nobetterway234

So, I have been reading a little bit in this forum and want to expound a little bit on what faith in a Christian sense is and how we all practice faith on a daily basis and how faith is not this word that is only for religious people. I also want to show that the Bible or the God of the Bible never calls for a blind leap of faith into Christianity, but gives us good reason to believe in Him.
First off, I see that many people believe today that the word"faith" is reserved for only religion. People believe that faith has no place in any thinking persons mind. In other words, faith and our reasoning should be kept separate. I disagree and say that faith and reason should not be kept separate, but are compatible with eachother.
I define reason as "the human faculty or capacity to grasp concepts, judge truth value in propositions, and argue from premise to conclusion. It is the minds logical discursive activity in understanding, interpreting, organizing, explaining, inferring, comparing, weighing, testing, and evaluating." It is more or less the ability to think logically. WEa ll possess reasonng capabilities, but i am sure that you all agree, our reasoning is not perfect. it is fallible. It fails us on a daily basis. If you agree that our reasoning fails us as humans, then that is important in seeing how faith and reason are comp[atible.
Now I should define what I mean when I say faith. Faith in its simplest term is trust. People, whether they believe it or not, all have faith in something. Without faith, we would not be able to function as humans and engage in relationships with one another. If we could not trust people, our lives would be miserable because we would never be able to get beyond the surface and enter into meaningful relationships that God planned for us to have. Anything a person said to us would essentially be worthless if we were unable to trust them. Business partnerships, sports teams, and bands would not be able to function with each person doing everything for only self-interest. Relationships, like marriage, would be a joke to a person without the ability to trust. It is unthinkable to even try to separate the words “trust” and “marriage”. It would not be able to work. Also, without faith, we would have no knowledge of historical facts. All of our knowledge of history does not come from tangible evidence, but from witnesses and their testimony. Without faith, we could never fully know that Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States. But we do know that he was in fact president. Not because we were there and saw him serving as president, but because we know it from credible authority and eyewitnesses who were there and watched him serve as president. We trust them that they are telling us the truth when it comes to Abe Lincoln and who he was, what he did, etc. Without trust, our historical knowledge would probably start when we were two or three years old and were able to store memories of people, places, and events in our minds. Therefore, without trust, our knowledge of history would only be what we have personally experienced and can ourselves remember. Another example of everyday faith is our trust in something simple like a chair. Right now as I write this, I am sitting in a chair. I trust that the chair will hold me up for a number of reasons. First, I know from previous experience that chairs have been trustworthy to me and have held me up before. I have seen people sit in chairs and they have not broken, and that is another reason that I can also safely assume that this chair will not break. Also, many trustworthy people have told me that chairs are good for sitting off the ground and will hold me up without breaking. All of these things combine to allow me to be able to trust the chair that I am currently sitting in, and many other chairs that I come across. With these examples of some of the uses of faith in everyday living, it is easy to see that everyone practices faith.
When I speak of religious belief, I am speaking in a more specific sense than it sounds. Some Eastern religions require the abandonment of reason, but when I speak of religious belief, I will not be referring to those religions. I am speaking of religions where a theistic God is at the center of belief. Examples of these types of religions are Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. These religions, particularly Christianity, require some sort of knowledge about God and who he is and claims to be, before you are expected to submit to him. Religious belief is part of many peoples’ everyday lives and if a belief like Christianity is true, then the whole of a person’s life will be influenced. It is important to see how many peoples’ foundational beliefs are built off of religion, and how that puts emphasis on the relationship between faith and reason. Essentially what I am saying is that religious beliefs should not and are not relegated to the recesses in many peoples’ lives.
As I have shown in my definition of faith, we as humans exercise faith in many people and things on a daily basis. Religious belief should not be separated into another category of our lives, simply because it is religion. It is a part of many people’s daily activities. Although, the general consensus today among many people is that faith is merely a “blind leap”. People believe that it has no evidence to support it, but is simply something that people must acquire to believe in religion. With that, our society treats religious belief as something that has no room in the thinking, reasoning, and rational community. They say that people can have faith in their respective religions as long as they do not try to convince us of truths with religion as a backdrop. I believe that I have shown how we interact with faith on an everyday basis, so it is sensible to think that we also interact with reason everyday as well. We use our reason to make decisions all day, every day. The purpose of our reason is to use it to evaluate people and objects which we want to put our trust in. With our reason, we can conclude what we reasonably want to put our trust in. Without reason, I would only be guessing at what things to put my trust in. Take a car for example. If I blindly put my faith into buying and driving the first car I see, chances are that the car could let me down. Without my reason I could not evaluate if the car will be reliable and get me where I need to go. It is possible that the car I choose will run well, but I would rather choose a car and know that it will run and be trustworthy. In the same sense, when choosing a religion we should not put our faith in the first religion we see or the one that sounds the best. We need to carefully weigh the evidence for and against them by using our God given faculty of reason. Religion should not be relegated to some category of our lives where reason is absent, but should be at the center of our lives where reason is prominent.
Because of the fallibility of our reason, it is nearly impossible to know many things with one hundred percent certainty. Granted, there are some things like mathematical truths, such as 2+2=4, that we can know to be necessarily true. But, a majority of our knowledge is not known with complete certainty. We cannot be one hundred percent sure that George Washington crossed the Delaware, but we trust the sources that told us that information. Also, we cannot be one hundred percent sure of something like sitting in chairs, but we have had previous experience that has made us capable of putting our faith in most chairs to hold us up. I will stress again that with regards to things that we put reasonable faith in everyday, like chairs and tables, our religious beliefs are no different. Our belief about God should be based on reason, but because of the limits of our reason, we need faith. Simply because we cannot know something beyond any possible doubt does not mean it is something that we should be skeptical of. Our reason is limited in that aspect, therefore we need to exercise faith and trust in things that we deem to be true and trustworthy.
So, hopefully you can see that we practice faith(call it trust) everyday. We also use our reasoning capabilities, and those two are fully compatible with eachother.
If you all are interested in what the Bible actually says about faith, then I will do another thread on that topic! sorry for the length, and thanks for reading!