BLIND FAITH by Stephen Ardent

This is a newcomer to my blog, Stephen, who gracefully offered his writing today and last week as well,but I had a full plate last week but i promised to get him in.

Blind Faith
by Stephen J. Ardent in Religion, August 4, 2009

An answer to the same-old-same-old questions that ask why a Christian can believe what they do. First, is faith blind?

I know I’m coming late to this party, but I think I can pull this off without treading to heavily on things already written.

Back in May REPuckett wrote an article entitled Top 50 Questions Christians Can’t Answer. And several people have done excellent jobs of responding with comments and articles.
Is Faith Blind?

Why is this always one of the first items brought up? Why is it the first insult to be hurled? And yes, it is an insult, even if it is an unwitting one. (I am in no way implying that REPuckett’s article was crafted to be an insult) I will show you how it’s an insult in just a moment.

* How can Christians accept things on blind faith?
* This is a logical fallacy called “begging the question.” This kind of “reasoning” is fallacious because simply assuming the conclusion inherent in a question to be true does not make it so.
* In order for this question to not be a display of bad reasoning, the questioner would first have to prove that faith was indeed blind. Good luck.

It fails the logic test. It assumes something not in evidence. It assumes that a believer has faith because of any of several factors -

* such as being raised that way
* being told to believe
* being afraid of hell
* being afraid of death
* being feeble-minded

And while some certainly may believe for those reasons, I have yet to see a study done by unbiased researchers that explores this.

Apparently the concept of having examined the evidence available, let alone that there is evidence available, and decided that belief is justified, just doesn’t fit into some people’s mindset. It puts an immediate divider between the questioner and the Christian. One that says that not only is my knowledge of the universe greater than yours, my reasoning ability is better than yours as well, because of course, they do not believe and you do. That’s the insult. Arrogance. Arrogance not based on anything tangible, but instead based solely on the fact that you believe. Based only on their self-estimation of their own accumulated knowledge and reasoning ability. As though the “choice” not to believe is based on anything tangible outside of their own desire not to believe.
Faith

I have read Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale and Anthony Robbins. From them I gained insights into faith that I had never dreamed of before. Rather than chip a crack in my faith, they established the veracity of truly supernatural faith existing in the world firmly in my mind.

Combine the concept of faith with both quantum philosophy and quantum science, and faith - the will of the sentient being, seems to be an underlying foundation to the very nature of the universe and reality itself.

The “weird” quantum experiments that show, as in the case of one, the double slit study, that mere observation changes the outcome of a purely physical action.
VIDEO CLIP

And yet, no one disbelieves this. Even though both science, logic, and reason, say it cannot happen.

Faith is the benefit of the doubt I give to that which I do not understand based on the sufficient evidence of what I do know and understand.

More next time kiddies.