Can you have faith without embracing ignorance?

Question

As I understand faith in a spiritual context, it involves not needing evidence in order to believe something is true, at least not the kind of evidence that can be fully grasped by others or predicted. And in order to have that type of faith, wouldn't you have to embrace you ignorance and think in a way that is, with all due respect, irrational?

Answer 1

Yes. I have faith and I am not ignorant. You should clarify exactly what you are referring to as ignorant. I have a spiritual relationship w. God. I believe in Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I am not a fundamentalist nor am I a lefty.
So what do you classify as irrational and ignorant?

Answer 2

I have faith that God exists and I do not believe one is ignorant for doing so. I believe God exists because I look around and it seems logical. Does that mean, though, that I must attempt to come up with illogical assumptions or deny observable evidence just so I continue believing what I believe? No. Science will never prove or disprove God, but accepting unsubstantiated claims or blindly following ignorance in order to retain a belief is wrong and only makes ones faith weaker.

Answer 3

Jesus said in the book of Matthew that be harmless as doves and be wise a s a serpent.
Solomon, the wisest man ever lived on earth, wrote the book of Proverbs. Read it and know that God don't want us to be fools.
If you read the whole Bible, you will know the real meaning of faith and what kind of people are ignorant.

Answer 4

Faith is that part of you that you use to believe and overcome adversity, the strength of spirit and power of self that YOU give to yourself and others. Having faith in someone or something is Your gift of spirit.
You can believe in an all powerful being or the Prancing guitar of peanutbutter orange juice. It all comes from you.
The need for evidence is alive in all of us. There is not one person that does not need proof that what they believe in is real. If they didn't need proof, we would be as lemmings leaping from high ground to die and go to our proverbial heaven. Shy of Zealots ofcourse.
If this is in question let us speak of that needed proof.
People will not leap just to see if god is real. It is a rather idiotic move to prove you are right.
Were some all powerful being to arrive and prove him or herself by preforming miracles then the masses would leap on just his or her word.Or would they? Sure the Deity proved that it was all powerful but many wont jump because that is not enough proof to kill yourself over.

Faith is not irrational. Faith can not be irrational. Actions, Ideals, religions and beliefs can be irrational. But the strength and inner spiritual power that is faith, the gift of spirit in our spiritual beings is without thought. We as Spiritual beings use our faith to deal with adversity, fear, foreboding and melancholy. We use our faith to grow beyond the sum of ourselves, to achieve, to create things that make us stronger as a person and to believe in something greater than we feel ourselves to be.
We give our faith to our goddesses, gods, loved ones, friends and others that we believe in.
Gods and Goddesses ask for faith because it is a gift of spirit. And for this faith they give us their power of spirit so that we as a spiritual being may succeed.

Answer 5

Your statement "the kind of evidence that can be fully grasped by others" says it all.

The believers think they have some sort of special dispensation that precludes them from providing evidence for their assertions.

Thinking people don't buy that. I wouldn't buy a car that way, and I sure wouldn't design my life that way.

Answer 6

Ungrounded faith is irrational in my opinion.

Answer 7

don't believe then,if it will make you ignorant...We surely wouldn't want you to lose any intelligence..I will never understand why people feel we as believers are stupid,go ahead and think whatever you feel you need to,too feel good about how you live..

Answer 8

Your jumping into the final stage of faith before understanding the initial ones.

First let us consider the act of faith, which lies at the root of Catholicism. An act of faith is, in the Catholic sense, an act of reason, an assent on adequate grounds to certain intellectual propositions. Outsiders constantly misunderstand and frequently misrepresent the Catholic act of faith. Hence, to avoid confusion, I will treat the matter in two ways.

First. - I will try to tell you what faith is not.

Second. - Then I will try to explain more fully what it actually is, and to show you how reasonable it is, and how it benefits a sane man to make acts of faith.

(1) First, then, a Catholic act of faith is not mere credulity or a blind acceptance of the marvellous without reasonable grounds. Non-Catholics often credit Catholics with this kind of thing; they imagine Catholics to be folk gaping openmouthed for any strange story to swallow it down whole.

(2) Nor is faith mere sentimentalism - i.e., accepting things as true because they give you a comfortable feeling. The Catholic, in believing, is not guided by emotion, but by conviction.

(3) Nor, again, does Catholicism appeal, as the Modernists did, to a special sort of instinct whereby one reaches out after the Supernatural - apart from intellectual conviction. Modernists taught that the department of faith was so distinct from that of science that while by faith you believe the Resurrection of Christ to be true, scientifically you might deny its truth; and so with other Christian dogmas. If we Catholics taught that kind of thing we could hardly claim that ours is a sane religious system.

Hence, I repeat, faith is not mere blind superstition, not sentimentalism, not the functioning of a special subconscious faculty, whereby the soul grasps the Divine. No! in the true Catholic sense, faith is conviction. The Catholic says, "I KNOW."

What is Faith?

Now we come to the positive declaration of what faith really is.

Religious faith in the reasonable and Catholic sense is an extension or application to the spiritual world of an ordinary intellectual process which all exercise daily, and without the exercise of which our lives as social beings would be impossible. This process consists in assenting to the truth of propositions on the testimony of others. We may acquire knowledge in two ways - either by direct observation (you see a man knocked down by a motor car in the street), or through the testimony of others (you read an account of the accident in the evening paper, or learn it from a friend).

The last intellectual operation, whereby we assent to the truth of facts (which are, perhaps, beyond the reach of our Own observation) because other men testify to their truth, plays an incessant part in our lives. It is in this way most of our knowledge comes to us - on the authority of others. If you reflect on the method whereby people as a rule acquire scientific, geographical, historical, philosophical knowledge, or if you think of the part which books and newspapers play in our lives, you will, I think, admit the truth of what I say.

We each of us investigate a very small portion of the earth's surface on which we live - namely, the part traversed by the tiny track of our perambulations through life. All the other knowledge we have of the world - or of the universe - rests on the testimony of others.

Not Unscientific

Now, who will say that such faith, such willingness to accept testimony, is unscientific, or unworthy of a rational being? Who will suggest that it is not based on sound intellectual principles? It may not be easy for you to trace the process whereby you have come to believe without any doubt in the existence of Jupiter's satellites, or of icebergs in the Antarctic, or of Hitler or Mussolini. The evidence has come through many almost imperceptible channels, but is such that it excludes all doubt from your mind. If you analyse the process, it comes to this: You convince yourself by direct examination or reasoning of the reliability of the witness; then you accept his testimony as true. Two things must be clear to you about the witness -

(1) That he had ample opportunity to learn the facts;
(2) that he is telling the truth.

In other words, that he is not deceived himself, nor wants to deceive you. In a court of law, the judge and jury must test these two points:

Is the witness truthful?
Has he knowledge of the facts?

Once they are convinced of these two things, then they accept his evidence, and believe his statements to be true.
To a Catholic believer Faith is just this process. It is not conjecture, nor is it credulity. It means assenting to the truth of certain facts on the evidence of a reliable witness, the witness in this case being God Himself. That the facts (e.g., the Trinity, Incarnation, the Real Presence ) are beyond our ken and cannot be directly tested by us is no more a difficulty to our accepting them (when the evidence is sufficient) than my inability to investigate directly the murder of Julius Caesar or the execution of Mary Queen of Scots militates against my belief that these two eminent persons met with violent deaths.

Steps in the Process

The steps that lead to Faith are these: -
(1) I assure myself by reasoning and argument that God has actually spoken and communicated knowledge to mankind - that He is a witness to men of truth.
(2) I prove that this knowledge is still available for use, is actually preserved somewhere in the world, is in the keeping of somebody from whom I can obtain it.
(3) I learn the contents of the message, and accept them as God's revelation, on His authority. This last mental act is the formal act of faith. The other two processes, for the carrying out of which we rely on our own intellectual acumen and activity (aided by God's grace), are preparatory, and lead up to the formal act of faith.
.

Answer 9

You got it