Faith to me is an experience. I wish I knew how to explain this experience to someone else. The closest I can say is faith is a sense that there is something that is fundamental and inherent to my experience, but what is fundamental and inherent about it is the 64 million dollar question.
Faith isn't logical or illogical. Faith is non-logical. However, faith can be loosely applied to logic, but there is no direct correlation. This is the problem many believers is that they want to believe faith is logical, but faith as an experience is a separate issue from what they happen to want to believe about it, how they want to interpret it according to specific theologies.
Faith is a non-verbal experience. As such, we can talk circles around it until the end of time. Words are useful towards communication if the people communicating already share an experience such as what I speak of. But if their isn't a shared experience, then they're talking around eachother.
You two don't seem to understand what I mean by my experience of faith. So, I can only assume the word as I'm using it is meaningless to you. The term 'faith' is often used the same as belief or a set of beliefs, and I guess we're limited to talking about it in that way.
If I experienced God, it would be logical to claim to know God. However, no one ever experiences God. People have experiences that they interpret as God and these interpretations are ususally based on social expectations. So, the statement that "I experienced God" isn't itself logical. In a sense, all our interpretations of our experience can be questioned in this way.
Belief plays into this in the sense that:
- someone assumes their interpretations accurately describe their experiences, and
- someone assumes the social expectations that they base their interpretations on correlate with 'objective' reality to a large enough extent that they can be considered true/real. |