I was on “The Twitter” yesterday and a Catholic blogger decided to promote her anti-atheist blog post using the #atheism hashtag. That’s cool; I promote some of my posts with Christian hashtags on occasion. So I took the bait and in the comments section of her article, the Catholic blogger said the craziest thing. She said, “The evidence points to faith.”
I had to stop the conversation right there and call her out on this. I asked her to present that evidence and she told me that she didn’t have to and that I should know it already. That’s what I thought – she has no evidence to present.
But let’s take a look at the statement itself because it is quite comical by the standard definition of the term “faith.” Faith is generally defined through the Biblical definition:
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” – Hebrews 11:1
Clearly, the term “seen” is meant not just to represent one out of our five senses, but rather as a stand-in for all of our five senses. In other words, faith is generally defined as wishful believing based on no evidence. One could say it is synonymous with hoping, but when we hope for something, we are acknowledging that it is in reality expressing a desire rather than a belief.
When we say we hope that we will win the lottery even though there is no evidence that we will, we aren’t expecting to actually win the lottery. We are just expressing a desire for that outcome. On the other hand, if we say we have faith that we will win the lottery even though there is no evidence that we will, we are actually expecting to win the lottery. It isn’t some mere desire, it is the expected outcome.
So now let’s look at the statement again: “The evidence points to faith.” Faith is the belief without evidence and yet, the claim here is that the evidence points to a belief without evidence. Not only that, but the blogger has refused to present any of the evidence that points to belief without evidence.
Of course she may be using a completely different definition for either the term “faith” or the term, evidence.” If she is, then we are talking past each other and I have no idea what she is talking about because that is the generally accepted definition of “faith” in this context.
