Faith Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! === Criticism === {{see also|Anti-abortion violence|September 11 attacks|7 July 2005 London bombings}} [[Bertrand Russell]] wrote:<ref name="auto"/> {{blockquote|Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm. At any rate, they hold this about the communist faith. What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define "faith" as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith". We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions. Christians have faith in the Resurrection; communists have faith in [[Labor theory of value|Marx's Theory of Value]]. Neither faith can be defended rationally, and each therefore is defended by propaganda and, if necessary, by war.| ''Will Religious Faith Cure Our Troubles?''}} [[Evolutionary biology|Evolutionary biologist]] [[Richard Dawkins]] criticizes all faith by generalizing from specific faith in propositions that conflict directly with scientific evidence.<ref name=TheGodDelusion>{{cite book| first = Richard | last = Dawkins | title = The God Delusion | url = https://archive.org/details/goddelusion0000dawk_b2x1 | location = Boston | publisher = Houghton Mifflin | year = 2008 | isbn = 978-0-618-91824-9 }}</ref> He describes faith as belief without evidence; a process of active non-thinking. He states that it is a practice that only degrades our understanding of the natural world by allowing anyone to make a claim about nature that is based solely on their personal thoughts, and possibly distorted perceptions, that does not require testing against nature, cannot make reliable and consistent predictions, and is not subject to peer review.<ref name="Is Science a Religion?">{{cite web|author=Dawkins, Richard |date=January–February 1997 |url=http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/dawkins.html |title=Is Science a Religion? |access-date=15 March 2008 |publisher=American Humanist Association |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121030144700/http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/dawkins.html |archive-date=30 October 2012 }}</ref> Philosophy professor [[Peter Boghossian]] argues that reason and evidence are the only way to determine which "claims about the world are likely true". Different religious traditions make different religious claims, and Boghossian asserts that faith alone cannot resolve conflicts between these without evidence. He gives an example of the belief held by Muslims that [[Muhammad]] (who died in the year 632) was the last prophet, and the contradictory belief held by Mormons that [[Joseph Smith]] (born in 1805) was a prophet. Boghossian asserts that faith has no "built-in corrective mechanism". For factual claims, he gives the example of the belief that the Earth is 4,000 years old. With only faith and no reason or evidence, he argues, there is no way to correct this claim if it is inaccurate. Boghossian advocates thinking of faith either as "belief without evidence" or "pretending to know things you don't know".<ref>{{cite book |title=A Manual for Creating Atheists |author=Peter Boghossian |author-link= Peter Boghossian|year=2013 |publisher=Pitchstone Publishing |isbn=978-1-939578-09-9 |page=31}}</ref> [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] expressed his criticism of the Christian idea of faith in passage 51 of [[The Antichrist (book)|The Antichrist]]:<ref>{{cite book|first=Friedrich|last=Nietzsche|translator-first=H.L.|translator-last=Mencken|title=The Anti-Christ|location=Chicago|publisher=Sharp Press|year=1999|page=144}}</ref> <blockquote>The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idée fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum. Not, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health—the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to make people ill. And the church itself—doesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?—The whole earth as a madhouse?—The sort of religious man that the church wants is a typical décadent; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the "inner world" of the religious man is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest" states of mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form—the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem....</blockquote> [[Gustave Le Bon]] emphasizes the irrational nature of faith and suggests that it is often based on emotions rather than reason. He argues that faith can be used to manipulate and control people, particularly in the context of religious or political movements. In this sense, Le Bon views faith as a tool that can be wielded by those in power to shape the beliefs and behaviors of the masses.<ref>{{cite book|title=The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind|first=Gustave|last= Le Bon|year= 1896}}</ref> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page