Faith of the third kind
Jun 28th, 2009 by Paul
Faith in modern usage has three major meanings which often get muddled up.
One is trust in a person. That’s usually a fairly empirical thing - you trust people who have given you good reason to trust them.
Another is in the general sense of any religion or spirituality. Pantheism could qualify on this score, but personally I would not use the word because of confusion with the third meaning.
The third meaning is a strong belief in things that just cannot be proved or disproved, or even in things that seem, on the face of it, impossible to believe.
Voltaire said: “Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.” Of Christ’s resurrection, Tertullian said: “It is certain, because it is impossible.”
This third meaning defines faith as belief not just in “things unseen” as St Paul put it, but belief in the unbelievable. In Christianity, that kind of faith is touted as a great virtue, because there is so much doctrine there that conflicts with logic, evidence and everyday experience. In Pantheism faith of the third kind would be seen more as a shortcoming.
Personally, I do not have a strong belief in the existence of anything that cannot be proved or disproved. I might have a provisional belief in it, pending evidence.
For example, I would like to believe that the Omniverse is eternal. In fact I would LOVE to believe that and some emotional part of me does believe that.
However, it’s not an impossible thing that the Omniverse might be eternal. It doesn’t fly in the face of reason or evidence. It’s just that there is as yet no proof either way. So I can’t be said to have faith in it.
I believe the word faith is misleading if we use it for any aspect of naturalistic pantheism.





