Theists, and others, use the word "faith" to mean many different things. Faith can mean trust in
someone for example. But when it comes to religious belief, faith means belief in something
despite a lack of evidence (or, in many cases, belief in spite of overwhelming evidence
to the contrary). Is this kind of faith rational?
"I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose." - Clarence Darrow
It makes just as much sense to have
faith in Mother Goose as it does to have faith in a god. Many theists think that faith in
Mother Goose would be ridiculous while faith in God is not. This is because they have been
conditioned, often from birth, to have faith in their god and not to have faith in the many
other equally plausible magical creatures. When someone says that faith is the reason that they believe
in something, what they are really saying is that they
have no valid reason whatsoever for holding their belief, but they believe anyway because they feel
like it. Faith is nothing
more than wishful thinking.
If one person can use faith to justify a belief, another person can use faith to justify
a diametrically opposed belief.
For example, faith provides no way of discerning who
is correct when someone says that they have faith that God created the universe and someone
else says that they have faith that the
Invisible Pink Unicorn created the universe.
Since it is clear that faith cannot be used to reliably justify
any belief, we have to conclude that faith is irrational.
In fact, in the entire history of human civilization, we have only been able to come up
with one method of determining whether some claim is true or not: objective experimentation
that is repeatable, i.e., the scientific method.
Some theists claim that it takes as much faith to be an atheist as it does to be
a theist. Nothing could be further from the truth. An atheist's lack of belief in gods is not a
result of having faith
that gods do not exist, but a result of lacking faith that gods do exist. Some atheists don't
just lack belief in gods, but actively believe that gods don't exist. This belief does not come
from faith, however, but from reason and evidence.
Rational freethinkers,
whether they be atheists, agnostics or other, invariably reject faith as epistemological nonsense.
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.
Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." - Richard Dawkins