Faith vs Irrational Belief

Faith is usually used by religious nuts as the wild-card that wins an argument when all other options are illogical. When the questions become too uncomfortable or impossible to answer logically, faith is thrown in as the get-out-of-jail-free answer. But is it really faith that these people have, or an irrational belief? Are the two identical, or entirely different?

Faith as a concept is used by religious and atheistic types alike. It is very often misunderstood as equated with irrationality. But, like it or not, every single one of us from Richard Dawkins to Pat Robertson uses faith in everyday life. Without faith, life would be impossibly hard to live. Now before you mistake this notion for the justification of a belief in God or Angels or Ghosts or whatever, let me explain. Faith is the belief in something that lacks evidence. When I get into my car in the morning and put my key in the ignition, I believe my engine is going to start. I don't have the hard evidence that my starter motor is working, or my fuel injectors are clean, or my petrol hasn't been siphoned during the night; I believe my engine will start. When I read about the development of new mathematical theories that I couldn't even begin to comprehend, I accept them because I place faith in the intelligence of world-class mathematicians. I suspect the most gifted biologist who is mathematically impared would do the same. We all believe in things that lack evidence as it would be a physical and mental impossibility to verify everything we accept before believing it. I put my faith in scientists; the best and brightest humanity has to offer. However, when believing something that lacks evidence, the potential of discovering and verifying evidence is paramount before accepting it. I could have faith that my car will start, but the potential for me to pop the hood and check every single mechanical part before I believe it will run is always an option. The same applies to mathematical theories I don't understand.

An irrational belief, however, is the belief in something that contradicts the evidence. To use the previous example, if I jumped into my car knowing full well that my engine had been removed by theives, and I still believed that it was going to start and I could drive to Uni then I would be in possession of a thoroughly irrational belief. This is where faith crosses over into irrationality. A belief in God, Angels, an Afterlife, Demons, Witches and a stable democracy in Iraq are irrational beliefs because they contradict, not lack, current evidence. We know that snakes cannot talk. We know that thousands of years ago it would be impossible for the world to flood, and for some bloke to build a boat that saved two of every species from drowning. We know that people cannot come back to life after they have started rotting. We know that people can't live inside a whale for days. And we know that the friggin' Earth is more than 10,000 years old. Yet belief still persists.

I suppose faith is a more friendly term than irrational belief. A presidential candidate couldn't get up before thousands of braindead conservative Christians and proclaim himself to be a man of irrational belief. People like Richard Dawkins, as much as I admire and idolise him, should probably stop referring to religious types as 'faith-heads'. We all have faith (minus the religious connotations). Yet we do not all have irrational beliefs. That is left to those of us who still deny evolution, who still think the Earth is only thousands of years old, who still believe in talking snakes, and who still believe that Jesus was not some Middle-Eastern street magician, but God incarnate who died then popped back up and flew off to be with the real God who was both his Father and himself and a Spirit thing that can be three people in one yet individuals...or something like that.