Your definition of faith is why you find faith inadequate. There are several different and legitimate ways to define faith, and they are all used in the Bible, depending on the context.

1. Faith is "complete trust or confidence in someone or something." This is a very common definition we use through our daily lives, when we trust a chair to hold us or a car to start when we turn a key. We are expected to have faith in God and in the Bible.

2. Faith is "belief in, trust in, and loyalty to God." This is obviously an explicitly religious definition involving knowledge, assent, and trust.

3. Faith is "a system of religious beliefs." This is what is meant when one speaks of "the Protestant faith" or "the Jewish faith".

I define faith as "making an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to warrant that assumption." In other words, faith is knowledge, pure and simple, but because it pertains to the future, we cannot be certain. When you turn the key, you can't be certain that your car will start, but you make an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to warrant the assumption. So also when you go to the mall, assuming it's still there. It's an act of faith, because you can't be certain the car will start or the mall will be there, even though there's every reason to believe it is still there.

You'll notice in the Bible that evidence precedes faith. God appears to Moses in a burning bush before he expect him to believe. He gave signs to take back to Pharaoh and the Israelite people, so they could see the signs before they were expected to believe. So also through the whole OT. In the NT, Jesus started off with turning water into wine, healing some people, casting out demons, and then he taught them about faith. And they couldn't possibly understand the resurrection until there was some evidence to go on.

My faith in God is a conscious choice because I find the evidence compelling. It's an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for me to make that assumption. When you read the Bible, people came to Jesus to be healed because they had heard about other people who had been healed. They had seen other people whom Jesus had healed. People had heard him teach. Their faith was based on evidence. Jesus kept giving them new information, and they gained new knowledge from it. Based on that knowledge, they acted with more faith. People came to him to make requests. See how it works? My belief in God is based on my knowledge of the credibility of those writings, the logic of the teaching, and the historical evidence behind it all. The resurrection, for instance, has evidences that give it credibility that motivate me to believe in it. My faith in the resurrection is an assumption of truth based on enough evidence that makes it reasonable to hold that assumption. The same is true for my belief in the existence of God, my belief that the Bible is God's word, and my understanding of how life works.

In other words, the one definition of faith that is NOT a biblical definition is yours, that faith is just belief without evidence.

As far as prayer, it's impossible to set up a control on prayer to see if it's useful. In the Bible, God never promises to answer every prayer, so we can't just pray and expect certain effects. Secondly, sometimes God answers prayer partially, or in a different way than what we suggested. So your "controlled situation" is rather meaningless. Another biblical situation is that sometimes the answers to prayer happen a year later, or even more. There's nothing about prayer that is a defined cause-and-effect relationship, and so it's outside of the reach of scientific control. Other things in life are like this, and some elements of psychology, and even political science (falsely so called) can be like this. Ultimately, people are not entirely predictable. Prayer is even more so: God is not predictable. He is sovereign and executes his will.

How do I personally test prayer? I don't. Prayer really isn't mostly about asking for things, but developing the relationship with God. And when I pray and do ask for things, it's with the full knowledge of the things I mentioned above: God may not grant it, the answer may look different than what I had in mind, or it may take a different form altogether. But that's OK, because often I notice that God's way was a far better way.

> I didn't understand how talking to myself or thinking things within my brain could be transmitted out, understood by a supreme being(whatever that means), then used by the being to change the world(effecting events by exerting force)

Since I believe in God, prayer is not just talking to myself, but to him. And if he truly is God, then him hearing me and responding is easy to conceive.

> confirmation bias

But prayer is certainly not confirmation bias, as I explained. There is no baseline to measure off of, and no specified cause-and-effect relationships to evaluate. The other part of it is we don't know how many people are praying for a certain thing and who isn't. We believe that God is always at work in the world in far more ways that we can see. How is "confirmation bias" even a workable theory in this case? It's far more likely that God is active in more ways than I see, not less. What you're calling "confirmation bias" may only be the tip of the iceberg of God's activity in the world.

Do I ignore events that don't fit the bias? Not at all. This is just a misunderstanding of what is going on with prayer. As I've mentioned, there are so many variables when it comes to prayer, it's far more complex than confirmation bias and ignoring contrary evidence.

> The main issue with your Perseid meteor shower analogy is that meteors really exist. Does God?

Actually, the evidence for the existence of God and the logical arguments for his existence are far stronger than the evidence against his existence and arguments against his existence. If anyone is honestly trying to infer the most reasonable conclusion, theism would win every time and by a large margin.

> This tells us that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

This is just not so. It's not that extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence, but that all events, extraordinary or not, require a reliable source. It's not the outrageousness of the claims that conditions belief, but the soundness and dependability of the source that make them credible or not.

> Miracles are just claims that some event happened and a deity was the cause of it. If that's so, there should be evidence.

There was evidence, but it's not evidence that hangs around or leaves a trace, just like seeing a rainbow or having a stomach ache. It could be very real, but there is no evidence that hangs around or leaves a trace.

> When you say God is mysterious or that we can't know God's mind - you're just moving the goalposts and not being rational.

I never said that and wouldn't.

The main problem I have is that faith is just belief without evidence. It's not rational to believe something without evidence, or to claim that the lack of evidence or the inability of finding evidence means it's rational to believe it because we should.

If you are talking about answers to prayer, science won't help you with that, either. to be able to verify confirmation bias, you need to have a standardized base line of what works and why, and what all of the possible elements are so that we can establish a control group and be able to directly identify exactly where Christians are blowing it out their ear. The problem with your wanting to check "true" claims, you need to have information and isolation of data that you absolutely do not have.

I don't understand how we cannot set up a control on prayer and see if it's useful. Can we pray to a random deity, and then count positive results? How did you personally test prayer? Personally, I didn't understand how talking to myself or thinking things within my brain could be transmitted out, understood by a supreme being(whatever that means), then used by the being to change the world(effecting events by exerting force). If you have any idea how any of those mechanisms work, please elucidate me.

However, it seems like prayer is simply confirmation bias. You believe a deity is out there listening, and then you look for events that confirm your bias. You ignore events that do not fit the bias.

The great thing about this idea is that it explains how you, a Christian, can find validation in prayer, and how a Muslim can find validation in prayer, or a Mormon, or person of any religion. Confirmation bias will always make it appear that the deity is there when they find positive events, and ignore negative events. (I just mean positive as something confirming the prayer).

Christian faith is--irrational because it just means believing without evidence.

The main issue with your Perseid meteor shower analogy is that meteors really exist. Does God? Do angels? Do demons?

You could tell me that a meteor shower happened last night and you saw some shooting stars and at the very least, I'd know it's possible and that it's possible you're telling me the truth. But if you said, oh yeah, I saw Dani on a Dragon flying 3000 feet over me and breathing fire - would it be rational for me to accept your claim? You're right, I can't go back to that spot and see the dragon. I can't use science in any way. But I can see if the claim fits the data that we have and it simply doesn't.

This tells us that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Miracles are just claims that some event happened and a deity was the cause of it. If that's so, there should be evidence. There should be a method to reproduce interaction by a deity. And there shouldn't be any possibility that confirmation bias is at play. When you say God is mysterious or that we can't know God's mind - you're just moving the goalposts and not being rational.

Some things from the Bible are verifiable by historical and archaeological corroboration, and some are not. We can certainly look at other records to see if Hezekiah was a king of Judah, but we can't look in archaeology to see if God led Israel through the desert with a pillar of cloud. It's illegitimate to apply the wrong criteria to certain issues, just as I can't use an MRI to see if you are experiencing pain in your stomach.

I use the Bible where it's appropriate to use the Bible. If you are talking about answers to prayer, science won't help you with that, either. to be able to verify confirmation bias, you need to have a standardized base line of what works and why, and what all of the possible elements are so that we can establish a control group and be able to directly identify exactly where Christians are blowing it out their ear. The problem with your wanting to check "true" claims, you need to have information and isolation of data that you absolutely do not have.

When you say, "I'm just confused how you can be so rational about something that is so intrinsically irrational," are you claiming miracles are irrational, or that the Christian faith is? Regardless, your logic is inconsistent, since neither of these can be proved, nor can science be used to substantiate your point, so you'll need to go a little further to explain what you mean by your accusation of "intrinsically irrational."

Again, as far as miracles, it sounds as if you want to to use science to prove something that is not particularly scientific in a backward look. For instance, last August there was a Perseid meteor shower in the middle of the month where thousands of meteor fragments were burned up in the atmosphere. Well, prove it. You can't. They burned up. There is no remaining evidence of them. There were some eyewitnesses, but can we really believe the eyewitnesses? I could pull up a thousand illustrations like this. And yet there are many similar events in the Bible. At the time they were provable, but 3000 years later, they aren't. That doesn't make Christianity intrinsically irrational, and there may be no empirical resource to verify it.

It's clear that you're a very clever guy. I'm just confused how you can be so rational about something that is so intrinsically irrational.

I also have to add that it's kind of sad that the only source you have for any of your knowledge is the Bible. There's no other way to check any of these 'true' claims?

Biblical miracles cover a broad range of definition. The one of "breaks the laws of physics" is not a catch-all. Some miracles are a matter of changing the relative time continuum (wine always comes from water, but it takes 3 months, not .3 seconds), some are a matter of timing (earthquakes were common in the region of Jericho, but one just when the Israelites blew their trumpets is a bit too oddly coincidental), some an extension of what normally happens anyway (bodies heal, bread can some from previous bread and fish from previous fish). To claim that all miracles require a breakage in the law of physics is reductionistic.

Besides, there is nothing in science to successfully prove that science is all there is. Science cannot prove that nature is a closed system, nor that the laws of physics cannot be broken. The laws of physics merely describe how things normally act given that there isn't any interference. I hit a pool ball across the table, and I can predict its velocity, its angle of reflection, and its loss of energy assuming there is no interfering force. With an interfering force, all bets are off. Classical science cannot prove that miracles are impossible, and quantum mechanics even less so.

> How do you explain, at the psychological level, why other people are so deeply convinced that they believe in the correct religion?

I'm sure you're aware of the phenomena of people seeing what they want to see and believing what they want to believe. While such confidence doesn't make things false, it doesn't make them true either. Veracity has to be established at other than the psychological level.

> Are you aware of confirmation bias as it relates to prayer?

Of course I am, but apparently you're not. Prayer is not subject to scientific inquiry, nor is it necessarily a victim of confirmation bias. If God exists, and the Bible is the revelation of him, then it's safe to assume God answers prayer. Discerning what events in life are answers to prayer and which are not can be very difficult, but claiming any answer to prayer is not automatically confirmation bias. It's always quite impossible to prove or verify that any particular event is an answer to prayer, unless it involves something so astoundingly coincidental and/or something that our current understanding of nature considers impossible, such that Ockham's Razor indicates that the simplest answer is divine intervention. But this is no longer the argument from efficacy of prayer, but rather the argument from miracles, which is a different discussion, as mentioned above.

It's true that it's very difficult to establish whether God answered prayer or not, though it would be more proper to say, "We have no idea whether He will answer any specific prayer," since one would need only ONE example (not a statistical majority, or even a statistically significant minority) to prove that he "answers prayer" (meaning "grants requests") in general. The Bible records numerous examples of answered prayers, and since the same Christians who believe that God does answer prayers believe that the Bible is the accurate record of the activity of God, it is not inconsistent for them to believe that God DOES answer prayer, though this gives them no assurance that he will answer any given (or any at all) prayer of THEIRS. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Most Christians will affirm that they have no way of knowing whether or not God will grant a particular request, and most of the ones that won't affirm that are operating under faulty theology that I have no desire to defend.

We do know that God answers prayer didactically, not empirically. Causation (of any kind) can't be measure empirically without fully isolating variables and replicating results. Revelation ( = being told by God) is the only way we know ANYTHING about what God is like or how God acts. Generally, when we affirm something as an "answer to prayer," this is not on the basis of an absence of physical/biological efficient causes, but on the belief that God works by means of those causes. In other words, we believe that prayers are answered ONLY because we first believed in a God who answers prayer.

If you want to jump to confirmation bias any time a Christian claims an answer to prayer, you have no logical ground to stand on. If you expect to prove that the argument from the efficacy of prayer is invalid, well, technically it isn't. If anyone could manage to prove that even ONE incident, ever, in the history of time, occurred as an answer to prayer, and NOT from some other cause, it would prove that God exists (or existed at that point in time), that he answers prayer, and that confirmation bias is as much a bias of accusation as it is of conclusion.

No one could ever possibly isolate all the variables at work in a particular situation subject to prayer. It's not a scientific situation. In ways it's like the weather, but more so. We can use science to predict the weather, but we will never get it absolutely perfect and flawless. There are just too many variables at play to nail it down with precision (like we can do with gravity, for instance). So also with prayer. It's impossible to have a totally and perfectly controlled laboratory environment to evaluate prayer with precision, and therefore confirmation bias is an illegitimate accusation against its efficacy.

I meant the rainbow thing because it's not an extraordinary claim. It doesn't break the laws of physics. Biblical miracles do, however, and need a better explanation.

So it seems you agree that all religions cannot be true. How do you explain, at the psychological level, why other people are so deeply convinced that they believe in the correct religion? Are you aware of confirmation bias as it relates to prayer?

> We can't watch anyone and we can't get people to become peaceful Jews so lets give them a Messiah that will achieve those goals.

You are free to make up whatever you want and believe what you want to believe.

> "Rainbow" ... So not a miracle?

Hm. Sarcasm won't lead us to productive dialogue. Of course rainbows aren't miracles. if you're making a snide comment about Genesis 9, then we need to discuss that, because you have a distorted misunderstanding.

> The issue of prophecy in the Bible means that someone wrote it knowing what the prophecies were.

Hm. You obviously have a distorted notion of prophecy as well. I don't know where you got your ideas, but no wonder you mock—you've been fed a bunch of lies, I guess.

> People's experiences prove that every religion is both true

It's impossible for every religion to be true, and also impossible for every religion to be both true and false. The law of non-contradiction leads us there, as well as common sense. To sound grand and magnanimous by saying, "I accept all religions" (I recognize the words of the Living One no matter what his name) is actually to either violate them all or violate reason, or both. We all have a right to proclaim what we believe about ultimate things, but that doesn't mean that everything we believe is right. All religions, plainly and simply, cannot be true. Some beliefs are false, and we know them to be false. So it does no good to put a halo on the notion of truth as if everything could be equally true. To deem all beliefs equally true is sheer nonsense for the simple reason that to deny that statement would also, then, be true. But if the denial of the statement is also true, then all religions are not true. The thinking person must honestly weigh the evidence and come to the right conclusion.

> It's not subjective to say that all religions are false, it's basic logic.

OK, then, give me the syllogism.

> In your system, God, not love, is nothing but a meaningless social construct.

We can't watch anyone and we can't get people to become peaceful Jews so lets give them a Messiah that will achieve those goals.

> I saw a rainbow last week

Really? Wow. So not a miracle? Why would I believe you if you saw a man rose from the dead? Because that's crazy.

1. The issue of prophecy in the Bible means that someone wrote it knowing what the prophecies were. If we say 'We can't assume there is anything supernatural, as you do, then this is the only possibility'.

2. People's experiences prove that every religion is both true (for as long as they are delusional enough to believe it) and false (/r/thegreatproject has many stories of ex-theists). It's not subjective to say that all religions are false, it's basic logic.

We don't know that the Bible is actually from God. We know the prophecies are too good to be true and were likely made up. So 'His desires' are likely made up too.

We do need updated communications. Why would we trust a single source thousands of years old with a murky authorship and no proof of the claims it makes? If God exists, why is He hiding? Sure is strange if you ask me.

Sure an atheist can love people in the same way. What the atheist doesn't realize, however, is that they are borrowing capital from theism to claim that though. For instance, atheists love to talk about the problem of evil, but not too many think far enough to ponder the problem of good. To the atheistic naturalist, everything that exists is merely chemicals, matter and forces that were the result of accidental collocations of atoms, natural selection (a misleading term, another borrowed capital making one think purpose is part of the process), and genetic mutations, which are almost always deleterious. If there is no purpose (except contrived purpose), no meaning (except randomly assigned meaning), and what matters is survival (food,fight, flight, and reproduction), then what is love? In your system, love is nothing but a meaningless social construct. All ends at the grave, there is no meaning, and eventually humanity will end in ruins. As Richard Dawkins says, the universe has "precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." How can you talk of love as if it has actual meaning unless you are borrowing capital from theism?

> We don't know for sure that any of the things recorded in the Bible are actually from God...

Obviously, while science, archaeology and history can show us that the Bible is a reliable document, to comment on its divine inspiration is outside of the scope and possibility for those disciplines. I believe they are actually from God for many reasons, most of which you won't buy into. But a few of them are:

1. Most of the time God gave a miraculous sign to confirm that the word he spoke was actually from him and not anything else. Those signs are recorded for us all over the Bible. Skeptics say, "Prove it," which is like asking me to prove that I saw a rainbow last week. Some things are just outside of the purview of science.

2. The issue of prophecy in the Bible is a confirmation that the things recorded there are actually from God. We can't even predict the weather flawlessly, let alone the score of the football game or who's going to win the election in November. Atheists claim that we can't prove that the documents were written before the events prophesied, but there are plenty of scholarly evidences that say otherwise as well.

3. People's experiences confirm what the Bible says about itself and about us, but those are obviously subjective. But no less subjective than me saying, "I'm in love with Hannah." It can be perfectly true, but nothing that science can prove.

> how do you know what God's desires are?

If the things recorded in the Bible are actually from God, then we know what his desires are. The Bible is specifically written to reveal God to us, and therefore what it tells us about his desires are to be taken as authoritative.

> We don't have any updated communications that we can trust came from him.

We don't need updated communications. We have 1600 pages of them, and his desires haven't changed. We look at the same moon and sun that the ancients did. So also God's desires are the same now as then.

Why do you need to do all that through God? You seem like a decent, moral person. Couldn't you just be an atheist and love people the same way?

We don't know for sure that any of the things recorded in the Bible are actually from God, or that God could even communicate with the people that wrote the Bible...so 'trust what he says as true' is really 'trust what the Bible authors thought'.

> To love God means to live my life giving preference to God's desires and what will advance his person and cause.

For instance, how do you know what God's desires are? We don't have any updated communications that we can trust came from him.