George Michael was the only guy who could make me believe in it
Faith is either a distinct faculty of experience, or a special term for a certain type of belief.
The reason people want to say it is a kind of belief, or equivalent to some kinds of belief, is because there are in fact many things we believe without actually knowing why we believe them, or being able to prove them with utter certainty.
A common sort of reasoning goes like this: I've never seen Australia, but I believe it's there, therefore I can believe in god without seeing it.
Of course, like the stupid man-made watch implies man made design, therefore tree implies design argument, this sort of reasoning ignores the definition of god. I learned this from Ayn Rand years ago, and it is about the only useful bit of philosophy I still have from her.
Australia is proposed as an observable phenomena, it is a country like other countries, a place like other places, on the same planet as us, known through other people by empirical evidence.
What the theist will do is obfuscate this by referring to direct experience, and something like degrees of trust: People have direct experience of Australia, people have direct experience of god.
But direct experience is also what people have of their delusions. I have had direct experience of delusions, or beliefs that completely contradicted what I understood about reality, and they would have remained if I had not rigorously analyzed and critique them.
Empirical evidence, however, is what we can demonstrate to each other. I can take you to Australia, I can show you pictures, or I can just tell you that I saw it.
God, on the other hand, is not strictly delineated. You can't photograph god, you can't falsify god, you can't smell god.
This is where faith comes in! You have to just trust that there is something there.
And what are you trusting? That there is something that you can't see, can't demonstrate, can't point at, can't catch, can't go to, and can't touch. And if you can't do any of that, than where did you get the information to have the belief, and how did you come to believe it?
The answer is you got the idea from someone else. And that faith/trust/belief is really trust that someone else had a good reason to believe, and then you develop your own reasons to believe.
Since god is all belief, it has nothing to hold itself out of the grip of human will. This is why it is not surprising to find that faith in god resolves nothing unless you already prescribe to the same beliefs (which you arrived at through some reasoning in a limited social context.) If we are the same kind of Christian, than we have a framework within which to get along.
If your faith is too different from mine, than you and I, at best, can agree to disagree, at worst, we can dehumanize each other for not recognizing the through god, and at most tiresome, we can just argue about evidence, history, and all the other things we expect to sway others with, even though are faith renders us immune to them.
When we get to the point of trying to pretend that god is a universally agreed upon concept, we near the sad reasoning of modern believers like William Lane Craig, and Rabbi Wolpe, who both debated Christopher Hitchens.
God they say, or Religion, which they conflate, because it all comes down to knowing other religions through viewing them as versions of their own religion, is the only basis for objective moral values.
They love to quote Smerdyakov (I think it was him because he was the jerk) in The Brothers Karamazov: If there's no god, anything goes.
Dear god what nonsense, as Hithcens pointed out, If there is a god, anything goes.
If there is a god, than people can rape pre-pubescent girls, massacre aborigines, stab pregnant women and rip out their fetuses with bayonets, send young men to their deaths, organize genocide, and drop a couple nukes on Japan after they surrendered. .
If there is a god, than that's what goes in it's/their world.
As for objective moral values, this is where they confuse their own insulated world with all the others that seem close enough to their own, as long as they don't understand these other religions from an insider perspective. So of course they can be made to seem equivalent.
Religions don't share any more objective values than religious people do with non-religious people.
Both Craig and Wolpe think that if you don't have a just universe!!! than you cannot just base your morality on expedient context-based guidelines.
Imagine a just universe, where moral codes for humans were built into the universe That's the language Wolpe used!
Physicists, astrophysicists, and astronomers have all failed to find these moral laws. And that's where faith comes in.
And this is what distinguishes faith as a distinct experience. No matter what fails to verify your belief, or no matter what contradicts your belief, you still know it's true.
And this is the objectivity of the theists, the totality of the absolute monarch and dictatorship. Amongst other theologians and theists, they talk about mutual appreciation, but in their godly hearts, they know that there way is the only way, and those who don't share their faith, are doomed to suffer.
This is their certainty. And to sustain it, they use faith.
