A Christian friend of mine ones asked, “How come you say you lose your faith in faith while believing in Darwinian evolution requires the same faith?"
So is belief in evolution a sort of faith?
Belief and faith are both synonymous with trust…but there’s a difference.
Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true. Well…so far so good…Belief is an attempt to represent your world. That means belief is built because of how you look at the way the world is. In “belief” there must be some causal connection between the fact in question and the acceptance of it. Remember, a belief is based on our trust in the evidence or proof of a matter.
For example: I believe that the Taj Mahal is located in India, “because” there are facts that support this belief.
Notice that the word “because” is very important when we talk about belief. It is what we define as “due to the fact that…”
How “faith” is different to “belief”?
According to Paul Tillich, “faith is an act of “knowledge” that has a low degree of evidence”. Faith is also described as nothing more but a willingness to await the evidence. Faith is also considered to be too personal. It is completely subjective and it serves as no basis for anyone else to draw a conclusion. As Soren Kierkegaard described it, faith is something total and passionately committing to something. Faith is not base on objective reasoning – it doesn’t care whether it is absurd or it doesn’t make any sense.
So that we have differentiate the difference between plain belief and faith, we now again asked the question “is belief in evolution a sort of faith”?
Evolution is a scientific theory and in scientific terms a theory does not mean a “guess” or a “hunch”. Scientific theories are something that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as for the known facts; it is a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known and observed.
So it can be observed and experimented. Hmmmmmm…this definition doesn’t fit the definition of faith. Remember, faith is the “evidence” of things NOT SEEN.
Belief in evolution is not a faith. Evolution, like other scientific theories are built and modified with new information. As a 2006 “Statement on the Teaching of Evolution” from the Interacademy Panel on International Issues, a global network of national science academies, said, “Evidence-based facts about the origins and evolution of the Earth and of life on this planet have been established by numerous observations and independently derived experimental results from a multitude of scientific disciplines”.
Evolution doesn’t claim any absolute truth because all such conclusions must be subject to testing against observations. The very essence of science is that one must always remain open to the possibility of superior explanations to those which we currently find convincing. This is the exact opposite of faith.
