Here it is. DO NOT POST IN THIS THREAD. I'm guessing there will be a rail thread that neither of us will read or something if you want to comment.

Faith is a concept that has had great impact on human history, at an individual and societal level. To evaluate this impact, we must first understand what faith actually is. The true meaning of the word can be difficult to pinpoint as language is an evolving system. However, while the word 'faith' is used in several different contexts, the idea behind the concept of faith is somewhat less vague. Having faith in someone or something is more than simply trusting or believing; it is doing so without first requiring evidence of veracity. It is difficult and arguably impossible to have absolutely no evidence for something that one is considering, else how would the idea have entered one's mind? Generally, faith is understood to exist when the evidence is insufficient or solely subjective, and while this is not an entirely objective definition, it should be sufficient for this discussion. It should be noted that by this definition, faith is not that same as believing in something despite evidence to the contrary (where again, evidence is taken to be evidence that is sufficient and objective). It can be debated what word would be most appropriate there, but delusion and ignorance are closer fits than faith.

Is faith a virtue? According to Wikipedia, a virtue is "is a positive trait or quality deemed to be morally good," or a characteristic "valued as promoting collective and individual greatness." How can one determine if faith, or any characteristic is virtuous? Most characteristics can be used to promote morality if used in one way, but can also be used as a vice if taken to extremes or in certain other situations. Fortitude, for example, is often viewed as a virtue. However, "Ambrose says ... that 'fortitude without justice is an occasion of injustice; since the stronger a man is the more ready is he to oppress the weaker.'" Even vices can be used for good if in moderation and balanced by virtues, such as greed helping to drive businesses and innovation. Therefore, a trait is not decided to be a virtue based on the outcome of using it in one situation or another, but instead based on an evaluation of how the trait is used overall and the intentions behind its use. To demonstrate that faith is a virtue, I will first show how it has been used for millennia to build communities and promote other virtues within them. Then, I will discuss how faith has been used for personal growth. Finally, the intentions behind the use of faith will be explored.

One tool for bringing people together is a common faith, often in a deity. This is how many ancient and modern communities have formed. In this way, faith has helped promote the collective good by providing common ground around which people can congregate. Even without physical evidence of these deities, it is the belief in them that drives these people to work together and help each other survive, including through providing charity. It is not only religious communities that have flourished in this way; the existence and popularity of Wikipedia can be seen as an example of the virtuous nature of faith. For many people reading many articles on the site, faith is not required. Instead, people collect evidence as to the trustworthiness of the article as they read parts of it of about which they already know the truth. However, an encyclopedia is not very useful for learning things you already know. I submit that the success of Wikipedia can be traced to its users having faith in the articles they read that they did not previously know about. While references are required to be provided for those wanting to see evidence before trusting, I believe that the growth can be attributed, at least in part, to the faith of many of its users.

Personal growth is another area in which virtues can be assessed. Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization designed for battling the vice of addiction, has faith as its core tenet. In order for members to overcome their addiction, they first put their faith in a higher power. In less structured settings, the same principle applies; it is not uncommon to hear that faith in the goodness of a deity drove someone to accomplish a moral goal. As before, it is not just religious faith that demonstrates virtue. When people have faith in their ideas, even before collecting the evidence necessary to convince others, it drives them to further pursue these ideas. This is not to say that without faith, people would always abandon their ideas. In a scientific experiment, for example, one must come up with a hypothesis of what they believe will happen before running the experiment, but they also first find evidence that would lead them to believe that hypothesis could be correct. The argument being made here is that faith is the tool used to provide the strength to look for that evidence in the first place. It can lead students to explore and learn, even if they later find their faith was misplaced.

It can be argued that the intentions behind faith represent the height of morality. When one puts faith in the word of another person, such as a stranger providing directions, they are extending their respect and demonstrating their trust in the good of this individual and all of humanity. Requiring evidence to convince yourself represents distrust and creates a more antagonistic environment. By having faith, you make yourself vulnerable while communicating to the other that you believe they will not take advantage of you. In this way, faith promotes trust, love, kindness, and other moral characteristics, thus proving itself to be virtuous in its own right.

Citation for non-Wikipedia quote in paragraph 2: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3123.htm#article12

First off, I’d like to thank those who nominated me to represent the atheist side in this debate, and thank Original Position for moderating.

In this opening statement, I will begin by discussing the obligations my opponent and I have to you, the audience. The proposition is “Faith is a Virtue”, therefore, it will not be sufficient for my opponent to show that faith is necessary, morally permissible or useful. As neither my opponent nor I are moral nihilists, I will not argue against moral realism or the concept of virtue, but will outline the necessary conditions of a virtue and demonstrate that any reasonable definition of faith cannot meet the required standard.

As ‘virtue’ is likely to be least disputed term in the debate I will present the relevant definition of that term first:

A virtue must be a moral good and, for my opponent’s argument to have any persuasive force, that goodness must be demonstrable. For example, when considering whether kindness is a virtue, there are many ways to demonstrate its desirability on consequentialist, deonotological or contractarian grounds. Similar arguments can be made for some other commonly-held examples of virtues like prudence, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, and humility.

To avoid creating a straw-man, I will let my opponent present his definition of faith before I commit to a particular definition. However, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a summary of the most common models of religious faith:

Across this range of definitions emerge two clear themes. Firstly, faith involves a certain confidence/trust creating a bridge between, or supplementing, belief and knowledge. Secondly, most of these definitions explicitly refer to faith in God. For theists, this focus on God is a necessary to establish the virtuousness of faith. After all, even those theists who claim that atheists have ‘faith’ in science or ‘faith’ in God’s non-existence do not suggest that this is to be taken as an acknowledgement of virtue. Faith, it seems, is not a quality that reflects how we treat each other, but how we treat God.

This immediately throws light on a significant difference between faith and virtues like kindness or charity. To claim that faith is a virtue, on these definitions, presupposes the existence of God. This may or may not be a fatal problem. However, this does add to the already difficult task of demonstrating that faith is a moral good.

We can also see that this makes faith far less of a universal good than other so-called virtues. It is clear how someone can have faith in a negative way - one only needs to think of the tragedy of 9/11 for a vivid example - but it does not seem clear that one can be kind, charitable or patient in a negative way.

In summary, faith does not share any of the qualities we typically associate with virtues. Its goodness is not demonstrated, it is not a quality that aims to help us interact with those around us, and is not a universal moral good in itself. Therefore, we should reject the proposition that ‘faith is a virtue’.

My opponent appears to be trying to win your hearts through pointless formalities. I will instead continue to appeal to your great minds alone, if you don’t mind. There were two main arguments raised in my opponent’s opening statement; namely, faith by definition refers to God and therefore requires His existence in order to be a virtue, and other generally accepted virtues cannot be used in morally bad ways, and since faith can it should not be characterized as a virtue. I will address these both in turn.

Our first point of conflict is the dreaded definition. My opponent did not actually present a definition of the word, but instead provided "models of religious faith" and then concluded that they shockingly "explicitly refer to a faith in God." It should be clear that the definition of the word, and not a religious model, will allow for faith to be more inclusive. The definition I previously presented still encompasses all that my opponent says faith is. In order to support that faith in the context of this debate should be more than just a belief without evidence, we are given the example that faith in the non-existence of God is not thought of as virtuous. This is generally true because such faith does not generally lead to behavior. A thought or characteristic that does not influence behavior cannot be judged as virtue or vice as there is no way to measure its morality. I presented in my opening statement several examples of non-religious faiths that lead to actions that could be judged, and I therefore submit that my definition still holds as more relevant.

However, even if we were to accept that faith in this debate refers solely to faith in God, my opponent offers no explanation to his assertion that God’s actual existence would then be necessary for it to be a virtue. In the examples I provided previously, I showed the virtuous nature of faith without ever presupposing theism to be correct. In fact, those that hold faith to be a virtue hold it to be so even for those of other religions, even when the faith is being held in a God they believe to be untrue. This can be seen in polls that show atheists are less trusted than members of other religions.

The other argument is that faith is different from other virtues in that is can present itself negatively while other virtues cannot. As I previously stated, the morality of a trait should not be judged on individual events, so I do not accept 9/11 as a sufficient counter-argument to faith’s virtuousness. Additionally, I do not even accept that faith is unique amongst virtues in its ability to be used in a negative way. Honesty is a characteristic that is seen as a virtue across numerous traditions and by several philosophers. It is not difficult, however, to imagine a multitude of scenarios in which unrestrained honesty leads to unnecessary pain and devastation. Loyalty is also commonly seen as a virtue, and while I could easily show how it turns into a vice, I prefer not to forfeit to Godwin’s Law so early.

Faith, however defined, is therefore not significantly different from other virtues. Given the several aspects of moral goodness I demonstrated that come from faith, we can still conclude that the affirmative side of the proposition "faith is a virtue" has been upheld. (Hmm, I have extra words, so thank you all for particpiating, OrP for organizing, and Zumby for debating.)

In my opening remarks I defined virtue as “a quality considered morally good or desirable in a person“. My opponent has given much the same definition – “a positive trait or quality deemed to be morally good”. So here we find agreement on a key term. While I presented a comprehensive list of definitions of faith and outlined some broad flaws common to many of them, I maintained that I would allow my opponent to present his own definition before I started my specific objections. Ganstaman has defined faith as “more than simply trusting or believing; it is doing so without first requiring evidence of veracity” which is “understood to exist when the evidence is insufficient or solely subjective”. I would also agree that this is the correct way to define ‘faith’ without direct appeal to a deity.

However, our agreement ends when my opponent attempts to lay out the necessary and sufficient conditions for virtue. He asserts that one cannot assess whether a trait is a moral good by merely examining the consequences of that trait in a given situation, noting that a virtuous trait may manifest immoral consequences and that a vice may manifest moral consequences and that therefore we should assess the virtue of a trait “based on an evaluation of how the trait is used overall and the intentions behind its use”.

Unfortunately, my opponent then attempts to establish that faith is a virtue by appealing to purported beneficial consequences: community cohesion via faith in a deity, Wikipedia, and situations where faith in God motivates people to perform some moral act. Leaving aside for the moment that these are all empirical claims for which my opponent cites no sources, these examples fall immediately victim to my opponents own proposed theory of virtue; “a trait is not decided to be a virtue based on the outcome of using it in one situation or another”. One would reasonably ask how he proposes to show that faith is not simply a vice that occasionally produces some moral good, like his example of greed.

Although Ganstaman did not deliver on his promise to demonstrate the virtue of faith via an examination of how it “is used overall and the intentions behind its use”, we can take some time to see if this approach can work. Considering intention does seem like a promising approach for differentiating between virtues such as kindness and vices such as greed. For the sake of argument, it is plausible that this would allow us to admit exceptional circumstantial consequences like greed leading to innovation. We could say that the intention behind greed is a selfish desire to gain, which is not plausibly an inherently moral trait. Likewise, the intention of kindness is to benefit another, which is a moral good even if the consequences in a particular situation turn out to be morally bad. But this does not hold up when considering my opponents definition of faith as an epistemic bridge. In his example of a common community faith in a deity the intention is not any particular moral good – the community does not decide to believe in the deity in order to create social cohesion – the moral good (to whatever extent it exists) is simply an unintended by-product. Similarly, when Wikipedia users have faith in its veracity, there is no evidence they do so because they intend to make it successful. Again, the examples my opponent provides do not support his conclusions.

In my opponent’s opening statement, he made two arguments to show why he believes faith is different from other virtues, and therefore should not be considered a virtue itself. The first was based on the definition of faith. In my first rebuttal, I expanded on this, explaining that while my opponent used faith solely to mean faith in God, I did not feel that was really at the heart of the definition. In accepting my broader definition in his first rebuttal, my opponent has shown agreement with me on this count, and it appears he is therefore retracting that argument.

This leaves my opponent with a single argument as to why faith is not a virtue, and that is that it can be used negatively. I have previously demonstrated that faith can be a positive, and other virtues can be used negatively as well. In my opening statement I mentioned how this was going to be an issue. While my opponent and I have both defined 'virtue' similarly, only I have presented some potential criteria that can be used to determine if some characteristic actually fits that definition, namely how that potential virtue in question is used overall in humanity and the intentions behind such usage. I have given several examples of the good that has come from faith, and my opponent has provided a negative example as well. Perhaps he is correct that it is difficult to weigh these positives and negatives to determine the true overall value of faith. I still believe that more and greater good has come from faith than harm, but I admit there is no way to actually quantify this. For this reason, this aspect of the criteria makes for terrible debating.

This leaves us with the argument I made at the end of my opening statement; faith can be recognized as a virtue due to the good and moral intentions behind its use. My opponent appears to accept this method and even demonstrates its value in correctly sorting kindness and greed into virtue and vice. He then misses the mark, however, by stating that when faith leads to the good of community building, the community building is not the intention of the faith, and therefore faith fails to be decided as a virtue by this test. I agree with my opponent that in this example, the community building is an unintended positive side effect that comes from faith. However, while my opponent did not attempt to discern what the intentions actually are behind faith, I had done so in my opening statement. I say again: "When one puts faith in the word of another person, such as a stranger providing directions, they are extending their respect and demonstrating their trust in the good of this individual and all of humanity. ...In this way, faith promotes trust, love, kindness, and other moral characteristics." Through these as of yet unchallenged sentences, we can see that faith is a virtue through the criterion my opponent has accepted as valid.

As my opponent’s first rebuttal offers no improvement on the deep flaws identified in his argument and instead addresses irrelevancies, I will take this opportunity to examine the logical, moral and empirical inadequacies of his position.

As we have established, my opponent defines faith as trust or believing when evidence is insufficient. Of course, my opponent does not mean to say that faith is belief that is no more than proportionate to the evidence. To say this would be to immediately concede the debate to the atheists who demand sufficient evidence for theistic claims.

However, it is interesting to note that my opponent is attempting to give sufficient evidence for the proposition. He does not ask you to take it on faith, despite this presumably being the virtuous approach. In fact, my opponents view on the value of evidence and truth are clear in his scathing review of the movie ‘Life of Pi’, posted on RGT some months ago:

If all we need when faced with insufficient evidence is faith, why should we ever seek more evidence? Furthermore, does this not imply that seeking more evidence reduces the virtuousness of a belief? Then in what sense ought we to seek truth? My opponent’s views are incoherent. Given even a moments consideration we can see that he does not argue for faith as a virtue but as an epistemic ‘last resort’ - a stop-gap on the way to knowledge. On his own terms, faith is not a virtue, but an unfortunate consequence of the frailty of human minds.

My opponent has asked us to judge the value of faith by the beneficial social consequences of faith “in a deity” and notes that “A thought or characteristic that does not influence behavior cannot be judged as virtue or vice as there is no way to measure its morality.” He adds that faith promotes other virtues. These are empirical claims for which he has provided no evidence. The reason for this is that the evidence is not on his side. For example, we know that the most atheistic nations are the most peaceful, and the most religious nations are the most violent.


We also know that the religious are more likely to support torture and the death penalty, and the religious have higher rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and abortions. We also know that there is a strong correlation between religious faith and opposition to gay marriage. For the purpose of this debate I need only to show that faith is not a moral virtue – I could, for example, argue that faith is merely morally permissible - but these correlations are, prima facie, a strong argument that faith is a moral vice.

My opponent has used the common yet desperate tactic of bringing up new arguments now when I have little space to address them instead of using the ample extra space he had earlier in this debate. This sign that he lacks confidence in these arguments should inspire the same lack of confidence in others. I will briefly comment on these before proceeding with a summary.

Firstly, while it would have been amusing had I simply asked you to all take my side on faith alone, that would hardly have been convincing to anyone but those who already had faith. I at least feel that I owe this forum a better debate than that. Secondly, what I have said in the past as a poster in reference to a terrible movie has no bearing on the arguments I am making now as a debater.

I would now like to provide a recap of the arguments presented in this debate. My opponent started with two arguments. His first was that the definition of faith relied on God existing. He has since recanted this claim. His second argument was that faith is different than other virtues in that it can be used negatively. I have presented examples of other virtues, such as loyalty, that lead to immoral behaviors as well. Therefore, faith is not actually different in this regard, so the argument fails. Though he had opportunity to do so, my opponent did not address this point, so we have to assume he agrees with it.

While my opponent is left without arguments, there are still arguments on the affirmative side of this debate. I presented positives that come from faith. While it is difficult to weigh the positives versus the negatives, some moral goodness must be present to support virtuousness (and to satisfy my opponent’s demand for sources, in this limited space I can only point you to AA holding faith as their primary tool for combating addiction). I have also presented the moral good that stands behind faith. My opponent has not challenged how faith comes from and promotes trust and kindness. He has also not provided a different metric for determining what is a virtue. In conclusion, using the only metric introduced into this debate, with my unchallenged argument for how faith meets this metric, and no arguments on my opponent’s side, you must find that faith is a virtue.

My intention entering this debate was to allow my opponent the courtesy of setting the definition of faith and model of virtue that he prefers to defend, and avoid thus avoid arguing past each other or arguing against straw men. In return, my opponent has had to shoulder the burden of proof for his argument. This burden has not been met.

First my opponent offered examples of beneficial social consequences that follow from faith in a deity. My opponent has now conceded that his examples do not support the proposition of the debate.

My opponent’s final argument is that the intentions behind faith make it a moral virtue: "When one puts faith in the word of another person, such as a stranger providing directions, they are extending their respect and demonstrating their trust in the good of this individual and all of humanity."

We can immediately see some circularity. My opponent has already defined faith as a form of trust – specifically a trust that goes beyond the evidence – and cannot now merely invoke trust as a demonstration of the virtue of faith. One might accept that trust proportionate to the evidence is a moral good. But my opponent needs to demonstrate that disproportionate trust is a moral good and has presented no argument to support this claim. Therefore my opponent’s invocation of trust is either circular or unsupported, and can be easily dismissed.

The appeal to the virtue of respect is also problematic for my opponent. Certainly there are circumstances where faith can foster respect, but it is trivial to see that this only happens in certain circumstances. Putting “faith in the word of another person” could be argued to be a moral good, but clearly something like “faith in the supremacy of white people” does not engender respect in a morally meaningful way.

In summary, my opponent has only managed to show that his version of faith – in certain circumstances — may or may not have good intentions, may or may not have good consequences and, therefore, may or may not be a virtue. Perhaps there is a successful argument that faith is a virtue but, by his own standards, my opponent has not given it.