Lara Buchak's Can It Be Rational To Have Faith

In Lara Buchak’s essay, Can It Be Rational to Have Faith?, she asserts that everyday faith statements and religious faith statements share the same attributes. She later states that in order to truly have faith, a person ceases to search for more evidence for their claim, and that having faith can be rational. Although she makes compelling arguments in favor of faith in God, this essay is more hearsay and assumption than actual fact. In this paper, you will see that looking for further evidence would constitute not having faith, but that having faith, at least in the religious sense, is irrational. According to Buchak, common every day faith statements and religious faith statements share the same attributes. Such attributes include “a relationship between the agent and a particular proposition, between the

As previously stated, evidence does interact with faith. When you have evidence that a friend is a person that does morally good things, such as giving to charity, you have faith that friend would never steal from another person. How, then, is the overlooking of hard cold evidence, such as a cheating boyfriend, considered faith and not blind hope? Faith, according to Merriam-Webster, is to believe, defined as “the feeling of being sure that something is true”, and trust, “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something”. Faith does not seem to be the word you would use when describing putting all of your eggs in one basket for something you already know to be false. Now, Merriam-Webster’s definition of hope is “to want something to happen or be true”. Blind hope is much more fitting to something that you would like to believe is true yet have evidence against, such as a cheating boyfriend you blindly hope miraculously won’t