“Faith” really is just pretending to know things you do not actually know

Dr. Peter Boghossian takes the stance that the word Fath is simply pretending to know things that you do not really know at all and I truly do agree with that thought – but don’t take my word as a basis for accepting this, because here is the man himself describing it …

This stance is a direct challenge to the very foundation that religious beliefs rest upon. Tempting as it might be to go for the symptoms such as homophobia, intolerance or creationism, a far more effective strategy is to directly remove the foundation that all of that has been built upon.

Key points here …

• Remove faith and the rest will fall away.
• Faith has nothing to do with morality, it neither makes you a good person, nor does lack of it make you a bad person.

It is no surprise then to find that there are rebuttals to this line of direct criticism, for example here in Christian Today, where Mr Trimmer attempts to claim that faith and evidence are not mutually exclusive, and that faith is simply “trusting” and has nothing to do with “knowing”.

This assertion is of course complete nonsense and is easily testable. Simply ask any highly religious person, “How do you know?”. At first you will be advised “The bible/Quran says” or similar, but then that comes right back to, “How can you know that this is true?”, and you will soon find that the word “Faith” is indeed deployed as the basis for their knowledge claim.

The attempt to substitute “trust” is simply playing word games, faith is indeed a claim that is built upon the pretence of knowledge without actually knowing at all.