When we hear the word faith we often think of religion.  Many see faith as being something we need to get to heaven.  What is faith?  What does it have to do with getting to heaven?

Everyone’s view of the world encompasses their faith position.  Faith does not stand alone.  Faith is always related to ones view of reality.  A person does not just have faith.  Faith, by definition, is believing in something even though it can not be seen. To have faith in something is to believe that the something that you are believing in is really real or true, even though you have no direct, objective,, (usually physical) evidence that is is real.  Generally, we do not talk about faith that something is really real when we can see and touch it.

Some aspects of our reality can only be believed by faith.  How our world came to be can only be believed by faith.  There is no direct evidence.  It is something we can never see.  We accept what we believe by faith, whether we believe that God created in six days or that there is no God and that reality came to be by chance over millions of years.

What we believe about life, that is what we believe about the nature of reality, knowledge and morality, are inseparable from faith.  To have faith in something is to believe that that something is really real.

Not all faith positions are equal.  You may have faith that painting your face green will gain you access to heaven  Just because you believe it, does not mean that what you believe will actually happen. What we have faith in, or what we believe in, can be true or it can be false. If we base what we believe on something false, is there any reason to hope that what we believe will prove to be true and helpful?

When we refer to saving faith, we imply that there is something we need to be saved from and saved to.  Almost everyone will agree that our world has problems or that our world is broken.  Is there something that we need to be saved from? Most will agree that there are problems in our world. There are many things that need to be fixed. There are wars. There is killing. Many hurtful things are done and said. Then there is sickness and premature death. How are we to make sense of all of these terrible things? Many will agree that things are not getting better and that they seem to be getting worse. So, there are things to be saved from. But how are we to sort these things out. What we are talking about is life. So, before understanding saving faith, we need to understand something about life.

How one understands life and makes sense of the problems in our world depends ones worldview or what one believes about live. In the blog posting, titled I believe, I describe a way to understand the truth about life by looking at life in terms of reality, knowledge and morality.

Everyone’s worldview can be described in terms of three questions….

To be continued…..

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The description of saving faith has not yet been completed in this blog posting.  If you are interested an attempt at a more complete description of saving faith can be found in the posting titled, I Believe – True Faith, Comfort in the Shadow of Death