How does one distinguish faith from delusion?

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Faith - belief that is not based on proof. (dictionary.com)
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Delusion - in psychology, a rigid system of beliefs with which a person is preoccupied and to which the person firmly holds, despite the logical absurdity of the beliefs and a lack of supporting evidence. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008)

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It seems to me that there is a presupposition here that has so far gone unsaid. Note the words "proof" and "lack of supporting evidence' in the above definitions. If you're doing science, you are using the scientific method, which is based on empiricism. It sounds as if some people here are applying empiricism to more philosophical realms and IMO the two do not always equate. Surely, having some faith that there is more to life than what the 5 senses can detect is not delusional? That is an emotive word with specific and negative connotations and I've noticed that many atheists use it liberally to describe all non-atheists. I don't believe this is correct and I find it condescending.

Interesting discussion. I'll try to address various questions that have been put to me; if anyone thinks I haven't responded to what they've asked, please let me know.I like RAZD's example of art. How do you define "good" art? Personally I don't like modern non-representational art. I'm quite a fan of Caravaggio and Rembrandt. And I could epxlain to you why this is, which would be my evidence. But why is my own evidence in this area any more valid than someone else's evidence to the contrary? Trying to apply empiricism to such a subject is clearly nonsensical. And I still stand by my comment that philosophy is such an area. Where ancient philosophers such as Aristotle tried to describe physical reality, we can of course apply empiricism and say that we can be reasonably sure whether they were right or wrong. But describing physical reality is not the only mandate of philosophy. And sometimes the dividing line is rather blurry. For example, can empiricism tell us anything about Plato's world of forms? I would say no. It's a way of looking at reality, and we each have our own chosen lenses for viewing.I am training to be a counsellor and I am keenly aware of the labels given to people. We are very ready in this day and age to judge someone as being delusional. A thousand years ago, the community might have judged very differently, and believed that the person had had a profound religious experience. I anticipate that many here will think, "Yes, and that shows how primitive or misguided they were," but that is an opinion too. Let's do a little thought experiment. You travel back in time a thousand years to Europe in the Middle Ages. Being the educated modern person that you are, you tell society that we live in a galaxy called the Milky Way and that the stars are light years away from us, though a telescope and some instruments with which to measure the speed of light would be handy. The continents beneath us move around, though at a rate so slow that we can't detect it without special instruments. There are also zillions of bacteria on us and in us, right now, though you need special instruments to detect them. These "sensible" people of the Middle Ages decide to indulge your fantasies with polite smiles (if you're lucky and escape torture for heresy) because you are obviously a foreigner with some serious delusions about how the world works.How can you empirically know that a person's experience is nothing more than pure meaningless fantasy? How can some people pathologise all religion when it's clear that the vast majority of religious people are well adjusted individuals who cause no harm and actually do some good in the world? Calling someone delusional is a value judgment and IMO the person who makes such a judgment is taking on a large responsibility, especially in the case of a psychiatrist forcibly institutionalising and drugging someone.Addressing the term "faith," I think others have done well with this already. I would just add my own opinion that it applies to that which cannot be proved. Faith which is maintained despite the existence of contradictory evidence is delusion (in the case of most creationists, willfully lying to oneself in order to prop up a cherished belief). We know that the world cannot be 6,000 years old and it is nonsensical to believe otherwise. We don't know, empirically, what happens after we die, or whether spirits exist and can communicate with us, or whether there is a transcendent reality -- though many people (myself included) would argue that you can feel the truth of some things inside yourself. You can't really argue in a logical way for this, but logic and empiricism have limits sometimes when the whole scope of human experience is considered.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

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Personal preferences tell us nothing about reality external to the mind of the experiencee. Those who have faith generally do not limit themselves to saying that their object of faith exists only in their mind. The two are not comparable.

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Yet here is an area where empiricism cannot apply; you cannot empirically define "good art." This is no doubt obvious, but there are also other areas in which empiricism cannot logically be applied. Belief is one, when no evidence exists to disprove the belief. In this sense it's not very different from holding an opinion. As I said in my previous post, judging someone as "deluded" is a subjective act and one that should be carried out with due consideration. There's clearly a difference between believing that your family are really KGB agents secretly out to get you, and believing that the transcendent might exist. In the former case, it would be reasonable to conclude that the person is ill; in the latter, the person is thinking about spirituality.

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If it relates to something that is supposedly non-empirical and materially undetectable how can it be anything else?

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How was it experienced at all if not by means of the material senses? A sixth sense?

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I take it you've never tried meditation. This no doubt sounds like babble to you; but if you open yourself to such experiences, they will come. If you don't, they won't.

I missed conversations like this. It's quite a step up from trying to explain to creationists that they can't just sit there and make up ad hoc explanations without being educated in the subjects they are misrepresenting. Faith and evidence again.It's probably obvious that I am in close agreement with RAZD. To put it simply, faith includes the unproved/unprovable. If objective evidence exists to contradict that faith, then clinging to the faith is a delusional act.Straggler, I wonder why you are drawing a line between perceived internal and perceived external experiences. It's all the same thing: perception. I can think of instances where empiricism is not appropriate externally, which I have already cited. Internally, empiricism can sometimes work too, depending on how you look at this internal perception. I have reasons for believing the things I do, and those reasons are based on evidence. I think you'd find that this applies to many people, especially those who have thought consciously about the beliefs they subscribe to (and admittedly some don't). I have read scientific studies in peer-reviewed journals about near death experiences, ESP, and so on, and it seems clear to me that if one can overcome the prejudice against such things being possible, there is indeed more to the world than what we are able to measure with our 5 senses. Though that is not the subject of this thread, I think it is wrong to label people as delusional for believing such things. It's as wrong as labelling the time-traveller delusional because he's talking about things like bacteria that Middle-Age Europeans have never seen or heard of. He would surely sound mentally ill to them -- tiny critters crawling all over your body and your insides?

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The fact that you experience something internaly does not mean that you have experienced any aspect of external immaterial reality.

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Nor does it mean you haven't. How do you know for sure?
Some people believe that "all is one," and that the internal and external are more intricately related than many people realise. There is no evidence to contradict this faith, it harms no one, and it is the experience that some people have reported in deep meditation practised rigorously. Others report feeling this way during loving sex. Astronauts have reported it after having seen the earth from space. IMO to call this delusional, or invalid because it cannot be proved, is to deny a rich part of human experience.

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The term "delusional" is only being used to describe individuals who adamantly believe their faith is an accurate description of reality, and they attempt to force others into thinking the same.

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Hi Stile,Do you think that is accurate though? So the person who is convinced that their family are secret members of the KGB who are out to get them, is in the same category as a Christian who believes in the righteousness of their faith, and in letting others know how they, too, can get to heaven?I had trouble typing that because it's probably as galling to me as it is to you. But IMO "delusional" is too extreme a term. Other words I might personally use are intolerant, ignorant, unthinking, unquestioning. Stripping away all the earthly trappings of religion itself though: holy books, thou shalt/thou shalt not, saints and messiahs, etc -- at the core we've got a belief in a god, gods, something transcendent. Someone here is going to have to make a very strong case for calling this delusional. Calling someone delusional of course requires one to be free of delusions. Atheism is faith, too, so be careful. Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

RAZD, I was particularly intrigued by something you said:

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And one of the questions I have tried to pursue, is the one about how one can determine the relative validity of concepts, once you have run off the scientific methodology mapping and into areas where the method cannot be applied. Once we have run off the mapped area of verified evidences we are left with non-verified evidence and logic, and concepts extending into areas where there is no evidence and logic does not help - like art.

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Try as we might, we can't fit life neatly into boxes. It's messy and it can be confusing. Empiricism can teach us much but it cannot be the correct approach 100% of the time. Here is where fear and uncertainty can lie, because using evidence and logic to explain everything can be a comfort for some (perhaps like religion is a comfort to others, as it also pushes fear and uncertainty aside). I hesitate to say here that sometimes you can "just know" that things are right, as true as that is to me. Anyone can claim this and be wildly, catastrophically inaccurate. Gut instincts can be helpful guides but they need to be coupled with the power of our brains. And I don't see an easy formula for any of this. You can't write in a scientific paper that you just had a feeling something was right -- but you can use that feeling to guide your ideas when formulating and testing hypotheses.I think that wisdom and experience count for a lot. When you have both of those, it gets easier and easier to approach life from different perspectives and to choose which one to use depending on the situation. Who ever said that getting old was a bad thing?

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How is Atheism faith? You seriously think faith can be defined in not believing in something? Atheism is the lack of faith.

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Let me make it easy. Faith is believing in something without any evidence.

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Atheists follow the evidence. Which makes us not have faith because there is no evidence.

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Atheists have faith that there is no god, or gods, or anything transcendent. You cannot prove that this is the case. You are not the null set, you're in a certain set of presuppositions and beliefs just like most other people. If anything could be defined as being close to the absence of faith, I think it would have to be agnosticism. Just like the scientist who has to be as objective as possible in his/her work, an agnostic is also tentative and rules nothing out completely.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

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The context I'm talking about is how each one believes in something that they have absolutely no objective evidence for, yet they insist that it be taken by others as absolute truth.

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Well that's a caveat that didn't exist in the OP. As I recall, it was asking about how you tell the difference between faith and delusion.

Hi Stile,So what you want us to talk about and what the OP said are slightly different things. I'm fine with that. The interesting part of the quote in question, IMO, was:

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individuals who adamantly believe their faith is an accurate description of reality, and they attempt to force others into thinking the same

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What people seem to be wanting here is a very definite distinction between verifiable and unverifiable reality. I think that can be a tricky line to draw. For example, some people believe that their faith is the only "true" faith. These people tend to be frightened and angry, and usually pretty ignorant of the ways of others as well. Should we equate closed-mindedness with delusion? Is it delusional to try to convert others to one's way of thinking? Actually that's what we all are doing in a way, by debating here (hopefully with some open-mindedness mixed in).

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How do you tell the difference between the delusional KGB person and a christian in regards to faith versus delusion? How do you distinguish between the two? I believe distinguishing the two would be vitally important if someone plans on treating their beliefs as the truth.

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Wisdom and discretion. If someone honestly had trouble distinguishing between those two examples then they, as well, would probably be considered deluded. Christianity is not a mental illness.

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There is no evidence for a god, so therefore I do not have a belief in a god. There is no evidence for a god, but those that have faith have faith that there is a god. One stance is based on the evidence, the other is based on faith. Big difference.

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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Hi Straggler,

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The problem with the "no contradictory evidence" approach is that there are a near infinite array of unprovable irrefutable concepts. Immaterial Unicorns, ghosts, fairies, undetectable goblins that live in your toilet, ethereal squirrels, incorporeal iguanas and the usual host of immaterial gods and deities that theists and deists more commonly believe in on the basis of "faith".

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Do you accept all of these as reasonable possibilities? Or are you agnostic towards some and atheistic towards others? On what basis do you make your distinction? None are contradicted by any evidence after all. And that is your stated criteria for acceptance is it not?

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This is an interesting question. Atheists often ask it: if you allow yourself to subscribe to one faith, even a little bit, then doesn't that open the door to you believing all sorts of nonsense? The answer of course is no, because pink unicorns and the flying spaghetti monster are strawmen to make spiritual beliefs seem silly. We human beings can differentiate pretty easily between these examples.Unfortunately the above statement is not true for everybody, and there are some people who are very gullible, easily led, or unfortunately just not very bright. The internet is full of some utterly nonsensical claims. We use empiricism where it's applicable, to try to get at the truth. Sometimes we also have to draw on our wisdom and experience, or those of others. This seems like a pretty good combo approach to me.

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Because our knowledge of any reality external to ourselves is necessarily limited by our ability to perceive that external reality whilst internal experiences are limited only by our imagination.

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Do you not think we should attempt to differentiate between the two? Does this distinction between imagination and reality not lie at the very heart of what is delusional and what is not?

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Well yes we need to differentiate between the two, but I think the line is blurrier than we tend to imagine. There's the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. There are various ESP studies I know of which I won't go into here. I don't believe any of this is delusional. We run the risk of dismissing something very interesting by using that "delusional" label.

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The fact that "some people believe" or "some people feel" that internal experieces must relate to some aspect of external reality does not answer the question as to HOW this can possibly be the case? Conviction is not evidence.

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Are you advocating a sixth sense?

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Don't you think it's possible to accept that something happens, without knowing why or how it happens?I don't claim to understand the mechanism, other than to go back to my previously stated belief, that all is one. I do know that the very heart of matter, the constituent of quarks and other particles that are the smallest of the small, can be described as frozen energy. If everything in its essence is energy, then all is one. I'm not sure how science could study this further but I'd watch for discoveries in quantum physics.

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I don't have faith. I accept the philosophical possibility of such things existing. But given the highly evidenced human prediliction for inventing supposedly irrefutable concepts for reasons of explanation, comfort, higher purpose or whetever else, I think the default position has to rationally be that such things are far more likely the product of human invention.

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No faith involved.

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I suppose the distinction between atheism and agnosticism is something that people have to be honest with themselves about. I've heard atheists pay lip service to a vague "possibility" that they are wrong, though they quickly dismiss this as being "highly unlikely." It's like creationists claiming, "I love science. But . . . " If you truly think that it's unlikely that the transcendent exists, but you are willing to take on any kind of evidence to the contrary (not necessarily empirical), then you are probably an agnostic. I was one for a long time, but I ended up changing how I personally evaluate some of the evidence.

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"If anything could be defined as being close to the absence of faith, I think it would have to be agnosticism."

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Only if you deny the very strong objective evidence in favour of humans having a strong tendancy to invent gods.

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Sorry, I don't understand how your answer addresses the quotation from me. Could you elucidate?This seems to have become a busy thread. In the past I've had a tendency to try to answer everything as quickly as possible, which isn't conducive to well written posts. I'm going to have to give this a little break and think on it.

Ah, a few shorter posts here. That's OK.

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There is a great deal of objective evidence that tells us as verified fact that humans have a strong disposition to invent gods.

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Maybe that's telling us something, though I think you and I would come to different conclusions. Mine is that the transcendent exists, and the gods that people have invented are their attempts to understand it. Hinduism accepts figures from other religions with a remarkable degree of tolerance because their own religion contains many avatars. They are all incarnations of Brahman, the transcendent. People have a timeless propensity to personify abstract concepts.I hope my previous post satisfactorily addresses some of your other questions?

Hi Masterdebator,I said

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Wisdom and discretion. If someone honestly had trouble distinguishing between those two examples then they, as well, would probably be considered deluded. Christianity is not a mental illness.

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You said [/quote]Claims without warrants. Once again, personal incredulity is not an argument. Believing your family is the KGB is not a mental illness either. Its simply a delusional idea.[/quote]So if you're a psychiatrist, and it's your job to decide whether someone is going to be labelled mentally ill (and if so, what kind of label to use), you're telling me that "personal incredulity" doesn't count? Empiricism falls flat here. I happily admit that it's a very useful thing to use and that in many situations it's appropriate -- but not all. And I used an extreme example of someone who clearly is ill. What about someone who claims that someone else "has it in" for them but can't back it up with solid proof. Are they having paranoid delusions or could there be some basis in reality? What about hearing benign voices in their head? Do we immediately jump to the conclusion that this person has lost the plot? IMO we shouldn't rule out the possibility that the voices are doing the person some good or even that they are hearing spirits. What is our objective measure for the reality of that person's experience? There is none, but 99 times out of 100 the "spirit voices" will be judged delusional in our society (and of course this will be appropriate in some cases, though perhaps not all). Judging is subjective -- it is based on opinion.

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What do you mean by "wisdom and discretion"? Are these specific ideas that distinguish faith from delusion or are you just trying to make a subtle ad homenem attack on anyone who thinks they are the same?

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Beg pardon, but do you not ever use "wisdom" or "discretion" in your own life, in any situations? This is going to stir up the hive some more, but in all honesty I would add "inner voice" as well. We often gauge our feelings before making a decision, and if "gut feeling" were not a common experience then it wouldn't be a saying. I'm not saying these should all be used in place of empiricism; I'm saying that surely it's best to be able to rely on a mixture of approaches depending on the situation. My point here is that we can apply any of these to a situation where we have to judge someone as delusional. It would probably be helpful if a group of people with mixed opinions and backgrounds could discuss it and come to a consensus. Of course this usually isn't the reality, and the person is judged according to cultural norms.

Just wanted to say thanks RAZD for sharing your ideas here. Your brain works more logically than mine and you're better at formulating arguments in a debate. Shame you didn't become a scientist -- with the mindset you have, you could have made some interesting discoveries (though of course these are not confined to qualified scientists alone).