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Originally Posted by Red Slinger
Did you mean to write that the opposite of doubt is certainty? Otherwise, I'm confused by what this means. Isn't faith a form of unprovable certainty?
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Faith is misconstrued primarily by religious fanatics especially to mean a sort of intractable, irrational sense of certainty. You are no doubt correct in noting that faith is often used in this context, but I believe that this is likely as a result of the developed Western worldview and the high commitment that we have afforded to rationalism. Not that there is anything wrong with rationality, but our collective empiricism has precipitated a redefinition of "faith", and mostly on the part of adherents to religious faith. For religious fundamentalists, "faith" has come to mean something other than what it is, and in desperate reaction to the powerful arguments of rationalist philosophers. It conveys the sense on the part of critics that faith is some sort of irrational and blind commitment to an unsustainable set of ideals, and in the eyes of adherents it is believed to be an equivalent assertion of truth.
In actual fact—and I think that I am right in my understanding of the classical philosophers and the early Church fathers on this point—faith is not in any way an irrational ontological claim; rather, it is an intense hope or expectation in the absence of all the evidence. This is the furthest thing from certainty. This sort of faith remains fairly comfortable in acknowledging its limitations, and is much more malleable than how the fundamentalist apologists choose to exploit it.