On Definitions of Faith and Arguments Against It

Skeptics define "faith" differently than believers. It's hard to find a middle ground between us because we see faith differently. Here are a few skeptical definitions of faith:

Mark Twain defined faith as “believing what you know ain’t true.”

Sam Harris: "Faith is the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail."

In the documentary Religulous, Bill Maher said “Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.”

Richard Dawkins: “The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices.”

John Loftus: "Faith is an attitude or feeling whereby someone attributes a higher degree of probability to the evidence than what the evidence calls for."

Except for Mark Twain's definition I think all of these definitions work, but mine at least reaches out to believers, since many of them might agree in principle while all of them agree in actual practice, and that's my point. I further argue that reasonable faith is an oxymoron because having faith is an irrational leap over the probabilities, which again, is what all Christians do in practice.

Christian philosopher Victor Reppert takes issue with my definition:

This strikes me as a simple error in linguistic philosophy. If Christians develop and use the term "faith" then you have to pay attention to what that linguistic community means by it. Irrationality isn't part of the meaning of faith. It may be that, in believing their religion and in having faith, they commit irrationality, but this is contingent on the evidence being different from what they suppose it to be.

If you assessed the evidence and you thought that Christianity was probably true, you could still have faith. This would be true if you were right about the evidence or wrong about the evidence. You can't presume your assessment of the evidence to define words that Christians use. Link.

Sure we can, and we do.

Definitions of words couch arguments in disguise. In our arguments we demand a different definition of "faith" because our definitions more accurately describe what we see from believers around the world in their respective sects. It's the same phenomena all over the globe.

When it comes to evaluating the strength of the evidence for a claim, any claim, my definition works just fine. After all, we're not just talking about a word but a concept, one that should apply to everyone and not just Christians, otherwise you are special pleading. Agreement among Christians isn't a criteria for how a word is used anyway, especially since the debate over the word has been framed in the western world by Christianity.

All you need to do, Vic, is say that what you have concluded is more probable than other alternatives and that you do not claim a higher probability to the evidence than what the evidence calls for.

Can't do that?

Why not?