An Inter-Polemic Blog

Seeing as how the Metaphysicals on this blog can’t seem to make any actual arguments (figures…they’re so caught up in this love crap, that they can’t make a solid stance on anything for fear of offending someone), I am going to engage with an argument from one of the other blogs.

Elliott Lummin argues that faith is a sense. He says:

Hobbes portrays sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch all as objective, perfect receptacles for information (which Hooke proves is untrue), while conveniently reducing faith, or "fancy" as he calls it, to an after thought of these supposedly more legitimate senses. This is precisely why Hobbes fails to perceive the goodness of man and the universe; he has denied the one sense required for the accuracy of his study: faith. For the metaphysicals, we can point to universal goodness and love because of this. Faith is no product of imagination, but the sense with which we percieve this purely benevolent force. By this, I do not mean to group you with the perceptually impaired members of society. After all, I would not dream of insulting the visually and hearing imparied, people born with conditions that limit given senses, in such a way. Unlike them, you have chosen your "blindness"...the same way Satan chose Hell. If you had faith, you might join us in seeing the balance Boethius sees in nature.

First off, the Oxford English Dictionary would disagree. Sense is defined as:

“Each of the special faculties, connected with a bodily organ, by which man and other animals perceive external objects and changes in the condition of their own bodies.”

Faith is not connected in any way to a bodily organ. And don’t give me that crap about souls and hearts. Souls are not real organs. Hearts pump blood. And as for the perceiving – we cannot perceive God. God is infinite and (if he even exists) therefore cannot be comprehended by human beings.

How can you say that faith is a sense, then? Senses give us evidence of the existence of things (for example, smelling a cinnamon bun, or hearing a telephone). Faith only gives us the idea that we are perceiving something – you can’t say to someone else: “Hey, I sense God. Can you sense that too?” Faith is something personal to the individual and is therefore only a work of imagination.

The OED uses words like “confidence,” “reliance,” “trust,” and “belief” to define faith – hardly anything to base an argument on. I might have faith that that roast beef is going to taste good, but when I put it in my mouth and taste rancid meat, well…which argument are you going to side with?