Faith keeps people from searching for what is true. It allows you to believe what you want. The way to seek truth is to examine the evidence and go where it leads you even if it is not the outcome that you wish. Faith is beginning with what you want to believe and then trying to fit the evidence to your preconceptions. That is wrong-headed.
Faith (and age) got me to search for what is true. I had evidence by that christ was in the Eucharist through experience. Faith let me drop Christianity, because what was true didn't line up with how I wanted to live. Not all facts are healthy for a person to live by.
Faith is another word for trust. If you don't trust what you think is true evidence, experience, so have you, then you're headed for a dead-in if by luck you get somewhere. Trust lets you evaluate your perceptions because your perceptions you thought were true, now that you are starting to trust yourself (or for others trust another person), you find out the evidence was not true-at least for you.
Trust doesn't exclude evidence but makes you trust in the evidence if you want what you find to shape your life. If you have trust with nothing to build from it,
then that is blind faith. Many people have different criteria of what they consider as evidence.
I'm not a "science person" so evidence is also one's experiences. When you have delusions, the delusions are real (people actually see what they think exists) and in some cases their delusions don't harm them or others, so they don't need help. Why would anyone criticize or try to make them see delusions as a delusion? What is the point? It is a fact by criteria put together by psychology (different type of science).
Likewise with belief in god. A Hindu's view of belief is based on experience. If one experiences Brahma, that (in addition) is evidence enough to know Brahma exist. Why would we call Brahma a delusion when the evidence for this fact is based on different criteria than what you are familiar or use?
You can't use the same criteria of evidence for everything. What is not true to you because it's not detectable by the six senses and tested is true to someone else because they
can experience and test it by their senses and real life experience. Their point of reference is different than yours.
That does not make their view false. Unless you can find any evidence that god does not exist, both sides are in the same boat. You can't get evidence for what is not there. That's like testing if there is a person in front of you just because millions of people say there is. If god does exist, you can't get evidence that he is there if he does exist unless you go off of different criteria to support other people's
beliefs that he does.
