I like the idea expressed in your description. However, for me that meaning has always been encompassed in what I mean by "values." Someone can hold the core value that it is best to believe things that are true. Someone else can hold the core value that it is best to believe things that are comfortable. It sounds like you are describing this nature of our beings, of our inscrutable natures, that makes us choose to value something over another thing. It's curious to apply "faith" to that inexplicable determinant, but that's how I interpreted your explanation and it has left me with interesting thoughts to explore.
Thanks for your response. To be clear, I'm quoting someone else in how he defines the differences between the nature of faith and the nature of beliefs, and the relationships between them. I just agree with him based upon my own experience and observations, plus I very much respect his entire meta-perspective philosophy of Integral Metatheory.
Regarding comparing faith with values, I can see some comparison between them as they are really more philosophical in nature. That makes "beliefs" secondary, and not primary. One can say they "believe" that love is better than hate, but that is really more a gut sense, than it is intellectual in nature. But faith in the context of what Wilber is touching on has to do with more than just values. It has to do with one's perspective of Ultimate Reality, or religious Faith, with a capital F.
That's distinctly different that lowercase faith, as in having faith one's car is going to start. That doesn't have anything to do with one's view of Ultimate Reality. Values will be part of that, of course, but it's more than just values, and has to do with how one sees the Big Picture, or that which holds everything together. It's existential in nature, not relative to questions of various situations, which is where values comes into play. I like he describes it as an intuition. Beliefs on the other hand are cognitive in nature.
Does it take "faith" to believe that the things we value are in fact valuable and worth pursuing? Perhaps. And in that way, perhaps that is precisely the faith that motivates and internally justifies religious people in their comfortable beliefs, as well as that essence of motivation that causes someone to abandon their religious indoctrination because they most value the open-eyed pursuit of knowledge wherever it leads.
Incidentally, I think this is what morality is based on. We each value things for subjective, maybe inexplicable reasons. Where we can all mostly agree, like valuing human well-being, we can advance those values based on objective facts about reality that dictate which actions will advance or detract from achieving that value. Where we disagree, we can do nothing but convince, coerce, or conflict.
I would add however, like beliefs, our values can change. I used to hold to the standard party line values of my peers in a conservative Christian context, but ultimately it was what my heart told me, or what faith intuited to be true, listening to my heart instead of my head, or my fears, that led my values to shift. So I don't equate a religious faith, that which intuits the nature of the Divine on an interior level, to be the same as what we adopt as value systems.
Our beliefs and values are more like the caboose to the engine of faith. And if you don't have faith, you make a god out of your beliefs or values, and project your doubts about them upon others as a result. They are static box cars, unable to move without faith. You identify yourself as those, and come hell or high water, you must defend them as true, as that is where you have placed your whole sense of self and truth in. All that is a lack of faith. And that applies to any beliefs and values, be they religious or secular in nature.
