Faith consists of believing something without reference to reality, i.e., divorced of reason.
A scientist engaging in an experiment is attempting to gain knowledge, and he may expect the experiment to go a certain way, based on what he knows.
Someone engaging in faith says, "I believe this, just because I want to." There is no reference to knowledge, reason, or reality. It's putting an "I wish" over "It is."
To engage in faith is to surrender your mind. To surrender your mind is the most basic kind of evil there is; it's anti-human life.
If you are actually interested in thinking about this further, you'll probably find my cousin response (i.e. responding to another child of this comment's grandparent) highly relevant.
Obviously, we disagree. Some may do that and call it faith, but people who are serious about faith do not believe without reference to reality or reason. Their faith is also predicated upon facts which they already know -- for instance, almost all people have an internal feeling that there is a God to be found out there. As such, based on their previous spiritual experiences, they will hear some information, believe that it is plausible and aligns with the things they already know, and act upon it, until their faith becomes knowledge on the topic, either affirming the original faith or negating it (learning something is true or learning something is not true).
In religious circles, one that believes things merely because they "want to" is not considered faithful, but ignorant at best. God has given reason to man and He expects man to use it. You may feel personally that a belief in any spiritual realm or being is unreasonable, but almost all people, historically, and to a somewhat lesser extent, contemporarily, disagree with you.
You're demonizing faith as an entire principle because some bad dudes have couched their badness in religion. It is common to attempt to shroud filthiness in virtue; most people find spiritual matters somewhat confusing but also consider spiritual teachers most noble, and that makes religion and false piety an excellent cover for corruption.
However, not every religious person is bad just because some "religious" teachers exploit and denigrate and abuse the trust of their perishoners ("false priests", as they are called).
Your attack on "faith" as a concept is silly; faith is often used in reference to religious circles because there seems to be some contention among modern persons whether it is worth having any faith in spiritual information at all, and they therefore assume their faith in scientists or physical teachers is not faith, but "reason", or something like that. Faith is a belief in a thing that has not been proven and a set of actions that seek to discover the reality of that belief one way or another. Anything that is eventually proven is proven because of the faith of its provers -- someone has to believe that an idea may have some merit in order to test it and discover if it is real or not.
Religious faith is necessary among all men because spiritual proofs are communicated "spirit to spirit", and as yet, man does not know how to transfer these or write a mathematical proof of spiritual truths learned personally. This, however, does not mean that faith is not necessary in non-religious fields. A small degree of faith is necessary to believe even things that have obvious and blatant proofs available.
The "anti-faith" thing is a silly and petty demonization and misappropriation, promoted by those that hate religion, and I don't really see the point in it, other than an attempt to make those that believe in religion and exercise faith in not just temporal, but also spiritual, matters appear "unreasonable" or stupid. And that's just not the case.
This has turned into an argument over the definitions of words, at its core. One person is defining "faith" to mean "having a belief that significantly mismatches the evidence", and you're defining "faith" to mean something drastically different. May I suggest either agreeing on a definition for the sake of argument, or splitting it into two separate words? You could call the first definition "mimble", and the second definition "spuzz", for example, and then the discussion might be able to go somewhere.
(I also don't consider your definition of faith to be particularly useful, and I suspect that you're equivocating, but those are tangential to my point here.)
I'm not trying to equivocate at all. I'm just trying to show that 'evidence' works fine in the large -- at the society level. But it doesn't work at the individual level since most individuals don't actually have evidence -- they choose to believe what their culture calls 'evidence'. Call it faith, belief, whatever. But the individual doesn't have evidence.
It's easier to see when we pick something that the whole culture hasn't coalesced on yet. Like string theory and worm holes. Some people believe there's a worm hole at the center of our universe. They have 'evidence' that supports their theory. I can believe or not, but I'll never know one way or another. 100 years from now, if everyone believes the _exact_ same theories we have today, with the _exact_ same raw data, my great-grandkids will say they know the worm hole exists and the 'evidence' is obvious. The only difference between now and then is how widely those theories are dispersed and accepted. Yet today I (and you?) wouldn't say we know worm holes exist. And my great-grandkids won't 'know' any more than you and I do.
In other words, my 'evidence' is what is commonly known and accepted to be true. Yet I personally don't know it to be true -- I trust that it is. Isn't that blind?
A scientist engaging in an experiment is attempting to gain knowledge, and he may expect the experiment to go a certain way, based on what he knows.
Someone engaging in faith says, "I believe this, just because I want to." There is no reference to knowledge, reason, or reality. It's putting an "I wish" over "It is."
To engage in faith is to surrender your mind. To surrender your mind is the most basic kind of evil there is; it's anti-human life.
If you are actually interested in thinking about this further, you'll probably find my cousin response (i.e. responding to another child of this comment's grandparent) highly relevant.