Faith is the belief in something without evidence to back it up. A lack of evidence is ignorance, no matter how much you believe with all your heart that it's true.

"Ignorance is the state in which one lacks knowledge, is unaware of something or chooses to subjectively ignore information. I don't see how trusting in something that is working so far is ignorance."

Exactly, and faith fits this description of ignorance. When you say "something that is working so far", that's where the self-deceiving part of faith comes. Have religion and God been working so far? You will only say this is true if you are subjectively choosing information. People of faith tend to thank God for little good things that happen in their lives and leave the little bad things unnoticed. They choose not to look for the real causes of a "virgin Mary" appearing on a toast, therefore they ignore the real cause, which usually is randomness... Why did the rain stop right the moment you left the house? A person of faith would take that as one more proof that God loves them, and ignore the fact that a bunch of other faithful people have been getting wet all day. And surprisingly, for the wet people, this went unnoticed, and their faith is still strong. Every faithful person subjectively picks and chooses information.

Faith keeps people from looking for the real causes of events, and this leads to ignorance about how the world actually works.

About your car example, I'm not sure what you mean... Do you usually cross the street without checking first if there are cars coming? Because if you do check, and see that there are no cars, you are not crossing based on hope, but in evidence. You see the size of the street, your brain compares it to all your previous experiences with cars coming in your direction, and it tells you that even if the fastest car you've ever seen comes up now, it couldn't possibly be fast enough to hit you before you reach the other side.

Now, imagine if the brain worked based on faith, picking and choosing information which agrees with your preconceptions. If you come with the fixed idea that you can cross the street, your brain would tend to remember the slowest cars you've ever seen, or maybe a donkey, a bicycle... It would tell you it's ok to cross this street even though you hear the motor of a F1 car coming just around the corner.

Luckily, we've been taught to analyze data properly before crossing a street, but unfortunately, millions of kids in the world are growing up being taught to be ignorant. Have faith that God is watching you, that God is the creator, that God is the answer to all your questions! Don't question anymore, just be ignorant.

Could you tell us what's YOUR definition of ignorance then?

I agree. In fact, I've come acknowledge that everytime someone describes something as "faith" (like in the bolded statements), it sounds more like expectations. Is it really faith that your car's brakes are going to work, or is the expectation that they should, would, and probably will work? Is it faith that you get up in the morning and expect your feet to touch the ground without thinking that they will, (because that would be considering compulsive thinking if you think that way about everything to take away the sense of "faith"), or is it the reality that for every morning you've woken up since you learned to walk, that the floor has been there and you subconsciously expect it to be there?

You can look at it all either way, really. In my opinion, I think those falling on "faith" are those that like to ignore psychology...which has so many awesome explanations about how the human mind works. Is faith ignorant? To a degree. But I think it's the point that the word is so applied to religious belief that those of us annoyed with religion, just hate the hear the word when you could use something more... real... like, the word "expect." :-)

If you believe in a god that is deemed false and you believe in him that he is real and you should love him that kind of faith is blind faith which is also ignornace.

Without ignorance it is hard to have faith. Faith is not hope its delusion spurred on by the unknown.

3 Points

a. "supported only by tautology", the correct term is begging the question, since p then q and since q then p.

b. "Occam's Razor drives us to admit that when we cannot empirically disprove the existence of something". Occam's razor proposes that given two equally likely explanations, the simpler one is usually correct. This is not an argument for the ambiguity of disproof. However, Faith cannot be disproved, yes, because it is a metaphysical trait, it is like disproving an concept, you can never 'prove' communism or anarchy, you can prove it exists, but you can never prove they're right, because it is metaphysical. You might be able to show advantages and disadvantages of a metaphysical concept, but you cannot absolutely prove or disprove a metaphysical value like one can with a physical, concrete law or theory.

c. "Ergo, we must accept that it is possible for a living, real, listening and noticing God to exist". That is a false dichotomy, why should 'god' be listening and noticing? Why endorse it with such attributes? When physicists use the word god, it is not always used to describe any omni salient being, rather it's an all encompassing term to include everything they don't know about the universe. It is even speculated that 'god' is nothing but a natural phenomenon that occurred concurrently with the creation of the space time continuum. Endowing god with such anthropomorphic traits is quite presumptuous, if not ignorant.

I believe that perhaps it is the wording of the debate which is causing much confusion, I would support "Faith is ignorant", but to assert metaphorically results in much more turmoil as interpretation is at the discretion of the responder. To that extent, I do cede that to categorically assign all faith to ignorance is logically fallacious.