@Ren
If one says "faith" has no dictionary meaning, then what does it mean for you or you accept the dictionary meaning?
I think the important point here is not to say that faith - or any given word - has no dictionary meaning, but that it has
several dictionary meanings, which are not necessarily synonymous with each other; and that one may be inadvertently (or sometimes, but I think rarely, consciously) playing with different meanings of a word like faith, in an argument supposed to only target one single meaning. From this follows a fruitful source of fallacies.
At the moment I'm reading an essay by Bertrand Russell called "On the Notion of Cause". (Complete coincidence, by the way). Here is the introductory paragraph of his essay: "In the following paper I wish, first, to maintain that the word “cause” is so inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable; secondly, to inquire what principle, if any, is employed in science in place of the supposed “law of causality” which philosophers imagine to be employed; thirdly, to exhibit certain confusions, especially in regard to teleology and determinism, which appear to me to be connected with erroneous notions as to causality."
And: "... The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. In order to find out what philosophers commonly understand by “cause,” I consulted Baldwin's Dictionary, and was rewarded beyond my expectations, for I found the following three mutually incompatible definitions (...)"
This is very close to the point I am making about faith - but it applies to any polysemic word that exists.
