Philosophy and the F-Word
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A small boy was once asked what faith is, and his response was very revealing. He said;
“Faith is believing in something you know isn’t true.”
That is how many people view faith, which explains why the word is so repugnant in so many circles. Most people associate the word with the phrase, ‘leap of faith’ as an antithesis to reason. It sounds like an irrational stab in the dark upon which they base their understanding of all things. What intelligent person would claim that kind of faith as a foundation for anything? Well…a religious nut, I guess. Or a lunatic. Certainly not a rational human being.
But there are really two kinds of faith.
I’m going to borrow an example from Francis Schaeffer.
Let’s say there is a group of people climbing in the Swiss Alps.
They have been climbing for days when suddenly a fog bank descends around
them. 
The
guide tells the group that there is no hope; the ice is forming all around, and
by morning they will all be frozen to death.
To keep them all warm for the moment, she has everyone continue to climb
until no one has any idea where they are. Eventually
they come to a cliff’s edge. One
member of the group asks the guide;
“Suppose I were to hang and drop from this edge. If there happened to be a ledge or a tree branch below the fog bank, and I landed on it, would I survive?”
The guide responds, telling the man that if there were such a ledge and he was to land on it and if it was below the fog bank that, yes, he would probably survive. So without any knowledge or reason to support his act, one of the climbers hangs and drops. This is one type of faith—a leap of faith.
Now, let’s take the same situation; a group climbing in the Alps, the fog bank descends, they get lost and come to an edge. But then they hear a distant voice that says;
“Hello! You are in great danger. If you stay there, you will freeze to death. I have lived in these mountains since I was a boy, and I can tell exactly where you are from your voices. Right now, you are at the edge, but what you can’t see is that fifteen feet below you is a ledge about six feet wide. It is below the fog bank. If you hang and drop, you will last the night and my boys and I will get you in the morning.”
Now I would not hang and drop at once; I would want to make
sure this guy knows what he’s talking about. I might ask him how can I be sure he is as familiar with this
mountain as he says? He might
respond by instructing me to walk twenty paces to the north, where there is a
stone with his initials on it, F.A.S. Upon
investigation I would find, sure enough, there is a stone with the initials
F.A.S. on it. I would want to
determine if this person is an enemy who wants us to drop off the edge so he and
his boys can rifle through our pockets for valuables.
I would ask questions until I was satisfied, and then (because
time is running out, and no answer would mean death) I would hang and
drop. It is still faith because I
cannot see the ledge, but not a wild, irrational leap based upon fantasy.
In fact, this type of faith is so different from the first that there
should really be a different word for it.
Faith is a strong conviction, belief or trust in something. So faith can only be evaluated by its object. You have faith in something, and that thing you have the faith in either is worthy of your faith or it is not. For example, you would be foolish to have faith that I could juggle four eggs without breaking them, because I do not know how to juggle. That faith would be misplaced. However, if you gave those same eggs to Michael Moschen (the world’s foremost juggler), your faith would be rational—he could do that in his sleep. The person in the first illustration that wanted to hang and drop with no reason had placed his faith in guesswork and a wish that something might be there. The second illustration had an object of that faith that withstood rational testing. One person is a fool and another is not because of where they placed their faith, not because they had faith.
We all use faith—all of us. Even scientists. In fact, scientists need faith. Scientists must have faith that there is a reality that you can know and trust; that there is an underlying order that can be understood; that our senses correspond to that same reality; that Nature behaves the same way when observed or not; that there are laws of nature that can be depended upon; that other scientists do their work accurately and honestly. Science is more than collecting data; the data has to be explained. It requires a theory as to how the data fits together. That means an educated guess that then gets tested to see if it is true. What makes science a rational tool is the testing process. That is the litmus test. Scientists, we like to think, dedicate themselves to objective reality. They examine the facts and follow them wherever they lead—no matter what the consequences. If new information is discovered that proves the theory false, then the theory is scrapped or amended to fit the facts. As the saying goes;
‘There’s nothing like a little data to upset a theory.’
Until it is proven, the scientist relies upon faith in his theory to guide him through.
Galileo
serves as a prime example of this heroic stance, standing for truth in the face
of adversity. He bucked the
authority and believed that the Earth revolves around the sun, not the sun
around the Earth, and as a result, he endured a lot of persecution.
Oddly enough, that persecution came from the Church, but they persecuted
him, not based upon anything the Bible had to say, but because they had adopted
the views of Aristotle into Church dogma, and as a result, accused Galileo of
being a heretic. Why? Galileo believed that the God of the Universe is the same as
the God of the Bible, and anything observed in Nature would be consistent with
the Bible, so it didn’t adversely affect his faith in either area when he
noticed the anomalies in the stellar objects he was studying. They said he had no faith, when in fact he had tremendous
faith. And he also had faith in
God.
And so have a host of scientists like, say Pascal. And Faraday, Kelvin, Boyle, Kepler, Joule and Newton. So when you question whether the use of faith is appropriate, don’t look at the person who has the faith, look at what he has faith in.
“Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.”
–Elton
Trueblood
Darren Turney
21 August 2005