To Know or Not To Know - Is Faith The Answer?

Q: I've cornered my good friend through reductionist logic before and he's often ended the discussion with "Well to an extent it is a matter of faith...but I know these things to be true, yada yada." I would like you to expand on the idea of 'faith' being an unreliable rubric for truth. To me it is apparent why faith can be misleading if not wholly incorrect, but why can it not be used to justify an entire theology that seemingly makes sense?

My Response:

The simplest way of putting it is that I take the believer at his word, i.e. that faith is a means of ascertaining knowledge.

The mistake of many is to look at faith as some kind of childish attempt at giving a glib justification for believing anything one wants. While certainly, this may be the case for some religious believers of various dogmatic persuasions, it is not the issue for the more learned religious intellectuals, notably Augustine and Aquinas or more recently Gordon Clark and Carl Henry. For these men, faith is a tool for acquiring knowledge, a necessary one due to the innate problems that empirical knowledge supposedly has, based on the critical observation that numerous times in history the scientific method has led to wrong conclusions.

The immediate issue for both the believer and unbeliever concerns the usage of faith. When the agnostic asks the believer how they know the resurrection of Christ is true, the response is some variation of "the Bible says so" or "faith compels me." Notice here in the last phrase the issue of compulsion. When I was a believer I often used this notion and have heard many others use it; the idea of faith being some kind of internal force, pushing and prodding one to believe in some predetermined thing. Curiously, the very same phraseology is used when referencing reason or logic, as when someone says, "I was forced to see his logic" or "the force of his reason was strong" or "his argument held weight." Even in our linguistic metaphor, we accept tacitly that faith and reason are synonymous at least in as far as they are a compelling inner force, pulling us along to claimed conclusions.

It is imperative that the believer accept this. The sophomoric usage of "faith" whenever an objection is brought up that can't be answered any other way, needs to be seen as masking the underlying dynamic, of the force of faith. I am not making a case for the efficacy of faith as a legitimate epistemic (way of knowing) tool, but merely pointing out the power of it. Believers and unbelievers alike do themselves a disservice when they mistake the usage of faith as being simply an easy answer to tough questions. The fact is, faith isn't easy. Faith, like reason, via the perceived force that it embodies, compels people to various conclusions that are, depending on the situation, difficult to accept. I am not equating the two, merely pointing out that the conclusions of the two forces can be jarring to the person led to them, whether it is the resurrection of Christ as prescribed by faith, or special relativity as prescribed by reason.

Logic and reason, through thousands of years of philosophy and recently cognitive science, have been documented quite thoroughly as to their inner workings. In fact, anybody can go to college and take a course in logic. One can also read books and take classes in cognitive science, figuring out the inner workings of the brain and the means by which thought and analysis are done. While there are many years left, before a complete understanding of human thought is understood, only the hugely obtuse individual would declare we have not made great leaps in our understanding.

Where, then, are the texts and classes on the inner workings of faith? In the world at large, there are billions of people going about their lives, claiming to make decisions, often life-altering, based on a system of epistemology called “faith.” Entire governments are at the mercy of this self-described inner force. Lives are continuously lost and ruined because of inner compulsion. Bombs are set off, planes have flown into buildings, court decisions and civil rights violated because of the claimed dictates of this force. Yet, not a single book, article, or letter has been written detailing the process by which faith works. What other force that affects this many people is either not understood or attempted to be understood? The answer is simple, none.

Faith, then, is a force compelling one to certain ideological conclusions, dependent on the religion one grows up in. The next question is: how? It is all well and good that the nominal notion of a force has been accepted, but as with all forces, the acknowledgment of their existence is only half the issue, the other is the means by which it works. Ironically, this question is empirical in nature.

Since faith is used as an answer to questions that have no empirical basis, like the resurrection, how exactly sin functions, the tripartite existence of "god", and the virgin birth (to name a few) then it cannot rely, for its own justification, upon a system of thought that is incapable of supplying the conclusions sought after. Now, I can already hear the religious apologists of the empirical camp raising their objections. Who has not heard the point of "reason brings you to the water and faith makes you jump in?" Kierkegaard referred to it as a "leap" of faith, into the unknown. These "answers" skip the why and how of faith's compulsion to leap into the water. This is an important question. If someone were to jump off a bridge and survive, the first question asked of that person once rescued is why did they jump. The next question is how did the reason's power incite the action. These questions are basic to how we deal with the actions of people. No answer to the why of action is ever taken completely at face value, as is shown anytime we become puzzled over an answer that doesn’t seem to fit. It doesn’t fit because we find it difficult to understand the how, or power, of the why to incite such an act.

Yet, when it comes to religious acts, the why is never followed up with the how. Faith is blindly accepted as an answer to the why of an act and yet never pursued further as to the how of its power. The lack of the second question should be astoundingly puzzling. We constantly grasp at the reasons why people do the things they do, often asking in various states of incredulity or hysteria "why did you do that?" When the answer is given, while we may not understand it personally, there is a weight lifted by the knowledge, this being because we now know the compelling force, the reason. Who has not heard or said the phrase after hearing a reason given, "I can see how that would force you to do it" or some variation?

If faith is not capable of answering the why/how questions of human action, there must be another route. Now, one way out is the notion that faith actions occur in a vacuum without any causal predecessor. However, since the actions of faith are said to be, by any religion, moral in nature and morality is only there if will (self-causation) is behind it, saying that faith acts occur without causal connection would destroy the moral mandate of absolutism.

The conclusion reached is that faith is not an answer in the traditional sense of a cause, but rather faith exists as a cognitive box holding together various ideas that are believed for other reasons. In other words, faith is an answer to "why," but the "how" is to be found in psychology, sociology, memetics, and cognitive science. Faith is not a belief itself, but the object of belief, a concept used to hide the real reasons behind belief in something.

Is it any great surprise that people who grow up around a specific religion tend to identify with it? Or when the story of conversion happens, it is most often told in the light of some great emotional experience surrounded by mystery? The confusion created by a lack of truly knowing the how of conversion is covered up and hidden by yet another uncertainty, allowing the believer to continue on without getting in touch with a very real human, not divine, experience.

I am not denying the power that faith has. I am allowing the power of its force to be more fully understood. Here is the answer to why "faith" is given as an answer to the "why" of a belief, that's because the "how" is different for everyone. Faith is a force with no motor device, it is waves without water. The power of faith is then to be found in the ability of it to mask the "how" of human action, to end the discussion before it goes further.

This is why faith cannot be used to justify an entire theology; it has no means of explicating the how of its compulsion and therefore no means of delineating between legitimate true faith concepts and the false. Nor can it be defined in any way that allows us to understand the how of its compulsion. Therefore, it cannot be a valid source of epistemology, no matter how many times the word is used.