[Industrialblog,
December 30, 2005]
Random thoughts on faith
While reading Sam Harris' The End of Faith, I began to wonder about a few things. The first is, even though I'm a Christian, I agreed with the vast majority of what's in the book. When he discusses the nature of faith, I began to really wonder ... and get a little confused.
It seems to me there's faith and then there's faith. Confusing, yes. But by that, I mean we mean different things when we speak of faith.
Faith is a powerful process. And as I learned in AA, you can access that power by having faith in anything. "Just believe in a Higher Power," we were told, incessantly. I had problems with that, but I couldn't argue with the results. People believed, with all due sincerity or not, in all sorts of nonsense. The Big Book (that is, the manual of AA) was the word of God, for example. "The lightbulb is my higher power," is another. People constantly told me about the importance of faith, about people who got out of insane asylums by believing in an angel on their shoulder (seriously, a guy told me that he told a person in the nuthouse that he was placing an angel on the crazyman's shoulder, and the crazy guy got better).
There was a deeper, Joseph Campbell-esque conclusion to be drawn as well -- that God was everywhere, and you could access Him by having faith, and that His presence informed all world religions, well-known or made up. And that it was all about your own intentions, and what you chose to put your attention upon. And of course this meant that there was a religious experience to be had in all faiths, and the real enemy, according to Campbell, was the dogma that great up around it.
Anyway, these different definitions of faith are part of the problem. There is simply the power and happiness that comes when you stop questioning and just get on with your life, secure that you're on the right path. There is also (potentially) a power that comes merely from having faith in God, as God makes Himself known through His various masks (or in the Catholic sense, through His grace in different traditions). But when I speak of faith, I'm also talking about a third thing. And that's a belief in the actual truth of the spiritual propositions because there is evidence of such, not complete evidence, more like an incomplete picture. I'm a Christian not because I believe that Christianity is a way that man has found to experience God, and God has gone along with it, ignoring its dogma, but because I believe that God has sent Christ into the world to save it. My faith is based on spiritual experiences, yes, and scripture, and by testing my beliefs against what I see in the world.
Okay, to back up. There's the faith I have because I self-identify as a Christian, and because I have a personal investment in that identity, and because I want to be right about it. This faith is a mental trap. Sam Harris tears this kind of faith apart, and I agree with him. Then there is a faith that produces results, regardless of its truthfulness or falsity; this is the AA experience, and it's more or less a mental trick designed to allow us to get on with our lives. This is faith is useful, but can also lead to the mental trap above. Then there's faith that's really about holding fast to the memory of experiences, learning to trust in the truth of propositions formulated by evidence, and holding to them even when it's difficult.
I dunno. More on this later.
It seems to me there's faith and then there's faith. Confusing, yes. But by that, I mean we mean different things when we speak of faith.
Faith is a powerful process. And as I learned in AA, you can access that power by having faith in anything. "Just believe in a Higher Power," we were told, incessantly. I had problems with that, but I couldn't argue with the results. People believed, with all due sincerity or not, in all sorts of nonsense. The Big Book (that is, the manual of AA) was the word of God, for example. "The lightbulb is my higher power," is another. People constantly told me about the importance of faith, about people who got out of insane asylums by believing in an angel on their shoulder (seriously, a guy told me that he told a person in the nuthouse that he was placing an angel on the crazyman's shoulder, and the crazy guy got better).
There was a deeper, Joseph Campbell-esque conclusion to be drawn as well -- that God was everywhere, and you could access Him by having faith, and that His presence informed all world religions, well-known or made up. And that it was all about your own intentions, and what you chose to put your attention upon. And of course this meant that there was a religious experience to be had in all faiths, and the real enemy, according to Campbell, was the dogma that great up around it.
Anyway, these different definitions of faith are part of the problem. There is simply the power and happiness that comes when you stop questioning and just get on with your life, secure that you're on the right path. There is also (potentially) a power that comes merely from having faith in God, as God makes Himself known through His various masks (or in the Catholic sense, through His grace in different traditions). But when I speak of faith, I'm also talking about a third thing. And that's a belief in the actual truth of the spiritual propositions because there is evidence of such, not complete evidence, more like an incomplete picture. I'm a Christian not because I believe that Christianity is a way that man has found to experience God, and God has gone along with it, ignoring its dogma, but because I believe that God has sent Christ into the world to save it. My faith is based on spiritual experiences, yes, and scripture, and by testing my beliefs against what I see in the world.
Okay, to back up. There's the faith I have because I self-identify as a Christian, and because I have a personal investment in that identity, and because I want to be right about it. This faith is a mental trap. Sam Harris tears this kind of faith apart, and I agree with him. Then there is a faith that produces results, regardless of its truthfulness or falsity; this is the AA experience, and it's more or less a mental trick designed to allow us to get on with our lives. This is faith is useful, but can also lead to the mental trap above. Then there's faith that's really about holding fast to the memory of experiences, learning to trust in the truth of propositions formulated by evidence, and holding to them even when it's difficult.
I dunno. More on this later.
I tend to reserve faith in some formal sense to a belief in God with whatever details the individual puts around it. If used broadly to cover all of the beliefs that we actually use to operate in the world, then faith is linked to action. That seems attractive to me in terms of something more meaningful.
Feel free to expand on the "mental trap" element. I do think that one throws away their ability to reason when they stop questionning their beliefs, the evidence surrounding their beliefs, and whether the outcome of the actions they take based on their beliefs is consistent with their beliefs. (That goes along with my belief that we're all flawed and no one is all knowing, so each of us has got at least a few things wrong all of the time.)
Have a great New Year.
My own disorganized thoughts, on a Saturday morning when I'm still waking up, is that your second kind of faith— "faith that produces results, regardless of its truthfulness or falsity"— is connected to something structural in the nature of human thought. Gregory Bateson, for all his occasional battiness, had some interesting musings on the structural side of "self-bootstrapping belief."
On a much deeper level, there seem to be structures, symbols, archetypes— call them what you will— which are built into the human soul and which seem to surface again and again, in slightly varying outward dress, at various places and times. They can be studied in various ways, in a Joseph Campbell way, or in a Carl Jung way, etc. From a theological perspective I would consider them to be part of the God-given orders of creation— or rather, in light of the Fall, part of the God-given orders of preservation, and as such, at best by God's grace a preparatio evangelii, at worst by Man's perversity part of the human rebellion against God. Think of C.S. Lewis and the value he found in Greek, Roman, and Norse myth— and how that was interwoven with his eventual conversion to Christianity.
My own encounter with this "deep level" came at age 17 when I cooked up my own religion, called Hermetic Dualism, and even wrote its "scriptures" in a detailed and very complex language I'd been constructing throughout my teenage years. Hermetic Dualism was sort of a backhanded take on gnosticism, with the good god striving to purify and preserve the "myriad-faceted jewel" of this world in all its tangled diversity, the evil god working to return all things to the undifferentiated primordial unity. I never granted this religion any primary credence, I remained throughout a committed Christian and a very traditional Presbyterian— much like the devout Catholic Tolkien and his Middle Earth with its Valar, etc. At the same time, I became acutely aware that I was not just tinkering with idle fancy, but rather working on something deep, something of very high voltage.
Here's the odd thing: as a teenager I was fairly well read in the same sort of mythologies which captivated Lewis; but there was much more of this sort of "deep structure" in Hermetic Dualism than I knew how to put into it. Some years later, on into my 20s, a friend of mine who was deeply versed in Jung showed me how my Hermetic Dualist "scriptures" were crawling with Jungian archetypes. Rather uncanny. And I can't explain it. Only it does seem to relate to the notion of distinct structural levels of faith— some of these levels directly correlatable with our Christian faith, some of them more problematic and ambiguous.
Dammit, Bill, you're making me think! Not on a Saturday morning!