Faith. A term so revered it is difficult to discuss. Those three phonemes together have the power to evoke incredible emotion. The word holds a special place in the minds of many; culture dictates it should remain sacred: immune to the deconstruction which defines our age. It is holy. It is, if nothing else, traditional.

Before getting to my main point, I have to head off a persistent equivocation. Many people use the word faith in two different ways, and they often use these two different definitions interchangeably. They are not interchangeable.

In the religious, primarily Christian sense, faith is usually defined by Hebrews 11:1 which states, “…Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Many people use faith to mean trust. “I have faith that my friend will repay the favor he owes me.” I trust that he will repay me. But if we get into a enough circumstances where the repayment is not forthcoming, or if I’m always bailing him out and there is no recompense, that trust will eventually disappear. You only get a certain measure of trust with each person and if you blow it, you’re done. In some cases, trust can never be regained.

When discussing theistic belief, faith is used to mean “belief without evidence”. The Bible goes to great lengths to rationalize persistent faith in the lack of evidence, including the end of Hebrews 11 where it states, “These [people mentioned in the preceding verses] were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.” In other words, keep the faith and you get heaven later, even if nothing went right on Earth. A similar book promises 72 virgins, among other perks.

There are numerous passages in the Bible extolling the virtues of faith—which is curious considering that Christ said in Matthew 17:20, “if you have faith the size of a mustard seed you can say to a mountain, ‘move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” The point of the mustard seed metaphor is that it’s a really small amount—so minuscule that you can hardly see it. If you just had that tiny little bit of faith, you’d have super powers. You’d be like a real life X-Man. [1]

Nobody has moved a mountain via faith, so everyone on Earth must have microscopic amounts of it. Maybe there’s a Plank Faith Unit which represents the smallest amount of faith one can have within uncertainty constraints? But I digress. The point is, despite a small, tiny bit of faith being able to accomplish great things, the Bible still needs to justify the lack of results from faith.

But let’s step down to a more hands-on level. From a practical, down-to-Earth standpoint, we should be taking a look at faith and how people use it every day. How does it affect the way people make the mundane decisions that everyone needs to make as they maneuver the road of life?

Well, from what I can see regarding every day circumstances, no one uses it.

All the arguments I have heard in support of faith are either the trust kind of faith, or they’re the scientific method, which is not faith-based at all. Let’s run down a few examples.

The pastor of the church I used to attend loved to use the analogy of the blue chair. (The church had blue chairs.) I must have heard it a dozen times, and it always ticked me off because even at a young age I could very plainly see that the analogy was invalid. The argument went: When you came in to church this morning, you just plopped right down in the chair. You didn’t look under it. You didn’t kind of ease into it. You didn’t ask anyone else about it. You just sat down and you knew that the chair was going to hold you up. That’s faith.

No, that is not faith. That is the scientific method in action. How many times have church-goers been sitting in those blue chairs? Every weekend for twenty years? And thousands of people per weekend sat in thousands of chairs. Out of all those plopping down in chairs, how many times did a chair collapse? To my knowledge, none. In other words, the “sitting down in the chair” experiment has been run literally millions of times and it has never given any result other than “chair successfully holds fat butt”. It’s a pretty safe bet, then, to say that this sit will be no different.

By the same token, you don’t just throw your fat butt into any chair you come across. If you go into an antique collector’s home, you’re not going to sit on the first chair you see, particularly if it looks old, because it might not be sturdy. If you start to sit down and the host says, “oh, don’t sit in that chair; it’s not safe,” most people are not so dense that they keep trying to sit.

In other situations, the trust example is used. “I have faith in our leaders to do the right thing.” This is true until they do something you disagree with, at which point you try and vote them out in the next election. This is not “faith without evidence”, it’s trust. You trust in leaders, but when that trust is betrayed, it evaporates—and so does the “faith”. They’re really synonymous.

If we take the usage of faith as it refers to a god, we also see two definitions in action. Sometimes people use it to talk about their trust in God. “I have faith that God will deliver us from evil.” Fair enough. This is again synonymous with “I have faith that our leaders will deliver us from evil.” The personage is rather incidental to the trust that the action will happen.

But when it comes to belief in God—that is the clincher. I’ve had many debates where at least this much could be agreed on: you must have faith that God exists. This is different from having faith in God, which could mean trust again, depending on the situation.

Faith that God exists is the “belief without evidence” kind of faith. Except the only time people ever use faith this way—the only time this is acceptable in any situation at all—is when we’re discussing God. Anyone who uses this type of faith without evidence in daily life is considered foolish.

Examples are plentiful. Everyone knows that the offer which sounds too good to be true is too good to be true. Plenty of con artists use Christianity to play on people’s trust-faith, but only the most gullible buy into a program that sounds too good to be true without doing a little research on it. The internet has made this even easier. There is no excuse for not running a ministry’s name through Google. If they claim to be a multi-million dollar operation but have little or no web presence, something is wrong. You don’t need faith to verify this—it’s the scientific method again, coupled with life experiences of dealing with this sort of thing. No moderately intelligent person buys into something like this based on evidence-less faith.

Evidence-less faith gets you ripped off. You could argue that this is due to the unscrupulous people who take advantage of everyone, but evidence-less faith is foolish even when you’re not dealing with people. You can take pretty much any mundane activity, like the quintessential lightbulb that seems pop up in so many philosophical illustrations. Nobody has evidence-less faith that the lightbulb is going to be fixed. They just replace the dang bulb. It’s the scientific method again. If your car runs out of gas, you don’t have faith that it’s going to get more gas. You take the initiative and fix the problem.

We can also look at the field of medicine. You may have faith in in the doctor that they will give you the care you need to recover, but this is trust-faith. You trust they’re not lying to you about their qualifications, and the fact that they work in the hospital and have a team of assistants lends credibility to their being a doctor. You trust this because your experience tells you that this is a safe assumption.

Christians will pray and hope and believe that someone will be healed, but they rarely do this apart from medical care. There are stories of cancer going into remission and other modern day “miracles”, but these things will happen regardless—they happen just as often to people with no religious leanings. Contrariwise, someone who gets medical attention has a much higher rate of recovery, again, independent of their beliefs. Evidence-less faith in medicine is ineffectual without additional medical action.

I’ve tried to make the difference as clear as I am able, between trust-faith and evidence-less faith. There will still be people confusing the two. However, the difference is important, because I have yet to see one single example anywhere of people using evidence-less faith in everyday life. The only time it is ever invoked is when one needs to explain their belief in God.

In Hebrews 11, there is a large run-down of people who had faith, but didn’t receive part or all of what they were believing for. Recently, we have seen the private correspondence of Mother Teresa, where she also could not find evidence of Christ’s presence. The Bible promises that these people will be rewarded postmortem, but the question remains: what guarantee do we have that this should be the case? We have the Bible, which must be believed on evidence-less faith: the same evidence-less faith that let Mother Teresa down for fifty years.

More importantly, if evidence-less faith is such a poor tool in daily, practical life that the very thought of using it on a regular basis is silly, then why should it suddenly become a virtue when presented with grand concepts like God? How can something which is impotent in little things justify grand things?

Evidence-less faith persists due to tradition. There is no practical situation in which it is useful. Its utility is that it allows enormous concepts such as God to be discussed in what appears to be a rational manner, free from the persistent gadfly that is no evidence.

Now some people will point out that we do indeed have evidence for God. The very fact we’re alive is a testament to this. The complexity of life, the unfathomable size of the universe, the interplay of ecology on the planet: these things are, to some, evidence of a greater intelligence.

Philosophically, there is nothing wrong with this. The debate has been going on for centuries, and it’s rather outside the scope of this essay to examine it. But from a scientific standpoint, this evidence does not support a rational conclusion. A scientific conclusion must be put to the test.

Jesus Christ famously pointed out in Matthew 4:7 that the Bible states in Deuteronomy 6:16, “It is written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the Test.’”

What is a rationally minded individual to do? There are some people—perhaps a greater number than is typically thought—who approach things with reason. It happens naturally. This is not to say these people are emotionless machines, or that emotions do not affect the decision making process subconsciously, as has been shown to happen in numerous psychological experiments, but simply that they recognize this in themselves and to the greatest extent possible, approach life with a rational mindset.

I am one of these people.

Christians will quote Christ in Matthew 18:3 where he says, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” The idea behind this is that one must set aside doubts and have faith—both kinds: trust-faith and evidence-less faith—that God exists and he will take care of you.

The passage bothers me for two reasons. First, as a child, I was still much the way I am today: searching, experimenting, questioning, and so on. To me, becoming like a child really means one thing. It means giving up the knowledge and experience I have gained over the past fifteen years. I consider this injudicious.

The second reason I do not like the “set aside your doubts” suggestion is that I have a very good method for setting aside doubts. I do more research and experimentation. If I have a doubt that, for example, global warming is not true, well I hardly have an excuse to remain ignorant of the situation. I go and read about it. If I doubt that Smedly Schmuckatelli would make a good president, I find it absurd that I would set aside my doubts and vote for him anyway. I’m going to go find out more about him. Maybe he would make a good president, but I’m not going to accept that on faith.

Unfortunately, the Bible clearly states that this method of setting aside doubts is not an option. Disregarding the fact that “God” is not a testable concept anyway, the Bible tells us in no uncertain terms that this is not allowed.[2] So the methods that I use to approach life—the only thing I know that works for me—is the one thing I am not permitted to fall back on when discussing the concept of God. Instead, I am told to set aside my doubts (but not the way I always have, that’s not allowed), and use evidence-less faith (because, again, I’m not allowed to test the evidence that is commonly cited), and after I die I might be rewarded—but not necessarily before.

In essence, I have no belief in faith. Faith is an alien idea to me; as strange as breathing water or making my own food via chloroplasts. My rational nature is integral to my perceptual gestalt. It is part of who I am. I have no concept of this strange virtue of evidence-less belief and I find it impossible to act in a manner which demands this. It is as physically impossible to me as flying.

I am not opposed to the idea that a god exists. One very well may. But until such a time as the concept of god can be tested empirically, I do not believe a god exists. I am atheist by way of faith—faitheist, if you will. And if reason, knowledge, logic and the scientific method—if these are my sins, I wear them with pride.

-Ted


[1] It’s important to note that the epistle James wrote in James 2:20, “Faith without works is dead.” People take these verses together to mean the “moving of the mountain” could actually be accomplished if you believed in yourself enough to organize a massive team of people to move the mountain for you. This is “faith” supported by works. (A less fanciful example would be starting a business and becoming a billionaire.) This is a rather disingenuous justification, though, because taken in context, the “faith with works” line means that if you had true faith in your salvation through Christ, this should manifest itself through your works. That is to say, your actions will speak louder than your words, and you’ll feed the poor, help the sick, and so on, not that you’ll be literally changing the face of the Earth through brute force.

Besides, many people do believe that Jesus was being literal, here, so the X-Men comparison, while snarky, is not really that far off the mark.[Back]

[2] There is a single exception to this which I am aware of, and indeed took advantage of when I was a teenager. An essay for another day, perhaps. [Back]