The Science of Faith

Faith and Science are constantly being represented as opposites in the arena of how we arrange to believe something. The usual view is that faith takes it as given without examination, while science insists upon proving it. Faith appears absolute, to be utterly relied upon; the other is always relative to the evidence, but once established scientifically it's assumed it can always be relied upon. Thus, in their different ways, faith and science always achieve the same outcome-apparent certainty.

Ever since Thomas Aquinas brokered an arrangement between faith and reason in the mid-13th century, facilitating their coexistence without threatening God-science to deal with matters of this world, while God dominated the next one-reality has been divided between the two elements of psychic function, faith and reason. Though this has happened not without a great deal of violent struggle-the Inquisition and Holy wars of the next 4 centuries-as the details were ironed out when Protestantism offered alternative ways of being religiously faithful.

And yet a closer examination of how these two psychic parts function, reveals that falsehood exists in our conventional understanding of both. Reason doesn't roll over with new evidence without a great deal of resistance; it is most inclined to defend the status quo that spawned it, making it more like faith than it admits. And faith doesn't take everything at face value without being goaded or intimidated into that perception in times of fear and crisis.

And contrary to popular notion, reason is no slave to reality, meaning it can't be relied upon always to see the truth. Reason is only capable of inventing various perceptive options, offering alternative views of what's happening. Though objectivity has appeared to make reason king of the hill, as a sense-maker it is nothing more or less than a model builder and a meaning-speculator, as Sherlock Holmes has always insisted to those who like evidence to explain simply; when what's missing, that can't easily be seen, may often be the biggest clue.

In effect reason can be employed to prove anything. As such it's a whore to whatever assumptions have set it in motion. Indeed it's those same assumptions that also determine what we have faith in.

Assumptions are the sneakiest-most hidden-parts of the human psyche, so taken for granted that we never examine them. Indeed we prevent them from being questioned as a matter of love, loyalty and trust, thus hiding them behind a curtain of convention which demands that we believe in them in order to belong to the familial, social and cultural groups to which we all cling for identity and security. These basic, usually unexamined assumptions represent our beliefs-in effect what we have faith in.

Such as, for instance, the prejudiced notion that black people are stupid, therefore it doesn't mean much to kill them. A great many of us held that assumption for a very long time. We believed in it faithfully.

Lets examine faith's falsehoods. Faith is always defined by those who propound it as surrendering to higher meaning. When the term, "higher", can lay claim only to the fact that it's old, very traditional, and that a great many people believe in it. That sounds a lot more like conformity than it does faith. Thus faith and conformity are often assumed to represent the same thing.

The human spirit hungrily craves to surrender to higher meaning; but only if that meaning can spontaneously, by virtue of its intrinsic and irresistible wisdom-inspire us! Nowadays only romantic love seems to possess that power, why we're so excessively enamored with it.

But there's nothing offered in present time, either in politics or religion capable of inspiring all of us. If something did, the stories we love to see and hear, the movies, would not be dominated by obsessive repetitions of superhero violence. Successful stories, meaning those with which we can identify as uplifting moments, require the inspiration of shared myths to provide character complexity greater than good guys/bad guys. This moronic, yet popular view of life derives from a regression to comic book mentality and morality, most likely in this time of spiritual crisis-meaning presently we have nothing in which we can together enthusiastically believe ... except the military, a sad commentary upon our democracy.

In their most fundamental sense, both faith and science are ways to mediate fear, which in essence means nothing more profound than the unknown, the unfamiliar, what's unexpected. All learning is traumatic-i.e. fear avoidant, to facilitate learning, yet also provide the security of familiar structure. That's the way nature arranged it, fear being a rallying cry to learning. Though fear is most often employed as a rallying cry to learning's archenemy-violence. Fear does what it's supposed to do-motivates-but not usually to feel it, examine and try to understand it; instead it motivates us to act impulsively.

We usually regard what frightens us as our enemy and as evil, thereby making us very vulnerable to doing what faith, in its most primitive form, means-taking into our hearts a predetermined solution, hook, line and sinker ... i.e. burn the witch, or the book, at the stake of utter rejection. In other words, don't think any more about it; it's been preordained, as all institutionalized faiths claim.

And yet at it's very best faith is a willingness to believe something not previously known, as the most creative alternative to cynicism, the emotional and mental lair to which pure reason has taken many thinkers in matters of understanding. Faith is what any action ultimately requires, including the wisest, most well considered solutions to life's problems. Because science, or reason never knows anything for sure whose meaning won't change tomorrow. Thus, in moments of decision, only faith in our best option can propel us on our way today.

All great innovative understanding occurs in a spiritual realm, not in an intellectual one. Once it appears-i.e. E=MC2 as Einstein woke from a night's sleep-the mind devours inspirational insight because it can do so much with it. But the originality of new thoughts occurs only in the foggy miasma of emotive-intuitive leaps of faith, which may have climaxed enormously frustrating and repetitive intellectual work. But the great jump of faith occurs just to those capable of navigating the unknowing of massive uncertainty, illuminated only when the learner submits humbly to the bearing forces of the universe finally revealing another secret.