I’ve been thinking about faith and belief lately. At the outset I would like to say that as far as I’m concern, faith and belief are one and the same. In my Catholic school days, the nuns would say that in order to have faith you must believe. And in order to believe you must have faith. Two views of the same coin or circular reasoning?
The faith and belief that’s promoted today by many religions tend to be talked about in terms that could lead one to think that faith and belief are “things”. In fact I heard one preacher try to make the point that somehow faith had substance.
Faith is supposedly something that comes into you as a gift when you pray a lot or attend church a lot. C.S. Lewis made the point in “Mere Christianity” that you couldn’t reason Christianity out so the best way to have faith is the pray and convince yourself through repetition that it’s true. I prefer to see faith as a mind concept or process that can supplant normal reasoning.
In the Catholic Encyclopedia, belief is defined -”that state of the mind by which it assents to propositions, not by reason of their intrinsic evidence, but because of authority.” To me the crucial items in the definition are “not by reason” and “because of authority.” So when you believe something you abandon reason and you assent or accept belief because of some authority, either human or written.
The problem with that is that you relinquish your normal reasoning process to then just accepting what someone tells you “because of authority”. You now abandon looking at the evidence and no longer question assumptions. Now you are susceptible to anything because you have no external basis to judge validity. If you believe that illness can be cured just by praying, then you may die sooner than if you sought medical help. So belief can be a real life or death issue.
It’s amazing to me to hear how much preachers continually push the notion to “just have faith” and everything will be just dandy. From an evolutionary point of view, belief can be a life saving thing for example if the tall grass is rustling, and you believe it’s because a lion is walking through there, it might save your life. But then again it might just be that the wind is moving the grass. So if you are right or wrong in your belief doesn’t matter because you are still alive to tell about it. But if you are rational and say that it was just the wind and a lion was truly there, then you no longer get to pass on your genes because you are a lions’ lunch.
But as we have gain knowledge through science about how the world works we may need to abandon some beliefs. Infrared technology can now tell us whether or not the lion is in the tall grass. We no longer have to rely on faith. But to hold onto to faith when science and evidence tell you other wise, can have profound consequences.
Take the belief that prayer works or you can pray away a disease. If a child is sick and the parents refuse to take the child to the doctors and rely on prayer instead, then the child is in great danger. Or if you are out of work and you have the belief or faith that God will find you a job with out you looking for one, you may end up on the street.
Or if your belief is that the Bible has the truth about how people came to be on this earth and insist on Creationism or Intelligent Design be taught in pubic schools instead of evolution, then our whole country is put at risk.
Beliefs can be comforting but they can be dangerous. We really need to recognize that.