Against Faith

You awake and find yourself alone in the woods, with no memory of how you arrived there. In fact, you have no memory of your past at all. You could have been living there for years, or recently been moved there against your will. You have no relevant survival skills. You do not know how to judge direction by sun or stars. You do not know how to track game. The woods are vast, seemingly without end. You walk for several hours in one direction to find yourself no closer to an exit into civilization. Then you recognize footprints in the mud. The prints match your own shoes: you've been walking in circles. You're hungry and cold. You feel that your situation is hopeless, and with all probability you won't survive more than a few days. You're afraid.

How would you cope? It's probably fair to concede than many would allow themselves to lapse into despair, and more or less await the inevitable. However, I believe that many more would eventually summon the courage to keep trying, learning as much as they can about their surroundings and trying to muddle their way through the situation and find a way out of the woods, or at least find food, fresh water and shelter, so they can continue the struggle.

One thing that hope none of us would do: deny the reality of the situation. Simply because we have no knowledge of life before the woods - or present knowledge of a way out - does not imply that this is an illusion. As great as the human capacity for denial is, I doubt any of us would believe that if we sit in the dirt and focus on a warm house, cable TV and a pepperoni pizza, we can make that a reality through force of will.

Well, you can see where this is going. The setting of the woods is our life on earth. The struggle for survival is our own spiritual struggle. I mean this not in a mystical sense, but in an ethical an metaphysical sense. Being born into this place and time means we have full bellies and warm beds. But we still struggle to find meaning, fulfillment and a understanding of truth, goodness and badness, rightness and wrongness in our daily lives.

My thesis is this: In as much as these concepts aren't readily apparent or easy, the reaction of turning to faith for answers is wrong. Not just unwise, but wrong.

In my judgement, the first thing one must accept is the existence of physical reality. In order to do so, one must accept the basic correctness of ones own perceptions. As fallible as they are, one must trust one's own eyes, ears, sense of feeling and touch, and one's own mind. With these basic assumptions acting as a foundation, a super-structure of theories about ethics, metaphysics and philosophy (not to mention scientific knowledge of the physical world) is possible. Without them, a person is capable of any wild, random action. They could lapse into solipsism, believing that theirs is the only real experience, and that it means nothing to shoot a thousand people in the face. They could choose to ape the behavior of others, without really accepting social mores, becoming a narcissist or sociopath. Etc, etc.

Faith is, in essence, preferring one type of knowledge (gnosis: spiritual or revelatory knowledge) over another (material knowledge). It doesn't necessarily deny the reality of material knowledge, but it insists that gnosis take precedence when there is a conflict. That doesn't mean that a believer is a dangerous sociopath (for the most part), but it means that the "foundation" has been compromised.

My own understanding derives entirely from sensory information, and any rational correlations my mind might derive from that information. To a believer, that material data has competition, from a "higher power": another source that is both apart and above the physical world. In the case of one who believes he himself is a prophet, with direct access to gnosis, the wrongness of his faith will become immediately apparent when he tries to sleep with your wife and start building a holy army (see Joseph Smith). In the case of one who merely has faith in the words of dead prophets, the wrongness will be less obvious, but still there. Dead crazy is more inert than living crazy, but the possibility for unreasonable action is still there. If scripture has anything at all to say about current events, it probably will provoke believers to take actions that they wouldn't otherwise take.

Everything that we have in this world - an understanding of how the universe works, how to efficiently grow food, how to live and work with each other, how to organize a society with laws and courts, how to build a roof that doesn't collapse and kill the family living within - we owe to rational, clear thinking. Faith is a corruption of that. Faith is an appeal, a deference, a yielding - a surrender - to the not-rational. At the bottom, faith is the insistence that by concentrating on an idea, with enough will-power, one is capable of making reality - that if you focus your Chi hard enough, you can make that lightsaber leap off of the ground and into your hand.

For what? What does the believer gain? Quite a lot, I must admit: A sense of purpose, fulfillment, moral certainty and comfort in an afterlife. These are the "higher values" that one seeks after finding food, shelter, a mate, and security. These are the values that rationality alone has difficulty providing in the long run. Faith makes it easier. But Faith has many hands, and while it gives with one, it takes with all others. The cost of comfort is the loss of an ability to judge for oneself, challenge assumptions, and hold opinions outside of orthodoxy.

Other than that, I do believe it actually erodes one's capacity to think critically. If one spends a portion of his life training to ignore or suppress doubts or judgements that are rooted in materialism, during a religious frame of mind, that cannot but have a deleterious effect on the ability to return to that more rational method of thinking when the situation demands it. When trying to parse and understand an essay written by a theological scholar, I cannot help but be boggled by how complex and nonsensical it is. It reads that way because the arguments aren't rooted in a common, tangible world that we all share, but in a supernatural world that cannot be explained without ridiculously convoluted analogies and parable, and even then, poorly.

Faith in general, especially organized religion, and in particular Abrahamic religions cripple the minds of human beings by training them to turn off a critical part of their brains. It says, basically: "You are, as of the moment you were born, scum that has no right to breath air or live freely - no rights at all, as a matter of fact. Despite this, you may be given some of the things that you want if you freely give yourself up. Give up your free judgement, give up your autonomy, be totally obedient in thought and action and you will be given the comforts you desire in return".

Say what you want about the limits of pure reason. If one reviews the works of philosophy from Socrates onward, and you'll see the arguments, counter-arguments, refutations, revisiting and reviewing of ideas long abandoned, affirming, denying, affirming and denying again - the footprints crossing each other in the woods, circling the path again and again. But progress is being made. Today we know more about the world than we ever did before. We know more about our past - and our potential future - than ever before. We're living better than ever before. We're treating each other with more decency than ever before. In spite of the limitations of reason, and the difficulty of living in this universe, we are managing. We're muddling through, to the best of our ability. And I have reason to hope that the trend will continue. Tomorrow means better knowledge of fact, truth and value. Better perspective, a better life. But every moment spent in belief of the supernatural is a moment squandered. A few minutes in the woods, pausing to try one more time to will that house/TV/pizza into reality is a moment not looking for real food, real safety. Beyond that, the demands of obedience from faith put our real achievements in jeopardy by causing random, irrational, dangerous and, yes, immoral behavior. That is why when I say that I am an agnostic - I reject gnosis - it is not with a shrug but with resoluteness and confidence.