I’ve just downloaded an audiobook called Faith versus Fact: The Incompatibility Between Science and Religion. Written by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, it’s been on my list for some time and I’m really looking forward to getting into it.
Part of the anticipation is my own view that faith is of no use in establishing the truth about the universe. Like any opinionated human being worth their salt, I look forward to hearing someone tell me (for 11 hours, no less) why I’m right about that. The fact I’m able to do so for the discounted price of $US4.95 (75% off! Donald Trump, eat your heart out!) makes the whole deal that much sweeter.
I’m also looking forward to listening to Jerry Coyne (via the book’s narrator). Coyne is a rare human being: well informed, always engaging and fearlessly direct without ever, in all my readings of his frequent blog articles, sliding into personal attacks. He may attack your views, but as far as I can tell he’ll never attack you.
I admire that.
The whole business also has me now thinking about this word faith. In the context that Coyne’s writing about, etymonline describes it as “assent of the mind to the truth of a statement for which there is incomplete evidence”.
That meaning is a bit of a latecomer. Faith originally meant what we would now call faithfulness, fealty or loyalty, often based on a promise. It comes from the Latin fidere, “to trust”, a meaning that can be heard clearly and painfully when we talk about a marriage partner being unfaithful. We also hear it in the phrase act in good faith. In neither context does faith have anything to do with belief, but it does have a lot to do with being someone who can be believed or trusted.
Sometime around the 14th century, faith began to assume a religious connotation. To non-believers like me, it makes little sense to believe something is true without compelling evidence. But to many believers, faith is a gift whose nature Saint Augustine captured eloquently - and in terms antithetical to science - when he wrote: “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”
It may be what led one of my favourite poets, Denise Levertov, to convert to Catholicism late in life. I once heard that when another poet, Robert Creeley, asked her how she could believe something so unbelievable, she replied that it was this very fact that drew her to Catholicism.
I find myself shaking my head in disagreement yet at the same time unable to dismiss her choice out of hand. Levertov was a powerful poet, profoundly connected to life in a way that I doubt I ever will be. She went down a path that makes no sense to me, but she was not someone to choose where she stood lightly.
American theologian James Fowler proposed six stages of “faith development”, beginning in infancy (the Intuitive-Projective stage) and progressing through to late adulthood (Enlightenment). Each stage is characterised by increasing shades of subtlety, acceptance of uncertainty, and - finally - less dependence on what is believed, and more on principles of compassion and love. No person will necessarily go through all six stages.
It’s an interesting model, not least of all for its universality. While religious faith may be optional, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could operate in life without any kind of faith at all. If you accept that it’s impossible to know anything with 100% certainty, some degree of faith is surely required.
So it is that we board the airplane and step into the lift. We set the alarm for the morning and make dinner reservations for the evening. We trust our eyes when they tell us it’s safe to cross the road. We act as if life is certain, even though we know it’s not.
Maybe that’s not faith; perhaps it’s pragmatism.
Descartes grappled with this whole business in the 1600s when he dealt with what philosophers call radical doubt - the question of whether it’s possible to know anything at all. How do you know your senses aren’t misleading you, for example, and that the world isn’t a figment of your imagination? Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) was his answer. The fact I am thinking (or questioning) is proof of my existence. Hence, I can know at a minimum that I exist.
Other philosophers have questioned even that assertion. Pierre Gassendi, one of Descartes’ contemporaries, pointed out that cogito, ergo sum presupposes that there is an “I” doing the thinking.
But this isn’t a philosophy newsletter, and I’m now so far out of my depth that I could audition for the role of Jack in Titanic. So enough of that.
There was a time I had faith in spades. By the time I was 18, though, it was fast disappearing. I’d left home at 17 to go to university, and one of the first things I discovered was that no one was making me go to Mass on Sundays. Without that expectation placed on me, I began to use my Sunday mornings to question everything I’d believed. Then I discovered sex - or more accurately, I discovered that it was both available and ridiculously enjoyable, and that nothing bad happened afterwards. Given the choice between that and my religion - which forbade sex outside marriage - my questioning became a matter of some practical urgency. The outcome, in retrospect, was not just predictable; it was inevitable.
Losing my faith, as Catholics call it, came at a price. Without the familiar structures to help me make sense of life, I found myself veering between feelings of exhilarating freedom and overwhelming dread. Things weren’t helped by my questionable choice to take a course in existentialism, a philosophy that rubs its adherents’ noses in the assertion that the universe is a vast, cold, indifferent place.
It took me years to stop worrying about the possibility I might be headed for hell, a fate I’d been told awaited those who’d been granted the gift of faith but then rejected it. It took me a while, too, to make my peace with a godless universe that had no special interest in me yet somehow, still, presented itself as a gift to be marveled at and explored.
These days, I have little patience with professions of certainty about matters of faith, especially when hellfire and brimstone are part of the equation. I find myself drawn, however, to people like Levertov and New Zealand’s James K Baxter, for whom faith was not a matter of arriving at a belief and being done with it, but of grappling with all the doubts and challenges that arose from that world. I don’t really get it, but I can respect the courage and humility it requires.
Where I’m truly at home now is with scientists like Jerry Coyne who put their trust in the evidence and refrain from making judgements beyond what the evidence supports. I value the willingness to acknowledge what isn’t and maybe can’t be known, and to live with the uncertainty that comes with that. I value the openness to being proved wrong and to change one’s mind in the face of new evidence. That also takes courage and humility, something that usually gets missed by those who regard scientists as a cold and unbending lot.
In this, I know I’m at odds with many people close to me who regard faith as essential to a life worth living. Then again, I never was much of a George Michael fan.
Bits and specious
Further to my recent post on grump and the reference to kiki/bouba, one of my favourite Substack authors, Rebecca Ericson-Hua, has taken a deep dive into the matter that shows what happens when an actual professional tackles a subject. Read it here.
What’s the best way to test your website? Hire a drunk.
Here is Robert Creeley’s tribute to Denise Levertov following her death. This is the way to do it. Spare, elegant, direct - and straight from the heart.
Quote of the week
I have faith. I just need proof to back it up.
Unknown