Faith

February 26, 2016 (Revised: June 27, 2020)

Knowing is a very interesting term that can be defined as the state of being informed about or aware of something. We learn new knowledge as we age through various ways ways of knowing. One of these ways is faith. Faith is a firm belief in something for which there is no proof. Faith is often described along with religion, one of the areas of knowledge but faith can also be implemented into other areas of knowledge such as natural science. Faith is often looked down upon or belittled because faith is, by definition, believing without proof. There are things that are yet to have proof of such as creationism and evolution. Some people decide to just have faith and believe in a certain beginning of life. Believing in an idea is the start to any contemporary knowledge hence faith is a belief system. Therefore, to what extent can one gain knowledge through faith?

Faith is very essential in order to obtain knowledge. However, contemporary people would often say that reason is the major and the important way of knowledge in regards to different subjects such as science or mathematics. This is true to some degree however this perspective may be myopic as well. I have often relied upon reason to disprove faith’s basis of knowledge, and a question arises, does reason have the best claim to knowledge? I would generally agree being a rationalist, but reason is not infallible. I have not experienced or witnessed any empirical evidence supporting the existence of God, existence require evidence, God therefore doesn’t exist. This was how I used to think for a majority of my life until recently I realized that this was an ad ignorantium fallacy. My reasoning was incorrect because the premises were malconstructed. This means that faith could be the right premise to gaining knowledge beyond reasoning. Therefore, faith may allow for the gains of greater knowledge.

When talking about faith, the talk about religion is inevitable. Faith is the way of knowing in the majority of religions. Faith is subjective as much as each believer’s relationship to their own god is subjective. This kind of truth axiom results in irrational and non-quantitative data which limits the ability to gain a common knowledge. It is true that faith can be used to develop a diverse set of subjective and individualized knowledge. Diversity from subjective knowledge is great to learn about different experts’ perspectives on varying topics. However, diversity also means possible conflicts between opinions which can lead to more chaos. A current real life example of conflicts of opinion due to faith would be the ISIS. ISIS identify themselves as an Islamic group believing in Salafi jihadism. They believe in physical movements to return to “true” Sunni Islam. Although this is an extreme case, it is true that ISIS is striving for a different kind of knowledge through said faith. As once said by Henry Adams, “Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.” Using faith as a way of knowing is a natural part of life but it is also the Iblis that haunts men. Faith is a tradeoff between knowledge and order. Therefore, faith can be used to gain knowledge but it should be recognized that chaos may emerge.

Another major part of faith that is often overlooked is in natural science. It may a surprise to some to think that faith, which is not based on logic, is a major aspect within science. Before talking about why faith is a part of science, it is necessary to understand the different contexts faith holds. Faith can be used to describe four meanings: belief, trust, fidelity and vision. When conducting an experiment for a physics lab, one will make a hypothesis. This hypothesis is a result of faith; One based on trust and assumptions. There is a definite existence of scientific faith which is different from religious faith by a lot. However, science and religion share a certain epistemological status – Humans are taught of both by generations before us. This means that humans develop bias as humans grow and live in a box set by our parents and the environment. So to think beyond the box, there is a need for faith which allows for imaginations. These imaginations can be used to gain rather radical knowledge. For instance, if Newton didn’t realise some correlation between the consistency of apple falling down, humans may have not discovered gravity beyond this day. There is no guarantee that the same occurrence will happen throughout time. Yet, it is extremely unlikely that tomorrow gravity will suddenly stop working, and we will float into cold, empty space. Faith allows for imagination, which allows for thoughts beyond what is currently understood to be logic. Therefore, faith is a definite way of knowing.

On the contrary, faith is doubtable. Faith, as mentioned previously, is subjective. This means that knowledge gained from having faith is not agreed by everyone. There will be times when people question one’s faith regardless of how true it is for the one person. A question that must be answered prior to exploring further is: Is the knowledge/truth gained by faith absolute or relative? For other ways of knowing such as logic, the knowledge/truth is often considred absolute. However for faith, it isn’t. The knowledge gained by faith is questionable because of reliability. The reliability of faith is a whole topic on each own. But the common answer to the question is that faith is reliable with doubt. However, if a knowledge is only somewhat reliable, the knowledge isn’t reliable enough. I believe that knowledge should be agreeable by all. Doubt often makes us quetion faith. However, doubt can be used to reinforce faith. Doubt allows for stronger faith and more reliable knowledge since doubt gives chance to debunk questions. However, this raises a red flag. If an ultimate evidence regarding the non-existence of God in any religion is found, what would happen? Would this mean that faith would no longer be a reliable since it has been disproved? I think that it would bring many religious scholars to deny the evidence at first whereas some will immediately relinquish their religion. However once the evidence is found to be ultimate even by the scholars, majority will accept the evidence. This means that just by faith’s characteristic of being doubtable makes faith a poor way of knowing.

P.S: This is an essay from my high school days. I happened to come across it and thought I’d revise a little bit and share.