Human beings have been classified as homo sapiens (wise men), a celebration of our unprecedented unique ability to master the natural world. However, beneath the greatest feats of all human ingenuity lies an element of faith. Every great human leap has been powered by an act of Faith. Faith is a fundamental and vital aspect of the human experience. It is central to leaps in all spheres of human existence; political, legal, economic, scientific, religious, e.t.c. And most importantly it is central in the human quest for the good.
Faith is fundamental to the life of the person because of the limitations that our biology places on us.
Over the course of the coming several months I will explore this faith nature of the man (homo credens/believing man). Ideally, a good section of the content in this blog would be in a book. But at the moment I have decided that I will share the ideas as a blog over the course of several months.
In this blog, you should expect to find articles building the case for the argument that human wisdom is really a question of faith. I will also write articles celebrating the acts of faith that have resulted in human leaps; in various fields social, scientific, and political.
And then I will also share articles celebrating and explaining faith in God. Being a Catholic, most of these will be biassed towards Catholicism. However, I will also celebrate acts of Faith that rise beyond Catholicism and even perhaps beyond Christianity. My aim is to celebrate all human faith that has powered us to live and to enjoy the life we do today.
But first I must give a brief definition of Faith:
Faith is knowledge that is accepted without direct experience. This knowledge of faith usually comes from an entity external to the person. It usually is another person (by hearing), it could also be a creature (through observation). But it could also be attributed to super-natural phenomena e.g. dreams or visions.
What matters the most in the question of Faith is that the person “believing” does not have direct experience on what they believe to be true. They accept what they do because they trust the “source of Faith”. That is that person teaching them, or that supernatural extraordinary event or that creature (they see). Faith may move people to action in times of need.
Faith entails a certain uncertainty on the outcome of actions done in faith. Faith is by no means equivalent to being unreasonable. Faith is held based on the trustworthiness of the persons who are believed or the reasonableness of their statements (from the perspective of the listener).
I will start this blog with three examples which I will expound on later.
The first is the introduction of vaccination by Dr Edward Jenner. It is important to state that this is not entirely true as vaccinations in some form or another was practiced on other continents. Jenner, heard repeatedly that dairymaids were protected from smallpox naturally after suffering from cowpox. From this, he judged that cowpox may be able to protect from smallpox. He in time recruited a subject to test his faith first “vaccinating him” using cowpox and then infecting him with smallpox. The boy did not get sick and this marked a start for vaccination at least in Europe although it never proceeded smoothly. Here we see the primary component of Faith, which is the tales of many people that those with cowpox don’t suffer from smallpox. In this, Dr Jenner had reason to believe the milkmaids perhaps judging they did not have motivation to lie.
Faith is still central to most medical treatments and vaccinations today, this is not to mean they are quack. Far from it. It is simply the fact that except for the most basic treatments, most things are done in faith. No one can give a 100% guarantee to any one person that a given treatment will work. Covid vaccinations gives us a good example to use for understanding faith. Vaccination did not completely guarantee that a person (that is any one person) will not fall sick or die from Covid. And there are a few people that actually died due to the vaccinations. However it cannot be disputed that vaccinations helped to protect many people. Getting vaccinated was at its very core an act of Faith.
The MAGA movement and #The StoptheSteal movement beautifully highlights the relevance of faith in politics. It is very easy to understate this; there are many people who believe genuinely that the elections of 2020 were stolen. And these are not uneducated right wing extremists. These are ordinary people, many of them educated to the highest levels, with PhD’s to their name. They do believe the election lies. They believe Trump when he says the elections were stolen. Because they believe crazy as he might seem, Trump says exactly what is on his mind. He does not LIE.
Conversely those who think Trump lost do so because they believe in the machinery which called the elections for Biden. Faith is the common denominator for both groups.
MAGA supporters will point to what Trump said just like the Biden supporters will point to the machinery that called the election for Biden. A machinery which Trump supporters might call the machinery of the deep state; an entity they do not trust.
The commonality between both groups is that they believe someone or something about the election. None of them can guarantee anything about the election. In fact with the distributed system of voting, it is not possible for anyone to guarantee the entire election. It depends on the entire system functioning flawlessly. And everyone must believe that the entire system is functioning. This Faith is important because it is not possible for any single person to perform all the actions that would verify election integrity. They must believe in someone or something. This is a fact we cannot run away from.
Finally at the epitome of Faith we have religion, exemplified by Abraham who leaves his probably dying world following the promise of a new country for his descendants yet to be borne. But before him, we have the original man of faith. The one who believed that the eating of a fruit would cause him to die and then that the eating of a fruit would cause him to become wise like the gods; Adam.
Adam’s story allows me to explore another aspect of faith; namely that having been moved to experience, our experiences may not always conform to what we believe. When the experience differs from the Faith, the Faith can become shattered. And when the experience concurs with faith. The faith can become reinforced. But most importantly there is always more to experience than faith can reveal.
Welcome to my blog and thanks for reading.