Signpost #2--What Faith is Not

So, I thought that was now going to turn to discussions of God, but I think there is something else that is worth getting out of the way from the beginning, and that is what it means to "believe" in God or some faith tradition, and how one goes about doing that.  In other words, what it means to have faith.  Because I think there is a fundamental divide here in the way this is presented, a divide that is not between people who believe and people that don't, but between one of sort of believers (and, somewhat ironically, the most vocal critics of those same folks from the non-believer side) and another.

On one presentation, faith is something that is fundamentally alien to all other aspects of the human experience.  It is not something that we reason toward, and it is not based on our normal encounters with people or objects.  Instead, it comes from "outside" of us and imposes some sort of new reality on our otherwise mundane experiences.  Basically, we are going along, minding our own business, and then--boom, we have this thing called "faith" that God or the Universe has given us.  It's almost like the Beyond downloads a program into us, a program called "faith," that we otherwise have no way of getting any access to or any sense of on our own.

Non-believers have a tendency to portray this sort of faith as a kind of mental illness.  And I can see where they are coming from.  If I told you that I was receiving some sort of message or imposition on my consciousness that was wholly divorced from, and irreconcilable with, my normal experience, you might reasonably wonder whether I was suffering from some sort of psychotic break-down.  The good news is that I don't believe that's how faith actually works--even for those who claim that faith works that way.  Instead, I think that faith is a way of "settling into" an explanation for the diverse forms of experience we have in the world, filtered through our powers of reason and discernment.  In other words, we have experiences that we try to order and process into some coherent picture of reality, and that framework that we use for that process that we take on board from wisdom traditions and other sources is our faith.  Rather than having to constantly "reinvent the wheel" for every experience, we trust in the framework that we have absorbed and incorporated into ourselves and our life.  That's faith.

One of my most fundamental commitments is that the Universe is intelligible.  By this I mean that human ways of engaging with our environment--our sense experiences interpreted via our intellectual powers and faculties--reflect the order of Creation that is ultimately the product of the First Principle that gives rise to Creation, God.  The first line of the first chapter of the Gospel of John expresses this in a beautiful way--"In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God."  The Logos, the order of Creation, is something that we can experience and understand.  It is of course true that our experiences are limited and cabined and our ability to process those experiences are constrained and flawed, but it is nevertheless the case that our encounters with the Universe are real encounters and our ability to understand them is real as well.  Those traditions that claim that we can't really do anything with our minds except by the get-out-of-jail-free card of some external imposition of grace or divine blessing, such as Reformed Protestantism, are to me the ultimate form of nihilism.  If I can't trust to at least some degree what we experience and how we come to understand those experiences, then literally life is meaningless.  No, I don't accept that.

If our experiences are intelligible, then faith is the way we put those experiences together.  It is not something imposed on us from the outside, but something that comes together within ourselves. It's not "irrational," in the sense of contrary to reason; but it is also not strictly reduceable to reason, in the same way not all of our experiences (love, to pick the best example) are not strictly reduceable to a point-by-point deductive process.  And it is certainly not counter to our experiences, as our experiences are the very thing that faith orders and structures.  If a faith tradition provides a structure of explanation that is wholly divergent from a person's lived experiences, then the faith tradition is going to constrain and restrain the person like a straight-jacket; they will either jettison the faith tradition, or else go through a very real psychological dislocation and trauma.  In contrast, the portrayal of faith as something "downloaded from above," is (I think) in many cases a product of a faith tradition that so closely matches a set of lived experiences  that it feels like something being put into us from above.  But it's not contrary to our experiences, but instead the manifestation of the alignment between what we are experiencing and how we understand it.

Part of what is going on here, in my view, is an overstated divide between the "natural" and the "supernatural," or other similar formulations.  Some traditions, unwisely and incorrectly in my view, want to strictly police the line between the world of Nature and the world where God "resides," either for the purpose of denigrating the natural world, or for the purpose of cabining off the "God talk" in order to focus on Nature.  But if the Logos, which John the Evangelist clearly states is co-identified with God, is something that we encounter via our encounter with Nature, then ultimately the line between the natural and supernatural is necessarily blurry.  A long time ago, I told the story of wading out into the water of the coast of Santa Monica, California and experiencing a profound feeling of being loved.  That experience was real, but the subjective experience was not all that different from the feeling I've had being with a woman who loves me.  Some would like to call one the later of those experiences "natural" and the other "supernatural" (or, otherwise, dismiss the experience as "not real"), but for me this is really a false distinction.  I have experienced being loved, in a number of forms and situations, and so from that I build out a faith that makes sense of and integrates those experiences.  Ultimately, I think the Source of all of those experiences are the same, anyway.  We don't need to believe in an imposed faith in order to accept things that are not reduceable to the scientific method or other reductive approaches. 

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I would offer two more objections to the idea that faith is some sort of program that is superimposed over our consciousness and reason and experience.  First, if that is true, then there is basically no purpose for, or even possibility of, talking about anyone's religious experiences or position. If faith is not subject to either some sort of rational analysis or process, and is not tied to (potentially common) experiences that we have, what are we supposed to talk about?  What is the point of theology or philosophy?  More to the point (at least for some), how exactly could I go about "sharing my faith" with someone else, as we have no common points of reference between my wholly imposed from above thing called faith and my dialogue partner's lack of the same?  I know the word "gnosticism" gets thrown around a lot in religious spaces in unhelpful ways, but it seems to me that this presentation of what faith is cannot avoid going down the path of gnosticism, where the believers possess something that they cannot meaningfully express or discuss with the non-enlightened.  Genuine sharing of faith and the religious journey is impossible.

The other one is delicate, but I think needs to be said.  Groups, institutions, and systems of practice that tell you to ignore your own thoughts and your own experiences in favor of some a priori system of "truth" are inherently dangerous.  Not everyone who believes that faith is imposed from above and has no rational or experiential checks and comparison points is trying to manipulate you into being part of a destructive cult; nevertheless, everyone who is trying to manipulate you into being part of a destructive cult is going to tell you that you should not question the doctrines of the cult via rational analysis or experiential testing.  Closing off the ways in which someone can question what is going on with the system of control is Job #1 for any cult leader or aspiring cult leader.  And if it were obvious that a group is manipulative, then they wouldn't be doing a very good job of manipulating people.  Your reason and your experiences are not perfect, as everyone knows, but the alternative of turning all of that off and giving everything over to an ideological program is far, far worse than riding with the ups-and-downs of our limited and flawed personal perspectives.  Your reason and your experiences are a protection against the those people, present in all religious traditions and systems of belief, that want to use what I believe is an inherent human longing for meaning and connection with something beyond ourselves to control and exploit others.  Hold tight to that.

So, we walk the path to finding meaning, grounded in our experiences and with our minds sharp and our eyes open.  This is hokey, but I've unironically always loved the tag line that they used in the TV show Friday Night Lights--"Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose."  That is what faith is for me, that's the journey of religio can and should be.