Much of the confusion in this discussion surrounds the question of faith. Faith is typically seen as non-rational or even irrational by its opponents, who congratulate themselves on adhering strictly to evidence, inference, and the like. Worse, faith is sometimes championed precisely as absurd or “supra-rational” by some of its defenders. (Um, thanks a lot, guys.)
At least two mistakes about the concept of faith need to be dealt with here. The first is to think that faith is a peculiarly religious word and has nothing to do with everyday life. The second is to presume that faith has no relationship to knowledge, that the two stand as utterly separate categories of assent.
Some of us might think we can do entirely without any sort of faith and conduct our lives strictly according to what we (think we) know. Everyday life, however, constantly presses us beyond what we know (or think we know) and requires us to exercise faith. We frequently find ourselves compelled to trust beyond what we’re sure of, to make commitments that go outside our sense of safety. And yet these moments of trust and commitment—these acts of faith—are intrinsically and importantly related to knowledge.
Faith is what we do when we cantilever our lives out over what we do not and cannot know, while anchoring our lives upon what we think we do know. Faith relies on knowledge even as it moves out from knowledge into the unknown.
Darrell cannot know for certain that this canoe bobbing by the dock will still float once he gets in it, but he cannot be “mostly convinced” and stay with most of his weight committed to the canoe while reserving some of his weight for the dock. To enjoy the canoe, he has to get all the way in. He has to make a commitment. He has to exercise rationally-based faith.
A young journalist once said to me, as the sound guy was winding up his cables and the camera guy was putting his equipment in its case, “May I ask you a personal question?”
She had been interviewing me for a Canadian TV network on some topic in contemporary religion and society in my historical/sociological mode and the interview had gone fine. Now we had a couple of minutes while the tech guys tidied up.
“Sure,” I replied.
“Well,” she started, “you actually seem to believe some of this stuff.”
“I do.”
“Really!” she exclaimed. “And do you go to church?”
“Yes, pretty much every week.”
“Really!” she exclaimed again. And then there was a pause.
“You know,” she then went on, pensively, “I had a roommate like you once. She was reasonably bright, and had a sense of humour, and also was a Christian. That’s now two!”
I was privileged to offer a public lecture this past week on the UBC campus on this question. I’ll write more about the topic soon, once I’m done a brief bit of travelling (Banff, Alberta, this weekend; the coastal town of Anacortes, Washington, the next).
But I confess that I had to resist offering the following flippant answers to the question instead of the serious ones I did (again, which I’ll set out for you soon):
“Yes, you do. That’s why I handed back my Ph.D. and professorship last week, and now happily believe unencumbered by intelligence.”
or
“Well, since I have so few of either, it’s no big deal for me…”
or
“Why do we have to keep answering this question? After two thousand years of Christianity, with figures as various and as brilliant as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, J. S. Bach, Blaise Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and [fill in the names of any number of geniuses here] to point to, why is this still an interesting question?”
or
“This event is sponsored by UBC Christian students, who by definition have good brains (or they couldn’t get into UBC) and serious faith (or they wouldn’t bother sponsoring events such as this). Q.E.D. The End.”
I didn’t say any of that, of course. I said something more sober and sensible.
(But I did think it, I confess, and perhaps when you read this post’s heading, you thought something similar!)
