Science and Religion: Nature of the conflict (VII)

Knowledge and Faith

We need a good word to sum up this process of organizing our emotions around our assumptions, and religion has provided us with the word: faith. We can define an individual's faith to be his total emotional and psychological orientation resulting from the body of assumptions about reality which he has made (consciously or unconsciously). Of course, his faith may change with time as he has new experiences and modifies his concepts.

We can see from this analysis that faith is not some vague thing possessed only by a few religious mystics. Every human being has faith just as surely as he has a mind and a body. We are not free to choose not to have a faith any more than we can choose whether to be born. However, the quality of people's faiths differs considerably depending on the degree to which the basic assumptions on which a given faith is based are justified. Faith is the process of organizing our emotional life around our assumptions, and so the quality of faith is directly proportional to the validity of the assumptions (again, conscious or unconscious) on which faith is based. We can see, now, why the Bahá’í Faith enjoins a scientific outlook on life as being essential. The scientific approach does not guarantee us absolute knowledge, this being beyond the possibilities of man in any case, but it does guarantee that our concepts will be as functional and as close to reality as possible.

We have already indicated that change and reappraisal characterize knowledge and faith. But what is also true is that we seem to be more suited to gradual, smooth transitions than to sudden, violent, cataclysmic ones. The latter tend to over stimulate us to the point of shock, rendering a new and pragmatic response difficult. This is to say that living is basically a serious business, and that it behooves us always to maintain a certain alertness in order to be able to modify our conceptions gradually, thus avoiding rude awakenings where we find that our faith has been totally blind and misguided.

In short, when our concepts are grossly unscientific, our faith becomes blind and unreal. We come to expect the wrong things and to be upset when they do not happen as we wish. We become hardened and adamant in our faith. Even when presented with clear contradictions in our conceptions we resist change, for we sense that even though the purely intellectual effort necessary to reconstitute our thought may be small, the emotional reorientation necessary to assimilate the new truth will be great. Thus, we may be led, by our emotions, to act against our own interest. The more we persist in our blind faith the greater the inertia against acceptance of a truer picture of reality, and the greater the pain when the larger conception forces itself upon us, and we can avoid it no longer.

Our discussion here touches upon yet another common misconception about science and its relationship to religion. This is the idea that there is an intrinsic opposition between faith and reason. Rather than being in opposition, the two are part of the same process of knowing and living, as we have seen. Faith must be rational, and reason always operates within the context of our basic assumptions, that is, our faith. Our assumptions, when made explicit, are the purely intellectual component of our total faith.

I wish to close this section with two brief comments. The first is for the philosophically minded individual who may feel he sees a contradiction in that I make an absolute principle of the relativity of truth. This, I do not do. The reason for accepting scientific method is that it works. The statement “the scientific method is a good one” is to be evaluated by the same pragmatic criterion as any other statement. I admit the possibility that later experience may force me to revise my evaluation even of that statement. I thus do not make an absolute out of relativity.

The second comment is this: Though the nature of knowledge and of man's own limitations makes relativity an essential feature of knowledge, it may be that in practice most statements can be rendered either very acceptable or very unacceptable, thus reducing the existential component of “undecidability”. The theoretical uncertainty remains even with the surest of statements, but it is our explicit awareness of this uncertainty which is our greatest asset in adapting to our human situation. Once we accept humbly the limitations imposed on us, it becomes practically possible to resolve a good many issues and to make real progress in formulating a meaningful and practical understanding of reality.

(All above are excerpts from an article “The Science of Religion” by Dr. William Hatcher which I liked very much so to share it here with you.)

(To be continued…)

"Science and Religion:Nature of the Conflict(VIII)"

"Science and Religion:Nature of the Conflict(VI)"
"Science and Religion:Nature of the Conflict(V)"
"Science and Religion:Nature of the conflict(IV)"
"Science and Religion:Nature of the conflict(III)"
"Science and Religion:Nature of the conflict(II)"
"Science and Religion:Nature of the conflict(I)"
Ref.: The William Hatcher Library