A question of faith
jewel January 25th, 2008
A while back I got into an interesting conversation on religion with an acquaintance (he brought it up, not me). Well, it started out as a conversation anyway. He got louder and louder as it went on, as if being loud made him right. He went on about how faith is a virtue (an assertion I disagreed with). Anyway, during the course of this conversation he made many assumptions about me and about atheists in general. One of them is that we couldn’t possibly understand faith or even know what it really was. This assumes that people who are atheists have never been religious, which for most atheists I’ve met simply isn’t the case.
Faith is believing something in spite of a lack of evidence or in spite of contrary evidence. I certainly know what it is. What I don’t know is why people cling to it beyond all reason. Why they are so frightened to let go. So, in that respect, I certainly don’t understand faith.
I haven’t always been an atheist, but I’ve never been particularly religiously inclined either. Faith has never been a satisfying answer to me. Telling me I just had to have faith when I had questions always seemed like a condescending way of saying “don’t worry about all that stuff, you wouldn’t understand it anyway”. Or maybe it was just that the person telling me that didn’t understand and moreover, didn’t want to. Too much questioning causes doubts and we wouldn’t want that, now, would we? Perhaps they were just afraid.
It’s not that I didn’t want to believe in god. There was a time when I did want to believe. My family, my friends all believed and they didn’t seem to have the same problems with it that I did. In fact, for much of my childhood I thought there was something wrong with me because I never once felt god’s presence (other people claimed to feel it, why couldn’t I?) and I thought I was going to go to hell because I just couldn’t have faith. Somehow the idea of hell seemed much more real than the idea of god.
Now I know that fear is a very powerful instinct with deep evolutionary roots. As a child, I didn’t have this knowledge, though I’m not sure it would have mattered if I had. As I got older the dissonance became stronger and there came a point in time where I realized that it wasn’t that god wasn’t listening, but rather he just wasn’t there. What a liberating experience that was.
Since I was a kid, I’ve had the desire to know how the world works and how it is we know what we know. I’m pretty grounded in reality and science is a fantastic way of finding out about the natural world. Science is skeptical in nature and self correcting. Science is a state of mind; a way of thinking. And it doesn’t require one bit of faith. It does require discipline and a willingness follow the facts where ever they may lead. In fact, that is the beauty of science – it’s all about the journey – and what a journey it is. No matter how much we learn about ourselves, our world, our universe, there will always be much we don’t know; so much more to explore.
I was raised in an atheist household, although at a young age I was taken to a Presbyterian church by my grandparents for a few years (I hated it). I had books of Bible stories, which I enjoyed reading, not because of their religious meaning but just because I liked reading stories (I also immensely enjoyed Fairy Tales and Arabian Night stories). But it was in 5th Grade that I discovered Greek and Norse mythology and it seemed to me that the Bible stories I read were the same things to the ancient Hebrews what the stories of Thor and Heracles were to the Vikings and Greeks, and any vestiges of religion I had floated away.
Oddly enough, I remember in 2nd grade a bunch of my buddies and I started a dinosaur club in school, and were likewise fascinated with geology and paleontology and the coolest thing to us was that the fossils were the remains of creatures who lived millions and millions ago.
Later Ice Age creatures fascinated us also, and even at the age of 6 or 7, the ideas of evolution just seemed natural (and to 2nd graders, much much cooler than anything they told us at church).
So maybe I don’t understand faith… but why do I need to? I have yet to be convinced I need to believe in something I can’t touch or see when there are much more interesting things in the Universe that I can see (and touch, if it’s nearby). And the fact I don’t know everything, that’s fun, too. Because it’s always fun to learn something new.
Thanks for sharing Brett! I’ve often wondered what it would have been like to have been raised without religion. I agree that there is really no need to understand or have faith. There is so much out there to see, learn and experience that is real and meaningful. Faith is unnecessary.
Speaking for myself, I have “faith” in my atheism.
As to religion & the concept of an afterlife: Humans are the only creatures on Earth who are profoundly aware of their own mortality. And in an effort to come to terms with that, we created religion and the idea that there’s something more waiting for us.
And yes, I have faith in that belief.
Fair enough. Something I have noticed, in general, is that people tend to use “faith” and “trust” interchangeably. I, obviously, cannot speak for you on that. But for that reason, I have become very conscious of my own use of language and I tend to not use the word “faith” for anything.