Peter Weeks wrote a short commentary for last week’s issue entitled “Faith is not a virtue,” and it struck a chord in me that makes me want to respond to it in a hopefully constructive but contradictory way. His thesis that “Faith … is not a virtue and is subversive to the process of education” is simply not acceptable to me; I reject it not because I disagree with him about dogma or the pervasiveness of religion in public schools, but because I think that we perhaps do not realize how essential faith is to the process of education.
Immediately I sensed that Peter mischaracterized faith when he gave one dictionary definition for faith as a “firm belief in something for which there is no proof.” This particular formulation of faith is not only exceedingly restrictive, but I think it is needlessly narrow-minded.
Think of how this definition might be used in comparison to what you think faith means. Most of us cannot prove by experience or direct knowledge something as grand as a sunrise or as commonplace as a light bulb, yet we continue to have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow and act as if the room will get brighter when we flip the switch even though we have no direct proof of it ourselves.
More importantly, faith is a process, a complicated process of recognition, doubt and reconciliation. One does not wake up suddenly having faith that God exists in the most vibrant and true sense; although hypothetically possible, faith takes years of worship, contemplation and wrestling with to reach this level of devotion.
This epistemological argument aside, I think Peter’s synonymous use of religion with the groups that have caused terror and war throughout history and the world is a callous and unsympathetic remark, especially in the ears of the faithful. No one denies that Hitler’s strong ideology made his own version of Christianity that made persecution of Jews to be religiously tolerable. However, this example, as well as the many others throughout history like it, can be explained by the power of evil in humans to dominate and use coercive dogma to support themselves.
To include Weinberg’s remark that “To make good people do bad things takes religion” is also unfair, even if it is true in many cases. I would argue that to make good people do bad things takes bad people, bad people who prey on people’s weaknesses and fears. Western Europe has been dominated by religions for over two millennia; what better institution to control the masses than one that determines the fate of your eternal soul and is so culturally engrained? Put simply, religions may have been what leaders chose to justify tyrannical, even genocidal policies. But that does not mean that religion is a dogmatic entity inherently destined to put people in conflict with each other.
In fact, I think faith points to an a-dogmatic religion, rather than one that puts down hard rules in all things. An act of faith is one in which the consequences of the action are both uncertain (however probable they may be) and there is a difference between the various outcomes. Since we cannot know for certain that any action will lead to an individual consequence until the end of time where no new consequences can exist, all action rests on faith, although you may not believe me at first.
It does not weaken the strength of science to say that all scientific law is based on observable facts that have been shown to be non-contradictory, yet the other edge to the sword is admitting that as soon as one counterexample to a law is found, you no longer have “absolute” scientific truth (although you never had it in the first place, only believed it to be true). Just because things have been shown to repeatedly lead to the same outcome, no one in the world could demonstrate that they were universally true unless they could stop the arrow of time in perpetuity.
I can hear Peter Weeks saying to me, “That’s not what I meant by faith; I just meant to say that dogmatic religion should not be a core value of Gustavus.” I do not believe anyone takes strict dogma to be a core value at Gustavus, since nowhere in our admissions material do we stress how all students must attend Chapel every day or believe that abortions equate to murdering God’s greatest gift.
Rather, I believe Faith earns its place among the five core values of Gustavus because of how central it is to all our lives, how we begin every day, take every step of the walk between classes faithfully believing that the ground beneath us will not turn into lava, even if an occasional stone or crack in the sidewalk sets us tumbling.
Beyond this everyday applicability, I think Faith completes learning because although we never can know anything will be universally true, we do learn what is true to us and come to pragmatic truths, rather than dogmatic ones. Faith helps us become individuals who can resist the temptation of dictators, correct falsifiers and recognize hyperbole when we come across it in our media. Without faith, we are left without the capability to act, because by striving to avoid error we cannot acknowledge the possible, for to act on mere possibility is to act when there is no proof.
Faith must always be considered a core value to Gustavus, but I hope it is a core value in all of our lives. We are incomplete without acknowledgment of our personal faith, because without it we delude ourselves into believing that what we think is true is absolutely so, and eliminate any chance we may grow personally or affect change communally. Faith guides all we do, and once we recognize this we can finally look at whether our faith leads to good or bad consequences, and in turn that gives us the best possible guide to how we should go about living our lives.