Published by Faith is a highly abused word. It’s a common victim of the equivocation fallacy. That’s the fallacy where one word has two meanings and the person using the word does a sort of bait and switch, using the word one way while meaning it the other. Faith has two meanings. One definition is belief without evidence. The other definition has more to do with trust. I’ve been all over my living room floor. I have faith that there are no sinkholes or quicksand pits. I have faith that it’s solid from one wall to the other.
I want to I tell you a heartwarming story. It’s an anecdote, which means it doesn’t constitute evidence, but Harvard Medical School did an extensive study that shows Mimi’s story to be typical.
This is from the Boston Globe, November 11, 2006
“Four-and-a-half years ago, Mimi was among the thousands of infants languishing in Romanian orphanages. A listless, joyless girl, she lacked the sparkle that draws sympathy — and special attention — even in a state facility. No overworked caregiver was going to waste time waggling fingers or making coo-coo sounds to blank-faced Mimi, abandoned at birth by her own mother.
Then she got lucky.
“At the age of 18 months, Mimi was plucked from St. Ecaterina orphanage in Bucharest and entrusted to foster parents as part of a small but ambitious MacArthur Foundation-financed study of the effects of family rearing on formerly institutionalized children.
“The ongoing study strongly suggests that raising an abandoned child in a family setting is not just socially desirable but medically therapeutic to the child. Orphans given over to family care at a very early age — ideally before age 2 — are almost certain to grow up stronger, healthier, and smarter than those who remain in institutions.”
What’s the point of this little story? Love heals. The healing power of love is supported by massive evidence beginning with a similar study done in the 1930s on infants in orphanages. Infants that are fed well enough and kept clean and dry and warm still die if they are never touched.
So I have faith in the healing power of love. Faith that is founded on evidence.
I trust the researchers at Harvard Medical School. I believe that they are reporting their findings accurately. That trust is not placed without some evidence that they are telling the truth. That evidence constitutes a study in the 1920s and 30s by Elias Trotzsky (not spelled like the famous one), studies by the World Health Organization in the 1950s and research done by Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund, in the 1970s. My faith is founded on evidence.
When I hear someone say “She has such a touching simple faith,” I shudder. I know what they mean by that word. They mean someone is believing everything they were told without requiring any evidence or corroboration. They are believing things without thought or examination and they have no doubts. In my opinion, that’s an extremely poor thing to admire and a very bad habit to encourage in others.
Richard Dawkins once wrote:
“[W]henever I lecture publicly, there always seems to be someone who comes forward and says, ‘Of course, your science is just a religion like ours. Fundamentally, science just comes down to faith, doesn’t it?’
“Well, science is not religion and it doesn’t just come down to faith. Although it has many of religion’s virtues, it has none of its vices. Science is based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops. Why else would Christians wax critical of doubting Thomas? The other apostles are held up to us as exemplars of virtue because faith was enough for them. Doubting Thomas, on the other hand, required evidence. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of scientists.”
Doubting Thomas wasn’t a scientist. He wasn’t an atheist. He was a Christian like all the other apostles. He believed in God and he believed in Jesus. But he understood what, in my opinion, is the better kind of faith. The faith that rests on evidence.
So when you have faith in something what do you mean? Do you mean you have studied the situation, have some experience with it and therefore can predict the outcome with a fair degree of accuracy? Or do you believe it because someone told you it was true? Or you read it somewhere or your mother believed it and so you always have.
There is something out there called “affinity fraud.” It’s a kind of fraud where the criminal pretends to be just like you in some way, your religion, your race or your ethnicity are the most common, but there are other things as well.
This is from a website called “Crimes of Persuasion”:
The Internet missionary organization called Greater Ministries International Church took in over $550 million dollars from over 27,000 believers and although it promised great returns from heaven over one half of the money has not been accounted for.
Many of the investors were fundamentalist Christians, including Mennonites in rural Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia. They were told their money would double in installment payments made over 17 months or less. The scam artists quoted Luke 6:38: “Give, and it shall be given unto you.”
These thieves took advantage of the habit of faith without evidence. They had a fair amount of certainty that religious people would accept their claims without any investigation or questions. All they needed to do was pretend to be religious themselves and quote the Bible.
27 thousand people would not have lost over five hundred million dollars if they had had more esteem for Doubting Thomas and had asked a few questions. They would not have lost their money if they had required a little evidence that the promises that seemed to be too good to be true were, in fact, true.
But they had a habit of believing things without evidence, on the word of someone who seemed to have a little authority. They were out of the habit of asking questions, probing deeper, or getting a second opinion. In their world there’s a premium placed on believing things without evidence. Every day they are asked to believe some pretty impossible things and highest praise is reserved for those who do so without breathing a single question.
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation reports that in interviews, especially where he takes questions from the audience, someone inevitably asks him. “What about love? Love is illogical and unscientific. How can science account for love?”
I would answer that question with a couple of different questions. “What is illogical about love? In what way is its mystery impenetrable?”
We evolved as a social species. The ability to form close bonds with others enhances our survival. It’s as simple as that. The fact that the scientific basis of love can be understood doesn’t diminish its power. The poet John Keats once proposed a toast to Newton that went “Confusion to the memory of Newton” and when someone asked him why, he said “Because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.”
But knowing that a rainbow is composed of billions of drops of water acting as a prism to break up the light into those beautiful colors doesn’t reduce the power of the rainbow. It’s still beautiful and still awe-inspiring.
The same is true of love. We know we evolved to love each other. It perpetuates the species. And man-o-man it’s wonderful. Knowing how it works doesn’t make it less than it is. It does not reduce its power to comfort us, to uplift us.
And, above all, to heal us.
