All the facts about the world or about ourselves are not in yet. The willingness to live in the world and the willingness to go ahead as if we deserved to live, or as if it was good to live, is, then, a matter of faith.
It has been harmful that faith has been too much connected with religion. This is not necessary. Wherever some of the facts are taken to stand for all the facts, and where facts not yet seen in tranquil arrangement, are seen as possibly in tranquil arrangement—there is faith.
It follows from this that science is the greatest showing of faith. Here, as before, I do not in the least mean to be “paradoxical” or ostentatiously iconoclastic, or any such thing. The fact that science is based on faith in its truest sense is, to me, soberly clear.
Science goes ahead on the great preliminary that it is good or desirable to know. If it is good to know reality, then reality in some fashion is fundamentally good. Science says, You must have faith in reality. Reality, says science, is at least good to know.
Take what may be called unscientific thought. This kind of thought would evade, lessen, alter, enhance reality. Doing this, however, certainly means a lack of faith in reality as it is. It follows then that the more scientific a person is, the more faith in reality he has. He has, this scientific person, faith in knowledge, trust in the facts, devotion to exactness, pious allegiance to precision, deep loyalty to comprehensiveness. If he hasn’t, then the quality of his scientific attitude is that much diminished.
No person will try honestly to know unless he has a feeling that knowing is good, or pleasant. By the precepts of biology itself, a person or animal will follow the more gratifying path than the less gratifying. This means that a scientist, as person or animal, has faith that knowing is more gratifying than not. If a scientist says that in so far as he tries to know, really to know, he doesn’t feel it is best to know, or most deeply pleasurable to know, I must say that he doesn’t know fully what he’s talking about.
But at some point the desire to know must not have been seen as clearly as it might be. After all, a person can’t say he wholly, one hundred-hundredths, knows that it’s good to know. So the evidence that knowledge is desirable is not complete. And, so much as the evidence is not complete, this person trying to know acts on the faith that it is good to know.
Wherever evidence is incomplete, and we act on that matter to which the incomplete evidence pertains, we act on faith. The same persons who say that there is no absolute knowledge are also likely to decry “faith.” If there is no absolute knowledge, then whatever we act upon does not have absolute knowledge as a base; and if we don’t act on knowledge, what do we act on? This phase of what we act on, which is not knowledge, can be called faith with cheerful propriety.
In fact, it is knowledge which makes for faith, and faith which makes for knowledge. If a child walks across three-fourths of a floor without mishap, he has faith that he will walk across all of it without mishap—though, to be sure, one foot from the wall, the child, impelled by knowledge and faith, may topple with some inglory.
We can’t be sure that we shall be alive next year, or for that matter, tomorrow. We go ahead as if we shall (though certainly such things as wills are made). We have faith that we shall be alive. The faith is an outcome of our knowledge, a continuation of our knowledge.
The scientist has faith in the order of the world. He feels that things can be explained. He feels that the unknown is like the known, and can become the known. He is not ready to say that the redoubtable scientific method, properly modified or placed, would not apply elsewhere than on earth.
If the scientist is skeptical, there is a kind of faith in his skepticism. He says we can’t know, but he can’t prove we can’t know. If we can’t prove that we can’t know, then our belief that we can’t know has so much faith-in-reverse in it. If a person does not believe that the dead rise from their graves, there is some “faith” in his disbelief. For it cannot be absolutely proved that the dead do not rise from their graves. After all, even as the scientists say, our senses are incomplete and fallible.
The lack of complete knowledge works both ways. If we can’t wholly prove that a thing is so, neither can we wholly prove that a thing isn’t so. The way we can accept the visible, touchable world, the world of scientific data, is based on faith in so far as we can’t prove wholly that what we see or touch is everything there is.
We both want to see things and do not want to see things because of comfort. The ego, as a thing less than the whole self, is disposed not to see just as well as to see. The hypochondriac, for example, cannot have faith in his being well; but his reason for not having faith can hardly be commended. Too much has been said of wishful thinking in terms of optimism only. If a person is jaundiced, he has faith in the world as miserable. Is not something like a “wish” to see it as miserable behind the pessimistic outlook, or, if one wishes, “inlook”? We can wish to make the world less and less desirable. The ego may wish a comfortable heaven of goodness, truth, and beauty; but it can also wish to see the world disorderly, wicked, without meaning. When the ego does this, the pessimism makes the ego bigger. To see the sun as other than bright is not the same as realism.
Faith should be judged in terms of its source. Since we don’t have complete evidence about the world, the value of the incomplete evidence must be seen. If we say that one person has a better right to have faith in the thing in which he has faith than another person, why do we say this? It is because we have judged the person and what he has faith in. Intuitions are judged, too.
Columbus had faith that the world was round. He didn’t have all the facts we have. We can hardly say, however, he was a wishful thinker. His preliminaries to complete evidence—rather, evidence more nearly complete—had value.
It is now quite clear that those who did not believe in Fulton’s steamboat were not the wise ones. In their “skepticism” they didn’t have all the facts; they had less facts than those who had “faith” in the power of steam to propel vessels.
People, long before they understood the physiology of their bodies as well as we do—and we can likely do better—felt their lives would go on; that they wouldn’t die in the next ten hours. No person in ancient Media, walking on Median territory, could say just why he was alive, able to walk, able to kick, able to run, able to bend, and able to get up after sleeping. He, this Median we may call Lysattes, had faith that he could; it was the kind of faith he didn’t think even he had to affirm. If one asked Lysattes, would he be able to bend his body, walk, kick, get up one day next month, he would say yes. He couldn’t give much of a reason, except that he had been doing it; but he would be right.
There are many things we feel are so without sufficiently presentable evidence. We have faith that they are so: the faith may be right. Certainly the evidence should be in; we should have all the evidence we can about everything. As things are, no one can say with complete evidence why he’s alive and why he’ll be able to bend his knees next month. Where we can’t, it is faith; and scientists have faith, too.
We arrive at feelings that we can see, before we know how we do the arriving. It is true that we can know things without our knowing that we know. A child at a certain time knows some words and doesn’t know that he knows them. He may know later, after using these words in talk.
Faith can come from a desire to know, or from a desire of less than our whole selves to be comfortable. A desire to know may be held back, obscured, suppressed by a desire for the ego as vain to be mighty or complacent. At this time, the faith that something is true is unconscious. What a person asserts as untrue, and what he may be able to support by adroitly arranged statements, may look like verified observation; the faith, however, that is in his larger unconscious has been suppressed.
It can be said with reason, and it is also a matter of faith, that the world makes sense, is good, has meaning. It is just possible that the faith that the world is good consists of reasonings; facts in us which we cannot present, arrange, articulate as well as we should. It is further possible the reason we cannot is because there is something in us: the ego as vain, our narrower self, which does not wish to see the world as sensible. Put otherwise, the ego as vain, or the narrower self, wishes to have the faith that the world is bad, meaningless, ugly. So we have two faiths fighting, because there are two selves fighting.
The faith that the world is good is physiologically backed. Our bodies do keep on living. As bodies, they do not think wishfully. The faith that the world is good has its strongest support in the fact that the world is. It would take a great deal to prove that reality went to all the trouble of being reality, in such unbounded diversity, to be bad and meaningless. At a certain point in saying the world is bad, you have to deny the propensities of the living body, which goes to a great deal of trouble to go on living; for our body pains us when we are hungry or thirsty or don’t breathe right.
It comes to this: everyone desires. To desire is to have faith. To desire knowledge is to have faith, too.