Faith

I've been thinking about faith lately. The Apostle Paul said, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen." Which sounds kind of neat, except that when you examine it closely, it ends up not meaning much. Exactly what is "the substance of things hoped for?" The other half, "the evidence of things not seen" makes a little more sense, except that I'd say that the evidence of things not seen is -- evidence. We can't see the back side of the moon, but we accept that it's there, based on, what? Faith. No, I'd say that we have faith based on evidence.

And yet the idea of evidence-based faith runs counter to most religious thought today. One religious leader said, "Faith precedes the miracle," which I interpret to mean, if you believe hard enough, it will come into being. Kind of a twist on the "If you build it they will come" mantra from otherworldly movies like "Field of Dreams."

So, I'd like to posit that there are three types of faith.

Faith A is faith that you have because of the evidence. What the Greeks called "logos." When my doctor told me I had blockage of the cardiac artery and showed me the X-ray, I believed. I had faith. Some people differentiate between knowledge and faith, but that's a false dichotomy. If you believe because of the evidence, you have Faith A. In a court case, both sides present evidence, and one side engenders more faith than the other. Then you get a verdict.

Faith B is a faith that you have in the absence of evidence. This is what most people think of as faith, and perhaps what Paul had when he started his maundering definition. I believe in God, or Jesus, or Buddha, or Mohamed, or Zoroaster, or astrology or the Tarot, or tea leaves, even though there is no real evidence that the information is true.

Faith C is a faith that you have in spite of the evidence. The belief that the earth is 6,000 years old, for instance, or that God created a certain number of animal species which has remained constant, that there was a world-wide flood -- you get the picture. This faith is the scary one. It's one thing to believe in a 6,000 year-old earth when all you have to go on is some old texts, but it's quite another when you can walk out in your back yard and see the folding in the earth that took place a good sight longer ago than a measly six grand years. In order to keep your belief, you have to reject not only the accumulated evidence, but pretty much rational thought itself. The work that people will go through to explain away data is awesome. One person explained to me in solemn detail how the layers in the earth's crust were the effect of a giant earthquake that shook things up and made them naturally sort themselves out into layer. Sir William of Occam is twirling in his grave.

The superiority of emotion

It's 4 a.m., but this hit me so hard it woke me up. I've been running the words of a song through my head. It's "Deportee," by Woody Guthrie, and if you get on youtube and choose the version from the album "Highwayman, (Willie, Waylon, Johnny, and Chris) you'll get the best of the lot, IMHO.
See, Woody read an account in a newspaper in 1947 about a planeload of illegal aliens that crashed and killed 'em all. The account said they were deportees, but didn't name any of them. Guthrie got all indignant and wrote what is one of my favorite songs. One of the lines is "You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane. All they will call you will be deportee." Another line is, "Who are these friends who are scattered like dry leaves? The radio said they were just deportees."
But wait a minute. Think about it. Why did the paper say they were "deportees"? Because the reporters were callous brutes who didn't think the people were worth being named -- as is implied in Guthrie's song? Or perhaps -- and much more likely -- because the newsfolk didn't have any names and were under a deadline?
An emotional response is immediate, strong, and hot. A rational response takes longer, requires more data, and is cooler. It's also not nearly as much fun to stop and think about it. If Woody had considered things, we probably woudn't have such a great song.
What interests me, though, and prompted this piece, is an underlying assumption that emotion is somehow superior to logic and reason. The heart, we believe, is superior to the head. But it isn't. Ration and logic are the only real bases for decision making. Because we believe in the heart over the head, we frequently make wacko decisions that come back to haunt us, screwing up our lives and making hash of them.
The vast majority of bad decisions I've made, and that I've seen people around me make, are based on an emotional response.
Makes for good songs, though.

When are you dead?

Psychologists note that we tend to make sharp divisions among items arranged in a spectrum. Suppose, for instance, that we have an array of drinking vessels, with what is clearly a mug on the left and what is clearly a glass on the right. From left to right, the intervening vessels become less mug-like and more glass-like. Am I making sense? Okay, at some point, I am going to say, "The ones from here on," gesturing to the right, "are glasses." At some point, you are going to say the same. The catch is that we will probably not make the choice at the same point. However, the choices we make are firm. They call it "discrete perceptual discontinuities." What a grand phrase that is.

We could, at that time, spend a few hours defending our choices and ridiculing the choices of others, and nothing would be lost but time. Except. The same tendency exhibits itself in any situation where a spectrum of possibilities exists. When are we viable entities? In the womb? At the moment of birth? When do we die? How much radiation risk is too much?

We are not happy with fuzzy answers to many of life's questions, so we set firm boundaries. And that's the problem. We assume all along that those boundaries are natural ones. They aren't. We don't discover boundaries; we create them. There is no magical moment when a person becomes alive or when a person becomes not alive. There's a fuzzy area between and someone, sometime, has to decide just where the boundary is. Sort of like in a football game when the referee runs up to a pile of players and plants his foot. That place is where the ball belongs. Not that the ball is really there, but because the ref has made the decision.

Or, to pursue the sports analogy further, remember the old story of the three umpires talking? The first says, "Some is strikes and some is balls, and I calls them the way they is." The second one says, "Some is strikes and some is balls, and I calls them the way I sees them." The third (it's always the third) says, "Some is strikes and some is balls, but they aint nothing till I calls them." Now, this is not a vindication of Schroedinger's cat, nor evidence of how reality flexes, but simply an illustration of how we make decisions about how events should be punctuated.

The problem is, obviously, that we kill each other over where events should be punctuated. Doesn't seem right, does it? A sane world would discuss costs and benefits for decisions such as "Should we have nuclear power?" or "When should we allow an abortion?" or "When can we terminate the life of a person?" If we keep in mind the rights of a human (which are not, T. Jefferson to the contrary, inalienable), the needs of society, and the future of the planet, we might come to some sort of rational policy set. Of course, the minute we try it, someone will say that god has told him to blow us up for blasphemy. Sigh.