Why We All Live by Faith

If I said, “I live by faith and not by sight,” how many of you would smirk and think of me as naive?  I’d bet that a few of you would as this often repeated worldview of Christians on the surface seems founded upon nothing more than hopes and emotions and grounded in very little “fact.”  I’m finding, though, that the more I read and study about the philosophy of knowledge, the more I’m coming to realize that much of what helps people feel confident in what they can know is based upon a faith they have in “facts” that are well-accepted as unknowable.

Take, for instance, the trust people put place in their experiences.  Having an experience touching an red, round apple allows that person to make observations about it and describe its characteristics.  Studying it in closer detail allows them to develop an “understanding” of the basic properties of apples.  If enough apples all have these same characteristics (round, red, juicy, etc), then the observer can come up with a general set of “facts” about apples.  These “facts” become well-known amongst people and may even be put into textbooks so that this “knowledge” can be passed along to others.

A few years later, someone else comes along and starts looking at a green apple and realizes that one of the supposed “facts” they learned about apples isn’t true in this case.  That person makes new observations and submits their findings to other experts that agree the old set of “facts” (all apples are red) were wrong and need to be corrected or modified (some apples are green).  All of those textbooks with the old set of facts have to be thrown out and new editions need to be written that tell the world some apples are also green.

If you notice, what I just described is a method that our society has come to accept as a reasonable means to discovering “truth” about the world and life.  The only problem with it is that the “facts” that the method produces only stay “facts” until they are disproved by a later set of observations.  What is interesting to me is that this method of discerning “truth” is what many people consider a reasonable alternative to what they pejoratively call “blind faith” in Christians.  It is Christians though who have simply decided to trust in the words of God and believe a message of salvation that hasn’t changed in 2000 years.  We don’t have to guess about what truth is; God has been revealing truth to mankind for 6000 years and its never failed in its reliability.  The only thing that has changed is what we think is the best means for finding truth and all we’ve come up with is a system of how to replace our false theories…ha!

Philosophers say that we cannot know what “truth” is unless we can be sure about the reality we experience.  They also admit that we cannot know what “reality” actually is until we can first decide how to discover “truth.”  It is a dilemma of circular reasoning and I think it demonstrates the idea that people really are living by faith, whether they realize it or not.  I guess I’m really not alone when I say that “I live by faith and not by sight” after all.  This makes me smirk.