There is a lot of faith about at the
moment (something I noted previously). Some of it is obvious, some of it less so. But it’s there. Indeed it
always is, because faith is indispensable to life. You might be tempted to
respond to the question above by objecting that you have no faith to place. But
such a response would naïve at best, and delusional at worst. Faith is woven into
the fabric of our existence, as a moment’s reflection will demonstrate. Let’s
start with something trivial.
You are probably sitting on a chair as
you read this. How do you know that it will support your weight? You don’t. But
you are trusting that it will, all the same. This is a (trivial) form of faith;
a “trust in” something. Of course, you have no reason not to expect the chair
to support you and you will feel that you have ample evidence from the past
that it will support you. So reliable has this evidence always proved, that you
would never think of weighing it carefully, or indeed of conducting a thorough
investigation. If you were to take such an approach to something as
straightforward as sitting in a chair, you would presumably feel it only appropriate
to apply it to much else and life would quickly become intolerable. However, as
David Hume, the arch sceptic and Scottish enlightenment philosopher pointed
out: “It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove
this resemblance of the past to the future….”; the fact that the your chair has
never collapsed under your weight before is a guarantee of precisely nothing.
But you don’t care. And so you sit; serenely - or perhaps just a little less
serenely that before?
You could point out that the worst
that could happen, even if the worst came to the worst, would be a rapid decent
to the floor from not too high a height. The result would be minimal damage,
and, if you’re alone, zero embarrassment. So on the one hand there is a
realistic expectation of no problem arising, because you are confident in the
object of your faith (the chair). On the other hand even if a problem does arise,
nothing too troubling is going to happen. This is all true. It also tells us
things that are generally true about faith. It’s not so much the faith that we
exercise that’s particularly important, rather it’s the object we place it in
(faith is always “in” something). And the context is key; what does placing our
faith in that object do for us and what would happen if it let us down?
In the pandemic we’ve all been
exercising faith is spades, and it has been a matter of life and death. In
fact, we’ve been exercising our faith not in a single object, but a chain of
objects. The politicians have been saying repeatedly that they have been
exercising faith in the scientists advising them (“do x and our model shows
that y people will die as opposed to y + another big number). This advice has
been closed to the rest of us. Until recently, even the names of those sitting
on the SAGE committee (who thought that one up?) were unknown to the UK
population. Indeed it took a campaign to have the list released. We in turn
placed our faith in the politicians (ie “do x because the scientists tell us if
we do x….etc”). In fact the reason why we are probably prepared to trust the
second lot, was precisely because they were claiming to trust the first lot.
Surveys show that by and large scientists are trusted more than politicians. So,
as a population we have “done x” and the result has (probably) been fewer
deaths in the pandemic so far than would otherwise have been the case. But a
lot us relying on this chain of faith do not, and probably cannot, understand
the science underpinning what we’re being asked to do. Hence we are exercising faith,
and when it really matters.
The observation that this exercise of
faith is central to what we’ve been doing recently isn’t peculiar to me; others
have made it too. Eve Willis, writing in Prospect magazine, also spotted the
centrality of faith to what has been going on (“During coronavirus, eventrusting in science feels like a form of faith”). While she doesn’t provide a
particularly penetrating analysis (maybe she didn’t intend to), it is revealing
that a self-confessed non-believer is now willing to cut us believers the sort
of slack that was probably absent previously. However, she doesn’t really get faith,
because one of the things she tells us is that “I increasingly fear that this
pandemic will make a believer out of me..”. But in fact she is a believer
already. As she touchingly continues “We simply have to trust those with
expertise…”.
Her conclusion though is interesting: “The
grip of a crisis demands we surrender control—and quite rightly—to forces
bigger than us: the long arm of a newly-paternalistic state, the unknowable
complexities of science. Why not faith, too? Find comfort where you can; we’re
in this for the long-haul.”. Her argument is that faith brings comfort. If it
works for you that’s fine; in current circumstances, I might try it too. And
here she means faith in organised religion. I’ve noted before the importance of
expertise in the current crisis. Science, limited and uncertain as the
information it provides inevitably is, does provide a guide to how we get
through the pandemic. It is not the only kind of analysis we need, and it won’t
help us with all of the decisions we have to make. But it will take us an
important part of the way.
However, any comfort you obtain from
placing your faith in what cannot support it, will be temporary, unsatisfying
and futile. So for the really big issues, your really should ask what, or who,
are you putting your faith in. What can it (or He) really deliver? What is the
evidence that as an object of faith it (or He) has delivered in the past, or is
delivering in the present. My contention is that for the biggest of big issues,
the answer is not to be found in a system, code or ritual. And certainly not in
some blind general adherence to “religion”. Faith can save, but only if its
object is the correct one.
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