A Meditiation on Faith

This Meditation originated as a response to Stephen Uhl's recent article "From Catholic Priest to Athiest Psychologist: A Memoir" from The Humanist, but became something more...


A Meditation on Faith and Freedom

Chesterton was right; our age cannot stomach paradox. Theists are afraid of reconciling the apparent randomness of evolution with a rational Creator. Between intellectual honesty and faith, atheists believe there is a choice to be made.
Stephen Uhl, for example, describes his “road to agnosticism” as maturation from “the ingrained prejudices and superstitions learned at my mothers knee to the sunrise of adult freedom.” The message of his “Memoir” is clear: Faith is the easy way out of a problem. Faith is a line beyond which a timid intellect is unwilling to reason.
Blind trust is indeed cowardly and detrimental to intellectual freedom. That is not faith, however, but a kind of presumption. Faith, if properly understood, is a rational act. It is an act possible only to rational beings and is essential to the proper exercise of freedom in the world.
We need not reserve faith for the “big” questions. Just consider how acts of faith form part of our ordinary lives. It seems that natural acts of faith can be divided into two basic categories:

1. Trust in propositions that are believed to be true but not immediately apparent.
2. Trust in an authority over one’s private judgment in the absence of information.

As fleshy beings, faith is essential to maintain one’s conviction in the presence of strong appetites and emotional highs and lows. A good example of this can be found in the individual struggling to overcome his addiction to cigarettes. He knows the harmful nature of cigarettes, but needs faith to persist in the presence of a powerful attraction.
The second type of faith is even more common. Limited by time and space, we cannot possibly have the time to make an exhaustive examination of all the possible choices in each and every decision that we will have to face. Many of our daily decisions are over what authority to trust in the absence of information. For example, if I have a problem with my car, I will entrust it to the mechanic across the street. I have reasons to find him a trustworthy authority, but they could never be in proportion with the trust I place in him. Nevertheless, submitting to his judgment is a perfectly reasonable act. To neglect more pressing duties in order to learn the complex structure of an automobile engine would be entirely unreasonable.
This, of course, is not to say that we are always correct or wise about who or what we place our trust in. The problem I have with Stephen Uhl’s “Memoir” is not with his decision to stop trusting in the authority of the Catholic Church, but in his pretense of having abandoned faith entirely in favor of a more “logically and intellectually directed life”. Let’s be honest here, his new assumed authority is the particular brand of psycho- analysis that enables him to critique his unfortunate experience of the priesthood.
Uhl is right about Aquinas. The Angelic Doctor does not offer us proofs for the existence of God by pure reason apart from any faith, if one understands faith as described above. His arguments rely upon certain assumed principles that cannot be immediately proven (i.e. causality, teleology, etc.) But every argument has certain principles or assumptions that cannot be demonstrated – or proven at all! This is why there is never pure reason apart from faith. The biologist, for example, can supply data to support his hypothesis, perhaps even repeat his experiment in the lab in front of my eyes. In order to accept his conclusions, however, I must trust in a basic correspondence between the intellect and sensory observation – a principle that cannot be demonstrated empirically!
Freedom, as I see it, is not creating some illusory autonomy, as if I could be completely self- sufficient in the evaluation of the options before me. Freedom has more to do with owning your decisions, even if they involve trusting another, and by living with the consequences.