What is Faith?; or, Faith Like a Child....

Kelly, you don't want to read this... unless you've picked up some holy water before logging on! :D

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So I was reading a post on Debunking Christianity, as well as the following comments people were talking about... an the insubstance of faith was brought up on more than one occasion. It got me to thinking about my own loss of faith, when it occurred, the linchpin, the struggle afterward, but mostly, about Faith itself.

Faith, of course, is the hope of something that has no proof, or logical sense to it. Webster's defines "faith" in 2b(1)(2) as (1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2): complete trust, which I think sums it up nicely.

But why do we as people rely on faith? We certainly use faith everyday: When I place my key in the ignition every morning, I have faith that my car will start; When I place chicken in the stove and turn the knob, I have faith that it will heat and cook my dinner; when I turn the knobs on the faucet, I have faith that water will gush forth, or at least dribble out in an attempt at flowing.

Now, what happens when that faith gets challenged? When the car doesn't start? If my chicken were to remain cold and raw? When water doesn't come out of the faucet?

I do what every other person in the world does: Call someone. I make a call to my father, or I find the yellow pages and search for a professional to give money to, or I look it up on DIY to see if they can tell me how to fix it without handing someone a wad of cash.

When it comes to faith in God, though, what do people do? We turn to pastors, priests, rabbis, and other "professionals" who have been in training and schooling for years, someone to whip out an idiom from the pages of scripture, a proverb or psalm to ease our pain...

And for some people, that works. They shut off their brains, take their two pills, and "call" god in the morning. While others, kicking and screaming, unable to shut off their logic centers, say, "But why?" or "How can that be?"

When you start your car, of course, you have faith that it will start based on past experience. And while you have no proof that it will start, experience says it will. A mechanic, on the other hand, places his faith in the mechanisms which you probably know nothing about. He also starts his car based on faith, but with more working knowledge of how the car starts, with the turning causing an electrical signal that makes something move, which in turn, brings the engine to life. The engineer, who also places faith in both past experience, as well as the mechanisms, also places his faith in his original design, in the concepts of science and math he/she employed in designing the mechanism. It could be said the designer practices the most faith in this car starting mechanism. His faith is based on theories and mathematics most of us couldn't comprehend without some type of engineering degree.

But, in fact, the designer has no more faith that his or her car will start than you do. You are both exercising an immeasurable amount of faith. Just because you have more knowledge of how something works doesn't translate into more faith, but it does mean you have more knowledge of what you are placing your faith in.

Now this could be hard for some to grasp. The Christian, when presented with someone who doesn't place faith in God, says, "You need to have more faith," or perhaps, "You are placing your faith in the wrong things." Past experiences have made them interpret life events in such a way that they have placed their faith in a God that causes things to happen in certain ways. They have interpreted their experiences to mean that they have placed their faith in something that works, so therefore, it must be that faith that allowed A, B, and C to happen as opposed to X, Y, and Z. But, since faith cannot be measured, who's to say that it was their faith that made it happen, and not random chance?

Let's go back to the car. When turning the key doesn't work, certain things that past experience has also taught us come to mind: Did I fill the car with gas? Is it possible that the battery is dead? Did the mechanic not fix the previous issue correctly? Past experience has taught us that, while we may have faith that our car will start, it still doesn't always start. So the experiences of the past have a.) Told us a car is supposed to start when the key is turned, and b.) If the car doesn't start, is not the fault of the key, or even our faith, but is the fault of the car itself, or somehow related to something that the car has had an issue with before.

So let's say Aunt Phoebe is in the hospital. Maybe for a routine appendicitis. A Christian will place their faith in not only the doctor's and the hospital's procedures, but will kneel down in prayer, start a "prayer chain," or request that others, too, pray for dear Aunt Phoebe. An agnostic or atheist will simply place their faith in the doctor and the hospital.

Aunt Phoebe recovers just fine, the surgery was a success, and she'll be out tomorrow. And while the agnostic/atheist says thank you to the doctor, the doctor's experiences of the past, and the hospital's great staff, a Christian will, in addition, thank God. And they interpret this experience of Aunt Phoebe's as an answer to their prayer. And if Aunt Phoebe were to have died? In a less law-suit happy world, both the Christian and the atheist wouldn't sue. But they both might anyway. But the atheist will still shrug, attribute it to bad luck, maybe a drunk doctor, a bad twist of fate. The Christian will say that it was simply the will of God, and also, shrug, uncomprehending.

Both the atheist and the Christian exercised faith in the workings of the hospital (not to mention, so did Aunt Phoebe!), but how they compartmentalized their faith is slightly different. The Christian had the additional box "God" checked off on his faith form. And irregardless of the same result, whether positive or negative, the Christian will still place his faith in God when Uncle Phil is in the hospital next week, and the atheist will still place his faith in the doctor and hospital. They both may learn to send their family members to a different hospital based on Aunt Phoebe's experience there, but the distribution of categories their faith is placed in remain basically the same.

What can we learn from the car, the hospital, and God? Our faith in all these situations is the same. We place it, or distribute it differently, but until the "Faith-o-meter" is invented, a Christian has no place to say, "You are pacing your faith in the wrong things," and neither does the atheist have the right to say this to the Christian. Faith is subjective in it's tangible outcomes and procedures. There is no way to prove or disprove the effect of faith on any situation. And for one to say to another, "Your faith is misplaced" or "misdirected," is simply an exercise in folly.

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Reading this draft from about a week ago, I am unsure what my actual, practical conclusion of this is. Certainly faith is immeasurable, but can one still say they have more faith in something than someone else? Can one Christian say to another, "You are not placing enough faith in God?" Certainly they would be basing this on observed worship styles, or maybe some sort of tally on how much each attends church. It would all be based on one's physical observations and practices of the other. And I believe that physical activity certainly has nothing to do with how much faith one person has over another.

A commonly used phrase in church circles is "have faith like a child." To not ask "why?", but to simply have faith that such and such is, and will always be. Just because you don't understand something is no reason to not have faith in it, they say. And to a certain extent, I can agree with this philosophy. I don't understand how my oil furnace works, but that doesn't mean I'll stop using it to heat my house.

Where I disagree with this philosophy is in that it seems to almost be a "prohibitive" idiom. I know, it really all depends on context and meaning of the person saying it, but to automatically tell all Christians that they must "have faith like a child" almost seems to be saying, "Look, okay, we have no idea about God's plan, and we certainly don't feel like trying to explain the in's and out's of what we do know, so, please, just take our word for it."

And anyone who knows me well enough knows that telling me to not do something or say something, almost guarantees I will do exactly that which I was told not to, after weighing all the facts and consequences of such. Perhaps this is why my faith left the church and God? Because someone told me to just have faith? I am still analyzing this part of my life, and who knows? Faith may one day return to God... but for one to tell me that I have "wrong faith" or "misplaced faith"? That simply shows a lack of understanding about what faith is, in my humble opinion.

Thoughts? Feelings? Flaws in my logic?