What is "Informed Faith"?

One of the things I particularly enjoy and appreciate about my circle of friends (and I'm fortunate enough to have a wide circle of them) is the level of conversation that often occurs, even when we are all kicking back on a weekend night. This past Friday was specifically enlightening as our banter turned to the issue of faith. Given the turn our nation has taken over the last decade or so, faith is a concept that has increasingly assumed a level of pejorative association among certain quarters of society. The reactionary turning toward fundamentalism has turned a lot of people away from the idea. I suppose that this issue isn't specifically contained to the US, but has rather become an international crisis.

Taking into account that context, it's not surprising that someone I would respect would lump all forms of faith together under the same banner, and ridicule all and sundry adherents. Yet I think that this type of generalization can lead to a narrowing of an important dialog. I've come to believe in a wide variegation of attitudes, definitions, and approaches to faith. I've been trending this way for a while, but it's mostly been at a subconscious or an intuitive level. I have to give a shout-out here to J.C. Hallman and (as an extension) William James for helping lead me to the language necessary for framing my thoughts. Ultimately truth is a function of an individual's perspective of the consequences of his/her actions.

As a starting point I'd like to suggest that there is a simplistic but substantial difference between "Faith" and faith. The former entails the fundamentalist variety I mentioned earlier. In the case of "Faith", the individual formation of ideals isn't as important as the level of commitment one brings to them. One determines his/her "Faithfulness" according to how rarely (s)he questions his/her belief system. The individual earns his/her identity with acceptance bred from a revocation of rationality. In fact this is belief beyond reason (in a Kierkegaardian "leap of faith" sense). All of this is well understood and sounds almost cliché to the postmodern reader. I realize that I'm not expressing anything particularly revelatory by spelling this out.

But at the same time, those who embrace a form of pure rational scientific thought seem to be missing a crucial piece of the puzzle... for there is a level of faith involved in the paradigm of cause-and-effect as well. I believe that there are many people that never consciously acknowledge this proposition. The very nature of the empirical sciences entails a quality of mystery. We form our questions about our external reality, and then we seek to study them under certain controlled conditions to isolate a chain of causality. That's all well-and-good. However I think some folks tend to misrepresent the conclusions of such experiments as "ultimate answers".

Even if we have ample scientific data concerning specific phenomena, we still rely on a level of speculation that requires a degree of faith to help us guide our decisions. As soon as we anticipate a time beyond the present, we are unavoidably engaging in the practice of faith, no matter how informed (or alternatively misinformed) our expectations are. So I'm a bit uncomfortable when someone discounts faith outright. We may be able to apply a statistical analysis to a problem (and of course that system itself is vulnerable to a wide range of manipulations), but our understanding is still limited by the constructs of prior experience (and received preconceptions). Just as Eskimos have an expanded language to communicate the different forms of snow, I think we have to honor the idiosyncrasies of "faith".

J.C. Hallman, "The Devil is a Gentleman" (2006).

Last year I reached my reading target in May, and by June I had consumed 50 books. I felt pretty certain that I would set a personal record with my annual total. However, I got complacent and limped along to the end of the year, largely neglecting anyone's written words but my own. Being largely a creature of habit, I have allowed that lack of forward momentum to infect this first month of 2009 as well. I intend to turn this around, and acknowledge that it is going to be hard work doing so. Falling out of the practice of daily reading has made me slow. It doesn't necessarily help that I've made a couple selections of rather dense material so far. One such title is J.C. Hallman's The Devil is a Gentleman.

The intellectual center of The Devil is a Gentleman is made up from observations the author made about the life and work of philosopher, psychologist and writer William James. This eminent scholar has been the focus of much study over the last century, and Hallman wisely forgoes an in depth analysis of his work. Instead he concentrates on presenting a skeleton account of James' life, along with a smattering of his more important ideas and thoughts. Ultimately Hallman is compelled most by the accounts of observations that James compiled in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). The fact that it's so hard to identify this great man's ultimate conclusions allows the reader to personally identify with various facets of his journey.

This ambiguity inspired Hallman's own personal quest of "seeking". Today's world presents just as many opportunities to study man's relationship with god as existed in the era of William James. If you scratch the surface, you will find no end to the strange assortment of approaches to spirituality lying just beneath society's orthodox veneer. Hallman travels to Southern California on a pilgrimage to the site of the Heaven's Gate suicides and tries to interview the neighbors. Finding a predictable resistance, he broadens his exploration of the area by visiting an extant UFO cargo cult. He thus establishes a baseline of weirdness for what follows throughout his book. The insights he constructs are often as fascinating as the individual tales he unearths.

In my opinion, one of Hallman's keys to success is found in his open minded attitude toward what many Americans would consider disturbing and confounding takes on faith. It's manifestly apparent that Hallman wanted to engage the objects of his study on their own terms. This strategy allows him a level of access that many writers would preclude due to their own preconceptions. Instead we get to be present alongside Hallman when he attends the bible study of a group of "Born Again" Christian professional wrestlers who seek to transform souls through their performances. He also participates in a Wiccan ritual and a Satanic "Black Mass". He even takes a Scientology Training course.

Alongside these perambulations (and those of William James), Hallman includes lots of contextual information and historical data about the religious groups he interacts with. The stories of the founders of many of these odd belief systems provide some of the most interesting higlights of The Devil is a Gentleman. Who knew that there was an Atheist community dedicated to the support of non-believers? For that matter, who imagined a group of neo-Pagans holding their convention in a casino? Ultimately though, the concise descriptions about Jamesian "Pragmatism" are likely to stick with me the longest. For years I've always considered the outcomes of belief more important than their rationalizations or origins. I just didn't realize that there was a name for that perpsective.