Faith
The Original Mystery
There’s no getting away from the givens of life. We’re all part of a universe that sets the stage for life. We’re all sentient animals who encounter a stream of experience during our years upon this planet and who perform tasks in order to meet our needs as best we can. And our brilliant flexible minds can have insights on anything we hold our attention on. Somehow our universe jumped into being and somehow it has grown into the reality that we all share.
It is hard to know to make of these strange givens, or of the incontrovertible truths of our personal situations. The enormity of existence is beyond comprehension and existence’s raw truth is essentially mysterious.
As soon as our ancestors gained minds like ours, they probably tried to make sense of the mysteries that lie behind the lives we live.
The Word ‘God’
These early people would have used words to think and talk about the unfathomable whole lying behind the known and the knowable. They would have told stories and celebrated the source of everything that helped them meet their needs.
Today, people refer to the enfolding whole that’s the source of everything using words such as ‘God’.
Sometimes the word ‘God’ is used to point out the magnificence of existence or to remind us that the ultimate realities lie beyond the reach of our capacity for knowledge. Often, however, the word ‘God’ is used in the same sentence structures that we use to talk about people. This makes God take on the appearance of a person, albeit one with super-human powers — a being who might punish us, or intercede on our behalf in the manner of an idealised and all-powerful parent.
Belief
The way the word ‘God’ fits into sentence structures makes it easy to ask ‘Does God exist?’, just as we might ask ‘Do martians exist?’
It doesn’t make sense, however, to question whether the all-enfolding whole exists, in the way we might question whether martians exist, for the enfolding whole obviously does exist. But in practice, questioning God’s existence has a different function. It asks a person whether or not they believe that this enfolding whole matches what a particular religious creed says about it.
All religions bundle together many beliefs about what this world is like and about how we should behave within it. Members of the religious community are expected to accept the bundle of beliefs as a whole, along with the stories of revelation that give the bundle of beliefs its authority. To question God’s existence is often to question the bundle.
The Problem with Creeds
Bundling beliefs was important in the past, for it made it easier to transmit knowledge through the generations, but it is not so helpful today when there are so many channels of learning available.
And there is a fundamental problem with bundling beliefs. It is always idea-centred. It is the ideas that are taken as givens, rather than reality. People are expected to accept the creed as a whole, so they ask how well reality matches up with the creed.
It would make more sense, however, to start with the truths of the observable world and to examine how good a fit different aspects of the creed are to reality. Some aspects of a religious picture may be accurate, or useful in guiding people’s actions. Others will not be. Assuming that a creed has to be accepted or rejected as a whole makes it harder for believers to see what reality is actually like, or see what it would actually take to be creative and kind.
Free of Doubt
In the lectures that formed the basis of William James’s book The Varieties Of Religious Experience, he described examples of the religious and mystical life from many times and places. To conclude the series of lectures, he picked out two distinct aspects of religion — ‘creeds’ and the ‘faith-state’.1
The creeds, he pointed out, differ widely from one religion to the next. But when we subtract the beliefs, we’re left with feelings and a general attitude to life that is common to believers of all religions. This ‘faith-state’, James said, “overcomes temperamental melancholy and imparts endurance to the Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life.”2
The faith-state appears where doubts about life’s big questions dissolve. This can happen through religious conviction, through an atheistic embrace of life’s givens, or through the dissolution of philosophical problems. Where there might have been an anxiety, or a temptation to think unproductive thoughts about impossible big questions, there is only the invigorating All of the world.
Simply Living Well
A believer has convictions, but a person in the faith-state lives with conviction. They assume that what lies beyond our understanding is fine just as it is and they focus all their attention and efforts on what is in front of them.
Religious communities can support people in following ethical precepts that will keep them acting aesthetically. They can help people overcome the kind of doubts that would hold them back from embodying the faith-state. And they can offer people a sense of community, a rich inheritance of cultural narratives, and a sense of the wonder of the world. They offer shared rituals and powerful collective experiences. Religions can transmit a wisdom that isn’t present in political discourse or everyday chit-chat.
Religious narratives can also dehumanise people from other communities through stories that involve a them and an us. A great many atrocities have their roots in religious conviction.
There are many ways religions can touch people. At best they help people find a harmony with the givens of life where they’re confident about what living well means for them, where the doubts that might inhibit them melt away, and where they naturally act aesthetically, serving others and making whatever contribution to the world is uniquely theirs to make.