faith for freaks
one of my favorite things to do, apparently, is point out when people use the word "faith" incorrectly, at least in a christian context
i think a pretty common use of the word is something like "firm belief without evidence or justification", and i'm not gonna pretend that isn't a legitimate colloquial meaning of the word. growing up in a para-evangelical context, i thought i needed to believe in, say, the literal and infallible truth of scripture precisely because i had no firm justification for believing it, as a kind of test of epistemic loyalty. to distinguish this use of the word "faith" from the sense i want to focus on here, i'll capitalize it as Faith (it's pretentious af but it's better than insisting on fides or sth so be grateful).
one of my least favorite things to do, at least by comparison, is give a firm, concrete characterization of what Faith does mean. my usual go-to hand-waving example involves the exercise of cartesian doubt: let's say we do what all the kids are into these days and doubt every one of our basic assumptions and percepts, everything we intuitively feel to be true but have no incontrovertible evidence for. we've dug ourselves into a pretty deep pit, and as firm and comforting as "cogito ergo sum" is as bedrock, it doesn't exactly tell us much about how to pull ourselves out of that hole. what about the world around us? what about the future? what about all of the other minds and thoughts that define our social reality?
if you'll forgive my reductive summary, decartes has a cheeky, characteristically medieval response: god would never deceive us so! if you're taking a contemporary secular epistemology class like i was a little over a decade ago (!!), it feels like rené pulled up the ladder and left us at the bottom; invoking an infinitely good, omnipotent being is all well and good if you can sell yourself on it, but many of us are too empirically physicalist and/or theologically cynical to buy in, myself included.
nevertheless, at the end of lecture, despite the existential haze we'd plunged ourselves into, we all managed to gather our things and carry on with the mundanities of our day. none of us remained rooted to our seat, too unable to ascertain whether the floor under our feet was solid or the hunger in our stomachs was worth sating. maybe some of us, most of us, did re-accept our old beliefs without strictly verifiable evidence, exercising small-f faith, but i never did. i just kept my feet moving anyway.
my relationship with Faith is more visceral now. of late, it has been impossible to convince myself that i have any kind of future, any kind of promise of happiness or fulfillment or safety. i can comfort myself, distract myself, work for a future i can't dream of ensuring, but the abyss feels absolute and enveloping. when i ask myself what reason i have to keep living, my response is not an answer; rather, it's a rejection of the validity of the question. i live because i have to live. sum ergo vivo. stop looking for the ladder and keep your feet moving.