Ubiquity of faith

Contrary to the outstanding work of art, outstanding theory is susceptible to improvements. – Karl Popper

By Susantha Hewa

The word “faith”, has a sanctified place in our vocabulary because of its associations with religious sentiments. However, faith is a basic element in a whole range of aspects of ordinary life. It is so much a part of everything in life that we often fail to see its pervasiveness in a variety of our experiences. In all mundane matters, faith as well as its loss is the undeclared rule; not the exception. If faith is a fact of life, so is the loss of it.

Faith is so often thought of as exclusively confined to the area of religion that many would not be able to talk for two minutes on it without referring to the latter. However, there is practically nothing you can do without faith. It has equal currency and validity in religion as well as in secular affairs. For example, at the most fundamental level, you have complete faith in your sense organs to engage in all your day-to-day activities. You cross the road without much effort because you have at least faith in your eyes and legs. On the day you have no faith in them you depend on others who still have faith in theirs to accomplish the feat. You know how your unimpressive ears serve you when you eavesdrop on your son’s or daughter’s phone calls. Of course, your faith in your hearing apparatus is rarely mentioned. After taking a drop too much, you count on your hands to help you find your way out of the bar. If your hands fail to support you, well, you have to rely on your friends. If your curd tastes funny you immediately realize that your host has poured sauce instead of treacle on it. How unfortunate that you had trusted your friend to pick the right bottle from the fridge! In all such instances you have tacit faith in your sense organs or on others around you, though you may hardly think of appreciating their services.

Faith is nowhere more invisible than in family relations. Children unconditionally trust their parents for protection and sustenance. Day-to-day dealings would be impossible without having faith in your family members, friends, officemates, neighbours and numerous others who interact with you in various ways. A friend’s failure to keep an appointment will ruin your day. All know how much we trust on the safety of consumer goods including gas cylinders. Aren’t faith and its invariable loss the driving forces of all Elections?

Faith works in your life in subtler and obscurer ways. You never doubt that your ‘parents’ are your biological parents. The need for verification may arise very rarely, if medical or legal problems crop up. Social life would be unimaginable without faith in written documents: letters, checks, bonds, deeds, currency notes, certificates, etc. We collectively believe that the written word is more reliable than the spoken word. What is important is, in all of the above instances, faith, however fragile it may prove to be, is fundamental to everything we do. In other words, faith is the unseen rule mundane life and its loss, the exception.

Science does not proceed on belief or faith. However, as laymen, we do believe in things that are said to be scientifically established- in things that experts recommend us. Of course, it is beyond the layman to examine or verify the truth of professional advice. As such, the common man’s most ‘scientific’ method boils down to believing things when they work. Thus, we have faith in gadgets, vaccine, medicine and all kinds of expert opinion. However, the fun part is there is nothing sacrosanct about our faith in things that are said to be scientifically proven at any given time. Take, for example, the coconut oil conundrum. We shift from our indispensable coconut oil to alternative cooking oils on doctors’ advice, but return to the former when the expert opinion takes a U-turn to favour it. A few decades ago, children dreaded fever because their parents made rice a taboo to them on the family doctor’s advice, but the present-day child has nothing to quarrel with the merry doctor who would not rule out rice or virtually anything the brat could eat! So clearly, in ordinary life, which is constantly influenced by rapidly expanding knowledge, faith cannot go unchallenged for long.

We also have faith in principles, qualities, superstitions and beliefs. For example, a child who is taught that honesty is the best policy will not be so keen to adopt it unconditionally as an adult. Here, the loss of faith in the aphorism learnt as a child is the inevitable result of real-life experience, which is gainful.

He will have no reason to regret it unless he is uncommonly naive. Likewise, life provides you with many situations where you lose faith in individuals, relationships, theories, etc. without much regret.

Some of the ideas implanted in our head when you were a child are superstitions that come down generations. You don’t lose faith in them as easily as you do in the above because you are afraid of the misfortunes that are supposed to visit you as retribution. Surely, you may be rational and would totally rely on medicine to cure your loved one who has fallen sick, but however rational you may be, you would not be able to pluck up the courage to refuse descending to occult practices, if the latter’s condition becomes critical. If performing the ritual, the healer has prescribed makes even slightest improvement in the patient, you continue with it without trying to be too investigative. As such, faith happens to be a customer you cannot help dealing with frequently, if more unconsciously than consciously.

Much of what has gradually been discarded as superstition over millennia was the very stuff of primeval religions that oversaw a range of important areas in primitive life including physical and mental health, food safety, hunting, agriculture, placating deities to tame forces of nature and avert evil spirits, etc. For our ancient cousins, losing faith in what we now dismiss as occult sciences was unthinkable.

Shifting faith from pseudoscience to modern science has not been the only positive change that the civilizing process has produced in humans. It has also changed our attitude to faith. For the primitive man, faith was the necessary ingredient of survival. Today we are more at ease with its changing facades and its fluctuations thanks to the diffusion of scientific thinking in society. The pitiful outcomes of pseudoscience displacing science, which create disturbing but temporary ripples of shock and dismay in society, an instance of which was in the news recently, deserve more and sustained attention from all concerned groups.