What Is Faith?

Do you trust your worldview like you trust the highway system. If you don’t, why not? 

Note well that faith produces action. You're comfortable enjoying the convenience of your automobile because you are persuaded that it's safe to do so. Your persuasion isn't just a mental state. You act on it every time you start your car and drive it somewhere. When you do this, you "live out your faith."

Today there is a bizarre categorization of truth being attempted by our post-modern culture. Moral, religious, political, social, and even economic "truth" is held to be flexible and totally up for grabs. People seem free to understand these topics any way they want to. Yet everyone expects to have their subjective understandings validated by everyone else at all times. This is a chaotic open-mindedness, and it's widely celebrated today as "progress."

Progress towards what exactly?

I wonder why nobody has the intellectual courage to integrate post-modern relativism with the road-system, or even with the lunch-menu at a favorite hangout.

Imagine for a moment that you're visiting your favorite lunch-spot. You're hungry and order a bacon-double-cheese-burger and a chocolate shake (extra thick). These items are featured on the menu with appetizing photographs and mouth-watering descriptions like "tender," "juicy," and "rich." 

You give the server your order, and your tummy rumbles as you anticipate your mid-day feast. Moments later, the server sets a plate of baked kale chips and a green-smoothie down in front of you. 

If this illustration offends your sensibilities, just flip it around. 

Instead, imagine you ordered a "fresh" and "crispy" kale salad and a "vitamin-rich" vegetable smoothie full of fiber and antioxidants—but instead, you were given a fat-encased hunk of bloody carcass—and a belly busting carb-bomb as a chaser.

The obvious point is that you have your preferences; you shared them with your server; and they have chosen not to share that meaning with you. After all, who are you to really mean what you say?

You spread your hands and give the server a confused and frustrated look. They return your look confidently and then move their hands in that obnoxious "6-7" gesture. Then they say: "What's your problem? This is my truth about your order." 

Now, do you have a meaningful reason to complain to the restaurant manager? 

Only if your worldview equips you to recognize that confusing a hamburger for a pile of kale is a genuine mistake. Why genuine? Because the truth of the matter isn't really relative at all. It is stable and objective—and you really ought to be able to share such meaning with another human-being. Why?

Because truth is perfect information about the way things really are. Because it's a sharable fact that "kale" and "hamburger" aren't English synonyms. Because it's reasonable for any restaurant patron to expect a competent food-server to know and respect that difference as knowable fact.

That's how society functions—by sharing meaning. So, sober up and ask yourself honestly: Can I trust my worldview to integrate with a lunch-menu? If you can't, why do you trust it at all?

Ask again: Can I trust my worldview to integrate with the road-system in the real world? If you can't, then get honest with yourself and confess that deep down you already know better. You really do. It's the reason you're not dead or in jail.

Ideas matter. 

Is your faith a bad-faith?

If we are to live meaningful lives, Meaning itself has to be trustworthy. We all bet our lives and eternities on something. Are you making a smart bet? You might want to notice your position relative to the Dealer (the Logos)—and then calculate your "pot-odds." Because it's a life and death game of reality that you find yourself in, and wager you must. It isn't optional, you're embarked. That is to say: You're "all-in!" 

A trustworthy faith has to be a meaningful faith. Many popular interpretations of reality can be excluded by carefully noticing and asking its begged-questions, and then applying a little common-sense to the answers.

The mission of good-philosophy isn't to seed doubts. It's to foster discernment so that you can pursue a meaningful life. A life in which you trust your understanding of the way things really are—and through that true understanding, come to know Reality.

A good-philosopher always asks these preliminary questions:

1. Is my worldview internally consistent (Is it logical)?

2. Does my worldview explain the known facts (Is it plausible)?

3. Does my worldview have a horizon that extends beyond myself (Is it shareable)?

4.. Does my worldview integrate with life in the real world (Is it livable)?

If your worldview fails the first challenge (logic), you should abandon it at once and start over. Because nobody should trust in something that violates the law of non-contradiction and is therefore meaningless. There is no hope when you trust in something that cannot be the way things really are.

Mark Twain said: "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." I think there's a demonstrable exception to his rule. I also think that he's mostly right when it comes to the real trust that most people place in their own worldviews.

Was he right about your faith?

If your worldview falls to the second or third challenge, then it's incomplete and stands in need of revision. To some degree this state of affairs holds us all. Why?

Because "we see through a glass dimly." Like Odysseus, we are trying to make our way safely home, but it's a perilous journey. There are monsters to deal with along the way, and we can't just ignore them and sail safely by.

A good-philosopher recognizes this fact and takes it seriously. Unlike the fundamentalist, a good-philosopher knows that they haven't arrived yet. Indeed, we all are orbiting Meaning together, even as "He" holds all things together for us to know (Colossians 1:15-23). Each one of us has this in common, and every time we engage with Meaning and learn something new, our mass of knowledge grows and we are drawn into a closer orbit to Reality as it really is. 

The mission of good-philosophy is a mission of hope—a justified hope that one day we will make it safely home. That one day we will make the ultimate landfall and come face to face with Meaning Himself—and through Him come to know Reality as He Really Is. (1 Corinthians 13).

With these "First Things" firmly in mind, let us begin a discerning search for The Truth. Let us set out in search of the first Fact. Let's explore Meaning together and see if we can find its Perfect-Headwaters. 

Of course, the journey starts with a question. What does "God" mean?