The material in this blog is now available at amazon.com under the title: Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an.
Given the urgent need to develop a coherent sense of self from our earliest days, the complexity of our surroundings, the flood of information that would overwhelm us if we were to process it all instantaneously, and the ever-pressing need to act on the basis of the minute amounts of data that we actually do process, we, like all sentient beings, are constrained to live by faith. Faith is not merely a set of assumptions about how the world works; nothing is accomplished by mere hypothesizing. Rather faith is, in its most general sense, active affirmation – an intricate interplay of motivation, perception, assessment, and initiative. It can be thought of as a feedback loop or self-regulating system in which desires influence our intake of information, both sensory and supersensory, from which we derive motivated judgements that can, in turn, be translated into acts of will intended to strengthen, weaken, or alter our desires. Faith thus comprises elements of emotion, awareness, intelligence, and praxis, which together constitute an affirmation of someone or something.
Consider, just as an example, a boy’s going to morning soccer practice.
This is, firstly, an affirmation of environmental probabilities – that it won’t rain this morning, that the trip to the field will be safe, that the grass will be short enough to play on, and so forth. Other probabilities – that the playing field will be level (as it was last week), that daylight will be sufficient for the two hours of practice time, or that gravity will work the same way it always has – are automatically assumed. These latter probabilities include the bedrock assumptions of science, namely that there are laws that govern the universe in a regular, predictable, and intelligible manner, and that these laws are not subject to human will or preference. The boy affirms all these postulates by taking them for granted and acting as if they are true. He cannot prove them true (nor can scientists), but he affirms them nonetheless.
But besides his faith in what will or will not happen, and what has reliably happened in the past, this boy of ours has been encouraged and supported in certain beliefs regarding the value of what he has done or plans to do. It has been affirmed, first for him and then by him, that playing soccer is something he can do without blame, and probably be proud of too. Interwoven with this are cultural norms that also become items of faith, such as it being good for children to play sports, to do what they enjoy, to spend time with their peers, to strive to win, and to learn how to lose graciously. Perhaps he does not actually enjoy soccer, but affirms by going that it is good to satisfy the demands of his parents if they encourage blameless activities of this sort.
As our boy gets involved in his soccer practice, this framework of physical constants and ethical girders is retained subconsciously. In the meantime, he must attend to and react to facts on the ground and demands that arise moment by moment from those facts – to shoot, to pass, or to dribble, to anticipate the movement of the ball and other players, to attack or defend, to speed up or slow down, and so on. Here he enters a realm of seamless interplay between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, where events and situations determine the needs of the instant, which in turn determine what facts are worth absorbing and what information can be safely ignored.
These two aspects of what he has learned to process as a single sequence of stances and circumstances, or as a passage through an integrated continuum spanning ‘hard’ facts and ‘soft’ imperatives, constitute the normal texture of our lives. Every moment of our existence comprises a foreground of ‘body’ that we pay close attention to, even though it represents but a tiny fraction of our total possible sensory experience, and a background of ‘soul’, consisting of preferential or moral assessments that constantly nudge us towards the centre of our comfort zone. Both perspectives rely on faith – in a crude summary of physical phenomena, and in a set of spiritual principles we rarely question – to substitute for what could only be attained by years of scientific study or philosophical pondering. Faith is the shortcut to action that all of us take. And by faith, we affirm our own identities as persons who are real, however constructed, and worth saving.
Faith, therefore, is a natural, rational, and motivational response by not only humans but practically all sentient beings to a dynamic, over-informed, and ultimately unknowable environment. Without it, we would never be able to navigate the intrinsically bewildering confusion of the two realms we inhabit – the world of so-called facts, which are shorthand notes about a flurry of mainly sensory phenomena, and the world of values, where we construct our normative models and sculpt our absolutes into the gods we live and die for.
The GOD You Already Know 