If you read the title of this post and immediately thought I was talking about religious faith, I got ya! I don’t mean to be rude, but you’ve been programmed by our secular culture to think of “faith” purely as a religious phenomena that applies only to religious people. In fact, faith, a synonym for trust, is an inescapable reality of every day existence for finite human beings. You can’t live without it. I will shortly prove that, but why this is so important is because the enemies of religious faith, specifically Christian religious faith, distort the meaning of faith to demean our faith. This is not double talk. Many Christians have allowed this distortion to create unnecessary doubt about their faith. As I’ll argue, doubt is as necessary to a normal functioning human being as faith, two sides of the same coin. Which brings me to the virus.
Having now gone through six decades of life, I have never seen faith and doubt so prominently displayed in the lives of my fellow citizens than in these last several months. Thank you COVID-19! It is clear that most Americans, and most of our elected leaders, have unquestioning faith in so called “experts,” and government representatives, not to mention the media. So much faith that they will allow their lives to be turned upside down. I don’t need to detail the disruption this has caused worldwide because it can’t be escaped, but most of it was clearly unnecessary, and needlessly harmful. I won’t argue that here because that’s not the purpose of this post. My point is that faith and doubt, and how much they play into our every day lives, are not uniquely religious, at all.
This all comes down to a question of epistemology, or how we know what we know, if we know. We can’t know anything without faith, or trust. There is no knowledge that cannot be questioned, or any knowledge of which we can be absolutely certain. Descartes started this whole mess when he claimed we could have absolute certainty if we started with the one thing we could not doubt: that we could think, or cogito ergo sum. I know I am because I know I think. But do I? Do you? Maybe this is all a dream, and when we go to sleep at night that is the reality. Maybe solipsism is true, and I am the only thing that exists, and everything exists only because I think it exists. Don’t look at me that way. I’m not crazy. How do you know that’s not the case? You don’t. It’s called faith, trust, trust that your senses aren’t deceiving you, trust that you’re not insane, trust that God made reality real, and that others are just as real as you and me, and trust that my perceptions don’t determine reality. It’s all faith, and none of it can be proved.
I know what you’re thinking. This is all just esoteric, intellectual crap! (I was tempted to use the other word, but this is a family blog, and a Christian one at that!) In fact, it is not, at all. Every moment of every day I have to choose who and what to trust. Why? Because I can’t know everything, or much of anything really. I have to trust, have faith. Do masks really work? Are they necessary to stop the spread? Depends on who and what you choose to believe. Is COVID-19 a lethal pandemic that threatens death? Some people believe that. Why? Because they trust the “experts” and the media telling them that it is so. Me, I doubt everything, and everyone, they have faith in. We all have to choose, and I choose different sources to believe because I can’t know everything. Other sources are more credible to me, so I make different choices.
When it comes to religion, or metaphysics, things beyond the physical or material, to spiritual things, I also have to choose what and who to believe and trust. Be it Christianity or COVID-19, the dynamics of faith and doubt, of knowledge and truth, are no different. I look at the evidence, I weigh the credibility of the authorities, and I make my decision, what and whom to trust. So no, I will never wear a mask, and me and my family will stand with Joshua:
But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.
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