Faith & Science: The Mental Toolbox
How Certainty & Exclusivity Destroy The Value of Faith
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Faith is having an identity crisis in the Western world.
Faith doesn’t seem to know what it is anymore. It also seems blissfully unaware of what it isn’t. Faith walks around dressed up as certainty; it has taken on the job of destroying doubt and flattening other perspectives.
‘Having faith’ seems to have become about joining a side, dismissing opposing ideas, and stubbornly insisting on your beliefs against all contradictory evidence.
Since when was this what faith was all about?
In my final year of being a Christian, I began to come across evidence that convinced me that some of my beliefs were wrong. The first things to go were my belief in a literal six day Creation, the existence of Hell, and the perfect inerrancy (no errors or contradictions) of the Bible.
When I began to discuss these issues with other people, I came across one particular response that deeply bothered me. It was a response that told me to ‘just have faith’. Some people were upset by the contradictions I brought up, and their answer was to let go of the evidence and just keep believing. They thought it was wrong of me to even mention this contradictory evidence, in case it caused other people to stumble in their own faith.
There wasn’t an answer to the specific issues that I was facing, or a willingness to discuss different opinions. There was simply a call to ignore evidence and stubbornly hold on to what we already believed.
When I saw this kind of response, I felt frustrated and disillusioned. It seemed to me like faith had simply become a cover-all answer for doubt, a quick way to avoid reality and reject change. Some of us were simply using faith as a defence against ever having to be wrong.
This attitude eventually helped to push me completely out of my old Christian belief system. It was one thing to believe in something without objective evidence, but to continue believing while blindly ignoring the evidence seemed dysfunctional and dangerous.
Many of us in the modern world have placed faith and science on opposing sides. They seem like enemies, unable to cooperate, viewing the world through completely contradictory and exclusive lenses.
By turning them against each other like this, we draw both sides as caricatures: science is a know-it-all who despises faith, and works incessantly to prove it wrong; while faith is stupid, rejecting all evidence and breeding ignorance.
This is such a sad, reductive, and harmful view of both science and faith. It turns people into enemies, builds walls and closes down the possibility of understanding.
Here’s how I think about it: faith and science are simply tools in our mental toolbox. They are two different, specific ways of thinking that we should use in appropriate circumstances. They are not opposites, any more than a hammer and a chainsaw are opposites.
We all have our own mental toolbox: it’s the place where we store all the tools that can help us experience and understand the world around us. Some of us have more available tools than others, depending on our upbringing and life experience. Faith and science are just two of these tools. There are a huge amount of others, including mysticism, mathematics, empathy and artistic criticism. Each tool has its place, an appropriate context to be used in; and as we acquire more mental tools, we become more flexible and able to interact with a wider world of experience.
The problem arises when we try to use the wrong tool for the job. If I bring a set of paints and brushes to the construction site, I’m going to find it hard to do my job. At the same time, if I turn up to an art workshop brandishing a chainsaw, there may be issues. It doesn’t matter how strongly I insist that my chainsaw is a fantastic piece of equipment; people will become upset, the police will be called, and conflict will ensue.
The same is true of both faith and science.
I don’t need faith to believe in gravity. Gravity lies in the realm of science: there is a massive amount of data, evidence, and research that I can go out and digest right now that will prove to me that gravity is a real force in the Universe. The theory of gravity makes incredibly accurate predictions about reality, and is shown to be correct consistently and to an incredible level of precision. We see the results of this understanding in everyday life: from the bridges we travel across, to the GPS directions we’re following, to the very mechanics of the car we’re driving.
Maybe we don’t have 100% certainty in the theory of gravity, but I could say I have 99.99% confidence in it. Not once have I woken up in the morning with the fear that I will float away into the sky when I leave my bed. I have never had to really convince myself to believe that I will stick to the ground when I walk to work.
A good scientific theory must always have solid evidence to back it up, and that evidence removes the need for faith. The amount of confidence we place in a scientific idea varies directly with the amount of evidence we have for that idea.
Faith, on the other hand, doesn’t have the requirement of evidence. It’s a completely different tool, for a different realm of experience. Faith, by definition, is the tool we use when we don’t have evidence to back us up, or when our only evidence is subjective and personal.
When I think about what happens when I die, or whether there are higher beings in the Universe, or my purpose for being alive, I’m entering areas where faith is an appropriate tool to use. Science simply doesn’t have much to say here, at least for now. In theory, events may come to pass, or new evidence may arise, that has something direct to say about the human soul, or the existence of God/s, or what existed before the Big Bang. Until that time, there’s space for question, thought and discussion.
When science tries to discredit faith for being ‘wishful thinking’ and not based on objective data, it’s correct; but it’s still making a mistake. Those would be valid criticisms towards an attempt at science, but faith is built for exactly those situations. It’s not supposed to be data-based and concrete. It’s based on hope, trust and personal experience, for situations where clear evidence is not available.
There are many large gaps in scientific knowledge: for example, the nature of consciousness, or how life first began. Maybe these are places where faith has some room to speak. But faith shouldn’t try to own these areas either: because there’s a possibility that science will solve those mysteries at some point. If faith insists on simply hiding in the scientific gaps, then it’ll find itself consistently losing ground in the future.
There’s a time for every one of the tools in our mental toolbox; and we should be able to equip ourselves with them all at the appropriate time. Sometimes in life I need to turn on my scientific brain; sometimes I need to switch into a more spiritual point of view. Sometimes I activate my inner skeptic; sometimes I have to let go and be a bit more mystical for a while. Sometimes I need to stand on evidence; sometimes I need to admit my own uncertainty.
Of course, I’ll use certain tools more often than others. We all skew in different directions, and tend to land in different places. I don’t see a problem with that: in fact, diversity and variety of opinion and perspective is key if we are to grow and learn and become better.
Sadly, it seems like some of us just want everyone to be a hammer.
You cannot prove whether or not God exists.
No matter how many times I’ve heard inspirational sermons or seen viral Facebook videos trying to say otherwise, it cannot be done. The existence of God lies squarely in the realm of faith.
There are many reasons that people today still believe in God: some find (subjective) evidence in the complexity of the natural world, others have personal experiences that they can’t explain without God, others are convinced through stories or sermons, and still others were simply brought up with that belief.
Whatever personal reasons may be given, and however valid they may be, the existence of God has not been objectively proved. When I see Christians contend this fact, it saddens me, because it seems that they are trying to dress up their faith as certainty in order to feel more secure.
As a Christian, I believed that there was proof for my faith: our evidence lay within the Bible. We used scriptures that spoke about the inerrancy of God’s Word, showing that not a single letter of the Bible was misplaced or flawed. Everything it said about God was incontrovertibly true, and I could depend on it completely.
How did I know I could trust the Bible? Because it said so in the Bible! Looking back now, I don’t know how I was able to swallow this idea for such a long time. It took a serious amount of self-distraction and stubbornness not to see the problem there.
You can’t prove something has authority by referring to the thing itself (unless you’re doing mathematics). If a prisoner on trial proclaims that he is innocent, he doesn’t automatically receive a verdict of ‘not guilty’. You can’t become the President of the USA simply by announcing that you are. You can’t take one sentence out of a book and take that as proof that the entire book is permanently and perfectly true.
What you can do is believe in the Bible: value it, love it, and trust it, using the tool of faith. At the same time, you can learn about its history, its translation, and its context; the way it was edited and put together by a variety of people over a huge amount of time. You can love and appreciate it without having to turn it into a completely perfect account direct from God. This is an appropriate place to use both tools: science and faith working together. Science (or history) uses the evidence to tell us what the Bible is and where it came from; faith can help us to live with its contradictions and flaws, to draw out hope and wisdom from its words, and maybe to see divine influence among its human pages.
For me, the misuse of faith destroyed my ability to read the Bible. I lost the ability to take anything good from it. While I can appreciate it as a piece of our shared human history, and as a cultural milestone, I can’t approach it on a personal level any longer.
Here’s where our faith went wrong: we saw ourselves as the exclusive owners of truth, rather than as believers in one particular worldview among many.
I wish that my old pastor had started every sermon by saying: “I might be completely wrong about this. This is simply what I believe to be true.”
Instead, we went hard on the line that we had the Truth, and we had to stand strong on that Truth no matter what.
We didn’t really have faith. We didn’t even need faith: we just needed stubbornness. We pressured each other to continue on in our stubbornness, and this led to an atmosphere of certainty and exclusivity, two things that I now see as completely antithetical to faith.
Certainty, not doubt, is the opposite of faith. Where there’s no room for doubt, there’s no need for faith.
In order to hold on to our certainty, we also needed to own exclusivity: if we were completely right, then every contradictory perspective must be wrong. We no longer needed to look outside of ourselves for wisdom and understanding. We no longer needed to equip ourselves with more mental tools: we had the only one we would ever need.
We brought this exclusivity into our whole reason for being. We taught about a literal place called Hell, where anybody who didn’t believe like we did would be punished eternally after they died. Our entire purpose was to try and convince people to come over to our side, so they could be saved from this torture.
According to what I was taught, even the kindest Buddhist who authentically followed what she thought was right, loved her family and did good in the world, would be sent to Hell if she didn’t accept Jesus as her Saviour. I’m sorry that it took me so long to let go of that particular belief.
Now, I see Hell as the peak expression of our need for certainty and exclusivity. To be honest, for the last couple of years of my Christianity, I found Hell kind of embarrassing. I think that all of us did to some extent. If we really believed in it, we would have been preaching non-stop to every person we could get our hands on. I think that on some level we understood how gross that belief was; but the weight of it was so heavy, and so embedded in our worldview, that we could never fully let it go.
Some of us even took the offensiveness of Hell as a badge of honour. We would preach about the ‘offence’ of the Gospel; how the rest of the world saw it as hardheaded and mean, because they simply couldn’t understand God’s wisdom. We turned it around on everyone else: ‘if you’re offended, that’s your problem; we can’t change the truth just because you don’t like it.’
By taking this line, we continued to misuse and abuse our faith. We denied the possibility of being wrong about anything, and doubled down on certainty and exclusivity. Instead of equipping ourselves with a variety of mental tools, we were in the process of becoming hammers.
If our main goal is to make people believe like we do, then all we’re doing is building empires. The Christianity I grew up with spoke often about grace and inclusion, but it was really just another set of walls to separate insiders from outsiders. If you accept our God’s grace and kindness, you’re an insider. If you don’t, you’re an outsider. Our ‘faith’ became close-minded, divisive, and driven by our own desire for security.
Real faith is not interested in empires. It has a far better part to play in the world.
I love to write about science, because I find it fascinating, inspiring, mind-expanding and beautiful. I even find spirituality in science, which is something that I couldn’t understand when I lived with the false dichotomy of science and faith. When I realised they were simply two unique tools for me to use, I noticed crossovers and connections between them in places I had never expected.
However, I also know that science isn’t the definitive solution to the world’s problems. It’s not the only valid way of thinking, and it doesn’t have all the answers. It does have a fantastic ability to answer questions about how our Universe works, and we should listen to what it has to say. But it also comes with its own unique set of problems and weaknesses.
The truth is that science and faith need each other. A person who can expertly use both of these tools in their appropriate contexts is able to communicate with a wider variety of people, and to empathise with a larger spectrum of experience. It’s a bit like being fluent in many different languages: the ability can bring greater unity and understanding between groups of people.
I’ve talked a lot in various articles about the value and beauty of science, so here’s what I think is potentially beautiful and important about faith:
Faith is about believing for the best, even when circumstances are difficult.
Faith is about believing the good in other people, even when the world seems dark and hateful.
Faith is about authentically holding what we believe most deeply, even when we can’t fully describe the reasons for that belief.
Faith is the ability to listen to other ideas without fear, to take in new information, and to change your mind when appropriate.
Faith is about learning to live with uncertainty, nuance, contradiction, and a million shades of grey.
Faith is about knowing that you don’t know, and holding that not-knowing with honesty and open hands.
Faith is a gift that you offer to the world; not to convert others, but to bring peace and kindness and compassion, to confront injustice and to work for a better society.
That list may sound like a series of inspirational fridge-magnets, but I actually believe it could be true. If we could solve faith’s identity crisis, and use it for the purpose it is best suited for, I honestly think the world would be a better place.
I wish more religions would preach this kind of faith: not faith as certainty that ignores evidence, or exclusive rights to the Truth, but as hope and joy in the absence of objective evidence.
Even an ex-Christian like me could get on board with that.
