angels and demons II

In my previous post, I extracted some dialogue from Dan Brown's Angels and Demons which make some interesting observations about religion. I summarised it as follows:
1) There are many religions, and they are more or less the same. They are good because they teach good values and provide comfort and stength to many people.
2) Perhaps God does exist, but we will never understand, and our belief must be based on faith and miracles, not intellect.
This post will discuss my thoughts on the second point. (You can read the first one here.)

Faith seems to be an essential ingredient in most religions, since we cannot understand them. But what is faith? Is it all about miracles? And does it require a suspension of rationality? In a recent bible study with my youth group, the little brats refused to do the assigned reading during the week. So I decided to tekan them with this philosophical question.

"Faith means to believe loh," one girl volunteered.

"Ok," I said, holding my handphone aloft. "So if I let go of this handphone now, do you believe it will fall to the ground?" There were several nods of agreement. "Does that require any faith?"

Most of my kids are still in sec sch or poly. So I can see the looks of annoyed bewilderment crossing their faces. What is our idiot teacher trying to get at? So cheem one. Spoonfeed us lah!

I think it is important to differentiate between knowledge, faith and belief. Knowledge refers to the things we know from our own experience. Belief is in the answer I would give when asked a question - the phone will fall. And faith is the gap between the two. I know that the last time I dropped a handphone, it fell to the ground. (Because it was an Ericsson and not a Nokia, the screen broke.) I know that in general most things fall to the ground. I believe this handphone will fall too, because it is consistent with my knowledge of the world. There is no gap between knowledge and belief, hence there is no faith. I drew a graph.



The girl asked, so if I am meeting Charles and I know he is usually on time, so I believe he will be on time, is that knowledge or faith?

Well let's say you are at Orchard MRT and you are meeting him in five minutes. He has never been late before so you are confident that he will be on time. That takes some faith. If he suddenly messages you then and says he is one stop a way, you know that he will be on time. So faith is no longer required. The gap between knowledge and belief has been closed.

(On the other hand, if he messages to say that he is still at Clementi, and you still believe he will be on time, that is when the faith becomes irrational.)

It is the same thing about religion isn't it. Most religions comes as a package of teachings, which may include philosophy but also many facts about life. These can be tested. Take Christianity for example.

The bible teaches of dead people who come back to life, of seas that part so that people can walk through, and all kinds of miraculous healings. In our modern age, it is quite difficult to imagine such things happening, hence the natural tendency to be a bit cynical and incredulous. But the bible also documents thousands of years of human history, such as the rise and fall of empires, and also global events (such as the great flood that covered the earth for 40 days). It also contains many prophecies that are fulfilled. All of these things can be tested for internal coherence (i.e. if someone made up the whole book as a big con job, it is not likely that all the statements would be consistent) and also against the historical accounts recorded in other documents from the same time.

I remember the first time I took a history class in college. I was supposed to write a book review of A.J.P. Taylor's The Origins of The Second World War. In this book, Taylor proposed an alternative view of what led to the war. Hitler never intended to start a world war. In fact, his main motive was lebensraum; limited expansion into the neighbouring countries to obtain more living space for German people. To this end, he occupied Austria, while the allies looked on, all the while seeking to appease him because they were so reluctant to start another war. In the same spirit, he began occupation of Poland, when suddenly the Allies decided to act against him. Had he known they would oppose his actions, he would never have dared begin the conquest. But because of the ambiguity of English and French foreigh policy, Hitler suddenly found himself drawn into conflict, and had no choice but to begin his invasion of Western Europe.

Having done 4 years on the engineering track, my concept of "book review" at the time was the same kind of thing I had done all through primary and secondary school: summarise the book. So I did, and said what a brilliant and convincing analysis it was, and how I now saw the war in a whole new light. I was given a B and the professor spoke to me about it. Very nice summary, he said, but why didn't I critique the book. Why hadn't I analysed it for logical errors and fallacies? Well it just seemed really convincing, I said. Is this what you were taught in school, he asked? No it wasn't, I admitted. The conventional view of history paints Hitler as quite the villian.

Well, if AJP Taylor's version of history was true, why didn't it become the accepted view? He was certainly a prominent historian, and the book stirred up a huge amount of controversy. But at the end of the day it has been accepted as an interesting alternative viewpoint, but not an accurate portrayal of the events and motives that led to the war. Simply put, when it came under scrutiny of the world's leading academics, it failed the test. So there must be some reason it was not accepted, and you should have thought about that when you wrote the review. That was what my professor told me, and it has stuck ever since.

In the same way, the bible contains thousands of pages of history. This is an open invitation for anyone to scrutinise it for factual accuracy. If the bible was wrong, we would hear about it. Surely anyone who can disprove the bible would make the discovery known, and many have tried. The very dramatic controversies raised by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code are actually a rediscovery of earlier arguments. He himself has openly admitted that ideas were borrowed from other sources. And the reason we never heard about them before is that they never gained enough credence to bring them to public attention. The difference is that Brown has now published the anti-biblical view, without the corresponding counter-arguments, in a novel that makes it accessible to the general public. Like an engineer reading history, the general public does not have the inherent knowledge to spot the fallacies in the argument. Many books have since been written to correct this imbalance, but unfortunately they are probably not quite as interesting and gripping as DVC.

I cite this example because I don't want to go into the myriad of debates and proofs for the correctness of the bible. This is something that is important for everyone to investigate for themselves, but way beyond the scope of a short post. As a heuristic, I think we can rely on the internet and the mass media to trumpet the finding if a major religion should be disproved. In the absence of such an announcment, we can accept that there is a good chance it is true.

So back to faith. Not all religions are based on faith alone. Some, especially Christianity, offer many opportunities to be cross-examined for historical accuracy, and until now, it has stood the test of time. This means that belief in Christianity actually comprises a large knowledge component, and the knowledge is consistent with the belief. Faith is still required, but it is not quite the leap into the unknown that some people might think.

The views expressed here are the author's own, drawn from personal experience and private thoughts. They do not represent the teaching of any religious group.