Faith used to be a powerful label...

Faith is a word. Words have the power to create or destroy. Faith, as a word, has been stripped of its power to create by the divergent meanings associated with it. One the one hand, it has been bounded by religiosity, and on the other, remolded to fit within the scientific domain of empirical classification.  As a consequence, we can no longer utter the word faith without conjuring up mental images ranging from the Catholic Pope, to the Christian cross, to turban clad Muslims bowing East, juxtaposed with wild-eyed, faith healers gyrating in maniacal contortions with snakes wrapped around every limb. In effect, faith is relegated to a position of institutionalized ritual that affords it some dignity, or labeled a comical farce not worthy of consideration by any modern, scientific-minded individual.  Either way, faith is stripped of its creative power.  

This was not always so, as my perusal of the progressive developments in Judeo-Christian religion and science will shortly show. But before we jump into an analysis of faith, I need to warn you that my presentation structure is bordering on heretical by academic standards. While I do present a logical progression of events, I have intentionally refused to place a neatly packaged, single sentence thesis at the entrance to this paper as the traditional top down deconstruction advises. This is because I am approaching this subject from the bottom up, which is defined as, “moving from experience to understanding in the quest for motivated belief (Polkinghorne, 2007, p.73). In other words, you have to wait until the end for the conclusion.

Faith has commonly been associated with religious doctrines that profess belief in a god or multiple gods.  The Judeo-Christian religions profess belief in one God, and so their definitions of faith are bounded by that ideological framework. Here faith has power. But that faith has power only in relation to the Judeo-Christian perception of belief in God.

Here are two examples of faith that the Holy Bible provides:

•       Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you. (Mathew 17:20, 2011, New International Version);  
•       By faith in the name of Jesus, this man whom you see and know was made strong. It is Jesus’ name and the faith that comes through him that has completely healed him, as you can all see (Acts 3:16).

As I mentioned earlier, science developed in cooperation with this concept of faith for quite some time. Many of the prominent scientists of their day professed to be of the Judeo-Christian faith.  Galileo and Newton believed that “God had written two books, the book of scripture and the book of nature” (Polkinghorne, 2007,  p.108 ) and they saw no contradictions between observing natural law, experimenting scientifically and faith( Polkinghorne, p.108 ). Even much later in the nineteenth century when the mechanistic view firmly entrenched the scientific method as “single handedly capable of providing  all knowledge worth knowing, or even possible to know,” ( Polkinghorne, p.109 ) three renowned physicist: Michael Faraday,  James Clerk Maxwell, and Lord Kelvin were still devout Christians (Polkinghorne, p.109). It was much later when faith and science diverged irreversibly, with the arrival of Darwinism.

 In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. This was a key turning point in the castration of faith. In a nutshell, Darwinism founded evolutionary theory through concepts such as natural selection, adaptation to the environment of the conditions of the present, survival of the fittest…all concepts that were empirically verifiable (Lenox, 2010, sect. 2.2). So from Darwinism we ended up with a perception that the faith of our Judeo-Christian forefathers was a fairy tale best suited for whimsical reminiscing of humanities’ evolutionary childhood. C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield expressed this idea best with a term called “chronological snobbery”, a term which refers to:

The belief that "intellectually, humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last (i.e. nineteenth) century." - e.g. Darwinian Evolutionary Theory (Lewis, 2011, n.p.)

Today we see the results of this castration of faith. The polished salesmanship of television evangelists preaching salvation by faith have replaced the snake charmer for those not residing in third-world countries. Enlightened people know that only the truly desperate and feeble minded give credence to such faith. The religious and dignified association with faith rejects the proposition that anyone may identify themselves as a person of authentic faith if they do not adhere to the religious tenets associated with that particular doctrine (Wainright, 1984, p.357). And the scientific communities’ obsessive reliance on empirical evidence has solidified into an immovable force in a gridlock with an immovable mass.  Here faith is only for those scientists who possess the courage to “make assertions with a quiver in the voice” ( Polkinghorne, 2011, p.109) knowing full well that the weight of the complexities involved in restoring faith could crush them.  Some of these lonely souls cling to the sanitized definition of faith in modern dictionaries, “faith is confidence in a positive outcome despite or in lieu of verifiable evidence,” (Faith, dictionary.com  )in a desperate attempt to fend off the voices shouting, “heretic.” Some have banded together and theorized faith into whole explanatory systems offering faith disguised with scientifically acceptable names.  Symbolic Interactionisms’ self-fulfilling prophecies (Symbolic, n.d.) is one of many that take this approach.  Some have even gone as far as to boldly use the word faith in a scientific study, although often the sanitized version of faith addressing issues like faith in intuition (Zimmerman, 2011. )

So far, we have traced the castration of faith from its roots in religiosity and scientific rationality.  This leaves the future as the final destination. Should we continue on the path that has been firmly established by religiosity and rationality? Not unless we want the same results we have been getting from past actions. As Albert Einstein once said, "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them" (Einstein, n.d.).

Our global state of affairs, with problems ranging from environmental pollution to economic recession requires new insights, not just solutions. Visioning futurists know this. They step outside of the artificial boundaries created by religion and science to create a better future.  Where “Science asks what is it?  Futures asks what should it be” (Lum, 2002, p. 475)? Their approach also goes far beyond what many think of as the futurists’ domains of economics and business. Unlike business futurists that focus on interpreting existing trends and how best to react to them (Polkinghorne, p.425) visioning futurists focus on envisioning and creating a holistic future.

So what our future looks like depends on the faith we have to envision it.

The faith of religiosity can’t do it, neither can the faith of scientific rationality.

As a visioning futurist, I invite you to join me in envisioning a new definition of faith. One that restores its creative power:

Faith is the catalyst for dynamic creative energy. Faith feeds mental constructions of images of the future with such charismatic focus as to make what is envisioned a manifest reality.

Will you have faith?                                            

References

Einstein, A. (n.d.). A new type section. Retrieved from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

Faith. In dictionaryreference.com. Retrieved from  http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/faith

Holy Bible. (2011). New International Version. Retrieved from http://www.biblegateway.com

Lennox, J. (2010).  Darwinism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/darwinism

Lewis, C. (1898-1963). Surprised by Joy.: Blackstone Audio.  Ashland, OR.

Lum, R. (2002). When in Doubt, Vision your Way Out. Futures.34( 5), 471-477.

Polkinghorne, J. (2007). Quantum physics and theology : An unexpected kinship. Yale University Press. New Haven, CT.  (129).

Symbolic Interactionism Theory. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://hhd.csun.edu/hillwilliams/Symbolic%20Interactionism%20Lecture.htm

Wainwright, J. (1984) Wilfred Cantweel Smith on Faith and Belief.  Religious Studies, 20 (3), 353-366.

Zimmerman, I. , Redker, C. , & Gibson, B. (2011). The Role of Faith in Intuition, Need for Cognition and Method of Attitude Formation in Implicit–Explicit Brand Attitude Relationship Strength. Consumer Psychology, 21(3), 290-301.