The need for faith

I've given two questions to be pondered upon, and now i'll give the solution. Practically, there's no way we can't be sure that we have interpreted something correctly. Human beings are evolving. Our understanding is improving. We are undergoing a process of gaining more knowledge, getting wiser as time passes by. Hence, if this is so, how can we be so sure that we have done something that's correct? One might say that we can ask others for giving their opinions that act as indications. Well..even Newton's mistake by considering time and space as absolute values are unnoticable by experts on that time. How can we be so sure about anything then? A principle in philosophy says that something that is undergoing a process can't be made absolute. To put it simple, this means that so long as we are evolving human beings, we can't obtain that truth! We can't derive it in a systematic, scientific, and fundamentalistic way since we can't answer arguments that peeks into the future! A dead end? Nope.. this introduces to us the necessity of faith. We must have faith! We can't remain skeptic all the time. Truth is too strong for skepticism. And it was said that the peak of skepticism is agnosticism, meaning, it will come to a conclusion that we can't really conclude upon anything.

So what is this 'faith' all about? I would like to emphasize that faith is not an 'escape route' since we don't have any choice or scientific explanation. Wanna proof? Actually I have proven this point above. But just to make it clearer, think of it this way : we often see in science that assumptions comes first, and explanations comes later. The quantization in physics, for example, was never meant to be intended to be serious at first! But it was later found out that if we adopt this as true, then we are able to explain many things! In quantum mechanics, we have postulates! And we simply have to devour that and then only we can start to see things in the later stage, building on that postulates. Indeed, faith is like an assumption, so to speak. And finally, a true faith should provide us with a coherent worldview, and provide us with a profound understanding consistent with the observable reality. Faith gives understanding.

One thing to be noted is that, faith, although like an assumption, is not really an assumption. Well, you might actually start out to take it as an assumption, but this never works! Very often people wouldn't take it as a serious assumption, e.g. assuming that a particular religion is true, and start worshipping their Gods as they took upon that assumption, and wait for the results or any worldview changes. So i'm saying that faith is not really like an assumption. And, if Christianity was right, which is my stand (I am sure it is right), God works that faiths in our hearts. And this would be my explanation on why faith is not an assumption. This argument is too anthropocentric, and assuming that we are indeed the measure of all things, and nothing external can affect us.

Assesing the 'truth'

I assumed that you already have the mindset that there is indeed one and absolute truth. If not, you can refer back to my previous post.

Now, we agreed that amongst all the religions, there is indeed one that is true. The question is, how do we find out?

Firstly, before we argue upon anything, we should filter out possible 'distortions' amongst the religion itself. What I mean is, there are many misguided teachings within religions itself! So we need to understand that before we could perform any investigations upon those religions, we must obtain the 'pure forms' of each religion to be weighted. And the way we obtain the authentic form is of course, by going back to its scripture, the source of the religion itself. By this, we need to assess all possible implications if the doctrine taught by every religion in its scripture is to be taken as 'true'. But there is a very crucial point here. We may claim that we have read the scripture of a particular religion and we've found that it's totally absurd. First, we need to question, are we interpreting the verses correctly? This, I suggest, we need to find an expert. We must not learn things about religion B from anyone that's from religion A, etc. So we need to find a 'reliable source' to explain us about a particular religion and we must make sure that the person is really faithful to the scripture of his religion, and not distorted in his views.

Next thing, one instrument that can help us investigating the true religion is, of course, by examining the claims of the religion (providing it is understood correctly). This would help filter out 'nonsensical' religions which goes completely beyond common sense. Imagine a particular religion saying that the earth was triangular (well, a bit exaggerated). This would be completely out of sense and proven wrong! But here's the idea. In scriptures, we might find claims about facts. If those facts are wrong, then we can filter out those religions to be, well, a high chance that they are false! This does not go the other way round. It may happen that many claims about facts found in a particular scripture is true, but this would not automatically announce that religion as the 'truth'! The steep is slippery here. One might instantly denounce the religion as false if they found something false about the claim of facts (assuming they interpret the verse correctly), but we can't say that the religion is true the facts in its scriptures are correct!

So much I can say about helping us search for the truth. If you notice, this is a very tough job to do. How do we even know that we are interpreting correctly of one's scripture? And how can we be sure about the facts we know are really established facts?... This is what i would discuss in the next post.