Reflections on Faith (Certainty Series Part 2)

December 2024-January 2025 Fundraiser

I like to imagine that people like you, who know about our work, will separately and together send us $12,000 in bits and pieces during the next seven weeks. We enjoy the fact that there are more than 1500 of you, so it might actually happen!

So far we’ve received $417.08 from 9 people. We’d really like more, BUT we only want you to send your tax-deductible donation if doing so will be as wonderful for you as if you were four years old feeding some riverside ducks (which happens all the time here in Oregon). That would make it doubly delightful!

So, thanks for listening – and blessings on your support of Life in all the ways you do – and on the Journey we’re all on together!

Coheartedly,
Tom

(For more on what we at CII do, see the intro to my last post.)

Dear friends,

If you’re looking for certainty, this post may not help. However, it may be interesting to notice how you feel as you read it.

Faith helps us make it through life when we are uncertain about what’s happening or how to think about it or act on it. Fortunately, faith is only one way to face uncertainty. Radical acceptance and non-attachment – like what we find in Buddhism and the Serenity Prayer – can serve that purpose, too. Another approach is to engage in the dance between clarity and inquiry in the face of Mystery with a spirit of adventure.

In this same category of “guidance in the face of uncertainty” we also find “oracular” media like Tarot, I Ching and astrology, all of which can be approached as providing “answers to believe in” or (as I prefer) as “archetypal symbols to evoke insights that might be useful or instructive”. Regardless of how we engage with them, we actually need to believe in their usefulness in order for them to work well for us. It’s almost like the placebo effect or the “self-fulfilling prophesy” effect – both of which can generate significant outcomes, albeit seldom with the predictability of good scientific testing (although so much of our lives is not actually subject to scientific testing!!).

Faith can come from something you read or heard from a trusted source (such as an elder, research project, political commentator, or The Bible) … or from your own experience in everyday living … or from a natural or drug-assisted epiphany experience. In any case, you sense that the perspective or guidance you get has the ring of truth to it, that it is something you can depend on.

Yet, from a co-intelligence perspective, it is important to be aware that the certainty associated with faith is an emotion, a FEELING of confidence in something, and that that feeling may or may not accord with what most people consider really real. And yet (#2) the confidence felt in faith IS a form of clarity, of clear orientation and guidance about how to think, feel and behave, something we trust, whether or not other people trust it.

And yet (#3), again from a co-intelligence perspective, that confidence is ideally something for us to be humble about, recognizing that other people’s experience, traditions, cultures, and cognitive habits and capacities lead them to have different fundamental orientations comparable to ours. Being humble – and even curious – can help us generate positive relationships with such people who are different from us AND can give us the flexibility we need to contribute to efforts to develop shared understandings and actions with them, for our shared benefit.

One of the most fascinating phenomenon that dances in the relationship between faith and evidence is that a belief can seem to have no basis in experimental or experiential evidence AND YET (#4) the people who hold such a belief – almost no matter how ridiculous it may look to others – seem to generate greater success and benefits for themselves and those around them. The belief, itself, seems to have power – a phenomenon used in many versions of “manifestation” (aka, “calling forth what you want”, which shares some common ground with the placebo effect and self-fulfilling prophecies).

FAITH CAN BE TRICKY

Cate Montana says she is totally certain that “I can trust life to deliver what’s perfect for me and my healthy growth and evolution. It may not be what I think I want. But it’s always what I need.”

I can see how that assumption WOULD always lean towards her growth and evolution. However, when she adds, “And this holds true for everyone”, I think she steps onto a slippery slope. For example, I had a housemate once who used a similar logic to deflect his housemates’ challenges to his abusive behaviors because “they’re responsible for their own condition and can learn from their upset”. In other words, other people being upset with him had nothing to do with him, and he refused to consider changing his behaviors. That attitude resulted in everyone in the house wanting him to leave!

There’s a sense in which faith and evidence-based approaches constitute polarities in the tradition of the Taoist yin-yang symbol. Our faith and evidence dance together in our sensing of what’s true … AND our faith is rooted in certain forms of evidence (e.g., our experience or the wisdom of our sources) … AND even scientific evidence is rooted in certain forms of faith (e.g., assumptions about the nature of reality and about our knowledge of it, and even about the relative ethics and rigor of some scientific research).

Personally, I have faith in the Dance of Inquiry and Clarity and in the metabolism dynamics of the living earth (as atoms flow through all living things doing different jobs in different places and moving on…). Others have faith in the Bible or the Koran, or in scientific research, or in their own direct experience. All these can be critiqued in various ways by the others. But tolerance among diverse faiths is vital for any society and especially for a wise democracy (see the Sacredness pattern in the Wise Democracy Pattern Language). AND we risk disaster if we ignore the implicit warning in Philip K Dick’s observation that “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” So we need to be able to apply our diverse beliefs to the shared work of understanding complex reality well enough to take appropriate action together in our responses.

When faith is shared, it gives us a sense of belonging and – depending on how broad our sharing is – some shared social capital to invest in generating shared positive outcomes. How positive those outcomes will be, however, depends on the breadth of benefits we generate by what we believe. Do our beliefs generate benefits for all Life? Are our problem-solving capacities (our intelligence) guided by the wisdom of deep insight and broad caring? If our intelligence – no matter how bright – is narrow in its goals and understandings (often made worse by arrogance), the outcomes will be narrow and shallow, even to the point of toxicity for all involved, especially over the long term, as we see in our currently growing global predicament.

By their fruits shall we know both them and the quality of their faiths.

THE ROOTS OF FAITH

My dictionary’s first definition of “faith” is “complete trust or confidence in someone or something”. It also says the word “faith” comes from the Latin word fides, which means “to trust”. (Words like fidelity, confident, and confide share that same Latin root.) Going deeper into the roots, all those words come from the Indo-European root bheidh- which also means “to trust”.

So where does the word “trust” come from? Trust derives from the Indo-European root dreu- meaning “to be firm, solid, or steadfast”. I love that words like “truth” and “tree” come from that same root. A tree, like truth, is something we can trust; something we believe has real and lasting dependability.

So it seems like we use the word “faith” – along with all these related words – to talk about things we can really depend on. And that leads me to think that faith is both essential and inevitable. We depend on many things as we go through life, and WHATEVER we depend on is something we have faith in, often to the extent we just assume it.

When I lean on a wall, I have faith that it won’t collapse. When I buy food in a grocery store, I (usually) have faith it won’t poison me. But I notice the word “faith” carries a positive connotation: For example, I don’t say “When I let go of a brick, I have FAITH that it will fall”. That would sound silly. Words like trust, expect, and assume seem more appropriate in that case. They are more neutral and matter-of-fact.

So the word “faith” tends to be more associated with outcomes, dynamics or people we consider “good”. Thus its association with the goodness dimensions of religion. A person who has faith in God wouldn’t say they have faith in the Devil. They may say they “don’t believe in” Karma, but they “have faith” that if they’re good, they’ll go to Heaven.

MYSTERY

Speaking of religion, I wonder if one of the biggest roles of faith is to help us deal with Ultimate Mystery. After all, the totality of Unknownness is so vast that even just attempting to imagine it can quickly lead to overwhelm. But, even more worrisome, is that buried in all that vast Unknownness are surely things that could harm us.

So I’m thinking that we come to depend on such things as faith in God (even if He often “moves in strange ways”) or faith that “the universe is friendly” (despite the fact that bad things frequently happen). I wonder how often we “have faith” simply because we Just Don’t Know and/or are afraid (as in, “there are no atheists in foxholes”). In this sense, faith is an existential impulse, a semi-arbitrary reach for certainty and safety in the face of Ultimate Mystery. We maintain certain foundational beliefs in order to distance ourselves from the profound angst of existential nothingness and peril.

In this sense, I see faith as the elder cousin of assumption, which is the strategy of acting as if something profoundly complex or unknowable is actually quite simple and obvious – something that, if we believe it, allows us to live somewhat proper and successful lives. After all, we have to assume SOMETHING in order to function in the world at all.

Although both faith and assumptions can be considered types of belief, the word “belief”, by itself, has a certain fragility about it. A mere “belief” seems to lack sufficient certainty to provide any guarantees. It is generally considered more subject to doubt and change than faith or an assumption. Teasing out my sense of this nuance, I think about how

  • doubting one’s faith can lead to existential crisis.
  • doubting one’s assumptions can be disorienting and transform one’s perspectives in fundamental ways… whereas
  • doubting a belief is more likely to just generate some confusion, and maybe even lead to some interesting learning.

I realize that those are probably just my linguistic connotations. For most people, I suspect, all these doubt dynamics could actually apply to any belief, faith or assumption. Practices like Byron Katie’s The Work and Bohm Dialogue – as well as many forms of therapy – help people question and/or explore the nature and truth of their beliefs and assumptions so they don’t get stuck in ways that create problems for them in their lives.

ASSUMPTIONS AND FIELDS OF FAITH

Another way to think of all this is that faith hardens into certainty when it becomes an assumption. An assumption is a verity that is so obvious to me that it is beyond question and/or so transparent that I see right through it, unaware that it is even there shaping how I see, think, feel and respond. Luckily, I can learn more about what assumptions are keeping my understanding narrow and small, un-nuanced and static. But that requires me to step into that potentially risky and endless journey of inquiry through a landscape of evolving clarities and questions.

(At a deep level, I view that internal cognitive “landscape of evolving clarities” as just one more facet of the total landscapes of evolving realities we call “real life”. I see it as one dimension of the shared co-evolving relationships, metabolisms, and co-responsive, co-intelligent, wise and co-regenerative fields that ARE the Community of Life. [If that seems too big an abstraction to bite off right now, please accept my apologies. Or perhaps reflect on it with a bit of careful attention soon, until you can sense what it refers to.])

Each of us is actually embedded in a psychosocial field containing thousands of largely unconscious assumptions about ourselves, our stories, and our society’s institutions, including all the social, economic, political, governmental, educational and other social dynamics that most of us simply ASSUME is just the way things are. It can be radical or liberating to question them.

Here are a few examples of assumptions that we could question en route to more nuanced understandings:

  1. People are basically good … or evil … or stupid … or rational or … (or potentially all of these, depending on their context).
  2. It is impossible to do things that are purely good or harmful (or to know for certain that a particular action is absolutely better than other possible actions).
  3. It is possible to help complex living systems like communities evolve into wiser agency as part of the larger intelligent life of the world.
  4. Every approach and action involves trade-offs.
  5. Getting rid of the bad guys would – or wouldn’t – solve all our problems.

To the extent our faith in any of these is open to doubt and exploration – such that our thinking can evolve, grow and transform – our belief in them can be a contribution to the world at large rather than the problem we become when we and our beliefs are locked down in certainty. If a belief is free to evolve, it becomes part of the clarity-inquiry cycle and a wise form of the fractal dynamic of mutual learning-in-context (aka symmathesy) that IS the Life of the World.

Finally, we should remain mindful that both flexible faith and solidified faith can be manipulated for narrow purposes by those with narrow perspectives and interests, often without the faithful even realizing it… AND we might also remember, in response to that, that choice-creating processes like Dynamic Facilitation can provide contexts that optimize collective learning and thus support evolving wisdom which, in turn, helps people avoid the toxic manipulation of their diverse faiths so they can co-create wiser outcomes together. We certainly need these contexts and capacities in these choice-constraining times.

CONCLUSION

All that was quite an adventure for me to realize and write, over many days, often in the wee hours. I apologize for its meandering length and I hope you find it useful and at least a bit interesting and enlightening.

Blessings on the Immense Journey we’re all on together! May we all have faith in the larger Wisdom of Life, itself, in all the ways we variously imagine that to be.

Coheartedly

Tom

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Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440
“Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole”

Wise Democracy Pattern Language Project
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  1. Intrinsic Participation and the Great Co-Creative Dance
  2. Can problem-solving itself be problematic? (Sense-making, Part 6)
  3. Offerings for a New Paradigm Politics

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