Musings on Faith

Bishop Sally posted in her blog this week about the faith of Mother Teresa and how it was not this absolute thing but something that was at times filled with doubt. Her posting also caused me to look up Christopher Hitchens and read some of his thoughts around the psychological need for faith in God, something I believe he hopes can be overcome at some level. All of this has caused me to reflect on faith. I find the fact that Mother Teresa did not have a perfect unwavering faith to be a comforting one. I hold strongly to the idea that faith is meant to be questioned, tested and challenged as a way of affirming it. It would be foolish to think we get our faith right the first time we believe, it needs to be open to change. Descartes suggested the idea of questioning one's reality and deconstructing it, I believe he suggested once a year, but not more. The idea is to examine once again what it is we believe and to reaffirm it, or change it. Certainly our doubts around faith can happen more regularly and not as deliberately, but I think it all points to a need to reflect on what we hold to be true.
Since the start of the "modern" thinking, so again basically Descartes and on, there has been a desire to understand faith and a tendancy by some some to look for rational explanations for it. Philosophers and psychologists have offered theories about how faith is part of the brain's need to make sense of the world. Some people would offer this as further proof that God is simply a creation of our intellect, one more way we attempt to make sense of that which we cannot yet understand. I prefer to think of it in a different way, one that is influenced by the fact that I believe that God is the one in control and not us. The same information could be used to say that we are wired, created, shaped, with an affinity towards belief and faith. That seems much more powerful for me.
The power of faith to me is that it works not on concrete things that we prove but instead is an expression of our understanding and beliefs around things we cannot prove. I may be wrong, faith may all be part of my desire to cope, but my experiences tell me otherwise. We can try and rationally destroy faith, but I think in the end we are forced to replace it with something else, because it is a part of who we are. Scientists place a great deal of faith in data, that their perceptions of the world are in fact accurate. Hume and Descartes both observed that such perceptions are in fact quite fallible. Faith is not meant as the perfect answer, it is the imperfect answer which grows and expands with us, and when the time comes, the imperfect will pass away, as Paul says, and then just the perfect will remain, a real knowledge and a love of God.