I published the original version of this on Quora, where I used to write in my senior year of high school, in response to the question, “What is the saddest truth of religion?“.
The fact that organized religion (as an independent truth, or answer to questions of purpose and meaning) doesn’t allow for questioning, and the consequence that most religious people use this fact to reaffirm their beliefs.
Faith, by definition, is bridging the evidence gap to believe in something.
The distance of this gap can matter in a lot of things. Outside of some mathematical realities, for example, you can argue that most of how the world works is because we have varying amounts of faith in its systems.
- The global economic system has faith in the United States government, with the gap to bridge there being the belief that a country can continue to function and fund its growing self on declining tax revenue and foreign loans while being in debt.
Without understanding of the historical power and presence of the US, this seems like a stupid belief. Even with this context to some, the debt and accountability is dubious at best. That’s why the global system is characteristic of faith at its core – if not in just the dollar, than in the notion that the military and populace will defend the dollar if the time comes. Or, that in the situation where a dollar was no longer trustable or transactable, there would be a lot more to worry about. - Scientists regularly (on a human timeframe) discover situations and identify materials, organisms, and environments that defy previously held “laws” or “rules” about life and the natural world. So, these rules are held in tentative faith – because they are subject to change and cannot be proved fully until we can claim full knowledge of all there was is and will be. (Never)
These individual acts of faith, however, have different breadths of gaps that are being bridged.
- Scientific study of organisms from millions of years provide enough evidence of theories like evolution to make the reliance on faith minimal. New advances in evolutionary research change the proposed model all the time, creating over time a theory supported by thousands of distinct biological ancestries.
- If anything, scientists themselves are very clear about changing their beliefs immediately with the presence of new evidence (a recent example being the confirmed existence of the Higgs boson particle and the related full acceptance of the associated Higgs field).
The idea here is that even in our use of faith in approaching worldly situations, our related conclusions and ideas are never set in stone. Faith bridges the gap before more evidence and more time makes that gap smaller and our faith is readjusted for new parameters. In this case, faith is a practical tool that enables us to operate and continue when things aren’t fully clear.
The sad truth about organized religion is that it uses faith as both an initial acceptance point and a barrier from questioning.
Unlike faith used scientifically, religion, most dominantly in its organized/Abrahamic forms, uses faith to prevent a change in opinion regardless of the presence of new, or contradictory evidence. In fact, by the very nature of accepting such a religion, one denounces the idea that such evidence might ever exist or is available for discovery – by definition of having the word of an all-powerful God’s religion, that word, and associated religion, is supposedly immune from change.
If the true God is only one messenger, and that messenger says there is or will be no other God, then everything is already final. Even if tomorrow, man started doing miracles only attributable to the divine, the godly would claim it was an illusion, or the devil, or something unrelated to God. By self-containing godliness, anything new is always out of the realm of possibility.
Text-wise, religions like Christianity and Islam begin and self-contain all their claims with this finality. According to their core messages (across most interpretations), God is a defined entity that has itself communicated — unquestionably — with humanity in order to give a varying amount of laws/guidelines/advice on how to live and what to believe. Everything in this process is unquestionable – the vehicle God uses to communicate, the messages communicated, and the impossibility of any future, contradictory communication or evidence. Similarly, the failure payoff is equally terrifying, as any concept of hell or eternal punishment is also the unquestionable alternative.
I have yet to find explanations for the following questions:
“Why, after over 100,000 years of homo sapiens (human life) as a species, and 15,000 years of civilization, did God finally choose a specific region of Earth that was disconnected from entire continents, only 2,000–1,400 years ago, to send his message through a poor carpenter in a land of poverty or a prominent businessman with a large extended family?”
A lifelong companion in a pet is doomed by God to cease existence permanently at the moment of death – because Heaven and any afterlife is only for humans, regardless of the emotional intelligence, bonding, or any other connection to humanity in life. Why?
Regardless of the pain or joy, duty or debauchery, you cause in this life, a simple recognition of our proposed entity can ensure you’ll be fine for the next one, or the afterlife. There is no supposed sin, no matter how vile, that can’t be surpassed by a simple belief in God. Why?
Religious faith can’t answer these questions, because everything is circular. There is no why because you cannot question the will and way of God at best. At worst, no explanation makes sense because actually, “this is not for us humans to understand” and that’s why your faith must be stronger than ever because look how above us God really is.
For the religious, it seems that faith is supposed to get stronger by the more seemingly irrational and self-defined an explanation is – if the gap gets larger between explanation and evidence, it is more necessary to bridge it on the basis of faith.
When inspired by faith in the divine, the judgement of a heroic ruler, the logic of a governmental system, the value of a certain mineral, or even in one’s own self-determination, humanity has been able to achieve quantitatively and qualitatively tremendous things. But if the 8th wonder of the world is truly compounding, then nothing beats the compounding of bridging the gap of belief with faith.
Religious faith in particular, because of its proposed solution to the question of existence beyond death, has created perennial monuments and powered entire civilizations. A sad truth is it as also powered atrocities unparalleled by any other relative ideology. At their core, the most common religions create the settings for these actions with their finality – what is supremely guaranteed to be true must be followed supremely, with any less being direct disobedience of the divine.
Why isn’t this finality questioned more?