Program 148 What is faith?

by Ernest O'Neill

What is faith? That's what we're discussing on this station each morning. What is faith? Many of us think, of course, that faith is something that is purely religious or superstitious or rather an emotional train of ideas that somebody has in their head, or what people live off that have no reason or intellect to use. What we've been sharing this past week is, of course that that's foolishness. In fact, everyday life is filled with faith. We all put faith in all the things that we use during the day. We put faith in them.

Many of them show that there is no absolute certainty of knowledge in regard to so many of the things that we use in connection with our transportation or our finances or in connection with our communications. We cannot be absolutely certain in the sense of mathematical knowledge that the things will operate, but we do lift the phone and put our faith in the fast that we'll be able to get through to the person in the other office and be able to discuss the business problem with them. We do put our faith in the fast that the automobile is going to work and is going to start and is going to take us to work.

So, in a hundred ways during the day we put our faith in things, in people, in circumstances. Far from faith being something unusual for all of us, all of us use faith whether we're fantasy people or not. We all put our faith in certain things. Or, think of the way you learned to swim; think of how your father or your swimming coach told you to put yourself in a certain posture or a certain altitude in the water and to kick your legs in a certain way and move your arms in a certain way. Even though you could see no real reason why that would keep you up or keep you from sinking or move you through the water, yet you had seen other people do it, and you observed that it kept them up, and so you did it, often mechanically at the beginning, if you remember, with very little feel of the water at all. Yet you moved your arms and your legs in a certain way and you launched yourself off your feet, off the bottom of the pool or off the bed of the lake and you launched yourself into the water and lo and behold, you found that you stayed up.

So, faith is action based on evidence that you have observed with your senses or that you have analyzed with your mind. Faith is action based on belief that is founded on reasonable evidence. And so, it is with sky divers. They, of all people, show immense faith and often, as we see by tragic accidents, it is ill-founded faith. And yet, how many of them continue to launch themselves out of planes thousands of feet in the air and they put absolute faith in the parachute's ability to open at the right height. Some of them even put their faith in the timing mechanism that will pull the rip cord and release the parachute itself; and so they put their life in the hands of a mechanical devise that actually on occasion in the past has failed.

So it is with all of us that have learned to play tennis or learned to play hockey or learned to play football. The coach tells us we do a certain thing, the ball will go in a certain direction and certain results will follow. And we put our faith in his advice. We put our faith in our own observations of other people in spite of the fact that often these things do not turn out as we thought they would. Yet we put our faith in them.

So, faith is something that we exercise daily in our ordinary everyday life. And that's why when we come to this question, What is faith?", we need to see that it's not a problem to define faith. It's not a problem to exercise faith. We often exercise faith ourselves. But the issue is what you put your faith in and why you put your faith in that. And that's the kind of thing that we would like to discuss now.

That car that you're driving. I'm going to ask you to put your faith in certain things that I'm going to tell you about that car. Do you know, for instance, that that car of yours was manufactured in a very strange way? Do you know that the manufacturers got all the parts together from all the suppliers and then he put them all in what was really a very large washing machine, that is, a huge cylinder in his factory that turns at about 3000 revolutions per hour? He put all those parts in, the gear lever, the steering wheel, the spark plugs and the electronic ignition He put the carburetor in, and then he put the floor equipment and the carpets and the seats in and the windshield and the windshield wipers. Then he switched this machine on, spun it round at 3000 revolutions every hour. He did that for about 25 hours and then he stopped it. And lo and behold, there was your car ... all constructed perfectly just as you're driving it al this moment. And so, he used a huge crane to lift it out of that huge washing machine and to put it on the ground. Then it was eventually delivered to the dealer that you bought it from. Now, would you put your faith in that? Would you believe that that's in fact the way your car was manufactured?

You know of course. "No, oh, not at all, not for a moment do I believe that the car was manufactured that way. I believe that it's impossible to manufacture this complex piece of machinery in that purely arbitrary fashion. When I consider the effort that I have had to exercise simply to get a screw that has come loose in the dashboard, back in again, I realize that there must have been many people involved in manufacturing this car, with much more care than I have exercised myself in replacing just one screw. I realize how much concentration it requires on my part to simply replace one small part in this mechanism. So, I know from my own experience that it must have taken many men a great deal of time and a great deal of care to produce this automobile."

So it's reasonable to reject the idea that car that you're driving was created by chance or just by the passage of time plus the jumbling together of many atoms. And when you look at the world around you and you see how complex it is, you realize what perfect timing is involved making sure this planet of ours orbits around the sun in such a way that it doesn't collide with the other planets or the other stars in the solar system. When you see the way the am rises at the same time every year, on the same day, and sets in such a way that we can run even our precise atomic clocks by the rising and setting of the sun, you see that there is great precision in our world and that it is madness that it has come about by simply time plus chance. it's reasonable to put faith in the idea that it was created with at least as much care as the manufacturer used in making the automobile that you're sitting in at this moment.