Faith and Works

Preface (Because This Is A Long Post)
As a disclaimer I would like to warn you that this is fairly hardcore philosophy. It took about 3 hours to write and I have not revised or proofread it as of this posting. This is academia level work on my part. Please do not reply based on a single sentence you understand. It is meant to be understood paragraph by paragraph.

I don't want religion to become a major component of this blog. It is dependent on phenomenological, metaphysical evidence, which in itself is logical to the individual but is difficult to relay to others in any convincing or meaningful way. In this post I will discuss how faith and works intertwine, why I see works as a by-product of faith, and why faith itself is a work that is substantiated by other works.

I do not discount any holy book as being fallacious, but for the sake of avoiding unnecessary arguments I will not refer to any holy book. This is purely an essay about the relationship between faith and works, not about what a specific passage says or how it should be interpreted.

This is one of the few very serious posts you will find in this blog, so there will be no mention of my ex-girlfriend, her douchebag boyfriend, meth, or anything related to hot dogs.



If you want a general idea of this essay, or just happen to be as lazy as I usually am, I have provided a concluding paragraph that outlines the entire essay. It is the very last section.



------------------------------------------

Inductive Faith
The first question you may be asking is why I am debating faith against works as opposed to faith against reason. Name one unreasonable thing you have ever done. Perhaps things seem unreasonable to you now, but at any given time you can only do things that you find reasonable. Even if you're reasons for doing or believing something are not the most well-founded, you will always have your reasons. Faith itself is reasonable, and reason requires a certain degree of faith. It is not one over the other but a combination of the two.

Reason in reality is not like reason in an ideal situation, such as we tend to work it out in the mind. In the philosophy of time there is something known as the closure principle. It states that we cannot know the outcome of any action because there is no such thing as a deductive act. There are always events, objects, etc. that are out of our control. Even running the same test with the same instruments can lead to different results, the million-in-one chance. Kierkegaard plays on this in his dialogue wherein a man invites his friend to a party, his friend accepts the invitation and intends to go, and is immediately hit by a broken roofing tile, killing him. The man laughs at it, stating that his friend should have said he would be at the party assuming he does not get hit in the head by a falling roofing tile. As dark as Kierkegaard was, he did understand the problems with our idea of "common sense".

I do not believe anymore detail is necessary about the problem of induction, so we may now continue to our real conversation. The type of faith I have talked about thus far is simply assuming induction is a reliable source of information for later decisions. The faith of a religious person make a much greater claim. I am not here to claim truth or falsehoods in that faith, but to provide a working dialogue on how faith interacts with works. Lets begin.


The Importance of Experience
Works provide a person with experience. Experience piles up over time with more works, allowing a person to predict states of affairs. As any decent detective can tell you, though, that experience exists purely in your mind. There is no way to rewind time and experience something in the exact same way again. Not even video or photographic evidence is a viable alternative in this situation since they are not how you as a person experienced any event. It is that stockpile of experiences that directs you and prompts your future works to a degree. Yes, you could one day be faced with a new, unrelateable experience that forces you to act in an unpredictable fashion, but for the most part you will act in accordance with previous experiences.

With enough experience over time, you will base your works on predicted states of affairs. Just look at how people work the stock market every day. When you buy stock in a company you are saying, "I see this company growing in the future and will act as though that will happen." When someone agrees to marry another person, they are saying, "I see us as a family in the future and will act as though that will happen."The one thing Kierkegaard failed to realize in his example of the closure principle is that, even though the closure principle exists, for humans to act in such a way that sees nothing as predictable is nearly impossible. The friend said he would be at the party in spite of the fact that he could not control certain events. To plan, to think, to act in spite of the closure principle is the only option we as temporal beings have to act reasonably even though it is fundamentally unreasonable. For this reason alone there is a high degree of reason in predicting future events based on past events; not because it is logical but because any other option is considerably less so.


Acting on Faith
The woman who buys stock in a company is acting in accordance with her prior experiences. Whether it will be beneficial or damaging, she is basing her preset decisions on her experiences in the past and her predictions of the future. This is a smaller version of the faith a religious person possesses.

Faith itself is an action. No one is capable of creating a belief ex nihilo. Any belief is based on their experiences and they will relate any belief to be in accordance with those experiences. Unlike a physical causal relationship (i.e. electricity running through a wire, powering motor, which powers a car) the construction of beliefs is a phenomenological causal relationship. You are capable of thinking and relating things based on reason and experience. To form a belief that a certain stock will do well you must have justification for that belief and be sufficiently convinced that it either is or will be true. Having faith in something is not a quality you either possess or lack; it is a conscious decision based on experience.

(As a side note, this is why I despise debating with certain religious or anti-religious folk. God can exist or not exist, but the belief in either is based entirely on your experiences. It is fully possible to believe in God with no exposure to religious texts or organizations, just as it is entirely possible to not believe in God after being immersed in that religious culture. It is nearly impossible to give someone the same experiences as you. However, it is possible to explain to them why you believe what you believe and what your justification is for holding that view. Whether they agree with you or not is not up to you, it is up to them.)


Religious Faith
Once you have decided to genuinely believe something in this way your actions will reflect that belief. Take the Judeo-Christian concept of hell as retributive punishment. If you live a sinful life then you will spend eternity in hell. What a sin is exactly matters less than the fact that believing an all-powerful entity is watching you all the time will change your behaviors. Were a person holding these beliefs to acquire the Ring of Gyges they would not commit any action they consider sinful. Faith is an act by which all other acts must abide. This is not to say that beliefs cannot be changed, though. However, we shall assume for this essay that a person has unwavering faith in their position.

Unlike the woman putting her faith in a stock, a religious woman has faith in a certain metaphysical view. This view will direct all of her choices assuming she adheres to it strictly. All of our experiences in this world are temporal, temporary, time-based. Faith in inductive reasoning is time-based since it requires time to be a relevant belief. Faith in a God takes those temporal experiences, that temporary understanding and predictability of time-based events and derives a belief about the infinite. I am one of the belief that it is possible to experience things in this universe and logically derive, at the very least, fundamental necessities about things outside of this universe. One of my favorite metaphors is from "Imagining the Tenth Dimension." If we were to look at the entire universe and all of its possibilities as a whole, we could also understand the possibility of looking away from the universe. While we may never have experiential evidence of this event, it is still a reasonable metaphysical belief for some people.

Conclusion/ The Short Version
Every conscious action requires reasoning, justification. We constantly make decisions with a certain degree of faith that our past experiences and future predictions will be similar. This faith is in temporal things, whereas the faith of a religious person is placed in infinite things. This faith does not come about by itself but by a deep understanding of the temporal universe itself. This is an easily arguable statement but I see any genuine belief in God or any eternal object whatsoever as needing to be based on this type of reasoning. While faith is based on prior works, faith plays an overarching role in all future decisions a person makes.

Because of this, I see faith and works as equally important to each other. Works must come first for any person as faith is substantiated by experiences, but faith, in inductive reasoning, religion, or any other usage of the word, affects all works from the beginning. The way I see it is that faith guides works while works, specifically the experiences someone acquires from them, shape that faith.

Hot dogs.

Steve