Faith and Facts

Faith and Facts

by Peter Shikli
2 January 2009

Faith, hope, and charity. The three characteristics of a good life, at least according to the nuns who taught me as a kid. Charity made sense even back then. Who could argue with helping the downtrodden, especially if we grew up to become one? Hope seemed like the poor cousin of faith. If one had faith, one could hope for what faith would bring.

A lot depended on faith, and I saw it as little more than self-serving marketing on the part of the church. If they could convince me to have faith, I would be buying what they were selling. Going to UCLA, I was expected to root for the Bruins. Going to a religious school, I was surrounded by pictures and statues of Jesus and his saints, and I was expected to root for them. Faith was assumed more than explained, and religion was more about traditions and its details -- and admonitions of living righteously, whether we had faith or not.

The problem was that faith was defined somewhat narrowly as faith in Jesus and his friends, none of whom I had ever met. During the formation of a young man, a crisis of spirituality is common and I questioned that religious faith and discarded it. I decided I was a reasonable creature and would strive to believe only what I could see or at least what science can show is real. I threw religion in the bucket with the tooth fairy.

To fill the void, I plunged into business and science, the practical world of solid possessions and measurable achievements. Only now do I see how much business and science are faith-based pursuits.

A businesswoman who opens a restaurant is filled with little more than faith. Faith in her ability to cook. Faith in the location to attract customers. Faith in her cash flow to extend into profitability. Faith in her determination and hard work. Faith in her triumph over the cruel statistics about restaurant survival. The solid facts of pots and pans and tax forms are the details that do not determine the outcome.

When Einstein dedicated himself to years of non-stop work to develop his famous theory of relativity, nothing could have driven him but faith. What is a theory but a statement of faith? In his day, few facts were more rock-solid, more scientifically accepted, more logical than that the passing of time is the same for everyone. To believe his outrageous theory based on some scribblings that could not be proved at the time, and then to dedicate over a decade of his life to this belief, this is no different from the saints dedicating their lives to their faith in Jesus.

Years later, when the eclipse of the sun in 1919 proved his theory, Einstein was already pursuing the unification theory, an expansion of his faith that was to consume the rest of his days. When Niels Bohr challenged Einstein with quantum mechanics, Einstein felt it was at best a modification of his theory applied to the tiny world of atoms. He had built a world around his faith that was unshakable.

Curiously, it is the advance of science that has shown how the world is based on fewer facts and more faith. We characterize science as unmasking faith and separating the results into either proven facts or mistaken faith. Progress is defined as yielding more facts and less of the faith they replace.

Its track record, at least regarding the big questions, is the opposite. Scientific fact less than a thousand years ago proved that we were at the center of the world, documenting in great factual detail how the sun went around us. But when Newton and Galileo dispelled that, they did not replace it with another fact about what was at the center of the world. They left that to the scientists who are still arguing theories about the origin of the Big Bang, with the main consensus that it occurred before time and place could be defined. How can anyone then tell us where the center of the world is except through faith?

There was no more solid scientific fact in antiquity than that we are creatures of flesh and blood standing on this Earth. Now we learn that we are actually a cloud of atoms. With more scientific progress, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that we can know less about these things individually than scientists ever realized. Now we have quantum mechanics showing that we are actually stopping to exist and then reappearing many times each second.

When Darwin dispelled the scientific fact that God made us as freaks of nature, we became instead part of a grand plan that formed all creatures. Darwin didn't answer the question about the existence of God. He just made God more wondrous and powerful than a trickster who breaks his own rules.

As scientists answer questions about who we are with more facts, the questions do not disappear. They expand and the opportunities for faith-based answers multiply. Consider the comparatively recent birth of science fiction. It exists because science has progressed to dispelling so many facts and has opened the door to so much more imagination. And what is faith but imagination that takes root?

In my life, I was fortunate to pursue business interests that were faith driven. It started in a belief in the companies I worked for, their products and the people I worked with. Inspirational posters in the hallways and motivational meetings were designed to compel the faith I already had. There were Monday mornings I couldn't wait to get to work, driven by some epiphany over the weekend that no fact could oppose -- not our competitors, not a lack of resources, not logical arguments, not even my boss. Like a babbling mystic, I crusaded my cause sometimes based on little more than the depth of my belief.

After I started my own company, it became a string of faith-based runs at every great idea that came across my desk. If I had a defect, it was too much faith. Without realizing it, the faith I had discarded in my early days as having no relevance to me turned out to be about all there was to me. My wife wanted to pull me down from the clouds on numerous occasions, to stop pursuing dreams and visions, to be better rooted in the solid facts of checkbook balances and the reality of daily life.

"Be honest in your estimate of yourself, measuring your value by the faith God has given you." -- Romans 12:3

Our capacity for faith is to be valued, not just our faith in God. To achieve that great faith, we must first grow our faith in all we do, much as we practice to excel in sports. Similarly, we must practice seeing what is around us before we can see God.

But she toughed it through the roller coaster rides of my faith-based adventures, driven more by love than faith. Perhaps she found something uplifting about the antics of a faith-based person. We had the occasional triumph of a vision proven to have been defined correctly, but more often, the world didn't cooperate. Oddly, I was not troubled by the failure of my faith. I hardly noticed, as perhaps I should have. I would be too busy, infected by the joyous birth of my next article of faith, my next business adventure.

More likely, my wife probably understood all along that this wasn't about faith in my business ideas any more than it was about faith in Jesus. It was a non-stop, unreasonable faith in myself. In spite of all the things about me that needed repair, she didn't want to fix that. Perhaps she tolerated it because it was contagious enough that she gained more faith in herself. More likely, it was that love thing.

If only the nuns had told me the wider meaning of faith, that it is the fabric of so many people we admire. It is their set of beliefs that drives them rather than their critical thinking and logical conclusions. If only the nuns had pointed out how much we already believe. "Does your mom love you?" they could have asked. No matter how many demonstrations of love we could cite, the answer does not boil down to facts but rather, "I deeply believe so."

Perhaps we were too young to understand that for faith to mean anything to us, it must eventually lead to faith in ourselves. Faith in our potential to succeed, faith that we are to do great things, faith that we will be loved, faith that we are basically good, faith that we are wondrous creatures on a mission.

Curiously, we have defined God in all the world's religions as the entity at the apex of all those characteristics. How could we have faith in so many godlike qualities in ourselves without him being part of us? God thus becomes an extension of ourselves, or in the less egotistical view, we are extensions of God.

Christians can manifest this spiritual faith in ourselves as faith in Jesus, others in Buddha or Allah. Atheists and agnostics can believe in the innate goodness of humanity on some path to try to discover our true meaning. If we have no such faith, what can possibly get us out of bed in the morning. The facts are not that many, and dwindling less important as we grow wiser.

More ramblings like this: www.shikli.com/blog

Peter Shikli is CEO of Bizware Online Applications. You can view his bio and contact him at pshikli@bizware.com.