Faith

Faith and the creative act are closely connected, though it is a link that is not much talked about these days. I suspect this is partly because the very idea of having faith – in anything – seems to have become a fool’s game. This is hardly surprising given that many of the things we used to have faith in have let us down so badly – politicians, bankers, the Church, to mention just a few. The scandals of recent years have left us jaded. However, the marginalizing of faith goes back further than these recent revelations. It has its roots in the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Ever since Darwin’s discoveries and his publication of On Origin of Species, and even though he wrote, “I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one”, ¹ religious faith in particular has come under continued attack by certain scientifically minded people; most prominently in recent years by academics Richard Dawkins and Anthony Grayling, author and neuroscientist Sam Harris, and social commentator Christopher Hitchens. While their arguments strike me as rather simplistic, often relying on literalistic interpretations of sacred texts, they may have succeeded in furthering a general decline in perceptions of faith. The result is that, in modern times, faith is probably one of our most misconstrued, misrepresented ideas. Commonly, it is linked to religion and dismissed as an irrational belief in scientifically unproven concepts – a kind of belief that is given credence only by the gullible. This understanding of faith is naive and, in my view, both a travesty and a tragedy.