Faith and Reason

"People believe what they want to believe," I said.
"Yes," Malcolm replied. "Reason follows faith."

I wasn't sure that was what I meant. But it stayed with me.

I recently saw these two headlines next to each other in the Washington Post's Acts of Faith email feed.

The second article talks about two different kinds of truth. One kind of truth is scientific facts, and the second is, well, faith of some sort. But I couldn't quite figure out, as author Anna Katharine Mansfield apparently has, how people can know "in their bones" as true what quite clearly isn't. 

People have always believed what they wanted to believe. We don't have to look at others to see this; if we are honest, we see it regularly in ourselves. But there is a difference between being influenced by our worldview and denying everything that contradicts it. Sometimes we need to adjust our view.

No single group of people has a lock on believing without evidence. There are climate-change deniers and anti-vaxers, and I doubt these two groups overlap much. Some people believe that the US popular vote in the 2016 election went to the same one who won the electoral college. Other people believe GMOs are bad for you. The evidence is missing in either case.

At some point someone realized that the media was biased. Responsible news sources do not disagree, which is why they employ principles and practices to guard against letting their bias determine what they say. Complete objectivity, like perfection, cannot be achieved, but responsible media strive for it.

Less responsible media outlets have said, "All media is biased. Therefore, we can be as biased as we want." Some media of this latter type have gained huge followings among people of faith.

The first article shown above is about non-religious people getting together for the same sort of fellowship enjoyed by church-goers. These are people who avoid faith and God. They know "in their bones" that God does not exist.

It strikes me that non-religious people care about truth just as much as people of faith. For some, truth is what drives them; it is their god, if you will. On average, in my experience, they are at least as willing to accept evidence as people of faith.

Having been reared to believe that God is also Truth, I'm confused and frustrated by the devotion of many American Christians to blatant lies and liars. I don't believe that facts are all the truth there is, but they are significant. Yes, belief is another side of truth, and we believe things that cannot be scientifically proven. But that is not a license to believe any damn thing we want.