Faith is believing or placing confidence in something, whether within us or beyond us. It involves trusting in the inherent goodness or efficacy of something. As humans, we all live by faith. Faith is largely determined by culture, in other words, the experience of our environment, as we learn and grow accustomed to the world. I was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1964 to a white, middle-class family, and I developed a Christian faith. (Interestingly, my two brothers developed entirely different faiths.) Had I been born at a different time and place; I may have established a different faith. The challenge of living by faith is that it determines the trajectory of our lives, including how we relate to our inner and outer reality. Faith informs our world view; it constitutes the lens through which we operate in life.
Because faith is so fundamental to being human, I think it should be tested, just as we are tested by life’s demands. Much like a scientific paradigm, it needs to be open to investigation, and flexible enough to change. This business of blind faith, of carrying unexamined beliefs and thinking from cradle to grave, has sadly resulted in so much of the “I am right, you are wrong” conflict we have seen in the past 4 000 years. It’s become more of a dying by faith, than living by faith experience. The Bible describes faith in Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Having practiced Christianity for most of my life, up until three years ago, I placed faith in my salvation and the belief that I was a child of God. Everything I did was premised by my faith, including my understanding of the environment and other people. My faith helped me make sense of the world when I was young, but it eventually started limiting my life and my growth, which is when I was forced to reevaluate my faith. Brene Brown describes this painful process so well in her piece, “Midlife Unravelling”.
I now believe living by faith is living by knowing and not knowing, especially not having to know when it comes to concepts like God and eternal life. However, there are many things we can and should know, and with scientific advancement we know a lot about the origins of our species and many others. We know about the evolution of the brain historically, and the development of the brain in utero and in our life cycle. It’s time we were taught to have faith in ourselves as human beings within our natural environment, by understanding the complex and yet simple workings of our own nervous systems. We are all extraordinary creatures, the inheritors of a million overcoming generations for us to be here today. When we learn how to understand and manage our inner complexity, nurturing our natures, we will each emerge with all our inherent creativity, confidence, and clarity to solve the myriad problems facing us. Our faith will be in nature, our own and our environments, as human beings operating with an internal locus of control, whole, wild, and free, instead of faith in things not seen as human doings, operating with an external locus of control, conditioned, compromised, and captive.