WHAT IS FAITH AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?
A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan
University Public Worship
Stanford Memorial Church
September 16, 2007
This summer I preached a sermon about Stanford graduate Sam Harris’s book entitled
The End of Faithi, published in 2004 and long on the New York Times best seller list. Harris
defines “faith” as “unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern.” He explains that “Faith is
what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of
terrestrial discourse – constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor.”
In his opinion “Ignorance is the true coinage of this realm” of faith. We are asked to “disregard
the facts of this world” out of deference to God – who’s only a figment of our imaginations in
the first place.ii On the other hand, in the Psalmist’s view, as we heard in this morning’s
reading,iii those who say there is no God are themselves fools. Instead, God “looks down from
heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God.” “Have they no
knowledge?”iv God asks of those who don’t call upon the divine. So, what’s faith really all
about: ignorance or knowledge, foolishness or wisdom?
One of my favorite professors in divinity school was a world religions scholar named
Wilfred Cantwell Smith. He began his career as a Presbyterian missionary to India, but over his
four years there he began to count Hindu, Muslim and Sikh intellectuals among his closest
friends. Ultimately he became a professor of comparative religion at Harvard and ran its Center
for the Study of World Religions.v Among his many books is one called Faith and Belief,vi
which I’ve found very helpful in thinking about the nature of faith. Let me tell you a bit about
his ideas.
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Faith, Smith explains, is a universal quality of human life like love. That’s not to say that
everyone has experienced it, just as not everyone has experienced love, but most people have
sooner or later throughout history. It’s the ability to live at more than a mundane level: to see, to
feel and to act in terms of a transcendent dimension that integrates all that is. Though it’s an
orientation of the individual personality, it’s been nurtured and shaped by religious traditions and
therefore comes in different forms: Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, etc.
It enables one to feel at
home in the universe -- to find meaning and purpose in the world and in one’s own life. That
meaning is profound and ultimate, relating us as finite beings to an infinite reality far beyond us,
as well as to a sense of centeredness deep within us. That sense of ultimate purpose is stable
regardless of what happens to each of us personally in terms of the buffeting of life events. In
fact, a great strength of faith is how it allows us to look beyond ourselves and beyond material
realities to the ideal and the absolute.vii
The opposite of faith, as Smith describes it, is nihilism. Other terms might be despair,
alienation, ego-disintegration, or anomie. The nihilist is unable to find any significance in the
universe or in his or her own life. One feels lost in the world, not to mention in the cosmos. If
I’m without faith, I become almost totally dependent on immediate, everyday events, and yet I
don’t feel that those events can really be depended on for very long. I cannot commit myself to
anything, and I find it hard to get far enough outside of myself to love anyone else. I’m largely
the victim of my own whims internally and social pressures externally. In essence, I grow to be
simply an organism reacting to my environment.viii
What does this look like in concrete lived reality? The poster-child of someone without
faith is the main character, Meursault, in Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger.ix He lives at a
totally mundane, day-to-day level. He has no awareness of anything transcending his own
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feelings. For example, he spends a lot of time describing to the reader that he feels very hot in
his Algerian setting or that he’s being burned or blinded by the sun. He even explains that the
reason he murdered another man was the feeling of the burning sun on his forehead when he
pulled the trigger. Meursault can’t commit himself to anything or anyone, including his
girlfriend or his mother. When he’s with his girlfriend, all that seems to matter is the sensual
experience. He didn’t visit his mother much late in her life when she’s in a rest home and he
seems to be indifferent at her funeral. He’s continually saying, “It doesn’t matter,” about a wide
variety of things.x He sees no significance in his own life or in the world generally. As he sits in
prison awaiting his execution for the murder, he comforts himself with this thought: “But
everybody knows life isn’t worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn’t much
matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy.”xi
So this kind of nihilism is the opposite of faith. But why does faith matter? Specifically,
why would faith matter for a person like Meursault? Well, first of all, he might feel less alone in
the universe; indeed, he might experience love and compassion rather than the hate he imagines
at the end of the book. Perhaps he’d escape his enslavement to a sensate daily routine, the
humdrum and the ordinary. He might find some sustaining hope in his future or that of the
world, and even discover that something beyond himself matters, whether that be his family,
lover and friends -- or a community as small as his neighborhood or as large as humankind. Life
could be worth living for others or for something even more transcendent, and not only for
himself. It would also be possible to translate his immediate reaction to his environment into a
much larger sense of awe and gratitude for the natural order of the universe.
By the way, I don’t want you to walk away from this sermon thinking that atheists can’t
have faith. I preached another sermon this summer on evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’
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sense of awe for the natural order. He’s an atheist who’s written another best-selling book called
The God Delusion.xii Dawkins spends a lot of time describing how deeply moved he is by the
“transcendent wonder” of the universe.xiii He speaks of springing from bed each morning, eager
to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it”xiv Sam Harris actually seems to
have faith in this sense as well. He writes that ”Each of us has to get out of bed in the morning
and live his life, and we do this in a context of uncertainty, and in the context of terrible
certainties, like the certainty of death. This positive disposition, this willingness to set a course
in life without any assurance that things will go one’s way, is occasionally called ‘faith…’ Let
me state for the record that I see nothing wrong with this kind of faith.”xv
But then Harris goes on to criticize religious faith; he argues that this sort of faith should
be put to an end by humanity, once and for all. By religious faith he means the likes of
“ludicrous convictions about the divine origins of certain books,”xvi the assertion that Jesus was
“born of a virgin, and destined to return to earth trailing clouds of glory,” and xvii“the
willing[ness] to die for … unjustified beliefs,”xviii He defines religious faith as “the belief in
historical and metaphysical propositions without sufficient evidence.” As he puts it, “When the
evidence for a religious proposition is thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence
against it, people invoke faith…Faith is simply the license people give themselves to keep
believing when reasons fail.”xix
But as Wilfred Cantwell Smith has explained, it’s a fundamental error to confuse faith
with mere belief. Belief has only to do with certain propositions held in the mind. It is simply
an intellectual process or state. “Faith,” is a total response of the whole person including how
one feels, how one acts, and how one celebrates. Starting with the Enlightenment of the
eighteenth century, rational conceptualization has become the major mode of understanding and
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insight in the West. We privilege our minds over the rest of our being. “I think, therefore I am,”
said Descartes. Religious faith came to be described not so much as experience of transcendence
beyond us or of our soul deep within us, but instead as certain intellectual propositions about
God that could be debated and organized into systematic statements or theologies.
By the nineteenth century, it was understood that “believing” is primarily what religious
people do.xx For secular rationalists, this had the effect of reducing faith to manageability in
their own terms. Instead of understanding faith as a complete response of the human personality,
faith could be limited to certain optional mental processes and conceptual frameworks of
religious people. In essence, faith became reduced to this in the secular mind: “Given the
uncertainty of God, as a fact of modern life, so-and-so reports that the idea of God is part of the
furniture of his mind.”xxi
Unlike an earlier kind of “knowing,” “believing,” also lost its connection to reality.
People could “believe” that which was untrue, and that’s how those who were skeptical of
religious people came to see them.xxii As Smith puts it, for secularizing culture, “The concept [of
belief] served as an inherently irreligious interpretation of a phenomenon that it could not
authentically appreciate. To imagine that religious people “believe” this or that is a way of
dominating intellectually, and comfortably, what in fact one does not truly discern.”xxiii
Ironically, the Christian Church had became a willing accomplice in this development, partly
because of how much it had been influenced by the larger culture for more than a century, but
also because asking “what do they believe” allowed Western Christians to disparage other
religious traditions as untrue – other traditions which these Christians were learning more about
in a colonial era.xxiv
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By the twentieth century, this whole development had become largely unconscious. For
example, one can now pick up a Random House dictionary and find that the first entry for the
word “belief” is “an opinion or conviction” and the example given is “the belief that the earth is
flat.” So a dictionary reader learns right off the bat that “belief” connotes something that is false
or wrong.xxv The emphasis on “belief” in religion has also created a barrier to faith for many
who might otherwise be religious, especially with waning intellectual intelligibility in much of
the Church. Like the schoolboy who quipped that “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so,”
many sensitive, thoughtful people have been needlessly turned away from Christianity.xxvi
That’s not been true in the same way for Judaism, though, because Jews’ faith is defined much
more by practice than by belief. Are you living an ethical life? Keeping the great
commandments of the Torah? Gathering together in community and telling the stories of the
Jewish people? Keeping kosher or lighting candles at home on Friday night or having a Passover
Seder or going to Rosh Hashanah services every year, if not to synagogue every Sabbath? That’s
how Jewish faith is experienced and expressed: through orthopraxy (right action) much more
than orthodoxy (right belief).xxvii
Meanwhile, through the emphasis on “belief” in Christianity, attention to faith as the
primary religious category, has suffered deeply. For religion is not just a set of propositions in
one’s mind. It’s something we sing and dance and eat and pray. It’s enmeshed in art and
literature and architecture and drama – in symbols and myths and rites and liturgy. It has to do
with vocation and morality and character. It’s experienced through taste and smell and sight and
touch and hearing, not just thinking. It’s a matter of heart as much as head. As Smith proclaims,
faith includes recognizing “the goodness of a cup of cold water given in love or the horrendous
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evil of Auschwitz, the glory of a sunset or a cherry blossom.”xxviii It’s an utter travesty to reduce
faith to a “subset of beliefs about the world.”xxix
It needs to be clearly affirmed, though, that faith as a quality of the whole person
does also have an intellectual dimension. It requires valid insights into the nature of the universe
and it requires personal intellectual integrity and sincerity. The Dalai Lama represented that kind
of integrity and sincerity, for example, when he said publicly in a visit to Stanford University in
2005 that if modern scientific evidence clearly refutes any tenets of Buddhism, then those
Buddhist tenets will have to be rejected and Buddhism will have to change.xxx For intellectuals
like myself who teach in a university, faith of course includes an attitude toward truth and the
will to know and understand in my mind. I cannot only sing and preside over liturgy and have
my own heart touched. I must also conceptualize my faith and communicate it to others, as well
as listening openly and attentively to their religious ideas, applying my mind to all they say. My
faith also must integrate what I know to be true scientifically, logically and historically. For, as
Wilfred Cantwell Smith has insisted, religious conceptualizing must “if it is to be faithful, be the
closest approximation to the truth of which one’s mind is capable.”xxxi
In this morning’s gospel lesson,xxxii Jesus is seen as breaking bread and spending time
with tax collectors and others whom the religious authorities called sinners. While the scribes
and Pharisees grumble, Jesus acts like a shepherd who cares as much for the one lost sheep in the
wilderness as for the ninety-nine who have been following along obediently in line. In the midst
of all the religious arguments of his day about which proposition was right and which was
wrong, about who was a true believer and who wasn’t, Jesus just kept on loving, unconditionally.
He had an open table, where he ate and drank and celebrated life with everyone. He came not to
constrict life to narrow statements of belief, but he came that we might have life more
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abundantly.xxxiii As we find ourselves in the midst of strife about beliefs, may we find solace in
our faith – one that is much broader than the furniture in our mind, having to do instead with a
sense of meaning and purpose in the universe and a deep centeredness within ourselves. May we
sing our faith as well as think it, may we know throughout our being and not just believe in our
heads, may we love others rather than try to convince them of our truths, may we glory in the
freedom of the spirit, rather than in the tyranny of dogma.
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NOTES
i
Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2004).
ii
Harris, End of Faith, p. 65.
iii
Psalm 14: 1-7.
iv
Psalm 14: 3.
v
Kenneth Cracknell, Wilfred Cantwell Smith: A Reader (Oxford: OneWorld, 2001), pp. 5, 9.
vi
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
vii
Smith, Faith and Belief, pp. 3-12.
viii
Smith, Faith and Belief, pp. 13, 20; Towards a World Theology, p. 168.
ix
Albert Camus, The Stranger (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p. 69.
x
See, for example: Camus, Stranger pp. 8, 37, 41, 69, 114, 121.
xi
Camus, Stranger, p. 114.
xii
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006).
xiii
Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 12.
xiv
Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
(London: Penguin Press, 1998), p. 6.
xv
Harris, End of Faith, p. 232.
xvi
Harris, End of Faith, p. 232.
xvii
Harris, End of Faith, p. 204.
xviii
Harris, End of Faith, p. 64.
xix
Harris, End of Faith, p. 232.
xx
Smith, Faith and Belief, p. 122.
xxi
Smith, Faith and Belief, p. 118.
xxii
Smith, Faith and Belief, p. 144.
xxiii
Smith, Faith and Belief, p. 144.
xxiv
Smith, Faith and Belief, pp. 144-145.
xxv
Smith, Faith and Belief, p. 120.
xxvi
Smith, Faith and Belief, pp. 124.
xxvii
Smith, Faith and Belief, pp. 14, 57; see also Dennett, Breaking the Spell, p. 224.
xxviii
Smith, Faith and Belief, p. 159.
xxix
Citing Harris in End of Faith, p. 67.
xxx
See similar statements in two published sets of conversations with the Dalai Lama, edited by
Daniel Goleman: Healing Emotions (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), p. 3, and Destructive Emotions
(New York: Bantam Books, 2003), p. 41.
xxxi
Smith, Faith and Belief, p. 168.
xxxii
Luke 1: 1-10.
xxxiii
John 10:10.
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