I’ve been accused of having too little faith, and having too much. I’ve been accused of taking things on faith, and I’ve been accused of having an empty life because I live it without faith. I’ve been accused, most gallingly, of having faith in science, or faith in evolution — like where idiots like Ray Comfort have said they don’t have enough faith to believe in evolution. And to be blunt, I’m kind of tired of these dueling accusations, because they depend on equivocation of the type that would get a proper theist consigned to one of the first circles of Hell.

According to Princeton Word-net Web, faith is:

– religion: a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny; “he lost his faith but not his morality”
– complete confidence in a person or plan etc; “he cherished the faith of a good woman”; “the doctor-patient relationship is based on trust”
– religion: an institution to express belief in a divine power; “he was raised in the Baptist religion”; “a member of his own faith contradicted him”
– loyalty or allegiance to a cause or a person; “keep the faith”; “they broke faith with their investors”

Note that there are two definitions that are completely secular, and there are two that are completely religious. This is probably not an accident. There is the “blind faith” flavor of faith, which is belief in an assertion without any evidence, and in fact oftentimes in the face of contradictory evidence; and there is “trust”, which is oftentimes explicitly due to the magnitude of evidence that your trust is not misplaced.

I have “faith” in science in that science has self-correcting mechanisms such that where it is demonstrably wrong through the scientific method, it will be amended such that all evidence is taken into account. It is the method by which humans can objectively study reality and learn about it. It is the method by which people can separate what they WANT reality to be like, from what reality actually IS. Science is in this way a filter you can use to sift through assertions made by innumerable people to determine what is true and what isn’t. But to install that filter in your mind, you have to trust it — you have to have faith that the scientific method is the best method by which to make these judgments.

In much the same way, theists are praised for blind faith in their foundational texts. They are told to read the texts and learn them by heart, to filter all claims through the framework given by those texts. They are given no outside corroborating evidence of the claims made in the texts themselves, but are told that the texts are divinely inspired by the god described therein. Theists must accept the texts as true in order to read the evidence within and accept those as true as well. Once they have entered that feedback loop, their blind faith is reinforced by preachers or fellow believers, especially those believers in positions of power and influence.

Faith in science is not a blind faith, dictated dogmatically and reinforced by praising those that believe without proof. Science has no single prophet, it has no single doctrine, and it has no churches at which you spend Sunday having your faith in science renewed. There are innumerable advancements in every field of the scientific endeavour that prove that the scientific method achieves results and is efficacious at culling the false assertions, leaving only the truth or as close to the truth as we can manage to determine. Each of these fields are interconnected, so learning about advancements in one field that depend on vast swathes of other fields, reinforces those other fields, because the whole body of science would collapse in on itself if it were fundamentally wrong in any one field. Where science doesn’t know, it says “let’s investigate”, and continues to investigate long after an adequate answer is found, in hopes of developing a more perfect answer to supplant it. And even then, great care is taken to ensure that these more perfect answers are actually more perfect — lest they crumble and do damage to the body of science and must be replaced with the older theories once more.

Religion refuses to acknowledge any area where they know nothing — or if they do, they glorify that mystery, and they put their god into that gap. Over the centuries, many things have been considered proof that there is a god — from the sun rising and setting daily, to lightning bolts, to volcanoes, to rainbows and the order of the colors in them. In every case, Option God has been premature. And yet, it is the theist’s null hypothesis — wherever you don’t understand some aspect of nature, then “magic man done it”, and you must leave it at that. For a time, when religion had its shot at controlling western civilization, anyone who did NOT merely “leave it at that” was persecuted and either forced to recant their heretical beliefs in observable and provable science, or they were excommunicated, ostracized, tortured or killed. Many of these religions even codify an explicit preference for ignorance and blind faith in the deity in question, and occasionally even explicit hatred of intellectualism and philosophy outside of what is deemed acceptable by the human beings put in charge of defending the religion in question.

Faith as a word has multiple meanings, but they boil down to two. One is trust in a person, method or object based on sufficient evidence that this trust is not misplaced, which is lifted aloft by the mountain of evidence beneath it and held there by pillars of scientific knowledge that are rooted to the ground and stretch upward to the heavens; and the other is a blind trust which is freely given and propped up with little or nothing to support it, thrown aloft repeatedly by the arms of believers who claim to have hung this faith on the skyhook that is their nonexistent deity. The latter is suspended from the sky on nothing but the faith of the multitudes of believers, while the former is held up from below by the body of science.

Just because the two methods put the two definitions of faith at the same level, doesn’t mean they both deserve to be at that level, nor would they both rest there if not constantly propped up by the faithful giving that faith one volleyball-bump after another. As soon as enough people stop believing in that skyhook, it disappears of its own accord — because indeed it was never suspending that faith at all, being nonexistent — and the faith they were bouncing upward repeatedly comes crashing down to Earth. On the other hand, it would take considerable and concerted effort by evil men to destroy the pillars by which faith in science reaches its lofty position — because it would involve destroying the science itself which holds it aloft.

And these evil men stand by with pickaxes and a grim determination to ensure their faith in their skyhook is paramount. Some even attempt to pull certain pillars out and use them to prop up their own faith so they don’t have to keep throwing it upward as often. These efforts are doomed to fail due to the interconnected nature of each of the pillars of science — but we must be vigilant, lest they damage the pillars themselves in their vain pursuit of glory for their imaginary friends.