People act on faith every day. They go to bed every night expecting the sun to rise in the morning. They plan for it as if it had already occurred.
They get into cars and hurtle at dangerous velocities on narrow pathways with other humans operating other cars, trusting in the rules of the road and the capacity (and willingness) of those other humans to follow them. As far as I am concerned, that is a huge leap of faith.
They use money. Now there is faith! I go to work, investing my time and effort in somebody else's interests, in exchange for pieces of paper that are no more than a promise. I trust that everyone else with whom I deal will also believe in that promise. These days I don't even get a piece of paper all that often. Sometimes I just get numbers recorded in electronic devices I have probably never even seen.
Faith is a part of life. It is believing a certain outcome will occur from a certain action. It is believing in effect following cause. Even those who know enough to doubt the veracity of cause and effect still live as if it were true. Faith can be a funny thing.
They sit in chairs without even thinking about their beliefs about chairs. Though I would hazard that most people have had at least one chair failure in their life, yet they still tend to sit as if there could be no doubt that the chair will chair and hold them up from the ground.
They choose to believe and act this way because life would be very difficult to manage without fundamental assumptions and beliefs. Such faith, such belief, is practical. It makes life work. We just don't have time to test every chair upon which we might sit. We can't afford the time and expense of seeing every chair certified and regularly tested to insure our safety.
What defines the cut-off? After all, we don't regularly trust ourselves to cars because they are absolutely safe. Accidents happen all of the time, yet we run that risk just to go to the mall, even when we don't really need anything. We get out on the road sometimes just for the experience of driving, even though there is some probability that we won't survive the adventure.
I recall a television program which featured a woman who could make herself drive after an accident, but would only make right turns. She would plot her whole journey to insure that she could make right turns all of the way to her destination and back. This behavior seems psychotic to most of us, and by definition it is. However, is it that much more crazy than the rest of us running the risk just to get a loaf of bread?
Faith, by whatever degree, is still faith. Trust me.
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