अर्श पे तू, ज़मीं पे तू। जिसकी पहुँच जहां तलक, उसके लिए वहीँ पर तू।
(Realm of God begins where our limits end.)
The word “Faith” is the ultimate way to stop wondering. Faith is considered a virtue, perhaps the highest virtue of all, and as such “I just have faith” is a proudly virtuous way of saying you’re done wondering, stopped reasoning, stopped thinking logically. We don’t feel or experience faith, we have it, as though it’s a permanent possession. Your faith is with you always, not in waves of certainty amidst your doubts, but a conviction made and held once and for all.
Unlike other animals, we are gifted with the power of imagination. And we can imagine there are unlimited possibilities (in a way it negates the assumption that other animals cannot think)- we can imagine a ravan with ten heads, a Devi (Mother Nature) with eight arms, a bhim with strength of ten thousand elephants. This 'unlimited possibility' is imagined and personified by us the God. At the same time we are aware of our own physical, mental and perceptual limitations. This gap between the limits and the limitless is our God and our prayer; our faith is directed towards bridging this gap. Now we begin to realise that 'faith', after all, is not so unreasonable.
According to Wikipedia, “Faith is confidence or trust in a person, thing, deity, or in the doctrines or teachings of a religion or view (e.g. having strong political faith). It can also be belief that is not based on proof. The word faith is often used as a substitute for hope, trust or belief. In religion, faith often involves accepting claims about the character of a deity, nature, or the universe. While some have argued that faith is opposed to reason, proponents of faith argue that the proper domain of faith concerns questions that cannot be settled by evidence.”
I’m a bit of an outlier here, but from what I can tell, not many questions can be settled by evidence. In other words, you simply can't do without faith in this life. Evidence doesn’t speak for itself. It must be interpreted, people deciding what it’s evidence for and how far to extrapolate from the evidence to a general certainty. Even if all of us agree that the evidence points a certain way, we may later come to a different conclusion. Even science, that most stubbornly persistent form of wondering, never proves anything. It only comes to today’s best guesses, to be beaten tomorrow perhaps, by better guesses.
To me then, bounded rationality isn’t just a function of our limited time to wonder about things, but uncertainties inherent in the universe. That's how the universe has been designed. Even if we gathered all the available evidence, and had all the time at our disposal, we couldn’t settle decisions by means of it and always be right. To me there’s a leap of faith in every decision we make. We work from the evidence at hand to confidence in a bet we think will work.
Without our leaps of faith, we’re unfocused, un-reliable, our effort too diffuse to yield anything of lasting value. Without faith, we would expend our energy every which way and never get anything done.
Faith constrains the directions our energy goes. It’s like an engine cylinder’s hardened walls, which focus the otherwise omnidirectional gas combustion so the piston moves straight out in one direction. Faith is like the insulation on circuits that keeps electrons from sparking every which way, forcing them instead down particular channels. Faith is the river bank that keeps water flowing in only one direction, a force that can be used to generate electricity.
We all have faith, bets we live and work by. Faith is just a highfaluting name for our level of commitment or confidence in a bet or prediction on certain conditional outcomes. We should celebrate faith as means to our ends, but not as an end in itself. And we should wonder more about faith, how it works, how much to have, where to direct it and what happens when our faiths conflict, as they often do.
