July 1, 2006,
Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City, Utah, 2006)
[Bracketed words are my own corrections and comments]
I’ve been following the fate of the valley’s famous Lone Cedar Tree — the monument on 600 East to the “only cedar tree in the valley when the Mormon pioneers arrived”
But now, it seems, scholars are saying it wasn’t the only cedar tree in the valley at the time. In fact, it wasn’t even a cedar tree, it was a juniper [‘cedar’ is often used colloquially to refer to a juniper]. And, piling it on, the thing might not have been a tree at all, just a post pounded into the ground [a post that sprouted leaves?].
But more than these “errors,” what interests me is our attitude toward them. We roll with them.
When historians get things wrong, we don’t give up on the study of history as a “flawed pursuit.” We make adjustments and forge ahead.
The same goes for philosophy. Philosophers once claimed rabbits had white tails to make them more visible to hunters. When such notion[s] proved to be silly, people didn’t throw out philosophy as a false discipline. They don’t do that with science, literary critism and medicine.
But for some reason, the world expects religious people to toss out their faith each time some new piece of evidence appears that contradicts a tradition. Just because some facts must be rethought, the secular world thinks spiritual souls should abandon their religions.
What if scientists abandoned science every time they reached a wrong conclusion?
That would be silly.
But then I’ve always felt faith is more about trust, not “facts.” Scientists trust science, philosophers trust philosophy and religious souls trust religion.
For hundreds of years, “reasonable people” have predicted the demise of Catholicism [the doctrine], feeling its flaws have been exposed by scholarship. But the Catholic Church [the institution] soldiers on with a billion members, at last count.
It’s the people who’ve put their faith behind “rational thinking” who’ve had to make the adjustments [including the Catholics].
But then “reason and faith” have been uneasy buddies in the human brain for millions of years. In fact, Bill Moyers has a current program about those two old adversaries on PBS. He sees faith and reason as engaging in a kind of ping-pong match.
“Throughout the double helix of our DNA,” he says, “the molecules of faith and reason chatter away, and it’s in our interest, and the the [sic.] world’s, that they stay on good speaking terms.”
To keep that conversation going, I think, faith [doctrines] can’t be seen merely as absolute conclusions about the world. Faith must be about having confidence there is a power behind all those conclusions — the right ones [logos] and the wrong ones [mythos] — that pushes the universe along.
Gandhi played ping-pong with faith and reason his whole life. At the end, he said: “I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality. I tolerate unreasonable religious sentiment when it is not immoral.”
And so human beings wobble forward — banging back and forth between reason and belief, science and the spirit — always making adjustments in our findings but never abandoning the quest.
So it is in the world of science.
So it is in the worlds of history, literary criticism, medicine, law and politics.
And so it is in the world of faith.