Leap of Faith

What do you call evidence of things not seen?

I recently listened to a story on This American Life that got me to thinking. There was a news report about the football coach from a religious school. His team was going to play a team from some juvenile prison school. He made all the parents of his team members memorize the names of the players on the other team, and they cheered for them. They set up a spirit line for the other team and gave them the experience of being the beloved home team for one night. That story was touching, focusing on students who were really down on their luck and how this was the first time anyone ever treated them in such a welcome way.

A woman heard the story and sent the coach an email where she praises the coach and mentions in passing that she is a fallen Catholic. He immediately contacts her, picks her out of hundreds of responses he got from the publicity that came from the story being aired on the news. He contacts this fallen women and tries to convince her to regain her faith. She was willing to, and hoped he could say something that made sense. They spoke, but he wasn't convincing to her. All the supports and arguments he voiced to convert her back to faith fell flat. At one point, you could hear her make a sound of dismay when he stated that Hitler was following Darwinism in his quest to wipe out the Jews. The comment was that any time someone uses Hitler in an argument, they automatically lose the argument.

It made me realize that he was struggling to lead someone step by step to the conclusion that he came to in a single leap. His own faith had come when he lept over the facts and accepted the conclusion. Since he was an evangelist, and working hard to convert people and spread the faith, he spent a lot of time trying to pursuade people to come to the same conclusion he had. It made me realize that later, after his initial leap of faith, he had to backfill the "facts" to support his faith. So now, when he tries to get someone to follow him, he tries to get them to cross over all the ground between no faith and faith. This doesn't work because between faith and no faith is a chasm. It requires a leap to get across. Religious people arguments would have people walking on something as insubstantial as air to get to their point. I know they sometimes get people to take the leap with them, but often they try to lead them across the void and fail miserably.

I was discussing this with my wife, and she remarked that the non-religious community, science, can't answer the questions religion tries to answer. I don't think it usually tries, but I take her point. Religion wants to answer the question of where did we come from and why are we here, is there a supreme being and what happens when you're gone? Science doesn't claim to have these answers. I find it interesting that different religions come up with different answers. The Buddists think we get recycled, and in a real sense, we do. Our bodies decompose and find their way into other lives later, as raw materials. Each religion has their own myths and ways of explaining the deep unknowable mysteries of life and death. But they have no real proof. They point to books that may have been wrong when written, or altered since written. They make statements that are not verifiable. Science, on the other hand, wants to be able to prove things by filling in all steps from ignorance to understanding. Sometimes you leap in science, but only to get to the conclusion faster, and then you have to go back and fill in the steps. Sometimes you leap in science and either find out that you leapt into thin air and your idea is unsupported, or that it takes years for people to find the proofs to fill in the steps of how to get there.