This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
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What even is faith?
This question has dogged me my whole life. I grew up the only child of a devoutly Mormon mother. We went to church every week, where I was also involved in religious youth programs, and even attended a scripture study class every morning at 6am all four years of high school. Then I went to BYU for a semester before serving a two-year mission. After the mission, I went back to BYU for another five years.
Despite big swings in my relationship to so-called questions of faith, and spending years exploring the trenches of atheism and throw-your-hands-up agnosticism, I never did stop going to church.
So. Faith.
According to the core tenets of my own religion, faith is the first principle. And from what I understand of early Silicon Valley culture and American Innovation, first principles thinking is about stripping everything away to get down to the basic fundamentals of any given topic or question. The first principle, in other words, should be something simple, something solid, indivisible, irrefutable.
So. Faith?
For a first principle, it sure seems to be a tough one around which to achieve any kind of consensus. There are countless volumes written on the subject. Endless arguments and circular rhetoric both supporting and challenging whatever meaning anyone dares attach to the word.
So what? Do I just give up on faith as a first principle?
Well, since that would be tantamount to giving up on my entire religious heritage, and utterly recusing myself from most cosmological conversations, you can probably guess my answer.
No! Instead, I’ll try to do what so very many have done before, and probably better. I’ll try to define faith.
Based on everything I’ve read, heard, and experienced, I believe the best synonym for faith is trust.
And of course trust requires an object. Trust in what?
I’m reminded of David Foster Wallace’s famous observation that, “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
He goes on to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of different categories of things people choose to worship.
Ah, but we’ve switched terms again, haven’t we? So let’s define worship as the active exercise of faith, which, as I’m endeavoring to define it, is trust.
This feels right, doesn’t it? It also feels appropriately challenging. Not in the sense that it’s difficult to understand, but in the sense that it’s perhaps more demanding than we’d like.
Because while we don’t like to believe this about ourselves, the truth is that most of our actions are based on trust in pretty untrustworthy things -- like youth, money, and power. Even trust in our own selves can be, and often is, ruinous.
Inside this framing, faith starts to feel like a viable first principle of any religion, doesn’t it? Because at its very root, religion is a challenge to change your behavior to align with something, or someone, greater than yourself. More reliable. More trustworthy.
So, faith.
Who, or what, can you trust more than anyone or anything else?
The simplest definition of faith