In order to do so, we must first define what me mean by "faith." There are several definitions to choose from. The dictionary has two definitions: 1.) complete trust or confidence in someone or something; 2.) strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof. Clearly the second definition will work for the theist hypothesis, but, just as clearly, it will not work for the cosmic consciousness or atheist hypotheses. The first definition works for, oh, say faith in the government or in a bank, but it doesn't really capture what we are looking for here. There is something more to it. The Christian Bible defines it as "confidence in what we hope for..." (Hebrews 11:1)
Is there more than one kind of faith? Consider the difference between the "faith" of the Biblical Abram when he was commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac and the faith invoked in a religious faith healing or healing blessing. Are these the same? Or are they different? The first involves sacrifice where the second doesn't necessarily. The second requires the mind to be open to the idea that healing can and will occur, where the first requires believing that either God will intervene to stay the sacrifice or will make the reward worth the cost. The first involves taking action; the second may not require anything more than sitting in a chair with a priest or minister's hands on your head while he/they pray.
From the theist view, both involve a mutual promise and expected gift. Abraham promised to be faithful to God and expected God to reward that faith by stopping the sacrifice; God promised to make Abram the father of many nations (which required his son to survive) and gifted Abram with the ram in the thicket and a new name, Abraham. For the healing blessing the promise is again to be faithful and believe that God will gift the healing; God promises to take the petitioner's burdens and gifts healing in some manner - not necessarily the one petitioned for.
Well, we are certainly not going to conduct any experiments with human sacrifice. But there are other similar situations. Consider those religions that practice "tithing" or donating one tenth of ones income or increase to charity. I think we will use that as the basis of our thought experiment. Here the gift is the sacrifice of the worldly wealth with the promise being an increase in abundance.
The common thread in both the healing blessing and the paying of tithes centers on belief that the process will produce the result on the part of the practitioner. Perhaps we can define what we mean in this context by the term "faith" as an opening of the mind to the idea that a ritual action will produce a desired result, with the concomitant setting aside of skepticism in the process.
From the theist perspective, the gift of faith is to whatever deity is being worshiped, and the promise comes from that deity. It is well within the assumed powers of a supernatural deity to grant the gift/promise in return for the faith and sacrifice.
But does the process require the existence of deity to work? I knew a man once, his name was Dean, who regularly paid 10% of his earnings in tithes. Not to a church, but to a non-profit educational organization. Dean credited his success, in part, to paying his tithe. When I knew him, Dean reportedly had net worth of over $100,000,000. I think we can consider that to be anecdotal evidence.
Faith and the Cosmic Consciousness Hypothesis
As you will recall, our "Cosmic Consciousness" hypothesis considers the possibility that there is a completely natural phenomenon that exists external to the self, or the body, but which we are, or can be, connected to via some as yet undiscovered mechanism. Within the constraints of the natural laws that govern it, this cosmic consciousness is able to manifest positive or negative results based on our communication with it. Essentially controlling what we might otherwise call "luck."
About 20 years ago, I went through a four day educational program put on by the same folks that Dean paid his tithe to. The program was called the PSI Basic, and it was a self actualization workshop designed to help participants become more effective in their daily lives. (I found this program to be excellent and later volunteered to help staff several other basic courses, but in order to get the full benefit of the program it is necessary to be open to the concepts they teach. I will be discussing the Basic more in later essays.)
Brian, the instructor, taught us that our conscious mind serves as a sort of sentry or sentinel to protect our sub-conscious mind from what can best be described as "bad input." It does this quite well, but we humans have a tendency to internalize certain beliefs about ourselves and the world around us - he called them "programs" - that create a sort of filter that skews all of our input and blocks our ability to communicate with what he called "super consciousness." As part of the program we were taught to identify these programs, evaluate whether they were helpful or harmful, and eliminate the harmful ones. In doing so, we could open communication with this super consciousness, which in turn could provide us with whatever it was we needed.
That sounds a bit weird, but it produced results for almost every participant in the program. Chalk it up to my lack of skill in describing it. The main point I am trying to make here is that Brian taught us techniques for opening a channel of communication to an external, higher consciousness. These techniques were a combination of meditation and visualization very similar in some respects to prayer. They certainly fell within the definition of "faith" we are using; opening of the mind, ritual visualization, and setting aside skepticism.
I have since found similar practices among the Rosicrucians (The AMORC variety) and a couple of Pagan groups that I have encountered.
One Pagan priestess I know says that she does not believe that the elemental "gods" she invokes in her rituals are real beings, but merely representations of elements of nature that she wishes to call upon; the anthropomorphic gods are just focal points that help to channel her mind and the minds of the other participants in the ritual. When I asked her if she felt that what she was invoking appeared to be internal to herself or external, she didn't hesitate to say that "it feels external."
Faith and the Atheist Hypothesis
When my wife was pregnant with our last child the doctor who had delivered our other children had retired and moved away. In the course of deciding who would provide her prenatal care, we decided to explore "hypno-birthing." Hypno-birthing uses hypnosis and relaxation techniques instead of the standard medical analgesics and anesthesia to control the pain of child birth. Amy had tried Stadol and Demerol as well as epidural anesthesia. None of there was truly satisfactory. As her birthing coach, I was to learn the techniques of hypnotic induction so that when the time came I could induce a hypnotic state that would help Amy control the pain.
At the time, Amy and I were active Mormons. I had been ordained as an Elder in that church's Melchizedek Priesthood. In that role I had performed many "healing blessings." The general procedure is for two Elders to perform the ritual. First the person to receive the blessing is anointed with oil by one of the Elders. Following this, the Elders again place their hands on the recipient's head, and the other Elder invokes a blessing prayer for whatever healing or other blessing is desired, and any other blessing the Elder feels to pronounce. The blessing prayer starts with an invocation of the name of Jesus Christ, and names the priesthood power by which it is being performed, and it usually ends with a statement that the blessing is conditioned on the faith of the recipient, another invocation of Jesus' name and the ritual "amen."
As I learned the techniques of hypnotic induction, I couldn't help but notice how similar some of them are to the LDS healing blessing. For someone who has been conditioned to accept these blessings and to believe in the power of the LDS Priesthood, the "anointing" and "laying on of hands" are hypnotic anchors, the invocation of Jesus and the naming of the priesthood establish the trust - faith - in the hypnotist and process that are required to allow one to be hypnotized, and are a short "deepening" of the hypnotic state, and the prayer is classic hypnotic suggestion. The "amen" is the trigger to end the hypnotic state.
To make a long story short, the hypno-birthing worked better than we could ever have expected. Amy was practically able to turn her labor on at will, and proceeded through the entire delivery without any medication at all. Her labor was short (about 2 hours) and painless (she says that the highest her pain level ever got was a 3 on the ten point scale, and that was after the delivery was all done and she was nursing on baby. She was incomplete control the entire time, and able to feel everything that was going on with the delivery - which was an almost miraculous thing as the baby had his umbilical cord around his neck three times and it was tied in a know. The midwife that did the delivery said that the only other time she had seen a birth where the baby had that much cord trouble the baby hadn't made it. Amy and I both believe we would have lost our little boy if we had not used the hypnosis techniques.
Part of hypnosis is setting aside skepticism and allowing the mind to accept things that it would not normally accept in a full conscious state. The mind is opened to suggestions that it would otherwise reject as preposterous. If you've ever seen a stage hypnotist you know what I'm talking about. Beyond being able to make people think they're chickens and such, hypnosis enables the mind to overrule pain and other normal body functions and to marshal the body's resources in ways that would not normally occur. Hypnosis can help a person stop smoking or help them succeed in reaching goals. I believe it can also speed healing, and who knows what else. The opening of the mind and setting aside of skepticism in the process of hypnosis - especially when one considers that hypnosis generally does not occur if the subject does not trust (have faith in) the hypnotist or does not believe in his or her skill - fits well within our definition of "faith" and it apparently works on the internal workings of the mind. In the hands of a well trained hypnotist, it works much, much more effectively than and LDS healing blessing or other similar religious ritual.
Final Thoughts
In this essay we've done little other than develop a working idea of what faith is under our three hypotheses. For our purposes, faith is setting aside our skepticism and opening the mind to believing that a process will work. We still need to examine in more detail how faith impacts other practices and determine if there is any usefulness to it. We've seen that there is a plausible function for faith under each of the three hypotheses.In my travels round and about I have had several experiences that seem to point to the external connection to something outside of myself that can affect the outcomes in my day-to-day life; things that can't be explained by any internal process. I have also had experiences that seem to point to internal processes with the same capability. I will probably relate some of these experiences in future essays.
I have also observed that there is a sort of universality of the processes of faith. Although western religion tends to arrogantly claim that their way is the only way, it would seem that this just isn't so. Many faiths, philosophies, and mystery schools proclaim that their technique works, while others just as quickly denounce the claims as false. As we have seen with Dean and hypno-birthing, these processes are not associated directly with any one system of theology or philosophy, but are somewhat ubiquitous in there scope, if differing in some of their particulars. It would seem that the mechanism of faith depends on the individual and what he can accept more than it depends on the name of any particular deity or membership in any particular church. We will explore this concept more in the future, but for now it is sufficient to note that some practices work for some people and not for others, while another practice may work for the others, and so on.
In pondering this, I came to realize that there is no exclusivity here. It is entirely possible under our very broadly accepting metaphysics that all three hypotheses are correct.
We still cannot prove or disprove the existence of a god, but if one does exist, and he/she/it/they are similar to the father-god paradigm, the it would not be surprising to find that this deity created the internal and external natural mechanisms that produce the results I've experienced. Nor would it be surprising to find that the individual mind is a smaller microcosm of the larger cosmic mind to which it connects.
One last item to cover: faith and the afterlife. For many religious people, their faith in their god and his promise of eternal life or equivalent system provides comfort in times of the death of a loved one or when the individual's own death is immanent. I think this believed connection to the divine is somehow important, but I'm not sure how to examine it within our framework. It seems that the atheist hypothesis would hit a dead end here, while there are some possibilities with the cosmic consciousness hypothesis. We don't have any way to evaluate the actual outcomes, but perhaps we can explore how such beliefs affect day-to-day choices.
