Facts and Faith
I've encountered so many people who fail to distinguish between Facts and their faith. These people act consciously and unconsciously as if their belief in those ideas that form their religious faith are themselves factual descriptions of the world outside of their mind, outside of their belief systems. These people lack an understanding not only of how the world works but how their own mind works. This lack of understanding and this belief that they need not inquiry and learn about how the human mind works inevitably leads to them confusing their faith with facts and thus living in a distorted view of the world.
Facts is a term I am using to describe items of information that can be proven, such as historical and legal facts, and additionally there are scientific facts which are provable and also measurable by the five senses and the tools developed to augment and enhance the senses, microscopes, telescopes, etc. Any item of information that can not be proven and or measured is not to be described as a fact, but can be described as an item of faith.
Facts are items of information that can be proven as true, though the methods vary for historical, legal and scientific facts. Items of information that can not be proven as true in the same manner as those of fact are still important and can be labeled as truths. True is a word to be used for something that could be proven false if it fails to meet the rigors of the examination to test its validity. Labeling something as a Truth is designating that idea as something that can be inspiring intelectually, morally, ethically, and/or spiritually. Believing in Truths is what makes us better human beings. Truths are those things that Plato summarized as items that are amongst his holy trinity of values: the Good, the True and the Beautiful.
Examples of Facts:
That the Earth orbits the Sun is a fact.
That Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States of American, was born in the year 1809 and died in the year 1865.
Robbery, the taking of another person's property without their permission for one's own gain, is a crime.
Examples of Faith:
The existence of a Divine Being/Entity.
The existence of the soul.
The existence of angels.
"Becoming an angel is a choice. They were not made to be indentured servants, they were not created to be slaves."
"Anything our children and angels can think of will appear, anything."
"We believe in life after death."
"I can assure you that God did not put any soul on this planet with a genetic predisposition to grow up confused about their sexual identity."
"We have polluted ourselves out of existence or nuked ourselves, many times before. Earth is not the only planet that this species has inhabited. This is not the first lifetime for any of you. Nor are you the only species in the Universe."
"[We are] Victims of a spiritual war that has been raging since the beginning of sin. Everything that is played out on this planet is nothing more than a mirror of the conflict that rages in the spirit world. Merely pawns in a much larger cosmic war. "
That Sacred Scriptures, such as the New Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Koran, etc, are the Word of God.
That Jesus died and was resurrected.
That Jesus is the Son of God and or is God.
Reincarnation of the soul.
Any statement describing God's plan for humanity.
I am not saying that faith is unimportant. I too hold and believe many ideas on faith. I just know that matters of faith are opinions that can not be proven and therefore are not facts; they are truths.
To mistake statements of faith as statements of fact is a sign that the writer/speaker lacks understanding of how his/her own mind works, lacks insight into the nature of reality, lacks a critical and analytically honest mind and lastly lacks self-awareness. I for one can not take seriously the thinking of people who can not distinguish between facts and faith.
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Comments: 11
Rosa wrote : "Facts seem to change sometimes. Even our scientists have had to change their theories. We adjust accordingly. Many truths were unproven at some point. As we dig deeper, we find more truths. Does that mean it wasn't true prior to being proven? Will we ever know the full truth? Aren't we always learning and never really coming to the full knowledge of truth?"
Theories are explanations created by scientists and philosophers to account for facts that they encounter. The theories can be proven or disproven. But religious and ethical truths, as I was using the word, are inspiring statements of faith. They are not by their nature provable. They are statements of opinion. We can believe them but again we should not confuse them with fact. Believing them to be true does not make them a fact.
Mary wrote: "In my opinion truth supercedes fact, as facts are subject to change; truth, however, is eternal. Many people's views or opinons of faith are actually truths yet undiscovered, unrevealed and unexplored by the masses."
Actually what is considered a 'truth' changes over time and according to differing cultures and religions – which is why they are statements of belief and faith and not facts or theories. 'Religious and ethical truths' are not eternal but are contextual to the history of human cultures from which they emerge. Theories that can be stated as fact do change, can be proven or disproven. But there are many eternal facts: The sun rises and sets, fire burns, objects will fall to the earth below your feet, etc. The explanation of these fact change, but those facts do not. Facts – the observation of the senses, the things actually observed and not the explanation as to the reason for the observed events – these are eternal. Also, we can be mistaken in our observation and thus the error is in the eye of the beholder.
'Truth' does not supersede fact, but truth can be more important and more meaningful than fact.
Statements of faith are always things that are unproveable, they are never facts.
You are right to distinguish fact from theory. That's where some people get messed up. "Facts" by definition do not change. Theories change, but not facts. And the confusion is understandable, because we often relate to theories as though they were facts, just as we relate to belief as though they were facts, and for good reason. Science is very rigorous, so even something that seems patently obvious to most people will be seen as "theoretical" by a scientist who studies the field in question.
We are confused by appearances and limited by our perceptual and cognitive abilities. We see a chair and think of it as solid; the "fact" is that there's more space than matter in the chair. It's the same with beliefs that we want to hold as facts: sometimes we believe something simply because we cannot imagine it being any other way. But that's a failure of imagination.
One of the Religious Studies professors where I work says that the most difficult challenge for him as a teacher of religion is to get his students to see the difference between fact and faith. He says faith is there for the questions that "facts" cannot answer. You cannot prove the existence of God as a fact, and that's where faith comes in -- although I cannot not know this, this is what I believe. And that can obviously be a very powerful force for good. But getting them confused is where mischief ensues.
The philosopher Ken Wilbur does a lot of really interesting work in trying to tease out the difference between the spiritual and the scientific or factual. I recommend his work.
You cannot argue with someone who believes their bible is the truth. They know it which is why they use it to such degrading ends.
All facts are not truths. The facts that are not truths are subject to change. It is the truthful not factual nature of a thing that makes it eternal.
The Divine can not get beyond the limits of the human finite mind/body which the Divine helped to create.
Your use of the word "He" is just one of the human words to describe a thing which is beyond human words - that is the message of all the worlds mystics.
We can never know the Divine truth because it can't get through to the filteration process of our finite human limited mind. Our finite mind choose the words which we think are the Divine's message.