Faithless is a brilliant student and he has just finished his doctorate degree from the notorious University of Pure Reason & Anti-Faith as the best student there. His thesis is supporting evidentialism, which is the view that every belief always needs to be supported by evidence and not faith. He’s always convinced that there is no need of faith in this world… at all. His mission is to awaken the world of its long distorted view on faith. Starting his career to ruin faith in this world, Faithless apply for for a tenure as a junior faculty in the University of Evidentialism. He reasons that because of his long-list of awards and publications, that university will not have any justified reason to reject him at all. Indeed, he got it.
Starting a new life as a lecturer there, Faithless plans to demolish every faith he has before. Coming back home after his first day of work, he meets his parents. He starts to wonder about them whether they really are his parents. He insists them to give him their blood sample for DNA testing. They are so sad about it, yet lovingly go with their beloved son to the nearby clinic. DNA tests were conducted on these family to prove whether Faithless is their biological son. After 3 days, the results come out and it states that Faithless was really the biological son of his current parents. Faithless did not believe it, he has no faith in the doctor and insists the doctor to teach him how to do the DNA tests himself. Certainly the doctor was enraged and rejects his weird request. Faithless had no choice, and even now he had lost his faith on his parents. He’s afraid that his “parents” adopted him and raised him up since childhood to sell him in the black market someday, and after this DNA tests he’s even more afraid that his “parents” will give him anesthetic and sell him that night. With such a panic, he runs away from the man and woman he knew personally for more than 2 decades.
And so he plans to rent a room nearby to his workplace. To save some accommodation fee, he shared the room with someone else in a double room. He’s quite happy with the new environment. However, on that first night of sharing the room with someone else, with the room lit only by a dim light, he could not sleep. His eye is opened, observing his roommate, afraid that his new roommate will kill him that night. He could not stand the feeling and he flees to the nearest hotel. In the following day, he rented a studio room, so he’ll feel safer during sleeping time. However, on that night, he’s still afraid that someone will destroy the door and shoot him. He hardly slept because he has no faith that he’ll be able to open up his eyes tomorrow. Getting up from his sleepless night, he come down the next morning to grab his favourite Egg & Ham Breakfast. Oops! He’s aware now that this breakfast may contain some poison and he’ll die of it. He wraps his breakfast and brings it to a laboratory to check whether it is safe to eat them. The laboratory test is negative on any harmful chemicals, but he still doesn’t have enough faith on the result. He takes a portion of it and give it to a stray dog, and observe whether it’ll die or has any disorder. After following the dog for 1 hour and nothing happens, he starts to eat his breakfast with relief. Afterwards, he goes home to prepare for lecturing on the evening.
Being ready for conducting a lecture on the topic of The Fall of Faith, he waited for a bus going to the university. After the bus come, he looks at the bus and the bus driver.
Faithless: Hey Mr. Bus Driver, have you checked all the passenger’s bag and ID card, to make sure that they didn’t bring any bombs or weapons to hijack the bus?
Bus Driver: What?! If you want to take the bus, just come in quickly!
Faithless: Yeah, I want to do so, but I don’t have faith to believe that there will be no bombs or hijacking during the journey. Could you check all the passengers please?
Bus Driver: Hey man, I think you should take bus number 51 going to the mental hospital, it’s not too far from here. If you don’t alight now, I’ll leave!
Faithless: Oh man… okay, just this time… I’m almost late for the lecture.
He takes a seat behind 2 gentlemen discussing about reason. He’s interested in the discussion and introduces himself to them, whose name is Anti-Reason and Christian.
Anti-Reason: Yeah, just join in the discussion, we are discussing about the role of reason in belief system.
Faithless: Okay, so what is your position and assertion here?
Christian: Hi Faithless, I believe that true belief system is supported by reason. Else if there are many belief system that claimed exclusive absolute truth for itself, it will be contradictory because there could not be more than 1 absolute truth that exists in this world. I am an advocate of reason, but also of faith. I firmly believe that reason alone is not enough. In some instance in our life, faith is necessary, but faith must be rational, i.e. I believe in rational faith.
Anti-Reason: And I don’t believe in that. I am very skeptical about reason. Reason is not capable of obtaining truth at all, because there are no criterion to obtain epistemic knowledge. I have problem with epistemology here, i.e. I don’t agree that human could know how he know, and therefore human could not know anything even with building up argument through reasoning.
Faithless: I agree with Christian here in the sense that reason is capable to obtain truth, but I don’t agree with him that faith is necessary. And for you Mr. Anti-Reason, I believe that human has a set of basic belief that is obvious to all of us, e.g. I know that to murder people is wrong and I know that the law of logic is true. Without these basic belief that forms criterion for sorting out knowledge, we won’t have anything to equip.
Anti-Reason: Yeah, I think we don’t have anything to equip and we could not know anything.
Christian: Mr. Anti-Reason, I agree with Mr. Faithless that we have obvious set of basic belief. We don’t have to know how we know them. I don’t agree with your skepticism on reason because skepticism could not hold its position and defend it. In fact, it is self-defeating. How could you know that nothing could be known if you don’t have any basic belief to build up arguments? How could you know that we could not know how we know?
Anti-Reason: … Yes, you are indeed right, Mr. Christian. I don’t know how to prove it, but I just know and believe it. I think it is my faith.
Faithless: Faith? No, I don’t agree in faith. If you do not know how to defend your position by reason, it is definitely false.
Christian: I agree in faith, but only reasonable faith. Mr. Anti-reason, would you hold a faith in something that is illogical and irrational?
Faithless: I won’t have faith in both cases, Mr. Christian, rational or irrational faith doesn’t matter.
The bus has arrived at the University of Evidentialism. Faithless said goodbye to his two new friends, and he went in to the lecture theatre. He gives a 2 hour full-passion lecture on The Fall of Faith to the students. The next 1 hour will be a discussion session. One brilliant student, Faithful, arise a question to him.
Faithful: Dr. Faithless, I have one objection to your objection on faith. In all your lecture, you build up your argument against faith using reason, but how do you know that our reasoning is reasonable? How could we know that every faculty of reasoning on human beings is working well and they are all building up the same argument?
Faithless: What do you mean dear Faithful? Could you rephrase your words?
Faithful: What I mean is whether we could believe that human’s faculty of reasoning is trustworthy. Isn’t it a faith to believe that it is trustworthy? If it is, then we are having faith in a faculty of reasoning, and we are using our faculty of reasoning to abolish faith. Isn’t it like cutting off the branch on which we sit on? Isn’t it self-defeating? Even further, you mention that we could gain epistemic knowledge by having a set of basic belief that forms a criterion for knowledge. If we could not prove them by reason, then we accept it by faith, isn’t it?
Faithless: Yes, exactly Mr. Faithful. However, they are just too obvious for us to hold on. Without presupposing and believing in them, we could not build up any argument and we could not gain any knowledge. I would not categorize them as faith, but as presuppositions that is rationally defensible.
Faithful: But it depends on how you define faith. If we are talking about faith in daily life, I define faith as believing something that is more rational as compared to believing something that is more irrational, e.g. I would have faith that when I sleep, I’ll wake up in the next morning. However, if we are talking about faith of the supernatural things, I define faith as something that we know is true, although the proof for it could not be locked by reason. I think this is because those belief that needs faith falls outside the boundary of reason, and not because reason is fallible. Reason in this case is trustworthy and limited. Further, to believe in presuppositions is faith isn’t it?
Faithless: … You have given a weighty argument here, Mr. Faithful, I really appreciate it, and I’ll think about it. We’ll end up the lecture for today and I’ll see you next week.
Faithless feels uncomfortable about his position on faith after the lecture. He thinks that Faithful was right that he actually has faith in basic belief and human’s faculty of reasoning. Pragmatically he’s also uncomfortable in having a life without faith at all, i.e. he hardly slept and ate. He agrees now with Mr. Faithful that every human beings is having faith. He planned to deliver a lecture titled as “Life is Faith” for the following week. Faithless is happy now that he is no longer faithless and he could enjoy a faithful life, a reasonable faith of course.
