Many of you are probably wondering why religion has been at the origin of many of the wars along the history of the world. Or, why do people become fanatic? And at the basic level, what is faith? These are all complex questions, and I will try to give a very condensed answer to the most important questions, what is faith. Of course, this is my own personal view about the meaning and importance of faith, but you might find things that resonate with you in the paragraphs below. I will urge you not to get offended by any of my views because that is not my intention. I respect every religion, because at their core they all have the notion of faith. There are a number of ways of defining faith. Here are just a few ways that one can answer the question what is faith:

·        Believing in something you know isn’t true. I heard this brilliant answer coming out of the mouth of a six year old girl. At a philosophical level it’s a paradox, but at the same time it expresses a lot of how faith is perceived in almost all religions. Of course, it refers to the fact that you can’t see the things you have faith in. You can just believe they exist and that is enough. Most religions argue that you can only see the truth after you die, and that’s when you will understand the true meaning of faith. It’s when you get to know that everything you believed during your life time to be true, even though you have never seen it, is either validated or invalidated.

·        Believing in something in spite of scientific evidence. Of course this is a very debatable subject. First of all it is because it depends on how you take the word of a holy book, for example the bible. If you take every word by its literal meaning than it is definite that faith contradicts science. And that is a problem, because science is based on evidence, while faith has no basis. You can’t apply reasoning or scientific arguments to faith. The other path, that seems a bit more enlightened, is to take the word of the bible as being metaphorical. This way, all the stories, that invoke miracles and other supernatural events, become more of a collection of morals, of ways to behave, of teachings. This version of faith, more in the conceptual form than in the actual words, isn’t necessarily in opposition to science.

·        Seeing the work of an omnipotent god at work in every little aspect of your life. This is a very accurate way of describing what faith is for most people. Of course this is just a pure speculation because if you put this theory to mathematical scrutiny, you will find very quickly that it is a beautiful paradox. Because you can find in everything around you the work of god. If something happens, it can be interpreted as the hand of god. If something doesn’t happen, again, it is still proof of god. So, basically everything becomes a proof of your faith. This definitely sounds like a compelling argument for those who have faith. Of course proving everything in this sense is equal to proving nothing.

·        Faith is sometimes confused with intuition. I think this is a distinction that needs to be made. If you want to know what is faith, than you should probably think of it as something more than intuition. Intuition is basically the leap that you make for obtaining an answer, based only on instinct, but that you can subsequently prove as being correct by using logic. Of course it is a very interesting thing altogether, being able to see the answer before you prove it logically, but that is not what we are here to discuss. Faith is more than intuition, because faith means knowing the answer, but also having the knowledge that you are not able to prove it to anybody by using logic.

The subject revolving around the question what is faith is a very tricky and at the same time, a very vast one.  There can never be any definite answers in this domain. You either have faith or you don’t. You can’t explain it thoroughly to somebody else because it is a very intimate feeling, and at the same time, it is something that you can’t impose on people. Faith should be discovered by everybody in the intimacy of their heart and soul. So, faith can be considered as good thing because it gives people hope, and at the same time, it gives people the knowledge that everything we do on this Earth is quantifiable, therefore behaving in a good manner, will bring a reward, and at the same time, the opposite is also true. Faith is important until the point where it leads to fanaticism.

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