GAMSAT Practice Essay - Faith

Faith has been an integral part of the human psyche as long as humans have existed. The most paramount example of the phenomena is religion; possibly the most hotly debated topics in history, it is a concept where different faiths collide. Reason is what sets human beings apart from other animals and allows us to transcend the limitations of the most primal senses that all creatures have in common. Some say that as our reason increasingly enables us to make discoveries and decide upon empirical truths, religious faith becomes obsolete. So are faith and reason mutually exclusive, compatible, or does one necessitate the other? One could argue that faith is the enemy of reason; that faith is a vehicle that gives us a method of maintaining our beliefs despite mountains of evidence that we are unequivocally wrong. You could go so far as to say religion has only propelled itself due to the concept of faith as it disguises illogic as something spiritual that does not require the test of reason. This is backed up if one asks the simple question – why do the majority of religious people stay within their own religion? Surely if faith and reason went hand in hand you would see more people searching for truth and in the process transitioning between beliefs, critically evaluating each. But on the contrary, faith acts as an adhesive when the overwhelming gusts of reason blow to knock our beliefs over. Claiming that faith is never contrary to reason is fallacious. When faith cannot explain what reason can, it is used 'above' reason to say that there is an explanation for the apparent contradiction; we just conveniently don't know said explanation. In other words, it is an excuse for a lack of critical thinking. The other extreme of the argument is that faith and reason necessitate each other. It is simply wrong to consider science to be a flawless, empirical reality. Scientific 'truths' are developed by humans – creatures that are flawed in themselves. It is no secret that few if any things in the world are certain; we just believe they are because of probabilities that we calculate to be admittedly, very high. But even these are based on observation through the scope of five limited human senses. The completion of our beliefs therefore require a component of faith. Moreover, science is anything but static, whereas we know that the world does not change every time our beliefs about it change. From this, isn't it a logical conclusion that human beings can't possibly uncover all truths about the world with cerainty? Surely then it is reasonable to accept that things beyond our knowledge exist and that the only way we could believe they exist is through faith. Reason is hardly a set of principles standardised for every human being to use as a litmus test to decipher truth from falsehood. Reason means something different to every human being, and it is used in different ways. People with religious faiths don't practice their religions thinking they have no logical basis outside of their own minds – that would be against human nature. They must feel as though they are using some form of reasoning to come to the conclusion which they have accepted; irrelevant of how flawed their reasoning is. Faith and reason cannot be mutually exclusive as otherwise human beings would not be able to make judgements about any phenomena. Reason is nature to human beings, and is how we develop ideas and test them, consciously or subconsciously. However, it is impossible to know anything for certain, and our range of 'confidence' in our reasoning can vary depending on what is being considered. Therefore faith must come in to complete our beliefs, despite how 'scientific' the processes we use to judge are.