Hence, Faith

We're studying Rene Descartes in my philosophy class right now. He's most famous for his thought "I think; therefore, I am," but what's even more interesting is how he got to the point where it made sense for him to say that.

At some point in his life, Descartes became aware of the fact that some of the things he thought he knew turned out not to be true. This caused him to doubt some other things he thought he was sure of, and he decided to (at least temporarily) forget everything he thought he knew and see if he could find anything he could know for certain, starting completely from scratch.

This was no easy task, given how thoroughly he discarded everything that could be doubted. He decided that he couldn't rely on religion or science or even his own senses for information that was completely beyond doubt. He believed that everything he had been told and everything he was perceiving could have been just a large collection of lies and illusions.

He even questioned his own existence at one point, but he figured that if he was having all of these doubts, he must exist, because if he didn't exist, he wouldn't be able to think. Hence, ironically, his many doubts led to his first certainty: "I think; therefore, I am."

Now, I kind of get where Descartes was coming from with regards to his many doubts. Our professor opened the class by asking "How do we know that we are not dreaming right now?" and my answer is that we don't. Our senses could be deceiving us. We could all be brains in jars, receiving fabricated stimuli from a network of fraudulent machines, all designed to trick us into thinking that we're not brains in jars. Why anyone would set up such a system, I have no idea, but it would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove that we're not trapped in such a trick.

Hence, the need for faith. We may not know that the world is real any more than we know (really know) that God exists. Of course, we have seen signs and felt impressions, but those signs and impressions could, theoretically, have been falsified. It's entirely possible that we are all brains in jars right now and that it doesn't matter what we "do" in this simulation we're trapped in because nothing about this existence is real.

But we have faith that it is real and that it all does matter. We may not be able to prove that we actually have real bodies and that we actually live on a real Earth, but we have faith that we do. We trust God and our own senses enough to be confident that what we see and hear and feel in our hearts is real and that what we do on this Earth, because we trust that we are really doing things on a real Earth, will have eternal significance. We have faith that this all matters, even if we can't actually prove that any of it even exists.