Faith and the Unknown

The ‘academic consensus” of the Modern Age is that Faith is dead, stabbed to death by the Natural Sciences, Reason, and Empiricism. Modernity says all knowledge and information, can be reduced to material properties and physical interactions, aka Naturalism.  While I find this absurd, I am more concerned with why such a belief is existentially damning.

What is Love? This question can be addressed through a variety of referential mediums. The physical, chemical, sociological, theological, the list goes on. But one thing characteristic of all of these mediums is they do not address the being itself doing the loving, they never address Love as a subjective experience, only an objective one, only an act in reference to other things outside the thing loving. Naturalism cannot explain the subjectivity of Love, that the I, a conscious being, experiences it, and experiences it solely and only in reference to itself.  Naturalism will never be able to accurately explain this, but the bigger problem is it has not explained it

Which is exactly the irony of the Dawkins types. Dawkins may laugh at my belief in the soul, but it would only be fair to laugh back due to his belief that mental properties, consciousness and subjectivity somehow arise out of material substances and physical interactions. The only difference would be I recognize my belief rests upon Faith, while he does not.

So is Faith dead? Surely not, it’s more alive than ever, and its more arrogant and full of hubris amongst individuals who deny its validity. Faith is everywhere, everything rests on it. The denial of this fact, especially on the societal scale, results in the disaster of Modernity, as this error radically corrupted the West's view of the human person. The current cultural depravity is partly due to the inability to accept Faith as not only necessary but valid. With the denial of Faith came the denial of God and all the Goodness He entails. Faith is the wisdom of Unknowability, the perception of the Infinitely Ungraspable, a Divine Mystery. Through this, beauty is retained, as beauty requires mystery, at least in our current sinful state.

The necessary end to alienation is not through more reason but in acceptance of life’s unknowable truths. Truths which can be sensed and actualized by the individual, while reaping their benefits without understanding every detail. We need to leave the unknowable to be known by the All-Knowledgeable, and live as we feel we must.