Faith and the unbelievable

Every day we witness countless testimonies to what the mental turbulence we experience in the face of modernist positivist scientism does to our beliefs. Yet it is not only Muslims who are exposed to the hegemony of positivist rationalism. Christians are exposed to this threat as well, and we generally assume that they surrender more unquestioningly. On this subject, I would like to leave you with a passage from an article by the famous Catholic philosopher John D. Caputo, which I recently translated and which was published in issue 71 of Tezkire. It is a summary of a section of the text. We will discuss it later:

“He (the Phronimos) is a prudent man and does not do foolish things. He knows what his chances are, and he decides by carefully judging that a risk is worth taking. So when he believes in something, we can be assured that he has good reasons to believe it, that is, that it is quite credible. What he believes is trustworthy and his naivety is guaranteed. His thinking is not the highest realization of faith but moderation; it is not believing in too many things too easily, nor believing in too few things with too much resistance. For he believes in things only to the extent that they are guaranteed and reasonable. But this means that he believes in something only to the extent that he sees it to be so, and where the evidence is greatest and the actual belief required is least. Because his beliefs are organized around the principle of the possible (here, the probable or likely), he always prefers situations that require the least belief and make the most evidence possible. When the scale of probabilities works against him, he will give up his belief and place his trust elsewhere. Therefore it is not faith but evidence that has won his heart, and at this point he sees faith as a kind of supplement, or a prosthesis it uses while waiting for all the evidence that comes to support its real act.

Indeed, when things look a little incredible, isn't that when faith is needed most? Is faith not faith only to the degree that believing in certain things is impossible? We need faith precisely when the odds are against us, when everyone thinks it is madness to go on, when certain things begin to seem unbelievable. Faith is not faith in certain reasonable or similar cases: in such cases the matter is not one of faith but of a calculation of probabilities. Faith is faith only in unbelievable cases. That is, when we need faith in order to go on, just to keep going.

Let us think of an innocent person who has been unjustly accused of wrongdoing. At first his friends believe in his innocence and gather around to support him, especially in the early days, when they do not know the story and when the facts are on his side. But when the tide of evidence turns against this person, the most wholehearted among his friends gradually vanish, and the crowd of his audience begins to thin. For they are, alas, disciples of the principle of the possible, and they shrink and flee from the axiom of the impossible. They believe in things only when they are believable, that is, reasonable, which is the case where believing in something requires only a minimum of faith....

But this poor person, under this unjust accusation, in the darkest hour of midnight, where he is condemned as guilty by the whole world and all the evidence is against him, needs friends precisely at this extreme point that requires maximum faith. To go on believing in this person at a time when everything shows him to be guilty, at the point where it seems unbelievable, this is faith, the ultimate realization of a person's faith in a friend, a faith tried and tested in the fire of the impossible. The others are merely fair-weather or good-time friendships, the hesitant firm-friend support that heads for the door at the first trouble.

Faith is not reducible to believing in things as long as they are believable; it is rather believing in things that have become unbelievable, when it has become impossible to believe them. Only the impossible can melt the steel of faith. At this extreme point, in this darkest hour, when our reason against the impossibility of believing and going on increases, only then do we believe. Before that, we were merely in a game of poker, playing the odds. At this point we reach one of the thresholds of our experience, a limit or extreme situation where our powers and potentials reach a breaking point, and we realize that we have entered a realm we cannot control, where our command does not run; then we begin to believe in God, or in whatever else, God knows what, because it is something that is not in our hands. This is one of the ways in which the name of ‘God’ enters the realm of our ‘experience.’ For God to be accepted, for the name of God to come onto the stage, the walls of the possible must be torn down and the experts of the possible must leave the stage. For we surrender to God in the experience of the impossible, when we reach our own limits and admit that we do not know what we are doing.

‘I believe in you, I trust you, whatever you are accused of, even if the whole world condemns you as guilty, I will stand by you. From now until the end I will believe the unbelievable. And I entrust you to Allah. I will pray for you and ask Allah to watch over you. For with Allah everything is possible, even the impossible! For us, with our limited powers, it is impossible, but for Allah it is possible. For Allah makes the crooked straight and makes the lamb lie down with the lion. God protects and watches over the little ones, and cares not for the ninety-nine in the fold but for the strange one lost outside. The name of God is the name of the One who can make this possible, even if it is impossible. For God is the giver of all good gifts, especially of the impossible ones. This is what we mean by God, this is what the name God means.

... entering into an experience is taking a risk, braving the stormy seas of the impossible, putting ourselves in danger when common sense asks us to stay close to land and keep the shoreline in view, staking ourselves when the odds are against us. The experience of God is ‘seeing’ the hand of God in the course of events, taking the course of experience as if under God's guidance, finding a loving hand, a divine favor that others may chance upon, such that when something happens it is as if it were a grace, not a coincidence, spontaneous and willed. But grace is not the grace of a chance. It is partly coincidental, but its spontaneity is the work of a divine mercy.”