Faith

The concept of faith is often cited as that ethereal ingredient which connects man to divine, notwithstanding its slavish implications. 

In the days of yore, when civilizations were cradling to life, the curiosity of many  a man was quenched by invoking divinity. Gods were beings of supreme power, and sometimes wisdom, who knew the answers to those worries that ailed the early human's mind. They at once seemed to answer all the burning queries and provided a purpose to life. A marvellous invention! Faith was necessary for the Ego of man to believe that it had the answer to everything, that it was special.  The ignorance of man was thus replaced by the wisdom of the unknowable. The divine rug covered all. Delusion flourished. Yet discomfort lingered on in the minds of few. They eventually challenged the scriptural propaganda of the He-who-knows-all.  Science loomed ominously in the horizon.

Although at some level all sciences need axioms, which are similar to faith, the real merit of science is the capability of making falsifiable predictions. The concept of a deity who knows all cannot predict anything. Seen in another way such an entity is in fact a measure of scientific ignorance*. Thus the more scientific knowledge we amass, either the kingdom of this entity shrinks or humans become more divine. Either way the pedestal wobbles increasingly with time.

Probably there are things that are fundamentally unknowable ( Godel's incompleteness theorem, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, etc) and a god or two may lurk in these sublime crevices of logic. But there is an important distinction: these unknowabilities are quantifiable. In other words one can precisely estimate where ignorance begins and how. This knowledge of ignorance eventually begets more knowledge.

Faith is a crutch one certainly needs to start tapping into the cumulative human knowledge, but it is unnecessary beyond a point. Unfortunately this point is non-universal.




* The assumption that all knowledge is necessarily scientific maybe incorrect. But all impersonal or, objective  knowledge is most likely scientific. Although both subjective and objective knowledge are potentially consequential, the only knowledge retained over time is the objective one.