Faith v. Certainty

Faith is the expectation that certain actions or occurrences will, in fact, become reality. Certainty, on the other hand, is the sure knowledge that an action or an occurrence has or will become reality.


For example: We have absolute certainty that the sun will rise in the morning. We know this not only from our science classes, where (hopefully) we learned about the conservation of angular momentum as applied to the rotation of the Earth, but also from personally observed evidence that we see every day of our own lives. Faith could be expressed as the expectation that we would be alive to see that sunrise. We have no definitive proof that we will survive that long, but we have the hope (faith) that we will probably live long enough to witness that certainty.

Probably? Uh, What?

Faith, you see, really all rests upon the probability of an outcome. Most of us can rely upon the probability that we can get into our motorcar, hurtle ourselves along a narrow, twisty asphalt roadway at 90 feet per second, avoid the oncoming cars also traveling at the same speed, missing them by only a few feet, and arrive at our destination completely unscathed. We do it all of the time. Those probabilities, statistically, are really pretty good. We have the required faith to place ourselves in that situation. But, if you add alcohol consumption and an ice storm to that equation, those good probabilities will rapidly deteriorate, statistically making the planned outcome far less certain, and, perhaps, our faith would need some reasonable re-evaluation.

If, like many of us, you are an atheist, and have ever discussed with a believer your reasonable lack of faith in gods or deities, you have undoubtedly been questioned on how you can hold to the certainty of your convictions. Do you, the believer asks, have the absolute certainty that you are not wrong, and that your tormented soul will be not be condemned to spend all of eternity (what ever that really is) stoking the fires of Hell? Of course you don't. But what you do have is a reasonable degree of certainty that your views are correct.

In other words, you are certain enough.

Very few reasonable adults have faith that unicorns exist. Granted, there may be a faithful few, but if they talked much about it, most people would think that they were crazy. But, let us suppose that a lot of people believed in unicorns, and it was socially acceptable to discuss unicorns, extolling their many virtues and mysteries in a way that gave credence to the idea that they are real and yet unknowable. Would faith in these unproved claims validate the unicorn’s existence as certainty?

No, of course not, you are certain enough that there would be no such thing.

And that would be a reasonable degree of faith that you can believe in.