Do you think faith can be a useful tool (in a non-religious context)?

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Lars Hildebrandt quotes Randall Wilks by saying, “those blinded by faith will never know truth.” I’d like to offer a counterpoint. Faith is one of those things you need to pick up the trick of before you can ever really get close to truth. Sure, if it’s blinding you, then you won’t learn that truth either. But you’re still closer to it than if you never had it.

An example is in order. Just today, a friend of mine was telling me how his wife is better at learning certain aspects of computer programming better than he is. I told him that among the other things his wife would be better than him at, such as retaining knowledge, his wife had the advantage of having faith in the process of being taught by someone, this was something he never had.

Rather than being able to take advantage of the fact that other people learned these things before he did and was willing to teach him, (me) he chose to go and learn all those lessons himself. Oh he eventually got there in the end, because while he didn’t have faith in me teaching him, he had faith in his ability to learn. He just wasn’t able to learn as fast as his wife is, just by virtue of not being willing to work together with someone.

Faith is the willingness to operate without evidence as if something were already true. It allows you to not constantly shift course in the face of conflicting feedback you’re getting because you’re not good enough yet to control that feedback. It’s the classic ‘fool’s luck’, a fool doesn’t realize the difficulty of the task he’s been handed, so he doesn’t even think that failure is a serious option, so he’s less likely to fail. When you believe in the ultimate benevolence of the universe, you’re much more likely to get lucky than if you have more ‘cynical’ ideas about the likely outcome of events.

This is faith taken outside of a religious context, but it works the exact same way inside the religious context. In fact, having religious faith makes it much much much much much much much easier to have the sort of faith I refer to above than not having it. Religious people are said to be happier on the whole than nonreligious people, this is why. If you actually do it right, and believe in the omnibenevolence of the universe through God, than you’re far less likely to get in your own way about stuff.