Stepping Into the Fog

When I was a graduate student at Southern Methodist University I had the opportunity to study under Schubert M. Ogden. Although not exactly a household name, Ogden nevertheless was a brilliant and creative thinker who has since taken a very active retirement. In any case, I bring him up this morning because there's fog in the hayfield. When I woke up, it was only a tiny sliver along the treeline but in the past hour it's grown to the point that I almost feel like I'm living in a cloud bank.

Now what has fog got to do with Ogden? Well, it's like this. He once said that every human being lives on the premise of a basic faith that life is worth living. This is not religious faith as such, but simply the confidence that getting up in the morning is a worthwhile endeavor. He went on to suggest that this is, indeed, a faith decision because there really is no scientific or empirical evidence that living is preferable to the alternative.

This is very interesting. The newest buzzword in medicine is "evidence-based" and it refers to the idea that decisions should be based on the results of careful testing and the analysis of data. How could anyone determine that life was worth living based on empirical testing? Could we design a placebo-controlled double-blind clinical trial, such as is used in drug testing, to validate the premise? Forgive me if I sound ridiculous, but what would constitute a placebo? In drug testing, benign substances like a sugar pill are used as a comparison against the real medication. In a double-blind study neither the patient nor the tester knows who's gotten the medication and who's gotten the placebo. How can you fool someone into thinking life is worth living?

When it comes down to it, whether one likes the word "faith" or not, we go about our lives on the unspoken and, perhaps, unconscious notion that living is more meaningful than not. And that's one of the things that keeps us going. I can't see the hayfield for the fog bank, but that doesn't mean the hayfield is no longer there. It just means I can't trust my senses for valid evidence of its existence. If I want to walk out into the hayfield, I have to walk through the fog trusting my feet will find the ground.

Some would say I've simply made an assumption based on previous experience and faith has nothing to do with it. In point of fact, faith has everything to do with it. Faith has gotten a bad rap over the years and some would suggest it is both irrational and the activity of the uninformed. It is neither. Faith gathers and evaluates information and then acts on the basis of what is most persuasive. That is a rational process. We may not think about whether getting up in the morning is a good idea or not, but the fact that we do it means that at some point we decided it was better than the alternative. And that is a rational process, too.

Stepping out into the foggy hayfields of life may not always seem logical but that doesn't mean it's irrational. It just means a person has evaluated the information using criteria that is personally significant and decided on that basis. We may not always understand what drives a person and what motivates one might not motivate another. But however we live, sometime, somewhere, and in some way, we've decided that living is a pretty good idea. And that alone, is an act of faith.

(Creative Commons image by David Yu via Flickr)