Time Magazine and the healing power of faith

The February 23rd issue of Time had a cover story on the healing power of faith. This week's Inbox (i.e. letters to the editor) has an interesting collecting of responses to that issue of Time, but what I am intrigued by is the utter confusion of the supposedly rational responses to the articles. However it is not so surprising when the original articles are equally confused.

There at least three quite distinct but related constructs at work in this issue. Firstly there is faith - hard to measure but without doubt a human attribute. Faith does not require that the thing in which faith is placed is reliable or even exists - in much the same way that a person can feel love towards a fictional character or a dead person.

Secondly there is religion. This is a human activity and a social construct. Religion and religious activity clearly exist. They don't need to be wholesome. They can be riddled with hypocrisy. However it is a demonstrable fact that religious (not spirtual, sacred, holy or godly) activity exists.

Thirdly there is deism - the belief in a power or powers, generally considered benign and beyond human control.

These are partially inter-related but certainly not born of the same egg.

Maheshkumar Mathilakath I think gives the best summary of the whole issue in his letter from the U.A.E: "Perhaps it is the persevering faith of the patient and not God or the doctor that actually heals."

You can have faith without god or religion. You can have god without religion and without a formalised faith. And you can have religion without faith or god. In much the same way that apples continued to fall to the ground in much the same way after Newton conceived of the force of gravity as they did before his insight, so faith will have its own characteristics (which can be studied in an objective, sound, methodical way) regardless of the interpretation placed on faith from either a religious or a deist point of view. The activities of religion may strengthen faith, and if a diety has the power to influence faith that might also help. But the study of the power of faith should be just that. Don't deny the phenomenon just because you don't like the interpretation and mythologizing that accompanies the phenomenon.