I never thought even in my dreams that I will be writing under the title that sits proudly on top of this text. It looks absurd to start with and it is not clear what it means either. Does logic of faith means under what logic it makes sense to have faith or does it starts with faith and figures out its consequences logically? Let’s dive in.
Faith has many meanings. The usual one is linked to belief in God. When I use the word Faith in this article, I will use a slightly tighter definition.
Faith is our belief in goodness in others, the ones we don’t know personally.
As any society scales, most people don’t know most people. The social brain barrier is breached. Given that Dunbar’s Number is around 150, to scale beyond that number social brain needs help. Two historical techniques to deal with this problem are: symbolised faceless authority and faith. Both these techniques help in scaling society to a larger number of people and give us everything that has better returns as society scales.
Symbolised faceless authority is something like police or soldier or priest or doctor or fire-fighter, etc. Since it is impossible for people to personally know many people, how do they understand when to obey authority? And even more basic who is authority? Scaling society under authority requires threat of violence and recognition of symbols of authority. The symbols could be how someone is dressed or their hair style or helmet or colour of dress or which transport they use. The specifics don’t matter, all we care about at neurological level is just distinct enough for our brain to identify and fear. The term faceless means the person wearing those symbols is not important and replaceable at will. It is not surprising that large armies need medals and stars etc on their dress to communicate the hierarchical authority structure even within itself.
Faith is the second alternative. If we can’t know all the people and our fates are intertwined with them as we live in the same society, one way to scale is simply to have faith in goodness of others. It is not true. It can’t be derived rationally from anything else. It is a free variable. Except, if people have faith, it does becomes true, a self fulfilling prophecy. Faith, and of course unconditional faith because that is the only kind that matters, is a logically sound way to scale a society, just like authority, with predictable results. It proves its existence by excercising a social choice. If most people are unconditionally good to others, our brain from experience will learn that most people are unconditionally good to others and will in turn be good to others. Assuming brain works, this is as trivial as it gets. Faith makes it predictable by assuming its existence. For those who are aware of it, this is simple application of induction. In economics such problems are called coordination problems. For example, it doesn’t really matter which side of the road we drive: left and right are equally valid choices. It is uncertainty about it which could cause problems. When a city or country decides one of the choices, people go about driving without giving it a second thought. Trusting others could potentially work in a similar fashion.
The thing that makes us human is this faculty that helps us simulate other people’s brain in our brain. Faith combined with this faculty, gives us environment of mutual trust and helps us go about helping and getting help from people we will never know or remember. Note that trust is earned over time and we don’t have enough neural capacity to remember and enough time to spend with everyone to establish trust. But if trust can be a matter of faith, we don’t have to. And that means scale.
World as it exists, has no problem with its own existence. It is us who call whatever we understand and perhaps can control: order and whatever we can’t: chaos. Order and chaos are just mental constructs that tell us nothing about the world, but the mind of the person making that distinction. Inability to scale at social level comes in the form of internal fights within a society. Division and death decrease the complexity of social scale. We don’t fight with our enemies, we simply fail to deal with complexity and diversity of society at some scale. We just fail as a society to comprehend everyone that is part of it.
Be it saying like ‘do good and it will come back to you multiplied’ or ‘do in Rome as Romans do’ are all examples of faith at work. May be the copy cat behaviour in us a genetic bias to help us get along and scale and perhaps scale has survival advantage.
Whatever we want be it sex, consoling, food, shelter, acceptance, appreciation, skills, role models, etc all comes from others or help of others. If God is not what is good in each one of us for others, I am not sure what is. Faith then is just a choice left to us. We can beat around the bush and prove it is irrational as it comes from nothing. Or we can have faith in goodness of others we don’t know and enjoy the fruits of scalable trustable society. Faith, howsoever counter intuitive it might feel, is a logically sound strategy to scale society, but tragically only if everyone has it.
