Hello!
The word faith, belief in something for which there is insufficient evidence, has some obviously negative connotations for our community of skeptics and secularists, but of course, it has many shades of meaning beyond the purely religious.
There’s the faith we place in each other, where it’s more synonymous with trust. For example, we may or may not know our local pharmacists on a personal level, but we tend to have faith in their expertise and trust in their guidance when it comes to our medications and treatments. This week, we’re urging pharmacists to be worthy of that trust by refraining from recommending useless homeopathic products to patients. President Biden has just reinstituted the White House’s “faith-based initiatives” office, which asks us to have faith in their intention to include explicitly secular organizations, and we will just have to see if they can earn it. We already know how the current Supreme Court feels about the primacy of religious faith, and we have all the evidence we need to recognize this court’s hostility toward science and secularism.
The ultimate extreme comes in the form of QAnon, where an unquestioning faith in absurd conspiracy theories has infested our political institutions. We’ll learn more about what drives this form of faith as well. If only our society put more stock in science-based initiatives! The incredibly quick development of effective COVID-19 vaccines is a testament to the power of science and reason over magical thinking. And now, another science-based initiative is about to attempt to land a soil-probing robot on another planet. We of course can’t know for sure whether it will be successful, but given what we know, we can have some faith, trust, and hope. Robyn E. Blumner,
CEO and President, Center for Inquiry
Executive Director, Richard Dawkins Foundation
