Poor Science Makes for Poor Religion

Bad Faith

The Republican presidential candidates’ refusal to believe in things like global warming isn’t just bad science; it’s also very poor religion.

 We mustn’t blame them. God is a mighty difficult idea to grasp. Proof of his existence doesn’t make it any easier. Faith is required. Because faith, Moses knows, is more than believing in things we’ll never know for certain exist; faith is also the wisdom to believe in things we know for certain do.

Which brings us back to the Republicans. The adherence of so many in the party to counterfactual narratives is often explained away by faith. Just what kind of faith Rick Perry repeatedly makes clear. In a speech in Virginia earlier this week, he said that his “faith journey is not the story of someone who turned to God because I wanted to. It was because I had nowhere else to turn. I was lost spiritually and emotionally.”
Perry, then, assumes that if he trusts in God, God will tell him what to do. He believes, if we take him at his word, that he is capable of interpreting the precise and unerring will of the Creator. This is the opposite of Moses’ brand of faith. For Perry, faith comes first, and proof is unnecessary; for Moses, proof comes first, and faith must follow. Perry was lost until he found God; Moses found God first and then made his people wander in the desert for 40 years, until they were ready—intellectually as well as emotionally—to embrace what faith meant.
And what faith really means is responsibility. Because we are incapable of knowing God’s mind—and by “we” I mean decent people of all political persuasions who are humbled by their belief in God—we’re left grappling with life’s greatest mysteries by ourselves. We try, like children playing a game with rules they don’t entirely understand, to make sense of what might seem, to the unbelieving, like a cruel and random existence. All we can do is our best, and our only guide is our heart and its call for compassion.
The Israelites at Sinai didn’t understand this idea at first. They yearned for a god they could grasp, a shiny golden god, a god they believed could redeem them. It took them four decades in the wilderness to learn that only they could redeem themselves, and that faith isn’t, in itself, salvation, but merely its engine. The Republicans are now learning the same lesson. Let us hope that they, too, are headed to the wilderness, where they can wander and wonder about the true nature of faith and the dictates of personal responsibility. If they don’t, if they allow the Tea Partiers in their midst to prevail, we are all looking at decades of false idols and bad faith.

Liel Leibovitz, Tablet Magazine