Through Agustine’s works, Wilken argues and defends the position that faith is unavoidable and beneficial. Through the reading, it is clearly emphasized how faith is key to seek out knowledge, and how believing and trusting witnesses is essential to this. Wilken starts of by citing Saint Augustine to argue that “nothing would remain stable in human society if we determined to believe only what can be held with absolute certainty.”; and I really agree with this statement. I agree as it links to the fact that humans are born with the “desire to know the truth” and we are encouraged to question everything; we seek knowledge and faith is a very important source of knowledge that many question. One very good example that emphasizes trust and faith is the one in which Wilken describes the fact that “a child cannot know with absolute certainty who his father is unless he believes what his mother tells him”. The child chooses to believe and trust the word of this authority, and this happens in the same way when we choose to trust and have faith in what we are taught about God and through the Bible.
Although the religious faith is a different kind of faith, the same thing happens with historical events, events which you “cannot run an experiment to verify” and events that we choose to believe. Faith is a “constituent part of historical knowledge” as we cannot provide witnesses for every historical event nor physical and malleable proof; in the same way that you can’t see love but you do know and trust that feeling, you cannot see faith either. And this perfectly exemplifies the unavoidable nature of religious faith as, like Wilken describes, we “trail our thoughts behind the truths of others.”
I think it is beneficial because everything relies on faith, like I mentioned above, if we decided not to trust our mom on who are father is, or if we decided not to trust history everything would be more complex and life would become hard to live. By choosing to trust I think that we open our hearts to each other and this brings us together as a community and as a whole.
carlotastheoblog 