Why do we consider "faith" to be a virtue?

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

116. Carl Sagan's movie "Contact" was pretty interesting

Jodie Foster was a scientist and discounted faith in favor of the empirical, the palpable, and the tangible. The world preferred to send someone of faith to meet the aliens and all Jodie Foster had to do was lie about it and she would have been chosen but she didn't.

In a conversation with her new boyfriend Joss, the writer of religious books she can't bring herself to admit that there might be other ways of knowing the universe than just using her scientific method.

Joss: "...I had … an experience. Of belonging. Of unconditional love. And for the first time in my life I wasn’t terrified, and I wasn’t alone..."

Ellie: "And there’s no chance you had this experience simply because some part of you needed to have it?"

Joss: "...Look, I’m a reasonable person, and reasonably intelligent. But this experience went beyond both. For the first time I had to consider the possibility that intellect, as wonderful as it is, is not the only way of comprehending the universe. That it was too small and inadequate a tool to deal with what it was faced with..."


And yet by the end of the film, Jodie Foster has a personal experience that she couldn't prove or comprehend. She could only appreciate it through her subjective belief that it happened to her and wasn't a hallucination.

"Dr. Arroway, you come before us with no evidence. No records, no artifacts–only a story that–to put it mildly–strains credibility. Over half a trillion dollars was spent, dozens of lives were lost. … Are you really going to sit there and tell us that we should simply take this all on faith?"

"Because I can’t. I had … an experience. I can’t prove it. I can’t even explain it. All I can tell you is that everything I know as a human being, everything I am–tells me that it was real.

I was given something wonderful. Something that changed me. A vision of the universe that made it overwhelmingly clear just how tiny and insignificant–and at the same time how rare and precious we all are. A vision … that tells us we belong to something greater than ourselves … that we’re not–that none of us–is alone.

I wish I could share it. I wish everyone, if only for a moment–could feel that sense of awe, and humility … and hope. That continues to be my wish. ..."


I loved this movie and I think Carl Sagan saw the issue of faith as something hard to explain but something that science can't just dismiss too easily. We can't even understand why a mass of cells, nerves, and blood make us self-aware and able to use the scientific method. I think there are in fact other ways of understanding the universe than simply using logic and science. I can't really feel confident in dismissing one way over the other. I just know that I respect someone like a Shaman or Zen master who truly believes and subjectively experiences other worlds or states of being. I don't respect individuals who lie about having faith to gain an advantage, like Dr. Drumlin (Tom Skerritt) did.