Doubt and Faith: Resolving the Debate Between Science and Religion

There has been a long-standing debate between religion and science, centered around the question of faith versus the search for truth through the use of the mind and its powers. This raises several questions, however, about the type and nature of the faith, and the type and nature of the mental action. There is no necessary or irreconcilable division between them, but we need to understand the situation more in depth to find the point where they coexist and actually support one another.

It is clear that the mind and the mental process has its specific powers and its clear limitations. The mind is most competent in terms of its ability to distinguish differences, organize and categorize them, and analyze. It is less effective when looking for overarching principles or first causes. Even when it tries to develop some kind of principle, this is generally based on experience and data it has developed to date, and then this principle becomes outdated when new facts become available. Thus, the world was flat until it was round. The sun revolved around the earth until the earth rotated and revolved around the sun. The observations of the senses and the determinations by the mind were based on incomplete facts and thus, inaccurate principles were adduced. There are things the mind does very well, but determining first causes is certainly not one of them.

We turn then to the process of faith. In this case, we find that faith can either be driven by the mind and the vital nature, whereby it adopts a teaching, a dogma or a specific movement or process that satisfies a need of the mind for certainty and the vital nature for inclusion and acceptance. The books are written by men who are interpreting events with their minds and then turning these things into articles of faith. We then find dogmatic interpretations and attempts to proselytize and convert others because this is the one “true faith”. Wars have been fought over these different interpretations and many people have been tortured as a result of this type of faith.

True faith actually stems from a different part of the being, which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother call the psychic being, the seat of the true soul. The Upanishads refer to this true being as no larger than a thumb and seated in the secret heart. It is the source of the mystic fire. When it comes forward it brings with it a deeper and truer understanding and a burning flame of faith that is not troubled by different interpretations, different scriptures, different ritual practices, different emphasis that the mind may have to offer, and it is not at all troubled by the development of the mind and the growth of its knowledge. This faith is not a matter of dogma, but a matter of experience, which is in truth, the experience of the oneness of the entire creation. It is this faith that actually can intuit and understand deeply, inwardly, the principles and first causes without turning them into weapons of debate with others. This faith has no doubts, as it is rooted in a deep and abiding experience that is self-evident. It is this faith that needs to be harbored and protected as it grows in the being.

This leads then to the personal effort needed. The attention must be tuned to the psychic being, which is called aspiration. The distractions need to be minimized and removed. This is called rejection. In scientific terminology we can say that we need to tune to the ‘signal’ and reduce the ‘noise’ to strengthen the reception of the signal. The third step is called surrender, and this is essentially accepting and responding to the signal without all the distractions, in other words locking in the signal without deviation..

The Mother notes: “Some people think it is a very great mental elegance to play with ideas, to discuss them, to contradict their faith; they think that this gives them a very superior attitude, that in this way they are above ‘superstitions’ and ‘ignorance’; but if you listen to suggestions of doubt and scepticism, then you fall into the grossest ignorance and stray away from the right path. You enter into confusion, error, a maze of contradictions…. You are not always sure you will be able to get out of it. You go so far away from the inner truth that you lose sight of it and sometimes lose too all possible contact with your soul.”

“Certainly a personal effort is needed to preserve one’s faith, to let it grow within. Later — much later — one day, looking back, we may see that everything that happened, even what seemed to us the worst, was a Divine Grace to make us advance on the way; and then we become aware that the personal effort too was a grace. But before reaching that point, one has to advance much, to struggle much, sometimes even to suffer a great deal.”

“To sit down in inert passivity and say, ‘If I am to have faith I shall have it, the Divine will give it to me’, is an attitude of laziness, of unconsciousness and almost of bad-will.”

“For the inner flame to burn, one must feed it; one must watch over the fire, throw into it the fuel of all the errors one wants to get rid of, all that delays the progress, all that darkens the path. If one doesn’t feed the fire, it smoulders under the ashes of one’s unconsciousness and inertia, and then, not years but lives, centuries will pass before one reaches the goal.”

“One must watch over over’s faith as one watches over the birth of something infinitely precious, and protect it very carefully from everything that can impair it.”

“In the ignorance and darkness of the beginning, faith is the most direct expression of the Divine Power which comes to fight and conquer.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter VI Faith, pp. 63-64