The first act of bad faith is to flee what it cannot flee, to flee what it is. - Jean-Paul Sartre
Faith can be dangerous. In 1997, thirty-nine members of the Heavens Gate UFO cult happily killed themselves with drug overdoses, leaving behind upbeat suicide notes on videotape. The believers were liberating their consciousnesses from their bodily containers. Upon liberation, said consciousness would be taken aboard a spacecraft, and then transported Trekkie-style to a higher reality state, otherwise identified as The Evolutionary Level Above Human. To assist them on the journey, each believer sported new Nike track shoes, donned a Heaven’s Gate Away Team arm band, and carried $5.75 in a pants pocket. The $5.75 was an inside joke, and their way of saying, “we’ve left the building.”
It’s easy to call them crazy, but we can’t prove their beliefs were wrong. Maybe they’re looking down at us, from some extraterrestrial sphere, the way we look at reptiles, as a lower rung on the ladder. By the same measure, not being able to prove something wrong doesn’t mean that it’s right. There’s a good chance that misguided beliefs led to their demise.
Some forms of faith, specifically bad faith, result in damage, both personal and social. Cults of personality are an example, where faith is invested in a human not worthy of the trust, leaving a lot of disruption in its wake. The Nazi movement and Heaven’s Gate exist together as examples of bad faith in action.
Bad faith is why modern science was invented. Since people can obviously believe anything, faith became distrusted as a source of knowledge and The Age of Reason was born. From an Enlightened point of view, rational faith is approved, but not the irrational kind. Faith should be reasonable. The unreasonable kind leads to things like UFO cults.
What is meant by rational faith, however, is actually faith in rationality, believing that the world can be known through reasoning, logic, mathematics, and proofs. “Trust the evidence” is the mantra, even though evidence is always a matter of interpretation. We have no ultimate knowledge of anything.
A world subject to reason is only valid to the point where reasoning ends, where the rational universe, like our minds, reaches its limits. Despite all the data processing and calculations, we possess probabilities, not certainties. If something is certain, we can’t know it. There are boundaries, such as the speed of light, beyond which we cannot go, or the direction of time, which we can’t rewind. The configuration of physical reality in our universe is simply one of an unknown number of possibilities. Who knows what other realities exist beyond our own? There may not be other forms of life in this universe, but that doesn’t mean we’re alone.
We can make a case that our faith in our ability to figure things out for ourselves, to keep things rational, is another example of bad faith, reflected in the damaging results. Along with amazing discoveries, human reason has also created numerous possibilities for purposeful mass extinction, and rationales for when to use them. Eliminating our own species may be the ultimate indicator of bad faith, and, unlike the dinosaurs, we will only have ourselves to blame.
To understand bad faith more deeply, a good place to start is with Sartre. What he regarded as bad faith resulted from not keeping faith with ourselves. There are aspects of ourselves we desire to avoid, and bad faith enables the self-deception. Self-deception results in bad choices, and those choices have a material effect on our lives. Good faith, by contrast, requires what Sartre called authenticity.
Heaven’s Gate provides a clear example. The believers wanted to discard their bodies, those degrading “containers,” with all the unseemly needs, pains, and waste. By endeavoring to attain the The Evolutionary Level Above Human, they hoped to escape being what they were: human beings. In a very Freudian move, they liberated themselves from death by killing themselves. This is the bad faith of fleeing what we cannot flee.
Faith in the power of reason, making ourselves the measure of all things, empowers a similar kind of deception. It is a faith that denies our limitations, our ignorance, our inability to know the unknowable amount that lies beyond our senses and reasoning minds. As intelligent as we think we are, our intellect is most likely dwarfed by the enormity of what surpasses human rationality. To believe the universe is what we imagine it to be, denying our finite nature, is to exist in bad faith.
Good faith is based in humility, embracing our limitations, and acknowledging what we cannot perceive or know. Human authenticity accepts human reason as a useful tool, but not as a means to know the immensity that transcends us and is the source of our existence. Good faith remains open to what surpasses human understanding, to what can never be proven.
It is within the space provided by good faith, by remaining authentically human, that we can find a relationship to the Divine, to God, to the Source, to Emptiness, to all that lies outside the boundaries of our minds. Good faith leads to the enlarging of our consciousness, not its end.
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