I’ve finished The Selfish Gene, a book written by a famous biologist Richard Dawkins. It is a book that give a new face for the evolution theory. A book that discuss the role of our gene in the evolution process.
I am not interested to argue whether the preposition of the argument proposed by Dawkins is correct or not, for I am not a biologist or zoologist. I am more interested in a part of the book. A phrase to be more precise, a phrase that further been elaborated in the end notes of the book. The phrase that sounds “blind faith can justify anything”.
It is undeniably true that without knowledge, having faith in something that you don’t know will lead to more foolishness. But, the phrase in the book seems like directed to religion which I feel not true at all.
You see, not all religion were based on blind faith. There are some, of course type of religion that have this but you cannot generalized the phrase on all religion. Islam for example give space for its follower to question anything that they might think confusing, even if you read the Qur’an, you’ll find a lot of verse that stressed the importance of thinking, which mean that faith have no problem with reason.
Having faith doesn’t mean that you have to abandon reason, in fact reason is the tool to strengthen faith. So, when someone said that being religious is the opposite of thinking clearly with reason, that is just absurd. Maybe you don’t believe in God because you don’t see the experimental evidence of its existence, but you can’t prove that it doesn’t exist either.