What is this thing, faith? I’ve been giving it a lot of thought lately. It seems that in the twenty-first century, it is, among other things, faith that science hasn’t figured it all out and won’t, and that will leave room for demons, souls, and other metaphysical entities. It’s a trust that you can believe the Bible, even though there are scores of contradictions in it, and it’s clearly rooted in archaic thinking.

Take demon possession, for instance. In the New Testament, there’s a lot of exorcisms going on, and most of it seems for things like epilepsy:

Just then a man from the crowd shouted, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child. Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.”

Jesus answered, “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you? Bring your son here.”

While he was coming, the demon dashed him to the ground in convulsions. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father (Luke 9.38–42).

Today we look at this and think, “Very clearly the boy had epilepsy.” But that’s not what the Bible says. So we can take a liberal interpretation and say, “Well of course Jesus, even though he knew, would not have said, ‘Your son has epilepsy,’ because no one would have understood him or believed him. He simply healed the boy, and explained in language they could understand.” The other extreme is what my father said once: most of the people in mental hospitals today probably just have demons.

There’s also the question of the soul, which eventually could be shown to have very little to do with our personality and very little room in which to do it. Of course you can’t prove there’s not a soul, and scientists are not out to do that. What you can do, though, is show that all the things formerly associated with the soul—personality, memory, etc.—are in fact chemical reactions in the brain and nothing more.

It’s the question of faith in what, also. I know if I went through the motions, if I pretended to believe, I might eventually believe. But is that “the spirit working in me,” or a result of psychological and sociological phenomena?