The Marginalian revisits a distinction that Alan Watts drew in his 1951 book "The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety." The essay situates Watts among a long line of writers and scientists who have tried to reconcile spiritual life with the scientific attitude, including Carl Sagan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Lightman, Albert Einstein, Flannery O'Connor and Jane Goodall, and presents Watts as one of the most articulate voices on the question.
Watts insists on a clear distinction between belief and faith because, in common usage, belief has come to mean almost the opposite of faith. He defines belief as the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief"—or wish—it to be. The person who holds beliefs, he argues, will open his mind to the truth only on condition that it fits with preconceived ideas and wishes.
Faith, by contrast, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. It has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. In Watts's phrase, "Belief clings, but faith lets go." Understood this way, he says, faith is the essential virtue of science and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.
Watts connects this inner openness to the historical moment. He writes that the present phase of human thought and history almost compels us to face reality with open minds. For him, an open mind is the only way to know God, just as a clear window is the only way to see the sky; if the glass is covered with blue paint, the sky remains hidden.
He also warns that some "religious" people resist the "scraping of the paint" from the glass. Those who regard the scientific attitude with fear and mistrust, and who confuse faith with clinging to certain ideas, are, in his view, curiously ignorant of the laws of spiritual life that they might find in their own traditional records.
A careful study of comparative religion and spiritual philosophy, Watts argues, reveals that abandoning belief, letting go of a future life for one's own, and ceasing to escape from finitude and mortality is a regular and normal stage in the way of the spirit. He calls this a "first principle" of spiritual life and suggests that learned theologians should therefore adopt a cooperative attitude toward the critical philosophy of science.
The Marginalian closes by noting that "The Wisdom of Insecurity" is the kind of book that stays with a reader for life, and points readers to Watts's related reflections on money versus wealth and on becoming who you really are.
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