To affirm life fully: the seventh
faith characteristic listed in Alton’s letter can best be appreciated from
focusing on human traits that are unique for mankind. Faith appears to be one such uniquely human phenomenon. While we can project faith upon an animal (such
as we do with the pig in the movie Babe),
or use it to describe an animal as when we refer to a faithful dog; the stark
reality may well be that no other animal has faith as understood and
experienced by the human mind—the human brain recently described in a forum as
perhaps the most complex structure in the universe. A closely allied characteristic to faith is the
creative power of thought called imagination.
Faith and imagination go together.
While other animals can affirm life, none other than man has the
capacity to affirm it fully. For reality
can only be understood and affirmed though the active engagement of the
imagination. Whether a physicist is conceiving
nuclear structure, or a scientist the double helix, or an astronomer the black
hole, or whether someone is devising a recipe for tonight’s supper; imagination
is inherently involved in affirming life fully.
Faith without imagination would be impossible, as would imagination
without faith. Affirming life fully concerns
not only the understanding of physical systems and phenomena, but of the intangible
world as well. These include the
qualities that are represented in human relationships as well as the conditions
that reside in ethical and spiritual systems.
Faith and imagination both require and are at home with
abstraction. Faith to affirm life fully
requires imagination to help infer reality.
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