It’s ironic to me that the inverse of this question would be far less controversial. If we were asked whether or not the state of our belief was affected by the state of our physical health, there would be, I suspect, broad agreement. Those who are comfortable with faith would regale us with tales of spiritual awareness that came at moments of illness, extreme physical suffering, or great physical accomplishments.
Those who think that faith is “nothing more” than an electro-chemical or neuro-biological reaction in the brain, would see evidence for their conclusion in the fact that people under physical stress experience new mental states which help them to explain or cope with new realities. But because the issue here is whether or not faith is real in the physical sense, we are likely to see some genuine disagreements. I wonder if that is even necessary.
This issue is not whether or not “one believes” that faith affects our health, because it is a scientific fact that it does. My hunch is that each of us has had the experience of pulling ourselves together emotionally, or insisting to ourselves that we can overcome a specific challenge and experience a newfound strength that helps us to achieve our desired goal. That is no less a matter of faith simply because it is momentary faith in ourselves than it would be if we called upon God, Jesus, Allah, or any other Divine name in whom we might believe.
The issue is what we mean by faith and how we understand the effect. And no, this does not mean that I think one can believe their cancer away, or visualize an end to the global epidemics of malaria or AIDS. That would be “new age nonsense.” It simply means that contemporary science has demonstrated what traditional faiths have long believed, i.e. that there is no gap between what we call our physical selves and what we have called at different moments in human evolution, our spiritual, psychological, or emotional selves.
We don’t need to affirm our faith in an old man in the sky who will swoop down and fix us if we just offer up the correct ritual or prayer in order to recognize that our minds or souls, at least for the time being, are a part of our bodies, and that the dynamics of each effects the other. Although, I would point out that for many of us who have suffered, especially through the illness of someone we loved, that the offering of such prayers to that personal poppa in the sky can be very comforting.
Moreover, the comfort that comes along with turning to that God is very healing, even if only for the one offering the prayer, and even if it comes from turning to the God we usually reject, because intellectually we are uncomfortable with a God who would fix my kid and not the kid in the next bed. Does that make us hypocrites? No, it makes us real. It means that we recognize the struggle between the God we may need, and the dangers of invoking that God in ways that belittle the suffering of others as some kind of sacred necessity. But that’s for another post.
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