Religion Case

Analyse the strengths and weaknesses of using faith as basis for knowledge in religion and in one area of knowledge from the TOK diagram.

Faith is not an element which is present when an individual is born. Faith gradually builds up in one's life through their own experiences. As a person matures in life there is as well an increase in fineness of the thought process of the person as common sense strengthens. As said by George Seaton "faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to" can signify that faith is blind. For instance when a baby is born, it blindly has faith that the person who is near it is its mother. Hence does not need any sort of evidence to build up. Religion is an area where faith plays pivotal role, as faith is considered to be the basis for knowledge in this area. As religion is where a set of people share the same cultural and belief systems. A religion relates humanity to spirituality and at times connects itself to moral values. The sources of gaining knowledge in religion are through the holy books, religious preachers, cultural heritage, monuments, sculptures, prayer places (temple, mosque and church) and from one's own family.

Faith is one of the only common area which is found in each and every religion of our planet. Faith is one of the ways to gain knowledge in religion. Ethics and religion are closely connected since belonging to a certain religion simply means following a set of ethical rules set by the religion.

A religion follows a set of rituals, which are like old stories. We cannot be entirely certain when they started and how much they have changed over time. What we do know is that like stories that have morals, rituals too are filled with wisdom and people belonging to a particular religion build up rigid faith on these ritual. Due to the existence of rituals, scholars have contemplated their origins and role in society. Philosophers, sociologists, historians and biologists all have complied theories on the need for rituals and their persistence despite the passage of time. Hence this proves the fact that people gain knowledge in religion partly from these rituals, but it would be wrong to consider that all the people belonging to a particular religion will follow these rituals and as life became busier in the modern days the people are not having the time to properly follow the rituals and hence this results in them performing the rituals for name sake rather than from heart as they lack faith in these rituals, this leads to the weakness of faith in religion as its impossible to convince every person belonging to a single religion to agree with the same set of rules.

Faith cannot itself generate knowledge as it is impossible to convince everyone to have faith in the same particular aspect as the others, hence it is subjective for instance a people with a scientific background has faith in the idea that the before earthquakes the small creatures behave in an unusual manner since they believe that small creatures can sense the changes in magnetic field which precedes a major earthquake because of their sensitive body receptors which can even sense the movement of an electron. On the other hand an ordinary person as well can reach this conclusion through continuous keen observations and without any sort of faith in science that the creatures do behave differently before an earthquake. In this case having faith in the concept of "unusual behaviour of the before earthquakes" is not wrong as there has been a certain amount of knowledge which has been obtained but the way it has been obtained is inaccurate as 2 different people having faith in two totally different concepts with the same conclusion knowledge of the unusual behaviour of the creatures that small creatures, hence it cannot be 100% reliable.

The belief in a religion on the concept of contraception has taken many turns as the years passed by. The concept of using contraception in religions like Christianity, Islam and Hinduism was believed was a wrong act as contraception were considered as the barrier to a natural process, this can be held as the appropriate knowledge in the 20th century because of the low levels of population and high degrees of unsafe contraception but in the modern days i.e. the 21th century the belief in this concept does not hold as an appropriate knowledge due to the advancement in science which leads to high degrees of safe contraception and due to the large population measures should be taken to control the birth rate. Belief in this case should be altered in order to cop up with rapid changes in our world in order to gain appropriate knowledge.

Advancements in sciences has