One of the mind games people learn somewhere in a usual education is to ponder the question, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?”

The solipsist would say that there would be no sound, because it takes a hearer to constitute a sound — humans being the measure of all things and such.

To that, representationalists claim that we do not have actual contact in our surroundings, but that our brains re-construct the perceptual stimuli so as to make them manageable, understandable to us. Thus, we might actually hear a tree fall, but we cannot know if the sound we hear is actually the sound that that tree makes, because everyone’s ears convert the sound waves in their own manner. The philosopher and phenomenological thinker, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, coined a term, “perceptual faith”, to indicate that some things must be taken, in a modified realism, to be what we perceive them to be.

I hear what sounds like a tree falling in the forest. It does not sound to me like a jet plane, a bird singing, or a cat calling in the night air. I think, “A tree fell out there somewhere in the forest,” and my question is not what happened, but exactly where it happened. I instinctively know that a tree fell, because I have immediate trust in my perception — it is valid to me on the basis of perceptual faith.

For psychologists, this issue might be covered under the term “validity”. In reference to perceptual faith, it might be refined to refer to phenomenological validity. How accurate are our perceptions, and thus, is our faith good faith or bad faith? Good perceptual faith would be trust well founded, but bad perceptual faith would be trust ill founded.

Why? Faith that is founded on something that is not true, that is not actual, leads to mistakes. Thus, issues of philosophical or logical validity stand behind the construct of perceptual faith. In research design one might say that the philosophical validity, the question of the truth of any given stated hypothesis, is evaluated systematically, and validity then is often thought to refer to four considerations: “support for the conclusion that the causal variable caused the effect variable in the specific study (internal validity), support that the same effect generalises to the statistical population from which the sample was drawn (statistical conclusion validity), support for the intended interpretation of the variables (construct validity), and support for the generalisation of the results beyond the statistical population (external validity).” (Wikipedia).

I used to go round and round on these issues of faith, trust, validity and truth with a friend of mine, Sylvia Fleming Crocker. Sylvia is a gestalt therapist living in Wyoming, who wrote a good book a few years back (‘A Well-Lived Life’), and she has a PhD in philosophy. She is also a Christian, and when we began to encounter differences with one another about the basic subject of what faith might be, I found myself somewhat dumbfounded.

Over the years of arguing with one another in public (for we would do this so consistently and so passionately on a professional discussion list that others gave our process a name — “Phylvia”), we have affected one another, and I value her influence on me a great deal.

Sylvia believed that there is a difference between religious faith and mundane faith. She believed these two were actually diverse categories.

I contended that faith is faith, but that the objects of faith might change, giving the appearance that religious faith was one thing and mundane faith was something else.

The Bible defines faith as the conviction of things unseen, the proof of things hoped for, and the trust it takes to act on what one holds to be true. Without that last part, action based on what one holds to be true, Jesus’ brother, James, asserted that faith is dead.

Is this any different from perceptual faith? Certainly we trust in our perceptions. In fact, this is Merleau-Ponty’s point, that we trust so much in what we perceive that it is rather automatic and leads to a holistic, lived-body response. We act in accord with our perceptions. We see the kitchen knife, we reach to pick it up and cut the onions, and we do so without questioning if we are actually seeing a real knife, or if the knife is actually there.

The only people who do question such things are those who have lost their perceptual faith because they have suffered some neurological or psychological disorder that interrupted the normal flow of their perceptual experience.

Thus, to me, it is not a tremendous leap, some kind of fanatical loss of reason, that makes a person trust in Jesus Christ (for instance) but a specific application of a dynamic principle of life so common to human experience that we could not live without it — FAITH.