Faith is the Bottom Line

 We in chiropractic, especially those who are more philosophically inclined, tend to think of our understanding as rational, as opposed to one based on faith or one based on empiricism (scientific).  We usually attribute faith to religion or a belief system.  We say that our chiropractic philosophy is based on deductive reasoning, not faith.  We deduce an innate intelligence from a universal intelligence and from innate intelligence we deductively conclude that the body is smart, runs itself, heals itself and can maintain itself in a state of health and can do it better without nerve interference due to vertebral subluxations.  What always bothered me was that while deduction is how we arrive at our chiropractic objective, our Major Premise comes from induction and in the end (or beginning, as it were) we must make a leap of faith to accept a universal intelligence.

 Then I read a quote from G.K Chesterton that hit me right between the eyes. He wrote: “It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith.  Reason itself is a matter of faith.  It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”  To be able to deduce our philosophy, we must believe that the world is really organized and truly is as we see it.  The mechanist who accepts the world as a product of time plus chance really is demonstrating a belief system also.  The only question is “whose belief system is grounded in reality?”