process

Religious traditions are evolving complex adaptive systems. If religion stops evolving, it will die of stagnation and perish, becoming too out of step with humanity to be acceptable. If on the other hand, religion evolves too quickly, it will dissolve into incoherence, and thus also die. Religion must exist and evolve on that cutting edge between order and disorder, on the edge of chaos.

As far as the proof of any new religion, such as the Baha'i Faith, well, the proof is in the pudding. If the Faith is able to evolve in step with the times, with science, and in accord with human reason, then it will grow and prevail. If, on the other hand, it fails to do so, it will die. Now, I and all Baha'is have faith that the Baha'i Faith will prevail, but that faith is not a blind faith, but a real put-it-on-the-line existential faith that Baha'u'llah was right, that He established a system that will be good and beneficial, and that the Baha'i system will successfully and beneficially co-evolve with the human race in the future. It seems to me that this is what belief in the Infallibility of Baha'u'llah really means; that we Baha'is really believe that His system, as we incrementally better understand it as time moves forward, will remain consistent with reality; that is, remain consistent with what is true, what is good and what is beautiful.

Thus, what we sometimes have simplistically understood infallibility to mean, is precisely backwards and incorrect. The correct notion of infallibility is that Baha'u'llah was indeed always correct, but what we understand as "correct" must be calibrated to be based on the best knowledge available, which is always increasing. Since we know Baha'u'llah was always correct and infallible, then as new scientific knowledge becomes available, we may have to re-calibrate our understandings of what He said; for we know His statements must always have been correct, even though we may not have correctly understood them until their significance was revealed by further growth in human knowledge and maturity. We know He would not disagree with Reality, although we may quite easily have mis-understood what He said.

Like many religious topics, this requires us to mentally reconcile two seemingly paradoxical concepts, in this case, the concept that Baha'u'llah is correct even when our fallible minds seem to indicate that He is wrong (He doeth what He will), with the idea that true religion must also be in accordance with reason and science. But, as Baha'u'llah pointed out in the Kitab I Iqan, or Book of Certitude, most people have always misunderstood some of the important things said by previous Manifestations; the Manifestations were correct in their utterances, but most followers of the religions were grossly incorrect in their comprehension of what was actually meant. This should give us some degree of humility in our understandings of Baha'i theology, and especially in our dealings with those of other beliefs who may disagree with us on many points of theology.

To summarize, too much certainty on the part of we religious adherents can be a bad thing, in its extreme form even leading to superstition, irrationality, and intolerance. Certitude, on the other hand, as championed by Baha'u'llah in the Kitab I Iqan, implies that one has faith that, no matter what is true, no matter what direction future science may take, it will ultimately be in accordance with God's will and with the revealed Writings, if only we have the courage to adapt our understandings as appropriate and the faith to do so with an open mind.