Once there was a man who sat in a chair. His friend came up to him after he had done so, and asked, quizzically, “Why did you do that?”
“My feet were sore . . .” began the man who was sitting down.
“No, no, that’s not what I meant. Why did you sit down without first satisfying yourself that the chair would not give way under you? Why did you not check it out first?”
“Well, a collapsing chair did happen to me once when I was a kid. But they generally don’t, and so I figured it was worth the risk.”
“You figured? It seems to me that you didn’t figure at all. No due diligence whatsoever.”
“You are right,” the man replied, kind of amused by the conversation. “I didn’t figure at all beforehand. But that’s what I figure now, now that you have brought it up.”
“So then, you admit that you have no rational basis for your faith in this particular chair?”
“I guess you’re right,” the man said. “I have never seen this chair before in my life. No rational basis whatsoever. But I do have a rational basis for my faith in chairs generally.”
“So why do you just sit there? Aren’t you going to examine the legs? The supports underneath?”
“No,” the man said. “My feet are sore.”
“Then you could fall at any minute!”
The man who was sitting down said, “You are talking as though my faith is what holds me up. But my faith doesn’t hold me up. My faith puts me in the chair, and the chair holds me up. If it is sturdy, the chair will hold me if I have virtually no faith in it, and am sitting here in a panic. And the chair will collapse if I ascertain, to my satisfaction, that it is really sturdy, if in fact it is not sturdy.”
“But you are being irrational in your faith. You must know that your faith is well grounded. You must sit on your faith.”
“No, I don’t want to do that,” the man said. “It always collapses when I do that.”