"Walking in heuristics", REALLY?

I am quite sure the word "heuristic" is not common for you, must less the phrase "walking in heuristics." Oddly enough, you might hear this idea more often in the business world than "walking in faith". This blog is my continuing effort to bring the word faith out of the closet for many people. Obviously, if religion is common in your life story, then you are probably quite comfortable with the notion of faith. However, I have found that misconceptions of faith is a stumbling block to both the nonreligious and the religious peep to how belief influences what they think, feel, and do.

Let's start with how business executives "walk in faith" all the time, but would generally not see it that way.

This cartoon appeared in Harvard Business Review to illustrate what all business executives already know when it comes to making decisions. You can never have enough conclusive evidence through scientific inquiry to be sure of the decision you make. In his book on leadership Jack Welch, one of the most renown CEO's in our lifetime, describes "the gut" as both an emotional or instinctive response as well as fortitude and courage. In other words, 

"the gut" is a good modern way to explain faith, and trusting "the gut" to act is an obvious representation of "walking in faith". 

  
In the study of decision-making there is a concept we call "bounded rationality." March and Simon recognized years ago that rational decision-making is essentially impossible for many reasons. Simply put, we do not have enough time, money, or mental ability to examine all alternative solutions of a problem to select the best. Experts in decision-making claim that peeps are more likely to use heuristics rather than rationale to select a course of action. Heuristics is just a more impressive word than "gut", but represents the same idea. Heuristics are our instincts, our intuition. Heuristics are "rules of thumb" which come from both experience and analysis of data. Once obtained, we draw on heuristics or conclusions we have come to through both observable and unobservable "data" (knowledge).

For example, I worked for an executive for 17 years who was smart and analytical. He had an MBA from North Carolina and was considered one of the stars in the carbonated soft drink industry. He would demand that others have a " buttoned up", rational argument for their suggestions, derived from empirical analysis of data. Yet, he was very comfortable using heuristics to make his own decisions. He was comfortable relying on faith for business decisions, regardless of their importance to the company's success.

Isn't this the way many of us are in other matters of life. In interpersonal relationships we want others to prove their love for us. In theology skeptics need to prove that God exists and that we need Jesus to satisfy His wrath. Yet, we are comfortable using our own intuition and instinct, our heuristics, as the evidence we can trust for our own actions.

We may defend the evidence we trust for how we think, feel and act. BUT, we cannot argue that we all "walk in heuristics." No one ever has a thought, feeling or an action that is not informed by a sense of certainty from evidence we cannot see. No one is exempt from "walking in faith." All of our disagreement is in what we trust, or truth about the object of our faith. It is what we have conclusive evidence in that we cannot see that compels us to choose to be vulnerable to it.

It's how we TRUST ....