James Fowler sees human beings as essentially meaning makers, and he says that what defines us as human beings is the fact that we engage in the construction of visions of ultimate meaning. He also maintains that the order we develop to make sense of the world is developmental and changes through the life cycle in the direction of greater complexity. He postulates that there are six faiths stages identifying the different paradigms of meaning we derive from our experience and impose on our perceptions. We should be able to ascertain what stage we have reached at a given age and see why we have not progressed beyond that stage.
Fowler describes the way human beings react to their environment in terms of a science project from his experience in the eighth grade using magnets:
We live our lives in dynamic fields of forces. In contrast to the bipolar orderliness shaped by the pull of the magnets, we are impinged upon, pulled at and moved from many directions. Part of what we mean when we say that humankind--Homo poeta--lives by meaning is that from the beginning of our lives we are faced with the challenge of finding or composing some kind of order, unity and coherence in the force fields of our lives (24).
Fowler identifies our structure of values and the patterns of love and action by which we view the world as faith. He cites these issues as questions of faith and says that they are intended to help us "get in touch with the dynamic, patterned process by which we find life meaningful" (3). Faith in this sense need not be religious but rather refers to something else:
Faith is a person's or group's way of moving into the force field of life. It is our way of finding coherence in and giving meaning to the multiple forces and relations that make up our lives. Faith is a person's way of seeing him- or herself in relation to others against a background of shared meaning and purpose (4).
Fowler says that all of or k...