We of Little Faith
Jason Kuznicki on Aug 15th 2006
A conversation with the Inner Ethical Council, who are back from a long hiatus to answer a number of recent questions on reason, faith, and fundamentalism.
“A writer I know once called it ‘intellectual bigamy.’ Even his friends gave him grief for that one,” said the Skeptic. “And yet I can’t help but agree.”
“To use a mixture of faith and reason is not intellectual bigamy,” replied a stranger leaning against the far side of the bar.
“And who are you?” the Skeptic asked.
“The name’s Fidelio,” he said, “Pleased to meet you. And it is not bigamy to judge each thing according to its own nature. On the contrary, this is the very definition of justice. We would never judge a dog by laws that were made for humans; nor would we judge humans by the standards we apply to dogs. Faith and reason are kind of like that — They are two different species, and there is no need to exterminate the one for the benefit of the other.”
“We exterminated smallpox,” said the Malthusian. “Or did we do wrong there? Were we mistaken, when we judged smallpox by human standards, and found it wanting? And would it be better, as with dogs and faith, to judge smallpox by the standard of its own best interests?”
“Well said, my friend,” replied the Moral Relativist. “The best interests of ‘faith’ and of ‘reason’ are beside the point. No, instead we should apply either faith or reason depending on some properly external evaluation. Indeed, I think we should judge them both, situation by situation, by which one offers us the greatest personal advantage. Deciding such questions then becomes perfectly simple: Let me have reason, when it benefits me materially, and faith, too, when I can extract some gain from it. And my life will be just as Fidelio says. The best of both worlds.”
“My heart bleeds for you, my dear Moral Relativist, and for everyone like you,” replied the Stoic, “But you are not a member of the Council. Technically, you’re still our prisoner, and you are merely out on furlough. You would do well not to forget it.”
“Faith may be surrounded by reason upon all sides,” said the Skeptic, “It may be so even within the mind of a single man. Yet it remains a belief without evidence, a belief in things unseen.
“Theologians may use syllogisms; they may even know their modus tollens from their modus ponens better than most others. But at the core, at the very kernel of all their thinking, there is a stark raving lunacy. At some point, if you search their armamentarium long enough, you will find a man on a mountaintop, talking to his imaginary friend. And it is about this one point of lunacy that all their logic revolves.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Fidelio. “I’m certainly no lunatic. I use reason plenty often enough. Much more than faith, if truth be told. But I make room for faith, in some situations, because I find it gives life a greater meaning than it might otherwise have had. Faith gives me a purpose worth living for. And while I don’t let faith rule my entire life, I also don’t put my faith to the test of reason. Faith is something different from reason entirely.”
“But meanwhile, my rule is even simpler,” said the Stoic. “In a sense, I am the one who never puts faith to the test, for I never resort to faith in the first place. Reason alone, I say, Reason alone. Meanwhile, who are you to claim that my life is less worth living? It seems to me that all your faith has done for you, my friend, is to give you a false sense of superiority over others. And that is hardly a thing worth living for.”
“I think you’ve cut out half the way that humans understand the world,” Fidelio said. “You’ve sacrificed it on the altar of abstract principle, which is foolish.”
“Oh? Let me ask you a question, then,” said the Cynic.
“Anything. I’m feeling indulgent.”
“You avow your support for faith — and for well-evidenced reason, too?”
“Assuredly.”
“Then how are all of my friends here — the Epicurean, the Academic, and so forth — how are they to know which one to listen to when considering a given issue?” the Skeptic asked.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” said Fidelio.
“If you’re not sure whether to employ faith or reason, then how do you decide?” the Skeptic asked. “Do you reason it out? Surely not! Because if you truly use reason to decide whether to employ reason or faith, then you will begin by gathering evidence. You will next posit a number of conclusions, you will try to make the conclusions agree with the evidence, and you will act. And never will you even think to employ faith.
“No, you will only say, ‘I have evidence for X, and thus I believe it’ or ‘I have no evidence for Y, and thus I do not believe it’ or ‘I have seemingly contradictory or partial evidence for Z, and therefore I am unsure.’ And we are never brought to make the leap of faith itself,” said the Skeptic.
“Perhaps we might use faith to distinguish between those cases that call for reason and those that call for faith,” Fidelio replied.
“Oh no,” said the Skeptic. “If your ‘reason’ is predicated on an act of faith, then it is not really ‘reason’ at all. It is merely an embroidered version of faith. The faith of an abstract theologian rather than a man on a mountaintop.”
“Some,” the Academic replied, “Lewis Carroll among them — would say that reason itself requires a leap of faith.”
“I feel certain that it does,” said Fidelio.
“But I do not agree,” the Academic continued. ” Now, of course, modus ponens reasoning can indeed be made to run in circles, if we phrase it just right. Consider:
If P, then Q
P
Therefore Q.
This is the classical statement of modus ponens reasoning, a very foundation of logic. But suppose that I regard the whole thing as a premise that might be subject to doubt: I would then have to prove it, right? Yet how can I prove it, except through more modus ponens reasoning? It would seem to be a vicious circle, and logic would indeed seem to be just a different flavor of faith.”
“Exactly,” said Fidelio.
“But the error lies in thinking that modus ponens is how we prove the validity of modus ponens in the first place. It is but a curious side effect of language that modus ponens can be made to run in circles this way. Yet we do not, in fact, prove that using evidence to validate inference is valid by inferring inference itself from evidence. No, we prove that the use of evidence to validate inference is valid — by considering the reverse situation:
“If P, then Q.
P
Therefore not-Q.
“And this is perfectly, utterly absurd. Rather than accepting something, we accept something — and its opposite at the very same time and in the same respect. Which is lunacy.
“Yet it’s either this — or we’re back at modus ponens, which is by far the more palatable alternative. It is no leap of faith to substitute ‘Therefore Q’ in the last term of the above argument; it is, on the contrary, the only possible term. We are not acting here on faith, but only on the refusal to accept self-contradiction: Let all be based evidence, on experiment, and on the noncontradictory inferences we can make therefrom.”
“Yet philosophers,” said Fidelio, “do not rely on experiment. Are they not therefore quite like theologians?”
“What Fidelio says is true, up to a point,” replied the Academic. “Yet a philosopher, properly speaking, does not use faith, either. If he does use faith, he becomes a theologian, albeit perhaps one of a philosophical bent, which is really just a man given to using big words when he confuses us. But this does not a philosopher make: A philosopher, while not relying on experiment, certainly relies on introspective experience, and on the common lived practice of mankind, and on all those things that seem most solid to him at the time. He does his work with these alone; if he devises a theology, we do not call it a revealed religion, but a natural religion, and this is the only type of religion that a pure philosopher can ever create. Thus we distinguish him from the man of faith, who also accepts the advice of the imaginary friend on the mountaintop.”
“There must be a third thing,” said Fidelio, “that enables us to sort out cases of faith from cases of reason. It seems now that neither faith nor reason can be a proper judge between faith and reason. So what is that third thing?”
“Immanuel Kant claimed to have discerned a third thing,” said the Academic. “Or at least I believe that he claimed it. But I confess that even I cannot make heads or tails of his work on the subject.”
“Could it be,” asked the Cynic, “that politeness is the third thing?”
“What?” asked Fidelio.
“Politeness,” replied the Cynic. “I observe that there are certain subjects about which it is thought impolite to talk. Religion is usually one of them. Sex is another. Politics, often, is a third.
“I suggest — merely on the basis of empirical evidence here, for I am no great philosopher — that there are two classification systems that may be applied to all branches of human knowledge: The first is the duality between the polite and the impolite. The second is the duality between those things conventionally decided on faith, and those things conventionally decided on reason. I submit that there is very nearly a one-to-one correspondence between the two. Wheresoever it is impolite to ask, to probe, to doubt, or to demand evidence — there you will find humans using faith. Everywhere else, they use reason.”
“It brings new meaning,” said the Stoic, “to the phrase ‘An armed society is a polite society.’ For it seems to apply, though somewhat in reverse, to the battle of wits as well.”
“The question remains,” said the Academic, “whether politeness is indeed the causative agent in these divisions — and if so, whether it holds that title justly.”
“Howdy, boys,” said a woman whose full bosom pressed against her lacy pink dress.
“Who are you?” asked the Stoic.
“I’m Fundamentia. I overheard you debating the question of faith and reason, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to have my say.”
“No burqa?” asked the Epicurean. With a smile.
“I’m a Christian fundamentalist, sweetie pie,” she said, and primped her bouffant.
“But you do take everything on faith?” asked the Skeptic.
“I believe that the entire Bible is the literal truth of God. And wherever this seems to contradict reason, then it is reason that must give way. My faith is simply that much stronger than anything else. Including my reason. Including your reason.”
“Some would say,” replied the Academic, “that certain parts of the Bible are obviously metaphorical. The parables of Jesus, for instance, are not to be taken as the literal stories of actual people.”
“No,” said Fundamentia, “They are not, because Jesus told us that the parables were merely that — parables. But the Creation is a literal story, and we know it is literal, because nothing in the Bible says otherwise. The same is true of the Flood. And likewise to Samson killing a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass. All are literal.”
“But wait,” said Fidelio. “I, too, believe in the Bible. But I do not think that the whole thing was meant to be taken literally. On the contrary, the Word of God takes on its profoundest meanings when we consider it as a figurative guide to the will of the Lord. Genesis, for example, was not meant to be a biology textbook.”
“I see we do have some points of agreement already,” said Fundamentia. “We both believe that man is” — she paused, deliciously — “sinful by nature.
“We believe he was” — deliciously again — “tempted, in the garden. Whether it happened literally or figuratively hardly matters. The effect is the same.”
“Precisely,” said Fidelio. “Though I think you make yourself look silly by believing in the literal story. You do your religion no favors by making it hard for others to accept it.”
“Perhaps. But I have a question for you, Fidelio: Why is it that you reject the literal words of the Creation story? How do you determine when it is right to use a literal reading, and when it is right to use merely the figurative one?”
“That’s simple,” Fidelio replied. “When I cannot believe the literal reading, still I hold to the figurative one.”
“When you cannot believe!” said Fundamentia. “When your faith, then, is weak, you turn aside from God’s own truth.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Fidelio.
“Whatever did you mean?” asked Fundamentia. “I just heard you say that when you can’t believe something in the Bible, then you disagree with it. That makes you every bit as bad as the Skeptic — in kind, if not in degree.”
“I am a Christian, I swear it,” said Fidelio.
“By the Trinity?” asked Fundamentia.
“By the Trinity!”
“Can you explain the Trinity?”
“No,” said Fidelio. “The Trinity is a mystery I can never fully explain. No one can.”
“Then maybe you should stop believing in it. You already don’t believe in Genesis, which is also a mystery.”
“The Trinity is more important,” Fidelio answered.
“More important? More important than the reality of God’s Creation?”
Fidelio paused, uncertain of what to say.
“You see, my faith really is stronger, because I most certainly can believe in the literal reading. I believe the figurative one too — I heartily accept that we are all depraved and in need of salvation — but my faith is greater than that. You, by contrast, are not much of a believer, are you?”
“No, I’m not, I suppose.”
“So much for your name then. And you even thought yourself a Christian.”
At that point we had to leave. The Cynic was having convulsions.
Filed in The Belfry, The Biosphere
I approve of the Stoic’s dry response to the Moral Relativist.
Still, I think Fidelio’s armament was not so bare as to force concession just yet, and I was sorry to see the rest of the lot leave off early.
If I may go barging into your inner citadel, I have a few thoughts of my own. In the first place, when people talk about religion, they’re usually talking about the Abrahamic Three. And all three claim to be ultimately reducible to concrete historical events submittable to reason. That is to say, you arrive at faith after God has given some pretty clear-cut evidence that His spokesmen are to be believed. The faith that one has is the same sort of faith by which you board an airplane that really doesn’t seem like it should fly.
If I were more wide awake, here is where I would launch into an excursus on Occasionalism.
So you don’t necessarily need to take Fundamentia’s argument that once you’ve accepted faith, you are necessarily accepting the Whole Bannana. If, after all, you are convinced enough by, say, the historical account of the Gospels and Acts, you can thus make a decision (based on “airplane faith”) that there is an entity out there that is on something of a learning curve, supernaturally guided, but also using the collective reason of Her members.
So, for example, using faith in Ecclesia, we can see that She’s pretty much always accepted that “In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth” is to be taken as is, but that her brighter members have also realized pretty much from the get-go that much of the rest of the creation account is told “after the manner of a folk-tale.”
Of course, you will eventually come to the problem of Ecclesia’s ornery cousin Ummah, who also claims to be supernaturally guided, but that’s for another time…
Andrew,
You write that
And all three claim to be ultimately reducible to concrete historical events submittable to reason. That is to say, you arrive at faith after God has given some pretty clear-cut evidence that His spokesmen are to be believed.
I think it was Keirkegaard who pointed out that the Incarnation is indeed a pretty unreasonable thing when it comes to questions of faith vs reason. After all, that’s a statement that the Creator became man. If you’re not willing to admit that is a shocking (unreasonable?) thing then you are kidding yourself.
On the other hand, belief in that occurance is not entirely out of the blue. There are reasons (as it were) why one comes to think that is necesarily to be believed. And pure unreasonableness of an thing doesn’t make it untrue, witness the particle/wave duality of light and matter for example.
Jason,
On the question of whether literal exegesis is “required” in order that one’s faith not be watered down, I’m going to try to draw into this discussion a third party, a reformed calvinist fundamentalist who does hold to a literal interpretation of Genesis 1. I’m guessing your assertion that such literal vs figurative exegesis of Genesis 1 will not be held by him as a requirement for having a strong active Christian faith. I’m also confident he will have some helpful insights to add to our discussion.
Jason,
One other thing, on the contention that a person who uses a figurative interpretation of Genesis 1’s Creation account is weak of faith. Would the existence of a willing martyr who interprets Genesis 1 figuratively disprove your contention? I wonder how St. Edith Stein interpreted that account.
I would think the Moral Relativist would have taken a different tact in reply to the Malthusian, for certainly he would have spoken that smallpox would only spread through human interaction through crowding, and that by eradicating those it’s around, it creates expanses where it cannot pass and thus dies out, while those it infects becomes immune to it, or survive, and thus are strengthened from the whole. Thus smallpox has a potential benefit, rather than a detriment, to human civilization, by preventing overcrowding. This is, indeed, a philosophical point to be made in favor of decentralization of powers and a more agrarian society, in which disease becomes less virulent without easy access to victims. Consider, though, that other diseases thrive in isolation, and much genetic knowledge may be lost.
The moral relativism is that we cannot judge for any organisms by our fear of its removing us, or, by extension to multicellular organisms, the wolves eat our food and thus starve us, however silly this would by in today’s culture. Yet it is morally realistic to argue that killing wolves benefits us (and some say, benefits them). Using reason cuts both ways.
As a final comment:
Faith and reason must both argue from a dependant standpoint, such that they must draw on something that came before them. Reason can work from any base, and derive a different base, if even to reject it, as a hypothesis. Faith must only validate one hypothesis, and thus dismiss another. Faith, as it is, argues Shrödinger’s cat is dead because cat + poison = dead cat; reason cannot, since it must observe the outcome, examine the cat, examine the poison, before it can argue the condition that the poison killed the cat, and thus the cat is dead.
But then, where do faith and reason derive?
Jaime –
There are a lot of different directions a sprawling dialogue like this one could have taken. I like yours — I hadn’t actually thought of it — but I’m also already going in about a million different directions as it is. Still, thanks for bringing it up. A Moral Relativist might very well look at disease and see it as an interesting companion. Which is chilling.
As to where faith and reason derive, it’s a difficult question. My own answer is that reason is the method by which humans survive and flourish. To live the life that is proper to mankind, we must live an examined or a reasoned life. Very little is done well, in the sense of craft or technique, without reason. And a “good” life in the moral sense is a craft as well.
And faith? Faith seems to me a shortcut, a way of avoiding one or another aspect of thinking on and living in this world. There are an unending number of ways that this shortcut can be taken, and it appears at every turn in human thought. Yet to me it does not seem fitting to the life of the mind or to the good life properly speaking.
Let me give you an example: Rather than assert, as a reasoned morality might do, that man must live a morally good life because it is in his own this-worldly interests to do so, faith instead says that man should live a good life because he will be rewarded or punished in another, unseen life, if he does not. If you accept the shortcut, then this seems like a good explanation of morality. But if you do not accept the belief in heaven and hell — because you have no plausible evidence for either — then the whole thing falls apart.
Jason,
I think even most fundamentalists would disagree with fundamentia. Even the most ardent fundamentalists will typically make a distinction between “blind faith” and Andrew’s “airplane faith” (an excellent term, that) and claim to have the latter.
As an example, if you ask a fundamentalist why he believes the bible is inerrant, he will not tell you, “because I just do.” He will list a number of evidences based on reason (however faulty it may be). He will tell you there are no contradictions within its pages; he will tell you that the archaeological record bears out the Bible’s claims; he will tell you that the manner in which scribes copied the texts was impeccable. Each of the evidences cited may be false, but nevertheless the fundamentalist will use reason (though perhaps not rigorous reason) to build his case for inerrancy from them.
As for Fundamentia’s dichotomy between Christ’s parables and the creation story, I would say she’s got some fundamentally good reasoning, but fails to apply it universally. We know the parables are to be taken figuratively because that’s what the context of the passages tells us. But if we look at the cultural and historical contexts of the creation story we can find good evidence that it should be taken figuratively as well. The Christian creation account looks a lot like other creation accounts of the time, but differs from them in some important manners.
For instance, in the Epic of Gilgamesh the oceans and clouds are created by splitting the body of one of Marduk’s rival gods. In the creation account they are created by dividing the waters on the earth’s surface. Similar accounts, but in the Hebrews’ version God does not form the earth through struggle. He is the single source of power and creation is naturally in submission to him.
Jason, I agree with your functional explanation of faith-as-shortcut, at least in the realm of morality. And I’m interested in how basic tenets of faith can clash with people’s natural perceptions of right and wrong. For instance, one of the questions I ask people who are strongly convinced of orthodox or fundamentalist soteriology is, “Why can’t someone give up his own chance for salvation and give it to someone else, that they might be saved instead?”
It’s implied that the giver has to go to the furnace, but in return is consoled by the idea that a loved one is safe and in paradise. (I wonder if Camus wrote about this.) I draw an analogy between this scenario and the lore surrounding sinking ships like the Titanic, in which it’s always been the height of selflessness, morality, and honour to give up one’s space on the lifeboat to someone else. (Not a perfect fit, but close.) Now, people from different Christian traditions have lots of ways to explain exactly why this is not permitted. Not surprisingly, the form (if not always the substance) of the response usually correlates well with the faith tradition of the responder.
But what I do then is say, “no, don’t recite to me why others (namely, theologians and preachers) think this isn’t allowed. Tell me what you think about the morality or immorality of this. Would you want to give up your chance at heaven so that someone else could have it? If not, is it wrong to want this? Just misguided?”
It’s not supposed to be a neat gotcha! question. (Although if I were on a talking-heads show with Ann Coulter I’d probably use it to go from defense to the attack.) But it can be one way of illustrating to believers, but particularly fundamentalists, how their claims to be more moral are built on a radically self-interested foundation.
Jason,
If faith is a shortcut, what then are the milestones a man chooses to skip by or the path he takes intently to gain a goal? If reason is the whole path, without shortcuts, who put the milestones in place?
I have struggled to even consider a definition of faith, as every time I do, I end up reasoning a thing out. I find, instead, only the reason for the actions, with the explanation falling to faith. I am a man of science, an analytical mind, yet I cannot forgo experiences I cannot explain through reason, events that in my life reason has no name for . So I think only that I have no names for it yet. I reason out faith, and find faith doesn’t exist.
So I have a theory: Faith is fear. Faith is essentially the fear of not knowing. Instead of finding one possible answer, or the lack of one, that “shortcut” you mention perhaps, the man makes a leap that the fire came to him because he wished to be warm, and that the sky “heard” his call way back in the African plains when lightning cracks the sky and Homo erectus huddles in the cold.
Man is afraid of not having power, and so he places this power in proxy, to a source he can control with belief. This is done perhaps conciously or perhaps not. Instead of the fire being random so that it might toast him next, he holds that, like the ancient clay men of Greece, Prometheus has stolen it for him and granted him power over it. Only through his lack of observance to this holy thing, perhaps, would the fire burn him. It is now his, and he cannot belong to the fire. It could only be the Gods’ wrath that would compel his death by flame now, so he is truly holy.
———
Tim Ross wrote:
“‘Why can’t someone give up his own chance for salvation and give it to someone else, that they might be saved instead?’”
One might say that the act of giving up one’s place in Heaven may ensure it, instead. That such an act of selflessness or altruism cannot but reward the doer, even if the act would seem to be a rejection of the place they would have itself. So instead of losing a thing, they gain TWO such things instead. One can reason that this act is selfless, but in fact one can turn it on it’s head that one can gain their own place and one in honor by giving a place up, knowing they would gain another and greater standing for it.
An act done for another without thought to the self might also seem morally wrong, as one who forbears his own self injures or hurts a man, and causes pain, suffering, and loss. If one aids his- or herself, as on an airplane when one is told to place the mask over your own face before placing it on your child’s, one is more capable of assisting others by a moment of selfishness; yet, this act is for another person, as well, at the same time, so that primary morality is neither selfless nor selfish.
Faith might bring us to the selfless act of giving up a seat, but reason seems to bring us to the selfish act of assisting others alongside oneself.
[...] I’m reminded of a dialogue I once wrote, back when I wrote such things: “There must be a third thing,” said Fidelio, “that enables us to sort out cases of faith from cases of reason. It seems now that neither faith nor reason can be a proper judge between faith and reason. So what is that third thing?” [...]