Imagine Faith
Very often, we ask of theists: "Why do you think God exists? What is your evidence?" Sometimes people try to present some evidence, but more often than not, they turn the whole thing on its end go "We take the existence of God as a matter of faith; if we did have evidence for his existence, we could not have faith." As amazing a somersault of logic this is, it also provides for some... interesting consequences.
Faith quite literally refers to "accepting something as true without any reason to do so," at least in the context we are discussing it today. The whole point of having faith in God is to accept him as existing despite continuous evidence to the contrary, an exercise in doublethink theists have taken to extreme levels as science marches on, trodding Yahweh beneath its heels. The other kind of "faith", as in someone saying "I have faith in my ability to do this", should perhaps more accurately be called confidence, but that's not relevant here.
Instead, I want to make the observation that religious matters seem the only context in which theists choose to adopt this faith excuse. This magical word "faith" only ever seems to appear in this form when debating God, and never in any other of our daily situations (apart from the distinct "confidence" meaning mentioned above). But, from all this arises in the back of my mind a question: What if we really took other things on faith, too?
Imagine a financial consultant telling you that he thinks you don't need to pay any taxes this year, because he has faith that you don't.
Imagine a medical doctor saying she thinks your heart problems will go away on their own, without showing any good reasons to think that, because she has faith that they will.
Imagine a safety inspector assuming that a building is safe without actually inspecting it, because he has faith that it is safe.
Imagine an astronomer claiming that an asteroid will crash into the Earth in 5 days, sending us all into worldwide panic, because she has faith that the asteroid will indeed do so.
Imagine a nutritionist telling people that they should ingest five milligrams of cyanide every day to promote good health, because he has faith that cyanide is healthy without looking at any evidence.
Imagine a police officer arresting you on the street, without any prior suspicion, because she has faith that you committed a crime.
Imagine a judge sentencing you to a lifetime in prison without looking at the evidence because he has faith that you are guilty.
For that matter, imagine the judge letting a serial murderer/rapist go free without looking at the evidence because he has faith that he is innocent.
Imagine a schoolteacher telling the children in her class that they can fly if they jump off of tall, tall buildings, because she has faith that children can indeed do so.
Religious matters seem to be the only context in which it is currently socially acceptable to shrug your shoulders when asked to prove the first damn thing you are saying, ignore any evidence to the contrary and say "We should still believe because we have faith." In any other context, you would be branded a dangerous lunatic, and rightly so. God is no different. Like anything else, the claim that God exists is one for which we should demand rigorous proof, especially considering the power that claim has over so many people worldwide.
Yet, not only do we let theists use their own ignorance as a shield from criticism, and as a point of pride, despite the strong influence theism has on the daily lives not only of themselves and of the innocent children in their care, but on the rest of humanity who have to share society with them.
Enough is enough; we as a society need to recognize "faith" as the dangerous, deceptive cop-out that it is. The next time you hear someone trying to use "faith" as an excuse for believing in something, put your foot down instead of paying lip service in the name of "respect". It's the only way we could possibly kill off this unreasonable idea once and for all.
Comments
In the first place, I agree with the main point of this article for the most part, but wanted to comment on this aside:
"The other kind of "faith", as in someone saying "I have faith in my ability to do this", should perhaps more accurately be called confidence, but that's not relevant here."
chuckles Having faith in another person's ability to do something would also be discounted as unacceptable by this argument - and perhaps rightly so?
As a person who often makes assessments subconsciously, in a process usually dubbed "intuition" by the authors of the MBTI, I often find myself in the uniquely frustrating situation of having a conclusion which has been reached by this method, and which I would give very good odds on being correct, but for which I cannot spell out specific points of evidence or any linear/logical argument. (Had a rather thorny conversation about this - faith-in-people - the other day, actually. Couldn't prove my point for crap - though, of course, the argument was further complicated by questions of what sort of evidence is acceptable, and also questions of psychology and subjective evidence, especially the confirmation bias. But anyway!)
The reason this is so frustrating is simply because, although I may not be cognizant of any particular linear process leading to my conclusion (and even those are not foolproof - take just about any ancient or Continental philosopher and trace his perfectly linear arguments, and see what extreme places you end up!) there is a process there: only instead of being based on selected, explicitly stated givens, it is based holistically on most everything in my experience relevant to the idea at hand, and none of it processed on a fully conscious, step-by-step level. Naturally, when asked to cite points of evidence, I can but return with the decidedly weak-sounding "It just seems that way, from everything I know about x. I couldn't give you any specific examples."
Is that faith, then, to give my intuition credence until something better comes along and shifts the picture? Confidence somehow does not seem to fit. I am curious as to your thoughts.
> Having faith in another person's ability to do something would also be discounted as unacceptable by this argument - and perhaps rightly so?
I disagree. It's perfectly possible to have confidence in someone else's ability, because they have demonstrated competence on previous occasions or because you have some other compelling reason to believe they will succeed. For instance, I have confidence in this programmer friend of mine because I've seen the good stuff he has written before, and I would have confidence in a muscular man being able to punch really hard because he has got huge muscles.
The difference is that faith is explicitly not based on observation or reason. That's the whole point of having faith -- to believe despite not having evidence. Anything else isn't faith, it's regular old reason (though it may be strongly or weakly motivated). Like I mentioned, this is exactly what someone will say if you push them hard enough: that they know they have no reason to believe but do so anyway, because it's faith--and even worse, pretend to be more justified or righteous because of it, somehow.
And, yes, we should distrust our own intuition. As humans we are very good at finding patterns even where there are none, and we do need to think twice before we do anything. It's understandable that we do it, because it works a lot of the time, and we shouldn't blame ourselves too hard for doing it... as long as we change our minds when we realize how unfounded our conclusions are. Religious people often do not. Instead, they turn it around and take their lack of foundation as a point of pride, and we should call them out on the ridiculousness of doing so whenever they do.
Again, I agree with the main thrust of your article, entirely. However, in the aside, I did mean faith, and not confidence. When there is no evidence or reasoning for or against someone being able to do something or being a certain way, does one assume that he or she can do it, or that he or she cannot, until proven otherwise? When one has no basis for confidence, is it acceptable to have faith until evidence one way or the other presents itself?
(...perhaps I got a bit sidetracked on the intuition bit.)
For example, if someone has never been seen dancing before, does one assume that he or she does not have the ability to, or does one try to teach them anyway (assuming being in a position to do so anyway) until they prove they honestly do not have the aptitude? (Unless, of course, there is something obviously preventing them, such as their being a paraplegic -- which, even so, though it might prevent typical dancing, like a waltz, might be open to, say, breakdancing, or wheelchair-dancing, both of which I have seen.)
And of course we should test our assumptions and our conclusions, always - even those arrived at by strictly rational, explicitly proven methods.
And while I am not a theist, per se, I would argue that faith is adherence to an age-old pattern recognized by the human brain: that of order and complexity in the universe, and that of order and complexity in the human mind. There must have been some human-like being who made this, we say, and that being must be far more powerful than we simple creators are. The rest is just trying to recover from scaring ourselves shitless, because we all know that if gods were human-like and not benevolent, we'd be in deep trouble. (See: Greek mythology.) Thank you, <a href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/index.htm">Feuerbach</a>.
(Apologies if my HTML didn't come through. I can't preview comments.)
Well, what you're skirting with here is the idea of the a priori assumption. A lot of the time we have very little information to go on (though I wouldn't say none--in the case of the dancer, we can infer some weak promise from the fact that statistically, most non-handicapped people are capable of dancing). And it's true that can't just refuse to function while we await further evidence, but what we can do is hedge our bets.
We usually do try to teach the rookie dancer, but we tend to do so with a kind of guardedness, making sure we don't overcommit to a stategy (person) we know we don't have enough information on yet. You wouldn't take the rookie and praise him as the next big thing and spend your fortune on educating him, and you wouldn't ignore him either. You'd take a happy middle path between being overly cautious and recklessly committing to an unsure proposition, making sure that if it does turn out you were wrong, you haven't lost anything significant; essentially, hedging your bet.
Religious belief does none of this, and religious doctrine generally demands nothing less than complete committal to an idea, despite the fact that you have no evidence to go on (or in the worst case, significant contradictory evidence). And, again, typically they will make it seem a virtue to persevere despite bad odds. Hedge-betting is generally (and rightly so, given the doctrine) seen as bad thing, a "lack of faith" or "unpiety".
As for the last point, I'm going to steal a line from the eminent professor Dawkins and say that if you want to argue that some sort of alien humanlike intelligence created us, then that's one thing, but that intelligence would have to have evolved in a manner much similar to ours, and not just appeared out of nothing (like gods typically are said to do). Faith, however, is a completely different thing and not tied to any particular ideology.
Finally, note the little thing that says "Markdown may be used" at the bottom? That explains how comment syntax works. HTML is not supported.
I am, again, not disagreeing with your article overall; merely taking a side-trail into the semantics involved with faith and confidence, intuition and argument.
The hedging of bets makes sense, and of course goes without saying for the most part. It's pragmatic. I, personally, hedge my bets pretty soundly with religion by saying that if (IF) I'm a theist, I'm a Deist. Clockwork universe, etc.
That said, if I may play Devil's (God's? lol) Advocate for a moment here, wouldn't believing in a faith be a form of hedging your bets? Since if they're right and you're wrong, and you die, you go to hell; whereas if you're right and they're wrong, and you die, nothing different happens? I've heard this argument used, and find it a rather poor way to truly convert people since all you'll get is bet-hedging pragmatists, but it does exist. Now, if the religion were to, say, mess with your existence in this life in a negative fashion, then the hedge wouldn't have worked, of course.
In any case, with the Feuerbach paraphrase I was arguing no such thing; Feuerbach basically explains in The Essence of Christianity that God is a human-created concept, and explains how. It's interesting philosophy, in any case, and his writing is pretty awesome in parts, if in other parts impenetrably Hegelian. ><
Also, I think I got the Markdown working. Silly me for not digging through a page and a half of marketing descriptions very cheerily telling me that Markdown will work for me to get to the "links" tag markup. For some reason I just assumed that, since Markdown...er, markup...will translate into HTML, that straight HTML would work. Whoops.
...also, hah hah, I just got that markup/markdown pun. headdesk
...and I'll stop ranting in your blog now.
Ah, I see you've found Pascal's Wager. Unfortunately it has a lot of flaws, perhaps the most important of which is this: You don't choose what to believe in. Implying that it's somehow a choice implies that tomorrow, I could choose to believe there is a God, only to choose to not believe the day after, but belief simply does not work that way. And even if it did, surely that's not the kind of belief a God would be looking for.
(Also, Markdown does allow inline HTML. I just disabled it for comments to prevent abuse.)
I'm sorry to jump in here so late after this discussion has come to an end, but I have only today come across your site.
Overall, I've enjoyed stumbling across this conversation, but I believe there may be a slight error in your definition of the word "faith". Rather than it being, as you state, "accepting something as true without any reason to do so", I would argue that the more accurate definition would be something along the lines of "accepting something as true without logical proof or material evidence". Your original definition has more in common with the description a particular type of faith - blind faith.
Now, if we switch your argument and look at it in terms of "blind faith", then I am in 100% agreement with you.
I think that there can be many reasons to believe in a god, and I think that, throughout the ages, many of those earlier reasons have since been explained away by science. But science, as it currently exists, cannot answer all questions. In fact, there are certain questions that science cannot even ask because no testable hypotheses can be created that can help answer those questions (i.e. Is there a god? Is there life after death? Is there a heaven or a hell? Can people be connected, somehow, psychically/spiritually/emotionally?) This is where philosophy and religion step in.
I have utmost respect for people who have studied, questioned, and have thought long and hard to have come up with the belief systems that they have. It is the people that believe in things on blind faith that need to be stopped.
I assure you I have thought equally long and hard about these things, and in the end, there is only one conclusion to be drawn: the evidence in favor of these supernatural things amounts, in the end, to nil, zero, zilch, and utter bolonkey.
I do not buy the argument that "philosophy can answer what science can't", either; see another article here on the topic of NOMA. If something as decidedly cosmological as a deity can exist in this world, it is firmly within the realm of science, and as mention, the evidence amounts to absolutely nothing.
So yes, I will stand firm by my definition of "faith", because in the religious sense of the word, there is no faith that is not blind. In fact, many believers use it as a point of pride to believe even when confronted with pretty convincing evidence, and I find that extremely perverse.
If you have any specific point you would like countered, do let me know.
I've also stumbled across your site, by chance as it were, after being linked to your brilliant TF2 strip - and apologies again for stirring up an old post - I'm familiar with your line of reasoning and also with work by people such as Richard Dawkins, and while I suppose I would count myself firmly on the skeptical side of things, I do like to approach these sort of arguments from a devils advocate point of view, as a scientist myself. I find a lot people, such as Dawkins, take an almost hostile approach to belief systems which I find interesting in that they put just as much faith into the fact that something does not exist as others put into the fact that it DOES exist.
A simpler way of me putting this is, with reference to one of your quotes in the above passage - "...there is only one conclusion to be drawn: the evidence in favor of these supernatural things amounts, in the end, to nil " - although there is no "proof" for a belief system in a (for want of a better phrase) "higher power", and that the lack of proof is what requires faith from the followers, equally there is no evidence to the contary - to scientifically prove or disprove a theory, you need evidence from an experiment, an experiment that can be repeated over and over again with the outcome always the same. So in a sense, the people who object to belief systems, have a strong "faith" of their own - a metaphysical situation I've always found intriguing.
You do make a reference to "pretty convincing evidence", in reference to the foolishness of religious faith - I'd be interested to know what you would define as evidence in this case. Natural disasters? Disease? Human suffering?
Well, let us first remember where the burden of proof lies. When a hypothesis is offered--for instance, "there is an all-powerful all-knowing all-loving deity"--the burden of proof always lies on the person presenting it, and not on its opponents to disprove it. In absence of such evidence, intellectual honesty demands that we reject the hypothesis. This becomes obvious when we consider that a priori "there is a god" carries the same weight as "there are leprechauns" or "there are pink unicorns on the moon". Unless we can somehow back these statements up, it would be ridiculous to believe them to be true.
I strongly oppose the notion that this would be "faith"; it is not. It is simply recognizing where burden of proof should be placed, and recognizing when it has not been met to satisfaction. In such a situation it is reasonable, and most certainly not at all a matter of faith, to conclude that most likely there is no such thing as leprechauns, pink moon-unicorns, or a God. (Side note: Naturally, every position can be overturned with new evidence. But so far none has presented itself.)
As for evidence that indicates the foolishness of faith: first, I would like to remind everyone that when I say "evidence", I don't mean "100% foolproof beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt proof". I simply mean that there are issues that cast a lot of doubt on the image of a God as people perceive it in modern Abrahamitic religions, and combined with the utter lack of any evidence in favor of such a God, shifts the probability of its existence even further towards "no" than it was to begin with.
For instance, consider the issue of prayer. Jesus states many times over in the Bible that prayer works and that those who have faith can achieve anything through prayer. See, for instance, Mark 11:24: "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." and Matthew 17:20: "For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you."".
Yet, anyone approaching the issue with some skepticism will realize that prayer does not work. I don't have the space to elaborate in great detail, but a brief listing would include: Lost limbs never regrow despite prayers, people who pray furiously still have bad things happen to them, when results are claimed they never go below what would be statistically probable in the absence of prayer (such as cancer remission, which does happen spontaneously in some cases). There is also that famous study that did double-blind trials of the influence of prayer on surgery success rates, and found that there was absolutely no difference between those that were prayed for and those that were not; although the group that were told they were being prayed for showed worse results for some reason.
The common objections amount to very little. "God wants to remain hidden" is easily disproven; God apparently had no issue with staying hidden 2000 years ago when some very obvious miracles were ostensibly being performed, and very few of those cases where people claim a miracle has occurred are "hidden" anyway; in fact, they tend to shout it out rather loudly. "God is not a gumball machine" rhymes poorly with what Jesus himself is claimed to have said, in no uncertain terms: that prayers will be answered and that nothing is impossible. "God's ways are mysterious" is just a cosmological shrug, an "I dunno" that doesn't actually explain anything. "Jesus was speaking metaphorically" doesn't work either; not only is the statement reiterated some seven times in the Bible in no uncertain terms, but the Bible is also often supposed to be the unerring, faultless word of God, who would not lie to his believers nor intentionally deceive them. Why would he phrase it like that when he knew (all-knowing, remember) how we would interpret it?
All in all, the problems surrounding prayer are just a few of many that cast doubt on the image of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God. They are certainly no unequivocal proof, and they aren't supposed to be, but they show some significant contradictions between reality and what the religion claims in a case where the reasons for believing are practically zero to begin with.