A Thinking Reed

Category: Atheism

  • By faith, not by sight

    Atheists sometimes describe faith as “believing something without evidence.” But is this the way religious believers understand faith? I don’t think so, but I do think that there’s a kernel of truth here and that it’s important to distinguish between faith and knowledge.

    First it should be noted that there often lurks a polemical and tendentious understanding of “evidence” behind this definition. The kind of evidence being appealed to is usually the sort of measurable, repeatable evidence appropriate to a scientific experiment (and, it has been well-argued that the scientific enterprise itself rests on a certain kind of faith). But much of our life proceeds on “evidence” in a much wider sense, and there’s no a priori reason to allow this kind of methodological imperialism to go unopposed.

    But there is a legitimate point poking out of this straw-man definition. We do distinguish between faith and knowledge, say. Kierkegaard described faith as “the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty” That’s a bit more paradoxical than I’d want to put it, skating toward Tertullian’s “I believe because it is absurd,” but it nicely illustrates the point that faith and knowledge are, in some respects, mutually exclusive. If we knew, we wouldn’t need faith.

    In the Bible, faith has little to do with belief in God’s existence. Mostly it involves trusting God’s promises, believing that God will be faithful and that he will be vindicated and his purposes fulfilled. Abraham is the archetype of faith because he believed God’s promise that he would be the father of a great nation and acted accordingly.

    Often, though, faith involves trusting in God even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Confining ourselves just to the Psalms we often see lamenting that God’s will doesn’t seem to be done on earth: the wicked prosper, the poor and orphaned are oppressed, and God’s people are dragged into exile. And Abraham believed in God’s promise, despite his and his wife’s advanced ages.

    So, in the biblical sense there is a distinction between faith and “sight.” We don’t see Gods’ purposes unambiguously realized in the world, but we trust that they will be, even if we can’t see how. Hebrews says that faith is “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” and St. Paul says that we walk by faith and not sight. But this doesn’t mean that we have no reason for our faith, rather it means that the world doesn’t yet reflect the presence of God in such a way as these things would be obvious to anyone. That state of affairs is associated with the end.

    And I do think that this tension between faith and sight can apply to the question of God’s existence. Some people claim that God’s existence can be proved (or disproved), but, whatever their merits, these arguments have failed to achieve universal assent, even among well-informed disputants. However, I think many people would agree that our experience of the world is religiously ambiguous.

    By this I mean that neither God’s existence nor nonexistence is overwhelmingly obvious. There are certain philosophical considerations that can point to the question of God, such as the sheer existence and order of the universe. There are also, to steal a term from Peter Berger, “signals of transcendence.” I would include here moral, aesthetic, and religious experience of various kinds. But, at least in most cases, these aren’t absolutely compelling on pain of irrationality.

    In other words, it’s possible to interpret the totality of our experience in a theistic or non-theistic way. And I think that in this ambiguous situation we find ourselves in it’s possible for reasonable people to differ on the best interpretation. Faith, in this aspect, is trust that there is a God, not in the absence of evidence, but in the face of evidence that is partial and ambiguous. Like the Psalmist who continues to trust in God even in the midst of the exile, the modern believer trusts in God in her exile in this world.

    Also, faith isn’t just a set of beliefs about the world, but a commitment to a way of life. It does have an essentially “practical” aspect. And, it can, I think, be reasonable to stick to this commitment even during those periods where the beliefs that undergird it seem doubtful (at least I hope so!). In fact, one strain of the Christian tradition has it that following the path of faith will lead to experiences of “sight” which partly confirm the direction that one is traveling in.

    I think that the justification of religious belief ends up being quite agent-relative. There is no algorithm for interpreting the totality of our experience, and each of us will have different particular experiences that we weigh differently, and not in some value-neutral way. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be reasonable debate between adherents of different perspectives, but faith remains (in the words of Keith Ward) “a practical commitment beyond what the evidence would compel any reasonable person to believe” (Pascal’s Fire, p. 223).

  • Richard Dawkins does not exist

    That’s the only conclusion I can come to after reading things like this.

    “Richard Dawkins” is obviously a pseudonym of someone seeking to discredit atheism by associating it with the most ridiculous and childish “arguments” available.

    (HT: Richard at Connexions, who insists on perpetuating this charade by responding to “Dawkins” in a reasonable and intelligent manner.)

  • Doubt and atheism aren’t the same thing

    Thomas has an excellent riposte to some of the truly insipid things being said about Mother Teresa in light of some recently publicized letters that make it clear that she (like many, many other saints) struggled with doubt and a feeling of God’s absence.

    Of course, this won’t be news to anyone who read Carol Zaleski’s “The Dark Night of Mother Teresa,” published in that notorious skeptic rag First Things over four years ago. What is surprising is that some atheists have such a shallow understanding of religious faith that they can’t fathom how it can coexist with doubt. Indeed, you might think that someone who could persist in the kind of ministry Mother Teresa was engaged in, even in the absence of the kind of experiential awareness of God she had experienced earlier, was displaying even greater faith.

  • Could we turn out not to have free will?

    Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a blog post suggesting that some forms of atheism make free will and moral reasoning absurd. Will Wilkinson responded by essentially saying that this is a psuedo-problem (link via Unqualified Offerings).

    I think Wilkinson doesn’t really acknowledge the source of the worry here. He writes:

    Here are two things you know: free will exists (it is obvious: go ahead, touch your nose) and the universe is made of whatever it is made of (obvious, if anything is). Therefore, you know the conjunction of those two things. Therefore, you know that the crazy proposition that says that one of them must be false isn’t true! There’s no need to get hung up on an arbitrary conjecture about the trascendental conditions for the very possibility of the existence of something when things you already know rule it out.

    He seems to want to say that this is a psuedo-problem because we already know that we have free will, so whatever the universe turns out to be like must be compatible with that fact.

    But the whole point of the worry about determinism or physicalism that Ponnuru originally raised was that, if the universe turned out to be a certain way, we might not have free will after all as we originally supposed. In other words, there are possible ways the universe might be that are, on closer inspection, incompatible with free will.

    Wilkinson is certainly right that we can distinguish voluntary from involuntary actions, and that this distinction isn’t threatened by whatever metaphysical account of reality we come up with. But this isn’t the meaning of “free will” that people who worry about determinism and/or physicalism (incompatibilists in the philosophical jargon) usually have in mind.

    There worry is something more like this: if the universe consists entirely of the sorts of things and events described by physics, then it seems that what we take to be actions based on reasoning and choice would turn out to be really explained by the laws of physics. Moreover, these laws make no reference to things like intention or value, so it would appear to be false that the cause of my choosing x was that I believed it to be the best course of action all things considered. Rather the real explanation would make reference to various physical events in my brain, body, and environment.

    Essentially, it boils down to this: free will (in a deeper sense than just voluntary action) appears to be threatened if the real springs of our actions lie in non-rational causes, whether this be some Freudian subconscious motive or the interactions of subatomic particles. It is the question whether rational thought and choice are causally efficacious in virtue of their own unique properties, or whether they are “epiphenomena” generated by other non-rational causes.

  • Eugene McCarraher on Hitchens

    I wrote a while back that I’d like to see Christopher Hitchens debate a serious Christian thinker. We may have found our man.

  • Sibling rivalry

    This is interesting – Peter Hitchens, who unlike his brother Christopher, is religious, conservative, and opposed the war in Iraq – reviews the latter’s God Is Not Great.

  • Religious myths

    I got my hands on a copy of Keith Ward’s Is Religion Dangerous? courtesy of our local library and have been enjoying it very much.

    In the introduction alone Ward takes on several myths about the study of religion that tend to be propagated by its cultured despisers:

    1. “Religion” is a univocal term. Ward points out the obvious (but frequently overlooked or elided) fact that the term “religion” covers a broad array of phenomena and it’s by no means easy to identify a core of belief or practice common to everything we would identify as a religion. “Is Communism a religion? Or football? Or Scientology? How do we know what a religion is?” (p. 8). And this makes it extremely difficult to say that “religion” as such is good or bad:

    There are obviously many different sorts of things that we can call ‘religion’. Since religions have existed as far back as we can trace the history of the human race, and in almost every society we know about, there are going to be as many different religions as there are human cultures. They are going to exhibit all the variety and all the various stages of development of the cultures in which they exist. That is going to make it virtually impossible to say that religion, as such, at every stage of its development and in all its varieties, is dangerous. (pp. 9-10)

    2. The true nature of religion is given by its earliest examples. Early anthropological studies of religion that first took up the attempt to explain religion as a natural phenomenon made two questionable assumptions. The first was that religious beliefs were false and thus to be explained entirely in naturalistic terms. The second was that so-called primitive religion showed the “essence” of religion and that all more developed religions were ultimately reducible to this essence. Religion, the story goes, began when people attributed personalistic characteristics to the natural objects around them, giving rise to animism, the earliest form of religion. Gradually, however, these spirits were combined into a single spirit and monotheism was born. These beliefs were rooted in early humans’ attempts to make sense of and exert control over their environment. But now that we have science these beliefs have been revealed as superstitious and irrelevant.

    The problem with this view, says Ward, is that there is very little evidence to support it. We simply don’t have access to the religious beliefs of early human beings, nor do we know in what order they developed. “It seems more like pure speculation without any evidence at all — a story that might appeal to us, given certain general beliefs about the universe and a generally materialist philosophical outlook” (p. 13).

    3. Early people took their religious beliefs “literally.” We commonly assume that people in the past took their religious beliefs literally and only gradually do they start to think of them as symbols or metaphors. Sometimes atheists accuse more “sophisticated” religious believers of not really being religious since they recognize the role of myth, symbolism, and metaphor in religion. The implication is that real sincere religious belief means literalism.

    But Ward calls into question this assumption. For starters, we simply have very little evidence about the content of the religious beliefs of “primitive” people. “We simply have no way of knowing how they interpreted their religious ideas. The truth is that we know virtually nothing about the first origins of religious belief” (p. 13). Again, the assumption that the evolution of belief starts from literalism and gradually moves to symbolism and metaphor is more a philosophical dogma than the result of empirical investigation. In fact, Ward suggests, it may well be that literalism is the late comer on the scene:

    If humans have evolved, then it will be true that at some stage, many tens of thousands of years ago, human thought would have been less developed than it is now. But does that mean it would have been more literal? Perhaps literalness is a late development, and the idea that artefacts should literally be like what they represent — or even the idea of ‘literalness’ itself — is a concept that only developed when humans began to think scientifically or analytically. (p. 15)

    Ward cites anthropological investigations in India where worshipers are puzzled by questions about whether the gods are “real” or whether the images “really” represent them. And linguists have long recognized that virtually all human language is metaphorical to some degree. A purely literal language about anything, much less about the divine, may well be impossible for us. “Metaphorical thinking is deeply rooted in the human mind. It may be the case that very early human thinking was more metaphorical than literal in nature” (p. 15).

    4. It is inauthentic for religion to develop. This myth can take religious or anti-religious forms. The atheist may point to later, more sophisticated forms of religion as not reflecting the “real” nature of the faith. This is often an attempt to catch the “moderate” believer on the horns of a dilemma: either you’re a fundamentalist or you’re not a genuine believer. Ironically, the same argument can be made by fundamentalists of all stripes; the “faith once delivered” is taken to be a set of timeless truths that can never change, and any re-thinking of previous expressions of the faith is tantamount to apostasy.

    Ward’s contention is that one of the positive fruits of the scientific study of religion has been the realization that religions do develop and that later forms aren’t necessarily inauthentic expressions of the faith. Since religious ideas are ways of trying to give expression to a reality that is “beyond all images” they naturally become more or less effective over time. That doesn’t mean they have no basis in objective reality, but that they can never perfectly depict it and are therefore subject to critique and revision. “Once we escape the delusion that [religion’s] earliest stage provides its real essence, we will be able to see that it is a continually developing set of diverse traditions” (p. 20).

    5. Religious belief is primarily aimed at explanation. One common atheistic argument, related to a particular story about how religion developed, assumes that religious belief is primarily about explaining why things happen, a kind of proto-science. But once science with its superior explanatory power comes along, the “God hypothesis” is rendered unnecessary.

    This may be a powerful argument against, say, 18th-century deism, but it’s not particularly convincing as an argument against religious belief as such. It’s not at all obvious that religious people either today, or historically, believe in God primarily as some kind of explanatory hypothesis. For instance, it’s been a commonplace of biblical scholarship for some time that the ancient Israelites first became aware of Yahweh through the powerful experience of deliverance from Egypt and only later did his role as universal creator become apparent to them. They didn’t propose the existence of God as a hypothesis to explain creation; rather through their awareness of his power and loving-kindness it became obvious that he must also be the Lord of all creation.

    As Ward says, “if we look at present religious beliefs, they are not only, or even mainly, used to explain why things happen. They are used to console, inspire and motivate, but not to explain” (p. 17):

    It looks as if the roots of religious belief do not lie in attempts to explain why things happen. If we ask intelligent modern believers where the roots of their belief lie, many different sorts of answers would be given, but rarely that their beliefs explain why things happen. One answer, and I think it is a very important one, would refer to experiences of a transcendent power and value, of greater significance and moral power than anything human. The metaphors of religious speech — metaphors of ‘dazzling darkness’ or ‘personal presence’ — are inadequate attempts to express such experiences of transcendence. Why should it ever have been different? For all we know, early religion could have originated in experiences of a transcendent spiritual reality, especially in the vivid experiences, sometimes in dreams and visions, of shamans or holy men and women. (pp. 17-18)

    I’m sure Ward wouldn’t deny that religious belief can sometimes play the role of explanation, but more often than not this isn’t to explain particular phenomena, but to offer more “global” sorts of explanations. For instance, Leibniz’s question Why is there something rather than nothing? may not demand the existence of a god, but it can point to or suggest it. Likewise, the question Why the universe has the particular order it does, one that seems “fine-tuned” to give rise to intelligent personal life. The existence of a personal God can make sense of these global phenomena that appear to be beyond the reach of scientific explanation.

    Ward’s point in discussing these myths is that any study of religion that proposes to evaluate whether it is on the whole and all things considered a good or bad thing needs to look at it in all its complexity and as it is actually lived. Too often critics of “religion” are attacking what is essentially a straw man or an ideological construct.

  • Debating tactics

    Only in Berkeley would you get a debate between Christopher Hitchens who thinks that all religion is evil and Chris Hedges who merely thinks that all “religious orthodoxy” is evil billed as a debate over the merits of religion. Hitchens seems to like soft targets; I’d like to see him debate a serious orthodox Christian thinker: Stanley Hauerwas, maybe? I have a feeling the cantankerous Texan could hold his own against Hitch.

  • Is religion dangerous?

    Saw an ad for this in the new First Things: Keith Ward (see here) has written a response of sorts to the “new atheist” crowd. I imagine it’s the usual kind of irenic, thoughtful stuff Ward is known for.

    I’ve often thought that the whole issue of whether “religion” is on the whole good or bad is a pretty muddled one. In addition to the probably insoluble matter of deciding what exactly counts as a religion, there’s no religion-less society to act as a control group in determing whether the influence of religion has been on the whole good or bad. And beyond that it’s very difficult to see how you would weigh the moral improvements against the moral defects that are arguably attibutable to a particular religion. Was the Inquisition worth the outlawing of infanticide? and so on. Plus there’s the issue of casuality: how do we know what’s attributable to religion? For instance, several scholars, including secular ones, have made the case that modern science arose in the West in part precisely because of the Christian worldview. The idea of a God who creates a universe that displays a rational order served as an impetus to discovering that order. But such a hypothesis hardly admits of definitive proof one way or the other.

  • I’m just a dupe

    Sam Harris informs us that “there is not a person on Earth who has a good reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in a cave.”

    Not only is there no conclusive proof that Jesus rose from the dead, mind you, but no good reason at all to believe it. How does he know this? He doesn’t tell us. He just does, I guess.

    Also, if you’re a conservative, moderate, or liberal Christian you are providing cover for the “millions” of people who are “quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin’s Geneva.”

    This is because “wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism.” Does this mean that Harris is inadvertently sheltering the would-be Stalins and Pol Pots of the world by providing cover for their more fanatical forms of atheism?

    Why is it that people who so loudly trumpet their commitment to reason make such bad arguments? Harris’s strategy seems to be that if you say things in a bullying enough tone people will believe them. The guy gives atheism a bad name.