Questioning Faith
(Cross-posted on the Front Page)
Asking questions is dangerous business. I have friends and acquaintances who, after completing an inquisition into their own religious beliefs, forsook their religion, kicked the dust from their feet, and hit the road for a stroll in the sun. You probably know such people as well. I know others whose questioning led them to embrace a faith life of one kind or another. Questioning can precipitate radical change.
Good that it does. I’m all for this dangerous business, and I say this as someone whose own self-examinations have gotten me a ride on an endless roller-coaster of a spiritual life. I’m told it’s best to build my spiritual house on a rock rather than upon the sand, but the stormy sea is more to my liking. If religious faith really entails an encounter with an infinite being, then, in my book, it shouldn’t ever be a stably anchored position on life. As if the divine could be so constrained! In my book, a complacent faith is no faith at all. I can’t tell you exactly where my belief ends and my unbelief begins. The line isn’t fixed; I keep it in question.
To frame faith as a kind of Gnosis or special, unassailable knowledge by which every truth claim must be measured and judged does a disservice to faith. Yet many of people of faith do just this. They question everything except the precepts of their faith. In their world, faith is a divine gift that enables them to see the real truth free of doubt and uncertainty. To question it is to sin against its very nature. If faith gives one access to certain knowledge, then to question that knowledge reveals a want of faith.
To be sure, this “gnostic” approach to faith has a long train of antagonists among the religiously devout. Augustine argued in favor of a metaphorical reading of the bible when a more literal interpretation clashed with the insights of reason. Pope Francis interprets the story of Jonah as a metaphor for the way in which human certainties imprison the mind and soul. For many a religious believer, science and history and philosophy serve as keys for interpreting religious texts. Andrew Sullivan recently linked to an Evangelical calling his fellow Christians to develop a habit of skepticism. Revelation may come from God, but it still has to be interpreted in light of what we know. Treat the bible as the instructional manual for morality, and you may end up justifying genocide and slavery and all manner of evils.
As I see it, faith is the willingness to act when one doesn’t have all the answers, when certainty hides behind a cloud of unknowing. The life-long commitment of marriage takes faith because neither party can know where life and marriage will lead them. Raising children takes a degree of faith. You might have good cause to believe that a particular style of parenting will work well for your offspring, but conceivably you could instead be harming their delicate psyches and setting them up for much misery. My religion takes faith because I neither see nor hear the God whom I worship. The tenets and rituals of my Catholicism were formulated by strangers long dead and personally unknown to me.
I think it prudent that engaged couples question their relationship before making the promises of marriage, that parents question the methods of child-rearing they’ve chosen to employ, and that religious believers question their beliefs and what the content of their beliefs mean. Uncertainty itself is good cause for raising questions, but we’re not exactly flying blind here. As our species develops, we have the chance to learn more and more, meaning we have good cause to rethink what we think we know and think we do not know and think we believe.
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But isn’t it also limiting to discount the possibility of satisfaction?
Let me explain what I don’t mean by that. I don’t mean that we ever truly understand. I don’t mean that we can relax in our faith, confident that we’re never going to have another struggle. I don’t mean that we can ignore our faith without spiritual risk.
What I do mean is that there are times of consolation, of confidence, that provide real spiritual comfort. You don’t want to deny other people those moments, or come off as questioning the credibility of their faith. In my youth I made assumptions about others in this way, and probably forced myself into doubt at times just because I feared complacency. There’s merit in your article, but we shouldn’t make a deity out of the act of questioning.
Faith needn’t be questioned at every moment or for any reason. I would be a poor husband to question my love for my wife simply because, from an epistemological standpoint, my love may be otherwise than what I think it.
I’m not against satisfaction, but this tends to be relative. I’m personally satisfied walking in darkness, but not everyone is.
I think you are introducing an obfuscation be drawing a parallel between religious faith and “faith” meaning reasonable expectation based on experience, evidence and perhaps self confidence.
No one has faith in future events based on no evidence or experience. Plenty of people have religious faith in things despite evidence to the contrary and no supporting evidence apart from the evidence ad populum or ad verecundiam.
If I’m obfuscating, it’s not in the way you’ve framed it. I did not and would not define “faith” to mean a kind of expectation. It is rather the willing to act without certain expectation. As a parent, I would say I have a reasonable expectation that my parenting style will work well for my children, but I could be wrong. So part of my decision is based on evidence and experience, but because I recognize that I may be misreading the signs, I’m also making a leap of faith. Reasonable expectations leave room for doubt and uncertainty. What keeps me moving despite these is what I call faith. Religious faith functions in this same way, albeit usually in circumstances in which conclusive evidence and direct experience are not to be found. I say usually because people have been known to claim to hear the voice of God and even see God in the flesh. Their “encounters” won’t serve as evidence to you, of course, but they do to them.
I’m afraid this appears just like further obfuscation. If the evidence clearly showed that your method of child rearing was in error you would change it. Not only do you not change your religion on the same basis but the difference between emotionally based religious faith and faith meaning reasonable expectation based on evidence and experience would probably cause you to discount or at least downgrade any evidence contrary to your religious belief.
The fact that some believe they have very good evidence for their faith does not change the distinct high emotional commitment of religious faith compared to “faith” in evidence based predictions.
One of the reasons we are equipped to reason is that reason better allows us to predict the future. It is not a “leap of faith” to act according to our prediction but an attempt to bring about favourable consequences. Our faith or confidence or expectation of these consequences is justified to a greater or lesser degree by our past efforts at predicting outcomes.
If the evidence clearly showed that your method of child rearing was in error you would change it.
Yes. Hence my advocacy for questioning. But a parent doesn’t always have “evidence clearly showing.” What looks to work well in the short term may not work so well in the long run, for example.
Not only do you not change your religion on the same basis but the difference between emotionally based religious faith and faith meaning reasonable expectation based on evidence and experience would probably cause you to discount or at least downgrade any evidence contrary to your religious belief.
Not universally true. A casual glance at the history of religious people shows that a) people change their religion for reasons including it’s bad for them or it’s believed to be wrong, b) people leave religion altogether believing it in error, and c) religions themselves develop in response to contrary evidence.
Gordon, I find the description of “faith” (the non-religious faith) as “reasonable expectation based on evidence and experience” interesting. I wouldn’t say this is incorrect, but it certainly isn’t universal. Sometimes we just have to have faith in people. We may have no reason to expect that people will act a certain way or “come through”, but we can still have faith.
I think if we look at faith (again, non-religious faith) that way, it brings us closer to Kyle’s talk of faith.
…or I’m totally out to lunch on this. Both are equally possible.
@Jonathan McLeod
The key difference between religious faith and “faith” in one’s judgement is the emotional investment people have in their religious faith as part of the way they define themselves.
You may indeed be put in a position of having to trust a stranger because there is no better option but the fact you have faith, insofar as you do, without cause still doesn’t make that unfortunate position similar to religious faith because you don’t have an emotional investment in it. If some less risky alternative shows up at the last minute you will switch to that all other things being equal. It would take a lot more than a less risky alternative to cause you to switch religion.
Comments are closed on this article on the front page. I wonder if it would be all right to continue here a discussion about that was in progress there and has now been interrupted by the comment closure? It was about the meaning of faith as such and whether it is an equivocation and an insult to religious faith to categorically conflate it, qua faith, with acts of trust essential to ordinary, natural human relationships (I am on the other side of that one). But I do not wish to presume that it would be welcome.
Carry on. Comments close on the FP after a time.
Kyle,
As a suggestion, when I’ve been cross-posted, I close comments one place or the other to avoid split conversations.
Re-posted from comment area of Front Page, now closed for comments.
From M0rat20
Newlyweds don’t have “a track record” to go by. They have faith, because their relationship is one of trust bound by promises, justifying beliefs. That is what faith is. All faith, without equivocation, is that. That is why it is a virtue, not a vice.
That would no longer be faith, since the trust would already have been breached, and could no longer justify a unqualified belief of the proposition. That would simply be naïveté, and to call that faith would be an equivocation.
Granted in full. At that point, you make a choice based on what is true, including what you value about the relationship as it is. At that point, if you don’t call her on it because you love her and wish to preserve the relationship while it is at a fragile point so you can get past that juncture and get to the point where you can come up with a practical solution, that is a way to keep faith with her, and that is exercising a virtue, not a vice. OTOH, if she has stolen your wallet after having promised never to do that again, you are well within your rights to confront her and not in breach of faith to do so. If you anticipate that such a confrontation will damage the relationship, you make an intelligent choice based in part on whether you believe you can handle that.
Now, if the application of the term “faith” to religious beliefs does not seem proper because you cannot see how anything I have described as natural faith, which is indisputably virtuous, could apply to that sort of thing, that criticism would make more sense than calling faith, as such, a vice. If I were an atheist, I would deny that religious beliefs are, in fact, faith. I would deny them the status of a virtue by denying them the status of faith. If I could not see how a relationship existed because I did not believe that one or more of the Persons in the relationship existed, I would deny that there was a ground for anything that could be called faith. That would make more sense then bad-mouthing faith per se. Naturally, I do not think that is right since I do believe in God, but I would have less to argue about. I would either have to stay out of it, or I would be forced into arguing about the existence of God and the reasonableness of an evidence-based conclusion accepting the validity of a claim, attached to a certain set of beliefs, of divine revelation.
So you see, it is Morat20 and JamesK and those like them who muddy the waters by saying obviously false things about faith as such. We should all be able to agree at least about what faith is without giving an inch of theological or philosophical ground to our opposition. But we have all been dumbed down. I don’t know exactly how, but somehow everyone, religious and skeptic alike, accepts a dumbed down and stupid definition of faith when applied to religion. What most people, religious ones included, think of as faith (in a religious context) is a vice! They think that faith is believing, for no particular reason and without ever questioning it or critically exploring its meaning, that Jesus is the Son of God or that Allah is God and Mohammed is His Prophet, or something of that sort, even if it makes no difference to their lives whatsoever. But unless there is a relationship context to justify such a belief, and which requires certain actions as a matter of duty based on that belief, it does not qualify as faith.
I think you’re right that our disagreement here is semantic – we use the word “faith” to denote different things.
I also accept your framing of the atheist-theist dispute, I don’t understand the relationship between what you call faith and the question of whether a god (or gods) actually exists.
@Kevin Rice
Why do you see faith of the non-religious kind as an unqualified virtue? Surely if it is not justified it is merely naivety, gullibility or bad judgement? You will not be doing yourself or those who dupe you any favours in the long run.
What justifies faith is a relationship with an element of trust. Outside of such a relationship, there is no unjustified faith which could be equated with ” naivety, gullibility or bad judgement”, for apart from relationships, there is no faith. Period.
@Kevin Rice
This appears to mean that you want:
to exclude all uses of the word faith, (such as: He had faith in the free market), which do not include a relationship with another person, (or at least sentient being) .
to exclude all instances where trust was unjustified and faith betrayed?
Thus I suppose we get faith which cannot be equated to naivety, gullibility or bad judgement?
This looks to me like another case where you reject some meanings of a word which are in common usage.
“He had faith in the free market”
To exclude such a usage might not be necessary. True, it does not qualify as faith according to the definition, but non-literal language is acceptable. The word can be used in such a way as analogy. There may be acceptable metaphorical usages as well.
Faith betrayed is still faith. If you are betrayed by someone you had a right to expect and believe would keep faith, you are not necessarily guilty of,as you put it, naivety, gullibility or bad judgement. The other person is certainly culpable for breaking faith, but that does not justify any and all exercises of hindsight self-blame on the part of the one betrayed. So, yes, sometimes you can have faith for good reasons and be mistaken. That’s life. Applying that qualification to religious faith may not be easy as you think, but you are welcome to the attempt.
This looks to me like another case where you reject some meanings of a word which are in common usage.
Common usage here is confused and relatively recently dumbed down. People commonly agree that faith is a virtue but they are unable to explain how or why it is. They have accepted an understanding (to use that word charitably) of what faith is that belies its status as a virtue, but they have not rejected it as a virtue. That means common usage is incoherent and still in a state of flux. It is not yet fully changed and incorrigibly evacuated of its meaning. It is still open to being re-filled with its traditional meaning. I may not succeed (and without the help of others, I will certainly fail), but I will keep trying to remind people of the meaning of the word that they are “commonly” using as a placeholder more or less empty of significance, or, worse, as a self-contradictory monster term (e.g. the virtuous exercise of unjustified belief). I may be Don Quixote tilting at windmills, but I will not give up.
Faith is fidelity.
Why isn’t that obvious? Just because they don’t teach Latin in grade school anymore?
@Kevin Rice
I suggest it may not qualify according to your definition but that it is perfectly good English.
I would agree with this but not with the contention that the betrayed must be blameless. I would say faith on inadequate grounds is still faith also.
When it comes to religious faith I would say that Morat20 is right with his contention that religious faith is different, although his emotive idea that other uses are “a grave insult” to religious faith is not warranted.
See my posts at:
GordonHide April 30, 2013 at 8:41 pm
GordonHide May 1, 2013 at 10:52 am
GordonHide May 1, 2013 at 7:05 pm
I think I identify the key differences between religious faith and uses not relating to religion.
This is not as true as you would like to believe. Many people see faith without evidence, typically religious faith in someone else’s god as positively iniquitous. Also where religious faith leads to demonstrable evils people are not so keen.
From my own point of view I look at it pragmatically. Non-religious faith is justified on good evidence otherwise not and is not a good thing.
Religious faith, which from my point of view never has good evidence, may still be a good thing because of the advantages people get from it such as:
Comfort
Reduced anxiety
Strong life motivation – always given this is channelled in a productive and benevolent direction.
Phrases such “keep the faith”, “keep faith”, “in good faith” and the word faithful confirm that the implication of loyalty or obligation is alive and well.
@GordonHide
I see fewer areas of disagreement between us than you do. For example:
Well, I said that. Non-literal language is acceptable…analogy…metaphor.
“must be blameless”. I did not contend that. I said that they are not always to blame , meaning that they are sometimes blameless. How often, and the ratio of times they are partly culpable to times that they have no culpability at all, I did not specify. To disagree with this, you would have to say that anyone who ever took anything as true on faith, no matter how well warranted the decision to trust, is at fault if he or she is deceived. Would you really go that far?
I do not think that all faith betrayed is by definition “faith on inadequate grounds”. Sometimes they are as good as they get, and there is still betrayal. There is always a risk.
When it comes to religious faith I would say that Morat20 is right with his contention that religious faith is different, although his emotive idea that other uses are “a grave insult” to religious faith is not warranted.
It is good that you would not go as far as he does. My definition of faith makes it meaningful to call both forms of faith faith. Any assertion that they are completely different sounds like an assertion that faith of the religious sort does not deserve to be called faith, but something else.
I have read them. I still do not agree. I do no think that you have identified relevant differences. But how are they the same? Do you deny them any meaningful similarity at all? If they are not the same at all, then why not simply deny religious belief the status of faith? Why conform to the convention that conflates them and uses the same word to refer to both.
Believing that someone else is in error, even believing that they are culpable for that error, is not the same is denying that faith is a virtue. Affirming that faith is a virtue is not the same as affirming particular exercises and expressions of faith as specifically good. Get them talking about others faith and they will talk about their incorrect beliefs. Talk to them about faith itself and see if they deny that it is a virtue. They would rather deny that those others were exercising faith at all, at least a true faith. They would deny that people worshiping another god or worshiping God in an improper way were doing so in keeping with an established relationship with that deity and not in breach of another relationship or prior commitment. That is light years from denying faith its status of virtue.
What are the standards of evidence that justify non-religious faith but which religious faith cannot meet?
That is why it is a virtue. That is why I keep reminding people who make foolish statements that imply that faith, as such, is nothing more than a form of gullibility or stupidity that they have no idea what they are talking about.
@Kevin Rice
My mistake. I assumed your balking at the possibility that a person may be guilty of misplaced faith because of naivety, gullibility or bad judgement meant the you were denying they had real faith in the first place.
The fact that I believe religious faith to be significantly different does not cause me any concern about this usage of the word. Many words have more than one meaning. While non-religious faith is just a synonym for trust or confidence religious faith is more a matter of belief and is not only part of a person’s self image but is emotionally charged and often held in the teeth of the evidence. I don’t see trust or confidence as being a necessary part of religious faith but I would expect these to be included in many cases. Also religious faith will usually involve loyalty where non-religious faith need not. I can have faith in my political representative to support some of my values but need feel no loyalty towards him at all. I can have faith in my own judgement but will disregard it in an instant and without regret if proved wrong.
How much evidence one needs to have non-religious faith depends on the importance of the decision or judgement which is being made. If I have faith in my ability to produce a spelling error free post despite a dubious record It doesn’t really matter. Perhaps I’m an optimist. If I have to cross a level crossing where the lights have stuck on green three times before I’m not going to have faith in its operation no matter what the maintenance engineer is now saying.
I would say that religious faith need not meet standards of evidence at all. Perhaps this is anathema to someone like you who is trying to equate religious and non-religious faith.
Religious faith for most people is a pretty important decision so the evidence which justifies it needs to be good or there needs to be other reasons why one might hold to the faith.
Someone might tell me they have faith in the Roman Catholic religion because they agree with the moral tenets promoted by it and support what they see as the good work it does. They may say that religious beliefs part of the exercise is not an issue because true or false it makes no material difference. They are quite happy to go along with it. I might disagree with their judgement but I wouldn’t regard this sort of faith as irrational.
When I look at a particular instance of religious faith and insofar as I must pass judgement on it at all I assess the effects of the belief on the individual and on the community in general. I assume that belief part of it is unjustified but I understand that’s not necessarily what it’s all about.
I don’t see this “faith is a virtue” stuff as being any more than a matter of opinion. Clearly those with religious faith are going to feel that it is virtuous while others, because it represents belief without evidence, (that is: for no good reason, according to their lights), are going to see it as a vice.
I suppose I must throw up my hands. I have explained how religious faith can qualify as faith as such which justifies the use of the same word and explains its status as virtue. I have cut through the confusion and provided clarity. I have rendered intelligible that which made no sense. I have replenished with significance that which had been emptied of its meaning by decades of cultural devolution and stupefaction. But you prefer the confusion. You prefer the shattered, incoherent remnants of an idea to a consistent concept. It must be very important to you to continue to think yourself smarter or more rational than religious people. The irony is that to maintain that self-image, you must insist on the dumbed-down version of that which distinguishes them from you.
The fact that seriously religious and smart people are able to compartmentalise part of their thinking and apply different standards to it does not make them any less smart.
Or rational?
@Kevin Rice
I guess rationality depends largely on the ability to use logic correctly. I can see no evidence or reason why theists should be inferior in this respect.
I guess if your looking for theistic cognitive deficiencies compared to non-theistic individuals here are a few possibilities:
I guess theists are more likely to assume premises for their arguments for which there is not general acceptance, (such as the existence of a god).
Mental compartmentalisation is often a reaction to childhood indoctrination. When childhood indoctrination becomes inconsistent with real world observation who knows what other forms of unconscious mental gymnastics the brain creates to cope? Even those who claim to have overcome religious childhood indoctrination often carry some mental baggage around indefinitely.
Your responses to my probing and prompting are quite interesting, GH.
I wonder, do you see any analagous intellectual weaknesses to which atheists are especially prone compared to theists, or are the cognitive deficiencies all on one side of the metaphysical issue? Does the assumption of a premise “for which there is not general acceptance” count against atheists who commit themselves to materialism as a metaphysical worldview even, to use your phrase, “in the teeth of evidence”?
Materialism is dogmatic or is at least perceived to be. However, it’s a long way from being universal amongst atheists and many atheists have switched to methodological naturalism which is perceived to be less dogmatic. If their were any credible evidence falsifying materialism you can be sure materialism would have been dumped over the side.
So, while atheists, like everybody else, have undesirable hang-ups I don’t think I see any that are close to universal or attributable mainly to atheists.
I guess the closest I can come is nihilism which afflicts some atheists. But this is, in my view, a symptom of childhood theistic indoctrination anyway.
Well, for all your hemming and hawing, you’ve effectively granted the point: you believe that, unlike atheists, theists are inclined as theists, to cognitive deficiencies and to beliefs you judge to be to be lacking in justification and virtue, “in the teeth of evidence”. Your response to my probing about your assessment of their rationality that finally made this clear, as it was in connection with this question that you brought up the “cognitive deficiencies” that you named, which you attribute to them as theists. There is no way around this – you believe that atheists are, as atheists, more rational than theists, because of the belief difference that distinguishes them, which you see as a cognitive deficiency. You know you do. I know you do. What is less clear is why you wouldn’t just cop to it immediately. So my final point stands – your concept of yourself as being more rational than religious people on account of what distinguishes them from you must be very important to you. So important that you preferred a dumbed down idea of that which distinguishes them and you. You prefer a vague and inconsistent non-idea-of faith to a clear and coherent idea that makes better sense of all aspects of its use in language than the currently offered multiple incoherent ones.
So this is my last contribution to this discussion. I think it was very interesting all the way to the end, but it is now played out. I now take this last opportunity to review my main thesis.
GH, you can take refuge in the common use definitions of the word faith on the strength of the fact that words can have many different uses and meanings, not all of which are consistent with each other. But I still say that the word faith, and the way it is used, is not adequately or accurately described by such definitions. An original unity has faded from view. Occasionally common use definitions do not adequately describe all the important ways that common use terms are actually used. This is one such occasion.
Faith is fidelity. Religious, non-religious, faith is fidelity. Faith is the exercise of loyalty and trust in the context of a relationship. Creedal faith is the application of that trust to propositions presented in and emerging from that context which, apart from such a context, generally do not have sufficient support to justify their acceptance as true, or at least not enough to compel such acceptance. The application of that trust to those propositions can and do justify and render virtuous the acceptance of those propositions as true. So you would not be heroically intellectual and critical to demand a blood test to prove that your dad is who your mom says he is, but rather, you would be lacking a due faith. And you would be mistaken to judge a Christian who believes that Jesus is God Incarnate to be holding a belief that has no epistemic justification and nothing supporting it but some gullibly accepted emotional commitment. What justifies that belief held by faith that Christ is divine is the relationship that the faithful believer has developed with Christ who the believer has encountered in a way that you may not be able to understand, but is not, for that fact, rightly judged as unreal. It is also justified by the commitment that the believer in Christ has with the faith community, the Church, that Christ founded and built as a real family unit and presented His teaching, and His Life, and Himself, through. When you judge such acceptance of truths presented in that way as irrational, unjustified, and lacking in a virtue present in natural exercises of faith, making natural faith an essentially different thing than religious faith as I have just described it by reason of the virtue present in one and absent in the other, I believe and contend that you judge this matter incorrectly.
The last word is yours if you want it.