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WillowOne's Positions

Faith

My Positions

  1. Faith, in the sense of belief held without sufficient evidence or in the face of contrary evidence, is not a virtue. It is the name given to a failure of method in order to make it sound like an achievement.
  2. The other sense of faith, trust grounded in a track record ("I have faith in my surgeon"), is ordinary inductive confidence. It is not what religions ask for, and sliding between the two senses is equivocation.
  3. "You have faith in science too" is false. I have reasons, I can say what they are, and when they fail I change my mind. That last clause is the whole difference.

Notes

  1. The religious sense is explicit in the texts. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). Thomas, who asked to see the wounds before believing, is gently rebuked: "blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed" (John 20:29). Faith is praised precisely to the extent that it operates without evidence. No other field of human activity treats this as a merit. A juror who convicted on faith would be dismissed; an engineer who built on faith would be prosecuted.
  2. Faith is immune to revision by design, and that is the defect. My whole approach rests on holding beliefs provisionally and updating them when they are surprised (Fallibilism, Knowledge). A belief protected by faith has been removed from that process: contrary evidence is reinterpreted as a test of faith, and the stronger the evidence, the greater the virtue in resisting it. This is not a different way of knowing. It is a way of not knowing while feeling certain, and certainty is a feeling, not a measure.
  3. As a method, faith is demonstrably unreliable. The same method, applied with equal sincerity, produces Christians in Alabama, Muslims in Riyadh and Hindus in Varanasi, and these conclusions contradict one another. A method that yields incompatible answers depending on where it is used is not tracking anything outside the user. This is the point Street Epistemology is built around: not "is your belief true?" but "how reliable is the way you arrived at it?"
  4. The trust sense is fine and is not faith. I trust my doctor because of medical training, licensing, a track record and the possibility of a second opinion. I trust the aeroplane because of a century of engineering and an accident rate I can look up. If the track record failed, the trust would go with it. The apologist who says "you take science on faith" is borrowing the respectability of this sense to lend it to the other; the response is to ask which sense is meant and hold them to it.
  5. Faith as identity. For many people "faith" names a community, a history and a set of rituals rather than an epistemic state, and that is the sense in which I have no quarrel with it (see Religion on belief versus identity). The quarrel begins when the identity is used to underwrite factual claims about the world, which it cannot do.
  6. The ethics of belief. W. K. Clifford argued in 1877 that it is wrong, always and everywhere, to believe anything on insufficient evidence, because beliefs are not private: they issue in actions, and they are contagious. William James replied that in some cases one must choose without evidence. I side with Clifford, with the qualification that the duty is proportionate to the stakes, and the stakes of religious belief, for the believer and for everyone the believer votes about, are not small.

Sources

  • Clifford, W. K., "The Ethics of Belief", Contemporary Review (1877)
  • James, W., "The Will to Believe", New World (1896)
  • Boghossian, P., A Manual for Creating Atheists (2013), for the "pretending to know things you don't know" definition, which I think is too polemical to be useful but is not wrong

Also see