Christianity (like many religions) promotes blind faith as a virtue. John 20:19-31 (KJV) is often cited as support for that proposition with the story of "Doubting Thomas:
Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.
And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the LORD.
Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.
And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost:
Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.
But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.
The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the LORD. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.
And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.
Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.
And Thomas answered and said unto him, My LORD and my God.
Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book:
But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name. [my emphasis]
The suggestion that belief without evidence is more virtuous than belief supported by evidence is counterintuitive. William Kingdon Clifford (1845-1879) was an English philosopher and mathematician who achieved some notoriety for calling this ace an ace. Clifford argued that it is immoral to believe things for which one lacks evidence in his 1879 essay "The Ethics of Belief" (which can be found in its entirety at: http://files.meetup.com/12763/Clifford%20-%20The%20Ethics%20of%20Belief.pdf) which contains the famous principle:
"it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
Clifford's essay was famously attacked by pragmatist philosopher William Joseph (1842-1910) in his lecture entitled "Will to Believe": http://falcon.jmu.edu/~omearawm/ph101willtobelieve.html. Joseph's thinking is now popularly known as the "right to believe" doctrine.
I find all of this fascinating. I wish Mr. Joseph was alive today so that I could ask him a simple question: Would you agree that believing something is true does not make it true?
Great post, and certainly it was difficult for me to choose between the many dozens of Bertrand Russell Quotes which are relevant to this situation, but I've always been fond of this one:
ReplyDelete"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
I read that William Joseph lecture, however, and it's not as bad as I expected it to be. He certainly doesn't argue that human belief has any impact on the veracity of given claims; he simply argues for one's right to believe suppositions that seem plausible to one's intellect, even if they cannot be conclusively proven - not quite blind faith in the classical sense, which he derides. Of course, he acknowledges right off the bat that which hypotheses are "live" to an individual can be cultural and based on no evidence, which makes it tough for me to take them seriously.
Atheists should be wary, however, of thinking that in conquering blind faith they will have conquered religion. Faith in the absence of proof is the theology of SOME Christians - I'm thinking of the Catholic theologian who said that a camera present at the Resurrection would have recorded nothing, because faith was required to witness supernatural events - but not all, and not many of the most dangerous. Most modern evangelical Protestants, however, do not believe in this variety of faith - they believe that their hypotheses absolutely can be empirically proven, that true scientific rationalism supports them, and that there is nothing wrong with performing the experiments personally. Hence organizations such as the Creation Institute, which certainly don't need proof to believe - but don't see anything wrong with finding the "proof" and waving it under our noses.
A Catholic will look at your evidence that one of his articles of faith is incorrect and tell you he sees your evidence, he believes you, but he stands by his faith. A Fundamentalist will tell you your evidence is fabricated, a lie of the devil, and that he knows real science when he sees it. Big difference.
Of course, you will know the Christians response to this? From Francis Schaeffer (Appendix A, "He is there and He is not silent") : “One must analyze the word faith and see that it can mean two completely opposite things.
ReplyDeleteSuppose we are climbing in the Alps and are very high on the bare rock and suddenly the fog shuts down. The guide turns to us and says that the ice is forming and that there is no hope; before morning we will all freeze to death here on the shoulder of the mountain. Simply to keep warm, the guide keeps us moving in the dense fog further out on the shoulder until none of us have any idea where we are. After an hour or so, someone says to the guide, “Suppose I dropped and hit a ledge ten feet down in the fog. What would happen then?” The guide would say that you might make it till the morning and thus live. So, with absolutely no knowledge or any reason to support this action, one of the group hangs and drops into the fog. This would be one kind of faith, a leap of faith.
Suppose, however, after we have worked out on the shoulder in the midst of the fog and the growing ice on the rock, we had stopped and we heard a voice which said, “You cannot see me, but I know exactly where you are from your voices. I am on another ridge. I have lived in these mountains, man and boy, for over sixty years, and I know every foot of them. I assure you that ten feet below you there is a ledge. If you hang and drop, you can make it through the night and I will get you in the morning.”
I would not hang and drop at once but would ask questions to try and ascertain if the man knew what he was talking about and if he was not my enemy. In the Alps, for example, I would ask him his name. If the name he gave me was the name of a family from that part of the mountains, it would count a great deal to me. In the Swiss Alps there are certain family names that indicate mountain families of that area. For example, in the area of the Alps where I live, Avanthey would be such a name. In my desperate situation, even though time would be running out, I would ask him what to me would be the sufficient questions, and when I became convinced of his answers, then I would hang and drop.
This is faith, but obviously it has no relationship to the first instance. As a matter of fact, if one of these is called faith, the other should not be designated by the same word symbol. The historic Christian faith is not a leap of faith in the post-Kierkegaardian sense because “he is not silent,” and I am invited to ask the sufficient questions in regards to details but also to the existence of the universe and its complexity and in regard to the existence of man. I am invited to ask the sufficient questions and then believe him and bow before him metaphysically in knowing that I exist because he made man, and bow before him morally as needing his provision for me in the substitutionary, propitiatory death of Christ.”
Which works flawlessly as a response right up until you consider that he IS silent, and that even if you suppose an omnipotent creator to have left messages in the form of "the existence of the universe and its complexity" and "the existence of man," the rational person can find nothing which can possibly tie him to Christ.
ReplyDeleteThis, as a I recently commented elsewhere on this blog, is the real question - not "why do you believe in God," because that word can mean anything we want it to and can be defined in any number of ways that cannot be disproved and have no bearing on our lives. The real question is why ANY proof of God has any bearing on the Christian religion, which Schaeffer (like most Christian thinkers) seems to take for granted.
There is a huge leap between "a consciousness outside of existence must have created it" and "that consciousness is this dude whose biography my grandmother gave me," and I grow tired of people assuming that in supporting one statement they have buttressed the other.
Free Radical, you are dead on. It's the difference between looking up in the sky and saying "there must be something up there greater than me" (how could we ever disprove that?) and believing in the resurrection. It's the difference between agnosticism and delusion.
ReplyDeleteIt’s a redundancy to call faith blind. To have faith in the unseen doesn't necessitate having a dogmatic religion attached to it; instead it is a moral appreciation (blind faith) for believing in something greater than you, it is being unselfish opposed to the self-interested.
ReplyDeleteThe mistake with anti-spiritualism is to think that you can reason things out through some innate rational approach and believe that you’ve come to any sort of conclusion. You have to sport your ideas with more depth. This literalism is constantly trying to define and connect the dots, while confusing the idea of something with the actual doing of it.
Boiled down without the stories and all the myths religion is at its heart a faith-trust in the morality of life, in the goodness of God. If you want to make a caricature of people’s beliefs based on some external you are missing the point that it coming from within. The difference between a blind faith and blind skepticism is the latter is a greater moral philosophy by simply being inclusive, by responding to the higher ideals in life. This may involve sticking their necks out, but you can’t understand what motivates people to strive for the spiritual. They are working towards a goal, while all you’re doing is trying to smash it down.
Dotard, as far as trying to smash down a goal, my aim is not to dissuade people from seeking spirituality. Far from it. My aim is much more on the target best described today by Free Radical as: "that consciousness is this dude whose biography my grandmother gave me".
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting that humans continue to debate the virtue of blind faith among our own species yet we use something very akin to that concept to analyze the intelligence of other members of the animal kingdom.
ReplyDeleteFor example, when confronted with a crisis situation, apes react much different than, say, cows. You may find several cows in a row fall to their death down a hole in the upper loft of a barn while trying to escape a fire. They may simply follow the lead of one who steps a certain way, falls down the hole and dies. Zoologists will tell you that they would expect to see different behaviour from apes in that one unlucky one who runs that way and falls down the hole may be the only one to meet that fate because the others choose an alternative after seeing what happened to the first. We have come to see this as a sign of intelligence.
So do we explain the behaviour of the cows, in this example, as a form of blind faith, or is that inappropriate because they are too stupid to have any sort of faith in what the first one did?
I hope the latter is correct, because otherwise we better assess the intelligence of Bibleists.
I don't think we need to claim that "Bibleists" are of sub-human intelligence - but their behavior almost certainly is. The behavior of the truly zealous is more worthy of cows than primates.
ReplyDeleteI think the definition of Insanity often attributed to Einstein is instructive here: "Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results." Sounds like a good definition for some other concepts we know.