Against Faith

*this post is a part of the Assuming the Supernatural series*

Unfortunately there are a great many definitions of Faith (a few of which I'm actually ok with).  Most arguments about Faith get derailed long before deliberations begin- they get derailed because of a fundamental difference the two people have in their definition of Faith.  So I'm going to try to be as specific as possible here and avoid using the generic term "Faith."  Instead, I'm going to talk about "contingent belief", "non-contingent belief", and "divinely imparted belief" as proxies for what most people mean when they talk about Faith

Contingent belief is the kind of Faith that I'm OK with.  This kind of Faith is really just a different way of talking about weak Bayesian belief (I think its a mistake to call this "Faith" at all, because it seems to me so categorically different from the other types of Faith.  But this is the definition some people use- particularly when trying to accuse science of requiring Faith).  It is a mental assent to a proposition that you are less than sure about, but it is necessarily beholden to your future experiences.  Scientific theories all fit into this category.  We're not 100% sure of anything, and if we find sufficient evidence against a theory, we will discard it.  Moreover, we have (or ought to have) no emotional attachment to this kind of Faith, and having this Faith is neither virtue nor vice- it is simply applied logic.

Non-contingent belief is that belief which I cannot accept.  The problem with non-contingent belief is that it separates our beliefs from reality.  We are no longer tied down by experience or reason, but rather let loose to roam the plains of our own desires.  To put it another way, if we allow ourselves non-contingent belief, how are we to decide what to believe without evidence?  Surely there are a great many possible beliefs that we could hold without offering any defense for them.  Why pick Christianity, or Islam, or Buddhism?  Why not pick "Jakeism", the religion of Jake, in which I am god and get to decide what is right and wrong according to my own whims?

I want to be clear that I don't think most religions fall into this category- but many do glorify such belief.  The intelligent Christian believes because there are good arguments, and he is convinced of the historical accuracy of scripture, and he cannot make sense of life without the meta-ethical framework that Christianity provides.  This man may well be wrong, but he is not believing without basing his conclusions on evidence.  But when a religion exhorts its followers towards Faith- towards belief without evidence, or worse, belief in the face of evidence- my spider sense starts tingling.  We ought not believe anything on this kind of Faith.  If we find evidence or experiences that contradict our religious beliefs, we should question our beliefs.  Either our beliefs are correct, and we will find good answers to our questions, or our beliefs are incorrect, and we will be one step closer to finding the correct beliefs.

What I want out of my epistemology is to become a more accurate predictor of reality.  The only way non-contingent belief could accomplish this is if there were something that was true, but no evidence could be offered up for it.  While it is conceivable that such truth exists, consider which is more likely- that someone claiming absolute truth without evidence actually has the truth, or that someone claiming absolute truth without evidence is wrong.  Obviously, we expect you to have no evidence if you're wrong.  You haven't differentiated yourself from other people claiming truth if you tell us that we need faith to believe you.  I don't want arbitrary belief; I want belief based in reality.

But I think the best argument against non-contingent belief is the following: any non-contingent-belief-Faith you have derives from your belief in the Authority of something else (a holy scripture, a prophet, a tradition, etc.) which tells you to have Faith (or at least tells you the truth you ought to have Faith in).  Your Faith can never be stronger than your belief in the Authority.  Likewise, that belief in the Authority can never be stronger than your belief in whatever it is that gives your Authority-source it's Authority.  After peeling back all the layers, there are only two places you can end up: experience, or reason.  Your Faith cannot be stronger than your belief in experience and reason, because your Faith derives itself, through layers of abstraction, from this experience and reason.  Otherwise, what you have is a floating belief, not tied to any actual observable reality.  If your Faith in the Authority is working in a feedback loop with the Authority proclaiming Faith, you need to take a serious look at your belief system, because you would believe it no matter what it said.  You believe it simply because you believe it, and for no other reason.  You are perpetuating the status quo for the simple reason that you already believe the status quo.  And that's why non-contingent belief is such a great evil- because it is inescapable, even when its wrong.

This brings us to divinely imparted belief.  I'm not sure what exactly I can say here, other than throwing up my hands and rolling my eyes.  Fine.  You believe you have divinely imparted belief.  You don't need reasons, because you simply *know* something is true that the rest of us don't see.  This is like the man who is convinced the world is one big dream of his, and he will be waking up any minute.  Nothing you can say, nothing you can do will ever convince him otherwise.  Divinely imparted belief is (most often) a veneer placed over a gaping hole in the reasonability of a religion.

Again, I want to be clear that I think divinely imparted belief is totally possible.  But you ought to be so suspicious of it that you don't believe it, even if it is true, because you're not the only one claiming this.  If other people can be mistaken about the level of certainty they ought to have in the divine origin of their beliefs, why can't you?  It seems like hubris to claim that we have divinely imparted belief, which we can be sure of because it was divinely imparted, but your divinely imparted belief is purely psychological (and by the way, you should convert).

Before closing this post, I should note that C.S. Lewis has a definition of Faith that I can totally get behind.  He basically says that Faith is the ability to hold on to what you know to be true even when it doesn't seem true at the moment.  Certainly mood, circumstance, and chance play a large role in our lives, and can definitely affect what we consider to be reasonable at a given time.  If all we require of Faith is that it is a caution against impetuous overcorretive steering, then I'm on board- you shouldn't make big life decisions about what you believe in an instant.  But if we're saying Faith can keep us from converting or deconverting long-term, even when we're convinced that the evidence is arrayed against us?  I'm not buying it.  That's what keeps people trapped in false religion.

What DO I Believe?

*this post is a part of the Assuming the Supernatural series*

I've spent a lot of time talking about what I don't believe, and what I find difficult to believe in other religions.  It only seems fair that I talk about what I do believe (at this point), as we can't just go along defeating other people's beliefs forever.

In one sense, these beliefs are not very scientific.  In another, they quite are.  They are the synthesis of my moral sensibilities and my observations about reality as a rational moral agent (and a substantial amount of modern Western culture that has found it's way in as well).  They are (for the most part) distinct from my axioms of belief, but rather are the conclusions I draw from the application of my axioms to my life experience.  Basically, these are the things that I would be looking for a metaphysical system to support if I'm to buy into it.

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I believe in Reason- mostly because it seems to work.  The universe is orderly, not out of necessity, but out of observation.  And we can codify good methods of defining, discovering, and extrapolating that order to make predictions.  Reality agreeing with a belief system's predictions is a necessary condition for me accepting that belief system.

I believe in Right and Wrong- that they are real and objective things.  I believe that when societies or groups don't recognize the objective moral right and wrong (which is a historical reality), it is out of ignorance.  It is because they don't fully understand their actions, or the effect their actions have on other people.

I believe in Love- I believe its more than hormones and herd instinct.

I believe in free will- I don't think we are destined to do anything.  We make our own choices.  If the world was any other way, I see no reason for this physical reality to exist at all.  If the end is already set, why bother with this charade?

I don't care if there's an afterlife-  Seriously, it seems really secondary to me.  First, this reality is the only one I can be sure of.  Second, I just don't see ceasing to exist as such a great evil.  I'm not saying I reject the idea of an afterlife out-of-hand, just that any claim about the afterlife makes me suspicious, because it's a great method of control (not to mention being totally unverifiable).

I believe in freedom- personal, political, and economic.  We ought to be be free to determine the outcome of our own lives. (obviously we can't live in a vaccuum, free from outside influences, but we can and should give as much autonomy as possible to the individual)


I believe everyone has the right to decide for themselves what they believe- I reject any religion or epistemology that threatens the non-believer or disallows interpretation and honest disagreements by its adherents

I believe in accepting and loving everyone, even those we disagree with- I'm not sure yet whether I agree with "loving your enemies", because I'm not even really sure what that means.  But I am pretty sure we ought not make enemies with anyone if we can help it.  Those that differ from us are still human, and worthy of human dignity and love.  I like the way C.S. Lewis puts it- "But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less."  Once you see another human as a moral agent just trying to maximize his own happiness, you begin to forgive that which would previously be unforgivable.

I believe in justice- Wrongdoers should be punished.  This is not diametrically opposed to the "loving and accepting everyone" point.  Justice is devoid of emotion.  It is a recognition that actions have consequences, and that to encourage correct behavior we need to discourage incorrect behavior.  "Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen".  But justice is more than this.  I think, even if incentivizing people to not do bad things didn't work, I would still believe that wrongdoing should be punished.

I do not believe in faith- Here's the problem with faith: if we believe something on any strength other than the evidence, then we lose the grounding of our belief in reality.  There are several definitions of faith, but I think they basically fall into two categories- blind faith and contingent faith.  Contingent faith is not really "faith" at all- it's weak bayesian belief.  I have "faith" in those I trust, because the evidence says they are trustworthy.  If they continually fail at that standard, I will lose my faith in them. I cannot justify believing in any other conception of faith. (This is a topic that deserves a more considered discussion.  I'll be writing a post on Faith soon)

I do not think humans are basically good. I do not think humans are basically bad. I think humans are basically free- it seems to me that we all have a great capacity for both.  It is equally hard to be all-good as it is to be all-bad. It seems to be a common claim in religion that humans are all bad, and anything good we do is God, and anything bad we do is us.  I think humans, with or without God, are capable of choosing to do the right thing.  

I do not believe in the authority of tradition- Tradition is useful because smart people have been thinking hard for thousands of years about the same problems we encounter today.  But tradition cannot be authoritative- those who created tradition were no different, no better or worse, than we are today.  If anything, they had fewer resources, had been exposed to fewer diverse belief systems, and had  less scientific and historical knowledge of the world than we do.  Moreover, adhering to tradition for the sake of tradition almost inherently slows down or outright prevents progress.  I cannot and will not cede the authority to determine my beliefs to anyone other than myself.  I am ultimately responsible for both my beliefs and my actions, so I need to take responsibility for verifying my beliefs against reality. There is obviously something more to be said if God has revealed something to specific people- those who had direct interaction with God do have a great deal more authority.  But the standard of proof for me to believe this is astronomically high.  I will cover my full view of tradition in a later post.

I don't believe any human is infallible- I cannot accept any claims of infallibility for living humans, because infallibility removes my right to question, criticize, and argue- those are some of our fundamental rights (and indeed, obligations) as humans.  I'm suspicious of any religion that elevates its leader to "unquestionable" status for the same reason I'm suspicious of any country that has a president but no elections. (note that this doesn't disqualify Christianity, because Jesus was not really human in the sense that all the rest of us are- he was "all God and all Man".  Whatever that means, its something fundamentally different than us)

Assuming The Supernatural...

At this point, I think I've enumerated most of my good arguments against Theism in general.  And I'm finding that, when considering different religions and different sects within the same religion, I'm getting bogged down by questions of metaphysics rather than questions of theology.  While the two are by no means mutually exclusive, I do think there's been an element of not-taking-this-religion-stuff-seriously in a lot of my posts, and more to the point, in a lot of my thinking.

The truth is, I'm about 50/50 on whether or not I think there's a "supernatural" anything.  The half of me that believes in the supernatural is the same half that rejects Nihilism.  The half of me that doesn't thinks we're meaningless bags of atoms hurtling towards our inevitable doom.  The second, it turns out, is a much less interesting half.

I'm going to try and make an effort over over the next few weeks, starting with my next post, to consider the case where I am convinced that there is something more than the physical world, and the problem has been reduced to deciding which of these religions, if any, seem to be the best fit with my observations and reason.  I'm going to mark these posts in the "ATS" category (assuming the supernatural), so I don't have to write this long paragraph every time about how I'm arguing for things with only a 50% buy-in.

Deconverting a Muslim

The question that seems to have generated the most interesting results for me in conversations with Christians is "On what basis should a Muslim deconvert?"  The power of this question is that it forces you to consider what would make you deconvert from a religion, while separating you from the emotional ties you have with your own.  It implicitly asks you if you hold yourself to the same standard you hold other religious believers (who you presumably think have the wrong idea about God, and should convert).

I've been surprised by how many Christians have answered this the same way I did three years ago, but arrived at a totally different conclusion.  My answer was that there was no standard I could apply to both them and myself that would declare my religious experience to be true and their religious experience to be false.  I had to admit that, had I been born a Muslim and maintained my current standards for belief, I would have forever remained a Muslim.  What surprised me about the Christians who echoed my sentiments was that their response was not to doubt the validity of their belief.  Rather, their response was to thank God that they had been born into a Christian environment.  Several times I have heard the phrase "if I had been born a Muslim, I think I would probably still be a Muslim", and was astonished that it was not immediately followed by a recanting of Christianity.

This seems so logically inconsistent to me that I don't really know where to start.  This is a confession that your beliefs are not based on reality, but on Geography.  This is a confession that your beliefs are not objectively true, but rather culturally convincing.  This is a confession that your standards of belief are so weak that you cannot even differentiate yourself from your principle rival (globally speaking) that claims to offer a contradictory version of truth.  And most important, it seems a confession that there is no reason anyone should choose Christianity over Islam, because their relative plausibility is based on your culture rather than the truth.  I just can't get my head around someone admitting to all this, and being thankful they were born into this particular arbitrarily held belief system- as if the Muslim would not say the exact same?

I honestly think Islam is the best argument against Christianity.  It falsifies a lot of the core assumptions of Christian apologetics- that a group of men two thousand years ago wouldn't have died for a belief unless it was real, that God reveals himself in an active and unmistakeable way, that miracles and fulfilled prophecy are convincing and sufficient to prove a religion correct.  Moreover, it shows that people can be absolutely convinced that their religious beliefs and experiences are true- but be totally wrong.

My point is, if you don't have a good filter that passes your religion and fails every other religion, then I think you need to reevaluate your standard of belief.  This is why I placed such a premium on the Personal Relationship claim made by Christianity, because it was just one such differentiator.  But in the end, that didn't bare itself out in my life.

I'd be interested in hearing any suggestions about what kind of filter we might apply that passes one and only one religion- or an argument of how we're justified believing one of the two religions without such a filter