Faith

Discussion in 'Religion Archives' started by Canute, Oct 7, 2003.

  1. Canute Registered Senior Member

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    More an essay than a question.

    I’ve been reading up on faith recently and thought I’d write something about it for comment, faith being the cause of quite a few disagreements here. Sorry about the length but I couldn’t figure out how to make it shorter, even though it’s only an outline of some of the issues.

    This is partly a personal interpretation of the evidence. I’m posting it to check what’s wrong with it, so feel free to disagree or point out errors. I haven’t tried to prove everything, but I’ve added a few quotes from people who seem to know what they’re talking about it in case you feel like ploughing through them.


    FAITH

    Introduction

    Faith, what it is and whether one should have any, crops up in most arguments about religion. By one common view an act of faith is necessary to the achievement of ultimate knowledge and understanding, and by another it is not reasonable or rational to have faith, since one should not believe in things that haven’t been proved. People are often very sure of themselves on this question, but it’s actually a difficult one to settle once and for all. It is not even clear that these positions contradict each other.

    Definitions

    Faith is a word with many meanings. As it relates to religious belief the Collins English Dictionary gives these definitions:

    - A strong or unshakeable belief in something, esp. without proof or evidence
    - A specific system of religious beliefs
    - A trust in God and in his actions and promises
    - A conviction of the truth of certain doctrines of religion, esp. when this is not based on reason

    I’ll assume that faith is defined as conviction without proof or conclusive reasons, although not necessarily without any reasoning or evidence. In arguments for and against the need for faith this is what most people seem to mean by it.

    Another definition comes from Buddhist teaching, which suggests that there are three kinds of faith.

    - A longing or a wish that what you hope and believe to be true actually is true.
    - A lucid faith in which you conclude that what you believe to be true actually is true.
    - An unshakable faith, which is total conviction.

    (Lama Suryadas ‘Awakening the Budha Within’.)

    I’ll stick to the last two of these, since they presents faith in its strongest and most controversial form. It is equivalent to the previous definition in that it also assumes a lack of any (third-person) proof.

    There is some potential confusion between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’. Here I take ‘belief’ to be equivalent to ‘article of faith’.

    The Importance of Faith

    Faith is not simply a matter related to morality. It is a fundamental epistemological issue concerned with what we can know and how we can know it. Nevertheless it does relate particularly strongly to moral issues.

    This is because our faith in our system of beliefs forms the basis of our behaviour, how we each live and act (or don’t act). This is as true for a materialist as it is for a Muslim. Our beliefs guide our every action from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. More accurately it can be said that to the precise extent that we have faith in our beliefs then to that extent those beliefs determine our actions.

    Because of this the relationship between faith and morally correct behaviour might be stated like this. To the precise extent that a person believes that they are acting morally they are acting morally, since under no circumstances can a person behave more morally than this. This is true because it is not reasonable to suppose that it is ever morally correct to act other than in accordance with ones belief as to what is morally correct action.

    This does not entail that morality is entirely relative and subjective, as is often argued. Rather it entails that there is a moral dimension to our pursuit and judgement of the knowledge on which we base our beliefs, a moral resposibility attached to the process of forming our beliefs.

    Faith and Knowledge I

    If faith is a personal conviction of the truth of something that cannot be proved then there seems to be a good argument that it is not logical to have faith in anything at all. This is a pretty common view and it has been argued in this forum. It is often assumed that to have faith in something that cannot be proved is unreasonable and irrational. This is a standard charge against religious faith.

    It is what is called ‘evidentialism’, the position that a belief is justified only just as far it is proportioned to the evidence. Evidentialism states that it is not justified to have a unshakeable religious belief unless there is conclusive evidence for its truth. (This is also a Buddhist doctrine).

    However the issue of what constitutes evidence is not simple. We could call our evidence our provably true knowledge. However if we assume that our knowledge is what we can prove (to others) to be true then we must conclude that faith is the very basis of our knowledge. This sounds paradoxical and it is. Philosophers have puzled over over it for thousands of years. It follows inevitably from the fact that all proofs of knowledge are constructed within systems of logical terms and theorems which rest upon an assumption of the truth or falsity of some set of initial assertions about the world, assertions in which one must simply have faith.

    (Non-dual philosophies escape this epistemological restriction, although whether they can provide a true description of reality must remain a matter of opinion).

    Faith and Rationality

    The problem with human reasoning is not simply that all formally logical systems of reasoning must be based on axioms that cannot be proved. It’s worse than that. These unproved axioms are the only theorems in the system of reasoning that are not self-referential, absolutely the only theorems that refer outside the system to reality itself, and it is exactly these statements about reality that we are forced to take on faith alone.

    A good analogy is a dictionary, in which all words are defined in terms of other words. A dictionary can say nothing about the world outside of itself except by the use of undefined words. These are the equivalent of the dictionary’s ‘axioms’, its only reference to any reality beyond itself. (As I understand it mathematics uses undefined terms for the same reasons).

    The consequence of all this is that while any such system of belief, whether physics, mathematics, Christianity, analytic philosophy, Islam, alchemy or any other, may be judged individually better or worse at creating consistent structures of truths and falsities, it is logically inevitable that they all rest on a naïve faith in their axioms, their initial assumptions about what is true about reality. In theism or deism this is pretty obvious, but it is no less true for all other formal systems used to explain or describe reality.

    For this reason it is very difficult to claim that having faith is irrational. One can quite logically argue that it is irational to claim that faith is irrational, since it can be shown that all rational knowledge depends ultimately on an act of faith. However it is an argument that should be used carefully, since it does not entail that all faiths are equally rational.

    Science and Religion

    From a metaphysical point of view religion and science are only in opposition to each other in a rather superficial way. Although the arguments may rage forever about which system of explanation is nearer the truth, in the end, at a metaphysical level, they are just different systems of faith. This is definitely not to say that everything a scientist or theist believes is just a matter of faith and, to say it again, it does not mean that these belief systems are equally rational.

    Nevertheless at a metaphysical level, the level at which they refer to the truth about reality, theism, physicalism, idealism and Buddhism and so forth are all equally unprovable. The first three are metaphysical theories that must be taken on faith or not at all, and belief in the last depends ultimately on subective evidence inaccessible to third-persons. No system of strictly formal reasoning will ever decide between these metaphysical positions.

    The Scale of the Problem

    It may seem a rather trivial or arcane academic problem that we cannot prove the axioms of any formal system of reasoning capable of giving us knowledge of reality. Nobody seems to worry about it much except philosophers and mathematicians. Science makes good predictions, technology seems to work, and it is perfectly possible to compare the reasonableness of, say, the Baha’i faith with that of Christianity or Physicalism on logical grounds. However when it comes to metaphysics, the truth about reality, the problem of knowledge becomes serious.

    The ultimate undecidability of our axioms, our inability to prove which of two possible answers to the most fundamental questions about reality are true, entails that for every systematic explanation of reality there is always at least one other systematic explanation that is, or may be equally correct, and both will agree equally with the evidence. That is, for all fundamental metaphysical questions there are always at least two 'rational' answers, each of which gives rise to a quite opposite but equally consistent system of metaphysical beliefs/knowledge. Instances include physicalism/idealism, God/no-God, freewill/physical determinism etc.

    What is more, the effect of this uncertainty as to the truth of any set of axioms infects the whole of any possible system of formal reasoning, inevitably making the whole system a matter of faith insofar as it asserts anything about reality. (cf. the ‘Quine-Duhem Thesis’).

    All this is not to say that there is no true or knowable explanation of reality, but rather that the construction of a single, true and provable explanation of it is forever beyond the power of human reasoning and explaining. (As non-dual philosophers have been asserting for a few thousand years).

    Faith and Knowledge II

    Knowledge is generally thought to be superior to faith in determining our actions, it is thought to be more ‘rational’. However this is only true to the extent that that knowledge is true, and only to the extent that our knowledge is provable and not itself simply a belief, and from the above it can be seen that provability is a tricky issue.

    This does not mean that it is impossible to know things with certainty, or impossible to hold firm convictions that are completely rational. However, paradoxical as it seems, no formal system of proof can produce provably true statements about reality itself. Provable statements about reality, what lies beyond the self-referential system in which such statements must always be made, are true or false only ever in relation to some set of unproven assumptions, and in all cases there is an equally valid but quite contradictory set of possible assumptions that are equally consistent with the evidence.

    Conclusion

    In principle it is perfectly possible to argue that some faiths are more rational than others on the basis of their internal logical consistency and by their level of agreement with known empirical evidence. However it is not possible to argue that faith per se is irrational, for this is the very reverse of the truth.


    SOURCES & EXTRACTS

    Belief & Behaviour

    “Men frequently outlive their beliefs; but for as long as the beliefs survive (often a very short time), they form the (momentary or lasting) basis of action.”

    Karl Popper - The Problem of Induction (1953)
    Full paper at http://www.dieoff.org/page126.htm

    “Every belief of every person has some practical effects (nothing doesn’t matter).”

    Clifford, William Kingdon (1879), Lectures and Essays (ed. Pollock, F.), London: Macmillan

    “We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith.”

    William James – ‘The Will to Believe’, in ‘Writings’ 1878-1899 Library of America

    “Or, again, take the question: why do we believe what we do? In former times philsophers would have said it was because God had implanted in us a natural light by which we knew the truth. In the early nineteenth century they might have said it was because we had weighed the evidence and had found a preponderance on one side. But if you ask a modern philosopher or political propogandist he will give you a more scientific and more depressing answer. A large proportion of our beliefs are based on habit, conceit, self-interest, or frequent iteration. The advertiser relies mainly on the last of these, but if he is clever he combines it skillfully with the other three. It is hoped that by studying the psychology of belief those who control propaganda will in time be able to make anybody believe anything. Then the totalitarian state will become invincible.”

    Bertrand Russell - ‘Human Knowledge’, 1948.

    (Perhaps, fifty years later, substituting ‘nothing’ for ‘anything’ and ‘capitalist’ for ‘totalitarian’ in the last two sentences makes it easier to understand his fears).

    Evidentialism

    “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence"

    Clifford, William Kingdon (1879), Lectures and Essays (ed. Pollock, F.), London: Macmillan

    “In the absence of evidence for the existence of things of kind X, belief in Xs is unjustified.”

    Scriven and Flew ‘Primary Philosophy’ (1966).

    Uncertainty of Knowledge

    “The programme of tracing back all knowledge to its ultimate source in observation is logically impossible to carry through: it leads to an infinite regress.”

    …“Every proof must proceed from premisses; the proof as such, that is to say the derivation from the premisses, can therefore never finally prove the truth of any conclusion, but only show that the conclusion must be true provided the premisses are true. If we were to demand that the premisses should be proved in their turn, the question of truth would only be shifted back by another step to a new set of premisses, and so on to infinity.”

    …“What we should do, I suggest, is give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge. And admit that all human knowledge is human: that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes: that all we can do is grope for truth even though it be beyond our reach. We may admit that our groping is often inspired, but we must be on our guard against the belief, however deeply felt, that our inspiration carries any authority, divine or otherwise. If we thus admit that there is no authority beyond the reach of criticism to be found within the whole provinnce of our knowledge, however far it may have penetrated into the unknown, then we can retain, without danger, the idea that truth is beyond human authority. And we must retain it. For without this idea there can be no objective standards of enquiry; no criticism of our conjectures; no groping for the unknown; no quest for knowledge.”

    Karl Popper - ‘The Problem of Induction’ (1953. )

    (Much earlier but equivalently Plato talked of human beings being trapped by the nature of their own reasoning inside a metaphorical cave, never able to see more of the reality outside the cave than just the shadows it casts on the cave walls. He deduced that however much, or however well we reason about the phenomenal world of shadows (our perceptions and conceptions), we are never able to see outside of our cave, our hermetic systems of reasoning, to the origins of those shadows. Similarly Kant talked of our inability to know the ‘noumenal’, what is really there. Aristotle cheated by saying that there are axioms which are indubitably true, and which do not need any proof; and he called these ‘basic premisses’. He didn’t have a solution to the faith problem either. )

    Proofs of Reality

    “ So far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. And so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality”.

    Albert Einstein - lost the source I’m afraid.

    “ in whatever way the Deity should be made known to you, and even … if He should reveal Himself to you: it is you … who must judge whether you are permitted to believe in Him, and to worship Him.”

    Kant - quoted by Popper, ibid.

    "There is one great question. Can human beings know anything, and if so, what and how? This question is really the most essentially philosophical of all questions."

    Bertrand Russell - In a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell dated 13 December 1911, quoted in Slater (1994), p. 67. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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    Last edited: Oct 23, 2003

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