A while back a friend posted the following question on Facebook:

“Can you criticize someone who doesn’t believe in climate change if you believe in God?

Person A shows facts, stats, etc. to disprove God.

Person B ignores it, says it is their faith and belief system which can’t be challenged by logic.

Replace God above with Climate Change.

Why do we criticize people who don’t believe in climate change when their rationale is entirely similar if not exactly the same as those who believe in God? If facts and science can’t prove God, how can it prove climate change?”

This post caused me to …

1. discover that Facebook comments have a 10,000-character limit, and
2. end up with a new blog post for you all.

Why does this merit such extended treatment?

Because as I was reading through other comments in the thread, I disagreed vehemently with what I saw. Most comments claimed there was a difference between climate change and the existence of God. They thought it was fine to think that God exists absent, or even in spite of, evidence. But they thought it was not fine to think the climate is not changing absent, or even in spite of, evidence.  

And this worries me. Those responses betray a deeply distorted understanding of faith. This distortion, in turn, encourages intellectual dishonesty within the church, cheapens the demands of faith, and finally, I think, relegates religion to a lower or lesser status.

1-Religious Faith and Reasons for Religious Belief

Many of the comments on my friend’s Facebook post tried to defend an epistemic asymmetry between belief in God and belief in climate change. Beliefs in climate change should be responsive to evidence and arguments. Belief in God need not be.

But why accept this difference? Some seemed to think science is special. Science has certain special standards, and so if you want to believe something scientific you need special evidence for it. Others seemed to think religion is special. Religion has certain special standards, and so if you want to believe something religious you only need faith to do so. Let’s address both of these views in turn.

1.1-Something Special about Science

Now, to be fair to these commentors, we often do talk about the special standards of science. In school you are taught about the scientific method, a special procedure you use to empirically confirm scientific hypotheses. So clearly there must be something special about science! Scientific claims require their own unique method of evidence! To deny climate change is to advance a scientific hypothesis, and there are norms for what evidence is required to support a scientific hypothesis. You need evidence, you need reasons, you need arguments.

This is wrong, it confuses the social norms for publicly accepted scientific research with the epistemic norms for scientific belief. The requirement to believe things for evidence is not a feature of the scientific nature of scientific beliefs. The requirement to believe things for evidence is a feature of the beliefy nature of scientific beliefs.

Suppose I tell you that I will give you fifty dollars if you come to believe there is an elephant in your bedroom, will you be able to win the money? Not easily. But why not? Is it because elephants fall into biological science? No. Rather it is because belief itself imposes standards of evidence. You cannot believe something that you think is false, because to believe something just is to think that thing is true. Thus, if you want to believe something, you need to have evidence that you at least think shows that thing is true.

We know it is the ‘belief’ and not the ‘elephant’ that creates the demand for evidence because we can change the challenge. Suppose I will give you fifty dollars if you come to believe that Zeus is sitting in your bedroom. Will you now be able to win the money? Zeus is not a topic of scientific investigation. But still, of course not. You can’t win the money even though we have switched to a religious subject matter. That switch in fact makes it no easier to win the money because the standards of evidence had nothing to do with the content of your belief, but rather its form.

Orthodox religious belief makes substantive claims about matters of fact. If you say God exists, then you are saying much the same sort of thing that you are saying when you say climate change exists. Now, it is true that we don’t tend to slot the ‘God’ question into the domain of science, but that is largely a contingent matter of historical development. For most of intellectual history, theology was considered the ‘science of God’ in precisely the same way that astronomy was considered the ‘science of the heavens’.

Some in the Facebook thread were arguing that scientific claims are empirical, and therefore are subject to special standards of confirmation. The thought seemed to be that because scientific theories can be empirically confirmed, they therefore require empirical confirmation. The problem is, this is not a principled difference between science and religion, and even if it was a principled distinction, it wouldn’t have those implications on evidential norms. It might be, in principle, impossible to prove that the classical model of relativity is correct and the neo-Lorentzian model is mistaken. Likewise, it might be unprovable whether the Everett interpretation or a Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is right. But just because neither interpretation can be empirically falsified, that does not mean we’ve moved from ‘science’ to ‘religion’ and we can now believe without evidence. Rather we can argue about which theory is simpler, which more elegant, which better fits with other physical laws etc..

Sure, sometimes our arguments can only indicate, but not prove, a conclusion. In that case we should weaken our confidence one way or the other. And sure, sometimes we cannot even make arguments one way or the other, in which case we should suspend belief entirely.  But it does not make any sense to say that because we cannot show something is true or false that we can then just think it is true or false without reasons. If I lock your bedroom door, that does not suddenly enable you to believe Zeus is sitting on your bed. But it might well make it impossible for you to prove or disprove that Zeus is sitting on your bed.

1.2-Religion is Unique Because of the Virtue of Faith

Ok, so perhaps beliefs in general, and not just scientific beliefs, require faith. But just because something is true in general does not mean it is true in every instance. Dogs generally have four legs, but Fido over their can still have three.

This is important because most people on the thread really were not arguing that only scientific beliefs need evidence, or that only empirically falsifiable beliefs need evidence, or anything like that. Rather, they were arguing that religious matters are a special exception to the general rule that you must believe things for reasons.

Why?

Because of the virtue of faith. Religious claims are unique because faith is legitimate for religious belief, and that is because there is something special about religious beliefs. Now, no one in this particular thread articulated what it is about religious beliefs that suspend the usual requirements of evidence. A lot of people tossed out that religious claims are unprovable, but as we have already seen someone who believes something without evidence cannot defend that belief by pointing out it is unprovable (by the way, have I yet explained on this blog my confident belief that Plato was actually an incredibly life-like and magically moving Play-Dough sculpture? Sure, I don’t have any evidence but at this point it’s unprovable one way or the other).

That said, there are some interesting arguments that religious beliefs are special, and thus the ordinary standards of evidence no longer apply to them. Philosophers who defend this view are known as fideists. They are profoundly mistaken, but they do at least make some interesting arguments.

For the purposes of this blog, I’ll just give my own favorite argument for fideism, one that is an adaptation of various points made by the great fideist Blaise Pascal. The argument is a little long, so bear with me (I want to do justice to the fideist position since it is not a view I’m naturally sympathetic to).

Imagine I want to study a snail. That study will be profoundly asymmetric. I can study the snail, learn all about it, and the snail will only form the most shadowy conjectures (if that) of what I am like. Nor do I require the snail’s cooperation. If it tries to crawl (slide, slither, what is the word for how a snail moves?) away from me I’ll be able to chase it down.

But now suppose I wanted to get to know a dog. Now things will be a little more equal. I can learn about the dog but may require some degree of cooperation. The dog could bite me or run away. Its cooperation will definitely help. Likewise, the dog will be able to get some true understanding of who I am, but that will require a great deal of cooperation on my part. In many ways I will need to reveal myself to the dog if it is to understand me even a little bit.

Moving past the dog, if I want to understand you it will have to be a fairly equitable exchange. You will need to enter into the conversation about as much as I will. You will understand my ideas about as well as I understand yours.

That would not be true if I were talking with Einstein. He could understand my thoughts, but I would NOT be able to understand his. Or at least I would not understand them the way he understands them. I would need him to simplify his ideas, give me helpful examples. He would have to bring them down to my level. It’s not just that I would not understand his reasons for what he thinks, I would not understand what he thinks at all. So even if I could repeat back exactly what he says when he explains relativity, I would not have a rational belief, because I don’t understand what it is that I am purporting to prove. I can accept on Einstein’s testimony that relativity is true. But what I’m really accepting is that whatever Einstein understands as relativity is true. My own understanding of relativity, I expect, is actually probably wrong in all sorts of particulars.

So before I can really prove that something is true, the thing I’m proving needs to be something that ‘fits’ into my intellect. Unless I got a lot better at math and science, relativity just won’t ‘fit’ in my intellect, and so even if I could repeat back Einstein’s proof I could not actually prove anything. It would not be totally unlike if I repeated back a proof in a language I don’t know. My repetition could be technically flawless, but the words don’t ‘grip’ onto anything real in my mind.

What does this have to do with religious beliefs? Well, the gap between us and God is FAR greater than the gap between us and a snail. Thus there is an essential mystery to God such that God’s nature is just not graspable by our reason. It is not that ‘God exists’ might be impossible to prove or disprove. It’s that ‘God’ is so far beyond our understanding that ‘God exists’ does not fit in our intellects (and cannot fit in our intellects no matter how much smarter we become).

Because ‘God exists’ is not something that fits in our intellect, it also does not fit into the conclusion of one of our arguments (nor does the claim ‘God does not exist’). Even if one of the classic argument’s for God’s existence worked, that would not matter. Perhaps the argument from a first cause is successful. If so, it does not prove God exists. It proves a first cause exists. I can comprehend a first cause, and precisely because I can comprehend a first cause and cannot comprehend God, whatever I’ve proven exists is not the God I was seeking to prove.

Thus, we should conclude that knowledge of God is not propositional knowledge—rather it’s something like acquaintance knowledge.

Take a quotidian example of acquaintance knowledge. I know Paul. Part of that knowledge involves knowing lots of facts about Paul. But that is not all that is required. If I spent two years telling a high school friend every single thing I know about Paul, even at the end of those two years the friend would not know Paul. The friend would know a lot about Paul, but if you asked them ‘Hi, do you know Paul Rezkalla by any chance?’ they would have to say ‘no.’ It is the same as how, though I know a lot about John Adams, I don’t know John Adams. And I could never gain that acquaintance knowledge even if I make all sorts of new historical discoveries about him. You can’t gain acquaintance knowledge of someone just by provable propositions.

So, why are religious claims not provable? Because we can’t have propositional knowledge of God and only propositional knowledge of God can be secured by evidence. Rather we have acquaintance knowledge of God, and evidence and arguments are irrelevant to that acquaintance knowledge. If you give me lots of evidence that Paul does not exist and is just a persistent hallucinatory delusion, then eventually I may come to lack propositional knowledge of Paul. I’ll cease to believe Paul exists, or at least cease to be justified in that belief. But assuming Paul does exist, that evidence could never destroy my acquaintance knowledge. I would still know Paul even if I think I don’t know him.

In Summary: Because religion is about acquaintance knowledge of God and not propositional knowledge of God. And because acquaintance knowledge is not secured by evidence. Therefore religious belief is not secured by evidence.  

There are elements of this fideist story I actually agree with. I think the fideist is right to emphasize acquaintance knowledge of God. Philosophers are often less good Christians than non-philosophers, despite knowing more about God. Why? Because what is central to Christian faith is not knowledge about God, it is knowing God. And one can know God without learning much theology (though I will defend that knowing theology can help).

However, what we are after is not just a reemphasis on acquaintance knowledge of God. What the fideist really needs is for propositional knowledge of God to be impossible, because as we have seen one element of a propositional belief is that as a belief it has an internal demand to be believed based on evidence. But that is an extreme claim, and it is certainly not the sort of claim that ordinary American Christians want to be making when they claim they just believe in God based on faith. They still want to say that it is true that ‘God exists’. They claim to know that God is Trinitarian, and don’t just claim to know a Trinitarian God. They claim to know that God was incarnate in the person of Jesus, and don’t just claim to know a God who was incarnate in the person of Jesus.

Now I can run through the various objections I have to the argument I just made for fideism. For instance, I could explain how we don’t need full understanding to believe something (e.g. I can believe Paul exists without understanding much about Paul). The problem is there are lots of arguments for fideism and I can’t address them all.

So, instead I’ll just point out that it seems clear that at least some religious beliefs will be really propositional, and so for at least those beliefs you should be able to give good reasons to think they are true. Take the belief that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Now perhaps I don’t understand the resurrection in any deep sense (I don’t), but I do at least understand that it entails that there is no dead body of Jesus Christ somewhere. So, if I believe that fact I should, because it is a belief, be able to give some reason to think it is true. Perhaps that reason is I have found the church a trustworthy source of truth. Perhaps that reason is the martyrdom of the apostles. Perhaps that reason is the explanatory coherence of Thomistic philosophy. Whatever it is, however, I’m being intellectually dishonest if I don’t have something I can point to. If I claim religious beliefs are somehow special and don’t need evidence, I had better explain how the belief this particular dead body does not exist is somehow different from every other dead body that it would be absurd to deny exists without evidence.  

2-So what is Faith?

Now, here you might be wondering: if I think the reason one should believe Christian doctrine is that the weight of evidence favors Christianity, then what role is left for faith? My answer: faith involves believing God, not believing that God exists.

For some reason, especially in American Protestantism, faith has come to be identified with a firm doxastic commitment to the existence of God. People think that faith involves believing certain religious truths. But this is not at all what faith actually is. Abraham believed God and that was counted to him as Righteousness. That does not mean that Abraham believed God existed, it meant that Abraham who knew God existed, trusted what God told him.

To clarify what it is to believe God, it might be useful to look at what it is to believe another ordinary human. If you tell me that Valletta is the capital of Malta, I face a choice about whether to believe you. But suppose I did believe you, what would that mean? It would not mean I come to think you exist, rather it means I come to think Valletta is the capital of Malta. This is important, you don’t show up in the content of what I end up thinking. I believe you, but what it is that I believe has nothing to do with you at all. Of course I could come to believe you about something you tell me about yourself (say you tell me you played the trumpet in high school). But the ‘believing you’ does not depend on the content having anything to do with you. Rather, I believe you insofar as I take your word as the basis of believing what you say. (This is a rough description, if you say ‘I speak English’ I might take that as the basis of believing that you speak English but not because I believe you but rather because that speech act is itself evidence of your fluency. We can put those complications aside for now.)

This talk of believing you is totally different from an expression like ‘I believe IN you’ (in the sense that people talk about believing IN God). If I were to say I believe IN you in that way, what I would be saying is something like I believe you exist. But the statement, ‘I believe you exist’ is just a silly one to believe without good reason. In exactly the same way, it is silly to believe that there is a perfectly good, maximally perfect, triune being who created the world and entered into covenantal relationship with humanity without good reason. 

Consider the way Elizabeth Anscombe puts it in her wonderful piece “What is it to Believe Someone”:

“At one time, there was the following way of speaking: faith was distinguished as human and divine. Human faith was believing a mere human being; divine faith was believing God. Occurring in discussion without any qualifying adjective, the word “faith” tended to mean only or mostly ‘divine faith’. But its value in this line of descent has quite altered. Nowadays it is used to mean much the same thing as ‘religion’ or possibly ‘religious belief’. Thus belief in God would now generally be called ‘faith’—belief in God at all, not belief that God will help one, for example. This is a great pity. It has had a disgusting effect on thought about religion. The astounding idea that there should be such a thing as believing God has been lost sight of. … This has had its effect; for in matters of intellectual fashion we tend to be like sheep. And so, even though the words appear plainly, they are not, it seems, reflected on. Rather, we are deluged with rubbish about ‘believing in’ as opposed to ‘believing that’. Like the chorus of animals in Orwell, there is a claque chanting “believing in goo-ood, believing that ba-ad.”

…

I am not interested here in any sense of ‘believing in ___________’ except that in which it means ‘believing that _________ exists’. This belief, with God as argument, could not be ‘‘divine faith.” This comes out quite clearly if we use my suggested form: believing x that p. It would be bizarre to say that one believed N that N existed.”

Faith comes in only after one believes someone exists. Once I believe God exists, for reasons, I then face the question of whether to believe God, to trust that his plan for my life is right even when it seems wrong.

On this understanding of faith there is no worrying parallel with climate change. It makes sense to believe God when he tells us things. Or to believe God will save us, protect us, deliver us etc. (though those latter things move us into the theological virtue of hope which is the practical corollary of faith). But it does not make sense to believe the non-existence of climate change when it tells us things. The non-existence of climate change is not something one can trust.

Christians with a proper understanding of faith are free to criticize those who deny climate change without evidence. Christians with the confused understanding I think are hypocrites anytime they criticize someone’s closely held beliefs as unreasonable. You don’t get to carve out an exception just for your own most cherished beliefs and say ‘these beliefs, and these beliefs alone, I insulate from criticism by faithful fiat.’ And so, while this correct understanding of faith means we can still go about saying climate change is real, it also means Christians cannot walk around saying ‘it does not matter if you have good arguments against God’s existence, we are supposed to accept him on faith’. Faith is not a suitable basis for believing God exists (or at least faith in God is not, you could have faith in the Church and believe the Church when it says God exists I suppose; but then you should have good reasons to think the Church trustworthy). Rather, once one believes God exists based upon the evidence, only then is one faced with the question of whether to trust God when he tells us stuff that seems, by our own lights, wrong.

Of course, faith in the traditional sense is a rational response to belief in God. If you believe there is a perfectly good and loving being, of course it is rational to trust that being. But it is still scary to trust God because God is so far beyond us. If I trust my friends, I have a pretty good sense of what that trust involves. I can be pretty confident what sort of demands they will make of me and what sort of things they might require me to do. I’ve baked those possibilities into my understanding of the friendship. I have no such assurance when I trust God, because God tells us:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

    neither are your ways my ways,”

    declares the Lord.

As the heavens are higher than the earth,

    so are my ways higher than your ways

    and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

This makes divine faith a lot scarier and more difficult than human faith. It is harder to trust someone that it is safe to leap than it is to trust someone that it is safe to step. And even if I trust this person completely, it is still difficult to leap just because they tell me to. But trusting God, given his transcendence is trusting him about a leap not just into the unknown but into the unknowable. That much of what the fideist told us we can accept.

3-The Damage Done

So I’ve just spent way too many words trying to convince you that all those Facebook comments betrayed a distorted understanding of faith. But how big a deal is this mistake? At the beginning of this post I claimed that:

This distortion “encourages intellectual dishonesty within the church, it cheapens the demands of faith, and finally, I think, relegates religion to a lower or lesser status.”

And while I don’t want to go into those in detail, I’ll just end quickly sketching the basis of those worries.

Intellectual Dishonesty — This is perhaps the easiest thing to see. People gravitate to this distorted notion of faith not, I think, because they really have a good reason to accept it, but because they don’t actually have very good reasons to think Christianity is true and punting to faith gives them an excuse. This is cowardly. They don’t want to change their mind, nor do they want to take the arguments of others seriously, and so they instead insist that they don’t need good reasons to support their beliefs.

Cheapens the Demands of Faith — If salvation requires faith merely in the sense of propositional belief, then salvation is easy. All you need is some careful self-deception, or some careful critical thinking and you can come saved by having acquired the right beliefs. In contrast, if faith involves actually trusting what God tells us, then faith involves a much more radical transformation of one’s life. One is saved not by believing certain things, but by turning a life over to Christ. Trusting God is hard, believing certain things about God is, in comparison, easy. But of course, if God it exists it is only by trusting him that you can cooperate in his radical transformation of you into a true child of God.

Relegating Religion — Faith as mere belief, while it insulates your beliefs from the criticisms of others also insulates others from having any reason to possibly care what it is you believe. It is because our reasons are public that others should take note when we believe something and consider that it might be something they should believe too. If I express a personal opinion, it is irrelevant to what anyone else thinks. But if I express a scientific belief, then people take note. With scientific beliefs I’m expressing something I take to be true, and as such something that others should believe as well. On the view of faith I’ve been criticizing, religious beliefs don’t seem to have the import or universality of scientific truths. Instead they look much more like a mere personal opinion, something for me that may or may not be relevant to you. And talking to various people around me, it does seem like they regard their religious beliefs as weird sorts of opinions. Two people on an airplane won’t just agree to disagree about where the plane is headed, they are going to get to the bottom of this, hopefully before it takes off. And yet many I meet seem untroubled that those around them disagree fundamentally about where their own lives and the whole universe is heading.

On this popular understanding of faith the idea that religion has no place in the public sphere makes perfect sense. How could merely private beliefs be appropriate in the public square? But religious beliefs are not a personal sort of fashionable accessory you place atop your other beliefs. Rather religious doctrines are profound and radical claims that should influence how you understand just about every part of the world around us. Religion, when at its best, reaches out, clarifies and transforms everything we think about. If you lock your religious beliefs up so others can’t touch them, then those beliefs won’t be able to reach out to touch others, and I expect, eventually won’t really even be able to touch you.

Objections

Do you have questions or objections? Are you unsure how my view of faith make sense of doubting Thomas? Or why Paul says Christian faith is foolishness to the worldly wise? Do you have thoughts on the proper verb for a snail’s movement? Then weigh in in the comments!