The (Atheist's/Naturalist’s) Problem with Faith

I have noted or glanced over in some places (here, here, and here for three) that one’s understanding the nature of faith has a lot to do with how one understands religious belief in relation to scientific inquiry rooted in logico-deductive rational processes. It is clear that the current trinity of atheist thought in Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens assumes that faith is something blind. They are interpreting faith as an epistemological category in which there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to substantiate the object to which faith is directed, namely God.

The hypothesis here, if you will, is that all kinds of faith bear no distinction and that fundamentally all forms of faith must fall under the category of that for which there is no evidence. Since, therefore, there is no such evidence to substantiate the very foundation of the belief in something in any form of faith, regardless of how one slices and dices the definition, it is irrational and perhaps even delusional to have any kind of belief that can be so described as faith.

The question is how faith is being defined as an epistemological category. In this usage it is a category of knowledge that is being tested as an hypothesis in terms of empirical substantiation. And this is done in terms of distinctly scientific processes rooted in hypothesis testing and external validation of those processes. The entire enterprise of scientifically-formed knowledge claims is rooted in predictability. Low yield of predictability leads one to reconsider hypotheses or the means by which hypotheses are tested. High yield of predictability will lead one to enough confidence in the probability that the hypothesis is valid that the construction of a theory through which to view a set of processes about observed phenomenon can thus be offered. This is what all scientists look for.

Faith, as described above does not meet this quality of rigor. So conceived, faith is a belief in that which yields low probability of predictable observed phenomena in terms of the reality to which faith is directed namely God. Because it yields a low to nil predictability as a means to verify the existence of that to which it is directed, it is irrational or something that smacks of delusion. Faith so understood does appear to be a rather low epistemology and quite absurd to take on the level of import that Jesus and Paul among others in the Bible place it. That is to say, if faith is the means by which salvation is made effectual, it is absurd to assert that our eternal relation to God is determined by something that does not offer any degree of predictability that God exists!

It is another level of absurdity and danger that one should associate faith in this regard with certainty. The logico-deductive reasoning must boil down to absurdity here and it does. This is a perfectly coherent and sensible argument if faith is conceived as one of many epistemological frameworks that ought to yield if not predictable knowledge of the observable world, a means by which that can at least be sought after and achieved.

But is faith something adequately circumscribed this way? Is this the nature of faith? Many if not most Christian theologians will offer an interpretation of faith as a relation of trust. The direction of this trust is that the God to which the Bible refers is a real existent even if the way that the Bible interprets that existence is something conditioned by the sitz im leben of those who told the many stories of God’s interaction with God’s people from Abraham to Jesus and beyond. While we may be able to analyze the behaviors that this relation of trust yields and how those behaviors relate to worldview, beliefs, etc. in rather empirically rigorous sociological and psychological analyses, the predictable outcome that God is real cannot be so analyzed.

Others have attempted alternative views of faith such a more aesthetic understanding such as Schleiermacher’s notion of “absolute dependence”. In this way faith is one intense sense of “feeling” among others. It is a rather poetic understanding of the nature of belief and how people interact with God. This has also been taken up in process philosophy as the creative energy of God that permeates reality. The sense that there is “something more” to what we observe is good enough of a foundation to assert that faith itself is not irrational. Pascal makes a distinction between knowledge of the head, which is translated in terms of the logico-deductive methods of science, and knowledge of the heart, which is one’s sense of well-being or sense of the good. It is this latter lens through which one interprets the world and through which one’s knowledge of the world is ultimately mediated.

The question is why does an atheist rely so heavily on the logico-deductive method to understand the world and evaluates that understanding of the world as the only valid means? The poet may interpret the world quite differently and simply not see its value as determined by what we can predict about it or the theoretical lenses that are built upon previous predictions about the objects and processes of the world. But apart from loading faith into the aesthetic, it seems to permeate far more – even the reliance one has on logico-deductive methodology as a basis for living. Science cannot tell you if a life lived based on an evidentiary and predictable basis is better than one that is not. Some judgments, to be sure, are better made when the evidence of predictable forces in the world are taken into account. Is it wise to fall in love with a person who has a long history of abuse and recidivism? Is it good to give money to an organization (see Peter Popoff) that has been found to be fraudulent in its practices and use of funds? Even if these kinds of practices give one a sense of well-being, that sense of well-being may indeed be falsely construed. So it is clear that well-being and “feeling good” are not adequate bases of judgment. That which feels good for a time can not only hurt us later, but hurt others as well.

But nonetheless, we do attribute value to what we perceive to be the good – even if the good is not something that gives us immediate pleasure or well-being. Raising a child certainly does not always give us a sense of well-being, happiness and pleasure, yet if we step away from our selfish ends in the process, there is an inherent goodness to observing the healthy development of a child. Love itself is not something that consistently derives pleasure. Often we confuse love with pleasure. Hollywood relationships are rooted in this confusion – at least as portrayed by the media. Love is as much receiving what we consider good as it is giving what we consider good back to some recipient. Empirically considered, can we make a judgment on the value of love as something to drive human well-being? We can certainly look to its physiological outcomes, emotional outcomes, social outcomes, etc. But these are all effects and not necessarily the basis to evaluate the desire to love a given object. Some will say that such sources of our sense of self are mere attributions of value to rather mundane chemical and social predictable processes.

But why do we attribute a sense of well-being and goodness at all to such things? Science can tell me all about the effects and causes of love. Many have done so. But science cannot determine for me the evaluation of something like love as a good that commands such a powerful sense of how one evaluates what is good. Unless of course all values are delusions or radically so subjective as to have no real value at all. But I doubt a loving mother would buy that as a worldview in which to practice the art of parenting.

A value is a judgment between levels of what is good. Both scientific and theological rigor are engaged in the same process, but with different fields of experience by which to make those judgments. The complexity of human behaviors in interaction with all of the facets of the environment and the various syntheses of experience deeply embedded in the minds of those who interact and construct each other’s experience surely stretch beyond what we can predict in terms of scientific processes. But the evaluation of scientific processes as they current are practiced as being that medium through which all such processes can be determined and described is a value ascribed to those processes that those processes themselves did not determine in the minds of those who continue to practice them!

The satisfaction and sense of well-being that predictable experiences and ways of knowing the world is not readily determined by a scientific procedure. That is to say, we can know that predictability gives us satisfaction, but not why it does. This also applies to the delimitation of one’s field of knowledge-producing data to that which can only be apprehended by what is observed through the senses. It is not the field of knowledge that is the issue, but the choice to delimit that field to a certain set of boundaries that is the issue.

So why do people have faith in God? It can be one’s experience with what they have learned is God, it can be the trust they have ascribed to their religions traditions, it can be the sense that this or that particular religion offers a sense of wholeness and well being as a medium to receive and give what is good, etc. But all of these bases are no different in character from the bases on which one decides logico-deductive methods to understand the world through observable phenomena will yield a much higher sense of goodness and well-being than religion ever could. What both hold in common on this level is a sense that the good is somehow constitutive of what is of most highly esteemed value to uphold in human history. The discussion of the good is that which lies above and through either discourse and to which both sets of understanding the world find their relative sense of value.

So the final question for the naturalist (atheist) is, has the scientific method determined for you what is good? If so how and why?

Related posts:

1. harvey cox: from the secular city to the age of faith