Let’s own up to a dark and terrible truth.
We atheists all know that we have just as much faith in unproven superstitions as the religious people we so gleefully despise. I mean, secretly, we’re all well aware that our beloved “science” is just another way of seeing the world, dependent on at least as much blind belief as, say, fundamentalist Christianity, and that evolution is a religion just like any other, with Darwin as our god. Right? That’s why we worship him and never question anything he ever said or did, right?
We like to bill ourselves as the skeptical, rational, faithless ones, just because our convictions are always tentatively held based on the current state of the competing theories and subject to change in light of new observations. But come on, we’re among friends here. We don’t need to keep this ludicrous pretence up all the time.
But I was wondering: Since our position is really one of at least as much blind faith as your average god-botherer, what would a position genuinely devoid of any faith actually look like?
Most religious believers will proudly claim faith as a virtue, after all, and wear their disregard for measurable truth and empirical reality as a badge of honour. But any traditional scientific mindset is just as faith-based – or so we’re often told by these same religious types (and who would know better?). Does this mean that everyone alive has to have some sort of faith in something? Must every opinion ever held by a human brain be on this same level of unprovability? Does belief in anything, or the holding of any conviction, on any subject, necessitate an equally religious approach?
Or is it actually possible to be truly faith-free, and look on life without ever making that leap, leaving aside for now the issue of whether this would actually be a good thing?
This is a question for any faithful who make this argument, rather than actual skeptics, obviously. Despite my little rhetorical device up there, which you may have noticed my attempting to use for comic effect a few paragraphs ago, faith is entirely antithetical to what we call our scientific, skeptical worldview. But the true believers do stop by here from time to time, so maybe someone will care to explain this. If scientific understanding is based on faith just as much as your religion, what would an outlook that really doesn’t have any faith at all look like? Are there people out there who approach the world in this way? Would it be possible for them to ever know anything, or form any kind of views on the truth?
Many people would say that this is called “science” – but is science something different, and intrinsically faith-based in the way it’s set up? Or could science potentially be this faithless worldview I’m talking about, if all those silly scientists would stop espousing positions that so obviously require you to just “believe” in them, like evolution, for which nobody has ever published reams and reams of evidence?
Or, if we tried to take a faith-free approach to everything, would we find ourselves stuck in some sort of limbo, where nothing can ever be known, understood, or even talked about coherently? Are we really left with no choice but to apply a faithy outlook constantly, one way or another, if we ever want anything to mean anything? This seems weird to me, but if you can explain how it’s reconciled with whatever your concept of faith is, I’d love to hear it. (It also brings up the usual questions of how you can judge your own kind of faith to be superior to any other, but that’s a long-awaited rant that I’ll get back to working on another time.)
Yes, it seems to me that true nihilism would be about the only position some Christians might recognize as being divorced from faith. Even then, I’m doubtful that all would be on board.
I think that all of us (regardless of belief system) live on some level of faith that our lives will continue on tomorrow in much the same way that they did today; we take a great deal for granted. That doesn’t require religious belief or empirical evidence. It’s part of how we function. We just don’t see it because there isn’t a great chasm that opens up until we lose our jobs, or the car breaks down, or someone dies, or the well dries up, or the crops fail, or the soldiers come. There’s also the assumptions that social scientists make when putting together social theories that may or may not be able to be proven empirically that are heavily based on what can be described as faith determined by how they view the world through socialization. Let’s not forget all the ways in which science in general HAS been manipulated due to such socialization *cough*eugenics*cough*. People are people, and no one is 100% objective and free of assumptions at all times.
I’m not interested in the arguments that some religious people make about evolution as faith (though I do have a friend getting a PhD in religious studies who also has a PhD in mathematics and would love to get down with you on the shakiness of the foundations at the basis of mathematical theory), because I don’t find them compelling. I’m with Donald Miller on this one: “Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care.”
It does depend on what exactly you understand by “faith”, which is something I didn’t get into here. I tend to understand it as the act of maintaining a belief or conviction despite an absence of supporting evidence, but there may be some room for differences of interpretation within that.
I really don’t think there’s much that I have “faith” in, though, in this sense. I trust in a lot of things, but I think I’m usually pretty rational about it. I’m pretty certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, and I think I’m on fairly solid ground there. I think the laws of the universe will generally carry on tomorrow much as they did today, but that doesn’t seem to require any abandonment of rationality. It’s a supposition to which I assent for the moment. I’m open to the idea that things might change, if there’s evidence for it.
Maybe it’s there hidden in some of the unproven assumptions that we’re working with, but often these are provisional ideas, held because they seem to be the best we can do for the moment, but only tentatively so. I don’t have faith that God doesn’t exist, I’m just not buying it for now. I’m trying to be as reasonable as I can, and although the position I’ve ended up taking isn’t something that can be “proven”, as such, I don’t think it requires any leap of faith either. It just seems to be the best I can do for now.
I think the Donald Miller quote is of limited applicability. Sure, there are areas where the argument has just become tedious, but I think it’s a cop-out to just dismiss the whole debate as an unproductive dick-swinging contest. “Some guys believe and some guys don’t” doesn’t mean the whole thing’s a stalemate and nobody’s getting anywhere. There are coherent and valid arguments being made on both sides, and well reasoned refuations being made on both sides, and it’s not necessarily unfounded to suggest that, at least with regard to some things, one side is right and one side is wrong. (Which might not be something that you were suggesting at all.)
I’d love to hear your multiply-doctorated friend’s thoughts on the shaky foundations, though. Depending on exactly what’s meant by “mathematical theory”, a better description might be that they’re perfectly stable, but entirely malleable. The foundations can be whatever (internally consistent) rules you like, but there’s nothing shaky about what you build with them. Tying deductions from the mathematical world of platonic ideals to the real, non-abstract universe is where things get shakier. But that’s a whole other discussion on which I haven’t taken the time to organise my thoughts lately.