Faith & Scepticism

“We walk by faith, not by sight”

– 2 Corinthians 5.7

In the Ancient world, there was a school of philosophy called scepticism. This word didn’t quite have the same connotations of pessimism, laziness and doubt as it does today. Rather, it meant someone who was first and foremost an inquirer, an investigator. They wanted to know the truth, and were trying to hunt it down.

Ancient sceptics thought that as you investigated an issue, you would turn up good reasons for one idea, and then good reasons for an opposite idea. As you tried to find the truth of the matter, you were confronted with two incompatible options, each which seemed as good and reasonable as the other. And so it turns out that we never have reason to commit ourselves one way or the other. We suspend judgment. We adopt a detached and uncommitted attitude to whatever the issue was.

If this is the case – how did sceptics think they could find their way around life? How can we commit ourselves to beliefs? How did this not paralyze them?

Sceptics thought that all that is available to us is to ‘live by appearences’ or ‘live by sight.’ That is, they thought that just because they cannot commit themselves to something 100% doesn’t stop things appearing to them in a certain way. Being rationally uncommitted or ‘on the fence’ doesn’t do away with other desires that help us get by – habit, desire, want of approval, fear of the law, basic needs, social enculturation and so on.

Paul told the early Corinthians Christians (who were, to point out the terribly obvious, Ancient Greeks) to live by faith, not by sight. Could he have meant: because we know God in Jesus, we have a kind of certainty that the sceptics were right to point out is never available to humans otherwise. Therefore, we don’t need to settle for living by sight like the sceptics prescribed, but can have a kind of certainty that can motivate and direct us through all sorts of desires, fears, needs, cultures, and laws?

William James on Faith

Faith is belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible. Since doubt is theoretically possible with respect to any belief, we cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith.

– William James, ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’ (1879), p. 79

Christians believe that faith is one of the most significant dimensions of human life. We think that faith ought to colour a person’s whole outlook, such that they can say that they walk by faith and not by sight. We think that faith is more significant than being a good person, since a person is in the end justified by faith alone. We think that faith will actually lead to a person living a loving, selfless and courageous life, since faith without good works isn’t really what we’re talking about. Perhaps most importantly, we think that our faith picks out and latches onto a very specific object – the risen Lord Jesus.

The above quote from Nineteenth-Century American philosopher William James (a founder of the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism, brother of Henry James the novelist, and one of the few philosophers that the great Ludwig Wittgenstein actually read) catches nothing of the richness of the Christian conception of faith, and nothing of its quite specific orientation. But it is a helpful quote since the very idea of ‘living by faith’ is a confusing and laughable notion to many people today. James suggests that every human life has movements of faith running through it.

Christianity doesn’t ask people to give up certainty, to give up questioning, in the name of blind faith. It asks them to have faith in a certain way, and particularly, to have faith in a certain person. It asks people to have faith differently to how they have faith now.

Intellectual Sloth

The most serious noetic effects of sin have to do with our knowledge of God. Were it not for sin and its effects, God’s presence and glory would be as obvious and uncontroversial to us all as the presence of other minds, physical objects, and the past. Like any cognitive process, however, the sensus divinatus (inherent sense of the divine) can malfunction; as a result of sin, it has been damaged. Our original knowledge of God and his glory is muffled and impaired; it has been replaced (by virtue of sin) by stupidity, dullness, blindness, inability to perceive God or to perceive him in his handiwork. Our knowledge of his character and his love toward us can be smothered: it can be transformed into a resentful thought that God is to be feared and mistrusted; we may see him as indifferent or even malignant.

In the traditional taxonomy of the seven deadly sins, this is sloth. Sloth is not simple laziness, like the inclination to lie down and watch television rather than go out and get the exercise you need; it is, instead, a kind of spiritual deadness, blindness, imperceptiveness, acedia, torpor, a failure to be aware of God’s presence, love, requirements.

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (2000), p.214-215

Christians often talk about sin. By this we can mean two things. The first is referring to the act of sinning, usually meaning morally reprehensible actions. The second is a more dark, elusive and mysterious use of the word, which refers to the brokeness and frailty of human nature and the world in which we live. The above remark is illustrative of how deep Christians believe the effects of sin (in the second sense) are felt.

Cornel West on Relativism and Scepticism

Yet to give in to sophomoric relativism (“Anything goes” or “All views are equally valid”) is a failure of nerve, and to succumb to wholesale scepticism (“There is no truth”) is a weakness of the will and imagination.

– Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader (1999), p. xvii

Moral relativism (‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are not a fixed, universal list) and epistemological scepticism (we can’t really know the ‘Truth’) are often thought to be the default position of many. This sentence from the popular African-American intellectual Cornel West (pictured) is instructive in two ways for the Christian wanting to speak to this issue.

First, he rightly points out that wholesale relativism and scepticism are a way of being intellectually lazy and morally indifferent. To shrug your shoulders and say ‘all views are pretty much the same’ or ‘there’s really no way of telling who is right or wrong, better or worse’, is a cop-out. It is a way of not even entering into philosophy. It is a way of not even taking seriously the question or the views of others.

The lesson here is to push back firmly on anyone who holds to scepticism or relativism, and to try to find a way of challenging the relativist or the skeptic out of their apathy. In popular discourse and general conversation with people around us, I think this is an important activity. It is easy to be a relativist or a sceptic. It takes effort (West would say it takes courage and strength) to attempt to hold to conclusions and to believe that other people are wrong in certain ways.

Second, West’s quote reminds me that to be accused of wholesale relativism or scepticism is a serious charge. It effectively amounts to calling someone indifferent, apathetic, and intellectually disengaged. I suspect that these labels get thrown around today by Christians in a careless way; in a way that can be disrespectful and unloving to our conversation partners. Many intellectuals are accused of holding to these cut-and-dry positions, but know full well the implications which West has spelled out above and so have worked out more sophisticated and nuanced positions.

If calling someone a relativist or a sceptic is synonymous with calling them lazy, then it would be unloving to reduce others positions to this when they have deliberately tried to avoid this caricature. Perhaps it would be fruitful for Christians to rethink how to disagree with those who question the strong epistemological and moral claims of Christianity without first relying on the terms relativist or skeptic.

To me, this seems like a more loving thing to do, and a way which does not preclude the Christian being corrected in some way, or changing their mind on some issue.

What do you think of West’s quote? Do Christians rely too much on charging those who disagree with them of skepticism or relativism?

On Complexity in Ethics

Literary critics are moral advisers simply because they have an exceptionally large range of acquaintance. They are moral advisers not because they have special access to moral truth but because they have been around. They have read more books and are thus in a better position not to get trapped in the vocabulary of any single book.

– Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), p. 80-81

In this typically provocative remark, Richard Rorty suggests that literary critics, poets and authors ought to be humanity’s moral guides, rather than philosophers, scientists or Christians. The reason for this is because ‘they have been around.’ They have read or written books in which you encounter strange people, strange families and strange communities. They have experienced some of the depth of human possibility.

What I like about this quote in the way in which Rorty prioritizes an awareness of and an empathy with complexity. He holds that the person most qualified to speak about right and wrong is the person who is aware of how socially conditioned moral norms can be, of how many different shapes and sizes ethical expression can take, of how contingent upon a tradition ethical reasoning can be, of how any moral system can be shot through with subjectivity and fragmentation, of how fragile and intricate moral agents can be, and how complex, messy and confusing ethical problems can be.

I ultimately disagree with Rorty’s prioritizing of experience over knowledge, as  I think the epistemic task of attempting to access moral truth is far from a fruitless one. But I agree that there is a complexity to ethics which those who chase after the epistemic certainties can often ignore, or at least dilute. People, cultures, norms, attempts at reasoning, actions, history’s consequences, and institutions are complex. Ethics which impose an overly simple framework on this complexity often do so by trimming away diversity and difference, and in the process, excluding certain people’s experiences from really counting, or deeming some people’s way of life as being not that important.

What do you think of Rorty’s remark? What do you think the role of ‘experts’ who are aware of complexities ought to be in an ethical conversation?

For an interesting take on this theme from a different angle, check out Jamie Dunk’s review of the film The Reader. (Pun unintended.)

The Limits of Reason

The human understanding is subject to influence from the will and the emotions, a fact that creates a fanciful knowledge; man prefers to believe what he wants to be true.

– Francis Bacon, The New Organon (1620: Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 44

Lurking behind all philosophical conversations, and particularly conversations about religion and ethics which hope to make demands upon the hearers, is this fear. Perhaps we are really not controlled by rational, deliberative reflection. Perhaps we are never swayed by observation, thought and argument. Perhaps we only ever pay lip-service to rationality, slapping a proposition, argument or idea with the term ‘reasonable’ or ‘important’ or ‘good’ when we have deep and hidden reasons for wanting to believe such a thing.

How open are you to having your mind changed?

Kierkegaard on Faith and Philosophy: I. Knowledge

Even if one were able to convert the whole content of faith into conceptual form, it does not follow that one has comprehended faith, comprehended how one entered into it or how it entered into one…Philosophy cannot and must not bestow faith but must understand itself and know what it has to offer and take nothing away and least of all trick people out of something by making them think that it is nothing.

– Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843: Cambridge UP, 2006) p. 5, 27

The Danish Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard thought a great deal about the relationship between Christianity and philosophy. In the next few posts I’ll be putting up some quotes of his that shed unique light on what the relationship could be between Christianity and various fields of philosophy. There will be four posts: knowledge, politics, ethics, and the practise of theology. Kierkegaard is an extremely unique and rich thinker, both as a Christian and a philosopher, and he has exerted considerable influence over various streams of Christianity from Karl Barth and neo-orthodoxy to the current New Calvinists in the United States.

The above quote shows Kierkegaard’s firm belief in the limitations of philosophy and therefore it’s inability to scrutinize Christianity. Whilst he no doubt believed that philosophy was a worthwhile activity to pursue (himself churning out scores of philosophy books and papers) he held strongly to the notion that the religious sphere was an area of life and experience that human thinking, no matter how profound or comprehensive, would never be able to fully grapple with. For Kierkegaard, the being of God, the Christian experience, and the act of a faith commitment are the kind of things which are not able to be analyzed by or taken apart by philosophy’s tools.

The reason for all this is because Christianity involves choice and subjectivity. Kierkegaard coined the now famous phrase ‘a leap of faith’, and he held that this is what real Christianity demands of a person. It requires an individual to personally choose to commit to propositions which are beyond the realms of certainty, and it involves a radically personal choice to become a certain type of person and live in a certain way. Christianity demands an individual make an intensely personal decision about the kind of individual they will commit to becoming and the kind of life they will lead, and it requires them to do so not on the grounds of certainty (which philosophy likes to think of as its turf), but in asking the individual to throw themselves before God, and in the same motion, to throw away their all too human ways of knowing.

I think this is what Kierkegaard is getting at when he says ‘Philosophy cannot and must not bestow faith but must understand itself and know what it has to offer and take nothing away and least of all trick people out of something by making them think that it is nothing.’

Philosophy, for what it can do, is a valuable thing. But it should never be in the business of criticising people’s faith commitments or attempting to adjudicate on theological propositions. When it does this, it often tells people of the epistemological weaknesses of their beliefs, or the contingency, predictability or transparent nature of their faith experience and so convinces people that where they thought they had beliefs, they in fact have nothing, and where they thought that they made a crucial individual choice, they were in fact just slotting themselves into a certain psychological type. I think Kierkegaard wants to limit philosophy from doing this as it is stepping into an arena of life in which it is not apt to function.

Perhaps it is a little like a physicist and a chemist getting together and convincing a pair of lovers that where they thought they were in love, they are in fact only experiencing certain chemical reactions which are explainable through reference to a causal network of neurons and stimuli, and where they thought they were taking in a glorious sunrise together, they are in fact only seeing particular light rays bouncing off particular particles of random matter (pardon the amateur science!).

I think Kierkegaard is saying that just as the physicist and the chemist aren’t the best ones to describe what is going on as two lovers watch the sunrise, so a philosopher is not the best one to describe what is happening when someone becomes a Christian, or says something like ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’.

What do you think? Are you attracted to this view of faith and knowledge? Do you think Kierkegaard (as I’ve construed him) is off target in any way?

Know Thyself

 

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1938)

 

Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.

– Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

 

Humanity never achieves a clear knowledge of itself unless it has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating Him to scrutinize itself.

– John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1560)

Taken together, these three quotes paint a rich picture of the importance and the challenge of self-knowledge. Kant suggests that having a correct and detailed knowledge of yourself is necessary for living well, but warns that gaining such knowledge is often the outcome of prolonged and painful periods of introspection. Periods in which we may come face to face with a realistic image of ourself that grieves us, disappoints us, or demands much of us. 

Wittgenstein adds that such knowledge is elusive and hard to come by. It is hidden behind a misleading web of images that we construct about ourselves, and in order to grasp it we need to stop lying to ourselves. It is as though we know that coming face to face with ourselves very well may cause us pain like Kant suggests, and so our minds grab readily onto deceit to avoid this pain. 

Calvin suggests that the most important way in which can free ourselves from such deceit is by ensuring that we do not engage in introspection without first considering our being and place compared with God, and indeed not before contemplating God alone. If we do this, Calvin envisions us coming to terms with our smallness, our finitude, our limits and our weaknesses which we try to keep from ourselves. Without contemplating God, there is little hope of our escaping the deceit Wittgenstein suggests is our default position.

What I love about these three quotes taken together is the similarity between Kant and Calvin in emphasising the ethical direction of self-knowledge, and the sober warning from Wittgenstein. Do you think these quotes establish the importance of introspection and frame it in the right way? Is a right knowledge of oneself necessary for living well, and so something we ought to be chasing after?

Christianity as Comprehensive Cultural Tribunal?

Once conversation replaces confrontation, the notion of the mind as the Mirror of Nature can be discarded. Then the notion of philosophy as the discipline which looks for privileged representations among those constituting the Mirror becomes unintelligible. A thoroughgoing holism has no place for the notion of philosophy as ‘conceptual’, as ‘apodictic’, as picking out the ‘foundations’ of the rest of knowledge, as explaining which representations are ‘purely given’ or ‘purely conceptual’, as presenting a ‘canonical notation’ rather than an empirical discovery, or as isolating ‘trans-framework heuristic categories’. If we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practise, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature, we will not be likely to envisage a metapractise which will be the critique of all possible forms of social practise.

– Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), p. 170-171

In this central chapter of his well-known work, Richard Rorty rejects a dominant conception of philosophy and gestures towards his own vision of what philosophers ought to be doing with their time. Ever since Kant, he claims, philosophy has been wrongheaded as it has been concerned with the comprehensive search for foundations and justifications and consequently has come to see itself as the final adjudicator. Rorty makes much of Kant’s phrase that philosophy is to function as ‘a tribunal of reason’, which gives the impression of a special body — philosophy — sitting in cool, wise judgment over all other areas of life and thought. Rorty famously rejected this conception of philosophy, and urged philosophers not to see themselves as more privileged than practitioners of other disciplines, but rather to consider themselves as one voice in an ongoing cultural conversation with many different contributors, and urged them to keep the topic of the conversation focused on the actual human needs of a society.

My question is, ought Christianity place itself in the position that Rorty is asking philosophy to vacate? That is, should we agree with Rorty that philosophy ought not to have special priority over other disciplines, but insist that Christianity ought to have some sort of priority? Taking the tribunal metaphor a step further, ought Christianity have the warrant to comment upon all areas of life and thought in a non-reciprocal way, the way in which a tribunal is able to pass judgment on an individual whilst the individual is not able to scrutinize the workings of the tribunal?

Rorty argues that the Kantian conception of philosophy emerged because it followed Descartes and Locke in establishing the mind as a separate entity and a particular field of inquiry. Hence, philosophy was in the business of explaining how the mind functioned and consequently what constituted genuine knowledge and how it was attainable. This then gave philosophy a self-assured sort of dominance over every other discipline – it was the business of philosophy to have the final word on whether the claims others disciplines were making could actually be justified. Whenever a claim was made from the fields of politics, anthropology, physics, art, religion, gender studies, law or chemistry – philosophy was able to step in with its special access to the workings of the mind and the conditions of knowledge and dissipate the fog by designating certain claims valid or objective, and others nonfalsifiable or speculative.

I suspect it is the gut reaction of Christians to laugh this off as human hubris and, once we are finished laughing, to say something about how philosophy can’t do that, but Christianity can do something like that.

Why is that?

What is the unique subject matter which Christianity has privileged access to? And how does this access qualify us to comment upon all other areas of life, culture and thought? Does Christianity even want to be, in Rorty’s words, ‘a metapractise which can be the critique of all possible forms of social practise’, or is Christianity altogether something different, and so ought to remain silent or neutral on some things?