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.