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?

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?