When “truth” is to be weighed by scales of faith, no belief is discernible from another in terms of credibility. As Friedrich Nietzsche once put it, “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
On a daily basis you can find numerous cases of people doing insanely stupid, dangerous things because they were driven by faith. So often we hear cries that the atheist has caricatured faith by pointing these things out. The charge is that we are highlighting a handful of extremists (of course, there’s far more than a handful), and we are admonished to accept that these people have somehow gotten faith wrong. This statement is usually followed by a pablum of condescending sighs and an insistence that the moderate’s faith teaches something completely different than the lunatic in question. But what are religious people really expressing when they say that a particularly dangerous person’s faith is not their faith? Here are some options.
1. My faith is more likely to be true than theirs.
2. My faith is not more likely to be true, but it is more benign.
I can’t think of any other implications we could glean from that sentence. Can you? Leave a comment and I’ll add them if you can.
I think the second option once thought through defaults back to the first. Maybe god wants us to kill certain people (if you’re a Christian, you must admit that he has wanted it before), and if faith can lead us to truth then you must be aware of why your faith is more likely to be true than the extremist’s faith, since you think god wants something different than what the wackos say god wants. Therefore it’s not enough to simply say that your faith is different from that of the extremist – you must show us how the extremist gets faith wrong – you must show how your faith functions on a different mechanic that is “right”, and how that makes your belief about what god wants more likely to be true than theirs. After all, you’re both trying to act in accordance with god’s will, right? You just think that god wants us to do something different.
Of course, faith does not eject the false and keep the true – the notion of faith can embrace any belief. Faith is a horrible tool by which to acquire truth (think of all the people who follow faiths that aren’t yours…most people on Earth must be wrong if you’re right). Faith is a means to circumvent reason and reality. A single person in the 21st century believing that a man walked on water 2,000 years ago would be considered crazy, it is merely the number of people who believe it that rescues the believer from that assessment. As Sam Harris put it, “It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your prayers, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.” Because faith is a means to reject reason and reality when they threaten to obliterate a belief, faith disarms us of our only tools to separate credible truth claims from non-credible truth claims, and often makes bad ideas it allows us to adopt immune to any conceivable challenge from the world of evidence. It is clear that the moderate’s faith is no more likely to be true than the extremist’s because they operate on the same mechanics, even if the moderate’s faith is thankfully less dangerous.
Because both faith that leads to murder/discrimination and faith that leads to charity operate under the same principle, it is impossible for me to criticize one but not the other. I am a critic of lazy thinking, and both sides of the theological coin are equally guilty. Citing to me that your faith is different does not rescue it from this accusation, and it certainly has no bearing on whether or not the nutjob got faith wrong – perhaps god really is talking to him and not you.
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I was impressed by Obama’s perspective that faith goes with doubt. This is likely what separates conservative religion from liberal religion.
I’m sure this will come off as abrasive to some extent, but I could not disagree more.
What is faith aside from a means to circumvent doubt? There is a reason that the theologian so often mutters, “That is where faith comes in” when presented with an apparent contradiction or the findings of science that conflict with their position.
I find the difference between conservative and liberal religion is not a difference in mechanics – both faiths are the same thing. The difference is the extent to which those mechanics are employed. While the conservative/fundamentalist shuns doubt as a corruption of the intellect, the influence of Satan, and/or otherwise barricades the psyche against doubt, the moderate/liberal theologian allows doubt into some facets of their faith. This does not mean that the two are compatible – in fact, it’s quite the opposite. The liberal simply has less faith than his fundamentalist counterpart, and this is a good thing.
However, just like the fundamentalist, the liberal cannot (or has so far failed to) defend their ultimate belief in god any more effectively than the fundamentalist (in fact, in my discussions with both, their reasons for believing in god’s existence are almost always the same). If less faith results in a more sensible world view, which you seem to suggest, why not simply go all the way and trade faith for doubt?
JT