This week's edition of
The Question from the
Guardian was
"Should we believe in belief?" The four responses can be found on the linked page; Karen Armstrong, Julian Baggini, Daniel Dennett and H.E. Haber all provided responses, and intriguing ones at that.
The question itself comes from Dennett's book
Breaking the Spell, in which he takes modern society, and many atheists, to task for "believing in belief", that is, holding that some beliefs are too valuable, important, sacred, necessary, etc. to subject to criticism; that raising doubts or questions about these beliefs (in this case, religious beliefs, especially about the existence of God), is beyond the pale. That these beliefs must be insulated, taken off the table, put in the archives.
It is important to understand what is here meant by "belief". I believe a lot of things, and so does everyone. I have beliefs about where my car is currently parked, how long it will take me to walk to the store, who the current Prime Minister of Canada is, and a whole host of other things, both everyday and uninteresting, and obscure and fascinating. To believe something, in this sense, is just to think something to be true. I think that it is true that my car is parked in parking lot 11, that it will take me less than 2 minutes to walk to the store from my current location, and that Stephen Harper is Prime Minister. Furthermore, I have good reasons to think that these things are true, and I know how it is that these beliefs could be shown to be false; Stephen Harper might have resigned earlier today, and I may not have checked the news and read the story. Or, my car might have been stolen. I have good reason to believe what I believe, but it's possible that I'm wrong. And if I'm shown I'm wrong, I gladly give up my now false beliefs. All of this is so far uncontroversial.
But that is not what is at issue in the
Guardian's question. In this case, "belief" refers specifically to religious belief--to faith. The question might as well have been "Should we believe in faith?" That is, should faith be susceptible to the same kind of open inquiry, criticism and possible refutation that our ordinary beliefs are? Or is faith too important to risk in this way?
If we answer in the affirmative, we acknowledge that it's possible that criticism of faith will lead to the frightful consequence that it will be found epistemically and ontologically wanting. Better that we continue on than face the possibility that our religious faith is nothing but doxastic vanity. But in this we risk a condescending, paternalistic elitism. On this view, the learned could well figure out that there is no reason for faith in God (for example), but this being too important for those who cling to it, the boat must not be rocked. This treats "the masses" like little children, who can't handle the truth (or even the possibility of it) and must be left with their comforting fairy stories so they don't get upset. Unfortunately, it is true that very often we human beings would rather believe something false but pleasant, as opposed to a cold, hard, unfriendly truth. But simply because it is a predisposition of human beings to believe pleasant falsehoods over truths that would be unpleasant to us, does not mean that we must foster ignorance.
But what if we answer in the negative? If we think that there is no domain of human cognitive endeavour that ought to go unchecked by free and open inquiry, then we must hold that faith beliefs are just as open to criticism and contradiction as any other belief. The belief that God exists, that one can survive bodily death, that there is in some sense an ultimate, salvific reality, all these, as well as more specifically sectarian claims, ought to be investigated and interrogated to see if they hold up in the light of investigation or if they burn up under the heat.
This is the debate's typical dialectic. But it carries with it an assumption about religious discourse that may be misguided. I referred above to "human cognitive endeavour"; that is, to those areas of human activity that seek to produce knowledge (or at least reasonable belief) about the world we live in. The sciences, for example, are cognitive endeavours, which use particular methodologies that have been found to be the most fruitful for gaining insight into the natures of things, and explaining those natures. Our ordinary beliefs about the world around us, too, are part of similar endeavour, though our everyday standards of doubt and evidence are not as rigid as the scientific method--not that this makes them lacking in any way. Art, on the other hand, is not a cognitive endeavour in this sense; the object of art is not explain the mechanisms of the natural world nor give us knowledge consisting of true propositions about the world around us. Instead, art has a family of diverse intents: to cause us pleasure at the experience of beauty and rapture at the experience of the sublime; to represent aspects of the human condition in abstract or material form; to cause us to think about ourselves, others, and the world, and to challenge the familiar ways in which we
do think about those things; and much else besides. There is debate about where philosophy falls in the cognitive/non-cognitive divide--but that is an issue for another time. (Full disclosure--I think philosophy is more akin to art than it is to science, though it is not entirely foreign to the latter. But I digress.)
The moot question underlying the
Guardian's question is whether or not faith really is a cognitive endeavour. Is the goal of religious faith to give us knowledge of the world around us, and explain the mechanisms that underlie what we see? There is reason to think that this notion of religion, so central to the criticisms of the so-called New Atheists (one need only consider their common reference to God as a "hypothesis" which has failed), is a recent invention, that, paradoxically, is due to the rise of science and the culture of scientism that we currently find ourselves in.
Karen Armstrong taps into this with her response the Guardian's question; actually, it is less a response, and more a rejection of the question. I agree that this is the method we must adopt, and like Armstrong, we must look to history to understand religious practices aright. The notion that
belief is fundamental to Western religion, especially Christianity, is rather odd:
The extraordinary and eccentric emphasis on "belief" in Christianity today is an accident of history that has distorted our understanding of religious truth. We call religious people "believers", as though acceptance of a set of doctrines was their principal activity, and before undertaking the religious life many feel obliged to satisfy themselves about the metaphysical claims of the church...
This focus on belief is peculiar, she says, because religion is better understood as, and has traditionally been, a
practice, a
way of life, not simply a set of doctrines that one holds to:
[R]eligion is something you do, and that you cannot understand the truths of faith unless you are committed to a transformative way of life that takes you beyond the prism of selfishness.
...
Above all, myth was a programme of action. When a mythical narrative was symbolically re-enacted, it brought to light within the practitioner something "true" about human life and the way our humanity worked, even if its insights, like those of art, could not be proven rationally. If you did not act upon it, it would remain as incomprehensible and abstract – like the rules of a board game, which seem impossibly convoluted, dull and meaningless until you start to play.
All this makes sense when we consider the origins of religious practice and its tie to the activity of a culture. Faith is woven into people's lives, and developed as a response to the situations they found themselves in; their distinctive location, circumstances, and form of life. It was not about intellectual assent to a series of propositions, but a matter of acting and living that providing meaning, not truth, where truth means something like "correspondence to facts", facts meaning something like "the way the world is".
I quote Armstrong again, for she is instructive:
In most pre-modern cultures, there were two recognised ways of attaining truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were crucial and each had its particular sphere of competence. Logos ("reason; science") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to control our environment and function in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external realities. But logos could not assuage human grief or give people intimations that their lives had meaning. For that they turned to mythos, an early form of psychology, which dealt with the more elusive aspects of human experience.
Stories of heroes descending to the underworld were not regarded as primarily factual but taught people how to negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche. In the same way, the purpose of a creation myth was therapeutic; before the modern period no sensible person ever thought it gave an accurate account of the origins of life. A cosmology was recited at times of crisis or sickness, when people needed a symbolic influx of the creative energy that had brought something out of nothing. Thus the Genesis myth, a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion, was balm to the bruised spirits of the Israelites who had been defeated and deported by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar during the sixth century BCE. Nobody was required to "believe" it; like most peoples, the Israelites had a number of other mutually-exclusive creation stories and as late as the 16th century, Jews thought nothing of making up a new creation myth that bore no relation to Genesis but spoke more directly to their tragic circumstances at that time.
Religion thus lies in the sphere of meaning and understanding, not empirical truth. Or at least, that's where it began and is at home, and where to a large degree it is still at home in many religions today. But modern Christianity is rather different, and this is born out both by the New Atheists and their adversaries--none more so than biblical literalists and creationists. But now that we've seen the non-cognitive way that religion is best understood, we are ready to see how this changed for Modern Christianity and why the rise of science and modern scientism played a role.
In the 17th century, the rise to prominence of science, thanks to the likes of Descartes and Newton, had a radical effect on Western culture. It allowed us a systematic way in which to discover truths about the world around us, and explain the mechanisms that underlie the working of the natural world. What was once the domain of speculation and inference by philosophers, was now a more methodical, careful, empirical method of study that produced reliable, testable results. These methods were refined, and ever since the Industrial Revolution, the success of science and its practical offshoot, technology, increased in the minds of everyone the reputation of the scientific method and the scientific approach to human problems. The results of science, in terms of fascinating and important truths gleaned, as well as concomitant advances in technology, spoke to the overwhelming success of the scientific method for human life.
Scientism is defined as the encroachment of natural science and its methods into areas in which it does not properly belong. We are living in a scientistic age. The success of science in its own domain, and in technological development has led us to adopt a scientific mindset where it is often less than appropriate. This is true in everyday life no less than in philosophy and other humanistic disciplines. But as scientism's influence spread throughout the culture, so to came it to language. To believe in Christ and in God became just like believing any other proposition about the world--it became a matter of empirical fact, not a matter of meaning. The varied uses and thus meanings of the concept of "truth" were ignored in favour of a single standard--scientific, empirical truth. But there is a realm of things we refer to as truths, truths about the nature of human existence. The nature of these truths are not the same as the scientific, empirical truths discovered by science. But, from a scientistic mindset, the only kinds of truths worth caring about are those that speak about facts in the world, truths expressed in propositions that we assent to and thus believe.
Thus people began to think of religion as a set of doctrines that one assents to intellectually. The worst offenders began to take the bible literally, to think that the earth really was only 6000 years old, was created in six days, etc. But this is exactly the irony; the most staunch, anti-intellectual creationist Christians exist in large part thanks to the influence of scientism on our culture, and in many cases the New Atheists are just as much a product of our scientistic age. Their most reviled adversary, creationism, owes its life to the scientism that ripped religion from its home in engaged practices and placed it in the purely doxastic realm. Insofar as the New Atheists' criticism of religion is criticism using the same criteria and conceptions of truth and belief as the creationists, they are just as guilty of misunderstanding.
Science is a wonderful thing. There is no better way for us to learn about the natural world and explain its workings. But in asking whether or not we should believe in belief, that is, insulate faith-beliefs from the criticisms of open inquiry, we are rather missing the point. For properly construed, religion is not a cognitive matter that is open to empirical inquiry and criticism. Insofar as some religious people treat religion as such, the New Atheists are perfectly correct in their criticisms. But the point is that both parties are missing the point.
That said, doesn't this amount to agreeing that religion ought to be sacrosanct and free from criticism? No. But the criticism takes place on a different level. It will not be about what we should hold to be true about the world, but rather what we ought to
do as autonomous agents in the world. When we engage religion on its own terms, on the terms of an engaged activity, a way of life, we can still find it wanting; just not epistemologically wanting. We will find it
existentially wanting.
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APPENDIX
It is worth noting, that despite my praise for Armstrong's article, she does go astray at least once:
But during the modern period, scientific logos became so successful that myth was discredited, the logos of scientific rationalism became the only valid path to truth, and Newton and Descartes claimed it was possible to prove God's existence, something earlier Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians had vigorously denied. Christians bought into the scientific theology, and some embarked on the doomed venture of turning their faith's mythos into logos.
Though I said something similar, she is not strictly correct. Philosophers in the middle ages, such as Anselm and Aquinas, thought that they had provided proofs of God's existence. And Aquinas is a great example of the Catholic endeavour to ground religion in reason; in Armstrong's terms, to ground
mythos in
logos.
