“The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness,” said Thoreau. We are told that faith is the foundation of all achievement, that without faith nothing is possible, and “you gotta have faith.” But is faith really a good thing? William Harwood suggests that faith and insanity are the same thing: “the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence.” Kurt Vonnegut said “I consider a capacity for [unquestioning faith] terrifying and absolutely vile.” Simone de Beauvoir insists that “Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself.” I’ve said that religious faith is not a crutch—you can walk with a crutch—but a bear trap of the inquiring mind. While many contemporary philosophers are atheists, religious philosophers include Martha Nussbaum (reform Judaism), Marilyn McCord Adams (Episcopal), and Abdolkarim Soroush (Islam). Philosophers and theologians have long debated whether to follow faith or reason. (https://iep.utm.edu/faith-re/). So is faith the greatest gift to mankind or a disease of the mind?
Three Types of Faith
Credence faith is about believing something to be true or false: it means believing something to be true despite the evidence. The evidence either shows that your belief is (most likely) false or that there is no rational reason to believe it. The evidence does not favor your belief, and may even be strongly against it. Credence faith is mostly what religions mean by faith. Belief in a conscious, all-good, all-powerful creator who arranges or interferes with human life, is an example of credence faith, since the evidence suggests no such god exists. (I argued this is a paper called “Bad Samaritans, Aftertastes, and the Problem of Evil.” But that’s really a topic for another blog.) Flat earthers have credence faith. Some people have faith in astrology or ghosts. Some people have faith in Karma. A special kind of credence faith is unjustified optimism: thinking that things will work out, even when the objective likelihood is that they won’t. (So you’re believing that things will work out despite the evidence.) Commitment faith means maintaining a commitment to a project, person, or ideal even when it is not clear that keeping that commitment is reasonable. Commitment faith is often linked to credence faith, as when I remain committed to a hopeless project because I believe that, somehow, it will succeed (optimism). But also I can be committed, out of faith, to supporting my alcoholic friend even though I believe he probably won’t recover. I can remain committed to a scientific project even though I believe it will most likely end in failure. Finally, moral faith is the conviction that, whatever happens, whatever life brings, there is enough goodness to make life worthwhile. However bad life becomes, it is enough to eke out a minimally good human life. A person with moral faith can be troubled and unhappy about what is happening. But underneath is a serenity and contentment that, despite all that, life is somehow good. As Jews sing on Passover, “Dayeinu”—it suffices, it is enough.
Are any of these a virtue? Virtues, says Aristotle, are habits or ways of living that contribute to a good life. Together, they build a good character. Aristotle saw virtue as the golden mean or right balance between two extremes (the vices). Courage, for example, is the right balance between too little regard for danger (recklessness) and too much (cowardice). How would that work for credence faith? Is faith the right balance between strict adherence to evidence and just “going with your gut”? That’s not how Christians see faith: they view faith, ideally, as total, absolute, and unwavering. It makes sense for commitment faith—don’t give up too easily, but don’t beat a dead horse. (Beating live horses must be avoided too, of course.) Moral faith is already a balance between pessimism and optimism (being realistic about what will happen but optimistic about your ability to deal with it.)
Credence Faith Is No Virtue
Credence faith is generally a bad thing, for four reasons. 1) It’s almost always wrong. 2) There is no check on what people believe by faith—anything goes, no matter how evil. 3) That means there is no way to settle disagreements except by force and pressure. 4) It leads to having a bad character.
Credence Faith Is Almost Always Wrong
What the evidence supports is usually true. If it looks like a kumquat, smells like a kumquat, and tastes like a kumquat, it’s usually a kumquat and a not a cleverly disguised alien from Alpha Centauri. So, most of the time, people who have credence faith are just wrong. There are exceptions. But for every celebrated example of faith carrying someone through, there are a thousand people who relied on faith and got burned. Sometimes credence faith turns out to be useful. As a wild-eyed guess, I’d say maybe 2% of the time. But even if the available evidence is wrong, it doesn’t mean that your particular belief is the right one. Even if the evidence is wrong and there is a conscious creator, It may not be the Christian god. It could be indifferent or even incompetent or evil. The creator of our universe could be the vicious child of a superior species. Our universe could be a failed lab experiment. Belief in the most bizarre of these alternatives tends, over a long enough time, to disappear. Today you won’t find many worshippers of Zeus, Mesmerists (believers in animal magnetism), and phrenologists, (who thought the shape of the skull determined personality), though Zeus/Jupiter was worshipped for a thousand years. So, maybe 98% of the time (or more), credence faith is just plain wrong. Very rarely, unwavering belief in something false turns out to have good consequences. But almost always it does harm. Christian and Islamic faith has killed and tortured millions. Throw in, among countless examples, the Cultural Revolution, Cambodia’s killing fields, and Nazi faith in the superiority of the Reich and the Aryan race, and saying credence faith is, in general, a good thing begins to sound insane. As I said in another post, you can ignore logic, but it won’t ignore you (Logic and Who Does the Dishes). Cyanide doesn’t care what your heart tells you—drink it and you die. There are things that can make credence faith less dangerous. Humility is chief among them. Deciding your religion is so certain you’re willing to murder heretics is grotesquely arrogant. If the evidence is against you, recognize there’s a decent chance you’re wrong. Let that guide your actions. Don’t bet your house on it, and especially don’t bet someone else’s house.
Commitment faith works kind of the same way. Commitment against what reason suggests sometimes pays dividends, but, most of the time, it doesn’t work out well. We celebrate those who persevered against all odds. You’ll find their stories everywhere. You won’t read articles about the millions of times commitment to a hopeless project ended in disaster. In the movies, the captain saves the day by pushing the ship beyond its limits. In real life, that usually results in an exploded ship and a dead crew. Humility is needed here, too. The more that reason tells you commitment is a bad idea, the less you should put at risk. And look before you leap. If the evidence is strong that your brother will fall off the wagon, don’t risk your home, your career, and your children’s lives. Loyalty is important, but self-destruction is rarely a good choice. A little close and objective scrutiny would have prevented many a disaster.
There Is No Check on Credence Faith
If you follow the evidence wherever it leads, the evidence corrects you when you’re wrong. If you “follow your heart,” it can lead you anywhere, and there is nothing to pull you back when you go astray. Faith told the Aztecs that human sacrifice to Tonatiuh was needed to keep the sun rising every morning. Faith told the Catholic Inquisitors that torture and burning of heretics was a duty owed to God. The point is that there is nothing one could say to an Aztec or Inquisitor to show them they were wrong. They know it in their heart, and that’s that. Scientists can be wrong too, but you can appeal to reasons and evidence. As Carl Sagan and many others have said, science is self-correcting (at least in the long run, despite human stubbornness). Evidence can be misleading and logicians and scientists can be myoptic, but eventually they keep on the path. Faith is blind.
Force Becomes the Only Way to settle Disputes
Disputes and disagreements are an inevitable part of human life. Sometimes we can “agree to disagree,” but if you say your neighbor is a witch and you’re going to hang her and I say I can’t let you do that, we can’t just agree to disagree. So how do we settle it? If we both follow reason and evidence, we can sit down calmly and rationally and try to figure out what is true and fair and reasonable. There is something we can both appeal to—the evidence, the arguments, what reason tells us. If we both follow our faith and what our heart tells us, there is nothing to appeal to. Your heart says yes and mine says no. End of story. So we have no choice but to use force or pressure. I can beat you. I can make you feel guilty or seduce you or make you take pity on me. Force or pressure is not a good way to resolve things. At best it leaves resentment and at worst it leaves a corpse.
Credence Faith Leads to a Bad Character
To keep the faith when the evidence proves otherwise, you have to lie to yourself. My favorite example is the 1936 Olympics. The Nazis believed that “Aryans” were morally and physically superior. Yet right in front of Hitler’s eyes, at the Olympics held in Berlin, the African-American athlete Jesse Owens wiped the floor with his “Aryan” competitors, winning four gold medals. So much for being physically superior. But it didn’t put a dent in Nazi’s faith in their superiority. The Nazis, of course, faked scientific and archaeological studies, just as Christian Monks for centuries altered and faked texts to “prove” the events in the Bible and creationists faked fossils to disprove evolution. On a more personal level, people who make unfair demands and say “I’m worth it” are refusing to ask if other people are “worth it” too (The Golden Rule for Relationships). How different is the person of integrity who follows the evidence and reason wherever they lead, however uncomfortable or embarrassing or inconvenient the truth may be. Morris Weitz was a well-respected philosopher. As a snot-nosed undergraduate, I gave him a knock-down argument that he was wrong about something in one of his articles. You might think he would be angry or huffy, but no. He warmly shook my hand in gratitude. As Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to say, scientists (and philosophers) love to be corrected, because our aim is truth.
Moral Faith
Moral faith is the hardest kind of faith to maintain, and the most beautiful. True moral faith recognizes the devastating extent of hardship. It doesn’t pretend that everything will work out. Rather, it has faith that awful as life can be, it offers something worth cherishing. It affirms the potential of human creativity to make something of value out of dust and manure. This is something I struggle with. I know that, when I am dying of cancer, I will want to end things rather than suffer out a painful and inevitable end. So I believe strongly in physician-assisted suicide (under those circumstances). I’m not even sure I would have the strength of character to want to live if I were confined to bed for the rest of my life. This is a failing, a weakness in me. It is a failure of moral faith. I try to live with moral faith, but I recognize my limitations, much as I regret them. I admire the true “knight of faith,” to steal a phrase from Kierkegaard, the person whose love of life and ability to cherish even scraps of goodness is so strong that no adversity can eradicate them. There is a story about Simchat Torah on a train ride to Auschwitz. Simchat Torah is a day of celebration when Jews celebrate the joy of Torah (the five books of Moses) by lifting the Torah scroll in the air and dancing with it. On this train ride to the extermination camp, there was no Torah. One man turned to a boy on the train and asked, “did you study your Torah well?” The boy replied that he had. “Well then, the Torah is in your head,” and so they lifted the boy in the air and danced with him, lifting their voices in song, even as the train roared on bringing them all to their deaths. To me, this is a story of true moral faith. They did not kid themselves. They knew they were going to die. The conditions on the train were abysmal. Yet their resourcefulness found joy and goodness worth celebrating even in extreme misery. They were moral heroes.
Moral faith, it seems to me, is the kernel of truth in Stoic detachment or Hindu Vairagya: not to care less passionately about life and the things that earn one’s heart, but to find peace and strength in the fact that no matter how badly things go, that even if the worst happens, life is still worth living and still worth revering.
Faith is different from hope. Suppose your beloved is terribly ill. If you have hope they will recover, the possibility of their recovering retains a valid place in your worldmap. Their recovery is, in the world as you see it, someplace your future might actually go. That door remains open. If you have moral faith, then you are confident that, even if they die, you will feel terrible pain and loss, but life without them, however painful and difficult, is still worth cherishing. Even when all hope of recovery is lost, all is not lost. Aching loss and grief are in your worldmap, but not despair.
We need not fear desperately the loss of what is most precious to us, the death of a child or a spouse, the collapse of the country one loves, the diagnosis of a fatal illness. Those are terrible things, and we are right to mourn them. But if we have moral faith we will not collapse inside. All is never lost, for there is always some shimmer of goodness and delight among the ruins. Moral faith is faith in life itself, no matter how things turn out. Even if I am to die, I know that the people I care about will survive. And even if all of humanity will perish, the brief sparkle of greatness and joy and pain and hope and despair and insight that we, together, have brought to be, will forever remain part of the long history of the cosmos. That alone should bring us a measure of comfort. It is this kind of moral faith I mean, this great gift of the human spirit, so beautiful and so hard to maintain, when I ask, with a mixture of pride and humility, “grant me faith.”
For those who are sensitive to moral beauty, no matter how terribly everything turns out, there is a beauty in doing right as best one can, whether anyone else notices or cares, a beauty that brings some pleasure to life. It is something to open one’s eyes for on a dreary morning, even in a jail cell or a small Cinderella corner of the world. This is a faith not of worship but of devotion. Moral faith is the hardest kind of faith to maintain, and the most beautiful. True moral faith recognizes the devastating extent of hardship. It doesn’t pretend that everything will work out. Rather, it has faith that awful as life can be, it offers something worth cherishing. It affirms the potential of human creativity to make something of value out of dust and manure. This is something I struggle with. I know that, when I am dying of cancer, I will want to end things rather than suffer out a painful and inevitable end. So I believe strongly in physician-assisted suicide (under those circumstances). I’m not even sure I would have the strength of character to want to live if I were confined to bed for the rest of my life. This is a failing, a weakness in me. It is a failure of moral faith. I try to live with moral faith, but I recognize my limitations, much as I regret them. I admire the true “knight of faith,” to steal a phrase from Kierkegaard, the person whose love of life and ability to cherish even scraps of goodness is so strong that no adversity can eradicate them. There is a story about Simchat Torah on a train ride to Auschwitz. Simchat Torah is a day of celebration when Jews celebrate the joy of Torah (the five books of Moses) by lifting the Torah scroll in the air and dancing with it. On this train ride to the extermination camp, there was no Torah. One man turned to a boy on the train and asked, “did you study your Torah well?” The boy replied that he had. “Well then, the Torah is in your head,” and so they lifted the boy in the air and danced with him, lifting their voices in song, even as the train roared on bringing them all to their deaths. To me, this is a story of true moral faith. They did not kid themselves. They knew they were going to die. The conditions on the train were abysmal. Yet their resourcefulness found joy and goodness worth celebrating even in extreme misery. They were moral heroes.
Moral faith, it seems to me, is the kernel of truth in Stoic detachment or Hindu Vairagya: not to care less passionately about life and the things that earn one’s heart, but to find peace and strength in the fact that no matter how badly things go, that even if the worst happens, life is still worth living and still worth revering.
Faith is different from hope. Suppose your beloved is terribly ill. If you have hope they will recover, the possibility of their recovering retains a valid place in your worldmap. Their recovery is, in the world as you see it, someplace your future might actually go. That door remains open. If you have moral faith, then you are confident that, even if they die, you will feel terrible pain and loss, but life without them, however painful and difficult, is still worth cherishing. Even when all hope of recovery is lost, all is not lost. Aching loss and grief are in your worldmap, but not despair.
We need not fear desperately the loss of what is most precious to us, the death of a child or a spouse, the collapse of the country one loves, the diagnosis of a fatal illness. Those are terrible things, and we are right to mourn them. But if we have moral faith we will not collapse inside. All is never lost, for there is always some shimmer of goodness and delight among the ruins. Moral faith is faith in life itself, no matter how things turn out. Even if I am to die, I know that the people I care about will survive. And even if all of humanity will perish, the brief sparkle of greatness and joy and pain and hope and despair and insight that we, together, have brought to be, will forever remain part of the long history of the cosmos. That alone should bring us a measure of comfort. It is this kind of moral faith I mean, this great gift of the human spirit, so beautiful and so hard to maintain, when I ask, with a mixture of pride and humility, “grant me faith.”
For those who are sensitive to moral beauty, no matter how terribly everything turns out, there is a beauty in doing right as best one can, whether anyone else notices or cares, a beauty that brings some pleasure to life. It is something to open one’s eyes for on a dreary morning, even in a jail cell or a small Cinderella corner of the world. This is a faith not of worship but of devotion. Moral faith is finding in the mirror of one’s soul a reflection of the lustrous beauty of a world that goes on quite apart from us, long before we were born and long after we die, our small and shining glimpse of stark eternity.
Disclaimer
Nothing that appears on this blog is meant to replace legal advice, therapy, or medical treatment. I am not providing legal, medical, or mental health advice. Always seek the advice of your own attorney or medical or mental health provider about specific questions concerning your specific health or legal issues.
