Finally got a chance to start an account. Sorry for the delay. I’ve enjoyed reading the comments and there are some very good point raised. I realize now that trust in sensory experience was not the strongest argument. What I was hoping for with it was to show an example of faith that secular people can relate to. It does not seem like it landed so I may have to keep thinking about what those might be. Realizing that there is not going to be anything directly analogous to religious faith. I wonder if something like “faith in the scientific method to help understand the world” might better illustrate the point I was going for?
C.S. Lewis addressed the issue of faith in Mere Christianity as follows:
In one sense Faith means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people—at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad.
Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then— and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so.
For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.
When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, “Perhaps she’ll be different this time,” and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true.
Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water—or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.
Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
Although many religious people use the word differently, this is how I use Faith, and I propose that it would be an acceptable one to facilitate this discussion: a determination to hold on to what you have already established a high confidence level in, despite signals you may have received from less rational sources (i.e. emotions).
Honestly the CSL definition is I think one of the best for faith. I think though that the lived definition of faith is as trust in God. Because most Christians, me included, would not say that hey believe in God without any evidence at all. The evidence is experiential, feeling forgiven, feeling loved, or some other deeply personal moment. Those moments may not be proof that you can take to a wider society or really anyone who has not had them but they are very real to those who experience them.
Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
So Bayes update on intellectual arguments, but not on your emotions when you consider them likely to change in the immediate future? That seems like a good virtue if one desires accurate beliefs.
It is, and I think “faith” in this sense is indeed an intellectual virtue. But it seems to me that
many, many uses of the word “faith” by believers are describing something quite different and are in fact endorsing belief in the absence of evidence or in the teeth of contrary evidence;
even when the meaning is broadly in line with CSL’s here, most applications of it refer not to holding on to belief merely “in spite of your changing moods” but advocate much firmer persistence than that. A Christian who after lengthy consideration is beginning to think that the problem of evil is insoluble is likely to be enjoined to exercise “faith”.
The second of those is not necessarily unreasonable. E.g., if you know you are about to talk to someone supernaturally persuasive, able to come up with extremely convincing arguments for any position true or false, you might do well to precommit to not being moved by whatever arguments they might offer you. Christians might suggest (indeed, in another place Lewis does suggest) that the influence of the devil is like that. But the possibilities for abuse are very obvious.
[EDITED to add: I see that at least two people have downvoted this. Rereading it, it still looks perfectly reasonable to me. I don’t suppose anyone who dislikes it would do me the favour of saying why?]
I think that’s the strongest move. Faith as allegiance, trust, submission, etc.
There has always been a fundamental equivocation in “Faith in God”, which most atheists mistake only as “Belief that some being exists”, and not “choose to trust and obey God”.
When you combine that with our notion of instrumental rationality and rationality as winning, you have a clear path to the rationality of faith in God: Choosing to trust in God and submit to God leads to winning.
I recall a Christian gal I knew in high school saying “I just concluded that I would have a happier life if I believed in God.” At the time, that struck me as blasphemous. I was appalled. You believe it without regard to correspondence to reality? Self willed delusion? But once one no longer makes a fetish of epsitemic truth, it’s perfectly sensible.
you have a clear path to the rationality of faith in God: Choosing to trust in God and submit to God leads to winning.
Do you in fact believe that to be true? (For the avoidance of doubt, I mean: do you believe that it corresponds to reality?)
once one no longer makes a fetish of epistemic truth
The word “fetish” has a value judgement built in (e.g., the relevant definition in the OED is “something irrationally reverenced”), and I don’t see any reason to agree with that value judgement. If we rewrite your statement without that inbuilt sneering, here’s what we get.
[...] You believe it without regard to correspondence to reality? [...] But once one stops caring about whether one’s beliefs correspond to reality, it’s perfectly sensible.
And, yeah, if you don’t care whether your beliefs correspond to reality then you won’t be bothered by someone else not caring whether their beliefs correspond to reality, and that may be convenient sometimes. But on the whole I am inclined to agree with Eliezer that “not making a fetish of epistemic truth” is a bad strategy overall.
Also, if it becomes known that to you truth is only a matter of strategy, no one is ever going to trust anything you say ever again. I asked you a question above, but no matter what answer you give I am going to harbour a suspicion that the question you’re really answering is more like “which answer will produce results I like better?”.
I don’t think this is entirely fair to the point buybuydandavis was making. By “making a fetish of epistemic truth,” I don’t think he meant not caring about truth at all, but not putting it above everything else. In reality, everyone cares about truth, but they also care about other things. And that means that our actions are going to be affected by our concern about truth, but they will also be affected by our concerns about other things.
This includes actions like making statements. And no one is exempt from this, because everyone cares about more than one thing. If someone says they care only about truth and nothing else, it is untrue, and in fact is an example of its own untruth, because the person who makes this untrue claim must be motivated by something other than truth in making the claim.
I care a lot about truth, and more than most people do, as far as I can see. But that does not mean that I don’t care about other things. I do, and those other motives can and do affect my statements and beliefs, even if I try to minimize those effects. Certainly I would be unwilling to adopt a false worldview for the sake of other motives. But if someone else cares a bit less about truth than I do, and a bit more about other things, and consequently accept a false worldview for the sake of those other things, I am not horrified by that, even if I would be unwilling to do it myself. In that sense I find the statement by buybuydandavis’s friend understandable.
In a similar way, “truth is only a matter of strategy” is probably not entirely true of anyone. But everyone is going to have their statements affected by their other motives to some degree, and in that sense I am suspicious of everyone’s statements, including my own, much in the way you say here.
I don’t think he meant not caring about truth at all
Sure. Neither, in fact, do I. But let’s be clear: the question was never just “should we care about truth more than everything else?” but “should we care about truth more than anything else when deciding what to believe?” and I think answering no is much more reasonable in the first case than the second. Prioritizing truth when deciding what to believe is no more “fetishizing” than prioritizing minimal aberration when having eyeglasses made, or prioritizing drinkability when arranging your town’s water supply. You may pay some attention to price or aesthetics, but you’d generally be crazy to get lenses that don’t actually do a reasonable job of correcting your vision or drinking water that will poison you.
Instances where you ‘trust and obey’ something without regard to its epistemic truth but seeking something else out of that ‘trust’ or ‘faith’ should arguably be regarded as aliefs, not beliefs. So is it rational to alieve in a god? Well, the answer will probably depend on what your goals are and what god, or gods, you’re alieving in at any given moment. If you’re part of a group of warriors trying to enter some kind of collective berserker-like frenzy, it may be rational to alieve in a warlike deity like Mars, Thor or (at some level, at least) the Abrahamic god/Yahweh. But maybe you have other goals, and you’d do best by placing your faith in an entirely different deity.
What I was hoping for with it was to show an example of faith that secular people can relate to.
While I believe “faith” as a concept is insufficiently defined, I suspect its definition would have to be expanded too much for it to occupy some of the space of secular epistemology.
Regarding secular experiences relating to religion, you might want to check out the discussion here about the article written in response to yours. Might pick up some good ideas there for relevant points to make.
Finally got a chance to start an account. Sorry for the delay. I’ve enjoyed reading the comments and there are some very good point raised. I realize now that trust in sensory experience was not the strongest argument. What I was hoping for with it was to show an example of faith that secular people can relate to. It does not seem like it landed so I may have to keep thinking about what those might be. Realizing that there is not going to be anything directly analogous to religious faith. I wonder if something like “faith in the scientific method to help understand the world” might better illustrate the point I was going for?
C.S. Lewis addressed the issue of faith in Mere Christianity as follows:
In one sense Faith means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people—at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then— and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other. When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, “Perhaps she’ll be different this time,” and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water—or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down. Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
Although many religious people use the word differently, this is how I use Faith, and I propose that it would be an acceptable one to facilitate this discussion: a determination to hold on to what you have already established a high confidence level in, despite signals you may have received from less rational sources (i.e. emotions).
Honestly the CSL definition is I think one of the best for faith. I think though that the lived definition of faith is as trust in God. Because most Christians, me included, would not say that hey believe in God without any evidence at all. The evidence is experiential, feeling forgiven, feeling loved, or some other deeply personal moment. Those moments may not be proof that you can take to a wider society or really anyone who has not had them but they are very real to those who experience them.
So Bayes update on intellectual arguments, but not on your emotions when you consider them likely to change in the immediate future? That seems like a good virtue if one desires accurate beliefs.
It is, and I think “faith” in this sense is indeed an intellectual virtue. But it seems to me that
many, many uses of the word “faith” by believers are describing something quite different and are in fact endorsing belief in the absence of evidence or in the teeth of contrary evidence;
even when the meaning is broadly in line with CSL’s here, most applications of it refer not to holding on to belief merely “in spite of your changing moods” but advocate much firmer persistence than that. A Christian who after lengthy consideration is beginning to think that the problem of evil is insoluble is likely to be enjoined to exercise “faith”.
The second of those is not necessarily unreasonable. E.g., if you know you are about to talk to someone supernaturally persuasive, able to come up with extremely convincing arguments for any position true or false, you might do well to precommit to not being moved by whatever arguments they might offer you. Christians might suggest (indeed, in another place Lewis does suggest) that the influence of the devil is like that. But the possibilities for abuse are very obvious.
[EDITED to add: I see that at least two people have downvoted this. Rereading it, it still looks perfectly reasonable to me. I don’t suppose anyone who dislikes it would do me the favour of saying why?]
It may help to point out which conception of faith you have in mind. For example:
faith as a feeling of existential confidence
faith as knowledge of specific truths, revealed by God
faith as belief that God exists
faith as belief in (trust in) God
faith as practical commitment beyond the evidence to one’s belief that God exists
faith as practical commitment without belief
faith as hoping—or acting in the hope that—the God who saves exists
etc...
I think that’s the strongest move. Faith as allegiance, trust, submission, etc.
There has always been a fundamental equivocation in “Faith in God”, which most atheists mistake only as “Belief that some being exists”, and not “choose to trust and obey God”.
When you combine that with our notion of instrumental rationality and rationality as winning, you have a clear path to the rationality of faith in God:
Choosing to trust in God and submit to God leads to winning.
I recall a Christian gal I knew in high school saying “I just concluded that I would have a happier life if I believed in God.” At the time, that struck me as blasphemous. I was appalled. You believe it without regard to correspondence to reality? Self willed delusion? But once one no longer makes a fetish of epsitemic truth, it’s perfectly sensible.
Do you in fact believe that to be true? (For the avoidance of doubt, I mean: do you believe that it corresponds to reality?)
The word “fetish” has a value judgement built in (e.g., the relevant definition in the OED is “something irrationally reverenced”), and I don’t see any reason to agree with that value judgement. If we rewrite your statement without that inbuilt sneering, here’s what we get.
And, yeah, if you don’t care whether your beliefs correspond to reality then you won’t be bothered by someone else not caring whether their beliefs correspond to reality, and that may be convenient sometimes. But on the whole I am inclined to agree with Eliezer that “not making a fetish of epistemic truth” is a bad strategy overall.
Also, if it becomes known that to you truth is only a matter of strategy, no one is ever going to trust anything you say ever again. I asked you a question above, but no matter what answer you give I am going to harbour a suspicion that the question you’re really answering is more like “which answer will produce results I like better?”.
I don’t think this is entirely fair to the point buybuydandavis was making. By “making a fetish of epistemic truth,” I don’t think he meant not caring about truth at all, but not putting it above everything else. In reality, everyone cares about truth, but they also care about other things. And that means that our actions are going to be affected by our concern about truth, but they will also be affected by our concerns about other things.
This includes actions like making statements. And no one is exempt from this, because everyone cares about more than one thing. If someone says they care only about truth and nothing else, it is untrue, and in fact is an example of its own untruth, because the person who makes this untrue claim must be motivated by something other than truth in making the claim.
I care a lot about truth, and more than most people do, as far as I can see. But that does not mean that I don’t care about other things. I do, and those other motives can and do affect my statements and beliefs, even if I try to minimize those effects. Certainly I would be unwilling to adopt a false worldview for the sake of other motives. But if someone else cares a bit less about truth than I do, and a bit more about other things, and consequently accept a false worldview for the sake of those other things, I am not horrified by that, even if I would be unwilling to do it myself. In that sense I find the statement by buybuydandavis’s friend understandable.
In a similar way, “truth is only a matter of strategy” is probably not entirely true of anyone. But everyone is going to have their statements affected by their other motives to some degree, and in that sense I am suspicious of everyone’s statements, including my own, much in the way you say here.
Winner.
Sure. Neither, in fact, do I. But let’s be clear: the question was never just “should we care about truth more than everything else?” but “should we care about truth more than anything else when deciding what to believe?” and I think answering no is much more reasonable in the first case than the second. Prioritizing truth when deciding what to believe is no more “fetishizing” than prioritizing minimal aberration when having eyeglasses made, or prioritizing drinkability when arranging your town’s water supply. You may pay some attention to price or aesthetics, but you’d generally be crazy to get lenses that don’t actually do a reasonable job of correcting your vision or drinking water that will poison you.
I consider prioritizing truth over winning as fetishiizing truth.
Sometimes.
And sometimes you pick the wrong god.
And sometimes you get burned at the stake as a heretic, anyway.
By “path to the rationality of faith in God”, I meant “an argument you can make for the rationality of faith in God”.
I’m not saying that’s a slam dunk or anything, but I can see a plausible argument for it.
Yes, sometimes yes, and sometimes no. A convincing argument would not require a guaranteed road to winning.
Instances where you ‘trust and obey’ something without regard to its epistemic truth but seeking something else out of that ‘trust’ or ‘faith’ should arguably be regarded as aliefs, not beliefs. So is it rational to alieve in a god? Well, the answer will probably depend on what your goals are and what god, or gods, you’re alieving in at any given moment. If you’re part of a group of warriors trying to enter some kind of collective berserker-like frenzy, it may be rational to alieve in a warlike deity like Mars, Thor or (at some level, at least) the Abrahamic god/Yahweh. But maybe you have other goals, and you’d do best by placing your faith in an entirely different deity.
While I believe “faith” as a concept is insufficiently defined, I suspect its definition would have to be expanded too much for it to occupy some of the space of secular epistemology.
No worries, delays happen!
Regarding secular experiences relating to religion, you might want to check out the discussion here about the article written in response to yours. Might pick up some good ideas there for relevant points to make.