"Because I Love Her" Is a Rational and Logical Response
In his book The End of Faith Sam Harris points out, "People of faith naturally recognize the primacy of reason and resort to reasoning whenever they possibly can. Faith is simply the license they give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail" (232). To believe something true without evidence or in spite of evidence is called faith -- and many consider it a great virtue. A semantic distinction becomes necessary here; I am not talking about faith as trust -- as in, "I have faith my wife will show up on time." This type of faith is likely based on experience, e.g. the many times my wife has been on-time. Having faith as the result of weighing and thinking through available evidence is simply how one operates in a reason-based worldview. Logic, emotion, and even subtle "subconscious" cues may add to and aid our evaluations and calculations, but this kind of faith requires no leaping or revelation. This kind of faith does not require faith.
There is another kind of faith that lies "beyond" logic and cannot be shaken by logic. While our ideas about the importance of this kind of faith are likely based on a combination of childhood imprinting, evolutionary adaptation, and emotional gaps unsatisfied by reason, no amount of explanation or examination accounts for its power to those who have it. The importance of faith, especially in the concept of God -- inlayed as it is upon our earliest experiences -- becomes immune to the intrusion of logic and inquiry; as Freud states, "For any other question at all -- even one that affects us so little as the question whether whales lay eggs -- we demand more proof than we have for Providence." And revealed religions recognize the need to regard faith as the final arbiter when judging what is true or false. The Bible provides a telling quote: "For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent" (1 Corinthians 1:19). Reason becomes faith's enemy when reason points us in other directions; science and religion have been at odds because science does not recognize faith as a valid way of knowing, and is therefore not bound or convinced by the revelations and proclamations the faithful may hold as true.
Faith as a way of knowing is regarded not only as an alternative to logic and reason, it is held as a virtue. People of great faith are often judged as "good" simply by exhibiting those high levels of faith. This equating of good with faithful feeds the allure of religious extremism. Richard Dawkins finds this allure worthy of high concern writing inThe God Delusion: "Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them -- given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by -- to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades" (285).
Conditioning the mind to dismiss reason as unnecessary (or inadequate) to know our deepest truths -- and to perceive such a perspective as virtue itself -- creates in the fanatically faithful a dangerous worldview. In this worldview lies an inexhaustible wellspring of answers that can be wholly detached from reality. Prayers of the truly faithful are always answered; the reply may be Yes, No, or Maybe but a willingness to hear makes even silence indicative of God. This deep attraction-to and hunger-for faith results at least partly from a failure to appreciate the complexity, strength, and power of human emotion.
We must remember that when asked, "Why do you want to marry that woman?" Because I love her is a perfectly reasonable and logical response. Emotion, intuition, and desire are not mutually exclusive to reason. To see faith as an alternative to machine-like rationality is to set up a false dichotomy of the most glaring kind, but for many believers "materialism" carries the taint of an impossibly cold and cruel logic. The Christian writer Ravi Zacharias describes his view of materialism in his book Can Man Live without God: "A materialist is forced to a theory of randomness and cannot avoid this reduction of man to flotsam and jetsam. Where there is the loss of wonder there is a natural tug toward a reductionistic view of everything aesthetic or virtuous. For that matter, all of life boils down to the rags of matter in chemical or physical reaction, and the strongest ‘reactions' win. Man becomes another blip on the radar screen of time. The noblest is reduced to the lowest, and love is merely glandular."
Holding such a view of materialism is as depressing as it is wrong. For love, glandular as it may be, is just as intense, wonderful, and valid regardless of its origin. The feeling of love does not subside when I learn that the human heart is a pumping machine. The metaphors that surround it are no less accurate, no less human, for our knowing that the heart is not heart-shaped. My appreciation of cardiac-mechanics in no way detracts from the love I have for my family and friends -- in my heart.
To accept Zacharias' definition of materialism is to become willfully blind to the incredible machinery of nature, and it is to cede our emotions, the most human of human qualities, as the sole domain of ministers and priests, gurus and mystics -- all the men and women of faith. Under the guise "faith" lies a detachment from science, reason and reality. Faith may be touted by believers as a panacea for whatever ails. But faith can be a dangerous drug, an intense hallucinogenic for those fanatics tightly focused on the pages of their books or on the words of their leaders revealing to them the Truth of what must be done.
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William Olson
Churchgoing Agnostic
Fudo Myoö
Rob St. Amant
Americain
ana koska
Salon.com
Comments
(rated) very much so
Any thoughts on what that might be?
Thanks.
Monte
"To believe something true without evidence or in spite of evidence is called faith -- and many consider it a great virtue."
It depends what you mean by "evidence," what counts as evidence. For example, if I say that torturing someone for one's own sadistic pleasure is wrong, I can't really give any evidence for that. If I say that Beethoven's 9th symphony is beautiful, I can't give any evidence for that either. But I wouldn't call such statements acts of faith.
"Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument."
If faith brooks no argument, why is it that religious people within the same faith tradition argue with each other so much?
"Conditioning the mind to dismiss reason as unnecessary (or inadequate) to know our deepest truths -- and to perceive such a perspective as virtue itself -- creates in the fanatically faithful a dangerous worldview."
It seems to me that you're really referring here to religious fundamentalism, not to religious belief in general.
"Reason becomes faith's enemy when reason points us in other directions . . . "
Another option is that one's faith becomes more informed, more sophisticated. Having gotten a BA in philosophy, spent years studying biblical criticism, read Harris, Dawkins, et al, it comes as a surprise to me that reason is an enemy.
"For love, glandular as it may be, is just as intense, wonderful, and valid regardless of its origin."
But does a materialistic view of love entail any moral content -- for example that you have an obligation to keep your marriage vows?
"Under the guise "faith" lies a detachment from science, reason and reality."
How then does one explain someone such as Kenneth Miller, Catholic and biologist, who argues for evolution?
Answering your questions involves a whole new essay, but the short answer is yes, without religion, there are still morals.
If you cant come up with a religion-free reason why torture is wrong, you're short-sighted.
Without religion to provide moral absolutes, morals are what we make them. If we accept torture and rampant cheating, then we will live in a world where torture and cheating are rife.
If we want to live in a world without torture and have a marriage without rampant cheating, then we set those standards.
In fact, if you look at the bible and the history of morality, this happens anyway. The bible provides no condemnation of slavery and makes it clear non-marital sex is a deadly sin. Those aren't our morals today. As society's morals have changed, the churches have followed.
I'm going to avoid the subject of religion altogether and make my example a secular one. A husband comes home late from work. He makes excuses. His wife KNOWS he is lying, but she lets him talk her round, she decides all her screaming instincts and the absurdity of the excuses and all the things about him that show he's lying, his getting angry to distract from the situation, his bullying to make it her fault, even the way he stares too long into her eyes when he's trying to seem truthful, she decides all of this is her overactive imagination. She has broken faith with herself, and with the universe. She knows perfectly well, KNOWS, with the part of her that perceives truly, that her husband is having an affair, but she allows herself to be bullied into thinking she is wrong.
What would have allowed her to hold on to the truth, that's faith. I don't know anyone who is truly faithful who believes because Mom and Dad said to or because it says to in the Bible. True people of faith believe because they have tested the waters and they know. They have had experiences, real experiences, which may or may not be visible or repeatable but nevertheless happened.
I admit freely that most of the people who talk loudest about their faith don't have any. In fact, according to a study on authoritarians, authoritarians who called themselves Evangelical Christians were far more likely to confess, under the protection of anonymity, that they had serious doubts about what they claimed to believe in. These folks are loud not because they have faith but because they don't. The folks with real faith are the ones mostly keeping their mouths shut. They aren't afraid that science will disprove the existence of God because they really believe in God, so science is not a threat. When science proves that some passage in the Bible is mistaken, that's not a threat either; all it means is that that passage is, having been written by human beings, wrong. It doesn't mean the whole Bible is worthless anymore than the testimony of an eyewitness who was mistaken about the color of a shirt is necessarily worthless. Because the Bible is simply testimony, the writings of some human beings about their experiences.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that just as the definition of materialism you have attacked is a bad definition of materialism, the definition of faith is a bad definition of faith. Materialism does not mean a rejection of the value of human experience; faith doesn't mean a rejection of the value of intellect.
You do a nice job setting up the dilemma. Then you stop.
In your concluding line you state that, “faith can be a dangerous drug, an intense hallucinogenic for those fanatics tightly focused on the pages of their books or on the words of their leaders revealing to them the Truth of what must be done.”, but give us nothing in terms of how to deal with the faithful.
In your view, is merely knowing enough? Is that all there is?
Reason alone was not able to break through this woman's emotional barrier — actually I would say that is the norm. We make most our decisions based on emotion, not on reason. Do you want to say that Faith is the combination of emotion and reason? If so, that’s cool, I just call that regular human decision making. I use faith to describe something different, I use it to describe exactly what the woman did, to suppress her emotion and logic and to believe in her husband for no good reason. It’s sort of funny that we use the word to describe completely opposite situations… I will have to ponder that!
Two questions, I would love to read the study you reference, can you give me a link? Second, could anything based in reason shake your faith? Ok, one more question, how do you know which bits of the bible to believe are divine?
I agree that “I love her” is reason enough to marry her. Is it, then, reason enough to leave her later for someone else? (My own answer is “It depends.” And that on which it depends is complex and has filled volumes.) Emotion informs reason so much more strongly than the other way around. We are wired to believe our experience over our thoughts, although we can learn to veto our emotions, often to our peril.
Thanks for this. It puts both my brain and my heart into gear at this early hour.
This is a beautifully written and constructed statement of the truth I know.
Laws provide us with moral guides - what are religions without the supernatural other than a set of laws that are codified by mutual agreement?
The point at issue is who is involved in setting up the mutual agreement - is it a group of twelve leaders or a nation of millions who represent others to create and enforce the law.
Therefore, the same idea of morality holds true of law based upon reason and non-faith based institutions. Neither religion nor reason have been or will be totally correct - witness slavery.
Rather than condemn slavery, the bible sets out terms for compensation and treatment. Based upon this information alone, we can know that the bible does not offer any higher moral values for human life and laws than those based upon reason. Instead, in the most twisted of believers, faith can be used as a way to do immoral acts and claim they are right.
However, reason offers a better way to change immoral laws because there is no unseen entity whose will must be parsed or who must be appeased out of fear.
This, in fact, is the strongest feature of our law - that we do not need to appeal to a god to determine the rightness of our laws and that those laws must be made within a system of checks and balances to avoid, as much as possible, any appeal to god as a way to continue unjust laws.
Therefore, as a nation, we can agree that torture is wrong and this is all the "higher power" required for this to be true. We can agree with this so strongly that we make treaties with other nations who also look at the course of human history and decide that torture is also morally wrong (as well as strategically.)
This is, in fact, what we have done in the past when we signed The Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles and when Reagan signed on so a no-torture treaty.
This is also why we can look at the Bush Administration and know that, as a nation, we weaken our laws, and thus our entire form of government if we do not hold torturers liable for calling for these crimes.
My point wasn't that morality depends on religion, but that we have all sorts of beliefs that aren't supported by any kind of materialistic "evidence." These beliefs are typically in the areas of value and meaning.
Paris writes: "Rather than condemn slavery, the bible sets out terms for compensation and treatment. Based upon this information alone, we can know that the bible does not offer any higher moral values for human life and laws than those based upon reason."
Let's talk about slavery. Aristotle wrote that some are "natural" slaves: "For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule."
When people read something like that they don't conclude that we have to throw reason in the trash. No one concludes that reason is a great evil. Religion, like philosophy, develops over time.
Most of the criticisms of religion that I read are really criticisms of extremist of fundamentalist religion, not religion per se. There are other kinds of religious belief, and there are both religious and non-religious extremists.
we do not have make exception for Aristotle. we note he lived in a time when human slavery was a form of spoils of war that are no longer legally permitted by any nation.
we look at what he said against the history that came after him.
It is the religious dogmatists who are the problem. Obviously people can and will believe many things. The problem is when that belief is used as an attempt to overturn reality that we know... i.e. to say that b/c slavery was in the bible, it is now okay.
sadly, there are christians in the U.S. who preach this very thing - the dominionists. they have some very powerful funding - I think Richard Mellon Sciafe, the same guy who helped to fund dirty tricks against democrats, was a big contributor at one point.
Without faith even just new born child could not live on this earth.he had faith that mother give him breast.
All scientists creating bad faith in society,wise man like Soccrtes creating good faith in society.
I was raised Catholic in the 60's, became agnostic (apathetic) for 3 decades and then decided that religion was too large of a part of the lives of many people that I respected and loved to ignore.
The current read is Scott Atran's, "In Gods We Trust", he uses a singular perspective, evolutionary psychology, an new and unproven theory to explain why religion came about, what role in plays and why it isn't going anywhere.
I had a chance to meet Sam Harris and Scott Atran in different settings, they have a high degree of respect for each other and a similar background that makes their increasingly divergent views interesting, at least to this novice.
Thanks for the post, I'll be looking for your future comments.
My view of what passes for "religious" faith is that it was originally a control mechanism and everything related to it since is a total joke as in if you believe any of it you've already been had on!
The clergy's consistent attempts at control continue. In between bouts of hypocrisy and molestation.
Auwe
I agree that we have a semantic problem here (among other things.) What I'm doing is trying to describe a process, the process which I've observed in myself and in other faithful people, a process which I think is a good thing and which I think is what is meant when the Bible tells us to have faith. That process clearly doesn't coincide with the dictionary definition, with your definition, or with the definition usually intended on the 700 club. As long as we're all clear on that I think we should be okay.
Before I answer your questions, a little discursion. In your response to my example, you seemed to feel that the woman surrendered her own opinion in the face of her husband's bullying due to an emotional reaction - that her awareness that he was cheating was a logical response, and that her failure to stick to her guns was an emotional response. I disagree. If you think through such an imaginary argument, you can easily imagine the husband laying out very logical "proofs" of his innocence and characterizing her doubts as motivated by unreasonable jealousy - an emotion. What's taking place in this example isn't as straightforward as logic versus emotion, with one on one side and the other on the other side. Our culture doesn't have a name for what's happening, although it's been documented many times in many studies. Why can't people speak up to authority figures? Why do people in groups tend to conform to the group? It's not logic, and it's not emotion - in fact such people often do things their emotions are telling them not to do.
A medieval theological might have called it "the World." A sociologist might call it something like "instinctive peer bonds." I work on video games for a living, so I call it "pathing," because that's what you call hidden nodes in level design which tell video game characters where to go and what to do next. Pathing is the strongest determinant of behavior for most human beings most of the time, stronger than logic and emotion both, and it's the enemy of free will. It's not possible to have faith, or even to make a decision of any kind, while simply following your pathing.
Okay! Now, to answer your questions. The quote comes from a book called "The Authoritarians" by Bob Altemeyer at the University of Manitoba. He's got the book online and I think you would enjoy it.
Could anything based in reason shake my faith? Well... hmm. It's a little like asking if anything could convince me I was not a human being but a brain in a jar being fed stimuli to convince me I was living a normal life. Yes, I suppose something could convince me of that, but I'm not immediately sure what it would take. I have had personal experiences of God which were as real as any other experience I've considered real. It's interesting that others in this thread have picked up on the "at some point we have to trust our experiences" motif.
Which parts of the Bible do I believe are divine. Okay, now we have to go into why I believe what I believe - and honestly it's not something I'm comfortable discussing on a forum. I'll do my best to answer you without getting into anything too personal. I believe, due to personal experience, that there is a God, that God is a Person (in other words, interested in and capable of interacting with people on a level which people would find meaningful), and that God is loving. That's it as far as what I know, what you might call my axioms. Starting from that point, I went searching for people who have had similar experiences to my own, to find out what else there was to know. A number of those people seem to have documented their experiences in the Bible. Some had similar experiences as members of other religions.
I'm oversimplifying since otherwise this could become a book! But. To make this short, I'm a Christian because I've read a lot of fiction from antiquity and I've read the Bible, and I don't think Christ is a fictional character. There was a person who said and did the things written down about Christ, or most of them, and that person was remarkable.
Having gotten as far as that, Christ himself gave me a key for sorting divine truth from human error: There are only two laws. Love God, and love thy neighbor. All other valid laws can be derived from those two laws.
I wish I could preview comments! I'm sure this is rambling and my thoughts are not well organized. Thanks for your respectful reply and I hope we can continue to share insights.
As for "the woman's" sources of information and her ultimate decision, I also didn't mean to imply it was reason v. emotion. I'm sure evidence from all three (logic, emotion, nature) come in on both sides, but ultimately one side is chosen. That decision process may be complicated and messy. What I am calling faith is when folks allow the side of weaker evidence to convince them.
It's all very personal and subjective, to be sure. I notice you speak of "religious experience" and I believe for many it does come down to that. It's too much to discuss here (perhaps I will post on it) but each person has to decide whether their "religious experience" is really a "supernatural" type thing or if it has a natural, human explanation. I think that faith discussions often come down to this because the argument is inviolable. One can always say, "Well you didn't have the same experience I did!"
John Bunyan believed that to be a Christian it was necessary to have had a personal, mystical experience. I'm not sure if I'd go that far, but I would say that if you feel you have no reason to believe, it's better and more honorable to say that than to try to pretend to believe because that's the "right" thing to do. After all, if God wants your attention, he knows where you live.
I think that hits the nail on the head: is marijuana bad? To someone with cataracts or undergoing chemotherapy it's a godsend. To others, it's a mindless diversion. But it totally consumes the lives of many.
My faith (such that I have) is a direct result of my reasoning, direct observation and questioning. I have found belief systems that directly relate to the way I see the world, not the other way around.
The Zacharias quote is a perfect example of binary reductionism, "A materialist is forced to a position of randomness", it's the old "black or white, no shades of gray" argument so loved by George W. Bush among others, the fallback argument for every dogmatist and absolutist. It's ironic that Zacharias decries reductionism in this quote, when his argument in this quote proceeds from a reductionist statement