I remember it vividly. It was after my first visit to my then-girlfriend's church, and I found myself out to lunch with her pastor--a forceful personality whose every word radiated a kind of aggressive conviction. You got the sense that, whenever he said something, there was an unspoken addendum that went something like this: "By the way, if you disagree with this, then you are spitting in the face of God and have proved yourself to be a dangerous servant of Satan whom I will do my best to convert or silence so as to make sure that you do not endanger anyone's immortal soul."
Or maybe that was just my imagination. In any event, I found him quite intimidating.
I was reminded of that lunch the other day while I was reading Stephen Law's recent post, "Do atheists know God exists? " Law's post is a response to another post by Randy Everist. Both are considering a claim commonly made by conservative Christians--namely, that atheists really know that God exists but are engaged in some sort of deception, including self-deception. Put another way: they're in denial. Both Law and Everist have some trouble with this claim, but Everist tries to salvage a version of it. Law--I think quite convincingly--shows why Everist's salvage job fails.
But I don't want to talk specifically about the merits of Law's arguments here. Instead, I want to think in a somewhat different way about this idea that all atheists and agnostics are in denial.
My girlfriend's pastor, lo those many years ago, asserted this idea over lunch. And when my face began to inch, ever so slightly, towards an expression that may have hinted at skepticism, he quickly invoked the Bible--specifically, Romans 1:18-20, in which Paul writes, "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."
The man said that last bit more than once: "They're without excuse." This piece was important to him. It was important that non-believers be without excuse. And I remember that an old woman at a nearby table overhead him (the pastor had a resonant voice--he was preaching even in the restaurant), and she felt the need to voice her earnest agreement.
When the preacher said this, I wanted to respond with vocal incredulity. I might have said "Are you nuts?" if I'd had more courage. You see, I knew lots of atheists and agnostics. Some were close friends. Others were loved ones. And it was quite apparent to me that their lack of belief in God wasn't about denying what was plain before their eyes.
Even though this happened years before The God Delusion hit shelves, I'd met atheists a bit like Richard Dawkins. And say what you will about Dawkins, it's pretty clear that he believes what he says about the absurdity of belief in God. I think it's clear to most followers of my work where I stand on this matter: We live in a world that is like that famed duck-rabbit image, a world that can be seen in different ways. And, contrary to Dawkins, I think one reasonable way in which to see the world is theistically. But in such a world, belief in the existence of God isn't a matter of knowledge but of faith--by which I mean it's a matter of choosing to see the world in terms of a hoped-for possibility. And this means that those who don't see it this way aren't denying something that they "really know in their heart is true."
But let's set aside such philosophical ideas and simply look at actual atheists and agnostics.
The reason I couldn't take that preacher seriously that day was because of the atheists and agnostics I'd known. Some had once been believers but had lost their faith--and they'd lost it kicking and screaming. They'd fought tooth and nail to preserve what had for so long helped to define who they were...until, finally, they had to admit that they just didn't believe anymore.
This doesn't smack of denial. In fact, I've know people who quite clearly were lying to themselves while they avowed belief in God, who really had already stopped believing and just weren't ready to admit it yet.
And I've known people who were perfectly open to the idea of God, but who neither found a compelling internal drive to believe nor saw any compelling evidence for God's existence when they looked at the world around them. And so they remained agnostic--friendly to believers, but honest enough to say, when pressed, "You know, I just don't have any beliefs about that." And these were not people full of "godlessness and wickedness," but rather people with a strong moral center, a noble heart, deep compassion and kindness.
I'm speaking, specifically, of my father.
The preacher at that restaurant table announced, in effect, that my father was without excuse. That he was willfully denying the truth--this man whose character I knew as well as I've known the character of anyone. And I can tell you this: Anyone who met my father, paid any attention to him, and then insisted that he "knew in his heart that there is a God but lied to himself and others about it"...well, such a person would have to have been doing what that preacher claimed nonbelievers do: Refuse to acknowledge the obvious.
More broadly, the notion that all atheists and agnostics are in denial is one that you can persist in clinging to only if you either don't pay attention to your atheist and agnostic neighbors, or if you willfully distort the evidence that pours in when you do pay attention. This notion operates as a way of blocking or impeding honest appreciation of other human beings. It is, in that sense, an impediment to love--because love begins with attention and the effort to understand.
So why do some Christians, like this preacher from my past, insist on clinging to this notion?
There are probably a number of reasons. Three in particular come to mind: First, because they cling to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy, and it sounds as if Paul endorses this notion in Romans. Second, because they cling to the doctrine that nonbelievers are damned to eternal hell at death, and they're astute enough to recognize that such a fate doesn't seem just if the person who is being thus damned is, well, exactly like my father in fact was. Third, because the level of certitude that they long to invest in their beliefs is hard for them to preserve in the face of sincere, authentic disagreement, thus leading them to want to deny that any sincere disagreement really exists.
And so, when they meet decent atheists and agnostics whose views are obviously sincere, views that express personal integrity as opposed to denial, they have to lie to themselves and others about those people, and declare them to be without excuse, in order to be able to cling to their infallibilist and hellish certitude.
In the process, they lose sight of what may be the deeper message of Romans 1:18-20--a message about paying attention to what's plain, about being honest with oneself about what one sees; a message about how those who fail to do this risk becoming alienated from the source of truth and love.
Showing posts with label agnosticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agnosticism. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
New Religion Dispatches Feature: A Review of Vincent Bugliosi's Case for Agnosticism
Regular readers of the blog may be interested in my most recent Religion Dispatches essay, Unreasonable Doubt: Vincent Bugliosi Defends Agnosticism (not my title, but it's catchier than what I had). In it, I review what is touted as the agnostic contribution to the God debates: famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's Divinity of Doubt. In a phrase that was edited out of the final version of the essay, I basically characterize Bugliosi's book in the following terms: He essenitally agrees with the criticisms that atheists and theists level against each other, but rejects their defenses of their respective positions. The result, of course, is uncertainty.
But is the case for epistemic uncertainty about God's existence the same as a case for agnosticism? I don't think so. My main aim in the essay is to offer my thoughts on what sorts of arguments should have been taken up in a book that markets itself as a defense of agnosticism. I'm left wishing someone had written that book (or something a bit closer to it than what Bugliosi offers). Maybe someone will. (Bernard?)
One warning, however: This review essay was edited a bit more heavily than the essays I usually submit, probably because I spent less time doing my own tinkering and editing than I usually do (I think I felt some pressure to get the essay submitted the week that Bugliosi's book came out). Fortunately, as usual at Religion Dispatches, the editing was overwhelmingly beneficial: streamlining the prose, eliminating unnecessary qualifying phrases, cutting unnecessary digressions, all the while remaining sensitive to the substance of my argument.
But here's the warning: While the edits that were made to the section on the Kierkegaardian objection to agnosticism make it punchier and more readable, they also remove the "distancing" remarks that make it clear I am not personally endorsing Kierkegaard's view. Too many people close to me in my life are agnostics for me to sincerely believe that agnostics inevitably lack a passional relationship with their world. For reasons I've expressed in an earlier post, I think Kierkegaard's arguments offer some reason to think it can be legitimate to take "leaps of faith" beyond the limits of what we know (although I think a conversation about what constraints should be imposed on such leaps is essential). But I am far from convinced that Kierkegaard demonstrates that taking such a leap on the God-question is required of anyone who wishes to live a fully human life.
In any event, the essay is more open than I would have liked to the sort of misreading that comes out in the first reader's letter (although a part of me wants to ask that reader if he read all the way to the end of the article). I've submitted a clarifying response, but as of this moment it has not yet been posted.
But is the case for epistemic uncertainty about God's existence the same as a case for agnosticism? I don't think so. My main aim in the essay is to offer my thoughts on what sorts of arguments should have been taken up in a book that markets itself as a defense of agnosticism. I'm left wishing someone had written that book (or something a bit closer to it than what Bugliosi offers). Maybe someone will. (Bernard?)
One warning, however: This review essay was edited a bit more heavily than the essays I usually submit, probably because I spent less time doing my own tinkering and editing than I usually do (I think I felt some pressure to get the essay submitted the week that Bugliosi's book came out). Fortunately, as usual at Religion Dispatches, the editing was overwhelmingly beneficial: streamlining the prose, eliminating unnecessary qualifying phrases, cutting unnecessary digressions, all the while remaining sensitive to the substance of my argument.
But here's the warning: While the edits that were made to the section on the Kierkegaardian objection to agnosticism make it punchier and more readable, they also remove the "distancing" remarks that make it clear I am not personally endorsing Kierkegaard's view. Too many people close to me in my life are agnostics for me to sincerely believe that agnostics inevitably lack a passional relationship with their world. For reasons I've expressed in an earlier post, I think Kierkegaard's arguments offer some reason to think it can be legitimate to take "leaps of faith" beyond the limits of what we know (although I think a conversation about what constraints should be imposed on such leaps is essential). But I am far from convinced that Kierkegaard demonstrates that taking such a leap on the God-question is required of anyone who wishes to live a fully human life.
In any event, the essay is more open than I would have liked to the sort of misreading that comes out in the first reader's letter (although a part of me wants to ask that reader if he read all the way to the end of the article). I've submitted a clarifying response, but as of this moment it has not yet been posted.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Distinctions, Part I: Contrasting the Epistemic Circumstances Underlying Agnosticism and Fallibilism
It seems to me that some of the conversations we are having on this blog could benefit from making some distinctions. As such, I want to devote a couple of posts to simply making some distinctions that I think may prove helpful--although in some cases the distinctions are subtle and hard to make, and so I welcome advice in refining them.
The first distinction I want to make has to do with a pair of contrasting epistemic circumstances that, it seems to me, are often inadequately distinguished. I say this because, as I reflect on what I was doing in Is God a Delusion?, I worry that I was blurring together these contrasting epistemic circumstances myself.
The distinction bears on the relationship between two other contrasting concepts, namely agnosticism and what I like to call fallibilism. These are, if you will, contrasting epistemic attitudes. In roughest terms, to be an agnostic is to withhold belief on a matter, whereas to be a fallibilist is to have a belief but recognize that you could be mistaken, that those who disagree with you could have some or all of the truth, and that it is important to comport yourself accordingly.
What I want to suggest is that these contrasting epistemic attitudes may be correlated with contrasting epistemic circumstances--where agnosticism is (all else being equal) the most fitting response to one while fallibilism (again all else being equal) is the most fitting response to the other. It is the distinction between these underlying epistemic circumstances that I want to try to get at.
The contrasting epistemic circumstances I have in mind are ones that might be faced by reasonable people confronted with a body of evidence. For the sake of sketching out these circumstances, I am going to leave the concepts of “evidence” and “reasonable people” largely unanalyzed. All I will say is that I when I speak about "presumptive evidence" below, I mean to use the term in a broad sense so as to include anything that can be propositionally expressed, where that proposition strikes one as clearly ("evidently") true (in the way that propositions which express what one's senses are immediately delivering strike one as clearly true), and its truth supports the truth of some other proposition(s). But this definition is itself couched in terms that require unpacking, and which might be understood in different ways. In short, I am fully aware that these terms are not uncontroversial, but I am going to sidestep these controversies for the sake of focusing on a different issue, while remaining fully conscious of the fact that in order to adequately address the issues raised here, it is likely that we will eventually need to return to these more basic controversies.
Here, then, are the two epistemic circumstances I want to consider:
Epistemic Circumstance 1 (EC1): You confront a body of presumptive evidence that "reasonable people" (however that is to be understood) generally accept, but you recognize that there are different ways of fitting that evidence into a coherent whole—different "stories" we can tell that fit just as well with the given evidence. In other words, we have certain mutually exclusive holistic ways of seeing the evidence, each of which maps onto the evidence just as well. For simplicity, let us assume there are only two such ways of seeing that fit as well onto the evidence, which we will call Worldviews A and B.
Epistemic Circumstance 2 (EC2): You confront a body of presumptive evidence that reasonable people generally accept, as well as certain further “apparent truths,” that is, things you experience as clearly true/self-evident/obvious/hard to deny/intuitively correct. But some of the people you regard as rational don’t find these apparent truths nearly as apparent as you do, and may instead find other things evident which are hardly evident to you. So, within the total body of “evidence” with which you are confronted, some of it is “shared evidence” whereas some of it is “personal evidence.” Now suppose that, as before, Worldviews A and B both map onto the shared evidence (and are the only worldviews you have so far encountered that do this). But now let us suppose, furthermore, that Worldview A maps well onto the conjunction of the shared evidence and your personal evidence, while B doesn’t (accepting B would force you to abandon things that seem clearly right to you). At the same time, Worldview B maps well onto the conjunction of the shared evidence and what is apparently the personal evidence of reasonable people other than you.
These, in brief, are the two contrasting epistemic circumstances I want to consider. They are not meant to be exhaustive. There may even be a kind of continuum between EC1 and EC2--that is, a range of cases that are a bit like both in one way or another, some more like on and some more like the other. As such, they might be seen as ideal types.
Now if you find yourself in EC1, there is a clear sense according to which, from your standpoint, A and B are equally plausible on the evidence. Put another way, there is no reason, on the evidence, for you to favor A over B. If A and B are the only ways of seeing that you've so far encountered that offer a good fit with the evidence, you may have some reason to endorse the disjunctive proposition, "A or B." But the evidence as such favors neither.
This doesn't mean that you won't have pragmatic or personal reasons for operating as if Worldview A is true and not Worldview B. You might find A more hopeful. Or you might like who you are better when you live as if A is true. Or perhaps you’ve grown up with a community that embraces A, and you continue to have a sense of solidarity with that community. Or perhaps you’ve tried to see the world through the lens of B and it just doesn’t sit right with you because of what you identify as mere quirks of personality. Or perhaps it is a combination of these factor. In any event, you recognize these factors as personal and idiosyncratic ones, and you see those who choose to operate as if B is true (or who choose neither, assuming that is pragmatically possible) as being motivated by personal idiosyncratic motives that are no better and no worse than the ones that motivate you.
Put another way, whatever it is that you take to be motivating you to adopt A over B, you don't take that something to be evidence for the truth of A. It is, rather, a practical reason for you to engage in the act of behaving as if A is true, even though you don't think the evidence especially favors A over B. In a real sense, you experience A and B as equally plausible, and you see your own choice of A as nothing more than a story you like to tell yourself. As such, on a theoretic or intellectual level your stance is clearly agnostic (although, on a pragmatic level, you qualify as a kind of pragmatic believer in A).
But now suppose you find yourself in EC2. In this case, in addition to whatever pragmatic and personal reasons might move you towards Worldview A in EC1, you also have the further reason that Worldview A fits with the totality of the evidence available to you in a way that B does not. You have available to you a set of apparently compelling truths that you are striving to account for, and A accounts for them well. B, however, would force you to give up on a subset of the things that seem obviously correct to you. So, in terms of everything that strikes you as evident, A is more defensible than B.
But the very subset of apparent truths you would have to give up were you to accept B is a subset which some people—who otherwise seem like reasonable people to you—do not find intuitively obvious in the way you do. And they seem otherwise reasonable. And this gives you some reason to attach less weight to the “personal” evidence than you do to the shared evidence, and so be less confident than you might otherwise have been about A.
Put simply, looked at purely on its own merits, the personal evidence seems as compelling to you as the shared evidence. But the fact that others do not see the personal evidence in the same way that you do--in addition to being the primary reason why it ends up being put into the "personal" rather than the "shared" category--gives you reason (especially in the face of a general awareness of your own fallibility) to have doubts about the reliability of the personal evidence. But you are also aware that those who don't find the evidence compelling are also fallible--and you have no special reason to think that you are the one who is wrong in this case, rather than them. For all you know, the reason you regard as clearly true what others don't is that you are so situated so as to be able to immediately intuit truths that these others can't intuit from where they are situated.
Put in somewhat more technical terms, you have so far not encountered any "defeaters" for your personal evidence--that is, nothing that gives you clear reason to believe either that what seems right to you is false, or that the mechanism whereby it comes to seem right is sufficiently suspect to place no credence in its fruits. All you have, at this point, is the immediate intuitive sense that something is the case, along with the clear awareness that other seemingly reasonable people lack this sense.
In EC1, your reasons for favoring A over B are ones that do not appear to you as evidence for the truth of A, and in this sense are seen by you as nothing but pragmatic reasons to operate as if A is true. But in EC2, your reasons for favoring A over B have the "look and feel" of evidence, that is, they seem to be truths that speak in favor of the truth of A. And this makes your epistemic situation clearly different. It means, among other things, that when you endorse A, it is because A seems right to you in a way that B does not. You favor A over B on the basis of considerations that present themselves to you as evidence for the truth of A and against the truth of B. In this sense, you are not an agnostic on the theoretical level (although you may be a kind of pragmatic agnostic, insofar as you choose to operate as if either A or B were equally plausible for pragmatic reasons).
But the broader features of EC2 may inspire you to adopt an attitude of fallibilism with respect to your endorsement of A. It might also inspire you to reassess the reasonableness of those you had previously taken to be reasonable, insofar as they do not accept what strikes you as clearly true. But at least in general, fallibilism seems a better "fit" with EC2. If so, then while A just seems right to you in a way that B does not, you also know that you are fallible, and you know that some of the evidence you are using in arriving at A is not regarded as veridical by other people who otherwise seem eminently reasonable. This fact alone does not make the evidence seem less veridical to you, but it does motivate an attitude of due caution, a willingness to investigate, to hear opposing arguments and be open to be moved by them if they do amount to "defeaters" of your presumptive evidence. And it also makes you resistent to condemning those who endorse B.
In effect, you are inclined to say, "This is an issue about which it seems that reasonable people can disagree; but in my judgment, based on the considerations that seem convincing to me, A seems true and B false. That others reach the opposite judgment calls for respect, but it doesn't as such require that I abandon my judgment. Rather, it only requires that I hold to the judgment fallibilistically."
A few final remarks. It seems clearly possible for one person to be in EC1 and another in EC2 with respect to the same body of shared evidence. That is, Amy may confront the shared evidence without any substantive personal evidence to add, and so may see A and B as equally plausible on the evidence--while Ben confronts the shared evidence with a supplement of personal evidence, on the basis of which Ben sees A as clearly more plausible than B. In such a case, Amy might decide for pragmatic reasons to operate in terms of A--in which case we might say that both are pragmatic believers in A but Ben is also a theoretic believer (wherease Amy is a theoretic agnostic). But there are a number of alternative permutations here that need to be kept in mind--permutations which can generate theoretic accord and practical divergence, etc.
I will confess that this is a first run at my thinking on this issue, and so it doubtless needs considerable refinement. Thoughts?
The first distinction I want to make has to do with a pair of contrasting epistemic circumstances that, it seems to me, are often inadequately distinguished. I say this because, as I reflect on what I was doing in Is God a Delusion?, I worry that I was blurring together these contrasting epistemic circumstances myself.
The distinction bears on the relationship between two other contrasting concepts, namely agnosticism and what I like to call fallibilism. These are, if you will, contrasting epistemic attitudes. In roughest terms, to be an agnostic is to withhold belief on a matter, whereas to be a fallibilist is to have a belief but recognize that you could be mistaken, that those who disagree with you could have some or all of the truth, and that it is important to comport yourself accordingly.
What I want to suggest is that these contrasting epistemic attitudes may be correlated with contrasting epistemic circumstances--where agnosticism is (all else being equal) the most fitting response to one while fallibilism (again all else being equal) is the most fitting response to the other. It is the distinction between these underlying epistemic circumstances that I want to try to get at.
The contrasting epistemic circumstances I have in mind are ones that might be faced by reasonable people confronted with a body of evidence. For the sake of sketching out these circumstances, I am going to leave the concepts of “evidence” and “reasonable people” largely unanalyzed. All I will say is that I when I speak about "presumptive evidence" below, I mean to use the term in a broad sense so as to include anything that can be propositionally expressed, where that proposition strikes one as clearly ("evidently") true (in the way that propositions which express what one's senses are immediately delivering strike one as clearly true), and its truth supports the truth of some other proposition(s). But this definition is itself couched in terms that require unpacking, and which might be understood in different ways. In short, I am fully aware that these terms are not uncontroversial, but I am going to sidestep these controversies for the sake of focusing on a different issue, while remaining fully conscious of the fact that in order to adequately address the issues raised here, it is likely that we will eventually need to return to these more basic controversies.
Here, then, are the two epistemic circumstances I want to consider:
Epistemic Circumstance 1 (EC1): You confront a body of presumptive evidence that "reasonable people" (however that is to be understood) generally accept, but you recognize that there are different ways of fitting that evidence into a coherent whole—different "stories" we can tell that fit just as well with the given evidence. In other words, we have certain mutually exclusive holistic ways of seeing the evidence, each of which maps onto the evidence just as well. For simplicity, let us assume there are only two such ways of seeing that fit as well onto the evidence, which we will call Worldviews A and B.
Epistemic Circumstance 2 (EC2): You confront a body of presumptive evidence that reasonable people generally accept, as well as certain further “apparent truths,” that is, things you experience as clearly true/self-evident/obvious/hard to deny/intuitively correct. But some of the people you regard as rational don’t find these apparent truths nearly as apparent as you do, and may instead find other things evident which are hardly evident to you. So, within the total body of “evidence” with which you are confronted, some of it is “shared evidence” whereas some of it is “personal evidence.” Now suppose that, as before, Worldviews A and B both map onto the shared evidence (and are the only worldviews you have so far encountered that do this). But now let us suppose, furthermore, that Worldview A maps well onto the conjunction of the shared evidence and your personal evidence, while B doesn’t (accepting B would force you to abandon things that seem clearly right to you). At the same time, Worldview B maps well onto the conjunction of the shared evidence and what is apparently the personal evidence of reasonable people other than you.
These, in brief, are the two contrasting epistemic circumstances I want to consider. They are not meant to be exhaustive. There may even be a kind of continuum between EC1 and EC2--that is, a range of cases that are a bit like both in one way or another, some more like on and some more like the other. As such, they might be seen as ideal types.
Now if you find yourself in EC1, there is a clear sense according to which, from your standpoint, A and B are equally plausible on the evidence. Put another way, there is no reason, on the evidence, for you to favor A over B. If A and B are the only ways of seeing that you've so far encountered that offer a good fit with the evidence, you may have some reason to endorse the disjunctive proposition, "A or B." But the evidence as such favors neither.
This doesn't mean that you won't have pragmatic or personal reasons for operating as if Worldview A is true and not Worldview B. You might find A more hopeful. Or you might like who you are better when you live as if A is true. Or perhaps you’ve grown up with a community that embraces A, and you continue to have a sense of solidarity with that community. Or perhaps you’ve tried to see the world through the lens of B and it just doesn’t sit right with you because of what you identify as mere quirks of personality. Or perhaps it is a combination of these factor. In any event, you recognize these factors as personal and idiosyncratic ones, and you see those who choose to operate as if B is true (or who choose neither, assuming that is pragmatically possible) as being motivated by personal idiosyncratic motives that are no better and no worse than the ones that motivate you.
Put another way, whatever it is that you take to be motivating you to adopt A over B, you don't take that something to be evidence for the truth of A. It is, rather, a practical reason for you to engage in the act of behaving as if A is true, even though you don't think the evidence especially favors A over B. In a real sense, you experience A and B as equally plausible, and you see your own choice of A as nothing more than a story you like to tell yourself. As such, on a theoretic or intellectual level your stance is clearly agnostic (although, on a pragmatic level, you qualify as a kind of pragmatic believer in A).
But now suppose you find yourself in EC2. In this case, in addition to whatever pragmatic and personal reasons might move you towards Worldview A in EC1, you also have the further reason that Worldview A fits with the totality of the evidence available to you in a way that B does not. You have available to you a set of apparently compelling truths that you are striving to account for, and A accounts for them well. B, however, would force you to give up on a subset of the things that seem obviously correct to you. So, in terms of everything that strikes you as evident, A is more defensible than B.
But the very subset of apparent truths you would have to give up were you to accept B is a subset which some people—who otherwise seem like reasonable people to you—do not find intuitively obvious in the way you do. And they seem otherwise reasonable. And this gives you some reason to attach less weight to the “personal” evidence than you do to the shared evidence, and so be less confident than you might otherwise have been about A.
Put simply, looked at purely on its own merits, the personal evidence seems as compelling to you as the shared evidence. But the fact that others do not see the personal evidence in the same way that you do--in addition to being the primary reason why it ends up being put into the "personal" rather than the "shared" category--gives you reason (especially in the face of a general awareness of your own fallibility) to have doubts about the reliability of the personal evidence. But you are also aware that those who don't find the evidence compelling are also fallible--and you have no special reason to think that you are the one who is wrong in this case, rather than them. For all you know, the reason you regard as clearly true what others don't is that you are so situated so as to be able to immediately intuit truths that these others can't intuit from where they are situated.
Put in somewhat more technical terms, you have so far not encountered any "defeaters" for your personal evidence--that is, nothing that gives you clear reason to believe either that what seems right to you is false, or that the mechanism whereby it comes to seem right is sufficiently suspect to place no credence in its fruits. All you have, at this point, is the immediate intuitive sense that something is the case, along with the clear awareness that other seemingly reasonable people lack this sense.
In EC1, your reasons for favoring A over B are ones that do not appear to you as evidence for the truth of A, and in this sense are seen by you as nothing but pragmatic reasons to operate as if A is true. But in EC2, your reasons for favoring A over B have the "look and feel" of evidence, that is, they seem to be truths that speak in favor of the truth of A. And this makes your epistemic situation clearly different. It means, among other things, that when you endorse A, it is because A seems right to you in a way that B does not. You favor A over B on the basis of considerations that present themselves to you as evidence for the truth of A and against the truth of B. In this sense, you are not an agnostic on the theoretical level (although you may be a kind of pragmatic agnostic, insofar as you choose to operate as if either A or B were equally plausible for pragmatic reasons).
But the broader features of EC2 may inspire you to adopt an attitude of fallibilism with respect to your endorsement of A. It might also inspire you to reassess the reasonableness of those you had previously taken to be reasonable, insofar as they do not accept what strikes you as clearly true. But at least in general, fallibilism seems a better "fit" with EC2. If so, then while A just seems right to you in a way that B does not, you also know that you are fallible, and you know that some of the evidence you are using in arriving at A is not regarded as veridical by other people who otherwise seem eminently reasonable. This fact alone does not make the evidence seem less veridical to you, but it does motivate an attitude of due caution, a willingness to investigate, to hear opposing arguments and be open to be moved by them if they do amount to "defeaters" of your presumptive evidence. And it also makes you resistent to condemning those who endorse B.
In effect, you are inclined to say, "This is an issue about which it seems that reasonable people can disagree; but in my judgment, based on the considerations that seem convincing to me, A seems true and B false. That others reach the opposite judgment calls for respect, but it doesn't as such require that I abandon my judgment. Rather, it only requires that I hold to the judgment fallibilistically."
A few final remarks. It seems clearly possible for one person to be in EC1 and another in EC2 with respect to the same body of shared evidence. That is, Amy may confront the shared evidence without any substantive personal evidence to add, and so may see A and B as equally plausible on the evidence--while Ben confronts the shared evidence with a supplement of personal evidence, on the basis of which Ben sees A as clearly more plausible than B. In such a case, Amy might decide for pragmatic reasons to operate in terms of A--in which case we might say that both are pragmatic believers in A but Ben is also a theoretic believer (wherease Amy is a theoretic agnostic). But there are a number of alternative permutations here that need to be kept in mind--permutations which can generate theoretic accord and practical divergence, etc.
I will confess that this is a first run at my thinking on this issue, and so it doubtless needs considerable refinement. Thoughts?
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Human Decency Across Ideological Divides: The Case of Penn Jillette
Penn Jillette (of the entertaining magic duo "Penn and Teller") wrote a blurb for Dawkins' The God Delusion in which he called it "true like ice, like fire." Beyond this, I've not had any exposure to his thoughts on religion--just a vague knowledge that he's an atheist. But when Robin Parry over at Theological Scribbles posted a video message (below) from Jillette, calling it "refreshing," I was intrigued enough to check it out.
I find Jillette's message moving and thought-provoking--and it touches in various ways on themes that are central to this blog. So I thought I'd repost it here and solicit thoughts/reaction from my readers.
In his blurb for Dawkins' book, Jillette says, "If this book doesn't change the world, we're all screwed." I can't say I agree with that, but I do think that if we can't find ways to understand and appreciate each other across the divisions created by different understandings of the world (and ways of living in it), we are all screwed. It may be for this very reason that I don't hold out much hope for the new atheist books changing the world in a positive way. In this brief video, Penn Jillette models for me--in a way that Dawkins, at least in the pages of The God Delusion, does not--the capacity for the kind of understanding and appreciation that we all need to have.
And he expresses this capacity despite being convinced that he has the truth--and that, by implication, the man who proselytized him is wrong ("I know there's no God," he says quite emphatically at one point in the video). Jillette has convictions--he thinks he knows--on matters about which I am pretty sure there is nothing like knowledge to be had. And yet I don't find in him--at least in this personal moment--the kind of dangerous ideological conviction (with its concomitant in-groups and out-groups) that I too frequently hear coming from Sam Harris at one pole and Pat Robertson or John Piper (who likes to excommunicate by tweet) at the other.
While resisting the allure of certainty about our worldviews--either by being agnostic in one form or another, or by holding "lightly" to one's beliefs in the way that Allen Stairs describes (a lightness that, I think, depends on a consciousness of one's fallibility)--seems to be one way of avoiding dangerous ideological division among people, I wonder if Jillette in this video message is modeling another way. And if so, how should we characterize it?
I find Jillette's message moving and thought-provoking--and it touches in various ways on themes that are central to this blog. So I thought I'd repost it here and solicit thoughts/reaction from my readers.
In his blurb for Dawkins' book, Jillette says, "If this book doesn't change the world, we're all screwed." I can't say I agree with that, but I do think that if we can't find ways to understand and appreciate each other across the divisions created by different understandings of the world (and ways of living in it), we are all screwed. It may be for this very reason that I don't hold out much hope for the new atheist books changing the world in a positive way. In this brief video, Penn Jillette models for me--in a way that Dawkins, at least in the pages of The God Delusion, does not--the capacity for the kind of understanding and appreciation that we all need to have.
And he expresses this capacity despite being convinced that he has the truth--and that, by implication, the man who proselytized him is wrong ("I know there's no God," he says quite emphatically at one point in the video). Jillette has convictions--he thinks he knows--on matters about which I am pretty sure there is nothing like knowledge to be had. And yet I don't find in him--at least in this personal moment--the kind of dangerous ideological conviction (with its concomitant in-groups and out-groups) that I too frequently hear coming from Sam Harris at one pole and Pat Robertson or John Piper (who likes to excommunicate by tweet) at the other.
While resisting the allure of certainty about our worldviews--either by being agnostic in one form or another, or by holding "lightly" to one's beliefs in the way that Allen Stairs describes (a lightness that, I think, depends on a consciousness of one's fallibility)--seems to be one way of avoiding dangerous ideological division among people, I wonder if Jillette in this video message is modeling another way. And if so, how should we characterize it?
Monday, March 21, 2011
On Agnosticism and Faith
I’d like to think a bit about agnosticism, and in so doing pick up on some themes that have been brushed up against in comment threads in earlier posts. Specifically, I want to explore what it means to be an agnostic about God. The term “agnostic” was coined by Thomas Huxley in the 19th Century, but I’m not mainly interested in pinning down what he meant by it. Rather, I want to think about how the term is used today—and I expect it is used in some different ways.
This issue is interesting to me for a number of reasons, not least of them being that my wife is a self-described “genetically Catholic, Episcopalian agnostic” (who happens to attend a Lutheran church).
Etymologically, “agnostic” literally means “without knowledge.” But on that definition, many self-professing theists would qualify as agnostics. As so many of my students put it, “Belief in God is a matter of faith, not knowledge.” If agnosticism is to qualify as an authentic alternative to theism and atheism, what kind of alternative is it, given that no small number of theists confess to lacking knowledge about God?
Here, it may be helpful to zero in on what they do claim to have in relation to God, namely faith. Perhaps the agnostic is one who has neither faith nor knowledge when it comes to God. The difficulty here, of course, is that “faith” is a difficult concept, used in different ways—and often without any clear meaning or usage in mind at all.
(More often than not, when my students profess to believe something “on faith” and I ask them what that means, they stare at me blankly. “Do you mean,” I ask, “that you don’t have any good reasons to believe it, but you willfully believe it anyway, just because your parents and community will approve of you if you do?” They shift uncomfortably. Eventually I can get an interesting conversation going, but it takes awhile—because so many use the term “faith” unreflectively, without any clear sense of what they really mean by it.)
Hence, it seems to me that defining agnosticism in relation to faith merely shifts the problem to a different place. Furthermore, it may be that there are different kinds of agnosticism, and that not every kind of agnosticism involves an absence of faith (or an absence of faith in every sense, since there may be different kinds of faith). As such, it may be better to explore the concepts of agnosticism and faith in tandem.
Since faith and agnosticism both seem in some way related to beliefs about God, it may be helpful to begin with the notion of belief. What does it mean to believe something? Here, I tend to be rather influenced by the pragmatic philosopher William James, who held that that a belief’s meaning is given by the difference it makes for what we do and how we live. If this is correct, then to believe X is, most essentially, to behave in certain ways—to operate in the world as if X is true. To believe in the existence of the force of gravity is to operate as if stepping off a precipice (when standing on Earth) will lead to a nasty fall. Those who believe in gravity therefore step off precipices (without parachutes) only when they are suicidal. Those who want to experience floating but believe in gravity will, perhaps, strap on a parachute.
But notice a few things here. First, someone who believes in gravity but wants to die may engage in the same outward behavior (stepping off a precipice) as someone who (inexplicably) does not believe in gravity. The former steps off expecting to die, while the latter steps off expecting to float. The difference lies not in the outward behavior but in aims and expectations.
One might therefore argue that the essence of believing in the existence of the force of gravity lies not in what one does, but in what outcomes one expects—based, perhaps, on what one does, but also based on what one sees happening, etc. This way of understanding belief enables us to distinguish between those who just “go through the motions” of belief—doing the sorts of things that people who believe in gravity (and want to live) do, but who honestly expect to float when they step off cliffs—and those who “really believe it,” that is, who really expect to suffer a nasty fall if they fail to follow the appropriate behavioral protocols.
But defining belief in terms of expectations is problematic, too. Suppose you believe that Marge is secretly in love with you and would appreciate text messages expressing your ardor for her. Suppose, however, that Marge is married and that you are convinced she takes that bond so seriously that she would not respond in any way to amorous texts from people other than her husband, even if they are welcome. And so you don’t expect any discernible response from Marge when you text your little love notes. If you expect anything, it is that your messages will generate a wholly indiscernible internal response, one that will look the same (from your vantage point) as what you would expect to see if some very different things were true about her (for example, that your messages are not welcome but that she thinks the easiest solution is to ignore them).
In other words, if belief is construed in terms of expectations, it needn’t be in terms of what you would expect to observe. And if a belief makes no difference for what you would expect to observe, we are led to Anthony Flew’s pragmatic question framed in terms of his invisible gardener fable: If the person who “believes” in the invisible gardener expects the world to look exactly the same as it would were there no gardener, how is believing in the gardener any different from not believing? Here, the most plausible answer (suggested by R.M. Hare in his response to Flew) is that it makes a difference in terms of how the believer operates in the world. This seems right to me: There is a difference between the believer and the skeptic, but the difference lies not in expectations as much as it does in behavioral dispositions. In other words, we’re pushed back to the behavioral understanding of belief.
Now the implication of all of this might be that beliefs come in different kinds—some of which have their primary meaning given by what we expect to experience under a range of conditions, some of which have their primary meaning given by what we are inclined to do, at least given certain motives. But the line here cannot, I think, be neatly drawn. In most cases, to believe something amounts to having both certain expectations and certain behavioral dispositions.
But now consider a somewhat different example—the case of a trust fall. The idea in a trust fall is that someone falls backwards—presumably into the waiting arms of someone else. Suppose you are preparing to do a trust fall. You are standing at the edge of a table, your back to the floor, and Joe is standing behind you on the floor ready to catch you. If you fall backwards into his arms, assuming you have no desire to be hurt, can we say that you believed Joe would catch you? (Let us suppose that Joe is big enough and strong enough to catch you easily if he chooses to.)
We’d surely say you were putting your trust in Joe. But this trust might be automatic (you know Joe well and confidently expect that he will catch you), or a fairly easy decision (you don’t know much of anything about Joe, but you have no special reason to think he’ll let you fall and so you decide to operate as if he will catch you), or a rather anguished one. Perhaps you and Joe have a deeply conflicted relationship, Joe has betrayed you in the past, but he has apologized and seems to want to establish a new and better relationship.
In the first case, it seems natural to say that you believe Joe will catch you. You behave as if he is going to catch you, and you fully expect him to do so—you might even say that you know he will (although you may be wrong about this, in which case you’ll say “I thought I knew” once you pick your bruised self off the floor).
In the second case, it still seems appropriate to say you believe it (but in a weaker sense). You have no reason not to expect him to catch you, and the context of the game and your general sense of human nature leads you to adopt a defeasible presumption that people in this situation will catch you barring any reason not to.
But it also seems appropriate to say that you have faith that Joe will catch you. You can hardly count on Joe’s reliability in this case, since you know nothing about Joe. You are simply extending to Joe a general confidence you have towards people (a confidence that others, who’ve been burned too many times, don’t have). You are optimistic about Joe because you are optimistic about people in general—but you recognize, perhaps, that your optimism isn’t universally shared, that your reasons for optimism are largely anecdotal in character, and that others who lack your optimism also have anecdotal reasons for their reluctance. In other words, you expect Joe to catch you, but you recognize that your reasons for having this expectation are contestable. Nevertheless, you act as if he will.
In the third case, when you fall backwards into Joe’s arms, “belief” that Joe will catch you seems too strong for what is going on. Furthermore the act of falling seems better described as a gesture of faith than a case of having faith. Faith in this case isn’t something you have so much as it is something you are doing. It is something you are doing in the face of uncertainty, when the stakes are substantial. You don’t expect Joe to catch you, but neither do you expect him to let you fall. Your expectations on the matter are conflicted or ultimately silent. But you decide to operate as if he will catch you.
To decide to fall backward is to give Joe a chance to prove his trustworthiness. You might think gestures of this kind are the only way you can begin to test the sincerity of his overtures of friendship. When you let yourself fall, you operate as if he will catch you, but at best what you have is the hope that he will do so.
But under those same conditions of uncertainty, possessing the same absence of any clear expectations about what Joe will do, you might deciding not to make that venture of faith. You clearly don’t know what Joe would have done. You don’t claim to know that he wouldn’t have caught you Your inner expectations are the same as in the third scenario—conflicted or silent—but your behavior is different.
Now clearly, the first and second cases are not cases of agnosticism. But what about the third and the fourth? Here, the most helpful thing might be to distinguish between two dimensions or parameters of belief—one having to do with expectations, the other having to do with behavior. We might then say that in terms of expectations, cases three and four are both instances of agnosticism; but in terms of behavior, case three exemplifies a kind of pragmatic faith and case four exemplifies the absence of such faith. (Case four, however, needs to be distinguished from case five, in which you fully expect that were you to fall, Joe wouldn't catch you, and so you refuse to fall so as to save yourself from the expected pain).
Now I don’t want to go too far with the analogy between believing that Joe will catch you and believing that there is a loving God who transcends the material world and is operating to redeem its evils. And I’ve barely touched in this post on the issue of evidence and the justifiability of belief. My interest here is in providing some talking points for defining notions of “agnosticism” and “faith,” and perhaps distinguishing some different species of each. And so, with that in mind, I’ll stop here and ask what others think.
This issue is interesting to me for a number of reasons, not least of them being that my wife is a self-described “genetically Catholic, Episcopalian agnostic” (who happens to attend a Lutheran church).
Etymologically, “agnostic” literally means “without knowledge.” But on that definition, many self-professing theists would qualify as agnostics. As so many of my students put it, “Belief in God is a matter of faith, not knowledge.” If agnosticism is to qualify as an authentic alternative to theism and atheism, what kind of alternative is it, given that no small number of theists confess to lacking knowledge about God?
Here, it may be helpful to zero in on what they do claim to have in relation to God, namely faith. Perhaps the agnostic is one who has neither faith nor knowledge when it comes to God. The difficulty here, of course, is that “faith” is a difficult concept, used in different ways—and often without any clear meaning or usage in mind at all.
(More often than not, when my students profess to believe something “on faith” and I ask them what that means, they stare at me blankly. “Do you mean,” I ask, “that you don’t have any good reasons to believe it, but you willfully believe it anyway, just because your parents and community will approve of you if you do?” They shift uncomfortably. Eventually I can get an interesting conversation going, but it takes awhile—because so many use the term “faith” unreflectively, without any clear sense of what they really mean by it.)
Hence, it seems to me that defining agnosticism in relation to faith merely shifts the problem to a different place. Furthermore, it may be that there are different kinds of agnosticism, and that not every kind of agnosticism involves an absence of faith (or an absence of faith in every sense, since there may be different kinds of faith). As such, it may be better to explore the concepts of agnosticism and faith in tandem.
Since faith and agnosticism both seem in some way related to beliefs about God, it may be helpful to begin with the notion of belief. What does it mean to believe something? Here, I tend to be rather influenced by the pragmatic philosopher William James, who held that that a belief’s meaning is given by the difference it makes for what we do and how we live. If this is correct, then to believe X is, most essentially, to behave in certain ways—to operate in the world as if X is true. To believe in the existence of the force of gravity is to operate as if stepping off a precipice (when standing on Earth) will lead to a nasty fall. Those who believe in gravity therefore step off precipices (without parachutes) only when they are suicidal. Those who want to experience floating but believe in gravity will, perhaps, strap on a parachute.
But notice a few things here. First, someone who believes in gravity but wants to die may engage in the same outward behavior (stepping off a precipice) as someone who (inexplicably) does not believe in gravity. The former steps off expecting to die, while the latter steps off expecting to float. The difference lies not in the outward behavior but in aims and expectations.
One might therefore argue that the essence of believing in the existence of the force of gravity lies not in what one does, but in what outcomes one expects—based, perhaps, on what one does, but also based on what one sees happening, etc. This way of understanding belief enables us to distinguish between those who just “go through the motions” of belief—doing the sorts of things that people who believe in gravity (and want to live) do, but who honestly expect to float when they step off cliffs—and those who “really believe it,” that is, who really expect to suffer a nasty fall if they fail to follow the appropriate behavioral protocols.
But defining belief in terms of expectations is problematic, too. Suppose you believe that Marge is secretly in love with you and would appreciate text messages expressing your ardor for her. Suppose, however, that Marge is married and that you are convinced she takes that bond so seriously that she would not respond in any way to amorous texts from people other than her husband, even if they are welcome. And so you don’t expect any discernible response from Marge when you text your little love notes. If you expect anything, it is that your messages will generate a wholly indiscernible internal response, one that will look the same (from your vantage point) as what you would expect to see if some very different things were true about her (for example, that your messages are not welcome but that she thinks the easiest solution is to ignore them).
In other words, if belief is construed in terms of expectations, it needn’t be in terms of what you would expect to observe. And if a belief makes no difference for what you would expect to observe, we are led to Anthony Flew’s pragmatic question framed in terms of his invisible gardener fable: If the person who “believes” in the invisible gardener expects the world to look exactly the same as it would were there no gardener, how is believing in the gardener any different from not believing? Here, the most plausible answer (suggested by R.M. Hare in his response to Flew) is that it makes a difference in terms of how the believer operates in the world. This seems right to me: There is a difference between the believer and the skeptic, but the difference lies not in expectations as much as it does in behavioral dispositions. In other words, we’re pushed back to the behavioral understanding of belief.
Now the implication of all of this might be that beliefs come in different kinds—some of which have their primary meaning given by what we expect to experience under a range of conditions, some of which have their primary meaning given by what we are inclined to do, at least given certain motives. But the line here cannot, I think, be neatly drawn. In most cases, to believe something amounts to having both certain expectations and certain behavioral dispositions.
But now consider a somewhat different example—the case of a trust fall. The idea in a trust fall is that someone falls backwards—presumably into the waiting arms of someone else. Suppose you are preparing to do a trust fall. You are standing at the edge of a table, your back to the floor, and Joe is standing behind you on the floor ready to catch you. If you fall backwards into his arms, assuming you have no desire to be hurt, can we say that you believed Joe would catch you? (Let us suppose that Joe is big enough and strong enough to catch you easily if he chooses to.)
We’d surely say you were putting your trust in Joe. But this trust might be automatic (you know Joe well and confidently expect that he will catch you), or a fairly easy decision (you don’t know much of anything about Joe, but you have no special reason to think he’ll let you fall and so you decide to operate as if he will catch you), or a rather anguished one. Perhaps you and Joe have a deeply conflicted relationship, Joe has betrayed you in the past, but he has apologized and seems to want to establish a new and better relationship.
In the first case, it seems natural to say that you believe Joe will catch you. You behave as if he is going to catch you, and you fully expect him to do so—you might even say that you know he will (although you may be wrong about this, in which case you’ll say “I thought I knew” once you pick your bruised self off the floor).
In the second case, it still seems appropriate to say you believe it (but in a weaker sense). You have no reason not to expect him to catch you, and the context of the game and your general sense of human nature leads you to adopt a defeasible presumption that people in this situation will catch you barring any reason not to.
But it also seems appropriate to say that you have faith that Joe will catch you. You can hardly count on Joe’s reliability in this case, since you know nothing about Joe. You are simply extending to Joe a general confidence you have towards people (a confidence that others, who’ve been burned too many times, don’t have). You are optimistic about Joe because you are optimistic about people in general—but you recognize, perhaps, that your optimism isn’t universally shared, that your reasons for optimism are largely anecdotal in character, and that others who lack your optimism also have anecdotal reasons for their reluctance. In other words, you expect Joe to catch you, but you recognize that your reasons for having this expectation are contestable. Nevertheless, you act as if he will.
In the third case, when you fall backwards into Joe’s arms, “belief” that Joe will catch you seems too strong for what is going on. Furthermore the act of falling seems better described as a gesture of faith than a case of having faith. Faith in this case isn’t something you have so much as it is something you are doing. It is something you are doing in the face of uncertainty, when the stakes are substantial. You don’t expect Joe to catch you, but neither do you expect him to let you fall. Your expectations on the matter are conflicted or ultimately silent. But you decide to operate as if he will catch you.
To decide to fall backward is to give Joe a chance to prove his trustworthiness. You might think gestures of this kind are the only way you can begin to test the sincerity of his overtures of friendship. When you let yourself fall, you operate as if he will catch you, but at best what you have is the hope that he will do so.
But under those same conditions of uncertainty, possessing the same absence of any clear expectations about what Joe will do, you might deciding not to make that venture of faith. You clearly don’t know what Joe would have done. You don’t claim to know that he wouldn’t have caught you Your inner expectations are the same as in the third scenario—conflicted or silent—but your behavior is different.
Now clearly, the first and second cases are not cases of agnosticism. But what about the third and the fourth? Here, the most helpful thing might be to distinguish between two dimensions or parameters of belief—one having to do with expectations, the other having to do with behavior. We might then say that in terms of expectations, cases three and four are both instances of agnosticism; but in terms of behavior, case three exemplifies a kind of pragmatic faith and case four exemplifies the absence of such faith. (Case four, however, needs to be distinguished from case five, in which you fully expect that were you to fall, Joe wouldn't catch you, and so you refuse to fall so as to save yourself from the expected pain).
Now I don’t want to go too far with the analogy between believing that Joe will catch you and believing that there is a loving God who transcends the material world and is operating to redeem its evils. And I’ve barely touched in this post on the issue of evidence and the justifiability of belief. My interest here is in providing some talking points for defining notions of “agnosticism” and “faith,” and perhaps distinguishing some different species of each. And so, with that in mind, I’ll stop here and ask what others think.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Contemplating New Atheism's Effects
The other morning I read a brief interview with Bernard Beckett, a New Zealand school teacher and young adult novelist, who shifted from being a self-described atheist to being an agnostic after chairing an event featuring Richard Dawkins. He says he was put off by the kind of true-believer mentality of the fans that crowded in to hear Dawkins speak—and he was reminded of the kind of group-think and demand for orthodoxy that had turned him off of church. Here’s how he puts it:
...it felt more like being in church. Suddenly, there were a whole heap of people who seemed to be responding as one. To me, that reproduced some of the things I disliked about the church I was brought up in, because leaps are made from atheism to other beliefs that you are meant to have as well.
One of those beliefs which Beckett disagreed with was the view that religion is evil, a danger to the world. A bit further on in the interview, Beckett invokes (in his own way) Kant’s distinction between reality itself (the noumenal realm, in Kant’s language) and the world as it appears to us (the phenomenal world). Beckett argues that ultimate reality is unknowable—especially if our cognitive faculties are the result of evolution through random mutation and natural selection. His idea (a contemporary adaptation of Kant) is that our brains evolved for survival, not for piercing the phenomenal veil to get at the ultimate nature of reality. Hence, even if science offers us some incredibly useful models for engaging with our environment successfully, there is no good reason to suppose that these models can provide us with the ultimate truth about the nature of reality.
Given this perspective, Beckett found himself put off by the confidence of those gathered to listen to their atheist hero—the confidence that they and Dawkins were right and everyone who disagreed with them wrong. Apparently, Beckett couldn’t identify with that confidence, and so found himself gravitating towards agnosticism.
This got me wondering about the broader effects of the new atheist movement (presuming that a cluster of bestsellers coordinated with online communities and speaking engagements, along with groups of avid followers, qualifies as a movement).
Dawkins expresses his own hope about these effects in his preface to The God Delusion. “If this book works as I intend,” he says, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” He quickly concedes that “dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument,” so that he really can’t expect to convert them. But he goes on to express the hope that there are “people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn’t ‘take,’ or whose native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether.”
In short, Dawkins—arguably the most prominent and influential new atheist leader—sees his aim as a kind of atheist evangelism (although he probably wouldn’t care for that term). But this evangelical fervor was part of what turned Bernard Beckett off, insofar as he was hoping to escape such things when he left religion behind. And I don’t doubt there are plenty of people like Beckett—people who’ve left religion or stayed away from it because so much religion is wedded to this attitude of “we’ve got the truth, those who disagree with us are idiots or victims or villains, and we must spread the truth to all who are able to hear.” Finding this attitude reproduced in the new atheist movement is therefore enough to drive people like Beckett away.
And then, of course, there are people like me. How does new atheism affect us? I wasn’t subjected to any kind of “childhood indoctrination” into religion (my parents were both agnostic preachers’ kids who responded to religion in much the way that Beckett did)—and, if I do say so myself, had I been I a victim of such indoctrination I’d likely be among those whose “native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it” (unless, of course, religious belief isn't as opposed to reasonableness as Dawkins supposes). In my case, theistic religion is something I came to out of a vague agnostic/atheistic youth—as the result of a personal journey that started in a moment of philosophical reflection in the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees library and carried me through several years of flirtation with charismatic Christianity, close to half a year in India fascinated by the diversity of faiths represented there, and then on to an academic career in philosophy.
Of course, my story isn’t typical of religious believers. But there are others like me. And how are we affected by the new atheist movement? It annoys us—sometimes enough to motivate us to write books about it. It annoys us because it entirely ignores us—that is, it argues against religion as if people like us, and religious faith like ours, doesn’t exist. (Not all atheist critics are guilty of this, by the way--but it is pretty characteristic of the new atheist movement.) And then when we defend our faith—when we say that it does exist and that the new atheist arguments don’t account for it—we get accused of “avoiding the new atheist arguments by redefining religion as something no one believes in.” Which, predictably, makes us even more annoyed.
The religious fundamentalists, by and large, are unaffected by the new atheists in much the way that Dawkins predicted—because, as he puts it in The God Delusion, they are protected by “immunological devices” such as the “dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely the work of Satan.”
I don’t doubt that there are some who have been grating under the weight of the kind of religion that the new atheists most directly attack (poised to reject it as my mother rejected her fundamentalist upbringing) for whom a new atheist bestseller or lecture served as the catalyst. But I also suspect that most of these would have rejected religion sooner or later anyway.
All of this leads me to wonder, first, who the real target audience is for the new atheist movement; and second, what is being offered to that target audience.
So who is new atheism’s target audience? It’s not non-religious free thinkers like Beckett, who are bothered by the movement’s group-think mentality. It’s not religious free thinkers like me (I've thought about devoting a post to complaining about the tendency for atheists to reserve for themselves the "free-thinker" label). We find the new atheists to be not only willfully ignoring our brand of religion but also reproducing in atheist clothes the very same in-group/out-group mentality, the very same demands for “correct thinking” and cries of heresy, that we take to be the crud weighing down the gems we find in religious life and thought.
And it'spretty obvious that the target audience is not devoted fundamentalists, who are mostly immune to atheist arguments.
It may be that those poised to shake off religious fundamentalism like a set of chains are among new atheism’s target audience—but if so they are part of a substantially broader group which includes (for example) those who have already rejected their fundamentalist past but harbor an ongoing resentment, and those who have never been fundamentalists but have clashed with them in various ways (over the teaching of evolution in school, or over the separation of church and state, or over homosexuality, etc.).
And what is it that the new atheist movement offers this loose collection of people? Despite Dawkins’ expressed hopes, new atheism is not ultimately about atheist evangelism. The disaffected fundamentalists are most probably heading towards some species of atheism in any event, and the others in the target audience are already there. What the new atheist movement offers them, I think, is precisely what Beckett saw when he chaired a gathering of Dawkins fans—namely, a church...or the atheist equivalent of one.
The new atheism is speaking to those who have rejected organized religion but who still long for its structures, its unity, the sense of belonging and purpose it has to offer. It’s such people who are most likely to be drawn to new atheism’s evangelical mission, its in-group/out-group mentality, and its established visionary leaders. But instead of gathering together every week in a shared building, they gather together online—listening to PZ Myers’ sermons (delivering their amens! and halleluias! in posted comments) or having small group book studies at RichardDawkins.net—and then occasionally attending a big tent revival when Hitchens or Harris or Dawkins comes to town.
And so I conclude that the chief effect of the new atheist movement hasn’t been to substantially increase the number of atheists in the world. Rather, it has been to help build the atheist’s version of an organized religion—somewhat less organized, but complete with its characteristic vices.
And given the evangelical fervor with which this new church on the scene attacks its rivals, I’d be surprised if one of its most telling effects hasn’t been to exacerbate the ideological polarization and entrenchment in the world. If so, we can only hope that more atheists will have a moment like the one Bernard Beckett experienced at the Richard Dawkins event he chaired: looking at the new atheists gathered all around him and thinking, “Good God, this is just like church.”
...it felt more like being in church. Suddenly, there were a whole heap of people who seemed to be responding as one. To me, that reproduced some of the things I disliked about the church I was brought up in, because leaps are made from atheism to other beliefs that you are meant to have as well.
One of those beliefs which Beckett disagreed with was the view that religion is evil, a danger to the world. A bit further on in the interview, Beckett invokes (in his own way) Kant’s distinction between reality itself (the noumenal realm, in Kant’s language) and the world as it appears to us (the phenomenal world). Beckett argues that ultimate reality is unknowable—especially if our cognitive faculties are the result of evolution through random mutation and natural selection. His idea (a contemporary adaptation of Kant) is that our brains evolved for survival, not for piercing the phenomenal veil to get at the ultimate nature of reality. Hence, even if science offers us some incredibly useful models for engaging with our environment successfully, there is no good reason to suppose that these models can provide us with the ultimate truth about the nature of reality.
Given this perspective, Beckett found himself put off by the confidence of those gathered to listen to their atheist hero—the confidence that they and Dawkins were right and everyone who disagreed with them wrong. Apparently, Beckett couldn’t identify with that confidence, and so found himself gravitating towards agnosticism.
This got me wondering about the broader effects of the new atheist movement (presuming that a cluster of bestsellers coordinated with online communities and speaking engagements, along with groups of avid followers, qualifies as a movement).
Dawkins expresses his own hope about these effects in his preface to The God Delusion. “If this book works as I intend,” he says, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” He quickly concedes that “dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument,” so that he really can’t expect to convert them. But he goes on to express the hope that there are “people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn’t ‘take,’ or whose native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether.”
In short, Dawkins—arguably the most prominent and influential new atheist leader—sees his aim as a kind of atheist evangelism (although he probably wouldn’t care for that term). But this evangelical fervor was part of what turned Bernard Beckett off, insofar as he was hoping to escape such things when he left religion behind. And I don’t doubt there are plenty of people like Beckett—people who’ve left religion or stayed away from it because so much religion is wedded to this attitude of “we’ve got the truth, those who disagree with us are idiots or victims or villains, and we must spread the truth to all who are able to hear.” Finding this attitude reproduced in the new atheist movement is therefore enough to drive people like Beckett away.
And then, of course, there are people like me. How does new atheism affect us? I wasn’t subjected to any kind of “childhood indoctrination” into religion (my parents were both agnostic preachers’ kids who responded to religion in much the way that Beckett did)—and, if I do say so myself, had I been I a victim of such indoctrination I’d likely be among those whose “native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it” (unless, of course, religious belief isn't as opposed to reasonableness as Dawkins supposes). In my case, theistic religion is something I came to out of a vague agnostic/atheistic youth—as the result of a personal journey that started in a moment of philosophical reflection in the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees library and carried me through several years of flirtation with charismatic Christianity, close to half a year in India fascinated by the diversity of faiths represented there, and then on to an academic career in philosophy.
Of course, my story isn’t typical of religious believers. But there are others like me. And how are we affected by the new atheist movement? It annoys us—sometimes enough to motivate us to write books about it. It annoys us because it entirely ignores us—that is, it argues against religion as if people like us, and religious faith like ours, doesn’t exist. (Not all atheist critics are guilty of this, by the way--but it is pretty characteristic of the new atheist movement.) And then when we defend our faith—when we say that it does exist and that the new atheist arguments don’t account for it—we get accused of “avoiding the new atheist arguments by redefining religion as something no one believes in.” Which, predictably, makes us even more annoyed.
The religious fundamentalists, by and large, are unaffected by the new atheists in much the way that Dawkins predicted—because, as he puts it in The God Delusion, they are protected by “immunological devices” such as the “dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely the work of Satan.”
I don’t doubt that there are some who have been grating under the weight of the kind of religion that the new atheists most directly attack (poised to reject it as my mother rejected her fundamentalist upbringing) for whom a new atheist bestseller or lecture served as the catalyst. But I also suspect that most of these would have rejected religion sooner or later anyway.
All of this leads me to wonder, first, who the real target audience is for the new atheist movement; and second, what is being offered to that target audience.
So who is new atheism’s target audience? It’s not non-religious free thinkers like Beckett, who are bothered by the movement’s group-think mentality. It’s not religious free thinkers like me (I've thought about devoting a post to complaining about the tendency for atheists to reserve for themselves the "free-thinker" label). We find the new atheists to be not only willfully ignoring our brand of religion but also reproducing in atheist clothes the very same in-group/out-group mentality, the very same demands for “correct thinking” and cries of heresy, that we take to be the crud weighing down the gems we find in religious life and thought.
And it'spretty obvious that the target audience is not devoted fundamentalists, who are mostly immune to atheist arguments.
It may be that those poised to shake off religious fundamentalism like a set of chains are among new atheism’s target audience—but if so they are part of a substantially broader group which includes (for example) those who have already rejected their fundamentalist past but harbor an ongoing resentment, and those who have never been fundamentalists but have clashed with them in various ways (over the teaching of evolution in school, or over the separation of church and state, or over homosexuality, etc.).
And what is it that the new atheist movement offers this loose collection of people? Despite Dawkins’ expressed hopes, new atheism is not ultimately about atheist evangelism. The disaffected fundamentalists are most probably heading towards some species of atheism in any event, and the others in the target audience are already there. What the new atheist movement offers them, I think, is precisely what Beckett saw when he chaired a gathering of Dawkins fans—namely, a church...or the atheist equivalent of one.
The new atheism is speaking to those who have rejected organized religion but who still long for its structures, its unity, the sense of belonging and purpose it has to offer. It’s such people who are most likely to be drawn to new atheism’s evangelical mission, its in-group/out-group mentality, and its established visionary leaders. But instead of gathering together every week in a shared building, they gather together online—listening to PZ Myers’ sermons (delivering their amens! and halleluias! in posted comments) or having small group book studies at RichardDawkins.net—and then occasionally attending a big tent revival when Hitchens or Harris or Dawkins comes to town.
And so I conclude that the chief effect of the new atheist movement hasn’t been to substantially increase the number of atheists in the world. Rather, it has been to help build the atheist’s version of an organized religion—somewhat less organized, but complete with its characteristic vices.
And given the evangelical fervor with which this new church on the scene attacks its rivals, I’d be surprised if one of its most telling effects hasn’t been to exacerbate the ideological polarization and entrenchment in the world. If so, we can only hope that more atheists will have a moment like the one Bernard Beckett experienced at the Richard Dawkins event he chaired: looking at the new atheists gathered all around him and thinking, “Good God, this is just like church.”
Friday, March 12, 2010
Take Two: Ariel Sightings and Atheist Faith
Reposted here is one of my earliest blog posts, from back in October 2008. It's worth revisiting for the "Ariel Sighting" alone, I think. Enjoy!
A few days ago, as my family was getting loaded into the car for a thrilling afternoon of shopping, we all noticed a bird dropping on the rear driver’s side window—a mostly white SPLAT with, of course, the requisite dribbles (now dry).
Actually, I should say that my wife and I noticed it, as did our five-year-old son. My daughter, who is two, didn’t notice it until a little while later, as we were driving away from a visit to Goody’s Department Store.We were pulling out of our parking space when my daughter shouted out, “Ariel!”
I glanced around and saw no obvious images of the Little Mermaid, but my daughter is good at spotting them even when I don’t. A few months ago, at the airport, her Ariel radar proved to be especially keen, and whenever she cried out “Ariel!” or “Mermaid!” I would eventually (after looking around for a few minutes), find some tiny Little Mermaid bookmark in a shop window or an Ariel backpack disappearing around a corner (attached to the back of a flouncy five-year-old with pigtails).
But this time I could see nothing of the sort. “Where?” I asked.
She pointed insistently out her brother’s window. I looked out across the parking lot, in the direction she had indicated, but saw nothing…until I abruptly realized she was pointing at the window.
To be precise, she was pointing at the bird poop. And as I looked at it, the splat of excrement took on a new meaning. I could see Ariel rising in the water, her hair streaming behind her, her fish tail lost in a roiling swirl, clearly about to be transformed into legs. The poop bore a remarkable resemblance to the scene from Disney’s The Little Mermaid in which Ariel is rising to the surface of the ocean just after visiting with the sea witch, as her wish for human legs is in the process of coming true.
And I thought to myself: “Too bad it doesn’t look like Our Lady of Guadalupe. Then I could remove the window, laminate it, and sell it on e-Bay for $28,000.”
Instead, when we stopped to fill gas, I went after the Ariel image with the blue window washing liquid and squeegee courteously supplied by the gas station. In moments, Ariel was no more.
The lesson, of course, is this: bird poop is always forming patterns. Most of the time these patterns don’t match any to which we’ve attached special significance. Sometimes they match ones that are deeply important only to two-year-olds. And, every once in awhile, they’re going to match images that someone, somewhere, invests with religious meaning. The same is true, of course, of patterns in toast and chocolate drippings.
And so, when it just so happens that an image imprinted in toast looks like the Blessed Virgin, it really doesn’t make any more sense to view this as a sign from God than it does to view Ariel-in-bird-poop as a sign from Triton the Sea King.
But many religious people are hungry for signs of this sort—tangible images which we can see or touch or (God forbid) taste. They long for a world in which God shows up not just as a quiet presence in a moment of meditative prayer, but in more straightforwardly empirical ways.
Of course, there is a long theological tradition which claims that God does show up in the empirical world all the time because the very existence of the empirical world in all its wonder and mystery is a constant manifestation of the divine. Such a theological view has no need for Virgin Mary sightings, because the entire created world in every aspect is a constant testament to the glory of God. (I should note that this tradition of thought, although it needn't exclude talk of miracles, is very different from the tradition of religious thought which is fixated on miraculous suspensions of natural laws).
But this idea that the empirical world is an ongoing manifestation of the divine is a WAY of seeing the world—and there are other ways to see it, too. A religious worldview offers one set of glasses through which to interpret and understand the meaning of our ordinary experience. But there are non-religious worldviews that do this, too. So long as these worldviews do not call upon us to reject or deny empirical facts or the best understandings of the patterns by which the material world works (in the way that, say, Young Earth Creationists do), there is nothing in the empirical evidence that will force us to prefer one such worldview to another. There may be more broadly philosophical reasons to favor one general worldview over another, but the empirical data by itself is “polysemitic”—that is, able to be invested with alternative fundamental meanings.
And this means that the embrace of a broadly religious worldview will always be a matter of choice and hope, not a matter of certainty. But many are uncomfortable with living in hope. For a variety of reasons they long for a certainty that is impossible to have, at least in this world we live in.
We see this hunger for certainty not just among the religious, but also among many atheists, who insist that their naturalistic worldview—according to which the world we encounter through our senses and through scientific investigation constitutes all that there is—is an incontrovertible truth established by the empirical evidence. But it should be plain that the question, “Is there more to reality than meets the eye?”, will not be answered by pointing out that I cannot see more to reality than meets my eye. Empirical evidence cannot settle the question of whether there are orders of reality beyond the empirical one.
But the hunger for certainty leads many to look for empirical evidence that confirms in some way their worldview. And this is why so many cling to Virgin Mary sightings. They want something in the empirical world that settles the question of what, if anything, lies beyond the world. The problem, of course, is that nothing will really do this trick. Even if the heavens parted tomorrow and a booming voice declared to the entire planet, “I AM,” it would still be possible to be an atheist. After all, the manifestation might be the work of space aliens (or the result of a freakishly rare confluence of natural events that produced a sonic boom which, by virtue of our tendency to discern anthropomorphic patterns in natural events, we interpreted as the words “I AM”).
In short, to look for proof that your way of seeing the world is the right one by pointing to images of the Blessed Virgin in a grilled cheese sandwich is just shifting the problem of interpretation down one level. The image in the grilled cheese is itself polysemitic, and to treat that image as the deliberate product of a transcendent God is to offer one possible interpretation among many.
In the words of the theologian John Hick, “the true character of the universe does not force itself upon us, and we are left with an important element of freedom and responsibility in response to it…I would suggest that this element of uncompelled interpretation in our experience of life is to be identified with faith in the most fundamental sense of that word.”
If there is a God, he hasn’t created a universe in which His presence is unambuously attested to, perhaps because such an uncompromising testament to His presence would stifle our development as autonomous selves. And if there is no God, then nothing in the universe cares enough about us to make the fundamental nature of reality manifest to us. And so we are left with the “element of uncompelled interpretation” that Hick identifies with faith.
In other words, even the atheist has faith when we get to the most basic level of interpretation. I would argue that even agnostics have faith in this sense, insofar as some kind of implicit worldview is needed in order to live one’s life in any kind of coherent way. At least on an implicit or practical level, we make a decision about what the world is like at its root. And it’s just that, inescapably that: a decision. It's a decision that ought to pay attention to the facts. That is, we should make sure as best we can that our interpretation fits with the facts.
But I am sceptical of anyone who claims that only one worldview, or one kind of worldview, will offer such a fit.
A few days ago, as my family was getting loaded into the car for a thrilling afternoon of shopping, we all noticed a bird dropping on the rear driver’s side window—a mostly white SPLAT with, of course, the requisite dribbles (now dry).
Actually, I should say that my wife and I noticed it, as did our five-year-old son. My daughter, who is two, didn’t notice it until a little while later, as we were driving away from a visit to Goody’s Department Store.We were pulling out of our parking space when my daughter shouted out, “Ariel!”
I glanced around and saw no obvious images of the Little Mermaid, but my daughter is good at spotting them even when I don’t. A few months ago, at the airport, her Ariel radar proved to be especially keen, and whenever she cried out “Ariel!” or “Mermaid!” I would eventually (after looking around for a few minutes), find some tiny Little Mermaid bookmark in a shop window or an Ariel backpack disappearing around a corner (attached to the back of a flouncy five-year-old with pigtails).
But this time I could see nothing of the sort. “Where?” I asked.
She pointed insistently out her brother’s window. I looked out across the parking lot, in the direction she had indicated, but saw nothing…until I abruptly realized she was pointing at the window.
To be precise, she was pointing at the bird poop. And as I looked at it, the splat of excrement took on a new meaning. I could see Ariel rising in the water, her hair streaming behind her, her fish tail lost in a roiling swirl, clearly about to be transformed into legs. The poop bore a remarkable resemblance to the scene from Disney’s The Little Mermaid in which Ariel is rising to the surface of the ocean just after visiting with the sea witch, as her wish for human legs is in the process of coming true.
And I thought to myself: “Too bad it doesn’t look like Our Lady of Guadalupe. Then I could remove the window, laminate it, and sell it on e-Bay for $28,000.”
Instead, when we stopped to fill gas, I went after the Ariel image with the blue window washing liquid and squeegee courteously supplied by the gas station. In moments, Ariel was no more.
The lesson, of course, is this: bird poop is always forming patterns. Most of the time these patterns don’t match any to which we’ve attached special significance. Sometimes they match ones that are deeply important only to two-year-olds. And, every once in awhile, they’re going to match images that someone, somewhere, invests with religious meaning. The same is true, of course, of patterns in toast and chocolate drippings.
And so, when it just so happens that an image imprinted in toast looks like the Blessed Virgin, it really doesn’t make any more sense to view this as a sign from God than it does to view Ariel-in-bird-poop as a sign from Triton the Sea King.
But many religious people are hungry for signs of this sort—tangible images which we can see or touch or (God forbid) taste. They long for a world in which God shows up not just as a quiet presence in a moment of meditative prayer, but in more straightforwardly empirical ways.
Of course, there is a long theological tradition which claims that God does show up in the empirical world all the time because the very existence of the empirical world in all its wonder and mystery is a constant manifestation of the divine. Such a theological view has no need for Virgin Mary sightings, because the entire created world in every aspect is a constant testament to the glory of God. (I should note that this tradition of thought, although it needn't exclude talk of miracles, is very different from the tradition of religious thought which is fixated on miraculous suspensions of natural laws).
But this idea that the empirical world is an ongoing manifestation of the divine is a WAY of seeing the world—and there are other ways to see it, too. A religious worldview offers one set of glasses through which to interpret and understand the meaning of our ordinary experience. But there are non-religious worldviews that do this, too. So long as these worldviews do not call upon us to reject or deny empirical facts or the best understandings of the patterns by which the material world works (in the way that, say, Young Earth Creationists do), there is nothing in the empirical evidence that will force us to prefer one such worldview to another. There may be more broadly philosophical reasons to favor one general worldview over another, but the empirical data by itself is “polysemitic”—that is, able to be invested with alternative fundamental meanings.
And this means that the embrace of a broadly religious worldview will always be a matter of choice and hope, not a matter of certainty. But many are uncomfortable with living in hope. For a variety of reasons they long for a certainty that is impossible to have, at least in this world we live in.
We see this hunger for certainty not just among the religious, but also among many atheists, who insist that their naturalistic worldview—according to which the world we encounter through our senses and through scientific investigation constitutes all that there is—is an incontrovertible truth established by the empirical evidence. But it should be plain that the question, “Is there more to reality than meets the eye?”, will not be answered by pointing out that I cannot see more to reality than meets my eye. Empirical evidence cannot settle the question of whether there are orders of reality beyond the empirical one.
But the hunger for certainty leads many to look for empirical evidence that confirms in some way their worldview. And this is why so many cling to Virgin Mary sightings. They want something in the empirical world that settles the question of what, if anything, lies beyond the world. The problem, of course, is that nothing will really do this trick. Even if the heavens parted tomorrow and a booming voice declared to the entire planet, “I AM,” it would still be possible to be an atheist. After all, the manifestation might be the work of space aliens (or the result of a freakishly rare confluence of natural events that produced a sonic boom which, by virtue of our tendency to discern anthropomorphic patterns in natural events, we interpreted as the words “I AM”).
In short, to look for proof that your way of seeing the world is the right one by pointing to images of the Blessed Virgin in a grilled cheese sandwich is just shifting the problem of interpretation down one level. The image in the grilled cheese is itself polysemitic, and to treat that image as the deliberate product of a transcendent God is to offer one possible interpretation among many.
In the words of the theologian John Hick, “the true character of the universe does not force itself upon us, and we are left with an important element of freedom and responsibility in response to it…I would suggest that this element of uncompelled interpretation in our experience of life is to be identified with faith in the most fundamental sense of that word.”
If there is a God, he hasn’t created a universe in which His presence is unambuously attested to, perhaps because such an uncompromising testament to His presence would stifle our development as autonomous selves. And if there is no God, then nothing in the universe cares enough about us to make the fundamental nature of reality manifest to us. And so we are left with the “element of uncompelled interpretation” that Hick identifies with faith.
In other words, even the atheist has faith when we get to the most basic level of interpretation. I would argue that even agnostics have faith in this sense, insofar as some kind of implicit worldview is needed in order to live one’s life in any kind of coherent way. At least on an implicit or practical level, we make a decision about what the world is like at its root. And it’s just that, inescapably that: a decision. It's a decision that ought to pay attention to the facts. That is, we should make sure as best we can that our interpretation fits with the facts.
But I am sceptical of anyone who claims that only one worldview, or one kind of worldview, will offer such a fit.
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