In my last post I introduced the idea that storytelling is an inescapable and important element of our nature, if not a definitive one. We are in the business of piecing together elements of human experience into a narrative that fits them together. These stories are important for our lives, and they serve a wide range of functions. In my last post I ended with a question: What do stories have to do with belief?
Sometimes what we try to piece together is a set of facts or observations, and our aim is to understand what is going on by coming up with the narrative that does the best job of coherently integrating these facts or observations. The more facts or observations that are accounted for coherently by this "story," and the fewer anomolies are left unexplained, the less likely it seems that a radically different story we haven't thought of could work as well. Sometimes, of course, there is more than one story that works as well, in which case we keep looking for something that will decide the case--some new observation or bit of evidence that fits better with the one story rather than the other.
In some arenas of inquiry it seems possible to decide among rival stories in a deliberate way, because the stories not only fits the facts on offer but enable us to make predictions: We imagine "what should happen next" in the story--and what should happen next is actually something that we could, in principle, observe. If observation supports prediction, we become increasingly convinced that the story is in fact true. What may have started out as conjecture moves progressively closer to certainty. Here, we say, is a true story.
This, I think, is what is going on with scientific or quasi-scientific explanations--and while we're not in the habit of calling such explanations stories, it seems to me that the same creative mechanisms that function in all story-telling are inexcapably implicated in scientific work. In such cases there is no question about whether we believe the stories we tell. Often, we claim to know. At the very least, we claim to have good reasons to believe that they are true.
Fictional stories, by contrast, we know to be false. We don't believe the story; but at the same time, one test of the quality of a fictional story is its believability. Even a far-flung fantasy novel, with magic and monsters, has to pass a test of believability. The magic has to follow rules that, in some way, make sense. The laws of logic must be respected even if the laws of nature are imagined to be different. More significantly, the (human or human-like) characters have to behave and think and respond in ways that ring true to what human beings are like. Good fiction, even if it is known to be false in the details, has to be "true" at some more general level on pain of failing to connect with readers.
Between these extremes is a species of storytelling sometimes called speculation. You hear that a couple from your old neighborhood is getting divorced. You remember several things you witnessed concerning their interpersonal dynamics, and you know a few facts about their recent history. And you say, "Here's what I think might have happened between them." Your speculation might not be true--but you have some reasons to think it is. At the very least you don't know that it's false in the way that you know a fictional story is false. And if the story resonates with you strongly enough there's a good chance you'll believe it. Believe it, but not claim to know it.
Then again, you might resist believing it. Perhaps you have a history of getting things wrong in these kinds of cases. Or there's someone else you know whose speculations on these sorts of matters--even when they know fewer relevant facts than you do--more often turn out correct (when it's been possible to find out "the true story" later on). This person is "intuitive." And this person doesn't agree with your speculation. Or maybe you're just are dispositionally resistant to believing "mere" speculation unless you have to.
Of course, sometimes you do "have to," in the sense that you have to make a decision about how to act, and all you have to go on is speculation. So you do the best speculating you know how to do, given the pieces of the story that are available to you. And you operate as if the speculative story you've come up with is true, and you hope for the best.
And sometimes, even if you don't "have to" believe it (in the sense of needing to make a decision), you have an instinct. You're speculation feels right. Perhaps you have a history of getting these sorts of stories right, at least on the general level. You're the one who's "intuitive." You might resist acting as if it's right if you don't have to, but in a different sense, you believe. You don't know, of course, and you don't claim to know. But in the privacy of your heart you believe.
But all cases of speculation, regardless of whether the speculative stories are believed or not, differ from fiction in important ways. One has to do with the purpose. Speculation is an attempt to offer an account of what is going on. One isn't just making stuff up in a way that fits together. One is trying to fit facts or events or experiences together. A second difference does have to do with belief: At the very least, when you speculate, you don't disbelieve. As soon as you disbelieve the story, the story is no longer your speculation.
These three--rigorously vetted explanation, speculation, and fiction--are really points along a continuum. There's fictionalized speculation (a hostorical novel about real people that tries to be faithful to the known facts but involves lots of mere invention). And before an explanation becomes well-vetted, it starts out as speculation and moves up the continuum. And how our stories relate to belief may change dependning on where on this continuum they fall.
Showing posts with label pragmatic belief. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pragmatic belief. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
From the Archives: Evidentialism and Theistic Belief
Because I start talking about evidentialism in my philosophy of religion class today, I wanted to reprise the following post which I composed a year ago, and which stimulated quite a lot of discussion at the time. Also, I think it has bearing on an issue I want to blog about in the near future, having to do with the fundamentalist tendency to treat the Bible as "evidentially basic" in the way that most of us treat our senses as evidentially basic--and why I think that the most radical cases of "deconversion" followed by "evangelical" atheism often begin from such a fundamentalist starting point. And so, without further ado, here it is again: "Evidentialism and Theistic Belief":
One of the most important grounds for challenging religious belief, especially theism, has involved invoking “evidentialism,” that is, the doctrine that one ought never to believe any claim, C, on insufficient evidence. Taken together with the premise that there isn’t sufficient evidence in support of the claim that God exists (a premise denied by not a few theists—but that’s another matter), evidentialism entails that belief in God is illegitimate.
Probably the clearest and most uncompromising articulation of this doctrine was offered by William Kingdon Clifford in the 19th Century. In his essay “The Ethics of Belief,” Clifford argued that all of our beliefs have the potential to affect what we do in ways that, should our beliefs prove false, can be very harmful. As such, belief is not a private affair but a public one, and we have a solemn responsibility to extend belief only to “truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning.” Clifford thus concludes that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
Formulated in such strident and sweeping terms, evidentialism does not appear to be a tenable doctrine. Among other things it would mean that it’s wrong for children to take anything on trust from teachers or parents—and this seems a recipe for the impossibility of children ever arriving at a state in which they could actually engage in the sort of investigative activity that Clifford demands.
Furthermore, this kind of sweeping evidentialism falls prey to the following problem: In order to operate in accord with the evidentialist principle, we need to know what counts as evidence. But how do we arrive at the correct belief concerning what counts as evidence? What evidence do we use?
This is a variant on the problem of the criterion—basically, the problem of ascertaining in a non-circular way what criteria we should use for deciding what to believe. The problem can be summarized as follows: for any proposed criteria for deciding what to believe, one might ask, “Why should I believe that these criteria are the ones I should use?” If we answer this question by invoking the criteria in question, then we have begged the question. If we answer this question by appeal to different criteria, we can then ask the same question about them.
The difficulty that this poses for evidentialism can be emphasized with an example. Assume that “C” is the following proposition: “My senses are reliable.” A sweeping evidentialism would insist that we not believe this on insufficient evidence. But what is to count as sufficient evidence? How could we test the reliability of our senses without appeal to the very senses we are not supposed to trust until their reliability has been established?
This, of course, is the path to a radical skepticism which precludes having any beliefs at all. But, of course, it is impossible to actually live a human life—to make choices, to act on those choices, to form and maintain relationships, to work, etc.,—without having any beliefs. While Clifford rightly notes that our beliefs imply certain actions, it is equally true that our actions presuppose beliefs. Whenever we act, we act as if something is the case. Radical skepticism is therefore pragmatically impossible for anyone who actually gets on with the business of living (as Hume famously noted).
And in this business of living, isn’t it the case that we trust our senses unless and until we have good reason not to—unless they generate inconsistencies of various sorts? More broadly, doesn’t the business of living routinely require that we trust a range of propositions unless and until there is evidence that calls that trust into question? To put this point a bit more formally, the business of living requires that, with respect to some propositions, our “default” position should be belief (that is, we should operate as if the proposition is true unless we are confronted with reasons not to). Evidentialism, by contrast, insists that the default position for every claim C is disbelief or agnosticism. Put bluntly, then, one cannot be a faithful evidentialist of this sweeping sort and still lead a human life.
But a defender of evidentialism could seek to salvage the doctrine by making some distinctions. For example, there is a difference between what we might call “actual belief”—where you are convinced that something is the case, that you've got the truth—and “presumptive belief”—where you are merely operating as if something is the case. The criminal justice system in the US (and elsewhere) operates on the presumption of innocence. That is, if there is insufficient evidence to establishing guilt, the accused is treated as innocent. But everyone has heard stories of juries that quietly harbor the view that the accused is “guilty as hell” while delivering an acquittal. The jurors don’t “actually” believe that the accused is innocent in such cases, but they operate in accord with the presumption of innocence (at least in their role as jurors--they might in their private lives take steps to make sure that their children are kept away from the accused).
A modified evidentialist could hold that what living a human life requires is not that we actually believe that our senses are reliable, but that we presumptively do so. We operate as if our senses are reliable unless and until we encounter sufficient reason not to. And so the modified evidentialist could say that one ought never to actually believe any claim C on insufficient evidence, but that one should be free to presumptively believe a range of things, within certain limits, so long as there is no evidence against these things.
Several issues arise, however, in relation to this modified principle. First, there is the question of the limits within which presumptive belief (if not actual belief) is taken to be legitimate. Here there will be room, I think, for considerable dispute—especially in connections with “meaning bestowing beliefs about the transcendent” (religious beliefs). The evidentialist challenge to theism, then, will have to take a position in this disputed territory, making a case for the view that the class of propositions for which presumptive belief is appropriate excludes belief in God. But if this is what the evidentialist wants to argue, there are a number of important opposing arguments. Since I will be covering a number of these arguments later in my philosophy of religion class (when discussion pragmatic arguments for religious belief), I won't take up this version of evidentialism in detail at this time.
But there is another way of construing the evidentialist challenge to theism that I do want to explore a bit further here. Perhaps the evidentialist challenge to theism is merely targeting “actual” belief, while accepting the legitimacy of presumptive belief. In this case different concerns arise. First of all, as a challenge to theism it is radically attenuated insofar as it leaves space for the epistemic legitimacy of people organizing their lives around a presumptive belief in God.
But second, there is the question of the extent to which our actual beliefs are in our control. When it comes to the reliability of my senses, for example, I don’t just presumptively believe their deliverances. I really believe them. Of course, I could say something along the following lines: “Although living a human life requires that I presumptively believe the deliverances of my senses, I affirm that I have no compelling reason to actually believe them.” But saying this doesn’t make it the case that my belief here is merely presumptive. It remains an actual belief. Converting it into a merely presumptive belief seems beyond my power.
What is not beyond my power is lifting up, alongside this actual belief in the reliability of my senses, the judgment that such actual belief exceeds what is warranted by the evidence and as well as what is demanded by the pragmatic requirements of living (which only requires presumptive belief). Pairing this judgment with my actual belief might produce a kind of "functional equivalent" of mere presumptive belief.
But in that case, we would still need to ask, “On what basis should I believe this judgment about my actual belief in the reliability of my senses?” Is this belief about my belief itself an actual one or is it a presumptive one? And if it is a presumptive one, does that mean we are to act as if our belief is merely presumptive even though it is actual? This will be possible only if there is a discernible pragmatic difference between actually believing C and presumptively believing C. In other words, the behavior you exhibit when you behave as if C is true is different from the behavior you exhibit when by actually believe C is true. But in that case, in what sense are you behaving as if C is true when you presumptively believe C?
Assuming these difficulties can be overcome (and I think they can), acknowledging that what we actually believe is often out of our control forces evidentialists to truncate their evidentialist principle even further. They can no longer say that, on insufficient evidence, presumptive belief can be okay but actual belief never is. Rather, they'll have to say that actual belief can be okay too, so long as we pair that belief with a clear recognition of our fallibility with respect to it—a recognition which serves to generate the functional equivalent of mere presumptive belief.
But now, an evidentialist challenge to theism that makes room for presumptive belief will have to make room for actual belief as well—so long as that belief is paired with fallibilism. In other words, if we follow this path, we no longer have an evidentialist opposition to theism at all. What we have is a challenge to fanaticism.
I suspect very many theists would be very happy to accept that conclusion--because it isn't really a case against theism at all, but rather a case for favoring moderate forms of theism over fanatical ones. And what this shows, I think, is that in order really to have an evidentialist case against theism, the evidentialist would need to argue that presumptive belief in God is illegitimate—in other words, that it is wrong to live as if there is a God.
I think an argument of this sort can be made with respect to what I call (in my book, following Plutarch) “the god of superstition.” And there may be other specific forms of theism for which a case can be made that presumptive belief is illegitimate. But I think it would be very difficult indeed to make this case with respect to every species of theism--for example, the species which conceives of God as that whose existence would (borrowing language from my book) fulfill "the ethico-religious hope" (the hope that, in some fundamental way, reality is on the side of the good).
One of the most important grounds for challenging religious belief, especially theism, has involved invoking “evidentialism,” that is, the doctrine that one ought never to believe any claim, C, on insufficient evidence. Taken together with the premise that there isn’t sufficient evidence in support of the claim that God exists (a premise denied by not a few theists—but that’s another matter), evidentialism entails that belief in God is illegitimate.
Probably the clearest and most uncompromising articulation of this doctrine was offered by William Kingdon Clifford in the 19th Century. In his essay “The Ethics of Belief,” Clifford argued that all of our beliefs have the potential to affect what we do in ways that, should our beliefs prove false, can be very harmful. As such, belief is not a private affair but a public one, and we have a solemn responsibility to extend belief only to “truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning.” Clifford thus concludes that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
Formulated in such strident and sweeping terms, evidentialism does not appear to be a tenable doctrine. Among other things it would mean that it’s wrong for children to take anything on trust from teachers or parents—and this seems a recipe for the impossibility of children ever arriving at a state in which they could actually engage in the sort of investigative activity that Clifford demands.
Furthermore, this kind of sweeping evidentialism falls prey to the following problem: In order to operate in accord with the evidentialist principle, we need to know what counts as evidence. But how do we arrive at the correct belief concerning what counts as evidence? What evidence do we use?
This is a variant on the problem of the criterion—basically, the problem of ascertaining in a non-circular way what criteria we should use for deciding what to believe. The problem can be summarized as follows: for any proposed criteria for deciding what to believe, one might ask, “Why should I believe that these criteria are the ones I should use?” If we answer this question by invoking the criteria in question, then we have begged the question. If we answer this question by appeal to different criteria, we can then ask the same question about them.
The difficulty that this poses for evidentialism can be emphasized with an example. Assume that “C” is the following proposition: “My senses are reliable.” A sweeping evidentialism would insist that we not believe this on insufficient evidence. But what is to count as sufficient evidence? How could we test the reliability of our senses without appeal to the very senses we are not supposed to trust until their reliability has been established?
This, of course, is the path to a radical skepticism which precludes having any beliefs at all. But, of course, it is impossible to actually live a human life—to make choices, to act on those choices, to form and maintain relationships, to work, etc.,—without having any beliefs. While Clifford rightly notes that our beliefs imply certain actions, it is equally true that our actions presuppose beliefs. Whenever we act, we act as if something is the case. Radical skepticism is therefore pragmatically impossible for anyone who actually gets on with the business of living (as Hume famously noted).
And in this business of living, isn’t it the case that we trust our senses unless and until we have good reason not to—unless they generate inconsistencies of various sorts? More broadly, doesn’t the business of living routinely require that we trust a range of propositions unless and until there is evidence that calls that trust into question? To put this point a bit more formally, the business of living requires that, with respect to some propositions, our “default” position should be belief (that is, we should operate as if the proposition is true unless we are confronted with reasons not to). Evidentialism, by contrast, insists that the default position for every claim C is disbelief or agnosticism. Put bluntly, then, one cannot be a faithful evidentialist of this sweeping sort and still lead a human life.
But a defender of evidentialism could seek to salvage the doctrine by making some distinctions. For example, there is a difference between what we might call “actual belief”—where you are convinced that something is the case, that you've got the truth—and “presumptive belief”—where you are merely operating as if something is the case. The criminal justice system in the US (and elsewhere) operates on the presumption of innocence. That is, if there is insufficient evidence to establishing guilt, the accused is treated as innocent. But everyone has heard stories of juries that quietly harbor the view that the accused is “guilty as hell” while delivering an acquittal. The jurors don’t “actually” believe that the accused is innocent in such cases, but they operate in accord with the presumption of innocence (at least in their role as jurors--they might in their private lives take steps to make sure that their children are kept away from the accused).
A modified evidentialist could hold that what living a human life requires is not that we actually believe that our senses are reliable, but that we presumptively do so. We operate as if our senses are reliable unless and until we encounter sufficient reason not to. And so the modified evidentialist could say that one ought never to actually believe any claim C on insufficient evidence, but that one should be free to presumptively believe a range of things, within certain limits, so long as there is no evidence against these things.
Several issues arise, however, in relation to this modified principle. First, there is the question of the limits within which presumptive belief (if not actual belief) is taken to be legitimate. Here there will be room, I think, for considerable dispute—especially in connections with “meaning bestowing beliefs about the transcendent” (religious beliefs). The evidentialist challenge to theism, then, will have to take a position in this disputed territory, making a case for the view that the class of propositions for which presumptive belief is appropriate excludes belief in God. But if this is what the evidentialist wants to argue, there are a number of important opposing arguments. Since I will be covering a number of these arguments later in my philosophy of religion class (when discussion pragmatic arguments for religious belief), I won't take up this version of evidentialism in detail at this time.
But there is another way of construing the evidentialist challenge to theism that I do want to explore a bit further here. Perhaps the evidentialist challenge to theism is merely targeting “actual” belief, while accepting the legitimacy of presumptive belief. In this case different concerns arise. First of all, as a challenge to theism it is radically attenuated insofar as it leaves space for the epistemic legitimacy of people organizing their lives around a presumptive belief in God.
But second, there is the question of the extent to which our actual beliefs are in our control. When it comes to the reliability of my senses, for example, I don’t just presumptively believe their deliverances. I really believe them. Of course, I could say something along the following lines: “Although living a human life requires that I presumptively believe the deliverances of my senses, I affirm that I have no compelling reason to actually believe them.” But saying this doesn’t make it the case that my belief here is merely presumptive. It remains an actual belief. Converting it into a merely presumptive belief seems beyond my power.
What is not beyond my power is lifting up, alongside this actual belief in the reliability of my senses, the judgment that such actual belief exceeds what is warranted by the evidence and as well as what is demanded by the pragmatic requirements of living (which only requires presumptive belief). Pairing this judgment with my actual belief might produce a kind of "functional equivalent" of mere presumptive belief.
But in that case, we would still need to ask, “On what basis should I believe this judgment about my actual belief in the reliability of my senses?” Is this belief about my belief itself an actual one or is it a presumptive one? And if it is a presumptive one, does that mean we are to act as if our belief is merely presumptive even though it is actual? This will be possible only if there is a discernible pragmatic difference between actually believing C and presumptively believing C. In other words, the behavior you exhibit when you behave as if C is true is different from the behavior you exhibit when by actually believe C is true. But in that case, in what sense are you behaving as if C is true when you presumptively believe C?
Assuming these difficulties can be overcome (and I think they can), acknowledging that what we actually believe is often out of our control forces evidentialists to truncate their evidentialist principle even further. They can no longer say that, on insufficient evidence, presumptive belief can be okay but actual belief never is. Rather, they'll have to say that actual belief can be okay too, so long as we pair that belief with a clear recognition of our fallibility with respect to it—a recognition which serves to generate the functional equivalent of mere presumptive belief.
But now, an evidentialist challenge to theism that makes room for presumptive belief will have to make room for actual belief as well—so long as that belief is paired with fallibilism. In other words, if we follow this path, we no longer have an evidentialist opposition to theism at all. What we have is a challenge to fanaticism.
I suspect very many theists would be very happy to accept that conclusion--because it isn't really a case against theism at all, but rather a case for favoring moderate forms of theism over fanatical ones. And what this shows, I think, is that in order really to have an evidentialist case against theism, the evidentialist would need to argue that presumptive belief in God is illegitimate—in other words, that it is wrong to live as if there is a God.
I think an argument of this sort can be made with respect to what I call (in my book, following Plutarch) “the god of superstition.” And there may be other specific forms of theism for which a case can be made that presumptive belief is illegitimate. But I think it would be very difficult indeed to make this case with respect to every species of theism--for example, the species which conceives of God as that whose existence would (borrowing language from my book) fulfill "the ethico-religious hope" (the hope that, in some fundamental way, reality is on the side of the good).
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.
Monday, November 8, 2010
From the Archives: The Parable of the Spaceship
Last week, my philosophy of religion class considered pragmatic arguments for religious belief--including the arguments articulated by William James (especially in The Will to Believe). It so happens that the view of "faith" that I defend in Is God a Delusion? is very influenced by James's pragmatic approach. At one point, as I was writing the chapter on faith for the book, I wrote up a kind of parable that was intended to capture the Jamesian picture of our human predicament as it relates to religious belief (slightly modified to include, as part of the pragmatic dilemma humans confront, an important thematic distinction in my book, namely Plutarch's distinction between "religion" and "superstition"--or what might be better called the religion of hope and the religion of fear). The parable ended up not making it into the final book, but I did post it on the blog back in 2008, before the book even came out. Since many current readers of this blog have likely never seen it, and since it has bearing on what we've been doing recently in my class, I reprint it now:
Imagine that you abruptly wake up to find yourself on an enormous spaceship. Earth appears through one of the viewports as a diminishing globe—only less blue than it looks in the photos you’ve seen, as if you’re looking at it through a brownish film. You have no idea how you got here. You begin to explore, opening doors at random. You find a kitchen, an exercise room, several bedrooms, and other rooms with strange equipment. Some doors are locked.
As you explore, you begin to meet others who, like yourself, have no memory of how they got here. The first people you meet are a middle-aged woman named Jane, who reminds you of your favorite aunt, and a young man named Paul. Together you follow the sound of voices to what looks almost like a classroom. A dozen people have gathered there. You join them. More people trickle in, until your numbers swell to about fifty.
Eventually, several groups of intrepid explorers head off to see if they can learn more. Your own explorations are interrupted by a scream. Following the sound, you find a smashed-in door leading to a deep shaft. At the bottom is Paul, his neck obviously broken.
Having no way to reach him, you gather in the classroom with others who were close enough to hear the scream, and you await the return of the rest. After a time, one of them—whom you’ve learned is a college student named Joe—returns. He says he’s done a complete circuit of every level and found nobody else, certainly nothing like a crew. “If there are space aliens flying this thing, they’re hiding behind the locked doors.”
But then, a few minutes later, Jane returns, full of excitement. “I’ve met them!” she announces. People gather around. “Well, I didn’t actually see them. It’s like they exist in another dimension. But they were able to…talk to me…sort of. What they did was make pictures in my head. From what I could gather, there’s been some kind of catastrophe. A nuclear war, maybe. I think the aliens were studying Earth when it happened and decided to save as many of us as they could. There are dozens of ships, and they…beamed us up. I guess the process is disorienting. Wipes your short-term memory. Anyway, we’re being transported to a new home. They’ve used their technology to make the ship as comfortable as they could. But some doors are locked for our safety. We shouldn’t try to go in them.” Jane pauses and shrugs. “That’s it. And I’m not sure I got it all right. It was weird, all these pictures in my head.”
Her story elicits considerable heated discussion. Jane is shocked to hear about Paul’s fate, but takes it as evidence that her visions were honest. Someone points out that her experience sounds suspiciously like hallucinating. Someone else asks if she’s ever taken LSD, which elicits a few chuckles. Jane looks away, turning red, but doesn’t answer.
More explorers return without much to report. And then a frazzled young man, Chris, stumbles in. His story is similar to Jane’s, but with important differences. “They were getting in my head, man. Putting pictures there. Forcing me to see stuff I didn’t want to see. It’s like, I saw explosions, all over the planet. And then their ships were swooping down and suckin’ people up with beams of light. They destroyed the planet, man. Alien invasion! And now they’ve snagged a few of us and they’re taking us to some other place. We’re gonna be zoo exhibits.”
Jane shakes her head. “No, no. You’ve misunderstood.”
“This is nuts,” says Steve, a chemistry professor. “Space aliens? I doubt it. This is some kind of experiment. Someone perfectly human has built this thing to test our psychological reactions or something. These…visions…are probably some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion.”
As hours stretch into days, people stake out bedrooms and establish routines. Steve leads a cadre of “investigators” in a systematic exploration of the ship. They map and describe it, and eventually call a meeting where they report their discoveries. One significant discovery is a room where they can regulate the ship’s temperature, humidity, and light levels. They also note that some of the unlocked rooms contain dangerous machines. “Joe nearly got electrocuted,” Steve explains. “And the nearest kitchen is running low on food. We’re gonna need to find some other food source pretty soon.”
“But what does it mean?” you ask. “Why are we here? Are we zoo specimens taken by hostile aliens, or refugees rescued by friendly ones? Or lab rats in some experiment?”
Joe shrugs. “Who knows? All we can do is describe what this place is like. If you want to know what it all means, ask the mystics over there.” He points to Jane and Chris.
“The mystics are idiots,” Steve snaps. “If we’re gonna survive we need to figure this out.”
“Maybe we can’t,” says Jane.
“Yes, we can. There’s a perfectly…human explanation for all this. We just need more information. We need to break down those locked doors.’”
“No way, man!” Chris rises to his feet, looking fierce.
“Chris is right,” says Jane. “They’re locked for our safety.”
“So says mystic Jane.”
“But remember what happened the first day. That young man who broke his neck.”
“Paul was a reckless idiot. We’ll be careful. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”
“I’ve told you what’s going on. They talked to me.”
“Convenient that they only talked to you.”
“Chris, too. Maybe only some minds are receptive.”
Steve rolls his eyes. “Let’s suppose they did communicate with you. Some kind of woo-woo ESP. Why should we trust them? They sucked us from our homes.”
“To save our lives.”
“So says mystic Jane. Mystic Chris has a different interpretation, as I recall.”
“If we need more information,” Jane says, “let’s try to communicate with them again. I was in that room with all the pillows—the meditation room—when they first contacted me. Let’s go back there, try talking to them.”
“A waste of time,” Steve huffs. “If they exist at all, they obviously can’t or won’t do more than put pictures in the heads of a couple of screwballs.”
Jane sighs in frustration. “It’s hard to understand them, but I think they exhausted their ability to affect our dimension when they altered the ship to make it suitable for us. But that doesn’t mean they’re not helping. They can still get the ship to its destination. The drive systems operate in both their dimension and ours.”
“How convenient.” Joe shakes his head. “If you’re right, they might as well not exist as far as life on this ship is concerned. If we’re going to deal with that, we need to help ourselves. Let’s figure out how the ship works, what the dangers are, how to control them. I’m with Steve. We gotta start breaking down doors.”
“They’ll kill us, man,” Chris says. “Just like they took out Paul. You start going where they don’t want us to go, they’ll get mad. They’ll blast us. Not just you. These bastards are nasty. They’ll take it out on all of us.”
“Yeah, right,” says Steve.
“I’m serious, man. We gotta keep these buggers happy. We’re in their power. You start opening doors, I’m gonna have to stop you, man.”
“Just try it.” Steve looks around the room. “Who’s with me?” he says again.
And now, finally, the moment is here. You have to decide what to do. Do you join Steve and start breaking down doors? Do you join Jane in the meditation room? Do you join Chris in trying to stop Steve? Do you decide to ignore all of them and head to the kitchen for some soup?
Let’s suppose you like Jane. She seems a decent person, and her story of what is happening is certainly more attractive than Chris’s. If she’s right, then going to the meditation room with her might uncover some new insight. And so you decide to go, in the hope that her story is on the right track, that there are benevolent aliens guiding the ship, aliens you can trust.
Suppose you go with Jane. Suppose that while you’re sitting in the meditation room, silently asking for the aliens to speak to you, you experience a momentary glimmer of something. It feels like someone is there, except that you can’t see or hear anything. Jane, meanwhile, is ecstatic. “They’re talking!” she says. “They’re worried about Steve and Chris. They don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
The feeling you have might just be the power of suggestion. Jane might be hallucinating. For all you know, Steve might be right about things, or Chris. There’s no evidence that clearly speaks one way or the other. But you’ve sensed something. You trusted Jane enough to follow her to the meditation room, and it produced what felt like contact with someone. You could shrug and walk away. Go get soup. Maybe Jane’s delusion is just rubbing off on you. But you hope otherwise.
You turn to Jane. “What’s it like? Talking to them?”
“Wonderful,” she says. “They want to know us, to be our friends. And it makes it so much better, knowing they’re there and mean us well. You know? It’s all so frightening, otherwise.” She sighs. “Do you hear them at all?”
“I thought, maybe, a little.”
She smiles. “It’s a start. Keep listening for them. In the meantime, just know you can trust them.”
Let’s suppose you do just as she says. Suppose that you orient your life aboard ship in terms of Jane’s teachings, in the hope that she’s right. You decide, out of hope, to live as if her teachings are true. But since her teachings are about benevolent aliens who are looking out for the denizens of the ship, orienting your life in terms of those teachings means trusting the aliens Jane says are there.
And this means rejecting Chris’ claims about nasty aliens that need to be appeased on pain of retaliation. While it doesn’t mean blocking Steve and his group from finding out what they can about the ship, and while it certainly doesn't mean rejecting their findings, it might mean taking seriously the idea that the locked doors are locked for a good reason. But mostly, it means two things: continuing the practice of listening for their voices in the hope that a relationship with them will be possible, and finding some comfort in the promise that the ship is taking you, in the end, to a safe harbor.
And here is the question: Could a morally decent, reasonable person follow this path? If you apply the reasoning of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to this parable, the answer would seem to be no. After all, Jane is training people to believe beyond the evidence, and therefore priming them to become followers of Chris and his extremism. Right?
Or have Dawkins and Harris missed something important?
Imagine that you abruptly wake up to find yourself on an enormous spaceship. Earth appears through one of the viewports as a diminishing globe—only less blue than it looks in the photos you’ve seen, as if you’re looking at it through a brownish film. You have no idea how you got here. You begin to explore, opening doors at random. You find a kitchen, an exercise room, several bedrooms, and other rooms with strange equipment. Some doors are locked.
As you explore, you begin to meet others who, like yourself, have no memory of how they got here. The first people you meet are a middle-aged woman named Jane, who reminds you of your favorite aunt, and a young man named Paul. Together you follow the sound of voices to what looks almost like a classroom. A dozen people have gathered there. You join them. More people trickle in, until your numbers swell to about fifty.
Eventually, several groups of intrepid explorers head off to see if they can learn more. Your own explorations are interrupted by a scream. Following the sound, you find a smashed-in door leading to a deep shaft. At the bottom is Paul, his neck obviously broken.
Having no way to reach him, you gather in the classroom with others who were close enough to hear the scream, and you await the return of the rest. After a time, one of them—whom you’ve learned is a college student named Joe—returns. He says he’s done a complete circuit of every level and found nobody else, certainly nothing like a crew. “If there are space aliens flying this thing, they’re hiding behind the locked doors.”
But then, a few minutes later, Jane returns, full of excitement. “I’ve met them!” she announces. People gather around. “Well, I didn’t actually see them. It’s like they exist in another dimension. But they were able to…talk to me…sort of. What they did was make pictures in my head. From what I could gather, there’s been some kind of catastrophe. A nuclear war, maybe. I think the aliens were studying Earth when it happened and decided to save as many of us as they could. There are dozens of ships, and they…beamed us up. I guess the process is disorienting. Wipes your short-term memory. Anyway, we’re being transported to a new home. They’ve used their technology to make the ship as comfortable as they could. But some doors are locked for our safety. We shouldn’t try to go in them.” Jane pauses and shrugs. “That’s it. And I’m not sure I got it all right. It was weird, all these pictures in my head.”
Her story elicits considerable heated discussion. Jane is shocked to hear about Paul’s fate, but takes it as evidence that her visions were honest. Someone points out that her experience sounds suspiciously like hallucinating. Someone else asks if she’s ever taken LSD, which elicits a few chuckles. Jane looks away, turning red, but doesn’t answer.
More explorers return without much to report. And then a frazzled young man, Chris, stumbles in. His story is similar to Jane’s, but with important differences. “They were getting in my head, man. Putting pictures there. Forcing me to see stuff I didn’t want to see. It’s like, I saw explosions, all over the planet. And then their ships were swooping down and suckin’ people up with beams of light. They destroyed the planet, man. Alien invasion! And now they’ve snagged a few of us and they’re taking us to some other place. We’re gonna be zoo exhibits.”
Jane shakes her head. “No, no. You’ve misunderstood.”
“This is nuts,” says Steve, a chemistry professor. “Space aliens? I doubt it. This is some kind of experiment. Someone perfectly human has built this thing to test our psychological reactions or something. These…visions…are probably some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion.”
As hours stretch into days, people stake out bedrooms and establish routines. Steve leads a cadre of “investigators” in a systematic exploration of the ship. They map and describe it, and eventually call a meeting where they report their discoveries. One significant discovery is a room where they can regulate the ship’s temperature, humidity, and light levels. They also note that some of the unlocked rooms contain dangerous machines. “Joe nearly got electrocuted,” Steve explains. “And the nearest kitchen is running low on food. We’re gonna need to find some other food source pretty soon.”
“But what does it mean?” you ask. “Why are we here? Are we zoo specimens taken by hostile aliens, or refugees rescued by friendly ones? Or lab rats in some experiment?”
Joe shrugs. “Who knows? All we can do is describe what this place is like. If you want to know what it all means, ask the mystics over there.” He points to Jane and Chris.
“The mystics are idiots,” Steve snaps. “If we’re gonna survive we need to figure this out.”
“Maybe we can’t,” says Jane.
“Yes, we can. There’s a perfectly…human explanation for all this. We just need more information. We need to break down those locked doors.’”
“No way, man!” Chris rises to his feet, looking fierce.
“Chris is right,” says Jane. “They’re locked for our safety.”
“So says mystic Jane.”
“But remember what happened the first day. That young man who broke his neck.”
“Paul was a reckless idiot. We’ll be careful. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”
“I’ve told you what’s going on. They talked to me.”
“Convenient that they only talked to you.”
“Chris, too. Maybe only some minds are receptive.”
Steve rolls his eyes. “Let’s suppose they did communicate with you. Some kind of woo-woo ESP. Why should we trust them? They sucked us from our homes.”
“To save our lives.”
“So says mystic Jane. Mystic Chris has a different interpretation, as I recall.”
“If we need more information,” Jane says, “let’s try to communicate with them again. I was in that room with all the pillows—the meditation room—when they first contacted me. Let’s go back there, try talking to them.”
“A waste of time,” Steve huffs. “If they exist at all, they obviously can’t or won’t do more than put pictures in the heads of a couple of screwballs.”
Jane sighs in frustration. “It’s hard to understand them, but I think they exhausted their ability to affect our dimension when they altered the ship to make it suitable for us. But that doesn’t mean they’re not helping. They can still get the ship to its destination. The drive systems operate in both their dimension and ours.”
“How convenient.” Joe shakes his head. “If you’re right, they might as well not exist as far as life on this ship is concerned. If we’re going to deal with that, we need to help ourselves. Let’s figure out how the ship works, what the dangers are, how to control them. I’m with Steve. We gotta start breaking down doors.”
“They’ll kill us, man,” Chris says. “Just like they took out Paul. You start going where they don’t want us to go, they’ll get mad. They’ll blast us. Not just you. These bastards are nasty. They’ll take it out on all of us.”
“Yeah, right,” says Steve.
“I’m serious, man. We gotta keep these buggers happy. We’re in their power. You start opening doors, I’m gonna have to stop you, man.”
“Just try it.” Steve looks around the room. “Who’s with me?” he says again.
And now, finally, the moment is here. You have to decide what to do. Do you join Steve and start breaking down doors? Do you join Jane in the meditation room? Do you join Chris in trying to stop Steve? Do you decide to ignore all of them and head to the kitchen for some soup?
Let’s suppose you like Jane. She seems a decent person, and her story of what is happening is certainly more attractive than Chris’s. If she’s right, then going to the meditation room with her might uncover some new insight. And so you decide to go, in the hope that her story is on the right track, that there are benevolent aliens guiding the ship, aliens you can trust.
Suppose you go with Jane. Suppose that while you’re sitting in the meditation room, silently asking for the aliens to speak to you, you experience a momentary glimmer of something. It feels like someone is there, except that you can’t see or hear anything. Jane, meanwhile, is ecstatic. “They’re talking!” she says. “They’re worried about Steve and Chris. They don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
The feeling you have might just be the power of suggestion. Jane might be hallucinating. For all you know, Steve might be right about things, or Chris. There’s no evidence that clearly speaks one way or the other. But you’ve sensed something. You trusted Jane enough to follow her to the meditation room, and it produced what felt like contact with someone. You could shrug and walk away. Go get soup. Maybe Jane’s delusion is just rubbing off on you. But you hope otherwise.
You turn to Jane. “What’s it like? Talking to them?”
“Wonderful,” she says. “They want to know us, to be our friends. And it makes it so much better, knowing they’re there and mean us well. You know? It’s all so frightening, otherwise.” She sighs. “Do you hear them at all?”
“I thought, maybe, a little.”
She smiles. “It’s a start. Keep listening for them. In the meantime, just know you can trust them.”
Let’s suppose you do just as she says. Suppose that you orient your life aboard ship in terms of Jane’s teachings, in the hope that she’s right. You decide, out of hope, to live as if her teachings are true. But since her teachings are about benevolent aliens who are looking out for the denizens of the ship, orienting your life in terms of those teachings means trusting the aliens Jane says are there.
And this means rejecting Chris’ claims about nasty aliens that need to be appeased on pain of retaliation. While it doesn’t mean blocking Steve and his group from finding out what they can about the ship, and while it certainly doesn't mean rejecting their findings, it might mean taking seriously the idea that the locked doors are locked for a good reason. But mostly, it means two things: continuing the practice of listening for their voices in the hope that a relationship with them will be possible, and finding some comfort in the promise that the ship is taking you, in the end, to a safe harbor.
And here is the question: Could a morally decent, reasonable person follow this path? If you apply the reasoning of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to this parable, the answer would seem to be no. After all, Jane is training people to believe beyond the evidence, and therefore priming them to become followers of Chris and his extremism. Right?
Or have Dawkins and Harris missed something important?
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Belief in Search of Evidence
An occasional commenter on this blog, Dan, recently posted on his own blog, Rationality Now , a reflection inspired by a church sign. The sign said “Begin to weave and God will provide you with the thread”—which, as Dan pointed out, could be taken as a variant on the common saying (among Christians), “Just have faith in Jesus and He will show Himself to you.”
I should point out that this is only one possible reading of the sign. One might also take the intended message to be about projects that urgently need to be done, but for which you lack the resources. On this reading, the sign is meant to encourage you to begin such projects anyway, operating in the hope that once you are underway, the needed resources will begin to come in (provided by God).
And yet it seems plausible to claim that faith in Jesus, properly construed, is really a kind of life project. If so, then Dan’s interpretation of the church sign might not be so far off the mark. I suspect that most Christians will agree that “having faith in Jesus” is much more than just believing in a set of propositions. It’s a way of leading one’s life. (Agreement among Christians is likely to break down as soon as we ask what way of life is implied by faith in Jesus.)
But even if faith in Jesus is much more than belief in a set of propositions, the way of life implied by such faith will certainly presuppose a set of beliefs. To have faith is, in part, to live one’s life as if certain things are true. In the broadest terms, having faith in Jesus means living as if Jesus’ life and ministry express the ultimate reality, the divine, in some unique and profound way. And having faith in Jesus as savior means living as if Jesus has secured the redemption of the world; as if the evils that shatter human lives and infect human hearts are never the final word; as if somehow, because of Christ, even the most devastating horrors and malignancies have been stripped of the power to deprive our lives of meaning and value.
Living as if something is true—that is, exhibiting both outward behaviors and inner dispositions that make sense only given a set of presuppositions—is at least one definition of what it means to believe something. More specifically, this is the pragmatic sense of belief. When you live as if X is true, then you are giving pragmatic assent to X even if you withhold your intellectual assent. On an intellectual level you might say, “I have no idea if X is the case”—by which you probably mean that you have no more reason to think that X is true than you have to think otherwise, or something to that effect. But if you still live your life as if it is true, then you express pragmatic belief.
In his post, Dan pointed out that the common Christian saying, “Have faith in Jesus and He will show Himself to you,” amounts to the injunction to reach a conclusion before seeing any evidence for it—an injunction that many agnostics and atheists view with great suspicion, to say the least. After all, shouldn’t we form our beliefs on the basis of the evidence? Dan clearly thinks so, calling this kind of "belief-in-search-of-evidence" a species of "cart before the horse" thinking. He then goes on to criticize what he takes to be the essence of religious faith—which involves, as he sees it, not merely the act of embracing a conclusion before seeing any evidence (in the promise of evidence to come), but a broader indifference to evidence.
Now I agree that much of what goes by the name of “faith” in the lives of religious believers (but not all) is just as Dan describes it here: belief without any regard for evidence. And I also think that many who follow the dictum, “believe it first and evidence will follow,” do so improperly. Doing so would obviously be improper if one ought to withhold belief until the evidence comes in. And we can all agree that waiting for the evidence is quite frequently the proper way to proceed. But is that always the proper way to proceed? This is the question I want to explore here.
Put simply, the question is whether there are occasions when it’s legitimate to “believe first” (at least on some sense of “belief”) in order to see if the evidence follows. To assess this question, it may be helpful to consider some examples.
First, there is the matter of hunches. At least sometimes, a researcher or investigator has a strong sense that some hypothesis is true, and this sense inspires her to keep doggedly pursuing evidence in favor of the hypothesis despite setbacks that would have discouraged those less convinced (sending them off in pursuit of an alternative hypothesis).
Put in ordinary language, the researcher “has a hunch” and acts on it. To “have a hunch” means that you are willing to invest time and resources into investigating a possibility that, on the clear or explicit evidence available, seems no more worthy of investigation than countless other possibilities. You have “the hunch” that something is going on which, if it were, would leave certain traces. And so you don’t just proceed to look for these traces, but do so with an attitude of expectation. Perhaps, because of the strength of your hunch, you look longer than you might have otherwise. If you finally do uncover the traces that confirm the hunch, it may well be that the only reason you did so is because you kept looking long after others would have given up.
Were there explicit clues that suggested you should start your investigation with this hypothesis rather than some other one, you wouldn’t be acting on a hunch. You’d be acting on the initial evidence. To have a hunch means in part that, based on the explicit evidence, you could as readily have started with any number of other lines of investigation. But in the case of a hunch, your decision to start where you do isn’t arbitrary. It isn’t based on the mere fact that you have to start somewhere, and starting here is as good as anywhere. It is, instead, based on some level of conviction—some initial sense, not rooted in the explicitly available evidence, that this hypothesis is true. You choose to start here because there is a part of you that expects to find the traces you are looking for.
Put yet another way, the person with a hunch believes in the hypothesis more than do those who are simply going by the available evidence. There is at least a level of belief here that precedes the evidence and which may actually help to generate confirming evidence. At least on one level, the belief at issue here is pragmatic: the person with a hunch had different behaviors and dispositions than do those who lack the hunch. On the level of what they are inclined to do and expect and feel (e.g., surprise when the traces aren't there), they are like the person who thinks the hypothesis is true.
In short, there’s a real sense in which a hunch is a certain kind of belief-in-search-of-evidence. But I can’t imagine any researcher or investigator who would categorically condemn those of their colleagues who have hunches and act on them. In fact, I doubt that there are many researchers out there who don’t have occasional hunches, or who consistently resist them when they do.
That said, it is also true that, in scientific or forensic research, hunches can be dangerous. The decision to follow a hunch flirts with the kind of bias that undermines objective inquiry. A hunch becomes a bias, for example, when the researcher refuses to give up on it even once contrary evidence starts to pile up. It also becomes a bias when the researcher reads confirming evidence into ambiguous observations.
Let me clarify this last point. A body of clues often permits a variety of interpretations. If one interpretation supports one’s hunch while others don’t, it can be easy to accord preferential status to the supportive interpretation even though there are no other compelling reasons to do so. In short, one can ignore or fail to notice one’s own interpretive bias and so slide without realizing it from “The evidence is consistent with my hunch” to “The evidence favors my hunch over other hypotheses.” The police detective who falls prey to this danger when following a hunch may not only ignore a trail of evidence leading to the real killer, but may help put an innocent person behind bars.
But these risks do not constitute a decisive basis for ignoring hunches altogether and condemning those who don’t. If one is aware of the dangers, one can guard against them. And the fact is that acting on hunches sometimes bears important fruits.
Consider a different example: the act of trusting someone. Often, the only way you can find out whether or not someone is trustworthy is to actually trust them. That is, you begin by acting as if they are trustworthy. You invest them with responsibility and don’t hover over them to see whether they will fulfill it. You put yourself in their hands. You adopt behaviors and dispositions premised on the trustworthiness of the person, and in this sense adopt a belief in the pragmatic sense. When it comes to trustworthiness, it is often the case that only once you do this—only once you adopt a pragmatic belief—does the evidence for or against it becomes available.
Of course, here things get tricky, because often the decision to trust inspires someone to be more trustworthy than they might otherwise have been. Trusting can often operate as a self-fulfilling prophecy: give a dog a good name to live up to, and the dog is more likely to do so.
In my prison work with the Alternatives to Violence Project, we routinely introduce an array of trust exercises—trust circles and trust lifts—that call upon some participants of the workshop to voluntarily put their trust in others. Part of the point of these exercises is to give participants the chance to take the risk of trusting to see what happens (to believe in the trustworthiness of others as a way of discovering evidence of the same). But part of the point, I think, is also to inspire inner transformations in those who are given the experience of being trusted. The act of trust attributes to them a good character trait that they want to live up to. In doing so, they begin to own this character trait in a way that, perhaps, they hadn’t before. By being trusted, they become more trustworthy.
But this is an interesting point. Sometimes what we pragmatically believe shapes the reality around us—a fact that can operate both for good and for ill. In short, there may be circumstances in which it behooves us to believe the best hypothesis, even when there is no evidence to think it likely, precisely because expecting the best often makes the best more likely.
Finally, consider the case of a convicted murderer who seems to most everyone to be a kind of moral monster, a psychopath incapable of remorse or compassion towards his victims. But one person—a nun, say—is convinced that there is something good in every human being. Armed with this conviction, she seeks to reach that something in him. She really believes that it is there, and that a real human connection with this man, a mutual acknowledgment of shared humanity, is therefore possible.
There is, we can suppose, nothing in the man’s behavior that gives the nun any indication that he really possesses the capacity for such a connection with others. Everyone else has dismissed him as a psychopath lacking the kinds of human emotions and dispositions that make love, empathy, and compassion possible. His behavior is entirely consistent with such a dismissal of him. But this nun is convinced, in spite of this evidence, that somewhere buried beneath all the crud is a spark of human goodness. And so she reaches for it—persistently, sincerely.
Here’s what I think about such a case. If that “spark” is there, it’s only someone who is sincerely convinced that it’s there—someone like the nun—who’s likely to find it. Someone who doesn’t believe this will be neither persistent enough nor sincere enough to get through the crud. The vulnerable humanity of this criminal, if it’s there, is only accessible to those who are already convinced that it’s there, and who therefore have the behavioral dispositions and feelings necessary to reach it. Evidence for the existence of this spark will come only to those who believe in it before any evidence is available.
So here’s the question: Is the nun’s conviction inappropriate? Should we condemn her for it? Should we insist that belief must follow evidence, and thus conclude that she ought to reject the claim that this man has a tender human core she can reach, at least until evidence comes in—thereby guaranteeing that the evidence will never come in? Or should we, rather, declare along with William James that “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule”?
The point is this: The decision to follow a hunch, or to trust a stranger, or to have faith in the potential of a human being who shows no evidence of potential, can be legitimate (even though it isn’t always so). But such decisions are cases of belief-in-search-of-evidence. That is, they involve pragmatic belief—acting as if something is true—before the evidence is in, while at the same time facilitating the acquisition of evidence.
And so I conclude that there are legitimate cases of believing in the hope that evidence will follow. The question, then, is whether there are theistic correlates for such cases—ways of having faith in God that exemplify legitimate belief-in-search-of evidence. Is there such a thing as a legitimate God-hunch, or a legitimate act of trusting in that which transcends the world of ordinary experience, or of seeking sincerely to establish a personal connection with the transcendent based on the conviction that it is there and has some the personal character that makes relationship possible? If so, what are the parameters within which such faith must fall in order to be legitimate?
I should point out that this is only one possible reading of the sign. One might also take the intended message to be about projects that urgently need to be done, but for which you lack the resources. On this reading, the sign is meant to encourage you to begin such projects anyway, operating in the hope that once you are underway, the needed resources will begin to come in (provided by God).
And yet it seems plausible to claim that faith in Jesus, properly construed, is really a kind of life project. If so, then Dan’s interpretation of the church sign might not be so far off the mark. I suspect that most Christians will agree that “having faith in Jesus” is much more than just believing in a set of propositions. It’s a way of leading one’s life. (Agreement among Christians is likely to break down as soon as we ask what way of life is implied by faith in Jesus.)
But even if faith in Jesus is much more than belief in a set of propositions, the way of life implied by such faith will certainly presuppose a set of beliefs. To have faith is, in part, to live one’s life as if certain things are true. In the broadest terms, having faith in Jesus means living as if Jesus’ life and ministry express the ultimate reality, the divine, in some unique and profound way. And having faith in Jesus as savior means living as if Jesus has secured the redemption of the world; as if the evils that shatter human lives and infect human hearts are never the final word; as if somehow, because of Christ, even the most devastating horrors and malignancies have been stripped of the power to deprive our lives of meaning and value.
Living as if something is true—that is, exhibiting both outward behaviors and inner dispositions that make sense only given a set of presuppositions—is at least one definition of what it means to believe something. More specifically, this is the pragmatic sense of belief. When you live as if X is true, then you are giving pragmatic assent to X even if you withhold your intellectual assent. On an intellectual level you might say, “I have no idea if X is the case”—by which you probably mean that you have no more reason to think that X is true than you have to think otherwise, or something to that effect. But if you still live your life as if it is true, then you express pragmatic belief.
In his post, Dan pointed out that the common Christian saying, “Have faith in Jesus and He will show Himself to you,” amounts to the injunction to reach a conclusion before seeing any evidence for it—an injunction that many agnostics and atheists view with great suspicion, to say the least. After all, shouldn’t we form our beliefs on the basis of the evidence? Dan clearly thinks so, calling this kind of "belief-in-search-of-evidence" a species of "cart before the horse" thinking. He then goes on to criticize what he takes to be the essence of religious faith—which involves, as he sees it, not merely the act of embracing a conclusion before seeing any evidence (in the promise of evidence to come), but a broader indifference to evidence.
Now I agree that much of what goes by the name of “faith” in the lives of religious believers (but not all) is just as Dan describes it here: belief without any regard for evidence. And I also think that many who follow the dictum, “believe it first and evidence will follow,” do so improperly. Doing so would obviously be improper if one ought to withhold belief until the evidence comes in. And we can all agree that waiting for the evidence is quite frequently the proper way to proceed. But is that always the proper way to proceed? This is the question I want to explore here.
Put simply, the question is whether there are occasions when it’s legitimate to “believe first” (at least on some sense of “belief”) in order to see if the evidence follows. To assess this question, it may be helpful to consider some examples.
First, there is the matter of hunches. At least sometimes, a researcher or investigator has a strong sense that some hypothesis is true, and this sense inspires her to keep doggedly pursuing evidence in favor of the hypothesis despite setbacks that would have discouraged those less convinced (sending them off in pursuit of an alternative hypothesis).
Put in ordinary language, the researcher “has a hunch” and acts on it. To “have a hunch” means that you are willing to invest time and resources into investigating a possibility that, on the clear or explicit evidence available, seems no more worthy of investigation than countless other possibilities. You have “the hunch” that something is going on which, if it were, would leave certain traces. And so you don’t just proceed to look for these traces, but do so with an attitude of expectation. Perhaps, because of the strength of your hunch, you look longer than you might have otherwise. If you finally do uncover the traces that confirm the hunch, it may well be that the only reason you did so is because you kept looking long after others would have given up.
Were there explicit clues that suggested you should start your investigation with this hypothesis rather than some other one, you wouldn’t be acting on a hunch. You’d be acting on the initial evidence. To have a hunch means in part that, based on the explicit evidence, you could as readily have started with any number of other lines of investigation. But in the case of a hunch, your decision to start where you do isn’t arbitrary. It isn’t based on the mere fact that you have to start somewhere, and starting here is as good as anywhere. It is, instead, based on some level of conviction—some initial sense, not rooted in the explicitly available evidence, that this hypothesis is true. You choose to start here because there is a part of you that expects to find the traces you are looking for.
Put yet another way, the person with a hunch believes in the hypothesis more than do those who are simply going by the available evidence. There is at least a level of belief here that precedes the evidence and which may actually help to generate confirming evidence. At least on one level, the belief at issue here is pragmatic: the person with a hunch had different behaviors and dispositions than do those who lack the hunch. On the level of what they are inclined to do and expect and feel (e.g., surprise when the traces aren't there), they are like the person who thinks the hypothesis is true.
In short, there’s a real sense in which a hunch is a certain kind of belief-in-search-of-evidence. But I can’t imagine any researcher or investigator who would categorically condemn those of their colleagues who have hunches and act on them. In fact, I doubt that there are many researchers out there who don’t have occasional hunches, or who consistently resist them when they do.
That said, it is also true that, in scientific or forensic research, hunches can be dangerous. The decision to follow a hunch flirts with the kind of bias that undermines objective inquiry. A hunch becomes a bias, for example, when the researcher refuses to give up on it even once contrary evidence starts to pile up. It also becomes a bias when the researcher reads confirming evidence into ambiguous observations.
Let me clarify this last point. A body of clues often permits a variety of interpretations. If one interpretation supports one’s hunch while others don’t, it can be easy to accord preferential status to the supportive interpretation even though there are no other compelling reasons to do so. In short, one can ignore or fail to notice one’s own interpretive bias and so slide without realizing it from “The evidence is consistent with my hunch” to “The evidence favors my hunch over other hypotheses.” The police detective who falls prey to this danger when following a hunch may not only ignore a trail of evidence leading to the real killer, but may help put an innocent person behind bars.
But these risks do not constitute a decisive basis for ignoring hunches altogether and condemning those who don’t. If one is aware of the dangers, one can guard against them. And the fact is that acting on hunches sometimes bears important fruits.
Consider a different example: the act of trusting someone. Often, the only way you can find out whether or not someone is trustworthy is to actually trust them. That is, you begin by acting as if they are trustworthy. You invest them with responsibility and don’t hover over them to see whether they will fulfill it. You put yourself in their hands. You adopt behaviors and dispositions premised on the trustworthiness of the person, and in this sense adopt a belief in the pragmatic sense. When it comes to trustworthiness, it is often the case that only once you do this—only once you adopt a pragmatic belief—does the evidence for or against it becomes available.
Of course, here things get tricky, because often the decision to trust inspires someone to be more trustworthy than they might otherwise have been. Trusting can often operate as a self-fulfilling prophecy: give a dog a good name to live up to, and the dog is more likely to do so.
In my prison work with the Alternatives to Violence Project, we routinely introduce an array of trust exercises—trust circles and trust lifts—that call upon some participants of the workshop to voluntarily put their trust in others. Part of the point of these exercises is to give participants the chance to take the risk of trusting to see what happens (to believe in the trustworthiness of others as a way of discovering evidence of the same). But part of the point, I think, is also to inspire inner transformations in those who are given the experience of being trusted. The act of trust attributes to them a good character trait that they want to live up to. In doing so, they begin to own this character trait in a way that, perhaps, they hadn’t before. By being trusted, they become more trustworthy.
But this is an interesting point. Sometimes what we pragmatically believe shapes the reality around us—a fact that can operate both for good and for ill. In short, there may be circumstances in which it behooves us to believe the best hypothesis, even when there is no evidence to think it likely, precisely because expecting the best often makes the best more likely.
Finally, consider the case of a convicted murderer who seems to most everyone to be a kind of moral monster, a psychopath incapable of remorse or compassion towards his victims. But one person—a nun, say—is convinced that there is something good in every human being. Armed with this conviction, she seeks to reach that something in him. She really believes that it is there, and that a real human connection with this man, a mutual acknowledgment of shared humanity, is therefore possible.
There is, we can suppose, nothing in the man’s behavior that gives the nun any indication that he really possesses the capacity for such a connection with others. Everyone else has dismissed him as a psychopath lacking the kinds of human emotions and dispositions that make love, empathy, and compassion possible. His behavior is entirely consistent with such a dismissal of him. But this nun is convinced, in spite of this evidence, that somewhere buried beneath all the crud is a spark of human goodness. And so she reaches for it—persistently, sincerely.
Here’s what I think about such a case. If that “spark” is there, it’s only someone who is sincerely convinced that it’s there—someone like the nun—who’s likely to find it. Someone who doesn’t believe this will be neither persistent enough nor sincere enough to get through the crud. The vulnerable humanity of this criminal, if it’s there, is only accessible to those who are already convinced that it’s there, and who therefore have the behavioral dispositions and feelings necessary to reach it. Evidence for the existence of this spark will come only to those who believe in it before any evidence is available.
So here’s the question: Is the nun’s conviction inappropriate? Should we condemn her for it? Should we insist that belief must follow evidence, and thus conclude that she ought to reject the claim that this man has a tender human core she can reach, at least until evidence comes in—thereby guaranteeing that the evidence will never come in? Or should we, rather, declare along with William James that “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule”?
The point is this: The decision to follow a hunch, or to trust a stranger, or to have faith in the potential of a human being who shows no evidence of potential, can be legitimate (even though it isn’t always so). But such decisions are cases of belief-in-search-of-evidence. That is, they involve pragmatic belief—acting as if something is true—before the evidence is in, while at the same time facilitating the acquisition of evidence.
And so I conclude that there are legitimate cases of believing in the hope that evidence will follow. The question, then, is whether there are theistic correlates for such cases—ways of having faith in God that exemplify legitimate belief-in-search-of evidence. Is there such a thing as a legitimate God-hunch, or a legitimate act of trusting in that which transcends the world of ordinary experience, or of seeking sincerely to establish a personal connection with the transcendent based on the conviction that it is there and has some the personal character that makes relationship possible? If so, what are the parameters within which such faith must fall in order to be legitimate?
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