Some months ago, my dad (a very conservative Christian) told
me about an article he saw in Salvo (a very conservative Christian magazine).
The title is, “
You
Gotta Believe: Atheist or Not, You Already Have More Faith Than You Realize,”
by James S. Spiegel. Based on the title and his description, the article
sounded like yet another variation on an argument which atheists hear
ad nauseam, that atheists have just as
much faith as religious people (which almost seems like an acknowledgement that
there would be an imbalance if their beliefs were based on faith and ours were
not). Since this is such a common line of argument, I thought it might be
worthwhile to go through the article and address the points it makes
individually. At the time, I only had my dad’s physical copy to work with, so I
decided to wait until Salvo posted the full article online.
The article begins with a story of a man who considers
himself an “extreme nihilist,” who believed “that even the physical world is an
illusion.” He visits theologian Francis Schaeffer, who challenges him to really
live according to that belief. A few hours later, the man comes back and says
he’s abandoned his nihilism, because “There are too many bumps on my head.” Ha
ha ha, aren’t atheists dumb?
Spiegel explains the point of this story is that worldviews
have implications in the real world and they affect how we live. Okay, fine,
with you so far. He adds that “the story also reminds us that it is wise to
affirm some truths, even though we cannot prove them,” and in the next
paragraph explains that all sane people believe in the general reliability of
our senses, even though there’s no way to prove
that, because “there is no way even to make the attempt without relying upon
your senses to do so.” I don’t entirely accept this, because you can use one of
your senses to confirm another. The article’s own story illustrates this; the
nihilist didn’t believe his sense of sight, but his sense of touch (through the
bumps on his head) confirmed that there was really something to what he saw.
Someone might object, “but that’s still using your senses to
confirm your senses!” Maybe I’m just missing some basic philosophical
implication that’s obvious to everyone else, but I don’t see why the senses
should all be bundled together in the consideration of their reliability. The
sense of touch is not the same as the sense of sight; why must our judgment of
their reliability be all-or-nothing? If I took off my eyeglasses, I will have
good reason to distrust the reliability of my sense of sight; but that doesn’t
give me any reason at all to think that my other four senses have become
deficient as well. On the contrary, studies have shown that a brain which lacks
the reliability of one sense (i.e. being blind or deaf) will rewire itself so
that the other senses are more heightened.
[1]
Thus, I see no basis for the mindset that we must judge the reliability of “our
senses” as an all-or-nothing packaged deal. I contend that it’s perfectly reasonable
to validate the reliability of one of our senses using another one of our
senses.
And lest you argue that this just moves the issue back a
step (because I would then need to justify what validates that other sense), I
see no reason why the senses can’t mutually validate each other. Let’s say I’m
not sure whether I should trust the reliability of my sense of sight, so I use
my sense of touch to validate it. In doing so, I’m not assuming (or taking on
faith) the reliability of my sense of touch; if the sensory data of my sight
and touch didn’t match, I wouldn’t just assume one was correct and the other
was wrong, so there’s no faith in anything’s reliability there. Rather, it is
the fact that they agree which validates both of them. Think of it like
scientific experiments. When one scientist conducts an experiment, the accepted
scientific method is for someone else to go along and reproduce the experiment
to double-check the first scientist’s findings. If the findings of the two
experiments don’t agree, the accepted scientific method is not just arbitrarily
decide, “well, the first one was done right, so the second one must have some
mistake,” or vice versa. They don’t just assume that either one was correct.
Even so, if both experiments turn out the same way, then it is taken as good
evidence that there is something to the results of that experiment (while
always leaving the door open for additional data to be added). So I don’t think
there’s anything circular or irrational about using two sources of data to
validate each other.
I would go even further and say that this is a perfectly
common practice. If there are two witnesses to a crime (or perhaps two suspects
who are pleading innocence), then investigators will question them for details
separately, and then see how well the two stories align. If they don’t match
up, the detectives may not treat either testimony as reliable, but if they do
(especially if the police are sure they didn’t have an opportunity to discuss
and plan out their cover story together), then that will give them both some
validation as being reliable, even though neither of them had been validated
individually beforehand. Now, I will grant that it’s even better if the
investigators have some external way of verifying their stories. I’m not saying
that this type of mutual validation is the best warrant for a belief we could
ever possibly have. But in the case of judging the reliability of our senses, I
think it’s more than adequate.
And you know, I might even take it a step further, and say
that we do have an external source of verification; our continued survival.
Think about the story of the “extreme nihilist” again; if he decided to persist
in his belief that the whole world was an illusion, then it wouldn’t have taken
very long before the bumps on his head would’ve reached a fatal level. Unless we all
have unreliable senses in an unperceived world that is completely safe and
docile, then I can see no way that our senses being completely unreliable
wouldn’t get us killed very quickly.
As such, I don’t agree with Spiegel when he says “You must
assume from the outset the very thing you are trying to prove.” We can uncouple
the senses from being a packaged deal and allow them to validate each other. If
I’m trying to prove the reliability of my eyesight, then I might use my sense
of touch or hearing, over maybe even smell, to confirm that. I do not need to
assume that my vision is accurate to give myself evidence (I don’t agree with
the use of the word “prove” here) that my vision is accurate. We can also
recognize that the very fact we’re still alive is evidence that our senses are
getting the job done well enough. None of that requires us to assume from the
outset the very thing we are trying to prove.
---
And so, this is the first place where I find a strong
disagreement with Spiegel’s line of argument, and this is really where his
argument takes off running, because he follows that statement about assumption
by saying, “you might say that your belief in the reliability of your senses is
an article of faith. After all, it is
something that you hold to be true without conclusive proof.” Then, at the end
of the paragraph, he adds, “In short, you devoutly trust your senses.” I’ll probably spend some time later on the
crucial differences between “faith” and “trust” (and how religious people so
commonly conflate them for arguments like this), but for now I think it’s more
important to focus on the way Spiegel has just conflated “faith” with simply
not having conclusive proof.
This is exactly where this type of argument always breaks
down, in my experience. The reason non-believers attack the idea of faith-based
thinking, is because the whole idea of faith is belief without evidence. Of
course, I absolutely grant that there are multiple meanings for the word
“faith,” and most of them really aren’t that problematic. The one that atheists
take issue with is the usage of “faith” where it basically means believing
things without evidence, which can more specifically be labeled “blind faith.”
Religious people are more than happy to apply that term to atheists
[2],
but sure don’t seem interested in accepting that label for themselves, even
though they also say that belief in God is “properly basic,” which is to assert
that such a belief can be rationally held without any evidence.
[3]
The problem with the type of argument that Spiegel is making
here is that it equivocates between different usages of the word “faith.” He
says that believing in the reliability of our senses is by faith, because we
don’t have conclusive proof, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have very
good evidence for it. The whole underlying implication of this article seems to
be, “we all have faith anyway, so you might as well have faith in God.” If the
volume and quality of evidence I had to support the existence of God was as
good as the evidence I have for the reliability of my senses, then I would
believe in God. I don’t demand that the evidence for God be at the level of
conclusive proof, because when you get right down to it, nothing ever really
is. Thus, I find it a bit of a bait-and-switch to say that we’re just believing
in our senses by faith, simply because the proof isn’t conclusive, therefore,
theists and atheists are on an exactly even playing field (but that’s skipping
a bit).
---
In the next section (What is Faith?), Spiegel
distances himself from the association with blind faith, invoking the
definition of faith that is much more popular with believers, saying “the
essence of faith is trust.” I often
wonder, when hearing this from religious people, if “faith” and “trust” just
mean the same thing, why do we have two different words for it? Now, I am being
a bit glib, I’m not really arguing that the existence of synonyms must mean
that two words have more divergent meanings than is being claimed. But I do
think that using the word “faith” simply becomes unhelpful and confusing if all
you’re gonna do is just strip away any of its meaning that isn’t effectively
the same as “trust.”
Spiegel offers various examples of things we might have
faith in through the course of our daily lives. Your spouse, your doctor, your
car. Of course, in all these cases, he’s working from the less challenging usage
of faith, which is essentially where you do have a lot of good reason to
believe in something, but just not complete certainty. I say again that if I
had that much evidence for God, I would be a believer. I’m certainly not gonna
say that’s true of every atheist, but it would by definition be true of
everyone who embraces the philosophy of believing things that have good
evidentiary support (which is a mindset that a lot of atheists, in my
experience, seem to hold). Maybe this is just me depending on anecdotal
evidence too much, but I don’t think that the problem for rational-minded
atheists is that they have this level of evidence for God, but they just don’t
think it’s enough because they don’t have conclusive proof.
In that sense, I don’t understand the value of these
examples Speigel is giving. He’s extolling the virtues of “faith” with examples
that, to me, are more effective in extolling the virtues of evidence. Later on,
though, he does draw a distinction between blind faith and justified faith, saying,
“In order to have a justified faith in a person or thing, your trust must be
grounded in some objectively good reasons.” Sure, fine, I have no problem with
that. It’s not the label I would’ve chosen, but if you want to call it
“justified faith” to believe in something when it’s grounded in a sufficient
volume and quality of good reasons, then I have no problem with justified
faith. But my question is, who does? Are there really atheists out there
ranting like, “those dang Christians have some objectively good reasons for
believing in God, and that kind of faith is dangerous!” I’m certainly not aware
of anyone like that. In my exposure to “activist atheists,” the thing they have
a problem with is people who believe things without
evidence, not this justified faith that Spiegel is describing.
So, to summarize what we’ve covered up to this point (before delving into the next
section, Reasonable Religious Faith), it seems that Spiegel is
essentially identifying three strata for how much grounding we can have for a
belief. The highest is “conclusive proof,” the middle is “justified faith,” and
the lowest is “blind faith.” My assertion is that very few (if any) rational
atheists would have any problem with “justified faith” (though they might
prefer to call it by a label other than faith), but would disagree with what I
expect Spiegel will be arguing next, that religious faith is justified.
---
The next section actually does start out rather reasonable,
with Spiegel acknowledging that the authority of Scripture can’t be proved, and
that “one may have reasonable or unreasonable faith in God, depending on
whether one has good grounds for trusting him.” I don’t disagree with that at
all. But then he takes a leap:
But even those who have plenty of
grounds for trusting God cannot prove that he will act in certain predictable
ways in the future. So the need to trust God is unavoidable.
The main point here is that trust
in God is really just one instance of faith among many kinds of faith that all
of us display on a daily basis.
I say he’s making a leap here because he’s skipping ahead to
claiming that faith in God is on an equal footing with those other examples of
justified faith he previously offered. The problem is, he didn’t first
establish that faith in God actually is justified, or that anyone does have
good grounds for trusting him. At this point, he seems to just be taking it for
granted that some people do have good justification for believing in God, and
therefore, the type of faith those people have is “justified faith.” That’s not
an argument, that’s just an assertion.
Playing devil’s advocate, Spiegel says, “some will object
that there is a big difference between faith in God and faith in other people
and things, since we can see and otherwise experience the latter, but not the
former.” He rebuts this objection by pointing out that “millions of people all
over the world have reported experiences of God.” But remember what he said
earlier; “In order to have a justified faith in a person or thing, your trust
must be grounded in some objectively good reasons.” Personal experiences of a
non-material being, which generally aren’t shared by anyone else, are about as
far away from objective as we can get. So by Spiegel’s own definition,
subjective personal experiences of God cannot be a sufficient grounding for
justified faith.
His second rebuttal to this objection is that there are
things like gravity and quarks that we can’t directly see, but we know they
exist because we can see the effects of them. As with the claim that faith in
God is reasonable, he skips a step here, saying “these are no less matters of
faith than belief in God,” even though he doesn’t bother to provide any
examples of how we can see the effects of God’s existence (unless you count the
personal religious experiences, which is by no means the same type of evidence
that we have for gravity or quarks). If we can see the effects of those things
in an objective and measurable way, then yes, they are less matters of faith
than belief in God. If, on the other hand, Spiegel does have examples of
objective and measurable ways we see the effects of God’s existence, then why
isn’t he talking about those instead of something so utterly subjective as
personal experience?
This whole section basically just seems to me like, “here
are some examples of justified faith, so faith in God is justified too.” If you
recognize a distinction between “justified faith” and “blind faith,” then it’s
not enough to show that faith in some things is justified. You need to also
show specifically that God is one of those things. In this section, Spiegel has
utterly failed to do that.
---
In the next section (Philosophical Faith Commitments),
Spiegel seems to already be done with the discussion of whether faith in God is
justified. Now, he’s back to reminding us that believing in the reliability of
our senses is nothing more than an article of faith, and offers more examples
of “philosophical articles of faith to which any sane person is committed.” I’m
pretty confident that I could go through his examples and show that they
needn’t be as much a matter of faith as he’s asserting (for instance, you can
live and go on about your daily life as if the external world we perceive is
real, without just assuming that it’s definitely true), but perhaps I’ll save
that for some other time. For now, I find these examples to be wholly
irrelevant, because the ultimate point he’s making is that theists and atheists
are on equal footing (“if not in the same boat, at least in the same waters”)
in terms of how much faith they exercise to get through their daily lives. But
all of these issues are not in dispute between atheists and theists. So if it
takes faith to believe in God, but it doesn’t take faith to not believe in God,
then stating a bunch of things that theists and atheists both have faith in has
no bearing on the point of whether theists and atheists employ faith in the
same way.
Allow me to try an analogy. If two people have the same food
for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then one of them eats a bag of candy, it
wouldn’t make sense for them to say, “we’re pretty much the same in terms of
nutrition, since we both eat all the same meals.” That doesn’t make sense
because the candy is exactly what makes that person’s eating habits less
nutritious, so having the same meals doesn’t put them on equal footing, if
they’re taking such a significant extra step.
---
Skipping over Sane Faith Commitments, since it’s
basically just a summary of the previous section, we come to The Atheist's
Ultimate Faith Commitment, where Spiegel really starts going for the gusto.
Again, it starts out pretty reasonable (actually acknowledging some of the
objections I just raised), but then takes a hard left turn:
This is not to say that religious
people don't exhibit certain forms of faith that non-religious people do not.
Clearly, we theists trust in God, while atheists do not. And Christians
consciously trust in the person of Christ, while non-Christians do not. But we
should not conclude from this that atheists exhibit less faith overall than
religious folks. In fact, there are some faith commitments that an atheist must
make precisely because of his rejection of God and all things supernatural.
(Here I assume, for simplicity's sake, that atheists are also naturalists.)
Something tells me I know exactly where this is going, but
I’ll keep reading anyway. Spiegel asserts that something he calls the “naturalist
explainability thesis” (which appears to be a phrase he just coined himself) is
a major article of faith for atheists:
Atheists often complain that
theists constantly fall back on God as the ultimate explanation for everything.
Though they present their rejection of this as a point of intellectual
scrupulousness, they overlook the fact that their own belief—that all the
fundamental facts of the universe have a materialist explanation—is left
completely without foundation.
Spiegel seems to be ignoring the fact that naturalists do
have plenty of foundation for natural explanations of a lot of specific things
in the universe. The formation of stars and planets, or the complexity of
living organisms, for example. For some things like that, there are very
well-evidenced natural explanations which do provide a more than sufficient
foundation for what Spiegel would label as “justified faith.” And for other
things that may not have as solid a foundation, many naturalists have no
problem saying, “we don’t know, and that’s okay.” As Michael Shermer put it, in
response to a claim that something could be not be explained through existing
scientific knowledge:
So what? The fact that we cannot
fully explain a mystery with natural means does not mean it requires a
supernatural explanation. It just means that we don’t know everything. Such
uncertainty is at the very heart of science and is what makes it such a
challenging enterprise.
[4]
(To be very forthright, this isn’t the quote I would’ve
preferred to use, because it’s less direct, and thus leaves room open for less
charitable interpretations. I’ve seen a number of debates with Michael Shermer,
and my recollection is that it’s not uncommon for him to say that we just don’t
know some things, and that’s okay. But of course, audio/video is much harder to
search than text, so I opted for this quote instead of re-watching all the
Shermer debates I’ve seen, just to find that one sound-byte.)
Let me clarify what I think he’s saying here, because I
suspect someone who is less sympathetic towards naturalism may well read this
quote and see it as some kind of admission that naturalists are completely
closed to any supernatural explanation no matter what. But notice, the issue at
play is that there’s no existing natural explanation for something. There’s not
even a claim being made that there’s actual evidence for a supernatural explanation,
just the lack of evidence for a natural one. What Shermer’s saying here is that
if there’s no evidence for a natural explanation, and no evidence for a
supernatural explanation, then it’s better to just accept that we don’t know,
instead of assuming a supernatural explanation so we can feel like we’ve closed
the gap in our knowledge.
In other words, contrary to Spiegel’s assertion that the
naturalist’s explanations are completely without foundation, Shermer’s position
(which I believe is shared by many rationally-minded atheists) is that it’s
better to accept ignorance than have any belief which is completely without
foundation. The mistake Spiegel’s making here (with the examples he gives of
fine-tuning, and the emergence of life and consciousness) is that just because
naturalists may not have an airtight natural explanation for those things,
they’re just assuming a natural explanation because this so-called “naturalist
explainability thesis” is an article of faith. On the contrary, I contend that it’s
perfectly reasonable, and demands no faith at all, to say “we don’t know what
caused life to emerge, but until you give me any actual evidence that it was
God, I’m not gonna believe that.” Because, if I did just assume it was God
without any positive evidence (as
opposed to the “evidence” of simply not having any other explanation), then I
would be left completely without foundation as a theist, not an atheist.
---
Ironically, the next section is called “The Bigger Leap,”
and Spiegel starts it out by making a big leap. Referencing those examples he
gave in the previous section, he refers to them as “these inexplicable facts of
the cosmos.” The big leap he’s making is determining that just because
something doesn’t currently have an explanation, apparently means to him that
no explanation can ever be found (isn’t that what “inexplicable” means?).
That’s exactly what Shermer was saying. Just because something doesn’t
currently have an explanation, doesn’t mean we should give up and assume
they’re inexplicable without invoking God. The only reason we should accept God
as the explanation is if there’s actual evidence that God is the correct
explanation, and not because we’re frustrated by how inexplicable it seems to
be.
And then in the second paragraph, Spiegel goes on and makes
a second big leap:
Now it is true that the theist
also believes by faith that divine intelligence created life, consciousness,
and the laws of nature. But considering the attributes of an almighty, all-wise
God and his infinite capacity for creativity, this actually seems much less of
a leap of faith than the atheist makes in holding to the naturalist
explainability thesis. It is for this reason that some have claimed that it is
not the theist but the atheist who exhibits more faith.
While there are doubtless some believers who are cheering at
his deft use of the classic “I am rubber, you are glue” defense, we shouldn’t
ignore the fact that there’s yet another unsupported assertion in that
statement. What is the reason he gives for saying that theists aren’t making a
leap of faith? “The attributes of an almighty, all-wise God and his infinite
capacity for creativity.” How does he know God has these attributes? He’s
already acknowledged that the authority of Scripture can’t be proved, so it
can’t be just from the Bible. He’s certainly made no arguments in this article
for how it would be justified faith that God has any of those attributes, much less all. In short, he’s defending the assertion that theists
aren’t making a leap of faith by making a different leap of faith.
In the final section, Spiegel makes what seems to me a
pretty big shift in the point he was making. He says, “regardless of your
worldview, you must make a number of belief commitments that cannot be
evidentially justified,” and then he lists those “Philosophical Faith
Commitments” like the Law of Causality and the Uniformity of Nature. Now, I’ll
grant you that the label of “justified faith” is something he only used once,
that I’ve kinda picked up as a way streamlined way of describing what he was
talking about. He never actually referred to any of these beliefs as justified,
so it’s not a direct contradiction to say they cannot be evidentially justified.
But what he did say is that these are beliefs “to which all sane people are
committed.” What I don’t understand is, why would holding these beliefs be a
mark of sanity, if they cannot be evidentially justified? If it’s purely a
matter of assumption, then I don’t see how a person would be insane to not
share those assumptions. But if it’s a mark of sanity to hold these beliefs
because there actually is good grounding to believe them, then it would be
shifting the goal posts to say that they cannot be evidentially justified.
And that is, in general, what this type of argument usually
comes down to; an equivocation fallacy where the theist begins by showing that
everyone has “faith” (in the sense of having faith that the sun will come up
tomorrow, because it has every previous day without fail for our entire lives),
and then subtly transitioning to a conception of “faith” that they use to
justify faith in the existence of God, while being unfettered from the need to
provide any evidence that this faith is warranted (in the same way that the sun
rising tomorrow clearly is).
I don’t know (and won’t assume either position as an article
of faith) whether the people who make this type of argument are doing it as a
willful deception or are themselves victims of self-deception, but in either
case, the pattern of equivocation seems to hold true with notable consistency.
In this instance, Spiegel may have delved into more details and provided more
examples of one point or another, but ultimately, he still succumbed to the
same fallacies of equivocation and unsupported assertions. Believing in the
reliability of one’s own senses does not put theists and atheists on equal
footing. If you have to make a leap of faith to defend the point that you’re
not making some other leap of faith, then it might be time to think a lot
harder about how much faith you actually have.
[2] Ironically,
most atheists are disgusted with Christianity because atheists claim
Christianity requires “blind faith” or “blind trust.” But by the very
definition of the name they carry, atheists in fact are the ones who have based
their beliefs on the absence of evidence.
http://applygodsword.com/the-blind-faith-of-atheism/
Kirk Cameron [from his appearance on Nightline with Ray Comfort]: ….I want to
quote Richard Dawkins who wrote The God Delusion. He said, “Even if there was
no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be
justified in preferring it over all rival theories.” Did you hear that? He said
even if there is no actual evidence, we should still believe it over the other
theories. Even in light of what can be presented to justify those theories.
That is unreasonable and it’s unscientific. That is the definition of blind
faith: “I believe something even though there is not evidence to support it.”
[3] Fifth,
belief in God can be properly basic, without needing further evidence to be
rational. Alvin Plantinga has argued that belief in God is just like belief
that the universe is more than 15 minutes old or belief that other minds exist.
That is, we can rationally believe all of these things without evidence. If we
are designed to know and love God, then belief in God would be properly basic
and rational. For example, I may come to believe in God because I have an
overwhelming sense of God’s presence or of God’s forgiveness and grace. These
beliefs arise from my own experience, and I have no reason to deny them — or
think these are inadequate without supporting evidence.
http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/201304/201304_028_believe_evid.cfm
And in fact, Plantinga maintains, following Calvin, that belief in God is
properly basic. Man has an innate, natural capacity to apprehend God's
existence even as he has a natural capacity to accept truths of perception
(like "I see a tree"). Given the appropriate circumstances- such as
moments of guilt, gratitude, or a sense of God's handiwork in nature-man
naturally apprehends God's existence. Hence, Plantinga insists that his
epistemology is not fideistic, since there are circumstances that make belief
in God a properly basic belief. In fact, it may be more correct, he admits, to
say that the proposition "God exists" is not itself properly basic
but is entailed by other beliefs that are truly basic, such as "God is
convicting me of sin" or "God is speaking to me." Hence, one is
perfectly rational to believe in God wholly apart from evidence.
