Abstract
Many theists who identify themselves with the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) maintain that it is perfectly acceptable to have faith that God exists. In this paper, I argue that, when believing that God exists will affect others, it is prima facie wrong to forgo attempting to believe that God exists on the basis of sufficient evidence. Lest there be any confusion: I do not argue that it is always wrong to have faith that God exists, only that, under certain conditions, it can be.
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Notes
Hilary Kornblith, ‘Naturalizing Rationality,’ in Naturalism and Rationality, edited by Newton Garver and Peter H. Hare (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books), 119.
John 20:29.
By ‘God,’ I mean the Abrahamic god, a being who is understood to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, perfectly good, eternal, self-existent, and personal, among other things.
Stephen T. Davis, Faith, Skepticism, and Evidence (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1978), 26.
Davis, 28.
Alvin Plantinga, ‘Science and Religion,’ in Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, Daniel Dennett and Alvin Plantinga (New York, NY: OUP, 2011), 9.
Richard Dawkins, ‘Science Versus Religion,’ in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, edited by Louis Pojman (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2003), 451. Also, Sam Harris, citing Paul Tillich, writes of faith as ‘an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence.’ See Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004), 65.
Richard E. Creel, ‘Faith as Imperfect Knowledge,’ in Faith in Theory and Practice, 69.
It should be noted here that one reviewer of this paper expressed misgivings about this understanding of having faith that God exists, claiming that,
although many people understand … faith in this way, it is scarcely the mainstream understanding of … faith. I imagine that many Christians, for example, would say that they have faith that Christ died for our sins, and would say that an adequate reason for the truth of this proposition is that the Bible declares that it is true.
But, ironically, this case gives us reason to believe that the understanding of having faith employed is indeed mainstream. After all, what does it even mean to say that many Christians ‘have faith’ that Christ died for our sins and that they believe that they have an ‘adequate reason’ to believe this? If such Christians really believe they have adequate reason to believe that Christ died for our sins, what are they adding—if anything at all—when they say that they ‘have faith’ that Christ died for our sins? Faith has a non-trivial role to play in this claim, I submit, only if the reason they have for believing that Christ died for their sins is, by their own lights, somehow inadequate. So, if such Christians are representative of the mainstream view of having faith, as the reviewer seems to be suggesting, then my understanding of having faith is indeed mainstream.
William Lad Sessions, ‘The Certainty of Faith,’ in Faith in Theory and Practice, edited by Elizabeth S. Radcliffe and Carol J. White (Peru, Illinois: Open Court Publishing), 75.
See Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 17ff.
The Language of Psychology: Dictionary and Research Guide, http://www.123exp-health.com/t/01084175594/.
For more on eliminative materialism, see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/.
W. K. Clifford, ‘The Ethics of Belief,’ in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, 367.
The possibility of such a doxastic practice is discussed in George Mavrodes’s ‘Jerusalem and Athens Revisited,’ in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 209.
If the reader is not sufficiently familiar with the history of these progresses, a perusal of the relevant entries in an encyclopedia is a good place to start.
Again, if the reader is not sufficiently familiar with the history of these progresses, a perusal of the relevant entries in an encyclopedia is a good place to start. See also Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker, eds., A History of Western Ethics, 2nd edition (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003); Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998).
See Alvin Plantinga, ‘Reason and Belief in God,’ in Faith and Rationality, 16–94.
Clifford held that even believing propositions that are not others-regarding has deleterious effects, such as making the individual who does so (repeatedly anyway) more gullible and, in turn, more susceptible to believing on the basis of insufficient evidence propositions that are others-regarding.
For example, one might wonder whether we can control what we believe and, in turn, be morally accountable for what we believe. There is much to say about this. But, briefly, even we do not have direct control over what we believe—though we may not be able to, say, will ourselves to adopt any given belief—we nevertheless seem to have indirect control over what we believe. Indeed, two philosophers who couldn’t disagree more on the issue of having faith—Jonathan Adler and William Alston—nevertheless agree that we have indirect control over what we believe. The ardent evidentialist Adler writes,
for many of our beliefs we do have the ability to influence and shape the dispositions underlying their acceptance. If you are quick to ascribe ill motives to others, you have probably had many occasions to discern and evaluate this pattern of your attributions and you can undertake to control them accordingly. The modification does not require direct control over your believing. (Jonathan Adler, Belief’s Own Ethics (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2006), 66)
While the equally ardent anti-evidentialist Alston writes:
… I do have voluntary control over moves that can influence a particular belief formation—for example, looking for more evidence or selectively exposing myself to evidence—and moves that can affect my general belief-forming habits or tendencies—for example, training myself to be more critical of testimony. (William P. Alston, ‘Christian Experience and Christian Belief,’ in Faith and Rationality, 114)
If Adler and Alston are correct about this—and it seems to me that that they are—then we can indeed control what we believe, at least indirectly.
William Rowe introduced the concept of a ‘G.E. Moore Shift.’ See Rowe, 128–29.
An anonymous reviewer of this paper took issue with my previous claim that we cannot help believing these things, noting: ‘For one thing, Pyrrhonist skeptics have claimed to have a fair degree of success in carrying out a policy of withholding belief while, with respect to their attitudes and actions, being guided by appearances.’ Now, I am no expert on Pyrrhonist skepticism, and I have no doubt that the reviewer is correct in saying that they claimed to have such success. But I find it nearly impossible to believe that being guided by beliefs regarding appearances rather than being guided by beliefs regarding the real existence of, say, physical objects—including not only ducks but stampeding horses, swinging swords, incoming spears, falling rocks, food, doors, etc.—is conducive for successfully navigating through life. After all, mere appearances are just that, mere appearances. So, unless one also thinks that appearances give us good reason to believe that physical objects really exist, I fail to see how appearances could serve one in successfully navigating through life. ‘I am being appeared to sword-swingingly; thus, I ought to move out of the way’ makes sense if the appearance of a swinging sword gives one good reason to believe that the swinging sword really exists. And if it does give one good reason to think that the swinging sword really exists, then it’s doubtful that Pyrrhonist skeptics really withheld belief about the real existence of physical objects. On the other hand, if being appeared to sword-swingingly does not give one good reason to believe that a swinging sword really exists, then what possible role could such appearances play in one’s successful navigation of life? In other words, if appearances do not give one good reason to believe that a physical object really exists, how are they any better at helping us successfully navigate through life than mere fictions or fantasies? All this is to say I rather doubt Pyrrhonist skeptics really suspended judgments about physical objects. Moreover, Pyrrhonist skepticism notwithstanding, the claim that such beliefs are forced upon us remains true for the vast majority of us—i.e., those of us who are not Pyrrhonist skeptics.
According to adherents.com, 3.6 billion out of the world’s 6.7 billion are adherents of religions that include belief in God as understood here. Moreover, since being an ‘adherent’ does not entail that one really believes that God exists, the number of believers in God’s existence may be a lot smaller. See http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html.
Incidentally, this seems to be reflected in the legal outcome of this case. Though there is not a one-to-one correspondence between moral status of acts and the legal status of acts, of course, it is worth noting that the mother was subsequently convicted of second-degree reckless homicide. See http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/05/guilty_guilty_guilty_the_mother_who_reli.php
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Lovering, R. On the Morality of Having Faith that God Exists. SOPHIA 51, 17–30 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0284-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0284-y