Faith and Misunderstanding

I've come to learn that there's no end in atheistic dismissive complacency when it comes to faith -- an epistemic bugaboo from popular atheistic standing that needs to end, that is a disease to us and our world, that in the words of the eloquent ferocity of Christopher Hitchens "poisons everything". However, the way to end something you don't like that has an emotional attachment by living, breathing human beings isn't to botch your terms, thereby giving even the ignorant of the faithful a chance to rile up their emotions in claiming that faith is nothing of the kind. I found another atheist misunderstanding the theistic worldview, this time by a chap named Massimo Pigliucci, a professor with three -- yes, three -- doctorates, one of which is in philosophy. His most recent subject is "faith and reason", and not once does he reference Aquinas, James, or any other theistic superhero in unrutting a working definition for faith. No, his hands are enough in fashioning his own understanding.

According to Pigliucci, faith "means that one believes something regardless or even in spite of the evidence." Right away I'm left involuntarily recalling Dawkins' ill-suited definition from The Selfish Gene over thirty years ago: where faith means "blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence." The fact that Pigliucci has such a clear Dawkinsian aftertaste only points out pedestrian stolidness on his part. Faith is not defined by its ability to deny. Only scientists with question begging tendencies or those who conflate a word's connotative meaning with its historical associations would ever define faith in such a way as Dawkins and Pigliucci do.

He then goes on to dismiss himself from any association with faith in secular contexts. Faith in your wife, Dr. Pigliucci? "No, I trust her because I know her and know that she loves me." Then what on earth is faith if it isn't trust-based? Twenty seconds perusing through a Greek lexicon with the Greek term for faith (pistis) will lead to the conclusion that its morphological root is the exact same as the Greek term for belief (pisteuo), and that both of these words heavily imply trust or (closely related to this) commitment. And belief is exactly what Pigliucci claims faith isn't, with his example regarding his belief in evolution, which he claims is legit given that it coincides with evidence.

Well, as it stands, and much to the contrary of sloppy theological rambling, belief as we understand it as a synonym for faith is decidedly not belief in at least the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Belief for the Jews and early Christians was existential, ours intellectual; theirs was the trust associated with a person rather than an idea or system of thought, while ours was precisely this. Still, belief (in the contemporary, intellectual sense), Pigliucci says, can be held "in proportion to the available evidence and reasons in their favor." Yes, it can. But this just isn't how the word is used. Alan Watts went as far to understand belief as "the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be." There's an element of uncertainty in belief that fails the scientific thirst for certainty, and is all the more emphatic with regard to acceptance and agnosticism.

Even the age-old question of the existence of an external world to our senses isn't a matter of faith for Pigliucci. That's an assumption taken up for pragmatic reasons, he says -- namely, the reason that one would be no better off than insanity without accepting it. This is a point that glimmers, much to his credit, and few without philosophical training would ever put it this way. As far as pragmatism and assumptions go, he's absolutely right. But assumption is the heart of faith, and faith (as generic trust) itself is the working out of assumption. Faith in the deepest sense, not as generic trust (which could include trust in metaphysical assumptions) but as existential trust also involves the working out of a philosophical assumption: namely that one's intuition is sufficient in mediating religious experience as valid, and if intuition is thrown out, reason itself, which is continually validated by it, would be out the door as well. It's not so much a matter of doctrine, and anyone who limits faith to objectivity rather than existential encounter is only waiting for a rational or scientific whipping, and it's no shock that so many religious individuals coil up in aggressive fear when their belief systems are barraged by scientific thought. What they love is being ruined. Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.

Now, I'm not at all going to deny that religion is in eclipse, or that God to the Western mind is drifting to a doze, what with more people than ever coming out of a cognitive closet in confessing a downright unbelief in anything related to religiosity. More power to them. In line with where Hitchens stands, unbelief has historically been forced to the closet because of the madness and fulminating intolerance of the religious faithful who idolize their ideas rather than ascertain God through conscience, and given this unbelief might not have been as much a minority position that bloomed into the world so recently as one would like to think. I don't doubt it.

When people don't have the freedom to think on the side of the antithesis of faith, they usually end up becoming the nasty believers that people like Hitchens justly and contemptuously attack. It's not so much faith that's the criminal, as if human beings were so passive as to be corrupted by scribbles in an antiquated book (though the matter is different when flesh and blood authorities enforce their views on the innocent). It's the inability of the brain to breathe that's to blame. Feeble faith -- which so notoriously limits itself to faith in dogma, rather than faith in God, pre-rationally but by no means absolutely anti-rationally -- deserves to have the freedom to be rebelled against, and one of the main reasons for so much sour-faced repugnance for the religion of one's youth these days is that there is too often no freedom to rebel against what a collection of intolerant God-touters foment without severe stigmatic consequences.

Let the rebels rebel. My favorite thought tacked to this relates to a pack of bloodthirsty Calvinists (a modification, not a characterization; not all Calvinists are bloodthirsty) I was speaking with a while back. As usual, they were phenomenally ticked that a "heretic" they were speaking of could dare to rebel against God by believing in something like free will or, tee, objective scriptural criticism, and they were becoming more and more inconsolably angry over God's "truth" being rejected the more they thought of him. As if God couldn't fend for Himself. If religion would only learn to shut up when people choose what it views as perdition and let God be God according to its own damnable dogma, things would be a million times better. The sword dropped in the name of Christ is done not from authentic, existentially trust-based faith (which is necessarily conscience-driven), but from the most brutal unfaith in one's comprehension-sponsored, pathetic scriptural worship so ridiculously confused with faith. It's like the "believers" can't even keep to their own rules. Or they don't really believe them to begin with.

Of course, if instead of wasting away on theological rabbit trails they actually did such blindingly evident commandments first like loving their enemies, praying for the lost, and in all things eschewing grumbling and disputation, being perpetually patient and dovelike in the spirit of Christ, and, oh, well, I can see that now I'm losing even the choir.