Hope is not the same as faith. Hoping is not the same as knowing. If you hope something happened you’re not claiming it did happen. When the faithful say, “Jesus walked on water,” they are not saying they hope Jesus walked on water, but rather are claiming Jesus actually did walk on water.
Thought Challenge!
In my May 6, 2012, public lecture for the Humanists of Greater Portland, I further underscored the difference between faith and hope by issuing the following thought challenge:
Give me a sentence where one must use the word “faith,” and cannot replace that with “hope,” yet at the same time isn’t an example of pretending to know something one doesn’t know.
To date, nobody has answered the thought challenge. I don’t think it can be answered because faith and hope are not synonyms.
Atheist
“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer God than you do.”
—Stephen F. Roberts
Of all the terms used in this book, none is more problematic, more contentious, more divisive, or more confusing than the term “atheist.”
This confusion is understandable given that the word “theist” is contained in the word “atheist.” It is thus natural to assume a type of parallelism between the two words. Many of the faithful imagine that just as a theist firmly believes in God, an a-theist firmly disbelieves in God. This definitional and conceptual confusion needs to be clarified.
“Atheist,” as I use the term, means, “There’s insufficient evidence to warrant belief in a divine, supernatural creator of the universe. However, if I were shown sufficient evidence to warrant belief in such an entity, then I would believe.”8 9 I recommend we start to conceptualize “atheist” in this way so we can move the conversation forward.
The atheist does not claim, “No matter how solid the evidence for a supernatural creator, I refuse to believe.”10 In The God Delusion, for example, Horseman Dawkins provides a 1–7 scale, with 1 being absolute belief and 7 being absolute disbelief in a divine entity (Dawkins, 2006a, pp. 50–51). Dawkins, whom many consider to be among the most hawkish of atheists, only places himself at a 6. In other words, even Dawkins does not definitively claim there is no God. He simply thinks the existence of God is highly unlikely. A difference between an atheist and a person of faith is that an atheist is willing to revise their belief (if provided sufficient evidence); the faithful permit no such revision.
Agnostic
Agnostics profess to not know whether or not there’s an undetectable, metaphysical entity that created the universe. Agnostics think there’s not enough evidence to warrant belief in God, but because it’s logically possible they remain unsure of God’s existence. Again, an agnostic is willing to revise her belief if provided sufficient evidence.
The problem with agnosticism is that in the last 2,400 years of intellectual history, not a single argument for the existence of God has withstood scrutiny. Not one. Aquinas’s five proofs, fail. Pascal’s Wager, fail. Anselm’s ontological argument, fail. The fine-tuning argument, fail. The Kalm cosmological argument, fail. All refuted. All failures.11
I dislike the terms “agnostic” and “agnosticism.” I advise Street Epistemologists to not use these terms. This is why: I don’t believe Santa Claus is a real person who flies around in a sleigh led by reindeer delivering presents. I am a Santa Claus atheist. Even though there’s nothing logically impossible about this phenomenon, I’m not a Santa Claus agnostic. (That is, a large man in a red suit delivering presents at the speed of light is not a logical contradiction.) “Agnostic” and “agnosticism” are unnecessary terms. Street Epistemologists should avoid them.
EPISTEMOLOGY AND KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS
Now that the terms “faith,” “atheist,” and “agnostic” have been clarified, we can have a meaningful discussion about “belief without evidence” being an unreliable way to navigate reality. We can also examine the dangers of formulating beliefs and social policies on the basis of insufficient evidence.
Faith Claims Are Knowledge Claims
The term “epistemology” comes from the Greek “episteme,” which means “knowledge,” and “logos,” which means “reason and logic” and “argument and inquiry” and therefore, by extension, “the study of.” Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that focuses on how we come to knowledge, what knowledge is, and what processes of knowing the world are reliable.
Conclusions one comes to as the result of an epistemological process are knowledge claims. A knowledge claim is an assertion of truth. Examples of knowledge claims include: “The moon is 52,401 miles from the Earth,” “My fist has a greater diameter than a soda can,” and “The Azande supreme God, Onyame, created the world and all lesser gods.”
Faith is an epistemology.12 It’s a method and a process people use to understand reality. Faith-based conclusions are knowledge claims. For example, “I have faith Jesus Christ will heal my sickness because it says so in Luke” is a knowledge claim. The utterer of this statement is asserting Jesus will heal her.
Those who make faith claims are professing to know something about the external world. For example, when someone says, “Jesus walked on water” (Matthew 14:22–33), that person is claiming to know there was an historical figure named Jesus and that he, unaided by technology, literally walked across the surface of the water. “Jesus walked on water” is a knowledge claim—an objective statement of fact.
Much of the confusion about faith-based claims comes from mistaking objective claims with subjective claims. Knowledge claims purport to be objective because they assert a truth about the world. Subjective claims are not knowledge claims and do not assert a truth about the world; rather, they are statements about one’s own unique, situated, subjective, personal experiences or preferences.
Think of subjective claims as matters of taste or opinion. For example, “Mustard on my hot dog tastes good,” “John Travolta is the greatest actor who’s ever lived,” and “The final season of Battlestar Galactica wasn’t as good as the first two seasons.” These are subjective statements because they relate to matters of taste. They are not statements of fact about the world. They do not apply to everyone. Contrast these statements with, “The Dalai Lama reincarnates.” This statement is a knowledge claim. It’s an assertion of truth about the world that is independent of one’s taste or liking; it’s a faith claim masquerading as a knowledge claim, a statement of fact.
Faith claims are knowledge claims. Faith claims are statements of fact about the world.
Faith Is an Unreliable Epistemology
“Your religious beliefs typically depend on the community in which you were raised or live. The spiritual experiences of people in ancient Greece, medieval Japan or 21st-century Saudi Arabia do not lead to belief in Christianity. It seems, therefore, that religious belief very likely tracks not truth but social conditioning.”
—Gary Gutting, “The Stone,” New York Times, September 14, 2011
Faith is a failed epistemology. Showing why faith fails has been done before. And it’s been done well (Bering, 2011; Harris, 2004; Loftus, 2010; Loftus, 2013; McCormick, 2012; Schick & Vaughn, 2008; Shermer, 1997; Shermer, 2011; Smith, 1979; Stenger & Barker, 2012; Torres, 2012; Wade, 2009). There’s no need to recapitulate this vast body of scholarship. Instead, I’ll briefly explain what I find to be one of the principal arguments against faith.
If a belief is based on insufficient evidence, then any further conclusions drawn from the belief will at best be of questionable value. Believing on the basis of insufficient evidence cannot point one toward the truth. For example, the following are unassailable facts everyone, faithful or not, would agree upon:
There are different faith traditions.
Different faith traditions make different truth claims.
The truth claims of some faith traditions contradict the truth claims of other faith traditions. For example, Muslims believe Muhammad (570–632) was the last prophet (Sura 33:40). Mormons believe Joseph Smi
th (1805–1844), who lived after Muhammad, was a prophet.
It cannot both be the case that Muhammad was the last prophet and someone who lived after Muhammad was also a prophet.
Therefore: At least one of these claims must be false (perhaps both).
It is impossible to figure out which of these claims is incorrect if the tool one uses to do so is faith. As a tool, as an epistemology, as a method of reasoning, as a process for knowing the world, faith cannot adjudicate between competing claims (“Muhammad was the last prophet” versus “Joseph Smith was a prophet”). Faith cannot steer one away from falsehood and toward truth.
This is because faith does not have a built-in corrective mechanism. That is, faith claims have no way to be corrected, altered, revised, or modified. For example, if one has faith in the claim, “The Earth is 4,000 years old,” how could this belief be revised? If one believes that the Earth is 4,000 years old on the basis of faith, then there’s no evidence, reason, or body of facts one could present to dissuade one from belief in this claim.13
The only way to figure out which claims about the world are likely true, and which are likely false, is through reason and evidence. There is no other way.
THE DANGER OF FAITH
“No amount of belief makes something a fact.”
—James Randi
The pretending-to-know-things-you-don’t-know pandemic hurts us all. Believing things on the basis of something other than evidence and reason causes people to misconstrue what’s good for them and what’s good for their communities. Those who believe on the basis of insufficient evidence create external conditions based upon what they think is in their best interest, but this is actually counterproductive. In the United States, for example, public policies driven by people who pretend to know things they don’t know continue to hurt people: abstinence-only sex education, prohibitions against gay marriage, bans on death with dignity, corporal punishment in schools, failure to fund international family planning organizations, and promoting the teaching of Creationism and other pseudosciences are but a few of the many misguided conclusions wrought by irrationality.
The less one relies on reason and evidence to form conclusions, the more arbitrary the conclusion. In aggregate, conclusions that result from a lack of evidence can have incredibly dangerous consequences. The Taliban, for example, have rooted their vision of a good life on the Koran. By acting on what they perceive to be divine injunctions revealed to God’s Prophet, they think they’re creating a good life and a good society. They are not.14 15 Consequently, the conclusions they act upon—covering women and beating them, beheading people who have rival interpretations of the Koran or who act in ways they deem un-Islamic, perpetrating violence against females who seek an education, denying citizens basic freedoms, executing people for blasphemy—take them away from a good life. They’ve misidentified the process that will allow their community to flourish because they’ve identified and used faith, not evidence and reason, as a guide.
How do we know the society the Taliban created has not led to human flourishing? By virtually every modern metric: exports versus imports, literacy, economic aid, public health, life expectancy, infant mortality, household income, GDP, Happy Planet Index, etc. Afghanistan under the Taliban was an unmitigated catastrophe. It is not in anyone’s interest, particularly the people who live under their tyranny, to have created a dystopian, premodern, misogynistic theocracy.16 (If you don’t think they created a dystopia, or if you’re a relativist and think they created a society that’s merely different, not better or worse, from Denmark, for example, then there’s nothing I can say to you. Nothing I write in this book will persuade you.)
The vast majority of people use faith to understand the world, to guide their actions, and to ground their institutions. Nation-states like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran adhere to Islamic law (sharia) as the basis for state law. This is a problem that would be unimaginable in its scope and severity were it not for the fact that we’re currently witnesses to this epistemic horror show, such as the beheading of homosexuals, blasphemers, adulterers, and apostates and radically disproportionate treatment of individuals based upon their gender.
Yet there is hope. Faith is slowly falling into disrepute. The forces of unreason are diminishing in number. Thousands of new Horsemen, Street Epistemologists, are emerging.
DIG DEEPER
Books
Sam Harris, The End of Faith (Harris, 2004)
Stephen Law, Believing Bullshit (Law, 2011)
John W. Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith (Loftus, 2013)
Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain (Shermer, 2011)
Al Stefanelli, A Voice Of Reason in an Unreasonable World: The Rise of Atheism On Planet Earth (Stefanelli, 2011)
Victor Stenger, God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (Stenger, 2012)
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Wright, 2013)
Videos
Peter Boghossian,“Jesus, the Easter Bunny, and Other Delusions: Just Say No!” http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2012/02/14/Jesusthe-Easter-Bunny-and-Other-Delusions-Just-Say-No.aspx
Peter Boghossian, “Faith: Pretending to Know Things You Don’t Know,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp4WUFXvCFQ
Jerry Coyne, “Why Science and Faith Are Incompatible: My Talk in Edinburgh,” http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/why-science-and-faith-are-incompatible-my-talk-in-edinburgh/
QualiaSoup’s YouTube channel, “UK Secular Humanist Discussing: Science & the Natural World, Critical Thinking, Atheism, Philosophy, Religion,” http://www.youtube.com/user/QualiaSoup
The Atheist Experience, “The Atheist Experience is a weekly cable access television show in Austin, Texas geared at a non-atheist audience. Every week we field live calls from atheists and believers alike, and you never know what you’re going to get!” http://www.atheistexperience.com
Thunderf00t’s YouTube channel, “The true beauty of a self-inquiring sentient universe is lost on those who elect to walk the intellectually vacuous path of comfortable paranoid fantasies,” http://www.youtube.com/user/Thunderf00t
NOTES
The Book of Alma is one of the books in the Book of Mormon. The complete title is “The Book of Alma: The Son of Alma.” Religious belief is very often defended through the use of clever semantics. There are some important things to note about these dodges. When a person of faith is questioned over one or more specific, illogical tenets of their belief, they often respond with, “Well, of course I don’t believe that,” leaving the Street Epistemologist at a disadvantage since the believer continues to profess their unaltered faith-based belief regardless. If pressed further, the believer will either respond with deepities or with a somewhat different version of “why” they continue to believe despite a lack of evidence. This entrenched position results in a cycle of indefinite repetition. My sense is that those who use meaningless words to protect their emotional ties to faith are engaging in self-deception. (This type of “conversation” is not twosided; it is a monologue masquerading as a dialogue.)
The emotional satisfaction of religious belief vitally depends upon the beliefs being taken literally; the epistemic defense of such beliefs crucially depends on taking them nonliterally. This type of cognitive disruption does not bode well in the search for truth.
What nearly all sophisticated believers do is simultaneously deceive themselves while alternating between two stances: they absolutely don’t believe in that—of course he didn’t walk on water—while voicing unflappable conviction about this—the world was created by a higher power. When defending epistemically, they characterize the belief as not literally requiring the existence of a Special Person (“God loves us” means “Love is important,” “Love prevails in the end,” etc.), but then as soon as they have satisfied the epistemic challenge, they reframe the belief more literally (“God loves us” means “There is a Special Person w
ho loves us”).
I think this latter issue is far more important to address than critics of faith realize, and it is probably a more common phenomenon (not limited to intellectuals) than one might think. It is at least a part of what the believer is doing when replying to criticism by simply and mysteriously saying, “You just don’t understand.” The other part is, “You lack detailed familiarity with the culture, history, and theology of my religion.”
This is a separate issue, and is often enough true, though the response to that is like replying to someone who points out Star Trek is fiction by saying, “You wouldn’t say that if you had the detailed and rich experience of being a Trekkie that I have,” which is, of course, absurd.
Hebrews 11 defines faith, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence [elenchus] of things not seen.” What is interesting is the use of the term “elenchus” in this passage. “Elenchus” in Homer (8th century) is variously: to put to shame, to treat with contempt, to question with the aim of disproving, with the aim of censure, accusation, to accuse someone and perhaps to convict him—oftentimes in uses where superior officers dress down rank and file soldiers. In courts of law the term is also used: to bring charges, to bring accusations, but also to bring proofs, evidence, to offer convincing proofs. Pre-Socratics like Parmenides (early 5th century) use it as Socrates does: as argument, scrutiny, cross-examination for the purpose of refutation or disproof.
In Koine, the verb elencho is “I accuse, rebuke, reprove,” and also “I expose, I show to be guilty, I prove” (in the sense of putting the lie to a public statement). It’s in John 3:20; 1 Cor 14:24; Eph. 5:11, 13; James 2: 9. Souter’s Lexicon of the New Testament lists elenchus as “proof, possibly a persuasion” (Souter, 1917). This evidence points to a straightforward fact: in the Apostolic Age, the word elenchus expands in an important new context to take on the sense that is on stage in Hebrews 11, that is, people began using the word in a new way. They advocated, practiced, and helped make a success of using the word “elenchus.” Socrates used this term to indicate a rigorous process of argumentation by strict application of logic. In the new sense elenchus is used as conviction or persuasion or some other species of willing and satisfied affirmation—without argument—without going through the Socratic process of rigorous argumentation.
A Manual for Creating Atheists Page 3