Discussing Faith

Written: October 21, 1999

This week's article will be from our guest columnist Lance...

Atheists encounter a lot of religious folks in a variety of forums, including on-line. Many times we try to converse with them about religious or philosophical topics but we frequently seem to get nowhere. On atheist forums we frequently encounter those of "strong faith". In many ways it seems that the stronger the religious person's faith the more difficulty we have communicating with them. I want to explore the issue of the failure of communication between those of faith and those without it.

One thing that should be made clear is that I am including people who are not religious in a traditional sense as people of faith. The postmodernist spiritualist is as much a person of faith as a fundamentalist Christian. In addition, using the definitions I describe below, it is possible for an atheist to be an atheist due to faith. So, these types of communication problems are not strictly along believer - nonbeliever lines. This article deals primarily with developing dialogue between those without faith and people of faith.

To fully explore this issue we first have to examine faith. What is it? What do we mean when we say someone is a "person of faith" or they "have faith"? The most common definition I see floating around in atheist groups is faith is belief in something in the absence of supporting evidence. While I think that might be accurate I think it is also inadequate in the same way that saying atheism is the belief that there are no gods is accurate in that people who have that belief are atheists, but inadequate since that is not the full description of atheism.

Forming Beliefs

While people who believe something in the absence or even in contradiction to evidence may be considered to have faith that doesn't really get to the core of what faith is all about. I think that definition is missing an essential element. That essential element is trust. I think that discussing faith without discussing trust is to be missing an important part of the picture. To explore why I think this is we need to explore the ways in which people can come to beliefs.

Beliefs do not simply appear from nowhere. A belief always comes from somewhere even if the believer may not realize where it comes from. I think there are three essential ways a person can come to believe something. Loosely I would say these are through authority, through intuition and through reason based on experience/evidence. I think most people probably use all three to some extent and there is also the potential for interaction between the three. Some of us may have a strong preference for one over the others. I also think all three methods involve trust to some extent and I'll explain why. Let's consider each method individually.

Authority

We'll examine coming to a belief based on authority first. Essentially, one trusts an authority for some reason or another and accepts what that authority says as truth. The reason for trusting a particular authority will vary depending on the authority and the person doing the trusting. I think that all people will form beliefs based on authority, including atheists. In our modern, complex society it is almost a necessity. Most atheists trust the opinions of at least some scientists. We may have what we consider good reasons for that trust and the trust is not absolute or irrevocable but it is still trust in authority.

Another example of such trust might be a Catholic who accepts what the church tells them on trust. The church is a trusted authority to these people. The reason that a Catholic trusts the church may be [probably will be in my opinion] very different than the reason an atheist trusts a scientific authority, but both instances represent belief formation based on a trusted authority. We'll discuss some of the differences in approach to trust further on.

Quote of the week: Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), p. 36.

Intuition

The second method of belief formation is through intuition. It is hard to say for sure exactly what intuition is. It may be a broad heading that actually covers several possible mechanisms. Intuition might be related to emotion. It might be a process of the brain related to pattern matching. It might be a "lower" brain function relating to instinctual behavior. It might be an unconscious reasoning process, or it might be a combination of these or something else entirely. Regardless of its exact nature it can generally be described as having a "feeling" that something is true.

I think it safe to say that we have all experienced this feeling at one time or another. Any time you've had a "hunch" it is your intuition at work. If you act on a hunch then you are trusting your intuition to some extent. After all, you could just ignore the feeling. Why give it any credence at all? Even if you follow your hunch, as many police investigators and scientists have, by reasoning based on evidence, you still had to have some trust in your intuition to take that step. However, some people might not bother following up on a feeling from intuition. They might trust their intuition implicitly and simply accept what their intuition tells them is true as true.

Reason

Finally, there is the formation of a belief by reason based on experience/evidence. By using a deductive process based on some starting premises, you can arrive at conclusions that you believe are true. The premises come either from empirical evidence that you have experienced or from previous conclusions of this same process. Note that it is possible to reason based on premises that are not empirically derived, such as from intuition or authority, but I'm not including those items here as I think they fall more under the previous two categories.

Here we are talking about reason based on empirical facts. I think it is only fair to say that even this option also involves trust to some degree. Specifically we have to have some trust in our minds and senses. It is true that we may have good reason for this trust and that not trusting your own mind and senses would make life quite difficult to live and might even qualify as being insane. Our trust in our mind and senses also is probably qualified and revocable to some extent, as we know that our mind and senses have limitations and can be incorrect sometimes.

An example of cases where our minds and senses can play "tricks" on us would be optical illusions. In addition, we recognize that both our minds and senses are biologically based and as such if there is something wrong with our brains there could be problems leading to hallucinations, unusual emotional feelings, and other symptoms. But, with these provisos we still have to have some trust in our minds and senses to use reason based on evidence to come to beliefs. While it should be acknowledged, I think that this trust falls into a somewhat different category than the trust described in the previous two categories since I would say it is almost required to live. Even the most ardent fundamentalist needs to trust their mind and senses to some degree. Only the insane could be justified in not trusting their mind or senses at all and even they would probably require at least some small level of trust unless they are catatonic or comatose.

Don't miss the other section:

Part 2: Common Ground?