Faith vs. Reason, Part 1: The Nature of Belief
I have wrestled with the relationship between Faith and Reason ever since my senior year in high school when I was reconverted to conservative, evangelical Christianity (it is possible that I was just extra-converted, a dilemma I am happy to now leave to the theologians). Over the last seventeen years, the battle to hold faith and reason together made for a painful journey over a number of terrains – geographical, institutional, psychological, political, and intellectual. The intellectual journey is for the most part complete, now that I have finally found some genuine cognitive rest. I am not the first to land on the resting place I have found, but I do believe my struggle has produced some ways of looking at the relationship between faith and reason that just may allow a small contribution to this subject’s evolution.
I wish to guide you, the reader, to this same resting place – once we are there, you can decide for yourself if it is a place you can inhabit for good. But there are some less than pleasant waters to tread on the way. In order to begin wading into this deep and murky swamp, I will turn first to what philosophy proper might be able to say about the relationship between faith and reason, or more precisely, about the alleged tension between them. In particular, I will address four philosophical topics: Metaphor, Narrative, Knowledge, and Belief. I will argue that each reveals the unlikelihood of locating a distinction between faith and reason given a strictly philosophical armchair methodology. If an important distinction cannot be found, then neither can a philosophical tension.
The skeptic is usually a good place to begin a dialectic, and so we should tune our ears to the voice of the unbeliever: Faith calls us to dispense with verifiable facts and empirical investigation so that we may cling to the mythological stories, fables, parables, and metaphors that boast to connect us with the otherwise mysterious, eternal unknown. Faith thereby remains an epistemological stance that demands the flouting of our most basic intellectual duties. This is not a faith in harmony with reason. This is a faith at war with reason.
Fair enough. But is this worry at all grounded in sound philosophical enquiry? Can philosophical inquiry lead us to these conclusions? Can philosophical enquiry at least help justify these conclusions?
The first part of this Faith vs. Reason series is my attempt to demonstrate my answers to these questions, and my answers are no and no and no. This worry is not at all grounded in sound philosophical enquiry; philosophical inquiry will not lead us to these conclusions; and philosophical enquiry does not offer justification to these conclusions. In sum, it is impossible to locate a tension between faith and reason with the tools of armchair philosophy.
In this entry I begin to address the subject of Belief.
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Knowledge of fact itself is a bit more complicated than traditional discussions in theology and Plantingian philosophy suggest. I doubt that propositional knowledge – if we must even reference such a technical concept – is a matter of just believing a proposition that ends up being true in the right sort of way – justification, warrant, or whatever. Eric Schwitzgebel, for instance, suggests that knowing that is a capacity whereas belief is a tendency (‘Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs’). But for simplicity, I will here assume that there is a sufficiently tight relationship between propositional knowledge and believing propositions. Considering the current cultural landscape, this seems an innocent move to make: Christians are more apt to talk about their beliefs and believing more than about what they ‘know’; and skeptics these days are more concerned about the rationality, safety, or sanity of what the Christian purportedly believes, not what the Christian can claim to have ‘knowledge’ about. Interest is waning over whether Christians really know something about God since nobody, apparently, can know that they know anyways. Plantinga’s (new reformed) epistemology, for example, is really defending the rationality of Christian belief, by means of a point over the traditional concept of ‘knowledge.’ For the sake of this entry, then, I will collapse propositional knowing into the question of belief.
What is hardly intuitive about the nature of belief after a moment’s reflection tends to be maximally intuitive after a pause and another moment’s reflection guided by the philosopher. This was true for me, and I found it true for my Christian friends when I shared with them years ago Robert Audi’s talk about beliefs comprising, not our conscious, discursive, holding of a proposition in the mind, but rather our dispositions to verbally affirm certain statements of fact. Upon explaining this distinction, I recall meeting firm skepticism, but then ten minutes later, more or less an acceptance of the paradigm shift I was proposing.
There is something important about this dispositional idea about belief that just has to be true; beliefs are not discursive, abstract items within conscious thought, but must be, or at least have some sort of strong connection to, verbal and non-verbal behavioral dispositions. For example: My wife is out getting the mail as I write and I gather she does not have any conscious thought going on at the moment that watermelon is red on the inside; but that does not mean she does not currently believe it. Why do I think this? Because I am sure that upon her return, when I ask her if watermelon is red on the inside she will have no hesitation saying, yes, dear, oh yes it is, I just love being married to a philosopher. She is disposed, in the right sort of way, of making the correct affirmations about the color of watermelons, as well as philosophers – depending on how one takes her meaning.
But on the other hand, perhaps this quality of our believings can be explained without appeal to behavioral dispositions. Propositional content might be somehow preserved in the unconscious mind, a sort of representation of the world that dips into an unconscious state only to be called back up into conscious thought at the appropriate time. On this view, my wife somehow possesses the kind of unconscious state that can produce a conscious state with the same propositional content and according to John Searle, the same literal, ontological intentionality as the unconscious state. Searle thinks that intentional states such as beliefs are like a fish that jump above the surface of the water, making themselves known to the conscious human world, only to then dive back into the ocean – unseen, but keeping their ‘aspectual shape’ of fishhood. Fishhood remains within the deep ocean of the unconscious mind in virtue of the unconscious state – distinct from a nonconscious one – that has the ‘capacity to cause’ another intentional fish of similar wriggling and proportions to jump right back up out of the water at some later date.
I think this idea makes analytic chess a clean game, but I do not think it has much going for it as we progress in our scientific understanding of the mind (particularly after sprinkling in some of Daniel Dennett’s ferocious yet true suggestions). I will get back to this a bit later on. I also think this theory fails when we offer more subtle reflection on particular scenarios of believing in which the proposed ‘content’ of beliefs in the unconscious mind as evidenced by non-verbal behavior tend to pull apart from the ‘content’ of verbally expressed beliefs. For instance, I might be able to sincerely affirm the truth of a propositions while not ‘really’ believing it all that much in practice. Christians struggle, for example, with ‘really’ believing on a daily basis, wondering if they are going to have the inspiration to both talk the talk and walk the walk.
But I will illustrate the general point with some belief scenarios less creedal: We often take someone to believe something based on their answer to a question; you ask Sally where South Dakota is and she says “the Northwest”. But Sally might know how to answer this question correctly without having much understanding about the meaning of ‘Northwest’ – the geography and significance of state lines, and how South Dakota stands in relationship to other places of U.S. geography. On the other hand, someone might not be able evidence a belief credibly through the answering of a question, and yet reveal a belief through non-verbal behavior. You might doubt I have any correct beliefs about the location of the post office after I try to give you directions, yet find me a perfectly suitable guide when I just give up and say “follow me”. Or, someone’s sincere answers might be contrary to what their non-verbal behavior suggests about their real beliefs. For example, someone might sincerely claim that they are not at all racist and note that they do not believe that any race is inferior to another; and yet they continue to act in profoundly racist ways. The intuition here is that on a fundamental level this person does believe that a particular race is inferior to another despite their sincere verbally expressed ‘belief’ that they do not.
These kinds of considerations have led some philosophers come to the conclusion that beliefs just are verbal and non-verbal behavioral dispositions. To these behavioral dispositions, Eric Schwitzgebel adds phenomenal and cognitive dispositions. According to Schwitzgebel, it is more scientifically and philosophically useful to think of a belief as consisting of just those dispositions that we take to be stereotypical for that belief.
I propose a position that might be seen as a middle ground between the jumping fish idea and the dispositional account. On the one view, beliefs are contents or representations that are stored in the unconscious mind for later affirmation in thought and words. On the other view, beliefs are rather just stereotypical dispositions – verbal expression just one of the many different dispositions of the belief’s stereotype. I will briefly explain why I distance myself from both views, and I will then summarize my own position (although I will need a second ‘Part 2′ entry to complete this task).
The Jumping Fish
I am intrigued by David Pitt’s (2004) restatement of Dretske’s view that we differentiate an Object from an Object’s immediate environment based on what the Object is like, how the Object looks. On my interpretation of Pitt’s view, what the Object is like, and by implication our entire conscious visual experience generally, is primitive, a simple given, and the basis on which ‘we’ differentiate an Object. Whatever information or content resting behind this simple given is irrespective to how we discriminate the Object, whether – again by implication – in our phenomenology, thought, or verbal expression. The connection between what the Object is like and what the Object is rests therefore appears to rest – again, on my interpretation – on our observing that visual theatre in our head. Pitt says: “to see that the Object is F is to believe that it is F because of the way it looks” (9).
This creates a picture similar to the idea of fixed propositional content in the unconscious mind – the jumping fish idea. Just as stable ‘content’ can remain in the unconscious mind in the form of an unconscious intentional state, to be called up as the occasion arises for conscious thought and verbal expression, so here do we have a stable visual field that provides the basis for the calling out of conscious thought and verbal expression: belief that the Object is an F, or more simply, the belief that P.
But here is the difficulty for both accounts: We have good reason to think that our abilities to think or assert “that Object is an F” rest upon our unconscious mind discriminating the Object as “an F” – at least metaphorically speaking, since our unconscious mind does not engage in the linguistic practice that the phrase “the Object is an A” is abstracted from. On Pitt’s view, it appears that what “the Object is like” is more primitive than our ability to assert that the Object “is an A;” this in itself seems like an innocent enough suggestion, although not one I am willing to bet on. What I would be willing to bet on is that what the Object is like and the ability to assert that the Object is an F (and believe that the Object is an F) both rest upon our unconscious mind’s more primitive and more sophisticated ability to non-linguistically and non-phenomenally discriminate the Object.
Think of it this way: the unconscious flow of information about the world provides the river our phenomenal knowledge tracks and into which our linguistic attempts dip their bucket. Empirical advancements in the study of the mind do not tend to support the idea of a stable unity of conscious, nor anything like an inner visual field that we as the observer can discriminate and formulate beliefs about. Similarly, there seems to be little support for the idea that there is some kind of fixed content in the unconscious mind from which our beliefs about the world make their conscious expression; empirical investigation has not discovered anything remotely resembling a jumping fish. [Citations Needed!] Rather, our dispositions to assert that P depend on the immediate status of unconscious information, which includes the status of primed long term memory – lexical and otherwise – and the conversational context. The information rivers and the conversational contexts are always to some degree in flux, and more importantly, far more sophisticated and complex than the resulting – and wrongly termed on my view – ‘higher-order’ thoughts. I side with Heraclites on the issue of content: we can step into propositional content only once despite our stable habits to assert the same linguistic ‘that P’ over and over again. I have a bit more to say about this later.
On my view then, the dispositionalist account has much more to offer; it allows for the pulling apart of our verbal and non-verbal belief behavior we have already noted in the belief scenarios, and it permits belief ascription to general behavior traits, such as asserting that P over and over again, while remaining uncommitted to the idea of fixed content in the head. However, there seems to be an underlying, mild incoherence in the view, as far as I can tell so far. I will address this as well as my own position in Part 2.
(To be Continued . . . )
Posted by metzler on Wednesday, April 29, 2009, at 8:13 pm.
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