“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” This is the opening stanza of the Nicene Creed, which — from the time I learned to speak until when I first came to Brown — I recited at weekly Mass. Integral to Catholicism, this affirmation of faith represents a fundamental aspect inherent to many religions. But what exactly is faith? And what is its purpose?
Rational beliefs are formed based on empirical evidence. Here I do not mean “rational” in the economics-class sense of being beneficial for the believer, but rather in the epistemic sense. A multitude of cases exist in which a belief might be useful, but this is seldom connected to its likelihood of being true. In any case, I have never heard an individual propose that God’s existence is a consequence of his belief in God. With this understanding, faith is irrational by definition, as it is not based upon fact.
So are faith-based beliefs relegated to being solely utilitarian in nature? Most religions defend faith on grounds transcending such a view. But what room is there for faith when we have science as a superior instrument of rational thought? Perhaps it is unfair to pigeonhole religion into being at odds with science. Science wins out as a matter of definitional logic when the domains of the two intersect, but faith is by no means required to engage in such a direct contest and could instead provide insight outside the territory of science.
Once upon a time, religion proffered explanations of astronomical observations, which — to people living hundreds of years ago — may have seemed like questions inaccessible by means of the scientific method. But technology improved, opening up new realms that were once thought to be unassailable. The potential domain of religion is ever decreasing as that of science inexorably encroaches forward. Hundreds of years from now, scientists will be answering questions we have not even conceived of in this fantastic age of information. Yet one could imagine that controversies such as the existence of God are not, and possibly never will be, within the scope of science.
Naturally, we wonder what we should believe about such questions — specifically due to their heavy significances. People generally would like to maximize the number of true beliefs they hold, while simultaneously minimizing their number of false ones. When we try to explain any observed phenomena via religion, we find an infinite number of competing and contradictory explanations, which are comparable to empirical data one might find in science. In such an environment, science makes no claims, and by remaining epistemically agnostic, is seemingly biased toward avoiding error. Intuitively, this seems to be a much more desirable outcome, for it is unquestionably better to live in a world in which the few bridges that exist are structurally sound than to live in a world with many bridges of dubious integrity.
But even from a non-utilitarian and purely rational perspective, I do not think we are engaging in any dangerous predilections by eschewing belief in falsehoods. Since we can arbitrarily fabricate many explanations, among which there are no evidentially justifiable discriminating features, the probability of an individual ever selecting the correct explanation to believe in is zero, and so it would be irrational to make any choice. Faith does not solve this problem, as it does not bridge the logical gap necessary to come to a conclusion about which explanation is superior. The citation of any justifiable argument to the contrary would serve only to demonstrate the insignificance of faith.
If both a proposition and its negation imply the same conclusion, that conclusion is deductively true. We have now covered both possible accounts of the relationship between evidence and justified belief and, in both scenarios, can see the same conclusion is implied. The first case is that evidence is used to form justified beliefs, in which case faith is irrelevant, as it does not supervene upon evidence. Alternatively, if situations exist in which evidence cannot be used to form justified beliefs, faith is irrelevant. It becomes statistically impossible to hold any correct beliefs since there would never be any justifiable reason to pick one in particular, given no evidence. Personally, I believe the former to be true since it seems obvious we can hold justified beliefs on the basis of evidence, but my justification would be necessarily circular. I suppose I’ll just have to take this one on faith.
Andrew Powers ’15 can be reached at andrew_powers@brown.edu.
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