FAITH
A religious post in honor of Sunday.

Some Christian virtues are understandable and appealing enough: in particular, love. We all seek love, admire love, sing about love. Non-Christians can understand why it is appealing to believe in a loving God, and the Beatles, though more popular than Jesus, are very much in his vein when they proclaim that "all you need is love." Service and self-sacrifice, honesty and truth, an equality in which all souls are equally beloved, these are uncontroversial and easy enough to understand, in theory.

Faith is much more difficult. It is hard for me to understand what it is, and/or to approve of it, particularly when it is set up as the antagonist of reason. A caricature of the virtue of faith is that faith is the virtue of believing in a dogma in defiance of contrary evidence. But this is not a virtue, it is a vice, an offense against truth. It is the Jesuits believing that "black is white, white is black" if the Church says so. It is the modern fundamentalist's angry and insistent deafness to widespread claims that the world was not created in seven days by God, but over billions of years by a process of (materialistic) evolution. Faith is the inquisition internalized.

I believe in truth, inquiry, reason and science, freethinking; in a rather loose way, I adhere to the idea that a man only has a right to hold a belief to the extent that he has evidence for it (though I am generous, even promiscuous about what is permitted as evidence; tradition, intuition, aesthetic sensibilities are all permitted, and I tend to be satisfied with sincere and heartfelt persuasion rather than rigid, airtight proof). I consider the Jesuit gesture of granting epistemic absolutism to the Catholic Church to be sinful. I think a Christian ought to follow Descartes's path of universal doubt, and fearlessly, for if he believes in Christianity, he ought to believe that Christianity can pass that test, and if it does not pass that test, he loses nothing by abandoning it. So where does faith come in?

The question has troubled me for years and I do not claim to have a complete answer. But I have discovered the need for faith in unexpected places, as a necessary answer to philosophical problems that cannot be dealt with any other way.

David Hume offered a famous disproof of the validity of inductive reasoning. Hume argued that there is no basis in reason for our habit of inferring future events from past events. If you flip a coin twenty times and it comes up heads each time, what are the chances that it will come up heads the next time? Only 50%. This is not part of Hume's argument, but it gives you the idea. If the sun has risen every day, does that mean it will rise again tomorrow? Does it even mean it is likely to rise tomorrow? Why? Hume denies it. He does not merely deny that the sunrise is certain; he denies that we have any adequate reason to believe even that it is plausible. And an adequate answer to Hume's devastating critique has never been devised. If the sun rises so many times, that shows something about the world, namely that the world is so arranged as to make the rising of the sun likely we may say. Hume asks, "Why should we expect this trait of the world to last until tomorrow?" But this kind of reasoning works perfectly well in our everyday lives, we point out. Hume points out that only inductive reasoning allows to evaluate the practical value of inductive reasoning, so the argument is circular, and provides no proof of inductive reasoning's validity.

Hume's argument is logically sound, yet seems perfectly mad. We must rely on inductive reasoning. Science, with its reliance on experiment, is founded on inductive reasoning. So is language: we discern the meaning of words only by assuming that there is a pattern in them. This is not even a choice, it is in our nature, we cannot live for a single day without using knowledge we derived from inductive reasoning, without engaging in inductive reasoning anew. And yet inductive reasoning has no basis in logic. Inductive reasoning is the search for patterns, and it rests on a belief in patterns which it cannot itself prove, but which is an inescapable part of human nature. Here I think the idea of faith may be introduced. We have faith that the world has patterns, that there is order in the universe, so that the pattern-discerning tracks on which our minds necessarily run are valid. Faith is there at the very beginning, it precedes reason, it is the prerequisite for reason.

I found another role for faith while thinking about the reconciliation between categorical and consequentialist ethics. Categorical ethics is the idea that moral rules are independent of their consequences, that "the end does not justify the means." Even for a good cause, even when I know for a fact that the benefits of an action outweigh the costs, I must not kill, rape, torture, lie, and so on. Consequentialist ethics measure the moral value of an act in terms of its consequences. If one person's death will save many lives, I should kill that person. If a lie makes everybody happy, I should go ahead and tell it. Both present problems. Categorical ethics entail undergoing and inflicting an infinite amount of pain, if necessary, for the sake of a moral principle. If I could save all life on Earth by telling one lie, I must not do so. Such insistence seems perverse. Yet consequentialist ethics seem to open the door to all manner of cynicism. Under certain circumstances, there is no crime a thoroughgoing consequentialist would not commit.

Of the two sides, the consequentialists seem more reasonable, for they at least care about people's welfare, whereas the categorical camp seems to be ready to sacrifice anything on the altar of their abstract principles. But another problem with the consequentialists is that the results of our actions are unforeseeable. Take in a homeless orphan, love him, care for him, devote yourself to him, selflessly give him every chance to succeed, and he may still grow up to be an ax-murderer. We are powerless to discern the vast web of unintended effects spreading out from our point in time. For all I know, I may do more good by erring badly and serving as a warning to others than by acting well and eclipsing them.

Here I introduce faith again: this time, a faith not in the physical order of the universe, but in the moral order of the universe; a faith that in the grand balance of things, a good action will yield net positive results and a bad action net negative results. To be more precise, I propose a faith in the idea that ethics are both consequentialist-- because what matters is the good and evil that result from our actions-- and categorical-- because in conscience, properly developed and applied, we have a subtle sign, a compass needle pointing to which actions will lead to the "greatest happiness for the greatest number," in ways that, given the complex ripples of effects and side-effects that continue without end in the wake of our actions, we can never discern by reason alone. I have some reason from my own experience to think that by following one's conscience one is best able to make others happier. Experience, but by no means any proof.