Scott Alexander just posted an excellent writeup on how the behavior of so many mainstream voices makes it perfectly reasonable for skeptics to doubt the prevailing narratives on treatment of COVID by therapeutic means such as ivermectin even if, as Scott believes, such doubts are incorrect and factually unjustified. When those who are supposed to be defending sound reason and science constantly smear those who hold contrary positions as X-ists and Whateverphobes, when they say over and over again that there is “no evidence” to support those contrary positions while their opponents are presenting one piece of evidence after another after another, when they turn questioning the experts into a punishable offense while the other side says “do the research, look at the facts and make up your own mind,” Scott says, it’s no wonder so many people look at the “sound reason and science” folks and conclude that they’re full of crap. Insights like this are why I like Scott, and respect him even when I disagree with him.
Then he says something even more interesting:
It sounds kind of like fideism, the belief (more common in atheists’ imaginations than real religion) that somebody who reasons their way to belief in God is a sinner, because a real saint would have believed through blind faith, without having to reason.
First off, I’d like to recognize and thank Scott for pointing out that the notion of fideism and "blind faith" is an atheist strawman not found in actual religious thought. If he truly wishes to be fair in his acknowledgments, though, he should take it one step further: Faith is not some "different thing" that's in conflict with reason; properly understood it's not even "a religious thing" at all. It's simply a religious name for the value of trust and experience as a source of input data for the reasoning process to act upon.
Foundations and infinite regress
"Reason" and "correctness" are not the same thing. It's entirely possible for someone to start from incorrect information, apply perfectly valid logical reasoning, and arrive at an incorrect conclusion. (Philosophers call this principle "ex falso quodlibet;" in the world of computing it's known at "garbage in, garbage out.") So in order to arrive at valid conclusions, it's just as important to start from correct data as it is to reason about it in a valid way. The question then becomes, when presented with contradictory data points, how does one determine which data to use?
Carl Sagan famously pointed out that "in order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." As most of us lack the time and resources to do so, we typically content ourselves with taking a few shortcuts, buying the apples, flour, sugar, etc pre-created at the local supermarket and calling it good enough, because the preceding steps are prohibitively difficult.
The same applies to the reasoning process. None of us have the time or resources to "make science from scratch" and reinvent everything from first principles. At some point along the way we must all take shortcuts and skip the prohibitively difficult stuff that other people have already worked out along the way. (Isaac Newton famously proclaimed that he could only see so far by standing on the shoulders of giants. He got the phrase from Bernand of Chartres.) At some point we take principles that others have worked out and accept them as valid, because their validity has been demonstrated to our satisfaction. Through this experience of having the principles proven by someone we trust, we can accept them and then apply them in our reasoning.
This is faith.
To take a different example, none of us gets paid for the work that we do. (I'm serious. Bear with me.) There are a few people who work on commission, getting paid in advance, but for the vast majority of laborers, we get paid after the fact, for work we have done, rather than the logistically impossible task of being paid for the work we do as we are doing it. If we're not getting paid, why are we working? Because we understand that we will be paid. We have some understanding of the consequences that would arise should our employer fail to pay us for the work we have done, we understand that the employer does not want this to happen, and so we work because we have faith (but no solid proof!) that the money will be there. Our experience and trust in the underlying societal systems provide the basis for us to act upon.
If that sounds a lot like Hebrews 11:1 to you, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” yup, that’s the point. We use that “substance and evidence” all the time in our day-to-day lives, as part of our motivating and decision-making processes, on matters that have nothing whatsoever to do with religious beliefs or moral decisions. We use it because experience tells us that it works.
Religious faith is no different
While it’s unfashionable to say so these days, there’s a lot of true, valid wisdom to be found in the Scriptures. Times change, but human nature never does, and the ancient prophets wrote down their knowledge of what works well and what does not on matters of human nature, and now we have that knowledge available to us. It’s available as an input to our reasoning and decision-making processes.
The question is whether or not our experience gives us a basis to trust that knowledge and consider it valid. And this is where believers tend to part ways with our atheist colleagues. Because experience is individual rather than empirical, the standard shortcuts are in short supply. We can take someone else’s word for it, to believe in something because they believe and we trust them, but that only gets you so far. (Just look at how many youths, raised on their parents’ religious traditions by default without building up their own individual core of experience with their validity, end up abandoning them once they encounter other ideas that test those principles.)
In Matthew 17:20, Jesus said to his disciples, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” Many people interpret that as saying that it takes only a very small amount of faith, a tiny seed’s worth, to accomplish great miracles. But in context it looks very different.
The mustard seed is mentioned one other place, in Matthew 13:31-32, where Jesus calls it “the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.” The mustard seed is not literally the smallest seed that exists, or even the smallest that was known to his audience. Nor is the mustard “tree” particularly large. What is remarkable is the magnitude of the growth: among plants familiar to his audience, no other plant so large grows from such a small seed. (This use of words to convey an accurate overall sense or impression without being literally true, though largely foreign to our way of speaking, is quite common in Eastern cultures and always has been.)
Earlier in Matthew 13, we have two other parables speaking of other seeds, and the emphasis in both cases was on their capacity for growth and the yield they produced. This strongly suggests that the true “mustard seed faith” is not faith that is little, but rather faith that grows, that doesn’t let starting out small stop it from becoming big and powerful.
Religious faith arises just like any other form of trust: through personal experience. It begins with borrowing a little seed’s worth of faith from someone you know. And if you choose to plant that seed in fertile ground, to put a little bit of trust in it and act on it, to test it and see what happens, is this not an experiment upon a hypothesis?
It is the experience of hundreds of millions of people worldwide that, when these principles are tested, they do indeed yield good fruit. With that experience under our seeker’s belt, their trust in the principles increases. Their faith grows stronger. This enables them to put it to the test in larger increments the next time, and when that experiment is successful as well, the positive feedback loop of test and experience increases, and the faith grows bigger and stronger over time.
This is why I call “blind faith” a strawman. With the possible exception of the very first experiment, the exercise of faith is never blind. Rather than blind faith, it’s confirmed faith, faith that has been put to the test and found valid, so that the believer can say “God’s never let me down so far, so I trust him in this new thing.”
Just the same way anyone might say that about anybody else that experience has given them a good reason to trust. Faith is a completely normal, fundamental part of everybody’s day-to-day life.
(Credit where due: I stole the “getting paid for work previously done” example from a philosophical discussion in Anthony Peers’ delightfully geeky story I Do Not Want To Do This.)