Faith: a Christmas reflection

Some shy thoughts …

Faith

I’m thinking the first association you had with the one word heading above was religious - perhaps particularly if you’re not religious. The call to unbelievers to ‘just have faith’. I’m going to call that ‘heroic faith’. Science has won most of its battles with institutionalised religion on whether we need the hypothesis of God to explain the natural world. And in that context it’s not surprising that organised religion falls back on calls for heroic faith. You must believe, however implausible it seems to you that there’s a great paternal figure looking down on us from the heavens. Well this post isn’t about that kind of faith. Well not mostly about it anyway. It’s about humble, not heroic faith.

It’s one of the disasters of modernity that that grand and sharply binary distinction between science and faith has evacuated the meaning of the word ‘faith’ for many people. To get ahead of myself just to give you a simple snapshot to which I’ll return, we’re told Western society is suffering from a crisis of trust. But you could also call it a crisis of faith - of faith in our institutions and, by implication faith in those within them. The difference? The word favoured by social science and, following it, the punditry of the savvy, is a passive word. Whether we have ‘trust’ in a system or the person knocking on our door doesn’t frame the situation as one of mutuality. Faith does. (Elsewhere, I’ve documented academic psychologists weird aversion to talking of ‘love’, in favour of the flat abstract passivity of ‘proximity’.)

Michael Polanyi

Michael Polanyi, philosopher of science and of liberalism (he was a founding member of the Mont Pèlerin Society), wanted to rescue the idea of faith for modern sensibilities. He was fond of quoting St Augustine’s great dictum which is often taken as the canonical invitation to ‘heroic faith’: “Unless you believe, you cannot understand.” But the faith Polanyi depicts is humble, not heroic.

Polanyi's whole intellectual project was to build an alternative paradigm to what he called objectivism - and which I outlined here. We can never have a God's eye view of the world because we are not God. We come to knowledge of the world the way we learn to walk. We cobble together fragmentary routines, building on those that seem to work and ditching those that end in tears. A humble faith is the motive force behind this process. The toddler's faith that her efforts will bear fruit is not heroic. She cannot be sure. But she has a humble faith that the universe is sufficiently hospitable to her being that her efforts are worth it.

And the first step is just the start. It strengthens her faith in the next step and so on. And while the element of faith in each step recedes in her consciousness, every now and then something goes wrong, and she's reminded that nothing in this process is guaranteed. In this sense, each step builds the toddler's faith. But at the same time this is faith as active participation, not passive belief or mere trust. It draws her into effortful engagement with the world and constantly tests that faith against the world's response.

For Polanyi, the process of learning and the knowledge we have learned, in life and in science, takes the same form. It begins with our placing faith in our own judgment, in the coherence of what we’re seeing, in the reliability of those things we’ve learned from others. Then, as we test our beliefs, our entanglement with the world deepens as its responses confirm or correct those beliefs.

Polanyi’s interpretation of Augustine’s dictum shows that faith isn’t a religious add-on to knowledge—it’s baked into how we come to know anything at all. And, whether we’re learning to walk or seeking to understand celestial mechanics (pardon the anachronism, but what a glorious expression!) this is quite different from being sure that we are right.

Science is always a tentative kind of faithfulness. And though it is often crowded out by heroic ideas of faith, this much more modest idea of the work that faith does, and of its accountability to experience, is also alive and well in Christian theology - not that I’m any expert on that or that I’m trying to sell you anything.

William James

Like Polanyi, William James regarded faith as reason’s foundation, not its antithesis. And like Polanyi, he was interested in faith as an ingredient of action, rather than as a mere state of belief. The ultimate goal of his famous essay, The Will to Believe, was to defend his own religious belief. However, like Polanyi, the faith he elaborates is ‘humble’, not ‘heroic’. Where I’ve drawn on Polanyi to show faith grounding individual knowing and action, I’ll use James’ essay to illustrate its operation in our social life.

Intriguingly, James elaborates his position via Pascal’s wager, which, in its original form, sounds pretty heroic. God may not exist, but if you believe and he does, you hit the jackpot. And if he doesn’t - OK, you’ve missed out on some parties, helped more little old ladies across the street than you otherwise should have, but your losses are minuscule in comparison. But is such a cosmic gamble what James would call a ‘live’ option? Whether you’d like to or not, you can’t make yourself believe something - whether it’s God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster - to win a bet.

Just as Polanyi re-anchors Augustine's grand dictum — “Unless you believe you cannot understand”— around the mundane foundations of life, so James brings Pascal's wager back into earthly orbit. He shows how faith comes into its own where decision is forced upon us, and holding back is itself a choice. We live our lives in ignorance, particularly about how efforts to live more expansively will turn out. If I left my job and started a business, would my life be better or worse? If I tell her that I love her, will she reciprocate, or run screaming from the room? Seen in this light, faith grounds a generative wager — a bet made not after proof but, like a toddler trying to take their first step, in the hope that something is true or good, and to find out.

James contrasts this with the posture he saw dominating educated opinion in his time — what I’d call a scientistic refusal to believe anything that can’t be proved. For James, this betrays the generative ethic of science. Science, at its best, proceeds by careful scepticism after a prior wager: “that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other”. (Polanyi had a similar intent to forge what he tellingly called a ‘post-critical’ philosophy - a philosophy that is not built on the indubitable because, being finite in space, we’ll never know for sure however long we wait, and, in any event, being finite in time, we must often choose here and now.)

Where Pascal’s Wager treats belief as a rational gamble for eternal benefit, James stresses how ignorant we are about the ultimate outcome of our choices, whilst also often understanding which is the more generative choice. If you refuse to believe, you forfeit the very experience that might have made the belief true. Refusing to love until one is guaranteed it will be reciprocated, or to commit to an ideal until it is certain it will pay off forecloses both prospects. And it never tests their possibility.

Science will often reward scientists for their faith in its method, but natural phenomena themselves are typically indifferent to our beliefs and wishes — a star exists or not, whatever we think. But the social and ethical realities within which our lives are enmeshed are not like that. They are often made real only through our participation in them. Faith here has a generative force; our belief assisting what is believed to come into being. The classroom, the courtroom, the community all require people who act as if mutual respect, fairness, or shared purpose can be forged and depended on, often before these qualities are reliably present.

James calls this “precursive faith”— the act of stepping toward the good before it is assured. This is analogous to Polanyi’s child learning to walk or a scientist chasing a hunch. And just as Polanyi saw faith at the base of all human knowledge, James sees it at the heart of our shared life.

A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, [he writes], “all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted.

In each case, people must act in faith that others will act similarly. Or nothing happens.

Faith, trust and the accretion of social capital

In this sense, and in contrast to the more passive ‘trust’, faith is a form of generosity—a gift we extend toward others and toward life itself. It’s offered in the hope that it will somehow be reciprocated. And that hope can be naïve. But it can also be self-regarding. True, an act of faith can be repudiated, leaving the initiator feeling exploited or humiliated. But, as I observed regarding my own life here, there are lots of good fish in the sea, and the risk of betrayal can be a small price to pay, not just for all the times generosity pays off, but for all the times it does not, enabling the initiator to remember whom not to rely on in future.

This brings the moral order out of the textbooks and into our lives. Believing in a moral world - even before there is proof - is the first condition for helping to create one. As James explains, the alternative is barrenness:

Moral scepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows. If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one. Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head’s play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. But then it will also dry up the springs of moral energy, and leave us without any guidance for action.

James is not making a metaphysical claim. He is making an existential one. If you want to live in a moral world, if you want meaningful relationships, community, or purpose, you must sometimes step beyond the evidence and put down your stake. That stake is your faith—not just in others, but in the possibility that acting as if something good were possible might help make it so. And as James notes, this is not just a private bet. It is how whole societies are built. When enough people place such stakes, something new becomes possible between them.

A word from David Foster Wallace

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.