Why is faith a virtue?

November 4, 2004 10:27 AM

Why is faith a virtue?

I appreicate that the question effectively borrows its language from Christianity and in that context it can be argued that it's part of encouraging people to remain loyal to a church, but is faith really a positive attribute outside that context? (Please don't take this as an opportunity to have a pop at religion - I'm refering to faith in more general terms, but obviously relevance to faith within religion may be relevant to some answers.)

posted by biffa to religion & philosophy (25 comments total)

Well, faith can make being oppressed more tolerable, which is useful in those cases where fighting oppression really would be futile. Of course it is essentially incompatible with democracy, since it denies the value of critical thinking. So faith provides a kind of local maximum for happiness: if enough people threw it off, recognized reality, and voted or fought for change, then we'd all be happier and better off; but if that isn't going happen, then each individual will be happier pretending that things aren't really that bad, their leaders are wise and benevolent, they're going to Heaven in the end anyway, &c.
posted by nicwolff at 11:02 AM on November 4, 2004

It seems to me that faith can also be a virtue when it motivates people to continue struggling for things in the face of terrible adversity. At least in the Christian tradition, faith and hope are strongly linked. The two can be a powerful antidote to feelings of helplessness and despair.
posted by louigi at 11:07 AM on November 4, 2004

For the same reason trust is. One thing to remember is that faith traditionally doesn't just mean believing that there's a God. Remember, when most of the Bible was written, it wouldn't have occurred to many that there wasn't a God. Faith is basically about trusting something or someone other than yourself. It's considered a kind of courage, because you are gambling that your faith is well placed; and there may be consequences should you be wrong. It's a bit like the old trust exercise where you fall backwards, and a friend catches you. You have faith that the friend will not let you fall. You show a kind of courage by sticking your neck out, and gambling that your friend isn't an asshole.

Bear in mind that faith in a higher ideal has motivated people to do many things. Most of the abolitionists were motivated in part by faith, for example. This is not limited to religion. People can, and often do, have faith in the goodness of ideals, such as freedom of speech, to guide them.

If you think about it, the expression of all ideals are a matter of faith. We believe that it is better to save than to kill, to give rather than steal. There is little rational reason to believe that these ideals have substance, but many hold these ideals none the less, and have at times died for them.
posted by unreason at 11:07 AM on November 4, 2004

I think there are two answers to this question.

One: Sarte - obviously no friend of Christianity - acknowledged that the lack of faith leaves a "God-shaped hole" in one's soul. Most human beings are simply "wired" for faith - religious faith, romantic faith, faith that things will just "turn out okay". It's a basic human need, part of the human condition, and with the exception of a few very unusual individuals, almost everyone feels this need in some way.

Two: Faith is necessary for reason to function and, as a practical matter, for human beings to function. Reason, after all, takes premises and churns out conclusions that are as reliable as the premises. Thus, logic will get you into insanity if you've got the wrong premises.

So where do you get your first premise? Not from reason, because then you would be reasoning from other premises in order to justify them.

Seeing this, some people try to find some "minimal" faith commitment in empiricism. This sounds really appealing, but it turns out that empiricism's faith commitment is actually quite substantial; in addition, empiricism isn't really very good at providing reliable answers to anything more complex than questions about direct sense perception. See Quine's "The Two Dogmas of Empiricism".

After discovering that rationalism is irrational and that empiricism isn't empirically verifiable, some people become "skeptics". True skeptics believe that knowledge is unattainable. But nobody actually believes that; the cars in the road are real, whether I can justify their existence or not. At a minimum, if I really believe that their existance is not knowable, I'm not likely to get out of the way, and so I won't be around long to spread my philosophy.

Seeing the utter failure of skepticism, some turn to pragmatism, which is the belief that "truth" doesn't matter; that a proposition is true if it is useful to you. But it turns out that pragmatism fails its own test for truth; it leaves people hollow, unable to find any guiding principles that they find satisfactory. Perhaps because of Sartre's "God-shaped hole", maybe for other reasons in addition. Regardless, pragmatism doesn't work.

So rationalism isn't rational, empiricism isn't empirical, and pragmatism doesn't work. What does that leave?

Faith.

Faith allows reasoning to begin; it allows empiricism to make reliable predictions about the world; it creates belief in morality and meaning; and it allows me to cross the road only when cars aren't going to run me down. Faith, in some form, is necessary for life. There's no escaping it.
posted by gd779 at 11:20 AM on November 4, 2004

Depends on who you ask.

If you're asking the Xian right, it means that those without faith cannot be virtuous. There's also the implied lesson that virtue is defined not by humans, but by God.
posted by jaded at 11:36 AM on November 4, 2004

Faith only functions when it serves as hypothesis to allow for calculation with a lack of data. But given how the human brain works, it is all too easy to generalize beyond (way beyond) that limited use, and it quickly becomes self-deception, which is always immoral and disfunctional (though sometimes useful in the short-term).
posted by rushmc at 11:40 AM on November 4, 2004

and pragmatism doesn't work

Humbug. Pragmatism is the reality-check you need to make sure your faith isn't misdirected. Case in point: the constitution has amendments, a set of rules that are always right. Freedom of speech, search and seizure rules, etc. But everything changes over time -- even core beliefs. What makes the constitution strong is that it accepts this possibility, and thus has an internal provision for changing the amendments, should enough people think they're no longer valid. That's pragmatism at work.

But to answer the initial question, faith is a virtue for religions everywhere because it stops people from asking questions that might undermine it.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:19 PM on November 4, 2004

in artificial intelligence there's a notorious stumbling block called "the frame problem". the world is a very complicated place - you could easily get caught up thinking about, say, why a falling leaf takes a certain trajectory, and, before you find the answer, starve to death. well, perhaps not you, but only because, as a human, you have a remarkable ability to decide what is worth thinking about and what not (something that is very difficult to codify into a fixed set of rules, hence the problem for ai).

faith is a good, pragmatic solution to the frame problem: question: why does the world exist? answer: doesn't matter if you have faith. next problem...

this is why faith is universal. when there are a bunch of things you can't control and don't understand, faith is a neat short-circuit that keeps you going. it boosts survival. as a meme, it's strongly selected by evolutionary pressures. and that - helping you to survive - is as close as you get to virtue from a standpoint like this.
posted by andrew cooke at 1:09 PM on November 4, 2004

faith is a good, pragmatic solution to the frame problem: question: why does the world exist? answer: doesn't matter if you have faith.

Actually, it doesn't matter regardless of whether you have faith or not.
posted by kindall at 2:40 PM on November 4, 2004

All Faith is false, all Faith is true:
      Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes
      His little bit the whole to own.
           —Sir Richard Francis Burton
posted by rushmc at 2:58 PM on November 4, 2004

Faith denies the value of reason

This is a common misunderstanding both inside religious communities and out, but if you think this is true, you really don't understand what faith is. I think I see where the problem comes from: so many rationalists of all stripes see beliefs in religious folks that they don't see any evidence for (and in fact, see evidence against), that they assume that faith means belief without or against evidence. There's an element of this to faith -- since exercising faith sometimes requires action based on principle without guarantee of a hoped for outcome -- but faith works best when it's working with faculties of reason (though not controlled by it). Faith is a belief that leads to action, based on the idea that something good can come out of that action.

Take it outside of a religious context and it's actually easy to see. Take a guy who hasn't had a date in a few years, who mostly strikes out and is afraid of striking out, or who's so stuck on someone he used to have that he doesn't fall in love even when he does get someone nice to say yes to him. At some point, empirical evidence and inductive reasoning could lead such a guy to give up hope, and just spend the rest of his life alone. Reason could leave him a loophole that says that with all the millions of people in the world, there's got to be somebody out there for him. Faith is what makes him actually apply that thinking and get out there and start trying again.

Faith is what makes you move to NYC for a new job that seems right, but you don't know how it's going to turn out. Faith is what makes you pour several thousand bucks into a CD you don't know if anybody's going to like. Faith is what makes you go back to law school. Faith is *definitely* what it takes to get married, to make a promise about two lifetimes that you really don't know the course, and in many cases, making a promise you don't already know how to keep.

Faith can be misplaced -- or outright wrong, and when you place faith in something that isn't true, you fall hard. Reality has a way of imposing itself that way. But the thing that makes faith a virtue is that it makes things that would have been impossible without belief -- and more specifically, without a belief that leads to truly invested action -- possible.

And in fact, that's one reason why faith is even a foundation of the progressive vision. It's an act of faith to assume that democracy works -- that the people, collectively, will make the right choice. It's an act of faith to assume that people are basically good and will do the right thing given a good environment and half a chance......


On preview, I see that a number of people here have made my main points... especially like gd779's. But I'll post anyway in case my way of saying it happens to be useful to someone...
posted by weston at 3:07 PM on November 4, 2004

Faith is not a virtue, it's a weakness. You shouldn't have to just believe in what someone else says, you should be able to proove it yourself. Faith is part of a way to control people, like fate. If you can convince people that what happens to them is fate they don't fight back when you manipulate their lives.

Honesty is a virtue.

Correct use of the apostrophe is pretty high on the list too.
posted by krisjohn at 3:43 PM on November 4, 2004

It isn't.
posted by majcher at 4:51 PM on November 4, 2004

Faith is what makes you move to NYC for a new job that seems right, but you don't know how it's going to turn out. Faith is what makes you pour several thousand bucks into a CD you don't know if anybody's going to like.

No. What you are describing is called hope. With faith, you know the job in NYC will turn out right without verifiable data beforehand. With faith, you know before listening to the CD that you're going to like it.

If you just hope something is true, you acknowledge that it might not be. Faith is more single-minded then that. You know something is true. Anything that suggests otherwise is obviously in error, somehow.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:56 PM on November 4, 2004

If you just hope something is true, you acknowledge that it might not be. Faith is more single-minded then that. You know something is true. Anything that suggests otherwise is obviously in error, somehow.

i don't think that's true at all unless you're speaking of some kind of religous faith of the unshakable, absolute kind. biffa has indicated that the question is about faith in more general terms.

merriam webster gives a def. of faith as "something that is believed especially with strong conviction"
strong != absolute.
posted by juv3nal at 5:51 PM on November 4, 2004

Faith is part of a way to control people, like fate.

I'd disagree, largely because I think faith is tied up heavily with choice. This is one of the things that differentiates it from a hope or a wish -- there is an active component where you have chosen to commit yourself to a course of action in line with your convications.

What you may be talking about is when individuals encourage others to put "faith" in them -- to put the epistemology of their particular authority above all others. This is, as you say, generally trouble.

In fact, I'd say that faith is nearly the opposite of fate: it's the way you escape a lifetime of having the mechanistic universe operate on you, just letting life happen -- you take internal visions and convictions and turn some of them into reality.

No. What you are describing is called hope. With faith, you know the job in NYC will turn out right without verifiable data beforehand. With faith, you know before listening to the CD that you're going to like it.

C_D, I take the point that faith has a compelling factor that makes it both feel like knowledge and motivates as if it were knowledge, but I think the thing that differentiates it is that it is that it's generally not empirical, and therefore in that sense different from what we usually think of as "knowledge." Thus knowledge is what you get after you act and see what happens.

Then again, maybe you can argue that knowledge is not necessarily empirical.
posted by weston at 6:48 PM on November 4, 2004

Let's assume that faith is "knowledge" without "proof". I don't think you can possibly do without that. But maybe I'm wrong, you all tell me. Can you name one thing, anything, that you can know with certainty, without employing faith at some point?

Any statement except "I exist" is fair game. That shouldn't be hard, right? Any statement about yourself or the world that constitutes knowledge without faith.
posted by gd779 at 6:54 PM on November 4, 2004

Let's assume that faith is "knowledge" without "proof".

I waffle a little bit on this. I tend to believe that you can exercise faith as I've described it above in something that is incorrect, and will therefore fall on your face. I'm also aware that some define faith as a conviction of things which aren't seen, which are true -- thus, if it's not true, it doesn't count as faith...

Any statement except "I exist" is fair game. That shouldn't be hard, right? Any statement about yourself or the world that constitutes knowledge without faith.

Isn't any any primary sensory perception not a matter of faith? Faith may be somewhat involved in coming to a conclusion about how accurately the signal reflects reality, but the signal itself isn't...
posted by weston at 7:21 PM on November 4, 2004

weston: you make good points. I agree that "faith" can have multiple meanings, and that the meanings you suggest may be the best interpretation. I'm just assuming a more strict definition of faith for discussion purposes.

Isn't any any primary sensory perception not a matter of faith? Faith may be somewhat involved in coming to a conclusion about how accurately the signal reflects reality, but the signal itself isn't...

This is true. Weston scores the first point! I can know that "I exist" and that "I perceive X at this moment". But, as you pointed out, that doesn't tell you anything about the world or about yourself - it could all be an illusion, after all.

Anything else? Or is that really what people mean when they criticize faith: that rational human beings should deny all knowledge other than an immediate, possibly illusory sense perception?
posted by gd779 at 7:44 PM on November 4, 2004

gd779 : That's one of the deepest things I've ever read. (Your first comment.)

Do you have recommended reading?
posted by croutonsupafreak at 9:47 PM on November 4, 2004

Well, this has been fascinating, I guess my major consideration of faith is in the religious context and beyond that I had not thought it was that relevant. Particularly it had never really occurred to me about its appilcability within romantic love or at all with regard to perception of the world. Thoroughly glad I asked the question, will have to think on this a bit more.
posted by biffa at 2:53 AM on November 5, 2004

That's one of the deepest things I've ever read. (Your first comment.)

Thank you.

Do you have recommended reading?

I don't know, I haven't yet found many books that address these questions in a disciplined but accessable manner. (I don't have any background in this stuff, so I'm having to work my way up to being able to understand the technical literature). Also, I'm still working out my thoughts on this issue, so I can't just give you a "definitive" tome with a clear answer. Maybe someday.

If you're interested in the religious angle, my biggest recommendation is Does God Exist? An Answer for Today by Hans Kung. I'm currently working through this, and it's thorough. It allows you to trace the arguments of Western philosophy, and by following in the footsteps of the intellectual giants you can see your own viewpoint growing with them.

Also, Descartes "Meditations on First Philosophy" was a revelation for me, and I think it should be read by everone, as was Hume's "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding". Cliche, I know, but there it is. And, of course, there's Qunie's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", which I linked to above.

Maybe this was just a "tipping point" for me, but I found the following exchange very helpful:

Why We Can't All Just Get Along by Stanley Fish.
Why We Can Get Along by Richard John Neuhaus.
A Reply to Richard John Neuhaus by Stanley Fish.

Maybe I just liked those articles because I got to watch a noted professor of literature and law defend religious faith, while an eminent Catholic theologian defended modernity. ;-)

In fact, if you're interested in religion, First Things is, in general, a great source of articles. Just browse through the archives for titles that seem interesting.
posted by gd779 at 9:04 AM on November 5, 2004

Any statement about yourself or the world that constitutes knowledge without faith.

You're missing something, which is the internal check empiricism has that simple faith lacks. I think Statement X is correct, but that is only based on current knowledge at hand. Any new knowledge that comes up (heretical as it may seem) that changes the validity of Statement X takes precedent.

Perhaps my faith lies in the empirical method.

I don't think religious faith (for example) allows for this kind of error-correcting.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 11:40 AM on November 5, 2004

I don't think religious faith (for example) allows for this kind of error-correcting.

Sure it does. I've seen intellectually brilliant, exceptionally disciplined people argue over the fine points of morality and theology. (And yes, even science. Don't forget that science was created by highly committed Christians - Descartes, Pascal, Newton, etc. - applying their religious faith to the physical world). The question is not, can religious or empirical faith correct for errors; the question is, according to what standard will the corrections be judged?

What constitutes "proof"? (I'm seriously asking, how would you define "proof"?)

What counts as evidence? What constitutes truth? Religion proposes one standard; empiricism another; rationalism a third. These standards are different only in the substance of their original premise; after that, they are all equally logical or illogical.

Perhaps my faith lies in the empirical method.

Yes, that's probably true. But how justified is that faith? You take a particular method and make it an article of faith, and claim that the virtue of doing so is that everything is open to criticism, right? Well, everything isn't open to criticism; you can't criticize the empirical method itself.

Say, for example, that there was good historical reasons to believe that a man named Jesus was ressurected. (There is: See The Ressurection of the Son of God by Oxford historian N.T. Wright). Depending on how you define the "empirical method", ressurections might not be empirically possible. Can you fairly assess the evidence, and seriously consider the possibility that Jesus was ressurected?

But let's take a more clear example. Science tells us that the brain is a biological machine; that feelings, and the appearance of choice, and the color green are all in your head. But you observe, subjectively, that you choose. Do you conclude that you have Free Will, or not? The "empirical method", as some people define it, excludes the possibility of subjective evidence. So which interpretation of the world wins out?

The "empirical method" doesn't really tell you as much about the world as you probably think. Most of the "knowledge" obtained through empiricism is highly debatable, even within the structure of empiricism. See "The Two Dogmas of Empiricism", above.

But none of that is the fundamental objection. The fundamental objection is this: assume that X represents reality as it really is. An empiricist interprets reality according to his physical senses. But the Buddhists believe that what an empiricist would call "reality" is just an illusion; that the higher spiritual reality is all that really exists. Step out of your empirical frame for a moment: Which view is closer to X? How can you tell? Can you justify your answer at all?

In other words, what justifies your "leap of faith" to empiricism? Can you distinguish your leap of faith from a religious leap of faith? Sure, you can say that empiricism is better at manipulating reality as determined by sense perception, but does that make it true? Or just useful? If it's just useful, then you're a pragmatist, not an empiricist; and you should accept that.

"Spinning your wheels is what you would be doing if you were to bracket your first premise and make it the object of critical attention. To be sure, this is something you might do, at least as an experiment, but where would you be if you did it? You would be nowhere-at sea amidst innumerable interpretative possibilities-and you could only proceed by installing some other premise in the position of first (usually while pretending not to do so)."
posted by gd779 at 1:29 PM on November 5, 2004

So many good points... lemme just address a couple.

Can you fairly assess the evidence, and seriously consider the possibility that Jesus was ressurected?

Of course I can. I assess that it's bullshit, but leave it open to the possibility that I could be completely wrong. There's the power.

But the Buddhists believe that what an empiricist would call "reality" is just an illusion

Ah, but what a good Buddhist would point out is: does the distinction even matter?

Or just useful? If it's just useful, then you're a pragmatist, not an empiricist; and you should accept that.

I think the two can co-exist. Right now empiricism seems to be working best. But should a better system come up, I'd have to give it serious consideration. In such a case, I suppose pragmatism would be the super-set, in which case I happily accept the label.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:38 PM on November 5, 2004