Certainty and doubt: Descartes Revision Notes

I produced a number of revision documents for my degree course, and maybe someone will find them useful. This is for A222 Exploring Philosophy, Book 4, Knowledge by Cristina Chimisso.

I printed these revision notes on card as an aide-memoire to the issues I needed to touch on in an exam question on the subject; most exam questions require an exposition of the ground to be covered before any actual philosophy can be done (ie, the question answered!). Having these, almost bullet, points burned into my memory allowed me to write this background stuff whilst planning my answer.

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Walk in the Dark with a Mystery, or Walk in the Daylight Alone?

Friendly Atheist has this video up in a post by Paul Fidalgo. As Paul says, it's quite heartbreaking, especially given the recent news. In it Kay Warren, wife of Rick, says:

I would rather be in relationship with a god who in many ways remains a mystery. And walk in the darkness with a god who in some ways remains a mystery, than to try to walk in complete daylight without him.

That seems to me to be such a sad thing to say, although maybe many people identify with it; who wants to be alone in the universe? But wanting something does not make it so, although we are excellent at conjuring beings out of thin air.

I remember as a kid growing up on an estate with dark, rather forbidding woods behind the houses. I used to gather the kids together and we would go down into the wooded valley where the foundations of an old hut remained, and play in the mud and the streams and the trees. The foundations of the hut had the look of a footstep. A large one, obviously, so I used to regularly scare the other kids by telling them how it was a giant's footstep, and that I had seen the giant once. In fact, I would say, looking nervously about, I think I can hear him coming now. With not much more than that, I would put the heebie-jeebies up the gang and a rushing, stumbling, all out retreat from the woods would ensue.

And here's the odd thing; I would get caught up in the panicky evacuation too, just as frightened as the others! I was excellent at invoking beings with completely bogus emotional manipulation, and I don't doubt that everyone else is too. There we were running in the dark with a mystery (and quite thrilling it was too), and we have at least one believer who would rather remain in those woods than escape to the daylight.

But what we prefer does not determine what is true. We would prefer the universe to be one of innate justice and goodness, but as Kay Warren appears to have noticed, sadly, that does not appear to be the one we live in.

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The Advantages of History but None of its Risks

This appears to be the only picture of Van Harvey available. He's the one in the hat, I think.

The title of this piece is, I think, a pretty fair description of what faith, in the religious sense, gives a believer (I've paraphrased it from a better writer than me).

I've long been intrigued by faith, having failed to maintain it myself, and puzzled over the Catholic definition of 'certain' faith. There is always, it seems to me, a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of anyone's faith: it is based on historical events but it refuses to countenance their non-occurrence.

Weird Catholic leaning blog First Things recently posted a piece by Thomas Cothran (an attorney who lives in Lexington, Kentucky, so there) called Against Faith in Faith. He rails against a naive depiction of faith:

Confronted with inadequate evidence for the deeper truths of life, one must conjure up a commitment to ideas for which the subjective act of faith can be the only ground, and one must believe not only in the content of faith but in the faith-act itself. 

This is the faith described by Dennett, Dawkins and Harris, he says, and also professed, embarrassingly, by Christians too (well done for admitting that). Indeed, as I have discussed, William James defends a pragmatic faith against Clifford. Incidentally, for (another!) good discussion of James and Clifford, see this and this from Massimo Pigliucci.

But Cothran wants to draw a different picture of faith:

Far from posing a threat to one’s faith, knowledge reinforces it: the more reason one has to believe in God’s providence, the more readily the believer entrusts himself to God. 

But if one has more reason to believe, that is not faith, but reason. He then attempts to objectify his faith:

The knowledge of faith, rather than relying on the outmoded theories of knowledge where the mind merely represents external objects, is participatory; the act of contemplating the things of God partakes in God’s own Trinitarian activity. The knowledge of faith is not therefore “subjective” in the sense that it happens primarily in the believer, but is “objective” because the believer participates in the eternal activity of the object of faith; the believer’s subjective faith is therefore secondary and derivative.

I have no idea what phrases like "the act of contemplating the things of God partakes in God’s own Trinitarian activity" and "the believer participates in the eternal activity of the object of faith" mean, but Cothran appears to be trying to remove subjectivity from faith. Well, that would be nice, but baffling sentences do not by themselves give faith objectivity. Sadly, Cothran has more in the bank:

The tacit participatory metaphysics in which Christian faith becomes intelligible emphasizes that Christianity is not an abstract system or an existential human possibility, but the ontological union of God and man in time and history through the recapitulative activity of the incarnate Word of God.

Yikes. It's hard to believe someone wanting to make themselves understood put these words together like this. He ends by trying to set aside a faith that is different, I presume, from the faith attacked by Dennett, Dawkins and Harris:

One must attack (or defend) Christian faith where it may actually be found, not in the mind as an idea but as a form of life realized in the historical community established by Jesus Christ.

It's a No true Scotsman defence of faith. But, as he himself pointed out, the problem is that many profess the version of faith he dismisses, so any attack on that version is perfectly justifiable, and there is no 'must' about what is attacked or defended. In any case, his version of faith appears to be incomprehensibly post modern.

I'm currently reading Van Harvey's The Historian & the Believer, which, while exploring the tension between history and belief, includes a chapter on dialectical theology's attempts to set aside faith (in a similar fashion to Cothran) from the attack of the 'rational robots' of the enlightenment. In fact, I find Cothran's blurb reminiscent of Bultmann's, Barth's and Tillich's. Consider this analysis of Barth's view of faith, by Van Harvey:

Faith is...the realisation of the abysmal gulf separating man from God. It is the recognition of the "qualitative distinction between time and eternity." Consequently, faith is closely allied to, if it is not identical with, a recognition of the ambiguity and questionableness of life. (p.132)

I don't begin to understand this, but that, of course, may be my failing. Barth appears to accept the ambiguity that I find troubling, but it's not clear how that helps the situation. In discussing the tension between the historical reality of the resurrection and belief in it, Van Harvey quotes Bultmann as arguing that the Christian faith proclaims to man:

...that in what happened then, however it might have been, God has acted, and through this act of God the Word of divine judgement and forgiveness which now confronts him is authenticated. The meaning of that act of God is nothing other than the actual establishment of this Word - the proclamation of this Word itself. No historical science can control or confirm or reject this affirmation. For that this Word and this proclamation are God's acts stands on the other side of historical observation. (p.143)

Orrly? How convenient that one's beliefs lie "the other side of historical observation". Talking about Tillich's notion of absolute faith, Harvey says:

What seems remarkable about the description of absolute faith is its apparent formlessness, although Tillich, like Bultmann and the early Barth, understands it to be the way of talking about the cruciform structure of faith, the self-surrender and negation of everything finite which brings one into confrontation with the Absolute. (p.147)

(note that the goal appears to be transcendence from our poor finite existence to some absolute infinite, er, existence, or knowledge, perhaps)

Now, I don't begin to understand dialectical theology (as is surely plain), but in Harvey's analysis of Barth's defence of faith in the face of facts, I think he puts his finger on the issue that drives me mad about much apologetic writing: its special pleading (and I quote extensively from the book because I think it's worth it):

To say that Barth's view is an arbitrary one is to say, first of all, that he makes historical assertions on the basis of faith which he then claims no historian has the right to assess. He claims that the bodily resurrection is a guarantee that it was Jesus who appeared to the disciples and yet insists that no historian can, in the nature of the case, assess this claim. He insists that the resurrection was physical and appeals to the story of Thomas in the Fourth Gospel to prove it but deals with none of the numerous critical questions concerning the historical veracity of that Gospel or the function miracle stories have in it. He appeals to the forty-day tradition and the empty-tomb stories but in no way answers the many questions biblical critics have raised about these stories. Consequently, Barth uses the stories to argue for the historical nature of the events but concedes that the stories cannot, from a historical standpoint, stand any critical scrutiny. this leaves the believer in the position of accepting an argument the warrants of which are historical in type but which are, at the same time, confessed to be contradictory and "imaginative-poetic." It leaves the inquirer in the position of having to accept the claims of alleged eyewitnesses or risk the state of being a faithless man, Insofar as the believer wants to be historian, or the historian a believer, he has to surrender the autonomy of critical judgement. Barth, in effect, claims all the advantages of history but will assume none of its risks. (p.157-158)

Spot on, and I would say that many apologists and believers do the same - they are inconsistent in their application of critical judgement. Of course, we all are inconsistent, at times, but it is surely our duty in such weighty matters to eliminate such inconsistencies, and rule out subjective influence where we can.

To sum up, the faith claims of believers are a non-starter without the assumption of rules that they then go on to deny, because those rules threaten their faith. It's a vicious circle, and I don't think obscure redefinitions of faith break that circle, but simply twist it. Cothran's 'historical community' is confirmed by rules that rule out the events that spawned it.

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The God That Hides Himself

In a piece called The mystery of faith that is baffling but beyond doubt in Saturday's Times (behind a paywall, sadly), the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe, Geoffrey Rowell wrote about something that does indeed baffle; what is the justification for belief?

Natural theology looks to establish good reason for belief in a god, and revealed theology looks to persuade toward a particular flavour. Neither is successful in their project, often by their own proponent's admission. William Lane Craig, for example, who runs a website called reasonablefaith.com only believes because a 'radiant' girl told him that god loved him, not because he was persuaded by the arguments.

The believer is on the horns of a dilemma: if you have reason to believe, why should you be rewarded with eternal life - you're just doing what any reasonable person should do. On the other hand, if you don't have reason to believe, well, you shouldn't, and you won't be rewarded with eternal life! Either way, I don't see why belief with or without evidence deserves eternal life.

Rowell grabs this dilemma by both horns, and gets gored by both:

The biblical writers recognised that the God who makes himself known is at the same time a hidden God - as the prophet Isaiah exclaims, "Truly thou art a god who hidest thyself!"

Great; hidden but 'seen', somehow. This is the common refrain of the believer who wants to privilege his perception over non-believers'.

In Elijah's flight, God reveals himself in "a still small voice", or the "sound of thin silence":

It is this silence, almost the absence of God, which is the presence of God which awes Elijah into worship.

When almost absence is equated to presence, then we know we're skating on thin ice, not thin silence.

Centuries later the poet, R.S. Thomas, would speak of God's "absence which is his presence".

Now we seem to be getting into straight apophaticism. He then quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins as writing in a letter:

You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty.

I think we're familiar with the Catholic certainty supposedly delivered by 'divine light'. 

But this is hand-waving; if the certainty is incomprehensible, it is unjustified. If something is absent, it is not present. If it's hidden, it cannot be seen. If something is baffling, it cannot be beyond doubt. Embracing contradictions like these will simply result in absurdities. We are all allowed our own private absurdities, but it's time we grew up as a society and banished them from respectable public fora.

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Blind Leading the Blind

Alister McGrath has written another vacuous piece attacking the new atheists. He seems unhealthily obsessed with them.

It's an extended exercise in equivocation on the meaning of faith. He starts by complaining how the naughty new atheists caricature faith:

One of the core New Atheist assertions, endlessly and uncritically repeated on New Atheist websites, is Richard Dawkins's dogmatic statement that faith is "blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence."

...and:

For Dawkins, this means that faith counts as a "form of mental illness." This nasty intellectual perversion is limited to religious people. "Faith, being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion."

Fair enough (except it's obviously not limited to religious people, and I have no idea who would say that - the quote doesn't say that); generally speaking the faithful I've met do make the leap of faith in the face of evidence to the contrary; that is certainly how I became a theist. But it's true also that other theists claim a different basis for their belief, including, apparently, McGrath. Since it's not "blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence", it must be because of evidence, mustn't it?

Faith is based on reason, yet not limited to the somewhat meagre truths that reason can actually prove.

So McGrath agrees with the new atheists that faith goes beyond reason! Welcome aboard. Except in one particular; that the truths that reason 'proves' (to be charitable, let's allow that in the non-scientific sense) are 'meagre'. These 'meagre' truths, of which McGrath is so contemptuous, include:

• Man was not fashioned from dust and woman from his spare rib
• The Earth was not magicked into being before there was any light
• Women are not subservient to men
• Homosexuals are not doing anything wrong
• All religions cannot all be right; they can all be wrong
• There is no need to take what another person says on trust
• Freedom of belief is a good thing, and religions usually only encourage belief in themselves
• Freedom of expression is a good thing, and religions usually discourage questioning of belief

McGrath goes on:

It is not a blind leap into the dark, but a joyful discovery of a bigger picture of things, of which we are part. It is complex and rich idea [sic], which goes far beyond simply asserting or holding that certain things are true.

If it's a joyful discovery of a bigger picture of things, then why can it not be demonstrated? Here's the thing; theists 'discover' bigger pictures all the time. They either relate to reality or are a figment of their imagination. How to decide? Of course, there's only one answer to that, and McGrath won't like it.

Theists present multifarious and contradictory 'bigger pictures' to non-believers, and then moan at them for quibbling about evidence. If we are to accept McGrath's word without evidence, then we may just as well accept a Muslim's, a Jew's, a Scientologist's or Al Queda's. Theists then say, no, you must discover it yourself. No, no, and again, no. Without reason and evidence one cannot be sure one isn't fooling *oneself* any more than the many theists clearly are. To think anything else is to adopt the arrogant mantle of omniscience. Far from being scientistic, new atheists are simply being modest in their claims to knowledge; while theists presume to know more than their fellows. Such hubris.

McGrath promises more of this drivel, so it's going to be a long road to Golgotha.

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The Selfish Ape

The second part of Antony Thomas' film for Channel 4, How Do You Know God Exists? poses the question: is it really possible that the creator of this vast universe could have a direct, personal relationship with you, and with me?

Not terribly well worded, IMO, since anything that is logically possible can be agreed as possible. Is it really likely etc... would have been a more interesting question. Never mind; let's see what the protagonists said:

Yes! In a word.

...said Rowan Williams. A little triumphantly, I thought. He expanded:

Because the difference between us and god is not that, we're very small and he's very big...

...is it that we exist and he doesn't?

Christians have always held, and Jews and Muslims too, that god is absolutely present in every bit of the creation, that his energy, if you like, is at work in every act within the universe. We may be very small, but we, and everything else, are in the palm of god's hand.

No, of course not, it's that he's omnipresent, like Big Brother. Note the final sentence, hoping to portray some humility in this most arrogant of doctrines. This arrogant-humility is a hallmark of theist belief. The universe; it's all about *us*, and we've done wrong. This is attention seeking behaviour, and should be ignored if it wasn't so prevalent, and respected.

This little speech doesn't address why the Archbishop thinks the god that he worships is a personal god. He's not one for answers, though, as we've seen.

Swami Pramtattvadas, for the Hindus, then offers:

God pervades his entire creation; that means he is everywhere... in the rivers... he's all around us.

He goes on a bit with a few examples of where he is, although saying he's everywhere should have communicated the message. Not sure what this has to do with the personal god, though.

He then talks with the Swami and the Archbishop and Vincent Nicholls about doubt, and the testing of their faith. Nicholls says:

I think doubt is an intrinsic part of faith.

I've noted that another Catholic priest has acknowledged the doubt in his faith. This is a little odd when one considers what the Vatican says about it:

Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie. To be sure, revealed truths can seem obscure to human reason and experience, but "the certainty that the divine light gives is greater than that which the light of natural reason gives."

I'd really like to know which it is; are these theists certain, or doubtful? Because this affects how people take the message they are pushing. When they are sermonising they seem to be pretty certain about what it is they believe. Do they add provisos at the end when talking about the bible?

The events depicted in this book may or may not be fictitious. Any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental.

Not at any church I've been to. But Nicholls ends by saying:

My own experience of faith is real, and, at times, very encouraging, very fruitful.

Here we go again, with the solipsism. Will they never stop thinking about themselves? Everyone's experience is different, so to extrapolate from one's own experience to a general truth is *unsafe*. Please stop doing it, unless one is prepared to be scientific about it.

Nicholls again:

We come from god, and we return to god.

He believes that life is a *separation* from god. To what end? Does he recall being with god before he was born? Does he know he will be with god after death? No, of course not; it is selfish wishful thinking. Probably! Jonathan Sacks would prefer to dwell on the hear and now, but also says:

We are more than physical beings, and everything about us should tell us so.

I disagree; everything about us should tell us we *are* just physical beings. Letting our desires rule the evidence is simply dishonest. Rowan Williams says:

All I really know about the afterlife is that god has promised to be there. God has promised that death is not the point at which he wipes his hands and says 'I've done with you'.

Could you show me that promisory note? Is that really all you claim to know about the afterlife? Which god will be there?

Swami Pramtattvadas talks about the Hindu belief of the journey of the soul through different incarnations, gradually building to the point of release. He talks of the afterlife as a place of bliss and calmness. Serenity for ever.

Ultimately, this portrayal of a man shaped being who will guarantee us eternal bliss is a form of infantilism; we don't like the idea that when we die, we are gone - forever. But these constructs allow for the fact that people we know and love *will* be excluded from this eternal bliss. To believe that is true, and accept eternal bliss for oneself, is surely the very definition of selfishness. So the personal aspect of god is important only if one is worried about oneself. I certainly am worried about myself, but I also care about the people I know and love, and many I don't. I'm not prepared to respect a doctrine that suggests that some of them, through no fault of their own, deserve some kind of hell, whilst others enjoy an eternity of bliss.

Next up in the program; is religious faith important for community?

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