"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
-- William James
When I was about 18 years old, I had one of the worst experiences of my life. I'm not sure if it was a virus or some sickness or disease. It only lasted a few days but it felt like weeks. I remember crawling to the shower, struggling just to move my hands in front of the other. The muscles in my body stiffened to such an extreme to where I had to use concentrate efforts to move. The pain I got from simply moving is almost ineffable. It sort of resembled that warm muscular tension you get when lactic acid builds up from exercise, only a hundredfold, coupled with that prickly feeling you get when your hand goes numb. It was completely debilitating. It was as if some invisible pressure held me there just loose enough not to crush me completely. But it wasn't the pain that was the worst of it. It was the maddening struggle to move. Like boxing someone who outmatches you in every way, every swing a miss, until exhaustion and frustration blinds every subsequent swing, always hitting nothing but air.
Throughout the whole ordeal, every time I felt like I couldn't move another inch, when I was trapped in a shirt halfway up my chest, arms fixed straight up, I did the only thing I could think to do: I prayed. I closed my eyes tight and asked for an inch, just a little mercy, any kind of relief.
This is not faith.
Faith is not the yearning for a higher power. It is not prayer. It is not solely a religious phenomena. And it definitely is not the answer to spirituality. There seems to be a great misconception about faith that says it is a religious statement of belief. A way of saying "I believe because I have faith.," which is equal to "I don't know why I believe." The concept of this faith present a problem.
In order to explain why, though, we must first understand belief as a mental state. Everyone knows what beliefs are. Beliefs are what you believe. It seems self explanatory. It seems absurd there can be anything at all left to say about beliefs. When we believe something we mean every degree of assurance, including the highest possible certainty and conviction. This sums up the definition of a much smarter man than I, William James. There is something, however, that does not have the same intuitive feeling: the fact that belief is actually a mental and emotional state. Much like anxiety, depression, or irritation, belief is a mental state.
"What characterizes belief is the cessation of theoretic agitation [the stopping of a conflicting idea], through the advent of an idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the exclusion of contradictory ideas."
Belief is simply the absence of contradictory thoughts. This means that when we are in a state of belief we are in a state of equilibrium. A stable mental state in which no thoughts contradict each other. Now this might get a little abstract but like all complex ideas, the insight emerges only when grasped.
So if belief is the absence of contradictory thoughts, at what point is something in a state of disbelief? When do we decide not to believe in evolution, God, or Democrat? If belief is characterized as the absence of contradictory thoughts, then its opposite is the presence of contradictory thoughts. A state where two or more ideas seem correct and no clear consensus can be made. Although this all seems very straightforward, it has a few major implications relevant to faith. First, any object which remains uncontradicted is believed and posited as truth. As William James put it: "As a rule we believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we only could... A child's mind is the same. It is only as objects become permanent and their relations fixed that discrepancies and contradictions are felt and must be settled in some stable way." Secondly, from this simple analysis, it is clear that a belief has an opposite which is not disbelief but rather resembles doubt.
Although disbelief may grammatically seems like the opposite of belief, recall belief is a constant state. If you've ever argued with someone who didn't believe what you believe you know that their viewpoint seemed just as constant as yours. Both of you didn't budge. And there is a distinct feeling we get when someone talks about something that we don't necessarily agree with or believe (I guess it's possible you may be feeling that right now). But this feeling of disbelief is merely a byproduct of belief itself:
"We never disbelieve anything except for the reason that we believe something else which contradicts the first thing. Compare this psychological fact with the corresponding logical truth that all negation rests on covert assertion of something else than the thing denied [this is a principle of logic]."
Good God that was wordy and confusing. Translation: you cannot be in a state of disbelief without believing something else to be true in its place instead. We need to believe something first to disbelieve something else. As an example, if I do not believe that the sun revolves around the earth it is only because I believe the the earth actually revolves around the sun instead. I believe the earth revolves around the sun which makes me disbelieve the opposite because it contradicts my beliefs. So really, disbelief is just a way of saying I believe something else. Disbelief = belief. They are the same. Two sides of a coin. If you recall
Belief as the absence of contradictory thoughts then the presence of contradictory thoughts is best described as doubt.
If a man consistently told a woman they loved her with all their heart but then had sexual relationships with other people and physically abused the woman, it would be hard for the woman to make sense of that because two different contradictory messages are being recieved. Do they love me or not? They say they do but they don't act like it. This is doubt.
So why would this be good? Consider the example I just gave and the role faith would play in it. Faith may have different meanings for many different people but there is one definition that, in one way or another, captures the true nature of faith regardless of its usage. Faith is believing in the absence of evidence. Phrased another way, faith is also believing in the
presence of contradictory evidence. Faith would have the woman believe he loves her despite infidelity and abuse.
"The different between faith and hope is that faith is believing in the absence of evidence; hope is wishing for an outcome based on probablity."
The problem is that faith resembles a choice; a choice that has chosen based on feeling and done so without the consent of evidence. Faith would chose the first choice; the man loves her and just excuse the abuse and infidelity. It would never conisder that the man may not love her because there is evidence that suggests otherwise. Outside a religious context, faith seems like a problem no question. But faith presents a problem universally. This is not saying that religion or spirituality is groundless, on the contrary, but a belief system surrounded by more answers then questions will likely have faith as an emotional comfort and support.
When people point to faith as an emotional comfort, they seem to be consciously choosing a position that may have no basis at all. Again, this is not just a religious thing and is not a religious statement. An atheist debating a theist that states "nothing happens when you die" is also taking a leap of faith. No one knows what happens after we die. Science does not answer it and religion answers in presumptuously. I recall hearing the famous Christian apologist D'Souza argue this brilliantly. The theist is taking a leap of faith by saying there is an afterlife and the atheist is by saying nothing happens. Also remember that belief and disbelief are two sides of a mental coin. They are analogous mental states. Disbelief simply has another belief already in its place. The problem with faith is that it is a choice not based on evidence but on the feeling of belief itself. Belief, like depression,
feels like something. From my experiences growing up in the Christian church, the religious circles I've experienced have routinely pointed to doubt as a kind of phase that the masses go through. You know, just a bump in the road. There is no validation for the questions being asked or the feelings being felt. Faith prefers the choice that is in our own self-interest and its bias is toward the unexplainable.
In a practical sense, however, faith appears wonderfully adaptive. A person who can persistently bat off negative contradictory evidence in favor of positive beliefs supported only by faith is choosing the more positive outcome and thereby reducing anxiety. These people can achieve longer (but obviously fragile) periods of mental stability and comfort. It is a medical fact that positive beliefs (even without evidence)statistically affect the likelihood of recovery in a favorable way. The positive consequences of a belief supported by faith always reinforces faith. Doubt almost always, especially in religious and dogmatic domains, supports negative consequences. Strictly as an example, if you don't believe in an afterlife, then where will you go when you die? If faith is believing in an after life, thereby continuing our existence (everyone wants to live), faith has a positive consequence. So would doubting the possibility of an afterlife mean possibly missing out? Religion would certainty says yes (because religion is an enterprise dependent on group membership), and if that's the case, faith clearly seems like the route to an afterlife-- and less stress, evidence or no evidence. Why would we ever consciously choose negative consequences over positive ones? Why would we ever choose doubt over faith?
Because doubt is
NOT the rejection of a belief (disbelief)
NOR the opposite of faith. It was previously logically demonstrated how doubt is the opposite of belief not faith. Going back to the afterlife example, those who do not believe in an afterlife are saying they believe in something else instead. This is
disbelief. Doubt allows for a choice to be made, but demands evidence to make it, and never has the brazen to say for sure. Most of the time there is just no way of knowing. Is hope not superior to faith? Is the possibility of something not enough? The different between faith and hope is that faith is believing in the absence of evidence; hope is wishing for an outcome based on probablity. I hope I win the lottery today. I hope my friend recovers for his illness. I hope I live to see tomorrow.
Doubt has the ability to confront the anxiety of not knowing and make it habitual. It can make conflict become a constant stable state that provides adaptive mental strategies to cope with all the stressors inherent in human life. Doubt is dispassionately passionate about the truth. Doubt forces a search for evidence-- a self perpetuating machine that draws attention to the details and promotes intellectual growth. The focus no longer rests on being right or blindly accepting positive consequences. The attention goes to the limits of knowledge and truth. It has no preferences. It is unbiased. It records the path said to take while referencing the entire known map.
But doubt is not for the faint of heart. It is uncomfortable, at least a first. It takes courage to admit we don't know-- and prudence to know if it can be known. The most important function of doubt is it leads to inquiry, the birth of the modern age. It is well known that common sense and intuition are flawed and misguided by our sensibilities. Sometimes they can be just dead wrong (stereotypes, phobias, ect.). Human inquiry gave us the power of questions but the weakness of answers. It is my belief, based on the evidence I have, that as we discover how much there is to know, and in doing so uncover just how little we actually know about more and more, that doubt is the only acceptable intellectual position. This is not a philosophy of agnosticism or a system of neutrality; this is an objective examination of belief, disbelief, faith, and doubt-- as evident by those far greater than I who have devoted their lives in the search for truth-- and the conclusion that doubt is superior to faith in its ability to generate knowledge and produce lasting comfort without the weak foundations of faith. The fragility of faith lies in the fact that it does nothing for understanding. It is, by its very definition, volitional ignorance.
The common phrase "you always fear what you don't understand" rings true enough. We should be weary of those who claim to already know the answers. It is not enough to surround ourselves with like-minded people. Doubt will shake our preconceptions and unsettle us just enough to start searching for our own answers. And that is doubt's trump card over faith. Growth. We must never stop searching. The fact we can choose at all is a match struck in the dark.
"... the whole psychology of belief, disbelief, and doubt, is thus grounded on two mental facts-- first, that we are liable to think differently of the same; and second, that when we have done so, we can choose which way of thinking to adhere to and which to disregard."
*referenced from William Jame's classic work The Principles of Psychology in his second volume on Belief
