Take Nothing on Faith

Do Not Fall for Irrationalist Tactics

Being rational is hard. I can confidently say that none of us succeed at being entirely rational all the time for every topic and action. Being rational does not mean always being right. It means being willing to discover when you are wrong. It does not even mean being able to give compelling reasons for all of your beliefs. At its core, being rational means being open to the possibility of being mistaken, being willing to listen to evidence and arguments that might falsify your beliefs, being committed to learning rather than to any particular position.

Because rationality is hard, we should not let non-rationalists and antirationalists undermine it. One tactic is especially common and insidious. Sometimes it is a deliberate and conscious strategy to undermine rationalism. At other times, it reflects confused thinking about reason. Here is an example, something I came across in the comments section of a news blog:

“Even the most die-hard atheist does, though, have to have some faith if they want to make any argument about the world, even if it is only the faith that they can trust their own senses that what they see, hear etc. is real and not figments of their imagination. We can’t escape from that.”

This assertion is not merely wrong, it is corrosive. The mistake lies in assuming that rationality requires unquestionable foundations. If we were to allow this move, it would undermine reason, evidence, and critical thinking. In its most blatant form, we find it in discussions of religion and gods. The rationalist argues that belief in a particular religion or deity not only is not supported by evidence, it clearly contradicts the evidence. The believer may start by denying this and attempting to argue that evidence does support a belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent God, as well as belief in the resurrection of Jesus, his miracles, and other claims central to Christianity and other religions.

When this approach proves difficult to sustain, the tactic changes. The claim now is that reason itself relies on assumptions that cannot be proven and that must be taken on faith. Before seeing exactly what is wrong with this claim we first need to be clear about the meanings of reason, rationalism, and fideism.

Reason vs. faith

This term has been used in varying ways over the centuries. The confusion this causes tempts me to abandon it in favor of “reasonism” or some other new term. I will stick with the term but specify what I do – and do not – mean by it. In the sense I intend, rationalism is the commitment to base one’s beliefs on the evidence, to calibrate the strength of ones beliefs according to the strength of the evidence, and to be open to revising one’s beliefs when one becomes aware of conflicting evidence.

Rationalists use reason, meaning that they ask questions, apply logic, criticize, and use methods that have improved reliability and accuracy.

If you have taken a course on epistemology or the history of philosophy, you will probably have come across a distinction between rationalists and empiricists. Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge comes from, and must be tested by, sense experience. Rationalism, as empiricism’s rival, says that reason is a faculty that can apprehend truths beyond sense perception and can reach certainty. This is not what I mean by rationalism. I take no position about the role of the senses. I disagree with both rationalism and empiricism in the historical sense due to their search for absolute foundations for knowledge.

Another source of confusion in recent years comes from the association of the term with a specific group of writers and thinkers focused in the Bay Area. When people talk about “the rationalist movement,” this is often what they are referring to. These individuals are indeed rationalists in my general sense but they also affirm other views that are not required by rationalism itself. (Bayesianism, fears of AI as an existential risk, utilitarianism, and effective altruism.)

In contrast to rationalism, fideism holds that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths. The word fideism comes from fides, the Latin word for faith, and literally means “faith-ism”. Alvin Plantinga – a philosopher I used to read in the 1990s – defines “fideism” as “the exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason and is used especially in the pursuit of philosophical or religious truth”.

Few people consistently reject reason in everyday life. They couldn’t. People will not survive for long if they make choices based on emotion, religious dogma, or revelation alone. Far more common is a fideism that claims equal status to reason or even superiority when it comes to certain matters, as in religious belief. The Christian Bible is clear enough: 163: Hebrews 11.1: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

In his book, Modern science and Christian Beliefs, Arthur F. Smethurst argued that the basic principles of science – causality, the uniformity of nature, and the reliability of reason – cannot be verified through reason and hence enter the domain of faith. He claims that:

“if we look far enough we shall find that modern science rests upon a foundation of religious belief, and is based upon assumptions which can only be justified by monotheistic faith. Science rests upon acts of faith.”

We can see a similar claim in my original example. That we have faith that our senses are giving us accurate information. That we have in logic and scientific method. Reasoning can only get started by building on a foundation of faith, of the non-rational.

This is a common thought but is mistaken. It trades on an equivocation over the meaning of “faith.” Religious faith requires belief in various things in the absence of evidence and contrary to the evidence. A prima facie trust in sensory information is different. We have come to know that our senses provide us only a small slice of reality and our scientific knowledge enables us to compensate. We do not trust our senses (and other basics about the world) in the absence of or contrary to the evidence. We trust it in line with evidence.

The old rationalist/empiricist distinction feeds this misconception. Both sides attempted to find absolute foundations for knowledge. Descartes most starkly represented the “rationalist” side in basing certain knowledge on indisputable concepts (“I think therefore I am” and his “clear and distinct ideas”). The empiricists instead sought to ground knowledge in sense data. Neither side succeeded but their struggle reinforced the view that knowledge must have foundations that are certain.

True rationalists rely on logic, scientific methods, sensory information, and so on, but they do not treat any of these things as absolutely infallible. They use them because they have proved helpful in acquiring reliable knowledge. They also recognize their limitations. Our senses can mislead us. Even our instruments may mislead us.

Rationalists rely on some principles and some items of knowledge more than others but hold none beyond question.

This is the essence of critical rationalism. In its most comprehensive and consistent form, this is often known as pancritical rationalism. This is a rationalism that holds the methods of reason themselves open to criticism and refutation or correction. No unquestionable foundations for knowledge are required. Nothing is beyond question. Rationalists hold everything open to revision. A rationalist can be completely consistent. No irrational faith is required.

One modern figure who appears explicitly to be a pancritical rationalist is David Deutsch, who wrote: “The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails. To this day most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified true, belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge.”

We can see the rejection of reason not only among religious thinkers, as I mentioned in an early essay on this blog. Consider also postmodernists and neo-Marxists who reject science and reason as tools of oppression and class warfare. “Another form of fideism – faith as primary – can be seen in existentialists who take a leap of faith to hold a commitment. In today’s world, a much bigger problem than existentialists are those activists who push their emotions as if they were facts and outrage as if it were an argument, and those who place consensus above truth or who see it as the very definition of truth.”

Rationality as a virtue

Rationalism is a fundamentally different cognitive attitude and habit than fideism or any accommodation to faith. Rationality – the consistent application of reason – is an admirable and courageous orientation. Courageous because it is hard to hold everything open to question. Especially when it comes to life and death matters (such as the idea of an afterlife) it is much easier to hold firmly to a reassuring belief despite its obvious weakness when considered rationally.

You cannot act in the world while constantly questioning and doubting all of your beliefs all the time. But that is not what is required of rationalists. We establish some beliefs with a reasonably high degree of confidence based on experience and critical thinking. Until or unless someone gives clear grounds for doubting those established beliefs, it makes sense to continue relying on them. Even so, this takes work, attention, and commitment to finding our way closer to truth rather than to fooling ourselves into a desired belief.

I have major differences with Ayn Rand’s philosophy but appreciate her ability to cut through to the core of issues. Rand made a crucial point when she declared that rationality “means a commitment to reason, not in sporadic fits or on selected issues or in special emergencies, but as a permanent way of life.” I think she was also right to tie rationality to the virtues of independence, integrity, and honesty.

Transhumanism incorporates rationalism in the sense I have described. Like consistent humanists, transhumanists explicitly commit to continually striving to be rational. Like humanists, transhumanists reject faith as a source of knowledge. Perhaps more so than humanists, transhumanists also reject emotions as a source of knowledge and are sensitive to the tendency of emotions to bias thinking.

Reasoning usually concerns itself with finding arguments for continuing to believe what we already believe – reasoning as rationalizing. Rationality concerns itself with challenging our beliefs and relentlessly rooting out those that fail to withstand the challenge. Rationality is not comfortable but it is freeing. Being rational takes commitment, effort, continuing focus, and practice.

It is worth noting a perhaps obvious point: Those who talk a lot about rationality are not necessarily any more rational. Recent evidence shows that famous academics with books and TV shows about dishonesty and cheating do it themselves. In fact, talk about rationality can be little more than signaling to others. Talk is not the same as putting reason into practice. Heavy rationalist talk can even be a way of discouraging others from examining your views and conclusions too closely. “I’m so rational, how dare you question me!” This is rather like the left-wing associated tactic of accusing others of things that you are doing yourself.

A good rationalist is a consistent rationalist. Nothing needs to be taken on faith. We hold our beliefs and assumptions genuinely open to question and to refutation. We apportion the strength of our belief to the evidence. Even the principles of logic and scientific method are open to question. (But good luck trying to construct an argument while doing away with logic.)

The faith-based thinkers want to undermine reason, arguing that it is essentially no different than faith because it relies on assumptions taken on faith or unsupported. This leads inevitably to irrationality. This view leads to the conclusion that there is no rational basis for anything, therefore you might as well choose what you want to believe.

Whenever someone tells you that reason ultimately rests on faith, don’t concede the point. Ask them which belief you are supposedly required to hold beyond criticism. The answer usually reveals the confusion.

Postscript

I recently re-read parts of a book by George H. Smith that I originally read in 1985: Atheism: The Case Against God. On the current topic, I especially recommend Part Two: Reason, Faith, and Revelation. Smith’s discussion is penetrating and illuminating. I do not entirely agree with his epistemology but his core points are strong and well put. A couple of brief excerpts:

“The conflict between Christian theism and atheism is fundamentally a conflict between faith and reason. This, in epistemological terms, is the essence of the controversy. Reason and faith are opposites, two mutually exclusive terms: there is no reconciliation or common ground. Faith is belief without, or in spite of, reason.”

103: “Depending on various factors, such as the nature and amount of available evidence, a belief may be categorized as probable to some degree… Reason demands that the degree of certitude assigned to a belief must be in accordance with the available evidence. Reason does not demand that every bit of human knowledge must be accepted as certain or closed to further investigation.”

108: “This is why reason and faith are incompatible. Faith depends for its survival on the unknowable, the incomprehensible, that which reason cannot grasp. Faith cannot survive in a natural, knowable universe.” “Thus far we have seen that faith must entail belief in the absence of rational demonstration, because reason and faith cannot coexist in the same person at the same time with respect to the same object of knowledge. The presence of rational demonstration negates the possibility of faith. Since nonrational belief is an integral component of faith, we concluded that reason and faith are irreconcilable.”