Some readers may have objected to the fact that in the post God is Not Obvious I listed the reasons to believe in something as experience, logic, desire, and fear. I did not list faith.
Lots of people, if asked why they believed in God, would answer something along the lines of “I have faith” or “my faith tells me so.” This is perfectly legitimate, but it is the language of the insider. To the outsider, it is going to sound like a tautology, like saying I believe because I believe. It is the sort of thing that makes them reflexively attach the word “blind” whenever they speak the word “faith.”
When someone says they believe in God because of their faith, they are, at one level, simply saying that belief in God is part of their world view. Everyone grows up inside a worldview. I am a Catholic because I was raised Catholic. That came about because of the happy accident of my father having rejected the atheism of his university years and having joined the Church shortly after I was born. Had he not done so, I cannot say for sure that I would have found my own way to Rome, as he did. I might now be writing a newsletter about why I am still an atheist. (Not that that is something one would likely be called on to defend these days.)
But that’s not what happened. I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic schools. I went to a Catholic church. I read Catholic books. I was taught Catholicism as if it was simply the true explanation of human affairs and the state of the world. Catholicism was my faith and I believed in its precepts, such as the existence of God, because that is the faith I was taught. Like all children, I accepted the faith of my tribe.
As I grew older, of course, I became aware that not everyone was Catholic. My school friends all were, but the friends I made on our street in Manchester were Anglicans or Methodists if they were anything. As I delved into my father’s shelves, I found a number of books of Catholic apologetics addressed to the objections of protestants. It was some time later before I figured out that the greater argument with Catholicism came not from Protestantism but from atheism.
University is the place where one is generally brought face to face with these questions, and so it probably was for me, though it is too long ago now for me to identify the point with precision. The fact that, as the child of a recent convert, I had already been exposed to apologetic literature probably shaped the approach I took to these questions once they were raised. For many young people who experience this sudden challenge to the world view in which they were raised, the experience may not be so much an intellectual challenge as a tribal one.
I said in the previous essay that one of the reasons for believing something is fear. The main fear that drives us to change our beliefs is fear of ostracism. We are tribal creatures. As a condition of membership, our various tribes demand conformance to the defining ideas of the tribe. To even question such ideas is to risk expulsion, for doubt about the tribe’s defining ideas is doubt about the legitimacy and cohesion of the tribe itself, and if people doubt the legitimacy and cohesion of the tribe, that threatens the safety and prosperity of every member. This means that there are questions in every tribe that you just don’t ask, let alone answer.
Leaving home and going to university introduces you to new tribes, tribes you will be anxious to join. After all, you have just been separated from the tribe you grew up in, the tribe of your family, school, church, and neighborhood. You need a new tribe, and the tribes that form in universities tend to appeal to our appetites as much as to our need to belong. Most young men on their own for the first time are going to want to join the tribes with the prettiest girls and the best parties. Even if you go to a Catholic university, as I did, you are still going to encounter other tribes and other ideas, and they are going to have much about them that is appealing, and not just pretty girls and parties, but an alternate way of living and thinking, which may seem to promise things that your old tribe did not.
What one also encounters in university, or, at least, one used to encounter it, is philosophy and the great questions. From all I hear, this may no longer be the case in a university system now dominated by Marxist ideology. Be that as it may, in my day one encountered philosophy, and if you did not take a philosophy course, you would at least encounter philosophical questions in that most valuable of courses, which we in our day called Cafeteria 101. Which is to say, sitting around in the cafeteria talking grand talk about great questions as if you understood them.
In Cafeteria 101, I heard all of the objections and the arguments against God in general and Catholicism in particular. Anti-Catholic talk at Catholic universities tends to be both more coherent and better informed than in other places. Hearing these arguments and considering them led me to dig down into the fundamental questions and to understand, with whatever approximation of philosophical rigor one can achieve without dedicating their life to philosophy, that the Catholicism in which I was raised was a complete system of thought, and that if I were to leave Catholicism, I would be leaving that whole system in its entirety. The whole ground of being would be shifted. The whole world would turn topsy-turvy and settle back into a new pattern. My feet would stand upon new ground and all the world would be new.
After looking at the world without Christianity, without God, I concluded that while it might indeed be true, and it might have the better parties, or at least the more decadent ones, there would be nothing about it that would seem in any way comforting or fruitful. It might license all sorts of self-fulfilling behavior, which seemed to be its attraction to many, but when I looked at the account it gave of the human person and their dignity and reason, I found nothing coherent there. I stayed a Catholic, in short, because there was nowhere else to go.
The fact that I am the child of a convert is probably significant here. Because of it, I was aware of Catholicism as a complete system of thought, and the ways in which that system of thought differed from that of the society around me. I suspect that many people raised Catholic in Catholic homes were not really conscious of Catholicism as a system of thought in this way, nor of how it contrasts with the thought of the wider society. Most, I suspect, take pieces from here and pieces from there according to the kind of acceptance they gain from adopting these ideas and never worry overmuch about whether all the pieces fit together. Fitting all the pieces together is difficult enough, even when they come from one puzzle, let alone when they come from several puzzles all mixed up together.
People raised in Catholic homes in secular neighborhoods will pick up ideas from both. Some part of their thought and practice will be Catholic, certainly, but some parts of it will probably be secular. Their parents themselves, raised similarly, probably have the same mix themselves. If many Catholics do not see any contradiction between the Catholic and secular parts of their thoughts, this is hardly surprising because most of us have thoughts which, if questioned logically, are inconsistent with each other.
Our loyalties are tribal and our sympathies are sentimental. We can believe all kinds of contradictory things quite happily and never notice the contradictions. I’m sure that this is true of me too. I have not made it my life’s project to make sure all the pieces of my thought fit and none are missing. But my particular upbringing made me aware at least that there was more than one system of thought in the world, and that internal consistency within a system of thought is a desirable thing. If I can’t be sure that all the pieces in my head come from the same puzzle, at least I recognize that they might not, and that it would be good if they did.
Now, a Protestant reader might read this and say, yes, but there are not just two such systems of thought, the Catholic and the atheist. We have one too. You can leave the Catholic church and come here. We too share the view of the human person as a creature of dignity and reason. In some sense, indeed, every protestant denomination was born of an attempt to make the Christian world view simpler and more coherent than the Catholic version. To extend my puzzle metaphor, they would claim that Catholicism had allowed some foreign pieces into the box which their denomination sorted out and rejected at its founding. A Jewish or Moslem reader might make a similar case for their own faiths.
One could spend a lifetime on the study of these faiths and the differences in their world view. But like most people, I don’t have the time to do a comprehensive study of every religious alternative in the world. When we look outside of our current world view, it is because of a specific challenge from some particular world view. In the 19th century, for instance, it was a clash with the protestant world view that occupied the attention of people like Cardinal Newman and the Oxford Movement. But this is not where the main point of confrontation occurs today. Today the confrontation is with materialist rationalism. When I open the church door and look out, that is the abyss into which I gaze.
That too, like my father’s conversion, is a happenstance of history. I am a man of this age and I confront the questions that are at the forefront of this age. I do so not for any grand philosophical reason, but because these are the ideas with which I am challenged by the times I live in and the people I meet. I am not a philosopher. I am a retired technical writer who is trying to make a second career as a novelist.
Being a novelist makes me aware of the astonishing particularity of our lives. Philosophy floats away on the wings of abstraction, and so it should, for there are great abstract philosophical questions that underlie all that we think and believe, and it is necessary and good that some should devote their lives to investigating those questions, testing the answers, and holding the rest of us to account when we say or think illogical or inconsistent things. But that is not my part. I am concerned with the particularity of things.
And yet, the particularity of things leads me to confront the great questions, for upon the answers to the great questions rest the foundation of all that is particular in our thoughts and experiences. My answer to the great questions is the fundamental Catholic anthropology: that mankind was created by a loving God, is capable of reason, and is subject to original sin. The atheist anthropology is that mankind is the product of chance in an indifferent mechanical universe subject to the biochemistry of the brain. If I stoop in my garden to pick a flower, these two anthropologies give massively different accounts of that singular and particular action, its impetus and its significance.
But the focus on the particularity of individual experience requires us to recognize that we each approach the great questions from within our particular world view and our own particular experience. When people change their minds about things like whether to remain a Catholic, it is not always the great fundamental questions that influence them. For many, it is some specific event or scandal, such as the clergy sexual abuse scandal. For some it is the attraction of some aspect of another way of life, such as the sexual freedom promised by the sexual revolution. For some it is boredom at the cultural ennui that has overcome the church, subsequent to the post-Vatican II liturgical reform.
Even when we do approach the great philosophical questions, we do so at a particular time and for a particular reason and we bring particular baggage with us. Logical consistency of thought and action should, in theory, be our goal. Whatever one believes about everything else in life, it ought to be consistent with what you believe about the fundamental questions. And yet this admirable principle leads us immediately into deep water. First, of course, who has time for all the thinking required to achieve such consistency? Second, the attempt to achieve logical consistency in any system of thought tends to lead to conclusions and actions that are abhorrent, or at least leave us reluctant. Perhaps a fuller consideration and a more sophisticated balancing of principles could resolve these difficulties. But who has the time or even the mental equipment for that? Our world view, in the practical circumstances of earthly life with all its limitations of aptitude, time, and resources, is a hunch as much as a product of pure reason.
You can attempt to swim those deep waters yourself, or you can turn to a system of thought that has been developed by thousands of minds working in concert with each other over thousands of years, discussing the great questions, grappling with their practical application to lives lived in this veil of tears. You can, in other words, adopt a faith. Faith, then, is indeed a reason to believe in God, for a faith gives us something that we could never work out for ourselves with a single mind in a single lifetime. If we fail to adopt a faith, we are doomed never to live with a mature, developed, and tested world view. We will never work through the problems ourselves while also making a living and dealing with all the other task that ordinary life lays upon us.
In some sense this is as simple a choice as buying a car rather than designing and making one for yourself. You could never finish a car project from scratch, should you spend your whole life on the project. You could bodge together a rat rod out of parts of other cars, but it is never going to have the sophistication or integrity of a factory model. Most of us need a reliable daily driver, and for that we must rely on the ingenuity and prowess of a large team of other people maturing the design over decades or centuries. An established faith does the same thing for our intellectual and spiritual needs.
It isn’t any different if you claim to have faith is science. Science is a method and a body or work assembled using that method by generations of scientists over hundreds of years. It is a corporate project, just as the body of the Catholic faith is a corporate project. It is conducted by fallible men and women. Much of its history is a record of some of those men and women being proved wrong by other men and women who are then proved wrong in their turn. It is a great, noble, and useful project, but if you accept it you are not working it out by yourself from first principles. You are not conducting all of the experiments and verifying the results yourself. You have neither the time nor the resources nor the skills to do so. You are adopting a faith, because it is the only choice you have if you want the benefits of this methodology and the body of knowledge it has produced. You can’t get it by yourself. You have to embrace the work of others. Faith in those people and in their method, then, is the reason you believe in quantum mechanics or evolution or heliocentrism. You did not work them out for yourself, nor have you verified the experiments. You take them on faith.
Please note that I am not suggesting an equivalence between faith in science and faith in religion. They are two different ways of knowing, each suited to a different kind of knowledge about a different kind of subject matter, and relying on different forms of provenance. The material universe is obvious (though perhaps not as obvious as it once seemed). God is not obvious. I have faith in both, though the nature of my trust in each is of a different quality. The similarity I am drawing is simply that we do not get to faith in either one by working it out for ourselves. The greatest rational humanist of our age, had he been born into a stone age tribe, would have made sacrifices to the gods of his tribe according to its precepts and understanding, and never once paused to think that maybe the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of the other way round. From our birth we enter into a body of thought that we did not create and will never fully comprehend.
Faith, then, whether it is in science or in Catholicism genuinely is a reason to believe. The essence of that reason is that you cannot get there yourself. I was not present on the road to Damascus, nor in the upper room after the resurrection, nor in the stable at Bethlehem. I no more know these things for myself than I know quantum mechanics or evolution or heliocentrism for myself. To get there at all, I must trust others.
Trust, is, of course, one of the meanings of the word faith, indeed, its primary meaning. In these things as in almost all things in our lives, it is not so much a matter of what you believe, but of who you believe, of who you trust. Faith is the reason we believe almost everything.
I have had a very hard time writing this essay, and I think the reason is that I keep getting lost in the particularity of my own thoughts and experiences. In writing that our approach to the greatest and most fundamental philosophical questions is particular and influenced by the particularity of our individual experience, I become conscious that the same is true of whatever I write in this essay.
But what I take from this is not that my world view is irredeemably individual, though I suppose it is. What I take from it is the value of committing myself to a world view that is external to myself and my experience. Both my understanding of and adherence to the Catholic world view are particular, of course, but they are at least oriented to something outside of me. Some parts of Catholicism I don’t understand, and some parts of it are conclusions I would never reach on my own and struggle to see the sense of now. But far from being disturbing to me, I find these things reassuring.
There is something involved here which I will call the rational surrender of the ego of belief. If it all made perfect sense and seemed entirely right to me, that would mean that my ego was the arbiter of truth, and I cannot see how that can be the case. It would be a very lonely universe in which all truth came from my own mind. In some sense, of course, the universe is a lonely place, for we never truly know any mind but our own. But if minds are to meet, they must meet in a place outside of both of them, a space they share, and if that space is shared, it cannot be the product of a single ego. I need there to be a world out there, a truth out there, that I do not fully like or understand. Otherwise, I am quite alone.
The parts of Catholicism that seem hardest for me to reconcile are, for this reason, the parts that reassure me that I have not made myself the arbiter of truth. They give me some reason to hope that I am living not my truth, but the actual truth of the actual universe, however foggily I may comprehend it.
Of course, the same kind of difficulty exists with every other system of thought out there. I don’t fully like or comprehend any of them. Being disquieted or puzzled by some aspect of a system of thought is not a reason to believe in that system. Nor is it a reason to disbelieve in it. Every defined system of thought you are likely to encounter would qualify for both belief and disbelief by these criteria. Your disquiet and puzzlement are simply a source of reassurance that you have not made your own mind the arbiter of all things.
Finally, I should note that the church considers faith a gift from God. It is, perhaps, not the most obvious of gifts. (God is not obvious.) It is more like the mysterious unsigned secret Santa gift from the office Christmas party. You don’t quite know what it is, or what it is for, or who it is from. But as a reason to believe, faith as a gift would fit under the experience category of my little belief schema. Faith is a choice, a choice of who to trust, and that choice will be made out of experience, logic, desire, or fear.
Is Faith a Reason to Believe?
"But if minds are to meet, they must meet in a place outside of both of them, a space they share, and if that space is shared, it cannot be the product of a single ego. I need there to be a world out there, a truth out there, that I do not fully like or understand. Otherwise, I am quite alone."
Beautifully said.