The End of Faith (7 page)

While behavioral and linguistic necessity demands that we seek coherence among our beliefs
wherever we can, we know that total coherence, even in a maximally integrated brain, would be impossi- ble to achieve. This
becomes apparent the moment we imagine a per- son's beliefs recorded as a list of
assertions like I am walking in the park; Parks generally have animals; Lions are animals; and so on each being a belief unto itself, as well as a possible basis upon which to form
further inferences (both good ones: I may soon see an ani- mal; and bad ones: I may soon see a lion), and hence new beliefs, about the world. If perfect coherence is to be had, each new belief
must be checked against all others, and every combination thereof, for logical
contradictions.11 But here we encounter a minor compu- tational difficulty: the number of necessary
comparisons grows exponentially as each new proposition is added to the list. How many
beliefs could a perfect brain check for logical contradictions? The answer is surprising. Even if a computer were
as large as the known universe, built of components no larger than protons, with switching
speeds as fast as the speed of light, all laboring in parallel from the moment of the big
bang up to the present, it would still be fighting to add a 300th belief to its list.12 What does this say about the possibility of our ever guaranteeing that our worldview is
per- fectly free from contradiction? It is not even a dream within a dream.13 And yet, given the demands of language and behavior, it remains true that we must strive
for coherence wherever it is in

doubt, because failure here is synonymous with a failure either of

linguistic sense or of behavioral possibility14

Beliefs as Representations of the World

For even the most basic knowledge of the world to be possible, reg- ularities in a nervous
system must consistently mirror regularities in the environment. If a different assemblage
of neurons in my brain fired whenever I saw a person's face, I would have no way to form a
memory of him. His face could look like a face one moment and a toaster the next, and I
would have no reason to be surprised by the inconsistency, for there would be nothing for
a given pattern of neu- ral activation to be consistent with. As Stephen Pinker points out, it is only the orderly mirroring between a system that
processes infor- mation (a brain or a computer) and the laws of logic or probability that
explains “how rationality can emerge from mindless physical process” in the first place.15 Words are arranged in a systematic and rule-based way (syntax), and beliefs are likewise
(in that they must logically cohere), because both body and world are so arranged. Con-
sider the statement There is an apple and an orange in jack's lunch box. The syntactical (and hence logical) significance of the word “and” guarantees that anyone
who believes this statement will also believe the following propositions: There is an apple in jack's lunch box and There is an orange in jack's lunch box. This is not due to some magical property that syntax holds over the world; rather, it is a
simple consequence of the fact that we use words like “and” to mirror the orderly behavior
of objects. Someone who will endorse the conjunction of two statements, while denying them
individually, either does not understand the use of the word “and” or does not understand
things like apples, oranges, and lunch boxes.16 It just so happens that we live in a universe in which, if you put an apple and an orange
in Jack's lunch box, you will be able to pull out an apple, an orange, or both. There is a
point at which the meanings of words,

their syntactical relations, and rationality itself can no longer be

divorced from the orderly behavior of objects in the world.17

W H A T E V E R beliefs are, none of us harbors an infinite number of them.18 While philosophers may doubt whether beliefs are the sort of thing that can be counted, it
is clear that we have a finite amount of storage in our brains,19 a finite number of discrete memories, and a finite vocabulary that waxes and wanes
somewhere well shy of 100,000 words. There is a distinction to be made, therefore, between
beliefs that are causally active20i.e., those that we already have in our headsand those that can be constructed on demand.
If believ- ing is anything like perceiving, it is obvious that our intuitions about how
many of our beliefs are present within us at any given moment might be unreliable. Studies
of “change blindness,” for instance, have revealed that we do not perceive nearly as much
of the world as we think we do, since a large percentage of the visual scene can be
suddenly altered without our noticing.21 An analogy with computer gaming also seems apropos: current generations of com- puter
games do not compute parts of their virtual world until a player makes a move that demands
their existence.22 Perhaps many of our cognitive commitments are just like this.23

Whether most of what we believe is always present within our minds or whether it must be
continually reconstructed, it seems that many beliefs must be freshly vetted before they
can guide our behavior. This is demonstrated whenever we come to doubt a proposition that
we previously believed. Just consider what it is like to forget the multiplication table12
x 7 = ? All of us have had moments when 84 just didn't sound quite right. At such times,
we may be forced to perform some additional calculations before we can again be said to
believe that 12x7 = 84. Or consider what it is like to fall into doubt over a familiar
person's name (“Is his name really ]eff1 Is that what I call him?”). It is clear that even very well-worn beliefs can occasionally
fail to achieve credibility in the

present. Such failures of truth testing have important implications, to which we now turn.

A Matter of True and False

Imagine that you are having dinner in a restaurant with several old friends. You leave the
table briefly to use the restroom, and upon your return you hear one of your friends
whisper, “Just be quiet. He can't know about any of this.”

What are you to make of this statement? Everything turns on whether you believe that you
are the “he” in question. If you are a woman, and therefore excluded by this choice of
pronoun, you would probably feel nothing but curiosity. Upon retaking your seat, you might
even whisper, “Who are you guys talking about?” If you are a man, on the other hand,
things have just gotten interesting. What secret could your friends be keeping from you?
If your birth- day is just a few weeks away, you might assume that a surprise party has
been planned in your honor. If not, more Shakespearean possi- bilities await your
consideration.

Given your prior cognitive commitments, and the contextual cues in which the utterance was
spoken, some credence-granting circuit inside your brain will begin to test a variety of
possibilities. You will study your friends' faces. Are their expressions compatible with
the more nefarious interpretations of this statement that are now occur- ring to you? Has
one of your friends just confessed to sleeping with your wife? When could this have
happened? There has always been a certain chemistry between them. . . . Suffice it to say
that whichever interpretation of these events becomes a matter of belief for you will have
important personal and social consequences.

At present, we have no understanding of what it means, at the level of the brain, to say
that a person believes or disbelieves a given propositionand yet it is upon this
difference that all subsequent cognitive and behavioral commitments turn. To believe a
proposi-

tion we must endorse, and thereby become behaviorally susceptible to, its representational
content. There are good reasons to think that this process happens quite automaticallyand,
indeed, that the mere comprehension of an idea may be tantamount to believing it, if only
for a moment. The Dutch philosopher Spinoza thought that belief and comprehension were
identical, while disbelief required a subsequent act of rejection. Some very interesting
work in psychol- ogy bears this out.24 It seems rather likely that understanding a proposition is analogous to perceiving an
object in physical space. Our default setting may be to accept appearances as reality
until they prove to be otherwise. This would explain why merely enter- taining the
possibility of a friend's betrayal may have set your heart racing a moment ago.

Whether belief formation is a passive or an active process, it is clear that we
continuously monitor spoken utterances (both our own and those of others) for logical and
factual errors. The failure to find such errors allows us to live by the logic of what
would otherwise be empty phrases. Of course, even the change of a single word can mean the
difference between complaisance and death-defying feats: if your child comes to you in the
middle of the night saying, “Daddy, there's an elephant in the hall,” you might escort him
back to bed toting an imaginary gun; if he had said, “Daddy, there's a man in the hall,” you would probably be inclined to carry a real one.

Faith and Evidence

It does not require any special knowledge of psychology or neuro- science to observe that
human beings are generally reluctant to change their minds. As many authors have noted, we
are conserva- tive in our beliefs in the sense that we do not add or subtract from our
store of them without reason. Belief, in the epistemic sense that is, belief that aims at representing our knowledge about the worldrequires that
we believe a given proposition to be true, not

merely that we wish it were so. Such a constraint upon our thinking is undoubtedly a good
thing, since unrestrained wishful thinking would uncouple our beliefs from the
regularities in the world that they purport to represent. Why is it wrong to believe a proposition to be true just because it might feel good to believe it? One
need only linger over the meaning of the word “because” (Middle English “by” + “cause”) to
see the problem here. “Because” suggests a causal connection between a proposition's being true and a person's believing that it is. This explains the value we generally place on
evi- dence: because evidence is simply an account of the causal linkage between states of
the world and our beliefs about them. (“I believe Oswald shot Kennedy because I found his
fingerprints on the gun, and because my cousin saw him do it, and my cousin doesn't lie.”)
We can believe a proposition to be true only because something in our experience, or in our reasoning about the world, actually speaks to the
truth of the proposition in question.25

Let's say that I believe that God exists, and some impertinent per- son asks me why. This question invitesindeed, demandsan answer of the form “I believe that God exists because...” I cannot say, however, “I believe that God exists
because it is prudent to do so” (as Pascal would have us do). Of course, I can say this, but I cannot mean by the word “believe” what I mean when I say things like “I
believe that water is really two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen because two centuries
of physical experiments attest to this” or “I believe there is an oak in my yard because I
can see it.” Nor can I say things like “I believe in God because it makes me feel good.”
The fact that I would feel good if there were a God does not give me the slightest reason
to believe that one exists. This is easily seen when we swap the existence of God for some
other consoling proposition. Let's say that I want to believe that there is a diamond
buried somewhere in my yard that is the size of a refrigerator. It is true that it would
feel uncommonly good to believe this. But do I have any reason to believe that there is actually a diamond in my yard that is thousands of times larger than any yet discovered? No. Here
we can see why

Pascal's wager, Kierkegaard's leap of faith, and other epistemological ponzi schemes won't
do. To believe that God exists is to believe that I stand in some relation to his
existence such that his existence is itself the reason for my belief. There must be some causal connec- tion, or an appearance thereof, between the fact in
question and my acceptance of it. In this way, we can see that religious beliefs, to be
beliefs about the way the world is, must be as evidentiary in spirit as any other.

THE moment we admit that our beliefs are attempts to represent states of the world, we see
that they must stand in the right relation to the world to be valid. It should be clear that if a person believes in God because he has
had certain spiritual experiences, or because the Bible makes so much sense, or because he
trusts the authority of the church, he is playing the same game of justification that we
all play when claiming to know the most ordinary facts. This is probably a conclusion that
many religious believers will want to resist; but resistance is not only futile but incoherent. There is simply no other logical space for our beliefs about the world to occupy. As long
as religious propositions purport to be about the way the world is God can actually hear your prayers, If you take his name in vain bad things will happen
to you, etc.they must stand in relation to the world, and to our other beliefs about it. And it is
only by being so situated that propositions of this sort can influence our subse- quent
thinking or behavior. As long as a person maintains that his beliefs represent an actual
state of the world (visible or invisible; spiritual or mundane), he must believe that his
beliefs are a conse- quence of the way the world is. This, by definition, leaves him vul- nerable to new evidence.
Indeed, if there were no conceivable change in the world that could get a person to
question his religious beliefs, this would prove that his beliefs were not predicated upon
his taking any state of the world into account. He could not claim, therefore, to be representing the world at all.26

ALTHOUGH many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its
power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs,
and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them. Those who are destined to
suffer terribly throughout their lives, or upon the threshold of death, often find
consolation in one unfounded proposition or another. Faith enables many of us to endure
life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit
only by reason. Faith also appears to have direct physical consequences in cases where
mere expectations, good or bad, can incline the body toward health or untimely death.27 But the fact that religious beliefs have a great influence on human life says nothing at
all about their valid- ity. For the paranoid, pursued by persecutory delusions, terror of the CIA may have great
influence, but this does not mean that his phones are tapped.