The End of Faith (8 page)

What is faith, then? Is it something other than belief? The Hebrew term 'emžn‰ (verb 'mn) is alternately translated as “to have faith,” “to believe,” or “to trust.” The
Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, retains the same meaning in the
term pisteuein, and this Greek equivalent is adopted in the New Testament. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as
“the assurance of things hoped for, the convic- tion of things not seen.” Read in the
right way, this passage seems to render faith entirely self-justifying: perhaps the very
fact that one believes in something which has not yet come to pass (“things hoped for”) or
for which one has no evidence (“things not seen”) consti- tutes evidence for its actuality
(“assurance”). Let's see how this works: I feel a certain, rather thrilling “conviction”
that Nicole Kid- man is in love with me. As we have never met, my feeling is my only
evidence of her infatuation. I reason thus: my feelings suggest that Nicole and I must
have a special, even metaphysical, connection otherwise, how could I have this feeling in
the first place? I decide to set up camp outside her house to make the necessary
introductions; clearly, this sort of faith is a tricky business.

Throughout this book, I am criticizing faith in its ordinary, scrip-

tural senseas belief in, and life orientation toward, certain histor- ical and
metaphysical propositions. The meaning of the term, both in the Bible and upon the lips of
the faithful, seems to be entirely unambiguous. It is true that certain theologians and
contemplatives have attempted to recast faith as a spiritual principle that transcends
mere motivated credulity. Paul Tillich, in his Dynamics of Faith (1957), rarefied the original import of the term out of existence, casting away what he
called “idolatrous faith” and, indeed, all equa- tions between faith and belief. Surely
other theologians have done likewise. Of course, anyone is free to redefine the term
“faith” how- ever he sees fit and thereby bring it into conformity with some rational or
mystical ideal. But this is not the “faith” that has ani- mated the faithful for
millennia. The faith that I am calling into question is precisely the gesture that Tillich
himself decried as “an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence.” My argument,
after all, is aimed at the majority of the faithful in every religious tradition, not at
Tillich's blameless parish of one.

Despite the considerable exertions of men like Tillich who have attempted to hide the
serpent lurking at the foot of every altar, the truth is that religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concernspecifically in propositions that promise some
mechanism by which human life can be spared the ravages of time and death. Faith is what
credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of
terrestrial discourse constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and
candor. However far you feel you have fled the parish (even if you are just now adjusting
the mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope), you are likely to be the product of a culture
that has elevated belief, in the absence of evidence, to the highest place in the
hierarchy of human virtues. Ignorance is the true coinage of this realm“Blessed are those
who have not seen and have believed” (John 20:29)and every child is instructed that it is,
at the very least, an option, if not a sacred duty, to disregard the facts of this world
out of deference to the God who lurks in his mother's and father's imaginations.

But faith is an impostor. This can be readily seen in the way that all the extraordinary
phenomena of the religious lifea statue of the Virgin weeps, a child casts his crutches to
the groundare seized upon by the faithful as confirmation of their faith. At these moments, religious believers appear like men and women in the
desert of uncertainty given a cool drink of data. There is no way around the fact that we
crave justification for our core beliefs and believe them only because we think such
justification is, at the very least, in the offing. Is there a practicing Christian in the
West who would be indifferent to the appearance of incontestable physical evi- dence that
attested to the literal truth of the Gospels? Imagine if car- bon dating of the shroud of
Turin28 had shown it to be as old as Easter Sunday, AD 29: Is there any doubt that this revelation
would have occasioned a spectacle of awe, exultation, and zealous remission of sins
throughout the Christian world?

This is the very same faith that will not stoop to reason when it has no good reasons to believe. If a little supportive evidence emerges, however, the faithful prove
as attentive to data as the damned. This demonstrates that faith is nothing more than a
will- ingness to await the evidencebe it the Day of Judgment or some other downpour of
corroboration. It is the search for knowledge on the installment plan: believe now, live
an untestable hypothesis until your dying day, and you will discover that you were right.

But in any other sphere of life, a belief is a check that everyone insists upon cashing
this side of the grave: the engineer says the bridge will hold; the doctor says the
infection is resistant to peni- cillinthese people have defeasible reasons for their
claims about the way the world is. The mullah, the priest, and the rabbi do not. Nothing
could change about this world, or about the world of their experience, that would
demonstrate the falsity of many of their core beliefs. This proves that these beliefs are
not born of any examina- tion of the world, or of the world of their experience. (They
are, in Karl Popper's sense, “unfalsifiable.”) It appears that even the Holo- caust did
not lead most Jews to doubt the existence of an omnipotent

and benevolent God. If having half of your people systematically delivered to the furnace
does not count as evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking out for
your interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could. How does the mul- lah
know that the Koran is the verbatim word of God? The only answer to be given in any
language that does not make a mockery of the word “know” ishe doesn't.

A man's faith is just a subset of his beliefs about the world: beliefs about matters of
ultimate concern that we, as a culture, have told him he need not justify in the present.
It is time we recognized just how maladaptive this Balkanization of our discourse has
become. All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective
of a man who was just beginning his day on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade
Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, only to find his meandering thoughts of
family and friends, of errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetenerinexplicably
usurped by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity: between being burned alive by
jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the concrete below. In fact, we should take the
per- spective of thousands of such men, women, and children who were robbed of life, far
sooner than they imagined possible, in absolute terror and confusion. The men who
committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not “cowards,” as they were
repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordi- nary sense.
They were men of faithperfect faith, as it turns out and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to
be.

I AM CERTAIN that such a summary dismissal of religious faith will seem callous to many readers,
particularly those who have known its comforts at first hand. But the fact that
unjustified beliefs can have a consoling influence on the human mind is no argument in
their favor. If every physician told his terminally ill patients that they were destined
for a complete recovery, this might also set

many of their minds at ease, but at the expense of the truth. Why should we be concerned
about the truth? This question awaits its Socrates. For our purposes, we need only observe
that the truth is of paramount concern to the faithful themselves; indeed, the truth of a given doctrine is the very object of their faith. The search for comfort at the
expense of truth has never been a motive for reli- gious belief, since all creeds are
chock-full of terrible proposals, which are no comfort to anyone and which the faithful
believe, despite the pain it causes them, for fear of leaving some dark corner of reality
unacknowledged.

The faithful, in fact, hold truth in the highest esteem. And in this sense they are
identical to most philosophers and scientists. People of faith claim nothing less than
knowledge of sacred, redeeming, and metaphysical truths: Christ died for your sins; He is the Son of God; All human beings have souls that will
be subject to judgment after death. These are specific claims about the way the world is. It is only the notion that a
doctrine is in accord with reality at large that ren- ders a person's faith useful,
redemptive, or, indeed, logically possible, for faith in a doctrine is faith in its truth. What else but the truth of a given teaching could convince its
adherents of the illegitimacy of all others ? Heretical doctrines are deemed so, and
accorded a healthy measure of disdain, for no other reason than that they are presumed to
be false. Thus, if a Christian made no tacit claims of knowledge with regard to the literal truth of
scripture, he would be just as much a Muslim, or a Jewor an atheistas a follower of
Christ. If he were to discover (by some means that he acknowledged to be incon-
trovertible) that Christ had actually been born of sin and died like an animal, these
revelations would surely deliver a deathblow to his faith. The faithful have never been
indifferent to the truth; and yet, the principle of faith leaves them unequipped to
distinguish truth from falsity in matters that most concern them.

The faithful can be expected to behave just like their secular neighborswhich is to say,
more or less rationallyin their worldly affairs. When making important decisions, they
tend to be as atten-

tive to evidence and to its authentication as any unbeliever. While Jehovah's Witnesses
refusing blood transfusions, or Christian Scien- tists forgoing modern medicine
altogether, may appear to be excep- tions to this rule, they are not. Such people are
merely acting rationally within the framework of their religious beliefs. After all, no
mother who refuses medicine for her child on religious grounds believes that prayer is
merely a consoling cultural practice. Rather, she believes that her ultimate salvation
demands certain displays of confidence in the power and attentiveness of God, and this is
an end toward which she is willing to pledge even the life of her child as col- lateral.
Such apparently unreasonable behavior is often in the service of reason, since it aims at
the empirical authentication of religious doctrine. In fact, even the most extreme
expressions of faith are often perfectly rational, given the requisite beliefs. Take the
snake-dancing Pentecostals as the most colorful example: in an effort to demonstrate both
their faith in the literal word of the Bible (in this case Mark 16:18) and its truth, they “take up serpents” (various species of rat- tlesnakes) and “drink any deadly thing”
(generally strychnine) and test prophecy (“it shall not hurt them”) to their heart's
content. Some of them die in the process, of course, as did their founder, George Hensley
(of snake bite, in 1955)proof, we can be sure, not of the weakness of their faith but of
the occasional efficacy of rat- tlesnake venom and strychnine as poisons.

Which beliefs one takes to be foundational will dictate what seems reasonable at any given
moment. When the members of the “Heaven's Gate” cult failed to spot the spacecraft they
knew must be trailing the comet Hale-Bopp, they returned the $4,000 telescope they had
bought for this purpose, believing it to be defective.

W H E R E faith really pays its dividends, however, is in the conviction that the future will be
better than the past, or at least not worse. Consider the celebrated opinion of Julian of
Norwich (ca. 1342-1413), who distilled the message of the Gospels in the memorable sentence

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” The
allure of most religious doctrines is nothing more sub- lime or inscrutable than this: things will turn out well in the end. Faith is offered as a means by which the truth of this proposition can be savored in the
present and secured in the future. It is, I think, indisputable that the actual existence of such a mechanism, the fact that uttering a few words and eating a cracker is an effective means of redemption, the certainty that God is watching, listening, and waiting to bestow his blessings upon one and allin
short, the lit- eral correspondence of doctrine with reality itselfis of sole impor- tance
to the faithful.

The amazing pestilence reached Paris that June [of 1348], and it was to afflict the city
for a year and a half... .

King Philip [VI] asked the medical faculty of the University of Paris for an explanation
of the disaster. The professors reported that a disturbance in the skies had caused the
sun to overheat the oceans near India, and the waters had begun to give off noxious
vapors. The medical faculty offered a variety of remedies. Broth would help, for example,
if seasoned with ground pepper, ginger, and cloves. Poultry, water fowl, young pork and
fatty meat in general were to be avoided. Olive oil could be fatal. Bathing was dangerous,
but enemas could be helpful. “Men must preserve chastity,” the doctors warned, “if they
value their lives.”

The King still worried about the divine wrath. He issued an edict against blasphemy. For
the first offense, the blasphemer's lip would be cut off; a second offense would cost him
the other lip, and a third the tongue. .. .

The town authorities reacted with a series of stern measures to halt the spreading panic.
They ordered the tolling of the bells to cease. They outlawed the wearing of black
clothing. They forbade the gathering of more than two people at a funeral, or any display
of grief in public. And to placate the angry God who had brought this affliction, they
banned all work after noon on Saturdays, all