A friend yesterday remarked that my article about faith and skepticism doesn’t really deal with the kind of faith that the religious fanatics have.
But of course it doesn’t. I’m not defending the religious fanatics. In fact, they are a part of the same problem as the skeptics, because skeptics summarily reject perfectly sufficient evidence just because they don’t like it, and the religious fanatics choose to believe in things for which no good evidence is provided. So the choice isn’t really between those two, it’s between them and a reasonable approach, where you believe in things based on the evidence that you personally have, but without expectations that others need to accept this evidence.
But first, let’s quantify faith.
Type 1 faith is the faith I have in the fact that my car is still parked in front of the house, if my wife didn’t take it to go somewhere. There’s always a possibility that it was stolen, or that the aliens abducted it, or maybe I’m completely crazy and I’m deluding myself that I have a car, but the reasonable assumption is that it’s where I left it. I can’t verify it from where I’m sitting right now because my workplace is across the building, but I believe it’s there based on my memory and application of reason. If you don’t have this kind of faith, you are mentally ill and you are incapable of performing any kind of common tasks, because in almost everything we rely on memory, and we don’t constantly go around the house to re-check that the kitchen is still there just because we don’t see it from the bathroom. If there is no valid reason to assume that something changed from the last time we established the facts, it’s reasonable to have faith that the gravitational constant is still what it was ten years ago, as well as the speed of light.
Type 2 faith is when you have two possible, equally valid interpretations of the same facts, and you need to choose one based on something other than reason. Reason brought you to the point where you can’t know for sure whether option A or option B is true, because in both cases the same facts remain valid, both solutions will have weak points, and in both cases you will need to ignore or disregard some problems in order to solve others. In order to solve the dilemma, you need to make a leap of faith in one direction or another, and proceed from there. If it turns out that you were wrong, you need to change your mind and admit you chose to believe in the wrong option, but since additional evidence brought you to that point, you actually made progress and you are no longer stuck at the same spot. This is the kind of faith people needed to have in order to adopt the heliocentric system when evidence for its validity was insufficient to make the model work. If you don’t have it, you can’t make progress in science.
Type 3 faith is when you believe in things contrary to evidence, based on strong belief in something that has no rational grounds. This is the kind of faith religious fanatics have, and in order to block the voice of reason that warns them that they are on less than solid ground, they resort to hysteria and borderline madness.
Type 4 faith is when you don’t know what the reality is because your brain is so severely malfunctioning, you’re hallucinating. In this state, you can have faith in things that are not only irrational, but they would be irrational to a type 3 believer.
Applied to religion, type 1 faith is when the disciples believed what Jesus told them because he just saw him rise from the dead, talk to them comfortingly and then ascend to heaven. The degree of confirmation of his supernatural power was such, that it would not be rational for them to doubt his statements. If the statements later proved not to be true in the expected way, they would conclude that they misunderstood him, not that he lied. This is the kind of faith in God that you have when you saw him, but you can’t repeat the experience at will. You trust your memory.
Type 2 faith is what people have if they didn’t directly experience God, but they believe it’s possible that someone did, they just can’t be sure. They therefore make a leap of faith and accept that God is real and can be experienced by some, and it would be great if everybody could do it, but it obviously isn’t that simple and one can’t just verify something like that at will, just like one can’t just decide to verify Moon landing at will, because it’s impractically expensive. You can’t go there yourself to verify, you can’t see someone go there right now because it’s impractical, but there are credible witnesses and documents and it is more irrational to doubt them than to trust them. But this kind of faith can only get you so far. You can’t really make life-altering choices based on some scripture written thousands of years ago if you don’t have a more personal, direct reason to believe it’s all true. This is why type 2 faith is not completely rational, nor is it completely irrational, but is a necessary transitional step from lesser to greater knowledge. It contains a risk of error, but without acceptance of this risk there is no possibility of change and learning.
Type 3 faith is irrational, but not completely insane. This is the kind of faith people have when they decide to become suicide bombers in order to get their virgins in afterlife. You can talk to them, but it won’t do much good, because people snap out of this only because when something changes in their internal reasoning and their inner motives for embracing the irrational faith subside. This is not really religion, it’s fanaticism and hysteria.
Type 4 faith is pure madness, and there’s not much one can say about that. It’s the kind of faith you have when you’re so stoned you see dragons in the kitchen.
The problem with the atheists is that they assume that religious people have type 3 and type 4 faith, because this is easy to ridicule. They occasionally argue with type 2, but they are on loose ground there and they usually argue as if they are talking to a type 3 person, using emotional arguments. They completely dismiss the possibility of type 1 faith in religious matters, because if they accepted that, they wouldn’t be atheists, they would be type 2 believers.
You can notice how I never mention certain knowledge as an option? You’re right, I don’t. Because there’s no such thing, or almost. Even when you directly perceive something, there’s the question of interpretation. So even in that case you need to have type 1 faith that you understood it correctly. Certain knowledge is the domain of type 3 and type 4 lunatics.