From Faith to a Pernicious Idolatry
1. You shall have no other gods before me.
2. You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
It might seem easy to avoid idolatry, to avoid worshiping false gods. All you need to do is avoid worshiping either an image of your own god or some other religion’s god(s). However, a more pernicious idolatry is easy to fall into. It comes as a result of a certain kind of belief process, namely, faith.
“Faith” has a variety of meanings, but my understanding of the Christian perspective on it is that “faith in God” means not only trusting in God, but believing in God’s existence without evidence and come what may. As such, belief in God on the basis of faith does not provide any epistemic (truth preserving) reasons for belief; moreover, such faith is taken to require that one maintain belief in the face of controverting evidence.
So the person of faith holds certain beliefs without evidence and maintains those beliefs despite counter evidence, often rationalizing the counterevidence away. An extreme example of this would be to say that all of the fossils that suggest a very, very ancient earth are put there by God to test our faith. To question God is unthinkable. From a psychological perspective this is understandable given the weighty nature of the issues involved, e.g., the inevitable eternal stay in heaven or hell, and the existential fear they produce.
Unwavering faith in anything, god or other, is a dangerous thing, . Being unwilling to question something puts one on the path to abuse or be abused, regardless of one’s best intentions. However, as dangerous as faith may be, it becomes even more dangerous given that the object of religious faith is an infallible, perfect god.
The Lord, our God, is Almighty, omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, etc. God cannot err. To have faith in such a god creates two nearly impenetrable levels. The faith runs independent of reason/evidence and that in which one has faith is infallible, can never be wrong.
The issue here is not whether God really exists. The danger of this situation is that those who have faith are, like everyone else, human, and thus fallible, prone to error. All human beliefs are the product of fallible processes, namely, experience, testimony, and reason. The result is that the object of the believer’s unflinching faith is supposed to be God, but in the believer’s unwillingness to consider the possibility that her ideas of God and God’s intentions are wrong, the believer’s faith is really a faith in her own self, in her abilities to comprehend God and God’s will. And since God is infallible, the believer’s idea of what God wants becomes infallible. This unconscious transference of faith to oneself and one’s ideas makes those abilities and ideas into idols.
The believer may have the best intentions to submit to God’s will, but is instead putting herself on the throne. Whatever the believer takes to be God’s Word IS God’s Word—and must be followed. Whatever the believer takes to be God’s Will IS God’s Will—and must be followed. Why? Because all is known through faith and God cannot err. Moreover, since God is good, that means that the believer is good, and the believer’s actions are good (despite any proclamations of sinfulness).
I take it that it is clear how dangerous this situation is: you have a fallible, prone to error human having unwavering faith her abilities and ideas, believing herself to be endorsing the good, and thus right to promote that good—WHATEVER that “good” may be.
Must it be this way? Is it possible to have belief in God and not suffer a persistent and dangerous myopia? I’d say “yes,” provided one embraces one’s fallibility and is careful and conscious of how one uses faith, and how it is susceptible to abuse and is the source of a pernicious idolatry.
But, the believer might object, what if one’s beliefs about God and God’s will are right? Won’t that mean that one is not worshipping false idols? No. Not if the beliefs are based on unwavering, indefatigable faith. Faith can’t provide justification for the beliefs and thus can’t provide access to whether they indeed are true. And it is that aspect of faith in combination with it being held come what may that produces the idolatry.
2 thoughts on “From Faith to a Pernicious Idolatry”
I think you make a great point here when you talk about the possibility of transference of belief from the proper object of God to the futile (“vain”) object of oneself or one’s ungrounded or ill-grounded or little-grounded beliefs.
May I comment on a couple of propositions that I disagree with, and which I find Christianity historically and pretty consistently in disagreement with?
1. Your claim that faith is baseless in any kind of evidence. This sort of thinking isn’t found in the Bible, in any Christian writer worth his salt, in the official doctrines of the more orthodox denominations, in the canonized saints, and so on. No one claims that you have to believe without reason for belief. This would be a sham, anyway — it would be make-believe or sheer objectless, subjective willpower rather than assent to truth. In the immortal words of Happy Gilmore, “I would have to kick my own ass…” On the contrary, Christians like St. Paul indicate from the human situation and the world around us that there must be a divine creator (cf. Romans 1.16-32 and 2.11-16, for example), and such arguments are constructed not deductively but still amount to pretty cogent inductive reasons. And I know that, as a philosopher, you’ve already heard the name St. Thomas Aquinas from the theistic side over and over again. It’s not important here whether he was right; what’s relevant to us here is that his reasoning (empirical, rational, logical, grounded in sensible reality) and his immense endorsement by the Church — along with many intellectual philosopher-theologians like him — shows that Christianity does not necessarily (or even typically) claim that faith is without reason.
I like what I heard philosophy prof. Dr. Peter Kreeft say one time: That God gave us enough evidence that those who seek will find, but not so much that those who do not seek will find.
2. Following from (1) and in relation to your statement that “Faith can’t provide justification for the beliefs and thus can’t provide access to whether they indeed are true,” I’d say that faith is not meant to provide the justification for itself anyway — it’s what needs to be justified. And then you get into external evidence such as the Gospels, the Jesus that the early disciples were walking around with and whom they believed in, attested miracles, logical demonstrations, etc. Anyone begging the question in the form, “Faith is justified because faith justifies faith” or, inserting the term “belief” instead, “Faith justifies my beliefs [my faith; i.e., itself]” is a snake eating its tail. Yes, faith — in some legitimate form — is sufficient and necessary for a relationship with God, but faith entails a bunch of external and philosophical justifications. “But sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being always ready to satisfy every one that asks you to give a reason for that hope which is in you” (1 Peter 3.15).
I really like the argument you make about avoiding intellectual (or even denominational!) pride. If God is real, he won’t give us a theology exam when we meet him. He wants holy people, not merely smart ones. He’s a person, not a list of propositions and platitudes, and what I think matters to him is not how much a person knows about him, but whether the person knows him. I can know you without knowing everything about you; knowing you might entail that I want to know more about you so that I can know you more intimately, but the defect of this latter kind of knowledge is not necessarily a foil of the former kind (like the Fr. “savoir” vs. “connaitre”). I pray that we don’t get our faith in God mixed up with faith in theologians or in propositions about God which can be more or less clear or necessary for salvation.
You say rightly that it’s dangerous, it’s counter our somewhat selfish survival instincts, to cast ourselves on the waters for anything, even a concept of a perfect God. There is a sense in which it is dangerous and scary rather than prudent, sophisticated, or natural. But it’s to this issue that Jesus said, “Whoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it, and whoever shall lose it, shall preserve it” (Luke 17.33). No good story was ever created, no good movie was ever made, that was totally placid and comfortable. I and the Church maintain that we do have sufficient natural evidence of the Judeo-Christian God but that, nevertheless, faith also requires the recklessness that comes with trust on our part. And trust leaves you vulnerable whether you’re talking about God, a friend, a spouse, a car, a chair, or a soda. But it’s necessary for life and for love.
When you’re up on a bungee cord about to take a plunge, you know rationally that the probability of the cord breaking is very low; but, despite that hard fact, the height still causes you to be nervous. And questions of God are much more immense than that height is high. But the thing that sucks about fear is that it often deters us from doing things that we later, having cooler heads or seeing things better, wish we would have done.
I would say something like this to anyone who’s afraid of embracing orthodox religion, especially academics and philosophers, because there’s really more room for speculation and philosophy and reason and charitable dissent than many people know. You need not be a “fundamentalist” or total “anti-evolutionist” or be anti-science-and-reason to be Christian. Heresy is only to deny one of a handful of primary principles; the Catholic Church, for example, doesn’t dictate but shepherd, and many, many questions are officially open for debate. (We don’t even say that the Bible is “divinely dictated,” and always literally true, as the Koran is alleged to be, but rather “divinely inspired,” which is very different). There are ten commandments because everything else is lawful. There’s an incredible freedom in my religion. Sure there is railing around the roof to keep us from falling off (moral law, dogma, doctrine, etc.), but you can do whatever you want on the roof. On a personal note, I’m a critic and even a cynic in some ways — or am often tempted to be — but the Judeo-Christian conception of God doesn’t offend my reason in any insurmountable way; in fact, it’s the only philosophy that I can imagine ever being universal and satisfying.
Thanks, Dr. Wrisley, for a theological post utilizing modern philosophical training, psychological insight, and concern for sincerity and humility. Let those of us who see (or suspect?) God have faith in him, not in mere faith, and may we pray to know him. I wonder if those that seek God don’t all fall into this form of idolatry fairly often. I hope that, most of the time and for most ordinary believers, it’s so subtle, non-explicit, and unintentional that we’re never significantly culpable for it.
Derek, thank you for your thoughtful response to my essay. “Faith” has a number of interrelated senses, and I admit that my brief explanation of it didn’t do them justice. However, I don’t think my take on faith was too far off the mark, as it was gleaned from discussions with Christians over the years. Moreover, it is in accord with fideism and the main epistemological issue that it encapsulates seems to be an issue for most other versions of faith. John Bishop has a good article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the various senses of faith and the philosophical issues surrounding them.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/faith/
Regarding your point that
…Christians like St. Paul indicate from the human situation and the world around us that there must be a divine creator (cf. Romans 1.16-32 and 2.11-16, for example), and such arguments are constructed not deductively but still amount to pretty cogent inductive reasons.
One could grant that there is evidence for a divine creator, for example, by endorsing some version of a cosmological or teleological argument, but that won’t point you in the direction of Christianity. So the step from the evidence to Christianity is going to depend on faith of one kind or another, e.g., faith in the testimony of others. And there again the epistemological question of justification raises its head. It seems inevitable that acceptance of CHRISTIAN doctrine or a CHRISTIAN version of God is going to require a venture that goes beyond the evidence.
You wrote:
[God is] a person, not a list of propositions and platitudes, and what I think matters to him is not how much a person knows about him, but whether the person knows him. I can know you without knowing everything about you; knowing you might entail that I want to know more about you so that I can know you more intimately, but the defect of this latter kind of knowledge is not necessarily a foil of the former kind (like the Fr. “savoir” vs. “connaitre”).
This is good, but it’s not clear to me how much one can know God without having certain propositional beliefs about God. While it’s true that you can know me without knowing everything about me, it’s hard to say that you know me even a little if you don’t know some things about me, e.g., my name, or some of the things I’ve done or said, or what I look like, etc. And while we can distinguish different senses of “to know” (the “savoir” vs. “connaitre” you mention, as well as the German “wissen” and “kennen”), it is difficult to see how that will hold up when the “person” [God] you are supposed to know does not have any of the attributes that allow you to know other people, e.g., physical form, voice, observable actions, etc.
Lastly, regarding your point—“the Catholic Church, for example, doesn’t dictate but shepherd, and many, many questions are officially open for debate”—it’s unclear to me how this could be true, since the Catholic Church clearly dictates quite a bit, e.g., what a person can do regarding birth control, sex, marriage, homosexuality, etc. I admit I’m ignorant of much of the Catholic Church’s doctrines and views, but given the control it tries to exert on central aspects of people’s lives, control based on highly problematic natural law theory, it strikes me less as shepherding and more as corralling (I intend no disrespect thereby). And that corralling is based on an epistemologically problematic faith and the philosophically contentious natural law theory.
Derek, thanks for provoking me to think more about these issues.