This is – usually – right up there amongst the most cliché of clichéd topics, and yet, somehow, also the most popular, if one goes by how many people nevertheless seem to want to discuss it.
There are few subjects more done to death over the millennia than that of god, this being a major reason for its boringness, that there is little, if anything, new – at least, nothing that is easily found. The other reason is because of the warlike camps it is divided into. One is immediately asked to pick a side, to classify oneself under a suitable label – theist, atheist or the like, though why someone’s belief or lack of it should matter to anyone else is difficult to fathom.
What is interesting about faith, however, is that it’s one of those topics you can have multiple diverging views about, and thus affords the joy of holding two directly contrasting opinions, completely at odds with each other, simultaneously. The label I do think comes close to one is ‘apatheism‘. In a nutshell, the theist believes, the atheist disbelieves, the agnostic doesn’t know, and the apatheist doesn’t care.
A very common take on god is attributed to Pascal (though, apparently, is a misrepresentation of his intentions). A distorted form of Pascal’s wager goes that to believe in God is net-positive and thus good reasoning. If you believe, and he (I’ll go with a ‘he’ for now) exists, you supposedly gain a lot (all that matters to ‘him’, apparently, is belief). If he doesn’t exist, you lose little, whereas if you disbelieve, you gain nothing if you’re right and supposedly lose a lot if you aren’t (‘he’s’ apparently very vindictive to doubters).
I’m always surprised by how many people seem to be wowed by this reasoning (which is obvious enough), as though ‘faith’ was simply logic and expected value calculation. If something is in your interest, you don’t need to ‘believe’ to accept it. Just as, if you only believe in something because it benefits you, you don’t really believe in it.
The opposite of the wager, I think, is the apatheist’s lack of interest, the question being a matter of complete indifference, of zero expected value either way. If he’s existed, he’s always gone on existing, and if he hasn’t, he’s gone on not existing, and either way, life has gone on and will go on, in his absence or presence. There are, perhaps, more interesting things to ponder upon, and in any case, if he exists, he would surely have better things to concern himself about than what a nobody believes (though one can, as Kierkegaard does, dispute this, that if you don’t love him, you hate him, that you don’t have an opinion on that which you look down on superciliously).
Another trite take is the ‘spiritual but not religious’ one. Perhaps one doesn’t want to or can’t bring oneself to believe the usual dogma, but still prefers lofty ideas and abstractions of ‘higher powers’ to shallow, earthy facts like that of human beings as little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium. Obviously, this is simplification, and everyone has their own reasons, from the one who genuinely thinks someone watches over, to the one who is afraid no one might be watching over. And, of course, more prosaically, it makes life easy for those who want to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, be on good terms with the atheist (I’m not religious) and on good terms with the priest (I’m spiritual). Whatever the reason, this once niche segment now seems to be a huge market – I recall an astro-tech founder smirking that over 75% of their customers were ‘spiritual but not religious’.
The opposite of ‘spiritual but not religious’ is quite literally ‘religious but not spiritual’, the mirror image on the axes. That is, I think, close to what Søren Kierkegaard writes on faith, and is also why I don’t care for the distorted Pascal wager logic. Faith is, after all, not a mere hedging of costs and benefits, that I believe X if it brings me gain, or reject Y if it doesn’t. You don’t need any faith for that. Faith is, in fact, the opposite – that I believe X even though it costs me significantly to do so.
Anyone can believe anything when it’s convenient. One doesn’t need faith for that, only a flexible enough spine to turn in the wind like a weathervane. To be an orthodox believer in the time of the Inquisition is not just uninteresting but likely, though of course not necessarily, a sham, a self-seeking move to reap power and pelf by aligning with the regime. To hold the same beliefs under the Communists or Nazis is quite another thing.
If faith is not a mere balancing of costs and benefits, neither, I think, is God. And yet it is a common enough notion, that of god as a merchant and religion as a transaction, whereby you chant or kneel or pray or sacrifice, in return for something else. It is, in essence, that I do X for you, and in turn you do Y for me, the X taking whatever form it does, whether a sacrifice of cash or food, or deeds performed for a purpose, or rituals engaged in. One doesn’t have anything against merchants, but surely a god isn’t simply a merchant, weighing the scales and supplying services against wares provided.
In religion, then, to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, “I do not trouble God with my petty sorrows“. Someone who believes would not ask their god to do anything for them. And a God who is not a merchant, is a God who would not do anything for me. Faith is not something that makes my life easier; on the contrary, it only makes it more difficult.
This absence of gain differentiates faith from the rest, ‘religion’ from self-interest or, more pointedly and interestingly, even ethics, as Kierkegaard tries to show from the stories of Abraham and Agamemnon.
On the journey to Troy, the Greek fleet is unable to sail to Troy until Agamemnon atones for his sin against the goddess Artemis by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia, which he does. Difficult as his decision is, one can, at least from a certain perspective, understand it. This is Kierkegaard’s ‘tragic hero’, the one who makes the movement of ‘infinite resignation’ by giving up what is most precious to him. One is in the realm of the ethical here, for whether you agree or disagree with the choice, you can at least comprehend it, that the tradeoff is of the individual’s sacrifice for the greater good. What is comprehensible, one can still thresh out, as the Greek commanders did with Agamemnon, and write intelligibly about, in favour or against. Iphigenia herself, apparently, in some versions of the story, desires to give herself up for the good of the many. The tragic hero drinks the bitter cup of sacrifice to the dregs, but he is always understood, and, usually, praised.
But what of Abraham? The story of Abraham, who was to sacrifice – or to shun euphemisms, kill – his son Isaac at what he took to be the command of God, is a familiar one. Too familiar, in fact, that one glides over it effortlessly. And yet, if one really goes into, sees it from the first person point-of-view, as Kierkegaard does in astounding detail, rather than as a legendary fable of a hero, the feat of Abraham is, whether admirable or insane, incomprehensible and unsurpassable. “It is repugnant to me to do as so often is done, namely, to speak inhumanly about a great deed, as though some thousands of years were an immense distance; I would rather speak humanly about it, as though it had occurred yesterday, letting only the greatness be the distance, which either exalts or condemns.“
As Kierkegaard writes, imagine a parson who preaches the tale of Abraham so powerfully that a man is moved to sacrifice his son. All the parson’s eloquence would be as nothing to the earnestness with which he now strives to undo the effect of his own sermon, upon what he considers to be a madman out to commit infanticide, such is the insanity of Abraham’s actions.
For that is what Abraham does, and for no apparent purpose, other than that he supposes it to be the command of God. Agamemnon one can still understand, even honour, for giving up what was dearest to him for what was supposed to be the collective good, but Abraham? To sacrifice what is most precious, or to shun abstractions, to kill one’s own son, for no purpose whatsoever other than an imagined command, is incomprehensible, and if anything, condemnable.
A disclaimer – one can, obviously dent this story severely by pointing out that Abraham had seen God and hence for him a leap of faith was far easier than another, and that is undeniable. The point is, however, not Abraham or Agamemnon, but the religious and the ethical – they are only examples of the concepts.
In that sense, then, Agamemnon, dealing as he does with the ethical, is still in the realm of reason and logic. You can quibble about whether he was wrong or right, whether he was heroic or demonic, and draw on your internal logic to back your claims. The utilitarian may laud him for sacrificing the happiness of the few for the many, the deontologist might condemn him for abandoning his offspring.
Faith, however, both in general and in the instance of Abraham, transcends reason, in the sense that one can’t ‘comprehend’ it. I use the phrase ‘transcending reason’ with caution, well aware of the patronizing sense it is used by theists of all breeds, having been on the receiving end myself countless times, to seek to imply that the doubter, however smart he thinks himself, lacks some sophisticated higher understanding the believer possesses, and doubtless, one day, will learn the error of his ways. There is no such ‘right’ understanding implicit in ‘transcending reason’ here; transcending reason simply implies that reason doesn’t get you to faith. If you do get to faith, there is a leap involved; but whether one wants to (let alone needs to) make a leap, is a purely individual choice, and certainly not an injunction to be obeyed. As far as leaps go, for that matter, there are certainly many other leaps in the market, whether it be the hedonistic or absurdist or nihilist one. Thus far, and no farther, says reason. Beyond that is a leap, whichever one, but everyone leaps.
Faith transcends reason, but it also, I think, goes against reason, at least a particular kind of reason, the reason of self-interest. One can transcend this reason without going against it, but the peculiarity of faith is that it goes against it as well. It is in this sense that the pseudo Pascal’s wager fails the test of faith, though it doesn’t transcend reason either, and instead, in fact, originates from it. To go against such reason is to necessarily do something ‘unreasonable’, that someone ‘in their right mind’ wouldn’t – like, in fact, Abraham killing his son for no good reason. An orthodox believer’s faith might transcend reason in the Inquisition or in the atheist gulag, but it only goes against it in the latter, which, I dare say, would be a truer test of it.
As already pointed out, faith is incomprehensible, and the reason for it’s incomprehensibility is this leap beyond the edges of what reason takes you to. But what also follows from its incomprehensibility is silence. Faith, true faith, is silent for the reason that it can’t be comprehended. Agamemnon could, and in fact did, thresh things out with the Greek commanders, for his sacrifice of Iphigenia for the expedition’s sake was immediately comprehensible, even to those who wouldn’t agree with it. Imagine, however, Abraham seeking the opinion of others of his plan to kill Isaac in obedience of a demand he believed God made of him. Disgust, condemnation, if not physical restraint awaited him. What one cannot explain, one cannot speak of, and must remain silent.
Silence is also a prerequisite for another reason, that, whether or not virtue is its own reward, the appearance of virtue is certainly a reward. The faith that makes a virtue of itself, that breathes tales of its own heroics and sacrifices and self-negation, or glorious deeds and benefactions, has already had its reward of self-validation. It is firmly in the realm of reason and self-interest, transactional in its exchange of services provided for rewards reaped, rational in the sense of falling on the positive side of the cost-benefit ledger, and easily understood.
This is not the sort of topic I typically write about, and, I think, one I don’t do too well either. Making the claim that something transcends reason is always fraught with risk, usually cringe-inducing even to read, let alone write. Too often, that claim is a way to weasel out of defending a position you take, an excuse to write loosely and get away with it. With reason, as far as it takes you, you can follow the writer’s steps, detect stumbling blocks he overlooked or attempted to paper over, and observe the explicit or implicit foundations on which he builds. At any rate, you can agree or disagree, and know why. Whereas, without reason, you either believe or disbelieve, usually because you already believe or disbelieve.