The term 'useful fiction' was apparently coined by a Hans Vaihinger, who felt that at times the psychological benefits of acting as if something were true sometimes justified our persisting in promoting concepts that were false or unfalsifiable.
I was first prompted to blog on this subject after discussions with a bright student about whether 'faith' was a virtue; and recently after pondering on the idea of having faith in love as an ideal.
In the First Letter to the Corinthians in the New Testament, St. Paul praises agape (the Christian notion of love, or, as it was once known in English, charity). He says: "Love never faileth", and argues that it will last beyond death ("when perfection comes"). In verse 13, he finishes the chapter by saying: "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." These 3 have become known as the 'theological virtues', and for many Christians they are considered the greatest traits a person should aim at nurturing.
In this musing, then, I aim to discuss the value of faith, hope and love. The merits of faith have been much debated. Bertrand Russell, a well-known critic of religion, argued:
"We may define “faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith.” We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions. Christians have faith in the Resurrection; communists have faith in Marx’s Theory of Value. Neither faith can be defended rationally, and each therefore is defended by propaganda and, if necessary, by war."
(Russell, Bertrand. "Will Religious Faith Cure Our Troubles?". Human Society in Ethics and Politics. Ch 7. Pt 2) retrieved 4/8/10)
In other words, faith, not being amenable to reason or evidence, can be dangerous when beliefs conflict or when beliefs lead to conflict. C. S. Lewis, however, defines faith with a subtle twist: arguing that faith is not so much substituting emotion for evidence, but rather it is the holding on to beliefs that were based on reason or evidence, regardless of the ups and downs of our emotions. I can clearly see a value in faith in this latter sense, though I am more inclined to call this virtue the virtue of constancy. Furthermore, I suspect that Lewis' attempt to define faith in this way is motivated by his Christianity, and this article is not about whether Christianity is rational. The word St Paul uses for faith is 'pistis' (πίστις), which is defined (by the author of Hebrews - possibly Paul, but probably not) in Hebrews 11: "Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, proof of things not seen." However, even this passage seems confusing, as the first and second clause of this verse have quite different senses to me. The first part, having confidence in what you hope for, I will return to discuss as part of my wider discussion of hope. The second part raises the question of what kind of 'proof' or 'evidence' you can have of things not seen.
Obviously, although Paul says "not seen", I think we must rule out other senses too (an appeal to the taste of God is not what he had in mind!) Also, the word translated as 'proof' has also been translated as 'evidence' or 'conviction' (ESV, KJV). Having faith in something, as Russell's definition suggests, seems to imply at least some lacking of evidence for it. For instance, it would be stretching the meaning of the word beyond its elastic limit to say that I have 'faith' that my fingers are currently typing on a computer, as the evidence for this is just too overwhelming. However, it does not imply a complete lack of evidence. For example, Arthur can have 'faith' that Angela will bring back the car he lent her because Arthur has some (perhaps limited) evidence that Angela is a nice person (e.g. she smiled in a friendly way). Nonetheless, the idea of having faith in something without empirical evidence, (as Paul's phrase: "things not seen" implies), is a usage of the word that is commonly found with regards to religion. The NIV translation says it is being "certain of what we do not see": I will call this 'faith-1'.
Is faith-1 a virtue? Bertrand Russell's argument is one that has been repeated by the likes of Richard Dawkins. "Faith is the great cop-out; the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence" [Edinburgh Science Festival lecture, 1992]. Dawkins, like Russell, goes further, arguing that such faith is not just irrational, but dangerous. The argument is simple and effective, and can be supported by examples where someone is convinced in something and will not 'listen to reason'. Imagine the difficulty of persuading someone who is paranoid, or believes in a conspiracy theory, who thinks that Obama is a lizard or that the earth is flat, (or all of these!) to think otherwise. If they are convinced despite the lack of evidence, then changing their minds will not be easy. Unfortunately, false beliefs can be damaging to oneself and to others. For example, the belief that Obama is a lizard is not just false, it is immoral, as it dehumanises him, and the belief that vaccines cause autism could lead to unnecessary and avoidable harm. The idea that faith-1 is good, I conclude, is a useless fiction.
I wish to clarify that the problem isn't believing in things that are not 'proved', if by proved you mean something like 'made absolutely certain by the evidence'. Science, we should remind ourselves, does not make anything absolutely certain. Evidence can only make a claim overwhelmingly likely. Furthermore, it is reasonable to believe in some things with little evidence. For example, if you told me that you had cornflakes for breakfast, such limited testimony is perfectly ample under ordinary circumstances to warrant my belief that you had cornflakes for breakfast. I do not need to launch a CSI-style inquiry. Being overly sceptical could also be damaging to oneself and to others, if it leads to intense distrust and a lot of time-wasting trying to undertake experiments to check perfectly ordinary claims.
At this point, to close this part of the discussion, I wish to refer to a good old classical idea from Aristotle's ethics. If faith is a virtue in any way, it doesn't lie in certainty. Nor is unbridled scepticism helpful. The virtue is a mean between them. Aristotelian thinkers (such as MacIntyre, mentioned in a previous blog) emphasise the value of practical reason, and this form of wisdom is a matter of being well adjusted to the facts of the world and how it works, being sensitive- rather than indifferent- to evidence. As Hume said: "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence."
