2 The Nature of Belief

2 The Nature of Belief
IT IS OFTEN argued that religious beliefs are somehow distinct from
other claims to knowledge about the world. There is no doubt that
we treat them differently—particularly in the degree to which we
demand, in ordinary discourse, that people justify their beliefs—but
this does not indicate that religious beliefs are special in any important
sense. What do we mean when we say that a person believes a
given proposition about the world? As with all questions about
familiar mental events, we must be careful that the familiarity of
our terms does not lead us astray. The fact that we have one word for
"belief" does not guarantee that believing is itself a unitary phenomenon.
An analogy can be drawn to the case of memory: while
people commonly refer to their failures of "memory," decades of
experiment have shown that human memory comes in many forms.
Not only are our long-term and short-term memories the products
of distinct and dissimilar neural circuits; they have themselves been
divided into multiple subsystems.1 To speak simply of "memory,"
therefore, is now rather like speaking of "experience." Clearly, we
must be more precise about what our mental terms mean before we
attempt to understand them at the level of the brain.2
Even dogs and cats, insofar as they form associations between
people, places, and events, can be said to "believe" many things about
the world. But this is not the sort of believing we are after. When we
talk about the beliefs to which people consciously subscribe—"The
house is infested with termites," "Tofu is not a dessert," "Muhammad
ascended to heaven on a winged horse"—we are talking about
50
T H E N A T U R E OF B E L I E F 51
beliefs that are communicated, and acquired, linguistically. Believing
a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents
some state of the world, and this fact yields some immediate
insights into the standards by which our beliefs should function.3 In
particular, it reveals why we cannot help but value evidence and
demand that propositions about the world logically cohere. These
constraints apply equally to matters of religion. "Freedom of belief"
(in anything but the legal sense) is a myth. We will see that we are
no more free to believe whatever we want about God than we are
free to adopt unjustified beliefs about science or history, or free to
mean whatever we want when using words like "poison" or "north"
or "zero." Anyone who would lay claim to such entitlements should
not be surprised when the rest of us stop listening to him.
Beliefs as Principles of Action
The human brain is a prolific generator of beliefs about the world.
In fact, the very humanness of any brain consists largely in its
capacity to evaluate new statements of propositional truth in light of
innumerable others that it already accepts. By recourse to intuitions
of truth and falsity, logical necessity and contradiction, human
beings are able to knit together private visions of the world that
largely cohere. What neural events underlie this process? What
must a brain do in order to believe that a given statement is true or
false?. We currently have no idea. Language processing must play a
large role, of course, but the challenge will be to discover how the
brain brings the products of perception, memory, and reasoning to
bear on individual propositions and magically transforms them into
the very substance of our living.
It was probably the capacity for movement, enjoyed by certain
primitive organisms, that drove the evolution of our sensory and
cognitive faculties. This follows from the fact that if no creature
could do anything with the information it acquired from the world,
5 2 THE E N D OF F A I TH
nature could not have selected for improvements in the physical
structures that gather, store, and process such information. Even a
sense as primitive as vision, therefore, seems predicated on the existence
of a motor system. If you cannot catch food, avoid becoming
food yourself, or wander off a cliff, there does not seem to be much
reason to see the world in the first place—and certainly refinements
in vision, of the sort found everywhere in the animal kingdom,
would never have come about at all.
For this reason, it seems uncontroversial to say that all higherorder
cognitive states (of which beliefs are an example) are in some
way an outgrowth of our capacity for action. In adaptive terms,
belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing
various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider
the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of
action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes
by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the
world is represented and made available to guide our behavior.4
THE power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be
total. For every emotion that you are capable of feeling, there is
surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter of moments. Consider
the following proposition:
Your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail.
What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that
such a proposition would loose in the mind and body of a person
who believed it? Perhaps you do not have a daughter, or you know
her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailors are
renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason, the door to
belief has not yet swung upon its hinges.
The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably.
Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be
T H E N A T U R E OF B E L I E F 53
ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary
claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the
world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond
the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring
them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There
is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and
they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in
killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States
attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers
are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to
innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue
to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.5
The Necessity for Logical Coherence
The first thing to notice about beliefs is that they must suffer the
company of their neighbors. Beliefs are both logically and semantically
related. Each constrains, and is in turn constrained by, many others.
A belief like the Boeing 747 is the world's best airplane logically
entails many other beliefs that are both more basic (e.g., airplanes
exist) and more derivative (e.g., 747s are better than 757s). The belief
that some men are husbands demands that the proposition some
women are wives also be endorsed, because the very terms "husband"
and "wife" mutually define one another.6 In fact, logical and semantic
constraints appear to be two sides of the same coin, because our need
to understand what words mean in each new context requires that our
beliefs be free from contradiction (at least locally). If I am to mean the
same thing by the word "mother" from one instance to the next, I
cannot both believe my mother was born in Rome and believe my
mother was born in Nevada. Even if my mother were born on an airplane
flying at supersonic speeds, these propositions cannot both be
true. There are tricks to be played here—perhaps there is a town called
"Rome" somewhere in the state of Nevada; or perhaps "mother"
54 THE END OF FAITH
means "biological mother" in one sentence and "adoptive mother" in
another—but these exceptions only prove the rule. To know what a
given belief is about, I must know what my words mean; to know
what my words mean, my beliefs must be generally consistent.7 There
is just no escaping the fact that there is a tight relationship between
the words we use, the type of thoughts we can think, and what we can
believe to be true about the world.
And behavioral constraints are just as pressing. When going to a
friend's home for dinner, I cannot both believe that he lives north of
Main Street and south of Main Street and then act on the basis of
what I believe. A normal degree of psychological and bodily integration
precludes my being motivated to head in two opposing directions
at once.
Personal identity itself requires such consistency: unless a person's
beliefs are highly coherent, he will have as many identities as
there are mutually incompatible sets of beliefs careening around his
brain. If you doubt this, just try to imagine the subjectivity of a man
who believes that he spent the entire day in bed with the flu, but also
played a round of golf; that his name is Jim, and that his name is
Tom; that he has a young son, and that he is childless. Multiply these
incompatible beliefs indefinitely, and any sense that their owner is a
single subject entirely disappears. There is a degree of logical inconsistency
that is incompatible with our notion of personhood.
So it seems that the value we put on logical consistency is neither
misplaced nor mysterious. In order for my speech to be intelligible
to others—and, indeed, to myself—my beliefs about the world must
largely cohere. In order for my behavior to be informed by what I
believe, I must believe things that admit of behavior that is, at a minimum,
possible. Certain logical relations, after all, seem etched into
the very structure of our world.8 The telephone rings . . . either it is
my brother on the line, or it isn't. I may believe one proposition or
the other—or I may believe that I do not know—but under no circumstances
is it acceptable for me to believe both.
Departures from normativity, in particular with respect to the
THE NATURE OF BELIEF 55
rules of inference that lead us to construct new beliefs on the basis
of old ones, have been the subject of much research and much
debate.9 Whatever construal of these matters one adopts, no one
believes that human beings are perfect engines of coherence. Our
inevitable failures of rationality can take many forms, ranging from
mere logical inconsistencies to radical discontinuities in subjectivity
itself. Most of the literature on "self-deception," for instance, suggests
that a person can tacitly believe one proposition, while successfully
convincing himself of its antithesis (e.g., my wife is having
an affair, my wife is faithful), though considerable controversy still
surrounds the question of how (or whether) such cognitive contortions
actually occur.10 Other failures of psychological integration—
ranging from "split-brain" patients to cases of "multiplepersonality"—
are at least partially explicable in terms of areas of
belief processing in the brain that have become structurally and/or
functionally partitioned from one another.
The American Embassy
A case in point: While traveling in France, my fiancee and I experienced
a bizarre partitioning of our beliefs about the American
embassy in Paris:
Belief system 1: As the events of September 11 still cast a shadow
over the world, we had decided to avoid obvious terrorist targets
while traveling. First on our list of such places was the American
embassy in Paris. Paris is home to the largest Muslim population
in the Western world, and this embassy had already been the target
of a foiled suicide plot. The American embassy would have
been the last place we would have willingly visited while in France.
Belief system 2: Prior to our arrival in Paris, we had great difficulty
finding a hotel room. Every hotel we checked was full,
56 THE END OF FAITH
except for one on the Right Bank, which had abundant vacancies.
The woman at reservations even offered us a complimentary
upgrade to a suite. She also gave us a choice of views—we could
face the inner courtyard, or outward, overlooking the American
embassy. "Which view would you choose?" I asked. "The view of
the embassy," she replied. "It's much more peaceful." I envisioned
a large, embassy garden. "Great," I said. "We'll take it."
The next day, we arrived at the hotel and found that we had been
given a room with a courtyard view. Both my fiancee and I were disappointed.
We had, after all, been promised a view of the American
embassy.
We called a friend living in Paris to inform her of our whereabouts.
Our friend, who is wise in the ways of the world, had this to
say: "That hotel is directly next to the American embassy. That's
why they're offering you an upgrade. Have you guys lost your
minds? Do you know what day it is? It's the Fourth of July."
The appearance of this degree of inconsistency in our lives was
astounding. We had spent the better part of the day simultaneously
trying to avoid and gain proximity to the very same point in space.
Realizing this, we could scarcely have been more surprised had we
both grown antlers.
But what seems psychologically so mysterious may be quite
trivial in neurological terms. It appears that the phrase "American
embassy," spoken in two different contexts, merely activated distinct
networks of association within our brains. Consequently, the
phrase had acquired two distinct meanings. In the first case, it signified
a prime terrorist target; in the second, it promised a desirable
view from a hotel window. The significance of the phrase in
the world, however, is single and indivisible, since only one building
answers to this name in Paris. The communication between
these networks of neurons appeared to be negligible; our brains
were effectively partitioned. The flimsiness of this partition was
revealed by just how easily it came down. All it took for me to
T H E N A T U R E OF B E L I E F 5 7
unify my fiancee's outlook on this subject was to turn to her—she
who was still silently coveting a view of the American embassy—
and say, with obvious alarm, "This hotel is ten feet from the American
embassy!" The partition came down, and she was as flabbergasted
as I was.
And yet, the psychologically irreconcilable facts are these: on the
day in question, never was there a time when we would have willingly
placed ourselves near the American embassy, and never was
there a time when we were not eager to move to a room with a
view of it.
While behavioral and linguistic necessity demands that we seek
coherence among our beliefs wherever we can, we know that total
coherence, even in a maximally integrated brain, would be impossible
to achieve. This becomes apparent the moment we imagine a person's
beliefs recorded as a list of assertions like I am walking in the
park; Parks generally have animals; Lions are animals; and so on—
each being a belief unto itself, as well as a possible basis upon which
to form further inferences (both good ones: I may soon see an animal;
and bad ones: I may soon see a lion), and hence new beliefs,
about the world. If perfect coherence is to be had, each new belief
must be checked against all others, and every combination thereof,
for logical contradictions.11 But here we encounter a minor computational
difficulty: the number of necessary comparisons grows
exponentially as each new proposition is added to the list. How
many beliefs could a perfect brain check for logical contradictions?
The answer is surprising. Even if a computer were as large as the
known universe, built of components no larger than protons, with
switching speeds as fast as the speed of light, all laboring in parallel
from the moment of the big bang up to the present, it would still be
fighting to add a 300th belief to its list.12 What does this say about
the possibility of our ever guaranteeing that our worldview is perfectly
free from contradiction? It is not even a dream within a
dream.13 And yet, given the demands of language and behavior, it
remains true that we must strive for coherence wherever it is in
58 THE END OF FAITH
doubt, because failure here is synonymous with a failure either of
linguistic sense or of behavioral possibility14
Beliefs as Representations of the World
For even the most basic knowledge of the world to be possible, regularities
in a nervous system must consistently mirror regularities
in the environment. If a different assemblage of neurons in my brain
fired whenever I saw a person's face, I would have no way to form a
memory of him. His face could look like a face one moment and
a toaster the next, and I would have no reason to be surprised by the
inconsistency, for there would be nothing for a given pattern of neural
activation to be consistent with. As Stephen Pinker points out, it
is only the orderly mirroring between a system that processes information
(a brain or a computer) and the laws of logic or probability
that explains "how rationality can emerge from mindless physical
process" in the first place.15 Words are arranged in a systematic and
rule-based way (syntax), and beliefs are likewise (in that they must
logically cohere), because both body and world are so arranged. Consider
the statement There is an apple and an orange in jack's lunch
box. The syntactical (and hence logical) significance of the word
"and" guarantees that anyone who believes this statement will also
believe the following propositions: There is an apple in jack's lunch
box and There is an orange in jack's lunch box. This is not due to
some magical property that syntax holds over the world; rather, it is
a simple consequence of the fact that we use words like "and" to
mirror the orderly behavior of objects. Someone who will endorse
the conjunction of two statements, while denying them individually,
either does not understand the use of the word "and" or does not
understand things like apples, oranges, and lunch boxes.16 It just so
happens that we live in a universe in which, if you put an apple and
an orange in Jack's lunch box, you will be able to pull out an apple,
an orange, or both. There is a point at which the meanings of words,
THE NATURE OF BELIEF 59
their syntactical relations, and rationality itself can no longer be
divorced from the orderly behavior of objects in the world.17
WHATEVER beliefs are, none of us harbors an infinite number of
them.18 While philosophers may doubt whether beliefs are the sort
of thing that can be counted, it is clear that we have a finite amount
of storage in our brains,19 a finite number of discrete memories, and
a finite vocabulary that waxes and wanes somewhere well shy of
100,000 words. There is a distinction to be made, therefore, between
beliefs that are causally active20—i.e., those that we already have in
our heads—and those that can be constructed on demand. If believing
is anything like perceiving, it is obvious that our intuitions
about how many of our beliefs are present within us at any given
moment might be unreliable. Studies of "change blindness," for
instance, have revealed that we do not perceive nearly as much of the
world as we think we do, since a large percentage of the visual scene
can be suddenly altered without our noticing.21 An analogy with
computer gaming also seems apropos: current generations of computer
games do not compute parts of their virtual world until a
player makes a move that demands their existence.22 Perhaps many
of our cognitive commitments are just like this.23
Whether most of what we believe is always present within our
minds or whether it must be continually reconstructed, it seems
that many beliefs must be freshly vetted before they can guide our
behavior. This is demonstrated whenever we come to doubt a
proposition that we previously believed. Just consider what it is like
to forget the multiplication table—12 x 7 = ? All of us have had
moments when 84 just didn't sound quite right. At such times, we
may be forced to perform some additional calculations before we
can again be said to believe that 1 2 x 7 = 84. Or consider what it is
like to fall into doubt over a familiar person's name ("Is his name
really ]eff1 Is that what I call him?"). It is clear that even very
well-worn beliefs can occasionally fail to achieve credibility in the
6 0 THE E N D OF F A I TH
present. Such failures of truth testing have important implications,
to which we now turn.
A Matter of True and False
Imagine that you are having dinner in a restaurant with several old
friends. You leave the table briefly to use the restroom, and upon
your return you hear one of your friends whisper, "Just be quiet. He
can't know about any of this."
What are you to make of this statement? Everything turns on
whether you believe that you are the "he" in question. If you are a
woman, and therefore excluded by this choice of pronoun, you
would probably feel nothing but curiosity. Upon retaking your seat,
you might even whisper, "Who are you guys talking about?" If you
are a man, on the other hand, things have just gotten interesting.
What secret could your friends be keeping from you? If your birthday
is just a few weeks away, you might assume that a surprise party
has been planned in your honor. If not, more Shakespearean possibilities
await your consideration.
Given your prior cognitive commitments, and the contextual cues
in which the utterance was spoken, some credence-granting circuit
inside your brain will begin to test a variety of possibilities. You will
study your friends' faces. Are their expressions compatible with the
more nefarious interpretations of this statement that are now occurring
to you? Has one of your friends just confessed to sleeping with
your wife? When could this have happened? There has always been
a certain chemistry between them. . . . Suffice it to say that
whichever interpretation of these events becomes a matter of belief
for you will have important personal and social consequences.
At present, we have no understanding of what it means, at the
level of the brain, to say that a person believes or disbelieves a given
proposition—and yet it is upon this difference that all subsequent
cognitive and behavioral commitments turn. To believe a proposiTHE
NATURE OF BELIEF 6l
tion we must endorse, and thereby become behaviorally susceptible
to, its representational content. There are good reasons to think that
this process happens quite automatically—and, indeed, that the
mere comprehension of an idea may be tantamount to believing it,
if only for a moment. The Dutch philosopher Spinoza thought that
belief and comprehension were identical, while disbelief required a
subsequent act of rejection. Some very interesting work in psychology
bears this out.24 It seems rather likely that understanding a
proposition is analogous to perceiving an object in physical space.
Our default setting may be to accept appearances as reality until
they prove to be otherwise. This would explain why merely entertaining
the possibility of a friend's betrayal may have set your heart
racing a moment ago.
Whether belief formation is a passive or an active process, it is
clear that we continuously monitor spoken utterances (both our own
and those of others) for logical and factual errors. The failure to find
such errors allows us to live by the logic of what would otherwise be
empty phrases. Of course, even the change of a single word can
mean the difference between complaisance and death-defying feats:
if your child comes to you in the middle of the night saying, "Daddy,
there's an elephant in the hall," you might escort him back to bed
toting an imaginary gun; if he had said, "Daddy, there's a man in the
hall," you would probably be inclined to carry a real one.
Faith and Evidence
It does not require any special knowledge of psychology or neuroscience
to observe that human beings are generally reluctant to
change their minds. As many authors have noted, we are conservative
in our beliefs in the sense that we do not add or subtract from
our store of them without reason. Belief, in the epistemic sense—
that is, belief that aims at representing our knowledge about the
world—requires that we believe a given proposition to be true, not
6 2 THE E N D OF F A I TH
merely that we wish it were so. Such a constraint upon our thinking
is undoubtedly a good thing, since unrestrained wishful thinking
would uncouple our beliefs from the regularities in the world that
they purport to represent. Why is it wrong to believe a proposition
to be true just because it might feel good to believe it? One need
only linger over the meaning of the word "because" (Middle English
"by" + "cause") to see the problem here. "Because" suggests a
causal connection between a proposition's being true and a person's
believing that it is. This explains the value we generally place on evidence:
because evidence is simply an account of the causal linkage
between states of the world and our beliefs about them. ("I believe
Oswald shot Kennedy because I found his fingerprints on the gun,
and because my cousin saw him do it, and my cousin doesn't lie.")
We can believe a proposition to be true only because something in
our experience, or in our reasoning about the world, actually speaks
to the truth of the proposition in question.25
Let's say that I believe that God exists, and some impertinent person
asks me why. This question invites—indeed, demands—an
answer of the form "I believe that God exists because..." I cannot say,
however, "I believe that God exists because it is prudent to do so" (as
Pascal would have us do). Of course, I can say this, but I cannot mean
by the word "believe" what I mean when I say things like "I believe
that water is really two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen because
two centuries of physical experiments attest to this" or "I believe
there is an oak in my yard because I can see it." Nor can I say things
like "I believe in God because it makes me feel good." The fact that
I would feel good if there were a God does not give me the slightest
reason to believe that one exists. This is easily seen when we swap
the existence of God for some other consoling proposition. Let's say
that I want to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in
my yard that is the size of a refrigerator. It is true that it would feel
uncommonly good to believe this. But do I have any reason to
believe that there is actually a diamond in my yard that is thousands
of times larger than any yet discovered? No. Here we can see why
THE NATURE OF BELIEF 63
Pascal's wager, Kierkegaard's leap of faith, and other epistemological
ponzi schemes won't do. To believe that God exists is to believe that
I stand in some relation to his existence such that his existence is
itself the reason for my belief. There must be some causal connection,
or an appearance thereof, between the fact in question and my
acceptance of it. In this way, we can see that religious beliefs, to be
beliefs about the way the world is, must be as evidentiary in spirit as
any other.
THE moment we admit that our beliefs are attempts to represent
states of the world, we see that they must stand in the right relation
to the world to be valid. It should be clear that if a person believes in
God because he has had certain spiritual experiences, or because the
Bible makes so much sense, or because he trusts the authority of the
church, he is playing the same game of justification that we all play
when claiming to know the most ordinary facts. This is probably a
conclusion that many religious believers will want to resist; but
resistance is not only futile but incoherent. There is simply no other
logical space for our beliefs about the world to occupy. As long as
religious propositions purport to be about the way the world is—
God can actually hear your prayers, If you take his name in vain
bad things will happen to you, etc.—they must stand in relation to
the world, and to our other beliefs about it. And it is only by being
so situated that propositions of this sort can influence our subsequent
thinking or behavior. As long as a person maintains that his
beliefs represent an actual state of the world (visible or invisible;
spiritual or mundane), he must believe that his beliefs are a consequence
of the way the world is. This, by definition, leaves him vulnerable
to new evidence. Indeed, if there were no conceivable change
in the world that could get a person to question his religious beliefs,
this would prove that his beliefs were not predicated upon his
taking any state of the world into account. He could not claim,
therefore, to be representing the world at all.26
64 THE END OF FAITH
ALTHOUGH many things can be said in criticism of religious faith,
there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are
quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it
seems, are willing to kill for them. Those who are destined to suffer
terribly throughout their lives, or upon the threshold of death, often
find consolation in one unfounded proposition or another. Faith
enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity
that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.
Faith also appears to have direct physical consequences in cases
where mere expectations, good or bad, can incline the body toward
health or untimely death.27 But the fact that religious beliefs have a
great influence on human life says nothing at all about their validity.
For the paranoid, pursued by persecutory delusions, terror of the
CIA may have great influence, but this does not mean that his
phones are tapped.
What is faith, then? Is it something other than belief? The Hebrew
term 'emûnâ (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 conviction
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") constitutes
evidence for its actuality ("assurance"). Let's see how this
works: I feel a certain, rather thrilling "conviction" that Nicole Kidman
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, scripTHE
NATURE OF BELIEF 65
tural sense—as belief in, and life orientation toward, certain historical
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 equations
between faith and belief. Surely other theologians have done
likewise. Of course, anyone is free to redefine the term "faith" however
he sees fit and thereby bring it into conformity with some
rational or mystical ideal. But this is not the "faith" that has animated
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 concern—specifically 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.
66 THE END OF FAITH
But faith is an impostor. This can be readily seen in the way that
all the extraordinary phenomena of the religious life—a statue of
the Virgin weeps, a child casts his crutches to the ground—are 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 evidence
that attested to the literal truth of the Gospels? Imagine if carbon
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 willingness
to await the evidence—be 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 penicillin—
these 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 examination
of the world, or of the world of their experience. (They are, in
Karl Popper's sense, "unfalsifiable.") It appears that even the Holocaust
did not lead most Jews to doubt the existence of an omnipotent
THE NATURE OF BELIEF 67
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 mullah
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" is—he 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
sweetener—inexplicably 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 perspective
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 ordinary
sense. They were men of faith—perfect 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
68 THE END OF FAITH
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 religious
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 renders
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 Jew—or an atheist—as a follower of Christ. If he
were to discover (by some means that he acknowledged to be incontrovertible)
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
neighbors—which is to say, more or less rationally—in their worldly
affairs. When making important decisions, they tend to be as attenTHE
NATURE OF BELIEF 69
tive to evidence and to its authentication as any unbeliever. While
Jehovah's Witnesses refusing blood transfusions, or Christian Scientists
forgoing modern medicine altogether, may appear to be exceptions
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 collateral.
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 rattlesnakes)
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 rattlesnake
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.
WHERE 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
70 THE END OF FAITH
"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 sublime
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 all—in short, the literal
correspondence of doctrine with reality itself—is of sole importance
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
THE NATURE OF BELIEF 71
gambling and swearing, and they demanded that everyone living
in sin get married immediately. Li Muisis [an abbot of Tournai]
recorded happily that the number of marriages increased considerably,
profanity was no longer heard, and gambling declined so
much that the makers of dice turned to making rosaries. He also
recorded that in this newly virtuous place 25,000 citizens died of
the plague and were buried in large pits on the outskirts of the
town.29
Where did the religious beliefs of these people leave off and their
worldly beliefs begin? Can there be any doubt that the beleaguered
Christians of the fourteenth century were longing for knowledge
(that is, beliefs that are both true and valid) about the plague, about
its cause and mode of transmission, and hoping, thereby, to find an
effective means by which to combat it? Was their reliance upon the
tenets of faith enforced by anything but the starkest ignorance? If it
had been known, for instance, that this pestilence was being delivered
by merchant ships—that rats were climbing ashore from every
hold and that upon each rat were legions of fleas carrying the plague
bacillus—would the faithful have thought their energies best spent
cutting the tongues out of blasphemers, silencing bells, dressing in
bright colors, and making liberal use of enemas? A sure way to win
an argument with these unhappy people would have been with penicillin,
delivered not from a land where other "cultural perspectives"
hold sway, but from higher up on the slopes of the real.
Faith and Madness
We have seen that our beliefs are tightly coupled to the structure of
language and to the apparent structure of the world. Our "freedom
of belief," if it exists at all, is minimal. Is a person really free to
believe a proposition for which he has no evidence? No. Evidence
(whether sensory or logical) is the only thing that suggests that a
72 THE END OF FAITH
given belief is really about the world in the first place. We have
names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational
justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call
them "religious"; otherwise, they are likely to be called "mad,"
"psychotic," or "delusional." Most people of faith are perfectly sane,
of course, even those who commit atrocities on account of their
beliefs. But what is the difference between a man who believes that
God will reward him with seventy-two virgins if he kills a score of
Jewish teenagers, and one who believes that creatures from Alpha
Centauri are beaming him messages of world peace through his hair
dryer? There is a difference, to be sure, but it is not one that places
religious faith in a flattering light.
It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else
believes. To be ruled by ideas for which you have no evidence (and
which therefore cannot be justified in conversation with other
human beings) is generally a sign that something is seriously wrong
with your mind. Clearly, there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is
merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our
society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your
thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that
he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code
on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not
generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are. This is not surprising,
since most religions have merely canonized a few products of
ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as
though they were primordial truths. This leaves billions of us believing
what no sane person could believe on his own. In fact, it is difficult
to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than
those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. Consider
one of the cornerstones of the Catholic faith:
I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper, and propitiatory
sacrifice is offered to God on behalf of the living and the
dead, and that the Body and the Blood, together with the soul
THE NATURE OF BELIEF 73
and the divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially
present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist,
and there is a change of the whole substance of the bread into the
Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into Blood; and this
change the Catholic mass calls transubstantiation. I also profess
that the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received
under each separate species.30
Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated
death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the
form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy,
and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that
a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather,
is there any doubt that he would be mad? The danger of religious
faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the
fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation
of children is taught that religious propositions need not be
justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged
by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves
over ancient literature. Who would have thought something
so tragically absurd could be possible?
What Should We Believe?
We believe most of what we believe about the world because others
have told us to. Reliance upon the authority of experts, and upon the
testimony of ordinary people, is the stuff of which worldviews are
made. In fact, the more educated we become, the more our beliefs
come to us at second hand. A person who believes only those propositions
for which he can provide full sensory or theoretical justification
will know almost nothing about the world; that is, if he is not
swiftly killed by his own ignorance. How do you know that falling
from a great height is hazardous to your health? Unless you have
7 4 THE E N D OF F A I TH
witnessed someone die in this way, you have adopted this belief on
the authority of others.31 This is not a problem. Life is too short, and
the world too complex, for any of us to go it alone in epistemological
terms. We are ever reliant on the intelligence and accuracy, if not
the kindness, of strangers.
This does not suggest, however, that all forms of authority are
valid; nor does it suggest that even the best authorities will always
prove reliable. There are good arguments and bad ones, precise
observations and imprecise ones; and each of us has to be the final
judge of whether or not it is reasonable to adopt a given belief about
the world.
Consider the following sources of information:
1. The anchorman on the evening news says that a large fire is
burning in the state of Colorado. One hundred thousand acres
have burned, and the fire is still completely uncontained.
2. Biologists say that DNA is the molecular basis for sexual reproduction.
Each of us resembles our parents because we inherit a
complement of their DNA. Each of us has arms and legs
because our DNA coded for the proteins that produced them
during our early development.
3. The pope says that Jesus was born of a virgin and resurrected
bodily after death. He is the Son of God, who created the universe
in six days. If you believe this, you will go to heaven after
death; if you don't, you will go to hell, where you will suffer for
eternity.
What is the difference between these forms of testimony? Why isn't
every "expert opinion" equally worthy of our respect? Given our
analysis thus far, it should not be difficult to grant authority to 1 and
2 while disregarding 3.
Proposition 1: Why do we find the news story about the fire in
Colorado persuasive? It could be a hoax. But what about those teleTHE
NATURE OF BELIEF 75
vised images of hillsides engorged by flame and of planes dropping
fire retardant? Maybe there is a fire, but it is in a different state. Perhaps
it's really Texas that is burning. Is it reasonable to entertain
such possibilities? No. Why not? Here is where the phrase "common
sense" begins to earn its keep. Given our beliefs about the human
mind, the success of our widespread collaboration with other human
beings, and the degree to which we all rely on the news, it is scarcely
conceivable that a respected television network and a highly paid
anchorman are perpetrating a hoax, or that thousands of firefighters,
newsmen, and terrified homeowners have mistaken Texas for
Colorado. Implicit in such commonsense judgments lurks an understanding
of the causal connections between various processes in the
world, the likelihood of different outcomes, and the vested interests,
or lack thereof, of those whose testimony we are considering. What
would a professional news anchor stand to gain from lying about a
fire in Colorado ? We need not go into the details here; if the anchor
on the evening news says that there is a fire in Colorado and then
shows us images of burning trees, we can be reasonably sure that
there really is a fire in Colorado.
Proposition 2: What about the "truths" of science? Are they true'?
Much has been written about the inherent provisionality of scientific
theories. Karl Popper has told us that we never prove a theory
right; we merely fail to prove it wrong.32 Thomas Kuhn has told us
that scientific theories undergo wholesale revision with each generation
and therefore do not converge on the truth.33 There's no telling
which of our current theories will be proved wrong tomorrow, so
how much confidence can we have in them? Many unwary consumers
of these ideas have concluded that science is just another
area of human discourse and, as such, is no more anchored to the
facts of this world than literature or religion are. All truths are up
for grabs.
But all spheres of discourse are not on the same footing, for the
simple reason that not all spheres of discourse seek the same footing
(or any footing whatsoever). Science is science because it represents
76 THE END OF FAITH
our most committed effort to verify that our statements about the
world are true (or at least not false).34 We do this by observation
and experiment within the context of a theory. To say that a given
scientific theory may be wrong is not to say that it may be wrong
in its every particular, or that any other theory stands an equal
chance of being right. What are the chances that DNA is not the
basis for genetic inheritance? Well, if it isn't, Mother Nature sure
has a lot of explaining to do. She must explain the results of fifty
years of experimentation, which have demonstrated reliable correlations
between genotype and phenotype (including the reproducible
effects of specific genetic mutations). Any account of
inheritance that is going to supersede the present assumptions of
molecular biology will have to account for the ocean of data that
now conforms to these assumptions. What are the chances that we
will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with
inheritance ? They are effectively zero.
Proposition 3: Can we rely on the authority of the pope? Millions
of Catholics do, of course. He is, in fact, infallible in matters of faith
and morality. Can we really say that Catholics are wrong to believe
that the pope knows whereof he speaks? We surely can.
We know that no evidence would be sufficient to authenticate
many of the pope's core beliefs. How could anyone born in the
twentieth century come to know that Jesus was actually born of a
virgin? What process of ratiocination, mystical or otherwise, will
deliver the necessary facts about a Galilean woman's sexual history
(facts that run entirely counter to well-known facts of human biology)
? There is no such process. Even a time machine could not help
us, unless we were willing to keep watch over Mary twenty-four
hours a day for the months surrounding the probable time of Jesus'
conception.
Visionary experiences, in and of themselves, can never be sufficient
to answer questions of historical fact. Let's say the pope had a
dream about Jesus, and Jesus came to him looking fresh from Da
Vinci's brush. The pope would not even be in a position to say that
THE NATURE OF BELIEF 77
the Jesus of his dream looked like the real Jesus. The pope's infallibility,
no matter how many dreams and visions he may have had,
does not even extend to making a judgment about whether the historical
Jesus wore a beard, let alone whether he was really the Son
of God, born of a virgin, or able to raise the dead. These are just not
the kinds of propositions that spiritual experience can authenticate.
Of course, we could imagine a scenario in which we would give
credence to the pope's visions, or to our own. If Jesus came saying
things like "The Vatican Library has exactly thirty-seven thousand,
two hundred and twenty-six books" and he turned out to be right,
we would then begin to feel that we were, at the very least, in dialogue
with someone who had something to say about the way the
world is. Given a sufficient number of verifiable statements,
plucked from the ethers of papal vision, we could begin speaking
seriously about any further claims Jesus might make. The point is
that his authority would be derived in the only way that such
authority ever is—by making claims about the world that can be
corroborated by further observation. As far as proposition 3 is concerned,
it is quite obvious that the pope has nothing to go on but
the Bible itself. This document is not a sufficient justification for his
beliefs, given the standards of evidence that prevailed at the time of
its composition.
WHAT about our much championed freedom of religious belief? It is
no different from our freedoms of journalistic and biological
belief—and anyone who believes that the media are perpetrating a
great fire conspiracy, or that molecular biology is just a theory that
may prove totally wrong, has merely exercised his freedom to be
thought a fool. Religious unreason should acquire an even greater
stigma in our discourse, given that it remains among the principal
causes of armed conflict in our world. Before you can get to the end
of this paragraph, another person will probably die because of what
someone else believes about God. Perhaps it is time we demanded
78 THE END OF FAITH
that our fellow human beings had better reasons for maintaining
their religious differences, if such reasons even exist.
We must begin speaking freely about what is really in these holy
books of ours, beyond the timid heterodoxies of modernity—the gay
and lesbian ministers, the Muslim clerics who have lost their taste
for public amputations, or the Sunday churchgoers who have never
read their Bibles quite through. A close study of these books, and of
history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that
it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages.
It is only by the most acrobatic avoidance of passages whose canonicity
has never been in doubt that we can escape murdering one
another outright for the glory of God. Bertrand Russell had it right
when he made the following observation:
The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants
and then immediately dash their brains out: by this means they
secured these infants went to Heaven. No orthodox Christian can
find any logical reason for condemning their action, although all
nowadays do so. In countless ways the doctrine of personal
immortality in its Christian form has had disastrous effects upon
morals. . . .35
It is true that there are millions of people whose faith moves
them to perform extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice for the benefit of
others. The help rendered to the poor by Christian missionaries in
the developing world demonstrates that religious ideas can lead to
actions that are both beautiful and necessary. But there are far better
reasons for self-sacrifice than those that religion provides. The
fact that faith has motivated many people to do good things does not
suggest that faith is itself a necessary (or even a good) motivation
for goodness. It can be quite possible, even reasonable, to risk one's
life to save others without believing any incredible ideas about the
nature of the universe.
By contrast, the most monstrous crimes against humanity have
THE NATURE OF BELIEF 79
invariably been inspired by unjustified belief. This is nearly a truism.
Genocidal projects tend not to reflect the rationality of their
perpetrators simply because there are no good reasons to kill peaceful
people indiscriminately. Even where such crimes have been secular,
they have required the egregious credulity of entire societies to
be brought off. Consider the millions of people who were killed by
Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality,
communism was little more than a political religion.36 At the
heart of its apparatus of repression and terror lurked a rigid ideology,
to which generations of men and women were sacrificed. Even
though their beliefs did not reach beyond this world, they were both
cultic and irrational. To cite only one example, the dogmatic embrace
of Lysenko's "socialist" biology—as distinguished from the "capitalist"
biology of Mendel and Darwin—helped pave the way for tens of
millions of deaths from famine in the Soviet Union and China in the
first part of the twentieth century.
In the next chapter we will examine two of the darkest episodes
in the history of faith: the Inquisition and the Holocaust. I have chosen
the former as a case study because there is no other instance in
which so many ordinary men and women have been so deranged by
their beliefs about God; nowhere else has the subversion of reason
been so complete or its consequences so terrible. The Holocaust is
relevant here because it is generally considered to have been an
entirely secular phenomenon. It was not. The anti-Semitism that
built the crematoria brick by brick—and that still thrives today—
comes to us by way of Christian theology. Knowingly or not, the
Nazis were agents of religion.