Tue 8 Dec 2009
Believing
Posted by David Banach under David Banach , Philosophy Department Blog , Weekly Word[9] Comments
Imagine explaining Christmas to an alien. Surely it would be strange to attempt to explain Santa Claus to someone completely unacquainted with the custom. Even once one got past the difficulty of explaining the religious significance of the holiday that celebrates God’ s redemption of humanity by his being born as a child and the tradition of giving gifts as an imitation of this ultimate gift, there would still remain even more and greater strangeness. We give our children gifts but pretend that they are not from us, but from this imaginary kind-hearted Santa Claus, who watches the naughty and the nice and grants the wishes of all the world’s children. We smile with tenderness at the innocence of our children as they absorb this belief and allow it to tinge the appearance of presents under a tree on Christmas Eve with a magical, mysterious glow. And we grieve, in a way, when the illusion is lost to the inevitable advance of our children’s knowledge of the practicalities that govern our world and the laws that govern the human heart. Why? Why do we do this, and why do we feel a great loss when we come to see it all as humbug?
It is surely no virtue to lie, nor is it worthwhile fostering an ability to be deceived, even about things that we might wish were so. The value of believing cannot lie in a willed ignorance of what is right before our eyes, but in a hope for a deeper truth that lies beneath the surface of things. All magic lies in there being more to things than meets the eye, in there being hidden virtues and powers hidden within the heart of things that cannot be revealed in their appearances without special probing and prompting.
It may seem that there are no two things more dissimilar than scientific knowledge and belief in Santa Claus, but I believe that there is a deep connection between them that reveals the value of belief of this sort. The scientist learns to probe beneath the surface of things, to believe that within the flux and chaos of normal experience there lie hidden laws of nature that exhibit themselves only to the initiated under controlled conditions. The natures of things, as Plato saw, exist eternally and purely, and can only be revealed in things as they come to fulfill them in time, in the absence of interference and impurity. A scientist must see in the complex morass of empirical data, a hidden structure. He must have confidence that at the heart of chaos, lies law; that the random ramblings of the most unruly particle is in the grips of a form, a law that will be revealed by its behavior only over time under pure enough experimental conditions. The scientists who sit and wait in the super-conducting super collider for the particle predicted by the exquisitely beautiful mathematics of their physical theory are waiting for Santa Claus.
Just as the scientists can work only in the hope the mathematical order to which his mind responds is reflected in the order of nature, so in the innocent heart of a child there lie the urgings of beneficence and love. Like the secret forms of the natural world, hidden in its complexity, these seeds lie amongst our passions and the practical requirements of our world, which interfere with their expression. Just as the scientist believes that reality, in the grips of a form, in the fullness of time, will exhibit the actions that mathematical laws prescribes, so the innocent, pure soul in the grips of these most scared urgings of the heart (as Simone Weil calls them) hopes for good rather than evil, that kindness will be returned, that their letters to Santa will be answered.
According to Weil, we grieve the loss of belief, because this ability to feel ourselves in the grip of eternal forms, forms that express themselves in this world only in pure circumstances in the fullness of time, whether these forms be forms of natural law or forms of life and love; this ability is the most sacred part of human nature. I don’t think this has much to do with the gullibility of believing in pleasant things, whether they be religious dogmas or cute fairy tales. There is a rationality to the belief of the scientist and the child. The things that matter, in both science and life, are more than what meets the eyes; they are things whose expression requires the fullness of time and purity of condition. We are sometimes mistaken in our ascription of form to the natural world, but only the man who believes, beyond all hope, in the face of the fear of error, that there is an order at the heart of motion of the planets, will discover it, as Kepler did. Often kindness is repaid with pain, and no unknown stranger provides hidden acts of kindness to delight us, but only those who keep alive the secret urgings of their heart to see the good, and expect it in all men in the fullness of time, will have the courage to build the types of conditions, as rare and difficult as a super-conducting super collider, in which these urgings can come to fruition. Only those that continue to hear the hidden ringing of the bell, inside the hollow metal shell, will discover one day as they sit back exhausted in the silent gleaming, after arranging presents quietly under a magically glistening tree, that there is indeed a Santa Claus, and that it is them.
Tags: belief, Christmas, Eternal, faith, form, Hope, Polar Express, Sacred, Santa Claus, science, Simone Weil
I believe, as an ethical principle, that beliefs about what reality contains should always be formed on the basis of evidence or rational argument–so that “faith” is inherently an unethical way to form your beliefs. To believe “on faith” is to believe that the world is a certain way (contains a god etc) without the support of either empirical or logical justification. This violates the ethics of belief–how you ought to arrive at your convictions. That, for me, is the original sin of theism; and from this sin the other sorts of sin arise–religious intolerance, persecution, and violence.
“It may seem that there are no two things more dissimilar than scientific knowledge and belief in Santa Claus, but I believe that there is a deep connection between them”
Here is a sentence I firmly believe (have faith) to be true:
(1) Die Lache in meinem Hinterhof ist oval
I haven’t the foggiest idea what (1) means, but I know it’s true, because I asked a trusted German speaking friend to provide me with a true sentence for just this purpose. I would bet a large sum of money on the truth of this sentence–that’s how sure I am that it’s true. I don’t know whether (1) is about trees, or people, or history, or chemistry,… or God. There is nothing metaphysically peculiar, or difficult, or unseemly, or embarrassing about my state of mind. I just don’t know what proposition this sentence expresses, because I’m not “expert” in German.
Here, one might say, is the ultimate division of labor, the division of doxastic (logic concerned with reasoning about beliefs) labor, made possible by language: we laypeople do the believing–we sign on to the doxology–and defer the understanding of those dogmas to the experts. Consider the ultimate talismanic formula of science:
(2) E = mc2
Do you believe that E = mc2? I do. We all know that this is Einstein’s great equation, and the heart, somehow, of his theory of relativity. And many of us know what the E and m and c stand for, and could even work out the basic algebraic relationships and detect obvious errors in interpreting it. But only a tiny fraction of those who know that “E = mc2″ is a fundamental truth of physics actually understand it in any substantive way. Fortunately, the rest of us don’t have to; we have expert physicists around to whom we have gratefully delegated responsibility for understanding the formula. What we are doing, in these instances, is not really believing the proposition. For that, you’d have to understand the proposition. What we are doing is believing that whatever proposition is expressed by the formula “E = mc2″ is true.
The difference for me between (1) and (2) is that I know quite a lot–but not enough–about what (2) is about. In the infinite space of all possible propositions, I can narrow down its meaning to a rather tight cluster of nearly identical variants. With (1), however, all I know is that it expresses one of the true propositions–cutting the infinite space of propositions in half, but still leaving infinitely many propositions indistinguishable by me as its best interpretation.
I drew an example from science to show that this is not an embarrassing foible of religious belief alone. Even scientists rely every day on formulas that they know to be correct but are not themselves expert in interpreting. However, the experts do understand the methods they use–not everything about them, but enough to explain to one another and to themselves why the amazingly accurate results come out of them. It is only because I am confident that the experts really do understand the formulas that I can honestly and unabashedly cede the responsibility of pinning down the propositions (and hence understanding them) to them.
In religion, however, the experts are not exaggerating for effect when they say they don’t understand what they are talking about. The fundamental incomprehensibility of God is insisted upon as a central tenet of faith, and the propositions in question are themselves declared to be systematically elusive to everybody. Although we can go along with the experts when they advise us which sentences to say we believe, they also insist that they themselves cannot use their expertise to prove–even to one another–that they know what they are talking about. These matters are mysterious to everybody, experts and laypeople alike.
“To what extent can we ascribe personality to God? I don’t know. In the end we have to say we don’t know. If we knew God, God would not be God.” ~Rev. Tom Honey, TED 2005
And John of Damascus asserts, God is unknowable by mankind:
“But what He is in His essence and nature is absolutely incomprehensible and unknowable”
When scientists have faith in understanding the unknown they believe in the power of scientific methodology and the experts to which they may differ (if required) deeper understanding and questions to. This faith in process and personnel is held against the collateral of accurately testable predictions–without which the faith of science is credulous and facile. Scientists are doing more then just professing their faith, they additionally put what they believe true to the test and into manifest practice. And when we switch to theism–via the strangest inversion of reason–religious faith is not to be sequestered to such collateral or any.
. . .
It is often stated that scientific belief is a form of faith in the same sense as it is for religion. Seemingly, the understanding of exactly what faith subsumes has become incomprehensible, making faith perceived as a universally applied concept between diametrically (the tenets of science and religion are, respectively, naturalism and supernaturalism) different ideological disciplines.
Scientific understanding proceeds from a premise of that which is known through description is ultimately reducible to knowledge of that which we have acquaintance. It can be easily seen that religious faith tries to subvert this resolution of knowledge. That religious concepts based upon religious supernatural knowledge, which we have no direct acquaintance with through forms of sense datum, are left hanging with no means of resolution to make them understandable. However, we must attach some meaning to the words we use–if we are to speak significantly and not utter mere noise–and the meaning we attach to our words must be from particulars or universals in which we are acquainted.
In this sense the concepts of understanding and enlightenment in science, and that of theology, do not overlap and are in stark opposition. An epistemic chasm has been created upon the fault line between religious authority and the authority of individual experience. Are we to defer this thirst to a prophetic succession who heard divine voices? Or, are we to open our windows and search the heavens of our own experience right now in the objective world without any clerical intercession? As Bertrand Russell wrote, “If the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor all their own.”.
. . .
Biblical literalism has swain but in its wake of we have all started to believe in different Gods (e.g. more or less anthropomorphic; a God of universal essence or a personal God). We say we all believe in the same God, but that would not be the most accurate of statements considering our admitted inability to understand what God is and the unique internal conceptualization each believer has. Belief in belief has become so paramount that believers have sacrificed the mandate for a conceptual common denominator for a belief in any incomprehensible concept marching under the noun “God”.
The proposition that God exists is not even a theory. That assertion is so prodigiously ambiguous that it expresses, at best, an unorganized set of dozens or hundreds–or billions–of quite different possible theories, most of them disqualified as theories in any case, because they are systematically immune to confirmation or disconfirmation. The result of this unfortunate behavior is that when theists forgo attaching some common meaning to a noun they use they are quite literally talking non-sense of the most esoteric kind.
“What we can not speak about we must pass over in silence.” ~Wittgenstein
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the comments.
I’ll address the first one first:
I think I agree for the most part (caveats below) with your ethical principle. It is instructive, however, to notice that this principle itself does not appear to be believed on the basis of evidence. (You certainly adduce no evidence for it, though it is clearly controversial)
But apart from this philosopher’s amusement at its self-referentially self-defeating nature, I think I agree with its spirit. Belief ought to rational and it ought to take into account evidence and be revisable on the basis of evidence. While we feel sad about the loss of our children’s belief in Santa at the age of 7 or 8, we would feel differently if they persisted at 13 and would take steps to disabuse them of this tendency to retain beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary.
But it is the essence of rationality to go beyond the evidence available at a particular moment on the basis of the apprehension of form. All prediction of the future (as Hume saw)goes beyond the evidence we have at the moment. Both science and love find something beneath the surface of things that takes them beyond the present moment to investigate the possibility of behavior that arises not from the present moment, but from a form or nature only imperfectly exhibited in the moment.
I am holding a glass that is not at the moment breaking, nor have I ever seen it break. Yet I believe it to be breakable. (Of course this belief if revisable under the force of contrary evidence in the future.) When a man strikes me on the cheek, the evidence at the moment does not support the belief that he is deserving of kindness, yet I believe that he is,and may even turn the other cheek.
Both of these are rational. Reason judges the ratio or form of things that lies beneath the surface of things. We know when forms are present in things only through evidence and our judgments are revisable, but reason reaches for the future, while evidence dwells in the past.
Now for your second comment, the argument of which, of course, is not yours but belongs to Daniel Dennett from the Chapter on Belief in Breaking the Spell. I think this chapter the best in the book, and agree that it raises significant issues for religious belief.
Kierkegaard had seen this when he said:
So the whole existence of the human race is rounded off completely like a sphere, and the ethical is at once its limit and its content. God becomes an invisible vanishing point, a powerless thought”
(Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Chapter 4.)
It is ironic that we had discussed these very arguments from Dennett in a recent discussion on our campus:
http://www.anselmphilosophy.com/PhilosophyClub/?p=29
But, apart from the issues these arguments raise for both scientific and religious belief, I was talking about Santa Claus and not God.
Belief in Santa Claus is not faith. Santa Claus does not really exist, even to those who instill this belief in their children. It is a naive belief, expressing the innocence of the children who hold it, and it is the loss of this innocence that we mourn when the belief ends.
My post had advocated belief in belief in Santa Claus among our children without advocating belief in Santa Claus, to use Dennett’s terminology.
The type of belief that I discuss in this post, and which belief in Santa Claus and scientific belief share, is not faith, tried in the crucible of doubt.
I’ve made parallel arguments in the past for religious faith (see the link below), with which I think you would disagree, but they are not the arguments of this post, and poor Santa Claus does not deserve the brunt of Dennett’s arguments. It is God you have issues with, not Santa Claus.
Even an atheist, taking Christmas as the secular holiday it has become in our culture, could adopt the practice of Santa Claus with a clear conscience.
Merry Christmas!
In a pursuit to be objective I try to state my biases up front, the first comment (while certainly self referential and in need of further justification outside of itself) is simply and attempt at such and a statement of modus operandi.
Anyhow…
“Belief in Santa Claus is not faith.”
Well, since adults simply do not believe in Santa, we must be taking children as the subjects of the belief in Santa.
And I won’t pretend to know all to much about the mental states of children in reference to Santa, but it would seem fair to say children hold a belief in Santa on grounds that are not the result of any sort of empirical process.
As you said it’s a native tradition which is passed onto them to hold as a belief, and grabs hold of a child’s mind as a belief purely by the process of a child’s credulity to believe whatever a parent insists upon. Parent-child credulity of which there is good adaptive reason for, but the question you raised (perhaps it was only implicit or in my reading) is whether or not some uses of this innate tendency are malicious (Santa not being a case).
This state of affairs, of children believing in Santa, due to innate parent-child credulity, is highly analogous to faith (as they have complete trust and confidence in the parental figure, which is based on apprehension rather then proof).
And so, in comparing this form of belief to scientific beliefs one becomes open to Dennett’s criticisms on the comparison. Which is where my contention and issues are.
And subsequently, with the beliefs of children based on innate parent-child credulity tendencies (whether it be God or Santa or any other culturally transmitted idea) and if such use of this biological disposition by parents is predatory of children.
It is interesting how you say even an atheist could adopt the practice of Santa Claus with a clear conscience.
As a Christian parent, I did not allow my children to ever believe in Santa Claus. We hung stockings and I read them all the stories associated with Santa Claus but they always were told that it was “just” a story. The faith in God which my husband and I hold is based on revelation. We did not want our children to be misled by “stories” which they could and most likely would then attribute to the different parts of the creed of faith.
They never were misled to believe in the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy either.
Like the Apostle Paul, we encouraged them to be like the Bereans, working hard, to rightly discern the words of truth.
As adults, they do not seem worse for wear at the notion of never believing in the stories our culture supports. To date, all three of them claim they will not practice these cultural traditions with their own children. They do not have children of their own yet and it will be interesting to watch how it plays out in their own parenting.
Hi Donna,
I certainly respect your choice and I can see your reasoning. Believing in Santa Claus is not faith; it is a type of make believe we do with our children. You are right that you would have to do some discussion to make sure they know the difference between Santa and things that are real, once they can understand the difference, but I find those types of discussions to be a good thing.
I don’t think these kinds of decisions are crucial to a child’s development. especially when they have parents as committed and caring as you appear to be. I was simply wondering about why those who practice it find the custom so endearing.
Children have a natural tendency to see the world as magical and an object of wonder. I’m not sure young children need to be as hard-nosed in their beliefs as we might be. The world will knock the innocence out of them soon enough. I think this tendency towards wonder is an aid to faith rather than inimical to it. Even C.S. Lewis says in Surprised by Joy that he had his first experiences of the numinous in children’s books.
I would have thought it impossible, but I am most pleased to see that I have found common ground between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Atheists: They are united against Santa Claus! The big guy can take it, and he would be delighted to see a bit more harmony in the world during this season of harmony. Peace to men of good will, which, undoubtedly, the majority of both Christians and Atheists are.
Against Santa Claus! Never!
I could talk about stories and characters all day long but I must admit I prefer biographies. I enjoy real life stories more than fiction.
Also, I would not classify myself as a fundamentalist Christian. Just because a Christian can quote chapter and verse does not make them fundamentalist by any means.
A very Merry Christmas to you and yours, Dr. Banach.
Baruch Hashem Adonai!