Faith

For classical sceptics, a dearth of arguments, or a clash of countervailing arguments, lead to peaceful suspension of belief, whereas in our own times it is seen more as a license for people to believe what they like. Perhaps this is a consequence of our general appetite for freedom and license. And there is a general impression that 'scepticism', like 'atheism', is a bad thing. Not having convictions is often bad form, unsociable or unpatriotic. 'Faith' is a word with a positive ring to it, although of course it rings really positively only when it means 'faith like ours' rather than the conflicting faiths of others.

Insincerity still bothers us: even a politician should not be caught saying what he does not believe. But as for what a person does believe, well that, we tend to think, is much more his or her own business. It is a morally important fault, we suppose, if politicians claim that some country has weapons of mass destruction when they know that it does not, or if NASA says that a shuttle is safe when it knows it is far from it. But it is not a morally important fault if they believe the same thing although all the evidence points against it. How we weigh evidence, like religion, tends to be regarded as a private affair. Perhaps it does not matter if a thousand flowers bloom, or if we are none too good at distinguishing weeds from flowers. Perhaps our situation is like that of Rome as described by Gibbon: 'The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.' But is it really the cranky, oversensitive philosopher who spoils the party?

William Clifford was a nineteenth-century Cambridge mathematician and polymath, who partly anticipated Einstein by claiming that mass and energy are each perturbations in space-time. He also has an algebra named after him. He is remembered in philosophy mainly for one classic essay, 'The Ethics of Belief', and that in turn is famous because of the reply to it given by the American philosopher William James. Their dispute may appear to have a dated air about it, defining as it does the state of late-Victorian anxiety specifically about religious faith. But philosophically the issues it raises go deeper than that. They concern not only the right to belief, but also the nature of belief, and my aim is not so much to judge the debate about anyone's right to conviction, as to follow it into deeper waters. The philosophy of religion is here only an introductory taster, or a laboratory example, of a wider perplexity.

In his essay Clifford argues that there is a duty to believe carefully, in the light of reason alone. He begins with a story nicely designed to induce a sense of outrage:



Clifford is surely right that we censure the negligent shipowner. We would find his 'faith' in his ship discreditable, even though Clifford is careful to tell us that it is sincere. About this Clifford comments that:



In a marvelous passage Clifford enlarges on the danger of ignoring our duty to reason:



A train, here, is a train of explosive leading from a detonator to a mine. And of course, Clifford is right. Someone sitting on a completely unreasonable belief is sitting on a time bomb. The apparently harmless, idiosyncratic belief of the Catholic Church that one thing may have the substance of another, although it displays absolutely none of its empirical qualities, prepares people for the view that some people are agents of Satan in disguise, which in turn makes it reasonable to destroy them. Clifford also emphasizes our social duty. Our beliefs help to create the world in which our descendants will live. Making ourselves gullible or credulous, we lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them, and that means 'sinking back into savagery'.

Clifford is admirably stern about the position of the untouched, unclouded innocent who just believes what he has been told:



Thus apologists for religious identity politics sometimes describe themselves as having been born one thing or another: born a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Jew. According to Clifford this is false consciousness. People are born human beings, nothing else. They may have been taught to regard themselves as one thing or another, and they may have been taught as well the doctrines and attitudes of particular traditions. But if they choose to go on refusing to question what they have been told, and if, as is so commonly the case, what they have been told is incredible or pernicious, then their continued adherence is, in Clifford's eyes, a sin against mankind.

That's all very well, but what then is the mark of reason? How are we to tell whether particular convictions escape Clifford's rather strenuous call to doubt and query? Are we, like the Greek sceptics, to regard all questions as open questions? That way (as Clifford acknowledges) lies paralysis. Even to conduct the inquiries that Clifford demands, we will have to stand somewhere. To try to unearth historical or metaphysical or other error, we will need to take many things for granted.

Clifford sees the problem, and answers it in terms of method rather than in terms of results: