A Defense of Faith

The recent tussle over Barbara's guest post on Unclaimed Territory defending liberal religion has gotten me thinking. Given the extent to which the current political climate is split along religious lines, it is unsurprising that defense of an institution so closely identified with the worst of our opponent's excesses provoked such a vehement reaction. Personally, I hate the way religion is used by the right-wing, but I remain unconvinced that religion as a whole must be thrown out. The most vocal advocate of the "baby-too" school of thought is Pharyngula, who responded to Barbara's post with this no-holds-barred assault on religion.

The problem is faith.

Faith is a hole in your brain. Faith stops critical thinking. Faith is a failure point inculcated into people's minds, an unguarded weak point that allows all kinds of nasty, maggoty, wretched ideas to crawl into their heads and take up occupancy.

Here is where the anti-religion folks leave me behind. I am, I must say, a die-hard fan of faith. I think that faith is, really, quite a positive force in the world. Like, for example, I have faith that people can create a government that is fairer, kinder, and more efficient than any that exist today. I don't really have any reason for believing that this is so, and there is much evidence to the contrary, but I do anyway. I also variously believe in the power of love, the value of forgiveness, the capacity of science to better the human condition, and many other fluffy feel-good bits of utter nonsense for which I have no proof. I do not, by the way, believe in any form of higher divinity.

I am hard-pressed to imagine a world worth living in, devoid of faith. I would also be willing to wager that PZ Myers can't either. Faith gives everything meaning--without it, life is nothing but inhaling and exhaling, and then a stop.

Now, I am willing to bet also that at this point, PZ Myers would step in and tell me that this isn't what faith is, that this sort of faith isn't what he was talking about at all. He would of course be right. But why is that? Why is it that we can have entire arguments about this subject, and not even be able to agree on what our terms mean?

In every argument I have ever had about religion (and there have been many!), that is the turn the debate has taken. PZ's was no exception. He posted a follow up commenting on that very thing. He called it a "bothersome strategy," identifying it as "an attempt to defocus religious belief." I would dispute this: it was not an attempt to "defocus," it was an attempt to refocus. The problems PZ identifies and attacks are problems no reasonable person would deny are real and threatening. But calling them "religion," as though these odious tendencies are the single defining aspect of religiosity, is to grossly oversimplify.

PZ:

The other effect of this strategy is to turn religion into a completely empty word. When someone can say they don't believe in any deities, the supernatural, or any kind of afterlife, but that they are "religious", then religion is meaningless.

The problem isn't that the word "religion" is empty of meaning--the problem is that it is overfilled with meaning. The word "religion" is wildly overdetermined--it has hundreds of different and contradictory meanings; no one can agree on which is "right." This was the problem that PZ was facing, and was unable to deal with: when he calls religion a foul and corrupting thing, he is right. When others call it an uplifting and crucial aspect of life, they are right too. He looks in from the outside and sees blank-eyed robots marching in lock-step; others look from the inside and feel a holy joy.

To summarize: If you are making an argument about religion that presumes that religion is primarily a mechanism for social manipulation, and the person you are arguing with assumes that religion is primarily a method for personal spiritual growth, you are going to get exactly nowhere, and you are going to get there real fast.

Is PZ right that this makes religion a word worthless for arguments? Yes. But that is the way it is. PZ is right: words mean nothing but what we think they mean, and we don't always agree.