Faith or False Hope?
“In fact, we must believe by virtue of the absurd.”
Kierkegaard made a number of quotes along these lines, all using the phrase, “by virtue of the absurd.” This is the kind of stuff that a few indignant atheists have a heyday with. But I think this deserves a closer look. Here are my thoughts on the matter.
People are scared of faith. Nobody will admit this. For this reason, many Christians spend their daydreaming on thinking up ways to conclusively prove God’s existence. We attempt to find logical proofs of Christian doctrine or scientific evidence of creation, and we look for miracles because we want undeniable proof of God working in the mortal realm. We even go as far as stretching the truth to create miracles where there aren’t any. The concept of faith scares people so much that we try to rationalize it and change it from belief in the unprovable to objective acceptance of observable facts.
If this sounds familiar, it might be because I had similar things to say about Existential freedom, meaning freedom of choice (and, ultimately, personal responsibility for that choice). This is pretty much the same concept. If we accept a fact, we can’t be held personally responsible for our choice; if we uphold a belief which can never be proven, we hold a lot more responsibility for that belief. So, just like many people try to give their freedom of choice and independent thought away, many Christians try to give their faith away in exchange for flimsy truths and smoke and mirrors.
This is really damaging to many Christians. If our beliefs in God are firmly supported on a table of perceived facts, so to speak, and one of the legs of that table gets kicked out from under us, we scramble to find new support for our belief. Sometimes, we find it; sometimes, we don’t; but sometimes, we replace those legs with other legs of shoddy workmanship, and we trust in that support as much as the old legs. That happens enough times, and eventually the entire table just collapses. When that happens—and there’s a good chance that it will eventually happen—we need faith to fall back on. With enough faith, we don’t need that table at all.
Now, I’m not saying that we should ignore logical fallacies and cease working out our own salvation with fear and trembling. I’m just saying that we need to realize that there are some aspects of faith that can be neither proven nor disproven. If we seek out false certainty as a crutch, it’ll carry us for a while—maybe even our whole lives—but we’re missing out on the deepest parts of faith.
“The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd.”
- Hebrews 11:1-2 (The Message)
August 13th, 2010 at 7:43 am
I tend to take Kierkegaard’s statement’s with the proverbial grain of salt, not only b/c of the at times disjointed nature of his writing (in which one can never be completely sure of how much is meant to be satirical and how much expresses his actual thought) but also b/c of the immediate intent as a critique and satire of Hegelian idealism.
However, I think in this instance K’s assertion of ‘the absurd’ (whether as a telelogical suspension of the ethical or a pointed barb at the subsumation of the individual in a Hegelian ‘humanity’) must be tempered with an understanding of his underlying epistemology. For K, faith is ‘absurd’ b/c of the limits of rationality-
“The eternal essential truth is by no means in itself a paradox; but it becomes paradoxical by virtue of its relationship to an existing individual…”
“Christianity exists before any Christian exists . . . it maintains its objective subsistence apart from all believers.”
Thus, for K, existence and thought, ontology and epistemology are two spheres that have difficulty overlapping. (Again, in contrast to the idealism of Hegel.) The problem becomes how thought can approach existence. If thought is abstraction from subjective experience, then approaching or apprehending any existence, let alone that of God, is impossible. Therefore, the ‘absurdity’ lies in the epistemology. Thus, to have faith becomes ‘absurd’ precisely b/c it attempts to apprehend something that cannot be abstracted from lived experience.
However, even K seems to think there is some level of ‘non-absurdity’ to faith…for example:
“So the believing Christian not only possesses but also uses his understanding . . . to make sure he believes against the understanding. Nonsense therefore he cannot believe against the understanding, for precisely the understanding will discern that it is nonsense and will prevent him from believing it . . . .”
Here K has erected a rational defense against the question-begging of his ‘absurdity’ argument. It seems he falls pretty much in line, for the most part, with Augustine’s ‘faith seeking understanding.’
I am inclined to agree with your analysis of the relationship between ‘fact’ and faith. I would probably only take a different take on it. ‘Fact’, subsequent to modernity and empiricism, has come to mean ‘datum with the capacity to be falsified viz-a-viz an empirical method.’ The difficulty I find with reducing reality to that which can be empirically falsified- that which is deemed ‘factual’- is that any attempt to posit realities apart from such a conceptual matrix are doomed to failure. That, imo, is the biggest failing of movements such as intelligent design or other apologetic approaches that take an empirical tack- by beginning within such a conceptual framework, one has already conceded the argument. Thus, the entire project is doomed before it has even begun. If one accepts the reductionism of empiricism and modern philosophy, there seems to be little hope to find a place for faith within it.
I think part of an integrated Christian approach to the world and faith is going to need to dispense with the baggage of empiricism (at least in its reductionistic manifestation) as our guide to reality. I think we need to seriously critique the way in which we as moderns approach reality, and that needs to start with Christians, who, in many ways, have subscribed to the same epistemological approaches. In that way, the ways in which faith can approach science, history, and other ‘facts’ can be more meaningful and integrated, as faith is surely, in the final analysis, supposed to be.
August 13th, 2010 at 10:43 am
Pretty much what I was trying to get at, Watson, although your version is much more eloquently stated. I don’t think there are a lot of intelligent Christians–K included–that would say that faith doesn’t need to make sense; however, applying an empirical approach to faith is like using math proofs to study literature: they can answer the what, but not the why.