Are belief and faith the same?

I've had the dubious pleasure of reading, for a paper I'm working on, Sam Harris' The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I read the section on belief, where belief means assenting to a proposition that is either true or false about the world (e.g., 'the billiard ball is green.'). In this very simple conception of belief, the world is self-evident. It is just there, and all we need to do is match up our statements with the world. What we can verify through our senses (this includes scientific observation) is what is true. Hence, Harris argues, "religious faith is simply unjustified belief" (where "unjustified" means "lack of evidence").

He has a couple of pages on the possibility that "faith" and "belief" are not the same - and quickly rejects it, because he says, "I am criticizing faith in its ordinary, scriptural sense - as belief in, and life orientation toward, certain historical and metaphysical propositions." He then goes on to talk about Paul Tillich, who is one (among many) theologian who argued that faith and belief are not the same. Harris concludes that most religious people do not have this opinion, and thus his book is aimed at "the majority of the faithful in every religious tradition, not at Tillich's blameless parish of one."

Harris might be surprise to learn that belief (in his sense) and faith are not traditionally considered to be the same. In fact, there has been a lot of Christian ink spilled over the person who believes, but has no faith. The passage he cites in Hebrews (11:1, 'faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen') is case in point. There, the faith of various people (Abel, Abraham, Moses, etc) is extolled as examples for the nascent Christian community. The interesting thing is that all this faith took place around hardships and hope: hardships that seemed insurmountable (like the Isrealites being freed from Egypt), and with a promise from God that seemed a bit incredible. In each of these contexts, 'faith' is clearly seen as trust (which in general is a better translation for the Greek word pisteuein, since the Greeks did not have a discourse on "belief" the way Harris thinks).

Now, Harris' reductio ad absurdum - reduction to absurdity - against this passage is quite amiss. His example of how this Hebrews passage would work is that he has a 'conviction' that Nicole Kidman is in love with him, and since they never meet, his feelings are just an example of her infatuation with him. Thus he sets himself up outside her house, and waits for her.

That this is a rhetorical device to counter any notion of faith outside his narrow definition of belief - which he then imputes on most Christians, by the way, without a piece of evidence (which he couldn't, since he's not too well read in the Christian tradition). Yet for most people, they don't go around thinking about proposition like 'I should believe in God, because only then will I have eternal life.' The question is rather: 'I'm nervous about death. What is the point of my life if it all ends up there? Is there something in this religious message that assures me?'

These are questions, as theologians say, of "ultimate concern" - a phrase Harris uses without the least understanding of what it means. He merely says faith is just unjustified belief in terms of these concerns. Now, evolutionary biology or science has absolutely nothing to say about death, since no one every actually experiences death. There is no observation from an "insider's" perspective. Scientists would say, well this is what happens to the organism when it dies, but saying such an 'objective' fact does not deal with the possibility for an actual person. In other words, the 'ultimate concern' is not even answered by scientists - who would, most likely, say it's just not a scientific question. Yet would this then mean people would stop asking it? Clearly not. Ultimate concerns are just compelling for most people.

Now, if faith is aimed at ultimate concerns, then it is clear the issue is less a propositional one, but rather a orientation issue. This is so because every person deals with plenty of doubt in their faith (doubt is one thing Harris seems to utterly forget). In fact, doubt is one of the most normal things in faith, and some of the greatest mystics and saints have a lot to say on the topic. Faith includes doubt, because faith is an way of being, rather than a way of thinking. In fact, there is a large literature in Christianity about the problem of lack of doubt in faith, because this lack of doubt often indicates unjustified belief. Augustine, for example, thought that one very important part of faith was examining yourself, in order not to be deceived by yourself. Nietzsche was clear about this too: his main argument against Christianity was that it deceives itself, and Kierkegaard's railing against his fellow Christians normally took the form of denouncing their self-deception about the assurance of salvation.


Harris seems to have no recognition that this is even a conversation in Christianity. I personally think that Nietzsche would have just as much of a problem with Harris as he had with Christianity: Harris thinks that somehow science can provide him with everything he needs in life, but he's not cognizant of his own motives concerning science (see my blog post below, "The New Priests."). His positivistic outlook blinds him to his own cultural assumptions, and his own desire for power (as Nietzsche would put it). Thus he, along with Dawkins and Hitchens, for example, can dismiss large parts of Christian thought that just "isn't Christian enough" (like Tillich here, or Hitchens absurd argument that Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer weren't really Christians, or Dawkins' absurd argument that Ghandi wasn't really religious).

Finally, I should point out that Harris, along with Dawkins and Hitchens, have an almost fundamentalist view of the Bible, precisely because they all see belief as a bunch of "propositions." Thus the treat the bible as if it were scientific evidence. I should point out that this view of the bible originated in the late 19th, early 20th century, by Christians who felt threatened by science. There are not all that many Christians who hold this view anymore, despite the press that fundamentalists get now. Thus Harris can say something this stupid: "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." Like a good fundamentalist, Harris here views the bible as utterly eternal, not affected by the historical epochs it is read it, a uninterpreted "fact" that we can see as evidence for religion's barbarity. But this is a laughable position. Religion is not the book itself, but the people who interpret and use the book. These people are eminently time-bound, people with limited view, and absolutely no handle one what the bible "meant" when it was written. We have no access to the "original" meaning of the words, and so those Muslim clerics who have lost a taste for amputations are merely mirroring their historical time period; those Christians how haven't read through their bible (which, by the way, most Christians didn't even read the bible until the reformation) are pretty much on par for Christians; those gay and lesbian ministers are trying to maintain their faith in the promise of God, but also want to be themselves. Harris calls these "heterodox," but Harris seems to have no clue that the Bible is merely a testimony; the people of God is the subject of religion.

To conclude this rather long post, one might say that Harris is making a typical modern mistake. He conflates "justification" with "proof." Now, these are not the same: justification deals with arguments about things that are quite uncertain, while proof deals with things that are pretty much certain. Thus the ideal proof is a geometrical proof: with one proposition, we can get many really good results. There are varying degrees of this in scientific discourse, and that this goes from the "hard sciences" to the "soft sciences". However, matters of ultimate concern are completely uncertain, and thus these can be justified, even if not proved.