Eva the Believer
A rational treatment of Christianity has to deal with a complicated issue not faced in the study of Buddhism, the question of faith in God. Both “faith” and “God” are notoriously difficult to deal with in a rational fashion. I want to introduce my discussion with a fictional story.
Here is a fictional person — let’s call her Eva-the-Believer. Eva is a concrete-minded person, who tends to identify “reality” with visible events in the material and social world surrounding her. Everything really real must either be part of this world, or at least something like objects and events in this world.
Eva knows in her heart that it is good and important to be honest, fair, and kind. But she also sees that people who are honest, fair, and kind, often suffer failure in this life, while dishonest and malicious people succeed. This causes conflict and doubt in her mind, making her doubt that her feeling about the importance of moral goodness has any basis in anything really real. She also feels that her intuitive perceptions of what is morally good and not good are too subjective and personal. She is aware that different people have different perceptions of moral goodness, and there are many specific cases where she herself is uncertain about what is the right thing to do.
The kind of Socratic reasoning developed in other essays could possibly support Eva’s belief in the importance of fairness and kindness is well-founded, helping her address problems concerning the diversity of moral perceptions and uncertainty in the case of moral dilemmas. She could resolve these doubts concerning subjectivity and diversity, and also doubts caused by the fact that goodness does not prevail in the real world, by becoming a Platonist philosopher, able to form and devote herself to idealized abstract virtue-concepts separate from imperfect concrete reality. But like most people, concrete-minded Eva finds abstract thinking very difficult, and finds it even more difficult to actually feel that abstract Platonic Forms are as real as the material world.
This is why Eva feels it to be morally necessary to believe in the idea of a God who rewards goodness and punishes badness in an afterlife. Essentially what this belief does is concretize her personal feeling of the importance of being honest, kind, and fair, supporting her intuitive sense of their importance by clothing this intuitive but subjective feeling in apparently concrete and objective form.
For psychological reasons, it becomes morally essential to Eva to assert the truth of afterlife rewards. It is morally essential in the sense that denying it would make her feel that being morally good is not really important. When facing difficulties, she would be more likely to lie and steal from her neighbors, if she did not believe in the concrete reality of God and rewards/punishments in the afterlife.
However, this motivation is only half-conscious, manifest only in the feeling that somehow ceasing to believe in afterlife rewards would make her less admirable on a moral level — her strong feeling that faith is a “virtue,” and not having faith would make her less virtuous. If asked about her own conscious thought concerning what motivates her to be good to others instead, Eva tells them it is because she is afraid of God’s punishments in the next life, and wants to be one of those whom God rewards in heaven instead. This makes it mistakenly appear that Eva is just a selfish person who will only be morally good if she thinks she will be rewarded for it. It mistakenly appears that being good is only a means she is using to get some rewards and advantages for herself in the afterlife.
But this account of her faith is mistaken. It traces her desire to be good back to her faith in afterlife rewards, but fails to ask what motivates this faith itself, the real reason why Eva believes what she believes. In my story, a genuine perception of the reality of goodness, and concern for being good is the ultimate reason why she believes in the existence of these rewards. This is not really the free-standing belief it appears to be. Eva’s conscious thought “God will reward me for being good,” is an indirect way of asserting Eva’s well-founded feeling about the importance of moral goodness. This genuine concern for goodness stands on its own, and it is the basis for her belief in afterlife rewards, which just serve to clothe this genuine and well-founded concern in concrete imagery.
As a very rough analogy, consider Boris, who sets the clock in his car five minutes fast in order to better motivate him to get to his appointments on time. Once the clock is set this way, the fast clock is what consciously motivates him to go faster to get to his appointments. But of course the clock is not ultimately independent of Boris, serving as an external source of motivation. Ultimately, Boris himself is responsible for the clock being five minutes fast, so ultimately it is Boris’s own internal desire to be on time that makes the clock show the time to be later than it is. Of course if, unknown to Boris, someone else sets Boris’ clock five minutes fast, then Boris is being manipulated by this other external person.
In the same way, it might at first appear that afterlife rewards serve for Eva as an external motivating factor, appealing to her selfish non-moral desire for rewards. If someone else managed to impose this belief on Eva completely from the outside, then it would be true that this other person is manipulating Eva from the outside, drawing both on her gullibility and her self-centeredness. But this is not the case in my present store. In this story, ultimately Eva herself is responsible for the image of afterlife rewards being present and important in her worldview, and what motivates her in making and keeping this an important part of her worldview is her perception of the importance of moral goodness.
The following diagram will help make this important point clear:
(B) What Eva believes
(A) Why Eva believes (B) (C) Practical Consequences of Eva's believing (B)- (B) represents the literal surface content of Eva’s belief, apparent facts about God and rewards in the afterlife.
- (C) represents the consequences connected with believing (B), in this case, Eva’s attitude that it is important to be honest, fair, and kind.
In my account, (A) is the implicit underlying basis for (C). That is, Eva’s intuitive perception of the reality and importance of moral goodness (A) is the implicit ultimate motivating basis for her desire to be fair, honest, and kind (C).
(A) is also the underlying motivational basis for (B). Her intuitive perception that it is really important to be good is what makes the image of God and afterlife rewards feel right to her, and makes her feel it is right and necessary to believe in (B).
A complete analysis would reveal that asserting and committing herself to this belief (B) is really an indirect way of remaining committed to her belief in her intuitive perception of the importance of being good (A). (B) is not an independent basis (as Eva tends to think, on a conscious level), but really just an indirect way of getting her from (A) to ©.
This diagram explains what I will call the “implicit structure” of Eva’s faith. By the “structure of faith” I mean what is based on what. It might appear that (C) is based on (B) — Eva consciously thinks and says she wants to be good because she wants afterlife rewards. But actually, both (C) and (B) are based on (A). I say this is the “implicit structure” of Eva’s faith, because Eva is not explicitly and consciously aware of (A). What she thinks consciously and explicitly is that she wants to be good because she wants to go to heaven after she dies. She also feels it is right and important to believe in God, heaven, and hell, but she is not explicitly conscious of what makes her feel that this is important.
Not only is Eva unaware of what motivates her faith, she would reject the present account if it were presented to her. That is, what makes belief in afterlife rewards seem morally necessary to Eva in the first place is her concrete mindedness, her deeply ingrained assumption that only very concrete facts deserve to be taken seriously. From this concrete-minded perspective, my account seems to deprive moral goodness of any really real and objective foundation, because it traces everything back to personal and “subjective” perceptions, and conceives of moral goodness in a way that is too abstract and too divorced from anything tangible and concrete.
This problem of subjectivity and abstractness is the very problem that belief in concrete afterlife benefits resolved in her mind, so she will naturally resist the idea that her belief in concretely real afterlife benefits is based on something that feels to her less real, something subjective and abstract like personal perceptions of what is good and not good.
This part of Eva’s story is my account of why so many believers are so attracted to the view that faith has no basis that can be rationally analyzed and evaluated. Eva instinctively knows that it is important and essential for her to insist that God and afterlife rewards are concretely real. She isn’t fully conscious of what really underlies this instinctive feeling, and (for reasons just given) reflecting on this would actually undermine her commitment to being honest, kind and fair. So, if asked, she will simply say that she knows “by faith” that God will reward good people in an afterlife. And if pressed she will say that there is no further reason why she believes this. She just knows (rightly) that her faith is admirable and that she is right in believing what she believes. Even though my intention here is to defend and support Eva’s faith, the analysis underlying this defense is something Eva herself can only feel as undermining her faith rather than supporting and defending it.
Ironically, I have to say that there is some justification for Eva’s rejection of the analysis of her faith, even though it is actually a true account. Ultimately, it is more important to be morally good than it is to reason well, and if accepting this account would undermine her moral motivations, I have to recommend that she reject it.
Rejecting it will however cause some unresolvable problems for Eva, especially if she does try to reason about her faith. That is, Eva will tend to think that faith is actually a special way of knowing some objective facts about God and heaven not dependent on any objective evidence. And she will think that her desire to be good is “based on” these facts about God and heaven. Her own analysis of her faith can then be diagramed:
(B) Belief in God and heaven
(C) Desire to be goodNote the missing (A) in this diagram. Because Eva is not conscious of (A), in her mind her belief in God and heaven (B) hangs in the air without any basis. But she nonetheless thinks that she knows that her picture of God and heaven are accurate representations of objective facts, real in the same way as the tables and chairs in her kitchen are real. She will say to herself and to others that her desire to be good (C) is based on these facts.
This (mistaken) analysis of her faith will cause problems if Eva ever does try to reason about her faith.
First, since she thinks that her moral motivation is based on objective facts about God and heaven, she will take these facts as the focus of critical reason, trying to find “proofs of God’s existence,” proofs of the soul’s existence after death, etc. Failure to find convincing proofs will weaken her commitment to fairness and kindness.
A second set of problems might arise if Eva’s reasoning takes the form of a search for consistency in her beliefs about God. That is, suppose she takes her image of God as an accurate representation of objective facts about a real person-like entity having motives and plans that can be understood in the same way she understand the motives and plans of her friends. Then she might begin asking questions like: If God wants people to be good, why did He create life on earth in a way that makes this so difficult? She will begin trying to elaborate on her ideas of God in such a way as to create a consistent picture of Him as a person with consistent and understandable reasons for the way He operates.
A final set of problems might arise if Eva regards her beliefs about God as universal truths. Objective facts about the sun and moon are true for everyone, so she thinks that if she truly knows objective facts about God and heaven, these facts must also be be true for everyone. Eva will regard atheists as people clearly mistaken about important objective facts concerning what happens after death, just as people who think the moon is made of green cheese are mistaken about objective facts concerning the moon.
Because of these problems, on my view it is better if Eva sticks to her view that “you can’t reason about faith” creating a separate mental space for faith separate from her ordinary way of understanding the rest of reality.
This doesn’t mean that it is actually impossible to reason about Eva’s faith. It’s just that reasoning about her faith requires a different analysis of the underlying structure of her faith.
(B) God and heaven
(A) Perceptions of moral goodness (C) Commitment to being kind, etc.(C) has a good basis insofar as it is based on (A).
(B) is not an independent basis for (C), but only a means of getting from (A) to (C), necessary because of Eva’s concrete-mindedness. (B) is a good belief only insofar as it concretizes (A) and supports ©.
(A) is not a basis for actually knowing any objective facts about an objectively existing God and heaven (B). “Faith” is not a way of actually knowing any objective facts.
Since (A) is the ultimate basis for everything, Eva’s thinking about (B) is well-founded so long as ultimately it only helps her get from (A) to (C) — helping her trust in her subjective and abstract perceptions so as to strengthen her commitment to be honest, kind, and fair.
Eva goes astray when she mistakenly thinks that faith is a way of knowing objective facts, and so begins developing thoughts about God and heaven not restricted to its practical function in supporting her commitment to moral goodness. Assigning any importance to “proofs for the existence of God,” is mistaken because her attitude toward moral goodness is not really based on the objective existence of God. Trying to work out a consistent picture of God’s thinking is also a mistake because it mistakenly assumes that the picture of God associated with faith is supposed to be an accurate representation of objective facts concerning a person-like entity and of this persons’ thinking. Eva is on solid ground so long as her faith only serves to support her own moral perceptions and convictions ((B) serves as a means to get from (A) to (C)). She goes astray if she starts trying to draw other conclusions especially about other people, such as the conclusion that atheists are mistaken about some objective facts.
Eva is not the only person who will tend to misconstrue the underlying structure of her faith. Selma the scientist has been trained in a kind of reasoning focused on objective facts, so naturally when she applies “reasoning” to Eva’s beliefs, she will naturally focus on the surface content of Eva’s belief, the apparent objective facts about God and heaven that Eva believes in. She will then want to apply “scientific reasoning” to belief in these facts. Selma insists that, since Eva takes her beliefs literally as knowledge of objective facts, it is quite proper to treat this as a claim to know objective facts, so it is quite proper also to ask, as everyone should, whether Eva has the kind of evidence needed to support this belief in objective facts. Examining this case, Selma concludes that there is no objective evidence pointing to the existence of God or of immortality and heaven. She regards Eva as just irrational and mistaken.
Selma and Eva agree in their mistaken analysis of Eva’s faith. Both ignore the question about what actually motivates Eva’s faith, and so mistakenly see Eva’s belief in God and heaven as hanging in the air without any basis. Both see faith as belief-without-reasons. Eva intuitively knows that it is morally necessary and admirable for her to believe in God and heaven, but she cannot given any good account of why this is necessary and admirable. Selma sees that Eva has no objective evidence for the facts about God that she believes in and takes literally, and so she thinks that Eva’s faith-without-reasons marks her as merely an irrational person who is completely mistaken.
I think that Selma has misunderstood Eva, because she sees her as primarily trying to find out some objective facts about God and the afterlife, while ignoring questions about objective evidence necessary to establish objective facts. To really understand Eva, we need to see that what primarily drives her thought has to do with problems about the reliability of her intuitive perceptions of moral goodness and the importance of being good. It’s just that her way of resolving this problem by clothing her intuitive perceptions in concrete supernatural images, might indirectly involve her in some mistakes when she regards faith as a way of actually knowing some objective facts.
Selma’s view of Eva’s faith differs from my view because of our different concepts of what constitutes a “good reason” for faith. Selma is accustomed to the idea that the only good reasons for believing in any particular set of facts is objective evidence about those same facts.
I don’t want to argue that all faith is good faith. My analysis only gives a different account of what constitutes a good reason for faith.
To make this clear, consider a different character, Manuel, a completely self-centered amoral thief leading a luxurious life, who is also however very gullible. Manuel happens on a church where the preacher is telling a large congregation that the larger their contribution to his church, the greater will be their rewards in heaven. Seeing that so many people in this large congregation seem to believe the preacher, gullible Manuel redoubles his thievery and moves to a low-rent district, so that he can contribute larger amounts to this preacher, for the purpose of taking out after-death insurance, insuring himself a pleasant existence in the afterlife.
In this case, the literal surface content of Manuel’s belief is the same as the surface content of Eva’s belief. But what motivates Manuel’s belief in afterlife rewards is a mixture of selfishness and gullibility, clearly not admirable motivations when compared to Eva’s perception of the importance of being fair and honest.
In addition, one can see that, if it turns out that there are no afterlife rewards, Manuel will turn out to have been foolish to give up some material comforts in order to get these rewards. His investment in the afterlife will have been a foolish investment, in the same way that an investment in non-existent real estate in Florida would be a foolish investment. Contrast this with Eva: She will have led an admirable life even if it turns out that there is no God handing out rewards to good people in an afterlife.
All this could be put in terms of a “moral identity” defined in relation to a “worldview.”
“Moral identity” refers to the moral dimension of a person’s self-image and sense of who they are. That is, most individuals not only want to have some definite identity, but want to think of themselves as worthwhile persons leading meaningful and admirable lives. They want to have an identity they can be proud of. Different people pride themselves on different things.
A moral identity needs to be defined in relation to something. What it is defined in relation to is part of a “worldview.” God and heaven are important parts of Eva’s worldview, the context in which she defines who she is as a moral being. Her worldview and her moral identity are so closely connected that she will experience any attack on her worldview as an attack on her identity, just as, say, a devoted Muslim will experience any denigration of Mohammed as an attack on her identity as a Muslim. Defense of one’s faith is often a form of self-defense.
This is the real root of the dilemma of faith vs. reason. Eva mistakenly thinks that the validity of her moral identity is “based on” the actual existence of a person-like entity “God,” in the sense that, if such an entity does not exist, her sense of self is based on an illusion. This then leads to the idea that what must be reasoned about is whether or not “God exists.” This leads to an impasse. Eva knows (rightly) that it is important to define her identity in relation to God. She also knows that reasoning can’t prove God’s existence, so she falls back on the common theme of believers “You can’t reason about faith.” Selma knows that reasoning cannot prove God’s existence, so she concludes that Eva’s moral identity is based on an illusion.
I think this problem can be resolved, it is possible to reason about Eva’s faith without undermining it. The solution I propose is based on the following ideas:
First, there is some reason for Eva’s faith, something that motivates her to believe. Let us call this the “motivational basis” for her faith. What actually motivates Eva’s belief in God and heaven is very different from what motivates Selma’s belief that malaria is carried by mosquitoes. Selma’s belief that malaria is carried by mosquitoes is based on objective scientific research into the facts of the case. Eva’s belief in God and heaven is not based on objective scientific research. She did not first dispassionately examine the evidence for God and heaven, and decide on this basis to begin believing in their existence.
Secondly, something must be true in order for Eva’s faith to be well-founded. Let us call this the “logical basis” for Eva’s faith, the basis for its validity. Reasoning critically about Eva’s faith requires that we formulate some notion about what needs to be true in order for Eva’s faith to be well-founded, and take this as the focus for critical reasoning. I argue that the existence of God as a person-like entity is not the logical basis for Eva’s faith — reasoning about her faith should not mean asking for rational evidence of God’s existence, because her faith can be well-founded whether or not such an entity exists.
Reasoning about Eva’s faith requires making a crucial distinction between its motivational basis and logical basis on the one hand, and what might be called the “conscious existential focus” of her faith. God and heaven form the conscious existential focus of Eva’s faith.
The big mistake most people make is taking the existential focus as also the logical basis — since the conscious focus of Eva’s faith is God and heaven, people mistakenly think the existence of God and heaven is what must be true in order for Eva’s faith to be well-founded.
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