FAITH AND SCEPTICAL INQUIRY


June 15th 1999


The next issue, Number 37, will appear on July15th 1999.





It is often said, or vaguely suggested, that these two thought-procedures, Faith and Sceptical Inquiry, are incompatible and that therefore we have somehow to choose between them.

The anti-science faction - whose members are generally rather prosperous persons enjoying the fruits of science-based technology of various sorts - are inclined to the view that 'progress' should stop where we're at - or rather where they're at - and that society is going to the materialist dogs if we do not regain an attitude (which they describe as faith) which, allegedly prevailed in an ill-defined golden age conveniently beyond the range of living memory. The anti-science faction loves unsolvable problems; the more or less fanciful non-solutions to these 'ultimate problems' provide much self-indulgent diversion to those with a yen for inscrutable wisdom.

The anti-faith faction - whose members are generally rather prosperous persons enjoying the fruits of science-based technology of various sorts - are inclined to the view that 'progress' (based upon sceptical inquiry into the way the world actually works) should not be stopped and indeed they embrace a deeply held faith that it cannot be stopped and they entertain the accompanying hope that its benefits will accrue relentlessly. All problems, they allow us to suppose, have solutions and indeed if a problem cannot be solved it is not a genuine problem at all. The notions that solutions often generate problems and that some problems are real but, to us at least, unsolvable ..... is heresy to the faithful adherents to the cult of progress.

The thrust of this thought is that Faith and Sceptical Inquiry, properly understood, are two sides of the same coin. The faithful have to be sceptical; the scepetics cannot do without faith.



Most of the world's people adhere uncritically - often in a flagrantly opportunist way - to some faith or other to which they have been habituated by their parents, teachers and priests. Unless they are totally ignorant that faiths other than their own are held by other people and unless they are unaware that it is possible, desirable even, for people of differing faiths to abstain from hating one another on principle .... unless these two conditions are met, the faithful cannot shirk the need to question their own faith and to wonder whether a different one might make more sense. In short, it is only the ignorant or bigoted faithful who are able easily to eschew scepticism - to eschew the practice of questioning alleged truth-claims to see if those claims hold up. The intelligent and fair-minded adherents to a faith require to practise sceptical thought ; their faith is that which survives all their honest attempts to question it.

Once you begin to question received doctrine there is, logically, no end to the process. You are left with the residual need to assume only those things that make possible the practical conduct of daily life; these assumptions have to include the notions that we live in a material world of objective realities which are to a sufficient extent accessible to our thought processes, via our senses, and that the sense-data, thus acquired, can be processed logically to enable us, sufficiently, to get on with the business of living as members of the more or less sustainable species that we are.

These assumptions cannot be proved to be true but practically we accept them, on faith, because to do otherwise would make a nonsense of daily life. The humanist faith is that we have what it takes, individually and collectively, to live satisfactory human lives. Whether we believe that we have what it takes because a creator has made us that way ..... or whether we think we having what it takes is a result of the hypothetical circumstance that not having what it takes would have eliminated us by the well-known process of natural selection ....... or whether we think that natural selection is the creator's chosen way of doing things ....whatever we think about such supposedly important questions, it is up to us to get on with life as best we may. God, if any, helps those who help themselves and, in so far as we are inescapably a social species, helping ourselves entails helping one another.

'God' is a superfluous idea but a useful one ....... to people who construct compelling, but rival, fantasies on the subject of 'god'; such fantasy-makers are potentially cantankerous power maniacs whose activities should be scrutinised with sufficient care - with a sufficient faith that scepticism will keep such people in check.





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