FIDES ET RATIO: Last night I read Diana Hsieh’s essays/lectures “The Philosophical Underpinnings of Capitalism” and “Why Be an Atheist?“. I’ll get to the capitalism one in a moment; for now I just want to address the atheism one. Hsieh is a good, clear, fluent writer, and I found many of her analogies both helpful and entertaining.

As far as convincing me of stuff, the lecture didn’t do much, simply because the arguments she presents for belief in God are arguments I don’t believe anyway (first cause argument–why can’t the universe be the uncaused thing?), arguments I don’t even pretend to understand (argument from order, which she calls the argument from design but which I think would be more familiar to Catholics under the other name), and arguments that aren’t arguments (“I had a personal experience of Jesus’s presence”).

I don’t know that there are “knockdown” arguments for God’s existence. I do think that a) reason can point out extraordinarily difficult choices, cf. the “Dostoyevsky meets Plato in the Richard Rorty Bar & Grill” stuff I do here (in case you’re wondering, yes, that is the SAME LINK that you have seen a million times if you read this blog a lot), and b) theistic, specifically Jewish or Christian, and Christian most of all, explanations of the world better fit our experience of things like wrongdoing, love, and beauty than atheistic explanations. So basically, Hsieh’s lecture simply didn’t touch on the philosophical paths that led me to pray, to ask with an open heart and mind whether God could be found (while trying not to indulge in wishful thinking, trying not to “have an experience of God’s presence” simply because it would be interesting!), to “ask, seek, and knock.” That’s not her fault, of course! It’s just the reason that engaging her actual arguments isn’t super-exciting for me. If my scarily scientifically-minded Catholic friends want to take her up on the argument from order, y’all can be my guests, but it’s really not a subject I feel qualified to treat confidently. Oh, and Occam’s Razor is a lot more complicated than she makes it sound, to the point of not being super helpful in this discussion, but whatever, that’s not something I want to blog about just at the moment. Maybe I’ll get into my problems with common uses of the razor later.

The one thing I did want to write about (after all that, now we finally approach the point of this post!) is a casual phrase toward the end of the lecture. Hsieh says, “Since people claim to know that God exists and that Jesus loves them for other irrational reasons (like faith)…” and in the margin I have written ARGH!

Rereading the paragraph, I’m honestly unsure what Hsieh means by “faith” here, so let me set out a few thoughts on faith and the non-rational. Faith, at least for Christians, does not mean “believing stuff at random.” The proper understanding of the faith/reason relationship is one I should hold off on until I’ve reread Fides et Ratio, but first let’s clear away some underbrush.

There are good but non-rational reasons for believing things. (I take “irrational” to mean “anti-rational, contrary to reason,” and “non-rational” to mean “not using the processes of syllogistic reasoning but not contrary to such reasoning.”) “Non-rational reasons” may sound like an oxymoron, but let’s take a look at one important example: aesthetic judgments. What process of syllogistic reasoning can lead us to conclude that Hamlet is a greater work of art than The Long Goodbye, or that Goodbye is nonetheless a terrific book? Beauty and sublimity are encounters, not conclusions of philosophic reasoning (although the conclusions we draw from reasoning may make it easier or harder for us to see or accept beauty or sublimity in certain places–for example, I’m not sure I could have found El Greco’s “Saint Sebastian” sublime rather than horrible before my conversion; I was very anti-depictions of Saint Sebastian in general).

So I think it might help clarify matters if, when we talk about “faith,” we cash out a little more clearly what the term means. Loving trust in someone’s promises–for example, God’s promises? (That’s a fairly standard Christian definition of one kind of faith.) Non-rational beliefs that nonetheless can be discussed, justified, or convincingly described? Everything that isn’t based on evidence of the senses + axioms of logic (“A is A”)? Random belief in whatever toxin happens to be flowing through the culture-stream? Many Objectivists write as if Christians themselves believe that faith is basically irrational rather than nonrational, leading the Objectivists to assume that faith is necessarily either random or a capitulation to an evil cultural trend. Cashing out the meaning of “faith” may be helpful for Objectivists who want to talk to Christians and other theists rather than simply about them. (I do realize that Hsieh’s speech was given to an Objectivist group, thus it wasn’t necessarily intended to speak to theists as well as about them; nonetheless I suspect that even essays directed toward explanation rather than persuasion will explain better if they take into account the self-understandings of the people being explained.)