Topics Religion

Question I've been giving a lot of thought lately to a line out of Woody Allen's most recent movie, "Match Point," in which the lead character opines that "...faith is the path of least resistance..." My tentative conclusion is that this may be true for what I call "megachurch faith," but perhaps not for thinkers like St. Augustine or Maimonides who struggled in their faith. What do your philosophers think about this proposition?

Accepted:
February 28, 2006

Comments

I agree with you. We may be inclined to believe something, even though we don't have sufficient evidence for it. If we follow our inclinations, we might describe this as an act of faith and also as following the path of least resistance. But sometimes people feel that they ought to have a certain belief they are not inclined to have. We might say that they are stuggling to acquire faith, and this may be a path of great resistance.

I should add that don't myself find either of these paths very attractive. What attracts me is the idea of tailoring one's beliefs according to the strength of the evidence. But this must be understood in a way that is compatible with the fact that the great bulk of what we believe we believe not because we saw it or worked it out for ourselves, but because someone else told us. There is a sense in which all those beliefs based on testimony are acts of faith, though this faith need not be wholly uncritical.