Topics Religion

Question Is there a common human need for faith? If so, what alternatives are there to religion? Science? Ethics? Hugely interested by this aspect of human nature. Do we basically all need to believe in something & belong to something, however discerning and self-sufficient we may pride ourselves on being? Thank you.

Accepted:
November 17, 2007

Comments

My first thought in response is that you ar raising an empirical question about human psychology that philosophers aren't in a very good position to answer. It is very hard to tell what is true of human psychology, in general, without looking at lots of different humans in different circumstances, etc. (Of course we do generalize about some aspects of human psychology from our own case all the time...the particular question you ask seems tricky to answer because it isn't exactly clear what sort of need you have in mind. We don't need faith like we need air and water, surely, i.e., we can live without it. Is the question whether it is necessary for something other than life itself?)

A related question might be whether it is possible (or desirable) to live with only well-justified beliefs, or whether sometimes we have no choice but to believe things without sufficient evidence. There are (at least) two kinds of case: (i) we might believe things for which it is possible, in principle, to gain sufficient evidence (we just lack the evidence), and (ii) we might believe things for which it is never possible, even in principle, to gain sufficient evidence. Some philosophers have thought that science differs from religion in that religion, but not science, asks us to have the second sort of belief. On this view, faith in God, for example, requires a step beyond the faith that with hard work we will one day discover, say, whether there is life in a distant solar system.

I think it is pretty clear that we have to rely on beliefs that are not fully justified in order to get around in life, e.g., we have beliefs (or something like belief) about the future, for example, and act now based on them. But many of those beliefs are not fully justified. This isn't faith of the ordinary sort though.

William James was interested in unjustified beliefs that were such that holding them helped make them true, or helped us gain evidence of their truth. So my belief that you will find this answer helpful, although unjustified, gets me to write it in a comprehensible way that makes it more likely that you will find it helpful. And my belief that a stranger is kindly disposed towards me will make it more likely that I will talk to the stranger to learn whether he or she is. He thought that having such beliefs was not only pragmatically justified, but in a sense epistemically justified. It would be wrong, he thought, to cut ourselves off from sources of evidence by refusing to believe what we currently lacked evidence for. One way of putting his point would be to say that in order to be a good knower, you have to have faith (sometimes). But this still would only get us faith of the first sort, i.e., faith in things that it is in principle possible to have evidence for. Interestingly, James considered faith in God of this sort too: belief in God positions us to gain evidence, if there is any, for God's existence.

So is it possible (or desirable) to live without faith? I think we cannot live without having some unjustified beliefs, and that we sometimes need to (should?) take a risk in believing things we don't have evidence for. I don't think we need to hold beliefs that could never be justified even in principle, though again, it would be helpful to think more about what sort of need is at issue.