Tania Lombrozo, a Templeton-funded associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been writing on the cosmos & culture science website for National Public Radio. Yesterday I discussed what I saw as her gratuitous call for “respectful dialogue” between believers and nonbelievers, which seemed to me an effort to buttress religion’s undeserved privilege in public discourse. Soon thereafter—about a week ago—Lombrozo followed up with another post, “Can faith ever be rational?” Her answer, of course, is “yes.”

To those of us who think of “rational” as “something based on reason and logic,” and “faith” (I use Walter Kaufmann’s definition) as “intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person,” this seems strange. How can it be rational to have a confident belief in something without supporting evidence?

Well, it all depends on a semantic trick: redefining “faith” and “rationality” in a way that makes them compatible. Sounds like Steve Gould’s NOMA gambit, doesn’t it?

Lombrozo reached her faith-friendly conclusion after reading some philosophy. As she notes:

To help me think about these weighty matters, I decided to read two recent papers (one already published, with a more accessible version forthcoming) by Berkeley philosophy professor Lara Buchak.

I’ve read both (free at Lombrozo’s links), but will take Buchak’s quotes from the one cited at the bottom of this post. Here’s Buchak’s definition of “faith”

By ‘faith statements’ I simply mean statements involving the term ‘faith’. The following are representative

I have faith in your abilities.
He has faith that his spouse won’t cheat on him.
I have faith in you.
He has faith that you won’t reveal his secret.
She acted on faith.
She has faith that her car will start.
It was an act of faith.
I have faith that God exists.
I have faith in God’s goodness.
I have faith in God.

Note that this conflates the notion of faith as “evidence-based confidence” with the “belief in the absence of much evidence” definition of Kaufmann.  Buchak then says that “faith” involves taking an action initially motivated by some empirically-supported belief—but not a belief held with 100% certainty.  Faith means taking such an action without looking for further evidence that could provide more certainty.

Then Buchak distinguishes between two types of rationality: “epistemic” rationality, which involves “[proportioning] one’s beliefs to one’s evidence.” and “practical” rationality, which involves “selecting the means to achieve one’s ends.” (I’m simplifying things a bit here, but not in a way that seems to distort her argument.)

Given that, then of course it can be practically rational to have faith. If you have a certain end beyond just a stronger knowledge of the truth (say, more money, a better relationship, etc.), then you can act based on what you know—provided, of course, that you are initially acting based on a fairly strong degree of evidence. It would be rational, then, to act without getting more evidence if  “available evidence is such that no potential piece of evidence [yet unfound] would tell conclusively enough against it.” (I’m still quoting Buchak here.)

Buchak uses an example of a marriage in which one partner is contemplating adultery.  He would do so if he found out his spouse was cheating, but there is no evidence to suggest that; the evidence is that she is faithful. It would be rational, then, to not continue to look for evidence for the wife’s adultery, because by so doing you could just make the relationship worse—something that isn’t in your interest.  In other words, in this situation, says Buchak, it’s rational to have faith in your wife’s fidelity. There are costs of further investigation, including the time lost when you could have achieved your end.

So faith can be rational.  But this isn’t something new, for of course scientists act the same way so long as you use “faith” in the scientific sense of “confidence based on evidence.” We never have 100% certainty, but when we take actions based on evidence, like launching a Mars rover, we have enough confidence in our results that we consider it rational to launch the rocket. We could keep testing the systems over and over again, but one reaches a point of diminishing returns.

Too, we could always look for more evidence for the hexagonal nature of benzene, as we’re not 100% certain it has that shape; but one reaches a point where it’s “rational” to act as if we know the shape with sufficient confidence to achieve our chemical ends. Further investigation will never give us 100% certainty in the scientific sense.

So if you define “faith” as “confidence based on evidence”, which is its vernacular meaning in science, then yes, it can be rational for even scientists to have faith.

But that’s not what Lombrozo’s piece is about, of course. In the end it’s about whether it can be rational to have faith in God. One would think that this wouldn’t wash, because to believe in God in the first place you require fairly strong evidence (that’s part of Buchak’s definition of “faith”), and there simply isn’t that kind of evidence.  Buchak says otherwise:

[William] James argued that when a decision about what to believe is momentous—in that it involves a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, for example—then it must be made by the will, and that postponing the decision is a decision in itself. He used this observation to argue that it is rationally permissible to choose to believe in God even when one does not have conclusive evidence for God’s existence. I don’t think that it is rationally permissible to believe that God exists when one does not have conclusive evidence, if this means setting one’s credences differently from what one has evidence for (though I’m not saying that this is what James is suggesting). However, I do think that it is sometimes rationally permissible (and indeed, sometimes rationally required!) to have faith in God—as evidenced by doing some particular religious act without looking for further evidence—in circumstances in which postponing the decision to act is costly, provided one has the appropriate credences, and provided these are the correct credences to have given one’s evidence.

This is where Buchak’s argument goes wonky. How can one have faith in God without believing in God? That implies that you take an action normally predicated on fairly strong evidence—”appropriate credences” is the euphemism here—that God exists, without having such evidence. That contravene’s Buchak’s notion of faith, which initially requires pretty strong evidence.  Second, postponing belief in God is not costly unless you think you’re going to die and are desperately making a Pascal’s Wager.  Maybe I’m missing something in Buchak’s argument, but it doesn’t sound to me, based on her own definition of faith, that it is “sometimes permissible (and rationally required!)” to have faith in God. Indeed, the argument above contradicts Buchak’s own claim at the end of her paper:

We have seen that whether faith that X, expressed by A, is rational depends on two important factors: (1) whether one has a high enough (rational) credence in X, and (2) the character of the available evidence. Specifically, faith in X is rational only if the available evidence is such that no potential piece of evidence would tell conclusively enough against X. . . So, in a rough-and-ready way, we might say that faith that X (expressed by some particular act A) is practically rational to the extent that the individual’s degree of belief in X is already based on a large body of evidence.

. . . Individuals who lack faith because they insist on gathering all of the available evidence before making a decision stand to miss out on opportunities that could greatly benefit them.

It would be rationally permissible to believe in God, then, only if you have enough evidence for a deity that no further evidence (rationally considered) would change your actions predicated on that belief.  And that’s not the way religion works. One doesn’t require strong empirical evidence to believe, nor does one contemplate what evidence would erase your faith.

I find myself criticizing Buchak more than Lombrozo here, but Lombrozo’s piece is largely a regurgitation in popular language of what Buchak says, and Lombrozo’s piece will certainly have far wider circulation than Buchak’s two articles that were published in anthologies of religious philosophy.

But Lombrozo certainly assents to Buchak’s conclusions. She first gives a nod to atheists (without apparently realizing that their arguments are absolutely decisive in this case) and then reproduces some correspondence she got from Buchak (in italics) that seems to give religious people permission to claim that their faith is rational:

Of course, it doesn’t follow from these arguments that religious faith – in general – is rational. Skeptics could argue that the condition of having strong evidence to begin with simply won’t obtain when it comes to having faith in God, and New Atheists might argue that actions based on faith can themselves be costly to oneself and to others, challenging the idea that they’ll ever yield greater expected utility.

Nonetheless, Buchak’s paper suggests that under some conditions, faith can be rational, and sets the stage for a more sophisticated conversation about faith for theists and atheists alike. In our own conversation, Buchak shared the following reflections:

“The way that religious faith is sometimes talked about in the larger cultural conversation can be harmful to everyone who is trying to find out the truth in religious matters and how they should live their lives. There’s a naïve idea that faith requires believing against the evidence, or in the absence of evidence. When this idea is adopted by atheists, it can allow them to dismiss all religious faith as irrational by definition, without considering what the evidence is for particular religious claims. When this idea is adopted by religious people, it can allow them to think that believing against the evidence is a virtue, which is harmful to the pursuit of truth – it can also be psychologically harmful to try to believe something you think you don’t have evidence for.”

Sounds like an excellent basis for establishing more charitable ground!

Oy vey!  This is a “more sophisticated conversation”? At the outset Lombrozo notes that there’s a case to be made that there isn’t strong evidence for God, but then quotes Buchak as saying that maybe there is some good evidence for particular religious claims (“everyone . .  trying to find out the truth in religious matters”). But what makes either Buchak or Lombrozo think that there is such truth to be found? Buchak’s assertion that atheists don’t consider “what the evidence is for particular religious claims” is flatly wrong. We all know that the claims of different faiths are contradictory, so at most only one can be right. But none of them have credible truth claims. If Buchak and Lombrozo imply that if it’s rational to believe in Jesus, then it must be irrational to believe in Allah.

Atheists have good reasons for not believing in God, and those come down to the lack of evidence. This means that can never be rational to have religious faith, by either Lombrozo or Buchak’s lights. There’s simply not the required preliminary evidence that’s an integral part of “rational faith”.  Nor need we atheists admit that faith can be rational, no matter which definition of “faith” you use.

Yet look at Lombrozo’s last sentence. It claims that Buchak’s argument provides “an excellent basis for establishing more charitable ground,” i.e., creating a respectful and fruitful dialogue between faith and religion.  That’s simply not the case. Although Lombrozo is a cultural Jewish atheist, she seems unaware of why most people are atheists. If she understood that, she’d know that Buchak’s paper doesn’t establish any common ground.

As I noted yesterday, the claims of belief and atheism are irreconcilable, and a dialogue between them will accomplish nothing. That doesn’t mean we need to vilify believers themselves—as opposed to their beliefs. But it does mean that we needn’t consider faith as either credible or rational.

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Buchak, L  2013. Can it be rational to have faith? In Louis P. Pojman & Michael Rea (eds.), Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, 7th edition (forthcoming)