Belief without Verification or Certainty

[Belacqua]

You either have "faith" that the other passengers will act as you have, or you don't. "Faith" here meaning only that you act on something that you are not certain of. I suppose a good objection would be to ask, "What separates this from a calculated risk?" 

On neighborhood clean-up day, I finished my own area and went to clean up a kind of drainage ditch that nobody feels responsible for. Since it was the day for feeling neighborly, I assumed that once I got started other people would see me and join in. But goddamn, nobody helped. I did the whole thing myself. I was pretty pissed about this.

So when my train is getting robbed, I'm not going to be the first one to jump up.

Well, I may as well come out and say: I think James makes the case that some faith, even that of a religious sort, can be considered reasonable. I don't think this is too ambitious of a thesis. But it does challenge the notion that we ought only to believe that which has evidential support. Some hard-nosed atheists will make the claim that any belief or action made on insufficient evidence is foolhardy. If anything, James challenges them... even though I think most atheists already acknowledge what James is saying.

Yes, I think there is a kind of epistemological hardness which is overly strict -- a kind of scientism about how we live, and pretend that what we believe is only what can be demonstrated in some official or logical way. Life isn't like that. 

We know things in different ways, and develop faith for different reasons. 

Also, I don't think this is very beneficial for our times. People undervalue skepticism these days. An anti-vaxxer can't really learn anything from James I don't think. I think James is most-appropriately read by people who know the value of skepticism and are ready to put the final nail in faith's coffin. For these folks, James's arguments are a good "Not so fast!" But for the general population, especially in these trying times, James's thesis can only be misunderstood.

Yes, the right balance is tricky. Faith only in the fully tested is not reasonable. Faith in what one reads on Facebook is not warranted. 

Anti-vaxxers and such people are frustrating, but if we take a step back, I think we can have some sympathy. They have reached wrong conclusions, but not all of their arguments are insane. The government really does lie constantly, and has lied about Covid all along. Pharmaceutical companies really do only care about money, and don't give a hang if we live or die. Parsing just exactly which lies are important to see through becomes a difficult project. In a sense, the anti-vaxxers have overdone the skepticism -- they think that there is too much faith in the unproven. The vaccines really were developed quickly, and I remember when Kamala Harris said she would never trust a vaccine developed by the Trump administration. Then as soon as the President changed the same vaccines became trustworthy. The anti-vaxxers merely disbelieve in one more god than you and I do (figuratively speaking). 

Here we get into questions of elitism, and who controls information. 

On the recent thread about the Book of Job, I was feeling sympathy for the Catholic leaders prior to the Counter-Reformation, who thought that regular people really shouldn't be reading the Bible for themselves. Non-stupid interpretation is something for educated people. There is something to be said for offering carefully selected bits, carefully pre-interpreted, so as not to encourage those who don't know what they're talking about. As with the Church, though, it often turns out that the gatekeepers themselves are not trustworthy. There is a strong movement these days for more censorship to combat anti-vax type people, so that we've suddenly got educated liberal people wanting the government and Zuckermann to control speech. YouTube has taken down or demonetized several good people who depart slightly from the official line on Ukraine. 

So to bring this back on topic: the various things we have faith in are all founded to some degree on reasons. These may not be good reasons, and they may not be logically-stateable concepts. We can't expect scientific-type foundations for all faith, and frustrating as it is sometimes, this is actually a good thing. Fully-realized human convictions have multivalent origins, just because of how our minds work.