This is the second part of my exposition of Theistic Atheism. Recall that the position holds that one ought to be an atheist on the grounds of a statistical rationality view of belief, yet one can plausibly still hold the belief that God exists regardless. In this post I'm going to discuss how one believe in God whilst being Atheist under the statistical rationality view of belief.
The first thing to note is that belief's don't necessarily require justification. It seems at least, that I can believe that Earth is round, or that 2+2 = 5, regardless of whether it is justified or not. Now, simultaneously, it seems that a belief that possesses this type of justification (making certain reference to internalist theories of knowledge) are virtuous in some sense. To some people, it might be argued that a person can only be rational if their beliefs are justified or at least obey a certain type of logic.
The statistical rationality view can be thought of as providing a framework for rational argument and justified beliefs. It is not the only framework, and perhaps not the best one for dealing with most cases. Yet I think it has a certain intuitive strength when tasked with assessing a belief in God. There is a strong intuition by many who would identify as Atheists, that whilst they may not be able to directly prove the non existence of God, they are still allowed to reject God, or at the least the variety of religions that surround it. A note here that some Atheists adopt the position in order to express a negative attitude towards religions, whilst maintaining an agnostic position with regards to God's existence. I assume in this essay that the Atheist we are dealing with has a negative stance towards God's existence, beyond an agnostic position.
So the statistical rationality view was how I justified that rationally I think that we should adopt the Atheist position. When we're trying to discuss God's existence, I simply don't think there is enough evidence for us to accept an alternative hypothesis that God exists. Thus on these grounds, one rationally ought to be an Atheist. A key word here; ought. We note that there are many things we ought to do, but we nevertheless might not do. Perhaps I ought to clean my bed everyday, or to get up early in the morning. It does seem however that perhaps by definition, to say that I ought to have this belief on these grounds, suggests that there is something wrong in not doing so. That I am being in some sense, doxastically irresponsible. Thus at the moment, there still seems to be something questionable about having a belief in God, if one adopts this Atheist rationale.
To resolve this, at least rationally, I seem to have to appeal to a contextualise argument. Essentially I would argue that it's fine for me to adopt the Atheist position on grounds of rationality, and it's also fine for me to believe in the existence of God, as long as this second belief is on different grounds. Thus here I appeal to the notion of faith.
Faith I define as a belief that is not necessarily grounded in rationality. One can have a faith that there are flying pigs circling the moon, that there is an alien conspiracy or that there is a floating man in the sky. Faith does not require the type of justification that statistical rationality does. There is not this supposedly objective measure of evidence that is required for me justify this belief. I can justify a faith using any reasons, or even no reasons at all.
Now, note that whilst I can plausibly have a faith in any claim, the status of of my faith belief appears to be much weaker when expressed to others. For example suppose I had a faith that homosexuality was immoral. Whilst it seems reasonable for me to believe this myself even perhaps without justification, I encounter a significant difficulty when I try to convince others of my position. It might even be thought that a direct expression of my faith is a political statement and is unjustified, especially due to my (possible) inability to provide arguments. The main thing is that because is without justification, it seems that I also lose the ability to use such a belief as justification for other actions. That is, again if I had a faith that homosexuality was immoral, in virtue of this belief being ungrounded in rationality, such a belief would not properly justify an action such as a potential choice to send all homosexuals to prison. If I wanted to justify this action, my belief of homosexuality being immoral would need to be justified rationally.
So broadly speaking, when I say that I have faith in God, the claim is actually rather meaningless from an outsiders perspective. Because with regards to them, I need no justification when discussing my faith to them, and I am also not entitled to use this faith as any justification for an action that would affect other agents. This doesn't take anything away from my ability to believe of course. I can still believe in God given the 'contextual' modifier of faith, and simultaneously adopt the Atheist position when confronted with doxastic demands of rationality. To sum things up, one could be an Theistic Atheist if their theistic belief, and their atheistic belief belong to different belief classes, generally one rational and the other simply faith based.
This sounds rather complicated. So here's perhaps a simpler example. Consider a football fan, who hopes that their local team will win. Now we ask the fan whether their team actually will win, and what they actually believe. The fan responds that when discussing this topic seriously, if you look at the statistics of all of the other teams and engage in a degree of analysis, the odds of the local team winning are rather slim. Thus when we are discussing a type of belief that demands such evidence, the fan says that the local team is unlikely to succeed. Yet plausibly, the fan still has a degree of belief in his teams victory. Even though he knows the odds are against him, the fan still believes in his team. His faith in his teams victory goes against the rational evidence, and he certainly doesn't think he'd have the ability to convince someone else (especially one who is less emotionally invested) into believing in the local teams victory. Yet he believes regardless.
In my final post, I'm going to discuss my reasons for actually believing in a God on grounds of faith and why I call it faith as opposed to any other term. To conclude this post, I want to briefly discuss whether one is justified in having beliefs that appear to belong to different classes - statistical rationality and faith. I think the justification for rational beliefs is rather uncontentious, so the main issue is whether we think one justifiably have faith based beliefs. Rephrased we ask whether there is any issue with one having a belief that they know is purely faith based and may lack rational justification. I think the thing to note is that many faith based beliefs are non entirely without justification, it just happens to be justification that would be insufficient to convince a present non believer. Yet it seems that we have many such beliefs that one might class as faith on a daily basis. Many of our emotions for example seem to belong to this category. One might of course view emotions in a rather negative light as opposition to the sort of cold logic of rationality that we have discussed, but I think such a view is mistaken. At the least there doesn't seem to be anything innately wrong with one having emotions, and to deny this seems to dismiss an inherently human element of ourselves. I'll discuss the importance of emotions in another post, but for now I hope I have provided some intuition on why we should not immediately object to people having faith based beliefs, as long as they do not use such belief in justifying actions that would actually affect other agents.
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