C.S. Lewis' take on Science and Religious Belief

C.S. Lewis wrote an essay entitled On Obstinacy in Belief, published in The World's Last Night.

This is a great essay full of great ideas, even if it can be more fully developed. It's evident that Lewis was inspired by William James' The Will to Believe.
 
Lewis' essay deals with why it's not irrational of Christians to believe Christianity even when confronted by contrary evidence. This idea is coming up a lot lately in the New Atheist movement, but it's been around for a while.

The scientific frame of mind dispassionately confirms hypotheses, and if data turns up that falsifies the hypothesis, or forces some modification, scientists have no problem discarding it. Isn't God just another hypothesis postulated to explain phenomena? And isn't it understandable that this annoys scientists, since the hypothesis seems unfalsifiable by any usual ways in which any other scientific hypothesis can be falsified?

Is there something else going on? Well, Lewis thinks so. 





First, we have the way science goes about finding truth about the world. Scientific method has a complicated foundation, but it's mainly this:

1. Formulate a hypothesis to explain the phenomena.
2. The hypothesis predicts how the phenomena will behave. 
3. The hypothesis must be falsifiable. 
4. The hypothesis is tested through experiment. 
5. The hypothesis is confirmed, modified, or discarded. 

It's much more complicated than that, but for the purposes of this blog, that should be sufficient for our purposes. The epistemology driving this method, when used as a way to get 'knowledge' about the world, is a kind of evidentialism: x (where x is a belief about reality) is justified only if x is believed on the basis of evidence E, and E is such that E is validated via the scientific method. The spirit of this epistemology is captured in these two quotes:

1. William Kingdon Clifford: "To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
2. David Hume: "In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”

So, why is it that Christianity extols faith? Faith is admired as a praiseworthy virtue, which helps the Christian to hold on to their belief in the face of evidence to the contrary. Is there something wrong going on here? To hone in on this, let's focus on the word 'believe'. Consider these two belief-statements:

1. I believe Christ died for my sins. 
2. I disbelieve in the whole Christian myth. 

Do 1 and 2 use 'belief' with the same conviction? It seems not. Consider 1. Is the phenomenon 'Christ died for my sins' used by the Christian as a scientist uses postulated hypotheses? No. Before I get into why, Lewis distinguishes between certainty and knowledge.

Certainty doesn't mean (like it's tossed around nowadays) that of which it's logically impossible to be wrong. That's too strong. Certainty is a psychological attitude wherein the proposition feels so overwhelmingly probable that one doesn't struggle with a doubt; but it isn't so strong that it's immune from logical criticism. Then, Lewis makes what I think to be a keen segue. 

On the one hand, there's the initial decision, the first mental assent, to Christian propositions. This can come about in so many different ways that it's impractical to write them down here. But what's important is that at the initial assent, we have a certain evidential attitude, an exploration of proofs, an indubitable religious experience, authority of some kind (Doctors, poets, parents, friends, historians, etc.). These may be hasty or overreaching or fallacious or presumptuous, but the relevant point is that the assent was made initially for evidential reasons of some sort that, while perhaps not sufficient in themselves (to satisfy an ideal, scientific standard for belief formation), it 'felt' sufficient enough by the person. So, to the person, conscience might not have been violated by exceeding what the evidence allowed, since it was perceived by that person to be sufficient. 

On the other hand, we have the Christian who has already assented. Now, the Christian is in the different position. Now that the Christian has assented, the Christian 'now' believes in the Christian story, that he or she stands in a unique relation to a loving God with all the trappings of the Christian drama.

Now that the Christian is 'within' the Christian worldview, he or she is in a different epistemic position to contrary evidence as opposed to the epistemic position he or she was in before the initial assent. This is where the analogies of marriage and friendship or other scenarios in which faith in the face of contrary evidence can be construed as a virtue. To see this let's look at the analogies. 

Suppose evidence is presented to me that my wife was unfaithful. It doesn't seem appropriate, before the initial assent, that I dispassionately weigh the evidence pro/con for my wife's fidelity. At first, I do not believe what the evidence suggests, since my trust in my wife keeps me believing in her, because of my love for her. If the evidence becomes so overwhelming, I will have to give up this belief with great heartbreak. But if it turns out that the evidence was found wanting, and in the process of adjudicating the evidence I immediately assented to the evidence as a scientist is related to a dispassionate hypothesis, and it turns out that my wife had never been unfaithful, it seems I'd be at fault for not being trustful of my wife's fidelity. 

In the second context, faith as a virtue, according to Lewis, is the art of holding on to a belief the mind had once found worthy of rational assent in the face of changing emotions and moods, aroused by later contrary evidence.

To illuminate the idea that sometimes trust, in the face of contrary evidence, is praiseworthy, Lewis brings up a string of really helpful analogies from everyday life where it seems epistemically appropriate. 

1. Getting a dog out of a trap: suppose that to get the dog out of the trap, we had to push its leg further in the trap to extract it. Suppose that the pain increases once the leg is pushed further in. The dog, if it were a theologian, might question the benevolence of the liberator based on the immediate evidence. But would we fault the dog, if we knew its mind, if it went on trusting the liberator because of his or her scent? This, while there being a wide epistemic gulf between the dog's cognitive capacities and our own? It doesn't seem so. 

2. Getting a thorn out of a child's finger - We've all had a splinter and it isn't pleasant. Usually, the way to get it out is to use tweezers, which have to be partially inserted into the cut, increasing the pain, to effectively grasp the splinter for extraction. From the child's point of view, increased pain presents itself as contrary evidence that the method of extraction is a good one. But suppose the child went on trusting the extractor because of a 'look on the mother's face'. Surely, a loving look isn't sufficient evidence to overturn the increased pain caused by the tweezers! Yet the child goes on trusting. Is this not virtue worthy of praise if the child continued in its trust? 

3. Teaching someone to swim - If you've ever observed someone learning to swim, it can be an eye-opening experience. The prospective swimmer truly believes, based on sensuous experience (however rudimentary), that objects left unsupported in the water will sink. As a result, because of this imaginative delusion, reinforced by strong feeling, they thrash about. To that person, to be told that he will float if they just lay back and keep air in their lungs seems so contrary to their immediate experience (even if they rationally understand) that some avoid the water all their life. But suppose they finally resolve to try, and the resolution was reinforced by nothing else but the confident, reassuring tone of the voice of a swimming coach. To act would be, according to that person, contrary to that person's evidence that they would sink. But that they tried in the face of such evidence seems worthy of praise as being a courageous act! 

4. The trapped, beginning mountain climber - Suppose you're learning mountain climbing and you freeze up on an exposed ledge. You look down and see the awful drop if anything goes wrong. But then you're mountain climbing coach tells you that the only way to safety is to climb up to what appears to be a more treacherous-looking part of the crag! It appears even more dangerous. But you trust (probably because of nothing else but the tone/look of the coach) the coach and do it anyway. It seems contrary to your immediate feelings, but you do it anyway. Have you violated your epistemic duties without the assurance of scientific confirmation? It doesn't seem so, and it seems praiseworthy that you did what the coach recommended. 

In all these cases, trust was a necessary prerequisite for great accomplishment to be had: the dog's liberation, the splinter's extraction, learning to swim, or getting to safety. The lesson here is that Christians really do believe, after their initial assent to the Christian story, that we are to God what the dog was to its liberator, what the child was to a mother, what the swimmer and mountain climber was to the coach. We believe, on whatever grounds, that God is good, that He exists, desires our good, etc. Therefore, when contrary evidence to such beliefs arise, we interpret it from within that epistemic context; and it seems appropriate considering the context. Trust is the great virtue required for the relationship to be possible. 

There is, therefore, a disanalogy between a scientist holding on to a hypothesis in the face of evidence, and the Christian holding on to their belief in the Christian God after the initial assent. But here comes the rub. Christianity is either true or false. If it's false, then the strategy of trust only reinforces the delusion; but if true, such trust is a necessary part of the relation. That is why the conversation ought to center on what the reasons were for the initial assent. But once we have assented, there seems to be an unwarranted expectation for us to sway to and fro with the slightest breeze of any contrary evidence whatsoever. There is a dialectic here between the logic of rational assent and the logic of personal relationships, which can probably be derived from Pascal's reasons of the head and reasons of the heart. 

The moral of the story is that skeptics of all stripes should keep this in mind when having a conversation with a Christian about whether it's true. They can't expect an immediate deconversion, and they shouldn't be irksome if there's a certain obstinacy. It would be the same as if you were arguing with the husband about the wife's infidelity. But the same sort of thing should be recommended to the Christian. When dialoguing about the truth of their faith with a skeptic, they have departed from personal-relation logic and are now on common, rational ground with the skeptic, and from here the normal, procedural rules of logical argumentation are used. It just needs to be kept in mind that two dialectical realms need to be kept distinct.