Philosophical Essay: Claiming Faith is Knowledge is a Failure of both Faith and Knowledge
It is noxious when believers insist that their beliefs can be knowledge. Such a claim is a failure of both religion and epistemology.
I believe that answering the question of “What is known?” begins with asking the question “What can be known?” I take as my base premise that the only things that can truly be known are those that can be detected with the physical senses. What I can see, hear, taste, smell, touch, etc-- if they can enter my consciousness through physical stimuli, then they can be known.
Of course, this severely limits what counts as knowledge. Say you are driving on a rural highway and see a single white sheep grazing in a corral. What can you know about the color of sheep from this scenario? If your answer was anything other than “One side of this single sheep is white,” then you are wrong. There is nothing else that can be truly “known” about the color of any other sheep, nor even about the color of the other side of the sheep (since it can’t be seen from where you are looking.)
How do we overcome these limits? The only way to obtain direct knowledge of the other side of the sheep would be to stop the car, enter the corral and see for yourself the other side of the sheep. Of course, such a course of action would be patently absurd. Imagine having to develop direct knowledge of every single relevant variable! Such a method would be completely impractical for the purposes of survival that our bodies evolved to serve. We simply do not have the time, energy or computational power to do so. So, our brains have developed a very time-saving workaround: inferential heuristics.
Inferential heuristics are a shortcut that permit our brains to extrapolate what is likely from what is known. Through the repetitive process of layering stimuli and interpretation that we call “experience,” our brains enable us to infer information about the world around us. Given that almost all sheep we’ve seen before have uniformity of coat color, we can infer that the other side of the sheep is white even if we don’t directly know it.
The salience of inferential heuristics cannot be understated. If a jungle dweller hears a rustle in the bush, he’s not going to say “I wonder if that’s a jaguar” and go searching in the bush to confirm. He’s going to hightail it out of there! Sure, there’s the chance that it was just a benign creature, but inference allows the jungle dweller to ascertain there is a likely threat nearby, and act accordingly.
We all rely on inferential heuristics developed through experience to navigate a complex world where direct knowledge is severely limited. They are necessary for survival-- but I think it is obvious how inferential heuristics are vulnerable to biases of all kinds. Much of racism, for example, could be accounted as a form of both generalization bias and genetic fallacy, where a single experience with a person of another race is assumed to result from an inherent trait of that person, and those traits generalized to the entire category of people. Such a belief, of course, is easily identifiable as false, and yet has proved pervasive and widespread enough to perpetuate centuries of misery.
Science is not a perfect answer to the limitations of direct knowledge. It is, of course, a human endeavor, meaning that it is still prone to bias. It is also not “objective,” because there isn’t any such thing-- take the sheep in the corral mentioned previously. One way to get around the immense effort required to obtain direct knowledge is to have somebody else go examine the sheep and report the findings back to you. This is still not knowledge (as it relies on the word of someone else, and not direct experience.) Science has developed ways to work around these limitations, such as peer review, that give it the next best thing to objectivity: intersubjectivity. And yet, science is still a practice in inferences, and can only determine what is more or less likely to be true given the evidence, and not what is definitively true.
Now, I identify as a person of faith. The reason I do so is because when I engage in my faith practice (in my case, various forms of prayer and meditation) I feel more grounded and centered within myself, and better able to love and have compassion for others. I choose to interpret these feelings of compassion and groundedness as coming from a higher power.
This is not knowledge. Internal feelings are not evidence for a claim. Save for the vanishingly rare instance of someone completely unable to sense, one could have a Bible thrown at them and they would know that a book called the Bible exists and hurts when it impacts them at velocity-- that is knowledge-- but have very, very different internal responses when asked to read it. Believers might argue “They had peaceful feelings when they read the Word, so therefore the Word is true,” but there are people who might feel nothing, or even have negative feelings when reading the Bible. It’s a form of circular reasoning: Those who have faith experience peaceful feelings when they read the Bible, so therefore the Bible is true. In actuality, the only variable that likely differs between people who have peace reading the Bible and those who don’t is the presence of faith-- faith leads to peace which leads to faith. Occam’s razor suggests that faith itself is the variable that matters. It is differences in the interpretation of the venerated object (in this case the Bible) that leads to the differences in experience, and not any actual quality of the object itself.
People who have faith in something unseen do not have knowledge. Faith is belief in something in the absence of physical proof or evidence-- by its definition, not knowledge. Further if God physically descends to a person and says “Here I am, I’m God,” that person has knowledge, not faith. Even then, their knowledge does not translate to others-- as explained previously, others’ reports of phenomena do not count as direct evidence of phenomena. I would not believe a person who told me they saw God unless I could experience the same for myself.
Further, there is a sociocultural impulse towards categorizing faith as knowledge of which we must be aware. We live in a world where access to needed resources depends on one’s position in the dominance hierarchy, a reality that very strongly shapes choices of word and action. There is truth to the saying “knowledge is power.” Possession of knowledge, or at the very least accurate inferences, gives power. If we can establish some claim as knowledge, then that claim demands a change in our actions. But as I have already established, most claims (if not all of them) are impossible to know for certain, especially those having to do with the unknown-- the realm of faith. Thus, a believer that attempts to claim their beliefs as knowledge are not attempting to establish truth-- they are attempting to establish dominance. By claiming their beliefs as knowledge and employing any sleight of hand necessary to “prove” it, they are attempting to put themselves in control, to take epistemology by force and rule it with an iron fist. “Knowledge,” after all, is power.
The genius of genuine spiritual practice is it leads people to let go of their place in the dominance hierarchy. Whatever their station, they humbly live in peace with their fellow man, having dissolved their compulsion to exert undue authority over others. They do not claim to know-- they have faith, and live in the humility that results in understanding there is no certainty in the path they have chosen. Such a way of spiritual life is inherently threatening to those invested in dominance as a means of survival. Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world,” and was killed for it.
Despite Jesus’s example, Christians have systematically missed the mark for thousands of years. Look at the pain and misery wrought in the name of Christianity, a Christianity that has so often sought to convert bodies by force rather than change hearts by love (a truth unfortunately shared by all the major religions). They say “knowledge is power, and power is survival, so we must transubstantiate our faith into knowledge so we may have power and thus survive.” Faithless, in other words-- for if they have knowledge, they no longer have faith. Those who are whole have no need of a physician.
For those who are sick, philosophy has developed a ready remedy for this need for certainty where there is none: epistemic humility. The practice of epistemic humility starts by recognizing the extreme limits of what can be known due to the extreme limits of what can be directly experienced. It rarely dares say “I know,” instead saying “I find it likely/unlikely,” knowing that all constructions of the universe are made of inferential heuristics and therefore almost certainly erroneous in some way. Epistemic humility reminds believers that their faith is not knowledge-- and unbelievers, in turn, that their lack of faith is also not knowledge. Epistemic humility demands of its practitioners the simultaneous recognition that there is very little that can be directly known, but that effective probabilistic means of understanding the world around us are available to those who will do the necessary work. Epistemic humility demands that we simultaneously apply the generosity and skepticism implied in the phrase “It might be true, and they might be right.” Finally, epistemic humility is the foundation of ethics: what is right comes from what we infer about the world from what we know-- and since we know so little, and what we do know evolves, we must be open to revision in the way we construct the world and our part in it.
Believers who insist that what they believe is knowledge fail at both religion and epistemology. By insisting such, they ignore the humility that is central to rigorous, genuine faith practice, replacing it with confidence as brash as it is fragile, certainty as big as it is false. And by insisting such, their journey of obtaining or inferring real knowledge ends before it begins.
Socrates had it right from the beginning. “All that I know is that I know nothing.”
I believe that answering the question of “What is known?” begins with asking the question “What can be known?” I take as my base premise that the only things that can truly be known are those that can be detected with the physical senses. What I can see, hear, taste, smell, touch, etc-- if they can enter my consciousness through physical stimuli, then they can be known.
Of course, this severely limits what counts as knowledge. Say you are driving on a rural highway and see a single white sheep grazing in a corral. What can you know about the color of sheep from this scenario? If your answer was anything other than “One side of this single sheep is white,” then you are wrong. There is nothing else that can be truly “known” about the color of any other sheep, nor even about the color of the other side of the sheep (since it can’t be seen from where you are looking.)
How do we overcome these limits? The only way to obtain direct knowledge of the other side of the sheep would be to stop the car, enter the corral and see for yourself the other side of the sheep. Of course, such a course of action would be patently absurd. Imagine having to develop direct knowledge of every single relevant variable! Such a method would be completely impractical for the purposes of survival that our bodies evolved to serve. We simply do not have the time, energy or computational power to do so. So, our brains have developed a very time-saving workaround: inferential heuristics.
Inferential heuristics are a shortcut that permit our brains to extrapolate what is likely from what is known. Through the repetitive process of layering stimuli and interpretation that we call “experience,” our brains enable us to infer information about the world around us. Given that almost all sheep we’ve seen before have uniformity of coat color, we can infer that the other side of the sheep is white even if we don’t directly know it.
The salience of inferential heuristics cannot be understated. If a jungle dweller hears a rustle in the bush, he’s not going to say “I wonder if that’s a jaguar” and go searching in the bush to confirm. He’s going to hightail it out of there! Sure, there’s the chance that it was just a benign creature, but inference allows the jungle dweller to ascertain there is a likely threat nearby, and act accordingly.
We all rely on inferential heuristics developed through experience to navigate a complex world where direct knowledge is severely limited. They are necessary for survival-- but I think it is obvious how inferential heuristics are vulnerable to biases of all kinds. Much of racism, for example, could be accounted as a form of both generalization bias and genetic fallacy, where a single experience with a person of another race is assumed to result from an inherent trait of that person, and those traits generalized to the entire category of people. Such a belief, of course, is easily identifiable as false, and yet has proved pervasive and widespread enough to perpetuate centuries of misery.
Science is not a perfect answer to the limitations of direct knowledge. It is, of course, a human endeavor, meaning that it is still prone to bias. It is also not “objective,” because there isn’t any such thing-- take the sheep in the corral mentioned previously. One way to get around the immense effort required to obtain direct knowledge is to have somebody else go examine the sheep and report the findings back to you. This is still not knowledge (as it relies on the word of someone else, and not direct experience.) Science has developed ways to work around these limitations, such as peer review, that give it the next best thing to objectivity: intersubjectivity. And yet, science is still a practice in inferences, and can only determine what is more or less likely to be true given the evidence, and not what is definitively true.
Now, I identify as a person of faith. The reason I do so is because when I engage in my faith practice (in my case, various forms of prayer and meditation) I feel more grounded and centered within myself, and better able to love and have compassion for others. I choose to interpret these feelings of compassion and groundedness as coming from a higher power.
This is not knowledge. Internal feelings are not evidence for a claim. Save for the vanishingly rare instance of someone completely unable to sense, one could have a Bible thrown at them and they would know that a book called the Bible exists and hurts when it impacts them at velocity-- that is knowledge-- but have very, very different internal responses when asked to read it. Believers might argue “They had peaceful feelings when they read the Word, so therefore the Word is true,” but there are people who might feel nothing, or even have negative feelings when reading the Bible. It’s a form of circular reasoning: Those who have faith experience peaceful feelings when they read the Bible, so therefore the Bible is true. In actuality, the only variable that likely differs between people who have peace reading the Bible and those who don’t is the presence of faith-- faith leads to peace which leads to faith. Occam’s razor suggests that faith itself is the variable that matters. It is differences in the interpretation of the venerated object (in this case the Bible) that leads to the differences in experience, and not any actual quality of the object itself.
People who have faith in something unseen do not have knowledge. Faith is belief in something in the absence of physical proof or evidence-- by its definition, not knowledge. Further if God physically descends to a person and says “Here I am, I’m God,” that person has knowledge, not faith. Even then, their knowledge does not translate to others-- as explained previously, others’ reports of phenomena do not count as direct evidence of phenomena. I would not believe a person who told me they saw God unless I could experience the same for myself.
Further, there is a sociocultural impulse towards categorizing faith as knowledge of which we must be aware. We live in a world where access to needed resources depends on one’s position in the dominance hierarchy, a reality that very strongly shapes choices of word and action. There is truth to the saying “knowledge is power.” Possession of knowledge, or at the very least accurate inferences, gives power. If we can establish some claim as knowledge, then that claim demands a change in our actions. But as I have already established, most claims (if not all of them) are impossible to know for certain, especially those having to do with the unknown-- the realm of faith. Thus, a believer that attempts to claim their beliefs as knowledge are not attempting to establish truth-- they are attempting to establish dominance. By claiming their beliefs as knowledge and employing any sleight of hand necessary to “prove” it, they are attempting to put themselves in control, to take epistemology by force and rule it with an iron fist. “Knowledge,” after all, is power.
The genius of genuine spiritual practice is it leads people to let go of their place in the dominance hierarchy. Whatever their station, they humbly live in peace with their fellow man, having dissolved their compulsion to exert undue authority over others. They do not claim to know-- they have faith, and live in the humility that results in understanding there is no certainty in the path they have chosen. Such a way of spiritual life is inherently threatening to those invested in dominance as a means of survival. Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world,” and was killed for it.
Despite Jesus’s example, Christians have systematically missed the mark for thousands of years. Look at the pain and misery wrought in the name of Christianity, a Christianity that has so often sought to convert bodies by force rather than change hearts by love (a truth unfortunately shared by all the major religions). They say “knowledge is power, and power is survival, so we must transubstantiate our faith into knowledge so we may have power and thus survive.” Faithless, in other words-- for if they have knowledge, they no longer have faith. Those who are whole have no need of a physician.
For those who are sick, philosophy has developed a ready remedy for this need for certainty where there is none: epistemic humility. The practice of epistemic humility starts by recognizing the extreme limits of what can be known due to the extreme limits of what can be directly experienced. It rarely dares say “I know,” instead saying “I find it likely/unlikely,” knowing that all constructions of the universe are made of inferential heuristics and therefore almost certainly erroneous in some way. Epistemic humility reminds believers that their faith is not knowledge-- and unbelievers, in turn, that their lack of faith is also not knowledge. Epistemic humility demands of its practitioners the simultaneous recognition that there is very little that can be directly known, but that effective probabilistic means of understanding the world around us are available to those who will do the necessary work. Epistemic humility demands that we simultaneously apply the generosity and skepticism implied in the phrase “It might be true, and they might be right.” Finally, epistemic humility is the foundation of ethics: what is right comes from what we infer about the world from what we know-- and since we know so little, and what we do know evolves, we must be open to revision in the way we construct the world and our part in it.
Believers who insist that what they believe is knowledge fail at both religion and epistemology. By insisting such, they ignore the humility that is central to rigorous, genuine faith practice, replacing it with confidence as brash as it is fragile, certainty as big as it is false. And by insisting such, their journey of obtaining or inferring real knowledge ends before it begins.
Socrates had it right from the beginning. “All that I know is that I know nothing.”
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