for Chris
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. My response kind of kept going and going until I decided it needed its own journal entry. I want to reiterate that it is not my desire to be argumentative or evangelical. Rather, I'm attempting to explain what my faith means to me in a way which is understandable to you. This is done out of love and the belief that greater understanding of "the other" will lead to greater mutual understanding and even to greater self-understanding. =)
That said, we are discussing two different things: we are discussing religion as a basis for ethics, and we are discussing the nature of faith. These are two divergent topics, so I'm going to address them separately.
First, to faith:
I still don't believe that you understand the difference between faith and belief. You claim that faith can be unreasonable and then back up that assertion with examples of beliefs that are unreasonable. The two are not the same.
Similarly, you claim that asking the question, "why do people want to believe" is a fine way of understanding faith while simultaneously professing that you don't understand faith. This is a contradiction.
To be clear, I'm not taking issue with any of your positions, which are as well thought out as ever. What I'm taking issue with is your methodology. Rationalist critique is useful in the field of theology, but not in the field of faith.
For ease of discussion, let me define some terms. Revelation is God as experienced in the lives of people. Faith is a person's response to revelation. Theology is critical, intellectual reflection on faith.
Revelation, obviously, is intensely personal and completely subjective. Some people find revelation in meditation, others in the beauty of the earth, others in scripture, etc. It is the foundation of religion, but no one agrees what it is, which is why we have so many religious creeds in the world. It is not the sort of thing which one can really debate.
Theology, on the other hand, is perfectly suited for debate. Of the three, only theology is an academic discipline and only theology shares tool sets with philosophy, mathematics, and (to a limited extant) science. One cannot critically evaluate revelation or faith, but one can critically evaluate theology and judge whether it is internally consistent, whether it's logic makes sense, whether it holds true to its initially stated axioms, etc. Because it's methodology is objective, you, even as an atheist, have all the tools you need to do and/or critique theology.
Those tools won't work with understanding faith, however. Consider the following quote from John Dillenberger:
"Faith, then, is neither objective nor subjective; it is an interrelation of both, with priority lying on the objective side in God's activity. Once that foundation is affirmed, the experiential or more subjective aspect of faith can be properly focused. The experiential aspect of the faith relation, however, is not identical with general religious experience or with various elaborations of religious experience. In the last few decades, religious experience as a category of living and understanding has gained a new prominence. With the new interest in spirituality and meditation, both the strengths and dangers of such an inner orientation are evident. Hence, careful distinctions and qualifications are necessary.
Emotion, reason, and will also converge in religious experience and faith. In various degrees an emotional element is included in religious experience, which cannot be understood only in emotional terms. Facets of reason also are present in religious experience, but the dynamics of faith cannot be understood simply as an exercise of reason. When reason is narrowly defined, faith and reason stand in opposition; when reason is broadly understood, it belongs to the matrix of faith. There also are aspects of decision, sometimes described in terms of the will, in faith. Hence, the mystery that underlies faith does not mean the cancellation of the self, but its redirection; faith is appropriated neither by an act of will nor without the affirmation of will."
Faith and belief are not the same thing anymore than faith and theology are the same thing. It is difficult to discuss these nuances in English. I turn to Christopher Morse:
"Unlike other languages, including the language of the New Testament itself, English vocabulary has no verbal form of the noun 'faith.' We can speak of 'having faith' or 'being faithful,' but to use a verb we must say, 'We believe.' Wherever in the New Testament Greek the word faith (pistis) is used as a verb (pisteuein), in English this is most often translated by the verb 'to believe.' Faith comes to equal believing, trusting, and assent."
The thing is, when you look at narrative depictions of what human faithfulness involves (bible, spiritual autobiography, personal witness, etc), this limitation in our language is painfully noticeable. Faith is far more than assent to a set of doctrines.
And so, the question you should ask isn't, "why do you want to believe," but rather, "what has led you to faith." When you understand how radically different these two questions are, you'll be a long way towards understanding people of faith.
Ethics: You are right that morality can't be measured objectively. Every attempt to set up a single principle as a measure by which morality can be judged has failed. I have no argument there. I wasn't, however, suggesting that it was, which is why I made the comment that "objective morality" is probably impossible for a human to fully understand.
My point isn't to argue what universal morality is, my point is that a person who discusses ethics as anything other than preference is implicitly appealing to a universal morality. Appealing to a universal is an inherent part of comparing two things. When you say, "not bombing abortion clinics is better than bombing them," you are saying something very different from "I like chocolate ice cream better than strawberry ice cream." The second statement is purely subjective and purely preferential whereas the first statement claims to be true in some universal sense.
This does not mean, of course, that the first statement isn't subjective; it is. It does mean, however, that the statement presupposes an idea of what "better" means. You might not be able to measure "better" quantitatively, or even depict it poetically, but the presupposition is there. If they were both purely matters of personal preference, than the preference to not bomb abortion clinics is of no more import than the preference of ice cream.
You might retort by saying, "but there is a difference - the first issue potentially impacts other people in a very harmful way while the second is purely personal." This is true. But why do other people even matter? Why is harming people so bad? Even here is an implicit appeal to a universal value.
I'm not trying to argue that anyone has adequately expressed a universal code of ethics. I'm certainly not suggesting that institutional Christianity has. I don't think anyone will ever be able to. What I am arguing, however, is that the doctrine of moral relativism is incompatible with any ethical system (christian ethics, universal human rights, kantian natural law, etc). Without an assumption of universal morality, however vague, all ethics are reduced to preferences and ethical judgment makes no sense.