What is Faith and Can Secular People Have It?
On transformative action
“Faith” is a loaded term, meaning it has different connotations for different kinds of people. Every culture has certain terms which acquire semantic baggage over time. A community imputes additional meanings to a term when members of that community use it in increasingly variegated contexts. The term simultaneously gains communal (cultural) significance while losing specificity. This process is often referred to as “concept creep.”
Community members come to feel deeply about a term which undergoes this process because it becomes associated with impactful experiences in their lives. A consequence of this proliferation is that new efforts to precisely define the now loaded term invariably either trample on people’s personal definitions or fail to adequately capture people’s sense of the term’s profundity. Due to this inevitable friction, community members often refrain from critically examining the term’s meaning. Since they are not pushed to define it precisely for others, they do not define it precisely for themselves. The term’s definition becomes taken for granted in situations; people assume that others are using it to refer to the opaque and mysterious something towards which they feel an intensely personal connection.
You can see these sociolinguistic dynamics play out in American culture when examining terms like “gender identity,” “cancel culture,” “socialism,” “common sense,” “wokeness,” and “offensive.” Multiculturalism makes terms like these extraordinarily difficult to pin down. Those who do not inhabit the community (culture) in which a term has undergone concept creep cannot feel the richness and depth the term elicits for members of that community. And how could they? They haven’t had the experiences necessary to develop such affective connections. This asymmetry complicates attempts at definition even further. Now the definer must face the wrath of those from the origin community and the confusion of those from external communities. He must somehow unpack the term in a manner which simultaneously captures a depth of feeling and a lack of connection.
Christians and other religious people, when pressed, often define “faith” as something approximating “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1, ESV). Secular skeptics prefer something like “belief without adequate evidence.” I don’t find either of these definitions particularly useful. What does it mean to have a conviction of things unseen (unknown)? How invisible (unknown) must a thing be for the perception of it to qualify as faith? Similarly, what constitutes adequate evidence? How much evidence must one have for a thing for her belief in that thing to no longer count as faith?
What has troubled me most in my quest to reach a useful definition is the following question: What is faith for a secular person?
The religious people in my life say that those of different religious communities can and do have faith, just in different religious things than they do. After all, the typical religious definition isn’t “the conviction of the unseen things my particular religious community believes in.” But when I ask them whether secular people can have faith, they pause.
This indicates to me that they insert a hidden qualifier – not “the conviction of things unseen” but “the conviction of conventionally religious things unseen.” But what differentiates conventionally religious unseen things from unseen things that are not conventionally religious? Perhaps the key difference is that conventionally religious things exist supernaturally, meaning they are composed of an immaterial material. Do secular people categorically not believe in unseen things of this sort? In my experience, they do!
Many secular people believe in things like honor, beauty, dignity, love, and identity. These things cannot be located in nature, they are not made of any known material. As with God, you can’t see beauty itself, only manifestations of it. As with God, honor itself cannot be located in the natural world. Why would these supernatural things which so many secular people believe in and feel passionately about fail to qualify as “things unseen”?
The fact I have yet to find any answer to this question which makes sense to me leads me to conclude that, yes, secular people’s conviction of things unseen can count as faith. But this still leaves the issue of justification: How unseen must a thing be for the belief in it to qualify as faith? Stated otherwise, what kinds of things can one have faith in? Applying the skeptical paradigm, how much (or how little) evidence must one have for a thing for his belief in it to count as faith?
Skeptics argue the difference between faith and knowledge rests in the degree of scientific evidential justification available for a believable proposition. Now, philosophers have argued for forever about what constitutes knowledge and I’m not arrogant enough to claim to have a definitive answer. However, there are some distinctions I can make that further this definitional project. When distinguishing faith from knowledge, it is critical to first determine what we mean by evidence and who must be privy to the relevant evidence.
Usually, skeptics suggest that the relevant evidence pool is filled with the current consensuses among professional scientists. Under this view, belief in X requires faith if the current consensus among the professional scientists who study the class of things to which X belongs also believe X. For example, to determine whether belief in the proposition “sexual orientation is a heritable trait” requires faith or not, skeptics will look to the current scientific consensus among the professional scientists who study topics related to heritability and human sexuality. If professional scientists largely agree that it is heritable, then you are justified in believing the proposition and do not require faith to believe it. So, for the average skeptic, the evidential what is the relevant set of current scientific findings and the evidential who is the relevant community of professional scientists.
The problem with this is that, while there are certainly exceptions, “faith” is most commonly discussed by those who feel a deep connection to the term as a property of decisions, not knowledge claims. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard statements like, “I felt that God wanted me to do X and, even though I was not sure about it, I had faith and did it.” When religious people say things like this, they are indicating that faith is a property of decisions (i.e., actions – a decision is always a decision to do something).
It is “through faith” or “with faith” that they make certain decisions. It was because they “had faith” that they made certain decisions. If faith is a property of decisions and not knowledge claims, the evidential what is the set of perceived costs and benefits for each available decision-option and the evidential who is the decider.
Let’s unpack this with an illustration. A religious high school senior is faced with a tough decision. She has the opportunity to go on a three year mission trip after she graduates. She is struggling to decide whether she should attend college immediately after she graduates or go on the mission trip. She makes a pro-con list for each decision-option and the lists seems equally balanced. She prays earnestly, but does not receive any clear feedback. She desperately searches for what God wants her to pick. Ultimately, she makes her decision despite still feeling uncertain. When asked why she decided the way she did, she explains, “I felt lost, but I had faith.”
What is the relevant evidence in this example? Professional scientists cannot really help this woman make her decision. She is trying to figure out how to decide which decision-option best comports with her current values and beliefs. Even if you handed her a complete collection of all the current scientific meta-analyses, it would not help her decide because she is trying to decide what is right for her to do, not decide what is empirically justified for someone to think.
The relevant evidence is comprised by her pro-con lists. Crucially, her intuitions, her feelings about the decision-options (which she likely represents to herself and others as divine guidance), go on the pro-con lists. Imagine “I feel better about this one” (or “I feel like maybe God wants me to do this”) written out on the pro side. Even if one decision-option outperforms the other across a wide set of metrics important to her like money, time, and energy, she may still pick the poorer performing option if her intuition that it is better is sufficiently strong and/or long-lasting. Every true martyr ultimately defers to intuitions of this type.
Generally speaking, people who feel a deep connection to the term “faith” selectively apply it to decisions with particular characteristics. Most of the religious people I know usually do not use the term when talking about mundane decisions. Instead, they reserve it for emotionally significant decisions that appear to have substantial personal, familiar, communal, or societal consequences. In other words, they typically employ the term when speaking about decisions that they perceive as having the potential to transform something important in their lives.
Additionally, they tend to apply it to decisions about which they feel unconfident. If the woman in the last example felt like her analysis of the pros and cons of each decision-option definitively revealed what she should decide, I argue she would be far less likely to explain her decision as faith-based. Say, for instance, that the organization coordinating the mission trip called her while she was stuck in analysis paralysis and informed her that they would pay her college tuition if she went on the trip. And say once she added that benefit to her cost-benefit analysis she felt an overwhelming sense of relief because it made the mission trip decision-option seem significantly better than the alternative. If, after this happened, you were to ask her why she decided what she did, I propose she is far less likely than she would be had the organizational not called to explain her ultimate decision using the term “faith.” She might say something like, “I felt led to go on the mission trip and the organization offered to pay for my tuition.”
I believe it is possible at this point to define “faith” in a way that (1) does justice to how most people who have a deep connection to the term use it and (2) allows for the possibility of secular faith: Faith is trust that a potentially transformative, ostensibly unjustified (i.e., its currently perceived costs equal or exceed its currently perceived benefits) decision about which one does not feel confident will, through currently unknown processes, eventually turn out to have been justified (i.e., its actually yielded benefits exceed its actually incurred costs). To “have faith” is to strive to speak, feel, and act as though a perceptibly unjustified transformative decision about which one is unconfident will acquire its justification at some point in the future.
I am a secular person, but I am intentionally trying to approach my decision to have kids with my wife, Alyona, with faith. When I analyze the costs and benefits of having kids, the costs significantly outweigh the benefits. Having kids requires vast expenditures of time, money, physical energy, and mental bandwidth. To decide to bring a person into the world is, in my view, to voluntarily take on one of the greatest responsibilities possible. I cannot justify the decision to my current self. However, I am moved by the beautiful stories of countless parents who say that having kids transformed their experience to such a degree that their decision almost immediately acquired retroactive justification. Earlier this year, the journalist Elizabeth Breunig wrote eloquently on her experience having kids: “What I didn’t understand — couldn’t have, at the time — was that deserting yourself for another person really is a relief. …you are something that is constantly in the process of becoming, the invention of endless revolutions. You never know who you are, because who you are is always changing.”
To have faith in a decision is to trust that the experience you will have as a result of deciding will transform the way you think about costs and benefits to such a profound degree that something you view as unjustified now achieves retroactive justification later. Countless decisions secular people make fulfill these qualifications. Deciding to practice a new habit often isn’t self-justified until after the habit achieves automaticity (I wrote about this here). Difficult decisions about big life changes almost always require faith.
What so often goes unnoticed is that the most significant of all possible unseen things is The Desirable Future. If you can figure out what that is, pursue it with as much faith as you can possibly muster. Its realization hinges on your risking today for a transformative tomorrow.
Note from Marshall - I formed the ideas presented here in part through conversations with my good friend Ram. Our most productive discussion on this topic revolved around this podcast episode by The Very Bad Wizards on the philosophy of transformative experiences.