christian@topaz.UUCP (03/29/87)
In a recent post, Mike Huybensz writes:
"...once again, believers must resort to blind
faith, that most worthless justification for belief."
He follows this with an admonition to lay all on the altar in a search
for "TRUTH." The major point of his post, it appears, is the
(seemingly reasonable) request that we question all our assumptions
before declaring our belief in some proposition. This is a generally
worthwhile thing to do, but strict adherence to this rule will place
its user in a dilemma.
If we are to question _all_ our beliefs, we will need to inspect
our belief in logic as a good method of arriving at TRUTH. One of the
central tools in logic is the aristotelian syllogism, i.e. All men are
mortal, socrates is a man, therefore socrates is mortal. This form of
reasoning seems to work pretty well, but upon closer inspection by
philosophers, the syllogism had been declared to be:
-really a type of induction (J. S. Mill)
-a mere superstition regarding correct reasoning (F. H. Bradley)
-based upon an infinite regress and ultimately, faith (Lewis Carroll)
-unimportant in describing real reasoning (Bertrand Russell)
If the syllogism is so doubtful as a tool it certainly cannot help
us with TRUTH. Induction does not fare much better when placed under
the lens. Hume, Bradley, Russell, and Strawson all provide
devastating critiques of the claim that induction will allow us to
infer laws that are TRUE. Strawson suggests that we simply _believe_
the inductive principle, while Russell, Keynes, and others hope that
the probability calculus will provide us with a justification.
Probability is no saviour though, for the leap from .9999 to 1.0 is
still based upon faith. This, then, is the dilemma: we must either
_have_faith_ that logic or induction provides us with certainty or we
must admit that we have found no way yet of achieving it.
The dilemma is even more tragic because we live in the real world.
After all, we must make judgments every day, and it has just been
shown that we cannot KNOW them to be correct. They are all based,
ultimately, in faith (in the continuity of the universe, or mere
optimism). We must decide whether or not (or what) to eat, whether to
invest in South Africa, and a host of other either more or less
important decisions. We are required to act without certainty that
our actions have any resemblance to TRUTH.
The point of all this is that the choice is not so simple as one
between religion and logic/science. There is not a competition
between faith and reason. There is really a cooperation. Both
religion and logic/science involve differing levels of faith, and none
of those beliefs can be entirely justified. We can discuss whether
our beliefs are well or poorly justified, but we must be willing to
lay _all_ our beliefs on the altar - including those about science,
logic, reason, and religion. Once we have done that (and seen the
consequences) we might ask whether we have approached the right altar.
In Christ,
-Chuck Huff
Carnegie Mellon University
Committee for Social Science Research in Computing
huff@c.cs.cmu.edu.arpa
or
ch2f@cmuccvma.bitnet
"My employers are not responsible for my opinions, but if determinism is
true, then neither am I."