is faith a legitimate basis for knowledge claims?

GCSE Religious Studies (Philosophy & Ethics)

Theory of Knowledge Essay

Some people say that religious beliefs can be neither satisfied nor refuted by reason. Sometimes this claim is used to reject different religious beliefs but other times it is used to conclude that this beliefs are established by faith. In you opinion, to what extent is faith a legitimate basis for knowledge claims in religion and other areas of knowledge?

Faith is usually defined either as belief not based on evidence and reason or as belief in what cannot be comprehended or explained, while rationality is belief based on logic and evidence. Let us consider two terms- “Rationalism” holds that truth should be deduced by reason and factual analysis, rather than faith or religious teaching. “Fideism” implies that faith is a necessity and a belief must be accepted without a proof or a reason to back it. However rationalism makes no statement either way about the existence of a God or the soundness or worth of religion, but it rejects any belief based on faith alone. To sum it up, faith and rationalism are in technically opposite.

A layman holds his belief "by faith" in three kinds of ways with respect to rationality:

Faith as basic rationality: According to this, the knowledge acquired by him and his reasons are dependent on faith itself. This faith is the one that we have in our own senses, our reason, in our memories and in the knowledge that we receive from people and tradition throughout our life that we believe or have “faith”(again) in to be credible. Accordingly, faith is seen as essential to and inseparable from rationality. By this argument we conclude that faith is an element involved to express rationality. This concept also implies that we cannot gather evidence to express what we are seeing or what we ever saw, that mathematical laws are not real and that the sun won’t rise tomorrow. A movie, the Matrix, is all about defying the faith in our senses. A great example is that a person having a headache cannot evidently prove it, he can only sense it and relies on his senses to call it the truth. Yes, people do fake headaches but when you actually have it you haven’t created it nor can you stop it at will you can only feel it.

Faith towards issues which rationality cannot explain: In this view, faith is the means adopted to hold beliefs which science and rationality fail to explain, but which are still sound. This way faith is a counterpart to rationality by answering questions that the latter cannot.

Faith as contradicting rationality: This implies that people adopt faith as a means to believe knowledge claims even though there is ether no evidence to support it or existing evidence to oppose it. This way faith emerges harmful as it prevents the person from considering and analyzing his belief by thinking it ...

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Faith towards issues which rationality cannot explain: In this view, faith is the means adopted to hold beliefs which science and rationality fail to explain, but which are still sound. This way faith is a counterpart to rationality by answering questions that the latter cannot.

Faith as contradicting rationality: This implies that people adopt faith as a means to believe knowledge claims even though there is ether no evidence to support it or existing evidence to oppose it. This way faith emerges harmful as it prevents the person from considering and analyzing his belief by thinking it over and forces him to strictly accept what he is told. For example, atheists strongly oppose the existence of God and those that have faith in his existence without a valid reason to describe him or his existence.

“Theism” implies the belief in God. Theists, its supporters, are found all over the world in large numbers. Take India for example, you’d definitely find more theists than atheists here and these theists on being questioned on their belief, make an admission that the reason behind it is their acquired knowledge from their parents or the soundness of religious texts that they may have read. They want to believe that the world was created by a form, a force because well it cannot be created by “nobody”. That is all the reason they can come up with to contradict an atheist like me. Many of these people deny that our epics are very fairy-tale like and that Lord Krishna didn’t exist in Human form and lifted a mountain on his tiny fingers. Instead they get furious when I try to prove them wrong and refuse to continue to participate in the argument which indicates that their it is their strong faith that are stubborn to maintain.

All religions involve some kind of hypocrisy and contradiction in some way. Basically they are unstable, unorganized and not based on much analysis, dictating their own principles and laws of morality, which makes them pretty unreliable.

The reasons people still believe in them is that they are cowards to defy their faith even after knowing that they cannot back their belief with a reason, they fear things that cannot be explained by science, and their faith in the religion itself defies them by dictating a punishment to those who do not hold on to their respective religions (Islam is an evident example).

To a considerable extent, religion has dampened the progress of humanity causing war, exploitation and suppression of many things, for both man and his society. Therefore a world without religion would be a better place to live in with atheists reasoning beliefs by voicing their ideas. But I do no see this happening and people will continue to believe in the masses discrediting the factual matter that no proof backs the existence of God, hell or afterlife.

Let us move from religion to knowledge claims and areas of knowledge. Knowing means grasping and retaining something in your mind with clarity, according to most dictionaries. This definition does not imply that you have to have proof to argue about the degree of rationality about what you know. Different areas of knowledge have different answers and it is not necessary, therefore, to prove something in order to barely know about it. When we acquire knowledge in class everyday we get to know about new things but these things don’t need to be backed by proof to be just “known” to us.

For example, in Math, my favourite subject, there are specific and sometimes even more than one proofs for a particular formula. You can apply the formula without having to know the proof and still deduce the answer with accuracy. All you have to know for calculating the third angle’s value in a triangle is the law that “the sum of al three angles is 180 degrees” and the value of the other two angles without having to know the proof behind the laws validity. We therefore also come to a conclusion that proof is very evident and exists in mathematical knowledge than all the other areas of knowledge. My cousin, who dropped out of junior college, once argued that science cannot prove things it. Instead it can alter existing beliefs and replace it by ones that sound more rational. For example the theories about the size of the universe and the structure of matter have been gradually disproved in the past and displaced by fresh ones. Does this mean that science will end up disproving all of its own theories just because certain facts are freshly discovered? What’s the point in studying science in high school then? What we end up doing is grasping laws and their applications, so we say that we have knowledge of them, but the fact lies that what we are learning are facts that can never have stable proofs which brings us to the conclusion that we are having faith in what we are told about the subject.

Considering history, we all know that our text books comprises mostly of information that is passed on from different authors to their successors so their works can not actually be proved by them unless they are eyewitnesses to the events.

Moral values, for example, can neither be proved. One may believe that it is wrong to undertake a certain deed but will run out of a single proof to explain why we believe it is wrong. I asked my sister why she feels killing a person is wrong, to which replied that religious texts, law and society consider it wrong which is why she must do as well. Here again we come down to faith, don’t we? I admit that it is wrong to kill humans but my reason is that I believe in it and I confess of having no proof to back my belief.

This argument, I believe, is long enough to put before you my conclusion that we are able to know things without being able to prove things, as is the case with most areas of knowledge and that belief in something comes down to your faith in it and not evidence. Amazingly nothing is “absolutely true” because nothing can have stable evidence.

Abhishek Chhabria

TOK 1