Intellectual Integrity

Faith as a choice to trust someone or to follow a certain pattern of life does not necessarily conflict with openness to other possibilities or to putting our ideas to the test. And there is always the possibility that the choice may change based on future experience.

Suppose I say of someone, “He doesn’t believe in anything!” What problem am I having with this person? I am saying that he has no inner core. He cannot be trusted. You cannot know what he will do because he has no guiding principles.

Faith then does not mean accepting something without question. It means a firm decision to live life in a certain way and perhaps to take certain ideas and theories as working assumptions.

But what if I take as working assumptions things that end up being contradicted by experience? Can I still be a person of faith if I change my beliefs? I don’t necessarily change them quickly but I note that this experience needs to be reconciled with my faith, and if it can’t be, then I change my working assumptions. My faith is firm, but it can change if needed. This is not the same as just jumping from one thing to another.

From the other end, some people say that it is always wrong to believe something without sufficient evidence. It is OK to decide to follow certain ethical principles, but I cannot claim truth for things that I cannot verify. But taking something as a working assumption is not the same as claiming it is true. It is deciding, when there is nothing better to go on, to try a theory out in practice and to see what comes of it. It is suspending disbelief for some purpose. It is not claiming absolute certainty since we are only human, and it is not insisting that other people must make the same choice although we might recommend it to them.

The problem comes when we insist that our faith must be accepted independent of any future experience, and that it must be universally accepted. We want certainty from our faith. We want assurance that our faith will never, never fail us. But this is a confusion of categories. A decision is not the same as truth. And refusing to consider contradictory evidence is not the same as absolute assurance.

Intellectual integrity is the willingness to test our theories despite our hopes and fears. It is avoiding wishful thinking and insisting that something must be true just because we want it to be. It is resisting the temptation to compartmentalize and to give our most cherished beliefs preferential treatment. It is facing up to our limits.

But we can do all of this and still explore options and be open to possibilities. It is not wrong to hope. It is wrong to deny evidence in the name of hope. It is not wrong to have working assumptions. It is wrong to claim that our working assumptions are absolute truths. It is not wrong to join a community of faith, to decide to take on its norms and practices. It is wrong to declare war on other communities of faith and to try to force other people to make the same decision.

But wouldn’t it be better to be more conservative with our working assumptions? Shouldn’t we apply Occam’s Razor and keep things as simple as possible? Shouldn’t we suspend judgment on areas that we cannot easily test?

It depends on what you want from life. It is possible to not try anything unless you know for sure that you are making the right choice, but that would severely limit your choices. Most choices have an element of risk.

But what are you risking when you decide to join a community of faith? And what possibilities are you opening up for yourself?

One problem is that many people of faith will not be so careful about their claims. They will be dogmatic and intolerant and exclusive. It is a danger of faith. It may be hard for you to accept this attitude and it may eventually chase you away. Also, these others may look at you with suspicion. You are not a true believer, not like them. Maybe you are a covert heretic.

 We have already discussed that religious communities may have legitimate concerns about preserving the integrity of their religion. But you do not want to change the religion. You are not a highjacker. You just want to be honest with yourself. If the community cannot accept that, you choices are to keep it to yourself, to find a more open community, or to withdraw into a private religion.

But religion is not just a matter of making working assumptions about things you can never know for sure. It is more about finding a context and structure for your inner experiences and ethical choices. A view of knowledge that takes in the whole range of experience and accepts that some experiences are easier to test than others, leaves a lot of room for exploration. It is not just beliefs, it is experience and mutual support in ethical choices. Such an approach to faith can be very compatible with intellectual integrity.