Thought for the Week: Faith and scepticism
John Anderson considers the need for faith and scepticism
Faith and scepticism – we need both – faith without scepticism is like trying to walk with one leg only – but, as I omitted to say, one has to have some impression, opinion or belief for scepticism to act on – scepticism is the leg that cannot exist on its own.
William Le Fevre
If we require evidence that Homo sapiens is not, in the nature of things, the topmost predator, we need look no further than the evolution of these counter-balancing virtues – faith and scepticism. Credulous gazelles that mistake a crouching lion for an anthill are easy prey, and nature, red in policy and performance, makes short work of the credulity gene.
At the other extreme a gazelle that suspects every anthill to be a crouching lion soon dies of starvation, if not from nervous exhaustion. Our sense organs have evolved to help us to locate good things (pasture, shelter, mating opportunities) and dodge the bad (lions). But the knowledge (learnt the hard evolutionary way) that, one way or another, the world out there is trying to deceive, causes us constantly to question the evidence of our senses.
Evolutionary pressures ensure those ‘prey species’ that successfully negotiate the narrow straits between these contraries out-survive the others (this also explains the total absence of solipsist gazelles). A top predator has no such imperative or need to question his impressions: mistaking a gazelle for an anthill is not, for the lion, an immediately lethal misapprehension.
Quakers are, I believe, unique in placing scepticism at the heart of a belief system: Advices & queries 17 counsels us to ‘Think it possible that you may be mistaken’.
Members of the Religious Society of Friends believe, and are sceptical about, many different things – each belfry with its full and different quota of bats. Even so, Quakers are pretty much agreed that there is more to life than pasture, shelter, mating opportunities and the avoidance of lions. Consequently, we aspire, among other things, to answer that of God in everyone and live in the ‘Light and Power’ that takes away the occasion of war.
Of course, we cherish belief, but always with a degree of provisionality and in the knowledge that a multitude of perfectly reasonable people believe something diametrically different. Experience may lead to increasing certitude, even to convincement, but never beyond; perhaps what we all might aim for is a living faith as opposed to a dead certainty – for in the Society of Friends scepticism is returned home to its proper abode in the soul as this counterbalance to credulity.
So, there remain these twin virtues – faith and scepticism. Both are necessary and, give it a tweek, neither is more necessary than the other. The appropriate function of scepticism is not to critique the experience of others but my own.
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