One way to deal with an apparently contradictory doctrine in your religion is the response of Restraint. There’s a connection here, with the medieval Catholic doctrine of “implicit faith”, so I thought I’d explore it a little, and in my next post, I’ll apply this to the issue of Restraint in the face of an apparent contradiction. I welcome any Catholic friends out there to add to or correct what I say here.
This term (fides implicitas) pops up frequently in 16th-19th century non- (O.K. anti-) Catholic material, and it is easy to ridicule. I have the impression that it was a popular teaching both at the scholarly and popular level in late medieval Catholicism, but at least according to this Cardinal, more recent Catholic thought has steered away from it:
Wisely, in my opinion, the popes and councils have avoided talk about implicit faith, a term that is vague and ambiguous. (Avery Cardinal Dulles, in “Who Can Be Saved?” in First Things magazine)
In the current Catholic Catechism I could find only one reference to it, so while it hasn’t been repudiated, it seems that (at least at the official level) it is not put to much use.
In any case, “implicit faith” in a doctrine is where you don’t believe that doctrine, but you have some state of mind such that it’s as good (for some purpose) as if you did believe it. If one holds, with the “Athanasian” Creed that
Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith; Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
and one interprets “holding the catholic faith” as believing all of its core doctrines, or some core of these, then people who have never heard those doctrines, or loyal laypeople who are too stupid, busy, or uneducated to do this are out of luck. And that seems a bit harsh. So, “implicit faith” to the rescue! Doug the ditch-digger may be saved. And some Christian circa 200 C.E. didn’t believe the Chalcedonian two-natures doctrine, but he did “implicitly believe” it, because he committed himself to believe whatever the Church says, and it was saying things which logically implied that doctrine. And perhaps the pius Buddhist enjoys something similar.
My own view is that talk of “implicit belief” isn’t helpful, for it isn’t a kind of belief. Rather, one is admitting that belief in these doctrines isn’t, for some folks at least, necessary for salvation, and asserting that God will accept something else from them.
Apparently, in at least in late medieval and early modern times some theologians applied to this issue of “mysteries” such as the Trinity and Incarnation. Is it of any help? Ought we to say that simple folk needn’t believe in, say, the Trinity, because they have “implicit faith” whatever the Church (or if you like, the Bible) teaches? This is a possibility worth exploring.
Next time: a “Dumb Ox” on Restraint and “implicit belief”.
I think we could add a symptom (even though probably a fallible one) by considering your question:
Suppose you consider something P, and it seems true, and it also seems pretty strongly to you that If P is true then Q – something you firmly believe – is false. Now, what is the criterion for dismissing these seemings (that P is true, and that if P then not-Q) as mere puzzles or technical quibbles?
But this is not the right question to ask in this context; for when would a person in the circumstances imagined be in a position that it could be said, “you consider something P, and it seems true, and it also seems pretty strongly to you that If P is true then Q – something you firmly believe – is false.” Are we to assume that all objections are just so patently obvious that you can lay it out as “it seems that P” and “it seems that if P is true, Q is false”? When we are faced with objections we’re rarely put in a position where it’s just obvious that this is precisely defined P, which seems pretty clearly true, and it seems pretty obvious that if P, then precisely defined Q is false. P’s and Q’s are not well-defined, so obviously the objection’s a good candidate for a defeater; rather, they have to be minded. Sometimes there are ambiguities about P and Q or how they are determined, subtleties of distinction that require development before they can even be assessed properly, quirks in the relations between P and Q that have to be examined before we can be sure that they are always related in that way. Sometimes objections trade on precisely defining something this way, which verbally looks very similar to that way of defining it, but in application turns out to be very different. So complexity is surely a major factor as well. (I suppose it would not be just any complexity but disproportionate complexity: i.e., given one’s best and most reasonable estimate of how complex and sophisticated a response should be, if it turns out to be massively more complex and sophisticated, one might well be suspicious of sleight of hand or invisible mistake.)
“she has as yet no reason not to regard it as more than a mere puzzle or technical quibble”
Suppose you consider something P, and it seems true, and it also seems pretty strongly to you that If P is true then Q – something you firmly believe – is false. Now, what is the criterion for dismissing these seemings (that P is true, and that if P then not-Q) as mere puzzles or technical quibbles?
One criterion, I guess, would be fleetingness – those seemings go away, and are perhaps forgotten. I guess I’m more interested in difficulties that are pretty stable – like, they’re there whenever you do return to the issue (or if you’re intellectually lazy, they would be there if you did, but, you don’t).
In any case, I agree that a difficulty like the above does not, on its first appearance, constitute a defeater. I suspect that the mere puzzle out isn’t very helpful – though I imagine it could be when the problematic seemings are either relatively weak or fleeting.
I agree that an objection you don’t understand can’t give you a defeater.
I agree as well with your last statement. If I’m really exercising restraint, then I’m not going to see how *any* claim can defeat my belief – ’cause I don’t really grasp the content of that belief.
One needn’t be in a state of doubt to be open to the possibility of encountering a defeater for one’s belief.
Yes, but being ‘open to the possibility of encountering a defeater for one’s belief’ is very different from thinking that such-and-such is very possibly a defeater for one’s belief; and recognizing a genuinely possible defeater for one’s belief is one of the very things we mean by doubt.
Anyhow, if she has this extra, defeat-insulating belief, I’m probably going to call her a Mysterian Resistor, rather than a practitioner of Restraint. Her way of handling the problem, probably, is declaring the problem (the apparent contradiction) to be not a problem at all, *for this sort of case*, that is, because we’re dealing with a mystery.
I’m not sure this is required. Cathy could very well hold that she doesn’t know, that other people know; but that she has as yet no reason not to regard it as more than a mere puzzle or technical quibble, and therefore is not inclined in the slightest to doubt on the basis of the objection. I don’t think a ‘defeater-insulator’ is required: all that is required is just not assessing something as a defeater, and there are any number of ways one might be in such a position. (For instance, the objection may have been put in such a way that she herself finds it unintelligible, even though she is willing to defer to the objector at least so far as to allow him to know what he’s talking about.) In other words, there are two ways of not recognizing something as a defeater: simply not seeing how it could be such, and having a reason for actively denying that it is such. I take it that the latter is what you would want to assign to Resistance; but the former still seems to be very much in Restraint territory.
One needn’t be in a state of doubt to be open to the possibility of encountering a defeater for one’s belief. Nor need one be in a state of “certainty” for apparent contradictions to not bother you. Cathy, as you’re imagining her, has what epistemologists call a defeater-insulator – some other belief (which you haven’t stated yet) in light of which any apparent contradiction will be taken as merely apparent – as you say, a puzzle that she might or might not get around to solving, but which can be taken as irrelevant to the truth of the belief in question (here, transubstantiation).
Anyhow, if she has this extra, defeat-insulating belief, I’m probably going to call her a Mysterian Resistor, rather than a practitioner of Restraint. Her way of handling the problem, probably, is declaring the problem (the apparent contradiction) to be not a problem at all, *for this sort of case*, that is, because we’re dealing with a mystery. More on this when I get to Resistance – this is actually the strategy that got me interested enough to make this whole R classification scheme.
Ah, I think it’s possible I might have hit on one reason why you and I are treating cases so different; you are focusing on cases that exhibit doubt (e.g., Cathy sees the argument as an [at least possible] defeater) and I’ve been focusing on cases that exhibit certainty (think of a Cathy who sees the argument not as a defeater at all, or even as a serious candidate for one, but simply as a puzzle she herself hasn’t yet learned to formulate a completely adequate answer to). I would agree that in the former case restraint is more likely to be a problematic response (temporary suspension of judgment or even deference to authority might be in order, but I take it that by restraint we are talking of an approach that has an indefinite but long-term shelf-life, and in any case is more than just deference to experts). And part of the reason, I take it, is that if Cathy regards the argument as a defeater, that would also mean, in this context, a defeater for the beliefs about authority that allow implicit belief in the first place. And if she can regard the argument as a defeater rather than simply as a puzzle, it’s much more unclear what her disposition with regard to X is.
Brandon,
I’m still thinking this through, and I thank you for pressing me on all this. You’ve convinced me on the John next door case. I think you’re right, that I could have referred to him and had beliefs about him. And my worry about my misidentifying him upon meeting him is I think irrelevant. I also agree with your example of implicit about Venus. Note that both of these cases have to do with referring to individuals, though – not with believing in doctrines.
Here, my friend, is where I think you run into trouble.
“No, if she has a vague belief, then she does know that she would believe the fully understood X, for exactly the same reasons she has the vague belief. This is because a full understanding wouldn’t change any of those reasons, by the very nature of the case.”
Catholic Cathy believes the host and wine “are” the body and blood of Jesus. Why? Because Mother Church says so. Then, she reads some anti-Catholic polemical literature, which makes a case that the doctrine of transubstantiation is demonstrably false, and also unsupported by the passages Mother Church adduces in favor of it. Now, Cathy is troubled, for it seems that she’s not only “precisified” her belief in transubstantiation (the polemic accurately relates the doctrine), but she’s acquired at least one defeater for her belief in it. Does she still trust Mother? Yes. But, she’s torn. She may go the way of what I call Mysterian Resistance (or somehow otherwise discover some defeater-defeater) and remain Catholic, suspend belief in trans. until she looks into it more, or agree with the polemicist, so denying that doctrine and either remaining a conflicted Catholic or leaving Catholicism. Which happens is by no means guaranteed by the nature of the case. Even subtract the polemical book from the scenario. It is possible that Cathy, on her own, will when finally made aware of the details of the doctrine, with acquire a defeater for her belief. Let’s grant that the object of her (first implicit, then explicit) belief all along has been THE real (not a straw-man) doctrine. That doesn’t help with my present worries. And my worries about guidance of action and belief-formation are very much intact.
Here’s an additional thought on that. Suppose I in *some* sense believe X, but have just the most meager grasp of the content of X. How ought I to form beliefs or act in light of X? In many cases the answer will be – beats me! It seems, my recourse will be to take the Authorities’ word for it. Might I die for X? Yes, in some sense. But it would seem I’m really dying for my loyalty to the Authorities. Now if the Authorities really are God-sanctioned, this is great. But this is different from dying because of your refusal to deny some truth which you (rather fully) grasp and are convinced of. Both of these can be done from the love of God, of course.
On the worry about there being no fact of the matter. You say “it follows from your reasoning in that paragraph that on a dispositional account of belief nobody knows what they believe.” Not at all. It could be that in most cases, there are determinate facts or probabilities. It’s just, the more levels you go up, the more opportunity there is for libertarian freedom to come into play. So this worry relates more to implicit beliefs.
You say,
You say, “My finding out that John was next door has to be in some way a clarification or ‘precisification’ of the very same belief I had in the first place”.
The very same belief? X and Y can be the same belief even when X and Y have different contents?
But that’s not what I said, and you can clearly see it in the sentence you are quoting. I did not say that X and Y are the very same belief; I said that if X is the original belief, then Y is a ‘precisification’ of that very same belief, i.e., X.
It seems I didn’t refer to him. I had a belief about the house next door, that it was occupied by some person or other, but no belief about who that was. You say “I implicitly believed that John was next door, without being in a position to believe explicitly that John was next door”. Is this because, having only Alice’s testimony to go on, were I to go knock on his door, then I would (explicitly) believe that John lives next door? But, maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d confuse John with a guy who lives across town (and looks a lot like John), and upon meeting him, I’d think he was this other guy. Or is it solely because of the casual origin of my belief, that it traces back to John’s being next door?
The latter part of this is, again, simply a problem that can be posed to dispositional accounts of belief generally; one could pose the same type of ‘maybe’ to any dispositional belief (maybe I wouldn’t assent). This is actually, I think, irrelevant to the question of dispositional beliefs, because a dispositional accounts of belief are not committed to there being no possible circumstances under which the actualization of the disposition would be impeded, so talk of counterfactuals is pointless unless we have good reason to think those counterfactuals are so common or probable that they suggest there is no disposition there at all. And so it is in the case of implicit belief, as well.
You say, “It seems I didn’t refer to him.” But it seems you did, or at least could have. Suppose that you said, “Alice knows that someone is next door”, which is also true given the scenario as set up; Alice knows in particular who it is who’s next door, so in believing that Alice knows that someone is next door, I am believing that there is someone next door whom Alice knows is there. And to believe that I have to be able to refer to that someone next door even though I have no idea who they are. So some sort of reference is there. As it happens, you are referring to John; you just don’t know John under the description ‘John’.
You say, “What I’m concerned with is spinning as “implicit faith” what does not in fact seem to be an actual committment(belief or otherwise) to, say, the core teachings of Catholicism.” But you have still given no account of what it is about implicit beliefs (or any other commitment) that makes this impossible. Prima facie, the fishwoman has a commitment to the core teachings of the Church. She knows them only vaguely, but she is firmly devoted to the Church’s authority, and because of that she might, as perhaps some fishwomen through the centuries have, be willing to be martyred for even finer points of Church teaching that she doesn’t understand. If that’s not practical commitment to what the Church teaches, what is?
For all she knows, were she to understand X, she would (1) only very weakly believe it, (2) withhold on it (neither affirm nor deny it), or (3) deny it.
No, if she has a vague belief, then she does know that she would believe the fully understood X, for exactly the same reasons she has the vague belief. This is because a full understanding wouldn’t change any of those reasons, by the very nature of the case. Thus it is quite clear that she is committed to X; saying that she is not requires introducing a supposition inconsistent with the hypothesis. Assume, as a hypothesis, that she has a vague belief V for reasons R, and that V accurately, within the limits allowed by its level of vagueness, conveys what she intends it to convey (i.e., it really is the teaching of the Church, just vaguely expressed); since new information about what is covered in V will simply fill in the details of V itself, it won’t change the reasons R, because everything new will be consistent with V, and therefore will be covered by R. Thus she knows, for reasons R, that all three of your alternative options are false. Thus your options are only possible on one of three suppositions, none of which require us to reject implicit belief in general: (1) R is actually irrelevant to V; (2) V does not convey what she intends it to convey (the teaching of the Church); (3) the teaching of the Church is incoherent. She has reason to reject (1) (her own evaluation of the situation); she has reason to reject (3), namely, her reasons for accepting the authority of the Church; and (2) she can rule out with the help of the Church. So she is in an excellent situation, and no supposition consistent with her situation rules out implicit belief.
Your libertarian freedom paragraph, if it is a problem, is a problem for dispositional accounts of belief, not implicit faith in particular. For it follows, on your reasoning, that it could be there is no fact of the matter about what someone would assent to. Since a disposition to assent does require that there be some fact of the matter, even if only a ‘probabilistic spread’, it follows from your reasoning in that paragraph that on a dispositional account of belief nobody knows what they believe. That would be a problem, because we do seem to know what we believe, at least to an extent, and it’s precisely these beliefs that we think we have that we have theories of belief to explain. So if your reasoning is correct we should simply reject dispositional accounts of belief. I think the reasoning is flawed, for reasons too long to get into here; but even if good my point would still stand: there is no clear way, assuming a dispositional account of belief, to reject implicit faith.
believing the world is how God believes (or beholds) it to be. Here, we do have vague content.
No, we don’t. We have another trivial truism, at least on standard suppositions about God. For of course the world is how God believes it to be; otherwise God would be mistaken. Assuming that it is impossible for God to be mistaken, then, it is simply a precise statement of a trivial relation between an omniscient God and the world.
Re: my comment #9, and Brandon’s take on it, comment #13.
Brandon, you pounced on the way I put it – “believing the world is a certain way”, or that it is how it is, etc. This would be more to my purpose: believing the world is how God believes (or beholds) it to be. Here, we do have vague content.
I like your John next door example. My intuitions, though, are different than yours. What I believe on Alice’s testimony is that someone is next door. You say that when I find out later that John lives next door, I’ll say: “John is obviously the person I thought was next door”. Huh? “John is next door entails” someone is next door, but not vice-versa. Was I referring to John, believing something about him when I earlier believed that someone is next door?
You say, “My finding out that John was next door has to be in some way a clarification or ‘precisification’ of the very same belief I had in the first place”.
The very same belief? X and Y can be the same belief even when X and Y have different contents? I find that hard to buy, and it doesn’t help to say that the one content is a “precisification of” the other. Don’t we individuate beliefs by contents? Or when you say that the former is just a vague version of the latter – do you mean that they are two, but beliefs somehow of the same kind, say, of the same origin?
In any case, your idea is this. John’s being next door is part of the reason that I believe (on Alice’s testimony) that John is next door, because his being there partly caused her believing so which partly caused her telling me that *someone* is next door). I’m sorry, but I don’t see how my first belief is about John, despite these connections. It seems I didn’t refer to him. I had a belief about the house next door, that it was occupied by some person or other, but no belief about who that was. You say “I implicitly believed that John was next door, without being in a position to believe explicitly that John was next door”. Is this because, having only Alice’s testimony to go on, were I to go knock on his door, then I would (explicitly) believe that John lives next door? But, maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d confuse John with a guy who lives across town (and looks a lot like John), and upon meeting him, I’d think he was this other guy. Or is it solely because of the casual origin of my belief, that it traces back to John’s being next door?
I’m not attacking the notion of implicit belief generally. Look, if I think of beliefs as dispositions, they’re going to come in levels – so “immediately” realizable, others “buried deeper”, as it were. You can call whichever you want “implicit”, when we get beyond the first level. What I’m concerned with is spinning as “implicit faith” what does not in fact seem to be an actual committment(belief or otherwise) to, say, the core teachings of Catholicism. Part of the concern is practical. Beliefs are and action-guiding, and what is “implicitly believed” in many cases, is not (at least, not in the same way). Yet doctrines such as the Trinity and Incarnation are often urged to be centrally important to practice. Further, existing beliefs guide the formation of new beliefs, and again, these Doctrines are often urged as theoretically central to Christian thought. It isn’t clear that implicit beliefs – the kind we’re talking about in the fisherwoman etc. cases – can play this role.
Brandon sez: “old fish woman has an acquired readiness to assent explicitly to claims about Chalcedonian theology that are put forward by a certain authority. So implicit belief is a disposition of the same sort as explicit belief, just less developed and thus less easily issuing in assent in practice to specific details. Everyone recognizes — or, at least, every dispositional account of belief I have seen recognizes — that you can at least sometimes develop a dispositional belief even in cases where you’ve never explicitly formulated it to yourself. So how do we draw a line between these beliefs and implicit beliefs without simply doing it by fiat?”
I grant that she does, just because of her trust in the Authorities have an inclination to believe X (fill in the blank with some theological profundity she can’t now understand).
However, is she overall committed to X? This is far from clear, and here is where I think there’s a non-arbitrary line to be drawn. For all she knows, were she to understand X, she would (1) only very weakly believe it, (2) withhold on it (neither affirm nor deny it), or (3) deny it. Let’s suppose there’s a fact of the matter now about which she would do. Even so, it’s hard to see how she could be in any position to know any of these, or that (4) she would firmly believe X. If so, she can believe she’s committed to X, and want to be committed to it, and want to fully believe X, but all she’s aware of is her current, firm and fervent trust in the Authorities, who say X. That’s not enough to know what she would believe were she to understand X.
But it gets worse. Do you believe in (1) libertarian freedom, or (2) indeterminate mental states? If either or both (yes, I’m aware of the dominant view of counterfactuals) it could be there is no fact of the matter about what she would believe upon finally understanding X (enough to believe it) – there could be possibilities and even probabilities, but no fact about what she would do upon finally understanding X.
Stay tuned for a post on this.
OK, now to the argument of your second comment:
In your view, I could have a (very) vague belief that the world is “a certain way”. I also have a belief about how the details may be filled in – after the resurrection, just ask God. That could fill in *all* the details, right? So then, in your view, I implicitly believe every truth. But, that is incredible. So, if there’s such a thing as “implicit belief” it’s not what you say above.
But a belief that ‘the world is a certain way’ is not a vague belief; triviality and vagueness are not the same, and this is clearly a trivial truth, not a vague one. It actual says something that can be precisely pinned down: it means nothing other than that the particular way the world is, is a particular way the world is. And that’s a precise statement of a trivial fact about the world. Think of it this way. If I say, “For all X, X is X”, I haven’t said anything vague; I’ve simply stated precisely a claim that everything is self-identical. If I plug things into X, I’m not actually ‘filling in the details’ of a vague belief; and you can tell this because I don’t learn anything by plugging things into X — I’m just repeating, by way of particular examples, exactly the same thing that I learned about self-identity in the original claim. The only sense, and it is only a very loose sense, in which it is ‘vague’ is that it is trivial, i.e., it applies regardless of what else may be true, and so doesn’t tell us anything about actually existing things that we couldn’t already take for granted, regardless of what else may be true.
This contrasts with a genuinely vague belief. If I believe, e.g. on good testimony, that someone is in the house next door, we know that this is a vague belief because we can, at least in principle, learn more about the person we believe to be in the house next door, and so can genuinely fill in details in that very belief. If we can have vague beliefs, there is no reason to deny that we can have implicit ones. Consider the following situation. I believe, on Alice’s good testimony, that someone is next door. It turns out that John is next door (and Alice was in a position to know that). Alice later points this out and asks, “Is that what you meant when you said you believed someone is next door?” And I can say, “Yes, it is; I didn’t have John in mind, because you didn’t give me the details, but John is obviously the person I thought was next door, on your authority.” My finding out that John was next door has to be in some way a clarification or ‘precisification’ of the very same belief I had in the first place; but that means that there must be some definite connection between my original vague belief and the ‘precisified’ recognition that John is next door. And there is: the former was just a vague version of the latter, because Alice knew that John is next door, and Alice told me that someone is next door, and because of her I believed that someone is next door, and I later found out that that very person I believed to be next door is none other than John. So it seems that I implicitly believed that John was next door, without being in a position to believe explicitly that John was next door; because there’s no connection between “There’s someone next door” and “John is next door” unless, in fact, John is the someone next door and John’s being next door is the reason I believe someone is next door, whether I knew it or not.
Consider a different sort of example, this one geared not to implicit belief but simply to suggesting that there is nothing problem with the implicitness of implicit belief. I know a lot about Hesperus because of an astronomer friend; but I don’t know yet that Hesperus is Phosphorus, and I haven’t been told anything using the description ‘Phosphorus’. Do I know a lot about Phosphorus? Can’t we hold that my knowledge of Phosphorus is already there, implicit in my knowledge about Hesperus, and can become immediately explicit if only my astronomer friend points out that Hesperus is Phosphorus? But if we can say this, then it doesn’t seem that implicit belief is ruled out simply by being implicit; and we have to answer why the fishwoman can’t implicitly believe what the Chalcedonian believes, without believing it explicitly under the terms the Chalcedonian believes it. If we don’t say this, though, then we have to bite the bullet and say that, because we don’t know that Hesperus is Phosphorus, we don’t know anything about Phosphorus, even though Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus. So we can have implicit knowledge. (And, in fact, we often assume that we can have some form of implicit acceptance when we say that someone holds contradictory beliefs. For it is rarely the case that someone will explicitly believe two things that are contradictory, in the sense that they would at the same time assent to both sides of the question. Rather, usually what we mean is that they hold a set of principles that, if their logical implications are followed through, bring us eventually to a contradiction. So we take people to believe, implicitly, what their beliefs imply; but most of what their commitments imply will not be explicitly recognized. So it’s implicit in the original belief — if it weren’t we couldn’t explicate it and say that they believed a contradiction, because they never explicitly believed it.) Why not implicit belief? If it’s the implicitness that’s the problem, what makes it problematic? If it’s not, what is the problem?
Carl – I must admit that you have me a bit confused. First, you say that
“Faith is a combination of actions and dispositions.”
But then you say that
“Salvific faith in particular is not a matter of an intellectual understanding at all, but an understanding that is shown forth as walking in response to a hope for a thing unseen.”
I have no intention of saying that salvific faith is entirely intellectual; I want to say that it involves both the beliefs and the acts too. However, you then seem to say that it is entirely the act.
Maybe an illustration would help. Let’s say that Person A gets up, goes to church, worships God, read the Bible, is enlightened by fellow members of the church. Person B, on the other hand, goes to a temple, and performs a puja ritual starting with a little elephant-headed idol, and reads the Vedas and Upanishads for spiritual comfort. Person C avoids all stuff even remotely connected with “spiritual” realities and really wants to do nothing more than kick up his feet, drink watered-down beer and watch old football games for the rest of his life, since nothing really matters in life anyhow.
It seems that the actions of each of these people presuppose different beliefs, and therefore different intellectual understandings. We can argue about what the necessary belief is that distinguishes Christian living (or perhaps even the necessary cluster of beliefs, of which only one would be needed), but if the Christian lifestyle and the the active component of salvific faith have something which differentiate them, then there is some different understanding involved.
If faith really were only “an understanding that is shown forth as walking in response to a hope for a thing unseen” with no further determination, then any optimist who realizes that she doesn’t understand the world would have saving faith.
Just as a good map is isomorphic with a region of land, so we want how we’re committed to the world being to match with how it really is.
Beliefs are not ‘isomorphic’ to reality, even on standard correspondence theories. If I have a belief, “Strawberries are delicious,” this is not isomorphic to anything; it is merely a judgment about strawberries. It may correspond in the sense of strawberries actually being delicious; but it is no more ‘isomorphic’ to or ‘maps’ reality than a nametag is ‘isomorphic’ to or ‘maps’ a human being. There are no analogies between maps and beliefs except in the vague sense that they are things that in some way or other can be about other things.
On “stoutly asserting something as obvious which is not at all obvious, at least to many of us” I think it can be fairly pointed out that you are actually doing this, as well, and have done it several times in discussing restraint alone (which is not to say I don’t like the series). (Cf. your ‘nuts’ comment on the Aquinas post.) So at the very least turnabout’s fair play. But there is more to it than that, because
(1) Recall that my point was that it’s hard to see how a line can be drawn, if we take belief to be dispositional. If you have a dispositional account of belief, you hold belief to be an acquired readiness to assent explicitly, or something analogous. But the old fish woman has an acquired readiness to assent explicitly to claims about Chalcedonian theology that are put forward by a certain authority. So implicit belief is a disposition of the same sort as explicit belief, just less developed and thus less easily issuing in assent in practice to specific details. Everyone recognizes — or, at least, every dispositional account of belief I have seen recognizes — that you can at least sometimes develop a dispositional belief even in cases where you’ve never explicitly formulated it to yourself. So how do we draw a line between these beliefs and implicit beliefs without simply doing it by fiat?
(2) Either the old woman’s belief is a vague belief about Christ understood in light of the Church’s Chalcedonian theology, or it is not a belief at all. We can see this by the fact that the old woman intends to believe in what the Church teaches, and the Church teaches Chalcedonian theology; she may be right or wrong in formulation even on her level of vagueness, but she herself recognizes herself as assenting to the teaching of the Church, whatever precisely it may be, under such description as she is able to formulate. Again, even if her belief is mistaken, it is a belief about that; and it is against that that it will be measured as correct or incorrect. So either she is assenting to the teaching of the Church, however vaguely, or she is simply incorrect in thinking that she is assenting to anything. But she obviously is assenting to something; so she must be assenting to what she thinks she is assenting to. And thus we seem to be in implicit belief territory.
I have to run now, but I’ll comment on the argument in your second comment a bit later.
“Saying that it is about ‘who knows me’ doesn’t get out of the problem; I still respond, whether from my will or God’s, based on certain understanding.”
Yes, but the question is whether the response takes the form of an “intellectual belief” or an “action.” — Of course, this is a false dichotomy. James 2:20 “But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?” Faith is a combination of actions and dispositions. Salvific faith in particular is not a matter of an intellectual understanding at all, but an understanding that is shown forth as walking in response to a hope for a thing unseen.
“But besides that, there is a difference between what is required for salvation, and what is required for responsible conversation with people along intellectual lines. One may be saved regardless of a deeper understanding, but to be a responsible member of the community, on needs to put in some mental work.”
But the question here is not about whether it is possible to talk about theology in depth. Clearly, it is. The question is about whether one can believe in a theology without understanding all of its details.
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Brandon – one more thought on your comment.
In your view, I could have a (very) vague belief that the world is “a certain way”. I also have a belief about how the details may be filled in – after the resurrection, just ask God. That could fill in *all* the details, right? So then, in your view, I implicitly believe every truth. But, that is incredible. So, if there’s such a thing as “implicit belief” it’s not what you say above.
I’m not sure why you’re so down on the map analogy. Just as a good map is isomorphic with a region of land, so we want how we’re committed to the world being to match with how it really is. In this analogy, your strawberry belief would be just a teeny bit of the whole map.
“It is simply wrong to say that she has no belief whatsoever about whether Christ is both God and Man” – nothing like just stoutly asserting something as obvious which is not at all obvious, at least to many of us. There are a great many propositional contents that could be meant by “Christ is both God and man”. What is obvious is that said woman could believe many of those. What isn’t obvious is that she could believe, e.g. that Christ has complete divine and a complete human nature – supposing, for instance, that she’s completely unfamiliar with this “nature” terminology or the metaphysical concepts that go with it. As to my view somehow ruling out vague beliefs – sorry, I don’t get it. Care to elaborate?
But anyway, it’s pretty clear that you don’t have this ability.
Yes, it’s very clear that I don’t have this ability. But abilities and beliefs, even when the latter are considered dispositional, are not usually lumped in together so easily. I don’t have the ability to see through walls, either, but I can still believe that there’s something inside the house next door.
I think it’s very implausible to suggest that ‘beliefs are like a map of reality’; in what way is my belief that strawberries are delicious ‘like a map of reality’? But if beliefs were like a map of reality, that would tell in favor of implicit belief, not against it: we don’t think that a map suggests that if you reach the edge of the map that there’s nothing beyond, particularly if there’s a note saying, “Consult an atlas for any information beyond this point.”
What implicit belief is, I think, is a vague first-order belief combined with a belief about how details may be filled out. So, for instance, a poor fish woman believes that Christ, in some sense the Son of God, died for her sins as the Church has told her he has, but lacks the education to follow a discussion of the Church’s Chalcedonian theology. It is simply wrong to say that she has no belief whatsoever about whether Christ is both God and Man; she just doesn’t have a belief about it that is precise enough to be able to cash it out in rigorously Chalcedonian terms. If your position were right, it should be impossible to have vague beliefs about things — you can’t, in believing that physicists have discovered a black hole have a vague belief about their discovery of empirical confirmation of a singularity arising in certain equations in advanced physics. This doesn’t seem right. Ordinary Joe can clearly have a vague belief about the empirical confirmation of mathematical equations far too advanced for him to understand, which clearly is a vague belief about that rather than something else because it is conjoined with a belief about who is the right authority to consult for details (physicists).
Hi Brandon,
I was assuming that belief is dispositional. Still, it seems clear to me that the doctrine of “implicit faith” is aimed at cases where people don’t believe something.
Can you speak Chinese? I assume not. Of course, it’s logically possible that you speak it, and it seems to me you’re smart enough to. Perhaps some circumstances in your life prevent you from coming to speak it. But anyway, it’s pretty clear that you don’t have this ability. Similarly, ditchdigger Dan may (and I mean no offense to ditchdiggers here!) be a bit dull – really unable (in this life) to conceive of the Incarnation as theologians do. But what about someone who is plenty smart enough, and who is disposed to trust (say) Catholic theologians, but who never looks into it. Does she believe in the Incarnation? I think not. Our beliefs are like a map of reality. Hers lacks this God-man element. I think this is different from someone who has believed that in the past, but who has been distracted, say, for 50 years. The latter, as it were, has a bit of his map which long stays folded up and out of sight. But that bit is still there.
So I guess what I’m saying is – having a belief is having a low-order ability to think in a certain way. Either first-order (one just can think that way) or second-order – one is able to be able to think that way. Or something close. Once you get to “high up”, I think, our concept of belief no longer applies. But the “implicit faith” cases – so far as I can tell – are like these “higher up” ones.
My own view is that talk of “implicit belief” isn’t helpful, for it isn’t a kind of belief.
I don’t think the division between implicit and explicit belief is as clear as you are suggesting; for instance, if I am discussing Hume, there are things that I am directly familiar with and therefore have explicit beliefs about, and there are things that I don’t have direct familiarity with, and so would check with the text. So if I have a claim X, which I believe already; and claim Y, which I believe on condition that it is confirmed by the text; and claim Z, which I haven’t actually thought yet, but, given my exegetical habits, I certainly will believe if I look at the text; and claim A, which I used to believe explicitly but have long since forgotten, but am disposed to believe if I come across it again; is it really the case that I only really believe X? As you know, there’s a longstanding distinction between views of belief that take it as occurrent and those that take it as dispositional; there are serious problems with denying that belief is dispositional, but if belief is dispositional, it is very difficult to draw a line that rules out implicit belief as a genuine form of belief.
(It is interesting, incidentally, with regard to Dulles’s comment, that in Aquinas’s account of belief it is explicit belief that is the vague term; implicit belief is a readiness to believe on the basis of faith in authority — you either have it or you don’t. But explicit belief can be more or less explicit.)
Carl – It would seem that some knowledge is necessary for salvation on any sort of exclusivist soteriology. I have to know something about the Christian narrative which is not true outside of that narrative (e.g. that Jesus is the Son of God who died for my sins, and was resurrected). Now, I can understand these points in a number of ways, and this is only background knowledge to a existential conversion which is ultimately salvific (whether that is through faith in Christ, acceptance of the sacrament of baptism, repentance, etc.), but it is necessary knowledge nonetheless. Is this gnosticism, too? Otherwise, it seems that no more Christians would be saved than non-Christians. Saying that it is about “who knows me” doesn’t get out of the problem; I still respond, whether from my will or God’s, based on certain understanding.
But besides that, there is a difference between what is required for salvation, and what is required for responsible conversation with people along intellectual lines. One may be saved regardless of a deeper understanding, but to be a responsible member of the community, on needs to put in some mental work.
A nice quote: “Thus, St. James says, we are only fully justified when we act on what we say we believe–otherwise we only have the theology of demons: assent without deeds.”
From http://ohtasteandsee.blogspot.com/2007/04/faith-and-works-paul-and-james.html
John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by [knowing all about] me.
Matthew 19:14 But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven [provided, of course, that they understand the Nicene Creed when they recite it].
James 2:19 Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe [but their belief is based on an understanding of an altogether sketchy sort and does not really count as belief], and tremble.
The good book says it; I believe it; that settles it.*
* For values of it, where it = what I wanted to believe anyway and not what it actually says.
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My own view is that talk of “implicit belief” isn’t helpful, for it isn’t a kind of belief. Rather, one is admitting that belief in these doctrines isn’t, for some folks at least, necessary for salvation, and asserting that God will accept something else from them.
Isn’t the belief that possessing a particular, secret kind of knowledge is the key to salvation called “gnosticism”?
We certainly aren’t saved by what we know. If we are saved, it is because of Who knows us.
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