Seeing is Believing

By Jon Elsby

*Seeing is Believing* develops themes touched on in an earlier book by the same author, *Coming Home* (also published by CentreHouse Press), but with greater focus on the relations between faith and culture, in the broadest sense. It’s a crucially important issue for our time, addressed by several American apologists, though very few on the UK side of the Atlantic have shown much interest in it. In fact, British Catholics in general – both clergy and laity, with only a handful of exceptions – have been content, in recent years, to leave apologetics to the Americans.

Apologetics raises one fundamental question with the widest implications: exactly how do we form beliefs? Few people are argued into beliefs by any process of reasoning. Arguments are usually ex post facto rationalizations of beliefs that have already been arrived at on other grounds. They bolster beliefs, but do not cause us to hold them. The subject of belief – what it is, how it differs from knowledge, what the epistemological status of true beliefs is, and what precisely constitutes a ground or warrant for belief – has been much debated by philosophers, theologians, and others. Perhaps the most important questions are these:

How do we form beliefs? Why do people who are equally rational, equally intelligent, and equally well informed, differ so markedly over what to believe, over what to count as evidence, and over what evidence is deemed sufficient to warrant assent, or is deemed finally probative?

These are not easy questions, which perhaps cannot safely be entrusted to the speculations of the uninstructed. Nevertheless, the views of the laity have their place. They cannot claim any special authority, unlike the views of trained theologians or the Church’s magisterium, and they must therefore be offered with a proper degree of humility. But, if theology is, as Chesterton said, merely the application of thought to religion, then it is the responsibility of all Christians to engage in theology to the best of their ability, while bearing in mind that their opinions, however sincerely held, are as fallible as the next person’s. The ultimate folly is to suppose that anyone, including oneself, possesses a monopoly of truth, wisdom, or rationality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CentreHouse Press
• Release date: Dec 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005483524

Jon Elsby

Jon Elsby’s spiritual and intellectual journey has been from Protestantism to atheism, and finally to Catholicism. He writes extensively on Catholic literature and Catholic literary figures.

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About the author

Jon Elsby’s spiritual and intellectual journey has been from Protestantism to atheism, and finally to Catholicism, an evolution he has traced in his memoir Wrestling With the Angel: A Convert’s Tale, published in paperback by CentreHouse Press. The present text is one of several explorations of Christian apologetics.

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Copyright © Jon Elsby 2021

Published by CentreHouse Press 2021 | http://www.centrehousepress.co.uk

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Introduction

Seeing is Believing picks up some of the themes touched on in an earlier book of mine, Coming Home, but it is more focused on the relations between faith and culture, understood in the broadest sense. This seems to me a crucially important issue for our time, but, although it has been addressed by several American apologists, very few on this side of the Atlantic have shown much interest in it. In fact, British Catholics in general – both clergy and laity, with only a handful of exceptions [1] – have been content, in recent years, to leave apologetics to the Americans. [2]

Apologetics raises a very interesting question with wider implications: exactly how do we form beliefs? Few people are argued into beliefs by any process of reasoning. Arguments are usually ex post facto rationalizations of beliefs that have already been arrived at on other grounds. They bolster beliefs, but do not cause us to hold them.

The subject of belief – what it is, how it differs from knowledge, what the epistemological status of true beliefs is, and what precisely constitutes a ground or warrant for belief – has been much debated by philosophers, theologians, and others. Perhaps the most important questions are these:

1 How do we form beliefs?

2 Why do people who are equally rational, equally intelligent, and equally well informed, differ so markedly over (a) what to believe, (b) what to count as evidence, and (c) what evidence to deem (i) sufficient to warrant assent, or (ii) finally probative?

Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, in his recent book Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don’t begins with an account of the scientific investigations of the evidence for the development of the human brain. The capacity to form and hold beliefs is related to the capacity to conceptualize the world – to anticipate, to distinguish cause and effect, to draw valid inferences from the particular to the general, to frame hypotheses, to reason deductively, to recall the past, to interpret data, and to form a logically coherent cognitive architecture. All these capacities are, in turn, related to language – the ability to verbalize, describe, analyze, and categorize experience in complex and sophisticated ways. The early hominids were probably incapable of forming beliefs in the sense in which we understand the term; their brains and mental capacities may have been closer to those of apes. In other words, they lived in a perpetual present, and were equally unable to reflect on past experiences and to anticipate future events. The capacity to form beliefs, and to reason in the subtle, complex, and multilayered ways that make beliefs possible, awaited the emergence of Homo sapiens.

Ward’s exposition of the deliverances of the most recent researches in neuroscience and the cognitive sciences is extremely complex. Unfortunately, it does not lead to any definite conclusions. The reason for this is suggested by the Canadian psychologist and academic, Jordan B. Peterson, in an interview published in The Tablet of 3 February 2018, in which he says,

I don’t think we understand the relationship between space and time and consciousness at all. And I certainly don’t think we understand the role that consciousness plays in being. It is central to being – in some sense. And what that means about consciousness in relationship to space and time, we don’t understand. […] I have read most of the primary works on consciousness and I have kept up with the neuroscience literature. We can localize conscious experiences more effectively to certain brain areas than we could, but I don’t think we know any more about consciousness than we did 50 years ago. And that leaves everything open.

Even among scientists, with their love of exactitude and abhorrence of anything that smacks of poetic or journalistic vagueness, phrases like ‘in some sense’ and ‘in a certain way’ occur pretty frequently in discussions of consciousness: a fact which is itself indicative of the paucity of our knowledge in this area. Perhaps the nature of consciousness, and the relationship between mind and brain – or, to put it another way, between mental and physical events – are mysteries which will lie forever beyond our understanding. Perhaps our efforts to use consciousness to understand consciousness are as futile as trying to see the back of one’s own eyeballs. And perhaps the effort to arrive at a reductive scientific understanding of consciousness is as absurd as trying to give a scientific account of the merits of the Choral Symphony – a bizarre category error. These things remain to be seen. But in the meantime, the scientific inquiries and investigations will continue. New data will be unearthed, previously unknown facts will be established, and novel theories will be developed. But it may be doubted whether all this activity will bring us any closer to a real understanding of consciousness.

But if, ultimately, we cannot shed much light on the problematic relations between mind and body, which, after all, is a perennial question that has dogged philosophy from its beginnings, we can at least demonstrate how complex and inherently mysterious the process of forming beliefs actually is. We can also show that the distinction between beliefs and knowledge is not nearly as clear-cut as scientistic rationalists would like to think. All our beliefs about the world, however closely reasoned they may be and however nearly they may approximate to exact and certain knowledge, are culturally embedded in a matrix of prior assumptions, prejudices, ideas, and ways of seeing. We never just see, but always see as: we represent something to ourselves in a certain way, so that the element of interpretation is inescapable. Yet, the roots of our seeing as – its motives, reasons, and causes, its embeddedness, and whether this be mental and cultural or physical and physiological – remain obscure, unconscious, perhaps pre-conscious, and, to some degree, unfathomable.

Many Christians believe that, given the post-Enlightenment distinction between the exact knowledge supposedly yielded by logico-mathematical or scientific methods of reasoning and the ‘irrationality’ (or arationality) of belief in propositions for which no clear proof could be adduced, and given the cognitive dissonance between the truth-claims of Christian orthodoxy and the modern scientistic worldview, the best that religion can achieve is a sort of half-belief. The objection to this, from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy, is that it comes nowhere near meeting the criteria for religious faith. No one will be martyred, or serve in the missions, or devote his or her whole life to prayer and contemplation or to the relief of the suffering of the wretched, for the sake of a mere ‘half-belief’. Nothing short of the certitude of faith will suffice for such purposes.

But the question remains: is such certitude available to us today? Liberal Christians deny that it is. So do some philosophically sophisticated Christians. If we want to create a secure space, somewhere in the cognitive architecture of knowledge and belief, for faith, in the sense in which the word has been traditionally understood by the Christian community (i.e. an apostolic faith as opposed to ‘half-belief’), we need to pursue a different apologetic strategy.

In ‘Cosmology’, the final essay in her 2012 collection When I Was A Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson considers the question how we form beliefs and convictions. She writes as follows:

I pause here to ponder what I consider one of the most remarkable aspects of human nature, its profound tractability. In fact, its intractable tractability. When its subject is our own nature and the nature of our kind, something we all experience continuously and immediately, it is clear that we can be persuaded of absolutely anything, at whatever cost in personal misery or general destruction. Education of every kind, whether random or intentional, can have the deepest consequences for any individual’s sense of himself or herself. Our ancestors seem to have been persuaded that they were souls or spirits. Very much in their society reinforced this ancient belief. Was it based in intuition? Superstition? Wishful thinking? Or the simple tendency of people to allow their culture to form their beliefs? Now there are those who reject the very idea that there is such a thing as a soul or spirit. Is this denial based on their own experience? Is it a consequence of the rejection of the cultural narratives that make a religious understanding of the self available? Is it an acceptance of cultural tendencies that seem to them most intellectual or influential or least open to challenge, or seem to be shared among their peers? Who can know, finally? Why we think what we think is another imponderable. That the mind is susceptible to any number of influences is beyond doubt. Also beyond doubt is the significance for the individual of the contents, processes, and conclusions that characterize any mind.

That is well said. The processes by which we form beliefs, and beliefs grow into convictions are largely opaque to our understanding. The New Atheists arrogantly (and childishly) claim that atheists should be known as ‘brights’, presumably implying that anyone who holds theistic beliefs is dim. They also claim to be ‘rationalists’, again implying that they enjoy a monopoly of reason, and religious believers are, by definition, irrational. This is nonsense, and indicative not only of hubris on their part, but of a truly astonishing level of bigotry, insularity, psychological naïveté, and cultural ignorance. If they were capable of appreciating the value of any opinion that they do not already hold, they might benefit from an introductory course in Marilynne Robinson’s essays.

So again: how do we form our beliefs? One answer to the question is surprisingly simple: we form them by perception. We simply see that something is the case. Not necessarily with the organs of physical sight – in fact, more often than not, perception depends not on eyesight, but on some inward faculty of vision or intuition which enables us to apprehend an idea, and, having apprehended it, to appropriate it as our own.

Let’s take a concrete example. Suppose someone denies the existence of saints. Suppose he argues that all human beings are imperfect, none of us is black or white, but we are all varying shades of grey. Therefore (he continues, pursuing his argument) to revere some people as saints is a kind of idolatry: it involves putting some people on pedestals to be uncritically admired by others. But no one deserves such admiration. Instead, we should just try to form accurate judgments about the people we know (or know about), and refrain from judgment about the people we don’t know.

On the face of it, the argument has a certain plausibility. But now suppose that you have not only read about the saints: you have actually met a saint. You have met someone whom you knew well, whose words and acts convinced you that s/he was more than just a good person: s/he was an actual, living saint, a person who, despite his or her human defects, was endowed with what the Catholic Church calls ‘heroic virtue’, a person with an authentic and unmistakable aura of holiness. It is impossible to deny such primary evidence. Abstract knowledge arrived at through a process of reasoning may be doubted, for such ‘knowledge’ often turns out to be mistaken. But no one can reasonably deny what s/he has experienced at first hand. Anyone who has undergone such an experience will be unmoved by abstract arguments, however reasonably or persuasively they may be expressed.

Here is another example, one drawn from my own experience. Back in the 1960s, I lived for nearly three years in Virginia in the United States. One of our neighbours was a lady who had been brought up in the deep South. She had been taught, from her earliest years, to regard black people as inferior to whites and to accept that view as scripturally warranted. But when she grew old enough to think for herself, she found that, for two reasons, those beliefs could not be sustained. First, they were not consistent with the teachings of Christ. And second, they were not consistent with observable facts. She had come to know a great many black people whom she liked and respected and knew to be admirable in many different ways. The view that these fine men and women were intrinsically inferior to white people merely because of the colour of their skin, became rationally untenable for her. So her views changed in light of what she had seen.

For certain beliefs, notably religious beliefs, what is decisive (or so it seems to me) is an experience of encounter. If we have encountered holiness, we cannot deny its existence. By the same token, if we have encountered evil, we cannot deny its existence. We have to accept it and account for it in some way that satisfies not only our intellects, but all our cognitive faculties. We are not free to adopt a worldview which does not take proper cognizance of what we know to be the case because we have seen it for ourselves. If we were so foolish as to attempt it, the resultant cognitive dissonance would be intolerable.

Encounter is not necessarily physical. For example, we encounter works of art. Listening to a piece of music, looking at a painting, and reading a book, are all experiences of encounter in the sense I mean. All such experiences have the power to influence us, to shape our thinking, and affect the way we see the world and conceptualize what we see.

I take all this to be simple and self-evident. Yet many people today base their views of religion not on what they can see, but on a handful of unexamined assumptions: God does not exist; miracles are impossible; and ancient testimony is unreliable. No proof is offered for any of these: they are treated as unchallengeable axioms. Yet all three are highly disputable.

The perspective from which this book is written is that of a believing Catholic, but a layman without expertise in theology. My purpose is only to set before others like myself some of the reasons why they should consider the Catholic option instead of dismissing it as a mediæval relic, undeserving of the attention of educated adults in the modern world. In keeping with this modest aim, I have nothing to say on such complex and controverted matters as the relations between nature and grace, or logos and ethos, or revelation and reason: these are technical questions of theology, and best left to the professionals. That is not to say that such questions are irrelevant to the laity: in fact, the opposite is true – the questions are of such importance and criticality that they cannot safely be entrusted to the speculations of the uninstructed.

Nevertheless, the views of the laity have their place. They cannot claim any special authority, unlike the views of trained theologians or the Church’s magisterium, and they must therefore be offered with a proper degree of humility. But, if theology is, as Chesterton said, merely the application of thought to religion, then it is the responsibility of all Christians to engage in theology to the best of their ability, while bearing in mind that their opinions, however sincerely held, are as fallible as the next person’s. The ultimate folly is to suppose that anyone, including oneself, possesses a monopoly of truth, wisdom, or rationality.

Chapter One

Introducing apologetics

When suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal,

Corrected ‘I believe’ to ‘one does feel’.

—Ronald Knox, Absolute and Abitofhell

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

—C. S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?

What is apologetics?

Apologetics is the defence or justification of belief. Although one can be an apologist for anything, the term is generally used in connexion with religious belief, especially Christianity.

Justifying a belief is not the same as offering proof that the belief is true. If a belief can be proved, then it is no longer a belief but an item of knowledge. When we can prove that x is true, we no longer believe it; we know it. We do not have faith in the laws of physics or in mathematical theorems; we consider them objects of knowledge.

So what exactly does it mean to justify a belief? And why should we believe something we can’t prove? The answer to the first question will, I hope, emerge in the course of this essay. At this stage, I shall only say that, in order to justify a belief, we have to show some reason to think it more probably true than false. As for