The Physiology of Faith by N. Fakhr - HTML preview

Trust in Expert Consensus

If someone asks me how fast light travels, I can answer with considerable confidence: about 300,000 kilometers per second. If I am asked how far the Sun is from the Earth, I will again answer confidently: about 150 million kilometers. But where does this confidence come from? Not only have I never measured the speed of light or calculated the distance between the Earth and the Sun myself, I would not even know how to perform those measurements. Yet I feel that I possess knowledge about both. And if an ordinary person were to deny either of these statements, I would probably regard him as ignorant—someone who, without understanding the science, has chosen to challenge it. How, then, did this strong sense of knowledge about the speed of light or the distance between the Earth and the Sun arise in me?

If I were told that physicists had become divided over the speed of light, I would no longer have the same confidence in the figure of 300,000 kilometers per second. In fact, it is the agreement—or consensus—among experts in a field that leads me to regard propositions accepted within that field as reliable knowledge. I rely on them and, by treating them as correct, use them as the basis for solving scientific problems.

The fact is that consensus among experts in a field creates in us a sense that the propositions accepted within that field constitute genuine and reliable knowledge.

A similar attitude toward religious scholars exists among believers. When it comes to religious rulings derived from the texts of a religion, this is not in itself an unusual or irrational approach. After all, the clergy and scholars of a religion have learned the knowledge and methods required to derive religious rulings from its sacred texts and other sources. If they reach a substantial degree of consensus on a particular ruling, there may be little alternative but to assume that following the ruling they have derived is probably the closest available course to what the religion actually requires, and that it is unlikely that the majority of its religious scholars have all made the same mistake.

Yet many believers arrive at what they regard as knowledge concerning the fundamental doctrines of their faith in much the same way. Without independently examining the existence of their God, their prophet, or the afterlife through reason, and without evaluating their religious worldview through their own logic, they simply rely on the complete consensus of their religious authorities and assume that all the fundamental doctrines of their religion must therefore be reasonable, logical, and acceptable.

But this raises a question: if the consensus of physicists about the speed of light gives us good reason for confidence, should the consensus of Shinto priests concerning the existence of the Sun Goddess¹² give us the same kind of confidence?

People, whether consciously or unconsciously, expect three conditions to be present among experts in the empirical sciences. It is because these three conditions exist that expert consensus can serve as a source of knowledge for them:

1—Curiosity: People know that experts in the empirical sciences are curious about the subjects they study, and that it is precisely this curiosity that has led them to investigate, study, and debate those subjects. Curiosity makes scientists want to know what the truth about a particular question actually is. It drives them to develop increasingly reliable methods for discovering that truth. It also leads them to question one another’s methods, challenge them, and debate their validity. Curiosity helps make scientific knowledge increasingly reliable and effective. Indeed, curiosity is one of the very qualities that makes an expert in the empirical sciences an expert.

If a scientist lacks curiosity, he is unlikely to enter the path of research in his field, join the community of experts who advance that field through investigation and debate, or become a recognized figure within it.

Religious authorities, however, are generally not curious about the fundamental doctrines of their own religion in this sense; rather, they have faith in them. Firm faith is regarded as a virtue in a religious authority. What makes someone a religious authority is, first and foremost, faith—not curiosity, doubt, or skepticism about the fundamental doctrines and worldview of his religion. If a religious authority studies philosophical works or engages in philosophical debate about the foundations of his religion—for example, the existence of his God—his purpose is usually not simply curiosity, but rather to find rational arguments that reinforce his faith. If philosophy and logic support his religious doctrines, so much the better. But if they seriously call those doctrines into question, he will often prefer to abandon philosophy and logic rather than abandon his fundamental beliefs—and may advise others not to pursue philosophy and logic too deeply either.

Religious myths, too, often portray curiosity unfavorably, depicting the misfortunes that befall those who question or investigate too far—unless they quickly return to their faith.

2—The existence of a decisive criterion in the empirical sciences: The second condition people recognize is that experts in the empirical sciences accept observation and sensory experience as decisive criteria for resolving disagreements among themselves. Empirical observation provides a common standard that scientists can accept regardless of their beliefs, language, nationality, or race. Eventually, after months or years of appropriate observations and experiments, disagreements can be narrowed or resolved, and one theory comes to be accepted by most scientists as the best explanation of the observations, or as the most effective theory for practical purposes.

When it comes to fundamental religious doctrines, however—such as the existence of God or gods and their attributes, the unseen world and the afterlife, the relationship between life before death and life after death, or accounts of the creation of the universe by different gods—there is no single, clearly defined criterion accepted by everyone. Within a particular religion, different people claim to have arrived at faith through one or more different criteria. Some say they trust revelation and regard their prophet as truthful; some appeal to philosophy and logic; some to mystical experiences; some to miracles they believe they have witnessed; some to stories of miracles they have heard; some to dreams they have had; some to their own auditory or visual hallucinations; some simply to trust in the testimony of earlier generations; and some to the virtues and moral teachings promoted by their religion.

Even when one of these criteria is debated and ultimately shown to be epistemologically inadequate, a believer will often move on to another criterion rather than conclude that the fundamental doctrines of his religion are false. For example, someone may say that he believes his religion is true because it contains the best moral teachings. Yet if he is shown better moral teachings in other religions, or more advanced and ethical societies whose people follow another religion, he is unlikely to decide to change his religion.

In other words, believers and religious authorities generally lack a single decisive criterion—a common epistemic tool capable of settling the question of whether their fundamental doctrines are true or false. Religious faith does not usually arise from a clearly defined and universally shared set of epistemic tools by which it can subsequently be challenged, and through which people of every language, nationality, and race could examine the same questions and arrive at a common conclusion.

3—Scientific beliefs are not conditions of membership in the scientific community: The third condition people recognize about scientific communities and their experts is that an expert is not expelled from the scientific community simply because he rejects a theory, continues to doubt it, considers the available research insufficient for a final conclusion, or believes that further investigation is required. A physicist who doubts the correctness of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is not thereby expelled from the community of physicists.

By contrast, if a religious authority seriously doubts even one of the fundamental doctrines of his religion, neither he himself nor other religious authorities and believers may continue to regard him as a religious authority of that faith. Consequently, people can hardly expect to observe anything other than consensus among the religious authorities of a religion concerning the truth of its fundamental doctrines. Shinto priests, for example, will never reach a consensus that the Sun Goddess does not exist. Any Shinto priest who comes to doubt or deny the existence of the Sun Goddess has, by that very fact, ceased in an important sense to be a Shinto priest and effectively leaves the group whose consensus is being observed.

Of course, leaving a religion and losing religious faith are not impossible, and this happens to religious authorities as well as ordinary believers. Indeed, some of the most formidable intellectual critics of a religion may be former believers and religious authorities who once held its fundamental doctrines with deep conviction but eventually lost their faith. Such people may be capable of offering some of the most detailed and penetrating criticisms of the doctrines they once believed.

In any case, the absence of these three conditions within the religious authorities of any particular faith—and the fundamental difference between such a community and the communities of the empirical sciences—means that a consensus among religious authorities concerning the fundamental doctrines and worldview of their religion cannot be treated as equivalent to expert consensus within a scientific discipline. It should therefore not, by itself, generate the same sense of knowledge and epistemic confidence.

It is not only religious believers who can be influenced in this way by the invalid consensus of a particular group. Supporters of conspiracy theories can make the same mistake. Anti-vaccination advocates, for example, may look at the agreement among other opponents of vaccination and treat it as an epistemic criterion, thinking to themselves: “Can so many people who oppose vaccination—including many educated people—really all be wrong?” Here again, however, we are dealing with a reference group that lacks the three conditions described above:

First, they are not curious. Anti-vaccination advocates who believe in conspiracy theories do not seriously question their own beliefs or set out to investigate whether they might be mistaken. They do not have questions; they believe they already have the answers. They regard contrary research as fabricated or manipulated and assume that wealthy interests and sinister groups are behind a vast conspiracy. Exactly who these groups are may remain unclear, but they are nevertheless imagined to exist and to exercise control over everything—including the media, universities and research institutions, governments around the world, and so on. Consequently, no authority or institution that presents evidence in favor of vaccination is regarded as trustworthy.

Second, anti-vaccination advocates lack a decisive criterion such as standardized observation and empirical testing, because they do not regard standardized observations or experiments conducted by any recognized authority or institution as sufficiently trustworthy. Instead, they arrive at their opposition to vaccination through their own particular reasoning. Within this framework, any statement or isolated incident anywhere in the world that appears to count against vaccination is treated as important, credible, and decisive. Evidence supporting vaccination, by contrast, is dismissed as unreliable and excluded from the body of evidence they consider.

Third, their reference group is defined in advance: opponents of vaccination. Naturally, anyone within this group who changes his mind and comes to support vaccination ceases, by definition, to belong to the group. There is therefore no possible outcome other than a consensus within this group against vaccination.

Thus, the agreement of millions of people who oppose vaccination cannot, in itself, serve as an epistemic criterion or a source of knowledge.

Nor can the consensus of supporters of vaccination serve as such a criterion if membership in that group is itself defined by support for vaccination. What can serve as a source of knowledge is the consensus of experts in medicine and public health: scientists who are curious about—and concerned with—ways of protecting human health and extending human life; whose methods are based on observation and empirical evidence; and who remain members of the scientific community regardless of the conclusions they reach, whether those conclusions support vaccination or oppose it. They are not expelled from that community merely because their findings point in one direction rather than another. For these experts, observation and empirical evidence are tools for acquiring knowledge; for ordinary people like us, the consensus of such experts can itself serve as a tool for acquiring knowledge.

I suggest looking at the Holocaust, and the question of whether it should be regarded as a historical reality or denied, from this perspective as well. Where does the consensus of reputable historians around the world—scholars whose concern is to discover the truth about the past—stand on this question?