The Times Literary Supplement: Believers without belief

However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted. According to the historian of religion Karen Armstrong, the doxastic conception of religion is a relatively recent development, shaped by the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Armstrong goes so far as to argue that our modern doxastic conception of religion is largely the result of mistranslation. In terms of Christianity, one difficulty with translating the Greek of the New Testament into English is that the English word “faith”, unlike the Greek equivalent “pistis”, does not have a verb form. Hence what should really be the verb “to faith” comes out as “to believe”. When the Bible was first rendered in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was not a bad translation. The word “bileven” in middle English meant to prize or to hold dear (related to the German “belieben”) and when the King James Bible was published, “believe” was close in meaning to the Greek pistis, which has connotations of engagement and commitment. As one piece of evidence for this, Armstrong offers a line from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (written shortly before the publication of the King James Bible) in which Bertram is urged to “believe not thy distain”; in other words, he is being told not to engage his contempt (in this case for the low-born Helena) and let it take root in his heart.[...]

Separating “faith” from “belief” also makes sense outside a religious context. Suppose a loved one is seriously ill and the prognosis is not good. You might say to that person, “I have faith that you’re going to live”. This does not necessarily mean that you believe that your loved one will live; you might be entirely realistic about the chances of survival. What you mean is that you are rooting for that possibility: you are personally committing to living in hope that the illness will be overcome. Faith is a matter of hopeful commitment. To take another example, anyone taking a cold hard look at the facts must accept that the odds of humans preventing climate catastrophe do not look great; certainly, it is more likely that we will fail than that we will succeed. Nonetheless, many continue to have faith that our species will rise to the occasion. Again, this is not a matter of believing, against all the evidence, that climate change will be dealt with. It rather means committing to live, and more importantly to act, in the hope of a better outcome. Such leaps of faith are not irrational; they are what give life meaning and significance. It would be a sad world if everyone apportioned their aspirations for the future in the manner of an insurance broker.[...]

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. To put it simply: God is a useful fiction. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion. [...]

While many atheists will no doubt see the benefit of shared traditions, they may find it hard to see the point of prayer and worship. In response, the fictionalist will point out that we are not cold-blooded creatures of reason motivated purely by an accurate understanding of the world around us. Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship.

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The Times Literary Supplement: Holocaust denial and the marketplace of ideas

Anyone who wants to understand the current spate of fake news and fake history must go back some years to its most extreme modern manifestation: Holocaust denial.  An entire industry has been built to legitimize Holocaust denial.  The deniers have funded “research” “institutes”, “journals”, books, magazines, videos, websites, newsflashes – all designed to provide a patina of academic respectability to demonstrable falsehoods.  Nearly every day, I receive dozens of emails from websites with such legitimate-sounding names as “The Institute for Historical Review”, and “Legalienate” and “Reporters Notebook” that purport to disprove “the Holocaust yarn”. These include newsflashes containing “new facts” that put the “final nail in the coffin of history’s Mother of all hoaxes” – that Jews were “allegedly gassed” and cremated at Treblinka and other “death camps”. [...]

Yet, thousands of people, many with academic degrees, and some with professorial positions, persist in denying the undeniable. These professional liars were given a degree of legitimacy by Noam Chomsky, who not only championed the right of these fake historians to perpetrate their malicious lies, but who actually lent his name to the quality of the “research” that produce the lies of denial. A widely circulated petition of 1979, signed by Chomsky as well as Holocaust deniers such as Serge Thion, Arthur Butz and Mark Weber, described the notorious denier Robert Faurisson as “a respected professor” and his false history as “findings” based on “extensive historical research”, thus giving it an academic imprimatur. Chomsky has since argued that he had intended only to support Faurisson’s right to free speech and not the validity of his claims, but whatever his intentions may have been, his name on the petition helped to bolster not only Faurisson’s standing, but also that of Holocaust denial. [...]

I have no problem with courses being taught about the phenomenon of Holocaust denial – it is after all a widespread concern – just as I would have no problem with courses being taught about the phenomenon of false history, false facts and conspiracy theories. But the classroom, with its captive audience of students being graded by professors, is never an appropriate place to espouse the view that the Holocaust did not take place. By publishing his book, the psychiatry professor mentioned above placed it in the public sphere, where readers could choose whether to read it, and believe its claims, or not. The classroom, however, is not a free and open marketplace of ideas. The monopolistic professor controls what can and cannot be said in his or her closed shop. Accordingly, the classroom must have more rigorous standards of truth than the book market, or the internet. [...]

Freedom of speech and the open marketplace of ideas are not a guarantee that truth, justice or morality will prevail.  The most that can be said is that freedom of expression is less bad than its alternatives such as governmental censorship, official truth squads or shutting down the marketplace of ideas.  Like democracy itself, untrammelled freedom to express hateful and dangerous lies may be the “worst” policy – except for all the others that have been tried over time.

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