House on Faith

I was recently watching an episode of House entitled House Versus God. It was about a faith healer that seemed to have extraordinary abilities. He seemed to know people's problems through revelation not observation, he seemed to actually heal others. House would not be deterred. "There is always an answer," he proclaimed. What he really meant was: There is always a naturalistic answer.

I have no desire to defend faith healers. I would want to defend them as much as any other thief or con. What interested me was something I have seen a lot of in my many years of watching television, and that is television's defense of faith.

I have noticed that it is usually presented in a roughly similar dichotomy. There is one who is bent on science and one who is unmovable in their faith. If you don't believe me, see my earlier post on Friends where Ross is defeated by Phoebe by presenting plausible doubt (although I really don't think she actually establishes that, but that's already been covered).

At the end of the day, I think that television is actually attacking faith. They present faith more as a virtue than anything worthy of our intellectual attention. What is that virtue? I think it is bravery coupled with ignorance. So where is the attack? Is not bravery a good thing? Sure it is, but in this case one has to be ignorant in order to be brave. It really is a subtle attack. They make the person of faith seem virtuous but utterly wrong. The one of science is the one who is usually the strongest and the more intelligent. The one of faith really only has one argument which is the fallacy of stacking the deck. No matter what one would try they could never prove the person of faith wrong because they have made ignorance a necessity for having their position. This is usually indicated by statements such as the sin of "challenging faith." The more ignorant one is the more faith they have and therefore even more virtuous.

The good news for the person of faith is that this is a straw man argument. Faith does not have to be opposed to science. It has to be opposed to Verificationism, which is what is really being promoted on the science side of the argument. What is being said is that faith is of no value for knowing the way the world is, only science can do that. Verificationism is the belief that only what one can verify with one's senses is meaningful or of value. If you ask Richard Dawkins how the world is he will tell you "we are working on it." No Verificationist can tell you how the world really is or why there is something rather than nothing. They can only say we are working on it. Verificationism has a fundamental contradiction at its core (among many other problems) which caused philosophers to reject it a long time ago (verificationism cannot verify itself). Nominalistic assumptions of Verificationism are also a problem, but that will be covered in my conclusion to Christianity and Ontology.

One may say that Theism cannot tell us the way the world is. I would argue that Theism offers a negative corollary to the assumptions that underpin Verificationism-as-science and therefore is internally more consistent and therefore offers a more plausible explanation (much to the chagrin of the faith healers). The only defense of the Neoverificationists is the rejection of logic and not very safe footing. In fact, I would even say that would be a brave position to have.

Science is not a problem for a person of faith. Philosophy, however, is offering hurtles that I believe the Neoverificationists cannot logically withstand.