faith

I grew up in the 2000s reading the New Atheists, where 'faith' was considered a dirty word. Faith was the opposite of reason; it meant believing things that there was no actual evidence for. It was a tool with which to manipulate people into irrational beliefs. It was hard for me to conceive of how stupid people must be in order to speak about faith in a positive light.

Of course there was and is a great deal of accuracy in that view. But these days, I think it's more interesting to take a charitable view of the concept of faith and why it's had such staying power in religious traditions. I've found a few different ways to understand faith that help me to understand why it's so meaningful to many people.

Faith means remembering our higher selves

As usual, Buddhism provides a nice bridge between spiritual language and the rationalist world view. In Buddhist teaching, doubt (the opposite of faith) is one of the five hindrances that work against spiritual progress. Importantly, the doubt in question is not doubt in the existence of gods or supernatural beings, or even doubt in the Buddha (who actively encourages us not to take his word for the things he says, but to test them ourselves), but doubt in spiritual practice, in the effectiveness of meditation and the noble eight-fold path. And importantly, this doubt is irrational. Most people who pursue Buddhist practice develop a rational belief that these practices do work, a belief based on the evidence of their own experiences, their understanding of psychology, the experiences of trusted friends, and the living presence of masters and teachers for whom these practices have had a clearly transformative effect. Like all beliefs, this one should always be opening to questioning and revision, but only on the basis of evidence. If you wake up one morning and find yourself thinking (implicitly or explicitly) "why should I bother meditating, it's not going to do anything", but this is not actually based on any new evidence about the effectiveness of meditation, that is irrational doubt.

More pointedly, doubt in the practices often manifests as doubt that they can work for you. Maybe you in particular are too distracted, too lazy, somehow inherently broken, doomed to always be doing it wrong, so that the practices that have worked for all kinds of people throughout millennia will be uniquely ineffective in your case. Faith in this context just involves consciously reminding yourself of what you believe. It's not anti-evidence, it's actually about noticing when you're tempted to act in a way that's not in accord with your evidence-based beliefs. It's about pushing back against cognitive biases to help me act more rationally.

Seen this way, faith is just what we need in order to succeed at any difficult, lengthy endeavor where the rewards come . This could be a meditation practice, a (physical) exercise routine, a diet, a research project, learning a language, starting an organization, etc.

Faith is critical to passing the marshmallow test: in order to delay gratification, we must maintain faith that the delayed gratification will actually come. There is of course a rational question about whether that belief is justified: if we suspect the experimenter may be lying about the second marshmallow then that would obviously change our calculations. But whatever rational belief we come to, we still need to maintain it. Even if we're totally confident that the second marshmallow will come and is worth waiting for, we still need to get through fifteen minutes of our animal brain tempting us to take the easy way out. That struggle, the struggle of the fallen to live up to the ideal, is the essence of faith.

Faith is trust

Global utility in the prisoner's dilemma is maximized when we both cooperate. In an iterated prisoner's dilemma, strategies like tit-for-tat help ensure that cooperation is a robust equilibrium. These strategies implicitly trust that your counterparty will also act pro-socially rather than simply exploit your cooperation. Such trust is always initially unearned, and yet, it is necessary and rational. It is a different form of faith that is nonetheless essential for a functioning society.

In his book Sapiens, Yuval Harari argues that societies function by agreeing on common myths. If you and I both believe that we are servants of the same abstract entity --- whether that is Jehovah or the General Motors Corporation --- then our interests are aligned, and we can trust each other to cooperate in pursuit of those interests.

Optimism

The first notion of faith above was about maintaining individually rational behavior in the face of irrational impulses. The second is about maintaining collectively rational behavior. A third, distinct, sense of faith comes from the well-established result that optimism is rational in the face of uncertainty, even for an individual agent with full control of its actions. This type of faith allows us to take risks, to venture out into unknown territory.