Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age > Status Update

Toland (a prominent deist) - "For as ’tis by Reason we arrive at the Certainty of God’s own Existence, so we cannot otherwise discern his Revelations but by their Conformity with our own natural Notices of Him." again, "As long as a man conceives not what he believes, he cannot sincerely acquiesce in it... I stand by it that Faith is knowledge."

A new kind of moral commitment would necessarily attend this reconstrued ‘faith’: not trust in others (be it relations, the Church, or even the Scriptures themselves), but a capacity on the part of each individual to fully comprehend and provide reasons for holding those propositions that now constituted religious faith.

Faith is ‘a rational and discursive act of the mind … an assent upon evidence, or reason inducing the mind to assent’.

"On these new understandings, to believe in God or Christ was not so much to reside trust in them as persons, but to believe their edicts and utterances on the basis of some independent evidence. To the extent that faith might seem to require a degree of trust, determining the trustworthiness of a source was the business of reason."

If faith was going to be defined as assent to particular propositions, it becomes of utmost importance to identify just what those were. What exactly is necessary to believe to be saved? "Locke thus shared with Herbert of Cherbury a concern to identify the fundamental propositional beliefs necessary for salvation." As did Hobbes, who took a rather minimalist approach, teaching that assenting to 'Jesus is the Messiah' was sufficient.

"Reason is separated out from religious convictions that are now understood as consisting in knowledge claims of the kind that stand in need of the external confirmation that reason might provide."

Against implicit faith, the Protestants began promoting "experimental faith": faith based on good propositions that were tested and proved experientially (and, crucially, individually). Tellingly, if we trace the rise of the word "experiment" in the English language, we find that it arises as a common religious word in the 16th and 17th centuries, before "making the jump" in the 18th to the scientific context it carries today.

"In popular understanding, a genuine scientific claim must be one that is, in principle, empirically falsifiable. Science progresses, on this view, not by verifying favoured scientific hypotheses, but by falsifying the alternatives. This attempt at demarcating genuine science from pseudoscience (which indirectly owes its origins to positivist notions of verification) has not found much favour among historians and philosophers of science. But it continues to play a role in the self-conception of many scientists and popularisers of science.

One deeply misleading aspect of this notion is its failure to grasp the degree to which scientific knowledge is dependent upon networks of trust and credibility. The image of science that we often presented with – as an exemplary rational activity driven by systematic scepticism – is an unrealistic as the rational-calculator model assumed by neoclassical economics.

This is relevant to the historical parallels between two quite similar notions of implicit faith because the contrast that is sometimes drawn between a rational, self-correcting, and sceptical science on the one hand, and a credulous and irrational religion on the other overlooks the hidden role played by trust and authority in both of these communities."