Get the entire Tekton site on CD or zipfile. Get a stripped-down copy of this page.

A reader recently alerted me to a response on the Secular Web by one David Gleeson (link removed now, since they want to play that "name game" silliness that will be outdated at the end of October 2005) that addresses my article on the meaning of faith. If I were in an Allan Glenn mood I might comment on the fact that Gleeson chose to address a "thoroughly outdated" version of the article which did not include recent comments on Soren Kierkegaard. I'm not in that mood, though; the comments on Kiekegaard are not necessarily adding anything Gleeson would have addressed, and Gleeson seems somewhat earnest in his reply (if not, as usual from this camp, also somewhat misguided) so we'll skip the nitpick parade and see what we have to deal with.

Gleeson begins with a number of agreements with the article. He agrees with me that modern definitions of "faith" of the sort I criticize are indeed irrational, and even commends me for not sticking to the irrational definition; he also agrees that he doesn't buy Twain's definition of faith (or that of Bierce that it is "belief without evidence"). He also allows that "this type of faith-as-ignorance is not limited to Christians" and that he has seen "many atheists claim allegiance to untestable theories." I find such a concession quite commendable; if Gleeson keeps this up he will join Kyle Gerkin on my top 3 list of reasonable Skeptics. But then Gleeson states his first thesis that my own definition (as drawn from Greco-Roman sources) of faith is "just as unworthy of respect" as those I debunk. And how does he do this? Unfortunately, this is where my commendations for Gleeson break down. It is regrettable to report that rather than deal with the data, Gleeson opts for the path of political correctness.

To begin his critical portion in depth, Gleeson writes:

But I'm not sure Holding is justified in dismissing this "unfair" characterization of faith, and the others, simply because they are not in line with his own Biblical interpretation. This rings of intellectual dishonesty and falls into the trap of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Since there are many Christians who understand faith in these contexts, one cannot blithely toss them aside as No True Definitions of faith simply because they paint faith in an unflattering light. Holding is free to deride them as long as he realizes he is mocking a vast segment of Christianity in the process.

Gleeson is "not sure" I am justified? What's up with that? My article contained solid data from parallel uses of pistis in the Greco-Roman world; data from scholars who were specialists in ancient anthropology of the Mediterranean (Malina, Neyrey, deSilva) -- and Gleeson is saying that this is a matter of it being "not in line with my own Biblical interpretation"? It's as simple as this: either the "standard view" is right, or I (and Malina, Neyrey, etc) are right, and the other is wrong, or both are wrong. Gleeson doesn't even mention in his article that there are parallel definitions in Quintillian and Aristotle, or the context of the Greco-Roman client-patron relationship, though I would not guess that is because of dishonesty but rather because he either has no answer, or doesn't understand the importance of the data. If I am wrong, then Gleeson needs to show it from the data, not merely hoist the flag of difference of opinion as though that counts for argument. As for "mocking" and "deride" I prefer to say "educating" and "enlighten" or "assist" -- and if Gleeson has data showing otherwise, and showing that specialists like Malina and Neyrey have their heads in the sand, he needs to bring it to the fore. For a Skeptic who aligns himself with reason, it is a shocking anomaly that Gleeson falls for the standard PC canard that the mere existence of an alternate opinion or view somehow nullifies or contraindicates another view. And if that was not his intent, he should never have made a point of this as he did.

As a result of not grasping or dealing with this data, Gleeson resorts to claiming that when I say of Hebrews 11:1:

[Faith] here is a matter of trust in a God who has demonstrated His ability to be a worthy patron, and the examples are those of clients who, knowing this ability, trust in God's record as a patronal provider. Hebrews 11:1 therefore is telling us that faith (trust in our patron, gained by conviction based on evidence) is the substance (the word here means an assurance) . . . of things hoped for (this word means expected by trust, which is something earned!), and the evidence of that which is not seen, which in context means we expect, based on past performance, continuing favor from our patron, who has already proven Himself worthy of our trust by example.

...I "practically trip all over [my]self trying to justify faith in terms of evidence." Trip over what? The real and actual ancient definition of pistis within the context of a client-patron relationship? Gleeson mumbles over "conforming to the pesky rules of evidence that impart that legitimacy" but this is a fine set of words from a commentator who completely ignored the key evidence being presented. But rather than confront that first as he ought to, Gleeson says he will "generously assume [I am] correct" and proceed to show that believing based on evidence is wrong anyway. We can hardly wait! And how does he do this? With yet more political correctness!

Holding's premise, then, is that Biblical faith is not blind at all; rather, it is trust that has been earned based on the evidence of past performance. The obvious objection to this is that the Bible is open to widely varying interpretations, and while Holding's liberal translation certainly suits his own agenda, he has not even attempted to demonstrate its validity.

I didn't? What of the parallels noted in Qunitillian and Aristotle? What of the client-patron relationship context? Gleeson hoists the sail of "widely varying interpretations" over what amounts to a sea of his own (and others') ignorance and/or miseducation. Hoisting the spectre of "thousands of denominations of Christianity spread throughout the world today" is no more an answer than hoisting differences of opinion among Skeptics (you can find plenty on the Secular Web!) means anything. If Skeptics were as numerous as Christians and had denominations, there would be thousands of those as well, and their mere existence does not keep one from finding a right answer. Gleeson hoists the vague claim, "there are many ways of interpreting the various Biblical passages that deal with faith." Oddly enough, though, he presents not one of these, much less one that actually deals with the data presented.

And for yet the third time, almost halfway through, Gleeson says this is not the route he wants to take anyway; rather, after giving yet one more analogy expressing this same argument that is not the route he says he doesn't want to take, he wants to show us that faith even in the way I define it is "irrational". He objects in a way that still doesn't get to that point:

Before jumping head first into the meat of my argument, we need to clear up a matter of terminology. Any time the words "evidence" and "faith" occupy the same sentence, or are lazily interchanged as in Holding's definition above, a rational skeptic would rightly object, for if "faith" is truly based on "evidence," then the term "faith" is superfluous. Why not just call a horse "a horse"?

"Lazily interchanged"? Where? I do no such thing, and Gleeson does not quote me doing any such thing. I show that "faith" as a term of action is our reaction to evidence. I think where Gleeson is confused is in that he read where I spoke of a noun form of pistis meaning "forensic proof" and then somehow got from that, that I was defining the action form of pistis in the same way. It's hard to say, since no quote is provided; at any rate, Gleeson's objection is misguided. He goes on to say:

So the obvious question becomes: Does trust play a role in, say, science, and is Biblical faith, therefore, merely a misunderstood mirror-image of the scientific method? The answer, of course, is no.

The obvious answer is, "So what? What does this have to do anything?" Actually, it doesn't. Gleeson is mixing issues. Pistis as most often used in the Christian faith refers to "trust" within the context of a personal relationship with God -- something not subject to scientific method by any means. Gleeson can't subject his relationships with his loved ones, or with his boss, to the "scientific method" either, yet I am sure he doesn't go around suspecting his loved ones of not loving him, or his boss of secretly wanting to fire him. To that end, Gleeson's counter-example of flipping a coin is askew. Supposing we may get a case where the coin somehow ends up tails 20 times in a row after being flipped, Gleeson says:

Here is where the scientific method and Holding's version of evidentiary faith part company. In Holding's view, the trust earned by 20 consecutive flips of tails would be the evidence needed to say that the next flip of the coin would be tails. If we think of each tail as a documented miracle by Jesus, the clear evidence of these twenty documented miracles would be enough for Holding to conclude that having faith in the twenty-first miracle is simply a rational extension of what we would expect given the evidence of the previous twenty miracles. As Holding states: "We expect, based on past performance, continuing favor from our patron, who has already proven Himself worthy of our trust by example."

Gleeson's comparison is magnificently simple-minded, if I may be blunt. He has already assumed a coin that has not been tampered with (unlikely as is); he offers no thesis as to why then the coin performs this act and therefore presumably takes it to be random. This is in contrast to the miracles of Jesus, which would involve the purposeful act of a person. A better comparison would be to a man who every day at 3 PM watches Seinfeld, and proclaims himself a fanatical devotee of the show. Under such circumstances we can trust (barring unusual circumstances) that if the man stops his day at 2:59 PM to watch the show, then on day 21, he will be there at 2:59 in front of the TV set. Or, better yet, we have a man who juggles flaming cans of gasoline, and does it for 20 straight performances with skill and adequacy; barring unusual circumstances, we have every reason to say he will succeed in performance #21. Gleeson may be positing here a scenario in which Jesus fails at miracle #21 -- it's hard to say, but if Jesus truly shared the divine identity then such a failure was incredibly unlikely, and from there we must move to the issue of whether the evidence points to him sharing in that identity. (It's also not a good analogy, and would be closer to the idea of a man who is seen to be 6 feet tall for 20 days straight being a good sign that he will be 6 feet tall on day 21.) Moreover this has nothing to do with the principles of continuing favor in a client-patron relationship.

Gleeson proceeds with an episode of mind-reading, though he knows me not from Adam:

A small aside: Keeping our notion of tails as a documented miracle by Jesus, what if we were to assign heads to mean "a documented failure by Jesus to heal or cure." How do you suppose it would affect Holding's "trust" if, say, Jesus' track record was more like sequence #1 instead of #2? I suspect it would not affect his trust in the least, because he would stumble directly into the Observational Selection fallacy, also called the Enumeration of Favorable Circumstances. Or, and I will say more on this below, the tendency to "count the hits and forget the misses."

Gleeson can pack that assumption right back in the mothballs. The true meaning of faith means that my trust would indeed be dissolved if such were verifiably the case. Indeed Paul says as much in 1 Cor. 15 when he says, "If Christ is not risen, your faith is in vain." It seems rather than Gleeson is suffering "Observational Selection Fallacy" in his assumption that I would be no different in my reaction than any other believer he knows. Hopefully he won't forget this little miss on his part in the future.

So this, at any rate, is Gleeson's core case: "Clearly, past performance is no indication of future performance...." Thus he says we have "advertisements for mutual funds; trusting that a fund will perform in the next year as it has in the last ten could lose you a he[ck] of a lot of money." Nice analogy. It fails. Mutual funds involve a complex set of factors across a variety of points, some involving purposeful and knowing actions, some involving actions done with lack of data. Jesus being raised or doing a miracle does not. I doubt if Gleeson lives his life under such paranoid constraints; not in his personal relationships, not when he sits in a chair (does he require a report of the chair's "past performance" before he will sit down? will he dismiss the report if given to him?). I'll concede as much as this: Gleeson could open the door here for the likes of Acharya S who say that maybe, just maybe, Jesus was a space alien. If we want to play that game, anything is possible, even in science. "It is not trust, therefore, that sends us to Guatemala in the year 2030 to watch a solar eclipse; it is independently, verifiable evidence that successfully makes predictions about future events." How does he know the earth will not suddenly reverse its orbit? If past performance does not indicate future performance to the extreme Gleeson wants to play it, even science is up in the air. No, science exercises "trust" of this sort as much as anyone -- in the ability to understand and sense the data; in the understanding that nothing unusual will happen to change the prediction. Otherwise we may as well speculate that all of our memories are illusions and the world actually came into being five minutes ago.

Gleeson humorously compares the "faith" I offer to "Charlie Brown Syndrome (CBS)." as he describes the classic and immortal conflict:

Poor Charlie Brown. He has a great deal of trust but not a lot of brains. Every time Lucy agrees to hold the football for him, Charlie Brown trusts her not to pull it away. It doesn't matter that Lucy has never not pulled it away; he still has faith that this time will be different, that Lucy will finally hold it still long enough for him to boot it to the sky. And every time, he ends up flat on his back. Why does he keep at it? Is he really that gullible? Is his faith so blind (for that's what it appears to be, blind faith, trust in spite of contrary evidence) that he will keep slamming himself into this particular porch light for the rest of his days?

It's telling enough that Gleeson has to resort to a fictional example from a comic strip to make this point. Charles Schulz had gags to write for over 50 years, and this essentially required him to dip into the same well in a way that was untrue to life. I suppose next Gleeson will want to make an argument based on Snoopy sleeping atop his doghouse, or driving a car. My poodle is fairly smart, but not even he would be able to manage that feat of derring-do. For one thing, his little legs would never reach the gas pedal.

And what then of this comic unreality? A "real" Charlie Brown would not have persisted for 50 years of Peanuts life to keep trusting Lucy with that football. For one thing, a real Charlie Brown would have been in the hospital by age 35 if he kept that up, or else would have put Lucy in the hospital for her impertinence. Real life knows of no Charlie Browns who persist in such extremes of gullibility -- not for so many years, not so many times. There are lesser examples, of course, of people who for example stay with abusive spouses, and return to them; yet such examples are invariably complex and not a simple matter of, "They should not trust that person any more." In essence Gleeson therefore isn't criticizing my understanding of "faith" -- he is criticizing yet another simple-minded sort of faith that actually doesn't consider the evidence at all, but only considers it selectively. Hence, we are back to Twain's bogus definition yet again, not mine.

Gleeson asks, "But what would it take to make Charlie Brown a hero in Holding's eyes, a perfect example of a human being with rational, evidentiary faith? Turns out, not much at all. All it would take would be some evidence of past performance." And from here, Gleeson supports his sagging comic analogy with the "liberty" that "the reason Charlie Brown continue[d] to abuse himself is because he did, indeed, have evidence of past performance, that at some point in the past, before the first comic strip appeared, Lucy held that d*mn ball still for him to kick. Maybe it was once, maybe twice, maybe a hundred times; it really doesn't matter." It doesn't? It does matter than Gleeson needs to hypothesize beyond evidence to make his case, and create a fictional scenario in which Lucy let Charlie actually kick the ball any number of times; at this point he is as good as Acharya S and her ilk with their space alien theories. Gleeson can produce no real-world example of "a hundred times" that makes for a match. On the other hand, after twice with the pull-away trick, all but the stupidest -- or those with a vested interest (maybe Lucy also gave Charlie Brown chocolate candy after the performance) -- will give up on such shenanigans. And even the stupidest will give up after the third or fourth time, and maybe even as the MAD magazine parody showed, pass on the football and kick Lucy into the air instead.

There is far more to it as well that Gleeson's comic strip analogy can't approach. What of the relationship with Lucy outside of the football scene? A real Lucy would have been beaten up by the neighborhood kids, or shunned socially, within only a few weeks of obnoxiously collecting nickels for dispensing worthless advice. I say again that it is telling that Gleeson doesn't pick and deal with a real-world example, and sees fit to fill in gaps to the point of a hundred previous kicks with the football. It's not that simple, and Christianity is not just a matter only of the evidence of Jesus' miracles. On this site and those I link to we provide and discuss a plethora of evidences that the Christian faith is rational and supported by evidence. Perhaps someday Gleeson will deal with these; perhaps not. Based on this performance I do not think he is able to as yet. And yet Gleeson admits:

If Holding's premise is granted, then I have no problem calling Jesus' contemporaries rational. After all, they witnessed his miracles and saw his power first-hand. He backed up his claims with proof, with rational evidence. He healed the sick, resurrected the dead, brought food to the starving and eradicated disease. If this man had told me the world was going to end tomorrow, you bet your *ss I would have believed him. The evidence of his past performance would have imbued within me a deep and reverential trust assuming, of course, that no contrary evidence presented itself at some point in the future. Had I lived at the same time as Jesus, and had he performed the miracles that I am generously assuming that he did, it would have been irrational not to take his claims seriously.

So Gleeson admits to this; but then he wants to change the subject:

But let's fast-forward a couple of years. Jesus is now dead, but it is claimed he can still heal the sick, still eradicate disease, still resurrect the dead. All you have to do is have faith, faith grounded in the evidence of his performance when he was alive. But looking around, you see sick people who are not healed, dead children who are not resurrected, famine and pain and suffering that is not alleviated.

The analogy actually needs to stop right there. It's hard to tell who Gleeson refers to here when he speaks of a "couple of years" and claims that he can "still heal the sick," etc. The former seems to refer to the Apostles and the latter to Benny Hinn. If the former, the record at least shows that the Apostles were every bit as successful in performing miracles as Jesus. If the latter, it amounts to someone piling an unwarranted claim onto the coattails of evidence, and the analogy fails. It is, actually, hard to know what Gleeson is saying or referring to in these arguments. He say, 2000 years pass, and we have problems. "Wars and diseases and plagues have killed millions..." Did Jesus or God promise relief from these? Not that I can find, and it remains that in our world, the good outweighs the bad. "...prayers have gone unanswered..." Is prayer a gumball machine with guaranteed results? If Gleeson thinks so, he needs more education in the purpose of prayer. "...not one person has been resurrected..." And where was this promised? Only at the end of the messianic age, at a time that was left unspecified (as it should have been). And that's it? Gleeson does not even touch a single positive apologetic for Christianity. Not that we expect him to re-invent the wheel, yet he still has put the cart before the horse. For one who says we don't count the misses, he hasn't done much homework on whether the "misses" have actually occurred. All he does is scuttle behind the quick-draw that the evidence is "highly debatable" (there's that political correctness in action again!).

As a final note, Gleeson notes my interpretation of Mark 6:5, which speaks of Jesus not being able to do miracles because of the people's lack of faith. I said:

To reject a gracious act was the height of dishonor. Jesus could not heal these people, not because of a lack of power, but because of ingratitude and a rejection of his gracious patronage! A rejected patron could and would never force his gracious gifts upon a client who didn't want them!

Gleeson bewails, "In other words, if a person is not healed, or a disease is not eradicated, or a child is not resurrected, it's not because Jesus couldn't do those things; it's because Jesus merely withheld his favors from an ungracious host. Do you see the perfectly wondrous circularity here? Jesus can never lose and, by extension, you (the naive, believing Christian) can never win." I wonder if Gleeson has the same exegetical diseases Benny Hinn has. Nowhere at all do we have any indication that healing is a free-for-all gift, and if anything, we have some evidence that such miracles were to cease by 70 AD (see here -- maybe Gleeson can spend some time tackling preterism; he may do a better job than Farrell Till so far). Mark 6:5 speaks exclusively of Jesus and his actions and one may only apply it further if a person has a genuine gift of healing. It has zip to do with present ideas of persons who die in spite of prayer (not a gumball machine, as Gleeson seems to think). In any event, if Jesus can't "lose" here it is because the meaning of pistis demands it, and Gleeson still hasn't hauled up any ancient linguistic data to the contrary. Sure Jesus can't lose this way, any more than a Roman patron could "lose" his reputation for generosity simply because some dull-witted client threw back his basket of food. The rejection was a key factor, and it was open and dishonoring. Now if Gleeson can circumvent that definition of pistis beyond invoking "maybe others would say different," perhaps he will have a respectable case. As it is, in invoking modern faith healers and modern suffering, he is reeling up a host of even more blatant misinterpretations and poor arguments just like the one I am correcting in my "faith" article. Perhaps he can have his ducks in a row next time he tries to take us on. Given that he does appear to have some greater semblance of reason than most Skeptics I have encountered, he might find it, and make it, a worthwhile endeavor.

Addendum: Some readers have pointed out that several dictionaries do have a definition of faith as, "Belief proceeding from reliance on testimony or authority." Another reader gave us this citation from an older source:

1551 T. WILSON Logike (1580) 60b, An historicall faithe. As I doe beleve that Willyam Conquerour was kyng of Englande. a1628 PRESTON Breastpl. Faith (1630) 15 Faith is..assenting to Truthes for the Authority of the Speaker. 1725 WATTS Logic II. ii. §9 When we derive the Evidence of any Proposition from the Testimony of others, it is called the Evidence of Faith. a1873 HUXLEY in Hamerton Intell. Life VIII. ii. (1873) 299 The absolute rejection of authority..the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith.

It appears Twain was being more off base than he realized.

(As an amsuing side note, our reader also added that "Charlie Brown Syndrome" is an informal phrase used in the cartooning industry to describe characters that never age, like the Peanuts gang, or Peter Pan!)