We live in a post-fact era, social media sites are full of misinformation and beliefs that often have very little evidential backing. This is somewhat benign when the things raised are of little impact to our lives (the belief in UFOs for example), however when this is not the case they can cause us to make very real decisions that have very real negative consequences. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the saying “faith is a virtue” is false and talk about better methods for seeking truth.

Before we begin we better get some definitions out of the way. Faith is simply belief without evidence, this means when somebody tells you that they believe something and then cannot point to a set of facts that support their claim that they are employing faith. The dictionary definition of faith is: “strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof.”_{Oxford Languages} A virtue is generally something which has moral quality but can also be used to describe something useful. The dictionary definition of virtue is: “a good or useful quality of a thing”_{Oxford Languages}

Let’s tackle the issue of faith being useful first. Utility can mean many things, but for the sake of argument I will use the definition that aligns with progress to begin with. The main reason for human beings being the dominant species is due to our ability to create things with a useful function. Iterations of useful creations are what I will describe as progress. Think of how we have made cars better over time for example, they have a longer range thus becoming more useful. Well how did we come to building and then iterating on the car? We used predictive models about the universe to come up with the idea of the internal combustion engine which enabled us (along with other impressive inventions) to build a car.

Notice how I said “predictive models about the universe” rather than “facts about the universe”. This is an important distinction since we don’t actually know how the universe works, we can however build models that describe it and predict outcomes given initial conditions. Gravity, for example, is one predictive model we have about the universe, it describes the apparent attraction between objects with mass. We can then use this model to predict things, such as the trajectory of a thrown ball. These models have utility, they enable us to do things that would seem like witchcraft to someone from a few hundred years ago.

So why is faith not useful in the same way? Well faith doesn’t predict anything, it doesn’t build predictive models and it doesn’t make it any easier to build cars. There’s a reason that technological progress has exploded since the Enlightenment. Instead of relying on faith to tell us what to believe and how to think, we started employing the scientific method and reason to come to better conclusions. Some people may say that I have faith in science, this is incorrect, I have been provided with plenty of evidence that science works; planes don’t drop out of the sky, rockets put man on the moon, as Richard Dawkins once said “it works… bitches”.

Faith doesn’t cause progress. This is evident from the fact that if you go back 100 years and tell the average scientist a fraction of what we know today it would blow their mind, and probably lead to numerous early scientific breakthroughs. You do the same with religion and you wouldn’t surprise anybody, it hasn’t changed.

The reason why I prefaced this with mention of our current post-fact era is due to those people employing the very same dangerous justification for their beliefs, faith. An anti-vaxxer has faith in the one paper written by Andrew Wakefield in 1998 linking MMR with autism, or simply second hand information from someone equally misinformed on Facebook. They haven’t looked at the evidence, they haven’t taken notice of the numerous papers debunking the claim from the scientific community. Instead they blindly believe in something without evidence, something incredibly damaging, not just for themselves but for their children as well as other people. Faith is dangerous, it has directly contributed to numerous unnecessary deaths and continues to do so. It also causes strong opposition to human rights laws (abortion laws in Alabama) and education (evolution in Louisiana and Tennessee) but that’s for another time.

Now that we have established that faith isn’t useful let’s go on and tackle the moral aspect. Is it moral to base your beliefs on nothing but blind faith? The desert dwelling peasants who wrote the Bible would have you believe that. I think it is impossible to separate the utilitarian and moral aspect of this discussion, if faith has no utility then surely it must have no moral quality either. How is it moral to let yourself and others be deceived? Perhaps I am being too harsh, let’s give faith the benefit of the doubt, it can be useful, in certain circumstances, or can it?

The most common argument for faith I have heard is that of dealing with grief. The belief that you will see everyone you love again after death is certainly an appealing one and I can see the reason why people cling to that. I take issue with religion for this, however. It has promised us all an afterlife, eternal paradise with everyone we love (unless of course they are a member of the wrong religion or not a member at all). This, I think, does more harm than good. If you believe that you will see everyone you care about after death then why would you bother doing everything you can to make things right with people in the here and now? Why would you make the most of your earthly existence, it is after all a temporary state in between oblivion and paradise. My lack of belief in this enables me to cherish the life I have and the people in it, I know I won’t get the chance to make up for things in the afterlife and as such can try my best to fix them now. Furthermore, when people lose someone, if their only coping mechanism is false hope that they will see them again then they haven’t dealt with it. If somewhere down the line their beliefs change, they will be distraught, it is therefore an anchor to the religion they were born into, a carefully designed and sinister trap that plays on the emotions of innocent people.

Faith doesn’t work in the sense that it doesn’t enable us to build new things or progress our understanding of the universe. This is crucial, no matter the philosophical argument this will always be the case, if you come to me with sufficient evidence that something you have apparent faith in is true, then it is no longer faith. Faith, by definition, is the most ridiculous and useless idea that humans have ever come up with. In order for humanity to progress we must cast off the shackles of faith and embrace reason and science. We cannot continue believing in things without evidence, it is not only stupid but damaging, to yourself and others.