The Justification For Faith

Today I encountered a pharmacist who was about fed up with giving flu shots. Oh, he was nice enough, but you could tell this was not his favorite part of the job, and he was having to do it a lot. Later in conversation with God I thought up words I could have said to him. I should have told the guy that he could think about it this way: out of the hundreds of shots he gives this year, if he saves only one life, then it would be worth it. Perhaps this advice would have brightened his day. 

Let's imagine that I had said this to the man. Or that he just comes to the thought on his own. Would this belief be justified? Is it reasonable to think " well, maybe I'm saving lives"? Notice, the pharmacist can never KNOW he has saved any lives, or prevented hospitalizations, for the person who would've gotten sick will never have access to the counterfactual world where they would've gotten sick. But it seems intuitive to me that acting on this belief is reasonable, however lacking in hard evidence. All that is necessary is the possibility of the truth of the statement. Notice, too, that the belief could be central to one's life. It might be the reason one does a particular job over another. "It might help someone" seems enough reason to choose a way of life. "I believe I am doing good here" is justified even if one only has evidence that one MIGHT be helping someone.

So it looks to me like narratives of meaning, beliefs that are action-guiding in a positive way, require a different standard of justification, such narratives only need to be POSSIBLE or PLAUSIBLE to be justifiably believed. Isn't the person of faith in just this kind of situation. Christ, through faith in Him, has helped me get past a terrible drug problem, has pushed me to be a better person, and pushes me to heights of experience beyond anything I've ever imagined possible. I owe an account of this belief, it must be shown to be possible and plausible, but it seems like I am in an epistemic position much like the hypothetical pharmacist. 

This exchange between Robert Wright and Freeman Dyson  from http://meaningoflife.tv comes to mind:

Wright:  So just tell me in closing kind of how your frame of reference which is I guess I would characterize as technically agnostic but on the other hand suspecting that there is an ultimate source of meaning. Is that right?

Freeman Dyson: Yes I mean I wouldn't say suspecting I mean to me it's a way of life I mean that I couldn't function if I didn't believe the thing had a purpose and so it's not really...

Wright:  A larger purpose.

Freeman Dyson: Yes. I mean the point is action comes before thinking. Life is action and not thinking. And so the belief in a purpose has to do with action it has it's not something that we could've come to logically but it's just part of a part of a part part of the of being alive. 

Wright:  So if you weren't if you if you in this sense didn't have a little bit of religion in your world view you would have trouble just living.

Freeman Dyson: Yes.

Wright:  And what about people who say well that's a cop out, you're just you're just relying on this belief as a crutch as you might you know on a on a prescribed drug or something made you feel good.

Freeman Dyson: Yes well maybe so and but then everybody has to rely on all sorts of things I mean we're not self-sufficient. It's silly to imagine that you could be.

Wright:  And the larger point I guess is that whatever the origins of your intuition, it is compatible with science. It it it's plausible in light of everything you you know about science.

Freeman Dyson: Yes I mean I like to think of there is this metaphor of the two windows that religion and science are two windows looking out on the universe and you can't look through both of them at the same time, that they both of them show the same universe. There are simply different ways of looking.