Fallibilism and Faith

Fallibilism and Faith

The first step toward finding out is to acknowledge you do not satisfactorily know already; so that no blight can so surely arrest all intellectual growth as the blight of cocksureness; and ninety-nine out of every hundred good heads are reduced to impotence by that malady—of whose inroads they are most strangely unaware! Indeed, out of a contrite fallibilism, combined with a high faith in the reality of knowledge, and an intense desire to find things out, all my philosophy has always seemed to me to grow.

—Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1

Cardinal Ratzinger's homily at the votive mass for the election of the new pope in April 2005 is a troubling text, rife with inner tensions rendered ominous by his subsequent election to the papacy. Though its condemnation of an alleged "dictatorship of relativism" is the occasion of this symposium, more than relativist thinking is at issue. The homily defines relativism as a "trickery that strives to entice people into error" so that their belief is "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine." The "ultimate goal" of this tricky and satanically enticing dictatorship is to serve "one's own ego and desires." Refusing to acknowledge intermediary positions that could better serve the growth of faith and understanding, Cardinal Ratzinger contrasts relativism with the "Creed of the Church," which he identifies as "truth" and "knowledge" that are "definitive" because heard directly from our friend Jesus: "There are no secrets between friends: Christ tells us all that he hears from the Father; he gives us his full trust and with trust, also knowledge. . . . To our weak minds . . . he entrusts his truth."

One intermediary position or attitude that this homily ignores is "fallibilism," which insists (as the homily does) that our "minds" are "weak" but also insists (as the homily does not) that human knowledge, as imperfect, needs continuous improvement. Fallibilism thus combines, as Christianity is supposed to do, humility (expressed as open-minded curiosity) with an ethics of perfectionist meliorism. Fallibilism, moreover, is not inconsistent with Christian doctrine and must be distinguished from the sort of "falsificationism," advocated by Karl Popper, that insists knowledge grows only by attempting to falsify our theories and beliefs so as to test their veracity and discover their errors. Rather than focus on disproving or doubting our given beliefs, fallibilism more simply recognizes that future experience may show them to be somehow insufficient or inferior to newer ideas that build on but surpass them. C. S. Peirce, the pragmatist philosopher who coined the term and constructed the fallibilist argument, rejected the whole program of Cartesian methodical doubt (more recently condemned by Pope John Paul II) as distracting from the more positive goals of inquiry. Why waste time, Peirce asks, trying to doubt that in which we have firm faith, when there are so many things of which we are not sure? Far from a nihilist or skeptic or relativist, Peirce was a scientific philosopher and Christian believer who urged intellectuals "to worship God in the development of ideas and of truth."¹

Though sharing neither Peirce's goal of effecting "the marriage of religion and science" nor his (unfulfilled) desire "to join the ancient church of Rome," I hope that my commentary on Cardinal Ratzinger's homily will indicate how the fallibilist attitude can promote spiritual development, deepen religious faith, and advance ethical knowledge, since fallibilism avoids the tensions between growth and truth, dynamism and fixity, that torture the cardinal's text. His efforts to negotiate these tensions by invoking repeatedly the cooperative complementarity of body and soul prove unsuccessful because these notions, as he deploys them, are equally implicated in dualistic discord. It seems to me, in other words, that Joseph Ratzinger has been looking for philosophical help in the wrong quarters; and I would like, with respect, to suggest that pragmatic fallibilism may be of use to him as an ethicist and theologian.

At first glance, the cardinal...