Martin Gardner died last Saturday, provoking a round of reminiscences from the skeptical community. There’s been a fair amount of talk about Gardner’s status as the odd theist out within the skeptic movement. In a comment at Phil Plait’s blog, James Randi gave a nice, succinct explanation of Gardner’s stance (HT Massimo Pigliucci):

Martin was a fideist, and he defended that belief in his usual calm, direct fashion. When I questioned him on the subject he told me that he had no really good evidence to support his belief, but that it simply made him feel better to adopt it. He said that I — and other curmudgeons — had far better evidence for our convictions, but that he just felt more secure in his acceptance. He admitted — easily — that he could not convincingly argue his case… That was Martin, and I love him for being Martin.

What Randi is describing fits very well with Gardner’s discussion of religion in Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener.

Gardner’s skepticism was a matter of responding to people who claimed to have proven things they hadn’t, not about trying to disprove anything. This has actually been a popular stance in anti-pseudoscience circles, and Michael Shermer has made especially strong use of it when he turns to talking about God. What’s striking about Gardner’s version of fideism, though, is the way blocks arguments. On atheist blogs you’ll hear complaints about attempts by theists to stop debate entirely, but that’s actually very different than Gardner’s position. But these complaints are a response to people who want the conversation to go on just long enough for them to get your immediate concession that you were wrong to bring the issue up in the first place. Gardner, though, usually just said “here’s what I believe and why,” where the “why” wasn’t much to argue about.

The fact that there isn’t much to argue about when people express there beliefs this way is evidence for the an idea in philosophy that often doesn’t come into rationality-of-religion discussions. The idea is that demands for rational reasons for belief are partly a matter of norms for assertion: we don’t much care whether other people have good reasons for their beliefs, but once they’re going around telling us certain things are true, then we expect them to have good rational reasons for their beliefs. That can’t be all of it, though: there’s something profoundly odd about saying “I believe this and don’t have any reason for believing it, got a problem with that?” which is what some defenses of religion amount to (I’m thinking of Alvin Plantinga especially here, though he wouldn’t put it like that). Notice that the oddness of that statement isn’t shared by the appeals to non-rational reasons like Gardner’s, even though non-rational reasons for belief don’t seem to satisfy norms of assertion.

Probably when we talk about needing reasons for beliefs, we’re talking about more than one thing. We’re talking about rational reasons backing up assertions, and reasons in general accounting for beliefs. And that’s not all. We also want good rational reasons for our own beliefs, in part because we want our own beliefs to be true. That need pretty clearly doesn’t trump all others–if no other example will convince you, just imagine you need to take a false-belief pill to get through an interrogation without sparking a nuclear war. All else being equal, though, I’m with Carl Sagan preferring to know what the world is really like rather than persist in a satisfying delusion.

More than that, in my personal experience pragmatic fideism becomes impossible when you think too hard about it. At some point in high school I admitted to myself that I had no good reasons for believing in God, and moreover didn’t even really believe. I was vaguely attracted to the idea that there might be pragmatic reasons for believing even if the chances were small, but if I had just admitted the chances were small I didn’t believe, and I didn’t see any way to change that. I’ve been told I’m abnormal for finding it difficult to believe things I know ain’t so, though, so the psychological ineptitude for certain kinds of fideism can’t be an issue with everybody.

Anyway, I find Gardner’s position psychologically impossible and really not all that good a policy, though. It’s a bit of an odd feeling, though, realizing I don’t have the same visceral reaction to it that I do to apologetic cliches or baseless assertions.