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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48209
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48209
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

## Avoid the imputation of naiveté.

In the real world, of course, all most all people hold their beliefs reflexively and naively. Most atheists have not thought through or are even aware of the epistemological and ontological difficulties of their position. The same is true of most Catholics, Jew, Hindus, etc. Thinking through the philosophical difficulties of your faith is rare and difficult. Most people are naive about what they believe.

But when you present any belief system in fiction (as opposed to sticking to events and emotions, as much of fiction does) you inevitably assume a non-naive posture. Your position may in fact be very naive, but your posture, in choosing to treat the matter at all, is one of non-naiveté. You are implicitly claiming (as you claim when you treat anything in fiction) that you are not naive about it.

Implicitly, therefore, you will treat your own faith as non-naive, and the faith of others as naive. If you simply present all the characters of your own world view as non-naive and other characters as naive, you will have produced a devotional or confessional work.

Devotiotional and confessional works exist for every faith, including agnosticism and atheism.

However, it is possible, in life as in fiction, for a person to recognize the philosophical difficulties with their faith and choose to believe it anyway. Their faith then becomes non-naive.

The agnostic position is that the universe is ultimately too mysterious for our limited capacity for understanding. The agnostic therefore refuses to take a position. The naive believer (Catholic or atheist alike) accepts the faith they were brought up with or the faith of their peers without awareness of the philosophical difficulties it presents. A non-naive believer acknowledges the same difficulties as the agnostic, but choose to believe anyway. (And note that there is also naive agnosticism which lazilly refuses to even think through the problem. For them, saying they are agnostic is a means to avoid the argument.)

A good example of establishing the non-naive faith of a character can be found in _Brideshead Revisited_ in which the naively agnostic narrator Charles Ryder questions his dissolute Catholic friend Sebastian Flyte about how he can believe "all this nonsense". Sebastian replies (quoting from memory) "Is it nonsense though? I rather wish it were."

Sebastian's faith is non-naive. He knows there are difficulties. He knows he does not live up to its standards. He knows that many of his co-religionists don't live up to its standards either. He chooses to believe anyway.

Of course, to pull this off, you can't hold your own faith naively either. You have to acknowledge that, whatever your own views, there are philosophical difficulties with them as well. If you hold that position, you can be sympathetic with people who, faced with the same final uncertainty that we all should face (but that most turn their backs on) made a choice different from yours. Then you are no longer looking down on them, you are looking them in the eye. You may be looking at them across an abyss of differing faith, but you are looking them in the eye and acknowledging the intellectual honesty and sophistication with which they have come to a conclusion different from your own.

This does not mean, of course, that you can't also portray naive characters of the faith in question, or of many faiths. But if you also portray non-naive characters of the same faith, it becomes clear that it is the way that the other characters hold their faith, rather than the faith they hold, that is naive.

Original score: 6