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Is the Pauline passage an example of Jamesian over-belief?
Category: Belief
Christianity and Intelligibility: A Response to Flood
Anthony Flood writes,
Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word.
Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard, Bill wrote:
While I agree that Christianity makes sense of the world and in particular of the scientific enterprise, and while I myself have argued against materialism/physicalism/naturalism and in favor of Divine Mind as source of the world’s intelligibility, it must be borne in mind that Xianity [Christianity] is a very specific religion with very specific tenets such as Incarnation and Trinity. Why should anyone think that such apparently unintelligible doctrines are necessary for the intelligibility of the natural world? (Emphasis added.—A. G. F.)
The short answer is that appearances can be untrustworthy. Unless it can be shown that those tenets are really, not just apparently, unintelligible, the implicit objection (in the form of a rhetorical question) has no force.
BV: Not so, and for two reasons. Trinity and Incarnation may or may not be intelligible doctrines. Either way, the question remains why an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of nature in terms of Divine Mind requires them. That is the question I am posing to Joe, and indirectly to C. S. Lewis, and it is not rhetorical. I am genuinely asking it. But I have found that some people do not understand what a rhetorical question is. In fact, one night I caught the astute Mark Levin of Life, Liberty, and Levin (Fox News) misusing the phrase. So permit me a brief digression.
A rhetorical question is a grammatically interrogative form of words that is not logically interrogative but either logically indicative or logically imperative. Such a form of words is used to issue a command or to make a statement, not to ask a question. For example, Daddy says to teenage girl, "Do you have to talk on the phone while driving?" Clearly, the old man is not asking a question despite the grammatically interrogative formulation. He is issuing a command, or perhaps a recommendation, in a polite way. A second example is from Hillary Clinton. "Do you really think Donald Trump has the temperament to be commander-in-chief?" When she said that in a speech, she was not asking whether Trump has the requisite temperament, but stating or asserting that he does not. And this despite her use of the grammatical interrogative.
Here is an interesting case. Someone sincerely asks, "Does God exist?" and receives the reply, "Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon?" (Ed Abbey). The first question is genuine; the second is rhetorical. Another curious case: an uniformed person sincerely asks a genuine question, "Is Mayorkas lying about border security?" and receives in response a rhetorical question that expresses either a tautology, "Is a cat a cat?" or an analytic truth, "Is the Pope Catholic?" End of digression.
And so my question is not rhetorical. I am not asserting anything, I am genuinely asking why Joe or C. S. Lewis, to whom Joe links, or anyone thinks that an account of the intelligibility of nature (including its uniformity, regularity, and predictability) in terms of Divine Mind must also include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation. By the intelligibility of nature I mean its intrinsic understandability by minds such as ours. The natural world is intrinsically such as to be understandable by us. As opposed to what? As opposed to deriving its intelligibility from us via our conceptual schemes. If the latter derivation were the case, then the intelligibility would not be intrinsic but relational: relative to us and our conceptual frameworks. (I note en passant that there are other ways of accounting for intelligibility without God. The late Daniel Dennett would probably say that it 'evolves.' I'll come back to Dennett later.)
After all, a Jew who rejects Trinity and Incarnation could hold that nature is intrinsically intelligible only if it is a divine creation. And a Muslim could as well. And our friend Dale Tuggy too! He is a unitarian Christian.
So again: Why does an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of the natural world in terms of Divine Creative Mind require the specific doctrines of normative Christianity? That and that alone is the question I am raising in my response to Joe and C. S. Lewis.
Tony may have a defensible answer to my question. Or he may not. We can discuss it if he likes. But all of this is irrelevant to the initial post and the comment thread it generated. The question I raised in the initial post was whether the knowledge involved when a person knows that the Sun has risen is exactly the same sort of knowledge involved when a person knows — if he does know — that Christianity is true.
The Sun Also Rises: On Solar and Christian Belief
A reader sends us to an article that begins like this:
The need for a return to God is clearly evident in today’s deranged and dysfunctional world. It is a need, exceeding all others, that must be fulfilled in order to keep enemies of God from interfering with human life.
And then a little later we get an unsourced quotation from C. S. Lewis replete with a non-functioning hyperlink:
C.S. Lewis: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” This points directly to the essence of the faith in Christianity and to its need in life. A short explanation, found here, includes the observation: “At first glance, this quote may appear simple, but upon closer examination, its deep meaning and profound importance become evident. Essentially, Lewis suggests that his faith in Christianity is not solely based on tangible evidence but also on the transformative impact it has on his perception of the world.” [My emphasis.]
Since the quotation is unsourced, I cannot check whether Lewis said what he is quoted as saying. If he did, it is a silly thing to say. Let me explain.
This morning I observed a beautiful sunrise. And so I believe that the Sun rose this morning. I also believe that the Sun is the source of the natural light we enjoy on Earth. But it is false, and indeed silly, to say that one who believes in Christianity believes in the very same way. The difference is obvious. I cannot help but believe that the Sun rose this morning: I saw it with my own two eyes! Seeing is believing in a case like this.* That the Sun rose is given, if not indubitably, then for all practical purposes.** There is no need for a leap of faith beyond the given. The will does not come into it. In no way do I decide to believe that the Sun has risen. Examples like this one refute a universal doxastic voluntarism.
But if you believe that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth, if you believe that the God-Man is fully divine and fully human, that he is one person in two natures, then you believe beyond the sensorily given. (You also arguably believe beyond what is intelligible to the discursive intellect.) You cannot see God the way you see the Sun. To 'see' God in Jesus you need the 'eye' of faith which is quite obviously not a physical eye but a spiritual 'eye.' The last sentence in the quotation reads:
Essentially, Lewis suggests that his faith in Christianity is not solely based on tangible evidence but also on the transformative impact it has on his perception of the world.
Better, but still bad. Someone who comes to embrace Christianity comes to view the world in a way very different from the way he viewed it prior to his becoming a Christian. True! So, yes, his worldview has been transformed. But that transformation is no part of the evidence of the truth of Christianity; if it were, then the transformation that occurs in someone who goes from being a Christian to an atheist or a Christian to a Communist or a Christian to a Buddhist, etc. is a transformation that is evidence of the truth of atheism, Communism, Buddhism respectively, etc.
Article here.
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*There may be other cases in which seeing does not suffice for belief. I am thinking of G. E. Moore's putative counterexample: "I see it, but I don't believe it!"
** The hyperbolic skepticism of Descartes is not to the point here.
Faith: Life-Enhancing Only if True?
In July of 2022 I published a post entitled Faith's Immanent Value. Here are the opening paragraphs slightly redacted:
Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably. My question is whether that possible upshot would matter. If it should turn out there is nothing on the other side of the Great Divide, would that retroactively remove your faith's immanent value?
My answer is that it won't matter because you won't know it. You will not learn that your faith was in vain. There will be no disappointment. You will not discover that your faith was a life-enhancing illusion. You will have had the benefit of a faith which will have sustained you until the moment of your annihilation as an individual person. You will not die alone for you will die with the Lord-believed-in, a Lord never to be known, but also never to be known not to be. If the Lord-believed-in is enough for this life, and this life turns out to be the only life, then the Lord-believed-in is enough, period.
Your faith will have had immanent value. If this life is the only life, then this immanent value is the only value your faith could have had.
The post received a strong response positive and negative. I return to the topic now, as I re-read for the third time Dietrich von Hildebrand's Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven (Sophia Institute Press, 1991, tr. Alice von Hildebrand. The German original appeared in 1980 under the title Über den Tod (On Death)).
On pp. 109-110, von Hildebrand says things that seem to contradict what I am saying. My purpose in this entry is to re-think the question so as to test my view against his. Here is the paragraph that gives me pause and prompts me to re-examine my position:
Nothing would be more absurd than for us to regard the subjective happiness that results from the supernatural view of death as an end, and to see faith as a means for obtaining this end. To do so would mean detaching from truth both faith and the supernatural view of death. Such a pragmatic interpretation of faith comes close to a total misunderstanding of it. We must, therefore, condemn as blind nonsense the idea that, because it cheers and comforts us, supernatural view of death is worth nourishing even if it is an illusion. Faith gives comfort only if it is true. (110, emphasis added)
The pragmatic interpretation of faith as described by von Hildebrand is not mine. My first task, then, is to explain why. I turn then to an evaluation of von Hildebrand's positive view.
I
My claim is that religious faith has an immanent value, a value for this life in the here and now, whether or not the objects of this faith, God and the soul,* really exist. This is equivalent to saying that faith has immanent value whether or not the faith is objectively true. I am not saying that that faith has immanent value whether or not the believer really believes in God and the soul. I assume that he really does believe, and shows that he really does believe by living his faith, by 'walking the walk' and and not merely by 'taking the talk.' My claim is that a believer who really believes derives an important life-enhancing benefit from his sincere belief whether or not the objects of his belief really exist.
It is important to understand that one who really believes in God and the soul believes that they really exist whether or not he or anyone else believes that they do. His believing purports to target transcendent entities that exist independently of his believing. But note that this purport to target the transcendent is what is whether or not the targets exist. In other words, from the fact that one really believes that a transcendent God exists, it does not follow that a transcendent God really exists.
Am I saying that faith is a means to the end of subjective happiness? No. The sincere believer does not make himself believe in order to make himself feel good or to comfort himself. He is not fooling himself so as to comfort himself. To fool himself, he would have to know or strongly believe that God does not exist and then hide that fact from himself.
The believer believes because of various experiences he has had: he feels (what he describes as) the presence of the Lord on certain occasions; he senses the absoluteness of moral demands and the gap between what he is and what he ought to be; he feels the bite of conscience and cannot bring himself to believe any naturalistic explanation of conscience and its deliverances; he has religious and mystical experiences that seem to tell of an Unseen Order; he takes the beauty, order, and intelligibility of the world to point beyond it to a transcendent Source of this beauty, order, and intelligibility; he feels that life would be meaningless if there were no God, that there would be no ultimate justice; he senses the presence of purely spiritual demonic agents interfering with his attempts to pray and meditate and conform to the demands of morality.
Or it may be that a sincere religious believer never has any experiences that purport to reveal the reality of God and the soul, and has never considered any of the arguments for God and the soul; he believes because he was brought up to believe by people he admires and respects and trusts. Even in this case the believer is not making himself believe as a means to the end of feeling good or comfortable or subjectively happy; he believes simply because he has taken on board the beliefs of others he trusts and respects. I seem to recall Kierkegaard somewhere saying that he believes because his father told him so. Some imbibe belief with their mother's milk.
II
Despite these clarifications of my position, it still seems that if von Hildebrand is right, then I am wrong, and vice versa. He holds that "Faith gives comfort only if it is true." I will take that to mean that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit only it is objectively true and not merely believed to be truth by a sincere believer. What I am saying, however, is that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit to the sincere believer whether or not it is objectively true.
Who is right? In all intellectual honesty, it seems to me that I am right. Why should it be necessary that the faith be true for it be life-enhancing, for it to be good for me to believe it? An analogy may help me get my point across.
At age 60 I attempted a marathon. At the starting line I did not know whether I could cover the 26.2 miles within the allotted time (under seven hours). I did not know whether I could pull it off, but I strongly believed that I could, and surely this strong belief, whether true or false, was good for me to believe: it had race-immanent value in that with this belief I performed better than I would have performed without it. As things turned out, I completed the marathon in six hours. But suppose I hadn't. Suppose that my belief in my ability to complete the marathon in the allotted time was false. It would still have been the case that my belief in completion had race-immanent value. I would still have been better off with that belief than without it.
Now in the Great Race of Life we compete against our own hebetude, decrepitude, and sinfulness for the crown of Eternal Life, the Beatific Vision. But here below we cannot know whether we will attain the crown, or even whether it exists, so here below we need faith. Living by faith we live better than we would have lived without it. We run the Race better, with more enthusiasm, commitment, and resoluteness. Clearly, or so it seems to me, we reap the benefits of this faith in the here and now whether or not there is anything on the other side of the Great Divide.
So I say that von Hildebrand does not understand the pragmatics of faith. One problem is that he caricatures the pragmatic approach as I showed in the first section. The other problem is that he is a dogmatist: his doxastic security needs are so strong that he cannot psychologically tolerate the idea that he might be wrong. He wants objective certainty about ultimates, as all serious philosophers do, but he confuses his subjective certainty, which falls far short of knowledge, with objective certainty, which knowledge logically requires.
He claims to know things that he cannot possibly know. He writes,
We ought to have faith because by our belief in God we give the response to which He is entitled. We ought to believe in divine Revelation because it is absolute truth. (110)
What von Hildebrand is doing here is simply presupposing the existence of God and the absolute truth of divine revelation. If God exists, then of course we ought to have faith in him. And if divine revelation is absolute truth, then we ought to believe in it. But how does von Hildebrand know that God exists and that revelation is true? He doesn't t know these things, he merely believes them. He is claiming to know what he cannot know, but can only believe.
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*'Soul' in the Platonic sense, not the Aristotelian one according to which the soul is the mere life-principle of the body.
Theistic Belief and What Inclines Me to It
Substack post du jour.
Limited Doxastic Voluntarism and Epoché
Are there any beliefs over which we have direct voluntary control?
I am a limited doxastic voluntarist: I hold that there are some beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control. That is, there are some believable contents — call them propositions — that I can bring myself to believe at will, others that I can bring myself to disbelieve at will, and still others about which I can suspend judgment, thereby enacting something like the epoché (ἐποχή) of such ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics as Sextus Empiricus.
Note that the issue concerns the formation of beliefs, not their maintenance, and note the contrast between direct and indirect formation of beliefs. Roughly, I form a belief directly by just forming it, not by doing something else as a means to forming it. Suppose the year is 1950 and you are a young person, sincere and idealistic, eager to consecrate your life to some cause higher than a bourgeois existence of conspicuous consumption in suburbia. You have vibrant stimulating friends who are members of the Communist Party USA. They tell you that the Revolution is right around the corner. You don't believe it, but you want to believe it. So you go to their meetings, accept Party discipline, toe the Party line, and soon you too believe that the Revolution is right around the corner. In this example, the formation of belief is indirect. You do various things (go to the meetings, repeat the formulas, hawk the Daily Worker, toe the line, etc.) in order to acquire the belief. But then in 1956 you learn of Krushchev's denunciation of Stalin and your belief in the glorious Revolution and its imminence suddenly collapses to be replaced by an opposing belief. The formation of the opposing belief is direct.
A correspondent supplies an example of the third case, that of suspending belief:
Suspending belief. Sometimes in the face of good or strong evidence that p, I refuse to believe that p or again that not-p. I suspend any opinion on p.
This has always been my attitude on OJ and the murders he was charged with. Recently I talked with someone who had been teaching OJ knife-fighting in conjunction with a Commando-style TV show that never got launched. His evidence was excluded from the trial. Even in the face of this new evidence that OJ was competent with a knife, I do not form an opinion as to whether or not OJ killed his wife. (This is close to the classical skeptical epoche, except I do not bother to inquire and try to build a counterbalancing case for the opposite belief. Pyrrhonian skepticism says that I always can build such a case and the result will be spontaneous cessation of belief.)
In both these cases [I omitted my correspondent's first example] I think it's clear that what I believe (or don't believe ) is a function of what I will or wish to believe, trumping the evidence on hand and any reasonable induction therefrom. Hopefully, in both case it is also a principled refusal on my part to buy into beliefs that condemn other people. To believe my wife a poisoner or OJ a killer, I require evidence several parsecs beyond a reasonable doubt. You can say that that standard is too liberal [too stringent?], but I can choose to live (and die) by it and it is for several grounds an attractive ethics of belief.
This addresses my concern about the possibility of an ethics of belief. My correspondent suspends judgment, holds no opinion, on the guilt or innocence (as charged) of O.J. Simpson. By suspending judgment, he deliberately impedes or rather prevents the formation of two beliefs, the belief that O.J is guilty and the belief that O.J. is not guilty. I find that I have the same power of doxastic abstention, except that in this particular case I assent to the proposition that O. J. is guilty since I judge the evidence that he is guilty as charged to be overwhelming, and the notion that 'racism' played any part in this case utterly absurd. (My ethics of belief is perhaps less stringent than my correspondent; but we both have an ethics of belief.)
Our question does not concern the content of an ethics of belief, but the very possibility of one whatever its content. Since 'ought' implies 'can,' if I ought to withhold judgment in some cases — and surely there are some cases in which I ought to withhold judgment — then I can withhold judgment. I have the power to withhold judgment; hence my epoché (ἐποχή) is voluntary. So here seems to be a case in which believing/disbelieving is under the direct control of the will: I decide to neither believe nor disbelieve. And from this it follows that the application of deontological categories is legitimate. For example, "You ought not believe that your neighbor Jones is a homosexual on the basis of such flimsy evidence as that he is unmarried and has a Martha Stewart-like interest in home furnishings! You ought to suspend judgment!"
My provisional conclusion is that our manifest ability to suspend judgment in some cases shows that we do have direct voluntary control over some of our believings. I have no control over my believing that a naked woman is standing in front of me if in fact such is the case (in good light, etc.) And I have no control over my believing that the Imperium Romanum no longer rules Western Europe (to adapt an example from Alston, Beyond 'Justification', p. 63). But I do have direct voluntary control over my believing that neighbor Jones is a homosexual.
Unusual Experiences and the Problems of Overbelief and Underbelief
Substack latest.
One day, well over 40 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person. Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!" It was a wholly spontaneous cri de coeur, a prayer if you will, but not intended as such. I emphasize that it was wholly unpremeditated. As soon as I had said the words and made the gesture, a wonderful peace descended upon my mind, and the flood of negativity vanished. I became as calm as a Stoic sage.
The Pragmatic and the Evidential
Substack latest.
On believing beyond the evidence. Immoral? Irrational?
The Infirmity of Reason versus the Certitude of Faith
Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively as regards the ultimate questions that most concern us. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:
It seems therefore that this unfortunate state [the one brought about by the infirmity of reason] is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one. This is a great step toward the Christian religion; for it requires that we look to God for knowledge of what we ought to believe and what we ought to do, and that we enslave our understanding to the obeisance of faith. If a man is convinced that nothing good is to be expected from his philosophical inquiries, he will be more disposed to pray to God to persuade him of the truths that ought to be believed than if he flatters himself that he might succeed by reasoning and disputing. A man is therefore happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. (206, emphasis added)
Now how is this a solution to the alleged infirmity of reason? A Christian fideist, acquiescing in pure blind (purblind?) faith, accepts the Trinity while a Muslim fideist, equally subjectively certain of his faith, rejects the Trinity while intoning that God is one. Blind conviction butts up against blind conviction of the opposite kind, and all too often strife and bloodshed is the upshot. I hope you agree with me that there is something utterly mad about torturing and murdering people over such an abstruse matter, one so far removed from any conceivable method of rational settlement. I say this as a hard-core, life-long committed student of metaphysics who has a healthy contempt for such benighted neo-positivist 'philosophistines' as David Stove. But even if it doesn't come to bloodshed, the threats of 'cancellation' and dhimmitude for the heterodox are intolerable.
Admittedly, reason is weak and inconclusive. But fideistic faith is blind: the certitude it provides is merely subjective. For if the Christian's subjective certitude of the Trinity were also objective, then the same would hold for the Muslim's subjective certitude of the opposite, with the result that one and the same proposition would be both objectively true and objectively not true. To avoid this result one would have to throw out the Law of Non-Contradiction. But then one would have taken one step too far. But what I just wrote is slightly tendentious. To put the point with the proper caution: the jettisoning of LNC is to be avoided if at all possible. For LNC is the supreme law and norm of the discursive intellect.
The dogmatic Christian will claim that his subjective certainty that God is triune is also objective; but the dogmatic Muslim will do the same with respect to the negation of the characteristic (orthodox) Christian claim. Obviously, they can't both be right. So one must be wrong. Each will call the other wrong. But neither will be justified in so doing.
Although there is scholarly debate as to what exactly Pierre Bayle's ultimate philosophical position is, the following argument can be attributed to him (cf. Richard H. Popkin, "Pierre Bayle's Place in 17th Century Scepticism" in Paul Dibon, ed. Pierre Bayle: Le Philosophe De Rotterdam, Elsevier, 1959, pp. 1-19):
1. Reason is too weak and confused to discover the truth about the world and how we should live in it.
Therefore
2. One must rely on faith as the guide to, and divine revelation as the measure of, the truth about the world and how we should live in it.
This is a non sequitur for a couple of reasons. First, one response to the supposed truth of (1) might be a universal epoché (εποχη) of all contention-inspiring beliefs and a resolve to stick to the mundane and follow the customs of one's time and place, and in the relaxed manner in which worldly people do this: one goes along to get along without getting too worked up over anything. Among meat-eaters one eats meat, among vegetarians vegetables only. Among church-goers, one goes to church. And this without dogmatizing about the evils of factory farms, the supposed health dangers of red meat, etc., and in the case of the church-goers without taking seriously the talk of "turning the other cheek," etc. In the teeth of (1), one abandons the search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. One sticks to the classical Pyrrhonian path of Sextus Empiricus & Co., a path that leads not upwards to the object sof religion, downwards to a tranquil re-insertion into the quotidian.
Second, the above argument gives one no reason to accept the Christian faith and the Christian revelation as opposed to, say, the Muslim faith and revelation. (See the Bayle quotation above.) Given that we need divine revelation, which of the competing putative revelations should we accept? From the fact that we need revelation to set us straight, it does not follow that the Christian revelation will satisfy our need. Besides, there is reasonable dispute about what exactly the Christian revelation is. On both fronts we are thrown back upon our fail and exigent reason.
My tentative conclusion, then, is that the infirmity of reason, though a fact, does not straightaway license any embrace of fideism which, for present purposes, can be characterized roughly as reliance on pure blind faith in matters of religion. (Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is a good 19th century example of a fideist.) Fideism comes in different varieties. There is Wittgensteinian fideism, to mention just one variety. I have something to say about it over at Substack.
What are our options? Perhaps only these:
A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others who, in different ways and to different degrees, develop the theme of the infirmity of reason.
B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to what purports to be revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.
C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane, if not on all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tri-personal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet to me.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)
D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.
I recommend and practice (D). Or are there other options?
Faith’s Immanent Value
Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably. My question is whether, and to what extent, that upshot would matter. What if there is nothing on the other side of the Great Divide?
My answer is that it won't matter because you won't know it. You will not learn that your faith was in vain. You will not discover that your faith was a life-enhancing illusion. You will have had the benefit of a faith which will have sustained you until the moment of your annihilation as an individual person. You will not die alone for you will die with the Lord-believed-in, a Lord never to be known, but also never to be known not to be. If the Lord-believed-in is enough for this life, and this life turns out to be the only life, then the Lord-believed-in is enough, period.
Your faith will have had immanent value. If this life is the only life, then this immanent value is the only value your faith could have had.
"But then your faith will have been in vain!"
Yes, I said that myself at the outset. But it is true only from a point of view external to my life, a point of view that cannot be my point of view. What then is that to me when I no longer exist? In life, I can view my life from outside: I can play the spectator of my life. But if and when I no longer exist, I cannot play that role. If my faith is lived here and now by me in full conviction of its non-vanity and non-illusoriness, then nothing that happens after my annihilation can retroactively mark my lived faith as vain and illusory. It will have served a good, life-enhancing purpose, and indeed the only purpose it could have served if my earthly tenure ends in utter annihilation.
"The believer believes that God exists independently of whether or not anyone, including himself, believes that God exists. The sincere belief in God is belief in a transcendent being."
Yes, that is right, but it doesn't follow that God exists. It also does not follow that God does not exist. The life-enhancing content of the belief is what it is whether or not the transcendent object of the belief exists. My point is that sincere belief in God suffices for this life, and suffices sans phrase (without qualification) if this life of mine ends utterly with death.
"What do you mean by 'suffices for this life.'"
I mean that a sincere lived (existentially appropriated and practically manifested) faith in God suffices to confer upon this life value, purpose, and moral structure, making it affirmable as good, and worth living.
"But if a believer took this attitude you are describing and apparently also advocating, then that believer would be in some doubt as to whether there would be any post-mortem experiential confirmation by the believer himself of the transcendent validity of his faith. If so, his faith would not be subjectively certain to him, and would then be neither knowledge nor faith!"
I respectfully disagree! It would not be knowledge, of course, but it would be genuine faith. A faith that is subjectively certain is not a living faith, but a crutch, a convenience, a cop-out, an evasion. Living faith, genuine faith, is faith sustained in the teeth of doubt. Only then is it authentic.
"Why is an authentic faith one that lives with doubt?"
Because our predicament in this life is not such as to allow us any certainty about such ultimate matters as the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, whether we have a higher destiny, whether we are called to divine fellowship, whether theosis is a real possibility, and so on. One ought not dogmatize about the uncertain. To do so is to pretend to enjoy an insight that one does not enjoy. Such epistemic pretension is a kind of hubris that could have tragic consequences. Think of all the people who have been murdered and tortured to death because others claimed to be certain about what they had no right to believe they could be certain about.
"But aren't you dogmatizing when you claim that one cannot be certain about the matters in question?"
No, because I am claiming merely that there are plausible reasons to believe that there are no rationally compelling reasons to believe that one can be certain about the things that the dogmatists claim to be certain about.
Genuine faith is not blind, but it is at best reasoned faith. Experience, however, teaches that reason is weak and vacillating. This experientia docet is not a dogmatic pronunciamento. In plain English, I am not dogmatizing when I report what experience teaches. Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot apprehend its own infirmity. It is weak, but not impotent. Its infirmity affects both arguments for and arguments against God, the soul, and rest of the ultimate matters. And this includes arguments for and against the veridicality of a putative divine revelation.
We are not wholly in the dark or wholly in the light. Our predicament is a chiaroscuro, a play of light and dark. It is as if we are in a cave in which there is light enough to discern reasonably a possible route of escape from a condition which is admittedly not wholly satisfactory, but darkness enough reasonably both to doubt whether there is an escape and to suspect that those who claim to see a way to the fullness of light of being empty dreamers, wishful thinkers, utopian reality-deniers, mentally unstable, or even utterly mad. Some in the cave will reasonably argue that their condition is as good as it gets and that we must accept reality and not muck things up by reaching for the unattainable. They will deny, with justification, that their condition is speluncular. Other in the cave will reasonably argue the opposite. Neither party is entitled to dogmatize.
If our condition is cave-like, then a reasoned faith is as good as it gets and its ongoing vitality feeds from its tension with reasoned unfaith.
Here below we ought not allow our inquiry into the ultimate matters to degenerate into either denialism or dogmatism. Saying this, I am not dogmatizing, but expressing my reasoned conviction. Thus place is made for reasoned faith which is neither blind nor dogmatic.
On Thinking for Oneself
You must think for yourself while never forgetting that the wild and troubling and contention-stoking diversity of opinions abroad in the world is due to people thinking for themselves. The herd animal may be stampeded into a slot canyon where he drowns; the maverick may end up in the same place and meet the same fate on his own.
If only there were an utterly reliable teaching authority available to us here and now. Some say there is. See my longish entry, Michael Liccione on Private and Collective Judgment.
Ernst Mach and the Shabby Pedagogue: On Belief De Se
1. In The Analysis of Sensations (Dover, 1959, p. 4, n. 1) Ernst Mach (1838-1916) offers the following anecdote:
Not long ago, after a trying railway journey by night, when I was
very tired, I got into an omnibus, just as another man appeared at
the other end. 'What a shabby pedagogue that is, that has just
entered,' thought I. It was myself; opposite me hung a large
mirror. The physiognomy of my class, accordingly, was better known
to me than my own.
When Mach got on the bus he saw himself, but not as himself. His first thought was one expressible by 'The man who just boarded is a shabby pedagogue.' 'The man who just boarded' referred to Mach. Only later did Mach realize that he was referring to himself, a thought that he might have expressed by saying, 'I am a shabby pedagogue.'
Clearly, the thought expressed by 'The man who just boarded is shabby' is distinct from the thought expressed by 'I am shabby.' After all, Mach had the first thought but not the second. So they can't be the same thought. And this despite the fact that the very same property is ascribed to the very same person by both sentences. The second thought is the content of a belief de se. Such a belief is a belief about oneself as oneself.
One can have a belief about oneself without having a belief about oneself as oneself.
The difference emerges even more clearly if we alter the example slightly. Suppose Mach sees that the man who has just got on the bus has his fly open. He thinks to himself: The man who has just boarded has his fly open, a thought that leads to no action on Mach's part. But from the thought, I have my fly open, behavioral consequences ensue: Mach buttons his fly. Since the two thoughts have different behavioral consequences, they cannot be the same thought, despite the fact that they attribute the very same property to the very same person.
But if they attribute the same property to the same person, what exactly is the difference between the two thoughts?
Linguistically, the difference is that between a definite description ('the man who just boarded') and the first-person singular pronoun 'I.' Since the referent (Frege's Bedeutung) is the same in both cases, namely Mach, one will be tempted to say that the difference is a difference in sense (Frege's Sinn) or mode of presentation (Frege's Darstellungsweise). Mach refers to himself in two different ways, a third-person objective way via a definite description, and a first-person subjective way via the first-person singular pronoun.
If this is right, then although there are two different thoughts or propositions, one indexical and the other non-indexical, it might seem that there need only be one fact in the world to serve as truth-maker for both, the fact of Mach's being shabby. This is a non-indexical fact. It might seem that reality is exhausted by non-indexical facts, and that there are no such indexical or perspectival facts as those expressed by 'I am shabby' or 'I am BV' or 'I am the man who just got on the bus.' Accordingly, indexicality is merely a subjective addition, a projection: it belongs to the world as it appears to us, not to the world as it is in itself, in reality. On this approach, when BV says or thinks 'I,' he refers to BV in the first-person way with the result that BV appears to BV under the guise of 'I'; but in reality there is no fact corresponding to 'I am BV.'
2. But is this right? There are billions of people in the world and one of them is me. Which one? BV! But if the view sketched above is correct, then it is not an objective fact that one of these people is me. That BV exists is an objective fact, but not that BV is me. BV has two ways of referring to himself but there is only one underlying objective fact. Geoffrey Maddell strenuously disagrees:
If I am to see the world in a certain way, then the fact that the
world seen in this way is apprehended as such by me cannot be part
of the content of that apprehension. If I impose a subjective grid
on the world, then it is objectively the case that I do so. To put
it bluntly, it is an objective fact about the world that one of the
billions of people in it is me. Mind and Materialism, 1988, p.
119.)
Maddell's point is that the first-person point of view is irreducibly real: it itself cannot be a subjective addition supplied from the first-person point of view. It makes sense to say that secondary qualities are projections, but it makes no sense to say that the first-person point of view is a projection. That which first makes possible subjective additions cannot itself be a subjective addition. That which is at the root of the very distinction between the for-us and the in-itself cannot be merely for-us. (Maddell might not approve of this last sentence of mine. It sounds a little 'Continental.')
Consider the phenomenal redness of a stop sign. It makes sense to say that this secondary quality does not belong to the sign itself in reality, but is instead a property the sign has only in relation to a perceiver. In this sense, secondary qualities are subjective. But to say that subjectivity itself, first-person perspectivity itself, is a subjective projection is unintelligible. It cannot belong to mere appearance, but must exist in reality. As Madell puts it, "Indexical thought cannot be analysed as a certain 'mode of presentation', for the fact that reality is presented to me in some particular way cannot be part of the way in which it is presented." (p. 120)
3. Trouble for materialism. According to materialism, reality is exhausted by non-indexical physical facts. But we have just seen that indexical thoughts are underpinned by indexical facts such as the fact of BV's being me. These facts are irreducibly real, but not physically real. Therefore, materialism is false: reality is not exhausted by non-indexical physical facts.
Romantic Postscript
That most mysterious of all pronouns, the first-person singular, is the key, or one of them, to the riddle of the universe.
Doubting the Teachings of One’s Religion
I argued earlier that besides its salutary role in philosophy, doubt also has a salutary role to play in religion. But I left something out, and Vito Caiati caught it:
I have been thinking about your recent post “A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and Religion” and would like to pose a question to you: While it is certainly true that the religionist “doubts the teachings of other religions,” does he not do the same with some or many of the teachings of his own religion? In raising this question, I have in mind the intellectual believer, imbued with an inherent religious sensibility and inclination, desirous of affirming the foundational propositions of his faith, including those that appear illogical or contradictory, but who, however much he wills it, is often suffused with doubt about their veracity. I would go so far as to argue, speaking as a Christian and Roman Catholic, that certain dogmas and doctrines by their very nature engender such doubts. None of this necessarily entails the abandonment of belief, but it renders the faith of the religionist more tenuous and unstable than many would like to admit. His struggle to uphold one or more members of a set of beliefs is, at least for those not gifted with special grace, a characteristic property of his faith. At best, he should acknowledge the tension and understand that he will repeatedly transverse an arc between belief and doubt and that the warm convictions of one moment will often dissipate in the cold misgivings of another. The gap between what is affirmed and what is consistently believed is for the religionist of this type never entirely closed.
That is a very fine statement and I cannot disagree with it. Religious believers who are both sincere and intellectually sophisticated will in the main, and as a matter of fact, question the truth of their beliefs and the efficacy of their practices. Dr. Caiati doesn't quite say it, but he does suggest that this is as it ought to be. Whether or not he would commit himself to the further step from the factual to the normative, I will commit myself to it: one ought to, at least sometimes, question truth and efficacy of beliefs and practices. It has always seemed to me that a living faith, as opposed to a convenience and a soporific, must maintain itself in the teeth of doubt. A vital faith, a living faith is animated in part by doubt and a spirit of inquiry. He who finds first had to seek; but here below the finding is never secure and final and so must be renewed by further seeking.
Vito speaks of certain doctrines and dogmas that by their very nature engender doubts. Some of these are harder to believe than others. The hardest to believe are those that demand or seem to demand the "crucifixion of the intellect." Trinity and Incarnation are the two main main examples. One cannot be a Christian and deny them* (in the way one could be a Christian and deny Transubstantiation). It is, however, difficult to make logical sense of them (in the way that it is not difficult to make logical sense of the Resurrection.) See my Trinity and Incarnation category for details, and this relatively short and precise entry in particular: The Logic of the Trinity Revisited.
Religious faith here below must remain "tenuous and unstable" to the intellectually awake. The tenets we hold to must remain tentative and thus "tenuous." Doxastic 'grip,' like physical grip is subject to the world's loosening. No one's grip is absolutely secure. There is no helping that unless you want to sink into the somnambulance of the worldling who has the world and its pleasures and "fire insurance" to boot.
Religious faith is a faith seeking understanding. It is not a blind faith without understanding, but neither is it a faith that goes beyond a clear understanding, superadding intellectual assent to a clearly conceived proposition. Perhaps the Pauline image is apt: religious faith is a seeing through a glass darkly. The glass of the discursive intellect is a distorting lens through which the Incarnation must appear logically impossible even though in truth it is actual.
Let me put the question to myself directly: Do you or do you not accept Jesus Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, as your only hope for salvation? My acceptance takes the form, not of an acceptance of a ready-made proposition or set of propositions, but the acceptance of a task to be pursued in all seriousness, the task of investigating the matter in all its ramifications via reasoning, prayer, meditation, examination of conscience, study of all relevant literary sources, including scripture, commentaries thereon, the works of the great and not-so-great philosophers of all times and places, with no slighting of Athens, or Jerusalem, or Benares, or Alexandria, and seeking out the few living who may have been vouchsafed a higher degree of insight than that which I find in myself.
_________________
*I spew from my mouth those miserable 'liberals' who would remake Christianity in their own stunted image. They are free to reject the doctrine, and I defend their right to do so; but they ought not be allowed to change it to suit themselves. Christianity is what it is; its definatory tenets are essential to it and cannot be jettisoned without jettisoning the whole thing.
Addendum (6 February 2022):
Malcolm Pollack comments on the above here. In an e-mail he writes,
I hope you are well. I set off in 2022 imagining I was going to write a lot more (I'd been tapering off lately), but things are now so completely insane that I hardly know what to say. How does one analyze, or comment productively on, what goes on in a madhouse? Why even bother? And why continue to elaborate the various and infinitely detailed breakdowns and malfunctions of a system that's going over a cliff? I can hardly bring myself, any longer, to raise a pen.
There is indeed something absurd about continuing to add to the analytical literature on our social and political collapse. For example, what is the point of this excellent article by Anthony Esolen? It will not be read by those who need its instruction, and even if they did read it, it would do them no good. You cannot appeal to the reason of those bereft of reason, or to the consciences of those who either lack a conscience or whose conscience was never properly formed.
So why do I continue to think about and write about these things? The short answer is that I have a theoretical bent. I enjoy figuring things out. "All men by nature desire to know." (Aristotle). This is so even if few live up to their (normative) nature. The bios theoretikos and all that. Intellectual types derive intense pleasure from reading, study, thinking, and all cognate activities.
Even if the subject-matter is disgusting as is that of the medical and social pathologists, the pleasure of understanding is a delight. The feculent can be fascinating.
Theory has its escapist joys. But in the end we would prefer to act upon the world and its recalcitrant denizens and bring about improvement. But even if we know what needs to be done to bring about, not mere change, but improvement, the tasks are formidable and perhaps insurmountable especially since we who oppose the current madness are divided among ourselves, which is the topic of this article which explains the Boomer versus 'Based' generation gap on the Right. Excerpt:
Do you hate America and want it to fail?
A lot of younger right-wingers would say yes . . . in a certain sense, they do. And they have reasons for saying that. What young man with any sense wants to die for the Joe Biden regime in the Ukraine? Who wants to pay taxes so Kamala Harris can shower money on illegal immigrants and left-wing shock troops?
That’s a hard message to hear for anyone who lived through the 1960s and the Cold War. For a long time, to be on the Right—to defend liberty and morality and decency—meant to be a patriot and to love America. And it still does. But the enemies of freedom and decency who hate America are no longer godless communists abroad, they are the godless leftists at home who are currently in power.
If America means transgender rights and suffocating biomedical security measures, then those who love freedom will come to hate America—or, to be more specific, the current regime that has taken control of what used to be America.
Young people on the Right don’t hate liberty and morality and decency; they despise woke ideology. The older idea of “America” that the Boomers love is gone, as far as the younger generation is concerned. Most Boomers will never share this antipathy, but they must learn to distinguish between America the nation and America the state. The American state—as the COVID lockdowns, Russiagate hoax, and the political prosecution of the January 6 protestors show—is at war with the American people. (Many older conservatives recognized this distinction and gave Rush Limbaugh a pass when he famously remarked on air that he hoped Barack Obama would fail.)
Faith Animated by Doubt
A living faith is animated by doubt. Faith dies when it hardens into a subjective certainty and a moribund complacency. I have had this thought for years. Each time I re-enact it, it strikes me as true. I was pleased to discover recently that T. S. Eliot holds the same or a very similar view:
'For people of intellect I think that doubt is inevitable,' Eliot once told an interviewer. The doubter is a man who takes the problem of his faith seriously.'
The quotation is from the outstanding 712 pp. biography by Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, W. W. Norton & Co, 1998, p. 112.
Doubt, the engine of inquiry, is the purifier of the quest for contact with that which lies beyond inquiry.
Is Belief Voluntary?
Why would it matter? Here is one reason.
If the experts are evenly divided on some question, many will urge that that the rational thing to do is to suspend belief. To satisfy the dictates of reason, then, one ought to suspend or withhold belief in some cases. But 'ought' implies 'can.' So, if one ought to suspend belief, then one has the ability to suspend belief, which implies that at least some beliefs or rather believings are under a person's voluntary control. I say that some are. That makes me a limited doxastic voluntarist. Catherine Elgin says that none are:
Belief is not voluntary. Belief aims at truth in the sense that a belief is defective if its content is not true. If believing were something we could do or refrain from doing at will, the connection to truth would be severed. If Jack could believe that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end just because he wanted to, then his believing that Neanderthals were a evolutionary dead end would not amount to his thinking that 'Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end' is true. For nothing about the fate of the Neanderthals is affected by what he wants. ("Persistent Disagreement" in Disagreement, eds. Feldman and Warfield, Oxford UP 2013, p. 60)
This argument leaks like a sieve. Either that, or I don't understand it.
It is true that belief is connected to truth. But what exactly is the connection? If I believe that p, then I believe it to be true that p. That is the connection. I cannot believe that p without believing that it is true that p. But of course my believing that it is true that p is consistent with p's being false.
Now suppose that the evidence available to me for and against the existence of God is equal, and I choose to believe for prudential reasons, say, or for no reason at all, that God exists. This choosing to believe would not sever the connection between believing and truth. For again, the connection is just this: my believing that p entails my believing that p is true. That connection remain in place whether or not believing is voluntary. My believing that God exists does not make it true that God exists. Believing entails believing to be true; it does not entail being true!
The same holds if I choose to disbelieve that God exists or if I choose to suspend belief. My disbeleiving that p does not make p false. And my suspending that p does not make p indeterminate in truth value.
Elgin tells us that "a belief is defective if its content is not true." But surely an occurrent mental state is a believing whether or not its content is true. A false belief is just as much a belief as a true belief. Surely Elgin is not telling us that only true beliefs are beliefs! But then what is she saying?
Elgin writes, "If Jack could believe that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end just because he wanted to, then his believing that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end would not amount to his thinking that 'Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end' is true."
Elgin seems to have a 'straw man' conception of doxastic voluntarism. After all, no one holds that the fate of the Neanderthals depends on what anyone thinks or believes. If the paleontologists are evenly divided on the question and Jack chooses to believe that the Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end, he is not thereby committing himself to the absurd notion that his so believing makes it true that the Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end.
With respect to a purely theoretical question like this, one the answer to which has no practical consequences for the believer, the doxastically (as opposed to practically) rational thing to do would be to suspend judgment/belief. If so, then some believings/disbelievings/suspensions come under the control of the will.