Category: Belief
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Over-Belief and Romans 1: 18-20
Substack latest. Is the Pauline passage an example of Jamesian over-belief?
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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Theistic Belief and What Inclines Me to It
Substack post du jour.
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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,…
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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…
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The Pragmatic and the Evidential
Substack latest. On believing beyond the evidence. Immoral? Irrational?
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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:…
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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…