Category: Belief

Dale Tuggy Pays Me a Visit; Belief Versus Acceptance

Dale Tuggy was kind enough yesterday to drive all the way from Tucson to my place in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.  He came on short notice and late in the day but we managed to pack in more than six hours of nonstop conversation on a wide range of philosophical and theological topics.  He was still going strong when, two hours after my bedtime, I had to send him on his way.

Talk got  on to mysterianism, of course, and his ongoing debate with James Anderson.  Dale made a distinction that I hadn't considered, namely, one between belief and acceptance.  My tendency up to now has been to identify believing that p with accepting that p.  Up to now I thought I should make a four-fold distinction: Accept, Reject, Suspend, Withhold. 

For the distinction between belief and acceptance, see Raimo Tuomela, Belief Versus Acceptance.

I repaid Dale for his gift of the belief vs. acceptance distinction by pointing out the distinction (or  putative distinction) between supension and withholding which I borrow from Benson Mates:

Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 5: ". . . the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonists is one of aporia, of being at a a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied." Aporia is not doubt. Doubt implies understanding, but aporia is a lack of understanding. The modern skeptic may doubt, but not the ancient skeptic.

Connected with this is a distinction between epoché as the withholding of assent and suspension of judgment. One can withhold assent from an assertion without granting that it makes sense; but if one suspends judgment then one has a clear propositional sense before one's mind which one neither affirms nor denies. See Mates, p. 32. A good distinction! Add it to the list.

So, strictly speaking, aporia is not doubt and epoché is not suspension of judgment. Close but not the same.

Does Knowledge Entail Belief or Exclude Belief?

A reader who says he is drawn to the view that knowledge excludes belief comments:

I am taking a philosophy class now that takes for granted that knowledge entails belief. My sense is that most philosophers now think that that condition is obvious and settled. They tend to dispute what "justification" means, or add more conditions to the Justified True Belief formula.

That knowledge is justified true belief is a piece of epistemological boilerplate that has its origin in Plato's Theaetetus.  The JTB analysis is extremely plausible.  It is first of all self-evident that there is no false knowledge.  So, necessarily, if S knows that p, then 'p' is true.  It also seems obvious that one can have a true belief without having knowledge.  Suppose I believe that at this very moment Peter (who is 60 miles away) is teaching a class on the philosophy of science, and suppose it is true that at this very moment he is teaching such a class; it doesn't follow that I know that he is teaching such a class.    Knowledge requires justification, whatever exactly that is.  Finally, if S knows that p, how can it fail to be the case that S believes that p?  It may seem obvious that knowledge entails belief.  Necessarily, whatever I know I believe, though not conversely.

So I agree with my reader that most philosophers now think that the belief condition is "obvious and settled."  But most academic philosophers are fashionistas: they follow the trends, stick to what's 'cool,'  and turn up their noses at what they deem politically incorrect.  And they read only the 'approved' journals and books.  I pronounce my 'anathema' upon them.  In any case it is not obvious that knowledge entails belief.

The Case for Saying that Knowledge Excludes Belief

Why not say this:  Necessarily, if S knows that p, then it is not the case that S believes that p?

One cannot understand belief except in relation to other mental states. So let's consider how believing and knowing are related, taking both as propositional attitudes.  They are obviously different, and yet they share a common element. Suppose we say that what is common to S's knowing that p and S's believing that p is S's acceptance of p. I cannot (occurrently) believe that Oswald acted alone unless I accept the proposition that Oswald acted alone, and I cannot (occurrently) know that he acted alone with accepting the very same proposition. To accept, of course, is to accept-as-true. It is equally obvious that what is accepted-as-true might not be true. Those who accept that the earth is flat accept-as-true what is false. Now one could analyze 'S knows that p' as follows:

a) S unconditionally accepts-as-true p
b) p is true
c) S is justified in accepting-as-true p.

This is modeled on, but diverges from, the standard justified-true-belief (JTB) analysis of 'know' the locus classicus of which is Plato's Theaetetus.

And one could perhaps analyze 'S believes that p' as follows:

a) S unconditionally accepts-as-true p
d) S does not know that p.

These analyses accommodate the fact that there is something common to believing and knowing, but without identifying this common factor as belief. The common factor is acceptance. A reason for not identifying the common element as belief is that, in ordinary language, knowledge excludes belief. Thus if I ask you whether you believe that p, you might respond, 'I don't believe it, I know it!' Do I believe the sun is shining? No, I know the sun is shining. Do I know that I will be alive tomorrow? No, but I believe it. That is, I give my firm intellectual assent to the proposition despite its not being evident to me. Roughly, belief is firm intellectual assent in the absence of compelling evidence.

Surely this is what we mean by belief in those cases that clearly count as belief. Lenny the liberal, for example, believes that anthropogenic global warming is taking place and is a dire environmental threat. Lenny doesn't know these two putative facts; he believes them: he unconditionally accepts, he firmly assents to, the two propositions in the absence of compelling evidence. And it seems clear that an element of will is involved in our boy's belief since the evidence does not compel his intellectual assent. He decides to believe what he believes. His believing is in the control of his will. This does not mean that he can believe anything he wants to believe. It means that a 'voluntative surplus' must be superadded to his evidence to bring about the formation of his belief. Without the voluntative superaddition, he would simply sit staring at his evidence, so to speak. There would be no belief and no impetus to action. Beliefs typically spill over into actions. But there would not be even a potential 'spill over' unless there were a decision on Lenny's part to go beyond his evidence by superadding to it his firm intellectual assent.

"But aren't you just using 'believes' in an idiosyncratic way?"

It is arguably the other way around. Someone who says he believes that the sun is shining when he sees that it is shining is using 'believes' in an idiosyncratic way.  He is using 'believes' in a theory-laden way, the theory being the JTB analysis of 'knows.'

"But then isn't this just a terminological quibble? You want to substitute 'accepts' or 'accepts-as-true' for 'believes' in the standard JTB analysis of 'knows' and you want to reserve 'believes' for those cases in which there is unconditional acceptance but not knowledge."

The question is not merely terminological. There is an occurrent mental state in which one accepts unconditionally propositions that are not evident. It doesn't matter whether we call this 'belief' or something else.  But calling it 'belief' comports well with ordinary language.

Let me now elaborate upon this account of belief, or, if you insist, of Aquinian-Pieperian belief.

1. Belief is a form of acceptance or intellectual assent. To believe that p is to accept *p*, and to disbelieve that p is to reject *p*. One may also do neither by abstaining from both acceptance and rejection.  (Asterisks around a sentence make of the sentence a name of the Fregean proposition expressed by the sentence.)

2. If acceptance is the genus, then knowing, believing, and supposing are species thereof. In knowing and believing the acceptance is unconditional whereas in supposing it is conditional. It follows that believing is not common to believing and knowing as on the JTB analysis. To think otherwise is to confuse the genus (acceptance) with one of its species (belief).

                                                           Genus:  Acceptance-as-true

[Species 1:  Knowledge                          Species 2:  Belief]                      [Species 3:  Supposal]

                     Unconditional Acceptance                                                   Conditional Acceptance

 

3. What distinguishes believing and knowing is that the believer qua believer does not know, and the knower qua knower does not believe. Both, however, accept.  What I just wrote appears objectionably circular. It may seem to boil down to this: what distinguishes believing and knowing is that they are distinct!  We can lay the specter of the circle by specifying the specific difference.

If believing and knowing are species of the genus acceptance, what is the specific difference whereby the one is distinguished from the other? Believing that p and knowing that p are not distinguished by the common propositional content, p. Nor are they distinguished by their both being modes of unconditional acceptance. Can we say that they differ in that the evidence is compelling in the case of knowing but less than compelling in the case of believing? That is true, but then the difference would seem to be one of degree and not of kind. But if knowing and believing are two species of the same genus, then we have a difference in kind.  Perhaps we can say that knowledge is evident acceptance while belief is non-evident acceptance.  Or perhaps the difference is that belief is based on another's testimony whereas knowledge is not.  Let's explore the latter suggestion.

4. It is essential to belief that it involve both a proposition (the content believed) and a person, the one whose testimony one trusts when one gains access to the truth via belief. To believe is to unconditionally accept a proposition on the basis of testimony. If so, then there are two reasons why it makes no sense to speak of perceptual beliefs. First, what I sense-perceive to be the case, I know to be the case, and therefore, by #3 above, I do not believe to be the case. Second, what I sense-perceive to be the case I know directly without need of testimony.

On this approach, the difference between believing and knowing is that believing is based on testimony whereas knowing is not. Suppose that p is true and that my access to *p*'s truth is via the testimony of a credible witness W. Then I have belief but not knowledge. W, we may assume, knows whereof he speaks. For example, he saw Jones stab Smith. W has knowledge but not belief.

Two Kinds of Critical Caution

One person fears loss of contact with reality and is willing to take doxastic risks and believe beyond what he can claim strictly to know. The other, standing firm on the autonomy of human reason, refuses to accept anything that cannot be justified from within his own subjectivity. He fears error, and finds the first person uncritical, gullible, credulous, tender-minded in James' sense.  The first is cautious lest he miss out on the real.  The second is cautious lest he make a mistake.
 
The second, brandishing W. K. Clifford,  criticizes the first  for believing on insufficient evidence, for self-indulgently believing what he wants to believe, for believing what he has no right to believe. The second wants reality-contact only on his own terms: only if he can assure himself of it, perhaps by ‘constituting’ the object via ‘apodictic’ processes within his own consciousness. (Husserl) The first person, however, is willing to accept uncertainty for the sake of a reality-contact otherwise inaccessible.
 
What should we fear more, loss of contact with objective reality, or being wrong?
 
Analogy.  Some are gastronomically timorous: they refuse to eat in restaurants for fear of food poisoning.  Their critical abstention does indeed achieve its prophylactic end — but only at the expense of the  foregoing of a world of prandial delights.
 
Now suppose a man believes in God and afterlife but is mistaken.  He lives his life in the grip of what are in reality, but unbeknownst to him,  life-enhancing illusions.  And of course, since he is ex hypothesi wrong, death cannot set him straight: he is after dying  nothing and so cannot learn that he lived his life in illusion.  But then why is his being wrong such a big deal?  Wouldn't it be a much bigger deal if his fear of being wrong prevented his participation in an unsurpassably great good?
 
"But he lived his life in the grip of illusions!"
 
To this I would respond, first: how do you know that he lived his life in untruth?  You are always demanding evidence, so what is your evidence for this?  Second, in a godless universe could there even be truth? (No truth without mind; no objective truth without objective mind.)  Third, even if there is truth in a godless universe, why would it be a value?  Why care about truth if it has no bearing on human flourishing?  Doesn't your concern for evidence only make sense in the context of a quest for truth? 

Serious Faith

A serious faith, a vital faith, is one that battles with doubt.  Otherwise the believer sinks into complacency and his faith becomes a convenience.  Doubt is a good thing.  For doubt is the engine of inquiry, the motor of Athens.  Jerusalem needs Athens to keep her honest, to chasten her excesses, to round her out, to humanize her.  There is not much Athens in the Muslim world, which helps explains why Islam breeds fanaticism, murder, and anti-Enlightenment.

How Could I Be Wrong?

I say that there are beliefs.  An eliminativist contradicts me, insisting that there are no beliefs.  He cannot, consistently with what he maintains, hold that I have a false belief.  For if there are no beliefs, then there are no false beliefs.  But he must hold that I am wrong.  For if there are no beliefs, as he maintains, and I maintain that there are, then I am wrong. 

But if my being wrong does not consist in my holding a false belief, what does it consist in?  The eliminativist might say that my being wrong in this instance is my uttering or otherwise tokening of the sentence type 'There are beliefs' or  being disposed to utter or otherwise token the sentence-type 'There are beliefs.'  But a parrot could do that and you wouldn't say that a parrot is wrong about the philosophy of mind.

Utterances, inscriptions and the like, if they are to mean anything must have mind behind them.  See The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic.

Eliminativism is absurd.  If that's too quick for you, see the posts in the Eliminative Materialism category. 

Can I Stand Unflinchingly for Convictions that I Accept as Only Relatively Valid?

Isaiah Berlin's great essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" concludes as follows:

'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions', said an admirable writer of our time, ' and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.'  To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity. (Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford 1969, p. 172.)

A marginalium of mine from 1994 reads, "If I think my convictions merely relatively valid, how can I stand for them unflinchingly?  Even if this is psychologically possible, it seems to be something we ought not do."

To expand upon my 1994 thought.  The liberty of the individual to be free from coercion and obstruction — "negative liberty (freedom)" in Berlin's terminology — obviously comes into conflict with other things we deem valuable such as equality, security, and public order. 

Consider how liberty and security are related. Liberty worth having is liberty within a context of security, and security is security worth having only if it makes possible a robust exercise of liberty.  For example, my liberty to leave my house at any time of the day or night  is worth very little if the probability is high that I will be accosted by muggers and other unsavory types when I step out my door.  The security of a police state would prevent that but at a cost too high to pay.

So liberty and security, though both values, are competing values.  Does one rank higher than the other such that we ought to prefer one to the other?  In a concrete situation in which they come into conflict,   one must choose.  Consider for example a sobriety checkpoint on New Year's Eve when by custom booze intake is high.  Such checkpoints involve a clear violation of the (negative) liberty of the individual, and yet they are arguably justifiable in the interests of security and public order.

Now suppose you have a conservative and a libertarian.  In conflict situations, the conservative tends to rank security over liberty, while the libertarian does the opposite.  They both agree that the values in play are indeed values, but they differ as to their prioritization.  Suppose further something that seems obviously true, namely, that this value difference that divides them cannot be objectively resolved to the satisfaction of both parties by appeal to any empirical fact or by any reasoning or by any combination of the two. 

Now here's the question.  Given that the two maintain contradictory value-prioritization theses, how can either "stand unflinchingly" for his thesis given that each recognizes that each thesis is true only from his orientation, an orientation which rests crucially  on his value-prioritization, a value-prioritization that he has no objective reason to prefer over that of his opponent?

I am suggesting that a truly civilized man, one who fully appreciates this predicament he is in, must give up his unflinchingness.  He ought to flinch!  After all, his opponent has all the same intellectual and moral virtues as he has –let us assume — is equally capable of reasoning cogently above whatever are the facts, and is equally well apprised of all empirical facts that bear on the issue.  Isn't there something "barbaric" about insisting on one's own position assuming that all of these conditions have been met?

I agree with Berlin that it would be "dangerous and immature" to claim absolute truth for convictions that rest on value judgments that cannot be objectvely established.  But once we get this far, then unflinchingness must also go by the board: what I recognize as true only from my point of view, I cannot hold in an unflinching manner.

And yet I must act, hold opinions, vote, take a stand, smite my enemies.  Suspension of judgment and retreat from the political sphere does not seem to be a viable option — especially not in the face of a bunch of leftist totalitarians who want to so extend the public /political sphere so as to destroy the private.  A hell of a bind we are in: we are essentially agents, hence must act, hence must stand fast, be resolute and smite our dangblasted political opponents — all the while realizing that we have no justification for our unflinchingness.

The admirable writer Berlin mentions is Joseph Schumpeter.

Does Sincere Belief in an Afterlife Entail Religious Zealotry?

Spencer Case e-mails:

Greetings from Afghanistan. I’d very much like to hear your response to a sketch of an argument I’m developing. It goes as follows:

1. Suppose an afterlife is obtainable based on one’s performance in this life. If this afterlife is as I understand it, it must have an infinite value while all the goods in this life have only finite values. In fact, the value of afterlife goods (as I clumsily name them) must be infinite on two planes: quantitative and qualitative; quantitative because the duration of the reward is infinite, qualitative because, I assume—and I think, based on some recent blog posts of yours I’ve read, you would agree—no mortal goods, or accumulation of them, can be qualitatively better than the eternal goods to be found in the afterlife, even when we do not consider duration (this not the case with Islamic fundamentalists, who are promised virgins. But let that pass). Perhaps there is even a punitive afterlife with similar disvalue. 

I agree with this conception of the afterlife.  To put it in a slightly different way, the goods of this life are vanishing quantities axiologically speaking as compared to the goods of the afterlife as portrayed in sophisticated conceptions.  (We agree to set aside crude conceptions such as we find in popular Islam: endless disporting with black-eyed virgins, getting to do there all the sensual things that are forbidden here, etc.)

2.  If this ranking system is correct, it is hard to see how it could ever be rational for one to pursue any set of mortal goods—no matter how well they rank on the finite scale—when one could spend the same time and resources in the pursuit of the afterlife goods or avoiding afterlife evils, which are both endless in duration and of infinitely great quality. If extreme fasts are pleasing to God, and increase my chances of obtaining salvation by a tiny bit, then the rational thing for me to do is to live in such an ascetic state for as long as possible, unless it prevents me from doing other activities that could do even more to promote my own salvation.

Well, Spencer, you have put your finger on a genuine and serious problem, a problem I will rephrase in my own way.  If (i) this world and its finite goods is soon to pass away, and if (ii) one sincerely believes that there is a world to come the value of whose goods infinitely surpasses the values of the goods here below, and if (iii) whether or not one participates in this Higher Life or is excluded from it (either by being sent to the Other Place or by being simply annihilated at death) depends on how one lives in this world, then how can it be rational to pursue mortal goods beyond what is necessary for living in accordance with the precepts of one's religion?  The rational course would be to orient all one's activities to the achievement of the afterlife goal.

For example, if a young person is a Roman Catholic and sincerely believes the teachings of his church, especially as regards what are called the Last Things, and this person is free of such encumbrances as children or aged parents to care for, and has the health and other qualifications necessary to join a monastery, then why doesn't the person do so, and join the most rigorous monastery to be found?  Wouldn't that be the most rational course of action given (i) the end in view, (ii) one's beliefs about this end, and (iii) one's beliefs about the means for securing this end?

Converts often follow this course.  Unlike those who have been brought up in a faith,  they are seldom lukewarm.  They have found the truth with a majuscule 'T' (they think) and their authenticity demands that they act on it.  Thomas Merton, for example, after renouncing his worldly life and joining the RC church was not content to be a good practicing Catholic, or become a parish priest even; no, he had to go all the way and join not just any monastic order but the Trappists!  One can appreciate the  'logic' to it.  And then there is Edith Stein, the brilliant Jewish assistant of Edmund Husserl.  She was not content to convert to Catholicism; she abandoned her academic career and all the usual worldly blandishments (sex, love, children, travel, etc.) to spend the rest of life behind the walls of a strict Carmelite convent until the Nazis murdered her at Auschwitz.

I hope the conversion  'logic' is clear:  if in a few short years we will be pitched head first into Kingdom Come, then pursuing and fretting over the baubles of this life is like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Let's note en passant that the same 'logic' is found in the thinking of adherents to nonreligious ideologies.  Thousands of young people, some of them among the best and the brightest, sacrificed their lives to the Communist illusion in the 20th century.  They wasted their lives in pursuit of a fata morgana, while at the same time contributing unintentionally and indirectly to the murder of over 100 million people.

3.  Anyone who pursues only afterlife goods in this way is a paradigm case of a religious zealot.

This formulation needs improvement.  Merton and Stein did not pursue ONLY afterlife goods.  They pursued  this-worldly goods too but only insofar as they were instrumental to the achievement of afterlife goods. (I ignore Merton's lapses.)  A better formulation is as follows:

3*.  Anyone who pursues afterlife goods primarily, and this-worldy goods only insofar as they are instrumental in the achievement of afterlife goods, is a religious zealot.

I can accept (3*), but I would add that being a zealot is not necessarily bad, despite the fact that the word generally carries a pejorative connotation.  Aren't we all legitimately zealous when it comes to the preservation of our lives and the lives of those animals and humans in our care?  Suppose Al Gore is right, and global warming is about to do us all in, then GW zealotry would be justified would it not?

4.  So, accepting these very basic religious propositions makes one rationally committed to religious zealotry and denying our normal reasons for acting.

I don't think your conclusion follows in quite the way you intend it.  For one thing, you seem to be assuming that zealotry as such is bad.  But surely not all zealotry is bad.  To modify a saying of Barry Goldwater: Zealotry in the defense of liberty is no vice!  (He had 'extremism' where I have 'zealotry.')  You may also be assuming that the religious claims are false.  Suppose they are true.  Then one would have a good reason for denying/modifying our normal reasons for acting.  (The same would hold in the case of nonreligious ideologies.)  A 'normal' person, if if he is a practicing adherent of a religion, pursues all sorts of pleasures and diversions which do not advance him toward his spiritual goal, but rather, in many cases, impede his realization of it.  The 'normal' Buddhist, for example, does not carry the precept "Conquer desire and aversion!" to the point where he eats whatever is put on his plate.  (If a fly lands in his soup he does not practice nondiscrimination and eat the fly with the same relish or lack thereof with which he eats the rest of the soup.)  But if our Buddhist really believed Buddhist teachings would it not be rational for him to modify 'normal' behavior and bend every effort towards achieving enlightenment?

What I hope this shows is that religious belief (at least in the religions you and I are most likely to debate about) disallows moderation, which I take it, is a bad thing. What I especially like about this argument is it seems to be an argument that appeals to conservatives, because conservatives are most likely to have strong intuitions against ideologies that tell us to ignore our ordinary reasons for acting.

I think you are right that religious belief, if sincerely professed and lived, disallows moderation of the sort that the average  worldly person displays.  But it is not just religious belief that has this property.  So do many ideologies or action-guiding worldviews.  I gave the example of Communism above.  Other examples readily come to mind. 

You are assuming that moderation of the sort displayed by 'normal' worldly people is a good thing.  But if Communism or Catholicism were true, then moderation of that sort would not be good!  True-blue reds devoted all their energies to their chimerical Revolution  just as true Christians consecrate their lives, without reservation, to Christ.  They don't 'hedge their bets' they way most people do.  Whether that singlemindedness is good or bad depends on whether the underlying beliefs are true or false.  Of course we now know that Communism is a god that failed, but the religious God is safely insulated in a Beyond beyond our ken.

So if your thesis is that sincere belief in an afterlife entails (or maybe only leads to) religious zealotry, and is for that reason  objectionable, then I don't think you have made your case.  Genuine belief in an afterlife will lead to behavior that is 'abnormal' and 'immoderate'  as measured by the standards of the worldly.  But this won''t cut any ice unless worldly standards can be shown to be correct and truly normative, not just statistically 'normal.'

Of course, as you’ve no doubt noticed, this argument does not take into account epistemic uncertainty. Uncertainty about the existence of the afterlife might make it more rational for us to go ahead and pursue other goods. I haven’t yet done the research in probability theory, but I’d be willing to guess our levels of epistemic confidence in religious propositions would have to be very low in order for it to be rational to pursue anything else.

This is another  important side to the problem of balancing the claims of this world with the claims of the next.  People fool themselves into thinking they KNOW all sorts of thinks they merely BELIEVE.  Now it seems to me that no imtellectually honest person can claim to KNOW (using this word strictly) that there is an afterlife: the evidence from parapsychology, though abundant, is not conclusive, and the philosophical arguments, though  some of them impressive, are not compelling.  But I do KNOW the pleasures of good food, and strong coffee, and fine cigars, and chess, and good conversation, and scribbling away as I am now doing, all of them activities which are not necessary for my salvation, and perhaps stand in the way of it.  (Not to mention disporting with ladies of the evening, etc.)

So what is the rational thing to do given my epistemic predicament in which what I KNOW is confined to this ephemeral world which cannot be worth much, and my access to the other is via mere belief and the occasional religious/mystical experience whose veridicality is easily called into question?

A difficult question.  I don't know that there is an afterlife, and I don't know that there isn't.  It strikes me as highly irrational to live for this life alone since it is nasty, brutish, short, miserable, full of natural and moral evil, and of scant value if it doesn't lead to anything beyond it.  It also seems irrational to forego every positive value in this world which is not conducive to otherworldly salvation on the strength of mere belief in that otherworldly possibility.

So my tentative answer is that the rational course is to  inquire ceaselessly into the matter in a critical, exploratory and tentative spirit; avoid being bamboozled by the dogmas of churches and sects which claim to have the Truth; enjoy the limited goods of this life in a measured way while realizing that, in and of themselves, they are of no ultimate value.

In short, be neither a worldling nor a monk.  Be a philosopher! (Not to be confused with being a paid professor of it.)

Can a Faith Commitment be Tentative?

Ed Farrell writes,

I greatly enjoy your blog and read it often.

I think your latest post (Mature Religion: More Quest than Conclusions) misses the mark.  For the believer of a revealed religion (I'm a Christian) the issue is not so much quest or conclusions as commitment.  It's true we can't know God in the sense you're speaking of but we can have faith that the biblical revelations are true as far as they go, which is to say in defining our relations to God and the terms of our reconciliation with Him.  The faith that's required here is not tentative but committed, because it will require action and probably sacrifice.  In this arena quest is put behind although theology may remain a kind of quest, for elucidation if not for the meaning supplied by faith.

Thanks for all your thought-provoking posts.

Thank you for writing, Mr. Farrell.  You too have a very interesting website.

You are right to point out the important role of faith.   I agree that faith, if it is genuine, must manifest itself in action and sacrifice.  Faith is not merely a verbal assent to certain propositions but a commitment to live in a certain way.  Where we seem to disagree is on the question whether a commitment can be tentative.  You write as if commitment excludes tentativeness, whereas I tend to think that a faith-commitment can and indeed must be tentative.  A living faith, one that is not a mere convenience, or merely a source of comfort or psychological security,  is one that regularly examines itself and is open to question.  A living faith is one that needs ongoing examination and renewal, with the possibility left open that the faith-commitment be modified or even abandoned.  But that does not imply that one does not act on one's commitments while they are in place.

The point of my post was that religion needs to be rescued from both the despisers and the dogmatists.  I expect that you'll agree that the nincompoops of the New Atheism with their flying spaghetti monsters and celestial teapots have no understanding of religion.  But neither can religion be reduced to doctrinal formulae that finitize the Infinite.  The spirit of my post is adumbrated in these sentences from Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace in the chapter, "Atheism as a Purification": "Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the others." (103) "Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith: in this sense atheism is a purification."

 

 

Trotsky’s Faith

Trotsky The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe.  Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism . . . I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.  My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is even stronger now than it was in the days of my youth. [. . .] Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air might enter more freely into my room.  I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight is everywhere.  Life is beautiful.  Let the future generations cleanse it of evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full. (Patenaude, pp. 234-235)

No pie-in-the-sky for old Trotsky, but pie-in-the-future.  Those of us who take religion seriously needn't deny that it can serve as opium for some.  But if one can see that, then one should also be able to see that secular substitutes for religion can be just as narcotic.   Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?  Why is a faith in Man and his future more worthy of credence than faith in God?

I should think that it is less credible.  Note first that there is no Man, only men.  And we human beings are a cussedly diverse and polyglot lot, a motley assortment of ornery sons-of-bitches riven by tribalisms and untold other factors of division.  The notion that we are all going to work together to create a workers' paradise or any sort of earthly paradise is a notion too absurd to swallow given what we know about human nature, and in particular, what we know of the crimes of communism.  In the 20th century, communists  murdered 100 million to achieve their utopia without achieving it.

We know Man does not exist, but we do not know that God does not exist. Religious faith, therefore, has a bit more to recommend it than secular faith.  You say God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

Trotsky, as you can see from the quotation, believed in a redemptive future.  Life in this world is beautiful and will be cleansed by future generations of evil, oppression, and violence.  But even if this fantasy future were achieved, it could not possibly redeem the countless millions who have suffered and died in the most horrible ways since time beyond memory.  Marxist redemption-in-the-future would be a pseudo-redemption even if it were possible, which it isn't. 

There is also the moral and practical absurdity of a social programme that employs present evil, oppression, and violence in order to extirpate future evil, oppression, and violence.  Once the totalitarian State is empowered to do absolutely anything in furtherance of its means-justifying ends it will turn on its own creators as it did on Trotsky.  Because there is no such thing as The People, 'power to the people'  is an empty and dangerous phrase and a cover for the tyranny of the vanguard or the dictator.  The same goes for 'dictatorship of the proletariat.'  What it comes to in practice is the dictatorship of the dictator.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.

It is interesting to compare Edith Stein and Lev Davidovich Bronstein.  Each renounced the present world and both set out in quest of a Not-Yet, one via contemplation, the other via  revolution.  Which chose the path of truth, which that of illusion?  it is of course possible that both quests were illusory.

How strange the stage of this life and the characters that pass upon it, their words and gestures resounding for a time before fading away.

From the Mail: John Bishop, Believing by Faith

Dr. Vallicella,

Another excellent post with which I whole-heartedly agree!  You asked if there were any other options besides:

John Bishop (University of Auckland) has a book , Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Faith (OUP, 2007) which is perhaps the best book that I have read on  the subject.  He argues for what he calls a ‘supra-evidential fideism’ in which  one is ‘morally entitled’ to “take as true in one’s practical and theoretical deliberations” a claim that lacks  evidence sufficient for  epistemically-justified acceptance or rejection.

It is a developed Jamesian’ approach to the right to believe. He does not allow for beliefs that go contrary to the weight of evidence, thus he rejects Wittgensteinian fideism. One may believe beyond the evidence, but not against the evidence. He holds that one must always respect the canons of rational inquiry and not dismiss them, even in matters of faith. Yet, by the very nature of the faith-issue, they can be transcended with moral entitlement.

Nor does he allow for ‘induced willings-to believe.’  He holds that one who already has an inclination / disposition to believe is morally entitled to do so if the issue is important, forced, and by the nature of the issue cannot be decided upon the basis of ‘rationalist empiricist’ evidential practice.I came across  the book on a list of important books in philosophy of religion on Prosblogion.

I think that it is a type of fideism that combines your categories B and D – fideism and reasoned faith.

 With continuing appreciation,

Mark Weldon Whitten

The Infirmity of Reason Versus the Certitude of Faith

Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively. 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:

Continue reading “The Infirmity of Reason Versus the Certitude of Faith”

The Naturalist’s Version of Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Theism in its various forms faces numerous threats to its truth and coherence. Christianity, for example, is committed to doctrines such as the Trinity whose very coherence is in doubt. And all classical theists face the problem of evil, the problem of reconciling the fact of evil with the existence of a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Faced with an objection like the one from evil, theists typically don’t give up their belief; keeping the faith, they seek an understanding both of it and its compatibility with the facts and considerations alleged to be inconsistent with it.

What I want to argue is that naturalists employ the principle of Faith Seeking Understanding no less than theists. Naturalism faces numerous threats to its truth and coherence. Let’s start with what philosophers call the phenomenon of intentionality, the peculiar directedness to an object that characterizes (some) mental states. It is very difficult to understand how a purely physical state, a state of the brain for example, could be of, or about, something distinct from it, something that need not exist to be the object of the state in question. How could a physical state have semantic properties, or be true or false? How could a piece of meat be in states that MEAN anything? How do you get meaning out of meat? By squeezing hard? By injecting it with steroids? Does a sufficiently complex hunk of meat suddenly become a semantic engine? How could a brain state, for example, be either true or false? This suggests an argument:

Continue reading “The Naturalist’s Version of Fides Quaerens Intellectum“

Freud on Illusion, Delusion, Error, and Religion

Freud-1 I found the discussion in the thread appended to Is There a 'No God' Delusion?  very stimulating and useful.  My man Peter is the 'rock' upon which good discussions are built.  (I shall expatiate later on the sense in which Lupu is also a 'wolf.') The thread got me thinking about what exactly a delusion is.  It is important that I have an explicit theory of this inasmuch as I routinely tag leftist beliefs as delusional. 

If belief is our genus, the task is to demarcate the delusional from the illusory species and both species from beliefs in general.  In this context, and as a matter of terminology, a delusion is a delusional belief, and an illusion is an illusory belief.  (I won't consider the questions whether there are illusions or delusions that do not belong to the genus belief.)  Let us push forward by way of commentary on some claims in Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion (tr. Strachey, Norton, 1961).

1. Freud distinguishes between illusions and errors. (p.30) Eine Illusion ist nicht dasselbe wie ein Irrtum . . . .  There are errors that are not illusions and there are illusions that are not errors.  Given that our genus is belief, an error is an erroneous or mistaken belief. So now we have three species of belief to contend with: the erroneous, the illusory, and the delusional.  "Aristotle's belief that vermin are developed out of dung . . . was an error." (30)  But "it was an illusion of Columbus's that he had discovered a new sea-route to the Indies." (30)  What's the difference?  The difference is that illusions are wish-driven while errors are not.  "What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes." (31)  Für die Illusion bleibt charakteristisch die Ableitung aus menschlichen Wünschen . . .

2. Every erroneous belief is false, but no erroneous  belief is derived from human wishes. Every illusory belief is derived from human wishes, and may be either true or false.  So if a belief is illusory one cannot infer that it is false.  It may be false or it may be true.  By 'false' Freud means "in contradiction to reality." (31)  Suppose that a middle-class girl cherishes the belief that a prince will come and marry her.  And suppose the unlikely occurs: a prince does come and marry her.  The belief is an illusion despite the fact that it is true, i.e., in agreement with reality.  The belief is illusory because its formation and maintenance have their origin in her intense wish.  The example is Freud's.

3.  The difference between an illusory belief and a delusional belief is that, while both are wish-driven, every delusional belief is false whereas some illusory beliefs are true and others false.  "In the case of delusions we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality." (31)  An der Wahnidee heben wir als wesentlich den Widerspruch gegen die Wirklichkeit hervor, die Illusion muß nicht notwendig falsch, d. h. unrealisierbar oder im Widerspruch mit der Realität sein. To sum up:

Errors:  All of them false, none of them wish-driven.

Delusions:  All of them false, all of them wish-driven.

Illusions:  Some of them false, some of them true, all of them wish-driven.

4.  Now that we understand what an illusion is, we are in a position to understand Freud's central claim about religious ideas and doctrines:  "they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind." (30) ". . . all of them are illusions and insusceptible of proof." (31)  Sie sind sämtlich Illusionen, unbeweisbar, . . .. 

To say of a belief that it is an illusion is to say something about its psychological genesis or origin: it arises as the fulfillment of a wish.  It is not to say anything about the belief's truth-value (Wahrheitswert).  So even if some religious doctrines were susceptible of proof, they would still be illusions.  For again, what makes a belief an illusion is its stemming from a wish.  Since Freud admits that there are true illusions,  he must also admit at least the possibility of there being some provably true illusions.  It could therefore turn out that the belief that God exists is both demonstrably true and an illusion.

But although this follows from what Freud says, he does not explicitly say it.  Indeed, he says something that seems inconsistent with it.  After telling us that "the truth-value of religious doctrines does not lie within the scope of the present inquiry," he goes on to say that "It is enough for us that we have recognized them as being, in their psychological nature, illusions.  But we do not have to conceal the fact that this discovery also strongly influences our attitude to the question which must appear to many to be the most important of all." (33)  That question, of course, is the question  of truth or falsity.

So the good Doktor appears to be waffling and perhaps teetering on the brink of the genetic fallacy.  On the one hand he tells us that a belief's being an illusion does not entail that it is false.  He himself gives an example of a true illusion.  On the other hand, from what I have just quoted him as saying it follows that showing that a belief arose in a certain way, in satisfaction of certain psychological needs or wishes, can be used to cast doubt on its truth.  But the latter is the genetic fallacy.  If a third-grader comes to believe the truths of the multiplication table solely on the strength of her teacher's say-so, this fact has no tendency to show that the beliefs formed in this way are false.

Lycan, Rationality, and Apportioning Belief to Evidence

Is William G. Lycan rational? I would say so. And yet, by his own admission, he does not apportion his (materialist) belief to the evidence. This is an interesting illustration of what I have suggested (with no particular originality) on various occasions, namely, that it is rational in some cases for agents like us to believe beyond the evidence. (Note the two qualifications: 'in some cases' and 'for agents like us.' If and only if we were disembodied theoretical spectators whose sole concern was to 'get things right,' then an ethics of belief premised upon austere Cliffordian evidentialism might well be mandatory. But we aren't and it isn't.)

Is There a ‘No God’ Delusion?

A certain popular writer speaks of a God delusion.  This prompts the query whether there might be a 'No God' delusion.  Is it perhaps the case that atheism is a delusion?  Bruce Charlton, M. D. , returns an affirmative answer in Is Atheism Literally a Delusion?  In this post I will try to understand his basic argument and see if I should accept it.  The following is my reconstruction of  the core of Charlton's argument:

Continue reading “Is There a ‘No God’ Delusion?”