Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Belief

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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;…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Trotsky’s Faith

    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…

  • 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: 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 that point to the infirmity of reason. B. Fideism: Put…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Freud on Illusion, Delusion, Error, and Religion

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Do You Really Believe in an Afterlife?

    A correspondent poses this question:   If you believe in an afterlife, one in which things are presumably a lot better than here, why not be eager to "move on"?  I can understand the wicked fearing judgment, but why are the righteous not eager to shuffle off? To put the challenge in a sharper form: "You say…