William James Redux: "The New Atheists" v. "The Will to Believe"
{Note: The following essay is in two parts. The second part immediately follows the first. Because the subject of this thread focuses on a work by a philosopher rather than original religious scriptures, it has been posted in the “Philosophical Literature “ forum rather than in “Religious Texts.”}
“But whence can wisdom be obtained and where is the place of understanding?” (Job 28:12)
William James Redux:
The New Atheism vs. “The Will to Believe”
Part One: The Will Not to Believe
Among the many hagiographies I heard in my youth, the one which stands out is a slightly irreverent story about the saintly scholar Teresa of Avila (1515-1582.) While St. Theresa was making an arduous journey, a sudden storm brought a horrifying clap of thunder which frightened her donkey so much that he threw her straight into a mud puddle. As legend has it, St. Theresa sighed, lifted her eyes heavenward, and said, “Lord, if this is the way you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few!”
Fast forward five centuries. Over the millennia, human history seems to have backed up St. Teresa’s wry observation. Persecution, enslavement, and genocide continuously plagued its victims, from Biblical times, up through the latter years of the Roman Empire, during the Spanish Inquisition,the Reformation (for both Catholics and Protestants, depending on the monarch), and the hysteria-fueled witch hunts in western Europe and the American colonies, to the violence of atheistic totalitarianism in both China and Stalinist Russia, all overshadowed by the tragic cloud of the Holocaust, the inexorable sin of modern-- if not all-- times. At the end of the twentieth century, religious persecution still was raging in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and as the new millennium began, on a September morning in 2001, the United States suffered devastating acts of violence attributed to members of a radical religious sect from The Middle East, followed by two wars in two different countries in that part of world, while tensions within The Holy Land itself–a veritable ground zero for religious conflict- intermittently continue to flare up. These events are just a few of many that have stirred the witch’s brew of seemingly intractable ethnic and religious bias against the “Other.” Yet despite the undeniable turmoil and tragedy, various religious cultures seem to be holding on. Nevertheless, if The Lord can still count on having friends – listed perhaps on some kind of celestial “Facebook” – His status here on Earth seems to have fallen, like St. Teresa, into a mud puddle of its own.
The current “state-of-the- art” technology hasn’t- yet!- enabled us to read the minds or look into the hearts of our neighbors; for this we can be thankful. One can speculate, however, on the reasons by which an individual would characterize himself as an atheist. For instance, like the existential anti-heroes who wander aimlessly through novels and film, he may have been buffeted around so much by the vagaries of modern life that he has become mired in cynicism, a dark but endurable milieu in which faith in God –and certainly the outward trappings of worship – are irrelevant. Or he may be a perpetual adolescent, one who is so emotionally sensitive that he considers the aforementioned vagaries not merely as the inevitable ups-and-downs of the human condition but a personal affront –a direct assault on him! Somehow the person might latch on the notion that if God really existed, he would never be treated so badly. Such solipsism might be reduced to “I am miserable; that means God must not exist.” Or perhaps the person had received a more-or-less secular upbringing out of which he has inherited no apparent religious traditions or practices. There may not be a place for faith in a person quite content to live in the here-and-now, a bit like the “things as they are” mantra of Wallace Stevens, but without the poet’s pervasive credo for the“necessary angel” of the–albeit secular - imagination. Some individuals are de facto atheists through force of habit, or for the reason that the question has never come up, in either case, he feels no need to seek spiritual succor. Others actively reject beyond anything that can immediately perceive through the senses. (Ironically, not even scientists limit their thinking in that way, as we hope to show later in the second part of this discussion. )
None of these hypothetical non-believers are intrinsically harmful to society as a whole; indeed, in a pluralistic or “enlightened” culture, to ostracize or persecute one who professes no religious belief is every bit as erroneous as disrespect or persecution against members of a particular religion. It cannot be overemphasized that, generally speaking, committed Secular Humanists are often as conscientious, charitable, and ethical as the best of their church-going brethren –if not more so, because the secularist’s motives for doing good do not stem from an ultimate desire to achieve, in a future life, the reward of eternal salvation. The freedom to listen to one’s conscience and to follow its direction according to one’s will is –or certainly should be – the inherent right of every human being. Within an individual, atheism is in itself a neutral intellectual stance in that is self-contained.
It is only when atheism adopts its own kind of orthodoxy, when it becomes doctrinaire, and proselytizes for its unilateral acceptance that it threatens an individual’s faith. This shift in the way segments of human race think of their place in the universe amid the absence of a Supreme Being has been called “The New Atheism.” Books by celebrity atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris have appeared on Best Seller lists, and within the realm of popular media have been given air time on late night talk shows and bandwidth on the worldwide web. Even sitcoms and standup comedians have slyly inserted mocking one-liners against organized religion. (To a certain extent, there have always been enclaves of an atheistic world view among the intelligentsia. In the early 1960s the Vassar alumnae in Mary McCarthy’s wildly-popular novel, The Group, advised one another to read the Bible– “as literature.”)
Lately the collective mind-set among the educated classes of the West who have not only turned their backs on organized religion but also have abandoned all belief in a Creator or a Supreme Being seems more prevalent –and aggressively vocal. There has been a stark change from the way atheists formerly regarded their believing brethren. According to CNN news, “What the new atheists share is a belief that religion should not be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument. . .Their tone is overtly confrontational rather than gently persuasive.” Adherents of this kind of atheism seem to act as if they are on a sacred mission, adapting the same methods which religion used to gain converts with more imperious force than a Tudor cardinal, and more fiery zeal than any band of Jehovah’s Witnesses ringing doorbells on a Saturday morning.
The primary reason for this position is that there has not yet been found any tangible or verifiable evidence of the existence of God, nor, as they believe, can such facts be established by means of rational argument.
Secondarily, atheistic ideas have surfaced perhaps as a reaction to actions and notions expressed by believers. When some atheists are asked the reason for disdaining religious belief, the facile answer often runs toward “All the evil in the world has been done in the name of God.” Though a bit simplistic, that retort is at least partially valid: often the justification for war includes some statement from the nation’s leader that “God (or justice, or goodness, etc.) is on our side.” Invariably, though, the nation’s enemy adamantly trusts that God is on their side as well. It is difficult to believe that God in His infinite wisdom (justice, goodness, etc.) would hedge His bets, or claim to be on both sides, like the Mayor of New York during a Subway Series between the Mets and the Yankees. Blaming religion for the woe in this Valley of Tears may be admittedly an historically valid opinion in the sense that it was the human interpretation of religion in this--not the next -world that used the pretext of “God’s will” to execute the horrifying deeds. It takes monumental presumption, not to mention exquisite hubris-- for a leader of a country or government to say that he knows exactly what “God’s will” might be.
Conventional wisdom posits that the basis of knowing “God’s will” as well as forming specific religious beliefs and practices within Judeo-Christian cultures is The Bible, constituted from a set of books in The Old and New Testaments, which the devout consider to have been
divinely inspired and thus represent “The Word of God.” In this idea atheists have found a vulnerability, another way of showing how religion does not stand up to rational argument. When a religious person says, “ The Bible is true because it says so in The Bible,” he or she has committed a sin of logic - “begging the question.”
In addition to falling victim to the fallacy of circular reasoning by its devotees, the Bible has come under fire with disputes over its authenticity. Because its origin stretches deep into antiquity, the provenance of the manuscripts is cloudy with questionable authorship, and as two of the world’s major religions evolved, large segments of the tome have been subject to mistranslation and egregious redaction, with several books –The Apocrypha-- banned from the finished Bible entirely. Because both the Old and New Testaments sprang from a culture quite different from civilization as it developed down through the centuries, a thorny problem grew in the attempt to adapt the teachings of the Bible to that of various and highly disparate cultures. It doesn't help matters that, taken as a whole, passages in one part of the Bible directly contradict what a different chapter and verse proclaims. The confusion surrounding the Holy Book did not escape the irreverent wit of Mark Twain in his Letters from the Earth: “It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.”
Another possible explanation for the rise of the New Atheists is a reaction to the tendency of some sects of Christians -variously called in recent decades “The Moral Majority” or “The Religious Right”-- to exert influence upon social mores and especially legislation. The fundamentalist Christians desire to downplay the Wall between Church and State implicit in the United States Constitution in order to effect changes in the country’s laws and social structure. Some of the causes cherished by this Christian faction are: “faith-based initiatives” (which would allow federal funding of church-based charities and educational groups), allowing prayer in public schools, “pro-life” as opposed to “pro-choice” in abortion and birth control issues, campaigns against rights for gay people, as well as the most-contentious wedge issue: the espousal of “creationism” to replace or at least share an equal footing with evolution, upon which the life sciences form a basic framework and which most Christian fundamentalists consider merely a “theory.”
Aside from the fact that everyone has a right to one's own opinion, it would seem that Science and Religion would be on the proverbial “level playing field” in that each side would have the ability to present evidence to back up its opinion. Lurid news stories about financial and sex scandals among institutional Christian religions and individual clergymen, often made worse by the inevitable cover-up, have thrown fuel into the passionate fire. More trivially, the atheistic cause has locked on isolated anecdotes ripe for mocking: unquestioned adherence to religious doctrines based on the Bible’s literal text rather than allegorical truth, sermons and tracts which wildly underestimate the actual age of geographical earth, and the “Creation” museum which feature homo sapiens incongruously living side-by-side with dinosaurs, as if the dioramas had been designed in the Hanna Barbera studio. Another point which atheists are fond of bringing up is that it took the Catholic Church 400 years to apologize for having excommunicated Galileo, yet one can't help thinking that it might take another 400 years for Science to forgive the Church for maligning Galileo in the first place.
There is, however, an astounding aspect of the controversy has arisen in that many members of religious congregations do not completely know whereof they speak. If someone should ask a an American church member about the core tenets of his religion, the odds of his coming up with the correct answer are about as good as his using the apostrophe appropriately. In a recent newspaper column,”The Unbelievable Truth,” Daniel Dennett maintains that “atheists and agnostics tend to know more about the world’s religions than believers do.” According to research from the Pew (no pun intended) Forum on Religion and Public Life, on average, nearly half the people who took the survey were unable to answer questions about the doctrines of their own faith. For instance, 54% of Protestants did not know Martin Luther’s seminal role in the Protestant Reformation, while Catholics did not fully comprehend the Church’s doctrine concerning transubstantiation. (Although the article did not spell this out, many Christians and a large number of Catholics are misinformed about the nature of the Immaculate Conception, as they erroneously think the concept has something to do with Virgin Birth.)
Dennett further explains that because of the scientific knowledge that came to light over the centuries, The Church found itself in the uncomfortable position of being forced to defend the plausibility of its tenets and to maintain its viability in society. There were two ways in which religion could reconcile itself with these “new sophisticated understandings.” The first choice: to “[t]reat the long steady retreat into metaphor and mystery as a process of increasing wisdom” was, in Dennett’s opinion overruled by the second tactic: to "[c]loak all the doctrines in a convenient fog and then not just excuse the faithful from trying to penetrate the fog, but celebrate the policy of not looking too closely at anyone’s creed –not even your own.” The result of this ecclesiastically-sanctioned obfuscation, Dennett believes, is that “the most religiously affiliated people have no firm knowledge or even opinions” about religion, including the one in which they worship.
Ironically, atheists seem to know more about religion than churchgoers. Dennett believes that atheists are “curious” and “truth-loving folks,” as opposed to those who “are afraid of what they might discover if they read the fine print too carefully, so they sign on the dotted line without glance, and then often feel the need to defend their lack of curiosity as an example of their holy trust in their own faith.” Dennett concludes his argument with the idea that some theologians are “well-nigh indistinguishable from atheists,” because the deeper their study of doctrine goes, the less likely the core beliefs can stand up under scrutiny. The benchmark for this phenomenon is the increasing appearance of “pastors who no longer hold the beliefs that are professionally obliged to preach, but go on executing their duties. . .These folks are caught in a web of what might be called designed miscommunication, and it takes an unmeasured toil on their consciences.”
Pastors preaching what they themselves don’t believe? Will atheism capture the soul of humanity– if we, indeed, still have souls? Is religious faith about to receive its own last rites, and is God really dead? Are our most cherished truths doomed because they were never true? And will we leave poor St. Teresa out there in the mud-covered field? Or—
–did an American philosopher already resolve this issue over 100 years ago? Stayed tuned for part two, which immediately follows.
William James Redux, Part 2 of 2
William James Redux – Part 2 of 2
“If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.” –William James
Part 2: “The Will To Believe”
America has been characterized by its “exceptionalism,” a term coined two centuries ago and lately revived with different connotations for the country's cheerleaders and critics. In the long course of human history, no other nation has ever been quite like it in its unique philosophy of government, its diversity of population, cultures, and religious beliefs, and most of all, its tendency to propel itself into the future, with the result of becoming an ever-changing, dynamic society. The foundations of the republic–outlined in both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution- were indeed “revolutionary” in the most profound sense, in that some of the even- younger, developing nations admired and emulated the twin values of individual rights coupled with equality for all– in theory at least, though not-- given the country’s tragic past-- in practice.
The popular wisdom holds that the country’s early settlers arrived to escape religious intolerance in their native land with the understanding that this newly discovered continent would provide a refuge to practice their faith freely. To a certain extent that is true, despite the fact that much of the exploration and settlements stemmed from non-apologetically commercial interests. Still, the desire for religious freedom is an undeniable feature of the country’s history. What is unique about the country’s religious milieu is that it not only tolerates the commercial aspect of America’s origins but in many ways, religion and commerce are quite content to stroll hand-in-hand, an alliance made common knowledge in The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism, the seminal 1930 work by German sociologist Max Weber. Despite the great divide between church and state implicit in the U.S. Constitution, the words “In God We Trust” appear on the dollar, yet, practically speaking, Americans tend to place the majority of their trust -- as the irrepressible Mark Twain put it-- “mainly in the dollar,” or to quote the title of one of Jean Shepherd’s books, In God We Trust –All Others Pay Cash.
Apart from sheer acquisitiveness, a positive aspect of the American character is its optimism and practicality: the value of working not merely harder but “smarter,” the need to fix what’s broken and for what isn't broken, a more efficient method of operating it, the pursuit of creating new technologies and inventions, to build a bigger, better mousetrap and a smoother path for the world to beat to your door.
Such a down-to-earth collective vision was ripe for a brand-new method of thought, one that cast off the ivory-towered absolutism of Europe in favor of a system of thought easily adaptable to actual practice and thus tangible results in the real world. Toward the end of the 19th century, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910) developed a typically American philosophical system which they called Pragmatism. Unlike historical philosophies which, while “rational,” dealt with abstractions, pragmatism works within the guides of concrete facts and practicality. The value of any premise can be measured only by its “observable consequences,” and the value of “truth” of any proposition or course of action increases or decreases only in its practical results. Rather than a school of philosophy, pragmatism, William James tells us, it is a method, one that is “uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions.” It’s an “empiricist attitude” twist in that it is meant to be an instrument, a method of testing our “absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equality of absolute reality.” James considers pragmatism to be a “mediator and a reconciler,” it “unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and set each one at work . . . It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretense of finality in truth.”
One would think that pragmatism -– the roll-up-your-sleeves, hit-the-nail-in-the-head test of whether an idea works or not-- would be outside the realm of religious belief. Or we'd conclude that if someone drew the clichéd “line in the sand” between religious believers and non-believers, pragmatists wouldn't hesitate to jump over on the atheist side. Think again. The idea for which the most famous American pragmatist, William James, is best known is “The Will to Believe.”
William James was born to a New York family destined to become known for its intellectual prominence; his father was an American minister, religious philosopher and social reformer, and his brother Henry, one year younger than William, wrote several highly-regarded novels guaranteeing him a lofty place in America’s literary pantheon. William received his medical degree from Harvard, where he taught physiology. Flourishing in a era that had already been rocked with controversy over the unprecedented findings of Charles Darwin, William James is credited with the creation of a new medical discipline –psychology- as well as co-creation of the particularly American brand of philosophy - pragmatism. Throughout his multi-faceted career, William James sought to reconcile science with pragmatism “in a positive assessment of religious faith.”
In 1897 James delivered a lecture to his students and told them that he meant to write “an essay in justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religion matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.” The result was “The Will to Believe.”
The essay itself is linear, with each point illustrated with concrete examples. Taking a cue from the Socratic method, James anticipates possible objections and questions and preemptively discusses them. The tone is not what anyone would call “colloquial” it is nonetheless clear and successfully keeps itself from becoming too “dry.” As in Cleanth Brooks’s admonition about poetry analysis --“paraphrase is heresy”-- James’s prose is so concise that it is difficult to use any other words except his own. Thus, the preponderance of direct quotations in my essay, with James’s own italics retained. In light of the fact that William James’s upbringing must have been steeped in the teachings of religious texts, we can probably assume that he knew the Bible, backwards and forwards, “chapter and verse.” Yet an intriguing feature about his treatise on religion is its apparent lack of direct allusions to Christian Scripture; in their place James often quotes his contemporaries in the scientific and philosophical world. Still some of the topics which James brings up make me, for one, think of cognates both from the Bible and from the “talking points” which the New Atheists have been known to make.
Not surprisingly, he begins with the hypothesis, defined as “anything that may be proposed to our belief.” The hypothesis can either be “live” or “dead” James says, “just as the electricians speak of live or dead wires.” It is the individual thinker who decides whether the hypothesis is live or dead, “measured by his willingness to act.”
Next, James calls the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options can be: “1. Living or dead, 2. Forced or avoidable 3. Momentous or trivial. . .an option [is] a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.”
In order to be a “living” option, both hypotheses have to be live ones. James gives an example tailored to his student audience: “If I say to you ‘Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,’ it is probably a dead option” because neither option is likely to be a live one, as opposed to the more relevant option–“ ‘Be an agnostic or be a Christian,’ ” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.”
Next, James demonstrates what a forced option is. Saying “Either love me or hate me” is not a forced option, because the individual can also choose to “remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating.” A forced option by contrast has two choices, either one or the other with no third choice or escape clause. So if James says, “ ‘Either accept this truth or go without it,’ I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing place outside of the alternative.”
The last distinction of an option is whether it is momentous or trivial. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, such as James’s example of a chance to participating in a North Pole expedition is momentous, because refusing “to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as he tried and failed.” The opposite kind of “option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant or when the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise.” In a witty aside, James pokes fun at his fellow scientists in that “trivial options abound in the scientific life.” Even though a chemist may spend a year of his life attempting to verify a live hypothesis with his experiments showing inconclusive results, apart from the loss of time, “no vital harm” has been done.
The second section of “The Will to Believe” deals with “the actual psychology of human opinion.” James starts with the premise that with certain facts, our “passional and volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions. When we look at other facts, it seems that they could do nothing when the intellect had once said its say.”
James then quickly asks whether it seems “preposterous” that our opinions could be modified at will. “Can our will either help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of truth?” The answer of course is that our will cannot modify facts; we can't “believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars[.]” Nor can we change matters of fact or will them into existence or put them there “by any action of our own.”
Following that is an analysis of Pascal’s famous wager, in which the French philosopher “tries to force us into Christianity by reasoning as if our concern with truth resembled our concern with the stakes in a game of chance.” James translates Pascal’s wager thus: “You must either believe or not that God is –which will you do? Your human reason cannot say. A game is going on between you and the nature of things which on the day of judgement will bring out either heads or tails.” Weighing your gains and losses, Pascal seems to be advising, “you still should stake all you have on heads, or God’s existence: if you win . . .you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing at all. . .Why should you not? At bottom, what have you got to lose?”
James finds fault with Pascal’s wager, a “last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the unbelieving heart. . .We feel that a faith. . .adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the inner soul of faith’s reality.” James, somewhat slyly, then adds if we were in the Deity’s place, “we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern from their infinite reward.” Unless Pascal had a “pre-existing tendency” to believe in the tangible expressions of faith, such as masses and holy water, then “the option offered to the will by Pascal in not a living option.” This reminds me of a bit of Scripture reprimanding believers who are not totally committed to their faith: “So you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:15.) The fence-sitting posture of Pascal’s wager is not a “living” option and thus James finds it distasteful. Rather than deciding to commit himself to belief, he “hedges” his bet, much in the same way an individual shrinks from embracing organized religion. In 2010, we often hear people (usually young adults) describing themselves as “I'm not religious, but I am spiritual.” To me, that sounds like a hedged bet or a wishy-washy attitude or what we used to call in the 1960s a “cop-out.” If one is indeed “spiritual,” where does all this vaunted spirituality come from, and to what – or Whom- is it directed?
From one point of view, James says, believing through our volition seems to be “simply silly,” but “from another point of view it is worse than silly, it is vile.” Set along side “the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences. . .”how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream! Can we wonder if those bred in the rugged and manly school of science should feel like spewing such subjectivism out of their mouths?” James concludes this section by quoting one of his contemporaries, “enfant terrible Clifford,” the British mathematician, who sounds just like one of the “New Atheists” of today: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
At first blush, James considers Clifford’s observation to be “healthy, “ but he modifies this position the next section which is an examination of beliefs within one’s social structure. The influence of the intellectual climate, especially when certain beliefs are endowed with a kind of “prestige” can affect our beliefs, which are already compromised by such factors within “our non-intellectual nature” such as “fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set.” Such factors can lead to a “habit of belief” rather than a belief that has sprung out of our willing nature: “Our faith is someone else’s faith. . .Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,–what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?” But as James is quick to remind us, even though society countenances –“backs us up” in our belief, a skeptic may ask “how do we know it’s true?” It’s not really volitional when “we willingly go in for life upon a trust or assumption” which the skeptic himself “does not care to make.”
The opposite of society’s pressure to accept a certain belief can perhaps be seen in the tactics of the new atheists of today. Even a century ago Clifford and other empiricists were as strict as Harris in their dependence on “objective evidence,” upon which they insist with exquisite zeal. James tells us that “[t]he greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.”
James himself admits he is a complete empiricist, but also a “reflective” man. “Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine idea to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?. . . No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed on,” James tells us. Objective evidence is “never triumphantly there,” it is a “mere aspiration. . .marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking life.” If you want to claim that a certain truth possess objective evidence, is simply to say that when you think them true and they are true, then their evidence is objective; otherwise it is not.” Practically speaking, your conviction ” that the evidence you go by is of the real objective brand is just one more subjective opinion” added to the mix.
Next James reminds us that the world is full of a “contradictory array of opinions” which claim to have “objective evidence and absolute certitude.” Amid so many conflicting ideas “there is indeed nothing which some one has not thought absolutely true while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false.” According to James, “Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says,’Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!’ merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe.” No one really courts the disapproval of others, especially those who operate from a position of intellectual smugness. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the new atheists , such as Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, wants to exert so much pressure upon believers that it becomes “too embarrassing to believe in God.” From a psychological standpoint the duty to “Believe truth! and Shun Error!” can propel us into toward a whirlpool of self-doubt. In some cases, “our errors are surely not such awful things.” Dr. James recommends that “[i]n a world where were are so certain to incur them in spite of all of our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier rather than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.”
At this point James returns to his earlier distinctions concerning momentous options. When the option between losing and gaining the truth is not momentous, he says, “we can throw the chance of gaining truth away and at any rate save ourselves from believing falsehood by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has come.” In most human affairs, it is not very often that the need to act on our beliefs is so urgent that we can't wait until all the facts are known. Many of our everyday choices often are trivial, and seldom forced. Even in those cases in which the individual tends toward one side or the other in an issue, his interest in the results “is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he be deceived.” Science has taken this nervousness and developed it into a “technique, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen so deeply in love with the method that. . .she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth as technically verified that interests her.” Science, therefore, can only go so far and no farther; this is the wall at which objective evidence stops. “Science can tell us what exists but to compare the worths of both what exists and what not exists we must consult not science but what Pascal calls our heart.” When it comes to eternal truths – the ultimate question as to whether or not God exists –we do not have the luxury of waiting wait around “until Doomsday” for objective evidence to reveal itself, for this is a “special” truth, which James says, “Omniscience only knows.” Some tempting jewels of knowledge are simply not accessible, and if you read the Bible –“as literature” – you will discover that complete wisdom “is not to be had in the land of the living.” (Job 28: 18.)
Back in part one of this essay, there was an implication that even scientists cannot depend solely on what they can immediately perceive with their senses as the only available truth, and the only truth that exists. Upon the onset of an experiment, for instance, the scientist at least has a hunch or preliminary notion of just what it is he hopes to find or prove. “There are cases then,” James explains, “where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And were faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of immorality into which a thinking being can fall.’ Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives!”
Religion is not only a momentous option, but also a forced option: “We cannot escape the issue by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light, because , although we do avoid error. . .if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.”
What we can only do is take a “risk,” and meet the hypothesis “half-way.” “One who would shut himself up to snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from making his only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance.” In this case, “pure intellectualism” would be an absurdity, James contends. “I therefore, for one cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule for thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.”
Again, I think that can't expect to wake up some morning and suddenly find unmistakable, objective evidence of God appearing next to the newspaper on the breakfast table. That kind of beatific vision, if such exists, is the province of saints, not ordinary human beings with all of attendant faults. Perhaps that is what James is getting at when he says “But if we are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty to wait for the bell.” Even if we do choose to wait, “we do so at our peril as much as if we believed. In either case, we act, taking our life in our hands.”
A strong statement follows, urging both believers and non-believers not to “veto” nor “bandy words of abuse.” Both the New Atheists and the Fundamentalists would do well to heed James’s words of advice: “We ought . . .delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism’s glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as well as in practical things.”
James ends his essay by quoting a passage from Fitz-James Stephen who states that “ in all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark,” reminiscent of the famous metaphor from still another philosopher, Kierkegaard, with his “leap of faith.”
Even though the most famous essay has come to an end, James had plenty more to say about religious belief ten years later in “What Pragmatism Means”: unlike positivistic empiricism “with its anti-theological bias” and unlike “religious rationalism with its exclusive interest in the remote, the noble, the simple and the abstract. . .,” pragmatism “widens the search for God. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact– if that should seem a likely place to find him.”
The “very dirt” of human endeavor –from the exploitation of believe and the undermining of religion for political and commercial gain, to the hectoring arguments of New Atheists and the self-righteous rigidity of fanatics – - can be cleansed with an open mind and a willing heart. No matter how noble the search for ultimate truth may be, it is only with a spirit of humility that it will ever be found.
Sources:
CNN (link)
http://articles.cnn.com/2006-11-08/w...on?_s=PM:WORLD
Dennett, Daniel. “The Unbelievable Truth,” New York Daily News, October 3, 2010.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/...ownothing.html
James, William. “What Pragmatism Means” in American Literature, Volume II, edited by Poirier and Vance. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970, 261-272.
James, William. “The Will to Believe” in The World Treasury of Religious Thought, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1990,
95-115.
The New American Bible.
Twain, Mark. Letters from the Earth, edited by Bernard DeVoto. New York: Harper and Row, Perennial Library Paperback, 1974, p. 20.
Pascal's wager and Rev 3:15
I think I must have some sort of attention deficit disorder because I find it difficult to read long passages, but I'm glad I went through these because of the following idea they left with me:
This reminds me of a bit of Scripture reprimanding believers who are not totally committed to their faith: “So you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:15.) The fence-sitting posture of Pascal’s wager is not a “living” option and thus James finds it distasteful.
I've never liked Pascal's wager and now Revelations is as good of answer to it as any I've been able to think up. I've also never really liked Revelations, but that's another issue.
Maybe, with a little luck, Pascal's wager and Revelation can cancel each other out like my wife and I do when we vote?
Anyway, thanks for the posts.
