William Niels Christensen

Faith — and Faith in Hypotheses

Where shall a sane man begin to look for criteria of reasonableness which will not immediately rule any commitment to live by religion, ideology or even systematic ideals right out of Reason’s court? A substantial option is to begin with philosophy. And a good way to start in philosophy is by straightway challenging some current parrotisms of philosophical fashion.

From God to Is and from Is to Ought

During this chapter and the next we hope to clarify and defend, in an initially perplexing variety of ways which bring together ethics and logic, a cluster of reasons for saying that “God exists” can be a necessary truth for a rational believer. More than one sort of necessity should turn out to be necessary. Clues as to the relevant sorts of necessity are supplied by considering some relevant senses or uses of “meaning”. To say with Frege that “meaning” covers meaning 1 or Sense and meaning 2 or Reference is to begin well, but barely to begin! Nonetheless, if flexibly deployed by philosophers who can in the right context relate talk of a word’s Sense and Reference in terms of its users’ typical work and intended work with it, this distinction can beautifully reflect many of the ways in which we very naturally talk. Consider two well reflected things one might say. A militarist orator might retort to a vegetarian pacifist heckler at Hyde Park Corner: “By ‘murder’ sensible and literate people have always meant [meant1] an immoral and illegal taking of a man’s life. They’ve not just meant [meant1] any case of just any old taking of life.” An Israeli officer searching for Martin Bormann might reply to a colleague in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police “By ‘him’, sir, I meant [meant2] Bormann, not Eichmann.”

Gambling on other Minds-Human and Divine

Our examination of “Probability” in the last chapter brought out the central importance for understanding central uses of that term of value judgments like “There is good (truth-seeking) reason to believe P”, “Thanks to our familiarity with Q we have good (truth-seeking) reasons to believe P”, “If we could establish a strong (truth-seeking) case for accepting S, then we could have an even stronger (truth-seeking) case for accepting P”. The notion of there being good (truth-seeking) reasons to believe P, like the notion of ones having a strong (truth-seeking) case for accepting the truth of P, is one of the most crucial notions, perhaps conceptually “primitive notions”, relevant to understanding why thought is not merely a flow of consciousness and language is not merely the rather predictable occurrence of scratches and sounds. At the risk of seeming tiresome we have repeated the insertion “(truth-seeking)” in order to distinguish the sort of good reasons and strong cases relevant to Probability as such from the complex sort (involving reference to the former) relevant to Maximizing Expected Utility. Let us say that ‘paradigmatically’ good, truth-seeking reasons form a family from which beliefs arrived at by application of the Principle of Maximizing Expected Utility are excluded. When the Justifying Explanation Argument for belief in God is used by a sincere, reasonable person, the use should in the initial steps work only from what the user takes to be ‘paradigmatically’ good, truth-seeking reasons. But the Justifying Explanation Argument CAN so be used as to culminate in what the user takes to be a strong case for making a commitment from the standpoint of Maximizing Expected Utility. But if it is used properly (in a way closer to James’ approach to harmonize in this life with ‘eternal things’ than to Pascal’s Wager), then the envisioned utilities should include ones like living now in accordance with the most important truths, like realization of one’s human best now, like growth now in wisdom and in a spontaneous moral sense of fraternity, like enjoying innocent happiness now in a way that makes others happy now. Utilities like eternal closeness to truth in a possible afterlife, eternal growth in spontaneous goodness and innocent happiness in a possible afterlife can be organically included as natural correlates of the first ones. Given the right utilities, the quest for Maximizing Expected Utility can as strongly affirm the sovereignty of The True and The Good as the quest for Probability about what counts. But as emerged from our clarification of James’ ‘The Will to Believe’ (in the final section of Chapter V), discovering more truth and coming closer to certainty can be perfectly respectable utilities for one to try to maximise in making commitments in accordance with the Principle.

Two Sides to a Theist's Coin

The concepts of a personal God that prevail among many committed Judaeo-Christians who are not (or are not primarily) Voluntarists can usefully be linked with concepts of Reason through the mediating teleological notion of reasonable persons as persons naturally and wisely prone to seek for Justifying Explanations. Reasonable persons do not necessarily conclude in the end that their existence has a theistic Justifying Explanation, nor even that their existence must have some Justifying Explanation or other. But for reasonable persons the justification-seeking “Why?” sort of question arises naturally. It is a question that appears to them for a long time to demand thoughtful answering. And, if for many reasonable persons it appears eventually unprofitable to reflect on further, then often some form of philosophical reflection also appears required for its removal by agnosticism, by scepticism or by sheer mysticism.

Miracles: Nowell-Smith’s Analysis and Tillich’s Phenomenology

The concept of a justifying explanation may be usefully employed in pointing towards at least two salutary explications for the still vexed notion of a Miracle. In at least two ways, a person can take something to be miraculous, and can reasonably take it to be so. Either he can if he reasonably takes it to be a sign that there is some (perhaps still hidden, but real) justifying explanation of the world and human history. Or he can if he reasonably takes it to be a sign that some particular religious, metaphysical or broadly ideological position supplies the wisest form of justifying explanation for a limited and fallible, but rational mind like his own. What does “reasonably takes” signify? If he takes it to be a miracle reasonably then he must meet most of the criteria for reasonableness that were discussed in Chapter I.

Rational Action, Aquinas and War

What is it to be a reasonable person? Can a reasonable person still feel respect for any answers about the nature of rational agency which the main contributors to the Judaeo-Christian tradition have had to offer? From the very start of this work we have sought to explicate a cluster of sound criteria for being a person who is reasonable about any systematic ideals, about any all-encompassing religion, metaphysic, or ideology. The Judaeo-Christian tradition is one in which, quite possibly, there has been less stress on contemplation than is found in that of the Buddhists or the Hindus. It is a tradition in which quite clearly, there is less stress on prompt and very likely violent action than is espoused by many exponents of Marxism or Immediate Republicanism or Anarchism or Militant Nationalism. But the Judaeo-Christian tradition, despite its diversity and despite obvious disparities in the credibility or wisdom of its rather mixed spokesmen, has persistently stressed the importance of both contemplation and action. Contemplation, for example, has been encouraged not only by mystics and monastic orders, but by the influence of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neo-Platonic ideals (such as theoria) upon Judaism, Christianity and Islam. On the other hand, the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Gospels and the Koran rightly emphasized the importance of acting and reflecting on how to improve one’s actions. Humanists have often found inspiration in such Scriptures for acting reasonably and wisely, much as Humanists have deplored — sometimes very justly deplored — the results of religious institutions’ attempts to spell out and enforce what they deem reasonable, just and wise through spidery excesses of legalism and casuistry, sometimes accompanied by mastodontic attempts at brainwashing and repression.

Probability and ‘The Will to Believe’

The ‘hypothetical’ approach to questions of faith and metaphysics, which we have advocated all along since Chapter I, suggests that it is a search for probability rather than an insistence on certainty which should characterize the philosopher of religion. Such a search for probability goes with the very kind of open-ness to new concepts, new values, new forms of thought and visions which the (so closed-minded) Pharisees and Sadduccees would have needed to be ready for the traditionally based, yet shatteringly novel messages of Jesus about Spiritual Redemption, Prudent Unworldliness, the Resurrection, the Real Presence and the Trinity. Such open-ness would have left the later Christian clergy and laymen far better able to benefit from the most valuable ideas of Galileo, Spinoza, Darwin, Marx and even (with a pinch of salt) Freud, Carnap, Quine and the later Wittgenstein.

From Is to Ought and from Ought to God

In Chapter IV we allowed ourselves to cover a good deal of mixed territory in the hope of illuminating a cluster of importantly related confusions. Taken together these confusions often seem to discredit belief in the sort of personal God (whose ‘Gooper’-properties are coordinate with ‘Expo’-properties) that emerges from those strands of the Judaeo- Christian tradition which we aim to defend.