Pascal’s wager
• Simplified version:
– “It’s safer to be a believer than a nonbeliever. As a believer,
if you’re right you go to heaven and if you’re wrong it’s no
big deal. But as a nonbeliever, if you’re right it’s no big deal
and if you’re wrong you go to hell”
• Why believe in God?
– ‘epistemic reasons’: reasons that concern what’s most
plausible, likely to be true, backed by evidence,
intellectually justified, etc.
• e.g., the design argument
– ‘prudential reasons’: reasons that concern what’s in your
own best interest, what’s to your advantage, what makes
your (after)life go better, etc.
• e.g., Pascal’s wager
Pascal in the Pensées
• Reason
– “Reason can decide nothing here”
– Pascal thinks it’s intellectually unclear whether God
exists: “I look on all sides, and I see only darkness
everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is
not matter of doubt and concern.”
– He mentions the “Deus absconditus” (hidden God) of
Scripture (Isaiah 45:15, Vulgate).
– This is supposed to be part of Christianity:
“[Christians] profess a religion for which they cannot
give a reason”, “[Christianity] says that men are in
darkness and estranged from God, that He has
hidden Himself from their knowledge”
Pascal in the Pensées
• Intellectual integrity
– “[A]ccording to reason, you can defend neither of the
propositions”—neither theism nor atheism.
– So, you might think, it’s therefore inappropriate to
take a position: the best response to withhold judgment
on the question.
– That is, if there’s no intellectual basis for theism and
none for atheism, then the most intellectually honest
position is a kind of agnosticism.
– But Pascal insists that “you must wager” and that
“[i]t is not optional”—you have to take a position on
this issue.
– So there’s nothing intellectually dishonest in taking a
position. You’re forced into it.
Pascal in the Pensées
• Wagering setup
–
–
–
–
You can either go with theism or atheism.
You have two things at stake: your reason and your will.
You might gain knowledge or you might fall into error.
You might gain happiness or you might fall into misery.
• Wagering: reason
– Since this is an intellectually unclear and forced choice,
neither option will compromise the integrity of your
reason.
• Wagering: happiness
– Go with theism: “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you
lose nothing”
Standard payoff matrix
God
No God
Believe
∞
-0/+0
Disbelieve
-∞
-0/+0
Heaven, hell, nothing lost or
gained in this world
‘No hell’ payoff matrix
God
No God
Believe
∞
-0/+0
Disbelieve
-0/+0
-0/+0
Heaven, no hell, nothing lost or
gained in this world
Pascal in the Pensées
• Cost of religious obedience
– Pascal seems to start out with the assumption
that there’s no cost to believing if God doesn’t
exist (“if you lose, you lose nothing”)
– But later he seems to allow for the view that
there is a real cost, in giving up a happy life
(“I may perhaps wager too much”).
– In any case, since “what you stake is finite”,
therefore the ‘wager’ still works.
‘Cost of obedience’ payoff matrix
God
No God
Believe
∞
-n
Disbelieve
-∞
+0/-0
Heaven, hell, n = the cost in this
world of religious obedience
Pascal in the Pensées
• Probabilities
– Pascal seems to start with the assumption that God’s
existence has a probability of 0.5 (“Since there is an
equal risk of gain and of loss...”)
– But he later allows for the view that the odds are
against God’s existence, insisting that the ‘wager’ still
works.
– Just as [0.5(∞) + 0.5(-n)] > [0.5(-∞) + 0.5(0)], so too
[0.01(∞) + 0.99(-n)] > [0.01(-∞) + 0.99(0)]
– The wager still works, so long as God’s existence has a
probability greater than zero, and so long as the cost
of religious obedience in this world is finite.
Pascal in the Pensées
• Objection: choosing beliefs?
– Pascal’s entire argument seems to rest on the
assumption that beliefs can be voluntarily chosen
(this view is called ‘doxastic voluntarism’).
– But that assumption seems false.
– My current belief is that cats do not lay eggs. I
cannot simply choose to believe otherwise.
– I can raise my arm at will, but I can’t change my
beliefs at will.
– So someone might object to Pascal, “Yes, I’m
convinced that it’s to my advantage to be a
believer, but I have no control over my beliefs!”
Pascal in the Pensées
• Reply: indirect control
– Since your reason is not keeping you from belief,
it must be your passions.
– So don’t bother looking at proofs and reasoning;
instead, work on your passions.
– Imitate believers you know: “Follow the way by
which they began; by acting as if they believed,
taking the holy water, having masses said, etc.”
– Eventually it will influence your passions and
make you into a genuine believer.
– In other words, even if we have no direct control
over our beliefs, we still have indirect control.
Summary
• Reason can decide nothing.
• You have to pick one side or the other.
• You stand to gain more happiness by being a
believer than by being a disbeliever.
• This holds true even if there is a worldly cost
to being a believer, and even if God’s
existence is unlikely.
• Even if you can’t directly choose to be a
believer, you can gradually gain belief by
imitating believers.
Objections:
intellectual honesty / personal integrity
• Mackie on indirect control
– Remember that Pascal says that picking a side will not
compromise (or “shock”) your reason.
– But Mackie thinks the indirect conversion process
recommended by Pascal does just that.
– He writes that, “in deliberately cultivating non-rational
belief, one would be suppressing one’s critical faculties”—
and Pascal himself writes that the process “will naturally
make you believe, and deaden your acuteness”.
– This is an especially big problem if you think the odds are
against God’s existence—now Pascal’s recommendations
are to “deliberately... reject all rational principles of belief
in uncertainty”.
Objections:
intellectual honesty / personal integrity
• Why not suspend judgment?
– Remember that, despite his assumptions that reason
doesn’t support theism or atheism, Pascal thinks it’s still
okay to pick a side because you have to pick a side.
– That is, he defends the intellectual integrity of picking a
side by saying you can’t refuse to wager—this ‘suspension
of judgment’ agnosticism isn’t a real alternative.
– But why isn’t it a real alternative?
– Maybe he thinks it’s not a legitimate alternative because
such agnosticism is practically equivalent to atheism.
– But even if that’s true, such agnosticism still seems
intellectually superior to theism and atheism (at least given
Pascal’s assumptions about what reason can tell us)
Objections:
intellectual honesty / personal integrity
• Biting the bullet
– Pascal might retreat to the claim that it is still rational to
sacrifice one’s intellectual honesty and personal integrity.
– After all, what’s a little dishonesty compared with eternal
bliss?
– A very principled nonbeliever might insist that it is never
okay to sacrifice one’s integrity for the sake of self-interest.
– But suppose you could get a trillion dollars just by getting
yourself to form some trivial unjustified belief (e.g., that
the trillionth digit of pi is odd)—wouldn’t that be okay?
– Of course, Pascal spends a lot of time emphasizing the
grave importance of the question of God’s existence. It
therefore doesn’t seem like something to take trivially.
Objections:
intellectual honesty / personal integrity
• Fooling God?
– Mackie writes that Pascal needs God to be “both
stupid enough and vain enough to be pleased with
self-interested flattery”
– Pascal could respond that, even if we find that kind of
God distasteful, it’s still rational to be a believer in
such a God.
– A more palatable response: what starts out as selfinterested flattery of God will eventually develop into
genuine heartfelt worship of God.
– That way, God might reward those who follow
Pascal’s wager without being “stupid” or easily
fooled.
Objections:
The ‘many gods’ objection
• Pascal’s key assumption
– Pascal seems to assume that there are only two
possibilities: (1) God exists and rewards believers
with heaven (and perhaps punishes nonbelievers
with hell), and (2) God doesn’t exist and we’re all
annihilated at death.
– He even has a nonbeliever character say, “I know only
that, in leaving this world, I fall for ever either into
annihilation or into the hands of an angry God,
without knowing to which of these two states I shall
be for ever assigned.”
– But this seems to overlook a lot of possibilities.
Objections:
The ‘many gods’ objection
• Other possibilities
– God exists, everyone goes to heaven.
– God exists, everyone goes to hell.
– God exists, only Protestant Christians go to heaven
(everyone else goes to hell).
– God exists, only Sunni Muslims go to heaven.
– God exists, only people who speak Czech go to
heaven.
– God exists, believers go to hell, nonbelievers go to
heaven.
– God exists, everyone goes to heaven except those
who follow Pascal’s wager—they go to hell.
‘Reversal’ payoff matrix
God1
God2
No God
Believe
∞
-∞
-n
Disbelieve
-∞
∞
+0/-0
Heaven, hell, n = the cost in this
world of religious obedience
Objections:
The ‘many gods’ objection
• Mackie on predestination
– Perhaps “people are predestined to salvation or to
non-salvation—perhaps to damnation—no matter
what they now decide, or try to decide, to do”
– If you think salvation is a matter of divine grace, and if
you’re serious about avoiding Pelagianism, then you
might think there’s nothing you personally can do to
acquire salvation.
– Pascal seems to make the controversial assumption
that you personally can put a strategy into effect that
will probably get you saved.
– But if the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination
is true, then that assumption cannot be made.
Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief”
• Famous statement
– “[I]t is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to
believe anything upon insufficient evidence”
• Famous shipwreck case
– People die because some shipowner stifles his doubts
about his ship’s seaworthiness.
– Even if the ship didn’t sink, he’d still have had no right to
believe on insufficient evidence.
• Another case: public accusations
– The charges turn out to be false, and the accusers are
dishonored.
– Even though they sincerely believed the charges were true,
since they got their beliefs “by listening to the voice of
prejudice and passion”, they had no right to believe.
Belief and action
• Objection
– Their beliefs weren’t wrong, just their actions—
they should have investigated more thoroughly
before they acted.
• Short reply
– You can’t separate the belief from the action like
this. After all, if you’ve already got strong beliefs
on a matter, it’s impossible to do a fair and
unbiased investigation.
Longer reply
• Beliefs are action-guiding
– Beliefs by their very nature have an influence on actions.
– Even a single trifling belief will have wider effects on other
beliefs, as well as on our habits in accepting beliefs—
eventually influencing our actions.
• Beliefs are not private
– “Our lives are guided” by the common opinions found
throughout society.
– We have a responsibility to take care of this stock of
common opinion.
– We owe it to the rest of humanity and to future
generations to form our beliefs with evidence and testing.
Longer reply
• It’s everyone’s responsibility
– This duty is not just for intellectuals.
– Even the “rustic” and the “hard-worked wife”
have an influence on the stock of common
opinion—so they too are ‘on the hook’.
• It’s not easy
– Feeling like we know what’s going on gives us a
pleasant sense of power.
– And it feels bad to realize that we were wrong
and lose this false sense of power.
– But we have to give it up, out of respect for
mankind.
Longer reply
• Character/habits: credulity
– Unsupported belief is always bad, even when it doesn’t
have the kind of bad effects you can point to.
– For it weakens your intellectual habits, and makes you into
a credulous person.
– Cf. Even if stealing doesn’t hurt anyone, it makes the thief
into a worse person.
– We don’t want to end up with a society of credulous
persons, “sink[ing] back into savagery”
• Character/habits: dishonesty
– If my mind is filled with unsupported beliefs, others are
more willing to lie to me, and they get into bad habits.
– Dishonesty spreads around alongside credulity, and we
end up with a general disrespect for evidence and truth.
Universal skepticism?
• Objection
– “Are we then to become universal sceptics,
doubting everything, afraid always to put one
foot before the other until we have personally
tested the firmness of the road?”
• Short reply
– Certain matters concerning morality and the
physical world have stood up to testing—they
have a “practical certainty”
– Also, you don’t need beliefs to act. It’s quite
possible to act on probabilities—after all, that’s
precisely how you get evidence.
Longer reply: relying on
testimony and tradition
• Testimony
– It’s okay to accept testimony only when we have evidence
that the reporter is honest, capable of knowing the matter, and
reasonable.
– In particular, it’s not enough for the report to be a good
person. We need reason to think that he might know what
he’s talking about.
– Example: Even if Muhammad was a good person with
excellent contributions to society, that doesn’t give Clifford
any reason to trust his claims concerning the supernatural.
– Example: Trusting a chemist is okay on normal matters of
chemistry. But not if the chemist claims to know of an atom
of oxygen existing throughout all time.
Longer reply: relying on
testimony and tradition
• Tradition
– Tradition is good at “supply[ing] us with the means of
asking questions, of testing and inquiring into things”—
providing us with a framework for inquiry.
– It shouldn’t be taken as “a collection of cut-and-dried
statements to be accepted without further inquiry”.
– We should accept the claims of tradition only when we
have evidence that the persons responsible knew what
they were talking about.
– He illustrates this good use of tradition with examples
from “the moral and... the material world”.
– The “sacred tradition of humanity” consists in “questions
rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask
further questions, and in methods of answering
questions”.
Conclusion
• Moving beyond experience
– Clifford also discusses what to think about “that which
goes beyond our experience”.
– The rule is to take our experience as a guide—we make the
working assumption that nature is uniform.
• Summing up
– “We may believe what goes beyond our experience only
when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption
that what we do not know is like what we know”
– “We may believe the statement of another person, when
there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows
the matter of which he speaks, and that is speaking the
truth as far as he knows it”
– “It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence;
and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate,
there is more than presumption to believe”
Objections to Clifford
• Exaggerated consequences
– Most commentators seem to agree that Clifford has
overstated the bad consequences of beliefs based on
insufficient evidence.
– After all, perhaps people can hold to a limited class of such
beliefs without losing all respect for evidence and all
intellectual virtue.
• e.g., some respected scientists claim to have religious
convictions based on pure faith, backed by no evidence
at all
– And presumably lots of people can hold to wildly
irrational beliefs without it having much of an influence on
the rest of society.
– Clifford could always insist that there’s something
intrinsically wrong with unjustified beliefs, but then he’d
be giving up his ‘destructive social consequences’ style of
argument.
Objections to Clifford
• Foundational matters
– It’s hard to know how to give evidence for things
like the reliability of one’s senses, or the reliability
of one’s memory, or the existence of an external
world, etc.
– Perhaps it’s okay to accept these things merely as
working hypotheses, or to just take them for
granted as a sort of background framework for
thinking.
– But then why can’t we take religious beliefs (like
the existence of God) for granted in the same
way? (Historically, a lot of people have done just
that)
Objections to Clifford
• Foundational matters, cont’d
– Maybe it’s okay to accept them because they’ve stood up to
testing.
– But the tests we use rely on things like the reliability of the
senses, the existence of the external world, etc. They take
for granted what we’re supposed to be testing for.
– Similarly, the evidence we have for saying some testimony
or some tradition is reliable and trustworthy is typically
taken from previous testimony and tradition.
– Generally, it’s hard to do tests or provide evidence without
drawing on a large pre-existing stock of beliefs.
– So, again, it’s unclear whether we need to have evidence
for all our beliefs.
Objections to Clifford
• Children
– How do we get beliefs in the first place? Are we
supposed to rely on evidence from day one?
– It seems implausible that a child would first need
evidence of his mother’s reliability and
trustworthiness before believing her claims about
the names of things.
– Perhaps the child should just take her claims as
working assumptions for the purposes of further
testing?
– But if all you have to work with are working
assumptions, how do you get the kind of evidence
needed for justifying a belief?
Objections to Clifford
• Religious belief
– Perhaps religious belief doesn’t fit Clifford’s rule because
there’s no way to get evidence one way or the other.
– Clifford would probably say that, even when evidence is
unavailable, belief without evidence has bad
consequences.
– You might think that there are no bad consequences to
religious beliefs like “God loves us and wants us to be
nice”.
– But Clifford would argue that these beliefs will in any case
reinforce bad habits across the board.
– So the heart of the matter might be this: Is it
psychologically realistic that people can treat religious
beliefs differently from their other beliefs, as a sort of
isolated ‘special case’?
William James’s
“The Will to Believe”
• James criticizes Clifford’s essay, arguing that belief
on insufficient evidence is sometimes okay.
• Distinctions, terminology:
– Live / dead hypothesis: A hypothesis is dead when we
couldn’t bring ourselves to believe it (e.g., the mythology of
ancient Greece); otherwise it’s live.
– Option: decision between two hypotheses
• Living / dead option: between two live hypotheses?
• Avoidable / forced option: possibility of not choosing?
• Momentous / trivial: significant stake, irreversible
decision?
Psychology of human opinion
• Against ‘doxastic voluntarism’
– We can’t change our beliefs at will.
– A Pascal’s wager conversion would end up lacking “the inner
soul of faith’s reality”
– Without “some pre-existing tendency” towards Catholicism,
imitating Catholics wouldn’t bring belief.
• Non-intellectual influences
– But beliefs aren’t entirely controlled by the intellect.
– “[A]uthority” and “intellectual climate” make a big
difference: “fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation
and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set”
– Our foundational beliefs (e.g., in truth itself) are just
“passionate affirmation[s] of desire, in which our social
system backs us up”
– We disbelieve “facts and theories for which we have no use”
Stating the thesis
• Evaluating our psychology
– So apparently, as a matter of fact, our beliefs are influenced
by lots of non-intellectual factors.
– Is this a bad thing? Is it “reprehensible and pathological”?
– Or it is okay, to be “treat[ed] as a normal element in making
up our minds”?
• James thinks it’s okay
– “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must,
decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a
genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on
intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances,
‘Do not decide, but leave the question open,’ is itself a
passional decision,—just like deciding yes or no,—and is
attended with the same risk of losing the truth”
Dogmatism, absolutism,
and empiricism
• Dogmatism
– James is going to work with the assumption that there really is
such a thing as truth.
• Absolutism
– When you get at something true, there is some sort of telltale
indication that you’ve gotten it.
– James uses the metaphor of a bell that goes off in your head
whenever you get knowledge.
– He thinks that most of us are absolutists at heart. Even
empiricists like Clifford think they know certain things for sure.
• Empiricism
– But James is an empiricist: he thinks that there is no sure
indicator of truth, and that no belief is so sure as to be beyond
reinterpretation and correction.
– The test of a belief is not whether it comes from some infallible
intellectual faculty, but whether it stands up to repeated
examination.
Two goals
• Epistemology involves two goals:
– Gain truth
– Avoid error
• Ranking these goals
– Clifford thinks (according to James) that avoiding error is
of supreme importance—he’d give up all chance at gaining
truth rather than risk any error.
– Others might think gaining truth is more important.
– James insists that any such ranking is an “expressio[n] of
our passional life”—some people are terrified of believing
false things, whereas others feel like it’s no big deal.
– He says Clifford’s rule “is like a general informing his
soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to
risk a single wound”
Examining agnosticism
• James’s strategy
– James is going to examine principled agnosticism in the
realms of science, morality, and religion.
– He’s going to see whether we should be agnostics when
confronted with ambiguous evidence.
• Science
– James will argue that it makes sense to be agnostic on
scientific issues when the evidence is ambiguous.
• Morality
– James will argue that principled agnosticism is absurd in
cases of personal relations.
• Religion
– James will argue that it’s okay to follow pro-religion
passions, and that principled agnosticism is an irrational
rule.
Science, morality
• Science
– The options in science are not momentous or forced, so
principled agnosticism makes sense as a way of avoiding
falsehood.
– It’s not like science is so urgent that we need some belief,
any belief to get by.
– Though it’s nice to have zealous scientists pushing their
theories, just as a way of encouraging scientific progress.
• Morality
– James seems to suggest that both philosophical skepticism
about morality and commitment to morality are okay.
– With personal relations, having positive hopeful beliefs
(“precursive faith”) is a good way of making these beliefs
eventually come true.
– It would be absurd to wait for evidence as to whether
someone likes me before trusting them.
Religion
• Essence of religion
– First, “the best things are the more eternal things”
– Second, “we are better off even now if we believe [the first
thing] to be true”
• What if religion is true?
– The option is momentous: a “vital good” is at stake.
– The option is forced: being agnostic is just one more way of
missing out on this vital good.
– Agnosticism isn’t a way of avoiding the options; it’s a way
of taking a specific option: “Better risk loss of truth than
chance of error”.
– It’s not saying the intellect is better than the passions; it’s
saying that the fear of error is a better passion than the
hope of gaining truth.
– Doesn’t “my passional need of taking the world
religiously” have any say in the matter?
Religion, cont’d
• Personal religion
– Now consider that (for most of us) religions present the
eternal perfection as somehow ‘personal’.
– And the option feels like it’s being proposed to “our active
good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld from
us unless we met the hypothesis half-way”
– Agnostics might “cut [themselves] off forever from [their]
only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance”
• Principled agnosticism is irrational
– If all this is true, then principled agnosticism keeps us
from the truth.
– And “a rule of 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”
Religion, concluded
• Waiting for evidence
– James thinks it’s bizarre to say we’re required to wait for
the evidence to come in.
– It might make sense if we were absolutists, if we thought
our intellect would somehow tell us when we had
knowledge.
– But we’re empiricists, so we don’t expect to know anything
for sure.
• Tolerance
– We shouldn’t criticize each other for making our decisions
one way or the other.
– “We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to
respect one another’s mental freedom”
Some comments on James
• James’s counterexamples
– Clifford gives a big universal rule: “it is wrong always,
everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon
insufficient evidence”
– One way of understanding James is that he comes up with
two kinds of counterexamples to this rule:
• Beliefs such that believing them helps make them come
true (e.g., social relations).
• Beliefs such that the only way to get the relevant
evidence is to believe them first (e.g., God).
– [I’m taking this from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
article “Pragmatic Arguments for Belief in God” written by
Jeff Jordan]
Some comments on James
• Optimistic practical beliefs
– People have given other examples of practical
beliefs that it’s okay to have (even without
sufficient evidence).
• The world is an overall nice place.
• People can usually be trusted.
• Our efforts can make the world a better place.
• The problems I experience will not last my whole life.
• I can successfully climb up from the edge of this cliff.
– These beliefs make your life go much better, the
line of thought goes, and so it’s okay to believe
them without sufficient evidence.
Some comments on James
• Depressive realism
– Some evidence in psychology indicates that
happy people tend to overestimate their own
abilities, reputation, etc.
– In contrast, people suffering from depression
tend to give relatively accurate estimates.
– I’m told this is all extremely controversial, and I
have no expertise in the matter.
– But perhaps it could lend support to the idea that
having unjustified optimistic beliefs makes your
life go better.
Objections to James
• Optimistic beliefs
– It’s unclear whether you need to have optimistic
beliefs in order to get the benefits James mentions.
– Maybe all you need is a sort of optimistic
pretense where you dwell on happy outcomes.
– In baseball, do you need to believe “I’m going to
hit a home run” or is it enough to focus on that
particular outcome?
– Perhaps James’s arguments can’t justify religious
belief, but only a sort of hopeful pretense (which
arguably fits with some traditional notions of
faith).
Objections to James
• Fear of false beliefs
– James says Clifford is against beliefs based on insufficient
evidence because Clifford suffers from a pathological fear
of false beliefs.
– James also says that principled agnostics in general have
nothing to back up their position but a fear of false beliefs.
– But first, that’s probably a misinterpretation of Clifford—
what Clifford is worried about is the destructive
consequences for society if people stop respecting truth
and evidence.
– And second, a principled agnostic needn’t take avoiding
false beliefs as the one supreme goal of epistemology—she
might argue that her agnostic methods will give us the best
mix of gaining true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs.
– That way, an agnostic might have something better than a
dubious passion backing up her recommended methods.
Objections to James
• Are religious beliefs good?
– James sometimes seems to assume that religious
beliefs make things better.
– After all, he focuses on our right to believe good, nice,
optimistic things.
– Presumably, for example, James would not defend a
racist’s right to follow his racist passions and believe
that certain races have genetically lower IQ’s.
– Now, religious beliefs like “God loves us and wants
us to be nice” are hard to worry about.
– But when we get to more detailed, real-world
religious beliefs, it’s highly controversial whether
they’re good, whether they make things better.
Objections to James
• Living options
– Whether an option counts as living for you will depend on
lots of arbitrary factors about where you happened to be
born.
– And whether an option is living determines whether you
have the right to believe it—James doesn’t defend the
voluntary adoption of beliefs that seem bizarre and
incredible to the believer.
– It might seem irrational to deliberately allow your beliefs
to be influenced by such arbitrary factors.
– But perhaps James thinks that you need some arbitrary
cultural background or another in order to start
intellectual inquiry in the first place—without it, you’d
have nothing to work with
• Remember from the Clifford slides, I mentioned that we
might need a “large pre-existing stock of beliefs”.
Objections to James
• Getting at the truth
– James seems to reject any epistemic rule that might
possibly cut us off from the truth.
• He rejects Clifford’s rule “don’t believe without sufficient
evidence” because perhaps God won’t reveal himself
unless you’re willing to take a leap of faith.
– But every epistemic rule might possibly (if things get weird
enough) cut us off from the truth.
– Any rule of the form “never do x” might cut us off from
knowing God—after all, perhaps God won’t reveal himself
unless you do x.
• “Never knowingly believe in contradictions”
• “Never deliberately suppress good evidence”
• “Never reject evidence from a person just because you
don’t like the way they look”
– So it looks like James would have to reject all sorts of very
plausible epistemic rules.
Part I
• ‘Natural religion’
– religion based on scientific-style reasoning
and observation of the natural world
– as opposed to ‘revealed religion’: religion
based on Scripture and miracles
• Characters:
– Cleanthes: has an “accurate [careful]
philosophical turn”
– Philo: “careless [carefree] scepticism”
– Demea: “rigid inflexible orthodoxy”
Religious education
• Demea’s method:
– “[F]irst... learn logics, then ethics, next physics,
last of all, of the nature of the Gods”
– Teach children the weakness of human reason
before teaching them religion
– First, “a proper submission and self-diffidence”,
and then, “ope[n] to them the greatest mysteries
of religion”
– This protects them from the dangers of
philosophy, from “that assuming arrogance of
philosophy, which may lead them to reject the
most established doctrines and opinions”
Religious education
• Philo agrees:
– Ignorant and devout: The ignorant masses see the
“endless disputes” of scholars and cling tighter to
religion.
– A little learning...: Novices to philosophy get excited
about reason and end up rejecting religion.
– Skeptical and devout: But once you learn enough, you’ll
see the weakness of human reason (even in common
life, even in basic physics and metaphysics), and you
won’t trust reason in ‘out there’ matters of theology.
______________________________________________________________________
Both Philo and Demea say that a healthy
appreciation of the weakness of human reason
(which comes from mature study of philosophy) can
be good for religion.
Skepticism: insincere and unlivable
• Cleanthes is having none of it:
– Self-proclaimed ‘skeptics’ are insincere or maybe just
joking. They rely on reason just like everyone else.
– Maybe you can actually be a skeptic for less than a
few hours; but you can’t keep it up, and after a while,
you return to the real world along with everyone else.
• And why go through the trouble!?
– The Stoics thought the truly virtuous could overcome
even torture. The Pyrrhonian skeptics thought you
could live your life as a skeptic.
– Both failed to see that, just because you can keep
something up for a little while, it doesn’t mean you
can keep it up your whole life.
Philo’s defense of skepticism
• The healthy residue of skepticism
– Maybe you can’t keep up skepticism all the time, your
whole life.
– But something will remain with you; you won’t forget the
lessons of skepticism, and it will affect the way you think.
• Why to bother with skepticism
– Why do skeptics act like normal people? We’re humans
and we can’t help it.
– Why go into deep skeptical philosophy? It’s interesting
and pleasant and rewarding.
– Why philosophize? Everyone does some reasoning. And
philosophy is just “regular and methodical” reasoning—
no different in kind from the reasoning of common life.
Philo’s defense of skepticism
• Going too far
– When we leave common life and start reasoning about
stuff like eternity and God, we’ve gone too far.
– Reasoning about “trade, or morals, or politics, or
criticism” is okay—it gets backed up by “common sense
and experience”.
– But reasoning about God has nothing backing it up, and
we don’t know whether we can trust our reason.
– In reasoning about common life, skeptical worries never
succeed, because they get outweighed by common sense
and observation.
– But in reasoning about God, skeptical worries are
powerful, because there’s nothing to oppose them.
Religion and science
• Cleanthes responds:
– Even you skeptics accept reasoning about ‘out there’
stuff—look at science!
– It would be crazy to reject Galileo or Newton on the
general grounds that human reason is too weak and
untrustworthy on such remote subjects.
– The ignorant masses, they reject science because they
don’t understand it, and they cling to even the lowest
superstition.
– But you skeptics are perfectly willing to accept scientific
reasoning, even about very outlandish topics.
– So, unless you’re just inconsistent or biased, you should
be willing to accept reasoning concerning God.
Religion and science
• Sincerity
– So, again, you’re just being insincere. It’s obvious
you don’t believe what you’re saying.
– I’ll be charitable and say you’re just joking, you’re
just having a good time.
• Obvious arguments for religion
– And it’s not like the arguments for religion are
really strained and weird and intricate.
– On the contrary, they’re perfectly obvious and
natural.
– So reasoning about religion is actually in better
shape than scientific reasoning.
Religion and skepticism
• Cleanthes continues, addressing Demea.
• Early Christianity
–
–
–
–
In those days, everyone railed against reason.
The Church Fathers borrowed from the Academic skeptics.
The Protestant Reformers bashed reason.
Catholics have written skeptical tracts very recently.
• Enlightenment Christianity
– But then Locke said Christianity is based on reason.
– Bayle and others misused skepticism, and everyone joined
Locke.
– And now everyone acts like ‘atheist’ and ‘skeptic’ mean the
same.
Religion and skepticism
• Philo chimes in:
– This looks like ‘priestcraft’ (priests manipulating people
for their own gain)
– In the old days, only a love of reason could challenge
religion.
– And people were more susceptible to indoctrination.
– So the priests bashed reason.
– But now people are more independent-minded and they
know about other religions.
– So now the priests base everything on reason.
• Cleanthes responds:
– Come on, it’s only natural for people to use whatever
means they have to defend their beliefs.
Review
• Philo seems to be going with some hardline
version of agnosticism:
– Reason is incapable of showing anything one way or
the other about religion.
– Those who think reason can prove or disprove
religion are putting too much stock in reason.
– Trusting reason might be okay in matters of common
life, but not in matters of theology.
• But Cleanthes thinks reason is up to the task:
– There are obvious arguments to establish the
important doctrines of religion.
– These arguments are just as solid (or even more so)
than scientific arguments.