FAITH: The Imperative Ingredient

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Surreal Australian landscapes you must see in your lifetime. Inside the revamped Chiva-Som, Thailand's most luxurious wellness retreat. Why I made my Mary Poppins 'a bit raunchy' Premium. Concerning dogmatism, James states that it has two forms; that there is an " absolutist way " and an " empiricist way " of believing in truth. James ends section V by arguing that empiricists are really no more tentative about their beliefs and conclusions than the absolutists: When the Cliffords tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such "insufficient evidence", insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind.

For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other way.

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They believe so completely in an anti-Christian order of the universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead hypothesis from the start. James begins section VI with the following question: Shall we espouse and endorse it? James ends section VI by stressing what he finds to be the "great difference" merit of the empiricist way over the absolutist way: Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide.

It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter a hypothesis may come to him: James begins section VII by stating that there is "one more point, small but important, and our preliminaries are done". However, James in fact gives in this section a crucial bit of argumentation:. One possible way of interpreting James' words here is to take him to be arguing that while we should avoid falsehood, it is no vice to err if we do so while pursuing truth.

The Will to Believe

That is, James is steadfastly agreeing that we must withhold belief until we possess sufficient evidence when that evidence is forthcoming. Not to do so would be to wholly disregard the duty to avoid falsehood. However, as James is about to argue, where the truth of a belief only comes about after something is believed or where evidence regarding a belief's truth or falsity is only accessible to believers, the pursuit of truth seems to require us to believe upon insufficient evidence. Here James first identifies areas of belief where he holds that to believe without evidence would be unjustified: In scientific questions, this is almost always the case [ In section IX, James moves to investigate whether there are areas of belief where belief without evidence would be justified.

James gives self-fulfilling beliefs as one example of such beliefs:. From examples like these, James concludes: And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an 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.

James begins section X with the thesis that he takes himself to have already proven: Although James does not here explain the way in which the truth or evidence regarding religious belief depends upon our first having religious belief, he does argue that it is a part of the religious belief itself that its own truth or the evidence of its own truth depends upon our first believing it.

In the preface to the published version of "The Will to Believe" James offers a different argument for the way in which the evidence for religion depends upon our belief. There he contends that it is through the failure or thriving of communities of religious believers that we come to have evidence of the truth of their religious beliefs. In this way, to acquire evidence for religious belief, we must first have believers who adopt such belief without sufficient evidence.

Much later in life, in his "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking" lectures, James also mentions the possibility that God's existence may actually depend upon our belief in his existence. The doctrine James argues for in "The Will to Believe" appears often in both his earlier and later work. James himself changed the name of the doctrine several times. First appearing as "the duty to believe", then "the subjective method", then "the will to believe", it was finally recast by James as "the right to believe".

Whatever the name, the doctrine always concerned the rationality of believing without evidence in certain instances. Specifically, James is defending the violation of evidentialism in two instances:. After arguing that for hypothesis venturing and with self-fulfilling beliefs a person is rational to believe without evidence, James argues that a belief in a number of philosophical topics qualifies as one or other of his two allowed violations of evidentialism e.

The reason James takes himself as able to rationally justify positions often not believed to be verifiable under any method, is how important he thinks believing something can be for the verifying of that belief. That is to say, in these cases James is arguing that the reason evidence for a belief seems to be unavailable to us is because the evidence for its truth or falsity comes only after it is believed rather than before. For example, in the following passage James utilizes his doctrine to justify a belief that "this is a moral world":.

It cannot then be said that the question, "Is this a moral world? Any question is full of meaning to which, as here, contrary answers lead to contrary behavior. And it seems as if in answering such a question as this we might proceed exactly as does the physical philosopher in testing an hypothesis. Epicycle upon epicycle of subsidiary hypothesis will have to be invoked to give to the discrepant terms a temporary appearance of squaring with each other; but at last even this resource will fail.

Schiller in his lengthy essay "Axioms as Postulates". In this work, Schiller downplays the connection between James' doctrine and religious positions like God and immortality. Instead, Schiller stresses the doctrine's ability to justify our beliefs in the uniformity of nature , causality , space , time , and other philosophic doctrines that have generally been considered to be empirically unverifiable.

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