Abstract
I argue for the following four theses: (1) The Dread Thesis: human beings should fear having false religious beliefs concerning some religious doctrines; (2) The Radical Uncertainty Thesis: we, namely most human beings in our culture at our time, are in a situation where we have to commit ourselves on the truth or falsity of some propositions of ultimate importance; (3) The Radical Choice Thesis: considerations of expected loss or gain do not always provide guidance as to how to commit ourselves on matters of religious doctrine that are both radically uncertain and of ultimate importance; (4) The Scandal Thesis: radical choice on matters of ultimate importance is neither good nor inevitable, but due to the collective failure of philosophers of religion. Then I consider some inadequate responses: playing the faith card; contra-Pascalian decision theory; spiritual chauvinism; that faith presupposes uncertainty; the older pachyderm; irony, subjectivity, relativism and non-cognitivism; tainted truth; and muddling through. Finally I submit that the way forward is quite simply to become better philosophers.
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Notes
I think Kierkegaard would have accepted the first three theses but not the fourth. I also think that if we want to discuss the moral psychology of commitment Kierkegaard has much to teach us. This paper is not, however, intended as a piece of Kierkegaard scholarship. Nor is it primarily a contribution to the debate on disagreement that has flourished in this century, especially in Princeton (see Christensen 2007, Elga 2007a, b, Feldman 2006, Kelly 2005, Oppy 2006, Pettit 2006). My aim, rather, is to show that one sort of disagreement is a scandal and should be replaced by another.
Given a hypothesis h I take it that the probability of a piece of evidence e relative to h is itself a range included in 1/n% to (100-1/n)% for some positive integer n. It then follows that prior probabilities equal to either 0% and 100% are stable under the discovery of new evidence.
Extreme uncertainty about extreme uncertainty is equivalent to extreme uncertainty. Hence it is not self-refuting to adopt a neo-positivist position of extreme uncertainty about the propositions that according to the criteria of Logical Positivism are said to be meaningless. Readers who find that attractive should modify the example to make the interval 0% to 100%.
Because precision is an idealization we may without further idealization take the intervals to include their end-points. So we may characterize full commitment as having a degree of belief that is at one or other end-point. Hence if the interval for the existence of God were 70% ± 20% then there can be a committed theist who believes in God with 90% confidence and a committed agnostic who has confidence 50%. If this usage sounds too odd then we can require in addition that for a commitment there should be a belief in the proposition committed to.
Graham Oppy put a version of this objection to me at the 2008 APRA Conference.
Notice, though, that this bit of good news might be, like an older ‘good news’, only true because we have been saved, in which case Christianity would continue to have a role in reminding us to be grateful.
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Forrest, P. The Philosophical Scandal of the Wrong Kind of Religious Disagreement. SOPHIA 48, 151–166 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0097-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0097-4