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On the Will Not to Believe and Axiological Atheism: a Reply to Cockayne and Warman

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Abstract

In a recent article in Sophia, Joshua Cockayne and Jack Warman (2019) defend a view they call supra-evidential atheistic fideism. This is the idea that considerations similar to William James’s defence of theistic belief can be used to justify atheistic belief. If an individual evaluates the evidence for atheism and theism as roughly the same (i.e. either can be epistemically rational), then she can rationally believe in atheism if her passions lean in that direction, provided the belief in atheism is forced, live and momentous. After outlining their defence of atheistic fideism, I offer some friendly amendments to their position. Cockayne and Warman claim that when the existential question of God’s existence is undecided for someone, she is rational to let her passions answer the existential question. This is a version of Rowe’s friendly atheism because it can explain the existence of religious disagreement, even in cases where an atheist and theist give the same assessment of the evidence for God’s (non)existence; they disagree at the passional level, not at the evidential level. I argue for a different version of friendly atheism: a mere passion need not settle the existential question about God when the evidence cannot decide it. For one might be rational in preferring that God not exist if God’s existence would make things worse. For certain individuals, this is reason enough to accept and act as if atheism is true, even if it is not epistemically rational to believe that it’s true.

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Notes

  1. There are three minor worries which are not the focus of my main project. The first is that Cockayne and Warman distinguish between holding a proposition to be true (involuntary) and taking a proposition to be true (voluntary). This is not different from the standard distinction between believing and acceptance: Belief is an involuntary attitude one takes toward a proposition. Acceptance, on the other hand, is taking a proposition to be true regardless of whether one believes it. It would have been clearer for the reader had Cockayne and Warman stuck to the standard terminology of belief and acceptance. I will use these terms in the standard way throughout the rest of the paper. The second concerns their use of ‘moral permissibility’ and ‘epistemic permissibility’. At times, Cockayne and Warman say they are defending the epistemic and moral permissibility of atheism. At other times they only refer to the moral permissibility of atheism. The most charitable way of reading them is that epistemic and moral permissibility overlap and are in fact interchangeable terms. For Cockayne and Warman, if P is epistemically permissible to believe, then it is also morally permissible to believe P (and vice versa). Again, it would have been helpful if Cockayne and Warman were clearer on this point. In what follows, I will take the epistemic and moral permissibility of believing P to be identical. The third regards the ambiguity thesis and whether two parties can ever share the same evidence, let alone evaluate it. It’s also unclear whether we ever have the total evidence complicated questions like whether God exist. However, this is really a worry for James, so it is not fair to press Cockayne and Warman on it. It’s worth noting the epistemology of disagreement addresses some of the problems concerning peerhood and evidence, and could perhaps be used to help James. Such a discussion would take us too far afield.

  2. There are, of course, many additional answers to the axiological question (see Kraay 2018).

  3. Likewise, even if they disagree on the answer to the axiological question, it is a separate question whether they can reasonably disagree about it (i.e. separate from the disagreement over the existential question).

  4. Some have suggested that anti-theism, if true, entails atheism. If this is right, then this version of friendly atheism. For this would mean that if it’s rational to believe theism then it’s rational to believe atheism. A more detailed version of my account of friendly atheism would have to address this worry (for example, see Schellenberg 2018).

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Lougheed, K. On the Will Not to Believe and Axiological Atheism: a Reply to Cockayne and Warman. SOPHIA 58, 743–751 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-00740-0

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