assign#6

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION READING ANALYSIS ASSIGNMENT, DUNDON

Text:Pomerleau
Assignment number:6_ Reading Assignment location Pp. 432-.492,

Argument Location p.474_

As with all your assignments, it is best to start this one by taking a few moments to read the biography of William James, pp. 432-440. James was tormented most of his life by what would be described today as periodic bouts of depression, deep enough to be suicidal in early years. His physical health seemed to be poor as well. As is often the case with brilliant people afflicted with serious mental and emotional stress which have little external justification, he became interested in psychology and, later, philosophy as a way to find some explanation and possibly a relief from his affliction. Part of his suffering was linked to an affective disorder, which your author describes on page 434, noting in it a sense of powerlessness. Nowadays what he describes there is often thought to be due to some biological problem. On a short term basis you may have experienced it yourself when severely fatigued, or after an evening of too much drinking or in an illness: A sense that the world is simply out of one's control, that one cannot change anything, that one cannot even command oneself to do anything hard and cannot think of any reason for doing it. It is embarrassing, certainly to me, when such a dark mood lifts, to realize how closely body and soul (mind, or self if you wish) are tied together so that biologically distorted moods are hard for the mind to penetrate and see the foolishness of. The quotation at the bottom of page 434 shows how James did penetrate the hopelessness of feeling powerless. He just decided that he was free, he chose to believe he was free even if he didn't feel that way at all. And by acting as if he were free he became free! A key to much of his later thought

It is important to recognize that a psychology or a philosophy constructed to find relief from a pathology are very tricky to use for the general population which is not afflicted by the pathology. James lived in an era when philosophic materialism already seemed to be tied to "scientific" thinking as a preferred framework. Human freedom is extremely difficult to explain within a solidly dogmatic materialism. ( I..e. nothing exists except the particles and energy of physics which are entirely rule driven.) And outside of such materialism where rational selves are admitted to exist with their ability to seek the truth and to freely commit themselves to it or even to ignore it, proving the existence of freedom (free-will) is impossible because it is directly known by anyone constructing a proof. * And what is directly known cannot be proven, but rather functions as the premises in proofs or as presuppositions to a given argument.

What James did, as noted in the quotation, and what probably saved his sanity and allowed his great creativity to flourish, was to believe that he was free regardless of the pathologically caused lack of evidence (he did not feel free) and lack of any philosophic defense of freedom. He then set out to act as if he were free, and thereby became outwardly (pragmatically) as free as any normal person. He cured himself, ironically, by sheer force of will-to-believe!

In an interestingly analogous process he also reached God in a counter-evidential way, based on the epistemology he formed which depends not on evidence of the truth we can grasp in things but on the advantages (practical value) of acting like certain things are true.

James confesses to not knowing much of older philosophic traditions and this shows in the special way he defines "belief" (quotation, bottom of p. 445) as assent to the truth of any proposition (S is/is not P), whereas we have been using it to mean those assents based on authority of some speaker.

Pomerleau's digest of James' epistemology from this point on (445 to 474) is an effort to show how such assents are made, not just those of religious faith but even those of experience and science. He shows how much the will (desire, emotion, hope, fear) influences the process. Only, unlike other writers, James does not do this to debunk such willful assent (voluntarism, it is sometimes called, but in a modern sense) but to establish its inevitability and its acceptability. This may sound sloppy and repulsive, but one must read carefully what Pomerleau says to see that it is not as messy as one would think.

But for the sake of this assignment I want to direct you to pages 464 to 474, "Faith and the Will to Believe." James is at pains to convince his audience that they deceive themselves about the extent to which some sort of solid evidence controls their assent on most issues. On the top of p. 467, James makes fun of the range of beliefs of his Harvard audience supposedly based on evidence, whereas most, even the scientific examples, are based on trust in some speaker. And throughout he suggests that desire (for something or other) is heavily involved in that trust.

Earlier he showed that the desire to simply focus on an idea or regarding an hypothesis as a "living" choice were critical to the advance of personal thinking. He had earlier decided that there is no adequate evidence or argument to prove the existence of God, or the truth of any specific religion (mass and holy water, p.466). But we should still be free to choose to believe in such things without feeling guilty of some special sloppiness. Why so? Because even our belief in the existence of truth itself is "willful." (Second quotation, p. 467).

He begins then to close in for the kill: Moderns, not having adequate evidence for the propositions of religion (God exists, He is a loving Father, Good will triumph over evil,) choose to believe nothing. But, says James, these moderns claim allegiance to two dicta, "We must know the truth and we must avoid error." But the latter, "avoid error" seems to be operating only on the religious beliefs whereas there is just as much danger of error in all their other beliefs. He is getting close to something I have referred to in class as the "fear of God." Some moderns choose to be non-believers because they find that choice easier and more appealing, not really because of their fear of "being duped.", or if it is a fear of being duped, it is a choice of what kind of dupery they prefer to avoid (the God kind) and which kind they are willing to tolerate (the anti-God kind).

People, especially intellectual agnostics who believed their position to be thoroughly "scientific", did not take his position kindly. And while I enjoy any discomfort that can be applied to the dogma of materialism, especially its covert but powerful "fear of God," I am not comfortable with the whole path by which James got to this point. As you know by now, I have argued that there are very strong rational arguments for the existence of God. I have found that one of the main reasons why such arguments are not accepted is that people willfully choose to ignore them. This is a point James himself has made about beliefs (in his wider sense). Unless a person is willing to intently pay attention to an issue, one can avoid the conclusion it could otherwise demand. A perfect example of this is in the issue of partial birth abortion. If you want abortion rights to have no limits whatsoever then you just cannot let yourself think, nor let the public think about the fact that it is an extremely cruel and painful way of killing a baby which is being born. So you force your mind to look the other way.

But I am uncomfortable with James because he claims that even carefully looking at some facts will never lead to a solid and unchangeable belief. Read carefully the second quotation on page 468. My own argument from design demands, for example, that if one saw the identical college dorms which exist at Chico, San Luis Obispo, and (I believe) Northridge, you could never sincerely claim that such identity came about by accident, or that two composers could have composed Mozart's 40th symphony without knowledge of the other's work.. Anyone who could make such a claim would be moved by willfulness which was a disgrace to his/her mind. It is said that Hume cast doubts on whether we know the real-world truth of "From nothing comes nothing." This does not surprise me, because such a principle, known to the mind, destroys his entire theory of the mind and much of what he derives from it. He is understandably motivated to doubt such a principle and such motivated doubts I take to be dishonest and shameful. The principle, as I have pointed out in class, shows the incredible power of the mind to derive much more from experience than just connections of pictures (empiricism). It enables us to sweep over infinite time in the past and declare that there always was something--a certitude for which there is absolutely no corresponding picture whatsoever, because we have no idea what that something was like, only that it be adequate to explain and produce what has in turn led to what we see before us today. People who doubt this power of the mind to know the truth about causality encompassed in that principle are, in my opinion, not completely honest or sincere for reasons much better explained by William James than by any other philosopher I have read.

James, as your text makes clear (p. 484-86), puts absolutely no stock in rigorous proofs of the existence of God, nor even in the negative properties assigned Him in traditional natural theology (which he oddly calls "dogmatic theology.") such as infinite, not spatially limited, nor in knowledge, nor in power, nor in being. So he is logically compelled to make a "leap of trust" (it is hard to say in whom that trust is placed) which was then, as it is now, looked down on as intellectually sloppy. But he has already dealt with that (admirably in my opinion) above in his discussion of "dupery." He uses his pragmatism to recapture in a rather startling way much of the beauty and comfort of the Judeo-Christian concept of God and of man's relationship in two distinct lines of the argument. The first has to do with reaching the belief that God exists and the second that we can, with all our weakness and evil, reach out to Him and work collaboratively with him in our lives, and see our lives as being defined by a calling to that collaboration. He seems to accomplish this astonishing feat without appeal to any divine revelation of God's love for us, and without any solid rational argument as to the bare existence of a supreme, first cause we could call God.

With respect the latter, he seems to be arguing in the analogy,( p. 474) about how the decision to believe without evidence can be made to seem reasonable. This argument is about creating friendship by believing in its possibility and so acting, but it is meant to show how lack of evidence is not intellectually sloppy. Note: Category A is collected from two places on page 474, and so is category C.

= person with a legitimate right to believe in future friendship and justified in acting in accordance with that belief

= person who. can still choose/decide to cultivate friendly relations with him expecting a genuine friendship to develop and in spite of no evidence be moved to the decision due to its being a living, forced and momentuous option.

= person who helps select a junior colleague w/o any evidence of a friendly disposition in the junior colleague

Note: Frame this argument as leading to a "particular"conclusion, i.e. either I or O (Some is or Some is not) since James is not arguing to a conclusion compelling everyone.

article boxes________subject boxes______copula boxes____predicate boxes

____|______

_________

M&P (Major)

S&M (Minor)

Conclusion

____|______

-----S

_________

-----M

____|______

-----S

_________

-----P

Do a circle diagram of your argument in this box:

1. My S is A, B, C.
2. My P is A, B, C.
3. My M is A, B, C.
4. My major prem. is an A, I, E, O, prop. (A=A, I=B, E=C O=D)
5. My minor premise is an A, I, E, O, proposition (Same code.)
6. My conclusion is an A, I, E, O, proposition (Same code.)
7. The syllogism is Valid (A), Invalid (B)
8. The figure is First (A), Second (B).

Comment and text for the Second Argument: It should be clear that James is not guilty in this argument or anywhere of foolishly arguing that things are true simply because you want them to be true or that they become true because your belief makes them come into existence. He is simply showing how reasonable it is to act in accordance with a belief w/o evidence under certain circumstances. How would this apply to God's existence? Once I thought that a conclusive argument against James, and against any claim that belief in God is wishful thinking was the following:
First Analogy
Suppose I was ship-wrecked on a desert island, hilly enough that I could not see the other side. Anxiety about survival, given the lack of water, keeps me awake. Can I actually say to myself: "Well just wish that there is a boat on the other side and you can rest till morning and then go and find it." ? Of course not. Few people would so gifted at self deception to not see the foolishness of this process.

But then, when I paid more attention to James' (see pp. 471-73) actual argument a better ship-wreck example occurred to me whose central argument I want you to analyze before we move on to James' own second argument about friendship with God:
Second Analogy
Suppose a group of twenty of us were ship-wrecked on a desert island. There was some water, but it looked like it would dry up too soon before the next rainy season to keep us all alive. But other side of the island has a rocky outcropping coming out of the reef. The reef is of flesh-slashing quality and the surf is perpetually wild with monstrous waves. Whether there is a beach on the far side of the outcropping or not is not possible to determine, let alone whether there might be a boat there. Would it make sense for someone to risk their life to swim out to see? Would deeply wishing a boat to be there improve the reasonableness of such a risk? Hardly.

But suppose the following: One night a group of six exhausted but healthy men walk into our camp and tell us that they have come to show us a way off the island. They claim they are camped on the far side of the rocky out-cropping but have seen the smoke of our occasional campfire. They tell us that they have constructed a large raft which can carry them, the rest of their community and us, but that they want to leave soon. They have sophisticated navigational equipment and sea-lane maps salvaged from a wreck, ample food supplies and water and could use our muscle power in rowing the craft out to the main shipping lanes where the chances of being picked up are excellent. The trick is to get to the other side of the outcropping. There is a tunnel/cave which opens on our side, partially underwater. It is only wholly submerged at low tide for less than 40 yards and it comes up on the far side through a longer dark but dry stretch of the cave. The problem is that the 40 yards of underwater swimming are tricky, dark and easy to get confused in. We will have to lash ourselves together, allow our guides to lead and, if need be, pull us through. Even if someone passes out, we will be able to revive them after the short underwater swim.

Of course, what we need here, more than anything, is to be able to trust these visitors to our camp. These are witnesses to a possible route to salvation. Is it intellectually sloppy wishful thinking to trust the witnesses and believe that the raft is there under construction and will have room for us, etc.? The answer, it seems to me is demonstrably no! And all of James's criteria justify that conclusion. This is a perfect case where we have no direct evidence of the path to salvation. We have only the witnesses and the effort they seem to be willing to make and the far from absolutely convincing reasons why they would take such a risk as to traverse that 40 yard underwater swim twice to save us. Look at page 464-65 but also review up to page 474. There you will see that this is the example of 1) An option,, a choice between two hypotheses (or three): a.) the witnesses are trustworthy; b.) they are not; c.) our water supply will hold out.

That they are trustworthy is also a 2) living, 3) forced and 4) momentous option. We cannot cooperate only diffidently (half-heartedly) because we are going to have to work hard to get through the submerged tunnel, not turn back, and then row hard trusting in the navigational equipment which is strange to us. How do we know this is not just a bunch of crazed ship-wreck victims on that other side, who wish to sexually abuse and eventually eat us? Look at how macho and healthy these visitors are. How could they have been ship-wrecked for so long? We do not have any absolutely total evidence. The Pascal type of calculation is not going on here (pp. 465 bottom, to top 466). We must trust sincerely or not at all. All sorts of cues are likely to influence our decision to believe or not. Do the visiting witnesses seem like sexual abusers and potential cannibals? But a decision to not believe is likely to be just as "subjective" and certainly no more "rational" than the decision to believe as James makes clear, on page 467.

From my essay above I chose the following categories to frame my central argument:

Second argument, location above.(Do this argument in the first figure.)

= intellectually sloppy wishful thinking

= decision to trust & believe the visiting witnesses in this case w/o sufficient evidence

= decision to select a living, forced and momentous option (James' terms)

article boxes_______subject boxes______copula boxes____predicate boxes

____|______

_________

M&P (Major)

S&M (Minor)

Conclusion

____|______

-----S

_________

-----M

____|______

-----S

_________

-----P

Do a circle diagram of your argument in this box:

9. My S is A, B, C.
10. My P is A, B, C.
11. My M is A, B, C.
12. My major prem. is an A, I, E, O, prop. (A=A, I=B, E=C O=D)
13. My minor premise is an A, I, E, O, proposition (Same code.)
14. My conclusion is an A, I, E, O, proposition (Same code.)
15. The syllogism is Valid (A), Invalid (B)
16. The figure is First (A), Second (B).(Make it First!)

Third Arg. Location, Clifford's objection, mid page 466.

Note that this objection is badly structured.. I.e. it does not show whether any of James' (here actually my application of James) premises are false but goes after his conclusion.

= wrong decision to believe

= decision to trust & believe the visiting witnesses w/o sufficient evidence

= decision to believe w/o sufficient evidence

article boxes_______subject boxes______copula boxes____predicate boxes

____|______

_________

M&P (Major)

S&M (Minor)

Conclusion

____|______

-----S

_________

-----M

____|______

-----S

_________

-----P

Do a circle diagram of your argument in this box:

17. My S is A, B, C.
18.My P is A, B, C.
19. My M is A, B, C.
20. My major prem. is an A, I, E, O, prop. (A=A, I=B, E=C O=D)
21. My minor premise is an A, I, E, O, proposition (Same code.)
22. My conclusion is an A, I, E, O, proposition (Same code.)
23. The syllogism is Valid (A), Invalid (B)
24. The figure is First (A), Second (B).

Comment on the first three arguments: But if this "salvation" is reasonably believed in in spite of Clifford's objection, is it really a good analogy for believing that God exists? Pomerleau makes the point (p. 471, 2/3rds down) that James does not mean to argue that such a decision would make God exist, but only that by acting as if he exists (as if the witnesses were trustworthy), we will finally come to know that the pre-existing God really does exist (we get to the other side of the outcropping and there really is a crowd of great and caring people working hard on the raft and they need our help and want to help us). So finally James has nothing to offer the person who finds the whole notion of God impossible. Such a person would be someone who believed it impossible for any human to swim 40 yards underwater and so these witnesses must be liars. I am not sure that James has an answer for resolute atheists here. Using our analogy, they could say that the decision to believe the visiting witnesses is reasonable because there are such things are trustworthy humans, but we have not been given an argument that makes the existence of God seem reasonable.

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Fourth Argument: Let us move on now to the reasoning process by which James reaches the second most consoling aspect of the Judeo-Christian tradition without seeming to draw on any of its specific teaching and with no reference to the "visiting witnesses" who brought its "good news" (English for evangelium) about God to the human race. That belief is that we can, with all our weakness and evil, find forgiveness, reach out to Him and work collaboratively with Him in our lives, and see our lives as being defined by a calling to that collaboration. This appears on page 491,but the essential reasoning process is laid out by Pomerleau starting on page 487 under "Concept of God." Some of his convictions about humans weaknesses and yet wonderful destiny are also laid out on pages 482 to 484 under "Conclusions."

It is my opinion that the material laid out in "Concept of God" is a stunning example of the heart of pragmatism as a methodology described rather succinctly by James himself in two formulations of his "faith-ladder" (p.472 and 473, second quotation). It is uncomfortable for me and probably most philosophers who are afraid to admit that much of our reasoning (or even any significant part of it) is a product of our desires and not a rational analysis. But I will try to do justice to James in what follows.

The basic question of whether God and a human can be friends is raised by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics where he answers in the negative because of God's infinite greatness and therefore inequality with mankind. Reason convinced Aristotle that God is infinite, experience convinced him of our finiteness. So the equality needed for friendship is impossible.

Augustine, following his Christian faith, said that Aristotle was right except that God could chose to close that gap. And He did that by taking on human nature ("incarnation") so that we could relate to Him as a friend. James seems to have found another way: He makes God more approachable both by insisting that, for us to be able relate to Him as a friend he cannot be identified with us (knowledge and interpersonal friendship require that the friend be known and that that means be "other" and also be a "person", i.e. be a knower and a lover, not some mere force or "energy.") If this seems like blatant wishful thinking remember that James was a kind of anthropologist of religion, i.e. he studied all sorts of religion and found that the only ones that seemed to give satisfaction to humans, joy, happiness, direction and a purpose for living, as well as guidance and forgiveness to lift them out of their weakness were those which had a personal concept of God. So no pantheism, or infinite brute power concept is acceptable.

Next he must conceive of God as less than infinite (to close the gap), as not omniscient (all-knowing) to allow the mutual growth which is part of friendship. At the same time He is the personal source of the deepest power in the universe, able to determine its destiny apart from (but without contradicting) the laws of physics and to protect our destiny within it, so that we can have confidence in our ultimate safety and happiness, ready forgiveness for our sins, and a sense of direction in our actions. ("To cooperate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems to be all he wants of us." p. 491) A lot of this rosy picture is gotten from his review of religions and religious persons where he eventually develops his distinction of the sick-minded and the healthy minded person. The concept of God and the religious practices which lead to this healthy minded person, must be true, or at least truer, than any rivals because this harmony with the needs of the human personality (we need a friendship with God, he pretty boldly states) and with the needs for the progress of society is a test of truth. We need salvation, so a true religion and the God that is its center must be such that salvation is achievable, where salvation is defined in terms of changes not in God's attitude toward us, but in our attitude toward Him, our decision to embrace His values. It is an amazing reasoning process which I will attempt to condense into a syllogism just so that we can critique it in class. If you have read what I wrote above and the pages of Pomerleau I cited you should be able to get this right:

Fourth argument location: In my essay and in Pomerleau as noted above but especially. pp. 490-91.

= believing in God as a person who relates to humans lovingly, guides, forgives, protects and provides salvation

= belief that fits the facts of human nature and needs and promotes all the qualities of healthy-mindedness, the requirements of a friendly (loyal) relationship, etc.

= belief that intellectually sound persons have a right to

article boxes_______subject boxes______copula boxes____predicate boxes

____|______

_________

M&P (Major)

S&M (Minor)

Conclusion

____|______

-----S

_________

-----M

____|______

-----S

_________

-----P

Do a circle diagram of your argument in this box:

25. My S is A, B, C.
26. My P is A, B, C.
27. My M is A, B, C.
28. My major prem. is an A, I, E, O, proposition. (A=A, I=B, E=C O=D)
29. My minor premise is an A, I, E, O, proposition (Same code.)
30. My conclusion is an A, I, E, O, proposition (Same code.)
31. The syllogism is Valid (A), Invalid (B)
32. The figure is First (A), Second (B).

* When you work at constructing a proof you expect the reader of a valid proof with true premises to be moved to accept the conclusion due to the validity and truth together, not due to any biological or chemical compulsion. Freedom from materialistic determinism is presupposed in any reasoning and inevitably any attempt to prove it will end up being circular. You are trying to prove what you not only already know but what you know must be true before setting out on a proof.