RISKING BELIEF : Why William James still matters - 'Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited' - Excerpt

Commonweal, March 8, 2002 by Charles Taylor

It is almost a hundred years since William James delivered his celebrated Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh on The Varieties of Religious Experience. I want to look again at this remarkable book, reflecting on what it has to say to us at the turn of a new century.

In fact it turns out to have a lot to say. It is astonishing how little dated it is. You can even find yourself forgetting that these lectures were delivered a hundred years ago.

What was James's take on religion? What was the wider agenda of which it was part? Like any sensitive intellectual of his time and place, James had to argue against the voices, within and without, that held that religion was a thing of the past, that one could no longer in conscience believe in this kind of thing in an age of science. A passage in Varieties gives a sense of what is at stake in this inner debate. James is speaking of those who are for one reason or another incapable of religious conversion. He refers to some whose "inaptitude" is intellectual in origin:

   Their religious faculties may be checked in their natural tendency to
   expand, by beliefs about the world that are inhibitive, the pessimistic and
   materialistic beliefs, for example, within which so many good souls, who in
   former times would have freely indulged their religious propensities, find
   themselves nowadays, as it were, frozen; or the agnostic vetoes upon faith
   as something weak and shameful, under which so many of us today lie
   cowering, afraid to use our instincts.

A fuller discussion of these "agnostic vetoes," and the answer to them, occurs in James's essay "The Will to Believe." Here it is plain that the main source of the vetoes is a kind of ethics of belief illustrated, James contends, in the work of English mathematician and philosopher William Clifford (1845-79). Clifford's The Ethics of Belief starts from a notion of what proper scientific procedure is: Never turn your hypotheses into accepted theories until the evidence is adequate. It then promotes this into a moral precept for life in general.

The underlying picture of our condition, according to Clifford, is that we find certain hypotheses more pleasing, more flattering, more comforting, and are thus tempted to believe them. It is the path of manliness, courage, and integrity to turn our backs on these facile comforts, and face the universe as it really is. But so strong are the temptations to deviate from this path that we must make it an unbreakable precept never to give our assent unless the evidence compels it. James quotes Clifford: "It is wrong always, and everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

   James opposes to this his own counterprinciple: 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.

Backing this principle is James's own view of the human predicament. Clifford assumes that there is only one road to truth: We put the hypotheses that appeal to us under severe tests, and those that survive are worthy of adoption--the kind of procedure whose spirit was recaptured in our time by Karl Popper's method of conjectures and refutation. To put it dramatically, we can win the right to believe a hypothesis only by first treating it with maximum suspicion and hostility. James holds, on the contrary, that there are some domains in which truths will be hidden from us unless we go at least halfway toward them. Do you like me or not? If I am determined to test this by adopting a stance of maximum distance and suspicion, the chances are that I will forfeit the chance of a positive answer. An analogous phenomenon on the scale of the whole society is social trust; doubt it root and branch, and you will destroy it.

But can the same kind of logic apply to religion, that is, to a belief in something that by hypothesis is way beyond our power to create? James thinks it can.

What is created is not God or the eternal, but there is a certain grasp of these, and a certain succor from these that can never be ours unless we open ourselves to them in faith. James is, in a sense, building on the Augustinian insight that in certain domains love and self-opening enable us to understand what we would never grasp otherwise.

What does that tell us about what the path of rationality consists in for someone who stands on the threshold, deciding whether he should permit himself to believe in God? On one side is the fear of believing something false if he follows his instincts here. But on the other there is the hope of opening out what are now inaccessible truths through the prior step of faith. Faced with this double possibility it is no longer so clear that Clifford's ethic is the appropriate one, because it was taking account of only the first possibility. As James notes,