Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot.
Clifford and James on evidence and belief.
Clifford: “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
James: “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.”
...
James holds that because the arguments for the existence of the traditional God fail, the traditional conception of God fails as well. Accordingly, in James’s hands, religious belief is reconstructed. The religious hypothesis is less a view about God’s nature and existence, and more a view about the place of hope in our lives. That is, James’s strategy for defending religious belief is simply to transform it into something else, something less theological. And so, according to James, religious belief is not about God, Jesus, Heaven, Hell, angels, immortality, souls, or miracles. It rather is simply the belief that “the more eternal things are best.” This is the belief that the will-to-believe doctrine aspires to defend.
The question for traditional religious believers, of course, is whether James is really an ally at all. The Jamesian argument seems an overt bait-and-switch; he seems to have defended religious belief by distorting it into something else. Arguably, Jamesian reconstructed religious belief is not religious belief at all. Indeed, it seems that Jamesian religious belief is in the end no different from Cliffordian non-belief. And so the iconic opposition between Clifford and James admits of reconciliation.
Clifford and James on evidence and belief.
Clifford: “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
James: “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.”
...
James holds that because the arguments for the existence of the traditional God fail, the traditional conception of God fails as well. Accordingly, in James’s hands, religious belief is reconstructed. The religious hypothesis is less a view about God’s nature and existence, and more a view about the place of hope in our lives. That is, James’s strategy for defending religious belief is simply to transform it into something else, something less theological. And so, according to James, religious belief is not about God, Jesus, Heaven, Hell, angels, immortality, souls, or miracles. It rather is simply the belief that “the more eternal things are best.” This is the belief that the will-to-believe doctrine aspires to defend.
The question for traditional religious believers, of course, is whether James is really an ally at all. The Jamesian argument seems an overt bait-and-switch; he seems to have defended religious belief by distorting it into something else. Arguably, Jamesian reconstructed religious belief is not religious belief at all. Indeed, it seems that Jamesian religious belief is in the end no different from Cliffordian non-belief. And so the iconic opposition between Clifford and James admits of reconciliation.
