Nature of Belief

Question 1

sources of authority within religion

Answer 1

• Strong Rationalism as an approach to faith contrasted with Fideism
• Revelation: propositional and non-propositional
• Sacred texts: the extent to which scripture is inspired by God and authoritative for believers e.g. Judaeo-Christian concepts of God

Question 2

2 different approaches to faith

Answer 2

Rationalism- holds that truth should be determined by reason and factual analysis, rather than faith, dogma, tradition or religious teaching.
Fideism- holds that faith is necessary, and that beliefs may be held without any evidence or reason and even in conflict with evidence and reason. Religious belief has to come from faith alone.

Question 3

Definitions:
Natural theology
Revealed theology

Answer 3

• evidence for God in nature (A Posteriori)

- knowledge gained from divine revelation or intervention (not through human reason)

Question 4

Difference between moderate and extreme fideism

Answer 4

Moderate fideism sees reason as a barrier from knowledge and God and views natural theology as irrelevant to faith.
Extreme fideism is the view that belief in God ought to be irrational and reason isn’t essential for belief in God but leads to arrogance.

Question 5

Extreme Fideism

Answer 5

Tertullian:
-“Credo quiam absurdum est” (I believe because it is absurd)
-Since humans cannot have a God’s eye view of reality, we must accept that reason cannot explain all truths. We ought to have a little epistemic humility
-Where reason and evidence fail to make sense of claims which seem (to the religious believer) undeniably compelling, that is the place for faith
Soren Kierkegaard:
- Faith and reason entirely different things and should embrace faith due to its irrationality as is a passionate commitment.
- Fear and trembling - “Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith” shows how faith requires submission of the intellect as human intellect can never grasp concept of an infinite God.
-Not enough evidence to provide rational justification for belief so a leap of faith is required.

Question 6

Moderate Fideism

Answer 6

Alvin Plantinga
Reformed Epistemology – Belief in God is justifiable and independent from reason.
-Rejects Evidentialism’s definition of ‘basic belief’ as argues evidentialists unduly limit the definition of basic beliefs and their definition fails its own criterion, ‘I am entitled to believe X if….’, is itself not self-evident, incorrigible or available to sense data, it is an assumption.
-Believed in basic beliefs that don’t require evidence but we build our beliefs on them and don’t involve any inference from other beliefs. All sorts of basic beliefs which we take for granted and aren’t immediately obvious, self-evident or incorrigible, e.g. my belief that you are having thoughts right now.
-Believed that belief in God is a basic belief and non-inferential as A Priori and a foundation for other beliefs.
-Religious belief is basic, therefore faith is reasonable.
-Criteria for a basic belief:
product of a functioning mind
functioning mind in an appropriate environment
mental process aimed at producing further true beliefs
Is it successful at producing further true beliefs

Question 7

Strong Rationalism as opposed to Fideism quotes

Answer 7

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” - Richard Dawkins
“Where there is evidence no one speaks of “faith”. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence” - Bertrand Russell
Both atheists.

Question 8

Evidentialism and Foundationalism

Answer 8

Evidentialism- idea that our beliefs must be grounded in sufficient evidence
William Clifford - belief must be earned through patient investigation and can’t involve any doubt. Forming a belief on insufficient evidence weakens our cognitive powers and makes us less concerned with telling lies. Therefore, if any religious belief has insufficient evidence it is wrong and faith is unreasonable.
“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” - Clifford
Foundationalist Assertion- entitled to believe something if it is itself self-evident, incorrigible (not able to be changed) or certain to person in some way

Question 9

Pascal’s Fideism

-strengths and weaknesses

Answer 9

Pascal’s wager aims to show that Faith operates in the same way as reason and argues that belief in God is the most rational decision one can make in terms of a life insurance. Policy is that we lose more if we choose not to believe and there is better reward for the risks taken in believing in God. Receive infinite loss if we choose not to believe and God exists and can’t bet against the infinite. Scepticism shows that we will never know whether god exists or not, so only decision we have control over is whether to believe or not.
Strengths:
-Logical and obvious/clear and coherent
-If you accept his premises, there is no logical option but to accept his conclusion
-We don’t know the chance of God existing, so we might as well ‘hedge our bets’
Weaknesses:
-Works on paper yet argue that it is impossible for someone to reason themselves into belief in God and faith and reason can’t operate in the same way.
Responds: Can choose to lead a religious life and faith will progress from this

Question 10

Moderate Fideism

Answer 10

Thomas Aquinas-
Believed there are 2 levels to truth: rational truth and higher truth. Therefore, there are 2 levels of theology:
-Natural theology: Use of human reason to support revealed theology and no contradictions between 2 theologies and if there seems to be it is because we don’t have capacity to fully understand.
-Revealed theology: knowledge obtained through divine intervention, rests on faith and beyond reason.
-Reason can give only some aspects of God and so faith is required when reason falls short of its subject (God).
-Faith is an acceptance of already revealed truths and, by definition, requires a lack of scientific evidence
-Was a compatibilist- ‘philosophy is the handmaiden of theology’ so shows how reason supports faith and they are not opposed.
-As God by definition is beyond human reason there will always be a cloud of unknowing surrounding him as a subject so therefore have to take a leap of faith in order to know about God and bridge the epistemic gap.

Question 11

Who were pragmatists and believed in faith as an act of will?

Answer 11

Pragmatism is an approach that evaluates theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application. Finding true beliefs is less important than finding beliefs that work, practically, in living of your life.
Pascal
William James

Question 12

Who defended Faith against William Clifford?

Answer 12

William James in ‘The Will to Believe’ - Faith is reasonable as sometimes it can be right or reasonable to believe something without sufficient evidence. For evidence of something to exist, it must form a “genuine option” meaning there must be mutually exclusive alternatives, eg. God exists or he does not.
According to James, faith is reasonable because it meets the criteria for a genuine option which can be believed even though it can’t be decided on the basis of evidence.
Criticisms:
-Can faith be this binary?
-Makes beliefs reasonable but not necessarily right
-gives any belief the ability of sounding reasonable
-assumes there is no evidence for God, yet some believers argue there is

Question 13

Logical positivists

Answer 13

LPs try to create clear and strict boundaries for truth and knowledge and come up with a logical definition of what is meaningful so we can know what is worth talking about and enable agreement in language. They reject religious language as there is no way of verifying it.

Question 14

Example of a Logical Positivist

Answer 14

A.J.Ayer - Verification Principle
-Language and phrases only meaningful if either analytically or synthetically verifiable because they can be proven within their own terms or using empirical evidence.
-Ayer said that statements are also true in principle: In Principle Verification- if it can’t be verified first hand yet no ambiguity or contradictions
-Religious propositions cannot be analysed using empirical methods either in principle or in practice so they are utterly meaningless
-Principle is strong insofar as it allows us to determine what is and isn’t meaningful
-Weak Verification can still be meaningful:
There are some historical propositions that haven’t been proven with certainty, but are still taken to be true and are therefore meaningful and it is when the likelihood of a statement being proven is highly probable, but impossible to be proven absolutely eg. the fact that Columbus discovered the Americas
Criticisms:
-With infinite time and resources, all sorts of statements can potentially be proven verifiable in principle
-The Verification principle in itself is not verifiable
-Religious statements can be weak verification
-If the senses are wrong, nothing is verifiable
-synthetic verification basically impossible and analytic verification doesn’t provide us with new information or tell us anything.

Question 15

Response to the Verification Principle

Answer 15

John Hick - ‘eschatological verification’

• Uses metaphor of ‘The Celestial City’: an atheist and a theist are travelling down a road. The theist believes that there is a destination at the end of it but the atheist believes that there isn’t. However, if this road is endless, then they will not find out the real answer until the end of their journey. Thus, their claims are not falsifiable yet the issue is not experimental, we will find out the answer at the end of the journey.
• When we die, truth of God’s existence will be proven true or false so we do know how to verify these propositions so Religious language is meaningful.
• “At the end only truth will be known”

Question 16

Principle that aims to improve the Verification Principle

Answer 16

Anthony Flew - ‘Falsification Principle’
religious statements are meaningless as can neither be proven true nor false as religious believers don’t accept any evidence that counts against their belief. –Believers give countless reasons (qualifications) for their belief that make it unfalsifiable and rendering it meaningless. Only meaningful if it has grounds for falsification.
“Death by a thousand qualifications”
-Flew argues that in asserting something, you are denying the opposite and Religious statements have no grounds because they are, in asserting their belief, denying the fact that God could not exist which is a reasonable position to hold.
- Uses John Wisdom’s gardener metaphor to show how belief can be unjustified:
Two explorers in a jungle, weeds and flowers grow, one believes there is a gardener, the other does not, several attempts to find this gardener none is seen, faithful explorer does not give up their belief - just how does an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all.

Question 17

How does FP different or improvement of VP?

Answer 17

Differs from logical positivism in that

• It depends on falsification rather than verification to render statements as meaningful
• Flew is asking that the proof of existence of God must be based on what the believer can know as opposed to what the believer can believe
• It is tighter than the verification principle, it has no blurred edges

Question 18

Responses to Flew

Answer 18

-Religious language does have meaning even if cant be verified/falsified as religious statements are non-cognitive and so shouldn’t be treated as such
-Religious belief is meaningful as it is unfalsifiable and good believers can’t accept grounds by which they stop believing. Kierkegaard ‘The more contradictions the stronger my belief’. Not good believers and no point or value in belief if the believer accepted that belief could be falsified.
-Richard Swinburne: The Principle of Credulity
The idea one should believe in something until it is proven otherwise
He believed that the falsification principle does not work for all statements but they are still meaningful. He uses the analogy of the toys in the cupboard, although one cannot prove or falsify that the toys do not leave the cupboard when unsupervised, the concept of their movement still has enough meaning because we can understand it.

Question 19

Response to Flew (BM):

Answer 19

Basil Mitchell- Parable of the Stranger
Admits the problem of unfalsifiable religious language but responds with his Parable as thinks Flew has misunderstood what religious believers actually say and do. Argues that religious believers do regard their beliefs as falsifiable and wrestle with the difficulty of maintaining them in the face of contradictory evidence, but religious faith involves a commitment to trust in the existence of God despite contradictory evidence.
Illustrate the concept of non-propositional faith:
During the time of a war a Partisan meets a stranger claiming to be the leader of the resistance (an analogy for a religious experience or God leading someone into believing in him). The stranger urges the Partisan to have faith in him, even if he is seen to be acting against Partisan interests. The Partisan is committed to a belief in the stranger’s integrity, but his friends think he is a fool to do so. The original encounter with the stranger gives the Partisan sufficient confidence to hold onto his faith in him even when there is evidence to the contrary.If Partisan accepts that he is a soldier for the other side, fundamentally changing the nature of their relationship.
This logic can be applied to God and religious language is still meaningful even if we disagree with it and still able to discuss belief and religious experience

Question 20

Response to Flew (RMH):

Answer 20

R.M. Hare- the notion of ‘Blicks’ and the Parable of the paranoid student
‘lunatic’ believes dons at his university are trying to kill him and no one can convince him otherwise so the believer/student will never falsify their belief byut is still meaningful as it is monumental and has great impact on the person’s life whether it is right or wrong (religious life).
A ‘blik’ is a belief that is strongly held in spite of evidence to the contrary
There can be sane ‘bliks’ such as religion
All bliks are meaningful, simply by the nature of the strength with which they are held.

Question 21

Response to Flew (LW):

Answer 21

Originator of Logical positivists yet later goes against LP stance.
Language games- LP fails to appreciate the complexity of language as language is equivocal.
-If one participates in the game it has meaning to them and can have varying degrees of participation meaning varying degrees of meaning and understanding.
-Phrases are only meaningless in the sense of not being significant for a particular purpose but is given meaning when fitted into its appropriate context.
-Usage and context of a word give it its meaning and words don’t require clarity or verifiability to have meaning.

Question 22

Kierkegaard vs Kant

Answer 22

Story of Abraham and Isaac - Genesis 22

• Martin Luther praised Abraham for his uncritical obedience to God and for the “blind faith” exhibited by his refusal to question whether it was right to kill Isaac. -Immanuel Kant later opposed this, arguing that Abraham should have reasoned that such an evidently immoral command could not have come from God.
• For Luther, divine authority superior to any claim on behalf of reason or morality, whereas for Kant there can be nothing higher than the moral law.
• In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard follows Kant in emphasising that Abraham’s decision is morally repugnant and rationally unintelligible. However, he also shows that one consequence of Kant’s view is that, if nothing is higher than human reason, then belief in God becomes dispensable.