Sunday 13 January 2013

Schellenberg's Skeptical Religion: thoughts on 'belief in' vs 'belief that'

In his book The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion, Schellenberg offers a neat set of concepts with which to approach the old problem of the relation of faith and reason. For Schellenberg, religious skepticism - by which he means, neither believing nor disbelieving religious propositions - is fully justified. His proposal, however, is that the religious skeptic may nevertheless have religious faith. Specifically, he may have propositional faith in religious propositions, defined as follows:

Propositional faith involves voluntary asset to a proposition, undertaken in circumstances where one views the state of affairs it reports as good and desirable but in which one lacks belief in the proposition. In thus assenting to a proposition, one adheres to a certain policy: a policy of mentally going along with its content in relevant contexts (as opposed to questioning or criticising or ignoring it, or simply keeping it at arm's length) - of imagining the world to oneself as including the relevant state of affairs and mentally endorsing this representation ( in thought 'taking its side', aligning oneself with it, deciding in favour of it, selecting it to guide one). (p3)

One can have propositional faith in regard to any of the world's great religions, but Schellenberg argues that the best object of propositional faith is a sort of generalised religion he calls 'Ultimism': the view that "what is deepest in reality (metaphysically ultimate) is also unsurpassably great (axiologically ultimate) and the source of an ultimate good (salvific)" (xii) This kind of general faith is to be recommended over particular faiths on the basis of an intellectual virtue religious skeptics will readily recognise - the virtue of openness, understood as encompassing 'intellectual vigilance', 'evenhandedness', and the 'readiness or willingness to accept' the widest possible range of significant religious propositions.

The idea that ultimism is to be preferred in this way is plausible, since being open to the widest possible range of religious propositions will naturally lead one to want to leave open one's commitment to any one such proposition by committing instead to the most general version of such propositions. But it could be argued that the momentum of this argument actually takes one even further than Ultimism. For the extreme openness of the genuine religious skeptic will naturally lead him to doubt, not only whether ultimism is true - which is strictly irrelevant to the question of the adoption of propositional faith - but precisely whether it is the best object of propositional faith. For instance, she will be driven to consider whether a version of Satanism (in which what is axiologically ultimate is not also salvific) or naturalism (in which what is metaphysically ultimate is not axiologically ultimate or salvific) might not be better objects of propositional faith than Ultimism. Note that if she is a religious skeptic, neither believing nor disbelieving in religious claims, the fact that these views imply atheism do not make them inappropriate as objects of propositional faith - since for such a skeptic atheism is just as much a matter of faith as religion.

Perhaps a more significant way in which the openminded skeptic will be led to question Ultimism, however, relates to the very concepts in which Ultimism is formulated. Genuine openness would surely include openness to other ways of conceptually formulating and expressing the ultimate object of one's propositional faith. It would include, for instance, vigilance regarding the intellectual histories of such words as 'axiological' and 'salvific' (and the terms with which such words are explicated), and regarding whether such words might have undesirable or unwarranted metaphysical or Christian connotations. What this suggests is that there may be a problem with the propositional aspect of propositional faith: for in being tied to a particular proposition - a particular logical concatenation of particular concepts - propositional faith seems to lack the fluidity required by skeptical openness.

It is interesting in this context to recall the distinction between 'belief that p' and 'belief in X'. H H Price argued that some uses of 'belief in X', and in particular belief in God, are not reducible to 'belief that p', i.e. to any combination of propositional beliefs. Schellenberg implicitly draws an analogous distinction in his account of propositional faith, which is essentially 'faith that p' rather than 'faith in X'. But if belief in X is not necessarily reducible to belief that p, then 'faith in X' may not always be reducible to 'faith that p' (and observe that this latter is by far the less natural idiom). Consequently, the fact that skeptical openness involves an openness to the variety of possible propositional formulations of the object of faith, suggests that the object of this skeptic's faith may be best expressed in the idiom of 'faith in X'. The phrase 'faith in God' , for instance, might be said to possess the same combination of maximal generality with specifically religious content as Schellenberg's Ultimist proposition, while avoiding the limitations of being tied to specific propositional commitments. (Note that an assumption being made here is that the skeptic avowing this kind of 'faith in God' will not understand the word 'God' in such a way as to commit himself to the kinds of propositional claims affirmed in specific religions).

The move from propositional to non-propositional mental attitudes also threatens to undermine Schellenberg's fundamental distinction between faith and belief. For a key point about propositional faith, for Schellenberg, is its compatibility with the absence of propositional belief. But if belief in God is quite distinct from believing some range of propositions about God, there may be no need for the religious skeptic to make a leap from belief to faith, in order to avoid commitment to particular propositions; instead, all that may be required is a move from avowals of 'belief that' to avowals of 'belief in'.

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