![\"Prof.](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/09\/William_James_b1842c.jpg\")
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Earlier today, one of the commenters on this blog \u2014 I hope that he won\u2019t mind my describing him as a non-believer \u2014 posted the following:<\/p>\n
When faced with an unresolvable uncertainty, the correct response is agnosticism, not to embrace whatever hope or bias you have. You can want or hope, but the moment you let your desire outweigh your objectivity, you\u2019re going to quickly find ways to reinforce it. No-one\u2019s perfect at avoiding this, but that doesn\u2019t mean you shouldn\u2019t try.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I\u2019m not altogether certain, if a matter is genuinely \u201cunresolvable,\u201d if the two (or more) available options are really, for all intents and purposes, equal, why one shouldn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0make a choice based on sheer desire, or whimsically decide by means of a coin toss?\u00a0 Especially if a choice is urgent or in some way inescapable.\u00a0 (The great al-Ghazali [d. 1111] offers a good metaphor for such a situation in the opening chapter of his Tahafut al-falasifa<\/em>: (\u201cThe Incoherence of the Philosophers\u201d):\u00a0 A hungry man stands between two juicy dates.\u00a0 They are, so far as he can tell, identical, but, for some reason, he can only choose one of them.\u00a0 Should he simply stand there forever, unable to decide between the two pieces of fruit?\u00a0 Or should he just choose one?)<\/p>\n
Here, though, I want to call attention to the discussion of this very topic that occurs in the classic 1896 lecture \u201cThe Will to Believe,\u201d by the great Harvard philosopher and psychologist Williams James (brother of the great novelist Henry James).\u00a0 To a large degree, it represents a response to the English mathematician and philosopher William K. Clifford\u2019s earlier essay \u201cThe Ethics of Belief.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one,\u201d Clifford had written, \u201cto believe anything upon insufficient evidence.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n
James, umm, doesn\u2019t accept Clifford\u2019s position:<\/p>\n
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, \u2018Do not decide, but leave the question open,\u2019 is itself a passional decision,\u2013just like deciding yes or no,\u2013and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.[2]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Of course, there are cases where the costs of inaction, agnosticism, indecision, are negligible:<\/p>\n
Let us agree . . . that wherever there is no forced option, the dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.[4]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In other cases, though, a decision is inescapable.\u00a0 Not to decide is, itself, a decision.\u00a0 Claremont philosopher Stephen Davis updates a Jamesian analogy (from carriage to truck, from male coach driver to female truck driver) while continuing to use James\u2019s terminology of \u201cgenuine options,\u201d \u201cforced options,\u201d and \u201cmomentous options:\u201d<\/p>\n
Imagine the following situation: while entering a steep downgrade, a truck driver suddenly discovers that her brakes have failed.\u00a0 The truck is starting to pick up speed and the driver sees that soon she will be in danger.\u00a0 The driver is faced with a choice: she can either immediately jump from the truck, risking bruises and broken bones while escaping the greater danger of a possible crash farther down the hill.\u00a0 Or she can remain in the truck, risking a crash but hoping eventually to guide it down the hill to a level spot.\u00a0 But the driver does not know how long the downgrade is; she cannot see where it ends and this stretch of road is new to her.<\/p>\n
It surely seems that this is a genuine option for the driver.\u00a0 It is live, because both possibilities appeal to her as distinct possibilities.\u00a0 It is forced, because there is no third option beside jumping now or staying with the truck (jumping later is a logical possibility, but is clearly too unsafe to be seriously considered).\u00a0 It is momentous, because her life is at stake.\u00a0 And the evidence is ambiguous because, let\u2019s say, neither possibility seems to her any safer or more dangerous than the other.\u00a0 Of course James had more reflective, intellectual situations in mind than this when he wrote \u2018The Will to Believe\u2019; in our thought experiment the driver must make up her mind almost instantaneously on the basis of the limited evidence that is available to her.\u00a0 Still, if this case does amount to a genuine option, then James would claim that she now has the intellectual right to choose whichever option she wants to choose, to let her passional nature decide.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n
But the more careful \u2018wishful thinking\u2019 critic will now argue that the passional nature of the driver has nothing to do with the question of which is the safer choice.\u00a0 (We can imagine that one of the two options might prove to be objectively safer than the other to the driver and to other drivers and passengers on the road that day; experiments with many volunteer drivers in similar trucks trying out both options could be carried out.)\u00a0 The critic will claim that the driver has no other rational choice than to make up her mind on the basis of the (admittedly meagre) evidence that is available to her at the moment\u2014her own driving abilities, the speed of the truck at the moment of decision, the appearances of the road ahead, the terrain at the side of the road (where she could possibly jump), etc.<\/p>\n
In other words, the critic will argue that Russell\u2019s Principle still holds in cases such as this for the simple reason that the driver\u2019s passional nature might opt for the wrong alternative, the more dangerous one.\u00a0 But this leaves James the option of replying, \u2018What evidence is there, in this or any other case of a genuine option, that deciding on the basis of one\u2019s passional nature is more likely to lead to the wrong decision than deciding on the basis of the evidence, which we are granting is ambiguous?\u2019\u00a0 He could go on and say: \u2018If this is a case that can<\/em> (and thus should<\/em>) be decided on the basis of evidence, then it is not a genuine option, and thus not a legitimate counter-example to the \u201cright to believe\u201d argument.\u2019\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But, of course, James wasn\u2019t really talking about runaway carriages or coaches, let alone about trucks suffering from brake failure.\u00a0 Back to William James himself:<\/p>\n
So proceeding, we see, first, that religion offers itself as a momentous<\/em> option.\u00a0 We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital good.\u00a0 Secondly, religion is a forced<\/em> option, so far as that good goes.\u00a0 We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue<\/em>, we lose the good, if it be true<\/em>, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n
\u201cScepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk.\u00a0 Better risk loss of truth than chance of error, \u2014 that is your faith-vetoer\u2019s exact position.\u00a0 He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.\u00a0 To preach scepticism to us as a duty until \u2018sufficient evidence\u2019 for religion is found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true.\u00a0 It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law.\u00a0 And by what, forsooth, is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted?\u00a0 Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?\u00a0 I, for one, can see no proof.\u201d[8]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But that\u2019s not quite all that Professor James has to say about Professor Clifford\u2019s position:<\/p>\n
When the Cliffords tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such \u2018insufficient evidence,\u2019 insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind.\u00a0 For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other way.\u00a0 They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead hypothesis from the start.[3]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
[1]<\/a>\u00a0 $Cited by James, \u201cThe Will to Believe,\u201d 8.*<\/p>\n
[2]<\/a> $ James, \u201cThe Will to Believe,\u201d 11 (italics deleted).*<\/p>\n
[3]<\/a>\u00a0 $James, \u201cThe Will to Believe,\u201d 14.*<\/p>\n
[4]<\/a>\u00a0 $James, \u201cThe Will to Believe,\u201d 21-22.*<\/p>\n
[5]<\/a>\u00a0 $Davis, God, Reason and Theistic Proofs<\/em>, 173-74.*<\/p>\n
[6]<\/a>\u00a0 $Davis, God, Reason and Theistic Proofs<\/em>, 174 (emphasis in the original).*<\/p>\n
[7]<\/a>\u00a0 $James, \u201cThe Will to Believe,\u201d 26.<\/p>\n