The Will To Believe

1. The Will To Believe William James (1842-1910)

2. Background: Evidentialism • Evidentialism: One should believe only propositions that are supported by evidence. • Moreover, the strength with which one holds a belief should be proportional to the evidence for the proposition’s truth. • Believing otherwise is wrong and even unethical.

3. James’ Thesis • Defend the lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith. • Defend a person’s right to believe without evidence.

4. Hypothesis • A hypothesis is a claim that is proposed as a possible belief and has some explanatory value. • Living hypothesis: A proposition is alive for a person if the proposition has some degree of plausibility for that person.

5. Living Hypothesis • Living hypothesis: A proposition is alive for a person if the proposition has some degree of plausibility for that person, mostly due to the person’s background beliefs.

6. Dead Hypothesis • Dead hypothesis: A proposition is dead for a person if the proposition has no degree of plausibility for that person, mostly due to the person’s background beliefs. • Living or dead is not an intrinsic property of propositions. It is a relational property and depends on a person’s contingent background information.

7. An Option • An option is a decision between two hypothesis.

8. Options • 1) Living or dead. • 2) Forced or avoidable. • 3) Momentous or trivial.

9. Genuine Option • Living • Forced • Momentous

10. New Thesis • “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 …”

11. In Other Words • It is permissible to believe genuine options even if one has no evidence for its truth. • It is permissible to have faith in cases involving genuine options

12. Genuine vs. Ingenuousness • Not all options are genuine options. • Most scientific inquiries do not involve genuine options because they are not momentous or forced.

13. The Religious Hypothesis • Momentous • Forced (suspending judgment or skepticism is a risk – the risk of loss of truth) • Thus, no matter what we decide, we will decide it with our passional nature. • Dupery through hope or Dupery through fear.

14. Within a Religious Paradigm • Religious belief might be more like beliefs about our relations with others. The view about that relationship is determined in part by our initial attitude towards it. • Evidence may be withheld if we do not meet the hypothesis halfway. • A sympathetic nature may be required – pure intellectualism will not be sufficient.

15. Cannot exclude the will • “I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truths if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.”

16. Conclusion • “No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic: then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism’s glory ; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things.”