For classical sceptics, a dearth of arguments, or a clash of countervailing arguments, lead to peaceful suspension of belief, whereas in our own times it is seen more as a license for people to believe what they like. Perhaps this is a consequence of our general appetite for freedom and license. And there is a general impression that 'scepticism', like 'atheism', is a bad thing. Not having convictions is often bad form, unsociable or unpatriotic. 'Faith' is a word with a positive ring to it, although of course it rings really positively only when it means 'faith like ours' rather than the conflicting faiths of others.
Insincerity still bothers us: even a politician should not be caught saying what he does not believe. But as for what a person does believe, well that, we tend to think, is much more his or her own business. It is a morally important fault, we suppose, if politicians claim that some country has weapons of mass destruction when they know that it does not, or if NASA says that a shuttle is safe when it knows it is far from it. But it is not a morally important fault if they believe the same thing although all the evidence points against it. How we weigh evidence, like religion, tends to be regarded as a private affair. Perhaps it does not matter if a thousand flowers bloom, or if we are none too good at distinguishing weeds from flowers. Perhaps our situation is like that of Rome as described by Gibbon: 'The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.' But is it really the cranky, oversensitive philosopher who spoils the party?
William Clifford was a nineteenth-century Cambridge mathematician and polymath, who partly anticipated Einstein by claiming that mass and energy are each perturbations in space-time. He also has an algebra named after him. He is remembered in philosophy mainly for one classic essay, 'The Ethics of Belief', and that in turn is famous because of the reply to it given by the American philosopher William James. Their dispute may appear to have a dated air about it, defining as it does the state of late-Victorian anxiety specifically about religious faith. But philosophically the issues it raises go deeper than that. They concern not only the right to belief, but also the nature of belief, and my aim is not so much to judge the debate about anyone's right to conviction, as to follow it into deeper waters. The philosophy of religion is here only an introductory taster, or a laboratory example, of a wider perplexity.
In his essay Clifford argues that there is a duty to believe carefully, in the light of reason alone. He begins with a story nicely designed to induce a sense of outrage:
Quote:A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.
Clifford is surely right that we censure the negligent shipowner. We would find his 'faith' in his ship discreditable, even though Clifford is careful to tell us that it is sincere. About this Clifford comments that:
Quote:The sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him; because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.
In a marvelous passage Clifford enlarges on the danger of ignoring our duty to reason:
Quote:He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it; he has committed it already in his heart. If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action.
A train, here, is a train of explosive leading from a detonator to a mine. And of course, Clifford is right. Someone sitting on a completely unreasonable belief is sitting on a time bomb. The apparently harmless, idiosyncratic belief of the Catholic Church that one thing may have the substance of another, although it displays absolutely none of its empirical qualities, prepares people for the view that some people are agents of Satan in disguise, which in turn makes it reasonable to destroy them. Clifford also emphasizes our social duty. Our beliefs help to create the world in which our descendants will live. Making ourselves gullible or credulous, we lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them, and that means 'sinking back into savagery'.
Clifford is admirably stern about the position of the untouched, unclouded innocent who just believes what he has been told:
Quote:If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious these questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it -- the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.
Thus apologists for religious identity politics sometimes describe themselves as having been born one thing or another: born a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Jew. According to Clifford this is false consciousness. People are born human beings, nothing else. They may have been taught to regard themselves as one thing or another, and they may have been taught as well the doctrines and attitudes of particular traditions. But if they choose to go on refusing to question what they have been told, and if, as is so commonly the case, what they have been told is incredible or pernicious, then their continued adherence is, in Clifford's eyes, a sin against mankind.
That's all very well, but what then is the mark of reason? How are we to tell whether particular convictions escape Clifford's rather strenuous call to doubt and query? Are we, like the Greek sceptics, to regard all questions as open questions? That way (as Clifford acknowledges) lies paralysis. Even to conduct the inquiries that Clifford demands, we will have to stand somewhere. To try to unearth historical or metaphysical or other error, we will need to take many things for granted.
Clifford sees the problem, and answers it in terms of method rather than in terms of results:
Quote:In regard, then, to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn that it consists, not in propositions or statements which are to be accepted and believed on the authority of the tradition, but in questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask further questions, and in methods of answering questions. The value of all these things depends on their being tested day by day.
Quote:We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance. CliffordÂ…exhorts us to take the latter course. Believe nothing he tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies. You, on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very small matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true. I myself find it impossible to go with Clifford. We must remember that these feelings of our duty about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our passional life.
Quote:Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
But immediately following he protests that he is not after all offering an indiscriminate defense of any kind of irrationality, dogma or bigotry:
Quote:I am, therefore, myself a complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them - I absolutely do not care which - as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the whole history of philosophy will bear me out.
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