Dariusz Lukasiewicz, Roger Pouivet - The Right To Believe. Perspectives in Religious Epistemology-Ontos Verlag (2012)

Dariusz Łukasiewicz & Roger Pouivet (Eds.
)
The Right to Believe
Perspectives in Religious Epistemology
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Dariusz Łukasiewicz & Roger Pouivet (Eds.)
The Right to Believe


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Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Russell’s China Teapot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

PeTeR van Inwagen
Religious Belief and evidence from Testimony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

John gReCo
Steps Towards an epistemology of Revelation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

RogeR PouIveT
Faith as an epistemic good according to aristotle: Towards an aristotelian

understanding of the act of Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
MIChel BaSTIT
aquinas and the will to Believe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

CyRIlle MIChon
To Be in Truth or not to Be Mistaken? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

PIoTR guTowSkI
Do we have the epistemic Right to Believe in Jesus? an epistemological

analysis of some arguments for Credibility of Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
JaCek woJTySIak
Religious Beliefs in the Face of Rationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

uRSzula M. Żegleń
Believing the Self-Contradictory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

FaBIen SChang
logic, Right to unbelief and Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

Jan woleńSkI

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6 Contents
Scepticism and Religious Belief. The Case of Sextus empiricus . . . . . . . . . . . 149

RenaTa zIeMIńSka
are we Morally obliged to Be atheists? Marian Przełęcki on the Right

to Believe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
DaRIuSz ŁukaSIewICz
Can there Be Supernaturalism without Theism? Contra Tooley’s Thesis . . . . . 179

gaBRIele De anna
on the Interrelation between Forgiveness, Rationality and Faith . . . . . . . . . . . 213

geRhaRD heInzMann
Transfiguration of human Consciousness and eternal life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

STanISŁaw JuDyCkI
Notes on the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

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InTRoDuCTIon
The Right to Believe:

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon
insufficient evidence1”, said the english philosopher and mathematician
william Clifford. Clifford made his remark in a polemic against those
religious thinkers who have responded to the positivist program of making
evidence subject to the sole authority of science by claiming that the lack
of sufficient scientific evidence for belief in god was not a vice. Clifford’s
viewpoint was famously attacked by william James in his essay, “will to
Believe2”, defending the adoption of beliefs as hypotheses and self-fulfilling
prophecies even without prior evidence of their truth. James took the case
of the uniformity of nature presumed by science as a hypothesis that is as
hard to conform to the criterion of evidence as religious belief. In these
ultimate cases, he wrote: “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.” Their
polemic inaugurated a debate over the moral right to believe. This book
situates itself in this debate, and proposes new perspectives on it.
of course, Clifford and James were engaged in an argument that goes
all the way back to the time of origen and Clement of alexandria, and has
absorbed the energies of such figures as augustine, abelard, Thomas
aquinas, Duns Scot, leibniz, and newman. In the twentieth century, with
the introduction of new formal frameworks of argumentation and the
1
william k. Clifford, „The ethics of Belief”, lectures and essays, ed. l. Stephen &
F. Pollock, london: Macmillan and Company, 1879.
2
william James, „The will to Believe” (1896), The Will to Believe and Other Essays
in Popular Philosophy, new york: Dover Publications, 1956.

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8 Introduction
extension of scientific research to many realms once hidden from scholarly

research, many contemporary epistemologists in the analytic tradition have
entered into this debate with new tools: Richard Swinburne, anthony
kenny, alvin Plantinga, nicholas wolterstorff, Peter van Inwagen (who
contributes a piece in this volume) among many others, defending or
contesting the requirement of evidence for any justified belief and even
discussing the epistemological value of this requirement of justification
for our beliefs, whether we are touching on religious belief here or not.
This polemic on the moral right to believe is both epistemological and
ethical. The epistemological debate turns principally around the question
of epistemic justification. The ethical debate derives from the epistemo-
logical one, pursuing the question of the kind of responsibility which our
ultimate beliefs engage. when justification is not sufficient, it would
perhaps better not to believe; and if we do accept that it would be better,
we are not only wrong to believe, but also bad in believing upon insufficient
evidence. as our beliefs should commit us to act in certain ways, beliefs
that are not only bad in themselves (insofar as they are not justified) must
also be irresponsible. of course, the question of responsibility rests on the
idea that our beliefs are at our disposition, that we can decide to believe or
not – a point that william James, with his emphasis on the claims of our
passional nature, makes ambiguous.
how could we say to young children that god exists, that he loves us,
that he is our creator, and that we must obey his commands as revealed
to us in the Bible (or another sacred text), if such beliefs are definitively
without any evidence, and simply express our convictions, or perhaps
the cultural stereotypes in our community? If religious beliefs were all
epistemologically weak, and even deficient, our moral right to have them
would be proportionally weak, and we could be blamed for believing what
we ought not to believe or communicate. Religious beliefs would not only
be irresponsible, but also morally shameful. Certainly if it is a virtue, both
epistemic and moral, to believe only upon sufficient evidence, is not faith
(the open confession that there is no sufficient ground from the human
point of view) an epistemic and moral vice? If we accept Clifford’s dictum,
then we should try to ground our faith in non-religious and non-disputable
arguments – and if these cannot be found, we should give it up. This is the
task of natural theology, after all. But putting this task in this way should
throw light on why some religious thinkers, embracing skepticism, find it
irrational to ground conclusions about the existence of a supernatural
Being, creator of everything, on the basis of natural reasons and facts that
this creator must have created.

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Introduction 9
Clifford’s formula presupposes that our beliefs must have certain

adequate grounds without spelling out his criterion of adequacy. even the
thesis that all beliefs must have generally adequate grounds is ambiguous
in its privileging of some form of unquestionable foundation, posited
by enlightenment epistemology. The epistemological question implies
a practical question, for if the ethics of religious belief is truly ethics and
truly deals with the reasoning that leads to belief, it must also, as ethics,
deal with practical matters. It is not simply that we use a moral vocabulary
to characterize the integrity of the belief acquisition process, asking people
to be responsible for appropriating only those beliefs for which they have
sufficient evidence, but in the matter of religious beliefs, we are also
expressing our existential commitments. In a sense, these ultimate beliefs
are different in kind from other intellectual objects that we could examine
seriously or not, finding a viewpoint that would allow us to judge them
rationally. These beliefs constitute the selves of those who have them.
we exist as religious believers differently than we exist as non-believers. as
religious believers, we have a different explanation of our existence, and
the existence of non-believers, than non-believers have. Thus, it seems
disproportionate or even ridiculous to decide to belief or to decide not
to belief concerning the ultimate grounds of existence because we do not
have sufficient evidence. That our religious beliefs are groundless could
have nothing to do with what a Cliffordian would be tempted to charac-
terize as credulity, for the question concerns whether we have adequately
thought out who we are – not, for instance, why we believe some product
will cure a certain ill, or some investment will produce a certain return.
very often, an academic believer has to cope with colleagues who
consider that overwhelming evidence and logical arguments against religious
beliefs makes religious faith quite surprising! Conversely, the academic
believer could (and does) ask, why do certain people who hear and under-
stand the Christian message not accept it? as Saint Paul says, speaking
about unbelievers in Romans 1: 19: “what can be known about god is
plain to them because he has shown it to them”. From both sides, the
assumption prevails that the moral right not to believe is uncontroversial
– or, among believers, that the moral right to believe is uncontroversial.
This insensitivity to the very problem should remind us that there are no
knockdown arguments in religious matters, any more than in philosophy
in general, but also that other domains, including physical sciences, are
founded on suppositions that are synthetic, and can always be questioned.
while some part of mathematics and logics is analytically certain, even

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10 Introduction
there we can find space for constructing a variety of logical or mathemat-

ical systems, depending on the axioms we accept. It does not mean at all
that everything goes, but that our moral right to believe does not rest on
any absolute ground. The best things we can do, it seems, is to examine
more attentively the true notion of “right to believe”, especially about
religious matters. This is exactly what authors of the papers in this book,
from different perspectives, do. Cliffordian evidentialism and James’
pragmatism presents two extreme positions within which we find a whole
spectrum of others, which some may perhaps find more plausible. The
papers in this book covers position in between, and we hope that they will
bring the attention of philosophers to this quite important topic.
This book is a cooperative enterprise and, as editors, we would like
to express our gratitude to all authors who participated in the project and
submitted their papers. Due thanks go to Roger gathman for his proof-
reading work and his valuable improvements, as well as to Mariusz
kaniewski, M.a. for his preparation of the index of names. Finally, it gives
us pleasure to record here our gratitude to Prof. Janusz ostoja zagórski,
vice Rector of kazimierz wielki university, for his kind and much needed
financial support of the publication.
DaRIuSz ŁukaSIewICz & RogeR PouIveT

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Dariusz Łukasiewicz & Roger Pouivet (eds.)
PeTeR van Inwagen
Russell’s China Teapot
In 1952, Bertrand Russell received a commission from a periodical called

Illustrated Magazine to write an article with the title “Is There a god?” In
the event, the editors of Illustrated Magazine decided not to publish the
article that Russell submitted to them, presumably because they judged
(rightly, I’m sure) that their readers would find it offensive.
My purpose in this paper is to examine some of the reasoning contained
in “Is There a god?” I am afraid that the body of this paper will have to be
devoted to getting clear on just what that reasoning is.
I will begin by considering a sentence from the final paragraph of
the article, the sentence in which Russell states the conclusion of his main
argument:
… there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology.
what does Russell mean by these words – and, in particular, by the words,
‘there is no reason to believe’? or, if you like, what does he take these
words to imply?
My question is, of course, rhetorical. let me explain what I have in
mind by raising it. Suppose I am to be dealt a single card from a well-shuffled
standard deck of playing cards, and that I have no information about the
card I shall be dealt beyond what is contained in that statement. Then
I have no reason to believe that the card will be black: of all the reasons
I have for believing anything, none of them is a reason to believe that the
card will be black.
Suppose further that someone, let us say you, wanted to bet me that
the card would be black. I should be willing to offer you any odds less than
even odds – if I could negotiate no more favorable odds, I should be willing
to agree to pay you $99 if the card turned out to be black, provided that

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12 PeTeR van Inwagen
you agreed to pay me $100 if the card turned out to be red. (at any rate,
I should be willing to offer you odds in that range if I were a bookmaker
whose livelihood consisted in taking bets of that sort in large numbers.)
and the reason that I should be willing to offer you odds that fell somewhere
in that range is obvious: I assign a probability of 0.5 to the proposition
that the card will be black. and it is at least a defensible position that one
might have no reason to think that a proposition was true and yet be con-
strained by reason to assign it a higher probability than 0.5. Consider, for
example, the proposition that at least one of two cards dealt me (from that
well-shuffled standard deck) will be black. It is, again, a defensible position
that I have no reason to think that this proposition is true; nevertheless,
reason dictates that I assign it a probability of 0.75. (But the idea of a reason
for thinking something true is not as clear as it might be. Might someone
not maintain that a proposition’s having a higher probability than 0.5 is
a reason – a weak reason, perhaps; certainly not a decisive reason – for
thinking it true?)
Does Russell assign a probability of 0.5 – or even some higher prob-
ability – to each “dogma of traditional theology”? almost certainly not –
and we need know nothing about Russell’s theological views to reach
that conclusion. our knowledge that he was a mathematician will suffice.
Presumably some pairs of traditional theological dogmas are logically
independent of each other. and, presumably, the conjunction of two
traditional theological dogmas is itself a traditional theological dogma.
and any mathematician will know – indeed many high-school students
will know – that if the probability of each of two independent propositions
is 0.5, then the probability of their conjunction is 0.25. (More generally: it
is pretty certain that Russell would have seen that it was impossible to
assign the same probability to every dogma of traditional theology.)
well, does Russell assign a probability of 0.5 (or perhaps even some
higher probability) to any dogma of traditional theology? Does he, for
example, assign a probability of 0.5 (or higher) to the proposition that god
exists? – a proposition that is certainly a dogma of traditional theology, in
the technical sense of the word ‘dogma’, even if it wouldn’t normally be
referred to as such. (Presumably, Russell would assign few if any of the
dogmas of traditional theology a probability higher than the probability he
assigned to the proposition that god exists, since most, if not all, dogmas
of traditional theology entail or presuppose the existence of god.)
Russell has said nothing that constrains him to assign a probability as
high as 0.5 to the proposition that god exists. The only statement he has

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Russell’s China Teapot 13
made that is relevant to the question of the probability of the existence of

god is the statement that there is no reason to believe that god exists, and
it certainly doesn’t follow from the premise that there is no reason to
believe a certain proposition that its probability is as high as 0.5. (The
thesis that there is no reason to believe that god exists may constrain those
who accept it from assigning a higher probability than 0.5 to the proposition
that god exists. whether it does will depend on whether a proposition’s
having a higher probability than 0.5 counts as a reason for thinking that it
is true.) nor does it follow from the premise that none of the propositions
that a certain person accepts constitutes a reason for accepting the proposition
p that the probability of p conditional on the whole set of propositions that
that person accepts is 0.5.
after all, I have no reason to believe that in 1939 Poland invaded and
occupied germany. (That is, among all the reasons I have for believing
anything, none is a reason for believing that in 1939 Poland invaded and
occupied germany.) But it certainly doesn’t follow that I should assign
a probability of 0.5 to the proposition that in 1939 Poland invaded and
occupied germany. and, in fact, I assign it a somewhat lower probability
than that – 0 or some very good approximation to 0. and that, of course,
is because I have some rather compelling reasons for accepting its denial.
So, although the two theses ‘one has no reason to accept the propo-
sition that god exists’ and ‘one should assign a probability of 0.5 to the
proposition that god exists’ are mutually consistent, the former certainly
does not entail the latter. and, as matter of reasonably well-attested
historical fact, Russell did not assign a probability as high as 0.5 to the
proposition that god exists. If he had been a bookmaker of the kind I imagined
a moment ago, and if Theodoxa the Theist had said to him, “Russell, I want
to place a bet that god exists – that is, a bet I win if god exists and lose if
he doesn’t. what odds will you give me?”, Russell would have been
willing to give Theodoxa just about any odds that might have been neces-
sary to persuade her to place her bet with him rather than with some rival
bookmaker. (of course, this bizarre little scenario presupposes that there
would have been some way to settle the bet – but take that as given.) That is
to say, Russell regarded the existence of god as highly improbable (or, if you
like, highly improbable on the totality of the evidence available to him).
But why? not simply because he had (so he supposed) no reason to
believe that there was a god. (The playing-card example shows that this
can’t have been the totality of his reasons for assigning a low probability
to the existence of god.)

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Is it because he believed he had some reason – some very compelling

reason – to believe that there was no god? no doubt. But what was this
reason? – or what were these reasons?
one would suppose both that if the author of an article called “Is There
a god?” had had such a reason he would have presented it to his readers
and that any reason he might have had was one that could be presented
in the form of an argument for the non-existence of god. But the only
argument for the non-existence of god that Russell considers in “Is There
a god?” is the argument from evil. More exactly, he presents in passing
an argument something like the argument from evil, but it isn’t really the
argument from evil, since its conclusion is not ‘god does not exist’ but
‘god, if he exists, is wicked to a degree that is scarcely conceivable’.1 (That
is, Russell does not treat ‘no being that is wicked to a degree that is
scarcely conceivable is god’ as a conceptual datum.) So, in the last analysis,
Russell presents no argument for the non-existence of god and hence, if
he has a reason that supports his conviction that the existence of god is
highly improbable, he does not present that reason to his readers.
what, then, grounds this conviction? It certainly seems to be the case
that Russell regards the statement ‘There is no reason to believe that god
exists’ as having some sort of strong anti-theological or anti-theistic impli-
cations. But, surely, the strongest thesis that would be unacceptable to
theists that can possibly be supposed to follow from this statement, this
statement alone, is what we might call “neutral agnosticism”: the thesis
that a rational person – a rational person who is aware that there is no reason
to believe that god exists (and who, of course, does not suppose that he
has some good reason to think that god does not exist) – will regard neither
1
“I will say further that, if there be a [cosmic] purpose and if this purpose is that of
an omnipotent Creator, then that Creator, so far from being loving and kind, as we
are told, must be of a degree of wickedness scarcely conceivable. a man who
commits a murder is considered to be a bad man. an omnipotent Deity, if there be
one, murders everybody. a man who willingly afflicted another with cancer would
be considered a fiend. But the Creator, if he exists, afflicts many thousands every
year with this dreadful disease. a man who, having the knowledge and power
required to make his children good, chose instead to make them bad, would be
viewed with execration. But god, if he exists, makes this choice in the case of very
many of his children. The whole conception of an omnipotent god whom it is
impious to criticize, could only have arisen under oriental despotisms where sovereigns,
in spite of capricious cruelties, continued to enjoy the adulation of their slaves. It is the
psychology appropriate to this outmoded political system which belatedly survives
in orthodox theology.”

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the existence nor the non-existence of god as more likely than the other.2
and yet it seems clear that Russell regards ‘There is no reason to believe
that god exists’ as somehow implying, if not atheism, then, as one might
call it, “strongly negative agnosticism”: the thesis that the rational person –
a rational person who is aware that there is no reason to believe that god
exists – will assign a far higher probability to the non-existence of god than
to the existence of god. (and he will do this even if he has no “positive”
reason for thinking that god does not exist – no reason other than the
absence of evidence for the existence of god.) as we have seen, however,
strongly negative agnosticism does not follow from the “no evidence” thesis.
and yet Russell, who has some reputation as a logician, apparently thinks
that it does follow. why he might think this is an interesting question.
The answer to this interesting question, if it can be found anywhere
in “Is There a god?”, is to be found in a piece of text of approximately
paragraph length, three sentences that have come to be known as “Russell’s
teapot argument”:
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to
disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is,
of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the earth and Mars
there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody
would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that
the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.
But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved,
it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it,
I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
(This argument is immediately followed by a coup de grâce that is such

a beautiful example of Russellian rhetoric that I can’t resist quoting it:
If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books,
taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of
children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become
a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the
psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.)
Despite the fact that many atheists regard the “teapot argument” as a knock-
down argument for atheism, it is not easy to discover what argument this
2
one way to be a neutral agnostic is to assign a probability of 0.5 both to the proposition
that god exists and to its denial. another is to decline to assign any probability to
either proposition.

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knockdown argument is. If the three sentences I have quoted contain an

important argument, that argument deserves a clearer presentation. when
one examines a piece of text that represents itself as an argument and one
is not entirely sure what that argument is, the best strategy for getting clear
on this point is usually to begin by asking what the intended conclusion of
the argument is. That, at any rate, is the strategy I will employ. In my view,
the conclusion of the argument is contained, appropriately enough, in its
final sentence:
But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it
is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should
rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
I think that the thesis expressed by this sentence, stripped of all rhetoric,
is something like this:
It is epistemically permissible to doubt whether there is a china teapot
revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit between the earth and Mars,
despite the fact that the non-existence of such a teapot cannot be demon-
strated by astronomical observation (or any other means).
But what is it to “doubt” an assertion? or, to adapt this general question to

the present case, what is it to “doubt whether” there is a china teapot
revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit between the earth and Mars?
here are two possible answers to that question:
To doubt whether there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in
an elliptical orbit between the earth and Mars is (to have considered
the question whether there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an
elliptical orbit between the earth and Mars and) not to believe that – to
lack the belief that – there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an
elliptical orbit between the earth and Mars.
To doubt whether there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical
orbit between the earth and Mars is to believe that there is no china teapot
revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit between the earth and Mars.
The first of these answers seems to be too weak, and the second too strong.
Perhaps few will dispute my contention that the second answer is too
strong. My contention that the first is too weak, however, may need
a defense. I offer this. Suppose a single card is to be drawn at random from
a standard deck, and someone says, “It won’t be the queen of diamonds.”
I would not say in reply, “yes, you’re right. It won’t be the queen of

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diamonds,” although I might well say, “you’re probably right” or even

“you’re almost certainly right.” That is to say, while I believe that the
drawn card will probably not be the queen of diamonds, I do not believe
that (I lack the belief that) it will not be the queen of diamonds. The reason
for this is a simple one: if the drawn card is the queen of diamonds, that
outcome will contradict nothing I believed before the draw. I certainly
wouldn’t say, “golly, I didn’t think that would happen.”3 If that isn’t evident
without argument, the well-known lottery Paradox provides materials
for an argument for the same conclusion – an argument whose weakest
premise is that anyone who accepts each of two propositions accepts their
conjunction.
all right: I don’t believe that (don’t have the belief that) the card
drawn will not be the queen of diamonds. But it would be bizarre to say in
reply to my colleague’s statement that the card will not be the queen of
diamonds, “oh, I doubt whether that’s so.” one would not say both that it
was highly probable that a certain hypothesis was true and that one doubted
that hypothesis. and it seems nearly as evident that if my colleague had
said, “The card drawn will be black,” it would be a strange thing if I said,
“oh, I doubt whether it will.” The lesson seems to be this: whatever,
exactly, it may be for someone to doubt a proposition, it must involve that
person’s assigning it a probability lower than 0.5. and, in fact, it seems
plausible to say that doubting a proposition implies assigning it a low
probability – a probability significantly lower than 0.5. (how low is low?
how low does a probability have to be for us to call it significantly lower
than 0.5? Perhaps the following statement is a reasonable answer to these
questions: ‘doubt’ and ‘low probability’ and ‘probability significantly
lower than 0.5’ are all vague terms – but their vaugenesses “match up
perfectly,” with the consequence that we may say without qualification
that to doubt a proposition is to assign it a low probability or is to assign
it a probability significantly lower than 0.5.) let us say, therefore, that we
can read the conclusion of the “teapot” argument this way:
It is epistemically permissible to assign a low probability to the proposition
that there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit
between the earth and Mars, despite the fact that the non-existence of such
a teapot cannot be demonstrated.
3
Remember that it’s an unfortunate feature of english idiom that ‘I didn’t think that
would happen’ means ‘I thought that wouldn’t happen’.

Angemeldet
and this conclusion is obviously true: it would certainly have been per-
missible for someone (that is, someone in the epistemic position of Russell
and his intended readers in 1952 – or, indeed, someone in your or my present
epistemic position) to assign a low probability to the “teapot hypothesis.”
That is the conclusion. But what is the argument? as we have seen, it
cannot be an instance of this inference-schema:
There is no reason to accept p
hence, It is epistemically permissible to assign a low probability to p.
For that inference-schema is invalid. (If we substituted ‘The proposition

that there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit
between the earth and Mars’ for ‘p’ in the above schema, we should obtain
an invalid4 argument with a true premise and a true conclusion.) But then
what is the argument?
well, suppose someone said this to me. “having identified the propo-
sition that it is epistemically permissible to assign a low probability to the
teapot hypothesis as the conclusion of the ‘teapot argument,’ van Inwagen,
you went on to say that this proposition was ‘obviously true.’ you must have
had some reason for saying that, and a reason for affirming a proposition
can be presented in the form of an argument for that proposition. Might
your reason for affirming the proposition that it is epistemically permissible
to assign a low probability to the teapot hypothesis – if that were presented
as an argument for that proposition – be the very argument that Russell
would use to defend it?”
let us see whether this is indeed so – whether my reason for believing
that it’s epistemically permissible to assign a low probability to the teapot
hypothesis might be Russell’s reason for believing this. If we are to see
this, we must know what my reasons are for believing this, and I suppose
that end would be best achieved by my telling you what those reasons are.
4
I am aware that if an argument is an instance of an invalid schema, it does not follow
that that argument is itself invalid. (For example, the valid argument, ‘Russell was
a fellow of Trinity; hence Russell was either a fellow of Trinity or a fellow of
Peterhouse’ is an instance of the invalid schema ‘p, hence q’.) But the argument is
nevertheless invalid. Suppose for example, that we were in possession of some
extraordinary piece of evidence that raised the probability of the teapot hypothesis to
some probability that is not “low” – 0.4, let us say. Then the premise of the argument
‘There is no reason to accept the teapot hypothesis; hence, It is epistemically
permissible to assign a low probability to the teapot hypothesis’ would be true and
its conclusion false.

Angemeldet
Before I do this, however, I must first say that, in my view, it is not

only epistemically permissible for us today (and a fortiori for anyone in
1952) to assign a low probability to the teapot hypothesis, it would be epis-
temically obligatory for anyone in the twentieth or the early twenty-first
century to assign a low probability to that hypothesis. and, in fact, not
simply a low probability but a vanishingly small probability – a probability
that, while not theoretically 0, might well be described as “essentially 0”
or “0 for all practical purposes.” I have in mind probabilities of the sort
that most of us would assign to the proposition that I shall die by being
trampled by a water buffalo while crossing Times Square in new york
City, or to the proposition that warsaw will be destroyed by the impact of
a large meteor at 11:57 a.m. on May 16th, 2049.
very well then: I’ll proceed for laying out the reasons I have for my
belief – no doubt it’s also your belief – that the probability of there being
a china teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars is vanishingly small.
note first that if there is a teapot in orbit between Mars and the earth, it
would have got there somehow. and not by any natural process, since china
is an artificial material, a stuff that does occur in nature. here is one “origin
story” (as they say in the comic books) for the orbiting teapot.
extraterrestrial visitors to our planet, in pursuit of some unknown agenda,
at some point in time before 1952, acting in disguise or through human
agents, purchased, or otherwise acquired, a china teapot of human manu-
facture. They transported it into space, to some point that lay in the
plane of the ecliptic and was about one hundred and seventy-five million
kilometers from the center of the sun. They imparted to it – carefully, owing
to its fragility – a velocity with a magnitude of 27.6 km/sec in a direction
lying in the plane of the ecliptic and at right angles to a line connecting
that point and the center of the sun. and then they departed, leaving the
teapot to its own devices.
I take it that this is a story to which we would all assign a probability of

“essentially 0.” There are of course many such stories, many possible “origin
stories.” The teapot might have been placed in orbit not by extraterrestrials
but by a secret cabal of nazi rocket scientists, unknown to history, who
had achieved a level of rocket technology that the uS and the Soviet union
would not reach for several decades. or we might suppose that the orbiting
teapot was the work of a supernatural agency – god or a god or Satan or
St Michael. we might even suppose that the teapot emerged (with exactly
the right velocity vector) from a smallish black hole as it was giving up
its intrinsic energy in a last, sudden, violent burst of hawking radiation.

Angemeldet
(This last story, however, is vastly more improbable than the “extraterrestrial
visitors” story and the “nazi cabal” story.)
It seems evident to me that the aggregate probability of all these origin
stories (the probability of their disjunction) is very low indeed. It seems to
me that this aggregate probability is, like the individual probabilities of
the members of the aggregate, essentially 0. I say “it seems to me,” but it’s
very hard to turn the intuition behind this judgment into an explicit argument.
The best I can do by way of providing an argument for that conclusion is
to apply simple arithmetic to some made-up numbers. (I can say this much
in defense of my employment of made-up numbers: the cogency of my
argument is not very sensitive to the values of the quantities – the quantities
measured by those made-up numbers – that figure in it.)
Suppose, then that there are 1000 independent origin stories – 1000
stories that are consistent with all we know, each of them being a story of
the coming to be of an orbiting teapot, and any two of which are logical
contraries. That number – 1000 – is the first of the made-up numbers
I promised you. But, for all it is made up, it seems to me to be not only
plausible and reasonable, but generous: I’m inclined to think that the actual
number must be a lot lower than 1000. (But how reliable are my intuitions,
the intuitions of a human being, on this point? The stories I’m counting
must include all possible stories, a class that no doubt includes stories that
are inaccessible to the human intellect. after all, the “black hole” story
was inaccessible to the human intellect till quite recently. I can only say
that, although it is no doubt true that there are origin stories I am unable to
comprehend, I cannot believe that the number of possible stories is very
many orders of magnitude higher than 1000 – and, as I’ve said, the cogency
of my argument is not very sensitive to my choice of made-up numbers.
If there were a billion possible origin stories, that would not affect any
essential feature of the argument. I would also say that, even if there are
vast numbers of origin stories that I cannot comprehend, it still seems to
me to be evident that the probability of any given story that entails the
teapot hypothesis, let that story be as far beyond human comprehension as
you may care to suppose, must be essentially 0. I mean – why a china
teapot?; why not an earthenware teapot or a china giraffe or an earthenware
giraffe?)
all right: there are 1000 origin stories, and the probability of each of
them, taken individually, is essentially 0. let’s assign a made-up number
to be the upper limit of the class of probabilities that are essentially 0.
let’s say – just to have a number – that a probability is essentially 0 if it is

Angemeldet
10 exp -20 or lower (that’s 1 divided by 100 billion billion). again, I think
that the choice of this number, although arbitrary, is plausible, reasonable,
and in fact constitutes a generous estimate of the upper limit of “essential
zero-hood.” I would guess, if I had to guess – if my welfare somehow hung
on the correctness of this guess – that the probability of my dying by being
trampled by a water buffalo while crossing Times Square is significantly
lower than 10 exp -20.5
now, given these made-up numbers, what is the aggregate probability
of all the origin stories, the probability of their disjunction? our made-up
numbers do not provide an answer to this question, but they do assign an
upper limit to the aggregate probability. any one of the origin stories, since
its probability is essentially 0, must have a probability equal to or less than
10 exp -20. So let us suppose that each of them has the highest probability
that is consistent with this constraint – that probability of course being
10 exp -20. Then the aggregate probability of the origin stories is 1000 times
10 exp -20 or 10 exp -17 or 1 divided by 100 million billion or a decimal
point followed by sixteen zeros followed by a lonely ‘1’. This is not, by
the strict terms of our arbitrary definition, a probability that is essentially
0, but don’t attach any philosophical significance to that fact, which is no
more than a logical consequence of our having assigned to each individual
origin story the highest probability that a proposition whose probability
was essentially 0 could have. however we describe it, it’s a very low prob-
ability, fairly close (as those things go) to the probability of a tossed coin’s
landing “heads” fifty-six times in a row. (I hope I did the powers-of-10 to
powers-of-2 conversion right. If not, my mistake doesn’t affect my point.
If my number is wrong, the right number would have the same philosophical
implications.)
and, of course, the probability of the “teapot hypothesis” is equal to
the aggregate probability of all the possible “teapot origin” stories. or at
any rate it is if we count “The teapot came into existence, uncaused and ex
nihilo, at just the right place with just the right velocity” as an origin story.
If stories of that kind count as origin stories – and why shouldn’t they? –,
then the proposition that every physical object has an origin story is, as we
used to say, an analytic proposition, and the teapot hypothesis and the
proposition that one of the “teapot origin stories” is true entail each other
5
note on infinite universe, closest 10 exp 20 planets that perfectly duplicate the earth
up to this point in respect of your consciousness. “Closest” represents arbitrary choice
of 10 exp 20 planets that have this feature out of the infinite totality.

Angemeldet
– or they do if we don’t take the teapot hypothesis to specify the length of

time for which the teapot exists (and let’s not)6.
The bottom line is: I have as good reason to “doubt whether” there is
a china teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars as I have to “doubt
whether” a coin that I know has just been tossed fifty-six times has fallen
“heads” every time. That is to say, this is the case given our made up numbers.
But any even marginally plausible way of making up the numbers will
yield a result with the same philosophical import: “… has just been tossed
forty-two times has fallen ‘heads’ every time,” “… has just been tossed
seventy-eight times has fallen ‘heads’ every time,” and so on. I have, moreover,
as good reason to doubt whether there is a china teapot in orbit between
the earth and Mars as I have to doubt whether I shall be killed by a water
buffalo while crossing Times Square or as I have to doubt whether warsaw
will be destroyed by the impact of a large meteor at 11:57 a.m. on May 16th,
2049. and, for each of these propositions, the good reason I have to
doubt whether it is true has the same ground: I have very good reasons for
assigning it a very low probability indeed – an understatement of under-
statements, since that probability is “essentially 0.”
let us now return to the topic of Russell’s reasoning in “Is There
a god?” as I have said, Russell seems to suggest or imply – I concede that
he does not actually say this – that the argument
There is no reason to believe that there is a china teapot in orbit between
the earth and Mars
hence, It is epistemically permissible to doubt whether there is a china

teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars
is valid. The falsity of this thesis is masked by three features. First, since
he does not explicitly affirm it, the reader is not invited to consider the
question of its validity. Secondly, its premise and its conclusion are both
true. Thirdly – but the third (and most important) feature requires a lengthy
statement.
6
not that it would make any difference if we did. The proposition “one of the
teapot-origin stories is true” and the proposition “a china teapot in orbit between
the orbits of the earth and Mars existed for some period of time” entail each another.
and, e.g., the proposition “There is now a china teapot in orbit between the orbits of
the earth and Mars and it has been in that orbit for ten years” must have a probability
equal to or lower than that of “a china teapot in orbit between the orbits of the earth
and Mars existed for some temporal interval.

Angemeldet
we can easily imagine someone’s saying that we should reject the

teapot hypothesis because there is no evidence for it – although it is hard
to imagine anyone’s saying anything about the teapot hypothesis outside
what David lewis has called the philosophy room. and, more generally,
it is easy to imagine someone’s saying of any of many other hypotheses
that we should reject it because there is no evidence for it. here is an example
of such a statement that one might, with some pretense of realism, imagine
being made in the ordinary business of life.
Jack has suddenly and mysteriously disappeared, and the police are looking
into the matter. a neighbor says, “I know he wanted to leave his wife and
run away to the South Seas to paint. he always said that the only thing
stopping him was lack of funds. and I happen to know that he was addicted
to playing on-line poker. Maybe he won a large sum on line, collected his
winnings, and ran off to follow his dream.” a police officer replies, “That’s
very doubtful. There’s no evidence for it.” But, surely, the police officer’s
very sensible statement means something along these lines: the prior
probability of that story is very low (an on-line gambler’s winning a sum
sufficient to underwrite a gauguin-style life in the South Seas is a very rare
occurrence indeed); to take the possible truth of the story seriously, we’d
need to be in possession of evidence that raised its probability significantly;
and since we have no evidence for it at all, a fortiori we have no evidence
that raises its probability significantly. In short, the prior probability of the
story is low, and in the absence of supporting evidence, it retains that low
prior probability.
and, of course, much the same thing is true of the teapot hypothesis – and
with a vengeance. Its prior probability is essentially 0, and, in the absence
of supporting evidence (an actual sighting by astonished astronauts of
a teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars, for example), that probability
is unchanged.
we may state the third of the features of Russell’s reasoning that mask
its invalidity as follows. The following inference is valid:
The prior probability of there being a teapot in orbit between the earth and
Mars is very low (in fact, essentially 0).
There is no reason to believe that there is a china teapot in orbit between

the earth and Mars
hence, It is epistemically permissible to doubt whether there is a china

teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars.

Angemeldet
(valid but odd – since the premises obviously support the much stronger
conclusion that it is epistemically obligatory to doubt whether there is
a china teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars. and even this stronger
conclusion sounds as if it’s supposed to be a joke; a person who said,
“I doubt whether the result of the next 56 consecutive tosses of that coin
will all be ‘heads’” would presumably be making some sort of joke.) and
someone who – engaged in the practical affairs of everyday life but for
some reason employing the jargon of professional philosophers – presents
an argument of the form
There is no reason to believe that p
hence, It is epistemically permissible to doubt whether p
would naturally be taken to have presented an enthymeme, the suppressed

premise of the enthymeme being something like ‘The prior probability of
the hypothesis that p is low’ (or, more realistically, something like ‘If there
is no reason to believe that p, the hypothesis that p has to be regarded as
unlikely to be true’). owing to this fact, it’s easy to assume that someone
who presents an argument of the above form must be presenting a valid
argument in enthymematic form (the suppressed premise of the enthymeme
being the corresponding statement of the form ‘The prior probability of
the hypothesis that p is low’). This fact, together with the fact that ‘The
prior probability of there being a teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars
is low’ is obviously true, is an important part of the explanation of why
many of his readers have been slow to see that Russell’s teapot argument
depends essentially on an invalid inference.
unless, of course, Russell meant the teapot argument to be an
enthymeme of the sort I have been describing – unless the teapot argument
was supposed to have ‘The prior probability of the teapot hypothesis is
low’ as a tacit premise, a premise Russell perhaps regarded as so obvious
that he thought it would have been pedantic to state it explicitly. (and
I certainly concede that it’s obviously true.) But, if that is the case, what
are the implications of the argument, so construed, for the epistemology
of religious belief – and, in particular, for the epistemology of theistic
belief? The only such implication I can see is this: that the argument
The prior probability of the proposition that god exists is low
There is no reason to believe that god exists
hence, It is epistemically permissible to doubt whether god exists

Angemeldet
is valid. But, one may ask, why should one accept the first premise of this
argument? I certainly see no reason to accept it. I certainly see no reason
to accept it that in any way resembles the reason – presented in the form
of an extended argument – I have given for assigning a low prior probability
to the proposition that there is china teapot in orbit between the earth
and Mars. I have no idea what a “parallel” argument would look like –
a parallel argument, that is, for the conclusion that one should assign a low
prior probability to the existence of god. I have given an argument for the
conclusion that, prior to the consideration of such evidence as there may
be for or against the teapot hypothesis, we ought to assign it an extremely
low probability, a probability that nevertheless could in principle be raised
by the acquisition of evidence for the existence of an interplanetary teapot.
I see no way to construct an argument, an argument that employs reasoning
that even superficially resembles my reasoning anent the teapot hypothesis,
for the conclusion that, prior to the consideration of such evidence as
there may be for or against the existence of god, we ought to assign an
extremely low probability to the proposition that god exists. In any case,
it is undeniable that Russell presents no reason to assign a low prior
probability to the existence of god.
I conclude that the strongest “theologically negative” conclusion that
one can possibly deduce from ‘There is no reason to believe that god exists
(and no reason to believe that god does not exist; I’ll allow the content of
this obviously necessary parenthetical addition to be “understood” in those
places in which it is needed in the sequel)’ is neutral agnosticism – the
thesis that the proposition that god exists and its denial should be accorded
precisely the same epistemic status. (In probabilistic terms: one should
either assign to each a probability of 0.5 or else should decline to assign
any probability to either.) and I should be remiss if I did not point out that
a serious problem faces anyone who wishes to draw even that weaker
conclusion – weaker, that is, than the conclusion of the teapot argument,
viz. that it is epistemically permissible to doubt whether god exists: neutral
agnosticism implies that it is not epistemically permissible to doubt
whether god exists. It is a defensible position that if I am present when
a fair coin is about to be tossed three times, I shall have no reason to think
that it will not fall “heads” all three times. (whether one regards that
defensible position as in fact correct depends on whether one regards
a proposition’s having a probability higher than 0.5 as a reason for thinking
it true.) nevertheless, my attitude toward that proposition will not be one
of neutral agnosticism. I shall indeed be an agnostic as regards the question

Angemeldet
whether it is false that the coin will fall heads three times – I shall accept
neither that proposition nor its denial –, but not a neutral agnostic, since
I shall assign a probability of 0.875 to that proposition and a probability
of 0.125 to its denial.
But even if neutral agnosticism (as regards the existence of god) can
be validly deduced from the premise that there is no reason to believe that
god exists (owing perhaps to some epistemically relevant feature of the
proposition that god exists that it does not share with propositions about
the outcome of an impending sequence of coin-tosses), that premise may
nevertheless be false. whether there is evidence of the existence (or, for
that matter, for the non-existence) of god is a question that lies outside the
scope of this paper.

Angemeldet
John gReCo
Religious Belief and Evidence

from Testimony
In the latter part of the 20th century religious epistemology underwent

somewhat of a revolution, centered on an investigation into the epistemology
of religious experience. This work perhaps cumulated in 1991 with william
alston’s Perceiving God.1 what made this a revolution was not the topic
of religious experience – philosophers of religion had treated that topic
extensively before. Rather, it was the methodology that alston and others
employed. In sum, these philosophers took advantage of recent developments
in the epistemology of perception and perceptual experience in general,
and applied them to the epistemology of religious experience in particular.
The idea was this: recent work in the epistemology of perception made
traditional skepticism about religious experience out of date, precisely
because that skepticism traded on an inadequate and out-dated understanding
of the nature of perceptual evidence in general. The current paper takes
that idea as its model. In short, I believe that recent developments in the
epistemology of testimony make it time for a second wave of advances in
religious epistemology. This paper constitutes an attempt along those lines.
The paper proceeds as follows. Part one reviews three skeptical
arguments regarding religious belief and testimonial evidence. The first
two are versions of “the problem of religious diversity”: how can religious
belief be reasonable in the context of conflicting testimony regarding reli-
gious truths? The third is hume’s famous argument regarding testimonial
evidence for miracles. The common theme here is that testimonial evidence
seems inadequate to support reasonable belief in matters religious, especially
in the context of conflicting evidence. Part Two steps back from our three
1
alston, w. P. (1991). Perceiving God. Ithaca: Cornell university Press.

Angemeldet
28 John gReCo
skeptical arguments in order to consider some recent work in the episte-

mology of testimony. Several issues regarding the nature of testimonial
evidence in general are considered, and an account of testimonial evidence
is defended. Part Three returns to issues regarding testimonial evidence
and religious belief, and uses the results of Part Two to reconsider the
skeptical arguments in Part one.
Part One. Some Problems in Religious Epistemology:

Three Skeptical Arguments
“The Problem of Religious Diversity” has been much discussed in religious
epistemology.2 Stated very generally, the problem is this: The plurality of
religious traditions, and the attending fact of conflicting religious beliefs
among traditions, seems to undermine the epistemic standing of religious
belief in general, including one’s own. here are two ways that the general
problem can arise.
First, I might reflect that it is merely a historical accident that I was
born into one religious tradition rather than another, and therefore merely
an accident that I received the testimony about religious matters that I did.3
Moreover, the religious beliefs I have now are largely influenced by my
receiving the testimony that I did. If I had been born into a different
tradition, and received different testimony, then I would not have the same
religious beliefs that I do now. In fact, it is plausible that I would have
religious beliefs that conflict with those I have now. But then it seems too
much an accident that I have the religious beliefs that I do. even if I am
lucky, even if I am born into the one true faith and I am handed down
nothing but religious truths, it seems still just an accident that I am in that
tradition and believe those truths. let’s call this “The Problem of accidental
Belief.” The problem can be stated more formally as follows:
The Argument from Luck

1. when one forms a true religious belief on the basis of testimony
from within a tradition, it is just an accident (just a matter of luck)
2
See for example, alston, Perceiving God, especially chapter seven; and Meeker, k.,
& Quinn, P. (eds.) (2000). The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity. new
york: oxford university Press.
3
For ease of exposition, I here treat atheism as a “religious tradition” and the belief
that god does not exist as a “religious belief.”

Angemeldet
Religious Belief and evidence from Testimony 29
if one forms a true belief on the basis of this testimony rather than
a false belief on the basis of different testimony. In particular, if one
had been born into a different testimonial tradition, then one would
have formed different religious beliefs on the basis of different
testimony, but it is just a matter of luck that one was born into his
or her religious tradition rather than another.
2. knowledge cannot tolerate that sort of luck or accident.
Therefore,
3.True religious belief based on testimony from within a tradition
cannot count as knowledge.
here is a second way that the problem can arise. I might reflect on the fact
that I am nothing special when it comes to matters religious. I am not more
intellectually gifted or more intellectually rigorous than the next guy. In the
language of contemporary epistemology, many of the people who hold
religious beliefs that conflict with mine are my “epistemic peers.” For
example, many of those people base their religious beliefs on roughly the
same sort of evidence on which I base mine – i.e. on testimonial evidence
from within their own traditions. Moreover, many of those people have the
same evidence regarding religious diversity that I do – they are just as aware
as I am about the diversity of religious traditions, and the diversity of
testimony therein. But then who am I to stick to my guns in the face of
disagreement? For that matter, who are they to stick to their guns? Shouldn’t
we all be more skeptical in the face of our common epistemic position?
Consider a non-religious case: I confidently believe, and think I know,
that our dinner bill comes to less than one hundred dollars. (let’s say
I have just looked at the bill and added the total.) But then I find out that
you, who are as well placed epistemically as I am, disagree. you confidently
tell me that the bill has come to well over one hundred dollars. Can I
reasonably stick to my guns here? Can you? Shouldn’t we now both lose
our confidence, at least until the conflict can be explained and resolved?
let’s call this “The Problem of Peer Disagreement.”4 here is that problem
stated more formally:
4
The epistemology of disagreement has been much discussed in the recent literature.
For example see, kelly, T. (2006). “The epistemic Significance of Disagreement.”
In hawthorne, J. & and gendler Szabo, T. (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology,

Angemeldet
30 John gReCo
The Argument from Peer Disagreement

1. If my epistemic peers disagree with me on some issue, then it is
unreasonable for me to continue believing as I do. I ought to
lose my confidence, or even suspend my belief, at least until the
disagreement can be explained and resolved.
2. But many people who are my epistemic peers disagree with me on

matters religious. In particular, my peers in different testimonial
traditions do.
Therefore,
3. It is unreasonable for me to continue believing as I do in matters
religious.
Finally, consider hume’s famous argument regarding testimony about

miracles.5 according to hume, it is never reasonable to believe, on the
basis of testimonial evidence, that a miracle has occurred. There has been
much debate about how hume’s argument is supposed to go, but here
(I believe) is a plausible reconstruction.
First, suppose we are presented with testimony that some apparent
miracle has occurred – let’s say that someone has risen from the dead.
according to hume, reasonableness requires that we weigh this testimonial
evidence against whatever other evidence we have that the event in ques-
tion did not occur. That is the first premise of the argument. But since the
event in question is an apparent miracle, that guarantees that our evidence
against its occurring will be very good indeed. here is the argument for
that: If the event in question appears to be a miracle, then it must conflict
with an apparent law of nature. But nothing could appear to be a law of
nature unless we have very good evidence for it – unless we have excellent
evidence for it, in fact. That is the second premise: that our evidence
against the apparent miracle occurring will always be excellent.
Finally, hume’s third premise is that our evidence in favor of the
event’s occurring will always be less than excellent. That is because we
1. oxford: oxford university Press; Christensen, D. (2007). “epistemology of

Disagreement: the good news.” Philosophical Review, 116, pp. 187-217; elga, a
(2007). “Reflection and Disagreement,” Noûs, 41, pp. 478-502; and Frances, B.
(2010). “Disagreement.” In Pritchard, D. & Bernecker, S. (eds). Routledge Companion
to Epistemology. new york: Routledge.
5
From Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section 10, Of Miracles.

Angemeldet
already know that people often testify falsely about purported miracles
occurring. Sometimes people lie. Sometimes they are self-deceived. Some-
times they just make a mistake. In sum, the track record is not very good.
and in light of that track record, the testimonial evidence for the present
case is not very good either. In any case, it won’t be excellent. But now all
hume’s premises are in place: our testimonial evidence that an apparent
miracle has occurred will never be as good as our evidence that it has
not occurred. and so we can never be reasonable in believing, on the basis
of testimonial evidence, that a miracle really has occurred. here is the
argument again:
Hume’s Argument (reconstructed)

1. In any case where we are presented with testimony that an apparent
miracle M has occurred, we must weigh that testimonial evidence
in favor of M’s occurrence against our evidence that M has not
occurred.
2. But if M is an apparent miracle, then M must conflict with an

apparent law of nature l, for which our evidence must be excellent.
(our evidence for l (and hence against M’s occurrence) must
amount to excellent inductive evidence, or else l would not be an
apparent law of nature.)
3. on the other hand, our testimonial evidence in favor of M’s

occurrence will always be less than excellent. (This because
testimony in favor of miracles carries a less than excellent track
record: we know of many cases where testimony that some miracle
has occurred was false.)
Therefore,
4. In all cases where we are presented with testimony that some
apparent miracle has occurred, our testimonial evidence in favor of
M’s occurrence will always be weaker than our inductive evidence
against M’s occurrence. (from 1-3)
Therefore,
5. It is always unreasonable to believe, merely on the basis of testimonial
evidence, that a miracle has occurred. (from 4)

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32 John gReCo
A common problem?
we have reviewed three arguments that threaten skepticism about religious
beliefs based on testimony. The first is put in terms of knowledge, the
second and third in terms of reasonable belief. Do our skeptical arguments
have anything in common? Do they sound some common theme? Perhaps
it is this: that testimonial evidence cannot give religious belief adequate
support or grounding, especially in the context of conflicting evidence.
Put differently, testimonial evidence is not “up to the task” epistemically
speaking – it is inadequate to give us either knowledge or reasonable belief,
at least in matters religious, at least in the sort of circumstances in which
we actually find ourselves.6
one reaction that religious believers can have to this theme is to
embrace it. That is, many believers are happy to embrace a skeptical
conclusion, in favor of some brand of fideism, or anti-intellectualism, or
even irrationalism. Two considerations should make us wary about this
reaction, however. The first is that the resulting faith entails a kind of
intellectual schizophrenia. That is because, in very many contexts, we are
happy to express our faith confidently, without qualification, and without
apology. For example, we teach our children that we are all god’s children,
that god loves us, that god wants certain things for us, and that god wants
certain things from us. and although we teach our children to be reflective
and critical about such claims, and about what such claims mean, we also
teach them not to be overly skeptical, overly cautious, or overly timid about
their faith. That is, we also teach them not to be unreflective and uncritical
about pressures not to believe.
The second reason we should be wary of a skeptical reaction is more
specific to present purposes. namely, that the three skeptical arguments
directed at religious belief seem to prove too much. That is, it is at least
plausible that they trade on considerations that, if sound, would have
skeptical consequences far beyond the realm of religious belief. Consider
that belief based on testimony is ubiquitous. So is conflicting evidence.
accordingly, if we require too much for the epistemic adequacy of testi-
monial evidence, far-reaching skeptical consequences threaten.
6
The sort of reasonableness at issue here is itself “epistemic,” or the kind of reason-
ableness that is (among other things) required for knowledge. For ease of exposition,
I will often talk below in terms of knowledge only. however, much of what is said
applies to reasonable belief as well.

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all this suggests that we should take a step back. In particular, we

should more carefully consider what is required for testimonial knowledge
and reasonable belief in general. More specifically, we should consider
what testimonial evidence would have to be like in order to avoid skeptical
consequences more generally. having done that, we will be in a better
position to adjudicate our questions about religious belief in particular.
Part Two. Some Recent Work in the Epistemology

of Testimony
Recently there has been an explosion of interest in the epistemology of
testimony.7 The contemporary literature does not discuss skepticism about
testimonial evidence directly, but it is nevertheless driven by worries about
skepticism in an important way. Much like contemporary epistemology in
general, the epistemology of testimony is largely framed by an anti-skeptical
methodology. That is, the name of the game is to understand how testimonial
knowledge and testimonial justification are possible. That is, we begin with
a methodological assumption that testimonial knowledge and reasonable
belief based on testimony are possible and are even widespread. The
theoretical task is to explain how that is possible, to explain what testimonial
evidence must be like in order for testimonial knowledge and reasonable
belief to be as wide spread as we think they are.
a major motivation for anti-skepticism about testimony is anti-skep-
ticism in general. In general, contemporary epistemologists assume that
knowledge of various kinds is widespread, and they take themselves to
be explaining how such knowledge is possible. But now the following
substantive claim becomes important in this methodological context: we
would have very little knowledge at all, if testimonial knowledge is not
widespread. That is, our knowledge in general is heavily dependent on our
testimonial knowledge in particular. Thus epistemologists who want to
save widespread knowledge, who want to be anti-skeptical in general, are
motivate to save testimonial knowledge in particular.
I have put the forgoing in terms of testimonial knowledge, but we
could say the same things about reasonable belief – that is, our reasonable
7
For excellent overviews of the relevant literature see: lackey, J. (2006) “knowing
from Testimony.” Philosophy Compass 1/5, pp. 432–448; and adler, J. (2008)
„epistemological Problems of Testimony.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/testimony-episprob/.

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34 John gReCo
beliefs (even if they fall short of knowledge) in general depend heavily on

other of our reasonable beliefs based on testimony, and so skepticism
regarding the latter threatens a broader skepticism regarding the former.
This kind of anti-skeptical motivation drives nearly every aspect of the
contemporary literature on the epistemology of testimony.
1. Three Related Issues

Perhaps the major issue discussed in the epistemology of testimony is
whether testimonial evidence can be “reduced” to some other familiar kind.
The issue here is whether testimonial evidence, and hence testimonial
knowledge, is epistemically special, or whether, rather, it can be under-
stood as arising from familiar epistemic sources such as perception and
induction. Put another way: Does testimonial evidence (or knowledge, or
reasonable belief) require special treatment in epistemology, insofar as it
is an epistemically distinctive phenomenon?
Two other issues that get a lot of attention are closely related to this
one. First, can testimonial evidence generate new knowledge, or are all
cases of testimonial knowledge cases of knowledge transmission from
testifier to hearer? Second, is testimonial evidence, and hence testimonial
knowledge, distinctively social? Clearly, testimonial knowledge is social
in a superficial sense – it requires both a testifier and a hearer – but is it
social in an epistemically interesting sense? again, does it thereby require
special treatment in epistemology?
2. Different Cases Pull in Different Directions

These three issues are hotly debated, largely because different cases pull
our intuitions in different directions. Consider the following, for example:
Case 1. a seasoned investigator questions a potentially uncooperative

witness.
The investigator asks questions and the witness answers them, but clearly
the investigator should not just believe whatever the witness says. on the
contrary, she will employ skills learned and honed over a career to discern
what is and is not believable in what the witness asserts. Moreover, it is
plausible to think of these skills in terms of bringing to bear inductive
evidence – the investigator employs various well-grounded generaliza-
tions to determine whether the witness is telling the truth in a particular
instance.

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But now consider some other cases:
Case 2. a job applicant tells you that he has no criminal record.
Case 3. you ask directions from a stranger in an unfamiliar city. he tells

you that the train station is down the street.
Case 4. you ask your friend whether he intends to come to your party, and
he tells you that he does.
Case 5. a third-grade teacher tells his students that england is west of

France.
Case 6. a mother tells her child that there is milk in the refrigerator.
In Cases 1 and 2 (the investigator, the job applicant) it seems clear that
knowledge requires something akin to good inductive reasons. By the
time we get to Cases 5 and 6 (student/teacher and parent/child), it is less
plausible that basing one’s belief on inductive reasons is required for
knowledge, and more plausible that the speaker can believe straight away
what she is told. It is also more plausible that something epistemically
special is going on – that testimonial knowledge depends on a relationship
between speaker and hearer that is present in these cases but not in the
first. Cases 3 and 4 (asking directions, trusting a friend) seem somewhere
in between.
of course, it is not obvious how to handle any of these cases. That is,
it is not clear what to say regarding any one of them. But more problem-
atically, it is not clear that anything can be said about all of them together.
That is because the different cases seem to place very different demands
on the hearers. In particular, some cases suggest a necessary condition on
testimonial knowledge – that the hearer needs something akin to good
inductive reasons for knowledge – that she must base her testimonial belief
on such reasons. But other cases suggest sufficient conditions for testimonial
knowledge that do not include that necessary condition. Students can learn
from their teachers, and children from their caretakers, it would seem, without
extensive inductive evidence. and if we say that they can’t, then a much
broader skepticism threatens, given the heavy dependence of all of us
on our teachers and caretakers. and so a single account of testimonial
evidence, one that explains how testimonial evidence gives rise to knowledge
in all of the cases, seems unavailable.

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36 John gReCo
we can put the problem in in the form of a dilemma:
1. either testimonial knowledge requires inductive evidence on the

part of the hearer or it does not.
2. If it does not, then testimonial knowledge is too easy. There will be

cases counted as knowledge that should not be.
3. If it does, then testimonial knowledge is too hard. There will be

cases not counted as knowledge that should be.
Therefore,
4. an adequate account of testimonial knowledge is impossible:
a given account must make testimonial knowledge either too easy
for some cases or too hard for others.
once again, I have put the forgoing considerations in terms of testimonial

knowledge. But also once again, we could say similar things, and generate
a similar dilemma, regarding reasonable belief based on testimony.
we can say similar things about whether testimonial knowledge

involves transmission, and whether there is a distinctive social dimension
to testimonial knowledge. That is, our cases pull in different directions on
these issues as well. Thus in Cases 1 and 2 it seems that nothing like trans-
mission is going on, or that there is anything distinctively social involved
in the hearers coming to know. on the contrary, it seems that the hearers
must use something like inductive evidence to judge whether the relevant
testimony is reliable. But by the time we get to Cases 5 and 6, the notion
of “transmission” makes more sense – there does seem to be a sense in
which the teacher transmits her knowledge to her students, and the parent
transmits his knowledge to his child, and without anything like inductive
reasoning on the hearer’s part required. likewise, there seems to be some-
thing distinctively social about the process of coming to know in these
cases – transmission of the relevant sort plausible depends on the social
relationship between speaker and hearer, and on the social roles they play
in giving and receiving the testimony in question.
again, the problem that our series of cases present is this: Some of
those cases suggest a necessary condition on testimonial knowledge –
that testimonial knowledge (or reasonable belief) requires something like
basing one’s belief on good inductive reasons. But others of those cases

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suggest that testimonial knowledge is nothing like that. They suggest,

rather, that testimonial knowledge is its own kind of animal, a distinctively
social phenomenon that involves something like knowledge transmission.
no single approach handles all the cases well.
The thought might now occur that all of our cases should not be handled
the same way – that testimonial knowledge does not make up a single
epistemic kind. Testimonial evidence, we might say, is not homogeneous.
That will not be satisfying, however, without an explanation regarding why
that should be so. we need a theory that tells us why not all testimonial
evidence (or knowledge, or reasonable belief) can be handled the same way.
3. A Proposal for Progress:

The Point and Purpose of the Concept of Knowledge
we get the sort of explanation we want if we adopt a suggestion from
edward Craig in Knowledge and the State of Nature. when doing episte-
mology, Craig suggests, we ought to raise questions about the role that the
concept of knowledge plays in our conceptual-linguistic economy: why
do we have a concept of knowledge in the first place? what purposes does
it serve? By raising questions about the point and purpose of our concept
of knowledge, Craig argues, we put ourselves in a position to ask the
following question about knowledge itself: what would knowledge itself
have to be like, for the concept to serve those purposes?
Craig argues that the central purpose of the concept of knowledge is
to flag good information and good sources of information for use in
practical reasoning. Put differently, the concept of knowledge is used to
identify actionable information and sources of actionable information.8
It comes as no surprise, Craig argues, that beings like us would have such
a concept. human beings are social, information-dependent creatures. That
is, we have a great need for actionable information, and we greatly need
each other to get it. The concept of knowledge addresses these needs.
8
More exactly, Craig suggests that the concept is used to identify good “informants”.
The present gloss on that idea is a plausible reconstruction of what Craig intends,
however, and jibes well with recent work on the close relations between knowledge,
action and reasons. See Craig, e. (1990) Knowledge and the State of Nature. oxford:
oxford university Press; hawthorne, J. (2004) Knowledge and Lotteries. oxford:
oxford university Press; Stanley, J. (2005) Knowledge and Practical Interests.
oxford: oxford university Press; and Fantle, J. & Mcgrath, M. (2009) Knowledge
in an Uncertain World. oxford: oxford university Press.

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38 John gReCo
here now is an elaboration on Craig’s proposal. If Craig’s story about

our concept of knowledge is even broadly correct, we should expect that the
sources of knowledge come in at least two broad categories. First, there will
be original sources of knowledge, or sources that originally get information
into the system by means of reliable uptake. Thus sense perception (under
the right conditions) is an original source of information about physical
objects in our environment. Second, there will be means for distributing
knowledge, means that reliably transmit true information from one person
to another. Thus there will be mechanisms that get information into the
system in the first place, and mechanisms that keep the information
flowing. on the account of knowledge that emerges, knowledge from
testimony begins to look paradigmatic. That is, it is paradigmatic of
the second category of knowledge that we expect to find – knowledge
grounded in the reliable distribution of reliably true information.
we may take the case of scientific knowledge as an instance of this
general picture. any item of scientific knowledge must have its original
source, presumably in reliable method. But eventually that knowledge
spreads through a shared system of knowledge by means of various kinds
of reliable testimony. Through record keeping, formal and informal
teaching, journal articles, public lectures, media reports, and the like, what
begins as knowledge for a few becomes knowledge for many. In the case
of scientific knowledge, then, various institutional and social practices
are in place so as to bring true information into the system, but also to
distribute it through the system.
what holds for scientific knowledge in this regard seems to hold
for knowledge in general. The account of knowledge that emerges
makes testimonial knowledge paradigmatic, and predicts that it should
be ubiquitous.
4. Application to our three issues

The foregoing remarks do not constitute anything approaching a “theory
of knowledge”. That is, they do not constitute a theory about the nature of
knowledge, nor do they suggest anything approaching necessary and
sufficient conditions. nevertheless, they are substantial enough to allow
progress regarding our three issues in the epistemology of testimony.
we take a brief look at each of these in turn, and then return to our three
skeptical arguments aimed at religious belief.

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a. Reductionism vs. Anti-reductionism

Can testimonial knowledge be reduced to some other kind of knowledge?
Is testimonial knowledge sui generis, requiring its own distinctive treatment,
or is testimonial knowledge merely an instance of, for example, inductive
knowledge, requiring no special epistemology over and above that required
for inductive knowledge in general?
on the present approach, it is plausible to think that there are two
kinds of testimonial knowledge: a) one in which testimony functions as an
original source, along sense perception, reason, and other familiar origi-
nating sources; and b) one in which testimony functions as a distributing
mechanism. In the first case, testimonial knowledge plausibly reduces to
other kinds of knowledge. In the second case, testimonial knowledge is
plausibly distinctive, and requires a distinctive treatment. This is plausible
because the conditions for admitting information into the system are plausibly
more demanding than the conditions for distributing that information once
admitted. once admitted, and given the stamp of approval as “usable” or
“actionable,” it is reasonable that information should be allowed to flow
relatively freely for use by others.
we may now reconsider the dilemma stated above. here again is its
first premise:
1. either testimonial knowledge requires inductive evidence on the

part of the hearer or it does not.
we read that premise with a universal quantifier: it says that either all
testimonial knowledge requires inductive evidence on the part of the hearer
or it does not. understood that way, we now are in a position to take the
second horn: not all testimonial knowledge requires inductive evidence.
That brings us to premise 2:
2. If it does not, then testimonial knowledge is too easy. There will be
cases counted as knowledge that should not be.
on the present proposal, we have good reason for denying this premise.
namely, testimony may at least sometimes function so as to distribute
knowledge throughout the system, and do so without requiring inductive
evidence on the part of the hearer. In this distributing role, the conditions
for testimonial knowledge need not be so demanding.
This answer allows us to embrace the truth contained in premise 2, and
which made that premise prima facie plausible: that testimonial knowledge

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40 John gReCo
sometimes requires inductive evidence on the part of the hearer. It does

when testimony functions as an original source of knowledge, functioning
so as to admit information into the system in the first place, as it plausibly
does in Cases 1 and 2.
b. Generation vs. Transmission

Does testimony generate knowledge, or does it transmit knowledge from
one knower to another? our answer here is by now straightforward. In
some cases (as in 1 and 2), testimony generates knowledge. That is, it
generates knowledge for the hearer, since he or she cannot rely on the
speaker to faithfully distribute the information in question. But testimony’s
distinctive epistemic function is to transmit knowledge from one knower
to others. This is plausibly the function of testimony in Cases 5 and 6,
where the hearer can happily accept the information being distributed by
the speaker to her audience.
This answer raises an important question, however: when is it appro-
priate for a hearer to “happily accept” information from a speaker? In other
words, when does testimonial evidence properly function in its distributing
role in the transmission of knowledge, and when does it properly function as
an original source of knowledge? This brings us to our last issue, regarding
the social dimension of testimonial knowledge.
c. Is Testimonial Knowledge Distinctively Social?

In what way is testimonial knowledge a social phenomenon? Is it merely
that at least two people are involved, or does the social character of testi-
monial knowledge go deeper than that? The following answer is plausible:
at least in its distinctive function of distributing information within a social
system, the social character of testimonial knowledge goes deeper than
that. Specifically, testimonial evidence distributes information through the
system only by means of relevant social mechanisms. Just as we exploit
regularities in nature so as to effect the reliable uptake of information, we
sometimes exploit social regularities so as to effect the reliable distribution
of information.
To see the plausibility of this, return to our six cases. In Cases 1 and 2,
there is no social mechanism in place to underwrite a reliable transfer of
reliable information. Put differently, there is no social relationship between
speaker and hearer that would underwrite such a transfer. as our cases
progress, however, it becomes increasingly plausible that there is such

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a relationship. In Case 3 a stranger is asked for directions, but even here

there might be social institutions in place that make the exchange of infor-
mation more or less reliable. In Case 4 (asking a friend) this seems even
more plausible, and in Cases 5 (parent to child) and 6 (teacher to student)
it seems obvious. That is, in these latter cases it seems obvious that there
are social institutions and relationships in place that underwrite reliable
transfers of information. In the case of teachers teaching students, this is
quite explicit and formal.
notice that, on the present proposal, hearers are sometimes relieved
of epistemic burden by virtue of their occupying a relevant social role. This
allows that, for example, children can learn (come to know) simply by
listening to their parents. likewise, students can learn (come to know)
simply by listening to their teachers. This oversimplifies somewhat, to be
sure. But two important ideas are now in place. First, at least sometimes it
is relatively easy to come to know by means of testimonial evidence. and
second, at least sometimes this is made so by means of social institutions
and relations designed for that purpose. all this is consistent with a third
idea, however. namely, that testimonial evidence sometimes does not afford
an easy transmission of knowledge, but rather requires good inductive
evidence on the part of the hearer.
Part Three. Application to Religious Epistemology

how should the epistemology of religious belief treat the evidence of
testimony? one approach would be to treat testimony as an originating
source of reasonable belief and knowledge. on that approach, the hearer
(or receiver) of testimony would be treated akin to an inductive reasoner.
The task of such a reasoner is to gather the relevant evidence, to judge the
quality of the evidence on either side, and to form one’s beliefs accordingly.
In this instance, the task would be to judge the quality of one’s testimonial
evidence, presumably by means of considering such factors as relevant track
records, competing explanations of the nature and content of the testimony,
etc. In short, the receiver of testimony would be akin to hume’s hearer of
miracles, and epistemic assessment of the receiver/hearer would proceed
along roughly humean lines. of course, one might think that hume has got
the nature and/or the content of the inductive evidence wrong, and that
adjustments to our assessments of the inductive evidence have to be made
accordingly. But the rough idea would be in place: testimonial evidence is
a species of inductive evidence, and must be assessed accordingly.

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42 John gReCo
an alternative approach, however, would be to treat testimony as having

a distributing or transmitting function. on this approach, the hearer or
receiver of testimony might arrive at reasonable belief, or even knowledge,
by means of his or her location in a social context. Such location, along
with its constituting social roles, might be informal, as when “common
knowledge” is passed from individual to individual by means of interpersonal
communication. alternatively, the social location of speaker and hearer
might be formal, as when traditional lore is passed from teacher to student
by means of formal education. Clearly there will be many cases that fall
in between. The task of religious epistemology, and of the epistemology
of testimony more generally, would be to understand the nature and
conditions of such knowledge by transmission.
In this final part of the paper I will take this second approach. In
particular, I want to consider the consequences of the approach for our
three skeptical arguments.
1. Application to the three skeptical arguments.

First, recall The argument from luck:
1. when one forms a true religious belief on the basis of testimony

from within a tradition, it is just an accident (just a matter of luck)
if one forms a true belief on the basis of this testimony rather than
a false belief on the basis of different testimony.
2. knowledge cannot tolerate that sort of luck or accident.
Therefore,
3. True religious belief based on testimony from within a tradition
cannot count as knowledge.
on the present approach, we may deny either premise 1 or premise 2.

Regarding premise 1, we may deny that when one receives testimony from
within a tradition it is “just an accident” or “just a matter of luck” that one
forms a true belief on the basis of that testimony. on the contrary, if the
transaction in question constitutes an instance of knowledge transmission,
it is underwritten by a reliable transmission of reliable information. That
is, the transaction will involve knowledge on the part of the speaker,
derived ultimately from some original source of knowledge, and then
a reliable transmission of knowledge from speaker to hearer. Moreover,

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the latter will involve social relations designed for that purpose, and so, again,
the hearer’s believing the truth on the basis of the speaker’s testimony will
be no accident.
alternatively, we may deny premise 2 of the argument. That is, we
may acknowledge that true belief on the basis of testimony involves some
sort of luck; specifically, it involves the luck of being born into a particular
tradition, and of occupying a particular social location within that tradition.
But we may deny that knowledge cannot tolerate that sort of luck or
accident. on the contrary, that sort of social endowment enables testimonial
knowledge, much as one’s natural endowments enable knowledge through
accurate perception and good reasoning.
next, consider The argument from Peer Disagreement. That argument
depended on the following premise:
2. Many people who are my epistemic peers disagree with me on

matters religious. In particular, my peers in different testimonial
traditions do.
on the present approach to testimonial evidence, premise 2 is false. That

is because the notion of “epistemic peer” that is operative in that premise
is a very strong one – it requires not only that peers are equally intelligent
and equally conscientious, but that they share the same epistemic position
regarding the claim that p more generally. For example, epistemic peers
must share the same evidence regarding p. But on the present account,
people in different testimonial traditions do not share the same epistemic
position and do not share the same testimonial evidence, and so are not
epistemic peers in the relevant sense.
one might think that simply being aware of another testimonial
tradition, and being aware of the testimony within it, puts one in the same
epistemic position as those who live within the tradition, at least with
respect to the testimony in question. But that confuses a) merely hearing
or knowing about testimony, with b) receiving testimonial evidence. The
latter, we have seen, requires situation in a reliable testimonial exchange,
and that, in turn, requires participation in social practices and institutions
that underwrite reliability. Put differently, receiving testimonial evidence
requires more than being in the right time and place geographically – it
requires being in the right time and place socially.
Finally, we return to the argument from hume. That argument depended
on the following premise:

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44 John gReCo
3. our testimonial evidence in favor of M’s occurrence will always

be less than excellent. (This because testimony in favor of miracles
carries a less than excellent track record: we know of many cases
where testimony that some miracle has occurred was false.)
we may now see that hume’s support for premise 3 depends on treating
testimony as an originating source of knowledge for the hearer. That is, it
treats the hearer as an inductive reasoner, whose task it is to weigh her
inductive evidence on each side of the issue and adjust her belief accord-
ingly. But that is misguided in cases where testimony plays a distributing
function. Put differently, the conditions for knowledge transmission are
plausibly different from the conditions for knowledge by inductive reasoning.
That being so, hume cannot assume that one’s testimonial evidence for
a miracle will always be “less than excellent.” For even if that evidence
constitutes less than excellent inductive evidence, it might nevertheless
constitute excellent testimonial evidence. That would depend on the quality
of the testimonial transaction, constituted by the quality of the original
source (perhaps the miracle was eye-witnessed) and the quality of the
social relations underwriting the testimonial exchange (perhaps the exchange
is between trusted friends, verified by reliable authorities, etc.)9
2. Too Rosy a Picture?

Does the present approach to testimonial evidence, and its application to
religious belief in particular, paint too rosy a picture? Does it make rational
religious belief and religious knowledge too easy? That depends on the
answers to some further questions.
First, it depends on the existence and the extent of originating sources
of religious knowledge. knowledge (or reasonable belief) cannot be
transmitted from speaker to hearer if the speaker does not have knowledge
(or reasonable belief) to begin with. accordingly, the present approach to
testimony and religious belief depends on more traditional issues in the
epistemology of religion, i.e. issues regarding originating sources of
knowledge and reasonable belief.
But suppose we take it for granted that there are such originating
sources, and that they are fairly widespread. That is, suppose we take it for
granted that religious knowledge is fairly common. Questions still remain
9
hume cites a case involving such a verification process, but does not appreciate its
social significance. Cf. hume, Enquiry, Section 10.

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concerning the conditions for the successful transmission of that knowledge.

what, in general, are the conditions for the successful transmission of
knowledge within a testimonial tradition? and are those conditions met
by religious traditions today?
These questions further divide. For we may ask: what are the conditions
for successful inter-personal transmission? at the very least, those would
seem to include personal expertise and inter-personal trust. what are the
nature and conditions of these in general, and in regard to religious belief
in particular? what more is required, over and above appropriate expertise
and appropriate inter-personal trust?
we may also ask: what are the conditions for successful institutional
transmission? at the very least, those would seem to include institutional
expertise and institutional integrity. In other words, institutional transmission
requires institutional authority. what are the nature and conditions of these
in general, and in regard to religious belief in particular? what more is
required?10
Questions such as these frame a research program for social episte-
mology – for the epistemology of testimony in general, and for religious
epistemology in particular. answers to them are required to determine the
extent of rational religious belief and religious knowledge.11
10
here is one thought in that regard: It would seem that epistemic authority depends,
in part, on moral authority. That is because immoral people and institutions cannot
be trusted to tell the truth. This diagnoses a mistake of the Catholic Bishops: Trying
to protect the teaching (i.e. epistemic) authority of the Church, they covered up
sexual abuse by priests. But this in fact undermined the Church’s epistemic author-
ity, insofar as it undermined her moral authority. accordingly, the Bishops will have
to account for the epistemic harm they have done to the Church, as well as the more
obvious moral harm.
11
Thanks for useful discussion to the participants in the conference The Right to
Believe: Perspectives in Religious Epistemology, hosted by Dariusz Łukasiewicz
and Roger Pouivet in Bydgoszcz, Poland in 2010.

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RogeR PouIveT
Steps Towards an Epistemology

of Revelation
The Christian tradition is structured by three important affirmations about

Christian faith:
1. Faith requires divine grace: it is not achievable for the unaided
human mind and will.
2. Faith is voluntary: this does not necessarily mean that we decide

whether or not to have it (doxastic voluntarism), but instead that
true faith is not something that can be imposed upon us.
3. Faith is theoretically reasonable: even if we cannot prove that our

faith is true empirically, accepting them is not absurd.
The problem is that it is not clear how these three claims could be true
together.
a good way to pinpoint the difficulty, at least in its epistemological
aspect, is found in an argument that I am borrowing from John greco.1
(1) knowledge is indeed a cognitive achievement. S knows p only if S

has gone through the intellectual effort to know p, and thus deserves
(intellectual) credit for believing the truth regarding p. Take, then,
the case of knowing p if p is the proposition that god exists.
1
In his non-published paper “god, grace, and gettier”. I thank John greco for sending
me this paper. he speaks about perception of god and revelation from god. But
I am interested only here in the question of revelation and revealed truths. of course,
as non-published, this paper does not represent the “official” thought of John
greco…

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48 RogeR PouIveT
(2) a revelation from god requires god’s grace.
(3) But if we define grace according to the Christian tradition, it

undermines the epistemological credit behind knowing. It is never
to S’s credit – it is not by his ‘works’ – that god, by his grace
alone, reveals himself to S.
Therefore,
(4) a revelation from god does not yield knowledge of god.
This argument could be taken as an up-to-date articulation of a very old

problem concerning the relation between faith and reason. If we accord
reason the power to determine knowing, how can we claim any moral
right to believe in revelation? how can Christians believe in revealed
truth without grossly sinning against rationality? and, in keeping with
the Cliffordian notion of an “ethics of belief” that we mentioned in the
Introduction, how could believing what is revealed be intellectually
honest?
For example, Daniel Dennett says:
If religion isn’t the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress,
what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But
although each of these scourges – mixed blessings, in fact – has the power
to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion
has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn’t just disable, it honors
the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world,
to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions
of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by
rituals designed to intoxicate them.2
This is expressed rather mockingly, but of course I could name many ancient,
modern and contemporary philosophers, including authorities like voltaire,
Diderot, nietzsche and Clifford, who precede Dennett in expressing dismay
about the malign effect of religion. My intention in this paper is to show
that there is a way out of greco’s reasoning. greco himself proposed one,
which I will describe; but I prefer another way out, borrow an argument
from Thomas aquinas.
2
In a paper in The Guardian, “Is Religion a Threat to Rationality and Science?”, Tuesday
22 april 2008. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/apr/22/highereducation.uk5>

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Steps Towards an epistemology of Revelation 49
let us first examine greco’s argument more attentively.
1. The first premise expresses greco’s characterization of knowledge as

a cognitive achievement. This way of construing knowledge is derived
from the virtue-theoretic account of epistemic normativity that greco has
defended, and which I believe we can accept, in at least its broad outlines.3
let us suppose, with aristotle, that the intellectual virtues are abilities. Then
knowledge is a kind of success from virtue. This is a thesis about what
knowledge is. More specifically, and more importantly, it is a thesis about
the sort of normative status that knowledge requires. The thesis, then, is
that knowledge is an instance of a more general normative phenomenon –
that of success through ability (or success through excellence, or success
through virtue).4
Some French contemporary philosophers would perhaps offer the counter-

claim that knowledge is a special sort of repression of desire or political
alienation and not just a cognitive achievement. But this is an argument that
goes in a vicious circle, for their own claim is either a cognitive achievement
that they should be praised for or a political strategy detached from any
epistemological claim. however, there might be other, and better, reasons
for questioning greco’s first premise. For example, greco says that alvin
Plantinga and george Mavrodes would accept (2), (3) and (4), thus locating
(1) as the problem. If warranted beliefs result from properly functioning or
reliable faculties, as Plantinga would say, then knowledge (identified
as warranted belief) is not to the cognitive agent’s credit any more than
proper digestion is to the credit of the one who digests. If you go to bed one
night and wake up in the morning with the firm conviction, caused by god,
that there is a god – this is Mavrodes’ example – you do not gain any
epistemological or ethical credit from your knowledge. (and linda zagzebski
even claims that this example meets Plantinga’s criterion for warrant.)
But I do not think that we should so easily identify warranted belief
and knowledge, even in the cases pressed by Plantinga and Mavrodes. It is
one thing to reject a deontological account of knowledge (a sort of moni-
toring or control of our belief) in favor of the thesis that knowledge results
3
In his book: Achieving Knowledge, A Virtue-Theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity.
(2010). Cambridge: Cambridge university Press. I myself defended a virtue-Theoretic
account of epistemic normativity in: Le réalisme esthétique. (2006). Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, chap. II (l’épistémologie des vertus).
4
John greco, Achieving Knowledge, p. 3.

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50 RogeR PouIveT
from the proper functioning of our sensible and intellectual faculties directed
toward truth in an appropriate environment. It is another thing to identify
warranted belief with knowledge. a belief could be warranted even if god
were the direct cause of it. It might perhaps even be the best possible
warranted belief. But would it be knowledge? It seems that there is neces-
sarily an anti-luck component in knowledge. you cannot be admired because
you were lucky, although you may arouse envy. But you can be admired for
what you know. when we make up a list of the good qualities of a person,
that person’s knowledge will be included, and will have the further impact
of creating our expectations about that person. we expect, for instance, an
airplane pilot to know how to fly a plane. In our ordinary life, we commonly
hold people responsible for knowing things, and we praise those who are
especially knowledgeable. If knowledge were like digestion, all intentional
aspects, such as intellectual responsibility, that deserve admiration, and
represent intellectual virtue and value, would disappear. So would our sense
of expectation that one should know certain things, which is intrinsic to the
division of labor, to education, and to interpersonal relationships. These
aspects seem to be analytically related to knowledge.
So, let us say that the first premise can be accepted, at least as a necessary
(even if not sufficient) condition for knowledge.
2. The second premise of greco’s argument follows from what revelation

is. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that revelation is “the communication
of some truth by god to a rational creature through means which are beyond
the ordinary course of nature”. when god speaks to us, even through the
special inspiration of the historical human authors of sacred books, one
can maintain that there is supernatural communication. The case of inspired
scribes seems to be quite different from Saul of Tarsus’ case, where god
acted and spoke directly. But the Scriptures also deliver “truth coming
down to us from heaven”. even if an historical human author wrote down
the text, it is god who speaks to us, and this requires god’s grace. Indeed, it
is close to a direct perception of god. If the tax inspector sends you a letter,
even written by an employee, you may consider that it is a communication
from the tax inspector to you. So let us accept the second premise.
3. The dramatic moment in greco’s argument is the third premise, for it is

upon this that the argument turns. Revelation undermines our epistemic
credit because we are asked to believe what we are not allowed to believe:
that god speaks to us. epistemic work, here, counts for nothing, when it

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should count for all. Revelation makes us religiously better by making us

intellectually worse. Recall what locke said in the chapter on “enthusiasm”
in the Essay:
Immediate Revelation being a much easier way for Men to establish their
opinions, and regulate their Conduct, than the tedious and not always
successful labour of Strict Reasoning, it is no wonder, that some have been
very apt to pretend to Revelation, and to persuade themselves, that they are
under the peculiar guidance of heaven in their actions and opinions…
Is it possible to be both a good Christian and a good thinker? greco’s

dilemma seems to show that it is not possible to reconcile the two.
Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say if he found
himself standing before god on the Judgment Day and god asked him,
“why didn’t you believe in Me?” Russell is supposed to have replied:
“I would say, ‘not enough evidence, god! not enough evidence!’” By
Russell’s lights, it seems that we would do far better intellectually by not
believing that god reveals truths to us than we would do by believing it.
Russell’s criterion for embracing a belief is evidence. But the reasoning
could be similar if the criterion were different. The reliabilist’s criterion
of using the correct epistemic process seems likewise to warrant the same
epistemological condemnation of faith. To listen to messages coming from
heaven could seemingly never be a correct epistemic process.
But even if we point to a means behind the knowledge, i.e. that god
uses revelation to let us know certain truths, isn’t this in itself a paradoxical
and shocking means to use upon his creation, which is after all created to
be rational? we are tempted then to say that even if we apprehend divine
truths in this way, we do not know them, because the achievement of
knowledge deserves credit, and we seemingly deserve none if god
does all the work. even worse, revelation could be described as an act of
intellectual violence, akin to brainwashing. and when truths lie definitively
beyond what we can understand, this violence is aggravated all the more.
what does greco say about the puzzle he is presenting? he supports
(1) and (2), and rejects (3). he says:
– “grace does not undermine credit in cases where S’s own intellec-
tual abilities continue to play an important role in the formation
of belief.”
– “god might reveal himself in a way that importantly involves the
intellectual abilities of the believer.”

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52 RogeR PouIveT
– “Just as luck is compatible with an important role for one’s cognitive

abilities [greco gives plausible examples that I will not examine
here], grace is as well.”
greco, then, finds reasons in the way we know things that contradict (3):
grace would not undermine the epistemic credit of the knower. and (4)
would therefore not be established.
greco may have a point in showing that the contemporary sense of
knowing is compatible with revelation. I think that aquinas also offers
a very plausible solution to greco’s puzzle in Summa Theologiae, II-IIae,
2, 9. here is a passage from the objection 3 (and so the argument is one
that will be criticized by Thomas):
Further, he who assents to a point of faith, either has a sufficient motive
for believing, or he has not. If he has a sufficient motive for his belief, this
does not seem to imply any merit on his part, since he is no longer free to
believe or not to believe: whereas if he has not a sufficient motive for
believing, this is a mark of levity, according to ecclus. 19:4: „he that is
hasty to give credit, is light of heart,” so that, seemingly, he gains no merit
thereby. Therefore to believe is by no means meritorious.
I propose to reconstruct the argument this way:
(a) If S assents to a point of faith, his motive to do so will either be

sufficient or insufficient.
(B) If S’s motive is sufficient, it amounts to a cause of his assent,

understood as a psychological constraint. no merit accrues to S
for being constrained to assent.
(C) If the motive is insufficient, S’s assent is light (i.e. not weighty),
and for assenting lightly he again gains no merit (nor can he be
credited with achieving knowledge).
Therefore
(D) S’s assent to a point of faith is never meritorious.
To this objection, aquinas answers that:

The believer has sufficient motive for believing, for he is moved by the
authority of Divine teaching confirmed by miracles, and, what is more, by

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the inward instinct of the Divine invitation: hence he does not believe
lightly. he has not, however, sufficient reason for scientific knowledge,
hence he does not lose the merit.
I think for better understanding of what aquinas says, we must take into
account another passage of the Summa Theologiae, in II-IIae, 6, 1:
as regards … man’s assent to the things which are of faith, we may observe
a twofold cause, one of external inducement, such as seeing a miracle, or
being persuaded by someone to embrace the faith: neither of which is
a sufficient cause, since of those who see the same miracle, or who hear
the same sermon, some believe, and some do not. hence we must assert
another internal cause, which moves man inwardly to assent to matters
of faith.
Christian revelation does not place us in the situation described in premise

(B) above. when someone assents to a point of faith, they are not yielding
merely to a psychological constraint. Instead, there are good non-psycho-
logical motives. First, there are miracles, for those who purportedly witness
them. Secondly, there is persuasion by someone. The second case is, of
course, more frequent. This is also a case we meet in non-religious contexts,
when we are persuaded by testimony that appears convincing. however,
these motives are not constraining “since of those who see the same
miracle, or who hear the same sermon, some believe, and some do not”.
hence, we have motives that are not sufficient causes in the sense of
psychological constraints, and then, contrary to what (B) describes, merit
for assenting is not lost.
In the case of assent to a point of faith, (B) does not adequately
describe the case and must be replaced by (B*):
(B*) If S’s motive is sufficient, but does not amount to a cause of his assent,
understood as a psychological constraint, merit may accrue to S for assenting.
S is not, however, in the situation described in premise (C) of the objection.

The faithful person assents, not lightly, but with a sufficient motive: the
authority of god and the inspiration of holy Spirit. Such a motive would
not be sufficient for scientific knowledge, which may judge it to be light,
but it is sufficient in another way. So I rewrite (C) this way:
(C*) If the motive is insufficient, in that it does not amount to a cause of

S’s assent, understood as a psychological constraint, but constitutes an

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54 RogeR PouIveT
appropriate “internal cause”, which moves S to assent to a matter of faith,

then merit accrues to S for assenting.
From (a), (B*), (C*), what follows is not (D) but:
(D*) S’s assent to a matter of faith may be meritorious.
Some remarks are necessary.
1) one could object that aquinas is speaking about moral merit and not
about intellectual (or epistemic) merit. and so aquinas’ reasoning would
not be an answer to the kind of difficulty greco is concerned with. To which
I would confess that I am not making a historical exegesis, but retrofitting
the substance of aquinas’s passages for my own philosophical project.
The appropriation of the argument puts it in line with aquinas’s teaching,
in as much as aquinas does ask if believing in revelation is to believe
lightly or not, for surely the problem he is posing is genetically close to
the problem of epistemological ethics. Firstly, to believe lightly is an act,
and every act can be judged from a moral point of view that assesses the
responsibility of the actor – which is the question that is really at the center
of greco’s problem. This is the problem of the relation between moral
and intellectual virtues, and it is one that I have examined elsewhere as
well.5 Secondly, the difference between the second element and the third
element in Christian tradition (as we articulated it at the beginning of this
paper) comes into play here. If the third element, faith, is theoretically
reasonable, then it is intellectually meritorious. But it could be possible
to be epistemically safe in the recognizance of revealed truths, but not to
assent (and to accept) revealed truths. Thus, the condition that faith be
voluntary is salient in aquinas’s example. epistemic merit is not sufficient
for faith, while there is also a moral merit and a supernatural merit in faith.
we could be enlightened by understanding that some truths are revealed,
thus enlarging our epistemological possibilities; but we might not be
converted, because it changes nothing in our will! This is the way it seems
for me possible to understand this passage (Summa Theologiae, II-IIae,
8, 6, corpus):
5
R. Pouivet, “Moral and epistemic virtues: a Thomistic and analytical Perspective”,
Forum Philosophicum 15 (2010).

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accordingly on the part of the things proposed to faith for belief, two
things are requisite on our part: first that they be penetrated or grasped
by the intellect, and this belongs to the gift of understanding. Secondly, it
is necessary that man should judge these things aright, that he should
esteem that he ought to adhere to these things, and to withdraw from their
opposites: and this judgment, with regard to Divine things belong to the
gift of wisdom, but with regard to created things, belongs to the gift of
knowledge, and as to its application to individual actions, belongs to the
gift of counsel.
aquinas uses here the quite important notion of the “gifts of the holy
spirit”, upon which I cannot comment in the space of this paper. But clearly
aquinas considers that the gift of understanding is related to what I call
“epistemic merit”.
2) In the abovementioned objection examined by aquinas, a motive is

a sufficient cause, and a sufficient cause is a psychological constraint.
If you are under such a constraint, as in premise (B), epistemic merit is
lost. you cannot do anything other than assenting, exactly like a jealous
person who is unable to think that he is not betrayed. If you are not under
a constraint, as in premise (C), epistemic merit is lost also, but this time
because you are acting heedlessly. I think that the argument is close to
a paralogism. “Motive” does not have exactly the same meaning in (B)
and (C). In (B) it means a causal constraint; in (C), S lacks a ground for
assent, but S is not under the causal constraint referenced in (B). If this remark
is right, we may distinguish two kinds of motives: internal and external. The
former are psychological constraints; the latter are extra-psychological
reasons. In (C*), “motive” means “psychological cause”, and “internal cause”
means a “reason”.
3) what does “internal” mean exactly? It does not mean “internalist”, in

the contemporary sense that a person with justified beliefs has an internal
access to the basis of those beliefs, a basis that consists in some subjective
mental state. what is “internal” in the present case is a virtue, the virtue of
faith. at the beginning of the eucharistic Prayer, the priest says “Sursum
corda” (“lift up your hearts”), and the congregation responds: “we lift
them up to the lord”. The heart is not here opposed to reason, as it has
been in the later history of philosophy. It would make no sense for the
priest to say: “now, don’t try to understand, just feel!” without making
any pretention here to a deep historical and theological interpretation,
I consider that “heart”, in this context, means an intellectual motivation.

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56 RogeR PouIveT
That we “lift” our hearts must indicate some intellectual or spiritual element.
we shouldn’t be fooled by possible substitution of terms, here. For gregory
of nyssa, the heart was the vegetative part of the soul; but it would make
little sense to claim that the priest tells us to lift up the vegetative part of
our soul! The source of this intellectual motivation is internal in the sense
that we are disposed to hear, and to heed, god’s word. and this source is
the virtue of faith – a disposition of our character.
4) aquinas says that “the inward instinct of the Divine invitation” makes
us meritorious, even if we do not have sufficient reason to claim that we
are conforming to the standards of scientific knowledge here. I said that
this inward instinct is the virtue of faith. This virtue motivates the believer.
and so, even if she lack sufficient reason for scientific knowledge, she has
reasons to accredit revealed knowledge, and she can be, in turn, credited
for assenting to them. grace does not undermine credit, even if the inward
instinct of faith may be traced to Divine invitation, because it supposes the
exercise of a virtue, an excellence, making us the best we can be. I do not
think that for aquinas epistemic merit is of an inferior sort because it
concerns non-scientific knowledge. Furthermore, I think he is right.
epistemic merit is coordinate to the kind of knowledge you can achieve.
To achieve knowledge of the truths that must be revealed, because we do
not have the means to reach them by ourselves, is not the same as achieving
knowledge in other matters concerning nature, and employing means in
conformity with natural law. It would be worth examining attentively what
aquinas means by “scientific knowledge”, but we don’t need to be diverted
by this within the argument I am making here. My point is simply that it
makes sense to think that as understanding sees epistemological possibilities
beyond those given by ‘scientific knowledge”, so, too, there must be a kind
of knowledge that is intellectually meritorious by being achieved within
the domain of revelation.
5) Revelation does not suppose psychologically constraining motive acting

upon the person who receives the revelation. when there is a glass on the
table and I look at it, my perception of the glass on the table is psychologically
decisive. But if a person witnesses a miracle, or is exhorted by someone
to embrace the faith, there comes into play an understanding of what is
going on, such that there may be those who see the same miracle, or who
hear the same sermon, and do not believe. “Some believe, and some do
not”, as Thomas points out. If someone sees a glass on the table and does

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not believe he sees a glass on the table, he is either crazy or is attending

a course on epistemology where he is reading the First Meditation by
Descartes. But if someone does not assent to a revelation, he is not crazy
(although he has perhaps also read too much epistemology) – he merely
lacks the virtue of faith. Is this lack a cognitive sin? as Robert adams says:
“fears may be raised that the stigmatization of unbelief as sin will feed the
flames of persecution”.6 The most important matter here is not finally to
answer the question “Is the unbeliever cognitively vicious?”, but rather the
question, “Can the person who believes in revelation by the grace of god,
and has the virtue of faith, also be intellectually meritorious, and can the
knowledge of god so infused be credited to him?” In this argument, I have
tried to show that the answer is yes.
6) let us imagine this case. a nearsighted person awakes one morning

with perfect vision. earlier, the status of all of her perceptual beliefs, at
least when she wore no glasses, was suspect. The sudden recovery
modifies everything: her perceptual beliefs are now legitimated. and even
were her recovery based on the intervention of a supernatural cause, and
her perceptual beliefs the results of the correct functioning of her sensory
faculties (something causal), her belief that she sees things correctly (and
not simply the fact that she sees the things correctly), even without glasses
(something rational), is meritorious. Belief grounded in revelation may
be compared with this case. Revelation cures us from unbelief, and gives
us knowledge that we are physically and cognitively unable to reach by
ourselves. we cannot take credit for this gift, but can only be grateful for
it. But the knowledge through grace we now have, accepting the gift as
a fact, can be credited to us. First, because it would have been possible to
refuse that knowledge, by not assenting to what is revealed, and, second,
because it is built upon the virtue of faith – and all virtuous acts are
meritorious.
To conclude, let me go back to what I called the dramatic moment repre-

sented by the third premise of greco’s puzzle. That premise could be taken
to say that it is not possible to be a faithful Christian and a respectable
knower; that Divine faith, belief in revelation, and knowledge through
grace are epistemically irresponsible and trespass against the ethics of
6
Robert M. adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology.
(1987). oxford: oxford university Press, p. 9.

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58 RogeR PouIveT
belief. like greco, aquinas was well aware of epistemological critiques

of acts of faith and well aware of the arguments against them. and I think
that the positive epistemology of faith and revelation he argues for disposes
of the objection quite impressively, even if I suppose it would not impress
those, like Daniel Dennett, who cannot imagine or understand knowledge
beyond ‘scientific knowledge’.7
7
I would like to thank the audience at the Right to Believe Conference in Bydgoszcz
(September 2009), the audience at a meeting at my university in December 2010,
and John lamont for useful remarks. I especially thank Mikael M. karlsson.

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MIChel BaSTIT
Faith As an Epistemic Good

According to Aristotle:
Towards an Aristotelian Understanding
of the Act of Faith
as my title says, this paper1 proposes to establish that the act of faith is
neither the result of a scientific demonstration, nor an irrational spasm of
the kierkgaardian heart, but is instead a good for the believer. It expresses
the outcome of the act of belief, committed within the precincts of reason,
namely, that faith is a good to be pursued by man to realize his end. Clearly,
then, human faith and confidence are the principal concerns of this paper,
although as a corollary concern it also touches upon their application to
the realm of religious faith.
The reference to aristotle is due to the fact that (1) contemporary
discussions about the epistemology of faith are in large part about the
relation between ethical virtues, epistemic virtues and the will, which are
all categories of aristotelian ethics; and (2) these aristotelian analyses of
the human act of knowledge may well be valuable in helping us understand
the human act of faith as well as the religious one. Taking my second point
as a challenge, this paper takes up the renewal of virtue ethics initiated by
alasdair McIntyre and applied to the intellectual virtues discussed by
linda zagzebski.
while aristotle is often presented as a philosopher of science, science
does not, for him, monopolize the entire set of valid modes of knowledge.
Those of aristotle’s commentators who have approached him from this
1
I would like to thank to the participants of the Bydgoszcz meeting whose remarks
about the oral version of this paper have mostly been taken into account in this
revised text.

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60 MIChel BaSTIT
point of view have remarked that the works of aristotle contain not only
a theory of science and of the scientific syllogism, such as we find in the
Prior and Posterior Analytics, but treat and analyze other ways of knowing,
each in their proper domain, as in the Topics, the Rhetoric and even the
Poetics.
In aristotle we can find:
1) The affirmation of a general inclination to know which is also an
ethical good;
2) an understanding of faith as a way of knowing adapted to some
subject matters; and
3) an understanding of faith as a way of knowledge adapted to some
persons.
Therefore the inclination and the ethical good of knowing are realized by
faith for some persons or for some subject matters.
1) A General Inclination to Know and the Ethical Good

The best expression of this inclination is found in the very beginning of
the Metaphysics, with its famous first sentence: “all men by nature desire
to know.”2 First, let us note the idea of the desire’s universality. all men
are of the same species, the human species, and consequently they want to
know. The claim is not that only man want to know in some way, because
it is also necessary that animals know; for instance, animals need to know
where to find food in order to survive. however, men are particularly called
upon to know.
aristotle employs the verb to know and not something like to know
scientifically. That is to say that to know involves a broader sense of
knowledge than that characterized by scientific proof. Reading aristotle,
here, against the range of knowledges upon which he wrote, the sentence
certainly does not imply that science is the only way of knowing. For
instance, there is sensible knowledge (De anima 416 b 38-418 a 6), and
within sensible knowledge there is a special way of knowing for each
sense: to know by touch is not the same as to know by vision, and so on.
Perhaps one may think that these sensible ways of knowing are inferior
or subordinate to other ways like science. They are inferior because they
do not by themselves apprehend essences. It is astonishing that aristotle
2
Met.A, 980 a: «Pantes anthropoi tou eidenai orègontai phusei».

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Faith as an epistemic good according to aristotle 61
does not refer to science – to episteme – to justify the desire to know. after
the first sentence already quoted, aristotle continues by justifying the
desire to know. on this point, he says that it is the desire to see that shows
the desire to know. The fact that men go to theatrical plays in order to see
them and that this sensation gives pleasure to men is the sign and proof of
the human desire to know. The inference from aristotle’s use of verb and
example is that science is not the form of knowledge that characterizes
man at all times and places, but is one among them. Science is discursive:
making syllogisms entails personal and social development over time.
Science must be acquired. But science itself depends on principles, on first
things known. So science is not self-sufficient. In as much as we construct
the hierarchy of knowledge to correspond with degrees of self-sufficiency,
there must be more perfect ways of knowing than science. one such is
insight.
This more perfect knowledge is distinguished by its direct nature. unlike
science, sensible knowledge like vision or touch is direct, without discourse.
In intellectual knowledge, there is also a direct way of knowledge that
aristotle compares to sensible knowledge because it is also immediate,3
without discourse, namely, insight (nous). In the nicomachian ethics,
aristotle solidifies the identity between sensation and insight,4 because of
former’s direct nature. Insight furnishes the principles of science, it is
principle of principles;5 sensation and induction also produce the first
things (ta prota) of knowledge6. Both sensation and induction are primary,
or in aristotelian parlance, each functions as a principle, arkhè. Intuition
is a direct transference of the information presented by the object to the
knower. It is a fact of the world and not a belief. In contemporary terms,
aristotle’s theory is attested to by the adaptation of animals to their
surroundings,7 a capacity without which they could not survive.
Returning to our point of departure, the opening line of the Meta-
physics, another important aspect of aristotle’s epistemology is revealed
by the fact that he uses the term “desire to know” instead of ‘will to know’.
Desire is more fundamental in the order of human nature. we must read
this reference to nature not only in the light of the universality of the desire
3
De Anima, III, 429 a 16-18.
4
Ethic. Nic., VI, 1043 b 5.
5
Anal. II, B, 100b12-17.
6
Anal. II, B, 100b3-5.
7
kornblith, h. (1995), Inductive Inference and its Natural Ground: An Essay in
Naturalistic Epistemology, harvard: MIT Press.

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62 MIChel BaSTIT
to know, which places it in the natural history of men, shared by all mem-
bers of the species, but also in the light of the spontaneity essential to desire
itself. Men desire to know because of their determinate and constitutive
principle of motion. That is to say that the desire to know is part of the
attainment of their end, telos. They are complete men when they know,
and, by contrast, the refusal to know is an harm that attacks the end of man,
making it impossible for him to flourish; the man who chooses to not know,
to not use his possibilities to know, is not simply acting passively, but is
living in a self-destructive way.
From this perspective, the natural desire to know takes on an ethical
character. It is destructive and absurd not to want to move towards one’s
end. So the desire to know, in the measure that it is a motion to the end, is
good and rational for men, and its suppression for one reason or another is
bad and irrational, since it is irrational and self-defeating to move against
one’s proper end. Properly speaking, suppressing the desire to know is
a form of violence against oneself. Thus, beginning with a fact in our
natural history as a species, we are thrust into considerations that link the
epistemological to the ethical.
aristotle’s virtue ethics recognizes a species of intellectual virtues
(aretai dianoētikai) as opposed to moral ones. unlike the contemporary
idea of the value of neutral knowledge, aristotle incorporates the ethical
nature of knowledge into the entire system of virtues that should guide
our conduct. The kind of knowledge that falls under the practical, instead
of the theoretical, is ultimately governed by the intellectual virtue of
prudence. That is to say that prudence, like the moral virtues, is concerned
with discovering the proper medium within which to investigate and
understand different types of knowledge. Prudence does not take the place
of the activity of the other virtues, but governs the when, where, means by
which, and other elements of each of the ways of knowing. In particular,
prudence ensures that the way of knowing befits or is appropriate to the
object of knowledge.
It is in this context that faith has its place.
2) Faith as an Adapted Way of Knowing Something

given that there are a plurality of the ways of knowing which correspond
to the plurality of realities to be known, aristotle is concerned that we get
the alignment between the method, or way knowing, and the object known
right. It is a great error, one due to a lack of education, to employ a way of

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knowing that is antithetical to the object to be known. For instance, he who

treats physics as though it were nothing more than mathematics, or ethics
as though it were nothing more than mathematics commits this error. he
who confounds sensible knowledge with intellectual knowledge commits
an error on a higher level.
To be sure, for aristotle, the theoretical intellectual virtues, among
which he includes science, rank high in terms of knowing. nevertheless,
as I have mentioned, insight is more basic than science in that it is more
universal, being rooted in our natural history. There is no absolute opposition
between science and insight, but they are not to be confounded. To possess
science and insight is posed by aristotle as the kind of ideal that we see
with the person who has wisdom. one may also think of examples of pure
insight, as in the pure act of thinking without discourse, such as with the
first Mover’s knowledge.
Science is valuable and befits certain kinds of subject matter. aristotle
proposes science as a way of knowing the necessary relations that operate
within some certain genus of beings. he understands necessity in two ways:
first, syllogistic necessity, which comes about through the connection
between the premises; and second, the necessity which is derived from
the essence of the particular subject matter of a particular science.8 For
aristotle, science partakes of both demonstrative and existential necessity.
The genus of beings is further characterized, for aristotle, by the funda-
mental discontinuity between the realm of immobile beings and the realm
of sublunary beings, who are subject to mutability. In the former, science
is able to completely synthesize the two necessities, while in the latter,
beings are partly necessary and partly contingent, leaving a margin that
science cannot perfectly comprehend. Thus, while in this domain, there
is room for some sciences that indicate what occurs most of the time, which
is the domain of aristotelian physics, there are also modes of knowledge
that are not based upon the analysis of a necessity operating among the
objects of their interest. In the domain of these kinds of knowledge,
contingency reigns. This contingency must be taken into account especially
in the domain of human things, that is to say, of human action and practice.
knowledge in this domain cannot be translated into the kind of science of
phisis in which regularities indicate necessary relations, because here action
is always particular, and an irreducible contingency must be considered
as a part of the rational way of acting and of thinking about action.
8
Anal. II, A, 74b5-12.

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64 MIChel BaSTIT
To solve this problem, aristotle draws on the experience of human

affairs to propose a way of knowing adapted to the subject matter. he wrote
at least two books for this purpose: the Topics and the Rhetoric. The Topics
deals with opinions, endoxa. Men who hold opinions about something will
discuss it in order to know which is the better opinion. This is indeed the
way the city must function, as members of the city confront questions of
peace and war, of economic policy, etc. In the Topics, aristotle does not
deal with the question of how we acquire opinions, which he reserves for
the Rhetoric.
one feature of opinions is that, contrary to the data of science, they
change. In the course of discussing some action, one may proceed from
one opinion to another one until eventually he who held one opinion at the
beginning of the discussion holds the contrary opinion at the end. This
variability is related to the fact that opinions deal with the attributes of
sensible things “that do not always and necessarily follow”, as aristotle
puts it in the Topics. So to hold any opinion, neutral in itself, one must be
persuaded by it for reasons that are other than necessary in order to hold
it. This is where the purpose of the Rhetoric comes in, employing the
‘existing means of persuasion [pistis]” in any particular case to convince
a listener of the correctness of one’s opinion.9
The greek term pistis has been translated by persuasion, but it may
also be translated by confidence or even by faith. The orator’s task is to
create confidence or faith in his hearer, who thereby comes to believe the
orator’s opinion. not only does the hearer come to agree with the opinion
he has heard, but also he embraces it as his own opinion, thus possessing
it as one of his own beliefs, for which he too would argue. This fullness of
adherence makes the difference between opinion and faith.
aristotle thinks that the speaker who uses rhetorical argumentation
must also be able to support the contrary opinion, which is why he draws
the parallel between the rhetorician and the dialectician at the beginning
of the Rhetoric. Contrary to science, it is possible to move from one
opinion to another, and the speaker must know the false opinion in order
to oppose it. however, two contrary opinions are not of the same value.
as a real type of knowledge, faith cannot be indifferent to the truth.
aristotle solves this question by thinking that the true opinion is stronger,
that is to say better able to convince than the false opinion10, as men have
9
Rhet. I, 1355b 26.
10
Rhet. I, 1355a 21-22, 36-38.

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‘a sufficient natural instinct for what is true’ [1.1. 15]. True opinion can
receive adherence or strong adherence. This is a point of contention
between aristotle and the Sophists. It also distinguishes him from some
contemporary renewals in rhetoric, like the work of Perelman.11 Perelman
never speaks of the question of the truth of the opinion, but seems to allow
us the leeway to decide what opinion to adhere to solely on the persuasive
strength of the arguments presented for them. More charitably, he may
have thought that the strength of the truth in these kinds of dispute is
self-evident.
For aristotle, the speaker who sustains the strong thesis may also
detect fallacies12 or paralogisms because of which the false thesis must fail.
on the contrary, the Sophist thinks that he may sustain the strong thesis as
well as the feeble one with the same success if he can disguise the paralo-
gisms he uses. as has been said, the variability of opinion is due to the
indeterminacy of the subject matter of rhetoric. Rhetoric, opinion and faith
are concerned first of all with human matters. Rhetorical speeches occur
in politics, to convince an assembly, or in juridical events to convince
a judge. To this end the speaker uses many means of persuasion, like
rhetorical reasoning, enthymemata, common opinions with different
degrees of authority, examples from the past, witnesses, proofs or evidence
in the juridical sense, etc. all these means of persuasion are indirect ways
of knowing. witnesses tell the judge what they have heard or seen, but the
judge must repose confidence in the truth and accuracy of their witness.
as well, since the events cannot be repeated, witness concerning them must
rely on memory. evidence or proofs are not demonstrations of present
facts, for they are signs of past events. even in the case of necessary signs
(the cow has milk, then she has a calf …) or rhetorical syllogisms, such
rhetorical persuasions are not scientific demonstrations because the very
middle term, the explicit cause, does not appear as it should in a scientific
argument.
nevertheless, rhetorical persuasion is not illusory; the one who has
been persuaded about something learns something, and in this sense,
persuasion is synonymous with learning. That is the reason why rhetoric
may be employed even to help the listener understand a scientific truth,
even if he can’t understand the scientific demonstration. The hearer of
a rhetorical speech is more informed at the end of the discourse than at its
11
Perelman, CH. and olbrechts-Tyteca, l. (2008), Traité de l’argumentation: nouvelle
réthorique, 6th ed., Bruxelles: E.U.B.
12
Rhet. I, 1355a 29-33.

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66 MIChel BaSTIT
beginning, and he is informed about matters that perhaps he could not have
been taught scientifically. he has learned and has new knowledge, but he
does not thereby possess the tools of science. That is to say that he has
grasped information using his intellectual capacity, but this information
has not been demonstrated to him as a necessary inference. This indeter-
minacy is common to human affairs, where rhetoric has its place, and to
religious faith, where god is believed without being directly known
through insight or a demonstration propter quid. The indeterminacy of the
subject matter corresponds to, although it is not the same as, the impossibility
for a human subject to determine the veracity of the kind of belief that is
evoked in the face of an object that exceeds his intellectual capacity to
know once and for all the truth about it.
hence, we can infer, from the constitution of the various realms of
knowledge as construed by aristotle, that to ask evidence of faith is to
make an epistemological mistake, confounding science, insight and faith;
in aristotelian language, because of a lack of education, one demands
a mode of knowledge that does not fit the subject matter. Because of the
indeterminacy, prudence has to judge to what extent it is reasonable to
adhere to something. Therefore, the prudential act that governs reception
and adherence (to the truths of faith) is a sign of the ethical nature of these
acts. when linda zagbeski insists on the responsible use of the intellectual
virtue, even in the religious act of faith, she is expressing an argument
that is solidly in line with the aristotelian tradition.13 This responsibility
concerns judging the quality of the prudential judgment as well as receiving
new knowledge. here, zagbeski’s insight might be applied to the respon-
sibility for attentiveness, for instance.
The result we can derive from these aristotelian themes is that rhetorical
persuasion is made possible by the fact that there is a complementarity
between science and faith as pistos. Some things are to be known by
scientific demonstration, and others rely on faith. The same thing may be
known by science by one man and by faith by another: this depends on
their respective capacities. Both labor under the condition that both seek
the truth. The same person cannot know the same thing by science and by
13
In the case of revelation, the speaker cannot err about the fact that he or she has had
a revelation. The inspired person is only responsible for the gift. on the side of the
audience, the hearer is responsible, for instance, for the attention that he does or
does not give to the speaker’s discourse. From another point of view, in most cases,
the supernatural gift is given through a social context, as in the exercise of all virtue
– this sociability is insisted upon by McIntyre.

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faith, as the former is a matter of demonstration, while the latter depends

on an ultimate indemonstrability of the matter at hand. nevertheless,
science as well as faith entails adherence to some belief about the world
by the knowing subject. Therefore, faith, for an aristotelian, is marked by
a relative inferiority in the way it becomes knowledge, but this is only
a methodological inferiority, that of dialectical reasoning or rhetoric in
comparison with demonstrative science. This does not entail an inferiority
in the degree of reality of the known object. By contrast, some men are
not able to know by science certain higher objects. Science and faith are
both inferior to, or at least dependent upon, insight or vision.
It is significant to note the meaning of this carefully worked out epis-
temological scheme for scientism, which takes science beyond its domain,
that of necessary beings, and applies it to other genera of beings. Scientism
tends to reduce rhetorical culture to aesthetical ornament. Resistance to
the kind of scientism that was becoming dominant in the enlightenment
took up the cause of renewing the culture of rhetoric, as for example, in
the way vico opposed the scientism of the eighteenth century.14
3) Faith As a Way of Knowledge Adapted

to Some Persons: Believing in Someone
one of the reasons we believe in the truth of a particular speech is one has
confidence in the credibility of the speaker, aristotle maintained. It is for
this reason that the speaker’s moral qualities come into play, and the speech
act is part of the whole ethos or way of life of the speaker. This ethos
includes virtue (arêtè), prudence (phronèsis) and benevolence (eunoia).15
according to aristotle, these elements of the speaker’s character are infused
into his technical rhetorical arguments, meaning that he presents his view
of a policy or an action with reference to his moral character to persuade
his listener of his belief. It does not suffice simply that the speaker possesses
these qualities, but he must also persuade others that he possesses them in
order to successfully accomplish his rhetorical task. however, although the
truly virtuous speaker might at one time or another fail to accomplish his
rhetorical task, overall, the stronger argument will go with the speaker
whose virtue is true as opposed to the one whose virtue is only apparent.
14
vico, g. Institutiones oratoriae (1989), Crifo, g. edit. napoli: Istituto Suor orsola
Benincasa, 1989.
15
Rhet. 1377 b2-1378 a 19.

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68 MIChel BaSTIT
yet the speaker must not simply convincing display his or her virtues;
the speaker’s task is to convince others that, as well, he or she has some
knowledge of the subject matter. For instance, when speaking about public
finances, the rhetorician has to show that he knows something of economics
and the budget. The same holds true if he tries to convince others on
a matter of military strategy, and so on. The record of the speaker’s abilities
and expertise contributes strongly to the task of convincing the assembly.
here, we might take an extreme case. Suppose that we were on a ship and,
in a dramatic moment, were ordered by the captain to put on life jackets and
to climb into the emergency boats. Surely, we would obey to the command.
Certainly, in cases like this, a long speech would not be necessary to persuade
us to obey. one could even imagine, in time of war, for instance, briefer
orders like “go,” “stop,” etc., where rhetoric is reduced to bare imperatives.
Is this not to say that, in these cases, we are not persuaded, that we put
aside our reason to obey only by the submission of our will to that of
another? First, one should remark that the command must be understood
in order to be executed. Second, our obedience is not irrational. It is very
reasonable to obey the officer16 during battle or the captain in the storm.
why? Because they are clearly competent, so that our confidence in them
is well placed. They are able to ensure our safety, which is a good and an
end, both for those who give the commands and those who obey. hence,
the will of the man giving the order does not eliminate the rationality of
the confidence given to him. Because of the rationality of the command
the will, which is for aristotle a rational desire, one can want to obey the
order. In rhetorical terms, parallel to this psychological analysis, the ability
of the speaker entails the rational and voluntary compliance of the hearer,17
that is to say, faith or confidence (pistis). These indications show that
persuasion not only concerns the truth of the speaker’s argumentation but
16
The risk of being punished in case of disobedience is not the first motive, and if it
is, it is still a rational though utilitarian motive.
17
From this point of view, the rational motive of Christian faith is the «authority of
god», where «authority» must not be taken to mean «power», but something like
intellectual authority. In other words, the believer’s adherence is rational because it
clings to revelation, wherein god speaks of himself, and he certainly knows himself
best. he is the best theologian and proposes a good for man: to partake of the
knowledge that he has of himself. Participation in divine knowledge was already
envisaged by Plato and aristotle (Met. a, 982 b28-983a 8). on this point and its
Christian continuation, see Bastit-kalinowska, a. (2008), «Dieu exempt d’envie:
autour du prologue à la Métaphysique d’aristote et du début du discours de Timée», in
Aristotle and Aristotelian Tradition, ed.de Bellis, e., Soveria Manelli: Rubettino, p. 21-30.

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also the person of the speaker. however, it is more correct to say that one
is also persuaded of the practical utility of the speech by the trust that one
may convincingly find in the speaker’s record and position.
aristotle did not invent this personal dimension of faith. It was well
known in classical antiquity, for instance in Roman law. In ancient Rome,
the goddess Fides protected civil contracts and all transactions. even today,
in the French Civil Code, contracts must be made and carried out in “good
faith,” that is to say with trust in the partner. Because of this fact, trust is
also the outcome of the means of persuasion. To give one’s trust to a speaker
is reasonable if it means trusting someone worthy of trust.
The same kind of argument holds for witnesses in a courtroom. Surely,
what a witness testifies to is not a direct proof, nor a scientific demonstration.
witnesses themselves speak of what they have seen or of what they are
convinced of having seen. nevertheless, there are precautions that allow
us to believe the witness or not. Is he a distant or proximate witness? are
there one or several witnesses? lawyers and various laws have developed
various criteria in order to determine what makes a witness worthy of belief
or not, which parallel the extension of these conditions to other domains
like history or politics.
Conclusion
This paper has sketched out the case for taking aristotle’s epistemology
to have something to tell us about the rationality of faith and belief. The
difference in these domains of the human perception of the world is that
they concern relations that are not brought together necessarily. That is to
say that they can be, depending on the belief or faith, fully reasonable.
Faith is motivated by rationality and amenable to a rational analysis that
employs dialectical reasoning and understands rhetoric. There are rational
means to acquire knowledge suitable for a certain subject matter or for
certain types of individuals. This rationality makes the act of faith fitting
for the rational human nature, because the ethical life consists in a life of
virtue with reason, with a given act of faith being a reasonable act of
knowledge and knowledge corresponding to human nature. This means
that the act of faith is an ethical good in the sense that it is an act that
corresponds to our rational nature and desire, a necessary act to perfect
human nature concerning some subject matters or in the case of some types
of individuals. Therefore, aristotle gives us the rudiments that allow us to
construct a doxastic conception of the act of faith. There is an understanding

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70 MIChel BaSTIT
of faith – such as the kierkegaardian understanding that we alluded to at

the beginning of this paper – that claims the impermeability of faith to
reason. according to this line of thought, admitting reason into faith is the
first step to falling victim to humanist or positivist critics, since it welds
an indemonstrable position to the logic of demonstration.18 This last point
cannot be developed now, but one might emphasize that it is also possible
to reject the positivist on the basis of a right understanding of intuition and
induction.19
as an ethical act, the act of faith is not an absurdity that man is obliged
to refuse. nor is it the result of a scientific demonstration that would oblige
ascent, denying the freedom of the believer. It is like all the moral acts,
including the acts of our intellectual powers, an act governed by prudence,
prudence in the inquiry about the reasons of faith whose rationality allows
the will to adhere.20 as faith is the expression of a rational desire, the will
cannot give up rationality without giving up the desire at the basis of faith.
Pascal’s wager can probably be understood in this way, as a reasonable
prudential act, even if the desire to know is clearly lacking. This interpreta-
tion does not exclude the pragmatist side of the wager: it is reasonable to
bet that to engage in this or that type of worship, one will gain something,
namely, faith and salvation. This is an instance of utilitarian type of rationality
that steps outside of faith itself and simply inquires as to its consequences
– but it is still a reasonable calculation.
aristotle gives us a solid analysis of human faith. In this way, he
shows us that faith is a normal human phenomenon indispensable for the
whole of our practical and even theoretical lives. It is impossible to conceive
of a human life without faith. For instance, all financial transactions by
telephone or mail would disappear in the absence of faith. In the same way,
without faith, it would be impossible to use authoritative references, unless
there existed confidence in the expertise of colleagues more learned in
some matters.
18
wolterstorff n. (1999), “epistemology of Religion”, in Epistemology, ed. John
greco and ernest Sosa, oxford, Massachusetts: Blackwell, p. 303-324; cf. also C.
Stonescu (2009), «The doxastic ideal in traditional epistemology and the project of
an epistemelogy of religion», Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 8,
22, http://www.jsri.ro/, p. 53-62.
19
a positive re-evaluation of aristotelian intuition and induction can be found in
groarke, l. (2009), An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating Something from
Nothing, Montreal/london/Ithaca: Mcgill Queen’s university Press, 467 p.
20
without sufficient rationality, the will cannot adhere.

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This understanding of the human act of faith can be, and de facto has
been, transposed to the religious context and applied to the religious act of
faith. In this way, religious faith appears as an answer to and an effect of the
proposal of divine rhetorical speech referring to knowledge about god, that
is to say, a good for man that entails his flourishing as well as his salvation.
historically, the transition from aristotle’s reasoning to religion has
been constructed largely according to two models, the averroïst and the
Thomist. according to averroes, we have three levels of knowledge. each
of them corresponds to a way of reasoning and to a type of person. Starting
at the bottom, there are:
1) The believer using rhetorical syllogisms and knowing by faith;
2) The theologian using dialectic and dialectical syllogisms, knowing
by opinion;
and
3) The philosopher using demonstrative syllogism and knowing by
science.
This model fits well with a religion whose revelation is presented as the
equivalent of natural religion.
The second, Thomist model reasserts the place of aristotelian adherence,
neglected by averroes. adherence, or trust, becomes love and plays an
important and necessary role.
There is a difference between what has been revealed, the revelatum,
and what needs to be revealed and believed, the revelabile, because the
human mind cannot conceive the latter without revelation (e.g. Trinitarian
faith, the Incarnation, etc.). Since different persons have different capacities
to know, the border between what is believed of the revelatum and what
is held by science depends on the intellectual capacities of each person.
nevertheless, the believer also adheres by love to the parts of the revelatum
that he could know by science.21
In the Thomist view, theology is a science that takes its principles
from the revelations of the saints who have direct insight into the nature
of the divine. The theologian who has faith in these principles and adheres
to revelation by love may also achieve a higher science in relation to the
humanly unknowable subject matter, the revelabile. That science constitutes
theology and also contains some truths about humanly, philosophically
knowable subjects, like the existence of god, for instance.
21
Science and faith are mutually exclusive in relation to the object known, not the
way of receiving it, namely, by adherence.

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72 MIChel BaSTIT
on the one hand, the philosopher may know by science only a part of
the revelatum. In this case, he is relatively superior in his way of knowing,
for he knows by science and not by faith, but he is not superior in regard
to the subject matter known. But he may or may not have love. on the
other hand, this love gives the believer a knowledge by connaturality, by
the gifts of the holy Spirit, knowledge that is higher than the science of
the metaphysician. This is not to exclude the metaphysician from belief,
but serves as a caution that the metaphysician may also be a believer but
his belief depends on love.22
what differs between these two transpositions, the averroïst and
Thomist versions, is the hierarchy of the sciences, because of the possibility
of a scientific theology in Thomism.23 But for both models, the act of faith
remains a rational one, because of the rational nature of man and especially
the rational nature of the will. ultimately, the aristotelian source of the
Thomist theology allows us to say that the act of faith can be a good for
man to the extent of its reasonableness, while the addition given by the
revelation of the saints is in the new knowledge given by love.
22
Cf. the case of Jacques Maritain, who simultaneously lived as authentic philosopher
and mystics.
23
another difference is the importance of love. however, the theology of the sources
(i.e. the study of the Bible and the ecumenical Councils as doctrinal sources), which
is part of Catholic theology, often remains on the level of the kind of dialectic
envisioned by averroes.

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CyRIlle MIChon
Aquinas and the Will to Believe
I want to discuss the idea that faith is voluntary. In the Catholic tradition
that I know best, this is a doctrinal teaching. It can mean many things, but
Thomas aquinas offers the most privileged interpretation, which has been
adopted as an expression of the Magisterium in the recent Catechism of
the Catholic Church. There, aquinas is quoted for this quasi-definition
of the act of faith: „Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the
divine truth by command of the will moved by god through grace.” (Ipsum
autem credere est actus intellectus assentientis veritati divinae ex imperio
voluntatis a Deo motae per gratiam)1. The voluntariness of faith is then
the voluntariness of the act of believing (credere) the divine revelation.
now, though this sentence is not exactly aquinas’s definition of faith, it
certainly contains what aquinas thinks is necessary and sufficient for the
existence of faith. voluntariness is the feature I want to concentrate upon,
but there are other aspects, one being certainty, on which I will also have
something to say. I will begin by clarifying terms in order to isolate
aquinas’s analysis of the act of faith. I will then criticize his use of the two
criteria of certainty and voluntariness. and finally I will offer a proposal
to repair his analysis in keeping with the spirit of the Catholic doctrine that
faith is in some sense voluntary2.
1
St. Thomas aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, 2, 9; cf Dei Filius 3; DS 3010. Quoted
by the CCC n. 155.
2
I have to say that the position I defend is very close to that presented by Richard
Swinburne, mainly in his Faith and Reason (oxford 1981), ch. 4, and appendix. But
in presenting aquinas’s conception of faith, Swinburne does not focus on voluntari-
ness at all (but on propositional belief vs trust, which is to be found in the lutheran
view of faith). and so he does not propose to correct aquinas the way I do. See
nonetheless the remarks on voluntariness on p. 109.

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74 CyRIlle MIChon
1. The first thing to be said is that aquinas distinguishes faith (fides) as

a disposition (a virtue) and the act of believing, the credere, which is
considered as the actualization of the disposition. Both are studied separately
in the Summa theologiae. First the act of faith (actus fidei) II-II, q.2 and
then the virtue of faith, q. 4. The definition of faith is taken from the letter
to the hebrews: “faith is the substance of the things hoped for, the evidence
(substance) of things not seen” (XI, est autem fides substantia sperandarum
rerum, argumentum non apparentium)3; that of the credere is taken from
augustine: “to believe is to think with assent” (de Praedestinatione sanc-
torum II, 5: credere est cum assensione cogitare). now, though a disposition
and its occurent actualization are distinct, they share many features, and
voluntariness is one of them. aquinas takes the act of faith to be under the
power of the will, and he considers the disposition of faith as a virtue,
having a moral significance, and being meritorious.
Second observation: the citation from aquinas in the first paragraph
does not belong to those texts where aquinas is investigating the nature of
faith (as disposition or act), but instead to a subsidiary question about the
merit of faith. This has some relevance, in that two features that are present
in the quoted sentence do not appear in what can be called the definitional
texts. one is that faith refers to the divine truth, the object of faith is divine
revelation. The other is that faith is set in motion by god, or more generally
is a divine gift. as important as those characteristics may seem, they do
not appear among the criteria by which aquinas isolates the act of faith
from other psychological attitudes.
This leads to our third clarification of aquinas’s statement: aquinas’s
own proper characterization of the act of faith must be found in other
parallel texts. Building on augustine’s definition, aquinas isolates the act
of faith as a species of the propositional attitude of assent to a proposition,
presupposing another attitude concerning propositional content. once
a proposition (e.g. the proposition that aquinas was a great theologian) is
considered by some thinking nature: (1) she can remain neutral, without
assenting to nor dissenting from it: this is doubt; (2) she can assent to some
degree; and (3) the assent can be fully determined (certain), but we have
to make some further distinctions, according to the source of the determi-
nation. In the second case, aquinas distinguishes between (2.1) suspicion,
when the motivation for assent is not strong, and (2.2) opinion, when the
3
In the article 1, aquinas criticizes those who refuse to take this statement as a definition
of faith.

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aquinas and the will to Believe 75
person simply fears the truth of the negation of the proposition. In the third
case, if (3.1) assent is motivated by the content under consideration, then
(3.1.1) the assent can be provoked by the sole consideration of the terms
that constitute the content, which is an act of pure intelligence (evidentia
ex terminis), such as happens for example in the apprehension of the first
principles (principle of non-contradiction, of principles such as the whole
is greater than the part). It can also be mediated by (3.1.2) an inference
from premises that are self-evident, or deducible from such premises, so
that the truth of the conclusion is logically warranted, and this is called
science. however, if assent is not motivated by the sole content, but is still
without degree, then we have (3.2) credere, the pure act of faith, as distinct
from any other non-evident beliefs. and aquinas adds as a condition that
the source of the certainty has to be the will4.
Determined by the content undetermined by the content (voluntary)

assent
(involuntary) given Suspended
uncertain opinion suspicion doubt
certain intelligence science act of faith (credere)
So we see that a necessary and sufficient condition for faith is that it is an

assent that is both certain and not motivated by the content it is directed
to. This is very close to the kantian description of Glauben as subjectively
sufficient but objectively insufficient. and this condition does without any
reference to the proper object of faith (divine revelation), nor with any
mention of a divine intervention. Finally, the condition of voluntariness is
not itself necessary, and we can see it as filling the gap left when the assent
is not motivated by the content (or by the intellectual understanding of the
content), as in (2). It is a psychological fact, for aquinas, that when assent
is given without analytic or objective evidence constraining the intellect,
it must be motivated by the will. of course, an intellectual consideration
of the content is always necessary, for there to be anything like assent,
4
See Sum. Theol. II-II, q.2, a.1 c and ad 3 (only text to distinguish between suspicio
and opinio, and to insist on the cogitatio that remains in faith but disappears with
intelligence and science). See also In III Sent. d. 23, q.2, a.2, qa1; Quaest. de ver.,
q. 14, a.1; Super Boet. de Trin. q.3, a.1 ad 4; Sum. Theol. II-II, q.1, a.4; In Hebr. 11, 1

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dissent or suspension of judgment. But, in all other cases, the content is

not enough for the assent to take place, and an act of will is necessary.
Doubt, suspicion and opinion share with the act of faith the condition of
voluntariness. But faith, as well, shares with science that of certainty (full
determination).
I must say that it seems to me a bit “incredible” that when we fully
characterize faith, the object of it drops out of consideration, as does
reliance on some form of authority, ultimately of god (think of augustine:
“knowledge relies on reason, faith relies on authority”5), nor is there even
some particular intervention of god to help the believer’s unbelief with
the grace or the gift of faith. But to say that sufficient conditions have been
given without mentioning those features does not imply that they are not
true features of faith, nor that they are not necessary for faith. It only means
that one can isolate the specific psychological attitude of faith without
those “true” and maybe “necessary” conditions. So I will not quarrel
aquinas for leaving them aside, since he does mention them in other
contexts, as in the quotation given at the beginning. But I will quarrel him
with two necessary conditions that he gives that are indeed sufficient, but also
redundant: the condition of certainty and the condition of voluntariness.
2. Concerning certainty. one may agree or admit that faith understood as

the content that is revealed, and to which the believers give their assent,
must be certain, since god cannot deceive nor be deceived. This is a special
meaning of “faith”, which we could call “objective faith”, the fides quae
creditur. But it is clear that our concern is with “subjective faith”, faith as
a disposition of the believer, taken as a virtue, and with the act of faith
which is a special kind of assent to a content, the fides qua creditur.
aquinas’s description, in those texts, puts faith, intelligence, and science
on the same side: the side of the fully determined assent that are without
degrees, or certain in the subjective sense. a mind that has fully determined
its stance towards a content cannot dissent from it, and is even unable to
find the room to doubt and suspend its assent. aquinas’s view is then that
the believer’s assent to an article of the Creed is as unavoidable as the
assent to the proposition that it is raining is obvious when it is raining, or
to the conclusion of an arithmetical proof that has been perfectly understood
by the thinker.
5
and see vatican I, De Fide, canon 2: “it is required for divine faith that revealed
truth be believed on the authority of god who reveals it.”

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I have the modern philosopher’s doubts about certainty being a neces-

sary condition for knowledge6. I doubt that certain opinions concerning
mundane matters are impossible to doubt without any kind of evidence. In
addition, I am inclined to think that certainty is not a necessary condition
for an act of faith. according to aquinas’s typology, either I cannot be fully
certain that it will rain tomorrow, not that aquinas was a great theologian,
or, since this belief cannot be based on evidence, such a fully determined
assent would be an act of faith. This is absurd, and I take it that aquinas
would choose the first option: such a certitude is an impossibility. But I do
not see anything impossible in being fully certain that it will rain tomorrow.
whatever it might be, I mainly have quarrel with the idea that an act of faith
is incompatible with a certain form of doubt, so that the psychological
attitude of the person with some degree of disbelief would not be one of
faith, but of something like a partial belief, or rather a certain degree of
belief. This makes doubt and faith mutually exclusive. But this puzzles us
when we remember great believers (saints) who have admitted that they
have spent some time in the night of faith, having doubts about what they
nonetheless gave their assent to. The divine intervention might not be
paralleled with a firm assent. let us suppose that on the Morning of the
Resurrection, Peter and John stay in front of the empty tomb, John sees and
believes, firmly, and Peter is shaken and begins to believe in the Resurrection,
but with very little confidence. he is just above the limit between assent and
dissent, very close to doubt. he is in the state of suspicion, or of weak opinion.
now, say you had the power to see into John’s psychological attitude and
saw that it was due only to human psychology – something like the denial
of a person in mourning and suffering under some trauma – whereas Peter’s
attitude is due to a constant and important inspiration from god, without
which Peter would entirely resist believing in the Resurrection. I demand:
who has faith? is it true that John has faith, and that Peter has none? My
own inclination is to say just the opposite: John believes that Christ is alive,
but not as an act of faith, whereas Peter is close to doubt, but he has faith.
Concerning voluntariness, my objection consists of my agreement
with the widely held contemporary notion that belief is a passive and not
6
of course, «science» in aquinas is not equivalent to the current notion of knowledge,
though disagreement abunds on this last one. But certainly, aquinas’s notion is more
demanding. nonetheless, it is not clear to me that even that demanding notion (direct
evidence and deductions from direct evidences) requires certainty as a necessary
condition. on the distinction between faith and knowledge, see Swinburne, Faith
and Reason, p. 107 ff.

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78 CyRIlle MIChon
a volitional state of mind. whether it is a question of dispositional or occurent

belief (or judgment), neither are directly under the power of the will. To
use our earlier example, we cannot believe at will that it is or will be
raining, or that aquinas was a great theologian, nor can we stop believing
it at will, nor is there any point in an internal command to believe it. This
happens to be true of strong as well as of weak beliefs, and even of doubt
as suspension of assent. If it seems to me to be more probable that it will
be raining than not, I cannot suspend my judgment, but instead, the analysis
of my belief in the greater probability entails the belief that it will be more
likely to rain than not. I may not act on that belief, I may decide to go out,
without umbrella, as if I believed that it would not be raining. I could deny
that (I believe that) it will be raining. These are actions, that I can undertake
or refrain from undertaking, and that I can be ordered to undertake. actions
are under the power of the will, while passive cognitive states are not. now,
actions may operate on a passive substratum, for instance when I hear
a dog bark behind me and I respond to it by sticking my fingers in my ears.
The hearing is not something I can help; the stopping up of the sound is
something I can facilitate. Similarly, I may operate so as to have an indirect
causative power over my belief. I can induce myself into a state of credulity
or incredulity by, for instance, inquiring into a particular domain about
which I am curious so as to end up with beliefs I would not have acquired
without inquiry. It may not be in my power to not believe that the sun won’t
rise tomorrow, but I may acquire knowledge as to why the sun does rise
which leads to other beliefs, and in this way I exercise an indirect power
over my belief, or over my standards or policies for belief. But this is not
a matter of psychological or philosophical theory, a humean thesis, but
instead a logical truth that belief is not due to my whim: if I knew that my
belief (that aquinas was a great theologian) issued from my will, this
would undermine it. If I knew that my belief that it will be raining was
motivated by my wish to stay at home, I would not believe it anymore. It
belongs to the concept of belief (weak or strong) and to the concept of
doubt, that the thinker considers it as cognitively happening to him, and
not as something he voluntarily does.
now, one could argue that this might be true of belief in general, but
not of the particular case of faith. In response to this, I must first highlight
the fact that aquinas equates all non-evidential and non-scientific assents
(beliefs in meteorological events as well as divine ones) as being voluntary.
But let us make this not fully Thomistic distinction. aquinas says that the
believer sees the good that there is in assenting to the revelation (to believe

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that the Revelation is true)7. This is certainly true. But the question is: does
he believe because of this consideration? If what we have been saying
about belief in general is true, why should this not apply to faith? one
might argue that there is more to faith than propositional belief, to which
I would agree (and to which I will come back later). however, we are
discussing faith and the act of faith (credere) as defined by aquinas, within
his focus on the assent given to certain propositional contents (the articles
of the Creed namely). one feature is proper to propositional faith: absolute
certitude. I just criticized aquinas for his thesis that the act of faith has to
be fully endorsed by the believer. But let us agree that it may have only
a certain degree of certitude. one could then argue that, though the belief
state is not voluntary, the degree of certitude is. But here I fear the same
logic of belief kicks in. I do not see how one could raise or lower one’s
own degree of certitude at will. Rather, it seems that we can act so as to
indirectly create the conditions for a different degree of certitude, just as
we could in the case of all beliefs. once we have put ourselves in a certain
cognitive and affective situation, we are still bound up by the insulation of
belief – including its degrees – from the will. Belief and its degrees are
both cognitive states that happen to me, they are naturally occurring in me.
Finally, one could say that the introduction of the will in the assent
proper to faith is the way one can understand how the divine influence is
exercised. The act of faith is moved by the will that is itself moved by the
divine grace. But it seems the argument here lacks necessity: I do not see
how this could be the only way for god to act on the believer. The first
action of god in the process of faith is the act of revealing, through the
prophets, his own truth. Revelation is addressed to the cognitive faculty
by the way of a public message. and the private assent to this public
message is also a revelation of a particular sort; that is, the revelation to
this person that this message revealed to all is true. at least this is the way
Jesus speaks to Peter when he tells him, after his explicit act of faith (“you
are the Christ, the Son of the living god”): “Blessed are you, for this
revelation does not come from flesh and blood that have revealed this to
you, but from my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 16, 17). The divine influence
on the particular believer, the influence that makes him believe, seems also
to be a kind of light, directed to his cognitive powers rather than to his
7
Quaest. De ver., q.14, a.1 Sum. Theol., II-II, q.1, a.4; q. 2, a.1, ad 3; a.2 (which
grounds the difference between credere in Deum, credere Deo and credere Deum,
on the motion of the will: «the first truth is related to the will as it has the nature of
an end»).

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will. I would not deny that grace influences the will, but I would insist that
we can better describe the act of propositional faith by adducing the intellect
as the better candidate for receiving the divine influence. Both the content
and the assent have a divine origin, and both can be described in terms of
revelation, light, knowledge that are given to mankind, to a people or to
a particular person. we have to keep distinct two senses of revelation: the
first is a revelation that makes a content known or understood, and the
second is a revelation that makes it being believed, assented to. Perhaps
we are misled here by the distinction public-private, for god can make
a particular content that is known to only one person, but this is not enough
to provoke assent: a further action is needed to make the content be
believed. aquinas explicitly recognizes it when he says that faith is from
God (a Deo) a) with respect to the things that are proposed on the outside
(ex parte rerum quae exterius proponuntur) – the content; and b) with
respect to the inner light on the inside (ex parte interioris luminis) – the
assent8. In this part of the argument, aquinas does not mention the will.
Surely adding the will later to this description of revelation is unnecessary,
since it shifts the focus away from the event of the revelation itself, which
is a matter of divine and not mortal action.
3. So far, we seem to be picking at aquinas’s description and the traditional

statement that faith is voluntary, is meritorious, and, as far as dispositional
faith is concerned, is a virtue. Is there no way, then, to rescue these state-
ments?
8
In Boet. De Trin. q.3, a.1, ad 4. aquinas says: “… in faith by which we believe in
god, not only is there acceptance of the truths to which we give assent, but also
something which inclines us to that assent; and this is the special light which is
the habit of faith, divinely infused into the human mind. This, moreover, is more
sufficient for inducing belief than any demonstration, for, though from the latter no false
conclusions are reached, still man frequently errs in this: that he thinks something is
a demonstration which is not. The light of faith is also more sufficient than the natural
light of reason by which we assent to first principles, since this natural light is often
impeded by bodily infirmity, as is evident in the case of the insane. But the light
of faith, which is, as it were, a kind of impression of the First Truth in our minds,
cannot fail, any more than god can deceive us or lie; therefore this light suffices for
making judgment.” with this I have no quarrel. But he then adds: “This habit of faith,
nevertheless, does not move us by way of intellectual understanding, but more by
way of the will; therefore it does not make us comprehend those truths which we
believe, nor does it force assent, but it causes us to assent to them voluntarily.” and
I do not see the justification for this addition.

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I guess that there is, and that you can see how. our reform consists in
enlarging the concept of faith (disposition and act) so as to include some
actions that are under the control of the will. There are actions that prepare
the assent, and may lead to it. god’s first command is the command to listen
(Shema Israel). In order to believe some particular content, one has to be
acquainted with it: this might be the result of an involuntary encounter, but
it might also be due to some active participation: inquiring, listening to,
thinking about. let’s call these actions upstream with regard to the assent
proper to the act of faith. and let’s also look at downstream actions, which
follow the act of faith, and are in a certain accordance with it, even though
they are not necessitated by it. The profession of faith is a first example.
But so are the behaviors that are governed by signs and rituals belonging
to divine revelation (prayer, charity and so on), and which can be said
based on faith. aquinas made an important distinction between dead
(or unformed) and living faith (or faith formed by love), according to the
presence of charity in the believer. This helps us to understand James’
remark that the devils also believe, and they shudder (Jas 2, 19). Such belief
and faith is not meritorious, according to aquinas. Meritorious faith has
to go with works, actions, that suppose the presence of love. But aquinas
does not reject the idea that belief without works is not even voluntary.
I would go far enough to claim that one can exert the assent proper to faith
without acting upon it. Such is the faith of James’s devils, whose faith is
dead, being only the passive result of god’s inner revelation.
at this point, a contemporary epistemologist would surely refer to the
opposition of acceptance to the concept of belief. according to many
philosophers, notably Jonathan Cohen, to accept a proposition is to take
a special attitude towards it, while believing is just a passive state that has
causes but over which one has no direct power. To bet is to take some stand
towards a proposition, to build a strategy is to do the same with many
propositions. But, as well as one can lie and profess a proposition one does
not assent to, one can bet in favor of a proposition that one does not believe,
or build a strategy that take as granted propositions that one disbelieve.
I can accept advice given to me in extreme circumstances by a person I have
every reason to disbelieve (he always betrayed me before), because I do
not see any other way out of my problem. In that case I consider the propo-
sition as true, I act as if it were true, though, if asked what I believe, I might
answer that I believe the proposition is false. The requisites of action, or
any purposive behavior whatsoever, can motivate acceptance even when
belief is absent. and the reverse is possible: one can refuse to accept, even

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reject, what one believes, for some reason or other. Descartes’ method-
ological doubt consists in refusing to accept those propositions that one
can believe but that one realizes can be doubted. w.k. Clifford’s example
of the shipowner who should have rejected the belief he had that the boat
would not sink was about whether belief itself could be blameworthy, and
not just the decision one takes because of a belief. But, if belief is a passive
state, one cannot be directly responsible for it. The shipowner can be
blamed for what he did by not ensuring the safety of the ship, or for having
accepted his belief, and acted on that belief and acceptance, but not for
believing what he (passively) believed. given our notion that responsibility
only makes sense in the framework of actions and decisions over which
we have some control, we understand how there can be an ethics of
acceptance, but not how there can be an ethics of belief. The engineers
of an airline might well be incorrectly persuaded that a particular make of
jet would not fail, but they do not accept their belief until all the procedures
of its testing had been satisfied. of course, the usual situation is to accept
what one believes, but belief and acceptance are distinct psychological
phenomena, one passive and involuntary and one active and voluntary.
now, if our definition of faith includes some actions before or after
the assent, in particular if faith includes the acceptance of the belief that
the Revelation (as expressed, for instance, in the articles of the Creed) is
true, then we can understand how faith may be said to be voluntary. we
could even understand that the divine influence is also given to the will,
so that there would be three steps
– the (public) revelation of the content, so that the person can
know/understand it
– the (private) inner revelation, so that the believer can assent to it
– the inner action on the will, so that the believer can accept the belief
he or she holds and profess it, act on it, die for it.
Thus, if faith is understood in this broader sense as living faith or as formed

faith (by charity), then there should be no problem in saying that faith is
voluntary, is meritorious, or is a virtue. at least the problem I mentioned
vanishes, repairing aquinas’s analysis to extend the characteristics of the
act of faith further than assent to a propositional content.
If this is done, we can draw interesting consequences.
First, the question of the certainty of the assent to the Creed may be
reconstrued as implying the full determination of the acceptance. This
comes closer to the Christian experience, sanctioned by the gospels, that

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one may entertain doubts about this or that aspect of the divine revelation
while at the same time accepting without hesitation the articles of faith,
for which one would die rather than commit apostasy9.
Second, since the assent could be moved by god, and thus be unfolded
disguised, so to speak, under the felt aspect of the phenomenal character
(such as certitude and voluntariness) of other kinds of assents, the believer
would have no clue to identify his assent as an act of faith. one could argue
the point that there is one or another specific contents of the revelation,
like the Trinity of the divine Persons, that require divine assistance to be
assented to meaningfully. This would always make faith a gift from god.
however, this point is not self-evident, as it assumes that the revelation
contains content that no one could have purely mundane reasons to believe
in. Recall our contrast of the two hypothesized states of mind of Peter and
John. The proper consequence to draw seems to me that there is no clear
indication that one’s belief is occasioned by divine assistance, that is by
faith. Faith is not naturally recognizable. or: faith is itself an object of
faith, and also an object of belief as opinion. Joan of arc answered the
question: “are you in a state of grace?” with the word: “If I am, please god
let me in, and if I am not, please god set me in” (Si j’y suis que Dieu m’y
garde, si je n’y suis pas que Dieu m’y mette). I suppose that the same could
be said about faith.
here, I must add a remark. Contemporary religious philosophers often
assert that belief in the Christian revelation is just propositional faith. I dis-
agree. The idea that faith is not only a belief in a certain content, but also
a gift that could be possessed without being received, is well grounded in
the Christian tradition. This implies as a consequence, that from a Christian
point of view, belief in another content cannot be properly called faith
(there is no faith in the doctrine of the Qoran, only belief, and acceptance).
one might want to make a distinction between faith as a general proposi-
tional attitude, and supernatural faith. natural or human faith would be
9
This is the idea suggested by De veritate, q. 10 a. 12 ad s. c. 6: «ad sextum dicendum,
quod illa quae sunt fidei, certissime cognoscuntur, secundum quod certitudo importat
firmitatem adhaesionis: nulli enim credens firmius inhaeret quam his quae per fidem
tenet. non autem cognoscuntur certissime, secundum quod certitudo importat
quietationem intellectus in re cognita: quod enim credens assentiat his quae credit,
non provenit ex hoc quod eius intellectus sit terminatus ad illa credibilia virtute
aliquorum principiorum, sed ex voluntate, quae inclinat intellectum ad hoc quod illis
creditis assentiat. et inde est quod de his quae sunt fidei, potest motus dubitationis
insurgere in credente.»

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84 CyRIlle MIChon
distinct from belief, for example, by including a certain confidence in the

source of the content, or even by having some particular content. and
supernatural faith would imply divine assistance and bear on the content
of Revelation. But it is clear that what I am talking about, and what
aquinas is talking about, is supernatural faith, be it or not a species of
a more general psychological attitude.
Finally, another consequence flows from the argument I am offering:
there is no part of the divine Revelation that we could not believe on the
basis of good reasons without the help of god. That is, we have no reason
to think belief in it would be impossible on purely human grounds. This
opens the door to argument in favor of any part of this content (from god’s
existence or compatibility with evil to the resurrection of the bodies, or the
Trinity of the divine Persons). But at the same time, this implies that no
reasoning would produce (supernatural) faith, only belief and perhaps
acceptance. Faith as I have construed it requires divine assistance. That
a certain person has faith might be manifest in some actions that are above
the human forces, according to our judgment. But we cannot be sure, as
no human behavior is obviously above the human possibilities. we can
certainly believe (by the way of conjecture) that we or others have faith,
and we certainly can base this belief on the observation of our or their
behavior. In doing so we could also receive divine assistance, but under the
same phenomenal form: that is, I only believe it, maybe by faith, maybe not.
now to conclude I come back to aquinas, and I ask: would he have
accepted these remarks and mainly the emendation of his quasi-definition
of faith that I proposed? would he have admitted that belief is not volun-
tary, that the pure assent is a passive reaction, and that only acceptance is
really under the power of the will, as well as all other actions that can be
based on the belief? well, since I believe that the distinction between belief
and acceptance is a good and useful one, and I believe that aquinas was
a great theologian, so I believe he would have made the distinction, and
would have drawn the same conclusions.

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PIoTR guTowSkI
To Be in Truth
or not to Be Mistaken?
Introduction
My aim, here, is, firstly, to sketch a map of the controversy staged in
william James’ famous essay, The Will to Believe, between agnosticism
and “the right to belief”; and secondly, to suggest that in polemicizing
against agnosticism, James mistakenly weakens the distinction between it
and atheism. Furthermore, James’ defense of “our right to adopt a believing
attitude in religious matters” – reads, in the context of his examples, as
applying to just one type of belief, i.e. the set of beliefs that concern the
future life of a given person. My interpretation of the doctrine that hope
has a right to be taken into account in the discussion of the truth of religion
(James’ position) situates it in the broader context of James’ other themes
– his empiricism, anti-scientism and personalistic ontology. In this broader
perspective, James’ distinction between the desire not to be mistaken and
the desire for truth resonates with James’ whole epistemology.
My paper contains five sections:
1. The challenge of agnosticism consists in the precept that we should
‘avoid mistakes’;
2. The distinction between avoiding error and searching for truth, laid
down by James as the first move to counter the epistemological
assumptions of agnosticism;
3. The theism-atheism controversy, science and “our passional nature”;
4. Theism, the future, and “the deepest needs of our breast”;
5. Two responses to two objections and idealistic personalism.

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86 PIoTR guTowSkI
1. The challenge of agnosticism consists

in the precept that we should ‘avoid mistakes’
at first sight agnosticism seems to be a universally valid position, espe-
cially if it is construed so as to be in opposition to the precept that we
should make mistakes. when objective evidence, after it has been honestly
consulted, is found insufficient to decide an issue one way or another, it
seems reasonable to say: “I do not know”. Take for example the problem
of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings. If you are asked
whether you believe in their existence, you may consider answering “yes”
for various reasons – say, you have friends who believe in them, or you
have seen or have heard about people who have seen uFos. In this case,
even if uFos turn out to be weather balloons, it is still logically possible
– given the countless number of solar systems – that there are intelligent
creatures in the universe other than human beings. you may also consider
the answer “no” because uFo sightings can be explained without resorting
to the story that they are extraterrestrial vehicles with non-human
intelligent beings on board. and quite apart from the uFo evidence, you
may think that given our scientific knowledge about the peculiarities of
the earth that have made life evolve upon it, the probability of the existence
of non-human intelligent creatures in the universe is extremely low. Such
differences of opinion can be found not only in the group of uneducated
people but also among well informed scientists and philosophers.
There is, however, another position that seems to be the most reason-
able in the above controversy: to say: “I simply do not know if Martians
exist”. In other words, I withhold my judgment; I refuse to say either “yes”
or “no”. If I say “yes” or “no” I may “hit upon” the truth, but I may also
be mistaken. Should I, however, gamble in such a way? wouldn’t it be
better to avoid mistakes rather than to chase after a truth about which the
evidence, up until this point, is inconclusive? By deciding to withhold my
judgment I certainly avoid committing mistakes. This type of reaction is
called agnostic. examples confirming the agnostic intuition can easily be
multiplied, and we even find the attitude institutionalized in, for instance,
the principle of jurisprudence that, from the point of view of the court, an
accused person is legally innocent until proven guilty. If somebody is
accused of committing a crime, people usually split into three groups: those
who believe the suspect is guilty, those who believe she or he is not guilty,
and those who say “we do not know”. The last reaction does not mean
“we do not know and will never know” but rather “we do not know now,

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To Be in Truth or not to Be Mistaken? 87
so we have to wait for further evidence”. In other words, proponents of

agnosticism are far from renouncing their interest in truth, but, on the
contrary, stick to the truth as they know it, which is that they lack the
evidence to decide the matter on rational grounds. Thus, they say: “we
prefer to wait for new evidence, and the only thing that can be truthfully
said now is ‘we do not know’”.
It is noteworthy that the answer “I do not know” or “I refuse to take
any stand” or “I withhold my judgment” is not always a reliable indicator
of agnostic attitude. If you are asked by robbers where your children are,
you may say, “I do not know”. It does not mean, however, that you really
don’t know where they are. you may know perfectly well that they are
hidden in a secret place in your house but for the sake of their safety you
simply refuse to reveal this information. obviously, in that case you are
not agnostic: you intentionally hide the truth. There are also other cases as
well where withholding one’s judgment or saying “I do not know” does
not indicate the agnostic attitude so much as an unwillingness to search
for evidence to confirm a supposition or form an opinion. For instance,
I might say “I don’t know what I want for dinner” because I haven’t given
the matter any attention and don’t feel it is a priority at the moment, even
though only I would know, ultimately, the answer to that question. we have
to restrict the term “agnosticism” only to the situations where somebody
really does not know the answer to a properly formulated question and he
or she does not want to make any mistake by guessing what the truth might
be. even if proponents of agnosticism do not have to renounce their interest
in larger truths, their main aim can be described in the form of the imper-
ative: ‘Avoid mistakes!’. Thus, if you do not have sufficient evidence for
accepting (or rejecting) a proposition, you should suspend your judgment.
This imperative is premised not only on an epistemological and method-
ological principle, but also a moral one: to believe something without
sufficient evidence is both a cognitive and moral error. The agnostic
imperative was formulated by the 19th century British philosopher and
mathematician william k. Clifford in his article The Ethics of Belief,
published for the first time in 1877: “It is wrong in all cases to believe
on insufficient evidence”1. James responded to this claim with his counter
argument in his Will to Belief essay.
If agnosticism is a universally valid position, religious people face
quite a serious problem, since they seem to accept their major beliefs
1
Clifford w.k. (1879). “The ethics of Belief”. In Lectures and Essays, vol. II, london:
Macmillan, 186.

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concerning the existence of god on “insufficient evidence”. Their response

can take two forms: 1) they may show that they have good evidence
supporting their conviction about truthfulness of religious beliefs or 2) they
may claim that the rule of agnosticism does not apply universally, i.e. that
at least in some cases there is no need for sufficient evidence, and that it is
precisely these cases that motivate religious beliefs. In the first case we go
to considerations in epistemology concerning, among others, the nature
of human knowledge and its components (truth, justification, warrant),
probability or necessity of some belief being true, etc. I will leave aside
this line of argument, although of course there are great philosophers in
the Christian tradition who have chosen to work in this field, especially alvin
Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, and Peter van Inwagen. The second strategy
was developed by william James in the book The Will to Believe published
for the first time in 1897, and specifically in the essay of that name.
2. The distinction between avoiding error and searching

for truth, laid down by James as the first move to
counter the epistemological assumptions of agnosticism
william James admitted that in many cases, e.g. in solving scientific
problems, when we do not have sufficient evidence for accepting or
rejecting belief p or not p, we should suspend our judgment. as he puts it,
historically, the rise of science has come with the objective testing of
beliefs that are premised on what we want to be so, and a rejection of that
subjective feeling as any kind of evidence. There are, however, cases when
we have the right to believe despite the lack of objective evidence. To make
his point he introduces certain terminological distinctions. he uses the term
hypothesis for “anything that may be proposed to our belief”, and the term
option for the decision between two hypotheses: “options may be of
several kinds. They may be – 1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable;
3, momentous or trivial”2
a living option is one in which both hypotheses make some appeal to
us or when they produce in us willingness to act. a dead option does not
make such appeal to us. The feature of being alive or dead is not an objec-
tive feature of hypotheses (beliefs) but it refers to psychological state of
mind of various individuals reared in various cultures reacting to certain
2
James w. (1979). The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy.
Cambridge: harvard university Press, 14.

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situations. So e.g. if I am a crippled person without legs moving on a wheel-

chair, the option: “go to Mount everest” is probably a dead option, it does
not appeal to me. It may stimulate my imagination, but is unlikely to trigger
my willingness to act. on the other hand, the option: “go to the cinema or
stay at home” may be a living one. as a rule an option is not simply living
or dead for me but it may be more or less alive. If the option is completely
dead I will just ignore it without deciding which hypothesis to choose. If
the option is mostly living, I will have a strong feeling that I have to decide.
a forced option is “every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction,
with no possibility of not choosing”3. If I say to you: “Stand up or do not
stand up”, you have to choose one of the two disjunctive possibilities. But
when I say: “Stand up or lie down” it is an avoidable option to you: you
may stay sitting, you may kneel or walk away, and so on. To explain when
the option is momentous and trivial, let me use william James’ example:
If I were Dr. nansen and proposed to you to join my north Pole expedition,
your option would be momentous; for this would probably be your only
similar opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude you from
the north Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of
it into your hands. he who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses
the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per contra, the option is trivial
when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when
the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options
abound in the scientific life. a chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to
spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent. But if his
experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for his loss of time,
no vital harm being done4.
The point of Jamesian distinctions between various kind of options is to

say that there are many different types of problematic situations and it
would be highly inappropriate to have one universal prescription for all of
them. This is in line with pluralism that permeates his whole philosophy.
For our purpose it is important to know that when an option is of the forced,
living and momentous kind, James calls it a genuine option. If an option is
genuine, we are not obliged, according to him, to suspend our judgment
and wait for new evidence. we have a right to believe, which means we
have a moral right to believe on insufficient evidence from the point of
3
4

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view of science. This right is strictly connected with practical necessity of

action that solves this type of problematic situations. James compares
people who choose not to act in such a case to a man who hesitated
“indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not
perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home”5.
In other words, the nature of genuine options (or genuine problematic
situations) is such that they exclude staying in the state of hesitancy and
so also in the state of withdrawal of any judgment.
let us consider the following option: “accept a religious (e.g. Christian)
point of view or reject it”. For those who live in cultures where Christianity
is the dominant religion, this is a living option. If we assume that a religious
hypothesis may be true (not that it is actually true, but that it may be true),
the option becomes momentous in Jamesian sense since “we are supposed
to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain
vital good”. It is also a forced option, because “we cannot escape the
issue by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light […]. we do avoid
error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just
as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve”. as living, forced,
and momentous this option is, then, a genuine one. In this case it would
be unwise to wait for more evidence to make a decision because it is
unlikely that during our short life we will obtain such evidence. we have
to decide on insufficient evidence, and the real choice is only between
being religious and atheist6. Taking an agnostic stance would in that case
be unwise or even silly. James does not mean that we can thus stop looking
for evidence and modifying our previous beliefs. according to him, the
ideal for individual and social life should be ‘Look for the Truth!’, rather
than ‘avoid mistakes!’ In many cases these two imperatives remain in perfect
harmony: looking for truth is at the same time avoiding mistakes. But some-
times they push us in different directions. In the case of genuine options
the ideal of avoiding mistakes leaves us in a state of fearful suspension,
whereas the ideal of looking for truth makes us active, searching, and
5
6
It has to be remembered that for any option the feature of being genuine is not
universal but relative (the option may be genuine for me and not genuine for you).
It means that for many people theism-atheism controversy is not a genuine option –
they may be, for example, not interested in this problem at all. The Jamesian “right
to believe” doctrine concerns exclusively genuine problematic situations. It is quite
another question if some options regarded by certain people as not genuine should
be treated by them as genuine or vice versa.

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risking. according to the pragmatist principle that beliefs are wrapped up

in practices, the second attitude seems to be more fruitful for individuals
and for society as a whole. By believing we can ‘hit upon’ the truth without
having regular justification for it.7
It is important to remember one of James’ psychological claims about
the relation between our habits, thinking and judgments (beliefs). habit
“simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue”
and “diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed”:
The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless
custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free
for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than
one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting
of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to
bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of
express volitional deliberation.8
The state of indecision is meant to awaken thinking: the psychological and

evolutionary function of thinking is to react in cases where acquired habits
do not solve the problem. Thinking does not escape the economic limits
of energy assumed here: James takes it as a certain process in our mind
that ends in forming a judgment or belief within a mental routine – it acts
to simplify our life and in many cases enables our action. The emphatic
connection between believing and acting is a well-known theme in James’
philosophy. From this perspective agnosticism seems like a waste of
energy: it is a position that encourages staying in the state of indecision
and inaction, when the point of belief is to facilitate some action. There
are two conflicting ways of interpreting this position. First, that in case of
genuine problematic situations it is impossible to achieve such a state,
i.e. that in practice (and practice decides about content of our beliefs) it is
identical to atheism. But the second is to take agnosticism as a position
that is not only logically but also practically separate from theism and athe-
ism. True, it is based on some belief, but this is a different kind of belief
than theism or atheism, it is a belief about those two beliefs, a meta-belief.
7
and sometimes “the desire for a certain kind of truth […] brings about that special
truth’s existence” (James w. (1979). The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular
Philosophy. Cambridge: harvard university Press, 28). For example, if I assume that
you like me I will behave as if you like me, and by that I may in fact stimulate your
liking me. It is not, however, James’ intention to say that religious beliefs are of that kind.
8
James w. (1984). Psychology. Briefer Course. Cambridge/london: harvard university
Press, 128, 129, 134.

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In relation to them it can be legitimately called non-belief. what practice

can be supported by agnosticism? Much depends here on the genesis of
the agnostic attitude. If it is a result of gradual resignation from theistic
worldview, it can be even connected with the practice quite close to that
stimulated by theism, or it can be a similar move away from atheism. at
this point, its value depends on the lifestory of the agnostic.
3. The theism-atheism controversy, science

and “our passional nature”
James thus has reasons to not make a clear distinction between agnosticism
and atheism, but if we accord the agnostic attitude a practical dimension,
thus preserving it from atheism, his argument has a very interesting
consequence for the debate between religious believers and atheists. It
shows, that in the context of high agnostic demand for justification of our
beliefs, not only a theist but also an atheist is a believer. If so, atheists
cannot claim the superiority of their view over that held by religious people
by saying that their position is one of rational non-belief. James was
especially sensitive to the potential link between atheism and science. The
root of this fallacy is, according to him, in lack of distinction between
scientific and philosophical issues. In his 1892 Psychology. Briefer Course
he wrote about relation of scientific evidence to philosophical problem of
determinism and to ethical issues:
let psychology frankly admit that for her scientific purposes determinism
may be claimed, and no one can find fault. If, then, it turn out later that the
claim has only a relative purpose, and may be crossed by counter-claims, the
readjustment can be made. now ethics makes a counter-claim; and the present
writer, for one, has no hesitation in regarding her claim as the stronger,
and in assuming that our wills are ‘free.’ For him, then, the deterministic
assumption of psychology is merely provisional and methodological. This
is no place to argue the ethical point; and I only mention the conflict to
show that all these special sciences, marked off for convenience from the
remaining body of truth… must hold their assumptions and results subject
to revision in the light of each other’s needs. The forum where they hold
discussion is called metaphysics. Metaphysics means only an unusually
obstinate attempt to think clearly and consistently. The special sciences all
deal with data that are full of obscurity and contradiction; but from the point
of view of their limited purposes these defects may be overlooked9.
9
James w. (1984). Psychology. Briefer Course. Cambridge/london: harvard university
Press, 395.

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James was very much the self-described pluralist, as we can see from
the coloring of this argument. we can interpret James as claiming that
scientific evidence is neutral in relation to metaphysical controversies. In
other words science – more precisely present science – is and should
stay agnostic as to freedom of will or existence of god or gods. James
maintained this position throughout his entire career. In The Varieties of
Religious Experience, few years after writing The Will to Believe, he made
a distinction between science and what he called sectarian science, which
would be more or less what sometimes is called scientism. whereas science
properly conceived is based on rational and empirical evidence, and has
a sense of its own limits, sectarian science makes an imperialist grab to
judge all discourse. That is why sectarian scientists are prompt to announce
universality of naturalism and determinism whereas these positions are
accepted in science only as methodological assumptions10.
Peter van Inwagen emphasizes that in many areas, including philosophy,
politics, and religion, we cannot agree on what counts as evidence. he
thinks, however, that it does not follow from this that we have right to form
our beliefs without (what we regard as) good evidence. The difference
between us in what counts as evidence may be the result of some people
having better insight than others. Clifford’s rule should be preserved, but
it does not guarantee our agreement in all issues11. If we interpret James as
holding that in some cases we have the right to believe without evidence,
there is significant difference between him and van Inwagen. The difference
becomes less obvious, when we ascribe to James the theory that I have
right to believe on the basis of what I regard as evidence (assuming that
I and you form opposite beliefs in the field where both of us are experts).
In such a case James would agree with van Inwagen that certain kind of
insight can constitute objective evidence accessible only by some people
and not by others. what would be reason for that? In the context of religion
the term “grace” can be used, in the context of psychology the term “talent”
or “sensitivity. This disproportion in insights we observe quite clearly in
many fields from mathematics to esthetics. however, if we limit the notion
of evidence to scientific evidence or narrowly empirical evidence it follows
10
See James w. (1985). Varieties of Religious Experience. Cambridge/london: harvard
university Press, 105, 394, 408.
11
See van Inwagen P. (1996). “It is wrong, everywhere, always and for anyone,
to Believe anything upon Insufficient evidence”. In J. Jordan, D. howard-Snyder
(eds.), Faith, Freedom, Rationality. Philosophy of Religion Today, (137-153). lanham:
MD Rowman & littlefield.

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that atheists and proponents of naturalistic scientism have the same right
to their beliefs as religious people do. It is unlikely that metaphysical
evidence for each of the views will ever be accepted by opposing parties.
when we realize that besides various versions of atheism there are many
different religions, each with its own credo, this conclusion is depressing.
we have a right to believe in cases of genuine options, but there is no way
to determine rationally what we should believe. James does not give any
easy answer to this question. he notices that
our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option be-
tween 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 truth12.
It is not clear, what he means by saying that “our passional nature not
only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions”. Is it
just a statement about facts (that our emotions decide in all or in majority
of such cases), or is it also a statement about epistemic norm, and maybe
even moral norm (that our emotions should decide)? James himself
believed in superiority of the religious position over atheism, and he gave
some reasons for that; he did not just announce the preferences of his own
emotional nature. he was, however, conscious that those reasons will not
be counted as objective evidence by atheists or agnostics. Maybe that is
why he expressed his view as a defense of “right to believe” rather than
“right to accept evidence that is accessible to me and not to you”.
4. Theism, the future, and “the deepest needs

of our breast”
To look closer at this issue, it is important to notice that our right to believe
concerns just one type of beliefs, namely the beliefs that directly or indirectly
concern the future life of a given person and his or her hopes. James is not
clear about it in The Will to Believe but if we see this essay as an important
step in forming his philosophy, we can find clarification of this issue in
his Pragmatism. The critical side of the pragmatic method was designed
to identify empty philosophical, especially metaphysical, controversies.
12
The Will to Believe, 20.

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The emptiness of such controversies is, however, strictly connected with

their relation to time.
and first of all I call your attention to a curious fact. It makes not a single
jot of difference so far as the past of the world goes, whether we deem it
to have been the work of matter or whether we think a divine spirit was its
author. Imagine, in fact, the entire contents of the world to be once for all
irrevocably given. Imagine it to end this very moment, and to have no
future; and then let a theist and a materialist apply their rival explanations
to its history. The theist shows how a god made it; the materialist shows,
and we will suppose with equal success, how it resulted from blind physical
forces. Then let the pragmatist be asked to choose between their theories.
how can he apply his test if the world is already completed? Concepts for
him are things to come back into experience with, things to make us look
for differences. But by hypothesis there is to be no more experience and
no possible differences can now be looked for. Both theories have shown
all their consequences and, by the hypothesis we are adopting, these are
identical. The pragmatist must consequently say that the two theories, in
spite of their different-sounding names, mean exactly the same thing,
and that the dispute is purely verbal. [I am supposing, of course, that the
theories have been equally successful in their explanations of what is.]13
The situation changes completely if we see the same controversy in the

context of our future life. here the metaphysical problem makes a difference
to us, because it concerns our deepest hopes:
as far as the past facts go, indeed there is no difference. Those facts are in,
are bagged, are captured; and the good that’s in them is gained, be the atoms
or be the god their cause. There are accordingly many materialists about
us to-day who, ignoring altogether the future and practical aspects of the
question, seek to eliminate the odium attaching to the word materialism,
and even to eliminate the word itself, by showing that, if matter could give
birth to all these gains, why then matter, functionally considered, is just as
divine an entity as god, in fact coalesces with god, is what you mean by
god. Cease, these persons advise us, to use either of these terms, with their
outgrown opposition…But philosophy is prospective also, and, after finding
what the world has been and done and yielded, still asks the further question
‘what does the world promise?’ …
Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively, point,

when we take them prospectively, to wholly different outlooks of experience.
For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the laws of redistri-
bution of matter and motion, tho they are certainly to thank for all the good
13
James w. (1975). Pragmatism. Cambridge/london: harvard university Press, 50-51.

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hours which our organisms have ever yielded us and for all the ideals which
our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain to undo their work again, and
to redissolve everything that they have once evolved…This utter final
wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present
understood.
The notion of god, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in

clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy,
has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal
order that shall be permanently preserved. a world with a god in it to say
the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as
still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition;
so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck
and dissolution not the absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral
order is one of the deepest needs of our breast.14
now, everything depends, how we treat “the deepest needs of our breast”.
If we say that they merely provide a grand label for what comes down to
wishful thinking, materialism is the metaphysics for us. If, however, we
take these human hopes to intuit some extra-human content, some kind of
theism is much better. Can we get rid of those “ifs”? James would probably
say that it is more a question of experience and estimation of its significance
in our total life than a problem that can be solved by rational arguments.
arguments succeed experience, functioning, sometimes, to clarify it, and
sometimes to deform it. That is why we should not treat them as the main
tool of the branch of philosophy dealing with ultimate questions. also,
estimation of our experiences has to take into account our total life – not
just some of its fragments. In the light of this broadly empiricist and
holistic philosophy, the choice – real and important to each of us – cannot
be made on narrow rational or empirical ground.
5. Two responses for two objections,

and idealistic personalism
There are two important objections against James’ defense of the legitimacy
of religious faiths. The first one is that it encourages irrationalism that
might even be dangerous. he responded to this charge in the introduction
to the book Will to Believe where the essay under the same title was published:
14

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I quite agree that what mankind at large most lacks is criticism and caution,
not faith. Its cardinal weakness is to let belief follow recklessly upon lively
conception, especially when the conception has instinctive liking at its
back. I admit, then, that were I addressing […] a miscellaneous popular
crowd it would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believing
[…]. what such audiences most need is that their faiths should be broken
up and ventilated, that the northwest wind of science should get into them
and blow their sickliness and barbarism away. But academic audiences, fed
already on science, have a very different need. Paralysis of their native
capacity for faith and timorous abulia in the religious field are their special
forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion, carefully instilled,
that there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon which
they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth […]15.
This is a quite good response to the objection if the defense of our right to
belief is directed against agnostics or skeptics or positivists and their
conviction about omniscience of science. If it were directed to religious
fanatics, it would be inappropriate and even harmful. Besides, our right to
form some beliefs on the basis of faith is one thing, and our obligation to
rationalize it another one. how and to what extent we can and should fulfill
this obligation is still another matter. James was skeptical about the good
done by the rationalization, dogmatization and institutionalization of
religion, while seeing at the same time the human need for those processes.
The second objection concerns pluralism of religions. his argument
does not help us to decide which religion is better. It seems, then, that
James leads us in the direction of relativism. his response to this charge is
as follows:
If religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the active
faiths of individuals in them, freely expressing themselves in life, are the
experimental tests by which they are verified, and the only means by which
their truth or falsehood can be wrought out. The truest scientific hypothesis
is that which, as we say, ‘works’ best; and it can be no otherwise with
religious hypotheses. Religious history proves that one hypothesis after
another has worked ill, has crumbled at contact with a widening knowledge
of the world, and has lapsed from the minds of men. Some articles of faith,
however, have maintained themselves through every vicissitude, and
possess even more vitality today than ever before … [Faiths] ought to live
in publicity, vying with each other; and it seems to me that (the régime of
tolerance once granted, and a fair field shown) the scientist has nothing to
fear for his own interests from the liveliest possible state of fermentation
15
James w. (1975). Pragmatism. Cambridge/london: harvard university Press, 7.

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in the religious world of his time […]. he should welcome therefore every
species of religious agitation and discussion, so long as he is willing to
allow that some religious hypothesis may be true […]. Religious fermen-
tation is always a symptom of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is
only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and
authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm16.
according to my interpretation, the “right to believe” doctrine allows great

variety of not only religious but also atheistic beliefs17. It does not mean,
however, that all beliefs are equally good and acceptable. as the passage
above implies, there is a Darwinian flavor to James’ theory of the rise and
fall of specific religious beliefs, even if that theory ignores exogenous
factors (the conquest of peoples with one religion by those of another, for
instance) and concentrates on endogenous ones (claims made by specific
religions, such as the claim that the earth is the center of the universe, are
discredited by ‘widening knowledge of the world”). granted these contin-
gencies, „the fittest” worldview would seem to be that which is the soundest
in kind of a personalistic sense: namely, one which harmonizes objective
impersonal knowledge with our individual human experiences and our
deepest needs. This requirement is strictly connected with Jamesian
individualistic and panpsychic ontology and with his empiricism. within
this philosophy there are still problems with choosing this or that religion,
but we can find a good reason in our sense that our existence is meaningful
for preferring a general religious worldview over an atheistic one, especially
if the latter endorses a scientifically based naturalism.
The reason is this: contemporary science does not take into account
the fact of subjectivity that generates first person perspective of our
experience. Because of its goals (e.g. exactitude, precision, and universal
knowledge) and because of its methodological assumptions (looking for
natural causes of everything, e.g. mental phenomena), science is right to
ignore the fact of our first person experience. however, it should never
blind us to the fact that scientific categories (including “matter” and
“nature”) are ultimately the results of human minds. This fact should be
16
17
atheism as a separate thesis “god does not exist” is just one simple belief, but it is
usually connected with other numerous beliefs that are treated as integral to this
view, and not necessarily shared by all atheists. This is the main source of plurality
of atheisms. The situation is analogical to the diversity among theists, although it
can be claimed that there is much greater plurality of views here arising from various
interpretations of the term “god” in the thesis “god exists”.

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taken into account by any proper and full description of the world. at present,
it is taken into account by religion, and rejected by science. In Varieties of
Religious Experience he writes:
The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic places – they are strung
upon it like so many beads. To describe the world with all the various
feelings of the individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes,
left out from the description – they being as describable as anything else –
would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for
a solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The individual’s religion
may be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with
may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less
hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a Science which prides itself on
taking no account of anything private at all.
a bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word ‘raisin,’ with one
real egg instead of the word ‘egg,’ might be an inadequate meal, but it
would at least be a commencement of reality”18.
This basically idealistic argument is in line with Jamesian skepticism as to

the completeness claims of actual science, in conjunction with his postulate
to broaden its scope so that now omitted facts can be included by future
science and his idea that limits of naturalistic science can be partially
overcome by philosophy. however, philosophy does not give us any ulti-
mate knowledge but rather justifies our right to believe in this or that vision
of the world. one of the criteria of choice between various metaphysical
systems may concern the adequacy and accuracy of world description.
Still, however, there will be debates about the meaning of those criteria.
By accepting a personalistic ontology, James equips himself with good
reasons for skepticism about metaphysical meaning of present scientific
results based on naturalistic presumption. Religious worldview seems to
be quite attractive in this perspective since – according to him – it includes
essential element of the world that was not taken into account by science.
In James’ time the dominant positivism endorsed by mainstream
philosophers rejected any hint of a personalistic ontology, with its central
claim that human subjectivity is the primary fact about the world. They
were not only metaphysical naturalists but also, in supposing the progress
of intellectual history, neo-hegelian idealistic monists. Do such people
have right to believe in what they believe? Taking into account what was
said before, the answer is yes. It does not mean, however, that we cannot
18
Varieties of Religious Experience, 394.

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100 PIoTR guTowSkI
argue about omissions in their ontology (this is what James is doing in

many of his philosophical works). on the other hand, the persuasive power
of narrow rational arguments is limited if we disagree about the interpre-
tation of our basic experiences, and even the choice between rationalism
and empiricism seems to be based on psychological reasons. But we do
not have to embrace total subjectivism – certainly James did not. This
situation means only that finding the proper instrument for making one’s
choice of these positions is not simple, and that it ought to comprise
an evaluation of the short and long term consequences of respective views
in the lives of individuals and societies.
Conclusion
The fact that throughout the history of humanity, people regarded as educated
and wise, while differing in their worldviews, usually reject agnosticism
in important matters, confirm Jamesian ‘will to believe’ theory taken as
a psychological description of matters of fact. Do we have also “right” to
believe in what psychological nature inclines us to believe? The answer
to this question depends on some additional conditions. we certainly do
not have this right in cases where there is good evidence supporting one
of the opposing views. we have it if 1) there is no such evidence, and
2) the option is genuine. Such cases concern only beliefs that take some
view about the future, and they cannot be formed exclusively on the basis
of present science. In such cases it is better to accept the precept, “look
for the truth!” then conform to the precept, “avoid mistakes!”. It is both
more natural and more reasonable to form some belief than to stay in the
state of agnosticism, which is itself a belief.
It has to be remembered that for James the right to form beliefs in the
cases described above does not mean the right to maintain them or maintain
them in unchanged form. we have an intellectual obligation to look
for their broad consequences and for their coherence with other uncontro-
versial beliefs. we have to be cautious, however, in declaring logical
or empirical incoherence with other beliefs or facts. what seems to be
incoherent at first sight can be coherent after detailed examination. James
believed that the argument of violating logical principles is often misused.
Reason is just an instrument of experience – that is why on social level if
some set of beliefs does not violate basic moral rules and if people who
accept those beliefs preserve at least some capacity for skepticism about
their truth, they we can find no harm in their flourishing, which means that

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we cannot out of hand condemn the development of both their short and
long-term practical consequences. Democratic idea of religious freedom
and tolerance in relation to various worldviews that are not harmful in
some general sense of “harm” finds its foundation in this theory.
what kind of epistemology is involved in this view? To answer this
question briefly one could say that it is strongly anti-Cartesian, broadly
empiricist epistemology that views the mind as continually adjusting new
data to old worldviews. For this epistemology, the data of science does not
trump our deepest human hopes and personal experience, but rather all of
this data must be part of the domain of knowing and believing. It is thus
an epistemology without certitudes, full of “ifs”, and without such notions
as “necessary”, “all” or “always. It is also epistemology that prefers our
desire “to be in truth” over the desire of “not to be mistaken” in those cases
where they are in conflict over genuinely ultimate questions.

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Do We Have the Epistemic Right

to Believe in Jesus?
An Epistemological Analysis of Some Arguments
for Credibility of Christianity
The epistemology of religion (or religious epistemology) deals with the

cognitive (or epistemic) status of religious beliefs and how they are justified.
From the perspective of the general epistemology of religion, we can
disregard particular kinds of beliefs; but as religious beliefs are various, we
also need particular epistemologies to examine defined sets of beliefs.
Christianity, for instance, is constituted by belief in Jesus of nazareth as
the Resurrected Christ (Messiah) and god, and this brings up the particular
epistemological issue of whether Christians have the epistemic right to
believe in Jesus? In order to show this “right”, Christian apologists from
the beginning of Christianity have formulated various arguments for the
truth or credibility of the specific assumptions of its doctrine. In this paper,
I will reconstruct and evaluate two types of apologetic arguments. with regard
to the character of their most important premises the first one of them I shall
call the a posteriori argument and the second one – the a priori argument.1
I. The a posteriori argument

The a posteriori arguments for the right to believe in Jesus inherit the
“historical Jesus” school of reasoning, and reference certain historical data
1
The arguments constitute the ‘internal factors’ in justifying the belief in Jesus. There
is as well a set of arguments that rely on an ‘externalist element’. I omit them from
discussion in this paper. Cf. w. J. abraham (2009, 159).

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concerning the person of Jesus of nazareth and the beginnings of the first
Christian communities. The historical data forms the basis for demonstrating
that the best (or the simplest) explanation of the story of the resurrection
is that Jesus did actually rise from the dead, fulfilling a religious mission
that changes our basic sense of the world. My reconstruction of the most
important historically based arguments consists of three parts: assumptions,
(a minimum of) historical data and explanation of the data (in the light of
the assumptions).
Assumptions
The assumptions that background the a posteriori school are as follows:
a1. There are data concerning the life of Jesus that are accepted by
a majority of historians.
a2. an interpretation of the data that is neutral in terms of the outlook
on the world is possible – i.e. we can, in first analyzing the data, suspend
the question of whether naturalism or theism is true or false, or whether
miracles are empirically possible or impossible.
a3. when evaluating the cognitive value of accounts given by people
who lived in the 1st century a.D., one should be guided by two principles:
the Principle of Testimony and the Principle of Credulity. The former tells
us that ‘(in the absence of special considerations) the experiences of others
are (probably) as they report them’ (Swinburne 2004, 322); while the latter
tells us that ‘(in the absence of special considerations), if it seems (epis-
temically) to a subject that x is present (and has some characteristic), then
probably x is present (and has that characteristic)’ (Swinburne 2004, 303).
a4. we should reason to the best explanation in examining historical
data; “the best” means here “the simplest”, and “the simplest” means:
accepting the fewest theses reaching beyond the data.
Historical data
It is not easy to reach a consensus on what historical data concerning Jesus
and his disciples is beyond reasonable doubt. C.a. evans (2009, 34) –
following e.P. Sanders – claims that there are several ‘facts or activities
about which we may be relatively confident’.2 I believe that the core of
the facts accepted by the consensus is as follows:
2
Cf. a. Plantinga (2000, 414-418, especially 415), who in a critical manner examines
a.e. harvey’s views and those of other representatives of the so called non-Troeltschian
historical Biblical Criticism.

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Do we have the epistemic Right to Believe in Jesus? 105
D1. Jesus was a charismatic religious teacher.

D2. Jesus was aware of his exceptional (probably “sacrificial”) religious
mission.
D3. Jesus was executed about 30 a.D. in Jerusalem (probably because
of “the temple conflict”).
D4. after Jesus’ death a new religious community was formed, leaders
of which claimed that they had seen the bodily resurrected Jesus and that
he had given them the mandate to form a community of believers.
D5. This community quickly spread over the territories of the Roman
empire (in the 40s of the 1st century a.D. it already functioned in the cities
of greece and hellenized asia Minor).
Explanation
Thus, our question is: how (in the light of assumptions a1-a4) can one give
the easiest explanation of data D1-D5? Datum D4 and assumption a3 are
of the key importance here. In the light of a3, the easiest explanation of D4
is accepting that Jesus did actually rise from the dead, giving his disciples
the message which they then preached. unless we have a substantial reason
to doubt honesty of the first Christian leaders (and in the authenticity of
their records or the authenticity of the records of their records), we can –
by virtue of the Principle of Testimony – accept that they in fact saw the
resurrected Jesus (and heard his teachings).3 on the other hand, unless we
have a substantial reason to doubt their cognitive competences, we can – in
virtue of the Principle of Credulity – accept that the resurrected Jesus did
in fact reveal himself to them (and gave them his teachings). The exceptional
character of the (supposed) event, which is the rising from the dead, allows
us to treat it as a sign confirming the truth of Jesus’ teaching.4
3
The original testimonies about the resurrection of Jesus are Christian testimonies.
new Testament studies consider the proclamations of the resurrection of Jesus
themselves as the earliest (cf. 1 Thes. 1:10); the list of witnesses is supposed to have
been added later (cf. 1 Cor. 15:5-8), and the descriptions of Paschal Christophanies
were the last (luke 24:36-43; acts 9:3-8). The latter are divided into more “corporeal”
(as the ones concerning Cephas-Peter) and more “spiritual” (as the ones concerning
Saul-Paul). according to w.P. alston (1997), contrary to some of the biblical critics
(e.g. R. Fuller), there are no sufficient grounds to deny authenticity of the descriptions
of the former ones (“corporeal”).
4
I do not analyze here in detail the question of interpretation of the teaching. To be
sure, in the original Christian writings at least three layers of claims occur: (i) coming
from Jesus, (ii) coming from his actual disciples (apostles), (iii) coming from the
actual authors of the writings. In fact, however, all of them express or assume

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let us note that accepting that Jesus did actually rise from the dead
and delivered the message to his disciples, which was then preached by
them, constitutes a good explanation of D5 as well. For how is it possible
to accept D3 and D5 at the same time? In other words: how is it possible,
that after the death of Jesus a dynamic development of a group of his
followers takes place, ones who not so much commemorate him (as their
executed leader) but who propagate his strength-giving and living presence?
as M. Bockmuehl (2003, 103) puts it, ‘it is a matter of historical record
that [after Jesus’ death – J. w.] something happened – and that this changed
the course of world history’ – ‘without an event that occurred after his
death, we would almost certainly have no information of any kind about
Jesus of nazareth’ (Bockmuehl 2003, 102).
Evaluation
The above argument (especially in its last part) could be developed in detail.5
owing to this it can become more credible. But this does not alter the fact
that its value primarily depends on the value of the above mentioned
assumptions. let us have a closer look at them.
a survey of historical literature concerning the life of Jesus and the
beginnings of Christianity casts doubt on a1, as it is simply stated. as
Plantinga writes (Plantinga 2000, 402), ‘skeptical scripture scholars display vast
disagreement among themselves.’ when we take into account non-skeptical
authors, the disagreements mount. Rejecting a1 completely (understood as
at least a postulate to search for a minimum consensus amongst historians),
on the other hand, must lead to a radical historical relativism or skepticism,
which we can turn just as well on the accounts of other personages from
ancient times. I believe that data D1-D5 that I have specified can be
accepted by most moderate researchers even if they don’t accept the other
assumptions I have outlined, which is the best argument for a1.
the exceptional character of the man called Jesus. what is more, the acceptance of
reality of the resurrection of Jesus and the bestowal of the apostolic mandate to his
disciples makes rational sense of the acceptance of the cult of Jesus (that can be seen
in such writings as 1 Cor. 1:2-3 or Phil. 2:6,9-11) as a proper reaction to his person.
5
w.l. Craig (2008, 334-342) first reports the details as they appeared in the so called
traditional apologetic (the arguments for the authenticity and “purity” of the gospels;
arguments for reliability of the apostles: they were ‘neither deceivers nor deceived’);
then (Craig 2008, 350-399) he presents the details of his argument: the hypothesis
of an actual resurrection is the best explanation for the well documented facts: ‘the
fact of Jesus’ empty tomb’, ‘the fact of the postmortem appearances’, and ‘the fact
of the origin of the Christian faith’.

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a2 is harder to accept than a1. Is it possible to be completely neutral,

in terms of outlook on the world, in evaluating D1-D5? It is hard to find
someone, who in the starting point of research of the beginnings of
Christianity – as Plantinga puts it (Plantinga 2000, 414) – ‘doesn’t assume
that miracles did or could happen; but that is quite different from assuming
that they didn’t or couldn’t, and she [or he] doesn’t assume that either.’
a2 can be – similar to a1 – treated as at least a research postulate: try to
interpret and explain D1-D5, being directed only by the data, and not by
your own worldview. If we do not undertake such an attempt, we will be
left either with scarcity of data, or with pluralistic abundance of its inter-
pretations. Fulfillment of our cognitive curiosity will, however, not be
possible.
let us pass on to a3. It could be undermined in two ways: either by
denying the universal value of the Principle of Testimony or the Principle
of Credulity, or by showing that in the considered case restraints mentioned
in the preceding provisions (in the brackets) occur (cf. Swinburne 2004,
310-323). with respect to the former issue, the charges against the
discussed principles were soundly answered by Swinburne (Swinburne
2004, 304-310, 322-323); the principles can be then – at least for the
purpose of the consideration – regarded as reliable. with respect to the latter
issue, classical apologists have already given arguments against various
hypotheses of deception or illusion (as attempts to explain D4).6 however,
the existence of a more sophisticated religious illusion, whose mechanisms
remain unknown to us, or which is similar to irrational behavior under
the influence of a suggestion offered by a group (described by psychologists)
– as suggested by J.J.C. Smart – cannot be ruled out in this case.7 also, it
6
They (e.g. william Paley) pointed out e.g. (see note 5) that according to the historical
records people calling themselves witnesses of the appearances of the resurrected
Jesus – appearances that could be witnessed repeatedly and objectively (intersub-
jectively) – were normally cognizing and behaving human beings; what is more, the
people did not benefit from propagating certain beliefs, because they were repressed
for propagating them.
7
„The [Christian] argument relies on the sudden transformation of the disciples after
the crucifixion [...]. The transformation was indeed wonderful, but the workings of
the human brains are extremely complex and can be expected to issue in surprises.
In any case the transformation may not have been all that surprising. experience of
millennarian sects has given us instances of how resistant their devotees can be to
empirical disconfirmation when their millennarian expectations do not eventuate.
[...] a sect which behaved in this sort of way has indeed been studied [...] by the
american psychologists [...]” (Smart 1996, 65).

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cannot be ruled out that the mentality of the founders of Christianity was
radically different from ours: its religious ‘tint’ could influence their
perceptions and attitudes, and result in a subconscious – theological
or supernatural – interpretation of what they encountered and what
they did. The possibility of such an illusion or interpretation should
caution us against applying the Principle of Credulity or the Principle of
Testimony to the new Testament without second thought. however, this
caution does not undermine a2, nor lead to negating the grounds for the
Christian interpretation and explanation of D1-D5. Certainly it cannot
favour according to some principle understanding them in the naturalistic
way.8
a4 remains to be examined. The following arguments can be put
forward against its acceptance: reasoning to the best explanation sometimes
may be fallible when we gather further empirical information; criteria of
choosing the best (or the simplest) explanation are not unequivocal;
historical sciences concern human activities – and those are of enormous
variety and unpredictability – hence using methods typical of natural
sciences in them can lead to false results. This is all true, but apart from
the method of searching for the best explanation of historical data –
comparing and “weighing” possible hypotheses – we do not have any other
methods that would allow us to achieve more complete, though always
only probable, knowledge of the past.
as can be seen, a1-a4 are not unquestionable. on the other hand, if
we refute them, we must abandon a posteriori attempts to construct the
story of what actually happened with Jesus and who he was. Such an
attitude can culminate either in accepting ignorance of the discussed
question or in fulfillment (or replacement) of our ignorance by our prior
worldview beliefs. Those who, while not being agnostics, are not satisfied
with a posteriori and probabilistic knowledge about Jesus, must then have
some other method to back up their epistemic right to believe that Jesus is
the son of god. usually, the argument here stems from some more general
worldview or philosophical theses. Such an approach is typical of the
a priori argument.
8
even more so because it is hard to think that mentality of ancient people was different
from ours to such an extent that there was not epistemic “sense of reality” (in dis-
cerning a repeating and reliable experience from a singular illusion, and acting in
everyday life according to the former one) in it.

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II. The a priori argument

A priori arguments for the right to believe in Jesus do not proceed from
historical data, but subordinate it to a certain system of speculatively
justified theses. The theses, minimally supplemented by quite obvious
empirical data are to (in a quasi-deductive manner) lead to the conclusion
asserting the credibility of the Christian message about Jesus.9
The course of the argument

Many versions of the a priori argument start with three theses justified on
the grounds of the classical speculative metaphysics:
T1. god exists. he created the world.

T2. god is absolutely perfect. The manifestation of god’s perfection
is love.
T3. humans have a privileged status among all the creatures god
created.
let us supplement them with a quite obvious empirical and “socio-

logical” observation.
T4. human life is hard.
In that case, on the grounds of T1-T4, we can assert:
T5. god’s incarnation as a human is predictable (as highly probable)

or (at least) morally necessary.10
9
The most expressive (among the ones known to me) version of such an argument
was formulated by S. Judycki (2010, 69-106). To put it simply, it can be summarized
as follows: (i) the existence of god is conceptually necessary; (ii) the incarnation
of god is also conceptually necessary (with regard to his personal perfection and
the fact of finiteness and suffering of the creation, which “demand” the participation
of the Creator); (iii) events from the life of Jesus and his followers are so unique
that if he was not the incarnated god, it would violate god’s goodness (cf. the
Cartesian argument that assumes that god does not allow deceiving).
10
as Swinburne puts it (Swinburne 2003, 201): ‘any serious reflection on how a good
creator god would react to a race of suffering and sinful creatures whom he has
created must give considerable force to the claim that he must become incarnate’,
i.e. ‘take a human nature and live a human life on earth’ in order ‘to identify with
our suffering by sharing it’.

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let us note here that:
T6. various religious descriptions or stories of incarnation express T5.
In turn, on the grounds of T5 and T6 it can be asserted:
T7. human incarnation of god “should” really take place, and one of
the stories of incarnation “should” be literally true.
which one? I should believe the story which is (at the same time) the
most expressive, realistic and credible. and it is empirically known that:
T8. The Christian story of incarnation is (amongst the religious

records of incarnation known to us) the most (at the same time) expressive,
realistic and credible.
Therefore we can adduce from it the final conclusion, that the men-
tioned story is literally true, and thereby believing in Jesus as the incarnated
god is justified.
Evaluation
as can be seen, in the reasoning presented above premises T1-T3 are of
speculative character, and premises T4, T6 and T8 are (in a different sense)
empirically derived; on the other hand, the remaining elements (T5 and
T7) are simply conclusions derived from the previous elements. I believe
that there are no significant obstacles on the way to the acceptance of the
empirical premises (nB: only one of them – T8 – directly concerns the
Christian description, however – in opposition to the a posteriori argument
– it does not entail ascribing unconditional credibility, but only a relative
and conditional credibility). In such a case, soundness of the argument
depends on the speculative premises: in order to disprove the argument it
is enough to undermine one of them. hence, the value of the argument
rests on the strength of the insights supporting the main three theses of
traditional speculative metaphysics.
I will not discuss here the value of those insights. I will only point out
that the dependency of the a priori argument on these considerations is
both its advantage and disadvantage. The advantage is that the discussed
argument does not get entangled with the historical disputes concerning
the question whether the new Testament record reflects the most important

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facts concerning Jesus faithfully.11 (as I have already mentioned, T8 says

only that the Christian record is more credible than other – in principle
unequivocally mythological – records of the incarnation). however, the
cost of that is – and this is a disadvantage of the a priori argument –
replacing a historical dispute with a metaphysical dispute, and in this way
reducing the “empirical” problem of Jesus to the “speculative” problem of
the nature of god and man.
III. Conclusion: towards the “mixed” argument

This summing up of the advantages and disadvantages of the
discussed arguments – advantages and disadvantages that are derived from
our assessment of the nature of a posteriori or a priori knowledge itself –
thrust upon us the following problem: is one of these arguments more
fruitful than the other in justifying the epistemic right to believe in Jesus?
according to my own analysis of the arguments, it seems like the best
strategy consists of “mixed” argumentation, combining features of both
procedures. The mixed argument relies on the assumption, wide-spread in
contemporary epistemology, that almost each of our acts of cognition
includes both the a posteriori component and the a priori one. If there is
no experience without theory and there is no theory without experience,
there is also no “pure” historical knowledge about Jesus without its framing
worldview (or metaphysical interpretation), nor can we take a metaphysical
argument for Jesus seriously which does not take into account the historical
knowledge about him.
The mixed argumentation – taking into consideration both the histor-
ical factors and the metaphysical ones (from the field of natural theology)
– can be found in the writings of R. Swinburne. I would summarize (using
my terminology) the essential points of the reasoning included in his book
Was Jesus God? (Swinburne 2008) as follows:
S1. The probability of the belief in divinity of Jesus (let us call it J)

depends on
(i) the value of the set of certain theistic beliefs of the kind of “god
exists and loves us” (let us call it the a priori factor – A)
as well as on
11
Due to the variability and relativity of the “historical data”, there will never be an
end to these disputes.

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112 JaCek woJTySIak
(ii) the value of the testimonies about the life of Jesus (let us call it
the empirical factor – E).12
S2. when A’s probability is moderate, the probability of J is high:
after all we have various and sound testimonies E, that Jesus (and nobody
else) actually was characterized by such qualities (and performed such
acts) such that they can be predicted on the grounds of A (if a loving god
exists, he should reveal himself in a person such as Jesus). S3. Testimonies
E are sound in the sense that ‘it is very improbable that we would have
most of the evidence we do if Jesus did not live and teach in this [presented
in the new Testament – J. w.] way’(Swinburne 2008, 113).
S4. a very low (nearing 0) probability of A undermines the value of
testimonies E, and thereby of belief J, however, a moderately low (about
¼) probability of A is enough – because of the merits of testimonies E – to
assess the probability of J as being higher than ½.
S5. The probability of J will rise if, by virtue of arguments from the
field of natural theology, we accept a higher probability of A.
as this paper has tried to show, the value of Swinburne’s argument

(or a similar mixed argument) depends on whether we have a method of
reliable assessment of the degree of probability of A and E and on whether
the results of its (possible) application agree with Swinburne’s “calcula-
tions”. I believe that discussion (reaching beyond the scope of this paper)
of these issues must be at the center of the discussion of the epistemology
of the Christian religion in our time.
References
abraham, w. J. (2009). “The epistemology of Jesus: an Initial Investigation.” In

Moser, P. k. (ed.), Jesus and Philosophy (149-168). Cambridge: Cambridge
university Press.
alston, w. P. (1997). “Biblical Criticism and the Resurrection.” In Davis, S. T.,
kendall, D. SJ &o’Collins, g. SJ (eds.), The Resurrection. An Interdisciplinary
Symposium on the Resurrection of Jesus (148-183). oxford: oxford university
Press.
Bockmuehl, M. (2003). “Resurrection.” In Bockmuehl, M. (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Jesus (102-118). Cambridge: Cambridge university Press.
12
‘By “a priori reasons” I mean reasons arising from the very nature of god and from
the general condition of the human race why we should expect them to be true. […]
the historical evidence about the life and the Resurrection of Jesus […] provides
what I shall call “a posteriori” [or empirical – J. w. ] reasons’ (Swinburne 2008, 5).

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Craig, w. l. (20083). Reasonable Faith. Christian Truth and Apologetics. wheaton:

Crossway Books.
evans, C. a. (2009). “Jesus: Sources and Self-understanding.” In Moser, P. k. (ed.),
Jesus and Philosophy (27-40). Cambridge: Cambridge university Press.
Judycki, S. (2010). Bóg i inne osoby. Próba z zakresu teologii filozoficznej. Poznań:
w drodze.
Plantinga, a. (2000). Warranted Christian Belief. oxford: oxford university Press.
Smart, J.J.C. (1996). „atheism and Theism.“ In Smart, J.J.C. & haldane, J.J., Atheism
and Theism (6-83). oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Swinburne, R. (2003). The Resurrection of God Incarnate. oxford: Clarendon Press.
Swinburne, R. (20042). The Existence of God. oxford: Clarendon Press.
Swinburne, R. (2008). Was Jesus God? oxford: oxford university Press.

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uRSzula M. Żegleń
Religious Beliefs
in the Face of Rationalism*
In this paper I shall inquire into a question that is near the heart of the
philosophy of religion, namely, whether it is rational to have religious
beliefs. In order to reply to this question, I shall first define what I understand
by the rational subject, and next I shall give a brief characterization of
religious beliefs (1) with regard to the believing attitude and (2) with regard
to their content. It is important to note that my analysis of religious beliefs
is synonymous with those maintained by the Christian (and in particular
Catholic) religion, as opposed to some theoretically constructed natural
religion. The Christian religion is revealed, and that is why in my analysis
I shall appeal to the Bible and to some texts proclaimed by the Magisterium
Ecclessiae.
I. The rational subject

while it is trivial to say that „rationality” is an attribute of human being,
how rationality is construed in philosophy has always been the subject of
contention. let me start with four core characterizations of the rational
subject, to whom I attribute the following:
(a) the capacity for discursive thinking (especially to make inferences and
use them in different reasonings);
* I am indebted to Dr Slawek wacewicz for his proofreading of this text, and I would
like to thank the participants of the conference on “The Right to believe” for their
remarks and discussion of the first version of this paper.

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116 uRSzula M. Żegleń
(b) the ability to justify his beliefs in the light of standards which are
epistemically valid;
(c) the ability to communicate in language; and
(d) the capacity for reflection.
note that these characteristics are mutually dependent on each other.
The capacity for discursive thinking (a) assumes having a language in
which discourse is articulated (c), while epistemically justified belief (b)
implies a discourse in which justification is formed. Meanwhile, reflection
(d) allows for awareness and control of all the acts and capacities that make
up reasoning and communication, and is the prerequisite to any kind of
belief assessment. From the pragmatic point of view, these core elements
provide the context for man’s ability to apply certain instruments and
methods to change the world, in the light of the facts of that world, or, in
other words, objective knowledge. here I don’t develop this issue, which
belongs to the most topical and controversial in contemporary epistemology.
It is enough to say very generally that this kind of ability is an attribute of
rational subject, and it is especially important because the subject looking
for reasons for his beliefs must use his potential for logical thinking, and
out of that discursive process of reason and discovery is able to create the
kind of publicly accessible knowledge that belongs to the whole commu-
nity of humankind. The ability to communicate in language (in contrast to
the more limited sign systems employed by other living things, such as the
‘dances’ of bees) allows the subject to conduct dialogue with another
person and enter into social interactions. From the metaphysical point of
view, the most important aspect of the rational subject is the way these
core epistemological capacities produce another level of understanding,
which interprets the order of the world in which the subject lives. The
rational subject doesn’t just respond via reflex to the world, but looks for
general explanations of facts and events in his closer or farther environment;
he looks for a heuristic to explain nature, and he looks for meaning in his
own existence in the world and his personal life. an important metaphysical
aspect of reflection is its role in the human experience of the contingency
of being. here, in reference to the subject, it means his experience of his
own contingency, that is his experience of the fragility of existence as
a mortal being. as we can see, my approach to rationality has a broader
existential dimension than is countenanced in many epistemological theories.
My above characterization of rationality is concerned with the cogni-
tive equipment of the species, so to speak. These capacities are realized
by individual subjects to different degrees and intents, which depend both

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Religious Beliefs in the Face of Rationalism 117
on internal (e.g. neurophysiological) and external factors (e.g. cultural or

arising from social interactions). But as a philosopher I am not interested
in any individual subject, any concrete believer or society of believers.
I leave this to the domain of psychologists or sociologists of religion. From
the philosophical perspective of research I do not intend to describe any
concrete subject, but rather I attempt to sketch out a certain model of the
rational subject. Building this, I want to construct a certain model of
believer as a person who has religious beliefs in the sense of the Christian
faith. In the next section, then, I shall focus on the structure of religious
beliefs, firstly with regard to their formal attitude, and then with regard to
their content.
II. Religious beliefs characterized with regard

to their attitude
In my characterization of religious beliefs I appeal to a philosophically
known structure in which a person believes a proposition, or Bxp. I will
vary this in the analysis of religion in that I use the propositional attitude
B – „to believe” in the specific sense given to it by the Christian faith. let
us mark it by the index r as Br. appropriately p is a religious belief which
means that it belongs to the set of truths of the Christian faith. In this
sense religious beliefs are objective – they are proclaimed by the church
(Magisterium Ecclessiae) and shared by the believers. They are objective,
contrary to someone’s subjective beliefs, which can be ascribed to
a specific believer, such as for example „god is my sole support in my
homelessness”, „My guardian angel saved me from death in my last car
accident” and so on.
according to Christian theology (inspired by divine revelation) faith
is the result of grace, and not of the believer’s knowledge.1 In faith that
comes as a result of grace there is no room for doubts in the existence of
god. one could argue, then, that the believer does not need to look for any
1
Contrary to many philosophers of religion I do not appeal to natural theology, at least
not to the pure natural theology in which – roughly speaking – one looks for proofs
for the thesis of the existence of god, often by means of logical tools, in appealing
to scientific knowledge or looking for different signs of god in the world without
appealing to Revelation. The methodological status of natural theology and the
validity of its methods are the subject of many controversies among contemporary
philosophers (such as alvin Plantinga for example) and theologians (among whom
karl Barth belongs to the most known opponents of natural theology).

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evidence to accept religious beliefs, that his faith is completely passive,

dogmatic, and thus far from any rational approach. But let me first
characterize more exactly this case of Br construed as faith.
„To believe” in the sense of faith means that the believer
(1) harbors no doubts in the existence of god (and other fundamental
truths of faith). It is even the essential sense of Br-attitude, that it
– as faith – does not require any proof of “what we hope for and
the existence of things not seen”. looking for proof belongs to the
domain of reason.
„To believe” is, however, not only a propositional attitude, but first of all
a special kind of a relational attitude of the believing-subject towards god.
That means that
(2) the subject who is the believer has an inner and intimate personal
relation to god as a person;
(3) he trusts god completely (illimitably);
(4) he has passed through a certain inner transformation which means
the change of his own perspective of life, which means he rejects,
at least in the way of thinking and estimation, the world in favour
of a future life (what is “hoped for”) which is seen in the perspective
of eternity and salvation.
as we see, I propose here a very strong model of the believing attitude
within the believer’s adult faith. according to point (1) the Br-attitude,
contrary to the believing attitude in philosophical epistemology, which has
the sense of doxa, is characterized by certainty (without any graduation).2
In this light, we can pose the rationality of this believer’s attitude, and as
such, is it blind? In other words, is it blind because no rational subject will
accept it? Roughly speaking, is the experience of faith such that reason
cannot lead to it (as hume argued, among others)? yet if we look to the
Magisterium Ecclessia, doctrine tells us that it is not blind. Following the
Catechism of the Catholic Church one can say that „It is more certain that
all human knowledge”, because „the certainty that the divine light gives
is greater than that which the light of natural reason gives”.3 Both, however,
participate in the element of light. nevertheless it could be treated as
non-rational, but only in a narrow sense because, as has been already said,
the believer’s attitude is not supported by knowledge (even not by some-
one’s knowledge about god), but it comes about through a grace which is
2
See Catechism of the Catholic Church, Ch. 3, especially article 157.
3
See Catechism of the Catholic Church, Ch. 3, especially article 157.

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something supernatural and has nothing common with the human reason.
also the believer’s trust (point 2) can be seen as very far from any rational
approach, because it has no limit or condition, and as such it can be
considered as being in conflict with reason or even with common sense.4
But in opposition to this view, one can say that it is rational for the believer
to trust in god because he understands who god is for the believer – that
is, the believer has a privileged relationship to the experience. Thus, his
attitude to god is treated by him in some sense as a consequence of his
knowledge of the nature of god as our Savior, full of love for the man. But
this knowledge cannot be sufficient to warrant his belief in the existence
of god in an objective sense. also the believer’s complete confidence in
god does not entail some completely inwardlooking attitude, a passivity
towards life, but entails a dynamism of acts (point 3). In the Christian faith,
this dynamism must be strongly emphasized, which can be expressed by
the thesis: there is no faith without dynamism (in the sense of Christianity).
It is so because our faith is not born with us, and truths of faith are acquired
in a wide sense of religious education within the church (i.e. in the
community of believers by sacraments, liturgies and other forms of Christian
life) and someone’s faith without any personal inner transition (which is
just dynamic) cannot be treated as any adult faith (which is characterized
here). Thus, the subject who assumes the Br- attitude has the concept of
god (whose content has been formed either directly or indirectly by the
Bible), he has the experience of god in his life, and he understands who
god is to the extent he can, in as much as it is conformable to his faith.
„Faith seeks understanding”, as one can read in the Catechism of the
Catholic Church (ch. 3, art. 158). I am using “experience” here in a broader
sense than is given by epistemology, where human existence is wholly
captured by cognition, but in a wide metaphysical or existential sense. also
understanding is not treated narrowly in the sense of semantics or pragmatics,
but rather in the epistemological sense as a kind of conscious (reflexive)
cognition, directed at the supernatural, absolute being.
looking back at point (1), I want to stress that in the context of adult
faith also the believer’s certainty gains a certain dimension of rationality
4
Just this point belongs to the most topical in the philosophy of religion. See for
instance J. Jordan (2007), Pascal’s Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God,
oxford: oxford university Press or a. Plantinga (1983), Reason and Belief in God
in: a. Plantinga and n. wolterstorff, eds. (1983), Faith and Rationality, notre Dame,
52-59; a. Plantinga (2000), Warranted Christian Belief, oxford: oxford university
Press.

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because the believer constantly experiences the existence of god in his life
and this special kind of experience is treated by him as the evidence for
his beliefs. It is the believer’s certainty itself that makes his religious
knowledge (i.e. the system of his religious beliefs) coherent. The believer
as a rational subject occupies the appropriate attitude toward the content
of his beliefs. how could he assert the truths of faith that god is the
absolute (supreme) being, that he is in the form of the holy Trinity, that
Jesus Christ rose from the death and so on, without certainty? Could one
build a model of faith (being in agreement to the Magisterium Ecclesiae)
on other attitudes than „to believe” in the strongest sense as „to be certain”?5
nevertheless, the essence of certainty in the believing attitude is always
in the order of faith than reason, and even so-called periods of darkness in
believer’s spiritual life (best known from many hagiographies) cannot
impair this kind of certainty. I repeat again that it is warranted by grace,
which in Catholic Christianity means that it comes through Jesus Christ from
the holy Spirit.6 In this sense, religious belief in the truths of faith can be
said to have a very specific justification which in some sense is transcendent
(because it results from the external being) and in another is internal to the
subject, because the supernatural transcendent holy Spirit reveals its power
to specific and unique persons in the individual mind of (a concrete) believer.
however, it must be stressed that certainty concerns attitudes to the
fundamental truths of faith, and not someone’s subjective beliefs, which
are too weak to bear the term „certainty”. In individual cases, doubts can
be the path to mature faith. also in many cases of subjective religious
belief, the attitude can be characterized by doubt, as it is in many concrete
cases when someone, in spite of his faith in the existence of god and
other fundamental truths, has many doubts concerning for example god’s
relation to him. But the content of these subjective beliefs is different from
the objective content of religious beliefs, i.e. those which belong to the
fundamental truths of faith. It is the latter which form the subject of my
considerations here, as the former is the subject of religious psychology
more than religious epistemology. however, they are related, as the believer,
as a subject, is restricted in his cognitive possibilities to the limits of defining
his subjectivity.
on the other hand, it is the nature of faith in revelation to comprehend
an essential moment of mystery (which is seen for instance in the dogmas
of, for example, the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, to the mystery
5
Being in agreement with Magisterium Ecclesia cf. what Jesus has said to doubtful
Thomas, gosp. of St. John 20. 27-29.

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of Christ’s resurrection, etc.). as we read in the Encyclical Letter Fides et

Ratio „Christian faith immerses human beings in the order of grace, which
enables them to share the mystery of Christ” (Ch. III, 33). The rationalist
who wants to support his beliefs through reference to knowledge and who
needs evidence will not accept this kind of thinking – it will instead be
seen by him as rationalization for avoiding answers to questions which
have no rational solution. what is incompatible for the rationalist in a certain
philosophical approach (included strong evidentialism) is understood
within the epistemology of Christian religion as revealed truth. Saying
metaphorically, „the reason is open to the mystery” as could be quoted
from the Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio in reference to the Book of
Wisdom „Israel with her reflection, was able to open to reason the path that
leads to the mystery”7.
as has been already said, the religious believing attitude is consider-
ably wider than in the epistemological dimension because it addresses
existence – the meaning of the first and last things. This means that the
believer looks for the ultimate explanation and understanding of the existence
of the world, the history of humanity (and not only the particular nations
or societies) as well as his own individual existence (which is not purely
physical, but is realized in someone’s individual life, where a very rich
individual dimension maintains a relation with a very rich dimension of
communion). nothing is more reasonable than to search for explanation
and understanding of our life and our collective existence on this planet.
In fact, this is a universal attribute of human beings, found in all cultures.
and again I appeal to Fides et Ratio (Ch. III, 29), where it is emphasized
that the search for meaning implies the existence of something meaningful
and accessible; otherwise, it would not be a universal human trait. as
a ‘program’ of research, it is equally as rational as a scientific investigation.
The scientist, too, is aware that science as the process of knowing will
never reach any final form. But this doesn’t discredit our knowledge or
our research now.
But it is clear that there is the fundamental difference between science
and religion. Roughly speaking, we could say that our finite reason with
its limited cognitive possibilities stands before a vista of extremely rich
reality, the complete grasp of which is impossible. But you can answer that
it is so also in the case of physical reality. however, in the case of religion
6
Cf. gosp. of St. John 1, 17b: „grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”.
7
See The Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, Ch. II, 18. (www.vatican/va/.../encyclicals/.../
hf_jp_ii_enc_151019998_fides_et_ratio_en.html.)

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our finite reason stands in front of the infinite mystery of god.8 But at the
same time, humans possess unique cognitive possibilities and an exceptional
thirst for knowledge.9 as I’ve pointed out, the level of natural cognition
is different from the level of faith, and the epistemology of religion distin-
guishes a special kind of cognition which is characterized in the order of
faith. alvin Plantinga for instance, following the Calvinist tradition
talks about a special ability of the human mind which is the divine sense
(Calvin’s term sensus divinitas).10 But I am not appealing here to his
(Thomistic/Calvinist) model, nor do I say that the epistemic equipment is
different in case of believers and non-believers (which is evidently absurd).
what I want to say is that the order of faith has a transformative dynamic,
in which the appeal to the grace is legitimate. For example, when the
believer reads the text of the Bible, he does not interpret it from a secular
viewpoint: rather, he interprets it as the holy Scripture written under the
inspiration of the holy Spirit, which is the highest guarantor of reliability.
From such a perspective of faith and cognitive searching amongst the
believers in the church (who are united by the communion), the believer
undertakes the efforts to understand who god is, what is the sense of the
events which were described in the Bible and so on. Faith simply gives
a different perspective on cognition as applied to revelation, but it does
not concern some new form of cognitive processing. analogically, one
could say that someone’s experience (for example of clinical death or
holocaust) affords a different view on death, suffering, and the values of
life than would be the case with the views of a very young person who has
never had any experience of mortality. also faith, understood properly,
gives a richer context to propositions concerning the sort of cognition
exercised by the believing subject who has (cognitive) access to the truths
of faith (knowing them with certainty). we do not need to set up a vicious
circle here, in which faith leads to belief, which then leads to faith. of
course, no radical or narrow rationalism is in agreement with this approach,
just as pure fideism, which does not leave any room for reason and is far
from even moderate rationalism. But neither embraces all the spheres of
human reality, leaving out fundamental questions which humans as rational
created subjects ask concerning meaning.
8
hf_jp_ii_enc_151019998_fides_et_ratio_en.html.), Ch. II, 14.
9
hf_jp_ii_enc_151019998_fides_et_ratio_en.html.), Ch. II, 16.
10
See his Warranted Christian Belief, p. 174.

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III. Religious beliefs characterized with regard

to their content
I characterized above the believing attitude, but as it is already seen from
this consideration in order to have this attitude the believer must grasp the
content of religious truths and understand it, at least to the degree that his
conscious affirmation is cognitively ‘satisfactory’ (as opposed to, say,
the affirmation of a delusion). nowadays The Rome Catechism strongly
emphasizes that faith looks for understanding. But understanding cannot
be reduced here to any semantic or pragmatic dimension, even if these
dimensions (which can be included in the c) criteria of rationality) are
also important – after all, the content of religious truths is determined
communicatively by the holy Scripture, which requires interpretation.
The adequate interpretation, being one of the most important subjects of
theological research and delivered in church teaching, extends beyond the
methods and dimensions applied in natural domains of human activities.
First of all, it takes into account the revealed character of the delivered
content. and my interest as an epistemologist lies just in whether it is
rational for the subject to affirm this kind of content.
So far, our answer is positive: I have argued that searching the ultimate
explanations for questions that are irresolvable by science (they are not at
all in the field of scientific investigations) is prima facie rational. at the
same time, I attempted to show the specificity of the believing attitude
towards the truths of faith with regard to the nature of faith itself (which
means – the Christian faith, not someone’s faith in the various gods created
in the history of human culture). The believer’s faith is given by grace,
and not some endogenous capability. ultimately, our belief in the divine
revelation must be given by god. But one can also imagine a cold, deistic
god, discovered by the reasoning and reflecting subject (without appealing
to the whole body of religious truths), and such a deist subject might accept
the statement that god exists, that there is one god who is omniscience,
who is the Creator. In this case the subject affirms the content without faith
but only commits his natural reason. Could we say then that the subject
has religious beliefs? I am afraid that the answer must be no, for the simple
reason that religious beliefs must be embraced in the whole body of beliefs
of faith, not separately. Taken separately they can be interpreted as incon-
sistent and contradictory with regard to their content. In cognition, natural
reason can either affirm or reject such contents, and probably kant was
right when he talked about the antinomies of our theoretical reason. The

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rational operations of our mind in cognition are not sufficient to grasp the
content of faith (without grace) and to understand it. In the epistemology
of religion I characterize understanding as a certain kind of experience that
also has its dynamism and development – one can understand more, and
more deeply. In relation to faith, understanding as a kind of experience is
not only characterized as an epistemological property, but especially as
a metaphysical and existential one, which arises when the subject both
in its individual dimension and in the dimension of its relation to the
community (but not only the small community of believers, but the whole
humanity) is aware of itself as entering the history of salvation. From this,
which is the perspective of faith, the content of revealed truths, which is
seen as unintelligible by the subject untouched by grace, appears in its
deeper sense. at this moment, the believer can identify with the sacred
history, which includes the Fall, the Flood, abraham, Moses, David and
the prophets, etc. what was seen as either foolish or unintelligible to
natural reason, appears as meaningful, and no truth can be omitted because
it is important in the chain of the history of salvation and hence in the
whole body of beliefs which consist in the revealed religion.
and what is more, as has been stressed above, their content is not only
affirmed by the believer, but also has confirmation in his experience and,
in a different way, also in his life. one could recall here John h. newman’s
confession from his Apologies Pro Vita Sua, where he wrote „…whether
it could work, for it has never been more then a paper system”.11 From the
epistemological point of view this very widely understood experience of
faith can be also treated as a very specific kind of testifying or justification
of religious beliefs. If faith is taken in such a wide perspective, which
engages many dimensions of the human person having religious beliefs in
the sense of Christianity as the revealed religion, as the argument of this
paper shows, it is quite reasonable not only on an epistemic, but also on
an existential scale.
References
Catechism of the Catholic Church. (1993). Citta del vaticana: libreria editice vaticana;
(www.vatican va/archive/eng0015/_InDeX.hTM)
The New American Bible (2002). vatican: libreria editice vaticana (source: united States
Conference of the Catholic Bishops); (www.vatican va/archive/eng0839/_
InDeX.hTM)
11
See J. newman, Apologies Pro Vita Sua, p. 299.

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newman, J.h. (1994). Apologies Pro Vita Sua. new york: Penguin Book
John Paul II, (1998). Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio. vatican: libreria editice vaticana;
(www.vatican/va/.../encyclicals/.../hf_jp-ii_enc_151019998_fides-et-ratio-en.
html.)
Plantinga, a. (2000). Warranted Christian Belief. oxford: oxford university Press.

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FaBIen SChang
Believing the Self-Contradictory*
1. Three logics of justification

Traditionally, there are three sorts of attitude to religious belief that form
the three great interlocutive positions in the discussion of religion: those
who believe that god exists, or the believers;1 those who do not believe
that god exists, or the atheists; and those who believe that neither position
is justifiable given our human limits, or the agnostics. among the various
thematics into which this discussion flows, one of the commonest, as it
connects the abstraction of the topic with practice, is how to make
a choice among these three stances. In other words, how do we justify our
adherence to one of these three positions?
The advocate for religious belief has at least one advantage, in that it
is generally agreed that a belief needn’t be ascertained to be true in order
to be held. I may have good reasons to find ‘x’ belief plausible without
being able to prove it according to some verificational protocol. Thus,
I am entitled to believe that god exists without having to establish his
existence once for all. The lack of a conclusive proof doesn’t prevent me
from believing something true. But still, I do need reasons to have acquired
my belief. who knows anything about him? we must remember, here, that
knowledge is not the point about god, anyway, as he is not simply the
object of inquiry. after all, by definition, our entire being and social
structure, including inquiry, is grounded on god. That we believe in god
* I am grateful to Dorota Rybicka for our informal exchange about the present talk,
as well as to the anonymous referee for his helpful notes.
1
“Believers” will be used as a synonym for the theists or positive believers about the
sentence p: “god is existing”, throughout the paper. admittedly, the atheists are also
believers; but they are negative believers about p.

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128 FaBIen SChang
does highlight the fact that one can believe as strongly as possible without
ever knowing anything about this possibly empty term.
however, any belief ought to be justified before we can talk about its
being true (or not): a belief must be justifiable in order to be a valid belief,
that is, a belief that could be entertained by any reasonable subject. now
what sort of justification do we need to believe correctly?
let us state a first criterion for correct belief in terms of indefensibility:
(1a) a given sentence p is justifiable only if the negation of p is indefensible,

i.e. there is no evidence for p to be false.2
But this statement is still ambiguous: does the absence of justification

against p mean that there cannot ever be such a justification, or, rather, does
it simply have a temporal sense: up to the present, none has been found?
In order to go beyond a merely falsificationist definition of justification,
we add a further condition to the latter, as follows:
(1b) any evidence for p entails that there is no evidence for its negation, ~p.
The condition thus modifies the skeptic view of justification: (1a) entails
(1b) from this perspective, whereas a mere falsificationist view doesn’t
mean that there cannot be evidence for ~p if there are none yet.
If we adopt (1a)-(1b) together, such a necessary condition for belief
appears to be very stringent: it could satisfy a skeptic, but hardly an agnostic,
or even a theist for whom the existence of god can be believed without
a conclusive evidence.3 Moreover, an application of (1) would entail that
very few sentences could be properly believed, because most of our beliefs
rely upon empirical evidence whose falsifiability conditions make their
negations clearly arguable.
To loosen up our conditions in order to allow a greater scope for belief,
an alternative, weaker condition for correct belief can be constructed from
2
evidence can be an empirical datum, a thought experiment, a formal proof, or even
an intimate experience.
3
By a “theist” is meant whoever believes in the existence of god. no relevant difference
is made here between theism and deism, although depicting god as a universal class
sounds more like an argument for deism (god as an impersonal logos). note that
being an agnostic believer is not self-defeating: agnosticism merely means that it is
not possible to establish the existence of god, and that this needn’t lead to atheism,
since it is not possible to establish that there is no god, either.

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Believing the Self-Contradictory 129
supposing a criterion of justifiability as defensibility, which should hold

for both believers and atheists4:
(2) a given sentence p is justifiable if p is defensible, i.e. there is some

evidence for p to be true.5
The import of (2) is a “glass half full, glass half empty” story. That god
may exist is a sufficient reason to believe in his existence (i.e. believing
the sentence p: “god is existing”), according to the believer; that god may
be not existing is a sufficient reason to believe in his inexistence, according
to the atheist.6
however, it is unlikely that an armed truce like this will bring the
religious discussion to a satisfactory close. alternatively, the mere possibility
that god exists does not give the skeptic a sufficient reason to believe in
his existence or even his inexistence. In a sense, this is agnosticism
straight, in contrast with the soft logic of believers and atheists. at the same
time, an anti-skeptic logic of soft justification would turn out to be trou-
blesome if whatever possible is justifiable: any contingent sentence would
entail that the believer is entitled to believe both p and its negation, i.e. ~p.7
Correspondingly, most of the atheists and believers seem at this stage in
the debate to operate as partial or bad faith agents from a skeptic point of
view, reserving a duplicitous double register of justification in which both
take any evidence for or against the existence of god to be a sufficient
reason to support their belief, but requiring that their opponent give
conclusive (i.e. necessary) evidence for or against the existence of god.
4
The atheist attitude can be depicted by substituting ~p for p in (2).
5
let B stand for belief, and e for defensibility (ep means “there is an evidence for
the sentence p”). Then (1) and (2) result in three distinct axioms for two opposite
logics of justification, namely: (1a) Bp → ~e~p, (1b) ep → ~e~p, and (2) ep →
Bp. ep entails ~e~p for a skeptic, but not for a mere believer: that there is no
evidence for ~p (i.e. no evidence against p) does not force the believer to conclude
that there is an evidence for p. This means that e proceeds like a strong modal
operator  in the strong (conclusive) sense of evidence and like a weak one  in
the weak (testimonial) sense: not any evidence for ~p is an argument against p in the
latter case, for there can be evidence for both.
6
(1a) entails e~p → ~Bp (by contraposition), but not e~p → B~p. Thus (1) is not
a proper logic for believers and atheists, but is adequate for skeptics.
7
let C stand for contingency. Cp ↔ (ep  e~p), then, by (2), Cp → (Bp  B~p). and
given that the logic of the believer is taken to be normal, B~p → ~Bp. Therefore,
(2) entails Cp → (Bp  ~Bp).

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130 FaBIen SChang
In other words, they shift the burden of the proof (or conclusive evidence)
onto their opponent, only: the agnostic theist would require any atheist
being gnostic, and conversely.8
however, faith is a bad faith only if we already subscribed to the
skeptic criterion for belief as requiring conclusive evidence, whether for
or against a given sentence. against this strong criterion for evidence in
(1), faith seems to be described better in terms of a special logic of merely
religious belief that would support (2), while contravening one of the basic
axioms of epistemic logic, namely:
(3) If p is merely believed, then p is not known.9
unlike the skeptic, the believer does not require any conclusive evidence
for his belief and this holds equally whether the belief is in the existence or
inexistence of god. I need not have a definite proof to believe in him, while
having some reason to prefer this opinion rather than the contrary one.
and yet, (3) is hardly defensible for a believer in the sense that a logic
of religious belief cannot go on claiming that logical knowledge is incom-
patible with religious belief, since a proof of impossibility or necessity
should force the believer to either relinquish his belief or endorse non-belief,
respectively. In this respect, St. anselm’s and Descartes’ alleged proofs for
the existence of god are intended to show that believing is not only
justifiable but necessary: I cannot not believe in god, and I believe in
him all the more that I know that it is impossible for him not to exist.
now given that (3) makes any allegedly religious belief incompatible with
logical knowledge10, it should be replaced by another logic including
logical knowledge. The believer’s argument is premised on a logic that is
weaker than (1), but stronger than (2) and (3).
8
The logic of the atheist amounts to taking non-belief and negative belief to be equiv-
alent: ~Bp  B~p, so that ~ep → B~p. an abductive reasoning can display this partial
treatment of evidence in the atheist: pain and injustice are taken to be a sufficient
evidence against the existence of god, while the beautiful harmony in snow crystals
is not sufficient to establish divine design. The converse is true for the believer.
9
according to the mainstream epistemology, epistemic logic states that knowledge
is a justified true belief. accordingly, belief is one of the necessary conditions for
knowledge and the following is given to be an epistemic axiom: kp → Bp. To the
contrary, a religious belief assumes a logic of mere belief that is incompatible with
the preceding axiom: if Bp → ~kp, then kp → ~Bp (by contraposition).
10
For if we can deduce logical knowledge from every logical truth, then no such truth
should be believed according to (3): kp → B~p (see note 9).

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Consistency seems to be a necessary condition assuming that the

believer in the debate recognizes the aristotelian Principle of non-Con-
tradiction (hereafter: PnC).11 according to the psychological version of
the PnC, no one may logically believe that god exists and does not exist.
This rule equally holds for all our three parties: believers, atheists, and
agnostics. as a way to strengthen (2), the participant in the debate must
choose between believing either p or its negation ~p, even if there is
evidence to support both contents. let us specify that consistency is not
only a property of what the sentence says taken in isolation;12 rather,
consistency expresses a relation between the given sentence p and the
believer’s set of initially accepted sentences q. hence the resulting condition
for correct belief:
(4) a given sentence p is justifiable only if it is consistent with every other

sentence q already accepted by the believer.13
Thus far, defensibility is a sufficient condition and consistency is a necessary

condition for correct belief. against those who might still object that (4)
is redundant with (2) due to the identity of defensibility and consistency,
there is, in fact, a difference between them: a sentence p is defensible
whenever it is not self-contradictory, i.e. not contradictory with itself;
furthermore, it is consistent whenever it is not contradictory with other
sentences q in a given belief set. For if p is inconsistent with a given set
of beliefs a but self-consistent, this merely means that p should not be
included in a, even if it is compatible with other contexts. however, if p
is self-contradictory (or self-inconsistent), this means that p is impossible
to be believed in every respect or irrespective of any belief set.
11
Łukasiewicz (2000) stated three formulations of the PnC: an ontological version
(no object can have and not have the same property); a logical version (two
judgments where the one attaches to the object the very property refused by the
other one cannot be true together); and a psychological version (any two convictions
related to contradictory judgments cannot coexist in the same mind). (3) concerns
the latter version.
12
This is self-consistency; the ensuing difference between contradiction and self-con-
tradiction is detailed in the next section.
13
To simplify the criterion of consistency, we state that it requires the agent not to
believe both a given sentence and its negation: (3) Bp → ~B~p. (3) is incompatible
with (2), for ep → Bp, e~p → B~p and, therefore, (ep  e~p) → (Bp  B~p) entails
by (2) that (ep  e~p) → (Bp  ~Bp).

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132 FaBIen SChang
having unpacked the meaning of justification, we can now see that,

in the context of the logic of belief, justification combines two intercon-
nected but different modalities, namely: defensibility as conceivability, or
mental possibility; consistency as logical possibility. Moreover, (2) and
(4) entail that everything conceivable is self-consistent:
(5) a sentence p is self-defensible only if it is self-consistent, i.e. believing

p entails not believing its negation ~p,
i.e. whatever is conceivable cannot be self-contradictory.14 If so, I cannot

justifiably believe something inconsistent. This minimal condition for
grasping a thought is at stake for our main point, which concerns religious
belief about the existence of god.
To sum up, we have proposed three semantically different modes of
justification, which we will label as follows: a skeptical logic with (1),
where an evidence must be conclusive to be properly evidential; a relativist
logic with (2), where every evidence is defensible and leads to inconsistent
beliefs;15 and a dogmatist logic for (4). The latter will now be the focus of
our attention, as it has been favoured as a proper criterion for correct belief.
as we will see, it seems to entail an atheist position about the religious
belief that god is existing.
2. Is God a self-contradictory subject?

a number of arguments contribute to the notion that the argument for god’s
existence is self-defeating.
14
note that “conception” differs from “imagination”, among the range of mental
possibilities: the former concept gives us the formal object of a judgment, while the
latter is derived from being somehow being able to picture the object. Descartes’
case of the chiliagon marks this difference out: a thousand-sided polygon can be
conceived, but not imagined. hume supports (5) in his “enquiry concerning human
understanding”: everything conceivable is possible, equating possibility with
non-contradiction. Furthermore, (5) could be reasonably strengthened in the form
of a biconditional, in the sense that it hardly makes sense to state that something
self-consistent may be unconceivable. The question remains open, noting that the
converse (5) seems to make sense only if “conceivable” is replaced by “(actually)
conceived”. about the notions of conception, imagination, logical possibility and
their logical interrelations, see Costa-leite (2011).
15
For a detailed analysis of these three sorts of justification, see ganeri (2002) and
Schang (2010b).

Angemeldet
on the one hand, doubting the existence of god has been taken to be
self-contradictory by St. anselm or Descartes: it is not possible to conceive
the supreme Being as perfect without assuming his existence necessarily.
To contemporary ears, this sort of argument somehow sounds like the
performative account of the cogito once thinking of god is taken to be
a caused action. according to this view, it is not only that such a conceivable
sentence as “god exists” is consistent: its negation is self-inconsistent, so that
god cannot be conceived as inexistent.16 however, looked at from the other
side, such an argument does not make the atheist position self-defeating
because it relies upon a contraposited version of (5): whatever is not
self-consistent is not conceivable; god’s inexistence is not self-consistent17;
hence god’s inexistence is not conceivable. now god’s inexistence is not
a self-inconsistent judgment: it is merely inconsistent with the two initial
judgments that existence is a predicate and every cause has a supreme
cause, respectively.
on the other hand, a logical consequence of god’s perfection may
lead to the contrary conclusion that god’s existence is a self-contradictory
idea that cannot be conceived accordingly.18
Is god a self-contradictory object? The referent of a sentence is not
capable of being self-contradictory in the logical sense: contradiction refers
only to a condition that emerges in language. Thus, when we analyze
the term god for ‘contradictions’ in the language we use about god’s
existence, we are using the subject at hand as a dummy singular term
(a Russellian proper name) and a definite description, in accordance
with Russell’s theory. For instance, any sentence about a round square is
self-contradictory because it states something about a term that is round
and not round. Can impossible objects, the referents of the subject, exist?
In as much as existence is co-extensive with conceivability, there are
necessarily no impossible objects. whatever is self-contradictory cannot
be conceived.
16
about St. anselm’s argument, see his Proslogion seu Alloquium de Dei existentia;
about Descartes’ proof, see his Metaphysical Meditations, especially Books III and
v; about the performativeness of the cogito argument, see hintikka (1962).
17
It could be replied to this account that existence might not be taken to be a predicate,
as famously claimed by kant. But this does not undermine my point at all, insofar
as “being existing” can be safely replaced there “being existing as such and such”.
I thank the anonymous referee for emphasizing this technical point.
18
about St. anselm’s argument and its ensuing antinomy, see vuillemin (1971).

Angemeldet
134 FaBIen SChang
as an exception to (5), Łukasiewicz took the case of the Trinity in

order to make his point against the so-called universality of the PnC.19
let  be a complex sentence composed of three simple sentences p:
“god is the Father”, q: “god is the Son”, and r: “god is the holy Spirit”.
Prima facie,  is a conjunction of three contrary and, a fortiori, contradictory
sentences that cannot all be true about the same object, because whoever
is the Father is neither the Son nor the holy Spirit. To put it in Fregean
terms: these three names are not, like the morning star and the evening
star, different senses for one reference. each of the three is supposed to
express one unique individual. If we employ a Quinean paraphrase to turn
these singular terms into predicates, our will say that there are three
different individuals and that god is each of these. If so, then the Trinity
is to the effect that there is a x that is y and z while y is not z, so that the
premises x  y, x  z and y z imply that x  x. Contradiction: it is impossible
to believe such a sentence as , according to (5).
while admitting this reading, Łukasiewicz begs the point in saying
that contradiction may not be a necessary condition for meaningfullness
or, rather, that it should be bracketed for certain sorts of religious beliefs
that go beyond any rational understanding. however, there is another and
obvious way to state that  is not self-contradictory without violating any
property of classical logic, bringing up the issue of predication and the
meaning of “being”, or in other words, the relation between identity and
membership. as to whether  should be a contradictory sentence to be
rejected by (5), let us return to the basic formulation of opposition in terms
of predication with classes and their corresponding sentences (i.e. the basic
form ‘S is P’ for p). what sort of Russellian proper name should god ever
be, assuming that the Trinity really differs from a dummy proper name?
any two sentences p and q are said to be contrary if and only if they
cannot be true together and can be false together. They are said to be
contradictory if and only if they cannot both be true and cannot both be
false. accordingly, p, q and r should be contrary to each other: none of the
pairs {p,q}, {p,r} and {q,r} can be true together, but they can all be false.
a sample of contrary sentences has been displayed by keynes (1884) in
order to characterize the aristotelian square of opposition within a logic
of classes. Thus the universal pairs {A,E}, {A’,E}, {A,E’} and {A’,E’}
are taken to be cases in point, where: A: “every S is P”, A’: “every not-S
19
See Łukasiewicz (2000), pp. 70-1.

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is not-P”, E: “no S is P”. and E’: “no not-S is not-P”20. which of these
pairs is a counterpart of ? Following the Quinean paraphrase of singular
terms,  states that whatever S-izes is P and only one x P-izes. although
they are usually said to be contrary, there are two opposite conditions for
these pairs to be true: {A,E} and {A’,E’} are true pairs if and only if no x
is S, whereas {A’,E} and {A,E’} are true pairs if and only if every x is P.
The first condition fulfills the atheist position in as much as it is construed
in Christian terms, meaning that S is an empty class or, equivalently, that
god does not exist if he is both the Father and something else (i.e. the Son
and the holy Spirit).
Conversely, the second condition can satisfy the believer’s claim if it
entails that P is a universal class and requires for god to be everything
(every x). The third pair {A,E’}:
x ((S(x) → P(x))  (~S(x) → P(x))
is a plausible candidate for the truth of , therefore.21 letting P for “god”

and S for e.g. “the Father”, it is true that the Father is god and not only
the Father but the Son and the holy Spirit too, which are not S. By the
same token, that god is P and not S prevents one from believing something
self-contradictory with : the intersection (SP ∩ S’P) clearly differs
20
Such a translation of classes into universal sentences yields the following relations
in first-order predicate logic:
Sentences Logic of classes First order logic
A: SaP SP x (S(x) → P(x))
A’: S’aP’  PaS S’P’ x (~S(x) → ~P(x))
E: SeP  SaP’ PS’ x (S(x) → ~P(x))
E’: S’eP’  S’aP P’S x (~S(x) → P(x))
{A,E}: SaP and SeP SP ∩ SP’ x ((S(x) → P(x))  (S(x) → ~P(x))
{A’,E}: S’aP’ and SeP S’P’ ∩ SP’ x ((~S(x) → ~P(x))  (S(x) → ~P(x))
{A,E’}: SaP and S’eP’ SP ∩ S’P x ((S(x) → P(x))  (~S(x) → P(x))
{A’,E’}: S’aP’ and S’eP’ S’P’ ∩ S’P x ((~S(x) → ~P(x))  (~S(x) → P(x))
21
let us assume that v(P(x))  T. For every x, if v(S(x))  T then v(S(x) → P(x)) 
v(~S(x) → P(x))  T; if v(S(x))  F then v(S(x) → P(x))  v(~S(x) → P(x))  T.
Therefore v((6))  F, and v((6))  T only if v(S(x))  T. hence A and E’ can be true
together and are not contraries.
The first condition is related to the well-known topic of traditional logic: the
so-called “existential import”, stating that the aristotelian square is valid only if no
class is empty. For a validation of the square with or without a non-empty model,
see Schang (2010b) and a next paper with Saloua Chatti (submitted): “Import, or
not import? how to handle negation inside the square”.

Angemeldet
136 FaBIen SChang
from (SP ∩ SP) and implies that nothing contradictory is said about
god in the Trinity.
But there is still a problem. assuming that S and P are two unique
classes with only one member, that god is the Father and someone other
(the Son and the holy Spirit) entails that two individuals are one and the
same: “S is P” means an identity (“S  P”), and this is more than merely
saying a membership “SP” since identity (“S  P”) means two-sided
membership (“SP and PS”). accordingly, the pair {A,E’} should be
reformulated in stating that “every S is every P, and every not-S is every
P”.22 It results in the following conjunction of biconditionals:
(7) x((S(x) ↔ P(x))  (~S(x) ↔ P(x)),
the truth-condition of which cannot be merely satisfied by the truth of every

P: it is true only if every x is S, every x is P, … and no x is P. By obversion, that
no x is P entails that every x is not-P and this amounts to a self-contradictory
sentence (xP ∩ xP). no such sentence can be believed, unless we come
to admit that some sentences are both true and false.23 But to do this is only
presupposing what is forbidden by the clause of consistency (5) for every
correct belief.
3. Is God a proper class?

The problem can be stated as follows: how can god be everything without
entailing a self-contradiction and, accordingly, being an impossible thing?
a radical “solution” to this problem is to claim that nothing can be
properly said about god, while everything is said by him (or his name).
This means that god cannot be treated as a proper subject S in a predication
like “S is P”, since no class can include him fully without restricting his
domain of application and negating his “perfection” as it stands. a corollary
of this assumption is that god cannot be individuated: no definite collection
of properties can be attached to him in order to determine his identity;
22
This formulation has been put forth by Sir william hamilton, in his doctrine of
quantified predicates.
23
Such is the case with the logic in Paradox in Priest (1979), where some sentences
are assigned the paradoxical truth-value {T,F}. Then v(S(x))  {T,F} entails that (7)
is true: if v(P(x))  T, then v((S(x) ↔ P(x))  v(~S(x) ↔ P(x))  {T,F}; the same if
v(P(x))  F, so that (7) is always true and false (and, hence, true).

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determinatio est negatio, as claimed by Spinoza,24 so that the very process

of predication is unable to express anything consistent about god. But could
anything be said without subsuming a subject under a given concept?
That god may not fall under any other class than himself has been
echoed repeatedly in hegel’s philosophy about eastern thoughts: according
to the latter, contradiction doesn’t oppose two exclusive but, rather, inclu-
sive or complementary sentences that may be accepted together if we sort
them according to a context in which each plays a role in a sub-context.
likewise, it has been argued elsewhere that some Indian non-classical
logics admit a case where one sentence could be asserted and denied
simultaneously or, conversely, that it can be neither asserted nor denied
when it deals with some extra-rational entities like atman or Brahman.25
no wonder, if so, given that everything and nothing can be said about god:
everything, as a predicate; nothing, as a subject. whatever the final word
may be about this logical debate between the promoters of aristotle and
heraclitus, set theory is the culprit that leads us to atheism if we put our
belief into only well built sets; no sentence could make sense without
resorting to a subsumptive relation between a class P and its element S.
at the same time, the view that god is an unexpressible and universal
class also avoids the well-known set-theoretical paradox that normally
follows from it: if god is taken to be the set of all the sets, then it leads to
the famous Russell’s Paradox that disallows such a universal set because
it must include itself while, as the brackets of the set, not include itself.26
a way out to this self-contradiction occurs in John von neumann’s
24
B. Spinoza, Opera Iv, “letter to Jelles”, 240; see also Łukasiewicz (2000), 60. another
way to put it is that any sentence must be truly negated to be informative, following
Carnap’s theory of information: tautology and contradiction say nothing, accordingly.
25
a sentence that can be both asserted and denied is said to be “avaktavya”, whose
translation is variously rendered as “unassertable”, “undescriptible”, “unsayable”,
or “unexpressible”. about these Indian non-classical logics and the status of
contradiction within these, see e.g. Tripathi (1968) and Schang (2009a,2010).
26
Russell’s Paradox is an indirect consequence from Cantor’s Paradox (1891), according
to which the set of all subsets of a (the powerset of a) has a strictly greater cardinality
than a itself: Card((a)) > Card(a). now if a  u is the set of all the sets, then
Card(a) > Card((a)). Contradiction. If we weaken a by stating that a universal set
does not contain itself as a member, it follows from it that, if x is a member of itself,
then it is not a member of itself by definition: xx  xx.; and, conversely, if x is not
a member of itself, then it is a member of itself by definition: xx  xx. Therefore
x is a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself: xx  xx. This
set-theoretical formulation may be turned into a semantic version in terms of sentential
truth and falsity: the sentence p, “p is false”, is true if and only if p is false.

Angemeldet
138 FaBIen SChang
distinction between a set and a class: unlike a set, a proper class cannot be
included within another set and figure in the left-sided part of a membership
relation. In other words, everything said in connection with god should
be said, not about him, but in his name: “god is love”, e.g., must be replaced
with “love is divine”. Such a reversion would be trivial in a usual logic
of classes S and P, insofar as S and P can be interchangeably treated as
subjects or predicates by conversion;27 but it is not whenever class and
proper class are separated and accounted for by the very special nature of
god. It can be finally argued that, pace Priest,28 the distinction between
sets and classes is an appropriate solution to the inconsistency of god’s
perfection. The price to pay for a proper belief on this account is that god
be not predicable, therefore not expressible by any other predicate that
must be included into himself as a perfect, i.e. proper class.29
27
Such a reversion between subjects and predicates has been urged by ludwig Feuerbach
as an atheist argument to the effect that “Man is to Man the supreme being”.
according to Max Stirner, “So Feuerbach instructs us that, ‘if one only inverts
speculative philosophy, i.e. always makes the predicate the subject, and so makes
the subject the object and principle, one has the undraped truth, pure and clean’.
[Anekdota II, 64]. herewith, to be sure, we lose the narrow religious standpoint,
lose the God, who from this standpoint is subject; but we take in “exchange for it
the other side of the religious standpoint, the moral standpoint. E.g., we no longer
say ‘god is love’, but ‘love is divine’. If we further put in place of the predicate
‘divine’ the equivalent ‘sacred’, then, as far as concerns the sense, all the old comes
back again. according to this, love is to be the good in man, his divineness, that
which does him honor, his true humanity (it ‘makes him Man for the first time’,
makes for the first time a man out of him). So then it would be more accurately
worded thus: love is what is human in man, and what is inhuman is the loveless
egoist”. (M. Stirner, The Ego and its Own, new york, Tucker, B. (ed.), 1907, 61).
Feuerbach assumes hereby that whatever exists does so as a subject and must be
individuated. we do not.
28
according to Priest, von neumann’s distinction and Tarski’s metalanguage “are not
solutions. a paradox is an argument with premises which appear to be true and steps
which appear to be valid, which nevertheless ends in a conclusion which is false.
a solution would tell us which premise is false or which step invalid; but moreover it
would give us an independent reason for believing the premise or the step to be wrong.
If we have no reason for rejecting the premise or the step other than that it blocks
the conclusion, then the ‘solution’ is ad hoc and unilluminating.” (Priest (1979, 220).
29
This account of god as unsayable entity nicely matches with the Judeo-Christian
tradition as disallowing the very pronunciation of god’s name. For one can construe
this as a response to the fact that god is not a Russellian proper name, while taking
god to be that kind of name is to misunderstand god’s referential status. I thank
again the anonymous referee for this relevant note.

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4. Conclusion: an ethics of justified belief

after reviewing three logics of justification and opting for one feasible but
consistent view of proper belief, it seems as if the meaning of the claim that
god is perfect is not, per anselm and Descartes, that god is a necessary
existent, but that talk about god shows that we have to go outside the limits
of language in order not to utter self-contradictory statements about god.
Must he be made silent, accordingly? yes, if we don’t want to fall into
misleading predications about his nature. But our incapacity to grasp
a thought that is only intelligible outside of our language doesn’t negate the
content of such a dummy thought, it merely posits a relationship between
it and our language, putting into relief the limit of the latter. In a nutshell,
we are entitled to believe in god; but in silence, or in such a way that the
words don’t purport to rule the true and the false.
The point here is not that any proper logic for understanding god
should violate the rule of non-contradiction by allowing true contradictions.
Rather, a believer would be entitled to reply that god created everything
and rejected a world in which contradictories could be true together for
his thinking creatures.30
a final distinction is to be made between god as the cause of every
creature and god as entertained by some of these creatures (i.e. us, the
believing agents): that no one could think about him self-consistently does
not imply that he does not exist, because he might still have wanted to
restrict our understanding in accordance to his almighty and good delib-
eration. In other words: assuming that the order of truth is subjected to the
order of good, whatever cannot be true for us might be true for him because,
unlike fallible creatures, his perfect will leads him not to act badly, but,
in relation to creatures of an imperfect will (who cannot, for instance, will
their all of their conceptions to be imaginable) should restrict the under-
standing of those who can. here we have self-consistent grounds for claiming
that our limited understanding is not a sufficient condition to decide about
whatever is entitled to exist or not.
I’m not entitled to believe anything properly about god, for want of
any consistent judgment about him. But the failure of the believer to
30
Such an ethical account of the PnC is given in Łukasiewicz (2000): there is no
logical proof for the PnC, which is viewed as a necessary condition for agents to
live together; otherwise, mistakes and lies couldn’t be avoided and would lead
to self-destruction. now if an ethical principle purports to restrict the range of
possibility by will, then god can be entitled to think beyond non-contradictory
things because he needn’t be restricted in his perfect will.

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140 FaBIen SChang
convince the atheist conclusively that rational belief that god exists is still
compatible with the belief in god and his attributes, including, most
pertinently, as the one who limited our language for a good reason. here
is a sufficient evidence for being both rational and a theist.
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perspectives on the square of opposition, Béziau, J.-y. & Payette, g. (eds.), Peter
lang, Bern (2010).
Tripathi, R.k. (1968). “The concept of avaktavya in Jainism”. In Philosophy East and
West, 18, 187-93.
vuillemin, J. (1971). Le Dieu d’Anselme et les apparences de la raison. Paris: aubier
Montaigne.

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Logic, Right to Unbelief and Freedom
By aligning logic and the right to unbelief with freedom in my title, I do not
mean to suggest that the logical problem of right to unbelief is somehow
more important than religious tolerance in general. In the experience of
modern liberal societies, freedom, law, politics and social practice are certainly
of crucial significance. yet I think that a bit of logical analysis is a good way
to understand other issues, simply because conceptual clarity can’t be
avoided when considering the problem of belief and the political order.
Thus, let us start off by formalizing the problem. I consider “X has
right to belief ”and “X has right to unbelief (or non-belief)” as kinds of
normative or deontic statements. let us abbreviate them by the symbols
XRB and XR–B respectively. Putting the negation in the front of both
formulas we obtain (i) ØXRB (it is not true that X has right to believe) and
(ii) ØXR–B (it is not true that X has right to unbelief). let me fix at the
moment that (i) and (ii) mean “X has duty to belief but (ii) is equivalent to
“X has duty to unbelief” (a closer analysis come later). now observe that
(i), by expressing the view that belief is obligatory, is equivalent to
“X–unbelief is prohibited”. note that although the negations expressed by
the signs Ø and – are syntactically different, I can substitute between them,
logically, to define duty to belief as prohibition of unbelief. however, we
can also decompose belief into more complex formulas, viz. “X believes
in p” and “X does not believe in p” (where p is the object of belief) or even
“X believes that A” and X does not believe that A” (where A is a proposition
expressing the content of belief). This allows us to apply more canonical
formulas such as “it is a duty (obligatory) that X believes that A” and “it is
prohibited that X does not believe that A”. anyway, (ii) can be always
rendered by “X–belief is prohibited”. In my further remarks, I will use the
simpler grammatical forms.

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142 Jan woleńSkI
although duties, prohibitions and rights are always attributed to some-

one, the personal parameter X is not particularly relevant from the purely
logical point of view. Consequently, we can base our analysis on the four
basic forms expressing the normative status of beliefs: (a) belief is obligatory
(belief is qualified as a duty), (b) unbelief is obligatory (belief is prohibited,
unbelief is a duty), (g) belief is permitted (one has right to belief, one is
entitled to believe), (d) unbelief is permitted (one has right to unbelief, one
is entitled to unbelief). These introductory considerations suggest embedding
a – d into the web of logical dependencies illustrated by the well-known
logical square which is isomorphic with the logical square for traditional
categorical sentences or alethic modalities – the diagram (D):
a b
g d
we have the following formal theorems (I list only some tautologies):
(1) Ø(a  b) (duty to belief and duty to unbelief are contraries;
both cannot be true, but can be false);
(2) (a Þ g) (duty to belief entails right to belief; right to belief is
subordinated to duty to belief);
(3) (b Þ d) (duty to unbelief entails right to unbelief; right to
unbelief is subordinated to duty to unbelief);
(4) (a Û Ød) (duty to belief and right to unbelief are contradictories;
if one is true, the second is false);
(5) (b Û Øg) (duty to unbelief and right to belief are contradicto-
ries);
(6) (g Ú d) (duty to belief and duty to unbelief are not contraries;
both cannot be false, but can be true).
This table is very important, because it shows that we can consistently
conjoin g and d. otherwise speaking, the formula g  d is consistent.
The diagram (D) can be further extended by adding new points,
namely k, l, n and m. This leads to the diagram (D1)

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logic, Right to unbelief and Freedom 143
a b
k l
g d
The new points are interpreted as follows: k – there are believers, l – there
are unbelievers, n – believing or unbelieving are duties; m – believing
and unbelieving are permissible. we have the following (among others)
theorems:
(7) Ø(n Û m) (duty to belief or duty to unbelief is inconsistent
with right to belief and right to unbelief);
(8) Ø(k Þ a) (it is not true that that the existence of believers
entails duty to belief);
(9) Ø(k Þ g) (it is not true that that the existence of believers
entails right to belief);
(10) Ø(l Þb) (it is not true that that the existence of unbelievers
entails duty to unbelief);
(11) Ø(l Þ d) (it is not true that that the existence of unbelievers
entails right to unbelief);
(12) (a Ú b Ú m) (belief is obligatory, unbelief is obligatory or belief
and unbelief are permissible).

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144 Jan woleńSkI
The formula m, which is equivalent to g  d, deserves a special attention.

Introducing the personal parameter, it expresses the fact that X has the right
to belief as well as right to disbelieve. This right can be qualified as strong,
contrary to the d rendering, in which it is weak. Thus, weak rights can
be constructed as “parts” of strong ones. The crucial difference consists
in the fact that duty implies a weak right, but not strong one. Similarly,
duty or prohibitions constitutes strong duty (the negation of strong right).
Intuitively speaking, a strong right to belief (unbelief) is annihilated by the
duty to believe or not to believe.
Some general conclusions and/or conceptual suggestions come from
(D1); they modify suggestions made in (i) and (ii) at the beginning. It
seems reasonable to understand rights as strong rights, which agrees with
our intuition that rights are not duties. otherwise speaking, any right is
a fusion (combination) of a positive right (to do something) and a negative
right (right to not do of something what constitute the subject of positive
entitlement). Furthermore, the following (among others) conjunctions are
consistent (verbal comments about particular formulas are considerably
simplified): a  k (duty and existence of believers), a  l (duty and
existence of unbelievers), b  k (prohibitions and existence of believers),
b  l (prohibition and existence of unbelievers), n  k (strong duty and
existence of believers), n  k (strong duty and existence of believers),
m  l (strong duty and existence of unbelievers), m  k (strong right and
the existence of believers) and m  l (strong right and existence of unbe-
lievers). generally speaking, if s is strong duty or strong right, then the
formula s  k  l. Thus, the logic of (D1) does not distinguish between
any consistent combination of the factual state of affairs (that believers or
unbelievers exist) and its normative status (that believing or unbelieving
is obligatory or permissible). This corresponds to a well-known feature of
logic, namely that, logical theorems are neutral with respect to the course
of things in the real world. Philosophically speaking, duties and rights are
imposed by normative acts. nothing special is assumed here about the
content of the normative impositions save that they have formal existential
characteristics. The foregoing considerations cohere with cognitivism as
well as with non-cognitivism in meta-ethics. Incidentally, many of the
above formal remarks apply to other forms of belief, for example, epistemic
ones. however, there are also considerable differences. In particular,
religious belief does not admit degrees. assume fallibilism as the theory
of knowledge. If so, we are entitled to doubt in any epistemic result. Thus,
if we have reasons to belief in A, we have also a right (reason) to believe

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not–A. however, if the degree of belief in A is high, the corresponding

reasons for belief that not–A will be small. So-called virtue epistemology
tries to develop a kind of deontics for knowledge.1 It is perhaps interesting
that and not accidental that the expression “right to (belief) unbelief” does
not occur in epistemological discussions about degrees of (epistemic)
belief. Perhaps this fact is related to its normative character. on the other
hand, virtue epistemology also considers epistemic duties with the result
that we get a certain fuzziness in trying to define the concept of normativity.
I observed at the beginning of this paper that I focus on religious
matters, that is, belief and unbelief related to faith; I use the terms “belief”
and “unbelief” as abbreviations of “religious belief” and “religious unbelief”
respectively. yet this position requires some further comments. The concept
of unbelief covers many different attitudes (all in various forms) toward
religion, namely, atheism, agnosticism, scepticism or indifference.2 The
analysis of this variety is not the concern of this paper. let me only remark
that that all forms of unbelief either reject god or doubt his existence. of
course, since there are dubious cases, for instance, pantheism, some amount
of conventionality has to be applied. My own intuition is that believing in
personal god does not constitute a sufficient condition of being a believer,
and that thus the pantheist squeezes through when we are trying to collect
all forms of religious belief. More importantly, non-believing in a particular
god, but accepting another faith does not shape unbelief. This last point is
significant, because many religions have historically considered or even
consider today those who dissent or who maintain other than orthodox
beliefs in god as unbelievers. This view in its extreme form maintained
by fundamentalism (for example, Christian, Muslim or Judaic in order to
restrict examples to basic monotheistic religions) qualifies heresy or
heterodoxy as unbelief. The vocabulary used in this paper qualifies all
forms of religious faith, orthodox or heterodox, as cases of religious belief.
1
See F. huber, Ch. Schmidt-Petri (eds.), Degrees of Belief, Dordrecht: Springer 2009
for a general panorama of the problem of grading beliefs by pieces of evidence
attributed to them and e. Sosa, A Virtue Epistemology. Apt Belief and Reflective
Knowledge, v. 1, oxford: Clarendon Press 2007 as one of recently published accounts
of virtue epistemology.
2
See R. Dawkins, “Foreword”, in T. Flynn, The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief,
armherst: Prometheus Books 2007, pp. 14, J. woleński, “Theism, Fideism, atheism,
agnosticism, in l.-g. Johannson, J. Österberg and R. Śliwiński (eds.), Logic, Ethics,
and All That Jazz. Essays in Honour of Jordan Howard Sobel, uppsala universitet,
uppsala 2009, pp. 512-521.

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146 Jan woleńSkI
My position admits that various religious sects, independently whether large

or small, or officially recognized or illegal are kinds of religion. This broad
understanding of religion does not collide with restrictions of religious
freedom or right to belief sometimes introduced by legal orders, for example,
for security reasons, because it is commonly recognized that liberties
can have exceptions. Furthermore, I will neglect such limitations as not
relevant to the problem of tolerance, even if they turn up in the discourse
that swirls around current political tasks.
It follows from our general conceptual considerations that the right
to unbelief (belief) does not require treating unbelief as a kind of belief.
This statement can be extended to related strong rights. In fact, strong right
to belief (unbelief) always consists in allowing that any person can believe
in god or take the opposite attitude. Thus, we have serious reason to define
religious tolerance as admitting religious belief or religious unbelief. This
point has been frequently misunderstood in the history of liberal institutions.
John locke, the father of liberalism, political and economic, limited the
scope of the principle of tolerance by excluding the papists (Catholics)
and atheists from its benefits. his attitude to Catholics was the result of
17th century english political affairs, but locke’s verdict toward atheists
is more difficult to explain. Perhaps he considered atheism as socially
dangerous; perhaps he limited religious freedom only to believers and
concluded that unbelievers do not deserve right to unbelief. locke was not
an exception. Some writers dealing with religious freedom, for instance,
the Polish Brethren, left, consciously or not, the issue of atheism open;
others, for instance many american state legislatures, followed locke in
his unfriendly attitude to unbelievers. More specifically, legislatures in the
British colonies in north america and later the uSa introduced penalties
for atheisms. This practice, although more liberal and occasional, was
sometimes continued in the 20th century as it is documented by the Bertrand
Russell case in 1940; he was not allowed (by the local court in new york)
to teach in the City College for his atheism. If we look at the diagram (D1)
and the conclusions derived from it, locke’s view introduced legal
prohibition of unbelief and, a fortiori, duty to belief. although his position
is more liberal than, for example, the official Catholic standpoint declared
by the Trident Council (Catholicism as the unique vera religio), it still
restricts religious freedom to a spectrum of religions. on the other hand,
some anti-religious regimes, anticipated by the Jacobins in France and
continued by some communist states, liquidated the right to belief by
introducing duty to unbelief.

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logic by itself cannot solve the problem of the scope of religious freedom,
although it can clarify the structure of tolerance, suggesting there are no
conceptual reasons in the conjunction between deontology and political
rights to exclude unbelievers from its benefits. In order to have a wider
perspective we must appeal to the concept of freedom, which we can
construe as follows.3 Typically philosophers distinguish positive freedom
(freedom to) and negative freedom (freedom from). although the latter
consists in the lack of pressure which forces people to do something, the
former refers to human capacities, liberties, etc. allowing people to realize
their tasks directed by decisions and acts of will. Circumstances resulting
in pressure in question can be subjective or social. we say that we are free
when our actions are not completely determined by external circumstances.
The traditional view maintains that negative freedom is a condition of
positive freedom, meaning that our positive freedom, which entitles us to
a good or service, is grounded in our larger negative freedom, that carves
out a space of free choice for us to realize our tasks and desires to the best
of our abilities. The distinction of both kinds of freedom has several
aspects. ontological factors limiting freedom are often construed in terms
of fundamental problems relating to determinism, indeterminism, free will
etc. For obvious reasons I will disregard these great and controversial matters.
Simply speaking, I assume that we feel free and that this commonsensical
position is not without fairly solid foundations in our psycho-psychophysical
nature. let me only remark that, according to the assumed view, radical
determinism (roughly speaking, everything is predetermined or preordered
in advance) excludes freedom equally as radical indeterminism (roughly
speaking, everything is merely accidental or contingent). Thus, the com-
monsensical view seems to imply that the real freedom, negative as well
as positive, always functions in the context of various natural limitations.
Social and political aspects of freedom are much more important for
discussing rights and their execution.
although this picture, I agree, appears as somewhat naïve – disregarding
such things as financial endowments, differences in access to opportunities,
etc. – it fairly suffices to allow us to conclude that the right to belief
and right to unbelief is a fundamental civic liberty. Decisions about choosing
an attitude to religious faith are manifestations of positive freedom. These
decisions occur against the background of the negative freedom warranted
3
For a more comprehensive account see J. Feinberg, “Freedom and liberty”, in
e. Craig (ed.): The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3, london and new
york: Routledge 1998, 753-757.

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148 Jan woleńSkI
by the social system, which are meant to protect these decisions against
coercive forms of pressure. This picture applies to believers in secular
environment as well as to unbelievers in religious one. Both attitudes
require positive freedom and corresponding negative freedom, with the
question being how much persuasion can be exercised on the side of
believers or unbelievers to influence those undertaking decisions concern-
ing religion. needless to say, negative freedom here is a universal enjoyed
within a given political entity by everybody, and not separately by believers
and unbelievers. of course, there are several practical problems to be
solved. how to harmonize ways of expressing religious or secular beliefs
in various segments of the social space? Take, for example, religious
symbols in public school in which believers and unbelievers are present,
but the former constitute the majority. one perhaps would like to argue that
personal negative freedom defends an unbeliever X against participation in
religious practices even in a passive way. In other words, X can abstain
from attending religious teaching in public schools or from being taught
in rooms with religious symbols. yet both situations are different. If X is
a student of a school, he or she can refuse to participate in lessons of
religion. In this case, his or her negative freedom conditions positive
freedom manifested by right to be religiously educated or not. on the other
hand, if a person is unbeliever is taught in places in which religious
symbols are present, his negative freedom is illusive. however, believers
can observe that the issue is not so simple, because their negative freedom
requires tolerance for their religious principles. Consequently, the believers
need negative freedom in order to realize their positive religious freedom.
Both standpoints are mutually inconsistent, at least as far as the matter
concerns postulates related to practical issues. Moreover, positive freedom
and negative freedom go sometimes in opposite directions, although the
scheme of reasoning seems the same in both cases. Thus, the division
between both kinds of freedom is insufficient, although important, and
should be somehow supplemented if the question of religious freedom is
discussed. one of solutions consists in a defining a sharp borderline
between public and religious sphere. however, this goes beyond the scope
of the formal problem I set out to clarify in this paper. as that clarification
shows, it is inherent to rights talk that its theoretical absolutes must be
subject, in practice, to compromise.

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RenaTa zIeMIńSka
Scepticism and Religious Belief

The Case of Sextus Empiricus1
The article presents the ancient sceptic Sextus empiricus’ view on religious
beliefs. Sextus is an advocate of a radical form of scepticism that takes the
total suspension of judgment as its goal; Sextus even goes so far as to
suspend judgment about his own sceptical arguments. his philosophy is
better conceived as a way of life without beliefs rather than a doctrinal
approach to epistemology. Sextus as a philosopher writes about his own
impressions without accepting his own words as true. It is in this context
that Sextus’ discussion of religious belief should be read. Sextus makes
three claims about the gods: first, he claims that we are unable to acquire
a concept of god/gods; secondly, he shows that any proof of god’s existence
is impossible; and thirdly, he gives famous argument from evil against
providence. But, surprisingly, he prefaces his discussion of god by saying
of sceptics that “we say that there are gods and we are pious towards the
gods and say that they are provident” (Ph 3.2) In this paper I will argue
that Sextus’ efforts to reconcile religious practice and radical scepticism
fail. The superior contribution of scepticism to the philosophy of religion
is given to us by another ancient sceptic Carneades, who advocated a weak
assent to belief in religious matters. Sextus is not hostile towards religion,
but in rejecting the validity of any religious beliefs, he ends up promoting
a kind of behaviourism that empties religious observance of internal content.
The word sceptic is often understood as having a similar meaning to
atheist2, in as much as it describes a person hostile to religious faith. But
1
Scientific work financed by funds for science in years 2009-2011 as a research project.
2
Cf. george Berkeley, who treats both terms as closely connected. See the titles of his
works: A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Wherein the chief

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150 RenaTa zIeMIńSka
the history of philosophy, shows us that there is, as well, a close connection
between scepticism and fideism: we need only name nicholas of Cusa,
w. ockham, M. de Montaigne, and B. Pascal3. The complex relation
between scepticism and religious belief was already present in ancient
scepticism. I will analyse the case of major ancient sceptic Sextus empiricus,
whose many works had a profound effect on such early modern thinkers
as Montaigne, as well as enlightenment era thinkers, like hume.
1. Sextus Empiricus as a sceptic

Sextus empiricus (2nd century C.e.) is the only Pyrrhonian whose works
we still possess. we have his Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Ph) and Adversus
Mathematicos (M, composed of Against the Logicians 7-8, Against the
Physicists 9-10, Against the Ethicists 11, Against the Professors 1-6). These
texts are our main source for ancient sceptical arguments because many
other sceptical books are lost or known only indirectly in short or dubitable
reports embedded in the works of other writers. Sextus’ works are copious
enough to serve as an important source of our knowledge about the whole
of ancient philosophy.
we are immediately confronted with a problem when trying to define
Sextus’ scepticism, because he “neither reject[s] nor posit[s] anything”
(Ph 1.10), and considers scepticism as “an ability to set out oppositions”
(Ph 1.8) and “the ability to suspend judgment” (Ph 1.17) rather than as
a dogma. Scepticism does not promote any thesis, any doctrine but a kind
of practice, a way of life without beliefs. Sextus tries to characterize the
sceptical practice in opposition to other ancient philosophers. according
to him aristotle, epicurus and the stoics are dogmatists because they “think
that they have discovered truth”, Carneades and other academics are
negative dogmatists because they “have asserted that things cannot be
apprehended”, they believe the truth cannot be discovered (in modern
causes of error and difficulty in the sciences, with the grounds of Scepticism, Atheism,
and Irreligion, are inquired into and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonus.
The design of which is plainly to demonstrate the reality and perfection of human
knowledge, the incorporeal nature of the soul, and the immediate providence of a Deity:
in opposition to Sceptics and Atheists. See The works of george Berkeley, Bishop of
Cloyne, vol. 1-9, london 1948-57. See Richard h. Popkin, a. vanderjagt, Scepticism
and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Brill, leiden 1993.
3
Cf. R. Popkin, 2003 The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, oxford
university Press, xix.

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Scepticism and Religious Belief 151
philosophy such a philosophical stance is called agnosticism). Sceptics

oppose both groups, believing neither that anyone has so far discovered
the truth nor that it is impossible to do so. Rather, the sceptics “are still
investigating” (Ph 1.3)4. keeping on investigating may be logically
consistent with suspending all judgments, but it is also psychologically
implausible, for if I suspend all judgments through many years, my hope
that I will discover the truth will gradually vanish.
The core of Sextus’ texts consists of arguments against the possibility
of attaining certain knowledge. he includes the ten modes of aenesidemus,
i.e., arguments against trusting the information provided by the senses, and
the five modes of agrippa, i.e. arguments against the possibility of rational
justification of any thesis (we are in trilemma of infinite regress, reciprocity
or dogmatism); he adds his own arguments against the possibility to
establish the criterion of truth in rational way and many arguments against
valid proofs. The sceptical arguments are instruments to reach a mid
position between opposing judgments, intended to make it impossible to
believe either one or the other position rationally. The result is suspending
all judgments, and the lack of any belief, to the extent that even the
arguments that Sextus uses to make us suspend our judgment also fall
under suspicion about their truth value.
2. Sextus Empiricus about the concept and existence

of God/gods
Sextus’ texts (Ph, M 9-11) are stocked with arguments against god (or the
gods), but they also contain some arguments for the existence of god
against those who argue against his existence. Sextus discusses both the
concept of many polytheistic gods and the concept of monotheistic god,
as was the custom of his times. The stoics in particular were in the process
of moving from many gods to the concept of one god (hankinson 1995,
242 and long 1990, 286). The situation of two radically different concepts
of the divine did not discomfort Sextus’ scepticism, since his arguments
show the problems with both what we mean by god or the gods and, even
if we accept the concept, the problems with the existence of god.
The first argument against the concept of god springs from the
disagreement among philosophers. while the Stoics and epicureans agree
4
Sextus is unfair towards at least some academic sceptics, who suspended all
judgments.

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that god is the indestructible (immortal, everlasting) and blessed, they

disagree about what it is to be blessed. Stoics say that to be blessed is to
act in accordance with virtue and to provide for the things subordinated to
the power of the one so blessed. epicurus opposes this claim with the
counter-claim that the highest blessedness is to be inactive and take no
trouble to myself and cause none to others (Ph 3.4-5). Sextus suggests that
there is no way to decide which view is right.
Similarly, philosophers remain mired in many other conceptual and
definitional disputes (is god corporeal or not, anthropomorphic or not, in
space or not, within the universe or outside etc.). Sextus refers to the six
arguments formulated by Carneades in his dispute with stoics (we know
them as they were repeated by Cicero in De natura deorum 3.34-44) and
adds many others. In Against the Physicists there are eighteen arguments
against stoic’s theology, mainly against polytheistic gods (M 9, 182-3).
But some of them seem to be important also in the discussion of a monothe-
istic god. The sixth of the eighteen shows the incoherence of the concept.
It leads to sceptical thesis that god is neither a body nor incorporeal and
no such object can exist.
(1) If there is something divine, it is either a body or incorporeal
(2) It is not incorporeal, since
(3) what is incorporeal is inanimate and insensitive
(4) nor it is a body, since
(5) every body is changeable and perishable, whereas
(6) The divine is imperishable, consequently
(7) The divine does not exist (cf. M 9. 151)
Typically, Sextus does not claim that this argument is conclusive. he
presents the argument to give a dialectical counterbalance to common
religious beliefs. Following Carneades, he shows the dilemma between
god’s being sentient and imperishable (M 9.146-7) and between god’s
being comprehensible to humans and being perfect (M 9.152-77).
Canvassing the conflicting theories of god, Sextus suggests that the human
spirit is incapable of acquiring a concept of god, because „we posses
neither an agreed substance for him nor a form nor a place” (Ph 3.3).
yet, even granting that god is conceivable, conceivability does not
translate into a proof of existence. Rather, Sextus gives reasons to convince
us that it is necessary to suspend judgment about whether gods exist or
not. The first is again the dispute among philosophers that shows that the
existence of gods is not-evident and in need of proof (cf. Ph 3.6). The
second is the lack of valid arguments, which Sextus proves by surveying

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existing arguments and showing that they are invalid. In particular, he

presents the ontological argument by Stoic Diogenes of Babylon: „the gods
are of such a nature as to exist. But if so, then they exist. For if they ever
did exist, they do now, just as if atoms ever existed they do now. For this
sort of thing is ungenerable and incorruptible” (M 9.135). Sextus’ answer
is that „not everything conceived has a share in existence” (M 9.49).
Because Sextus has already shown that the intuition behind this argument,
which depends on some conception of god, does not stand, he does not
feel the force of that intuition that would confirm the first proposition: that
the gods are of such a nature as to exist.
having rejected the self-evidence of divine existence, Sextus then
deploys, as his third reason, the positive arguments against their existence.
The most space is devoted to the argument from evil. It is an extended
version of epicurean argument with, typical for Sextus, clear dichotomies5:
he who says god exists either says that he has providence for the things in
the world or that he does not, and if the former then either for all or
only some things. But if he had providence for all, there would be
neither evil nor vice in the world: yet they say that everything is full of
vice, and consequently he cannot have providence for all. But if only for
some, why has he providence for some and not others? For either (a) he
both wishes and is able to have providence for all, or (b) he wishes to but
is unable, or (c) he is able but doesn’t wish it, or (d) he neither wishes it
nor is able (Ph 3.9-10, transl. hankinson 1995, 238)
The first option is inconsistent with god’ power (god would be weak),
the second option is inconsistent with the fact of evil, the third option is
inconsistent with god’ goodness (god would be malign) and the fourth
option is inconsistent with both his power and goodness (god would be
both weak and malign).
If they say that the gods provide for everything, they will say that they are
the cause of evil; and if they say that they provide for some things or even
for none at all, they will be bound to say either that the gods are malign or
that they are weak (Ph 3.12).
according to Sextus, it is impious to say that gods are cause of evil

or that they are weak and malign. This leads to the paradoxical assertion
that those who say that the gods exist are being impious. Thus, it is more
5
other testimonies for epicurus’ concept of gods are briefer, cf. letter to Menoeceus
in Diogenes laertius, X 123-4.

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pious to say that they do not exist (or at least that they have no providence
for the world). If we do not want to be impious, we must say that god that
has providence for the world does not exist.
The argument from evil would seem to logically end at this point,
but, in a gesture that is typical of Sextus’ argumentative style, after
presenting many strong and weak arguments against some thesis, he does
not accept the conclusion of his own arguments. In this case, he does not
accept the conclusion that god does not exist. It would be negative
dogmatism. Sextus’ position is not any thesis but suspension of judgment
about god.
3. Suspending judgment and inconsistency

To counter the arguments against the existence of god, Sextus then turns
to atheism and its negative results. he refers to ancient atheists (like
Diagoras of Melos M 9.51) and tries to argue against atheism. For instance
we can find this weak argument: „if god does not exist, neither will piety,
since piety is the knowledge of service to the gods; but piety does exist;
so, too, do the gods” (M 9.123). Sextus juxtaposes the opposite claims
(atheism and theism) and suspends judgment about god (concerning both
concept and existence). The sceptic will not believe either side on the
question of whether the gods exist or not. he is neither a theist nor an
atheist.
But if sceptic suspends judgment, what is his/her everyday activity?
Does he attend religious ceremonies or not? we expect that disbeliever
will be rather inactive in religious matters. But Sextus surprisingly says:
„following ordinary life without opinions, we say that there are gods and
we are pious towards the gods and say that they are provident” (Ph 3.2).
„we accept, from an everyday point of view, that piety is good and impiety
bad” (Ph 1.24).
Sceptics suspend judgment about the existence of god but in practice
are pious and say that god exists. we need not actually believe that the
god exists and that s/he is benevolent to take part in religious ceremonies
or even to act in a manner that is pious. But there is something unsatisfac-
tory about this conclusion: it seems inconsistent or even hypocritical.
In fact religious beliefs are only one example of the general problem for
Sextus: how to live without beliefs?
This is the most important problem for ancient sceptics and for Sextus
as well. If a sceptic has no beliefs, s/he will be unable to choose a course

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of action, s/he will have no motive for doing anything, even assaulting
dogmatists. This will lead to a kind of lethargy, to the end of activity, and
even to the end of life (apraxia charge). Sextus answered to this charge in
the Outlines of Pyrrhonism pointing to the possibility of life without beliefs
due to following the appearances in the form of the fourfold observance.
Sceptic guides his/her actions by (1) nature, (2) necessitation by feelings,
(3) laws and customs, and (4) kinds of expertise. The sceptic as a human
being follows nature and feelings. “By nature’s guidance we are naturally
capable of perceiving and thinking. By the necessitation of feeling, hunger
conducts us to food and thirst to drink” (Ph 1.24). But we may use these
capacities so far as they don’t lead us to a dogmatic belief. Sceptic as
a citizen respects the law and tradition concerning evaluations of things
but s/he does not accept any common belief as true. Sceptic may also
practice some profession, for instance to be a doctor like Sextus. according
to Sextus a doctor need not accept any physiological theories to be good
in the practice of curing diseases (Ph 1.238).
Sextus also adds that he as a philosopher writes and speaks about his
own impressions without accepting his own words as true (Ph 14). he
says a lot but paradoxically he does not believe what he is saying.
4. Three recent ways to defend consistency

In contemporary scholarship, three important schools of thought have tried
to defend the consistency of the Pyrrhonian scepticism: (1) allowing
a sceptic to have weak beliefs about things (Frede, Brennan), (2) allowing
philosophy to be practiced without beliefs, as disposition and therapy
(hankinson, williams) and (3) taking inconsistency as the effect of the
development from the sceptic apprentice to the mature sceptic (McPherran,
Bailey, Thorsrud).
Michael Frede’s interpretation is to limit Pyrrhonian epochē to
scientific, philosophical beliefs as concerning what really is, the real nature
of things and to allow sceptic to have weak beliefs. Strong belief is “active
acceptance as true”, weak belief is “merely passive acceptance” (Frede
1998b, 138). weak beliefs allow the sceptic to lead a normal life within
which he accepts some beliefs and to philosophise against strong ones.
also religious beliefs can have status of weak beliefs. Frede interprets
Sextus consistently and reasonably but ascribes him a kind of Carneades’
fallibilism (we have no certain beliefs but we have some more or less
justified weak beliefs). In my opinion, Frede presents us with the most

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reasonable reconstruction of the ancient sceptical program, one in which

we can see, distinctly, a foreshadowing of modern scepticism. It is also
good model for relation between knowledge and faith. But the problem is
that Frede’s interpretation has a weak basis in Sextus’ texts. Sextus criticizes
academics for approving what is persuasive, he suggests that there is no
rational preference between opinions; he writes that only appearances are
accepted by sceptics (Ph 1.228-30). Sextus rejects even the modest appeal
to greater or lesser plausibility (cf. Striker 2010, 204).
according to R.J. hankinson scepticism is a practice without any
beliefs (hankinson 1995, 287) that is without any theses, theory, assertions,
opinions, judgments etc. a sceptic can live by impulse and habit. Philosophy
is just some disposition and ability: the disposition to epochē and the ability
to produce opposite arguments. Sceptical philosophy is not any thesis but
a way of life (agōgē). The question is why sceptics dislike dogmatists, if
they have no beliefs. The reason can be just their disposition. The same is
the status of the religious life: behaviour without beliefs.
hankinson (1995, 296) is even ready to accept the Sextus’ story that
a sceptic has a moral life without beliefs. The most serious counterexample
for Sextus is the case of a tyrant compelling a sceptic to perform a forbidden
act, for instance to kill his/her parents (M 11. 162-6). Sextus replies that
the sceptic can make a choice without beliefs, led by his/her education and
customs. It can be the result of appearances that created his/her dispositions.
Such an answer seems difficult to accept. life without beliefs seems to
lack essential elements of the human – it seems to be deprived of freedom,
reason, emotion and values. If sceptic rejects all rational principles, he/she
is lost for rationality. Sextus writes that all sceptics’ words are “implicitly
cancelled by themselves” (Ph 1.15).
In my opinion, hankinson’s interpretation cannot explain the logical
power of sceptical arguments and it reduces sceptical philosophy to some
kind of passive life in an animal style. Scepticism is left without rational
force. But we can ask, if arguments are so worthless, why sceptics devote
them so much attention? hankinson suggests that sceptical arguments are
instruments for sceptical therapy. The third, developmental interpretation
makes the important distinction concerning the function of sceptical argu-
ments.
according to alan Bailey we need to distinguish between the mature
sceptic and the developing sceptic (Bailey 1995, 42). The developing
sceptic must have many beliefs and the arguments, like agrippa’s five
modes, must have some rational force for him/her. after converting to

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scepticism, the mature sceptic can extend his/her suspension on the very
arguments that persuaded him/her to start a sceptical way. The modes were
just a ladder to climb to the level of sceptical thinking. The development
of sceptical position can explain why the sceptic uses an argument at one
point and later rejects the same argument at another point.
In fact, Sextus gives several metaphors to induce the impression that
this use of logic is actually a return to the natural situation. Bailey’s and
hankinson’s therapeutic model is supported by texts that deploy the
metaphor of purgative drugs. Sceptical arguments “can be destroyed by
themselves, being cancelled along with what they are applied to, just as
purgative drugs do not merely drain the humours from the body but drive
themselves out too along with the humours” (Ph 1. 206). The next famous
metaphor is the throwing step-ladder. “Just as it is not impossible for the
person who has climbed to a high place by a ladder to knock over the
ladder with his foot after his climb, so it is not unlikely that the sceptic too,
having got to the accomplishment of his task by a sort of step-ladder – the
argument showing that there is not demonstration – should do away with
this argument” (M 8.481)6. Sceptical arguments are like a throwing ladder,
used for therapy and rejected together with other beliefs. The two
metaphors are rhetorical tropes to cover the self-contradiction that threatens
Sextus’ philosophy.
In my opinion, the case for the developmental trajectory of scepticism
fails to explain the way sceptical arguments tend towards self-refutation.
If we pass over developing scepticism and look back from the ‘mature’
point of view, scepticism is deprived of its rational force – that is to say,
the sceptical arguments that have led us there are worthless. The idea of
the development is a good way to explain how the sceptic has and does
not have beliefs, but it is parasitic on the dogmatist’s beliefs, which in the
end justify the development of the sceptic. Scepticism may be consistent
at the mature stage but without dogmatic arguments it is unjustified and
irrational.
6
This metaphor is echoed at the end of wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “My propositions
serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually
recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb out
through them, on them, over them. (he must, so to speak, throw away the ladder
after he has climbed up it.).” l. wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 6.54.
wittgenstein calls scepticism “nonsensical”. Radical scepticism can not even be
coherently formulated, and so there is nothing to rebut. But he writes like Sextus
that philosophy is not a theory but a kind of therapy.

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however, the most vital moment in ancient scepticism consists in

the arguments that the sceptic uses against the possibility of acquiring
certain knowledge. here we get to the heart of the sceptic’s problem with
self-refutation: the arguments are formulated from dogmatic point of
view. They presuppose some information about the world, the senses, the
intelligibility of concepts and intellectual obligations, as for instance the
often alluded to principle, “no certainty – no belief”, and for the arguments
to work we must accept, for a moment, the dogmatic (in ancient sense)
point of view. If we are convinced by the argument and reject this point of
view and reject all beliefs and principles, then we cannot return to the
argument at all, as the logical power of the sceptical argument is lost. Thus,
scepticism can’t really present itself as a rational philosophy. and if
sceptical arguments are powerful they are also self-destructive: when we
have no beliefs, we have no reason to be sceptics.
If Sextus’ scepticism is a rational philosophy it is inconsistent and
if it is consistent it is irrational. I would argue, then, against the three
interpretations above, that it is more plausible for Sextus to have been
engaged in making a sort of reductio ad absurdum that shows how an
over-ambitious rationalistic philosophy falls into inconsistency, then to
claim that he was promoting an ultimately irrational practice or even
promoting it as a phase in the development of some practice leading to
wisdom (of either the esoteric sect or a passive animal life).
5. Inconsistency or irrationality
To return to our religious questions, if we accept the basic inconsistency
in Sextus’ view on religion, than we do not need to ascribe to him the view
of religion as some kind of passive life in animal style and to treat his
arguments as worthless. Sextus seems to be getting us to move towards
some kind of religious behaviourism, in which the member of the religion
actively performs what is required by the religion but is emptied out of
any internal religious beliefs. This may be possible from the point of view
of some esoteric sect, but it is obviously inconsistent from the common
point of view (practicing religion seems to require beliefs).
Carneades takes a more rational position: we are not certain in any
judgment, but in practice we have right to accept what is credible
(ac. 2.59). on the ground of this kind of scepticism, religious beliefs are
among the other common beliefs and they are weak, probable or fallible
assertions. Sextus finds this be a fatal weakening of the radical sceptical

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premise, and writes in order to assert himself as a more radical sceptic than
Carneades (Ph 1.227).
Sextus presents his view as one that is a curious mixture of the radical
and the conservative: he is not hostile towards religion but rejects all
religious beliefs. The consequence of this view is, as I have said, religious
behaviourism, and a religious conservatism, or passivity, that hollows out
practices as gestures performed without thinking, in mere instrumental
conformity to living in society. Radical and global scepticism like Sextus’
is not about guarding religious beliefs from being subsumed by rationality,
but instead, a way of depriving it entirely of rationality. In fact scepticism
was sometimes an argument for radical fideism (nicholas of Cusa, gian-
francesco Pico). But the modern pattern of scepticism was the Carneades’
fallibilism (uncertainty but rationality). Such rational scepticism with weak
beliefs and weak fideism is represented by M. de Montaigne.
Because Sextus‘ writing about religion is very sophisticated and his
position toward religion is ostentatiously reasonable – I cannot interpret
his view on religion as irrationalism. however, I do interpret it as incon-
sistent. Sextus’ declaration „we say that there are gods and we are pious
towards the gods and say that they are provident” (Ph 3.2) is, indeed, very
suspicious. Read in the context of his entire work, it seems to be either an
insincere declaration to neutralize the inconsistency between scepticism
and everyday life, or some despairing attempt at connecting radical sceptical
theory with the requirements of everyday life.
References
Bailey, a. (1990). “Pyrrhonean Scepticism and the Self-Refutation Argument. In The

Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 40 no. 158, 27-44.
Bailey, a. (2002). Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonean Scepticism. oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Barnes, J. (1998). The Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist. In: Burnyeat M., Frede M. (eds.), 58-91.
Barnes, J. (2000). Introduction in: Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism. Translated
by Julia annas, Jonathan Barnes, Cambridge and new york: Cambridge
university Press.
Bett, R. (ed.) (2010). The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism. Cambridge
new york: Cambridge university Press.
Brennan, T. (1999). Ethics and Epistemology in Sextus Empiricus. new york: garland.
Burnyeat, M. (1976). “Protagoras and Self-Refutation in later greek Philosophy”. In
The Philosophical Review, vol. 85 1, 44-69.
Burnyeat, M. & Frede, M. (eds). (1998). The Original Sceptics: A Controversy.
Indianapolis: hackett Publishing Company.

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Burnyeat, M. (1998a). Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism? In Burnyeat, M. & Frede, M.
(eds.). (1998), 25-57.
Burnyeat, M. (1998b). The Sceptic in His Place and Time. In Burnyeat, M. & Frede, M.
(eds.). (1998), 92-126.
Cicero, (2006). On academic scepticism. Translated by Ch. Brittain. Indianapolis/
Cambridge (=ac): hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (=ac)
Diogenes laertius, (2007). The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Translated
by C. D. yonge’. kessinger Publishing. (=Dl)
Frede, M. (1998a). The Sceptic’s Belief. In Burnyeat, M. & Frede, M. (eds.). (1998),
1-24.
Frede, M. (1998b). The Sceptic’s Two Kinds of Assent and the Question of the Possibility
of Knowledge. Burnyeat, M. & Frede, M. (eds.). (1998), 127-151.
hankinson, R. J. (1995). The Sceptics. london and new york: Routledge.
long, a. a. (1990). Scepticism about gods in Hellenistic philosophy. In griffith, M.
& Mastronarde, D.J. (eds.). Cabinet of the Muses, atlanta: Scholar Press.
long, a. a. & Sedley, D.n. (eds.). (2009). The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1.
Cambridge: Cambridge university Press 2009. (=lS)
McPherran, M. (1987). “Sceptical homeopathy and Self-refutation”. In Phronesis,
vol. 32 no 3, 290-328.
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oxford university Press.
Popkin, R. h. & vanderjagt, a. (1993). Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth
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Barnes, Cambridge and new york: Cambridge university Press. (=Ph)
Sextus empiricus, (2005). Against the Logicians. Translated by R. Bett, Cambridge
and new york: Cambridge university Press. (=M 7-8)
Striker, g. (2010). Academics versus Pyrrhonists, reconsidered. In Bett (ed.). (2010).
195-207.
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547-588.
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london: Routledge and kegan Paul.

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DaRIuSz ŁukaSIewICz
Are We Morally Obliged

to Be Atheists?
Marian Przełęcki on the Right to Believe 1
one of the essential characteristics of the philosophy of the lvov-warsaw

School is rationalism (Przełęcki 1989a, 56). This rationalism is very close
to its construal in the tenets of logical empiricism2. however, the School
was composed of Catholic believers (Bocheński, Drewnowski, Salamucha)
as well as atheists (kotarbiński) who defended strong metaphysical theses
in support of their atheism. These two belief sets might well be regarded
as nonsensical from the point of view of logical empiricism. But there are,
within the School’s notion of rationality, possible strategies to defend the
rationality of religious belief. I want to present and discuss one such strategy,
proposed by Marian Przełęcki, the eminent disciple and continuator of
the lvov-warsaw School3. I think it is interesting not only to consider
Przełęcki’s arguments in themselves from the purely philosophical viewpoint,
but also to see how the rationalism of the lvov-warsaw School was
preserved and developed in the late twentieth century from the viewpoint
of the history of philosophy.
The word “rationalism” has two meanings in the philosophy of the
lvov-warsaw School. First, rationalism is an epistemological view that is
in opposition to empiricism. In the second sense, more important for this
1
I am very grateful to ela Łukasiewicz and Roger gathman for their philosophical
comments, as well as for their improving the linguistic shape of the text.
2
This view is discussed by Jan woleński in Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov-Warsaw
School (woleński 1989, 296-297).
3
Marian Przełęcki was a student of kazimierz ajdukiewicz, Janina kotarbińska and
Tadeusz kotarbiński.

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162 DaRIuSz ŁukaSIewICz
paper, rationalism is the opposite of irrationalism, and is also called

“anti-irrationalism” (the name introduced by kazimierz ajdukiewicz). In
what follows I will use the word “rationalism” in the second sense.
within the tradition of the lvov-warsaw School, the rationalism of
beliefs was understood in the following way: beliefs are rational if and
only if they are semantically determined and sufficiently justified (exact).
This definition of rationality, though apparently simple, requires some
clarification, which will be important to backgrounding our presentation
of Przełęcki’s views on religious beliefs. let us therefore begin by explaining
such concepts as belief, semantic determinacy and sufficient justification
as they are construed or implied by the School.
First, the very concept of belief has, as Przełęcki underlines, two basic
meanings. In the first sense, a belief should be regarded as an assertive act
(rejection is in this sense also an assertive act), and the object of that act
of assertion is a sentence (or a proposition expressed by a given sentence).
In the second sense, a belief is a state of conviction and its object is the
truth of a given sentence or proposition4.
The distinction between assertion and conviction has important
consequences for the problem of rationality of religious beliefs. Firstly,
belief understood as an assertion of a proposition is voluntary, dependent
on the human will; whereas conviction is involuntary, it is a will-independent
act. Secondly, assertion is not a matter of degree; something is asserted or
is not asserted – it is a “dichotomous act” – degrees of assertion simply do
not exist (see Przełęcki 2002, 82; also Reinach 1982, 319)5. By contrast,
4
The distinction between belief as assertion and conviction was also present in
Brentano and the phenomenological tradition, as described by adolf Reinach, but
probably Przełęcki did not borrow it from Reinach (Reinach 1982, 319). It seems to
have been his own decision to use the distinction. There is a problem with Przełęcki’s
thesis that the object of assertion is a proposition. It would be better to say that it is
a state of affairs which is asserted, not a proposition. The latter is rather a content
of an assertion. The view that proposition is the object of belief is quite popular
with many philosophers. a subtle analysis of the problem of what is the object of
our beliefs and propositional attitudes is provided, for example, by John Perry in
“Perception, action, and the Structure of Believing” (grandy, warner 1986).
5
Roger gathman raised the following objection regarding the distinction between
assertion and conviction. as assertion is voluntary and conviction involuntary, one
would expect that the former would indeed have degrees – that it would be subject
to calculation that makes one thing more probable than the other – while the latter
would not, as the believer ‘can’t help himself” as a vehicle for a will independent
act. Thus, one would think that assertion would come about through the Pascalian

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are we Morally obliged to Be atheists? 163
conviction has levels or degrees of certainty; one can be more convinced

that something is the case or less so. There is also a difference between
assertion and conviction regarding their temporality; assertion has no
temporal extendedness, it is spontaneous and punctual, whereas conviction
has a temporal extent. assertion is directly dependent upon conviction;
the former is motivated by the latter, but this is not a causal dependence.
I can be convinced that something is the case even though I do not assert
that it is the case. The fact that assertion is a voluntary act and conviction
is an involuntary mental state is important for the following questions
concerning the moral status of beliefs (in both senses of the word): is it
reasonable to evaluate beliefs from the moral point of view and can I be
held morally responsible for my own beliefs? To these questions we will
return later.
The next concept that forms an essential condition for assigning ra-
tionality to belief is semantic determinacy (exactness), or, perhaps better,
the postulate of semantic determinacy. It was clear to all members and
followers of the lvov-warsaw School, Marian Przełęcki included, that any
debate over a philosophical thesis and the possibility of its decidability
(demonstration that it is true or false) requires precision with regard to its
content – what a given thesis says should be unambiguous, and without
any semantic blurring. The ideal is to formulate a sentence with only one
sense. however, Przełęcki in his many papers on the logic of empirical
theories repeatedly pointed out that even the language of scientific empirical
theories cannot satisfy the requirement of exactness, because observation
terms are by nature vague, and, therefore, sentences that include them are
not unambiguous (Przełęcki 1969, 1988)6. But he also demonstrated that
it is possible to construct a class of permissible interpretations, such that,
if each of them is either true or false, then it is possible to decide, in the
first case, that the sentence is true (it is the case if all its permissible inter-
pretations are true), and in the second, that it is false (it is the case if all its
permissible interpretations are false). The problem of decidability arises
when, in the case of a given sentence, it is true in one interpretation and
false in another. This may happen when a philosophical thesis is expressed
wager, while conviction should always be absolute. In answer to this I would say
that the key point here is that conviction is based on experience which is just a fact,
and cannot be controlled or manipulated in any way by the believer.
6
observation terms are vague because they are introduced by ostensive acts. This
vagueness is inherited by theoretical terms whose meaning is determined by logical
relations to observation terms (Przełęcki 2002, 38).

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in the language of metaphors, for instance. In that case it should be treated

as in principle undecidable, even though the interpretations are true or false
(Przełęcki 2002, 191). There is, however, another possibility considered
by Przełęcki; that is of those sentences which seem ambiguous at the
beginning of its analysis, and show themselves in the course of analysis to
be sufficiently precise; this sentence will be equivalent to the weakest of its
permissible interpretations, that is, it will be equivalent with the alternative
of all its permissible interpretations (Przełęcki 2002, 17). Therefore, because
of the essential vagueness of our language, Przełęcki does not advocate
“maximal” semantic determinacy (i.e. that a sentence has only one inter-
pretation) but only a “sufficient” semantic determinacy (Przełęcki 2002,
37). Deficiency in semantic determinacy is a particular problem in the
language of existential philosophy, as well as in the literary and religious
discourse.
another concept to which the claim that a belief is rational must
refer is that of justification. Przełęcki follows the general opinion of the
lvov-warsaw School in distinguishing two kinds of justification: a direct
justification and an indirect justification of a belief. The direct justification
of a belief consists in there being an empirical reason (direct empirical
data) for its acceptance7. The indirect justification of a belief rests on its
implicative relation with another belief (a sentence expressing it), which
has already been accepted.
It is important, given the two-fold semantics of justification, to explain
what it means that a belief is “sufficiently” justified. Przełęcki makes clear
that sufficient justification of beliefs depends upon the sense of the word
“belief”. If by “belief” we mean an assertion (a belief which has no degrees),
I’d suggest calling this an a-belief, then the belief is sufficiently justified
if the degree of its justification is high enough. The degree of the belief’s
justification can be identified with the degree of logical probability of the
sentence expressing it, as it is the case in R. Carnap’s theory of confirmation.
It is usual that the degree of probability of the accepted sentences with
regard to all our knowledge is relatively high, greater than 0.5, or even
close to 1 (Przełęcki 2002, 9-10). If what we mean by “belief” is conviction
(a belief which has degrees), I’d suggest calling this a C-belief, then a belief
in that sense is sufficiently justified if it is accepted with the degree which
corresponds to the degree of its justification. Thus, a conviction is sufficiently
7
The word “belief” is used here in a more general sense, without presuming any of
the two basic meanings of the word discussed earlier.

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justified if the empirical probability of its being true is identical with the
logical probability of the sentence expressing it. If, for example, the degree
of justification of sentence p is less than 0.5, then the belief that p is suffi-
ciently justified, but the degree of certainty of that belief is low8.
The postulates of sufficient semantic determinacy and sufficient
justification are closely linked with the requirements of inter-subjective
communicability and inter-subjective verifiability. one can debate in
a rational way over a given thesis provided that the meaning and the
manner of its decidability are accessible to all participants of the debate
(Przełęcki 2002, 11). The postulates of sufficient semantic determinacy
and sufficient justification are also closely related to each other. a belief
can be sufficiently justified if and only if the sentence expressing it is
sufficiently precise; we cannot have sufficient justification for beliefs
whose content is not expressed precisely enough.
Therefore, we are allowed to conclude that an a or C-belief is rational
if and only if it is sufficiently justified. an a-belief is rational if and only
if the degree of logical probability of its sufficient justification is high
enough, while a C-belief is rational if and only if the degree of its subjective
probability (the degree of certainty) is identical with the degree of logical
probability of the sentence expressing it. Thus, beliefs which are not
sufficiently justified are not rational; they are irrational. The rationality of
beliefs is rigidly dichotomous; beliefs cannot be more rational or less so,
they are either rational or irrational.
The kind of rationality described above is also known as the “logical
rationality”, or “methodological rationality” (Przełęcki 2007, 188). Przełęcki
speaks also, though rarely, of rationality in a “weak sense”, “rationality in
a formal sense”, or “rationality in a relative sense” (relative to a certain set
of premises (2007, 102)). This “weak” rationality, contrary to, let us call
it, “strong rationality” (logical rationality), consists in such characteristics
of beliefs as being semantically well-determined, being non-contradictory
and being inferred by a law of logic. This notion of rationality does not assume
that it is uniquely determined by the concept of sufficient justification
founded in empirical data.
In my view, it is not correct to think that rational beliefs in a formal
sense are beliefs sufficiently justified, if by justification we mean “indirect
justification”. The latter term means allowing the justifying reason for
8
kazimierz ajdukiewicz says that the degree of conviction concerning a given
sentence should be regarded as its degree of subjective probability (woleński 1989,
282).

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a belief to be another justified belief. In the end, any indirectly justified

belief presupposes that at some point in the chain of beliefs, one of them
will be directly justified. This is so because a belief is indirectly justified
if the reasoning whose conclusion is that belief is formally and materially
valid. an argument is materially valid if its premises are true or probable
enough (Czeżowski 1959, 141). how can we decide whether the premises
are true or probable? one can do that in an arbitrary way, just by assuming
that they are true, like we do in logic by assuming some theses as axioms
of the system, or one can do that by referring to some direct experience
that is inter-subjective and verifiable. But our discussion about the ration-
ality of beliefs does not concern theses of logic, or analytic truths, but
sentences which say, or seem to say, something about the world; thus,
indirect justification of a given belief presupposes direct justification of
some other beliefs. hence, when Przełęcki claims that there is an essential
similarity between the philosophy of the lvov-warsaw School and the
philosophy of logical empiricism, he is referring to the common thesis of
empiricism rooted in the humean tradition present in both philosophies
(Przełęcki 2007, 103)9.
The relation between the concept of “weak rationality” which contains
the postulate of semantic determinacy, and the concept of “strong rationality”
(let us call it “empirical rationality”) could be expressed as follows: all
beliefs which are rational in the weak sense only are irrational in the strong
sense, and all beliefs which are rational in the strong sense are rational in
the weak sense as well. This summary helps us to understand Przełęcki’s views
regarding such strongly Catholic philosophers as Bocheński, Drewnowski
and Salamucha. True, he treated them as anti-irrationalists, but that was
possible only because he recommended a divide between philosophical
beliefs held for professional and private purposes (Przełęcki 2007, 95).
Bocheński, Drewnowski and Salamucha all constructed arguments to
demonstrate that god exists10. had they limited their philosophical work
to the analysis of logical relations between premises of those arguments
and the conclusion (i.e. the thesis that there is god) and separated their
9
klemens Szaniawski, another eminent modern heir of The lvov-warsaw School,
also stresses that rationality of thinking, i.e., “logical rationality” in Przełęcki’s
sense, is based on empirical justification (Szaniawski 1983,7).
10
J. Bocheński, J. Drewnowski, J. Salamucha and also B. Sobociński were members
of the Cracow Circle. They were inspired by the project of a scientific religious
metaphysics as proposed by Jan Łukasiewicz, who sought to translate it into formal
terms using the axiomatic method (Pouivet 2009).

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philosophical beliefs from their religious beliefs, it would not be possible

to say that their philosophical beliefs were irrational – rather, they would
simply have been logically diagnostic. But they didn’t refrain from taking
a position and the price of that philosophical approach was a kind of
“double thinking” as Przełęcki called it (2007, 103)11.
apart from the strong and weak logical rationality predicated of
beliefs, there is also “pragmatic rationality”, which is predicated of actions.
an action is rational in the pragmatic sense if and only if it is valuable to
the maximal degree with respect to the system of values accepted by
a given agent (Przełęcki 2002, 95). hence, any evaluation of the pragmatic
rationality of actions (behavior) must be relative to the evaluations by
engaged and observing agents. If we regard the acceptance of a belief as
a kind of action, then the concept of pragmatic rationality of beliefs can
also be applied to evaluations of religious beliefs.
let us now return to the question of whether the evaluation of a belief
with regard to its logical and pragmatic rationality can have a moral status.
In the context of this question it is important to use the distinction between
beliefs as voluntary acts (assertions) and beliefs as involuntary acts
(convictions). a-beliefs can be directly evaluated as to their moral character
in the same way that all voluntary acts can, and by making such evaluations
we can take into account beliefs’ rationality and irrationality12. Importantly,
Przełęcki also subscribes to the thesis that human free will determines our
voluntary acts13. But the fact that each act of will is determined does not
make it impossible to evaluate it from the moral point of view. It is sufficient
for the moral evaluation of each act, acts of will included, that the behavior
of a given agent could have been different than it was, that is, that the
person could have done otherwise than she did, and that she could have
done otherwise because she could have willed otherwise. Thus, the possibility
of an action does not emerge from the lack of causal determinacy, but it is
11
I think that one can also find this kind of double thinking in the philosophy of
kazimierz Twardowski. according to him, traditional problems of the philosophy
of religion, such as the existence of god, god’s relation to the world, and the
immortality of the soul could not be regarded as objects of rational, scientific and
philosophical beliefs, but only as private religious beliefs (Łukasiewicz, D. 2009, 27).
12
This will be discussed in more detail below, now let me only point out that both
logical and pragmatical rationality are highly estimated values.
13
Determinism of human will was a view typical of the eminent representatives
of the lvov-warsaw School; it was held by kazimierz Twardowski, Tadeusz
Czeżowski, Tadeusz kotarbiński. Jan Łukasiewicz was an opponent of this form of
determinism.

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“the possibility in the dynamic sense” as Przełęcki’s teacher, Tadeusz

kotarbiński, put it (1966, 31)14. Thus, in regard to the a- beliefs of an
agent, we are right to say that these beliefs depend in part on the agent’s
choice, which depended on her will. In regard to C-beliefs, as they are
independent of the will, they are not immediately subject to such analysis.
however, we must bear in mind that convictions are the result of many
causes, among which are also some of our decisions and the situations that
arise from the conviction and feed back into it. From this point of view,
our convictions, even though directly independent of the will, can be
subject to moral evaluation (Przełęcki 2002, 83).
Thus, the deterministic conception of will is crucially important for
the moral evaluation of actions, among which we include, directly, a-beliefs,
and indirectly, C-beliefs. Perhaps, one of the most important consequences
of such a theory of free will is that we are morally obliged to avoid such
feelings as contempt, indignation or condemnation in relation to the agent
whose actions we are morally evaluating. This is so because the causes of
human decisions and actions are beyond control.
For the moral evaluations of beliefs with respect to their logical and
pragmatic rationality it is also important to adopt a system of moral values
and a conception of human nature. Przełęcki distinguishes two main types of
ethics: the ethics of dignity and the ethics of charity, which he also called the
ethics of compassion and kindness (Przełęcki 2002, 100). Those two ethical
systems are based on slightly different views on the human nature and fate.
The ethics of dignity presupposes that the essential human features
are reason and rationality. That assumption has been present in the western
philosophy since the antiquity, in a long narrative that goes back before
aristotle’s definition of the human, goes through the medieval modifica-
tions of aristotelian anthropology, for example, the definition given by
Bernard of Clarivaux, and changes in the early modern period with the
commencement of the Cartesian ego cogito. That is also, I think, the com-
monsensical attitude to the question of what makes the essence of human
nature. The position that reason and rationality are of the human essence
was also maintained by the members of the lvov-warsaw School15. This
14
It is, of course, debatable whether this conception of human freedom is satisfactory
because there is a problem of whether an agent could have willed otherwise than he
willed, and, in consequence, whether he could have acted otherwise than he acted.
15
let us remember here Twardowski’s position, according to which, rationality
embracing the ability to abstract, think logically, make prudent decisions and act in
a way unaffected by passions and feelings, is a constitutive feature of a human being.

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rationalistic conception of human nature implies that values and attitudes

like dignity, “intellectual honor”, pride, courage, determination and intel-
lectual honesty must assume a prominent place in the ethical system as ar-
ticulations and defenses of rationality. Such a rationalistic attitude is
supposed to be a source of power in struggle against suffering, misfortune
and despair.
The ethics of charity does not reject rationality as one of the essential
human features, but it presumes a more realistic view of human nature and
fate. Blaise Pascal is a thinker who very aptly grasped this inescapable
pessimism concerning humans:
what a chimera, then, is man! what a novelty! what a monster, what
a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile
worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the
pride and refuse of the universe! (Pascal’s Pensѐes, 434).
Therefore, the ethics of charity claims that each human, as a sensitive being
able to suffer and suffering, deserves the highest compassion and unlimited
charity (Przełęcki 2002, 100).
The ethics of dignity regards irrational actions, and the assertion of
irrational beliefs, as an offence to human dignity, its humiliation. Thus,
irrational beliefs deserve to be condemned; we are morally obliged to have
rational beliefs and seek for them. The ethics of charity, recommending
that we respect the good of other people at least as much as our own good,
claims that the moral evaluation of our beliefs depends on the effect they
have on our attitude to other human beings – do those beliefs serve the
good of other people or do they harm others? (Przełęcki 1989b, 16). If we
can conclude that irrational beliefs are socially harmful, then they deserve
to be morally condemned; furthermore, according to the ethics of charity,
we are morally obliged to accept rational beliefs only as they are socially
beneficial.
having explained those terminological and philosophical distinctions,
let us now go on to the key problem, namely, the rationality of religious
beliefs in Marian Przełęcki’s philosophy16. In his view, religious beliefs –
in the a and C senses of “belief” – are irrational, both logically and prag-
matically. Therefore, under the assumption that what has been said thus
16
It is worthy of note that to be counted as a religious belief, a belief must be dictated
by a given historical religion. In the case of the Polish philosophers, it was the
Catholic Church and its doctrine contained in the catechism.

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far is correct, we are morally obliged to be atheists17. It is worthy of note

that he does not draw a distinction between agnosticism and atheism, since
in both cases one does not accept the view that there is a god. So a believer
is morally blameworthy for embracing irrational beliefs, in the same way
that others who embrace irrational beliefs are culpable; and yet Przełęcki
does not claim that the believer deserves to be morally condemned. There
are two reasons for this reserve. The first depends on the determinism of
the human will; the second invokes the ethics of charity (provided we
accept this ethics). Charitably, we should feel compassion rather than
condemnation for people who are doing wrong. let us in what follows
explain Przełęcki’s argumentation in more detail.
Religious beliefs are irrational in the logical sense of rationality
because they are not sufficiently justified. why not? The key point here is
the nature of religious experience. Przełęcki says that such an experience
does exist and it may have a cognitive nature; thus, it is not reducible to
pure emotions. however, his concept of religious experience is slightly
ambiguous. I think it can be understood in a broad and a narrow sense.
a religious experience in the broad sense consists mainly, but not exclusively,
in our feeling (intuition) that there are significant values that really exist
in some realm of being, and that there is some meaning in our life and in
the world. a religious experience in the narrow sense depends on the
experience of the presence of god who is described by the dogmas of
Catholicism18. naturally, the last claim could concern other religions and
beliefs based on them.
according to Przełęcki, a religious experience understood in the
narrow sense cannot serve as a sufficient justification for religious beliefs
understood as assertions because it presupposes them; in other words,
a religious experience does not precede religion, here, but, on the contrary,
religion precedes a religious experience (Przełęcki 2002, 93). nor can the
narrow religious experience serve as the justifying reason for religious
beliefs understood as convictions because the degree of their justification,
that is their degree of logical probability, is incomparably low in relation
17
It is necessary to add the assumption that moral evaluations of beliefs which moral
agents have is sufficient to formulate moral propositions (obligations included)
concerning persons. as far as I know, Przełęcki himself did not entertain the radical
claim that we are morally obliged to be atheists, not directly at least. But we can
draw this conclusion from his assumptions.
18
Przełęcki understands the mystical experiences of the direct presence of god and
union with god described by w. James as being at the center of religious experience
in the broad sense (2002, 93).

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to the degree of conviction that they are true (to the degree of certainty).
Believers should be and probably are certain of the truth of the dogmas of
their religion; it lies in the nature of religious faith that a believer has
certainty or, at least, is convinced of the truth of religious dogmas to a very
high degree, but without sufficient empirical justification for these dogmas19.
a religious experience in the broad sense is rather a kind of metaphysical
or philosophical experience, strongly motivated by a sense of inconceivability
of the world or a sense of mystery of existence (Przełęcki 2002, 107-108). It
is very hard, if not sometimes impossible, to express the content of this
experience precisely, which is why it generates metaphors and parables.
however, Przełęcki maintains that such an experience can be the reason
justifying some beliefs (convictions)20. a metaphysical belief based on the
broad religious experience is rational if and only if the degree of its certainty
(subjective probability of a given belief) is proportional to the degree
of sufficient justification for the sentence or set of sentences expressing
that belief. The degree of sufficient justification is very low, and hence
metaphysical beliefs should rather be called “conjectures” or “surmises”.
Thus metaphysical beliefs are not religious beliefs in the narrow sense, i.e.
in the sense of religious faith, because they are semantically vague compared
to, for example, the dogmas of Catholicism and they lack certainty.
as said before, from the point of view of a humanist ethics (one based
on the insight that rationality makes us human) the religious believer is
morally deficient in as much as she embraces irrational beliefs that
presumably injure our humanity. But why should irrational religious beliefs
be morally wrong from the point of view of the ethics of charity, which
was accepted by Przełęcki (1989b, 22)? Przełęcki’s answer is that rational
thinking and its products, rational beliefs, are themselves values that
structurally ensure reliability in the domain of intellectual work. each form
of that reliability has a social and interpersonal character (Przełęcki 2002,
85). Thus, if we are not reliable in our intellectual work, we harm other
people; we act against their good. The problem with this solution is that it
is not quite clear why our irrational religious beliefs21 (provided they are
19
In this context, the urge to demonstrate the truth of religious faith is doomed to
self-contradiction.
20
he speaks here about convictions because the content of the metaphysical experience
and the experience itself are independent of our will.
21
one may raise the objection that the rational ethics significantly undervalues
spontaneity and overvalues predictability. however predictability of human action
might be regard as benefit from the social point of view.

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irrational indeed) should be considered harmful to other people. Is an

irrational religious belief like a virus spreading an infectious disease of
irrationality onto other beliefs we hold, thus affecting our, say, moral or
political choices?22 If this were the case, atheists would be morally obliged
to defend other people and society from religious beliefs, and religious
believers would be obliged to regard their religious beliefs as embarrassing
and very private vices that they should try to overcome. Consequently,
public confessions of faith should be prohibited as deliberate harm done
to a community. I do not claim that the latter idea was ever expressed by
Przełęcki himself, but rather it can be drawn as a conclusion from what he
said about religious beliefs, ethics and rationality.
on the other hand, Przełęcki subscribes to determinism of the human
will and accepts the ethics of charity, which is also the ethics of compassion.
what should be the attitude of an atheist, given these views, towards
a religious believer? It must be the attitude of understanding and compassion,
in particular in relation to persons who have irrational beliefs and are fully
aware of their irrationality. Perhaps the optimum moral program for an
atheists, then, is to argue for rational beliefs in public in the hope of arguing
those who have irrational religious beliefs out of those beliefs, in the same
way a psycho-analyst might free a patient of neurosis through the ‘talking
cure.’
now, let us consider the question of the pragmatic rationality of reli-
gious beliefs. as said before, a religious belief is rational in the pragmatic
sense if its acceptance (possession) maximizes the values ascribed by an
agent to the consequences of his actions (Przełęcki 2002, 89-90). In other
words, a behavior is rational if it is instrumental to bringing about an
expected desirable result. In the case of religious beliefs, one may speak
about “fruits of faith”, including enhanced psychological well-being caused
by a sense of meaningfulness of our existence, a non-resentful acceptance
to whatever happens to us, a relief in pain, a consolation in misery, and an
attitude towards others of love, born of the conviction that they are all
fellow creations of a supreme creator. There are also some moral benefits
of faith: a greater ability to feel compassion, to act for the good of others
and to overcome selfishness. In conclusion, a religious faith makes us
22
I think this idea can be supported by ajdukiewicz’s rationalist attitude, according
to which, rationality has social significance, and, therefore, it should be employed
in everyday activities to preclude nonsense and false beliefs (Łukasiewicz, D.
2009, 27).

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morally better and happier people. The moral benefits seem to be especially
important if one accepts the ethic of charity, as Przełęcki does.
however, Przełęcki contends that this interpretation of the pragmatic
rationality of religious beliefs is false, for three reasons. Firstly, the belief
that faith will bring some expected psychological or moral benefits is not
in itself a sufficient justification, since history has shown that there are
plenty of religious believers who are unhappy and who commit immoral
acts. Secondly, it is possible to bring about the same tranquilizing effect
in a morally more respectable manner – with the aid of rational beliefs.
Thirdly, as said earlier, the pragmatic rationality can only be predicated of
a beliefs, not C beliefs, as the latter are involuntary. we do not choose
to have religious convictions solely because we foresee them being good
for us; nor is belief in god chosen as a sort of happiness pill (Przełęcki
2002, 97).
let us consider how strong these three objections really are. Regarding
the first one, it is, of course, true that there are religious believers who are
unhappy or/and morally bad; religious belief itself is not an index of
happiness or morality. on the other hand, it is also true that there are
believers who are happy and morally good. Thus, it is not irrational to think
that one’s religious belief would put one in the set of persons who believe
that they are happier and morally better thanks to their faith. The objection
would only caution against thinking that religious belief alone would make
one happier and morally better. as it happens, the moral codes promoted
by most major world religions reflect a consciousness of this point.23
as to the second objection, Przełęcki suggests that there are two
atheistic (or at least religion-independent) paths that lead to the same
achievement of psychological and moral benefits that are supposed to
result from faith. he argues that our happiness, linked closely to the feeling
of sense of our and the world’s existence, can be achieved by the belief in
the absolute nature of truth. although the transience of everything in the world
and the awareness of death may give rise to a sense of meaninglessness24,
Przełęcki maintains that if we do something morally good in our life, for
example, and we act according to the ethics of charity, then the moral value
of our actions makes our life meaningful, and this true proposition about
23
I’m grateful for this remark to Roger gathman.
24
The certainty of one’s death is the root of religion in the opinion of Bogusław
wolniewicz, another eminent continuator of The lvov-warsaw School and kotarbiński’s
disciple.

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our actions was true before we performed them and will be true for ever25.
The awareness of the absolute nature of truth regarding our own deeds
should give us happiness and the sense of meaning in life26. This view pre-
supposes not only the absoluteness of truth, but also the objective nature
of moral values and the cognitive status of moral experience. If I am to
feel the sense of my life because I act in a morally good way, then I must
know that my actions are morally good27. From where do we know that?
Przełęcki’s answer is to posit a moral experience by which we discover
values, and that experience provides us with a sufficient ground for our
moral beliefs, based on inter-subjective communication and verifiability
– thus connecting the moral experience to rationality in the logical sense28.
By means of moral experience, for example, we discover the postulates of
the ethics of charity. Thus, it is possible to be happier and morally better,
and yet be an atheist. one can pose, however, the question whether it is
sufficiently justified to believe that having some experience of moral values
and accepting those epistemological and metaphysical theses (the classical
25
This conclusion is true regardless of whether we assume the absolute conception of
truth, according to which a true proposition was, is and will be ever true, or we
assume instead that true propositions may be found to be true but are now neither
true nor false. Przełęcki himself subscribes to both sempiternity – the view that
a proposition was true in the past and eternity – the view that a proposition will be
true forever (2007, 137).
26
The idea of a relation between meaning and value of life with the absolute nature
of truth is very typical of most of the eminent representatives of the lvov-warsaw
School. I mean here kazimierz Twardowski, Tadeusz Czeżowski, Tadeusz kotarbiński.
The crucial role is played by the absolute concept of truth and the classical theory of
truth defended by Twardowski, leśniewski, Tarski and others. as to the absoluteness
of truth, there is one eminent exception: Jan Łukasiewicz (also T. kotarbiński for
a time) rejected the sempiternity of truth and defended only its eternity. Two other
members of the School, Poznański and wundheiler, rejected the classical theory of
truth.
27
Certainly, the knowledge of what is morally good is the necessary although not
sufficient condition of morally valuable actions.
28
Moral beliefs, in Przełęcki’s opinion, differ from perceptual beliefs only with respect
to the degree of semantic vagueness; they are more vague than perceptual beliefs
but much more precise as to their content than religious beliefs (1996, 46). Moral
cognitivism was a typical view for most philosophers from the circle of Twardowski.
kotarbiński spoke about the “evidence of heart”, that is some moral data, which
justify our beliefs and Czeżowski about “axiological experience”. It is rather doubtful
that moral experience is independent of the morality which people accept, as it
is doubtful that religious experience is independent of the religion which believers
accept.

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theory of truth and the absoluteness of truth) will bring the same or very
similar benefits as religious faith is expected to bring. It is questionable,
given the history of human societies so far, that adherence to an abstract
philosophical theory will actually make people happier and morally better.
Przełęcki was aware of that problem; he clearly says that only our deeds
– the realization of ideals determined by moral experience – enable us
to become happier and morally better persons. Following the ethics of
charity, in his view, we can live a life committed to the good of others and
liberate ourselves from the feeling of absurdity and despair (Przełęcki
1989b, 23).
as to Przełęcki’s doubts concerning the pragmatic rationality of con-
victions, it is true that they are directly independent of the will, but still,
we could claim that they are indirectly dependent upon our previous
actions and decisions. even if it is true that, contrary to Pascal’s wager, we
cannot make a decision to believe in god (to be convinced that god exists),
we can decide to live as if we believed in god.
Taking into account what has been said so far, let us conclude that, in
Przełęcki’s view, that we are morally obliged to be atheists who live like
Christians in following the ethics of charity. But, and let us underline this
thought that is at the core of the problem I am elaborating in this paper, if
we are obliged to be atheists, both according to the standards of the ethics
of dignity and the ethics of charity, we do not have the right to believe29.
In his later writings, Przełęcki’s views on the pragmatic irrationality
of religious beliefs mellowed to some extent. he agreed that it does happen
that faith helps some people be happier and/or morally better persons –
even though, as he still maintained, there is no material connection between
religious beliefs and human happiness and moral perfection, and religious
belief in divine providence is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition
for happiness and morality (2002, 103). That change was dictated by
Przełęcki’s deeply pessimistic view on human life. according to Przełęcki,
in moments when we face despair and suffering that we cannot escape, we
do have the right to believe. on such occasions, we are morally permitted
to give up our “intellectual dignity” and to ease our suffering by embracing
logically unjustified beliefs. By doing it we can also gain more power to
serve other human beings. The right to believe in such cases is based on
extending the ethics of charity to ourselves and to all suffering humanity,
following the precept of acting compassionately for the good of other
29
If I am obliged to do A, I am not allowed to do non-A.

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people and, in as much as we are human, seeking such relief for ourselves.
Therefore, religious beliefs (assertions) could be considered rational in
the pragmatic sense, although they are irrational in the logical sense of
rationality30.
If there is a sort of moral escape clause for crisis situations, are we
still obliged to be atheists at other times? how do we make the right to
belief and the duty to disbelief cohere? The answer depends on whether
our irrational religious beliefs ultimately harm other people or not. as
we have seen, Przełęcki put a lot of weight on the idea that the logical
irrationality of certain beliefs would make the believer socially harmful,
in as much as he or she would be intellectually unreliable. however, later
he came to the conclusion that there is no evidence that the logical
irrationality of our religious beliefs and lack of logical reliability in that
domain will necessarily harm anybody, or threaten the rules of the ethics
of charity. Thus, finally, we are not morally obliged to be disbelievers who
act according to the ethics of believers; we do have the right to believe,
but only under the higher duty to be rational beings. Thus, taking seriously
the value of logical rationality, we are always under an obligation to think
in a critical way about all our beliefs. we are obliged to bear in mind that
our religious beliefs are irrational in the logical sense, and we should not
let ourselves believe they are rational.
In conclusion, Marian Przełęcki’s views concerning rationality of
beliefs are typical of the lvov-warsaw School. It is particularly important
that he stresses the role of experience as a justifying reason for beliefs
(strong logical rationality). however, it is also characteristic of the
lvov-warsaw School that those philosophers, by contrast to the vienna
Circle, had a broad concept of experience, as we can see in the very phrase,
moral experience. This broad concept of experience includes not only sense
perceptions, but introspection, as well as moral and aesthetic experience
(Twardowski, ajdukiewicz, Czeżowski, kotarbiński, Tatarkiewicz had that
concept of experience). Przełęcki’s views are in this context even more
liberal because he treated metaphysical experience (religious experience
in the broad sense) as a justifying reason for metaphysical beliefs. however,
Przełęcki’s existential pessimism regarding the human fate and the nature
of the world, inspired by Pascal’s intuitions, makes his views distinctive
30
The thesis that religious beliefs are rational in the pragmatic sense is accepted by
such followers of the lvov-warsaw School as Jacek Jadacki (2003, 201) and
Bogusław wolniewicz (1993, 197).

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in comparison to the rather optimistic worldview of the main representatives

of the lvov-warsaw School, who saw themselves in the tradition of the
european enlightenment. In spite of his Pascalian pessimism and atheism,
Przełęcki believed that it is possible for the human life to be morally valuable
and meaningful. what secures life’s meaningfulness is the absoluteness
of truth; the absolute nature of truth was the thesis defended by virtually
all representatives of the lvov-warsaw School. whether Przełęcki’s
conception of justification for beliefs and the thesis that religious beliefs
are irrational in the logical sense could be successfully defended from the
point of view of the contemporary analytic philosophy of religion and
epistemology of religious beliefs is a subject for another paper. here,
I have simply been trying to show how Przełęcki came to believe that
religious belief is morally permissible. It is also an open question whether
Przełęcki’s conclusion that religious beliefs are irrational in the logical
sense and can be rational in the pragmatic sense could not be interpreted
as a kind of „double thinking”, of which he himself accused some Catholic
philosophers from the Cracow Circle.
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naukowe.
Przełęcki, M. (1989a). “The approach to Metaphysics in the lvov-warsaw School”.
In Szaniawski, k. (ed.) The Vienna Circle and the Lvov-Warsaw School.
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demic Publishers, 55-66.
Przełęcki, M. (1989b). Chrześcijaństwo niewierzących. warszawa: Czytelnik.

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Przełęcki, M. (1996). Poza granicami nauki. warszawa: Polskie Towarzystwo

Semiotyczne.
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Semper.
Przełęcki, M. (2007). Horyzonty metafizyki. warszawa: wydawnictwo naukowe
Semper.
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gaBRIele De anna
Can There Be Supernaturalism

without Theism?
Contra Tooley’s Thesis
I
Does supernaturalism entail theism? Clearly yes, I would say. But Michael
Tooley has mounted an argument on the opposite side. In this article,
I argue against Tooley and justify the entailment between supernaturalism
and theism.
The issue is important, since it emerged as a pivotal point of disagree-
ment in the recent debate on religious epistemology between Michael
Tooley and alvin Plantinga.1 In their joint work for the Great Debates
in Philosophy series,2 Plantinga argues for the epistemic plausibility of
theistic belief by claiming that philosophical naturalism is epistemically
self-defeating in three different ways: “(1) if naturalism were true, there
would be no such thing as proper function, and therefore no such thing as
malfunction or dysfunction. hence there would be no such thing as […]
knowledge. […] (2) […] The naturalist is committed to [a] sort of deep
and debilitating scepticism[…][:] he has a defeater for whatever he believes,
including naturalism itself. and (3) […] naturalism, insofar as it implies
1
Plantinga and Tooley 2008.
2
This is a book series each volume of which focuses on a particular issue, with two
distinguished philosophers arguing opposite stands about it. each author is required
to make an opening statement and offer two replies, in which he can criticise the
opening statement of the opponent, or defend his own arguments from the attacks of
the other.

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180 gaBRIele De anna
materialism about human beings, has no room for the essential features of
mental life, including in particular belief.”3
Tooley, in response, offers a number of traditional secularist arguments,
as for instance the induction from the fact that there is evil in the world to
the implausibility of theistic belief, and a defense of the coherence and
consistency of naturalism. he also offers a more novel claim, which is that
even if naturalism were self-defeating and, hence, supernaturalism were
true, theism would not necessarily follow.
The claim comes up twice in the book, although it is not elaborated at
any length: the first time at the end of Tooley’s first reply, the second time
at the end of his second reply, which also closes the book. The two
instances make a crescendo of philosophical intensity: the first time, Tooley
just hints to the problem, in the context of an evaluation of Plantinga’s
general strategy: “even if some argument against naturalism were sound –
he writes –, that would not serve to show that it was reasonable to believe
in the existence of god.”4 The second time, he makes the point more
explicitly:
In his opening statement, Plantinga attempted to show that theistic belief
is justified by arguing that naturalism is false – a strategy that a number of
other theists are now adopting. In my response, I attempted to show that
the arguments that Plantinga offered, interesting though they were, are not
in the end successful. But beyond the question of the success or failure of
particular arguments, there is the question of whether this whole approach
is a promising one to pursue. It seems to me that it is not. The reason is
that a refutation of naturalism would get one only to supernaturalism of
some sort or other, and there is an enormous gulf between that conclusion
and the conclusion that god exists. The argument from evil shows, moreover,
that that claim cannot be bridged.
These words end the book. Plantinga never addresses this issue in the joint
book under discussion here. Perhaps Tooley’s first formulation of the
objection is not perspicuous enough for Plantinga to argue against, or
perhaps Plantinga thinks that the point is too small to bother with. Maybe he
is confident that he has a straightforward answer to offer anyway (we shall
see in a moment what that straightforward answer could be). Be that as it
may, this ending of the debate leaves the issue open and calls for further
discussion.
3
Plantinga and Tooley 2008, 1.
4

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Can There Be Supernaturalism without Theism? 181
In this essay I will mount an argument that, contra Tooley, any argument
that concedes supernaturalism would have to concede theism. I will do this
by setting it in a wider context than appears in Tooley’s discussion with
Plantinga. In next section, I will try to come to a definition of ‘naturalism’
and ‘supernaturalism’; following this, I will discuss what ‘theism’ means;
in the fourth section, I will present the argument that supernaturalism
entails theism; and finally, I will offer some comments on the notion of
transcendence for what I take to be a correct understanding of this issue,
which relates, as well, to debate between Plantinga and Tooley.
II
In order to explain why supernaturalism entails theism we need to have
a sufficiently clear grasp of what ‘supernaturalism’ and ‘theism’ mean.
In this section we will deal with ‘supernaturalism’ and in the next with
‘theism’. Furthermore, in order to grasp the meaning of ‘supernaturalism’,
we need provisionally to understand what naturalism is. ‘Supernaturalism’
is, indeed, a compound word parasitic on ‘naturalism,’ which means that
we need to understand what naturalism is in order to understand what
difference the addition of the prefix ‘super’ makes. These semantic matters
will help us understand what the relation between naturalism and super-
naturalism is.
when we try to define ‘naturalism’, however, we soon discover that
there is a wide spectrum of philosophical positions which have been called
‘naturalist’ in the history of philosophy. In fact, it is safe to predict that
most contemporary philosophers, in spite of their other differences, would
claim that their views are consistent with naturalism. Plantinga himself, in
the mentioned book, recognises this difficulty:
what is the basic idea of naturalism, the core notion in terms of which all
[the diverse positions which call themselves ‘naturalist’] can be understood,
perhaps as analogically related to it? This is by no means an easy question;
naturalism is not at all easy to characterize. […] Indeed some who think
about naturalism believe that it isn’t a doctrine at all; it isn’t a belief or
a position.5
Plantinga goes on to suggest that naturalism is best understood as a way

of looking at the world, exemplified by the approach of Bertrand Russell
5

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and described by Quentin Smith as “the thesis that there exist inanimate
or animate bodies, with animate bodies being either intelligent organisms
or non-intelligent organisms, but there exists nothing supernatural.”6 as
Plantinga recognises this definition is not that helpful, since it deploys the
word ‘supernatural’ which presupposes the grasping of ‘natural’, as we
have seen. he does not struggle – however – to find a satisfactory account
of the concept under discussion, and he somehow rests content with the
claim that “the best way to get at naturalism […] is to contrast it with
theism”: “the basic idea of naturalism […] is that there is no such person
as god, or anything at all like him.”7
as I speculated, Plantinga might not have replied to Tooley’s first
formulation of the objection that supernaturalism does not entail theism
because he thought he had a straightforward answer at hand. now we can
see what that answer could have been: if the best way to get at naturalism
is to contrast it with theism, i.e. to think of it as atheism, then some proof
that naturalism is false would be a proof that theism is true.
yet even Plantinga does not straightforwardly equate naturalism with
atheism, instead maintaining that naturalism is sufficient, but not necessary
for atheism: even an atheist can reject naturalism, if, for example, he
believes “in the Stoics’ Mind, or Fichte’s absolute I, or Plato’s Idea of the
good, or aristotle’s unmoved Mover, or hegel’s absolute.”8 he doesn’t
explain his instances, but perhaps he thinks that it is simply obvious that
no contemporary naturalist would even consider hegel’s absolute I or the
Stoics’ laws or Mind a serious metaphysical possibility.
It seems to me that this elucidation of ‘naturalism’ is hardly a satisfactory
one, for at least three reasons. First, it stipulates rather than explaining why
contrasting naturalism with theism is the best way to get at the former.
Second, Plantinga proposes a contrastive definition of ‘naturalism’ in
relation to atheism, but then he goes on to add that atheists could reject
naturalism without justifying that claim. This is a problem, since, if really
“the best way to get at naturalism” is to contrast it with theism, and if the
Stoics, Fichte, Plato, aristotle, and hegel are really atheists, then they
either should be counted among the naturalists or naturalism can’t be best
conceived by contrasting it with theism. Furthermore, the notion that all
of these authors are atheists is a lot more complicated than Plantinga seems
6
Smith 2001, 202, quoted in Plantinga and Tooley 2008, 18.
7
8

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to assume here, as we shall see. Third, this definition spoils Plantinga’s own
argumentative strategy precisely in the direction envisaged by Tooley: for if
even some forms of atheism could count as supernaturalism, Plantinga’s
arguments against naturalism could not establish the truth of supernaturalism
as he proposes. Indeed, that argument would only prove the truth of a dis-
junction of views, in which theism figures only as one of the disjuncts, while
at least one of the others includes Tooley’s position of the supernaturalist
version of atheism.
Failing in three ways is sometimes better than failing in a single one:
one might hope that by improving the definition of ‘naturalism’ offered by
Plantinga in at least one of the first two respects, the problem pointed out
by Tooley can also be overcome, i.e. that Plantinga’s general strategy can
be rescued. This is what I will try to do, but, before getting into that, we
need to make some preliminary methodological remarks.
Concepts like naturalism signify complex clusters of positions that
cannot be grasped just by analysing current usages of the relevant words.
Current usages are important, but the reasons why those usages are allowed
and established, while others are rejected, also provide crucial information.
Current usages depend on what and how the referents of words are, but
also on the history of the community which came to conceptualise those
referents in certain ways. In other words, these concepts (i.e. naturalism)
have historical trajectories, which characterise them as particular ways of
thinking about a reality of which the image changes with the various
discoveries of the intellect. Thus, there are an array of different naturalisms
which followed one another throughout history. Plantinga suggested that
‘naturalism’ refers primarily to a particular way of looking at the world,
and I believe that this point can be accepted, since it is a sufficiently wide
way to characterise what any philosophical stand (among which we find
naturalism) attempts to do – it gives some account of the whole of reality,
or at least of its major aspects as they press upon experience. If we want
to understand why we can call some current ways of looking at the world
“naturalistic”, in distinction from others, we would need to see how these
stances originated in the course of the history of western philosophy. This
is much too big a project for this paper. I only mean to suggest that looking
at the family resemblence linking together the current uses of ‘naturalism’
will only give us part of the story: we also need to look at how current
naturalisms originated, what philosophical problems they were prompted
to solve, what assumptions about the world, knowledge, and philosophical
enquiry they came from.

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My candidate for a crucial moment in the pedigree of naturalism is

the development of aristotelianism between the late Middle ages and the
Renaissance, which, as we know, made conceptually possible the origin
of modern science. Renaissance philosophy is certainly famous for its
“naturalism”, the character of which is best found, it seems to me, in its
early phases, for example in the work of Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588).
his opus magnum, Nature according to its own principles (De rerum
natura iuxta propria principia), was an attack on some aristotelians of his
time, in the name of an allegedly more authentic aristotelianism. as the
title suggest, his enterprise was to offer an account of the natural world
that relied solely on the principles (i.e., constitutive elements, causes,
forces, etc.) that were internal to it. In doing this, he certainly could be said
to have followed in the track of the aristotelian project, while in another
sense he took an important step away from aristotle.9
as it is well known, aristotle wrote a number of works in which he
attempted to describe the physical world, which, in his view, is the world
of which we have sensual and perceptual experience. Thus he wrote
works on biology, on geology, and on physics, i.e. his Physics, which is
the most general account of the operations of the physical world. In his
view, the physical world is characterised by motion (taken in the widest
sense, as including local motion, growth and decrease, change of charac-
teristics, etc.), and is populated by objects (substances) that have powers
of different sorts (some are animate, some are inanimate, i.e. some have
intrinsic principles of motions, some are moved from without). The
physical world enjoys a certain independence, in the sense that the motions
which characterise it can be accounted for or explained in terms of the
exercise of powers by the substances which populate it. Therefore, operations
within the physical world can be accounted for or explained, since it has
an intrinsic order which our reason can capture. however, the independence
of the physical world is not absolute: motion is the actualisation of
a potentiality by a power, and in order to account for the existence of
motion in the physical world at all, aristotle suggests, at the end of his
Physics, we need to introduce the existence of a first mover which is
completely actual, and, thus, not itself moved. Being motionless, the first
mover will not be part of the physical world, where everything is movable,
as we have seen. Furthermore, being completely actual, the first mover
cannot exercise actions which require the actualisation of powers, and thus
9
For a treatment of these points of the work of Bernardino Telesio, see my De anna
2011.

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it can only move “by desire”, as the final cause of all physical things: in
this way it is the ordering principle of physical reality. The first mover is
the object of a different inquiry than that constituted by physics, which
is why aristotle wrote his Metaphysics. This investigates a realm or reality
different from the physical world, which is constituted of unchangeable
and perfect beings (i.e., without potentialities needing actualisation).10
Telesio appropriated aristotle’s notion of nature, which is the world
of our experience, where everything is in motion, and which is self-suffi-
cient in the sense that motion can be explained in virtue of the powers of
the objects contained in it. Telesio thus agrees with aristotle that natural
motion follows an intrinsic order of the physical world, which rational
enquiry can find out.11 But he moved away from aristotle in an important
way by dismissing the first mover argument. The independence of the
physical world is absolute for Telesio, and the physical world, i.e. “nature”,
can be fully accounted for just by looking at its intrinsic principle, “juxta
propria principia.” when this is done, nothing is left out, no further
metaphysical enquiry is needed. The question of an ultimate explanation
of the origin of order in the physical world, of the origin of the “energy”
which supports the power of physical substances, is altogether overlooked.
The impression that he leaves is that there is nothing to say about or against
metaphysics and ultimate explanations – he writes as if aristotle had just
written his physical works, without his Metaphysics. historians have
speculated about the reason why Telesio takes an agnostic position to meta-
physics: on the one hand, it could have been due to his devout Catholicism,
as he (at least formally) had an answer in his religion to his quest for an
ultimate explanation;12 on the other hand, it could have been the sly move
of free thinker who did not dare challenging theistic belief in the open in
order to avoid persecution.13 This poses an interesting question, both in
itself and for an historical and psychological understanding of the roots of
naturalism, but we can leave it aside for the purpose of the paper and
merely remark on this foretaste of what, in modernity, has come to be
a common reaction to metaphysics.
10
Cf. aristotle, Metaphysics, 1073a 1-13.
11
although Telesio explicitly quotes aristotle, the source of his conception of nature
is certainly not just aristotle, and he is probably influenced by the ways in which
aristotelian nature came to be interpreted in the course of the Middle ages and the
early Renaissance.
12
Cf. De Franco 1996, ch. 1, in particular 74-9.
13
Bondì 1997, p. 103.

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It must be observed that Telesio’s metaphysical silence in no way

commits him to materialism: his exclusive focus on the physical world is
not a form of physicalist materialism, as we would expect nowadays. In
his view, indeed, the physical world is made of three principles: matter and
force, the latter being divided in heat and cool; and it includes also spirit,
spiritus, i.e. a vital force within animals, characterised by warmth and
motion, which cannot be perceived by the senses. when spirit cools and
rests, it solidifies, and becomes perceivable by the senses. The physical
world that we can perceive with the senses, then, does not exhaust reality,
but only includes matter and the solidified parts of the more inclusive spirit.
on the other hand, the spirit which cannot be perceived is not part of
a different reality: it is made of the same stuff as the perceivable world,
only in its rarefied form: the perceivable world is only a part of the physical
world, but they are the same reality, since they are made of the same stuff.
The main traits of Telesio’s thought are common to most forms of
Renaissance naturalism and were inherited by modern philosophers too:
the physical world is conceived as nature with a capital ‘n’, i.e. as an
absolutely independent and exclusive reality, in which laws operate, thus
creating an order that is so structured as to be comprehensible to at least
a part of that order, the human mind. It may be the case that not the whole
of nature is empirically accessible to the human mind – for instance, there
may be sub-atomic events we can’t understand, or dimensions we can only
mathematically construct – but it is still one single reality, since the parts
which are empirically accessible and those which are not are of the same
sort. Thus, for example, hobbes’s rigorous materialism led him to claim
that all that is, is corporeal, and the physical world is ordered in that all
bodies follow strict laws of motion. In hobbes’ cosmology, some bodies
are too small (atoms) and others are too big (god) to be perceived, but they
are of the same kind. he refers to atoms and their powers, where Telesio
refers to matter and forces, but both share the view that all of reality is
exhausted by the principles of the physical world. what counts here is not
that nature is material or physical, but that it exhausts reality, that it is
all there is, and that it can be fully explained with reference to forces
immanent to it.
I would suggest that the conception of nature as an absolute reality
that emerged in the Renaissance is the common ancestor of many different
and diverse modern and contemporary philosophical positions which, their
diversity notwithstanding, could all be considered “naturalist”, contrary
to Plantinga’s claim. Thus, for example, Spinoza thought that there is one

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only substance (natura naturans, or god), and all physical objects are just
modifications of it (natura naturata), modifications which follow rational
patterns: they are not just the same sort of thing, but they are even the same
substance. god is nature and all that exists is a modification of this one
substance. (If you feel resistance to the idea that someone who speaks
about god might be a naturalist, take hobbes as an example: he does speak
about god, but he is certainly a naturalist; he takes god to be as corporeal
as anything else – just made of the same stuff as us, dogs, and stones, i.e.
atoms). Furthermore, what holds for Spinoza, holds for hegel: he is also
dependent on the conception of nature of the Renaissance. absolute spirit,
according to him, is not a principle different from nature and constituting
a separate reality; rather, nature is but a moment of the becoming of the
absolute spirit, which needs to be overcome in the process of the returning
of spirit to itself. It would be unfair to apply the word ‘naturalism’ to hegel
in a strict sense, since he saw nature as a mere moment of the development
of spirit and reality is really spirit, according to him; but, in his view, spirit
is “the truth and the final end of nature” (hegel 1830, § 251), its fulfilment
we could say, and nature is identical to spirit in its objectified phase of
development; in this way his idealism is one of the possible developments
of Renaissance naturalism, rather than a denial of it. ultimately, hegel’s
absolute idealism is “compatible with naturalism” (Beiser 2005, 68).
Contrary to what Plantinga suggests, then, I would not consider Spinoza
and hegel straightforward anti-naturalists, although, of course, they would
not agree with contemporary versions of naturalism.
what differentiates contemporary naturalism from hegel, I would
argue, is not the formal of the naturalistic attitude, but a bifurcation which
occurred in the very bloodline of naturalism: hegel thought that he had
described in philosophical terms the phases of the progress of the human
mind up to its end in his logic, and that he could encompass all knowledge,
including scientific knowledge, in a way such that even scientific discoveries
turned out to be necessary steps in the process of historical development
of his “logical” system. But science was progressing beyond the point
recognised by hegel, and august Comte did not buy into his presumptions
about the possibilities of the absolute spirit: he claimed that science would
not be absorbed in a superior form of knowledge, like hegel’s absolute
spirit, but, after a theological phase and a philosophical phase of the history
of human kind, will constitute the definitive form of knowledge, and it will
vary only in its extension, not in its kind. The scientific method is the right
way to approach nature (still conceived as nature), and the sciences will

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be able to explain everything about reality, including the operations of

the human mind (psychology) and the processes of society (sociology).
Philosophy has to progressively fade away as the sciences take its place
on the path towards a complete explanation of reality. This finally brings
us up to the modern history of naturalism, which is what we are normally
taught, starting in the late nineteenth century and proceeding through the
twentieth and concentrating on such american thinkers as John Dewey,
ernest nagel, Sidney hook and Roy wood Sellars.
This sketch of the background of naturalism is not meant to undervalue
the enormous differences among Spinoza, Comte and hegel. My point is
only that those differences assert themselves as varying conclusions that
begin with the shared assumption of naturalism. Certainly, each of them
conjoined naturalism to other assumptions which the rest did not necessarily
accept, and reached conclusions which might contradict those of the others.
In order to get at contemporary forms of naturalism we need to add
a further step to this history, which was spelled out by David Papineau:14
contemporary varieties have a materialist/physicalist bent which was never
a large thematic among the positivists or the first american naturalists. up
until the early twentieth century, newtonian physics was still the paradigm,
action at a distance was as acceptable as an exercise of force through direct
contact, and the conservation of energy was still undigested as a principle
in most philosophical metaphysical schemes. In this framework, one could
still think about spontaneous, mental or psychic forces as respectable
scientific entities. This led to the flourishing of a non-physicalist psychiatric
and psychological literature. when the scientific paradigm changed with
relativity and with the permeation of the principle of conservation of energy
into all areas of physics, the mind came to be identified with the brain. This
identity has made the mind into another physical object, thus annexing the
last seemingly extra-naturalistic entity into the naturalistic cosmology, and
making possible the current, physicalist forms of philosophical naturalism.
what is the point of this rough historical overview? I am not suggesting
that all forms of naturalism are the same or even very close to each other,
but rather that assumptions made at some points in history have imposed
upon and conditioned the spectrum of available philosophical possibilities
for centuries. I am not assuming here a hegelian or otherwise historicist
conception of history, i.e. one in which history is seen as having a direction,
or an immanent principle of development, or an intrinsic rationality. My
14
Papineau 2002, appendix.

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claim is only contingent upon what actually happened to the Renaissance

conception of nature in the subsequent history of western philosophy. My
point is that the particular way of conceiving nature which was introduced
in the Renaissance was subsequently assumed as a common premise and
articulated in different, sometimes even divergent directions. Thus, if we
go back in the bloodline of a particular variety of naturalism, we find
assumptions which that variety shares with other branches originating from
the same ancestor, and at each junction we will find a trait, the typical trait
of the trunk from which that junction branches out, which will be shared
by all views branching from it. at each of those junctions, then, we
can offer a different definition of naturalism. The further we go back in
a bloodline, the vaguer the definition will be, the higher the number of
views comprehended in that definition will be. how far back do we need
to go to answer the question ‘does supernaturalism entail theism’? It
depends on what exactly we are asking, when we ask that question.
It seems that in the case of Plantinga’s strategy for defending theism,
he can go quite far back in the bloodline of current physicalist views, in
fact all the way to the general conception of naturalism of the Renaissance:
his three arguments against naturalism, indeed, rely on a naturalism with
the plainest scope as the thesis that nature can be fully explained in its own
terms, being an absolutely independent reality. I would argue that any view
which denies the existence of an external cause of the internal order of the
world of experience is committed to the denial of what Plantinga calls
proper function (and, hence, of knowledge), to a radical scepticism with
regard to explanations about why things are as they are, and to the rejection
of a special ontological status for mental states (including beliefs), for the
reasons brought forward by Plantinga. It is a secondary matter, for the
theism argument, what the specific terms of the functioning of the world
may be. My proposal, then, is to substitute Plantinga’s definition of
naturalism as atheism, with the definition according to which ‘naturalist’
is any view which [1] admits the existence of an ordered world which we
have experience of, [2] claims that this world has ordered features and
operations, and [3] denies that such ordered features and operations can
only be fully accounted for and explained by introducing entities which
are not of the same kind of those populating that world and which, for that
reason, belong to a different realm of reality.
So far we have construed what ‘naturalism’ is in its essence; now we
need to explain what ‘supernaturalism’ is. how does the prefix ‘super’ vary
the meaning of ‘naturalism’ as we have discussed it so far? The prefix

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‘super’ does not deny the content of the word which follows it, but suggests
that there is something above, or more than, or greater than that which the
word refers to. So, ‘supernaturalism’ does not deny that there is nature, but
suggest that there is something above, or greater than, or more than it.
Importantly, it is not the negation of nature – rather, the two are in a relation,
for a super-A must be related to A in order to be more or greater than it.
Indeed, in the understanding of naturalists, the absolute independence of
nature makes the supernatural, at the very least, unnecessary to nature, if
not a delusion about nature, whereas supernaturalists do not deny nature an
ontological status, but do grant it only partial autonomy. now, if we only
have empirical access to the natural world, and the supernaturalist claim is
not merely delusive, then surely the claim that the supernatural exists is
co-extensive with the claim that nature in itself does not allow us to derive
a sufficient explanation for all the characteristics of nature? Supernaturalist,
then, is any view which [1] admits the existence of an ordered world which
we have experience of, [2] claims that this world has ordered features and
operations, and [3] claims that such ordered features and operations can only
be fully accounted for and explained by introducing entities which are not of
the same kind of those populating that world and which, for that reason,
belong to a different realm of reality. according to these definitions, the only
difference between naturalism and supernaturalism is their disagreement
on [3]: one is the assertion, the other the denial of the same point.
we should make some epistemological remarks. First, the above
definitions are purely metaphysical, by which we mean that the distinction
between entities populating the world of our experience and entities which
are not of the same kind of those populating that world is a metaphysical
distinction and not the epistemological distinction between what is object
of experience and what lays behind our experience. Indeed, even naturalism
can claim that the ultimate constituents of the world of our experience do
not appear to us, but lay behind what appears to us and their existence can
only be inferred from what appears to us. Think of atoms or electrons, for
example: these are not objects of our experience, but they need to be
introduced in a physical explanation of our experience. In this example,
the point of naturalism, according to the above definition, would be that
the objects which populate the world of our experience lay behind our
experience, but are immanent in that world. The point of supernaturalism,
instead, would be that besides the objects laying behind our experience
that constitute the micro-level of the world we experience on the macro-
level (electrons), there must be objects which lay behind our experience

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and, furthermore, are part of a reality which does not appear to our expe-
rience in any way (for example, there might be atoms laying behind our
experience and populating the world of our experience, but there will be
also angels, which are inhabitants of a reality different from that which
appears to us). our second point is that an epistemological corollary
follows from the above definitions: the entities of supernatural reality are
not of the same kind as those of the world of our experience, but they need
to be somehow related to them, otherwise we would not be able to think
about them. In our thinking, we deploy concepts which are articulated
throughout our encounter with the objects of the world of our experience,
and thus we can think of something which is not of the same sort as the things
of our world, only to the extent it bears some resemblence to the things of
that world. This corollary will be further discussed in the fourth section.
Supernaturalism is only one of the possible negations of naturalism:
naturalism, as we have shown, is a conjunction of several traits, and there
are other ways of denying it. Supernaturalism denies the autonomy and
the exclusivity of nature; one kind of anti-naturalism might deny the
intrinsic order of nature, which our cognitive capacities can grasp; another
form of anti-naturalism might deny that we really have empirical access
to the one existent reality, and proclaim that all our experiences are illusory
and constitute a veil of Maya masking the unknown.
note that this opens a further problem for Plantinga’s quasi-identifi-
cation of naturalism and atheism. we have noted that he seems to concede
some atheistic forms of non-naturalism, which already tells us that atheism
and naturalism are not identical. The denial of naturalism by way of the two
other approaches I point to in my last paragraph also become problematic
for Plantinga, since – on the other side of the identity – it isn’t clear that
all anti-naturalisms are theisms. however, as my proposal does not equate
naturalism with atheism, I am basically concerned to rescue his strategy
only from his careless concession to Tooley’s claim that there can be
supernaturalism without theism. I will not be making other arguments that
take up my two other forms of anti-naturalism, here.
The definition of supernaturalism which I have proposed is similar to
one suggested by Peter Forrest (1996),15 which is worth discussing in order
to highlight some characteristics of my definition:
15
he proposes it in the context of a discussion of the opposite direction of the conditional
I am discussing here, i.e. whether theism implies supernaturalism. he tries to claim
that it does not, in the attempt to rescue theism, on the assumption that supernaturalism
is implausible.

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Supernaturalists differ from naturalists because they resort, in their expla-

nations, to either or both (i) entities for which neither the familiar entities
around us nor those mentioned in the natural sciences establish a precedent;
and (ii) violations of laws of nature (Forrest 1996, 3).
This definition provides a general framework within which many interpre-

tations of ‘naturalism’ and ‘supernaturalism’ can be constructed. It is
similar to mine in defining naturalism as the view that the physical world
(thought of as the world of our everyday experience and the world of
scientific investigation) can be fully explained without deploying entities
that are not of the same kind as those which fill it. This definition, though,
differs from mine in dealing more directly with current physicalist forms
of naturalism, in virtue of its reference to the entities “mentioned in the
natural sciences”, and to possible “violations of laws of nature.” I prefer
to avoid explicit reference to science as a source of knowledge of the physical
world, because of the historical considerations in which naturalism was
first formulated, as I have argued above. however, I certainly accept that
scientific knowledge can be one of the ways in which we come to know
the ordered features and operations of the world of our experience, according
to my definition. Furthermore, I have also a further reason not to mention
the violation of laws of nature, which is typically thought of as a case of
supernatural intervention: it seems to me that the supernaturalist does not
need to make the implausible claim that a supernatural intervention by god
breaks the laws of nature, since he can more plausibly claim that the
intervention of god in some fundamental features of the physical world
changes locally the laws of nature when he acts in ways which seem to us
miraculous (see wynn 1999, 488-9, and van Inwagen 1995).
III
So far, I have tried to offer a definition of ‘supernaturalism’ as a preliminary
step to justify my claim that supernaturalism entails theism. Before proposing
my justification, I now need to define ‘theism.’
etymologically, ‘theism’ refers to any view which admits the existence
of a god (theo), but this does not take us very far: the greek religion spoke
of many gods, but that it is not a view that we would call ‘theistic’, if we
use the word in the way in which it is used in the Plantinga-Tooley debate.
If we turn to the history of the word, indeed, we can notice that it has
always been used in a rather specific way since it was introduced into

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philosophical use by the english 17th Century Platonist Ralph Cudworth,

as all the dictionaries and encyclopaedias teach us. he defined ‘theism’ as
the view that “all things in the world do not float without a head or gover-
nor; but that there is a god, an omnipotent understanding Being, presiding
over all”, who is “essentially good and just”, and lets us be “principles and
masters of our own actions” (Cudworth 1678, xxxiv): here the definition
seems to be shaped by particular conceptions of god, those related to the
monotheistic abrahamic tradition.
It is in this sense, indeed, that Plantinga and Tooley use the term, in their
discussion. Plantinga gives a rich account of ‘theism’: theism, in his view,
is any religious or philosophical conception which conceives of a god who
is personal (i.e., who is conscious, has affections, has beliefs, has intentions,
and acts), non-physical (he acts by willing), omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly
good; who created the world and sustains it in existence (Plantinga and
Tooley, 1-5). Tooley, more briefly, but consistently with this definition,
claims that, according to theism, “god must be a person, and one who, at
the very least, is a very powerful, very knowledgeable, and morally very
good person, and who ideally, is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally
perfect” (72). In this way, Tooley offers a two-fold definition of god here:
one is that of an omnigod, a god who has all his distinctive properties
at the highest degree,16 the other of a quasi-omnigod, a god who has
the same properties as the other, but only at a very high degree. This is
a two-fold definition rather than two separate definitions, since the set of
relevant properties is the same in the two cases, and what varies is only
the degree at which god possesses them. In my argument, the degree of
omnipotence is irrelevant, and only the set of identifying properties will
matter. hence, I will consider Tooley’s as a single definition, and, in order
to avoid tediousness, I will refer to his view as the omnigod definition,
which will also count for the quasi-omnigod definition.
This way of defining theism is, in some ways, philosophically unsatis-
factory. as Tooley recognises, this definition starts from a survey of what
people or leading religions usually understand by ‘god’, thereby bypassing
all philosophical and metaphysical arguments which have been given to
support and justify the attribution of certain properties to god. This raises
two problems, in my opinion. First, a philosophical investigation should
not rely on the contingencies of traits that religions or other cultural forms
16
In their debate, Tooley and Plantinga by “omnigod” mean a definition of god as
being both omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.

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have taken in history. Second, although the definition is generic, in the sense
that – as both Plantinga and Tooley recognise – several, different views
could satisfy it, it is in a way (potentially) too rigid. It claims that the god
of theism must be personal, omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good;
but let us imagine that philosophical reflection discovers that god cannot
be omniscient; we should conclude that the resulting view is not theism,
but this is implausible, since it is still a question of the same Being that
traditional religions refer to; of that Being our reflection says that he is not
omniscient, contrary to what was thought. how can it not be theism, if
it admits the same entity that theism speaks about, although granting it
a diverse set of properties?
In order to offer an example of this definitional mismatch, I will
consider a case taken from Tooley, although this issue constitutes a problem
also for Plantinga. after defining theism in the way we have seen, at page 74,
Tooley doubts that the god of Protestant Fundamentalism, Catholicism,
and Islam17 can be called morally perfect, and he even claims that he must
be morally evil, since he is the maker of a “very bad” world, i.e. a world
which contains hell, which is a world where some people receive eternal
punishment – this, Tooley claims, must be bad. let us call ‘abrahamic
supreme entity’ the god of Protestant Fundamentalism, Catholicism, and
Islam. Tooley’s conclusion that the abrahamic supreme entity is evil, besides
being omnipotent and omniscient, is inferred from various assertions, at
least these: (i) he is the maker of hell, (ii) hell is a place for eternal
punishment, (iii) a world containing a place for eternal punishment is bad,
(iv) a creator of a bad world must be evil. Some of these assertions are
assumptions taken from abrahamic religions (i and ii), others are premises
believed by Tooley (iii and iv). The conclusion that the supreme abrahamic
entity is evil is inconsistent with the claim of abrahamic religions, according
to which the supreme entity is morally perfect. From the point of view of
Tooley, who believes in his premises, this must be a problem for abra-
hamic religions. one would expect him to suggest that abrahamic religions
have inconsistent beliefs about god, and thus should be readjusted: either
their supreme entity is not as morally perfect as they claim, or he is not
the maker of hell, or the amount of punishment inflicted in hell is very
limited and compatible with a morally perfect creator. Surprisingly, though,
Tooley does not draw any of these conclusions, and moves by a logic to
17
one could doubt that Protestantism, Catholicism and Islam have the same god.
however, Tooley assumes that thesis and I will follow him on this for the sake of
the argument, since, for reasons of space, I cannot justify or criticise that claim here.

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which he is rather bound by the other premises he accepts to conclude that

the supreme abrahamic entity is not god. at page 216, indeed, he claims
that, if the argument from evil is sound, “some non-theistic form of super-
naturalism might be true. Perhaps there is an omnipotent and omniscient
deity, but he is evil, to a greater or less extent, or morally indifferent.”
This is an important statement, since it summarises the structure of his
entire argumentative strategy. The fact that he calls non-theistic the
supernaturalism compatible with the conclusion of the argument from evil
entails that an omnipotent, omniscient and evil being would not be god.
and since the abrahamic supreme entity is, according to his previous
argument, omnipotent, omniscient, and evil, he must conclude that that
entity is not god.
This result is unsatisfactory in two ways. First, apart from being coun-
terintuitive, the result is inconsistent with the “denominational” definition
of theism that he had offered at the beginning: if, as he claims, he takes his
definition of ‘god’ from a survey of what leading religions believe, how
can he conclude that the supreme entity of abrahamic religions is not god?
what religions are leading, if the abrahamic one are not? Second, this way
of proceeding makes one’s identification of an entity with god totally
dependent on one’s meta-ethics, and this is awkward. a retributivist, for
example, could reject Tooley’s premise (iii), and claim that the abrahamic
supreme entity is morally perfect, and, hence, that he is god. now, suppose
that someone who shares Tooley’s moral intuitions becomes really persuaded
through rational argument that there is an omnipotent and omniscient being
who gives eternal punishment. would that person conclude that that being
is not god, or would she rather be challenged in her meta-ethical intuitions?
of course, the problem doesn’t arise if she takes the idea of omniscience
and omnipotence from a survey of traditional religions, but it does if she is
rationally persuaded that there is an entity with those properties.
My point here is not about the truth of particular claims of natural
theology (e.g., it is not a quick refutation of the argument from evil), but
about methodology (i.e., language, definitions and their use in philosophical
arguments). Plantinga and Tooley start by accepting a definition of god
taken from religious traditions, without philosophical justification, and
then proceed to argue about whether there is or there is not a being with
the relevant characteristics. But this makes their conclusions wholly
vulnerable to the contingencies of their initial, unjustified definitions. It
seems to me that natural theology should go the other way around: it should
not start off with a preconception about what and how god should be,

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given some standard we have, but it should rather try to form a rational
conception of a supreme being, if one is called for by philosophical
reasons, and then try to understand what properties that being must have.
only in a subsequent phase can it compare that being with the supreme
entities of traditional religious belief.
The upshot of these remarks is that, in order to address the question of
whether supernaturalism entails theism, we need a more flexible definition
of theism, one which allows for the possibility that views may vary in
respect to the properties that they attribute to god, and still be considered
versions of theism, as far as it can be guaranteed that they refer to the same
entity when they speak of god. In other words, we must look for a way of
thinking about theism that allows for the possibility that there are different
concepts of god, i.e. different way of thinking about god, which are related
enough, though, to let us presume that when philosophers of different
persuasions discuss god, they are referring to the same entity. as noted
above, Tooley’s definition of ‘god’ allows some flexibility about the
degree at which god has his properties, but leaves no room for variations
about the range of his properties. My point is that we need some flexibility
also about the range of properties god must have, and about our criteria
for granting him such properties.
we are dealing with the vagueness of the concept of theism, similar
to the vagueness of the concepts of naturalism and supernaturalism, which
we had to face in the previous section. In both cases we want to reach
definitions that are broad enough to allow us to see how different views
can be encompassed within them. however, the case of theism is different
than that of naturalism, which we analysed by following a historical-phy-
logenetic procedure. ‘naturalism’ refers to a particular set of philosophical
possibilities which originated in antiquity (i.e., in ancient atomism, in
stoicism, and in the thought of naturalist aristotelians, like Theophrastus
and Strato), was revived during the Renaissance, and diversified in the past
few centuries of western philosophy. our historical analysis brought out
the family relations between the varieties of naturalism. The vagueness of
‘theism’, however, is in a way more complicated: its history does not have
the central density around which the contingent features of naturalism have
collected over time. given the multi-faced character of theism, one could
wander whether a general and comprehensive definition of it is possible.
Maybe there are just as many theisms as there are ways of speaking of
‘god’, but there is no relation among them. John Bishop (1998) has made
a similar point. he is annoyed by the argument from evil, which he takes

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to prove that there cannot be an omnigod (i.e., the god of theism, as

defined above: omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good). however, he
is not prepared to give up his religious attitude for that reason, nor to retreat
into irrational fideism. Thus he investigates the possibility of outlining “an
adequate alternative concept of god, satisfying the following requirements:
(i) the concept must be genuinely distinct from the concept of omnigod; and
(ii) the concept must be acceptable as authentically a concept of God; that

is, belief in the existence of a god of the kind the concept specifies must
be religiously adequate to the theistic religious tradition, in the sense that
it could count at least as one viable expression of that historical tradition”
(Bishop 1998, 174).
he recognises that this is an important point also for the issue under
discussion here in relation to Tooley, i.e. for any attempt to overthrow
theism through an argument from evil. For if we grant the concept of
a god that is alternative to the omnigod, the argument from evil alone
does not overthrow theism. Subsequently, Bishop goes on to suggest the
criteria that a suitable concept of god should fulfil: a concept is a concept
of God if it “is the concept of something belief in whose existence plays
a certain functional role within […] the psychological economy of the
theist” (176). his main attempt is to establish the possibility of an alterna-
tive conception of god which might play that functional role, and he only
briefly sketches the proposal that he would endorse, i.e. that of god as
a real feature of the universe which warrants Christian hope. I am not
interested in discussing the latter aspect of his proposal here. Rather, I will
try to develop his claims about the possibility of alternative concepts of
god, in the hope that they may help to characterise a way of thinking about
god which gives us more flexibility in the desired sense specified above
than the “denominational” definition proposed by Plantinga and Tooley.
one of Bishop’s criteria requires that an alternative concept of god
“be one viable expression of [the Theistic religious] historical tradition”.
as we have seen, Bishop spells out viability in terms of “the psychological
economy of the theist.” I doubt that by playing this functional role a concept
would satisfy the mentioned requirement. Believers of what can be
identified as a “theistic religious tradition” (roughly, Judaism, Christianity
and Islam), indeed, can be characterised by a number of psychological
attitudes, such as hope, or trust; but psychological attitudes are not alone
at the centre of their religious life: they co-exist with epistemic attitudes
to a divine reality, which simply means that the believer in these theistic

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traditions thinks that his beliefs are true, by which he means that god truly
exists and that this truth was revealed to people like us in the past, and that
a tradition of passing down these truths from generation to generation is
worth of trust. Furthermore, the believer thinks that there are rational
arguments to support at least some of the core beliefs of his religion:
arguments are not available for all revealed truths, but at least for a number
of them, which he supposes thereby give rational support to the rest
(preambula fidei). The theist does not take these truths to be matters of
indifference, but instead believes that there is an Individual, a Being, whose
properties might remain mysterious to us, but who is to be thanked for all
we perceive and for what we are. In sum, the psychological attitudes of
the believer in the Theistic tradition are varied and tied to several beliefs
about reality, which might not need to be as rich as the definition of
Cudworth’s Theistic god, but cannot be as thin as Bishop’s vague general
feature of a reality which should be able to justify Christian hope.
when can we say, then, that the requirements for a concept being of
God are met? I would say that a concept is a concept of God, when it is
close enough to the classical, rich, core definition of the theistic God (i.e.,
an omniGod, who is personal, i.e. free and loving) to secure identity of
reference with it.18 Besides theism, there are – both as metaphysical possibility
and as historical philosophical views – other conceptions of the universe,
which are incompatible with theism, and offer alternative explanations of
what the first principle or the origin of the universe are: atheism, agnosti-
cism, deism, pantheism, polytheism, panentheism, being the main ones
(cf. Peters 2007). Those views either do not imply that there is a Being
having the characteristics of the theistic god, or even imply that there is
no such Being. My claim is that a view can be considered a kind of theism
to the extent that it is closer to classical, core theism than to any other
alternative view of the universe. In this case, indeed, it refers to the same
sort of entity as theism. Before refining my proposal, I would like to offer
an example of the kind of flexibility of reference that will be useful in
discussing the theistic god. let us imagine that I leave my office, the
window of which is wide open, for half an hour, and when I come back
18
note that Tooley’s definition is not consistent with mine: his definition is flexible
enough to allow variations in the degree at which the relevant entity must have its
properties; thus a quasi-omnigod conception of god, although different from the
traditional omnigod conception, would be close enough to it to allow identity of
reference. But his definition is too rigid to allow variations in the list of properties
that an entity must have in order to be called god, whereas mine does.

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I realise that a pile of sheets of paper on my desk, a draft of one of my

colleague’s book, is all messed up. But it is messed up in a peculiar way.
The sheets still form a perfectly ordered pile, but the order of pages is
changed. I am sure the order of pages was correct when I left, but now the
odd and the even pages form two series, one increasing and one decreasing,
and are piled one on top of the other. what happened? let us imagine three
hypotheses. First, the wind from the window could have blown all sheets
up, and they must have fallen off back in a pile with this new order: an
unlikely arrangement, but not any less likely then any other possible one.
Second, some man could have come through the window and played this
trick on me: he must have been a fit chap, since my office is at the third
floor and he must have climbed his way up. Third, the flying robot my
colleagues from the engineering department are working on could have
escaped and be troublemaking in the neighbourhood. For each hypothesis,
I claim that there is something responsible for the event: a blow of wind,
a person, a robot. and in each hypothesis, I describe the responsible things
through some of their characteristics.
let us now suppose that it turns out that a man did the trick, and so
my second hypothesis was correct; but, contrary to what I had thought
while formulating that hypothesis, the man was not fit, he was fat. he had
not climbed his way through the window, but he had been sly enough to
pretend he was an IT technician and to ask a spare key of my office from
the porter, just for the sake of playing this trick on me. I can still say that
it is true that there is a man who changed the order of the pages on the
manuscript on my desk, as the second hypothesis said, but that man did not
have the characteristics I thought. Still, my inexact description succeeded
in referring to him. how much can his characters vary from what I had
thought of, in order for the second hypothesis to remain the correct one?
This is a tricky question and I cannot address it fully here. For our purposes,
I can just note that if they vary too much, it may turn out that it was not
true that a man did it, and thus the second hypothesis turns out to be false.
For example, let us consider a different supposition: the individual which
did the trick was a humanoid, which looked exactly like a human, climbed
the wall, and entered my office through the window: but it is a different
sort of robot under development at the engineering department; in this case
the third hypothesis would be correct, not the second. Basically, when we
stretch the shifts in characteristics from the original second hypothesis too
much, we end up referring to another entity than that referred to in our
hypothesis, which means we end up with a different hypothesis.

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le us go back to my proposal: I would like to claim that in thinking

about god, things are similar to our thinking about the three hypothesis
of the example. The thought that there is a traditional theistic god, an
omnigod, is the thought that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly
good Being, who created all there is apart from himself, and, in his
goodness, providentially intervenes in the world to lead the free agents
inhabiting it to moral perfection, thereby making his existence shine in his
creation. we can manage to have a thought about that entity, even if we
think a little bit differently about him. But if our thoughts change radically,
we just end up thinking about something different, and so we end up in one
of the alternative views (atheism, agnosticism, deism, polytheism, pantheism,
panentheism). any way of thinking which is closer to traditional theism
than to any other of these views, though, can be considered as a way of
thinking of god within the framework of theism.
we can imagine an n-dimensional semantic space – i.e., a space in
which each point represents a possible object of reference19 of the relevant
word – with the traditional theistic meaning of ‘god’, i.e., omnigod, at its
centre, and n axes departing from it, where n is the number of attributes of
god granted him by traditional theism. along each axis, we have views
that depart from traditional theism in the respect relevant for that axis, and
eventually end up in a different view. Thus, if we take the attribute of
power, we can start from theism and follow the direction of decreasing
levels of power: at some point we will meet polytheism (the gods have
only limited power, at least since one limits the power of another), then
to deism (the great architect cannot intervene in nature at all)20, then
eventually to agnosticism (the agnostic commits himself neither to the
existence nor to the inexistence of god, since he believes that the universe
manifests no signs of the existence of such a being; hence, the supreme
entity which is an open possibility for him must be such as to leave no sign
of his existence in the universe, i.e. it must exercise much less power on
19
I should rather say a possibly infinite set of objects of reference which are all
perfectly identical in respect to the degree to which they posses the properties that
generate the semantic space, and which may differ for other properties. But I take
this to be an irrelevant complication.
20
we can at least imagine versions of Deism according to which god does not interfere
with the world because he has reasons not to (e.g. to let people find their way
through the world and grow in virtue). But this is still a sense in which he cannot
act: he is bound by his reason. The attribute of power, in the current discussion,
should not be read as a qualified possibility of some sort, but as the actual exercise
of a potentiality.

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the universe than god or the deistic architect), then, finally, to atheism (there
is no god, and thus he has no power); on the other hand, if we follow the
direction of increasing powers, we come to pantheism and panentheism,
according to which god can do anything which is logically consistent, not
being limited even by human free will or by the nature of things he created.
let us consider a second axis, i.e. the dependence relation between god and
the world. In the direction of decreasing degrees of dependence, we encounter
deism, for which the great architect started the universe-machine, but then
let it operate absolutely independently, then we find agnosticism, for which
either there is no supreme entity or there is one which leaves no sign in the
universe, i.e. which does not intervene in the operations of the universe, since
its existence is not required for an explanation of the origin of the universe
even, and, finally, atheism, for which the independence of the universe from
any god is so certain that the existence of god can be denied. In the direction
of increasing degrees of dependence, we find polytheism, for which all
happenings in the natural order are referred to the activity of some god, then
panentheism, for which anything which happens in the universe is the result
of the activity of the divine which manifests itself in the natural order, and
finally pantheism, for which all natural events occur in the divine.
now I can offer a refined version of my initial account of what an
alternative concept of god could amount to. Remember that the initial
account was the following: a concept is a concept of God, when it is close
enough to the rich definition of the theistic god (i.e., the omnigod) to
secure identity of reference with it. The new account I want to propose is
this: a concept is a way of thinking about God, if what it refers to finds its
object somewhere in the semantic space either occupied by ‘God’, or in
near proximity, taking the “God” space to be identical to that constructed
by classical theism. Nearness to the God of classical theism is measured
against that to any analogous term as intended by alternative cosmological
views (atheism, agnosticism, deism, polytheism, panentheism, pantheism).
here, a term analogous to god would be whatever word is deployed by views
different from theism to serve the main purposes that ‘god’ serves in
theisms: i.e., referring to an entity who constitutes an ultimate explanation,
who is worth of respect and admiration, who is the ground of existence
and/or obligation, who exists in absolute ways. examples could be ‘nature’
for pantheism, ‘deity’ for deism, ‘the fundamental laws of nature’ for atheism,
‘the gods’ for polytheism, ‘the unknown’ or the laws of nature for agnosticism,
‘the cosmic soul’ for panentheism. of course, these examples do not
exhaust all possibilities in each category.

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IV
Finally, then, we are prepared to engage with the question we started out
with: why supernaturalism entails theism. It should be clear, by now, that
this entailment is only apparently simple: it is instead a conjunction of
entailments, one for each variety of supernaturalism. The truth of each
entailment, furthermore, should be established case by case, since the
relation of each form of supernaturalism with its particular form of theism
will have to be supported on the base of its particular features. however,
I have argued, in section two, all supernaturalisms have a common historical
root, which is also a general basic assumption of all them, on the base of
which they then diverge, both historically and theoretically. even if the
features common to all forms of supernaturalism are not specific enough
to entail a particular position concerning god (the relation of which with
traditional theism could then be investigated), I can at least hope to show
that those features must entail positions concerning god, according to
which ‘god’ has to be interpreted as referring to a point included in a part
of the semantic space of ‘god’ surrounding the core theistic meaning of
‘god’, i.e. a part of the semantic space of ‘god’ which, according to the
discussion in the above section, can be called “theistic.”
My argument moves through two steps. Firstly, I will consider two
particular cases of supernaturalism and discuss how they entail two particular
forms of theism. Secondly, I will suggest that the reason why those particular
examples of supernaturalisms entail senses of ‘god’ which are in the theistic
area of the semantic space of ‘god’, has to do with features which are
common to all supernaturalisms, even if the particular point in the semantic
space of “god” that each version of supernaturalism entails is due to specific
features of that form of supernaturalism. This will allow me to reach the
general conclusion that supernaturalism entails theism, where ‘supernaturalism’
refers to all views which have the typical supernaturalistic common features,
and theism refers to a family of views which deploy the term ‘god’ as referring
to any point of the semantic space of ‘god’ that is found in (or in the part
surrounding) the core traditional, theistic meaning of ‘god.’
The first example of supernaturalism which I would like to discuss is
aristotle’s metaphysics. as we have seen, according to aristotle the physical
world displays regularities and order, which can be explained in terms of
causal interactions between objects; he took ‘casual interactions’ in a quite
general sense, as including the relation between a seed and the tree origi-
nating from it, the relations between parents and offspring, the relation

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between a craftsman and an object produced by him, besides examples

which would be more akin to our terminology, like the case of a moving
ball hitting a resting ball and putting it in motion. his analysis of causality
and motion (i.e., change) leads him to claim that all physical substances
are made of matter and form, the former being a potentiality to being
informed in certain ways, the latter the actuality of a structure received
by an object when it comes into existence or changes. Furthermore, he
claimed that all causation involves four kinds of causes, formal, material,
efficient and final: the first two would account for the fact that each object
is made of matter and form, the third would account for the need of a force
being exercised in order for an object to be structured according to
a particular form, the last relating to the fact that living creatures seem to
have ends build into their very nature, i.e., the tendency to grow according
to certain patterns and forms. he observed that efficient causes require
actualising their potentiality, although each actualisation of a potentiality
must be the result of a prior exercise of power by another efficient cause.
however, we cannot accept an infinite regress of causes, otherwise we
would not have a beginning of the process and we could not account for
the fact that powers have indeed been exercised, or so he claims. For this
reason, we have to introduce a first mover, which is not moved by a prior
cause. But in order to exercise its role of cause without being caused, it must
be completely actual, with no potentiality. This means that it cannot be
material, since matter is potentiality. now, since physical reality is constituted
of things made of matter and form that have potentiality and actuality and
move, the first mover cannot be part of the physical world. This leads
aristotle to supernaturalism: the order to be found in the physical world
can only be explained by a cause which is outside that physical world;
furthermore, the objects of the supernatural reality are not of the same sort
as the objects of the world of our experience, as the definition of supernat-
uralism requires: indeed, the objects of our world are made of matter and
form, are constituted of potentialities and actualities, and are movable,
whereas supernatural reality is made of entities which are fully actual, have
no matter, and are unchangeable. (Consider, further, that, consistently with
the corollary to the definition of naturalism put forward in section two,
supernatural realities are still explained by deploying concepts that we use
to describe our reality: ‘actuality’, ‘matter’ (privation of), ‘change’ (privation
of), and below we will use also ‘happiness’ and ‘perfection’).
now I would like to claim that aristotle’s supernaturalism entails
a sort of theism. In order to do that, I will first highlight some features of

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his supernatural reality. In book XII of his Metaphysics, aristotle claims

that since the prime mover is fully actual and immaterial, its substance
must be thinking, but thinking is a form of life, thus the prime mover must
be a form of life. Furthermore, since thinking is the most perfect and happy
form of life, the prime mover must be perfect and perfectly happy.21 It must
be perfect also for another reason: being fully actual it has no potentiality,
and, thus, it cannot be perfected in any way; i.e. it is perfect in its nature.
But what can a thinking, fully actual entity think about? not about other
things, otherwise its thinking would be an apprehension, and it should thus
move from potentiality to actuality in that respect, which is incompatible
with its full actuality. Therefore, it must be thinking about itself. Furthermore,
as a mover, it cannot operate or exercise a power on the physical world,
otherwise it would move, and, subsequently pass from potentiality to
actuality, which again violates its full actuality. The only way it can move
the physical world, then, is by desire: it moves the physical world by being
the final object of desire to which all physical things strive, through their
build-in-ends, by the final causes which define them in their natures. In
this way it is an ultimate object of love, i.e. the final explanation of the
order which we can recognise in the physical world.
are these features of aristotle’s supernaturalism enough to claim that
it is a form of theism? Certainly, it is not a full-bodied traditional theism:
the first mover is not the providential personal god of Christianity or
Judaism, who acts in the world with miracles and who intervenes in human
affairs. It cannot even think about humans. It is not omnipotent: there are
plenty of potential acts that lay outside its scope, like, for instance, typing
on my computer. It is certainly not omniscient: it does not know anything
about what is going on in the physical world. But even if this is not the
god of theism, it is not that far away from him, and, in many ways, it is
closer to him than to any other alternative fundamental cosmological entity.
of course, it would be too much of a god for atheists and agnostics.
Furthermore, it is quite personal: it thinks and it is happy. It lacks some of
the personal features of the theistic god, since the mover does not love
men, nor get angry with them. But at the same time the mover is even
further from polytheism, since it is not a god which can mess around with
humans. The mover clearly has his own independent being, distinct from
the being of the physical world, which distinguishes this entity from those
21
of course, ‘perfection’ here means fulfilment of one’s nature, and has no “moral”
significance in our sense.

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of pantheism or panentheism. although he is not omnipotent and omnis-

cient, he is probably the most powerful and the most intelligent being: he
has the power to move (although by desire) the whole physical world, and
he always thinks of the most perfect thing, himself. he has much more
power than the polytheistic gods or the deistic great architect of the
universe. It is true that he does not intervene in human affairs, but unlike
epicurus’ gods or the deistic great architect he is not idle, since all the
order and the motion in the physical world depends on his continuous
presence as a final cause and prime mover. In sum, it seems to me that
aristotle’s First Mover occupies a point of the semantic space of ‘god’
which is within the domain of theism, and, as we have seen, it occupies
that point because of the character and features of aristotelian supernatu-
ralism. hence, his supernaturalism entails his theism.
let us now consider the second example of a supernaturalist view
which entails theism: the proposal put forward by John Foster (2001).
Foster argues that the natural world displays many examples of regularities
and that these call for explanation. “at this point the argument presents us
with two options, which bring us to the theistic conclusion by different
routes” (160). on the one hand, one can assume “that the explanation of
the regularities, in their basic form, has to be supernatural”, whereas the
second option explains regularities by way of laws of nature, “i.e. laws
conceived as forms of natural necessity.” But the second option requires
an explanation of the necessity of the laws of nature, which by its nature
is not strictly necessary, Foster claims that any such explanation must
appeal to what is in essence a supernatural cause. In brief, his view is that
there is no way to account for the necessity of laws, but to claim that there
is something causing that necessity, since he takes that, contrary to hume’s
claim, lawfulness is explained by individual causation, rather the other way
around. But a cause explaining the lawfulness of natural world cannot be
part of the natural world itself, and thus it must be supernatural.
This view is open to some obvious objections: why would an appeal
to supernatural reality explain what is left unexplained at the level of
natural reality? why would a supernatural cause be ultimate and require
no further explanation on its turn? It seems to me that Foster could marshal
arguments to meet these challenge, but I am not interested in exploring
these issues here: I am simply interested in the entailment between super-
naturalism and theism. If I have set forth some parts of Foster’s arguments
here, it is not to support them, but only to claim that the distinctive features
which make his view a form of supernaturalism, entail also theism.

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Concerning that entailment, Foster claims that both horns of his

disjunctive argument lead to a theistic explanation. In both cases, “various
further considerations support the conclusion that the regularities [and the
laws] are imposed on the world by god.” his treatment of this last step of the
argument is not very extensive, but interesting for our purposes. he claims:
It is not hard to see how such a suggestion [i.e., supernaturalism] would
tend to issue in an argument for the existence of god – a god of the broadly
Judeo-Christian kind. on the one hand, if we accept the existence of such
a god, we have a perfect explanation for why the regularities obtain. Thus,
as omnipotent creator of the universe, god has the power to make its
internal workings regular in the relevant ways: and we can plausibly credit
him with purposes which give him reason to do so. on the other hand, there
does not seem to be any rival supernatural hypothesis which is anywhere
near as plausible. Such alternatives as we can think of either fail to provide
such an effective explanation of the regularities or strike us as too contrived
or fanciful to be taken seriously (Foster 2001, 149).
The point, here, is that if we want to explain the regularities which occur
in nature and we come to the conclusion that we have to do that by appealing
to a supernatural order, then we end up with theism, since the supernatural
cause(s) must be “god”, i.e. a “Judeo-Christian kind” of god, acting “with
purposes which give him reasons.” (Indeed, the feature of acting for
purposes makes the referent of “god” as used by Foster fall within the
theistic region of the semantic space of “god”).
according to Foster, furthermore, all alternatives, all other supernatural
explanations of regularities are either unconvincingly contrived or otherwise
unacceptable. his argument is a bit compressed, but I would like to offer
an interpretation of it, which, it seems to me, makes it clearer and stronger.
If we want to explain the regularities of the natural world, we need some
explanation of their necessity; yet this involves an appeal to a higher level
of existence than is possessed by any of the entities which populate the
natural world itself, as they are among the things that are necessitated. In
an argument similar to that by which aristotle gets back to the first mover,
we take it that the entities that satisfy this description will have to be unlike
natural entities at least in this respect, that they are not subject to natural
regularities and are not thereby necessitated. This is the only way in which
we can “have a perfect explanation for why the regularities obtain.”
But things which act to cause effects, and cause those effects without
being necessitated and subject to regularities, act by will and for reasons.
hence, these supernatural causes must act by will and for reasons. and

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the uniformity of the regularities of the universe and the unity that it mani-
fests seem to call for an “omnipotent creator of the universe”, [explain
why single] which is the best characterisation of a cause which must have
“the power to make internal workings [of the universe] regular in the
relevant ways.” The issue at stake in Foster’s argument, then, is whether
personal/intentional or mechanical/causal explanations should be given
priority and his point is that if we want to explain the mechanical features
of the natural world we need to see it as the effect of intentional action, as
the result of a cause which is not subject to that mechanism. Far from being
hidden, then, god would manifest himself as the cause which can best
explain the features that we recognise in the natural world when we try to
explain it. he is not one of the objects of the natural world since he is
not subject to natural regularities, but he can be conceptualised by means
of inducing, from the concept of regularity, an agent who can think of
regularities and bring them about through his actions.22
So far we have considered two versions of supernaturalism, aristotle’s
and Foster’s, and we have noted that both entail theism, or at least a view
about “god”, according to which the word “god” refers to a point in the
theistic region of the semantic space of “god.” Both supernaturalisms
claim that the world is ordered: according to aristotle there is an ordered
pattern of causal interactions which leads to the generation and decay of
living things, through the actualisation of potentialities of matter. Following
a similar logic, according to Foster the natural world behaves according
to regular patterns that are studied by the natural sciences. according to
both supernaturalisms, furthermore, the order of the natural world cannot
be accounted for in terms of entities which populate it, meaning that we
can only find the most perfect exploration by turning to entities which are
not of the same sort of those of the natural world, even though they can be
thought of through concepts which we form by interacting with the natural
world. aristotle found that the best explanation of the causal order of the
physical world, is to make it due to a first cause, who is not a physical
object, since he is fully actual, but who thinks and exists in full actuality,
in analogy with humans intellects and physical object in general. Foster
sees the regularities of the natural world as similarly requiring a Cause that
exists outside them and on another level, in that it is not subject to natural
regularities, but is capable of thinking, intending, and realising all natural
22
on the natural world as the means through which god manifests himself, cf. oakes
2008.

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regularities, like – although to a greater degree than – some of the beings

we have experience of (humans). Both the aristotelian first Cause and
Foster’s Cause of regularities are in the range of theism, since they have
personal features (they think and will, unlike the basic laws, or principles
of the reality admitted by atheism), are not of the same kind as the objects
populating the reality of the natural world (unlike the prominent being of
polytheism, pantheism and panentheism), but are not completely irrelevant
for what goes on within the natural world (their actions support the
operations within the natural world throughout, unlike the great architect
of deism).23 In sum, both the versions of supernaturalism we have looked
at entail theism.
now I would like to claim that what holds for the two versions of
supernaturalism that we have considered, holds for all sorts of supernatu-
ralism: they entail (some version or other of) theism. In doing this, I am
not attributing universally to all members of a class some property which
we only know to belong to some members. Indeed, my argument is that
the reason why both versions of supernaturalism entail theism depends
on features they have in common with all supernaturalisms, not on their
individual features. Individual characteristics determine what kind of theism
each form of supernaturalism entails, but general features of supernaturalism
purport that each individual view must entail one of the particular views,
which fall in the theistic region of the semantic space of “god.” The two
examples I have discussed are just meant to illustrate how the general
features of supernaturalism are relevant. In both examples, indeed, we can
see how supernaturalisms try to account for the order which they recognise
in the world of our experience by appealing to supernatural causes, i.e.
causes which are not part of that world, but are in important ways related
to it. Since the supernatural causes must account for the order of the world
of our experience, they cannot be ordered by it, i.e. their operations must
23
one could object that the deistic architect is also engaged with the world: he made
and started its operations. True, but this is consistent with my claim that the concepts
of “god” fill the semantic space of the world with continuous variations along
different axes. Deism can be seen as a view which occupies an extreme position along
the axis of the god-created world relation. according to deism, the order existing in
the world is fully explainable according to basic natural laws, which can thus account
for everything. So, once the world is made and started, god has nothing to do with
it, to the extent that it cannot be called “supernaturalism,” at least if supernaturalism
requires that forms of order in the world call for a continuous and persistent relation
between god and it. esthetical and moral order can be among the features of the
world that a supernaturalist might recognise as requiring an explanation of this kind.

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be above the laws applying to that order; on the other hand, since they have
to explain that order, they must in some way exemplify or instantiate it,
while not being subject to it. The only way in which this combination of
possibilities can be realised, as has been realized since aristotle, is that the
supernatural causes think, intend, and actualise the order of the world of
our experience. But this means that a suitable supernatural cause must be
personal (unlike the basic laws of nature of atheistic naturalism), cannot
be identified with the world of our experience or with anything in it (unlike
the main beings of polytheism, pantheism, panentheism), and cannot be
too irrelevant for what goes on in the world of our experience (like the
deistic architect). hence, supernaturalism(s) entail(s) theism(s).
V
If my argument is sound, Plantinga’s strategy can be defended from Tooley’s
objection that supernaturalism could be true while theism would still be
false. I have argued that there is no version of real supernaturalism that
does not entail some version of theism. In this way, Plantinga’s argument
against naturalism, and in favour of supernaturalism, proves theism. however,
in making this argument, I have had to eliminate some of the baggage from
Plantinga’s position. The three important qualification I make are as follows:
first, one has to confine Plantinga’s argument to those versions of the
argument against naturalism that lead in the direction of supernaturalism
– conceding that other ways of denying naturalism are possible, as for
instance those objections deny the absolute autonomy of natural world.
Second, I have modified one of Plantinga’s notions of supernaturalism in
holding that, contrary to what he claims, some views might be incompatible
with contemporary forms of naturalism, but still be in the naturalist tradition
(e.g., hegel’s and Spinoza’s). Third, I have weakened the rigidity of the
definition of theism accepted by Plantinga and Tooley, since I have claimed
that, contrary to what they both say, views which deny that god has all
the attributes of the (quasi-)omnigod might still be in the realm of theism
(e.g., aristotle’s metaphysics). however, I hope that it is clear that the
modifications of the concepts of supernaturalism and theism that I have
suggested are based on independent philosophical reasons deriving from
the philosophical theistic tradition, and, hence, are not ad hoc modifications
introduced just for the sake of defending Plantinga’s argument. Consequently,
they do not interfere with the dialectic of the debate with which I have
been engaged.

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one worry about my way of construing the notions of supernaturalism

and theism is that the loss of referential rigidity makes them seem vague
or imprecise. In my view, supernaturalism must claim that we can explain
the world of our experience by means of entities that are not of the same
sort of those which inhabit that world, but which we can still think about.
Theism, furthermore, specifies a list of properties by deploying concepts
which we normally use for objects of our worlds, and claims that god must
have (at least) an adequate number of those properties. The problem here
is: how can we apply concepts which acquire their meaning in our experi-
ence of the natural world to entities which are not part of it? what are the
exact criteria for the application of a concept to a supernatural reality?
I would like to suggest that we do not, as theists, need an answer to
this question. one feature of the concept of God is precisely that it applies
to a Being who is not part of the world of our experience, but who is still
closely enough related to it for us to be able to understand what we mean
by saying that god exists. This is what is traditionally called god’s
transcendence. The difficulty of explaining it, though, has led to negative
theology (which stresses the unbridgeable difference between god and the
world), and to kantian, transcendentalist objections to metaphysics. In both
cases, we are led to the view that god is too far away from us for us to be
able to say anything about him, and this, in turn, denies us a capacity for
transcendence. god becomes “totally other.” on the other hand, if we make
the concept of god too familiar, then it is easy to prove that nothing could
instantiate it and retain the supernatural characteristics of god. once we
have set our concept of God in a way such that we think we have a clear
and full grasp of what and how god is, we lose god’s transcendence.
Maintaining a notion of transcendence requires that we acknowledge the
possibility that there is something which, in instantiating that concept,
exceeds our conceptual capacities although not our conceptual sense of
what transcendence is. we cannot expect to be able to think about god
clearly and precisely. The Thomistic notion of analogy – which in my view
is not very far from the view on analogy suggested by kant at the end
of the Prolegomena – was meant to explain precisely the possibility of
a transcendent use of concepts: the analogical use of concepts, in that sense,
purports that a concept is a way of thinking about a thing, which does not
necessarily articulate a clear definition involving an individualising set of
empirically detectable characteristics of that thing; rather it recognises that
we can succeed in thinking about some things, just by mapping them to
things which are more familiar to us and have resemblance relations to

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them. I hope, in my defence of Plantinga’s argument, that I have also

succeeded in making plausible my reliance on similar notions of analogy
and transcendence. In my view, arguments – no matter whether for or
against theism – that do not allow for an analogical use of terms and for
a notion of the transcendence of god, and try, by contrast, to specify a rigid
definition of god, fail to come to terms with what traditional religions
express through the word ‘god’.24
References
aristotle. Metaphysics. (1924). w.D. Ross, (ed.), oxford: Clarendon Press.

Beiser, F. (2005). Hegel, abingdon and new york: Routledge.
Bishop, J. (1998). “Can There Be alternative Concepts of god?”. Noûs 32: 174-188.
Bondì, R. (1997). Introduzione a Telesio. Rome-Bari: laterza.
Cudworth, R. (1845). The True Intellectual System of the Universe. london: Thomas
Tegg.
De anna, g. (2011). “Telesio e la critica alla nozione aristotelica di intelletto”. In
Carlo Fanelli, Sandra Plastina e emilio Sergio (eds.), Telesius redivivus.
Bernardino Telesio tra naturalismo rinascimentale e scienza moderna. Soveria
Mannelli: Rubbettino.
De Franco, l. (1996). Introduzione a Bernardino Telesio. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.
Forrest, P. (1996). God Without the Supernatural. A Defense of Scientific Theism.
Ithaca: Cornall university Press.
Foster, J. (2001). “Regularities, laws of nature, and the existence of god”. Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, 101: 145-161.
hegel, g.w.F. (2004). Philosophy of Nature: Part II of the Encyclopaedia of the Philo-
sophical Sciences. Translated by e.v. Miller, oxford: oxford university Press.
oakes, R. (2008). “life, death, and the hiddenness of god”. International Journal for
the Philosophy of Religion, 64: 155-160.
Papineau, D. (2002). Thinking about Consciousness. oxford: oxford university Press.
Peters, T. (2007). “Models of god”. Philosophia, 35: 273-288.
Plantinga, a. & Tooley, M. (2008). Knolwedge of God. oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, Q. (2001). “The Metaphilosophy of naturalism”. Philosofia, 4: 195-215.
van Inwagen, P.(1995). God, Knowledge, and Mystery. Ithaca: Cornell university
Press.
wynn, M. (1999). “In Defence of “the Supernatural: a Response to Peter Forrest”.
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 73: 477-495.
24
I am very grateful to Professors Brunello lotti and Ramon Tello and to an anonymous
referee for very deep and thoughtful comments on a previous draft of this essay. all
mistakes in the final version are entirely due to my faults and stubbornness.

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Angemeldet
geRhaRD heInzMann 1
On the Interrelation between

Forgiveness, Rationality and Faith
In the 18th century Bishop Butler devoted two of his «Sermons», 8 and 9,
to the subject of resentment and forgiveness, the latter defined as the
overcoming of former, and the former consisting of a “deliberate and
settled” anger that feeds on the perception of an unwarranted injury. Butler’s
analysis of resentment of injury situates it at the heart of society, and thus
raises the stakes for understanding forgiveness. as he writes:
But from this, deliberate anger or resentment is essentially distinguished,
as the latter is not naturally excited by, or intended to prevent mere harm
without appearance of wrong or injustice. now, in order to see, as exactly
as we can, what is the natural object and occasion of such resentment, let
us reflect upon the manner in which we are touched with reading, suppose,
a feigned story of baseness and villainy, properly worked up to move our
passions. This immediately raises indignation, somewhat of a desire that it
should be punished. and though the designed injury be prevented, yet that
it was designed is sufficient to raise this inward feeling. Suppose the story
true, this inward feeling would be as natural and as just: and one may
venture to affirm, that there is scarce a man in the world, but would have
it upon some occasions. It seems in us plainly connected with a sense of
virtue and vice, of moral good and evil. Suppose further, we knew both the
persons who did, and who suffered the injury: neither would this make any
alteration, only that it would probably affect us more. The indignation
raised by cruelty and injustice, and the desire of having it punished, which
persons unconcerned would feel, is by no means malice. no; it is resentment
against vice and wickedness: it is one of the common bonds, by which
1
I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewer for his critical comments, his competent
suggestions and help with improving my english. I thank the participants of the
conference The Right to Believe for stimulating discussion of the issue of this paper.

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214 geRhaRD heInzMann
society is held together; a fellow feeling which each individual has in behalf
of the whole species, as well as of himself. (Butler, 1827, Sermon vIII.
upon Resentment and Forgiveness of Injuries – Matt. v. 43, 44).
In this paper, I would like to bring out the rationality of forgiveness and make
it relevant given the utilitarianism predominant in the public policy, economics
and ethics of modern societies. however, in this general framework I will
omit the discussion of the difficult problems how to recognize that someone
has really and sincerely forgiven or what practical circumstances favor the
act of forgiveness. My concern is human and not Divine forgiveness and
my aim can be expressed in three main questions: (1) are there necessary
symptoms for offering forgiveness? (2) how forgiveness is motivated?
and (3) how can this motivation be philosophically (rationally) justified? In
order to answer these questions, let’s first bring together some characteristics
of the concept of forgiveness.
I. Forgiveness as overcoming of resentments

The act to forgive is not identical with a simple forgetting, nor is it the
elimination of resentment by grace. as Pamela hieronymi (2001, 530) has
put it, “Ridding oneself of resentment by taking a specially-designed pill,
for example, would not count as forgiveness.” There is no known pill that
you can swallow that would eliminate the capacity to resent. Thus, forgiveness
demands the overtaking of resentment in the right way, i.e. for a good reason.
The following features of well-reasoned forgiveness are essentially based
on accounts given by Joanna north (1987) and Pamela hieronymi (2001).
(1) The injured party, upon rationally determining that he or she has been
unfairly treated in a serious way, forgive in the following instances:
(a) when the injury is provoked by a moral but not natural evil. The degree
of forgiveness is determined by the degree to which retribution may be
justified, so that if retribution is inappropriate, forgiveness of the injury
will consist of recognizing that inappropriateness. The wrongdoer is someone
held for responsible. It makes no sense to forgive her if she acts simply
“naturally” but not willfully – that is, the injury perpetrated is not commit-
ted by a morally whole, intending individual. we recognize special
circumstances if the perpetrator of a wrong is either not fully morally
capable, due to youth, or special states of mental illness, or if the perpetrator’s
act was an unintentional accident. In such a common sense context, the act

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on the Interrelation between Forgiveness, Rationality and Faith 215
of (not genuine) forgiveness is attenuated to an index of rational behavior

of the injured party.
(b) Forgiveness is a consequence of a freely decided moral choice. More
exactly, genuine forgiveness requires deciding to foster the disposition to
forgive, which is implemented when the victim abandons resentments and
their related responses (to which the victim has a right) without, nevertheless,
the victim surrendering self-worth in the bargain.
(c) The process of forgiveness may be reinforced by – but is not identical
to – fostering sentiments likely to generate empathy with the offender, such
as compassion, the recognition of the unconditional worth of all humans,
generosity, and moral love (to which the wrongdoer, by nature of the hurtful
act or acts, has no right).
(d) The process of forgiveness does not require excusing of the offender, or
forgetting the offense concerning the victim (see e.g. the golden inscription
near the Paris Cathedral: “we forgive but we don’t ever forget”).
My emphasis in (b) on the decisional character of forgiveness requires
some caution: I do not mean that one can abandon resentment just by deciding
to do so and offer forgiveness at will. what I say is that, to properly forgive,
we should fostering the disposition to forgive through an act of will. as
we will see later, the effective performance of forgiveness resulting in
a “non-natural” empathy depends on a complex dialogical process able to
change our “heart”.
Forgiveness is a core Christian concept: Jesus’ admonition, «forgive us our
debts as we forgive our debtors» is so important that it forms the basis of
the lord’s Prayer. Charles griswold has briefly sketched out the many
meanings of the greek term, sungnômê, making the claim that even if
it “was known to Plato, aristotle, and their contemporaries as well as
successors” in greek philosophy, the ancient philosophers did not praise
it a virtue nor use it to play any significant role in greek ethical thought.
our question (3): How can the motivation to forgive be rationally justified?
may imply an historically conditioned transference of a religious theme
into philosophical reasoning and, in the modern era, into the sphere of
secular political life. Indeed, the thematic of forgiveness has been incor-
porated, worldwide, in questions concerning the political and judicial order.
when Japan’s Prime Minister, for example, asked the Chinese people to
forgive Japan’s past aggressions (allers/ Smit (2010), XIII/XIv), he was
using a rhetoric that has become common in dealing with past historical
injustices, from apartheid to latin american ‘dirty wars’. Is it also possible
to transfer the significance of the Christian concept of forgiveness “into

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a socio-political practice of restoration and reconciliation?” (vorster 2009,

366). This depends on the mechanisms by which the past is socially
mediated, for, as kant said, “for once wrong has been done it cannot be
undone, even by god” (north 1987, 499).
II. Motivations for forgiveness

If the abandon of resentments is exclusively motivated by compassion or
love, one speaks of “emotional forgiveness”. These can be so intense that
the mechanisms of fostering forgiveness is superfluous, and thus the
determining role of the decision in forgiveness is lost. In this picture,
feature (1b) is clearly violated. Indeed, it is not even sure that emotional
forgiveness is cognitively adequate, in as much as the victim could herself
incorrectly project her own feelings and motivations onto the situation of
the offender, and thus forgive in error. So strong emotional forgiveness
may miss its purpose because it does not forgive in the right way.
If, instead, we engage cognitively in willing the disposition to forgive,
i.e., abandon our resentments, one speaks of “decisional forgiveness”
(worthington /Scherer 2004).
In this case there are two kinds of motivation:
(i) extrinsic motivation (e.g. accepted moral principles or religious obli-
gations),
(ii) Internal motivation.
If the decision to forgive were due to extrinsic motivations, forgiveness
would become a means either for individual feeling or for collective
consciousness. The evil would be put in balance to the benefit resulting of
its ignoring. There would be no more forgiveness, but a sort of amnesty.
Clearly, much ethical discourse has distinguished between the kind of duty
that commands forgiveness and the kind of utilitarianism, which suggests
that forgiveness should happen because it would lead to the greater happiness
of the parties involved. I will conflate these motives only with regards to
their extrinsic character and not with respect to their intrinsic values.
So, in pursuit of the ideal form of forgiveness, we seem to be committed
to internal motivation. To analyze the dilemma this poses, consider the
following two arguments.
Thesis 1: “Decisional forgiveness” should be motivated by internal “reasons”.
Indeed, is there any purely internally motivated forgiveness? If we view the
internal, here, from the point of view of psychology, the question can be
re-phrased to consider the problematic nature of the psychological personal

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benefit of forgiveness to the forgiver. If it is true that “unresolved anger

saps the strength of a person, as he must direct a portion of his energy to
maintaining resentment” (gudan 2005), then we would seem to have
a motive that uses forgiveness as a means for something other than itself.
Thesis 2: Forgiveness may be motivated by internal religious consciousness.
The dilemma of forgiving in the right way has been posed by the psycho-
logical benefit that we may aim at in forgiving to ‘move on’, or as a matter
of ‘health’. If all personal benefit is considered as a purely extrinsic
motivation, i.e. inadequate to motivate “decisional forgiveness” (thesis 1),
one probably has to search motivations for decisional forgiveness in the
internal religious consciousness. yet forgiveness chosen by a religious
(internal) source can nevertheless imply a personal benefit for the offended
person – indeed, the forgiveness for others, advocated in the lord’s prayer,
is tied up in the personal benefit of being forgiven by god. Thus, pure
forgiveness, which I qualify as naïve altruism, should not be consciously
chosen for the personal benefit.
In the absence of any convenient and reliable criterion of what is in a given

situation the internal and extrinsic part of the motivation of forgiveness,
I propose a methodological shift by asking the following question: are there
philosophical reasons to give weight to personal benefit as intrinsic to the
forgiving process, so that the endeavor to respond to the wrongdoer are
internally motivated by a rational process of adoption of the moral principle
of beneficence?
If personal benefit could be interpreted as internally motivated,
forgiveness could be consciously chosen for this reason. I will call this
kind of forgiveness dialogical altruism.
To conceive forgiveness as dialogical altruism presupposes that the victim

adds two further conditions to the features enumerated under (1):
(e) The victim should recognize the moral value of the offender,
(f) The victim should be conscious of his own moral value, i.e. to have
self-esteem and self-confidence.
an apparent theoretical difficulty consists in the fact that these are the same
conditions upon which resentment is founded. Thus, forgiveness, the
attempt to transcend resentment, seems to confirm the moral superiority
of the victim in such a way that forgiveness is a sort of disguised act of
resentment. So something more should be add in order to explain the
function of dialogical altruism.

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III. How can the motivation to forgive be rationally justified?

A The dialogical framework
In order to open up my argument, I will first argue against standard claim
that embeds the dictum that “Morality seeks the good” in the view that
“rationality is the neutral instrument of reasoning”.
I will not adopt a deconstructive point of view and deny any neutrality
to reasoning, but I will deny the separation of reason and morality. often,
theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy are strongly differentiated.
The question “what can I know?” is opposed to question, “what should
I do?” If this differentiation is accepted as a metaphysical principle, our
questions concerning forgiveness concern primarily theoretical philosophy.
and yet I will pursue and reinforce the kantian idea to found theoretical
rationality on practical rationality, because, finally, to “know” is also an
action which is constrained and motivated by purposes. and where there
are purposes, there are values.
are there some rational internal motivations for choosing forgiveness
as dialogical altruism?
obviously, rationality is what should be first defined. There exist at least
(2) Two necessary conditions for practical rationality:
(i) To pursue no purely causal interaction
(ii) To accept belief revision
In short, rationality must be conceived in a dialogue, conceived as
“competition by argumentation” where the two roles of teaching and
learning occur always together (lorenz (2010, 144-45). This approach in
ethical reasoning goes from Plato to herder and up to Buber.
B Forgiveness and repression

what can we say from a dialogical point of view with respect to three types
of reactions – which are by no means exclusive – against highly unfair
treatment?
(3) Indifference and resignation
(4) Punishment
(5) Forgiveness
applying our conditions, we would rule out indifference, the stoic pose,
because it violates the first criterion of rationality: pursue interaction with
others. Resignation, more indirectly, puts up barriers to interaction with
others in as much as it diminishes the areas in which the self interacts.

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Indeed, what about the rational character of (4) and (5)?

First, punishment can take different forms:
(i) It could take the form of vengeance.
vengeance (distinguish from retribution) is the satisfaction of a feeling
that puts us in a causal and therefore „natural” situation. So, the revanchist
punishment is irrational as indifference was. vengeance is a violation
of rational interaction with others. This might not be true of all punish-
ment.
(ii) It could take the form of repression by duty, even by respect, conceived
not as vengeance, but as rational measure according to the rules of
justice or to the code of family education.
now, both positions, punishment in this latter sense and forgiveness seem
to restrict the equality of the moral balance between the interlocutors on
different levels: the punishment limits the offender’s rights of certain
actions; forgiveness inflicts on myself a restriction of my rights to have
emotional reactions (I believe I have the right for resentment) in a manner
similar to resignation.
So far, the dialogical frame provides no clear criterion to qualify or
disqualify rational punishment or forgiveness. Quite apart from dialogical
reasoning, one could argue that neither an official repression as a legal
action nor a private repression is an adequate response to resentment. It
rests on a categorical mistake: resentment is a moral notion, repression
a directly or, in the private case, an indirectly legal measure and application
of a law or general principle, whereas resentment is the expression of an
individual feeling. So, forgiveness, as a moral gift to the offender, seems
to be a more appropriate response to overpass resentment. as a virtue,
konzelmann has argued, forgiveness is not subject to the claims of
normative „duty” (2008), and to possess the virtue of forgiveness is already
the decision to put the will in the disposition to undertake the task of
forgiving novitz (1998). It does not presuppose punishment. nevertheless,
to say that she should begin to forgive although she has good reasons to
punish may simply condition the cultivation of resentments by creating
a sense of wrong, instead of exceeding it. Forgiveness without punishment
seems purer, and to accord forgiveness without any repentance of the
offender seems supererogatory. obviously, from a systematic point of view
in which we try to achieve the most genuine forgiveness, repentance is not
necessary, but in reality it does facilitate forgiveness by acknowledging
the injury. The injury is, in a sense, doubled when it is not recognized as
an injury.

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If this reasoning is correct, you could forgive and punish at the same
time, since the punishment would be on the plane of action, and the
forgiveness would be on the plane of giving a ‘moral gift’ of feeling. This
would make forgiveness at best epiphenomenal. This strikes me as an
unsatisfactory result. Thus let us look more deeply at the dialogical frame.
C How the Dialogical standpoint could give an internal motivation

of forgiveness
Concerning the realization of forgiveness, we need distinguish two features:
the point of view of the victim who gives forgiveness and the perspective
of the offender.
I begin with this latter.
(6) has the offender a right to receive forgiveness?
In order to answer we have to resolve the following dilemma.
(7)
(i) Does one have rights because one has dignity?
or, inversely,
(ii) Does one have dignity because one has rights?
If we choose to affirm (ii), we are elevating human law over humanity, in
that dignity is inherent in the latter. But I suppose we will very quickly
enter here in an infinite regress: how to define human laws without the
notion of dignity?
I hold, therefore, that the logic moves in the other direction, and we
should choose to affirm (i) But who has dignity? It may be that we grant
dignity to animals, or to objects, or to the environment. But this is different
than human dignity.
we don’t want to identify human dignity with kant’s moral autonomy:
the latter is lost if she considers someone as tool to an end, for example by
lying, although this doesn’t violate human dignity according to our common
sense. on the other hand, in the case of a murderer who, in so doing, losing
his dignity, a question is posed when she repents and regains it: who should
then be forgiven: the wrongdoer or the repentant?
To solve this problem, it seems to be reasonable to adopt Schaber’s
(2010) position:
human dignity, contrary to social dignity, is not a contingent but a permanent
property that cannot be lost and not be acquired.
Deryck Beyleveld (2010) proposes certain capacities, none of which is
necessary or sufficient, that are part of what we mean by speaking of
human dignity.

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human dignity requires in “normal” cases the capacities to feel vulnerable,

to desire, to value.
In any case, the “personhood of the offender and its dignity has often
been obscured to the offended person. In other words, the offended person
has been “demonized”, and one does not forgive a demon” gudan (2005).
But on the other side, the recognition of the human dignity of the offender
does not give him a right to be forgiven by the victim; on the offender’s
side, she can underline her human dignity by showing honesty or repen-
tance and beg for forgiveness, but that act must be imbued with the idea
that forgiveness must be freely given by the victim.
Concerning the point of view of the victim,
(8) the value of forgiveness lies in the fact that it “essentially requires
a recognition of the wrongdoer’s responsibility for his action, and secondly
that forgiveness typically involves an effort on the part of the one wronged:
a conscious attempt to improve oneself in relation to the wrongdoer”
(north 1987, 499).
while demanding a kind of dialogue, forgiveness – just as punishment
– implies a lack of moral balance between the participants. This asymmetry
is philosophically trivial with respect to the relation of forgiveness between
god and us: if god created us, his forgiveness is only a logical conse-
quence of his own action: by his forgiveness, he recognizes himself as
responsible for our freewill and by asking him for forgiveness we admit him
as our creator. naturally, the lack of balance between god and ourselves is
such that we cannot forgive god. This seems properly absurd.
now, the asymmetry between the wrongdoer and the victim should
not be overestimated: it is “only” moral but not logical: just as the victim
can offer or refuse the wrongdoer’s begging for forgiveness, the wrongdoer
can refuse or accept the act of the forgiver. The moral superiority of
the forgiver exists in the fact that he has the freedom not to forgive, but
as a genuine forgiver he should not introduce this conscience of moral
superiority in the dialogue. The latter would actually pervert forgiveness
into another guise of resentment.
In discussing forgiveness, we should not forget that it can be auto-ref-
erential in character in the sense of self-forgiveness. Much more, this may
be a necessary element. In fact, who is unable to forgive herself, or to forget
her own errors, i.e. to be self-confident, and who is always reminding
others of her errors, will fatally conflate the act of forgiveness and resentment,
never really forgiving because lacking of self-respect. This seems to be
a first step in the genesis of our understanding of forgiveness. what must

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be noticed, however, as a second step, which is logically prior, is that it is

only the other who shows me that I am myself error-prone and that I made
a mistake. one of the misunderstandings of the Judaea-Christian tradition,
which had the most harmful consequences, was the misunderstanding to
presuppose the maxim of charity (instead of obtaining it as a result of
dialogical construction), i.e. that «the other thinks as myself, because we
are all brothers». This is exactly the kind of intellectual imperialism fought
by Martin Buber. according to his approach, I can construct myself only
with respect to others. « on pense comme on se heurte», said Paul valéry
and for the Swiss philosopher Ferdinand gonseth, “the dialogue begins by
meeting others, that is to say by meeting persons who do not think as
myself”. The awareness of making a mistake presupposes logically the
other and self-forgiveness is the result of individuation and socialization
through the dialogical process. She cannot forgive herself to be as she
is, when she does not know who she is in comparison with others. The
auto-reference of forgiveness forbids introducing in the dialogue itself the
moral superiority of the forgiver. we should accept mutual vulnerability.
Indeed, self-forgiveness is not yet forgiveness. In a third step, the
internal motivation to forgive could now be described by the formula:
forgive others theirs debts as you forgive yourself in order to be yourself.
If the situation of forgiveness is characteristically shaped by an asymmetrical
dialogue between the victim and the offender, the offender is nevertheless
not simply a passive recipient or a beggar for forgiveness, but a participant
in a dialogue in which the common narrative reconstruction of the past
incident is required simply so as to make the act of forgiveness to be
referentially intelligent. To forgive implies for both parts to “change” their
own person. But this change doesn’t signify a literal wiping out of sins for
the wrongdoer. Such a literal interpretation was perhaps the reason for
kant’s neglect of forgiveness: there cannot be “a reversal in a supposedly
irreversible process of crime. […] what is annulled in the act of forgiveness
is not the crime itself but the distorting effect that this wrong has upon one’s
relations with the wrongdoer” (north, 1987, 500). north’s conjecture finds
support in the dialogical approach. It follows that “apparently ‘instantaneous’
forgiveness is really moral weakness” (p. 506) or absolution of culpability
expressed by excusing. Forgiveness exceeds excuse, resentment and
repentance by allowing constructing a relation of offering and accepting.
I have been saying forgiveness bears on the nature of dialogue and self-esteem.
This latter aspect is largely recognized in the literature novitz (1998) but

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joined with the fictive capability to identify imaginatively with the wrong-
doer (311/312). So long as this identification has no firm rational founda-
tion genuine forgiveness has to be based on dialogical altruism, and cannot
concern the relation between persons not directly involved. we can neither
forgive those who are absent or dead nor can we forgive as proxy for those
who are absent or dead. with this regards something like the faith that we
are persons of the very picture of god seems necessary.
References
allers, Ch. R. & Smit, M. (eds.), (2010). Forgiveness in Perspective. amsterdam/new

york: Rodopi.
Beyleveld, D. (2010). “human hope, human Fear, human Dignity”, lecture on the
Conference Human Dignity, Contingent Dignity, and Rank, June 28. Bielefeld: zIF.
Butler, J. (1827). Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel. Cambridge: hilliard
and Brown; Boston: hilliard, gray, little, and wilkins. Transcribed by leRoy
Dagg, 2002 (http://anglicanhistory.org/butler/rolls/08.html).
gudan, e. (2005). Beyond Extrinsic Forgiveness: Recognizing the Dignity of the
Offender. arlington: The Institute for the Psychological Sciences.
hieronymi, P. (2001). “articulating an uncompromising Forgiveness”. Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, 62, 529–555.
Internet encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.bookrags.com/research/forgiveness-eoph/
konzelmann, a. (2008). “Collective Forgiveness and normative enactment”. 6th
european Congress of analytic Philosophy. krakow.
lorenz, k. (2010). Logic, Language and Method. On Polarities in Human Experience.
Berlin:De gruyter.
north, J. (1987). “wrongdoing and Forgiveness”. Philosophy, 62, (no. 242), 499-508.
novitz, D. (1998). “Forgiveness and Self-Respect”. Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 58 (no. 2), 299-315.
Schaber, P. (s.d.). Menschenwürde und Selbstachtung. Ein Vorschlag zum Verständnis
der Menschenwürde. universität zürich.
vorster, J. M. (2009). “an ethics of Forgiveness”. Verbum et ecclésia 30 (1), 365-383.

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STanISŁaw JuDyCkI
Transfiguration of Human
Consciousness and Eternal Life
In the Christian religious tradition, the ‘transfiguration’ signifies the change

of physical appearance of Jesus Christ referred to in Mark 9: 2-10. The
account reads as follows in the new Jerusalem translation:
and he said to them, ‘In truth I tell you, there are some standing here who
will not taste death before they see the kingdom of god come with power.’
2. Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led
them up a high mountain on their own by themselves. There in their
presence he was transfigured: 3. his clothes became brilliantly white,
whiter than any earthly bleacher could make them. 4. elijah appeared to
them with Moses; and they were talking to Jesus. 5. Then Peter spoke to
Jesus, ‘Rabbi,’ he said, ‘it is wonderful for us to be here; so let us make
three shelters, one for you, one for Moses and one for elijah.’ 6. he did
not know what to say; they were so frightened. 7. and a cloud came,
covering them in shadow; and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is
my Son, the Beloved. listen to him.’ 8. Then suddenly, when they looked
round, they saw no one with them any more but only Jesus.
Together with other signs, the meaning of the transfiguration is to reveal

the divinity of Jesus. yet this is to take an exclusively spectatorial view of
it, which is the point of view of Peter, James and John. But there are textual
indications that we may also legitimately assume that there is another point
of view, that of Jesus himself. From this perspective, the transfiguration
consisted not only in the change of his physical appearance, but also
entailed essential changes in his conscious relation to himself, to the world
of things and to other persons. yet, is it not the case that the problems
concerning transfiguration of Jesus are totally closed to philosophical
analysis because we have no access to his transfigured consciousness save

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226 STanISŁaw JuDyCkI
what this finally exterior account tells us? In addition, one could argue that
there is no universal philosophical import here, since the evangelical trans-
figuration gains its meaning only in the context of a particular religious
belief. For Christians, it points to the excellence of god and promises that
he is not forever inaccessible to direct knowledge, even if that access
consists, in the end, of „listen[ing] to him”. But contrary to this relativising
objection, I am of the opinion that there are speculative (philosophical)
means which allow us to reconstruct some features of the transfigured
consciousness.
The transfiguration of the human consciousness that is the very gate
to eternal life consists in the following qualitative changes. First, there is
a sudden annulment of the opposition between appearances and reality
(or, in kantian terms, the opposition between appearances and ‘things in
themselves’). Second, there is an actual experiential access to the relation
between universality and particularity that seems to happen in real human
time. Third, human persons will directly experience the way in which
different kinds of objects transform into other objects. Fourth, our relation
to the fundamental features of the world will be changed: the experiential
structure of space will be internalized and time will cast off its normal,
measurable structure. Fifth, we will gain direct access to our personal
uniqueness and in this way we will achieve the ultimate explanation of our
consciousness. By the formula ‘ultimate explanation of our consciousness’
I mean that we will get to know how our consciousness ‘flows’ from our
personal uniqueness. Sixth, the opposition between external and internal
world will be annulled. all these changes will not only bring about the
knowledge of who we are, but also for the first time we will see the world,
or, in other words, we will experience what the ‘world in itself’ looks like.
These dramatic changes will be superior to any event in the transformation
of the a-semantic animal consciousness into semantic human consciousness
that is part of our biological heritage.
I am not proposing, in this short article, to describe and analyze all of
the above mentioned aspects of the transfigured consciousness. Instead,
I want to concentrate on the problem brought out by central fifth claim: that
is, on the problem of the direct experience of one’s own personal uniqueness.
what motivates the philosopher of religion to speculate on the nature
of the transfigured consciousness? Remember, here, that transfiguration
occurs in more than one religious tradition; the Buddha, for instance, was
physically transfigured near his death in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta. I will
argue that there are four motivations for seeking, here, a deeper meaning

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Transfiguration of human Consciousness and eternal life 227
to what it means to have a religious belief. First, from our comparison, as

humans, of the existence of animal consciousness and the existence of
human consciousness, we receive validation for thinking that there are
different stages of cognition (or different stages of knowledge) and also
different world pictures. If these two forms of consciousness exist, we can
infer that there may be many possible forms of experience of the world
beyond the next stage immediately after animal conscious experience. as
I will further suggest, this inference is associated with the idea of the
eternal life of human persons, for in the eternal framework we have every
right to expect to experience a higher form of consciousness of the world,
especially when compared with animal experience and with our present
form of cognition.
The second thing motivating reflection on transfiguration is that the
transfigured consciousness seems to share the features of so-called absolute
consciousness. By ‘absolute consciousness’ I mean this ‘core’ of human
consciousness which we call ‘self’ or ‘ego’. This entity can be called ‘absolute’
because it evades every kind of experiential objectification.
The third motivation consists in the theme raised by classical theism
according to which god is necessarily a conscious being, yet it seems
obvious that, unlike what is humanly attainable, god’s consciousness
knows his own absolute consciousness, directly experiences his own ego
or, in other words, knows directly who he is. Thus, god’s consciousness
is structurally different from the animal, human and absolute conciousness.
The fourth motivation confronts us when we consider the problem
of individuation of human persons. Individuation for the Christian is
a particularly intricate business, given the problem of individuation of
persons belonging to the holy Trinity.
In addition to animal and human consciousness there is obviously
one more kind of entity that deserves attention. what I have in mind here
are pure spirits (angels). Because we assume that they are conscious
creatures, pure spirits must have experiences of their own mental states
which are somehow centered around something similar to the ego-center
of human consciousness; we can thus assume that pure spirits must also
be capable of experiencing some kind of world. what kind of knowledge
do they have especially at their disposal, and what kind of sense to they
possess of their own individuality? g.a. McCool, in his book From Unity
to Pluralism. The Internal Evolution of Thomism characterizes the knowl-
edge which god and these pure rational and conscious creatures have of
themselves in the following way:

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as pure spirits, god and the angels know their essences intuitively. Thus
they are immediately aware of their connaturality with other beings and of
the sympathetic love to which connaturality gives birth. Man, the lowest
of the spirits, is a form received in matter. Therefore he has no intuition
of his essence. he is immediately aware neither of his connaturality with
other beings nor of his sympathy toward them. The imperfection of his
self-awareness accounts for his deficient way of knowing other beings.1
McCool’s notion that the angels and god know their essences intu-
itively is suggestive, but needs to be unpacked. I would suggest that the
‘essence’ cannot be understood apart from individuality, or uniqueness,
and that the ‘intuition’ that enables god and the angles to grasp their
individual essences – that is, a first order, non-reflective knowledge – must
be of a very peculiar kind, wholly unknown to us as human persons, whose
instincts are fall into two fundamental types: perceptual intuition and the
intuition characteristic of our imagination.
I will begin with the problem of the semantic dimension of human
consciousness. Consciousness, to the extent that we know its nature, is
either simple phenomenal consciousness, which recognizes different
objects in the world and reacts to many types of stimuli and is blind to its
own existence, or self-consciousness, which takes into account both the
fact of phenomenal consciousness and the fact that consciousness can
reflect about its own existence. we normally assume that animals, or at
least more complicated animals, are equipped with simple phenomenal
consciousness. human beings also evidently possess this kind of con-
sciousness. But simple phenomenal consciousness characteristic of humans
is dramatically different from animal phenomenal consciousness: animal
consciousness is a-semantic, whereas human phenomenal consciousness
and human self-consciousness are, I would say, semantically ‘saturated’.
It is not easy to say what semanticity itself is: everyday human action
and interaction and the cognitively complex discourses of the sciences,
humanities, in religion, philosophy, and theology are all necessarily
semantic, i.e. everything has some meaning inscribed in the motivation
and elaboration of action and discourse. Meaning, furthermore, is an object
of understanding and interpretation – we make meaning from meaning.
we understand meanings of words, meanings of concepts, of sentences,
meanings of indexical expressions (‘now’, ‘here’). even so – called
syncategorematical expressions (‘and’, ‘or’) have meanings. But first of
1
McCool, g.a. (1992). From Unity to Pluralism. The Internal Evolution of Thomism.
new york: Fordham university Press 1992, 65.

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all, objects that surround us possess meanings: something in our perceptual

field we interpret as a star, something other as a mountain, mouse trap, cell
phone and so on.
If we put aside discussions concerning the existence of ideal (Platonic)
meanings, then it is certain that meanings (semantic information) do not
exist in themselves: meaning sets up, at a minimum, a triadic relationship
between the asemantic object and an interpreter out of which meaning
emerges. Thus, the ground of the possibility of meaning requires that
there exist some meaning-making subject capable of understanding this
meaning.
a few remarks are in order about the principal formal features which
characterize semantic information. Semantic information is general, which
means that concepts we have enable us to overcome particularity of
situations and particularity of perceptual images. That is, such tokens are
given to us meaningfully through a higher logical type. our concepts and
beliefs (judgments), then, refer to what is general, to theoretically many
situations, images, or individual things, and even to unbounded classes of
individuals.
Secondly, semantic information is susceptible to the distinction between
truth and falsity. By using concepts we can form beliefs (judgments), and
to these beliefs we can ascribe truth or falsity. Thirdly, semantic information
is inferentially interconnected: from one kind of content it is possible to
infer other contents, and from one concept other concepts. If I walk along
the beach and see a jellyfish, this will start a chain of associations going
from the particular content of this perception to other contents such as:
‘a creature living in the sea’, ‘an organism’, etc. This feature of our
conscious mind enables us to transcend the ephemeral one-time-only-ness
of the experiential data we are constantly receiving, making it possible to
go from what is given in some determined situation to the unobservable
things and in the end to form the idea of a world.
admittedly, it is true that animal consciousness must somehow cate-
gorize stimuli that it receives, but it does not categorize them semantically
in the way described above. Perhaps animal consciousness categorizes
input which it receives with the help of something similar to our human
pictorial schemes or stereotypes, but animal stereotypes do not posses any
semantic generality. They probably only have different levels of plasticity
but plasticity is quite another thing than semantic generality. From this
follows that animals are not aware that they are living in a meaningful
world and therefore they do not know or care what kinds of beings they are.

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animal consciousness is not only devoid of any semantic dimension,

but it also does not reflect upon itself. This means that it is not the kind of
consciousness in which all its contents would have some – active or passive
– reference to one pole which we call subject or ego. I would argue that
self-consciousness is not possible without concepts, without some kind of
access to semantic information: I am able to feel myself to be a subject
of my own conscious states, I am able to feel myself to be some determined
subject or ego only when I am able to know that I am a human being, and
that the creature I am differs from rocks, plants, from animals, stars, clouds
and from other human beings. what is important here is the fact that human
phenomenal consciousness is always accompanied by self-consciousness,
which means that in every moment when we perceive objects in the world,
in every moment when we are thinking of something, everything which
happens in our stream of consciousness is accompanied by conscious –
clear or less clear – reference to the center of consciousness, to the ego, to
the subject who we are.
here however we encounter a fundamental problem. objects in the
so-called external world perceived by our human consciousness, objects
appearing to our self-consciousness, i.e. our mental states, the whole
temporal structure of consciousness, and by this I mean the so-called
‘stream of consciousness’ with experiences of the changing present, with
all the data of memory and with anticipations of future experiences and
thoughts, even the ego itself – all these items become conscious by being
transposed into a higher level of consciousness, and it is on this higher
level of consciousness that we are conscious of these ‘things’. But,
evidently, this tiered hierarchy of consciousness is not able to grasp this
absolute consciousness, the very system itself, as an object. absolute
consciousness is not something which is extended in three dimensions
of time, it is not something which has the structure of a stream, it is not
something which is comprised of discernible mental states. as such this
consciousness can be called absolute consciousness, although I would like
to stress that we should try to get rid of all ‘mystic’ associations which this
expression seems almost naturally to generate. This ‘final’ consciousness
is absolute exclusively in the sense that it cannot be made conscious as an
object while, at the same time, it is just this consciousness which makes
all other ‘elements’ of consciousness conscious.
Into this picture of human semantic consciousness, both in its phe-
nomenal aspect and in its self-conscious dimension, we must introduce
one more very important element, which can be called ‘anticipation’.

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anticipation functions in every mental act and consists in the directedness

of human consciousness to the whole field of possible experience. every
act of our conscious mind ‘non-thematically’ aims at the totality of possible
objects of cognition, every act anticipates being as an infinite totality and
only in this way we can become conscious of determined objects of our
experience. anticipation arises not by generalization from what human
conscious subjects have already encountered in the world, but rather it is
immanent within consciousness and makes possible the processes of
generalization. In animal consciousness there are no traces of this peculiar
activity of the human mind and this why animals are not ‘open to the
world’ and are, so to speak, ‘closed’ in the particular situations that they
encounter. without anticipation, objects of perceptual intuition would
become something absolute and each epistemic act would be wholly
externalized.
I would like to suggest that, given this narrative of the hierarchical
difference between animal and human consciousness, the transfiguration
of human consciousness is a matter of radically changing the way we now
categorize data of our experience. In transfiguration, not only our experiential
input becomes wholly different from what we now receive, but also the
modes of its categorization change. In order to speak about these new
modes, I need to talk about trans-semantic consciousness. I am well aware
that for many philosophers the idea of trans-semantic categorization will
be very hard to swallow. They would say that trans-semantic categorization
must inevitably lead us to the brink of irrationality, because semanticity
seems to be the only ground for human rationality. Contemporary antire-
alism has almost convinced us that the same set of data can be differently
interpreted by applying different semantic tools and that each of these
interpretations must lead to a different world or at least to a different picture
of the world. But what I want to suggest here by introducing the concept
of trans-semantic categorization is by far more radical: here, we do not
envisage different sets of concepts applied to categorize some set of
experiential data, but instead we transcend semantic categorization
altogether. we will become able to categorize the data that we will be
receiving in such a radically different way from what we now have at our
disposal that this will dramatically affect our experience and understanding
of the world. The leap to trans-semantic consciousness is just as radical
as the leap from a-semantic animal consciousness to semantic human
consciousness. If animal consciousness could get human semantic tools to
categorize its data, it would become able to see that it lives in a world and

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only in this way it could enter into communicative relations. we absolutely

cannot imagine what amazing surprise it would be for animal conscious-
ness to discover that it lives in the world in which human beings now live.
But this idea of future trans-semantic categorization should not be
interpreted as a new form of antirealism. on the contrary, only through the
medium of trans-semantic categorization human consciousness will
become able to see the world in itself. I want to stress here that also other
changes mentioned by me at the beginning are a part of the trans-semantic
process. as semantic consciousnesses, we understand abstractly that one
kind of object can transform into another kind of object, but we cannot
perceive it. we can mathematically diagram but not perceive how, for
instance, some determined length of electromagnetic waves is transformed
into a highly individual shade of blue. By using our current epistemic
abilities we can perceive only sequences of events, not transformations
as such. In trans-semantic consciousness, however, we can experience
perceptually and consciously how one kind of things transforms into another
kind of things.
It seems to me that this transformation of our experience, its transfig-
uration, as I call it here, is not made possible only by means of a radically
different way of categorizing the data of experience, but that there is also
something I would like to call ‘subtle experience’ or ‘total closeness’
between the subject and the data it receives. Subtle experience falls outside
the field of trans-semantic categorization, as the former is structured by
the absence of any categorizing apparatus whatsoever. This new kind of
experience thus consists in an infinitely subtle differentiation of what is
given, in a very subtle but cognitively important feeling. as such it stands
in total opposition to the famous ‘raw feeling’ which some contemporary
epistemologists want to ascribe to small children.
when adult epistemic subjects perceive some shade of a blue color,
in order to grasp and to understand what they perceive, they must have at
their disposal not only the concept of blue and the concept of color, but they
also must be in possession of many, many other concepts: the concept of
a spatially extended thing, the concept of smell as something different from
the concept of color etc. according to some representatives of coherentist
strand in contemporary epistemology, very small children, who do not yet
possess any concepts, are only able to feel the sensation of a blue color but
are not able to grasp and understand what they see. That is, they feel, but they
do not know what they feel. But it seems to me that in order to overcome
this disjunction, adult semantic categorization is only one possible method.

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another possibility would consist in a more subtle differentiation of experience

itself. If each individual shade of a blue color could be felt with a very,
very high precision, then cognition would consist in a pre-semantic
discrimination or, more generally speaking, it would be a pre-categorial
discrimination.
It seems to me that the trans-semantic consciousness is not simply
a matter of academic speculation, but that we do have hints and premoni-
tions, in our adult mode of experience, of this ‘absolute closeness’ between
the subject and the data it receives. when we now perceive some determined
shade of a blue color and when we discriminate it from other shades of blue
and from all other objects in the world, then we, so to speak, ‘touch’ something
which transcends every kind of categorization. That is, we consciously
‘touch’ individual essence of this shade of blue. If this very blurred contact
with individual essences of all things could be sharpened to a very high
degree, then we would be in full contact with all individual essences and we
would also become able to experience how these individual essences interact
with each other. In both cases, i.e. in the case of trans-semantic categorization
and in the case of pre-categorial discrimination, the mechanism of anticipation
would continue to function under the terms of an important modification:
the world would cease to be experienced as something alien to us perceivers.
we would understand everything that surrounds us.
and what would happen if the idea of such a radical transformation of
our epistemic situation were applied to internal knowledge, to self-conscious-
ness? as I already suggested, in such a case we will begin to experience
our personal uniqueness, we will be irradiated with the immediate knowledge
of who we are. The problem concerning our uniqueness or our individual
essence seems to be one of the most difficult problems in philosophy and
perhaps it is even the most difficult philosophical problem of all. what is
the individual content that fills the shape of every person in a somehow
unique way? Is this a kind of sensuous content? Does it have some spatial
shape? on the one hand, it seems that a conscious subject, an ego, conceived
as an entity different from its own stream of consciousness, cannot have
any spatial appearance. on the other hand, the unique content of every
person must be capable of having some shape, but this shape must be
unique and as such it must be an adequate expression of the uniqueness of
every particular person.
This is a limit-situation in as much as speculative theorizing touches
the limits of conceivability. here, we must rely on metaphors to guide us
by going from experience as we know it to the possibility of an altered

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experience that transcends our actual cognitive incapacity. If we always

lived surrounded by a deep darkness and if in this situation we had only
tactual awareness at our disposal, would we be able to make even the
slightest supposition that such a person as painted by Rafael in his
Madonna Tempi is possible? or that such a person as a famous Johannes
vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring can exist? Speculations allowing the
possibility of existence of non-tactual entities, made by some members of
the ‘tactual society’, will be treated by its other members as completely
empty, because ‘to exist’ would mean ‘to be perceivable by touch’ and ‘to
have tactual shape’. every suggestion that shaped colors could exist would
be treated by more soberly disposed representatives of the tactual community
as cognitive nonsense. however, our own experience, informed by our five
senses, takes for granted visual shape. It is also obvious to us that to some
degree personal uniqueness can be expressed by talented painters by using
colored visual shapes.
Through experiencing our own personal uniqueness rather than being
alienated from it, we will become able to see how our consciousness of
the world derives from this uniqueness. our present mode of consciousness
can be described, as St. Paul described it, as a distorted mirror not only
because it cannot perceive things in themselves but also because our
consciousness does not see its own ground. either through trans-semantic
categorization or through pre-semantic sharpening of experience, the
transfigured consciousness will see its individual essence. Seeing our
individual essence will enable us to experience how from this essence
flows the unique kind of our conscious experience of the world. In this
way the transfiguration of consciousness will lead to the objectification of
absolute consciousness. absolute consciousness will be filled up with our
unique content – in a way that can be compared to the stained glass that is
filled with light and, only then, produces its unique configuration of colors.
human consciousness will not only see itself as seeing, which is already
the case now, but first of all it will see itself as the source of its unique
light.
animal consciousness a-semantically feels the world but it does not
see it and it also does not see itself. human beings know semantically some
aspects of the world, but they do not know themselves. god’s consciousness
knows directly all objects including itself in eternity. In the transfiguration
event, human consciousness imitates the immediate awareness of god’s
consciousness, although the end result is not omniscience but communi-
cation with other persons: the heavenly kingdom. when we become able

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to see our individual essences we will also be able to perceive our unique
relations to all other persons and all things. It seems to me that there are
no other words which would better describe this new experience of the
world than sympathy or love, but these have only a metaphorical meaning,
as this experience of love is inherent to the transfigured future experience
and knowledge. when we say that we are delighted with the beauty of
some work of art, would we say that we love it? Maybe some of us would
say this but at the same time these people would admit that such words as
‘love’ or ‘sympathy’ can only signal this unique delight which they feel
every time.
In this way, as I have argued, transfiguration is a subject for reflection
in the philosophy of religion. It is inherent to the promise of religion that
there be a leap from our semantic consciousness to a higher one. The
transfigured consciousness will experience directly its unique relation to
all objects. It will be in a position almost ‘to paint’ these relations, and then
to retain their characteristics in memory.

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Angemeldet
noTeS on The auThoRS
Michel Bastit is Professor of ancient Philosophy and Metaphysics at the university

of Burgundy (Dijon). he is also member of the archives Poincaré (nancy). he has
written several papers and books on aristotle, Thomas, Substance. Current research:
possibilities of physical proofs of the existence of god from the point of view of
modern science and philosophy of nature, and the possibility of a natural theology
extracted from first cause.
Gabriele De Anna studied at the universities of Padua, Italy (laurea, Dottorato) and
St andrews, Scotland (M.litt, PhD). Since 2001, he has been tenured researcher at
university of udine (Italy). he was visiting Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy of
Science, university of Pittsburgh (uSa, 2005-6), Marie Curie Fellow at the university
of Cambridge (uk, 2007-2008), and replacement on the First Chair of Philosophy at
Bamberg university (germany, 2008-2009). his main interests are metaphysics and
political philosophy. he authored four books, including: Identità e persona (Milan,
Bompiani (2007, with g. Boniolo and u. vincenti), Causa, forma, rappresentazione.
Una trattazione a partire da Tommaso d’Aquino (Milan, Francoangeli, 2011). his
edited volumes include: Evolutionary Ethics and Contemporary Biology (Cambridge:
Cambridge university Press, 2006, with giovanni Boniolo), and Willing the good.
Empirical challenges to the explanation of Human Behaviour (newcastle, Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, forthcoming).
John Greco holds the leonard and elizabeth eslick Chair in Philosophy at Saint louis
university. he is the author of Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-theoretic Account of
Epistemic Evaluation (Cambridge, 2010) and Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The
Nature of Skeptical Arguments and Their Role in Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge,
2000). his edited volumes include The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism (2008); Sosa
and his Critics (2004); The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology (1999); and Virtue
Epistemology: A Reader (with John Turri), forthcoming from MIT Press.
Piotr Gutowski is Professor of Philosophy at John Paul II Catholic university of lublin,
Director of the Department of history of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, and
the director of College of Interfaculty Individual Studies in the humanities at John
Paul II Catholic university of lublin, Poland. he published several books (in Polish)
on various aspects of contemporary philosophy, among others Process Philosophy
and Its Metaphilosophy (1995), Between Monism and Pluralism: A Study of the Genesis
and Foundations of John Dewey’s Philosophy (2002), British Philosophy at the Close
of 20th Century (with T. Szubka, 1998), Science, Philosophy, and Life. The Foundation
of William James’s Thought (2011).

Angemeldet
238 notes on the authors
Gerhard Heinzmann is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the university

of lorraine in nancy (France) and Director of the lorraine Institute for humanities
and Social Sciences (uSR 3261 of the CnRS). he is the editor of Publications of the
Henri Poincaré Archives (Birkhäuser) and of the journal Philosophia Scientiae (kimé).
Specializing in philosophy of mathematics and logic, he is the author of numerous
articles and books on the philosophy of Ferdinand gonseth, Jean Cavaillès, Paul
Bernays and henri Poincaré, among them Zwischen Objektkonstruktion und Struktu-
ranalyse. Zur Philosophie der Mathematik bei Henri Poincaré (1995). a book on
cognitive intuition in mathematics is under press and two textbooks on the discussion
about the foundations of geometry and arithmetic around 1900 are in preparation.
Stanisław Judycki is Professor of Philosophy at the university of gdańsk, Poland.
he is the author of Intersubjectivity and Time. A Contribution to the Discussion
Concerning Edmund Husserl’s Late Philosophy (lublin: Tn kul 1990), Mind
and Synthesis. The Case Against Naturalistic Theories of Mind (lublin: Redakcja
wydawnictw kul 1995), Consciousness and Memory. A Justification of Anthropological
Dualism (lublin: Tn kul 2004), God and Other Persons. An Essay in Philosophical
Theology, (Poznań: ‘w drodze’ 2010), and numerous articles. his work ranges over
epistemology, contemporary philosophy (phenomenology, kantianism), philosophy
of mind and philosophical theology.
Dariusz Łukasiewicz, Professor of Philosophy at kazimierz wielki university in
Bydgoszcz, Poland, Director of the Institute of Philosophy. Current research: Polish
Brentanism and philosophy of religion. he is the author of Stany Rzeczy i prawda,
Szkice filozoficzne (Bydgoszcz: akademia Bydgoska 2002), Filozofia Tadeusza
Czeżowskiego (Bydgoszcz: akademia Bydgoska 2002), Bóg, wszechwiedza, wolność
(Bydgoszcz: epigram 2007), Sąd i poznanie w fenomenologii Edmunda Husserla
(Bydgoszcz: wSg/Rolewski 2008); edited volumes: Actions, products and things.
Brentano and Polish Philosophy, (with arkadiusz Chrudzimski, Frankfurt: ontos
2006). Scientific Knowledge and Common Knowledge, (with Roger Pouivet, epigram
Publishing house/kazimierz wielki university Press, 2009).
Cyrille Michon is Professor of Philosophy at the university of nantes. he has published
in the field of Medieval Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion. Recently Qu’est-ce
que le libre arbitre? (Paris, vrin, 2011), and (with Roger Pouivet) Philosophie de la
religion: Approches contemporaines (Paris, vrin, 2010).
Roger Pouivet, Professor at the université de lorraine, Director of the laboratoire
d’histoire des Sciences et de Philosophie – archives Poincaré (Centre national de la
Recherche Scientifique). Roger Pouivet works mainly in philosophy of art (especially
in ontology and metaphysics of art), epistemology of religious beliefs. his publications
include: Esthétique et logique (Mardaga, liège, 1996), Qu’est-ce que croire? (vrin,
Paris, 2006, 2nd ed.), Le réalisme esthétique (Presses universitaires de France, 2006),
Qu’est-ce qu’une oeuvre d’art? (vrin, Paris, 2007), L’ontologie de l’oeuvre d’art (vrin,
Paris, 2010, 2nd ed.), Philosophie du rock (Presses universitaires de France, 2010),
La philosophie de Nelson Goodman (with J. Morizot, vrin, Paris, 2011). he edited
recently (with C. Michon): Philosophie de la religion: Approches contemporaines
(vrin, Paris, 2010).

Angemeldet
notes on the authors 239
Fabien Schang, Doctor in philosophy lhSP henri Poincaré (uMR 7117), university
of nancy 2 (France). Professional interests: philosophy of logic, philosophical logics,
Polish school in logic (abstract operators of consequence and rejection, algebraic
semantics), epistemic modalities, eastern logics, formal epistemology, ancient
philosophy. Most important publications: “Questions and answers about oppositions”,
in New Perspectives on the Square of Opposition, Béziau, J.-y. & Payette, g. (eds.),
Peter lang, Bern (2011); “MacColl’s Modes of Modalities”, Proceedings of the
Conference for the Centenary of hugh MacColl’s Birthday - Boulogne sur Mer, 9-10
octobre 2009, in Philosophia Scientiae 15 (1) (2011); “Two Indian dialectical logics:
saptabhaṅgī and catuṣkoṭi”, in Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical
Research 27 (2011).
Peter van Inwagen holds the John Cardinal o’hara Chair in Philosophy at the
university of notre Dame. Research interests in contemporary metaphysics, philoso-
phy of religion, and philosophy of action. his main books include The Problem of
Evil (oxford university Press 2006), Ontology, Identity, and Modality: Essays in
Metaphysics (Cambridge university Press 2002), The Possibility of Resurrection and
Other Essays in Christian Apologetics (Boulder, Co: westview Press 1998), God,
Knowledge and Mystery: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca: Cornell university
Press 1995), Metaphysics (Boulder, Co: westview Press 1993, rev. ed. 2002), Material
Beings (Ithaca: Cornell university Press 1990), An Essay on Free Will (oxford
university Press 1983).
Jacek Wojtysiak is Professor of Philosophy at John Paul II Catholic university of

lublin, head of the Department of Theory of knowledge at the Faculty of Philosophy;
the author of four books and many papers, some of them were published in english
in: Polish Journal of Philosophy, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion and
Studies in Logic and Theory of Knowledge (SLTK); the co-editor of SLTK; interests
in metaphysics, philosophy of religion and philosophy of language.
Jan Woleński, Professor emeritus of Philosophy (Jagiellonian university, krakow),

President of the european Society for analytic Philosophy (2005-2008), member of
Institut Internationale de Philosophie, Polish academy of Sciences and the Polish
academy of arts and Sciences. The author of over 550 scientific publications
in various languages, including 14 authored or edited books. Current research:
philosophical logic, epistemology, history of logic and philosophy, particularly in
Poland. Books in english include: Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov-Warsaw School
(Dordrecht: kluwer 1989), Kotarbiński: Logic, Semantics and Ontology (ed.,
Dordrecht: kluwer 1990), Philosophical Logic in Poland (ed., Dordrecht: kluwer
1994), Alfred Tarski and the Vienna Circle: Austro-Polish Connections in Logical
Empiricism (ed., with eckehart köhler, Dordrecht: kluwer 1999), Essays in the
History of Logic and Logical Philosophy (kraków: Jagiellonian university Press
1999), Handbook of Epistemology (ed. with I. niiniluoto and M. Sintonen, Dordrecht:
Springer 2004), Essays on Logic and Its Applications in Philosophy (Frankfurt a. M.:
Peter lang 2011).

Angemeldet
240 notes on the authors
Renata Ziemińska is Professor of Philosophy at the university of Szczecin, Institute

of Philosophy, the Chair of epistemology, editor-in-Chief of Analiza i Egzystencja.
Interests in epistemology (epistemic externalism, truth and skepticism), her papers in
english include: “was Pyrrho the Founder of Skepticism?” in Polish Journal of
Philosophy vol. v, no.1 (2011); “Descartes’ Meditations in the history of Scepticism”
in Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 15 (2009); “Two notions of the Internal
and goldman’s epistemic externalism” in J. Malinowski, a. Pietruszczak (eds.), Essays
in Logic and Ontology (Rodopi 2006).
Urszula M. Żegleń is Professor of Philosophy at nicolaus Copernicus university in

Toruń, in the field of her research is philosophy of mind, epistemology (especially the
problem of rationality), philosophy of logic, ontology (especially Ingarden’s and
Meinong’s ontology), semiotics and history of the Polish philosophy. She is the author
of Modalność w logice i w filozofii. Podstawy ontyczne [Modality in logic and
Philosophy. ontic Foundations] (Polskie Towarzystwo Semiotyczne, warszawa, uw
1990), Wprowadzenie do semiotyki teoretycznej i semiotyki kultury [Introduction to
Theoretical Semiotics and Semiotics of Culture] (Toruń 2000), Filozofia umysłu.
Dyskusja z naturalistycznymi koncepcjami umysłu [Philosophy of Mind. Discussions
with the naturalistic Conceptions of Mind] (Toruń 2003). She edited several collec-
tions including Philosophy of Mind in the Lvov-Warsaw School, (axiomathes, Trento,
Centro Studi per la Filosofia Mitteleuropea, vol. vI, 1995), Donald Davidson. Truth,
Meaning and Knowledge (london-new york, Routledge 1999), Hilary Putnam. Prag-
matism and Realism (ed. with James Conant, london-new york, Routledge 2002).

Angemeldet
InDeX oF naMeS
abelard, P. 7 Brahman 137

abraham 124 Brennan, T. 155, 159
abraham, w. J. 103, 112 Brentano, F. 162, 238
adams, R. M. 57 Brittain, Ch. 160
adler, J. 33 Buber, M. 218, 222
aenesidemus 151 Burnyeat, M. 159n
agrippa 151, 156 Butler, B. 213n, 223
ajdukiewicz, k. 161n, 165, 176
allers, Ch. 215, 223 Calvin, J. 122
alston, w. 27n, 105, 112 Cantor, g. 137
annas, J. 159n Carnap, R. 137, 164
anselm, St. 130, 133, 139 Carneades 149, 152, 155, 158n
aristotle 59-71, 137, 140, 150, 168, 182, Cavaillčs, J. 238
184n, 202-207, 209, 211, 215, 237 Chatti, S. 135
atman 137 Christensen, D. 30
augustine, st. 7, 74, 76 Chrudzimski, a. 238
averroes 71n Cicero 152, 160
Clement of alexandria 7
Barnes, J. 159n Clifford, w. 7, 8, 9, 48, 82, 87, 93
Barth, k. 117 Cohen, J. 81
Bastit, M. 59, 237 Comte, a. 187n
Bastit-kalinowska, a. 68 Conant, J. 240
Bayile, a. 150, 155-157, 159n Costa-leite, a. 132, 140
Beiser, F. 187, 211 Craig, e. 37n, 147
Bellis, e. 68 Craig, w. l. 106, 113
Berkeley, g. 149 Crifo, g. 67
Bernard of Clarivaux 168 Cudworth, R. 193, 198, 211
Bernays, P. 238 Czeżowski, T. 166n, 174, 176n, 238
Bernecker, S. 30
Bett, R. 159n David 124
Beyleveld, D. 220, 223 Davidson, D. 240
Béziau, J. 140, 239 Davis, S. T. 112
Bishop, J. 196-198, 211 Dawkins, R. 145
Bocheński, J. 161, 166 De Franco, l. 185, 211
Bockmuehl, M. 106, 112 Dennett, D. 48, 58
Bondi, R. 185, 211 Descartes 57, 82, 130, 132, 133, 139, 240
Boniolo, g. 237 Dewey, J. 188, 237

Angemeldet
242 Index of names
Diagoras of Melos 154 hegel, g. w. h. 182, 187n, 209, 211

Diderot, D. 48 heinzmann, g. 213, 238
Diogenes laertius 153, 160 heraclitus 137
Diogenes of Babylon 153 herder, J. g. 218
Drewnowski, J. F. 161, 166 hieronymi, P. 214, 223
hintikka, J. 133, 140
elga, a. 30 hobbes, Th. 186n
elijah 225 hook, S. 188
epicurus 150, 152n, 205 howard-Snyder, D. 93
evans, C. a. 104, 113 huber, F. 145
hume, D. 27, 30n, 41, 44, 118, 150, 205
Fanelli, C. 211 husserl, e. 238n
Fantle, J. 37 hylas 150
Feinberg, J. 147
Feuerbach, l. 138 Ingarden, R. 240
Fichte, J. g. 182 Inwagen, P. van 8, 11, 18, 88, 93, 192,
Flynn, T. 145 211, 239
Forrest, P. 191n, 211
Foster, J. 205-208, 211 Jadacki, J. 176n
Frances, B. 30 James, St. 225
Frede, M. 155n, 159n James, w. 7, 8, 81, 85, 87-100, 170, 237
Fuller, R. 105 Jesus Christ 79, 103-113, 120n, 215, 225
Joan of arc 83
gabriele, a. de 180, 184, 211, 237 Johannson, l.-g. 145
ganeri, J. 132 John Paul II 125
gathman, R. 10, 161n, 173 John, St. 77, 83, 120n, 225
gauguin, P. 23 Jordan, J. 93
gendler Szabo, T. 29 Jordan, J. 119
gianfranscesco, P. 159 Judycki, S. 109, 113, 238
goldman, a. 240
gonseth F. 222 kaniewski, M. 10
gonseth, F. 238 kant, I. 123, 133, 210, 216, 222
grandy, R. e. 162, 177 karlsson, M. M. 58
greco, J. 27, 47-52, 54, 57n, 70, 237 kelly, T. 29
gregory of nyssa 56 kendall, D. SJ 112
griffith, M. 160 kenny, a. 8
griswold, Ch. 215 keynes, J. n. 140
groarke, l. 70 köhler, e. 239
gudan, e. 217, 221, 223 konzelmann, a. 219, 223
gutowski, P. 85, 237 kornblith, h. 61
kotarbińska, J. 161
haldane, J. J. 113 kotarbiński, T. 161, 167n, 173n, 176n,
hamilton, w. 136 239
hankinson, R. J. 151, 153, 155-157, 160
hawking, S. 19 lackey, J. 33
hawthorne, J. 29, 37 lamont, J. 58

Angemeldet
Index of names 243
lang, P. 140, 239 north, J. 214, 216, 221-223

lapointe, S. 177 novitz, D. 219, 222n
leibniz, g. w. 7
leRoy, D. 223 oakes, R. 207, 211
leśniewski, S. 174 ockham, w. 150
lewis, D. 23 o’Collins, g. SJ 112
locke, J. 146 oesterberg, J. 145
long, a. a. 151, 160 ogden, C. k. 160
lorenz, k. 218, 223 olbrechts-Tyteca, l. 65
lotti, B. 211 origen 7
luke, St. 105 ostoja zagórski, J. 10
Łukasiewicz, D. 10, 45, 161, 167, 172,
177, 238 Paley, w. 107
Łukasiewicz, e. 161 Papineau, D. 188, 211
Łukasiewicz, J. 131, 134, 137, 139n, Pascal, B. 70, 119, 150, 169, 175-177
166n, 174 Paul, St. 9, 105, 234
Payette, g. 140, 239
MacColl, h. 239 Perelman, Ch. 65
Malinowski, J. 240 Perry, J. 162, 177
Marion, M. 177n Peter, St. 77, 79, 83, 105, 225
Maritain, J. 72 Peters, T. 198, 211
Mark, St. 225 Philonus 150
Mastronarde, D. J. 160 Pietruszczak, a. 240
Mavrodes, g. 49 Plantinga, a. 8, 49, 88, 104, 106n, 113,
McCool, g. a. 227n 117, 119, 122, 125, 180-183, 186n,
Mcgrath, M. 37 189, 191-195, 197, 209, 211
McIntyre, a. 59, 66 Plastina, S. 211
McPherran, M. 155, 160 Plato 68, 182, 215, 218
Meeker, k. 28 Poincaré, h. 238n
Meinong, a. 240 Popkin, R. h. 150, 160
Menoeceus 153 Pouivet, R. 10, 45, 47, 54, 166, 178, 238
Michael, St. 19 Poznański, e. 174
Michon, C. 73, 238 Priest, g. 136, 138, 140
Miller, e. v. 211 Pritchard, D. 30
Miśkiewicz, w. 177n Protagoras 159
Montaigne, a. 140 Przełęcki, M. 161-178
Montaigne, M. de 150, 159 Putnam, h. 240
Morizot, J. 238 Pyrrho 240
Moser, P. k. 112n
Moses 124, 225 Quinn, P. 28
nagel, e. 188 Rafael, S. 234

newman, J. h. 7, 124n, 137n Reinach, a. 162, 178
nicholas of Cusa 150, 159 Russell, B. 11-15, 18, 22-25, 51, 133,
nietzsche, F. 48 137, 140, 146, 181
niiniluoto, I. 239 Rybicka, D. 127

Angemeldet
244 Index of names
Salamucha, J. 161, 166, 178 Thomas aquinas 7, 48, 52-56, 58, 73-82,
Sanders, e. P. 104 84, 237
Savonarola, g. 150, 160 Thomas, St. 120
Schaber, P. 220, 223 Thorsrud, h. 155, 160
Schang, F. 127, 132, 135, 137, 140, 239 Tooley, M. 180-183, 191-198, 209, 211
Scherer, D. 216 Tripathi, R. k. 137, 140
Schmidt-Petri, Ch. 145 Tucker, B. 138
Scot Duns 7 Turri, J. 237
Sedley, D. n. 160 Twardowski, k. 167n, 174, 176
Sellars, R. w. 188
Sergio, e. 211 valélery, P. 222
Sextus empiricus 149-160 vanderjagt, a. 150, 160
Sintonen, M. 239 vermeer, J. 234
Smart, J. J. C. 107, 113 vico, g. 67
Smit, M. 215, 223 vincenti, u. 237
Smith, B. 178 voltaire 48
Smith, Q. 182, 211 vorster, J. M. 216, 223
Sobociński, B. 166 vuillemin, J. 133, 140
Sosa, e. 70, 145, 237
Spinoza, B. 137, 186-188, 209 wacewicz, S. 115
Stanley, J. 37 warner, R. 162, 177
Stirner, M. 138 williams, M. 155, 160
Stonescu, C. 70 wittgenstein, l. 157, 160
Strato 196 wojtysiak, J. 103, 239
Striker, g. 160 woleński, J. 141, 145, 161, 165, 177n,
Swinburne, R. 8, 73, 77, 88, 104, 107, 239
109-113 wolniewicz, B. 173, 176, 178
Szaniawski, k. 166, 177n wolterstorff, n. 8, 70, 119
Szubka, T. 237 wundheiler, a. 174
Śliwiński, R. 145 wynn, M. 192, 211
Tarski, a. 138, 174, 239 yonge, C. D. 160

Tatarkiewicz, w. 176
Telesio, B. 184-186, 211 zagzebski, l. 49, 59, 66
Tello, R. 211 ziemińska, R. 149, 240
Theophrastus 196 Żegleń, u. M. 115, 240

Angemeldet

Dariusz Lukasiewicz, Roger Pouivet - The Right To Believe. Perspectives in Religious Epistemology-Ontos Verlag (2012)

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Dariusz Łukasiewicz & Roger Pouivet (Eds.

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The Right to Believe

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North and South America by

United Kingdom, Ire, Iceland, Turkey, Malta, Portugal by

Livraison pour la France et la Belgique:

2012 ontos verlag

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted

Printed on acid-free paper

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Russell’s China Teapot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Religious Belief and evidence from Testimony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Steps Towards an epistemology of Revelation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Faith as an epistemic good according to aristotle: Towards an aristotelian

aquinas and the will to Believe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

To Be in Truth or not to Be Mistaken? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

Do we have the epistemic Right to Believe in Jesus? an epistemological

Religious Beliefs in the Face of Rationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Believing the Self-Contradictory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

logic, Right to unbelief and Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

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Scepticism and Religious Belief. The Case of Sextus empiricus . . . . . . . . . . . 149

are we Morally obliged to Be atheists? Marian Przełęcki on the Right

Can there Be Supernaturalism without Theism? Contra Tooley’s Thesis . . . . . 179

on the Interrelation between Forgiveness, Rationality and Faith . . . . . . . . . . . 213

Transfiguration of human Consciousness and eternal life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

Notes on the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

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The Right to Believe:

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extension of scientific research to many realms once hidden from scholarly

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Clifford’s formula presupposes that our beliefs must have certain

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there we can find space for constructing a variety of logical or mathemat-

DaRIuSz ŁukaSIewICz & RogeR PouIveT

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PeTeR van Inwagen

Russell’s China Teapot

In 1952, Bertrand Russell received a commission from a periodical called

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made that is relevant to the question of the probability of the existence of

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Is it because he believed he had some reason – some very compelling

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(This argument is immediately followed by a coup de grâce that is such

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knockdown argument is. If the three sentences I have quoted contain an

But what is it to “doubt” an assertion? or, to adapt this general question to

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diamonds,” although I might well say, “you’re probably right” or even

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For that inference-schema is invalid. (If we substituted ‘The proposition

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Before I do this, however, I must first say that, in my view, it is not

I take it that this is a story to which we would all assign a probability of

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– or they do if we don’t take the teapot hypothesis to specify the length of