Abstract
There are many questions that must be raised, problems that must be resolved, and consequences that must be traced as results of the claims that William James makes in his “The Will to Believe.” I have discussed some of those questions and problems in Chapter IV; therefore, I will simply draw out here some of the presuppositions and consequences of James’s introduction of psychology into religion. The dispute between James and William Clifford serves to illustrate the fundamental epistemological difference, as it is usually drawn, that underlies the difference between theism and naturalism. Clifford and naturalists generally think that we are limited in terms of what can justify any belief in terms of adequate evidence based upon our sense experience of natural phenomena. Such evidence, naturalists claim, limits our beliefs to the natural world and the natural phenomena in that world. The restriction that naturalists place upon what is considered to be adequate evidence for beliefs leads to a naturalism that will not allow justification of beliefs that extend beyond the natural world. The evidence must be empirical evidence of natural phenomena, and the scope of our theories is determined by the limits of sense experience. Although he regarded himself as a strict empiricist, James clearly held that beliefs based upon and limited simply to natural phenomena do not exhaust all there is to the world or all that we are justified in claiming to know about the world. According to James, “tough-minded” naturalism only goes so far, and then we must admit that there is more to the world than simply that for which our sense experience provides evidence. Alternatively, one can understand James as broadening the field of naturalistic data by the introduction of psychological data, and one should keep in mind that James’s understanding of psychology was not nearly so empirical or scientific as is the contemporary understanding. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James replies upon an “armchair” style of doing what is now called “humanistic psychology,” which would hardly pass as rigorous social science today. His “data” concerning religion, which he subjects to philosophical and psychological analysis, are the result of literary accounts, biographical reports, or second-hand information. It was James’s student, Edwin Starbuck, who was to become known for introducing more empirical and more scientific methods into the study of religious experience and religious phenomena that rely upon the now commonplace, controlled field studies. James, however, opened the door for the study of the psychology of religion and provided the clear juxtaposition of naturalism and theism for the social sciences.
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References
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: Norton Press, 1950) and The Future of an Illusion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1961).
Ibid., p. 40. Freud says that the question of assessing the truth-value of the illusion of religion is not a part of his inquiry. He intends, he says, simply to explain their psychological origin and nature. See ibid., p. 52.
For a detailed and lengthy theistic response to Freudian psychoanalytical theory, see William P Alston, “Psychoanalytical Theory and Theistic Belief,” in Faith and the Philosophers, edited by John Hick (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), pp. 63–102.
D. Z. Phillips, Religion without Explanation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), p. 71.
Ibid., p. 72. Phillips means that it is a way of looking at things that is not grounded in empirical fact.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), p. 50–51.
See D. Z. Phillips, Religion Without Explanation, pp. 63–64. I should add that Phillips main position is based upon his Wittgensteinian view of language-games and of the autonomy of language-games of religious beliefs. One consequence of this view is that it makes no sense to call religious beliefs mistakes. See the discussions of Wittgenstein and Phillips in Chapters III and IV.
For a thorough and detailed treatment of Durkheim’s theory of the sociology of religion, see W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1915). This work is regarded as providing a scientific grounding of Durkheim’s sociological account of the origin of religion; however, there must be several disclaimers entered regarding this work. Durkheim did no field work himself and thus relied completely on the studies of other social scientists. This work came at the end of his career, long after his developed theory concerning the sociological nature of religion, and his generalized claims about the universality of totemism are generally thought to be unwarranted. He claims that the question of whether totemism is universal or not is secondary and that the quality of facts is more important that their number, a position that allows him to impose quality and value on the facts he chooses. See pp. 114–15.
For further discussion of this point, see Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion, pp. 231ff.
The exact relationship between God and society is both complicated and controversial. See Pickering, ibid.,pp. 232ff.
See D. Z. Phillips, Religion Without Explanation,p. 90.
See Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 200–01.
Pickering suggests that sociological theory has developed very little since the time of Durkheim and Max Weber. See N. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion, p. 503.
Weber’s major work was The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Although Weber offered nothing resembling Durkheim’s reduction of religion to the social, his work kept religion at the forefront of the interests of social scientists.
Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post Traditional World (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
Gary Gutting, Religious Belief and Skepticism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 131. Gutting adopts four criteria for assessing explanatory adequacy — scope, accuracy, fruitfulness, and simplicity — all of which are fairly standard, objective criteria for determining the explanatory efficacy of a theory; however, as he himself notes, not all are applicable for comparing theism and naturalism. Ibid., pp. 131–37.
The phrase “God of the gaps” originated with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. For one discussion of the pitfalls of this approach, see Antony Flew, God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1966), pp. 60ff.
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited by Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing, 1980), p. 15.
See William Paley, Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (London: Longman and Co., 1813), p. Iff. and p. 18ff. Though most present anthologies in the philosophy of religion include Paley’s description of the details of the design of the watch, unfortunately his description of the eye and its design are often omitted.
J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 139–40.
Robert H. Hurlbutt III, Hume, Newton,and the Design Argument (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 180.
Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by N. Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), p. 87.
Ruth Millikan, Language, Thought,and Other Biological Categories Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p. 1 and p. 18.
Ruth Millikan, “In Defense of Proper Functions,” in White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice, edited by Ruth Millikan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 21.
See Philip Kitcher, “Function and Design,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 18, 1993, pp. 380–81.
Flew attacks this claim of Aquinas very strongly, calling it an argument from a “perverse premise” to a “gratuitous conclusion.” Aquinas’s claim amounts to a denial that things can do what we observe them to be naturally doing. See Antony Flew, God and Philosophy, p. 72.
See Robert Cummins, “Functional Analysis,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 72, 1975, pp. 741–764.
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1987), p. 21. sa Ibid., p. 77.
Ibid., pp. 77–79. It may be thought that the crucial issue is whether there can be a completely naturalistic explanation for the development of organic life from inorganic materials. Though perhaps at one time this crucial step was controversial, the second half of the twentieth century has seen a series of experiments (known as the Miller experiments) where electrical charges have been introduced into a “primitive” atmosphere containing hydrogen, nitrogen, and simple carbon compounds in such a way so as to produce organic molecules and amino acids. These experiments have been reproduced many times. See S. L. Miller, “Production of Amino Acids under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions, Science, Vol. 117, 1953; and ”The Formation of Organic Compounds on Earth,“ New York Academy of Science, Vol. 69, 1957. For a very detailed discussion of the Miller experiments and of the origin of order in the processes of self-organization and natural selection, see Stuart A. Kaufman, The Origins of Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 288ff.
Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996).
Much of the following is drawn from two book reviews of Darwin’s Black Box by scientists: Jerry A Coyne, “God in the Details,” Nature, Vol. 383, September 1996, pp. 227–28; and Neil W. Blackstone, “Argumentum ad Ignorantiam,” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 72, no. 4, 1997, pp. 445–47.
Neil W. Blackstone, “Argumentum ad Ignorantiam,” p. 445. Also see R. C. Lewontin, “The Units of Selection,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 1, pp. 1–18.
Ibid. Also see David B. Myers, “New Design Arguments: Old Millian Objections,” Religious Studies, Vol. 36, no. 2, 2000, pp. 141–62. Myers argues that even if biochemistry does support an intelligent designer, it does not support the God of theism.
Kenneth Nelson claims that naturalism does not undermine the argument from design simply because it is more simple, since science might discover at some point that the world was produced instantaneously, with design, just as some theists claim. He maintains that the theistic explanation would then be more reasonable, even though the naturalistic explanation is more simple. But Nelson describes a situation in which the respective adequacy and scope of the two explanations would also change, and this may happen in some possible (or future) world, but it is not the case in this actual world. The point here is not that simplicity overrides other criteria for assessing explanations but that, everything else being equal, simplicity favors naturalism. This is exactly why the process has been to compare the respective scope of theism and naturalism by asking whether there are some features of the universe — some gap — which is not explained by naturalism. See Kenneth Nelson, “Evolution and the Argument from Design,” Religious Studies, Vol. 14, 1978, p. 429.
ibid., p. 432ff.; and William Wainwright, Philosophy of Religion (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1988), pp. 50ff.
Natural selection is so inefficient that the length of time necessary for the process of selection to take place was originally a major criticism of Darwin’s theory, given what was considered at the time to be the age of the universe.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Chapter 13, p. 89.
See Kenneth Nelson, “Evolution and the Argument from Design,” pp. 437–38.
“The Presumption of Atheism,” in The Presumption of Atheism and other Philosophical Essays on God, Freedom, and Immortality, Antony Flew (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), pp. 14ff.
Ibid., p. 15. Attempts to respond to these tasks by theists are discussed in Chapters III and IV.
Anthony Kenny claims that a comparable claim of presumption can be made for theism if negative theism is defined, mutatis mutandis, as a person who is not an atheist and who does not disbelieve in God. Although the parallel is syntactical, it is not epistemological. Anthony Kenny, Faith and Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 85ff.
For a lengthy and detailed defense of negative atheism, see Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Defense (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), Part I.
Ibid., p. 22. The word “agnostic” has been used with different meanings. It is only in a very restricted sense that it is synonymous with “negative atheist.” In other uses it is closer in meaning to “positive atheist.”
Donald Evans, “A Reply to Flew’s The Presumption of Atheism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, September 1972, pp. 48ff.
Kai Nielsen, Philosophy and Atheism (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1985), pp. 129ff.
Ibid., pp. 140–41. This position sounds similar to Alvin Plantinga’s theory of properly basic beliefs discussed in Chapter IV.
Wesley Salmon, “Religion and Science: A New Look at Hume’s Dialogues,” Philosophical Studies, Vol. 33, 1978, pp. 143–76. For a lengthy discussion of Salmon’s argument, see Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Defense, pp. 317ff.
Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 277.
John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934), pp. 70ff.
Humanist Manifestos I and II (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books 1933–1973).
W. Donald Hudson, A Philosophical Approach to Religion (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), pp. 116–119.
John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster Press, 1963); Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965); Time Magazine, August 8, 1966.
Ibid., p. 219. There was disagreement among the “atheistic Christian” theologians (or the “GodIs-Dead theologians” concerning the exact meaning of the claim “God is dead.” For different views, see The Meaning of the Death of God, edited by Bernard Murchland (New York: Vintage Books, 1967); and The Death of God, Gabriel Vahanian (New York: George Braziller, 1957); and John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God.
John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 38.
Anthony Quinton, “The Soul,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 59, no. 15, 1962. Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion, edited by William L. Rowe and William J. Wainwright (Forth Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1998, p. 518.
For a discussion of Locke’s use of memory for personal identity, see Antony Flew, “The Identity of Incorporeal Persons,” in The Presumption of Atheism, pp. 132ff.
Terrence Penelhum, Survival and Disembodied Existence (London: Routledge and Regan Paul, 1970), pp.70–71. For discussions of various views concerning the importance of the physical criterion of the body on the continued existence of a person, see Hywel D. Lewis, The Self and Immortality (New York: Macmillan, 1973), Chapter 7; and Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 202ff.
Antony Flew, “Can a Man Witness His Own Funeral?” in The Presumption of Atheism, p. 121. 76 Antony Flew, Body, Mind,and Death (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 12.
For a discussion of different intrinsic and extrinsic views of personal identity, see Self and Identity, edited by Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin (New York: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 168ff.
J. J. C. Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 68, 1959. Reprinted in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards and Edward Pap (New York: Free Press, 1957).
P. F. Strawson, Individuals (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959), p. 100.
See Self and Identity, edited by Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin, pp. 181–192 and pp. 192226.
These experiments and their results are widely discussed and debated in the literature. Early reports of the experiments were made in M. S. Gazzaniga, J. E. Bogen, and R. W. Sperry, “Some Functional Effects of Sectioning the Cerebral Commissures in Man,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Vol. 48, 1962, p. 1765–69. Also see M. S. Gazzaniga, The Bisected Brain (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970); Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons; and Todd E. Feinberg, Altered Egos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Numerous articles address the issues of the divided brain phenomena, including R. W. Sperry, “Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness”; Thomas Nagel, “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness”; and Derek Parfit, “Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons,” in Self and Identity, edited by Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin; Donald McKay, “Divided Brains — Divided Minds?” and Derek Parfit, “Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons,” in Mindwaves, edited by Colin Blackmore and Susan Greenfield (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Georges Rey, “Survival,” in The Identity of Persons, edited by Amélie Rorty, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
Parfit, “Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons,” in Kolak and Martin, Self and Identity, p. 83.
Antony Flew discusses these issues from a strictly philosophical point of view without explicit attention to the divided brain phenomena by in “The Identity of Incorporeal Persons,” in The Presumption of Atheism, pp. 135ff.
Richard Swinburne has continued to defend the spiritual substance theory of self and has raised objections to the consequences of using the bundle theory to explain such cases. See his “Personal Identity,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 74, 1973–74, pp. 231–48.
John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1976), pp., 279ff. 131 Ibid., pp. 280–81.
Derek Parfit, “What We Believe Ourselves to Be,” in Reasons and Persons, p. 199ff. Reprinted as “The Psychological View,” in Self and Identity, edited by Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin, pp., 227ff.
Hearts pump while brains do not, but there is no commonly agreed upon descriptive term for the function that brains perform.
There is some controversy concerning whether the “same person” in fact continues to exist. Parfit thinks that personal identity is not preserved in such cases. This issue is addressed below.
Peter van Inwagen, “The Possibility of Resurrection,” in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, edited by Louis P. Pojman (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1998), p. 370.
Ibid. This extreme and unusual suggestion does not account for the problems of scattered or mixed persons. It also raises questions about the possibility of God’s systematically deceiving human beings — a possibility dismissed by theists in connection with the suggestion that God could create human beings with free will but without the ability to actually do evil.
See Parfit, “What We Believe Ourselves to Be,” in Reasons and Persons, pp. 200ff.
Neurotheology is now in its infancy. One of the earliest attempts to explore the neurophysiological bases for spiritual experiences is James Austin, Zen and the Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
For a summary of such criticisms, see Paul and Linda Badham, Immortality or Extinction? (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982), p. 87–88.
Paul and Linda Badham, Immortality or Extinction? (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982), p. 78.
This summary is taken from Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993), p. 68. There have been many studies of the hallucinatory effects of various drugs. For a good summary of the literature, see pp. 67ff.
For a detailed and objective description of the different kinds of anoxia and their potential differing effects, see Blackmore, Ibid., pp. 49–53.
Michael Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1982), pp. 105–11.
See Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live, pp. 51–52 and M. P. H. Gliksman and A. Kellehear, “Near-death Experiences and the Measurement of Blood Gases,” Journal of Near-Death Studies, Vol. 9, 1990, pp. 41–43.
Much of the forgoing is drawn from Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live, pp. 64–65.
This description is based upon the research of Tom Troscianko. See Susan Blackmore, Ibid., pp. 84–86 and Susan Blackmore and Tom Troscianko, “The Physiology of the Tunnel,” Journal of Near-Death Studies, Vol. 8, 1988, pp. 15–28.
For detailed discussions of the various difficulties with claims involving out-of-body experiences during NDEs, see the following: Raymond Moody, Life After Life, p. 25ff. Moody maintains that there is some sort of spiritual body that is occupied during out-of-body experiences. C. E. Green, Out-of -the-Body Experiences (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968). Green claims that such experiences are “aromatic” — without any sort of second, spiritual body.
See Cyril Burt, Psychology and Psychical Research (Society for Psychical Research, 1968), pp. 79–80. Discussed in Paul and Linda Badham, Immortality or Extinction?, pp. 73–74.
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Harris, J.F. (2002). Contemporary Challenges to Theism: Humanism, Naturalism, and Atheism. In: Analytic Philosophy of Religion. Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0719-0_7
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