God and Skepticism: A Study in Skepticism and Fideism (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 299 Terence Penelhum. God and Skepticism: A Study in Skepticism and Fideism. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol. a8. Dordrecht/Boston/ Lancaster: D. Reidel, 1984. Pp. xii+ x86. 80.0o DFL, cloth. "I believe that one of the things Christianity saysis that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life/" According to Terence Penelhum, thinkers like Wittgenstein who hold that philosophical arguments are irrelevant to religious faith are wrong. In his recent book, God and Skepticism, he examines Fideism and its relation to skepticism and argues that the influence of skepticism on religion springs from some major philosophical mistakes . Fideists hold that religion should not seek the support of reason. The Conformist Fideists--Erasmus, Montaigne, Bayle--find deep similarities between classical skepticism and the Christian Faith, the main one being their dissatisfaction with the anxiety caused by one's commitment to the secular world of common sense. The Evangelical Fideists--Pascal and Kierkegaard--find the attempt of natural theology to ground Faith in Reason useless: argument cannot replace conversion. Even if skeptics are more miserable than atheists, they can help believers feel and understand the unbridgeable gap between Faith and Reason, conversion and argument. Regarding Evangelical Fideism as the more important, Penelhum naturally sees in it the real opponent, both past and present. At one point in his sharp and detailed argumentation against the Fideists' assumptions, Penelhum offers a sustained exercise in the philosophy of mind. By analysing the concepts of belief and action, by probing whether a belief is an action, a passion or an emotion, he challenges the assumption of the skeptics that there is such a thing as beliefless action. However, the author does not seem aware that skepticism itself may well be an early form of philosophy of mind. He subscribes to the current view that ever since its revival in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, skepticism is above all an epistemological skepticism, threatening to undermine the claims of Reason and Science in all areas of human life. He overlooks the fact that skepticism, by arguing for the cessation of all belief, stressed--albeit negatively--the subjective self rather than objective reality. After all, what is skepticism if not a speculation about the human mind? It could well have been the main philosophy of mind against which Descartes argued in the Discourse and the Meditations. As against skepticism, which implied an obscure notion of mind leading to error, Descartes put forward his notion of a transparent mind with its "clear and distinct ideas," leading to truth. As worthy of a Hume scholar, Penelhum offers us an excellent analysis of Hume's arguments against natural religion. But his interpretation of Philo's skeptical fideist remark at the end of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion--"To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cultureand Value,ed. G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 198o), 53e. 300 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:2 APRIL i987 a sound, believing Christian"--leads to a surprising conclusion. It would seem that Hume does not deal the final blow to Natural Religion but simply changes it into an empty secularism--Deism. In his interpretation of Hume's skepticism Penelhum seems to confuse two kinds of skepticism: one about common sense and another about natural philosophy or science. When Hume argues within the experimental method or the doctrine of ideas, he is skeptical about common sense. But when he is playing backgammon and relying on his impressions and memory (not his ideas), then he is skeptical about Natural Philosophy. It is wrong to lump together these two skepticisms or, alternatively, their two opposite beliefs under one category: Hume's skepticism concerning commonsense beliefsand science orphilosophy. One must keep these two skepticisms quite distinct if one is to make sense of Hume's mitigated skepticism which enables him to steer his way between them by being "diffident of one's philosophical doubts" as well as of "one's philosophical conviction." To be diffident of one's philosophical doubts is to trust reason and science...