In Praise of Reason

5. The “Sacred Tradition of Humanity”

1 Belief, Faith, and Commitment The nineteenth-century British mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford is often portrayed as a poster-boy for reason. That doesn’t really do the man justice; but it is true in its way. Before his death at the age of thirty-four, Clifford anticipated aspects of Einstein’s theory of relativity, invented an algebra later named for him, married the novelist Lucy Clifford, wrote a book of children’s stories, and even survived a shipwreck off the Italian coast.1 But today he is mostly remembered, if at all, for a single essay, “The Ethics of Belief,” an impassioned, if rather severe, defense of the importance of reason. This 1877 essay still has lessons to teach us, and I’ll use it as a jumping-off point for my own positive defense of the value of reason.2 Clifford’s stance is uncompromising: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” He first introduces this point with a story about a ship. Here’s the reality TV version: Not long ago, a major American airline was fined millions of dollars by the FAA for neglecting to perform fatigue-crack inspections on its Boeing 737s. Such reports raise some obvious questions: Did the 5 The “Sacred Tradition of Humanity” 80 Chapter 5 executives involved willingly ignore the inspections, or did they simply convince themselves, perhaps over time (and without even knowing it) that these costly inspections were unnecessary? Either way, as the song says, “Somebody did somebody wrong.” For even if the airline’s executives sincerely believed that the airplanes were safe, they should have done the inspections anyway. After all, the point of the inspection is to determine whether an airplane is safe; safety is not something you guess about. And here we have Clifford’s point: Even if the executives did believe their airplanes were safe, and even if, luckily, they really were safe, these executives had no right to believe so without any evidence. In short, Clifford’s argument for thinking it is always wrong to believe on insufficient evidence is that beliefs are tied to action. We decide what to do (fly) because of what we believe (the airplane is safe). So, since belief is tied to action, believing without sufficient evidence (as did the executives, above) can lead to actions that hurt or kill other people. And that’s wrong. This, of course, is an entirely sensible point. Yet ever since it was written, Clifford’s essay has been a lightning rod for criticism . Most of this criticism, not surprisingly, has come from those who wish to defend the rationality of religious belief. The conservative writer David Berlinski, for example, seethes that Clifford’s view “functions as a premise in a popular argument for the inexistence of God . . . if there is insufficient evidence for the existence of God, then it must be wrong to believe in his existence.”3 Clifford is regarded by Berlinski as the standardbearer for the lab-coated thugs of the mainstream scientific community. In Berlinski’s eyes, Clifford, and anyone who agrees with him, is condemning religion. The “Sacred Tradition of Humanity” 81 Curiously, Berlinski fails to notice that Clifford’s “popular” argument for the “inexistence of God” is actually no such thing. After all, the conclusion of Clifford’s actual argument, summarized just above, is not that God doesn’t exist, but that it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence. So even if we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that there is insufficient evidence for the belief that God exists, it would only follow, according to Clifford, that we would be wrong in believing he exists. It doesn’t follow that we should believe he doesn’t. Berlinski isn’t the only one to overlook this point. No less than the great psychologist and philosopher William James fell into the same confusion in writing his response to “the enfant terrible ” Clifford. According to James, it is permissible to believe in God without sufficient evidence because religious belief is an example of a forced decision: you have to either believe in God or not. But that is a mistake: not believing that God exists isn’t the same as believing that God doesn’t exist. I may not believe that “the butler did it,” but that doesn’t mean that I think...