The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism

4. The Prospective Mode

91 c h a p t e r 4 The Prospective Mode The fourth distinctive mode of reasoning on behalf of a generalized religious skepticism I shall develop looks into the future instead of the past; it considers what may lie ahead rather than what lies behind us. It is the Prospective Mode. We human beings pay considerable attention to the past (though not—as the last chapter suggests—always the right sort of attention), some attention to the present, and much attention to the immediate future. But the more distant future receives very little consideration : it is a gray haze. And yet it is certain that there will be some sort of future (whether we will be in it or not), and we know quite a lot, in a general way, about what it may contain, both for the universe as a whole and for our species in particular. We need to take this into account in our philosophizing, but often we do not. And our failure to do so has, among other things, obscured from us an important way of arguing against the justification of religious and irreligious belief. So how might such a future-oriented form of religious skepticism be developed? No doubt there are many ways. Perhaps we should expect a development of points from Chapter 1, where we saw that inaccessible and undiscovered evidence may become accessible or be discovered, and turn out to contain defeaters of religious or irreligious beliefs supported by the examined evidence of the present. But in Chapter 1 we were talking in a general way about the consequences of finitude and developing an argument that might be utilized in any present, in reference to any future. The Prospective Mode, to exploit other possibilities of reasoning and retain its distinctiveness, might be expected to emphasize instead certain more particular facts about what may occur when a transition is made from this present—the first decades of the twenty-first century—to 92 Seven Modes of Religious Skepticism our future, and the connections between such facts and the justification of religious or irreligious belief in our time. Even someone who did not accept the argument of our first chapter might have reason to accept this one, and so the latter is not dependent on the former.1 Now it may seem that the Prospective Mode, thus construed, must still be dependent on the Retrospective Mode, bringing us into direct contact with facts emphasized in the previous chapter. For will it not focus on what needs to occur in order for us to leave behind the impoverished moral, psychological, and social conditions there discussed? To this I reply that our undistinguished past (or one similar in the relevant respects) does indeed represent a necessary condition for the truth of some of what I say here. Thus certain parts of the present argument might be said to presuppose the truth of (and in that sense to depend on) a premise of the Retrospective Mode. But the Prospective Mode as a whole still does not presuppose the success of the Retrospective Mode itself, both because it could be developed without any reference at all to the past and because, even though facts about the past sometimes appear in my own interpretation of it, that interpretation does not require that we may presently be incapable of discerning the truth about religion. Even if this is not so and the contrary claim of the Retrospective Mode is false, the Prospective Mode may retain its force—and thus the latter is distinct from the former. The Prospective Mode, as we will see, is concerned to advance the idea that, whatever might be true of other futures, in our future there may be enormous changes in the intellectual and religious realms. Because of this we have good reason to suspect that any views on ultimism that seem plausible to us now may well turn out to be false, or appear false to more fully informed individuals of the future, and hence to be in doubt about whether any evidence so far examined for and against religious claims is representative of the total evidence. This strongly suggests that the evidence humans have so far gathered is radically insufficient. And, moreover, when the possibility of unrepresentativeness is itself taken into account, we are again left with a situation in which even the available evidence, whatever its force might otherwise appear to be, is, overall, less than good evidence...