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11 p a r t i Finitude and the Future Seven Modes of Religious Skepticism the human tendency to form beliefs, it may be, is best understood in evolutionary terms, as bound up with the conditions of our survival in earlier times, and as unavoidable even today in many of the particular contexts of our lives. Whatever the case, for big-brained humans this believing tendency is all too easily, and often illicitly, transferred to what we may broadly term the theoretical or intellectual domain, where ratiocination that we hope will take us to knowledge of matters transcending the particulars of our lives is exercised. Now such knowledge, were it achieved, would by its very nature make belief at the intellectual level appropriate (knowledge entails belief), but it could also be that in certain areas—like religion—we need to curb our tendency to form beliefs in order eventually to arrive at such knowledge. Philosophers may think that the cautionary note I have sounded is accommodated by their omnipresent emphasis on carefully investigated and undogmatic and justified belief, but there is often reason, at the intellectual level, to doubt that belief can be justified (at least as things stand), both because of the good chance that we have missed something and are mistaken and because believing by its very nature tends to set up chains of events that will prevent us from seeing this, if it is so. (Because of this last point, assurances of alertness and openness to being wrong do not amount to much here.) And religious and irreligious forms of belief are most acutely subject to such difficulties. We all know, for example, how over and over in the history of the West truly terrible things have been done in response to what was taken as a word from the Lord. Over and over grievous errors have been perpetrated in the name of Divine Truth. Today it continues. So why doesn’t anyone infer that we have a tendency to think knowledge of ultimate things is present when it is not, and that the next time it seems we have it, we may well be wrong? Why doesn’t anyone recognize that we may well have a lot of growing up to do, that we are quite possibly not yet in a position—intellectually, morally, socially—to claim access to the Divine of the sort that is claimed when one expresses belief about such things? What I want to do, by asking questions like this, is to motivate a transformation in our basic view of the human intellectual situation. We tend to think of ourselves as incredibly advanced, and relatively speaking this may be true, but not absolutely. It is easy to think we are at the end of a long process of development, that all the basic options—and certainly all the religious options—are already “out there.” In fact, we may be just beginning: our ideas about how things ultimately are may be primitive precursors of much more complex and intricate and adequate things to come, and we may just have touched the tip of an iceberg where thinking about the Divine is concerned. Of course, it is also possible that our situation in respect of religion will soon be altered by important and obvious new discoveries as to the nature or existence of the Ultimate that quickly win wide support , but in the absence of such a happy state of affairs, radical modesty and even pessimism about the intellectual merits of what has been arrived at thus far, and about our present capacity as individuals or in concert to establish or disestablish claims concerning the existence or nature of an ultimate and salvific reality, is called for. The religious skepticism I support lives on the impression that detailed understandings of the Divine so far developed may be, to borrow from Hume, “but the first rude essays of an infant species.” If we take this line, we will see the formation of religious or irreligious belief in the present as wrongheaded, and when it is belief of some specific and detailed religious proposition from extant traditions or of some antireligious naturalism, we will see it as intellectually and morally dangerous—threatening, as it does, to cut off deep and wide religious investigation before it has a chance to properly get started. In Part 1 of this book I have divided the neglected arguments for religious skepticism bristling here into four...

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