The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion

12. Faith Is Positively Justified: The Many Modes of Religious Vision

237 c h a p t e r 1 2 Faith Is Positively Justified: The Many Modes of Religious Vision 1. Our Fundamental Results: Ten Modes of Skeptical Religion Let’s begin by listing the various arguments for faith we found in Parts III and IV, in the order in which we harvested them: Anselm: The Alignment Argument The Imaginative Fulfillment Argument Leibniz: The Understanding Argument Paley: The Respect for Beauty Argument Pascal: The Skeptical Dominance Argument Kant: The Moral Commitment Argument James: The Competing Duties Argument The Ought-to-Be-True Argument One thing the large plurality of arguments here immediately permits us to do is to cancel the ceteris paribus clause that (as I said in Chapter 6) should tacitly be seen as attaching to each of them. Any one of these arguments, by itself, even after the various defenses against objections I have provided, can say no more than that other things being equal, or so long as countervailing considerations are not forthcoming, it succeeds in providing sufficient support for skeptical religion. But, for each of the eight arguments, the other seven, spanning, as they do, every other area of human life, must surely represent among them every relevant competing consideration we should be prepared to encounter. And so, since the 238 The Will to Imagine other seven clearly are not competing, the ceteris paribus clause can be removed. If, for example, considerations associated with the imagination and understanding and beauty and transcendence and moral commitment , and so on do not count against seeking to be aligned with what is ultimately real and valuable (I have of course argued, more strongly, that they count for it, but that point is not strictly necessary here), then we have grounds to conclude that the intrinsic appropriateness of seeking such an alignment, emphasized by the Anselmian Alignment Argument, provides us with a sufficient reason for adopting skeptical religion, full stop. And similarly for the other arguments. Seeing this, we have attained the final insight needed to complete each of the arguments. This is what I had in mind when I earlier said that without recourse to our principles, the various arguments may, each of them, especially in the context of the others, already be taken as providing positive justification for faith, and, furthermore, that there is therefore a sense in which our task in this book is already completed. Let us take a moment to absorb this result . But then let us turn to the real focus of attention in this chapter: the various aims of human life those arguments support, which I have been setting out along the way, by means of which the case for skeptical religion can most clearly and precisely be made. Here they are: A1. The Alignment Aim (p. 114): the aim of approaching as fully as possible a state in which one is aligned in one’s own being with that of anything ultimately real and valuable. A2. The Imaginative Fulfillment Aim (p. 114): the aim of realizing an expanded imagination capable of embracing more fully the idea of something ultimately real and valuable. A3. The Understanding Aim (p. 123): the aim of promoting the conjunction of our various understanding-related interests (including cosmological ones) in the best available way. A4. The Respect for Beauty Aim (p. 147): the aim of doing the conjunction of the following four things as well as we can: paying tribute to the world’s beauty, doing justice to intense experiences of beauty, extending appreciation of the world’s beauty, and contributing to the cultivation of concern for the preservation of the world’s beauty. A5. The Prudential Alignment Aim (p. 181): this is A1 pursued for prudential reasons instead of for its own sake. A6. The Readiness Aim (p. 181): the aim of readying oneself for ever deeper discoveries in connection with the Ultimate. Faith Is Positively Justified 239 A7. The Transcendence Aim (p. 181): the aim of continually enlarging and enriching one’s life, of continually transcending previously attained heights in every area of human experience. A8. The Moral Commitment Aim (p. 194): the aim of carrying out a wholehearted commitment to the human good. A9. The Competing Duties Aim (p. 224): the aim of mediating and reconciling the demands made on us by our competing duties to avoid commerce with falsehood and error, but also to do...