Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion

2. On Belief

39 c h a p t e r 2 On Belief Having clarified “religion” as far as we have, we are closer to being in a position to tackle the ideas of religious belief and a generalized religious disbelief. Philosophers of religion are obviously very interested in the former attitude; one could go on for pages listing the titles referring to it. There is less mention of the latter, but clearly it is something in which philosophers are interested and should be interested , for it represents an important answer to the question of what response to religious claims is rationally most appropriate—an answer about as opposed, intellectually, to religious belief as anything could be.1 There are other answers too, and we will be exploring the main ones in due course. But before doing so I want to color in the borders of the discussion by considering the outermost responses to religious claims. To do that properly, however, we must first spend some time on the very important element these opposites have in common: namely, belief.2 1 Strictly speaking, one or two of the attitudes I explore (in particular, belief-in—or affective belief, as I call it) are not entailed by any such response. My reasons for exploring them will become apparent as we proceed. 2 I am indebted in what follows to the work on belief of L. Jonathan Cohen; see his An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Though I have come to disagree with some elements of it, Cohen’s positive account—“belief that p is a disposition , when one is attending to issues raised, or items referred to, by the proposition that p, normally to feel it true that p and false that not-p” (p. 4)—provides a starting point and continuing stimulation for my own thinking. And I am still persuaded, as will be evident, that the simplicity of his account (the reference to but one disposition) is worth preserving. 1. Propositional Belief as a Form of Thought The main sort of belief at issue here, as a glance at philosophical discussions will attest, is so-called propositional belief, the psychological state of believing that so-and-so. (Near the end of the chapter I also have something to say about the somewhat different notion of believing in.) But what is propositional belief? The answer to this question is not immediately evident, even though we all have innumerable beliefs of this sort, and despite the fact that we all seem to have immediate access to such beliefs through introspection. Indeed, there are many subtleties here, as well as possibilities for confusion. So we shall need to tread carefully. I begin with a small but not insignificant clarification, which will help to ensure that we are all singing from the same page of the hymnbook, or at least from the same hymnbook. We are, I have said, concerned with belief as a psychological state—with believing. But this is not the only meaning attached to the English word “belief.” The word is ambiguous: we use “belief” to refer both to the psychological state of believing and to what one is claiming when one gives expression to it (which philosophers call the propositional content of that state). We may, for example, speak both of someone’s belief that there are UFOs (the psychological state) as being hastily or carefully formed, rational or irrational, and so on, and of the belief that there are UFOs (the claim or propositional content now) as credible or incredible, as true or false, and as entailing or not entailing other propositions. From now on I use “belief” primarily in the former sense. It is interesting to note that the ambiguity here is quite parallel to that observed by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and noted in Chapter 1. “Belief,” like “religion,” has both an internal and an external sense. It is not surprising, therefore, that some of the confusion surrounding the meaning(s) of “religion” is expressed in terms of “belief.” A recent college textbook on philosophy of religion, for example, after spelling out what is to all appearances an understanding of religion in the internal sense (in which beliefs are mentioned alongside emotions), suggests that its concern is with the belief element of religion: namely, the propositions believed by religious persons. This is of course only a small matter, easily dealt with by noticing the ambiguity in question and avoiding equivocation. Other matters concerning the proper...