RATIONALLY DECIDING WHAT TO BELIEVE

Abstract

Terence Penelhum, Reason and Religious Faith Pp. 166. (Colorado and Cumnor Hill: Westview Press (Focus Series), 1996.) £32.50 hb, £10.95 pb.

A little boy at Sunday School once defined ‘faith’ as ‘believing firmly what you know isn't true’. The religious believer does not normally take himself to be in quite that desperate epistemic plight, even if he accepts Tertullian's motto credo quia absurdum. All the same, an uncomfortable tension is apt to appear between his religious beliefs and their rationality, and his other beliefs and their rationality. Like this: if ‘God exists’ seems or feels true, nonetheless it does not feel true in the same way that ‘There are nine planets in the solar system’ feels true. There are at least five contrasts. First, that there are nine planets in the solar system is not a belief that any sensible person will ever feel great fervour about (outside such improbable scenarios as those where they are struggling to resist being brainwashed by the Flat Earth Society). Second, it is immediately clear how the belief about the planets might be shown to be false. Third, no one is accounted morally praiseworthy for believing that there are nine planets in the solar system; that belief is even epistemically praiseworthy only in a very minimal sense. Nor (fourth) is someone worthy of moral blame, exactly, if they don't believe that there are nine planets – unless perhaps they refuse to believe it in the teeth of clear evidence. By contrast (a fifth point) some have apparently thought that praiseworthiness or importance of believing in God's existence is not only not dependent on the evidence, but actually inversely proportional to it.