On Christian Belief

A Defence of a Cognitive Conception of Religious Belief in a Christian Context

Andrew Collier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134377121
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

First Published in 2004. On Christian Belief offers a defence of realism in the philosophy of religion. It argues that religious belief – with particular reference to Christian belief – is not something unlike any other kind of belief, but is cognitive, making claims about what is real, and is open to rational discussion between believers and non-believers. The author begins by providing a critique of several views which try either to describe a faith without cognitive context, or to justify believing on non-cognitive grounds. He then discusses what sense can be made of the phenomenon of religious conversion by realists and non-realists. After a chapter on knowledge in general, he defends the idea that religious knowledge is very like other knowledge, in being based on reliable testimony, sifted by reason and tested by experience. The logical status of the content of religious belief is then discussed, with reference to Christianity.

1 Faith without belief I

Religious feeling

First of all, let me say what I intend to argue. I am in no way trying to play down the role of emotion in religion or in life in general. Emotions are the stuff of human life, and a religion without emotion is a withered up religion. What is at stake is what emotions are. Are they blind feelings, uncriticisable and needing no justification; or do they involve beliefs, which can be true or false? My view is the latter: I am afraid of a Rhodesian Ridgeback since I believe that they are dangerous (one having nearly killed my wife and son). I am angry about the government’s pension policy since I believe it is inhumane in its effects. I love God since I believe he first loved us, and showed it in the person of Christ. All these emotions are challengeable and need justification, since all involve beliefs which might be true or false. If someone disagrees with me about pensions, they will provide arguments: that it is possible to live very well on a pension, or that the effect of raising pensions would be some unthinkable disaster, like making well-to-do younger people spend less on cars and mobile phones. If I am not convinced, that is not because my anger is self-justifying, but because I believe the arguments against me are bad ones. If religious emotions are like this, then it is arguments about cognitive beliefs that decide whether they are rational or not. To avoid this cognitivist conclusion, one has to strip emotions of the beliefs that make them the emotions that they are. My argument is against this reduced conception of emotions, and more particularly against views which oscillate between a reduced ‘blind feeling’ conception of emotion and one which involves beliefs.

The idea of a purely non-cognitive faith has obvious attractions. It relieves the religious person of the duties of epistemic ethics – the duty to ask if one’s beliefs are well-founded, if they conflict with other, better-founded beliefs, and so on. If there were no cognitive element in faith, then one really could choose to have faith, without being convinced of anything first. There is also a serious intellectual history to this attraction: from Galileo to Darwin and beyond, there have been a series of seeming clashes between religion and science. In each case, some new scientific discovery has seemed to conflict with some proposition belonging to current religious belief; some believers have dug their heels in and refused to accept the discovery; some have accepted it and lost their faith; some have claimed that what the religious doctrine really meant never conflicted with the science anyway. I take it that the last response has always been the right one, but if it is merely an ad hoc response to each separate discovery, made out of necessity when it becomes clear that the discovery can no longer be rationally denied, then it looks like a retreat, making the best of a bad job, rather than a principled position.

Certainly, in many cases the literalist reading of the Scriptures that generated the science/religion clash has never been universally accepted by believers even before the new discovery, and in some cases looks quite strange even by purely internal criteria. Could anyone who has thought the matter through ever really believe, for instance, that the universe was created in seven literal days, when the sun was not even created till the fourth day (Genesis 1.18)? This was pointed out by the Christian philosopher and martyr Origen, as early as the third century. Nevertheless, it would be much better to solve the religion/science clash once and for all, by showing that they could not clash in principle because they are about different things. And the simplest and most radical way to do this would be by showing that while science is cognitive, religion is not. We could then dismiss in advance any supposed conflict between religion and any cognitive discipline, whether science, history or ‘commonsense’. There are of course more moderate ways of marking off religion from science, without abandoning a realist and cognitive account of religious belief. None can be certain of avoiding all conflict, but the area of possible conflict gets quite small, provided the realist is not an extreme fundamentalist who believes in the literal inerrancy of Scripture. Such a fundamentalist will, I think, inevitably confront a few conflicts with science (for example about Joshua making the sun stand still – Joshua 10.13) and indeed with logic (for example trying to reconcile Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of the fate of Judas Iscariot – Matthew 27.3–8, Acts 1.18–19). But an account which is realist about God and his acts and hence cognitivist about belief, but which is not fundamentalist in this sense, can usually avoid science/religion clashes, rather as chemistry does not clash with linguistics, though both are cognitive, simply because they are about different things. However, this does not definitively avoid such clashes since two sciences with different subject-matters may overlap (to use Aquinas’s example: both the astronomer and the physicist prove that the Earth is round – so much for the legend that the medievals thought it was flat!). Theology and history for instance overlap, so that a historical proof that Jesus never existed would refute Christianity, although a proof that Buddha never existed would not refute Buddhism, since the life of Buddha is not part of the religious subject-matter of Buddhism, while the life of Jesus is part of the religious subject-matter of Christianity. Buddhism does, however, contain some general doctrines which are propositional and have entailments and contradictories, and hence which can be defended as true or criticised as false by rational, if somewhat metaphysical, arguments. The non-cognitive account of religion though, if true, would make ‘faith’ completely rationally unassailable, come what may in the cognitive disciplines (though by the same token, it would make it rationally undefendable).

I shall now consider four versions of the non-cognitive account of ‘faith’: two, concerned with religious feeling, in the remainder of this chapter, and two, concerned with ‘moral faith’, in the next.

1 Bare feeling

Many non-cognitivists say that religion is based on feeling. But for this idea to do the work of parrying cognitive arguments, it must take a rather extreme form. It is likely that no one has ever consistently held this extreme form of the view, but some have seemed to slide between it and other, more moderate feeling-oriented accounts of religion. The plausibility of feeling-theology depends on a less extreme form being adopted, but the invulnerability to rational criticism depends on the extreme version. The extreme version is that religion is based on bare feeling, that is to say, feeling without any cognitive content or presuppositions.

Are there bare feelings? Perhaps there are: low-key nausea, for example, of the type that does not presage vomiting, could be said to be entirely non-cognitive; pains, if analytically distinguished from the information about bodily ailments which, to any adult, they convey; euphoria, induced by a long walk in the country but not about the long walk in the country. For of course as soon as a feeling comes to be about something, it is no longer purely non-cognitive: it involves beliefs about what it is about. If you express your euphoria by saying even ‘it’s good to be alive’, a passing Buddhist may tell you ‘on the contrary, the first of the Four Noble Truths tells us that all existence is misery’, and, if you stick to your guns, you have all the makings of an entirely cognitive religious argument.

So in order to stay non-cognitive, a feeling has to remain pretty thin: much too thin to be identified as religious. Can we fill it out enough to identify it as religious without implicating beliefs which can be assessed as true or false? I think not. Take Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ for instance. One can immediately ask ‘but are we absolutely dependent? If so, what on? Is that which we are dependent on worthy of worship?’ – and so on. One might hold, like Berdyaev, that the Divinity wills us to be independent – rather as when Ezekiel prostrates himself before a vision of God, he is told ‘ Son of man, stand up, I am going to speak to you’ (Ezekiel 2.1). These issues take us way beyond bare feeling. Indeed, knowing Schleiermacher’s love of Spinoza, one might think that the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ is none other than the feeling that Spinoza’s metaphysics is true; that is a feeling that those of us who have read Spinoza sometimes have. But Spinoza would be the last person to think that such a feeling was evidence that his metaphysics was true.

The objection to Schleiermacher is not that he overstated the importance of emotion – that would be hard to do. It is that he understates the importance of belief in emotional life. In this respect he ought to be more Spinozist. Of course, while basing religion on emotion, he wrote a whole book on doctrine, and so can hardly mean to drive a wedge between emotion and belief. But as soon as it is admitted that emotions involve beliefs, it becomes possible to criticise those beliefs and hence those emotions on the basis of other beliefs, that is ‘faith’ becomes vulnerable to cognitive criticism and requires cognitive defence. The decision between one emotion and another rests on an input of beliefs.

And such is surely our experience with non-religious emotions: I am made sad by the death of my friend, angry by the government’s welfare cuts, and so on. Religious emotions are no different: one may hate God because one believes he is a merciless judge or love him because one believes he is a compassionate father or fear him because one believes he is a mighty ruler or feel totally indifferent to him because one believes he wound up the clock of the universe and left it to tick out unaided, or whatever.

So far, I have discussed ‘pure feeling’ without textual references, to show that it cannot do the job it is meant to do: if it stays as pure feeling, it gives us too little to be called religion, and if it gives us enough, it goes beyond feeling and makes truth claims about the world. However, I have mentioned Schleiermacher, and since he is one of the ‘greats’ of Protestant theology, and I may be thought to have been using him as a straw man, I shall now discuss one text by him, namely the second (and crucial) speech from his On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. (If my purpose were to assess Schleiermacher’s work as a whole, I would have to discuss On Christian Doctrine, too, and the question as to whether the same questions arise about that text is a complex one. But here I am using Schleiermacher only as an examplar of the theology of feeling, so one text that indisputably belongs to such theology is enough.)

I think it is striking that within a few pages of this speech he has passed from talking about pure experience (which I shall claim is religiously empty) to talking about recognisably religious experience (laden with beliefs); yet he is claiming both religious fullness and belieflessness for what he is talking about.

First, he excludes both metaphysics and morals from religion:

[Religion] does not wish to determine and explain the universe according to its nature as does metaphysics; it does not desire to continue the universe’s development and perfect it by the power of freedom and the divine free choice of a human being as does morals. Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling.

(p. 22)

I think he is using ‘intuition’ in the Kantian sense: not a mysterious source of knowledge, but sensation, the effect of the outside world upon us.

I entreat you to become familiar with this concept: intuition of the universe.

All intuition proceeds from an influence of the intuited on the one who intuits, from an original and independent action of the former, which is then grasped, apprehended, and conceived by the latter according to one’s own nature.

(pp. 24–5)

He is talking about a sense datum, or rather, since it is not some particular thing but the whole universe that is affecting one, The Sense Datum. It does not include belief:

what you thus intuit and perceive is not the nature of things, but their action upon you. What you know or believe about the nature of things lies far beyond the realm of intuition.

…to accept everything individual as part of the whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite is religion. But whatever would go beyond that and penetrate deeper into the nature and substance of the whole is no longer religion, and will, if it still wants to be regarded as such, inevitably sink back into empty mythology.

(p. 25)

Just as sense-datum theorists thought that it was rash to say ‘I saw a dog’ and wiser to say more modestly ‘I saw a canoid patch of colour’, so Schleiermacher is calling The Sense Datum ‘religious’, but any fuller account of the universe experienced ‘mythology’. So far, two comments are required.

(i) Only someone highly trained in abstraction can make the distinction between sense data and the ‘nature and substance’ of what we see and hear. People had been seeing dogs since the earliest human settlements, but no one before Bertrand Russell had ever spotted a canoid patch of colour. Is it not the same with The Sense Datum? Doubtless the whole universe is having effects on me, but if I attend to the experience of it, I am aware only of entities and laws of which I have concepts and about which I have beliefs.

(ii) Schleiermacher appears to be talking not about some special mystical experience distinct from all particular sensations, but about the experienced effect of the whole universe on one; the whole does not presumably affect us in any way distinct from the totality of effects of particulars; The Sense Datum presumably includes the particular sense data. Salient in my intuition of the universe as I write this are the sight of new-leaved trees in the park outside the window, the sound of a bus revving up, and the click clack of women’s shoes on the library floor behind me. But if The Sense Datum were just the sum of such things, it would hardly do the job that Schleiermacher gives it. The clue is in the phrase ‘to accept everything individual as a part of the whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite’: I may take the springing into leaf of the trees as a symbol of the fecundity of nature as a whole; but to do so is no longer a naïve intuition of the universe, but one which is informed by an acquired notion of symbolism. And concrete religions have definite doctrines about what symbolises what. The apparent neutrality of The Sense Datum between different systems of dogma, ritual and ethics is only apparent. Schleiermacher goes on to contrast in ancient Greek paganism the ‘religion’ in which

they intuited the ever-active, ever-living, and serene activity of the world and its spirit, beyond all change and all the apparent evil that only stems from the conflict of finite forms

with their ‘empty mythology’ in which they kept ‘a wondrous chronicle of the descent of these gods’.

But this is not a distinction between a belief-free intuition and beliefs, but between pantheistic and polytheistic beliefs.

Schleiermacher’s next step is to say that the intuition of the universe is inseparably connected with a feeling. However, this feeling will not lead to any particular action:

[religion’s] feelings are supposed to possess us, and we should express, maintain, and portray them.

But should you wish to go beyond that dimension with these feelings, should they cause actual actions and incite you to deeds, then you find yourself in an alien realm. If you still hold this to be religion, however rational and praiseworthy your action may appear, you are absorbed in an unholy superstition.

(pp. 29–30)

But surely there are three things which need to be said about feelings here. (i) They come in different kinds; one may intuit the universe with joy like Spinoza or with misery like the Buddha or with nausea like Sartre. (ii) They generally come with beliefs, and which belief determines which feeling. (iii) They generally give rise to action. One is tempted to paraphrase the Epistle of James and say to Schleiermacher ‘show me your feelings without your actions, and I will show you my feelings by my actions’.

Schleiermacher’s next step is to point out that our intuition of nature includes all sorts of learnt concepts; I couldn’t agree more, but he seems unaware that this is a radical departure from beliefless feeling.

Certainly a greater yield is vouchsafed to us who have been permitted by a richer age to penetrate deeper into nature’s interior. Its chemical powers, the eternal laws according to which bodies themselves are formed and destroyed, these are the phenomena in which we intuit the universe most clearly and in a most holy manner.

(p. 36)

This is good Spinozism: we intuit and love not just particular things but the laws of nature. But laws of nature are true – or rather putative laws of nature claim truth and are either true or false. Schleiermacher further says that ideas like individuality and oneness are derived not from nature but from mind (p. 37), and that it is primarily in humanity and in a beloved human individual, rather than in nature, that we find the ‘material for religion’ (pp. 37–8). Precisely, but here we are no longer talking about The Sense Datum, we are talking about knowledge – knowledge acquired through science and social intercourse and philosophical reflection – and feeling evoked by and attached to it. We are now enjoined to learn from others:

From these wanderings through the whole realm of humanity, religion then returns to one’s own self with sharpened meaning and better formed judgement.

(p. 41)

This feeling seems now to have acquired a practical goal too:

To join the different moments of humanity to one another and, from its succession, to divine the spirit in which the whole is directed, that is religion’s highest concern.

(p. 42)

The beliefless, unmotivating intuition of a few pages earlier has been left far behind – and rightly so, for it was an intuition experienced by no one about nothing. But in leaving it behind, he is entering the field of beliefs and practical goals, where he must choose some one religion among others, and contend against the doctrines of others. And indeed he does so:

there then appears to you the form of an eternal de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Faith without belief I: Religious feeling
• 2. Faith without belief II: Moral faith
• 3. Non-cognitive grounds for belief
• 4. The intelligibility of conversion
• 5. About knowledge in general
• 6. About religious knowledge
• 7. The content of Christian revelation
• 8. The knowledge of God as creator
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index