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Belief and Will Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Robert Holyer
Robert Holyer
Affiliation:
Converse College, Spartanburg, SC
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Extract

The relation of will to belief is an issue of perennial philosophical and religious interest. Most of the classical accounts of religious belief, both ancient and modern, have accorded the will an important, if not the decisive, role. In the philosophy of mind, the issue has traditionally been one of the major dividing lines, some philosophers arguing a position near that of Descartes, that the will is a constituent element of belief, others siding with Spinoza and Hume, arguing that it is not. But what really is the issue? Much recent discussion of belief and will has been devoted to the question whether we can believe at will apart from any sort of evidence—what has been called belief by fiat. While it may be that this is the most natural interpretation of the claim that belief is based on will, it is certainly not the only one. What is more, most of those who have argued for the importance of the will in belief have never really asserted it. No doubt, one can glean statements from their writings that seem to suggest it; but with due allowance for rhetorical excess, a careful reading of their positions will, I think, show that they were really dealing with other issues. What I hope to accomplish in raising again the issue of will and belief is to advance and defend a set of claims that gets at these other issues. Throughout, my concern will be primarily with religious beliefs, and this not simply out of personal and professional interest, but because the issues I want to discuss arise more clearly (though by no means exclusively) in relation to beliefs of this sort.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , June 1983 , pp. 273 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1983

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References

1 Many of these accounts are mentioned by Pojman, Louis in “Belief and Will”, Religious Studies 14 (1978), 1–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a more extended discussion of some of them, see Hick, John, Faith and Knowledge (London, 1957), 45–69.Google Scholar

2 Price, H. H., “Belief and Will”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 28 (1954), 20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Ibid.; Evans, J. L., “Error and the Will”, Philosophy 38 (1963), 136–148CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Bernard, “Deciding to Believe”, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge, 1973), 136–151CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grant, Brian, “Descartes, Belief and the Will”, Philosophy 51 (1976), 401–419CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pojman, , “Belief and Will”Google Scholar; and Classen, H. G., “Will, Belief and Knowledge”, Dialogue 18 (1979), 64–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Evans, , “Error and the Will”, 145Google Scholar; and Classen, , “Will, Belief and Knowledge”, 67.Google Scholar

5 O'Hear, Anthony, “Belief and the Will”, Philosophy 48 (1972), 95–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Govier, Trudy, “Belief, Values, and the Will”, Dialogue 15 (1976), 642–663.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Classen, , “Will, Belief and Knowledge”, 71.Google Scholar

7 O'Hear, , “Belief and the Will”, 109.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 108–109.

9 Ibid., 104.

10 An interesting example of this from the literature of religious belief is the first of Lewis, C. S.' Screwtape Letters (London, 1942).Google Scholar

11 Classen, , “Will, Belief and Knowledge”, 68.Google Scholar

12 Pojman, , “Belief and Will”, 7.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 9.

14 Price, , “Belief and Will”, 13.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 17–18.

16 Ibid., 13.

17 Ibid., 17.

18 Wisdom, John, “Gods”, in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Oxford, 1969), 157.Google Scholar

19 Hick, , Faith and Knowledge, 138.Google Scholar

20 Ibid.

21 Wisdom, , “Gods”Google Scholar; Hick, , Faith and Knowledge, 134–163Google Scholar; Mitchell, Basil, The Justification of Religious Belief (London, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and later in “Faith and Reason: A false Antithesis?,”, Religious Studies 16 (1980), 131–144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Of course, “evidence” has been defined to include intuition, as Pojman does (“Belief and Will”, 7–8). Although in another context I might happily agree with him, I use the term here to exclude intuition, and this to avoid the misleading suggestion that the logic of intuitive beliefs is exactly that of factual or empirical beliefs.

23 Evans, , “Error and the Will”, 145.Google Scholar

24 Pojman is one of the few that discusses intuitive beliefs, but his analysis is most puzzling. He accepts “fundamental intuitions” as the “foundation beliefs of our noetic structure” (“Belief and Will”, 8), but passes over them without even considering whether they are chosen in some sense. He then turns to a discussion of “non-fundamental intuitions” or intuitive beliefs for which there is some independent inductive evidence, claiming that religious intuitions and Pascal's reasons of the heart are of this sort! Not only is it difficult to understand how there could be inductive support fora number of religious intuitions, especially for Pascal's reasons of the heart; it is not at all clear why our ability to heed or deny our intuitions is not a directly volitional element of belief. Pojman clearly states that human beings have this ability, but claims that “although the person who follows his intuitions may will to exalt the intuitions as the highest source of evidence in certain areas of life, he does not will to believe any specific proposition (not directly, that is)” (ibid., 9). But if this willing to exalt our intuitions is a choice we have, I fail to see why, if we exercise it in specific situations, we are not choosing to believe.

25 Braithwaite, R. B., “An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief”, in Ramsey, I. T., ed., Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy (New York, 1966), 53–94.Google Scholar

26 Hare, R. M., “Theology and Falsification”, in Flew, Antony and MacIntyre, Alasdair, eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London, 1955), 99–103Google Scholar; and more fully in “The Simple Believer”, in Outka, Gene and Reader, John P. Jr., eds., Religion and Morality (Garden City, NY, 1973), 393–427.Google Scholar

27 “The Will to Believe”, in The Will to Believe and Other Essays (New York, 1956), 1–31.Google Scholar

28 Pojman, , “Belief and Will”, 10.Google Scholar

29 Grant allows that “my wants can play a direct role [in belief] … only if I think that there is (inductive) evidence linking my wanting to believe the claim with its being true” (“Descartes, Belief and the Will”, 415). What I am arguing is that there is another possibility which he failed to consider.