Theories and Beliefs

Extract

In an essay entitled “The Scepticism of Believers,” Leslie Stephen remarks a common confusion between unbelief and contrary belief. The term “belief” is at any historical moment almost invariably used to denote the established belief, that is, the belief supported by authority or by the consensus of opinion; while the term “unbelief” is used to denote dissent from the established belief, even when, as is most often the case, this dissent is itself due to belief. The established belief resists change, and must be attacked, weakened, or destroyed, before it is possible for another belief to get a hearing; hence assenters come to regard dissenters as destructive in their primary intent, and are blinded to the fact that there is another belief at stake, which may be as affirmative and constructive in its own terms as that which prevails. Thus modern religious orthodoxy has condemned as unbelief a certain secular tendency, which really has arisen, not from a love of mischief-making, but from a most devoted confidence in the uniformity of nature, and in the power of man to save himself. It is not wholly unjust to assert, as Leslie Stephen does assert, that, in opposing the free advance of science and of individualism, defenders of “the Faith” have virtually sought to prevent or destroy that faith in the enterprise of civilization which has mainly inspired the progress of the last two centuries.