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Excerpt from my Dissertation : Constructive Skepticism, Critical Thinking and the Ethics of Belief (Chapter 3, Sec 1-3) Ó 1994 University of British Columbia

3.1 The Concept of Belief

Belief is not an activity, but a cognitive state of mind. Some beliefs are mutable, while others endure. It is not an affective state like an emotion or desire, but a disposition to respond or act in certain ways when the appropriate situation arises.[1] Many people are disposed to credulity, a tendency to be easily deceived and to accept propositions too readily or on weak or insufficient evidence. Credulity is a second-order disposition about how we arrive at beliefs and is a disposition that can lead to subjectivity.  Credulity is displayed in unqualified assent to propositions or belief in propositions that are not sufficiently grounded to justify belief in them. Credulity may be a function of a natural ignorance or an uncritical insensitivity in assessing evidence. It may result from a readiness to accept the prescriptions of authority or pre-eminence, submissive or acquiescent personality or mental self-manipulation, self-indulgence or intellectual sentimentality.               

We often try to convince people to believe things ("Believe in God and you will have everlasting life.") or implore them not to ("How can you believe in astrology?"), and although believing would hardly make sense if it were not a matter of decision, it cannot be construed as an action. It is characteristic of both believing and actions that they can be easy or hard and that we provide reasons for them. But if believing was an activity or exercise, when it ceased to occur we would stop believing. For example it makes sense to say that "I will play tennis, but not right now" but it does not make sense to say "I will believe that Clyde won the match, but not right now".                                     

It is generally accepted that believing is easy, and knowing is hard. It takes something more to know because knowledge requires, besides mere belief, some reliable coordination of internal belief with external reality. If one takes no thought for whether a belief is true or false, reliable or unreliable, then believing itself is simply an arbitrary game with no rules - a sort of mental helter skelter. Knowing is hard, but the cognitive demands of believing should not be child's play either. To speak of simply deciding to believe something, independently of any reasons real or imagined, is to stretch the notion of "belief" beyond belief. After all, is not care in managing our beliefs exactly what the study of reasoning and philosophy is supposed to teach us? Suppose, for example, the richest man in the world will grant you a billion dollars if you believe in the Tooth Fairy and disbelieve in gravitation. Also, suppose that this rich man has special telepathic powers in which he can decipher the contents of your mind and ascertain what you "really" believe. Is it possible for belief to be an act of the will in this way? I do not think so. To believe in the Tooth Fairy and reject gravitational theory, a person is going to have to make serious modifications to the remainder of his belief system and come to believe a whole range of other propositions that will become epistemically irrational for him. The nature of belief prevents this since belief surely cannot be a simple non-epistemic act of the will, although those who speak of a “leap of faith” reject this hypothesis                                            

 Is it then possible for us to believe something while holding there is no more reason to believe it than its contrary? Is the notion of a leap of faith psychologically intelligible at all? These are difficult questions. Moreover, since a leap of faith can be made to any one of an infinite number of metaphysical positions and world-views, what criteria are to be used in the process of selection? The notion, recurrent in Kierkegaard’s writings on Christianity, for example, that belief is subject to the will is a highly problematic one in philosophy, and is plagued by ambiguities. We can surely decide to act as if we believed a particular proposition to be true, leaving the matter of its actual truth-value, provisionally at least, undetermined. This is clear enough and can often be allowed to occur. Kierkegaard seemed to suggest, as did Pascal, that personal involvement, commitment and perseverance in action would have the consequence that a person will eventually come to believe the proposition in fact and not merely hypothetically. What is less likely is that we can, consciously and directly, set ourselves to believe something tout court, irrespective of any grounds we might have for supposing it to be true and even perhaps in the face of what we see to be overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Moreover, these difficulties are exacerbated if what we are asked to believe is stated to be inherently paradoxical - not only lacking in objective foundation, but intrinsically offensive from a rational standpoint. In what sense can I undertake to believe something that I recognize to be inconsistent, self-contradictory, opaque, contrary to experience or literally unthinkable? But this, it would seem, is the essence of Kierkegaard’s thesis - the very intelligibility of the claim that one can believe what one at the same time recognizes to be necessarily or demonstrably false.[2] Many beliefs and belief systems cannot in fact be epistemically justified since they are culturally inculcated conditioned responses and a function of habit, or perhaps the product of a doctrinaire upbringing. It is no coincidence that out of all the belief systems and world-views, the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents or society adhere to rather than the belief system that is the most coherent and plausible, has the most evidential support, the most equitable moral code, the best miracles, and so on.                         

It could be argued, however, that all beliefs grounded in authority are to some extent a function of "faith," particularly if there is some element of risk in acting on those beliefs or putting them into practice. For example, it would seem odd to say that one has faith that  "2+3=3+2" or that "the sun will rise tomorrow" but quite sensible to say "I have faith in Allah and the tenets of the Koran." Faith is, it would appear; a species of belief and it makes sense to speak of a credulous or "blind" faith (e.g., "The Lord will provide" or "My Country, right or wrong") and a rational faith (e.g., "I have faith in my physician's diagnosis of a peptic ulcer"). "Blind faith" can justify anything but "rational faith", or perhaps "trust" would be a better word, must have some significant degree of evidential support. To use faith as if it were an alternative way to the truth cannot bypass the crucial question of whether such results really have any likelihood of being true.[3]

3.2 Belief and Truth                                                    

                Belief is not independent of truth since: (1) what is believed must either be true or false (since the formal object of belief is always a proposition), and (2) what is believed, even if it happens to be false, is believed to be true. If we value the truth, then "psychological" assent to a proposition, without a commitment to determining whether or not it is true, comes at a heavy cost to intellectual integrity. Intellectual integrity requires that one be on guard against what he wishes to be true and to pursue an argument even if it leads to conclusions that are judged to be regrettable. For example, some, despite the strong arguments in its favor, that materialism is false, may desire it. I have also suggested in the previous section that the concept of belief as construed as an act of the will is problematic. If the object of belief is truth, then

                                If I could acquire a belief at will, I could not acquire it not knowing whether it was true or not; moreover I would know that I could acquire it whether it was true or not. If in full consciousness I could will to acquire a "belief" irrespective of its truth, it is unclear that before the event I could seriously think of it as a belief, i.e., something purporting to represent reality.[4]

                It could be said that an increase or decrease in knowledge is an increase or decrease in its extent, whereas sometimes an increase or decrease in a belief is an increase or decrease in its intensity. But the intensity of a belief cannot be counted on to reflect its supporting evidence any more than its causes can.[5] One obvious test of evidence is this: "would it still be taken to support the belief if we stripped away all motives for wanting the belief to be true?"[6] As Clifford has stated

                                The fact that believers have found joy and peace in believing gives us the right to say that the doctrine is a comfortable doctrine, and pleasant to the soul; but it does not give us the right to say that it is true. And the question that our conscience is always asking about that which we are tempted to believe is not, "Is it comfortable and pleasant?" but, "Is it true?"[7]

                Many beliefs are, of course, a function of a process of rationalization, wishful thinking or self-deception and it remains an open question as to whether all those processes are morally wrong. Nevertheless, "to maintain any belief while dismissing, or refusing to give due weight to, reasonable and relevant objections, is to show that you are more concerned to maintain that belief than really to know whether it or some other is, after all, true."[8] As I have pointed out earlier, there is a strong inclination, particularly among adults, to believe what they want to believe, to see what they want to see, conclude what they expect to conclude and to ignore or discount disconfirmatory evidence. A person's motivations influence his beliefs via the subtle ways he chooses a comforting pattern from the fabric of evidence. A person's preferences influence not only the kind of evidence he considers, but also the amount he examines. When the initial evidence supports an individual's preferences, he becomes self-satisfied and terminates the inquiry. Conversely, when the initial evidence is unfavorable, he resumes his search for confirmatory evidence to reveal reasons to believe that the original evidence was faulty. For example, when Jane loses 6-1, 6-0 to Joan in tennis, rather than accepting the rather clear evidence of her deficiencies as a tennis player, she will attempt to account for the loss by searching for further "evidence" such as problems with the tension of the string, external distractions, her biorhythm and so on.

3.3 Belief, Faith and Pascal's Wager

Religious faith, which H.L. Mencken glibly defined to be "the illogical belief in the highly improbable" and which Nietzsche defined as "not wanting to know what is true,"[9] is relevant to the present discussion. A colleague recently tried to convince me of the belief in the existence of the Christian God by arguing that "you can't prove that God does not exist"[10] and explained why this particular belief is a "no lose" situation. I countered by stating that the burden of proof for exceptional claims such as the existence of God rests with the believer and quoted T.H. Huxley's well known axiom: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and "the more a fact conflicts with previous experience, the more complete must be the evidence which is to justify one's belief in it." Moreover, when there is no good reason for thinking a claim to be true, that in itself is good reason for thinking the claim to be false and, accordingly, a proof of  X's non-existence usually derives from the fact that there is no good reason for supposing that X does exist. Michael Scriven subscribes to this view when he states that "the proper alternative, when there is no evidence, is not mere suspension of belief: it is disbelief."[11] In bringing this maxim to bear on theism, Scriven goes on to say that "atheism is obligatory in the absence of evidence of God's existence."[12] If epistemically null conditions could obtain for any proposition p and its denial ~p, then it seems we would be forced to disbelieve p, thereby believing ~p, and to disbelieve ~p, thereby believing p. But this is absurd, so epistemically null conditions cannot obtain both for a proposition and its denial. The absence of a positive epistemic consideration in favor of p will just be a positive epistemic consideration in favor of ~p, and vice versa.    

I stated further that, in my opinion, Pascal's notorious wager[13] and William James "Will to Believe" are strange distortions of the notion of belief, my colleague responded by saying that he was familiar with neither Pascal nor James. I explained Pascal's wager and argued that, since there is little or no evidence for the existence of God and rational people harbor reasonable doubts about it, surely a just God who values rationality would not punish people for being reasonable. In fact, He might even reward the skeptics for their independent habits of thought and punish believers for their credulity. In other words, there might be a god who looked with more favor on honest doubters and atheists who, in Hume's words, proportioned their belief to the evidence, than on mercenary manipulators of their own understandings. Indeed, this would follow from the ascription to God of moral goodness in any sense that we can understand. The sort of god required for Pascal is modeled upon a monarch stupid enough and vain enough to be pleased with self-interested flattery. We are, in effect, back with the god of the Book of Job, and, whatever we may think of Job himself, there can be no doubt that Jehovah comes out of that story very badly. Moreover, it never seems to be thought that since God has made us flawed in so many ways, He might also have seriously limited our capacity to find out precisely what He wants us to do.[14]                                     

A further quite obvious objection to Pascal's wager is the problem of numerous different versions of theism, many of which promise eternal bliss, all vying for credence. It is even logically possible that there exists a being who promises infinite eternal reward to all and only those who deny the existence of other claimants to worship, including the Christian God, yielding a dilemma equivalent to a practical contradiction: a rational person both ought and ought not to bet on, say, the Christian God. Perhaps the biggest reason why Pascal's wager is a failure is that if God is omniscient he will certainly know who really believes and who believes on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. He will spurn the latter - assuming He actually cares at all whether people believe in Him. And finally, it would seem that a fair and just God would judge people on their actions in life and not whether they happen to believe in Him.

                Pascal's wager could at most give us only psychological reasons (motives) for wishing that we believed or could believe. What we lack are good reasons (grounds) for having this kind of faith. The postulation of a Supreme Being has, ever since I was a youngster, seemed to me "throwing in the towel", a refusal to take complex problems seriously - a facile, groundless and evasive response to deeply disturbing difficulties. It welcomes the self-comforting delusion that we know what we do not know, and have answers that we do not have, thereby denying the true humility of awe, wonder, mysteriousness, and perhaps, inexplicability of what is. By sheer chance I had what I perceive to be the good fortune to arrive at these conclusions early in life when I became aware of the contradictions between my experiences and what I was told at Sunday school. One example of this was the result of my dear  mother's efforts to comfort me following the death of my dog Rusty who died after being struck by an automobile. My mother, in her efforts to console, assured me that I would eventually meet Rusty again in Heaven. But later at Sunday school I was informed that dogs do not have "souls" and consequently will not enjoy an afterlife. I did not find my mother's explanation comforting nor convincing and I have since been highly suspicious of facile explanations and solutions to difficult questions. The efforts of my mother and my teachers to answer my pressing metaphysical queries were not successful, and I could not understand why so many other students were not interested in these deep existential questions that seemed so important to me, and appeared to have no easy answers. Hence, if beliefs persist and there are no reasons for holding them, we should look for causes -  look what makes people believe as they do. Belief in God is irrational - perhaps absurd - but, as Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Santayana and Freud have shown, the psychological need for this construct of the human heart is so great, that in cultures like ours many people must believe in spite of the manifest absurdity of their belief. They can accept and see the absurdity in the religious beliefs of primitive tribes and ancient cultures and sometimes, as with Kierkegaard and Pascal, they can partially see it and accept it in their own culture, but the acceptance is not unequivocal and the full absurdity of their own belief remains hidden from them.

                Bertrand Russell was highly critical of pragmatic devices like Pascal's wager, asserting

                                The true precept of veracity, which includes both the pursuit of truth and the avoidance of error, is this: "We ought to give every proposition which we consider as nearly possible that degree of credence which is warranted by the probability it acquires from the evidence known to us. The further questions, what propositions to consider, and how much trouble to take to acquire knowledge of the evidence, depend of course upon our circumstances and the importance of the issue. But to go about the world believing everything in the hope that thereby we shall believe as much truth as possible is like practicing polygamy in the hope that among so many we shall find someone who will make us happy.[15]

                I am inclined to think that Pascal's advice carries with it a large dose of intellectual dishonesty and self-deception. William James, as we shall soon see, appears to advocate the same thing. Brand Blanshard attacks this Pascalian/Jamesian pragmatic defense of religious claims:

                                ...the only evidence that is relevant to the truth of a belief is evidence that is logically relevant... James was thus left in the uneasy position of saying that we were justified morally in accepting what we were clearly not justified in accepting logically; I say uneasy because if we know that we are not logically justified, to say that we are morally justified is to warrant an attempt at self-deception.[16]

Hence, what ought not to be allowed, if rational belief is to be objective, is that it be dependent on the particular value judgments or motives of the believer or on the kind of application or consequences the belief is going to have.                          

            Beliefs are, in many respects, like possessions. An individual acquires material goods because of the satisfaction they provide and one often feels inclined to purchase and retain beliefs in a like manner.[17] This similarity is captured in our language by people referring to beliefs as being "adopted", "inherited", "acquired", "held", "maintained", "lost", and "abandoned." However, in the market­place of beliefs one must be an astute and discriminating shopper. There are many things one is enticed to believe, and to do so would often be comforting and agreeable. The will to believe in ESP, for example,[18] is likely motivated by the fact that it entails several other comforting corollaries and opens up many inviting prospects such as the prospect of an "afterlife." There are many beliefs to be purchased at bargain-basement prices; but in acquiring some of these consolatory beliefs, one pays a high price in rationality and intellectual sincerity. There are many things we would like to believe but reality gets in the way. Furthermore, many people tend to be quite protective and tenacious about their beliefs and become overly sensitive and defensive when their beliefs are challenged and exposed to intellectual scrutiny and criticism. Others, aware of this neuroticism, are reluctant to openly question the beliefs of another, particularly those beliefs that lack substantial evidential support such as political and religious creeds. Many people of course try to avoid potential conflict with others and often feign agreement with the claims of others in order to "play ball" or to avoid being branded by the "group" as offensive, negative, unfriendly, or hostile. The hidden assumption in statements such as "I trust you won't mind if I'm perfectly frank" is usually false when it comes to criticism of another's cherished beliefs. Moreover, with the notion of "political correctness" seemingly dominating and restricting present day rational discourse, many topics such as religious and ethnic beliefs have become societal sacred cows. For example, many skeptics consider it dangerous politically or socially to apply their critical thinking to scriptural claims. The plight of Salman Rushdie is ample evidence of the paranoia that presently exists, and probably always has existed, in religious communities.

                Returning to Pascal, it would seem that with his infamous wager he was employing the “Principle of Insufficient Reason” which John Maynard Keynes, in his Treatise on Probability, renamed the “Principle of Indifference”. The principle can be stated as follows: If a person has no good reason for supposing a proposition to be true or false, then he assigns even odds to the probability of both truth and falsity. The principle has had a long notorious history having been applied is such disparate fields as science,[19] statistics, economics, philosophy, ethics and psychic research. Unfortunately, its application often leads to absurdities and paradoxes, if not wholesale logical contradictions. If one assumes that Pascal believed the odds of both the Christian God existing and the Christian God not existing to be even[20], one can easily see how it can lead to inconsistencies.

                To illustrate the problematic nature of the principle, consider the following. All theistic religions make claims about the existence of their God or Gods. Now, there have been a multitude of theistic claims throughout history and it is estimated that there are in the order of 200 theistic religions in the world today. In one of his well-known satirical essays, Memorial Service (1922), H.L. Mencken lists approximately 100 Gods that are no longer with us because of the dissolution of the cultures that believed in them. As Mencken proclaims in his closing statement of the essay, “They were all gods of the highest dignity - gods of civilized people - worshipped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.”[21] All these theistic religions claimed exclusivity; that is, their God is the one and only God. Now, if the probability of the Christian God’s existence is .5, the probability of the Muslim God’s existence is .5, the probability of the Jewish God’s existence is .5, and so on, one can calculate the following: The probability of the Christian God’s existence is (.5)ⁿ, where n represents the number of religions making exclusive claims to a deity, the probability of the Christian God existing is .5, and the probability of all the other God’s not existing are .5 respectively. But the probability of the Christian God existing or the probability of the Christian God not existing must equal 1, an obvious contradiction since (.5)ⁿ + .5 = 1 if and only if n = 1.

                It might be argued, in defense of Pascal, that he was actually following a course recognized as valid in the theory of utility in Decision Theory (i.­e., Expected utility = p(outcome) x value(of outcome). The only unresolved issue is the fact that here Pascal uses infinity as a multiplier (i­.e., "degree of happiness" = (infinite happiness in heaven), but  p(of this bliss) = 1/n (as n  ®  ¥), since, based upon subjective empirical probabilities concerning God's existence, it would be reasonable to assign a probability near zero to this event. Such relationships are considered acceptable in Decision theory. There is, however, some serious question about the use of probability assignments at all. It seems clear to me that the only interpretation of probability relevant and useable here is the subjective one; yet how are even subjective probability assignments supposed to arise out of the mere insistence that theism is not demonstrably impossible? Its mere possibility need not be taken to endow it with any positive probability at all. Even if it could be argued that theism and atheism are in approximate epistemic parity, no decision between them can be made on purely epistemic grounds and some form of agnosticism would seem to be the appropriate doxastic stance if no considerations other than purely epistemic ones could or should enter into such decisions.[22] It should also be pointed out that Decision Theory by itself is an instrumental theory of best action, not of rational action. For those who are intellectually honest, belief is based upon evidence and plausibility, not upon the power of the will or cost-benefit analysis. Moreover, is it not irrational to gamble on an infinitesimal probability, even though the stakes are high? Purchasing a Lotto Canada ticket when the odds of winning anything of significance are in the order of fourteen million to one is a case in point. 

References:    Abelson, R.P. (1986) "Beliefs are like Possessions." Journal for The Theory of Social Behaviour, vol. 16, pp. 222-250.  

                                Blanshard, Brand (1974) Reason and Belief. London: Allen & Unwin.    

                               Clifford, W.K. (1877) Lectures and Essays,Vol 2, eds. L. Stephen & F. Pollock,  London: MacMillan, 1901

                               Flew, Antony (1975) Thinking About Thinking, London: Fontana/Collins 

                               Flew, Antony (1982) "A Strong Program for the Sociology of Belief." Inquiry, vol. 25, pp. 365-385

                                Kaufman, Walter (1961) Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday

                                Martin, Robert M. (1992) There are Two Errors.... Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press.

                                Mencken, H. L. (1982)  A Mencken Chrestomathy. New York: Vintage Books