Abstract
Cockayne and Warman recently argued that William James’s argument as stated in his lecture ‘The Will to Believe’ can be reconstructed so as to justify a ‘passionately caused atheism.’ I will argue that this reading misses the important point of James’s argument, which is the attempt to show that our initial atheistic passional tendencies become untenable once we are aware of the beneficial consequences we might obtain from forming the belief that God exists.
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Notes
It is true that in some of his texts, James displayed something of an ambiguous opinion regarding immortality. Thus, in his lecture Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (1897), James said of himself that he was not ‘known as an enthusiastic messenger of the future life’ (James 1897 [1982], 78), while also claiming that ‘Immortality is one of the great spiritual needs of man’ (James 1897 [1982], 77) and devoting the entire lecture to defending the coherency of immortality, even accepting the brain-dependence of the mind. Similarly, in his The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), James claimed that ‘The whole interest of the question of God’s existence seems to me to lie in the consequences for particulars which that existence may be expected to entail. ... The difference in natural “fact” which most of us would assign as the first difference which the existence of God ought to make would, I imagine, be personal immortality. Religion, in fact, for the great majority of our own race means immortality, and nothing else. God is the producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written down as an atheist without farther trial’ (James 1902 [2002], 403–404). However, James added that the question of immortality was ‘a secondary point’ regarding the themes discussed in The Varieties of Religious Experience (James 1902 [2002], 404), while also expressing his sympathy towards the possibility of immortality, even when refraining from conclusively affirming human immortality given the lack of sufficient factual evidence for its support (i.e., ‘Yet I sympathize with the urgent impulse to be present ourselves, and in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them noble, I know not how to decide. It seems to me that it is emminently a case for facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove “spirit-return” ... I consequently leave the matter open, with this brief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why immortality got no mention in the body of this book’ (James 1902 [2002], 404)). Less ambiguous was James in 1904, when he recognized that he had ‘never keenly’ believed in personal immortality, although he confessed that he had come to believe in it ‘more strongly as I grow older. ... Because I am just getting fit to live’ (James 1904 [1920], 214). James, then, showed some resistance to fully endorsing the belief that we will, in fact, enjoy some kind of personal immortality. However, as the previous quotes show, the reason why James does not conclusively affirm human immortality relies exclusively on evidential terms, because he had not found conclusive and indisputable evidence that such a thing was actually going to occur. The point to emphasize is, then, that James did not deny the possibility of human immortality and, most importantly, he did not question its pragmatic value and therefore its role in making theism the only attractive option to us.
References
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Oya, A. On Jamesian ‘Passionally Caused Atheistic Belief’: a Reply to Cockayne and Warman. SOPHIA 60, 481–485 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00832-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00832-w