Terence Penelhum, Reason and Religious Faith Pp. 166.
(Colorado and
Cumnor Hill: Westview Press (Focus Series), 1996.) £32.50 hb, £10.95
pb.
A little boy at Sunday School once defined ‘faith’ as
‘believing firmly what
you know isn't true’. The religious believer does
not normally take himself
to be in quite that desperate epistemic plight, even if he accepts Tertullian's
motto credo quia absurdum. All the same, an uncomfortable tension
is apt to
appear between his religious beliefs and their rationality, and his other
beliefs
and their rationality. Like this: if ‘God exists’
seems or feels true, nonetheless
it does not feel true in the same way that ‘There are
nine planets in the solar
system’ feels true. There are at least five contrasts. First,
that there are nine
planets in the solar system is not a belief that any sensible person will
ever
feel great fervour about (outside such improbable scenarios as those where
they are struggling to resist being brainwashed by the Flat Earth Society).
Second, it is immediately clear how the belief about the planets might
be
shown to be false. Third, no one is accounted morally praiseworthy for
believing that there are nine planets in the solar system; that belief
is even
epistemically praiseworthy only in a very minimal sense. Nor (fourth) is
someone worthy of moral blame, exactly, if they don't
believe that there are
nine planets – unless perhaps they refuse to
believe it in the teeth of clear
evidence. By contrast (a fifth point) some have apparently thought that
praiseworthiness or importance of believing in God's existence is
not only not
dependent on the evidence, but actually inversely proportional to it.