Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

50 J.J.C. Smart
take. So despite his reservation about Pascal his own attitude was not really so
different. Indeed James held that if we take the leap of faith belief will follow.
(Or indeed not so much follow as be there already, given James’s largely
behaviourist theory of belief.) It may be that James’s pragmatism was a source
of his view in ‘The Will to Believe’ since the notion of working in practice in
the sense of leading to a worthwhile life could easily have been confused in
his mind with verification of a hypothesis by observation. Explicitly, I think,
he did distinguish the two things but even within this one essay he was not
always a very self-consistent writer, and this makes him hard to interpret. His
views are probably not as outrageous as a superficial account of them might
suggest. Be that as it may, his ‘Will to Believe’ does suggest something like
the decision to brainwash oneself.
Religious apologists do sometimes defend a leap of faith by saying that
science itself depends on a giant leap of faith. They might point out that
since Hume raised the philosophical problem of induction it has appeared
that we have no reason to believe that the future will be like the past. According
to Hume laws of nature are mere regularities whose continuance in the
future cannot be justified by reason. Nowadays we might put it by saying
that hypotheses are always underdetermined by observation. The apologists
could seek a similarity between attempted pragmatic justifications of induction
(or scientific method) and the religious pragmatism of William James.
These attempt to show that if any method of predicting the future works
then induction (the scientific method) works. (Of course science is concerned
not only with prediction but with explanation and with theoretical knowledge,
and there is a question of whether the pragmatic vindication of induction
could be taken beyond vindicating it as a mere prediction device.) There
does nevertheless seem to be an important difference. Many people have no
difficulty in living without religious belief but no philosophical sceptic about
induction could continue to live if he or she really believed this scepticism.
The spectacular advances of science, and its applications to technology and to
medicine, would seem to me to make impossible a really sincere philosophical
scepticism about scientific method. Even fundamentalist Protestant sects in
the USA who promulgate a two-thousand-year-old view of the universe do
so unblushingly with the aid of modern electronics of radio and television
and their medical missionaries make use of the most sophisticated biological
techniques of contemporary medicine. The religious leap of faith is therefore
a leap additional to that of the scientist, not an alternative to it. I conjecture
that the sort of religious apologist that I am considering here would have to
be an instrumentalist in the philosophy of science, and a realist in theology.
It is an uncomfortable position. By contrast an atheist who was a scientific
realist need not be an instrumentalist about theological statements: he or she
might simply give them the truth value ‘false’.