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Are Beliefs About God Theoretical Beliefs? Reflections on Aquinas and Kant

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

John O'Leary-Hawthorne  and
Daniel Howard-Snyder
John O'Leary-Hawthorne
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
Daniel Howard-Snyder
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, Washington 98119
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Abstract

The need to address our question arises from two sources, one in Kant and the other in a certain type of response to so-called Reformed epistemology. The first source consists in a tendency to distinguish theoretical beliefs from practical beliefs (commitments to the world's being a certain way versus commitments to certain pictures to live by), and to treat theistic belief as mere practical belief. We trace this tendency in Kant's corpus, and compare and contrast it with Aquinas's view and a more conservative Kantian view. We reject the theistic-belief-as-mere-practical-belief view: it is bad descriptive anthropology, it embraces a misguided ideal of a fragmented self unattainable by human beings, and it will deter people from the most desirable sort of faith. The second source consists in the idea that since theistic beliefs function as answers to why-questions, their epistemic status hangs on whether they meet certain distinctively explanatory standards, whatever support they might receive from other sources. We argue that this is a non-sequitur and suggest questions for further research.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 233 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

* On this and related matters, see, e.g., Alston's, William Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991)Google Scholar, and Pike's, NelsonMystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992).Google Scholar

1 Bernard Lonergan Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1967), p. 213.

2 We borrow this phrase from Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (London: Victor Gollancz, 1957), p. 255.

3 In Insight (Philosophical Library, New York, 1957), p. 609.

4 Critique of Practical Reason (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1956), edited by Lewis White Beck, p. 143.

5 Lectures on Philosophical Theology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), edited by Allen Wood, p. 123.

6 Ibid., p. 123.

7 Critique of Practical Reason, p. 143.

8 Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St. Martin's, 1965), translated by Norman Kemp Smith, B xxvi. Quotations in the text from the Critique of Pure Reason are from Kemp Smith's translation.

9 Quoted in Vaihinger, H., The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (London: Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1924), p. 301.Google Scholar

10 Quoted in Ibid., p. 302.

11 Quoted in Ibid., p. 303.

12 Quoted in Ibid., p. 305.

13 Quoted in Ibid., p. 306.

14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), edited by Eckhart Forster, p. 207.

15 Ibid., p. 250.

16 Ibid., p. 212.

17 See Wood's ‘Rational theology, moral faith and religion,’ The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge, 1992), edited by Paul Guyer, 404–405. Wood does not there make the point that we do, although he provides the rationale for it.

18 Our contention that there is a radical strain in Kant's writing about theistic belief will trouble those of his interpreters who rightly favor his conservative strain. Notably, in the latter part of this century, we think of Allen Wood. While we hold in high esteem Wood's exposition of Kant's views on religion, and while we heartily agree that the conservative Kant that Wood gives us is a more worthy philosopher to engage, we cannot agree with some of his early attempts to explain away the textual evidence for the radical Kant, some of which we have already marshalled. Contrast, for example, Wood's interpretive remarks on pages 148–49 of Kant's Moral Religion (Cornell, 1970) with the quotations above.

19 Ibid., p. 321.

20 Quoted in Vaihinger, Ibid., p. 322.

21 Ibid., p. 323.

22 Ibid., p. 324.

23 Ibid., p. 325.

24 An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1955).

25 After writing this paper, we were quite pleased to discover that in his recent Kant as Philosophical Theologian (Barnes & Noble, 1988), Bernhard M. G. Reardon agrees with us that Kant is the intellectual precursor of the non-cognitivist response to verificationism. See pp. 62–65.

26 Culture and Value, 28e.

27 Ibid. 30e.

28 Ibid. 32e.

29 Wittgenstein on Religious Belief, p. 57.

30 Religion Without Explanation, p. 36.

31 Ibid., pp. 28–29.

32 Ibid., p. 150.

33 Ibid., p. 181.

34 Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 1–2.

35 Ibid., p. 260.

36 This possibility was brought to our attention by Georges Rey.

37 To avoid unnecessary prolixity, we shall not keep qualifying everything we say to take account of double meaning doctrines: Lange will say, ‘but in a sense one will believe in the truth of Christianity, etc.’ Yes, of course Lange will say that.

38 Admittedly, only some sorts of God-related hopes presuppose the existence of God. If one hopes that God will save one, that presupposes His existence. If one hopes that there is a God who will save one, one is not thereby presupposing God's existence. But even the latter sort of hope requires belief in the real possibility of divine existence. Or so we contend. In both cases there is theoretical belief: in the first case, a theoretical belief that God will save one, and in the second case, a theoretical belief that there is a real possibility of salvation by God. The second sort of case allows a sort of faith which involves theoretical belief but rather less than forthright theoretical belief in the relevant religious propositions; nevertheless, it is a variety of faith that is certainly important. (For more on this latter point, see Robert Audi's discussion of ‘global faith’ in ‘The Dimensions of Faith and the Demands of Reason,’ in Reasoned Faith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), ed. Eleonore Stump.) But the second sort of cases does not allow for beliefs about God that are merely practical. (We are grateful to Paul Draper and those at St. Joseph's University who helped us see the need to address this issue.)

39 The rationale for the qualification is this: Suppose you stopped believing that there is a chair in front of you on the basis of your sensory experience, and really switched to believing it on the basis of the fact that the chair-hypothesis best explained the appearances. Then, if the chair-hypothesis failed to be the best explanation, your belief would not have the epistemic status it would have had if you had not switched grounds.

40 We would like to thank Felicity McCutcheon for suggestions and helpful discussion. This paper was supported, in part, by a Faculty Research Grant from Seattle Pacific University, 1994.