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Kierkegaardian Suspicion and Properly Basic Beliefs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Clifford Williams
Clifford Williams
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois60015-1284
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Extract

It is a commonplace that Kierkegaard believed Christians should adopt a stance of suspicion toward their beliefs. What appear to be genuine Christian beliefs may, he thought, really be spurious, not by virtue of being false, but by virtue of arising in illegitimate ways. Kierkegaard's works are replete with descriptions of these illegitimate ways – the psychological and sociological conditions that produce what people mistakenly take to be genuine Christian beliefs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , September 1994 , pp. 261 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Plantinga, Alvin, ‘Reason and Belief in God,’ in Alvin, Plantinga and Nicholas, Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and Rationality (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 78–80.Google Scholar

2 Plantinga, p. 80.

3 Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (Harper, 1956), Chapters 4 and 6.

4 It must not be supposed that Kierkegaard believes that all group-supported belief is spurious or that groups play no legitimate role in nurturing belief, even though he sometimes talks in these ways. His claim that one must be an individual in order to be a Christian means only that one does not become a Christian via a responsibility-escaping identification with a group; it allows for true, i.e. Kierkegaardian, individuals to form groups in order to sustain each other's individuality.

5 Edwards, Jonathan writes, ‘There is sometimes a very great similitude between true and false experiences, in their appearance, and in what is expressed and related by the subjects of them.’ Religious Affections (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 151.Google Scholar

6 I assume here that we actually can detect phenomenological differences between spurious and genuine beliefs, and not just that we think we can. Although this assumption needs justification, it does not beg any questions so far as Reformed epistemology is concerned. It is, moreover, shared by many defenders and critics of religious belief, is operative in psychoanalysis and other kinds of therapy, and often plays a role in everyday conversation (‘You just think you aren't angry, but you really are’). Justifying it, i.e. providing an epistemology of internal belief, though important – and currently lacking in philosophical literature – is both unneeded (since Reformed epistemologists accept it) and too large an undertaking for this article.

7 Edwards, , Religious Affections, p. 159.Google Scholar

8 Wykstra, Stephen J., ‘Toward a Sensible Evidentialism: On the Notion of “Needing Evidence”,’ in Rowe, William L. and Wainwright, William J., eds., Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, second edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), p. 437.Google Scholar