Incompatibility with fideism

What cannot, however, by any means be squared with agnosticism in Huxley’s sense are attempts to transmute the very limitations of human knowledge into grounds for accepting some wholly unevidenced faith. Such transmutations have been made in the interests of many mutually irreconcilable systems, and they apparently remain perennially attractive to thinkers with a different understanding of the ethics of belief.

St. Augustine of Hippo, near the end of the 5th century, felt the challenge of classical skepticism in Cicero’s Academica and De natura deorum (“On the Nature of the Gods”) and gave his response in Contra academicos (“Against the Academics”). Skepticism, he thought, can be overcome only by revelation. The orthodox Muslim philosopher and mystic al-Ghazālī (late 11th century) deployed skeptical arguments similarly, as a propaedeutic, or study preparatory to the acceptance of his rival revelation. With the rediscovery in the 16th century of the works of Sextus Empiricus, a course of skepticism became commonly a preliminary to fideist commitment. Fideism is the thesis that truth in religion is accessible only to faith. The course persuaded the inquirer that reason cannot attain truth, yet certainty in true religious belief was still thought absolutely necessary for salvation. Martin Luther was speaking for his times (first half of the 16th century) when he thundered against the extremely cautious and restricted agnosticism of Desiderius Erasmus, foremost figure of the northern Renaissance: “Spiritus sanctus non est skepticus” (“The Holy Spirit is not a skeptic”).

The only resort was, it seemed, faith: whether the easygoing Roman Catholic faith of the 16th-century skeptic Michel de Montaigne; the polemical Counter-Reformation fervour of his contemporary Gentian Hervet, veteran of the Council of Trent and Latin translator of the Adversus mathematicos (1569; “Against the Pundits”) of Sextus Empiricus; or, one century later, the vestigial Huguenot loyalty of Pierre Bayle—stocker of a great arsenal of secular argument, the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–97).

The decisive objection to any and every such rationally unfounded flight into faith was posed by John Locke, the 17th-century British empiricist, who set a tone of coolly unfervent Anglicanism for the following century:

We may as well doubt of our being, as we can whether any revelation from God be true. So that faith is a settled and sure principle of assent and assurance, and leaves no room for doubt or hesitation. Only we must be sure that it be a divine revelation, and that we understand it right: else we shall expose ourselves to all the extravagancy of enthusiasm, and all the error of wrong principles. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, ch. xvi, 14)

Many thinkers have agreed that it is all very well to depreciate the potentialities of unaided natural reason and to insist that if man is to have any knowledge of God this must depend largely or wholly upon whatever special steps God may have taken to reveal himself, and they have also agreed that, if man’s commitment of faith is not to be arbitrary and frivolous, then he clearly must have some good reason for believing, first, that there is a God who has so revealed himself, and, second, that his preferred candidate—and not one of its innumerable rivals—truly is that revelation.

These points are crucial—both for the appreciation of the history of ideas and for a reasonable contemporary understanding. Clearly, they were upheld by Aquinas, who in the Summa contra gentiles—before proceeding to present his own reasons for accepting Christianity, rather than Islam, as the authentic revelation—applied that same word frivolous to any such unsupportable commitment. Again, Judah ha-Levi, an early 12th-century Jewish poet and philosopher, has been authoritatively described as “concerned to bring men to a mystical and non-rational appreciation of religious truths” by his skeptical attacks on the established Aristotelian natural theology. Yet ha-Levi’s main work, entitled Kuzari: The Book of Proof and Argument in Defence of the Despised Faith, does in fact offer rational evidences of the truth of Judaism.

Skeptical propaedeutics to faith are now out of fashion. But the same challenge applies to all of the various responses to Kant’s famous invitation: “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason). Natural theology may, indeed, for Hume’s reasons as reinforced by Kant, be impossible. The way of religious discovery may indeed be mystical experience, personal encounter with the divine Thou, or whatever else. But there is, and can be, no substitute for a man’s having some sound grounds for identifying his experience not only as really mystical but also as experience of the real God; for holding his faith in some putative revelation not only to be real religious faith but also to be faith in a genuine revelation of the Real; and so on.

Rejections of the agnostic principle

Anyone who insists on the foregoing touchstones may still be agnostic as well as religious. What cannot consist with agnosticism is a calculated commitment to faith seen as altogether without evidential warrant. The classic example of such commitment was provided in the 17th century by the Wager Argument of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, who assumed, for the sake of the argument, that “reason can decide nothing here” and then urged that the only sane bet is Roman Catholicism; for we have nothing but this one short life to lose, and all eternity to win.

Pascal’s Wager Argument is unsound because, on its own stated assumption of total and inescapable ignorance, the gambler is not entitled to limit the betting options to two—and to one particular two, at that. A similarly parochial inattention to the variety of candidacies for belief has characterized most fideists. Thus Søren Kierkegaard, an influential mid-19th-century Danish lay theologian, happily glorified the essential irrationality of religious faith, while taking it always that faith will, of course, be Protestant. Elsewhere, Pascal himself did notice, and tried to meet, some of the competition; his neglect here is the more remarkable because his wager was originally imported into Christendom from Islam. What makes it a landmark is that it constituted a direct, reasoned rejection of the agnostic principle—a rejection in which the reason proposed for believing was explicitly a motive for self-persuasion rather than some evidence of truth. Thus, when William James, a pre-World War I American psychologist and philosopher, in The Will to Believe, developed the best known systematic attack on that principle it was, rightly, Pascal whom he hailed as his first inspiration. James distinguished those hypotheses that, for any individual, represent psychologically “live options” from those that do not, and he urged that, when evidential grounds are lacking, the choice may properly be determined by one’s passional nature. For men often have to act on some unproved hypothesis, and sometimes such firm commitments may help to make the belief come true. Consider, for example, some belief that a man is trustworthy. The objections are that belief in the existence of God is clearly not of this case, and generally that to act decisively on some hypothesis does not require the agent to believe it as a known truth.