The Deeper Source of Religion: Passional Reason in William James’s Writings

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Introduction: Encountering Truth

            Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?”[1] This is no simple question. Given the gravity of the moment in which it was asked, and to whom it was directed, Pilate’s question strikes at the very heart of humanity’s encounter with God. Some answer that truth is an outcome, the product of a logical process of considering a given situation’s evidence. Some say that truth is an encounter, whereby a person’s passional nature is the means by which circumstances are experienced and volitional conclusions are drawn. Is it possible that between the two—between reason and passion—truth is to be found as a result of utilizing both one’s passions and reason? The following research considers this possibility through an expository examination of the works of American philosopher William James (1842-1910), specifically considering aspects of his The Will to Believe, and The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature.[2] Three questions provide the framework for this investigation: 1) What is passional reason?; 2) What are examples of passional reason in the writings of William James?; and 3) What is the significance of James’s passional reason for religious epistemology? Research findings will suggest that James’s emphasis on the role of the passional nature provides a view of religious beliefs as both reasonably and passionally derived.

What is Passional Reason?

            To lay the groundwork for the discussion of James’s thought regarding the role of the passional aspects of human nature in forming religious beliefs it is helpful to begin with a definition of passional reason. Drawing upon the work of Wainwright, passional reason may be defined as the culmination of human reason’s investigation of proofs, history, and other logically arguable facts regarding religious truth claims, and the affective component of the human heart regarding such rational concerns that accepts them and recognizes their role in developing religious belief.[3] Wainwright explains,

This view was once a Christian commonplace; reason is capable of knowing God on the basis of evidence—but only when one’s cognitive faculties are rightly disposed. It should be distinguished from two other views that have dominated modern thought. The first claims that God can be known by ‘objective reason,’ that is, by an understanding that systematically excludes passion, desire, and emotion from the process of reasoning. The other insists that God can be known only ‘subjectively,’ or by the heart. . . . [Passional reason] steers between these two extremes. It places a high value on proofs, arguments, and inferences yet also believes a properly disposed heart is needed to see their force.[4]

In this explanation, Wainwright brings together both objective and subjective components to form a center ground for faith formation, the ground of passional reason.

            This concept of passional reason draws upon various aspects of the Christian tradition, including Calvin (with his Augustinian influence) and Aquinas. Calvin emphasizes the necessity of the Holy Spirit in confirming the authority of Scripture, and Aquinas teaches that even though “there is good evidence for the divine origin of Christian teaching . . . [it is not] sufficient to compel assent without the inward movement of a will grounded in a ‘supernatural principle.’”[5] Thus both Calvin and Aquinas, while making their arguments for Christianity utilizing proofs and evidences of various types, clearly highlight the role of affective, non-discursively derived conclusions relative to the formation of religious belief. This is passional reason, where reason (i.e., the mind) and the passions (i.e., the heart) synergize to cultivate religious beliefs.

What are Examples of Passional Reason in the Writings of William James?

            Moving on from this definition of passional reason, the investigation turns to the thought of William James, seeking to find how passional reason contributes to his understanding of the formation of religious beliefs. As a preface to the following quotes and the ensuing discussion, it is worth noting that interpretations of James vary from, on the one hand, those who think James does not accept religious beliefs as anything more than individual predilections that serve some ultimately personal need and have no connection, necessarily or actually, to any metaphysical reality; and, on the other hand, those who argue that James did, while recognizing the individual usefulness of religious beliefs, also affirm that such beliefs were metaphysically real and not only could but should be believed.[6] Whichever view one takes of James’s ultimate intention does not necessarily detract from the discussion below, insofar as the issue under consideration is how James understood the role of passional reason in cultivating religious beliefs, not the ultimate veracity of such beliefs.

            Four quotes from James are now considered. The first two are from The Will to Believe, an address to the Philosophical Clubs at Yale and Brown Universities in 1896. The last two are from The Varieties of Religious Belief: A Study in Human Nature, a work borne of James’s delivery of the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh beginning in 1900. The presentation of these four quotes is an attempt to demonstrate what may be described as a “Jamesian Justification for Passional Reason,” which, though far from exhaustive regarding his thought on the topic, do, as the comments given after each quote will attempt to show, reveal the centrality of passional reason in James’s work.

            Quote One: “Our passional nature must, and lawfully may, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds.”[7] Notice in this quote that James attributes to the passional nature the role of final decider in certain matters of belief, such that the evidence as reasonably considered may bring someone to the precipice of belief, but only the passional nature can and may let them take the step into belief. In taking this approach to passion and reason, James, according to Fuller’s estimation, “deftly pull[s] the philosophical rug out from under those committed to a modernist faith in the ability of the scientific method to usher humanity into the domain of universal truths and intellectual certainties. . . . His understanding of religious belief steer[s] a defensible middle course between naive credulity and agnostic skepticism.”[8] The conclusion that may be drawn from this first quote by James is that not only the intellect, but the whole person, is required in order to make choices regarding what to believe.

Quote Two: “I have said, and now repeat it, that not only as a matter of fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions, but that there are some options between opinions in which this influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful determinant of our choice.”[9] While similar to the fist quote by James, the key distinction in this second quote is James’s conclusion that is it not only permissible to allow passional reason to guide in forming one’s beliefs, but that the use of passional reason may be “inevitable;” more than a choice, passional reason is a requirement in certain instances. Wainwright remarks that, for James, “all conceptualizations, including scientific ones, are simply abstractions from the richness of concrete experience. The ‘personal point of view’ is thus essential.”[10] James, as this second quote demonstrates, recognizes passional reason as a universally constitutive element in belief; it is much more than a subjective option for a few.

Quote Three: “I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue.”[11] In this quote, James identifies the passional nature (i.e., “feeling”) as primary, whereas more rational considerations are secondary. His use of an analogy from language reveals that James views the passional as the vital language for religious experience, and the rational as its expression in the language of the intellect. As Croce explains, in this way James “distinguishes religion lived at first hand, which would include direct personal encounter with spiritual forces, from religion at second hand, based on traditions derived from those first hand experiences.”[12] Thus in this third quote from James there is a sense in which he views passional reason as paradigmatic for properly evaluating all religious conclusions; passional reason becomes a lens through which religious truth formulations are derived and evaluated.

            Quote Four: “In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.”[13] The context in which James makes this statement is his discussion of the various proofs for God’s existence presented by Aquinas and others; it is important to note, therefore, that he is not dismissing the value of proofs, per se, but acknowledging that they are not, in themselves, sufficient to the task. Just as a person made in the image of God is both reasonable and passional, so arguments for the existence of God must be more than reasonable; the passional element is indispensable. Is it possible, as Wainwright surmises, that James’s point of critique is not that proofs for the existence of God do not establish certainty, but that the passional element should be considered, along with the intellectual element, as part of a broader definition of proofs?[14] This fourth quote by James certainly leaves open the possibility that this is so; passion and intellect combine in James to make the case that passional reason is the best arbiter for religious belief.

            As this brief expository analysis demonstrates, James certainly gives a fundamental, if not primary, role to the passional elements of human nature in the formation of religious belief. However, whether or not James’s conclusions about passional reason are epistemically helpful is another matter. Although far short of a full critique of James’s religious epistemology, the next section considers one positive and one negative aspect of his thought.

What is the Significance of James’s Passional Reason for Religious Epistemology?

Briefly considered, there are two aspects of James’s passional reason of significance to religious epistemology; one is positive, and one is negative. Positively, James attempts to engage the total person in the matter of faith formation, rather than focusing exclusively on the rational and evidentiary aspects, or on the subjective and experiential aspects. In biblical parlance, there is a sense in which James encourages the formation of religious belief utilizing one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength; with the whole being.[15] In an era of radical materialism and scientism, which bring with them a diminution of any philosophical metaphysic, James’s perspective can provide a helpful corrective and balance.

However, given James’s radical empiricism and its attendant emphasis of the nature of belief as dependent on currently observable facts (be they experiential or otherwise), and his commitment to human experience as the final test of truth, James implicitly opposes the primacy of theological dogma and its necessary authority in matters of faith and practice.[16] While James may allow a place for dogma in forming religious beliefs, there is no absolute sense in which dogma provides the objective standard by which all religious matters are to be evaluated. Yes, passional reason impacts faith formation, but unless there is a final standard of truth as divinely revealed through Scripture and Tradition, then the creature, rather than the Creator, becomes the determiner of reality.

Conclusion

William James’s articulation of the role of passional reason in forming religious belief provides a seminal contribution to discussions of faith, in general, and religious epistemology, in particular. The preceding research considered this contribution of James by initially defining passional reason, then identifying and expounding examples of passional reason in James’s writings, and finally by critically evaluating the positive and negative aspects of James’s approach. Research suggests that, with correctives regarding the role of dogma in faith formation, James’s conclusions about the interplay of the rational and passional offer helpful insights for the interdependent areas of philosophy and religion.

Bibliography

Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica. New York: Benziger, 1947.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957.

Corbett, Robert. “The Will to Believe: An Outline.” St. Louis: Webster University, 1980.

Accessed 1 December 2016. http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/philosophy/misc/james.html.

Croce, Paul. “Spilt Mysticism: William James’s Democratization of Religion.” William James

Studies 9, (July 2012): 3-26. 

Elwell, Walter A., Ed. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001.

Fuller, Robert C. "'The Will to Believe': A Centennial Reflection." Journal of the American

Academy of Religion 64, no. 3 (September 1996): 633-650. 

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. South

Australia: eBooks@Adelaide, 2009. Accessed 25 November 2016. https://csrs.nd.edu/assets/59930/williams_1902.pdf.

------. The Will to Believe. Accessed 2 December 2016.

http://norm.unet.brandeis.edu/~teuber/James_The_Will_to_Believe.pdf.

Smith, John E. Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism. New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1978.

Wainwright, William J. Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional

Reason. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

 

[1] John 18:38. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982).

[2] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (South Australia: eBooks@Adelaide, 2009); and The Will to Believe, http://norm.unet.brandeis.edu/~teuber/James_The_Will_to_Believe.pdf.

[3] William J. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reason (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 3-4.

[4] Ibid., 3. Italics in original.

[5] Ibid., 4. Wainwright’s reference to Calvin is from John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), vol. I, book I, chap. 7, sec. 4; the reference to Aquinas is from Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica (New York: Benziger, 1947), vol. 2, part II-II, quest. 6, art. I.

[6] An example of the former evaluation of James is John E. Smith, Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). An example of the latter evaluation of James is Wainwright, Reason and the Heart, 84-107.

[7] James, The Will to Believe, sect. IV.

[8] Robert C. Fuller, “’The Will to Believe’: A Centennial Reflection,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 3 (September 1996): 634.

[9] James, The Will to Believe, sect. VIII.

[10] Wainwright, Reason and the Heart, 93.

[11] James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 327.

[12] Paul Croce, “Spilt Mysticism: William James’s Democratization of Religion,” William James Studies 9, (July 2012), 4.

[13] James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 344.

[14] See Wainwright, Reason and the Heart, 1-6.

[15] See Luke 10:27.

[16] R. J. VanderMolen, “Pragmatism,” in the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, 2nd ed., Walter A. Elwell, ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 945-946.

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T. J. Gentry is the Executive Editor of MoralApologetics.com, the Senior Minister at First Christian Church of West Frankfort, IL, and the Co-founder of Good Reasons Apologetics. T. J. has been in Christian ministry since 1984, having served as an itinerant evangelist, youth minister, church planter, pastoral counselor, and Army chaplain. He is the author of numerous books and peer-reviewed articles, including Pulpit Apologist: The Vital Link between Preaching and Apologetics (Wipf and Stock, 2020), You Shall Be My Witnesses: Reflections on Sharing the Gospel (Illative House, 2018), and two forthcoming works published by Moral Apologetics Press: Leaving Calvinism, Finding Grace, and A Moral Way: Aquinas and the Good God. T. J. is a Clinical Pastoral Education Supervisor, holding board-certification as a Pastoral Counselor and a Chaplain. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University (BA in Political Science), Luther Rice College and Seminary (MA in Apologetics), Holy Apostles College and Seminary (MA in Philosophy), Liberty University (MAR in Church Ministries, MDiv in Chaplaincy, ThM in Theology), Carolina University (DMin in Pastoral Counseling, PhD in Leadership, PhD in Biblical Studies), and the United States Army Chaplain School (Basic and Advanced Courses). He is currently completing his PhD in Theology at North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa (2021), his PhD in Theology and Apologetics at Liberty University (2022), and his PhD in Philosophy of Religion at Southern Evangelical Seminary (2024). T. J. married Amy in 1995, and they are blessed with three daughters and two sons. T. J.’s writing and other projects may be viewed at TJGentry.com.

In Love with the Word: A Charge to Christian Literary Critics

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In Love with the Word: A Charge to Christian Literary Critics

Marybeth Baggett

Back when I decided to become an English major during an American Literature class at the local community college, I was overwhelmed by many of the wonderfully creative pieces that we studied. Chief among the works that captivated my attention was Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. I don’t mean to overstate the situation, but I teach English today in no small part thanks to that book. It’s a tragic story, so its positive effect on me may be a bit surprising. But anyone who has read it can testify to Crane’s ability to use mere words to bring to vivid life the fully realistic character of Maggie and to garner sympathy and concern for her and those like her.

Somehow these marks on the book’s pages filled my mind with empathy for the less fortunate, challenged my preconceptions about poverty, and—among other things—helped me better understand American history and culture. Reading this novel impressed upon me what an astounding thing is language. Used well it fills us with joy and enobles our existence. Language can entertain us through stories and verbal games. It can delight us through brilliant literary expression. We can use it to convey our internal experiences and to get a peek into the experiences of others. In short, we can do wonders with words.

I felt as much when I wrote my end-of-term paper on Crane’s novel. I found such satisfaction in engaging Crane’s story, having responses to it formed in my mind, and turning those inchoate thoughts into something structured, something readable and understandable by another person. That was my first experience, I think, in writing an essay of which I was truly proud. What was true at that time remains true now: for me, there is little better than bringing ideas to heel in a well-crafted sentence. If I may engage in hyperbole, it sometimes feels like a miracle.

But as valuable and worthwhile as language and literature is, there is a danger of overvaluing the written word for those like us who spend our time dwelling on it. We risk overestimating literature’s worth and putting on it a burden it simply cannot bear. As we think about our love for literature, we can understand sentiments of writers like Samuel Coleridge who elevate literary expression to the apex of human activity. In Biographia Literaria, he says that “poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.”[1] Emerson, in his quintessential grandiosity, takes this notion a step further, making poetry foundational to reality itself and placing it beyond humanity’s comprehension or control:

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.[2]

On Emerson’s terms, we are unworthy mortals who can only glimpse poetry’s greatness.

Still others have put much hope in poetry as the means of personal or communal salvation, as does Matthew Arnold who, Culture and Anarchy, stakes his social agenda on advancing transformative cultural education:

Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people’s life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive.[3]

It’s an enchanting vision to be sure, of society in full cooperation and prosperity. But literary genius as the source of such conditions strikes the ear as a bit of wishful thinking.

Yes, Coleridge, Emerson, and Arnold affirmed the existence of God and saw poetry or cultural activity as in some way or other directly tied to a divine source, but in their writings that so highly elevate poetry, we can see the makings of a disconnection between the two, a displacement and eventually an elevation of one for the other—and the wrong one. In Screwtape Letters through the mouth of his titular demonic character, C. S. Lewis warns of such a temptation regarding social justice. Rather than the so-called “patient” prioritizing Christian doctrine with social justice concerns flowing from that, Screwtape wants him to reverse the order: “The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice.”[4] The temptation process he describes to Wormwood could work just as easily for literature. What this amounts to, of course, is idolatry, a status for poetry that Wallace Stevens makes explicit in Adagia: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”[5]

Christians would, of course, assiduously avoid embracing Stevens’ conclusions, not least of all because we retain a belief in God. But Christian or no, we’d do well to pause for a moment and consider the absurdity of Stevens’ claim. Poetry is wonderful, but life’s redemption? What a bunch of nonsense. In the face of death, disease, war, atrocities, we’ll respond with figurative language and some prosody. Grievous loss? Here’s a sonnet to remedy the situation. To offer lyricism alone as rectification for horrific abuse is frankly grotesque. Justice may at times be poetic, but poetry is far from justice’s source. At best it is a salve for sorrow, an intimation of a world set right.

But before we start patting ourselves on the back for recognizing the error of Stevens’ ways, I wonder if we don’t sometimes verge the same idolatrous thinking about our vocation. It’s often the subtle errors that are the most perilous and insidious. Do we ever ourselves prioritize literature and language at the expense of something more vital? Do we ever use it to overindulge our own longings or boost our own ego? Does our love of literature ever interfere with or displace our deeper callings, especially our highest calling as Christians to love God and love our neighbor? Do we mine literature’s truths as means for self-advancement instead of with kingdom-building aims? Have we ever allowed our God-given gifts for appreciating and analyzing literature to look down on others who don’t share those gifts? Are we guilty of imperialistic thinking, believing our discipline the most important, implicitly saying to another part of the body of Christ that we have no need of them?

In a poignant passage, William James well articulates the danger of mishandling literature:

All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale.[6]

Again, literature is a beautiful thing; prizing it over actual human beings is abhorrent.

In the literary field, we also sometimes see self-indulgence of a different kind, that which is practiced from a critical stance where a scholar or reviewer uses the work of another as merely a soapbox for self-promotion. W. H. Auden captures the temptations to pride involved in literary criticism:

If good literary critics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to learn to be humble in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject matter of a critic, before which he has to learn to be humble, is made up of authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say — “Life is more important than anything I can say about it” — than to say — “Mr. A’s work is more important than anything I can say about it.”[7]

A piece of literature is no human being, of course, but treatment of a book or literary work surely has implications for treatment of the one who wrote it and who poured so much of themselves and their time into it. It also has implications for our own character formation.

Christian literary critics must center our Christian identity as primary, with our study of literature flowing from that. John 13:35 says that love is the distinguishing mark of disciples of Christ. In Matthew 22, Jesus identifies love of God and love of neighbor as the two greatest commandments, ending with the profound but mysterious truth that “[a]ll the Law and the Prophets hang on [them].” Alan Jacobs uses this claim as a springboard for his worthwhile book, A Theology of Reading, which is intriguingly subtitled A Hermeneutics of Love. An adaptation of a well-worn scripture passage might frame our thinking here:

If I read through the lens of Marx or of Greenblatt, but do not have love, I am only a noxious judge or a nagging critic. If I have the gift of soliloquy and can fathom all poetry and all fiction, and if I have a style that can stir passions, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I pen all I perceive to the crowds and give over my essays to journals that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient reading, love is kind interpretation. It does not envy another writer’s gifts or troll another’s work, it is not vain about its own intellectual blessings. It does not dishonor others in the guise of criticism, it is not self-promotional, it is not easily angered when edited or evaluated, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are novels, they will cease; where there are odes, they will be stilled; where there is critique, it will pass away. For we read in part and we analyze in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

The challenge I want to pose—as Christians studying literature and language—is for us to contemplate what loving participation in the literary discipline looks like. What kinds of words do we use; when and how do we use them? What kinds of stories do we tell; why do we tell them? How do we handle the words and stories of others?

Literary studies today can give us critical frameworks for reading, terminology for literary criticism, insights into the creative process and lives of poets. It can provide us with untold lists of books to read, ways to understand them, and thematic angles for interpretation. But it cannot instill in us love for God or others. Even politically charged theories, concerned as they are with questions of justice, have no mechanism for personal transformation—they can tell us to be good but cannot make us good, as Jacobs points out in regards to cultural studies.[8]

What makes a difference for literary studies as for life—what makes possible our love for one another—is that God first loved us. He entered into our world to redeem his creation, thus enabling our free responses to his overtures of love. A belief in the incarnation, as Roger Lundin argues, should make all the difference in how we conceive of “the nature, scope, and power of words.”[9] Our words have value, they have meaning, they have purpose because of the Living Word, the Word made flesh who chose to dwell among us. This truth should ground our engagement with human words, our own and those of others. Done well and right, even our study of literature, if subsumed under the lordship of Christ, can become a way for us to fulfill the great commission and the great commandment, to discharge our God-given vocations, to do the good works for which we were intended.

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Marybeth Davis Baggett lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, and teaches English at Liberty University. Having earned her Ph.D. in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Marybeth’s professional interests include literary theory, contemporary American literature, science fiction, and dystopian literature. She also writes and edits for Christ and Pop Culture. Her most recent publication was a chapter called “What Means Utopia to Us? Reconsidering More’s Message,” in Hope and the Longing for Utopia: Futures and Illusions in Theology and the Arts. Marybeth's most recent book is The Morals of the Story: Good News about a Good God, coauthored with her husband, David.

notes:


[1] Coleridge, Samuel. Biographia Literaria. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm.

[2] Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” https://user.xmission.com/~seldom74/emerson/the_poet.html.

[3] Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. http://public-library.uk/ebooks/25/79.pdf.

[4] Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Centenary, 1944, Chapter XXIII.

[5] Stevens, Wallace. Adagia, section 1. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.

[6] James, William. Psychology. London: Macmillan, 1892, p. 124.

[7] Auden, W. H. Dyer’s Hand. New York: Random House, 1962, p. 8.

[8] Jacobs, Alan. A Theology of Reading. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 124.

[9] Lundin, Roger. Beginning with the Word. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2014, p. 8.

What is Philosophy of Religion?

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The philosophy of religion explores the Big Questions—the questions that philosophy at its best aims to answer. Philosophy should not rest content with merely verbal squabbles, technical debates among specialists, or games of intellectual gymnastics. Whether there’s a God, what God’s like if there is one, whether life persists beyond the grave, what life’s meaning is if one there be—these are the questions that often spur people to pursue the study of philosophy in the first place, and philosophy of religion indulges the chance to explore them. The questions are engaging even to children, but the difference between a child asking such questions and a philosopher is that the philosopher, in an effort to honor the wide-eyed childlike wonder of it all, has developed tools, strategies, and resources to answer such questions—or at least inch, however incrementally, toward answers. It does so by refining the questions themselves, ruling out certain answers, defending other answers against objections, revealing how various answers produce yet new questions. In the process it subjects various proposals to critical scrutiny every step of the way, separating the wheat from the chaff, in an effort to make progress. It’s exploration predicated on assuming that reason and rationality, properly exercised, make for progress.

Pascal once lamented indifference to and ignorance of the most existentially central questions of life; philosophy of religion, rightly done, is the cure for both, for it imbues and is motivated by passionate intellectual curiosity on the one hand, and a heartfelt desire not just to ask questions, but to find answers, on the other—and not for the sake of a false security or misleading assurance of certitude, but because the truth makes all the difference. To think otherwise is to forget the point of asking the questions; it would be a strange set of explorers indeed if they decided ahead of time, or in due course, to stop striving to arrive at their destination.

In C. S. Lewis’s wonderfully imaginative Great Divorce, the Solid Person of George MacDonald instructs the wispy protagonist (and great lover of books) about the danger of forgetting the point of intellectual investigation: “There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself . . . as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organizer of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares.”

The questions of philosophy of religion are not only inherently fascinating, but concerns of the most ultimate and practical significance. The fictional Sherlock Holmes, in “The Retired Colourman,” was “in a melancholy and philosophic mood” when he (echoing the writer of Ecclesiastes) asked the enduring question, “Is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not [Josiah Amberley’s] story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is life in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow—misery.”

Yet despite the challenges of life, the darkness of hearts, and ubiquity of suffering, Holmes at another juncture provided a glimpse into his remaining trust in the goodness of reality and the important role of reason. In “The Naval Treaty,” he held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose with its dainty blend of crimson and green before saying, “There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for the existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

Oxford graduate John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, similarly warned believers and unbelievers alike against impugning the value of logic, hard thinking, and rationality, “the candle of the Lord”: “Of what unspeakable use is even a moderate share of reason in all our worldly employments, from the lowest and meanest offices of life, through all the intermediate branches of business; till we ascend to those that are of the highest importance and the greatest difficulty!”

Of course philosophers of religion don’t all think reason yields the same deliverances, which makes this great conversation so close to the heart of the human condition a vital and ongoing dialogue. Some think the evidence points to a reductive materialistic world, others toward a richly theistic one, and yet others something in between.

In my own explorations, my tentative conclusion is that philosophy remains a necessary and viable means of discovery that, though consistent with science, go beyond it. I would echo the grave concerns about scientism William James presciently shared a century ago—critiquing proponents of parsimony who, fearing superstition, risked desiccation—“This systematic denial on science’s part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be but the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own most boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short.”

Etymologically and at its best philosophy is the love of wisdom—not a casual flirtation or weekend affair, but a passionate quest—and the philosophy of religion, it seems, resides at its culmination.