4. Divine hiddenness and the nature of faith

2018 ◽  
pp. 52-63
Author(s):  
Tim Bayne
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
William James ◽  
Divine Hiddenness ◽  
Belief In God

Assuming—as theists invariably do—that God wants to be recognized and worshipped, why does God not make Godself manifest? Perhaps God is ‘silent’ because God doesn’t exist. ‘Divine hiddenness and the nature of faith’ considers both the hiddenness objection and the benefits of divine hiddenness: that divine hiddenness is a precondition for moral agency; that if God’s existence were evident to us then any relationship that we might have with God would be inauthentic; and that belief in God is more virtuous when it is based on faith. It also discusses the thoughts of W.K. Clifford, William James, and Søren Kierkegaard on religious belief.

Public Theology, the Ethics of Belief and the Challenge of Divine Hiddenness

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-407
Author(s):  
Owen Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
William James ◽  
Public Theology ◽  
Ethics Of Belief ◽  
Rational Argument ◽  
Divine Hiddenness ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
The Ethics Of Belief

AbstractThis article considers the claim made by William Clifford that no belief should be held without sufficient reason and its implications for belief in God and public theology. Responses to Clifford, notably by William James, have tended to emphasize the personal side of religious belief. Public theology assumes a means for settling disputes through rational argument. However, David Hume and Immanuel Kant raised significant challenges to belief in God, and this developed during the nineteenth century into a rejection of public theology. This article traces the intellectual history behind Clifford's claim, and argues that, by the time that Freud offers his claim that belief in God is immature, the justification for public theology has been undermined. By clearly identifying the challenge facing public theology, this article lays the framework for constructing a response to the critique of reason given by Kant and the scepticism of Hume. If public theology is to be defended, this response is both necessary and timely.

William James on the Act of Religious Belief

Bijdragen ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-435
Author(s):  
Friedo RICKEN
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
William James

Faith and Goodness

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 167-191
Author(s):  
Eleonore Stump
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
The Other ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Richard Swinburne ◽  
The Relationship

Recent work on the subject of faith has tended to focus on the epistemology of religious belief, considering such issues as whether beliefs held in faith are rational and how they may be justified. Richard Swinburne, for example, has developed an intricate explanation of the relationship between the propositions of faith and the evidence for them. Alvin Plantinga, on the other hand, has maintained that belief in God may be properly basic, that is, that a belief that God exists can be part of the foundation of a rational noetic structure. This sort of work has been useful in drawing attention to significant issues in the epistemology of religion, but these approaches to faith seem to me also to deepen some long-standing perplexities about traditional Christian views of faith.

Literal and Figurative Language of God

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Whittaker
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
The World ◽  
Object Of Knowledge

One of the most peculiar features of the belief in God is the accompanying claim that God is an indescribable mystery, an object of faith but never an object of knowledge. In certain contexts – in worship, for example – this claim undoubtedly serves a useful purpose; and so I do not want to dismiss the idea altogether. But when pious remarks about the ineffable nature of God are taken out of context and turned into philosophy, the result is usually an epistemological muddle. The trouble, of course, is that those who insist on God's mysteriousness still manage to say all sorts of things about him; he is an incorporeal spirit, he created the world, he loves his creatures, and so on. To assert these things is to presume some understanding of God, but no understanding is possible if God is completely incomprehensible. So if that is how it is, if the object of religious belief is utterly incomprehensible, then it makes no sense to say – or believe – anything about God.

De scheepseigenaar en de gelovige: William Clifford over God, bewijs en doxastische verantwoordelijkheid

2007 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Rik Peels
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
William James ◽  
Ethics Of Belief ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Extensive Analysis ◽  
William Kingdon Clifford ◽  
The Ethics Of Belief

At the end of the nineteenth century, in his famous essay ‘The Ethics of Belief’ the well-known mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford offered a powerful argument against religious beliefs. This article first gives an extensive analysis of Clifford’s evidentialist argument by placing it against the background of his evidentialist epistemology. Second, some arguments of William James, Clifford’s most famous critic, are expounded and criticised. Although there is some plausibility to these arguments, they are insufficient to refute Clifford’s evidentialism. Third, the author presents some problems for Clifford’s evidentialism, having to do with evidentialism as a moral thesis and with doxastic involuntarism, and offers some new arguments against Clifford’s evidentialist argument. Clifford’s argument against belief in God, as it stands, turns out to be untenable.

A Measured Faith: Edwin Starbuck, William James, and the Scientific Reform of Religious Experience

2008 ◽  
Vol 101 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 431-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher White
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
William James ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Questionnaire Data ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
First Americans ◽  
Enormous Number

A number of recent studies have drawn attention to how the study of religion and religious seeking were intertwined in European and American cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ann Taves, Leigh Schmidt and Hans Kippenberg, for example, have pointed to ways that particularly Protestant anxieties and dilemmas shaped scholarly thinking about categories such as experience and “mysticism.” Scholars have been less interested, however, in the other side of the exchange—less interested, in other words, in how scholarship has reshaped religious belief and practice. The first Americans to study religion scientifically, American psychologists of religion, serve as a particularly useful illustration of how scholarly methods influenced modern ways of believing, but there is still little historical scholarship on the key figures involved. There remain few critical works, for example, on the pioneer psychologists of religion—Edwin Starbuck (1866–1947), George Coe (1862–1951), James Bissett Pratt (1875–1944), and G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924)—and their ways of studying and attempting to reform religion. The notable exception is, of course, the literature on William James, which includes an enormous number of dissertations and monographs, including several important studies examining the Varieties of Religious Experience and James's other efforts to help fashion a science of religion. But even the scholarship on James does not consider how he and others used the sciences to reform religious belief and revitalize American culture. Given the fact that James identified himself as a psychologist, engaged a wide range of neurological, physiological and psychological thinkers in his work, and drew extensively on psychologists like George Coe and Edwin Starbuck, it is remarkable that these contexts have been overlooked. His debt to the psychologist Edwin Starbuck is particularly striking. In his Varieties, he uses or refers to Starbuck's empirical work twenty-six times, he draws from Starbuck's questionnaire data thirty-seven times, and he mentions Starbuck by name a total of forty-six times, which is roughly the equivalent of once in every six pages of text.

Leaps and Circles: Kierkegaard and Newman on Faith and Reason

1994 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Jamie Ferreira
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Faith And Reason

Søren Kierkegaard (in the Climacus writings) and John Henry Newman have starkly opposed formulations of the relation between faith and reason. In this essay I focus on a possible convergence in their respective understandings of the transition to religious belief or faith, as embodied in metaphors they use for a qualitative transition. I explore the ways in which attention to the legitimate dimension of discontinuity highlighted by the Climacan metaphor of the ‘leap’ can illuminate Newman's use of the metaphor of a ‘polygon inscribed in a circle’, as well as the ways in which Newman's metaphor can illuminate the dimension of continuity operative in the Climacan appreciation of qualitative transition.

Modernization and Religious Concord

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-250
Author(s):  
David Weakliem
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Intermediate Stage ◽  
The United States ◽  
General Belief ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractTocqueville said that Americans combined a general belief in God with a lack of interest in denominational differences. Although this outlook may be particularly prevalent in the United States, it is also visible in other Western societies, although combined with lower levels of religious belief. This paper investigates the possibility of a relationship between a belief that there is truth in many religions and modernization, using data from the Gallup International Millenium Survey. The belief that there is truth in many religions is more prevalent in more affluent nations. Moreover, this belief does not seem to be merely an intermediate stage in a move away from religion. The relationship is about equally strong among people of all religious backgrounds. The tendency for modernization to lead to “religious concord” may help to explain the relationship between modernization and democracy noticed by Lipset.

Kierkegaard on truth as subjectivity: Christianity, ethics and asceticism

1998 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Metaphysical Tradition ◽  
True Relationship ◽  
The Way

This paper is an exploration and interpretation of Kierkegaard's account of Christian belief. I argue that Kierkegaard believed that the Christian metaphysical tradition was exhausted and hence that there could be no defence of belief in God in purely rational terms. I defend this interpretation against objections, going on to argue that Kierkegaard thought it possible to defend a post-metaphysical conception of religious belief. I argue that Kierkegaard thought that such a defence was available if we understand correctly what it is to speak with ethico-religious authority. I argue that, when interpreted in the way I outline, Kierkegaard's notion of ethico-religious authority shows his conception of religious belief to have great plausibility. However, Kierkegaard goes on to argue that an individual's true relationship with God is constituted through the cultivation of guilt and the sense of himself as a sinner, and I give reasons for rejecting this claim, arguing that such cultivation is a form of asceticism.

scholarly journals Belief, Belonging, or Both? The Interaction Between Supernatural Belief and Identity Fusion, and their Influence on Cooperative Behaviour

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Samuel Twitchin
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Cooperative Behaviour ◽  
Mixed Methods Design ◽  
Online Questionnaire ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Identity Fusion ◽  
Supernatural Punishment

<p>Research within the psychology of religion has illustrated the importance of both religious belief and religious belonging for facilitating cooperative behaviour. Specifically, the supernatural punishment hypothesis (Johnson, 2016; Johnson & Krüger, 2004) and identity fusion (Swann et al., 2009; Whitehouse, 2018) discuss belief and belonging, respectively. This thesis examines the connection of these two areas, with a focus on the understudied religious concept of karma. In Study 1, 193 participants took part in an online questionnaire, with a five-condition between subjects design, that investigated the content of religious belief by using karma and god related religious priming stimuli (images and vignettes) to influence individual’s belief. None of the four experimental conditions were found to change responses on belief in supernatural agents or karma. Belief in god/karma was associated with endorsement of both a punitive and benevolent god/karma. However, when both endorsements were included in the model, only benevolent endorsement was significant. In Study 2, 402 participants took part in a three-condition mixed-methods design with six repeated trials of a voluntary contribution task, which investigated how karma and god related religious priming stimuli (vignettes) influenced cooperative behaviour. Mixed methods analysis revealed that those in the karma condition had higher cooperative tendencies than those in the neutral condition, but did not differ from the god condition. Belief in supernatural agents did not affect how individuals were affected by the god condition. However, those with higher belief in supernatural agents and higher identity fusion were the least cooperative within the karma condition. Contrary to what was predicted, increased belief in karma predicted un-cooperative behaviour in the karma condition. These and other important findings are discussed with focus on the New Zealand context and how the findings from this thesis contributes to the supernatural punishment and identity fusion literature, by highlighting implications, limitations, and areas of focus for future research.</p>

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