Sermon for 6 May 2007, 1^st Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois

 

THE   RELIGIOUS   PHILOSOPHY   OF   WILLIAM  JAMES

Ronald J. Glossop

 

    William James was born in 1842 in New York City, the first son of idiosyncratic religious visionary Henry James.  He was also older brother to the other better known Henry James, the famous writer. The early education of both James brothers included school in New York and then, while teen-agers, schools and tutors in several cities in Europe.   After earning his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1869, William James became an instructor of anatomy and physiology there just four years later.  In 1875 he began teaching psychology at Harvard, and in 1879 he began teaching philosophy.   In his ground-breaking PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY published in 1890 he emphasized the need to make psychology a physiologically-based, experimental, scientific discipline distinct from the abstract philosophical speculations which had dominated it up to then.   At the same time, it was his views on philosophical issues that aroused wider interest.   William James died in 1910.

 

     William James and Charles Sanders Pierce are generally regarded as the co-originators of the only original school of American philosophy, "pragmatism."   This American school of philosophy called "pragmatism" takes its name from the Greek word "pragma," which means "act" or "deed."   Its basic principle is that a true belief is one that you can act on.   You can trust it to bring about what you expected.   In the world of science, a theory that successfully predicts what will happen as more experiments are conducted and what will be found as more observations are made is true, and one that fails to do this is false.   A true idea is one that is useful.

 

    But one can then ask, Useful to whom?   And it is in answering that question that William James offers a very different answer from that given by Peirce and later by John Dewey.   Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey were both what we may call "public pragmatists" who focused on the public or social nature of knowledge.   For them truth is what is useful to the human community as a whole and thus is closely tied to what has been established scientifically.

 

     James, on the other hand, put forth an individualistic or private pragmatism.   For him truth was what was useful to me.   James would readily admit that some other view could be useful to you.   There was no need that we should agree on the issue of what is true.   Thus James's view could have been promoted under the slogan "To Each His Own."   And for James this individualism was especially important in the areas of religion and philosophy.   In science where experimentation could be done to test the theories being advanced, any rational person would be stupid not to accept the theories supported by the evidence.   But the situation was totally different when attention was focused on philosophical and religious issues beyond what could be established scientifically.   In some areas there were no scientific experiments which could definitively determine what was true or false.   Then different people would be free to find one or another theory to their liking on the basis of non-rational (that is, non-experimentally verifiable) bases.

 

    This point of view was evident in one of James's earliest philosophical publications, "The Dilemma of Determinism" (1884).   There he makes the point that no experiment can tell us whether determinism is true or not, that is, whether things could turn out differently from the way they do.  Experiments can reveal actualities, that is, what does happen, but they can't reveal possibilities, that is, what might happen.   Scientifically predisposed persons, much in love with the ordered world of laws of nature, might < u>feel that nothing could happen but what does happen.  These tough-minded people, as James calls them, are temperamentally at ease with an ordered world where everything must be the way it is.   But the thing to note is that their belief is based on a feeling rather than on some facts about which everyone must agree.

 

    In fact, James concentrated not so much on their love of order but rather on their feeling of fear, on how uneasy they would feel if the world was not so neatly organized, if it did not unwaveringly follow the laws of nature.   These determinists would be very uncomfortable if the world were so chaotic that some things could happen that would be inexplicable and in principle unpredictable.   It was only years later in 1934 that the scientific study of the behavior of sub-atomic particles led to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the notion that one could not simultaneously know the exact location and the exact momentum of a tiny particle and thus could not predict its future course.   The great Albert Einstein could not accept that viewpoint and continued to insist that "God doesn't play dice."   That is, he continued to be a determinist convinced that nature had to be completely law-governed and that the Uncertainty Principle applied only to what humans can know about nature and not to nature itself.

 

     James argued that if the world was strictly governed by the laws of nature, as the determinists believed it was, that would imply that nothing, including my own actions, could be other than it is.   That would mean that the notion of moral responsibility would need to be abandoned and that we would need to look at ourselves as robots.  James said that tender-minded persons like himself preferred an indeterministic view of the universe that would allow moral freedom to a deterministic one that assumed that nothing could be other than it is.   He admitted that his view was based on the feeling of hope that this indeterministic view supported rather than on any kind of objective evidence.   But, he noted, the determinists were also adopting their view on the basis of feelings rather than any kind of objective evidence.

 

    Furthermore he said, if that deterministic view satisfied their psychological needs for stability and predictability, then it was true for them.   But they could not insist that it was true for him.   It was not useful to him to believe that the future was "closed" to alternative possibilities.   Believing in an "open future" which allowed for moral responsibility was what was useful to him, was what satisfied his psychological needs.   Therefore, it was true for him.   He also thought that once people saw what was at issue, most of them would agree with him that indeterminism rather than determinism is true.

 

    William James disliked playing verbal games and thus he delightfully always states the views of his opponents in the most attractive way while choosing the least attractive terminology for his own views.   For example, on the determinism issue I have just summarized, he refrained from saying he was arguing for "freedom."   He said that he was arguing for "chance," for lack of order.   When it comes to describing his own position on the key issues of religion, he says that he is a "crass supernaturalist" as opposed to the "refined supernaturalism" adopted by his opponents.

 

    A "refined supernaturalist" is a sophisticated thinker who takes the findings of science seriously, who admits that there are no miracles and no personal immortality after death.   Even if the refined supernaturalist believes in God (like a Deist or Absolute Idealist would), it is the kind of God who, in James's memorable words, does only a wholesale, not a retail business.   That is, it is a God who is concerned about running the world in general but who is not much concerned with my particular problems and my personal prayers for help in dealing with dire situations.  How much psychological help is such a remote God in hopeless situations?   One might as well be an atheist, James observed.   If a religion is to be good for anything, said James, it must meet the needs of the believer; religion must provide hope in otherwise hopeless situations and companionship when one is lonely and moral support in times of temptation and serenity in times of trouble.

 

    In line with this thought, and in another of James's unforgettable pithy statements, he unabashedly says, "Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism."  He observes, "The pivot round which the religious life . . . revolves is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny."   Truth in religion is what is useful to you.

 

    James often describes his thought as pluralistic rather than monistic.   His focus is usually on his own indeterministic metaphysical view which opposes the "everything-in-its-place" deterministic universe of the Absolute Idealists who held sway in his day.   But his view is also pluralistic in another sense, in its rejection of the one-size-fits-all view of religion and philosophy.   What is true is what is useful to the individual.   This does not need to be the same for all individuals.   In science, where there is objective evidence, it is ridiculous to try to believe something other than what the evidence supports.   But in the questions of metaphysics and religion, there is no objective evidence, so people are freer to search for and find the beliefs which are useful to them individually.   Scientific experimentation is not able to decide the issue between determinism and indeterminism.   Neither can it decide the issue between a natualism that denies a personal God and personal immortality on the one hand and a supernaturalism that affirms the existence of a God who cares for individuals and the continuing existence of individuals after death on the other.   Such openness to alternative ideas obviously makes James's ideas about religious viewpoints attractive to Unitarian-Universalists with their rejection of creeds with ideas that all members of the religious community must accept.

 

     James has many other interesting ideas about religion. free, which we must be in order to be morally responsible.   At the same time, in order to have hope in hopeless situations, we also need to believe in Providence, that in the end God and the values of love and justice associated with that superior being will ultimately prevail.   To show how believing in a finite God need not mean abandoning the idea of Providence, James provides the analogy of the master chess-player.  This master player need not control everything that happens on the chess board.   He can allow even his opponents to move as they want.   Nevertheless we can be confident that in the end he will win.   Furthermore, this confidence, this faith, that God will win in the end even provides something that atheists can never enjoy, namely, "moral holidays."   That is believers can try to do what is right and good most of the time, but they need not fear that a moment of leisure on their part will lead to moral disaster for the world as a whole.   In the end, God and good are bound to prevail.   But the atheist can never justify even a moment of relaxation since that moment of repose in a world without Providence could be just what the forces of evil need to prevail.   Maybe there could be a nuclear war that would destroy the Earth or irreversible damage to the environment, things that might have been prevented with a bit more effort.

 

    James also addressed the belief in a life-after-death.   He argued that most of us do not need assurance that we personally will go on existing forever.   His view is that if we know that our ideals are to be cared for in "eternity," he does not understand why we might not be willing to resign their care to others.   At the same time he understands the desire to be personally present to witness the ultimate victory of good over evil.   He says that in the conflict between "these two impulses, both of them so vague, yet both so noble," he does not know how to decide.   He concludes that the issue of everlasting life is a case for facts to determine.   James was a great believer in psychic research about the possibility of life after death, but he believed that so far no convincing evidence had been uncovered.   Furthermore, even if there were some evidence for some continuation of the individual after death, that would not show that such life-after-death would go on forever.   At the same time if we follow the general view of James in matters of religious belief, this absence of evidence means that belief about personal immortality is a matter for each individual to decide on the basis of which kind of belief one finds most satisfying.

 

    James was very interested in conversion or mystical experiences.   Those who never have had such experiences he called once-born while those who had gone from the depths of sin or despair to the heights of a close relationship with spiritual reality he calls twice-born.   He viewed this renewal resulting from the conversion or mystical experience as the core of religious experience.   He said that from a scientific point of view such life-changing experiences can be understood as an invasion from the sub-conscious into one's conscious life.   This observation on his part shows how committed James himself was to not ignoring the scientific viewpoint.

 

    For James it was the feeling-tone and the kind of behavior that were the essence of religion while the intellectual beliefs were just the trimming.   In his concluding chapter of Varieties of Religious Experience, he says:   "When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feeling on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives.   The theories which religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements."

 

   For James, in its intellectual content religion at its minimum can be boiled down to this:   (1) there is an uneasiness about us, "a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand," and (2) the solution to this uneasiness is "a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making the proper connection with the higher powers."   Any additonal intellectual content beyond this constitutes what James called "over-beliefs."   They are the trimmings of religion, not what is essential to it.

 

    I have noted how some of the ideas of William James about religion are appealing to some Unitarian-Universalists, especially his view that not everyone has to have the same ideas in the area of religion.   At the same time, I feel obliged to note that some UUs like myself are in strong disagreement with some of his ideas.   For example, although James may be right about the fact that traditional religion has appealed to individuals by making each of them feel personally important in the big scheme of things, I do not agree that that is what religion should do.   It seems to me that religion should help individuals to see the big scheme of things and what role they can play in it without making them the main thing that matters.   I also think that James's view on the relation between determinism and free will is very wrong-headed because being a free and morally responsible person is very different from and even contrary to behaving in an unpredictable way.   Might sub-atomic particles have free will because we cannot predict where they may go?   (For further discussion of this issue, you could come to our 9:30 a.m. forum on May 20.)  I also think that it is a mistake to define religion basically in terms of the conversion experiences of some individuals.   Since James himself says that "once-born" individuals can be religious, it seems inappropriate to think that the very essence of religion is revealed only in the experiences of "twice-born" persons.   But my aim today has not been to convince you of the rightness or wrongness of William James's views about religious philosophy but to inform you about what his views are and hope that you find some of them useful in the development of your own thinking about religious philosophy.