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The question whether religious beliefs can be justifiable is typically taken to be about whether they can be epistemically justified, and hence, justified on the evidence. Fideism holds that religious beliefs may be justifiable even though not held on the basis of evidence, which affords their truth adequate support. But such believing by faith initially seems unjustifiable, epistemically and perhaps also morally, even if evidentialism does not apply absolutely. This chapter introduces the central thesis of the book: a modest fideism that extends William James's ‘justification of faith’ in The Will to Believe can be defended against the hard line evidentialist rejection of religious faith-commitments. The argument begins with the metaquestion: when reflective believers come to be concerned about the justifiability of their faith-beliefs, what notion of ‘justifiability’ is at issue? The chapter concludes with an overview of the argument to come and a glossary of terms.

This chapter sets out a model of (theistic) faith as doxastic venture — understood, not as believing ‘at will’, but rather as taking a proposition to be true in one's practical reasoning while recognizing its lack of adequate evidential support. This doxastic venture model is contrasted with alternative models of specifically Christian faith (such as those of Calvin and Aquinas) that locate the venture of faith elsewhere. The conceptual and psychological possibility of doxastic venture is defended by appeal to William James's notion of ‘passional’ causes for belief in The Will to Believe. The possibility, raised by Richard Swinburne amongst others, that faith may involve only sub-doxastic venture (acting on the assumption that God exists without actual belief) is also acknowledged.

This chapter presents a comparative reading of W. K. Clifford's 1877 treatise, “The Ethics of Belief,” and William James' 1897 essay, “The Will to Believe.” It provides an interpretation of each in the distinctive contexts of England in the 1870s and New England in the 1890s. It argues that Clifford displayed more sensitivity than James did to the consequences of belief. This is an ironic reversal of roles in the story of a great pragmatist who insisted that “the whole defense of religious faith hinges upon” the action that faith requires or inspires. James' “The Will to Believe” should be understood not only as an artifact of its author's agony about the fate of Christianity in the age of science, but also as a product of his political complacency. Clifford had a much more modern understanding than James did of the function of belief systems in society and politics.

This introductory chapter discusses how William James' “The Will to Believe” has stimulated adverse criticisms, some of them fierce, as well as equally impassioned essays in defense. Philosophers naturally come at an essay of this sort with their own preoccupations, priorities, and methodological suppositions. One reason for the variety of criticisms and defenses of “The Will to Believe” is that critics and defenders are not always reading the same lecture, or reading it in the same way. Beyond that, the chapter shows that there are elements in James' argument to which almost none of them attributes the importance that they held for James himself.

Pragmatic arguments seek to justify the performance of an action by appealing to the benefits that may follow from that action. Pascal’s wager, for instance, argues that one should inculcate belief in God because there is everything to gain and little to lose by doing do. In this chapter I critically examine Pascal’s wager and William James’s famous “Will-to-Believe” argument by first explaining the logic of each argument and then by surveying the objections commonly arrayed against them. Finally, I suggest that among the various versions of the wager found in Pascal’s Pensées is a neglected version that anticipates the Jamesian argument and that avoids the many-gods objection.

This chapter scrutinizes James's evolving attempts to reconcile religion and science. Although James is sometimes modest in aiming to preserve a form of religion independent of claims about supernatural entities, his more typical stance is to strive for more. The striving is evident in his early writings and in the many-sided explorations of The Varieties of Religious Experience. The chapter shows how James's arguments in Varieties, whether we credit him with everyday views about truth and knowledge or whether we attribute to him the conceptions he would explicitly develop in Pragmatism, fall short of the more ambitious target. Nor can the different strategy pursued in “The Will to Believe” succeed in establishing a strong religious commitment. For all the ingenuity and subtlety of James's attempts, the most he can cogently defend is a demythologized version of religion, of the sort advanced by Dewey in A Common Faith.

This chapter examines the right and duty to will to believe, with particular emphasis on William James's work to show how a more robust ethics of belief is possible. At various points in the development of James's ethics of belief, we encounter such expressions as “duty to believe,” “will to believe,” and “right to believe.” Many commentators have suggested that the expressions “duty to believe” and “will to believe” were retracted by James, under the critical assault of his contemporaries. This chapter rejects that notion and suggests that there are in fact good Jamesian arguments for the retention of the expressions “duty to believe” and “will to believe.” It also discusses the implications of keeping the notions named by these expressions for overbelief. Finally, it proposes a terminology for use in future considerations both of James's ethics of belief and of the ethics of belief more generally.

This chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to serve as a subjective composite of a year that took millions of subtly distinct forms even as clocks and calendars divided it into the shared units of hours, weeks and months. In some ways, it is a Venn diagram, with vast numbers of individual sets (or lives) intersecting at moments of national significance; in others it is more akin to the notion of the multiverse advanced by William James in The Will to Believe (1895). The book tries to show how certain events were unique while others belong to currents that flow through the era. Certain aspects of British life were unchanged from much earlier in the century, but elsewhere, daily existence was altering at an increasingly rapid pace, with new technology unsettling those who favoured the horse over the bicycle, the fountain pen over the typewriter or the needle over the sewing machine.

This chapter examines the views of Dickinson Miller and C. J. Ducasse on William James's ethics of belief. In American philosophy, few papers have generated as much discussion as James's essay “The Will to Believe.” After reading the title of the essay The Will to Believe as separately published in 1896, Miller engaged in extensive correspondence with James. In one of these letters, James refers to Miller as his “most penetrating critic and intimate enemy.” The ideas developed by Miller in this correspondence he brought together in an 1899 paper published in Ethics. Miller continued to develop his criticism of the Jamesian doctrine of the will to believe for more than half a century. This chapter also considers Miller's correspondence with Ducasse in the 1940s and 1950s regarding the topic of the right to believe.

This chapter explains how both critics and defenders share a number of assumptions about how William James' central thesis should be understood. They regularly suppose that the validity of his contentions can be tested by application to “outcome” cases. The chapter strives to show that the thesis of “The Will to Believe” legitimately applies only to what James called “over-beliefs,” or propositions of weltanschaulich dimensions. It explains that the task of ferreting out the implications of “The Will to Believe” leads to comparing it with the other popular lectures James delivered during this same period of his life, and no less swiftly to detecting several points of consistency that initially justified such comparisons.

Chapter five traces James's role as an investigator of mental mediums purporting to communicate messages from the dead through automatic writing and trance speech. It examines the numerous mediums he studied and shows how and why Mrs. Leonora Piper, the famous Boston Spiritualist medium, convinced him of the “dramatic possibility” that her phenomena were real and genuine.

This chapter considers how the conception of spiritual goods that has been introduced in earlier chapters may provide a framework for the assessment of theological narratives. In brief, a narrative will make more of a demand upon us, in spiritual terms, to the extent that its truth would enable the realization of hybrid goods that run broad and deep. In this chapter, we call this the principle of spiritual good, and compare it with other ways of trying to map the basic structure of religious thought, notably the ‘great-making principle’ that has been propounded in perfect being theology. This second principle offers a divine-nature-focused route into the question of what we are to think in religious terms, whereas the proposal we are developing begins rather with the nature of spiritual goods, and is to that extent more human-nature-focused. We consider how the principle of spiritual good may enable us to integrate otherwise apparently quite disparate fields of enquiry, and how it may throw light on the entrenched character of some disagreements in philosophical theology. We also compare this principle to a related principle that William James presents in his essay ‘The Will to Believe’. James is also interested in the idea that prospective spiritual ‘benefits’ may provide a measure for the adequacy of religious thought, but the benefits with which he is concerned are, characteristically, psychological in nature, unlike hybrid goods, which have inherently a theological structure.

For the most part, this text is not concerned with questions of justification. But these questions are, of course, central to current debate in the philosophy of religion, and this chapter considers how the material reviewed in Chapters 2 and 3 (and the idea that religious commitment may contribute to an enrichment of the perceptual world) may be relevant to the justification of religious belief, in pragmatic and epistemic terms. It is argued, for example, that the theoretical perspectives introduced in earlier chapters allow us to fill out on certain key points the pragmatic case for religious belief which William James develops in his essay ‘The Will to Believe’.

To conclude the discussion, the author turns to James’s defense of the will to believe. Philosophers have tended to focus on the normative question of whether it is ever OK to adopt beliefs for pragmatic reasons. The “evidentialists” are prepared to criticize those who would resort to this sort of thing, and the intellectualists go further to argue that pragmatists are self-deceived. The author argues against these epistemic scolds. The social science of “positive illusions” confirms the coherence of James’s doctrine and provides an evidential basis for Bain’s theory of belief. Sometimes, we can ignore the evidence and believe what we want to believe knowing full well that this is what we are doing. The will to believe is real. Within limits, it can even be a good thing.

This chapter argues that while William James claimed it is best to go ‘round Kant’ rather than ‘through him’, a consideration of James’s arguments against determinism display a clear Kantian pedigree, particularly in the light of Kant’s famous claim that the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi for freedom. However, exactly what this claim amounts to, both in Kant and in James, is a much disputed matter, where for some it has seemed to put our belief in freedom beyond the pale of rationality, or perhaps to make it something other than a belief at all. This chapter suggests that both Kant and James can be seen as evidentialists about this issue, but where they are distinctive is in taking practical reason to provide us with the evidence for freedom that is required, thus giving it primacy over theoretical reason in this quite specific (and more defensible) sense.

Against criticisms that pragmatism’s antifoundationalism cannot account for political convictions without collapsing into a form of decisionism, this chapter examines James’s oration on Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment as an exposition of the psychological and political implications of his 1896 essay, “The Will to Believe.” What this comparison reveals is a phenomenologically rich account of political conviction that situates belief as emerging from within embodied social experience rather than moral ideas alone. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the “stutter” to capture the dynamic and relational nature of belief formation, the chapter shows how James proposes a novel way of conceiving of political conviction that steers between the Scylla of decisionism and the Charybdis of moral absolutism, or the craving for foundations.