SOPHIA (2009) 48:151–166

DOI 10.1007/s11841-009-0097-4

The Philosophical Scandal of the Wrong Kind

of Religious Disagreement

Peter Forrest

Published online: 8 May 2009

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract I argue for the following four theses: (1) The Dread Thesis: human beings
should fear having false religious beliefs concerning some religious doctrines; (2)
The Radical Uncertainty Thesis: we, namely most human beings in our culture at
our time, are in a situation where we have to commit ourselves on the truth or falsity
of some propositions of ultimate importance; (3) The Radical Choice Thesis:
considerations of expected loss or gain do not always provide guidance as to how to
commit ourselves on matters of religious doctrine that are both radically uncertain
and of ultimate importance; (4) The Scandal Thesis: radical choice on matters of
ultimate importance is neither good nor inevitable, but due to the collective failure of
philosophers of religion. Then I consider some inadequate responses: playing the
faith card; contra-Pascalian decision theory; spiritual chauvinism; that faith
presupposes uncertainty; the older pachyderm; irony, subjectivity, relativism and
non-cognitivism; tainted truth; and muddling through. Finally I submit that the way
forward is quite simply to become better philosophers.

Keywords Religious disagreement . Radical uncertainty . Afterlife

By the political problem of religious disagreement I mean the problem of avoiding

conflict between different religious groups. It may, I believe, be solved by a study of
history, which shows that God, assuming there is a God, does not fight on the side of
those who have the truth, assuming some group has it. So it is wise to negotiate even
if you believe that were you to win many more human beings would be saved. The
wars of the seventeenth century showed this to the satisfaction of most Europeans.
I am concerned, rather, with what I call the intellectual problem of religious
disagreement. Note that I contrast intellectual with political rather than the
theoretical with the practical. The intellectual problem is a practical one. It may be

P. Forrest (*)
School of Humanities, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia
e-mail: pforrest@une.edu.au
152 P. Forrest

expressed by the first three of the following theses (the fourth thesis turns a problem
into a scandal):
1. The Dread Thesis. Human beings should fear having false religious beliefs
concerning some religious doctrines. Call these propositions of ultimate
importance.
2. The Radical Uncertainty Thesis. We, namely most human beings in our culture
at our time, are in a situation where we have to commit ourselves on the truth or
falsity of some propositions of ultimate importance.
3. The Radical Choice Thesis. Considerations of expected loss or gain do not
always provide guidance as to how to commit ourselves on matters of religious
doctrine that are both radically uncertain and of ultimate importance.
4. The Scandal Thesis. Radical choice on matters of ultimate importance is neither
good nor inevitable, but due to the collective failure of philosophers of religion.1
Much of what I say carries over to other disputed topics, say in ethics and politics. I
suspect, though, that moral and political philosophers have done better than
philosophers of religion.
This paper is in four sections. In the first, which is a preliminary discussion, I
introduce some of the themes of the paper, such as commitment and the Paradox of
Commitment. Then I argue for the four theses. Next I examine some responses to the
problems they pose. Finally, I suggest a method of improving the situation for future
generations.

1. The Character of Religious Disagreement

The conventional wisdom is that religious disagreements are intractable because

people are irrational about religion. Now there is a use of the word ‘rational’ to refer
to the modern conception of rationality as resulting from reasoning processes that are
not in dispute. In that sense it is no doubt correct that people are ‘irrational’ on the
subject of religion, precisely because one of the things in dispute is what reasoning
processes should be relied upon. I take it, however, that a reasoning process is
rational if it is of a kind that is fairly reliable as a means to the end of truth. To reject
rationality in that sense is absurd, as Bigelow and Smith (1997) point out in their
discussion of the Muggletonians.
Nonetheless we are, I believe, currently in a situation in which although we are
rational, rationality under-determines what we believe. I call this ‘Radical
Uncertainty’, which I now explicate.

1
I think Kierkegaard would have accepted the first three theses but not the fourth. I also think that if we
want to discuss the moral psychology of commitment Kierkegaard has much to teach us. This paper is not,
however, intended as a piece of Kierkegaard scholarship. Nor is it primarily a contribution to the debate on
disagreement that has flourished in this century, especially in Princeton (see Christensen 2007, Elga
2007a, b, Feldman 2006, Kelly 2005, Oppy 2006, Pettit 2006). My aim, rather, is to show that one sort of
disagreement is a scandal and should be replaced by another.
The Philosophical Scandal of the Wrong Kind of Religious Disagreement 153

Radical Uncertainty

By ‘uncertainty’ I mean the lack of a case beyond all reasonable doubt either way on
the topic being discussed—the motion, to use the language of debate. Consider, for
instance, the motion that there is no afterlife. I distinguish between two kinds of
uncertainty, the Bayesian and the radical, although there is continuity between the
two. Bayesian uncertainty occurs when the probability of the affirmative is fairly
definite and near neither 0% nor 100%. The paradigm case of Bayesian uncertainty
would be a probability of precisely 50%. Bayesian uncertainty constrains individuals
on pain of irrationality to suspend judgment, regardless of the consequences.
Radical uncertainty occurs when the case for and against under-constrains the
probabilities. (By the case I mean the collection of all the available arguments.)
Extending Kyburg’s (1974) account of the logical probability of an inference I take the
probabilities of an intellectual case to be intervals of real numbers, e.g., 50%±25%.
Definite values such as exactly 50% are then a special case. Extreme uncertainty
occurs when the interval is 50%±50%, which is 0% to 100%. Such extreme
uncertainty cannot be revised by empirical evidence.2 For that reason I take it to be
irrational except on matters for which there could be no empirical evidence. But
anything that spans the range from strongly for to strongly against will count as radical
uncertainty, for instance the range 50%±45%.
As readers will have gathered, I am supposing there are precise end values to the range
of real numbers that are probabilities of arguments. Clearly, even if there is such precision
we cannot usually discover it. So there is a deal of idealization involved. To those who
worry about this, I ask them to say where they think the idealization undermines my case.
On matters of no practical consequence, such as the Axiom of Choice, radical
uncertainty is not a problem. For the rational attitude is to believe that the probability is
the specified interval, 70%±25% say.3 Clearly, there is an idealization in the precision
of the intervals but that need not concern us. What should concern us is the difference
between having a belief that the probability is in a given range and having a degree of
belief which is in that range. The former requires the concept of probability, the latter
does not. Here I note the hyper-rationalist thesis that it is never rational to have a more
definite system of degrees of belief than that constrained by the case.
The idea of commitment, somewhat abused by preachers, is that of believing with
the least doubt compatible with remaining in the interval specified by the case.4
Hyper-rationalism excludes commitment.

2
Given a hypothesis h I take it that the probability of a piece of evidence e relative to h is itself a range
included in 1/n% to (100-1/n)% for some positive integer n. It then follows that prior probabilities equal to
either 0% and 100% are stable under the discovery of new evidence.
3
Extreme uncertainty about extreme uncertainty is equivalent to extreme uncertainty. Hence it is not self-
refuting to adopt a neo-positivist position of extreme uncertainty about the propositions that according to
the criteria of Logical Positivism are said to be meaningless. Readers who find that attractive should
modify the example to make the interval 0% to 100%.
4
Because precision is an idealization we may without further idealization take the intervals to include
their end-points. So we may characterize full commitment as having a degree of belief that is at one or
other end-point. Hence if the interval for the existence of God were 70%±20% then there can be a
committed theist who believes in God with 90% confidence and a committed agnostic who has confidence
50%. If this usage sounds too odd then we can require in addition that for a commitment there should be a
belief in the proposition committed to.
154 P. Forrest

I may now state the scandal of religious disagreement as the problem of

differing religious commitments. But it helps to have an example of a non-
religious commitment and here the classic example is William James’
commitment to free will. This is an example in which there is radical uncertainty
but according to James no radical choice: there is only one way to decide, act as
if free will is correct. Another example might occur if you took the case for
being awake and not dreaming to have a probability interval 95%±4%. Then you
should commit yourself to a degree of confidence 99%. For it can do no harm to
assume you are awake when asleep, but it might be dangerous the other way
round.

The Paradox of Commitment

One of the reasons why religious disagreements are often intractable concerns what I
call the ‘Paradox of Commitment’. It is that the commitment cannot help being a
further premise. For instance, commitment to free will excludes hard determinism.
Hence that commitment, combined with arguments against compatibilism, leads to
the libertarian position, which Sartre took to be incompatible with theism. I disagree
with Sartre, but to illustrate the Paradox let us suppose he is right. And suppose that
theism is itself a matter of radical uncertainty. Then why should the commitment to
free will have atheistic consequences?
The Paradox of Commitment might be used as an argument for hyper-rationalism.
My reply is that even if hyper-rationalism held for perfectly rational beings it should
not constrain actual human beings on religious doctrines of emotional consequence.
Consider, for instance, the trust that God has forgiven sin. If you suspend judgment
as to whether there is a God, or whether there is a forgiving God, you could act as if
God forgives by going to confession or by praying to God. There is, for example,
nothing inappropriate about the prayer of the soldier before the Battle of Blenheim,
“O God, if there is a God, have mercy on my soul, if I have a soul.” The soldier
might believe that if there is a forgiving God then his death in battle would be no
tragedy for himself, but I fail to see how the soldier could derive comfort from this
unless he, perhaps only for the duration of the battle, believes there is a God.
Likewise the emotionally rich attitude of faith in God presupposes belief that there is
a God. Or so I say. And before you disagree, note that belief in God is rationally
compatible with radical uncertainty, for the latter concerns the case not the
individual’s response to the case.
Because we are not perfectly rational there are certain topics we find it almost
impossible to think clearly about. Such cognitive blind spots might be protecting
fairly reliable ways of arriving at beliefs from unreliable side-effects. Whether or not
that is so, it is very hard to attend simultaneously to radical uncertainty and to the
use of commitments as premises. For instance, either (1) we concentrate on the belief
in free will and, fully aware of the radical uncertainty, commit ourselves to free will,
or (2) we think of free will as intuitive and then argue using that belief as a premise,
as in Sartre’s argument for atheism. We cannot easily attend to (1) and (2) together.
This blind spot hinders the discussion of religious disagreement. For instance,
whenever I give examples of radical uncertainty I find myself arguing the issue,
using premises that I take to be intuitions but others take to be commitments. And
The Philosophical Scandal of the Wrong Kind of Religious Disagreement 155

you may react similarly. If so, please take my examples as standing in for whatever
is both radically uncertain and emotionally rich.
The defense of commitment in circumstances of radical uncertainty is nothing
new. It is implied by William James’ famous thesis that where arguments under-
determine the outcome a passional choice is reasonable, a thesis recently defended
by John Bishop (2007). Where I disagree with James and Bishop is that I do not
think the choice has to be passional for it to be reasonable; it suffices that the
issue is emotionally rich. But that is a quibble, for it is hard to see how
commitment on an emotionally rich religious doctrine could fail to be itself
charged with emotion.
Nothing I have said so far implies that we are inevitably in a position of radical
uncertainty on religious doctrines, and my aim in writing this paper is to argue that
radical uncertainty is bad and avoidable. So I turn to the chief reason why, here and
now, we are actually in a situation of radical uncertainty.

The Implication of Disagreement

Suppose your initial assessment is that there is no radical uncertainty on some topic,
say the occurrence of an afterlife. Suppose, unlike me, you think it is beyond all
reasonable doubt that there is no afterlife. If you meet people who seem as able as
you are and who disagree then you might enquire as to their reasons. You find their
reasons unpersuasive but cannot find any defect in their reasoning and cannot
persuade them that their assessment is incorrect. And they have the same difficulty
with your case. Then the very fact that well-informed people of equal ability
disagree about the probability of the case is itself a prima facie case for radical
uncertainty. Nor can we appeal to good luck. To be sure, we can coherently claim to
have had good or bad luck and we may coherently claim to be now enjoying the
consequences of past good luck. But we cannot coherently claim to be now having
the good luck to have a true belief (about the case in question).
One interpretation of the uncertainty resulting from disagreement is based on the
equal weights view, namely giving to your epistemic peers (those you consider as
able as yourself) the same weight as to yourself. I would be applying it not to
commitments but to the assessment of the strength of the overall case, for and
against. For a commitment is under-constrained by the case and so neither my own
commitment nor that of anyone else has weight. I note that Elga (2007a, b) has
provided a more detailed case for the equal weights view. It might, however, seem
self-refuting precisely because others disagree about disagreement, a point discussed
by Kelly (2005) and Elga (2007b). My response is that because disagreement leads
to uncertainty and because we disagree about emotionally rich topics it is not
inappropriate to commit yourself to the equal weights view in the face of
disagreement.
An alternative to the equal weights view is the right reason view defended by
Kelly (2005), according to which you give a greater weight to your own opinion
than that of others. This could be judged a reasonable compromise between the equal
weights view and the dismissal of others as benighted, that is, giving them zero
weight. My objection to the right reason view is the same as my objection to
premature dismissal of others as benighted. The objection is that until I have explicit
156 P. Forrest

arguments to examine I cannot say why I am dismissing others as benighted, other

than asserting that I am right and they are wrong. If this holds for dismissal, it also
holds for giving yourself a greater weight than others.
Another alternative is to say that the weights assigned to yourself and others
should themselves be intervals, because of the feebleness of the case for and the case
against your own superiority to others. But that too leads to uncertainty.
I conclude, therefore, that disagreement tends to result in uncertainty.
It could be objected in line with Wagner and Lehrer (1981) that a community, all
of whom assign some positive weight to the others, are committed to a consensus.
This may well be so, but the current consensus is that the cases for and against
various religious doctrines are quite indecisive. So this is not an objection to Radical
Uncertainty.
This discussion of disagreement does, however, motivate part of the way of
ending the scandal of religious disagreement, namely a program of transparent rival
apologetics, in which the cases for and against various religious doctrines are
presented so well that if we dismiss our opponents we know why we are doing so.
Suppose, first, that at the end of all discussion the consensus is that all but two
worldviews are irrational, theocentrism and scientific naturalism. And suppose the
fundamental issue between them is the status of the first-person perspective as a
source of reliable metaphysical beliefs. Then the advocates of theocentrism such as
Richard Swinburne and myself may comfortably dismiss the naturalists because they
ignore what is manifest, and they may dismiss us as intellectually irresponsible
because we rely on soft data, ignoring the Cartesian requirement of clarity and
distinctness. Or maybe there is a third position of those who lack enthusiasm for
theories of everything. Call these the metaphysical skeptics—a deliberately
ambiguous phrase. The metaphysical skeptics will dismiss both theocentrism and
scientific naturalism as hubris: who are we to think we can understand things as
a whole? Scientific naturalists will agree with advocates of theocentrism that the
metaphysical skeptics are intellectual puritans who condemn a great human good,
namely understanding, for fear of an associated evil, hubris. If that is how the
discussion ends with these three parties, then we know why we are dismissing
others as benighted, and we are not just rationalizing a dismissal that is made solely
on the grounds that we are right and others are wrong. Part of the scandal is that we
are not in the position of being able to dismiss others knowing why we do so.

2. The Four Theses

The Dread Thesis

Either having false beliefs is intrinsically bad or it prevents the intrinsic good of
understanding. But my present concern is not with this general point about false
beliefs but the instrumental evil of false religious beliefs. It can be hard to find an
audience when discussing this topic. For excepting conservative religious groups
there is a consensus in favor of the ‘Anodyne Disjunction’: either (1) there is no
God, or (2) there is a God but we have no idea what implications that has for how
we should live, or (3) because God is both kind and loving we have additional
The Philosophical Scandal of the Wrong Kind of Religious Disagreement 157

motivation to be kind and loving ourselves but need have no fear of how things
might turn out for us in an afterlife.
Now I grant that other things being equal a consensus is more likely to be true
than false, but, I hold, other things are not equal in this case.
There are other interesting theses about religious beliefs that would undermine the
importance of true beliefs on religious topics. For instance, there is the suggestion
that God wants us to have false beliefs, even wanting us to be atheists, or if we are
theists wanting us not to believe in an afterlife. Maybe God wants us to have these
false beliefs to avoid the temptation of doing right for the sake of a reward in an
afterlife.
In this subsection I argue that the Dread Thesis holds in spite of the consensus
in favor of the Anodyne Disjunction and in spite of other ways of undermining
the importance of true religious beliefs. It holds because it does not require that
we believe that religious beliefs make a difference to our prospects in an
afterlife. For the Dread Thesis to hold it suffices that it should not be beyond all
reasonable doubt that they make no difference. I argue for this first by presenting some
speculations about the afterlife, on the widespread assumption that God is willing to
forgive anyone. Then I consider and criticize the case for the three disjuncts of the
Anodyne Disjunction.

Speculations about the Next Life

Everlasting Shame Forgiveness removes the suffering of guilt but not that of shame.
That may be outweighed by proper pride in what we humans shall have collectively
achieved, but only if we do collectively achieve it. So there is a new case for dread,
dread at the prospect of collective failure. Maybe as individuals we are saved, but
humanity is an abysmal failure.

Degrees of Blessedness Another reason for dread is the possibility of degrees of

blessedness in Heaven. Dante has those degrees fixed forever, but a more plausible
account of an afterlife is continual growth where the suffering of growth, though
real, is always outweighed by the joy of the state we are in. If this results in
unending progress then those who start behind might well stay behind, so the
choices you make in this life might influence your well-being forever. And those
choices might depend on what you believe. Moreover, this applies not just to
yourself but to those you love. Now you might say that a forgiving God would
equalize everyone, but forgiveness does not turn the clock back. To be sure the
elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son behaved badly when the younger
brother returned. But had he welcomed the younger brother and later treated him
as an equal in all decisions regarding the family farm, no one could complain if
when they have both died the elder brother’s will leaves much more to his
children than to his nephews and nieces.

Who Wants to Go to Heaven? Again, and perhaps most likely to occasion dread, is
that the premise that God is willing to forgive does not imply the conclusion that
God does in fact forgive. Either as a matter of necessity or of justice, to be forgiven
requires repentance. A related reason for dread concerns the question, ‘But do you
158 P. Forrest

want to go to Heaven?’. If, as I think likely, Heaven is a free gift requiring neither
works nor faith there remains this question, one that past Hell-fire preaching
obscured. The worry is that many, maybe even most, of us would prefer a Limbo of
the sort to which medieval thinkers assigned Plato and Aristotle. Or we may prefer
Nirvana to Heaven. In fact one of the really basic religious disagreements is
whether to seek deferential friendship with God, or egalitarian human autonomy.
Human beings are, I rather think, polytelic beings—that is, there are several
incompatible human tele, where by a ‘telos’ I mean a valuable goal which we are by
nature of the right kind to achieve. That is compatible with the divine purpose
excluding one or more of the several tele.
Your beliefs influence the kind of person you choose to be and hence whether you
would accept or politely decline the offer of Heaven.

Purgatory Maybe Heaven is only for the truly holy and the farther we are from
holiness when we die the more work has to be done in Purgatory. So why not put the
hard work off? Because there is a collective task as well as an individual one, and
the nearer you are to true holiness in this life the more you help others and the more
you further the collective task of humanity.

The Best Time to Start the Next Life If those speculations still have too much the
whiff of brimstone about them for you to take seriously, here is a further one, a
consequence of an idea of Dean Zimmerman’s (1999), in a paper explaining why
even materialists may believe in an afterlife (he was not, however, concerned
with its further implications). On this speculation the next life starts off at the
best time of this life. ‘Best’ here does not presumably mean when you were best
looking or enjoyed life the most, but when you were morally best. If you go
downhill all the way then your starting-point is just like the person who died in
infancy or indeed was still-born. Not a bad situation to be in: but what a waste of
a life! If you live a good life but develop into a thoroughly nasty person when you
go senile then that section of your life is excised. If you achieve heroism and after
that mediocrity, as it might seem happened to Schindler, then you start from the
heroic state. Now this is a fairly cheerful happy ending thesis about an afterlife,
but it has serious consequences. We need to know and to teach our children which
good life is the truly good life. Here I repeat the choice between collective
autonomy and deferential friendship with God. There is a tension between love of
neighbor and obedience to God, a tension that has to be recognized if we are to
understand religious fanaticism, but which also surfaces in moral debates.
My aim in presenting these speculations is to persuade you only that, in the
absence of a good case against these scenarios, the Dread Thesis still holds. If God
requires complete submission to the divine will and I as a typical Westerner think of
God as attaching value to my own autonomy, then one way or another I am in for a
shock when I die. For I would have chosen the wrong religion.
We are accustomed to thinking of these sort of speculations as frivolous, but that
is because they generate radical uncertainty. The dismissal of speculation is itself
due, I suggest, to the cognitive blind spot that protects us from the Paradox of
Commitment. For the committed can protect themselves by dismissing disturbing
speculations as frivolous or as lacking in common sense.
The Philosophical Scandal of the Wrong Kind of Religious Disagreement 159

The Disjuncts of the Anodyne Disjunction

What About Atheism? One way to hold the Anodyne Disjunction is to be a confident
atheist. But many atheists fear damnation for their lack of belief. What should they
do? If they consider it beyond all reasonable doubt that there is no God then I
suggest they should re-examine the case for and against the existence of God. If,
however, they do not think it beyond reasonable doubt, but have committed
themselves to atheism, then the thought that their fear of damnation is irrational is
itself an instance of the Paradox of Commitment. Instead of telling themselves their
fear is irrational, they should consider what sort of God there might be on the
assumption that there is a God, and what their motives are for their commitment to
atheism. It is, I say, irrational for atheists not to pray about these things.
Atheism is not, then, the antidote to the Dread Thesis that Epicureans and others
have hoped, unless it is held with a confidence that I consider irrational.

Do We Have Any Idea of the Purposes of Whatever God or Gods There May Be?
The Argument from Evil has considerable force if directed against the thesis that the
universe was created by a God who loved all the possible creatures that would come
into existence. One response, then, is that God is a utilitarian who does not divide
the love of creation into love of individual creatures. Now utilitarians are concerned
with the big picture and we have no idea of what a utilitarian God has in mind for us
in an afterlife, if there is one. Nor can we trust a utilitarian God not to deceive us
with false revelations. So if we believe in a utilitarian God, it might seem that we can
have no religious guidance as to how to live, undermining the Dread Thesis.
My reply is that even if the Argument from Evil rebuts the idea that God created
out of love for individuals, this does not undermine the Dread Thesis. For although
we cannot trust a utilitarian God not to deceive us, we still have good reason to
behave in the way a deceptive utilitarian God wants us to. So we still need to
discover whether there is any divine revelation, even if it is deceptive.
In any case it is perfectly rational to hold that God now has a disposition to love
individuals even if for one reason or another we consider that God did not love
individuals at the time of creation.

Love is All You Need? The best way of being human is to be kind and loving. We
may all grant this. Does it follow that no one needs to worry about the afterlife? No.
For a start even if kind, loving people have nothing to fear, people are strangely
overconfident about their own loving-kindness. What, then, does religion have to
offer for those who admit they lack charity? Secondly, the injunction to be loving
does not distinguish between the goal of egalitarian autonomy and the goal of
deferential friendship with God.

The Radical Uncertainty Thesis

Recall the Stove Question: ‘Why have philosophers?’(Stove 1985). One thing
philosophers might be expected to do is to state in a fair and accessible way the case
for and against various religious doctrines, taking everything relevant into
consideration. In this way any normal adult could decide how strong the case is.
160 P. Forrest

Let me stress that when I say ‘taking everything into consideration’ I mean
everything that can be said in favor of settling the truth of the question. This includes
intuitions, religious experience and so on. As a consequence there are enormous
difficulties in the way of this project, such as the decision to decide where to end the
sequence of rejoinders to replies to objections, etc. As I have already foreshadowed,
one of the future directions I would like to see for philosophy of religion is a
genuinely collaborative project of overcoming these difficulties.
But even if these difficulties are overcome, the more serious problem is that some
of the important religious disagreements are, here and now, matters of radical
uncertainty. The difficulty in showing this is that when you attend to any one issue,
commitments on other issues usually provide arguments that seem to settle the issue
you are concentrating on. Moreover, instead of recognizing this as the Paradox of
Commitment, it can seem to show an admirable coherence in your beliefs, one you
suspect that your intellectual opponents lack. All I can do is to appeal to you to
survey doctrines of significance and decide if you can sincerely insist that in no
cases is your belief a matter of commitment rather than reason. A good source for
doctrines of significance concern conditional beliefs, that is, what you hold under the
supposition that there is a God of a certain kind and an afterlife of a certain kind.
Assume, for instance, that there is a kind and loving God. Under the scope of that
assumption, ask yourself if everyone goes to Heaven.

The Radical Choice Thesis

Radical Uncertainty is somewhat disturbing even if the issue is of neither practical

nor emotional significance, but in that case we may suspend judgment. If there is just
one hypothesis of consequence whose negation is not beyond reasonable doubt,
there is only one commitment that it is rational to make. Notice that this is not the
situation of Pascal’s Wager, which is one of Bayesian uncertainty.
The Radical Choice thesis is that radical uncertainty can occur on matters that are
of great significance but in which the consequences do not force the commitment.
Now John Hick has for many years held that a great deal of uncertainty about the
nature of the divine or transcendent is compatible with our knowing, beyond all
reasonable doubt, how to live, and that various religions may be assessed by
considering how conducive they are to the truly good life. Hick (1989) considers that
the basic choice of how to live is between being self-centered and reality-centered.
He has been widely criticized, but I shall make just two points. The first is that, as
always happens, the attempt to synthesize religions becomes a new doctrine as
controversial as the old. The second is that overcoming self-centeredness is a
necessary, not a sufficient, condition for living a truly good life and Hick’s use of the
phrase ‘reality-centered’ does not specify which alternative to self-centeredness is
required. Contrast, for instance, Muslim and Buddhist ideas of compassion: both are
reality-centered but they are not the same. Or consider again the choice between
egalitarian human autonomy and deferential friendship with God. Both are reality-
centered but they are not the same. If the former is some future goal for humanity in
which neither you nor anyone you care about will be alive to enjoy and the latter a
sure thing if there is a God and if you want it, then it would be irrational not to do
whatever can be done to ensure your children, at least, grow up desiring deferential
The Philosophical Scandal of the Wrong Kind of Religious Disagreement 161

friendship with God. But maybe there is a God with whom friendship of any kind is
impossible but who has arranged an afterlife in which true humanists will flourish. If
we are radically uncertain of the sort of God there is then the commitment cannot
itself be guided by reason.
The intellectual problem of religious disagreement, then, is that there are
emotionally significant religious doctrines of practical consequence that are subject
not merely to radical uncertainty but also to radical choice.

The Scandal Thesis

To have to commit yourself without guidance is a prima facie evil, something that
causes immediate suffering because of doubt and which might be of infinite
consequence in the afterlife. There are two tasks that philosophers of religion should
be able to perform, and if we cannot then why bother with philosophy of religion?
The first is that of helping people choose wisely, by adopting a way of life that
minimizes the risk of an unhappy ending. For instance I proclaim the following
dilemma for atheists who do not pray: either you are irrational in being such a
confident atheist, or if you are not that confident you should pray, ‘O God if there is
a God,…’. Likewise, I submit we should seek to become ourselves and bring our
children up to be the sort of people who love both God and our neighbor. But not all
difficult decisions can be dealt with in this way. So when it comes to forced
commitments the task of the philosopher should be to lay out the arguments in such
a way that anyone can survey them and so know why we dismiss others if we do so.
The scandal is that we have not done this.
There is an objection to the feasibility of this program for philosophers. It is based
on the Problem of the Last Word.5 But before I discuss this problem I should add
that even if it cannot be solved this does not remove the scandal. For it would show
that philosophy of religion is a hopeless task and should be abandoned. The problem
is that in a debate the side that gets the last word seems to have an advantage.
Consider a series of rejoinders to replies to objections to arguments. In order to
survey the case this must be cut off at some point; so we might, e.g., allow replies to
objections, but no rejoinders. That would give an unfair advantage to the person
proposing the argument. Therefore, the objection goes, we should not cut off the
series, in which case the argument cannot be surveyed.
This problem may be dealt with in three ways. First, even if we have a consensus
as to what the relevant arguments are we should still allow further discussion
because of the chance of progress, which would subsequently affect the consensus.
With that proviso, it is not so serious an omission if those surveying the arguments
are ignorant of something that might lead to a different conclusion, provided the
consensus as to the arguments occurs among those who are both for and against the
doctrine in question. The second way of dealing with the problem is only to consider
resilient arguments, those with a track record of successful modification to meet
objections. The third and most important way is to treat the series of objections and
replies as a research tool and subsequently reformulate the arguments so that the
objections just do not apply. For example, if you are presenting a cosmological
5
Graham Oppy put a version of this objection to me at the 2008 APRA Conference.
162 P. Forrest

argument, you should stress at the beginning that the conclusion of this argument is
that there is a necessary being that is the cause of all other beings, rather than state it
as an argument to the existence of God and then get entangled in a debate over just
how God-like the necessary being is.

3. Some Responses

I begin with what I take to be the only consistent response, but one of limited
applicability.

Playing the Faith Card

If after praying for guidance we come to believe, even though there is no weight of
argument in favor of belief, then we might reasonably treat this as God’s gift, and
hope and pray that others be similarly guided. I know the slogan ‘Thank God I’m an
atheist’, but it is just a matter of logic that atheists cannot play the faith card.
Therefore the believer in a providential God may avoid the Paradox of Commitment
by taking their commitment to be the result of grace. (Here I take it that only a
providential God would help us with grace.)Clearly this is limited to a commitment
to providential theism. Once we discover that proponents of other religions based
upon providential theism are as sincere in playing the faith card as we are, then it
ceases to be reasonable as a way of deciding between these religions.
I now turn to responses that promise a way of resolving the intellectual disputes
but, rather annoyingly, just assume we all agree on something that should be
controversial.

Contra-Pascalian Decision Theory

Although himself an atheist, Oppy (2006: 34) defends the agnostic who ignores
large positive and negative expected outcomes when they are based upon supposedly
small probabilities. Now I concede that there must come a point where the
probabilities are so small that hard-to-assess large or even infinite positive and
negative utilities can be ignored. Otherwise nothing short of Cartesian indubitability
would be a sound basis for prudence. But the assumption that there is only a small
probability of an afterlife in which there is something to be gained by having lived in
a certain way already assumes a resolution of a controversial issue, which is why this
response is unhelpful.
Maybe the agnostics could take the high moral ground here and commit themselves
to a deontological ethics in which collective or individual prudence is ignored. To that
I reply by means of a dilemma. If there are objective moral truths then the deon-
tological agnostic has made a commitment in the face of radical uncertainty about the
nature of objective ethics, and so is not free of commitments. Moreover, the Paradox of
Commitment then comes into play because an objective deontological ethics is the
premise for the strongest moral argument for theism. But if, on the other hand, the
agnostic holds that ethics is subjective then it is plainly irresponsible to ignore pruden-
tial considerations when it comes to the well-being of loved ones, especially children.
The Philosophical Scandal of the Wrong Kind of Religious Disagreement 163

Spiritual Chauvinism

There are those who think the concern over doctrine is a sign of spiritual immaturity.
Given that some doctrines have consequences as to how we should live, this spiritual
chauvinism clearly requires the falsity of such doctrines. Perhaps the idea is that
various ineffable experiences are inconsistent with the doctrines in question. To that
I respond that we need to be told just which religious doctrines are inconsistent with
whose experience. I am in principle open to persuasion that mystical experience
shows that atheism is correct, but that does not seem to be the consensus of those
who have such experiences. So what doctrines are consistent with these ineffable
experiences? Spiritual chauvinists may be charitably interpreted as taking religious
experience to support Hick’s thesis of there being something divine or transcendent
of which we can say little. But as mentioned above this does not remove radical
uncertainty, for there are different ways of being reality-centered.

Faith Presupposes Uncertainty

One of the doctrines of Protestantism is that we are justified by faith not works, but the
justifying faith is not mere belief, it involves a total trust in spite of the risk. This requires
a commitment in the face of radical uncertainty. The problem with this response is that
there is a further uncertainty, namely about how, on the assumption that justification is
required, human beings are justified. Even if something momentous and passionate was
required (why?), the commitment to faith is just one such passionate episode. There are
other dilemmas in which the decision as to how to act has enormous influence on the
kind of person you become. Why does it have to be faith?

The Older Pachyderm

There is a plague of elephants—scarce one room in ten lacks one. Time was when
elephants were so rare that the proverbial blind men each thought they had grasped
a different animal. Those who think of themselves as wise tell us that there is a
moral in this, namely that we should humbly acknowledge that we have only
partial truths. But why should we listen to those who claim wisdom? Theirs is yet
another disputed position. Think how it would apply to the Islamic abhorrence of
the doctrine of the Trinity. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity seems to be just
what the elephant ordered: some truth in tritheism, some truth in monotheism. But
Muslims could rightly complain that this is just another position we could disagree
with.

Irony, Subjectivity, Relativism and Non-cognitivism

There are various ways of achieving inconsistency. You can believe but in a calm
reflective moment suspend judgment; you can act as if the truth is objective and
absolute, but when faced with disagreement, retreat to subjectivism or relativism. Or
you may take our lack of agreement as a mark of lack of truth-value. My response is to
relate the story of the Scottish preacher who tells his congregation that on Judgment
Day the damned will protest, “But Lord we di’ no’ ken”. To which God will look down
164 P. Forrest

upon them and reply, “Ye ken the noo”. Matters of practical consequence require
truth, not make-believe or what you are comfortable with or what is widely accepted.
And strange though it may sound it is unreasonable to be less concerned about the
afterlife for yourself and those you love than whether your lump sum pension gets to
seven figures. Relativism, subjectivism and non-cognitivism about religion
presuppose that religion is a purely this-worldly matter, but that is a matter of
dispute.
Finally, I consider two responses that have not been proposed but we might think
were relevant.

Tainted Truth?

This is the idea that our beliefs are tainted by false presuppositions, like accurate
tables of sunrise and sunset drawn up in ignorance of the fact that it is the Earth that
is spinning, not the Sun rising. This may affect all our religious beliefs, but it does so
in a uniform way since we all share the same conceptual scheme, tied to our shared
linguistic capacity.
I have an additional response, namely that although the difficulties of knowing
religious truths might provide a further reason for not killing in the name of God, it
aggravates rather than ameliorates the dread occasioned by religious disagreement.

Muddling Through (Inspired by Edmund Burke)

I suspect the majority position is that when faced with an insoluble problem,
you should forget it and press on regardless. The more you think about it the
worse it gets. Let us, therefore, just press on with the project of ensuring
tolerance and throw the most important choices we ever make into the too hard
basket. This is related to the advice never to start philosophizing. It may be
sound advice but for a significant portion of the population it is too late: many
of us cannot help thinking of these questions. Incidentally that is part of the
answer to the Stove question: if you have started to philosophize the best way
of guarding against serious damage is to understand the ongoing tradition of
philosophical inquiry.

4. The Way Forward

The way forward, I submit, is quite simply to become better philosophers. First, we
should collaborate with our opponents, not with those who agree with us. By so
doing we should be able to reach a consensus about what the relevant arguments are
in such a way that no expertise is required to reach a judgment on the case for and
against. Here I note that there is no reason why any non-expert should grant that an
expert is better at judging the case than a non-expert.
Another way of making progress is to debate hypothetical topics, such as what
sort of God there is, under the assumption that there is a God, or what sort of
afterlife there is under the scope of the assumption that there is one. We might
even be able to show that the Anodyne Consensus was beyond all reasonable
The Philosophical Scandal of the Wrong Kind of Religious Disagreement 165

doubt, which would be bad news for organized religion but good news for
humanity.6
A third way of making progress is to engage in a dialectic, reminiscent of
Aristotle and Leibniz. Something should be said here about the rejection of the
Hegelian dialectic, the idea of a movement of thought leading to collective progress.
There is, I say, no tendency to progress. The only tendency is to go backwards.
Progress occurs only if we work hard against that tendency. My case for this bracing
assessment is the dismal history of philosophy.
Aristotle’s method was to collect the arguments as well as intuitive judgments and
then negotiate between them. Leibniz wanted to reconcile Catholicism with
Protestantism for the sake of German unity by a diplomatic process of giving both
sides what they most wanted. Something like this dialectical method is what is
required, I think. But the aim is not to find a formula that both sides can accept. That
might do for Church unity but not if the truth matters. Dialectic has to be based on
verstehen, walking a mile in the other’s shoes, and not on mere compromise. But it is
not just ecumenism. It requires both analytic rigor and metaphysical imagination.
For instance a Christian theologian might say that Jesus was tempted qua human but
not qua divine. While I do not say that such statements are false, they are inadequate
if the aim is to reconcile monotheism with the divinity of Jesus. For the talk of ‘qua
this’, ‘qua that’ is a promissory note. We need more.
It helps that often religious doctrines can be disambiguated into a version that we
do have good philosophical reasons to reject and a version that we can incorporate
into a synthesis. A case in point is, I think, the twin theses of reincarnation and the
law of karma. Understood as a thesis about personal identity in the strict and narrow
sense, in which guilt (and its opposite, justification) transfer over identity, this is
open to serious criticism. But understood in terms of the rather different idea of what
you may reasonably identify yourself with, thus acquiring both shame and pride but
not guilt, it is capable of defense. Likewise the Christian doctrine of Original Sin
may be disambiguated between a guilt thesis and a shame thesis. The former says
that our collective wrongdoing is occasion for proper individual guilt; the latter is
that it is occasion for proper individual shame. There are good reasons for rejecting
the former but not the latter. Moreover, the shame version of original sin may be
reconciled with the reasonable identification version of reincarnation and karma.
Even if radical uncertainty remained after all this work there would be something
that philosophy had achieved. For the Paradox of Commitment can be avoided by
making a single overall commitment to a metaphysical system rather than piecemeal
commitments. Previously I considered the case in which there is a consensus that all
but two worldviews are irrational, theocentrism and scientific naturalism. And I
considered the case of mutual dismissal. But suppose instead there is agreement that
the choice between them is radically uncertain. In that case, although there remains a
need for commitment there is a single commitment to a metaphysical system, also
known as a worldview, not piece-meal commitments. So at least the Paradox of
Commitment is avoided. And likewise if there is a choice between one of a
surveyable range of many metaphysical systems.

6
Notice, though, that this bit of good news might be, like an older ‘good news’, only true because we
have been saved, in which case Christianity would continue to have a role in reminding us to be grateful.
166 P. Forrest

Conclusion

What I have been proclaiming and I hope also making a case for is the thesis that we
are in an intolerable situation as a result of religious disagreement and that we are in
it because philosophers have not been earning their bread. The Stove question is still
on the table.

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