## 1. A Formal Definition



Alvin Plantinga has noted that fideism can be defined as an
"exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a
consequent disparagement of reason and utilized especially in the
pursuit of philosophical or religious truth" (87).
Correspondingly, Plantinga writes, a *fideist* is someone who
"urges reliance on faith rather than reason, in matters
philosophical and religious" and who "may go on to
disparage and denigrate reason" (87). Notice, first, that what
the fideist seeks, according to this account, is *truth*.
Fideism claims that truths of a certain kind can be grasped only by
foregoing rational inquiry and relying solely on faith. Insofar as
fideism insists that knowledge of these truths is possible, it must be
distinguished from various forms of skepticism with which it otherwise
shares certain common features. Notice too that this definition is
largely formal; the plausibility of fideism as a philosophical
doctrine and the proper extension of the term will therefore depend on
the content given to the terms "faith" and
"reason."


## 2. A Brief History of "Fideism"



The formality of definitions like the one cited by Plantinga is likely
to conceal underlying disagreements about what counts as a concrete
instance of fideism. Indeed, there is little agreement among
philosophers about which thinkers can properly be subsumed under this
rubric. To offer a straight "history of fideism" would
thus require one to take up a particular position with respect to a
series of ongoing philosophical disputes. This section thus
attempts - somewhat less ambitiously, though perhaps more
charitably - to sketch a brief history not of fideism but of
"fideism" - i.e., of the term's (contested)
usage within the philosophical literature.


### 2.1 Sin, Skepticism, and Kant: Theological and Philosophical Roots



The term "fideism" appears to have entered the
philosophical lexicon by way of theology in the late nineteenth
century. It was originally used in reference to a movement within
Roman Catholic thought, also known as *traditionalism*, which
emphasized, over against rationalism, the role of tradition as the
medium by means of which divine revelation is communicated, and which
was sometimes conjoined with a conservative social and political
agenda. Although of late modern vintage, the term
"fideism" has since been applied retrospectively to
thinkers at least as far back as the second century C.E.



Tertullian is frequently cited in this connection as a textbook
fideist. Developing a theme articulated by Paul in his First Letter to
the Corinthians, Tertullian insisted that the truth of Christianity
could be disclosed only by revelation, and that it must necessarily
remain opaque to unregenerate philosophical
 reason.[1]
 In an oft-quoted passage he maintains (against Marcion) that the
Biblical narrative of Christ's death and resurrection "is
by all means to be believed, because it is absurd...[T]he fact is
certain, because it is impossible" (525).



However, the conception of Tertullian as anti-rational is not
supported by contemporary scholarship. Contrary to popular belief,
what Tertullian said is not *credo quia absurdum* but
*credible est quia ineptum est.* Tertullian's point seems
to have been that the incarnation represents a paradox: salvation
requires both that God become human and that God remain wholly other.
His quarrel was not with reason *per se*, but with
philosophical hubris. Eric Osborne writes, "Not only did he
never say '*credo quia absurdum*', but he never
meant anything like it and never abandoned the claims of Athens upon
Jerusalem" (28). Tertullian, Osborne concludes, was a
"most improbable fideist" (29).



During the Middle Ages, efforts to reconcile Christian doctrine with
Aristotelian logic - newly reintroduced into European thought via
the translation of Aristotle's corpus from Greek and
Arabic - gave rise to a family of positions that Sheila Delany
groups together under the label "skeptical fideism." By
distinguishing the revealed truths of the Christian religion, which
can be accepted only via what they posited as a distinct faculty of
faith, from the knowledge-claims to which the dialectical method is
relevant, thirteenth-century thinkers like Boetius of Dacia and his
colleague Siger de Brabant sought a theo-philosophico rapprochement
(Delany, 13-17). Pragmatically, this appeal to faith was in the
service less of safeguarding Christian faith than of loosening
ecclesiastical constraints on philosophy. Summarizing these
developments, Delany writes:



> 
> With the separation of truths as their declaration of independence,
> progressive scholars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were
> able to pursue their arguments as far as logically possible. Skeptical
> fideism offered a way of saving both faith and reason, for while faith
> was no longer to be supported by reason, neither was it to be denied
> out of hand. As a separate mode of perception it could remain valid on
> its own terms, neither requiring proof nor infringing on it (21).
> 



The freedom claimed for philosophy was nevertheless a "limited
freedom": "Indeed logic was still restrained by the very
device that freed it, for as long as doctrine was acknowledged to be
supreme, and God's will the highest cause, then reason and
experience could attain only relative validity" (Delany,
21).



Moreover, theology had reasons of its own to be suspicious of
experience and (what passes for) reason. Of central importance in this
regard is the idea that one's rational faculties can be damaged
by sin. Although this idea was articulated by a variety of early
Christian theologians including Tertullian and Augustine (and has
obvious analogues in classical virtue theory), it came to be given
special attention within the Protestant tradition. The reformers held
that the human intellect had been corrupted by humanity's fall
from grace, and that consequently the truth of Christianity could be
apprehended only by faith. Protestant theologians from Luther and
Calvin to Karl Barth have thus affirmed the priority of faith not only
to "works" but also to natural theology.



Within Roman Catholicism, by contrast, greater weight has
characteristically been given to the classic arguments for God's
existence. (It is, however, doubtful that these arguments were
historically ever intended as freestanding proofs that would be
convincing to atheists. For an illuminating discussion of the
functions of such arguments in pre-modern and early-modern contexts,
see Clayton, Parts II and III.) This theological division thus
represents part of the context for the debate over fideism. It is
interesting in this connection to note that the Roman Catholic
Magisterium has repeatedly condemned fideism. Absent from the
documents of Vatican I, the term makes what seems to be its first
appearance in a papal encyclical in 1907, in Pius X's
*Pascendi Dominici Gregis* (see Other Internet Resources),
where fideism is referenced in the context of a more sweeping critique
of "modernist"
 theology.[2]
 More recently, in the 1998 encyclical *Fides et Ratio* (see
Other Internet Resources), John Paul II warned of "a resurgence
of *fideism*, which fails to recognize the importance of
rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding
of faith, indeed for the very possibility of belief in God"
(SS55), and in *Caritas In Veritate* (2009, see Other
Internet Resources), his third encyclical, Benedict XVI writes,
"Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism
that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism
that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space"
(SS3). This emphasis on reason in general, and on natural theology
in particular, may help in part to explain how the term
"fideism" has come to function within Roman Catholic
theology largely as a term of opprobrium.



On the other hand - and in a sort of ironic twist - the
counter-Reformation also launched a defense of Catholicism that some
historians have described as fideistic. The Protestant Reformation
coincided with the re-discovery in Europe of the ancient skeptical
arguments of Sextus Empiricus, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius, and as
Richard H. Popkin has demonstrated, these arguments were quickly
appropriated by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic
philosophers and theologians - including Erasmus, Montaigne,
Pierre Charron, and Petrus Gassendi (as well as by Protestant thinkers
like Pierre Bayle) - who deployed them in the religious
controversies of the
 period.[3]
 Their contention was simple, if something of an *ignoratio
elenchi*: since skepticism undermines any reason for becoming a
Protestant, one should remain a Catholic on the basis of faith alone
(Popkin 1992, 122-123).



But although the Protestant reformers and these "nouveaux
Pyrrhoniens" both relied on skeptical arguments to deflate the
pretensions of philosophical "reason," they tended to draw
somewhat different conclusions about the role and nature of faith. In
the face of uncertainty the latter counseled their readers to remain
loyal to the prevailing religious conventions of the time - in
this case Roman Catholicism. But they tended to eschew the religious
enthusiasm characteristic of the more pietistic Protestant sects.
Theirs was thus a temperate and tentative faith, grounded in action
rather than doctrine. If they were fideistic, they were nevertheless
not dogmatic. According to the reformed view, by contrast, the domain
of faith is characterized by fervor and passionate commitment:
skepticism thus ultimately gives way to certainty and religious
assurance of a kind unassailable by philosophical doubt. In his book
*God and Skepticism*, Terence Penelhum calls the latter view
"evangelical fideism," and he distinguishes it from the
"conformist fideism" that identifies faith with loyalty to
a tradition (15-16).



The theological developments in the nineteenth century in reference to
which the term "fideism" was first used had their
philosophical inspiration not simply in the skepticism of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, but also, and more
immediately, in Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy. For Kant,
God's existence was a postulate of
*practical* - rather than pure - reason. Accordingly,
Kant rejected the traditional "proofs" of God's
existence - the cosmological, teleological, and ontological
arguments - in favor of a moral argument. Thus, although Kant
famously championed the conception of a thoroughly
"rational" (i.e., moral) version of Christianity - a
"religion within the limits of reason alone" - he also
placed religious belief outside the domain of what can be known by
means of speculative philosophy. In this way, he "found it
necessary to deny *knowledge*, in order to make room for
*faith*" (1929, 29).



The earliest documented uses of the term "fideism" are to
be found in French theology. Thomas D. Carroll has located references
to *fideisme* from as early as 1854 (2008, 10); however,
the term appears to have entered into broader circulation in the
literature a quarter-century later, when it came to be used
pejoratively in reference to Catholic traditionalism by theologians
seeking to revive the Thomistic synthesis of reason and faith.



At around the same time or shortly thereafter, Carroll argues, the
term appears to have originated independently in the work of the
French Protestant theologians Eugeene Menegoz
(1838-1921) and Auguste Sabatier (1839-1901), who (unlike
the Catholic traditionalists of whom it was predicated by their
critics) applied it to themselves. Menegoz and Sabatier
both sought to distinguish faith - understood in terms of
something akin to Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute
dependence - from propositional belief, arguing that salvation
depends on the former, rather than on assent to any particular
doctrine. Because of Sabatier's emphasis on religious symbols,
this view was sometimes called
 "symbolo-fideism."[4]



As Carroll observes, the projection of the term "fideism"
ahistorically - onto thinkers as removed from the context in which
it originated as Tertullian - is potentially the source of much
confusion, given that the meanings of key terms like
"faith" and "reason" vary dramatically from
one context to another. Moreover, the term's presently
widespread pejorative connotations render "fideism"
problematic as a descriptive category.


### 2.2 The Usual Suspects



Today the term "fideism" is perhaps most commonly
associated with four philosophers: Pascal, Kierkegaard, James, and
Wittgenstein. In order to assess how well the label fits, it will be
helpful to discuss their respective views in slightly more detail.
Note, however, that each is also treated at greater length elsewhere
in this encyclopedia.


#### 2.2.1 Pascal



Whereas Montaigne's followers, though significant theological
figures in their day, "showed no particular fervor in their
religious views" and practiced a "tepid, if sincere"
form of Catholicism (Popkin 1992, 124), the same could not be said of
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), whose *Pensees* attest
to a more "evangelical" brand of Pyrrhonian piety.
Following a transformative mystical experience in 1654, Pascal spent
much of the remainder of his life in the monasteries of Port-Royal,
working out a defense of his faith.



Central to this defense, seemingly paradoxically, is the conviction
that belief in God cannot be defended by means of the usual apologetic
arguments. The very nature of what is believed in - namely, an
"infinitely incomprehensible" being - is such as to
render these arguments necessarily inadequate.



> 
> Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give reasons for
> their beliefs, since they profess belief in a religion which they
> cannot explain? They declare, when they expound it to the world, that
> it is foolishness, *stultitiam*; and then you complain because
> they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not keep their
> word; it is through their lack of proofs that they show they are not
> lacking in sense (201).
> 



The most the philosophical arguments could prove, Pascal suggests, is
the "god of the philosophers" - not the "God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."



Pascal insists that faith can nevertheless be rational in the absence
of proof - i.e., that it is rational in a prudential rather than
an epistemic sense. It is here that he introduces his celebrated
"Wager" arguments. Pascal's first move in the
argument is a skeptical one. He argues that although God either exists
or does not exist, we cannot settle the issue on the basis of reason
alone. The proofs of God's existence are not conclusive, but
neither are the proofs of God's non-existence. "Reason can
determine nothing" (201).



Granting that reason is indeed neutral with respect to the question of
whether or not God exists, it might at first be thought that the
safest and most rational course of action would be to refuse to take a
stand one way or the other - to remain agnostic about the
existence of God. However, Pascal argues that this is not possible:
*not choosing* to believe is equivalent to *choosing
not* to believe. If you do not choose *for* God, you in
effect choose *against* God. But on what basis, then, should
one decide?



The solution, Pascal argues, is to weigh the potential rewards of
believing in God against the potential rewards of failing to believe
in God - i.e., to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the relative
merits of "wagering" for or against God's existence.
The options, as Pascal construes them, can be outlined in the form of
a table:




|  | *God exists* | *God does not exist* |
| --- | --- | --- |
| *Believe* | Infinite Gain | No (or Finite) Loss/Finite Gain |
| *Disbelieve* | Infinite Loss | Finite Gain |



These options can be assessed in terms of what is known within
contemporary decision theory as the Expected Value Principle (EVP).
The EVP states that when one is faced with a choice among competing
courses of action, one should choose whichever has the highest
"expected value." Expected value can be calculated by (a)
multiplying the probability of a successful outcome by the value of
that outcome; (b) multiplying the probability of an unsuccessful
outcome by the cost of that outcome; and (c) taking the sum of the
results of (a) and (b). In light of the EVP it can be rational to
gamble on an improbable outcome given a sufficiently high potential
payoff.



Of course, in the case of God, it is hard to determine what the
chances of a successful outcome might be: we cannot justifiably
assume, for example, that the likelihood of God existing is equal to
the likelihood of God not existing. But that is irrelevant, Pascal
argues, because the payoff if God exists is an *infinite*
payoff. Thus, the potential for infinite gain makes it rational to bet
that God exists, however slim the actual chances of this might be: as
long as one is willing to grant that there is "one chance of
winning against a finite number of chances of losing," it is a
better deal to bet on God (202-203).



Although Pascal's argument seems to be valid - that is, its
conclusion follows logically from its premises - Pascal's
critics have raised a number of other objections to it. In the first
place, it has been said that any argument which seeks to justify faith
entirely in such crassly prudential terms is necessarily impious or
improper. To be sure, it is hard to avoid feeling, as William James
put it, "that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in the
language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps" (6).
James went on to remark that "if we were ourselves in the place
of the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting
off believers of this pattern from their infinite reward" (6).
In fairness, however, it should be noted that Pascal's use of
the "Wager" is merely instrumental. It is intended simply
as a first step toward, and not as a substitute for, genuine religious
faith. Furthermore, the claim that it is somehow improper to base such
a decision on prudential reasons seems to presuppose precisely what
Pascal denies - namely, that there are epistemic reasons on which
one's decision might more appropriately be made to rest. It is
important to appreciate that Pascal is not urging his readers to
believe something they otherwise have reason to doubt. As he puts it,
"Your reason is not more deeply wounded by choosing one rather
than the other because it is bound to choose" (202).



But can one choose to believe for purely instrumental reasons? A
second worry is that Pascal's argument seems to presuppose a
problematic version of *doxastic voluntarism*, the view that
believing is subject to the will. Believing in God, unlike raising
one's arm, it might be objected, is not open to direct voluntary
control. However, Pascal anticipates this objection, arguing that a
would-be believer should begin by imitating the motions of a believer.
By, for instance, attending Mass and taking holy water, a would-be
believer may succeed in cultivating genuine belief. This argument
suggests that Pascal is committed to the less controversial thesis of
*indirect* doxastic voluntarism - the view that a person
can indirectly control his or her beliefs by directly controlling his
or her epistemic situation. Still, the prospect of voluntarily
inducing belief for purely non-epistemic reasons has struck many
commentators as manipulative and self-deceptive.



A third problem is that Pascal's argument depends upon an overly
narrow construal of one's religious options. It is of course the
case, as Pascal claims, that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
either exists or does not exist, but the same is true of a seemingly
endless number of other possible deities. If we assume the possibility
of infinite reward in each case, it is no longer clear that
Catholicism is any more rational than its religious alternatives. In
reply, Jeff Jordan recently has argued that the "Wager"
can be reconfigured to show, not that one religion is more rational
than another, but simply that atheism and agnosticism are
irrational.



Jordan follows Pascal in treating religious belief as a necessary
prerequisite for eternal happiness. However, some critics have
questioned this assumption. How do we know - it might be
asked - that if he or she exists, God would make salvation
contingent on correct belief? Pascal seems to vacillate between a
professed ignorance of God's nature and some rather doctrinaire
assumptions about it. Indeed, if one grants that there is even a small
chance of achieving infinite bliss by pursuing a
*non-religious* path, then the EVP suggests that such a path
would be just as rational in light of its expected value.



Although Pascal's "Wager" is widely regarded as
having been discredited, within the past few years there has been a
revival of philosophical interest in the argument, and some
contemporary philosophers have attempted to rehabilitate a version of
it. In *Rationality and Religious Theism*, for instance, Joshua
L. Golding adopts a broadly Pascalian strategy in defense of what he
calls "religious theism." Whereas Pascal focused his
attention on the question of whether it is rational to *believe in
God*, Golding is primarily concerned with the question of whether
it is rational to pursue a *religious way of life* - one in
which beliefs about God's existence might play a relatively
minor and non-foundational role. To qualify as a religious theist,
Golding explains, one must seek to enter into a good relationship with
God, and for this it is sufficient to believe simply that God's
existence is not impossible (i.e., that the concept of
"God" is not contradictory) and that it is at least
slightly more likely that one can achieve a good relationship with God
by adopting a religious way of life than by not doing so. Arguing on
the basis of the EVP, Golding contends that it is rational to be a
religious theist if one conceives of the value of a good relationship
with God as "qualitatively superior" to any other
value.



Whereas Pascal held that the payoff of believing in God would be
infinite, if God exists, Golding is careful to insist that the value
of a good relationship with God is finite. Otherwise, as he notes, we
are faced with the problem - alluded to above - that more than
one path might be equally rational for a person in light of its
expected value. If, however, the value of a good relationship with God
is finite, then whichever path is deemed to have the greatest chance
of success at achieving this reward will have the highest expected
value, other things being equal. Of course, the expected value of the
good relationship with God must be higher than the expected value of
any non-religious pursuit, however likely the latter is to result in a
*mundane payoff*. Thus, Golding holds that the value of a good
relationship with God should be understood "not merely as
'a lot better' or 'vastly better' than any
other goal," but as *qualitatively* different. Given this
difference in kind, Golding concludes that "no quantitative
amount of other goods added together would equal the value" of
the good relationship with God (66).



However, it is unclear whether Golding's version of the
"Wager" argument is ultimately more successful than
Pascal's. The problem is that the EVP requires a single index of
value in accordance with which gambles can be compared, whereas
Golding's contention that the value of the good relationship
with God is different in kind from other values seems to suggest the
incommensurability of two different indices. Thus, although the
argument purports to show that religious theism is a more rational
choice, it seems ultimately to hinge not on an objective comparison of
two commensurable quantities but on a preference for goods of a
certain type. It might well be the case that certain goods are
preferable to others, even though there is no single scale of value by
means of which to rank them, but showing this would seem to require a
different sort of argument than the one Golding presents. In other
words, Golding's *quantitative* argument in favor of the
religious life over the non-religious life seems to be undercut by his
insistence that the outcomes being compared are *qualitatively*
different.



In any event, it is worth noting that Pascal and his intellectual
heirs, though frequently characterized as fideists, are not
antagonistic to reason *tout court*. In the first place, as
Pascal sees it, it is *reasonable* to acknowledge limits to
reason. "Reason's last step is the recognition that there
are an infinite number of things which are beyond it" (209). It
is in this spirit that he suggests, somewhat more elliptically, that
"[t]here is nothing which is so much in conformity with reason
as the rejection of reason" (209). Thus, Pascal invokes reason
to justify what might otherwise appear to be its antithesis. Moreover,
the aim of the "Wager" argument is precisely to secure the
rational respectability of faith in the face of an apparent antinomy.
In this respect, Pascal's approach anticipates Kant's
contention that God's existence is a question for
*practical* - as opposed to
*theoretical* - reason.


#### 2.2.2 Kierkegaard



Any discussion of Soren Kierkegaard's thought is
complicated by the fact that he wrote pseudonymously, attributing most
of his writings to a variety of fictional authors whose
"views" may or may not have corresponded to his own. In
*The Point of View for My Work as an Author* - one of the
few works to which Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was willing to append
his own signature - he explains his use of the pseudonyms by
noting that philosophical and religious confusion can be addressed
only indirectly: "one must approach from behind the person who
is under an illusion" (1848, 24-25). He adds that the
illusion against which his pseudonymous writings are directed is an
illusion about what Christianity requires, and that these writings,
though employing philosophical tools, thus subserve a religious
intent. According to this retrospective self-assessment, the whole of
Kierkegaard's work "is related to Christianity, to the
problem 'of becoming a Christian,' with a direct or
indirect polemic against the monstrous illusion we call Christendom,
or against the illusion that in such a land as ours all are Christians
of a sort" (1848, 5-6).



Although it is a subject of debate whether to take at face value
Kierkegaard's claim that his entire work serves a religious
end - after all, it seems to be contradicted by other remarks of
his - it is nevertheless clear that combating confusion, including
illusions about faith, was central to his
 work.[5]
 Kierkegaard suggests that speculative philosophy contributes to this
confusion by transforming Christianity into a sort of philosophical
theory or system. (Hegel is frequently - if not always entirely
fairly - parodied in this connection.) In so doing, it imports
into religion modes of inquiry that distort the essential nature of
faith.



It is perhaps tempting to imagine that the relation between evidence
and belief is purely epistemological, a question of justification. On
this account, beliefs mean what they do irrespective of their relation
to "the evidence"; what a consideration of the latter
reveals is whether or not they are justified. But one of the
implications of Kierkegaard's thought is that entitlement is a
social status, and that the various social practices within which it
is conferred or withheld contribute to the meaning of the beliefs in
question. There are different kinds of beliefs, logically speaking,
and different ways in which entitlement to such beliefs is vindicated.
The basic error to which philosophical systematizers are prone, he
argues, is assuming that the criteria for evaluating a belief in one
context are equally appropriate in other contexts. He writes,
"in our own age everything is mixed together: the aesthetic is
treated ethically, faith is dealt with intellectually, and so forth.
Philosophy has answered every question; but no adequate consideration
has been given the question concerning what sphere it is within which
each question finds its answer" (*Anthology*, 229).



Within the sphere of the "intellectual" - e.g., within
scientific or historical scholarship - inquiry is conceived in
terms of a process of "approximation" to reality. When it
comes to religion, however, what matters, according to Kierkegaard, is
not the "object to which the knower relates himself" but
the relationship itself: the accent falls not on "what is
said" but on "*how* it is said" (1846, 199
and 202). For Kierkegaard, as for the so-called evangelical fideists,
faith is characterized by passionate commitment and thus requires a
*decision* or "qualitative leap" (1846, 384). His
claim is not simply that having evidence is *unnecessary* in
this context, but that it would, so to speak, destroy the whole
endeavor, since it would alter the *meaning* of the beliefs in
question and the spirit in which they could be believed. "If I
am able to apprehend God objectively, I do not have faith; but because
I cannot do this, I must have faith. If I want to keep myself in
faith, I must continually see to it that I hold fast the objective
uncertainty, see to it that in the objective uncertainty I am
'out on 70,000 fathoms of water' and still have
faith" (1846, 204). Any belief that depended on the outcome of
historical or scientific approximation - and which could be
undermined by its results - would not be genuine faith, and
anything whose existence could be established purely on the basis of
philosophical argument - and so could be believed in
"indifferently," without this belief making a significant
difference in one's life - would by definition not be God.
"Anyone who wants to demonstrate the existence of
God...proves something else instead, at times something that
perhaps did not even need demonstrating, and in any case never
anything better" (1844, 43).



Kierkegaard's point is not that it is somehow permissible to
neglect one's epistemic duties where belief in God is concerned,
but that one cannot separate the question of "what" is
believed from the question of "how" it is believed. (For a
contemporary defense of this point, see Strandberg (2011), especially
Chapters 1 and 4.) Here the "how" refers to "the
relationship sustained by the existing individual, in his own
existence, to the *content* of his utterance"
(*Anthology*, 214). Religion, for Kierkegaard, is a matter of
what one does with one's life, a matter of
"inwardness." In this context, to observe that religious
believers lack evidence for their beliefs is not to render a negative
verdict on their entitlement but to comment conceptually on the
*kind* of beliefs they are.



Was Kierkegaard a fideist? Critics have argued that in recoiling from
natural theology, Kierkegaard transformed belief into a matter of will
and emotion, and that a decision as monumental as a leap of
faith - made seemingly arbitrarily, in the absence of any rational
assurance - might just as easily have disastrous results. J.L.
Mackie, for instance, claims that "what Kierkegaard himself is
advocating is a sort of intellectual Russian roulette" (216). So
far, it might be argued, Kierkegaard has done little to show that a
leap in the direction of Christianity is a better bet than any of its
alternatives, and that a wiser tack - as Hume counseled in
connection with alleged miracles - would be to proportion belief
(and passion) to the available evidence. Kierkegaard's defenders
might reply that it is only from the "outside" - from
the point of view, e.g., of the dispassionate pseudonyms - that
Christianity appears ungrounded and "absurd," and that
Kierkegaard's point is really that those already in possession
of faith need not be embarrassed by the fact that it is not the
ineluctable outcome of reasoning from an imagined set of neutral and
uncontested premises.



Although he relentlessly criticized what he perceived as the
overweening ambitions of academic philosophy and an unwarranted
reliance on foundationalist tendencies in theology, Kierkegaard held
that faith and reason are not mutually incompatible, and that
philosophy - when practiced with respect for the "conditions
of existence" within which human beings necessarily do their
thinking - can ultimately help to clarify the nature of Christian
commitment. For Kierkegaard, faith is *incomprehensible*, in
the sense that it demands a willingness to venture beyond the purview
of philosophical reason, but it is not *unreasonable* or
*irrational*. Thus, although he describes faith as
"believing against the understanding," he is careful to
distinguish the content of religious belief from mere
"nonsense." The believer "cannot believe nonsense
against the understanding, which one might fear, because the
understanding will penetratingly perceive that it is nonsense and
hinder him in believing it"; however, the believer "uses
the understanding so much that through it he becomes aware of the
incomprehensible" - i.e., of the logical limits of
speculative thought - "and now, believing, he relates
himself to it against the understanding" (1992, 568). By
discriminating between those cases in which it is competent to judge
and those in which it is not, philosophy thus plays a self-critical
role: mindful of its own limits, it allows religion to be itself.


#### 2.2.3 James



Mackie's contention that fideism is intellectually irresponsible
was anticipated in the nineteenth century by W.K. Clifford, who
famously declared that "[i]t is wrong always, everywhere, and
for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence"
(346). The American pragmatist William James (1842-1910) called
Clifford "that delicious *enfant terrible*," and in
his essay "The Will to Believe" he argued that Clifford
had overstated the case against faith (8). In the paper, James
delineates a set of conditions under which, he argues, it can be
reasonable to believe in the absence of proof.



These conditions are met whenever we are confronted by what James
terms a "genuine option" - i.e., a choice between two
(or more) "hypotheses" (or candidates for belief) which is
"live," "forced," and
"momentous" - and that option cannot be decided on
intellectual grounds. An option is live (as opposed to dead) just in
case each of the hypotheses at issue is "among the mind's
possibilities" (2). Insofar as it depends upon an
individual's willingness or ability to entertain it, a
hypothesis' "liveliness" is an extrinsic,
agent-specific property. By contrast, an option is forced (rather than
avoidable) just in case the candidate hypotheses are both mutually
exclusive and exhaustive of the possibilities. Finally, an option is
momentous (as opposed to trivial) just in case the opportunity is
unique, the stakes are significant, or the decision is
irreversible.



James points out that as people who hold beliefs, we generally have
two goals: to avoid error, and to believe the truth. Though related,
these aims are in fact distinct: one can, for example, avoid error by
*suspending belief*. James argues that the scientific method is
oriented around the goal of avoiding error, but that in other aspects
of life, the avoidance of error is
 inadequate.[6]
 For instance, in our relationships with others, we first have to
*believe* that others will meet us half-way in order for this
to be true. If we refused to interact with others until we had
"sufficient evidence" of their willingness to reciprocate,
we would no doubt appear stand-offish and unapproachable, thus cutting
ourselves off altogether from the possibility of entering into
mutually rewarding relationships.



According to James, something similar is true in the case of religion.
Religion, he says, teaches two things: (1) that "the best things
are the more eternal things" and (2) that we are better off now
if we believe (1) (25-26). These two assertions together
comprise what James refers to as the "religious
hypothesis." He contends that if the religious hypothesis is a
*live* hypothesis, the option with which it confronts us is
necessarily also a *genuine* option - i.e., it is momentous
and forced. In cases like this, James contends, it is not enough
simply to avoid error; we also have to seek truth. "We cannot
escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light,
because, although we do avoid error in that way *if religion be
untrue*, we lose the good, *if it be true*, just as
certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve" (26). As in
the social example, the religious hypothesis must, as it were, be met
half-way.



James acknowledges that choosing under such circumstances entails
risk - one might, after all, be wrong - but he denies that one
can avoid or reduce this risk by refusing to choose.
Skepticism - i.e., the refusal to choose - is just as risky as
commitment. Furthermore, all such postures are inevitably - and,
indeed, completely appropriately - shaped by one's passions:
not deciding is just as much a matter of emotion as deciding, insofar
as it is motivated by the fear of being wrong rather than the hope of
being right. But, James contends, there is no rational basis for
preferring fear over hope.



Like Pascal, James insists that when it comes to religion, we cannot
avoid taking sides and incurring risks. James also agrees with Pascal
that faith can be rational in the absence of epistemic
justification - at least in certain circumstances. However,
James's argument differs from Pascal's insofar as it
purports to show, not that religious belief is *more* rational,
but only that in the absence of definitive evidence it is *not
less* rational, than unbelief or agnosticism (at least with
respect to those for whom the religious hypothesis is live).



Although he disagrees with Clifford about the justifiability of
believing without conclusive proof, James appears to share
Clifford's view that - at least in certain
cases - belief is subject to the will (hence the title of his
essay). In other words, James's argument in "The Will to
Believe," like Pascal's wager argument, seems to imply
some version of doxastic voluntarism. But depending on how this latter
notion is understood, certain worries may here arise. If belief is
understood as a function of one's total epistemic situation,
rather than an independent judgment which that situation might or
might not warrant, then James's analogy between believing and
entering into a relationship appears problematic: only the latter is
subject to direct voluntary control. Of course, believing is subject
to *indirect* voluntary control. In other words, one can change
one's beliefs by changing one's epistemic circumstances;
the latter, even if not the former, are susceptible to direct control
by the will. James himself acknowledges that, in the vast majority of
cases, beliefs are not modifiable at will: "Can we, by just
willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth,
and that the portraits of him in *McClure's Magazine* are
all of someone else? Can we, by any effort of our will, or by any
strength of wish that it were true, believe ourselves well and about
when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the
sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred
dollars?" (4-5) James appears to take the position that it
is only with respect to *live* hypotheses that the will can
play a role.



A related objection is that James does not appear to take account of
the possibility of "partial beliefs," and that doing so
undermines his notion of a forced option. If believing admits of
degrees, then choices of the kind James describes seem less stark.
Responding to this kind of anticipated objection to his own work
(described in Section 4 below), John Bishop has argued that a forced
choice is required whenever one is confronted by the rival
"framing principles" of alternative doxastic practices.
"One either 'buys into' the framework by commitment
to its principles or one does not" (139).



James's essay is intended as a "defence of our right to
adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact
that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced"
(1-2). Some critics have worried that the argument leads down a
slippery slope to irrationalism. John Hick has claimed that
James's conclusion "constitutes an unrestricted license
for wishful thinking... If our aim is to believe what is true,
and not necessarily what we like, James's universal
permissiveness will not help us" (60). However, this seems
unfair. James insists that in defending the "lawfulness of
voluntarily adopted faith" he is not thereby opening the door to
what he calls "patent superstition" (2, 29). Faith, on
James's account, is not a matter of believing *against*
the evidence; the "will to believe" is justified only when
the option is genuine and the evidence is inconclusive. "*In
concreto*," James writes, "the freedom to believe can
only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot
by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him
who has them to consider" (29).



It is important to appreciate that James is *not* claiming that
it is morally permissible to believe something to which one is not
epistemically entitled. Rather, he is claiming that there are beliefs
to which one can be epistemically entitled even in the absence of
definitive evidence - that, *pace* Clifford, entitlement is
not always a function of evidential support. Although James's
argument is often classified as a pragmatic argument for belief, he is
not offering a prudential, *as opposed to an epistemic*,
justification. Rather, he is comparing the relative merits of rival
epistemic strategies (oriented respectively toward the goals of
avoiding error and believing truth). In this respect his argument
differs importantly from Pascal's "wager" arguments.
It can thus be argued that James is not disparaging reason in favor of
faith, but attempting rather to carve out a sphere for faith within
what is rationally respectable.


#### 2.2.4 Wittgenstein



Widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth
century, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was also one of the
most controversial and difficult. Wittgenstein famously argued that
"meaning is use" - that our words mean what they do by
virtue of the role they play in our discourse. Moreover, he argued
that words are used in more than one way, and that it is a mistake to
"sublime the logic" of our language - i.e., to treat
any single function of language as paradigmatic. "Think of the
tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver,
a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws. - The functions of words are
as diverse as the functions of these objects" (1958, I,
SS11).



In his later writings, Wittgenstein calls these diverse phenomena
*language-games*, in order, he explains, "to bring into
prominence the fact that the *speaking* of language is part of
an activity, or a form of life" (1958, I, SS23). Renouncing
his own earlier quest for a general form of propositions, his later
writings suggest that these language-games "have no one thing in
common which makes us use the same word for all, - but that they
are *related* to one another in many different ways"
(1958, I, SS65).



Although Wittgenstein was not by conventional standards
*religious*, his philosophical remarks and journal entries
reveal what might be described as a religious sensibility and are
informed by a definite sympathy toward at least certain features of
religion. For Wittgenstein, as for Kierkegaard, whom he admired,
religion was less a matter of theory than of practice. "I
believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound
doctrines are all useless. They have to change your *life*. (Or
the *direction* of your life.)...Wisdom is passionless.
But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a
*passion*" (1980, 53e).



It has been argued that Wittgenstein's later thought, though
perhaps not overtly fideistic, nevertheless lends itself to fideistic
interpretation. According to this interpretation, religion is a
self-contained and primarily expressive enterprise, governed by its
own internal logic or "grammar." This view - commonly
called *Wittgensteinian Fideism* - is variously
characterized as entailing one or more of the following distinct (but
arguably inter-related) theses: (1) that religion is logically cut off
from other aspects of life; (2) that religious discourse is
essentially self-referential and does not allow us to talk about
reality; (3) that religious beliefs can be understood only by
religious believers; and (4) that religion cannot be
 criticized.[7]



It is highly doubtful, however, whether Wittgenstein would have
endorsed any of these claims, let alone all four of them. Their
attribution to Wittgenstein seems in fact to depend on a narrowly
selective reading of what he actually said. As Richard Bell has
pointed out,



> 
> It is premised on the view that our language is a series of
> language-games rooted in a form of life each governed by its own set
> of rules - as if our life of speaking and acting were like a bag
> of marbles, separate spherical speech-worlds with their own boundaries
> and rules governing their size and elasticity and use - some are
> shooters, others decorative, all rest side by side and affect their
> neighbors only if they collide (217-218).
> 



It is true that Wittgenstein cautioned against the tendency to assume
a unity of logical form behind the diversity of actual usage. He
writes, "Don't say: 'There *must* be
something common...' - but *look and see*"
(1958, I, SS66). However, it is by no means clear that he intended
to advance any equally *a priori* thesis about the
discontinuity and incommensurability of our discursive practices.



Indeed, he suggests that the result of "looking" is that
"we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and
criss-crossing" (1958, I, SS66). A metaphor to which he
returns periodically is of language as an ancient *city*:
"a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses,
and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded
by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and
uniform houses" (1958, I, SS18). Remarks such as these seem
to militate against the siloed view of language implied by
Wittgensteinian Fideism.



It also should be noted that the term "Wittgensteinian
Fideism" appeared after Wittgenstein's death but prior to
the publication in English of some of his most important writings on
religion, including *Lectures on Religious Belief* (1967),
*Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough* (1979), and
*Culture and Value* (1980) - i.e., at a time when
Wittgenstein's legacy was particularly vulnerable to
misinterpretation.



The origins of the term "Wittgensteinian Fideism" derive
from an essay of that name by Kai Nielsen, which appeared in the July
1967 issue of *Philosophy*. There Nielsen suggested that
Wittgensteinian Fideism might in fact constitute a misrepresentation
of Wittgenstein's writings - not, interestingly enough, by
his critics, but by his *followers* - and that
"Wittgenstein might well wish to say of Wittgensteinians what
Freud said of Freudians" (194). Accordingly, Nielsen directed
the brunt of his critique not against Wittgenstein himself, but
against Wittgensteinians like Norman Malcolm and Peter Winch. More
recently, the charge of Wittgensteinian Fideism has become associated
especially with the work of the philosopher of religion D.Z.
Phillips.



Although it is impossible here to explore these allegations in any
detail, it is worth noting that Wittgensteinians generally regard
"Wittgensteinian Fideism" as a caricature not only of
Wittgenstein's views but also of their own. In defending himself
and other Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion against the charge
of fideism, Phillips writes:



> 
> Many philosophers of religion influenced by Wittgenstein have spent
> much of their time denying that connections of a *certain kind*
> hold between religious beliefs and other aspects of human life.
> Similarly, they have denied the appropriateness of *certain
> kinds* of criticisms of religion. Those who have been criticized
> often react as follows: "This is what I mean by the connection
> between religion and other aspects of human life and this is what I
> mean by criticism of religion. Here [are] Phillips and others like him
> denying the intelligibility of such connections and criticism.
> Therefore Phillips and others like him hold that there is *no*
> connection between religion and other aspects of human life and that
> religion cannot be criticized." Of course, all that I and others
> have denied is *their* conception of the relation between
> religion and other aspects of human life and *their* conception
> of criticism of religion. Sometimes, the explanation of the
> persistence of the critical theses concerning Wittgenstein's
> influence in the philosophy of religion...is as simple as that
> (1981, 89-90).
> 



In the last decade of his life, Phillips in fact devoted considerable
attention to what, following his teacher Rush Rhees, he called the
*unity* - i.e., the interlocking intelligibility - of
discourse. He argued that religious beliefs depend for their sense and
importance on non-religious features of human existence, but that the
relation between the former and the latter is not generally the
relation between conclusions and their justification.



Phillips's longstanding debate with Nielsen is commonly
portrayed as a modern-day contest between faith and reason, but
Phillips never regarded it that way himself. Whereas Nielsen treats
Phillips's "contemplative" approach to philosophy of
religion as essentially an apologetic strategy meant to shield belief
in God from criticism, Phillips contended that "it casts a
liberating light on both belief and atheism. *Both* are rescued
from philosophical distortion" (2005, 75). As Phillips saw it,
his disagreement with Nielsen was a disagreement not between the
advocates of competing first-order commitments, but between
Nielsen's atheism and his own professed desire to do conceptual
justice to rival points of view, both religious and
anti-religious - an asymmetry that the term "fideism,"
with its pietistic connotations, seemed to him to obscure.


## 3. Tendentious Terminology



One lesson to be gleaned from the preceding cases is that
"fideism" is a term that is seldom self-applied. This is
no doubt largely because it has come to function primarily as a term
of abuse as opposed to a genuinely descriptive term. In this respect,
its *de facto* role is similar to that played by terms like
"relativism" and, perhaps, "anti-realism."
Such labels generally say at least as much about the philosophical
commitments of those who use them as they do about the positions to
which they are applied.



Popkin argues that the skepticism introduced into theology in the
sixteenth century eventually led to the atheism and irreligious
"free-thinking" of the Enlightenment. After all, Hume says
essentially the same thing as the so-called fideists when he writes
that "[o]ur most holy religion is founded on *faith*, not
on reason" (140), except that by the eighteenth century this had
been transformed into an implicit - if
not-so-subtle - *reproach*. Thus, Hume proceeds to add that
since "[m]ere reason is insufficient to convince us of its
veracity...whoever is moved by *faith* to assent to
[Christianity] is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person
which subverts all the principles of his understanding and gives him a
determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and
experience" (141). The sarcasm here is hard to miss.



One way of understanding the emergence of the category
"fideism" is as a by-product of the development of secular
conceptions of rationality that, while not overtly hostile to
religion, moved God from the premises of thought to its possible
conclusions. On a classical theological account, the Christian
approaches the world *coram deo* - in God's
presence. God, on this view, is not the product of inference
*from* the world but rather its *logos*, the
hermeneutical key to understanding the world, where the latter is
imagined not as what Charles Taylor calls an "immanent
frame" (542) - a lawlike space that can be understood
fully on its own terms -but as *creation*. Creation,
conceived *coram deo*, presupposes a creator, but it is not the
starting point from which one is inferred. This classical Christian
view was gradually displaced by a secular imaginary, in which the
world, while not, as Descartes demonstrated, self-evident, was no
longer viewed as requiring reference to anything beyond itself.
Ostensibly theologically neutral, it thus came to provide a starting
point not simply for atheism, but for a new understanding of natural
theology, in which belief in God could be grounded in probabilistic
arguments from premises not themselves in dispute between believers
and unbelievers.



It is true that the classical arguments for God's existence
- e.g., Thomas's "Five Ways" - predate
the development of secular reason, but scholars have argued that their
function changed over time, and that they were not originally intended
as stand-alone proofs that would convince an unbeliever. They operated
*within* a distinctive theological theater to elucidate it,
rather than providing external foundations for it. John Clayton has
argued that, within pre-modern Judaism and Christianity, theistic
proofs were used within religious communities "to correct
heresy, confirm true belief or simply express awe or wonder"
(92). They were also used apologetically by Christians, but their
target audience was typically other theists, including Muslims.
"[S]ince the Muslims already believed in God, Thomas cannot have
wanted by means of rational argument to convince them that God exists
[...] It would seem more likely that he hoped through rehearsing
such proofs (together with other proofs about God's nature) to
establish with Muslims a positive basis upon which additionally, more
specifically Christian, arguments could be built" (92-93).
By the seventeenth century this had begun to change. In attempting to
rescue God from the enthusiasm and perceived dogmatism of traditional
religion, deistic thinkers sought to establish a less theologically
ramified, more universal or "natural" religion. Whereas
formerly the proofs had operated emically, within a horizon of shared
theological concerns, "[i]n the new dispensation," Taylor
argues, "the issues of God's existence, our relation to
him, what we owe him, and the like, are put by Deism quite outside
this horizon" (294). This shift in the arguments' role was
accompanied, necessarily, by a corresponding shift in the meaning of
key terms. "The world" which the "disembedded"
proofs take as their point of departure, is no longer the created
order, but the immanent domain of the emerging natural sciences. God
is no longer essential to a proper understanding of the world but a
hypothetical explanation for its existence and order.



These reinterpreted arguments presented new opportunities for
apologetics (such as Paley's design argument), but they also
exposed belief in God to new forms of criticism (such as those raised
in Hume's *Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion*). What
the parties to these disputes had in common was a conception of what
rationality in this realm requires - in particular, premises
neutral with respect to God's reality. By those lights, earlier
ways of thinking that *began* from God's reality, as well
as later ways of thinking that shared this earlier starting point,
appeared irrational and question-begging. "Faith," which
originally meant something like "trust," came to refer to
the act of holding beliefs without evidence sufficient to warrant
them. *Fideism* was thus, paradoxically, the claim that it is
rational to behave irrationally.



Hence, by the time the term "fideism" entered the
philosophical vocabulary, the position it denoted was already highly
suspect. In an Age of Reason, *faith-ism* is inevitably going
to sound irrational. However, the conception of *reason* which
the putative fideist is accused of transgressing is almost invariably
one the latter would reject as insufficiently robust. Thus, the
opposition to reason said to characterize fideism is perhaps better
conceived as a rejection of a particular *account* of
reason - one the so-called fideist regards as overly narrow and
restrictive - or of the applicability to religion of a particular
way of reasoning. To be sure, the thinkers described as
"fideists" have sometimes expressed their objections in
ways that contribute to the impression of irrationalism. Looked at
from this point of view, however, it is the critic of fideism who
fails to appreciate the irony with which the putative fideist uses the
term "reason." In effect, the putative fideist can
generally more charitably be interpreted as claiming that it can be
*rational* to refuse to subject certain of one's beliefs
to what is popularly (though misleadingly, from the point of view of
the putative fideist) called "reason" - reason, so to
speak, in "scare quotes."



Indeed, from the standpoint of some of the thinkers labled fideistic,
modern natural theology, insofar as it adopts secular premises and
treats God hypothetically, constitutes a theological error. The
twentieth-century Protestant theologian Karl Barth suggested that
Christian natural theology is plagued by an inner contradiction:
"As a 'Christian' natural theology, it must really
represent and affirm the standpoint of faith. Its true objective to
which it really wants to lead unbelief is the knowability of the real
God.... But as a 'natural' theology, its initial aim is
to disguise this and therefore to pretend to share in the
life-endeavour of natural man" (94). In other words, natural
theology is either insincere - pretending to start from a
standpoint of unbelief - or sinful, since, on Barth's
Protestant view, unbelief, even in the form of methodological
agnosticism, is not theologically neutral but "active enmity
against God" (94). Natural theology paradoxically requires
abandoning the Christian perspective - at least methodologically
- in a misguided effort to provide God with support God
doesn't, on a Christian view, need. This Protestant view is, of
course, at odds with the official Catholic view noted earlier.



In philosophical as opposed to theological terms, what the thinkers
labeled "fideists" have tended to find objectionable is
not reason *per se*, but *evidentialism* - i.e., the
doctrine (expressed forcefully by Clifford) that beliefs can be
rational only if they are supported by evidence. Since evidentialism
might otherwise seem to give rise to a regress problem, it is
generally conjoined with some version of foundationalism which
purports to delineate a criterion of "proper
basicality" - i.e., a set of conditions under which beliefs
can rationally be held without further evidential support. Whereas
some putative fideists - like Pascal - argue that religious
beliefs can be given non-evidential support, others can be interpreted
as suggesting that such beliefs are themselves properly basic, or (as
Plantinga has argued more recently) that no criterion of proper
basicality that would exclude religious beliefs can itself be shown to
be justified. Their contention in either case is that the believer can
be rationally justified - or at least cannot be shown to be
behaving *irrationally* - in holding certain beliefs, even
if these beliefs themselves are not supported by evidence. Conceived
of in this way, the putative fideist's position - though not
uncontroversial - is hardly the brazenly paradoxical doctrine it
might at first appear to be.


## 4. A Rational Fideism?



In recent years, a small number of philosophers of religion has
embraced the term *fideism* (or variations thereof) and sought
to (re-)claim its non-pejorative use. These thinkers are rare among
philosophers in their willingness to take up a gauntlet that is
usually refused - even by those with views in many respects
similar to their own.



One of the most carefully argued contemporary defenses of fideism is
C. Stephen Evans's book *Faith Beyond Reason*. Evans
attempts to rehabilitate - or perhaps habilitate - the term by
distinguishing "responsible" forms of fideism from various
irrationalistic alternatives. Whereas the latter pit faith directly
*against* reason, the former contend that faith can
appropriately take over where reason leaves matters of ultimate
concern unresolved. Drawing on Kierkegaard's thought, Evans
contends that while there are limits to reason, they are limits which
it is reasonable for reason to acknowledge.



Like the Protestant Reformers, Evans suggests that the customary
exercise of human reason is limited not merely by finitude but also by
pride and self-centeredness. For this reason, faith and reason can
find themselves in tension. For Evans, however, "faith is
against reason only in the sense that it runs into conflict with a
concrete form of reason that is damaged" (153). Moreover, Evans
insists that the defects in reason - though substantial - are
nevertheless not such as to render us completely oblivious to them.
Thus, he does not reject reason altogether. In his preferred
terminology, faith is not so much *against* as *beyond*
reason, since it is ultimately compatible, in his view, with a duly
self-critical intellect.



Another recent defense of fideism can be found in John Bishop's
book *Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics
of Religious Belief*. Where Evans draws on Kierkegaard, Bishop
builds on James's argument in "The Will to Believe"
to develop what he terms a "modest, moral coherentist,
'supra-evidential' fideism" (3).



A crucial premise in Bishop's argument is what he terms the
"thesis of evidential ambiguity," which holds that, under
"rational empiricist evidential practice," our overall
experience of the world is equally plausibly interpreted on either a
theistic or an atheistic reading, thereby leaving open the question of
God's existence (70-1). He argues that under appropriate
conditions - essentially those comprising what James called a
"genuine option," together with evidential indeterminacy,
on the one hand, and the satisfaction of certain moral constraints on
one's passional motivations and the content of one's
faith-commitment, on the other - it is morally permissible to make
a "doxastic faith-venture" - that is, to take belief
in God to be true in one's practical reasoning, while
recognizing that it is not certified by one's total available
evidence (147). The brand of fideism for which Bishop argues is thus
'supra-evidential' in the sense that it defends the
permissibility of reasoning on the basis of commitments that outrun
what is warranted on purely evidential grounds. Like Evans, and in
keeping with James and Pascal, however, Bishop is careful to
distinguish supra-evidential fideism from counter-evidential fideism:
unlike the latter, the former, he argues, cannot be shown to violate
any epistemic obligations. Although, unlike some putative fideists,
Bishop does not regard evidentialism as incoherent or epistemically
irresponsible, he argues that fideism of the kind he defends is
preferable on broadly moral grounds, suggesting, for instance, that
fideism's tolerance for passional commitments conduces to a more
balanced acceptance of human nature as more than purely rational
(216-220).



One difference between these two contemporary versions of fideism is
that Evans focuses primarily on what is permissible in an epistemic
sense, whereas Bishop begins with the *ethics* of fideistic
belief, by considering the justifiability in moral terms of taking
religious beliefs to be true in one's practical reasoning.
Unlike *holding* beliefs to be true, *taking* them to be
true in practical reasoning, Bishop argues, is subject to direct
voluntary control and an appropriate subject for moral evaluation.
Yet, insofar as such faith-ventures are not counter-evidential, he
argues, they carry epistemic entitlement too.



Another difference is that Evans regards faith as justifiable in light
of inherent limits to human rationality as such, whereas on
Bishop's account, evidential ambiguity is a feature of the world
viewed relative to what he calls "our rational empiricist
evidential practice." The latter qualification seems to leave
room for other practices to which ambiguity about God's
existence might be foreign. Bishop raises this possibility in a
discussion of "isolationist" epistemologies (such as
Wittgensteinian Fideism, if such a thing exists), which attempt to
segregate questions of evidential support for religious claims from
the standards of a "wider, generally prevailing, evidential
practice" (79). From within what the isolationist regards as the
appropriate practice, the "evidence" may seem to point
incontrovertibly toward, e.g., theistic conclusions (or certain
propositions about God may count as basic). However, Bishop contends
that insofar as questions may still arise for the reflective believer
about the justifiability of commitment to the *framework
principles* of the theistic doxastic practice, isolationism cannot
avoid the need for doxastic ventures that outrun the available
evidence. Some version of fideism thus seems unavoidable for the
reflective believer. But granting, for the sake of the argument, that
Bishop is right about the options available to the contemporary
reflective believer, it might nevertheless be argued that a very
different situation obtained prior to the development of rational
empiricist evidential practice (and perhaps continues to obtain where
that practice has not taken root). Arguably for premodern thinkers
there was no question of "isolating" belief in God from
any "wider, generally prevailing, evidential practice,"
and thus no existential "choice" to be made about which
standards to employ. If this is right, it provides additional support
for the claim that it is anachronistic to describe someone like
Tertullian as a fideist. Put differently, starting from the thesis of
evidential ambiguity allows for the historicizing of fideism, in a way
that encourages us to view the possibility to which the descriptive
use of the term refers as contingent on particular historical
developments, rather than as perennially available - i.e., as a
distinctively modern response to a distinctively modern problem. (To
what extent the "Christian" account of fideism articulated
in Section 3 can be generalized across other traditions is
unclear.)



Where Bishop and Evans agree is that some version of *fideism*
is justifiable - on moral and/or rational grounds - even if
*what is believed by faith* itself requires no external
evidential support. Their quarrel is thus not with reason *tout
court*, but with certain philosophical assumptions about belief
entitlement.



A third constructive proposal draws on a reading of Wittgenstein.
Unlike Bishop and Evans, Duncan Pritchard rejects the term
"fideism," which he regards as implying that religious
beliefs are unlike other beliefs in not being capable of rational
assessment or requiring rational support. On his account, *all*
beliefs depend for their assessment on commitments that are not
themselves rationally grounded. To the extent that religious beliefs
depend on a-rational commitments, they are thus not unique. Pritchard
calls his own position "quasi-fideism," to distinguish it
from both rationalistic conceptions and anti-rational ones. "Put
another way, while the quasi-fideist grants that religious belief is,
at root, a matter of faith rather than reason, she nonetheless holds
that this doesn't disqualify religious belief from being
rational since all belief is, at root, a matter of faith rather than
reason" (104).



In developing this proposal, Pritchard draws on Wittgenstein's
final writings collected in *On Certainty*. There, in a
discussion of the possibility of skepticism, Wittgenstein observes
that "the *questions* that we raise and our
*doubts* depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt
from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn"
(1969, SS341). On Pritchard's reading, these
"propositions" are not *beliefs* - which he
takes to be responsive to rational considerations - but
commitments of a more fundamental, practical kind.
Wittgenstein's point was a general one, but just for that
reason, Pritchard contends, it illuminates philosophical debates about
the justification of "religious" beliefs. "The
religious believer's overall set of commitments ... includes
fundamental commitments which are more a matter of faith than of
reason, but this fact alone doesn't mark any epistemically
significant difference between the life of faith and a life lived
without it. With the relationship between faith and reason and its
role in the production of rational belief understood along
quasi-fideistic lines, religious commitment can be at its most
fundamental level a matter of faith and yet there nonetheless be
rational religious beliefs" (118). If Pritchard is correct,
something like *faith* is a feature of rationality, and
so-called religious faith is epistemically on par with a-rational
commitments in other domains.



One question for this approach is whether the "hinge
commitments" operative in religious or other contexts are
cognitive or not. Some interpreters of Wittgenstein, like Rupert Read
and Alice Crary, hold that the forms of words to which Wittgenstein
refers in *On Certainty* lack any application and so are
nonsense. A different reading, advanced by, inter alia, Daniele
Moyal-Sharrock, holds that the hinges are not empty propositions
because they are not propositions at all; rather, they are
phenomenological descriptions of "the mindless, animal certainty
with which we move about in the world" (67). On neither account
is Wittgenstein taken to be advancing a form of "ersatz
foundationalism" (Read, 312), according to which certain beliefs
are properly basic. Nor does either reading entail that there is a set
of substantive propositions available for being appropriately held
"on faith" - i.e., that there is something to be
fideistic *about*. One way of holding together
Pritchard's quasi-fideism with Moyal Sharrock's
interpretation of Wittgenstein might be to regard so-called religious
faith as an orientation, rather than as propositional - i.e., as
expressing a practical understanding of reality within which the
"believer" lives and moves and has her being.


## 5. Reason without Limits?



As we saw above, Evans and Bishop seek to rehabilitate fideism by
identifying spaces inaccessible to (some form of) reason: faith is
warrantable where reason reaches its limit. But suppose there is no
such limit. This is the counter-fideistic suggestion made by the
contemporary French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, who seeks to
undercut religious theism by denying it a conceptual sphere of its
own. If there is no distinction to be made between faith and reason
that would constitute a limit to the latter, then philosophy need not
yield to religious claims to extra-rational revelation.



According to Meillassoux, the attractions of fideism can be traced to
what he takes to be a basic dogma of philosophical thought since Kant,
which he calls *correlationism*. According to correlationism,
thinking and being go hand in hand, such that there can be no
conception of the world independent of human experience: things in
themselves are thus unknowable (and on a strong reading unthinkable).
Correlationists embrace finitude as part of the human condition; it is
within this finitude that post-metaphysical thought, including
phenomenology and analytic philosophy, operates. So understood,
philosophy seeks to describe what is *given* in experience, but
it can furnish these facts with no ultimate ground or necessity.
According to post-metaphysical philosophy, the principle of sufficient
reason - whatever its utility in the phenomenal world - is
thus circumscribed within a more fundamental abyss of contingency.



Meillassoux argues that this drawing of a boundary to reason within
post-metaphysical philosophy is what authorizes fideistic
*religion*:



> 
> 
> Accordingly, facticity entails a specific and rather remarkable
> consequence: it becomes rationally illegitimate to disqualify
> irrational discourses about the absolute on the pretext of their
> irrationality. From the perspective of the strong model, in effect,
> religious belief has every right to maintain that the world was
> created out of nothingness from an act of love, or that God's
> omnipotence allows him to dissolve the apparent contradition between
> his complete identity and His difference with his Son. These
> discourses continue to be meaningful - in a mythological or
> mystical register - even though they are scientifically and
> logically meaningless (41).
> 
> 
> 
> Far from abolishing the value of the absolute, the process that
> continues to be referred to today as "the end of
> absolutes" grants the latter an unprecedented
> licence - philosophers seem to ask only one thing of these
> absolutes: that they be devoid of the slightest pretensions to
> rationality. The end of metaphysics, understood as the
> "de-absolutization of thought," is thereby seen to consist
> in the rational legitimation of any and every variety of religious (or
> "poetico-religious") belief in the absolute, so long as
> the latter invokes no authority beside itself. To put it in other
> words: *by forbidding reason any claim to the absolute, the end of
> metaphysics has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the
> religious* (45).
> 
> 
> 



Meillassoux concludes that, insofar as it cedes the absolute - the
domain once claimed by metaphysics - to religion, strong
correlationsim is "merely the *other name*" for
fideism (48).



For his part, Meillassoux advocates not a return to pre-critical
metaphysics, but a critique of Critique, which would re-open
philosophical access to what he calls the "great
outdoors" - i.e., Kant's "thing in itself"
or, to put it in Meillassoux's terms, the "thing without
me." While conceding that sensory concepts imply a human
relation to the world, Meillassoux argues that mathematics offers
privileged access to "primary qualities," thus breaking
philosophy out of correlationism. Rather than simply describing what
is given in experience, speculative philosophy can venture alongside
the physical sciences into an account of the world before human beings
existed, which Meillassoux calls "ancestrality."



The ensuing account is one in which Meillassoux rejects any idea of
necessary being, whether religious or metaphysical. Where
correlationism attributes the apparent absence of any sufficient
(metaphysical) reason for the existence of things to an
epistemological limit, Meillassoux argues that it points to something
ontological:



> 
> We must convert facticity into the real property whereby everything
> and every world *is* without reason, and is thereby *capable
> of actually becoming otherwise without reason*. We must grasp how
> the ultimate absence of reason, which we will refer to as
> "unreason," is an absolute ontological property, and not
> the mark of the finitude of our knowledge (53).
> 



The only absolute, on this understanding, is the *principle of
unreason* - i.e., the necessity of contingency.



Instead of retiring the concept of God, however, Meillassoux wants to
claim it for philosophy: what takes the place of revealed religion, on
this account, is not straightforwardly atheism, but the God of the
philosophers. God's inexistence belongs, Meillassoux argues, to
the general contingency he takes to be the condition of all being. Put
the other way around, this means that it is necessarily the case that
God's existence is possible (Watkin, 149). On Christopher
Watkin's reading, "Meillassoux comes tantalisingly close
here to implying that the only way to be rid of God is rationally to
prove his existence, but we shall have to wait a little while longer
for his conclusion on the existence of God" (137).



Meillassoux's critique is not of religion per se, but of what he
perceives as an unwillingness on the part of modern philosophy to
stress the claim of reason. On his reading, correlationism opens space
that doctrines lacking rational support quickly fill. However, to call
these doctrines "fideism" would be misleading: as
described earlier, the term refers to a philosophical position
*about* reason, as opposed to the beliefs that a proponent of
this position might view as not requiring "rational"
support. Perhaps his point is simply that strong correlationism might
be taken to establish a division of labor congenial to believing
without reason, and that insofar as it purports to place limits on
reason, it constitutes a form of fideistic philosophy.



Given its contrarian approach to nearly the whole of modern
philosophy, Meillassoux's thought is at least as controversial
as the "fideism" it challenges, and its plausibility
depends on one's position on a host of fundamental issues which
it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss. (For useful
critical discussions of Meillassoux's thought, see Sparrow and
Watkin.) In this respect, it helps to show how the question of
fideism, far from being a peripheral issue in the philosophy of
religion, leads directly into the very deepest questions of modern
metaphysics and epistemology.