The Two Pragmatisms: From Peirce To Rorty

Author:Howard Mounce [Mounce, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1997-02-28T06:00:00+00:00

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

James’s next chapter is entitled ‘Philosophy’. It deals not with philosophy in general but with the attempt to give religion a

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philosophical base. In effect, it deals with rationalism on its religious side. As a critic of rationalism, James is entirely consistent. If he concentrates on the form of rationalism termed scientific, that is simply because it is the form most prevalent amongst the educated people of his time. But he is equally critical of rationalism when it takes a religious form. In its religious form, rationalism attempts to prove the existence of God, relying simply on reason; more strictly, starting from premises that would be accepted by all reasonable people, it attempts by valid reasoning to arrive at the conclusion that God exists. Thus the most famous of such arguments, the cosmological, takes as its premise the most obvious of facts, namely that the universe exists. If the conclusion that God exists can be validly inferred from such a premise it will be coercive; all sane people will be forced to accept it. Another famous argument is the argument from design, which draws an analogy between general features of the world and those objects we know to be designed; it then concludes that those features likewise require a designer.

There is difficulty, however, with all such arguments. They all proceed on the basis of arguments that apply to familiar objects, extending them to apply to the world as a whole. Unfortunately, the world as a whole transcends our understanding. Consequently there is an evident difficulty in knowing what in this area counts as a cogent argument. For example, the cosmological argument, in one of its forms, treats the whole world as an object, or as a collection of objects, asks, by analogy with reasoning about an ordinary object, how we are to account for its existence and concludes that its existence must have a cause, namely, God. But if we are to proceed by analogy with ordinary reasoning, we are entitled to ask for the cause of God’s existence. If it is said that ordinary reasoning does not apply to God, one might reply by asking why it should apply to the world as a whole.

The argument, however, has a subtler form which evades that difficulty. In the subtler form, the argument states that everything in our experience is contingent – that is, depends for its existence on something else. But, it continues, if everything in the world depends on something else, we have no way of explaining the existence of the world as a whole, except by supposing the existence of something non-contingent. For a world of contingent things cannot explain itself. Its existence would therefore be inexplicable unless there were a non-contingent being, God, which brought it into existence. This argument, it is often claimed, commits the fallacy of composition. One commits the fallacy of composition in supposing that an explanation for A, B and

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