Assertion and commitment in religious belief

Abstract

That Izoth assertions and commitments are integral to religious faith or belief appears indisputable; yet how one is to conceive of the relationship between the two, and the relative emphasis each deserves, provides a focal problem for an Y philosophy of religion. ~ It is safe to say an analysis of faith claiming to be exhaustive or definitive yet concentrating on one of these elements to the exclusion of the other will be imperiled. Nevertheless the dominant trcnd in Anglo-American philosophy over the past few decades has been to focus almost entirely on the aspect of assertion, and the putative knowledge that grounds such assertion. Perhaps it is felt that a concern with commitment is too near the concern of the psychology of religion to be fit for an enterprise involved properly with the logic of faith and belief. Whatever the explanation of neglect, the imbalance of treatmcnt needs correction. I cannot offer here a full account of the mixing of assertion and commitment in religious belief er faith. However I will endeavor to highlight a curious feature of this mixture: the contrasting role played in the grounding and elaboration of commitments and in the grounding of the meaningfulness of assertions, respectively, by expectations of future events. To anticipate: while the proposal of falsifying f,3ture conditions seems vital to the grounding of the meaningfulness of a factual assertion, with regard to some commitments crucially significant in the phenomena of faith, the proposal of nullifying future conditions can radically undermine their meaning, scope, and intensity.