Popular pragmatism and religious belief

Abstract

Over the centuries the philosophers who have sought metaphysical and religious knowledge have shown surprisingly little interest in what leads ordinary, non-philosophical men to hold the religious beliefs that they hold; being elitists, philosophers have tended to assume that if the non-philosopher has reason for holding the religious beliefs he holds, those reasons probably are not profound or worth taking seriously. In the last few centuries, several philosophers (e.g., Pascal, J. H. Newman, James, and F. C. S. Schiller) have reacted to this assumption and argued that we learn more about the reasonableness of religious belief when we consider the simple believer's reasons than we do when we analyze the arguments found in metaphysical tomes. I agree and also believe that ordinary, non-philosophical people are attracted to a particular conception of metaphysics; for want of a better name, I shall call it "popular pragmatism," and in the pages that follow I discuss this conception of metaphysics, mainly in the hopes of shedding some light on the nature of religious belief. Put two metaphysicians together and you get at least three theories about the nature of metaphysics. Even historians of philosophy have trouble seeing what Heidegger's use of the term "metaphysics" has in common with Bergson's or what Bergson's has in common with Aquinas'. The founder of the science of metaphysics, Aristotle, himself, had many different views about the essential nature of "first philosophy." The ordinary person is not concerned with most subjects that metaphysicians discuss time, universals, the existence of external objects, etc. But almost all men are concerned about what Aristotle calls the "highest objects," and many if not most nonphilosophers do struggle with the question of what to believe about God or higher spiritual forces. So, ordinary men have some interest in the ultimate nature of reality; when they try to formulate, clarify, or choose their religious beliefs, they are doing a kind of metaphysics.