Genuine Option Research Articles

The religious option is a genuine option

In ‘The Will to Believe’, the religious hypothesis for William James says, first, ‘that the best things are the more eternal things’, and second, ‘that we are better off now if we believe her first affirmation to be true’ (p.26) He later qualifies the first affirmation: ‘The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having personal form’ (p.27).

Problems of Faith

Both philosophy and theology are given a raison d'etre by their problems. Some of their problems they share, and some they do not. They share a concern with the nature of morality and they share the problem of human freedom. But the filioque issue and the controversy between Arius and Athanasius regarding the consubstaniality of the persons of the Trinity belong to theology, if contemporary theology will have them. The problems of reference and denotation, and of classes, in the cast given them by Frege, Russell and others, are exclusively in the domain of philosophy. Sometimes the problems shared by philosophy and theology are also human problems: they intimately touch human lives and have palpable ramifications for the way men live. Camus, who said with a flourish that the only philosophical problem is whether or not to commit suicide, was saying in part that the only philosophical problems worth considering are human problems. And William James would perhaps concur; he would insist that only philosophical problems that are “living, forced and momentous” present a genuine option to men.