For a long time as a young teacher, I believed the danger of prostituting their minds by believing falsehoods was the preeminent, or even singular, intellectual danger my students faced. So I challenged them and tried to teach them always to be self-critical, questioning, skeptical. What are your assumptions? How can you defend your position? Where's your evidence? Why do you believe that?
I thought I was helping my students by training them to think critically. And no doubt I was. However, reading John Henry Newman has helped me see another danger, perhaps a graver one: to be so afraid of being wrong that we fail to believe as true that which is true. He worried about the modern tendency to make a god of critical reason, as if avoiding error, rather than finding truth, were the great goal of life.
If we fear error too much, and thus overvalue critical reason, we will develop a mind active and able in doubt but untrained to move toward belief, a mentality too quick to find reasons not to nurture convictions.
In my experience, although the modern university is full of trite, politically correct pieties, for the most part its educational culture is cautious to a fault. Students are trained-I was trained-to believe as little as possible so that the mind can be spared the ignominy of error. The consequences: an impoverished intellectual life. The contemporary mind very often lives on a starvation diet of small, inconsequential truths, because those are the only points on which we can be sure we're avoiding error.
We can worry about getting on the wrong train in the foreign train station whose signs we can't read. But we should also worry about dithering in the station too long and thus failing to get on the right train. We could starve to death in that station if we never leave.
If we see this danger - the danger of truths lost, insights missed, convictions never formed - then the complexion of intellectual inquiry changes, and the burdens of proof shift. We begin to cherish books and teachers and friends who push us and romance us with the possibilities of truth.
The life of the mind turns into an adventure. Errors risked seem worthy gambles for the sake of the rich reward of engrossing, life-commanding truths that are only accessible to a mind passionate with the intimacy of conviction rather than coldly can critically distant.
It's hard to believe, but it's doubtless the case that a century after American philosopher William James' devastating rebuttal to the evidentialism of William Clifford university academics still cling to Clifford's timid approach to belief.
Clifford was famous, it may be recalled, for his maxim that "it is wrong always and everywhere, for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Clifford had in mind religious belief, particularly belief in God. In practice evidentialism requires a perpetual suspension of belief even on matters, as James pointed out, when one is confronted with a forced and momentous decision.
James wrote that "this command that we should put a stopper on our hearts, instincts, and courage, and wait - acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true - till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough - this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave."
In the same essay James delivers one of my very favorite philosophical quotes. It's a quote that applies not only to religious skeptics like Clifford, but also to contemporary materialists who wish to keep science free of any taint of any hypothesis that may point beyond matter as the ultimate existent. James says:
"Any rule of thinking that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if these kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."
A science, for example, whose methodological rules prevent us a priori from acknowledging the existence of a transcendent intelligence, should such an intelligence really exist and should much of the empirical evidence point to it's existence, is exactly the sort of irrational rule James had in mind.
The goal of any intellectual pursuit should be to discover truth, not to discover the most probable hypothesis consistent with a naturalistic or materialistic worldview.
RLC
