A given theoretical fabric is always given by the life world where we grow up. From this our education has to proceed. What teachers tell us is to be accepted by their authority. Questioning comes only later. The concept of “knowledge as true belief” is an unattainable ideal; a better conception is knowledge as (p.207) “received teaching”. This better describes the limited and dynamic character of the information available to humans.

  As von Wright states: “In a genuine knowledge situation there must be grounds for knowing.” To know nothing is not to exist as a human being.

  William James in The Will to Believe argues for our right to make decisions beyond the realm of life where sufficient evidence exists or is likely to appear soon. On many profound issues concerning our lives, this situation arises; we have to make decisions but we lack the factual information needed to guide us. Still, not to decide is a decision in itself ; it may be that we miss opportunities for happiness or success.

  James is closely concerned with moral questions, but I see no reason to limit his argument to these only. As we noted, all scientific progress with its successful applications fails to inform us about the ultimate essence of reality and the guidelines for our conduct as humans. Thus we must decide, but a fully rational decision is not at our disposal.

  James defines a hypothesis as anything which offers itself to our beliefs. A live hypothesis is one representing itself as a real possibility. A hypothesis may be dead because it seems anachronistic or irrelevant.

  When we look at certain facts it seems that our passional and volitional natures lie at the root of all our convictions. When we look at others, it seems that they could do nothing when the intellect had once said its say.

  … but for us, not insight, but prestige of the opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our seeping magazines of faith.

  Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other ‐ what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up.

  James thus claims that many of the decisions supporting our lives have been chosen by faith not arguments:

  Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question open.” is itself a passional decision—just like deciding yes or no, and it is attended with the same risk of losing the truth. …

  I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued by the logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were personally all the time chock‐full of some faith or other themselves.

  According to James many of the opinions and convictions we have, do not have their origin in rational evidence. From a spectrum of beliefs we have to take a “leap of faith” which fixes essential parts of our life. This does not conflict with the rational endeavor of science. As noted above, science leaves open many questions central to life. As stated by Wittgenstein:

  (p.208) We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.

  He continues: “Of course there are then no questions left, and that is the answer.” However, the problems of life have refused to go away, they linger on both in natural science and moral discourse.

  Consequently nothing we have learned or will learn can make all questions silent.

  9.2.2. Role of religion

  One of the most developed networks for beliefs is offered by religion. Its role has always been central in most human societies and in the lives of individuals. This fact neither supports the existence of God nor its negation. It just happens to be the most influential feature of human attitudes, even when only sustained by beliefs chosen or imposed. Its relation to scientific progress is autonomous; there is no positive argument in its favour, but this does not justify the often expressed opinion that there can be no God. Even sophisticated scientists have not denied the reality of religious experiences. It emerges also in the arguments by the characters treated in this work.

  James on belief

  James's Will to Believe is actually aimed at religious faith:

  Now, to most of us religion comes in a still further way which makes a veto on our active faith even more illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having personal form. …

  When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instinct 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.

  James early considered the religious impulses and their manifestations in human behavior. A report on his observations, The Varieties of Religious Experience [57] appeared soon after The Will to Believe. The subtitle of the work, “A Study of Human Nature”, suggests the character of the approach. The book treats religion both as a social and a philosophical phenomenon. Among other things, he discusses what can be known about God and what we can only observe in humans. He presents some of his conclusions:

  If, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism to God's metaphysical attributes, strictly so called, as distinguished from his moral attributes, I think that, even were we forced by a coercive logic to believe them, still we should have to confess them to be destitute of all intelligible significance. …

  (p.209) So much for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the point of view of practical religion, the metaphysical monster they offer to our worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind. …

  But what shall we now say of the attributes called moral? Pragmatically they stand on an entirely different footing. …

  It needs but a glance at them to show how great is their significance. …

  An intellect perplexed and baffled, yet a trustful sense of presence—such is the situation of the man who is sincere with himself and with the facts, but who remains religious still. We must therefore, I think, bid a definitive good‐bye to dogmatic theology. In all sincerity our faith must do without that warrant.

  Thus James dissects both the logical and ethical arguments for God's existence and finds them ineffective. The belief must be founded in faith, and faith is taken to be a philosophical concept.

  It would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under this negative sentence. Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what she can do for religion. If she will abandon metaphysics and deduction for criticism and induction, and frankly transform herself from theology to science of religion, she can make herself enormously useful.

  The spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it feels in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions. Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from these definitions. Both from dogma and from worship she can remove historic incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious constructions with the results of natural science, philosophy can also eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or incongruous.

  In summary, James defends our right to believe in those parts of what we learn by education, which we find to satisfy our craving for supernatural existence. However, no rational argument or empirical progress can dictate what we have to believe. Philosophy can only survey the faiths and guarantee that they are situated in the realm where our epistemological machinery lost its power to direct us. What we cannot know or disprove, we may still will to believe.

  Bohr on religion

  In the talk “Physical Science and the Study of Religions” in [37], Niels Bohr discusses the relations of science to beliefs. His point of departure is physics and its development. His approach sounds very pragmatic, which may well derive from his contacts with James's writings.

  In any attempt of clarifying man's position in existence, it is a question of the proper balance between our want for an all‐embracing way of looking at life in its multifarious aspects and our power of expressing ourselves in a logically consistent manner

  Typically Bohr analyzes the situation in terms of complementarity. In this case particularized to the freedom to choose the separation between object and observer at will:

  (p.210) In fact, the varying separation line between subject and object, characteristic conscious experiences, is the clue to the consistent logical use of such contrasting notions of will, conscience and aspirations, each referring to equally important aspects of the human personality. …

  This attitude may be characterized by its striving for harmonious comprehension of ever more aspects of our situation in the never ending struggle for proper relation between content and frame, recognizing that no experience is definable without a logical frame and that any disharmony apparent in such relationship can be removed only by appropriate widening of the conceptual framework.

  In its context of religious discourse, this may be interpreted to say that Bohr regarded moral and divine issues as an unavoidable part of human life. It can be confined to the individual consciousness by a freely chosen demarcation against the physical phenomena whose description is dictated by the formal framework of our theories.

  Bohr's attitudes to religion are thoroughly documented by Honner [29]. Most of the evidence is found in Bohr's letters and reported conversations. Hence I will illuminate the issue by directly quoting Honner.

  Bohr recognized similar problems of physicists and theologians in the application of language to the extraordinary events in the sub‐atomic and the supernatural. …

  In physics we do not talk about God but about what we can know. If we were to speak about God, we must do it in an entirely different manner.

  The religious questions are outside the epistemology handled by the language we know. This, however, does not entail the nonexistence of ineffable features of reality; only we cannot reach them with our empirical way of life.

  On the other hand, the same epistemology, based as it is on the limitations to known experience and language manifests an openness to unlimited and ultimate harmony. …

  One would never substantiate the claim that Bohr ever enjoyed a mystical experience. …

  There is considerable support for Bohr's acceptance of an ever wider impression of an eternal and infinite “harmony” and a coherence that in itself can never be fully described but always more deeply studied. Thus belief in a One and the Many is not just the secret of success of science, as Bohr viewed it, but also a clue to a more rational metaphysics.

  One should not, however, put too much stress on Bohr's “holism”. His “wholes” are the completed descriptions of physical phenomena, and he cannot be accused of considering the totality of being as a phenomenon. But there is no denying his quest for a universal harmony in our experience of reality. We may not know what really exists, but our accumulated knowledge about Nature should be complete and consistent.

  When all possible scientific communication has taken place, the rest is not silence but personality and belief. Like James, Bohr does not impose any religious ideas on us, but recognizes the fact that science leaves room for them, if we choose to believe.

  (p.211) Early Wittgenstein

  In his later writings, Wittgenstein scarcely ever refers to God as a divine entity. He is used as a gedanken reference in logic, not as an existing and acting concept. Only in the Tractatus 6.432 does he write: “God does not reveal himself in the world.” This suggests the question: If his existence were something that “shows itself”, where would he reveal himself?

  There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest.

  They are what is mystical. …

  Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical.

  In this Wittgenstein almost verbatim concurs with the expressions chosen by Bohr.

  In the early notes before this [104], written during the First World War, the references to religion are far more common. At that time Wittgenstein, understandably enough, was more immersed in the fundamental issues of life and death. In fact, he never abandoned his devotion to moral and existential questions. His struggle with language and logic questions induced fewer direct religious references in his writings. He states in the early notebooks:

  To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.

  To believe in a God is to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.

  To believe in God is to see that life has a meaning.

  Thus Wittgenstein concludes that, in addition to the “facts of the world”, human life depends on beliefs.

  As for what my will is, I don't know yet.

  That is why we have the feeling of being dependent on an alien will.

  However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on, we can call God.

  In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing, the World ‐ which is independent of our will.

  But even this underdetermined concept of God can influence our way of living:

  I am then, so to speak, in agreement with that alien will on which I am dependent. That is to say “I am doing the will of God.”

  Certainly it is correct to say: consciousness is the will of God.

  Conclusion

  We have seen that the philosopher James regards religious experience as an essential part of human life. The physicist Bohr has to take them into account when situating physical phenomena into the world of man, and finally Wittgenstein uses the concept of God to found the moral obligations of humans. One may say that their attitudes are in conformance with our earlier insight. Theories about (p.212) reality are always underdetermined by factual experience. Thus even the most accomplished theory can only carry its operations so far. Beyond the formalized experience there are extended worlds which can be adjusted by the individual according to concepts and opinions formed freely by the conscious mind. It is not only possible but also necessary and desirable that we have enough personal faith to carry out our human lives.

  Religion comes in as one possibility. No philosophy or science can imply the validity of religion. But it still exists in the human mind and society.

  Religious convictions come in many different shapes. They may look like pieces of philosophy or politics, they may be historical or juvenile, but they control our lives. Not to speak of the emergence of very recent caricatures of religion, which have emerged from pop music or drug culture. Bizarre as these may seem, they derive from the same needs and survive in the underdetermined realm of mind. If it is not experienced that they infringe on the realm of what is stateable and verifiable, they derive from the limited knowledge of their practitioners, which can only be amended by better education.

  10 Concluding epilogue

  The present work follows the path of the philosophical and metaphysical discussion starting in the nineteenth century and carrying us into the just‐passed twentieth century. Many ideas have waxed and waned in this period; the history has developed from the seemingly stable Europe emerging from the Napoleonic Wars. For a while political stability seemed to be guaranteed; the old order was to dominate in a Europe destined to rule the underdeveloped people outside of it. As we know now, all this was an illusion; two great wars shattered all stability and the creed of Marxism spread only to suffer the most spectacular failure experienced by any ideology. First European stability broke down, and then the fragments had to be combined into new and conflicting structures. These have gone through many stages of more or less chaotic transformations, and after experiencing the international disorder presently prevailing one finds it hard to guess where we are heading next.

  The starting point for our analysis is the progress of science, especially physics, taking us from the Newtonian determinism to the present era with indeterminacy and counterintuitive features following from quantum mechanics. The development leads us from the fully causal Maxwellian theory through the statistical chaos of thermal physics. The uncertainty emerging in quantum theory is fundamentally different from the kinetic disorder of atomic ensembles.

  My argument is based on the fact that the social and scientific security offered in the nineteenth century evaporated without discernible reason. In the human mind, this emerged in the anarchistic philosophy of Nietzsche and the realization of the existence of our subconscious impulses by Freudian investigations. We know now that we are neither the simple animals of Darwinian evolution nor the rational masters of our culture. These insights have offered the background for multifarious human conflicts treated in the literature of the past century.

  The development in science has mirrored this general trend. My object of investigation is the breakdown of the logical structures envisaged by the positivistically inclined builders of well‐ordered worlds. Here I choose Ludwig Wittgenstein as the chief representative of this phenomenon. His published work Tractatus formally seems to close the world in a logical way. Everything that can be said is to be said and the rest is silence.

 

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