QuestionsShould we believe without proof?We have the right to believe when evidence cannot decide
Should we believe without proof?Faith goes beyond

We have the right to believe when evidence cannot decide

The will to believe

William James 1842 · 1910Religious experiences are psychological facts to be studied seriously, and belief can be a legitimate venture.
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What it claims

Faced with a genuine option that evidence cannot settle, our passional nature may, and indeed must, decide: we have the right to believe, at our own risk.

Why

When a choice is unavoidable and evidence cannot settle it, doubting is also a gamble: we may decide by what we feel.

The same idea through history
Blaise Pascal1670Pascal argues that we should wager that God exists, because reason cannot decide and abstaining amounts to wagering. James keeps the idea that reason cannot decide, but finds Pascal's wager too mechanical and limits it to "living" options.
William James1896In a lecture to students (published in The New World, June 1896), he defends the right to let our "passional nature" decide, but only for genuine options that evidence cannot settle.
In short

"We have the right to believe when evidence cannot decide" is an argument by William James ("The Will to Believe", 1896, 1896) on the question "Should we believe without proof?" (answer: faith goes beyond). Its claim: Faced with a genuine option that evidence cannot settle, our passional nature may, and indeed must, decide: we have the right to believe, at our own risk. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

"The Will to Believe", 1896
Valid with an implicit premise

A young man hesitates to propose to a woman because he is not sure she will prove an angel once she is home. He waits. Result: he loses that possibility as surely as if he had married someone else. This is James's image. For him, some questions are not settled by waiting for proof: religion, morality, trust between people. On those, the proof does not come, and waiting is already a choice. James does not say that we may believe anything. He sets three conditions: the option must be living (it genuinely appeals to us), forced (we cannot avoid it) and momentous (the stake is high and the chance will not return). Only then, and if the intellect alone cannot decide, do we have the right to believe at our own risk.

P1Some options are "genuine": they are at once living (both hypotheses appeal to us somewhat), forced (no way out, it is one or the other) and momentous (the chance is unique and the stake is important).
P2For some of these genuine options (religion, moral values, trust between people), the intellect cannot decide on the evidence, by its very nature.
P3In a genuine option, abstaining is not staying neutral: to doubt is to choose a particular kind of risk, that of missing the truth if it is there. The sceptic stakes as much as the believer.
P4The rule "better believe nothing than risk error" is not itself demonstrated: it expresses a fear, that of being duped. Nothing proves that being duped through hope is worse than being duped through fear.
P5 · implicit premiseWhen a decision is unavoidable, evidence cannot make it, and neither path (believing or abstaining) is shown to be more reasonable than the other, one has the right to decide according to one's passional nature.
Therefore, faced with a genuine option that evidence cannot settle, our passional nature may, and indeed must, decide: we have the right to believe, at our own risk.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where the option is genuine, evidence does not decide and no path is shown to be better, but where one still has no right to believe: for instance if one holds that, with no reason either way, the only right attitude is to suspend judgment.
With P5 the argument is valid: the option is genuine (P1), evidence cannot decide (P2), abstaining is an equally risky choice (P3), so neither path is shown to be more reasonable (P4), and P5 draws the right to believe from this. Without P5 it is no longer valid: from "nobody can prove which path is best" it does not yet follow that "everyone may follow their heart". Critics contest exactly this step: a right to believe may seem to open the door to wishful thinking.
Analogy. On a mountain pass in snow and mist, we glimpse paths that may be deceptive. To stand still is to freeze. To take a path is to risk a fall. We do not know which is right. Standing still is already a choice. James quotes this passage from Fitzjames Stephen: whatever we do, we do it at our peril.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

William Kingdon Clifford 1877 · attacks the conclusion

This is the opposite rule: it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. For Clifford, believing is an act that affects others, since everyone's belief goes into the common stock. It cannot be a private right exercised at one's own risk.

James replies
William James 1896 · James's reply
Avoiding error and finding truth are two different laws. Putting the first before the second only expresses a fear of being wrong, not a truth. Clifford's exhortation is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound.
William Kingdon Clifford 1877 · What Clifford had already answered (acting without believing)
Clifford (who died in 1879) never read James, but he had foreseen this reply: there are cases where we must act on probabilities even though the evidence does not yet justify belief. Acting does not require believing.
See the rest of the debate (1)
William James 1896 · James's rejoinder
Acting "as if" religion were false, in the meantime, is already a wager: we may wait if we will, but we do so at our peril as much as if we believed.
Bertrand Russell 1952 · attacks the conclusion

Russell targets the "useful" version of the idea, which he attributes to James: we should believe in God because otherwise we would behave badly. In his view this only shows that politicians and educators ought to try to make people believe in God, not that God exists. A man of genuine religious feeling wants to know whether God exists, not whether believing is useful. Father Christmas is likewise useful in the nursery, but that does not make him real.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1952, after the author's death (1910).
The debate goes on (our summary) James died in 1910: he could not reply to Russell (1952). A defender can note that James does not rest on usefulness alone: he requires the hypothesis to be living and the evidence unable to decide, and he speaks of what might be true (P1, P2). Russell can answer that James also writes that religion promises a vital good right now ("we are better off even now"), so that usefulness stays central to the argument. The debate on this point is open.
Objection anticipated by James (wishful thinking) attacks the conclusion

If we have the right to believe "what we will", faith is nothing but wishful thinking. James quotes a schoolboy's definition: "Faith is when you believe something that you know ain't true".

James replies
William James 1896 · James's reply
This is a misapprehension. The freedom to believe covers only living options which the intellect cannot by itself resolve. A superstition we know to be absurd is not a living option.
The debate goes on (our summary) A difficulty remains, which James himself acknowledges: being living or dead is not a property of the hypothesis but a relation to each person. For a believer, his own superstition is alive. James's criterion thus leaves each person to decide what is "living" for them, and draws no common line between faith and wishful thinking.
What today's voices say
Defend it
Philip GoffWilliam James is his 'big hero'. He agrees one may hope beyond the evidence: refusing to believe can also make you miss a truth.