How to Measure the Firmness of a Belief?

Abstract

One of the more well-known of Wittgenstein’s thoughts about the nature of religious beliefs is that we go wrong if we try to vindicate or refute religious beliefs in the same way as we do in the sciences. This may make it seem as if Wittgenstein held a view where the world can be divided into two separate spheres, one hard, objective, world of facts where beliefs are held because we have proof for them, and another subjective, softer, vaguer, where our beliefs cannot be proven and are held for completely different reasons. Religious beliefs would thus fall into the second category. In this text, I will argue (1) that even though it is true that Wittgenstein did not think that religious beliefs were on a par with scientific beliefs (held for similar reasons, vindicated in similar ways), he nevertheless did not divide the world into two (in the above mentioned way); and (2) that Wittgenstein’s reflections on the nature of religious beliefs tells us something important about what it means to hold a belief (in general) that challenges several predominant theoretical views about beliefs. I will, with some help from C.S. Lewis, try to show that thinking about the differences in beliefs according to the predominant model—where the “beliefs” are fundamentally different in a scientific and a religious idioms, which leads us to think that one of them has to be endorsing the right, true, belief; or that they are incommensurable—is a model that misrepresents the “conflict.” The matter may not be as intellectual as one may be prone to think—given that the concept of “belief” is at the center—but may rather be best understood (and, hence, the difficulties most efficiently overcome) if we learn to exercise other features of our experience. In particular, we need to learn how to listen and look at things that sound and look strange. A self-critical training of one’s ears is what is needed. (And for these reasons, the article starts in a different register than one might expect.)