Upon a strictly impartial and ‘objective’ consideration, the two kinds of bias are seen to be alike forms of craving, desires seeking satisfaction. Both inquirers seek for ‘causes.’ But one has the habit of seeking causes in terms of sequences of known or intelligible processes, capable of willed repetition; the other yearns to find proof of the existence of non-material personalities in the cosmos and in his personal neighbourhood, and, believing in such existence in advance, either provisionally or rootedly, hopes to bring others to his way of thinking by a demonstration that certain physical phenomena are not physically producible. And it must be granted him that herein he is theoretically at par with the man of science—physical or moral—who, having spontaneously framed a hypothesis, seeks to find that facts conform to it. Every man with a hypothesis, broadly speaking, wants to find that facts are so-and-so.
The rationalist, then, has his bias like another. Though it takes in part a critical or negative form, it is fundamentally as positive as another. He has come to crave for coherence and consistency in narratives, statements, explanations, arguments, propositions, and systems of thought; even as his ‘contrary’ or competitor has come to crave for evidence that something ‘supernatural’ wields a purposive and ‘intelligent’ control, mediate or immediate, over all things, using among others ‘supernormal’ means. This ‘contrary’ thinker may or may not believe in ‘spirits’ in the ordinary sense, may or may not believe in the immortality of human minds; but if he is really to be an opponent of the rationalist bias he is to be classed as having a bias to traditional or authoritative views of the cosmos, to religious as against naturalistic explanations of history, to a conception of the human as of the extra-human processes in terms of a controlling will and purpose. He too, it is true, must have some craving for coherence and consistency—else he could not debate and reason at all; but the other craving in him has primed that.
It is a fallacy, we may note in passing, to suppose that the ‘agnostic’ attitude, so-called, is something between the two main forms of bias here posited. Agnosticism, logically carried out, can differentiate from other forms of rationalism only in local limitation of belief; and in practice it is not often found to do even that. The agnostic inevitably begins in terms of the rationalist bias, in craving for coherence and consistency of statement; and his most circumspect negations stand for precaution against inconsistent credulity. But precisely in virtue of that bias, he is the opponent of the supernaturalist bias. He does not in effect merely say, ‘I do not know’: he implicitly says ‘You do not know’ to the professor of non-natural knowledge.
Bias, then, being clearly posited, the debate at once turns—as indeed it usually does even without formal acknowledgment of bias—to a competition of claims to consistency. All debate presupposes agreement on something. As antagonists in religion appeal either to God-idea or to Bible, to probability or to usage, to expediency or to authority, or to historic evidence for one revelation as against another, so antagonists upon the fundamentals of religion appeal to accepted laws of proof, measures of evidence, consistency of reasoning. The most tenacious of traditionists must put his case in a ‘reasoned’ form. And therein, of course, lies the secret of the gradual historic dissolution of traditional credence in the minds of those who come at all within the range of the argument. Every act of reasoning—as priesthoods are more or less clearly aware—is a concession to the rationalist position to begin with; and only superior skill in fence can ostensibly countervail the advantage thus given to the disputant who claims that reason must determine beliefs. Reasoning against the validity of reason is recognisable as suicidal by all who can reason coherently. If reason be untrustworthy, what is the value of reasoning to that effect? Either you go by reason or you do not. If not, you are out of the debate, or you are grasping your sword by the blade, a course not long to be persisted in. Even the skeptical defender of religion, following religious precedent, says, ‘Come now, let us reason together.’
Thus we reach the standing anomaly that the defence of faith against rationalistic criticism alternately takes the courses of pronouncing the appeal to reason a foolish presumption, and of claiming to reason more faithfully than the rationalist. The two positions being, to say the least, incompatible from the point of view of dialectic, we must fight upon one or the other at a time; and, having briefly dealt with the former, we may fitly consider at greater length the latter. The more philosophic assailant of the rationalist, we assume, professes after all to stand or fall by reasoning. That is to say, he claims to hold his supernaturalist positions in logical and moral consistency with his historical positions, his practice as a judge or juror, as a man of science, as a critic in politics, as a man of honour, as a player of cricket by the rules of the game. As a matter of fact, however, he at times goes about the task by way of an undertaking to show, not that his beliefs are well founded in reason, but that no beliefs are; and that his beliefs are therefore at least as valid as any one else’s. All the while he is ostensibly appealing to reason, to judgment. That position in turn must be considered.
§ 5. THE SKEPTICAL RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE
The philosophic issue under this head has been usefully cleared for English readers by Mr. A. J. Balfour in his Defence of Philosophic Doubt; and, in another sense, very usefully for rationalists by the same writer in his work The Foundations of Belief. The gist of the former treatise is an expansion of the proposition of Hume that all moral judgments, on analysis, are found to root in a sentiment or bias. In particular, Mr. Balfour argues that all scientific beliefs so-called, however immediately proved, rest upon general beliefs which are ‘incapable of proof.’ It is noteworthy that never through the whole treatise does Mr. Balfour analyse the concept of ‘proof,’ though his main aim is ostensibly to discriminate between proved and unproved propositions. It may be worth while, then, at this stage, to note the risks of intellectual confusion in connection with the term proof. The common conception, implicit in Mr. Balfour’s argument, is that concerning a ‘proved’ thing either we have, or men of science say we have, a right of certainty, as it were, which we cannot have concerning anything not proved or not capable of proof. The simple fact is that the very idea of proof involves that of uncertainty you seek to prove that which is not unquestionable. To prove is to probe,[8] to test. The idea of ‘demonstration,’ which seems commonly to connote special certainty, carries us no further. It means a ‘showing,’ a ‘letting you see with your own eyes.’ In geometry, it stands for a chain of reasoning in which every step rests upon previous steps which ultimately rest upon axioms and definitions agreed upon. There the process is one of analysis—a showing that a proposition formerly unknown as such is really contained in or implied by propositions known. Certainty follows. Yet there is abundant record of ‘proofs’ or ‘tests’ which were fallacious, and of ostensible demonstrations which were flawed—modes of squaring the circle, for instance. The ultimate in the matter is the belief arrived at or evoked; and the significant fact for us is, that beliefs ostensibly so arrived at may be false, because the cited proof or evidence is erroneous or the demonstration inconsequent.
Certainty, on the other hand, attaches in the highest degree to certain beliefs that, in the nature of the case, are ‘incapable of proof,’ that is, of being tested. No belief is more certain for all men than the belief that they will all die, though the event, posited as future, cannot as such be ‘tested.’ In this case, the connotation of the word ‘proof,’ nevertheless, is by common consent transferred to the concept of mortality: the invariable dying of all previous men is allowed to be ‘proof,’ or decisive evidence, that all living men will die to the last generation. In regard to some other certainties, the concept of ‘proof’ is wholly irrelevant. You cannot ‘prove’ that you feel a pain, though it is one of the most certain of all facts for you while it lasts. If, then, any general scientific or other belief be shown to be ‘incapable of proof,’ in this merely negative sense (as distinguished from ‘capable of disproof’), that is no argument against it for any practical or philosophic purpose. Such a belief is that in the ‘uniformity of nature,’ which is held by the same tenure as that in the mortality of all men. It cannot be ‘proved,’ either as to the past or the future, in the sense of being tested, save as regards past particulars, which are necessarily a small selection from the totality of phenomena. For the future, in the terms of the case, there can be no proof. Yet no man has any more doubt as to the rising of the sun to-morrow than as to his own ultimate death. Concerning this we are quite certain, which we cannot be as to many things reasonably held to have been ‘proved.’ Such and such are our ‘certainties.’