According to Clifford “… it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”. Assess Clifford’s defense of this principle and William James’ critique, with special reference to religious faith.
Introduction
W.K. Clifford was not the first to suggest that our beliefs be subject to evidentialist justifications. Long before the publication of his essay “The Ethics of Belief”, indeed, long before the existence of Clifford himself, John Locke declared unto mankind the obligation to proportion our assent to a proposition to the strength of the evidence for it. Half a century later, David Hume piped in with the claim that “A wise man…proportions his belief to the evidence.”[1] More than a century later still, Clifford emerged with the most extreme evidentialist contention, allegedly implicating ethics into epistemic justification. Unlike his predecessors, he was not himself bound by the ties of religious belief; consequently, his argument is not designed to preserve any personal convictions from its own onslaught of criticism. Clifford’s radical position leaves his argument open to a vast array of objections, notoriously those of William James in “The Will to Believe”. The majority of these views will receive due deliberation in what follows; specifically, Clifford’s argument and its significance for religious faith will be the focal point of this paper.
Recent Cuntributors