ABSTRACT
Pragmatism of the sort favoured by Nicholas Rescher has little time for what it regards as empty philosophical speculation engaged in without regard to any other question about practice and value. It would be a serious mistake to conclude from this, however, that such a philosophical pragmatism is like verificationism in denying meaning to metaphysical and theological hypotheses. To some degree the two positions were elided in the thought of Richard Rorty who occasionally, deployed verificationist considerations under the guise of his own Dewey-inspired (anti)metaphysical position, that he sometimes (self)styled as ‘pragmatism’ but which was a radical form of social constructivism.2 For Rescher, like Peirce from whom we shall hear shortly, pragmatism’s concern is with the warrants for and rational assessment of beliefs and it does not impose some prior criterion of what can feature as their subject or contents and does not seek to dispose of truth. As such it is not inherently disposed to scepticism or nihilism regarding metaphysics. In contrast to this is the ubiquitous deployment of a style of philosophical
argument designed to cast doubt on certain phenomena or purported realities, and which takes the form of asking how things would differ if the items in question did not exist. How would our experience of the world differ if there were no abstracta or natural necessities? How would science be different if the hypothesis of plural but causally insulated and inaccessible worlds were deleted from
speculation? How would human behaviour differ if there were no qualia? How would the world be different if there were no God? Those who press such questions usually do so in a spirit of scepticism or elim-
inativism, and often with something like verificationism ready to hand: the general idea being that something that makes no discernible difference is no different from nothing at all. If experience would be the same with or without the abstract, or the necessary, or the phenomenal, or the divine, then these have no experiential content or effects; and what has no content or effects remains only in name. There are two broad responses to this sort of argument. The first involves
accepting the challenge and trying to meet it on the terms in which it is posed. So one might try to show that qualia are implicated in explanations of perception or action. Or again, one might argue that the concept of the abstract is presupposed in the very idea of human experience inasmuch as this involves the classification of objects, and of experiences, by types; or that the necessary is presumed by certain kinds of subjunctive conditionals. Those familiar with the original challenges will know that these responses have counters to the effect that the proclaimed differences are in fact explicable in terms of lesser commitments, and know also that these counters in turn attract replies. And so it goes on. The second kind of response involves refusing this dialectic by rejecting the
terms of the sceptical argument, perhaps believing that to accept the challenge would be to endorse assumptions that would make it unassailable. If we conceive of something as non-empirical but then accept the demand to say how its existence or non-existence makes a difference to the empirically detectable, then we shall be in trouble, at least if we think of ‘making a difference’ in terms of sensemodification. Instead, we should refuse to allow the legitimacy of the challenge, or at least limit its scope. For while the demand that everything must be directly empirically discernible may be unreasonable, it may be proper to ask how the existence of the non-empirical might be registered or made theoretically plausible. And to the latter question there may be a variety of responses. Viewed in this way, challenge and response have a chance of doing more than simply standing in distant opposition. I offer these observations to set the stage for what follows, since I am inter-
ested in the issues of what difference the existence of God, and the belief in God’s existence might make to consciousness and reflection, and I will be considering the idea that common human experience leads to the expectation that there is a God, and that, in one way or another, the facts of this experience and consequent expectation themselves constitute evidence for the existence of the expected deity. Arguments from experience to God are familiar enough, involving either
encounters with purported natural or supernatural effects of God’s activity. I shall be concerned, however, with less familiar reasoning: in this case from the inclination (spontaneous or elicited) to believe that there is a God, and from the desire for God. On initial consideration the fact of inclination or of desire might not be thought to confer any warrant on the claim that the inclined toward or desired for exists; but I shall argue that further reflection unsettles this negative estimate.
In doing so I will be drawing on ideas suggested by Augustine, Aquinas, C.S. Peirce and C.S. Lewis; let me, therefore, quote briefly from each in turn.
