Pathways to certainty

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PRINCETON - NEW JERSEY

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BRO 100: 7 B6/ 1930 Fé .2 | Brown, William Adams, 1865- |

Prefatory Note

I wish to express my thanks to the many friends whose counsel has helped me to clarify my own thinking on this subject, on which, of all subjects, clear thinking is most essential. I am especially indebted to the members of the different groups, varying in number from fifty to several hundred, with whom from time to time, in Cleveland, in Hartford, in New York, in Halifax, and again in New York, it has been my privilege to think through the line of thought which is here presented in more systematic form.

To my colleagues, Professor Henry Pitney Van Dusen and Professor John Coleman Bennett, who have read the book in MS., I owe many helpful suggestions. My friend and former assistant, Professor Walter M. Horton, of Oberlin, has also been good enough to read the book in MS.

Of the help that has come to me through books, I have made acknowledgment at the appropriate place in the text. I wish especially to express my appreciation of a volume by Professor William P. Montague, of Columbia University, entitled The Ways of Knowing. In this book the author points out the different ways in which as a matter of fact we acquire knowlix x PREFATORY NOTE edge and relates each to the particular philosophical theory with which it is most closely associated. The line of thought in the present work, while worked out independently, parallels at more than one point Professor Montague’s suggestive reasoning.

Since beginning my book I have had the privilege of studying Professor John Dewey’s Gifford Lectures on The Quest for Certainty, which deal with the same subject from a different angle. While recognizing much that is helpful and true in Professor Dewey’s analysis of the contribution of reflective thought to the validation of our beliefs, and paying tribute to the moral earnestness which has led him to question the validity of convictions in which other thinkers have found serenity and solace, I believe that in his desire to guard against the dangers of uncontrolled speculation he has been led to underestimate the extent of the knowledge possible to us in the field of religion. I have, therefore, felt free to make a larger, although I trust not an uncritical, use of the more direct ways of approach to the apprehension of reality through which religious men in all ages have won their certainty of God.

It has been my aim, in the present study, so far as possible, to avoid all merely technical questions and

PREFATORY NOTE xi to address myself to the problem of certainty in the simple and direct form in which it meets the men and women of our day who, in the conflicts of contemporary thought, are trying to find some firm foundation for a faith in themselves, in the world, and in God.

Witt1am Apams Brown.

Union Tueonoctcan Seminary, 1930.

I wish to thank Professor George Santayana for permission to quote the sonnet on page viii. Professor A. S. Eddington, Professor Sir James Jeans and Mr. Walter Lippmann have also kindly granted me permission to use quotations from their books. To the publishers of Baron von Hiigel’s Selected Letters, I am under obligation for the privilege of using an extensive quotation from a letter of the Baron to George Tyrrell.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION: Wuy A New Book on ReEticious CrEr- TAINTY

CHAPTER I. Way We NEeEpD CERTAINTY IN RELIGION PAGE

1. The Loss of Certainty in Contemporary Religion .. 9 2. What It Meansto Be Sure... LAT are 4 3. What Certainty Contributes to Effective Lives Pt tocatal he 44, 4. Where Certainty Is Needed in Religion . . . . . 35

Cuapter Il. Ways or Reacuine CERTAINTY 1. How Convictions Are Born and How wae Maintain

Phemilifen su goa : Ry te eek eG 2. Why Untested Belief Is Not eet ah ARN OLIELAMNe ACCC ET OL 3. Four Ways of Testing Belief . . . . 65 4. How the Nature of the Belief to Be Tested Dees

CuHaptsr Til. Toe Way or Avuruoritry: oR WHat Oruers Can Tett Us Asout Gop

Tea VWhateis Meantipy Authority owe sh yah ee LBS 2. Bible and Church as Examples of Authority. . . . 90 3. What Authority Can Dofor Us . . . 97

4, 'The Sense in Which Jesus Is Authority to His Disciples 111

CuHapTeR [V. Tur Way or Intuition: or MEETING Gop Fact to Face

1. The Element of Immediacy in Religious Experience . 119 2. The Mystic’s Attempt to Isolate God aes Abstrac-

tion from the World Wh aka aes 128 3. How Worship shat Us to Recognize God's aay in

CuapterR V. Ture Way or ReEasoninc: or THe TEST

OF CONSISTENCY PAGE

1. The Approach Through Reasoning . . . . . . 4153 2. Difficulties Raised by Physical Science .. 166 3. How Science Helps Us to Meet the Difficulties It Raises 181 4. The Difficulty Presented by the Fact of Evil . . . 188

CHAPTER VI. Tue Way or EXPERIMENT: OR THE PRAC- TICE OF THE PRESENCE orf GoD

1. The Contribution of Experiment to Certainty . . . 197 2. The Use of Hypothesis in Experiment... 204 3. The Religious Life as the i Sea Verification of the Religious Hypothesis .. ! SSS 4, The Christian Way of Dealing wih Evil tibet i sy

CuaptTerR VII. Tuer Crrrainty or To-pAY AND THE Hope ror T0-MORROW

1. How to Win Assurance of God for Oneself . Pee eial 5! 2. How the Hope of Immortality Enlarges the he of

Possible Verification . .. . 264

Can we be certain of God? There are many people who tell us that we cannot. Some of them are glad of the fact and assure us that the thrill that comes to those who must bravely face the universe alone more than compensates for the loss of the satisfaction which men used to take in the divine companionship. Others are sorry and in their loneliness and isolation would gladly welcome any help toward a firm basis on which to build their lives. A common assumption underlies both attitudes, the assumption that something has happened that makes it no longer possible for a modern man to be sure of God.

This assumption we propose to examine. We shall try to show that those who make it fail adequately to distinguish between two types of certainty, the type which takes account only of such knowledge as may be attained through the exact sciences and which is reached by eliminating the qualitative elements in human life, and the type which makes room also for the values which life reveals and for ~ the meanings which it suggests. Religion is concerned with © certainty in the second sense. We hope to show that nothing which has been revealed by the researches of exact science renders the second type of certainty unattainable, although our modern way of expressing and clarifying it may differ considerably from the ways used in the past.

Introduction

Wuy a New Boox on Reuicious CERTAINTY

INTRODUCTION

Wuy Aa New Boox on Reticious CERTAINTY

This is a book about certainty in religion. It has to do with those singular personal possessions which we call religious convictions, especially with the central conviction which expresses man’s faith in the existence of a real God with whom he can have practical relations of worship and service. We shall ask whence this conviction comes and what it can do for us. Is it a tenable conviction, worthy of the acceptance of reasonable men, or is it, as some of our contemporaries would persuade us, simply an illusion, a garment woven out of our desires, with which we try to shield ourselves against the chill of the unknown? If it is a reasonable conviction, how happens it that so many in our day seem to have lost it? What can we do—indeed can we do anything—to win it back?

These questions have been the theme of philosophy in every age. For centuries the finest intellects of the race have grappled with them. What more, it may reasonably be asked, can be said about them which has not been said again and again?

But it is one thing to discuss religion as an academic question, quite another to achieve personal certainty on the issues at stake. One does not become sure of God simply by weighing the arguments which may be given for and against believing in him. A conviction is more than an opinion or a conjecture, more even than a belief. A conviction is a belief which has been personally appropriated and which has become a determining factor in life. To acquire religious conviction the assent of the mind is not enough. The whole personality must make its contribution, the emotions and the will as well as the intellect.

Students of psychology have recently been devoting attention to the problem of the genesis of conviction and they have much that is interesting and instructive to tell us. They have uncovered many hitherto unrecognized factors which enter into the making of our beliefs. Some of these factors are purely physical, such as the external environment in which we live, or the condition of our brain and nervous system; others are found in that mysterious part of ourselves that we call the subconscious, such as our impulses, our sentiments, and our dispositions. Psychology is charting for us this hitherto unfathomed sea and the charts are proving useful in helping us to steer our way past hidden reefs on which we might otherwise have suffered shipwreck. Of all these data we must take account.

But although we need to know all that psychology can teach us about the genesis of religious conviction we must be on our guard against an undiscriminating use of the psychologist’s methods. Psychology is a new science and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between its assured results and its untested theories. In the older sciences the testing of theory has gone

WHY A NEW BOOK ON RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 5 so far that there is a body of accepted knowledge on which we can rely. In psychology, as the best psychologists recognize, the body of available knowledge is both smaller in amount and less trustworthy in character. But the anticipations of the learner often outrun the achievements of the teacher and in the popular press and on the platform all sorts of extravagant claims are being made for psychology, as though it already possessed the key to all that is necessary for human welfare and happiness. Dazzled by such promises, many of our contemporaries find the well-trodden paths that have been followed by earlier generations hopelessly antiquated. They no longer have faith in the older ways of winning certainty of God.

Under these conditions it has seemed to me that there was room for a study of religious certainty which, while heartily welcoming the new knowledge which psychology brings and making use of its methods so far as they prove helpful, should relate these methods to the older ways of approach to God. If the book brings to some readers little that is new, it may at least justify its existence by furnishing them with certain guideposts by which they can find their way more conveniently to the most helpful material already available.

For certainty in religion, we must never forget, unlike the certainty of science, where the expert has the right of way, must be won by each one of us for himself. The most that one man can do for another is to point the way and to suggest the steps that may

6 PATHWAYS TO CERTAINTY lead to the desired goal. Whether the steps will be taken or not will depend in each case upon an act of individual choice. Even the most convinced authoritarian must still decide in what authority he will put his trust; and Church, and Bible, and Christ, and God himself, become ours only as we make them ours by that free assent which is the supreme expression of personality.

CHAPTER I Wuy We Neep Certainty In RELIGION

1. The Loss of Certainty in Contemporary Religion.

The Prevailing Uncertainty in Matters of Religion —Explanation of This Uncertainty in a Narrow Conception of Certainty—TIllustrations in Contemporary Humanism—A Humanist Assumption Concerning Certainty in Religion.

2. What it Means to Be Sure.

What Is Meant by Certainty—Some Current Misconceptions—Certainty Not Inconsistent with Change.

3. What Certainty Contributes to Effective Living.

How Certainty Contributes to Progress—How Certainty Promotes Fellowship—How Certainty Enriches Life.

4. Where Certainty Is Needed in Religion.

Wrong Reasons for Desiring Certainty in Religion— Fields in Which Discrimination Is Needed—Where Certainty Is Essential in Religion—The Importance of Taking Time—The Issue Raised by Contemporary Humanism.

A noticeable feature of contemporary religious life is the loss of the sense of certainty. One important reason for this loss is the widespread conviction that the only kind of certainty worth having is that which is reached by the methods of exact science. Science reaches its certainty by eliminating the qualitative element from its hypotheses and concentrating attention upon matters which are capable of quantitative test, a method which is manifestly inapplicable in the field of religion.

Yet the reasons which lead people to desire religious certainty were never stronger than to-day and the uses that it would serve, could it be had, were never more apparent.

The possibility of justifying the religious attitude in the face of the contemporary challenge depends upon our ability to show that the kind of certainty reached through the method of the exact sciences is not the only kind of certainty, but that in the qualitative field as well trustworthy knowledge is attainable. Non-theistic humanists admit the possibility of such knowledge within the limits set by our human relations, but deny the legitimacy of its extension to the cosmic friend whom religion calls God. To answer the humanist contention, therefore, we must show that this restriction is both unnecessary and unreasonable.

1. Tue Loss or CERTAINTY IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGION

The Prevailing Uncertainty in Matters of Religion

In his suggestive book, A Preface to Morals,’ Mr. Walter Lippmann calls attention to a striking feature of contemporary religion—its loss of the sense of certainty. Whatever one might think of the old religion, this at least could be said of it, that it was clearcut and positive. It presented men with definite doctrines to be believed, specific rules to be followed, and a supreme authority to which one could respond with unquestioning loyalty.

But to-day for many men the old unquestioning confidence is gone. They no longer believe what the old creeds say, yet they have not outgrown the needs of which the old creeds were the expression.

Mr. Lippmann has described with rare insight the plight in which many a modern man finds himself:

“There is no theory of the meaning and value of events which he is compelled to accept, but he is none the less compelled to accept the events. There is no moral authority to which he must turn now, but there is coercion in opinions, fashions and fads. There is for him no inevitable purpose in the universe, but there are elaborate necessities, physical, political, economic. He does not feel himself to be an actor in a great and dramatic destiny, but he is subject to the

1 New York, 1929. By permission of the Macmillan Company, publishers.

massive powers of our civilization, forced to adopt their pace, bound to their routine, entangled in their conflicts. He can believe what he chooses about this civilization. He cannot, however, escape the compulsion of modern events. They compel his body and his senses as ruthlessly as ever did king or priest. They do not compel his mind. They have all the force of natural events, but not their majesty, all the tyrannical power of ancient institutions, but none of their moral certainty. Events are there, and they overpower him. But they do not convince him that they have that dignity which inheres in that which is necessary and in the nature of things.”

This change is the more noteworthy because.it coincides with a great increase in our knowledge about religion. There has been no time since religion began when we knew as much about its origin, its history, and its present manifestations. For generations scholars have been bringing to its study the industry, the patience, and the open-mindedness which have won such signal triumphs in the field of the physical universe and the record of what they have discovered fills many libraries. If we are not certain about the truth of our religion, it is not for lack of knowledge in the sense in which science uses that term.

Explanation of This Uncertainty in a Narrow Conception of Certainty

But there is more than one kind of certainty and more than one way of reaching it. There is the certainty attained by science, in the conventional sense of the term, and the certainty of common life. The certainty of science is reached by means of laboratory experiment from which all disturbing factors have been systematically eliminated and the result of which commands the assent of all competent observers. The certainty of common life involves personal factors which vary in the case of different individuals and which lead to correspondingly different conclusions.

In our daily living we seek certainty in both these senses and we find both indispensable. There is a side of our life in which we are dependent upon what science can tell us and we use its results with unquestioning confidence. Science sets our watches, constructs our calendars, builds our bridges, and runs our trains, and its ceaseless researches are constantly enlarging the area which it can not only explain but control.

But there is another side of our life which science is not as yet able to chart, but where certainty 1s even more important for us,—the world of our hopes and of our fears, of our aspirations and of our loyalties. ‘There are persons to be loved and promises to be trusted, causes which command loyalty and faiths to be embraced. And here too we often find it possible to gain an assurance which is adequate for our personal need.

Even in the restricted field with which the exact sciences are more particularly concerned it is often necessary to distinguish between different kinds of certainty.

Some years ago the child of a neighbor was attacked by a malignant dysentery which was steadily sapping her strength and against which the best efforts of the physician in charge proved unavailing. At that time one of the great Foundations was experimenting with a serum for dysentery which had not yet been sufficiently tested to be made available to the profession. Through the courtesy of the physician in charge of the experiment a supply of the serum was obtained and it was administered to the patient with extraordinarily beneficial results. Almost immediately a change for the better took place and in a few days the child was pronounced out of danger.

A few days later I met an eminent specialist, who had been present when the serum was administered. “IT suppose,” I said to him, “that there can be no doubt that the serum saved the child’s life.” “If you ask me as a scientist,” he replied, “I should have to say that thousands of additional experiments would need to be made before I should feel justified in expressing an opinion, but if you ask me as a human being, I have not the least doubt that the serum saved the child’s life.”

This answer well illustrates the contrast between the two kinds of certainty referred to: the certainty of science, in which so far as possible all subjective elements have been eliminated, and the certainty of common life, into which the factor of personal faith necessarily enters.

This distinction will help us to understand what has been happening in the realm of religion. In the past the certainty which religion was supposed to guarantee has been frequently conceived after the analogy of the certainties of science. As science owes its authority to a source outside itself, namely the laws of nature which it discovers and does not invent, so religion traced its authority to a source no less independent—supernatural revelation, once for all given—and hence for all rational beings authoritative and final. And as the scientist can be satisfied with no proof which is not equally convincing to every one who is willing to examine the evidence, so the religious teacher professed to furnish man with an authority whose trustworthiness it was not possible for any open-minded man to doubt. Thus religion, like science, made complete objectivity its goal. For both, the certainty that was sought was independent of the fluctuations of individual opinion and hence equally valid for every one.

For many of our contemporaries this way of thinking of religious certainty presents all but insuperable difficulties. In making us better acquainted with the history of religion science has brought forcibly to our attention the subjective factors which enter into its making. Belief in a revelation that should mean the same thing for all men at all times is becoming increasingly difficult, and with its departure is going the unquestioning certainty which that belief brought to the men of an earlier generation. The conclusion is a natural one, that, since the kind of certainty which religious men have claimed for religion in the past is no longer attainable, all certainty that is worth while is at an end so far as the objects of religious faith are concerned. ;

This is in fact the conclusion to which Mr. Lippmann comes in the book already referred to. He dismisses as negligible all attempts to gain certainty in religion which do not yield results as definite as those of the traditional theology and bids us look for the practical certainty we need for the regulation of our daily life to other sources than religion.

In taking this position Mr. Lippmann is simply expressing with more than usual clarity and persuasiveness an attitude which is shared by many of his contemporaries. Having lost the certainty which the old religion gave them they are turning in other directions for substitutes to take its place. Some find the substitute of which they are in search in individual self-development, as it is made possible through the pursuit of science or the cultivation of the arts; others in the advancement of the social welfare in some one of its many forms. But they are all alike in this, that they have lost the consciousness of God which gave unity and security to the old religion. The object of their highest devotion is man, as he is or as he may become. If they are to have religion at all, it must be a humanist religion.

Illustrations in Contemporary Humanism

In speaking of humanism it is first of all necessary to define it. For the word is used to-day in two different and largely exclusive senses. As used by one group of contemporary writers,” it means a spiritual view of life, as opposed to a mechanistic view, and among those who accept or defend the humanist position are theists like Professor Paul Elmer More who stand in the classic Christian tradition.*? But the word is also widely used to designate a way of looking at human life which tries to conserve the essential human values without the aid which is furnished by belief in God. It is humanism in this second, non-theistic, sense that we shall have primarily in mind in what follows.

This use of the name has been given currency by a group of radical American Unitarians who employ it to distinguish themselves from the more conservative members of the Unitarian body, who still hold the theistic faith.*, But the word is also used to describe a point of view which is shared by not a few of our contemporaries who are not members of the Unitarian body. These thinkers combine a keen sense of the important role which religion plays in human life with the conviction that the needs which have hitherto been met by conventional theistic religion can be adequately met in the future by devotion to purely human aspirations and ideals.

Humanists of this type differ widely in their at-

2 Babbitt, Irving, Literature and the American College: Essays im Defence of the Humanities, 1908; Humanism and America: Essays on the Outlook of Modern Civilization, edited by Norman Foerster (New York, 1930).

3 Shelburne Essays, 1904-1910; The Greek Tradition (vols. III and IV): The Christ of the New Testament; Christ the Word (1924, 1927).

4 Of. Reese, Curtis W., Humanist Sermons (Chicago, 1927).

titude toward existing social institutions. Some of them believe that a church is still needed, but are convinced that the existing church must be reformed along humanist lines.> Others do not think that any specific religious institution is needed. A few are content to retain the word God as a symbol of man’s highest social aspirations.® Others regard the retention of any term which admits of the conventional theistic interpretation as misleading and dangerous.

When we inquire into the reason for this far-reaching and revolutionary change we find many different factors at work. Some of these factors are intellectual, others practical. In part the change represents a protest against the kind of theology still taught in many churches. This theology is based upon a view of the supernatural which many of our contemporaries believe to be inconsistent with the findings of modern science. It pictures God as a kind of magnified man, with thoughts, purposes, and passions like ourselves, though infinitely more extended in their range, acting upon man directly from time to time as one man would act upon another, and moved to act in one way rather than another by the attitude which his worshippers take toward him. Those who obey his commands and follow his precepts he assists and rewards, if not now, then in the life that is to follow

5 EB. 9.4 Sellars, Roy W., Religion Coming of Age (New York, 1928), pp. 286 f.

6 This was the position apparently taken by Professor EK. S. Ames in his Psychology of Religious Experience (Boston, 1910), p. 313. In his most recent book, Religion (Chicago, 1929), he is not content with this subjective position but attributes to God objective cosmic validity (pp. 149-162).

after death. Those who disobey he punishes. Persons trained in the methods of contemporary science find no evidence for the existence of such a God. In the interest of honesty, therefore, they have no option but to reject it.

Others find the practical reasons for rejection most convincing. They tell us that they can no longer believe in God because they find the belief socially demoralizing. It is not simply that God does not exist. It is a good thing that he does not. For, as pictured in the accepted theology, both Catholic and Protestant, he does not deserve our worship. According to this theology God is responsible, directly or indirectly, for all the evil that befalls man. As the author of nature, he is the author of all the evils that come to us through nature—the pain that racks our bodies, the weakness that paralyzes our wills, the futility and ineffectiveness in which so much of the energy which we put into our living culminates. No honorific titles addressed to the author of our being, no repetition of words like “wise” or “loving” or “‘sood,” can obscure the fact that the God of historic religion has too often been a God of power rather than of goodness and that in making his bare will the ultimate ground of good man has again and again done violence to his highest instincts alike of justice and of generosity. In bidding farewell once and for all to such a God, these humanists tell us, we open the way for man to be loyal to his own highest ideals, whether nature confirm those ideals or whether she say them nay.

Some moralists put the case against conventional religion even more strongly. It is not simply that faith in God has made acquiescence in things as they are easier. It has put needless obstacles in the way of those who are trying to change them. By making God the champion of the status quo it has opposed the august sanctions of revelation to man’s legitimate protest against preventable wrongs. In the path of all the great reforms which have won freedom for an oppressed humanity the representatives of organized religion have erected their “Thou shalt not’’s until God, instead of being the symbol of humanity’s highest aspirations, has become the most powerful single obstacle to their realization. Humanism delivers us from this impossible contradiction. In abolishing God it clears the way for human progress.’

The Humanist Assumption Concerning Certainty im Religion

Plausible as are these reasons, convincing as is their appeal to many persons, I do not believe that of themselves they would account for the strength of

7 This view of religion as a soporific of the conscience, blinding man to the possibilities of present improvement where it does not make him their active opponent, received a powerful reinforcement from the deterministic philosophy of Karl Marx. According to this philosophy we are committed by nature itself to the war of classes. Capitalism is simply one stage in a process of evolution through which society must pass to the dictatorship of the proletariat. For the attainment of this end it is necessary, above all, that the workers organize. Whatever stands in the way of their control, whether it be in state or in church—and to many disciples of Marx the church has seemed quite as dangerous a foe as the state—must be fought with every weapon at their command. I well remember, when a student at Berlin forty years ago, hearing contemporary humanism had there not been another factor at work. ‘This factor is the assumption already referred to, often unrecognized yet none the less potent, that the only way to gain trustworthy knowledge, and so the certainty that knowledge brings, is through the method of the exact sciences. It is not simply that these sciences have assembled evidence which has led men to question many hitherto accepted beliefs in the field of religion. They have created a temper of mind which has led many people to question whether any trustworthy knowledge concerning God is possible.