Sample Material of UPSC Mains Philosophy (Optional) Study Kit
Topic: Philosophy of Religion (Belief ‘In’ and Belief ‘That’)
H. H. PRICE
PART I
EPISTEMOLOGISTS have not usually had much to say about believing ‘in’, though ever since Plato’s time they have been interested in believing ‘that’. Students of religion, on the other hand, have been greatly concerned with belief ‘in’, and many of them, I think, would maintain that it is something quite different from belief ‘that’. Surely belief ‘in’ is an attitude to a person, whether human or divine, while belief ‘that’ is just an attitude to a proposition? Could any difference be more obvious than this? And if we overlook it, shall we not be led into a quite mistaken analysis of religious belief, at any rate if it is religious belief of the theistic sort? On this view belief ‘in’ is not a propositional attitude at all.
On the face of it, this radical distinction between belief-in and beliefthat seems plausible to anyone who knows from the inside what religious experience of the theistic sort is like. But to many philosophers it seems to have hardly any plausibility. It seems obvious to them that belief-in is in one way or another reducible to belief-that. This reduction, they would say, is not really very difficult, certainly not difficult enough to be interesting; and that, presumably, is why epistemologists have seldom thought it necessary to discuss belief-in very seriously. Why make such a fuss about this distinction between ‘in’ and ‘that’, when it is little or nothing more than a difference of idiom? I wish to suggest, however, that the distinction between belief-in and belief-that does at any rate deserve careful discussion. The question whether belief-in is or is not reducible to belief-that is by no means trivial, nor is it at all an easy question to answer.
It is not trivial. Religious belief, whether we like it or not, is quite an important phenomenon. Those who have no religious belief themselves should still try to understand what kind of an attitude it is, and they cannot hope to understand it unless they pay some attention to what is said by those who do have it. Moreover, as we shall see presently, religious belief-in is by no means the only sort. Nearly everyone believes ‘in’ someone or something, whether he believes in God or not.