The Challenge of Belief

Suppose you believe that the ice on your local pond is thinner than it looks. Very likely you will decide not to skate today. If you happen to be a humanitarian sort, you will warn others as well. You might even contact the local authorities and demand that they put up a sign forbidding anyone from going out there until the condition of the ice improves. Each of these actions would be entirely natural, and, in many circumstances, predictable.Readers may recognize this hypothetical as a gloss on an example deployed by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his clever demonstration that to believe a proposition p means not simply to have a particular state of mind concerning p but also to have a disposition toward a particular set of actions that are consistent with p.1 Even critics who consider "disposition" the wrong concept concede that Ryle is on to something: when we speak of "belief," we are invoking a far more complicated set of concepts than simply an evaluation of the likelihood that p is true.2Specifically, Ryle argues that "believe" is what he calls a "motive word," an explanation for one's disposition to say certain things or act in certain ways.3 The concept therefore is quite different from what we call knowledge (although, as Ryle says, they play in the same field). But it is also different from guessing, or from calculating probabilities. Belief plays a unique role in human thought. And religious belief, in important ways, provides the apotheosis of the concept.Consider a particular proposition p1: "The spirit that guides my destiny must be nourished with the blood of a freshly killed animal six times a year, or the spirit will die and my life will end in disaster." Anna believes p1. Anna is a member of a faith community that also believes p1. Anna, however, is also a member of a political community, a majority of whose members decide that killing animals is wrong. Her fellow citizens explain: "You are free to believe p1 if you choose, but you may not act on that belief."4According to Ryle, from Anna's point of view the statement is incoherent. Her belief in p1 involves a disposition to act. If Anna believes that her guiding spirit will die if not properly nourished, she will naturally seek to nourish it, and, if she is a humanitarian sort, will help other believers to nourish their guiding spirits too. If she is sufficiently kind and loving, she might even try to persuade others who do not believe p1 that they, too, should believe p1.Therefore to say that Anna is not free to act as her belief in p1 disposes her is, in practice, to say that she is not permitted to believe p1. We might well have good reasons for prohibiting Anna from acting on her belief; but we should not pretend that we are nevertheless permitting her to hold it. What we are doing instead is telling Anna that we have decided that p1 itself is wrong and using coercive force to keep her from acting as belief in p1 disposes her to act.5The example comes to mind in response to Ronald Dworkin's final book, Religion Without God. Until his untimely death last year, Dworkin was perhaps our foremost philosopher of law, and certainly among the staunchest defenders of liberalism. The book is beautifully written, intellectually challenging, and powerfully argued. Its central thesis is admirable and rich. But its understanding of religious belief is flawed, and the flaw carries over into the discussion of constitutional law.Dworkin's thesis is stated in his title. He seeks both to describe and to defend the concept of religion without God. In Dworkin's telling, both today's militant atheists and today's adamant religionists are missing a larger truth. Theistic religion is but one way of responding to our realization that there is such a thing as objective value, that "the universe and its creatures are awe- inspiring," and that "human life has purpose and the universe order."6 In understanding the theistic religions, says Dworkin, we should separate their science - their accounts of creation, for example - from their values - their "convictions about how people should live and what they should value. …