DAY 336
CHALLENGE
“Belief without evidence is irrational. A rational man will proportion his beliefs strictly according to the evidence.”
DEFENSE
Actions are irrational if they’re done contrary to reason, but not all reasons are evidential. We sometimes have practical rather than evidential reasons.
Suppose you are fleeing danger and the only way to escape certain death is to leap across a chasm. Suppose further that the chasm is wide enough you can’t tell whether leaping it is within your ability, but if you lose confidence you will certainly fail. In this situation, you have a practical reason to screw up your nerve and adopt the belief you can leap the chasm. You don’t have solid evidence of this, but practical reason dictates that you take a (literal) leap of faith.
This happens more in life than commonly recognized. Often practical reasons urge us to make a decision even though we do not have the kind of evidential reasons we would like. This can happen in unusual, dramatic situations like the one above, and it can happen in simple, daily situations, as when we need to make a decision just so we can move on to something else.
It is easy to see how the approach of death can give practical reasons to make a decision on religious matters, such as whether there is a God, an afterlife, and whether we can affect our state in the afterlife. Due to our survival instinct, human beings naturally fear death and try to avoid it. When it is unavoidable, we can experience intense anxiety. One way of relieving this anxiety would be to put faith in God and ask for his forgiveness. Another would be to conclude that there is no afterlife and so there is nothing to fear. Yet another would be to say, “God, I don’t know if you and the afterlife exist, but if you do, please forgive me.”
A study of the evidence about God and the afterlife points to the first of these options, but regardless what evidence a person has previously examined, the practical realities of a dying person’s situation give him reason to make some decision on these topics.
TIP
For a related discussion, see the essay “The Will to Believe” by William James (available online).