Study Notes: The Will to Believe

Teacher to pupil: "Gurney, what is the difference between justification and sanctification?"
Teacher to pupil: "Stephen, prove the omnipotence of God!"

A hypothesis is anything proposed for belief, classified as live (appeals as a real possibility to an individual, measured by willingness to act) or dead (refuses to spark credibility or appeal to an individual's nature).
An option is a choice between two hypotheses:
- Living or Dead: A living option features two live hypotheses (e.g., "Be an agnostic or be a Christian"); a dead option features hypotheses where neither appeals (e.g., "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan").
- Forced or Avoidable: A forced option provides no standing place outside the two alternatives (e.g., "Either accept this truth or don't accept it"); an avoidable option allows remaining indifferent (e.g., "Choose between going out with your umbrella and going out without it").
- Momentous or Trivial: A momentous option involves a unique opportunity, significant stakes, or irreversible results (e.g., Dr. Nansen proposing a North Pole expedition); a trivial option offers non-unique opportunities, insignificant stakes, or reversible decisions.
A genuine option is simultaneously forced, living, and momentous.

Pascal's Wager attempts to compel belief by weighing finite losses against infinite gains, but mechanical logic fails unless a pre-existing tendency to believe makes the hypothesis live.
Clifford asserts the strict scientific ethic: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
Non-intellectual forces—such as fear, hope, prejudice, passion, and social "authority" (as named by Mr Balfour)—fundamentally determine which hypotheses are possible, alive, or dead.
For $99.9\%$ of individuals, belief in truth itself is an act of desire and trust backed by the social system, rather than pure logical proof.

Absolutism: Asserts that humans can attain truth and know with infallible certitude when they have attained it via objective evidence (\text{adaequatio intellect\hat{u}s nostri cum r\hat{e}}).
Empiricism: Asserts that humans can attain truth, but cannot infallibly know for certain when they have attained it.
Concrete criteria for objective evidence remain unagreed upon across philosophical history, with conflicting systems proposed by thinkers such as Descartes (clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by God), Reid (common-sense), Kant (synthetic judgment a priori), Zöllner and Charles H. Hinton (transcending geometric axioms), and Hegelians (rejecting Aristotelian logic).
Empiricism evaluates beliefs based on their outcome ( $\text{terminus ad quem}$ ) rather than their origin ( $\text{terminus a quo}$ ).

The feeling and wanting side of human nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions whenever it is a genuine option that cannot be decided on intellectual grounds.
In genuine options, choosing to suspend judgment ("do not decide") is itself a decision driven by the passional nature and carries the same risk of losing truth as an explicit rejection.

Two distinct intellectual commandments govern belief:
1. Know truth.
2. Shun error.
Prioritizing the avoidance of error above the pursuit of truth (as advocated by Clifford) is a passional stance governed by the fear of being duped.
In scientific questions, options are rarely forced or momentous, making a balance of skeptical reserve wise; however, in forced human decisions, excessive fear of error prevents attaining truth.

Moral questions (asking what is good) cannot be answered by empirical proof or pure intellect alone.
In personal relations and social organisms (including governments, armies, commercial systems, ships, colleges, and athletic teams), faith running ahead of scientific evidence creates the fact itself.
Cooperation depends on mutual trust before evidence exists (e.g., train passengers successfully resisting highwaymen depends on reciprocal trust).

The religious hypothesis consists of two broad affirmations:
1. The best things are the more eternal things ("Perfection is eternal," per Charles Secrétan).
2. Humans are better off even now by believing the first affirmation to be true.
Religion presents a genuine option: it is living, momentous, and forced (suspending judgment loses the vital good as decisively as active disbelief).
If the universe possesses a personal nature ("Thou" rather than "It"), truth may require meeting the hypothesis half-way with trusting initiative.
As stated in Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: life demands acting on choices amidst uncertainty, where standing still on a mountain pass in a blinding storm leads to death regardless.