CLifford's Argument

Those of you who clicked the link on my last post were treated (or subjected, depending on your perspective) to a famous article by William Kingdom Clifford regarding the ethics of belief. The conclusion of his argument was that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

The first thing worth noticing about Clifford’s conclusion is that it is a moral conclusion. Clifford claimed that believing without sufficient evidence is always immoral, irrespective of the identity of the believer or the nature of the belief. That conclusion is undoubtedly too strong. For one thing, belief is not always voluntary. There are many propositions that we believe without evidence that we could not stop believing if we wanted to.

A famous example is the principle of induction, which tells us that we can reliably predict certain aspects of the future based on past experience. All of us rely on this principle instinctively in almost everything we do. For example, we regularly trust other people not to attack us when they see us in public. Why? We (implicitly) reason that because strangers have generally proven friendly or indifferent in the past, they will generally be friendly or indifferent when we encounter them in the future. Based on this reasoning, we leave our guns at home, ignore most of the people we see around us (except attractive members of the opposite sex), and extend our hands in friendship when introduced to someone.

Other examples abound. Reaching for the light switch to turn on the light presumes the principle of induction.

But David Hume famously pointed out that reliance on the principle of induction is an exercise in faith (or an act of question begging for you philosophers). Hume explained that there is no evidence that the future will resemble the past - there is only evidence that past futures resembled past pasts. And if we cite past incidents of the future resembling the past as evidence for our belief that future futures will continue to resemble the past, we are simply assuming (without any evidence whatsoever) that future futures will resemble past futures.

Got that?

Hume’s point was that the only evidence that could possibly justify our belief in the principle of induction is our past experience (the truth of induction is not a logical truth of the “all grandmothers have children” variety). However, relying on past experience to justify any prediction about the future, including our belief that the principle of induction will continue to hold, requires our application of the principle of induction. We have to presume the truth of the principle of induction to cite past experience as a justification for our belief in the principle of induction.

Thus, although there is absolutely no evidence supporting the principle of induction, and there never will be, all of us continue to believe in it. And we could not disbelieve in the principle of induction even if we wanted to (which none of us wants to). There are plenty of other propositions that people cannot make themselves disbelieve or doubt, despite the lack of evidence. This clearly demonstrates that Clifford’s categorical conclusion is too strong.

The second thing worth noticing about Clifford’s conclusion is that “sufficient evidence” is a problematically subjective standard. Clifford’s argument assumes (quite reasonably) that there is a gap between the level of evidence needed to create a belief and the level of evidence needed for the believer to be (morally) justified in believing - otherwise no one could ever believe without justification. But any individual who actually believes something also believes that he possesses sufficient justification for his belief. For Clifford’s conclusion to have moral force, we’d need to know (among many other things) when the evidence is sufficient, objectively speaking, for the particular type of belief in question. And on this topic, severe disagreement is the rule.

It is also clear that a given level of evidence will seem sufficient or insufficient, depending upon the degree to which we want (or don’t want) to believe a given proposition. Clifford would no doubt respond that we have an obligation to attempt to be as objective as possible. But the role desire plays in our perception of the evidence is frequently inscrutable. And because we can hardly be responsible for a feature of our psychology that we can’t even measure, much less fully transcend, the ethical charge that anyone knowingly believed on insufficient evidence will be difficult to sustain.

Clifford’s argument has other problems. I don’t want anyone to think that I think otherwise. However, I find Clifford’s underlying point - that we have a moral obligation to exercise our faculty of belief responsibly - compelling.

I also think many Christians have been systematically trained to ignore this moral obligation, and this constitutes a serious flaw in our culture.

Joe H.