William James, Clifford, And Belief William James' "The Will to Believe" was written in response to an essay on religious belief by William Kingdon Clifford. It is worth noting that James himself was a distinguished scholar, and sometime experimenter, on spiritual beliefs, and the author of a capacious and open-minded study of the subject entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience. Clifford provoked a response from James clearly because Clifford's approach is

This concept is implausible if there is a just and loving God, but if some evil genius had created the world instead -- along with human understanding of God -- then every single belief could be brought into doubt. Essentially, Descartes takes the null hypothesis regarding mental interpretations of the external world. Still, this construction of absolute doubt is merely a portion of Descartes' argument, because he intends to

Ethics of Belief Knowledge, Truth and Belief -- Cphl 550 For a long time, issues of faith and ethics have raised many concerns. In this study, I have used Clifford's argument to elucidate my support for the "ethics of belief." The Ethics of Belief by William Clifford state that it is incorrect for anyone to believe on anything based on insufficient evidence. Clifford mentions that the immorality of belief unsupported by

In society today, we are bombarded with messages that suggest that our morality is driven by anything but the Bible. Indeed, turn on the television and images which are antithetical to Christ's word are everywhere, open the pages of a textbook and you will see pages upon pages of secular explanations of the existence of mankind; however, Matt Slick author of "What is a Christian Worldview? And Why Do

Physician-Assisted Suicide: The Kantian View Thanks to modern developments in medical technology, people in advanced countries today live longer and stay healthy until they are relatively older. The technology, however, also allows some people to hasten their death and make it relatively pain-free. As a result, many patients suffering from unbearable pain of certain incurable illnesses from time to time ask their physicians to help them commit suicide. Any physician who

Clifford supports his thesis by telling two stories. In the first, he discusses a man who has doubts that his ships is sea worthy, but assumes that it will make the journey because it has done so many times in the past. After the men die at sea because of the poor construction of the ship, Clifford argues that the ship owner is to blame for their deaths. If the