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¶ … Clifford is trying to make in the story of the ship-Owner (Meister, 359)?
Despite the contention that religious belief has no moral downsides, having the belief can result in a refusal to take practical actions and thus does have many negative consequences for humanity. Even if no one was hurt due to the shipbuilder's belief in providence, this belief does not result in the shipbuilder taking prudent precautions. Similarly, religion can act as an inhibiter, preventing people from looking at an issue with scientific objectivity to make an advance in medicine or for a government to undertake appropriate social policies because of a religious notion like the poor are always with us.
Q2. What, according to Clifford, makes holding a belief right or wrong? (Be careful here. I'm not asking what makes the belief true or false, but rather what makes it OK to hold the belief.) (Meister, 360)
Holding a belief is correct if it is entered into when one holds the correct evidence. If someone has good reason to believe based upon concrete evidence that his ship is sound and he sails and the ship sinks, this does not make him wrong to hold his previous belief. On the other hand, if someone takes no precautions, trusts in providence and by happy accident the ship does not sink, that does not make the belief right, even if no ill consequences resulted from the erroneous belief that ships do not need to be regularly examined...
What, according to Clifford, is the chief danger of believing a claim to be true without having sufficient evidence? (Clifford's answer to this question goes from the bottom of p. 362-363.)
A belief does not exist in a vacuum but rather leads to other beliefs and are passed on to succeeding generations. A good example of this might be someone who believes in the God he is taught about in Sunday school, comes to believe that God does not bestow salvation to those who do not accept Christianity, holds intolerant political views about certain groups based upon his evangelicalism, and then passes these beliefs on to other people.
Q4. There is one sentence in the essay that is especially well-known. It is his thesis statement, and it occurs on p. 363. What is it?
"A bad action is always bad at the time it is done, no matter what happens afterward."
Q5. Thomas Aquinas argued that an important reason why the exercise of our wills to believe was important was because many people do not have the time to invest to assess carefully the evidence and arguments for and against religious belief. How would Clifford answer Thomas? (See 364)
In plain terms, according to Clifford, if someone is really so busy he does not have time to reflect upon the nature of reality in an effective…
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
He states that "there is never, within Scripture itself, an attempt to prove the existence of God; if proving God's existence were demanded of all believers; one might expect to find at least one of the believers in the Bible discussing theistic arguments." (Clark, unknown). However, Clark does acknowledge that Scripture contains many examples of God proving that He, rather than the false Gods worshipped by people during biblical
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