Justified True Belief

(●) The Harvard physician who made religious experience a subject a scientist could study, and who defended the right to believe before the evidence is all in. + In the spring of 1870 a twenty-eight-year-old man with a fresh medical degree was living in his father’s house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, too sick and too frightened to work. He had been to Brazil and to Germany, he had qualified as a doctor and had no intention of practicing, and he had lately come to suspect that a human being is a machine and that nothing he chose could ever be truly his own. Forty years later he was the most widely read philosopher in America and one of the most widely read in Europe. The distance between those two men is the story of his life, and he never forgot the first one. William James matters on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons, and they pull in different directions. The first is his answer to a rule laid down while he was a young professor, one still quoted at believers today: that it is always wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence. James answered that there are questions the evidence cannot settle, that some of those questions cannot be dodged, and that a person who refuses to decide has not stayed neutral but has decided the other way. The second is the book he built out of other people’s conversions, visions, and despair, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which treated the testimony of ordinary believers as evidence worth gathering rather than as a symptom to be diagnosed. He was not, by his own statement, a Christian. He said so in print, in a postscript most of his admirers skip, and the God he was willing to defend was smaller than the God of the creeds. That admission is part of why his defense of faith carries the weight it does: the man holding the door open was standing outside it.

(●) 1842 AD: Born in a New York hotel to a father who had made religion the family business. + He was born on 11 January 1842 at the Astor House, a grand hotel on Broadway in New York. That winter his father sat through all six of the lectures Ralph Waldo Emerson gave at the Society Library and introduced himself to the speaker, and the story the family told afterward is that he brought the New England essayist home to admire the baby. Emerson was then becoming the most famous voice in American letters, and he has been called William’s godfather ever since. That is the kind of household it was. Henry James Senior had inherited a share of one of the largest fortunes in America and spent his life writing books about God that almost nobody read. He was a Swedenborgian, a follower of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist who turned visionary and taught that every detail of Scripture hides a spiritual correspondence. The elder James held no pulpit and belonged to no church, and he argued theology at the dinner table the way other fathers argued politics. His children grew up certain that the largest questions were worth a shouting match and unsure that any answer was final. There were five children. The second, born in April 1843, was Henry James, who became one of the great novelists in the English language; the only daughter, Alice, left a diary that is now read as a small classic of its own. The family moved constantly, and William was schooled in Geneva, London, Paris, Boulogne, Bonn, and Newport, Rhode Island, picking up French and German along the way and never finishing anything on a normal schedule. He had no settled country, no settled church, and no settled career until he was almost thirty.

(●) 1860 AD: He meant to be a painter, gave it up for science, and took a medical degree he never used. + At eighteen he talked his father into letting him study painting at Newport under William Morris Hunt, the most sought-after painting teacher in New England. He was good. He was not, he decided within a year, good enough to spend a life on it, and in 1861 he enrolled instead at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School to study chemistry. In 1864 he moved on to the Harvard Medical School. The habit of sketching never left him, and a reader of his books keeps meeting it: the ideas arrive as pictures. In 1865 he interrupted his medical studies to join an expedition up the Amazon led by Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born Harvard naturalist who was the most celebrated scientist in the country and the most stubborn opponent of Darwin in it. The trip was a misery. James was seasick, he caught smallpox at Rio and spent weeks in a nursing home on straw bedding and chicken and rice, and he discovered that he loathed the patient work of collecting specimens. He came home in 1866 knowing something useful about himself: he wanted the ideas, not the jars. Then came eighteen months in Germany, from 1867 to 1868, studying physiology and reading in the new laboratory psychology that German professors were then inventing. His health broke down there: back pain, eye trouble that made reading an ordeal, digestive misery, and a blackness of mind that he did not name to anyone. He took his medical degree at Harvard in 1869 and never saw a patient.

(●) 1870 AD: At the bottom of a breakdown he decided that his first free act would be to believe in freedom. + Thirty years later, lecturing in Edinburgh on what he called the sick soul, by which he meant the sort of person who has looked into the pit and cannot afterwards forget what is down there, James read out a case of religious melancholy sent to him, he said, by a French correspondent. The man described walking into a dressing room at twilight and being seized by a horror of his own existence, and remembering an idiot epileptic patient he had seen in an asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin who sat all day with his knees drawn up under a gray undershirt, moving nothing but his eyes. That shape am I, the writer felt, potentially. For months afterward he could not go out into the dark alone. There was no French correspondent. James later admitted to Frank Abauzit, who was translating the book into French, that the case was his own, and his son printed it as such when he edited the letters after his father’s death. So the worst passage of his life reaches us in disguise, told by a man in his sixties about a man in his twenties, and even then under a borrowed nationality. The panic had come on him somewhere in the years between Germany and 1872. No source places it any closer than that, and whether the dressing room came before the diary entry of that spring or after it is not something anyone can now settle. What held him, he said, were verses he had learned as a boy: the eternal God is my refuge; come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden; I am the resurrection and the life. What broke the paralysis was not a verse but a French philosopher. Charles Renouvier was then defending free will against the determinists, the thinkers who held that every human choice is fixed in advance by prior causes the way one billiard ball fixes the path of the next. Renouvier defined a free act as the sustaining of a thought because you choose to when you might have thought otherwise. On 30 April 1870 James wrote in his diary that he could see no reason to call that definition an illusion, and that for the coming year he would assume it was not. Then the famous sentence: his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. Everything he later wrote about faith is that diary entry grown up.

(●) 1873 AD: Harvard hired him to teach the body, and he taught his way into the mind and a psychology textbook that took him twelve years. + Charles William Eliot, Harvard’s reforming president, had taught James chemistry a decade earlier and in the summer of 1872 offered him work: an instructorship in anatomy and physiology. It was a job about frogs and nerves and blood, and James took it because he needed one, facing his first class in January 1873. By 1875 he was giving instruction in psychology as well, with a room of brass instruments for measuring reaction times, which has a fair claim to be the first psychology teaching laboratory in America. He said of himself later that he never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology he ever heard being the first one he gave. On 10 July 1878 he married Alice Howe Gibbens, a Boston schoolteacher he had been introduced to two years before. One version of the meeting has his father coming home from the Radical Club in Boston and announcing that he had seen William’s future wife; another gives the credit to the wandering philosopher Thomas Davidson. What is not in doubt is that William, within weeks, was writing of her as the future Mrs. W. J. The marriage steadied him in a way nothing else had. One month before the wedding he had signed a contract with Henry Holt & Company for a textbook of psychology, and Holt asked whether he could have it in a year. James thought two years, say the fall of 1880. He handed it over in 1890. The Principles of Psychology ran to two fat volumes and just under fourteen hundred pages, and it is one of the few nineteenth-century science books people still read for pleasure. It gave the language a phrase that has outlived every theory in it: the stream of consciousness. It also contains chapters on habit, on attention, on will, and on the self that working psychologists were still arguing with a century later.

(●) 1898 AD: He gave pragmatism its public name in California and wrecked his heart in the mountains. + On 26 August 1898, lecturing to the Philosophical Union at Berkeley, James gave a talk called “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” in which he announced a method and refused the credit for it. The method fits in a breath. When two people are arguing about an idea, ask what practical difference it would make to anyone if one side were right rather than the other, and if no such difference can be found anywhere, the quarrel is about words and can be dropped (T5). The principle, he said, belonged to Charles Sanders Peirce, a difficult and unemployable genius who had published it in the Popular Science Monthly for January 1878 and watched it sink without trace. The name was Peirce’s too, from conversations at Cambridge in the early 1870s, and James put it into print: within a decade pragmatism was everywhere. Peirce was so unhappy with what James did with it that he renamed his own version pragmaticism, a word he thought ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers. That same summer he made a mistake in the Adirondack mountains of New York, where he had kept a share in a rough farmhouse camp since his thirties. He climbed too hard, carrying too much, at fifty-six, and did it again the next summer. Something gave way in his heart: one of the valves, the small flaps of tissue that swing shut to keep blood moving one way through the chambers. The valvular damage never healed, and he lived the rest of his life around it. He sailed for Europe in July 1899 expecting a summer of rest and stayed nearly two years, shuffling between Bad Nauheim for the baths, England, the south of France, Switzerland, and Rome, consulting one specialist after another while his plans collapsed one after another. He was, during those two years, an invalid who could work perhaps an hour a day. What he read in that hour was the literature of conversion: diaries, confessions, revival testimonies, the letters of mystics, the case files of religious despair. He was preparing the book he had been invited to Scotland to deliver.

(●) 1901 AD: He carried twenty lectures to Edinburgh and handed the study of religion a new method. + The Gifford Lectures are an endowed series on natural religion, founded by the will of a Scottish judge in 1887 and given ever since at the four ancient Scottish universities; natural religion means whatever can be known about God without appealing to a revelation. The invitation is one of the highest honors in the English-speaking academic world, and James accepted it while barely able to stand. He gave the first ten lectures at Edinburgh beginning in May 1901 and ten more the following year, and he said afterward that not until he had delivered the first course did he feel he had turned the corner and begun to live again. He had intended the second course to be his own philosophy of religion. The material for the first course grew so far past its banks that the philosophy was postponed entirely, and all twenty lectures went to describing what religion actually looks like from inside a human being. The Varieties of Religious Experience came out in 1902 and sold in numbers nobody expects of a book of philosophy. It is built out of first-hand testimony: George Fox and John Bunyan, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola, Jonathan Edwards and Leo Tolstoy, revival converts, drunkards, suicides, and mystics, quoted at length and taken seriously. Whatever a reader concludes from it, the book is the reason the psychology of religion exists as a field.

(●) 1910 AD: He died at his New Hampshire farmhouse with the system unfinished. + The last decade was his most productive and his least healthy. Pragmatism appeared in 1907, gathered from lectures he had given at the Lowell Institute in Boston and at Columbia, and it made him famous outside the universities and controversial inside them. He resigned his active duties at Harvard that same year, at sixty-five, to get the remaining books written, and for a while the plan held: The Meaning of Truth and A Pluralistic Universe both came out in 1909. In the spring of 1910 he crossed to Europe again, partly for a heart cure and partly because his brother Henry had collapsed and needed him. Neither errand went well. He sailed home in August, was carried up to the farmhouse at Chocorua in New Hampshire that he had bought for its view of the mountain, and died there on 26 August 1910, at sixty-eight, with his wife beside him. He left an unfinished book on the table. Some Problems of Philosophy was published the next year, subtitled a beginning of an introduction to philosophy, which is exactly what it is: the first chapters of the systematic statement he had been promising for twenty years and never lived to make. A philosopher who spends his life insisting that reality is unfinished and still being made is a strange one to leave a finished system behind, and he did not.

What He Taught

(T1) The mind is not a row of separate thoughts but a stream that never stops flowing. + Sit still for a minute and try to catch yourself having exactly one thought. You cannot. Before you have hold of it there is already a fringe around it: the noise of a car outside, a half-formed worry about tomorrow, the feeling of the chair. The thought you were trying to isolate was never sitting there by itself in the first place. The psychologists James had studied in Germany described the mind as a heap of elementary sensations, stuck together like beads on a string, and they proposed to study the beads one at a time. James said the beads do not exist. What is actually there, when you look, is continuous, personal, always changing, and always selecting: a stream, not a chain. He worked the point out in the ninth chapter of The Principles of Psychology, and the phrase he coined there escaped into the language and is now more famous as a description of novels than of minds. Two things follow that matter later. The first is that description comes before theory: you say what the experience is actually like before you explain it, and if the theory cannot fit the description, the theory goes. That is the method he took into the study of religion. The second is that the edges of consciousness are wide and dim, and things move across them that we did not put there. Twelve years later he would ask whether some of what comes across that edge comes from outside us altogether.

(Q) "Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described." + Source: William James, The Principles of Psychology, volume 1, chapter 9, “The Stream of Thought” (1890). The sentence immediately after this one asks the reader to call it, from then on, the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. The name stuck (T1).

(T2) Where the evidence cannot settle a question that must be answered and that matters enormously, a person may rightly decide it by what they care about. + In 1877 a young English mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford, who would be dead of tuberculosis at thirty-three, wrote an essay called “The Ethics of Belief” and summed it up in a rule as clean as a razor: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. That sentence is still quoted at Christians, often by people who have never heard of Clifford. James set out to answer it, and his lecture “The Will to Believe” is the answer. He begins by sorting the questions, and the sorting is worth following slowly, because every later step leans on it. A hypothesis, in his usage, is simply anything put to you for belief, and a choice between two of them he calls an option. Three tests then decide what kind of option you are looking at. - Live or dead. A hypothesis is live if it strikes you as a real possibility, something you can imagine yourself actually holding, and dead if it does not. Being asked to believe in the Mahdi, the Sudanese messiah of the 1880s, makes no electric connection with most Western readers at all, and a hypothesis that cannot make that connection is not a candidate for anything. - Forced or avoidable. An option is forced when there is no third place to stand. Going out with your umbrella or going out without it is not forced, because you can always stay home and settle nothing; but there are questions where staying home is itself one of the two answers. - Momentous or trivial. An option is momentous if something important rides on it and the chance will not come round again. His own example is a berth offered on a polar expedition: take it or leave it, and nobody is going to ask you twice. An option that is live, forced, and momentous he calls a genuine option. Nothing short of all three qualifies. Now here is the hinge. If a genuine option cannot be settled by the evidence, then refusing to choose is not a way of avoiding the risk. It is a choice, made for one particular reason, that you would rather miss a truth than risk an error. Clifford’s rule looks like pure intellect, but James says it is intellect with one passion, the fear of being duped, quietly laying down the law. Dupery for dupery, why is being fooled by hope worse than being fooled by fear? Two things this is not. It is not a licence to believe whatever you fancy: the option has to be genuine, the evidence has to be genuinely undecided, and James cautions that most of our questions fail those tests. And it is not Pascal’s wager, which James discusses and dismisses on the same pages. Pascal argues from the size of the payoff, staking a finite loss against an infinite gain, and James says that talking about God in the language of the gaming table is faith at its last trumps. His own argument is not about winnings. It is about whether some truths are the kind that stay shut to a person who insists on proof before taking a step.

(Q) "Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds." + Source: William James, “The Will to Believe,” section IV, in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897). James italicized the whole sentence and called it the thesis he defends. “Passional nature” is his term for everything in us that wants, hopes, trusts, and fears, as opposed to the part that calculates. The lecture was first delivered to the philosophical clubs of Yale and Brown, to rooms full of young men who had been taught Clifford’s rule as a matter of intellectual hygiene (T2).

(T3) Religion is what happens to a person alone before God, and it is judged by its fruits rather than its causes. + For the Gifford Lectures James made a deliberate and narrow choice. He set aside churches, creeds, and theology, said plainly that he was taking the word in an arbitrary sense for the purpose of the study, and defined religion as the feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals in their solitude so far as they take themselves to stand in relation to the divine. Institutions, he thought, grow secondarily out of that; the firsthand thing comes first, and the firsthand thing is what a psychologist can examine. He then had to answer the standing objection, which he named and which has not gone away. He called it medical materialism: the move that dismisses a religious experience by naming a bodily cause for it. Saint Paul on the Damascus road had a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, being an epileptic; Teresa of Avila was a hysteric; Francis of Assisi was a hereditary degenerate; George Fox’s hunger for spiritual honesty was a symptom of a disordered colon. James granted the whole framework and then turned it around. Every state of mind whatever has a bodily condition, including the atheist’s and including the scientist’s, so if organic causes discredit a belief they discredit all of them, and medical materialism never draws that conclusion because it cannot live with it. Naming the nerves behind a conviction tells you nothing about whether the conviction is true. So what does tell you? Here he borrowed openly from a Christian source. Jonathan Edwards, the New England pastor and theologian of the Great Awakening, had faced the same problem in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections of 1746, when the revivals filled his churches with people whose experiences no one could sort. Edwards’ answer, and James’ after him, was to look at what the experience does over time: at whether a life is changed, at charity, patience, courage, and endurance. James put it in a sentence borrowed from the Sermon on the Mount and then bent to his own use: by their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.

(Q) "Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." + Source: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture II, “Circumscription of the Topic” (1902). The word “arbitrarily” is doing real work: James knew the definition left out most of what the word ordinarily covers, and he says in the next breath that theologies, philosophies, and church organizations grow secondarily out of the personal experience. A Christian reader will want to argue with the order of that, and should (T3).

(T4) Underneath the warring creeds lies one common report: something is wrong with us, and the cure comes from outside. + Having listened to several hundred witnesses from half a dozen traditions, James asked the question a reader would ask: do these people, whose doctrines flatly contradict each other, actually report anything in common? He answered yes, and reduced it to two items. First an uneasiness, which in its simplest form is the sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. Second a solution, which is the sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making the right connection with a higher power. Read that slowly, because it is close to the Christian account and not identical with it. James thought the sufferer becomes aware of a better part of himself, however small, and then finds that this better part is continuous with something more of the same quality operating outside him, which he can get hold of and be saved by when everything else in him has gone down in the wreck. The wrongness he calls moral; the rescue arrives from beyond the person. That is a structure, not a doctrine, and it was drawn out of testimony rather than out of a catechism. It also decided how he read the human material. He divided his witnesses into the healthy-minded, who are constitutionally sunny and find religion a matter of gratitude, and the sick soul, who has looked into the pit and cannot forget it. He thought the sick soul saw more. A cheerful religion, he said, works beautifully until melancholy arrives and then breaks down without a word to say, whereas the religions of deliverance were built by people who had been to the bottom. He had his own reasons for thinking so (1870).

(Q) "The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers." + Source: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture XX, “Conclusions” (1902). He has just asked whether, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, there is a common core the religions testify to unanimously, and he answers immediately that there is. The two sentences are his whole answer, and everything else in the lecture hangs off them (T4).

(T5) An idea is true if holding it makes a difference you can cash out in experience. + James liked to start this one with a squirrel, and the second lecture of Pragmatism begins with it. A party of campers had argued for hours over a man circling a tree with a squirrel clinging to the trunk, always keeping the trunk between itself and him: does the man go round the squirrel or not? James settled it by asking what they meant by “round.” If it means passing north, east, south, and west of the animal, he does; if it means getting in front of it, behind it, and on both sides, he does not. Once you say which practical difference you mean, the dispute is over, and there was never anything else in it. That is the pragmatic method: take a disputed idea and ask what practical difference it would make if it were true rather than false. Where no difference can be traced, the dispute is idle. Where a difference can be traced, you now know what you are arguing about. As a way of clearing the table this is hard to object to, and it is the part of pragmatism that survived best. James then went further, and this is where the fighting started. He held that truth itself is not a static relation of matching between an idea and a fact, but something that happens to an idea as experience bears it out: an idea becomes true, is made true by events, and the true is what proves good in the way of belief. Critics heard that as saying a belief is true if it is useful, which would make wishful thinking self-certifying, and they said so loudly for the rest of his life. He spent The Meaning of Truth insisting he had never meant anything so crude. He applied it to God in the last pages of Pragmatism, and the application is worth reading before deciding what to think of him. On pragmatistic principles, he wrote, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. Whatever difficulties remain, experience shows that it certainly does work.

(Q) "'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving." + Source: William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Lecture VI, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” (1907). The sentence that made him the most attacked philosopher in the English-speaking world. He qualifies it at once: expedient in the long run and on the whole, and always open to correction, since experience has a way of boiling over and forcing us to revise. The qualifications did not save him, and a fair reader should notice both the line and the fine print (T5).

(Q) "Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with the Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type." + Source: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Postscript (1902). The most candid paragraph he ever wrote about himself. Philosophers of his generation who called themselves supernaturalists mostly meant something safely general: God as the ideal meaning of the whole, never interfering at any particular point. James called that the refined kind and wanted no part of it, because a God who makes no difference to any actual event seemed to him no God at all. He would rather be called crass and believe that something really happens when a person prays. And in the same breath he says he cannot accept the Christianity of the churches or the God of the theologians.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He gave the study of religion a method that neither took faith on trust nor explained it away. + Before 1902 a reader who wanted religion studied scientifically had two shelves to choose from, and neither was much use. On one side stood books that assumed the faith and argued from inside it. On the other stood the reducers: Ludwig Feuerbach had already explained God as humanity’s own nature projected onto the sky, and Sigmund Freud would shortly explain him as a father-figure grown cosmic. Both shelves decided the question before the evidence was collected. James opened a third way, and the instrument he used was his own argument against medical materialism (T3). Grant every organic cause you like; you still have not touched the question of whether the belief is true, because the atheist’s brain chemistry is as thoroughly involved in his unbelief as the convert’s is in his conversion. That single move is the reason The Varieties is still handed to first-year students, and it has done a century of quiet work for Christians answering the charge that faith is merely a symptom. It does not prove anything about God. It does clear away an argument that pretended to. What he built on the cleared ground was a discipline. The psychology of religion as an academic field starts here, and so does the practice of taking the testimony of ordinary believers as data rather than as decoration. The Christian philosophers who later argued that religious experience is a genuine source of knowledge, most carefully William P. Alston in Perceiving God (1991), were working a field James had staked out, whatever they made of his conclusions. So were the pastors and spiritual directors who found in his chapters on conversion and on the divided self a more honest account of what happens to people than the revival manuals gave them.

(†) The quarrel he picked, over whether believing without proof is a kind of dishonesty, is the one Christian philosophers are still having. + Clifford’s rule and James’ reply became the two poles of a debate that has run ever since under the name Clifford gave it, the ethics of belief. The rule assumes something philosophers now call evidentialism: that a belief is rational only in proportion to the evidence its holder can produce for it, so that believing in God without a proof is not merely unwise but a kind of dishonesty. Christian philosophers in the twentieth century attacked that rule from two directions, and James had opened one of them. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff gathered the case in the essays they published as Faith and Rationality (1983), where Plantinga quoted Clifford’s dictum and asked the question underneath it: by what evidence is the rule itself believed? Their answer, which came to be called Reformed epistemology, was that belief in God can be perfectly rational without being inferred from anything else, in the way that belief in other minds or in the reality of the past is rational without being inferred. That is not James’ argument. It arrives at the same door from the other side, and it walks through a door James had spent a lecture propping open. Christians have not simply adopted him, and should not. The commonest objection to the will to believe is that it proves too much: if wanting something badly enough licenses believing it whenever the evidence runs out, a great many things can be believed that ought not to be, and James’ three conditions look like a thin fence around a wide field. He knew the objection and thought his conditions did the work. The argument about whether they do is alive in the journals today, which is the surest sign that a philosopher is still being read rather than merely honored.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who need not be infinite, a truth that is only what works, and a religion with no church and no empty tomb. + He kept the door open, and then declined to walk through it. The reasons are in his own books rather than in his critics’, and there are four of them. - The God is too small. In the Postscript to The Varieties James says the practical needs of religion are met by believing that beyond each of us there exists a larger power, friendly to us and to our ideals; all the facts require is that it be other and larger than ourselves. It need not be infinite, he adds, and it need not be solitary, and the universe might turn out to be a collection of such selves, which would bring back a sort of polytheism. Scripture leaves no room for the option: "Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god." (Isaiah 44:6) - Truth is not what works. If the true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking (T5), then the Christian confession cannot mean what Christians have always meant by it. "Jesus is Lord" is not a report that a belief pays; it is a claim about who is on the throne, and Paul rests everything on its being a fact whether or not it is expedient: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins." (1 Corinthians 15:17) A faith that would remain useful after the resurrection was disproved is not the faith of the New Testament, and Paul says so first. - Religion is not a solitary business. James defined his subject as what happens to individuals in their solitude (T3), and treated churches, creeds, and sacraments as secondary growths. The gospel arrives the other way round. It arrives as public news about public events, carried by named witnesses to a gathered people: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve." (1 Corinthians 15:3–5) There is nothing solitary in that sentence. - The particular man is missing. Nothing in James’ account requires that the higher power ever became a man, died under Pontius Pilate, or rose. He said plainly that he could not accept popular Christianity or scholastic theism, and he called personal immortality a secondary point, which is a strange thing to call it if the tomb was empty. None of that makes him an enemy, and the ledger has another column. The test he chose for a religion he took from Christ: "Thus you will recognize them by their fruits." (Matthew 7:20) The sentences that held him through the worst months of his life were the ones about the eternal God being a refuge and the heavy laden being given rest. He spent his best energy arguing that a person who wants to believe is not thereby a fool, against a generation of clever men who said otherwise. He went as far as an honest man can go on the evidence he was willing to count, and where he stopped is exactly where the news of a particular Friday and a particular Sunday would have had to be counted too.