82 theory
the Epistles will find it said: not only that it is not reasonable, but
that it is folly. Not only is it not reasonable, but it doesn’t pretend to
be. What seems to me ludicrous about O’Hara is his making it ap-
pear to bereasonable.^26The question Wittgenstein’s remarks invite is the obvious one: is it ever
justifiedto believe what is not “reasonable.” This is the question that William
James dealt with in his celebrated essay, “The Will to Believe” (which he con-
sidered calling “The Right to Believe,” which is what the essay actually de-
fends). That often misrepresented and misinterpreted essay, it seems to me,
gives exactly the right answer to this question, but it would take a much longer
essay than this one to interpret and discuss it. I want, however, to make just
one point about it, namely that James emphasizes that saying there is a right
to believe is by no means to say that there is a right to be intolerant,^27 and that
too seems to me exactly right.
Why Did I Focus on Experience, Then?
In view of what I just said, it will be clear that I did not focus on experience
in this essay because I wish to argue that religious experienceanswersskeptical
questions. But I did have a reason for focusing on it, just as Wittgenstein had
a reason for focusing on the complexity of the phenomenon of religious belief.
Wittgenstein began his lectures on religious belief by pointing out that believ-
ers and atheists regularly talk past each other. If you search the Web under
“atheism,” you will find a great deal of intelligent and painstaking proof that
the Bible contains errors, that it is silly to think that every word of the Bible
was literally dictated by God, and so on, but precious little recognition that
most religious people are not fundamentalists, and many do not believe in the
idea of divinedictationat all. It is as if atheists too were “fanatics,” in Kant’s
sense; for atheists, too, their [negative] religious belief is, it seems, akin to a
perceptual certainty, something that involves noresponsibility. Wittgenstein, if
I interpreted him correctly,^28 did not want to make us believers (he was not
religious himself ), but he felt an enormous respect for the literature and the
spirituality contained in religious traditions, and he wished to combat this sort
of simplistic stereotyping. One way of overcoming the idea—and we need to
overcome it!—that it is simplyobviouswhat having a religious faith consists
in, is to overcome the idea that it is simply obvious (or if not obvious, obviously
irrelevant) what the words “religious experience” refer to. In this essay, I have
tried to suggest that what “experience” refers to is far more complicated a
matter than we tend to think, and that understanding how deep experience can