RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
227
some other fundamental assumption of inquiry.
As
if all fundamental
assumptions are equally valid! But the faith of the scientist is ex–
pressed in what he or
anyone else
cannot help believing if he wishes
to predict or control experience. And no one can continue to live
or choose to die without acting on "faith" in the principle of causali–
ty or its equivalent. This faith is of an altogether different kind from
the faith of the believer in something which he cannot help believ–
ing on exclusively personal grounds. No believer can live or die with–
out acting on faith in causality: but the non-believer can with no dif–
ficulty at all live Or die without faith in a single religious dogma.
If
one chooses to say that the scientist has "faith" in the power
of the anti-rabies treatment to ward off the consequences of the bite
of a mad dog, there can be no objection to this peculiar language
provided it
is
not regarded as equally justified with the "faith" that
rabies can be prevented by prayer, or with the "faith" that rabies,
when it occurs, serves some purpose in a divinely ordered economy,
or the "faith" that even
if
prayer is not efficacious, its appropriate–
ness or fittingness is in some way analogous to the appropriateness of
a scientific conclusion in respect to its evidential premises and the
principles of inference.
Nor are the facts of moral experience cogent evidence which
testifies to the existence of the objects of religious faith. Even if all
naturalistic interpretations of obligation and duty are denied out of
hand for some variety of ethical intuitionism, according to which
"right"and "wrong" are non-natural predicates, this in no way ne–
cessitates belief in the characteristic dogmas of religion. And con–
versely, neither the goodness nor justice of a supernatural power can
be derived from His existence. That God is does not entail that God
is good.
Indeed, from the point of view of modern need for religious be–
lief, it is highly questionable whether the existence of supernatural
elements, in the conventional sense, would be
~ufficient.
Even if psy–
chical research established the fact that some shreds of personality
survived the disintegration of the body, which is all the most sober
researchers at the moment claim for it, the genuine God-seekers
would find no edification in such a state of affairs any more than
they would in an atheistic community of more developed spiritual
selves.
