Kenny's "What I Believe"

Sometimes when you read something by an author you admire that reveals his or her personal convictions and beliefs, it's a bit disappointing. Anthony Kenny's What I Believe is one of those times. Kenny is an extraordinary historian of philosophy, whose works show the ability to deal deeply and subtly with complex philosophical problems in thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Wittgenstein. He also has written a number of broader historical books aimed at less specialized readers, including his phenomenal four volume history of philosophy, which ought to be on the shelf of anyone interested in the arc of philosophical history.

Is Faith a Virtue?

The epistemic status of faith is problematic on the face of it—to believe a proposition on faith is to believe without relying on either empirical evidence or the endorsement of reason. This much seems uncontroversial, for if reason or evidence were available to support the belief faith would be redundant. When someone claims to belief in something "on faith" they are bypassing reason and empirical evidence and asserting that they are justified in doing so. The issue I'd like to address here is twofold. One, can faith be reconciled with the demands of reason and empirical evidence? Two, if it cannot, then is faith a responsible way to form beliefs?

One way to answer this question is to say "No" to the first part and to simply assert that the dictates of faith outweigh the dictates of reason and evidence. This is the stance taken by those who claim that the world is around 6000 years, evidence of geology be damned. I'm not going to address this position here. Let it suffice to say that if you're uninterested in acknowledging that claims of faith need to be reconciled with what we know about the world, the rest of this post is not for you.

What's wrong with the Ontological Argument?

The Ontological Argument is a strange little argument that rears its head periodically in the history of philosophy.

One traditional version goes like this:

P1. God is the maximally perfect being (possesses every perfection).
P2. Existence is a perfection
C. Therefore, God exists