Truth, goodness, beauty . . . religion?

The gifts of evolution for virtually all who belong to our species include intellectual powers, moral scruples, and aesthetic sensibilities. To these corresponds the great triad of truth, goodness, and beauty.Footnote ¹ Given the nature of our evolved capacities, we are responsive to truth, goodness, and beauty and can become committed to them as well.

The commitment we see here is a general life commitment which anyone so gifted can make. The true – understood here as a true proposition or propositions – invites us to seek it and whenever we find it, to believe it; the good invites us to seek it and whenever we find it, to conform our behaviour to it; the beautiful, to seek it and whenever we find it, to love it. When we accept this threefold invitation and intend to live accordingly, we make the general commitment to which I have referred. To facilitate discussion I will call this commitment to truth, goodness, and beauty the TGB commitment. The facts involving truth, goodness, and beauty – with the notion of ‘facts’ taken as broadly as you please – I will call the TGB facts. The TGB commitment we might then also call a commitment to embody the TGB facts in one's person as fully as one can. I will sometimes speak in the corresponding way.

Now there are some interesting issues about relationships among members of the triad and our commitments to them. I will not linger over these for long. We speak of loving truth as well as beauty, and it may be good for us to love liberally in this way. Beauty might seem subsumed under goodness, but if we think of goodness as broadly moral goodness we will have a sharper distinction enabling sharper points. Accordingly I would recommend thinking of goodness thus. Truth and the commitment to truth may in a sense be fundamental here, since when one seeks to be conformed to goodness or loves beauty one thinks it true that something is good or something beautiful and also true that one should respond in that way. But goodness and beauty will, for some, stand behind the invitation to seek truth, and they may exert their own influence on how we look for it. The issue about what, if anything, is fundamental in this domain would, it seems fair to say, take some time to deal with adequately and in any case does not have a bearing on my main concerns. So I propose to set it aside on this occasion.

The general life commitment I have described, the TGB commitment, we must now distinguish from the more specific life commitments people tend explicitly to make, such as familial commitments, social commitments, humanitarian commitments, political commitments, and of course religious commitments. We tend to start specific, and need to learn the general. Perhaps we stick to some specific commitments longer or more tightly than we otherwise would when we don't notice the general alternative.

This is not to say that the two kinds of life commitment must be at odds with each other. Not at all. Indeed, the general commitment might in appropriate circumstances be seen as mediated by one or another specific commitment, such as a religious commitment, when the latter is rightly taken as offering a more fine-grained conception of the true, the good, or the beautiful. Nevertheless, once having noticed the general TGB commitment and how it is distinguished from the others, several things become possible: one may realize that the general commitment is the more fundamental; accordingly, it may become clear as well that specific commitments will need to be embedded in this general one if we are to listen to wisdom (which certainly could not speak with any voice unapproved by truth, goodness, and beauty), and moreover that one can always fall back to the TGB commitment when some specific commitment falters or seems to be undermined or shown to be unworthy.

Now, also, we may notice that it is not always obvious that specific commitments are yet appropriate for us. Caution may seem especially appropriate when we consider passing from the general TGB commitment to religious commitments, which give to T, G, and B a unified and highly profound and also detailed complexion. For example, the truth may be regarded as being explicable in detail in terms of God's creating and saving activity, the good in terms of obedience to God, and the beautiful in terms of God's inner nature which, if properly devoted, we may progressively enjoy. Especially if we attend to human limitations and to our early and, in some respects, immature stage of development in deep evolutionary time, we may see that T, G, and B themselves call for caution here; it would be contrary to the TGB facts to plump too quickly for such religious details, to be seduced by what we might call premature specification. Perhaps we are not yet in a position to explicitly or deeply or fully recognize the TGB facts: perhaps the details are and will for some time be hidden from us.

That would not be at all surprising. Because of our notorious lack of intellectual humility (or of an understanding of what it requires), which lack is commonly expressed by the assumption that almost any question can be answered with the answer rising to the status of knowledge, and is arguably manifested by the common contentment with early personal and agential notions of the divine and reliance on the religious experiences of family or tribe – because of this lack, I say, we have got quite used to specific religious TGB commitments. They represent the norm. But acquaintance with some neglected facts about human religious life can suffice to inject a different attitude into our thinking. The religious commitments we see all around us are, after all, associated with traditions only a few thousand years old. These traditions may seem ancient, but when we shift from the micro level of particular human doings to the macro level of evolution, noting, for example, that our planet will remain hospitable to life for another billion years, our perspective will change. The human species is about 300,000 years old, and at that seemingly advanced age is in fact still quite youthful in evolutionary terms, having traversed less than a third of the time that is, on average, allotted to mammal species on our planet. Some species might of course be prodigies, advancing swiftly through many stages of development, but it would be hard to defend this assessment for the human species – certainly where religion is concerned. Our religious traditions, like some other cultural artefacts of early Homo sapiens, display a profuse variety of developmental shortcomings: moral, psychological, social, and – in part because of this immaturity of shortcoming – intellectual, too.Footnote ² Consider only how dogmatism and a lack of empathy have governed so much religious behaviour; the jealous anger of so many human gods, including the god of the Christian Old Testament; the rampant sexism; and the sparse investigation of ‘other’ people's religious ideas. Though it would be rash to infer that nothing can be learned on religious topics in such circumstances, it would be perfectly reasonable to question whether everything of greatest importance to someone who has made the general TGB commitment has already been ascertained and has turned out to be religious in nature.Footnote ³

So, yes, specific religious life commitments are the norm. But in these circumstances of evolutionary infancy and cultural immaturity, starting from the general TGB commitment and maybe even staying with it for some considerable time while resisting the norm may seem to make a good deal of sense.

Conditionally intended religious commitment

A bit of reflection on the matters I've just raised might well convince someone that religious commitment is simply not on the cards, rationally speaking, for limited human beings at our species's present stage of development. Or perhaps it might lead them to favour and emphasize a non-doxastic religious commitment, which substitutes something like accepting or assuming or imagining for believing, over a doxastic one, which must somehow find justification for religious belief. Both approaches, however, are likely to make a questionable assumption: that to respond positively to religion in a manner compatible with religious commitment, one religious stance or another must consciously and explicitly be selected to the exclusion of others. I will now show how this assumption can be questioned, and a new possibility friendly to religion made to emerge, by applying the notion of a conditional intention and noticing how, in our circumstances, the general TGB commitment favours its application to a range of religious views rather than to any one.

Let's start with the second of these two points. A TGB commitment, even when it is general, will still involve a very great interest in a more detailed grasp of the TGB facts. One wants to be aligned with the true, the good, and the beautiful as closely and intimately as possible. So if there is some way for someone who has made the basic TGB commitment to be aligned with the detailed TGB facts, or to make it more likely that she will be thus aligned, she will naturally and rightly be drawn to it. Of course at our stage of development, we realize that the details may be virtually anywhere. A TGB commitment should make us interested in all the more fine-grained and detailed conceptions of the true, the good, and the beautiful that humans have uncovered (with the exception of those – like the picture of gambolling Greek gods atop Mount Olympus – that are rightly judged obviously false on the basis of investigations already undertaken; that it would, as one might say, be untrue to truth not to ignore). Moreover, our fundamental commitment should prompt us to strain to develop as many new TGB conceptions as we can. For in any of these, the details of TGB facts may be hiding. Therefore we should qualify the statement from before: if there is some way for someone who has the basic TGB commitment to make her alignment with the detailed TGB facts more likely while remaining sensitive to our place in time and our immaturity, she will naturally and rightly be drawn to it.

And thus – as I will now show – she will naturally and rightly be drawn to a form of religious commitment that presupposes the formation of a conditional intention. A conditional intention, as I shall understand the notion, is an intention to bring about a certain result R, provided that some condition C is satisfied. On my construal, we should not think of a conditional intention as an intention to make a conditional true (the statement of the intention would then be ‘I intend to make it the case that “If C then R” ’), nor is it conditional in the sense that formation of the intention must await the satisfaction of some condition (‘If C, then I will unconditionally intend R’).

An analogy is to conditional bets. They are not bets on conditionals. Nor are they predictions that if some condition holds one will bet on some statement. They are bets that are called off – no-one wins or loses – if some condition fails to obtain and are not called off otherwise. Similarly, conditional intentions, as understood here, are moot if the relevant condition fails to hold, that is to say they can no longer be carried out, but they behave like normal unconditional intentions otherwise.Footnote ⁴ And so, back in the good old days of nuclear stand-off between America and the Soviet Union, each side conditionally intended to blow up the other – that is, intended to rain down nuclear bombs on the other provided the other became sufficiently provocative, as it would by launching a first strike. The Soviet Union never did become thus provocative, so the conditional intention formed by the Americans ended up moot. If the Soviet Union had launched a first strike and the American intention had held up, action to carry it out would have followed just as it would have had the thought of bombing the Soviet Union entered the head of some intemperate American President and caused the formation in that head of an unconditional intention to do so.

Now in many, perhaps most, cases of conditional intending, the condition is the occurrence of an event at some time in the future, which we expect to come to know about if it happens. Indeed, a pertinent example is afforded by a conditional intention that quite uncontroversially comes precisely with the general TGB commitment: the intention to conform one's life to a specific religious detailing of TGB (call it TGBR), provided TGBR is discovered to be true in the future. But notice how this still keeps one at a certain distance from TGBR. Because the discovery in question must occur in the future, if it occurs at all, this intention cannot be construed as one that might yield its result in the present. The sort of intention I aim to introduce and explicate for religious purposes can be thus construed. So we need something other than a future event. What we need is, I suggest, provided by a state of affairs that obtains in the present, if it obtains at all. The bare truth of TGBR would be such a state of affairs. So we are getting closer to the sort of intention I have in mind if we think of intending to bring about some result provided that TGBR is true.

Notice now that TGBR could be true though I never discover that it is, and so if the sort of conditional intention here imagined is to be accepted as possible, we have to countenance the notion of an intention producing the intended result even when I do not know that it has done so. How are we to make sense of such a thing?

Analogies will help – and they will also bring us closer still to the sort of conditionally intended religious commitment I have in mind. So imagine a child who comes to his recumbent father asking for money to take to the mall. The father, without rising or opening his eyes, says: ‘If there's anything left in my wallet, you can have it’. Here we have the expression of a conditional intention. ‘I intend that you shall be allowed to take what's in my wallet, on the condition that there is anything in it’. Now should there be no money in the wallet, nothing is allowed. But suppose there is money in the wallet, which the child then takes to the mall. If his brother asks him where he got it, wouldn't he be correct to say: ‘Dad let me have it’? And wouldn't this statement be correct though Dad immediately forgot the whole incident, and never thought of it again – even when collecting his wallet the next morning to go to work?

Another analogy. A man close to death and making up his will is initially inclined just to leave all his money to the Mennonite Central Committee. Then he nostalgically remembers four romantic relationships with women who have long since passed out of his life. He realizes that, for each relationship, there is at least some small chance that it has, unbeknownst to him, produced a child who rightfully should inherit. So he inserts in his will the following conditional statement: ‘I intend that any would-be inheritor who comes forward in the first month after my passing shall be given one quarter of my money, provided he or she is proven to be my child’. Now suppose the man dies, and a young woman comes forward with a proven claim to be his child, thus inheriting one quarter of his money. If she is subsequently asked ‘From whom did you get that money?’, wouldn't she be correct to say ‘My father gave it to me’ – and this even though her father never knew or even believed that he had a child?

Another analogy. You live in a time of war and are working on experimental technology that you hope will help in a certain way W to drive out foreign invaders who are occupying your country. You realize that much other secret work with a similar aim could be going on, and that some of it might be highly sophisticated, so through private channels you communicate this message: ‘I intend that anyone doing resistance work shall be allowed to make use of my efforts and their results, provided that my efforts are found to complement their own’. On balance you don't believe there is anyone like that and you continue your lonely pursuit of W. But now suppose there is another secret and sophisticated resistance effort. Those involved with it find that although their way of resisting, W*, and W don't quite line up, your work, which they now secretly examine, fills a conspicuous and stubborn gap in their own efforts, and so they are able to make use of it to pursue W* successfully. You never come to know that this has happened, dying before the war ends. But after the war, aren't these other resisters right to say that you gave them this critical help and to support the government's desire to award you a posthumous Medal of Honour? (It's true that these other resisters could have got access to your work anyway, just by stealing it, say, but then you wouldn't have given it to them. Now you have.)

What we see in these analogous cases is that when the condition belonging to a conditional intention is the concurrent obtaining of a state of affairs, all that's needed for the intention to be fulfilled is for it to be true that the state of affairs obtains. The person whose conditional intention it is need not know or even believe that this is true. She or he may indeed believe it to be false! Call the sort of result R that comes with a fulfilled conditional intention like this a truth-triggered result.

Let's now take this notion of a conditional intention that, if fulfilled, yields a truth-triggered result and see if we can apply it religiously, remembering that we are doing so against the backdrop of a general TGB commitment maintained in circumstances of a recognized deep religious immaturity. Suppose that in these circumstances you are thinking about how some religious view you don't actually believe could still right now be correct. There is at least some small chance that it is. If it were correct, that would have special implications for how the TGB facts can most deeply be understood and/or most fully embodied by you, and so given that you're TGB-committed, you would desire if it were correct to be led into the corresponding pathways of thought and behaviour – explicitly and knowingly if possible but at least implicitly otherwise. (Here's how it might happen implicitly: say there's an important difference between treating suffering as arising from ignorance and treating it as resulting from moral failings, and that one of these ways of treating it is correct; without ever seeing how, you might – by the Powers that be – find yourself guided in one direction or the other and so become properly aligned with the truth of the matter.)

It's now possible to respond to such a TGB-inspired desire as I just mentioned, the desire to be led into any correct and TGB-relevant religious pathway either explicitly or implicitly, by forming the following conditional intention: ‘Provided some religious view is right now correct and I could under its auspices be led in more refined TGB directions, I intend that the Powers that be shall be permitted to exercise a corresponding control over my life’. Though a personal divine would be able to control my life anyway, such ‘permission’ affords a new reason for it to guide me into certain pathways – or, if the Powers aren't personal – promotes such guidance in a new way.Footnote ⁵ If what is here conditionally intended were sincerely intended – and we have seen how the more fundamental TGB commitment could make it so – and if also it came to be, one would be religiously committed, given over to Divine Powers, so we can think of the result R in this case as a religious commitment. (One must be careful here to distinguish the practical commitment to do or bring about something that any intention embodies and the religious commitment that in this case is the ‘something’ in question. The former one evinces in any event; the latter only if the condition C specified in the practical commitment – it being the case that some religious view is right now correct and that I could under its auspices be led in more refined TGB directions – is realized.)

The notion of ‘Powers that be’ should be taken very broadly here, to allow for quite unknown ways in which transcendent agency or something transcendent in some way analogous to agency or at any rate with relevant causal powers might operate. As just suggested, one might intend the religious commitment while in memory and imagination surveying all the religious possibilities, known and unknown, taking them disjunctively, or one might do that and also form the intention for each of an assortment of known possibilities, reasoning that one can show greater respect for possible truths – and thus be more meticulous in a TGB-recommended way – by taking them individually where able to do so. In the latter case, recalling TGBR, we'd have something like the following conditional intention: ‘Provided TGBR is true and this truth makes specific TGBR pathways objectively right and I can be led into them, I intend that such guidance shall be permitted’.

What we see here is similar to what Christians sometimes talk about in terms of ‘giving one's will over to God’. And of course it might be that it is God one has in mind. You might intend that your life be a gift to God on the condition that there is a God. But one might want to accommodate many other known religious possibilities too, in each case intending to give over one's will and one's life on the condition that the TGB facts can thus more deeply and richly be embodied in one's person.

Be sure to notice that you or anyone can conditionally intend such a religious commitment, and such a commitment can also be realized in your life, even if you do not believe and indeed even while disbelieving that the religious possibility in question corresponds to reality. Suppose you disbelieve. Let's take the two possible situations here in turn, starting with the one in which your disbelief is correct. In that case there is no religious truth, and there are no associated TGB-relevant mental and physical movements that you have not made but could make under its auspices. In that case it would not be right to call you religiously committed, even conditionally. Instead, your conditional intention is moot. It cannot be satisfied. But in intending to give yourself over to religious realities on the condition that they are there and could become productive in your life, you do conditionally intend to be religiously committed. The motive with which you do so might seem unusual and suspect, but a bit of reflection on human immaturity and the TGB commitment should suffice to dispel this impression.

And now what if instead we have the very different situation in which your disbelief is mistaken and the religious possibility you have in view when you form the conditional intention does correspond to reality and can in some way be brought into your life productively? Well, then the truth of these things triggers a religious commitment for you, activating a new life commitment even when it is in the nature of the case that you may never explicitly realize that this has happened. What we see here allows, again, for a diversity of possible ‘Powers that be’ and is an option designed for a situation of human immaturity and uncertainty in which, nevertheless, one finds oneself gripped by TGB. It involves a conditionally intended religious commitment, to which one is attracted by an unconditional TGB commitment.

Interestingly, what we see here – as in part I've already suggested – is an option favourable to religion that is universally accessible, that anyone at all might select. And we might go further, saying that everyone should form a conditional practical commitment of this sort, realizing that it could trigger a religious commitment. Think about it. Why wouldn't any person of good will be ready to do so? If we haven't done so, it's simply because it hasn't been recognized as an option before. By doing so, we increase the chances of being specifically committed to TGB in the right way, and this must surely look good from the perspective of the TGB commitment. Of course, if the response of the religious Powers that be, supposing there are any, does not enable explicit knowledge of TGB details, the result may appear somewhat limited even where a religious commitment is triggered or activated, but if this inspires dissatisfaction then we are again forgetting our evolutionary circumstances and, in particular, the possible absence or undeveloped condition of certain religious capacities. When we remember, we will allow that what we have here is a response to religion quite appropriate for creatures such as we are.

I have said that the sort of conditional intention that might yield a truth-triggered religious commitment is available to anyone. Are we to suppose that even conventionally religious people – Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and so on – can form such an intention? Yes, indeed. The view applies also to people of conventional religious faith who, much like conventional nonbelievers, may be led by reflection on our limitations and our evolutionary circumstances at least to be open to the thought of lacking the right detailed picture of truth, goodness, and beauty – in the present case, by having the wrong one. (Open how? It would suffice to make our conditional intention attractive were one less than absolutely certain about the completeness or correctness of one's TGB beliefs.) A Christian, for example, could follow that view while remaining a conventionally committed Christian believer – could follow it, that is, in relation to other religious possibilities. You could have the intention that your life be a gift to God B on the condition that God B is real while believing that God A exists and being in a conventional way committed to God A. Indeed, you could conditionally give yourself to many gods. At this level there is no need to choose.Footnote ⁶

But could a conventionally religious person really continue to be committed in the usual way while also thinking positively about another commitment? How could their commitment be wholehearted in that case? Wouldn't it be rather like the ‘commitment’ of someone who is married but willing to leave his partner should someone seemingly better come along?Footnote ⁷ The analogy is inapt. Notice how a marriage commitment includes committing oneself to never enter a relationship with someone else under such circumstances. A conventional religious commitment does not analogously include committing oneself to never become aligned with other religious ideas should those one presently believes to be true in fact be false. A better analogy would work with a somewhat different scenario: a scenario in which the person one is living with is an imposter – not at all the individual to whom one believed oneself to be married. Could one's marriage commitment be wholehearted even if one agreed that in such circumstances – which of course one does not believe oneself to be in – one would wish to live with someone else? It seems so. And similarly a religious commitment can be wholehearted even if one agrees that should the religious propositions one firmly believes to be true in fact be false, one would wish to become aligned with other religious propositions that are true.

The religious commitment I have been talking about may at first sight seem odd, since it is triggered or activated only if there's a religious truth of one sort or another, the intention that then would produce it being moot otherwise. If there are no religious truths then no-one ever has a religious commitment in this sense. But it's not as though you have no commitment at all otherwise; you still have at least the broader TGB commitment which produced the conditional intention in question, the former being itself quite unconditional and absolute. For those who have no conventional religious commitment – and no unconventional religious commitment of a different sort – things revert back to the TGB commitment alone if there's no religious truth. And that, as we have seen, is not at all a bad place to be.

Other problems may be suggested. It may seem that I have made things too easy for nonbelievers: that what we have is a recipe for laziness when it comes to religion. But there are a couple of problems with that idea. First, it fails to notice that the TGB commitment may independently require continuing involvement in strenuous religious investigation, among other things, and will involve for one who has conditionally intended a religious commitment the cultivation of a love of the truth sufficient to allow the recognition of any new religious influence grounded in the truth. Second, and quite importantly, the idea that what we have here is a recipe for laziness assumes that there are no religious truths of the relevant kind! If, say, you're a Christian you should think that the life of the nonbeliever who forms a conditional intention of the relevant kind in relation to Christianity is about to get a lot more interesting – a lot more religiously involved and perhaps demanding – as God responds to the TGB-motivated nonbeliever, even if for God's own good reasons this fact is never explicitly divulged to her.

But this may only seem to generate a further problem. The nonbeliever just described, who isn't explicitly aware of what's going on, may have another and explicit orientation that is contrary to the Christian commitment – perhaps she's a metaphysical naturalist. Or a Muslim, say, would, if what I've been arguing is right, have to be able to retain her explicit Islamic commitment while also having a Christian commitment triggered. Are we to suppose that one can be a metaphysical naturalist and a Christian at the same time, or a committed Muslim and a Christian at the same time?

A quick answer is that the activated Christian commitment is highly unconventional in nature, and so there can be compatibility with other, more conventional kinds of commitment. But to take this issue seriously, we should dig a bit deeper. Our metaphysical naturalist, let us suppose, believes metaphysical naturalism to be true, but notice that despite her activated Christian commitment she does not believe any Christian metaphysical proposition to be true; indeed, we might expect that, quite consistently with her naturalism, she will believe all such propositions to be false. As we've seen, having her conditional Christian commitment triggered is consistent with this. So there's no conflict at the level of belief. Mutatis mutandis, the same thing holds for our Islamic believer. What about non-intellectual behaviour, and the desires and emotions associated therewith? Here there may be areas of overlap anyway between what the two stances call for, and the Christian God could easily guide our naturalist or Muslim into these overlapping regions. And important new desires and emotions, as well as conjunctions of desires, emotions, and beliefs, will come with conditional religious commitments for any Muslim or naturalist – for example, the desire that if one's personal metaphysical beliefs are mistaken, one be moved, practically speaking, in the direction of what the truth requires. The unnoticed effects of the triggered Christian commitment would be quite in line with such a desire. And although such effects might sometimes seem at odds with the contrary metaphysical belief taken all by itself, they would be quite in line with the conjunction of that belief and the mentioned desire.

Another problem may be suggested that applies to atheists who wish to accept the argument of this article – at least to any atheists who also accept the hiddenness argument. Specifically, it may seem that the argument of the article, as thus far developed, is committed to a claim at odds with a claim of the hiddenness argument. For the hiddenness argument says or implies that if God exists everyone open to God believes in God,Footnote ⁸ and here I may seem to have suggested that if God exists we can be open to God without believing in God (since the commitment realized might remain implicit instead of becoming explicit).

But there is no real problem here. Notice that we get the apparent inconsistency only by assuming that the antecedent of each conditional – the one from the hiddenness argument and the one from my article – is the same, namely ‘God exists’. And that assumption is false. Going along with the argument of this article, we will not say that if God exists we can be open to God without believing in God but rather that if we have formed the conditional intention involving God and God exists, this is the case. ‘We’ in the more complex antecedent of this conditional refers to actual human beings who are open to God but do not believe in God, and there would be no such beings in a scenario including God's existence if the hiddenness argument were correct. So someone who affirms this conditional and is a supporter of the hiddenness argument will notice that she is thinking about a state of affairs in which the hiddenness argument is unsound and God exists. Open to being mistaken about the hiddenness argument, she is imagining how things might be if that were so. And, of course, if that were so there would be nothing preventing God from remaining hidden! So there is no reason for her to deny that, in such a scenario, a nonbelieving religious commitment of the sort we have been entertaining might be realized.

A final problem may seem to come with the very word ‘conditional’, which will strike some ears jarringly. But here a quick answer is possible. Do notice that we're not talking about making a religious commitment conditional on such things as finding one's keys when one prays for this result on losing them, or more generally on being successful or happy in life. The intention to be religiously committed is not made conditional on anything that could fail to obtain while the religious view involved is true. And caring about the truth is of course at the heart of any TGB commitment.

The idea coming into view here, then, is that there's a genuine and important sort of positive response to religion for which you don't need religious knowledge, belief, acceptance, or imaginative faith, for which religious truth alone suffices, together with your conditional intention. Though at another level you may also enter into a religious commitment featuring one or more of these other commodities, you don't have to do so to respond positively to religion (or even to be religiously committed, should truth be on its side), contrary to what's generally assumed when we bring knowledge, belief, acceptance, or imaginative faith into the discussion of religious commitment. It's usually thought that truth isn't necessary for a religious commitment though belief or something like it is. We've just seen how, for the sort of commitment we all should conditionally intend, the very opposite is true.

Putting the view to work

I will draw the article to a close by considering what its results might, if confirmed, contribute to discussions across the philosophy of religion. Some relevant points – for example, about how a positive response to religion, leading to a genuine religious commitment if any religious claim is true, is now universally accessible and justified – have already been made. But there are quite a lot of others. My results, it seems to me, may have consequences for discussions of deathbed decisions, the agnostic's prayer, religious scepticism more generally, Pascal's Wager, the nature of naturalism, and the notion of anonymous Christians. Even a new way of testing religious claims emerges here. Let me very briefly say something about each of these topics in turn.