Encyclopedia of Philosophy: John Henry Newman

« intolerance of contrary sugges¬tions.

If we are certain, we spontaneously reject objections as idle phantoms, however much they may be insisted on by a pertinacious opponent, or present themselves through an obsessiveimagination.I certainly should be very intolerant of such a notion as that I shall one day be Emperor of the French; I shouldthink it too absurd even to be ridiculous, and that I must be mad before I could entertain it.

And did a man try topersuade me that treachery, cruelty, or ingratitude was as praiseworthy as honesty and temperance, and that aman who lived the life of a knave and died the death of a brute had nothing to fear from future retribution, I shouldthink there was no call on me to listen to his arguments, except with the hope of converting him, though he calledme a bigot and a coward for refusing to enter into his speculations.To be sure, we can sometimes be certain of something and then later find out that we were wrong.

This does notmean that we should give up all certainty, any more than the fact that we are sometimes told the wrong timemeans that we should dispense with clocks.How does Newman apply all this to the evidences of religion? The strongest evidence for the truth of the Christianreligion, he believes, is to be found in the history of Judaism and Christianity; but this evidence only carries weightto those who are already prepared to receive it.

To be ready to accept it, one must already believe in the existenceof God, the possibility of revelation, and the certainty of a future judgement.

The persuasiveness of any proof,Newman says, depends on what the person to whom it is presented regards as antecedently probable.Two objections may be made to this.

The first is that antecedent probabilities may be equally available for what istrue and what merely pretends to be true, for a counterfeit revelation as well as a genuine one.

They supply nointelligible rule to determine what is to be believed and what not. If a claim of miracles is to be acknowledged because it happens to be advanced, why not for the miracles of Indiaas well as for those of Palestine? If the abstract probability of a Revelation be the measure of genuineness in agiven case, why not in the case of Mahomet as well as of the Apostles? Newman, who is never more eloquent than when developing criticisms of his own position, nowhere succeeds inproviding a satisfactory answer to this objection.Secondly, we may ask why one should have in the first place those beliefs which Newman regards as necessary forthe acceptance of the Christian revelation.

What are the reasons for believing at all in God and in a futurejudgement? Traditional arguments offer to prove the existence of God from the nature of the physical world; butNewman himself has no great confidence in them.It is indeed a great question whether Atheism is not as philosophically consistentwith the phenomena of the physical world, taken by themselves, as the doctrine of a creative and governing Power.But, however this be, the practical safeguard against Atheism in the case of scientific inquirers is the inward needand desire, the inward experience of that Power, existing in the mind before and independently of their examinationof His material world.The inward experience of the divine power, to which Newman here appeals, is to be found in the voice ofconscience.

As we conclude to the existence of an external world from the multitude of our instinctive perceptions,he says, so from the intimations of conscience, which appear as echoes of an external admonition, we form thenotion of a Supreme Judge.

Conscience, considered as a moral sense, involves intellectual judgement; butconscience is always emotional, therefore it involves recognition of a living object.

Our affections cannot be stirredby inanimate things, they are correlative with persons.If, on doing wrong, we feel the same tearful, broken hearted sorrow which over¬whelms us on hurting a mother; ifon doing right, we enjoy the same sunny serenity of mind, the same soothing, satisfactory delight which follows onour receiving praise from a father, we certainly have within us the image of some person, to whom our love andveneration look, in whose smile we find our happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings,in whose anger we are troubled and waste away.

These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause anintelligent being.It is not the mere existence of conscience which Newman regards as establishing the existence of God: intellectualjudgements of right and wrong can be explained – as they are by many Christian philosophers as well as byUtilitarians – as con¬clusions arrived at by reason.

It is the emotional colouring of conscience which Newman,implausibly, compares to our sense-experience of the external world.

The feelings which he engagingly describesmay indeed be appropriate only if there is a Father in heaven; but they cannot guarantee their ownappropriateness.

If the existence of God is intended simply as a hypothesis to explain the nature of suchsentiments, then other hypotheses must also be taken into consideration.

One such is that of Sigmund Freud, towhose philosophy we next turn.. »