Question

Hello Rabbi Michi. I’d be glad to know what you think about the following remarks by the 19th-century psychologist and philosopher William James, from his article “The Will to Believe” (1896):

“Skepticism, then, is not avoidance of choice; it is a choice of a certain kind of risk. Better to risk losing the truth than to risk the chance of error—that is precisely the position of the rejecter of faith. He actively bets just as much as the believer does; he bets on all the other horses except the hypothesis of faith, just as the believer bets on the hypothesis of faith against all the other horses. Whoever preaches to us that skepticism is our duty until ‘sufficient evidence’ for religion is found is like one who tells us, in the face of the faith-hypothesis, that it is wiser and better to yield to our fear that it is wrong than to yield to our hope that it may be true. This is not intellect standing against all the emotions, then; it is only intellect dominated by one emotion alone. And what, then, justifies this emotion’s claim to supreme wisdom? Among the various deceptions, what proof is there that the deception born of hope is worse than the deception born of fear?”