In his book “The Will to Believe”, William James discusses his point of view on religious matters, and meditates on the situations in which it is normal to believe without sufficient evidence. The author evaluates a number of examples from Christian religious books, and comes to a conclusion that everything that is true is also useful. He also states that religious truths should be trusted without any evidence. I cannot agree with this position by the philosopher because the main book of Christianity, which is the Bible, opposes such point of view, and urges religious people to be cautious and reasonable when they are offered something to believe in.
In “The Will to Believe”, James tells about his exalted purpose of defending Christian faith that is the main objective of this work. He states that religious matters do not need evidences, proofs and facts that support them, and people should believe those facts under any circumstances simply because these facts have a religious nature. However, it is very difficult to agree with such a position because Christian religion in itself is not the only. It consists of thousands of denominations and sects that have very different concepts of their religious way of living and praising God. Besides, these Christian religions have a different vision on the understanding the Bible itself. Moreover, many of such Christian religions support many other scriptures just as the Bible, and believe in their sacred nature. For example, Orthodox Christians also believe in the writings by Holy martyrs such as Jonathan, Epiphany, Nicolas, Macarius, and so on. Mormon Christians believe in the book of Mormon. And the examples such as this one are numerous. The fact that all of these writings should be believed in is a strange idea because all of these writings have a lot of contradictions, and encourage people to believe in very different things, and act accordingly these different things.
The other fact that makes it very difficult to agree with William James and his argument in “The Will to Believe”, is the position described in the Bible itself. Jesus Christ dedicated a lot of time to helping his disciples differentiate between the truth and the false teachings. He said that there will come times when the truth will be hidden from men, and many deceivers will come. He said that among people who call themselves Christians, there will be a lot of misunderstanding, and a lot of people will falsely call themselves holy, and will even pretend as they are “christs” themselves. With regards to such development of the situation, Jesus encouraged his followers to be cautious, and check everything that is told and written. He said that even if people use the quotations from the Bible, it is important to check if they comment them correctly. He mentioned the examples when he was approached by the Devil, and the Devil wanted to deceive him using the quotations from the Bible misinterpreting them. Then, Jesus showed an analogy between the actions of the Devil and the people who will try to deceive honest-hearted Christians in the future. Thus, the Bible’s position is different to what James defends in his book “The Will to Believe”. On this reason, I find it impossible to agree with the conclusions made by James in this book.