The Last Unanswered Question
MANY MEDIEVAL thinkers found logic useful and edifying, but others found it distressing because its consequences seemed to challenge their faith. And for a time, the greatest of all such logical challenges came from Peter Abelard, who was young, shrewd, frequently arrogant, and deeply threatening to religious conservatives in twelfth-century France.
Abelard applied himself to many philosophical controversies, especially to what philosophers call the problem of universals, but he always styled himself first and foremost a “dialectician,” which was the medieval term for logician.1 And the basic problem for Abelard and his followers was that they were being asked by Roman Catholic authorities to believe in doctrines whether the doctrines seemed reasonable or not.
Abelard’s investigations caused many people to wonder whether reasoning might undermine faith—and whether faith was even rational at all. His efforts led his opponents to argue that logic makes us worse as human beings rather than better. Abelard was committed to finding the true foundations of rational belief, but the further question raised by his approach was whether these foundations, whatever they were, would finally leave any room for God. Many medievals asked, Can logic ever tell us what the proper basis of a reasonable person’s convictions should be? And can logic tell us whether a rational human being, without reasons, might ever believe in something strictly as a matter of faith? More generally, could logic explain to the deeply religious world of the Middle Ages whether a religious person was any more or less reasonable than a nonreligious person? Such questions vexed thinkers of the medieval world, and they have continued to vex thinkers down to the present.
Abelard had been born into the Breton nobility in 1079, but he had renounced his hereditary right as eldest son of a landed knight and had chosen instead to take up what he called the “weapons of dialectic.” Treating logical techniques as if they were tools of combat, Abelard wrote, “Armed with these, I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war.”2
There were as yet no universities in Northern Europe, and so Abelard entered the cathedral school of Notre Dame at Paris, where he proved himself both clever and combative. He challenged his teachers and often embarrassed them by refuting them before other students, and in reaction his principal teacher tried to block his advancement. Nevertheless, Abelard succeeded in attracting so much attention with his questions and assertions that he was soon able to set up a school of his own. (This was not unusual in his day; in Abelard’s time, a popular teacher might found his own school if enough students would follow him.) Abelard established a school at Melun and then moved it to Corbeil near Paris; later, he moved it again to Mont Ste. Geneviève on the left bank of the Seine, the main site of today’s University of Paris. From these posts (as he wrote later), “I could embarrass him [his principal teacher] through more frequent encounters in disputation” (59).
After various rhetorical confrontations, Abelard finally ended up heading the school of Notre Dame himself, and though still quite young for the position, he was eventually regarded as the greatest living teacher in Europe. He became the observed of all observers: handsome, well spoken, intelligent, daring. He adds, “But success always puffs up fools with pride. . . . I began to think myself the only philosopher in the world.”
According to his own account, written years later and in great humility, he decided to seduce a young girl. He had had no earlier sexual experience, but now he fixed his eye on the niece of one of the cathedral’s canons, a young woman named Heloise, then about seventeen years old.
Heloise was highly unusual for a woman of her time: she could read and write, and she had studied Latin classics. Abelard offered to tutor her in exchange for room and board in the home where she and the uncle lived, and the uncle accepted. Abelard writes, “He gave me complete charge over the girl so that I could devote all the leisure time left me by my school to teaching her by day and night, and if I found her idle I was to punish her severely. I was amazed by his simplicity. . . . In handing her over to me to punish as well as to teach, what else was he doing but giving me complete freedom to realize my desires” (67).
Heloise seems to have accepted his advances willingly. Soon, says Abelard, though “our books [were] open before us, more words of love than of reading passed between us.” To disguise the situation from the uncle, they sometimes acted out beatings, and he passed many nights with her. In the words of the scholar and translator Betty Radice, their amorous relations became “uninhibited and ecstatic.” Eventually, however, they were discovered, and Heloise soon realized she was pregnant.
Abelard had her spirited away to his family estate in Brittany, which was then politically independent of France, and the uncle, as might be expected, was enraged. But Abelard then apologized to him abjectly and offered a secret marriage, to which the uncle agreed. The purpose of the marriage was to preserve the honor of Heloise and her family, and the purpose of keeping it secret was apparently to allow Abelard to continue his work. (In Abelard’s day, the leader of a school might indeed marry, but not if he wished to advance in the church hierarchy, which, at the time, dominated education.)
Even so, Heloise argued that marriage would be a mistake; her uncle would publicize the marriage anyway, she predicted, to assuage his wounded pride. As for her own wishes, she said she wanted no marriage bond. According to Abelard, Heloise argued that “only love freely given should keep me for her, not the constriction of a marriage tie” (74). As she later described her view, “The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress” (113). She wanted Abelard’s work to continue, she said, believing it to be important, and she argued that marriage would be an impediment. (Her arguments against marriage seemed to focus not on the possibility that marriage would block his advancement in the church but on the idea that marriage would interfere with his ability to philosophize.)3
Heloise bore a son, whom she named Astrolabe (the word for the Arab device, then new to Europe, for locating one’s longitude, provided that one knows the correct time, and thus one of the great scientific instruments of the age). Yet, just as Heloise had predicted, the uncle eventually made the marriage known anyway, and Abelard’s reaction was swift. He removed Heloise from Paris and had her disguised as a nun at the nearby convent of Argenteuil. His purpose was not to put her away but only to reestablish the fiction that he was unmarried. All the same, his decision proved to be disastrous.
While Heloise remained at the convent, Abelard visited her and made love to her secretly while the real nuns were away celebrating Mass. But when the uncle learned that his niece had been carried away a second time—now to a nunnery—he drew a different conclusion: he supposed that Abelard was simply discarding her by forcing her into a habit. He thought Abelard was making her a nun against her will, and in reaction, the uncle plotted his revenge. He vented his anger to his friends, and the friends then conspired to find Abelard in his rooms in the middle of the night and to castrate him.
With this astounding act of vengeance, Abelard was, for a time, spiritually broken. He withdrew into himself, and he said later that what most troubled him was not the physical injury but the humiliation: “I thought how fast the news of this unheard-of disgrace would spread over the whole world.” Heloise was equally stricken. As for the attackers, those who were caught were themselves blinded and castrated on orders of the king of France.4
After a time, asking himself over and over what he should make of his life, Abelard decided to withdraw from the world by becoming a monk at the Abbey of St. Denis. But he wanted Heloise to withdraw first by becoming a nun. His motive in this request? He never says, but he remarks to her later in describing their marriage, “I desired to keep you whom I loved beyond measure for myself alone.”5 When he demanded that she become a nun, Heloise was only nineteen, and she had known Abelard for about a year and a half. Still, she acceded to his request and took vows that would bind her to a convent for the rest of her life. She later wrote,
I have carried out all your orders so implicitly that when I was powerless to oppose you in anything, I found strength at your command to destroy myself. . . . At your bidding I changed my clothing along with my mind, in order to prove you the sole possessor of my body and my will alike. . . . I believed the more I humbled myself on your account, the more gratitude I should win from you. . . . I have finally denied myself every pleasure in obedience to your will. (113–17)
Heloise wrote these words in a letter to Abelard many years later, a letter once thought to be the forgery of some subsequent poet but now regarded by most scholars as authentic.6 In a further letter, she asks Abelard to consider her situation as prioress, the administrator of a convent of other nuns:
If I truthfully admit to the weakness of my unhappy soul, I can find no penitence whereby to appease God. . . . The pleasures of lovers . . . can scarcely be banished from my thoughts. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not let me sleep. . . . Everything we did and also the times and places are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through it all again with you. Even in sleep I know no respite. Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body, or they break out in an unguarded word. (132–33)
She was particularly troubled by these thoughts, she says, during celebration of the Mass. Referring to his castration, she remarks, “This grace, my dearest, came upon you unsought—a single wound of the body by freeing you from these torments has healed many wounds in your soul. . . . But for me, youth and passion and experience of pleasures which were so delightful intensify the torments of the flesh and longings of desire. . . . Men call me chaste; they do not know the hypocrite I am.”
She wishes she could worship God, she says, but based on her experience, she believes God is cruel. How can she worship God, she asks, if she thinks him unjust? Yet her daily task is to direct the spiritual life of others. As a result, she believes she has been condemned to the life of a hypocrite. Instead, she says, she can only worship Abelard, and yet, for this worship, she can expect no forgiveness, no reward, no salvation.
Heloise wrote the first of these eloquent letters after having heard nothing from Abelard of a personal nature for many years and after having come to the view that he had finally abandoned her. But she had also come across a copy of his memoir, The Story of His Misfortunes (Historia calamitatum), which told the story of his rise to power and of their affair. So she took up her pen. When he received her first letter, Abelard replied and strove to persuade her to relinquish her hopes of romantic love, which could no longer be. He counseled her to give her love to God and to devote herself to faith. More letters followed, and after this, their deep friendship continued. But what effect, in the end, did his letters really have? In particular, did he ever truly persuade her to renounce her bitterness toward life and God and to embrace his faith in the goodness of God?
As it turns out, the historical record leaves this last question unanswered. In the words of the historian étienne Gilson,
Abelard knew how to climb this summit. We may fear that he strove in vain to lift Heloise to the same height. We should like to be able to say that she was won by his eloquence and accepted this high ideal of Christian charity, and that she came finally to love Abelard for God, rather than God for Abelard, or even, as was the case, Abelard against God. [Nevertheless] if she ever submitted, it was in the hidden recesses of her heart, not openly in her letters. Her submission, accordingly, is not a part of recorded history.7
Indeed, looking back on her fate now, and especially on her complaints against God and on her insistence that God should be just, one might almost say Heloise was, in many ways, more of an Abelard than Abelard. She believed in reason and not simply blind faith, and she demanded that a just and merciful god should be logical and fair. Thus at the very bottom of her tragic personal story is the ultimate, vexing question of whether faith and reason can truly coexist. It was exactly this question, back in the early days of Abelard’s career, that first made him famous.
ABELARD’S ATTACK ON FAITH WITHOUT REASON
What Abelard’s students had wanted above all, he tells us, were “human and logical reasons” for the doctrines they were being asked to believe, the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. It was just his response to these demands that first made him notorious. When Abelard writes of his students, he remarks, “They said that words are useless if the intelligence could not follow them, and that nothing could be believed unless it was first understood, and that it was absurd for anyone to preach to others what neither he nor those he taught could grasp with the understanding: the Lord himself had criticized such ‘blind guides to blind men.’”8
After his castration and submission to monastic authority, Abelard says he still continued to work on the problem of faith and reason, and he composed a book, On the Unity and Trinity of God. His enemies, however, summoned a church council against him and forced him to throw a copy of it into a fire. Then he produced an even more daring book, Sic et non (Yes and No), which listed statements from church authorities in parallel columns so that everything in one column seemed to contradict what was said in the other. His purpose was not to show that such contradictions were real, he said, but to offer students material for debate and thus to stimulate their logical skills. The skillful student, he maintained, could resolve these apparent contradictions by drawing the appropriate distinctions—a method practiced to great effect about a century later by Thomas Aquinas.9
On the whole, then, Abelard’s view was that logic could strengthen faith, and he saw himself as advancing religion, not destroying it. All the same, powerful voices within the church thought otherwise, and the most powerful of all was the vigorous and forbidding Bernard of Clairvaux.
Bernard, somewhat younger than Abelard, was an abbot of rising fame and the charismatic leader of a revival throughout Northern Europe of unquestioning belief. Bernard railed against corruption in the church, and in the battle against corruption, he and Abelard were of like mind. But Bernard also condemned “dialectic” as a threat to Christian doctrine. Faith must be based on mystical experience, he argued, and Abelard’s methods, which consisted in considering opposing views in the manner of a Platonic dialogue, could only work mischief; they would encourage doubt. As a result, Sic et non represented, for Bernard, everything he opposed. The conflict between the two men finally came to a head in 1141 at another church council, the Council of Sen.
At the Council of Sen, Abelard and his supporters were vastly outnumbered. Bernard thundered against him, and Abelard was condemned. Many of Abelard’s opinions were declared heretical, his books were burned, and he was ordered to be confined for the rest of his life to another monastery under a regime of perpetual silence. His friend Peter the Venerable, then abbot of Cluny, intervened with the pope and managed to get the vow of silence softened, but Abelard spent the rest of his days in several of Peter’s monastic retreats.
At the close of his life, in his “confession of faith,” which was probably his last personal message to Heloise (Abelard addresses her with the salutation, “Heloise my sister, once dear to me in the world, now dearest to me in Christ”), he says logic has made him “hated by the world.” But he adds, “I do not wish to be a philosopher if it means conflicting with Paul, or to be an Aristotle if it cuts me off from Christ.” Nevertheless, when it comes to logic, he remains steadfast: “I do not fear the barking of Scylla, I laugh at the whirlpool of Charybdis, and have no dread of the Sirens’ deadly songs. The storm may rage but I am unshaken. Though the winds may blow they leave me unmoved, for the rock of my foundation is firm.”10 He died about eighteen months later, and according to his wish, his body was given to Heloise to be buried in her convent, the Paraclete, which Abelard had originally built as an oratory and had then donated for the use of Heloise and the other nuns. At her own death many years later, in 1163 or 1164, she was buried with him.
(In 1817, what were thought to be the remains of Abelard and Heloise were moved to Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. In look and feel, Père Lachaise is a place of immense decay, of faded photographs and broken mementos in the tombs; one sees not only that the mourned have died but that many of the mourners have also passed away. The cemetery contains the graves of many other famous personages, among them Molière, Chopin, Balzac, Collette, Oscar Wilde, and even the rock star Jim Morrison. But at the tomb of Abelard and Heloise, tucked away in a corner of the cemetery, it happens that there are often fresh flowers left by anonymous admirers.)
Abelard, Heloise, and Bernard all wrestled with the question of reason and faith, but who, in the end, was right? Does reason truly undermine faith, or not?
ARE FAITH AND REASON COMPATIBLE?
This conflict between faith and reason wasn’t unique to Christianity; it still continues in most religions today, and it was being played out in medieval Islam at almost exactly the same moment as the struggle between Abelard and Bernard. In medieval Islam, the chief antagonists were al-Ghazali from Persia, who attacked various uses of logic in religion in a work he titled “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” and Averroës from Spain, who defended such uses of logic in a response he called “The Incoherence of the Incoherence.” Indeed, perhaps the most significant difference between the Christian and Islamic versions of this struggle is that al-Ghazali and Averroës wrote from opposite ends of the Mediterranean and lived at slightly different times, with the result that neither could lay hands on the other.11 Still, Bernard and Abelard were actually separated by several questions, not just one.
Consider, first, Bernard’s outlook. Bernard thinks logic is harmful and that it makes us worse as people. It makes its students arrogant and vain. (Even Plato admits that those who study argument sometimes become like feisty puppies, eager to attack all who come near.)12 Certainly, when people do well in logic, they often do think themselves smarter than others, and the result is that they often mistake cleverness for wisdom. In addition, they are especially prone to discount the importance of tradition, and this is no small error.
In real life, we often defer to tradition, but our reasons for doing so needn’t be illogical. We sometimes follow tradition simply to avoid offending other people, and we also follow it because it is sometimes founded on experience that can’t be easily transmitted. Yet, even when a tradition is unreasonable, sometimes we follow it anyway for the sake of social cooperation; where conflicts might arise, some rule is often better than no rule, and sometimes the only force that unites people around any rule in particular is the force of tradition. The student of logic, if hasty, is apt to miss these points.13
Now, with many of these criticisms, we think Abelard might agree. To speak in Abelard’s defense, arrogance and vanity were weaknesses he plainly confessed, and he might easily retort that such weaknesses are simply the characteristic vices of intelligent people. He might also admit that deference to arbitrary traditions is sometimes quite reasonable. Yet the most powerful argument for Abelard (or so we suspect) is different. His most powerful argument is to point out the consequences of the alternative.
What happens if we don’t cultivate reasoning? What happens if we don’t learn to assess arguments? In that case, we leave ourselves intellectually disabled in facing a new world. Of course, some periods require us to think anew more than others, but our own period could hardly require it less, since technology is remaking the world every day. Everyone must engage in at least some reasoning, even Bernard, and so the real question is whether we shall do this cogently or foolishly.
Still, there is yet a further question that separates Abelard and Bernard, and this further question is perhaps the most profound of all. The further question isn’t whether we should cultivate our capacity for reasoning, but what even counts as a reason?
THE FOUNDATIONS OF RATIONAL BELIEF
Bernard also has reasons, but his reasons are the traditions and dogmas of his church. Abelard, on the other hand, seeks further reasons for these dogmas, and so we are once again confronted with a problem we considered in earlier chapters: the problem of foundations. Our foundations are our ultimate reasons, the reasons for which we have no others, but we have never actually figured out what these ultimate reasons are.
In fact, this last question was evident even to Aristotle, especially in the first sentence of his Posterior Analytics, which reads, “All instruction given or received by way of argument comes from preexisting knowledge.” His meaning was that argumentation can give us knowledge only if we assume for the premises something we already know. But how is this preexisting knowledge obtained? If we answer “by argument,” we fall into an infinite regress, since knowledge by way of argument always presupposes knowledge. The same difficulty arises, moreover, even if we talk not about knowledge in the full sense of the word but only about probable belief. A rationally persuasive argument must still begin with premises that are initially more acceptable than the conclusion to be proved. Yet, in that case, what distinguishes the initial premises of a reasonable person from the initial premises of a fanatic? Or how does a chain of rationally persuasive inferences get started?
It is just this conundrum that exercised not only Abelard and Bernard but many famous philosophers writing in the centuries that followed, especially in the wake of the wars of religion. Many of the most celebrated thinkers in the field of epistemology (the theory of knowledge) have asked this question: what makes an initial premise rational from the start? The question was posed by Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, Hume, and Immanuel Kant (among many others). And it is safe to say there are still large areas of disagreement over exactly how to answer it. Nevertheless, the key point for the student of logic (and the point we stress) is that nothing in logic truly supplies an answer. Quite the contrary, logic only tells us how to draw reasonable inferences from a premise. This is different from determining what makes a premise reasonable from the beginning. At most, then, logic lays out necessary conditions for being a reasonable person, but not sufficient ones. Logic can tells us what it means to construct a rational argument once we find the right starting points, but it is strictly silent as to what defines these starting points in the first place.
To friends of logic, this last result is apt to be disappointing. We often expect more from logic; we expect it to define rationality completely. We expect it to tell us not only how to draw reasonable inferences from our starting points but how to find the starting points too. Nevertheless, there is a further consolation to be drawn here, and if we can draw it, some of this disappointment may go away.
The consolation is this: just as a person can be quite logical without expounding a general theory of logic, likewise, many people can be quite reasonable without expounding a general theory of rationality. Even if many epistemologists do disagree among themselves about what makes a starting point reasonable in the first place (and about how to define rationality in general), this by no means makes it difficult for us to distinguish many particular cases of reasonable belief and of fanaticism. Nor does it prevent us from giving good reasons for these judgments, reasons particular to the case.
To illustrate, suppose a man now says he knows his neighbor to be a malevolent witch merely “on faith” (which is not too distant from some of the more fanatical assertions that one would have heard in the sixteenth century). In that case, we don’t really need a general theory of rationality to determine whether his assertion is reasonable. Instead, we can settle the question by analogy, meaning by comparison to similar cases. We don’t normally know a person to be a burglar merely on faith, a taxpayer on faith, a murderer on faith, or a registered Democrat or Republican on faith. A great many other beliefs about particular persons, if supported by nothing but faith, would be obviously irrational and indeed fanatical. In that case, however, this new particular belief about witches, also supported by nothing but faith, is probably fanatical too. This argument is strictly inductive and analogical, from like cases, but we wouldn’t need to settle the question by invoking a general theory of epistemology.
(For example, we wouldn’t need to decide such difficult matters as whether all human knowledge derives from physical sensation alone, as Hobbes asserted, or whether some of it, especially in mathematics and logic, might also derive from other sources, as Kant asserted, or whether morality and politics might also contain objectively knowable truths independent of the physical world, as many moral philosophers from Plato onward have asserted. Such questions are, of course, philosophically interesting, but trying to answer them is quite unnecessary in determining whether a particular assertion about witches is rational. Instead, all we need do is notice that many other such claims would be obviously irrational, and so we can argue from particular cases directly. More broadly, the difficulty with invoking one of these grand epistemological theories is that we may then find ourselves no less unsure as to whether the theory in question is really correct.)
But what can this observation tell us about the basic issue that separated Abelard and Bernard, the problem of religious faith? Most important, does it tell us whether a rational person might believe in something strictly as a matter of faith, without reasons? And can it tell us whether religious people are any more or less rational than non-religious people?
RATIONALITY AFTER THE WARS OF RELIGION
Abelard believed that religious assertions were propositions that could be reasoned about, and yet, at the same time, he seems to have denied that reason alone could establish all things a reasonable person should believe. He criticized those who expected reason to serve as the sole foundation of their beliefs.14 In Abelard’s world, the usual assumption was that faith was a virtue, and many medieval writers had long assumed that to believe a thing merely on faith, without any argument or evidence, was by no means an intellectual failing, provided the belief fell into a fairly narrow class of assertions. Abelard accepted this outlook even though he thought these same beliefs could also be objects of analysis.
Today this view might still be defended by arguing that there is nothing obviously disordered in a mind that believes on faith that the universe is somehow governed by an intelligent god, that life is basically good, that life isn’t merely a dream, or that all events do indeed have causes. Of course, many modern writers now assert that religious belief is irrational, and others argue that it is rational; nevertheless, few psychiatrists would take the question “Do you believe in a god?” as a valid diagnostic tool for predicting serious mental disorders. All the same, our world is different from Abelard’s, and today’s approach to faith is also different.
The wars of religion provoked a historical reaction to the medieval attitude. After an age of fanatical terror, many philosophers came to think that believing a thing merely on faith without some good reason for it is always irrational—unless the thing in question happens to be self-evident. It is never rational, according to this later view, to believe merely on faith, and this outlook was already widespread by Descartes’s time. (Except in ironical passages, Descartes seems to have accepted the new outlook completely; for Descartes, faith without reasons is, apparently, always irrational.15 As a purely verbal matter, of course, one might argue that the very meaning of the word “irrational” entails this outlook, if by “irrational” we mean “not a consequence of reasoning,” but a better term for this last meaning would be “nonrational.” The real issue here isn’t whether some controversial beliefs are embraced without argument or evidence—surely they are—but whether embracing them in this manner is always an intellectual defect.)
Our view, for better or worse, is that the correct answer to this question is actually the Socratic one—that what we really know about faith and reason in general is that we don’t know. We can describe what is often rational or usually rational, and we can give many good reasons for thinking that particular claims based on nothing but faith are irrational from the start. But to state a universal definition of what all rational starting points have in common (or all rational beliefs) is actually quite hard. In fact, what the study of modern epistemology shows is that even the experts sometimes differ over what counts as a rational premise, especially in metaphysics, abstract moral theory, and logic and mathematics.16
If the Socratic answer is indeed the right one (and we admit that perhaps it isn’t), then the problem of faith and reason is still partly as it was in Abelard’s day: difficult to decide. It is hard to know, as it was then, if faith without reasons is necessarily irrational. The foundations of rational belief are often obvious in particular cases, yet, in other respects, they are sometimes deeply mysterious.
How, then, can we tell whether any particular premise is rational or not? Checking the rationality of one’s premises is apparently like checking one’s arithmetic. One could carry on the process forever, checking and rechecking to ensure one had not made a mistake. One could demand not only good reasons for one’s beliefs but entirely new reasons, good reasons, for thinking that the initial reasons were good. And so on. We often say that what counts as reasonable depends on the available evidence, and yet we sometimes find that new evidence shows our initial evidence to have been erroneous. What we had first supposed as obvious or beyond reasonable doubt turns out, on reflection, to have been mistaken. As a result, the decision of how far to carry on one’s checking and rechecking seems to be a tradeoff, one between efficiency and certainty. A changing world often requires that we reconsider, and yet the necessity of action still demands that we be willing to take at least some things for granted.
The medievals had a peculiar way of representing this tradeoff, and perhaps their approach is instructive even now. They expressed the problem of doubt and certainty (and checking and rechecking) by contrasting the rational powers of human beings with the rational powers of God.
According to medieval philosophers, though God knows all things, God has no need to reason. Instead, reasoning (ratio) is something that is useful only to beings who are partly ignorant. These philosophers believed God knows all things immediately and directly, a power they called intelligentia, and as a result, they maintained that God has no need to infer one truth from another. Instead, God sees all truths independently.17 Of course, God could draw inferences if God chose to, but God is under no necessity of doing so, and as a result, there is no sense in which some of God’s beliefs depend for their justification on other beliefs. Instead, each of God’s beliefs stands on its own. God needs no foundations, so to speak, to serve as cornerstones for a further edifice of inferences. Instead, God’s beliefs are like an immense field of freestanding pilings, each sunk in bedrock. God needs no logic.
Human beings, however, are not gods. Not all human beliefs are reasonably arrived at intuitively. In consequence, we partly ignorant beings must build structures, and logic is the discipline that allows us to determine whether the structures are sound. Without this discipline, the structures become unreliable, and we may even start behaving like fools. Nevertheless, the upper elements of our structures depend for their justification on the lower. We can often reinforce these lower elements with further experience or analysis, but many things continue to elude us, and on other occasions, we discover new information that calls our initial premises into doubt.
Despite these difficulties, we are placed in a world of change and chance, of storm and strife, and of right and wrong, and we still need to make our choices and do more than merely stand paralyzed. Like the ancient Athenians, we often face fundamental questions of power and justice, and like the Athenians again, we often wrestle with sophistry and illusion. Like the inhabitants of sixteenth-century France, we sometimes encounter fanatical enthusiasms, and like the architects of seventeenth-century science, we must absorb new discoveries made possible by empirical reasoning and experiment. On some occasions, we face all the frauds and swindles listed by Jeremy Bentham. And whether we like it or not, we are also being carried forward with each passing minute into a new, mechanized world, where logical systems and modern computers can have vast, unforeseen consequences.
On our success or failure in navigating all this varying and difficult terrain really depends the whole future. As citizens, we each have a station, and our station has its duties. The trick, then, apparently, is to remain vigilant—vigilant in assessing the ground we stand on.