One morning, in the early days of the pandemic, I happened to be listening to a talk online by a Theravada Buddhist monk from London named Ajahn Brahm. As a young man, he had earned a scholarship to study theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, walking in the same corridors as the then unknown Steven Hawking had just years before. He was shocked, however, by the dogmas he had found in the scientific community regarding the interpretation of science, and how their worldview both led to exciting new research yet also limited what they saw.
To illustrate this point, he told the story of a scientist and a nun. Both had been introduced to a new, groundbreaking study in the field of neuroscience that showed the exact regions of the brain that were active during prayer, and how they differ from other similar activities like meditation. The scientist saw this data and said, “Aha! This shows that the brain is responsible for creating all the sensations that prayer causes, that it is just religious nonsense that can be simplified into a material response as always.” The nun, looking at the exact same study, was also delighted and commented, “How remarkable and wonderful is it that God loves us so much that he gave us the faculty to communicate with him built into our body and soul?”
This story has stayed with me – not because it highlights the arrogance of the scientist or the blind faith of the nun, but because it reveals the disconnection between these two ways of understanding and exploring God. Rather than interweaving their perspectives to open new lines of inquiry, they remained isolated. One side seeks to explain God solely through logic and scientific frameworks. The other roots her understanding in personal experience, interpreting the world as a site of divine encounter. It is a question of two sides coming to a crossroads of knowledge, where the intellect has been pushed to its very boundary and something else now remains: belief. At one point we must wrestle with the evidence given and make a decision within our uncertainty. Philosopher and psychologist William James himself noted this problem, acknowledging that perhaps “[o]bjective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?”1placeholder
This article thus will examine how both the nun and the scientist might teach us something about wrestling with our own beliefs, looking at the effects that belief can make on the world and how it effects our own experiences as well as our inquiries about the world and truth. I will focus on Christian examples principally, only to be consistent with the worldview that our nun might inhabit, though belief can be applicable not only to other religious communities, but also the scientist himself, and even our beliefs in mundane everyday occurrences that we take for granted.
The Failure of Rational Proofs Alone
For centuries, philosophers have attempted to prove God’s existence through rational and logical argument. Anselm’s ontological argument posited that the very idea of a perfect being necessitates God’s existence. Thomas Aquinas offered cosmological and teleological proofs, pointing to the need for a first cause and the intricate order of the universe. More recently, analytic philosophers have revived and refined these arguments, translating them into symbolic logic and probabilistic reasoning. On the other side, there is the scientific world, whose generally atheistic demeanor in fact attempts to use the exact same logic and rationality to argue for a completely different conclusion. Of course, this divide is not as clear-cut as I am presenting it here, but in the end both camps wield rational knowledge to arrive at completely different beliefs.
But these arguments, as intricate as they are, tend to be disconnected from the lived realities of religious life. They aim to approach God through the clarity of rational proof, yet in doing so, they risk flattening the complex, affective, and often ambiguous ways that people actually experience the divine. James saw these limitations clearly. In The Will to Believe, he argued that belief does not arise from logic alone, but from temperament, experience, and need. Especially in matters that cannot be settled by reason, he defended our right to believe – because belief itself can open doors to action, connection, and transformation. Sometime, a catalyst such as belief is needed to bring something into the world. “Faith in a fact can help create the fact,”2placeholder James wrote, suggesting that the act of believing may be what enables certain realities to be felt or known at all. Religious faith, for James, was not a deduction, but an experience: not something proven, but something practiced and inhabited.
These cosmological and ontological arguments are not without value, but their clarity often comes at a cost: they often conceal as much as they reveal. Alfred North Whitehead, a founder of process theology, made the point that just like the brightness of the sun can conceal the stars, “The excess of light discloses facts and also conceals them.”3placeholder In other words, the bright sun of our rationality can hide the millions of other suns that also illuminate the sky. These rational methodologies seek to pin down the divine only in terms that fit into our limited human comprehension, while neglecting what belief might or does produce, or the experiences of belief in the lives of those who hold it. When belief is reduced to a logical proposition, it becomes easy to dismiss experiences that don’t conform to that framework as irrational, delusional, or irrelevant. “As a rule,” says James, “we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use.”4placeholder If it does not fit into our systems of thought, our scientific framework, our logical stances, what use does the scientist have for taking the risk in believing in something that they cannot even put into their own practices?
But what if the effects of belief – the way it moves people, heals, or reshapes lives – might themselves be the traces through which God is most vividly felt and explored? That even without a “use value”, it nonetheless leads us closer to truth? And if belief cannot be reduced by proof or strengthened by proof, what does lead to reaching a belief in the first place?
Belief as a Living Option
For James, all belief starts out as what he calls a hypothesis.5placeholder From this, any given hypothesis can be seen as either alive or dead, in the same way an electrical wire can be alive or dead. However, to determine if a hypothesis is one or the other, is completely determined by the relations the potential believer holds with the subject. This aligns with James’ radical empiricism: the idea in which the relations between things – such as the relation between a person and a hypothesis – are just as real as the things themselves. As an example of how a believer’s relationship plays a role, in the case of the scientist and the nun, the scientist had no connection with the possibility that God could be real, while the nun sees God’s existence at least as a possibility. Thus, for the scientist the hypothesis is dead from the start, while for the nun it is a live possibility.
After determining that the hypothesis is live, the second step then is to examine whether it is either forced or avoidable. What makes a decision forced is that it makes you decide whether you must accept a truth or go without it, where there is a logical inconsistency in neutrality. In the case of religion, it is a forced option. You might think “but agnosticism exists, isn’t that between the two?” Well, if belief is an attempt to search for truth after exhausting our intellectual abilities, then agnosticism is simply stating: “Better risk loss of truth than chance of error”6placeholder That is, because of a fear of taking a leap into the religious hypothesis, they by default must side with the safer non-believing sceptics to avoid error, and their pursuit ends there by choosing to deny it.
Finally, if a hypothesis is both alive and forced, then the final question is whether it is momentous or trivial. A momentous option would be one that presents a situation or thought without similar opportunity or a high stake, whereas something trivial is not unique, is insignificant, and could be easily reversed. With the stakes of whether God being real or not being significant for the lives of both those who believe and those who don’t – affecting their life, afterlife, way of living, and worldview – it would qualify as a momentous option. If the hypothesis then is live, forced, and momentous, then it is a genuine option. That is, one that qualifies a belief as reasonable in the search for truth.
So what is left then, to help us really decide what to believe once we reach our genuine option? For James, he proposes the idea that we must look to our passional nature:
The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for it say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide, but leave the question open,’ is itself a passional decision, – just like deciding yes or no, – and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.”7placeholder
What is left, after we have done all the intellectual pondering, research, work, and questioning we can, is not just that we must give up or wait around for something to happen. Time will pass and affirming or contrary evidence will come whether we wait or not. There is also another path to continue the search for truth: putting your faith in something and seeing what might come to be. That is, listening to our passional nature and seeing where it might lead us because “there are some options between opinions in which this influence [of our passional nature] must be regarded both as an inevitable and a lawful determinant of our choice.”8placeholder It is a risk yes, but one that puts us in a position to explore the world by looking to our experiences and seeing what might come to fruition. It is putting trust in something and living with that wager.
Here, James’ philosophy of pragmatism comes into play. At its simplest, it is an art of consequences. It poses the question, “What difference will it make?”, willing to take “anything, to follow either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences.”9placeholder When we cannot decide by the intellect and we choose to believe in something, following our passional nature, acknowledging that at that moment we cannot understand, what James’ pragmatic approach allows us to do is humble ourselves and open ourselves up to experience itself. Instead of trying to play the role of a traveler faithfully following the most accurate maps we have available that for some reason haven’t lead us to our destination, pragmatism ask us to simply look at the road itself: follow the signs, circle back, struggle with the present situation and see where it takes you, trusting in your belief that you will arrive. Thus, what would happen if you put your trust in a genuine option and see where it leads? What are some of the effects that might come to be?
Practicing Belief: When God Talks Back
“There are,” writes James, “cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.”10placeholder We treat the spiritual in nature as an exception, but never as a possible part of nature itself. Yet sometimes the belief we put in the world is the only way that we can allow certain effects to come into being. Without taking the risk to believe in something, the skeptical approach to looking at truth often limits what we might find and experience. But what can such a faith really produce for the believers who put their trust in something like an Abrahamic God?
In this regard, Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann spent years studying evangelical Christians in the United States who describe an intimate, interactive relationship with God. In her book When God Talks Back, she found that this relationship is not something given, but something cultivated.11placeholder Believers learn, through deliberate practice, to recognize God’s voice, starting with something as simple as “having a coffee with God”. They read scripture aloud, pray in vivid sensory detail, and use techniques akin to “imaginative” training to sense God’s presence in their daily lives. They also had to learn how to discern what messages were from God, and which were their own mind trying to convince them otherwise. Over time, this effort reshapes their attention, their emotions, even their cognitive habits.
This is not belief as a static position. It is belief as a skill – something practiced and refined to see where it might lead. The Christians Luhrmann studied didn’t believe in God because of a philosophical or logical proof; they believed because they had developed an experiential intimacy with the divine, and it changed how they lived. For them, God wasn’t a hypothetical. He was a conversational partner. What’s striking is how these practices transform not only their inner lives but also their outward behavior. Believers who describe “hearing” God’s voice often report feeling calmer, more forgiving, and more supported in times of crisis. Their faith acts as a kind of internal infrastructure – something that helps carry emotional weight, directs moral choices, and opens space for new meaning. The effects are measurable, even if their cause resists empirical verification.
I want to pause here to make clear that this is not an attempt to idealize or sentimentalize the evangelical movement. I had known about Luhrmann’s book for years before reading it, but ignored it, assuming that my upbringing in an evangelical church (which I later left) had already given me all the insight I needed. What I didn’t expect was how her ethnographic account shed light on dimensions I had overlooked — not by painting the movement in a flattering light, but by showing what belief, when practiced deliberately, could actually do. Her aim is not to argue that evangelicals are consistent or unified in their views. On the contrary, she shows how difficult it is to treat them as a single, coherent group – even if media portrayals often do. She references, for example, a study by Robert Putnam showing that 83% of evangelicals say someone of another faith can still go to heaven12placeholder – and yet, many in the same communities express strong opposition to immigration, or hold sharply exclusionary views. Some oppose homosexuality entirely; others frame it as part of God’s design. One even remarked, “If God didn’t want us to do stem-cell research, why did he make the scientists so darn smart?” These contradictions are not the point of her study, but they’re part of the landscape. What she wants to show is that for those who undertake the work of cultivating belief – learning to hear God, to sense his presence, to respond to his guidance – these practices have real effects. They shape how people think, feel, and live. Even amid the contradictions, something is happening that changes lives. Belief here is not just an idea, but something practiced into being.
There are certain things that can only be learned by sensed experience, just like these believers are trying to learn. Yet, that does not make them any less valid. As philosopher Gilles Deleuze says, “that which can only be sensed…moves the soul, ‘perplexes it’.”13placeholder That is, there are certain encounters we face in the world that can only be sensed, and that by needing to neatly categorize all of our knowledge into preexisting concepts, we can easily miss so much of the experiential knowledge that might be produced from how one lives out their faith. This may unsettle our modern categories of truth, as scientific frameworks tend to treat unverifiable experiences as suspect, or at best, as useful illusions. But what if the experience is the evidence? As William James put it, “The relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.”14placeholder What if the power of belief lies not in what it proves, but in what it produces through our relations? We have seen what effects these beliefs can have on the believer, but what effects can they have on others, or on the world outside of themselves?
The Literality of the Bible
In 1961, anthropologist and Bible translator Jacob Loewen visited the Choco church in Panama, which challenged the strength of his own faith and revealed what he – and many North American Christians like himself – may neglect.15placeholder While staying with Aureliano, a local church leader, Loewen found himself faced with the serious illness of Aureliano’s wife, Nata, who was suffering from pneumonia. With no medicine available, one day Loewen stumbled upon James Chapter 5 in his daily devotional: “If anyone is sick, he shall call the elders, and they shall anoint the person with oil and the prayer of faith will raise the sick.” Though the verse was familiar, it triggered a profound crisis of faith. Loewen, living through a scientific worldview, had no category for the “germ-killing” function of the Spirit of God and wasn’t sure he could trust the efficacy of God’s word in this case.
He also knew these Christians were literalists: if they read the verse, they would take it seriously instead of a practice of supporting Nata as a community. Reluctantly, a week later he translated the passage, handed it to Aureliano, and retreated to wrestle with his doubts on a long walk. When he returned, he found Aureliano angry, questioning why he didn’t share this passage with him sooner, asking what he was afraid of? “That it might not work, that that God might not heal” he replied. But Aureliano, with an unyielding faith replied, “Well why shouldn’t he heal if we pray?” So Loewen, his colleague David and the leaders of the church gathered and performed the ritual. Nata initially improved, almost immediately sitting up in bed, then relapsed after a few hours. But later, without Loewen or David’s participation, the group repeated the ritual and she recovered fully, going from the brink of death to casually performing her daily housework. Days later, when Loewen commented on the healing and his exclusion from the second session, Aureliano gently told him, “Jake, I’m sorry, but it didn’t work when you and David are in the circle. You and David don’t really believe.”
This anecdote shows two men of faith. Loewen, even though he himself was a follower of the Christian faith, was too afraid of being duped to follow his God through and through. Because he was so afraid of putting his faith in the wrong thing, of being “duped”, he took “no further passional step.”16placeholder The intellect couldn’t come to comprehend how this Biblical passage, read by millions in their own readings, was regularly ignored – nor could he understand how such a ritual could have any efficacy in the current situation given what Loewen knew about western medicine. Faced with this problem, he had exhausted what he could think, yet because of how he related to the problem, never got past the stage of being a live hypothesis, instead having the possibility die then and there.
If there is sometimes a need for faith to bring something into the world, by being skeptical he had not even allowed the possibility to be born. “Scepticism [sic], then,” as we’ve seen with agnosticism, “is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error.”17placeholder Loewen’s risk was that although he might not heal Nata, he definitely wouldn’t be wrong. The result of this risk, being that “evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis half-way.”18placeholder Aureliano saw this Bible passage as a genuine option, one in which he took his faith and put it completely towards an experience and something came into the world. For him, the question wasn’t “how can this be possible? What if God doesn’t listen?” but instead asking pragmatically “what difference will it make if I trust in the ability of God? What if I trust and take seriously what is said in the Bible?” It is one thing to intellectually believe in God, it is another to live the experience, even in the face of potentially being duped.
Thickening the World: Belief as a Way of Relating
To take something seriously – to act as if it might be real – can itself be a kind of knowing. And the failure to do so, James reminds us, may leave us blind to what’s in front of us. The lesson here is not to abandon skepticism, but to expand what we allow ourselves to treat as real. It is searching how to thicken the world, adding more angles and ways of seeing things instead of thinning the world, putting it into one very specific interpretation that does not allow for a flurry of connections to be formed.19placeholder It means adding to reality, instead of limiting it to one specific field of interpretation and boxing it in.
Belief, in this sense, is not a retreat from the real but a wager that reality may be more expansive than we assume. It is a way of relating to the world – a mode of openness that allows meaning, transformation, and connection to take root where proof and our intellectual capacities alone cannot reach. This does not mean belief is always right, safe, or beyond critique. But it does mean that its effects matter socially, emotionally, and even physically. To believe, James suggests, is to risk being affected by something that cannot be fully known in advance.
This reframing also asks us to reconsider what we think of as rational. Is it truly more reasonable to reject all that cannot be verified, or to remain alert to the ways the unprovable nonetheless shapes lives? As James wrote:
If religion be true and the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher upon my nature…to forget my sole chance in life of getting upon the winning side, – that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and right.20placeholder
Belief, viewed this way, is not an intellectual failure but a generative risk, a form of world-making. It is not about certainties, but about following experience. So perhaps the most important question isn’t whether God exists in the abstract, but what we allow a belief in God to do in the world. Belief, in this light, is not the opposite of reason. Instead it’s a wager on possibility. Not blind acceptance, but a way of relating to the unknown that leaves space for something new to arise. In a time when so much of our thinking is geared toward skepticism, control, and closure, perhaps what we need most is the courage to take seriously the worlds that others live in. Not to convert, but to consider, to thicken, rather than thin, our sense of what reality might hold.
To end, lets return to look at our original example. Who is closer to the truth, the nun or the scientist? Who is taking the risk and allowing experience to help them along the way? Who thickens experience in the world, and who thins it more? Both can do phenomenal research and investigating given the place, time, and situation, but when it comes down to looking at a genuine option and taking a risk, who is closer to finding the truth in the end? Ajahn Brahm, the monk telling the story, doesn’t ask us to choose between them, but to instead learn to better consider what to do when faced with a genuine option and open ourselves to what experience itself can offer us in our quest for the truth.
Works Cited
Campbell, David E., and Robert D. Putnam. “America’s Grace: How a Tolerant Nation Bridges Its Religious Divides.” Political Science Quarterly 126, no. 4 (2011): 611–40.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
James, William. Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975.
———. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, and Human Immortality, Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine: Both Books Bound as One,. Dover Publications, 1956.
James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912.
Loewen, Jacob. “Problems for Export: Part 1.” Milligan Missiogram 1, no. 4 (1974): 4–11.
Luhrmann, Tanya. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Vintage, 2012.
Stengers, Isabelle, and Didier Debaise. “Résister à La Peur d’étre Dupe.” In Au Risque Des Effets. Les Liens Qui Libèrent, 2023.
Whitehead, Alfred North. The Adventure of Ideas. The Macmillian Company, 1969.
William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, and Human Immortality, Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine: Both Books Bound as One, (Dover Publications, 1956), 13.
James, The Will to Believe, 25.
Alfred North Whitehead, The Adventure of Ideas (The Macmillian Company, 1969), 199.
James, The Will to Believe, 10.
James, The Will to Believe, 26.
James, The Will to Believe, 11.
James, The Will to Believe, 19.
William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 44.
James, The Will to Believe, 25.
Tanya Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (Vintage, 2012).
David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam, “America’s Grace: How a Tolerant Nation Bridges Its Religious Divides”
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 140.
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), 42.
Jacob Loewen, “Problems for Export: Part 1,” Milligan Missiogram 1, no. 4 (1974): 4–11.
James, The Will to Believe, 19.
James, The Will to Believe, 26.
James, The Will to Believe, 28.
See Isabelle Stengers and Didier Debaise, “Résister à La Peur d’étre Dupe,” in Au Risque Des Effets (Les Liens Qui Libèrent, 2023).
James, The Will to Believe, 27.