The cognitive significance of religious belief in the work of William James

In response to A. J. Ayer's criticism that James is able to claim truth for the religious hypothesis only at the cost of stripping it of its intellectual content, this dissertation investigates William James's understanding of the cognitive nature of religious belief by focusing on three of his major works: "The Will to Believe" (1896); The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); and Pragmatism. By reading these works in light of James's earlier work on cognition in The Principles of Psychology, it becomes evident that James understood and anticipated the current "marriage" of cognitive psychology to the theory of knowledge. The dissertation attempts to demonstrate that the process of verifying a religious belief, must lead one to the evidential power of religious experience. The dissertation ends with a consideration of contemporary theorists who attempt to justify religious beliefs on the basis of religious experience, and an analysis of Ayer's own near-death experience as offering evidence which caused him to reevaluate his convictions concerning personal identity and the finality of death. Continual openness to the corrective power of this, (what James would call), "boiling over" of experience, is what insures the cognitive significance of our religious beliefs.