Pragmatism, Religious Fundamentalism, and the Shadow of a Dead God

de Waal considers both Christian fundamentalism and pragmatism as competing responses to what Nietzsche called “the death of God”: the demise of the concept of God that was central to both science and philosophy in the modern era. de Waal provides an account of the relation among religion, science, and philosophy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century that culminates in the demise of the idea of God as an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator and in science inheriting the social prestige that was once religion’s. The fundamentalists responded by maintaining that the only good science is that which is consistent with Scripture – unlike, e.g., the theory of evolution. Pragmatists responded by embracing the new science and responded to it with a passel of new philosophical ideas, e.g., Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, conceived as a test of meaningfulness for our concepts; his critical common-sensism, which allows us to take a critical position with regard to our common-sense beliefs; James’s denial of a ready-made world and his doctrine that it is sometimes permissible to believe in the absence of evidence; and fallibilism, which denies the possibility of certainty.