Religious Certainty: Peculiarities and Pedagogical Considerations
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Religious Certainty: Peculiarities and Pedagogical Considerations José María Ariso1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper presents the concept of ‘religious certainty’ I have developed by drawing inspiration from Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘certainty’. After describing the particular traits of religious certainty, this paper addresses two difficulties derived from this concept. On the one hand, it explains why religious certainty functions as such even though all its consequences are far from being absolutely clear; on the other hand, it clarifies why, unlike the rest of certainties, the loss of religious certainty does not result in the collapse of the worldpicture made up of all certainties. Subsequently, it analyzes to what extent the teacher can teach religious certainty by acting as a facilitator for its acquisition–if desired—particularly bearing in mind that religious certainty cannot be attained at will. These basic teaching guidelines have several advantages. First, they make it possible to know the nature of religious certainty even better. Second, and most importantly, the fact of having adopted the perspective of a teacher who tries inculcating a religious certainty contributes to detecting and preventing forms of indoctrination that, arguably, might go unnoticed even when attempting to properly present religious certainty—or rather, this way of being religious— in current schools to foster understanding thereof. Keywords Wittgenstein · Religious certainty · Will · World-picture · Indoctrination
Introduction According to a poll of U.S. citizens, 54% of Americans affirmed in 2013 to be “absolutely certain there is a God”, which constituted a drop of 12 percentage points from the 2003 testing (The Harris Poll 2013). In saying this, respondents might admittedly mean very different things. To give two examples, many of them are expected to regard this question as an opportunity to strengthen their faith, as doubt is a fundamental constituent of it. Many other respondents, however, may have found the question about the existence of God as obvious as if they had been asked whether they had a head, for, in their case, the possibility of doubt and mistake is completely excluded from both questions. Hence, this poll does not * José María Ariso [email protected] 1
Department of Education, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Almansa 101, Madrid 28040, Spain
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make it possible to clarify what both kinds of respondents really mean, as each respondent’s absolute certainty that God exists should be reflected or lived out in the way she leads her current life (Rhees 1969; Phillips 1970, 1976; Brenner 2001), e.g. in her “practices, aspirations, hopes, virtues, and so on” (Kerr 1986, p. 153). Stated otherwise, the mentioned poll conceptualizes religion in such a way that doctrines are prioritized over practices. This is, according to Burley (2017, p. 718), what happens in the UK’s secondary education, where religious studies courses include philosophy of reli
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