Mark asked:

It has been my experience thus far in philosophy that often when an answer seems very obvious to
me, I have not fully understood the question. With that in mind, I want to ask about Anselm's and
Augustine's assertion that belief must precede understanding.

It seems obvious to me that this cannot be so. For, belief must be belief in something, and having
identified that something, one has (already) begun to understand it. It seems a logical necessity that
belief follows understanding. Can someone help me understand Augustine's assertion in a way that
would make me more sympathetic to it, or is it just as I see it?

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I think you are referring to Anselm's phrase 'credo ut intellegam' (which means 'I believe so that I may
understand' ) It is the starting point of his ontological argument in the Proslogion.

I agree with your lack of sympathy for the position but for different reasons. It is not a logical necessity
that 'belief follows from understanding' as you suggest. If this were true, understanding the idea of
God, say, would be sufficient grounds for a belief in God. I think you are right to say that in order to be
able to identify something, you must understand it first. But it doesn't follow from this that
understanding is prior to belief.

There is an entire skeptical tradition in philosophy — of which Hume is probably the greatest
champion — which holds that some of our fundamental commitments (such as our beliefs in
causation, continued and distinct existences, freedom etc) are without rational foundation. Putting it
incredibly crudely, when you sit in a chair you believe it won't collapse under you (and it probably
won't). But is that belief based on any understanding? The idea is that a lot of our expectations and
beliefs are based on custom and habit, not the understanding. We only come to understand much
later.

Anselm and Augustine seem to me to be making a similar kind of point: the way we understand the
world has to start somewhere, and this starting point (to them) must be with a deeply held faith in the
Christian God.

There is an argument called the Parity Argument which might interest you. Lets say you agree with
the skeptical tradition that some commitments of secular concern are without rational foundation even
though we believe them. So, the argument goes, you are inconsistent if you refuse to yield to religious
beliefs merely because they have no rational foundation (i.e. the starting point for understanding the
world has to be with a set of beliefs of some sort). So faith in God is a bit like faith in other things.

The Humean take on this is that it is not an inconsistency unless:

*There is pressure to yield to religious beliefs equal in all respects to the pressure to yield to secular
ones.

*The meta-rational demands for religious belief are equal to the meta-rational demands to believe in
an external world etc.

*Religious beliefs fulfill the same criteria as our non-rationally founded secular beliefs which enable
those secular beliefs to be resistant to skepticism.

The criteria are:

*Conclusions arrived at must be temporally prior to reasoning.

*They are indispensable as presuppositions for knowledge and conduct for a being living in a
coherent relationship with the appearance of things. In practical terms one cannot live in the world
unless one carries those beliefs.

*So, 'natural beliefs' are universal and not simply the dominant ones held by the vulgar. They are
ones we all possess.

We conclude, firstly, that it is incontrovertible that religious beliefs are not universal in the manner of
(c), and secondly that individuals can and do act perfectly adequately without beliefs in God. The
beliefs are not an epistemic requirement for any coherent relation to the appearance of things. So (b)
is not fulfilled either and from (1) and (2) we can reject Anselm's point that we must believe in God in
order to understand.

Adam Gatward