William James liked to put his listeners on a ledge in the Alps. A climber has worked himself into a spot where the only way out is a terrible leap. He has never made a jump like it and has no evidence that he can. If he trusts himself, the confidence steadies his legs and he lands. If fear wins, he hesitates until, exhausted and trembling, he launches himself in despair and misses his foothold. James told the story in “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879) and again in “Is Life Worth Living?” (1895), and his point was that some beliefs help bring about the facts they are about.
Believing the cosmos has a purpose does not give it one. What such a belief can change is the believer: how he gets up in the morning, what he works for, what he tells his children. And every adult holds some belief of this kind, because every adult acts. A person is conscious, has to choose what to do next, and cannot know what the universe finally is or how his own story ends. Each plan he makes assumes a world in which effort counts for something, whether or not he has ever put that assumption into words.
James’s Forced Option
James named the situation in “The Will to Believe”, a lecture to the philosophy clubs of Yale and Brown in 1896. An option is forced, he said, when “there is no standing place outside of the alternative.” The sceptic who waits for more light avoids one error, but in James’s words “we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.”
There is a second reason the choice cannot be avoided. The Hierarchy of Belief places a person’s cosmology near the bottom of everything he believes, in the layer that every smaller belief is checked against. For most people that layer was set in childhood, by parents, school and the culture around them, long before they could weigh it. The person who declines to choose is still running the answer he was handed.
James’s further claim was that where the evidence cannot decide between live options, a person may let practical reasons decide. That is the sense of “rational” used here. The Life Force judged belief systems by how much vitality they produce and treated truth as secondary. The question here is narrower: among the answers the evidence leaves standing, which one does a person have most reason to adopt, and what result would show the choice was wrong?
Physicalism, Panpsychism and Idealism
The evidence does leave the ground standing open, though the two sides are not evenly matched among philosophers. Physicalism holds that everything is ultimately physical. It has the closed causal chains of physics behind it, the tight dependence of every mental state on the brain, and three centuries of explanations that worked. A slim majority of philosophers hold it: about 52 per cent in the 2020 PhilPapers survey, against 32 per cent for the alternatives. Those alternatives put consciousness first. Philip Goff argues that consciousness is the inner nature of matter itself (Galileo’s Error, 2019), and Bernardo Kastrup that matter is how mind looks from outside (The Idea of the World, 2019). Each side has a problem it has not solved, and no experiment run so far has decided between them.
One Mind, Many Vessels declares the consciousness-first ground as an axiom and notes that the mechanics of belief run the same under either reading. It also goes a step further, to intent. A conscious ground could be indifferent to every creature it appears in. That essay answers from the tradition: Plotinus taught that the One overflows into the many, and the kabbalist Ramchal that the Infinite created in order to give. It treats the two readings, mechanism and gift, as views from two places. From outside there is only mechanism. From inside a life there is a giver and a debt, and purpose is visible only from there.
Nobody acts from outside. Every decision is made by someone standing inside a life, so the practical question is whether that person should take the inside reading as true or treat it as a useful feeling. The rest of the case turns on what the belief in intent does to the people who hold it.
Purpose, Mortality and Alzheimer’s
The Life Force opened with Viktor Frankl’s observation that prisoners with a reason to live outlasted those without one. Cohort studies have since put numbers on it. Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiano followed more than six thousand American adults for fourteen years. Those with a stronger sense of purpose were less likely to die in that period, even after accounting for their relationships and their moods (Hill and Turiano, 2014). Patricia Boyle’s group at Rush University in Chicago followed 951 older adults. Those at the 90th percentile of purpose were about two and a half times as likely to stay free of Alzheimer’s disease as those at the 10th (Boyle et al., 2010). At autopsy, people with more purpose turned out to have kept better memory and thinking at the same load of brain damage (Boyle et al., 2012). These studies measure a person’s sense of his own purpose, and none of them asks what he believes about the cosmos.
How firmly a view is held matters as much as which view it is. Luke Galen and James Kloet surveyed more than six hundred members of a church and of a secular group. Those certain there is a God and those certain there is none reported similar life satisfaction and emotional stability, and the uncertain in between reported the lowest (Galen and Kloet, 2011). The reason is mechanical. Beliefs make up a person’s identity, the identity is what acts, and a belief held with doubt reaches action against friction, as the Belief page traces step by step.
The atheist side has been measured directly. A study of the 2008 General Social Survey found American atheists no more likely than believers to say life serves no purpose, and no more fatalistic (Speed, Coleman and Langston, 2018). Tatjana Schnell and William Keenan found that atheists averaged lower meaning in life than religious people but reported no more crises of meaning (Schnell and Keenan, 2011). Among the atheists, commitment made the difference. Those committed to causes beyond themselves scored high, and those committed to little scored low. Comparing countries, Ed Diener, Louis Tay and David Myers found that the religious enjoy a well-being advantage where life is hard, and almost none in secure, wealthy nations (Diener, Tay and Myers, 2011).
So a firmly held purpose matters, and either cosmology can supply one. A universe without intent leaves the purpose to be built by the person who holds it, and the people who never build it pay. A cosmology with intent hands the purpose over with the ground, and it does so most usefully where life is hardest. That last claim is the whole remaining case for intent, and everything after this rests on it.
Fate, Foreknowledge and the Person Who Acts
The obvious objection runs the other way. If the cosmos has a plan, the outcome is settled, and choosing looks like theatre. The traditions that took a plan most seriously met this directly. Rabbi Akiva held both halves at once: “Everything is foreseen yet freedom of choice is granted” (Avot 3:15). The Stoics believed in fate outright, and they faced a version called the lazy argument. If you are fated to recover from an illness, you will recover whether or not you call the doctor. Chrysippus answered that the recovery is fated together with the calling of the doctor (Cicero, On Fate 28 to 30). The effort is part of what was fated. Cleanthes wrote a prayer asking Zeus and destiny to lead him, admitting that if he refused he would make himself a wretch “and still must follow” (quoted by Epictetus, Handbook 53), and Seneca, putting the prayer into Latin, apparently added the line that became famous: the fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling (Letters 107.11).
The philosopher Jenann Ismael reaches the same place without any intent at all. In How Physics Makes Us Free (2016) she argues that a deterministic world still contains agents whose deliberation is one of the real causes of what they do. A person can act without a purposeful cosmos, then, and Ismael shows how. What intent adds is a reason the act matters beyond the person: in the Stoic picture the effort is wanted by the whole it belongs to, and the person who makes it is a part the plan relies on.
Providence and Action: Stoics, Calvinists, Rabbis
The Stoics held that a providential reason orders the cosmos, and they produced one of the most demanding ethics of action in antiquity, practised by a freed slave, Epictetus, and by an emperor, Marcus Aurelius. The Calvinists believed God had chosen the saved before birth and that nothing a person did could change it, which should have produced idleness. Max Weber argued that it produced the opposite: anxious to see signs that they were among the chosen, Calvinists turned to the methodical, disciplined work of the early modern Protestant merchant (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904 and 1905). The rabbis taught that the world was made to be finished by human hands, and the midrash says that everything created in the six days still needs further work (Genesis Rabbah 11:6). The Talmud counts a judge who rules truthfully, even for one hour, as a partner of God in the act of creation (Shabbat 10a).
The record cannot carry much more weight than that. Nearly every society before the modern era believed in a cosmos with intent, including fatalist ones that bred resignation, so intent wins any count of people and centuries by default. Movements that left no record cannot be counted at all. And Weber’s thesis is disputed: Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann (2009) traced the Protestant advantage in nineteenth-century Prussia to literacy, from a faith that required everyone to read the Bible. What the record shows is narrower: a cosmos with intent is compatible with intense effort, and drives it when the person is given a part to play.
Spinoza and Marx: Action Without a Purposeful Cosmos
Spinoza denied intent outright. The appendix to Part I of his Ethics calls final causes human fictions, and he denied free will as well. He still built an ethics of active power and lived by it, grounding the good in the necessity of Nature and in what he called the intellectual love of God. Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish congregation had expelled him in 1656, years before he wrote the Ethics, and he died in The Hague in 1677 with the book unpublished. His ideas spread widely through the radical Enlightenment (Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 2001). The reading that made him popular came later, after the Pantheism Controversy of 1785, when Herder and Goethe turned his God-or-Nature into a living force, and in Herder’s version a providential one.
Marxism is the harder case, because its materialism moved millions. Historical materialism held that the world is matter and that history moves through necessary stages toward communism, and Marx kept a place for the person inside that movement: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852). Karl Löwith argued in Meaning in History (1949) that the scheme was messianism with the names changed, and Bertrand Russell made the same point as a joke, with a dictionary in which dialectical materialism stands for Yahweh, Marx for the Messiah and the proletariat for the elect. On that reading, a movement that found no purpose in the cosmos took one from history.
The New Myth found the same pattern at the scale of whole societies: secular humanism has trouble saying what people are for without borrowing a purpose from somewhere else. Spinoza did without the loan, at the price of a lifetime spent reasoning his way there, and the Marxist movement took one from history as soon as it needed millions to act.
The Case for Intent, and Its Test
For a being who must choose without proof, then, a cosmos with intent is the more reasonable belief to adopt, in James’s practical sense. It hands over a purpose with the ground, most usefully where life is hard, and the people who have held it acted with force when it gave them a part to play. This is a reading of the evidence. The evidence says nothing about whether the cosmos has intent, which is why practical reasons are allowed to decide.
Either of two results would overturn it. If people firmly convinced that the universe has no intent reach a strong sense of purpose as often as people convinced it has one, at every level of hardship, the ready-made purpose is worth nothing. And if they report as much free choice and control over their own lives, the case for action fails with it. The World Values Survey asks most of what is needed in its core questionnaire, including how important God is in a person’s life and how much free choice and control they feel they have, and its files are public. Two published results already lean against the claim: American atheists are no more fatalistic than believers, and in secure countries the religious advantage in well-being disappears. The claim survives for now on the hard cases.
The Torah put the same choice to a people about to cross a river, with the consequences as its only argument: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19).