Editing Charles Sanders Peirce (section)

=== Psychical or religious metaphysics ===
Peirce believed in God, and characterized such belief as founded in an instinct explorable in musing over the worlds of ideas, brute facts, and evolving habits—and it is a belief in God not as an ''actual'' or ''existent'' being (in Peirce's sense of those words), but all the same as a ''real'' being.<ref name="Godasreal">Peirce in his 1906 "Answers to Questions concerning my Belief in God", ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'', 6.495, [http://users.xplornet.com/~gnox/CSPgod.htm Eprint] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080223094243/http://users.xplornet.com/~gnox/CSPgod.htm |date=February 23, 2008}}, reprinted in part as "The Concept of God" in ''Philosophical Writings of Peirce'', J. Buchler, ed., 1940, pp. 375–378: {{quote|I will also take the liberty of substituting "reality" for "existence." This is perhaps overscrupulosity; but I myself always use ''exist'' in its strict philosophical sense of "react with the other like things in the environment." Of course, in that sense, it would be fetichism to say that God "exists." The word "reality," on the contrary, is used in ordinary parlance in its correct philosophical sense. [....] I define the ''real'' as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have ''thought'' them to be, or ever will have ''thought'' them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible ''means'' are not used); but the real thing's characters will remain absolutely untouched.}}</ref> In "[[s:A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God|A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God]]" (1908),<ref name="NA"/> Peirce sketches, for God's reality, an argument to a hypothesis of God as the Necessary Being, a hypothesis which he describes in terms of how it would tend to develop and become compelling in musement and inquiry by a normal person who is led, by the hypothesis, to consider as being purposed the features of the worlds of ideas, brute facts, and evolving habits (for example scientific progress), such that the thought of such purposefulness will "stand or fall with the hypothesis"; meanwhile, according to Peirce, the hypothesis, in supposing an "infinitely incomprehensible" being, starts off at odds with its own nature as a purportively true conception, and so, no matter how much the hypothesis grows, it both (A) inevitably regards itself as partly true, partly vague, and as continuing to define itself without limit, and (B) inevitably has God appearing likewise vague but growing, though God as the Necessary Being is not vague or growing; but the hypothesis will hold it to be ''more'' false to say the opposite, that God is purposeless. Peirce also argued that the will is free<ref>See his [[Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography#MMS|"The Doctrine of Necessity Examined" (1892) and "Reply to the Necessitarians" (1893)]], to both of which editor [[Paul Carus]] responded.</ref> and (see [[Synechism]]) that there is at least an attenuated kind of immortality.