Faith and Hypothesis

James attempts to reconcile his Pragmatism--for which only empirically verifiable propositions are meaningful--and his belief that an unseen God exists, by conceiving Faith as a working Hypothesis., one the verification of which may just happen to come later rather than sooner.  This effort to rationalize Hope is thus a variation on Pascal's 'wager', i. e. a calculated anticipation of a possible eventual outcome.  Accordingly, it shares with its predecessor a neglect of some of the possible adverse practical consequences of adhering to his belief--e. g. psychological, political, economic, and intellectual deprivation, as has been previously discussed here--which tend to falsify the hypothesis that a beneficent God exists.  Furthermore, that Faith might remain staunch in the face of such adversity indicates that it is independent of the criteria governing hypothetical reasoning, as Kierkergaard, notably, argues.  So, James' assertion, at p. 508 of Varieties, that philosophy is "propped up" on religious faith, seems to acknowledge that the success of his attempted reconciliation entails a subordination of Pragmatism to Theology.