My treatment of 'God,' 'freedom,' and 'design' was similar.
Reducing, by the pragmatic test, the meaning of each of these
concepts to its positive experienceable operation, I showed them all
to mean the same thing, viz., the presence of 'promise' in the
world. 'God or no God?' means 'promise or no promise?' It seems to
me that the alternative is objective enough, being a question as to
whether the cosmos has one character or another, even though our own
provisional answer be made on subjective grounds. Nevertheless
christian and non-christian critics alike accuse me of summoning
people to say 'God exists,' EVEN WHEN HE DOESN'T EXIST, because
forsooth in my philosophy the 'truth' of the saying doesn't
really mean that he exists in any shape whatever, but only that to
say so feels good.

Most of the pragmatist and anti-pragmatist warfare is over what the
word 'truth' shall be held to signify, and not over any of the
facts embodied in truth-situations; for both pragmatists and anti-
pragmatists believe in existent objects, just as they believe in our
ideas of them. The difference is that when the pragmatists speak of
truth, they mean exclusively some thing about the ideas, namely
their workableness; whereas when anti-pragmatists speak of truth
they seem most often to mean something about the objects. Since the
pragmatist, if he agrees that an idea is 'really' true, also
agrees to whatever it says about its object; and since most anti-
pragmatists have already come round to agreeing that, if the object
exists, the idea that it does so is workable; there would seem so
little left to fight about that I might well be asked why instead of
reprinting my share in so much verbal wrangling, I do not show my
sense of 'values' by burning it all up.