Maverick Philosopher

From the Laws of Logic to the Existence of God

James N. Anderson and Greg Welty have published a paper entitled The Lord of Non-Contradiction:  An Argument for God from Logic. Having worked out similar arguments in unpublished manuscripts, I am very sympathetic to the project of arguing from the existence of necessary truths to the necessary existence of divine mind. 

Here is a quick sketch of the Anderson-Welty argument as I construe it:

1. There are laws of logic, e.g., the law of non-contradiction.

2. The laws of logic are truths.

3. The laws of logic are necessary truths.

4. A truth is a true proposition, where propositions are the primary truth-bearers or primary vehicles of the truth values.

5. Propositions exist.  Argument: there are truths (from 1, 2); a truth is a true proposition (3); if an item has a property such as the property of being true, then it exists. Ergo, propositions exist.

6. Necessarily true propositions necessarily exist.  For if a proposition has the property of being true in every possible world, then it exists in every possible world.  Remark:  in play here are 'Fregean' as opposed to 'Russellian' propositions.  See here for an explanation of the distinction as I see it.  If the proposition expressed by 'Socrates is Socrates' is Russellian, then it has Socrates himself, warts and all, as a constituent.  But then, though the proposition is in some sense necessarily true, being a truth of logic, it is surely not necessarily existent.

7. Propositions are not physical entities.  This is because no physical entity such as a string of marks on  paper could be a primary truth-bearer.  A string of marks, if true, is true only derivatively or secondarily, only insofar as as it expresses a proposition.

8. Propositions are intrinsically intentional.  (This is explained in the post which is the warm-up to the present one.)

Therefore

9. The laws of logic are necessarily existent, nonphysical, intrinsically intentional entities.

10. Thoughts are intrinsically intentional.

The argument now takes a very interesting turn.  If propositions are intrinsically intentional, and thoughts are as well, might it be that propositions are thoughts?

The following invalid syllogism must be avoided: "Every proposition is intrinsically intentional; every thought is intrinsically intentional; ergo, every proposition is a thought."  This argument is an instance of the fallacy of undistributed middle, and of course the authors argue in no such way.  They instead raise the question whether it is parsimonious to admit into our ontology two distinct categories of intrinsically intentional item, one mental, the other non-mental.  Their claim is that the principle of parsimony "demands" that propositions be constued as mental items, as thoughts.  Therefore

11.  Propositions are thoughts.

Therefore

12. Some propositions (the law of logic among them) are necessarily existent thoughts. (From 8, 9, 10, 11)

13. Necessarily, thoughts are thoughts of a thinker.

Therefore

14. The laws of logic are the thoughts of a necessarily existent thinker, and "this all men call God." (Aquinas)

A Stab at Critique 

Line (11) is the crucial sub-conclusion.  The whole argument hinges on it.  Changing the metaphor, here is where I insert my critical blade, and take my stab.  I count three views.

A. There are propositions and there are thoughts and both are intrinsically intentional.

B. Propositions reduce to thoughts.

C. Thoughts reduce to propositions.

Now do considerations of parsimony speak against (A)?  We are enjoined not to multiply entities (or rather types of entity) praeter necessitatem. That is, we ought not posit more types of entity than we need for explanatory purposes.  This is not the same as saying that we ought to prefer ontologies with fewer categories.  Suppose we are comparing an n category ontology with an n + 1 category ontology.  Parsimony does not instruct us to take the n category ontology.  It instructs us to take the n category ontology only if it is explanatorily adequate, only if it explains all the relevant data but without the additional posit.  Well, do we need propositions in addition to thoughts for explanatory purposes?  It is plausible to say yes because there are (infinitely) many propositions that no one has ever thought of or about.  Arithmetic alone supplies plenty of examples.  Of course, if God exists, there  are no unthought propositions.  But the existence of God is precisely what is at issue.  So we cannot assume it.  But if we don't assume it, then we have a pretty good reason to distinguish propositions and thoughts as two different sorts of intrinsically intentional entity given that we already have reason to posit thoughts and propositions.

 So my first critical point is that the principle of parsimony is too frail a reed with which to support the reduction of propositions to thoughts.  Parsimony needs to be beefed-up with other considerations, e.g., an argument to show why an abstract object could not be intrinsically intentional. 

My second critical point is this.  Why not countenance (C), the reduction of thoughts to propositions?  It could be like this.  There are all the (Fregean) propostions there might have been, hanging out in Frege's Thrid Reich (Popper's world 3).  The thought that 7 + 5 = 12 is not a state of an individul thinker; there are no individual thinkers, so selves, no egos.  The thought is just the Fregean proposition's temporary and contingent exemplification of the monadic property, Pre-Personal Awareness or Bewusst-sein.  Now I don't have time to develop this suggestion which has elements of Natorp and Butchvarov, and in any case it is not my view.

All I am saying is that (C) needs excluding. Otherwise we don't have a good reason to plump for (B).

My conclusion?  The Anderson-Welty argument, though fascinating and competently articulated, is not rationally compelling.  Rationally acceptable, but not rationally compelling.  Acceptable, because the premises are plausible and the reasoning is correct.  Not compelling, because one  could resist it without quitting the precincts of reasonableness.

To theists, I say: go on being theists.  You are better off being a theist than not being one.  Your position is rationally defensible and the alternatives are rationally rejectable.  But don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite.  In the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.

Related articles

A Review of Barry Miller's From Existence to God

Metaphysical Grounding and the Euthyphro Dilemma

Are Propositions Counterexamples to Brentano's Thesis?

Are the Laws of Logic Empirical Generalizations?

Caesar Is No More: The Aporetics of Reference to the Past

The Aporetics of Existence and Self-Identity

Beating the Dead Horse of the Thin Theory Some More

Abstracta: Omnitemporal or Timeless? An Argument from McCann

Metaphysical Grounding I: True Of

The New Atheism is Old Hat

Dawkins has lost.  Hitchens is dead.  And the prognosis is not good for the rest of the strident crew.  But an atheism chastened and temperate will remain with us.  As I have said many times, atheism is intellectually respectable and rationally defensible.  But so is theism.

In the end you must decide for yourself what to believe and how to live.

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Jerry Coyne on Religion as Child Abuse

Coyne writes (emphasis added):

Dawkins has taken flak for characterizing religious indoctrination of children as “child abuse.”  Well, look at this picture and deny it.  [The picture depicts a young child holding a sign that reads: Behead all those who insult the Prophet.] True, it’s not the same as beating or sexually molesting one’s child, but the brain of this boy is being warped and twisted by vicious Muslim ideology.  What hope does he have when he grows up?

This also shows how crazy it is to characterize Islam as “the religion of peace.”

Somehow—and this will never happen, of course—it should be illegal to indoctrinate children with religious belief.

This is pretty feeble stuff for someone who supposedly can think.  First of all, Coyne speaks of religious indoctrination and belief as such and in general, without qualification, making no distinctions among different religions or different beliefs within a given religion.  Suppose a child is made to memorize the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes.  That surely counts as religious indoctrination.  But is it child abuse?  Obviously not.

A second point is that Coyne and his New Atheist ilk  make no distinction between religious ideology and nonreligious ideology.  Radical Islam, if not Islam itself,  is a murderous religious ideology, and Coyne is quite right to protest its characterization as the "religion of peace."  But Nazism and godless communism are also murderous  ideologies whose doctrines justify mass murder.  According to the Black Book of Communism, communists murdered approximately 100 million people in the 20th century. 

Think of all the 'red diaper babies.'  I wonder if Coyne and his ilk would protest their indoctrination as child abuse.  If not, why not? Why is indoctrination in radical Islam worse than indoctrination in Naziism or communism?  Why the selective outrage?  If the genus extremist ideology is the problem, why attack only one of its species? 

I admit that there is something unseemly about criticizing a man like Coyne.  It's uncomfortably like rolling a drunk or beating up a cripple. Nasty work, but somebody has to do it.  Here is further evidence of what a fool this man is.

But even worse than Coyne and Dawkins on the topic of religion as child abuse is the noxious A. C. Grayling.

We can be happy that the New Atheism has lost its mojo and is on the way out if not already dead.

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Atheists, Anti-Philosophers, and Anti-Idealists: The 'One X Further' Meme

Beloved of cyberpunks and Internet infidels, the 'One God Further' meme invites generalization.  Although it is not an argument but an assertion, the Dawkins attribution suggests an argument.  The argument it suggests to me is the following:

1. All gods are on a par with respect to credibility.

2. All of us find most gods incredible.

Therefore

3. Consistency demands of us that we make a clean sweep and reject all gods, including the Judeo-Christian god.

The implict claim is that believers in the Judeo-Christian god refuse to apply their principle of god-rejection across the board, but instead make an irrational exception in the case of their god.

 

Suppose we generalize the argument and see what happens:

1G. All Xs are on a par with respect to credibility.

2G.  All of us find most Xs incredible.

Therefore

3G.  Consistency demands of us that we make a clean sweep and reject all Xs.

Now hear the speech of an anti-philosopher addressed to philosophers:

We reject all the philosophical theories you do, but we take it a step further by rejecting your pet theories as well.  We reject all philosophical theories. So we do exactly what you do except that we do it consistently, applying the principle of philosopheme-rejection across the board.  We make a clean sweep whereas you irrationally and inconsistently make an exception in favor of your pet theories.

And then there is the speech of the anti-idealist:

We reject all the ideals you do, but we take it a step further by rejecting your pet ideals as well.  We reject all ideals.  You distinguish between true and false ideals and reject those you take to be false such as the ideals of National Socialism.  You are not consistent.  You ought to make a clean sweep and reject all ideals.

Further examples of the argument schema can be provided, but you get the drift.  The history of science is littered with hypotheses that didn't pan out.  But of course it would be irrational to infer that one ought not propose hypotheses.  Same with ideals.  There are no doubt false ideals.  But it doesn't follow that there are no true ideals.  And the same goes for philosophical theories.

So if Dawkin's puerile meme is intended as a truncated argument, it is unsound.  But if is a bare assertion, then it is true but uninteresting. 

Lent for Atheists?

Apparently, there are some atheists who are adopting Lenten-type practices without abandoning their atheist beliefs.  This ought to be cautiously applauded: we all can profit morally from a bit of voluntary abstinence.  One cannot live well without (moderate) asceticism.  (See William James on Self-Denial.) Better self-controlled atheists than atheists 'gone wild.'

But I would urge these atheists to go further and practice doxastic abstinence.  Without rejecting your atheist beliefs, put them within brackets for the Lenten period.  Practice epoché with respect to them, that is, withhold intellectual assent.  That is not to doubt them or disbelieve them, but simply to make no use of them.  Leave them alone for a time.  In the strict sense epoché goes beyond even suspension of judgment.  If I suspend judgment with respect to a propositional content, I neither affirm it, deny it, doubt it, nor even just entertain it.  For if I do any of those things I admit that it has a coherent sense.  In epoché, however, I leave it open whether the content has a coherent sense.  Epoché is the ultimate in doxastic disengagement.  Practicing total doxastic abstinence, I totally disengage from those propositions that ignite often acrimonious disagreement. 

You can always go back to your atheist beliefs.  Another excellent form of self-denial for atheists and religionists alike is to abstain from all theological controversies and polemics from time to time.   One could call it a 'belief fast.'  I hope we can all agree that being just is better than developing a theory of justice.  And if discussing the Trinity only makes you angry and combative, then it might be best to drop theology and cultivate piety.

But while atheists can profit from voluntary self-denial, bringing such practices under the Lent umbrella makes little sense.  Will the period of self-denial go from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday?  Why tie it to these dates freighted as they are with Christian metaphysics?  When a Christian reminds himself on Ash Wednesday that he is dust and shall return to dust, the whole point of that memento mori is situated within the context of the hope for and promise of eternal life.  Christian mortalism is toto caelo different from atheist mortalism.  And what the Christian celebrates on Easter Sunday is precisely the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ by the power of God  and the hope that death will be conquered eventually for all. No atheist believes that.

In the final analysis, Lent secularized is no longer Lent.  Atheists ought to exercise their imaginations and come up with a secular analog free of Chistian trappings.

Atheists ought also to worry that if they take up Christian practices, the beliefs may follow . . . . 

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Mature Religion is Open-Ended Too: More Quest Than Conclusions

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Mature Religion is Open-Ended Too: More Quest Than Conclusions

The following is from an interview with A. C. Grayling who is speaking of the open mind and open inquiry:

It’s a mindset, he reveals, that “loves the open-endedness and the continuing character of the conversation that humankind has with itself about all these things that really matter.”

It’s also a way of thinking that marks a line in the sand between religion and science. The temptation to fall for the former—hook, line, and sinker—is plain to see: “People like narratives, they like to have an explanation, they like to know where they are going.” Weaving another string of thought into his tapestry of human psychology, Grayling laments that his fellow human beings “don’t want to have to think these things out for themselves. They like the nice, pre-packaged answer that’s just handed to them by somebody authoritative with a big beard.”

A. C. Grayling, like many if not most militant atheists, sees the difference between religion and science in the difference between pre-packaged dogmas thoughtlessly and uncritically accepted from some authority and open-ended free inquiry.

That is not the way I see it.  For me, mature religion is more quest than conclusions.  It too is open-ended and ongoing, subject to revision and correction. It benefits from abrasion with such competing sectors of culture as philosophy and science.  By abrasion the pearl is formed.

All genuine religion involves a quest since God must remain largely unknown, and this by his very nature. He must remain latens Deitas in Aquinas' phrase:

Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas;
Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit, Quia te contemplans totum deficit.

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore, Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more, See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.

(tr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, here.)
 

But as religion becomes established in the world in the form of churches, sects, and denominations with worldly interests, it becomes less  of a quest and more of a worldly hustle. Dogmatics displaces inquiry, and fund-raising faith. The once alive becomes ossified.  All human institutions are corruptible, and are eventually corrupted.

Mature religion must be more quest than conclusions. It is vastly more a seeking than a finding. More a cleansing of windows and a polishing  of mirrors than a glimpsing. And certainly more a glimpsing than a comfortable resting upon dogmas. When philosophy and religion and mysticism and science are viewed as quests they complement one another. And this despite the tensions among Athens, Jerusalem, Benares, and Alexandria.

The critic of religion wants to pin it down, reducing it to dogmatic contents, so as to attack it where it is weakest. Paradoxically, the atheist 'knows' more about God than the sophisticated theist -- he knows so much that he knows no such thing could exist. He 'knows' the divine nature and knows that it is incompatible with the existence of evil -- to mention one line of attack.  What he 'knows,' of course, is only the concept he himself has fabricated and projected.  Aquinas, by contrast, held that the existence of God is far better known than God's nature -- which remains shrouded in a cloud of unknowing.

The (immature) religionist also wants religion pinned down and dogmatically spelled out for purposes of self-definition, doxastic security, other-exclusion, worldly promotion, and political leverage. This is a reason why reformers like Jesus are met with a cold shoulder -- or worse.

How is it that someone as intelligent as Grayling could have such a cartoonish understanding of religion?  The answer is that he and his brethren  utterly lack the religious sensibility.  They lack it in the same way many scientists lack the philosophical sensibility, many prosaic folk the poetic sensibility, and so on.

This is why debates with militant atheists are a waste of time.  To get a taste of the febrile militancy of Grayling's atheism, see here. 

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Theism on Secular Grounds

A reader inquires:

Can one reason from secular premises to a theistic conclusion? Or is any argument that concludes to God's existence non-secular by nature?

The reader liked yesterday's abortion post in which I used non-religious (and in that sense secular) premises to support a conclusion which, though not religious, would be accepted by most religionists and rejected by most secularists.

To answer the reader's question, yes, one can reason from secular premises to a theistic conclusion.  Indeed, the traditional arguments do precisely that.  For example, cosmological arguments proceed a contingentia mundi, from the contingency of the world, and they attempt to show that there must be a necessary being responsible for the world's existence.  That the universe exists and that it exists contingently are secular starting points  -- in one of its meanings saecula just means 'world' -- and not deliverances of revelation or churchly doctrines to be taken on faith. 

Now the same goes for the rest of the theistic arguments, the ontological, the teleological, the moral, and indeed for all of the twenty or so arguments that Plantinga lists.

The reader has a second question.  Can a person sincerely  pray in a secular way?  Suppose a person comes to believe by some combination of the arguments mentioned that there must be a being, external to the universe, on which it depends for its existence and nature.  Suppose the person prays to this God.  Is the person engaged in a secular act?

No. Prayer is a specifically religious act.  The theistic arguments operate on the discursive plane to satisfy a theoretical need.  Indeed they are often denigrated on the ground that the God they prove is a mere 'God of the philosophers' and not 'the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.'  Even the great Pascal makes this mistake.  See Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers. 

There can't be two or more gods, but there can be two or more ways of approaching one and the same God.  I count four: philosophy (reason), religion (faith), mysticism (intellectual intuition), and morality (conscience).

To sum up.  From secular starting points one can reason to something 'out of this world.'  But to come into relation with this Something requires religious and mystical and moral practices that cannot be called secular. 

Nagel's Reason for Rejecting Theism

This is the second in a series.  My overview of Thomas Nagel's new book, Mind and Cosmos, is here.

I agree with Nagel that mind is not a cosmic accident.  Mind in all of its ramifications (sentience, intentionality, self-awareness, cognition, rationality, normativity in general) could not have arisen from mindless matter.  To put it very roughly, and in my own way, mind had to be there already and all along in one way or another.  Not an "add-on" as Nagel writes, but "a basic aspect of nature." (16) 

Two ways mind could have been there already and all along are Nagel's panpsychistic way and the theistic way.  My task in this entry is to understand and then evaluate Nagel's reasons for rejecting theism.  

But first let's back up a step and consider the connection between mind and intelligibility.  That the world is intelligible is a presupposition of all inquiry.  The quest for understanding rests on the assumption that the world is understandable, and indeed by us.  The most successful form of this quest is natural science.  The success of the scientific quest is evidence that the presupposition holds and is not merely a presupposition we make.  The scientific enterprise reveals to us an underlying intelligible order of things not open to perception alone, although of course the confirmation of scientific theories requires perception and the various instruments that extend it.

Now what explains this underlying rational order? Two possibilities.  One is that nothing does: it's a brute fact.  It just happens to be the case that the world is understandable by us, but it might not have been.  The rational order of things underpins every explanation but  itself has no explanation.  The other possibility is that the rational order has an explanation, in which case it has an explanation by something distinct from it, or else is self-explanatory.  On theism, the world's  rational order is grounded in the divine intellect and is therefore explained by God.  On what I take to be Nagel's view, the rational order is self-explanatory, a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos.

Nagel views the intelligibility of the world as "itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are." (17).  Now part of the way things are is that they are understandable by us.  Given that the way things are is intelligible, it follows that the intelligibility of the world is self-explanatory or self-grounding.

"The intelligibility of the world is no accident." (17)  The same is true of mind.  The two go together: an intelligible world is one that is intelligible to mind, and mind is mind only if it can 'glom onto' an antecedent order of things.  (This is my way of putting it, not Nagel's!)  Intelligibility is necessarily mind-involving, and mind (apart from mere qualia) is necessarily an understanding of something.  One could say that there is an antecedent community of nature between mind and world which allows mind to have an object to understand and the world to be understandable by mind.  What I am calling the antecedent community of nature between mind and world Nagel expresses by saying that "nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings." (17)

That neither mind nor intelligibility are cosmic accidents, and that they 'go together' as just explained  could be accepted by both Nagelian panpsychists and theists.  So why does Nagel reject theism?

His main reason seems to be couched in the following quotations:

. . . the disadvantage of theism as an answer to the desire for comprehensive understanding is not that it offers no explanations but that it does not do so in the form of a comprehensive account of the natural order. [. . .] But it would not be the kind of understanding that explains how beings like us fit into the world.  The kind of intelligibility that would still be missing is intelligibility of the natural order itself -- intelligibility from within. (25-26)

Nagel does not do a very good job of presenting his argument clearly, but the following is what I take him to be driving at.

Materialism cannot explain the origin of life from inanimate matter, the origin of consciousness from pre-conscious life, or the origin of reason in conscious beings.  Nondeistic theism can explain these crucial transitions by means of divine interventions into the workings of nature.  (Deism would leave the crucial transitions as brute facts and is  rejectable for this reason.)  To subscribe to such interventionist hypotheses, however, is to deny that there is a comprehensive natural order.  Nature would not be intelligible from within itself, in its own terms.  So maybe Nagel's argument could be put like this:

1. Nature is immanently intelligible: it has the source of its intelligibility entirely within itself and not from a source outside itself.

2. On theism, nature is not immanently intelligible: God is the source of nature's intelligibility. (This is because divine intervention is needed to explain the crucial transitions to life, to consciousness, and to reason, transitions which otherwise would be unintelligible.)

Therefore

3. Theism suffers from a serious defect that make it reasonable to pursue a third course, panpsychism, as a way to avoid both materialism and theism.

Now I've put the matter more clearly than Nagel does, but I'd be surprised if this is not what he is arguing, at least on pp 25-26.

As for evaluation, the argument as presented is reasonable but surely not compelling. A theist needn't be worried by it.  He could argue that it begs the question at the first premise. How divine interventions into the course of nature are so much as possible is of course a problem for theists, but Plantinga has an answer for that.  The theist can also go on the attack and mount a critique of panpsychism, a fit topic for future posts. 

There is also the question of why the cosmos exists at all.  It is plausible to maintain that the cosmos is necessarily intelligible, that it wouldn't be a cosmos if it weren't.  But necessary intelligibility is consistent with contingent existence.  Will Nagel say that the cosmos necessarily exists?  How would he ground that?  Panpsychism, if tenable, will relieve us of the dualisms of matter-life, life-consciousness, mind-body.  But it doesn't have the resources to explain the very existence of the cosmos.

Whether Atheism is a Religion

Yesterday I objected to calling leftism a religion.  Curiously, some people call atheism a religion.  I object to that too.

The question as to what religion is is not at all easy to answer.  It is not even clear that the question makes sense.  For when you ask 'What is religion?' you presuppose that it has an essence that can be captured in a definition that specifies necessary and sufficient conditions.  But it might be that the concept religion is a family resemblance concept like the concept game (to invoke Wittgenstein's famous example).  Think of all the different sorts of games there are. Is there any property or set of properties that all games have and that only games have?  Presumably not.  The concept game is a family resemblance concept to which no essence corresponds.  Noted philosophers of religion such as John Hick maintain the same with respect to the concept religion.

If you take this tack, then you can perhaps argue that Marxism and secular humanism and militant atheism are religions.

But it strikes me as decidedly odd to characterize  a militant anti-religionist as having a religion.  Indeed,
it smacks of a cheap debating trick:  "How can you criticize religion when you yourself have a religion?" I prefer to think along the following lines.

Start with belief-system as your genus and then distinguish two species: belief-systems that are theoretical, though they may have practical applications,  and belief-systems that are by their very nature oriented toward action.  Call the latter ideologies.  Accordingly, an ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs.  Then distinguish between religious and non-religious ideologies.  Marxism and militant atheism are non-religious ideologies while the Abrahamic religions and some of the Eastern religions are
religious ideologies.

But this leaves me with the problem of specifying what it is that distinguishes religious from non-religious ideologies.  Perhaps this: all and only religions make reference to a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence.  For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah  is the transcendent reality.  For Taoism, the Tao.  For Hinduism, Brahman.  For Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana.  But I expect the Theravadins to object that nibbana is nothing positive and transcendent, being only the extinguishing or dissolution of the (ultimately illusory) self.  I could of course simply deny that Theravada Buddhism is a religion, strictly speaking.  I could lump it together with Stoicism as a sort of higher psychotherapy, a set of techniques for achieving equanimity.

There are a number of tricky and unresolved issues here, but I see little point in calling militant atheism a religion, though I concede it is like a religion in some ways.

But as I pointed out yesterday, if one thing is like another, that is not to say that the one thing is the other or is a species of the other.

The Pragmatic and the Evidential: Is It Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

Is it ever rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence? If it is never rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence, then presumably it is also never rational to act upon such a belief. For example, if it irrational to believe in God and post-mortem survival, then presumably it is also irrational to act upon those beliefs, by entering a monastery, say. Or is it?

 

W. K. Clifford is famous for his evidentialist thesis that "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." On this way of thinking, someone who fails to apportion belief to evidence violates the ethics of belief, and thereby does something morally wrong. This has been called ethical evidentialism since that claim is that it is morally impermissible to believe on insufficient evidence.  Sufficient evidence is where there is preponderance of evidence.  On ethical evidentialism, then, it is morally permissible for a person to believe that p if and only p is more likely than not on the evidence the person has.

A cognitive evidentialist, by contrast, maintains that one is merely unreasonable to believe beyond a preponderance of evidence.  One then flouts a norm of rationality rather than a norm of morality.

Jeffrey Jordan, who has done good work on this topic, makes a further distinction between absolute and defeasible evidentialism.  The absolute evidentialist holds that the evidentialist imperative applies to every proposition, while the defeasible evidentialist allows exceptions.  Although Clifford had religious beliefs in his sights, his thesis, by its very wording, applies to every sort of belief, including political beliefs and the belief expressed in the Clifford sentence quoted above!  I take this as a refutation of Clifford's evidentialist stringency. For if one makes no exceptions concerning the application of the evidentialist imperative, then it applies also to "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence."  And then the embarrassing question arises as to what evidence once could have for the draconian Cliffordian stricture which is not only a morally normative claim but is also crammed with universal quantifiers.

If I took Clifford seriously I would have to give up most of my beliefs about politics, health, nutrition, economics, history and plenty of other things.  For example, I believe it is a wise course to restrict my eating of eggs to three per week due to their high cholesterol content.  And that's what I do.  Do I have sufficent evidence for this belief? Not at all.  I certainly don't have evidence that entails the belief in question.  What evidence I have makes it somewhat probable.  But more probable than not?  Not clear!  But to be on the safe side I restrict my intake of high-cholesterol foods.   What I give up, namely, the pleasures of bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning,  etc. is paltry in comparison to the possible pay-off, namely living  and blogging to a ripe old age.  Surely there is nothing immoral or irrational in my behavior even though I am flouting Clifford's rule.  And similarly in hundreds of cases.

The Desert Rat

Consider now the case of a man dying of thirst in a desert. He comes upon two water sources. He knows (never mind how) that one is potable while the other is poisonous. But he does not know which is which, and he has no way of finding out. Should the man suspend belief, even unto death, since he has insufficient evidence for deciding between the two water sources?  Let us suppose that our man is a philosopher and thus committed to a life of the highest rationality.

Absolute evidentialism implies that the desert wanderer should suspend judgment and withhold assent: he may neither believe nor disbelieve of either source that it is potable or poisonous on pain of either irrationality or an offence against the ethics of belief.

On one way of looking at the matter, suspension of belief  -- and doing nothing in consequence -- would clearly be the height of irrationality in a case like this.  The desert wanderer must simply drink from one of the sources and hope for the best. Clearly, by drinking from one (but not both) of the sources, his chances of survival are one half, while his chances of survival from drinking from neither are precisely zero. By simply opting for one, he maximizes his chances of reality-contact, and thereby his chances of survival. Surely a man who wants to live is irrational if he fails to perform a simple action that will give him a 50-50 chance of living when the alternative is certain death.

He may be epistemically irrational, but he is prudentially rational.  And in a case like this prudential rationality trumps the other kind.

Cases like this are clear counterexamples to evidentialist theories of rationality according to which rationality requires always apportioning belief to evidence and never believing on insufficient evidence.   In the above case the evidence is the same for either belief and yet it would be irrational to suspend belief. Therefore, rationality for an embodied  human agent (as opposed to rationality for a disembodied transcendental spectator) cannot require the apportioning of belief to evidence in all cases, as Clifford demands. There are situations in which one must decide what to believe on grounds other than the evidential.  Will I believe that source A is potable? Or will I believe that source B is potable? In Jamesian terms the option is live, forced, and momentous. (It is not like the question whether the number of ultimate particles in the universe is odd or even, which is neither live, forced, nor momentous.) An adequate theory of rationality, it would seem, must allow for believing beyond the evidence. It must return the verdict that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. 

But then absolute evidentialism is untenable and we must retreat to defeasible evidentialism.

The New Neighbors

Let us consider another such case. What evidence do I have that my new neighbors are decent people? Since they have just moved in, my evidence base is exiguous indeed and far from sufficient to establish that they are decent people. (Assume that some precisifying definition of 'decent' is on the table.) Should I suspend judgment and behave in a cold, skeptical, stand-offish way toward them? ("Prove that you are not a scumbag, and then I'll talk to you.") Should I demand of them 'credentials' and letters of recommendation before having anything to do with them? Either of these approaches would be irrational. A rational being wants good relations with those with whom he must live in close proximity. Wanting good relations, he must choose means that are conducive to that end. Knowing something about human nature, he knows that 'giving the benefit of the doubt' is the wise course when it comes to establishing relations with other people. If you begin by impugning the integrity of the other guy, he won't like you.  One must assume the best about others at the outset and adjust downwards only later and on the basis of evidence to the contrary. But note that my initial belief that my neighbors are decent people -- a belief that I must have if I am to act neighborly toward them -- is not warranted by anything that could be called sufficient evidence. Holding that belief, I believe way beyond the evidence. And yet that is the rational course.

So again we see that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. A theory of rationality adequate for the kind of beings we are cannot require that belief be always and everywhere apportioned to evidence.

In the cases just mentioned, one is waranted in believing beyond the evidence, but there are also cases in which one is warranted in believing against the evidence.  In most cases, if the available evidence supports that p, then one ought to believe that p.  But consider Jeff Jordan's case of 

The Alpine Hiker

An avalanche has him stranded on a mountainside facing a chasm.  He cannot return the way he came, but if he stays where he is he dies of exposure.  His only hope is to jump the chasm.  The preponderance of evidence is that this is impossible: he has no epistemic reason to think that he can make the jump.  But our hiker knows that what one can do is in part determined by what one believes one can do, that "exertion generally follows belief," as Jordan puts it.  If the hiker can bring himself to believe that he can make the jump, then he increases his chances of making it.  "The point of the Alpine hiker case is that pragmatic belief-formation is sometimes both morally and intellectually permissible."

We should therefore reject absolute evidentialism, both ethical and cognitive.  We should admit that there are cases in which epistemic considerations are reasonably defeated by prudential considerations.

And now we come to the Big Questions.  Should I believe that I am libertarianly free?  That it matters how I live?  That something is at stake in life?  That I will in some way or other be held accountable after death for what I do and leave undone here below?  That God exists?  That I am more than a transient bag of chemical reactions?  That a Higher Life is possible? 

Not only do I not have evidence that entails answers to any of these questions, I probably do not have evidence that makes a given answer more probable than not.  Let us assume that it is not more probable than not that God exists and that I (in consequence) have a higher destiny in communion with God.  

But here's the thing.  I have to believe that I have a higher destiny if I am to act so as to attain it.  It is like the situation with the new neighbors.  I have to believe that they are decent people if I am to act in such a way as to establish good relations with them.  Believing the best of them, even on little or no evidence, is pragmatically useful and prudentially rational. I have to believe beyond the evidence.  Similarly in the Alpine Hiker case.  He has to believe that he can make the jump if he is to have any chance of making it.  So even though it is epistemically irrational for him to believe he can make it on the basis of the available evidence, it is prudentially rational for him to bring himself to believe.  You could say that the leap of faith raises the probability of the leap of chasm.

And what if he is wrong?  Then he dies.  But if he sits down in the snow in despair he also dies, and more slowly.  By believing beyond the evidence he lives better his last moments than he would have by giving up.

Here we have a pragmatic argument that is not truth-sensitive: it doesn't matter whether he will fail or succeed in the jump.  Either way, he lives better here and now if he believes he can cross the chasm to safety.  And this, even though the belief is not supported by the evidence.

It is the same with God and the soul.  The pragmatic argument in favor of them is truth-insensitive: whether or not it is a good argument is independent of whether or not God and the soul are real.  For suppose I'm wrong.  I live my life under the aegis of God, freedom, and immortality, but then one day I die and become nothing.  I was just a bag of chemicals after all.  It was all just a big joke.  Electrochemistry played me for a fool.  So what?  What did I lose by being a believer? Nothing of any value.  Indeed, I have gained value since studies show that believers tend to be happier people.  But if I am right, then I have done what is necessary to enter into my higher destiny.  Either way I am better off than  without the belief in God and the soul.  If I am not better off in this life and the next, then I am better off in this life alone.

I am either right or wrong about God and the soul.  If I am right, and I live my beliefs, then then I have lived in a way that not only makes me happier here and now, but also fits me for my higher destiny.  If I am wrong, then I am simply happier here and now.

So how can I lose?  Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits. 

The Atheist

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, Volume 12, Part I, p. 96, #14:

He alone can be an atheist who has never experienced a glimpse, or who has been caught and become embedded in a hard dry intellectualism, or in whom ethics and conscience have withered.

The point is quite defensible if put in less ringing terms.  Most atheists have either (1) never had a religious or mystical or paranormal experience, or (2) have succumbed to the hypertrophy of the critical faculty, or (3) are bereft of conscience or moral sense, or all three or any two of the above.

Ad (1).  A prosaic fellow, earth-bound, who believes only in the visible, the tangible, and the edible, who has never had an unusual experience of the the sort that intimates a reality beyond the sensible, or beyond the grossly sensible, will of course not be inclined to take seriously the claims of religion or the beliefs in God and the soul.  He believes in what the outer senses reveal to him and will be inclined to dismiss as incredible the belief that there exist  things external to his consciousness that are not certifiable by the five outer senses or by the instrumental extensions (telescopes, etc.) of the five external senses.  If he had had a mystical experience or a religious experience or a paranormal experience such as an out-of-body experience then he might have been budged from his narrow empiricism.  But lacking these sorts of experience, he sees no need to believe in anything but the objects of sense experience and such scientific posits  as may be necessary to explain their behavior.

Our prosaic worldling's attitude is not irrational.  He bases himself on what is given, but what is given to him are only the deliverances of the outer senses. He is aware of various a posteriori arguments for the existence of God but they find no purchase with him.   For the sheer obtrusiveness of the sense world makes it impossible for him to believe in anything beyond it.  And in a battle between the massive testimony, at every waking hour, of this gnarly world of time and change, and the output of abstract reasoning, the former is sure to win in the mind of our sense-bound worldling.  And so he uses his intellect to resist the arguments, making of each modus ponens a modus tollens.

And of course there is that not unimportant matter of our worldling's enslavement to the pleasures of the flesh.    As Plato observed, each pleasure and each pain does its bit to pin the soul to the body so securely and in such a manner that nothing can be real to such an enslaved soul except that which has a bodily nature. (Phaedo St. 83) Our man may even have had a mystical or religious or paranormal experience or two; but they will be no match for his ground-conviction of the ultimate reality of the material world, a conviction made impossible to break because of his attachment to sensuous pleasure.

Ad (2).  A dessicated intellect honed on the whetstone of analysis and powered by the will not to believe will have no trouble finding reasons for disbelief.  Anything can be argued, and any argument can be turned aside.  Reason in us is a frail reed  indeed, easily suborned by the passions and other irrational factors.

Ad (3).  Can an atheist be moral?  Well of course.  There are plenty of atheists who are more moral that some theists, e.g., Muslim terrorists. A different and much more interesting question is whether atheists are justified in being moral.  I pursue this question in Sam Harris on Whether Atheists are Evil.  And then there is the matter of conscience.  What exactly is it?  Atheists are typically naturalists.  Is there a decent naturalistic theory of conscience?  Could there be?  Or is the fact of conscience in us not an indicator of our higher origin?  And so while it is not true, pace Brunton, that atheists lack a conscience, I would argue that (i) their atheism prevents them from fully plumbling the depths of its deliverances, and (ii) they are in no position to provide an adequate theory of conscience and its normativity. 

Atheist Blogger Swims the Tiber

Formerly atheist blogger Leah Libresco reports that she has converted to Catholicism.

That's quite a shift.  Typically,  the terminus a quo of Tiber swimmers is either generic theism or mere Christianity (in C. S. Lewis' sense) or some Protestant sect.  Seismic is the shift from out-and-out God denial to acceptance of an extremely specific conception of God.

How specific? 

The God of Catholicism is of course a Trinity: one God in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. (It was 'Holy Ghost' still in the 'fifties; the arguably ruinous Vatican II reforms of the 'sixties replaced 'Ghost' with 'Spirit.')  The Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, or Logos (Word), entered human history at a particular time in a particular place in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  This is the doctrine of the Incarnation.  God, or rather God the Son, became man.  "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  To do so, Jesus had to be born of a woman in that humble manner common to all of us, inter faeces et urinam, and yet without an earthly father.  Thus arises the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. But since the God-Man  is perfectly sinless, he canot be born of a woman bearing the taint of Original Sin.  Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception:  Mary, the mother of God, was born without Original Sin.  So far, five dogmas that go beyond generic Western monotheism: Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Original Sin, Immaculate Conception.  See Trinity and Incarnation  and Original Sin categories for some details.

I have gone only a about a third of the way into the specificity of the Catholic God-conception, but far enough for one to see how dogmatically rich it is.

Now the more dogmatically rich a religion, the more specific its claims, the harder it will be to accept.  To be an intellectually honest Roman Catholic, for example, one must accept not only the above dogmas but a number of others besides.  These extremely specific dogmas are stumbling blocks to many thinking people.  (Of course, the same problem arises with other doctrinally rich belief systems such as Communism.)

For some of us who were raised in the Roman church, the dogmas and their presuppositions beg give rise to questions that we simply must get clear about.  (We cannot merely go along to get along, or participate in rites and rituals the theological foundations of which are murky.  Example: to take communion when Transubstantiation beggars understanding.)  And so some of us become philosophers.  But any movement towards Athens is a movement away from Jerusalem . . . .

But it's Saturday night, time to punch the clock, time for my once-a-week ration of tequila, and time for Saturday Night at the Oldies.  Tomorrow's another day.

Can Theistic Arguments Deliver More Than Plausibility?

James N. Anderson writes,

. . . a good theistic argument doesn’t have to be irrefutable, but surely we should expect the conclusions of our arguments to rise above the level of mere plausibility. If indeed the heavens declare the glory of God (Ps. 19:1), and God’s existence can be “clearly perceived” from the creation (Rom. 1:20), it would appear that God has given humans something stronger than “clues” about his existence.

I tend to differ with Professor Anderson on this point.  I don't believe theistic arguments can deliver more than plausibility. Here below we are pretty much in the dark.  Just as our wills are weak and our hearts divided by disordered and inordinate loves, our minds are clouded.  The existence of God is not a plain fact, but the infirmity of reason is.  The believer hopes that light will dawn, fitfully and partially in  this life, and more fully if not completely in the next.  But he doesn't know this, nor can he prove it.  That there is Divine Light remains a matter of faith, hope, and yearning.  There is light enough in this life to render rational our faith, hope, and yearning.  But there is also darkness enough to render rational doubt and perhaps despair.  The individual must decide what he will believe and how he will live.  He remains free and at risk of being wrong.  There are no compelling arguments one way or the other when it comes to God and the soul. 

If a black cat jumps on my lap in a well-lit room, I have no doxastic 'wiggle room' as to whether a cat is on my lap.  It's not the same with God.  I don't believe God's existence can be "clearly perceived" from the existence or order of the natural world.  What is "clearly perceived" leaves me quite a lot of doxastic wiggle room.

I develop this thought in Is There Any Excuse for Unbelief?  Romans 1: 18-20.

A Temple to Atheism in the Heart of London?

Alain de Botton's proposal  to enshrine atheistic and this-worldly values has raised the hackles of Richard Dawkins on the ground that "the money was being misspent and that a temple of atheism was a contradiction in terms."  If I were an an atheist, I would support, or at least not oppose, de Botton's idea.  It is the negativism of the Dawkins Gang that turns many away from the New Atheism, a virulent example being A. C. Grayling's rant against religion as child abuse. 

Necessary Being: A Note on a Post by James Barham

In the context of a reply to a "nasty attack on [Alvin] Plantinga by Jerry Coyne that cannot go unanswered," James Barham explains why he is an atheist:

The other reason I balk [at accepting a theism like that of Plantinga's] is that I can’t help suspecting there is a category mistake involved in talking about the “necessity” of the existence of any real thing, even a ground of being. When we speak of the ground of being’s existing “necessarily,” perhaps we are conflating the nomological sense of “necessity”—in the earth’s gravitational field an unsupported object necessarily accelerates at 32 feet per second squared—with the logical sense of the word—if all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then necessarily Socrates is mortal.

Many experience intellectual discomfort at the thought of a being that is, as Barham says, real (as opposed, presumably, to ideal or abstract) but yet exists of broadly logical (metaphysical) necessity.  To discuss this with clarity I suggest we drop 'real' and use 'concrete' instead.  So our question is whether it is coherent to suppose that there exists a concrete being that necessarily exists, where the necessity in question is broadly logical.  The question is not whether it is true, but whether it is thinkable without broadly logical contradiction, and without 'category mistake.'   But what does 'concrete' mean?  It does not mean 'material' or 'physical.' Obviously, no material being could be a necessary being. (Exercise for the reader: prove it!)  Here are a couple of definitions:

D1. X is concrete =_df X is causally active or passive.
D2. X is abstract =_df X is causally inert, i.e., not concrete.

The terms of the concrete-abstract distinction are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive:  everything is one or the other, and nothing  is both.  And the same goes for the physical-nonphysical distinction.  The distinctions are not equivalent, however: they 'cut perpendicular' to each other.  There are (or at least it is coherent to suppose that there could be) nonphysical concreta.  Whether there are physical abstracta is a nice question I will set aside for now.

Plantinga's God, if he exists, is concrete, wholly immaterial, and necessarily existent.  Obviously, one cannot imagine such a being.  (A point of difference with Russell's celestial teapot, by the way.) But I find Plantinga's God to be conceivable without contradiction or confusion or conflation or category mistake.   Barham thinks otherwise, suggesting that the notion of a necessarily existent concretum trades on a confusion of nomological necessity with logical necessity.  I find no such confusion, but I do find a confusion in Barham's thinking.

First of all, there is a genuine distinction between nomological necessity and logical necessity. Barham's sentence about an unsupported object in Earth's gravitational field is nomologically necessary, but logically contingent.  It is the latter because there is no logical contradiction in the supposition that a body in Earth's gravitational field accelerate at a rate other than 32 ft/sec^2.   The laws of nature could have been other  than what they are.  But what does this have to do with the possibility of the coherence of the notion of a concrete individual that exists in all broadly logically possible worlds if it exists in one such world?  Nothing that I can see.  Barham points, in effect, to a legitimate difference between:

1. Necessarily, an unsupported object in Earth's gravitation  falls at the rate of 32ft/sec²
and
2. Necessarily, if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal.

The difference is in type of modality.  In (1) the modality is nomological while in (2) it is logical.  Both cases are cases of de dicto modality: the modal operator operates upon a dictum or proposition.  But when we speak of God as a necessary being, we are not speaking of the necessary truth of a proposition, whether the necessity be nomological or logical.  We are speaking of the necessary existence of a 'thing,' a res. Accordingly, the modality is de re. So I am wondering whether Barham is succumbing to de dicto-de re confusion.  Of course, there is the proposition

3. Necessarily, God exists

where the necessity in question is broadly logical.  The truth-maker of this proposition, however, is God himself, a necessarily existent concrete individual.

My point, then , is that there is no logical mistake involved in the concept of God as necessary being, no confusion, no category mistake.  Even if the concept fails of instantiation, the concept itself is epistemically in the clear.

Barham will no doubt continue to be an atheist.  But he ought to drop the above accusation of category mistake.  He can do better. He could argue that all modality is de dicto.  Or that all necessity is linguistic/conventional in origin.  Or he could give J. N. Findlay's 1948 ontological disproof, which I will feature in my next post.  

I should add that Barham's post, What Happened to Jerry Coyne's Sensus Divinitatis, only a small part of which I examined above, is extremely good and should be carefully read.

David Horowitz

In this video clip, Horowitz gets a Muslim Jew-hater to show her true colors.

Here he is on the Dennis Prager show discussing his new book, A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in this Life and the Next.

Peter Hitchens on an Evening Without Richard Dawkins

Excerpt (emphasis added)

The most moving – and most enjoyable – contribution of the evening came from the marvellous Dr Stephen Priest, simultaneously diffident and extremely powerful. I won’t try to summarise it because I’m sure I’d fail. I hope it will eventually make it on to the web. It reminded me of why I had once wanted to study philosophy, a desire which faded rapidly when I was exposed to English Linguistic Philosophy and various other strands of that discipline which made me wonder if I had wandered into a convention of crossword-compilers, when what I wanted was to seek the origins of the universe.

Many of you will know that in his failure to face William Lane Craig, Professor Dawkins was not alone. Several other members of Britain’s Atheist Premier League found themselves unable or unwilling (or both) to take him on.

The important thing about this is that what Craig does is simple. He uses philosophical logic, and a considerable knowledge of physics, to expose the shallowness of Dawkins’s arguments. I would imagine that an equally serious Atheist philosopher would be able to give him a run for his money, but Dawkins isn’t that. He would have been embarrassingly out of his depth.

It would be interesting to compile a list of those who were dissuaded, or almost dissuaded, from pursuing philosophy by their encounter with the Ordinary Language movement.  Hector-Neri Castañeda  once told me that the dominance of the latter in the '50s and '60s almost convinced  him to drop philosophy as a profession abd go to law school.  Not being a native English speaker, he could not hope to contribute to discussions in which the subtleties of ordinary English usage are put under the microsope.  But then things changed in that wild decade of the '60s in which so many things changed, the epigoni of Wittgenstein went into eclipse, and systematic philosophy was back on track and attractive of the better heads.

My posts on OLP are collected in the Ordinary Language Philosophy category.

The Dog Delusion

Image swiped from Reppert's site.  But the following is mine:

 

 

Wherein Kitty learns that there's probably no Dog and that she should stop worrying and enjoy her life.

Some Atheists

Those atheists who mock religion mock the craving for ultimate meaning.  So no matter how clever they are they are quite stupid when it comes to the human heart.  Atheism in these mockers is rooted in spiritual vacancy.

Were the Greatest Philosophers Theists or Atheists?

To answer the title question, we must first answer the logically prior question as to who the greatest philosophers were. But this presupposes an answer to the equally vexing question of who counts as  a philosopher. Heidegger published two fat volumes on Nietzsche, but dismissed Kierkegaard as a mere "religious writer." Others will go him one better, dismissing both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche -- and Heidegger as well. Was Aquinas a philosopher?  Or was he merely a brilliant man who used philosophical tools to shore up beliefs of an extraphilosophical provenience, beliefs that he wouldn't have abandoned even if he hadn't able to find philosophical justifications for them?

Note also that the question as to who counts as a gen-u-ine philosopher presupposes an answer to the hairy and hoary question as to what philosophy is. 

In any case, here is my ranking of the philosophers that made it onto a BBC shortlist from a few years ago. The ranking is mine; the list is from the BBC.

1. Plato (c. 429-347 BC)
2. Aristotle (384-322 BC)
3. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274)
4. René Descartes (1596-1650)
5. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
6. Socrates (c. 470-399 BC)
7. Benedictus de Spinoza  (1632-1677)
8. David Hume (1711-1776)
9. Epicurus (341-270 BC)
10. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
11. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
12. Arthur  Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
13. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
14. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
15. Karl Marx (1818-1883)
16. Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970)
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
18. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
19. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
20.  Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994)

Here are my criteria in order of importance:

1. Truth of the philosopher's conclusions
2. Belief in reason's power to discover some of the ultimate truth
3. Rigor of argumentation
4. Appreciation of the limits of reason
5. Depth and centrality of the problems addressed
6. Breadth and systematicity of vision
7. Originality
8. Long-term influence

The first seven philosophers on my list are great philosophers, the rest are important but not great. Kierkegaard, for example, though original and influential, and (too) appreciative of the limits of reason falls short on the other criteria.

It goes without saying that my ordering of the philosophers, my criteria, and their ordering are highly subjective. They reflect my interests, my biases, and my own philosophical conclusions. For example, my primary interest in a philosopher is not in his literary merit. If that is your primary interest, then you will probably rank Kierkegaard and Nietzsche ahead of Kant. Indeed, if you do not, then you have very poor taste!

You will notice that I am biased toward the rationalists. Thus all the philosophers I call great are either rationalists, or like Aristotle and Kant, have a strong rationalist side to their thinking. And when I   list truth as my numero uno criterion, it is clear that that is truth as I take it to be.

On the score of truth,  Nietzsche really falls short. For not only is there little if any philosophical truth in his writings, the poor soul denies the very existence of truth.

When one studies the first seven on the list, one actually learns something about the world. But when one reads Nietzsche and (later) Wittgenstein, one learns highly original and fascinating opinions that have little or no chance of being true. One learns from them, and from some others on the list, how NOT to do philosophy. But that too is something worth knowing! So they have their place and their use.

Now to our question whether the greatest philosophers were theists or atheists. The greatest philosophers on my list are Plato, Aristotle,  Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Socrates, and Spinoza. All of these are theists  of one sort or another.  But even if Spinoza is excluded, that leaves six out of seven. And if you argue that Aristotle's Prime Mover is not God in any serious sense, then I've still got five out of seven.

If you say I rigged my list so that theists come out on top, I will deny the charge and argue that I used independent criteria (listed above). But if you disagree my assessment, I will consider it par for the course.

Defeasible Presumption and Evidence: A Confusion in McInerny

A defeasible presumption in favor of proposition p is not evidence for p.  In a legal proceeding there is a defeasible presumption of innocence (POI): one is presumed innocent until proven guilty.  For example, Jones, who has been charged with Smith's murder, is presumed to be not guilty until such time as the presumption is defeated.  But this presumption is not evidence of Jones' innocence.  It is a rule that governs the adducing and evaluating of evidence.  The attorney for the accused does not attempt to prove or provide evidence for Jones' innocence; his task is merely to rebut the positive arguments of the prosecutor.  Thus POI does not play an evidential role but a procedural role: it amounts to a placing of ther onus probandi on the prosecutor.

In Why the Burden of Proof is on the Atheist, Ralph McInerny seems not to be clear about this ; he seems to confuse an argument for theism with an argument for a  presumption in favor of theism. He writes,

I am asking whether the skeptic is justified in calling into question the truth of 'God exists.' Why not put the burden on him? Why not insist that he is attempting to convict of irrationality generations of human beings, rational animals like himself, whole cultures for whom belief in the divine and worship are part of what it is to be a human being? Were all those millions, that silent majority, wrong? Surely to think something against the grain of the whole tradition of human experience is not to be done lightly. It is, need one say it, presumptuous to pit against that past one's own version of the modern mind. This suggests that the present generation is in agreement on things incompatible with belief in God. Or that all informed people now alive, etc. etc. Meaning, I suppose, that all present day skeptics are skeptics.

Is there thus a prima facie argument against atheism drawn from tradition, the common consent of mankind both in the past and in the present time? I think so.

In this passage McInerny appears to be confusing the question whether there is a presumption in favor of theism (so that the onus probandi rests on the atheist) because of common consent with the question whether common consent amounts to an argument for theism.  That God exists is a substantive claim made within the dialectical situation in which theist and atheist confront each other; that the burden of proof rests on the one who denies it is a procedural claim that helps define the dialectical situation.

McInerny begins by speaking of shifting the burden of proof onto the skeptic but ends by speaking of an argument against atheism.  It may be that common consent is a good reason for presuming theism to be true until shown to be false  without being a good reason for the truth of theism.

What is Behind the Terminological Mischief of the 'Negative Atheists'?

Joseph A. suggests it's all about politics:

 

You ask in your latest post "So what's going on here?"

 

The New Atheists are largely motivated by politics, not philosophy. So, what they try to zero in on is the most effective way to advance their cause, in the public and private sphere. And that means being on defense as little as possible, honesty or reasonableness be damned.

 

It's an anecdote, but it's been my experience that New Atheists (who seem to principally be behind all these weird re-definitions of atheism) hate being on defense. That's the fun of being a skeptic after all -- you risk nothing, and whoever you're talking with risks everything --- so long as you can frame the conversation as "You are making a claim, and I am not". You can criticize, mock, argue, whatever you wish, and so long as you avoid the right moves, you'll have no risk of having the same come back to you. But key to that is to avoid being thought of as making claims. Someone who says "There is no God", makes a claim. Therefore, that position is avoided, at least superficially. (In my opinion, often dishonestly.)

 

After all, who wants to be in the hot seat? And where would any person who wants to advance their political cause rather be - the questioned, or the questioner? Cynically, and spoken more out of personal experience than out of any hard data, but that's how I see the answer to your question. This is all about politics, and it has been from the start. (I'm differentiating here between actual agnostics or more intellectual atheists, and New Atheists.)

 

This is as good an explanation as I can think of.  The point, I take it, is not that the New Atheism as such is solely politically motivated -- which is  not the case -- but that the 'redefinitional gambit' is.

Against Terminological Mischief: 'Negative Atheism' and 'Negative Nominalism'

This from the seemingly reputable site, Investigating Atheism:

More recently, atheists have argued that atheism only denotes a lack of theistic belief, rather than the active denial or claims of certainty it is often associated with.

I'm having a hard time seeing what point there could be in arguing that "atheism only denotes a lack of theistic belief."  Note first that atheism cannot be identified with the lack of theistic belief, i.e., the mere absence of the belief that God exists, for that would imply that cabbages and tire irons are atheists.  Note second that it won't do to say that atheism is the lack of theistic belief in persons, for there are persons incapable of forming beliefs.  Charitably interpreted, then, the idea must be that atheism is the lack of theistic belief in persons capable of forming and maintaining beliefs. 

But this cannot be right either, and for a very simple reason.  Atheism is something people discuss, debate, argue for, argue against, draw conclusions from, believe, disbelieve, entertain, and so on.  Atheism, in other words, is a PROPOSITION: it is something that can be either true or false, that can be the object of such propositional attitudes as belief and disbelief, and can stand in such logical relations to other propositions as entailment, consistency, and inconsistency.  But one cannot discuss, debate, argue for, . . . believe, etc. a lack of something.  Atheism redefined as the lack of theistic belief is a PROPERTY of certain persons. Now a proposition is not a property.  Atheism is a proposition and  for this reason cannot be redefined as a property.

Someone who understands this might nevertheless maintain that 'negative atheism' is a proposition, namely, the proposition that there are people capable of forming and maintaining beliefs who simply lack the belief that God exists.  Admittedly, one could use 'atheism' as the label for the proposition that there are such people.  But then atheism so defined would be trivially true.  After all, no one denies that there are people capable of beliefs who lack the belief that God exists.  Furthermore, if 'atheism' is so defined, then theism would be the view that there are persons capable of belief who have the belief that God exists.  But then theism, too, would be trivially true.  And if both are true, then they cannot be logical contradictories of each other as they must be if the terms are to mean anything useful.

Now what is the point of the terminological mischief perpetrated by these 'negative atheists'?  It is terminological mischief because we have just seen it ruin two perfectly good words, 'atheism' and 'theism.'  If atheism and theism are worth discussing, then atheism is the view that God does not exist and theism is the view that God does exist. ((I am assuming that by 'God' we understand that being who is the main target of the venom of militant atheists, namely, the God of the Abrahamic religions. We are not talking about Spinoza's deus sive natura or anything of that order.)

Consider the parallel case of a nominalist who for whatever reason does not want to be taken to be asserting any positive thesis.  So instead of adhering to the standard understanding of 'nominalism' according to which it is the view that there are no universals and that particulars alone exist, he proposes to redefine 'nominalism' as the absence of the belief that there are universals. 

But now the same problems arise.  One cannot argue for or against nominalism if it is merely a lack of belief.  And if you say that nominalism is the proposition that some people lack the belief in universals then that is true, but not worth arguing for or against.  One does not argue for or against a trivially true thesis that all accept.

So what's going on here? 

Are Atheists Theologians?

This from a reader:

I’m e-mailing you with this question because it’s bothered me for a while and I think you are more than capable of giving me a better understand of it. “Can atheists rationally ignore theology? Further, if they do need to study it, quite how much should they study, and which aspect(s) of it?” Many atheists think that studying theology would simply waste their time, whereas I now think that no rational person’s atheism is complete without engaging with the best theology on offer.

Well of course you are right:  any atheist who does not engage with a sophisticated conception of God is simply attacking a straw man and may be ignored for that very reason.  I see little point is discussions with atheists who liken God to a flying spaghetti monster or a celestial teapot.  Let them first show that they have mastered the complexities of a sophisticated God conception, and that they have respect for, and some understanding of, the religious sensibility, and then we will talk with them. If they polemicize, or are disrespectful or dismissive, then they are best ignored.

My own position is that atheism is a kind of rival theology (atheology?), just as every disbelief is a kind of rival belief, and that no atheist can rationally afford to ignore theology.

Here you have to be careful.  Suppose S disbelieves that p.  (For example, Jones disbelieves that Osama is dead.) It does not follow that Jones believes that ~p.  For it may be that S neither believes that p nor believes that ~p.  If one neither accepts nor rejects the proposition that Osama is dead, then one could be said to disbelieve that Osama is dead without believing that he is alive.  So there are two modes of disbelief with respect to a proposition p.  Either one believes that ~p or one suspends judgment with respect to p.  So I don't agree that every disbelief is a kind of rival belief.

In fact, every atheist is implicitly a theologian. For instance, Thomas Aquinas believes that God is simple, and Richard Dawkins believes that God is complex. Dawkins and Aquinas seem to compete in the same arena and talk on the same subject, so aren’t they both theologians, albeit rival ones? Further, every informed atheist must hold that the arguments that are meant to establish the existence of God fail. To think this is to engage positively with theology. Not to think this is to fail to rationally found one’s atheism. An atheist who is ignorant of theology, in my view, is rather like someone who disbelieves in the planets but is ignorant of astronomy. Atheists who do not take God and theology seriously do not take their own atheism seriously either.

Here again you have to be careful.  It is not as if there exists an x such that x = God and that Aquinas and Dawkins have contradictory beliefs about this one entity, x.  They are not disagreeing in the way two theologians might disagree over say,  divine foreknowledge or the filioque, or divine simplicity.   These theologians disagree, not about the existence of God, but about his exact nature.  By contrast, Aquinas and Dawkins are not presupposing a common subject matter about whose attributes they disagree.  So it is highly misleading if not outright wrong to say that Aquinas and Dawkins are rival theologians.  For Aquinas, theology has a subject matter; for Dawkins it does not.  So they do not "talk on the same subject."

It helps if you distinguish concepts of God from God.  For Aquinas, there really is an entity which some of those concepts are concepts of, even though no concept could be adequate to the divine reality.  For Dawkins, however, nothing that could reasonably count as a God concept is a concept of anything.

I think you have the right idea, but you are putting it in the wrong way.  You are right that serious and intellectually responsible atheists must address themselves to the most sophisticated conceptions of theists.  In this sense they must "engage positively with theology."  But that is not to say that "every atheist is implicitly a theologian."  Atheists deny the existence of God.  So for them there cannot be any theology, any study of God, as a legitimate inquiry into a domain of reality.  And please note that one can deny the existence of God without in any obvious way presupposing the existence of God.  How?  In the same way one denies the existence of Pegasus without presupposing the existence of Pegasus.  One cannot predicate nonexistence of Pegasus without presupposing the existence of Pegasus.  But one can predicate noninstantiation of the concept winged horse of such and such a description without presupposing the existence of Pegasus,  And so it is with the denial of God.  The atheist simply claims that no God concept is instantiated.  So I deny that atheism is a species of theology.  It is a rejection of all theology.

I also deny here and here that atheism is a religion, though I grant that it is like a religion in some ways. 

Practical and Evidential Aspects of Rationality: Is it Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

I need to get clearer about the rationality of beliefs versus the rationality of actions. One question is whether it is ever rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence. And if it is never rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence, then presumably it is also never rational to act upon such a belief. For example, if it irrational to believe in God and post-mortem survival, then presumably it is also irrational to act upon those beliefs, by entering a monastery, say. Or is it? 

 

W. K. Clifford is famous for his evidentialist thesis that "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." On this way of thinking, someone who fails to apportion belief to evidence violates the ethics of belief, and thereby does something morally wrong. Although Clifford had religious beliefs in his sights, his thesis, by its very wording, applies to every sort of belief, including political beliefs and the belief expressed in the Clifford sentence lately quoted!  I take this as a refutation of Clifford's evidentialist stringency. 

 If I took Clifford seriously I would have to give up most of my beliefs about politics, health, nutrition, economics, history and a crapload of other things.  For example, I believe it is a wise course to restrict my eating of eggs to three per week due to their high cholesterol content.  And that's what I do.  Do I have sufficent evidence for this belief? Not at all.  I certainly don't have evidence that entails the belief in question.  What evidence I have makes it somewhat probable.  But more probable than not?  Not clear!  But to be on the safe side I restrict my intake of high-cholesterol foods.  It's a bit like Pascal's Wager.  What I give up, namely, the pleasures of bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning,  etc. is paltry in comparison to the possible pay-off, namely living  and blogging to a ripe old age.

And then there is a problem  whether Clifford has sufficient evidence for his evidentialist thesis.  It is obvious to me that he doesn't but I'll leave that for the reader to work out. 

Consider now the case of a man dying of thirst in a desert. He comes upon two water sources. He knows (never mind how) that one is potable while the other is poisonous. But he does not know which is which, and he has no way of finding out. Should the man suspend belief, even unto death, since he has insufficient evidence for deciding between the two water sources?

On one way of looking at the matter, suspension of belief would clearly be the height of irrationality. The desert wanderer must simply drink from one of the sources and hope for the best. Clearly, by drinking from one (but not both) of the sources, his chances of survival are one half, while his chances of survival from drinking from neither are precisely zero. By simply opting for one, he maximizes his chances of reality-contact, and thereby his chances of survival. Surely a man who wants to live is irrational if he fails to perform a simple action that will give him a 50-50 chance of living when the alternative is certain death.

Cases like this are clear counterexamples to theories of rationality according to which rationality requires always apportioning belief to evidence. In the above case the evidence is the same for either belief and yet it would be irrational to suspend belief. Therefore, rationality for a human agent (as opposed to rationality for a disembodied transcendental spectator) cannot require the apportioning of belief to evidence in all cases, as Clifford demands. There are situations in which one must decide what to believe. Will I believe that source A is potable? Or will I believe that source B is potable? In Jamesian terms, the option is live, forced, and momentous. (It is not like the question whether the number of ultimate particles in the universe is odd or even.) An adequate theory of rationality, it would seem, must allow for believing beyond the evidence. It must return the verdict that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational.

Let us consider another such case. What evidence do I have that my new neighbors are decent people? Since they have just moved in, my evidence base is exiguous indeed and far from sufficient to establish that they are decent people. (Assume that some precisifying definition of 'decent' is on the table.) Should I suspend judgment and behave in a cold, skeptical, stand-offish way toward them? ("Prove that you are not a scumbag, and then I'll talk to you.") Should I demand of them 'credentials' and letters of recommendation before having anything to do with them? Either of these approaches would be irrational. A rational being wants good relations with those with whom he must live in close proximity. Wanting good relations, he must choose means that are conducive to that end. Knowing something about human nature, he knows that 'giving the benefit of the doubt' is the wise course when it comes to establishing relations with other people. If you begin by impugning the integrity of the other guy, he won't like you.  One must assume the best about others at the outset and adjust downwards only later and on the basis of evidence to the contrary. But note that my initial belief that my neighbors are decent people -- a belief that I must have if I am to act neighborly toward them -- is not warranted by anything that could be called sufficient evidence. Holding that belief, I believe way beyond the evidence. And yet that is the rational course.

So again we see that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. A theory of rationality adequate for the kind of beings we are cannot require that belief be always and everywhere apportioned to evidence.

And now we come to the Big Questions.  Should I believe that I am libertarianly free?  That it matters how I live?  That something is at stake in life?  That I will in some way or other be held accountable for what I do and leave undone?  That God exists?  That I am more than a transient bag of chemical reactions?  That a Higher Life is possible? 

Not only do I not have evidence that entails answers to any of these questions, I probably do not have evidence that makes a given answer more probable than not. 

But here's the thing.  I have to believe that I have a higher destiny if I am to act so as to attain it.  It is like the situation with the new neighbors.  I have to believe that they are decent people if I am to act in such a way as to establish good relations with them.  I have to believe beyond the evidence.

Suppose I'm wrong.  I live my life under the aegis of God, freedom, and immortality, but then one day I die and become nothing.  I was just a bag of chemicals after all.  It was all just a big joke.  Electrochemistry played me for a fool.  So what?  What did I lose by being a believer? Nothing of any value.  But if I am right, then I have done what is necessary to enter into my higher destiny.

Why I am a Quasi-Atheist*

A guest post by Peter Lupu with some comments in blue by Bill Vallicella.

[This essay is dedicated to the memory of Ann Freitag, my significant other, who passed away on April 17, 2010, 11:30am. She gave me two priceless gifts: Herself and a deep understanding that the love of life is not a mere gesture, but a way of loving every living being.]

The title of this essay expresses what it is like for me to experience an ever ascending spiral of theistic aspirations inhibited by atheist inclinations, and vice versa. My predicament is both intellectual as well as existential. It is a blending of the two that fuels a restless existence, one which propels me to journey on this ascending spiral of unfamiliar territory towards an unknown destination.

I. Why I am not an Atheist

Let me begin with atheism. Atheism is first and foremost a rejection of theism. However, the rejection of theism itself springs from several often misunderstood sources. A deep and personal disappointment with a particular religion frequently converts into a fervent rejection of theism and all that it means. A second source may begin with a genuine delight in the achievements of science which now and then, and quite unnoticeably, spills over into a materialistic metaphysics. The latter, in turn, bluntly opposes theism’s commitment to a transcendent reality. Thus, what starts as a delight in the potential of inquiry to unlock the mysteries of the physical universe migrates into an impatient and often mocking rejection of anything non-physical. Theism is a casualty of such a sentiment.

God, Probability, and Noncontingent Propositions

Matt Hart comments:

. . . most of what we conceive is possible. So if we say that

1) In 80% of the cases, if 'Conceivably, p' then 'Possibly, p'
2) Conceivably, God exists
Ergo,
3) Pr(Possibly, God exists) = 80%
4) If 'Possibly, God exists' then 'necessarily, God exists'
Ergo,
5) Pr(Necessarily, God exists) = 80%,

we seem to get by.

I had made the point that conceivability does not entail possibility.  Hart agrees with that, but seems to think that conceivability is nondemonstrative evidence of possibility.  Accordingly, our ability to conceive (without contradiction) that p gives us good reason to believe that p is possible.

What is puzzling to me is how a noncontingent proposition can be assigned a probability less than 1.  A noncontingent proposition is one that is either necessary or impossible.  Now all of the following are noncontingent: 

God exists
Necessarily, God exists
Possibly, God exists
God does not exist
Necessarily, God does not exist
Possibly, God does not exist.

I am making the Anselmian assumption that God (the ens perfectissimum, that than which no greater can be conceived, etc.) is a noncontingent being.  I am also assuming that our modal logic is S5.  The characteristic S5 axiom states that Poss p --> Nec Poss p.  S5 includes S4, the characteristic axiom of which is Nec p --> Nec Nec p.  What these axioms say, taken together, is that what's possible and necessary does not vary from possible world to possible world. 

Now Possibly, God exists, if true, is necessarily true, and if false, necessarily false.  (By the characteristic S5 axiom.)  So what could it mean that the probability of Possibly, God exists is .8?  I would have thought that the probability is either 1 or 0.  the same goes for Necessarily, God exists. How  can this proposition have a probability of .8?  Must it not be either 1 or 0?

Now I am a fair and balanced guy, as everyone knows.  So I will deploy the same reasoning against the atheist who cites the evils of our world as nondemonstrative evidence of the nonexistence of God.  I don't know what it means to say that it is unlikely that God exists given the kinds and quantities of evil in our world.  Either God exists necessarily or he is impossible (necessarily nonexistent).  How can you raise the probability  of a necessary truth?  Suppose some hitherto unknown genocide comes to light, thereby adding to the catalog of known evils.  Would that strengthen the case against the existence of God?  How could it?

To see my point consider the noncontingent propositions of mathematics.  They are all of them necessarily true if true.  So *7 + 5 = 12* is necessarily true and *7 + 5 = 11* is necessarily false.  Empirical evidence is irrelevant here.  I cannot raise the probability of the first proposition by adding 7 knives and 5 forks to come up with 12 utensils.  I do not come to know the truth of the first proposition by induction from empirical cases of adding.  It would also be folly to attempt to disconfirm the second proposition by empirical means.

If I can't know that 7 + 5 = 12 by induction from empirical cases, how can I know that possibly, God exists by induction from empirical cases of conceiving?  The problem concerns not only induction, but how one can know by induction a necessary proposition.  Similarly, how can I know that God does not exist by induction from empirical cases of evil?

Of course, *God exists* is not a mathematical proposition.  But it is a noncontingent proposition, which is all I need for my argument.

Finally, consider this.  I can conceive the existence of God but I can also conceive the nonexistence of God.  So plug 'God does not exist' into Matt's argument above.  The result is that probability of the necessary nonexistence of God is .8!

My conclusion:  (a) Conceivability does not entail possibility; (b) in the case of noncontingent propositions, conceivability does not count as nondemonstrative evidence of possibility.

Gratuitous Evil and Begging the Question: Does LAFE Beg the Question?

What is it for an argument to beg the question? I suggest that an argument begs the question if it is impossible to know one of the premises to be true without knowing that the conclusion is true. The simplest question-begging arguments are of the form

p
---
p.

Clearly, every argument of this form is valid, and some arguments of this form are sound. It follows that an argument can be sound and yet probatively worthless. In plain English, no argument of the above form proves its conclusion in the sense of giving a 'consumer' of the argument any reason to accept the conclusion; it rather presupposes its conclusion. One cannot know the premise to be true without knowing that the conclusion is true.

Now consider a richer example: (P1) We are creatures; (P2) There is no creature without a creator; therefore, (C) A creator exists. This argument begs the question in that it is impossible to know that (P1) is true without knowing that (C) is true. For only if I know that a creator exists can I know that I am a creature. The argument is not probative because it presupposes in (P1) what it needs to prove. (Of course, I am assuming that one is not equivocating on 'creature' and that one is using it in the sense in which it must be used for (P2) to be true; if one is equivocating, then naturally the argument is worthless for this reason.)

Now it might occur to someone to wonder whether logical arguments from evil for the nonexistence of God also beg the question. Is there anything to this notion?

Logical arguments from evil start with a fact, the fact of evil. No doubt evils exist. But for evils to prove the nonexistence of the omni-qualified God of traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, these evils must be gratuitous. A gratuitous evil is one that cannot be reconciled with the existence of the omni-qualified God, for example, an evil that God has no morally sufficient reason to permit, or an evil that God cannot prevent because it is the deed of a free agent. A gratuitous evil, then, is one the existence of which is logically inconsistent with the existence of God conceived in the traditional way.

Granted, evils exist. But only gratuitous evils are inconsistent with the existence of God. Only they pose a problem for the existence of an all-good God. Consider the pain of a just punishment, the pain of imprisonment, say, that convinces a miscreant, an armed robber for example, to reform his life. (Few penal punishments are truly rehabilitating, but certainly some are.) The pain of punishment is evil. But in my example, it is necessary for the achievement of a greater good. Thus the evil in question is not gratuitous.

How do we know that there are gratuitous evils? To know this, we would have to know that God does not exist. Thus we would have to know the conclusion of the LAFE to be true in order to know that its key premise -- Gratuitous evils exist -- is true. But this is the very definition of begging the question.

Therefore, it seems that LAFE begs the question. To appreciate my point, compare:

1. If there are gratuitous evils, then God does not exist.

2. If creatures exist, then a creator exists.

Both of these propositions are analytically true. So if one knows that there are gratuitous evils, then one knows that God does not exist. Likewise, if one knows that creatures exist, or that the physical universe is a creation, then one one knows that a creator exists. But how does one know either of these things? Suppose I witness a brutal and unprovoked physical assault on a human being by another human being. Witnessing this, I witness an evil. But by what mark do I recognize the gratuitousness of the evil? By no empirical mark since what I observe is consistent both with the assault's being gratuitously evil and with its being nongratuitously evil.

Something similar holds for (2). How do I know that what I see, mountains and valleys, cacti and sky is creation or created nature as opposed to uncreated nature? By what mark do I know that nature has the status of having been created? By no mark.

Return to the brutal assault. Imagine it to be perpetrated against a loved one. Atheists will naturally take such crimes as 'proof' that there is no God. But it is no more 'proof' than the existence and order of nature is 'proof' of an intelligent creator. Both athetist and theist interpret the data in the light of a worldview that precedes the data and is imposed upon them. Each can fit the data into his scheme. But fitting data into a scheme is not the same as data proving a scheme. Thus the brutal assault fits the atheist's scheme but does not prove it, and the existence and order of nature fits the theist's scheme but does not prove it.

So here is my challenge to Peter and others: explain how LAFE does not beg the question against the theist.

From the Mail: Bryan Magee on Kant and the Theistic Proofs

Dear Dr. Vallicella,

I am of the understanding that one of your post-graduate degrees focussed on Kant. With your knowledge of said philosopher I wonder if I might trouble you to answer a few questions for me?

These questions pertain to Kant's criticism's of the cosmological argument for God's existence. I know that this argument comes in three basic forms: Leibnizian, Thomistic, and Kalam. Did Kant direct criticism to all three versions? Brian Magee has stated, "The fact simply is that Kant has demolished the traditional 'proofs' of God." (Confessions of A Philosopher, p.198) Many other credentialed philosophers make similar claims. In your view, is Magee's strident assertion justified? Do any of Kant's criticism's of the cosmological argument still have force today, or are you of the opinion that the work of recent philosophers has blunted the arguments of the Prussian?

Of course, I don't expect you to provide any counter-arguments to Kant. I am merely curious as to your take on the questions I have asked and I am quite happy for your answer to be brief. Thank you for your time.

Regards,

Stephen Lewin

Dear Mr. Lewin,

Thank you for writing and for reminding me of that delightful book by Bryan Magee.  Unfortunately, the sentence you quote  I do not find on p. 198.  But on p. 156, we read that Kant's philosophy ". . . demolishes many of the most important religious and theological claims . . . ."  On the same page Magee bestows upon Kant the highest praise.  He is "the supreme understander of the problem of human experience," "the supreme clarifier," and "the supreme liberator." For Magee, Manny is the man!

A little farther down on the same page we find your quotation:  "The fact simply is that Kant has demolished the traditional 'proofs' of God."

You ask whether Magee's confident claim is justified.  No, but first a comment on 'demolishes' as it occurs in the above quotations.  Magee uses it in connection both with claims and with arguments.   But to demolish a claim is not the same as to demolish an argument.  Presumably, to demolish a claim such as the claim that God exists would be to show that it is obviously false because ruled out on broadly logical grounds, or else ruled out on the ground that it is inconsistent with some well-known empirical fact or set of empirical facts.  Clearly, Kant does not demolish the claim that God exists in this sense of 'demolish.'  Ditto for the claim that the soul is a simple substance.  Nor is it his intention to demolish these claims.  At most he shows them to be unknowable or unprovable.  And he thinks that is a salutary thing to have shown.  "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith," Kant famously remarks in the preface to the 2nd edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Bxxx).  I suggest that Magee is being sloppy when he speaks of demolishing theological claims.  He may be confusing 'show to be false' with 'show to be unknowable or unprovable.'  I receommend a careful reading of the 1787 preface as a counterbalance to Magee's Kant interpretation as der Alles-Zermalmer, the all-pulverizer.

Now what would it be to demolish an argument?   To demolish an argument is to expose a clear mistake in it such as a formal fallacy or a plainly false premise. I believe that Kant demolished the ontological argument "from mere concepts" which is essentially Descartes' Meditation V ontological argument.  Kant did this by isolating a presupposition of the argument which is plainly false, namely, the proposition that  some concepts are such that, by sheer analysis of their content, one can show that they are instantiated. Surely Kant is right that no concept, not even the concept of God, includes existence.  Interestingly, Aquinas would agree with this. 

But there are modal versions of the ontological argument that are immune to the Kantian critique.  See my "Has the Ontological Argument Been Refuted?" Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110.  As for the cosmological argument, Kant thinks that it depends on the ontological argument and collapses with it.  This is an intricate matter that I cannot go into now.  If you are interested, see my article, "Does the Cosmological Argument Depend on the Ontological?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 4 (October 2000), pp. 441-458. 

Another idea of Kant's is that there cannot be a First Cause because the category of causality has no cognitive employment beyond the realm of phenomena.  Schopenhauer borrows this notion and pushes it for all its worth.  Relevant here is my post, On the Very Idea of a Cause of Existence: Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument.  But it cannot be said that either Kant or Schopenhauer demolished the cosmological argument because their critiques rest on their own questionable metaphysical systems.

And as you suggest above,  there are Kalam and Thomist versions of the CA that Kant doesn't even consider.  Kant's knowledge of the history of philosophy was meager and the metaphysics he criticized was that of the Wolffian school which derives from Leibniz.

Finally, I refer you to my article, "From Facts to God: An Onto-Cosmological Argument,"  International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 48 (2000), pp. 157-181.

 

Evil As it Appears to Atheists and Theists

In the preface to his magnum opus, F. H. Bradley observes that "Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct." (Appearance and Reality, Oxford 1893, p. x) The qualifier 'bad' is out of place and curiously off-putting at the outset of a 570 page metaphysical tome, so  if, per impossibile, I had had  the philosopher's ear I would have suggested 'good but not rationally compelling.'  Be that as it may, the point is that our basic sense of things comes first, and only later, if at all, do we take up the task of the orderly discursive articulation of that basic sense.

Thus atheism is bred in the bone before it is born in the brain.  The atheist feels it in his bones and guts that the universe is godless and that theistic conceptions are so many fairy tales dreamt up for false consolation.  This world is just too horrifying to be a divine creation: meaningless unredeemed suffering; ignorance and delusion; the way nature, its claws dripping with blood, feasts on itself; moral evil and injustice -- all bespeak godlessness.   There can't be a God of love behind all this horror!  For most atheists, theism is not a Jamesian live option.  What point, then, in debating them?

This deep intuition of the godlessness of the world  is prior to and the force behind arguments from evil.  The arguments merely articulate and rationalize the intuition.  The counterarguments of theists don't stand a chance in the face of the fundamental, gut-grounded, atheist attitude.  No one who strongly  FEELS that things are a certain way is likely to be moved by what he will dismiss as so much verbiage, hairsplitting, and intellectualizing.

But for the theist it is precisely the horror of this world that motivates the quest for a solution, or rather, the horror of this world together with the conviction that we cannot provide the solution for ourselves whether individually or collectively. Evil is taken by the theist, not as a 'proof' of the nonexistence of God, but as a reason, a motive, to seek God.  'Without God, life is horror.' 

Addendum 12/21:  I should add that it would be pointless to seek God if any of the atheist arguments were compelling.  But none are. 

God, Evil, Matter and Mind: How Both Theists and Materialists Stand Pat in the Face of Objections

It is a simple point of logic that if propositions p and q are both true, then they are logically consistent, though not conversely. So if God exists and Evil exists are both true, then they are logically consistent, whence it follows that it is possible that they be consistent. This is so whether or not anyone is in a position to explain how it is possible that they be consistent. If something is the case, then, by the time-honored principle ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it is possible that it be the case, and one's inability to explain how it is possible that it be the case cannot count as a good reason for thinking that it is not the case.

Example.  No one has successfully answered Zeno's Paradoxes of motion.  (No, kiddies, Wesley Salmon did not successfully rebut them; the 'calculus solution'  is a joke.) But from the fact, if it is a fact, that no one has ever shown HOW motion is possible, it does not follow that motion is not possible. 

So if it is the case that God exists and Evil exists are logically consistent, then this is possibly the case, and a theist's inability to explain how God and evil can coexist is not a good reason for him to abandon his theism -- or his belief in the existence of objective evil.

The theist is rationally entitled to stand pat in the face of the 'problem of evil' and point to his array of arguments for the existence of God whose cumulative force renders rational his belief that God exists. Of course, he should try to answer the atheist who urges the inconsistency of God exists and Evil exists; but his failure to provide a satisfactory answer is not a reason for him to abandon his theism. A defensible attitude would be: "This is something we theists need to work on."

Atheists and naturalists ought not object to this standing pat since they do the same. What materialist about the mind abandons his materialism in the face of the various arguments (from intentionality, from qualia, from the unity of consciousness, from the psychological relevance of logical laws, etc.) that we anti-materialists marshall?

Does the materialist give in? Hell no, he stands pat, pointing to his array of arguments and considerations in favor of materialism, and when you try to budge him with the irreconcilability of intentionality and materialism, or qualia and materialism, or reason and materialism, or whatever, he replies, "This is something we materialists need to work on."  He is liable to start talking, pompously, of his 'research program.'  He may even wax quasi-religious with talk of "pinning his hopes on future science"  as if -- quite absurdly -- knowing more and more about the meat within our skulls will finally resolve the outstanding questions.  And what does science have to do with hope?  There is also something exceedingly curious about hoping that one turns out to be just a material system, a bit of dust in the wind.

"I was so hoping to be proved to be nothing more than a clever land mammal slated for destruction, but, dammit all, there are reasons to think that we are more than animals and have a higher destiny.  That sucks!"

God and the 'No Angry Unicorn' Argument

This from an astute reader commenting on the Hell post:

'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon'

Does this not refer to doxastic uncertainty rather than a fatuous equation of God with something material? This is how I interpreted it when I read it. More in the vein of: why venerate something tenuous in lieu of a Lucretian reality? Not a profound solution by any means, but an almost noble one if lived humbly-- not sensually. Although , I suppose this is an agnostic take on the phrase. ( I've been reading too much of Montaigne!)

Thanks for exposing me to Henryk Gorecki . Do you know of Arvo Part?

I love Arvo Part, and Montaigne too.  But onto the issue you raise. To quote Cactus Ed himself, "Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?"

Now it would be foolish to try to discern in the scribblings of Ed Abbey anything very clear or precise or carefully thought-through.  But it seems clear to me that Abbey is likening God to an intramundane object much as Bertrand Russell likened him to a celestial teapot.  In so doing, both demonstrate a profound ignorance of what sophisticated theists mean by 'God.'  They are not talking about a being among beings, let alone a material being among beings. (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens, et cetera.)  But you focus on the epistemic side, with justification, as the quotation shows. 

Accordingly, Abbey is suggesting that, regardless of the nature of God, the evidence of his existence is no better than the evidence of the existence of an irate lunar unicorn, a lunicorn if you will.   

But please note that questions about the evidence for something are connected to questions about the nature of that something.  The existence of a lunicorn would be strongly disconfirmed were a a bunch of lunar modules to fail to detect the presence of any such critter.  But no number of space probes could disconfirm the existence of God.  Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was surely talking nonsense when he reported that he saw no God during his famous suborbital flight.  The empirical undetectability of God no more tells against his existence than the empirical undetectability of the square root of pi tells against its existence. 

So while Abbey's remarks do have an epistemological flavor, they cannot be divorced from their metaphysical import.

But there is also an axiological side to it, which may be even more important.  Abbey is implying that it doesn't much matter whether God exists or not.  He could have added 'Who cares?' after 'Who knows?' to his list of questions.  After all, it is of no great moment whether there are any lunicorns or celestial teapots out there.  My happiness cannot hang on that.  The meaning of life does not stand or fall with the existence or nonexistence of such things. 

Abbey's aphorism sums up the atheist attitude quite well.  Does God exist?  Who cares? Who cares whether there is some weird extra object in the ontological inventory?  And how would you know anyway?  "Bartender, another round!"

The Problem of Evil and the Argument from Evil

(A reader found the following post, from the old PowerBlogs site, useful.  So I repost it here with minor modifications and additions.)

It is important to distinguish between the problem of evil and the argument from evil. The first is the problem of reconciling the existence of God, as traditionally understood, with the existence of natural and moral evils.  As J. L. Mackie points out, this "is essentially a logical problem: it sets the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling the several beliefs which he holds." (The Miracle of Theism, Oxford 1982, p. 150) Mackie goes on to point out that "the problem in this sense signally does not arise for those whose views of the world are markedly different from traditional theism." Thus the theist's problem of evil does not arise for an atheist. It might, however, be the case that some other problem of evil arises for the atheist, say, the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with life's being worth living.   But that is a separate matter.

The argument from evil, on the other hand, is an attempt to show the nonexistence of God from the fact of evil, where 'fact of evil' is elliptical for 'the existence of natural and moral evils.'

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL

The main difference between the problem of evil and the argument from evil is that the former is an ad hominem argument whereas the second is not. I am using ad hominem in the way Peter Geach uses it on pp. 26-27 of his Reason and Argument (Basil Blackwell 1976):

This Latin term indicates that these are arguments addressed to a particular man -- in fact, the other fellow you are disputing with. You start from something he believes as a premise, and infer a conclusion he won't admit to be true. If you have not been cheating in your reasoning, you will have shown that your opponent's present body of beliefs is inconsistent and it's up to him to modify it somewhere.

As Geach points out, there is nothing fallacious about such an argumentative  procedure. If A succeeds in showing B that his doxastic system harbors a contradiction, then not everything that B believes can be true. Now can an atheist prove the nonexistence of God in this way? No he cannot: at the very most he can prove (with the aid of various auxiliary premises that he and his interlocutor both accept) that God exists and Evil exists cannot both be true. But it does not follow therefrom that God exists is not true. For the atheist to transform the ad hominem problem of evil into a non-ad hominem argument from evil, he would have to establish, or at least assert, that evil exists, and not merely that the theist believes that evil exists. To see my point consider the following conditional, where P is the conjunction of auxiliary premises:

C. If evil exists & P, then God does not exist.

The atheist who raises the problem of evil for the theist asserts (C), or rather a proposition of that form. But to assert a conditional is not to assert its antecedent, or its consequent for that matter; it is to assert a entailment connection between the two. Now although it is the case that for each argument there is a corresponding conditional, and vice versa, arguments must not be confused with conditionals.

Transforming (C) into an argument from evil yields:

Evil Exists

P

Therefore

God does not exist.

Clearly, an atheist who gives this argument, or rather an argument of this form, must assert both premises. Doing so, he ceases his ad hominem examination of the consistency of another person's beliefs, beliefs he either rejects or takes no stand on, and 'comes clean' with his own beliefs.

THE ARGUER FROM EVIL NEEDS TO AFFIRM OBJECTIVE EVIL

If the atheist's aim is merely to poke holes in the logical consistency of the theist's belief-set, then it doesn't matter whether he thinks of evil as objective or subjective. Indeed, he needn't believe in evil in any sense. He could hold that it is an illusion. But if the atheist's goal is to support his own belief that God does not exist with an argument from evil, then he needs to maintain that evil is objective or objectively real.

Consider all the enslavement of humans by humans that has taken place in the history of the world. Suppose it is agreed that slavery is morally wrong. What makes this true? Define a moral subjectivist as one who agrees that the claim in question is true, but holds that the truth-maker of this moral truth, and of others like it, is an individual's being in a psychological state, say, the state of being repulsed by slavery. For the moral subjectivist, then, sentences like 'Slavery is wrong' are elliptical for sentences like 'Slavery is wrong-for-X,' where X is a person or any being capable of being in psychological states. Furthermore, the moral subjectivist grants that moral claims have truth-makers, indeed objective truth-makers; it is just that these truth-makers involve psychological states that vary from person to person.

Now if our atheist subscribes to a theory of evil along those lines, then, although there will be objective facts of the matter regarding what various individuals feel about the practice or the institution of slavery, there will be no objective fact of the matter regarding the wrongness or moral evil of slavery.

If so, the fact of evil subjectively construed will have no bearing on the existence of God, a fact, if it a fact, that is objective.

Suppose a torturer tortures his victim to death solely for the satisfaction it gives him. And suppose that moral subjectivism is true. Then the torturing, though evil for the tortured, is good for the torturer, with the upshot that the torturing is neither good nor evil objectively. Now if I were on the scene and had the power to stop the torturing, but did not, would my noninterference detract from my moral goodness? Not at all. (The same goes a fortiori for God.) For nothing objectively evil is transpiring: all that is going on is that one person is securing his pleasure at the expense of another's pain. If you insist that something evil is going on, then that shows that you reject moral subjectivism. But if you accept moral subjectivism, then nothing evil is going on; the torturing is evil only in the mind of the victim and in the minds of any others who sympathize with him. If you accept moral subjectivism and continue to insist that the torturing is evil, then you would also have to insist that it is good, since it is good from the perspective of the torturer. But if it is both good and evil, then it is (objectively) neither.

What I am claiming, then, is that the atheist arguer from evil must construe evil objectively. This will result in trouble for the atheist if it can be shown that objective evil cannot exist unless God exists. For then the atheist arguer from evil will end up presupposing the very being whose existence he is out to deny. No doubt this is a big 'if.' But it is worth exploring.  The problem for the atheist is to explain how there can be objective good and evil in a Godless universe. 

And another line worth exploring is a theistic argument to God from the fact of objective good and evil.  No such argument could PROVE the existence of God, but it could very well have the power of cancelling out the argument from evil.

A Modal Ontological Argument and an Argument from Evil Compared

After leaving the polling place this morning, I headed out on a sunrise hike over the local hills whereupon the muse of philosophy bestowed upon me some good thoughts.  Suppose we compare a modal ontological argument with an argument from evil in respect of the question of evidential support for the key premise in each.  This post continues our ruminations on the topic of contingent support for noncontingent propositions.

A Modal Ontological Argument

'GCB' will abbreviate 'greatest conceivable being,' which is a rendering of Anselm of Canterbury's "that than which no greater can be conceived."  'World' abbreviates 'broadly logically possible world.'

1. The concept of the GCB is either instantiated in every  world or it is instantiated in no world.

2. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in some world.  Therefore:

3. The concept of the GCB is instantiated.

This is a valid argument: it is correct in point of logical form.  Nor does it commit any informal fallacy such as petitio principii, as I argue in Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110.  Note also that this version of the OA does not require the controversial assumption that existence is a first-level property, an assumption that Frege famously rejects and that many read back (with some justification) into Kant.  (Frege held that the OA falls with that assumption; he was wrong: the above version is immune to the Kant-Frege objection.)

(1) expresses what I will call Anselm's Insight.  He appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be noncontingent, i.e., either necessary or impossible.  I consider (1) nonnegotiable.  If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. There is no god but God.  End of discussion.  It is premise (2) -- the key premise -- that ought to raise eyebrows.  What it says -- translating out of the patois of possible worlds -- is that it it possible that the GCB exists.

Whereas conceptual analysis of 'greatest conceivable being' suffices in support of (1), how do we support (2)?  Why should we accept it?  Some will say that the conceivability of the GCB entails its possibility.  But I deny that conceivability entails possibility.  I won't argue that now, though I do say something about conceivability here.  Suppose you grant me that conceivability does not entail BL-possibility.  You might retreat to this claim:  It may not entail it, but it is evidence for it:  the fact that we can conceive of a state of affairs S is defeasible evidence of S's possibility.

Please note that Possibly the GCB exists -- which is logically equivalent to (2) -- is necessarily true if true.  This is a consequence of the characteristic S5 axiom of modal propositional logic:  Poss p --> Nec Poss p. ('Characteristic' in the sense that it  is what distinguishes S5 from S4 which is included in S5.)  So if the only support for (2) is probabilistic or evidential, then we have the puzzle we encountered earlier: how can there be probabilistic support for a noncontingent proposition?  But now the same problem arises on the atheist side.

An Argument From Evil

4. If the concept of the GCB is instantiated, then there are no gratuitous evils.

5. There are some gratuitous evils. Therefore:

6. The concept of the GCB is not instantiated.

This too is a deductive argument, and it is valid.  It falls afoul of no informal fallacy.  (4), like (1), is nonnegotiable.  Deny it, and I show you the door.  The key premise, then, the one on which the soundness of the argument rides, is (5).  (5) is not obviously true.  Even if it is obviously true that there are evils, it is not obviously true that there are gratuitous evils. 

In fact, one might argue that the argument begs the question against the theist at line (5).  For if there are any gratuitous evils, then by definition of 'gratuitous' God cannot exist.  But I won't push this in light of the fact that in print I have resisted the claim that the modal OA begs the question at its key premise, (2) above.

So how do we know that (5) is true?  Not by conceptual analysis. If we assume, uncontroversially, that there are some evils, then the following logical equivalence holds:

7. Necessarily, there are some gratuitous evils iff the GCB does not exist.

Left-to-right is obvious: if there are gratuitous evils, ones for which there is no justification, then a being having the standard omni-attributes cannot exist.  Right-to-left:  if there is no GCB and there are some evils, then there are some gratuitous evils.  (On second thought, R-to-L may not hold, but I don't need it anyway.)

Now the RHS, if true, is necessarily true, which implies that the LHS -- There are some gratuitious evils -- is necessarily true if true. 

Can we argue for the LHS =(5)?  Perhaps one could argue like this (as one commenter suggested in an earlier thread):  If the evils are nongratuitous, then probably we would have conceived of justifying reasons for them.  But we cannot conceive of justifying reasons.  Therefore, probably there are gratuitous evils.

But now we face our old puzzle: How can the probability of there being gratuitous evils show that there are gratuitous evils given that There are gratuitous evils, if true, is necessarily true?

Conclusion

We face the same problem with both arguments, the modal OA for the existence of the GCB, and the argument from evil for the nonexistence of the GCB.  The key premises in both arguments -- (2) and (5) -- are necessarily true if true.  The only support for them is evidential from contingent facts.  But then we are back with our old puzzle:  How can contingent evidence support noncontingent propositions? 

Neither argument is probative and they appear to cancel each other out.  Sextus Empiricus would be proud of me.

More on Whether Atheism is a Religion

Peter Lupu e-mails:

Your post provoked these thoughts:

I agree with you that most religions include as indispensable certain core metaphysical tenets about some kind of transcendental existence that is vital for the understanding of the nature and identity of our own self and that these core tenets distinguish religious ideologies from secular ideologies such as atheism and Marxism. However, it is worth noting that secular ideologies also include certain indispensable core metaphysical tenets: e.g., atheism denies the existence of a transcendental being such as God or denies that the existence of such a God is relevant to understand our nature and identity and Marxism is committed to the existence of deterministic historical laws which will inevitably lead to a certain socio-economic-political arrangement (i.e., communism).

In fact, both religious as well as secular ideologies can be identified in terms of their respective metaphysical core tenets in the sense that giving them up is giving up on the ideology itself. Hence, those who adhere to each ideology must hold on to their defining tenets come what may, for giving up these tenets is giving up the ideology itself. So we can define a religious attitude (in contradistinction to a religion) as a certain epistemic attitude whereby someone holds on to the metaphysical tenets that define their ideology come what may and regardless of the cogency of counterarguments or counter-evidence. Of course, we already have a word for this sort of attitude and it is "dogmatism." So it is not clear to me that we need another word for it, although I think that this is what people mean when they say that secular ideologies such as atheism or Marxism are or can be for some people a "religion."

Peter,  I take your point to be that when we say that militant atheism or Marxism are religions, we are speaking loosely: all we mean is that the commitment of their staunchest adherents is dogmatic and unshakeable.  Thus I take you to be agreeing with me me that militant atheism and Marxism are not, strictly speaking, religions.

Joseph Antolick e-mails:　

I think there's a problem when you worry - not without merit, since it's common in these discussions - that considering militant atheism a religion itself is a debating trick. You go on to say that there's a problem of defining religion (you even entertain the possibility that there's no way to "specify necessary and sufficient conditions") and also that these atheists are anti-religionist. Well, if it's not clear what a religion is, then how is it clear that atheists are anti-religion? I'll grant you that Richard Dawkins hates Catholicism. But so do a number of Muslims.

But I did suggest a criterion for distinguishing religious from non-religious ideologies:  "all and only religions make reference to a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence.  For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah  is the transcendent reality.  For Taoism, the Tao.  For Hinduism, Brahman.  For Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana."  This criterion makes it tolerably clear what counts as a religion and also what it is to be anti-religion.  I can't see what good purpose is served by lumping militant atheism in with the religions, unless one is talking loosely -- see Lupu's comment above.  In a serious discussion one should avoid loose talk.

My claim here is that A) There is reason . . .  to at least suspect that the New Atheists are themselves religious and B) That if this is in fact the case, then the New Atheists are no more "anti-religion" than fanatical muslims for whom there is no room in the world for any religion but Islam.

And what reason would that be?  The fact that one's commitment to one's ideology is is total, dogmatic, and unshakeable by counter-argument is not a good reason to think that the object of one's commitment is a religion.  Countless Communists were committed heart, soul, and mind to their ideology. Some, like Trotsky, sacrificed everything for the cause.  But that didn't make Communism a religion.  An ersatz religion perhaps, something that substitutes for religion in the lives of its staunch adherents, but not a religion strictly speaking.  Faith and hope were major players in Trotsky's life, but they weren't religious faith and hope, though I will grant you that they were quasi-religious.  See my post, Trotsky's Faith.

Obviously, Muslims are not anti-religion because their ideology is a religion by my criterion, albeit a political religion if you will, one that denies church/mosque-state separation.    (Whether Islam is a religion that deserves First Amendment protection is a further question, and a pressing one given the bit after 'albeit.') 

To give an analogous example, Stephen Hawking in his new book claims that "philosophy is dead" - but then, as reviewers have noted, goes on to engage in metaphysics and take explicitly philosophical positions. If that's a fair description of his views, is it right to say Hawking is "anti-philosophy"? Or is it just that he's anti- any philosophy that differs from his? I think the difference between those two descriptions is important.

I'm glad you brought that up.  There is a big difference between being anti-religion and being anti-philosophy.  To oppose philosophy is to do philosophy.  Any attack on philosophy is a philosophical attack.  Anti-philosophy is just more philosophy.  And so I agree with you about Hawking.  He is anti-any philosophy other than his own.  But anti-religion is not just more religion, but precisely the rejection of all religion.  To oppose philosophy is to do philosophy; but to oppose religion is not to do religion, but to do philosophy.

The right way to combat militant atheists is not by arguing that they are serving up religion, but by exposing what they do as bad philosophy, as based on the dubious philosophical doctrine of scientism, for example.  Atheism is a philosophical position with all the rights, privileges, and debilities pertaining thereunto.  Dawkins, Grayling  and the boys may be dogmatic pricks but that does not make them religionists.  It makes them -- dogmatic pricks.  Once you have exposed atheism as just another philosophical position you have already done quite a bit to undermine it: it is just another contender in the arena of Big Ideas;  just another contender that cannot establish hegemony -- except in the minds of its dogmatic adherents.

That said, I don't claim to have the ultimate answer on this. But I do worry that there's a recognition that defining "religion" is difficult, and then a move is made to try and define religion in such a way that purposefully excludes militant atheists from the outset. I'm reminded of when Paul Davies wrote an op-ed, pointing out that even scientists have faith - and there was a fierce reaction from a number of scientists.

But why would you want to lump militant atheists in with religionists?  That makes little sense unless you are engaged in some sort of rhetorical sleight-of-hand.    Surely the burden is on you to show that they are religionists when it is plain to most of us that they are not.

And you also have to be careful not to equivocate on 'faith' as between religious and non-religious faith. Above I mentioned the faith of Trotsky.  Surely he was a man of faith in a secular, non-religious sense: as a professional revolutionary he believed with all his heart in the coming world-wide proletarian revolution that would usher in a classless society, a worker's paradise, etc. etc.  One could even in his case speak of a secular soteriology and eschatology, of the final salvation from alienation at the eschaton.  But again, a substitute for religion, something that merely resembles religion in certain ways, something the commitment to which is like a religious commitment, is not a religion strictly speaking.  

Are men of science men of faith?  Of course.  They have faith in the intelligibility of nature and in the uniformity of nature, and they hold this faith beyond what they have actually verified.  They have faith that the future will be like the past.  But no good purpose is served by conflating this sort of faith with specifically religious faith.  You cannot effectively defend religion against the attacks of scientistic scientists and their literary (Hitchens) and philosophical (Dennett) fellow travelers by saying that the attackers themselves have various faith commitments.

 

 

Is Atheism a Religion?

From the mail:

Just read your On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance entry, and I have one concern. Is it really right to view the New Atheists, and atheists in general, as "not religious"? I imagine this really depends on how you yourself define religion, and I admit to not knowing that. [. . .]

I don't know it either [grin].

The question as to what religion is is not at all easy to answer.  It is not even clear that the question makes sense.  For when you ask What is religion? you presuppose that it has an essence which can be captured in a definition that specifies necessary and sufficient conditions.  But it might be that the concept religion is a family resemblance concept like the concept game (to invoke Wittgenstein's famous example).  Think of all the different sorts of games there are. Is there any property or set of properties that all games have and that only games have?  Presumably not.  The concept game is a family resemblance concept to which no essence corresponds.  Noted philosophers of religion such as John Hick maintain the same with respect to the concept religion.

If you take this tack, then you can plausibly argue that Marxism and secular humanism and militant atheism are religions.

But it strikes me as decidedly odd to characterize  a militant anti-religionist as having a religion.  Indeed, it smacks of a cheap debating trick:  "How can you criticize religion when you yourself have a religion?" I prefer to think along the following lines. Start with belief-system as your genus and then distinguish two species: belief-systems that are theoretical, though they may have practical applications,  and belief-systems that are by their very nature oriented toward action.  Call the latter ideologies. Then distinguish between religious and non-religious ideologies.  Marxism and militant atheism are non-religious ideologies while the Abrahamic religions and some of the Eastern religions are religious ideologies.

But this leaves me with the problem of specifying what it is that distinguishes religious from non-religious ideologies.  Perhaps this: all and only religions make reference to a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence.  For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah  is the transcendent reality.  For Taoism, the Tao.  For Hinduism, Brahman.  For Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana.  But I expect the Theravadins to object that nibbana is nothing positive and transcendent, only the extinguishing or dissolution of the (ultimately illusory) self.  I could of course simply deny that Theravada Buddhism is a religion, strictly speaking.  I could lump it together with Stoicism as a sort of psychotherapy, a set of techniques for achieiving equanimity.

There are a number of tricky and unresolved issues here, but I see little point in calling militant atheism a religion, though I concede it is like a religion in some ways.

 

Gutting, Dawkins, and Russell's Celestial Teapot

In his recent NYT Opinionator piece, On Dawkins's Atheism, Notre Dame's Gary Gutting writes, describing the "no arguments argument" of some atheists:

To say that the universe was created by a good and powerful being who cares about us is an extraordinary claim, so improbable to begin with that we surely should deny it unless there are decisive arguments for it (arguments showing that it is highly probable). Even if Dawkins’ arguments against theism are faulty, can’t he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God’s existence?

He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God’s existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell’s example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.

But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.

The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable to atheism.

I have a serious problem with Gutting's response to the Russell-Dawkins tag team.  Gutting concedes far too much in his reply, namely, that it even makes sense to compare the claim that there is an orbiting teapot with the claim that God exists.  Instead of attacking this comparison as wrongheaded from the outset, Gutting in effect concedes its aptness when he points out that, just as there could be (inconclusive) scientific evidence of a celestial teaspot, there could be (inconclusive) experiential and argumentative evidence for the existence of God.  So let me try to explain why I think that the two existence claims ('God exists' and 'A celestial teapot exists') are radically different .

Against Politically Correct Atheism

If contemporary Christianity and contemporary Islam are judged by their fruits, which is more conducive to human flourishing, or, if you think nothing good comes from religion, which is less conducive to human misery?  I hope you are clearheaded and unprejudiced enough to see that the religion of 'peace'  is far worse than Christianity, at least at present, if you think both are bad.

So why do so many contemporary atheists employ a double-standard?  Why is the full measure of their energy and vitriol reserved for Christianity?  Why the politically correct tip-toe dance around Islam?  Is it fear?  Is it like cops who go after jaywalkers to avoid confronting gangbangers?  Is it because most atheists are leftists and leftists are bred-in-the-bone PC-ers?

Check out this diatribe against politically correct atheism by Pat Condell. 

"Some of Us Just Go One God Further"

I've seen this quotation attributed to Richard Dawkins. From what I have read of him, it seems like something he would say. The idea, I take it, is that all gods are on a par, and so, given that everyone is an atheist with respect to some gods, one may as well make a clean sweep and be an atheist with respect to all gods. You don't believe in Zeus or in a celestial teapot. Then why do you believe in the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob?

What Dawkins and the gang seem to be assuming is that the following questions are either senseless or not to be taken seriously:   'Is the Judeo-Christian god the true God?'  'Is any particular god the true God'  'Is any particular conception of deity adequate to the divine reality?'  The idea, then, is that all candidates for deity are in the same logical boat. Nothing could be divine. Since all theistic religions are false, there is no live question as to which such religion is true. It is not as if there is a divine reality and that some religions are more adequate to it than others. One could not say, for example, that Judaism is somewhat adequate to the divine reality, Christianity more adequate, and Buddhism not at all adequate. There just is no divine reality. There is nothing of a spiritual nature beyond the human horizon.  There is no Mind beyond finite mind.  Man is the measure.

That is the atheist's deepest conviction.  It seems so obvious to him that he cannot begin to genuinely doubt it, nor can he understand how anyone could genuinely believe the opposite.  But why assume that there is nothing beyond the human horizon? The issue dividing theists and atheists can perhaps be put in terms of Jamesian 'live options':

EITHER: Some form of theism (hitherto undeveloped perhaps or only partially developed) is not only logically and epistemically possible, but also an 'existential' possibility, a live option;

OR: No form of theism is an existential possibility, a live option.

Theist-atheist dialog is made difficult by a certain asymmetry: whereas a sophisticated living faith involves a certain amount of purifying doubt, together with a groping beyond images and pat conceptualizations toward a transcendent reality, one misses any corresponding doubt or tentativeness on the part of sophisticated atheists. Dawkins and Co. seem so cocksure of their position. For them, theism is not a live option or existential possibility.  This is obvious from their mocking comparisons of God to a celestial teapot, flying spaghetti monster, and the like. 

For sophisticated theists, however, atheism is a live option. The existence of this asymmetry makes one wonder whether any productive dialog with atheists is possible.

Companion post:  Russell's Teapot: Does It Hold Water?

Atheism, Materialism, and Intellectual Respectability

Joseph A.  e-mails:

Just a quick question. You recently posted that you think atheism can be intellectually respectable. Fair enough. But wouldn't you agree that intellectual respectability in general seems to be assumed more often than it should be?

To put a point on the question: Do you think materialism is intellectually respectable? I seem to recall you saying that (at the least) eliminative materialism is a view you wouldn't bother teaching in a philosophy course. Yet it also seems that some people, even those who would argue that theism isn't intellectually respectable, would bend over backwards to deny that EM isn't as well.

We should begin with a working definition of 'intellectually respectable.'  I suggest the following:

A view V is intellectually respectable =_df V is logically consistent with (not ruled out by) anything we can legitimately claim to know.

People claim to know all sorts of things they do not know, which explains the qualifier 'legitimately.'   Note also that truth and intellectual respectability are different properties.  What is true might not be intellectually respectable, and what is intellectually respectable might not be true.  Truth is absolute while intellectual respectability is relative to the class of people to whom 'we' in the definition refers.  And which class is this?  Well, it would include me and Peter Lupu and other astute  contemporaries who are well apprised of the facts of logic and mathematics and science and history and common sense.  It would not include a lady I once encountered who thought that the Moon is the source of its light.  That opinion is not intellectually respectable. 

There are indefinitely many views that are clearly not intellectually respectable, and indefinitely many that clearly are.  The interesting cases are the ones that lie in between.  Let's consider two.

1. Eliminative materialism.  This is defended by some otherwise  sane  people, but I would say it is not intellectually respectable.  For it is ruled out by plain facts that we can legitimately claim to know, such facts as that we have beliefs and desires.  It is a  position in the philosophy of mind that denies the very data of the philosophy of mind.  Here is an argument that some might think supports it:

(1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs. 

But anyone with his head screwed on properly should be able to see that this argument does not establish (4) but is instead a reductio ad absurdum of premise (1) according to which beliefs are nothing if not brain states.  For if anything is obvious, it is that there are beliefs.  This is a pre-theoretical datum, a given.  What they are is up for grabs, but that they are is a starting-point that cannot be denied except by those in the grip of  an ideology.  Since the argument is valid in point of logical form, and the conclusion is manifestly, breath-takingly,  false, what the argument shows is that beliefs cannot be brain states.

2.  Theism.  Not every version of theism is intellectually respectable, obviously, but some are.  If you think otherwise, tell me which known fact rules  out a sophisticated version, say, the version elaborated over several books by Richard Swinburne.  ('Known fact' is not pleonastic in the way 'true fact' is; a fact can be unknown.)

a.  Will it be the 'fact' that nothing immaterial exists?  But that's not a fact, let alone a known fact.  Abstracta such as the proposition expressed by 'Nothing immaterial exists' are immaterial but indispensable.  Arguments to the effect  that they are dispensable merely show at the very most that it is debatable  whether abstracta are dispensable, with the upshot that it will not be a known fact that nothing immaterial exists.  No one can legitimately claim to know that nothing immaterial exists.

 b.  Will it be the fact that nothing both concrete and immaterial exists?  Even if this is a fact, it is not a known fact.  I am arguably a res cogitans.  We do not know that this is not the case the way we know that the Moon is not fifty miles from Earth.

c. Will it be the fact of evil?  But how do you know that evil is a fact at all?  Can you legitimately claim to know that the people and events you call evil are objectively evil and not merely such that you dislike or disapprove of them?  But even if evil is an objective fact, what makes you think that it is logically inconsistent with the existence of God? The Hume-Mackie logical argument from evil is almost universally rejected by contemporary philosophers. 

My claim is that there is no fact which we can claim to know -- in the way we can claim to know that the Moon is more than 50 miles from Earth -- that rules out the existence of God.  But I also claim that there is no such fact that rules it in.  Both theism  and atheism are intellectually respectable. I take no position at the moment on the question whether one is more respectable than the other, or more likely to be true; my claim is merely that both are intellectually respectable -- in the way that eliminative materialism and the belief that the Moon is its own source of light are not intellectually respectable.

Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable? On Romans 1:18-20

Joe Carter over at First Things argues that "We have to abandon the politically correct notion that atheism is intellectually respectable."  My own view is that  theism and atheism are both intellectually respectable.  Carter makes his case by invoking St. Paul:

In Romans, St. Paul is clear that atheism is a case of vincible ignorance: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Acknowledging the existence of God is just the beginning—we must also recognize several of his divine attributes. Atheists that deny this reality are, as St. Paul said, without excuse. They are vincibly ignorant. 

Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth.   There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork.  Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is  planted firmly in Athens (philosophy, the autonomy of reason). And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism.  It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident.  It is not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact. 

I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me" (Kant).  But seeing is not seeing as.  If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework.  But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.

At the end of the day you must decide which of these interpretations to accept. You will not find some plain fact that will decide it for you.  There is no fact you can point to, or argument you can give, that definitively rules out theism or rules it in.

If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many of the cyberpunks over at Internet Infidels and similar sites, not to mention such luminaries as Russell and Sartre, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Paul appears to be doing what ideologues regularly do when pushed to the wall in debate: they resort to ad hominem attacks and psychologizing:  you are willful and stubborn and blinded by pride and lust; or you are a shill for corporate interests; or you are 'homophobic' or 'Islamophobic' or xenophobic; or you are a fear-monger and a hater; or you are a liar or insincere or stupid; or you are a racist, etc. 

Joe Carter does the same thing. 

Objection: "You are ignoring the deleterious noetic consequences of original sin. Because our faculties have been corrupted by it, we fail to find evident what is in itself evident, namely, that the world is a divine artifact.  And it is because of this original sin that unbelief is inexcusable."

This response raises its own difficulties.  First, how can one be morally responsible for a sin that one has not oneself committed but has somehow inherited? Second, if our faculties have been so corrupted by original sin that we can no longer reliably distinguish between the evident and the non-evident, then this corruption will extend to all our cognitive operations including Paul's theological reasoning, which we therefore should not trust either. 

For a different take on Carter's piece, see Michael Liccione's Why Atheism Can Be Respectable.

In Romans, St. Paul is clear that atheism is a case of vincible ignorance: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Acknowledging the existence of God is just the beginning—we must also recognize several of his divine attributes. Atheists that deny this reality are, as St. Paul said, without excuse. They are vincibly ignorant. 

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth.   There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork.  Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is  planted firmly in Athens (philosophy, the autonomy of reason). And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism.  It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident.  It is not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact. 

I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me" (Kant).  But seeing is not seeing as.  If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework.  But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.

At the end of the day you must decide which of these interpretations to accept. You will not find some plain fact that will decide it for you.  There is no fact you can point to, or argument you can give, that definitively rules out theism or rules it in.

If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many of the cyberpunks over at Internet Infidels and similar sites, not to mention such luminaries as Russell and Sartre, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Paul appears to be doing what ideologues regularly do when pushed to the wall in debate: they resort to ad hominem attacks and psychologizing:  you are willful and stubborn and blinded by pride and lust; or you are a shill for corporate interests; or you are 'homophobic' or 'Islamophobic' or xenophobic; or you are a fear-monger and a hater; or you are a liar or insincere or stupid; or you are a racist, etc. 

Joe Carter does the same thing. 

Objection: "You are ignoring the deleterious noetic consequences of original sin. Because our faculties have been corrupted by it, we fail to find evident what is in itself evident, namely, that the world is a divine artifact.  And it is because of this original sin that unbelief is inexcusable."

This response raises its own difficulties.  First, how can one be morally responsible for a sin that one has not oneself committed but has somehow inherited? Second, if our faculties have been so corrupted by original sin that we can no longer reliably distinguish between the evident and the non-evident, then this corruption will extend to all our cognitive operations including Paul's theological reasoning, which we therefore should not trust either. 

For a different take on Carter's piece, see Michael Liccione's Why Atheism Can Be Respectable.

Karen Armstrong Versus Sam Harris

Two lightweights battle it out. Here and here.  Not particularly edifying.

Is There a 'No God' Delusion?

A certain popular writer speaks of a God delusion.  This prompts the query whether there might be a 'No God' delusion.  Is it perhaps the case that atheism is a delusion?  Bruce Charlton, M. D. , returns an affirmative answer in Is Atheism Literally a Delusion?  In this post I will try to understand his basic argument and see if I should accept it.  The following is my reconstruction of  the core of Charlton's argument:

J. P. Moreland on Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (Part One)

(The following review will be crossposted shortly at Prosblogion.  Comments are closed here, but will be open there.)

Apart from what Alvin Plantinga calls creative anti-realism, the two main philosophical options for many of us in the West are some version of naturalism and some version of Judeo-Christian theism. As its title indicates, J. P. Moreland’s The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM Press, 2009) supports the theistic position by way of a penetrating critique of naturalism and such associated doctrines as scientism. Moreland briefly discusses creative anti-realism in the guise of postmodernism on pp. 13-14, but I won’t report on that except to say that his arguments against it, albeit brief, are to my mind decisive. Section One of this review will present in some detail Moreland’s conception of naturalism and what it entails. Sections Two and Three will discuss his argument from consciousness for the existence of God. Section Four will ever so briefly report on the contents of the rest of the book. In Part Two of this review I hope to discuss Moreland’s critique of Thomas Nagel’s Dismissive Naturalism. Numbers in parentheses are page references. Words and phrases enclosed in double quotation marks are quotations from Moreland. Inverted commas are employed for mentioning and ‘scaring.’

Atheist Baggini: The New Atheist Movement is Destructive

Here.

Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept

I had an excellent discussion with Mike Valle on a number of topics yesterday afternoon.  The following post exfoliates one of the themes of our discussion.

One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006)  is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation." (206) He speaks of "the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts." (205)

Is Religion the Problem? Why Isn't Belief As Such the Problem? The Special Pleading of Some Atheists

One of the arguments against religion in the contemporary atheist arsenal is the argument that religious beliefs fuel war and terrorism. Rather than pull quotations from such well-known authors as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I will quote a couple of passages from one of the contributors to Philosophers Without Gods, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. His piece is entitled "Overcoming Christianity." After describing his movement from his evangelical Christian upbringing to a quietistic rejection of Christianity, Sinnott-Armstrong tells us how he became an evangelical atheist:

The Trouble with Continental Philosophy: Tillich

Today’s example of Continental muddle-headedness is not from a philosopher, strictly speaking, but from a theologian who was influenced by a philosopher, Heidegger, and who has had a great deal of influence on philosophers. Paul Tillich (1886-1965) writes:

Atheism can only mean the attempt to remove any ultimate concern – to remain unconcerned about the meaning of one’s existence. Indifference toward the ultimate question is the only imaginable form of atheism. Whether it is possible is a problem which must remain unsolved at this point. In any case, he who denies God as a matter of ultimate concern affirms God, because he affirms ultimacy in his concern. (Dynamics of Faith; quoted from White, Eternal Quest, p. 94)

Attaching Useful Senses to 'Negative Atheism' and 'Positive Atheism'

I have already sufficiently explained why 'atheism' and 'negative atheism' cannot be usefully defined in terms of mere absence of theistic belief.  (See also Peter Lupu's comments on this topic.)  But sense can be attached to these phrases and to their near relatives 'negative atheist' and 'positive atheist.'  I suggest that a negative atheist is a practical atheist while a positive atheist is a theoretical atheist.  But what do these terms mean?

Sam Harris on Whether Atheists are Evil

In Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), in the section Are Atheists Evil?, Sam Harris writes:

If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. (pp. 38-39)

Harris then goes on to point out something that I don't doubt is true, namely, that atheists ". . . are at least as well behaved as the general population." (Ibid.) Harris' enthymeme can be spelled out as an instance of modus tollendo tollens, if you will forgive the pedantry: