God, Evil, and the Human Good

Introduction

A theodicy is an explanation of how God and evil can co-exist in the world. In order to build a theodicy, we will first see why there is such a thing as “the problem of evil.” Then we will see how Plantinga’s response to this problem provides useful guideposts in constructing a theodicy. With these guideposts in place, I will argue that one reason for supposedly gratuitous evils is that they are required to realize the human good.

The Logical Problem of Evil

One powerful way to show that a worldview is false is to show that it contains internal contradictions. If, for example, we could show that Buddhism teaches that there are no such things as unified, human selves, but we can show that a real and unified human self is everywhere presupposed by Buddhist teaching, this counts as an internal contradiction. Buddhists are committed to two beliefs that cannot be reconciled together. This is the kind of challenge that the problem of evil poses to Christian theism.

Let us call the person pressing the objection to the Christian the “atheologian.” Now, the first the step the atheologian needs to take to show a contradiction within Christianity is say what two beliefs are supposed to contradict one another. The two beliefs in question are the orthodox view of God and the existence of evil. The next step is to spell out how exactly these beliefs contradict each other. The orthodox view of God is that he is maximally great. That is, he possesses all great-making properties to the greatest degree possible. Among these great making properties are omnipotence and omnibenevolence. By omnipotence, we mean that God has the power to do anything that is possible to be done. Being omnipotent does not mean that God can do what is logically impossible, like make a married bachelor.[1] By omnibenevolence, we mean that God’s nature is fundamentally characterized by love and goodness. As the Apostle John wrote, “God is love.”[2] Richard Swinburne says that God is “morally perfectly good… he always does the morally best action (when there is one), and no morally bad action.”[3] To say that God is omnibenevolent entails some important things about God. Atheist J. L. Mackie writes that “good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can.”[4] God, being maximally good, will be necessarily committed to following this principle.  However, God is also omnipotent. This means that God, being willing and able, should eliminate all cases of evil. But our everyday experience makes it plain to us that evil exists. Therefore, the Christian is faced with a problem. The dilemma is well expressed by David Hume. Concerning God, Hume writes, “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”[5] So the atheologian thinks he has shown that Christianity has an internal contradiction. God and evil cannot coexist, yet Christian teaching says they do. Therefore, Christians must be wrong about their view of God.

Certainly, if we Christians were to tweak our view of God, we could easily make this problem of evil go away. We can get rid of either omnipotence or omnibenevolence and escape the atheologian’s argument. If God is not omnibenevolent, then he will not always remove evil every chance he gets. But this solution fails. First, it contradicts clear biblical teaching. Second, a God who is not omnibenevolent is not worthy of worship. So, perhaps, we can get rid of omnipotence. This has been a more popular option among theologians. For example, Rabbi Harold Kushner says, “I would rather worship a God who is completely good but not totally powerful than a God who is completely powerful but not completely good.”[6] Some Christians could also be accused of making a similar move. The Open Theist movement takes a view of God as less powerful. Specifically, they say God (in at least some cases) could not know neither in advance nor for certain whether some particular evil would occur. Evil is out of his control in a way it is not on other views of God’s foreknowledge.[7] This solution fails, too. If God lacks omnipotence, then God is not maximally great. If not maximally great, then he could not properly be called “God.” So the Christian must find a way to preserve both God’s omnibenevolence and his omnipotence in the face of the existence of evil. Fortunately, Alvin Plantinga has provided a way out.

Plantinga’s Free Will Defense

Plantinga’s defense begins with this central insight: If an agent is free in the libertarian sense, then not even God could determine what she would do.[8] That is, it is logically impossible for God to determine what an agent does and for the agent’s actions to be self-determined.[9] This is not a threat to God’s omnipotence because, as mentioned earlier, being omnipotent just means being able to do whatever is logically possible. Given that this is the case, perhaps the reason that God and evil exist together has to do with human freedom. At least some humans chose to use their freedom for evil instead of good. Add to this thought about free will the idea that humans having free agency is an intrinsically valuable state of affairs. It is better for humans to be free and not automatons. In fact, human freedom has the kind of value that God would consider worth the risk of realizing even if it means some humans might do evil. Thus, this is at least possibly the source of evil in the world. This insight, by itself, does not get the Christian completely out of trouble with the atheologian’s argument. For one, the atheologian might argue that God could have created both free will and a world without evil. But this might not be possible. Perhaps, as Plantinga suggests, all humans (including all non-actual humans) suffer from trans-world depravity.[10] If a being is trans-world depraved, it means there is no possible world in which he does not commit at least one act of evil. Thus, possibly, there is no possible world in which free creatures exist and there is no evil. If this is even possibly right, then the Christian has escaped the logical problem of evil.

Guideposts for a Theodicy

One important aspect of Plantinga’s argument here is that it is a defense, not a theodicy. All he aims to do is show how, possibly, God and evil might co-exist.[11] Plantinga is not arguing that his view is true, only that it is possibly true. If what he said about free will and the kind of restrictions it places on the worlds God could actualize is even possibly true, this means that the Christian is not uttering a contradiction when she affirms that both God and evil exist. But what we are after here is not merely a defense, but a theodicy. We want a true explanation of why God allows evil. Despite the difference in my aim and Plantinga’s, his argument is still useful for a couple of reasons. First, he has turned back the atheologian’s first attempt at refuting the Christian position. The atheologian must now revise his argument and try again. Second, it is likely that something like Plantinga’s account is true. Or, at the very least, certain features of his account are likely true. In spelling out my theodicy, I intend to deal with both these points, but let us first look at the true (and not merely possibly true) features of Plantinga’s free will defense. These will provide the guideposts of my own theodicy.

The first true principle is this:

P1: God can justifiably allow some evil if it realizes some worthwhile good that would not otherwise be possible.

But should we think that P1 is true? To get at that, we first have to be specific about what P1 is committing us to. One idea that believing P1 commits us to is that there at least some goods that cannot be realized without allowing some evil. This is not a new idea. Virtues like courage, compassion, and empathy all require evil in order to be realized. How can one be courageous unless he has some menace to conquer? Or how can we be compassionate unless there is some wrong in need of righting?  Another plausible idea is that the presence of good free moral agents requires at least the possibility of evil. It may be that, given a world with more than a handful of people and with genuine opportunity to do evil, all worlds like this would have at least some evil in them. Still further, as Plantinga argues, there is the tremendous good of the Atonement of Jesus which requires human evil as a precondition.[12] I take all of these as sufficient for establishing that some goods require evil to be realized.

Another idea P1 commits us to is that God will allow evil if the good it realizes is worthwhile. In Plantinga’s free will defense, he assumes P1 when he says, “A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.”[13] To this principle, someone might say that this makes God into a consequentialist of the worst kind. Anything God does is acceptable so long as it gets the right kind of results. Kirk MacGregor writes, “If God permits evils to bring about greater goods, then God operates according to the principle that the ends justify the means, despite that he explicitly denounces this principle as unethical in scripture and punishes humans who act in precisely the same way he presumably does.”[14] One way to respond to this objection is to point out that God’s status as creator gives him a wider range of morally good actions to choose from than his creatures. For example, it would be wrong for a mere human to decide another’s eternal fate. However, a human’s Creator would be within his rights to make such a weighty judgment. Similarly, there is nothing inconsistent in saying that God could act as a consequentialist while simultaneously commanding his creatures to be deontologists or virtue ethicists. The apparent contradiction regarding what counts as right action could be reconciled by an appeal to a deeper story about the nature of the good.[15] But another way to respond to MacGregor is to suggest that he has too narrow a view of the greater good.

MacGregor seems to think that a principle like P1 can only be understood in terms of cold, utilitarian calculation. The variables in the equation do not matter so long as in the end, the good outweighs the bad.[16] But there is another way to understand the “greater good.” For example, we could say that God follows a principle like this: It is always good to create worlds with free creatures. [17]  Now, it may be, as Plantinga suggests, also true that no world with free creatures will be devoid of evil. But the deontologist is not primarily concerned with the consequences of an action, but with whether the act is good to do regardless of the consequences. In this case, God is like the man who tells the truth about who is living in his attic when the Nazis knock on the door. Protecting those under his care is important, but the “greater good” is fulfilling one’s duty by telling the truth, despite the consequences. God creates a world of free creatures even though he knows they will commit evil acts because the greater good is to create a world with free creatures. The upshot is that the truth of P1 is compatible with a wide array of ethical accounts. The compatibility derives from the fact that even the supposedly consequence-neutral, normative ethical theorist, like the deontologist, is committed to pursuing the greater good of fulfilling one’s duty instead of settling for the lesser good of happy consequence.  The bottom line is that P1 is a likely true principle.

The second true principle is this:

P2: God cannot do the logically impossible.

Not much needs to be said in defense of P2. It is a widely accepted theological principle, even if there are a few Ockhamists who disagree. What is worth pointing out, though, is that there are real limitations on how God relates to evil. He cannot magically make evil go away and preserve the goods that necessitate it.

With these guideposts in mind, let us return to the atheologian’s argument. The logical problem has been turned aside, so the atheologian must regroup and try another tack. William Rowe presents just such an argument. His argument has two premises:

R1: There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

R2: An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.[18]

From this it follows that “there does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.”[19]This argument is logically valid. And R2 is a true principle. Therefore, the Christian must reject R1. However, Rowe has some evidence to present in favor of R1. First is the case of Bambi. The second is the case of Sue. The Bambi case is a hypothetical scenario in which a fawn (Bambi) is slowly burned alive in a forest fire.[20] Even though this is only an imagined scene, we know that cases as bad as or worse than Bambi’s must occur frequently. In the case of Sue, Rowe narrates the true story of a little girl (Sue) who was brutally raped and killed by her mother’s boyfriend.[21] Both cases are meant to show examples evil that are completely senseless, especially cruel, and that God could have easily prevented without “thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.”

Having now laid out the guideposts for a theodicy and the evidential version of the problem of evil, I can now give an argument that shows why God must allow some evils in order for the human good to be possible.

How can Christians give a theodicy in light of Rowe’s argument and the specific cases he presents? The first step is to get clear on what we mean by “evil.” What is meant by the term “evil”? One way to answer is by ostension. We point to Sue and Bambi cases and say, “Here is an example of evil.” But that does not do enough. We need to know what about the Sue and Bambi cases make them evil. Rowe will say that suffering is an intrinsic evil. The Bambi and Sue cases are evil because they involve gratuitous amounts of suffering.[1] But that just pushes the problem back a step. Why is suffering evil? What does it mean to say that suffering is evil? Perhaps Rowe could say that it is just self-evident that suffering is evil; we do not need to provide any explanation because we can just see it is the case. But this response confuses epistemology with ontology. What we want to know is not whether we are justified in taking suffering to be evil, but what makes suffering evil. Here, the naturalist faces a problem. As Mackie says, “Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the course of events without an all-powerful god to create them.”[2] The point here is that there is no worldview neutral way to talk about moral properties. Since evil is a moral property, it can only be meaningfully referred to from within a given worldview. Because the problem of evil is an objection aimed at Christian theism, the term evil must refer to something Christians will recognize as such.

So, then, what is the Christian view of evil? One well accepted definition comes from Augustine. Augustine says, “For evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name ‘evil.’”[3] In this case, evil is a privation of goodness. On the Christian view, then, evil is not a substance on par with goodness. Christianity is not dualistic in this way. Evil is parasitic on the good. But parasitic in what way? Here Augustine is again helpful. Hick points out that Augustine thought of all God’s creation as good; Augustine “lays the foundation for a Christian naturalism that rejoices in this world… seeks to share it in gratitude to God for His bountiful goodness.”[4] Included in God’s creation is a God given telos. God makes the world and everything in it for a reason so that there is a way the world should function.[5] Augustine thinks that man’s telos is “to enjoy God as the end of all, while he enjoys himself and his friend in God and for God.”[6] Evil occurs

in every case where a man loves for their own sake things which are desirable only as means to an end, and seeks for the sake of something else things which ought to be loved for themselves. For thus, as far as he can, he disturbs in himself the natural order which the eternal law requires us to observe.[7] 

It is evil when man acts in a disordered way, when he acts contrary to God’s intention.[8] This principle can be broadened so that evil, generally speaking, can be understood as disorder and malfunction.

With this view of evil in mind, let us now consider the nature of the human good and how it might help shape a theodicy. Scripture teaches us that the good for humans has to do with how God made us. For example, when Jesus was asked whether it was lawful to get a divorce, he appealed to how God made humans to justify his answer.[9] The first chapter of Genesis also shines some light on this topic. In 1:26, we are told that humans are made, male and female, in God’s image and that we are supposed to take dominion over all the earth. The biblical anthropology is very rich and drawing out all that it has to say would take a very long time. But all that needs to be accepted here is that mankind has a telos and that telos includes three dimensions. First, being rightly related to God as his image bearers. Second, being rightly related to other humans in community, and third being rightly related to the earth as its rulers.[10] That this is the biblical view is not a controversial point.

Now I will introduce the principle that is at the heart of my theodicy. Here it is:

T1: For an agent to achieve its telos, it must do so with internal integrity.

What I mean by “internal integrity” must be specified. Achieving one’s telos is not a matter of simply getting certain inputs to generate the desired outputs. In other words, being a good human person is about more than just behaving the right way or doing the right thing. It is about being a certain kind of person. This involves a transformation of the individual from one state to another. This transformation takes place through an individual’s development of character, accomplished by habituation and the practice of the virtues. Part of the human good is that humans achieve it as humans. To see why this is so, we can run a thought experiment. Suppose that very technologically advanced aliens abducted a human named Dale. They implant into Dale’s brain a microchip that will override Dale’s normally disordered desires and give him good desires. The result will be that Dale will now live as an ideal human should. But it seems there is something deficient about Dale’s story. The good for Dale is not merely that he act like a good person, but that he would actually become a good person on his own volition. It would be better if Dale would live as good person, not because he was made to, but because he wanted to and thus, through a slow and difficult process, began forming his character to become a good person. The end matters, but so do the means to the end. C. S. Lewis makes a similar point in the Problem of Pain. Lewis points out that in the game of chess   

...you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him - if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking - then you could not have a game at all.

There is an analogy between the integrity of a chess game and the integrity of the human pursuit of their good. Humans must "play the game" on their own if winning is going to mean anything. Humans as humans must achieve their good; there is no other possible way it could be. This is what I mean by “internal integrity.” For an agent to achieve its telos, it cannot be overridden by forces outside itself; it must pursue its telos by its own volition.

Another idea implicit in the notion of internal integrity is the reality of libertarian free will. This means our choices are, at bottom, self-determined and not determined by God. God is restricted by what libertarian agents would choose to do.[11] But what reason is there to think that we actually have this power? While this is not the place to develop a full argument, I will give at least one piece of evidence. Libertarian freedom is the commonsense view. We navigate our everyday lives under the assumption that we determine what we will do. Of course, our determinative powers are limited. For instance, I cannot will that I teleport to Mars and have it happen. But within the range of my natural powers (like the power to move my arm or not), I can will to do or not do certain things. It is only when we operate according to this presupposition that things like deliberation or weighing our options make sense. We deliberate because we think we will make an important choice, not that someone else has already made the choice for us. So we should accept that we really have libertarian freedom or pay the very high cost of saying our commonsense experience is completely mistaken.

Something very important follows from T1 and biblical view of the human good that will allow us to say something about Sue’s case. Given that the human good includes relations with other humans, it follows that God must, as a general policy, not intervene in human interactions. If he were to intervene too often, he would compromise humanity’s internal integrity and short circuit our ability to achieve our telos. And, given the reality of libertarian freedom, sometimes humans may do things God does not want them to do. All things considered, it is better for humans for God to allow us autonomy and the possibility of achieving our good, even if this means that we inflict terrible evils on one another.

In addition to this, there is a sense in which any case of human evil is the fault of all humans collectively. We have a God-given responsibility to one another that goes unmet when we allow each other to fall into sin. I do not mean to say that you or I as individuals are directly responsible somehow for the abuse of Sue. What I mean is that humanity in general is responsible. If I work for Acme Dog Food Company as a customer service representative and my company ships rancid dog food that poisons thousands of dogs, there’s a sense in which I am responsible for that even though I did not directly cause it. The degree of culpability is not the same as Jim's, the Quality Assurance Manager, but I am a part of the community that poisoned the dogs and that makes me responsible at some level. We can also see this idea at work in the context of citizens and nations. When a country commits an injustice, there is a sense in which each citizen is responsible even if they did not directly contribute to the injustice. A citizen may not be the one doing the bayonetting, but they participate in a society that makes it possible. Further, any given citizen could have done more to prevent it. The extent to which he did not do what he could to prevent it, he has failed. Here another thought. Aristotle taught us that being a truly virtuous person is impossible to do on our own. We must live in the right kind of society - a society aimed at realizing the human good. Here Lewis is again helpful. In Mere Christianity, Lewis suggests that the metaphor of a fleet of ships on a voyage toward a particular destination captures the essence of the moral life: "The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ships do not collide and get in one another’s way; and, secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order." Later, Lewis adds a third part: the fleet must have a specific destination if the voyage is to be successful. Lewis concludes,

Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.

In our secular society, it often seems as the only real moral value is the first thing, staying out each other's way. So, on first glance, it may seem silly to think that we are somehow and to some degree responsible for Sue's abuse. Now, it ought to be made clear that I do not intend to say all of us are guilty of the same thing as Sue's abuser. That is obviously false. But, we humans are guilty of something with respect to Sue. To return to Lewis's metaphor: We have allowed other ships on the voyage to fall into severe disrepair and we have allowed other ships to wander off course. We can use the ideas of Aristotle to express the same concern. Aristotle thought part of being truly human is cultivating a society of excellence, a society where everyone practices the virtues. Cultivating this kind of society is the function of every human person, and it is a function that no one fulfills as fully as they ought. We fail both by not maximizing the virtue in ourselves and by not properly attending to the formation of virtue in others. In the sense that we all fail in this way is the sense in which we are all responsible for the creation of abusers - it is in this sense all of us humans have failed Sue. This does not lessen the seriousness of the abuser’s error, but it does show that we are all in this together and that we all have a responsibility to cultivate excellence in one another.

This is especially true in cases like Sue’s. If we consider the man who killed Sue, we will likely see a person who has a warped and distorted character (his ship is out of order and off course). Likely, this state of affairs is not solely the man’s fault. We know that abusers were often abused themselves; perhaps that is the case here. This chain of abuse could expand exponentially as we consider all the people who, in one way or another, contributed to the formation of Sue’s murderer into the kind of person who would rape and kill a little girl. Additionally, all of us humans fail to care for each other as we ought and so we create, together, the environment where acts like Sue’s murder can happen. Sue’s case is indicator not only of her killer’s depravity, but the depravity of humanity in general. To be clear, Sue's abuser still had the freedom to do otherwise and so he is still culpable for Sue's abuse. But, there is a sense in which humans in general are responsible for bringing about a world in which abusers exist.

Here is a possible objection. Even in the best case scenarios, some people will still choose to do evil. Even if humanity  had fulfilled its duty and given Sue's abuser the right kind of care and made every effort to keep him on course, he could still choose to be an abuser. Now, why exactly might this be a problem for my account?  The objector might say, "It is a problem because you have been saying that humans in general are responsible for the abuse of Sue. If our actions do not determine her abuser's actions, then we cannot be responsible. That is the problem."  In response, I want to first highlight and recall a distinction I made earlier. We can offer to repair a person's ship and tell him where to go, but making the repairs and plotting the course  are, in the end, up to him. This is true . We can only be responsible for cultivating an environment and offering direction, we cannot be responsible for what people do with those things. In the case of Sue's abuse, we are, at best, responsible for creating a context that made the abuse possible and not for the abuse itself. But this does not defeat my account because humans are still, albeit indirectly, responsible for Sue's abuse. That is, humanity is responsible for creating the environment in which abuse can take place.

That said, I want to give another caveat.  Even though the idea of the human good and internal integrity might help us make sense of why God allows even terrible evils as a general rule, we should exercise epistemic humility here. I do not mean to suggest that this is the reason God allowed Sue’s case. Alston is right; in most cases we cannot know what the actual reason is for God allowing an evil to occur. But we can make some “theodical suggestions.”[12]

But how can T1 and the biblical notion of the human good help us make sense of a case like Bambi’s?  Here we must remember that the human good includes care of the earth. Perhaps God’s intention for human care of the earth is that we were so meticulous that we would prevent cases like Bambi’s from ever occurring. At first, this might seem absurd, but that may be only because we humans have strayed so far from God’s intention for us. In a world in which every human properly exercised his or her responsibility to care for God’s creation, I suspect there would be vastly fewer Bambi-like cases. And, once humans actually achieved dominion on the earth, perhaps no Bambi-like cases would ever occur. So part of the answer for why there are Bambi-like cases may be that humans have failed in their responsibility as care-givers of the earth. Another part of the answer comes directly from Scripture. Paul says that nature itself is “subject to frustration”[13] because “humanity’s fall into sin marred the ‘goodness’ of God’s creation.”[14] Human sin, then is the cause of natural evil. And, given that the welfare of the earth is so closely connected with the human telos, God cannot, as a general rule, intervene in nature without compromising the internal integrity of humanity. Humans, if we ever hope to be what God intends, must willingly take on their responsibility as caretakers of the earth.

If what I have said is correct, then God has good reason to allow Bambi and Sue cases. This undermines Rowe’s R1 and thus his argument no longer goes through. But before moving to the conclusion, let me consider two objections.

First, the atheologian might say, “All this talk of the human good and human responsibility is very noble, but couldn't have God lessened the suffering of both Bambi and Sue and not compromise the internal integrity of humanity?” This objection presses on an ambiguity in my argument, specifically on the idea that God could not intervene as a “general rule.” If the rule is generally applied, then there is no reason God could not intervene in any particular case. But from this it also follows that God could intervene in Sue or Bambi’s case and not compromise human integrity. No particular case is essential to human integrity. However, if God intervenes too much, then human integrity will be compromised. So at least some evils must still be allowed. We can reason that those evils that occur must be allowed or else human integrity would be compromised.[15] So if God prevented Sue’s case or a Bambi-like case from occurring, there would be some evil equally bad or worse he would have to allow somewhere else. Therefore, this objection does not defeat the argument.

Second, the atheologian might object because, he says, I have described a morally hopeless situation. Humans, as they are now, will never develop to the point where we would prevent Sue and Bambi cases. A long list of gross human failures even from the past thirty days could be easily produced. If T1 is right, then the hope of ever realizing a just world is absurd. We are like a terminally ill cancer patient who suffers tremendous pain and who has no chance of recovery. Given the hopelessness of the situation, the only good we can reasonably hope for is that doctor would give us some drug to deaden the pain. So God should realize that since humans are in such a sad state, human integrity is not worth the suffering because it will never be realized. What is the point of allowing cases like Sue’s if it will never amount to anything? But, on this point the atheologian is mistaken. We Christians have yet more to say. Our plight is not hopeless because God himself has become one of us. God has done something dramatic and heroic on the part of creatures like Bambi, even more so for humans like Sue. In the person of Jesus, God has given humanity a way to be truly human and a way to end human and animal suffering. Through Jesus, God has acted to overcome human sin in a way that does not compromise the internal integrity of humanity because Jesus is fully human. And since Jesus is incarnate and fully human, he makes a way for humans to overcome the problem of sin as humans. Apart from him, humans are unable to achieve our God given telos. But with him, we can become what God intends. In every way, Jesus has redeemed humanity from our sin.

Conclusion

In this essay, we have seen a promising way for Christians to respond to the problem of evil. We saw that God can allow some evil if it realizes a worthwhile good and that he is limited by what is logically possible. Further, we saw that allowing humans autonomy to achieve their good is worthwhile and this entails that God cannot, as a general rule, intervene in areas of human responsibility. Finally, we saw that God, in Jesus, has acted in a way to solve the problem of evil while simultaneously preserving human integrity.

 Notes

[1] Rowe. 3.

[2] J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism : Arguments for and against the Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 115.

[3] Augustine, The City of God, XI, CHAP. 9.  http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120111.htm

[4] John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1977). 45.

[5]See Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (New York: Octagon Books, 1983). 132.

[6] Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book 22, chapter 78.

[7] Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book 22, chapter 78.

[8] A similar point is made by N.T. Wright in N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2006). Kindle location 343. He says that evil is the OT is understood as “idolatry” or “dehumanization.” This is consistent with the idea that evil is disorder or malfunction.

[9] See Matt 19-1-6.

[10] These three relations are inspired by a similar list mentioned in John Randall Sachs, The Christian Vision of Humanity : Basic Christian Anthropology, Zacchaeus Studies Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991). 17.

[11] Sometimes, defenders of libertarian freedom are accused of improperly limiting God. But this accusation is wrong for two reasons.  First, God is still fully omnipotent on the libertarian view. God can do whatever is logically possible for him to do. Second, to say that God chose to create agents with libertarian freedom does not mean that God has fewer options open to him at all. The opposite is true. The defender of libertarian freedom thinks that God could have determined everything; that is his prerogative. However, the defender also thinks God has the power to create finite, self-determining creatures. God has more options and not less on this view. It is the compatibilist that is, arguably, artificially limiting God’s power.

[12] William Alston, "The Inductive Argument from Evil," in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder(Bloomington, ID.: Indiana University Press, 1996).103.

[13] Romans 8:22

[14] Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 1996). 515.

[15] This response is inspired by a similar discussion in David  Baggett and Walls Jerry L., Good God : The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 144. Here they discuss an analogy from Peter van Inwagen aimed at showing that if God intervenes too much, he will defeat the law like regularity in a world.

[1] Thomas Aquinas said something similar: “everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms, is numbered amongst those possible things, in respect of which God is called omnipotent: whereas whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility.” ST I Q 25 A 3. Available here: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1025.htm

[2] 1 John 4:8.

[3] Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, Rev. ed., Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 184.

[4] J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” in The Problem of Evil, ed. Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 26.

[5] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4583/4583-h/4583-h.htm#chap10

[6] Sarah Price Brown, “Q & a with Rabbi Harold S. Kushner,” Jewish Journal 2006.

[7] It is important to add here that many, if not most, Open Theists would not see their position as weakening of God’s omnipotence. God still has the power to do whatever is possible. But, on their view, it is not possible to know the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom in advance. Thus, God still is able to do whatever is logically possible to do. Further, Open Theism is often not a response to the problem of evil, but to problems created by human libertarian freedom and certain perceived problems with God’s knowing some agent’s action in advance and that agent being genuinely free with respect to that action. There is a good discussion of these issues in Jerry L. Walls’ Hell: The Logic of Damnation, Library of Religious Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992). 33-56.

[8] Alvin Plantinga, “God, Evil, and the Metaphysics of Freedom,” in Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 85.

[9] This is similar to the definition of libertarian free will offered by Bruce R. Reichenbach, Evil and a Good God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982). 57. Reichenbach takes his definition from Anthony Flew.

[10] Plantinga. 101.

[11] If this were all Christians could say about the existence of God, that possibly he exists, Christian apologetics would be in a sad state. However, Plantinga’s free will defense provides a way out of the logical problem of evil so that Christians can now present a positive and cumulative case for the truth of Christianity.

[12] Alvin Plantinga, “Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa’,” in Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil, ed. Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004).

[13] Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977). Kindle location 337.

[14] Kirk R. MacGregor, “The Existence and Irrelevance of Gratuitous Evil,” Philosophia Christi 14, no. 1 (2012). 169.

[15] My own view would be that God is not really committed to a particular normative ethical theory. I think something like natural law theory is true. Whatever God does is good because God always acts in the appropriate way given the nature of the object he acts upon and his relation to that object.

[16] MacGregor, “The Existence and Irrelevance of Gratuitous Evil.” See especially his discussion on pages 170-171.

[17] MacGregor takes a similar view in the end. He wants to defend the idea that there are gratuitous evils (he wants to show that Rowe’s second premise is false), but that these pose no threat to the rationality of the theist’s position. The basic thought is that, following Augustine, evil is a privation. Because everything God creates is less than God, “it is logically impossible for God to create a world without evil,” says MacGregor. In this case, evils, even especially heinous ones, are not part of some very tight plan according to which, if a person refrained from a gratuitously evil act, some very great good would be lost. So some acts of evil happen just because an agent willed it to happen and no other reason. In some ways, I am inclined to agree with MacGregor on this point. However, I think it is a mistake to call these evils “gratuitous.” God does have some greater goods in view when he allows them. At least one would be the greater good of respecting human freedom. MacGregor may be right when he says that certain evil acts are not essential to God’s plan, but they might still be essential to the integrity of human autonomy. This does not need to be spelled out in terms of consequentialism. Perhaps God follows the maxim: It is good to respect human freedom without considering the consequences. In that case, the greater good is following the maxim instead of intervening.

[18] William Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington, ID.: Indiana University Press, 1996). 2.

[19] Ibid. 2.

[20] Ibid. 4.

[21] Rowe, William L. 1988. “Evil and Theodicy,” Philosophical Topics 16: 119-32.

Podcast: Dr. Baggett on the Moral Argument and Knowing What God is Like

In this week's episode, Dr. Baggett explains why he became interested in the moral argument and the role it has had in shaping his view of God.

EPS Interview with R. Scott Smith: In Search of Moral Knowledge

One of the variants of moral apologetics is epistemic. Angus Ritchie’s From Morality to Metaphysics is one example; Mark Linville’s excellent work is another. Another is R. Scott Smith’s excellent recent book called In Search of Moral Knowledge. Here is an interview of him conducted by Joe Gorra and the Evangelical Philosophical Society.  

A Perfect God

Yoram Hazony, author of The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, recently wrote a provocative opinion article for the New York Times in which he summarized his skepticism toward the idea of a perfect God. Hazony suggests that there are two compelling reasons why the God of classical theism should be rejected: first, reconciling the existence of evil with God’s omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence is too great a challenge. Second, he says, such a picture fails to match the Old Testament portrayal of God.

Hazony insists that the problem of evil shows that God cannot be both all-good and all-powerful, for if he were we would not find the injustices in the world we do. He chalks up affirmation of such perfections more to the influence of Greek philosophy than to biblical thought. Regarding the God of the Old Testament, he writes:

The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depicted as immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he regrets having made man). He is not all-knowing, since he’s repeatedly surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a cow). He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot control Israel and get its people to do what he wants. And so on.

Consider the standard perfections of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. Hazony says forthrightly that the problem of evil renders reconciliation of omnipotence and omnibenevolence either highly unlikely or flatly impossible.

Hazony’s claims are predicated on an unrefined conception of omnipotence. Talk of perfection only makes sense in terms of achieving the right balance of properties, not by maximizing a thing’s constituent principles simultaneously. To speak of a “perfect bottle,” for example, is colloquial at best, confused at worst; how many drops of liquid are contained in the “perfect bottle” admits of no objective answer. God has as much power, knowledge, and goodness as are mutually compatible and compossible.

If God sovereignly chooses to confer on human beings libertarian freedom, that means that some logically possible worlds are not feasible ones, but it hardly shows that God is not omnipotent. Hazony also errs in taking the great “I am” declaration of God to be an indication of God’s incompleteness and changeability, rather than, as seems the more straightforward meaning, God’s uncreatedness and ontological independence.

One reason Hazony makes these claims is that he wishes to emphasize the need for tentativeness and provisionality in theology, and remind us that our knowledge of God remains fragmentary and partial. In Hazony’s view, “The belief that any human mind can grasp enough of God to begin recognizing perfections in him would have struck the biblical authors as a pagan conceit.”

According to the Hebrew Bible, Hazony insists, God represents the embodiment of life’s experiences and vicissitudes, from hardship to joy; although God is ultimately faithful and just, these aren’t perfections or qualities that obtain necessarily. “On the contrary, it is the hope that God is faithful and just that is the subject of ancient Israel’s faith.”

He concludes by arguing that his view is one that ought to appeal to people of faith today: “With theism rapidly losing ground across Europe and among Americans as well, we could stand to reconsider this point. Surely a more plausible conception of God couldn’t hurt.”

Is theism really losing ground, or are certain religious institutions? And what does it even mean to speak of the Hebraic depiction of God as more realistic than the idea of God as altogether perfect? It is certainly more anthropomorphic, or to put it more precisely, anthropopathic; portraying God as if he had human passions. But does that make it more “realistic”? And why does the fact that lines of Scripture do not read like a philosophical text compromise the philosophical work of evincing such a conception, or render the effort utterly artificial, or invalid?

The claim that a perfect God is a Greek convention incorporated into theology is an allegation that overlooks the role of what theologians refer to as “general revelation.” The Greeks had no corner on the market of reason. Plenty of Greeks—Euthyphro, for example—believed in all sorts of rather morally deficient gods. Indeed, we could return the favor and suggest that it’s actually Hazony’s conception of God which is more influenced by Greek ideas in this regard than by Scripture.

The fact remains, though, that in the New Testament itself we find ample indications of a morally perfect and perfectly loving God. This happy convergence of the a priori deliverances of reason and the a posteriori deliverances of Scripture should come as no surprise since one would expect resonance between the outcomes of special and general revelation. Nothing less than this view of God can answer our deepest hopes.

David Baggett is professor of philosophy at Liberty University and co-author, with Jerry Walls, of Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. Tom Morris taught philosophy for fifteen years at Notre Dame and writes for various outlets .

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Yoram Hazony, “ An Imperfect God ,” New York Times , November 25, 2012

Originally posted at First Things

Photo: "greek god" by Giovanni. CC license. 

Thomas Nagel’s Rejection of Theism: A Critique

Review Essay* Thomas Nagel’s Rejection of Theism: A Critique

In his most recent book—Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False—and in numerous places in his previous work, Thomas Nagel wishes to suggest several reasons that theism is not a live option for him (to use a phrase made famous by William James).[1] He does not seem to intend many of his criticisms to be more than suggestive, much less decisive; nonetheless, in light of the strength of his conviction that theism is somehow too inherently outrageous an option to believe, I would like to spend a bit of time identifying and assessing the criticisms he mentions.

Nagel does not seem averse to characterizing his resistance to theism as something of a bias. He is rather transparent about theism simply not being a reasonable alternative for him. He seems to leave open the possibility that others may find it to be so, but he himself, he says, has not been blessed with the sensus divinitatis. Alvin Plantinga’s work in epistemology employs this notion, borrowing from the writings of John Calvin, to refer to the idea that God has made his reality known to people in a direct fashion apart from discursive inference.[2] Nagel, though, claims to have no such sense, however inchoate. The thesis of theism strikes him rather as a dead option—perhaps akin (this is my example, not his) to the difficulty if not impossibility for an evangelical Christian to endorse reincarnation or karma.

Important to emphasize is the irenic way in which Nagel conveys this impression. There is nothing overtly tendentious or dismissive about his view toward theists in general, despite his own rejection of theism and incredulity at some of its tenets. In fact, he goes out of his way to express gratitude for certain theistically motivated advocates of intelligent design—lauding them as iconoclasts—for raising important questions and pointing out salient limitations of naturalism. His recent review of Plantinga’s latest book is exceedingly fair.[3] And he admits that plenty of thinkers, on seeing the limitations of naturalism, might naturally gravitate toward theism as the superior explanation of various important aspects of the human experience—a few of which I shall mention below. Nagel’s fair-mindedness and collegial tone are laudable, refreshing, and a poignant contrast with the contentious animus of the New Atheists whose strident dismissiveness of their debate interlocutors bespeaks a troubling lack of intellectual accountability. Nagel’s is not a divisive, partisan voice, but rather the sincere effort of a great and scrupulously honest philosopher trying to understand reality in light of his atheism and the seemingly in-principle inability of naturalism to explain important phenomena that he is unwilling to renounce.

His book, to express it in broad outline, argues that various features of the human condition—value, meaning, cognition, consciousness, agency—reside beyond the ability of naturalism to account for. The thesis is not a new one, although what is most striking about Nagel’s book is that he is an atheist admitting the limitations of naturalism. Usually such criticisms are lodged by theists, like Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland, who, three years ago, published his book The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism.[4] Moreland argued specifically that consciousness, free will, rationality, personhood, objective morality, and intrinsic value are unable to be sustained by a naturalistic worldview. Ironically enough, in an appendix Moreland discusses Nagel at length, specifically the “dismissive strategy” Nagel employed in a 1997 book—a strategy that attempted to undercut, among other things, a theistic account of reason.[5] For present purposes, though, it is important to see that Nagel and Moreland agree that naturalism is ill-equipped to explain important features of reality.

Let us take value as a paradigmatic example to illustrate their point. The last chapter in Nagel’s (and Moreland’s) book treats the question of values generally, ethics more particularly. In seeking an adequate explanation of value (as he did for the other items on his list), Nagel divides the question into the constitutive issue concerning what value is all about and the historical question of how it could come about that creatures like us could recognize objective value and be motivated by it. Causal historical accounts, he argues, inevitably are problematically reductionist, leaving out important and ineliminable parts of the picture. Historical explanations, such as those offered by theists, could indeed help explain much of what needs explanation here, but Nagel nonetheless rejects it for reasons to be discussed below. Instead, he opts for a nonintentional teleological explanation, something in the vicinity of the ideas of Aristotle, he thinks. Although he admits he is not entirely sure such an explanation makes sense, it is the direction he thinks is most likely to prove fertile. What he remains adamant about is that subjectivist and eliminativist (anti-realist) accounts, though they may be explicable with the resources of naturalism alone, are beyond his ability to embrace psychologically, involving too prohibitive a price and too big an affront to common sense. “The teleological hypothesis,” he writes, in contrast, “is that these things may be determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics but also by something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them.”[6] The question as to which alternative is best comes down, he thinks, to a matter of relative plausibility.

Nagel, of course, admits that his notions of nonintentional teleology—a universe coming to life, coming into an ability to recognize itself, a view that resonates in certain respects with C. D. Broad’s view of the mind in nature and with Bergson’s picture of creative evolution—may well, in today’s intellectual climate, strike many readers as implausible, in the same way that materialism and theism strike him.[7] At any rate, although much of what Nagel is suggesting here is not altogether new, in the contemporary discussion of, say, value and reality, it represents a fourth option after three well-rehearsed ones, which are as follows: naturalists confident in moral realism, like Nagel, but who, unlike Nagel, retain the hope that secular ethical theory will eventually suffice to capture what is distinctive about value; naturalists who, like Nagel, see naturalism as in principle unable to explain important aspects of value and who, unlike Nagel, thus reject moral realism; supernaturalists who remain staunch moral realists, like Nagel, but who, unlike Nagel, identify theistic foundations for morality. Nagel agrees and disagrees with all of these camps. Let us call his view “teleological emergentism.” With respect to value, this is (1) a realist perspective affirming objective value, (2) it sees that naturalism cannot account for such realism, and so (3) it rejects naturalism. In its place, though, (4) Nagel steadfastly resists the theistic hypothesis, gesturing instead in this other direction—a view of the universe as somehow having had this teleological direction latent within it, rendering the emergence of consciousness, value, and the like more than just wild coincidence.

Assessing the merits of his alternative proposal is a task for another day; for now, why is it that Nagel retains so strong a bias against theism, beyond his admission to not being blessed with a sense of God’s reality? On my reading, he identifies several reasons to explain his philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic aversion. It is worth noting what they are, because classical theists have some important points to emphasize in reply. If the discussion is to proceed by more than merely citing one’s biases, but rather by a genuine, careful assessment of relative plausibilities, it is important that Nagel’s concerns about theism be forthrightly addressed.

To this end, let us identify the reasons he adduces for skepticism about theism. His quest for adequate explanation functions with a few strictures, one of which is antireductionism. Others are that certain things cannot be explained as merely accidental, and “the ideal of discovering a single natural order that unified everything on the basis of a set of common elements and principles.”[8] Both Cartesian dualism and classical theism reject this second criterion or aspiration, thus departing from the single natural order to which Nagel aspires. Theists who appeal to the miraculous are attempting to explain features of the world by divine intervention. Since this is not part of the natural order, it is beyond where he is willing to go. Is this merely his bias, or a reason for rejecting the theistic hypothesis? If we were to attempt to make it into a reason, the logic seems to go something like this: divine interventions seem to represent a breakdown in explanation, an unnecessary ad hoc add-on, a theological addition to the picture that is indulgent and foreign. This is why Nagel’s earlier aversion seems aptly characterized as rooted in something aesthetic: he seems to be operating on the assumption that there is something explanatorily suspect about theism and the miraculous from the start. He at any rate is unable to countenance it, and he suspects in today’s intellectual milieu appeals to theism will largely be seen as troublesome.

Call it a mere bias if you will, but Nagel’s concern here seems to be that an adequate explanation, to avoid appearances of being ad hoc or ontologically indulgent or something else, needs to be integrated. Its parts cannot just be slapped together in haphazard and unprincipled fashion, but must truly inform each other and combine into an organic whole. God’s transcendence or the disruption of the natural order by miracles or something of the kind seems to strike him at a deep level as incongruent with this constraint imposed by integration. Although I do not share his reservations here, for reasons I shall explain below, I think I can empathize with his concern to a degree and can feel some of the force of his sentiment. It is this issue in particular, in fact, that I wish to explore further below, enlisting the assistance of C. S. Lewis to do so. First, though, let us briefly review some of Nagel’s other reasons for rejecting the supernatural.

A recurring theme of Nagel’s is that mind must somehow be central to the story of reality—not just an accidental product fortuitously arising billions of years into the narrative, but something that somehow guided the process from the start. Theism accomplishes such a feat impeccably, of course, but Nagel insists that this does not help. For he writes, “So long as the divine mind just has to be accepted as a stopping point in the pursuit of understanding, it leaves the process incomplete, just as the purely descriptive materialist account does.”[9] This then is another reason for his rejection of the theistic hypothesis: its alleged incompleteness in making God, in this case, a stopping point. At this point plenty of classical theists would be entitled to balk, of course, since God seems to be a natural stopping point indeed, a Being whose existence is necessary, the One who is, in fact, the very ground of all being. If anyone or anything is entitled to be a legitimate stopping point, is this not it? Nagel admits (or at least intimates) that, unlike the nomological laws of physics, God’s existence is more plausibly thought of as metaphysically necessary. And even though theism accommodates Nagel’s insistence that mental phenomena must be attributed to the working of a comprehensive mental source, he still finds theism no more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. But why?

According to Nagel, “Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial explanation of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one.”[10] The problem with naturalism construed reductionistically is that it fails to undergird our confidence in the deliverances of reason, since reason itself is explicated in a way that casts doubt on its ability to uncover the truth (an issue we will return to later). The problems identified here for theism are that it fails to provide an adequate explanation. It “amounts to the hypothesis that the highest-order explanation of how things hang together is of a certain type, namely, intentional or purposive, without having anything more to say about how that intention operates except what is found in the results to be explained.”[11] Nagel continues by writing that “a theistic explanation will inevitably bring in some idea of value, and a particular religion can make this much more specific, though it also poses the famous problem of evil.”[12] He then mentions the difficulty of believing in God, and then claims that the disadvantage of theism as an answer to the desire for comprehensive understanding is that it does not offer explanation “in the form of a comprehensive account of the natural order. Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world.”[13] Thus, a theistic self-understanding “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—intelligibility from within. That kind of intelligibility may be compatible with some forms of theism—if God creates a self-contained natural order which he then leaves undisturbed. But it is not compatible with direct theistic explanation of systematic features of the world that would seem otherwise to be brute facts—such as the creation of life from dead matter, or the birth of consciousness, or reason. Such interventionist hypotheses amount to a denial that there is a comprehensive natural order.”[14]

How do we assess Nagel’s claims here? To begin with, let us identify and summarize the main sources of his concern. It is a bit challenging to unravel the cluster of inter-related concerns here, but let us give it a try. I suspect that the whole assortment of Nagel’s concerns is predicated on his reasonable assumption that metaphysics and epistemology tie together adequately. Among his foundational epistemic commitments is what can practically be dubbed an aesthetic preference: he is rather forthright about his psychological aversion to propositions that smack of being ad hoc, to overly pluralistic pictures of the world, to views he considers ontologically indulgent, positing unnecessary and extraneous entities. Even when such entities may accomplish work in explaining some of what is in need of explanation, Nagel is hesitant to affirm them if they do not seem to resonate and dovetail enough with a single natural order. His epistemology precludes theses like Cartesian dualism and interventionist variants of theism, because these would, in his estimation, amount to a denial that there is a comprehensive natural order. They push the quest for intelligibility outside the world, resulting in an inadequately integrated worldview. The epistemic strictures he maintains dictate that the right answer, the true view of reality, be a world involving an organic whole, and supernaturalism simply fails to satisfy such a constraint.

If this sort of summary is the gist of Nagel’s concern about theism, how might the classical theist, one who not only believes in the supernatural realm but even in a God who can and does intervene in the natural order, defend such theism against his criticisms? Can supernaturalists answer Nagel’s worries and nagging concerns? I think for the most part that they can, and where they cannot, I am inclined to say that this is so much the worse for some of Nagel’s epistemic strictures. This at least is the case that I am now going to argue for. In order to do so, I want to enlist the assistance of the great literary scholar and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, particularly some of the insights he shared in his book on miracles.

First let us dispense with a few preliminaries. Nagel writes that he lacks the sensus divinitatis. Even if such a reality exists, however, the fact that Nagel himself does not personally have much of an experience with it provides no evidence against theism generally or Christianity particularly. All sorts of potential obstacles can stand in the way of such religious experience. The wiser course here is to raise the relevant evidential questions about the truth of theism. Even Plantinga, a firm believer that we can be justified to be theists and indeed Christians while lacking discursive justification, remains convinced that several dozen arguments collectively provide a strong evidential case for the truth of classical theism. Let us for now simply set aside the notion of religious belief as a candidate for proper basicality, which would simply get us off track.

Nagel, recall, also mentions the problem of evil, a big discussion in its own right that we need to set aside for now as well. Writing on the problem of evil in recent years has ballooned into an enormous literature. In the estimation of many, it is the proponents and advocates of classical theism who have had the upper hand in the debate in recent years, as atheologians advancing arguments from evil have consistently had to keep changing their approach to find a workable version of the argument. Those convinced by the problem of evil that belief in classical theism is irrational, though, will need to look elsewhere for considerations aiming to disabuse them of this conviction. It will not be addressed directly here.

The particular crux of the issue on which I wish to focus is Nagel’s aesthetic bias in favor of an integrated picture of things, a constraint he is convinced interventionist (i.e. classical) theism cannot satisfy. By calling such a stricture “aesthetic” I do not mean to impugn its value; aesthetic considerations may well function in an important way in any right and properly expansive epistemic approach, especially as we attempt something so ambitious as identifying the true metaphysical worldview. No, rather than denying the need for the satisfaction of such a constraint, I would prefer to argue that classical theism is better at meeting such a constraint, or at least one in its close proximity, than Nagel seems to realize. Nagel’s view of theism, in certain respects, seems to be inadequately nuanced and sophisticated. Rejecting Sunday school versions of theism and Christianity may well be altogether appropriate; equating such variants with the real thing would be a mistake.

For a more sophisticated version of the theistic perspective, let us turn to the writings of C. S. Lewis; as we do so, it will be almost surprising to see the prescience with which Lewis anticipated just the sorts of worries that preoccupy Nagel. Recall Nagel’s concern that theism (by which I will mean, henceforth, classical and interventionist theism) would preclude the “organic whole” and “comprehensive natural order” Nagel desires. His own Aristotelian-like, emergentist, teleological account of mind, though not compatible with reductionist naturalism, does not preclude the sort of organic wholeness and comprehensively naturalistic explanation he is after. For this reason, despite the latter’s obscurity as an explanation, Nagel is more drawn to it than to classical theism with its notions of intelligent creation.

Now, by way of counterpoint, consider this passage from C. S. Lewis, from the eighth chapter of Miracles. It comes right after he speaks of the way some people find intolerable the notion of miraculous interventions in the world. “The reason they find it intolerable,” he writes, “is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent.”[15] He then says he agrees with them, but he thinks that “they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole.”[16] He then continues:

That being so, the miracle and the previous history of Nature may be interlocked after all but not in the way the Naturalist expected: rather in a much more roundabout fashion. The great complex event called Nature, and the new particular event introduced into it by the miracle, are related by their common origin in God, and doubtless, if we knew enough, most intricately related in His purpose and design, so that a Nature which had had a different history, and therefore been a different Nature, would have been invaded by different miracles or by none at all. In that way the miracles and the previous course of Nature are as well interlocked as any other two realities, but you must go back as far as their common Creator to find the interlocking. You will not find it within Nature.[17]

So Nagel and Lewis, we might say, entirely agree on the aesthetic constraint for an integrated worldview, but their views are diametrically opposite on the question of what such a constraint demands. Nagel’s insistence is that such integration be found within nature, and Lewis insists that, though it is to be found, it will not be found there. “Everything is connected with everything else: but not all things are connected by the short and straight roads we expected,” Lewis wrote.[18] They cannot both be right on this score. Nagel’s constraint would preclude taking seriously Lewis’s suggestion; and Lewis’s alternate suggestion means that Nagel’s effort would be bound to fail. In light of so fundamental a conflict of intuitions, argument and evidence would be useful, much more so than subjective epistemic biases. Unfortunately for Nagel, though, this is the precise point where his argument is the thinnest. Lewis, as we are about to see, is just getting started.

Nagel is no pantheist, but he definitely has resonance with panpsychism, according to which, via emergentism, the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties. This is how he is inclined to explain what needs explaining: that mind must somehow function centrally in the story of reality. Like pantheism, though, such an account is considerably more amorphous and simply vague than the account of classical theism. Nagel seems to consider this an advantage in practice over the crude and dualistic nature of theism, but Lewis would completely disagree. Speaking of pantheism, rather than panpsychism, but in a way that in salient respects could extend equally to both, Lewis writes that “at every point Christianity has to correct the natural expectations of the Pantheist and offer something more difficult, just as Schrodinger has to correct Democritus. At every moment he has to multiply distinctions and rule out false analogies. He has to substitute the mappings of something that has a positive, concrete, and highly articulated character for the formless generalities in which Pantheism is at home. . . . The ascertained nature of any real thing is always at first a nuisance to our natural fantasies—a wretched, pedantic, logic-chopping intruder upon a conversation which was getting on famously without it.”[19] Lewis notes that when people compare adult versions of other worldviews with a knowledge of Christianity acquired in childhood, they get the impression that the Christian account of God is the “obvious” one, the one too easy to be true, while its alternatives seem sublime and profound by comparison. Lewis thinks just the opposite is the case. Reality is hard and obstinate, and not at all what we might expect most of the time. Vague notions of spirituality or a diffused mind animating the universe is hardly a novel notion; it is arguably the native bent of mind and immemorial religion. “An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall?”[20]

Interesting to note is that Nagel’s problem with theism largely evaporates if it is a theism that does not involve intervention. Had God created the world in such a way that it was henceforth self-sustaining and self-regulating, then, Nagel thinks, there would be hope of reconciling such theism with the sort of worldview he is seeking. But a God who intervenes, who performs miracles, who upholds the universe by his power, who sent his Son into it to die for our sins—this sort of supernaturalism is beyond the pale, an unprincipled epistemic indulgence, an ontological foul. Interestingly, Lewis himself anticipated this very response. At the beginning of chapter twelve, Lewis captures the mentality of those who think a God who intervenes smacks of a petty and capricious tyrant who breaks his own laws. It is the good and wise kinds of gods who obey them. Even if miracles do not violate laws of nature, still the impression, in the minds of some, is that they “interrupt the orderly march of events, the steady development of Nature according to her own inherent genius or character. That regular march seems to such critics as I have in mind more impressive than any miracle.”[21]

Lewis himself seems to have entertained such a mentality as an atheist, but he would change his mind eventually. As a literary scholar, he offers an analogy to soften readers up to the propriety of God’s interventions. It is the stupid schoolboy, he says, who might think that the abnormal hexameters in Virgil or half-rhymes in English poets were due to incompetence. “In reality, of course, every one of them is there for a purpose and breaks the superficial regularity of the metre in obedience to a higher and subtler law: just as the irregularities in The Winter’s Tale do not impair, but embody and perfect, the inward unity of its spirit.”[22] Lewis’s point is that there are rules behind the rules, and “a unity which is deeper than uniformity.”

A supreme workman will never break by one note or one syllable or one stroke of the brush the living and inward law of the work he is producing. But he will break without scruple any number of those superficial regularities and orthodoxies which little, unimaginative critics mistake for its laws. The extent to which one can distinguish a just ‘license’ from a mere botch or failure of unity depends on the extent to which one has grasped the real and inward significance of the work as a whole.[23]

The analogy is even worse for the dogmatic anti-interventionist than this, though. In his insistence that miracles are improprieties unworthy of the Great Workman rather than expressions of the truest and deepest unity in His total work, he must be reminded that “the gap between God’s mind and ours must, on any view, be incalculably greater than the gap between Shakespeare’s mind and that of the most peddling critics of the old French school.”[24]

Employing yet another literary insight to drive home the point, Lewis highlights Dorothy Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker, whose thesis is based on the analogy between God’s relation to the world and an author’s relation to his book. “The ghost story is a legitimate form of art; but you must not bring a ghost into an ordinary novel to get over a difficulty in the plot.”[25] Doing the latter would be a blunder outside the realm of legitimate authorial prerogatives. Just such an analysis fuels many a suspicion that miracles are marvels of the wrong sort, involving an arbitrary interference with the organic whole of a story. Lewis admits that if he thought of miracles in such terms (as Nagel seems to), he would not believe in them either. But Lewis rests assured that if miracles have occurred, “they have occurred because they are the very thing this universal story is about. They are not exceptions (however rarely they occur), nor irrelevancies. They are precisely those chapters in this great story on which the plot turns.”[26] For those, like Nagel, who seem to think that atoms and time and space are the main plot of the story of the world, Lewis would respond by suggesting that the narrative God is weaving is a long one with a complicated plot. Lewis writes, “and we are not, perhaps, very attentive readers.”[27]

Again, Lewis and Nagel entirely agree on the epistemic preference that reality be integrated and a unity, even if they disagree on certain matters of uniformity. Lewis defends such subjective and admittedly aesthetic criteria, echoing Sir Arthur Eddington’s phrase that science progresses on convictions, perhaps unjustified but nonetheless cherished, about the “innate sense of the fitness of things.” A universe in which interventions were ubiquitous and irregularities omnipresent would be anathema; on this Lewis and Nagel agree. Lewis pushes this point a bit further, though, taking aim at naturalism. For we can ask, of what epistemic significance are such preferences? Lewis argues, and Nagel would likely agree, that if the true metaphysics is mindless naturalism, then such epistemic preferences we hold for order and unity are unlikely to be conducive to the truth. They would simply be facts about us. “If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform,” Lewis wrote.[28] But if theism is true, and the deepest reality is like us, the ultimate fact is a rational spirit in whose image we have been made, then our epistemic preferences are more plausibly thought to be reliable in pointing us toward the truth. This entirely turns on its head the notion that a desire for unity undermines belief in an interventionist God. Modern science, in fact, came about as a result of men believing in law in nature, expecting it because they believed in a legislator. “But if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, ‘Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.’ The philosophy which forbids you to make uniformity absolute is also the philosophy which offers you solid grounds for believing it to be general, to be almost absolute.”[29]

Miracles, Lewis argues—at least from the perspective of Christianity—are not arbitrary, capricious interventions, ubiquitous ad hoc interruptions, but carefully orchestrated turning points in the plot, key chapters on which the whole plot of the novel turns, the main theme of the symphony, as it were. Whether specific alleged ones among them are inherently problematic cannot be answered a priori, but depends on how illuminating of the whole they prove to be. The incarnation, for example, is a picture of the divine condescending to take human flesh, one person both wholly divine and wholly human. No greater portrait of integration and rapprochement of the natural and supernatural is easy to envision. If God can so descend into a human spirit, the reality we inhabit is “more multifariously and subtly harmonious than we had suspected.”[30]

Lewis’s is a classical theistic picture, and his is not the strawman to which simplistic caricatures of religious views lend themselves. If Nagel wishes to defend his aversion to classical theism—despite its superior explanatory power over naturalism—opting instead for his much less evidenced and more obscure conjectures about unintentional teleological emergentism, not only does he have a lot of work to do to defend his own view:  he also needs to do considerably more to subject classical theism to critical scrutiny.

*[1] Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[2] See Plantinga’s trilogy on Warrant. Warrant: The Current Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[3] Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, & Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Nagel published his review of Plantinga’s book in “A Philosopher Defends Religion,” The New York Review of Books 59 September 27, 2012.

[4] J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (London: SCM Press, 2009).

[5] Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[6] Nagel, Mind & Cosmos, 123.

[7] Nagel cites C. D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Routledge, 1925) 81–94, and Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (trans. Arthur Mitchell; New York: Henry Holt, 1911).

[8] Nagel, Mind & Cosmos, 7.

[9] Ibid., 21.

[10] Ibid., 25.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 26.

[14] Ibid.

[15] C. S. Lewis, Miracles, in C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperOne, 2002), 354.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid., 376.

[20] Ibid., 383.

[21] Ibid., 385.

[22] Ibid., 386.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., 387.

[25] Ibid., 388.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid., 389.

[28] Ibid., 395.

[29] Ibid., 395–396.

[30] Ibid., 401.

Photo: "Dendrons, Pisces and the Cosmos" by M. Flynn-Burhoe. CC licence. 

John Hare's Review of Good God

John Hare is one of the most important philosophers in the area of theistic ethics. Hare has written many important books on moral philosophy including The Moral Gap and God and Morality. He has penned a mostly positive review of Good God which is available here.

Here's a short excerpt:

Having said all of this by way of criticism, I want to end by reaffirming that the book is, on the whole, a very good book. I do not want to give a predominantly negative impression. Making points of disagreement is usually more helpful and more interesting than simply agreeing. Nonetheless, the book does an excellent job of supporting the moral argument for belief in God, an argument that has been unjustly neglected in favor of other parts of natural theology, such as the arguments from the origin of the universe or fine-tuning.

Photo: ginnerobot/Flickr 

EPS Interview with David Baggett and Jerry Walls

There's a great interview with Dr. David Baggett and Dr. Jerry Walls  by Joseph E. Gorra available at the blog of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Gorra's interview allows Walls and Baggett to go a little deeper on certain topics and explain the motivation of some of the positions taken in Good God. Gorra asks some great questions about the overall approach of the book, the objection to Calvinism, and the role of natural law, among other things. It's well worth the read. You can find  the interview here.  

How to Think about the Gospel of Autonomy

Why does Christianity seem to have such a poor ability to resonate with people in modern Western countries? This has been an operative dynamic in Europe for a long time, but it is increasingly apparent that the United States too is finding it difficult to harmonize the basic tenets of the Christian worldview with the ideas and values that shape the culture at large. I find myself wondering whether there is a primary explanation of the situation, despite the many different and complex factors contributing to this situation, some unifying, fundamental catalyst at work here.

For example, nearly everyone in Western societies today who has thought much about Christianity knows that the three most difficult issues facing Christianity in the minds of most modern people are (1) the problem of evil, (2) the question of the origin of species, and (3) biblical criticism. Yet not one of these problems is even close to being insuperable. The problem of evil is of course ancient and has been a topic of discussion since the very beginnings of monotheistic religion. In spite of the fact that life for most people in premodern times was much more difficult than it is for us today, very few people living in areas under the sway of the different monotheistic faiths came to the conclusion that the problem of evil warranted disbelief in God. In recent times, work on the problem of evil by philosophers and theologians has only made it more evident that it is no real barrier to faith, which is not to say that it isn’t important, or should be blithely dismissed, but only that it should not prevent anyone from having faith in God. The question of the origin of species and the matter of biblical criticism are uniquely modern problems for Christianity, due to the fact that the theories and practices which led to their emergence did not exist in the Western world prior to modern times. But the amount of ink spilled in addressing these problems by Christians in the last two centuries is staggering. Today a plethora of varied and sophisticated strategies are available for answering the difficulties raised by Darwinian evolution and higher criticism of the Bible. My preferred strategy among these alternative solutions likely depends on what I understand to be precisely at stake, but many of these strategies mitigate the problems posed for the Christian faith. Simply thousands of Christian intellectuals today have found ways to maintain a rational grip on an orthodox version of the faith while forthrightly facing these issues in their research and writing. Suffice it to say then that I don’t believe the problem of evil, the question of the origin of species, or higher criticism of the Bible, on adequate reflection, constitutes a legitimate barrier to faith. So the question remains: why is the modern Western world such poor soil for Christian faith to flourish? Why is there such a great contrast between the reception of Christianity in modern times and the way it was received in premodern times? I think the answer has to do more with general mindset typical of modern Western people than it does with any specific problems having to do with particular doctrines of the Christian faith. What is this mindset?

In a word, I would say it is autonomy, or the mindset of autonomy. Autonomy is a word that means self-rule, and I believe that most modern Western people have become unable to think of autonomy as anything but a great and irrevocable good. This perspective that autonomy is a great good and represents the reality of the human situation has a long history. Old Testament scholar Victor Hamilton argues that it was the mentality behind original sin. More recently it reared its head in seventeenth century Europe, reaching full flower in the eighteenth century. Historians generally refer to this period as the age of the Enlightenment, because that is how many of the intellectuals of that era understood the times in which they lived. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who is considered by many to be the greatest mind of the era, described this new perspective as the achievement of a higher level of maturity than any human culture had previously attained. Some, like Jeff Murphy, have argued that Kant, contra the interpretation of James Rachels, wished to emphasize that moral autonomy should be analyzed in terms of the responsiveness of a moral agent to the best available moral reasons, and not autonomy more expansively construed. Many modern Europeans, though, went further and adopted the viewpoint that autonomy construed most expansively was a great good, a true fact about human existence, and that the celebration of it represented a true and objective advance for humanity. Not only were other cultures that did not see autonomy as a great good viewed as backwards and childlike, even European culture itself prior to the age of Enlightenment was regarded as similarly stuck in a period of embarrassing immaturity best left behind.

Our culture today tells us in myriad ways that our autonomy is real, something that naturally belongs to us, and something that is to be cherished and defended at all costs. Everyone thus is encouraged to think that their life belongs to them, that it is theirs to do with as they please. So we find vociferous advocates of everything from abortion to polygamy to assisted suicide, all in the name venerating sacrosanct autonomy. Most people in Europe and North America resistlessly succumb to the temptation to think about themselves and their lives in these terms, regarding the few around them who don’t do so as strange and benighted at best, even hostile to their self-understanding at worst. As such, there is often a certain animus that those who relish and revere autonomy feel towards those who do not.

Christians of course are an example. They are unable to regard autonomy as the great unqualified good it is extolled to be, because Christians simply don’t believe in autonomy such an ultimate or absolute sense. While Christians are typically quick to affirm personal responsibility and the right of people to make many of their own choices, they think that some of these choices are definitely misguided or wrong, involving acts contrary to the will of God, the true ruler of all. From the Christian point of view, people might be free to engage in such acts, but they certainly have no ultimate right to do so, because they violate natural law or divine law, and so are sinful.

For people who have accepted that autonomy is an unqualified good and a great truth, this view is difficult to conceive, much less tolerate, for it seems to bespeak sinister motives and a suspect character. This is because from the perspective of the true believer in autonomy, such people can only be regarded as being interested in controlling and limiting the rightful autonomy of others. And this is not just unfortunate or unhelpful in their eyes; rather, it is a perspective that constitutes a real threat to what is true and good. Christians, from this point of view, are either duped or dupers; in either case, they can hardly be regarded as a force for truth and goodness in the world.

So a rather stark conflict ensues. Advocates for autonomy and advocates for Jesus as Lord cannot ever truly make peace. They can, and ideally should, tolerate other views and even love each other as human beings, but any kind of genuine rapprochement between their perspectives is out of the question. A disconnect and incommensurability seems inevitable and intractable. Many people in our society are unaware of how deep this cleft goes, however, and many people who regard themselves as Christians give more credence to what is peddled under the banner of autonomy than they realize. As I said earlier, it promulgation is ubiquitous, perpetually inundating us in countless ways. For those who have come to revere autonomy, it really becomes a gospel, a source of good news, and such people will naturally want to share it with others, even if they are not fully aware of what they are doing. Sometimes, simply by telling people that they “need to be true to themselves,” for example, or by iterating similar statements which have taken on the character of axiomatic platitudes in our culture, is to proselytize the gospel of autonomy. The idea, though often not made explicit, is that each individual is the master of their fate, the captain of their soul, and this is an important reason why some ethicists still insist that any form of authoritative theistic ethic violates autonomy.

To return to the opening question, I think it clear that this conception of autonomy is the fundamental difficulty that Christianity faces in the West. It is this guiding belief in and reigning plausibility structure of autonomy, understood expansively, that often makes Christianity appear vulnerable, vapid, even vitiated. If one doesn’t want to lose her belief in her own autonomy, then it is perfectly natural to make every difficulty for Christianity seem as immense and insuperable in one’s mind as possible. It is even possible then to see Christianity not as a great buttress to morality (something that even most philosophers of the Enlightenment conceded), but as being in fact a threat to it. But by refusing to bend knee to autonomy, by resisting its sacred status, many of the ostensible difficulties with Christian faith and theistic ethics go away.

The assignment of primacy to autonomy may help explain why even sophisticated apologetic efforts so often have such little impact. It’s why people oftentimes don’t even seem to care much whether or not apologetic arguments are good. They already have their religion, and they think they’re satisfied with it.

Autonomy, though, can be seen by its adherents as a way of making available goods not otherwise achievable. Giving it up is not easy. This is why I am inclined to think that the gospel of autonomy will have to undermine itself and exhaust its own appeal by revealing its impotence to provide long-term human well-being. Not everyone can do or be whatever they want, and they certainly can’t do it and leave any kind of mutually beneficial social fabric intact. That seems rather self-evident to me, but I believe it is in fact becoming increasingly clear to everyone in the Western world as the decades pass. This is not to say that everyone is willing to admit it, even to themselves.

As is often the case, sometimes things need to get much worse before they can get better, and the people that are most deeply invested in the gospel of autonomy are most reluctant to acknowledge that it has any shortcomings. In such cases, things will likely have to “hit rock bottom” before they “see the light.” As Christians, however, knowing that our faith is intellectually in good order, and knowing that destructive patterns of thinking, such as the gospel of autonomy, will reveal themselves as such eventually, it is our job to be patient, to trust in God, and to remain faithful to the faith once delivered to the saints. Things can only get so bad before they get better. Idols such as human autonomy don’t answer any prayers, and they don’t truly provide anything of value for anyone. This always becomes clear eventually. The idols crack and crumble. The Living God remains forever. It is our duty to persevere.

In light of the trajectory rhetoric of autonomy has taken, Kant was wrong in thinking that we, in appropriating autonomy the way we did, had achieved maturity. What really transpired was that humanity entered a phase analogous to that of a rebellious teenager. We thought ourselves mature compared to our preteen selves, not realizing that many of the rules we followed as children were in place for good reason, a topic to which this site will devote great attention. But teens grow up, and often the teenager who has left the faith returns, humbled, to the wisdom and meaningfulness earlier left behind. That is my prayer. But it’s also my prediction. Freud famously predicted that religion was an illusion that time would dispel. He was right in thinking that falsehood can’t keep its nature a secret forever. But entirely wrong about what is false.

Photo: "Lonely Tree" by M. Moeller

Audio Lecture: Four Ways God Best Explains Morality

In this lecture, Dr. Baggett shows how theism provides a better explanation of morality than naturalism.

Atheism & Morality

Plenty of people have now heard about Leah Libresco, an atheist blogger who recently converted to Christianity. The ostensible reason for the conversion was her nagging moral commitments that she finally decided made better sense on a theistic than atheistic worldview. In contrast with Libresco is Joel Marks, a Kantian-ethicist-turned-moral-antirealist. He used to be a firm believer in moral truths, and, like Libresco, he used to think that an atheistic picture of reality is adequate to undergird such facts. He was quite sure about the wrongness of torturing animals or massacring innocents. They were, as he put it in an op-ed piece from August 2011 in The New York Times, “wrong, wrong, wrong.” Not anymore. He came to think that such moral convictions are mere preferences. Whereas he had been sure of their wrongness, suddenly he knew it no more. “I was not merely skeptical or agnostic about it; I had come to believe, and do still, that these things are not wrong.” Marks didn’t run out to engage in such practices; he simply came to think that the whole category of morality is misguided. What drives human actions anyway, he writes, is desire; and his desires subsequent to what he dubbed his anti-epiphany didn’t much change. So he still strives to make the world more to his liking—a world of less brutality and more compassion—but he doesn’t think morality has anything to do with it. He tries to educate people about facts of suffering and exploitation and abuse in an effort naturally to elicit within them a desire to see and effect change, and he thinks the liberation from conducting such discourse with moral terminology is actually helpful.

Marks had earlier rejected the view that morality could find its foundation in God on the basis of the Euthyphro Dilemma. The famous Dilemma traces to an early Socratic dialogue, and today we would express the challenge it poses like this: Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command it because it is moral? If the former, morality seems arbitrary; if the latter, God seems irrelevant to morality. Although commonly repeated by ethicists, this objection to religious ethics has been thoroughly discredited. In our recent book, Jerry Walls and I made such a case, as have numerous others. Setting that objection aside, Libresco and Marks both found themselves with this insight: an atheistic world can’t make morality anything more than sentiment and preference. At present this view remains a minority view among most secularists, but it’s increasingly common; Nietzsche predicted that the implications of the death of God would take a few generations. They then found themselves with this further question: What then do we do with our moral convictions? Libresco took her nonnegotiable and inviolable convictions as serious evidence that the world isn’t atheistic; Marks in diametric opposition bit the bullet and gave morality up.

Both Marks and Libresco were basing their thinking on this sort of insight, which we can call their “shared premise”: If there’s no God, then there’s no morality. But then their ways parted. Libresco added this additional proposition: There is morality—binding, authoritative, objective morality. Therefore (by what philosophers call modus tollens), God exists. Marks in contrast added to their shared premise this premise: There’s no God. And (by what philosophers call modus ponens) he concluded that there is no morality.

Both arguments are logically impeccable in terms of their structure. The question boils down to which of the following claims is more obvious: that there is binding, authoritative, objective morality, or that God does not exist. Plenty of analysts, theists and atheists alike, readily affirm that most people can clearly apprehend moral facts of which we can be quite sure—torturing children for fun is wrong, mocking homosexuals is cruel and bad, and the like—so rejecting such a proposition strikes most people as wrong. In fact, such truths may be more obvious than God’s existence; but that doesn’t mean that God isn’t needed as the foundation of such truths. (To think otherwise confuses what philosophers call ontology and epistemology.) The question here is whether the alleged fact of God’s not existing is more obvious than the affirmation of moral facts. I see no compelling reason to think so, and have not heard any reasons to think so; in fact, the obvious nature of moral facts bolsters my belief that faith in God as the best explanation of such facts is eminently logical. So by my lights, Libresco’s response to the premise she shares with Marks seems the more rational way to go.

Image: Dilemma by N. Sienaert. CC license. 

Worldview as Explanatory Hypothesis

In the town in which I live resides a Harvard-trained academic neurosurgeon who, in 2008, was struck by a rare illness that put him into a coma for seven days, during which his entire neo-cortex shut down. Evan Alexander had mysteriously contracted E-coli bacterial meningitis, which attacks the brain. Just recently I met Alexander, who was doing a local book signing. He has written up the remarkable story of his experience in a gripping book—Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife—that has been featured on the cover of Newsweek. That he survived and without permanent brain damage is amazing enough, but perhaps that is not the most surprising part of his story. For during his coma, when the part of his brain responsible for thought and emotion was not merely malfunctioning but turned off and off line, Alexander recounts that he experienced a hyper-vivid voyage to another realm of existence where he claims to have gleaned profound insight into the nature of reality and the human condition—most importantly that an all-powerful, infinitely loving God is real. Irrespective of how veridical are all the features of his experience and his various interpretations of the experience, what is remarkable is that in his condition he was able to experience any conscious states at all.

Nobody was more surprised at this than Alexander himself, who admits that for the seven years leading up to this life-changing event, he had been a card-carrying materialist. He had heard his share of near-death experiences, and he had retained the conviction that an adequate scientific explanation would be forthcoming, an explanation predicated on the axioms of materialist reductionism, a thoroughgoing naturalistic paradigm. As a neurosurgeon, though, once he regained consciousness and came to understand the severity of his condition during the coma, he became convinced that no naturalistic account would do. As a scientist, he entertained a range of hypotheses to explain his memories—from a primitive brainstream program to ease terminal pain and suffering to the distorted recall of memories from deeper parts of the limbic system relatively protected from the meningitis inflammation, and seven more hypotheses—none of which, in his studied estimation, can explain the nature of his conscious experience during that coma on the assumption of a materialist worldview’s account of consciousness. Needless to say, the event proved transformative for him, unraveling the naturalistic paradigm that he has so long adopted and assumed, a viewpoint that is arguably the prevailing worldview among most contemporary philosophers and scientists.

That naturalism is a worldview means, among other things, that it is an explanatory hypothesis. To say a worldview is an explanatory hypothesis is to identify one of its most important functions: the epistemic task of providing, in J. P. Moreland’s words, “an explanation of facts, of reality, the way it actually is. Indeed it is incumbent on a worldview that it explain what does and does not exist in ways that follow naturally from the core explanation commitments of that worldview.” Moreland argues that such explanations must range over causal, epistemic, and metaphysical issues. A worldview is an expansive way of looking at ourselves and the world. Worldviews offer answers to questions about God, meaning, knowledge, reality, the human condition, and values. Naturalism is certainly a worldview, but is naturalism a religion? Here’s what Alvin Plantinga has to say on that matter: "[Naturalism] isn’t clearly a religion: the term ‘religion’ is vague, and naturalism falls into the vague area of its application. Still, naturalism plays many of the same roles as a religion. In particular, it gives answers to the great human questions: Is there such a person as God? How should we live? Can we look forward to life after death? What is our place in the universe? How are we related to other creatures? Naturalism gives answers here: there is no God, and it makes no sense to hope for life after death. As to our place in the grand scheme of things, we human beings are just another animal with a peculiar way of making a living. Naturalism isn’t clearly a religion; but since it plays some of the same roles as a religion, we could properly call it a quasi-religion." As I ponder such issues, I can’t help but think of the students at the Christian university where I teach. Unless they are told they must, when they are asked about their own worldview, very few of them will say anything about why they believe what they do. Nor will they tend to have much if anything to say about what explanatory power their worldview possesses. If they do broach the issue of why they believe their worldview, they tend to privilege psychological over philosophical or evidential categories. What students tend to do is just give a litany or perhaps one or two of their core convictions—God exists, for example, unlike what those atheists believe. What is especially hard to take about this, for me, is that this doesn’t just explain their answers coming into my introductory philosophy course, but going out too.

It pains me to admit this, but perhaps this sad state of affairs gives me an opportunity. At present I administer a worldview pre-test and post-test to my students in this particular class. The course has for one of its major goals greater clarity on worldview—articulating it, defending it, etc. We cover quite a few ways in which they can do these things better, but the results at the end of the course are generally disappointing, revealing nominal improvement at most much of the time. What I intend to do to ameliorate the situation is to hold their feet to the proverbial fire. For whatever reason, they often do not seem to be connecting the dots, despite our encouragement for them to do so. I am less convinced they can’t than that they simply are not. And if they think they can get away with the bare minimum, sad to say, they usually try, which means the post-test tends not to show their best work. Students at this age—with their philosophy of education, their pragmatism, their time constraints, and their still-forming pre-frontal cortex—often need their hand to be forced. Formerly I would refrain from requiring a minimum word length on the post-test, reasoning optimistically that surely students would avail themselves in an “essay assignment” as part of the final exam to show what they know. I figured they would relish the chance to knock it out of the park. What I have found too often instead are a series of strikeouts or, at best, weak singles. The internal motivation I had assumed would animate them on such an assignment frequently fails to materialize. If am I right, the problem is more about this issue of motivation than that of competence. So, one obvious way to address this situation is to require the post-test essay to be at least a specified minimum length. That’s an easy fix.

The second change I’m planning to implement, though, will be far more important, I’m convinced. Once again, since students tend to focus on the content of their beliefs, the assignment needs explicitly to force their hand to consider questions of evidence. Students tend to be steeped in the lingo of social science, so it needs to be clarified to them that the issue is not the origin of their beliefs—culture, parents, church—but rather their truth and evidence. So what I intend to do is to follow Moreland’s characterization of worldview as explanatory hypothesis. I intend to leave behind saying a worldview is primarily a matter of one’s beliefs and convictions about God, the world, and the human condition—which invariably lends itself to superficial first-order analysis and mindless litanies. No, the function of a worldview is to explain. Talk about that, I intend to tell them, and then to remind them of the specific ways in which they can do so. What can better explain facts that most all of us—theists and atheists alike—believe in and common sense can apprehend? The human capacity for rational deliberation, free will, objective moral truths, real guilt, and moral responsibility? Arguments, philosophical and otherwise, for the ability of theism to explain such realities better than atheism are both cogent and compelling. This is the very stuff we spend so much time in class on all term long. One of the books I have my students read in the course is C. S. Lewis’s Miracles, the third chapter of which is the famous “argument from reason,” the topic of Lewis’s famous debate with famed Wittgenstein student Elizabeth Anscombe, and an argument that in recent years has been updated by the likes of Alvin Plantinga and Victor Reppert. The import of the chapter is the intrinsic problem naturalism has accounting for rationality. In a recent book by atheist Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, he makes a similar point; this is not just an argument only theists can see. In the fifth chapter of Miracles Lewis shows that naturalism has an equally hard time making sense of objective morality. Morality and rationality, however, are comfortable fits in a world created and sustained by a loving and personal God. Elsewhere in the course we spend time exploring how naturalists lack the resources to make sense of genuine free will in the world as they envision it—yet without free will, there can be no genuinely authoritative morality. For theists who believe that, as a prerequisite for loving relationship, God has conferred on human beings, made in his image, the capacity for free choice, it all makes excellent sense. Classical theism can simply explain free will, rationality, and morality better than can naturalism; the evidence is on the side of theism.

But today’s Christian students, starting well before college, are breathing the air of a culture that, each day in a myriad of ways, proclaims the irrationality of a life of faith. Even the locution “faith” has been co-opted to convey connotations of an Enlightenment-foisted distorted view of faith as bespeaking a lack of evidence. Biblically, faith is nothing of the kind, but rather principled trust in God’s faithfulness to do all he has promised to do, principled for being rooted in God’s track record of faithfulness. If we do not wish to lose a generation of Christian young people to the corrosive effects of skepticism and cynicism, postmodernism and the quasi-religion of naturalism, we need to help them know not just what they believe, but see why. They must, and fortunately they can, come to understand that they are eminently justified to hold a Christian worldview because, as an explanation of life’s most important and undeniable realities—from love to logic, from cognition to consciousness—it is second to none.

The Bonobo and the Atheist

The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, by Frans de Waal. Norton, NY, 2013. The well-known primatologist Frans de Waal, author of nearly a dozen books, has produced a new one. Very well written, full of memorable turns of phrase, and eminently accessible, one of the more interesting features of the book is its recurring use of art and literature, particularly the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. It also poses a challenge to the idea that morality needs God or religion. Much of the book assumes a tacit battle between science and religion, particularly fundamentalist Christianity, although he thinks the conflict is less a battle about what the truth is than what are going to do with it: appropriate it or avoid it. Much of what he seems to be battling involves trite repetitions of the Dostoyevsky-inspired Karamazov hypothesis, kneejerk religious rejections of widely supported scientific insights, and a 1970’s-styled characterization of social Darwinism as entailing an abrogation of ethics—what de Waal dubs the (Thomas) Huxley-inspired “veneer theory.”

His resistance to the religious hypothesis, though, is markedly different from the New Atheists. He finds arguments about whether God exists to be uninspiring and uninspired, and the New Atheists unoriginal, gratuitously acrimonious, and filled with unrealistic confidence in the outcomes and potential of science and with dogmatism rivaling the most rabid of fundamentalists. Mindful of the missteps science has made—from the eugenics movements to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments to handing the tools of mass destruction to advocates of genocide—he is reticent to invest in science the same sort of enthusiastic and unconditional support as do Dawkins and Harris. He shares with them, though, the conviction that morality needs neither God nor religion, although he sees that religious motivations can be ennobling; and he thinks that he and his secular cohorts need to realize the need to engage in more than religion-bashing. He would rather explore what makes religion so prominent, and he recognizes that efforts to replace it wholesale and emulate its inspiration-conferring role have generally failed. The aspect of religion to which he seems most averse is its reinforcement of a top-down understanding of morality. His preferred understanding of morality is, quite to the contrary, bottom-up.

Using a variety of examples, he argues that animal tendencies to prosociality, altruistic behaviors, community concern, and aversions to inequity suggest that the operation of such moral building blocks in primates reveal that morality is not as much of a human innovation as we like to think. He asks why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for a livable society, is built into us? Since social norms preceded religion, this is evidence to suggest that morality does not need religion. Religious motivations to conduct ourselves morally came after the tendencies were already there, reinforced by a long evolutionary process. As evidence for his contentions, he points to instances of animal empathy, even bird empathy—and the fact that mammals give affection, want affection, and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs. It is particularly the bonobos who show, especially in contrast with chimpanzees, that our lineage is marked not just by male dominance and xenophobia, but also by a love of harmony and sensitivity to others. He resists the depiction of animals as primarily vicious and self-centered; just like us, he writes, monkeys and apes strive for power, enjoy sex, want security and affection, kill over territory, and value trust and cooperation. We have a psychological makeup that remains that of a social primate.

So his effort to identify the foundations of morality differ not just from those of theistic ethicists who point to the commands or character of God, but also to rationalistic Kantian efforts to root morality in reason and to utilitarian principles admitting of all manner of counterintuitive implications and susceptible to a myriad of counterexamples. He thinks the weight of morality comes not from above, but from inside of us. Following Hume, he thinks reason to be but the slave of the passions; we start with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. Sentiments alone are not enough, though; de Waal adds that what sets human morality apart is a move toward universal standards combined with an elaborate system of justification, monitoring, and punishment. To de Waal’s thinking, morality is created in day-to-day interaction, grounded in emotions, which often escape the neat categorizations of which science is fond. Such an approach to ethics comports, he argues, with what we know about how the human mind works, with visceral reactions arriving before rationalizations, and with the way evolution produces behavior.

The book marks a fundamental debate concerning what ethics is, and thus what is in need of explanation. He is hesitant to call apes or even bonobos moral creatures, but he definitely thinks what we call morality among human beings finds its origin in our evolutionary history. What distinguishes human morality from the prosociality, empathy, and altruism of other primates (traits that stand in contrast with a Hobbesian analysis of nature) is our capacity as humans to reflect about such things, build systems of justification, and generalize morality into a system of abstractions. But the question the book left me with was this nagging question: Hasn’t de Waal simply changed the subject? What he is referring to as “morality” does not seem to be any set of moral truths at all, but rather moral beliefs and practices. Although he identifies some necessary additions to animal behavior to arrive at “morality,” what he adds does not seem to be enough. What is left out of the picture is highly important to what most people mean when they talk about morality. Now, it’s true that “morality” sometimes is meant to refer exclusively to moral beliefs and practices, rendering on occasion issues of truth largely irrelevant. But in a book attempting to explain morality, disambiguating between truth and practice has got to be an important part of the analysis. Rather than disambiguating, however, de Waal seems, either intentionally or inadvertently, to exploit the ambiguity and thus conceal the potential equivocation and sidestep the most challenging and interesting aspects of ethical theory.

Consider moral obligations, which typically are thought to provide distinctive and authoritative reasons to perform an action or refrain from one. A moral obligation, particularly ultima facieones among them, ought to be obeyed; it has authority, punch, clout, prescriptive power. In an effort to account for moral obligations, de Waal employs one of the following strategies: he either (1) eschews their importance, arguing that moral feelings provide better moral reasons to act than do obligations; or (2) does not try to explain moral obligations at all, but merely our feelings or sense of moral obligations, exploiting equivocation on “obligations.” His first strategy goes hand in hand with his effort to hint at the emaciated nature of moral motivation when all that is motivating a person is a sense of moral obligation. He rightly sees, contra Kant, that in some sense it’s better to be motivated by higher moral impulses, like love. True enough, and nearly every virtue theorist would agree. But this provides no liberation from the need to explain the existence of moral obligations, which at least at this stage of our moral development are ineliminable and most certainly capture what most ordinary speakers believe. That we should often be motivated by something other than moral obligations is very likely true, but that does nothing to explain away moral obligations or the need of ethical theory to account for them. His second strategy explains how primates, and especially human beings, experience a feeling or sense of moral obligations. But evolutionary explanations of a feeling of obligation or a tendency to use the language of moral obligation do nothing to provide an explanation of moral obligations themselves. If a sense of obligations and the language of obligations are enough, then moral obligations themselves need not exist at all. De Waal has not provided anything a moral anti-realist or even hardened amoralist cannot already provide, and has instead fallaciously conflated feeling obligated with being obligated.

De Waal’s attempt to consign God to irrelevance in explaining morality is understandable in light of his watered-down account of what morality is all about. A thoroughly naturalistic effort to explain why we may well feel obligations or use the language of moral obligation seems eminently possible. But at what point is the move from “is” to “ought” effected? De Waal thinks this Humean concern is overblown and not the problem many think it is, so there’s hardly a need to invoke God to solve it. The move from is to ought, he argues, is something that animals living by a prescriptive code have already done. What he means to suggest, I think, is that oughtness should be construed in an instrumental way. Animals by nature want to mate and survive, and relative to such “desires” some behaviors are better than others, more conducive to meeting those goals than others. Likewise human beings, as social creatures, want to live in harmony with one another, which introduces prescriptive constraints and instrumental oughts, and it’s perfectly appropriate to call these moral constraints, and sometimes even moral obligations. Again, a naturalistic account can explain these mechanisms just fine, so no God required. (His interest in discussing the role of religion more than God may help explain why he never much broaches a role for God in explaining morality beyond that of a cosmic law enforcer. He seems blithely unaware of the vast philosophical literature on the subject, including that, since Locke, few divine command theorists have put the main focus on God as moral muscleman.)

Again, though, the fundamental question looms: What is morality? Expunged of categorical oughtness, is what is left over enough to qualify? Have we explained enough? Explanatory scope and power demand that all of the salient features of morality be explained, and explained well, by a theory before we dub the explanation a good one or the best. De Waal has simply left anything like categorical moral oughtness out of the picture without so much as an acknowledgement. Again, if he is content with an instrumental analysis of reasons to perform certain prosocial actions, then why use the language of morality at all? He is hard pressed to come up with anything more principled than an admission that traditional moral language carries with it more clout than prudential language. But this is disingenuous, to my thinking. He intentionally uses the thick language of morality, moral obligations, and the like while simultaneously emptying the relevant concepts of those distinctive features of morality that imbue moral language with its presumed force and binding authority. His concepts are thin, while his language remains thick and rich. Moral anti-realists can just as effectively speak in terms of behaviors that comport with prevailing preferences or even nearly universal human emotions. What has de Waal added to the case that such moral skeptics are unable to affirm, and thus what reason is there to think that the functionalist account he has provided has given a naturalist any reason to abandon moral anti-realism or even amoralism?

De Waal seems simultaneously underambitious and overambitious. He is underambitious in his characterization of morality, settling to cash presciptivity out in terms of prevailing expectations rather than objective authority, settling for an account of a sense of obligations rather than obligations themselves, and for empathic behavior rather than empathic motivations. He is overambitious, at the same same, and for related reasons, in characterizing advanced nonhuman primates as engaging in normative judgments that serve as precursors to morality. While it undoubtedly seems true we can use the language of oughtness for advanced primates in predictive and instrumental senses, the evidence to suggest that they have anything like a sense of categorical oughtness is a case yet to be made.

My biggest reservation of all of de Waal’s analysis and approach is his argumentative strategy that infers some weak form of moral realism from the findings of evolutionary moral psychology. If evolution can explain why we have some of the moral concepts we do, why we have a natural inclination to behave in certain prosocial or empathetic or altruistic ways, so the argument goes, then evolution has explained morality. To the contrary, however, naturalists need to take with much greater seriousness a challenge like that posed by Sharon Street or Richard Joyce: If evolution can explain why we have the moral concepts we do in a way that makes no reference to their truth, then what reasons do naturalists have to take morality seriously? Don’t they have all they need when they point to certain behaviors that stir in most human beings strong feelings, good or bad, and then letting nature run its course? Why the additional need to hold so tightly to distinctively moral language that carries bigger implications than they can explain? De Waal obviously thinks the question of God’s existence is uninteresting; what is even more surprising is that someone who writes whole books about morality seems uninterested in the objective truth of morality as well.

Image: Bonobos,  CC BY 4.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50736382

Review of Angus Ritchie's From Morality to Metaphysics

From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of our Ethical Commitments, by Angus Ritchie, Oxford University Press, 2012, 198 pages.

In this excellent and tightly argued book, Angus Ritchie offers a moral argument for theism, or at least a vital piece of a bigger argument to that effect. Theism, he argues cogently, explains the human capacity for moral cognition better than various secular rivals. For his pool of alternative candidates, he canvasses the field of meta-ethics. In this way he cuts to the heart of much of the contemporary ethical debate, and in so doing he highlights a serious and systemic problem facing secular positions that attempt to accommodate our pre-theoretical moral commitments. He also sketches a teleological and theistic alternative that he argues avoids such objections that prove intractable to the secular theories.

In my estimation Ritchie’s work is one of the more important books written in ethics in recent years. In terms of building a moral apologetic, it does three central tasks: it presses the distinction between justification and explanation of moral truths (a recurring and integrating motif of the book); it takes secular alternatives seriously enough to engage them with real seriousness (at sufficient length with arguments suitably generalizable); and spells out the theistic alternative (though a bit briefly, inviting others to extend the discussion). Despite its lamentable number of distracting typos that should have been fixed in editing, and its failure to discuss Railton, Joyce, or Parfit, I recommend this book with enthusiasm. I have every confidence it will be an important contributor to the resurgence of interest in moral arguments for God in both natural theology and popular apologetics.

Ritchie offers an inference to the best explanation (IBE); his argument is that classical theism better explains objective moral ontology and epistemology. His primary argument for the moral objectivism in need of explanation is its deliberative indispensability. Humans are committed to moral norms for much the same reason we believe norms underwrite practices indispensable to human thought and action in the arena of theoretical reasoning. It is impossible to engage in moral deliberation without taking oneself to be aiming at a normative truth that goes beyond personal preference or cultural custom.

Among the secular explanation candidates of moral cognition Ritchie considers are those provided by Blackburn, Gibbard, Korsgaard, and the early Scanlon, who argue that our fundamental moral convictions can be accommodated without objectivism; and those of Foot, Crisp, and the later Scanlon who seek to combine a fully objectivist account of moral norms with no purposive agent or force. What all of these secular accounts have in common is their systemic flaw. In the case of the less objectivist theories the concessions made to reductionism leave them unable to do justice to our most fundamental moral convictions; those that accommodate the pull of objectivism generate an ‘explanatory gap’. The book’s central contention is that all secular theories that do justice to our most fundamental moral convictions go on to generate an insoluble ‘explanatory gap’ that consists in their inability to answer the following question: How do human beings, developing in a physical universe which is not itself shaped by any purposive force, come to have the capacity to apprehend objective moral norms?

Secular (nonteleological) theories only escape the explanatory gap by failing to vindicate our pre-philosophical moral commitments. The gap arises when the following commitments are combined: (1) Robust moral objectivism, (2) secularism, and (3) the belief that humans, through the exercise of their normal belief-generating and belief-evaluating capacities, are able to apprehend the objective moral order. While secular theories can explain humans’ acquisition of moral sensibilities and practices of reasoning, this does not tell us why those practices and sensibilities have the property of tracking the truth.

Regarding cognitive capacities (perceptual, theoretical, practical), three questions can be asked about their genesis and justification: (1) What is the justification for our faith in their reliability? (2) What is the historical explanation of their development? And (3) what is theexplanation for their capacity for tracking truth? It is just because Ritchie takes the fundamental convictions that emerge from reflective equilibrium to be justified (to have non-accidental correlation with objective moral norms) that the third question arises. So Ritchie stresses the importance that we not confuse the demand for an explanation for the reliability of our moral beliefs with the demand for a justification of our trust in the human capacity to acquire and modify our moral beliefs in a way that tracks truth.

In terms of what sort of explanation is needed, what is most promising, he thinks, is a teleological form of explanation that explains a particular event or state of affairs by showing that it is either (1) part of the end-state which a system brings about or (2) part of the means by which a system brings about the end-state. To be an intelligible account, the teleological explanation will also have made it intelligible why the system yields the outcome and of the means by which the system is capable of generating those outcomes and why it tends to generate them.

Ritchie’s overall claim is that it is legitimate to raise questions of explanation with respect to the truth-tracking quality of humans’ moral faculties because we see in natural selection a way in which explanation can be answered for our truth-tracking capacities for theoretical reasoning and with respect to the physical world. The ability to track truth is selectively advantageous in those cases (unless Plantinga is right, which should prove no comfort to naturalists). Natural selection is the obvious candidate for an explanation of the development within humans of truth-tracking capacities regarding fundamental principles of deduction, IBE, and induction. It is highly probable that we will be better able to survive if we can come to true beliefs. So natural selection offers a story of how humans come to have truth-tracking capacities for theoretical reasoning; likewise for both physical perception and theoretical reasoning.

No such correlation is plausible in the moral case. On the account given by evolutionary biology, it is not the fact that moral beliefs are correct which leads to them being selected for. Rather, it is the fact that they are conducive to the flourishing of the collective. There is no guarantee that the qualities which lead to multiplication will have any other excellence about them. Any value system based on survival, replication, and pleasure alone is inadequate. If there is not a less obvious way in which moral valuations promote survival, replication, and pleasure, then they’re spandrels, lacking any direct connection with genetic survival and multiplication. Unless we have a wider teleological account, we have no reason to suppose that these valuations have any non-random connective with that moral order.

Beyond such a prima facie case, Ritchie turns to specific meta-ethical theories, beginning with quasi-realism (‘QR’). Gibbard respects what Blackburn calls the ‘realist-seeming grammar’ of practical deliberation, but they both seek to minimize its metaphysical implications. Both respond to an impulse to both reductionism and objectivism. They want to offer the best of both worlds while avoiding objections. Moral quasi-realism is designed to avoid the following kind of morally obnoxious counterfactuals:

(CF) If we approved of torturing the child it would be a good act,

while keeping the ontology to a minimum. In moral deliberations, we judge desires and the prevailing attitudes of our society by a standard which is independent of those desires and attitudes.

QR claims that (CF) should be read as a statement within ethics. They deny that it need be taken as a higher-order, metaethical assertion. When we consider counterfactuals, they insist, we cannot help but evaluate them from within our commitments. And as such, all decent people will obviously reject (CF). Blackburn insists that we have no conception of the nature of an independent order of reason. Ritchie disagrees, insisting that the existence of objective norms of theoretical reasoning shows that we do have a conception of what ‘an independent order of reason’ would be.

Ritchie thinks QR can answer various objections, but that it runs into difficulty when it has to account for the provisionality with which all human beings hold their ethical views. We simply do not regard moral truth as being fixed completely by our current views. In its efforts to accommodate such an objection, QR faces two challenges: tying morality too closely to current beliefs, precluding progress, or tying it to whatever we come to believe, thus introducing problematic counterfactuals.

The early Scanlon tried to accommodate the pull of reductionism by stressing rational procedures rather than an ontologically distinct moral reality, using the meta-ethics of Korsgaard.  Korsgaard says the procedural moral realist thinks there are correct answers to moral questions because there are correct procedures for arriving at them. Thus she tries to secure objectivity without ontological commitments. Ritchie responds that both Blackburn and Korsgaard locate moral value in a feature of the agent’s attitudes, but these only make sense as responses to an external order of value. Unlike Kant, Korsgaard says the way we choose between the different candidates for universalizable moral norms is an agent’s existential commitments. What, though, about someone who’s a member of the Mafiaso? In one sense this produces obligations, but Korsgaard says the Mafioso should, given sufficient reflection, come to see that obedience to the honor code is the wrong law to make for himself. Ritchie argues that agents’ valuations only have the wider implications her argument requires if they are understood as responses to an objective order of value. Korsgaard may disapprove of his existential choice, but it is hard to see why (on her account) the Mafiaso’s settled choice threatens his grip on himself as having any reason to do one thing rather than another, and with it his grip on himself as having any reason to live and act at all.

Later Scanlon moved toward a more objectivist position, describing himself as a ‘Reasons Fundamentalist’, contrasting the position with Korsgaard’s. Reasons Fundamentalism (RF) insists on the irreducible character of normativity. Scanlon has answered justification, but not of explanation of reliability. Once more, secular accounts fall foul of our most fundamental moral commitments, or in vindicating them they generate an explanatory gap.

Likewise Foot’s theory using ‘Aristotelian categoricals’ is trapped in this dilemma: we can define ‘good’ naturalistically, in which case it is reduced to that which enables the species to replicate and perhaps increase in complexity, but then what we call good we do not have good reason to promote. Or define ‘good’ to include evaluative judgments, but then we have gone far beyond anything those ‘Aristotelian categoricals’ could justify. To make this choice is to concede that the idea of ‘flourishing’ is itself heavily moralized, and there is no longer any sign of a purely biological story of natural normativity from which morality might emerge.

McDowell wants to defend moral realism. Instead of seeking to ground ethics in a non-moralized account of the natural world, McDowell urges Foot to acknowledge that ethical reasons are themselves part of any adequate account of nature. Ritchie insists, though, that there remains an explanatory question which McDowell is unwilling to answer, which is distinct from justificatory issues. Unless McDowell is urging a return to a fundamentally purposive account of the universe, the question of how we explain (rather than justify) the reliability of our belief-generating and belief-correcting processes will arise for him in a way it did not for Aristotle—who, incidentally, contrasted the natural not with the supernatural but the artificial.

Ritchie argues that theistic and teleological explanation is better than nomothetic explanation that is given in terms of causal laws. Natural selection has led to resistance of teleology. Natural selection can’t offer the explanation of our capacity for moral cognition, however, and nomothetic explanation is also unsuited to task. Teleological explanation accounts for an event or class of events by laws in terms of which an event’s occurring is held to be dependent on that event’s being required for some end. A paradigmatic teleological explanation involves a goal G of objective worth, the agent knows this to be so, the agent pursues G because of its value, and the agent has the power through X-ing to bring G about.

Theism explains the truth-tracking nature of human moral capacities by God’s understanding the value of such a state of affairs and intentionally bringing it about. Such an account avoids the explanatory gap, and the problems cited (raised by Rice and Hume) are far from intractable. A theistic explanation of the emergence of moral knowledge also need not conflict with a version of the theory of natural selection. All that the theist needs to add to the account given by evolutionary biology is the claim that the world is providentially ordered so that the interaction of the quasi-teleological process of natural selection and of the spandrel-like features it generates yield an outcome which enables human beings to apprehend that which is of objective value.

At this juncture the book left me slightly disappointed, but only because I had grown accustomed to seeing more. I could imagine a critic saying “God made it happen because he knew the value of its happening” does not so much explain as beg the question that God has or could. Although I might know that something happening in my head is making my hands type right now without my being able to explain that mechanism, the appeal to divine intentions to account for the truth-tracking ability of our moral faculties requires further analysis. It remains, in a sense, a promissory note and framework in need of fleshing out. If contemporary work on the moral argument is going to rival in quality the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments, more articulation of theism’s epistemic narrative of moral cognition is essential—particularly to answer the challenge posed by Harman and Joyce. Joyce, for example, echoes the case that the success of evolutionary moral psychology provides a stiff challenge to naturalistic ethics by explaining the formation of our moral beliefs without reference to their truth. Unlike Ritchie, though, he adds that “if the naturalist cannot make her case, Harman’s challenge seems to make non-naturalism and supernaturalism obsolete. . . . if moral naturalism fails non-naturalism and supernaturalism are sunk. Thus non-naturalism and supernaturalism suffer most in this argumentative fray.”[1]Although it is not clear why Joyce insists on this, beyond an earlier reference to parsimony, what is clear is that positing the possibility and, even more so, plausibility of a teleological explanation rooted in divine intentionality—however hopeful such a move promises to safeguard what ordinary speakers believe about morality—remains in need of careful articulation and strong cumulative evidential support in this emerging dialectic.

Throughout his excellent book, Ritchie is at pains to stress that theism is the most satisfying explanation of the human capacity for moral cognition. Theism can explain it simply better than the rivals can. As such he’s been doing philosophy as an autonomous enterprise to show the power of apologetic argument. Our moral commitments pull us to a supernatural source for our knowledge of what is good and evil. Philosophy, he argues and demonstrates, has a significant part to play, in helping us respond to the important and legitimate worry that the faith journey may be an exercise in wish fulfillment rather than a response to a genuine reality. Philosophy can create the intellectual space for an encounter of the heart. Apologetic arguments can show that unless our thought is open to the supernatural there are a number of correlations which are, by its own lights, inexplicable. Such arguments remind us of our need for God; they call us to humility rather than hubris.

[1] Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 210

Sam Harris on Faith

I’m always interested to see, as I read a particular author, what he or she thinks about the nature of faith. Some think it’s a good thing, others think it’s bad, if not about the worst thing of all. Not to mention that people can have widely different views of what faith is. In the show “Once Upon a Time”—which I rather love, by the way—faith tends to be characterized as sheer belief. Belief, for example, that the good will win. I like that belief, although it’s not always clear what it entails. But my biggest problem with such belief in the show is that it seems largely unprincipled. More like faith in faith than anything—which, sadly, was also exhibited in Shepherd Book from Firefly—another show I loved. (I think I watch too much television.) I remember realizing this most clearly when, after Book made reference to the importance of faith, Mal said waiting for God is like waiting for a “train that don’t come,” or something like that; at that point Book asked why Mal thought a reference to faith required reference to God. The suggestion seemed to be that something like faith in faith was enough; that it didn’t matter what we have faith in, just as long as we have faith. I really liked the character of Shepherd Book, but that struck me as more than a little lame. But Joss Whedon can be forgiven; he rocks. And heck, he’s an atheist. And for an atheist says pretty cool things, like these words he gave to Captain America, after seeing Thor and Loki: “There’s just one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” So yes, Joss can be forgiven. ANYWAY, back to faith. I’ve suggested before that, largely owing to the influence of an Enlightenment-foisted definition, faith has often nowadays come to be understood along the lines of epistemic disadvantage. The idea is that faith makes up for lack of evidence. So much so, in fact, that—as I’ve heard more than one say—if we had evidence, we’d have no need for faith. This is, to my thinking, sheer faith as fideism. I have a dear friend who’s an atheist and a very smart guy who, though he’s not particularly open to faith, tells me the only faith he’d really consider is fideism. He’s drawn to the likes of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard quite a bit, and, especially in the latter, sees a picture of faith as essentially fideistic—a wild leap in the dark, something that goes contrary to the evidence, a counterintuitive staking of an ultimate claim on what may or may not be the right choice, something radical and outrageous and countercultural and even absurd. Yet somehow winsomely so. My atheist friend sometimes makes me laugh because, of all the variants of faith on offer, this is the one that he, a trained philosopher, might gravitate to.

For the record, I do think there’s something radical and countercultural about biblical faith rightly understood, but I don’t think this translates into fideism. God may challenge our assumptions and cultural convictions about what’s right and wrong, but ultimately, the only way we can love God with all of our minds is if God makes sense. It might take some work and hard thinking, and of course God ever in certain respects remains beyond our ken, but it’s either possible for us to reconcile God with our clearest apprehensions of the dictates of logic and morality or, if it’s not, God makes little to no sense and faith is thus irrational. When Donald Miller says, in Blue Like Jazz, that he wants a God who doesn’t make sense, I get a tad nervous. If he means God might challenge our convictions and help us realize that what we thought had been true in fact is false, that’s fine; surely we should retain a correctable and teachable worldview and theology; but the phrase “doesn’t make sense” could mean a whole lot more, none of which is the slightest bit appealing to me and all of which smacks of anti-intellectualism. I think biblical faith is clearly not fideistic. It’s rooted in evidence. The “not seeing” part of faith usually has more to do with our inability to see how God’s going to work things out than having no evidence to believe trust in God’s faithfulness is warranted. The more evidence we have, in fact, the stronger our faith can and should be, in my estimation, contrary to the fideistic perspective.

Recently I read the atheist Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape, and his view of faith—and of religious people generally—is a delight to read. His fiery rhetoric veritably drips with animus—so much so, I have to confess, it makes for incredibly fun reading. The dude is passionate. I don’t mean to mock his convictions; I really don’t. I found myself liking him more and more as I read his book, however much I disagreed with parts of it. And it seems to me, anyway, that he sincerely cares about people and would like to see the world become a better place. He’s understandably grieved at how some folks, in the name of their religion and faith, do hideous things, and though I think he’s radically mistaken thinking of all religious conviction as of a piece and equally dangerous and deleterious, the fact that he thinks religion is so big a detriment to human well-being renders it eminently understandable he argues so vociferously against it, particularly its harshest manifestations.

For now I’d like to point out his depiction of the nature of faith, as I think it’s informative, and it adds something to the discussion: The condition of faith itself, he writes, is “conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc." So here Harris identifies what he considers to be five salient features of faith:

1. Convictions without sufficient reason;

2. Hope mistaken for knowledge;

3. Bad ideas protected from good ones;

4, Good ideas obscured by bad ones; and

5. Wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation.

I think there’s little doubt as to why, if that’s his view of faith, he rejects it. I’d reject it, too!

But again, I don’t see biblical faith, rightly understood, as anything like this. Biblical faith is trust in the faithfulness of God to do what he’s promised to do. And such trust is predicated on, in my estimation, excellent reasons to think God is trustworthy—a long, established track record of showing himself to be faithful. Not in the sense of giving us everything we want, but in showing his love, fulfilling his promises, and offering his salvation. Whether biblical faith is lacking in evidence is a matter for dialogue and discussion, not dogmatism. It seems to me, in my own study of these questions, philosophical arguments for God’s existence and historical arguments for the truth of Christianity are strong—even if the evidence is not such as to compel the assent of every rational person. There’s both light and darkness, as folks like Paul Moser, C. Stephen Evans, and Pascal before them, have argued is likely to be the case if God wants to do more than enlighten the mind, like woo the heart. The bald assertion that biblical faith lacks evidence grows tiresome. I suggest that atheists find someone who can debate William Lane Craig without getting their clock cleaned before repeating that vacuous mantra ad nauseum. And whether biblical faith involves empty hope, bad ideas, or wishful thinking entirely depends on whether the claims on which such faith is based are true or not. Again, merely repeating such charges as if doing so accomplishes anything is a paradigmatic instance of question-begging assertion without argument. So, once more, this sort of uncharitable and knee-jerk characterization of the nature of faith, however fun it is to read, leaves me unimpressed, and does little to advance substantive discussion.

Why it Matters

In a blog yesterday I offered my critique of God’s Not Dead, the recent Christian movie containing a smattering of apologetic arguments, a cheesy storyline, farfetched caricatures, and a conspicuous absence of subtlety, nuance, and sophistication—however noble and well-intentioned were the motivations of the film-makers. Someone responded with this comment: “Psssst. It’s a movie. Movies are meant to entertain. Provoke feelings. Make you laugh. Make you cry. Maybe start a little thinking. What movie has believable characters?? Really?? Enjoy it! I cried. I got angry. I laughed. I praised my Lord and Savior. It made me think. It inspired God filled conversation with my husband. Isn’t that what we are supposed to do??? So what if a freshman outdid a professor. Doesn’t God lead the ones we least expect??? I for one enjoyed it. Completely.”  

I don’t count it my job or duty or even prerogative to dictate to people what they like or don’t like, but this response was troubling to me for several reasons. Besides its needless and gratuitous snarky tone, the individual is obviously convinced that the main or perhaps even sole purpose of movies is entertainment—to provoke feelings, make you laugh, cry, maybe start a little thinking. And the person appears to be a Christian. This reminds me of when I used to teach business ethics, and students, including Christian students, would inform me, most soberly, that the purpose of business is to make money—which usually was taken to entail that pretty much anything goes. It struck me then as an emaciated picture of the purpose of business—what about a more expansive picture of what business is about? How about serving others, meeting needs, building relationships, following your passion, weaving a fabric of healthy, harmonious relationships—and in the process making a living? A narrow view of movies and the arts, too, strikes me as sadly myopic and theologically deficient. Especially when we’re talking about a Christian movie, what about conveying truth, provoking deep thought, smartly challenging reigning secular plausibility structures, imbuing wisdom, embodying excellence? And in the process, it can also entertain. Assigning primacy to entertainment seems objectionably thin to me, and predicated on a lame worldview.

Besides which, isn’t it relevant what entertains us? What’s entertaining about a movie lacking subtlety, depth, texture, honesty? What’s moving about one-dimensional characters and farfetched storylines, cultivating victimization mentalities and demonizing those to whom we’re called to minister, insulting secularists and trivializing apologetics, confirming people’s worst suspicions about evangelicals and communicating to Hollywood that we care more about a conclusion or resolution we like than quality production values in a film, bolstering the perception that evangelicalism is tantamount to superficiality and shallowness? I can’t say I find any of that remotely entertaining. But the simple truth is that we’re not here to be entertained, at least not primarily; as Christians we have serious business to do, and being entertained by simplistic caricatures and contrived narratives, even if they contain a modicum of cursory apologetics, doesn’t cut it.

I responded to that critic by writing this: “We’re called to think on what’s lovely, beautiful, of good report, excellent. We can and should do better–not convey to Hollywood that we as Christians are content, indeed thrilled to be entertained by movies with bad plots and shallow caricatures. There really is such a thing as excellent movies; there are such things as textured, profound characters; we should strive for these.” Our being merely entertained isn’t the end of the story. We shouldn’t be so easily satisfied and mollified into mediocre acquiescence.

I hate to rain on the parade of my Christian friends who are excited by such a film. I respectfully submit they haven’t thought hard enough about this. Let’s take just one example of the apologetics in the movie—the best part of the movie gesturing in hopeful directions, but still altogether too simple. The student defender of faith argues that secularists can’t make any sense of objective morality, quoting the Dostoevsky line that “everything is permissible without God,” as if that does the trick and makes the point.

The philosopher who replaced me at my old school when I moved to Virginia—a thoroughgoing secularist and bright fellow—recently wrote a scathing critique of the movie for the online version of Psychology Today. This was one of his points: “The ‘everything is permissible without God’ argument is one of the worst arguments for God. Not only are there many secular ethical theories, but divine command theory—the idea that God grounds all ethical truths—is one of the most discredited positions in all of philosophy. Not only is it subject to the Euthyphro problem (which suggests that God determining morality makes morality arbitrary) but it's not clear that divine command theory is any better than a ‘God of the gaps’ argument: ‘What makes a good, good and the bad, bad? I don't know, God did it.’”

I don’t at all agree with his assessment here; in fact, I think it’s predicated on a number of mistakes. The existence of “many secular ethical theories” doesn’t show that such a list contains the best explanation of objective moral values and duties, or even a plausible one; divine command theory is but one way to try couching the locus of moral obligations in God; most divine command theories worth their salt do not entail that God grounds all ethical truths since most divine command theories are delimited to deontic matters of moral obligation; divine command theory has undergone a major resurgence in recent years, garnering defenses and articulations by some of the brightest philosophers alive today from John Hare to Robert Adams to C. Stephen Evans; the Euthyphro Dilemma has been, in my estimation and in that of many others, definitively answered in the recent literature; and a whole panoply of reasons has been offered to take theistic ethics and even divine command theory seriously beyond a “God of the gaps” approach.

But such stiff resistance to the apologetics on offer in the movie is implicitly encouraged. Simplicity breeds simplicity; caricature breeds caricature. This is why this matters. It’s not just about our entertainment. These issues are important, and need to be handled responsibly.

Despite all of the various efforts to answer the Euthyphro Dilemma in the last decade alone, secularists continue relishing pointing to it as an utterly efficacious refutation of theistic ethics. In a recently published book by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Plato at the Googleplex), she writes: “Socrates proceeds to formulate a line of reasoning that will prove to be of fundamental importance in the history of secularism, one that will be adapted by freethinkers from Spinoza to Bertrand Russell to the so-called new atheists of today, persuasively arguing that a belief in the gods—or God—cannot provide the philosophical grounding for morality…. What is still referred to as ‘the Euthyphro Dilemma’ or ‘the Euthyphro Argument’ remains one of the most frequently utilized arguments against the claim that morality can be grounded only in theology, that it is only the belief in God that stands between us and the moral abyss of nihilism. Dostoevsky may have declared that ‘without God all is permissible,’ but Plato’s preemptive riposte, sent out to us across the millennia, is that any act morally impermissible with God is morally impermissible without him, making clear how little the addition of God helps to clarify the ethical situation. The argument Plato has Socrates make in the Euthyphro is one of the most important in the history of moral philosophy. … We humans must reason our way to morality or we will not get there at all. Relying on fiats, even should they emanate from on high, will not allow us to achieve an understanding of virtue.”

Answering these objections is eminently possible, but requires that we develop more sophistication in defending our theistic convictions, not watering down and simplifying the complex matters at issue. It’s remarkable that Goldstein acts as if the capricious pantheon of Greek divinities are on a moral par with the God of Christianity in whom there’s no shadow of turning. This is a huge disanalogy that makes a great deal of difference defending an intelligent theistic ethic, and one she dispenses with by a wave of her hand.

Included in the most important biblical command is loving God with all of our minds; this means we need to stop assigning primacy to entertainment, stop settling for superficiality, stop being indifferent to excellence, and stop settling for pat answers. Or we’ll get the relegation to irrelevance we deserve. If we treat those with whom we disagree like benighted dolts unable to think their way out of a paper bag, driven by irrational impulses, we’ll receive such treatment ourselves.

The Big Ghost, Thor, and the Self

The fourth chapter of C. S. Lewis’s imaginative Great Divorce features the Big Ghost, formerly a man, now an insubstantial wisp of a ghost, a transparent phantom who’s pursued by one of the solid people under whose tread the earth seemed to shake. In contrast the Big Ghost and other inhabitants of the heaven-bound bus from hell had trouble walking at all, for to their feet the blades of grass in this strange land seemed sharp as diamonds. The Big Ghost had already been told he didn’t have to leave this place, but was free to stay as long as he pleased, and his pursuer confirms it by offering to accompany him on his journey into the high country. The Big Ghost is appalled when he recognizes the bright person following him, a solid spirit jocund and established in its youthfulness, for the spirit is none but Len, who as a man had murdered their mutual acquaintance Jack. To the Big Ghost Len is still nothing but a bloody murderer, while he himself had unjustly been relegated to haunt the filthy, macabre streets of Dark Town. The Ghost is incredulous that Len is in this place of light instead of him. Len deserves punishment and should be riddled with guilt and shame, and seems entirely delivered from them, which grates against the Ghost. Len the substantial spirit’s entire orientation contrasts with that of the self-consumed, paradoxically insubstantial Ghost. The bright spirit assures the Ghost, “I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began.” The event in Len’s life that had served as the catalyst for repentance and deliverance from self-consumption is, to the Ghost’s undiscerning eyes, a cause for nothing but perpetual condemnation.

The forgiven spirit isn’t interested in vindicating himself, whereas the Ghost is interested in nothing but trying to vindicate himself. “I done my best all my life, see? I done my best by everyone, that’s the sort of chap I was. I never asked for anything that wasn’t mine by rights.” The Ghost doesn’t see that his very effort at self-vindication is a manifestation of his focus on self that prevents him from the necessary process of losing his self in order to gain it. Comparing his behavior with those of others, he thinks he comes out smelling like a rose, and thus demands nothing but his rights, without realizing that, as the bright spirit says, “I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better. Never fear.” But it’s as if their frameworks of understanding are so different that the wisdom the bright spirit is trying to share doesn’t even register to the Ghost, smacking of inverted or perverted truth, as he remains caught up in indignation that he would be put below “a bloody murderer” like Len.

The irony is palpable that the insubstantial Ghost, unable to move a blade of grass even if he were to exert all his strength, continues puffing himself up. Refusing to give up his self-focus, he’s relegated to becoming ever less substantial, while insisting on the sort of chap he is, how he only wants his rights, and refusing anybody’s bleeding charity.

Elsewhere in Lewis’s writings he laments the diminution of meaning the word ‘charity’ has undergone. Traditionally it wasn’t merely benefits conferred on the less fortunate, but one of the theological virtues, an orientation toward others rather than oneself, putting the needs of others before one’s own, esteeming the other better than oneself. “Ask for the Bleeding Charity,” the spirit exhorts the Ghost. “Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.” But the Big Ghost will have none of it: “I don’t want charity. I’m a decent man and if I had my rights I’d have been here long ago and you can tell them I said so.”

Undeterred, with mirth dancing in his eyes rather than a log of judgmentalism lodged there, the bright spirit points out that the Big Ghost, as a man, didn’t do his best and wasn’t so decent after all. “We none of us were and none of us did,” but he assures the Ghost it doesn’t have to matter now. But once more, the offer of hope sounds to the Big Ghost like nothing but condemnation from a worse sinner, and he won’t countenance it.

In a sense the bright spirit admits it’s worse than that, that his murder of Jack wasn’t the worst thing he himself had done during his life—that he had murdered the Big Ghost in his heart for years while they lived as men. This is why he was sent to him—to ask for forgiveness and to be his servant as long as he needed one, longer if the Ghost pleased. The Ghost bristles at any suggestion of his own shortcomings, insisting they’re his own private affairs, to which the bright spirit replies, “There are no private affairs,” we’re all tied in an interlocking web of mutuality; an insight lost because of the Ghost’s inflated sense of self.

Relishing the chance to refuse the offer, content with his diminished state, insistent on his rights, the Big Ghost tragically chooses hell over heaven. Unwilling to give up his life, he loses it, still unable to bend a blade of grass for being so diminished and insubstantial.

And here I can’t help but contrast the Big Ghost with Thor. In the first movie, the initially brash and arrogant Thor is cast out of Asgard and stripped of his powers, and subsequently unable to lift his hammer, no matter how hard he tries. He’s like the Big Ghost, too weak and diminished to move a small stone or leaf after disembarking from the bus. When Thor was banished, his father, before casting the hammer to earth as well, had said, “Let him who is worthy possess the power of Thor.” And at the climax of the film, a matured, heroic Thor had now become willing to give up his life to save others. He offered his own life to spare the rest, and then, after a moment when it looked like his brother might relent, Thor is killed. And it was then that the hammer, miles away, took off and flew in a fiery trajectory into the hand of a revived Thor. Having given up his life, he found it. Having been unable to so much as move the hammer, now he could wield it with powerful force. It’s a great scene, resonating with a universal truth: life is found when we’re willing to lose it.

Of course Thor is no real god. As Captain America says, after all, “There’s only one God, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” The essence of salvation, on a Christian picture, is not about obtaining a ticket to heaven, saving your cosmic rear end from the flames, but about deliverance from the tyranny of self, from a hell locked from the inside, from sufferings intrinsically connected to the inevitable product of consumption with self. To be saved to the full is to be made able to love God and others with all of our hearts, to find deliverance from an inward orientation that forever blocks us from the life that only comes when we’re willing to give up our own. It’s not about being good enough, but realizing that we’re none of us very decent, and we can do nothing to purchase this life; only receive bloody charity from nail-pierced hands.

Image: By Mårten Eskil Winge - 3gGd_ynWqGjGfQ at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22007120

Foot on Nietzsche

Philippa Foot identifies three issues in Nietzsche and says a bit about each. Let me start by saying that I think she deserves credit for recognizing the need to address Nietzsche, something too often neglected by folks content to ignore him. She wishes to try answering Nietzsche with the resources of her own naturalistic account of moral evaluation.  

Before getting to Nietzsche, she mentions Thrasymachus in the Republic as an example of an immoralist; Thrasymachus argues that justice serves the interests of the stronger. Socrates sort of ties Thrasymachus up in knots, but Glaucon and Adeimantus push the immoralist point, saying the life of the strong unjust man is better than the life of the just man, so long as one can escape the consequences of being perceived as an unjust person. Socrates tries meeting the challenge by arguing that happiness is harmony of soul, and an unjust man has disorder there instead.

Foot doesn’t pursue that further, but asks how she would answer the challenge of immoralism on her own view. She begins with the idea of friendship, which she imagines that aliens coming down to watch humans could understand as something we choose to pursue because we need friendship despite the burdens it can sometimes impose. Aliens might, she suggests, see friendship much like the immoralist interlocutors of Socrates see justice: as the second best thing. What would be better, she imagines them thinking, would be not to need friendship at all—as some very rich people don’t, perhaps. But for most human beings, friendship is worth it because of the rewards. If one could get the rewards, though, by not being a friend but just projecting the impression of being a friend while avoiding the actual burdens, that would be preferable.

The point of the analogy for Foot is that she wishes to suggest that the Martians would not understand the true nature of friendship. A Thrasymachean view of friendship is something she thinks we can instantly recognize as wrong. Likewise with a view of parenting that hesitates to put the good of the child before one’s own—as if a parent’s care of his child is just to hedge his bets and provide security for himself in the future. Not all instances of doing justice are motivated by love, though; we also pay debts, say, to profligate creditors. Here Foot is drawn to a virtue ethic that involves love of justice and a character that recognizes the claim of any human being to a kind of respect.

At this point she skips ahead to Nietzsche. Here she identifies three theses in Nietzsche she thinks it’s good we separate out. First is his insistence that free will is an illusion. In many ways his convictions on this matter fueled his views about morality, because without meaningful free will (or a substantive self) morality can’t seem to get off the ground, and blaming people for wrongdoing seems particularly misguided. He was wholly skeptical of meaningful free will as he thought it needed to be predicated on something quite mysterious, perhaps something like Kant’s noumenal self of which Nietzsche was nothing but hostile.

Foot isn’t overly worried about this challenge, as she thinks there are other alternative and better ways of understanding the distinction between the voluntary and involuntary than what Nietzsche seems to have assumed, and that a bloodthirsty desire for vengeance need not be at the root of moral evaluation. I agree with her on the latter, though I think that’s a caricature of retributive justice, and though I don’t think we need to posit a Kantian picture of the will, I am inclined to something like substantive agency theory. On a deterministic picture, which seems the likely scenario on Foot’s naturalism, not only would we have an inability to do otherwise, the sufficient conditions to ensure our every action would be in place before we were born. This is the insight of the source theorists with whom I tend to agree. Foot seems content with a compatibilist account of freedom, which I think is just flat inadequate for the purposes of morality. It violates the deontic principle of ‘ought implies can’ and makes anything like strong ascriptions of moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness seem like utter mistakes. So I’m inclined to side with Nietzsche in thinking that without substantive libertarian free will morality is dead in the water, though I disagree with him on the question of whether we have it. I agree with Foot that we’re meaningfully free, but disagree with her that her analysis of what that looks like is the right picture.

Next Foot turns to a second thread in Nietzsche’s thought: the attack on specifically Christian morality, especially ‘pity morality’ and the ‘herd morality’ that is secretly cruel and resentful, encouraging acts of ‘kindness’ that demean the recipient and bolster the self-esteem of the person performing the action. Here she goes into Nietzsche’s views about the way morality often functions to reduce and harm us, and how the true human good would privilege individuality, spontaneity, daring, and creativity.

Foot takes on this charge that one has to see morality that stresses the humanness of sympathy as mistaken. Must compassion be driven by a sense of inferiority? Is charity most usually a sham? Surely it is sometimes, she thinks, but the idea that it always is strains her credulity and she doesn’t seem to think there are good reasons to take the charge seriously, though she acknowledges that depth psychology has plenty to offer us to disabuse us from thinking that our ostensible motivations are always our actual ones down deep.

Perhaps at this point I should clarify in broad outline what her moral theory says. She wants to make moral goodness of a piece with goodness per se, and wants to tear down the distinctions between animals and humans. So her story generally goes like this: Various species feature behaviors that ‘fit’ their species. Rabbits jump and tigers run and such; these are natural normativities. It’s (nonmorally) good for such species to engage in these fitting behaviors. Humans feature analogous behaviors too, in light of the sort of species we are. When certain of these natural normativities (she likes to call them ‘Aristotelian categoricals’ following Michael Thompson or ‘Aristotelian necessities’ following Anscombe) are relevant to the happiness of human beings—which in neo-Aristotelian fashion she spells out in terms of human flourishing—they’re teleologically significant natural normativities that are aptly understood as morally objective facts about us. In this way moral goodness flows naturally out of natural goodness. Contra Nietzsche she thinks something like, say, compassion, particularly a character of compassion, is an example of something morally objective (and good) as a result of being an instance of a built-in natural normativity—a kind of behavior that fits with who we are as human beings and conduces to our flourishing.

In one sense she thinks what Nietzsche is doing here is right. He’s attempting to ask if, say, pity is good for the one doing it and the one being pitied, and Nietzsche thought the answer was no. If indeed such pity was harmful, Foot would likely agree that putting a stop to pitying wouldn’t be a moral defect, and might be a morally good thing for us to do. She’s not convinced he was right in his analysis, though. For one thing, she thinks much of what he did was mixed together with overblown guesswork about hideous motives in people like resentment and hatred, which she thinks is in the main wrong. And though she confesses that perhaps nobody wants to be ‘pitied’, compassion seems something different and something that does play an important role in our species’ flourishing, so she’s not inclined to think his conclusions are right.

I tend to agree with Foot on this, though I harbor serious doubts her view is adequate to lay out the reasons why something like compassion is morally good. Here’s a reason why. She claims not to be a utilitarian. In fact she says that natural normativities in tigers and rabbits aren’t based on the assumption that the flourishing of such species is a good thing—one reason being that cancer cells too have their own natural normativities that pretty clearly don’t entail anything like moral objectivity or intrinsic goodness in their survival. But if the entailment doesn’t work for animals or pestilential creatures or cancer cells, why think it works for human beings? I don’t think she’s got enough resources to make the case that our flourishing is intrinsically good morally, nor that human Aristotelian categoricals even when teleologically significant to our flourishing constitute facts about moral objectivity. So though I agree with some of her conclusions in through here, I don’t think she’s provided good premises for them; I think classical theism much more plausibly might.

The third strand of Nietzsche’s thought she considers is this one: his denial of intrinsic badness in any acts at all. She attributes this view most ultimately to what she calls his ‘psychological individualism’, according to which the true nature of an action depends on the nature of the individual who did it. This led to his admiration for certain nobles of earlier times who plundered or raped or murdered. It’s true he spoke disparagingly of certain types of folks, like the merely licentious. All in all Foot thinks what largely led Nietzsche to his conclusions here was his invention of a generalizing theory of depth psychology for which there’s little empirical evidence. So she’s left thinking there’s just little reason to agree with his rejection of the idea that injury and oppression go contrary to justice. Indeed she wishes to dub such things irremediably wicked.

Again I tend to agree with her conclusion, but not the basis for it. I rather doubt she can generate the theory to undergird this sort of moral outrage with the resources of naturalism alone. Jerry Walls makes this case well in the second appendix of Good God.

What is Philosophy of Religion?

The philosophy of religion explores the Big Questions—the questions that philosophy at its best aims to answer. Philosophy should not rest content with merely verbal squabbles, technical debates among specialists, or games of intellectual gymnastics. Whether there’s a God, what God’s like if there is one, whether life persists beyond the grave, what life’s meaning is if one there be—these are the questions that often spur people to pursue the study of philosophy in the first place, and philosophy of religion indulges the chance to explore them. The questions are engaging even to children, but the difference between a child asking such questions and a philosopher is that the philosopher, in an effort to honor the wide-eyed childlike wonder of it all, has developed tools, strategies, and resources to answer such questions—or at least inch, however incrementally, toward answers. It does so by refining the questions themselves, ruling out certain answers, defending other answers against objections, revealing how various answers produce yet new questions. In the process it subjects various proposals to critical scrutiny every step of the way, separating the wheat from the chaff, in an effort to make progress. It’s exploration predicated on assuming that reason and rationality, properly exercised, make for progress.

Pascal once lamented indifference to and ignorance of the most existentially central questions of life; philosophy of religion, rightly done, is the cure for both, for it imbues and is motivated by passionate intellectual curiosity on the one hand, and a heartfelt desire not just to ask questions, but to find answers, on the other—and not for the sake of a false security or misleading assurance of certitude, but because the truth makes all the difference. To think otherwise is to forget the point of asking the questions; it would be a strange set of explorers indeed if they decided ahead of time, or in due course, to stop striving to arrive at their destination.

In C. S. Lewis’s wonderfully imaginative Great Divorce, the Solid Person of George MacDonald instructs the wispy protagonist (and great lover of books) about the danger of forgetting the point of intellectual investigation: “There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself . . . as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organizer of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares.”

The questions of philosophy of religion are not only inherently fascinating, but concerns of the most ultimate and practical significance. The fictional Sherlock Holmes, in “The Retired Colourman,” was “in a melancholy and philosophic mood” when he (echoing the writer of Ecclesiastes) asked the enduring question, “Is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not [Josiah Amberley’s] story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is life in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow—misery.”

Yet despite the challenges of life, the darkness of hearts, and ubiquity of suffering, Holmes at another juncture provided a glimpse into his remaining trust in the goodness of reality and the important role of reason. In “The Naval Treaty,” he held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose with its dainty blend of crimson and green before saying, “There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for the existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

Oxford graduate John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, similarly warned believers and unbelievers alike against impugning the value of logic, hard thinking, and rationality, “the candle of the Lord”: “Of what unspeakable use is even a moderate share of reason in all our worldly employments, from the lowest and meanest offices of life, through all the intermediate branches of business; till we ascend to those that are of the highest importance and the greatest difficulty!”

Of course philosophers of religion don’t all think reason yields the same deliverances, which makes this great conversation so close to the heart of the human condition a vital and ongoing dialogue. Some think the evidence points to a reductive materialistic world, others toward a richly theistic one, and yet others something in between.

In my own explorations, my tentative conclusion is that philosophy remains a necessary and viable means of discovery that, though consistent with science, go beyond it. I would echo the grave concerns about scientism William James presciently shared a century ago—critiquing proponents of parsimony who, fearing superstition, risked desiccation—“This systematic denial on science’s part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be but the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own most boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short.”

Etymologically and at its best philosophy is the love of wisdom—not a casual flirtation or weekend affair, but a passionate quest—and the philosophy of religion, it seems, resides at its culmination.

Trees, Values, and Sam Harris

People are fond of dismissing the relevance of philosophy by asking in a mocking tone, “So does a tree that falls in the forest make a sound?” The question is often asked in a derisive effort to show how uninteresting are the questions that occupy the attention of philosophers. However fun it might even be to think about, for some, surely nothing much rides on such a thing—this seems to be the implicit point anyway.

The original context of the question, of course, was Berkeley’s discussion of whether something like a noise takes place if nobody is there to hear it. There’s something a bit fishy about the idea there could be a noise absolutely nobody hears, but then again, there’s perhaps something even fishier about saying no noise could happen if nobody hears it. Most of us are inclined to think the noise would happen whether perceived or not. Berkeley’s solution was to say no unheard sounds ever happen because God’s always there to hear it, even if nobody else. This was his effort to spell out the dependence of the created order on the divine in a particularly strong sense.

Whatever you think about that particular conundrum, though, consider this question: Does value exist if nobody benefits from it? Suppose someone were to argue, as the famous atheist Sam Harris does in The Moral Landscape, that the only value we can meaningfully make sense of is the value of human flourishing, or the well-being of conscious creatures, something in that vicinity. On such a view, friendships, for example, are valuable exactly and only because they enhance well-being. And friendships of course do enhance our well-being, at least good friendships, at least most of the time. But is this the locus of their value? Harris would suggest it’s downright incoherent to argue its value could reside in anything else.

So what we have here is a Berkeleyan point, minus the God part, regarding value. Something’s value resides in its ability to enhance the well-being of conscious creatures, he wants to say. A falling tree in the forest only makes a sound if someone hears it. See the parallel? My question is: If we think it’s in some sense silly to insist on the latter, why isn’t it mistaken to insist on the former? In other words, why isn’t it perfectly coherent and indeed plausible to suggest that something like friendship has intrinsic value? Value, that is, apart from its consequences? That friendship produces wonderful consequences is undeniable, but does this fact alone commit us to having to say that the value of friendship resides exclusively in its benefits? Wouldn’t this be akin to saying that the only thing to say about a noise is how it’s perceived?

How about this picture instead of Harris’s? Friendship involves fellowship between two people, both of whom are valuable in and of themselves, and the fellowship between them is something of great intrinsic value and worth. It is something that is good, in some more-than-consequentialist sense. Experiencing something intrinsically good like that produces all manner of wonderful results, surely, but those results come about because the fellowship itself is a good thing. It’s not that the fellowship is a good thing merely because it produces those consequences. Friendship produces those consequences because it is beautiful and lovely in and of itself. Good things happen when we experience goodness.

If we live in a world in which the experience of great intrinsic goods inevitably produces healthy results—enhancements of our well-being or flourishing, let’s say—it’s going to be an ever-present and never entirely avoidable temptation to reduce the value of the good in question to its positive results—treating harshly any other sorts of suggestions. But the result, I think, is an emaciated caricature of reality. I think we do live in such a world, a world in which objective moral and even aesthetic values obtain, a world in which the love between a mother and her child or between friends yields the sweetest of fruit. But the enjoyment of that fruit is only possible because of a yet deeper reality: the value, dignity, and worth of the people in question, and the beauty and goodness of their loving relationships, motivated by something more than the good results those relationships produce.

I suppose, at bottom, Harris and I just have a very deep disagreement about the nature of reality. As an atheist, the good results that he notices things like friendships produce are about all he can point to as the locus of their goodness. I’m rather inclined to see those good results as a roadmap to a more ultimate source of value.

Podcast: Dr. Baggett on the Abductive Approach to the Moral Argument

  Hello!

On this podcast we hear from Dr. David Baggett about the approach to the moral argument he and Dr. Jerry Walls used in their book, Good God. We discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of abductive arguments in the context of moral apologetics.

Thanks for listening,

Jonathan Pruitt