Does God exist? You can reasonably argue it both ways. The same goes for such other ‘big questions’ as whether there is personal survival of bodily death. Now on many other issues where the arguments and evidential considerations pro et contra are equally good and cancel out, it is reasonable to suspend judgment and unreasonable not to. But not with respect to the big or ultimate questions. Or so I shall argue. But first some terminological regimentation.
There are four different types of attitude one can take with respect to a proposition: Accept, Reject, Suspend, Bracket.
To accept a proposition is to affirm it. To reject a proposition is to deny it. One cannot on pain of embracing a contradiction accept and reject one and the same proposition. LNC rules the discursive plane.
To suspend a proposition is to take no stance with respect to its truth or falsity, its ‘truth-value’ as the philosophers say. It is neither to affirm it nor to deny it. One suspends judgment as to its truth-value. There is no doxastic commitment either by way of belief or disbelief.
What I am calling ‘bracketing’ is something different still. Consider the Trinitarian dogma, “There is one God in three divine persons.” Some will affirm, some deny, others suspend the proposition they take it to express; there is, however, a fourth possibility.
Here is a little speech someone might give.
“The Trinitarian sentence you uttered makes no sense; it is unintelligible, if not in itself then at least for me. It strikes me as self-contradictory and thus expresses no definite thought or proposition. I cannot accept or reject since I do not know what I would be accepting or rejecting. For the same reason I cannot suspend: with respect to what proposition would I be suspending judgment?”
The fourth stance, bracketing, is a sort of suspension, but not with respect to truth-value but with respect to propositional sense. The sense of a declarative sentence (a sentence in the indicative mood) is the proposition it is used to express. And so the bracketing stance or attitude amounts to a suspension of commitment to there being a proposition the sentence expresses.
“I cannot evaluate a thought unless there is a thought to evaluate, and the Trinitarian sentence does not seem to me to express a thought. The sentence, being self-contradictory, lacks a determinate propositional sense and therefore is unintelligible to me.”
That is surely a stance one can, and some do, take. Note that I mentioned the Trinity doctrine only as an example in order to explain bracketing. The topic is not the Trinity. So please no comments on the coherence or incoherence of that doctrine.
With the above as background, I advance to my thesis.
THESIS: With respect to many propositions, both the theoretically rational and the practically rational course is to suspend judgment; with respect to some propositions, however, it would be practically irrational to suspend judgment. It would be imprudent or pragmatically ill-advised. Among the latter: there is a God; the soul is immortal; we will be judged, rewarded and punished in the hereafter for some of what we have done and left undone here below. (I am presupposing a distinction between theoretical and practical (pragmatic, prudential) rationality.)
My point is that for beings of our constitution it would be practically irrational and highly imprudent to suspend judgment on the questions of God and personal immortality. For if one did so one would not be likely to live here and now in such a way as to assure a positive post-mortem outcome. After all, we do not know that the soul is immortal nor do we know that it is not. The questions are theoretically undecidable.
But man does not live by theory alone. We are not mere transcendental spectators but interested free agents, interested in the sense of embedded in real being. (inter esse) We have interests in this life and beyond it: we are concerned with our ultimate felicity, well-being, and continuance in being.
If we had no interests beyond this life, if we were pure spectators, we should suspend judgment on the ultimate questions and go back to the everyday and its proximate concerns. That would be the reasonable thing to do — if we were pure spectators and the big questions were of merely theoretical interest. Whether God and the soul are real or unreal would then be on a par with whether the number of electrons in the universe is odd or even. Since the latter question is theoretically undecidable, it would be practically irrational to waste any time on it.
This is essentially the attitude of the worldling when it comes to God and soul and the like. “Who knows?” “People say different things.” “The supposedly wisest among us have contradicted one another since time immemorial.” “Why waste time on this philosophy nonsense when you could be living to human scale by pursuing a profession useful to others, making money, buying a house, founding a family?” Remain true to the earth; make friends with the finite; don’t hanker after a hinter world; this world is all there is.
My thesis, however, is that while is is both theoretically and practically rational to suspend judgment on many questions, this does not hold for those questions pertaining to our ultimate felicity and well-being. My thesis presupposes the real possibility of ultimate felicity and well-being. And so, to appreciate my thesis you cannot have the mentality of a worldling. You have to have had the experience of the ultimate nullity of the proximate concerns I mentioned. You must have the sense that this world and this life are ‘vanishing quantities.’ You have to have been struck and troubled by the transience of life and the impermanence of things. You have to take that troubling impermanence as an indicator of the relative (not absolute) unreality of this life. You have to possess the Platonic sensibility.
Now I can’t argue you into that sensibility any more than you can argue me out of it. Argument comes too late. Or rather it comes too soon. What I mean is that argument and counter-argument disport upon the discursive plane which is foreground to the ultimate background, the Unseen Order. What breaks the standoff for some of us is a glimpse into the Transdiscursive, a peek behind the veil. But only some have had the Glimpse. It is a divine gift, a gratuitous granting ab extra. Others will say that the Glimpse experience has zero noetic quality; it is something on the order of a Spinozistic experientia vaga, or a random neuronal swerve, a ‘brain fart.’ There is no resolution to this dispute over noetic quality on the plane of theoretical reason. You will have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.
In sum:
You are violating no canon of theoretical or practical rationality if you decide to live as if God and the soul are real. And since the questions are theoretically undecidable, you will decide either by an explicit act of will or willy-nilly (nolens volens) how you will live. The will comes into it. Why do I say you will decide? Because if you don’t decide, that non-decision amounts practically to a decision for the other side of the question.
The atheist and the mortalist who abstain from taking a stand cannot help but take a stand, practically, though not theoretically, for atheism and mortalism.
Bill,
I would like to comment briefly on the third option, the suspension of judgement regarding the big questions and, in particular, why many, with the best of intentions and earnest intellectual effort, fail to more from it to option one, acceptance. And I think that the reason is found in the fact that while such persons “have the sense that this world and this life are ‘vanishing quantities’… and are “struck and troubled by the transience of life and the impermanence of things,” they have never been divinely graced with, what you call, a “glimpse into the Transduscursive, a peek behind the veil.”
The evil of our ignorance weighs particularly heavy on these unhappy souls, who fully know and feel the unsatisfactory nature of present reality, but who also encounter only silence and darkness when seeking to go beyond it. In saying this, I am excluding those who understand that it is an illusion to assume that knowledge in these metaphysical matters is possible; rather, I have in mind those who seek belief, however much this might be tainted by questions or doubt. Here, I think that there are essentially two options: The first, which is the path that most follow, is to remain in the state of suspension of judgment, at home in neither the realms of the “worldlings” or of those graced with a “Platonic sensibility.” The second, one which I personally have chosen to follow, is to accept essentially “le pari” of Pascal, since, as he argues, in choosing to believe in God, who actually exists, one gains the everything of eternal happiness, for the small loss of some ephemeral earthly pleasures, if he does not. For many, what I describe here is a impoverished notion of faith, and although I do not deny that this way lacks the richness of experience that those graced with the glimpse of True Reality have obtained, it, while only a “pari,” requires a real change in life, in which one seeks to live as if one’s eternal destiny, in whatever form, depends on one’s actions now, and by actions, I mean not just moral choices but also religious ones; but, of course, the latter require an additional “pari” in choosing to embrace a religious tradition or remain within the confines of philosophical theism; this choice was much easier in Pascal’s time than today, but it still had to be made.
Vito
>>The second, one which I personally have chosen to follow, is to accept essentially “le pari” of Pascal, since, as he argues, in choosing to believe in God, who actually exists, one gains the everything of eternal happiness, for the small loss of some ephemeral earthly pleasures, if he does not. <<
Your sentence implies that God actually exists. But you don't know that. I take you to be saying that you accept the Wager because eternal happiness, if God exists, infinitely outweighs the loss of earthly pleasures, if he does not.
So your belief, and not just belief but also actions expressive of theistic belief, is supported by "le pari" and not by any religious or mystical experiences. In the case of Pascal himself, I think the main ground of his conviction is the crashing mystical experience he reports in his Thoughts, a book that both of us greatly admire. The Wager is a secondary consideration intended mainly to help others. Or so I conjecture. But I am not a Pascal scholar.
Where I think Pascal goes wrong is in opposing the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to the God of the philosophers. Aquinas would agree with me on this. See https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/pascal-buber-and-the-god-of-the-philosophers?utm_source=publication-search
Bill,
Sorry, if i was unclear, but you understood my meaning, i.e., “I take you to be saying that you accept the Wager because eternal happiness, if God exists, infinitely outweighs the loss of earthly pleasures, if he does not.” When I was younger, I judged certain experiences as “glimpse[es]” of the type of which you speak, but I now wonder if they were the products of youthful enthusiasm and a too sensitive aesthetic sensibility. No way to really know.
Like you, I think that the wager is, for Pascal, a rational argument of the last resort, designed to aid the undecided, not graced by transformative experiences, such as the one (actually two) that he himself had.
Yes, the opposition God of the philosophers/God of Abraham does not seem right to me either.
Vito
Bill,
In rereading this post, I see that the “peak behind the veil” of which you speak makes all the difference in the sort of assent that one gives to notions such as the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. You are fortunate in having had a “Glimpse” into this other, truer reality. So, when I turn to the wager, it is not because I do not find the arguments in favor of theism more persuasive than those against it, for I do find them so. Rather, it is that without either spiritual or mystical experiences, belief is too intellectual and dry to sustain the burning conviction (faith) that permits one’s escape, if only in passing moments, from the shadowy reality of matter and time. So, with regard to the big questions, belief has to be more than simply assenting to certain metaphysical propositions; instead, it has to be something that animates the core of one’s life. I have struggled for this sort of belief most of my life and, at times, have perhaps come close to it, but now in my final years, find myself without it. Whether this lack is in the order of things—a troubling notion tied to the problem of evil—or within me, I do not know, but others with a religious sensibility likely find themselves in the same situation, and it is perhaps for such persons and others even more doubtful that the wager was designed.
Vito
Vito,
One difference between us, then, is that whereas I think the arguments for and against theism (the classical theism you and I were brought up on) balance and mutually cancel, you find the theistic arguments more persuasive than the atheistic arguments. But my sense is that you wouldn’t go as far as Feser in holding that one can prove (strictly speaking) the existence of God via, say, Aquinas’s quinque viae. I would say that no argument for or against God is rationally coercive, and that the most some of them do is render reasonable one’s theism or atheism. Sensu stricto, there are no proofs (knock-down demonstrations) on one side or the other.
Three main considerations incline me toward theism.
1. The arguments for it, which, though not rationally coercive, serve to articulate the position and render it rationally acceptable.
2. The strong case against metaphysical naturalism.
3. The various religious, mystical, and paranormal experiences I have had, including experiences AS OF demonic intrusions. The ‘as of’ locution used by analytic philosophers expresses salutary critical caution.
But in the end, one must decide what to believe and how to live. The will comes into it. This gives aid and comfort to a limited doxastic voluntarism. By contrast, no doxastic voluntarism is involved in the perception in good light of a black cat.
Old joke: what is the difference between a philosopher and a theologian? The philosopher searches a dark room for a black cat that isn’t there. The theologian finds the cat.
Bill,
No, like you, I do not believe that the existence of God can be proven; and while I give the rational arguments for his existence the edge, I admit that some of the atheistic counter-arguments, are very strong and often cause me to doubt and rethink my position. But I believe that doubt and in this area of inquiry is to be expected, since the ultimate nature of reality is unclear to us.
Vito
Vito,
The Phaedo passage I quoted was by way of response to your last comment.
Bill,
It is a beautiful and profound passage, and I appreciated you posting it, for it strengthens my resolve to stick to (D) reasoned faith with regard to the ultimate questions.
Vito
None of these propositions are “provable”:
1) There is a mind-independent world.
2) There are other minds.
3) My senses are reliable.
4) The past is real (i.e. the world didn’t pop into existence 5 minutes ago, seeming like it has been around for thousands, millions, or billions of years).
5) Morality is real (i.e. there are objectively good and bad ways of acting.)
But they are all – to me, anyway – obviously true.
I am certain of the truth of each of them.
Is there a good (rationally coercive?) argument for “provability” as a necessary condition of “certainty”?
Which leads me to proposition #6:
6) One can be certain about the truth of propositions that are not (strictu sensu) provable or “rationally coercive”).
Prove me wrong.