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Is the existence of nature a natural sign of the existence of God?
Category: Atheism and Theism
The Presuppositionalist Challenge to My Position
Substack latest.
Do not comment unless you have carefully read the entire article.
The Atheist
Substack latest.
A rumination 'inspired' by Paul Brunton. An embedded article confronts Sam Harris, one of the "four horsemen" of the New Atheism, which is now old hat. As old hat as the expression I just used. There's nothing new under the sun, saith the Preacher, and in these hyperkinetic times, what's new gets old quickly. The New Atheism is as passé as folk music, as passé as blogging, although some among the superannuated are still at it and will be until blindness, dementia, or death doth part us from it.
Curiously, thanks to Trump, Vance, and others, Christianity is now 'cool' among a large segment of youth. But don't get too excited about this development: it is in good measure driven by conformism and crowd behavior and by the lust to turn a buck, as witness 'prayer apps' and Martin Scorsese's latest offerings.
If you need an app to pray I will say a prayer for you. As for Scorsese's latest, I didn't watch any of it, considering it, whether rightly or wrongly, sullied by his and his pal Robert de Niro's glorification of mafiosi and other assorted scumbags in such productions as Goodfellas and Casino.
Notes on R. C. Sproul, Does God Exist? Part II
Part I is here. Sproul thinks he can prove that the God of the Christian Bible exists from reason alone. By 'prove' he means establish with objective certainty.
He begins by listing four possible explanations of reality as we encounter it. I take him to mean by 'reality' the world as given to the senses.
1) Reality is an illusion.
2) Reality creates itself.
3) Reality is self-existent.
4) Reality is created by something distinct from it that is self-existent, God.
Sproul considers these the only four possibilities. His strategy is to refute the first three, thereby establishing (4). Pressed for time, I will be brief. I will simply dismiss (1) as beneath refutation.
As for (2), nothing can create itself, if 'x creates x' means x causes x to exist. Why not? Well, for anything to do any causing it must already exist. 'Already' can be taken either logically or temporally or both. But nothing is or can be either temporally or logically prior to itself. It is therefore impossible that anything create itself. It is a necessarily true law of metaphysica generalis that nothing can create itself.
But isn't God classically characterized as causa sui? He is indeed. But what that means is not that he causes himself to exist, but that he is not caused by another to exist. As I like to put it, the sense of causa sui is privative, not positive. It is built into the very concept God that God would not be God if he were caused by another to exist; that is not to say, however, that he causes himself to exist. To say that God is causa sui is equivalent to saying that he exists of metaphysical necessity.
By the way, don't confuse the concept God with God. That would be like confusing the concept chair with what you are presumably now sitting on. Are you sitting on a concept?
As for (3), this pantheistic possibility is worth consideration, but I must move on. The idea is that Reality does not cause itself to exist, nor does it just happen to exist; it necessarily exists.
Sproul affirms (4) and he thinks he can prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. By 'reality,' he means "reality as we encounter it." (p. 9) That includes mainly, if not wholly, the people and things disclosed by inner and outer sense experience.
But are those four the only (epistemic) possibilities? Why couldn't the reality we encounter just exist as a factum brutum, a brute fact? By 'brute fact' I mean an obtaining or existing state of affairs that exists without cause or reason.
Sproul needs to explain why the cosmos, physical world, nature cannot just exist. Why must it have an efficient cause or a reason/purpose (final cause)? Why can't its existence be a brute fact? That is a (fifth) epistemic possibility he does not, as far as I can see, consider.
Notes on R. C. Sproul, Does God Exist?
Trudy the Calvinist gave me a reading assignment. Herewith a first batch of comments for her and your delectation, discussion, and (presumably inevitable) disagreement.
In Chapter One, "The Case for God," Sproul distinguishes between four approaches in apologetics: fideism, evidentialism, presuppositionalism, and "the classical school" (4) He comes out against the first three and nails his colors to the mast of the fourth.
Fideists maintain that there are no rationally compelling arguments for the existence of God, and that we must therefore rely on faith alone. Sproul mentions Tertullian who opposed Athens (philosophy) to Jerusalem (Abrahamic religion) and famously asked what the latter has to do with the former. He held that Christianity is objectively absurd in the sense of logically contradictory, and that this absurdity was a sort of 'reason' to accept it: credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd.)* Sproul rejects this extreme view on the ground that it amounts to "a serious slander against the character of God and the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth." (2) Sproul's point is solid. There cannot be self-contradictory truths. If so, how could the Source of all truth, the Spirit of truth, be self-contradictory?
Evidentialists defend the faith through appeals to biblical history. I am put in mind of what S. Kierkegaard calls "the infinite approximation process" (See Concluding Unscientific Postscript) a process which never arrives at a fixed and final result. According to Sproul, the most the evidentialist can attain is "a high degree of probability." (2) The probability is high enough, however, to prove the existence of God "beyond a reasonable doubt." Indeed, he thinks the probability sufficient to block every "moral escape hatch," except one: "You didn't prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt," i.e., the case has not been conclusively made. This is not good enough for Sproul: he thinks the case for the very specific God of the Christian Bible (presumably with all the Calvinist add-ons) must prove this God beyond even the shadow of a doubt.
Moreover, Sproul holds that one can establish the existence of the God in question beyond the shadow of a doubt. which is to say, in a rationally coercive, philosophically dispositive, entirely ineluctable, 'knock-down' way. Apologists of the classical school believe that the case for God can be made "conclusive and compelling." "It is actual proof that leaves people without any excuses whatsoever." (4) Sproul hereby alludes to Romans 1, as becomes clear at the end of the chapter. No excuses, no escape hatches. You are morally at fault for refusing to accept the God of the Christian Bible!
Presuppositionalists, led by Cornelius van Til, hold that the existence of the God of the Christian Bible can be conclusively established, but to do so, "one must start with the primary premise of the existence of God." (4) One can inescapably conclude that God exists only by presupposing his existence. Sproul's objection is the standard one levelled against the apologetics of the 'presuppers,' namely, that presuppositionalism enshrines (my word) the informal fallacy of petitio principii, or hysteron proteron if you prefer Greek. In plain English the fallacy is that of circular reasoning. To put it in my own way: every argument of the form p; therefore p is formally valid in that it is logically impossible for the premise to be true and the conclusion false. But no argument of this form could give anyone a reason to accept the conclusion. Circular arguments, though valid in point of logical form, are probatively worthless. Sproul goes on to tax Van Til & Co. with the fallacy of equivocation, but Sproul's discussion is rather less than pellucid, so I won't say any more about it; in any case, I agree with him that presuppositionalism is an apologetic non-starter, as I have argued over many an entry. (See my Van Til and Presuppositionalism category.)
Classical apologists such as Sproul and presuppositionalists both assert that without God there is and can be no rationality. The difference is that classicists insist that the existence of God cannot be merely presupposed, but must be proven in a non-circular or "linear" (Sproul) way. They also insist that it can be proven conclusively, and thus in such a way as to render the existence of God objectively certain. As I read Sproul, he is telling us that we can know with objective certainty, and thus without the possibility of mistake, that the God of the Christian Bible exists. In the later chapters of his book he lays out the proof.
Critique
So much for exposition. Where do I stand? I reject all four positions, as above formulated. My current position, tentatively and critically held, is however closer to fideism than to the other three. Call it moderate fideism to distinguish it from the Tertullianic and Kierkegaardian extremes. It is moderately fideistic in that it rejects the anti-fideism of the presuppositionalists and that of the classicists.
Readers of this weblog know that I have maintained time and again that one can both reasonably affirm and reasonably deny the existence of God. That is to say: there are no rationally coercive arguments either way. Nothing counts as a proof sensu stricto unless it is rationally coercive. So there are no proofs either way. An argument can be good without being rationally coercive, and there are good arguments on both sides. There are also bad arguments on both sides. The quinque viae of the doctor angelicus are good arguments for the existence of God, but in my view not rationally compelling, coercive, dispositive, ineluctable — pick your favorite word. They don't settle the matter, once and for all. But the same holds for some of the atheist arguments, some of the arguments from evil, for example. Galen Strawson is the polar opposite of Sproul on the God question. So to savor (bemoan?) the extremity of the worldview polarization, take a look at my critique of Strawson at Substack.
So am I taking the side of Tertullian and Kierkegaard? No way. They go to the opposite extreme to that of Sproul (although he is not as extreme as the 'presuppers'). I am a fair and balanced kind of guy.
I say that the belief that God exists is a matter of faith. Faith is not knowledge, but it is not entirely opposed to it either, as it is for Tertullian and Kierkegaard who hold that belief in the God of the Christian Bible, God Incarnate, is logically absurd, and yet is to be maintained, for S. K. anyway, by infinite subjective passion. On the contrary, I say that one ought not believe anything that is demonstrably absurd (logically contradictory), and that to do so is a plain violation of the ethics of belief. (If you subscribe to an ethics of belief, then you must also be a limited doxastic voluntarist, and I am.) Faith does not and cannot contradict reason; it supplements it. Faith is on the way to knowledge and seeks its fulfillment in it. Faith is inferior to knowledge as a route to reality, as Aquinas would agree. Faith extends our grasp of reality — our contact with it — beyond what we can know, strictly speaking, except that there are and can be no internal assurances of veridicality here below: the verification, if it comes at all, will come after we have quit these bodies.
Faith is neither blind nor seeing. It is neither irrational nor rational, but suprarational. It goes beyond reason without going against reason. 1 Corinthians 13:12 may provide a clue: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (KJV) Paul is suggesting that we see all right; we are not blind. But the seeing is obscure at present and will culminate in luminosity. Cognitio fidei is not cognition strictly speaking, but it is not blind either. We could liken it to a dim and troubled sighting in the fog. Pace Kierkegaard, not a desperate leap, but a hopeful reaching out beyond the bounds of the certain.
Sproul thinks he can prove the existence of God by reason alone. In my next installment I will show that he fails in this endeavor.
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*Nietzsche quipped that Tertullian should have said credo quia absurdus sum, "I believe because I am absurd."
On Anselmian or ‘Perfect Being’ Theology
Tom O. writes,
I was wondering if you have time to weigh in on the following problem. I take it you subscribe to perfect being theology as a constraint on our theorizing about God’s nature. For example, you write, “God is the absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is a contingent being. No absolute just happens to exist. it is built into the divine job description that God be a necessary being…”. Here, it looks to me like you’re endorsing a prior conception of what God must be like (‘absolute’) in order to infer that God must be a necessary being.
Actually, Tom, I do not subscribe to 'perfect being' theology, as I explain below. I do, however, have a prior conception of what God must be like to be 'worth his salt,' i.e., to satisfy the exigencies built into our concept of God. God is the Absolute, and nothing could be the Absolute if it merely happened to exist. So God, if he exists, exists of absolute metaphysical necessity, and he has this necessity from himself, and not from another, a se non ab alio. It follows that if God does not exist, then he is impossible. Thus what we should not say is that God necessarily exists, for this way of putting it implies that he does exist. We should say that God is necessarily non-contingent, i.e. necessarily such that, if he exists, he exists necessarily (in all possible worlds in the Leibnizian patois), and if he does not exist, then he is impossible (exists in no possible world in the same façon de parler.)
Now, suppose someone endorses a conception of God as a limited being. Maybe God is not all powerful, or he is dependent in some way (and so not a se in a strong sense- think pantheism) or he is contingent in some way. This view of God obviously parts ways with perfect being theology. But I want to know how the proponent of perfect being theology will argue that conceptions of God as a limited being are deficient. The very conception of God (as limited or absolute/perfect) is at issue here. So, the proponent of perfect being theology can’t assume God is the absolute to then argue a limited God is deficient. What criterion could he possibly appeal to in order to sort ‘genuine’ conceptions of God from ‘deficient’ conceptions?
In the context of this discussion there are three approaches to God that we ought to distinguish: the limited being approach, the perfect being approach, and the beyond-perfect-being approach of Aquinas, Barry Miller, and myself, et al. As for the limited being approach, I will just say for now that there might be one or more limited gods, but that they don't interest me. What interests me is whether there is an unsourced Source of the being, intelligibility, and value of everything other than it, a being of limitless perfection, return to which or fellowship with which, or participation in the being of which, would bring the ultimate in human felicity. That is my concept of God, and not just mine. My question then becomes: does anything in reality answer to that concept?
I have no interest in limited gods. I have no interest in affirming them or denying them. There might even be one or more in addition to the unlimited God; they might serve as emissaries between the unlimited God and us. But they would not be worthy of worship or worthy of my ultimate concern because my ultimate beatitude and need for final meaning could not be secured by them.
My interest is whether we need to go beyond perfect being theology. I say we do and that PBT is a limited approach to the divine.
The anthropomorphism of perfect being (Anselmian) theology
One approach to God and his attributes is Anselmian: God is "that that which no greater can be conceived." God is the greatest conceivable being, the most perfect of all beings, the being possessing all perfections. But what is a perfection? A perfection is not just any old (positive, non-Cambridge) property, but a great-making property. Some of these properties admit of degrees while some do not. To say of God that he is the ens perfectissimum, the most perfect of all beings, is to say that he possesses all great- making properties, and of those that admit of degrees, he possesses them to the highest degree.
For example, power admits of degrees; so while Socrates and God are both powerful, only God is maximally powerful. Wisdom too admits of degrees; so while both Socrates and God are both wise, only God is maximally wise. And the same holds for love and mercy and moral goodness. Many of the divine attributes, then, are maxima of attributes possessed by humans.
Are Socrates and God wise in the same sense of 'wise'? This follows if wisdom in God is just the highest degree of the same attribute that is found in some humans. Accordingly, the predicate 'wise' is being used univocally in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' despite the fact that God but not Socrates is all-wise. Bear in mind that the sense of a predicate is not to be confused with the property (attribute) the predicate is used to express. Suppose we distinguish three 'planes': the linguistic, the semantic, and the ontic. Predicates inhabit the linguistic plane, senses the semantic plane, and properties the ontic plane.
Thus a commitment to univocity appears to be entailed by the Anselmian or perfect-being approach. The predicate 'wise' is being used in the very same sense when applied to Socrates and when applied to God.
The polar opposite of univocity is equivocity. The phenomenon of equivocity is illustrated by this pair of sentences: 'Socrates is wise,' 'Kamala is in no wise fit to be president.' The meaning or sense of 'wise' is totally different across the two sentences. Midway between univocity and equivocity there is analogicity. Perhaps an example of an analogical use of 'wise' would be in application to Guido the mafioso. He's a wise guy; he knows the score; but he is not a wise man like Socrates, though he is like the latter in being knowledgeable about some things. But I mention analogy only to set it aside.
My thesis: an Anselmian approach to God and his attributes such as we find in Alvin Plantinga and T. V. Morris and the rest of the 'perfect being' theists is anthropomorphic. One takes God to have the very same great-making attributes or properties that (some) humans have, but to the maximal degree. Socrates is benevolent and merciful; God is omnibenevolent and all-merciful. And so on. We could say that God is omni-qualified or omni-propertied with respect to the great-making properties. If we take this tack, we approach God from the side of man, assimilating God to man. God is 'made' (conceptualized) in the image and likeness of man, as a sort of superman, but with defects removed and attributes maximized.
This anthropomorphism is very different from the God-is-an-anthropomorphic-projection thesis of Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach's thesis entails the nonexistence of God. Perfect being anthropomorphism does not.
Well, what is wrong with anthropomorphism? The problem with it is that it fails to do justice to God's absolute transcendence and ineffability. If the difference between creatures and God is only a matter of degree, then God would not be worthy of worship. He would be "the greatest thing around" and no doubt an object of wonder and admiration, but not an appropriate object of worship. (See Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1996, p. 3)
God is the Absolute. I take that to be axiomatic. That God is the Absolute is built into the very concept of God whether or not anything in reality answers to that concept. Starting from the concept, one cannot prove (demonstrate) that God exists. Kant is surely right that the ontological argument "from mere concepts" (aus blosser Begriffen) is not valid. To understand what I just wrote you must understand that the concept of X is not to be confused with the nature of X. Natures (quiddities, essences) are situated on the ontic plane mentioned above; concepts are either finite-mind-dependent in which case they cannot exist in themselves but only in minds, or else,they exist in themselves on the semantic plane, which I distinguished above from the ontic plane. One could say that the nature of God entails (or rather is) the existence of God. That, I believe, is true. But that truth does not help us prove the existence of God unless we have a rationally coercive reason to think that our concept of God is an adequate concept, i.e., one that captures the essence or nature of God. But we have no such concept. The doctor angelicus will back me up on this. In God, essence and existence are one. To capture God's essence in a concept, therefore, would require squeezing God himself into a concept. That would be like emptying the Pacific Ocean, or any ocean, into a hole in the sand at the seashore.
God is radically other than creatures. His attributes cannot be 'in series' with human degreed attributes even if at the limits of these series. God is not just another thing that exists and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties.
Suffering, Evil, and Galen Strawson’s ‘Proof’ of the Nonexistence of the Christian God
This just in from our old friend Malcolm Pollack:
I'm writing because I went to your Substack to read your 2A post, and beneath it was a link to your post about Galen Strawson's audacious letter to the NYT — in which Professor Strawson, in a single paragraph, proves the nonexistence of the Christian God!I have a quibble, however, about your response. In the version of Strawson's argument you offer, you make a move from "suffering" (Strawson's word) to "evil", and then rely on the incoherence of the idea of objective "evil" in a Godless world to undercut Strawson's argument.Strawson, though, never mentions evil; he only speaks of suffering. This means, it seemed to me, that the word "suffering" should take the place of "evil" in your framing of Strawson's argument, and I think it changes that line of attack that you might have used. (Evil is always wrong, of course, but how are we to know what suffering might be necessary in ways that, like children, we can't understand?)Am I being petty here? It seems to me that the distinction between the concepts of suffering and evil, though they share deep connections, is important enough to point out.
1) It is perfectly plain that the words 'suffering' and 'evil' have different meanings and that the corresponding concepts are different. I implied as much when I asked, "Is it certain that evil exists? Is it even true? Are there any evils? No doubt there is suffering. But is suffering evil?"
2) A different but related question is whether every instance of animal or human suffering is evil. I am inclined to say No, and that some instances of suffering are evil and some are not. William Rowe, however, disagrees. Here is my view in contrast to Rowe's from a February 2019 entry:
Suppose that to be restored to health a child must undergo an extremely painful medical treatment. So the parents of the child allow the treatment to be administered. We will agree that the infliction of the suffering upon the child is morally justified by the fact that the treatment is necessary to prevent a greater evil such as the child's death. Now what Rowe is saying above [in the linked article] is that in a case like this, the suffering is (morally) justified but evil nevertheless.
I find this difficult to understand. It sounds like a contradiction. For if the infliction of the suffering is morally justified, then the infliction is morally permissible. But if the suffering is morally evil, then its infliction is also morally evil, which is to say that its infliction is morally impermissible. But surely it is a contradiction to affirm of any action A that A is both morally permissible and morally impermissible.
If the suffering is morally justified in that it leads to a good unobtainable without it, then the suffering, though certainly unpleasant, disagreeable, repugnant, awful, excruciating, etc., is not under the conditions specified evil in a sense of 'evil' inconsistent with the divine omnibenevolence. It is instrumentally good. In the situation we are imagining, it is not only morally permissible but also morally obligatory for the parents to allow the painful treatment to be administered. This implies that the treatment ought to be administered. Therefore, if you say that the child's suffering remains evil despite its leading to a greater good, then you are committed to saying that the infliction of evil upon the child is morally obligatory, something that ought to be done. But this smacks of absurdity since it is hard to understand how any infliction of evil could be morally obligatory. Since in our example the infliction of suffering is morally permissible, I conclude that even intense suffering is not in every case evil.
What Rowe is saying is that suffering is intrinsically evil, and that its evilness remains the same whether or not the suffering is instrumentally good. What I am asserting contra Rowe is that whether or not an instance of suffering is evil depends on whether or not it is instrumentally good. For me, suffering that is instrumentally good is not evil. I concede of course that such suffering remains unpleasant, disagreeable, repugnant, awful, excruciating, etc. But I do not understand how suffering in itself, or intrinsically, can be said to be evil in circumstances in which it serves a greater good.
Perhaps the problem is that there are two senses of 'evil' in play, one non-normative (amoral) the other normative (moral), and that Rowe is appealing to the former sense. Accordingly, the non-normatively evil is that which elicits aversion. In this sense, mental and physical suffering is evil in that beings like us are prone to shun it. The normatively evil, on the other hand, is that which ought not exist. So perhaps the puzzle can be resolved by saying:
a) Every instance of suffering is evil in the non-normative sense that, as a matter of empirical fact, beings like us are prone to shun it.
b) Some instances of suffering are not evil in the normative sense that it is false that they ought not exist.
c) If an instance of suffering conduces to a good that outweighs it, and the good is unobtainable by any other means, then the instance of suffering ought to exist. Thus the child's suffering in our example ought to exist. Admittedly, this sounds paradoxical. But note that this 'ought' is not categorical but hypothetical or conditional: the child's suffering ought to exist given that, on condition that, the treatment that causes it is the only way to avoid the child's death, which would be an evil worse than the child's suffering from the treatment.
d) (c) is not paradoxical or incoherent.
e) The moral goodness of God is called into question not by the existence of evils in the non-normative sense, but by the existence of evils in the normative sense. Thus the mere existence of suffering, which is non-normatively evil, does not by itself cause a problem for the divine moral goodness. For it may well be that all instances of suffering are morally justifiable in the light of a greater good. This does not make these sufferings any less repugnant; but this repugnance is not a moral repugnance but the non-normative property of thwarting desire or eliciting aversion.
3) Therefore, if Strawson follows Rowe and not me, then 'suffering' and 'evil' are intersubstitutable in the following argument both salva veritate et salva significatione:
i) If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
ii) If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
iii) If God is omniscient, then God knows when and where any evil exists or is about to exist.
iv) If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate or prevent all evil.
v) Evil exists.
vi) If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate or prevent all evil, or doesn’t know when or where evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate or prevent all evil.
vii) Therefore, God doesn’t exist.
4) But I have argued against Rowe, so my response to Malcolm has to be different. I don't say that every instance of suffering is evil in a sense of 'evil' incompatible with the goodness of God. I say only that some instances of suffering are evil in that sense. But then it seems to me just to impute to Strawson the above argument.
5) Malcolm misconstrues what I am doing in that Substack article. He thinks I am "rely[ing] on the incoherence of the idea of objective evil in a Godless world to undercut Strawson's argument." I am not doing that. I am not presupposing that the objective existence of evil requires the existence of God. If I did that I would be begging the question against Strawson. For it may be that evil objectively exists whether or not God exists. What I am doing is refuting Strawson's claim to have proven the nonexistence of God. He has not done that because he has not proven that (ii) and (v) are objectively certain.
A Design Argument From the Cognitive Reliability of Our Senses: A Proof of Classical Theism?
You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes.
Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as more than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art. The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than intrinsic. It is not part of the presupposition on which your confidence rests that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don't. But it is part of your presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the intrinsic intentionality of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Thus the presupposition is that an intelligent being designed the objects in question with a definite purpose, namely, to indicate the trail's direction.
Of course, the two rock piles might have come into existence via purely natural causes: a rainstorm might have dislodged some rocks with gravity plus other purely material factors accounting for their placement. Highly unlikely, but possible. This possibility shows that the appearance of design does not entail design.
Nevertheless, your taking of the rock piles as trail markers presupposes (and thus entails) that they are designed. It would clearly be irrational for you to take the piles as evidence of the trail's direction while at the same time maintaining that their formation was purely accidental. And if you found out that they had come into being by chance due to an earthquake, say, you would cease interpreting them as meaning anything, as providing information about the trail. One must either take the cairns as meaningful and thus designed or as undesigned and hence meaningless. One cannot take them as both undesigned and meaningful. For their meaning — 'the trail goes that-a-way' — derives from a designer. Their intentionality is derivative, not intrinsic.
Now consider our incredibly complex sense organs. We rely on them to provide information about the physical world. I rely on eyesight, for example, both to know that there is a trail and to discern some of its properties. I rely on hearing to inform me of the presence of a rattlesnake. I rely on my brain to draw inferences from what I see and hear, inferences that purport to be true of states of affairs external to my body. The visual apparatus (eye, optic nerves, visual cortex and all the rest) exhibits apparent design. It is as if the eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. But the appearance of design is no proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory apparatus are supposed to have evolved by an unguided or 'blind' process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents.
But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.
As a matter of fact, we do rely on our senses. Our reliance may be mistaken in particular cases as when a twisted tree root appears as a snake. But in general our reliance on our senses for information about the world is justified. Our senses are thus reliable: they tend to produce true beliefs more often than not when functioning properly in their appropriate environments. We rely on our senses in mundane matters but also when we do science, and in particular when we do evolutionary biology. The problem is:
How is our reliance on our sense organs justified if they are the accidental and undesigned products of natural selection operating upon random mutations?
To put it in terms of rationality: How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology in its materialistic (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, et al.) guise provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutionary processes? It cannot be rational. I agree with Richard Taylor who writes:
. . . it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory and cognitive faculties had a natural, non-purposeful origin and also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them. (Metaphysics, 3rd ed., Prentice-Hall 1983, p. 104)
The foregoing may be summed up in the following design argument:
1. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties to provide access to truths external to them.
2. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties only if they embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.
Therefore
3. Our cognitive faculties embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.
To resist this argument, the materialist must deny (2). But to deny (2) is to accept the rationality of believing both that our cognitive faculties arose by accident and that they produce reliable beliefs. It is to accept the rationality of something that, on the face of it, is irrational.
The above is an impressive argument, wouldn't you say? Of course it needs beefing up in various ways. For example, how can we be sure that there is exactly one intelligent designer and not several working in concert? If these worries can be allayed, the argument seems to establish the existence of an intelligent designer of such cognitively gifted animals as ourselves, not to mention the world in which the gifted animals are embedded. Many will be quick to identify this intelligent designer with the God of classical theism. Essential to classical theism as I am using the term is the idea that God is a personal being (tri-personal on normatively Christian accounts) who is transcendent of the physical universe which he creates and sustains in being, and is thus transcendent in the sense that he could just as well exist in his full perfection without having created anything.
But I don't believe the above argument amounts to a proof of classical theism. It does not render the latter rationally inescapable; at best, it renders it rationally acceptable. On classical theism, the intelligibility of nature has a transcendent source: it accrues to nature ab extra, which is to say: it is not immanent in nature. But why couldn't the intelligibility of nature, and with it, the cognitive reliability of the natural faculties with which we investigate nature, be inherent in the natural world? The idea is not that 'Mother Nature' is a person with conscious purposes in the way that God is a person with conscious purposes, but that nature, below the level of conscious mind, is yet mind-like in that it aims at certain outcomes, and thus has 'purposes' in an analogous sense of the term. Dispositionality provides an analogy in the small for the immanent intentionality and teleology of nature in the large.
To say that a wine glass is fragile, for example, is to say that it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck or dropped onto a hard surface from a sufficient height. Several philosophers have noted the analogy with conscious intentionality. A consciously intentional state exhibits
a. directedness to an object;
b. an object that may or may nor exist;
c. an object that may be, and typically is, indeterminate or incomplete.
For example, right now I am gazing out my study window at Superstition Mountain. The gazing is an intentional state: it is of or about something, a definite something. It takes an accusative, and does so necessarily. The accusative or intentional object in question presumably exists. But the intentional object is what it is whether or not it exists. The phenomenological description of object and act remains the same whether or not the object exists. Moreover, the object as presented in the act of gazing is incomplete: there are properties such that the intentional object neither has them nor their complements. Thus, to a quick glance, what is given in the intentional experience is 'a purplish mountain.' Just that. Now anything purple or purplish is colored, and anything colored is extended; but being colored and being extended are not properties of the intentional object as such. No doubt they are properties of the mountain itself in reality; but they are not properties of the precise intentional object of my gazing, which has all and only the properties it is seen to have. Furthermore, in reality, yonder mountain is either such that someone is climbing on it or not; but the intentional object of my momentary gazing is indeterminate with respect to the property of being climbed on by someone.
The same or similar points can be made about dispositions. If a piece of glass is fragile, then it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck. There cannot be a disposition that is not a disposition to do something, to shatter, or explode, or melt.
Second, the reality of a disposition is independent of its manifestation: a fragile piece of glass is actually fragile whether or not it ever breaks. From the fact that x is disposed to F, one cannot infer that x ever Fs. This parallels a feature of intentionality: from the fact that x is thinking about Fs one cannot infer that there exist Fs that x is thinking about. (If I am thinking about unicorns it does not follow that there exist unicorns I am thinking about; if I want a sloop it doesn't follow that there is a sloop I want; if Ernest is hunting lions it doesn't follow that there are any lions he is hunting.)
Third, although a manifested disposition is a fully determinate state of affairs, this complete determinateness is not present in the disposition qua disposition. The disposition to shatter if suitably struck is not the disposition to shatter into ten pieces if suitably struck, although it is of course the disposition to shatter into some number or other of pieces, the exact number being left indeterminate.
Conclusion and Metaphilosophical Upshot
And so it might be like this: nature in itself is animated by an intrinsic immanent teleology or intentionality below the level of conscious mind, an intrinsic (as opposed to derivative) purposiveness which is present in nature all along, but which becomes conscious only in us. This intrinsic and ubiquitous pre-conscious teleology or purposiveness suffices to ground the cognitive reliability of our faculties, and in such a way as to make it rational for us to trust their deliverances. For on this scheme, there is nothing fluky or accidental about mind. Mind is king and it is there all along. And this without any assistance ab extra from God, and of course without any constructive 'worldmaking' nonsense of the Goodmanian sort. (Allusion to Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking). We also avoid the eliminativist Unsinn of Daniel Dennett the scientistic sophist.
I am limning the metaphysical scheme presented by Thomas Nagel in his Mind and Cosmos, an overview of which you will find at my Substack site.
Nagel's panpsychist immanentism no doubt has it own flaws, as any decent aporetician ought to suspect. But Nagel's proposal does challenge any quick acquiescence in the design argument for God sketched above.
And so I come around once again to my oft-made meta-philosophical claim that in these metaphysical and theological precincts (and not just here) there are no 'knock-down' arguments, no arguments that are rationally compelling (rationally coercive, rationally inescapable, philosophically dispositive, pick your favorite phrase).
Let the dogmatists howl.
The dogs bark, the caravan passes: it ürür, kervan yürür.
Along the Silk Road, headed East.
Assuming that God exists, could the atheist’s denial of God be reasonable?
I say Yes to the title question; Greg Bahnsen, glossing Cornelius Van Til, says No.
Yet it should be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is 'reasonable' to believe in him. (Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, P & R Publishing, 1998, p. 124, fn. 108, emphasis added.)
This is the exact opposite of clear. Atheists believe that there in no God, and thus that the Christian God does not exist, and the philosophically sophisticated among them have argued against the reasonableness of believing that the Christian God exists using both 'logical' and 'probabilistic' arguments. So how could it be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is reasonable to believe that God exists? Bahnsen's claim makes no sense. It makes no sense to say to an atheist who sincerely thinks that he has either proven, or rendered probable, the nonexistence of God that it is nonetheless reasonable for him to believe that God exists even if in fact, and unbeknownst to the atheist, God does exist.
Bahnsen is missing something very important: although truth is absolute, reasonableness is relative. This is why an atheist can find it unreasonable to believe that the Christian God exists even if it is true that the Christian God exists. Let me explain.
I do not need to spend many words on the absoluteness of truth. I've made the case numerous times. Here for example. In any case, whatever presuppositionalists such as Bahnsen think of the details of my arguments, they will agree with my conclusion that truth is absolute. So that is no bone of contention between us.
Reasonableness or rational acceptability is something else again. It is not absolute but can vary from person to person, generation to generation, social class to social class, historical epoch to historical epoch, and in other ways. Let's quickly run through a few familiar examples.
1) Falling bodies. It 'stands to reason' that the heavier an object the faster it falls if dropped from a height. It's 'logical' using this word the way many ordinary folk often do. Wasn't Aristotle, who maintained as much in his Physics, a reasonable man? But we now know that the rate of free fall (in a vacuum) is the same in a given gravitational field regardless of the weight of the object in that field. So what was reasonable to Aristotle and his entire epoch was not reasonable to Galileo and later epochs. Rational acceptability is relative.
2) For the ancients, water was an element. For John Dalton (English chemist, early 19th cent.) it was a compound, HO. For us it is H2O. Has water changed over the centuries? No. Truth is non-relative. What it is reasonable to believe has changed. Rational acceptability is relative.
3) Additivity of velocities. It 'stands to reason' that if I am on a train moving in a straight line with velocity v1 and I throw a ball in the direction of the train's travel with velocity v2, then the velocity of the ball will be v1 + v2. It also 'stands to reason' that this holds across the board no matter the speed of the objects in question. But this belief, although reasonable pre-Einstein, is not reasonable post-Einstein. Once again we see that rational acceptability is relative.
4) Sets and their members. Suppose S is a set and T is one of S's proper subsets. Then every member of T is a member of S, but not every member of S is a member of T. Now suppose someone comes along and asserts that there are sets such that one is a proper subset of another and yet both have the same number of members. Many if not most people would find this assertion a highly unreasonable thing to say. They might exclaim that it makes no bloody sense at all. And yet those of us who have read Georg Cantor find it reasonable to maintain. If N is the set of natural numbers, and E is the set of even numbers, and O is the set of odd numbers, then E and O are disjoint (have no members in common), and yet each is a proper subset of N which the same cardinality (number of members) as N.
5) When I was a very young boy I thought that, since I am right-handed, my right hand and arm had to be weaker than my left hand and arm because I use my right hand and arm more. Was that reasonable for me to believe way back then? Yes! I had a reason to hold the empirically false belief. Of course, my little-boy reasoning was based on a false analogy. If you flex a piece of metal back and forth you weaken it. If you a flex a muscle back and forth you strengthen it. Use it and use it up? No, use it or lose it!
Examples are easily multiplied beyond all necessity. The point, I trust, is clear: while truth is absolute, rational acceptability is relative. What is true may or may not be reasonable, and what is reasonable may or not be true.
What Bahnsen and the boys appear to be assuming is that both truth and reasonableness (rational acceptability) are absolute. Well they are — but only for God, only from God's point of view. God is the IRS, the ideally rational subject. He knows every truth and he knows every truth without possibility of mistake. So for God every truth, being a known truth, is in accordance with divine reason, and everything in accordance with divine reason is true. But we do not occupy the divine point of view. To put it sarcastically, only a 'presupper' does.
But of course neither we nor the presuppositionalists occupy the divine point of view. They only think they do. But that conceit is the whole essence of presuppositionalism, is it not?
Richard Dawkins on Christianity and Islam
Here (HT: Catacomb Joe):
Famed atheist and self-styled intellectual Richard Dawkins shared in a recent interview that he was “horrified” to find that Oxford Street in London had lit up its public signs and displays to celebrate the Muslim fasting period called Ramadan, just days before Easter Sunday. “I have to choose my words carefully: If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time,” Dawkins declared, expressing concern over the thousands of Muslim mosques being constructed across the U.K. He added, “It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”
I hope to say more about this later. Now I have to prepare for a meeting with Brian the Calvinist. First lunch and casual conversation about the events of the day and the latest outrages of the depredatory Left, then intense philosophical conversation about Jesus and the Powers, a stimulating albeit flawed book, and finally two or so hours of battling over the 64 squares.
That's the kind of socializing I like. Otherwise, solitude rules.
Is Belief in God Rationally Required? Response to a Critic
S. L. writes,
I will just tell you three quick things about myself in an effort to get your kind response to my question.1. I am a 70-year-old "evangelical", conservative (in every way), protestant, Christian believer. I put evangelical in quotes because I don't subscribe to all ideas that fit under the rubric of evangelicalism as it is known publicly today. I do believe that the true God has revealed Himself through creation/nature and human self-consciousness, and in the 66 "books" of the Old and New Testaments and supremely through Jesus Christ, sufficiently for man to understand and be accountable for that knowledge.2. I am not an intellectual by any stretch. I aspire to rigorous and valid thinking, but I am not terribly good at it. I do read, think, and investigate ideas in search for truth.3. I found your website probably back in the nineties. I have been reading you ever since, because you help me think better.Here is my question. I have gathered that your studied position is that belief in the existence of a personal, sovereign, and good God, and man's accountability to him, is not a necessary belief. Meaning the evidence for God is insufficient to rationally require anyone to believe in God. That is how I understand your thinking.To me, the evidence of our senses together with common sense makes the existence of this God beyond question. In other words, the way reality is presented to and experienced self-consciously by every man makes the existence of God beyond dispute. By "common sense" I just mean the common human experience and understanding of reality as it presents itself to every man; which cannot be successfully denied because it is obviously true across all of reality.These facts that "prove" this God's existence include common sense notions such as these:
- Nothing in nature comes into being without the intentional action of a personal agent. Natural infinities cannot exist. Nothing comes into existence out of nothing.
- In the natural world life cannot come from non-life. personality can only come from Personality.
- The existence of personal, self-conscious beings requires a supernatural, self-conscious, personal, powerful being to account for that existence.
- Goodness, truth, beauty, order are fundamental facts of reality, seen in the observation that their opposites (evil, error, ugly, chaos) only exist as the negation of them, not as fundamental facts of their own.
- Since our existence had a beginning and that beginning had to find its source in this God (nothing else explains that existence), that means all of this creation has meaning and purpose. Again, a God that is good, true, beautiful, powerful, sovereign, and orderly would to create something for no good and meaningful purpose. Additionally, the kind of God the Creator must be, He would communicate with this creation He made in a way that was available, understandable, and universally reliable. Because they cannot know about their Creator unless He reveals Himself.
These above undeniable realities along with others, require the existence of a good, true, beautiful, orderly, sovereign, and powerful God. Additionally, they render any denial of this God's existence by a rational person as invalid and carrying culpability with it. The existence of this God is just part and parcel the reality that presents itself to every self-conscious, rational being, simply by his existing in this world. He can use reason to understand it, to explain it, to analyze it, and even to defend the existence of this God. But believe it He must, or he denies all reality.
You understand my position, S. L. Using your words, but adding to them, I would put it like this: The evidence for God available to us in this life is insufficient rationally to require that God exists. Presumably angels and demons have sufficient evidence rationally to require belief that God exists, if they and he exist, and presumably this holds for us as well if we survive bodily death as conscious persons, and God exists. The way I usually put it, however, is that here below there are rationally acceptable arguments both for and against the existence of God, but no rationally compelling arguments either way.
A rationally compelling argument is one that is rationally coercive or philosophically dispositive. It is an argument such that the consumer of the argument must accept the conclusion on pain of being positively irrational should he not accept it. It is an argument that settles the matter once and for all beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt. Thus my position entails that one cannot prove or demonstrate the existence of God. Equally, however, one cannot prove or demonstrate the nonexistence of God. By my lights, then, theism and atheism are both reasonable. The ubiquity and depth of both natural and moral evil is the central consideration in support of the reasonableness of atheism.
For you, however, the existence of God is "beyond question" and "beyond dispute," and not just for you. You mean by these phrases that the existence of God cannot be reasonably or rationally questioned or disputed by anyone. You think that it is positively unreasonable to either doubt or deny the existence of God. Our disagreement on this point thus runs deep: you believe the exact opposite of what I believe. We don't disagree about the existence of God — we are both theists — and I take it that we both mean (roughly) the same thing by 'God' which is to say that our concepts of God, which must never be confused with God, are basically the same. (To the extent that our concepts differ, this discussion would take on added complexity. For the sake of this discussion, and to keep things simple, I will assume that you and I share the very same concept of God.)
In support of your position you invoke "the evidence of the senses" and "common sense." If by the senses you mean the five outer senses, they do not reveal the existence of God, and this for the simple reason that God is neither a material thing nor the totality of material things, the physical universe. God is nothing like Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot, or Edward Abbey's angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon. You are old enough to remember cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's 1961 space flight and his report to his handlers that he saw no God up there. I was eleven at the time and laughed at the stupidity of the remark. (In all charity to the cosmonaut, however, he was probably just spouting what he thought the commies at ground control wanted to hear.) And we will also agree that God, who is not a material thing, is also is not identical to the totality of material things, the physical universe.
As for inner sense, God is not evident to a person when he introspects his mental states. God is neither an object of sensible extrospection nor of sensible introspection.
Of course, there is what Calvin calls the sensus divinitatus, the sense of the divine, which is a type of inner spiritual awareness which purports to be of, or about, a being distinct from the awareness, namely, God. But there is also the sensus absurditatis, the sense of the absurd, which seems to reveal that the totality of what exists, the physical universe, exists without reason, cause, or purpose. It seems to reveal that the universe is just there as a factum brutum and is, in this sense, ab-surd. Clearly, these two senses cannot both be revelatory of the real. They might both be false, but they cannot both be true. One and only one of them can be veridical. Which one? Some people have both senses (at different times). How would such a person know which was veridical and which wasn't? The point here is that there is nothing internal to the SD or the SA experience that guarantees either the existence of God or the absurdity of what exists. (If existence is absurd, then of course God as we are using the term, does not exist.)
Your invocation of "common sense" does not help. The common sense of a majority of Westerners at the present time is that there is no God, and that the supposed sense of the divine is delusional. Galen Strawson is representative in this regard. In any case, and apart from any sociological considerations, "common sense" is no sure guide to truth as could be shown by many examples since it varies with time, place, social class, race, age, sex, level of social suggestibility, level of education, and so on. Additivity of velocities is a well-known example from physics.
For you and I it is just common sense that the toleration of criminal behavior leads to more criminal behavior, and we are surely right about this; but we are not right because this reasonable view is common: it is not common among our political enemies, and so it is not common to all of us. Imagine if a majority of Americans came to believe that the sex of a neonate is not biologically determined but is socially assignable at birth, or that a majority came to believe that eliminating penalties for shoplifting would lead to less shoplifting. "Common sense," despite its commonality, would then obviously not be a guide to truth. Invocation of "common sense," therefore, cuts no ice in an intellectually serious discussion.
Let's now look at your "common sense notions" that supposedly prove the existence of God.
Ad (1). You say that nothing comes into existence without the intentional action of a personal agent. But this is plainly not the case. Suppose a storm dislodges some rocks that roll down a hillside and form a neat pile by a trail. The rock pile comes into existence, but no personal agent is involved, in the sense in which a personal agent would have been involved had a hiker stacked the rocks into a cairn so as to mark the direction of the trail. You also say, rather more plausibly, that nothing comes into existence out of nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit. But that proposition is not consistent with the theism you embrace. For you presumably believe that creatures (created entities) came into existence out of nothing. For you believe in divine creatio ex nihilo: God created the world of creatures out of nothing. Not out of a pre-existent stuff, nor out of mere possibles, nor ex Deo, out of God, but out of nothing. Coming into existence ex nihilo is not easy to understand either with or without a divine efficient cause. The point I am making is that Ex nihilo nihil fit is a highly problematic principle which is reasonably doubted, and that bringing God into the picture does nothing to make it less problematic.
What you want to say, of course, is that the universe did not come into existence out of nothing by itself: it had to have had a cause of its coming to exist at some past time if it is finite in the past direction, and, if it it did not, if it always existed, it still needs a cause of its existing at all ('in the first place') given that it contingently exists, and thus might not have existed. And this Cause must be transcendent of the universe and be of a personal nature.
Well, suppose that, contrary to contemporary cosmology, the universe always existed. How could you prove that it is contingent in the existential sense of being dependent for its existence on something external to it, and not merely contingent in the merely modal sense of being possibly nonexistent? How could you prove (not merely argue for, but demonstrate or establish as objectively certain) that the existence of the universe is not a brute fact, where a brute fact is a fact that is modally contingent but without cause, reason, or explanation?
Ad (2). You say, ". . . life cannot come from non-life; personality can only come from Personality." Note first that life and personality are not the same since not every living thing is a person. Cancer cells are alive but they are not persons; otherwise a man suffering from cancer has multiple-personality disorder. I grant you, though, that it is very difficult to understand, and perhaps impossible for us to understand given our present cognitive architecture, how the biotic could emerge from a abiotic. But if life did arise from non-life, if that arisal is actual, then it is possible, and if possible then possible whether or not a finite intellect (an ectypal intellect in Kant's terms) can understand how it is possible. That is to say: my inability to understand how it is possible does not show that it non-actual. On the other hand, my inability to understand how the biotic could emerge from the abiotic prevents me from dogmatically asserting that the emergence is actual, and gives me a good reason, though not a compelling or 'knock-down' reason, to believe that it does not occur.
Do you see what I am doing here? I am questioning both a dogmatic assertion and a dogmatic counter-assertion. I am questioning the dogmatic assertion that the biotic just had to arise naturally (without any intervention ab extra) from the abiotic, the assertion that, in Daniel Dennett's phrase, a "gradualist bridge" can be built from the first to the second. I am also questioning the dogmatic assertion that there just had to be divine intervention to bring life out of mere matter. What I am saying is that both the assertion and the counter-assertion are reasonably believed. The are both rationally acceptable, but neither is rationally mandatory.
Ad (3). Your third "common sense notion" is that the existence of finite persons logically requires the existence of a supernatural person. How do you know that? You believe it, and you have reason to believe it, and you are probably better off believing it than not believing it, but you do not know it. The same considerations that I brought to bear on the preceding point I bring to bear here.
Ad (4). I myself have always believed something like your (4). Good and evil, for example, are not on an ontological par as equally real but mutually opposing principles: Good (goodness) is primary whereas evil exists only as a negation of the good, as you say, or as privatio boni, a privation of the good as Aquinas says. This is a very large topic, but unless one is an unreconstructed dogmatist one should appreciate the difficulty of reducing evil to privatio boni as Augustine and Aquinas do.
The Problem of Pain
How are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils as opposed to moral evils that come into the world via a misuse of free will. Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the felt pain is something all-too-positive. It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations.
The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a felt pain is a positively evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good. And so we cannot dismiss evil as privatio boni.
The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness. Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, clinical depression, etc.
Ad (5): Here you are merely telling us what you believe. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. But you have done nothing to show that your beliefs are rationally required.
Your beliefs are, however, rationally acceptable. And that is really all you need! Why the hankering for an objective certainty unattainable here below? So my advice to you is: go on believing what you believe. You are within your epistemic rights in so doing. And live your beliefs.
I suspect you will agree with me that orthopraxy trumps orthodoxy. All the best to you.
Theistic Belief and What Inclines Me to It
Substack post du jour.
Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable?
On Romans 1: 18-20.
Substack latest.
The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God: A First Response to Flood
I thank Anthony G. Flood for his The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God Revisited: Toward a Response to Bill Vallicella. Herewith, a first installment by way of rejoinder. Convergence upon agreement is not to be expected, but clarification of differences is an attainable goal. In any case, philosophy is a joy to its true acolytes, and in dark times a great consolation as well. Now let's get to work.
Tony introduces the theme skillfully:
Preamble: if the God of the Bible, who created human beings in his image to know and love him and to know, value, and rule the rest of creation under him (hereafter, “God”), exists, then we know one way that the conditions of intelligible predication (IP) can be met. The preceding sentence includes key aspects of the Christian worldview (CW)—the Theos-anthropos-kosmos relationship—expressed on the pages of the Bible.
If no alternative explanation for IP is possible, then Biblical theism is necessarily true (which is what the CW predicts).
[. . .]
If no worldview other than the Christian (CW) can account for IP, if (as I now hold) an alternative to the CW when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived, then to hold out for an alternative, as though doing so were an expression of rational exigency (“demandingness”)—that to reserve judgment somehow accords with epistemic duty—models only dogmatic stubbornness, not tolerant liberality.
Given the actual fact of intelligible predication, which is not in dispute, and assuming, as we must, the modal axiom ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it follows that intelligible predication (IP) is possible. Necessarily, whatever is actual is possible. So we ask the transcendental question: under what conditions is IP possible? What condition or conditions would have to obtain for it to be possible that there be actual cases of intelligible predication? An example of an intelligible predication is any true or false statement, such as 'The Moon is presently uninhabited' which happens to be true, or its negation which happens to be false.
Now I agree with Flood that if the God of the Christian Bible (hereafter 'God') exists, then the condition or conditions of the possibility of IP are satisfied. The existence of God suffices for the possibility of intelligible predication. But here we need to remind ourselves of a couple or three simple points of logic.
The first is that if X is sufficient for Y, it does not follow that X is necessary for Y. So if the existence of God is not only a sufficient but also a necessary condition of IP, this will require further argumentation. The second point is that to assert a conditional is not to assert either its antecedent/protasis or its consequent/apodosis. To assert or affirm a conditional is to assert or affirm a connection between antecedent and consequent, the nature of the connection depending on the type of conditional it is, whether logical or nomological or whatever. The third point is that some conditionals are true despite having a false antecedent and a false consequent.
And although it is not self-evident, I also agree with Flood that there is and must be some condition or set of conditions that make IP possible. Let 'TC' stand for this transcendental condition or set of conditions. We agree then that the TC necessarily exists.
We seem to have found some common — dare I say 'neutral'? — ground: (a) there are actual cases of IP; (b) given that they are actual, they are possible; (c) it is legitimate to launch a regressive (transcendental) inquiry into the condition or conditions of the possibility of these actual cases; (d) there must be such a transcendental condition; (e) the existence of God suffices for the possibility of IP.
This leaves us with the question whether the God of the Christian Bible = TC. Is God's existence not only sufficient but also both necessary for the possibility of IP? Flood will answer with alacrity in the affirmative: yes, God and God alone is (numerically) identical to the ultimate transcendental condition of all intelligible predication. This of course implies that it is not possible that anything distinct from God be the TC. God necessarily exists, and is necessarily identical to the ultimate transcendental condition of intelligible predication.
But wait, there's more! Flood tells us that "an alternative to the CW [the Christian worldview] when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived." So it is not just impossible that anything other than God be identical to the TC; this is inconceivable as well.
Here is one of the places where Flood blunders: he confuses the epistemic modality inconceivability with the ontic modality impossibility. Conceivability and inconceivability are tied to the thinking powers of such finite and limited intellects as ours. By contrast, what is possible and impossible in reality are independent of what we frail reeds are able to think and unable to think. I will have more to say about this in subsequent posts since it appears to be a trademark mistake of presuppositionalists to conflate epistemic and ontic modality.
In any case, it is very easy to conceive of alternatives to Flood's candidate for TC status. Here is a partial catalog of candidates in which (B), (C), and (D) are alternatives to Flood's candidate, (A).
A. Intelligible predication presupposes the truth of the Christian worldview (Van Til & Co.) as the transcendental condition of IP's very possibility.
B. Intelligible predication presupposes the existence of God, but not the Christian worldview as the Calvinist Van Til and his followers calvinistically understand it, the essential commitments of which include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity, Incarnation, etc. as well as the specifically Calvinist TULIP doctrines. Some who call themselves Christians are unitarians and deniers of the divinity of Christ. Our friend Dale Tuggy is such a one. And those the presuppositionalists refer to as 'Romanists' who do accept Trinity and Incarnation don't accept the specifically Calvinist add-ons.
C. Intelligible predication presupposes the truth of Kant's transcendental idealism according to which "The understanding is the law-giver of nature," and space and time are a priori forms of our sensibility. For Kant the ultimate transcendental condition of the objective validity of every judgment, and thus of every intelligible predication, is located in the transcendental unity of apperception which is assuredly not God, whatever exactly it is.
D. Intelligible predication presupposes, not the God of the Christian Bible, but an immanent order and teleology in nature along the lines of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012). On Nagel's view, the rational order of nature is self-explanatory, a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos. Nagel views the intelligibility of the world as "itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are." (17). Now part of the way things are is that they are understandable by us. Given that the way things are is intelligible, it follows that the intelligibility of the world is self-explanatory or self-grounding. "The intelligibility of the world is no accident." (17) But neither is it due to theistic intervention or imposition. "Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings." (17) See my overview of Nagel's book for details.
I am not endorsing any of the above-listed alternatives to (A). They all have their problems as does (A). My point is that they are conceivable alternatives to (A). This being the case, Flood's asseveration, "an alternative to the CW [the Christian worldview] when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived" is false.
It is quite clear that what Van Til & Co. want is a rationally compelling, 'knock-down,' argument for the existence of the God of the Christian Bible calvininstically interpreted. But they know (deep down even as they suppress the knowledge) that no circular argument is probative. So they essay the above transcendental argument.
What I have shown, however, is that the transcendental argument is not probative. It fails to establish that the God of the Christian Bible is both sufficient and necessary for the possibility of intelligible predication. At most, it renders rationally acceptable the conclusion that the God of the Christian Bible exists.
I am not denying that the God of the Christian Bible exists. Nor am I denying that if said God exists, then he flawlessly executes all the transcendental functions that need executing. How could he fail to? In particular, how could he fail to be the ultimate ungrounded transcendental-ontological ground of intelligible predication? My point is that the presuppositionalists have not proven, i.e., established with objective certainty, that God alone could play the transcendental role.
The Presuppositionalist Challenge to My Position
The presuppositionalism of Cornelius van Til, Greg L. Bahnsen, John M. Frame and others sets me a challenge given some long-held views of mine. I will here explain one of these views and then explain why it is incompatible with presuppositionalism. After that, I will begin to explain my reasons for rejecting presuppositionalism. This third task will require additional posts.
I have maintained that both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable by beings like us in our present state. Theism is the view that there is a supreme transcendent being of a personal nature who created ex nihilo everything other than himself. Atheism, then, is the view that there is no such being. Because the competing views thus defined are logical contradictories, they cannot both be true and they cannot both be false. Not everyone will accept the above definitions of 'theism' and 'atheism,' but if I am not mistaken presuppositionalists do accept them.
So on my accounting theism and atheism are both rationally acceptable. To appreciate my thesis you must understand that truth and rational acceptability are not the same. Some propositions are true but not rationally acceptable. It is also easily shown that some propositions are rationally acceptable but not true. This is because truth is absolute whereas rational acceptability is relative to various indices. Rational acceptability can vary with time and place and other factors; truth cannot. That there are four elements, air, earth, fire, and water was rationally acceptable to the ancient Greeks. It is not rationally acceptable to us. If one were to identify the true with the rationally acceptable, one would have to say that the number and nature of the elements has changed over time.
To claim that both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable is to claim that good arguments can be given for both. A good argument, as I use 'good argument,' is one that has plausible premises and commits no formal or informal fallacy. A good argument, then, is not the same as a rationally compelling or rationally coercive argument. Every rationally compelling argument is of course good, but not every good argument is rationally compelling. A well-reasoned case for a proposition needn't be a rationally compelling case. If it is well-reasoned, then I call it 'good.' Here are the details. (The reader may want to skip the next section (in Georgia 12-pt) the better to catch the drift of this entry, and then come back to it.)
Excursus
Philosophers make reasoned cases for all manner of propositions, but their colleagues typically do not find these arguments to be compelling. But what do I mean by 'compelling'? I say that a (rationally) compelling case or argument is one that forces the 'consumer' of the argument to accept the argument's conclusion on pain of being irrational should he not accept it. I will assume that the 'consumer' is intelligent, sincere, open to having his mind changed, and well-versed in the subject matter of the argument. Now it may be that there are a few arguments that are rationally compelling in this sense. But there are no rationally compelling arguments available to us here below (in our present state) for or against the existence of God. Or so I claim. I do not claim to have a rationally compelling argument for this meta-philosophical claim. I claim merely that There are no rationally compelling arguments for or against the existence of God is rationally acceptable. It follows that I will not tax you with irrationality if you reject my meta-philosophical claim. I tolerate your dissent: I allow that you may reasonably disagree with me about my meta-claim.
We need to bear in mind that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument of this form as proving that p. Every circular argument of the above form is valid, and some are sound; but none are probative. By that I mean that no such argument constitutes a proof. That ought to be perfectly obvious. Equally obvious is that one cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it. I trust that the reader understands the standard definitions of 'valid' and 'sound.' Proofs are demonstrative; they establish their conclusions with objective certainty. There is of course non-demonstrative reasoning, inductive and abductive. But no inductive argument, no matter how strong, amounts to a proof. This is a point I share with Greg L. Bahnsen: "Inductive arguments are always inconclusive . . . ." (Presuppositional Apologetics, American Vision, 2021, p. 302) Since every argument has a conclusion, what does it mean to say that an argument is inconclusive? It means that the argument does not amount to a proof of its conclusion.
Now given that no argument can prove its own premises, what reason could one give for accepting the premises of a given argument? Suppose argument A has P1 and P2 as premises and that its conclusion C follows logically from the premises. Why accept P1 and P2? One could adduce further arguments B and C for P1 and P2 respectively. But then the problem arises all over again. For arguments B and C themselves have premises. If P3 is a premise of B, what reason could one give for the acceptance of P3? One could adduce argument D. But D too has premises, and if you think this through you soon realize that you have brought down upon your head an infinite regress which is vicious. The regress is vicious because the task of justifying by argument all the premises involved cannot be completed.
To avoid argumentative regress we need premises that are self-justifying in the sense that they are justified, but not justified by any proposition external to themselves. Such propositions could be said to be, not just evident, but self-evident. But what is self-evident to one person is often not self-evident to another. This plain fact forces a distinction between subjective and objective self-evidence. Clearly, subjective self-evidence is not good enough if our concern is with things external to consciousness such as God as opposed to what Roderick Chisholm calls self-presenting states such as the state I am in when I feel pain. In the case of felt pain, subjective and objective self-evidence coalesce. Felt pain is an internal state: to feel pain is to be in pain. Felt or phenomenal pains are such that their esse (their to be) is identical to their percipi (their to be perceived) But with respect to propositions that are about external things, things that exist independently of finite consciousness, if it merely seems to subject S that p is self-evident, that does not suffice to establish that p is objectively self-evident. Trouble is, when someone announces that such-and-such is objectively self-evident that too is a claim about how it seems to that person, so that it is not clear that what is being claimed as objectively self-evident is not in the end itself merely subjectively self-evident.
Example. Suppose an argument for the existence of God employs the premise, 'Every event has a cause.' Is this premise objectively self-evident? No. Why can't there be an uncaused event? "Uncaused event,' unlike 'uncaused effect,' is not a contradictio in adiecto. So how does one know that that premise is true? It is a plausible premise, no doubt, but plausibility is not the same as truth. (There are implausible truths, and false plausibilities. Exercise for the reader: give examples.) And if you do not know (with objective certainty) that the premises of your argument are true, then your argument, even if logically impeccable in every other way, does not amount to a proof, strictly speaking. A proof of a proposition is a rationally compelling argument for it.
My point is that there are hardly any rationally compelling arguments for substantive theses about matters external to consciousness. But one can make reasoned cases for such theses. Therefore, a reasoned case is not the same as a compelling argument. Again, I do not claim to have a rationally compelling argument for the bolded thesis. I claim merely that the thesis is rationally acceptable. The thesis is both substantive and self-applicable; it implies with respect to itself that is not provable, strictly speaking, or compellingly arguable. I accept that consequence as I must.
Because people are naturally dogmatic and crave doxastic security, security in their beliefs, they are unwilling to accept my meta-philosophical thesis that there are hardly any compelling arguments for substantive theses about such matters external to our consciousness as the existence of God. They want to believe that their pet beliefs are compellingly provable and that people who do not accept their 'proofs' are either irrational or morally defective. Their tendency is to accept as probative any old argument for the conclusions they antecedently accept, no matter how shoddy the argument, and to reject as non-probative arguments that issue in conclusions they do not accept. I am not saying that all give in to this tendency in its crude form, but the tendency is there and is operative.
One way to refute what I am saying would be by providing a rationally compelling argument for the existence of God, or a rationally compelling argument for the nonexistence of God. You won't be able to do it. Or so I claim. But I am open to challenge. If you think you have a rationally compelling/coercive argument for or against the existence of God, send it to me.
The reader might suspect that it is the fact of disagreement among highly competent practitioners that leads me to hold, or at least plays an important role in leading me to hold, that on the theism-atheism issue (and on many others) both sides are rationally acceptable, but neither is provable, demonstrable, compellingly arguable. If that is what the reader suspects, then he is on the right track. My position is close to the one articulated in Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (Hackett, 1981, 7th edition; originally published in 1907):
. . . it will be easily seen that the absence of such disagreement must remain an indispensable negative condition of the [objective] certainty of our beliefs. For if I find any of my judgments, intuitive or inferential, in direct conflict with the judgment of some other mind, there must some error somewhere: and if I have no more reason to suspect error in the other mind than in my own, reflective comparison between the two judgments necessarily reduces me temporarily to a state of neutrality. (342, emphasis added)
End of Excursus: Back to the Main Line
Neutrality is the key word here. A stock claim of presuppositionalists is that there is no neutrality with respect to the existence or nonexistence of God, which for them is the God of the (Christian) Bible. That is to say: there is no neutral point of view from which to evaluate impartially the arguments for and against the existence of God and thereby objectively adjudicate the dispute between theists and atheists. There is and can be no neutrality or impartiality with respect to God because the existence of God is taken by them to be the ultimate presupposition of all reasoning such that, were God not to exist, neither would the possibility of correct or incorrect reasoning. No God? Then no correct or incorrect reasoning. According to John M. Frame,
. . . our [apologetic] argument should be transcendental. That is, it should present the biblical God, not merely as the conclusion to an argument, but as one who makes argument possible. We should present him as the source of all meaningful communication, since he is the author of all order, truth, beauty, goodness, logical validity, and empirical fact. (Five Views of Apologetics, Zondervan 2000, p. 220)
So if God were not to exist, there would be no meaning, truth, or logical validity. And if that were the case, then atheism could not count as rationally acceptable as defined above. Atheism is rationally acceptable, i.e., reasonable, only if arguments can be adduced in support of it. But if "God makes argument possible," then any argument the atheist gives would presuppose the existence of the very entity against which he is arguing. If "God makes argument possible," then atheism cannot be rationally acceptable, but is instead ruled out ab initio by the ultimate presupposition of all reason and argument, namely, the existence of God. By "God makes argument possible" I take Frame to mean that the existence of God is a necessary condition of the possibility of both correct and incorrect reasoning about any topic including God. Following Kant, such a necessary condition of possibility is called a transcendental condition.
The reader should pause for a moment to appreciate just how powerful this presuppositional strategy is assuming it stands up to scrutiny. If it so stands, then to deny the existence of God would be like denying the existence of truths. Anyone who denies that there are truths presupposes that there is at least one truth, namely, the truth that there are no truths. There is thus a clear sense in which the existence of truths is rationally undeniable. Surely, there is no neutral point of view from which to evaluate impartially the arguments for and against the existence of truths and thereby objectively adjudicate the dispute between those who assert that there are truths and those who assert that there are no truths. That there are no truths is not rationally acceptable.
Similarly, presuppositionalists think that there is a clear sense in which God is rationally undeniable: anyone who denies the existence of God, presupposes the existence of God. This is a powerful argument strategy if it works, and vastly superior to the fallacy — the 'logical howler' — of thinking that one can prove a proposition by simply presupposing it, which is what some presuppositionalists sometimes do or at least seem to do. It is perfectly plain that a circular argument for God is probatively worthless. But a transcendental argument for God is not a circular argument. Might it do the trick?
Here then is the precise place where my long-held view that there are rationally acceptable arguments on both sides of the God question collides with presuppositionalism. If I am right, then the presuppositionalists are wrong, and if they are right, then I am wrong. This is why my intellectual honesty requires me to confront the presuppositionalist challenge.
The issue is this: Is the God of the (Christian) Bible the ultimate transcendental condition of meaning, truth, and logical validity? That there is such a transcendental condition I do not deny. What I question is whether the God of the (Christian) Bible is this transcendental condition. Thus I do not deny that we must presuppose the existence of truth in all of our intellectual activities. To seek the truth is to presuppose that there are truths to be discovered. If someone were to assert that there are no truths, that person would be asserting it to be true that there are no truths, thereby presupposing what he is denying, namely, that there are truths. We, therefore, cannot fail to presuppose the existence of truths when we prosecute our intellectual activities which include forming concepts, making judgments, and drawing inferences.
But this is a far cry from presupposing the existence of the biblical God. There is clearly a logical gap between
1) We finite cognizers in pursuit of our cognitional goals must presuppose the existence of truths
and
2) We finite cognizers in pursuit of our cognitional goals must presuppose the existence of the biblical God.
It is easy to understand how (1) could be true without (2) being true. I will mention two ways. It might be that the truths that we must presuppose, such as the necessary truths of logic, have a 'platonic' status: they just exist as abstract or ideal objects whether or not the biblical (Christian) God exists. These necessarily true propositions necessarily exist: they don't just happen to exist. Since they are non-contingent, one cannot sensibly ask why they exist, any more than one can sensibly exist why a necessarily existent God exists.
The second way is the one suggested by Martin Heidegger in the notorious section 44 of Sein und Zeit (1927), Dasein, Disclosedness, and Truth. Roughly, the truth we must presuppose arrives on the scene with us and leaves the scene with us. I do not endorse this second way and will say no more about it here.
On the face of it, then, (1) can be true without (2) being true. But Frame seems to think that they stand and fall together. He seems to think that a transcendental presupposition in a broadly Kantian sense of the term could be identical to a transcendent metaphysical entity such as the biblical God.
Thinking this, however, Frame conflates two different senses of 'transcendental.' In one sense, 'transcendental' means transcendent. The God of the Bible is transcendent in the sense that he is other than the created realm and in no way dependent on it for his own existence. The biblical God exists in himself and from himself, a se. In a second sense, 'transcendental' has the roughly Kantian sense invoked by Frame when he describes God as "the one who makes argument possible." By conflating the two senses of 'transcendental,' Frame conflates (1) and (2).
Frame's conflation of the two senses occurs in the paragraph immediately following the one I quoted above:
We can reach this transcendental conclusion by many kinds of specific arguments, including many of the traditional ones. The traditional cosmological argument, for example, argues that God must exist as the First Cause of all the causes in the world. That conclusion is biblical and true, and if it can be drawn from true premises and valid logic, it may contribute to the goal of a transcendental conclusion. Certainly if God is the author of all meaning, he is the author of causality. And if God is the author of causality, the cause of all causes, he is the cause of all meaning. Therefore, the causal argument yields a transcendental conclusion. (pp. 220-221)
This is by no means obvious. What the causal argument purports to yield is a transcendent conclusion. If successful, what it proves is the existence of a transcendent metaphysical entity, a concrete entity, that exists whether or not finite cognizers exist. The truth of (1), however, does not require that the ultimate transcendental presupposition be concrete. For on the broadly 'platonic' approach, the transcendental conditions are of an abstract or ideal nature. (And if the early Heidegger is right, the truth of (1) does not require that the ultimate transcendental presupposition exist whether or not finite cognizers exist. But we leave Heidegger aside for now.)
By 'concrete,' I mean causally active or passive or both. Thus Socrates is concrete because he both acts and he can be acted upon. Leaving aside the question whether God can be acted upon, the biblical God surely acts by causing creatures to exist. So God too counts as a concrete entity by the definition. And this despite his being outside both space and time. What makes God concrete is his capacity for the exercise of causal power. Whatever is neither casually active nor causally passive is abstract. Abstract entities lack the capacity for the exercise of causal power.
Now the biblical God is obviously no abstract object. He is after all causa prima, the first or primary cause. So if the causal argument manages to establish his existence, what it manages to establish is the existence of a metaphysical concretum. Could this transcendent concretum be identical to the transcendental presupposition mentioned in (1) above? Frame and Co. will presumably say, Why not?
Here is an important difference. The transcendental presupposition of truth (and whatever else truth can be shown to presuppose such as truth-bearers, meaning, etc.) is objectively certain. The presupposition of truth is rationally undeniable such that to deny the existence of truth is rationally unacceptable. But that is not the case with respect to the causal argument and the rest of the standard theistic arguments including the quinque viae of Aquinas. These arguments are reasonably rejected and have been rejected by distinguished Christian theologians. Therefore, Frame is not justified in his conflation of (1) and (2). Equivalently, he is not justified in thinking that the standard theistic arguments constitute specifically transcendental arguments for the existence of God.
There is a lot more to be said, but this entry is already too long. To sum up the argument in the preceding paragraph: (a) The transcendental argument to truth is conclusive; it is rationally compelling; (b) none of the standard theistic arguments are conclusive, which implies none of them are rationally compelling; therefore, (c) pace Frame & Co. one cannot enlist the causal argument or any of the standard arguments to do the transcendental job; therefore, Frame's presuppositionalism, at least, does not prove the existence of God.