Category: Atheism and Theism

On Suspending Judgment Regarding the Big Questions

Does God exist? You can reasonably argue it both ways. The same goes for such other ‘big questions’ as whether there is personal survival of bodily death.  Now on many other issues where the arguments and evidential considerations  pro et contra are equally good and cancel out, it is reasonable to suspend judgment and unreasonable not to.  But not with respect to the big or ultimate questions. Or so I shall argue.   But first some terminological regimentation.

There are four different types of attitude one can take with respect to a proposition:  Accept, Reject, Suspend, Bracket.

To accept a proposition is to affirm it.  To reject a proposition is to deny it. One cannot on pain of embracing a contradiction accept and reject one and the same proposition.   LNC rules the discursive plane.

To suspend a proposition is to take no stance with respect to its truth or falsity, its ‘truth-value’ as the philosophers say.  It is neither to affirm it nor to deny it. One suspends judgment as to its truth-value. There is no doxastic commitment either by way of belief or disbelief.

What I am calling ‘bracketing’ is something different still. Consider the Trinitarian dogma,  “There is one God in three divine persons.”  Some will affirm, some deny, others suspend the proposition they take it to express; there is, however, a fourth possibility.

Here is a little speech someone might give.

“The Trinitarian sentence you uttered makes no sense; it is unintelligible, if not in itself then at least for me.  It strikes me as self-contradictory and thus expresses no definite thought or proposition. I cannot accept or reject since I do not know what I would be accepting or rejecting. For the same reason I cannot suspend: with respect to what proposition would I be suspending judgment?”

The fourth stance, bracketing, is a sort of suspension, but not with respect to truth-value but with respect to propositional sense. The sense of a declarative sentence (a sentence in the indicative mood) is the proposition it is used to express. And so the bracketing stance or attitude amounts to a suspension of commitment to there being a proposition the sentence expresses.

“I cannot evaluate a thought unless there is a thought to evaluate, and the Trinitarian sentence does not seem to me to express a thought.  The sentence, being self-contradictory, lacks a determinate propositional sense and therefore is unintelligible to me.”

That is surely a stance one can, and some do, take. Note that I mentioned the Trinity doctrine only as an example in order to explain bracketing.  The topic is not the Trinity. So please no comments on the coherence or incoherence of that doctrine.

With the above as background, I advance to my thesis.

THESIS: With respect to many propositions, both the theoretically rational  and the practically rational course is to suspend judgment; with respect to some propositions, however, it would be practically irrational to suspend judgment. It would be imprudent or pragmatically ill-advised. Among the latter: there is a God; the soul is immortal; we will be judged, rewarded and punished in the hereafter for some of what we have done and left undone here below. (I am presupposing a distinction between theoretical and practical (pragmatic, prudential) rationality.)

My point is that for beings  of our constitution it would be practically irrational and highly imprudent to suspend judgment on the questions of God and personal immortality. For if one did so one would not be likely to live here and now in such a way as to assure a positive post-mortem outcome.  After all, we do not know that the soul is immortal nor do we know that it is not. The questions are theoretically undecidable.

But man does not live by theory alone. We are not mere transcendental spectators but interested free agents, interested in the sense of embedded in real being. (inter esse) We have interests in this life and beyond it: we are concerned with our ultimate felicity, well-being, and continuance in being.

If we had no interests beyond this life, if we were pure spectators, we should suspend judgment on the ultimate questions and go back to the everyday and its proximate concerns.    That would be the reasonable thing to do — if we were pure spectators and the big questions were of merely theoretical interest.   Whether God and the soul are real or unreal would then be on a par with  whether the number of electrons in the universe is odd or even.  Since the latter question is theoretically undecidable, it would be practically irrational to waste any time on it.

This is essentially the attitude of the worldling when it comes to God and soul and the like. “Who knows?” “People say different things.” “The supposedly wisest among us have contradicted one another since time immemorial.” “Why waste time on this philosophy nonsense when you could be living to human scale by pursuing a profession useful to others, making money, buying a house, founding a family?” Remain true to the earth; make friends with the finite; don’t hanker after a hinter world; this world is all there is.

My thesis, however, is that while is is both theoretically and practically rational to suspend judgment on many questions, this does not hold for those  questions pertaining to our ultimate felicity and well-being. My thesis presupposes the real possibility of ultimate felicity and well-being.  And so, to appreciate my thesis you cannot have the mentality of a worldling. You have to have had the experience of the ultimate nullity  of the proximate concerns I mentioned. You must have the sense that this world and this life are ‘vanishing quantities.’ You have to have been struck and troubled by the transience of life and the impermanence of things. You have to take that troubling impermanence as an indicator of the relative (not absolute) unreality of this life.  You have to possess the Platonic sensibility.

Now I can’t argue you into that sensibility any more than you can argue me out of it. Argument comes too late. Or rather it comes too soon. What I mean is that argument and counter-argument disport upon the discursive plane which is foreground to the ultimate background, the Unseen Order.  What breaks the standoff for some of us is a glimpse into the  Transdiscursive, a peek behind the veil.  But only some have had the Glimpse. It is  a divine gift, a gratuitous granting ab extra.  Others will say that the Glimpse experience has zero noetic quality; it is something on the order of a Spinozistic  experientia vaga, or a random neuronal swerve, a ‘brain fart.’  There is no resolution to this dispute over noetic quality on the plane of theoretical reason. You will have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.

In sum:

You are violating no canon of theoretical or practical rationality if you decide to live as if God and the soul are real.  And since the questions are theoretically undecidable, you will decide either by an explicit act of will or willy-nilly (nolens volens) how you will live. The will comes into it. Why do I say you will decide? Because if you don’t decide, that non-decision amounts practically to a decision for the other side of the question.

The atheist and the mortalist who abstain from taking a stand  cannot help but take a stand, practically, though not theoretically, for atheism and mortalism.

Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

I return an affirmative answer in my latest Substack entry. Opening two paragraphs:

If God creates ex nihilo, and everything concrete other than God is created by God, and God is a pure spirit, then one type of metaphysical realism can be excluded at the outset. This type of realism asserts that there are radically transcendent uncreated concrete things other than God. ‘Radically transcendent’ means ‘transcendent of any mind, finite or infinite.’ On this view, radically transcendent items exist and have most of their properties independently of any mind, including the divine mind. Call this realism-1. We could also call it extreme metaphysical realism.

No classical theist could be a realist-1. For on classical theism, everything other than God is created by God, created out of nothing, mind you, and not out of Avicennian mere possibles or any cognate sort of item. God creates out of nothing, not out of possibles. (’Out of nothing’ is a privative expression that means ‘not out of something.’ It does not mean ‘out of something called nothing.’) We also note that on classical theism God is not merely an originating cause of things other than himself, but a continuing cause that keeps these things in existence moment-by-moment. He is not a mere cosmic starter-upper. That would be deism, not classical theism. Whom do I have in mind? Thomas Aquinas for one. But I am not interested in playing the exegete with respect to his texts. I am thinking things through for myself. Unlike the mere scholar, a philosopher thinks for himself.

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?

Bill and Trudy 18 Feb 2025 Hackberry TH

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.

_______________

*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.

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:
  1. 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.
  2. In the natural world life cannot come from non-life. personality can only come from Personality.
  3. The existence of personal, self-conscious beings requires a supernatural, self-conscious, personal, powerful being to account for that existence. 
  4. 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. 
  5. 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.