Category: Atheism and Theism

The Holocaust Argument for God’s Existence

Top o' the Stack.

Is there an adequate naturalistic explanation for the unspeakable depth and depravity of moral evil? If not, what might we reasonably conclude? Can one plausibly argue from the depth and depravity of moral evil to the existence of God?  

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Yesterday I ordered a book on Amazon and it arrived today. That's what I call service. The book is described here by its author:

.  .  . bold demonic action is on the rise, mainly due to the fact that sin is not only tolerated in society but even publicly celebrated. This is not what the film is about, but it is the basis of Fr. Gabriele Amorth’s ministry. It should be noted that Fr. Amorth was not, in fact, the exorcist for the pope but, rather, for the city of Rome.

Exorcisms are sacramentals, on which I have recently published a book. In it, I dedicate an extensive chapter to the subject of exorcisms and place it in the context of what theologians describe as “preternatural reality.” It means that demons operate in an order that surpasses the natural but is less than supernatural. The Latin word praeter indicates a realm that goes beyond the natural possibilities of any human being. In other words, demons cannot work miracles, but they can produce phenomena that appear miraculous to us because they exceed the power of the natural order. There are many references to this in Sacred Scripture.

After the Old Atheism (J. L. Mackie and Co.) came the New Atheism the  'four horsemen' of which were Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. The New Atheism is now utterly passé. These latter-day naturalists have been replaced by the preternaturalists, Satanists among them. 

Time to bone up on this stuff, folks, especially you folks with kiddies in the public schools.  I'll dive into Ralph Weimann's book tomorrow. If you've read any of it, report below.

UPDATE 10/11. Tony Flood comments on the Holocaust Argument:

Bill, woven through your well-wrought argument (to the effect, as I like to formulate the point, that naturalists can't even frame a problem of evil) is your insistence (but I'm sure it's more than that) that there are no knock-down (rationally compelling, not merely rationally acceptable) arguments for any substantive philosophical position. ("Show me one you think is knock-down, and I'll knock it down," I remember you writing years ago.) Do you have an argument for that? Is your claim more than a gambit or posture, a bluff that someone can call? Might the auditor of a rationally compelling argument simply be psychologically impervious to its objective rational power? Is there a rationally compelling argument for your "non-substantive" philosophical position? Or is it merely rationally acceptable? Can you "rationally coerce" me to accept your universal negative claim?  Sorry to hit you with a stream of questions which may not have been expressed with sufficient rigor.  

 
Your essay reminded me of a possible issue with my putative transcendental argument in PaC: an exclusive disjunction (P V ~P); the elimination of ~P, namely, the class of non-Christian worldviews; ergo, P. Arguably one weakness is that it's impossible to show that no non-Christian worldview can account for rational predication (etc.). 
 
I also appreciated your homo homini daemonium insight, which I hadn't considered before.

Thank you for the well-written comment, Tony. But it seems that you ignored my footnote which was intended to blunt the force of the objection/question that you pose in the first paragraph.  The footnote reads:

*It follows, of course, that there are no rationally coercive arguments for my characteristic meta-philosophical thesis. I accept this consequence with equanimity. I claim merely that my characteristic thesis is rationally acceptable.

If we assume, as I believe we must, that meta-philosophy is a branch of philosophy, then, given that my characteristic thesis is a thesis in meta-philosophy, it follows that my characteristic thesis cannot be rationally coercive, i.e., rationally compelling. Now I am not a dialetheist; I hold to LNC and deny that there are any true contradictions. So I maintain, as I must given the two assumptions already stated, that my characteristic thesis  is rationally acceptable but not rationally compelling. And so, being the nice guy and classical liberal that I am, I tolerate your dissent. I will not tax you with logical inconsistency should you reject my characteristic thesis.  

You ask whether I can "rationally coerce" you to accept my "universal negative claim." No, I cannot, nor do I want to. I want to live in peace with your.  I will now insert a psychological observation that I hope is not inaccurate. You started out a Catholic, became a commie — a card-carrying member of the CPUSA if I am not mistaken — and then later rejected that adolescent (in both the calendrical and developmental senses of the word) commitment to become some sort of Protestant Christian presuppositionalist along the lines of Cornelius Van Til and Greg L. Bahnsen.   What you have retained from your commie indoctrination is your polemical attitude which, I speculate, was already present in nuce in your innate psychological makeup and perhaps environmentally enhanced and molded by your life-long residency in NYC.

You see philosophy polemically, as a matter of  worldview.  (You are psychologically like Ed Feser in this regard, but I'll leave my friend Ed out of it for now.) I do not see philosophy polemically, or as matter of worldview. I see philosophy as inquiry, not worldview, Wissenschaft, not Weltanschauung. And so I distinguish philosophy from politics, which is not to be confused with political philosophy. Philosophically, I have friends, but no enemies. Politically, I have both enemies and friends.   And so I want the scum who support Traitor Joe beaten into the dirt figuratively speaking, that is, removed from power.  The tone of the preceding sentence indicates how I view the politics of the present day: it is not matter of gentlemanly debate, but a form of warfare. Whether it must by its very nature be a form of warfare (as per Carl Schmitt) is a further and very difficult philosophical, not political, question. 

All of this needs elaboration and nuancing. And I am aware that I haven't responded to all of your questions. More later. Time for this honorary kike to mount his bike. Combox open.

 

Agnosticism and Religiosity

There is an element of agnosticism at the heart of true religiosity. The atheist knows the god he denies; the theist hesitates to claim knowledge of the God he affirms. The god of a Christopher Hitchens is a cartoonish construct that lies open in every respect before the mind of the cartoonist. But the god that Hitch denies is not the one we affirm.

Debate, Disagreement, and the Limits of Rational Discourse

I wrote a few months back,

. . . the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Generally speaking and admitting exceptions, leftists need to be defeated, not debated. Debate is worthwhile only with open-minded truth seekers. Truth, however, is not a leftist value. At the apex of the leftist's value hierarchy stands POWER. That is not to say that a leftist will never speak the truth; he will sometimes, but only if it serves his agenda. 

Tony Flood replied that the above quotation reminded him "of [Eric] Voegelin's stance on this very issue, about which I blogged a few years ago."  In that post Tony reproduces the first paragraph of Voegelin's Debate and Existence as follows. [note to AGF: your hyperlink is busted: 404 error]  Tony breaks Voegelin's one paragraph into four.

 

Continue reading “Debate, Disagreement, and the Limits of Rational Discourse”

Countering the Absurd with an Argument from Desire: Preliminaries

Vito Caiati comments:

I have been thinking about your intriguing post in which you write: “For the absurd is not simply that which makes no sense; it is that which makes no sense, but ought to, or is supposed to.  To say that life is absurd is not merely to say that it has no point or purpose; it is to say that it fails to meet a deep and universal demand or expectation on our part that it have a point or purpose.”

Does this intuitive, subtle yearning for purpose have some probative value with relation to large questions such as belief in God and, if so, how much?  Does its existence reveal some innate need for an Ultimate Ground of meaning and purpose or can it be dismissed as a vain hope, a refusal by conscious beings to accept the chancy, hollow state of the world? Might it be one more ambiguous indicator that allows for either conclusion, leaving its evidential value as an open question?

Vito is asking the right follow-up questions. Here are five questions that his comments suggest to me.

Q1) Can one mount an argument from desire for the existence of God in which God serves as ultimate ground of meaning and purpose? Answer: Yes, of course. It's been done.

Q2) Is any such argument probative in the sense that it proves (demonstrates, definitively establishes) the existence of such a God? Answer: Not according to my metaphilosophy. For I maintain that there are no rationally compelling arguments for any substantive theses in metaphysics. 

Q3) Despite the nonexistence of any probative arguments from desire, are there any such arguments that render reasonable the belief that there is a God who (among other services) serves as ultimate ground of meaning and purpose, and in particular, the meaning and purpose of human life? Answer: Yes.

Q4) Given an affirmative answer to (Q3), are there also arguments that render reasonable the belief there is no entity, whether classically divine or not, that can that serve as ultimate ground of meaning and purpose of human life and indeed the world as a whole?  Answer: Yes. 

Q5) Given affirmative answers to both (Q3) and (Q4), how should one proceed? Answer: it is up to the individual to decide, after careful consideration of the pros and cons of the issue, what he will believe.  It is a matter of personal, free, decision. There is no algorithm, no objective decision procedure, that can decide the issue for you.  The life of the mind and spirit, like life in general, is a venture and an adventure. You could say that a leap of faith is involved as long as it is understood that the leap is a calculated one made after the exercise of due doxastic vigilance. The decision is free but not arbitrary, in that it is guided by, but not determined by,  reasons.

Of course I am not saying that the truth is a matter of free decision; I am saying that what one accepts as the truth, what one believes to be the truth, is a matter of free decision in a matter like the one before us.

But it all depends on whether I can make good on my claim that that are no rationally compelling arguments either for or against the existence of God. 

I will conclude today's installment by nuancing something I said earlier.  I now distinguish two sub-senses of the existential sense of 'absurd':  (a) the absurd as that which exists, exists contingently, but has no cause, ground, reason, or purpose for its existence; (b) the absurd as that which is absurd in the (a)-sense, but also necessarily refers back to a demand, desire, or expectation on our part that it fails to satisfy. In the (b)-sense, the world, human life, whatever is judged to be absurd, ought,  or is supposed to, or is expected to meet our demands for meaning and intelligibility but doesn't. 

Camus est mortThis is the sense of 'absurd' operative in Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. For Camus, absurdity is rooted in the perceived discrepancy between demand and satisfaction, a demand that we ineluctably make and that the world appears unable to satisfy.  There is a disconnect between the deep desire of the heart that 'it all make sense in the end' and the despairing belief that it does not make sense, that it is absurd in the (a)-sense. What constitutes the absurd sensibility so skillfully depicted in Camus' essay is not merely that the universe exists as a matter of brute fact, and is therefore existentially absurd in the (a)-subsense, but that the universe so exists  and in so existing fails to satisfy an ineluctable exigency or demand that the best of us make, namely, the demand that it have a purpose, a final cause in Aristotelean jargon, and our lives in it.

I am distinguishing between the absurd sensibility, which is a feeling, mood, attitude that Camus had and some of us have, or rather a disposition occurrently to possess such a feeling, mood, attitude, on the one hand, and the property of being absurd in the (a)-subsense, on the other, a non-relational property such that, if the universe has it, it has it whether or not there are any beings like us who make demands or harbor expectations of intelligibility.

Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

I return an affirmative answer.
 
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  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 possibilities. ('Out of nothing' is  a privative expression that means 'not out of something.') 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. 
 
Corresponding to realism-1, as its opposite, is idealism-1.  This is the view that everything other than God is created ex nihilo by God, who is a pure spirit, and who therefore creates in a purely spiritual way.  (To simplify the discussion, let us leave to one side the problem of so-called 'abstract objects.')  It seems to me, therefore, that there is a very clear sense in which classical theism is a type of idealism.   For on classical theism God brings into existence and keeps in existence every concretum other than himself and he does so by his  purely mental/spiritual activity.  We could call this type of idealism onto-theological absolute idealism. It is the position that my A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer 2002) defends. The book bears the embarrassingly 'high horse' subtitle: Onto-Theology Vindicated, which was intended as a swipe against Heidegger. But I digress.
 
I am not saying that the entire physical cosmos is a content of the divine mind; it is rather an accusative or intentional object of the divine mind.  Though not radically transcendent, the cosmos is a transcendence-in-immanence, to borrow some Husserlian phraseology. 
 
So if the universe is expanding, that is not to say that the divine mind or any part thereof is expanding.  If an intentional object has a property P it does not follow that a mind trained upon this object, or an act of this mind or a content in this mind has P.  Perceiving a blue coffee cup, I have as intentional object something blue; but my mind is not blue, nor is the perceiving blue, nor any mental content that mediates the perceiving.  If I perceive or imagine or recall or in any way think of an extended sticky surface, neither my mind nor any part of it becomes extended or sticky.  Same with God.  He retains his difference from the physical cosmos even while said cosmos is nothing more than his merely intentional object incapable of existing on its own.
 
Actually, what I just wrote is only an approximation to what I really want to say.  For just as God is sui generis, the relation between God and the world is also sui generis, and as such not an instance of the intentional relation with which we are familiar in our own mental lives.  The former is only analogous to the latter.  If one takes the divine transcendence seriously, as classical theism does, then God cannot be a being among beings; equally, God's relation to the world cannot be a relation among relations.  If we achieve any understanding in these lofty precincts, it is not the sort of understanding one achieves by subsuming a new case under an old pattern; God does not fit any pre-existing pattern, nor does his 'relation' to the world fit any pre-existing pattern.  God is the Absolute and the Absolute cannot be a token of a type. If we achieve any understanding here it will be via various groping analogies.  These analogies can only take us so far.  In the end we must confess the infirmity of finite reason in respect of the Absolute that is the ontologically simple Paradigm Existent.
 
God's relation to the world (the realm of creatures), then, cannot be just another relation.  There is also the well-known problem that the intentional 'relation' is not, strictly speaking, a relation.  It is at best analogous to a relation.  So it looks as if we have a double analogy going here.  The God-world 'relation' is analogous to something analogous to a relation in the strict sense.  Let me explain.  
 
Necessarily, if x stands in relation R to y, then both x, y exist.  But x can stand in the intentional 'relation' to y even if y does not exist in reality.  'Exist in reality' is harmless pleonasm; it underscores the fact that, strictly speaking, to exist is to exist in reality. It is a plain fact that we sometimes have very definite thoughts about objects that do not exist, the planet Vulcan, for example.  What about the creating/sustaining 'relation'? The holding of this 'relation' as between God and Socrates cannot presuppose the existence in reality of both relata.  It presupposes the existence of God no doubt, but if it presupposed the existence of Socrates then there would be no need for the creating/sustaining ex nihilo of Socrates. Creating is a producing, a causing to exist, and indeed moment by moment.
 
For this reason, creation/sustaining cannot be a relation, strictly speaking.  It follows that the createdness of a creature cannot be a relational property, strictly speaking. (Mundane example: if a cat licks my arm, then my arm has the relational property of being licked by a cat.)  Now the createdness of a creature is its existence or Being.  So the existence of a creature cannot be a relational property thereof; it is at most  like a relational property thereof.
 
What I have done so far is argue that classical theism is a form of idealism, a form of idealism that is the opposite of an extreme from of metaphysical realism, the form I referred to as 'realism-1.'  If you say that no one has ever held such a form of realism, I will point to Ayn Rand. (See Rand and Peikoff on God and Existence.)
 
Moderate  Realism (Realism-2)
 
Realism holds with respect to some of the objects of finite minds.  Not for merely intentional objects, of course, but for things like trees and mountains and cats and chairs and their parts.  They exist and have most of their properties independently of the mental activity of finite minds such as ours. We can call this realism-2.
 
Kant held that empirical realism and transcendental idealism are logically compatible and he subscribed to both.  Now the idealism I urge is not a mere transcendental idealism, but a full-throated onto-theological absolute idealism; but it too is compatible, as far as I can see, with the empirical reality of most of the objects of ectypal intellects such as ours.  (God's intellect is archetypal; mine is ectypal.) The divine spontaneity makes the objects of ectypal intellects  exist thereby rendering them  them available to the receptivity of such intellects.  Realism-2 is consistent with idealism-1. 
 
My thesis, then, is that classical theism is a type of idealism; it is onto-theological absolute idealism.  If everything concrete is created originally and sustained ongoingly ex nihilo by a purely spiritual being, an Absolute Mind, and by purely spiritual activity, then this is better denominated 'idealism' than 'realism.'  Is that not obvious?
 
But trouble looms as I will argue in the next entry in this series.  And so we will have to consider whether the sui generis, absolutely unique status of God and his relation to the world is good reason to withhold both appellations, 'realism' and 'idealism.'

Three Theisms: Ontic, Alterity, and Onto-Theological and their Liabilities

There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. One way into the problem is via the following aporetic triad:

1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence.

2.  For any x, y,  if x depends for its existence on y, and x exists, then y exists. (This implies that nothing can depend on God for its existence unless God exists.)

3. God is not one of the many things that exist, and so God does not exist.

It is easy to see that the limbs of the triad cannot all be true. And yet each has some plausibility, at least 'in-house,' i.e., among theists.

(1) or something like it will be accepted by both ontic theists and alterity theists, assuming that they are not pantheists. Roughly, an ontic theist is a theist who maintains that God is a being among beings, an ens among entia, while an alterity theist is one who maintains that God is radically transcendent, radically other, to such an extent that he cannot be identified with any being.

(2) won't be accepted by the alterity theists, but it is to my mind exceedingly plausible! If everything other than God depends on God for its existence, then God must in some mode or manner exist; otherwise he would be nothing at all. And on nothing nothing can depend.

(3) won't be accepted by the ontic theist, but alterity theists find it plausible. If God is other than every being, then he is no being. If to be is to exist, then God does not exist.

Since the limbs cannot all be true, one of them must be rejected.  I am assuming, of course, that there cannot be true contradictions.  There are therefore three main ways of solving the problem.

A. The quickest solution, call it Blanket Atheism, is by rejecting (1).  There is no God in any sense of the term.  No being is God, and there is no God 'beyond being.'   There is just the natural world (and perhaps abstracta) but nature is not God, and so God does not exist. Reality is exhausted by space-time, its occupants, and (perhaps) the Platonic menagerie.  To put it another way, concrete reality is exhausted by space-time and its occupants.

B.  The alterity theist rejects (2) while accepting (3).

C.  The ontic theist accepts (2) while rejecting (3).

But there are two other C-options, two other options involving the acceptance of (2) and the rejection of (3).

One could take a monistic tack, roughly along the lines of Spinoza.  Accordingly, (i) there is a sense in which God exists — God is not natura naturata, but natura naturans – ; (ii) God exists in the primary sense of 'exists'; (iii) God alone exists, hence is not one of many existents, and so does not exist in the sense in which Spinozistic modes exist.

This is what I used to think, back in the '80s.  See my "Two Faces of Theism," Idealistic Studies, vol. xx, no. 3 (September 1990), pp. 238-257.  But I moved away from this position in the '90s and took an onto-theological turn that found expression in my existence book.

That is the other C-option.  Accordingly, God is not an existent among existents as the ontic theist maintains.  Nor is God somehow real but nonexistent as the alterity theist maintains.  Nor is God the one and only existent as the monist maintains.  Rather, God is self-existent Existence, yet transcendent of the created realm, pace monism.  This is roughly akin to the position of Aquinas.  Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.  God is not a being (ens), but self-subsisting  Being (esse). So God is Being (esse) but God also is.  God is both esse and ens.  Gott ist beides: Sein und Seiendes. Thus there is no 'ontological difference' (Heidegger) in God. God is Being but also the prime 'case' — not instance! — of Being.  (Being has no instances.) But God is in a mode of Being unlike the mode of Being of anything else. So God is not a being among beings, nor does he have properties in the way Socrates has properties. I have gone over this in painful detail in many other entries.

If we take the Thomistic tack, we can navigate between the Scylla of ontic theism and the Charybdis of alterity theism. We can avoid the untenable extremes. God is not a being among beings, but God is also not nothing as he would have to be if he were wholly other than every being.

But this too has its difficulties.  I will mention one. How could anything both be and be identical to Being? How could anything be both ens and esse? How could Existence itself exist? This is unintelligible to intellects of our constitution, discursive  intellects. So now I am contemplating the final step: Into the Mystic.

The above triad strikse me as an aporia, an insolubilium.  The 'solutions' to it are mere stopgaps that generate problems of their own as bad as or worse than the original problem. For example, if you 'solve' the triad by embracing Blanket Atheism, then you face all the problems attending naturalism, problems we have rehearsed many times. The original problem looks to be absolutely insoluble. One has to blast through it, as through a koan, into the Transdiscursive.  The philosopher, however, hovers at the boundary of the Sayable, marking it without overstepping it, incapable qua philosopher of effing the Ineffable, but able — and this is his office –  to point to it while refuting both denials of it and bad theories about it.

We Must Work with Atheists to Defeat the Left

America is is where the West will make its last stand, or else begin to turn the tide. The rest of the Anglosphere appears lost. It is falling asleep under the soporific of 'wokeism,' the latest and most virulent form of the leftist virus. To assure victory we theists need to work with atheist conservatives. I agree with the following characterization of conservatism, apparently written by Jillian Becker, at The Atheist Conservative:

B.   On Conservatism

1. Individual freedom is the necessary condition for prosperity, innovation, and adaptation, which together ensure survival.

2.  A culture constituted for individual freedom is superior to all others.

3. Only the Conservative policies of the post-Enlightenment Western world are formulated to protect individual freedom.

4. Individual freedom under the rule of non-discriminatory law, a free market economy, the limiting of government power by democratic controls and constitutional checks and balances, and strong national defense are core Conservative policies.

A conservatism along these lines navigates a sane middle path between leftism and reactionary, throne-and-altar conservatism.  

I am a theist. But as I have repeatedly maintained over the years, atheism is a reasonable position. The reasonable is not the same as the  true. The reasonable is sometimes false, and the true is sometimes unreasonable. To ascertain the truth is not easy. Reason is a weak reed indeed. And despite my use of 'ascertain,' if we attain the truth we are rarely if ever certain that we have when the truths pertain to substantive matters. Humility is not just a moral virtue; it is an epistemic one as well. 

Nowadays there is talk of a 'postliberal' conservatism. We shall have to take a look at that. I suspect that it is a form of reaction insusceptible of resurrection, as a matter of fact, and even if patient of resuscitation, not worthy of it. It is a Lazarus that won't be raised and ought not be.

I have heard it said that a conservatism infused with classical liberalism is 'unstable' and will inevitably transmogrify into the madness of 'wokeism.' But that is a slippery slope argument, and they are all of them invalid.

Parallel Problems of God and Evil, Mind and Matter

For Bradley Schneider.

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It is a simple point of logic that if propositions p and q are both true, then they are collectively logically consistent, though not conversely. So if God exists and Evil exists are both (objectively) true, then they are collectively logically consistent, whence it follows that it is possible that they be collectively logically consistent. This is so whether or not anyone, any finite or ectypal intellect,  is in a position to explain how it is possible that they be logically consistent. It is presumably otherwise with the intellectus archetypus. 

For if such-and-such is the case, then, by the time-honored principle ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it is possible that it be the case, and my inability, or any mortal's inability, to explain how it is possible that it be the case cannot count as a good reason for thinking that it is not the case. There is no valid move from ignorance as to how something is possible to its not being possible. Such an inferential move would be tantamount to the ad ignorantiam fallacy. So if it is the case that God exists and Evil exists are collectively logically consistent, then this is possibly the case, and a theist's inability to explain how God and evil can coexist is not a good reason for him to abandon his theism — or his belief in the existence of objective evil.

The logical point I have just made is rock-solid.  I now apply it to two disparate subject-matters. The one is the well-known problem of evil faced by theists, the problem of reconciling the belief that God exists with the belief that evil exists.  The other is the equally well-known 'problem of mind' that materialists face, namely, the problem of reconciling the existence of the phenomena of mind with the belief that everything concrete is material.

The theist is rationally entitled to stand pat in the face of the 'problem of evil' and point to his array of arguments for the existence of God whose cumulative force renders rational his belief that God exists. Of course, he should try to answer the atheist who urges the inconsistency of God exists and Evil exists; but his failure to provide a satisfactory answer is not a reason for him to abandon his theism. A defensible attitude would be: "This is something we theists need to work on."  Or he could simply repeat (something like) what I said above, namely, "True propositions are (collectively) logically consistent;  this is so whether or not  a mortal man can explain how they are jointly true; I have good grounds for believing  both that God exists and that evil exists; I am therefore under no doxastic obligation to surrender my theism."