Tony Flood has gone though many changes in his long search for truth. He seems to have finally settled down in Van Til's presuppositionalism. Tony writes,
God, the cosmos, and a plurality of minds other than one’s own are in the same epistemological boat. [. . .] To be skeptical about one but not the other two is arbitrary. Our innate predisposition to be realistic about all three is divinely written “software” that informs our cerebral “wetware.”
I wish I could accept this, but I don't, and I believe I have good reasons for my non-acceptance.
By "in the same epistemological boat," Flood means that God, the physical universe, and other minds are all on a par in respect of dubitability. No one of them is more open to reasonable doubt than the other two, and none of them is open to reasonable doubt. Therefore, one can no more reasonably doubt the existence of God than one can doubt the existence of other minds. Atheism is on a par with solipsism in point of plausibility.
And bear in mind that by 'God' here is meant something very specific, the triune God of Christian theism, the God of the Bible as understood by Van Til and Co. It is one thing to argue — and it can be done with some plausibility — that the validity of all reasoning about any subject presupposes the existence of an omniscient necessary being. It is quite another to argue that the presuppositum must be the God of Christian theism as the latter is expounded by a Calvinist!
Now I concede that doubts about the external world and the the reality of other minds are hyperbolic, and if taken as genuine doubts, as opposed to thought experiments deployed in an epistemology seminar, unreasonable. No one really doubts the existence of rocks or other minds. Not even Bishop Berkeley doubts, let alone denies, the existence of rocks, the tree in the quad, and suchlike. This is why it is perfectly lame to think that Berkeley's idealism can be refuted by kicking a stone. (See Of Berkeley's Stones and the Eliminativist's Beliefs and Argumentum ad Lapidem?)
The hyperbolic skepticism of Descartes' dream argument and its latter-day brain-in-the-vat incarnations are methodological tools of the epistemologist who seeks to understand how we know what we know, and what it is to know what we know. A philosopher who wonders how knowledge is possible may, but need not, and typically does not, deny or have any real doubt THAT knowledge is possible. For example, I may be firmly convinced of the existence of so-called abstract objects (numbers, sets, propositions, uninstantiated properties, etc.) but be puzzled about how knowledge of such entities is possible given that there is no causal interaction with them. That puzzlement does not get the length of doubt or denial. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for knowledge of the past, knowledge of other minds, and knowledge of the external world.
My point, then, is that (i) practically no one has real doubts about the existence of the external world or the existence of other minds, and that (ii) it would not be reasonable to have such doubts. But (iii) people do have real doubts about the existence of the God of Christian theism, and (iv) it is not unreasonable to have such doubts. The various arguments from evil, and not just these, cast reasonable doubt on Christian theism.
One type of real doubt is an 'existential' doubt, one that grips a person who succumbs to it, and induces fear and perhaps horror. There are those who lose their faith in God and suffer in consequence. They experience a terrible sense of loss, or perhaps they fear that they have been duped by crafty priests who exploited their youthful innocence and gullibility to infect them with superstitious nonsense in order to keep the priestly hustle going. One can lose one's faith in God, and many do. No one loses his faith in the external world or in other minds. And this for the simple reason that there was no need for faith in the first place.
I believe I have said enough to cast serious doubt on, if not refute, the idea that God, the the cosmos, and other minds are are in the same epistemological boat. That's a boat that won't float.
Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. [. . .]
By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).
Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion.
Sully is not being specific enough. Consider Communist ideology. It is a practice, not just a theory. It is a way of life that gives meaning. It appeals to values that transcend the current situation such as the value of a classless society free of exploitation and alienation, a society with no need of the illusory consolations of religion, a society in which that opiate will not be needed because each will realize himself to the fullest in the here and now. Pie here below will obviate the hankering for pie in the sky. It is easy to see how so many millions in the 20th century could be recruited to the Communist cause.
On Sully's definition, godless communism is a religion that rejects religion, which is to say: it is not a religion on any appropriate understanding of that term. Sully's definition is not specific enough, sullied as it is by being too broad.
Sullivan ought to say something sensible. I suggest the following. Human beings have very strong worldview needs. Doxastic security needs, I call them. It is impossible not to have some worldview or other, tacit or explicit, unexamined or examined, uncritically imbibed from one's social environment or worked out for oneself. No human being lives, or can live, adoxastos, without beliefs, and in particular without action-guiding beliefs, beliefs that direct, as well as overarching beliefs that orient us in the scheme of things. Not even the Pyrrhonian can pull it off.
Now, in the genus worldview, distinguish two species: religious and non-religious. Communism, being militantly atheistic and anti-religious, is a non-religious worldview. By contrast, Catholicism is a religious worldview.
At this point you ought to ask me for the specific difference. If rationality is what distinguishes human from non-human animals, what property or set of properties distinguishes religious from non-religious worldviews? My answer in The Essence of Religion.
No good purpose is served by calling atheism a religion. It is a cheap piece of journalistic sloppiness too often maintained, too infrequently reflected upon.
In Catholic thought there is what is called vincible ignorance. Here is a definition:
Lack of knowledge for which a person is morally responsible. It is culpable ignorance because it could be cleared up if the person used sufficient diligence. One is said to be simply (but culpably) ignorant if one fails to make enough effort to learn what should be known; guilt then depends on one's lack of effort to clear up the ignorance.
For present purposes, it suffices to say that 'God' refers to the supreme being of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I hold that there is vincible ignorance on various matters. But I deny that atheists are vincibly ignorant. Some might be, but not qua atheists. Whether or not God exists, one is not morally culpable for denying the existence of God. Nor do I think one is morally culpable if one doubts the existence of God.
If God exists, and one is an atheist, then one is ignorant of God, but it does not follow that one is culpably ignorant.
This puts me at odds with St. Paul, at least on one interpretation of what he is saying at Romans 1: 18-20.
I’ve met and talked to a number of people who, while originally atheists, have found faith in God and become active Christians as result of their intellectual pursuit that led them to the conclusion that God is logically necessary.
There is an ambiguity regarding 'logically necessary' that needs to be removed. Suppose there is a sound deductive argument A for the existence of God. Necessarily, if the premises of A are all true, then A's conclusion — God exists — is true. That is not to be confused with: If the premises of A are all true, then A's conclusion — God exists — is necessarily true.
The necessitas consequentiae must not be confused with the necessitas consequentis. See my separate post on this topic. The premises of a sound argument logically necessitate its conclusion, but that does not imply that the conclusion is logically necessary.
So even if one succeeds in demonstrating the existence of God, one has not thereby demonstrated the existence of a necessary being. For one might have succeeded only in demonstrating the existence of a logically contingent being.
I will read you as saying that there are people who come to faith in God via deductive arguments that they consider to be sound, just that, without the additional idea that the God so demonstrated is a necessary being.
Other relevant sources of ambiguity: Are you thinking of persons whose faith is SOLELY based on argumentative considerations? Are the argumentative considerations demonstrative only, or are probabilistic considerations relevant?
I will assume an affirmative answer to both questions.
I've always wanted to know, but was a bit uncomfortable to ask, how well are they prepared to deal with a quite conceivable situation where they should accidentally discover that their investigation was logically flawed and from the rational point their conclusion is not valid and, therefore the their faith in God’s existence has no logical grounding.
In other words, if your intellect guided you on the road to God and in the years following the finding of God you developed strong faith in and love for God would you still cling to your faith if you had suddenly discovered that the reasoning that brought you to Him was defective?
Suppose someone comes to accept the existence of God on the basis of one or more arguments, but then discovers that those arguments are flawed. It would not follow from this that the person's reasoned faith has no logical grounding. For there could easily be other arguments that establish the existence of God.
So your question is better put as follows. "Suppose a person who became a theist solely on the basis of arguments comes to believe that there is no extant argument that demonstrates the existence of God. Would that person be justified in clinging to his faith in God?"
The question is interesting and important but also very complicated. I'll just make a couple of points.
Does the person also believe that there is no extant argument that demonstrates the non-existence of God? Suppose that is the case. Then the person has three beliefs: that God exists; that God's existence cannot be demonstrated; that God's non-existence cannot be demonstrated. Is he rationally justified in holding all three? The theoretically-rational course would be to suspend judgment on the question of God's existence by neither affirming that God exists nor denying that God exists.
But there is also prudential rationality to consider. If the arguments pro et contra cancel out, then God might or might not exist for all we know. Believing would then be the prudentially rational thing to do, and pragmatically useful to boot. This is because the question of the existence of God is not a merely theoretical question, but one that bears upon our ultimate happiness and well-being.
If, on the other hand, the person in question has come to believe that some argument demonstrates the non-existence of God, then to be rational he ought to reject belief in God. Or so it will seem to most.
But it is not that clear. Suppose one believes that there are no good arguments for the existence of God, but there are good arguments for the nonexistence of God, arguments from evil, say. Suppose the person is also skeptical about the power of reason to decide such a weighty, metaphysical question.
Would it not be prudentially rational for him to go on believing? After all, God might exist. And what would one lose by believing? What one would lose by believing would be as nothing as compared to what one might gain by believing and coming into right relation with God.
Suppose you believe that man has been created in the image and likeness of God. Could you, consistently with that belief, hold that only some possess a religious disposition?
I have discussed this before, but the question came up again in an e-mail from a reader.
I often say things like the following:
The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory and unameliorable by unaided human effort whether individual or collective; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa through a vale of tears that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place but is instead a place of probation and a vale of soul-making; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. He feels his fellows to be fools endlessly distracted by bagatelles, sunken deep in Pascalian divertissement, as Platonic troglodytes unaware of the Cave as Cave.
I maintain that one in whom the above doesn't strike a chord, or sound a plaintive arpeggio, is one who lacks a religious disposition. In some the disposition is simply lacking, and it cannot be helped. I 'write them off' no matter how analytically sharp they are. One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to them, any more than one can share one's delight in poetry with the terminally prosaic, or one's pleasure in mathematics with the mathematically anxious. For those who lack the disposition, religion is not what William James in "The Will to Believe" calls a "living option," let alone a "forced" or "momentous" one. It can only be something strained and ridiculous, a tissue of fairy tales, something for children and old ladies, an opiate for the weak and dispossessed, a miserable anthropomorphic projection, albeit unconscious, a wish-fulfillment, something cooked up in the musty medieval cellars of priest-craft where unscrupulous manipulators exploit human gullibility for their own advantage.
A perceptive interlocutor raises an objection that I would put as follows.
You say that some lack a religious disposition. I take it you mean that they are utterly bereft of it. But how is that consistent with the imago dei? For if we are made in the divine image, then we are spiritual beings who must, as spiritual beings, possess at least the potentiality of communion with the divine source of the spirit within us, even if this potentiality is to no degree actual. After all, we are not in the image of God as animals, but as spiritual beings, and part of being a spiritual being is having the potentiality to know itself, and thus to know that one is a creature if in fact one is a creature, and in knowing this to know God in some measure.
How might I meet this objection?
One way is by denying that all biologically human beings bear the divine image, or bear the divine image in its fullness. Maybe it is like this. The existence of specimens of the zoological species to which we belong is accounted for by the theory of evolution. God creates the physical universe in which evolution occurs, and in which human animals evolve from lower forms. The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis is not an account of how human animals came to be that is in competition with the theory of evolution. It is not about human animals at all.
Adam is not the first man; there was no first man. Eve is not the first woman; there was no first woman. Adam and Eve are not the first human animals; they are the first human animals that, without ceasing to be animals, became spiritual beings when God bestowed upon them personhood, which involves self-consciousness, free will, and moral sense, but also the sense of the divine and a call to a higher life. But the free divine bestowal was not the same for all: from some he withheld the sensus divinitatis and with it the power to know God and become godlike.
I know that this is not theologically orthodox. But it fits with my experience. I have always felt that some human beings lack depth or spirit or soul or inwardness or interiority or whatever you want to call it. It is not that I think of them as zombies as philosophers use this term: I grant that they are conscious and self-conscious. But I sense that there is nothing to them beyond that. There is no sense of the Higher. They sense no call to the task of self-individuation. There is no depth-dimension: they are surface all the way down. They are bereft of spirit. They may have moral sense, but it doesn't point them beyond this life. They may have conscience but it is only a product of acculturation and not a source of spiritual insight. They are human biologically but not normatively: there is a sense in which, ringing a change on Nietzsche, the death of God is by the same stroke the death of man: he suffers demotion and is after God's death back among the animals and in series with them, just the cleverest of the land mammals.
So the first conjecture is that not all human animals, even if biologically normal, are spiritual beings.
But it may be that a better line for me is the simpler one of saying that in all there is the religious disposition, but in some it is undeveloped or unmanifested, rather than saying that in some it is not present at all. (A disposition need not be manifested to exist; glass is disposed to shatter if suitably struck, but a particular piece of glass needn't shatter to possess (actually not potentially!) the disposition to shatter.)
The "perceptive interlocutor" (Steven Nemes) mentioned above responds (and these are his actual words):
To suppose that some persons lack the religious disposition is certainly not theologically kosher, at least not from the Christian perspective. This is more akin to certain varieties of predestinarian gnosticism to which early Christian theologians (e.g., Origen, Irenaeus, et al.) vehemently objected. These gnostic theories proposed that there were various different classes of human persons, some of whom were structurally determined to realize saving knowledge (gnosis) of Reality whereas others were cruder, baser, and doomed to live unenlightened lives in the body. The difference between classes was not choices they had made or anything of the sort; it was simply their ontological structure to reach enlightenment or not. The early Christians objected to this in two ways: first, it is denial of the freedom of the will of the human person, since some evidently are intrinsically incapable of choosing salvation; second, it is incompatible with God's goodness, since if he is good, he desires the salvation of all and works to accomplish it.
I don't disagree that these are among the theologically orthodox responses to my suggestion above. How good they are, however, is a separate question. First, if God does not grant to some class of persons the religious disposition, that is not a denial to them of freedom of the will. They can be as free as you please; they just lack that particular power, the power of achieving salvific knowledge. I am not free to fly like a bird, but it doesn't follow that I am not free.
As for the second point, there may be a confusion of damnation with non-knowledge of God. The suggestion above is that only some biologically human persons are disposed to seek God and possibly know God. That is not to say that these persons are predestined to a state in which they are conscious of God's existence but cut off from God.
God desires the ultimate beatitude of all that have the power to achieve it — but not all have this power on the above suggestion. If God desires the ultimate beatitude of all whether or not they have the power to know God, then God desires the ultimate beatitude of dolphins and apes and cats and dogs.
I suppose these are the two greatest problems for the quasi-gnostic position you consider above. Another problem would be that it might ethically justify mistreatment and prejudice against persons deemed to lack a religious disposition. After all, if they cannot sense God's existence and enjoy communion with him, how are they any different from animals? If God himself didn't care to make them such that they could know him, why should theists and those having the religious disposition care for them any more than for a dog?
I don't see any problem here either. Not all human beings have the same powers, but people like me and my interlocutor would not dream of using this fact to justify mistreatment of certain classes of people. (Analogy: I don't believe that animals have rights, but I don't need to assign rights to them to have good reason to treat them humanely
Interim Conclusion
Many if not most people in the West these days fail to manifest a genuine religious disposition. (Going along to get along by attending services etc. does not attest a genuine disposition.) While it does not follow that they lack such a disposition, absence of manifestation is defeasible evidence of the disposition's nonexistence. Supposing there is no religious disposition in some, the theist can, consistently with his theism, explain the fact in the unorthodox 'Gnostic' way sketched above.
Or the theist can insist that the disposition is present in all, but in some so buried under the detritus of sin and social suggestions as to be indiscernible by the person himself or others.
On the other hand, if one is a metaphysical naturalist, the problem dissolves: there is no God and the religious disposition is an evolutionary quirk in some that bespeaks nothing.
Earlier this evening I was watching Tucker Carlson. He had a psychology professor on whose YouTube videos had been blocked by Google but then later unblocked. His name is Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto. I had never heard of him, and his performance on Carlson's show was not particularly impressive. Having viewed his The Problem with Atheism, however, I am now impressed!
My finding of this video is serendipitous in that it ties in with a discussion I was having yesterday with Malcolm Pollack. Malcolm is a naturalist and atheist in the Dennett-Dawkins-Harris camp. He seems to think that an objective, agreed-upon, and life-enhancing morality has no need of a transcendent foundation, and perhaps also that there is no need that the majority believe in any such transcendent foundation. In an earlier thread Malcolm wrote:
. . . one can accept the principle of equality before the law, based on a fundamental sense of shared humanity and liberty, merely as a stipulation, a premise one accepts because one thinks it leads to a just society, without belief in a transcendent foundation in God. It is simply a choice that a person, or a society, can make; we do that with all sorts of other premises and conventions.
I replied:
Can someone who emphasizes the biologically-based differences between groups and sees cultural differences percolating up out of those differences [justifiably] appeal to a "sense of shared humanity" sufficiently robust to support equality before the law?
It may be that the West is running on fumes, the last vapors of the Judeo-Christian worldview and that your sense of equal justice for all is but a vestige of that dying worldview. Can belief in that moral code survive when belief in a transcendent Ground thereof is lost? The death of God has consequences, as Nietzsche appreciated.
This is the question that Professor Peterson addresses with passion and skill and with a slam or two at Sam Harris. (3:03) Peterson's point is essentially the one that Nietzsche made: belief in and respect for the authority of Christian morality stands and falls with belief in the Christian God. The death of God-belief in the West among the educated classes leads inevitably to moral nihilism.
Malcolm thinks we needn't drag the Transcendent into it; we can just agree on some set of moral conventions that will guide us. Sounds utopian to me. We don't agree on anything anymore: so how can we agree on this? Because it would be the rational thing to do to insure human flourishing?
But why should one care about the flourishing of anyone outside of oneself and one's tribe? Peterson raises the question of why it would be irrational, say, to exploit others for one's use and enjoyment. Why is it irrational for the strong to enslave the weak? How is pure naked self-interest irrational, Peterson asks. (3:53)
I've seen the above-captioned quotation attributed to Richard Dawkins. From what I have read of him, it seems like something he would say. The idea, I take it, is that all gods are on a par, and so, given that everyone is an atheist with respect to some gods, one may as well make a clean sweep and be an atheist with respect to all gods. You don't believe in Zeus or in a celestial teapot. Then why do you believe in the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob?
What Dawkins and his New Atheist colleagues seem to be assuming is that the following questions are either senseless or not to be taken seriously: 'Is the Judeo-Christian god the true God?' 'Is any particular god the true God' 'Is any particular conception of deity adequate to the divine reality?'
The New Atheist presupposition, then, is that all candidates for deity are in the same logical boat, and that this boat is one leaky vessel. Nothing could be divine. Since all theistic religions are false, there is no live question as to which such religion is true. It is not as if there is a divine reality and that some religions are more adequate to it than others. One could not say, for example, that Judaism is somewhat adequate to the divine reality, Christianity more adequate, and Buddhism not at all adequate. There just is no divine reality. There is nothing of a spiritual nature beyond the human horizon. There is no Mind beyond finite mind. Man is the measure. This is it!
That is the atheist's deepest conviction. It seems so obvious to him that he cannot begin genuinely to doubt it, nor can he understand how anyone could genuinely believe the opposite. Belief in God is like belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or Ed Abbey's Angry Unicorn on the Dark Side of the Moon. You don't believe in any of those nonentities, do you? Well, Dawkins & Co. just go one nonentity further!
This morning I received a message from a Canadian reader, C. L., who asks whether Dawkins and friends are begging the question against the theist. That depends on whether they are giving an argument or just making an assertion. It also depends on what exactly 'begging the question' is. If they are just making an assertion then I say: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. But suppose they intend the following argument:
1) All gods are on an epistemic/doxastic par: they are all equal in point of rational acceptability. Therefore:
2) If one god is such that its existence is not rationally acceptable, then this is true of all gods.
3) There are gods such as Zeus whose existence is not rationally acceptable. Therefore:
4) No god is such that its existence is rationally acceptable.
This is a valid argument: it cannot be the case that the premises are true and the conclusion false. Does it beg the question? The problem here is that it is not very clear what the informal fallacy in question (pun intended) is supposed to be. If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question. That is a clear example. But suppose I argue that The L. A. Times displays liberal bias because all mainstream media outlets display liberal bias and The L. A. Times is a mainstream media outlet. Have I begged the question? Not so clear. Surely we don't want to say that every valid argument begs the question! (John Stuart Mill floated this suggestion.) On the other hand, it is impossible for a valid argument to have true premises and a false conclusion which suggests that he who accepts the premises of the second argument above has in so doing begged the question: he has at least implicitly committed himself to an affirmative answer to the question, 'Does The L. A. Times display liberal bias?'
'Beg the question,' I suggest, is not a very useful phrase. Besides, people nowadays regularly conflate it with 'raising a question.' See On Begging the Question. It is becoming a useless phrase.
Regarding the above argument, I would say that, while valid, it is nowhere near rationally compelling and is therefore rationally rejectable. What reason do we have to think that all candidates for divine status are on a doxatic/epistemic par?
In sum, either Dawkins is asserting or he is arguing. If he is asserting, then his gratuitous assertion can be met with a gratuitous counter-assertion. If he is arguing, and his argument is as above, then his argument is easily turned aside.
The fundamental issue here is whether there is anything beyond the human horizon. The issue dividing theists and atheists can perhaps be put in terms of Jamesian 'live options':
EITHER: Some form of theism (hitherto undeveloped perhaps or only partially developed) is not only logically and epistemically possible, but also an 'existential' possibility, a live option;
OR: No form of theism is an existential possibility, a live option.
Theist-atheist dialog is made difficult by a certain asymmetry: whereas a sophisticated living faith involves a measure of purifying doubt, together with a groping beyond images and pat conceptualizations toward a transcendent reality, one misses any corresponding doubt or tentativeness on the part of sophisticated atheists. Dawkins and Co. seem so cocksure of their position. For them, theism is not a live option or existential possibility. This is obvious from their mocking comparisons of God to a celestial teapot, flying spaghetti monster, and the like.
For sophisticated theists, however, atheism is a live option. The existence of this asymmetry makes one wonder whether any productive dialog with atheists is possible. It is probably no more possible than productive dialog with leftists. We live on different planets.
1) The characteristic attitude of the skeptic is not denial, but doubt. There are three main mental attitudes toward a proposition: affirm, deny, suspend. To doubt is neither to affirm nor to deny. It can therefore be assimilated to suspension. Thus a skeptic neither affirms nor denies; he suspends judgment, withholds assent, takes no stand. This obvious distinction between doubting and denying is regularly ignored in political polemics. Thus global warming skeptics are often unfairly tagged by leftists as global warming denialists as if they are willfully rejecting some well-known fact.
2) The skeptic is not a cynic. A cynic is a disillusioned idealist. The cynic affirms an ideal, notes that people fail to live up to it, allows himself to become inordinately upset over this failure, exaggerates the extent of the failure, and then either harshly judges his fellows or wrongly impugns their integrity. His attitude is predicated on the dogmatic affirmation of an ideal. Skeptics, by contrast are free, or try to be free, of dogmatic commitments, and of consequent moral umbrage.
Cynic: "All politicians are liars!" Skeptic: "What makes you think that scrupulous truth-telling is the best policy in all circumstances? And what makes you think that truth is a high value?"
3) One can be skeptical about a belief or a class of beliefs, but also about the rational justification for a belief or a class of beliefs. Thus skeptics divide into belief skeptics and justification skeptics. (See R. Fogelin, Walking the Tightrope of Reason, Oxford UP, 2003, 98) You can be one without the other. There are various combinatorially possible positions. Here are three of several interesting ones:
a) S doubts whether p is justified, but S does not doubt that p: he affirms that p.
b) S doubts whether p is justified, and in consequence doubts that p.
c) S doubts whether p is justified, and concludes that one ought to suspend judgment on p.
Ad (a). Suppose Tom canvasses the arguments for and against the existence of God and concludes that it's a wash: the arguments and considerations he is aware of balance and cancel out. Tom finds himself in a state of evidential equipoise. As a result he doubts whether belief in God is justified. But he decides to believe anyway. In this example Tom does not doubt or deny that God exists; he affirms that God exists despite doubting whether the belief is rationally justified. With respect to the existence of God, Tom is a justification skeptic but not a belief skeptic.
Ad (b). Like Tom, Tim doubts whether belief that God exists is justified. Unlike Tom, Tim transfers his doubt about the justification to the belief itself. Tim is both a justification skeptic and a belief skeptic.
Ad (c). And then there is Cliff. He thinks it is wrong always and everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence. Like Tim and Tom, he doubts whether the existence of God is justified and for the same reason: the arguments pro et contra balance and cancel. He reasonably takes evidential equipoise as entailing that there is insufficient evidence for either limb of a contradictory pair of theses. But, unlike Tom and Tim, Cliff infers a normative conclusion from his evidential equipoise: it is morally wrong, a violation of the ethics of belief, to believe that God exists given that the evidence is insufficient.
For now I am concerned only with the rationality of doing as Tom does.
Tom examines both sides of the question. He does his level best to be fair and balanced. But he finds no argument or consideration to incline him one way or the other. Now it seems perfectly obvious to me that our man is free to believe anyway, that is, in our example either to affirm the existence of God or to reject the existence of God. He is not psychologically compelled by his state of evidential equipoise to suspend belief.
But while Tom is free to affirm, would it be rational for him to affirm the existence of God? Yes, because for beings of our constitution it is prudentially (as opposed to theoretically) rational to believe beyond the evidence. Consider the case of
The Alpine Hiker
An avalanche has him stranded on a mountainside facing a chasm. He cannot return the way he came, but if he stays where he is he dies of exposure. His only hope is to jump the chasm. The preponderance of evidence is that this is impossible: he has no epistemic reason to think that he can make the jump. But our hiker knows that what one can do is in part determined by what one believes one can do, that "exertion generally follows belief," as Jeffrey Jordan puts it. If the hiker can bring himself to believe that he can make the jump, then he increases his chances of making it. "The point of the Alpine hiker case is that pragmatic belief-formation is sometimes both morally and intellectually permissible."
We should therefore admit that there are cases in which epistemic considerations are reasonably defeated by prudential considerations.
And now we come to the Big Questions. Should I believe that I am libertarianly free? That it matters how I live? That something is at stake in life? That I will in some way or other be held accountable after death for what I do and leave undone here below? That God exists? That I am more than a transient bag of chemical reactions? That a Higher Life is possible?
Not only do I not have evidence that entails answers to any of these questions, I probably do not have evidence that makes a given answer more probable than not. Let us assume that it is not more probable than not that God exists and that (in consequence) it is not more probable than not that I have a higher destiny in communion with God.
But here's the thing. I have to believe that I have a higher destiny if I am to act so as to attain it. It is like the situation with the new neighbors. I have to believe that they are decent people if I am to act in such a way as to establish good relations with them. Believing the best of them, even on little or no evidence, is pragmatically useful and prudentially rational. I have to believe beyond the evidence. Similarly in the Alpine Hiker case. He has to believe that he can make the jump if he is to have any chance of making it. So even though it is epistemically irrational for him to believe he can make it on the basis of the available evidence, it is prudentially rational for him to bring himself to believe. You could say that the leap of faith raises the probability of the leap of chasm.
What if he is wrong? Then he dies. But if he sits down in the snow in despair he also dies, and more slowly. By believing beyond the evidence he lives his last moments better than he would have by giving up. He lives courageously and actively. He lives like a man.
Here we have a pragmatic argument that is not truth-sensitive: it doesn't matter whether he will fail or succeed in the jump. Either way, he lives better here and now if he believes he can cross the chasm to safety. And this, even though the belief is not supported by the evidence.
It is the same with God and the soul. The pragmatic argument in favor of them is truth-insensitive: whether or not it is a good argument is independent of whether or not God and the soul are real. For suppose I'm wrong. I live my life under the aegis of God, freedom, and immortality, but then one day I die and become nothing. I was just a bag of chemicals after all. It was all just a big bloody joke. Electrochemistry played me for a fool. So what?
What did I lose by being a believer? Nothing of any value. Indeed, I have gained value since studies show that believers tend to be happier people. But if I am right, then I have done what is necessary to enter into my higher destiny. Either way I am better off than without the belief in God and the soul. If I am not better off in this life and the next, then I am better off in this life alone.
I am either right or wrong about God and the soul. If I am right, and I live my beliefs, then then I have lived in a way that not only makes me happier here and now, but also fits me for my higher destiny. If I am wrong, then I am simply happier here and now.
So how can I lose? Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits.
Addendum
Dave Bagwill hits me with a powerful objection, which I will put in my own way.
It may be that mere intellectual assent to propositions about God and the soul "incurs no costs." But how could that be true for those who live their faith? There are plenty of examples of those whose lived faith has cost them their liberty, their livelihoods, and their lives. As we speak, Christians are being driven from their homes and slaughtered in the Middle East by adherents of the 'religion of peace.'
This is a good objection and at the very least forces me to qualify what I wrote, perhaps along the following lines: religious belief and practice incur no real costs for those of us fortunate to live in societies in which there is freedom of religion.
How long freedom of religion can last in the USA is a good question given the leftist assault on religious liberty. Yet another reason to battle the leftist scum. Luckily, we now have a chance with Trump as president.
Your post on a bad reason for thinking atheism is not a religion was excellent. I'm taking the liberty of sending a link to a review of mine that argues along the same lines as you do: Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies. By George H. Smith. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1991. 324 pp.
Best wishes,
David
It would be intolerably self-serving of me to say that great minds think alike, so I'll just say that sincere truth-seekers sometimes converge in their views. One thing I learned from Dr. Gordon's review is that George H. Smith is the (contemporary) source of the idea that atheism ought to be defined, not as the denial of the existence of God, but as mere lack of God-belief.
Atheism is not a religion. But the following is not a good reason for thinking so:
Atheism (and here I mean the so-called “weak atheism” that does not claim proof that god does not exist), is just the lack of god-belief – nothing more and nothing less. And as someone once said, if atheism is a religion, not collecting stamps is a hobby. That really ought to end the discussion right there. Clearly, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion.
Right, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion. But atheism is not a mere lack of belief in something. If atheism is just the lack of god-belief, then tables and chairs are atheists. For they lack god-belief. Am I being uncharitable?
Suppose someone defines atheism more carefully as lack of god-belief in beings capable of having beliefs. That is still unacceptable. Consider a child who lacks both god-belief and god-disbelief. If lacking god-belief makes him an atheist, then lacking god-disbelief makes him a theist. So he is both, which is absurd.
Obviously, atheism is is not a mere lack of belief, but a definite belief, namely, the belief that the world is godless. Atheism is a claim about the way things are: there is no such thing as the God of Judaism, or the God of Christianity, or the God of Islam, or the gods of the Greek pantheon, or . . . etc. The atheist has a definite belief about the ontological inventory: it does not include God or gods or any reasonable facsimile thereof such as the Plotinian One, etc.
Note also that if you deny that any god exists, then you are denying that the universe is created by God: you are saying something quite positive about the ontological status of the universe, namely, that it does not depend for its existence on a being transcendent of it. And if it does not so depend, then that implies that it exists on its own as a brute fact or that it necessarily exists or that it causes itself to exist. Without getting into all the details here, the point is that if you deny that God exists, this is not just a denial of the existence of a certain being, but implies a positive claim about the ontological status of the universe. What's more, if there is no creator God, then the apparent order of the universe, its apparent designedness, is merely apparent. This is a positive thesis about the nature of the physical universe.
Atheism, then, is not a mere lack of god-belief. For it implies definite positive beliefs about reality as a whole and about the nature and mode of existence of the physical universe.
Why then is atheism not a religion? No good purpose is served by using 'religion' to refer to any set of action-guiding beliefs held with fervor and commitment. For if one talks in that hopelessly loose way, then extreme environmentalism and Communism and leftism are religions.
Although it is not easy to craft a really satisfactory definition of religion, I would say that all and only religions affirm the existence of a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence. For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah is the transcendent reality. For Taoism, the Tao. For Hinduism, Brahman. For (Mahayana) Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana. Since atheists precisely deny any such transcendent reality, contact with which is our highest good and ultimate purpose, atheism is not a religion.
"But aren't militant atheists very much like certain zealous religionists? Doesn't militant atheism function in their lives much as religion functions in the life of the religiously zealous?" No doubt, but if one thing is like another, that is not to say that the one thing is the other or is a species of the other.
And another thing. If atheism is not a religion, then, while there can be atheist associations, there cannot be, in any serious sense of the word, an atheist church.
I have been objecting to the calling of leftism a religion. Curiously, some people call atheism a religion. I object to that too.
The question as to what religion is is not at all easy to answer. It is not even clear that the question makes sense. For when you ask 'What is religion?' you may be presupposing that it has an essence that can be captured in a definition that specifies necessary and sufficient conditions. But it might be that the concept religion is a family resemblance concept like the concept game (to invoke Wittgenstein's famous example). Think of all the different sorts of games there are. Is there any property or set of properties that all games have and that only games have? Presumably not. The concept game is a family resemblance concept to which no essence corresponds. Noted philosophers of religion such as John Hick maintain the same with respect to the concept religion.
If you take this tack, then you can perhaps argue that Marxism and secular humanism and militant atheism are religions.
But it strikes me as decidedly odd to characterize a militant anti-religionist as having a religion. Indeed, it smacks of a cheap debating trick: "How can you criticize religion when you yourself have a religion?" The tactic is an instance of the 'So's Your Old Man' Fallacy, more formally known as the argumentum ad hominem tu quoque.
I prefer to think along the following lines.
Start with belief-system as your genus and then distinguish two coordinate species: belief-systems that are theoretical, though they may have practical applications, and belief-systems that are by their very nature oriented toward action. Call the latter ideologies. Accordingly, an ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs. Then distinguish between religious and non-religious ideologies. Marxism and militant atheism are examples of non-religious ideologies while the Abrahamic religions and some of the Eastern religions are examples of religious ideologies.
I am using 'ideology' in a non-pejorative way. One could also speak of Weltanschauungen or worldviews except that 'view' suggests spectatorship whereas action-guiding belief-systems embody prescriptions and proscriptions and all manner of prudential dos and don'ts for participants in the flux and shove of the real order. We are not mere spectators of life's parade, but are 'condemned' to march in it too.
To repeat: there are theoretical belief-systems and belief-systems that are ineluctably action-guiding and purpose-positing. Among the latter we distinguish two subspecies, the religious and the non-religious.
But this leaves me with the problem of specifying what it is that distinguishes religious from non-religious ideologies. To put it Peripatetically, what is the specific difference? Perhaps this: all and only religions make reference to a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence. For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah is the transcendent reality. For Taoism, the Tao. For Hinduism, Brahman. For Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana. But I expect the Theravadins to object that nibbana is nothing positive and transcendent, being only the extinguishing or dissolution of the (ultimately illusory) self. I could of course simply deny that Theravada Buddhism is a religion, strictly speaking. I could lump it together with Stoicism as a sort of higher psychotherapy, a set of techniques for achieving equanimity, a therapeutic wisdom-path rather than a religion strictu dictu.
There are a number of tricky and unresolved issues here, but I see little point in calling militant atheism a religion, though I concede it is like a religion in some ways.
But as I have been pointing out lately, if one thing is like another, that is not to say that the one thing is the other or is a species of the other.
Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing, Nelson, 2016, p. 231:
There are people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God's existence.
I've had a similar thought for years.
One can of course argue, plausibly, from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. From Epicurus to David Hume to J. L. Mackie, this has been a staple in the history of philosophy. There is no need to rehearse the logical and evidential arguments from evil to the nonexistence of God (See my Good and Evil category.) But one can argue, just as plausibly, from the fact of evil to the existence of God. I envisage two sorts of argument. One type argues that there could be no objective difference between good and evil without God. The other type, an instance of which will be sketched here, argues from a special feature of the evil in the world to the existence of God. This special feature is the horrific depth and intensity of moral evil, a phenomenon which beggars naturalistic understanding. This second type of argument is what Klavan is hinting at.
How might such an argument go? Here is a sketch. This is merely an outline, not a rigorous development.
I should also say that my aim is not to sketch a rationally compelling argument for the existence of God. There are no compelling arguments for substantive theses in philosophy and theology. My aim is to neutralize the atheist arguments from evil by showing that the tables can be turned: evil can just as easily be marshaled in support of God. Further, I have no illusions about neutralizing atheist arguments in the eyes of atheists. The purpose of the following is simply to show theists that their position is rationally defensible.
A. Consider not just the occurrence, but also the magnitude, of moral evil. I don't mean just the ubiquity of moral evil but also its horrific depth. Fidel Castro, for example, that hero of the Left, did not merely imprison his political opponents for their dissent, he had them tortured in unspeakable ways:
Mr. Valladares and other prisoners who refused ''political rehabilitation'' were forced to live in the greatest heat and the dampest cold without clothes. They were regularly beaten, shot at and sometimes killed; they were thrown into punishment cells, including the dreaded ''drawer cells,'' specially constructed units that make South Vietnam's infamous tiger cages seem like homey quarters. Eventually, together with several others, Mr. Valladares plotted an escape from their prison on the Isle of Pines. But the boat that was to pick them up never arrived. He and his accomplices were brought back to their cells and given no medical attention, though Mr. Valladares had fractured three bones in his foot during the escape attempt.
The retribution was swift. Mr. Valladares writes: ''Guards returned us to the cells and stripped us again. They didn't close the cell door, and that detail caught my attention. I was sitting on the floor; outside I heard the voices of several approaching soldiers. . . . They were going to settle accounts with us, collect what we owed them for having tried to escape. . . . They were armed with thick twisted electric cables and truncheons. . . . Suddenly, everything was a whirl – my head spun around in terrible vertigo. They beat me as I lay on the floor. One of them pulled at my arm to turn me over and expose my back so he could beat me more easily. And the cables fell more directly on me. The beating felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then suddenly I experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.''
That treatment was typical. In the punishment cells, prisoners were kept in total darkness. Guards dumped buckets of urine and feces over the prisoners who warded off rats and roaches as they tried to sleep. Fungus grew on Mr. Valladares because he was not allowed to wash off the filth. Sleep was impossible. Guards constantly awoke the men with long poles to insure they got no rest. Illness and disease were a constant. Even at the end, when the authorities were approving his release, Mr. Valladares was held in solitary confinement in a barren room with fluorescent lights turned on 24 hours a day. By then he was partially paralyzed through malnutrition intensified by the lack of medical attention.
B. What explains the depth and ferocity of this evil-doing for which Communists, but not just them, are notorious? If you wrong me, I may wrong you back in proportional fashion to 'even the score' and 'give you a taste of your own medicine.' That's entirely understandable in naturalistic terms. You punch me, I punch you back, and now it's over. We're even. That may not be Christian behavior, but it's human behavior. But let's say you steal my guitar and I respond by microwaving your cat, raping your daughter, murdering your wife, and burning your house down. What explains the lack of proportionality? What explains the insane, murderous, inner rage in people, even in people who don't act on it? What turns ordinary Cubans into devils when they are given absolute power over fellow Cubans? There is something demonic at work here, not something merely animalic.
Can I prove that? Of course not. But neither can you prove the opposite.
Homo homini lupus does not capture the phenomenon. And it is an insult to the wolves to boot who are by (fallen) nature condemned to predation. Man is not a wolf to man, but a demon to man. No bestial man is merely bestial; he is beneath bestial in that he has freely chosen to degrade himself. His bestiality is spiritual. Only a spiritual being, a being possessing free will, can so degrade himself. Degrading themselves, the torturers then degrade their victims.
Now, dear reader, look deep into your own heart and see if there is any rage and hate there. And try to be honest about it. Is there a good naturalistic explanation for that cesspool of corruption in your own heart, when you have had, on balance, a good life? What explains the intensity and depth of the evil you find there and in Castro's henchmen, not to mention Stalin's, et al. What explains this bottomless, raging hate?
As a sort of inference to the best explanation we can say that moral evil in its extreme manifestations has a supernatural source. It cannot be explained adequately in naturalistic terms. There is an Evil Principle (and Principal) the positing of which is reasonable. The undeniable reality of evil has a metaphysical ground. Call it Satan or whatever you like.
C. It is plausible, then, to posit an Evil Principle to explain the full range and depth and depravity of moral evil. But Manicheanism is a non-starter. Good and Evil are not co-equal principles. Good is primary, Evil secondary and derivative. It cannot exist without Good. The doctrine that evil is privatio boni, a lack of good, does not explain the positive character of evil. But if there is an Evil One as the source of evil, then the positivity of evil can be charged to the Evil One's account. The positivity consists in the existence of the Evil One and his will; the privation in the Evil One's malevolent misuse of his free will. Satan is good insofar as he is: ens et bonum convertuntur. He is the ultimate source of evil in that his exercise of free will is malevolent.
D. If the existence of evil presupposes the existence of good, and evil exists in its prime instance as as an Evil Person, then good exists in its prime instance as God.
This sketch of an argument can be presented in a rigorous form with all the argumentative gaps plugged. But even then it won't be rationally compelling. No naturalist will accept the premise that there are some evils which require a supernatural explanation. He will hold to his naturalism come hell or high water and never give it up no matter how lame his particular explanations are. His attitude will be: there just has to be a naturalist/materialist explanation.
And so I say what I have said many times before. In the end, you must decide what you will believe about these ultimate matters, and how you will live. There are no knock-down arguments to guide you. And yet you ought to be able to give a rational account of what you believe and why. Hence the utility of the above sort of argument. It is not for convincing atheists but for articulating the views of theists.
Addendum (1/24). Paulo Juarez comments,
I just read your article regarding the Holocaust argument for the existence of God. It was gut-wrenching, as it was convincing in my eyes.
One line of argument worth considering (one that I sketch here) is that, on the supposition that the problem of evil is sound, and God does not exist, then presumably justice falls to us and no one else. But there is a disproportion between the justice we are able to administer, and the kind of justice everyone in their heart of hearts desires: justice for every person to ever live and to ever have lived [every person who will ever live and who has ever lived]. This desire for justice, unconditioned and absolute, can only be met if God exists, and so the very argument that is supposed to show an incompatibility between God and the existence of evil (particularly horrendous evils) fails to take into account that only if God exists, can there possibly be justice for the sufferer of evils (especially horrendous evils).
From there one could argue, either a) that our desire for justice unconditioned and absolute (call it 'cosmic justice') must have a corresponding object (God), or b) you could take a Pascalian route similar to the one we discussed last week.
Of course, an atheist could bite the bullet and say that there just are unredeemed and unredeemable evils. But then a different argument of mine kicks is, one that questions how an atheist could reasonablly affirm life as worth living given the fact of evil. See A Problem of Evil for Atheists.
. . . there is no substantive philosophical position for which there is *better* philosophical support than theism. I'm open to the possibility that at least one other philosophical position–namely, dualism–is at least as well supported by philosophical argument as theism. But nothing's got better support.
[. . .]
That said, I find St. Thomas's second way indubitable. I also find the modal ontological argument compelling. The kalam cosmological argument seems pretty much irrefutable.
In another comment in the same thread, Toner writes,
But we still do (or can) know God and the soul with certainty through the use of natural human reason. (emphasis added)
What interests me in this entry is Toner's explicit claim that the modal ontological argument is (rationally) compelling, and his implicit claim that this argument delivers (objectively) certain knowledge of the existence of God. While I consider the argument in question to be a good argument, I don't find it to be compelling. Nor do I think that it renders its conclusion certain. My view is that no argument for or against theism is rationally compelling. No such argument resolves the issue. I think it would be wonderful if there were a compelling argument for the existence of God. The metaphysical knowledge generated by such an argument would be the most precious knowledge that one could possess. So I would be much beholden to Toner if he could show me the error of my ways.
Perhaps there is a theistic argument that is rationally compelling. If there is I should like to know what it is. I am quite sure, however, that the following argument does not fill the bill.
A Modal Ontological Argument
'GCB' will abbreviate 'greatest conceivable being,' which is a rendering of Anselm of Canterbury's "that than which no greater can be conceived." 'World' abbreviates 'broadly logically possible world.' 'OA' abbreviate 'ontological argument.'
1. Either the concept of the GCB is instantiated in every world or it is instantiated in no world.
2. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in some world. Therefore:
3. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in every world. (1, 2 by Disjunctive Syllogism)
4. The actual world is one of the worlds. Therefore:
5. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in the actual world. (3, 4 ) Therefore:
6. The GCB exists. (5)
This is a valid argument: it is correct in point of logical form. Nor does it commit any informal fallacy such as petitio principii, as I argue in Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110. Note also that this version of the OA does not require the controversial assumption that existence is a first-level property, an assumption that Frege famously rejects and that many read back (with some justification) into Kant. (Frege held that the OA falls with that assumption, cf. Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, sec. 53; he was wrong: the above version is immune to the Kant-Frege objection.)
(1) expresses what I call Anselm's Insight. He appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be noncontingent, i.e., either necessary or impossible. I consider (1) nonnegotiable. If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. There is no god but God. God is an absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is contingent. End of discussion. (If, however, (1) is reasonably disputable, then this only strengthens my case against compellingness.)
It is premise (2) — the key premise — that ought to raise eyebrows. What it says — translating out of the patois of possible worlds — is that it it possible that the GCB exists.
Whereas conceptual analysis of 'greatest conceivable being' suffices in support of (1), how do we support (2)? Why should we accept it? How do we know that (2) is true? Some will say that the conceivability of the GCB entails its possibility. But I deny that conceivability entails possibility.
Conceivability Does not Entail Possibility
The question is whether conceivability by finite minds like ours entails real possibility. A real possibility is one that has a mind-independent status. Real possibilities are not parasitic upon ignorance or on our (measly) powers of conception. Thus they contrast with epistemic/doxastic possibilities. Since what is epistemically possible for a person might be really impossible (whether broadly-logically or nomologically), we should note that 'epistemic' in 'epistemically possible' is an alienans adjective: it functions like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.' Ducks don't come in two kinds, real and decoy. Similarly, there are not two kinds of possibility, epistemic and real. To say that a state of affairs is epistemically/doxastically possible for a subject S is to say that the obtaining of the state of affairs is logically compatible with what S knows/believes. For example, is it possible that my State Farm insurance agent Tim be working his office during normal business hours today ? Yes, epistemically: it is not ruled out by anything I know. But if Tim unbeknownst to me 'bought the farm' last night, then it is not really possible that Tim be working in his office today.
By 'conceivability' I mean thinkability by us without apparent logical contradiction.
First Argument
Why should the fact that a human being can conceive something without apparent logical contradiction show that the thing in question can exist in reality? Consider the FBI: the floating bar of iron. If my thought about the FBI is sufficiently abstract and indeterminate, then it will seem that there is no 'bar' to its possibility in reality. (Pun intended.) If I think the FBI as an object that has the phenomenal properties of iron but also floats, then those properties are combinable in my thought without contradiction. But if I know more about iron, including its specific gravity, and I import this information into my concept of iron, then the concept of the FBI will harbor a contradiction. The specific gravity of iron is 7850 kg/cu.m, which implies that it is 7.85 times more dense than water, which in turn means that it will sink in water.
The upshot is that conceivability without contradiction is no sure guide to (real) possibility. Conceivability does not entail possibility.
Second Argument
Both the existence and the nonexistence of God are conceivable, i.e., thinkable by us without apparent logical contradiction. So if conceivability entails possibility, then both the existence and the nonexistence of God are possible. If so, God is a contingent being. But this contradicts the Anselmian Insight according to which God is noncontingent. So if the Anselmian Insight is true, then conceivability-entails-possibility is false and cannot be used to support premise (2) of the modal OA. The argument can be put in the form of a reductio:
a. Conceivability entails possibility. (assumption for reductio)
b. It is conceivable that God not exist. (factual premise)
c. It is conceivable that God exist. (factual premise)
d. God is a noncontingent being. (true by Anselmian definition)
Ergo
e. It is possible that God not exist and it is possible that God exist. (a, b, c)
Ergo
f. God is a contingent being. (e, by definition of 'contingent being')
Ergo
g. God is a noncontingent being and God is a contingent being. (d, f, contradiction)
Ergo
~a. It is not the case that conceivability entails possibility. (a-g, by reductio ad absurdum)
Or, if you insist that conceivability entails possibility, then you must give up the Anselmian Insight. But the modal OA stands and falls with Anselmian insight.
Is Conceivability Nondemonstrative Evidence of Possibility?
We don't need to discuss this in any depth. Suppose it is. This won't help Toner's case. For if it is not certain, but only probable that (2) is true, then this lack of certainty will be transmitted to the conclusion, which will be, at most, probable but not certain. In that case, the argument will not be compelling. I take it that an argument is compelling if and only if it renders its conclusion objectively certain.
Are There Other Ways to Support the Possibility Premise?
I can think of one other way. It has been suggested that the possibility premise can be supported deontically:
A. A maximally perfect being ought to exist. B. Whatever ought to exist, is possible. Therefore C. A maximally perfect being is possible.
I discuss this intriguing suggestion in a separate post wherein I come to the conclusion that the deontically supercharged modal OA is also not compelling.
What is it for an Argument to be Compelling?
My claim on the present occasion is that the modal OA provides no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism. Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration. A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:
1. It is deductive 2. It is valid in point of logical form 3. It is free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii 4. It is such that all its premises are true 5. It is such that all its premises are known to be true 6. It is such that its conclusion is relevant to its premises.
To illustrate (6). The following argument satisfies all of the conditions except the last and is therefore probatively worthless:
Snow is white ergo Either Obama is president or he is not.
On my use of terms, a demonstrative argument = a probative argument = a proof = a rationally compelling argument. Now clearly there are good arguments (of different sorts) that are not demonstrative, probative, rationally compelling. One type is the strong inductive argument. By definition, no such argument satisfies (1) or (2). A second type is the argument that satisfies all the conditions except (5).
And that is the problem with the modal OA. Condition (5) remains unsatisfied. While the possibility premise may be true for all we know, we do not know it to be true. So while the modal OA is a good argument in that it helps render theism rational, it is not a compelling argument.
