Category: God

God and the ‘No Angry Unicorn’ Argument

This from an astute reader commenting on the Hell post:

'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon'

Does this not refer to doxastic uncertainty rather than a fatuous equation of God with something material? This is how I interpreted it when I read it. More in the vein of: why venerate something tenuous in lieu of a Lucretian reality? Not a profound solution by any means, but an almost noble one if lived humbly– not sensually. Although , I suppose this is an agnostic take on the phrase. ( I've been reading too much of Montaigne!)

Thanks for exposing me to Henryk Gorecki . Do you know of Arvo Part?

I love Arvo Part, and Montaigne too.  But onto the issue you raise. To quote Cactus Ed himself, "Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?"

Angry unicorn Now it would be foolish to try to discern in the scribblings of Ed Abbey anything very clear or precise or carefully thought-through.  But it seems clear to me that Abbey is likening God to an intramundane object much as Bertrand Russell likened him to a celestial teapot.  In so doing, both demonstrate a profound ignorance of what sophisticated theists mean by 'God.'  They are not talking about a being among beings, let alone a material being among beings. (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens, et cetera.)  But you focus on the epistemic side, with justification, as the quotation shows. 

Accordingly, Abbey is suggesting that, regardless of the nature of God, the evidence of his existence is no better than the evidence of the existence of an irate lunar unicorn, a lunicorn if you will.   

But please note that questions about the evidence for something are connected to questions about the nature of that something.  The existence of a lunicorn would be strongly disconfirmed were a a bunch of lunar modules to fail to detect the presence of any such critter.  But no number of space probes could disconfirm the existence of God.  Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was surely talking nonsense when he reported that he saw no God during his famous suborbital flight.  The empirical undetectability of God no more tells against his existence than the empirical undetectability of the square root of pi tells against its existence. 

So while Abbey's remarks do have an epistemological flavor, they cannot be divorced from their metaphysical import.

But there is also an axiological side to it, which may be even more important.  Abbey is implying that it doesn't much matter whether God exists or not.  He could have added 'Who cares?' after 'Who knows?' to his list of questions.  After all, it is of no great moment whether there are any lunicorns or celestial teapots out there.  My happiness cannot hang on that.  The meaning of life does not stand or fall with the existence or nonexistence of such things. 

Abbey's aphorism sums up the atheist attitude quite well.  Does God exist?  Who cares? Who cares whether there is some weird extra object in the ontological inventory?  And how would you know anyway?  "Bartender, another round!"

The Problem of Evil and the Argument from Evil

(A reader found the following post, from the old PowerBlogs site, useful.  So I repost it here with minor modifications and additions.)

It is important to distinguish between the problem of evil and the argument from evil. The first is the problem of reconciling the existence of God, as traditionally understood, with the existence of natural and moral evils.  As J. L. Mackie points out, this "is essentially a logical problem: it sets the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling the several beliefs which he holds." (The Miracle of Theism, Oxford 1982, p. 150) Mackie goes on to point out that "the problem in this sense signally does not arise for those whose views of the world are markedly different from traditional theism." Thus the theist's problem of evil does not arise for an atheist. It might, however, be the case that some other problem of evil arises for the atheist, say, the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with life's being worth living.   But that is a separate matter.

The argument from evil, on the other hand, is an attempt to show the nonexistence of God from the fact of evil, where 'fact of evil' is elliptical for 'the existence of natural and moral evils.'

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL

The main difference between the problem of evil and the argument from evil is that the former is an ad hominem argument whereas the second is not. I am using ad hominem in the way Peter Geach uses it on pp. 26-27 of his Reason and Argument (Basil Blackwell 1976):

This Latin term indicates that these are arguments addressed to a particular man — in fact, the other fellow you are disputing with. You start from something he believes as a premise, and infer a conclusion he won't admit to be true. If you have not been cheating in your reasoning, you will have shown that your opponent's present body of beliefs is inconsistent and it's up to him to modify it somewhere.

As Geach points out, there is nothing fallacious about such an argumentative  procedure. If A succeeds in showing B that his doxastic system harbors a contradiction, then not everything that B believes can be true. Now can an atheist prove the nonexistence of God in this way? No he cannot: at the very most he can prove (with the aid of various auxiliary premises that he and his interlocutor both accept) that God exists and Evil exists cannot both be true. But it does not follow therefrom that God exists is not true. For the atheist to transform the ad hominem problem of evil into a non-ad hominem argument from evil, he would have to establish, or at least assert, that evil exists, and not merely that the theist believes that evil exists. To see my point consider the following conditional, where P is the conjunction of auxiliary premises:

C. If evil exists & P, then God does not exist.

The atheist who raises the problem of evil for the theist asserts (C), or rather a proposition of that form. But to assert a conditional is not to assert its antecedent, or its consequent for that matter; it is to assert a entailment connection between the two. Now although it is the case that for each argument there is a corresponding conditional, and vice versa, arguments must not be confused with conditionals.

Transforming (C) into an argument from evil yields:

Evil Exists

P

Therefore

God does not exist.

Clearly, an atheist who gives this argument, or rather an argument of this form, must assert both premises. Doing so, he ceases his ad hominem examination of the consistency of another person's beliefs, beliefs he either rejects or takes no stand on, and 'comes clean' with his own beliefs.

THE ARGUER FROM EVIL NEEDS TO AFFIRM OBJECTIVE EVIL

If the atheist's aim is merely to poke holes in the logical consistency of the theist's belief-set, then it doesn't matter whether he thinks of evil as objective or subjective. Indeed, he needn't believe in evil in any sense. He could hold that it is an illusion. But if the atheist's goal is to support his own belief that God does not exist with an argument from evil, then he needs to maintain that evil is objective or objectively real.

Consider all the enslavement of humans by humans that has taken place in the history of the world. Suppose it is agreed that slavery is morally wrong. What makes this true? Define a moral subjectivist as one who agrees that the claim in question is true, but holds that the truth-maker of this moral truth, and of others like it, is an individual's being in a psychological state, say, the state of being repulsed by slavery. For the moral subjectivist, then, sentences like 'Slavery is wrong' are elliptical for sentences like 'Slavery is wrong-for-X,' where X is a person or any being capable of being in psychological states. Furthermore, the moral subjectivist grants that moral claims have truth-makers, indeed objective truth-makers; it is just that these truth-makers involve psychological states that vary from person to person.

Now if our atheist subscribes to a theory of evil along those lines, then, although there will be objective facts of the matter regarding what various individuals feel about the practice or the institution of slavery, there will be no objective fact of the matter regarding the wrongness or moral evil of slavery.

If so, the fact of evil subjectively construed will have no bearing on the existence of God, a fact, if it a fact, that is objective.

Suppose a torturer tortures his victim to death solely for the satisfaction it gives him. And suppose that moral subjectivism is true. Then the torturing, though evil for the tortured, is good for the torturer, with the upshot that the torturing is neither good nor evil objectively. Now if I were on the scene and had the power to stop the torturing, but did not, would my noninterference detract from my moral goodness? Not at all. (The same goes a fortiori for God.) For nothing objectively evil is transpiring: all that is going on is that one person is securing his pleasure at the expense of another's pain. If you insist that something evil is going on, then that shows that you reject moral subjectivism. But if you accept moral subjectivism, then nothing evil is going on; the torturing is evil only in the mind of the victim and in the minds of any others who sympathize with him. If you accept moral subjectivism and continue to insist that the torturing is evil, then you would also have to insist that it is good, since it is good from the perspective of the torturer. But if it is both good and evil, then it is (objectively) neither.

What I am claiming, then, is that the atheist arguer from evil must construe evil objectively. This will result in trouble for the atheist if it can be shown that objective evil cannot exist unless God exists. For then the atheist arguer from evil will end up presupposing the very being whose existence he is out to deny. No doubt this is a big 'if.' But it is worth exploring.  The problem for the atheist is to explain how there can be objective good and evil in a Godless universe. 

And another line worth exploring is a theistic argument to God from the fact of objective good and evil.  No such argument could PROVE the existence of God, but it could very well have the power of cancelling out the argument from evil.

A Modal Ontological Argument and an Argument from Evil Compared

After leaving the polling place this morning, I headed out on a sunrise hike over the local hills whereupon the muse of philosophy bestowed upon me some good thoughts.  Suppose we compare a modal ontological argument with an argument from evil in respect of the question of evidential support for the key premise in each.  This post continues our ruminations on the topic of contingent support for noncontingent propositions.

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.'

1. The concept of the GCB is either 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.

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; he was wrong: the above version is immune to the Kant-Frege objection.)

(1) expresses what I will 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.  End of discussion.  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?  Some will say that the conceivability of the GCB entails its possibility.  But I deny that conceivability entails possibility.  I won't argue that now, though I do say something about conceivability here.  Suppose you grant me that conceivability does not entail BL-possibility.  You might retreat to this claim:  It may not entail it, but it is evidence for it:  the fact that we can conceive of a state of affairs S is defeasible evidence of S's possibility.

Please note that Possibly the GCB exists — which is logically equivalent to (2) — is necessarily true if true.  This is a consequence of the characteristic S5 axiom of modal propositional logic:  Poss p –> Nec Poss p. ('Characteristic' in the sense that it  is what distinguishes S5 from S4 which is included in S5.)  So if the only support for (2) is probabilistic or evidential, then we have the puzzle we encountered earlier: how can there be probabilistic support for a noncontingent proposition?  But now the same problem arises on the atheist side.

An Argument From Evil

4. If the concept of the GCB is instantiated, then there are no gratuitous evils.

5. There are some gratuitous evils. Therefore:

6. The concept of the GCB is not instantiated.

This too is a deductive argument, and it is valid.  It falls afoul of no informal fallacy.  (4), like (1), is nonnegotiable.  Deny it, and I show you the door.  The key premise, then, the one on which the soundness of the argument rides, is (5).  (5) is not obviously true.  Even if it is obviously true that there are evils, it is not obviously true that there are gratuitous evils. 

In fact, one might argue that the argument begs the question against the theist at line (5).  For if there are any gratuitous evils, then by definition of 'gratuitous' God cannot exist.  But I won't push this in light of the fact that in print I have resisted the claim that the modal OA begs the question at its key premise, (2) above.

So how do we know that (5) is true?  Not by conceptual analysis. If we assume, uncontroversially, that there are some evils, then the following logical equivalence holds:

7. Necessarily, there are some gratuitous evils iff the GCB does not exist.

Left-to-right is obvious: if there are gratuitous evils, ones for which there is no justification, then a being having the standard omni-attributes cannot exist.  Right-to-left:  if there is no GCB and there are some evils, then there are some gratuitous evils.  (On second thought, R-to-L may not hold, but I don't need it anyway.)

Now the RHS, if true, is necessarily true, which implies that the LHS — There are some gratuitious evils — is necessarily true if true. 

Can we argue for the LHS =(5)?  Perhaps one could argue like this (as one commenter suggested in an earlier thread):  If the evils are nongratuitous, then probably we would have conceived of justifying reasons for them.  But we cannot conceive of justifying reasons.  Therefore, probably there are gratuitous evils.

But now we face our old puzzle: How can the probability of there being gratuitous evils show that there are gratuitous evils given that There are gratuitous evils, if true, is necessarily true?

Conclusion

We face the same problem with both arguments, the modal OA for the existence of the GCB, and the argument from evil for the nonexistence of the GCB.  The key premises in both arguments — (2) and (5) — are necessarily true if true.  The only support for them is evidential from contingent facts.  But then we are back with our old puzzle:  How can contingent evidence support noncontingent propositions? 

Neither argument is probative and they appear to cancel each other out.  Sextus Empiricus would be proud of me.

God, Possibility, and Evidential Support for Non-Contingent Propositions

Mike Valle gave a presentation yesterday before the ASU philosophy club on the skeptical theist response to the evidential argument from evil.  A good discussion ensued among Guleserian, Nemes, Lupu, Reppert, Valle, Vallicella, et al.  Peter Lupu made a comment that stuck in my mind and that I thought about some more this morning.  For what puzzles him puzzles me as well.  It may be that we are both just confused.

1. Let us assume that our concept of God is the concept of a being that has a certain modal property, the property of being such that, if existent, then necessarily existent, and if nonexistent, then necessarily nonexistent. Call this the Anselmian conception of deity.  It follows that God exists, if true, is necessarily true, and if false, necessarily false.  Simply put, the proposition in question is either necessary or impossible, and thus necessarily noncontingent.

2. Peter's question, I take it, was: how can such a noncontingent proposition have its probability either raised or lowered by any empirical consideration?  In particular, how can considerations about the kinds and amounts of natural and moral evil in the world lower the probability of God exists?  If true,then necessarily true; if false, then necessarily false.  Peter's sense — and I share it — is that evidential considerations are simply irrelevant to the probability of noncontingent propositions.

3. The problem — if it is one — arises in other contexts as well.  I once argued that conceivability does not entail (broadly logical) possibility.  I got the response that, though this is true, conceivability of p raises the probability of p's being possible. That is not clear to me.  Assuming the modal system S5, if p is possible then necessarily p is possible, and if p is necessary, then necessarily p is necessary. (The possible and the necessary do not vary from world to world.)

I happen to think that S5 caters quite well to our modal intuitions.  Assume it does.  Then It is possible that there be a talking donkey is necessarily true, if true.  If so, how can the fact that I (or anyone or all of us) can conceive of a talking donkey raise the probability of the proposition in question?

4. Reppert made a comment in response to Lupu about the probability being epistemic in nature.  I didn't follow it.  If p is noncontingent, and we are concerned with the probability of p's being true, and if truth is not an epistemic property (i.e., a property reducible to some such epistemic property as rational acceptability), then I don't see how evidential considerations are relevant.

The ComBox is open if Victor or Peter want to add to their remarks. 

 

 

On Praying for Christopher Hitchens

There is something strange, and perhaps even incoherent, about praying for Christopher Hitchens if the prayers are not for his recovery or for his courageous acceptance of death, but for conversion or a change of heart.  Let's think about it.

I do not play the lottery; I have good reasons for not playing it; I have no desire to win it, and I believe that I would be worse off if I were to win it.  Suppose you know these facts about me, but say to me nonetheless, "I am praying that you win the lottery," or "I hope you win the lottery."  Surely there is something strange about praying or hoping that I get something that I don't want and that I believe would make me worse off were I to get it. But beyond strange, it may even be incoherent.  Given that I do not play the lottery, there is no way I can win it; so if you hope or pray that I win it, then you are hoping or praying for the impossible.  Of course, you could hope or pray that I start playing.

Hitch does not want salvation of his soul via divine agency, and he has reasons that seem good to him for denying that there is such a thing.  And he presumably believes (though I am speculating here) that survival of bodily death and entry into the divine milieu would not be desirable.    For one thing, his brilliance would be outshone by a greater Brilliance which would be unbearable for someone with the pride of Lucifer, the pride of the light bearer.  It may also be that he believes, as many atheists and mortalists do, that the meaning of life here below, far from requiring a protraction into an afterlife, is positively inconsistent with such an extension.  "How boring and meaningless eternity would be, especially without booze and cigarettes and (sexual intercourse with) women!"

Hitch has lived his life as if God and the soul are childish fictions.  As a result, he has done none of the things that might earn him him immortality and fellowship with God, even assuming he wanted them.  This suggests that it is not just strange, but incoherent to pray for Hitch's metanoia.  For that would be like praying that he win the lottery without playing, without doing the things necessary to win it.

If a merciful God exists, then he should do the merciful thing and simply give Hitch what he wants and expects, namely annihilation.  Either that, or assign him another go-round, or series of go-rounds, on the wheel of samsara until such time as he is ready to accept the divine offer of everlasting life.

As for the prayer day in his honor, Hitch won't be attending.

 

On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit

This post examines Richard C. Potter's solution to the problem of reconciling creatio ex nihilo with ex nihilo nihil fit in his valuable article, "How To Create a Physical Universe Ex Nihilo," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1, (January 1986), pp. 16-26. (Potter appears to have dropped out of sight, philosophically speaking, so if anyone knows what became of him, please let me know. The Philosopher's Index shows only three articles by him, the last of which appeared in 1986.)

I. THE PROBLEM

We first need to get clear about the problem. On classical conceptions, God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.  He is not a Platonic demiurge who operates upon some preexistent stuff: he creates without it being the case that there is something out of which he creates.  Nor does God create out of himself, a notion that presumbaly would give aid and comfort to pantheism.  God creates out of nothing.  Given that God creates out of nothing, how is this consistent with the apparent truth that something cannot come from nothing? The latter, the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit, seems to be an intuitively self-evident metaphysically necessary truth. Let us assume that it is.   As metaphysically necessary, it is not a truth over which God has any control. Its truth-value is not within the purview of the divine will.  Our problem is to understand, if possible, how it can be true both that God creates out of nothing, and that out of nothing nothing comes.  Potter offers an ingenious solution.

Ex nihilo nihil fit is interpreted by Potter in terms of the following Principle of Creation by Compounding:

PCC. For any object O and time t, if O comes into being at t, then there exist some objects out of which O is composed and those objects existed prior to t.

Potter sees the problem as one of reconciling (PCC) with the following principle:

ENP. God created contingent objects in such a way that there was a time t1 at which contingent objects came into being, although there was no time prior to t1.

On the face of it, (PCC) and (ENP) are logically inconsistent.

Continue reading “On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit“

Gutting, Dawkins, and Russell’s Celestial Teapot

In his recent NYT Opinionator piece, On Dawkins's Atheism, Notre Dame's Gary Gutting writes, describing the "no arguments argument" of some atheists:

To say that the universe was created by a good and powerful being who cares about us is an extraordinary claim, so improbable to begin with that we surely should deny it unless there are decisive arguments for it (arguments showing that it is highly probable). Even if Dawkins’ arguments against theism are faulty, can’t he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God’s existence?

He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God’s existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell’s example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.

But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.

The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable to atheism.

I have a serious problem with Gutting's response to the Russell-Dawkins tag team.  Gutting concedes far too much in his reply, namely, that it even makes sense to compare the claim that there is an orbiting teapot with the claim that God exists.  Instead of attacking this comparison as wrongheaded from the outset, Gutting in effect concedes its aptness when he points out that, just as there could be (inconclusive) scientific evidence of a celestial teaspot, there could be (inconclusive) experiential and argumentative evidence for the existence of God.  So let me try to explain why I think that the two existence claims ('God exists' and 'A celestial teapot exists') are radically different .

Continue reading “Gutting, Dawkins, and Russell’s Celestial Teapot”

Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity

This is a slightly redacted version of a piece first posted on 18 September 2006 at the old PowerBlogs site.  I repost it not only to save it for my files, but also because it it important to remember not only the successful and unsuccessful acts of Islamist terrorism worldwide, but also the many incidents which betray the illiberal and anti-Enlightenment values of our Islamist opponents (e.g., the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoon 'caper,' etc. etc. The analog to the fatwa would be the Pope putting a price on the head of Andres Serrano, the 'artist' famous notorious for his 'Piss Christ.') 

……………

People need to face the fact that Western civilization is under serious threat from militant Islamic fanaticism. (And it may be coming to a theater near you.) Yet another recent indication of the threat is the unreasoning umbrage taken by many in the Islamic world over a mere  QUOTATION Pope Benedict XVI employs in his address at the University of Regensburg entitled, "The Best of Greek Thought is an Integral Part of Christian Faith."

Benedict's talk is only tangentially about Islam; it is primarily about the role of reason in the posing and answering of the God question, and about whether Christianity should be dehellenized. The Pope begins by mentioning a dialogue "by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both." Then comes the 'offending' passage (bolding added):

Continue reading “Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity”

“Some of Us Just Go One God Further”

I've seen this 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 the gang 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 idea, then, is that all candidates for deity are in the same logical boat. 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.

That is the atheist's deepest conviction.  It seems so obvious to him that he cannot begin to genuinely doubt it, nor can he understand how anyone could genuinely believe the opposite.  But why assume that there is nothing 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 certain amount 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.

Companion post:  Russell's Teapot: Does It Hold Water?

Freud or James? Wish-Fulfillment or Inducement to Strenuous Living?

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), The Future of an Illusion:

It would indeed be very nice if there were a God, who was both creator of the world and a benevolent providence, if there were a moral world order and a future life. But at the same time it is
very odd that this is all just as we should wish it for ourselves.

William James (1842-1910), "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life":

The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.

Both of these passages support the view that God is a posit, a postulate, a projection. But there is a striking difference. Freud, seeing the origin of the God-projection in weakness, takes this as
discrediting the God-idea. Having its genesis in our neediness, the God-idea is false or at least unworthy of belief. James, however, viewing the God-idea as an expression of our robustness, takes this fact as a verification of the idea of God.

Of course, there are two different notions of truth in play. I don't know whether Freud ever discussed theories of truth, but I'd guess he is a correspondence-theorist: an idea is true if it corresponds to reality. But James is a pragmatist: an idea is true if it works, if it is something good for us to believe in the long run. For James, we get more out of the game of existence when we believe in God and all that entails: a moral world order that places an ethical demand on us; an ultimate explanation of why anything exists and why we exist; a final guarantor of the veridicality of our ideas; a provider of sense and purpose; a repository of hope; a securer of immortality and adjustor of happiness and virtue.  Believing in God, we live better, richer, fuller lives; we wring from existence its  "keenest possibilities of zest."

To resolve the debate between Freud and James one would have to get clear about the nature of truth and its connection to human flourishing. The problems are deep and perhaps insoluble. But that doesn't stop them from being fascinating and worth pursuing. And we don't know they are insoluble. If we believe that they are soluble, that truth about ultimates is attainable, and we strive for it, then too we will wring from "the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest."

Companion post:  Freud on Illusion, Delusion, Error, and Religion

And Yet Again on the God of the Philosophers: A Summing Up

This topic is generating some interest.  I 've gotten a good bit of e-mail on it.   Herewith, a summing-up by way of commentary on an e-mail I received.  Joshua Orsak writes:

I wanted to email you to tell you how once again you have elevated the medium of the Internet blog with your recent threads on "The God of the Philosophers" and "The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob". As a minister, a person interested in  mystical experience, AND with a keen interest and even passion for philosophy, I have always found myself perplexed why we have to bifurcate our heart-based and mind-based encounter with the world like that. Personally, I've always thought of philosophy (of religion) and religion as encountering the same Divine reality in different ways. In philosophy we study God as an object, in religion we encounter Him as a subject.

Continue reading “And Yet Again on the God of the Philosophers: A Summing Up”

Robert Oakes Weighs in on the God of the Philosophers

I got a phone call from philosopher of religion Robert Oakes yesterday.  In the course of a lengthy chat, I mentioned my recent post on Pascal and Buber and asked him what he thought of it.  Today I received the following from him by e-mail:

Very good to talk with you.  Short comment on that El Stupido notion of Buber-Pascal. The idea, presumably, is that the God of  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob  is a proper object of worship, while the God of the Philosophers is  a bloodless abstraction. But, of course, God (for the philosophical  theist) is that than which a greater is metaphysically impossible. So: is a being Who is worthy of worship greater (ceteris paribus) than one who is not? Of course. End of issue, No?

An admirable instance of  pithiness.  Bob's argument could be extended as follows.  A quintessentially philosophical definition of 'God' is the one that derives from Anselm of Canterbury:  God is that than which no greater can be conceived.  Borrowing the phrase 'great-making property' from Plantinga, we can say that God instantiates all great-making properties.  Now being worthy of worship is a great-making property. Because no concept, idea, or abstraction is worthy of worship, it follows from the philosophical definition alone, without appeal to any (putative) revelation or anything from religion, that the God of the philosophers cannot be a concept, idea, or abstraction. 

But not only that.  It also follows from the Anselmian definition that nothing short of a worship-worthy being could be God.  So a First Cause could not count as God for a philosophical theist who operates with the concept of God  in Judeo-Christian monotheism.  Within this tradition the God of philosophy is not different from the God of  religion.  It is the same God, but approached via discursive reason rather than via  faith in revelation.

 

Still More on the God of the Philosophers Versus the God of Abraham, et al.

Ken e-mails and I respond in blue:

I turn on my computer and check out the Maverick Philosopher and suddenly half of my day is shot. First I have to look up the word 'pellucidity' and then I am stuck trying to figure out why your claim about the phrases 'God-P' and 'God-R' does not seem right to me.

It sounds like I'm doing something right!  You can look up a word without getting out of your chair.  Here's a tip that you may already be aware of:  type 'define: pellucidity' (without the inverted commas) into the Google search box and you will get a page of definitions, some of them from reputable sources.  (I don't consider Wikipedia a particularly reputable source.) Needless to say, this works for almost any word inserted after the colon and not just for 'pellucidity'!

I agree that the sentence [from Martin Buber], "What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea," is false but to state that that 'God-P' and 'God-R' have the same referent, if they have a referent, seems false to me as it carries an assumption of the monotheism of the 'God-R' that may not be present in 'God-P.' The idea that there is and can only be one God is one that does not have to be accepted in 'God-P' and I do not believe that it would be possible, except by defining 'God-P' ='God-R', for 'God-P' and 'God-R' to always have the same referent. Maybe you can point out where I am wrong and what I missed.

Well, every discussion occurs within a context, a context  which cannot be ignored or set aside, since the very meaning of the terms of the debate is influenced by the context.  The present immediate context is Pascal's exclamation, "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars"  and Buber's comment thereon.  The Pascalian exclamation and the Buberian comment themselves fit  into a wider context, Judeo-Christian monotheism.  The question before us  is whether, within this Judeo-Christian monotheistic context, there is any merit to the notion that what philosophers qua philosophers talk about and argue for and against is numerically different from what religionists qua religionists talk about and try to relate themselves to. My answer is plain from my earlier posts: this notion has no merit whatsoever.

Your suggestion seems to be that the God(s) of the philosophers needn't be one, but could be many, even if the God of the religionists must be one.  My answer to you is very simple:  in the precise context I have specified, namely, the context of Judeo-Christian monotheism, both the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is one.  Polytheism is simply not a Jamesian live option within this tradition and certainly  was not for Pascal and Buber whose utterances provide the immediate context of my remarks.

Of course, there is nothing to stop you or anyone from shifting the context.  Philosophers are free to make a case for polytheism if they care to.   Within the community of polytheists, the question could arise whether the gods of the philosophers (the gods the polytheistic philosophers argue for) are the same as the gods of the religionists (the gods the polytheistic religionists invoke in prayer, etc.)  But that question is not my question.

Note that I am not merely stipulating that 'God-R' and 'God-P' have the same reference.  That would be arbitrary and unmotivated.  What I am doing is unpacking the concept of God what we already have and work with in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  My point is that within this tradition, pace Pascal and Buber and many others, it makes no sense to imagine that what the philosophers are talking about when they talk about God is numerically different from what the religionists talk about when they talk about God.

Finally, none of my discussion presupposes the existence of God.  As I said, I am unpacking the concept of God, and this concept is what it is whether or not it is instantiated.

More on the God of the Philosophers

Spencer Case, 'on the ground' in Afghanistan, e-mails:

Your recent post discussing the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham and Isaac caught my interest. Having grown up in a religious home, I have always been of the opinion that arguments for theism argue for something different than what believers take themselves to believe in. After all, how many religious people take themselves to be praying to an unmoved mover or a-being-greater-than-which-cannot-be-conceived? For this reason, I have not felt that my atheism could be threatened by any of the arguments for theism, even if they turn out to be successful because they argue not for God but for God*.

No doubt it could be true that you could make an identification between the God of the philosophers and the God of the believers if you have established the existence of both. My point is none of the arguments for the existence of God even try to argue for the God of the believers.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Well, Spencer, it looks as if my earlier post, despite its pellucidity and penetration, made no impression on you.

Let's use 'God-P' to mean 'God of the philosophers' and 'God-R' to mean 'God of the religionists.'  Now my claim is that the two phrases, though the differ in sense, have the same referent, if they have a referent.  Thus I do not assume that they in fact have a common referent; my claim is that, if they have a referent, then they have a common referent.  You are undoubtedly familiar with Frege's distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung.  To use his old example, 'morning star' and 'evening star' have the same referent despite their difference in sense and in mode of presentation (Darstellungsweise).    One and the same celestial body — the planet Venus — is presented in two different ways.  Now in this case we know that the terms 'morning star' and 'evening star' have a common referent whereas in the God case we do not know this.  So my claim is merely that 'God-P' and 'God-R' refer to one and the same entity if they refer to anything.

It may help to distinguish between REFERENCE and REFERENT.  'Meinong's favorite impossible object' and 'the round square' both lack a referent; but they have the same REFERENCE despite their manifest difference in sense.

Therefore, I reject your assertion that one needs to establish the existence of a common referent of 'God-P' and 'God-R' as a condition of establishing that they refer to the same thing if they refer at all. 

Your main argument seems to be as follows:

1.  The philosophical arguments for God are arguments for the existence of God-P, not of God-R.

2.  Religious people qua religious people do not believe in or affirm the existence of God-P, but of God-R. (E.g. religious people who think about God or address God in prayer are not relating to an unmoved mover.)

3.  Atheism is the denial of the existence of God-R.  Therefore:

4.  The philosophical God arguments, even if sound, have no tendency to show that atheism is false.

A very interesting argument!  I reject the argument  by rejecting the assumption on which it is based, namely, that God-P is not identical to God-R.  To the contrary, I claim that they are the same God, albeit approached in different ways.  The philosopher qua philosopher approaches God via discursive reason unassisted by scriptural or other revelation, whereas the religionist approaches God via faith and revelation.  Now it may be (it is epistemically possible that) there is no God; but that does not alter the fact that the REFERENCE of the God-talk of philosophers and that of religionists is the same.

Think about it:  when Aquinas was working out his Five Ways, was he trying to establish the existence of a mere concept or abstract idea?  How could a mere concept create heaven and earth?  Was he trying to prove the existence of something numerically different from the God of the Bible?  Of course not.  Aquinas was a philosopher, a religionist, and a mystic.  It was the same God he was aiming at (and from his point of view, contacting) in his philosophical reasoning, his prayerful devotions, and his mystical experiences.

People get confused by the phrases 'God of the philosophers' and 'God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.'  They think that because the phrases are different, and their senses also, that the phrases cannot have the same reference.  But the reference is the same even if there in is no God.  For the concept of God we are operating with is the concept of a being that satisfies both narrowly philosophical and narrowly religious exigencies.  And this is so whether or not the concept is instantiated.  The philosopher qua  philosopher wants an explanation of the existence and intelligibility of contingent beings and finds his explanation in God, who is the real-ground of existence and intelligibility.  The religionist qua religionist has a soteriological interest: he seeks a solution to our awful predicament in this life, and finds his solution is a relationship with a personal Being.  Now what needs to be understood is that that real-ground and this personal Being are the same.

Or do you think that God can't walk down the street and chew gum at the same time?

Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers

"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars."  Thus exclaimed Blaise Pascal in the famous memorial in which  he recorded the overwhelming religious/mystical experience of the night of 23 November 1654.  Martin Buber comments (Eclipse of God, Humanity Books, 1952, p. 49):

These words represent Pascal's change of heart.  He turned, not from a state of being where there is no God to one where there is a God, but from the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham.  Overwhelmed by faith, he no longer knew what to do with the God of the philosophers; that is, with the God who occupies a definite position in a definite system of thought.  The God of Abraham . . . is not suspectible of introduction into a system of thought precisely because He is God. He is beyond each and every one of those systems, absolutely and by virtue of his nature.  What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea. (emphasis added)

Buber Buber here expresses a sentiment often heard.  We encountered it yesterday when we found Timothy Ware accusing late Scholastic theology of turning God into an abstract idea.  But the sentiment is no less wrongheaded for being widespread.  As I see it, it simply makes no sense to oppose the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God of religion — to the God of philosophy.  In fact, I am always astonished when otherwise distinguished thinkers retail this bogus distinction.  Let's try to sort this out.

It is first of all obvious that God, if he exists, transcends every system of human thought, and  cannot be reduced to any element internal to such a system whether it be a concept, a proposition, an argument, a set of arguments, etc.  But by the same token, the chair I am sitting on cannot be reduced to my concept of it or the judgments I make about it.  It too is transcendent of my conceptualizations and judgments.  The transcendence of God, however, is a more radical form of transcendence, that of a person as opposed to that of a material object.  And among persons, God is at the outer limit of transcendence. 

Now if Buber were merely saying something along these lines then I would have no quarrel with him.  But he is saying something more, namely, that when a philosopher in his capacity as philosopher conceptualizes God, he reduces him to a concept or idea, to something abstract, to something merely immanent to his thought, and therefore to something that is not God.  In saying this, Buber commits a grotesque non sequitur.  He moves from the unproblematically true

1. God by his very nature is transcendent of every system of thought or scheme of representation

to the breathtakingly false

2. Any thought about God or representation of God (such as we find, say in Aquinas's Summa Theologica)  is not a thought or representation of God, but of a thought or representation, which, of course, by its very nature is not God.

As I said, I am astonished that anyone could fall into this error.  When I think about something I don't in thinking about it turn it into a mere thought.  When I think about my wife's body, for example, I don't turn it into a mere thought: it remains transcendent of my thought as a material thing.  A fortiori, I am unable by thinking about my wife as a person, an other mind, to transmogrify her personhood into a mere concept in my mind.  She remains in her interiority  delightfully transcendent.

It is therefore bogus to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, et al.  There is and can be only one God.  But there are different approaches to this one God.  By my count, there are four ways of approaching God:  by reason, by faith, by mystical experience, and by our moral sense.  To employ a hackneyed metaphor, if there are four routes to the summit of a mountain, it does not follow that there are four summits, with only one of them being genuine, the others being merely immanent to their respective routes.

I should think that direct acquaintance with God via mystical/religious experience is superior to contact via faith or reason or morality.  It is better to taste food than to read about it on a menu.  But that's not to say that the menu is about itself:  it is about the very same stuff that one encounters by eating.  The fact that it is better to eat food than read about it does not imply that when one is reading one is not reading about it.

Imagine how silly it would be be for me to exclaim, while seated before a delicacy: "Food of Wolfgang Puck, Food of Julia Childs, Food of Emeril Lagasse, not of the nutritionists and menu-writers!"