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2000
Copyright © 2000 by Alvin Plantinga
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Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plantinga, Alvin.
Warranted Christian belief / Alvin Plantinga.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0–19–513193–2 (pbk.)—ISBN 0–19–513192–4
1. Apologetics. 2. Christianity—Philosophy. 3. Faith and reason—Christianity.
I. Title.
BT1102.P57 1999
230’.01-dc21 98.054362
To
WILLIAM P. ALSTON
Mentor, Model, Friend
This book is about the intellectual or rational acceptability of Christian belief. When I speak here of Christian belief, I mean what is common to the great creeds of the main branches of the Christian church, what unites Calvin and Aquinas, Luther and Augustine, Menno Simons and Karl Barth, Mother Teresa and St. Maximus the Confessor, Billy Graham and St. Gregory Palamas—classical Christian belief, as we might call it.
Classical Christian belief includes, in the first place, the
belief that there is such a person as God. God is a
person: that is, a being with intellect and will. A
person has (or can have) knowledge and belief, but also affections,
loves, and hates; a person, furthermore, also has or can have
intentions, and can act so as to fulfill them. God has all of these
qualities and has some (knowledge, power, and love, for example) to the
maximal degree. God is thus all-knowing and all-powerful; he is also
perfectly good and wholly loving. Still further, he has created the
universe and constantly upholds and providentially guides it. This is
the theistic component of
Christian belief. But there is also the uniquely Christian component:
that we human beings are somehow mired in rebellion and sin, that we
consequently require deliverance and salvation, and that God has
arranged for that deliverance through the sacrificial suffering, death,
and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who was both a man and also the
second member of the Trinity, the uniquely divine son of God. I
shall use the term ‘Christian belief’ to designate these two components
taken together. Of course, I realize that others may use that term more
narrowly or more broadly. There is no need to argue about words here:
the beliefs I mentioned are the ones I shall discuss, however exactly
we propose
Accordingly, our question is this: is belief of this sort
intellectually acceptable? In particular, is it intellectually
acceptable for us, now? For educated and
intelligent people living in the twenty-first century, with all that
has happened over the last four or five hundred years? Some will
concede that Christian belief was acceptable and even appropriate
for our ancestors, And perhaps (as they may add) even for contemporaries who lead sheltered
lives in cultural backwaters—for
instance, the area between the east and west coasts of the United States.
But can’t we be a little more precise about the objection? What, exactly, is the problem? The answer, I think, is that there are alleged to be two main problems. Western thought since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment has displayed at least two distinct styles of objection. First, there have been de facto objections: objections to the truth of Christian belief. Perhaps the most important de facto objection would be the argument from suffering and evil. This objection goes all the way back to Democritus in the ancient world but is also the most prominent contemporary de facto objection (see chapter 14). It has often been stated philosophically, but has also received powerful literary expression (for example, in Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov). The objection goes as follows: according to Christian belief, we human beings have been created by an all-powerful, all-knowing God who loves us enough to send his son, the second person of the divine Trinity, to suffer and die on our account; but given the devastating amount and variety of human suffering and evil in our sad world, this simply can’t be true.
The
argument from evil may be the most important de facto
objection, but it isn’t the only one.
There are also the claims that crucial Christian
doctrines—Trinity, Incarnation, or Atonement, for example—are
De facto objections, therefore, are many, and they enjoy a long and distinguished history in Western thought. Even more prevalent, however, have been de jure objections. These are arguments or claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or contrary to sound morality, or without sufficient evidence, or in some other way rationally unacceptable, not up to snuff from an intellectual point of view. There is, for example, the Freudian claim that belief in God is really a result of wish fulfillment; there is the evidentialist claim that there isn’t sufficient evidence for Christian belief; and there is the pluralist claim that there is something arbitrary and even arrogant in holding that Christian belief is true and anything incompatible with it false. De facto and de jure objections are separate species, but they sometimes coincide. Thus there is a de jure objection from suffering and evil as well as a de facto: it is often claimed that the existence of suffering and evil in the world makes it irrational to hold that Christian belief is, in fact, true.
De facto objections are
relatively straightforward and initially uncomplicated: the claim is
that Christian belief must be false (or at any rate improbable), given
something or other we are alleged to know. Quite often the claim is
that it is something we now know, something our ancestors allegedly did not
know, as in Rudolf Bultmann’s widely quoted remark that “it is
impossible to use electrical light and the wireless and to avail
ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same
time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and
miracles.” Kerygma and Myth (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p.
5.
These questions are much harder to answer than one might think. One project of this book is to try to answer them: I try to find a serious and viable de jure objection to Christian belief. That is, I try to find a de jure objection that is both a real objection and also at least plausibly attached to Christian belief. But there is a prior question: is there actually any such thing as Christian belief, conceived as Christians conceive it? Some thinkers (often citing the authority of the great eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant) argue that we couldn’t so much as think about such a being as the Christian God, infinite and transcendent as he is supposed to be. That is because our all-too-human concepts could not apply to such a being; our concepts can apply only to finite beings, beings who are not transcendent in the way Christians take God to be. But if it is really true that our concepts cannot apply to an infinite and transcendent being, if we cannot so much as think about such a being, then we human beings also have no beliefs about such a being. Indeed, we can’t have beliefs about such a being. ANd then the fact is there isn’t any such thing as Christian belief: Christians think they have beliefs about an infinite and transcendent being, but in fact they are mistaken. In part I, “Is There a Question?” (chapters 1 and 2), I argue that there is no reason at all to accept this skeptical claim: Kant himself provides no reason, and those contemporaries who appeal to his authority certainly do no better.
That
conclusion clears the deck for the main question of the book: is there
a viable de jure objection to
Christian belief? One that is independent of de
facto objections and does not
presuppose that Christian belief is false? There are, I believe,
fundamentally three main candidates: that Christian belief is
unjustified, that it is
irrational, and that it
is unwarranted. These
candidates will be introduced in due
That
may not come as much of a surprise, given that this book is a sequel to
Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper
Function. Both published by Oxford University Press (New York, 1993).
This book is also, and in a slightly different direction, a sequel to
God and Other Minds (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1967) and “Reason and Belief in God,”
in Faith and Rationality,
ed. A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1983).
According to Freud and Marx, therefore, the real problem with theistic (and hence Christian) belief is that it lacks warrant. In part III, “Warranted Christian Belief” (chapters 6–10), I address this objection. As it turns out, this de jure objection is really dependent on a de facto objection. That is because (as I argue) if Christian belief is true, then it is also warranted; the claim that theistic (and hence Christian) belief is unwarranted really presupposes that Christian belief is false. Freud and Marx, therefore, do not give us a de jure objection that is independent of the truth of Christian belief; their objection presupposes its falsehood. I go on (in chapter 6) to offer a model, the Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model, for theistic beliefs having warrant and argue that if theistic belief is in fact true, then something like this model is in fact correct.
In chapters 7 through 10, I extend the A/C model to cover full-blown Christian belief (as opposed to theistic belief simpliciter), beginning (in chapter 7) with an account of the place of sin in the model. Next (in chapters 8 and 9), I propose the extended A/C model; according to this model, Christian belief is warranted because it meets the conditions of warrant spelled out in Warrant and Proper Function. That is, Christian belief is produced by a cognitive process (the “internal instigation of the Holy Spirit” [Aquinas] or the “internal testimony of the Holy Spirit” [Calvin]) functioning properly in an appropriate epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth. Chapter 8, “The Extended A/C Model: Revealed to Our Minds,” sets out the cognitive side of this process. The process involves the affections as well as reason, however (i.e., it involves will as well as intellect), and chapter 9, “The Testimonial Model: Sealed upon Our Hearts,” explains some of the connections between reason and the affections. Chapter 10 concludes part III by considering various actual and possible objections to the model; none is successful. What I officially claim for the extended A/C model is not that it is true but, rather, that it is epistemically possible (i.e., nothing we know commits us to its falsehood); I add that if Christian belief is true, then very likely this model or something like it is also true. If I am right in these claims, there aren’t any viable de jure criticisms that are compatible with the truth of Christian belief; that is, there aren’t any viable de jure objections independent of de facto objections. And if that is so, then the attitude expressed in “Well, I don’t know whether Christian belief is true (after all, who could know a thing like that?), but I do know that it is irrational (or intellectually unjustified or unreasonable or intellectually questionable)”—that attitude, if I am right, is indefensible.
Finally, in part IV, “Defeaters?” (chapters 11–14), I confront the
following claim. Someone might concede that Christian belief could
in principle be warranted in the
way the model suggests; she might go on to insist, however, that in
fact there are various defeaters for the
This book can be thought of in at least two quite different ways. On the one hand, it is an exercise in apologetics and philosophy of religion, an attempt to demonstrate the failure of a range of objections to Christian belief. De jure objections, so the argument goes, are either obviously implausible, like those based on the claim that Christian belief is not or cannot be justified, or else they presuppose that Christian belief is not true, as with those based on the claim that Christian belief lacks external rationality or lacks warrant. Hence there aren’t any decent de jure objections that do not depend on de facto objections. Everything really depends on the truth of Christian belief; but that refutes the common suggestion that Christian belief, whether true or not, is intellectually unacceptable.
On
the other hand, however, the book is an exercise in Christian
philosophy: in the effort to consider and answer philosophical
questions—the sorts of questions philosophers ask and answer—from a
Christian perspective. What I claim for the extended A/C model of
chapters 8 and 9 is twofold: first, it shows that and how Christian
belief can perfectly well have warrant, thus refuting a range of de
jure objections to Christian
belief. But I also claim that the model provides a good way for
Christians to think about the epistemology of Christian belief, in
particular the question whether and how Christian belief has warrant.
So there are two projects, or two arguments, going on simultaneously.
The first is addressed to everyone, believer and nonbeliever alike; it
is intended as a contribution to an ongoing public discussion of the
epistemology of Christian belief; it does not appeal to specifically
Christian premises or presuppositions. I shall argue that, from this
public point of view, there isn’t the faintest reason to think that
Christian belief lacks justification, rationality, or warrant—at least
no reason that does not presuppose the falsehood
of Christian belief. The other project,
however—the project of proposing an epistemological account of
Christian belief from a Christian perspective—will be of special
interest to Christians. Here the project is that of starting from an
assumption of the truth of Christian belief and from
I hope Christians will find this second project appealing; I hope others as well may be interested—just as those who don’t accept philosophical naturalism might nevertheless be interested to see what kind of epistemology would best go with naturalism. The centerpiece of each of the two projects—the apologetic project and the project in Christian philosophy—is the extended A/C model. Taken the first way, that model is a defense of the idea that Christian belief has warrant and an effort to show that if Christian belief is true, then (very likely) it does have warrant; taken the second, it is a recommendation as to how Christians can profitably understand and conceive of the warrant they take Christian belief to have.
The reader is owed an apology for the inordinate length of this book. All I can say by way of self-exculpation is that its length is due to a determination not to commit a tetralogy: a trilogy is perhaps unduly self-indulgent, but a tetralogy is unforgivable. (I suppose a cynic might question the difference between a tetralogy and a trilogy, the last member of which is twice as long as the preceding members.) In any event, not every reader need read every page. For example, those readers who are not tempted to think that our concepts could not apply to God can safely skip part I, and those readers who want to read only the central part of the story line can confine themselves to chapters 6 through 9. Furthermore, even though the book is long, I am aware that it covers a shameful amount of ground, and that in nearly every chapter (but in particular chapters 8 and 12) a really proper job would go into considerably more detail. My excuse is that it is important to see the forest as well as the trees; God may be in the details, but God is also in the whole sweeping vista of the epistemology of Christian belief.
Trained observers may note two styles of print: large and small. The main argument of the book goes on in the large print; the small print adds further analysis, argument, or other points the specialist may find of interest. This book is not written mainly for the specialist in philosophy. I hope and intend that it will be intelligible and useful to, for example, students who have taken a course in philosophy or apologetics, as well as the fabled general reader with an interest in its subject. Although it is the third member of a trilogy, the book is designed to be relatively independent of Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function (and it therefore sometimes contains brief accounts of what goes on in them).
Most
books, of course, are to one degree or another cooperative enterprises;
every author is heavily indebted to others in a thousand
The
book is also something of a cooperative enterprise by virtue of the
advice, instruction, and criticism I have received from others—an
embarrassingly large number of others (I am entirely sensible of the
fact that with so much help, I should have done better). I’m grateful
to all those who helped me with the first two volumes and also to
Jonathan Kvanvig and the authors of the essays in his Warrant in
Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in Honor of Plantinga’s Theory of
Knowledge. Among those to whom I am
particularly grateful for help with this third volume are Karl Ameriks,
Jim Beilby (who also kindly prepared the index),
David Burrell, Kelly Clark, John Cooper,
Kevin Corcoran, Andrew Cortens, Fred Crosson, Paul Draper,
Steve Evans, Ronald Feenstra, Fred Freddoso,
Richard Gale, Lee Hardy,
John Hare, Van Harvey, David Hunt, Hugh McCann, Greg Mellema,
Ric Otte, Neal Plantinga, Bill Prior, Tapio Puolimatka, Philip Quinn,
Del Ratzsch, Dan Rieger, Robert Roberts, Bill Rowe, John Sanders,
Henry Schuurman, James Sennett, Ernie Sosa, Michael Sudduth,
Richard Swinburne, Bill Talbott, James VanderKam, Bas van Fraassen,
Calvin Van Reken, Rene van Woudenberg, Steve Wykstra, and Henry Zwaanstra.
(I’ve
undoubtedly omitted people who belong on this list; to them, I express
both my gratitude and my apologies.) William Alston, Dewey Hoitenga,
Eleonore Stump, and Nicholas Wolterstorff read and commented on the
entire manuscript; to them, I am especially grateful. One of my most significant debts is to a rotating
cadre of Notre Dame graduate students who, as a group and over a period
of several years, read the entire manuscript and submitted it to the
sort of searching and detailed criticism that only aroused and
contentious graduate students can muster. This group includes, among
others, Mike Bergmann, Tom Crisp, Pat Kain, Andy Koehl, Kevin
Meeker, Trenton Merricks, Marie Pannier, Mike
Rea, Ray Van Arragon and David VanderLaan. I am similarly indebted to
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s fall 1997 graduate seminar at Yale (especially
Andrews Chignell and Dole), who (with their mentor) read the manuscript
and provided illuminating and valuable comments. And once again
These three volumes began life as Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1986 and 1987 and Wilde Lectures at Oxford in 1988. I am grateful to both sets of electors; I am equally grateful for the hospitality my wife and I enjoyed while visiting Aberdeen and Oxford. Thanks are also due to the University of Notre Dame for a sabbatical in 1995 and 1996 and to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a fellowship that same year. A couple of bits of this volume have already seen the light of publication: chapter 13 contains a few pages from “Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism” in The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith, ed. Thomas Senor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), and chapter 14 contains a few paragraphs from “On Being Evidentially Challenged,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
Finally, I make special mention of William P. Alston. Bill was my teacher when I began graduate school in 1954 (if I wasn’t able to understand Alfred Whitehead’s Process and Reality, the subject of that first seminar, the fault was mine [or maybe Whitehead’s], not Bill’s.) I learned much from him then and much more from him since. His generosity in reading this entire manuscript was characteristic; so was the trenchancy and penetration of his comments. Alston’s contributions to contemporary philosophy and philosophy of religion (his leadership in establishing the Society of Christian Philosophers and the journal Faith and Philosophy, his splendid works in epistemology and philosophy of religion) are, of course, well and widely known; there is no need to enumerate them here (and in any case they are nearly indenumerable). It is to him that I dedicate this book.
A. P.
Notre Dame, Indiana
September 1998
“To whom will you liken me? Who is my equal? With what can you compare me? Where is my like?”
Our
interest, in this book, is the de jure question: For the contrast between de jure
and de facto questions, see Preface, pp. viff.
Accordingly, Christians ordinarily take it for granted that it is possible to refer to God by such descriptions as ‘the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe’, and possible, furthermore, to predicate properties (wisdom, goodness) of the being thus referred to. Of course, such a description succeeds in actually naming something only if there really is a being who is all-powerful and all-knowing and created the universe. Furthermore, it must be possible, if I can think about God and predicate properties of him, not only that there be such a being but also that my concepts apply to it. If not, then I am not in a position to assert or believe or even entertain any of the propositions mentioned above, if indeed there are any such propositions.
Now Christians also take it for granted that God is infinite, transcendent, and ultimate (however, precisely, we gloss those terms). And just here is the alleged problem. It seems many theologians and others believe that there is real difficulty with the idea that our concepts could apply to God—that is, could apply to a being with the properties of being infinite, transcendent, and ultimate. The idea is that if there is such a being, we couldn’t speak about it, couldn’t think and talk about it, couldn’t ascribe properties to it. If that is true, however, then, strictly speaking, Christian belief, at least as the Christian understands it, is impossible. For Christians believe that there is an infinite, transcendent, ultimate being about whom they hold beliefs; but if our concepts cannot apply to a being of that sort, then there cannot be beliefs about a being of that sort. This idea often sees the light of publication; it is even more heavily present in the oral tradition. In the spirit of interdisciplinary ecumenism, therefore, I want to begin by looking into this question.
Consider, for example, the theologian Gordon Kaufman:
The
central problem of theological discourse, not shared with any other
“language game” is the meaning of the term “God.” “God” raises special
problems of meaning because it is a noun which by definition refers to
a reality transcendent of, and thus not locatable within,
experience. God the Problem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p.
8.
In particular, it seems
to be widely accepted, among theologians, that Kant showed that reference to or thought about
such a being (even if there is one) is impossible or at least deeply
problematic, The whole medieval tradition of negative
theology also finds reference to God problematic. The difference is
that the medievals took it for granted that, of course, we can
refer to God; the problem is to explain
just how this can be accomplished. For the contemporaries I am thinking
of, however, the difficulties (whether apparent or real) lead them to
doubt that we can, in fact,
refer to and talk about a being that is ultimate and
transcendent. As we shall see in chapter 2, however, John
Hick constitutes an exception. As in Gordon Kaufman: see chapter 2, p. 41. As in John Hick: see chapter 2, p. 60. See Sallie McFague, Models of
God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1987).
But what is important for my present purposes is not an exploration of the ways in which religious language might be reconstrued or restructured, once we see (as we think) that it cannot function the way ordinary believers think it does; I want, instead, to examine the prior claim that, indeed, it cannot function as ordinary believers assume it does. Is there really something especially problematic about referring to or thinking about God? Did Kant show that if there were such a person as God, we couldn’t refer to or think about him? Or if ‘show’ is too strong a word, did he give us powerful or even decent reason to believe that our concepts couldn’t apply to God, if there is such a being? Or if he didn’t do that, do some of his contemporary followers—Gordon Kaufman, for example, or John Hick—give us a reason to think this is indeed true? And is the claim in question—that our concepts do not apply to God—a coherent one? (Or rather, is there a coherent claim somewhere in the nearby bushes, since clearly there are several different claims lurking in these bushes?)
Initially, the answer seems to be no; one who makes the claim seems to set up a certain subject for predication—God—and then declare that our concepts do not apply to this being. But if this is so, then, presumably, at least one of our concepts—being such that our concepts don’t apply to it—does apply to this being. Either those who attempt to make this claim succeed in making an assertion or not. If they don’t succeed, we have nothing to consider; if they do, however, they appear to be predicating a property of a being they have referred to, in which case at least some of our concepts do apply to it, contrary to the claim they make. So if they succeed in making a claim, they make a false claim.
Note how difficult it is, initially, to state the claim in question, the claim that if there is a being with the properties Christians ascribe to God, our concepts would not apply to that being. Consider the proposition
(1) If there were an infinite, transcendent, and ultimate being, our concepts could not apply to it.
But now suppose (1) were true. The idea, one takes
it, is that we do have at
least some grasp of the
properties of being infinite, transcendent, and ultimate (else we
shouldn’t be able to understand the sentence or grasp the proposition
it expresses). An infinite being, we might say, is an
unlimited being—unlimited, that is, with respect to certain
properties. Among these properties might be power, knowledge, goodness,
love, and the like. (A being is unlimited with respect to power and
(propositional) knowledge, for example, if there is a maximal degree of
power and knowledge, and the being in question enjoys that maximal
degree of those properties. It might be hard to say precisely what the
maximal degree of these properties is; with respect to knowledge, we
might begin by saying that a being displays that maximal degree if it
knows all true propositions and believes no false proposition.) Perhaps
we can also give an explanation of what it is for a being to be
transcendent: such a
being transcends the created universe; and a being transcends the
created universe if it is not identical with any being in
that universe (if it is not created)
and if it depends on nothing at all for its existence. So we do have
the ideas of transcendence and being infinite (and if not, then (1)
makes no sense). And the idea behind (1) is that if there
is such a being (i.e., if
there is an infinite and transcendent being), then none of our concepts
could apply to it. In particular, then, the concepts being
infinite and being
transcendent could not apply
to it. But how could that be? How could it be that there is a being
that is infinite and transcendent (i.e., falls under our concepts
infinity and transcendence) but is nevertheless such that the concepts
infinity and transcendence do not apply to it? Is the idea, perhaps, that these
concepts are impossible, incoherent, like the concept of a round
square, a concept such that we can just see a priori
that it couldn’t apply to anything,
that there couldn’t be a thing to which it
Thus some philosophers have claimed that the
notion of omnipotence is
incoherent; others have paid the same compliment to the notion
of omniscience (see Patrick Grim
and Alvin Plantinga, “Truth, Omniscience, and Cantorian Arguments: An
Exchange,” Philosophical Studies 70 [August 1993]); still others have argued the
same point with respect to the idea that God is a person without a
body.
(1*) If there were an all-powerful, all-knowing being, our concepts would apply to it.
So presumably that is not the idea here. What, then, is the idea? I think the best we can do in trying to state such a view coherently is to say with John Hick (see below, pp. 47ff.) that there is a being to which none of our positive, nonformal concepts apply (a being that has none of the positive, nonformal properties of which we have concepts) and that this being, somehow, is the one with which Christians and others are in touch in religious practice. This is perhaps the best we can do; I shall argue below (pp. 59ff.), however, that it isn’t good enough; it suffers from serious, indeed fatal difficulties.
So the suggestion is that Kant showed us, somehow, that there are real, perhaps insurmountable problems in the idea that there is a being like that acknowledged in traditional Christianity, to whom we can refer and to whom our concepts apply. This is a question of considerable import for our present project, for if this suggestion is right, then there really isn’t any such question as the one I say I propose to discuss; then, the sentences Christians use to express (as they think) their beliefs, do not really express the kinds of propositions or thoughts Christians think they express. Indeed, perhaps, they don’t express any propositions or thoughts at all but are a sort of disguised nonsense: they look as if they express propositions but in fact do not.
Before we explicitly turn to Kant,
however, it is worth reminding ourselves that the claim in question is
by no means a new claim in the present historical
context. Beginning in the 1930s, the logical positivists were fond of
insisting that the sentences Christians typically use—‘God loves us’
or ‘The universe was created by God’ or ‘God was in Christ, reconciling
the world to himself’—do not, as they are ordinarily used, say
anything at all; they express no propositions at all; they are really
disguised nonsense. See, e.g., A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and
Logic (New York: Dover
Publications, 1946), pp. 115ff. See, e.g., New Essays in Philosophical
Theology, ed. Antony Flew and
Alasdair MacIntyre (London: SCM
Press, 1955). Perhaps metaphysics can have other aesthetic
functions as well, as can Carnap’s own work. Although, as far as I
know, no one has ever used Carnap’s writings as music (or even set them
to music), in 1976 the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford displayed a page
of Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language magnified about 20x and posted on the wall. No
doubt a piece of metaphysics could serve the same purpose.
By now, logical positivism has
retreated into the obscurity it so richly deserves. For an account of the harrowing vicissitudes
of the Verifiability Criterion, see Carl Hempel, “Problems and Changes
in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning,” in Semantics
and the Philosophy of Language, ed. Leonard Linsky (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1952), and my God and Other
Minds (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1967), chapter 7. Something like it lingers on, not only among
some theologians who propose to reconstrue religious language in such a
way that it no longer refers to God but also in the Wittgensteinian
fideism of D. Z. Phillips and others, which is a sort of continuation
of positivism by other means. Although some of this work is eminently
worth discussing, I will not discuss it here, referring the reader
instead to Nicholas Wolterstorff’s perceptive “Philosophy of Religion
after Foundationalism I: Wittgensteinian Fideism” (presently
unpublished), to which I have little to add.
Immanuel Kant was a virtual titan of philosophy, with an absolutely enormous influence upon subsequent philosophy and theology. This is no doubt due to his great insight and raw philosophical power; it is perhaps also due to the grave hermeneutical difficulties that attend study of his work. The British philosopher David Hume writes with a certain surface clarity that disappointingly disappears on closer inspection. With Kant, there is good news and bad news: the good news is that we don’t suffer that disappointment; the bad news is that it’s because there isn’t any surface clarity to begin with. We can’t turn to a settled interpretation of Kant to see whether he showed or even held that our concepts don’t apply to God; there is no settled interpretation.
The
first thing to note, however, is that Kant often writes as if we
can perfectly well refer to God.
In the Critique of Practical Reason and elsewhere (Religion within the
Boundary of Pure Reason;
Lectures on Philosophical Theology), Kant regularly seems to refer to God and clearly
takes himself to be doing exactly that. Even in the Critique of Pure
Reason, his work most
heavily influential in this skeptical direction, Kant often seems to suggest that we can indeed refer
to and think about God. He often seems to suggest that the problem is
not that we can’t think about God but that we can’t come to speculative or
metaphysical knowledge of
God. His aim in this Critique, he says, is to curb knowledge in order to make
room for faith. Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1965), Preface to second edition, Bxxx, p. 29: “I have therefore
found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for
faith“ (Kant’s
emphasis). See Merold Westphal, “In Defense of the Thing
in Itself,” Kant-Studien 59/1
(1968), pp. 118ff.
Still, the idea that according to Kant our concepts couldn’t apply to God is no mere fabrication, no merely thoughtless misunderstanding—or, more exactly, if it is a misunderstanding, it is one with considerable basis in the Kantian text. There is much in the Critique of Pure Reason to suggest this or something like it; at any rate, there is much to suggest that the categories of the understanding, which are concepts of the first importance, do not apply to the things in themselves (and thus not to God). For example:
If, therefore, we should attempt to apply the categories to objects which are not viewed as being appearances, we should have to postulate an intuition other than the sensible, and the object would thus be a noumenon in the positive sense. Since, however, such a type of intuition, intellectual intuition, forms no part whatsoever of our faculty of knowledge, it follows that the employment of the categories can never extend further than to the objects of experience. (A353, B309, Kant’s emphasis)
Here and elsewhere, Kant suggests that the categories of the understanding do not apply beyond the realm of appearance, the world of phenomena. (“Suggests,” I say; these passages, like all the others, contain more than a hint of possible ambiguity.) But if those categories do not apply to the noumena, the Dinge an sich, then perhaps the same goes for the rest of our concepts. And if our concepts do not apply beyond the world of experience, the world of appearance, then they do not apply to God, who, of course, would be a noumenon in excelsis. So the claim would be that Kant shows or believes (at any rate in the Critique of Pure Reason) that our concepts do not apply to God, in which case we cannot refer to or think about him.
What
is to be said for this understanding of Kant? Hermeneutical obstacles
of formidable proportions loom. First, how are we to think about this
distinction between the noumena and the phenomena, the things in
themselves and the things for us? Unfortunately, the commentators are
not of one mind. There is a huge interpretative watershed, a
continental divide, between two fundamentally different interpretations
or basic pictures of what Kant had in mind, each with several
variations when it comes to detail. According to the first and
Now we must bear in mind that the concept of appearances, as limited by the Transcendental Aesthetic, already of itself establishes the objective reality of noumena and justifies the division of objects into phaenomena and noumena and so of the world into a world of the sense and a world of the understanding (mundus sensibilis et intelligibilis) and indeed in such manner that the distinction does not refer merely to the logical form of our knowledge of one and the same thing, according as it is indistinct or distinct, but to the difference in the manner in which the two worlds can be first given to our knowledge, and in conformity with this difference, to the manner in which they are in themselves generically distinct from one another. (A249, Kant’s emphasis)
Appearances are the sole objects which can be given to us immediately, and that in them which relates immediately to the object is called intuition. Appearances are not things in themselves; they are only representations, which in turn have their object—an object which cannot be intuited by us, and which may, therefore, be named the non-empirical, that is, transcendental object = x. (A109)
These phenomena are objects, objects that exist in space and time. The noumena, by contrast, are neither temporal nor spatial; space and time are forms of our intuition rather than realities that characterize the things in themselves. Noumena and phenomena, therefore, are distinct.
Still further, we have experience only of the phenomena, not of the noumena:
We have sufficiently proved in the Transcendental Aesthetic that everything intuited in space or time, and therefore all objects of any experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations,
Further still, the phenomena, the world of stars and planets, trees and animals, depends on us for existence. The above passage continues:
which in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings, or as series of alternations have no independent existence outside our thoughts. (A491, B519)
Elsewhere:
That nature should direct itself according to our subject ground of apperception, and should indeed depend upon it in respect of its conformity to law, sounds very strange and absurd. But when we consider that this nature is not a thing in itself but is merely an aggregate of appearances, so many representations of the mind, . . . (A114)
Now to assert in this manner, that all these appearances, and consequently all objects with which we can occupy ourselves, are one and all in me, that is are determinations of my identical self, is only another way of saying that there must be a complete unity of them in one and the same apperception. (A129)
This is the more traditional way of understanding Kant, the way Kant was taken by his great successors. To put it briefly and all too baldly, there are two realms of objects; our experience is only of one realm, the realm of phenomena, which themselves depend on us for their existence; if we should go out of existence, so would they. That is because the phenomenal realm is somehow constructed by us out of the given, the data, the raw material of experience. The noumenal realm, however, is not thus dependent on us but is also such that we have no intuition, no direct experience of it. Finally, there is nevertheless a connection between the two worlds in that something like a causal transaction between the noumena and the transcendental ego (itself a noumenon) produces in us the given out of which we construct the phenomenal world.
Call the above the two-world picture; this has been the dominant interpretation. There has always been another basic interpretation of Kant, however, one that more recently has perhaps achieved majority status. According to this other picture, there really aren’t two worlds after all, a world of phenomena and underlying it another world of noumena. There is only one world and only one kind of object, but there are (at least) two ways of thinking about or considering this one world. All objects are really noumenal objects, and talk about the phenomena is just a picturesque way of talking about how the noumena, the only things there are, appear to us. The phenomena-noumena distinction is not between two kinds of objects but, rather, between how the things are in themselves and how they appear to us.
So, for example, Graham Bird:
Such
phrases [e.g., ‘transcendental objects and empirical objects’] should
be understood to refer not to two different kinds of entity, but
instead to two different ways of talking about one and the same
thing. Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p.
37.
And Michael Devitt:
It is tempting to equate an appearance with the foundationalist’s sense datum, taking the thing-in-itself as the unknowable external cause of this mental entity. Kant’s writing often encourages this temptation. Nevertheless, scholars seem generally agreed—and have convinced me—that this two-worlds interpretation is wrong. What Kant intends is the following influential, but rather mysterious, one world view.
An Appearance is not a
mental sense datum, but an external object as we know it.
In contrast the thing-in-itself is the
object independent of our knowledge of it; it is not a second object,
and does not, indeed could not, cause an appearance. . . .
Realism and Truth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p.
59. See also D. P. Dryer, Kant’s Solution for Verification in
Metaphysics (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1966), chapter 11, section vi; H. E. Matthews, “Strawson on
Transcendental Idealism,” Philosophical Quarterly
19 (1969), pp. 204–220; Henry
Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). I am
indebted, for these references, to Karl Ameriks (“Recent Work on Kant’s
Theoretical Philosophy,” American Philosophical Quarterly
19 [1982], and “Kantian Idealism
Today,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 9 [1992]) and to James Van Cleve,
Problems from Kant (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
Although this second picture is perhaps now the majority opinion, it
seems a bit difficult to reconcile it with Kant’s own view that his
thought constituted a revolution—his famous second Copernican
revolution. “Hitherto it has been assumed that all our
knowledge must conform to objects. But also attempts to extend our
knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a
priori, by means of concepts, have,
on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial
whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we
suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. We should then be
proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primary hypothesis.”
(Bxvii)
According to Merold Westphal:
Finally, all twelve categories insofar
as they constitute the world of human experience and are not merely
formal features of judgment, are schematized with an essential
reference to time. Thus the object and property that would disappear
from the world in the absence of human knowers are not object and
property per se, but substance and accident as defined by human
temporality. Similarly, the
truth and falsity that would disappear derive from the categories of
reality and negation as essentially linked to our experience of
time. Thus we are back to
the tautology that in the absence of human cognition the world as
apprehended by human minds would disappear. “In Defense of the Thing in Itself,” p.
170.
That does, indeed, seem to be a tautology, or at least a trivially necessary truth; we could add that in the absence of bovine cognition, the world as apprehended by bovine minds would disappear. But how could Kant think of this as constituting a revolution, one according to which objects must conform to our minds (rather than, as previously thought, our minds to objects) if we are to have knowledge? Could a tautology constitute a revolution?
Our main interest here does not lie in trying to resolve the question of what Kant intended: that is perhaps necessarily beyond our powers. Instead, we are looking to see if there is good reason, either given by Kant or constructible from materials given by him, for the conclusion that our concepts do not apply to God. And how does the difference between these two interpretations of Kant bear on this question? Consider the second picture first, and note that on this picture, if our concepts apply to anything, they apply to the Dinge, those being the only things there are. Similarly, if we manage to refer to and think about anything at all, we succeed in referring to and thinking about the Dinge, because they are all that there is. So how could it be that the categories and our other concepts do not apply to them?
Well, what is it for a concept to apply to something, for something to fall under a concept? Consider the concept being wise. That concept applies to something (a thing falls under that concept) only if that thing is wise, only if, that is, it has the property of being wise. Properties and concepts are thus correlative. I have the concept being wise only if I grasp, apprehend, understand the property being wise. I have the concept being a prime number if and only if I grasp or apprehend the property being a prime number. For each property or attribute of which I have a grasp, I have a concept. Of course there are properties of which I have no concept. Small children often lack the concept of being a philosopher; that is to say, they have no grasp of the property being a philosopher. Large philosophers often lack the concept of being a quark; that is to say, they have no grasp of the property being a quark. No doubt there are properties none of us human beings grasps.
One further familiar fact about properties and concepts: they have negations or complements. There is the property being red; there is also its complement, which, naturally enough, is being unred, not being red. There is the property of being wise but also the property of being unwise, failing to be wise. So if one of my concepts (e.g., being wise) does not apply to a thing, then the complement of that concept (being nonwise, not being wise) does apply to it.
Perhaps you want to point out that this way of putting the matter presupposes that there are negative properties, such properties as being nonred, being unwise, and the like; you might object that in fact there are only positive properties, not negative ones. (You might also object to disjunctive and conjunctive properties.) This is no place to try to settle that issue. Clearly, there is the concept of a thing’s failing to be wise (I know what it is for a thing not to be wise), even if there is no negative property nonwisdom. So if you object to negative properties, say that a thing falls under the concept nonwisdom just in case it does not fall under the concept wisdom; more generally, for any property P, a thing falls under the concept P if and only if it has the property P; it falls under the concept not-P if and only if it does not fall under the concept P.
Given this elementary lore about concepts and properties, how could it
be that the categories and our other concepts do not apply to the
Dinge? Take the categories
first—the category of causality, for example. What would it mean to
say that this category does not apply to the
Dinge? So far as I can see, what
this would mean is that the noumena do not stand in causal relations to
each other or anything else. Consider the property stands in
causal relation to something; if
the category of causality does not apply to the noumena, then it must
be that none of them has that property. So our concept
standing in causal relation to something wouldn’t apply to things as they are in themselves.
It follows, however, that the complement of that category or
concept
Well, perhaps these matters can be straightened out. (See chapter 2, p. 48.) For present purposes, what we need to see is that on this way of thinking, it would not really be the case that our concepts fail to apply to God in such a way that we cannot refer to and think about him. What would follow, given that he is a noumenon (of course, in this way of thinking, everything is a noumenon), is that God would not have any of the positive properties of which we have a grasp. It would not be the case that we couldn’t refer to God and predicate properties of him: we could perfectly well do so, but we would be mistaken if we predicated of him a positive property of which we have a grasp. Thus we would make a mistake if we said that God is wise, or good, or powerful, or loving. That would be because nothing is wise, good, powerful, loving, and the like. (On the one-world picture, the Dinge are all there is; so if positive properties can’t be ascribed to the Dinge, they can’t be ascribed to anything.) Here there would be nothing at all special about God; what holds for him also holds for everything else. But those theologians who suggest that Kant showed we cannot refer to and think about God presumably believe that Kant showed there was a special problem about God; they don’t think that what Kant really showed is that we can’t talk or think about anything. As Kaufman puts it in the passage I quoted above (p. 4), “The central problem of theological discourse, not shared with any other ‘language game,’ is the meaning of the term ‘God.’ ” So Kant, taken this way, doesn’t fill this particular bill; it doesn’t give us a relevant way of seeing that our concepts do not apply to God.
Now suppose we consider the other main
interpretation of Kant: the two-world picture. This is the more
traditional way to understand Kant and still, perhaps, deserves the
nod. (Here I am not interested in which picture most accurately
represents Kant, but whether Kant, taken any plausible way, gives
support to the idea that we cannot
Of course, I do not mean to suggest that the
one- and two-world pictures as I present them are the only possible (or
actual) interpretations of Kant; clearly, there are various
complications and extensions of each. What I claim is that none of
them offers aid and comfort to the claim that our concepts do not
apply to God.
Accordingly, that which is in space and time is an appearance; it is not anything in itself, but consists merely of representations, which, if not given in us—that is to say, in perception—are nowhere to be met with. (A494, B522)
Now when we think about the application of our concepts to the noumena, we see that this two-world picture divides into two subpictures.
(a) The Moderate Subpicture. On the one way of thinking, (some of) our concepts apply to the things in themselves; we can think about them and refer to them, all right, but we can’t have any knowledge of them. When we think about them, predicate properties of them, what we have is just speculation, mere transcendental schein, and we deceive ourselves if we think we have more. Our knowledge doesn’t extend beyond experience; hence, it does not extend to the realm of the things in themselves. This would explain that bewildering variety and proliferation of metaphysical views Kant found so shocking. The reason, fundamentally, is really that all the metaphysicians have been just guessing, whatever their pretensions to apodictic conclusions and conclusive certainty. Our reason can’t operate in the rarefied atmosphere of the noumena, and the result of trying to do so is a mere beating of wings against the void.
Of
course Kant also represents his own work in the Critique of Pure
Reason as knowledge and as
certain and conclusive. And in that Critique he seems to tell us a fair amount about the
Dinge: that they are not in
space and time, that the world of experience is (in part) a result of a
‘causal transaction’ We need the scare quotes because Kant’s
official view is that the concept of causality doesn’t apply to the
Dinge.
(b) The Radical Subpicture. There is a more striking version of the two-world picture, however, on which we do get the result that we can neither refer to God nor predicate properties of him (call it ‘the radical subpicture’). On both versions of the two-world picture, the appearances are distinct from the things in themselves. The appearances are objects; they exist; they are empirically real. But they are also transcendentally ideal. And what this means, in part, is that they depend for their existence on us (on the transcendental ego[s]) and our cognitive activity. We ourselves are both noumena and phenomena: there is both a noumenal self and an empirical self. The things in themselves somehow impinge on us (taken as transcendental ego), causing experience in us; there is a productive interaction between the transcendental ego and the Dinge (the other Dinge, since the transcendental ego is itself a noumenon), the result of which is experience, the manifold of experience.
As it is initially given to us, this manifold of experience is a blooming, buzzing confusion with no structure. Perhaps it contains among other things what Kant calls ‘representations’ (Vorstellungen); these are of more than one kind, but among them might be phenomenal qualia, something like sense data, or Humean impressions and ideas. The manifold must be ‘worked up’ (Kant’s term) and synthesized by the application of the categories and other concepts. Thus we impose structure and form on it, and in so doing we construct the phenomena, the appearances. So the phenomena, the things für uns, are constructed out of the manifold of experience.
Well, how do we do a thing like that? How do we construct a phenomenon (a horse, let’s say) from the manifold of experience? At this point, the radical subpicture diverges from the more pedestrian version of the two-world picture, for on the radical subpicture, we construct objects by applying concepts (representations, Vorstellungen) to the manifold. The world of appearance gets constructed by virtue of our synthesizing the manifold, which proceeds by way of our applying concepts—both the categories and other concepts—to the manifold. We can’t perceive or in some other way witness this construction; Kant says we are largely unconscious of the activity whereby we structure the manifold and construct the phenomena. Still, it proceeds by way of the application of concepts to the blooming buzzing manifold of experience.
This
would require a way of thinking about concepts and their function that is very
different from the way of thinking about them I outlined above (a way
according to which a concept is fundamentally a grasp of a property).
And Kant suggests a different way of thinking of
Rules, so far as they are objective . . . are called laws. Although we learn many laws through experience, they are only special determinations of still higher laws, and the highest of these, under which the others all stand, issue a priori from the understanding itself. They are not borrowed from experience; on the contrary, they have to confer upon appearances their conformity to law, and so to make experience possible. Thus the understanding is something more than a power of formulating rules through comparison of appearances; it is itself the lawgiver of nature. (A127)
I don’t for a moment pretend that this passage or others that could be cited are easy to interpret. Still, the passage does seem to suggest that concepts are rules and rules are laws. What sort of rules and what sort of laws? Perhaps they are rules for synthesizing the manifold, rules for constructing the phenomena. This is the heart of the radical subpicture. Again, I don’t mean to suggest that this is Kant’s view, but some of what he says suggests it. (Some of what he says also suggests that it is false; that is part of his charm.) For example: “What is first given to us is appearance. When combined with consciousness, it is called perception. . . . ”
Interpretative difficulties abound; the basic idea, however, is that concepts are rules, rules for the synthesis of the manifold and the construction of phenomena. (They are also laws, laws whereby the phenomena are constructed from the manifold of experience.) These rules apply to portions or bits of experience and, by way of their application, the phenomena are constructed. A rule of this sort perhaps specifies that certain portions of the manifold are to be combined or ‘thought together’ as an object. So, for example, consider your concept of a horse: it instructs you to associate, think together a variety of representations, a variety of items of experience, thus unifying that bit of the manifold into an empirical object: a horse. It is a rule which would say something like: think that particular congeries of representations together as a unity.
Now
again, I don’t mean to claim that this is a coherent picture or a
coherent way of thinking about concepts; on the contrary, I believe
that it is not. But note that if it is coherent, then (at least if all
of our concepts have this
function As Karl Ameriks (private communication)
reminded me, Kant’s metaphysical deduction certainly seems
intended to reveal concepts which are
rules for judgments of any sort, whether limited to items of experience or
not.
On the radical subpicture, therefore, our concepts surely wouldn’t apply to God, if there were such a person. For God would be a noumenon. God would not be something we have constructed by applying concepts to the manifold of experience (God has created us; we have not constructed him.) So, on the radical subpicture, we can’t refer to, think about, or predicate properties of God.
This
way of thinking clearly displays a deep incoherence: on this
picture, Kant holds that the Dinge stand in a causal or
interactive relationship with
us, taken as transcendental ego(s); How many of those transcendental egos are
there, anyway? Like many questions of Kantian exegesis, this question is
vexed. Indeed, on the radical subpicture, it is more than vexed. If the
category of number doesn’t apply to the noumena, then there is
presumably no number n, finite
or infinite, such that the right answer to the question “How many of
those transcendental egos are there?” is n. In addition, of course, there is the problem
that it takes a great deal of effort to believe that we are really
responsible for the existence of sun, moon, and stars, not to mention
dinosaurs and other things, that (as we think) existed long before
there were any human beings.
Clearly, there are problems of coherence here. Suppose we ignore them for the moment: what kinds of reasons does Kant give for the contention that we can’t think about, refer to, predicate properties of the Dinge? Or, if he gives no such reasons (perhaps because he thinks we can think about them), what sorts of reasons or arguments does his work suggest for that conclusion? This conclusion—that our concepts are really rules for synthesizing the manifold into phenomenal objects and that the only things we can think about are objects we ourselves have somehow constructed—is, to say the least, rather startling. Some pretty powerful arguments would be required.
Argument for this view is
distressingly scarce. It is extremely difficult to find much that could
pass muster as an argument, or even as one of those “considerations
determining the intellect” John Stuart Mill sometimes gave when, as he
conceded, he didn’t have an argument. There is nothing here like the
ontological or cosmological arguments for the existence of God, or
Descartes’ argument that a person is not identical with her body (but
is, instead, an immaterial substance), or the argument for the conclusion
that propositions, the things we believe and assert, are not contingent
objects. See my Warrant and Proper Function
(WPF), pp. 117ff.
There is, however, a set of Kantian considerations that some might see
as taking us partway to the conclusion. These are to be found in what
he says about the antinomies:
allegedly powerful arguments on both sides of a given question. Thus
there is an allegedly compelling antinomical argument for the thesis
that the world had a beginning in time, but an equally compelling
argument for the antithesis that it did not. In the same way, there are
compelling arguments for the theses that the world is composed of
simples, that there is such a thing as agent causation (where an agent
cause is a being that freely originates a new causal series),
and that there is an absolutely
Now Kant apparently intends these antinomies to constitute an essential part of the argument for his transcendental idealism, the doctrine that the things we deal with (stars and planets, trees, animals and other people) are transcendentally ideal (depend upon us for their reality and structure), even if empirically real. We fall into the problem posed by the antinomies, says Kant, only because we take ourselves to be thinking about things in themselves as opposed to the things for us, noumena as opposed to mere appearances:
If in employing the principles of understanding we do not merely apply our reason to objects of experience, but venture to extend these principles beyond the limits of experience, there arise pseudo-rational doctrines which can neither hope for confirmation in experience nor fear refutation by it. Each of them is not only in itself free from contradiction, but finds conditions of its necessity in the very nature of reason—only that, unfortunately, the assertion of the opposite has, on its side, grounds that are just as valid and necessary. (A421, B449)
We solve the problem by recognizing our limitations, realizing that we can’t think, or can’t think to any good purpose, about the Dinge.
In presenting the antinomies, Kant does not explicitly argue for the radical subpicture. But suppose we try to find something like an argument there, either for the radical subpicture or for the conclusion we have been deriving from the radical subpicture, the conclusion that our concepts do not apply to the noumena, so that we cannot refer to and think about them. Perhaps the premises would be:
(2) If we are able to think about and refer to the Dinge, then the premises of the antinomical arguments (the premises of the arguments for the theses and for the antitheses) are about the Dinge and are all true,
and
(3) If those premises are all true, then the theses and antitheses would all be true, so that contradictions would be true.
Naturally enough, however,
(4) No contradictions are true.
Therefore:
(5) We cannot think about or refer to the Dinge.
We could perhaps weaken the first premise (2) to make it a bit more plausible:
(2*) If we can refer to and think about the Dinge, then each of the premises of the antinomical arguments will be about the Dinge and have overwhelming intuitive support.
(This is weaker, of course, because it says, not that the antinomical premises are true, if we can think about the Dinge, but that they strongly seem true to us.)
The second premise would then be:
(3*) If each of the premises has overwhelming intuitive support, we will have overwhelming reason to accept each of the theses and antitheses, and we see that each thesis is contradicted by its antithesis.
If, however, we weaken the first premise, we must strengthen one of the other two. Perhaps we could strengthen the third as follows:
(4*) It couldn’t be that we should have overwhelming reason to accept a proposition p and also its contradictory not-p.
And the conclusion would be as before.
Is
it really true that (as (4*) claims) we couldn’t have overwhelming
reason to accept both a proposition p and also its denial
not-p? It seems we could have good reason to accept each member of a
set S of beliefs such
that there is no possible world in which all the members of
S are true (the conjunction of
the members of S is
impossible), as is shown by the paradox of the preface. I write a book,
of course believing every proposition asserted therein. Past experience
and self-knowledge, however, lead me to think that very likely the book
contains at least one false statement. (All of my previous books, as
I’ve discovered to my sorrow, contain false statements.) In the
preface, therefore, I sadly concede that at least one statement in the
book is false. The total set of my beliefs, therefore—the statements
in the book plus the statement that at least one statement in the book
is false—is such that it must contain at least one falsehood;
nevertheless, I have good reason to accept each member.
Much more should be said about this objection to the argument, but I want to turn to the fatal objection. That is just that the antinomical arguments are not, to put the best face on it, at all compelling. Here I will argue this only for the premises of the first antinomy; exactly similar comments would apply to the others. In the first antinomy, there is an argument for the conclusion that “The world had a beginning in time and is also limited as regards space” (A426, B454); this is the thesis. There is also an argument for the antithesis: “The world has no beginning, and no limits in space; it is infinite as regards both time and space” (A426, B454). And the idea (in accordance with premises (2) and (2*)) is that if we can think about and refer to the Dinge, then both of these would be true or would have overwhelming intuitive support.
Well, what is the argument? I am sorry to say it is hard to take seriously. The argument for the thesis goes as follows:
If we assume that the world had no beginning in time, then up to every given moment an eternity has elapsed, and there has passed away in the world an infinite series of successive states of things. Now the infinity of a series consists in the fact that it can never be completed through successive synthesis. It thus follows that it is impossible for an infinite world-series to have passed away, and that a beginning of the world is therefore a necessary condition of the world’s existence. (A426, B454)
This argument proceeds
by reductio ad absurdum: show
that the denial of your conclusion leads to a contradiction, thereby
proving your conclusion. The first premise is that if the world had no
beginning in time, then at any point in time an infinite stretch of
time would already have elapsed. This is dubious because it is at
least abstractly possible that time and the world began together, some
finitely many years (or seconds) ago. If so, then we should say that
the world didn’t have a beginning in time, although it did have a beginning
with time. But let that pass.
According to the second premise, “the infinity of a series consists in
the fact that it can never be completed through successive synthesis”;
that is, it is characteristic of an infinite series that
But the real problem with the argument lies in a different direction. Kant points out that an infinite series can’t be completed by starting from some point finitely far from the beginning and adding members finitely many at a time at a constant rate; fair enough. He then concludes, “It thus follows that it is impossible for an infinite world-series to have passed away, and that a beginning of the world is therefore a necessary condition of the world’s existence.” This doesn’t follow at all. To claim that it does is to claim just what is to be proved: that the series in question had a beginning. The premise tells us that if you start from some finite point in a series—that is, some point finitely far from the beginning of the series—and add a finite number per unit time, then you will never complete the series. Fair enough; but if the world has existed for an infinite stretch of time, then there was no first moment, no first event, and no beginning either to the series of moments or the series of events; more generally, at any preceding moment an infinite time would already have elapsed. To conclude, as Kant does, that it is impossible that an infinite series of events has occurred is just to assume that the series in question had a beginning—that is, is finite—but that is precisely what was to be proved. So the argument really has no force at all. It is not as if it is an argument the premises of which have a certain limited amount of intuitive plausibility; it is rather that this transition to the conclusion completely begs the question by assuming what was to be proved: that the series in question has a beginning. The argument therefore fails to establish its conclusion; it merely assumes it. It therefore gives us no reason at all for accepting that conclusion.
The argument for the antithesis is no more promising. Here is how Kant puts it:
Let us assume that it [the world] had a beginning. Since the beginning
is an existence which is preceded by a time in which the thing is not,
there must have been a preceding time in which the world
Again, the argument is by reductio: assume the denial of your conclusion and show that it is impossible, thereby establishing the conclusion. Here the two premises are
(6) The beginning of an event or a thing is always preceded by a time in which the thing is not, that is, a time at which the thing in question does not exist.
and
(7) In an empty time (a time at which nothing exists) nothing could come to be, because there would be no more reason for it to come to be at one part of that empty time than at any other part of it.
Neither premise is at all compelling. As to the first, this is true only if it is not possible that time and the world (the first event) should come into existence together, simultaneously. Is it known that this isn’t possible? Certainly not. Indeed, some of the most popular theories of time (relational theories) would assume, not merely that this is possible, but that it is true.
As for the second premise, it is equally unpromising. Suppose (in
accord with the picture governing the argument) an infinity of time had
elapsed before the first event of the world took place—before its
creation, say. The objection is that there would have been no more
reason for God to create the world at one moment than at any other; hence he wouldn’t or couldn’t have created it at
any moment at all. Again, why believe this? If God proposed to create
the world, and no time was more propitious than any other, why couldn’t
he just arbitrarily select a time? Compare Augustine’s answer to those who wanted
to know what God was doing before he created the world in The
Confessions of St. Augustine, tr.
Rex Warner (New York: New American Library, 1963), book 11, chapter 12,
pp. 265–66.
This argument is like those
arguments that start from the premise that God, if he created the
world, would have created the best world he could have; they go on to
add that for every world God could have created (weakly
actualized, For the notion of weak actualization, see my
The Nature of Necessity (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 173, and Alvin
Plantinga, ed. James Tomberlin and
Peter van Inwagen (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), p.
49. See Robert Adams’s “Must God Create the
Best?” Philosophical Review 81
(1972), pp. 317–32.
The arguments for the other antinomies don’t fare any better. In no case is there anything like a conclusive argument (given the assumption that we are thinking about the Dinge) for either the thesis or the antithesis. In some cases, we may not know or be able to tell which (thesis or antithesis) is true: but that doesn’t constitute much of an argument for the conclusion that we can’t think about the noumena. What would be needed for the argument to work would be a really powerful argument for the thesis and an equally powerful argument for the antithesis. In none of these cases do we have something like that.
Suppose we think a bit further about antinomies and paradoxes in connection with this question of concluding that we simply can’t think about a given area or topic. Consider the Russell paradoxes, in their simple set-theoretical guise. Like Frege, we are all initially inclined to think that for every condition or property, there exists the set of just those things that meet the condition or have the property. It is pointed out that there is such a property as being nonselfmembered, the property a thing has just if it is not a member of itself; hence there must be a set S of nonselfmembered sets, but then S is a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself, which is a contradiction. Here it would be unduly enthusiastic to conclude that we can’t really think and talk about sets as they are in themselves and can instead think only about sets that we have ourselves constructed, sets as they appear to us. One takes the argument as proving only that there is no set of nonselfmembered sets and that, contrary to appearances, it is not true that for every property or condition, there exists the set of just those things satisfying the condition or displaying the property.
Take, instead, the Russell paradox as specified to properties, rather
than sets; in some ways, this is a more serious paradox. One is
initially inclined to think that there are properties, that some
properties (for example, the property of being a property) exemplify
themselves, so that there is such a property as
self-exemplification, and
that every property has a complement. These together lead to trouble:
they imply that there is such a property as
non-self-exemplification,
which inconsiderately both does and doesn’t exemplify
itself. If you balk at such properties as
self-exemplification and
non-self-exemplification,
conduct the argument instead in terms of
conditions; see Tomberlin and
van Inwagen, Alvin Plantinga, p. 320.
In what conditions would this drastic conclusion be right? Perhaps in none at all, and if in some, it is hard to say which. At the least, however, it would involve our being very strongly inclined to accept each member of a set of propositions about some subject matter, which set (by argument forms we are very strongly inclined to accept) entails a contradiction. It would also involve there being several such sets of propositions about the subject matter in question. Each of the premises and arguments involved would have to have very powerful, maximal or near maximal intuitive support; otherwise, we could more reasonably hold that a premise (or argument form) with only moderate intuitive support is false (or invalid). If there were several such sets of propositions—about properties, say—and each of these propositions and argument forms had the degree of intuitive support enjoyed by, say, 2 + 1 = 3 and modus ponens, then perhaps the right conclusion to draw would be that either there simply aren’t any such things as the objects in the alleged realm, or that if there are, we are incapable of thinking about them.
Even here, however, there would be reason to doubt the success of the argument. It would involve as a premise something like:
(8) If there are several sets of premises about properties, each member of each set having maximal intuitive warrant, and the members of each set together entail a contradiction, then we cannot refer to and think about properties an sich.
The next premise would be the antecedent of (8), and the conclusion would be the consequent of (8)—that is, the proposition that we cannot refer to and think about properties an sich. But if that conclusion were true, how could we grasp (8), the first premise? That premise seems to be, among other things, about properties an sich, and if we grasp it, we are able to think about properties an sich. The argument appears to be self-referentially self-refuting: if it is a successful argument, its first premise is both about noumena and such that we can grasp it, in which case that premise must be false.
The sensible Kantian conclusion, so it seems to me, is that if, indeed, we can refer to and think about the Dinge, reason alone doesn’t tell us such things as whether the world had a beginning in time or whether there are simple substances. It seems more likely than not, perhaps, that there are simple substances and that there are free agents who initiate new causal chains in the world, but the negations of these propositions are not demonstrably mistaken. Most certainly, it is not the case that both these propositions and their denials are demonstrable, so that each is both demonstrably true and, furthermore, demonstrably false.
We must also recall that the whole scheme, the whole radical subpicture, seems incoherent in a familiar way. One who states and proposes this scheme makes several claims about the Dinge: that they are not in space and time, for example, and more poignantly, that our concepts don’t apply to them (applying only to the phenomena), so that we cannot refer to or think about them. But if we really can’t think the Dinge, then we can’t think them (and can’t whistle them either); if we can’t think about them, we can’t so much as entertain the thought that there are such things. The incoherence is patent.
Would it be possible to induce coherence by refusing to make the
distinction between phenomena and noumena, speaking only of what, if we
did make that distinction, would
be the phenomena, and claiming that whatever there is, is either a bit
of experience or an object constructed by us from bits of experience by
way of concepts (i.e., rules for constructing things from experience)?
That is extremely hard to believe: are the stars, for example, which, as
far as we can tell, existed long before we did, either bits of human
experience or objects constructed by us from bits of human experience?
How are we supposed to make sense of that? On this view, furthermore,
the objection to Christian belief would not be that serious
Christians improperly take it that they can refer to God; the objection
would be that there is no God. If there were such a person, he
certainly wouldn’t be either a bit of human experience or something we
have constructed from it. Still further, on this picture we ourselves
(because we are among the things there are) would either have constructed
ourselves from bits of experience or we would just be
bits of experience; but of course we
couldn’t have constructed ourselves before we existed, so we must have
started off, at least, as bits of experience with
By way of conclusion then: it doesn’t look as if there is good reason in Kant or in the neighborhood of Kant for the conclusion that our concepts do not apply to God, so that we cannot think about him. Contemporary theologians and others sometimes complain that contemporary philosophers of religion often write as if they have never read their Kant. Perhaps the reason they write that way, however, is not that they have never read their Kant but rather that they have read him and remain unconvinced. They may be unconvinced that Kant actually claimed that our concepts do not apply to God. Alternatively, they may concede that Kant did claim this, but remain unconvinced that he was right; after all, it is not just a given of the intellectual life that Kant is right. Either way, they don’t think Kant gives us reason to hold that we cannot think about God.
Our subject is the de jure question about Christian belief: the question whether it is rational, or reasonable, or rationally justifiable, or intellectually defensible to accept such belief. A previous question, as we saw in the last chapter, is the question whether there is any de jure question about Christian belief or, indeed, any de facto question either. Christian belief is belief, among other things, in the existence of God. And Christians believe that God is infinite: unlimited with respect to such important properties as knowledge, wisdom, goodness, and power. They also believe that God is transcendent: distinct from the created universe, in no way dependent on it, and such that it is dependent on him. Finally, they assume that it is possible to refer to God, talk and think about him, address him in prayer, and worship him. Many contemporary theologians, however, apparently believe that these ideas are excessively naive: they hold that there are profound problems in the very idea that we can refer to and think about a being characterized in the way Christians characterize God. In particular, they seem to believe that Immanuel Kant gave us excellent reason to be (at best) extremely suspicious of such naively realistic ways of thinking about God or religious language. As we saw in the last chapter, however, there is really nothing in Kant to suggest that in fact we can’t think or talk about God. More generally, it is exceedingly hard to see how to construct an argument—an argument for the conclusion that we cannot refer to and think about God—from materials to be found in the work of Kant. Of course that doesn’t show that no such argument can be found: but if one can be found, it is, I should say, up to those who think there is one to produce and develop it.
In this chapter, I shall pursue this question into the present: if Kant gives us no reason to accept this conceptual agnosticism, do contemporary theologians (or writers in religious studies) do so? I choose two representatives: Gordon Kaufman and John Hick.
According to Gordon Kaufman,
The
central problem of theological discourse, not shared with any other
“language game,” is the meaning of the term “God.” “God” raises special
problems of meaning because it is a noun which by definition refers to
a reality transcendent of, and thus not locatable within, experience. A
new convert may wish to refer the “warm feeling” in his heart to God,
but God is hardly to be identified with this emotion; the biblicist may
regard the Bible as God’s Word; the moralist may believe God speaks
through men’s consciences; the churchman may believe God is present
among his people—but each of these would agree that God himself
transcends the locus referred to. As the Creator or Source of all that
is, God is not to be identified with any particular finite reality; as
the proper object of ultimate loyalty or faith, God is to be
distinguished from every proximate or penultimate value or being. But
if absolutely nothing within our experience can be directly identified
as that to which the term “God” properly refers, what meaning does or
can the word have? God the Problem
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 7. Henceforth
GP.
So the claim is that God is not to be identified with any particular finite reality—on the grounds, presumably, that God is not in fact identical with any particular finite reality. From the Christian perspective, this is, of course, no more than the sober truth: God is infinite and therefore not identical with any finite reality. So far, so good. Kaufman apparently infers from this, however, that “absolutely nothing within our experience can be directly identified as that to which the term ‘God’ properly refers”; he adds that if this is so, then there is a real problem for the reference of our term ‘God’: if “nothing within our experience can be directly identified as that to which the term ‘God’ properly refers, then what meaning does or can the word have?” I realize this last is a question, but it looks like a rhetorical question; the idea is that if nothing within our experience can be directly identified as that to which the term ‘God’ properly refers, then the term ‘God’ doesn’t refer to anything, or at any rate there is a real problem about its referring to something.
Here, therefore, we have two claims:
(a) if God is not a finite reality, then absolutely nothing within our experience can be directly identified as that to which the term ‘God’ properly refers.
and
(b) if nothing within our experience can be directly identified as that to which the term ‘God’ properly refers, then the term ‘God’ doesn’t refer to anything, or at least it is problematic that it does.
These claims awaken Kantian echoes—echoes that get stronger as we move further into Kaufman’s thought. And surely both are initially dubious. Consider (a). First, we must ask what it means to say that “nothing within our experience can be directly identified as that to which the term ‘God’ properly applies.” What is it, as Kaufman is thinking of it, for something to be within our experience, and to be such that it can be directly identified as that to which a certain term properly applies? What about my friend’s cat Maynard: is Maynard something within our experience which can be directly identified as that to which the term ‘Maynard’ properly applies? I should think so: else the problem is not merely with reference to God, but with reference to anything at all; Kaufman’s suggestion, I think, is that the problem is specifically with respect to God. According to (a) it is because God is infinite that the term ‘God’ doesn’t properly apply to anything within our experience. Now why, precisely, is that true? Maynard, I take it, is something within our experience, and this is because we can experience Maynard. We can perceive him: we can see, hear, touch, and sometimes smell him. The idea must be, then, that if God is not a finite reality, then we cannot experience him; we cannot perceive him (we cannot see, hear, or touch him) or in any other way experience him. An infinite being—one that is omnipotent and omniscient, for example—cannot be perceived or experienced in any way whatever.
Is
that really true? How does the fact that God is infinite mean that we
cannot experience him? Many Christians and Jews believe that God spoke
to Moses from the burning bush; Moses heard him. He spoke to Abraham in
a dream. He spoke to several people when he said, “This is my beloved
Son in whom I am well pleased”; these people all heard him. Christians
may also believe that the Holy Spirit works in their hearts, producing
conviction and faith, as well as the religious affections of which
Jonathan Edwards spoke; are they not then experiencing God? The term
‘experience’ (taken as either a noun or a verb) is notoriously
slippery, but if these things do in fact happen, do not the people
involved experience God? Christians may go still further and hold that
in some circumstances some people perceive God, a theme that
has received explicit and
powerful treatment in William P. Alston’s Perceiving
God. If they are right, then in
these
If God is omnipotent, infinitely powerful, won’t he be able to manifest himself in our experience, bring it about that we experience him? He will be unable to do so, presumably, under those conditions, only if it is logically impossible (impossible in the broadly logical sense) that an omniscient and omnipotent being should be able to make himself heard. But so far as I can see, there isn’t even the slightest reason to think that; certainly Kaufman gives us none. I will go into the question of the nature of experience of God in more detail in chapters 6, 8, and 9; here I only want to point out that it seems initially implausible to declare that God, if he is infinite and omnipotent, could not bring it about that we experience him.
The second premise (b)—the claim that if
nothing within our experience can
be directly identified as that to which the term ‘God’ refers, then the
term ‘God’ doesn’t refer to anything (or it is at least problematic
that it does)—also seems dubious. Cosmologists tell us of the Big
Bang, an event that occurred several billion years ago in which an
explosion of enormous energy caused an expansion from an initial
configuration of enormous density. I suppose the Big Bang is not
something within our experience, something that can be directly
identified as that to which the term ‘the Big Bang’ correctly refers;
does it follow that there is a profound problem with this term? Is the
real problem with contemporary cosmology not just the speculative
nature of those suggestions about many universes and what happened
during Planck time, but rather the very idea that we can refer to and
think about that initial Big Bang? It isn’t easy to see why: at the
least, a powerful argument would be required. And if there is no
particular problem here, why is there a special problem in the case of
God? One
source of Kaufman’s views here may be a sort of lingering allegiance to
the “Verifiability Criterion of Meaning” mentioned above (pp. 7–8):
“Since seemingly no clear experiential evidence can be cited for or
against that to which the word ‘God’ allegedly refers, the question has
been repeatedly raised whether all talk about him is not in the strict
sense cognitively meaningless” (p. 8). As we saw in chapter 1, however,
there is little to be said for the Verifiability Criterion.
Well, then, someone might say, if there is no problem about referring to an infinite being, how do we refer to God? In chapter 1, I suggested that we could do so, first, by way of definite descriptions such as ‘the creator of the heavens and the earth’, ‘the omnipotent and omniscient creator of the world’, ‘the divine father of our lord and savior Jesus Christ’, ‘the divine person who spoke to Abraham’, ‘the divine person I am presently experiencing,’ and so on. Each of these descriptions will refer to something if there is exactly one thing exemplifying the properties mentioned in the description; if not, then the description will not refer. (If Christian belief is true, of course, then each of these terms does refer to something, indeed, to the same thing.)
Furthermore, we can use the proper name ‘God’ to refer to the being
denoted by those descriptions. That term can serve as a proper name,
for me, of God, in several ways. For example, I might ‘fix the
reference’ of the term ‘God’ by one of the above descriptions, such as
‘the creator of heaven and earth’; if, indeed, just one person created
the heavens and the earth, and if that person is also denoted by those
other descriptions, then my name ‘God’ will be a proper name of the
same being as that denoted by those descriptions. My name will be a
proper name of a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, the creator of
the world, the father of our lord and savior Jesus Christ, and the
like. Under these conditions, my name ‘God’ will express an essence of
that being. See my The Nature of Necessity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974),
pp. 77ff. See my “The Boethian Compromise,” in
American Philosophical Quarterly (1978).
Alternatively, I might not get my proper name of God by using a definite description to fix the reference and then officially baptize the thing to which the description refers: I might instead just catch the name, so to speak, from others. In fact, this is the more usual way. Proper names, like colds, are ordinarily caught from our associates. As a child, I hear talk of God, talk in which the name ‘God’ occurs; I pick up the name, tacitly or implicitly intending to use it to refer to the same being to which those from whom I get the name refer. If they do indeed succeed in referring to God by using that name, then so will I. (Here is another way in which the success of my noetic ventures depends on the success of similar ventures on the parts of those around me: see Warrant and Proper Function, pp. 77–78.)
In any event, Kaufman holds that we can neither know nor experience what he calls ‘the real referent’ of the term ‘God’:
The real referent for “God” is never accessible to us or in any way open to our observation or experience. It must remain always an unknown X. . . . (GP 85)
When Christians use the term ‘God’, therefore, they do not refer to the real referent of that term (but then why call it “the real referent”?). To whom or what (if anything) do they refer when they say such things as that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, or that God created the heavens and the earth, or that God is our faithful and loving father? The answer, says Kaufman, is that when they say these things they are referring to the “available referent” of the name ‘God’, and the available referent is an imaginative construct, something we have somehow created:
For all practical purposes it is the available referent—a particular imaginative construct—that bears significantly on human life and thought. It is the “available God” whom we have in mind when we worship or pray . . . it is the available God in terms of which we speak and think whenever we use the word “God.” In this sense “God” denotes for all practical purposes what is essentially a mental or imaginative construct. (GP 85–86)
God is a symbol—an imaginative construct—that enables men to view the world and themselves in such a way as to make action and morality ultimately (metaphysically) meaningful. (GP 109)
So the available God, the God whom we have in mind when we worship and pray, the being to which we refer when we use the term ‘God’—this being is a human creation, an imaginative construct, something we ourselves have created. The view seems to be initially that there is this available referent, but also a real referent of the term ‘God’, a being with whom we have no noetic contact and about whom we cannot speak. Or rather, the view is, I think, that there might be a real referent, and that if there is, it is a being we cannot think about:
This fact, that the God actually available to people is an imaginative construct, does not necessarily mean that God is “unreal” or “merely imaginary” or something of that sort. That question remains open for further investigation. (GP 86)
Does this mean, then, that the conclusion is, after all, that God really does not exist, that He is only a figment of our imaginations? If those words are intended to put the speculative question about the ultimate nature of things, then, as we have seen, there is no possible way to give an answer. (GP 111)
In essence, then, Kaufman’s view in God the Problem appears to be the following. The term ‘God’ has an available referent: this is a human construction, something we have created; when we speak of God in worship or to him in prayer, it is this available referent about which (or to which) we are talking. Perhaps the term also has a real referent. If so, however, it transcends our experience and is hence something to which our concepts do not apply: a mere unknown X, to adopt Kaufman’s Kantian terminology.
Now I’ve already argued that there seems no good reason to hold this position. Here I must go on to add that there is excellent reason not to hold it. As it stands, the view is incoherent. First, the ‘available referent’: the suggestion is that when Christians pray and worship and speak about God, they are talking about the available referent. When they say such things, for example, as ‘God created the heavens and the earth’, they are really attributing this property—the property of having created the heavens and the earth—to the available referent. But the available referent is a human construct, and hence presumably did not exist before there were human beings. How then did it manage to create the heavens and the earth? Could it somehow do this before it existed? In any event, an imaginative construct, a symbol, a structure of meanings of some kind is just not the sort of thing that could create the heavens and the earth or, indeed, anything else. A symbol, an imaginative construct, may have properties: being a construct, for example, or being a symbol, or being appropriately used by human beings for such and such a purpose; it certainly won’t have such properties as being omniscient or creating the world. I suppose it could be that Christians are confused: they think they are referring to and talking about something that created them, but the fact is they are referring to something they themselves have created. Is it really plausible to think they are as confused as all that, however? Those who believe there is no such person as God will see Christians as mistaken in thinking there is, and perhaps it is at least sensible to think them mistaken in that way. Is it really sensible to think them mistaken in such a way that they predicate the properties of God of a mere construct? Well, perhaps that could happen; but surely a strong argument would be required to make this even reasonably plausible.
Say that a property
P entails a property Q just if it is necessary in
the broadly logical sense that everything that exemplifies P
also exemplifies Q; and say that a concept C contains
a property P if the property of which C is a grasp entails
P. Then it is clear that a concept might contain such
properties as being omniscient or having created the world
(even if it couldn’t exemplify them), and
equally clear that the concept corresponding to the definite
description ‘the omniscient creator of the world’ contains the
properties being omniscient and being the creator of the
world. Could it be that what
Kaufman really means is not that Christians assert that the available
referent—which is something like a concept containing salient
properties of God—exemplifies those properties, but rather that it
contains them? This too
seems wrong. It is indeed true that certain concepts, including some
associated with descriptions of God, contain those properties. When
Christians make their characteristic claims, however, they are not
merely saying such things as that the concept being the omniscient
creator of the heavens and earth contains the properties being
omniscient and being the
creator of the heavens and earth. That would, of course, be true; it would also be
wholly trivial. It wouldn’t be at all distinctive of
The above seems to be the literal construal of Kaufman’s words; of
course there are other possibilities in the neighborhood. Perhaps, for
example, he thinks of the available referent not as a being with the
properties Christians ascribe to God, but as something like a certain
type with which those properties are associated. See Nicholas Wolterstorff’s so-far-unpublished
From Presence to Practice; Mind, World, and Entitlement to
Believe, chapter 1.
Now consider the real referent. The idea is that our concepts do not apply to the real referent, if indeed there is such a thing. It follows that this being is not wise, almighty, or the creator of the heavens and the earth. For consider our concept of wisdom. This concept applies to a thing just if that thing is wise. So a being to which this concept did not apply would not be wise, whatever else it might be. If, therefore, our concepts do not apply to the real referent of the term ‘God’, then our concepts of being loving, almighty, wise, creator, and redeemer do not apply to it, in which case it is not loving, almighty, wise, a creator, or a redeemer. It wouldn’t have any of the properties Christians ascribe to God. And of course so far this is in accord with Kaufman’s intentions.
I suspect, however, that his official position has other consequences Kaufman does not intend. If this being, this real referent, is really such that none of our concepts applies to it, then it will also lack such properties as self-identity, existence, and being either a material object or an immaterial object, these being properties of which we have concepts. Indeed, it wouldn’t have the property of being the real referent of the term ‘God’ or any other term; our concept being the referent of a term will not apply to it. The fact is this being won’t have any properties at all because our concept of having at least one property does not apply to it. Kaufman’s view seems to entail that there could be a being that had no properties, didn’t exist, wasn’t self-identical, wasn’t either a material object or an immaterial object, and didn’t have any properties.
Taken strictly, therefore, Kaufman’s position is incoherent.
Perhaps it is for reasons like these that in more recent work, in
particular The Theological Imagination, Subtitled Constructing the Concept of
God (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1981; hereafter TI). See also his Essay on Theological
Method (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars
Press, 1975 and 1979).
It is a mistake, therefore, to regard qualities attributed to God (e.g., aseity, holiness, omnipotence, omniscience, providence, love, self-revelation) as though they were features or activities of such a particular being. Rather, in the mind’s construction of the image/concept of God, the ordinary relation of subject and predicate is reversed. Instead of the subject (God) being a given to which the various predicate adjectives are then assigned, here the descriptive terms themselves are the building blocks which the imagination uses in putting together its conception. . . . Contemporary theological construction needs to recognize that these terms and concepts do not refer directly to “objects” or “realities” or their qualities and relations, but function rather as the building blocks or reference points which articulate the theistic world-picture or vision of life. (TI 244)
Why must we think these
terms do not, in fact, denote an all-powerful, all-wise creator of the
universe? As far as I can see, it is because Kaufman does not believe
that there is any such thing: he thinks, so far as I can see, that the
proper attitude toward this proposition is either disbelief or
withholding, either atheism or agnosticism. Naturally enough, if there
is no being of that sort, then none of our terms will denote a being of
that sort. This is perhaps a surprising position for a theologian; a
theologian who does not believe in God is like a mountaineer for whom
it is an open question whether there are any mountains or a plumber
agnostic about pipes: a beguiling spectacle, but hard to take
seriously. Unhappily, this spectacle is not at present
uncommon. Compare, for example, Don Cupitt, who has similar views
sometimes expressed with a certain amiable dottiness: “It is spiritual
vulgarity and immaturity to demand an extra-religious reality of God”
(p. 10 of his Taking Leave of God [New York: Crossroad, 1981]); he adds, “The real
external existence of God is of no religious interest” (p.
96).
And why does he think there is no such person? Again, there is precious
little by way of argument. He cites first “the rise of a new
consciousness
“Evidentialism: A Theologian’s Response,”
Faith and Philosophy (January
1989), p. 30.
One
might expect someone who is atheist or agnostic about God to move away
from religion altogether, viewing religious devotion and belief with
something of a jaundiced or a pitying eye. This is not Kaufman’s
course. Instead, he argues that religious practice and devotion “still
has an important function to play in life.” This function, of course,
is not that of putting us in touch with a being with the properties
traditionally ascribed to God or that of enabling us to appropriate
the salvation in Jesus Christ that God has promised us. Rather, this
new function requires that theologians should construct
or reconstruct
the concept of God. Religious language
is still important, but it should be recast so as no longer to involve
a forlorn attempt to refer to a being who isn’t there. Instead, it
should be used to promote human flourishing, “human
fulfillment and meaning” (TI 34). The word ‘God’ is to be associated
with a symbol or image or concept theologians construct; it is their
job to reconstruct the concept or symbol ‘God’ in a way that is
appropriate to our present historical situation. (Thus in
Theology for a Nuclear Age, he
suggests that in this modern nuclear age we should think of God as “the
historical
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985,
p. 43. How do properties such as transcendence or
aseity get related to those symbols we
construct? Do we just draw up a list of properties and declare them
associated with the term ‘God’? It is far from easy to see how this is
supposed to work, and Kaufman doesn’t say.
What seems to be at stake here is a claim that human individuals and communities need a center of orientation and devotion outside themselves and their perceived desires and needs if they are to find genuine fulfillment. (TI 35–36)
God symbolizes that in the ongoing evolutionary historical process which grounds our being as distinctively human and which draws (or drives) us on toward authentic human fulfillment (salvation). . . . And ritualized devotion to God in religious cult as well as in the private disciplines of prayer and meditation still has an important function to play in life. (TI 41)
More generally:
“God” is the personifying symbol of that cosmic activity which has created our humanity and continues to press for its full realization. Such a personification has a considerable advantage for some purposes over abstract concepts such as “cosmic forces” or “foundation for our humanity in the ultimate nature of things”: the symbol “God” is concrete and definite, a sharply defined image, and as such it can readily become the central focus for devotion and service. . . . “God” is a symbol that gathers up into itself and focuses for us all those cosmic forces working toward the fully humane existence for which we long. (TI 50)
Speech about the Christian God as “real” or “existent” expresses symbolically this conviction that free and loving persons-in-community have a substantial metaphysical foundation, that there are cosmic forces working toward this sort of humanization. (TI 49)
The Christian image/concept of God, as I have presented it here, is an imaginative construct which orients selves and communities so as to facilitate development toward loving and caring selfhood, and toward communities of openness, love, and freedom. (TI 48)
The idea, so far as I can grasp it, seems to be this. Perhaps there is no such person as theists have traditionally believed in. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to continue to use the term ‘God’ and, in fact, to continue to utter many of the very same words and phrases and sentences as do those who believe in God; done properly, this will promote human flourishing. How, exactly? Perhaps as follows. We realize, first, that there is probably no such person as God. We are then free to select a concept/image ‘God’ and associate with it certain properties—existence and transcendence, perhaps—and use that symbol to symbolize such things as that the world is hospitable, to at least some degree, to distinctively human aspirations, goals, needs, and desires. We are to say such things as ‘God is real’, meaning that in fact there are forces in the world that contribute to human flourishing. (We should add, I suppose, that the devil is also real, thereby symbolizing that there are forces working against human flourishing.) We are to say ‘God is independent of us,’ meaning thereby that a community or person needs a focus of interest outside itself to flourish. (Perhaps we should add that ‘We are justified by the suffering and death of Jesus Christ,’ thereby symbolizing the fact that we do not always feel guilty, or ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself,’ thereby meaning that things are now more propitious for human flourishing than they have been at some times in the past.) And saying these things will itself promote human flourishing.
Can we take any of this seriously? This is not a matter of pouring new wine into old wineskins: what we have here is nothing like the rich, powerful, fragrant wine of the great Christian truths; what we have is something wholly drab, trivial, and insipid. It is not even a matter of throwing out the baby with the bathwater; it is, instead, throwing out the baby and keeping the tepid bathwater, at best a bland, unappetizing potion that is neither hot nor cold and at worst a nauseating brew, fit for neither man nor beast. Furthermore, this rehashing of secularity under the guise of ‘reconstructing’ Christianity encourages dishonesty and hypocrisy; it results in a sort of private code whereby one utters the same phrases as those who accept Christian belief but means something wholly different by them. You thereby appear to concur with those who accept Christian belief; in fact, you wholly reject what they believe. You can thereby patronize the person in the pew (who has not reached your level of enlightenment) but without paying the cost of unduly disturbing her. The fact is such double-talk is at best confusing and deceptive, contributing only to misunderstanding, dishonesty, and hypocrisy. Wouldn’t it be vastly more honest to follow the lead of, for example, Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, or even Madalyn Murray O’ Hair, declaring forthrightly that there is no God and that Christianity is an enormous mistake?
John Hick’s work is interesting both intrinsically and with respect to our topic; he too holds a view heavily indebted to Kant, and his view too can be put (with considerable qualifications) as the view that our concepts do not apply to God or ‘The Real’. There are evocative echoes of Kant and also evocative echoes of some of the trials and tribulations dogging an effort to find a coherent interpretation or understanding of Kant.
The traditional doctrine of
divine ineffability is to be found in Christianity, as well as other
religious traditions. Hick believes that this doctrine is really the
recognition of a quasi-Kantian distinction between God (the Real, the
Ultimate An
Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1989), pp. 236–39. Unless otherwise noted, page references to Hick’s
work will be to this book.
In each of the great traditions a distinction has been drawn, though with varying degrees of emphasis, between the Real (thought of as God, Brahman, the Dharmakaya . . .) in itself and the Real as manifested within the intellectual and experiential purview of that tradition. (236)
So far, so good; this claim—that there is a distinction between the Real as it is in itself and as it is for us—is relatively weak. It requires only that the way we think of God does not completely match what God actually is; it would be satisfied if, for example, there are things about God that we didn’t know or, more strongly, if there were things about him we couldn’t know.
But Hick goes much further; the Real is such that we cannot say anything at all about it, in that none of our terms can be literally (and correctly) applied to it:
Thus although we cannot speak of the Real an sich in literal terms, nevertheless we live inescapably in relation to it. (351)
It is within the phenomenal or experienceable realm that language has developed and it is to this that it literally applies. Indeed the system of concepts embodied in human language has contributed reciprocally to the formation of the humanly perceived world. It is as much constructed as given. But our language can have no purchase on a postulated noumenal reality which is not even partly formed by human concepts. This lies outside the scope of our cognitive capacities. (350)
This sounds like the two-world interpretation of Kant (above, pp. 10ff.). There is the phenomenal realm, to which our language literally applies; this “humanly perceived world” is as much constructed as given, and it is constructed, in part, by virtue of our application of concepts. However, there is also a noumenal world (‘The Real’), “which is not even partly formed by human concepts,” and as a result it is outside the scope of our cognitive capacities. And here some of the same questions arise as with the two-world interpretation of Kant: why think something is within the scope of our cognitive capacities only if it is partly formed by human concepts? Are horses and dinosaurs (partly) formed by our concepts? (Which parts?) And if the noumena lie outside the scope of our cognitive capacities, how is it that we know something about them, or even that there are any such things?
More frequently, however, he adopts the one-world view:
Kant distinguished between noumenon and phenomenon, or between a Ding an sich and that thing as it appears to human consciousness. . . . In this strand of Kant’s thought—not the only strand, but the one which I am seeking to press into service in the epistemology of religion—the noumenal world exists independently of our perception of it and the phenomenal world is that same world as it appears to our human consciousness. . . . I want to say that the noumenal Real is experienced and thought by different human mentalities, forming and formed by different religious traditions, as the range of gods and absolutes which the phenomenology of religion reports. (241–42)
Further, it is unclear whether Hick thinks we can or can’t, do or don’t perceive this being or in some other way experience it. On the negative side, we have
If the Real in itself is not and cannot be humanly experienced, why postulate such an unknown and unknowable Ding as sich? The answer is that the divine noumenon is a necessary postulate of the pluralistic religious life of humanity. (249)
On the positive side, we have, for example,
Analogously, I want to say that the noumenal Real is experienced and thought by different human mentalities, forming and formed by different religious traditions, as the range of gods and absolutes which the phenomenology of religion reports. (242)
and
The noumenal Real is such as to be authentically experienced as a range of both theistic and nontheistic phenomena. (246–47)
There are several more
passages to quote on each side; clearly, Hick is ambivalent about the
answer to this question. But perhaps this is
Another ambiguity, however, is not so easily dismissed. In chapter 19, Hick seems to say that our concepts do not apply to the noumenon, or, as he puts it there, none of our terms applies literally to it. He quotes the Buddha as saying, with respect to where or in what sphere a Tathagata (a fully enlightened being) arises after death, that none of the terms ‘arises’, ‘does not arise’, ‘both arises and does not arise,’ and ‘neither arises nor does not arise’ applies to the condition of the Tathagata (346). Hick apparently approves of this suggestion and adds, “We have here the idea of realities and circumstances which transcend the categories available in our unillumined thought and language. Their total elusiveness is signaled by the Buddha’s rejection not only of the straight positive and negative assertions but also of their combination and disjunction” (347). Hick also claims that “we cannot speak of the Real an sich in literal terms” (351). If Hick really means that none of our terms applies literally to the Real, then it isn’t possible to make sense of what he says. I take it the term ‘tricycle’ does not apply to the Real; the Real is not a tricycle. But if the Real is not a tricycle, then ‘is not a tricycle’ applies literally to it; it is a nontricycle. It could hardly be neither a tricycle nor a nontricycle, nor do I think that Hick would want to suggest that it could.
In chapter 14, however, Hick makes a suggestion of quite a different kind. As he says, “it would not indeed make sense to say of X that none of our concepts apply to it” (p. 239); for example, at least our concept being such that we can refer to it would have to apply to any X of which we were properly prepared to say anything at all, including that our concepts do not apply to it. The idea is rather, says Hick, that among our concepts, only formal concepts and negative concepts apply to the Real. That is to say, of the properties of which we have a grasp, only those that are formal, such as having some properties, being self-identical, and being such that 7 + 5 = 12, and those that are negative, such as not being a horse, not being a tricycle, and not being good, would apply to it. Hick adds that there is a substantial tradition within Christianity and other religions, according to which we should distinguish
between
what we might call substantial properties, such as ‘being good’, ‘being
powerful’, ‘having knowledge’, and purely formal and logically
generated properties such as ‘being a referent of a term’ and ‘being
such that our substantial concepts do not apply’. What they wanted to
affirm was that the substantial characterizations do not apply to God
in God’s self-existent being, beyond the range of human experience.
They often expressed this by saying that we can only make negative
statements about the Ultimate. . . . This via negativa
Here Hick is apparently endorsing what he sees these traditions as delivering. I am not sure there is any way of harmonizing chapter 14 with chapter 19; if not, I suggest we go with chapter 14.
At some points in characterizing these traditions he is historically incorrect. For example, he claims that “Calvin taught that we do not know God’s essence but only God as revealed to us” (250), and he refers to Calvin’s Institutes, I: xiii: 21. But Calvin doesn’t teach that we can’t know anything of God’s essence. In this chapter, he begins by arguing that
The scriptural teaching concerning
God’s infinite and spiritual essence ought to be enough, not only to
banish popular delusions, but also to refute the subtleties of secular
philosophy. Tr. Ford Lewis Battles and ed. John T. McNeill
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), I, xiii, 1, p. 120. (Page
references to the Institutes are
to this edition.)
He goes on to point out that we can’t ‘measure’ God ‘by our own senses’ as he puts it:
But even if God to keep us sober speaks sparingly of his essence, yet by those two titles that I have used [‘infinite’ and ‘spiritual’], he both banishes stupid imaginings and restrains the boldness of the human mind. Surely his infinity ought to make us afraid to try to measure him by our own senses. (p. 121)
Calvin’s next point is that because God is a spirit, we can’t properly attribute corporeal characteristics to him. He concedes that Scripture does seem to attribute such characteristics (a mouth, an arm, ears, eyes, hands) to him, but those who therefore take it that he has such bodily characteristics fail to understand that “as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us” (p. 121). Here Calvin clearly thinks we know that God ‘in himself’ is infinite, spiritual, and incorporeal; his essence includes infinity and incorporeality. In the passage to which Hick refers, furthermore, Calvin’s point is to caution us not to try to figure out God’s essence by way just of the resources of reason; given its limitations, that is bound to prove futile:
For how can the human mind measure off
the measureless essence of God according to its own little measure, a
mind as yet unable to establish for certain the nature of the sun’s
body, though men’s eyes daily gaze upon it? . . . Let us then
The point is that Scripture is a much better source of knowledge of God (including knowledge of his essence) than rational speculation. But Calvin didn’t think for a moment that none of our positive substantial concepts applies to God; he clearly believed that God really is the creator of the heavens and the earth, that he really does love us, that he is incorporeal, wise, powerful, loving, and the like.
On
this view, Hick’s claim about the Real is not that none of our concepts
applies to it or that none of our terms literally applies to it; that is
clearly incoherent. His claim, instead, is that only our formal
concepts and terms and our negative concepts and terms
apply to it. That is to say, the only properties it has of which we
have a grasp are formal properties and negative properties. Consider
first those formal concepts. Included here would be, first of all,
concepts of properties which are such that everything
has them and furthermore has
them necessarily. A concept’s meeting the first condition but
not the second (i.e., being such that everything falls under it but not
such that everything necessarily falls under it) is not sufficient for its being
formal. For example, the concept either not living on the moon
or else not being human applies to
everything (there are no human beings who live on the moon), but it
isn’t a formal concept in the intended sense.
We might add that they are essential to everything, where a property is essential to an object if it is not possible that the object exist but lack the property: the property of being self-identical would be an example. We could add still further that each of these properties is such that it is necessary that everything has it essentially. So take any of the properties under consideration: everything has it, it is necessary that everything has it, everything has it essentially, and it is necessary that everything has it essentially. Existence is another of those formal properties: everything exists, existence is an essential property of everything, and it is a necessary truth that existence is essential to everything.
But these aren’t the only properties that Hick means to include under the rubric ‘formal’. Others are such properties as being referred to by human beings and being thought of by John. So the idea is not that we cannot talk or think about the being in question. On the contrary: we can think about it, refer to it, and say of it that it exists. We can say of it, furthermore, that we can refer to it.
Second, in addition to formal properties, we can predicate negative properties of this being—that is, we can correctly predicate negative properties of it. This is implied by Hick’s position as I have so far explained it. We can see this as follows. First, note that every property has a complement, where the complement of a property P is the property of not having P. Each of the properties of which we have a concept has a complement: the property of not having that property. Thus the complement of the property wisdom is the property of not being wise, a property enjoyed by everything that is not wise. And if we have a grasp, a conception, of the property in question (wisdom, for example) then we also have a grasp of its complement. Now consider any property P and its complement -P; the property P or -P is one of those formal properties every thing necessarily has. Of course, anything that has that property has either the property P or else has its complement -P. (For anything you pick, either it is wise or it is not wise.) According to Hick’s position as so far explained, however, the Real doesn’t have any positive nonformal property of which we have a grasp. It follows, then, that for all the positive properties P of which we have a grasp, the Real has -P.
Here we are speaking of the properties the thing in question has, not about our abilities or lack thereof to know or warrantedly believe something or other about its properties. I say that every object has essentially the property of having P or -P for any property P; I say further that if a being has that property, then either it has P or it has -P. Still, a being might be known (or justifiably believed or warrantedly believed) to have P or -P without being known (justifiably believed, etc.) to have P and without being known to have -P. I do not know and have no view on the question whether Socrates ever owned a horse; nevertheless, either he did own a horse or he didn’t. In developing Hick’s view, then, I am taking for granted a sort of realism: the idea that things (some things) can be a certain way even if neither I nor any other human being knows whether they are that way or not. There is nothing in what Hick says to suggest that his position obliges him to take issue with this truism.
So
the idea is that we can predicate negative properties of this being.
Furthermore, the idea is that we can correctly predicate
negative properties of it: it has negative properties. Indeed,
for each of the nonformal positive properties we grasp, the Real has
the complement of that
property (which is a negative property). Among our positive concepts,
only the purely formal ones apply to this being; as for the rest
of our concepts, only the negative ones apply to it. The Real doesn’t
have wisdom: therefore it has nonwisdom; it does not have love:
therefore it has nonlove; and so on for all the other positive
nonformal properties we grasp. But, you say: it is not possible that
there be a being that has only formal and negative properties. No doubt
that’s true; still, it is neither here nor there, so far as Hick’s
claim goes. The being in question may very well have
positive properties
We must ask two questions here: first, is this Hickian position coherent? And second, is there any reason to accept it?
This being, says Hick, has no positive, nonformal properties of which we have a concept; the only positive properties it has are those of which we have no grasp. This is not clearly incoherent. We can’t just see, I think, that there couldn’t be a being like that; that is because we have a very slim grasp of those properties we don’t grasp. We just don’t know enough about them to know that it isn’t possible that there be a being like that. Of course, we also have no reason to think that there can be such a being: the fact that we can’t see that there can’t be a being like that is little or no reason for thinking we can see that there can be. (It is one thing to fail to see that something is impossible; it is quite another to see that it is possible.) In this case, so it seems, we don’t know enough to be able to tell whether it is possible that there be such a being. So suppose we provisionally concede, at least for purposes of argument, that it is possible that there be such a being.
But if there is such a being, how is it that we are able to refer to it, have some way of singling it out as a subject of predication? How can that be done? Not, to be sure, by way of the definite descriptions whereby Christians believe they can pick out God—such descriptions, say, as ‘the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the world’; such descriptions involve positive, nonformal properties of which we have a conception. Could we instead use the description: ‘the being that has no positive, substantial properties of which we have a grasp’? No; for if there is one such being, then maybe there are several more, none with any positive, nonformal properties we can grasp but differing from each other in positive, nonformal properties we can’t grasp. So we have no reason to think that that description will work either. (Of course once again we don’t know that it doesn’t work; for all we know or can tell, there is exactly one being with no positive nonformal properties of which we have a grasp.)
Now
Hick’s idea, I think, is that those who practice the great religions
really refer to this being (the
Real, which has no positive nonformal properties of which we have a
grasp) when (as it seems to them) they refer to God, Allah,
Brahman, Shiva, Vishnu, the Dharmakaya, or whatever. So
Christians think they
refer to a being who is personal,
See McGonagall’s Poetic Gems
(Dundee: David Winter and Son; London:
Gerald Duckworth, first published in two parts in 1890 and first
published as one volume in 1934). See also his More Poetic
Gems, Still More Poetic Gems, Yet More Poetic
Gems, and Poetic Gems Once Again.
Of course, there must be some kind
of connection between us. You can’t pick me out as that handsome
tenor-cum-poet-cum-economist who lives in (say) Jamestown, North
Dakota; that description doesn’t apply to me. But even this might be possible; if I have
some other way of referring to you but also think that this
description applies to you, then perhaps when I use that description,
thinking it applies to you, I do, in fact, refer to you. Suppose God
doesn’t have some of the properties we think he has: suppose, for
example, he isn’t simple, in the classical sense, but composite, with a
distinction to be made between him and his properties, between him and
his existence, and so on. Even so, if a creed like the Belgic Confession
refers to him as the spiritual, simple, creator of the universe, it
still refers to him by that description, even if the description
doesn’t apply.
Now perhaps this is possible: still, it does require a modification—and a significant modification—of Hick’s position. If this is the way the wind blows, then the Real enjoys at least one positive nonformal property of which we have a conception: the property being experienced by us. It stands in at least one positive nonformal relation of which we have a conception: the relation being experienced by. (So the ambiguity we noted above, pp. 44–45, must be resolved in favor of the alternative according to which we do experience the Real.) And that may lead to more, for what is involved in something’s being experienced by us or by the practitioners of the great religions? What is it for something to be experienced by us? Here there are several views. One is that the thing in question appears to us, in a way that defies further analysis. Another is that it causes us to be appeared to in a certain way, or causes some other kind of experience in us (and meets certain other conditions). What these have in common is at the least the idea that in order to experience the Real, we must be in causal contact with it, stand in a causal relation with it.
There is perhaps one
alternative to be found in the history of philosophy: that would be the
idea that we could experience something, perhaps in an analogically
extended sense of ‘experience’, if there were a preestablished
harmony between experiential
states of ours and states of the thing in question. Kant’s objection to this Leibnizian suggestion
is that any such preestablished harmony would not be a
cognitive relation; it couldn’t
support our having knowledge of the things in question. But it is very
difficult to see why that should be so. Suppose God brings it about
that our cognitive states appropriately match those of the world around
us, and suppose the other conditions for warrant are met (as outlined,
e.g., in Warrant and Proper Function): why wouldn’t that be sufficient for our having
knowledge of those things?
And this means that Hick or a Hickian (for perhaps we are going beyond Hick’s position here) must also ascribe another positive nonformal property to the Real: the property of being causally connected with us human beings. This is not a merely formal property, and it is also not a negative property. Still further, it may involve additional properties: whatever properties are necessarily connected with standing in a causal relation to human beings. The thing in question could not, for example, be like numbers and propositions are ordinarily thought to be: abstract objects that are incapable of standing in causal relations. So the being in question must have the property of being a concrete object, as opposed to an abstract object. The property of being a concrete object is also a nonformal property (many things lack it); as we shall see below, it isn’t easy to tell whether it is a positive or a negative property. And of course there may be still more properties necessarily connected with the property of standing in a causal relation with us human beings.
Should we perhaps say that this last property—being a concrete object—is really a negative property? Why can’t we think of the property being concrete as simply the complement of the property being abstract, with the latter positive and the former negative? Perhaps being concrete is really just not being abstract. But this leads to a real difficulty: why go that way? Can’t we just as well take the property being abstract as the property not being concrete, so that being concrete is the positive property and being abstract the negative? How do we determine which of the two properties really is positive, and which is really negative?
Indeed, are we guaranteed that this distinction between positive and
negative properties really applies to properties at all? Is there
really such a distinction for properties? Of course, there is a
distinction between positive and negative predicates, linguistic
items or phrases such as ‘is a horse’,
‘is not a cat,’ and the like. (Both ‘not being abstract’ and ‘not being
concrete’ are negative predicates; both ‘is concrete’ and ‘is abstract’
are positive predicates.) But do we know that this distinction between
positive and negative extends beyond predicates to properties? What
makes a predicate (in English) negative is the presence in it of some
negative particle, such as ‘not’ or ‘non’ or ‘un’ (as in ‘unlimited’)
or ‘a’ (as in ‘asymmetrical’) or ‘dis’ or ‘anti’ (as in
‘antidisestablishmentarianism’). But properties presumably don’t contain particles or other bits of language. What would distinguish
This is not an easy question to answer. Can the Hickian perhaps claim that he really owes us no further answer? There is a distinction between positivity and negativity for properties, he says, and there is no way of getting behind this distinction, to say what it consists in, what it is that makes a property positive, or anything of that sort. This distinction is rock bottom and cannot be explained in terms of anything else. There are clear examples: wisdom is a positive property, and its complement, unwisdom (enjoyed both by those things capable of but lacking wisdom and by those not capable of it), is clearly a negative property; the distinction itself is ultimate and can’t be explained in other terms.
Well, maybe so, but can we say anything
general about which properties are positive and which negative?
Presumably the idea is that (1) every property is either positive or
negative, (2) every property has a complement, (3) the complement of a
property P has the
opposite sense from P (that is, the complement of a positive property is
negative and the complement of a negative property is positive), (4) a
property equivalent Where P is equivalent to Q
if and only if it is necessary in the broadly
logical sense that whatever exemplifies either P
or Q exemplifies both P and Q. Where a property A entails a property
B if (and only if) it is necessary that any object
that has A also has B.
So far as I can see, there is nothing problematic about (1)—(6) at the level of logic alone. Indeed, note that we can give a ‘truth table’ (actually, a ‘positivity table’) for the complement of a property and for disjunction and conjunction among properties, and note further that the positivity table for conjunction is the truth table for disjunction and the positivity table for disjunction the truth table for conjunction. Mapping disjunction for properties onto conjunction for propositions, and conjunction for properties onto disjunction for propositions, we can help ourselves to some results from propositional logic and see that the logic of properties generated by (1)–(6) is consistent, complete, decidable, and so on.
Nevertheless, there still remains a problem with coherence. It appears, initially at least, that some nonformal positive properties are entailed by negative properties (given that there is such a distinction for properties). For example, according to Hick, the Real is both ultimate and infinite:
Unlimitedness, or infinity, is a negative concept, the denial of limitation. That this denial must be made of the Ultimate is a basic assumption of all the great traditions. It is a natural and reasonable assumption: for an ultimate that is limited in some mode would be limited by something other than itself; and this would entail its non-ultimacy. (237–38)
But what about this property of being ultimate? First, what is it to be ultimate? Well, at the least it is to be independent of all other beings, not depending on any other beings for existence or for intrinsic properties. And that sounds appropriately negative. Nevertheless, it entails the property of being self-sufficient; and that sounds positive. So it looks as if the negative property being independent of all others entails the positive property being self-sufficient. Of course, it is perhaps possible to bite the bullet and maintain that the property of being self-sufficient, contrary to appearances, is really negative. Well, perhaps we can live with that. But what about infinity?
According to Hick, the property of being unlimited, being infinite, is a negative property: it is the complement of the positive property of being limited or being finite. (Here is another case where it is far from obvious, initially, which of the pair in question is positive and which negative; let’s just concede for purposes of argument that being limited is a positive property.) Here we run into a real problem. What is this property of being unlimited? It is the negative property not being limited. Well, what is it to be limited? In the spatial analogue from which the notion is taken, it is to have limits or borders. A country that is unlimited, therefore, would have no borders and occupy all of space. (Again, having no borders sounds negative while occupying all of space sounds positive.)
Now
of course the idea is not that the Real is spatially
unlimited and occupies all of space.
But then how does the analogy apply? In the spatial analogue, there are
two features: an unlimited country is unlimited in a certain respect or
along a certain dimension: space. It is also unlimited by any other
country or space-occupying entity. In the same way, then, the Real, if
it is unlimited, is unlimited along certain dimensions and is unlimited
by any other being. Christians have traditionally thought of God as
unlimited, infinite, in both these ways. To take the second first, God
is unlimited by any other being: that is, he is unlimited in power or
with respect to his being able to accomplish his will; no being can
obstruct him, none can prevent him from doing what he wills. Clearly,
this property, even if we think of it as negative, entails positive
properties. If God is unlimited
Being unlimited along certain dimensions or in certain important
respects is similar. God is not unlimited in every respect: that could
presumably be so only if he had every property to the maximal degree,
which is impossible. If, for example, he has the property of being a
spirit, then he does not also have the property of being a material
object—a tree, for instance. Rather, the traditional idea has
been that God has every great-making property to the maximal
degree. This idea is what drives the ontological
argument; see my The Nature of Necessity, chapter 10. Indeed, the being in question would have at
least uncountably many such properties: for each proposition
P, the being in question would
have the property of knowing whether P is true. Here I assume
that there are at least
uncountably many distinct propositions. This seems relatively
uncontroversial in view of the fact that for each distinct real number
r, there is the distinct proposition r is not identical with
the Taj Mahal.
Is there a way out of this difficulty for the Hickian? Perhaps. He might try saying that this being is ultimate and unlimited, all right, but only with respect to properties of which we have no grasp. With respect to all the properties of which we do have a grasp, it is indeed limited, limited in the limiting sense of not exemplifying the property at all. It has the complement of every property we have a grasp of; it has other properties we have no grasp of; and the way in which it is infinite is that it has to the maximal degree some properties of which we have no grasp.
Well, this sounds a little bizarre, but perhaps it avoids incoherence (and anyway, who promised us that reality would not be bizarre?). The idea is that there is a being that has no positive properties of which we have a conception, except for being involved in human experience and any properties that entails. This being is also unlimited in that it has to the maximal degree properties of which we have no conception.
Even if the view is not incoherent, it pays another price. For suppose we believe there is a being of that sort. It is for us an empty idea; still, that is not to say that there couldn’t be such a being. I don’t know whether it is possible that there be a being like this, and have no grounds for making a judgment either way as to whether it is possible. Suppose we concede for the moment that it is. The basic question here is this: what reason is there for thinking such a being, if indeed there could be and is such a being, is in any special way connected with religion? According to Hick, “we can say of the postulated Real an sich that it is the noumenal ground of the encountered gods and experienced absolutes witnessed to by the religious traditions” (246). Why should we think so? What reason is there for thinking this being is connected in some way with Christianity or with any other religion? Why say that Christians are in fact referring to or witnessing to this being? Maybe it is, instead, connected with warfare, prostitution, family violence, bigotry, or racism. And why think this being, or contact with it, has anything to do with “transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness” (355)? Perhaps it is especially when human beings are in the grip of self-aggrandizement, hate, selfishness, and the like that they are most in contact with this being. If it has no positive properties of which we have a conception, why is the one assumption the least bit better than the other? The basic problem, here, is that if the Real has no positive properties of which we have a conception, then we have no reason at all to think that it is in religion that human beings get in experiential contact with this being, rather than in any other human activity: war or oppression, for example. This being has none of the properties ascribed by the practitioners of most of the great religions to the beings they worship: it is not good, or loving, or concerned with human beings, or wise, or powerful; it has not created the universe, does not uphold it, and does not pay attention to the universe or the creatures it contains. It is an unknown and unknowable X. But then why associate this unknowable X with religion, as opposed to warfare, violence, bigotry, and the horrifying things human beings often do to each other?
We
can put this question another way. Hick suggests that when Christians
make their characteristic utterances, saying, for instance, “In Christ, God was
reconciling the world to himself,” what they say cannot be literally
true but can be mythologically true. By ‘literal’ truth, he just means truth,
ordinary truth: “The literal truth or falsity of a factual assertion .
. . consists in its conformity or lack of conformity to fact: ‘it is
raining here now’ is literally true if and only if it is raining here
now” (348). The mythological truth of a statement is a horse of quite
another color: “A statement or set of statements about X is
Thus although we cannot speak of the Real
an sich in literal terms, Recall that we are amending this claim from
chapter 19 in the light of chapter 14; we can speak literally
of the Real, but only to predicate
negative and purely formal properties of it, together with those
positive properties entailed by its being such that we human beings are
in experiential contact with it.
And now our question can be put in terms of this suggestion. Why think that “we live in relation to . . . the Real” at all? Either the relation living in relation to is merely formal or it is not. If it is, then it would have no connection with religion. So it isn’t. But if it isn’t, then (1) we have still another positive property had by the Real: the property of being such that we live in relation to it. And (2) (and more poignantly) why think we live in relation to the Real at all? After all, we don’t live in relation to just any old thing—the highest mountain on Mars, for example, or the meanest shark in the Indian Ocean. If the Real has no positive properties of which we have a grasp, what is the reason for thinking we live in relation to it?
Second, why think some ways of behavior are appropriate to the Real and others are not? Again, unless this is a purely formal relationship, not just anything is such that some ways of behaving are appropriate or, for that matter, inappropriate with respect to it. None of my behavior, I think, is either appropriate or inappropriate with respect to the highest mountain on Mars or the meanest shark in the Indian Ocean. If the Real has no positive properties of which we have a grasp, how could we possibly know or have grounds for believing that some ways of behaving with respect to it are more appropriate than others?
Hick, of course, thinks that some ways of behaving
with respect to the Real are more appropriate than
others, and goes on to specify what those ways are: we are behaving
appropriately with respect to the Real when we learn to turn away from
self-centeredness and
We can put the question in still another way. Hick apparently thinks that some religious conceptions or ideas are authentic manifestations (“personae” or “impersonae”) of the Real:
And to the extent that ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ is indeed an authentic persona of the Real, constituting the form in which the Real is validly thought and experienced from within the Christian strand of religious history, to that extent the dispositional response appropriate to this persona constitutes an appropriate response to the Real. . . .
and of the eternal Buddha nature, he says
And to the extent that this is an authentic impersona of the Real, validly thought and experienced from within the Buddhist tradition, life in accordance with the Dharma is likewise an appropriate response to the Real. (353)
Again, the main question
here is obvious: if the Real has no positive, nonformal properties of
which we have a grasp, how could we possibly know or have reason to
believe that any such personae or impersonae are authentic
or, for that matter, inauthentic?
Authenticity implies a certain fit between the
(im)persona in question and the
Real; but if we have no positive idea what the Real is like, we have no
reason to think some personae or impersonae fit it better
than others. Again, Hick thinks not only that some do fit
better than others but also that we have some idea what they are: the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for example, and also others from
other traditions. But how could we have reason to think a thing like
that? If all we know about the Real is what Hick says we know, then for
all we can tell, God, Vishnu and the Buddha are inauthentic and it is,
for example, Ares, the god of war, Lucifer, and Stalin (or, for that matter,
Uriah Heep or
So the view seems to be of dubious coherence. Stated carefully, it isn’t initially incoherent. From Hick’s point of view, however, the most important feature of this alleged being is that it is in some special way associated with religion; this being is what those who serve God, Brahman, and so on are really referring to; in the great world religions, people get into a special relationship to it. And that seems wholly gratuitous; perhaps the Real is really connected with those who serve themselves, or power, or white supremacy. But I come now, finally, to the question what reason Hick has for postulating such a being: why does he think there is a being with no positive properties of which we have a grasp? Hick’s answer:
The Real an sich is postulated by us as a pre-supposition, not of the moral life, but of religious experience and the religious life, whilst the gods, as also the mystically known Brahman, Sunyata and so on, are phenomenal manifestations of the Real occurring within the realm of religious experience. Conflating these two theses one can say that the Real is experienced by human beings, but experienced in a manner analogous to that in which, according to Kant, we experience the world: namely by informational input from external reality being interpreted by the mind in terms of its own categorial scheme and thus coming to consciousness as meaningful phenomenal experience. (243)
Why should we want to postulate such a thing, a thing with no positive properties of which we have any grasp, but which is experienced by human beings in the great religions? More to the point, why does Hick postulate such a being?
The
answer, I think, must be explained dialectically. Hick began his
spiritual odyssey as a traditional, orthodox Christian, accepting what
I have been calling ‘Christian belief’. He was then struck by the fact
that there are other religions in which the claims of orthodox
Christianity—trinity, incarnation, atonement—are rejected.
Furthermore, so far as one can tell from the outside, so to speak, the
claims
But if the Real in itself is not and cannot be humanly experienced, why postulate such an unknown and unknowable Ding an sich? The answer is that the divine noumenon is a necessary postulate of the pluralistic religious life of humanity. For within each tradition we regard as real the object of our worship or contemplation. If, as I have already argued, it is also proper to regard as real the objects of worship or contemplation within the other traditions, we are led to postulate the Real an sich as the presupposition of the veridical character of this range of forms of religious experience. Without this postulate we should be left with a plurality of personae and impersonae each of which is claimed to be the Ultimate, but no one of which alone can be. We should have either to regard all the reported experiences as illusory or else return to the confessional position in which we affirm the authenticity of our own stream of religious experience whilst dismissing as illusory those occurring within other traditions. But for those to whom neither of these options seems realistic the pluralistic affirmation becomes inevitable, and with it the postulation of the Real an sich, which is variously experienced and thought. . . . (249)
Now
this passage is apparently an argument of some kind, an argument for the conclusion that
there is a being (the Real) of the sort Hick says there is. The
argument seems to proceed from two premises: (1) all the great
religions are “veridical,” and (2) none of them is more veridical than
the others. How does the argument go? The idea, I think, is that if we
suppose there is a being of the sort Hick says there is, then,
according to Hick, we can see how (1) and (2) could be true. I’m not
sure I see just how that is supposed to go, but let that pass. What
isn’t as easily ignored, however, is a sort of incoherence. “Within
each tradition,” he says, “we regard as real the object of our worship
or contemplation.” So within the Christian tradition, we regard God as
real; it is also “proper to regard as real the objects of worship or
contemplation within the other traditions.” This, of course, leads to a
problem; for some of the personae and impersonae are such that if they are real, and have the
properties ascribed to them, then other (im)personae
Now the way Hick proposes to do this is to declare that all the traditions are actually mistaken; the beliefs in each tradition are mostly false. (“Literally” false, he says; but literal truth and falsehood, as Hick conceives them, are just truth and falsehood.) Still, there is something right or valid in religion—the recognition that there is something beyond the natural world, and the encouragement to live a life in which self-centeredness is overcome. So really, the bottom line is that Hick cannot find it in himself to think one religion—Christianity, say—is true and the others false, or that one is closer to the truth than the others. At bottom, there is a generous desire to avoid the self-aggrandizement and self-exaltation he sees as attaching to the declaration that one’s own religious beliefs are true and those of others false.
Here
there are three comments or questions. First, is this posture in fact
possible for a human being: can a person accept it, and accept
it authentically, without bad faith or doublethink? I am to remain a
Christian, to take part in Christian worship, to accept the splendid
and powerful doctrines of traditional Christianity. However, I am also
to take it that these doctrines are only mythologically
true: they are literally false,
although accepting them (i.e., accepting them as true, as literally
true) puts or tends to put one into the right relation with the Real.
And how can I possibly accept them, adopt that
attitude toward them, if I think they
are only mythologically true—that is, really false? I could, indeed,
believe that they are mythologically true; believing
that, however, doesn’t move one
toward the right kind of life; it is only believing the
teachings themselves that
allegedly has that salutary effect. Once I am sufficiently enlightened,
once I see that those doctrines are not true, I can no longer take the
stance with respect to them that leads to the hoped-for practical
result. I am left, instead, in the position of a sad and disillusioned
Gnostic. I no longer hold Christian belief; I recognize, as I think,
that it is in fact false. I also see, of course, that those who
do accept it as true are
mistaken, deluded; but at any rate they are in the fortunate position
of enjoying the comfort and strength and consolation these false
beliefs bring; they are also being moved closer to the right kind of
life by
According to the Heidelberg Catechism (Q. 1),
“My only comfort in life and in death is that
I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in
death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” According to Hick,
however, my only comfort in life and in death is that I know the sad
truth: believing the great teachings of Christianity has beneficial
effects, but those teachings are, in fact, false.
Second, there is something wholly self-defeating, so it seems to me, in Hick’s posture. If we take this position, then we can’t say, for example, that Christianity is right and Buddhism wrong; as Christians, we don’t disagree with the Buddhists; and we take this stance in an effort to avoid self-exultation and imperialism. But we do something from the point of view of intellectual imperialism and self-exaltation that is much worse: we now declare that everyone is mistaken here, everyone except for ourselves and a few other enlightened souls. We and our graduate students know the truth; everyone else is sadly mistaken. Isn’t this to exalt ourselves at the expense of nearly everyone else? Those who think there really is such a person as God are benighted, unsophisticated, unaware of the real truth of the matter, which is that there isn’t any such person (even if thinking there is can lead to practical fruits). We see Christians as deeply mistaken; of course we pay the same compliment to the practitioners of the other great religions; we are equal-opportunity animadverters. We benevolently regard the rest of humanity as misguided; no doubt their hearts are in the right place; still, they are sadly mistaken about what they take to be most important and precious. I find it hard to see how this attitude is a manifestation of tolerance or intellectual humility: it looks more like patronizing condescension.
The
basic problem is that, given our actual intellectual and spiritual
situation, it simply isn’t possible to avoid serious disagreement with
others. If some people believe p and others believe something q
incompatible with p, there is no way in which we
can avoid serious disagreement. If we affirm p, we disagree with those who
affirm q; if we affirm q, we disagree with
those who affirm p; if we
propose a higher resolution, saying that neither p
nor q is true (though perhaps each
is ‘mythologically true’), then we disagree with both
groups. The same goes if we propose to remain agnostic
about p and q; see below, chapter
13.
Third, Hick doesn’t, of course, produce an argument
for the conclusion that no religion could be closer
to the truth than others; it is more like a practical postulate, a
benevolent and charitable resolution
Our topic, in this book, is the de jure question with respect to Christian belief—not the question whether Christian belief is true (although, of course, that is the more important question) but whether it is reasonable or rational or rationally justifiable to accept it. We have been examining a preliminary matter: is there really such a question? Is there really such a thing as Christian belief? Or is it rather the case that even if there were such a person as God, we couldn’t refer to and think about him, or predicate positive, nonformal properties of him? Our results, so far, have been that there isn’t the slightest reason to think so. There is no reason at all to think it isn’t possible to think about God; there is no reason at all to think that we cannot predicate such positive, nonformal properties of him as wisdom, knowledge, love, and all the rest. Obviously, there is enormously more to be said; this topic deserves a book in itself. There isn’t room for that in this book; so we shall have to content ourselves with what we have. At any rate, we can rest in the assurance that if there is reason to think our question ill-formed or somehow logically out of order, it is at the least exceedingly well concealed. We can therefore go in reasonable confidence to the next question: what, precisely, is this de jure question?
In part I, I considered a certain kind of objection to the de jure question with respect to Christian belief—the question, that is, whether it is rational or reasonable or intellectually respectable to accept Christian belief. This objection was that the de jure question is, to say the least, premature: strictly speaking, it isn’t really possible to hold a belief of the sort traditional Christians think they hold. That is because Christians think of God as ultimate and infinite, and there is something conceptually out of order with the very idea that it is possible to have a belief about a being that is ultimate and infinite. I concluded that this objection isn’t cogent; there is here no obstacle to raising the de jure question.
But the next thing to see is that it is far from obvious just what that de jure question or objection is supposed to be; precisely what question (or questions) is it that critics mean to press when they ask whether Christian and theistic belief is rational, or rationally defensible, or rationally justifiable, or whatever? Critics claim that Christian belief is not rationally justified or justifiable: what, precisely, is the infirmity or defect they are ascribing to the Christian believer? What, exactly, is the question? Call this question the ‘metaquestion’. One problem with contemporary discussions of the justification of Christian belief is that the metaquestion is almost never asked. People ask whether Christian belief is rational or reasonable or rationally justifiable; they turn immediately to answering that question, without first considering just what the question is. What is it? That is not easy to say; nevertheless, it is our subject in part II.
This
chapter is devoted to examining a certain answer to the metaquestion:
that the de jure question is
whether Christian belief is justified. That question is one that originates in
classical foundationalism, a way
of thinking about these topics that has historically been extremely
We
must begin with some history—first, a look back into the
relatively recent past and then a deeper look into the more
remote past. With respect to the first, I can make my point most easily
by referring to some earlier work of my own; please forgive the
personal reference. The present book, as I said in the preface, is
a sequel: to Warrant: The Current Debate (hereafter WCD) and
Warranted Proper Function (hereafter WPF); it is also and perhaps more
important a sequel to God and Other Minds Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. In Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).
And
that question, in turn, was so
taken that the way to answer it is by considering the
arguments for and against the
existence of God. On the pro side, there were the traditional theistic
proofs, the cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments, to
follow Kant’s classification. On the con side, there was, first of all,
the problem of evil (construed as the claim that the existence of evil
is logically inconsistent with the existence of a wholly good,
all-powerful, and all-knowing God). Then there were also some rather
opaque claims to the effect that the progress of modern science, or the
attitudes necessary to its proper pursuits, or perhaps something
similar lurking in the nearby bushes, or maybe something else that had
been learned by “man come of age”—the idea was that something in
this general neighborhood also offers evidence against the existence of
God. And
In God and Other Minds, I argued first that the theistic proofs or arguments do not succeed. In evaluating these arguments, I employed a traditional but wholly improper standard: I took it that these arguments are successful only if they start from propositions that compel assent from every honest and intelligent person and proceed majestically to their conclusion by way of forms of argument that can be rejected only on pain of insincerity or irrationality. Naturally enough, I joined the contemporary chorus in holding that none of the traditional arguments was successful. (I failed to note that no philosophical arguments of any consequence meet that standard; hence the fact that theistic arguments do not is of less significance than I thought.) I then argued that the objections to theistic belief are equally unimpressive; in particular, the deductive argument from evil (the argument that there is a contradiction between the existence of God and the existence of evil), I said, is entirely unsuccessful. So I saw, as I thought, that neither the arguments for the existence of God nor the arguments against it are conclusive; but then where does that leave us with respect to the question of the rationality or rational justifiability of belief in God? Does it follow, as seemed to be the prevailing opinion, that agnosticism was the right response and that belief in God, under these conditions, is irrational, contrary to reason, not rationally justifiable? That seemed to me wrong, but where could we go to pursue this question? How could we carry the inquiry further?
Faced with this impasse, I decided to compare belief in God with other
beliefs, in particular, our belief in other minds. There is allegedly a
traditional philosophical problem of other minds: since we can’t
perceive the thoughts and feelings of other people, do we know and how
do we know they really have thoughts and feelings? More poignantly, how do we
know that what we take to be persons (beings with thoughts, feelings,
and intentions) really are persons and not, for example, cunningly
constructed robots? Actually, this is not a traditional
philosophical problem in the sense that it is a problem for all
philosophers or all
positions in philosophy; you will find
it pressing only if you accept some version of classical
foundationalism.
Here two things are noteworthy. First, I was somehow both accepting but also questioning what was then axiomatic: that belief in God, if it is to be rationally acceptable, must be such that there is good evidence for it. This evidence would be propositional evidence: evidence from other propositions you believe, and it would have to come in the form of arguments. This claim wasn’t itself argued for: it was simply asserted, or better, just assumed as self-evident or at least utterly obvious. What was then taken for granted has now come to be called ‘evidentialism’ (a better title would be ‘evidentialism with respect to belief in God’, but that’s a bit unwieldy). Evidentialism is the view that belief in God is rationally justifiable or acceptable only if there is good evidence for it, where good evidence would be arguments from other propositions one knows. If it is accepted apart from such evidence or arguments, then it is at best intellectually third-rate: irrational, or unreasonable, or contrary to one’s intellectual obligations.
Second, I failed to ask why this question of rational
justifiability is important or, indeed, what the question is.
I didn’t give that question—namely, the question what is
this rational justifiability
of which I am speaking?—so much as a passing glance. Further, why
would rational justification, whatever precisely it is, require
evidence? What is the connection
between evidence and justification? And if the latter
does require evidence, why would
that evidence have to take the form of arguments (deductive or
probabilistic), evidence from other propositions one already believes?
And what sorts of propositions could properly function as the premises
of these arguments? I didn’t raise these questions. It wasn’t, however,
because their answers were well-known, so that further inquiry would be
carrying coals to Newcastle. On the contrary: no one else asked or
answered these questions either; instead, people turned directly to the
arguments for and against theistic belief, taking it utterly for
granted that this was the way to investigate its rational
justification. The exception was William James, whose “The
Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in
Popular Philosophy (New York:
Longmans, Green, 1897), was widely anthologized and took the
radical line (as it was then perceived) that if religious belief is
a live option for you, and
a forced option, then
believing even without evidence is excusable. See below, p.
89.
Here
what we need is another bit of history, some more of that archaeology of
which Foucault speaks (although again [see WCD, p. 11] I doubt that we
will uncover a hidden political agenda or a subterranean bid for
power). This question as to the rational justifiability of Christian
belief goes back to the Enlightenment response to the spiritual and
intellectual ferment generated (in part) by the Reformation; the
characteristically modern response to this ferment can be seen as
getting its start in the works of René Descartes and John Locke.
Both Descartes and Locke were impressed by the enormous disagreement in
religious and philosophical matters; this means, of course, that error
pervades our belief in these areas. They were also impressed (along
with their successors) with the meager progress made in philosophical
matters. Philosophy, said Descartes, “has been cultivated for many
centuries by the best minds that have ever lived, and nevertheless no
single thing is to be found in it which is not a subject of dispute,
and in consequence which is not dubious.” Part I of the Discourse on the Method of
Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences,
in The Philosophical
Works of Descartes, tr. and ed.
Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (New York: Dover, 1955
[originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1931]), pp.
85–86.
It is
now some years since I detected how many are the false beliefs that I
had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was
everything I had since constructed on this basis, and from that time I
was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid
myself of all the opinions which I formerly accepted, and commence to
build anew from the foundation. . . . The Philosophical Works of
Descartes, p. 144.
It
is John Locke, however, not Descartes, who is probably most crucial for
our understanding of the de jure question and the modern compulsion to ask
it. See Nicholas Wolterstorff’s luminous and
illuminating essay on Locke in John Locke and the Ethics of
Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
[They]
found themselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that rose on
every side. After we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any
nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my
thoughts that we took a wrong course; and that before we set ourselves
upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own
abilities, and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to
deal with. This I proposed to the company, who all readily assented;
and thereupon it was agreed that this should be our first
inquiry. An Essay concerning Human
Understanding, ed. with
“Prolegomena” by Alexander Fraser (New York: Dover,
1959 [first published by Oxford University Press in 1894]), vol. 1, p.
9. Subsequent page references to Locke’s essay are to this
edition.
That discussion was the
genesis of the Essay; it
probably took place in the winter of 1670–71, Fraser’s footnote 1, p. 9.
Locke doesn’t tell us what the topic of discussion was, but James
Tyrell, one of the five or six friends at the gathering, noted in the
margin of his copy of the Essay (now in the British Museum) that the topic of
discussion was “the principles of morality and revealed
religion.” Fraser’s “Prolegomena,” p. xvii.
Locke lived through one of the most turbulent periods of British intellectual and spiritual history; it was, in particular, the religious ferment and diversity, the enormous variety of religious opinion, that caught his attention. Of course he knew that in parts of the world other than Europe there were religions quite different from Christianity, but he was particularly impressed by the diversity of religious opinion in his own country. There was the Catholic-Protestant debate, and within Protestantism there were countless sects, countless disagreements and controversies; it was a time when every man thought what was right in his own eyes. Locke proposes to inquire into
the grounds of those persuasions which are to be found amongst men, so various, different, and wholly contradictory; and yet asserted somewhere or other with such assurance and confidence, that he that shall take a view of the opinions of mankind, observe their opposition, and at the same time consider the fondness and devotion wherewith they are embraced, the resolution and eagerness wherewith they are maintained, may perhaps have reason to suspect, that either there is no such thing as truth at all, or that mankind hath no sufficient means to attain a certain knowledge of it. (Locke’s Introduction to the Essay, para. 2, p. 27)
One problem here, says Locke, is fideism; many oppose faith to reason, declaring both that faith prescribes what reason proscribes, and that it is faith that is to be accepted and followed:
For, to this crying up of faith in opposition [his emphasis] to reason, we may, I think, in good measure ascribe those absurdities that fill almost all the religions which possess and divide mankind. For men having been principled with an opinion, that they must not consult reason in the things of religion, however apparently contradictory to common sense and the very principles of all their knowledge, have let loose their fancies and natural superstition; and have been by them led into so strange opinions, and extravagant practices in religion, that a considerate man cannot but stand amazed at their follies, and judge them so far from being acceptable to the great and wise God, that he cannot avoid thinking them ridiculous and offensive to a sober good man. So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves (bk. IV, chap. xviii, para. 11, p. 426)
Another source of riotous error and confusion in religion is tradition, believing a proposition just because you have been taught it or because those around you believe it:
The great obstinacy that is to be found in men firmly believing quite contrary opinions, though many times equally absurd, in the various religions of mankind, are as evident a proof as they are an unavoidable consequence of this way of reasoning from received traditional principles. So that men will disbelieve their own eyes, renounce the evidence of their senses, and give their own experience the lie, rather than admit of anything disagreeing with these sacred tenets. (IV, xx, 10, p. 450)
Tradition, he says (in characteristic Enlightenment disparagement),
keeps in ignorance or error more people than all the other [the other sources of error] together . . . I mean the giving up our assent to the common received opinions, either of our friends or party, neighbourhood or country. How many men have no other ground for their tenets, than the supposed honesty, or learning, or number of those of the same profession? (IV, xx, 17, pp. 456–57)
Appeals to tradition to settle disagreement had become ineffective; there were just too many. One had to choose which of these many conflicting traditions to endorse. Locke thought this disorderly pluralism quite scandalous; it was even more scandalous that there seemed no rational way to put an end to the contentious disputes.
The
Essay was Locke’s attempt to do
what he could to put matters right. Book IV, “Of Knowledge and
Probability,” is the end of the book—both in comprising the last
three hundred pages or so and in dealing with the question whose resolution is
Locke’s goal; and even in book IV he spends another two hundred pages before
explicitly addressing it. That main question is: how should
we regulate our opinion with respect to belief in general? In
particular, how shall we regulate our opinion with respect to religious
belief? As A. D. Woozley Introduction to his abridgment of the
Essay (New York: NAL Penguin,
1974 [originally published Collins, 1964]), p. 15. The
Essay is long and confusing; it
was composed over many years and didn’t receive anything like the final
editing it needed. As a result, it has been published in abridged
editions going all the way back to 1694 (Boston: Printed by Manning
and Loring, for J. White, Thomas and Andrews, D. West, E. Larkin,
J. West and the proprietor of the Boston bookstore) four years or so
after its publication and ten years before Locke’s death. These
abridgments sometimes delete some of the passages most important to a
proper understanding of the Essay; for example, A. D. Woozley’s omits the absolutely
crucial passage quoted on pp. 86–87, below.
The initial problem, of course, is that disorderly crowd of opinions: “men, extending their inquiries beyond their capacities, and letting their thought wander into those depths where they can find no sure footing, it is no wonder that they raise questions and multiply disputes, which, never coming to any clear resolution, are proper only to continue and increase their doubts, and to confirm them at last in perfect skepticism” (Locke’s Introduction to the Essay, para. 7, p. 31). Like Hume and Kant after him, Locke thinks the remedy requires that we first make a juster and more accurate appraisal of our intellectual capacities and capabilities:
Whereas were the capacities of our understandings well considered, the extent of our knowledge once discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things; between what is and what is not comprehensible by us, men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other. (Locke’s Introduction to the Essay, para. 7, p. 31)
The aim is not to achieve Cartesian certainty (about which he makes several disparaging remarks). Rather, “If we can find out those measures, whereby a rational creature, put in that state in which man is in this world, may and ought to govern his opinions, and actions depending thereon, we need not to be troubled that some other things escape our knowledge” (Introduction, para. 6, p. 31). What we need to find out is how we may and ought to govern and regulate our opinion, or assent. And his answer, in prototypical Enlightenment fashion, is that we ought to govern our opinion by following reason. But what does that mean? What is opinion and what is reason, and how can we govern the former by following the latter?
If we are
to have any hope of overcoming the contentious and disputatious horde
of conflicting opinion with which we are beset, says Locke, we must all
learn to govern opinion and assent properly. Following Plato, Locke
thinks of opinion as contrasting
with knowledge; to see
what he thinks opinion is, we must therefore look to his views about
knowledge. He thinks we have four kinds of knowledge, all of them
involving certainty. First, there is what he regards as the paradigm of
knowledge: perceiving the “agreement or disagreement of our ideas.” It
isn’t easy to see precisely what he had in mind here, but the principal
sort of knowledge involved here is the knowledge of
For an account of self-evidence, see WPF,
chapter 6.
Second, there is knowledge of propositions about the contents of your own mind, that is, propositions about the ideas of which you are the subject. An example would be your knowledge that you have a mild pain in your left elbow, or that you seem to see something white (i.e., things look to you the way they look when you are in fact seeing something white). This knowledge, says Locke, is infallible (IV, i, 4, p. 169, and elsewhere). This means at least that you cannot mistakenly believe such a proposition; if you believe that you seem to see something white, it follows that you do seem to see something white (though, of course, you may be mistaken in thinking there really is something white there). Following later custom, let’s say that propositions of this sort about my own mental states are incorrigible for me.
Third, there is also a kind of knowledge of “other things,” of external objects around you:
And of this, the greatest assurance I can possibly have, and to which my faculties can attain, is the testimony of my eyes, which are the proper and sole judges of this thing; whose testimony I have reason to rely on as so certain, that I can no more doubt, whilst I write this, that I see white and black, and that something really exists that causes that sensation in me, than that I write or move my hand; which is a certainty as great as human nature is capable of, concerning the existence of anything, but a man’s self alone, and of God. (IV, xi, 2, pp. 326–27; see also IV, ii, 14, p. 186)
It isn’t
wholly clear just what it is I know here: do I know that the piece of
paper is white, that my hand is moving, and that the ink is black?
Locke vacillates. Sometimes (for example, when commenting on the
relation between faith and reason) he speaks as if our knowledge of
external objects includes the sort of everyday knowledge we get from
perception: that my hand is moving, that the trees in the backyard are
budding, and so on. Other times, and perhaps when
And
fourth, there is demonstrative knowledge. I can come to know a proposition by
deducing it from or seeing that it is entailed by propositions of the
above three sorts (where a proposition p
entails a proposition
q just if it is not possible, in
the broadly logical sense, that p be true and q false. I do not and cannot know all
propositions entailed by those of the
above sort, of course; some might be much too complicated and difficult
for me to grasp, and others might be such that I simply can’t see the
connection between them and propositions of the above three sorts. For
still others, the argument for them is so long and complicated that I
lack the certainty required by knowledge.
When it comes to knowledge, therefore, we have no control over our giving assent; assent is elicited willy-nilly, and the question of how we should regulate assent in this area therefore does not arise. (We can’t regulate it at all, anymore than I could regulate the direction in which I fall, if I fell off a cliff.) Of course, knowledge forms only a part of the beliefs to be found in a human noetic structure and, according to Locke, a relatively small part (“Our knowledge, as has been shown, being very narrow,” IV, xv, 2, p. 364). It is opinion that includes the bulk of what we ordinarily believe; and it is with respect to opinion—that which we believe but do not know—that the question of regulation does arise.
Locke’s crucial claim is that we must be guided, in the formation of opinion, by reason. Well, what is reason? First, it is “a faculty in man, that faculty whereby man is supposed to be distinguished from beasts, and wherein it is evident he much surpasses them” (IV, xvii, 1, p. 386). Second, reason is the power whereby we can discern broadly logical relations among propositions (IV, xviii, 3, p. 417), which, of course, are the candidates for our assent, the things we believe. In particular, by virtue of employment of reason, we distinguish two kinds of relations among propositions:
The greatest part of our knowledge depends upon deductions and intermediate ideas: and in those cases where we are fain to substitute assent instead of knowledge, and take propositions for true, without being certain they are so, we have need to find out, examine, and compare the grounds of their probability. In both these cases, the faculty which finds out the means, and rightly applies them, to discover certainty in the one, and probability in the other, is that which we call reason. For, as reason perceives the necessary and indubitable connexion of all the ideas or proofs one to another, in each step of any demonstration that produces knowledge; so it likewise perceives the probable connexion of all the ideas or proofs one to another, in every step of a discourse, to which it will think assent due. (IV, xvii, 2, p. 387)
It is by
reason, therefore, that we perceive deductive and probabilistic
relations among propositions. We needn’t say anything here about
deductive relations between propositions; and while much needs to be
said about probability, Locke doesn’t say it. He does say a little,
however, beginning rather inauspiciously by declaring, “Probability
is likeliness to be true” (IV, xv, 3, p. 365). The uninformative
character of this, however, is ameliorated by his pointing out As
Aristotle also did; see WPF, p. 159. What he says is consistent with other views,
however, including the one proposed in chapter 9 of WPF.
Locke’s
claim is that we should regulate our opinion or assent by reason; but
what does this mean? How do you do a thing like that? His answer,
fundamentally, is that I must regulate my opinion in such a way that I
opine only that which is probable with respect to that which is certain
for me. I have no control over my
assent when it comes to knowledge, what is certain for me; however,
I do have control over my assent when it comes to opinion, what
isn’t certain. And the rule here is that I must not assent to a
proposition unless it is probable with respect to what is certain for
me. Assent, furthermore, comes in degrees Here I think he means to point to two
phenomena: first, that one believes some propositions more firmly than
others, and second, that we judge some propositions more probable than
others. To illustrate the first, I believe that 7 + 5 = 12 more firmly
than I believe that Glasgow is west of Aberdeen, but I do believe both of these
propositions. As for the second, I believe it is reasonably probable
that all the continents of Earth once formed a supercontinent; I also
believe that it is more probable that the works attributed to
Shakespeare were really written by Shakespeare, not by Bacon.
The
question that started off the whole discussion issuing in the nine hundred pages
of the Essay was on “the
principles of morality and revealed religion.” But now we see that we
are to regulate our opinion by reason, that is, proportion our belief in a
proposition to the degree to which it is probable with respect to what
is certain for us. Does this mean, then, that divine revelation,
“revealed religion,” is to play no
Locke answers, first, that God indeed can and does reveal such truths to us, and that what he reveals should certainly be believed: “we may as well doubt of our own being, as we can whether any revelation from God be true” (IV, xvi, 14, p. 383); “Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true: no doubt can be made of it” (IV, xviii, 10, p. 425). But then does he think these great truths are probable with respect to what is certain for us? First, he declares repeatedly that we can’t properly believe what goes against reason in the sense of going contrary to the principles of knowledge:
a man can never have so certain a knowledge, that a proposition which contradicts the clear principles and evidence of his own knowledge was divinely revealed, or that he understands the words rightly wherein it is delivered, as he has that the contrary is true, and so is bound to consider and judge of it as a matter of reason, and not swallow it. . . . (IV, xviii, 8, p. 424)
However, it is not required that to be worthy of assent, such a teaching must be probable with respect to what is certain for me. Rather, what has to be probable, in this way, is that the doctrine in question is indeed revealed, really is proposed for our assent by the Lord:
So that faith is a settled and sure principle of assent and assurance, and leaves no manner of room for doubt or hesitation. Only we must be sure that it be a divine revelation, and that we understand it right: else we shall expose ourselves to all the extravagancy of enthusiasm . . . (IV, xvi, 14, p. 383)
and
Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true: no doubt can be made of it. This is the proper object of faith: but whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge. (IV, xviii, 10, p. 425)
Locke’s constant question is ‘how do you know that this is from God?’ “How do I know that God is the revealer of this to me; that this impression is made upon my mind by his Holy Spirit; and that therefore I ought to obey it? If I know not this, how great soever the assurance is that I am possessed with, it is groundless; whatever light I pretend to, it is but enthusiasm” (IV, xix, 10, p. 435). “Reason,” he says, “must be our last judge and guide in everything” (IV, xix, 14, p. 438, his emphasis). He goes on:
I do not mean that we must consult reason, and examine whether a proposition revealed from God can be made out by natural principles, and if it cannot, that then we may reject it: but consult it we must, and by it examine whether it be a revelation from God or no: and if reason finds it to be revealed from God, reason then declares for it as much as for any other truth, and makes it one of her dictates. (IV, xix, 14, p. 439)
Overall, then, the view is this: God can certainly reveal truths to us. We are not obliged to accept as revealed, however, anything that would go contrary to what we would otherwise know, even with respect to the lowest level of knowledge. Furthermore, a given candidate p for revelation, if it doesn’t have evidence from what is certain, cannot have any more epistemic probability than is enjoyed by the proposition that p is indeed a revelation from God (IV, xvi, 14, p. 383). So we are to follow reason, in the formation of religious opinion, but so doing does not preclude accepting certain propositions as specially revealed by God, and accepting them on that basis.
In God and Other
Minds, I took for granted what was
then axiomatic: that belief in God is rationally justifiable only if
there are good arguments for it, and only if the arguments in favor of
it are stronger than the arguments against it. The origin—at
least the proximate origin—of this idea is to be found in the
work of Locke I’ve been outlining. A belief is acceptable, he says,
only if it is either itself certain or else probable (i.e., more
probable than not) with respect to propositions that are certain for
me. Christian belief, clearly enough, is not certain for me: it is not
self-evident, incorrigible, or a deliverance of the senses. Hence, if
it is to be acceptable, it must be probable with respect to
propositions of these sorts. Locke doesn’t, so far as I know,
explicitly raise the question whether I must know
or believe that the belief is thus probable, if it is to be
acceptable for me; I think he assumes that it must be. He thinks of
the matter in terms of applying a test:
Evidentialism is the
claim that religious belief is rationally acceptable only if there are
good arguments for it; Locke is both a paradigm evidentialist and the
proximate source of the entire evidentialist tradition, In “Reason and Belief in God,” I suggested that
Aquinas was also an evidentialist in this sense; various people (Alfred
Freddoso, Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump, Linda Zagzebski, and John
Zeis in “Natural Theology: Reformed?” in Rational Faith: Catholic
Responses to Reformed Epistemology,
ed. Linda Zagzebski [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1993], p. 72) remonstrated with me, pointing out that things were much
more complicated than I thought. The fact is that Aquinas is an
evidentialist with respect to scientia, scientific knowledge. But it doesn’t follow that
he thought a person could properly accept belief in God, say, only if
he had (or there are) good theistic arguments. On the contrary, Aquinas
thought it perfectly sensible and reasonable to accept this belief on
faith. I examine classical foundationalism in detail
in WCD and “Reason and Belief in God”; here I shall be brief and
schematic.
First, classical foundationalism is foundationalism. Here the
crucial notion is that of believing one proposition on the
evidential basis of others. Like
any important philosophical notion, this one has its problems,
complications, and perplexities. Let’s ignore them. The notion is
serviceable even if it is less than wholly clear, and at any rate there
are clear examples. I believe that 32 × 94 is 3008
(I’ve just
calculated it); I believe this proposition on the evidential basis of
others, such as 4 × 2 = 8,
4 × 3 = 12, 8 + 2 = 10,
and so on. However I don’t believe
The
propositions that I accept in this basic way are the foundations
of my structure of beliefs—my
‘noetic structure’, as I shall call it for ease of
reference. For an account of noetic structures, see WCD,
pp. 72ff. Even by coherentists: see WCD, pp. 78ff. See “Reason and Belief in God,” p. 54.
Now
Locke clearly accepts this much; but he also accepts more. A
foundationalist will also typically claim that not just any belief is
properly basic; some
propositions are such that if I accept them in the basic way, there is
something wrong, something skewed, something unjustified about my
noetic structure. Imagine, for example, that because of an inordinate
admiration for Picasso, I suddenly find myself with the belief that he
didn’t die; like Elijah, he was directly transported to heaven (in a
peculiarly warped sort of chariot with a great misshapen eye in the
middle of its side). If I don’t believe this proposition on the
evidential basis of any others, it is basic for me. But there is
something defective, wrong, unhappy in my believing this proposition in
the basic way; this proposition is not
properly basic. Noting that
only some propositions
seem to be properly basic, a foundationalist may go
Certainty is another difficult and much contested notion; again, let us ignore the difficulties and contests, noting that classical foundationalists don’t always agree as to which propositions are indeed certain in this way. Descartes admits only propositions that are self-evident or incorrigible. Locke accepts these as properly basic; he also adds, as I said earlier, propositions that are ‘evident to the senses’—at least such propositions as something is causing me to have the ideas I do in fact have, and possibly also more robust propositions, such as that the ground is showing through the snow in my backyard. Let’s say, a bit vaguely, that according to classical foundationalists, a proposition is properly basic, for a person S, if and only if it is self-evident for S, or incorrigible for S, or evident to the senses for S.
Further, according to the classical foundationalists (and everyone
else), you can’t properly believe just any proposition on the basis of
just any other. I can’t properly believe, for example, the proposition
that Abraham lived around 1800 b.c. on the basis of the proposition that
Brutus stabbed Julius Caesar; the latter has nothing to do,
evidentially speaking, with the former. Rather, I properly believe
A on the basis of
B only if B
supports A, is in fact
evidence for A. Again,
this notion of evidential support is difficult and
controversial; See WCD, pp. 69ff.
(CF) A
belief is acceptable for a person if (and only if) it is either
properly basic (i.e., self-evident, incorrigible, or evident to the
senses for that person), or believed on the evidential
In a properly run noetic structure, therefore, if you take any belief B that is not basic (not in the foundations), B will be accepted on the basis of other beliefs that are acceptable and that support B (either deductively, inductively, or abductively); if those others are not in the foundations, they will be accepted on the basis of still others that are acceptable and that support them, and so on, down to the foundations—that is, down to propositions that are self-evident, incorrigible, or evident to the senses for you.
Classical foundationalism, as I say, has been enormously influential from the Enlightenment to the present. For many philosophers and others (for myself earlier on), it has amounted to a sort of unquestioned assumption, unquestioned because it isn’t seen clearly enough even to recognize as an assumption. Locke’s views here, particularly with respect to religion, have achieved the status of orthodoxy, and most discussions of the rational justification of religious belief have been and still are conducted in the unthinking acceptance of that framework. There may be modifications of one sort or another, analogical extensions of the original framework, departures of one sort or another; there may be a sort of unease with it, a dimly felt sense that not all is well with it; still, for most of us, the basic framework remains in the near neighborhood of classical foundationalism.
We must now ask a question that has
been clamoring for attention all along. Suppose your beliefs
don’t correspond to the
standards the classical foundationalist or evidentialist holds before
you: so what? Exactly what is the matter with you? You will be told
that your belief structure is unacceptable and not rationally justified,
and that you yourself are irrational; but again, so what? What is wrong
with being irrational or with holding beliefs that are not rationally
justified? It certainly sounds reprehensible, but what, exactly, is the
problem? That is what we must know if we are to understand our
de jure question. Consider, for
example, John Mackie in The Miracle of Theism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Contemporary evidentialist objectors don’t (for the most part) explicitly say; their progenitor Locke, however, does say. His question, you recall, is how “a rational creature, put in that state in which man is in this world, may and ought to govern his opinions, and actions depending thereon.” And his answer, as we have seen, is that a rational creature in our circumstances ought to govern his opinions by reason—that is, proportion his belief to what is certain for him. But how are we to understand the ‘may’ and ‘ought’ and ‘should’ that Locke employs in stating his project?
At first sight, his words have a deontological ring; they are redolent of duty, obligation, permission, being within your rights and the rest of the deontological stable. Closer inspection reveals that this is, indeed, how they are to be taken. It is Locke’s idea that we have a duty, an obligation to regulate opinion in the way he suggests. We enjoy high standing as rational creatures, creatures capable of belief and knowledge. Noblesse oblige, however; privilege has its obligations, and we are obliged to conduct our intellectual or cognitive life in a certain way. Our exalted station as rational creatures, creatures with reason, carries with it duties and requirements:
faith
is nothing but a firm assent of the mind: which, if it be regulated, as
is our duty, cannot be afforded to anything but upon good reason; and
so cannot be opposite to it. He that believes without having any reason
for believing, may be in love with his own fancies; but neither seeks
truth as he ought, nor pays the obedience due to his Maker, who would
have him use those discerning faculties he has given him, to keep him
out of mistake and error. He that does not this to the best of his
power, however he sometimes lights on truth, is in the right but by
chance; and I know not whether the luckiness of the accident will
excuse the irregularity of his proceeding. This at least is certain,
that he must be accountable for whatever mistakes he runs into: whereas
he that makes use of the light and faculties God has given him, and
seeks sincerely to discover truth by those helps and abilities he has,
may have this satisfaction in doing his duty as a rational creature,
that, though he should miss truth, he will not miss the reward of it.
For he governs his assent right, and places it as he should, who, in
any case or matter whatsoever, believes or disbelieves according as
reason directs him. He
Here Locke isn’t speaking about specifically religious faith (faith as contrasted with reason, say), but about assent or opinion generally; and his central claim here is that there are duties and obligations with respect to its management or regulation. In particular, you are obliged to give assent only to that for which you have good reasons, good evidence: you are to accept a proposition only if it is probable with respect to what is certain for you. Someone who doesn’t regulate opinion in this way “neither seeks truth as he ought, nor pays the obedience due to his Maker” (emphasis added); God commands us to seek truth in this way and to regulate opinion in this way. Someone who does seek truth in this way, even if he should happen to miss it, still “may have this satisfaction in doing his duty as a rational creature.” You govern your assent “right,” he says, you place it as you “should” if you believe or disbelieve as reason directs you. And if you don’t do that, then you transgress against your own lights. One who governs his opinion thus is acting in accord with duty, is within his rights, is flouting no obligation, is not blameworthy, is, in a word, justified.
The
English terms ‘justified’, ‘justification’, and the like, go back at
least to the King James version of the Bible. We are justified, in this
use, if Christ’s atoning sacrifice for sin has applied to us, so that
we are now no longer blameworthy and our sin has been covered, removed,
obliterated, taken away; we are no longer guilty; it is as if (so far
as guilt is concerned) our sin had never existed. As a matter of fact
the term taken in that sense goes back to Wycliffe’s 1382 translation of
the Bible; the Oxford English Dictionary cites especially There are many other analogical extensions or
retrenchments of this original notion of justification, and many other
analogically extended uses of the term; see WCD, chapter 1.
Locke’s thought initiates the classical package: evidentialism, deontologism, and classical foundationalism. It is according to the first two that Christian belief requires evidence; that is, Christian believers are within their intellectual rights and conforming to intellectual duty, only if they have evidence for that belief. It is according to the third that the evidence must trace back, finally, to what is certain for them: what is self-evident or incorrigible or evident to the senses. This connection between justification and evidence has been at the center of the whole justificationist tradition in Western epistemology; it has been of particular importance for subsequent thought about the de jure question for Christian belief. According to this tradition, the de jure question is really the question whether Christian belief is rationally justified—that is, whether believers are justified in holding these beliefs, and whether they are conforming to intellectual duty in holding them. The main intellectual duty, however, is that of proportioning belief to the evidence, to what is certain. Hence the first version of the de jure question gets transformed into a second: do believers have sufficient evidence for their beliefs? We now see the connection between these two forms of the de jure question: the first is the basic question, but if we add (with Locke and the classical tradition) that the main duty here is that of proportioning belief to evidence, then we get the second question.
I say Locke’s influence—and that of the classical package—has been paramount in discussions of the de jure question. If I am right, we should expect at least two things. We should expect, first, that those who raise the de jure question would put it in terms of evidence, argument, propositional evidence, evidence from other things one thinks. And we should expect, second, that they also put it in terms of justification—justification construed deontologically or in terms of some analogical extension of deontology. Both of these expectations are amply fulfilled. Of course I don’t expect you just to take my word for it, and I don’t have the space for extensive documentation; I shall instead just give a bit of corroborating evidence.
For
the last hundred years, W. K. Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief”
has been cited in discussions of the de jure question; Clifford (that “delicious
enfant terrible,” as William
James called him) claimed (with charming and restrained understatement)
that “it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe
anything upon insufficient evidence.” Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1901), p. 183. In The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in
Popular Philosophy (New York:
Longmans, Green, 1897). “It’s not exactly emphasized any longer, but
one of James’s original purposes in promoting pragmatism was not to get
rid of empirically unverifiable beliefs, but to make room, in a
scientistic world view, for faith and God. . . . This was explicitly
the context for the 1898 lecture” (Louis Menand, “An American Prodigy,”
New York Review of Books [December 2, 1993], p. 33). The “1898 lecture” is
“The Will to Believe.”
James and Clifford wrote a hundred years ago and more; but the last
half-century has seen a host of evidentialist objectors to Christian
belief, thinkers who hold both that this sort of belief, if it is to be
rational, must be accepted on the basis of propositional evidence, and
that the evidence is insufficient. (Among them would be Brand
Blanshard, Reason and Belief (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), pp.
400ff. “Why I Am Not a Christian” in his Why I Am Not
a Christian (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1957), pp. 3ff. Primary Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 87ff. The Presumption of Atheism (London: Pemberton, 1976), pp. 22ff. “Religion and Science: A New Look at Hume’s
Dialogues,” Philosophical Studies 33 (1978), pp. 176ff. The Quest for Eternity: An Outline of the
Philosophy of Religion (New York:
Penguin, 1984). Experience, Explanation, and Faith: An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (London, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1984). On the Nature and Existence of God
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
everywhere and always belief has an ethical aspect.
There is such a
thing as a general ethic of the intellect. The main principle of that
ethic I hold to be the same inside and outside religion. That principle
is simple and sweeping: equate your assent to the evidence. Reason and Belief, p. 401. More evidence for the pervasive influence
of the deontological component of the classical package can be found in
chapter 1 of WCD. There I argue that both the prevalence of
internalism in contemporary
epistemology and the multifarious and confusing array of concepts of
justification among contemporary epistemologists can be understood in
terms of their relation to deontology.
Of
course it isn’t only evidentialist objectors to theistic belief who
embrace evidentialism. John Locke himself was an evidentialist, but no
evidentialist objector. Locke thought that religious belief is
‘evidence essential’ To use Stephen Wykstra’s term; see his
“Towards a Sensible Evidentialism: On the Notion of ‘Needing Evidence,’ ”
in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, 2d ed., ed. William Rowe and William Wainwright
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989). See his The Existence of God
(New York: Oxford University Press,
1981). An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Religion (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice Hall, 1985). “Towards a Sensible Evidentialism.” See his Faith and Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983),
especially chapters 3 and 4. See his The Existence of God
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
Swinburne, however, can’t be considered an evidentialist in view of
his “Principle of Credulity”: “that (in the absence of special
considerations) if it seems (epistemically) to a subject that
x is present, then probably x is present” (p. 254). Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1982.
Still, it is the evidentialist objectors that most clearly display evidentialism. John Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism is evidentialism at its most formidable; by way of conclusion, then, suppose we briefly note the form evidentialism takes in that book. Mackie proposes to ”examine the arguments for and against the existence of God carefully and in some detail, taking account both of the traditional concept of God and of the traditional proofs of his existence and of more recent interpretations and approaches.” He goes on:
If it is agreed that the central assertions of theism are literally meaningful, it must also be admitted that they are not directly verified or directly verifiable. It follows that any rational consideration of whether they are true or not will involve arguments. . . . it [whether God exists] must be examined either by deductive or inductive reasoning or, if that yields no decision, by arguments to the best explanation; for in such a context nothing else can have any coherent bearing on the issue. (pp. 4, 6)
Mackie assumes that the rational acceptability of theistic belief depends on the outcome of this examination: if, on balance, the evidence favors theism, then theistic belief is rationally acceptable; if the evidence favors atheism, then theism is not rationally acceptable. The evidentialism, of course, is palpable.
Now
Mackie takes it that theism is a hypothesis, something
like a very large-scale scientific hypothesis (the theory of evolution,
perhaps, or general relativity). He assumes further that its rational
acceptability depends upon its success as a hypothesis. Speaking of
religious experience, he makes the following characteristic remark:
“Here, as elsewhere, the supernaturalist hypothesis fails because there
is an adequate and much more economical naturalistic alternative” (p.
198). Clearly, this remark is relevant only if we think of belief in God
as or as like a scientific hypothesis, a theory designed to explain
some body of evidence, and acceptable to the degree that it succeeds in
explaining that evidence. On this way of looking at the matter, there
is a relevant body of evidence shared by believer and
Now
Mackie thinks it is not a good
explanation: he concludes, “In the end, therefore, we can agree
with what Laplace said about God: we have no need of that hypothesis”
(p. 253); he goes on to claim, “The balance of probabilities,
therefore, comes out strongly against the existence of a god.” He
clearly takes it for granted, furthermore, that if the balance of
probabilities comes out as he says it does, then there is no case for
theism, and the theist stands revealed as somehow irrational or
intellectually deficient or perhaps intellectually out of line; as he
puts it, “It would appear from our discussion so far that the central
doctrines of theism, literally interpreted, cannot be rationally
defended.” Indeed, Mackie takes the title of his book
from Hume’s ironic suggestion that upon the whole,
we may conclude that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but
even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without
one. . . . Whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued
miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his
understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most
contrary to custom and experience. An Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding (LaSalle,
Ill.: Open Court, 1966), p. 145.
But why make assumptions like that? Why think that theism is rationally acceptable only if there are good arguments for it? Why think that it is, or is significantly like, a scientific hypothesis? Of course these assumptions form part of the classical package: well, why should we accept that package? Clearly there are sensible alternatives. Consider our memory beliefs, for example: obviously, one could take a Mackie-like view here as well. I believe that I had a banana for breakfast; one could hold that a belief like this (and indeed even the belief that there has been such a thing as the past) is best thought of as like a scientific hypothesis, designed to explain such present phenomena as (among other things) apparent memories; if there were a more “economical” explanation of these phenomena that did not postulate, say, the existence of the past or of past facts, then our usual beliefs in the past “could not be rationally defended.” But here this seems clearly mistaken; the availability of such an “explanation” wouldn’t in any way tell against our ordinary belief that there has really been a past. Why couldn’t the same hold for theism or, more broadly, for Christian belief? What is to be said for (and against) the classical package, taken in particular with respect to Christian belief?
The classical picture has been enormously influential in guiding thought about the de jure question; its near relatives still dominate discussion of it; in particular, the evidentialism of the classical picture persists. This picture, however, like some other big pictures, doesn’t survive close examination; it is subject to powerful, indeed, fatal objections. After pointing out some of the problems, I’ll consider contemporary analogical extensions of the various elements of the classical picture to see whether any of them supports the evidentialism that is still widely popular and finds such a comfortable home in the classical picture. I’ll conclude that in fact there is no reason at all to think that Christian belief requires argument or propositional evidence, if it is to be justified. Christians—indeed, well-educated, contemporary, and culturally aware Christians—can be justified, so I shall argue, even if they don’t hold their beliefs on the basis of arguments or evidence, even if they aren’t aware of any good arguments for their beliefs, and even if, indeed, there aren’t any. Indeed, it is obvious that they can be justified in this way; as I shall argue, that suggests that the de jure question we seek is not this question of justification; that question is too easy to answer.
So,
first, what are these problems attaching to the classical picture?
Recent philosophy has not been kind to classical foundationalism; many
objections have been raised, many problems pointed out. I shall confine
my attention to two objections, both fatal. First, as I’ve argued
elsewhere, “Reason and Belief in God,” pp. 61ff.
(CP) A
person S is justified in
accepting a belief p if
and only if either (1) p is properly basic for S, that is,
self-evident, incorrigible, or Lockeanly
evident to the senses for S, Here I am reading Locke (see above, pp.
76–77) as claiming that what I know immediately is only that my
sensations are caused by external objects of some kind or other, not
that those objects have the properties of trees, horses, or the other
sorts of objects we think there are.
(2) S believes p on the evidential basis of propositions that are properly basic and that evidentially support p deductively, inductively, or abductively.
Here I ignore the fact that the ‘believes on the basis of’ relation is not transitive. The classical picture doesn’t really require that all of one’s nonbasic beliefs be believed on the evidential basis of basic beliefs; some nonbasic beliefs may be believed on the basis of other nonbasic beliefs that support them, provided those others are believed on the basis of still other beliefs that support them, provided those others. . . . To put this more accurately, say that a nonbasic belief is properly based if and only if it is believed on the evidential basis of beliefs that are either properly basic or properly based. Then, according to the classical picture, every nonbasic belief must be properly based.
Further, I ignore another condition that is really part of the classical picture. Suppose I believe p on the basis of propositions q1, q2 . . . qn where the qi in fact support p, but I can’t see that they do. (Perhaps I believe that there is no greatest cardinal on the basis of ordinary axioms for set theory, but don’t know, can’t see, and have no reason to believe that the latter support the former.) Then, presumably, on the classical picture I am not justified in this belief. My duty is to believe a nonbasic proposition on the basis of propositions that I can see support it, not just any old propositions that happen to support it, whether or not I can see it. Hence perhaps we should add what Locke and Descartes take for granted here: if S is justified in believing p on the basis of other propositions, it must be that those other propositions support p, of course; further, S must also recognize that they do so.
Now consider (CP) itself. First, it isn’t properly basic according to
the classical foundationalist’s lights. To be properly basic, it would
have to be self-evident, incorrigible, or Lockeanly evident to the
senses. But first, it isn’t self-evident for the foundationalist (or
for the rest of us). Even if someone claims it has some
intuitive support, one couldn’t with a
straight face claim that it has enough intuitive support to be
self-evident. For if it were self-evident, it would be such that it
isn’t even possible for a properly functioning human being to
understand it without seeing that it is true. See WPF, p. 109.
According to (CP) itself, therefore, (CP) is not properly basic. That means that if (CP) is true, those who are within their rights in believing (CP) must believe it on the evidential basis of other propositions—propositions that are properly basic and that evidentially support it. And if they do, in fact, believe it in that way, then there will be good inductive, deductive, or abductive arguments to (CP) from propositions that are properly basic according to (CP). As far as I know, there aren’t any such arguments. As far as I know, no classical foundationalist has produced any such arguments or proposed some properly basic propositions that support (CP). It is of course possible that there are such arguments, even if so far no one has produced them; but the probabilities seem to be against it. So probably one who accepts (CP) does so in a way that violates (CP); (CP) lays down a condition for being justified, dutiful, which is such that one who accepts it probably violates it. If it is true, therefore, the devotee of (CP) is probably going contrary to duty in believing it. So it is either false or such that one goes contrary to duty in accepting it; either way, one shouldn’t accept it.
But couldn’t one who accepts (CP) perhaps find a sort of
inductive argument for
it? See Philip Quinn’s “In Search of the
Foundations of Theism,” Faith and Philosophy 2 (1985), pp. 474ff.; my response, “The
Foundations of Theism: A Reply,” Faith and Philosophy
3 (1986), p. 298; and Quinn’s rejoinder,
“The Foundations of Theism Again,” in Rational Faith: Catholic
Responses to Reformed Epistemology,
ed. Linda Zagzebski (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993),
pp. 22ff. I am grateful to Quinn for showing that this possibility
needs to be taken much more seriously than I had been taking
it. Theory of Knowledge, 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice
Hall, 1989), p. 7. See also “Reason and Belief in God,” pp.
75ff.
Here is the question, however: are its premises properly basic
according to the classical picture? The premises include, crucially,
the propositions with respect to each member of J that it is
justified and of each member of U that it is not justified. What form
do such beliefs take? Well, presumably the sample classes would include
such propositions
Now here the classicist will be told that she has a really nasty problem: she will be told that there aren’t any cases at all where it is self-evident that a belief is unjustified, such that the believer has gone contrary to duty and in fact warrants disapproval and blame. The alleged reason is that our beliefs are not within our direct control; one can’t just decide to hold or withhold a belief. If you offer me $1,000,000 to believe that I am under 30, or even to stop believing that I am over 30, there is no way (short of mind-altering drugs, say) I can collect. Still, this is by no means the whole story. A full examination of this question would take us too far afield, but first some of my beliefs are indirectly within my control (in the way in which, for example, my weight is), even if I can’t simply decide what to believe and what not to. I can train myself not to assume automatically that people in white coats know what they are talking about; I can train myself to pay more attention to the evidence, to be less credulous and gullible (or less cynical and skeptical), and so on.
Furthermore, some of my beliefs or belief states are,
in a way, within my direct control. I
don’t at the moment have a belief on the question of the year of George
Washington’s birth; a quick look at my encyclopedia or a call to my
eighth-grade history teacher would remedy this deficiency. It is
therefore directly within my power to bring it about that I have a
belief on that topic. We might even go on to say that there is a belief
on that topic (the one the encyclopedia reports) such that it is
directly within my power to bring it about that I have
that belief. Still
further, I can be in a state of epistemic sin by virtue of failing to
have a certain belief. If it is my responsibility to care for a child
and I see her playing with a suspicious looking bottle but don’t take
the trouble to examine its label, I can’t expect to deflect blame by
claiming that I didn’t know the bottle contained poison. I
should have known. (“I
didn’t know the gun was loaded” doesn’t always suffice for
self-exculpation; it might be my responsibility to know.) And there are
plenty of other ways to be in epistemic sin by virtue of the beliefs
you hold or don’t hold. I believe that you failed to pay your income
taxes last year because X, whom I would have known to be irresponsible
had I made any inquiries, said so; and I was in the wrong not to make
further inquiries.) I am malicious and wish you ill; the speaker says
your thought is deep and rigorous; by virtue of my ill will, I form the
belief that what she said is that your thought is weak and frivolous.
Out of vanity and pride, I may form the belief that my work is unduly
neglected when the fact is it gets more attention
So suppose we accommodate the classical foundationalist by stipulating that at any rate there are some cases of self-evidently unjustified belief: there still remains a real problem for the classicist. That is because these cases, at least the ones I can think of, lend no support to the claim that it is unjustified to form a belief that is neither properly basic (according to classical standards) nor believed on the basis of such propositions. More important, aren’t there cases where a belief is formed according to (CP), but is nevertheless unjustified? I shouldn’t form the belief that you failed to pay your taxes last year on the basis of merely casual inquiry; the stakes are too high. But suppose I do just that: your false friend Myrtle tells me you didn’t pay them; I believe this in the usual way, a way, let us assume, that conforms to (CP); I am nevertheless unjustified in that belief.
And on the other side, aren’t there any number of cases where it is self-evident that a belief not formed in accord with (CP) is justified? Someone asks you what you had for breakfast; you reply that it was an orange and some cornflakes. You can’t really think of any propositions that are properly basic according to (CP) and support your memory belief; but isn’t it self-evident that you are not guilty, not worthy of reproof or blame, in so believing? And of course there will be an enormous number of examples of this sort. And the relevance of this is as follows: if the samples are chosen in any responsible and plausible way (if they are appropriately ‘random’), they will not support that conjecture that a person is conforming to intellectual duty if and only if her beliefs conform to (CP). Hence, I can’t see how a devotee of (CP) could responsibly argue for it by way of such an inductive, particularist procedure; and hence I conclude that there is probably no way in which the classicist can argue for (CP). If so, however, then (because she also holds that (CP) is not properly basic) she will be unjustified in believing (CP) if it is true; it is therefore self-referentially incoherent for her.
In his controversies with David Hume, Thomas Reid pointed out that the vast majority of our beliefs do not seem to conform to (CP): at least as far as justification is concerned, they are none the worse for that. This sentiment was echoed in the nineteenth century by others, in particular, Cardinal Newman. Says Newman:
Nor is
the assent which we give to facts limited to the range of
self-consciousness. We are sure beyond all hazard of a mistake, that
our own self is not the only being existing; that there is an external
world; that it is a system with parts and a whole, a universe carried
on by laws; and that the future is affected by the past. We accept and
hold with an unqualified assent, that the earth, considered as a
phenomenon,
A Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), p.
149.
But how much of this can be seen to be probable with respect to what is certain for us? How much meets the classical conditions for being properly basic? Not much, if any. I believe that I had cornflakes for breakfast, that my wife was amused at some little stupidity of mine, that there really are such ‘external objects’ as trees and squirrels, and that the world was not created ten minutes ago with all its dusty books, apparent memories, crumbling mountains, and deeply carved canyons. These things, according to classical foundationalism, are not properly basic; they must be believed on the evidential basis of propositions that are self-evident or evident to the senses (in Locke’s restricted sense) or incorrigible for me. Furthermore, they must be probable and seen to be probable with respect to propositions of that sort: there must be good arguments, deductive, inductive, or abductive to these conclusions from those kinds of propositions.
If there is any lesson at all to be learned from the history of modern philosophy from Descartes through Hume (and Reid), it is that such beliefs cannot be seen to be supported by, to be probable with respect to beliefs that meet the classical conditions for being properly basic. So either most of our beliefs are such that we are going contrary to epistemic obligations in holding them, or (CP) is false. It certainly doesn’t seem that we must be flouting duty in holding these beliefs in the way we do. I believe in the basic way that there is a lot of snow in the backyard just now and that I met my class yesterday; I don’t believe either of these things on the basis of propositions that meet the classical conditions for proper basicality; I do not believe there are any propositions of that sort with respect to which they are probable. Of course I realize I could be mistaken; but am I flouting duty in so believing? I reflect on the matter as carefully as I can; I simply see no duty here—and not because I doubt the existence of duties generally, or of epistemic duties specifically. Indeed there are duties of that sort: but is there a duty to conform belief to (CP)? I don’t think so. But then how can I be guilty, blameworthy, for believing in this way?
Could it be that I escape blame only
because of ignorance? As we saw in WCD (pp. 15ff.), there is a
distinction to be drawn between subjective and objective duty, a
distinction that goes all the way back to the New Testament. The
apostle Paul takes up the question whether it is
And perhaps the classical foundationalist can take advantage of this distinction as follows: “True,” he says, “you are not blameworthy in failing to conform your beliefs to (CP). But that is only because of ignorance. Fortunately for you, you nonculpably can’t see that you have a duty to conform your beliefs to (CP); that protects you from blame and guilt; nevertheless, you really do have an objective duty to regulate belief in the fashion I have described, even if you can’t see that you do.” Here discussion seems to come to an end. All I can do is ask my interlocutor why he thinks there is such an objective duty and how he came to the knowledge, as he thinks, that there is any such thing. Can he do more than to simply repeat that as a matter of fact we all have this duty? But why should we believe that? What reason is there for thinking it true? Further, I can’t properly accept (CP), even if by some wild chance it happens to be true. For if it is true, then to do my duty with respect to accepting it, I must believe it only on the basis of properly basic propositions, and ones such that I can see that they evidentially support (CP). But I don’t see that any such propositions support it (and the evidentialist apparently can’t help me by, e.g., giving me an appropriate argument). So if it is true and I accept it, I will be going contrary to objective duty; but if I accept it, I will (naturally enough) think it is true, and will therefore believe I am going contrary to my objective duty; hence if it is true and I believe it, I will be going contrary both to objective and subjective duty.
The
classical package taken neat, so to speak, can’t be right: there simply
doesn’t seem to be a duty to form belief in accordance with (CP). Of
course there may be other sorts of intellectual duties. There is a duty
to the truth of some kind. It may be hard to state this duty
exactly; See WCD, p. 33.
The
answer seems to be pretty easy. She reads Nietzsche, but remains
unmoved by his complaint that Christianity fosters a weak, whining,
whimpering, and generally disgusting kind of person: most of the
Christians she knows or knows of—Mother Teresa, for
instance—don’t fit that mold. She finds Freud’s contemptuous
attitude toward Christianity and theistic belief backed by little more
than implausible fantasies about the origin of belief in God See below, chapter 5, pp. 137ff.
On
the other side, although she is aware of theistic arguments and thinks
some of them not without value, she doesn’t believe on the basis of
them. Rather, she has a rich inner spiritual life, the sort described in
the early pages of Jonathan Edwards’s Religious
Affections; Ed. John Smith (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1959, first published 1746), p. 271.
And this is not only true, but obviously true. We may feel in some subterranean way that without evidence she isn’t justified; if so, this must be because we are importing some other conception of justification. But if it is justification in the deontological sense, the sense involving responsibility, being within one’s intellectual rights, she is surely justified. How could she possibly be blameworthy or irresponsible, if she thinks about the matter as hard as she can, in the most responsible way she can, and she still comes to these conclusions? Indeed, no matter what conclusions she arrived at, wouldn’t she be justified if she arrived at them in this way? Even if they are wholly unreasonable, in some clear sense? An inmate of Pine Rest Christian Psychiatric Hospital once complained that he wasn’t getting the credit he deserved for inventing a new form of human reproduction, “rotational reproduction,” as he called it. This kind of reproduction doesn’t involve sex. Instead, you suspend a woman from the ceiling with a rope and get her rotating at a high rate of speed; the result is a large number of children, enough to populate a city the size of Chicago. As a matter of fact, he claimed, this is precisely how Chicago was populated. He realized, he said, that there is something churlish about insisting on getting all the credit due him, but he did think he really hadn’t gotten enough recognition for this important discovery. After all, where would Chicago be without it?
Now
there is no reason to think this unfortunate man was flouting epistemic
duty, or derelict with respect to cognitive requirement, or careless
about his epistemic obligations, or cognitively irresponsible. Perhaps
he was doing his level best to satisfy these obligations. Indeed, we
can imagine that his main goal in life is satisfying his intellectual
obligations and carrying out his cognitive duties. Perhaps he was
dutiful in excelsis. If so, he
was justified in these
mad beliefs,
Again, what I’ve really argued is that this
believer is subjectively justified. Can the classical foundationalist
concede this but claim that he is not objectively justified, that
there really is a duty, whether he knows it or not, to believe only on
the basis of evidence? But is there even the slightest reason to think
there is any such duty? Here at
the least the classicist owes us an argument.
Our main quarry, of course, is the de jure objection or question. One prominent candidate is the question whether the Christian believer can be justified in believing as she does. Take that term in its original and basic deontological sense. Then the question is: can the Christian believer be within her epistemic rights and epistemically responsible in forming belief as she does? Can she be justified even if she doesn’t believe on the basis of propositional evidence and even if there is no good propositional evidence? The answer to this question is obvious—too obvious, in fact, for it to be the de jure question, at least if that question is to be worthy of serious disagreement and discussion. Of course she can be justified, and my guess would be that many or most contemporary Christians are justified in holding their characteristically Christian beliefs. We must therefore look elsewhere for the de jure question.
The
classical picture taken neat, therefore, is subject to devastating
difficulty. Nowadays, however, it is seldom taken neat. Instead, there
are many analogical extensions or analogically related alternatives for
each of the three main components of the classical package: the
evidentialism, the classical foundationalism, and the deontology. For
example, John Mackie The Miracle of Theism. See above, footnote 38. In Our Knowledge of God: Essays on Natural
and Philosophical Theology, ed.
Kelly Clark (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).
It isn’t clear whether they accept the deontological component of the classical picture; suppose for the moment we keep that component fixed, modifying only the evidential requirement. It is then obvious, I think, that the believer can be justified even if there aren’t good arguments from Mackie-style evidence, even if there isn’t good propositional evidence in the community, and even if there isn’t evidence in the broad Kretzmann sense. If it seems to me very strongly that the great things of the gospel are true, if upon reading the Scriptures I find myself convinced, and if after considerable reflection—on all the objections, for example—I still find myself convinced, how could I be properly blamed for believing as I do? Again, I could be wrong, deluded, a victim of wishful thinking, subject to some kind of cognitive disorder: nevertheless, there is no duty I am flouting. If the de jure question is whether the believer can be justified, or justified without evidence, the answer is still too easy: of course she can.
The
above involved extensions of the classical foundationalist
ingredient of the classical picture.
Note that we can also ring the analogical changes on the deontological
component, and we can mix and match the extensions in a dazzling
variety of combinations. I can’t possibly examine all these
multifarious versions of evidentialism in all their
For some of them, see WCD, chapter 1. I leave
as homework the problem of showing that Christian belief can indeed be
justified on these construals.
to be
justified in believing that p is to be in a strong position
for realizing the epistemic aim of
getting the truth. . . . I will begin by making the plausible
assumption that to be in an epistemically strong position in believing
that p is to have an adequate ground or basis for believing that p.
Where the justification is mediate, this ground will consist in other
things one knows or justifiably believes. Where it is immediate, it
will consist typically of some experience. . . . Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991),
p. 73.
A
belief is justified, therefore, if and only if it is formed on the
basis of an adequate ground. Clearly, Alston justification differs
radically from the original deontological notion. That is because it
doesn’t contain so much as a hint of the deontology of the classical
picture: “I reject all versions of a deontological concept [of
justification] on the grounds that they either make unrealistic
assumptions of the voluntary control of belief or they radically fail
to provide what we expect of a concept of justification.” Ibid.
Now
what sort of animal is a ground of belief? A mediate
ground of a belief, according to
Alston, is another belief, on the basis of which the belief in question is
formed; an immediate ground of a belief is an experience,
on the basis of which the belief is
formed. And what is it for the ground of a belief to be
adequate? “The ground of a
belief will suffice to justify it only if it is sufficiently indicative
of the truth of the belief. If the ground is to be adequate to the
task, it must be the case that the belief is very probably true, given
that it was formed on that basis.” Ibid., p. 75. See WPF, pp. 138ff.
Have we found the (or a) relevant de jure question? Is the right question to ask the question whether Christian belief is Alston justified? More specifically, the question, for a given Christian belief B I hold—the belief, say, that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself—is whether there is some truth-conducive ground G such that I hold the belief in question on the basis of that ground. But is this really a viable de jure question? I want to suggest that it is not. When we ask the de jure question about Christian belief, we are asking whether Christian belief is acceptable, OK, such that a sensible, intelligent, rational, informed person in something like our epistemic circumstances could or would hold such beliefs. The question as to whether such belief sometimes or typically has a truth-conducive ground, however, seems to be a very different question. I have two reasons for thinking so.
In
the first place, several important
sorts of beliefs—a priori belief and memory belief
in particular—do not seem to have a ground in Alston’s sense at all, but are
nonetheless perfectly in order from an epistemic point of view.
Consider memory. You remember what you had for lunch: lentil soup and a
doughnut. This belief isn’t based on propositional evidence. You don’t
infer it from other things you know or believe, such things, perhaps,
as your knowledge that you always have a doughnut and lentil soup for
lunch, or your knowledge that it is now shortly after lunchtime and
there are doughnut crumbs on your desk and an empty plastic soup dish
in your trash. So it doesn’t have a mediate ground. But it also isn’t
based on an experience.
See WPF, pp. 58ff. See WPF, pp. 57ff.
Accordingly, it isn’t that you know it was lentil soup on the basis of this experience; you don’t form the belief that it was lentil soup with that experience as ground. (The image seems to be more like a disposable decoration.) Instead, you simply remember, simply form that belief. Or, perhaps more accurately, that belief is formed in you: you don’t yourself, so to speak, take much of a hand in forming it.
The
same goes (though perhaps more controversially) for a priori
belief. See WPF, pp. 104ff.
So
many memory and a priori beliefs
are not formed on the basis of a ground in Alston’s sense, either
mediate or immediate. But of course many memory and a
priori beliefs are eminently
sensible, reasonable, rational, and the like. It therefore follows that
a belief need
Second, there are also beliefs that do have a truth-conducive ground (explained as Alston explains it) but are nonetheless not sensible or reasonable. A belief is based on an adequate ground, says Alston, if and only if it is based on a ground such that it is objectively probable that it is true, given that it is based on that ground. Note that (if objective probability conforms to the probability calculus) a necessary truth will have an objective probability of 1 on any other proposition whatever. Consider therefore the proposition 29 × 38 = 1102: the probability of this proposition is 1 on any condition whatever. Any belief in this proposition on any ground, therefore, is automatically a belief on the basis of an adequate ground. More generally, any grounded belief in any necessary proposition p is justified on this account; for the objective conditional probability that p on any proposition will be 1. So suppose I am extraordinarily gullible when it comes to set theory and believe, say, Cantor’s Theorem (according to which the cardinality of any set is always less than that of its power set), not because I have understood a proof or been told by someone competent that it is true, but just because I picked up a comic book on the sidewalk and found therein a character who claims it is his favorite theorem. Then this belief of mine has a truth-conducive ground, but isn’t rational or reasonable.
Further and closer to current concerns, according to the bulk of the theistic tradition, God is a necessary being who has his most important attributes essentially: there is no possible world in which he does not exist, and none in which he lacks such attributes as omniscience, goodness, love, and the like. If this is true, then the proposition that there is such a being as God (or that he is omniscient, or loving) will have an unconditional objective probability of 1, and consequently an objective conditional probability of 1 on any other proposition. Hence for any ground at all, the probability that one of those beliefs is true, given that it is formed on the basis of that ground, is 1. In asking the de jure question about belief in God, however, we presumably do not mean to ask a question to which an affirmative answer follows just from the fact that God is a necessary being who has his primary attributes essentially. Suppose God is indeed a necessary being; then if I believe in God just to please my friends, or because I am brainwashed or hypnotized, or because I am part of an evil social system, I will be justified in the Alston sense. If so, however, it is too easy to achieve justification in this sense.
No doubt there are variations on Alstonian justification, and in a complete treatment we should have to deal with them. But vita brevis est, even if philosophia longa est. I tentatively conclude, therefore, that the de jure question is not the question whether Christian belief is Alston justified. The de jure question is still elusive.
We have seen that the relevant de jure question—the question whether Christian belief is justified, or rational, or reasonable, or intellectually respectable—can’t be the question of justification strictly so called. That is, it can’t be the Lockean, deontological question whether Christian believers are or can be epistemically responsible, within their epistemic rights, flouting no epistemic duties, in believing as they do. That question, we saw, is much too easy to answer: obviously, a believer—even an intelligent, well-educated, contemporary believer who has heard and considered all the objections—can be justified in this original sense. We saw also that there are analogically extended senses of the term ‘justification’; but none of them is such that it is clear that a Christian believer can’t be justified, in that sense, in holding Christian belief. Believers may be mistaken; they may be deluded; they may be foolish; they may be insufficiently critical (in a way that doesn’t involve blameworthiness); but there is no reason to think either that they are inevitably derelict in their epistemic duties or that they are unjustified in one of those analogical extensions of the term.
Of
course there are other questions lurking in the nearby bushes, other
ways to construe the de jure question. In particular, we can ask whether the
believer is rational in
believing as she does. Many who put the de jure
question or urge a de
jure criticism put it in terms of
rationality, not justification. (More often, they put it
both ways, sometimes just using
the one as a synonym for the other.) So suppose we
But
what is it for a belief to be rational? The first thing to note is that this term is
multifarious, indeed, polyphonous, as our postmodern compatriots like
to say. There are several importantly different ideas of rationality
floating around, and the first thing we have to do is to specify the
concept of rationality involved in our question. What are
the main conceptions of rationality? In
Warrant: The Current Debate (hereafter WCD), I specified some different but analogically related senses of the
term. The basic sense is (1) Aristotelian rationality, the sense in
which, as Aristotle said, “Man is a rational animal.” Related to it in
various ways are (2) rationality as proper function; (3) rationality as
within or conforming to the deliverances of reason; (4) means-ends
rationality, where the question is whether a particular means someone
chooses is, in fact, a good means to her ends; and (5) deontological
rationality. We must look briefly at these; after that, we shall turn at
slightly greater length to William Alston’s practical
rationality. Our task will be
lightened, however, by the fact that we have already dealt with (5) in
the last chapter. Deontological rationality is really
justification; see above,
chapter 3, p. 87. It is worth noting the analogical connection between
justification and rationality.
According to Aristotle, man is a rational animal. Fair enough—on this point as on others, Aristotle is no doubt right: but what specifically did he have in mind? Here the term ‘rational’ apparently points to or expresses a property that distinguishes human beings from other animals. As Aristotle saw it, this property is the possession of ratio, the power of reason. The idea is that human beings, unlike at least some other animals, have concepts and can hold beliefs; they can reason, reflect, and think about things, even things far removed in space or time; human beings are (or, at any rate, can be) knowers. This is what it is to be a rational creature; and this is what Aristotle saw as distinctive about human beings. Of course rational powers can come in degrees. We ordinarily think of ourselves (no doubt in a burst of specific chauvinism) as much more talented, along these lines, than other terrestrial animals, although perhaps we are prepared to concede that some of them display at least rudimentary powers of reason. We also realize there may be other creatures, perhaps in other parts of the universe, that put us absolutely in the shade when it comes to intellectual power. Now is the de jure question the question whether a creature rational in this sense can accept Christian belief? Presumably not: given the many millions of rational animals who do accept it, that question, like the question of justification, has much too easy an answer.
If we agree that rational creatures do and therefore can accept Christian belief, we might ask whether it is only malfunctioning rational creatures that do so, creatures whose rational faculties are in some way dysfunctional. A person who suffers from pathological confusion, or flight of ideas, or the manic stage of bipolar disorder, or delusions (perhaps thinking the Martians are out to get him) is said to be irrational. Here the problem is dysfunction, malfunction of the rational faculties. The paranoid doesn’t form beliefs in the way a normal, properly functioning human being does; some part of the cognitive apparatus fails to function properly. Pathologically confused people may not know what day it is or where they live. Such dysfunction can be long-term or episodic; if it is the latter, then after the episode is over, we say rationality is restored. This sense of rationality, therefore, has to do with proper function, the absence of dysfunction or pathology: you are rational if not subject to such pathology. Correlatively, irrationality, in this sense, is a matter of malfunction of (some of) the rational faculties, the faculties by virtue of which we are rational animals. So there is an analogical connection between Aristotelian rationality and rationality construed as proper function.
We must distinguish two forms of rationality as proper function. On the one hand, there is what we might call internal rationality. We can initially characterize internal rationality as a matter of proper function of all belief-producing processes ‘downstream from experience’. How can we explain this metaphor? We may begin by noting that experience comes in several varieties. First, there is sensuous imagery, the kind of experience you have most prominently in vision but in hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching as well. To use Roderick Chisholm’s terminology, in this kind of experience one is appeared to in such and such a way. Sensuous imagery plays an enormously significant role in perception; perceptual beliefs are formed in response to sensuous imagery and on the basis of such imagery.
Still, this isn’t the only kind of experience that goes with belief
formation. In chapter 3 (p. 106) and in Warrant and Proper
Function (188–93, hereafter WPF),
I pointed out that the formation of memory beliefs is often unaccompanied by phenomenal
experience, or else accompanied only by fragmentary, fleeting,
indistinct, hard-to-focus sensuous imagery. You remember that you went
to a party in Novosibirsk; there is a bit of imagery, all right,
although it is fleeting, partial, indistinct, and such that when you
try to focus your attention on it, it disappears. But there is another
kind of experience present: the belief that it was
Novosibirsk (and not, say,
Cleveland) seems right, acceptable, natural; it forces itself upon you; it seems somehow
inevitable (the right words are hard to find). The belief
feels right, acceptable, and
natural; it feels different from what you think is a false
Suppose we call this second kind of phenomenal experience
doxastic experience because it
always goes with the formation of belief. From δοξα, the Greek word for belief. In WPF I
called this kind of experience ‘impulsional evidence’. Meditations, Meditation I.
There is more that internal rationality requires; we can deal with it briefly. A person is internally rational only if her beliefs are coherent, or at any rate are sufficiently coherent to satisfy proper function. If she is internally rational, then if she believes that her head is made of earthenware, she will not also believe that it is made of flesh and blood—or at least won’t believe these both within the confines of the same thought, so to speak. Much more ought to be said about the coherence required by proper function; it will have to await another occasion. Further, an internally rational person will draw the right inferences when the occasion arises: for example, someone who is internally rational but believes that her head is made of earthenware will probably believe that playing football (at any rate without a really good helmet) is very dangerous. Still further, given the beliefs she has, she will make the right decisions with respect to her courses of action—that is, the decisions required by proper function. Given that you do believe you are made of glass, for example, the rational thing to do is to avoid bumps. And finally, if she is internally rational, she will do what proper function requires with respect to such things as preferring to believe what is true, looking for further evidence when that is appropriate, and in general being epistemically responsible.
And now that we have internal rationality in hand, external rationality is easy to explain. It requires, first, proper function with respect to the formation of the sensuous experience on which perceptual belief is based. And it consists second in the formation of the right kind of doxastic experience—that is, the sort of doxastic experience required by proper function.
I suppose it would be widely conceded
that Christian belief can be held by people whose rational faculties
are not malfunctioning, or at any rate not malfunctioning in a way that
involves clinical psychoses. Although Richard Rorty somewhere suggests
that in the new liberal society, those who think there is such a thing
as the chief end of man will have to be considered insane. See also
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 516,
where he suggests that perhaps Baptists should be kept in zoos and
preserved as interesting cultural relics, but only if they refrain from
telling their children such patent untruths as that “‘man’ is not a
product of evolution by natural selection” (519).
First, what are the deliverances
of reason? Here we have to take the term ‘reason’ a bit more narrowly
than we did in thinking about Aristotelian rationality. Among the
things we know, some are self-evident. It isn’t entirely easy to see what it is for a
proposition to be self-evident; See WPF, pp. 108ff. Alternatively, we might say that a
proposition is irrational if its denial is among the deliverances of reason, and rational
if it is not irrational: then, of course, every proposition will be
either rational or irrational.
There is a problem here. The
deliverances of reason obviously come in degrees: some seem much more
compelling than others, and only some have the overwhelmingly obvious
nature of the propositions mentioned above. So, for example, it is
obvious, I think, that there aren’t any things that do not exist,
although this has been disputed, and although it is not as obvious as
the propositions mentioned in the above paragraph. Another example is
serious actualism: the proposition that an object has properties only
in worlds in which it exists. See “Replies,” in Alvin
Plantinga, ed. James Tomberlin and
Peter van Inwagen (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), pp. 316ff. See John Pollock, “Plantinga on Possible
Worlds,” in Alvin Plantinga, pp.
126ff., and also Nathan Salmon, “Nonexistence,”
Noûs (September 1998), p.
290.
Is Christian belief rational in this sense? No; the central truths of Christianity are certainly not self-evident, nor, so far as anyone can see, are they such that they can be deduced from what is self-evident. Of course, that is nothing whatever against Christian belief; the same holds for, for example, what we are taught by historians, physicists, and evolutionary biologists. So the de jure question can’t be the question whether Christian belief is rational in this sense. That is because a negative answer to the question is supposed to be a serious criticism of Christian belief; but it is no criticism of Christian belief (or the theory of evolution, or the belief that you live in Cleveland) that it is not a deliverance of reason in this sense.
Well, is Christian belief irrational, in this sense? That is, are the denials of some
of the propositions falling within Christian belief either
self-evident or deducible from propositions that are self-evident?
Could that be the
de jure question? If Christian
beliefs were irrational in this sense, that would certainly be
something against them. Some have certainly argued that characteristic
Christian belief is inconsistent. For example, it has often been
claimed that the existence of God is incompatible with the existence of
evil; Christian doctrine, however, embraces both. I believe it is
clear, however, that there is no inconsistency here; See chapter 9 of my The Nature of
Necessity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1974).
Some atheologians have also urged that certain Christian doctrines (e.g., the doctrine of the trinity or the doctrine of the incarnation) are self-contradictory and hence inconsistent with the deliverances of reason. But these claims are at best inconclusive; everything depends on which precise formulation of these doctrines we consider. Some of these formulations may perhaps be inconsistent, although it is very hard to find any formulations of these doctrines that are both clearly inconsistent and also widely accepted. (In particular, the formulations to be found in the great creeds of the Christian church are not clearly inconsistent.) Other formulations clearly are not inconsistent. Further, Christians who come to realize that they have accepted an inconsistent version of one of these doctrines can easily replace that version by one that is not inconsistent. So if this were the de jure question, then even if some formulations of central Christian doctrine are contrary to the deliverances of reason, the unhappy condition of believing such a thing could be easily avoided: just move to a formulation that is not inconsistent. But those who urge the de jure question with respect to Christian belief do not, presumably, mean to claim just that Christian belief is inconsistent: even if it is perfectly consistent, they think, there is still something seriously wrong with it. We can’t mollify them merely by pointing out that there are consistent versions of Christian belief. This, too, it seems, is not the de jure question.
What
about means-end rationality, what our continental cousins sometimes
call Zweckrationalität?
This is the sort of rationality displayed by the actions of someone who
aims to achieve a certain goal
Of course there are many variations on this
notion of rationality. The rational action might be the one that would
in fact lead to the achievement
of your goal, or the one you think would, or the one you would
think would, if your cognitive
faculties were functioning properly, or the one you would think would
if your cognitive faculties were functioning properly and you reflected
long enough, or the one you would think would if . . . and you were
sufficiently acute, or . . . and you were not distracted by lust, greed
or ambition, and so on.
Is the de jure question about this kind of rationality? Means-end rationality is a property of actions; hence it isn’t initially obvious that belief is the sort of thing that can be rational and irrational in this sense, because it isn’t initially obvious that beliefs are actions. In fact it seems initially obvious that beliefs (believings) are not actions. You don’t ordinarily form a given belief because you think holding that belief would be a good means to some end or other. Still, suppose we did think of belief as a sort of action (perhaps in a limiting sense); then presumably the end in view would be believing or knowing the truth. And then Christian belief would be rational in this sense if and only if a rational person, one whose cognitive faculties were functioning properly, would or could choose this means to the end of believing the truth. But there is something very peculiar about this suggestion. What you rationally choose as a means to an end depends on what you believe—for example, on what you believe about the likelihood that a given course of action will yield the result you are aiming at. But what if your aim is to believe truth? Then (pretending for the moment that what you believe is within your power in the appropriate way) you will, of course, believe a proposition if you think it is true: for if it is true, then, naturally enough, believing it is a good way to believe truth. So taking the action of believing Christian teaching will be rational for you, if, in fact, you do believe Christian teaching. (This oddness brings out the way in which belief really isn’t action or, if it is, at least isn’t much like other forms of action.) The real question, then, will be whether a rational person can believe the claims of Christianity, whether a rational person can accept Christian belief. And that means that the question whether Christian belief is means-end rational really reduces to the question whether it is rational in some other sense: the Aristotelian sense or, more likely, the proper function sense. So we don’t have here an independent sense of rationality; because we have already dealt with that sense, what we really see is that the de jure question can’t be this question of means-end rationality either.
None of the varieties of rationality I
have so far mentioned offers the resources for a sensible de
jure question. In his
magisterial book, Perceiving God, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Subsequent page references will be to this book.
The conclusion of Alston’s book is really that it is rational—practically rational, as he says—for at least many of us to engage in what he calls ‘Christian Mystical Practice’ (CMP, for short): the practice of forming beliefs about God (or the Ultimate) on the basis of experience of God, or more exactly (putative) perception of God (or the Ultimate):
My main thesis in this chapter, and indeed in the whole book, is that CMP is rationally engaged in [my emphasis] since it is a socially established doxastic practice that is not demonstrably unreliable or otherwise disqualified for rational acceptance. (194)
The sort of rationality at issue here is ‘practical’ rationality; we shall therefore consider whether the de jure question might be the question whether Christian belief is practically rational in his sense. Now Alston himself does not really address specifically Christian belief—trinity, incarnation, atonement, and resurrection, for example. He is instead concerned with the sorts of beliefs that are produced by (putative) perception of God. These include such beliefs as that God is glorious, delightful, holy, majestic, all-powerful, loving, and the like, as well as such beliefs as that he is strengthening, supporting or comforting one. These are not specifically Christian beliefs, and, of course, our de jure question is about the rationality of specifically Christian beliefs. Nevertheless, perceptual beliefs about God could contribute support to Christian beliefs about God; in any event, it will be of interest to ask whether Christian belief is rational in the sense of rationality Alston identifies, even if he himself does not address that issue. Further, the question whether Christian belief is practically rational seems to me at any rate closer to the de jure question we seek than the candidates we have already canvassed. But what is this ‘practical rationality’? How does Alston understand this protean notion, and how does he argue for the practical rationality of CMP and the beliefs it produces?
Here we need a bit of stage setting. A distinctive feature of Alston’s
entire epistemology is its emphasis upon social
doxastic practices—socially established ways of forming belief.
(It makes a certain rough sense to think of Alston as judiciously
blending Reid with Wittgenstein. See Alston’s “A Doxastic Practice Approach to
Epistemology,” Knowledge and Skepticism, ed. M. Clay and K. Lehrer (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1988).
These are doxastic practices: they issue in the formation of beliefs. They are also social practices in that they contain a considerable component contributed by our social environment. SP, for example, involves a substantial social component in that what we learn from others by way of teaching and testimony becomes part of the practice. For example, what we learn from others is involved in the society of checks and tests whereby we determine whether a putative perception is a real perception; I had to learn from others (parents, for example) what it is that I perceive when I perceive a tree or house or star. The contributions of nature and nurture may vary over these different practices; the contribution of nurture is perhaps maximal with respect to SP and perhaps minimal with respect to our grasp of elementary arithmetic and logic.
In addition to these universally shared practices, there is also what Alston calls MP, ‘mystical practice’, the practice whereby many but not all of us form beliefs about God (or the Ultimate) on the basis of experience or perception of God (or the Ultimate). CMP is a specific variant of mystical practice, where the beliefs formed are the specifically Christian beliefs held by Christians of all stripes in many different parts of the world and at all times since the beginning of the Christian era.
Clearly, we can raise many questions about these practices: in
particular, we can ask whether they are reliable. We can also ask
whether we can show that
they are reliable. If we ask this latter question about SP, then we are
asking whether we can show or successfully argue that the beliefs
Alston concedes that we can’t give a good noncircular argument for the
claim that CMP is in fact reliable. He pays the same compliment to SP,
however: we can’t give a good noncircular argument for
its reliability either. So
that distressing fact about CMP is balanced by a complementary
distressing fact about SP. The problem with arguments for the
reliability of SP is typically what he calls epistemic
circularity, a malady from
which an argument for the reliability of a faculty or source of belief
suffers when one of its premises is such that my acceptance of that
premise originates in the operation of the very faculty or source of
belief in question. If you give an epistemically circular argument for
the reliability of a faculty, then you rely on that very faculty for
the truth of one of your premises. An obvious example would be arguing
that your intuitive arithmetical faculties are reliable by pointing out
that your arithmetic intuitions seem to you to be intuitively sound. A
less obviously circular project would be that of trying to determine if
human cognitive faculties (including your own) are reliable by doing
some science: you find out what human beings think, and then check to
see whether what they think is true. Clearly enough, this
procedure is epistemically circular, for you rely on human cognitive
faculties—yours—in finding out what human beings think and
also checking to see if what they think is true. Alston detects many
examples of epistemic circularity (more than you might have thought),
some obvious and some not so obvious. I believe he succeeds in
establishing the important conclusion that it is not possible to show
in a noncircular fashion that SP is reliable—at any rate he gets
as close to establishing this conclusion as philosophers ever get to
establishing any important conclusion. The argument is given at even greater depth
and explicitness in his The Reliability of Sense Perception
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1993).
So according to Alston, SP and CMP are in the same leaky epistemological boat. Indeed, the fact is, he argues, all of our basic doxastic practices are in the same epistemological boat; none of them can be shown in noncircular fashion to be reliable.
The unhappy developments just
explained, says Alston, present us with a “crisis of rationality” and a
“desperate situation”: “The course of the argument led us to the
conclusion that with respect to even those sources of belief of which
we are normally the most confident we have no sufficient noncircular
reason for taking them to be reliable” (146). What are we to do? Well, we are obliged to settle for
second best: although we can’t show that any of these practices is
reliable, perhaps we can
show that we are rational—practically
rational—to engage in them.
Suppose we begin by examining the second argument; as we shall see, this argument leads back to the first. Here is how Alston puts the matter:
My main thesis . . . is that CMP is rationally engaged in since it is a socially established doxastic practice that is not demonstrably unreliable or otherwise disqualified for rational acceptance. If CMP is, indeed, a socially established doxastic practice, it follows from the position defended in Chapter 4 that it is prima facie worthy of rational participation. And this means that it is prima facie rational to regard it as reliable, sufficiently reliable to be a source of prima facie justification of the beliefs it engenders. And if, furthermore, it is not discredited by being shown to be unreliable or deficient in some other way that will cancel its prima facie rationality, then we may conclude that it is unqualifiedly rational to regard it as sufficiently reliable to use in belief formation. (194)
The basic contention is that it is prima facie rational to engage in CMP . . . because it is a socially established doxastic practice; and that it is unqualifiedly rational to engage in it . . . because we lack sufficient reason for regarding it as unreliable or otherwise disqualified for rational participation. (223)
The main premise of this argument, then, is:
It is prima facie rational (practically rational) to engage in a socially established doxastic practice, and unqualifiedly rational (rational all things considered) to engage in a socially established practice that doesn’t encounter severe internal or external incompatibilities.
And in chapters 5 through 7 Alston goes on to argue that CMP is indeed a socially established doxastic practice, and that it does not encounter severe internal or external incompatibilities.
Turn now to the main premise. First, I
don’t know precisely how to state the second part, the part about
‘rationality all things considered’, but while this is mildly annoying,
it isn’t really serious, because I intend to comment only on the first
part. How exactly are we to understand this proposition, and what is
the sense of ‘rational’ in which it is prima facie
rational to engage in a socially
established doxastic practice? As to the second, we are talking about
the rationality or lack thereof of taking a course of
action, of
doing something or other,
of acting in a certain
way. (That is why we’re talking practical rationality.) Whether an action is rational for me
will obviously have something to do with what it is I am aiming
at in taking that action,
what I am trying to accomplish, what my
purpose,
end, goal
is. So the kind of rationality at issue
is that means-ends rationality, that
Zweckrationalität we
came across above (p. 115). The rational action, for me, is the one
that will contribute to the realization of my goal, or contribute more
to it than any other action open to me. But is it the action that will
in fact contribute to my
goal that is rational for me, or the one I believe
will so contribute? Presumably the
second: I am not irrational, in taking a given line of action, if I
make a perfectly sensible mistake about what the best means to my end
is. As we saw above in footnote 10, there are
important distinctions within this category.
Now the case under consideration, of course, is the case of those
doxastic practices; we are to ask whether it is rational to form
beliefs by engaging in SP, CMP, or both. Here our relevant aim or goal,
says Alston, is that of getting in the right relation to the truth,
achieving some appropriate balance between avoiding error and believing
truth. And now the question for us is whether a rational way to try to
achieve that goal is to form beliefs as we always have, by employing SP, CMP, or both.
Of course, this question has about it a certain air of
unreality. It is up to me whether I open the faucet to get a drink of
water, but it isn’t really up to me whether I will form beliefs in
accord with SP. I don’t have any choice in the matter. And that means
that the question of the practical rationality of continuing in SP is a
little peculiar. I might as well ask whether it is rational for me to
continue to be such that the earth attracts my body with a force that
is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between us:
this really isn’t up to me. The same goes with respect to my
Well, perhaps I do have a bit
more control over my belief-forming
proclivities than over whether my body is attracted by the earth. The
fact is there are rather standard ways in which I can influence, mold,
or form my belief-producing tendencies.
Alston is perfectly well aware of the problem here, and what he suggests is that the interesting question is whether it would be rational to continue to engage in the practice in question if it were within my power to continue and within my power to refrain (168). The question is what it would be rational for me to do, if I were in a certain position: a position in which one of the things I believe, and believe truly, is that it is within my power to continue to form beliefs in the ways I have (by using the standard package and CMP), and also within my power to refrain from forming beliefs in those ways—either forming no beliefs at all of those sorts, or perhaps using some quite different belief-forming practice.
Suppose (with an apologetic bow to John Rawls) we call this position the ‘original position’. Our question, specified to the standard package, is something like this. Suppose I am in the original position: I know (or at any rate believe truly) that it is within my power to stop forming beliefs in the ordinary way, via SP, memory, and reasoning (the standard package). Perhaps I also know that it is within my power to choose some other way of forming belief. Then what would be the rational thing to do: continue to form beliefs as I have all along, try some other way, or give up on this whole belief-forming enterprise?
The answer, as we have seen, depends at least in part on my aims, ends, and goals. If my aim is psychological comfort, feeling really good about myself, perhaps I should choose some belief-forming mechanisms that lead me to think I am a really fine fellow. Perhaps I should choose a way that will bring it about that I believe I have just won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, heroically overcoming such serious obstacles as that I have no training in the subject and know next to nothing about it. Naturally I should carefully avoid any belief-forming practices on the basis of which I would come to see the true extent of my failures and ineptness, my sins and miseries, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it. In the present context, of course, my aim, according to Alston, is not personal comfort, or happiness, or psychological well-being, but getting properly in touch with the truth.
The rational course depends on my aims and goals; it also depends on
what I believe—that is, what I believe at the time I take the
decision in question. If my aim is to feel good about myself, it would
be irrational to choose belief-forming mechanisms that, as I believe,
would lead to a
Here we see the connection between the first and second of Alston’s arguments for the practical rationality of SP and CMP. The main premise of the second argument, we might say, takes it for granted that in the original position I believe that socially established practices are as likely to lead us to the right relationship to the truth as any alternative; and indeed I suppose most of us do in fact believe that. The main premise of the first argument is different; it is that I don’t know that SP (or CMP) is subject to any massive unreliability, and I also don’t know of any alternative practice I could adopt which is such that I could show with respect to it that it is reliable. In the original position (the first argument continues), I would have this belief (I would believe that I know of no better alternative practice); therefore, the rational thing to do is to stick with what I’ve got. (Or if that seems a bit strong, it is at any rate true that sticking with my present practices is a rational thing to do.) The first argument is the basic one; the second argument takes for granted the main premise of the first argument and then incorporates something else most of us are in fact inclined to believe, namely, that socially established doxastic practices have a good chance of being reliable, perhaps a better chance than idiosyncratic doxastic practices.
These thoughts lead to a crucial question: precisely what
is it that I believe in
the original position? In particular, what do I believe about the
reliability of SP and CMP in
that position? Is the idea that my beliefs, in the original position,
are as much as possible like the beliefs I do in fact have, given that
(in that position) I know or truly believe that it is within my power
to give up SP, CMP, or both? (Call this the wide original position.)
Perhaps that is the way to think of the original position. But this
doesn’t take us very far. The fact is that I now believe that
both SP and
Here there is a strong odor of triviality. I do in fact think both SP and CMP are reliable; so if, in the original position, I have the beliefs about SP and CMP that in fact I do have, then in that position, naturally enough, the rational choice would be to continue with SP and CMP. Given what I do believe about them, that would be the rational thing to do. This conclusion, while no doubt true, is pretty weak tea. Of course, if I knew I could refrain from forming beliefs in the SP and CMP way, and also believed that those ways were reliable, more reliable than any alternative way open to me, I would choose to continue to form beliefs that way. True, but not very interesting: how would this fact show or tend to show that my SP and CMP beliefs are in fact rational, in some interesting sense? We are told that if we knew it was within our power to continue to form beliefs in this way, and also within our power to abstain from so doing, then if we believed that SP and CMP are reliable, the rational thing to do would be to choose to continue to form beliefs in those ways. No doubt: nothing of interest follows. The same would go for any beliefs I have, no matter how crazy. The same would go, for example, for the insane beliefs of Descartes’s madmen, who believed that they themselves were gourds—zucchini, perhaps, or summer squash—and that their heads were made of pottery. If I really do believe that I am a summer squash, then the rational thing for me to do, if offered the chance, is to continue to form beliefs in a way that yields (as I see it) this true belief. Still, that doesn’t show that this belief itself is rational. We haven’t yet located the de jure question.
However we do have to consider another facet of the dialectical situation, one that so far I have been slighting: I am aware, in the original position, of the fact that neither SP, nor CMP, nor any other major doxastic practice can be noncircularly shown to be reliable. That, after all, is what, according to Alston, precipitated the crisis of rationality and called forth the question of rationality in the first place. It is after we realize this, he thinks, that we are in the desperate situation of which he speaks. So we must add that in the original position I am aware of the fact that we can’t noncircularly establish that the practices in question are reliable. (We must also add, perhaps, that I have devoted some attention to this fact, have thought about it at least a bit; perhaps we should say that I am acutely aware of it.)
This changes very little. In the original position as now conceived
(the wide original position), I know that it is within my power to
withhold perceptual and Christian belief; I also know that it isn’t
possible to give a good noncircular argument for the reliability of
these sources of belief; but otherwise my beliefs are as much as
possible like they are in
Here I assume what Alston disputes: that God
has beliefs. (Of course, on Alston’s view, there would be something
like beliefs in God.) But this is
really irrelevant to the point I make here, which is that it is a
necessary truth that no doxastic agent, no matter how exalted, could give a good,
epistemically noncircular argument for the reliability of his doxastic
faculties. See my “Divine Knowledge,” in Christian
Perspectives on Religious Knowledge, ed. C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).
In the wide original position, therefore, I would be convinced that SP and CMP are reliable sources of belief, despite the fact that I realize it isn’t possible to give a good noncircular argument for their reliability; hence, in the wide original position, the rational thing to do, obviously, would be to continue with them. We are still mired in triviality. We still don’t have either the de jure question or the original position quite right. The problem is that if, in the original position, we have the beliefs we actually have with respect to SP and CMP, then it is trivially obvious that the rational decision would be to continue to form beliefs in those ways. Unfortunately, the fact that this is the rational decision, given those beliefs, does nothing to show that the beliefs we form on the basis of SP and CMP are rational in any interesting sense. In particular, the atheologian who raises the de jure question with respect to Christian belief will not be mollified if told that it would be rational, given that you thought CMP reliable, to decide to continue to form beliefs in the CMP way.
In any event, there would be something very peculiar about supposing that the original position includes the beliefs I actually have about the reliability of SP and CMP (as well as the beliefs I actually form on the basis of those practices). The whole question of the rationality or sensibleness of CMP and SP arises, after all, because we realize we can’t successfully argue that those sources of belief are reliable. (It is this realization that precipitates the “crisis of rationality.”) We need a term for those beliefs which are such that we can’t successfully argue that the sources that produce them are reliable: say that such beliefs are uncredentialed. Then the crisis of rationality, with respect to SP and CMP beliefs, arises because we realize that they are uncredentialed. What to do? Alston suggests that at any rate we can argue that it is practically rational to form belief in the CMP and SP ways. That will give us something, even if it is settling for second best. So the idea is to show that there is something rational or reasonable about beliefs formed the SP and CMP ways, by showing that it would be rational to choose to form beliefs that way in the original position. But then presumably there would be something at best very peculiar about relying on the belief that CMP and SP are reliable; that belief itself, of course, is uncredentialed.
And, in fact, Alston’s idea, in Perceiving God, is that these beliefs are not to be included in the original position:
But I was also thinking of this subject
[the person in the original position] as realizing that s/he is unable
to show that any of these practices are reliable, and believing that
this implies that s/he is unable to use beliefs in that reliability, or
beliefs that presuppose that reliability, to determine the most
rational course to take vis-à-vis belief formation. Alston’s reply to comments on Perceiving
God at a meeting of the Society of
Christian Philosophers (concurrent with the meeting of the Eastern
Division of the American Philosophical Association) in Atlanta,
December, 1993 (a published version can be found in The
Journal of Philosophical Research
20 (1995), pp. 67ff.
The suggestion is, I think, that in the original
position we bracket our
confidence in the practices in question; better, we simply don’t
have any beliefs of this
sort in that position. In making this decision, we languish (or
flourish) behind a veil of ignorance. This is a narrow original
position. We are to engage
in the following thought experiment: try to see what it would be
rational to do if you didn’t already believe in the reliability of SP
or CMP, knew that there are no good noncircular arguments for their
reliability, and (correctly) believed that it is up to you whether you
engage in those practices: under those conditions, would it be rational
to continue in forming beliefs the SP or CMP way? The idea here
seems to be that the original position wouldn’t include the belief that
SP or CMP is reliable, or even any of beliefs formed on the basis
of SP and CMP; for presumably those beliefs presuppose the reliability of SP and CMP
(at least if I understand what Alston means here by
‘presuppose’). Another reason for supposing SP and CMP
beliefs are not to be included in the narrow original position: if they
were, then, of course, in that position we would think them
true, and we would know that
they were delivered by SP and CMP. But then, obviously, we would have
excellent reason to think SP and CMP are reliable, and it would be
obvious that the rational thing to do would be to continue forming
beliefs the SP and CMP way; we should be back at the previous condition
of triviality.
Well then, what beliefs are included in this narrow original position? Which of my beliefs could I sensibly use, in coming to a decision as to whether to continue with CMP, SP, or both? Alston holds, of course, that I can properly use the premises of his arguments for the practical rationality of CMP and SP; these are included in the original position. As you recall, the premises of the first argument include something like
(1) SP and CMP do not lead to massive inconsistencies; there is no reason to think them unreliable; we know of no alternative doxastic practices whose reliability we could demonstrate in an epistemically noncircular fashion; and it would be disruptive to stop forming belief in these ways;
the premises of the second include
(2) SP and CMP are socially established practices that are not demonstrably unreliable or otherwise disqualified; and it would be disruptive to stop forming belief in these ways.
Here (1) would be teamed with another premise according to which it is practically rational to decide to continue a practice that meets the conditions (1) says SP and CMP meet; there would be a similar premise to go with (2). And Alston’s idea is that at any rate we can use these premises in coming to a decision as to whether to continue in SP and CMP. So even though the original position is narrow, it would still include the premises of his arguments.
But why so? Why would it be appropriate to rely on these premises, in
the original position? The problem with relying on the beliefs that CMP
and SP are reliable and on the beliefs that are formed by way of CMP
and SP, of course, is that it is these very beliefs that are
uncredentialed. Doesn’t the same go, however, for the doxastic
practices that yield (1) and (2)? Can we do any better with respect to
them? For example, both (1) and (2) include the belief that we have
been engaging in CMP and SP,
forming beliefs in the CMP and SP ways. But how do I know that
we have been doing this
for some time? Presumably, it is only by way, in part, of perception
itself: I perceive other people (or, to be really finicky, their
bodies), and that perception is necessary to my knowledge that they use
CMP, SP, or both. But perceptual beliefs are also uncredentialed: so these
beliefs of mine are uncredentialed. Does the fact that the argument takes as a
premise a belief that is a deliverance of the very practice under
consideration show that the argument is epistemically circular? Not
obviously: the conclusion of this argument is not that SP is reliable, but that it is
practically rational to engage in it.
Indeed, as Alston himself points out (146–47), it is easy to see
that none of our beliefs
is credentialed. Even if we could give an argument to show that a given
source of belief was, in fact, reliable, in making that argument we would
be obliged to rely on other sources of beliefs. In particular, we would have to
rely on reason; but clearly we can’t establish that reason is
reliable without relying on reason itself; so beliefs that are
produced by reason are uncredentialed. Hence, if we insist that the
original position must include only credentialed beliefs, it won’t
include any beliefs at all. And if it doesn’t contain any beliefs at
all, then in the original position you wouldn’t have the faintest idea
what to do, whether to continue with SP and CMP or not. You might as
well flip a coin; more likely, the rational thing to do would be to
withhold judgment altogether. But why would that matter with respect to
the question of the rationality of forming beliefs in the SP or CMP
way? Obviously, if you had no beliefs to go on, you couldn’t come to a
sensible decision as to whether to continue with SP or CMP; why would
that fact show that there
is something irrational in forming belief in accord with SP and CMP? If
you had no beliefs at all on the subject, you couldn’t come to a
sensible decision as to whether to continue with SP and CMP: but that
fact is quite irrelevant to the question whether there is something
wrong with forming beliefs in the SP and CMP ways. If so, however, the
de jure question would
not be the question whether it would be rational to continue with CMP
(or SP) if I were in the narrow original position. Do I know, however (in the narrow original
position), that I have been forming beliefs all along in the SP and CMP
way, and that it would therefore be inconvenient to change
my way of forming beliefs, whether or
not other people are involved? I think this leads to a puzzle,
illustrating the limitations of this kind of counterfactual thought
experiment. I am to imagine myself in the narrow original position, one
in which I don’t have any SP and CMP beliefs; but then, of course, I
would have a different way of forming beliefs from the way in which I
actually do form them. If I were in that position, it would not be true
that if I were not to employ SP and CMP, then I would be changing my
ways of forming beliefs; for in the narrow original position I don’t
form beliefs in those ways! What this shows, I think, is that this
counterfactual way of trying to get at the de jure
question, either about SP or about CMP,
suffers from substantial limitations. For example, perhaps you endorse
conservatism: all else being equal, you say, the sensible thing to do
is to continue with the way you’ve been doing things. But in the narrow original position,
the conservative thing would be to continue in the agnosticism that is
part of that position; so if, in that position, you accept
conservatism, then the rational thing to do would be to remain
agnostic.
Should we perhaps consider a different possible narrow original position for SP and CMP? As for the first, take the original position to include the standard package minus perception: reason, memory, and introspection, the faculty (or means) whereby we know what our experience is (for example, how we are appeared to). Of course it would include only part of memory: in the original position thus conceived, I wouldn’t have any memory belief that depends upon perceptual belief. (For example, I wouldn’t have the memory belief that I saw a cat yesterday, but only the belief that it seems to me that I saw a cat.) What I would have to go on, therefore, would be just introspection, reason, and some fragment of memory. Then the original position with respect to SP includes (1) my knowing that it is within my power to form beliefs in the SP way and also within my power to withhold SP beliefs, (2) my knowing that it is not possible to give a good noncircular argument for the reliability of SP, (3) my having no views as to the reliability or unreliability of this practice, and (4) my not having SP beliefs or beliefs dependent on perceptual beliefs. My aim or purpose, of course, is to believe truth and avoid error. And now the question is: what would it be rational for me to do, if in fact I were in that position? Decide to continue to form beliefs the SP way? Or reject them?
Again, however, the real question, it seems to me, is this: why is
that question relevant?
That is, why would the answer to the question what it would be rational to
do in that position have
anything to do with whether it is rational, or whatever, for me to form
beliefs in the SP way in the position I am actually in? I doubt that
anything epistemically interesting hangs on the answer to it. What we
have left isn’t much to go on, and I really can’t see where the
probabilities would lie. Another possibility is that in the narrow
original position with respect to SP, I continue to form beliefs the
CMP way (so that the narrow position with respect to SP includes the
beliefs I actually form on the basis of CMP). In that case, I think the
probabilities would be with SP, at least if one thing I know in that
position is that I have an enormously powerful tendency or natural
inclination to form beliefs the SP way. God, as Descartes insisted, is
no deceiver.
As Reid also asks, however, why should I trust reason (and that smidgin
of memory) more than SP? “The sceptic asks me, Why do you believe the
existence of the external object which you perceive? This belief, sir,
is none of my manufacture; it came from the mint of Nature; it bears
her image and superscription; and, if it is not right, the fault is not
mine; I ever took it upon trust, and without suspicion. Reason, says
the sceptic, is the only judge of truth, and you ought to throw off
every opinion and every belief that is not grounded on reason. Why,
sir, should I believe the faculty of reason more than that of
perception? They came both out of the same shop, and were made by the
same artist; and if he puts one piece of false ware into my hands, what
should hinder him from putting another?” (An Inquiry into the Human
Mind, in Thomas Reid’s Inquiry and
Essays, ed. Ronald Beanblossom and
Keith Lehrer [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983], pp.
84–85). See WCD, pp. 97ff. Of course I don’t mean to
suggest that Alston thinks SP does have to prove itself before the bar of reason; I am
exploring various answers to the question ‘what do we know or believe
in the original position?’
The situation is a bit different with CMP. First, the narrow original position is different. It includes introspection, memory, and reason, as in the previous case, but it also includes perception and sympathy. So the narrow original position with respect to CMP includes my aiming at the truth, believing what I do, in fact, believe on the basis of the standard package; it also includes having no beliefs one way or the other about the reliability of CMP. I am to try to decide which among the courses open to me is the most likely to get me in the right relation to the truth. One option is to accept CMP. Another is to reject it in favor of some other systematic practice of forming beliefs on the questions to which CMP is addressed: for example, I could accept philosophical naturalism, or perhaps some non-Christian religious practice. Still another option, presumably, would be to continue in the agnosticism that is part of the original position, and yet another is to adopt a sort of ironic Rortian double-mindedness, a frame of mind as difficult to describe as it is intriguing, one in which at one level I believe these things; at another, I maintain a certain delicate distance, sheepishly conceding that I do in a way believe these things, but adding that officially I don’t take these beliefs at all seriously, instead adopting toward them an attitude of irony and condescension. (In my study, when I reflect on it, I can see things straight; but in church, with all that liturgy, those hymns, those people I love and admire, that Bible reading and powerful preaching. . . .) And the question is, if I were in this situation, what would be the rational thing for me to do: adopt CMP, adopt some alternative to it, or remain agnostic?
Here, it seems to me, agnosticism should probably get the nod. All things
considered, the best road to avoiding error and believing truth on the
topics of CMP as judged from this narrow original
position is agnosticism. To
establish this, of course, would require a lot of work—first, a
canvass of all the rational arguments for and against the existence of
God, and then an examination of the arguments for and against the
thought that we human beings do, in fact, perceive God (given that there
is such a person). From the point of view of the standard
package, Eliminating, of course, Calvin’s sensus
divinitatis, even if, as Calvin
thought, that belief-forming power or mechanism is part of the original
epistemic equipment of humankind generally. As outlined in my so-far-unpublished “Two
Dozen or So Good Theistic Arguments.”
For why suppose that if CMP is sensible or rational (in some important sense of that multifarious term), then from the point of view of the standard package it must be more likely than not that CMP is reliable? Consider memory, and consider its credentials from the point of view of the rest of the standard package. Suppose you don’t know that there’s been a past; you know only what reason, perception, and introspection tell you. How likely is it, from that perspective, that the deliverances of memory are mostly true? Not very likely, I’d say. Would that be a reason for mistrusting it, regarding it as suspect, or believing that it was less than wholly rational to rely on it? Would it so much as slyly suggest that it isn’t rational to form beliefs in the memory way? I don’t see how. But then presumably the same thing goes for CMP. Suppose there is such a thing as perception of God; suppose that CMP is in fact reliable. Would it follow that it is more probable than not, just given the deliverances of the standard package, that CMP is reliable? I don’t think so.
So there is no reason to hold that it is rational to take part in CMP only if its reliability is more likely than not with respect to the standard package. To think otherwise is to arbitrarily assume in advance that if CMP is a source of warranted belief, it must be likely with respect to the standard package that it is reliable; but there is no reason to accept this assumption. Here things stand with CMP just as with SP. It seems entirely arbitrary to insist that it is rational to engage in SP only if the reliability of SP is more likely than not with respect to the deliverances of some group of epistemic powers that doesn’t include SP; in the same way, it is not sensible to conclude that CMP is rational only if its reliability is more likely than not from the perspective of the standard package. Suppose God has created us with a battery of faculties aimed at our being able to acquire truth in different areas: it doesn’t follow that the reliability of any of these faculties would be more probable than not with respect to the deliverances of some package of faculties that does not include the one in question.
By way of summary, then: either the original position with respect to CMP is wide or it is narrow. If it is wide, then it will include my belief that CMP is reliable; in that case, the rational decision, clearly enough, would be to continue with CMP. But this does nothing to relieve any anxieties someone might have about the rationality or reasonability of CMP. If the original position is narrow, however, then it really doesn’t matter whether from that position it would be rational to continue with CMP.
Now suppose we return to specifically Christian belief. Our quarry is
the de jure question:
what is this rationality or rational justification Christian belief is
alleged by its detractors not to have? Our current suggestion is that
perhaps it is practical rationality. Perhaps the de
jure question is the question
whether Christian belief is in fact practically rational and the de
jure objection is that it is
not. But the same dialectic applies here as in the case of CMP. If we
are thinking of the original position with respect to Christian belief
as wide, then it will include Christian belief
So what is the question?
Surely there is a sensible de jure question lurking somewhere in this neighborhood:
what might it be? Where shall we look for it? Perhaps in the following
locality. Go back to the wide original position, and recall that if, in
that position, I accept SP and CMP beliefs, then, trivially, the
rational thing to do is to decide to continue to form beliefs in those
ways. Of course this would be true for other beliefs as well. In fact
it would be true even for beliefs that are in some clear sense
irrational. René
Descartes notes that there are people “whose cerebella are so troubled
and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile, that they . . .
imagine that they have an earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins
or are made of glass.” Meditations, Meditation I.
Fair enough: given that you think your head is made of glass, it is rational to wear your football helmet wherever you go, and rational to decide, if presented with the choice, to continue in that belief. But is it rational to hold that belief in the first place? Given that you hold the beliefs produced by SP or CMP and you don’t know of any epistemically superior practice, it is indeed rational to continue to form beliefs in that way: is it or was it rational, reasonable, sensible to hold those beliefs in the first place?
It is in this neighborhood, I suggest, that we must look for the de
jure question with respect
to Christian belief. What is it that determines whether a given way of
acting or believing, given that your circumstances are thus-and-so, is
rational or reasonable, in the relevant sense? Here is my suggestion:
what determines this is what a creature of our kind with properly
functioning reason (ratio) would do or
believe, given that she was in those circumstances. Or perhaps it is
what someone with
The genius of a man capable of explaining religion seems to me to be of a higher order than that of a founder of religion. And that is the glory to which I aspire.
Charles DuPuis
What we have seen so far is what the de jure question and criticism are not: it is not the complaint that the believer is not within her intellectual rights in believing as she does; it is not the complaint that she has no good argument from propositions that are self-evident, about her own mental states, or evident to the senses for her; it is not the complaint that she has no good argument of some other sort; it is not the complaint that her Christian belief lacks Alstonian justification, or means-end rationality; and it is not the complaint that it isn’t practically rational to decide to continue to form belief on the basis of experience. None of these criticisms has much of a leg to stand on.
So
the de jure criticism has proven
elusive. In the last chapter, however, we did finally catch a glimpse
of our quarry—no more than a glimpse, though—and in this
chapter I want to look further into the nature of this style of
criticism, in part by trying to come to an understanding of the
rejection of religious belief associated with Freud and Marx. Then I
will point out the connection between the de jure
question, properly understood,
and warrant, the subject
of the two preceding books in this series. In the next few
chapters, I will consider more explicitly the question whether Christian
belief can have warrant even if it doesn’t receive it by way of
argument or propositional evidence. This is really the question (as I
might have put it in
In Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.
As we have seen, atheologians (those
who argue against Christian belief) have often claimed that Christian
belief is irrational; so far, we have failed to find a
sensible version of this claim. But perhaps we can make progress by
exploring the animadversions on Christian belief proposed by Freud,
Marx, and the whole cadre of their nineteenth- and twentieth-century
followers. Of course, it wasn’t only Christian
belief that drew their fire: Freud and
Marx were equal-opportunity animadverters, attacking religion generally
and without discrimination. I don’t mean for a moment to dispute Merold
Westphal’s contention (in Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of
Modern Atheism [Grand Rapids: W. B.
Eerdmans, 1993]) that Christians have something to learn from Nietzsche
(as from Freud and Marx). Of course they do, but the same lessons can
be learned at a much subtler level from, for example, the
Bible—where, as Westphal points out, Nietzsche’s criticisms,
insofar as they are on the mark, are anticipated. Taken as a serious
account of the origin of Christianity, however, Nietzsche’s intemperate
scoldings can’t really be seen as a serious contribution to the
subject.
Now Freud, Marx, and their many epigoni (and anticipators) criticize religious belief; they purport to find something wrong with it; they are ‘masters of suspicion’ and (at any rate in their own view) unmask it. And in examining their critical comments on religious belief, I think we can finally locate a proper de jure question: one that is distinct from the de facto question, is such that the answer is nontrivial, and is relevant in the sense that a negative answer to it would be a serious point against Christian belief. The first order of business, therefore, is to try to get clear as to what the Freud-Marx critical project (‘the F&M complaint’, as I shall call it) really is.
There are several sides to Freud’s critique of religion. For example, he was fascinated by what he saw as the Darwinian picture of early human beings coming together in packs or herds (like wolves or elk), all the females belonging to one powerful, dominant, jealous male, and he tells a dramatic story about how religion arose out of an extraordinary interaction among the members of that primal horde:
The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill, and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal. After the deed they were unable to take over their heritage since they stood in one another’s way. Under the influence of failure and remorse they learned to come to an agreement among themselves; they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a repetition of such a deed, and they jointly undertook to forgo the possession of the women on whose account they had killed their father. They were then driven to finding strange women, and this was the origin of the exogamy which is so closely bound up with totemism. The Totem meal was the festival commemorating the fearful deed from which sprang man’s sense of guilt (or ‘original sin’). . . .
. . . This view of religion
throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of
Christianity, in which, as we know, the ceremony of the totem meal
still survives, with but little distortion, in the form of
Communion. “An Autobiographical Study,” in volume 20 of
the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74), p. 68. See also Totem
and Taboo, authorized translation
by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950 [originally published in
1913]), pp.
140ff.
Strong stuff, this, displaying Freud’s redoubtable imaginative powers
and his ability to tell a sensational story; Freud tells a similarly fantastic story about
how we human beings tamed fire—“a quite extraordinary and
unexampled achievement,” he says—and turned it to our use: Psychoanalytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to
clear interpretation, nevertheless admits of a conjecture—a
fantastic-sounding one—about the origin of this human feat. It is
as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire,
of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out
with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt
about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they
shoot upwards. Putting out fire by micturating—a theme to which
modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark
back—was therefore a kind of a sexual act with a male, an
enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first
person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it
off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of
his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This
great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of
instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of
the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her
anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this
desire. (Civilization and Its Discontents, tr. and ed. James Strachey [New York: W. W.
Norton, 1961 (originally published in 1930 as
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur)],
p. 37) Here see, e.g., Wilhelm Schmidt, The
Origin and Growth of Religion: Facts and Theories, tr. H. J. Rose
(New York: L. MacVeagh, Dial Press, 1931), p. 114,
who makes an attempt to evaluate this story as serious science; see
also Evan Fales, “Scientific Explanations of Mystical Experiences,
Part I: The Case of St. Teresa,” Religious Studies
32, no. 1 (June 1996), p.
148.
In any event, Freud offers quite a different account of the psychological origins of religious (theistic) belief:
These
[religious beliefs], which are given out as teachings, are not
precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are
illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes
of
The Future of an Illusion, tr. and ed. James Strachey (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1961), p. 30. This work was originally published
as Die Zukunft einer Illusion (Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer
Verlag, 1927).
As
we see, there is more to Freud’s critique than phantasmagoric fables
about the primal horde. The idea is that theistic belief arises from a
psychological mechanism Freud calls ‘wish-fulfillment’; the wish in
this case is father, not to the deed, but to the belief. Nature rises
up against us, cold, pitiless, implacable, blind to our needs and
desires. She delivers hurt, fear, and pain; in the end, she demands
our death. Paralyzed and appalled, we invent (unconsciously, of course)
a Father in Heaven who exceeds our earthly fathers as much in power and
knowledge as in goodness and benevolence; the alternative would be to
sink into depression, stupor, paralysis, and finally death. According
to Freud, belief in God is an illusion in a semitechnical use of the term: a belief that
arises from the mechanism of wish-fulfillment. This illusion somehow
becomes internalized. And in such a way that it (or its
deliverances) rather resembles Calvin’s sensus
divinitatis (chapter 6, below);
see Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 167ff.
An illusion (as opposed to a delusion), says Freud, is not necessarily false; and he goes on to add that it isn’t possible to prove that theistic belief is mistaken. Nevertheless, there is more here than a mere antiseptic comment on the origin of religion. Although religion originates in the cognitive mechanism of wish-fulfillment, Freud apparently believes that it is within our power to resist this illusion, and that there is something condemnable, something intellectually irresponsible, in failing to do so:
If ever
there was a case of a lame excuse we have it here. Ignorance is
ignorance; no right to believe anything can be derived from it. In
other matters no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest
content with such feeble grounds for his opinions and for the line he
takes. . . . Where questions of religion are concerned, people are
The Future of an Illusion, p. 32.
Psychoanalysis, furthermore, provides arguments against the truth of religious belief: “If the application of the psycho-analytic method makes it possible to find a new argument against the truths [sic] of religion, tant pis for religion . . . .” (p. 37). Once we see that religious belief takes its origin in wishful thinking, we will presumably no longer find it attractive; perhaps this will also induce in us a certain pity for those benighted souls who will never rise to our enlightened heights:
The
whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that
to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly, it is painful to think
that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above
this view of life. Civilization and Its
Discontents, p. 21.
Freud hopes and expects that we human beings will eventually give up religious belief, once we are clear about its origin, in favor of a view of the world that is closer to the actual facts of the matter:
I am
reminded of one of my children who was distinguished at an early age by
a peculiarly marked matter-of-factness. When the children were being
told a fairy story and were listening to it with rapt attention, he
would come up and ask: “Is that a true story?” When he was told it was
not, he would turn away with a look of disdain. We may expect that
people will soon behave in the same way towards the fairy tales of
religion. . . . The Future of an Illusion, p. 29. Freud isn’t unambiguously sanguine on this
point; he thinks there are three powers (religion, art, and philosophy)
that challenge the claims of science to cognitive supremacy, and of
these three only religion “is to be taken seriously as an enemy”
(22:160).
The fundamental theme here, therefore, is that religious belief arises from wish-fulfillment. We shall have to try to see more exactly what this amounts to and what bearing, if any, it has on the rationality of Christian belief; first, however, we should briefly note Marx’s rather similar criticism.
Marx’s most famous pronouncement on religion:
The basis of irreligious criticism is
man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words,
religion is the self-consciousness and the self-feeling of the man who
has either not yet found himself, or else (having found himself) has
lost himself once more. But
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of
religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for
their real happiness. The
demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the
demand to give up a condition which requires
illusions. The criticism of
religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of
woe, the
halo of which is religion [Marx’s
emphasis]. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right, Introduction,” in
On Religion, by Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, tr. Reinhold Niebuhr (Chico, Calif.: Scholar’s Press,
1964), pp. 41–42. Engels echoes Marx: All religion, however, is
nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external
forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the
terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces. In the
beginnings of history it was the forces of nature which were first so
reflected and which in the course of further evolution underwent the
most manifold and varied personifications among the various peoples. .
. . But it is not long before, side by side with the forces of nature,
social forces begin to be active—forces which confront man as equally
alien and at first inexplicable, dominating him with the same apparent
natural necessity as the forces of nature themselves. . . . At a still
further stage of evolution, all the natural and social attributes of
the numerous gods are transferred to one almighty god, who is but a reflection of the
abstract man. Such was the origin of monotheism. . . . It is still true
that man proposes and God (that is, the alien domination of the
capitalist mode of production) disposes. . . . What is above all
necessary for this is a social act. And when this act has been accomplished, when
society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them
on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the
bondage in which they are now held by these means of production which
they themselves have produced but which confront them as an
irresistible alien force; when, therefore man not only proposes, but
also disposes—only then will the last alien force which is still
reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the
religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will
be nothing left to reflect.
(Anti-Dühring, pp.
147–49 in On Religion)
Marx
suggests that religion arises from perverted world consciousness—perverted from a correct,
or right, or natural condition. Religion involves a cognitive
dysfunction, a disorder or perversion that is apparently brought about,
somehow, by an unhealthy and perverted social order. Religious belief,
according to Marx, is a result of cognitive dysfunction, of a lack of
mental and emotional health. The believer is therefore in an
etymological sense insane. Because of
There is another possibility as to how to
understand Marx here: see below, p. 162.
And here we can see an initial difference between Freud and Marx: Freud doesn’t necessarily think religious belief is produced by cognitive faculties that are malfunctioning. Religious belief—specifically belief in God—is, indeed, produced by wish-fulfillment; it is the product of illusion; still, illusion and wish-fulfillment have their functions. In this case, their function is to enable us to get along in this cold and heartless world into which we find ourselves thrown. How then is this a criticism of religious belief? Freud speaks elsewhere of a “reality principle.” Beliefs produced by wish-fulfillment aren’t oriented toward reality; their function is not to produce true belief, but belief with some other property (psychological comfort, for example). So we could initially put it like this: religious belief is produced by cognitive processes whose function is not that of producing true beliefs, but rather that of producing beliefs conducive to psychological well-being. We will look into this in more detail below; for the moment, perhaps what we can say is that the Marxist criticism of religious belief is that it is produced by disordered cognitive processes, while the Freudian criticism is that it is produced by processes that are not aimed at the production of true beliefs.
We must take a deeper look at these claims. First, however, we should note that although Freud and Marx often get the credit for this alleged unmasking (perhaps with a crumb thrown in the direction of Nietzsche), its essence is to be found much earlier. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) thought Christian belief was a product of corrupt society, and that the natural spirituality of our souls has been damaged by a Christianized civilization; he thus anticipates Marx in seeing Christian belief as a result of cognitive malfunction resulting from social malfunction. David Hume, a British contemporary of Rousseau, anticipates Freud:
It must necessarily, indeed,
be allowed, that, in order to carry men’s intention beyond the present
course of things, or lead them into any inference concerning invisible
intelligent power, they must be actuated by some passion, which prompts
their thought and reflection; some motive, which urges their first
enquiry. But what passion shall we here have recourse to, for
explaining an effect of such
David Hume: The Natural History of
Religion, ed. H. E. Root (Stanford,
Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 166.
What is crucial here is the claim that religious belief does not arise from ‘the pure love of truth’, but from other sources: desire for happiness, fear of death, and the like. In fact Hume ironically suggests that Christian belief is so contrary to experience and to the “principles of understanding” (i.e., the deliverances of reason) that a reasonable person can accept it only by virtue of a miracle:
upon
the whole, we may conclude that the Christian
Religion not only was at first
attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any
reasonable person without one. . . . Whoever is moved by
Faith to assent to it, is
conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all
the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to
believe what is most contrary to custom and experience. An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding (La Salle, Ill.:
Open Court, 1956), p. 145.
So the fundamental thrust of Hume’s suggestion, as of Freud’s, is that religious belief doesn’t emerge from the segment of our whole cognitive economy that is, as we might put it, aimed at the production of true belief; it comes, instead, from a desire for security or a fear of death or whatever. And of course what underlies Hume’s ironic jape is the idea that Christian belief goes directly contrary to the deliverances of reason and experience.
Many of our contemporaries also see religious beliefs in these terms. Thus Northrop Frye weighs in on Marx’s side, but employs Freudian or semi-Freudian categories: speaking of “the curious aberration of ‘believing the Bible’,” he says:
such
belief is really a voluntarily induced schizophrenia, and probably a
fruitful source of the infantilism and hysterical anxieties about
belief which are so frequently found in the neighborhood of religion,
at least in its more uncritical areas. Speaking of infantilism, Frye’s intemperate
comments call to mind schoolyard debating styles (perhaps about fifth
grade): “Oh Yeah? Well, the trouble with you is you’re crazy, and so’s
your whole dumb family!”
In the same vein, we have
Don Cupitt: “Theological realism can only be actually true
for [i. e. thought to be true by] a
heteronomous consciousness such as no normal person ought now to
have.” Taking Leave of God (New York: Crossroad, 1980), p. 12.
One gathers that Cupitt thinks it is “our modern form of consciousness”
that makes this obligatory. Ibid., p. 21. The World to Come (London: SCM Press, 1982), p. 83.
A final witness. Charles Daniels agrees with Freud in finding the origin of religious belief in wishful thinking:
we must begin to entertain suspicions that the explanation for these [religious] experiences does not lie in any perceived religious reality, but is rather the effect of some other cause—perhaps excessive emotion and fervor. . . .
It is not at all difficult,
however, to construct a plausible explanation not consisting of mere
possibilities like the machinations of demons, why people should come
very strongly to believe there to be a divinely populated religious
reality which is perceived in religious experience even when there is
none . . . we very much want there to be an understandable order to the
universe, we very much want our lives to be of consequence, and we very
much want to know in
practical detail what’s right and wrong. Religion addresses what we
very much want. The universe has an intelligible order because there is
an intelligent powerful God who made it. We are important because God
made us (as Christians say, “in his image”) and gave us the faculties
of understanding and free, intelligent action. “Experiencing God,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research (1989), pp. 497, 499.
Now the F&M (Freud-and-Marx)
complaint is, naturally enough, a complaint, a (negative)
criticism of religious belief, including Christian belief. But the
general project under which the efforts of Freud and Marx fall is that
of giving naturalistic explanations of religious belief, explanations that don’t
involve the truth of the beliefs in question or the truth of any other
supernaturalistic beliefs or hypotheses. Many (in addition to those
cited above) have joined them in this effort, and by now there is quite
a variety of naturalistic explanations of religious
belief. See, for example, J. Samuel Preus,
Explaining Religion (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1987).
Consider a priori belief, belief in such propositions as the laws of logic, perhaps, or the basic truths of arithmetic, or the proposition that if all cats are animals, and Maynard is a cat, then Maynard is an animal. Perhaps it is possible to give a ‘naturalistic’ account of our knowledge of these truths: an account, that is, that stands in the same relation to them as a naturalistic account of religious belief stands to it. Such an account would not invoke the truth of these a priori beliefs as part of the explanation; it would proceed instead by outlining certain salient features of the causal genesis or antecedents of these beliefs, perhaps pointing to events of some kind in the nervous system. The existence of a causal explanation, of this sort, of a priori belief would not show or tend to show that such beliefs are unreliable.
The same would go for religious belief. To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him. Suppose it could be demonstrated that a certain kind of complex neural stimulation could produce theistic belief. This would have no tendency to discredit religious belief—just as memory is not discredited by the fact that one can produce memory beliefs by stimulating the right part of the brain. Clearly, it is possible both that there is an explanation in terms of natural processes of religious belief (perhaps a brain physiological account of what happens when someone holds religious beliefs), and that these beliefs have a perfectly respectable epistemic status.
If we are
to have a criticism of religion
by way of a naturalistic explanation, what we need is something that in
some way discredits religious belief, casts doubt on it, shows that
it is not epistemically respectable—in a word, shows that there
is something wrong with it. And the criticism, of course, is that
religious belief (including
First, an assumption underlying it. Going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, it has been assumed that there are intellectual or cognitive or rational powers or faculties, or (possibly) virtues: for example, perception and memory. Joining the computer craze, we might say that these faculties have inputs and outputs; their outputs are beliefs. It is these processes that produce in us the myriad beliefs we hold. These faculties are also something like instruments; and, like instruments, they have a function or purpose. If we thought of ourselves as created and designed either by a Master Craftsman or by evolution, these cognitive faculties would be the parts of our total cognitive establishment or total cognitive design whose purpose it is to produce beliefs in us. Their overall purpose, furthermore, is presumably to produce true beliefs in us; to put it a bit less passively, they are designed in such a way that by using them properly we can come to true belief. Our cognitive faculties work over a surprisingly large area to deliver beliefs of many different topics: beliefs about our immediate environment; about the external world at large; about the past; about numbers, propositions, and other abstract objects and the relations between them; about other people and what they are thinking and feeling; about what the future will be like; about right and wrong; about God.
These faculties and processes are the instruments or organs, as we might put it, whereby we come to have knowledge. They are aimed at the truth in the sense that their purpose or function is to furnish us with true belief. Like any other instruments or organs, they can work properly or improperly; they can function well or malfunction. A wart or a tumor doesn’t either malfunction (although it might be by virtue of malfunction in some system that the tumor is present) or function properly: it doesn’t have a function or purpose. But an organ—your heart, for example, or liver or pancreas—does have a function, and does either work properly or malfunction. And the same goes for cognitive faculties or capacities: they too can function well or ill. The condition in which they function really badly is insanity; of course there are much milder, less intrusive forms of cognitive malfunction.
Now
among these faculties one of the most important is
reason. Taken
narrowly, reason is the faculty
or power whereby we form a priori beliefs, beliefs that are prior
to experience or, better, independent,
in some way, of experience. See my Warrant and Proper Function
(hereafter WPF), chapter 6. But see above, chapter 4, p. 114.
There are other faculties or rational powers that have as their purpose
the production of true beliefs in us; For more detail, see WPF, chapters 3–9. See WPF, pp. 122ff.
The Enlightenment looked askance at testimony and tradition; Locke saw them as a preeminent source of error. The Enlightenment idea is that perhaps we start by learning from others—our parents, for example. Properly mature and independent adults, however, will have passed beyond all that and believe what they do on the basis of the evidence. But this is a mistake; you can’t know so much as your name or what city you live in without relying on testimony. (Will you produce your birth certificate for the first, or consult a handy map for the second? In each case you are of course relying on testimony.) As Thomas Reid puts it:
I
believed by instinct whatever they [my “parents and tutors”] told me,
long before I had the idea of a lie, or a thought of the possibility of
their deceiving me. Afterwards, upon reflection, I found they had acted
like fair and honest people, who wished me well. I found that, if I had
not believed what they told me, before I could give a reason for my
belief, I had to this day been little better than a changeling. And
although this natural credulity hath sometimes occasioned my being
imposed upon by deceivers, yet it hath been of infinite advantage to me
upon the whole; therefore, I consider it as another good gift of
Nature. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of
Man, in Thomas Reid’s
Inquiry and Essays, ed. R.
Beanblossom and K. Lehrer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), VI, 5, pp.
281–82; see also WPF, pp. 77ff.
In
addition to the cognitive powers or rational faculties mentioned so far
there may be others that are more controversial. For example, we seem
to have a moral sense: certain kinds of behavior and certain kinds of
character seem wrong, bad, to be avoided; others seem right, good,
fitting, to be promoted. It is obviously wrong (all else being equal)
to hurt young children or to refuse to care for your aging parents;
perhaps we see this by way of a sort of moral sense. (It is no doubt
because this moral sense can malfunction, or atrophy, that inability to
tell right from wrong is a legal defense.) My point here is not to
argue that indeed there is a
moral sense, although I believe that there is, but rather to note that
there could well be truth-aimed faculties in addition to the ones
mentioned so far. Similarly a believer in God might think that there is
such a thing as Calvin’s sensus divinitatis, See below, chapter 6.
As
we have seen, these rational faculties can function either properly or
improperly. We ordinarily take it for granted that when our cognitive
faculties are functioning properly, when they are not subject to
dysfunction or malfunction, then, for the most part, the beliefs they
produce are true, or close to the truth. If your perceptual faculties
are functioning properly, what you think you see is probably what you
do see. (If you are suffering from delirium tremens, all bets are off.)
There is, we might say, a presumption of reliability
for properly functioning faculties; we
are inclined (rightly or wrongly) to take it that properly functioning
cognitive faculties for the most part deliver true belief. Of course
there will be mistakes and disagreements, and we may be inclined to
skepticism about various areas of belief: political
Returning finally to the F&M complaint, it’s clear that it has to
do with the deliverances of our rational faculties. Freud and Marx acquiesce
in the presumption of reliability; they assume (as do we all) that when
our rational faculties are functioning properly and are used properly,
then for the most part their deliverances are true, or at any rate
close to the truth. Of course, as we saw, it is possible for cognitive
faculties to function well or ill. The insane beliefs of Descartes’s
madmen Above, p. 133. See WPF, pp. 11ff. I can’t resist repeating (from WPF, p. 12) a
couple of passages from Locke: Would it not be
an insufferable thing for a learned professor, and that which his
scarlet would blush at, to have his authority of forty years standing
wrought out of hard rock Greek and Latin, with no small expence of time
and candle, and confirmed by general tradition, and a reverent beard,
in an instant overturned by an upstart novelist? Can any one expect
that he should be made to confess, that what he taught his scholars
thirty years ago, was all errour and mistake; and that he sold them
hard words and ignorance at a very dear rate? (An Essay concerning
Human Understanding, ed. A. D.
Woozley [New York: World Publishing, 1963], IV, xx, 11) And Let never so
much probability land on one side of a covetous man’s reasoning, and
money on the other, it is easy to foresee which will outweigh. Tell a
man, passionately in love, that he is jilted; bring a score of
witnesses of the falsehood of his mistress, ‘tis ten to one but three
kind words of hers, shall invalidate all their testimonies . .
. and though men cannot always openly gain-say, or resist the force of
manifest probabilities, that make against them; yet yield they not to
the argument. (Ibid., IV, xx, 12)
A
person may be blinded (as we say) by ambition, failing to see that a
certain course of action is wrong or stupid, even though it is obvious
to everyone else. Our idea, here, is that inordinately ambitious
people fail to recognize something they would otherwise recognize; the
normal functioning of some aspect of their cognitive powers is inhibited
or overridden or impeded by that excessive ambition. You may be blinded
also by loyalty, continuing to believe in the honesty of your friend
long after an objective look at the evidence would have dictated a
reluctant change of mind. You can also be blinded by covetousness,
love, fear, lust, anger, pride, grief, social pressure, and a thousand
other things. In polemic, it is common to attack someone’s views by
claiming that the denial of what they think is patently obvious (i.e.,
such that any right-thinking, properly functioning person can
immediately see that it is so); we then attribute their opposing this
obvious truth either to dishonesty (they don’t really believe what they
say; after all, who could?) or to their being blinded by something or
other—maybe a reluctance to change, an aversion to new ideas,
personal ambition, sexism, racism, or homophobia. Thus
according to Judith Plaskow, “If the Rabbinical Assembly Law Committee
cannot see that it is reflecting and supporting a long history of
religious homophobia (Jewish and otherwise), then it is either
willfully blind or patently dishonest.” “Burning in Hell, Conservative Movement
Style,” Tikkun (May-June 1993),
pp. 49–50. Recall in this connection Don Cupitt’s charge that those who
claim to accept “theological realism” (i.e., those who claim to believe
that there really is such a person as God) are “hypocrites or
psychotics”—the former, presumably, if they merely
claim to be theological
realists, and the latter if they really are. New York Times, April 9, 1989, sec. 7, p. 34. Daniel Dennett goes
Dawkins one (or two) better, claiming that one who so much as harbors
doubts about evolution is “inexcusably ignorant” (Darwin’s
Dangerous Idea [New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1995], p. 46)—thus displaying both
ignorance and
wrongdoing.
What
we see, therefore, is that there are at least three ways in which a
belief can fail to be a proper deliverance of our rational faculties:
it may be produced by malfunctioning faculties, by cognitive
processes aimed at something other than the truth, or by faculties
whose function has been impeded and overridden by lust, ambition,
greed, selfishness, grief, fear, low self-esteem, and other emotional
conditions. This last (perhaps we can call it
‘impedance’) is not strictly a case of malfunction, but for present
purposes I shall include it under malfunction.
And here we come to the heart of the F&M objection: when F&M say that Christian belief, or theistic belief, or even perhaps religious belief in general is irrational, the basic idea is that belief of this sort is not among the proper deliverances of our rational faculties. It is not produced by properly functioning truth-aimed cognitive faculties or processes. It is not produced by belief-producing processes that are free of dysfunction and whose purpose it is to furnish us with true belief. And this means that the presumption of the reliability of properly functioning cognitive faculties does not apply to the processes that yield belief in God or Christian belief more broadly. The fundamental idea is that religious belief has a source distinct from those of our faculties that are aimed at the truth. Alternatively, if religious belief does somehow issue from those truth-aimed faculties, their operation, when they function in such a way as to produce religious belief, is overridden and impeded by something else: a need for security, or for feeling important in the whole scheme of things, or for psychological comfort in the face of this pitiless, intimidating, and implacable world we face.
Just
what sort of deviation from the norm does religious belief present?
Here Freud and Marx seem to diverge. Although Marx has relatively
little to say about religion, there is of course that famous passage I
quoted above (pp. 140–41); he seems to hold that what our rational
faculties teach us (when they are unimpeded by that cognitive
Freud thinks of reason as the aggregate of those faculties (and he thinks
of them as the ones involved in the pursuit of science); his idea,
furthermore, is that reason taken this way is the only means we have
for achieving the truth. Displaying that touching confidence in science
characteristic of the Enlightenment, Freud assumes that scientific
reason will enable us to achieve the truth in areas where for centuries
we wandered in darkness; more modestly, perhaps reason so taken gives
us our best shot at the truth. Ironically enough, there is excellent
reason to doubt that Freud’s characteristic contributions themselves
constitute science in any sensible sense; see Adolf
Grünbaum’s The Foundations of Psychoanalysis
(Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984).
The
F&M criticism, then, is that religious belief is not produced by
cognitive faculties that are functioning properly and aimed at the
truth. And this, I think, leads us finally to a viable de
jure question. Those who raise this
question are not interested first of all in the truth
of Christian belief: their claim is
that there is something wrong with believing it. Christian belief may
be true, and it may be false; but at any rate it is irrational to accept
it. They are best construed, I think, as complaining that Christian
belief is not produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly and
aimed at the truth. Now what this suggests (at least to anyone who has
taken a look at the first two volumes in this series) is
warrant. Freud and Marx, from
the perspective
I’ve said most The rest is to be found in my reply to
Alston, Ginet, Steup, Swinburne, and Taylor in “Reliabilism, Analyses
and Defeaters,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
55/2 (1995), pp. 427ff.; “Respondeo,”
in Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in Honor of
Plantinga’s Theory of Knowledge,
ed. J. Kvanvig (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996);
“Warrant and Accidentally True Belief,” Analysis
57, n. 2 (April 1, 1997), p. 140; and
pp. 156ff., below.
Suppose we use the term ‘warrant’ to
denote that further quality or quantity (perhaps it comes in degrees),
whatever precisely it may be, enough of which distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief.
Then our question (the subject of WPF): what is warrant? My suggestion
(WPF, chapters 1 and 2) begins with the idea that a belief has warrant only
if it is produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly,
subject to no disorder or dysfunction—construed as
But
that notion is inextricably bound with another: that of a design
plan. See WPF, pp. 11ff. Although in WPF, chapter 11, I argue that there
is no viable naturalistic account of proper function.
Proper function and design go hand in hand with the notion of
purpose or
function. The various organs and
systems of the body (and the ways in which they work) have their
functions, their purposes: the function or purpose of the heart is to
pump the blood; of the immune system, to fight off disease; of the
lungs to provide oxygen; of peristalsis, to move nutrients along the
intestinal tract, and so on. If the design is a good
design, then when the organ or system
functions properly (i.e., according to its design plan), that purpose
will be achieved. The design plan specifies a particular way of working
that subserves that purpose. Of course, the design plan for human beings
will include specifications for our cognitive
system or faculties, as well as for
noncognitive systems and organs. Like the rest of our organs and
systems, our cognitive faculties can work well or ill; they can
malfunction
For necessary qualifications, see WPF, pp.
9ff. and 22–42.
But that’s not enough. Many systems of your body, obviously, are designed to work in a certain kind of environment. You can’t breathe under water; your muscles atrophy in zero gravity; you can’t get enough oxygen at the top of Mount Everest. Clearly, the same goes for your cognitive faculties; they too will achieve their purpose only if functioning in an environment much like the one for which they were designed (by God or evolution). Thus they won’t work well in an environment (on some other planet, for example) in which a certain subtle radiation impedes the function of memory.
And this is still not enough. It is clearly possible that a belief be produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly in an environment for which they were designed, but nonetheless lack warrant; the above two conditions are not sufficient. We think that the purpose or function of our belief-producing faculties is to furnish us with true (or verisimilitudinous) belief. As we saw above in connection with the F&M complaint, however, it is clearly possible that the purpose or function of some belief-producing faculties or mechanisms is the production of beliefs with some other virtue—perhaps that of enabling us to get along in this cold, cruel, threatening world, or of enabling us to survive a dangerous situation or a life-threatening disease. So we must add that the belief in question is produced by cognitive faculties such that the purpose of those faculties is that of producing true belief. More exactly, we must add that the portion of the design plan governing the production of the belief in question is aimed at the production of true belief (rather than survival, or psychological comfort, or the possibility of loyalty, or something else).
Even this isn’t sufficient. We can see why by reflecting on a fantasy of David Hume’s:
This
world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a
superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant
Deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; it
is the work only of some dependent, inferior Deity; and is the object
of derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and
dotage in some superannuated Deity; and ever since his death, has run
on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force, which it
received from him. Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion, ed. Nelson Pike
(Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 53.
So imagine that a young and untutored apprentice deity sets out to build cognitive beings, beings capable of belief and knowledge. Immaturity and incompetence triumph; the design contains serious glitches. In fact, in some areas of the design, when the faculties work just as they were designed to, the result is ludicrously false belief: thus when the cognitive faculties of these beings are working according to their design plan, they constantly confuse horses and hearses, forming the odd beliefs that cowboys in the old West rode hearses and that corpses are usually transported in horses. These beliefs are then produced by cognitive faculties working properly in the right sort of environment according to a design plan aimed at truth, but they still lack warrant. What is missing? Clearly enough, what must be added is that the design plan in question is a good one, one that is successfully aimed at truth, one such that there is a high (objective) probability that a belief produced according to that plan will be true (or nearly true).
Put in a nutshell, then, a belief has warrant for a person S
only if that belief is produced in S by cognitive
faculties functioning properly (subject to no dysfunction) in a
cognitive environment that is appropriate for
S’s kind of cognitive faculties,
according to a design plan that is successfully aimed at truth. We must
add, furthermore, that when a belief meets these conditions and does
enjoy warrant, the degree of warrant it enjoys depends on the strength of
the belief, the firmness with which S holds it. This is intended as an
account of the central core of our concept of warrant; there is a penumbral
area surrounding the central core where there are many analogical
extensions of that central core; and beyond the penumbral area, still
another belt of vagueness and imprecision, a host of possible cases and
circumstances where there is really no answer to the question whether a
given case is or isn’t a case of warrant. As I argue in WPF, pp. 212–13.
Responses to the
above account of warrant have made it abundantly clear that it needs a
certain kind of supplementation and fine tuning. By Robert Shope in “Gettier Problems,” in
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998), and
his forthcoming book Knowledge as Power; Richard Feldman in “Plantinga, Gettier, and Warrant,”
in Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in Honor of Plantinga’s Theory
of Knowledge, ed. Jonathan Kvanvig (New
York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), p. 216; and Peter Klein,
“Warrant, Proper Function, Reliabilism, and Defeasibility,” in
Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology, p. 105. I am grateful to all three for
instruction and enlightenment. For my reply and an effort at repair,
see “Respondeo,” in Warrant in Contemporary
Epistemology. For fuller development here, see “Respondeo,”
in Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology, pp. 314ff.
Consider another Gettier example, this one antedating Gettier’s birth (it was proposed by Bertrand Russell). I glance at a clock, forming the opinion that it is 3:43 p.m.; as luck would have it, the clock stopped precisely twenty-four hours ago. The belief I form is indeed true; again, however, it is true ‘just by accident’ (the clock could just as well have stopped an hour earlier or later); it does not constitute knowledge. As in the previous case, if the clock had been running properly and I had formed the same belief by the same exercise of cognitive powers, I would have known; here, therefore, we have another example that apparently refutes my account. Still another example: I am not aware that Paul’s look-alike brother Peter is staying at his house; if I’m across the street, take a quick look, and form the belief that Paul is emerging from his house, I don’t know that it’s Paul, even if in fact it is (it could just as well have been Peter emerging); again, if Peter hadn’t been in the neighborhood, I would have known.
What is crucial, in each of these cases, is that my cognitive faculties
display a certain lack of resolution. I am unable, by a quick glance, to distinguish
the state of affairs in which the clock is running properly and
What I can’t distinguish by those exercises of my epistemic powers are different cognitive minienvironments. In “Respondeo,” there is a fuller development of the distinction between cognitive maxienvironments and cognitive minienvironments; here the following will suffice. First, a cognitive maxienvironment is more general and more global than a cognitive minienvironment. Our cognitive maxienvironment here on earth would include such macroscopic features as the presence and properties of light and air, the presence of visible objects, of other objects detectable by cognitive systems of our kind, of some objects not so detectable, of the regularities of nature, of the existence and general nature of other people, and so on. Our cognitive faculties are designed (by God or evolution) to function in this maxienvironment, or one like it. They are not designed for a maxienvironment in which, for example, there is constant darkness, or where everything is in a state of constant random flux, or where the only food available contains a substance that destroys short-term memory, or where there aren’t any distinguishable objects, or no regularities of a kind we can detect; in such an environment, our faculties will not fulfill their function of providing us with true beliefs. Now a given cognitive maxienvironment can contain many different minienvironments—for example, the one where the clock stops, but also one where it doesn’t; the one where Peter is visiting Paul, but also one where he isn’t; the one where the coach’s minions destroy my van, but also one where they magnanimously temper the punishment I so richly deserve, contenting themselves with painting the windshield black.
And now here’s the point: some cognitive minienvironments—such as those of the Notre Dame van case, the clock that stopped, Peter’s visit to Paul—are misleading for some exercises of cognitive faculties, even when those faculties are functioning properly and even when the maxienvironment is favorable. The maxienvironment is right, but the minienvironment isn’t; in those minienvironments the cognitive faculties in question (more exactly, particular exercises of the cognitive faculties in question) can’t be counted on to produce true beliefs. The basic idea is this: our cognitive faculties have been designed for a certain kind of maxienvironment. Even within that maxienvironment, however, they don’t function perfectly (they sometimes produce false belief), although they do function reliably. (Perhaps perfectly functioning cognitive faculties would require too much brain size, thus interfering with the achievement of other desiderata.) In some minienvironments, therefore, they can’t be counted on to produce a true belief: if they do, it is just by accident and does not constitute knowledge. So even if the maxienvironment is favorable and the other conditions of warrant are met, a belief could still be true ‘just by accident’, thus not constituting knowledge.
It is clear, therefore, that S knows p,
on a given occasion, only if S’s cognitive
minienvironment, on that occasion, is not misleading—more
exactly, not misleading with respect to the particular exercise of
cognitive powers producing the belief that p. So the conditions of warrant (i.e., for the
degree of warrant sufficient for knowledge The thought is not that a belief produced in
an unfavorable minienvironment has no warrant at all, but only that it
doesn’t have a degree of warrant sufficient for
knowledge. See Trenton
Merricks’s “Warrant Entails Truth,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, 55, no.
4 (December 1995), p. 841; see also Sharon Ryan’s reply, “Does Warrant
Entail Truth?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
56, no. 1 (March 1996), p. 183, and
Merricks’s rejoinder, “More on Warrant’s Entailing Truth,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. 3 (September 1997), p. 627.
(RC) A belief B produced by an exercise E of cognitive powers has warrant sufficient for knowledge only if MBE (the minienvironment with respect to B and E) is favorable for E.
What does ‘appropriateness’ or ‘favorability’, or ‘nonmisleadingness’, for a cognitive minienvironment, consist in: can we say anything more definite? Intuitively, a minienvironment is favorable, for an exercise of cognitive powers, if that exercise can be counted on to produce a true belief in that minienvironment. Perhaps this is as specific as we can sensibly get; in “Respondeo,” however, I went on to make a tentative suggestion as to how we could say a bit more precisely what this favorability consists in. Where B is a belief, E the exercise of cognitive powers that produces B, and MBE a minienvironment with respect to B and E, say that
(F) MBE is favorable
for E if and only if, if S were to form a belief
by way of E in MBE, S would form a true belief. Here I am assuming (contrary to the usual
semantics for counterfactuals) that truth of antecedent and consequent
is not sufficient for truth of the counterfactual (a counterfactual can
be false even if it has a true antecedent and a true consequent). What
is also required is that there be no sufficiently close possible world
in which the counterfactual has a true antecedent and false
consequent.
Sadly enough, though, (F) won’t do the trick at all; the relevant
counterfactual itself can be true ‘just by accident’—that is, by
accident from the point of view of the design plan. As was pointed out to me by Thomas Crisp. See WPF, pp. 32–33.
What to do? Here is another (also tentative) suggestion. Recall that the resolution problem arises because I can’t (for example) distinguish Paul from Peter from across the street just by looking; this particular exercise of cognitive powers displays insufficient resolution for that. So consider a given exercise of cognitive powers E, the belief B formed on that occasion, and a relevant cognitive minienvironment MBE. If the conditions of warrant have been met, B will be probable (ordinarily very probable) with respect to MBE. Of course, MBE is a state of affairs. Among the states of affairs it includes are some that E is competent to detect, that are cognitively accessible to E. Thus in the twin case the appearance of a person, of a man, of someone across the road, and the like, are all detectable by E—that is, just by taking a look. On the other hand, it’s being Paul rather than Peter who appears in the doorway is not thus detectable; they look just alike at this distance, and I know nothing entailing that Peter isn’t there. So consider the conjunction of circumstances C contained in MBE such that C is detectable by E; call this conjunctive state of affairs DMBE. In the case in question, these circumstances will be observable, and observable by way of taking a look from across the road. In the typical case, furthermore (assuming that the general conditions of warrant are met), B will also be probable with respect to DMBE. And now we can say what it is for a minienvironment to be favorable:
MBE is favorable just if there is no state of affairs S included in MBE but not in DMBE such that the objective probability of B with respect to the conjunction of DMBE and S falls below r,
where r is some real number representing a reasonably high probability. In the twin case, for example, a state of affairs S such that B is not probable enough with respect to the conjunction of DMBE and S would be Peter’s being in the house as well as Paul, and being indistinguishable from him from across the street. In the case of the impecunious Wisconsinites, it is that there are more fake barns than real barns in the neighborhood. Also, of course, I don’t specify the requisite level of probability r, which in any case will display a certain contextual character, differing from case to case.
This suggestion seems promising, although induction leads me to be less
than wholly confident that it is right. It may be that in the long run
we can’t say more than that the minienvironment must be favorable. The
overall picture, then, is as follows. Our faculties are designed for a
certain kind of cognitive maxienvironment, one that sufficiently
resembles the one in which we do, in fact, find ourselves. And when a
belief is formed by properly functioning faculties in an environment of
that sort (and the bit of the design plan that governs its production is
successfully aimed at truth), then the belief in question has
some degree of warrant,
even if it happens to be false. But our cognitive faculties are not
maximally effective—not only in that there is much we aren’t
capable of coming
I have neglected several important components of our epistemic
establishment. First, I have said nothing here about
defeaters; in chapter 11,
I’ll address this topic. Another very important topic ignored
here But treated in WPF, chapter 9.
Now we are ready to return to the
F&M complaint. What we see is a clear if surprising connection
between the topic of warrrant and the F&M complaint: the latter is
really the claim that theistic belief lacks warrant.
According to Freud, theistic belief is produced by cognitive faculties
that are functioning properly, but the process that produces
it—wishful thinking—does not have the production of true
belief as its purpose; it is aimed, instead, at something like enabling
us to carry on in the grim and threatening world in which we find
ourselves. Therefore, theistic belief does not meet the third condition
of warrant; as a result, the presumption of reliability that goes with
warranted beliefs does not apply to it. Theistic belief is no more
respectable, epistemically speaking, than propositions selected
entirely at random. Suppose I have a random generator of English
declarative sentences (sentences that express propositions); it
randomly chooses one of a stockpile of a million sentences and
their negations, flashing its selection on a big screen. I use the
machine, recommending the resulting proposition to you for belief. You
quite properly demur, pointing out that there isn’t the slightest
reason to think the belief in question true. Theistic belief, thinks
Freud, has no better epistemic credentials, for the believer, than the
propositions expressed
Still further, Freud thinks, once we see that theistic and religious belief has its origin in wishful thinking, we will also see that it is very probably false. There is no good argument from this fact about its origin to the conclusion that it is false; nor is it that someone who recognizes its origin in wishful thinking will simply see that it is false. It is rather just that people of sense who know something about how the world works will take it to be probably false. They will take the same attitude toward theistic and Christian belief that they take toward the stories in Greek or Aztec or Persian mythology: we can’t really prove that these stories are false, but their chances of being true are pretty slim. So the proper intellectual attitude toward these beliefs isn’t merely agnosticism; it is that the beliefs in question are unwarranted and furthermore are very probably false.
Marx’s views are similar. He thinks first that theistic and religious belief is produced by cognitive faculties that are not functioning properly. Those faculties are, to the extent that they produce such belief, dysfunctional; the dysfunction is due to a sort of perversion in social structure, a sort of social malfunction. Religious belief therefore doesn’t meet the first condition of warrant; it is therefore without warrant, and an intellectually healthy person will reject it. Further, Marx also thinks that a person whose cognitive faculties are functioning properly and who knows what was known by the middle of the nineteenth century will see that materialism is very probably true, in which case Christian and theistic belief is very likely false. So he would join Freud in the contention that Christian and theistic belief is without warrant, a baseless superstition, and very probably false.
We could see the matter slightly
differently. Perhaps the problem with religious belief, according to
Marx, is not that it is produced by
malfunctioning faculties,
but rather that capitalist society constitutes a hostile environment
for the operation of human cognitive faculties; then the problem would
be the second condition rather than the first. Still another
possibility: perhaps the production of theistic or religious belief is
like a damage-control mechanism. When people are subjected to the nasty
conditions of capitalism, they come to believe these tales of a God and
another world as a means of coping with their otherwise intolerable
situation. Then Marx’s view would be more like Freud’s, and religious
belief could be seen as an illusion in the Freudian sense. There would
remain the following difference. According to Freud, the inclination to
form religious belief arises out of our nature and is therefore to be
expected, no matter what the social structure. According to this version
of Marx, however, religious belief is a response to the very
special social circumstances of misery and injustice generated by
capitalist society, so that there need be no inclination toward it
among people in a society
The F&M complaint, therefore, is that theistic belief and religious belief in general lack warrant. So say Freud and Marx—but are they right? In the next chapter, we shall turn to a model for the possession of warrant by Christian belief. Model in hand, we shall then evaluate the F&M complaint.
To know in a general and confused way that God exists is implanted in us by nature. . . .
Thomas Aquinas
for since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. . . .
St. Paul
The de jure
challenge to Christian (or theistic)
belief, as we have seen, is the claim that such belief is irrational or
unreasonable or unjustified or in some other way properly subject to
invidious epistemic criticism; it contrasts with the de
facto challenge, according to which
the belief in question is false. Put just like that, the de
jure rebuke is pretty vague and
general; we can’t do much by way of evaluating the proposed complaint
without achieving a clearer and more specific formulation of it. As we
have seen, clear and sensible formulation of the de jure
criticism—at any rate of one that
isn’t just obviously mistaken—has proven elusive. In the last
chapter, however, we were able to make progress by considering the
F&M (Freud and Marx) complaint. What we saw is that this complaint is really the
claim that Christian and other theistic belief is
irrational in the sense that it
originates in cognitive malfunction (Marx) or in cognitive proper
function that is aimed at something other than the truth
(Freud)—comfort, perhaps, or the ability to soldier on in this
appalling world in which we find ourselves. To put it another way, the
claim is that such
By way of response, in this chapter I shall first offer a model—a model based on a claim made jointly by Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin—for a way in which theistic belief could have warrant. Once we see how theistic belief might have warrant, we can also see the futility of the F&M complaint and its contemporary successors. In the remaining chapters of part III, I shall extend the model to cover specifically Christian belief. Chapter 7 will deal with sin and its noetic results. The extended model crucially involves the notion of faith. Following Aquinas and Calvin, I shall argue that faith has both an intellectual and an affective component: chapter 8 will therefore examine the way in which, as Calvin says, the great truths of the gospel are “revealed to our minds,” and chapter 9 will examine the way in which, as he also says, they are “sealed upon our hearts.” Then in chapter 10, I’ll consider and reply to objections to the original and extended models.
I say I propose in this chapter to give a model of theistic belief’s having warrant; but what sort of animal is a model, and what would it be good for? There are models of many different kinds: model airplanes, artists’ models, models in the sense of exemplars, models of a modern major general. There is also the logician’s sense of model in which, for example, any consistent first-order theory has a model in the natural numbers. My use of the term here is more abstract than the first and more concrete than the second. The rough idea is this: to give a model of a proposition or state of affairs S is to show how it could be that S is true or actual. The model itself will be another proposition (or state of affairs), one such that it is clear (1) that it is possible and (2) that if it is true, then so is the target proposition. From these two, of course, it follows that the target proposition is possible. In this chapter, I shall give a model of theistic belief’s having warrant: the Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model. Then in chapters 7, 8, and 9, I will extend the A/C model to a model in which specific and full-blooded Christian belief has warrant.
I
claim four things for these two models. First, they are possible, and
thus show it is possible that theistic and Christian belief have
warrant. The sense of possibility here, however, isn’t just broadly
logical possibility—after all, such obvious falsehoods as the
population of China is less than a thousand are possible in that sense—but something much stronger. I claim
that these models are epistemically possible:
Epistemic possibility is stronger than
broadly logical possibility, but also weaker. There are propositions
that are epistemically possible, but not possible in the broadly logical
sense—true for all we know, but nonetheless impossible. Of course
I can hardly be required to produce one; but I can produce a pair one or the other of which enjoys
this distinction. Thus consider
existentialism: the proposition
that singular states of affairs and propositions are not necessarily
existent but are ontologically dependent upon the objects with respect
to which they are singular. For example, according to existentialism,
no proposition singular with respect to
Socrates—Socrates was wise, for example—could have existed if Socrates
had not. I believe existentialism is false (see my “On
Existentialism,” Philosophical Studies [July 1983]), but I could scarcely claim to
know that it is false, and, I
believe, the same goes for everyone else. Existentialism is therefore
epistemically possible. The same goes, naturally enough, for its
denial. Each of these propositions, however, is necessarily true if
true at all; hence one or the other is necessarily false, in the
broadly logical sense, even if epistemically possible.
Second, and related to the first assertion, I claim that there aren’t any cogent objections to the model—that is, to the proposition that the model is in fact true or actual. More exactly, there are no cogent objections of a philosophic or scientific kind (or indeed any other kind) to the model that are not also cogent objections to theism or Christian belief. Another way to put it: any cogent objection to the model’s truth will also have to be a cogent objection to the truth of theistic or Christian belief. I shall go on to argue that if Christian belief is indeed true, then the model in question or one very like it is also true. If I am successful, therefore, the upshot will be that there is no viable de jure (as opposed to de facto) challenge either to theistic or to Christian belief. There is no sensible challenge to the rationality or rational justification or warrant of Christian belief that is not also a challenge to its truth. That is, there is no de jure challenge that is independent of a de facto challenge. That means that a particularly popular way of criticizing Christian belief—to be found in the evidentialist objection, in the F&M complaint, in many versions of the argument from evil, and in still other objections—is not viable. This is the sort of challenge that goes as follows: “I don’t know whether Christian (or theistic) belief is true—how could anyone know a thing like that? But I do know that it is irrational, or rationally unacceptable or unjustified or without warrant (or in some other way epistemically challenged).” If my argument is right, no objection of this sort has any force.
Third, I believe that the models I shall present are not only possible
and beyond philosophical challenge but also true, or at least verisimilitudinous, close to the
truth. Still, I don’t claim to show that they are true. That is because the A/C model
entails the truth of theism
As I shall argue below, p. 271.
Fourth, there is a whole range of models for the warrant of Christian belief, all different but similar to the A/C and extended A/C models. (In claiming that models I present are close to the truth, what I am claiming is that they belong to that range.) And the fourth thing to say here is that if classical Christian belief is indeed true, then one of these models is very likely also true. Alternatively, for one who thinks Christian belief true, one or more of these models (or their disjunction) is a good way in which to conceive the warrant of Christian belief.
Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin concur on the claim that there is a kind
of natural knowledge of God (and anything on which Calvin and Aquinas
are in accord is something to which we had better pay careful
attention). Here I want to propose a model based on Calvin’s version of
the suggestion, not because I think Calvin should be the cynosure of
all eyes theological, but because he presents an interesting
development of the particular thought in question. And here, as in several
other areas, we can usefully see Calvin’s suggestion as a kind of
meditation on and development of a theme suggested by Aquinas.
According to the latter, “To know in a general and confused way that
God exists is implanted in us by nature.” Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 1, ad 1. In Summa contra
Gentiles Aquinas adds, “There is a
certain general and confused knowledge of God, which is in almost all
men . . .” (Bk. III, ch. 38). Tr. Ford Lewis Battles and ed. John T.
McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960 [originally published in
1555]). Page references to the Institutes are to this edition.
For the
wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and
wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what
can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to
them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature,
namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the
things that have been made. So they are without excuse. . . .
( As Etienne Gilson says, very many medieval
and later thinkers have found in this passage a charter for natural
theology, construed as the effort to present proofs or arguments for
the existence of God. But is Paul really talking here about proofs or
arguments? Natural theology, as Aquinas says, is pretty difficult for
most of us; most of us have neither the leisure, ability, inclination,
nor education to follow those theistic proofs. But here Paul seems to
be speaking of all of us human
beings; what can be known about God is plain, he says. It is true that this knowledge comes by
way of what God has made, but it doesn’t follow that it comes by way
of argument, the arguments of natural theology, for example. See below, p. 175.
For our purposes, Calvin’s basic claim is that there is a sort of instinct, a natural human tendency, a disposition, a nisus to form beliefs about God under a variety of conditions and in a variety of situations. Thus in his commentary on the above passage:
By
saying, that God has made it manifest, he means, that man was created
to be a spectator of this formed world, and that eyes were given him,
that he might, by looking on so beautiful a picture, be led up to the
Author himself. Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the
Apostle to the Romans, volume XIX
of Calvin’s Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House,
1979; originally printed for the
Calvin Translation Society of Edinburgh, Scotland), p. 70.
In the Institutes, he develops this thought:
There
is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness
of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent anyone
from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has
implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty. . .
. Since, therefore, men one and all perceive that there is a God and
that he is their maker, they are condemned by their own testimony
because they have failed to honor him and to consecrate their lives to
his will. . . there is, as
the eminent pagan says, no nation so barbarous, no people so savage,
that they have not a deep seated conviction that there is a God. . .
. Therefore, since from the beginning of the world there has been no
region, no city, in short, no household, that could do without
religion, there lies in this a tacit confession of a sense of deity
inscribed in the hearts of all. (Institutes I, iii, 1, p.
44) The “eminent pagan” is Cicero. John
Beversluis suggests that these passages from the Institutes
are really directed to human
knowledge before the fall, and that, according to Calvin,
“fallen human beings lack
both the direct and immediate knowledge of God with which they were
originally created and the capacity to achieve it. In Plantinga’s
language, the ‘innate tendency, or nisus, or disposition’ to believe in
God with which human beings were originally created is no longer
operative in fallen humanity” (“Reforming the Reformed Objection to
Natural Theology,” Faith and Philosophy 12, no. 2 (April 1995), p. 193; see also p. 197).
Of course Calvin interpretation is not my project here; still, Calvin
is pretty clearly teaching that all people, fallen as well as unfallen,
have this knowledge (“naturally inborn in all”; “each of us is master
from his mother’s womb”). Furthermore, as Beversluis points out,
according to Calvin (following There is an additional subtlety here: Beversluis speaks of a tendency
“to believe in God.” There is obviously an important difference between
believing in God and believing that God exists (that there is such a
person as God); chapter 9 is devoted in part to that difference.
Perhaps in unfallen humanity, according to Calvin, the sensus
divinitatis is a disposition to
believe in God (to love
him, trust him, see his beauty and glory and loveliness), but in fallen
humanity only a tendency to believe that there is
such a person, just as (according to
the book of James) the devils do. See chapter 7 on the noetic effects
of sin.
Calvin goes on to claim that many rejections of God, or attempts to do without him, are really further testimonies to this natural inclination:
Men of sound judgment will always be sure that a sense of divinity which can never be effaced is engraved upon men’s minds. Indeed, the perversity of the impious, who though they struggle furiously are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of God, is abundant testimony that this conviction, namely that there is some God, is naturally inborn in all, and is fixed deep within, as it were in the very marrow. . . . From this we conclude that it is not a doctrine that must first be learned in school, but one of which each of us is master from his mother’s womb and which nature itself permits no one to forget, although many strive with every nerve to this end. (I, iii, 3, p. 46)
Separated from the extravagance of expression that sometimes
characterizes Calvin, the basic idea, I think, is that there is a kind
of faculty or a cognitive mechanism, what Calvin calls a sensus
divinitatis or sense of divinity,
which in a wide variety of circumstances produces in us beliefs about
God. These circumstances, we might say, trigger the disposition to form
the beliefs in question; they form the occasion on which those beliefs
arise. Under these circumstances, we develop or form theistic
beliefs—or, rather, these beliefs are formed in us; in the typical
case we don’t consciously choose to have those beliefs. Instead,
we find ourselves with them, just as we find ourselves
See my “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith
and Rationality, ed. Alvin
Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1983), pp. 34ff. It is no part of the model, however, to hold
that the sensus divinitatis is
never subject to malfunction; perhaps it is sometimes diseased or even
inoperative. It can also be impeded in the usual ways, and its
deliverances can perhaps sometimes be extinguished by the wrong kind of
nurture.
Second, it also sounds as if Calvin thinks knowledge of God is innate, such that one has it from birth, “from his mother’s womb.” Still, perhaps Calvin doesn’t really mean to endorse either of these suggestions. The capacity for such knowledge is indeed innate, like the capacity for arithmetical knowledge. Still, it doesn’t follow that we know elementary arithmetic from our mother’s womb; it takes a little maturity. My guess is Calvin thinks the same with respect to this knowledge of God; what one has from one’s mother’s womb is not this knowledge of God, but a capacity for it. Whatever Calvin thinks, however, it’s our model; and according to the model the development of the sensus divinitatis requires a certain maturity (although it is often manifested by very young children).
The sensus divinitatis is a disposition or set of dispositions to form theistic beliefs in various circumstances, in response to the sorts of conditions or stimuli that trigger the working of this sense of divinity. Calvin thinks in particular of some of nature’s grand spectacles. Like Kant, he was especially impressed, in this connection, by the marvelous compages of the starry heavens above:
Even the common folk and the most untutored, who have been taught only by the aid of the eyes, cannot be unaware of the excellence of divine art, for it reveals itself in this innumerable and yet distinct and well-ordered variety of the heavenly host. It is, accordingly, clear that there is no one to whom the Lord does not abundantly show his wisdom. (I, v, 2, p. 53)
You see the blazing glory of the heavens from a mountainside at 13,000 feet; you think about those unimaginable distances; you find yourself filled with awe and wonder, and you form the belief that God must be great to have created this magnificent heavenly host. But it isn’t only the variety of the heavenly host that catches his eye here:
Lest
anyone, then, be excluded from access to happiness, he not only sowed
in men’s minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken, but
revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship
of the universe. As a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without
being compelled to see him. . . . But upon his individual works he has
engraved unmistakable marks of his glory . . . wherever you cast your
eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at
least some sparks of his glory. (I, v, 1, p. 52) Compare Charles Sanders Peirce: A man
looks upon nature, sees its sublimity and beauty, and his spirit
gradually rises to the idea of God. He does not see the Divinity, nor
does nature prove to him the existence of that Being, but it does
excite his mind and imagination until the idea becomes rooted in his
heart. Quoted by Edward T. Oakes, “Discovering the American Aristotle,”
First Things (December 1993), p.
27.
Calvin’s idea is that the workings of the sensus divinitatis
is triggered or occasioned by a wide
variety of circumstances, including in particular some of the glories
of nature: the marvelous, impressive beauty of the night sky; the
timeless crash and roar of the surf that resonates deep within us; the
majestic grandeur of the mountains (the North Cascades, say, as viewed
from Whatcom Pass); the ancient, brooding presence of the Australian
outback; the thunder of a great waterfall. But it isn’t only grandeur
and majesty that counts; he would say the same for the subtle play of
sunlight on a field in spring, or the dainty, articulate beauty of a
tiny flower, or aspen leaves shimmering and dancing in the breeze.
“There is no spot in the universe,” he says, “wherein you
cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory.” Calvin could have
added other sorts of circumstances: there is something like an
awareness of divine disapproval upon having done what is wrong, or
cheap, and something like a perception of divine forgiveness upon
confession and repentance. People in grave danger instinctively turn to
the Lord to ask for succor and support, having formed the belief that
he can hear and help if he sees fit. (They say there are no atheists in
foxholes.) On a beautiful spring morning (the birds singing,
heaven and earth alight and alive with glory, the air fresh and cool,
the treetops gleaming in the sun), a spontaneous hymn of thanks to the
Lord—thanks for your circumstances and your very
existence—may arise in your soul. According to the model,
therefore, there are many circumstances, and circumstances of many
kinds, that call forth or occasion theistic belief. Here the
sensus divinitatis resembles
other belief-producing faculties or mechanisms. If we wish to think in
terms of the overworked functional analogy, we can think of the
sensus divinitatis, too, as an
input-output device: it takes
According to the A/C model, this natural knowledge of God is not arrived at by inference or argument (for example, the famous theistic proofs of natural theology) but in a much more immediate way. The deliverances of the sensus divinitatis are not quick and sotto voce inferences from the circumstances that trigger its operation. It isn’t that one beholds the night sky, notes that it is grand, and concludes that there must be such a person as God: an argument like that would be ridiculously weak. It isn’t that one notes some feature of the Australian outback—that it is ancient and brooding, for example—and draws the conclusion that God exists. It is rather that, upon the perception of the night sky or the mountain vista or the tiny flower, these beliefs just arise within us. They are occasioned by the circumstances; they are not conclusions from them. The heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of his hands: but not by way of serving as premises for an argument. Awareness of guilt may lead me to God; but it is not that in this awareness I have the material for a quick theistic argument: I am guilty, so there must be a God. This argument isn’t nearly as silly as it looks; but when the operation of the sensus divinitatis is triggered by perception of my guilt, it doesn’t work by way of an argument. I don’t take my guilt as evidence for the existence of God, or for the proposition that he is displeased with me. It is rather that in that circumstance—the circumstance of my clearly seeing my guilt—I simply find myself with the belief that God is disapproving or disappointed.
In
this regard, the sensus divinitatis resembles perception, memory, and a
priori belief. Consider the first.
I look out into the backyard; I see that the coral tiger lilies are in
bloom. I don’t note that I am being appeared to a certain complicated
way (that my experience is of a certain complicated character) and then
make an argument from my being appeared to in that way to the
conclusion that in fact there are coral tiger lilies in bloom there.
(The whole history of modern philosophy up to Hume and Reid shows that
such an argument would be thoroughly inconclusive.) It is rather that upon
being appeared to in that way (and given my previous training), the
belief that the coral tiger lilies are in bloom spontaneously arises in
me. This belief will ordinarily be basic, in the sense that it is not accepted on the
evidential basis of other propositions. The same goes for memory. You
ask me what I had for breakfast; I think for a moment and then
remember: pancakes with blueberries. I don’t argue from the fact that
it seems to me that I
remember having pancakes for
It is worth noting that even if I believe
something in the basic way, it doesn’t follow that I wouldn’t cite
various other propositions in response to your question, “Why do you
believe p? What is your reason
for believing p?” See
“Reason and Belief in God,” p. 51.
Of course there are options here. The
model could be developed in such a way that the role of the sensus
divinitatis is to enable one
to see the truth of the crucial premise for a quick theistic
argument—such as the heavens can be gloriously beautiful only
if God has created them.
This proposition is a consequence of theism in any event; what the
present suggestion would add is that it plays a crucial role in the
genesis of theistic belief. For suggestions as to how the model could be
developed in this direction, see Michael Sudduth, “Prospects for
‘Mediate’ Natural Theology in John Calvin,” Religious Studies
31, no. 1 (March 1995), p.
53.
this is due either to the fact that it is self-evident that God exists, just as other principles of demonstration are—a view held by some people, as we said in Book One—or, what seems indeed to be true, that man can immediately reach some sort of knowledge of God by natural reason. For, when men see that things in nature run according to a definite order, and that ordering does not occur without an orderer, they perceive in most cases that there is some orderer of the things that we see.
Here two things are noteworthy. First, what Aquinas says here suggests that this knowledge (the second variety) is by way of inference, so that, strictly speaking, this knowledge of God would not be basic. The inference, however, would be very quick, elementary, and obvious, so that perhaps believing by way of this kind of inference isn’t easily distinguished from believing in the basic way.
Second, note that this knowledge of God can indeed be very confused:
But this knowledge admits of a mixture of many errors. Some people have believed that there is no other orderer of worldly things than the celestial bodies, and so they said that the celestial bodies are gods. Other people pushed it farther, to the very elements and the things generated from them, thinking that motion and the natural function which these elements have are not present in them as the effect of some other orderer, but that other things are ordered by them.
Contemporary naturalists such as Daniel Dennett and
Richard Dawkins See the former’s Darwin’s Dangerous
Idea (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1995) and the latter’s The Blind Watchmaker
(New York: W. W. Norton,
1986).
Perhaps we can understand Aquinas as follows. Consider the description that which orders what we see. This description in fact applies to God. One who believes that it does indeed apply to something or other can therefore have de re knowledge of God; for example, she can believe of that which orders what we see that it has one or another properties—that it exists, is powerful, and indeed orders what we see. This would be to believe de re of God that he exists, is powerful, and orders what we see. But this knowledge also “admits of many errors”: for example, the naturalist thinks that what orders what we see is, in fact, the ensemble of natural laws; she therefore believes de re of God that he is the ensemble of natural laws.
Calvin’s view of natural knowledge of God would be a bit different.
Following Paul in For arguments casting doubt on the existence
of natural laws, see Bas van Fraassen’s Laws and Symmetry
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp.
17ff.
On
the A/C model, then, theistic belief as produced by the sensus
divinitatis is basic. It is
also properly basic, and
that in at least two senses. On the one hand, a belief can be properly
basic for a person in the
There is another sense in which a belief can be properly or improperly basic: p is properly basic for S in this sense if and only if S accepts p in the basic way, and furthermore p has warrant for S, accepted in that way. Perceptual beliefs are properly basic in this sense: such beliefs are typically accepted in the basic way, and they often have warrant. (They are often produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth.) The same goes for memory beliefs, some a priori beliefs, and many other beliefs. I suppose the fact is most of our beliefs that have warrant, have it in this basic way; it is only in a smallish area of our cognitive life that the warrant a belief has for us derives from the fact that it is accepted on the evidential basis of other beliefs. Of course, sometimes beliefs are accepted in the basic way but do not have warrant. As we saw in chapter 4, this can be due to cognitive malfunction, or to a cognitive faculty’s being impeded by such conditions as rage, lust, ambition, grief, and the like; it can also be because the bit of the design plan governing the production of the belief is aimed not at truth but at something else (survival, e.g.), or because something in the testimonial chain has gone wrong (one of your friends has lied to you), or for still other reasons.
According to the A/C model I am presenting here, theistic belief
produced by the sensus divinitatis can also be properly basic with respect
And since a belief has warrant only if it is
produced by properly functioning processes or faculties, a belief
properly basic with respect to warrant is also properly basic with
respect to rationality (that is, rationality as proper function; see
above, p. 110). Of course it doesn’t follow that theistic
belief can’t get warrant by way of argument from other beliefs; nor
does it follow that natural theology and more informal theistic
argument is of no worth in the believer’s intellectual and spiritual
life. Note further that, according to the model, sin damages the sensus divinitatis
and compromises its operation; see
below, p. 184 and chapter 7.
There will be a complicated and many-sided interplay between the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis and the deliverances of other sources of belief, just as there is a complicated interplay between the deliverances of perception, which are accepted in the basic way, and other sources of belief. It is not the case, of course, that a person who acquires belief by way of the sensus divinitatis need have any well-formed ideas about the source or origin of the belief, or any idea that there is such a faculty as the sensus divinitatis. (Just as most of us don’t have well-developed ideas as to the source and origin of our a priori beliefs.) Nor would such a person accept the belief in question on the basis of the following sort of argument: this belief seems to be a deliverance of the sensus divinitatis; the sensus divinitatis is a reliable belief-producing mechanism; therefore, probably this belief is true. Of course not; here, as in the case of other original sources of belief (memory, perception, a priori belief, etc.), the belief in question isn’t typically accepted on the basis of any argument at all, and the belief can have warrant even if the believer has no second-level beliefs at all about the belief in question.
This capacity for knowledge of God is part of our original cognitive equipment, part of the fundamental epistemic establishment with which we have been created by God. In this, it contrasts with one of the subjects of chapter 8, the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit. As we shall see there, the latter is an element in the divine response to human sin and the human predicament, a predicament in which we human beings require healing, restoration, and salvation. According to fundamental Christian teaching, the central divine response to our predicament is the incarnation and atonement: the life, sacrificial death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the divine son of God. By virtue of this divine response, we human beings can be put right with God and live triumphantly with him in this life and the next. Another part of God’s response to our condition, however, is Scripture and the testimony of the Holy Spirit. God speaks to us in Scripture, teaching us his response to our fallen condition and the way in which this response is to be appropriated by us. By virtue of the inward instigation of the Holy Spirit, we see that the teachings of Scripture are true. This work of the Holy Spirit, therefore, is a very special kind of cognitive instrument or agency; it is a belief-producing process, all right, but one that is very much out of the ordinary. It is not part of our original noetic equipment (not part of our constitution as we came from the hand of the Maker), but instead part of a special divine response to our (unnatural) sinful condition. Later, we will look at these notions in more detail; here, the thing to see is the contrast between the activity of the Holy Spirit in our cognitive lives, on the one hand, and the sensus divinitatis on the other. The former is part of a special response to the fallen condition into which humankind has precipitated itself; the latter is part of our original epistemic endowment. The former is a special divine response to sin; presumably it would not have taken place had there been no sin. The latter would no doubt have been part of our epistemic establishment even if humanity had not fallen into sin.
Suppose something like the A/C model is in fact correct: knowledge of
God ordinarily comes not through inference from other things one
believes, but from a sensus divinitatis, as characterized above. Would it follow that our
knowledge of God comes by way of perception? That is, would it follow that the warrant enjoyed
by theistic belief is perceptual warrant? Not necessarily. This is not
because there is any real question about the possibility or, indeed, the
actuality of perception of God. I believe William Alston has shown that
if there is
Perceiving God; The Epistemology of
Religious Experience (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991), chapters 1, 2, 5, and 6 (hereafter
PG).
Of course it isn’t wholly clear just what perception is (there is as much dispute about that as about any other philosophical topic); conceivably, the way to think of perception strictly so-called is such that it essentially involves specifically sensuous imagery. This imagery need not be of the sort that goes with our sense perception; other kinds are certainly possible. (Perhaps sensuous imagery goes with the bat’s echolocation, a kind of imagery wholly foreign to us.) But sensuous imagery of some kind may be necessary for perception, and perhaps it is also required that this imagery plays a certain specific (and hard to specify) causal role in the genesis of the candidates for perceptual belief in question.
What
Alston thinks of as putative perception of God, however, often appears
not to involve sensuous imagery. “Although mystical perception may or may not
involve sensory content, I will be focusing on the non-sensory variety,
since, in my judgment, it has a better claim to be a genuine direct
perception of God” (PG, p. 36).
So I have no doubt that perception of God or something very much like it does occur, and occur rather widely. But would beliefs gained by way of the sensus divinitatis of the A/C model be perceptual belief—that is, would the knowledge of God afforded (in the A/C model) by the sensus divinitatis be by way of perception? I’m inclined to think not. There are different accounts of what is essential to perception; Alston’s, I think, is as good as any. As he puts it,
what I take to be definitive of perceptual consciousness is that something (or so it seems to the subject) presents itself to the subject’s awareness as so-and-so—as red, round, loving, or whatever. When I stand before my desk with my eyes closed and then open them, the most striking difference in my consciousness is that items that I was previously merely thinking about or remembering, if conscious of them in any way, are now present to me. (PG, p. 36)
Of course it isn’t easy to say, in every sort of case, when the object seems to present itself to the subject; let’s suppose we have something of a grasp of this notion and can tell within reasonable limits when it applies. Then I think it is clear that in some of the experiences that are, on the model, operations of the sensus divinitatis, there is a sense of God’s actually being presented to, present to, one’s awareness, but in others not. In the sorts of cases Calvin speaks of (the night sky, the mountains, the ocean), it is sometimes as if one feels, perceives the very presence of God. This would be what Alston calls (p. 21) indirect perception of God—the perception of God mediated by the perception of something else (the night sky, the mountains). In other cases of this sort, however, God doesn’t seem exactly present, or presented, even though various beliefs about him—that he is powerful, glorious, to be worshiped, obeyed, thanked—arise. And in some of the other sorts of manifestations of the sensus divinitatis—situations of guilt, danger, gratitude—the sense that God is actually present to one, as Alston is thinking of it, seems rarer. So according to the model, the operation of the sensus divinitatis doesn’t necessarily involve perception of God.
Well, even if this sort of knowledge of God isn’t perceptual, can we at
any rate say that it is by way of religious
experience? Can we say
that the warrant it gets comes from experience? The first thing to see
is that this term ‘religious experience’ is construed in a thousand
different ways to cover a vast and confusing variety of
cases; the question as it stands is multiply ambiguous and, in fact, we are
probably better off boycotting the term. As Alston (PG, p. 34) suggests. See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
(New York: Oxford University Press,
1958). For more on doxastic evidence, see Warrant
and Proper Function (hereafter WPF), pp. 190ff.
So
all of these varieties of experience can be found in the operation of
the sensus divinitatis; doxastic experience accompanies any beliefs
formed by its operation, as it does the formation of any other belief.
So back to our question: shall we therefore say that knowledge by way
of the sensus divinitatis comes by way of religious experience, that it
is experiential knowledge? Shall
we say that (on the model) the warrant it has comes from experience? I
don’t propose to answer the question. An answer would involve a long
and essentially irrelevant effort to answer another
question: “What does it mean to say that
the warrant of a belief comes from (or comes by way of) experience,
religious or otherwise?” This is an interesting question, and a tough
question (doxastic experience always accompanies the formation
of a priori belief, and
scraps of sensuous imagery typically accompany it; does the warrant
of a priori belief
therefore come from experience?). But we don’t need an answer to that
question for our purposes. We
Finally, according to the A/C model this natural knowledge of God has been compromised, weakened, reduced, smothered, overlaid, or impeded by sin and its consequences. In the next chapter, we shall explore the noetic effects of sin in more detail, and in chapter 8 we shall see that (on the model) the sensus divinitatis is restored to proper function by regeneration and the operation of the Holy Spirit. For now, we note only that the knowledge of God provided by the sensus divinitatis, prior to faith and regeneration, is both narrowed in scope and partially suppressed. Due to one cause or another, the faculty itself may be diseased and thus partly or wholly disabled. There is such a thing as cognitive disease; there is blindness, deafness, inability to tell right from wrong, insanity; and there are analogues of these conditions with respect to the operation of the sensus divinitatis. According to Marx and Marxists, of course, it is belief in God that is a result of cognitive disease, of dysfunction. In an etymological sense, Marx thinks, the believer is insane. A milder, more conciliatory way to put it is that the believer, from those perspectives, is irrational; rational faculties fail to work as they should. But here the A/C model stands Freud and Marx on their heads (more accurately, what we see here is part of F&M’s extensive borrowing from Christian and Jewish ways of thinking); according to the model, it is really the unbeliever who displays epistemic malfunction; failing to believe in God is a result of some kind of dysfunction of the sensus divinitatis.
And
here we should note that the notion of warrant can be usefully
generalized. So far, we have thought of warrant as a property or
characteristic of beliefs; the basic idea is that a belief enjoys
warrant when it is formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties
in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan
successfully aimed at truth—which includes, we should note, the
avoidance of error. But withholdings, failures to believe, can also be dictated by a
design plan successfully aimed at truth and the avoidance of error. You
have conflicting evidence for the proposition that there is intelligent
life in other parts of the universe: some of those you trust say yes,
some say no, and some say there is little evidence either way. You
therefore withhold that belief, believing neither that there is nor
that there isn’t life elsewhere in the universe. Your friends with the
rocky marriage tell you conflicting stories about the latest quarrel:
by virtue of past experience in similar situations you have learned to
believe neither story without further corroboration. Your young son
asks
By contrast, if you call and ask what I am doing at the moment and I don’t form the belief that I am sitting at my computer trying to work on my book, there is something wrong somewhere in my noetic establishment. I am introduced to someone at a party; although I have no reason to do so, I withhold the belief that what I see before me is a person, motivated by nothing more than the broadly logical possibility that what I see is really an extraordinarily clever hologram with sound effects attached. I read Bertrand Russell and see that it is possible (in the broadly logical sense) and compatible with appearances that the world popped into existence just five minutes ago, complete with all those apparent memories, crumbling mountains, and dusty books; as a result, I withhold the belief that I am more than five minutes old. In these cases, my failure to believe is a sign, not of exemplary epistemic caution, but of cognitive malfunction; these withholdings lack the analogue of warrant. Of course I might, in a frenzy due to philosophical error, come to the conclusion that in some way I ought not to believe in other people; I might come to the conclusion that such belief is unjustified, somehow; and I might try not to believe in other people. I might even succeed for brief periods in my study. But it is exceedingly hard to maintain this attitude, as is demonstrated by the famous lady who dropped Bertrand Russell a postcard on which she wrote something like “I agree entirely with you that solipsism is the correct and most reasonable position: so why aren’t there more of us solipsists?” As Hume notoriously noted, it is exceedingly hard to maintain this attitude for long, or outside your study. The fact is that someone who consistently believes that she is the only person in the universe is suffering from a serious mental disorder, and the same is true for the person who is merely agnostic about the existence of other persons.
We
could put the same point by saying that some withholdings are rational
and some irrational. An important sense of the term ‘rational’ As we saw above, p. 110.
According to the present model, then, the sensus divinitatis has been damaged and corrupted by sin. Further, according to the extended model I mean to propose in chapter 8, the sensus divinitatis is partly healed and restored to proper function by faith and the concomitant work of the Holy Spirit in one’s heart. So the model as so far outlined is incomplete; the rest will come in chapters 8 and 9. Even if incomplete, however, the model as so far outlined will suffice for present purposes. For it shows us a sufficiently detailed way in which a properly functioning sensus divinitatis can produce theistic belief which is (1) taken in the basic way and (2), so taken, can indeed have warrant, and warrant sufficient for knowledge.
As
we saw above, Freud doesn’t really argue that theistic belief has no warrant if taken in the
basic way: he seems to assume that such belief is false, and then
infers in rather quick and casual fashion that it is produced by
wish-fulfillment and hence doesn’t have warrant. Here (despite the
appearance of carelessness) perhaps Freud’s instincts are right: I
shall argue that if theistic belief is false, but taken in the basic
way, And, let’s add, not taken on testimony. That
is because testimony, like inference, is not an ultimate source of
warrant; a belief taken on testimony has warrant for someone
only if that belief has warrant for the
testifier. See WPF, p. 83.
There is another and more important consideration, which we can approach
indirectly as follows. A belief has warrant only if the cognitive
process that produces it is successfully aimed at the truth—that
is, only if there is a high objective probability that a belief
produced by this process is true (given that the process is functioning
properly in the sort of epistemic environment for which it is
designed). Now from the fact that a
belief is false, it doesn’t follow that it is not produced by a process
or faculty successfully aimed at truth. It could be that on a given
occasion a process issues a false belief, even though there is a
substantial objective probability that any belief it produces will be
true (given the satisfaction of the other conditions of warrant). For
example, a reliable barometer may give a false reading because of an
unusual and improbable confluence of circumstances. Physicists tell us
that it is possible (though extremely unlikely) that, for just a moment,
all the air molecules in the room should congregate in the upper
northwest corner of the room. Suppose this happens; at that moment, the
air pressure in the vicinity of the barometer in the lower southeast
corner of the room is zero; the barometer, however, still registers
29.72, because there hasn’t been a long enough time for it to react to
the change. The fact that it issues a false reading under these
circumstances doesn’t mean it is not a reliable
I
think not. A proposition is objectively probable, with respect to some
condition C, only if that proposition is true in most of the nearby
possible worlds that display C. For an account of the connection between
possible worlds and objective probability, see WPF, p. 162.
On the other hand, if theistic belief is true, then it seems likely that it
does have warrant. If it is
true, then there is, indeed, such a person as God, a person who has
created us in his image (so that we resemble him, among other things,
in having the capacity for knowledge), who loves us, who desires that
we know and love him, and who is such that it is our end and good to
know and love him. But if these things are so, then he would of course
intend that we be able to be aware of his presence and to know
something about him. And if that is so, the natural thing to think is
that he created us in such a way that we would come to hold such true
beliefs as that there is such a person as
Suppose we try to take a deeper look. How could we make sense of the idea that theism is true but belief in God doesn’t have warrant?
We’d have to suppose (1) that there is
such a person as God, who has created us in his image and has created
us in such a way that our chief end and good is knowledge of him, and
(2) that belief in God (i.e., our belief in God, human
belief in God) has no warrant: is not produced by cognitive processes
successfully aimed at giving us true beliefs about God, functioning
properly in a congenial epistemic environment. That is, we’d have to
think that belief in God is produced by cognitive processes that either
(1) are not functioning properly (because of disease or impedance), (2)
are not aimed at producing true beliefs about God, or (3) are so aimed
but not successfully aimed, or
(4) the cognitive environment is uncongenial, not one for which our
faculties are designed. With respect to (4), however, we are supposing
God has created us; there seems no reason at all to think our epistemic
environment is not the one for which he created us. (We have no reason,
for example, to think that our ancestors originated on some other
planet and made a long, hazardous journey to Earth.) With respect to
(3), because, by hypothesis, theistic belief is true, it seems that if the
cognitive process that produces it is aimed at the truth, it is successfully aimed at the
truth. That leaves us with (1) and (2). Given that God would
certainly want us to be
able to know him, the chances are excellent that he would create us
with faculties enabling us to do just that. So the natural thing to
think is that those faculties that produce theistic belief were indeed
designed to produce that sort of belief and are functioning properly
in so doing. Of course
Here we must also suppose, in accord with the
conclusion of part IV of this book, that it is not the case that those
who believe in God for the most part have defeaters for that belief.
And here we see the ontological or metaphysical or ultimately religious roots of the question as to the rationality or warrant or lack thereof for belief in God. What you properly take to be rational, at least in the sense of warranted, depends on what sort of metaphysical and religious stance you adopt. It depends on what kind of beings you think human beings are, what sorts of beliefs you think their noetic faculties will produce when they are functioning properly, and which of their faculties or cognitive mechanisms are aimed at the truth. Your view as to what sort of creature a human being is will determine or at any rate heavily influence your views as to whether theistic belief is warranted or not warranted, rational or irrational for human beings. And so the dispute as to whether theistic belief is rational (warranted) can’t be settled just by attending to epistemological considerations; it is at bottom not merely an epistemological dispute, but an ontological or theological dispute.
You
may think humankind is created by God in the image of God—and
created both with a natural tendency to see God’s hand in
And this dependence of the question of warrant or rationality on the truth or falsehood of theism leads to a very interesting conclusion. If the warrant enjoyed by belief in God is related in this way to the truth of that belief, then the question whether theistic belief has warrant is not, after all, independent of the question whether theistic belief is true. So the de jure question we have finally found is not, after all, really independent of the de facto question; to answer the former we must answer the latter. This is important: what it shows is that a successful atheological objection will have to be to the truth of theism, not to its rationality, justification, intellectual respectability, rational justification, or whatever. Atheologians who wish to attack theistic belief will have to restrict themselves to objections like the argument from evil, the claim that theism is incoherent, or the idea that in some other way there is strong evidence against theistic belief. They can’t any longer adopt the following stance: “Well, I certainly don’t know whether theistic belief is true—who could know a thing like that?—but I do know this: it is irrational, or unjustified, or not rationally justified, or contrary to reason or intellectually irresponsible or . . .” There isn’t a sensible de jure question or criticism that is independent of the de facto question. There aren’t any de jure criticisms that are sensible when conjoined with the truth of theistic belief; all of them either fail right from the start (as with the claim that it is unjustified to accept theistic belief) or else really presuppose that theism is false. This fact by itself invalidates an enormous amount of recent and contemporary atheology; for much of that atheology is devoted to de jure complaints that are allegedly independent of the de facto question. If my argument so far is right, though, there aren’t any sensible complaints of that sort. (More modestly, none have been so far proposed; it is always possible, I suppose, that someone will come up with one.)
Now
that we have the A/C model before us, we can deal with the F&M
complaint in summary fashion. As we saw in the last chapter, Marx’s
complaint about religion is that it is produced by cognitive faculties
that are malfunctioning; this cognitive dysfunction is due to
social dysfunction and
dislocation. Besides that famous “Religion is the opium of the people”
passage, however, Marx doesn’t have a lot to say about religious
belief—except, of course, for a number of semi-journalistic gibes
and japes and other expressions of hostility. See On Religion by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, ed. Reinhold
Niebuhr (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1964). This is a collection
of bits of various writings on religion by Marx and Engels. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961 (originally
published 1927), p. 49.
Not to be outdone, a substantial number of subsequent psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have followed his lead. Thus Albert Ellis:
Religiosity is in many respects equivalent to irrational thinking and
emotional disturbance. . . . The elegant therapeutic solution to
emotional problems is to be quite unreligious . . . the less religious
they are, the more emotionally healthy they will be. “Psychotherapy and Atheistic Values,”
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 48, no. 5 (October 1980), pp. 635–39.
Sometimes these
suggestions take rather bizarre forms, worthy, almost to be compared
with Freud’s own highly imaginative stories about the origin of
religion and the taming of fire. See above, pp. 137–38. “Praying the Rosary: The Anal-Erotic Origins
of a Popular Catholic Devotion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion 26, no. 4 (December
1987), p. 491. The Farmer’s Church (New York: Century, 1925), p. 58. See, for example, Herbert Simon’s recent
article, “A Mechanism for Social Selection and Successful Altruism,”
Science 250 (December 1990), pp.
1665ff, in which he argues that the behavior of people like Mother
Teresa, who are prepared to sacrifice their own interests for those of
other people, is to be explained in terms of “docility” and “bounded
rationality.”
Following Voltaire, Rousseau, and others, furthermore, people in these
fields regularly declare that (in this modern, scientific age) the
death of religion is at hand Freud himself was often more careful on this
point; see footnote 161, above, p. 140.
the
evolutionary future of religion is extinction. Belief in supernatural
beings and in supernatural forces that affect nature without obeying
nature’s laws will erode and become only an interesting historical
memory. To be sure, this event is not likely to occur in the next
generation; the process will very likely take several hundred years,
and there will probably always remain individuals, or even occasional
small cult groups who respond to hallucination, trance, and obsession
with supernaturalist interpretation. But as a cultural trait, belief in
supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a
result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge
. . . the process is inevitable. Anthony F. C. Wallace, Religion: An
Anthropological View (New York:
Random House, 1966), pp. 264–65. Like the last three quoted passages,
this one is quoted in Rodney Stark, Laurence Iannaccone, and Roger
Finke, “Rationality and the ‘Religious’ Mind,” Economic
Inquiry 36, no. 3 (July 1998).
This very interesting paper takes an innovative approach to serious
religious belief, swimming against the stream of sociological analyses
that see such belief as a manifestation of one or another kind of
irrationality.
Is there any reason to believe these things? Is there any evidence for the F&M complaint? Why should anyone believe it? First, however, it is only fair to defend this complaint against a fairly common objection. The F&M style of criticizing religious (or other) belief is often improperly dismissed as an instance of the ‘genetic fallacy’. The question, so the claim goes, is whether the theistic beliefs in question are true; the question is not how it is that someone comes to hold them or what the origin of the belief might be. Furthermore (so the claim continues), questions of origin are ordinarily irrelevant to questions of truth. (“Ordinarily”—of course we can think of silly exceptions. For example, we might know that Sam came to believe a proposition by accepting the testimony of someone who, on the subject of the belief in question, asserts nothing but falsehoods; in that case the origin of the belief is obviously relevant to its truth.)
This criticism of the F&M complaint is mistaken. True, questions of origin are ordinarily not relevant to the question of the truth of a belief; but they can be crucially relevant to the question of the warrant a belief enjoys. The objector fails to note that there are de jure questions and criticisms as well as de facto; his objection is relevant only if it is the latter sort that is at issue. But the F&M complaint is that theistic belief is not rational and lacks warrant. Unlike memory beliefs, a priori beliefs, or perceptual belief, theistic belief does not originate in the proper function of cognitive processes successfully aimed at the production of true belief. And if the problem, according to F&M, is that such beliefs have no warrant, then questions of origin may be intensely relevant; on many accounts of warrant, including the one I defend in WPF, the genesis of a belief is intimately connected with the degree of warrant, if any, it enjoys.
Furthermore, there is an indirect connection with truth. Return to the random generator of p. 161, above: I use the machine, proposing the selected proposition to you for belief. You demur, citing the origin of the proposed belief, whereupon I accuse you of committing the genetic fallacy. Surely I am wrong; the fact is you haven’t committed a fallacy at all, and your real complaint is that you haven’t the faintest reason to think the proposition in question true. It is the same with beliefs that have no warrant for anyone. We ordinarily assume that propositions with warrant have something going for them: it is likely, or at least more likely than not, that they will be true. If I have reason to think your belief that your name is ‘Sam’ has warrant (you’re pretty likely to know what your name is), then I have a reason to accept this belief. If I know that a belief has no warrant for anyone, however, then I have no reason at all to think that belief true, no reason at all to rely on that proposition. Once I see this, I see that the proposition in question has no claim whatever on my belief.
But
is Freud right: does theistic
belief arise from wish-fulfillment, thereby failing to have warrant? Is
there any reason to believe this?
And in any event where is the evidence (empirical or otherwise) for the
Freudian claim? A survey wouldn’t be of much use. Hardly anyone reports
believing in God out of wish-fulfillment; the usual reports are, instead, of being seized, compelled,
or overwhelmed, or its just seeming right after considerable thought and
agony, or its having always seemed clearly true, or its suddenly
becoming obvious that it is really so. It certainly
doesn’t seem to those of
us who believe in God that we do so out of wish-fulfillment. Of course
that won’t be taken as relevant; the beauty of Freudian explanations is
that the postulated mechanisms all operate unconsciously, unavailable
to inspection. The claim is that you subconsciously recognize the
miserable and frightening condition we human beings face,
subconsciously see that the alternatives are paralyzing despair or
belief in God, and subconsciously opt for the latter. Even after
careful introspection and reflection, you can’t see that the proffered
explanation is true: that fact won’t be taken as even the slightest
reason for doubting the explanation. (Just as with your indignant
denial that you hate your father because you see him as a rival for
your mother’s sexual favors. In fact your indignation may be taken as
confirmation; you are resisting
As far as I can see, the only evidence Freud actually offers is the claim that we see a lot of young people, nowadays, who give up religion when their father’s authority breaks down:
Psycho-analysis has made us familiar with the intimate connection
between the father-complex and belief in God: it has shown us that a
personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father,
and it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose their
religious beliefs as soon as their father’s authority breaks down. Thus
we recognize that the roots of the need for religion are in the
parental complex: the almighty and just God, and kindly Nature, appear
to us as grand sublimations of father and mother. . . . Memoir of Leonardo da Vinci
in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957),
vol. 11, p. 123.
No
doubt Freud saw a good bit of that in his day (and perhaps even in his
own case: his relationship with his father, according to E. M.
Jones, Degenerate Moderns (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), p. 191.
According to Jones, Freud thought of his father as weak and “a
pervert.” Jeffrey Masson, The Complete Letters of Sigmund
Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p.
222. See also Paul Vitz’s Sigmund Freud’s Christian
Unconscious (New York: Guilford,
1988).
Of course the thesis isn’t stated
exactly, or with enough detail to enable us to see just what
would be evidence for it. One naturally thinks that there
must be a deeper, more precise statement of the theory somewhere; sadly
enough, one can’t find any such thing. The evidence for the theory
would perhaps have to be something like the way it fits or explains all
the data, all the phenomena of religious or theistic belief. But before
we could seriously assess its fit with the evidence, the theory would
have to be stated much more precisely; we should have to be able to see
what it does and doesn’t predict much more clearly than, in fact, we can.
Freudian explanations have never been strong along these
lines. Adolf Grünbaum’s The Foundations of
Psychoanalysis (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984) is a meticulous (and thoroughly
unflattering) chronicle of the scientific failings of Freud and
Freudianism. Some others are Malcolm Macmillan’s Freud
Evaluated: The Completed Arc (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991) and Allen Esterson’s
Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud
(Chicago: Open Court, 1993).
Even if it were established that wish-fulfillment is
the source of theistic belief, however,
that wouldn’t be enough to establish that the latter has no warrant. It
must also be established that wish-fulfillment in this
particular manifestation is not
aimed at true belief. The cognitive design plan of human beings is
subtle and complicated; a source of belief might be such that
in general it isn’t aimed at the
formation of true belief, but in some special cases it is. So perhaps
this is true of wish-fulfillment; in general, its purpose is not that of
producing true belief, but in this special case precisely that
is its purpose. Perhaps human
beings have been created by God with a deep need to believe in his
presence and goodness and love. Perhaps God designed us that way in
order that we come to believe in him and be aware of his presence.
Perhaps this is how God has arranged for us to come to know him. If so,
then the particular bit of the cognitive design plan governing the
formation of theistic belief is indeed aimed at true belief, even if
the belief in question arises from wish-fulfillment.
And how would Freud or a follower establish that the mechanism whereby human beings come to believe in God (come to believe that there is such a person as God) is not aimed at the truth? This is really the crux of the matter. Freud offers no arguments or reasons here at all. As far as I can see, he simply takes it for granted that there is no God and that theistic belief is false; he then casts about for some kind of explanation of this widespread phenomenon of mistaken belief. He hits on wish-fulfillment and apparently assumes it is obvious that this mechanism is not “reality oriented”—that is, is not aimed at the production of true belief—so that such belief lacks warrant. As we have seen, this is a safe assumption if in fact theism is false. But then Freud’s version of the de jure criticism really depends on his atheism: it isn’t an independent criticism at all, and it won’t (or shouldn’t) have any force for anyone who doesn’t share that atheism. Given the results of parts II and III of this chapter, this is of course just what we should expect.
Now
a believer in God, a Christian or Jew or Muslim, is unlikely to
acquiesce in the F&M claim that belief in God has no warrant. (It
is only a certain variety of ‘liberal’ theologian, crazed by the thirst
for novelty and the desire to accommodate current secularity, who might
agree with F&M here.) Indeed, a believer will see the shoe as on the other
foot. According to St. Paul, it is unbelief that is a result of dysfunction, brokenness,
failure to function properly, or impedance of rational faculties.
Unbelief, he says, is a result of sin; it originates in an effort, as
Of course it isn’t Paul’s idea that those who
don’t believe are, by that very fact, seen to be more sinful than those
who do. On the contrary: just a couple of chapters later he says we are
all involved in sin, including,
of course, himself (“Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from
this body of death?”). Furthermore, the malfunction that lies at the
root of unbelief is not necessarily that of the unbeliever herself.
Some kinds of unbelief (see below, p. 215) are like blindness; upon
seeing a blind man, the disciples asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this
man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (
The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can understand it?
According to the Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model, theistic belief (belief in God) has warrant, indeed, sufficient warrant for knowledge. The central feature of this model is the stipulation that God has created us human beings with a belief-producing process or source of belief, the sensus divinitatis; this source works under various conditions to produce beliefs about God, including, of course, beliefs that immediately entail his existence. Belief produced in this way, I said, can easily meet the conditions for warrant; given that it is true (and held sufficiently strongly), it would constitute knowledge.
So far, therefore, we have been thinking just about belief that there is such a person as God. But to go no further would be to give legitimate grounds for complaint:
First,
the beliefs that really shape and determine Christian intellectual
identity and existence are much more precise and specific than belief
in God. They are constituted by profound convictions about the person of
Christ, about the mysterious reality of the Holy Trinity, about the
presence of the Holy Spirit in one’s life. . . . It is these rather
than some minimalist theism which really matters to the vast
William Abraham, “The Epistemological
Significance of the Inner Witness of the Holy Spirit,” Faith and
Philosophy (1990), p. 435. Abraham
goes on to complain that the “reformed epistemologists” have so far
said little about the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit and haven’t
made explicit the relation between “talk of the inner witness of the
Holy Spirit and their epistemological proposals” (p. 446). This is true
(and the present volume aims to help repair the deficiency), but what’s
to prevent Abraham himself from lighting a candle (instead of cursing
the darkness) and making some of these connections explicit?
Well, I doubt that these beliefs have been neglected because they were thought secondary and peripheral; there is a more plausible explanation. Christian philosophers have been for the most part responding to various kinds of attacks on the rational justifiability of religious belief. Those who mount such attacks typically do so by attacking belief in God, which is the heart and soul of Christian belief as well as of the other theistic religions. This is a sensible strategy: if the atheologian can show that this belief is relevantly objectionable, he won’t have to deal piecemeal with all those more specific beliefs; he can do for them all in one fell swoop. But then Christian responses to these objections, naturally enough, have dealt with animadversions on belief in God. Still, Abraham is quite right; we must indeed think about specifically Christian belief and inquire into its justification, rationality, and warrant. That is the task of the next four chapters; my aim is to extend the model of chapter 6 to include specifically Christian belief. The extended model will bear some of the earmarks of Reformed theology, but similar models can be constructed for other theological traditions. This model, incidentally, will essentially involve such theological notions as faith and the work of the Holy Spirit. Some may find it scandalous that theological ideas should be taken seriously in a book on philosophy; I find it no more scandalous than the ingression into philosophy of scientific ideas from (for example) quantum mechanics, cosmology, and evolutionary biology.
My
aim is to show how it can be that Christians can be justified, rational
(both internally and externally), and warranted in holding full-blooded
Christian belief—not just ‘ignorant fundamentalists’, but
sophisticated, aware, educated, turn-of-the-millennium people who have
read their Freud and Nietzsche, their Hume and Mackie (their Dennett
and Dawkins). Justification and internal rationality are easy enough:
just as for theistic belief, I’ll argue that many or most Christians
not only can be but also are both justified and
internally rational in holding their characteristic beliefs. External
rationality and warrant are harder. The only way I can see to argue
that Christian belief
What I will do instead is extend the A/C model of chapter 6 to a model according to which specifically Christian belief (as well as theism) has both warrant and external rationality, and enough of the former to constitute knowledge. This model will include the main lines of ecumenical classic Christian belief. It also needs a certain amount of additional detail. This additional detail is broadly Reformed or Calvinist in inspiration, but I shall develop it in my own way. The point of the extended model is like the point of the A/C model itself. I shall use the model to argue three things. First, I will use it to argue that Christian belief can very well be both externally rational and warranted: there is a perfectly viable epistemological account of how it is that they should have these virtues, and no cogent objections to their having it. Second, I’ll argue (as in chapter 6 I did with respect to theistic belief) that if Christian belief is true, then it is probably both externally rational and warranted for most Christians. Thus I’ll be attacking again that stance I mentioned (above, p. x): the claim that of course we don’t know whether Christian belief is, in fact, true (that’s a pretty tall order, after all), but we do know that even if it happens to be true, it isn’t rational or warranted. Third, I’ll recommend the story or model I present as a good way, though not necessarily the only good way, for Christians to think about the epistemological status of Christian belief.
Now
one important difference between bare theism and Christianity has to do
essentially with sin and the
divine remedy proposed for it; it is sin that occasions Incarnation and
Atonement, redemption and renewal. The present chapter, therefore, will
examine the nature of sin and its noetic effects. Chapters 8 and 9 will
address faith, the Bible, and the internal instigation of the Holy
Spirit; these, on the extended model, are together the central source
of warrant for Christian belief. According to Calvin, whose thought I
shall follow (even if at some distance), faith is “a firm and certain
knowledge (cognitio) of
God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely
given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our
hearts through the Holy Spirit.” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and
tr. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960
[originally published in 1559]), III, ii, 7, p. 551. Subsequent page
references to the Institutes are to this edition.
An initial problem: the term
‘Christian belief’, like most useful terms, is vague. Does Tillich
count as a Christian theologian? What about Mormon beliefs: are they
Christian? See, for example, Albert Howsepian’s “Are
Mormons Theists?” Religious Studies 32 (September 1996), pp. 357ff.; for a reply, see
Blake T. Ostler, “Worship-worthiness and the Mormon Conception of
God,” Religious Studies 33 (September 1997), pp. 315ff. Indeed, there is vagueness with respect to
theism as well: what, precisely, must you believe to be a theist? That
the Ultimate or the Real is personal? Or could you be a theist if
(e.g., with Carl Sagan) you proposed that the laws of nature are
somehow ultimate, should be called ‘God’, and should be worshiped?
Could you be a theist if you thought that God is really a
set—perhaps the Cartesian product of the sets of possibly good
actions and true propositions? (Ignore the difficulty that there
probably is no such thing as the set of true propositions—or, if
you refuse to ignore it, see Patrick Grim and Alvin Plantinga, “Truth, Omniscience, and
Cantorian Arguments: An Exchange,” Philosophical Studies
70 [August 1993].)
This
isn’t a problem for my project. First, no doubt the term ‘Christian’ is vague; still, as
Dr. Johnson once remarked, the existence of twilight is not a good
argument against the distinction between day and night. There is such a
thing as Christian belief, and there is also such a thing as
non-Christian belief, even if it is difficult to say where the one
begins and the other ends. Second, nothing in my project depends on a
specific use of the term ‘Christian’. However we propose to use that
term, my project is to inquire into the epistemological status of a
certain set of beliefs: the ones embodied, say, in the Apostle’s Creed
and the Nicene Creed. (Alternatively, we could identify the beliefs in
question as belonging to the intersection of those expressed in the
creeds of more specific Christian communities [the New Catholic
Catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Augsburg Confession, the
Westminster Catechism, and so on].) Included are the affirmations that
God created the heavens and the earth; that he created human beings in
his own image; that human beings fell ruinously into sin, from which
they require salvation; that in response God graciously sent Jesus
Christ, the divine son of God, who took on our flesh (became
incarnate), suffered, and died as an atonement for
Now our question is whether these beliefs are justified,
rational, or warranted. But justification and internal rationality are
easily dealt with. First, justification taken deontologically, in terms
of intellectual rights and obligations, is no more problematic here
than in the case of theism. Clearly, a person (including a highly
educated, wholly with-it, twenty-first-century person who has read all
the latest objections to Christian belief) could be justified in accepting these and other Christian
beliefs and would be so
justified if (for example) after careful and nonculpable reflection and
investigation into the alleged objections and defeaters, she still
found those beliefs wholly compelling. She could hardly be blamed for
believing what strongly seems, after extensive investigation, to be the
truth of the matter. (She’s supposed to believe what seems
false to her?) It is open to someone to claim that the
Christian believer enjoys only subjective justification, not objective
justification; that is because (so the
claim goes) the fact is there are objective epistemic duties such that
one cannot accept Christian belief without violating them (above, pp.
98–99), and the believer escapes guilt only because she is not aware of
them. (Thus ignorance is a protection from guilt.) Once more, however:
what would those objective duties be? And is there even a suggestion of
a reason for thinking there are any such duties?
The
same goes for internal rationality, which is a matter of the proper
function of cognitive processes downstream from experience (see above,
p. 110. for explanation of this metaphor). These beliefs, we are
stipulating, seem to her to be clearly true. She finds them wholly
convincing, just as she does her beliefs about other persons, say, and
an external world; they remain thus convincing even after she has
considered the objections she has encountered. She has a powerful
inclination to believe these things and hence has strong
As we saw in the case of theistic belief, however, these observations won’t or shouldn’t quiet the critics. For even if Christian believers are justified and internally rational in their beliefs, they might still be externally irrational (see above, p. 112) and thus wholly without warrant. After all, even the beliefs of a madman or of a victim of a Cartesian evil demon can be both justified and internally rational. Well, then, what about external rationality and warrant? A belief is externally rational if it is produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly and successfully aimed at truth (i.e., aimed at the production of true belief)—as opposed, for example, to being the product of wish-fulfillment or cognitive malfunction. Now warrant, the property enough of which distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief, is a property or quantity had by a belief if and only if (so I say) that belief is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth. Because rationality (in the sense of proper function of rational powers) is included in warrant, the real question, here, is whether Christian belief does or can have warrant.
According to the extended A/C model, Christian belief does indeed have
warrant. In essence, the model goes like this. First, God has created
us human beings in his own image: this centrally involves our resembling God in
being persons—that
is, beings with intellect and will. Like God, we are the sort of beings who have
beliefs and understanding: we have intellect. There is also will,
however: we also resemble God in having affections (loves and hates),
in forming aims and intentions, and in being able to act to
accomplish these aims and intentions. Here I am thinking of will in such a way that
it includes not only decision and choice (the executive
function of will) but also loves and
hates, desire and conation (the affective function of will). This is a bit broader than the
usual contemporary understanding of the will, but in line with older
ways of thinking about it (see, e.g., Aquinas, Summa
Theologiae I, q. 82, a. 1 and 2
and Summa contra Gentiles Bk. III, ch. 26). Here I was helped by Derek Jeffreys.
The extended model retains this
feature and adds more. First,
it adds that we human beings have fallen into sin, a calamitous
condition from which we require salvation—a salvation we are
unable to accomplish by our own efforts. This sin alienates us from
God and makes us unfit for communion with him. Our fall into sin has
had cataclysmic consequences, both affective and cognitive. As to
affective consequences, our affections are skewed and our hearts now
harbor deep and radical evil: we love ourselves above all, rather than
God. There were also ruinous cognitive consequences. Our
original knowledge of God and of his marvelous beauty, glory, and
loveliness has been severely compromised; in this way the narrow image
of God in us was destroyed and the broad image damaged,
distorted. As Calvin puts it, “The natural gifts in man were corrupted, but the
supernatural were taken away” (II, ii, 4, p. 260). And according to Aquinas, “Man in the state of
corrupted nature falls short even of what he can do by his nature, so
that he is unable to fulfill all of it by his own natural power.” We
therefore need “a gratuitous strength superadded to natural strength”
not only “to do and will supernatural good,” but also, he says, to live
up to our original nature as persons (Summa Theologiae
I-II, q. 102, a. 2, respondeo).
Here we should note an ambiguity in such terms as “our natural
condition.” On the one hand, the term can refer to what we human beings
were like in our original and sinless condition, fresh from the hand of
God, and what we would still be like if it weren’t for sin; on the
other, the term refers to our fallen condition, prior to regeneration
and renewal.
So
far, what we have here is the mere Christianity of which C. S. Lewis
spoke; Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1958). See, e.g., Those who raise their eyebrows at the
application of this term to the work of the Holy Spirit are invited to
note the explanation below, pp. 257–58.
Now that we have the extended model before us in outline, we must take a more detailed look into some of its various aspects, starting with the nature of sin and its cognitive consequences. Reformed theologians used to speak of the “noetic effects of sin”; although (sadly enough) this topic has at present dropped out of favor, it will be important for our model, so after an examination of the nature of sin we’ll turn in the remaining part of the chapter to its cognitive consequences.
What
is sin? Whatever it is, it is both astonishingly deep and deeply
elusive. According to the model, there is first the phenomenon of
sinning: of doing what is wrong,
what is contrary to God’s will. This is something for which the sinner
is responsible; he is
guilty and warrants blame—but only if he recognizes that what he
does is sin, or
How
does it happen that we human beings are mired in this desperate and
deplorable condition? The traditional Christian answer: it is as a
result of the sinful actions of Adam and Eve, our original parents and
the first human beings. Whether this is indeed how it happened is a
matter on which the model need not take a stand; what is
part of the model is that in fact we
are in the condition. G. K. Chesterton once remarked that of all the
doctrines of Christianity, the doctrine of original sin has the
strongest claim to “empirical verifiability,” the quality that back in
the palmy days of positivism was widely trumpeted as the very criterion
of ‘cognitive meaningfulness’; it has been verified in the wars,
cruelty, and general hatefulness that have characterized human history
from its very inception to the present. Indeed, no century has seen
more organized hatred, contempt, and cruelty than ours, and
none has seen it on as grand a scale. Our century in particular also
enables us to see the social side of sin. We human beings are deeply communal;
we learn from parents, teachers, peers, and others, both by imitation
and by precept. We acquire beliefs in this way, but just as important
(and perhaps less self-consciously), we acquire attitudes and
affections, loves and hates. Because of our social nature, sin and its
effects can be like a contagion that spreads from one to another,
eventually corrupting Examples of this contagion are salient in our
century (though also of course in earlier times); for an unusual
fictional example, see Brian Moore’s Black Robe (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985).
Original sin involves both intellect and will; it is both cognitive and affective. On the one hand, it carries with it a sort of blindness, a sort of imperceptiveness, dullness, stupidity. This is a cognitive limitation that first of all prevents its victim from proper knowledge of God and his beauty, glory, and love; it also prevents him from seeing what is worth loving and what worth hating, what should be sought and what eschewed. It therefore compromises both knowledge of fact and knowledge of value.
But
sin is also and perhaps primarily an affective disorder or malfunction. Our affections are skewed,
directed to the wrong objects; we love and hate the wrong things.
Instead of seeking first the kingdom of God, I am inclined to seek
first my own personal glorification and aggrandizement, bending all my
efforts toward making myself look good. Instead of loving God above
all and my neighbor as myself, I am inclined to love myself above all
and, indeed, to hate God and my neighbor. Question 5 of the Heidelberg Catechism: “Can
you live up to all this perfectly?” Answer: “No. I have a natural
tendency to hate God and my neighbor.” This desire for autonomy, self-definition,
and self-creation can assume quite remarkable proportions: according to
Richard Rorty, Martin Heidegger felt guilty about living in a world he
hadn’t himself created, refused to feel at home in any such world, and
couldn’t stand the thought that he was not his own creation
(Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], p.
109).
The
defect here is affective, not intellectual. Our affections are
disordered; they no longer work as in God’s original design plan for
human beings. There is a failure of proper function, an affective
disorder, a sort of madness of the will. In this condition, we know (in
some way and to some degree) what is to be loved (what is objectively
lovable), but we nevertheless perversely turn away from what ought to
be loved and instead love something else. (As the popular song has it:
“My heart has a mind of its own.”) We know (at some level) what is
right, but find ourselves drawn to what is wrong; we know that we
should love God and our neighbor, but we nonetheless prefer not to. Of
course this raises an ancient question, one going back to Socrates: can
a person really do what she knows or believes is wrong? Meno 77b-78a; see also
Protagoras, 345e.
There are many traditional arguments for the idea that you can’t desire what on balance you see to be wrong: I don’t have the space to deal with these arguments here, except to say that I don’t find them at all convincing. One argument I would like to mention, though, can be put as follows: “There a serious semantic problem here. It isn’t so much as coherent to suggest that a person might love and value what she knows is hateful, or hate what she knows is good. Consider Sam, who says, ‘I love and propose to promote what is in fact evil’: his words fail to make coherent sense. Words like ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, etc. are used to commend and censure, express approval and disapproval; hence the first part of Sam’s utterance expresses his approval of the very thing of which the second part of the utterance expresses his disapproval. You can sensibly say that you are given to approving what is evil, that you have done so often in the past and even that you often do so; but you can’t sensibly say that right now you approve what is evil or hate what is good. Sam hasn’t contradicted himself (he hasn’t asserted a proposition and its denial); what he says is nevertheless incoherent, just as if he had said ‘Hooray for the red, white and blue, and furthermore execrations upon it!’ ”
Reply: first, there are two separate questions here: (1) Is it possible
to love what one knows is evil? and (2) Is Sam’s utterance coherent?
These are independent: one is a question about what sorts of attitudes
are possible, and the other about what sentences make coherent sense
(in English). Even if Sam’s utterance is incoherent, it might still be
possible to love what one knows to be evil. But second, the fact is
Sam’s utterance makes perfect sense. When Milton’s Satan says, “Evil, be
thou my good,” what he says is perfectly intelligible: he means to say
that he prefers, and proposes to promote, what he recognizes to be
evil. We can see what is going on here as follows. It is indeed true
that words like ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘evil’ perform the function of
expressing approval or disapproval. That is only part of their
function, however: they also express properties. (It doesn’t matter for
present purposes precisely what properties they express, but perhaps the property
expressed by ‘good’ [‘bad’] is at any rate equivalent, in the broadly
logical sense, to the property of being approved [disapproved] by God.)
Ordinarily these two go together: one expresses approval of what one
takes to have the property expressed by ‘good’. The important point,
however, is that the two functions can also be prized apart: either of
the two components of the meaning of these terms can be canceled. When
Satan says, “Evil, be thou my good,” the aspect of the term ‘evil’ by
which it ordinarily expresses disapproval gets canceled, as does the
aspect of the term ‘good’ whereby it ordinarily expresses the property
of being good. So Satan is
As
both Augustine and Pascal noted, this whole complex and confusing
congeries of attitudes, affections and beliefs that constitutes the
state of sin is a fertile field for ambiguity and
self-deception. For contemporary comment, see Bas van
Fraassen’s “The Peculiar Effects of Love and Desire,” in Perspectives
on Self-Deception, ed. A. Rorty and
B. McLaughlin (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1988. Van
Fraassen offers a subtle account of some of the tangled depths of
self-deception. Quoted in van Fraassen, “The Peculiar
Effects.”
This
ambiguity extends even deeper. One can’t help but concur with the
apostle Paul: “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil
I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (
A traditional conundrum (or pair of
conundra) asks how a person—human or otherwise—could get
into this condition in the first place, and whether what is deepest
here is a problem of intellect or a problem of
will. According to Calvin
(Institutes II, i, 4, p.
245), the first and primal sin is
disobedience; he also says
elsewhere that it is failure to trust God. According to Augustine, (Psalms,
“Not only because he [Adam] was seized by Satan’s blandishments,” says Calvin, “but contemptuous of truth, he turned aside to falsehood” (II, i, 4, p. 245). So it wasn’t just that he somehow non-culpably fell into false belief. He was indeed deceived, but he had a hand in it himself; it was partly a matter of self-deception. He was contemptuous of truth, and that was because at some point his affections went wrong: he was seized by pride. Still, why would his affections go wrong in this way? He must have known that this disobedience is both corrupt and contrary to his own good. So there must have been some kind of prior intellectual fault. But where could such a fault originate: how could it get started? It must be because of self-deception, turning away from what he in some sense knew was the truth. But why deceive himself? There is a complicated many-sided, dialectical relationship between intellect and will here, one such that it isn’t possible to say that either is absolutely prior to the other with respect to falling into sin. One thinks that in some way it must be pride and desire for autonomy that lie at the bottom of the whole mess. Somehow there arises a sneaking desire to be like God, indeed to be equal with him, not to have to play second fiddle (or nth fiddle, for very large n).
Of course the final mystery remains: where does this sneaking desire to be equal with God come from in the first place? How could the very idea so much as enter Adam’s soul? In one way, this is easy enough for us to understand; we ourselves share in the same corruption, the same madness of the will. But Adam was made perfect; so how could it happen? That’s not easy to say. God grants us an area of autonomy (we can accept or reject him), and this desire somehow arises out of that autonomy. I see what God is like, I see what I am like, and I have a choice (a choice I partly hide from myself): I can take pleasure in my condition, which is wonderfully good, or I can give in to envy. (Perhaps at first a mere prick, a small discomfort I can’t even identify, a subterranean half-thought: why can’t I be like that, like God, who owes no one anything and is such that what he wills determines what is good?)
A speculation: for
any free creature God creates, this falling into sin is clearly a
possibility; God can’t create significantly free creatures who cannot
fall into sin. And perhaps a high probability of such a fall attaches
to free creatures (creatures with an area of autonomy) who are created
in the image of God. God sets out to create beings in his own image:
they resemble him in having will and intellect, and they recognize the
lustrous beauty, glory, and desirability of God’s position. God is
himself the center of the universe; his creatures see the splendor and
wonderful desirability of that condition. Perhaps, insofar as one is
free, and sees both the glory of this position and its enormous
desirability, there is a powerful tendency to desire it for oneself.
Perhaps there is a high probability
These are deep and dark (and gloomy) theological waters; fortunately the model need not take a stand on the questions how God’s creatures could fall into sin, and whether it is intellect or will that is primary in sin. Suffice it to say that we human beings have indeed fallen from a pristine state into sin, a condition that involves both intellect and will. It is an affective malaise, a malfunction or madness of the will. But it is also a cognitive condition, and in what follows we will inquire a bit more closely into the cognitive consequences of sin.
According to the extended A/C model, the noetic effects of sin are
concentrated with respect to our knowledge of other people, of
ourselves, and of God; they are less relevant (or relevant in a
different way: see below, p. 218.) to our knowledge of nature and the
world. Sin affects my knowledge of others in many ways. Because of
hatred or distaste for some group of human beings, I may think them
inferior, of less worth than I myself and my more accomplished friends.
Because of hostility and resentment, I may misestimate or entirely
misunderstand someone else’s attitude toward me, suspecting them of
trying to do me in, when in fact there is nothing to the
suggestion. There are also beliefs we think no person of
good will could come to hold, so
that holding them is prima facie evidence of culpability; see my
“Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith and
Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 36. According to
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, certain kinds of knowledge—knowledge of how
to achieve salvation or happiness—require obedience: one won’t be
able to acquire this sort of knowledge without obedience. (“The Call of
Discipleship,” in The Cost of Discipleship [New York: Macmillan, 1963], pp. 83ff.) “’Tis inexpressible, and almost
inconceivable, how strong a self-righteous, self-exalting disposition
is naturally in man; and what he will not do and suffer to feed and
gratify it: and what lengths have been gone in a seeming self-denial in
other respects . . . ; and all to do sacrifice to this Moloch of
spiritual pride or self-righteousness; and that they may have something
wherein to exalt themselves before God, and above their fellow
creatures,” Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p.
241. Thus Herbert Simon (“A Mechanism for Social
Selection and Successful Altruism,” Science 250 [December 1990], pp. 1665ff.) believes that
the rational way to
behave is to act or try to act in such a way as to increase one’s
personal fitness, that is, to act so as to increase the probability that
one’s genes will be widely disseminated in the next and subsequent
generations, thus doing well in the evolutionary derby; this, he
thinks, is given by our evolutionary history. But then how do we account
for the behavior of people like Mother Teresa, the Scottish
missionary Eric Liddel, the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth
century, or the Methodist missionaries of the nineteenth? Why do they
devote their time and energy and indeed their entire lives to the
welfare of other people, apparently not giving a fig about the fate of
their genes? Two mechanisms, says Simon: “docility,” whereby they are
unusually likely to believe what others tell them (1666), and “limited
rationality” (1667)—to speak plainly, stupidity.
The
most serious noetic effects of sin have to do with our knowledge of
God. Were it not for sin and its effects, God’s presence and glory
would be as obvious and uncontroversial to us all as the presence of
other minds, physical objects, and the past. Like any cognitive process,
however, the sensus divinitatis can malfunction; as a result of sin, it has
indeed been damaged. It is no part of the model to say that damage
to the sensus divinitatis on the
part of a person is due to sin on the part of the same person. Such
damage is like other disease and handicaps: due ultimately to the
ravages of sin, but not necessarily sin on the part of the person with
the disease. In this connection, see Jesus’ remarks (
In
the traditional taxonomy of the seven deadly sins, this is
sloth. Sloth is not simple
laziness, like the inclination to lie down and watch television rather
than go out and get the exercise you need; it is, instead, a kind of
spiritual deadness, blindness, imperceptiveness, acedia,
torpor, a failure to be aware of God’s presence, love,
requirements. It is this sloth as blindness that C. S.
Peirce finds in David Hume: “Lately, when I was suffering at every
mouth through which a man can drink suffering, I tried to beguile it by
reading three books that I hadn’t read for a long time, three religious
books: Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy,
and Hume’s Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion. The
last one did one most good owing to the utter blindness of the man”
(quoted in Edward T. Oakes, “Discovering the American
Aristotle,” First Things [December 1993], p. 27). Insofar as sloth (so
thought of) is (in part) an element of original sin, it is not
something for which one is wholly responsible.
That is just one way in which sin interferes with the deliverances of
the sense of divinity. Another way in which the latter can be
compromised is by way of testimony (which includes not only the case where someone
rushes up and breathlessly tells me that my house is on fire but also
the whole course of my upbringing and acculturation by parents and
peers). Perhaps I am brought up to think there is no such person as
God, that belief in God is a result of superstition, belonging to the
infancy of the race. Perhaps I read Don Cupitt (after ingesting
hallucinogens) and come to regard serious believers in God as objects
of pity or figures of fun. Perhaps I am brought up to think
There are also those who are “always learning
but never able to acknowledge the truth” (
An analogy: Thomas Reid and others point out that the idea of truth, as a relation between beliefs and the world, is part of our native noetic equipment. We ordinarily take it utterly for granted that there is such a thing as truth, and we ordinarily take it for granted, with respect to any given belief we hold, that it is indeed true. But the right kind of cognitive environment can squelch and smother our notion of truth, so that some people in some circumstances wind up apparently with no concept of truth at all—or, more likely, with a way of thought that displays deep and buried conflicts. One way this can happen is by way of perverse philosophizing. Following certain postmodern thinkers, I can come to see that classical foundationalism is deeply mistaken, and then (perversely) leap lightly to the conclusion that really, there is no such thing as truth. (There is only my version, your version, and so on; where these differ, there is only an issue of power, not of truth.) It can happen in other ways as well. It is said that one of the most serious results of the long Communist tyranny in eastern Europe was just such a suppression of the idea of truth. The truth was officially perverted so often and so cynically (for example, the official organ of the Communist party devoted to the dissemination of this propaganda was ironically named Pravda, i.e., truth) that people came to lose the very idea of truth. They were lied to at every level in utterly shameless and blatant ways; they knew they were being lied to, knew that those who lied to them knew they were lying and that those to whom they lied knew they were being lied to, and so on; the result was that the whole idea of truth tended to evaporate. One said whatever would be of advantage; the question whether it was true no longer arose. In the same sort of way, the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis can be compromised, skewed, or even suppressed altogether.
The most important cognitive consequence of sin, therefore, is failure
to know God. And this failure can have further cognitive consequences.
At present and especially in academia, there is widespread doubt and
agnosticism with respect to the very existence of God. But if we don’t
know that there is such a person as God, we don’t know the first thing
(the most important thing) about ourselves, each other, and
our world. That is because (from the point of view of the model) the
most important truths about us and them is that we have been created by
the Lord and utterly depend upon him for our continued
existence. In this connection, consider the despised
creationists, who believe that the world is only ten thousand years
old: they are ignorant, pitifully ignorant about when God created the
world. From the point of view of the model, this ignorance pales into
utter insignificance compared with that of many of their cultured
detractors, who foolishly believe that there is no God and thus
(naturally enough) are ignorant of the vastly more important fact that
the world was, indeed, created by God.
Can we take things a step further yet?
According to John Calvin, “As soon as ever we depart from Christ, there
is nothing, be it ever so gross or insignificant in itself, respecting
which we are not necessarily deceived.” Commentaries on the First Book of Moses,
Called Genesis, tr. John King
(Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847); reprinted by Baker Book
House (Grand Rapids, 1979).
A
couple of less sweeping views however have a great deal to be said for
them. One who is agnostic about the existence of God may also be
agnostic about his origin and his place in the universe. In this
section, I shall argue that one who displays a certain kind of
agnosticism with respect to his origin and place in the universe, and
also grasps a certain cogent argument, will not, in fact, know anything
at all; nothing he believes will have warrant sufficient for knowledge.
To explore this suggestion, we may begin by considering the Scottish
philosopher David Hume. Thomas Reid, Hume’s great contemporary and
antagonist, took Hume to be a skeptic with respect to external objects, an enduring self,
other minds, causality, the past, and so on. Although Reid’s view has been the majority
opinion with respect to Humean exegesis, there has always been a
minority opinion according to which Hume really wasn’t a skeptic at
all. This striking divergence is testimony to the fact that Hume is a
black enigma: a certain surface clarity
masks a deep underlying murkiness that makes confident interpretation
impossible.
We
can see what by considering the Hume of the conclusion of Book I of the
Treatise. Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1951; first published in 1739), pp. 263ff. Subsequent page references
to the Treatise are to
this edition.
Where
am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what
condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger
must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any
influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all
these questions, and begin to fancy myself in
Of course this is Hume in his study, sometime before he emerges for that famous game of backgammon. Nature herself, fortunately, dispels these clouds of despair: she “cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends” (p. 269).
Still, the enlightened person, Hume thinks, holds the consolations of
Nature at arm’s length. She knows she can’t help acquiescing in the
common illusion, but she maintains her skepticism of “the general
maxims of the world” and adopts a certain ironic distance, a wary
double-mindedness: “I may, nay I must yield to the current of nature, in
submitting to my senses and understanding; and in this blind submission
I shew most perfectly my sceptical disposition and principles” (p.
269). This is the irony of the human condition: those who are
enlightened can see that what nature inevitably leads us to believe is
false, or arbitrary, or at best extremely dubious; they also see,
however, that even the best of us simply don’t have it in them to
successfully resist her blandishments. We can’t help believing those
“general maxims,” or if we can, it is only for brief periods of time
and in artificial situations. No one can think Humean thoughts about,
say, induction, when under attack by a shark or when clinging
precariously to a rock face high above the valley floor. (You won’t
find yourself saying, “Well, I do of course believe that if this
handhold breaks out, I’ll hurtle down to the ground and get killed,
still [fleeting sardonic, self-deprecatory smile] I also know that this
thought is just a deliverance of my nature and is therefore not really
to be taken seriously.”) Still, in other circumstances, one can take a
sort of condescending and dismissive stance with respect to these
promptings of nature; in reflective moments in my study, for example, I
see through them. As a rational creature, I can rise above them,
recognizing that they have little or nothing to be said for them.
Indeed, I see more: this skepticism is itself a reflexive
skepticism; it arises even with respect
to this very thought; this very doubt, this feeling of superiority,
this seeing through what our natures impose on us, is itself a
deliverance of my nature and is thus as suspect as any other. The true
skeptic, says Hume, “will be diffident of his philosophical doubts, as
well as of his philosophical conviction” (p. 273). And this leads to the scandal of skepticism:
if I argue to skepticism, then
of course I rely on the very cognitive faculties whose unreliability
is the conclusion of my skeptical argument.
In these passages, therefore, Hume isn’t shamefacedly confessing an epistemic weakness or flaw, rather as a victim of neurosis or mental disease might. (“Doctor, I often find that I simply can’t bring myself to believe that induction will continue to work, or that I myself have existed for a good long time, or that there really are other people or external objects.”) No; this multiply skeptical position, he thinks, is somehow the right one, the one that the man of sense (at least the man of philosophic sense) will adopt. The rest of us who unthinkingly acquiesce in the promptings of nature, who without a thought believe in causal connection, induction, persistent selves, external objects—the rest of us are from this perspective naive or foolish, unwitting dupes of our own nature. Hume is a sort of Presbyterian of the intellect; we are all, sage and ingenue alike, enmeshed in the toils of an original sin of the mind (and here perhaps we can see a lingering influence of the Calvinism of his youth). Of course Hume might claim that at least he has the advantage of recognizing that (ordinarily) he is a dupe. In this regard, he may seem like the publican in Jesus’ parable, who at any rate had the grace to confess that he was indeed a sinner. But the fact is Hume is really more like the Pharisee. He isn’t confessing a frailty or shortcoming, hoping for a cure; he is arguing, as he sees it, from a position of strength or at least insight; the rest of us who unthinkingly accede to the promptings of nature are the ones who suffer from intellectual shortcoming. More than that, we are irrational, in the Humean view, in that reason, carefully preserved from the corrupting influence of everyday attitudes, enjoins this skepticism upon us. To fail to accept it is to fail to follow reason, to go against its teachings, and in that sense to fall into irrationality.
Now Thomas Reid takes issue with Hume (at any rate Hume as he sees him) at just this point. He sees Hume as standing with Descartes in thinking that the deliverances of perception, memory, induction, sympathy, testimony, and any other faculty we might have must be validated before the bar of reason and consciousness. That is, none of these faculties can reasonably be trusted until it has been shown to be reliable by an argument that meets two conditions. First, the argument in question must start from premises that are either self-evident (like elementary truths of arithmetic), or else deliverances of consciousness: such propositions about my own mind as that I seem to see a horse, or am appeared to redly, or believe that the Orkney Islands are north of Aberdeen. Second, the argument must be such that each of its steps is self-evidently valid.
Now
Descartes thought that in fact the other sources of belief could
be legitimated by reason and
consciousness. He thought first to establish the reliability of reason
itself by giving a reasoned (rational) proof that we have been created
by a benevolent God who is nondeceptive
See his Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1979). As in “Epistemology Naturalized,” in
Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press,
1969).
Now one reaction would be to see this condition as interesting and perhaps even mildly regrettable, but of no real importance: these other sources of belief are perfectly acceptable, whether or not we can find arguments of the above sort for their reliability. Reid’s Hume, however, takes quite a different tack; he takes it to be a sign of foolishness or error or dupery (in any event, part of the deplorable human condition) to accept the testimony of any source whose veracity hasn’t been (or, worse, can’t be) established by way of consciousness and reason. He therefore concludes that the rational course is to reject these beliefs (given that we can’t show in the way in question that their sources are reliable), even if because of nature’s imperious edicts we can’t actually follow that austere prescription.
This strikes Reid as a piece of consummate arbitrariness:
The
sceptic asks me, Why do you believe the existence of the external
object which you perceive? This belief, sir, is none of my manufacture;
it came from the mint of Nature; it bears her image and superscription;
and, if it is not right, the fault is not mine: I ever took it upon
trust, and without suspicion. Reason, says the sceptic, is the only
judge of truth, and you ought to throw off every opinion and every
belief that is not grounded on reason. Why, sir, should I believe the
faculty of reason more than that of perception?—they came both
out of the same shop, and were made by the same artist; and if he puts
one piece of false ware into my hands, what should hinder him from
putting another? Thomas Reid’s Inquiry and
Essays, ed. Keith Lehrer and Ronald
E. Beanblossom (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), pp.
84–85.
I believe that Reid is substantially right here;
the Humean skeptic is arbitrary. But perhaps not entirely arbitrary; see Warrant: The Current
Debate, pp. 100ff. Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion, ed. Richard Popkin
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980), p. 45. Or at any rate Philo’s; I make no pretense
to settle the question of who speaks for Hume in the
Dialogues, something Hume
artfully conceals.
In such questions as the present [cosmogony, the origin of the universe], a hundred contradictory views may preserve a kind of imperfect analogy, and invention has here full scope to exert itself. Without any great effort of thought, I believe that I could, in an instant, propose other systems of cosmogony which would have some faint appearance of truth: though it is a thousand, a million to one if either yours or any one of mine be the true system. (Dialogues, p. 49)
He adds a bit later that on this topic, “A total suspense of judgment is here our only reasonable resource” (p. 53). Hume so understood has no idea at all how the world got here, how rational creatures such as we ourselves have arisen, and what the origin and provenance of our rational or belief-producing faculties might be.
Now
turn to the question whether our cognitive faculties are
reliable and do, in fact, produce for the most part true belief. Given
Hume’s complete agnosticism about the origins of his cognitive
faculties, something like his deeply agnostic attitude to that question
is no more than sensible. For suppose Hume asks himself how likely it
is that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given his views (or
rather lack of views) about the origin and provenance of ourselves and
those
We can see this more fully as follows. Let R be the proposition that our cognitive faculties are reliable: now what is the likelihood of R? As Reid points out, we all instinctively believe or assume that our cognitive faculties are indeed reliable; but what is the probability of that assumption, given the relevant facts? Well, what are the relevant facts? First, they would be facts about those faculties: the probability of R given (relative to) the population of China would not be relevant. And presumably the relevant facts would be facts about how these faculties originated; whether they were designed; if so, by whom and with what end in view; what constraints governed their development; and what their purpose and function is, if, indeed, they have a purpose and function. Were they, as Reid thought, created in us by a being who intends that they function reliably to give us knowledge about our environment, ourselves, and God himself—all the knowledge needed for us to attain shalom, to be the sort of beings God intended us to be? On that scenario, the purpose of our cognitive faculties would be (in part, at least) to supply us with true beliefs on those topics, and (given that they are functioning properly) there would be a high probability of their doing just that.
Did
they, by contrast, arise by way of some chance mechanism,
something like the mindless swerve of atoms in the Democritian void?
What is the likelihood, on that possibility, that our cognitive faculties are
reliable? Well, you might think it pretty low. More likely, you may
think that you simply can’t say what that probability is: perhaps it is
high (though presumably not very high), perhaps it is low; you simply
can’t tell. We aren’t thinking here of Bayesian
personal probability but of some kind of objective probability, the
sort of probability Hume has in mind when he says that “it is a
thousand, a million to one if either yours or any one of mine be the
true system.”
But that means that the probability of R, given Hume’s agnosticism, is also inscrutable for Hume. Let F be the relevant facts about their origin, purpose, and provenance: my claim is that, for Hume, P(R/F) (the probability of R on F) is inscrutable. He simply doesn’t know what it is and has no opinion about its value, although presumably it wouldn’t be very high. Another way to put it: the probability of R, given Hume’s agnosticism, is inscrutable.
And that gives Hume a reason to be agnostic with respect to R as well; it gives him a reason to doubt that R is, in fact, true. For our cognitive faculties, our belief-producing mechanisms, are a bit like measuring instruments (more exactly, measuring instruments under an interpretation). Our faculties produce beliefs; for each belief, there is the content of that belief, the proposition believed, a proposition that is true if and only if the belief is true. Now a state of a measuring instrument (relative to a scheme of interpretation) can also be said (in an analogically extended sense) to have content. For definiteness, consider a thermometer and suppose its pointer is resting on the number 70. Given the natural scheme of interpretation, this state can be said to have the content that the ambient temperature is 70˚ F. And of course a thermometer is reliable only if the propositions it delivers in this way are for the most part true, or nearly true.
Imagine, then, that you embark on a voyage of space exploration and
land on a planet revolving about a distant sun. This planet has a
favorable atmosphere, but you know little more about it. You crack the
hatch, step out, and immediately find something that looks a lot like a
radio; it periodically emits strings of sounds that, oddly enough, form
sentences in English. The sentences emitted by this instrument express
propositions only about topics of which you have no knowledge: what the
weather is like in Beijing at the moment, whether Caesar had eggs on
toast on the morning he crossed the Rubicon, whether the first human
being to cross the Bering Strait and set foot on North America was
left-handed, and the like. A bit unduly impressed with your find, you
initially form the opinion that this quasi radio speaks the truth: that
is, the propositions expressed (in English) by those sentences are
true. But then you recall that you have no idea at all as to what the
purpose of this apparent instrument is, whether it has
a purpose, or how it came to be. You
see that the probability of its being reliable, given what you know
about it, is for you inscrutable. Then (in the absence of
investigation) you have a defeater
The same goes, I think, in the case of Humean views (or non-views) about our origins and the origin and purpose, if any, of our cognitive faculties. Suppose I join Hume in that agnosticism. Then P(R/F) is for me inscrutable (as for Hume); I have no idea what the probability of my faculties being reliable is, given the relevant facts about their origin and purpose. But then I have a defeater for my original belief or assumption that my faculties are in fact reliable. If I have or can get no further information about their reliability, the reasonable course for me is agnosticism with respect to R, giving it up, failing to believe it. It isn’t that rationality requires that I believe its denial, but it does require that I not believe it.
Suppose, therefore, that I am agnostic with respect to R: I believe neither it
nor its denial. And now consider any belief B
I have: that belief, of course, will be
a deliverance of my cognitive faculties. However, I don’t believe that
my cognitive faculties are reliable—not because I’ve never
thought about the question, but because I have
thought about it and seen that P(R/F)
is inscrutable for me. Well, what does rationality require with respect
to this belief B? The
clear answer seems to be that I have a defeater for this belief too, a
reason to withhold it, to be agnostic with respect to it. Perhaps it
isn’t possible, given my nature, that I be
agnostic with respect to it, at least
much of the time; as Hume says, nature may not permit this. Still, this
agnosticism is what reason requires, just as Hume suggests (though for
different reasons). And we can take one further step with Hume.
Because B is just
any belief I hold—because
I have a defeater for just any belief I hold—I also have a
defeater for my belief that I have a defeater for B. This universal, all-purpose defeater provided by
my agnosticism is also a defeater for itself, a self-defeating defeater. Of course this raises problems: if I have a
defeater-defeater (a defeater for my defeater for R), then don’t I
thereby lose my defeater for R?
Am I back where I was before I acquired the defeater for R? No; for my
defeater-defeater is also a defeater for R. For explanation and detail,
see part IV, section E, “The Dreaded Loop,” from my “Naturalism
Defeated,” presently unpublished.
Here we can imagine the following response: “Hey, hang on a minute! You said Hume and any similarly situated agnostic has a defeater for R, a belief to which he is inclined by nature—and you added that the rational course for them therefore is to give up belief in R—provided they have no other information about the reliability of their faculties. But what about that strong natural inclination to believe that our faculties are in fact reliable? Doesn’t that count as ‘other information’?” According to Reid (who might object to being pressed into service in defense of Hume), this belief in the reliability of our faculties is a first principle:
Another first principle is—That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious. (275)
He goes on:
If any truth can be said to be prior to all others in the order of nature, this seems to have the best claim; because, in every instance of assent, whether upon intuitive, demonstrative, or probable evidence, the truth of our faculties is taken for granted. . . . (277)
Surely there is truth here: this conviction is one normal human beings ordinarily have, and, as Reid gleefully points outs, even skeptics also seem to assume, in the course of ordinary daily living, to be sure, but most poignantly when proposing their skeptical arguments, that their faculties are functioning reliably. Very few skeptics, in offering their skeptical arguments, preface the argument by saying something like, “Well, here is an argument for general skepticism with respect to our cognitive faculties; of course I realize that the premises of this argument are themselves produced by cognitive faculties whose reliability the conclusion impugns, and of whose truth I am therefore extremely doubtful.”
But
our question is whether this belief can sensibly be pressed into
service as information that can defeat the defeater provided for R by
Hume’s agnosticism about the origin and provenance of ourselves and our
faculties. As Reid clearly sees, it cannot. If the general reliability
of our cognitive faculties is under question, we can’t hope to answer
the question whether they are reliable by pointing out that these faculties
themselves deliver the belief that they are, in fact, reliable. “If a
man’s honesty were called into question,” says Reid, “it would be
ridiculous to refer it to the man’s own word, whether he be honest or
not” (276). Concede that it is part of our nature to assume R; concede
further that it is part of our nature to take R in the
basic way, so that this
conviction is not given or achieved by argument and evidence but comes
with our mother’s milk; concede still further, if
The same goes, naturally enough, for the
suggestion that we try to determine by scientific means whether our
cognitive faculties are reliable; any such attempt could proceed only
by reliance on the very faculties whose reliability is at issue.
Agnosticism with respect to our
origins is one way to reject the theistic belief that we human beings
have been created in the image of God: as we have seen, agnosticism
with respect to origins destroys knowledge. There is another way to
reject the belief in question: by accepting a belief incompatible with
it, for example, philosophical or metaphysical naturalism.
As Bas van Fraassen notes, it isn’t
easy to say precisely what naturalism is; See his “Science, Materialism, and False
Consciousness,” in Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in
Honor of Plantinga’s Theory of Knowledge, ed. Jonathan Kvanvig (New York: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1996). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. In Why I Am Not a Christian
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957),
p. 107. “Viruses of the Mind,” in Dennett and His
Critics: Demystifying Mind, ed. Bo
Dahlbom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 13ff. As evidence for the
virulence and tenacity of this virus, Dawkins cites the fact that it
took Sir Anthony Kenny (as learned and sapient a person as we can
easily find), a very long time to fight his way clear of it. Others may
wonder whether the virus is all Dawkins says it is, given that Dawkins
himself apparently escaped it long ago.
There is likely to be a further difference between you and Hume. Having
rejected theism, Hume had no comparable story to put in its place: he
was left with no idea as to how humanity arose, under what conditions
our cognitive faculties came to be, and so on. The contemporary
naturalist, however, is in a different condition; for naturalism now
sports a shared myth or story about ourselves and our origins, a set of
shared beliefs about who we are, where we come from, and how we got
here. The story is familiar; I shall be brief. We human beings have
arrived on the scene after millions, indeed, billions of years of
organic evolution. In the beginning, there was just inorganic matter;
somehow, and by way of processes of which we currently have no grasp,
life, despite its enormous and daunting complexity at even the simplest
level, arose from nonliving matter, and arose just by way of the
regularities studied in physics and chemistry. Once life arose, random
genetic mutation and natural selection, those great twin engines of
evolution, swung into action. Various other mechanisms (e.g., genetic drift
and neutral evolution) have been proposed, but these two remain the favorites.
Including ourselves and our cognitive systems. These systems and the underlying mechanisms have also been selected for, directly or indirectly, in the course of evolution. Consider, for example, the mammalian brain in all its enormous complexity. It could have been directly selected for in the following sense: at each stage in its development, the new stage (by virtue of the structures and behaviors it helped bestow) contributed to fitness and conferred an evolutionary advantage, giving its possessors a better chance of surviving and reproducing. Alternatively, at certain stages new structures (or new modifications of old structures) arose, not because they were themselves selected for, but because they were genetically associated with something else that was selected for (pliotropy). Either way these structures were not selected for their penchant for producing true beliefs in us; instead, they conferred an adaptive advantage or were genetically associated with something that conferred such an advantage. And the ultimate purpose or function, if any, of these belief-producing mechanisms will not be the production of true beliefs, but survival—of the gene, genotype, individual, species, whatever.
If
you are a naturalist and also believe these things, then you are what I
shall call an ordinary naturalist. Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous
Idea is a paradigm of ordinary
naturalism as well as naturalism simpliciter; the same goes for Richard
Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker (London: W. W. Norton, 1986). For
animadversions on Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (and on Darwin’s dangerous idea),
see my “Dennett’s
Dangerous Idea,” Books and Culture (May-June 1996); for a powerful animadversion on
the first but not the second, see Jerry Fodor’s “Deconstructing
Dennett’s Darwin,” in Mind and Language 11, no. 3 (September 1996), pp.
246–62. See James Beilby, ed. Naturalism Defeated?
Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism
(forthcoming) for fascinating
objections to and critical comments on this argument, along with my
reply.
First, a correction. In chapter 12 of
WPF, there are really two arguments: a preliminary argument and a main
argument. The main argument is for the conclusion that naturalism is
self-defeating (and hence not rationally acceptable); the preliminary
argument is not for that conclusion, but is, instead, a straightforward
(probabilistic) argument for the falsehood of naturalism. The preliminary argument is also
straightforwardly incorrect. Here I was helped by Branden Fitelson and
Elliott Sober; see their paper “Plantinga’s Probability Arguments
against Evolutionary Naturalism,” Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly 79 (1998), pp.
115–29.
After arguing that P(R/N&E) is low, I went on:
Suppose you do estimate these probabilities in roughly this way: suppose you concur in Darwin’s Doubt, taking P(R/N&E) to be fairly low. But suppose you also think, as most of us do, that, in fact, our cognitive faculties are reliable (with the qualifications and nuances introduced above). Then you have a straightforward probabilistic argument against naturalism—and for traditional theism, if you think these two the significant alternatives. According to Bayes’s Theorem,
P(N&E/R) = P(N&E) × P(R/N&E) / P(R)
where P(N&E) is your estimate of the probability for N&E independent of the consideration of R. You believe R, so you assign it a probability of 1 (or nearly 1); and you take P(R/N&E) to be no more than 1/2. Then P(N&E/R) will be no greater than 1/2 times P(N&E), and will thus be fairly low. No doubt you will also assign a very high probability to the conditional if naturalism is true, then our faculties have arisen by way of evolution; if so, then you will judge that P(N/R) is also low. But you do think R is true; you therefore have evidence against N. So your belief that our cognitive faculties are reliable gives you a reason for rejecting naturalism and accepting its denial (p. 228).
A very pretty little argument: too bad it contains a serious flaw. Here is the problem: in this argument, I was confusing the absolute (logical or anyway objective) probability of R with its probability conditional on our background information B; that is, I was confusing P(R/B) with P(R) simpliciter. (For simplicity, I shall henceforth also suppress E, annexing it to N, so that henceforth N will stand for ordinary naturalism, the conjunction of naturalism simpliciter with E.) We can see this by considering the argument both ways: first, relativizing the probabilities to our background knowledge B, and second, not so relativizing them.
First interpretation: if we relativize the probabilities in question to B, then the relevant application of Bayes’s Theorem will be
P(N/R&B) = P(N/B) × P(R/N&B) / P(R/B)
Here I can set P(R/B) very high, just as I say on p. 228. But I can’t sensibly claim that P(R/N&B) is low. That P(R/N) is low is what I argued: I didn’t argue that the probability of R is low on N plus background knowledge. In the argument that P(R/N) is low, I was abstracting from what we ordinarily think we know (for example, R itself). So I can’t, without further argument, anyway, claim that the probability of R on N together with our background knowledge, is low.
Second interpretation: if we don’t relativize the argument to B (or anything else), the relevant application of Bayes’s will be
P(N/R) = P(N) × P(R/N) / P(R)
as I said on p. 228. But if we are thinking of the absolute probability of R (conditioned only on necessary truths), then I can’t claim (as I did) that P(R) is high: how would I know what proportion of the space of possible worlds is occupied by worlds in which R is true? In particular, the fact that R is true in fact is no reason for assigning it a high absolute (logical) probability. So either way the argument fails.
Fortunately, there is a repair. We are comparing theism (T) and N. So the relevant applications of Bayes’s will be
P(N/R) = P(N) × P(R/N) / P(R)
and
P(T/R) = P(T) × P(R/T) / P(R)
where we are thinking of absolute or logical probabilities. P(R) will have the same value in each expression; so the question is, how do
(a) P(N) × P(R/N)
and
(b) P(T) × P(R/T)
compare in value? Well, P(R/N) is low, as I had argued. However, P(R/T) is not; R is just what we’d expect, given T. (At any rate we’ve got no reason for thinking P(R/T) low.) So (given that we don’t assign N a considerably higher absolute probability than T) we should take the probability of T on R to be greater than that of N on R. But we do, in fact, believe R. So we have a reason to prefer T to N. Not perhaps a very strong reason (this doesn’t tell us a whole lot about the probabilities of T and N on our total evidence) but a reason nonetheless. (It’s the same sort of reason the atheologian has for preferring atheism to theism, given that he thinks it unlikely that a world created by God would display all the evil the world does, in fact, display.)
In essence, the main argument is for the conclusions that P(R/N&E&C) (which I’ll abbreviate as P(R/N); see small print above) is either low or inscrutable; in either case, so I argued, one who accepts N (and also grasps the argument for a low or inscrutable value of P(R/N)) has a defeater for R. This induces a defeater, for him, for any belief produced by his cognitive faculties, including N itself; hence, ordinary naturalism is self-defeating. Now I argued that P(R/N) is low or inscrutable by noting first that natural selection isn’t interested in true belief but in adaptive behavior (taken broadly), so that everything turns on the relation between belief and behavior. I then presented five mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive possibilities for the relation between belief and behavior, arguing with respect to each possibility Pi that P(R/N&Pi) is low or inscrutable, yielding the result that P(R/N) is low or inscrutable.
Here
we can simplify by dropping two of the five possibilities, leaving just
epiphenomenalism, semantic epiphenomenalism (perhaps ‘content
epiphenomenalism’ would be a more felicitous name), and the common
sense (‘folk psychological’) view of the causal relation between belief
and behavior. The first possibility (call it ‘P1’) is epiphenomenalism, the proposition
that belief (conscious belief) isn’t involved in the causal chain
leading to behavior at all. This view was
“It may be assumed . . . that molecular
changes in the brain are the causes of all the states of consciousness.
. . . [But is] there any evidence that these stages of consciousness
may, conversely, cause . . . molecular changes [in the brain] which
give rise to muscular motion? I see no such evidence. . . .
[Consciousness appears] to be . . . completely without any power of
modifying [the] working of the body, just as the steam whistle . . . of
a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery” (T. H.
Huxley, “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata and Its History”
[1874], chapter 5 of his Method and Results [London: Macmillan, 1893], pp. 239–40.) Later in
the essay: “To the best of my judgment, the argumentation which applies
to brutes holds equally good of men; and therefore . . . all states of
consciousness in us, as in them, are immediately caused by molecular
changes of the brain-substance. It seems to me that in men, as in
brutes, there is no proof that any state of consciousness is the cause
of change in the motion of the matter of the organism. . . . We are
conscious automata” (243–44). (Note the occurrence here of that widely
popular form of argument, I know of no proof that
not-p; therefore, there is
no proof that not-p;
therefore, p.) In contrast
to Huxley, I am here using the term ‘epiphenomenalism’ to denote
any view according to which
belief isn’t involved in the causal chain leading to behavior, whether
or not that view involves the dualism apparently part of Huxley’s
version. December 28, 1992, p. 41.
And
the same can be said for conscious belief: if “behavior, however
complex, is governed entirely by biochemistry,” there seems to be no
room for conscious belief to become involved in the causal story, no
way in which conscious belief can get its hand in; it will be causally
inert. Furthermore, if this possibility were, in fact, actual, then
evolution would not have been able to mold and shape our beliefs, or
belief-producing structures, weeding out falsehood and encouraging
truth; for then our beliefs would be, so to speak, invisible
to evolution. Which beliefs (if any) an
organism had, under this scenario, would be merely accidental as far as
evolution is concerned. It wouldn’t make any difference to behavior or
fitness what beliefs our cognitive mechanisms had produced, because
(under this scenario) those beliefs play no role in the production or
explanation of behavior. What then is the probability of R on this
scenario? That is, what is P(R/N&P1)? What reliability requires, of course,
is that a large preponderance of our beliefs be true. Now most large
sets of propositions
The
second possibility as to the relation between belief and behavior (call
it P2) is semantic
epiphenomenalism. From a naturalistic point of view, the natural thing
to think is that human beings are material objects. Though it isn’t easy to say just what a
material object is (as Bas van
Fraassen emphasizes in “Science, Materialism, and False Consciousness”;
see above, footnote 274). For present purposes we need not try to
address that project; we can simply narrow our focus to the claim that
beliefs are neural events or processes of some sort.
Now
if this belief is really a belief, then it will also have
other properties, properties in
addition to its syntax or neurophysiological properties. In particular,
it will have content; it
will be the belief that p, for some proposition p—in this case, the proposition
Cartesian dualism is false. But
how does the content of
this neuronal event—that proposition—get involved in the causal chain leading to
behavior? A question just as pressing, of course, is
‘How does this neuronal event have a content at all?’ What is it that assigns to this neuronal event
the proposition that Cartesian dualism is false, as opposed, for
instance, to the proposition that it is true, or interesting, or
obsolete, or vaguely obscene?
Finally, what is the probability of R, given N&P3, the commonsense (folk psychological) view as to the causal relation between behavior and belief? According to folk psychology, belief serves as a (partial) cause and thus explanation of behavior—and this explicitly holds for the content of belief. I want a beer and believe there is one in the fridge; that belief, we ordinarily think, partly explains those movements of that large lumpy object that is my body as it heaves itself out of the armchair, moves over to the fridge, opens it, and extracts the beer.
Can
we mount an argument from the evolutionary origins of the processes,
whatever they are, that produce these beliefs to the reliability of
those processes? Could we argue, for example, that these beliefs of
ours are connected with behavior in such a way that false belief would
produce maladaptive behavior, behavior which would tend to reduce the
probability of the believers’ surviving and reproducing? Thus Quine: “There is some encouragement in
Darwin. If people’s innate spacing of qualities is a gene-linked trait,
then the spacing that has made for the most successful inductions will
have tended to predominate through natural selection. Creatures
inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy
tendency to die before reproducing their kind” (“Natural Kinds,” in
Ontological Relativity and Other Essays [New York: Columbia University Press, 1969], p.
126). Objection: in any event, these tribespeople
would be ascribing the right properties to the right things, so that
their beliefs are, in some loose sense, accurate, even if strictly
speaking false. Reply: by further gerrymandering, we can easily find
schemes under which their beliefs would lead to adaptive behavior (thus
being functionally equivalent with respect to behavior to the true
scheme) but are not accurate even in this loose sense. There are
schemes of this sort, in fact, in which the properties ascribed are
logically incapable of exemplification. They think everything is a
witch; perhaps, then, their analogue of property ascriptions involves
ascribing certain sorts of witches (rather than properties). (One of these witches,
for example, is such that, as we would put it, if a thing has
it, then that thing is red.) Then their
beliefs will not be accurate in the above sense and will indeed be
necessarily false.
Note
that epiphenomenalism simpliciter and semantic epiphenomenalism unite in declaring or
implying that the content of belief lacks causal efficacy with respect
to behavior; the content of belief does not get involved in the causal
chain leading to behavior. So perhaps we can reduce these two
possibilities to one: the possibility that the content of belief has no
causal efficacy. Call this possibility -C. What we have so far seen
is that the probability of R on N&-C is low or inscrutable,
P(R/N) = P(R/N&C) × P(C/N) + P(R/N&-C) × P(-C/N),
that is, the probability of R on N is the weighted average of the probabilities of R on N&C and N&-C—weighted by the probabilities of C and -C on N.
We
have already noted that the left-hand term of the first of the two
products on the right side of the equality is either moderately high or
inscrutable; the second is either low or inscrutable. What remains is
to evaluate the weights, the right-hand terms of the two products. So
what is the probability of -C, given ordinary naturalism: what is the
probability that one or the other of the two epiphenomenalistic
scenarios is true? Note that according to Robert Cummins, semantic
epiphenomenalism is in fact the received view as to the relation
between belief and behavior. Meaning and Mental Representation
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), p.
130.
It
is exceedingly hard to see, that is, how
epiphenomenalism—semantic or simpliciter—can be avoided, given N. (There have been
some valiant efforts, but things don’t look hopeful.) So it looks as if
P(-C/N) will have to be estimated as relatively high; let’s say (for
definiteness) .7, in which case P(C/N) will be .3. Of course we
could easily be wrong—we don’t really have a solid way of
telling—so perhaps the conservative position here is that this
probability, too, is inscrutable: one simply can’t tell what it is. Given
current knowledge, therefore, P(-C/N) is either high or inscrutable.
And if P(-C/N) is inscrutable,
Well, we really have several possibilities. Suppose we think first
about the matter from the point of view of someone who doesn’t find any
of the probabilities involved inscrutable. Then P(C/N) will be in the
neighborhood of .3, P(-C/N) in the neighborhood of .7, and
P(R/N&-C) perhaps in the neighborhood of .2. This leaves
P(R/N&C), the probability that R is true, given ordinary naturalism
together with the commonsense or folk-theoretical view as to the
relation between belief and behavior. Given that this probability is
not inscrutable, let’s say that it is in the neighborhood of .9. And
given these estimates, P(R/N) will be in the neighborhood of
.41. Of course these figures are the merest
approximations; others might make the estimates somewhat differently;
but they can be significantly altered without significantly altering
the final result. For example, perhaps you think P(R/N&C) is
higher, perhaps even 1; then (retaining the other assignments) P(R/N)
will be in the neighborhood of .44. Or perhaps you reject the thought
that P(-C/N) is more probable than P(C/N), thinking them about equal.
Then (again, retaining the other assignments) P(R/N) will be in the
neighborhood of .55.
In
either case, however, doesn’t the ordinary naturalist—at any rate,
one who sees that P(R/N) is low or inscrutable—have a defeater
for R, and for the proposition that his own cognitive faculties are
reliable? I say he does. To see how, we must note some analogies with
clear cases. First, there are the analogies I mentioned in WPF
(229–31); here are a couple more. Return (pp. 224) to that voyage of
space exploration and the radio-like device that emitted sounds that
constitute English sentences, sentences that express propositions of
whose truth value you are ignorant. At first, you were inclined to
believe these propositions, if only because of shock and astonishment.
After a bit of cool reflection, however, you realize that you know
nothing at all about the purpose, if any, of this instrument, or who or
what constructed it. The probability that this device is reliable,
given what you know about it, is low or inscrutable; and this gives you
a defeater for your initial belief that the instrument indeed speaks
the truth. Consider another analogy. You start thinking seriously about
the possibility that you are a brain in a vat, being subjected to
experiment by Alpha Centaurian cognitive scientists in such a way that
your cognitive faculties are not, in fact, reliable. For one reason or
another, you come to think this probability is greater than .5; then
you have a defeater for your belief that your cognitive faculties are
reliable. Suppose instead that you think this is a genuine possibility,
The
same goes for the naturalist who realizes that P(R/N) is low or
inscrutable. With respect to those factors crucially important for
coming to a sensible view of the reliability of his belief-producing
mechanisms—how they were formed and what their purpose is, if
any—he must concede that the probability that those faculties are
reliable is at best inscrutable. Unless he has some other
information, And how could he have or get other
information? Any such information would consist in beliefs
that were a product of his cognitive faculties, but he has a defeater
for the reliability of those faculties and hence for any belief
produced by them. See chapter 12 of WPF, and “Naturalism
Defeated.” The defeater can’t be defeated because any defeater would
arise from the very faculties or belief-producing processes in
question. For example, the defeater might take the form of an
argument, perhaps for the
conclusion that those belief-producing processes are reliable after
all. But then I would have the same defeater for each of the premises
of this argument, as well as for my belief that if the premises are
true, then so is the conclusion.
We can briefly extend this result to
the case where I am agnostic about ordinary naturalism. I don’t really believe
it; either it seems to me to be about as likely as its denial, or its
probability is inscrutable for me. In either case, once more, I have a
defeater for R, just as in the case of the ordinary naturalist. To see
this, consider once again an analogy, and just to preserve continuity,
make it another instrumental analogy. You
It is easy enough to make the application to agnosticism as between
theism and ordinary naturalism. If I am such an agnostic, the
probability of ordinary naturalism is either in the neighborhood of .5
or inscrutable for me. Suppose the former: what attitude should I take
toward R? Well, there is a fifty-fifty chance that my cognitive faculties
were produced in a way with respect to which the probability of R is
low or inscrutable; if so, however, I have a defeater for R, good
reason to withhold. Suppose the latter: then I can’t rule out any
probability for ordinary naturalism. Because the probability of R on
ordinary naturalism is also inscrutable, I can’t rule out any
probability for R; in particular, I can’t rule out a low probability
for R. But again, that gives me a defeater for my ordinary and
instinctive belief that R. In either case, therefore, I acquire a
defeater for R; unless I have or can come up with a defeater-defeater
for this defeater, And again (see footnote 291), how could I? Any
such defeater-defeater would be subject to the very defeater defeating
R in the first place.
By way of conclusion: the noetic effects of sin don’t necessarily include failure to know anything; Calvin (if that is what, in fact, he thought) goes too far. Still, something in the same general neighborhood is true. If I reject theism in favor of ordinary naturalism, and also see that P(R/N) is low or inscrutable, then I will have a defeater for any belief I hold. If so, I will not, if forming beliefs rationally, hold any belief firmly enough to constitute knowledge. The same goes if I am merely agnostic as between theism and ordinary naturalism. And the same goes if I am agnostic about my origin and the origin of my cognitive faculties. So rejection of theistic belief doesn’t automatically produce skepticism: many who don’t believe in God know much. But that is only because they don’t accurately think through the consequences of this rejection. Once they do, they will lose their knowledge; here, therefore, is another of those cases where, by learning more, one comes to know less.
In this chapter, we have begun to explore the extended model by exploring the nature of sin and some of its cognitive consequences. These consequences extend further than one would ordinarily think; indeed, insofar as sin interferes with the sensus divinitatis and thus with our knowledge of God, it can easily lead to a noetic condition where what rationality demands is that complex, many-layered Humean skepticism. But here a nasty problem looms. According to the A/C model of chapter 6, knowledge requires proper function, and knowledge of God requires proper function of the sensus divinitatis. According to the extended model, however, this belief-producing process has been damaged because of sin, so that it no longer functions properly: how then (on this model) can we have knowledge of the existence and character of God? In the next chapter, we turn to the question how specifically Christian belief, not just generically theistic belief, can have warrant; in answering that question we will also see how the sensus divinitatis is repaired.
The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.
In chapter 6, I proposed a model—the Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model—according to which belief in God can have the three varieties of positive epistemic status with which we have been concerned: justification, rationality (in both its external and internal guises), and warrant. What about specifically Christian belief, belief, not just in God, but in trinity, incarnation, Christ’s resurrection, atonement, forgiveness of sins, salvation, regeneration, eternal life? The main business of this chapter is to extend the A/C model to cover these beliefs, to show how they, too, can have those varieties of positive epistemic status. In chapter 7, I gave an initial statement of this extended model. One element of the extended A/C model has to do with sin and its epistemic consequences; most of chapter 7 was devoted to a development of this feature of the model.
In
this chapter, I turn to the central elements of the model: how can we
think of the full panoply of Christian belief in all its particularity
as enjoying justification, rationality in both its internal and
external varieties, and warrant? How
can we think of these beliefs—some of which, as David Hume loved
to point out, go entirely contrary to ordinary human
experience—as reasonable or rational, let alone warranted, let
alone having warrant sufficient for knowledge? The materials for an
answer lie close at hand. Actually, the materials have
Ed. John Smith (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1959 [first published 1746]). Subsequent page references to
Religious Affections are to this
edition. Ed. John T. McNeill and tr. by Ford Lewis
Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960 [first published in
1559]). References to the Institutes are to this edition.
In
this chapter, I shall develop those materials and propose a
model—the extended A/C model—for warranted
Christian belief: a model in
which full-blooded Christian belief in all its particularity is
justified, rational, and warranted. Contemporary relatives and ancestors of this
model can be found in Stephen Davis, Risen Indeed (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1993); William Abraham,
“The Epistemological Significance of the Inner Witness of the Holy
Spirit,” Faith and Philosophy 7, no. 4 (October 1990); C. Stephen Evans,
The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); my The
Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship (Grand Rapids: Calvin College, 1989); and my
“Christian Philosophy at the End of the 20th Century,” in
Christian Philosophy at the Close of the Twentieth
Century, ed. Sander Griffioen and
Bert Balk (Kampen: Kok, 1995), pp. 29–53.
According to the model (as we saw in chapter 7), we human beings were
created in the image of God: we were created both with appropriate
affections and with knowledge of God and his greatness and glory. Because
of the greatest calamity to befall the human race, however, we fell
into sin, a ruinous condition from which we require rescue and
redemption. God proposed and instituted a plan of salvation: the life,
atoning suffering and death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the
incarnate second person of the trinity. The result for us is the
possibility of salvation from sin and renewed relationship with God.
Now (and here we come to the specifically epistemological extension of
the model) God needed a way to inform us—us human beings
of many different times and places—of the scheme of salvation he
has graciously made available. It is no part of the model to suggest that
explicit beliefs about Jesus Christ are a necessary condition of
salvation: the Old Testament patriarchs, for example, are counted as
heroes of faith in the New Testament ( But hasn’t the historical-critical Scripture
scholarship of the last two hundred years cast grave doubt on the
reliability of the Bible and the claim that it is specially inspired by
God? This suggestion is a proposed defeater for Christian belief and is the subject of chapter
12. E.g., E.g.,
According to John Calvin, the
principal work of the Holy Spirit is the production (in the hearts of
Christian believers) of the third element of the process,
faith. Like the regeneration of which it is a part, faith
is a gift; it is given to anyone who is willing to accept it. Faith,
says Calvin, is “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence
towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in
Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through
the Holy Spirit” (Institutes III, ii, 7, p. 551). Faith therefore involves an
explicitly cognitive element; it is, says Calvin,
knowledge—knowledge of the
availability of redemption and salvation through the person and work of
Jesus Christ—and it is revealed to our minds. To have faith,
therefore, is to know and hence believe something or other. But (as we shall see in chapter
9) faith also involves the will: it is “sealed upon our hearts.” By
virtue of this sealing, the believer not only knows about the scheme of
salvation God has prepared (according to the book of James
[2:19], the devils also
know about that, and they shudder) but is also heartily grateful to
the Lord for it, and loves him on this account. Sealing, furthermore,
also involves the executive function of the will: believers accept the
proffered gift and commit themselves to the Lord, to conforming their lives
to his will, to living lives of gratitude. Presented in this brief and undeveloped way,
this model can seem unduly individualistic. But of course it doesn’t at
all preclude the importance of the Christian community and the church
to the belief of the individual Christian. It is the church or
community that proclaims the gospel, guides the neophyte into it, and
supports, instructs, encourages, and edifies believers of all sorts and
conditions.
But isn’t all this just endorsing a
wholly outmoded and discredited fundamentalism, that condition than
which, according to many academics, none lesser can be conceived? I
fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize
any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look
into the use of
It is therefore hard to take seriously the charge that the views I’m suggesting are fundamentalist; more exactly, it is hard to take it seriously as a charge. The alleged charge means only that these views are rather more conservative than those of the objector, together with the expression of a certain distaste for the views or those who hold them. But how is that an objection to anything, and why should it warrant the contempt and contumely that goes with the term? An argument of some kind against those conservative views would be of interest, but merely pointing out that they differ from the objector’s (even with the addition of that abusive emotive force) is not.
How
does this model, with its excursion into theology, provide an answer to
an epistemological question? How can it be a model for a way in which
Christian belief has or could have justification, rationality, warrant?
The answer is simplicity itself. These beliefs do not come to the
Christian just by way of memory, perception, reason, testimony, the
sensus divinitatis, or any other
of the cognitive faculties with which we human beings were originally
created; they come instead by way of the work of the Holy Spirit, who
gets us to accept, causes us to believe, these great truths of the
gospel. These beliefs don’t come just by way of the normal operation of
our natural faculties; they are a supernatural gift. Still, the
Christian who has received
Given the model, however, the beliefs in question will typically (or at
least often) have the other kinds of positive epistemic status we have
been considering as well. First, they will be internally
rational: For the notion of internal rationality, see
above, p. 110ff. Of course this belief-producing process isn’t exactly like the
others—memory, perception, reason, and even the sensus
divinitatis. That is because these
others are all part of our original increated cognitive equipment,
while (according to the model) the cognitive process here involves a
special, supernatural activity on the part of the Holy Spirit. But this
doesn’t so much as suggest that its deliverances can’t enjoy warrant,
and warrant sufficient for knowledge. What it suggests, instead, is
that the account of warrant of Warrant and Proper
Function must be understood in such
a way that a belief can have warrant even if it is produced by a
belief-producing process of this special kind. True, such a process
that consists in direct divine activity cannot fail to function
properly; we may therefore say that it functions properly in a limiting
sense of the term.
Now Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
So
much for the initial account of the model; I turn now to a more
detailed development of some of its aspects, beginning with
faith. The first thing to note
is that this term, like nearly any philosophically useful term, is used
variously, in a number of different but analogically connected senses.
According to Mark Twain, faith is “believing
To which Thomas Carlyle retorted, “Gad! She’d
better!” Mark Twain, by contrast, claimed he hadn’t heard it had
been offered to her.
In setting out the model, however, I am using the term in a different sense from any of those. My sense will be much closer to that which the Heidelberg Catechism (following John Calvin) ascribes to ‘true faith’:
True faith is not only a knowledge and conviction that everything God reveals in his word is true; it is also a deep-rooted assurance, created in me by the Holy Spirit through the gospel, that, out of sheer grace earned for us by Christ, not only others, but I too, have had my sins forgiven, have been made forever right with God, and have been granted salvation. (Q. 21)
We can think of this
account as making more explicit the content of the definition of faith
offered by Calvin in the Institutes (above, p. 244). The first thing to see is that
faith, so taken, is a cognitive activity. It isn’t merely
a cognitive activity; it also involves
the will, both the affections and the executive function. (It is a
knowledge sealed upon our hearts, as well as revealed to our minds.) Still, even if
faith is more than
cognitive, it is also and at least a cognitive activity. It is a matter of
believing (“knowledge,” Calvin
says) something or other. Christians, on this account, don’t merely
find their identity in the Christian story, or live in it or out of
it; In this way, the model (apparently) differs
from the postmodern Yale theology of Hans Frei (The Eclipse of
Biblical Narrative [1974]
and The Identity of Jesus Christ [1975]) and George Lindbeck (The Nature
of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age
[1984]), which emphasizes the role of
the Bible in the Christian life but is a bit coy as to whether its
apparent teachings—creation, sin, incarnation, atonement,
Christ’s resurrection—are to be taken as actually
true. (See, for example, pp.
143–45 of The Identity of Jesus Christ.) This standoffishness about truth is perhaps the
‘postliberal’ element in Yale theology; according to the present model,
however, it is also unnecessary. The model is designed to show that
straightforward, downright, out-and-out belief
in the great things of the gospel can
have the epistemic virtues we are considering.
Now
what one believes are propositions. To have faith, therefore, is (at
least) to believe some propositions. Which ones? Not, for example, that
the world is the sort of place in which human beings can flourish, or
even or primarily that there is such a person as God. “In understanding faith,” says Calvin, “it is
not merely a question of knowing that God exists . . . but
also—and this especially—of knowing what is his will toward
us. For it is not so much our concern to know who he is in himself, as
what he wills to be toward us” (549). I take it this is a definition or description
of faith by way of presenting a paradigm of it: fully formed and well-developed faith will
be like this. Thus a person who (for example) believes these things,
but without the firmness sufficient for knowledge
of them, can still be said to have
faith. And hence not everything a typical Christian
believes (as a Christian) will be, strictly speaking, part of faith.
For example, she may believe that Jesus Christ performed miracles, or
that God is omniscient, or that the Bible is a specially inspired word
from the Lord, or that faith naturally issues in good works; none of
these is, as such, part of the content of faith. (This is not in any
way to downgrade the importance of these things, and certainly the
content of faith may enter into her reasons for believing them.) And in
thus specifying the content of faith, I am not, of course, trying to
specify those beliefs which are such that accepting them is necessary
for being a real Christian. On the present model, therefore, faith is a
bit narrower than in the account of true faith from the Heidelberg
Catechism (above, p. 247), which includes a “conviction that everything
God reveals in his word is true.” God presumably reveals more, in his
word, than the great truths of the gospel. For example, there is Jesus’
turning water into wine, healing the demoniac, and raising Lazarus from
the dead; these are not among the central truths of the gospel,
although they are related to and illustrative of those
truths.
What
is at issue, in faith, furthermore, is not just knowing that there
is such a scheme (as we saw
above, the devils believe that, and they shudder), but also and most
important, that this scheme applies to and is available to
me. See Calvin, III, ii, 16, p. 561: “Here,
indeed, is the chief hinge on which faith turns: that we do not regard
the promises of mercy that God offers as true only outside ourselves,
but not at all in us; rather that we make them ours by inwardly
embracing them.” As we’ll see in the next chapter, there is more that
distinguishes what the devils know from what the person of faith knows:
she but not they also knows the beauty, loveliness, splendor of this
plan of salvation; still further, she loves it, gives it her hearty
approval, is grateful for it, and commits herself to love and trust the
Lord.
The principal answer is that faith is
a work—the main work, according to Calvin—of the Holy
Spirit; it is produced in us by the Holy Spirit. The suggestion that
belief in the “great things of the gospel” (Jonathan Edwards’s phrase)
is a result of some special work of the Holy Spirit is often thought of
as especially the teaching of such Calvinist thinkers as Edwards and
John Calvin himself. It is, indeed, central to their teaching, and here
the model follows them. On this point as on so many others, however,
Calvin, despite his pugnacious noise about the pestilential papists and
their colossal offenses, may be seen as following out and developing a
line of thought already to be found in Thomas Aquinas. “The believer,”
says Aquinas, “has sufficient motive for believing, for he is moved by
the authority of divine teaching confirmed by miracles and, what is
more, by the inward instigation of the divine
invitation.” Summa Theologiae II-II, q.2, a.9, reply ob. 3 (my emphasis).
According to Aquinas, therefore, faith is produced in human beings by
God’s action; “for since in assenting to the things of faith a person
is raised above his own nature, he has this assent from a supernatural
source influencing him; this source is God. The assent of faith, which
is its principal act, therefore, has as its cause God, moving us
inwardly through grace” (ST II-II, q.6, a.1,
respondeo). Calvin explicitly identifies the third person
of the trinity as the divine actor in question, and Aquinas does not;
this is not a difference of any moment. According to Aquinas, some of
the items proposed by God for our belief can also be the objects of
scientia; when they are, they
are not accepted by faith, for it isn’t possible, he thinks, to have
both scientia and faith
with respect to the same proposition. Because scientia
is often translated as ‘knowledge’,
this makes it look as if Calvin contradicts Aquinas when he says that
faith is a sure and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us.
Appearances are
deceiving, however, and there is no contradiction here.
Scientia for Aquinas is a very
special relation between a person and a proposition; it is one that
holds when the person sees that the proposition follows from first
principles she sees to be true. Thus ‘scientia’
is much narrower than our term
‘knowledge’. It is also narrower than Calvin’s term
‘cognitio’, which is much
closer to our contemporary use of ‘knowledge’. When Calvin says that
faith is a sure and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence to us, he
isn’t ascribing to faith a status Aquinas denies it. On this topic, see
Arvin Vos, Aquinas, Calvin & Contemporary Protestant
Thought (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans,
1985), pp. 18–20.
What
is really involved, in a believer’s coming to accept the great things
of the gospel, therefore, are three things: Scripture (the divine
We
read Scripture, or something presenting scriptural teaching, or hear
the gospel preached, or are told of it by parents, or encounter a
scriptural teaching as the conclusion of an argument (or conceivably
even as an object of ridicule), or in some other way encounter a
proclamation of the Word. What is said simply seems right; it seems
compelling; one finds oneself saying, “Yes, that’s right, that’s the
truth of the matter; this is indeed the word of the Lord.” I read, “God
was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself”; I come to think:
“Right; that’s true; God really was in Christ, reconciling the world to
himself!” And I may also think something a bit different, something
about that proposition: that it
is a divine teaching or revelation, that in Calvin’s words it is
“from God.” What one hears or reads seems clearly and obviously
true and (at any rate in paradigm cases) seems also to be something
the Lord is intending to teach. (As Calvin says, “the Spirit . .
. is the only fit corrector and approver of doctrine, who seals it on
our hearts, so that we may certainly know
According to the model, this conviction comes by way of the activity of
the Holy Spirit. Calvin speaks here of the internal ‘testimony’ and
(more often) ‘witness’ of the Holy Spirit; Aquinas, of the divine
‘instigation’ and ‘invitation’. On the model, there is both Scripture
and the divine activity leading to human belief. God himself (on the
model) is the principal author of Scripture. Scripture is most
importantly a message, a communication from God to humankind; Scripture
is a word from the Lord. On this model (pace most twentieth century Christian theologians), it is
not the case that revelation occurs just by way of
events, which must then be
properly interpreted. No doubt this does indeed happen, but much of
Scripture is centrally a matter of God’s speaking, of his telling us
things we need to know, of his communicating
propositions to us. See Nicholas
Wolterstorff’s Divine Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) for a
specific account of precisely how it could be that the Bible
constitutes divine speech and a divine communication to us. For the
sake of definiteness, in what follows I shall incorporate in the model
the proposition that something like Wolterstorff’s account is in fact
correct. (Of course other accounts could also serve in the
model.) See Warrant and Proper Function
(hereafter WPF), pp. 77ff.
So
Scripture is, indeed, testimony, even if it is testimony of a very
special kind. First, the principal testifier is God. It also differs
from ordinary testimony in that in this case, unlike most others, there
is both a principal testifier and subordinate testifiers: the human
authors. Most others: it sometimes happens with human testimony
that one person is deputized to speak for another, and in those cases
there is the same principal-subordinate structure. See
Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, pp.
38ff. According to
I’m proposing this model as a model of
Christian belief’s having the sorts of epistemic virtues or positive
epistemic status with which we’ve been concerned: justification,
rationality of both the internal and the external variety, and warrant.
Justification needn’t detain us for long. There should be little doubt
that Christian belief can be and probably is (deontologically)
justified, and justified even for one well acquainted
with Enlightenment and postmodern demurrers. If your belief is a
result of the inward instigation of the Holy Spirit, it may seem
obviously true, even after reflection on the various sorts of
objections that have been offered. Clearly, one is then violating no
intellectual obligations in accepting it. No doubt there are
intellectual obligations and duties in the neighborhood; when you note
that others disagree with you, for example, perhaps there is a duty to
pay attention to them and to their objections, a duty to think again,
reflect more deeply, consult others, look for and consider other
possible
Of course some writers charge that if you have faith (as on the model) and think your belief comes from God, then you are arrogant (and hence unjustified). Among the more vivid is the theologian John Macquarrie:
The
Calvinist believes that he himself, as one of the elect, has been
rescued from this sea of error and that his mind has been enlightened
by the Holy Spirit. However much he may insist that this is God’s doing
and not his own, his claim is nevertheless one of the most arrogant
that has ever been made. It is this kind of thing that has rightly
earned for theology the contempt of serious men. Principles of Christian Theology
(New York: Charles Scribner, 1966,
1977), p. 50.
A
Calvinist’s first impulse might be to retort by asking whom or what
Macquarrie credits with furnishing him with the truth, when he finds himself disagreeing
with the bulk of humankind on religious matters (as, of course, he does):
his own cognitive prowess and native sagacity? his own
self-developed penetration and perspicacity? And is that attribution
less arrogant than to attribute enlightenment to the work of the Holy
Spirit? Rather than pursue this unprofitable retort, however, let’s
think a bit more soberly about the charge. First, note that the
accusation initially seems to be brought, not necessarily against
someone who actually has been
enlightened by the Holy Spirit, but against someone who
believes that she has. No doubt
it was the Holy Spirit who was at work in the hearts of the faithful
and faith-filled patriarchs and others mentioned in
We’ll look further into this charge of arrogance in chapter 13; for now, let me just ask this. Suppose you believe that you have been favored by the Lord in a way in which some others haven’t been: does it really follow that you are arrogant? You recognize that in some respect you are better off than someone else: perhaps you have a happy marriage, or your children turn out well, or you are enjoying glowing good health while a good friend is succumbing to melanoma. And suppose you attribute at least part of the difference to God’s activity. Are you then automatically arrogant? Isn’t it rather that you would be arrogant if, instead, you thought the difference wasn’t attributable to God but was a manifestation, say, of personal strength, or virtue, or wisdom on your part? Suppose you think you know something someone else doesn’t—perhaps Macquarrie thinks that he, as opposed to his Calvinist friends, knows that the Calvinist view of faith is mistaken. Is he thereby arrogant? If not, is it that he fails to be arrogant because he does not attribute his good fortune to God, perhaps attributing it instead to his own native good sense? That hardly seem promising.
The
fact is there isn’t any arrogance involved as such in recognizing that
God has given you something he hasn’t (or hasn’t yet) given everyone.
Human beings are, indeed, tempted to arrogance, and often succumb; still,
one isn’t arrogant just by virtue of recognizing that God has given you
a good thing he hasn’t (yet, anyway) given everyone else. (You might be
as puzzled as anyone else that it is you who are the recipient of the gift.) Arrogance would
be involved, no doubt, if you thought of this gift as your
right, so that God would be
unjust if he didn’t give it to you. But you’re not culpable if you
believe your faith is a gift from the Lord and note that not everyone
has as yet received this gift. Indeed, the right attitude here, far
from a crestfallen admission that you have been arrogant in thus
believing, is gratitude and thanksgiving for this wonderfully great
gift. See my “Ad de Vries,” The Christian Scholar’s
Review 19, no. 2 (1989), pp. 171–78.
Internal rationality (see above, pp. 110ff.) has a dual aspect: on the
one hand, it requires proper function in the part of the cognitive
system that lies “downstream from experience”; on the other, it
requires more generally that you have done your best or anyway well
enough with respect to the formation of the belief in
question. This requirement of internal rationality may
seem to overlap with justification. It does, if in fact there are
intellectual duties prescribing the behavior required by rationality.
Even if there are no such duties, however, internal rationality still
requires the behavior in question. But aren’t there many different theories of
(say) incarnation and atonement? Don’t Christians disagree about this?
So which of the many views of Incarnation and Atonement are in fact
rational? The question is misplaced. There are many different theories
as to how it is that people are able to think; it is still plain to
many of us that some people do (sometimes) think. There are many
theories about what numbers are; it is still plain that 7 + 5 = 12. We
can quite properly believe in the Atonement even if we don’t see
exactly how it is supposed to go and don’t embrace any of the theories;
it can also be that we are rational in believing in the Atonement but
not in accepting some specific theory of it.
The part of Calvin’s definition of faith that is especially striking to contemporary ears is that on his account faith is a really special case of knowledge (“a sure and certain knowledge”; compare also the account of true faith in the Heidelberg Catechism, above, p. 247). Faith is not to be contrasted with knowledge: faith (at least in paradigmatic instances) is knowledge, knowledge of a certain special kind. It is special in at least two ways. First, in its object: what is allegedly known is (if true) of stunning significance, certainly the most important thing a person could possibly know. But it is also unusual in the way in which that content is known; it is known by way of an extraordinary cognitive process or belief-producing mechanism. Christian belief is “revealed to our minds” by way of the Holy Spirit’s inducing, in us, belief in the central message of Scripture. The belief-producing process is dual, involving both the divinely inspired Scripture (perhaps directly, or perhaps at the head of a testimonial chain) and the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit. Both involve the special activity of God.
If faith
is such an extraordinary way of holding belief, why call it ‘knowledge’
at all? What about it makes it a case of knowledge? Here we must look a
bit more deeply into the model. The believer encounters the great
truths of the gospel; by virtue of the activity of the Holy Spirit, she
comes to see that these things are indeed true. And the first thing to
see is that, on this model, faith is a belief-producing
process or activity, like
perception or memory. It is a cognitive device, a means by which
belief, and belief on a certain specific set of topics, is regularly
produced in regular ways. Although this regularity is typical of
cognitive processes, it isn’t really necessary; see my reply to Lehrer
in Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology, ed. J. Kvanig (New York: Rowman and Littlefield,
1996), pp. 332ff.
First, when these beliefs are accepted by faith and result from the
internal instigation of the Holy Spirit, they are produced by cognitive
processes working properly; A caveat: as Andrew Dole points out in “Cognitive
Processes, Cognitive Faculties, and the Holy Spirit in Plantinga’s
Warrant Series” (as yet unpublished), it is not obvious that one can
directly transfer necessary and sufficient conditions for warrant from
beliefs produced by faculties to beliefs produced by
processes. Though this need not be the only
purpose involved. Perhaps the beliefs
produced have other virtues in addition to truth: perhaps they enable
one to stand in a personal relationship with God, to face life’s
vicissitudes with equanimity, to enjoy the comfort that naturally
results from the belief that constitutes faith, and so on.
Reliability, of course, demands more than just that these beliefs be true. A thermometer stuck on 72˚F is not reliable even if it is somewhere—San Diego, say—where it is always 72˚F. What it would do if things were relevantly different (what it would do in appropriately nearby possible worlds) is also relevant; a process or instrument is reliable only if it would produce a true output under different conditions. On the current model, this condition is also met. The Holy Spirit doesn’t work just by accident or at random, and there are a thousand ways in which, even if things had been different, the Holy Spirit would have produced the results actually produced. Clearly, any circumstances in which it produces this output are circumstances in which this output is true; hence, under those circumstances, it would have produced a true output. Under what conditions would the Holy Spirit have failed, with respect to a given person, to do this work of enabling one to see the truth of the great things of the gospel? The model need take no stand on this issue, but it is part of much traditional Christian teaching to hold that a necessary condition of my receiving the gift of faith is my acquiescing, being willing to accept the gift, being prepared to receive it. There is a contribution to this process that I myself must make, a contribution that I can withhold.
According to this model, faith as a belief-producing mechanism involves a supernatural element; it involves God’s doing something specially and directly and quite out of the ordinary. Does that compromise the claim that the deliverances of faith constitute knowledge? I can’t see how. There was no suggestion in the original account that cognitive mechanisms must all be natural, whatever precisely that comes to. Must the account be revised because faith doesn’t go just by natural laws or regularities, working instead by way of the free cooperation of a person—God himself—whose speaking in Scripture is, of course, free, as is the action of the Holy Spirit in revealing and sealing the great truths of the gospel? Again, I can’t see why. The same goes for the mechanism Thomas Reid calls ‘testimony’, a mechanism whereby we learn from others; this mechanism too (often) works by way of free human agency. (When you ask me how old I am, I can [freely] tell you, or in a minor fit of pique, freely refuse.)
Why,
then, does faith constitute knowledge? Because what one believes by
faith satisfies the conditions that are jointly sufficient and
severally necessary for warrant. If the degree of warrant (which, given
the satisfaction of the above conditions, is determined by the firmness
or strength of belief) is high enough, then the beliefs in question
will constitute knowledge. On the account of knowledge given in WPF. I
leave as homework the problem of showing how to modify the model in
such a way as to accommodate the other main accounts of warrant.
According to the model, Christian belief in the typical case is not the
conclusion of an argument (which is not to say arguments cannot play an
important role in its acceptance), For example, in rebutting defeaters: see
below, chapter 11.
In
the typical case, therefore, Christian belief is
immediate; it is formed in
the basic way. It doesn’t
proceed by way of an argument from, for example, the reliability of
Scripture or the church. As Jonathan Edwards puts it, “This
evidence, that they, that are spiritually enlightened, have of the
truth of the things of religion, is a kind of intuitive and immediate
evidence. They believe the doctrines of God’s word to be divine,
because they see divinity in them.” A Treatise concerning Religious
Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1959 [originally published 1746]), p.
298. Subsequent references to Religious Affections
are to this edition. Of course that is not to say that a believer
can properly reject proposed defeaters out of hand, without examination
(see below, chapters 11–14); nor is she committed to refusing to think
she could be wrong. No doubt she can be wrong: that is part of the
human condition. If there were a demonstration or a powerful argument
from other sources against Christian belief, an argument to which
neither she nor the Christian community could see a satisfactory reply,
then she might have a problem; this would be a genuine example of a
clash between faith and reason. No such demonstration or argument,
however, has so far reared its ugly head.
Instead, Scripture (through the work of the Holy Spirit) carries its own evidence with it; as Calvin says, it is ‘self-authenticating’:
Let this point therefore stand: that those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and that Scripture indeed is self-authenticated. . . .
“Therefore,” he says,
illumined by his power, we believe neither by our own nor by anyone
else’s judgment that Scripture is from God; but above human judgment we
affirm with utter certainty that it has flowed to us from the very
mouth of God by the ministry of men. We seek no proofs, no marks of
genuineness upon which our judgment may lean; but we subject our
judgment and wit to it as to a thing far beyond any guess work! . . .
Such, then, is a conviction that requires no reason; such, a knowledge
with which the best reason agrees—in which the mind truly reposes
more securely and constantly than in any reasons. I speak of nothing
other than what each believer experiences within himself—though
my words fall far beneath a just explanation of the matter. I, vii, 5, pp. 80–81. Here Calvin speaks of
“utter certainty” and of the mind “reposing securely” in these
teachings. But this is only one side of the story: elsewhere he notes
that even the best and most favored of us are subject to doubt and
uncertainty: “For unbelief is so deeply
rooted in our hearts, and we are so inclined to it, that not without
hard struggle is each one able to persuade himself of what all confess
with the mouth: namely, that God is faithful” (III, ii, 15); he also
says that “unbelief, in all men, is always mixed with faith” (III, ii,
4, p. 547). (What he means, of course, is not that unbelievers always
have a portion of faith, but that faith always contains a portion of
unbelief.) It is only in the pure and paradigmatic instances of faith
that there is that ‘utter certainty’.
Calvin speaks here of a certainty, a knowledge that Scripture “has
flowed to us from the very mouth of God,” even if it is “by the
ministry of men.” He does not mean to say, I think (at any rate this
is not how the model goes), that the Holy Spirit induces belief in the
proposition the Bible (or the
book of Job, or Paul’s epistles, or the thirteenth chapter of First
Corinthians) comes to us from the very mouth of
God. As to what Calvin actually meant here, there
has been considerable debate.
What
is this ‘self-authentication’ of which Calvin speaks? Is he (or the
model) claiming that the truths of the gospel are self-evident
in something like the traditional sense
in which 2 + 1 = 3 is
said to be? Not at all. Self-evident propositions are necessarily true
and, at least
See WPF, 108–9. According to Richard Swinburne, “Very few
parts of the Bible seem to claim either ‘self-evident’ authority or
indeed even to be the immediate ‘word of the Lord’ . . . much of
Scripture has not seemed self-evident to so many of its readers;
argument is needed to show how it is to be understood and why it is to
be believed. Those to whom Scripture seems ‘self-evident’ are well
advised to reflect on these facts before reaffirming their conviction
that its truth needs no argument” (Revelation [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992], p. 118). Here two
issues are conflated: (a) are these gospel truths self-evident? and (b)
can they properly be believed without argument? According to the
present model the answer to (b) is ‘yes’ but to (a) is ‘no’. (There is
also still a further issue: according to the model, the central truths
of the gospel are self-authenticating in this way; the same does not
(necessarily) go for the rest of what the Bible teaches.)
Nor
does Calvin mean to say (nor is it any part of the model to assert)
that Scripture is self-authenticating in the sense that it offers
evidence for itself or
somehow proves itself to
be accurate or reliable. Suppose a question is raised with respect to a
given source of belief: is this source of belief really reliable?
Suppose a question is raised with respect to a particular teaching of
Scripture: is this particular teaching really true? Neither the source
nor the particular teaching can, by itself, give an answer that
(rationally) allays that doubt. Analogy: suppose I read Hume in an
unduly receptive frame of mind and become doubtful that my cognitive
faculties are, in fact, reliable. I can’t rationally quell or quiet that
doubt by offering myself an argument for their reliability. It is the
reliability of those very faculties, that very source, that is at
issue; and if I have a general doubt about their reliability, I should
also have the same doubt about their reliability in this specific
instance; I should have the same doubt about the premises of the
argument I offer myself, and about my belief that the premises imply
the conclusion. Similarly for Scripture: If I am doubtful about its
reliability, I can’t sensibly quell or quiet that doubt by noting that,
say,
What, then, could Calvin mean when he says that Scripture is
self-authenticating? We can see what he means by noting a respect in
which the gospel truths resemble self-evident propositions. According
to the model, these truths, like self-evident truths, are indeed
evident (do indeed have warrant); and, like self-evident truths, they
have their evidence immediately—that is—not by way of propositional
evidence. They do not get their evidence or warrant by way of being
believed on the evidential basis of other propositions. So from that
point of view, these truths too could be said to be
self-evident—in a different and analogically extended sense of
that term. They are evident, but don’t get their evidence from other
propositions; they have their evidence in themselves (and not by way of
inference from other propositions). Compare Jonathan Edwards: “The gospel of the
blessed God don’t go abroad a begging for its evidence, so much as some
think; it has its highest and most proper evidence in itself”
(Religious Affections, p.
307). Faith resembles perception, memory, and
rational intuition (whereby one grasps what is self-evident) in that in
all three cases the beliefs in question are properly basic with respect
to warrant. But faith differs from perception (though not from memory
and rational intuition) in that it does not involve anything like the
highly articulated and detailed sort of sensuous phenomenology that
prompts perceptual belief.
What Calvin means, then (and what the testimonial model endorses), is that we don’t require argument from, for example, historically established premises about the authorship and reliability of the bit of Scripture in question to the conclusion that the bit in question is in fact true; that whole process gets short-circuited by way of the tripartite process producing faith. Scripture is self-authenticating in the sense that for belief in the great things of the gospel to be justified, rational, and warranted, no historical evidence and argument for the teaching in question, or for the veracity or reliability or divine character of Scripture (or the part of Scripture in which it is taught) are necessary. The process by which these beliefs have warrant for the believer swings free of those historical and other considerations; these beliefs have warrant in the basic way.
But suppose someone does
believe these things with a degree of firmness sufficient to constitute
knowledge: isn’t this attitude, however it is caused, irrational,
contrary to reason? Suppose I read the
I don’t mean for a moment to suggest that
Scripture scholarship is unimportant or unimportant for the Christian
life (see chapter 12); what I mean is only that knowledge of its
results is not necessary for warranted Christian belief. As is argued by, e.g., James L. Muyskens,
The Sufficiency of Hope: The Conceptual Foundations of Religion
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1979), p. 113; see also pp. 134–44.
Not at all. Faith, according to the model, is far indeed from being a blind leap; it isn’t even remotely like a leap in the dark. Suppose you are descending a glacier at twelve thousand feet on Mount Rainier; there is a nasty whiteout and you can’t see more than four feet before you. It’s getting very late, the wind is rising and the temperature dropping, and you won’t survive (you are wearing only jeans and a T-shirt) unless you get down before nightfall. So you decide to try to leap the crevasse before you, even though you can’t see its other side and haven’t the faintest idea how far it is across it. That’s a leap in the dark. In the case of faith, however, things are wholly different. You might as well claim that a memory belief, or the belief that 3 + 1 = 4 is a leap in the dark. What makes something a leap in the dark is that the leaper doesn’t know and has no firm beliefs about what there is out there in the dark—you might succeed in jumping the crevasse and triumphantly continue your descent, but for all you know you might instead plummet two hundred feet into the icy depths of the glacier. You don’t really believe that you can jump the crevasse (though you don’t disbelieve it either); you hope you can, and act on what you do believe—namely, that if you don’t jump it, you don’t have a chance.
The
case of faith, this sure and certain knowledge, is very different. For
the person with faith (at least in the paradigmatic instances), the
great things of the gospel seem clearly true, obvious, compelling. She
finds herself convinced—just as she does in the case of clear
memory beliefs or her belief in elementary truths of
arithmetic. Again, in the paradigmatic cases; but of
course the fact is the conviction and belief involved in faith come in
all degrees of firmness. As Calvin puts it, “in the believing mind
certainty is mixed with doubt” and “we are troubled on all sides by the
agitation of unbelief.” In typical cases, therefore, as opposed to
paradigmatic cases, degree of belief will be less than maximal.
Furthermore, degree of belief, on the part of the person who has faith,
typically varies from time to time, from circumstance to
circumstance.
Compare belief of this sort with the a priori and memory beliefs I spoke of above. In a certain sense, there isn’t anything to go on in any of the three cases. You don’t accept memory and obvious a priori beliefs on the basis of other beliefs; but you also lack the detailed phenomenological basis, the rich and highly articulated sensuous imagery that is involved in perception. What you do have in all three cases is another kind of phenomenal evidence, what I have been calling doxastic evidence. (In WPF I called it impulsional evidence.) There is a certain kind of phenomenology that distinguishes entertaining a proposition you believe from one you do not: the former simply seems right, correct, natural, approved—the experience isn’t easy to describe (WPF, 190ff.). You have this doxastic evidence in all three sorts of cases (as, indeed, in any case of belief), and you have nothing else to go on. But you don’t need anything else to go on: it is not as if things would be better, from an epistemic point of view, if you believed, say, 2 + 1 = 3 or that you had oatmeal for breakfast this morning on the evidential basis of other propositions, or on the basis of some kind of sensuous imagery more or less like that involved in perception. (I don’t mean that you can’t get more evidence, for something you believe by way of memory, but that you would not necessarily be better off, epistemically speaking, if you believed the proposition in question on the basis of other beliefs or on the basis of sensuous imagery.) The same goes (on the model) for the beliefs of faith: you don’t have either sensuous imagery or evidence from other things you believe to go on; the beliefs are none the worse, epistemically speaking, for that. In fact (on the model) they are all the better for that; they have (or can have) much more firmness and stability than they could sensibly have if accepted on the basis of rational argument or, as in this case, historical investigation; they can also have much more warrant. These beliefs (on the model) are not accepted on the basis of other beliefs; in fact, other beliefs are accepted on the basis of them.
You might think this model is a model of how, broadly speaking, Christian belief can have warrant by way of religious experience. That’s not exactly right—or if it is right, then memory and a priori beliefs also get their warrant by way of experience. But suppose we think that (on the model) the beliefs of faith do get their warrant by way of experience—that is, by way of doxastic experience—and suppose we describe that experience as religious experience. What is crucially important to note is that we don’t have here an argument from religious experience to the truth of these Christian beliefs. There could be something like that, a model according to which Christian belief got warrant by way of an argument from religious experience. This would be one in which you have religious experience (or note that others do), and then argue (perhaps by way of something roughly like the analogical argument for other minds) to the truth of these doctrines. Alternatively, it might be like the arguments some have offered from the facts of perceptual experience for the truth of perceptual beliefs. This model isn’t like that. The experience in question is an occasion for the belief in question, not a phenomenon whose existence serves as a premise in an argument for that belief.
According to
But
faith is also “the evidence of things not seen.” By faith—the
whole process, involving the internal instigation of the Holy
Spirit—something becomes evident (i.e., acquires warrant, has what it takes to be
knowledge). And what thus becomes evident or warranted is indeed not
seen. This doesn’t mean that it is indistinct, blurred, uncertain, or a
matter of guesswork; what it means is that the belief in question isn’t
made evident by way of the workings of the ordinary cognitive faculties
with which we were originally created. (The author refers, by way of
synecdoche, to these faculties as vision.) Return to the account of
Thomas’s skepticism (above, pp. 254): Thomas would not believe until he
saw the nail holes, put his finger where the nails were, thrust his
hand into Christ’s side. Jesus then says to him, “Because you have seen
me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have
believed” ( Compare Aquinas: “Accordingly, if anyone
would reduce the foregoing words to the form of a definition, he may
say that faith is a habit of the mind, whereby eternal life is begun
in us, making the intellect assent to what is non-apparent
(ST II-II, q.4, a.i, respondeo).
We can understand this testimonial model better if we compare it with a
picture of a very different sort—that of John Locke, whose
Enlightenment model is still dominant in some Christian
circles. Locke’s cool rationalism with respect to the
authority of Scripture is echoed at present by, for example, Richard
Swinburne (see footnote 348), but also by those more evangelical thinkers who
hold that warrant for Christian belief can only come by way of argument
or evidence. An Essay concerning Human
Understanding, ed. with
“Prolegomena” by Alexander Fraser (New York: Dover, 1959 [original
first published in 1690]), IV, xix, 1, p. 429. Subsequent page
references to Locke’s essay are to this edition.
All of our beliefs should be formed by following reason; but this doesn’t mean, as Locke sees it, that there is no rational room for beliefs formed by faith, which he defines as “the assent to any proposition, not thus made out by the deductions of reason; but upon the credit of the proposer, as coming from God, in some extraordinary way of communication” (416). Nor does it mean that we can’t properly believe an item of divine revelation, where that item itself is not more likely than not with respect to what is certain for us:
I do not mean that we must consult reason, and examine whether a proposition revealed from God can be made out by natural principles, and if it cannot then we may reject it. . . .
What he does mean is
but consult it we must, and by it examine whether it be a revelation from God or no: and if reason finds it to be revealed from God, reason then declares for it as much as for any other truth, and makes it one of her dictates. (439)
Locke’s claim is that before believing an allegedly revealed proposition, we must first satisfy ourselves by reason that this proposition is, indeed, a revelation from God. What we need is a rational proof (a proof whose premises and procedures come from reason, not from revelation) that the proposition in question really is proposed for our belief by God. So what we need in the case of a scriptural teaching is a rational proof that this teaching is indeed a divine revelation; it is that proposition which must be shown to be probable with respect to what is certain for us. Once we have that, then we can properly believe what it teaches, although presumably with a firmness that is proportional to the probability (with respect to what is certain for us) that the teaching in question really does come from God.
Things are very different on the testimonial model. It isn’t that one believes, for example, that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, because one has first seen or shown that it is likely (with respect to what is certain) that this particular suggestion of Paul’s (or perhaps all of II Corinthians, or perhaps the entire New Testament, or perhaps the entire Bible) is in fact divinely inspired and hence true. This would be vastly too tenuous and speculative. A belief that the passage is a divine revelation, if properly formed by way of historical inquiry, could only be halting and tentative; but then the belief itself would have to be equally halting and tentative. As Calvin puts it:
If we
desire to provide in the best way for our consciences—that they
may not be perpetually beset by the instability of doubt or
vacillation, and that they may not also boggle at the smallest
quibbles—we ought to seek our conviction in another place than
human reasons, judgment, or conjectures, that is, in the secret
testimony of the Spirit. Institutes, p. 78. Of course it doesn’t follow that Scripture
scholarship and biblical commentary are not both important and
necessary; Calvin himself wrote more than twenty volumes of detailed
and searching biblical commentary.
Instead, on the present model the source of belief and knowledge here
is independent of ordinary historical investigation and of the
probability mongering, the vagaries and uncertainties to which that
line of inquiry is condemned. The belief in question is, instead,
immediate and basic, an immediate response to the proclamation. Of
course this response takes place within the context of a whole
interlocking
Since
for unbelieving men religion seems to stand by opinion alone, they, in
order not to believe anything foolishly or lightly, both wish and
demand rational proof that Moses and the prophets spoke divinely. But I
reply: the testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason.
For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the
Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by
the inward testimony of the Spirit. The same Spirit, therefore, who has
spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our
hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been
divinely commanded. (79) Note here that the Holy Spirit plays a dual
role: inspiring the human authors of Scripture (bringing it about that
they say what he wants them to say) but also working in the hearts of
the hearers and readers, bringing it about that they believe what they
hear and read. So the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit is to what he
himself has said.
Why is this elaborate scheme necessary? Why these supernaturally inspired writings and this individually applied supernatural testimony of the Holy Spirit? Or rather (because God could have accomplished his aim of enabling human beings of many times and places to know about the possibility and means of salvation in many different ways), what might recommend this particular scheme? Wouldn’t some less extravagant means suffice? Couldn’t this information come to us just as well by way of ordinary human testimony, for example? Perhaps (as Locke thought) God could have revealed the great truths of the gospel in some direct way only to certain human beings. They could then write them down for the benefit of the rest of us, who are then supposed to be able to see in the ordinary way that these writings do, indeed, constitute divine revelation (and are accordingly both true and to be believed). Why have any truck with special faculties or supernatural belief-producing processes like faith and the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit?
Well, first of all, we have no reason to think God either specially
prizes ontological economy or specially dislikes supernatural
processes. But the main problem with Locke’s appealingly simple device
is that it wouldn’t work. First, according to the extended A/C model,
“No one can come to me unless the Father who
sent me draws him” ( This, once more, is a point on which Calvin
and Aquinas concur: “for since, by assenting to what belongs to faith,
man is raised above his nature, this must needs come to him from some
supernatural principle moving him inwardly; and this is God”
(STII-II, q.6, a.1, respondeo; see
also article 2). When I speak of supernatural activity on the part of
God, I don’t mean to suggest a sort of incursion into or intervention in
the natural order. The fact is, God is constantly active in the world:
apart from his upholding activity, the world would disappear like a
candle flame in a high wind. Supernatural activity on the part of God
(as well as miracles) must be understood, instead, in terms of
God’s special activity,
as opposed to the way in which he ordinarily treats the things he has
created. There are depths and problems here; they will have to await
another occasion.
Furthermore, suppose someone did come to believe, just by way of historical
investigation that Jesus was indeed the divine son of God, that he died
for our sins and rose again, and that through him we can have eternal
life. Merely believing
this—as an interesting fact about the world, rather like the fact
that the universe began in a Big Bang some twelve to sixteen billion
years ago—is insufficient. These truths must be sealed to the
heart, as well as revealed to the mind. This sealing is the topic of the
next chapter; now we note only that coming to faith includes more than
a change of opinion. It also (and
“If they wouldn’t believe Moses and the
prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the
dead” (
We therefore need a change of attitude in addition to a change of opinion, and won’t sustain the latter without the former. Well then, why couldn’t God (supernaturally if he feels that is necessary) just arrange for a change of attitude and affections? Why do we need that supernatural source for a change in opinion? Given the right affections, wouldn’t Scripture and our ordinary faculties (reason, memory, perception, sympathy, induction, etc.) be sufficient to enable us to see the truth of the message of the gospel?
I
doubt it. First, what is proposed is such that by virtue of the
ordinary faculties employed in historical investigation, only a few
people would acquire the knowledge in question, and they only after a
great deal of effort and much time; furthermore, their belief would be
both uncertain and shot through with falsehood. As Aquinas says about the existence of God if
accepted on the basis of the theistic proofs (ST I, q.1, a.1,
respondeo; Summa
contra Gentiles, Bk. I, ch. 4; ST
II-II, q.2, a.4). It is for this reason, Aquinas says, that it was
entirely appropriate for the existence of God to be proposed as an
object of belief or faith, even though it could in fact be proved by
reason.
Still (comes the reply), can’t we discover for ourselves, without any
special divine aid or assistance, that the Bible (the New Testament,
say) is in fact “from God”: divinely inspired in such a way that God
speaks to us in it and through it, Perhaps in the way proposed by Nicholas
Wolterstorff’s Divine Discourse.
As I understand Wolterstorff, however, his account of how it could be
that God speaks presupposes the main lines of Christian teaching, and hence
wouldn’t offer a way in which we could come to see that that teaching
is in fact true (i.e., wouldn’t provide the materials for an argument
for the truth of that teaching). This would substantially be the
Locke-Swinburne model; however, it isn’t clear whether they would concur
with the current proposal in the suggestion that a change in affection
and attitude is necessary to a proper appreciation of the historical
case.
I
don’t think so. Even discounting the effects of sin on our apprehension
of the historical case, that case isn’t strong enough to produce
warranted belief that the main lines of Christian teaching are
true—at most, it could produce the warranted belief that the main
lines of Christian teaching aren’t particularly improbable. For how
could such a case go? What follows is roughly based on Richard
Swinburne’s argument for a similar conclusion in his Revelation
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992),
chapters 5, 7, and 8. A difference is that Swinburne thinks one
believes that p if and only if one believes that p is more probable
than not. (Faith and Reason [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], p. 32); I take it
that belief that p is more probable than not is nowhere nearly
sufficient for belief that p. (I am about to throw an ordinary die: I
believe it is more likely than not that it won’t come up showing face 2
or 3, but I certainly don’t believe that it won’t; what I actually believe on this head
is only that it will come up showing one of faces 1 through 6 (and not,
for example, wind up delicately balanced on one of its points or
edges). See below, pp. 390ff.
What
would such a case be like? How could it be constructed? The conclusion
of the case (or argument) would be that the central Christian claims
are probable. Now a proposition
is probable only with respect to some other proposition or
propositions. The absolute or logical probability of a proposition would then be its
probability with respect to a necessary truth. These probabilities would not be Bayesian
measures of degrees of belief, but something much more
objective—Richard Swinburne’s epistemic probability, or the
objective probability of WPF (pp. 161ff.). Peter’s vision in
How can we construct such a case—argue that P(G/K)
is reasonably high? The
usual way (and the method followed by Swinburne) is to try to find some
proposition (or group of propositions) P which is probable with respect
to K, and which is such that G is probable with respect to its
conjunction with K: that is, a proposition P such that P(P/K) and
P(G/P&K) are both high. For example, you might argue first that T,
the existence of God, is probable on K, our background knowledge. Then
you might argue that given our background knowledge K and
the existence of God (T), it is
probable that God
Thus Swinburne: “So if there is other
evidence which makes it quite likely that there is a God, all powerful
and all good, who made the Earth and its inhabitants, then perhaps it
becomes to some extent likely that he would intervene in human history
to reveal things to them” (Revelation, p. 70).
To illustrate and explain this procedure, suppose you are interested in the probability that Eleonore is at the party. It is very probable, on your background knowledge K, that Paul is at the party (call that proposition ‘P’): P(P/K) is high—for definiteness, say it’s .9. It is also very likely that Eleonore is at the party (call that proposition ‘E’), given that Paul is (she ordinarily goes to every party he goes to); so P(E/P&K) is also high—say it is also .9. There is a formula from the probability calculus that enables you to conclude that it is likely that Eleonore is there, too:
P(E/K) equals or exceeds P(P/K) × P(E/P&K).
Thus
P(E/K) will be at least .81. “At least”: that is because there could also
be some probability that Eleonore would be there even if Paul were not.
The probability of Eleonore’s being there (E) will be the weighted
average of the probabilities of E given Paul’s being there (P) and the
probability of E given -P—weighted by the probabilities of P and
-P. The relevant formula is P(E/K) =
[P(E/(P&K)) × P(P/K)] + [P(E/(-P&K)) × P(-P/K)].
This sort of argument can be reiterated. Perhaps you also know that there is a pretty good probability—.8, say—that Vonnie will be there, given that Eleonore is: in that case, you can conclude that the probability of Vonnie’s being there is at least .648; and perhaps you know that the probability of Jim’s being there, given that Vonnie is there, is .95; then the probability that he’s there will be at least .616.
Now
suppose we try along these lines to construct a case for the
probability of G with respect to that background knowledge K. We should
first have to find the probability that T (theism) is true: what is the
probability (on our background knowledge, or the totality of what we
know apart from theism) that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly
good being who has created the world? In his book The
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Especially, perhaps, with respect to the
judgments of comparative simplicity involved, and the judgment that
simplicity is, in fact, a good guide to probability.
But
if my only ground for Christian teaching is its probability with
respect to K, and all I know about that probability is that it is
greater than .5, then I can’t rationally believe that teaching. Suppose I know that the coin you are
about to toss is loaded. I don’t know just how heavily it is loaded, so
I don’t know what the probability is that it will come up heads, but I
do know that this probability is greater than .5. Under those
conditions I do not believe that the next toss of this coin will come
up heads. (Of course I also don’t believe that it will come up
tails; and I
suspect that it will come up
heads.) All I know is that it is more likely than not to come up heads;
and that’s not sufficient for my sensibly believing
that it will. The same goes in this
case: if what I know is only that the probability of Christian belief
(with respect to K) is greater than .5, I can’t sensibly believe
it. Note, of
course, that we can’t simply add theism to the relevant
body of knowledge K on the grounds that it is more probable than not on
what we know; that way lies contradiction. It is more probable than not
that this die will not turn up ace; the same, of course, for each of the
other five possibilities; so if we could add each of these propositions
(it won’t come up 1, it won’t come up 2 . . . ) to K, we wind up with
the contradiction that the die will come up showing some number between
1 and 6 (inclusive) and also that it will not.
We must next consider the probability, given T&K, that
A God would make some kind of revelation (of himself, or perhaps of what we need to know about him) to humankind.
Well, that seems quite likely, although of course it’s very hard to predict a priori what God would or wouldn’t do. Again, let’s be generous and estimate this probability as also lying in the interval .9 to 1.
But now we come to the hard parts. Somehow we have to make a probabilistic argument for the proposition that such a revelation would contain G, the great claims of the gospel. Of course a revelation from God would include G only if G is true; so what we really need here is a probabilistic argument for a conclusion sufficient to entail G. One common way to do this would be to argue that it is likely that Jesus taught G, and that by raising Jesus from the dead God endorsed or ratified that teaching. But just on the basis of ordinary historical scholarship, without the assumption that the Bible is, in fact, a divine revelation, it really isn’t likely that Jesus taught anything nearly as definite as G—that is, sin, incarnation, atonement, and general availability. Scripture scholars argue at length about what precisely Jesus taught, but those who approach the matter ‘from below’ (i.e., without employing any special theological assumptions) for the most part are not at all prepared to assert that Jesus taught G. Indeed, even if we do accept the Bible as authoritative, it still won’t be clear that Jesus taught G; much of our grasp of the central claims of Christian faith comes from other parts of the Bible (e.g., the Pauline epistles) and later reflection (e.g., the Nicene Creed).
Perhaps, though, it is likely just on historical grounds that the teachings of Jesus were such that by sensible interpretation and extrapolation one could arrive at G. So we must ask after the probability of
B Jesus’ teachings were such that they could be sensibly interpreted and extrapolated to G
given K&T and A;
that is, we must ask after the value of P(B/(K&T&A)). B
is fairly vague, but let’s suppose it’s rather likely, just on the
basis of historical scholarship. Of course there will be many who would
demur—those who think Jesus was a homosexual magician, See Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician
(New York: Harper and Row,
1978). See Thomas Sheehan, The First Coming
(New York: Random House,
1976).
But now things get harder yet. We must next consider the proposition that God endorsed Jesus’ teachings by performing a great miracle and raising him from the dead. What is the probability, just on historical grounds, that
C Jesus rose from the dead?
Of course, C must be
taken in a literal and bodily sense; it is not to be glossed as, for
example, the mere thought that the followers of Jesus underwent some
experience so impressive and revivifying that they
As in much contemporary liberal and
quasi-liberal theology. See, e.g., Norman Perrin, The Resurrection
according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), p. 83: of the
witnesses to the resurrection appearances of Jesus, he says, “in some
way they were granted a vision of Jesus which convinced them that God
had vindicated Jesus out of His death and that therefore the death of
Jesus was by no means the end of the impact of Jesus upon their
lives.” Here
we can bracket the question what sort of body Jesus had upon
resurrection: was the body he had upon resurrection (whether or not it
was numerically the same body he
had before his death) a glorified body with supernatural powers? The latter would be
still harder to establish by historical argument (see Robert Cavin’s
“Is There Sufficient Historical Evidence to Establish the Resurrection
of Jesus?” Faith and Philosophy [July 1995]).
Next, we must consider the probability of
D In raising Jesus from the dead, God endorsed his teachings
on the
previous propositions; that is, we must consider
P(D/(K&T&A&B&C)). From C we have only that Jesus arose from
the dead, not that God raised him from the dead, thereby endorsing his
teaching. Given T, though, it does seem likely that God
raised him from the dead—how else
would it happen? Still, did he, in so doing, ratify what Jesus taught?
Not necessarily: there are other reasons why he might have done it.
Perhaps it was to endorse the teaching of the Pharisees as opposed to
the Sadducees (
But there is still another probability to be evaluated here: the probability that in raising Jesus from the dead and endorsing his teachings, he was also endorsing their extrapolation to G, the central teaching of Christianity: we must look into the probability of
E The extension and extrapolation of Jesus’ teachings to G is true
That is, we must look into P(E/(K&T&A&B&C&D)). Here the issues are more complex than they appear at first. Suppose you were completely convinced, on merely historical grounds, that Jesus rose from the dead: wouldn’t it be an enormous further step to conclude G, that he was, in fact, the divine and unique son of God, the second person of the trinity, and that his suffering and death is a propitiatory sacrifice, whereby we can have eternal life? It isn’t easy to see how a powerful historical case for all this could be made; perhaps it could go as follows. In accord with B, above, Jesus’ teachings can naturally be extrapolated or extended to G; and perhaps God endorsed this extension of Jesus’ teachings in raising him from the dead. But why think so? Why think that extrapolation (as opposed to all the other possibilities) has it right? Well, perhaps Jesus intended to (and did) found a church to interpret and preserve his teachings; God ratified that intention too; the church he founded is still extant, preserved (by the Holy Spirit, perhaps) from error, and teaches G. Here we really have five further propositions that together constitute our historical case for E; so, instead of E, we must consider the probability of the conjunction of
(1) Jesus intended to (and did) found a church to interpret and preserve his teachings,
(2) God ratified that intention in raising him from the dead,
(3) The church Jesus founded is still extant,
(4) God has preserved that church from error,
and
(5) That church teaches G
on K&T&A&B&C&D.
Now in the
context of the present argument, we can take the conjunction of (1) to (5)
as E*. Our present project, then, is to evaluate the probability of E*,
so construed, on K&T&A&B&C&D. It seems sensible to
estimate
P((1)&(2)&(3)&(4)/(K&T&A&B&C&D)) as
very
Celsus, an early critic of Christianity,
apparently thought this probability fairly low, not much greater than
.5 (see Origen, Contra Celsum,
1.68); let’s suppose Celsus was wrong. Swinburne (Revelation, chapter 8) proposes two criteria for determining
what is to count as the church: continuity of aim and continuity of
organization. The first depends on continuity of doctrinal teaching;
but then to apply it we would already have to know what the true church
teaches. That is, we would have to know what Jesus intended his church
to teach; but then we can’t use this test to determine what Jesus
intended his church to teach.
Now how do we get a probability (on K) for G, given all this? Note that E entails G; so (following our present argument) to find the probability of G on K, what we need is to find the probability of E on K. How do we do that? Our argument followed the strategy of finding a series of propositions, T and A-E, such that the first is probable on K, the second on K together with the first, the third on K together with the first and second, and so on. A little arithmetic enables us to conclude that
P(E/K)
will be equal to or greater than
P(T/K) × (P(A/(K&T)) × P(B/(K&T&A)) × P(C/(K&T&A&B)) × P(D/(K&T&A&B&C)) × P(E/(K&T&A&B&C&D)).
The little arithmetic goes as follows.
By
(1) P(X/Y) ≥ P(X/Z&Y) × P(Z/Y)
we know that
(2) P(E/K) ≥ P(E/K&T&A&B&C&D) × (P(T&A&B&C&D/K).
Consider the right multiplicand. According to the probability calculus,
(3) P(X&Y/Z) = P(X/Z) × P(Y/X&Z);
hence
(4) P(T&A&B&C&D/K) = P(T&A&B&C/K) ×
P(D/T&A&B&C&K).
By substitution into (2) we have
(5) P(E/K) ≥ P(E/T&A&B&C&D&K) ×
P(T&A&B&C/K) ×
P(D/T&A&B&C&K).
Again, by (3) we know that
(6) P(T&A&B&C/K) = P(C/T&A&B&K) × P(T&A&B/K);
substituting into (5), we have
(7) P(E/K) ≥ P(E/T&A&B&C&D&K) ×
P(C/T&A&B&K) ×
P(T&A&B/K) × P(D/A&B&C&K).
Applying (3) and substitution a couple of more times and rearranging terms, we have
(8) P(E/K) ≥ P(T/K) × P(A/K&T) × P(B/K&T&A) ×
P(C/K&T&A&B) × P(D/K&T&A&B&C) ×
P(E/K&T&A&B&C&D),
which was to be demonstrated.
In some cases these values were intervals rather than real numbers, sharp probabilities. That’s no problem; since we are in any event winding up with the statement that P(G/K) is equal to or greater than some number, what we do is just use the lower bounds of the intervals. Doing the arithmetic, in the present case we wind up with the proposition that P(E/K) is at least .21. If instead of using just the lower bounds, we use the midpoints of the intervals assigned, we find that P(G/K) is at least .35. Suppose we stick with the midpoint (rather than the lower bound): then our argument entitles us to say only that the probability of G on K is at least .35. It could be higher, of course, but all we can say with confidence, given the argument, is that it is equal to or greater than .35.
Now of
course it is ludicrous to assign real numbers to these probabilities:
there is vagueness of many kinds here. Not only can’t we sensibly
assign a real number to any of these probabilities, it also seems wrong
to assign them intervals with sharp boundaries; our actual reasoning
must be vaguer. Perhaps the best we can really say is that these
probabilities are high, or low, or fairly near .5. Still, our
reasoning, even if vague, would have to be guided here roughly and
vaguely by the calculus of probabilities; and the best way to let it be
thus guided is to assign probabilities (and intervals of probability)
that comport with the vague estimates we seriously make, and then
It is for this reason that some such scheme as proposed in the testimonial model is necessary, if we human beings are to be able to know the great truths of the gospel.
According to Jesus Christ himself,
“unless a person is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (
Regeneration heals the ravages of sin—embryonically in this life,
and with ever greater fullness in the next. Just what are the
cognitive benefits of
regeneration? First, there is the repair of the sensus
divinitatis, so that once again we
can see God and be put in mind of him in the sorts of situations in
which that belief-producing process is designed
John Calvin summarizes some of these cognitive benefits in his famous spectacles metaphor:
Just as old or bleary-eyed men and those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing, yet can scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly; so Scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God. (Institutes, p. 70)
Here Calvin is
suggesting that what we learn from Scripture and by way of faith
gathers, focuses, and clarifies what we learn by way of the sensus
divinitatis, enabling us to see God
and his love, glory, beauty, and the like with much higher resolution.
He could have added that it also gives us a clearer view of our world:
we now see what is most important about all the furniture of heaven and
earth—namely, that it has been created by God. We can even come to
see, if we reflect, what is most important about numbers, propositions,
properties, states of affairs, and possible worlds: namely, that they
really are divine thoughts or concepts. See Thomas Morris and Christopher Menzel,
“Absolute Creation,” American Philosophical Quarterly
(October 1986) and Christopher Menzel,
“Theism, Platonism, and the Metaphysics of Mathematics,” in
Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy, ed. Michael Beaty (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1990). This ‘theistic conceptualism’ is controversial,
though certainly the majority opinion in the tradition of those theists
who have thought about it.
Still further, it enables us to see what is most important about
ourselves, and in so doing removes the defeater that is the Achilles’
heel of naturalism. As we saw in chapter 7, one of the most
far-reaching of the noetic effects of sin is that it skews belief about
our
A popular objection to the evolutionary argument against naturalism is a tu quoque—briefly, “the same to you, buddy.” Perhaps the most challenging version of this objection is by Keith Lehrer. Consider theism (and call it ‘T’)—not austere theism, but theism itself, including the proposition that we and our cognitive faculties have been created by a just and loving God and created in his image. What is P(R/T)? Well, maybe not as high as you think. The fact that God is just and loving doesn’t prevent all the ills we human beings are heir to—warfare, cruelty, starvation, earthquakes, flood, fire, and pestilence. Granted, God has his own good reasons for permitting these things; still, they do indeed occur, and so are clearly compatible with our having been created by a just and loving Father. So even if God created humankind, he might for his own good reasons permit us to suffer from cognitive malfunction of some sort, cognitive disease or disorder; and such cognitive disorder could inhibit the reliability of our cognitive faculties. Even if God is wholly good, he has or may have permitted Satan to introduce widespread natural evil into the world; but then might he not also permit Satan (that father of lies) to introduce widespread error into the world? (Indeed, hasn’t he done exactly that by permitting us to fall into sin?) Lehrer develops this thought:
Compare, finally,
S Satan and his cohorts produce incredible deceps of error
with
E Evolutionary processes produce incredible deceps of error.
I find little to choose between them. A
naturalist wishing to assign a high probability to the conclusion that
the proper
In his “Proper Function vs. Systematic
Coherence,” in Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in Honor
of Plantinga’s Theory of Knowledge, ed. Jonathan Kvanvig (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1996), pp. 29–30.
And as a matter of fact, of course, according to Christianity precisely this or something like it has happened: God has permitted us to fall into sin with its attendant noetic effects. So what is P(R/T)? Wouldn’t we have to say it is low or at any rate inscrutable, just like P(R/N&E)? So won’t the theist join the naturalist in having a defeater for any of his beliefs? Won’t he be in the very same leaky epistemic boat?
This is a formidable objection; there is a reply. See my “Respondeo,” in Warrant in
Contemporary Epistemology, pp.
333–38.
(1) Feike is a very wealthy eccentric who loves to wear dilapidated old clothes from the local Goodwill.
Acting on the principle that it is always a good idea to acquire some new true beliefs, I infer
(2) Feike wears dilapidated old clothes.
I have also believed for some time that
(3) Feike is a millionaire.
But now I note that P((3)/(2)) is low (most people who wear dilapidated old clothes are not millionaires); I conclude in considerable puzzlement that (2) is a defeater, for me, of (3), and do my best to refrain from believing (3). My error is plain: (2) isn’t, in fact, a defeater for (3), for me. Why not? Well, for one thing, because I see that the warrant (2) has for me is derivative from the warrant (1) has for me, and obviously (1) is not, for me, a defeater for (3). But that means that (2) is not a defeater of (3). If you would like a principle, try:
(4) If (i) S believes A, B, and C,
and (ii) S believes that the warrant B
has for her is derivative from the warrant A has for her, and (3)
Here ‘derivative from’ must be construed
narrowly, so that the paradigm case of the warrant of
p’s being derivative, for me, from the warrant of q is
(as in this case) where I infer p from q (explicitly or implicitly). In fact, (4) can be
strengthened by weakening the antecedent in various ways.
This principle, as I say, delivers R from defeat, for the Christian theist (and also delivers the evolutionary argument against naturalism from defeat by that tu quoque). For the Christian theist believes that she knows the whole Christian story, or that at any rate it has some considerable warrant for her. Theism is part of that story, and the warrant theism has for her is derivative from the warrant had for her of the whole Christian story. Hence by (4) theism won’t be a defeater of R for her unless the whole Christian story is. But it isn’t. Therefore, theism isn’t a defeater of R, for her, and the objection crumbles.
To recount the essential features of the model, the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit working in concord with God’s teaching in Scripture is a cognitive process or belief-producing mechanism that produces in us the beliefs constituting faith, as well as a host of other beliefs. These beliefs, of course, will seem to the believer to be true: that is part of what it is for them to be beliefs. They will have the internal features of belief, of seeming to be true; and they can have this to various degrees. Second, according to the model, these beliefs will be justified; they will also have at least two further kinds of virtues. In the first place, they are internally rational, in the sense that the believer’s response to the experience she has (given prior belief) is within the range permitted by rationality, that is, by proper function; there is nothing pathological there. And in the second place, the beliefs in question will have warrant: they will be produced by cognitive processes functioning properly in an appropriate environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at the production of true belief. To be sure, the process in question is not like the ordinary belief-producing mechanisms we have just by virtue of creation; it will be by a special work of the Holy Spirit. Recall Hume’s sarcastic gibe:
Upon
the whole, we may conclude that the Christian
Religion not only was at first
attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any
reasonable person without one. . . . Whoever is moved by
Faith to assent to it, is
conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all
the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to
believe what is most contrary to custom and experience. An Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court
Publishing, 1956), p. 145.
According to the testimonial model, Hume (sarcasm aside) is partly right: belief in the main lines of the gospel is produced in Christians by a special work of the Holy Spirit, not by the belief-producing faculties and processes with which we were originally created. Further, some of what Christians believe (e.g., that a human being was dead and then arose from the dead) is as Hume says, contrary to custom and experience: it seldom happens. Of course it doesn’t follow, contrary to Hume’s implicit suggestion, that there is anything irrational or contrary to reason in believing it, given the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit.
What I claim for this model is that there aren’t any successful philosophical objections to it (and in chapter 10 I’ll look into some objections); so far as philosophical considerations go, given the truth of Christian belief, this model, or something very much like it, could be no more than the sober truth. Of course there may be philosophical objections to the truth of Christian belief itself; I shall consider some of them in part IV under the guise of defeaters. But the point here is that if Christian belief is true, then it could very well have warrant in the way proposed here. If (as I claim) the fact is there are no good philosophical objections to the model, given the truth of Christian belief, then any successful objection to the model will also have to be a successful objection to the truth of Christian belief.
We can take the matter a step further. If Christian belief is true, then very likely it does have warrant—if not in the way proposed in the extended A/C model, then in some other similar way. For if it is true, then, indeed, there is such a person as God, who has created us in his image; we have fallen into sin and require salvation; and the means to such restoral and renewal have been provided in the incarnation, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the second person of the trinity. Furthermore, the typical way of appropriating this restoral is by way of faith, which, of course, involves belief in these things—that is, belief in the great things of the gospel. If so, however, God would intend that we be able to be aware of these truths. And if that is so, the natural thing to think is that the cognitive processes that do indeed produce belief in the central elements of the Christian faith are aimed by their designer at producing that belief. But then these beliefs will have warrant.
Someone who has read his Gettier See WPF, pp. 32ff.
Finally, I should like to ask how my
project in this book compares with William Alston’s in his magisterial
Perceiving God. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991. Subsequent page references are to this book.
See above, chapter 5.
My project differs in three ways. First, I am concerned not primarily
with beliefs of the two sorts Alston mentions, but rather with the
central claims or beliefs of the Christian faith. I am not limiting my
attention to beliefs about God’s (allegedly) perceptible properties or
his current actions with respect to the believer. My aim, instead, is to
examine the epistemic status of the great things of the gospel: that
Jesus Christ is the second person of the trinity, that he became
incarnate, suffered, died, and rose from the dead, and that by atoning
for our sins he made it possible for us human beings to achieve a right
relationship with God. Second, the epistemic property in which I am
most interested is not justification, taken either deontologically or
in the way in which Alston takes it, but warrant: does Christian belief
have, can it have, the property enough of which is what distinguishes
knowledge from mere
An Alston-like project in the neighborhood of my project would be an effort to argue that the kinds of beliefs he mentions—that God has some perceptible property, that he is acting a certain way vis-à-vis the believer—could have warrant by way of perception (there aren’t any successful philosophical objections to the claim that they do) and that from a Christian perspective the most satisfactory way of thinking of their warrant is in terms of perception of God and his properties: if Christian belief is, in fact, true, then (probably) these beliefs do have warrant in these ways. What about these suggestions? First, I take it Alston has adequately (and more than adequately) disposed of the main philosophical objections to the thought that we human beings can perceive God and perceive that he is amiable, delightful, powerful, glorious, loving, and the like. On this point, Alston is close to Jonathan Edwards, who is best construed, as I argued above, as holding that we do (not merely can) perceive God and perceive these things of him.
I have just one comment to make here. There is no doubt that human beings seem to experience God, and to experience him as being these things. To many, it has indeed seemed that God is present to their consciousness in something like the way in which any perceptible object can be present to my consciousness; it is equally clear that it has seemed to many that they experience God as having the properties in question. But are these really cases of seeming to perceive? On the one hand, they exhibit several salient differences from paradigm cases of perception, such as perception of trees, horses, other people: in particular, the phenomenology is quite different. (Of course the phenomenology of the various sensuous modalities of perception themselves also differ from each other.) On the other hand, there is the crucial similarity that, in this case as in the paradigm sensory cases, there is that sense of being in the presence of the object in question, the powerful impression that it is present or presented to one’s consciousness. The thing to say, I think, is that these cases of putative perception of God are such that the term ‘perception’ applies to them either perfectly straightforwardly, or else by way of close analogy. Which is it? Perhaps this is not a very important question. If it isn’t precisely perception, it is something closely and analogically related to it, and related in such a way that (if, in fact, things are as they seem to the believer) it too can perfectly well be a source of warranted belief. So I have a great deal of sympathy for this Alston-like project and would in fact be prepared to endorse it. Further, while I am not completely clear about Alston’s notion of practical rationality (see above, pp. 119ff.), I believe it is fairly close to my internal rationality; I would therefore concur with him in thinking that Christian belief does indeed enjoy these varieties of positive epistemic status.
Where my project differs from Alston’s, then, is that I am concerned
not simply with those perceptual (or ‘perceptual’) beliefs Alston
mentions. Further (and on this point I am not, so far as I know,
disputing anything Alston says), I doubt that perception of God, in his
sense, is the
“The experiential awareness of God is a rare
phenomenon except for a very few souls” (Perceiving
God, p. 36).
In the evening, I went very unwillingly
to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s
Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine,
while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through
faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust
in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me
that he had taken away my sins, even mine and saved me from the law of sin and death. John Wesley, ed. Albert Outler (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1964), p. 66.
Here what Wesley comes to believe, or believe more profoundly, is just what the Heidelberg Catechism sees as the content of true faith: that the divine scheme of salvation applies to oneself personally. As far as one can tell, however, this wasn’t a matter of perceiving God. There was, indeed, sensuous phenomenology (“I felt my heart strangely warmed”) and an oft-noted kind of phenomenology; but it doesn’t seem to be perceptual. Indeed, it isn’t clear that it is possible to perceive, for example, that Christ has taken away my sins, or that he is the incarnate second person of the trinity or that he suffered and died, thereby enabling us to have life. Consider also the apostle Paul’s vision on the way to Damascus: no doubt he then did perceive Jesus, and furthermore perceived that he said that he was indeed the Christ. So it is certainly possible to perceive Jesus the Christ and perceive that he is saying that he is the Christ; still, can we perceive that Jesus actually is the Christ? That he actually is the second person of the trinity? I’m inclined to doubt it. And the more ordinary cases where someone’s belief in the great things of the gospel comes by way of faith (i.e., Scripture/internal instigation of the Holy Spirit/faith) seem even less properly thought of as cases of perception.
Accordingly, there is indeed such a thing as perceiving God;
furthermore, perceiving God plays an important role in the religious
and spiritual lives of many Christians, in particular, Christians who
have been blessed with considerable progress in the spiritual life.
Indeed, we might think, following Edwards, that perceiving
God—perceiving that he is lovely, amiable, holy, glorious, and the
like—is an essential element in the full-blown, well-rounded
Christian life. I agree, furthermore, that these perceptual beliefs can
have warrant. The central Christian beliefs, however, are not
perceptual beliefs; they come, not by way of perception
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
Jesus Christ
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
St. Paul
He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.
Jonathan Edwards
In chapter 8, I proposed a model to
show how Christian belief can have warrant. On this model, Christian
belief is produced in the believer by the internal instigation of the
Holy Spirit, endorsing the teachings of Scripture, which is itself
divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit. The result of the work of the
Holy Spirit is faith—which, according to both John
Calvin and the model, is “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s
benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given
promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our
hearts through the Holy Spirit.” According to the model, these beliefs
enjoy justification, rationality, and warrant. We
Perhaps this needs qualification.
The content of faith is plausibly indexical: a person x has faith
only if x believes or knows that God is benevolent
toward x herself. But perhaps the devils do not believe that
God is benevolent toward them. They know
that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, and that he
has arranged a way of salvation for human beings; but perhaps they
reject the belief that God is benevolent toward them. (Note,
incidentally, that the author of James sometimes (in chapter 2, e.g.) seems to use the
term ‘faith’ to mean mere cognitive or intellectual assent.)
According to the model, And perhaps also according to Calvin. He sees
this sealing, as in the first instance, a matter of God’s putting his
mark, imprint, seal upon the believer; but perhaps this seal consists
in the believer’s having the appropriate affections. See Milton’s Paradise Lost, books 5 and 6.
The person with faith, however, not only believes the central claims of the Christian faith; she also (paradigmatically) finds the whole scheme of salvation enormously attractive, delightful, moving, a source of amazed wonderment. She is deeply grateful to the Lord for his great goodness and responds to his sacrificial love with love of her own. The difference between believer and devil, therefore, lies in the area of affections: of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, desire and detestation. In traditional categories, the difference lies in the orientation of the will. Not primarily in the executive function of the will (the function of making decisions, of seeking and avoiding various states of affairs), though of course that is also involved, but in its affective function, its function of loving and hating, finding attractive or repellent, approving or disapproving. And the believer, the person with faith, has the right beliefs, but also the right affections. Conversion and regeneration alters affection as well as belief.
According to Calvin, it is the Holy Spirit who is responsible for this
sealing upon our hearts of that firm and certain knowledge of God’s
benevolence toward us; it is the Holy Spirit who is responsible for
this renewal and redirection of affections. Calvin is sometimes
portrayed as spiritually cold, aloof, bloodless, rationalistic—a
person in whom intellect unduly predominates. These charges may (or may
not) have some validity with respect to the Reformed scholasticism of a
century later; even a cursory examination of Calvin’s work, however,
reveals that with respect to him they are wildly inaccurate. See, e.g., Dennis Tamburello, Union with
Christ: John Calvin and the Mysticism of St. Bernard (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press,
1994), chapters 1–3. “My heart, as if aflame, I offer to you, Oh
Lord.” This particular phenomenology—a phenomenology that is
naturally expressed in terms of one’s heart being warmed or even
aflame—goes back in the Christian tradition at least to the
disciples who met the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus: “Then their
eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their
sight. They asked each other ‘Were not our hearts burning within us
while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?’ ”
( John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and
tr. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960
[originally published in 1559]), III, i, 3, p. 540.
So the initial difference between believer and demon is a matter of
affections: the former is inspired to gratitude and love, the latter
to fear, hatred, and contempt. The Holy Spirit produces knowledge, in
the believer; in sealing this knowledge to our hearts, however, it also
produces the right affections. Chief among these right affections is
love of God—desire for God, desire to know him, to have a
personal relationship with him, desire to achieve a certain kind of
unity with him, as well as delight in him, relishing his beauty,
greatness, holiness, and the like. There is also trust, approval,
gratitude, intending to please, expecting good things, and much more.
Faith, therefore, isn’t just a matter of believing certain
propositions—not even the momentous propositions of the gospel.
Faith is more than belief; in producing faith, the Holy Spirit does more
than produce in us the belief that this or that proposition is indeed
true. As Aquinas repeats four times in five pages, “the Holy Spirit
makes us lovers of God.” Summa contra Gentiles, tr. Charles J. O’Neil (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1975), Bk. 4, ch. 21, 22 (pp. 122, 125,
126).
there are two ways of believing. In the first place I may have faith
concerning God. This is the case
when I hold to be true what is said concerning God. Such faith is on
the same level with the assent I give to statements concerning the
Turk, the devil and hell. A faith of this kind should be called
knowledge or information rather than faith. In the second place there
is faith in. Such faith
is mine when I not only hold to be true what is said concerning God,
but when I put my trust in him in such a way as to enter into personal
relations with him, believing firmly that I shall find him to be and to
do as I have been taught. . . . The word in is well chosen and deserving of due attention. We
do not say, I believe God the Father or concerning God the Father,
but in God the
Father, in Jesus Christ,
and in the Holy
Spirit. Luther’s Catechetical
Writings, tr. J. N. Lenker, 2 vols.
(Minneapolis: Lutheran Press, 1907), 1:203, quoted in H. R.
Niebuhr, Faith on Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 9.
Consider also Pascal: “So those to whom God has imparted religion
through the feeling of the heart are very fortunate and justly
convinced” (Pensées,
tr. M. Turnell [London: Harvill Press, 1962], p. 282).
Following Luther, we
may distinguish believing in God from believing that God
exists. The latter itself
comes in two varieties: theism, and believing de re
of God that he exists. A theist is one
who believes a certain proposition: that there is an all-powerful,
all-knowing, wholly good person who has created and sustains the world.
Where God is indeed the unique being meeting this condition, the theist
believes that there is such a being, but also, no doubt, believes of
God, the being who in fact
Our topic, therefore, essentially involves the affections. In trying to
understand the religious affections, we can obviously do no better than
to consult Jonathan Edwards, one of the great masters of the interior
life and a peerless student of the religious affections. Edwards, of
course, concurs with Calvin that true religion is more than just right
belief. Indeed, according to him, true religion is first a matter of
having the right affections: “True religion, in great part, consists in
holy affections.” A Treatise concerning Religious
Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1959 [first published 1746]), p. 95. Page
references to Religious Affections are to this edition.
There
is a distinction to be made between a mere notional understanding,
wherein the mind only beholds things in the exercise of a speculative
faculty; and the sense of the heart, wherein the mind don’t only
speculate and behold, but relishes and feels. That sort of knowledge,
by which a man has a sensible perception of amiableness and
loathsomeness, or of sweetness and nauseousness, is not just the same
sort of knowledge with that, by which he knows what a triangle is, and
what a square is. The one is mere speculative knowledge; the other
sensible knowledge, in which more than the mere
Of course he doesn’t think true religion is just a matter of affections, of loves and hates, as if belief and understanding had no role to play: “Holy affections are not heat without light; but evermore arise from some information of the understanding, some spiritual instruction that the mind receives, some light or actual knowledge” (p. 266). Still, true religion primarily involves (so he seems to say) the affections, in particular love: “all true religion summarily consists in the love of divine things” (p. 271). And love brings other affections in its train: “love to God,” he says, “causes a man to delight in the thoughts of God, and to delight in the presence of God and to desire conformity to God, and the enjoyment of God” (p. 208); elsewhere, he adds that one who loves God will also delight in contemplating the great things of the gospel, taking pleasure in them, finding them attractive, marvelous, winsome (p. 250). Further, one who thus delights in the great truths of the gospel may find himself disgusted by various attempts (see chapter 2) to trade that splendidly rich and powerful gospel for cheap and trivial substitutes. Still further, acquiring the right affections enables one to see the true heinousness of sin: “he who sees the beauty of holiness, must necessarily see the hatefulness of sin, its contrary” (p. 274); and he who sees the hatefulness of sin (in himself and others) will also (given proper function) hate it.
But how exactly is this supposed to work? What is the relation between affection and belief here, between will and intellect? Which, if either, is primary? Is it that first one sees (i.e., comes to know or believe) that the great things of the gospel and God himself are lovely and amiable, and then comes to love them? Or is it rather that first one comes to love them, thus coming to see that the things in question are, indeed, worthy of love? In working in our hearts, does the Holy Spirit first and supernaturally get us to see the truths of the great things of the gospel, our affections naturally following suit (so that we come to love and delight in them)? Or is it rather that the Holy Spirit first corrects our affections, cures the madness of our wills, so that we begin to love God above all rather than ourselves, as a result of which we come to believe the great things of the gospel? Or is neither prior, so that will and intellect are cured simultaneously? This question, of course, is connected with a correlative question we examined in chapter 7: is sin primarily a matter of intellect, of blindness, of failing to see or believe the right things, thus leading to wrong affection and wrong action? Or is it primarily a matter of the wrong affections, of loving and hating the wrong things?
Although Edwards emphasizes the centrality of the affections, he also seems to endorse the position that intellect is prior to will. He seems to suggest that the believer first sees the beauty, amiability, loveliness of God and the great things of the gospel, her affections then naturally following:
[The saints] first see that God is lovely, and that Christ is excellent and glorious, and their hearts are first captivated with this view, and the exercises of their love are wont from time to time to begin here, and to arise primarily from these views; and then, consequentially, they see God’s love; and great favor to them. (p. 246)
Here the focus of his attention isn’t the question whether it is intellect or will that is prior (but whether the saints first see that God loves them and then come themselves to love God, or the other way around). Nevertheless, there is the clear suggestion that what happens first is that the saint sees that God is lovely and Christ excellent and glorious; this vision is captivating, delightful, winsome; the result is love for God. Elsewhere he is more explicit: “Knowledge is the key that first opens the hard heart and enlarges the affections, and so opens the way for men into the kingdom of heaven” (p. 266); “Gracious affections do arise from the mind’s being enlightened, rightly and spiritually to understand or apprehend divine things.” Furthermore,
Truly spiritual and gracious affections . . . arise from the enlightening of the understanding to understand the things that are taught of God and Christ, in a new manner, the coming to a new understanding of the excellent nature of God, and his wonderful perfections, some new view of Christ in his spiritual excellencies and fullness, or things opened to him in a new manner, that appertain to the way of salvation by Christ, whereby he now sees how it is, and understands those divine and spiritual doctrines which once were foolishness to him. . . . That all gracious affections do arise from some instruction or enlightening of the understanding, is therefore a further proof. (pp. 267, 268)
This apparently fits less than perfectly well with another of Edwards’s characteristic doctrines: that what lies at the bottom of sin is hardness of heart—which, he says, is a matter of having the wrong affections, or (less disastrously) at any rate lacking the right affections:
Divines are generally agreed, that sin radically and fundamentally consists in what is negative, or privative, having its root and foundation in a privation or want of holiness. And therefore undoubtedly, if it be so that sin does very much consist in hardness of heart, and so in the want of pious affections of heart; holiness does consist very much in those pious affections. (p. 118)
Now by a hard heart, is plainly meant an unaffected heart, or a heart not easy to be moved with virtuous affections, like a stone, insensible, stupid, unmoved and hard to be impressed. Hence the hard heart is called [in Scripture] a stony heart, and is opposed to an heart of flesh, that has feeling, and is sensibly touched and moved. (p. 117)
These passages suggest (as I argued in
chapter 7) that sin is fundamentally a matter of failing to have the
right affections and having the wrong ones; it isn’t (in the first
instance, anyway) a failure of knowledge. It is less a failure to
see something than to feel something. Though of course I don’t mean to suggest for
a moment that an affection is simply a feeling of some sort, as if it had no intentional
component.
Somehow consequent upon that is a new knowledge of the loveliness and gloriousness of God and of the Christian story as well. Still, this suggestion is compatible with the thought that in acquiring faith it is a kind of knowledge or enlightenment that is prior. Perhaps sin is, indeed, a malfunction of the will (a misdirection of affection); perhaps this malfunction is, indeed, what is repaired with regeneration; but perhaps the way this repair is effected is by way of being granted a certain kind of knowledge or enlightenment. It can be both that sin is fundamentally malfunction or dysfunction of the will, and that what comes first in regeneration is a certain understanding or insight. Then revealing would be prior to sealing, with respect to faith, even though what needs repair is, at bottom, will rather than intellect.
Sometimes Edwards seems to suggest that neither intellect nor will is prior:
Spiritual understanding consists primarily in a sense of heart of that
spiritual beauty. I say, a sense of heart; for it is not speculation
merely that is concerned in this kind of understanding: nor can there
be a clear distinction made between the two faculties of understanding
and will, as acting distinctly and separately, in this matter. When the
mind is sensible of the sweet beauty and amiableness of a thing, that
implies a sensibleness of sweetness and delight in the
If there is no clear distinction between the two, then clearly neither is prior to the other. Even in this passage, however, it looks as if, according to Edwards, intellect really is prior. He speaks here of “a sense of heart”; that sounds like affection, but I think appearances are deceiving. To see how, we must note one further characteristic Edwardsian idea: that upon conversion and regeneration the believer acquires a “new simple idea.” She thus acquires the ability to perceive something she wasn’t able to perceive before. She can now perceive the beauty and amiability of the Lord, something she was unable to do prior to conversion. This ability involves a new phenomenology, one not available to “natural men”:
For if there be in the saints a kind of apprehension or perception, which is in its nature, perfectly diverse from all that natural men have, or that it is possible they should have, till they have a new nature; it must consist in their having a certain kind of ideas or sensations of mind, which are simply diverse from all that is or can be in the minds of natural men. And that is the same thing as to say, that it consists in the sensations of a new spiritual sense. (p. 271)
Here
Edwards speaks the epistemological language of the mid-eighteenth
century. Knowledge or cognition involves mental entities Locke calls
‘ideas’ and Hume ‘impressions and ideas’. These are on the order of
mental images, like bits of visual or auditory imagery or other
sensuous imagery. The details of the process, as the British empiricists
thought of it, need not concern us now (and in any event are
incoherent). But (to take an Edwardsian example) think of the taste of
honey. You know what honey tastes like, and that knowledge crucially
involves a certain kind of phenomenology. You wouldn’t know what honey
tastes like unless you actually tasted it (or in some other way
experienced that taste). You can’t have knowledge (more exactly,
sensible knowledge) of the taste of honey or of its sweetness, without
undergoing that phenomenology—without having that simple idea (as
Edwards would think of it). There is a certain kind of experience that
normally goes with seeing something red, and there is a certain kind of
knowledge, namely, knowledge of what it’s like to see something red, that
you aren’t able to have unless you have that experience. (Maybe this
experience is a little like hearing the sound of a trumpet; still, that
kind of analogy can take us only so far.) One who has never tasted
sweetness or perceived red can know a good deal about the sweetness of
honey and the look of something red (e.g., that both are experienced by
many people, that people find the first pleasant and the second mildly
exciting); there is also something she
Now
according to Edwards, one kind of experiential knowledge is spiritual
knowledge; more exactly, there is such a thing as spiritual knowledge,
and spiritual knowledge is experiential knowledge. This is knowledge of God’s
‘moral’ qualities, as Edwards puts it—knowledge of his holiness,
loveliness, beauty, glory, and amiability. Like knowledge of the taste
and sweetness of honey, this knowledge requires that one have a certain
characteristic phenomenal imagery, “a certain kind of ideas or
sensations of mind,” as he puts it. This is a new
idea and a new simple
idea. It is simple, first, because
(unlike the image of a house, say) it is not compounded out of other
ideas. And it is new in the sense that it is not available to “natural
men”; it is available only to those in whom the process of regeneration
has begun. In the fall into sin, Edwards thinks, we human beings lost a
certain cognitive ability: the ability to apprehend God’s moral
qualities. With conversion comes regeneration; part of the latter is
the regeneration (to a greater or lesser extent) of this cognitive
ability to grasp or apprehend the beauty, sweetness, amiability of the
Lord himself and of the whole scheme of salvation. And it is just this
cognitive ability that involves that new simple idea. There is little
to say by way of describing this new experience except to say that it
is the experience of God’s moral qualities; and one who doesn’t have
this new simple idea—one in whom the cognitive process in
question has not been regenerated—doesn’t have spiritual
knowledge of God’s beauty and loveliness. According to Edwards, those who have the
requisite experience and enjoy the requisite phenomenology note that
previous to this experience they hadn’t really understood such phrases
as ‘a spiritual sight of Christ’; these terms had not conveyed “those
special and distinct ideas to their minds which they were intended to
signify; in some respects no more than the names of colors are to
convey the ideas to one that is blind from birth” (The Great
Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen [New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1972], p. 174).
I
spoke of a cognitive ability, the ability to grasp and apprehend the
beauty and sweetness and amiability of the Lord and of the great things
of the gospel. Edwards constantly uses more specific language, the
language of perception. One in
whom the process of regeneration
For an insightful account of Edwards’s sense
of the heart (with extensive and useful quotations from Edwards’s
works), see William Wainwright’s “Jonathan Edwards and the Sense of the
Heart,” Faith and Philosophy 7,
no. 1 (January 1990).
Edwards believes we perceive these moral qualities of God; and I
believe that Edwards’s views here are, at the least, plausible. I don’t
propose to canvass the objections to perception of God, however, or
defend its plausibility. That is because this has already been done in
fine style by William Alston. Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). See also
my reply in chapter 10 to Richard Gale’s suggestion that perception of
God is not possible.
We can now return to the question that occasioned this detour: according to Edwards, which comes first, affection or intellection? Love for God or knowledge of God? I think Edwards’s answer is that it is knowledge. I think he thinks that one first perceives the beauty and loveliness of the Lord, first comes to this experiential knowledge, and then comes to develop the right loves and hates: love for the Lord, for the great truths of the gospel, hatred for sin: “all gracious affections do arise from some instruction or enlightening of the understanding”; “Gracious affections do arise from the mind’s being enlightened, rightly and spiritually to understand or apprehend divine things.” What he means here, I think, is that this experiential knowledge of God and his qualities comes first; then there is a consequent raising of affections. “Truly spiritual and gracious affections . . . arise from . . . some new view of Christ in his spiritual excellencies and fullness.” His idea, I think, is that the regenerated person perceives the beauty and loveliness of the Lord and of the great things of the gospel and then, naturally enough, comes to love them. It is the perceiving that comes first; in this respect, therefore, intellect is prior to will.
Is Edwards right? Is it really true that
intellect precedes will, that knowledge precedes love in this case? The
question divides itself. We may think of the structure of intellect and
will as follows. There are various dependency relations among the acts
of intellect and will, of such a sort that certain intellectual acts
(acts of cognition) are necessary conditions for certain acts of will.
Any given act of will could be basic in the sense that it
doesn’t depend on any prior act of intellect, and any given act of
intellect could be basic in the sense that it doesn’t depend on any
prior act of will. Perhaps one can’t love God without first seeing that
he is, indeed, lovely and attractive; if so, then no act of loving God
will be basic in the present sense. On the other hand, perhaps certain
affective acts do not depend on any prior acts of intellection; if
so, those acts will be basic. What is the relevant sense of
dependency involved? I suggest
that it is a matter of design plan: an act of will is dependent, for a
creature S, on a
certain act of intellect if and only if S’s design plan specifies that S
will engage in the act of will in
question only consequent upon engaging in the kind of act of intellect
in question. Of course there are other kinds of
dependency; we could call the variety currently under discussion
‘design plan dependency’. For present purposes I’m thinking of design
plan dependency as including logical and causal dependency; thus, if a
given act of will’s (intellect’s) occurring entails or causally
necessitates a given act of intellect’s (will’s) occurring, the former
act will be design-plan-dependent on the latter.
Given these preliminaries, it is evident that there are several different ways to take the claim that intellect precedes will here. It might be claimed only that
(1) For any affective act of will, there is at least one kind of act of intellect upon which it is dependent, and some acts of intellect are not dependent on any act of will.
By way of illustration, perhaps no one who is functioning properly comes to love God without first seeing, knowing, that God is indeed lovely and attractive (and perhaps that latter cognitive act must involve Edwards’s experiential knowledge); but perhaps that cognitive, intellective act of knowing that God is lovely and attractive is not dependent on any (affective) act of will. One comes to see that God is lovely and then (and therefore) loves him. This is quite compatible with there being some acts of intellect that are dependent on acts of will; it requires only that there also be some that are not. So it might be held, more strenuously, that
(2) For every (affective) act of will, there is a prior act of intellect on which it is dependent, and for no act of intellect is there a prior act of will on which it is dependent.
It isn’t easy to see which (if either) of these Edwards means to assert. And perhaps, indeed, he means to assert neither; perhaps he is thinking just of religious affections and the characteristic acts of intellect associated with them. Perhaps he means to claim only that the religious affections depend on a preceding (or concomitant) grasp or perception of some of the qualities of God, although it is not the case that perception of God’s moral qualities is dependent on a prior affection. Perhaps he means to say that, in the process of regeneration, what happens first is that the Holy Spirit enables one to perceive something of God’s moral qualities; this then (according to the normal working of the design plan) raises one’s religious affections. He is committed to this much, but perhaps to nothing stronger.
Still, even this
much is too strong. In the state of sin, we are inclined to be
indisposed to God and neighbor; this is the essence of our sinful
condition. The real problem, then, is a matter of will. It isn’t merely
that we fail to see the beauty of the Lord and the lovableness of our
brothers and sisters, thus failing to love them. Mere absence of the
right affections is only part of the problem; there is also the fact
that we are inclined to be resentful and dismissive toward the Lord
and competitive and self-serving with respect to other people. What is
required here isn’t, first of all, more knowledge. Given our sinful
inclinations to hate God and neighbor, we might perceive God’s moral
qualities and nonetheless continue to hold him at arm’s length,
refusing to love him—perhaps thus being in an even worse
condition than when his presence was obscured by
Edwards might retort that one simply can’t perceive the moral qualities
of God and fail to love him, to be attracted by him, to find him
marvelously delightful and fascinating. This is dubious at best. No
doubt one whose affective capacities or faculties are functioning
properly will love the Lord on
perceiving his loveliness, glory, and beauty; no doubt such a person
will find him delightful. Conversely, consider someone who did perceive
God’s beauty and glory but was nonetheless put off by him: such a
person would be malfunctioning in some way. (A person who saw God’s
beauty but didn’t love him wouldn’t, perhaps, describe
God as beautiful (although he might
describe him as terrible and fascinating, as a bird, transfixed by
terror, might describe a snake, or a mariner the horrifying beauty and
power of a storm that threatens his life); it doesn’t follow that he
doesn’t, in fact, perceive that beauty.) When intellect and will function
properly and are appropriately tuned to each other, we will delight in
what we see to be delightful, love what we see to be
amiable. As I see it, therefore, there are such
properties as being delightful, desirable, beautiful, and the
like; there is also the cognitive condition of noting that something is delightful,
desirable, or beautiful; in addition, there is the
affective condition of
delighting in the thing in question, or desiring it, or admiring and
being drawn to its beauty. I believe Edwards concurs.
So
which is primary in faith and regeneration: intellect or will? I say
neither. Sin is a malfunction of the will, a skewing of affections; it
is loving and hating the wrong things. Still, it also involves
blindness, an inability to see the glory and beauty of the Lord. The
answer to the question ‘which is prior?’ is ‘neither’ or ‘there’s no
saying’. Regeneration is a matter of curing both intellectual and
affective disorders. The structure of will and intellect here is
perhaps a spiral, dialectical process: heightened affections enable us
to see more of God’s beauty and glory; being able to see more of God’s
beauty and glory and majesty in turn leads to heightened affections.
There are certain things you won’t know unless you love, have the right
affections; there are certain affections you won’t have without
perceiving some of God’s moral qualities; neither perceiving nor
affection can be said
So far we have been speaking of perception of God, religious affections, and relations between them. Now we turn to a different though related question: how is it, according to Edwards, that we come to believe what he calls the great things of the gospel—trinity, incarnation, atonement, and so on? It is one thing to perceive the glory and beauty of the Lord and something quite different to know that Jesus Christ was, in fact, the divine son of God who took on human flesh, and suffered and died, thereby atoning for human sin. Do we also perceive the latter? No. Edwards doesn’t believe that we perceive the great truths of the gospel; we do not perceive such qualities of the Lord as that he loved us so much that he sent his only begotten son to suffer and die, thus enabling us to have life. A certain sort of perception may be involved in our coming to know these things, but we don’t perceive these things themselves:
A view of this divine glory directly convinces the mind of the divinity of these things, as this glory is in itself a direct, clear and all-conquering evidence of it. . . . He that has his judgment thus directly convinced and assured of the divinity of the things of the gospel, by a clear view of their divine glory, has a reasonable conviction; his belief and assurance is altogether agreeable to reason; because the divine glory and beauty of divine things is in itself, real evidence of their divinity, and the most direct and strong evidence. He that truly sees the divine, transcendent, supreme glory of these things which are divine, does as it were know their divinity intuitively; he not only argues that they are divine, but he sees that they are divine; he sees that in them wherein divinity chiefly consists. (p. 298)
There are two ways of understanding this and similar passages. On the
one hand, Edwards might think the believer perceives the divine glory
and beauty of the things of the gospel, and then infers from that, in a
quick argument, that they are indeed divine, from God, and hence are to
be believed. On the other hand, the account could be that the believer sees the
loveliness and beauty—divine beauty—of the things of the
gospel, and consequently and immediately forms the beliefs that these things are true and
that they are from God. The difference would be that, in the first case,
there is an inference,
perhaps so quick and inexplicit that one scarcely notices it, but an
inference nonetheless. Then the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit
would
On the second construal, a perception of the glory and beauty of the teaching in question would be an occasion of the formation of the belief that the teaching is indeed from God (and is true), but the transition from the one to the other would not be by way of an inference. The belief in question would be held in the basic way, although occasioned by the perception of something else (the beauty and glory of the teaching in question). This second way would resemble the way in which (as I see it) Calvin thinks the sensus divinitatis operates. It isn’t that upon beholding the glory of the mountains or the majesty of the ocean one infers that there is such a person as God who has created it; rather, the perception of the mountains or ocean (or one’s own sin, or danger, or . . . ) is the occasion of the formation of the belief about God in question. On this construal, the “real evidence” in question wouldn’t be propositional evidence functioning as premise for an inference. It would rather be something else that makes the belief in question evident—that is, something else that plays the appropriate role in the belief’s having warrant for one. It would be like the role played by perception of someone else’s facial expression in coming to the warranted belief that she is angry or depressed or delighted: again, even if I don’t infer the latter from the former, the former is still my evidence for the latter in the sense that the former is (part of) what makes the latter evident (warranted) for me.
Under the second construal, there are again two ways things could go. It could be that perception of the beauty and delightfulness of the great things of the gospel directly and without intermediary occasions the formation of the relevant belief. Then again, it could be that the Holy Spirit enables the believer to perceive that beauty and delightfulness and also enables her to make the right affective response of delight, admiration, and love: and it is that affective response which is the immediate occasion of the belief in question. You see that the great things of the gospel are glorious and beautiful; you find them winsome, delightful, and attractive; so you believe them. If things went this second way, then with respect to the formation of belief in the great things of the gospel, will (affection) would precede intellect.
Which of these is the truth of the matter? What does Edwards
think: is there or isn’t there a quick inference involved? It’s not
easy to tell, and indeed perhaps he thinks the belief is formed both
ways at once: “he not only argues that they are divine, but he sees
that they are divine.” I think the second position (according to which
perception of the beauty of one of the great things of the gospel is a
direct or
Or is there something dubious here? Would it be somehow irrational to form a belief B as a response just to the perception that B is attractive and beautiful, or to the fact that you delight in the thought that B, that you have a certain affective response to B? Wouldn’t this be like the cases we noted earlier on (above, pp. 149ff.) in which noncognitive or nonintellectual features of a cognitive situation can influence belief formation, thus impeding cognitive proper function? I don’t think so. It needn’t be the case that wherever there is influence of this sort—that is, from nonintellectual factors—what you have is impedance: perhaps the design plan calls for just this sort of belief formation, and perhaps the relevant part of the design plan is successfully aimed at true belief. According to the physicist Steven Weinberg, scientists often accept a view or a theory not (or not only) because there is good evidence for it, but because it is beautiful:
Nevertheless, despite the weakness of the early experimental evidence
for general relativity, Einstein’s theory became the standard textbook
theory of gravitation in the 1920s and retained that position from then
on, even while the various eclipse expeditions of the 1920s and 1930s
were reporting at best equivocal evidence for the theory. I remember
that, when I learned general relativity in the 1950s, before modern
radar and radio astronomy began to give impressive new evidence for the
theory, I took it for granted that general relativity was more or less
correct. Perhaps all of us were just gullible and lucky, but I do not
think that is the real explanation. I believe that the general
acceptance of general relativity was due in large part to the
attractions of the theory itself—in short, to its
beauty. Dream of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1992), p. 98. See also P.
Dirac, The Development of Quantum Theory (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1971), pp. 30–37;
speaking of some of De Broglie’s work, he says, “This connection of De
Broglie’s was very beautiful mathematically and was in agreement with
the theory of relativity. It was very mysterious, but because of its
mathematical beauty one felt that there must be some deep connection
between the waves and the particles illustrated by this
mathematics.”
Here
we have the same three possibilities: (a) Weinberg argued to the truth
of general relativity, employing as a premise the proposition that the
theory is beautiful (more exactly, displays a certain hard-to-specify
kind of beauty or aesthetic
appeal), or (b) Weinberg’s perception of the beauty of the theory was
the direct occasion of his belief that it is true, or (c) Weinberg’s
perception of the beauty was the direct occasion of an affective
response of admiration, attraction, and delight, that affective response
then occasioning belief. Ironically enough, Weinberg also argues (more
exactly, asserts) that religious beliefs arrived at by way of
experience are really formed by wishful thinking, completely failing to
note the parallel with his idea that scientific beliefs are sometimes
accepted because of their beauty.
We
can also compare the second Edwardsian construal with Augustine’s
famous dictum: “Our hearts are restless till they rest in you, O
Lord.” Confessions. See here George Herbert’s poem “The Pulley”
in The Poetical Works of George Herbert, with life, critical dissertation, and explanatory
notes by the Rev. George Gilfillan (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1853), p.
167.
Indeed, there is a connection between
belief and perception of beauty (and similar qualities) that goes much
deeper than Weinberg suggests. As Leibniz and many since have noted,
there are ordinarily
See Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and
Forecast (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1955; reprint, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), p.
74 in the 1973 edition; and see the corrected version of the paradox
in Problems and Projects (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), p. 359. See
also Warrant and Proper Function, pp. 128ff.
Because we find simple beliefs (whatever precisely simplicity is) more
natural and more attractive than complex beliefs. Only a madman would
project grue or its partner in crime, bleen. Where, as you expect, x is bleen if either it is examined before 2050 a.d.
and is found to be blue, or is not so examined and green.
How
shall we think of these things in the model? There are the three
Edwardsian possibilities: it could be
that there is a quick inference from the beauty and glory of the gospel
to its truth; it could be
We
should note the deep analogies between will and intellect, affection
and belief here. Intellect is the province of belief; will, the
province of affection. Now when our cognitive faculties function
properly, we won’t believe just any propositions; we will (ordinarily)
believe true propositions. And, of course, not just any true
propositions, but ones appropriate to the circumstances. I meet you at
a party; you tell me you live in Omaha; I form the belief that you live
there, rather than, say, the true belief that you were born in
Cleveland or that Caesar crossed the Rubicon.
Like
beliefs, affections can be justified or unjustified—or, rather, I
can be justified or unjustified in having a certain affection. Furthermore, affection, like belief, is not
within our direct control; for example, I can’t just by willing to do
so, take the right attitude toward someone who has wronged or offended
me. But also affection, again like belief, is to some extent within our
indirect control; one can train oneself not to be so sensitive to
slights, to see (and feel) them as unimportant. One can fight against
pride and self-centeredness, and sometimes achieve partial success.
Still further, there is an analogue of warrant for affections. A belief has warrant when it is
formed by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial
epistemic environment (both maxi and mini) according to a design plan
successfully aimed at truth. An affection can have an analogous
property. As we have already seen, it can be produced by faculties
functioning properly or not. The environmental condition is equally
obvious. On some distant planet, there could be a gas that causes human beings to react to
disaster with a silly giggle or an indifferent shrug, or to become
furiously angry for no reason at all. The right kind of affective
environment (for us) will be one where, given our design plan, we will
form the right affective responses. What about the last two conditions
for warrant: (1) the faculty in question being such that it is aimed at
the production of true beliefs, and (2) the design plan’s being a good
one? As to the first, again, there are clear analogues. It could be
that a specific form of affection is aimed, not at our valuing
something that is genuinely valuable, but at something else—at
the continuation of the species, or survival, or whatever. An affection
(or an instance of an affection) has the analogue of warrant only if it
is produced by a process that isn’t aimed at the production of
affections with any of those properties, but instead at
the production of affection that is appropriate to its object: valuing
or loving or desiring what is valuable or lovable or desirable. The
last condition for warrant is that the production of the belief be
governed by a design plan that is good in the sense that there is a
high objective probability that a belief formed in such a way as to
satisfy the first three conditions will be true. Again, there is a
clear analogue
Is there an analogue of the Gettier problem
for affections? I leave this problem for homework, only reminding the
reader that the essence of Gettier situations is the “resolution
problem”: the fact that cognitive minienvironments can be misleading,
even if embedded in maxienvironments apt for our style of cognitive
faculties (above, pp. 158ff.).
Conversion, therefore, is
fundamentally a turning of the will, a healing of the disorder of
affection that afflicts us. It is a turning away from love of self,
from thinking of oneself as the chief being of the universe, to love of
God. But what is this love of God like, and how shall we understand it?
William James, that cultured, sophisticated New England Victorian
gentleman, notes the throbbing elements of longing, yearning, desire,
eros in the writings of Teresa of Avila, looks down his cultivated
nose, and finds all that a bit, well, tasteless, a bit
declassé. Sniffs James, “in
the main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless
amatory flirtation . . . between the devotee and the
deity.” The Varieties of Religious Experience
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1902), p.
340. A feature that is retained in the King James
translation: “And Adam knew his wife Eve and she conceived and bare
Cain” (
My soul
yearns, even faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh
cry out for the living God. (
Oh God,
you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body
longs for you. (
One
thing have I desired of the Lord, that I will seek after; that I . . .
behold the beauty of the Lord. (
As the
deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My
soul thirsts for God, for the living God. (
I open
my mouth and pant, longing for your commands. (
This love for God isn’t
like, say, an inclination to spend the afternoon organizing your stamp
collection. It is longing, filled with desire and yearning; and it is
physical as well as spiritual: “my body longs for you, my soul pants
for you.” It is erotic; and one of the closest analogues would be with
sexual eros. There is a powerful desire for union with God, the oneness Christ refers to in
Of course expressions of this eros are not found only in the Psalms. In Isaiah, we read, “I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people” (65:19); “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you” (62:5b). This implies, I take it, not merely that God will rejoice over his people the way a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, but that the bride will return this love; when things go properly, God’s people love him the way a bride loves her new husband, with a similar sort of erotic desire. Then there is the Song of Songs, with its intensely erotic imagery, imagery the church has all along taken to be a picture of the love between Christ and his church:
I belong to my lover, and his desire is for me. Come, my lover, let us go to the countryside, let us spend the night in the villages. Let us go early to the vineyards to see if the vines have budded, if their blossoms have opened, and if the pomegranates are in bloom—there I will give you my love. (7:10–12)
In the New Testament, the relationship between Christ and his church is repeatedly compared to that between husband and wife:
He who
loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but
nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are
members of his body. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and
mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”
[
Christians over the centuries have echoed these expressions. Thus Augustine:
Late it
was that I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new, late I loved you! .
. . You called, you cried out, you shattered my deafness: you flashed,
you shone, you scattered my blindness: you breathed perfume, and I drew
in my breath and I pant for you: I tasted, and I am hungry and thirsty:
you touched me, and I burned for your peace. Confessions, tr. Rex Warner (New York:
New American Library, 1963), X, 27, p. 235.
The great mystical masters of the spiritual life, furthermore, speak in similarly erotic terms:
And
although the attractions by which God draws us be admirably pleasing,
sweet and delicious, yet on account of the force which the divine
beauty and goodness have to draw unto them the attention and
application of the spirit, it seems that it not only raises us but that
it ravishes and bears us away. As, on the contrary, by reason of the
most free consent and ardent motion, by which the ravished soul goes
out after the divine attractions, she seems not only to mount and rise,
but also to break out of herself and cast herself into the very
divinity. Francis of Sales, Treatise on the Love of
God, Library of St. Francis de
Sales, tr. Henry B. Mackey (London: Burnes and Oates, 1884) Bk. VII,
chap. iv, p. 294. See also, for another example among many, Fr. Nouet
Conduite de l’homme d’Oraison, Bk. VI in Anton Poulain, The
Graces of Interior Prayer, tr.
Leonora York Smith (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1950), p. 111,
quoted in William Alston’s Perceiving God, p. 54.
It isn’t only the great mystics who have this sort of experience:
as I turned and was about to take a
seat by the fire, I received a
mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost . . . the Holy Spirit descended
upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. I
could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through
and through me. Indeed, it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid
love; for I could not express it in any other way. Quoted (anonymously) in William James,
Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 350.
Even (and perhaps especially) the Puritans, dour and emotionally pinched as they are often represented, are full of expressions of erotic love of God. There is of course Jonathan Edwards; but he was by no means alone. Thus Henry Scougal:
when
once the soul is fixed on that supreme and all sufficient good, it
finds so much perfection and goodness as does not only answer and
satisfy its affection, but master and overpower it too: it finds all
its love to be too faint and languid for such a noble objection, and is
only sorry that it can command no more. It . . . longs for the time
when it shall be wholly melted and dissolved into love. The Life of God in the Soul of Man, or,
the Nature and Excellency of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia:
G. M. and W. Snider, 1827 [first published 1677]), p. 62.
What an
infinite pleasure must it needs be, thus, as it were, to lose ourselves
in him, and being swallowed up in the overcoming sense of his goodness,
to offer ourselves a living sacrifice always ascending unto him in
flames of love. Ibid., p. 66.
Amy Plantinga Pauw notes that
The joy
between Christ and the saints is described by such a staid figure as
Samuel Willard in frankly erotic terms: “We shall then dwell at the
Fountain of his Love, and the reciprocal ardours of Affection between
him and us, shall break over all Banks and Bounds, and we shall be
entirely satisfied, both in Soul and in Body.” “Edwards on Heaven and the Trinity,”
Calvin Theological Journal 30,
no. 2 (November 1995), pp. 392ff. The quotation from Willard is
from A Compleat Body of Divinity (Boston, 1726), sermon 146. See also Abraham
Kuyper, To Be near unto God, tr. John Hendrik de Vries (Grand Rapids: W. B.
Eerdmans, 1918, 1925), p. 675: “The homesickness goes out after God
Himself, until in your soul’s transport of love you feel the warmth of
his father heart in your own heart. It is not the Name of God, but God
Himself Whom your soul desires, and can not do without, God Himself in
the outshining of His life; and it is this outshining of His life that
must penetrate you and must be assimilated in the blood of your
soul.” We
should also note here some of John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” for example,
14:
What is to be made of this erotic love
of God, this yearning, longing, desire, and its apparent fulfillment in
some kind of ardent union between “the devotee and the deity”? This
phenomenon comes in all grades of intensity: there is the full-blown,
breathtaking, overpowering scenario de Sales points to, but also the
much quieter and more restrained movement of the heart toward God on the
part of one who gives thanks for a glorious June morning, or who for
one brief moment sees the glory and beauty of the Christian story and
feels a pang of attraction deeper than gratitude; and there is every
degree
See above, chapter 5, pp. 137ff. See also
Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, vol. 2, ed. A. M. Freedman, H. I. Kaplan, and B. J.
Sadock (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1975), in particular, the
article by Mortimer Ostow, “Religion and Psychiatry.”
What is it for sexual energy to be sublimated in art, or poetry, or love of God? The idea is that there is some finite store of energy whose ‘natural’ use or outlet is sexual; this energy can somehow be diverted into other channels, perhaps especially if the natural channels aren’t available. (There is also the suggestion that these other channels are socially somehow more respectable.) The person in whom the sublimation occurs, of course, is not aware of this origin of what he thinks of as his higher feelings and desires. (Here there is more of that unmasking for which Freud is famous.) We might stop to try to understand this claim more fully: what is this ‘energy’ like, and what does it mean to say that it gets pointed in some other direction, and why would energy be diverted in this fashion? And isn’t the whole claim really metaphorical (‘sublimation’, ‘energy’, ‘diversion’, etc., are all used metaphorically here), and, if so, what is it a metaphor for? Is there any way to give a literal statement of the theory? Let’s not tarry over those questions, however, and pretend we have a reasonably good grasp of the alleged theory: is there any reason to believe it?
Here I think things stand as with Freud’s account of religious belief as
wish-fulfillment (chapter 5). We are confronted with a question: how is
it that some people display this ardent desire and love for God? One
sort of answer would be: “Well, God himself, according to Scripture and
Christian belief, is essentially love; union with him is also the chief
end of us human beings; it is therefore no surprise that he would
create us in such a way that we have a deep desire for union with him,
even if that desire has been partly suppressed and effaced by sin.” But
suppose you think there is no God and that Christian (and other) theism is
an illusion (and delusion) of some kind: then how does it happen that many of us display this
love for God? I take it Freud’s suggestion is an answer to
that question, or to that
question with that presupposition. The answer is supposed to help us
understand what would otherwise be (from that atheistic perspective) a
Like his account of theistic belief as wish-fulfillment, this account (assuming we can make real sense of it) is of the sort that is vastly more likely to be true if theism is false than if it is true. It is, of course, possible that something like it is true, even if theism is true too. Even if theism is true, it is possible that (due, e.g., to sin) there is something like a drying up of the natural sources of love of God, and a sort of makeshift interim arrangement whereby sexual energy is commandeered for this purpose. Perhaps it is even possible that we were originally designed, in the unfallen state, in such a way that it was sexual energy that was somehow diverted and used in this other fashion—that is, for love of God (although, if that was part of the original human design plan, why call the energy in question ‘sexual’?). These things are possible, though not likely (given theism or Christianity). Even if they were true, however, there would remain an important difference: from the Christian or theistic perspective, this system or set of systems would have been designed or redesigned with love of God as its aim or end: that is what it would be for. Not so, of course, from Freud’s perspective.
From a Christian perspective, then, here (as often) Freud has things just backwards. It isn’t that religious eros, love for God, is really sexual eros gone astray or rechanneled, and it isn’t sexual eros (important as it is) that is basic or fundamental, with religious eros somehow derivative from it. The fact is things are just the other way around. It is sexual desire and longing that is a sign of something deeper: it is a sign of this longing, yearning for God that we human beings achieve when we are graciously enabled to reach a certain level of the Christian life. It is love for God that is fundamental or basic, and sexual eros that is the sign or symbol or pointer to something else and something deeper. (Of course I don’t mean to say that the importance and worth of sexual eros is exhausted in its being a sign of love of God.)
In fact sexual eros points to two deeper realities. First, it points to
human love for God, which is a passionate desire for the central
condition for which God has designed us. According to the Westminster
Catechism, the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him
forever. What is this “glorifying God and enjoying him forever”? The
first is not fundamentally a matter of telling God how great he is, paying him effusive
compliments, metaphysical or otherwise. God is, indeed, great,
magnificent, and awe-inspiring
As Ronald Feenstra reminded me, it is also,
no doubt, a matter of developing the image of God in us, both
individually and corporately. Compare Edwards, “I thought with myself, how
excellent a Being that was; and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy
that God, and be wrapped up to God in heaven, and be as it were
swallowed up in him” (“A Personal Narrative,” in A Jonathan Edwards
Reader, ed. John Smith, Harry Stout, and Kenneth Minkema
[New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 284). “The Macropoulos Case” in Problems of the
Self (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1973), pp. 94–95. “Swinburne’s Heaven: One Hell of a Place,”
Religious Studies 4 (1993), p.
521. Compare C. S. Lewis: such a person is “like
an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because
he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea”
(“The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other
Addresses, ed. with Introduction by
Walter Hooper [New York: Macmillan, 1980], p. 4).
Of course it isn’t only sexual eros that is in this way a sign or symbol
of love for God. Sexual eros and love for God are both passionate
desires for union, a passionate desire to be united with the object of
desire. And there are other manifestations of the same kind of desire
for union. Think of the haunting, supernal beauty of
Kuyper, To Be near unto
God, pp. 674–75. Compare C. S. Lewis again: our “inconsolable
secret” is that “We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty
enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into
words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to
receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it”
(The Weight of Glory, p.
126).
Sexual eros points to something deeper in a second way. As we
have just seen, it is a sign or type of a deeper reality, a kind of
love for God of which we now just have hints and intimations. It is
also a sign, symbol, or type of God’s love—not just of the love God’s children will
someday have for him but of
the love he also has for them. As we noted above (p. 312), Scripture regularly
compares God’s love for his people and Christ’s love for his church to
the love
See Anders Nygren, Agape and
Eros, tr. Philip S. Watson (New
York: Macmillan, 1939).
On this particular point I think we must take leave of the tradition; this
is one of those places where it has paid too much attention to Greek
philosophy and too little to the Bible. I believe God can and does
suffer; his capacity for suffering exceeds ours in the same measure
that his knowledge exceeds ours. Christ’s suffering was no charade; he
was prepared to endure the agonies of the cross and of hell itself (“My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). Can we say that Christ qua human being
(according to his human nature) suffered while Christ qua divine
(according to his divine nature) did not? This is hardly the place to
try to address a question as ancient and deep as this one, but I’m
inclined to think this suggestion incoherent. There is this person, the
second person of the divine trinity who became incarnate. It is this
person who suffers; if there really were two centers of consciousness here, one suffering and
the other not, there would be two persons here (one human and one
divine) rather than the one person who is both human and divine. See my
“On Heresy, Mind, and Truth,” Faith and
Philosophy, 16, no. 2 (April 1999), p. 182. He no doubt also suffers at the sufferings
and defections of all his children: “this bitter grief is inflicted
upon God, when a soul falls away from Him” (Kuyper, To Be near unto
God, p. 30).
Similarly for eros: “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will
your God rejoice over you” (
We can take this one step further (and here we may be crossing the
boundary into groundless speculation). According to Jonathan Edwards,
“The infinite happiness of the Father consists in the enjoyment of His
Son.” “An Essay on the Trinity,” in Treatise on
Grace and Other Posthumously Published Writings, ed. Paul Helm (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1971), p.
105. And this is the answer to one of the
traditional arguments for the conclusion that God has no passions: the
Father and the Son do indeed need each other, but it is a need that is necessarily
and eternally fulfilled. “So when we say that God loves his Son, we
are not talking about a love that is self-denying, sacrificial, or
merciful. We are talking about a love of delight and pleasure. . . . He
is well-pleased with his Son. His soul delights in the Son! When he
looks at his Son he enjoys and admires and cherishes and prizes and
relishes what he sees” (John Piper, The Pleasures of God
[Portland: Multnomah Press, 1991], p.
31).
Accordingly, the eros in our lives is a sign or a symbol of God’s erotic
love as well. Human erotic love is a sign of something deeper,
something so deep that it is uncreated, an original and permanent and
necessarily present feature of the universe. Eros undoubtedly
characterizes many creatures other than human beings; no doubt much of
the living universe shares this characteristic. More important, all of
us creatures with eros reflect and partake in this profound divine
property. So the most fundamental reality here is the love displayed by
and in God: love within the trinity. The thought that God is trinitarian
distinguishes Christianity from other theistic religions; here we see a
way in which this doctrine makes a real difference, in that it
recognizes eros and love for others at the most fundamental level of
reality. Does this suggest that we should lean toward a social
conception of the trinity, the
conception of Gregory and the Cappadocian fathers, rather than the
Augustinian conception, which flirts with modalism? See Cornelius
Plantinga Jr., “Social Trinity & Tritheism,” in Trinity,
Incarnation, and Atonement, ed.
Ronald Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga Jr. (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1989). For a more poetic account of connections
between human romantic love and divine love, see Charles Williams,
Religion and Love in Dante: The Theology of Romantic Love
(Westminster: Dacre Press,
1941). (See also, of course, Dante’s Divine
Comedy, the Paradiso.) Williams
argues (p. 11) that being in love (that more or less ordinary but also
utterly extraordinary way in which most of us are at one time or
another) is a way of participating in the divine Love
himself.
Suppose we use the term ‘human eros’ to refer
to sexual eros and also
to the kinds of longing involved in our experience of beauty,
nostalgia, and the like. I say that human eros is a
sign, a
symbol, a
type, a
figure, See Erich Auerbach’s powerful “Figura”
in Scenes
from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian Books, 1959).
Third, like the type-token relation and unlike the relation between a
word and what it denotes, the type-relationship here is not
conventional. The word
‘fish’ stands for fish; the relationship between ‘fish’ and fish is
conventional in the sense that this relationship holds by virtue of the
existence of a certain linguistic convention. (Perhaps this
relationship goes by way of the convention’s establishing a
relationship between the word ‘fish’ and the property of being a fish,
the former expressing the latter.) The relationship between ‘fish’ and
fish depends on us
Still, none of this tells us what this relationship
is. Perhaps we can make a
little progress by considering a biblical example. In
Perhaps the answer lies in the following area. There are features or
properties of God that are very good—that is, features or
properties such that exemplifications of them are good. These features
would include his love, power, knowledge, mercy, justice, beauty,
glory, and the like, and it is by exemplifying these features to the
maximal degree that God is supremely good. Of course I don’t mean to suggest that God
somehow depends on these features, or is ontologically subsequent to
them (whatever exactly that means); these features themselvess, as well
as other properties, can perhaps best be thought of as divine concepts.
See my Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press,
1980). C. S. Lewis, “Transposition,” in
Transposition and Other Addresses (London: G. Bles, 1949).
The fact that human eros is a type of divine love means that this feature of our lives can be explained or understood a certain way. We understand it better, see what it is all about, see what is most important about it, when we see that it is a type or sign of divine love. We see how it fits in with the rest of reality, and how it is connected with what is most real. There are, of course, various evolutionary accounts of erotic love; they center, naturally enough, in the connection of eros with reproduction or, more broadly, with the mechanisms of survival and reproduction. Why do human beings display eros, and what is its significance? From an evolutionary or sociobiological point of view, the answer has to do with how this feature of our nature came to be, bit by bit, in small stages, each stage proving to be fitness inducing (or genetically connected with something fitness inducing). From a Christian perspective, however, things look quite different. The significance of this feature of our lives lies in the fact that displaying it is part of what it is to be created in the image of God; in this way, we human beings share in one of the fundamental properties of the First Being of the universe. The questions ‘Why is it there?’ and ‘What’s most significant about it?’ are to be answered in terms of its being a type of divine love.
In sum, then: according to the model, faith is a matter of a sure and certain knowledge, both revealed to the mind and sealed to the heart. This sealing, according to the model, consists in the having of the right sorts of affections; in essence, it consists in loving God above all and one’s neighbor as oneself. There is an intimate relation between revealing and sealing, knowledge and affection, intellect and will; they cooperate in a deep and complex and intimate way in the person of faith. And the love involved is, in part, erotic; it involves that longing and yearning with which we are all familiar. Finally, love between human beings—between men and women, between parents and children, among friends—is a sign or type of something deeper: mature human love for God, on the one hand, and, on the other, the love of God displayed both among the members of the trinity and in God’s love for his children.
It is often taken for granted by the wise of this world, believers and unbelievers alike, that “religious experience” is a purely subjective phenomenon. Although it may have various psychosocial functions to play, any claims to its cognitive value can be safely dismissed without a hearing.
William P. Alston
Or, as we shall see, with at best a perfunctory hearing. In this chapter, we shall note and evaluate some alleged results of those perfunctory hearings.
The extended Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model of the last three chapters is intended to show how specifically Christian belief can have justification, internal and external rationality, and warrant. According to the model, we human beings have fallen into sin, a grievous condition from which we cannot extricate ourselves. Jesus Christ, both a human being and the divine son of God, made atonement for our sin by way of his suffering and death, thus making it possible for us to stand in the right relationship to God. The Bible is (among other things) a written communication from God to us human beings, proclaiming this good news. Because of our sinful condition, however, we need more than this information: we also need a change of heart. This is provided by the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit (IIHS); he both turns our affections in the right direction and enables us to see the truth of the great things of the gospel. The process whereby we come to believe those things, therefore, satisfies the conditions for warrant (and also the conditions for the affective analogue of warrant). But it is obvious that the beliefs in question are also such that they can be and often are both justified and internally rational.
In this chapter, I shall do two things. First, I wish to consider some of the arguments for the conclusion that theistic and/or Christian belief lacks warrant; second, I want to consider objections to my arguments and claims about the way in which Christian belief can have warrant. What I have argued so far, in order of ascending strength, is that (1) the extended A/C model depicts a way in which Christian belief could have warrant; (2) given the truth of Christian belief, there are no cogent objections to its having warrant in the way suggested by the A/C model; and (3) given the truth of Christian belief, it very likely does have warrant, if not by way of the extended A/C model, then by way of a closely similar model. (3) is stronger than (2). (2) says that, given the assumption that Christian belief is true, there aren’t any cogent objections to the A/C model and hence none to Christian belief’s having warrant; but of course there might be no cogent objections to a proposition p, even if p is, as it turns out, false. (3) adds that in fact Christian belief very likely has warrant, given its truth. A successful argument for the conclusion that Christian or theistic belief lacks warrant, therefore, will be a successful argument against both (2) and (3)—provided, of course, that it doesn’t assume (or argue for) the falsehood of Christian belief. Such an objection, therefore, will have to be independent of the question of the truth or falsehood of Christian belief; it will have to be cogent even on the supposition that Christian belief is true. Our question is really this: are there general epistemological reasons, independent of doubts about the truth of Christian or theistic belief, to think that it lacks warrant? If any of the objections is successful, therefore, it will remain successful even if we assume that indeed there is such a person as God and that Christian belief is, as a matter of fact, true.
There is also an initial difficulty. Those who raise the de jure question about Christian or theistic belief typically complain that it is “irrational,” or “unjustified,” or “unreasonable,” or “rationally unjustified,” or “rationally indefensible” or the like; they seldom make a serious attempt to explain what they mean by these terms. Instead, they typically take it for granted that we know perfectly well what these terms mean; then they argue that theistic belief has the unflattering properties expressed by them. But these terms and their associated concepts have had an enormously checkered career in modern and contemporary epistemology; to assume that their meanings are perfectly clear is excessively naive. It is also confusing, making it hard to construe the objector’s complaints with any exactitude. We have seen that the relevant de jure question is really the question whether Christian belief does or can have warrant: the property or quantity, enough of which is what distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief; I shall therefore handle this problem by construing the objections as arguments for the claim that Christian belief has no warrant. This course has the added attraction that, in at least some cases, it is likely that this is what the objector intended.
A number of thinkers consider the question whether Christian belief can be justified or warranted by way of religious experience, and go on to argue that it cannot. Now I argued in chapter 6 that it isn’t clear what it means to say that a belief is warranted by way of experience, and so didn’t propose to say whether or not, on the model, theistic and Christian belief gets its warrant from or by way of religious experience. Technically speaking, therefore, these objections wouldn’t apply to my claims about how it can be that such belief has warrant. For the purpose of considering these objections, however, let’s concede what may well be false—namely that (on the model) these beliefs do get their warrant from experience. Then at any rate we can see the objections as initially relevant.
The first objection is really less an objection, so it seems to me, than a confusion, a failure to make an important distinction. Anthony O’Hear considers the idea that theistic belief might be justified or receive warrant (it is hard to tell which he is thinking of) in a direct way, not by way of argument or inference. (In my terms, the question is whether theistic belief might be properly basic, either with respect to warrant or with respect to justification.) Referring to William James, John Baillie, and others, he notes that one suggestion as to how this might go would be by way of religious experience, broadly conceived. He then goes on to say:
It is
the idea of direct personal contact with a non-sensory reality that
non-believers will find hard to grasp. In order to bring out the nature
of the difficulty, I will consider the extent to which religious
experience can provide evidence for the existence of a reality beyond
the experience itself. Presumably people who are convinced that they
are in personal contact with some super-reality will not often attempt
to argue or prove their conviction at all, nor will their conviction be
arrived at inferentially, any more than we naturally infer from
statements about our sensations to statements about physical objects.
Nevertheless the question of the extent to which the conviction can be
justified by the experience naturally arises. Experience, Explanation and Faith
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1984), p. 27. Page references to O’Hear are to this work.
Here
there are several questions. First, note that this quotation
illustrates that initial difficulty I mentioned above: is O’Hear
talking about justification,
or rationality, or
warrant, or what? This isn’t
clear
Now his initial suggestion is that there is something problematic about the very idea of a human person’s being in cognitive contact (the kind required by warrant) with a nonsensory reality such as God. Why is this problematic? O’Hear doesn’t directly answer that question, but proposes to “bring out the difficulty” by turning to the question whether “religious experience can provide evidence for the existence of a reality beyond the experience itself.” This sounds like he thinks the way to answer the question
Does religious experience make it possible for us to have the right sort of cognitive connection with God?
is to ask
Is there a good argument from the existence of the experience in question to the existence of God: an argument whose premises report the experience in question and whose conclusion is that there is such a person as God?
That this is what he has in mind is confirmed by what he says a bit later:
Christians, for example, tend to explain this unpredictability [of religious experience of the relevant sort] by saying that these experiences are a gift of God. This may be so, but saying it certainly weakens attempts to argue from the experience to the reality. (p. 44)
This clearly suggests that what is at issue, here, with respect to the question whether theistic belief can have warrant by virtue of religious experience, is whether there is a good argument from premises reporting that experience to the existence of God. O’Hear goes on to say that what we are really asking for is
grounds on which the religious experiences we have . . . could be regarded as experiences of an objective sort. (p. 45)
the answer, he says,
will
have to be in terms of the explanatory power of the hypothesis that
religious experiences are due at least in part to the existence
His thought, then, as far as I can make it out, is twofold:
(a) theistic belief can have warrant by virtue of religious experience only if there is a good (noncircular) argument from premises reporting the occurrence of such experiences to the existence of God
and
(b) such an argument will have to involve as a premise the proposition that the existence of God is the best explanation of religious experiences.
(Of course such an argument would also have to provide reasons for thinking that premise true.)
I
say (a) is part of O’Hear’s thought; perhaps ‘assumption’ would be a
better term because he doesn’t explicitly make this claim but rather
just takes it for granted. Another way to put the assumption: theistic
belief can have warrant by way of religious experience only if some
theistic argument from religious experience is successful. This
assumption is widely shared and seldom argued; as I shall maintain,
however, it has the substantial disadvantage of being false. In fact,
one of the main points to see here is that the question whether
theistic belief can receive warrant by way of religious experience (and
thus in the basic way) is a wholly different question from the question whether there is a good
argument from the existence of religious experience to the existence of
God. (Not only are these different questions: an affirmative answer to
the first does not require an affirmative answer to the second.) I
shall argue that (a) is false. (a)’s being false doesn’t distinguish
religious experience and theistic or Christian belief from other kinds
of experience and belief: perceptual experience and belief, memorial
experience and belief, a priori experience and belief, and the like, all resemble
Christian belief in this respect. In each of these cases, it is
entirely possible that the beliefs in question have warrant even if
there is no good argument from the existence of the experience in
question to the truth of those beliefs. See Warrant and Proper
Function (hereafter WPF), pp.
61ff. and 93ff.
This is one of the most important things to see here; before arguing this claim, however, I want to note another writer who also simply assumes that (a) is true, without so much as raising the question whether it is. According to the late J. L. Mackie,
an
experience may have a real object: we ordinarily suppose our normal
perceptual experience to be or to include awareness of independently
existing material spatio-temporal things. The question then is whether
specifically religious experiences should be taken to have real
objects, to give us genuine information about independently existing
supernatural entities or spiritual beings. The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 178. Page
references to Mackie are to this work.
So far so good: this is the question whether religious experience can or does provide warrant for belief in “independently existing supernatural entities or spiritual beings” such as God. But Mackie goes on:
Whether their content [i.e., the content of religious experiences] has any objective truth is the crucial further question. . . . The issue is whether the hypothesis that there objectively is a something more gives a better explanation of the whole range of phenomena than can be given without it. (p. 183)
Mackie concludes his examination of the possible warrant conferred by religious experience with these words:
if the religious experiences do not yield any argument for a further supernatural reality, and if, as we have seen in previous chapters, there is no other good argument for such a conclusion, then these experiences include in their content beliefs that are probably false and in any case unjustified. [I take it ‘unjustified’, here, means ‘without warrant’.] (p. 186)
Here we see the very same assumption at work as in O’Hear. Like the latter, Mackie assumes that theistic (or other religious) belief could get warrant by way of religious experience only if there is a good argument from the existence and character of that experience to the existence of God (or “something more”). (And like O’Hear, he also seems to endorse (b).) Neither Mackie nor O’Hear argues for this claim, simply taking it utterly for granted that the only way a belief (or at any rate a religious or theistic belief) could possibly receive warrant from experience would be by way of an implicit argument from the existence and properties of that experience to the truth of the belief in question. But why think a thing like that? It certainly isn’t self-evident. In fact, once we explicitly raise the question whether it is true, (a) looks extremely problematic. Presumably one wouldn’t want to say that perceptual beliefs get warrant from experience only if there is a good (noncircular) argument from the existence of perceptual experience to the truth of perceptual beliefs; if not, however, what is the reason for saying it in the case of theistic or Christian belief?
Mackie makes
this assumption, I believe, because he makes another: that theistic and
Christian belief is or is relevantly
like a scientific
But why should we think of theism like this? Why should we think of it as a kind of hypothesis, a sort of incipient science? Consider the extended A/C model of chapters 8 and 9. On that model, it is not that one notes the experiences, whatever exactly they are, connected with the operation of the sensus divinitatis, and then makes a quick inference to the existence of God. One doesn’t argue thus: I am aware of the beauty and majesty of the heavens (or of my own guilt, or that I am in danger, or of the glorious beauty of the morning, or of my good circumstances): therefore there is such a person as God. The Christian doesn’t argue: “I find myself loving and delighting in the great things of the gospel and inclined to believe them; therefore they are true.” Those would be silly arguments; fortunately they are neither invoked nor needed. The experiences and beliefs involved in the operation of the sensus divinitatis and IIHS serve as occasions for theistic belief, not premises for an argument to it.
The same holds for, say, memory beliefs. Obviously one could take a Mackie-like view here as well. One could hold that our beliefs about the past are really like scientific hypotheses, designed to explain such present phenomena as (among other things) apparent memories, and if there were a more “economical” explanation of these phenomena that did not postulate past facts, then our usual beliefs in the past would have no warrant. But of course this is merely fantastic; we don’t in fact accept memory beliefs as hypotheses to explain present experience at all. Everyone, even small children and others with no interest in explaining anything, accepts memory beliefs. We all remember such things as what we had for breakfast, and we never or almost never propose such beliefs as good explanations of present experience and phenomena. And the same holds for theism and Christian belief in the suggested model.
So Mackie apparently believes that
(c) theistic belief is or is relevantly like a quasi-scientific hypothesis, designed to explain religious experience (perhaps among other things).
This explains why he believes (a), that is, that theistic belief can get no warrant from religious experience unless there is a good argument from premises reporting the experiences to the existence of God. As we have seen, however, (c) is false.
Well, perhaps Mackie would insist on (a) even if it is clear that Christians do not take belief in God or Christian belief generally as hypotheses; perhaps he would nonetheless insist that the only way in which such belief could possibly get warrant would be by being successful quasi-scientific hypotheses. But precisely this is what is refuted by the A/C model of chapter 6 and the extended A/C model of chapters 8 and 9. These models show that it is clearly possible that theistic and Christian belief have warrant, but not by way of being hypotheses that nicely explain a certain range of data. For if Christian belief is, in fact, true, then obviously there could be such cognitive processes as the sensus divinitatis and IIHS or faith. As we saw, beliefs produced by these processes would meet the conditions necessary and sufficient for having warrant: they would be the result of cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth. Hence (a) is plainly false. It is plainly false that Christian belief has warrant (and could constitute knowledge) only if there is also a good argument from the existence of the experiences involved in the operation of IIHS to the truth of Christian belief; and the same point holds for theistic belief and the sensus divinitatis. Why suppose that if God proposes to enable us to have knowledge of a certain sort, he must arrange things in such a way that we can see an argumentative connection between the experiences involved in the cognitive processes he selects and the truth of the beliefs these processes produce? That requirement is both entirely gratuitous and also false, since it doesn’t hold for such splendid examples of sources of knowledge as perception, memory, and a priori intuition.
A
second objection is that Christian and theistic belief could never
receive warrant from religious experience because religious experience
could never indicate or show anything as specific as that there is such a person as God—let
alone such beliefs as that in Christ God was reconciling the world to
himself. How could experience of any sort reveal the existence of a
being who is omniscient, omnipotent, wholly
Religious experience is also essentially incapable of supporting any argument for the traditional central doctrines of theism. Nothing in an experience as such could reveal a creator of the world, or omnipotence, or omniscience, or perfect goodness, or eternity, or even that there is just one god. (182)
Now why would Mackie say
a thing like that? And what precisely does he mean? For present
purposes, suppose we restrict ourselves to the experience involved in
the operation of the sensus divinitatis. I think what Mackie means is this: given any course of
experience, religious or otherwise—that is, given any course of
sensuous imagery, affective experience, and inclinations to believe I
might have—that experience could be exactly as it is and there be
no omnipotent being, or omniscient being, or perfectly good or eternal
being. My experience could be precisely what it is, and there be no
such person as God or anyone or anything at all like God. I could feel
the very way I do feel, and there be no God. Conceding for purposes of argument that God
is not a necessary being. Of course if God is a necessary being, as most of the Christian
tradition has thought, then his existence is entailed
by the existence of my experience,
because entailed by the existence of anything at all.
I think this is what he means; I can’t be sure. That is because it seems of only dubious relevance. Perhaps it is true that my experience could be just as it is and there be no such person as God; perhaps the existence and character of my experience don’t entail the existence of God. What follows? Why should it follow that my experience cannot reveal a creator of the world or an omnipotent or omniscient being? Consider an analogy: in WPF (pp. 50ff.), I noted that we all ordinarily think we have existed for many years (or, in the case of you younger readers, many months). It is logically possible, however, that I should have existed for only a microsecond or two, displaying all the temporally specific properties I do in fact display. Then I wouldn’t have such properties as being more than sixty years old or being responsible for something that happened ten minutes ago, although I would have such properties as thinking that I am more than sixty years old and that I am responsible for something that happened ten minutes ago.
Not
only is this logically possible, it is also compatible with the
existence and character of all of my present experience. It is not
compatible with my beliefs, of
course (in that I believe I’ve existed for
Does it follow that nothing in my experience can reveal that I have existed for more than the last second or so? Certainly not. To assume that it does follow is to assume something more general and vastly stronger than O’Hear’s (a) (above, p. 328)—which, as we have already seen, is itself too strong to be true. There isn’t the slightest reason to believe that if experience can reveal p, then the existence of that experience (or the proposition that it occurs) must entail the truth of p. There is no reason to think that if experience can reveal a proposition p, then that experience must be such that it (logically) cannot so much as exist if p is false. For consider perception, and consider your experience—the sensuous imagery, the affective experience, the doxastic experience—on an occasion when you see a horse. It is compatible with those experiences that there be no horse there then, that there be no horses at all, that there be no material objects that exist when I am not undergoing those experiences, and, indeed, that there be no material objects at all. Does it follow that perceptual experience doesn’t reveal an external world? Does it follow that I can’t tell from my experience that there is a horse in my backyard? Or that the lilacs are not in bloom? Surely not; that would be a leap of magnificent (if grotesque) proportions.
Well then, how does perceptual
experience reveal an external world—a horse, say? When I perceive
a horse, I am the subject of experiences of various kinds: sensuous
imagery (I am appeared to in a certain complicated and hard-to-describe
fashion) and also, ordinarily, affective experience (perhaps I am
frightened by the horse, or feel a certain admiration for it, or
delight in its speed and strength or whatever). There is also doxastic
experience. When I perceive a horse, there is that sensuous and
affective experience, but also the feeling, experience, intimation with
respect to a certain proposition (that I see a horse) that
that proposition is
true,
right, to be believed, the way
things really are. This doxastic experience plays a crucial role in
perception. How does perceptual experience teach me
that there is a
horse in my backyard? By way of this belief’s being occasioned (in
part) by the experience, and by way of the belief’s having
warrant—being produced by properly functioning cognitive
faculties in an appropriate epistemic environment (both mini and maxi),
according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth. So can I tell
from my experience
My point here is not that, in fact, people do tell from their experience such things as that there is a horse in the backyard, but rather that this is possible. More exactly, my point is that your seeing a horse in your backyard (thus determining by experience that there is a horse there) is not precluded by the fact that your experience is logically compatible with there being no horse there (or anywhere else). Your experience is logically compatible with there being no horse there: fair enough; but it simply doesn’t follow that you can’t tell by experience that there is a horse there. (How else would you tell? Deduce it from first principles and self-evident truths?) That’s the way it is with horses; can I also tell from my experience that I have existed for more than a microsecond or so? Certainly. I do this by remembering, for example, that I had breakfast much more than a microsecond ago and that I went to college embarrassingly long ago. True, my experience here (in particular, my doxastic experience) is compatible with its being the case that I have existed for only a microsecond; it simply doesn’t follow that I can’t tell by experience that I have existed for at least a good hour, say. I determine by experience that I have existed for more than a microsecond if the belief that I did something more than a microsecond ago is occasioned by my experience (doxastic and otherwise) and if that belief is formed under conditions that confer warrant upon it. This happens often: so we often tell (by experience) that we have existed for more than a microsecond.
And of course the same goes for religious experience and theistic belief.
True: the existence of the experiences that go with the operation of
the sensus divinitatis (or IIHS)
are compatible with there being no omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good
creator of the universe. It doesn’t follow from that, however, that we
can’t tell—and tell, broadly speaking, by experience—that
there is such a person. For here, as elsewhere, there is doxastic
experience: the belief that there is an almighty person to whom I owe
allegiance and obedience just seems right, proper, true, the way things
are. And one tells by experience that there is such a person if (1) the
beliefs in question are formed in response to the experience (doxastic
and otherwise) that go with the operation of the sensus
divinitatis and (2) those beliefs are formed under the conditions of warrant.
That these conditions should be met is, of course, entirely
compatible with the fact that the existence of the experience, doxastic
and otherwise, accompanying the operation of the sensus
divinitatis is compatible with the
falsehood of its deliverances. These beliefs can have warrant, and
enough warrant
I point out that this is so on my
account of warrant, but the same goes
for the other main accounts. Clearly beliefs produced by IIHS
could be coherent with the appropriate body of belief, or formed by a
reliable belief-producing mechanism, or justified, even if, as Mackie
points out, the existence of the relevant experiences is compatible
with the falsehood of the beliefs in question.
Could it be that Mackie’s point lies in a different direction? Perhaps he’s thinking like this: an experience could reveal a blue object, all right, but not an omnipotent object. The claim is not that experience can’t reveal any objects at all; the claim is rather that there are some properties such that experience could not reveal that there is an object with those properties. Examples would be such properties as omniscience, omnipotence, being divine, being the son of God, and the like. Here Mackie would presumably be relying on the analogy with sensuous experience: sensuous experience can perhaps reveal the existence of objects with color and shape properties (it can reveal the existence of blue and square objects) but not the existence of objects with properties like omnipotence.
By way of response: this is perhaps true of sensuous experience and of perception. It is not true of experience generally, however; in particular, it isn’t true of doxastic experience. Memory and a priori belief formation involve doxastic experience; and the deliverances of memory and reason are not limited to the existence of things with perceptible properties. The same goes for the sensus divinitatis and the IIHS. Should we therefore conclude that what one learns, if anything, by way of these sources of belief is not really something learned by experience? Perhaps. If we do, however, then the claim that one can’t learn by experience that there is for example an omnipotent being is no longer relevant to the model’s stipulation that one can learn these things by way of the sensus divinitatis or the IIHS. Maybe one can’t learn that sort of thing by experience; it will not follow that one cannot learn that sort of thing by way of the sensus divinitatis and the IIHS.
Richard Gale asks whether religious experience is
‘cognitive’, as he puts it. On the Nature and Existence of God
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), pp. 285ff. In the remainder of this section, page references are
to this work.
1. Religious experiences are analogous to sense experiences.
2. Sense experiences are cognitive.
Therefore:
3. Religious experiences are cognitive. (p. 288)
Gale directs most of his fire at the first premise.
Here we must issue a couple of caveats. First, strictly speaking, Gale is objecting to this argument by objecting to premise 1; so, strictly speaking, his conclusion would not be that religious experience or belief is not cognitive, but only that this particular argument for its cognitivity fails. For present purposes, this doesn’t matter: in fact Gale does much more than merely object to premise 1. What he really offers and what I want to consider is an argument for the conclusion that religious experience and belief are necessarily not cognitive. This argument, if successful, would show that it isn’t possible that we should have anything like a perceptual awareness of God. Second, he also seems to believe or assume that any experiential awareness of God would have to be or be like perceptual awareness of God (that any experience of God that was part of a cognitive process yielding knowledge of or warranted belief about God would have to play the same role, in that process, as perceptual experience plays in perception); he therefore concludes, I think, that it is not possible to have knowledge of God by way of experience—that is, that religious experience is not cognitive.
Now it isn’t entirely clear just how
Gale’s argument bears on my argument for the conclusion that theistic
and Christian belief can have warrant by way of the sensus
divinitatis and the IIHS (that, given the truth of these
beliefs, there are no cogent objections to their having warrant in that
way, so that any objection to these beliefs will have to be to their
truth rather than to their
rationality or reasonability). First of all, Gale didn’t have my
argument in mind, an omission that is entirely excusable, given that he
proposed his argument
well before I proposed mine. But second, the bearing of his argument on mine
isn’t clear because it isn’t clear whether knowledge by way of
the sensus divinitatis and the IIHS is properly thought of as knowledge by
way of experience. It
would be a shame, however, to pass up the chance to consider an
argument as engaging as Gale’s; so suppose we
So how does the argument go? It begins with a playful threat directed at those who, as Gale thinks, accept the analogical argument for the cognitivity of religious experience:
We have yet to unearth a deep disanalogy between sense and religious experience that will totally destroy the analogical premise of its analogical argument. This “big disanalogy” will prove to be the shipwreck of this defense of cognitivity, a time for Alston, Gutting, Swinburne, and Wainwright to join their fellow analogical arguers on the deck for a few heart-felt choruses of “Nearer My God to Thee.” (pp. 326)
Brave words! Does Gale speak with the tongue of an angel, or is he only a clanging cymbal? Precisely what is this killer argument?
Necessarily, any cognitive perception is a veridical perception of an objective reality. It now will be argued that it is conceptually impossible for there to be a veridical perception of God . . . from which it follows by modus tollens that it is impossible that there be a cognitive religious experience. . . . A veridical sense perception must have an object that is able to exist when not actually perceived and be the common object of different sense perceptions. For this to be possible, the object must be housed in a space and time that includes both the object and perceiver. It then is shown that there is no religious experience analogue to this concept of objective existence, there being no analogous dimensions to space and time in which God, along with the perceiver, is housed and which can be invoked to make sense of God existing when not actually perceived and being the common object of different religious experiences. Because of this big disanalogy, God is categoreally unsuited to serve as the object of a veridical perception, whether sensory or nonsensory. (pp. 326–27)
Note
first the implied claim in the second sentence: if it is conceptually
impossible that there be a veridical perception of God, then it follows that it is impossible that
there be “a cognitive religious experience”; Gale seems to believe that
any variety of religious experience would be cognitive only if it were
a part of a veridical perception of God. This seems wrong: as I argued
in chapters 6 and 8, we can appropriately think of the sensus
divinitatis and IIHS, on the
extended A/C model, as providing knowledge of God that is knowledge by
way of experience, but not perceptual knowledge. Consider the sensus
For
present purposes then, suppose we also temporarily concede
that knowledge of God by way of sensus divinitatis
or IIHS would be perceptual knowledge
of God, at least in an appropriately analogical sense. Alternatively,
suppose we consider Gale’s objection to perceptual knowledge of God,
bracketing, for the moment, the question of its bearing on the extended
A/C model. How does this objection go? “A veridical sense perception,”
he says, “must have an object that is able to exist when not actually
perceived and be the common object of different sense perceptions.”
That seems right, or at any rate plausible; and if there is such a
thing as experience of God, God will, of course, be able to exist
when At any rate, if God is indeed in time. And
even if he isn’t, someone who says, at a given time when (per
impossible) no one is
experiencing God, that God exists, speaks the truth. See my “On
Ockham’s Way Out,” Faith and Philosophy (July 1986).
Another
invidious consequence of their nondimensionality is that no analogous
explanation can be given of how they can exist unperceived and be
common objects of different perceptions to that
Similarly, how is Gutting going to decide when two religious experiences of a very powerful and loving nonhuman person had by two people at one time or by one person at two different times are of numerically one and the same being or only qualitatively similar ones? (pp. 341–42)
The alleged problem, therefore, seems to be twofold: it concerns (a) perceiving God at one time but not at another and (b) two different people’s both perceiving God—that is, perceiving the very same all-powerful, all-knowing, and loving nonhuman person. It isn’t as easy to see, however, just what Gale is claiming about (a) and (b). Two possibilities present themselves for (a) and three for (b). With respect to (a), Gale could be claiming that (1) if God is not in time and space, then no explanation could be given of our perceiving him at one time but not at another, and (2) if God is not in time and space, then it would not be possible that we experience him at one time but not at another. With respect to (b), the same two possibilities present themselves, and in addition there is the possibility that (3) if God is not in time and space, then we couldn’t decide (tell) when two people are both perceiving God—that is, both perceiving the very same divine person.
Well, consider (1) with respect to (a). Strictly speaking, I suppose, it wouldn’t damage the sensus divinitatis model or the claim that it is possible to perceive God if there were no explanation of our perceiving God at one time but not at another. All the model says is that such knowledge occurs; it doesn’t go on to add that there is an explanation of it, unless the model itself is an explanation. Still, I believe Gale is really claiming, in this first possibility, that we can’t see any way in which it could happen that we should perceive God at one time but not at another. More strongly, I think he means to claim that we can see that a person could perceive God at one time and not at another only if he and we were in the same time and space. We can see that this is the only condition under which such a thing could happen. So really, (1) and (2) with respect to (a) come to the same claim: it would be possible for us to perceive or experience God at one time but not at another only if he were in the same space and time (spacetime) as we.
So says Gale; is he right? I think not. Even with respect to things that
are in space and time, there are
a wide variety of explanations for my perceiving a thing at one time
and not at another. I might perceive the thing at t1, but then at t2 have my eyes closed, or be asleep,
Even if I am wide awake and eager to feel his presence, eager to receive an answer to prayer, or guidance, or a sense of his love, or a perception of his beauty and grace, I might not get what I am hoping for. This might be because at that time, and for reasons of his own, God doesn’t propose to communicate with me in those ways. Even if I am properly related to you both spatially and temporally and ask you a question, I still might not get an answer. I ask you why you are smiling in that enigmatic way: you make no reply, perhaps because you think the question is an impertinence, or not worth answering, or because answering would interfere with your desire to remain enigmatic. When it comes to knowing and knowing about other persons, their cooperation is often required. Naturally enough, the same would be true of God, and perhaps on many or most occasions he chooses not to be perceived. As I argued in chapter 6, it isn’t easy to say just what the necessary and sufficient conditions for perception are; whatever they are, however, they involve a certain sort of experience, an experience in which the perceived object seems to be present to or given to the percipient. Clearly, this experience could be absent at one time and present at another, whether or not God is in space.
This argument, then—the argument for the claim that if God is not in
space and time, then we couldn’t experience or perceive him at one time
but not at another—seems to me to be entirely without promise.
But what about Gale’s claims with respect to (b)? Here he makes a
double assertion: if God is not in time and space, then there could be
no explanation of two people’s
both perceiving or experiencing him (we can’t conceive of any way in
which this could happen), and furthermore there couldn’t be any way of
telling that it was God,
the very same person, that I experienced on two different occasions. Is
there any reason to accept either of the suggestions? How could it
Similarly for the other part of the suggestion: that it would be impossible to tell whether it was the same divine person one experienced on two different occasions. Because God is not in space, so the claim goes, we could never tell whether we encountered the same divine being on occasion B that we had encountered on occasion A. But is there any reason for thinking this true? This argument, I think, is as fatally flawed as the last. The idea seems to be that with objects not in space, one can’t, in principle, tell when one has encountered the same one again, or only encountered another thing that is appropriately like the first thing. But is this in fact true? What exactly is the problem? Suppose your experience is related to God in the right way and you form beliefs about him on two subsequent occasions, t1 and t2; at t2 you form the true belief that the being about whom you are then forming a belief is the same being about whom you formed a belief at t1: if this belief is formed under warrant-conferring conditions, then you would have told that the being about whom you formed a belief at t2 is the very same being as the one about whom you formed the belief at t1. Indeed, that’s just what it is to tell that the t2 belief is about the same being as the t1 belief. Well, perhaps the claim is that one can never tell that a t2 belief is about the same being as a t1 belief, if both beliefs are about a nonspatial object. This also seems quite wrong. At t1 I think of the null set, or the proposition that all men are mortal; I then read Gale’s book or watch a football game on TV, and at t2 think again about the null set (or that proposition). Is there really a problem with my telling or knowing that it is the same thing I think about at t2 as at t1? Should I be in doubt as to whether the set I think of at t2 really is the same set as that I thought of at t1?
Could it be that Gale’s suggestion is that if a dispute
arose over whether what I experience on
a given occasion is the same being as you experience on a given
occasion, the dispute might turn out to be
But aren’t there checks and tests for telling
whether you really perceive a horse? Indeed there are; but
consider the experiences that go with checking to see whether you
perceive a horse and determining that you did see a horse: it is also logically possible that you
have all those experiences when, in fact, there is no horse
there.
I think it is clear, therefore, that
these arguments don’t even begin to show that perception of God is
impossible, or that religious experience is never cognitive, or that
there couldn’t be knowledge of God by way of the sensus
divinitatis and IIHS. Gale’s arguments depend upon a lot of
assumptions that have little or no claim to assent: that if you
sometimes can’t tell whether p,
for example, then you can never tell whether
p, or that if God is not in
space and time, then you could never tell that it was he with whom you
were in contact on successive occasions; or that if God is not in space
and time, it couldn’t be that you should experience him on one occasion
and not on another. All of these assumptions seem monumentally dubious
at best. And, of course, there remains the point that
the extended A/C model does not, strictly speaking, require that one
perceive God at all.
Now according to the extended A/C model, belief in God and belief in the
central tenets of the Christian faith can be rational and have warrant
when they are not accepted on the evidential basis of other beliefs. On
this model, they can
have warrant that they don’t get by way of being
believed on the evidential basis of other beliefs; they can
First, there is the claim that if belief in God is really properly
basic with respect to warrant, then arguments and objections will not
be relevant to it; it will be beyond rational scrutiny and will be
insulated from objections and defeaters. But obviously objection and
argument are relevant to
theistic belief: therefore, it isn’t warrant-basic. Thus Michael Martin:
“Plantinga’s foundationalism is radically relativistic and puts any
belief beyond rational appraisal once it is declared
basic.” Atheism: A Philosophical Justification
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1990), p. 276.
Why think a thing like that? Theistic belief would certainly not
be immune to argument and defeat just
by virtue of being basic. In this, theistic belief only resembles other
kinds of beliefs accepted in the basic way. You tell me that you went
to the Grand Tetons this summer; I acquire the belief that you did so
and hold it in the basic way. I don’t hold it on the evidential basis of
such an argument as George says he went to the Tetons last
summer; most of what
George says is true; so
probably this is. I
could accept testimony on the
basis of such an argument, and perhaps in certain special circumstances
(a murder trial, for example) I would do so; but in the typical case I don’t. One condition is that of being
nonselfmembered; so, if Frege’s belief were true, there would be a set
of nonselfmembered sets—which would have to be both a member of
itself and not a member of itself. Hence Frege’s belief was false.
So it is not true, in general, that if a belief is held in the basic way,
then it is immune to argument or rational evaluation; why, therefore,
think it must hold for theistic belief? The fact, if it is a fact, that
belief in God is properly basic doesn’t for a moment imply that it is
immune to argument, objection, or defeat; it is surely no consequence
of my foundationalism or of the A/C model (simpliciter
or extended) that basic beliefs are
beyond rational appraisal. In “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith
and Rationality (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), a paper Martin quotes several
times in his book, I said, “Suppose someone accepts belief in God as
basic. Does it not follow that he will hold this belief in such a way
that no argument could move him or cause him to give it up? . . . Does
he not thereby adopt a posture in which argument and other rational
methods of settling disagreement are implicitly declared irrelevant?
Surely not.” See pp. 82ff., “Is Argument Irrelevant to Basic
Belief?”
A related complaint: according to the Great Pumpkin Objection, See “Reason and Belief in God,” pp. 74ff.
So the Great Pumpkin Objection as it stands is obviously a nonstarter.
Michael Martin recognizes this, Atheism, p. 272.
Although reformed epistemologists would not have to accept voodoo beliefs as rational, voodoo followers would be able to claim that insofar as they are basic in the voodoo community they are rational and, moreover, that reformed thought was irrational in this community. Indeed, Plantinga’s proposal would generate many different communities that could legitimately claim that their basic beliefs are rational. . . . Among the communities generated might be devil worshipers, flat earthers, and believers in fairies, just so long as belief in the devil, the flatness of the earth, and fairies was basic in the respective communities. (p. 272)
Call this objection ‘Son of Great Pumpkin’ (SGP). How exactly does it go? The first thing to see here is that SGP has moved up a level from the Great Pumpkin Objection itself. The latter complains that, on the view I’ve been presenting, just any proposition, no matter how fantastic, would have to be accepted as properly basic; this complaint, as Martin sees, is obviously false. SGP, therefore, moves up a level: according to SGP, someone who took any proposition p in the basic way could legitimately claim that p was properly basic—properly basic with respect to rationality, says Martin—that is, such that it can be both rationally accepted and accepted in the basic way. Take any possible community and any beliefs accepted as basic in that community: the epistemologists of that community could legitimately claim that these beliefs are rationally accepted in the basic way. Could, if what? What does Martin mean? There is more than one possibility, but I think he means this: could, if the ‘Reformed epistemologist’ can legitimately claim that theistic belief is properly basic. So the structure of the objection would have to be this:
(1) If Reformed epistemologists can legitimately claim that belief in God is rationally acceptable in the basic way, then for any other belief accepted in some community, the epistemologists of that community could legitimately claim that it was properly basic, no matter how bizarre the belief.
But
(2) The consequent of this conditional is false.
So
(3) The Reformed epistemologist can’t legitimately claim that belief in God is rationally acceptable in the basic way.
Is this a good argument? One initial problem is that the argument is pretty loosely stated; Martin doesn’t tell us what he means by ‘rational’, and he doesn’t tell us what he means by ‘legitimately’. As to the first, perhaps the best candidates would be rationality as justification (deontological justification), internal rationality, and rationality in the sense of warrant. We needn’t linger long over rationality as justification: obviously the voodooists could be within their intellectual rights in thinking what they do think (if only by virtue of cognitive malfunction); hence they could be justified. But then, presumably someone (the voodoo epistemologists, e.g.) could legitimately claim that those voodooists were justified, no matter what, precisely, Martin means by ‘legitimately’. Premise (2) of the argument, specified with respect to justification, is thus clearly false.
Well, suppose we specify the argument to internal rationality; take ‘rationally acceptable’ to mean ‘internally rational’. Then again the answer is pretty easy. A belief is internally rational if it is produced by faculties functioning properly ‘downstream from experience’ (see above, p. 110)—if, given your experience (including doxastic experience) at the time in question, it is compatible with proper function that you accept the belief in question. That could certainly be so for the voodooists. Perhaps they have always been taught that these voodoo beliefs are true, and all alleged contrary evidence is cleverly explained away by the priests; or perhaps they are all in the grip of some cognitive malfunction upstream from experience, one that skews their doxastic experience. If that could be so for the voodoists, then the voodoo epistemologists could no doubt know that the voodoists are internally rational in these judgments, and hence (one supposes, legitimately) report this fact. Premise (2) fails for internal rationality, just as for justification.
Accordingly, if we are to have something worth considering here, the argument must presumably be specified to rationality in the sense of warrant. The question is whether, if I can legitimately claim that belief in God is properly basic with respect to warrant, the epistemologists of the voodoo community can legitimately claim that those voodoo beliefs are properly basic with respect to warrant. But now we do need to know what is meant, here, by ‘legitimately claim’. There seem to be three salient possibilities: claim truthfully, claim justifiably, and claim warrantedly. First, therefore, Martin could mean that if belief in God can truthfully be said to be warrant basic, then the same goes for voodoo belief. We have already seen, however, that this is false. It is entirely possible that belief in God have warrant in the basic way and voodoo belief not have it in the basic way; this state of affairs would obtain, for example, if the A/C model is true, but voodoo belief originates in some kind of cognitive error. So premise (1) of the argument would fail.
Second, Martin might mean that if belief in God can justifiably be said to be warrant basic, then the same goes for voodoo belief: it too can justifiably be said to be warrant basic. Again, this is too easy: obviously those epistemologists might be justified in thinking that voodoo belief was warrant basic: it might seem just obvious to them, after protracted reflection and after considering objections, that, indeed, voodoo belief is warrant basic. So taken, premise (2) fails.
If we are to locate a respectable objection, then, it looks as if we must specify ‘legitimately’ to ‘warrantedly’. Take both ‘rationally acceptable’ and ‘legitimately’ as ‘warrantedly’: then is the argument a good one? Martin’s claim, so construed, would be that (1) if the claim made by the Reformed epistemologist—namely, that belief in God is properly basic with respect to warrant—has warrant, then for any proposition p (no matter how bizarre) accepted by some community, if the epistemologists of that community were to claim that p is properly basic with respect to warrant, their claim would itself have warrant; (2) the consequent of (1) is false; the conclusion of the argument would be that the Reformed epistemologist’s claim does not enjoy warrant. A problem with evaluating this version of the argument is that the Reformed epistemologist (this Reformed epistemologist, anyway) doesn’t claim as part of his philosophical position that belief in God and the deliverances of IIHS do have warrant. That is because (above, p. 186ff.) in all likelihood they have warrant only if they are true, and I am not arguing that these beliefs are in fact true. No doubt the Reformed epistemologist does believe that they are true, and is prepared to claim that they are, even if he doesn’t propose to argue for that claim. So for the nonce, suppose we think of the Reformed epistemologists as actually claiming that belief in God and the deliverances of the IIHS enjoy warrant in the basic way; suppose further that they claim this ‘legitimately’—that is, under the current interpretation, suppose this claim itself has warrant for them. Would it follow that for any proposition p, if there were a community who endorsed p, these people (or the epistemologists of their community) would be warranted in believing that p is properly basic with respect to warrant for those in this community?
It
would not follow. Suppose the extended A/C model is true
(not just possible); then (a) the central claims of the Christian faith
are, in fact, true, (b) there really are such cognitive processes as the
sensus divinitatis and IIHS, and
(c) their deliverances do meet the conditions for warrant. Suppose a
Reformed epistemologist believes the great things of the gospel on the
basis of the sensus divinitatis and IIHS; suppose he notes, further, that his
belief and that of many others is accepted in the basic way
(where, of course, accepting p on the basis of testimony is one way to
believe p in the basic
way). Suppose he further comes to see or believe that God intends his
children to know
It
doesn’t follow, of course, that the voodoo epistemologist is also
warranted in claiming that voodoo belief is properly basic with respect
to warrant. For suppose voodoo belief is in fact false, and suppose
further that it arose originally in some kind of mistake or confusion,
or out of a fearful reaction to natural phenomena of one sort or
another, or in the mind of some group hoping to gain or perpetuate
personal political power. If so, then those original voodoo beliefs did
not possess warrant. Suppose still further that these voodoo beliefs
were passed on to subsequent generations by way of testimony and
teaching. Now if a testifier testifies to some belief p
that has no warrant for her,
then p will also have no
warrant for anyone believing it on just the basis of her testimony.
If p has no warrant for
the testifier, then it has none for the testifiee either—even if
the latter’s faculties are working perfectly properly. See WPF, p. 83.
So
consider the voodoo epistemologist, and suppose he accepts those voodoo
views on the basis of testimony and (analogous to the Reformed
epistemologist) reasons from their truth together with other premises
to their being properly basic with respect to warrant. Then his
conclusion that voodoo beliefs are warrant-basic will not itself be
warranted, because it is accepted on the basis of an argument at least
one premise of which has no warrant for him. That is because
Here I ignore such carping criticisms as that
I might deduce r from
p and q
by deducing it from p
alone, which does in fact have warrant
for me.
It could certainly happen, therefore, that the views of the Reformed epistemologist are legitimate in the sense of being warranted, and those of the voodoo epistemologist, who arrives at his views in structurally the same way as the Reformed epistemologist, are not. That could be if, for example, the central claims of the Christian faith are true and voodoo belief is false. It is therefore not the case that if the claim that belief in God and in the great things of the gospel is properly basic with respect to warrant is itself warranted, then by the same token the claim that voodoo belief is properly basic with respect to warrant is itself warranted. Martin’s argument, construed as we are currently construing it, therefore fails; its first premise is false.
By way of summary: Martin’s complaint, apparently, is that if the Reformed
epistemologist can legitimately claim that Christian belief is properly
basic with respect to rationality, then the philosophers of a
community with clearly crazy beliefs could, with equal legitimacy, claim
that those crazy beliefs are properly basic with respect to
rationality; but clearly they couldn’t claim this; so the Reformed
epistemologist can’t legitimately make his claim. This complaint is
multiply ambiguous, inheriting the multiple ambiguity of ‘legitimately’
and ‘rationality’. Most of the disambiguations, however, show no
promise at all. The last disambiguation, where both ‘legitimately’ and
‘rationality’ are both understood as referring to warrant, is at least
interesting; the argument so construed, however, suffers from the
annoying defect of having a false premise. Son of Great Pumpkin does no
better than Great Pumpkin. Note, in particular, that Son of Great
Pumpkin doesn’t furnish the objector with a criticism of Christian
belief that is independent of its truth—that is, can be thought
to hold even if Christian belief is in fact true. It therefore does not
provide a de jure criticism.
Now in the spirit of Son of Great
Pumpkin, we might raise a slightly more general question here. I
propose the extended A/C model as a way in which Christian belief can
have warrant in the
Certainly not. Many propositions are not such that, if they are true, then very likely they have warrant: the proposition No beliefs have warrant comes to mind. But, you say, isn’t this just a bit of logical legerdemain; are there any systems of beliefs seriously analogous to Christian belief for which these claims cannot be made? For any such set of beliefs, couldn’t we find a model under which the beliefs in question have warrant, and such that, given the truth of those beliefs, there are no philosophical objections to the truth of the model? Well, probably something like that is true for the other theistic religions: Judaism, Islam, some forms of Hinduism, some forms of Buddhism, some forms of American Indian religion. Perhaps these religions are like Christianity in that they are subject to no de jure objections that are independent of de facto objections. Still, that isn’t true for just any such set of beliefs. It isn’t true, for example, for voodooism, or the belief that the earth is flat, or Humean skepticism, or philosophical naturalism.
For consider the set of beliefs involved in Hume’s skepticism with respect to his origins and the origins of his cognitive faculties (above, p. 218). Hume—at any rate, as we understood him in chapter 7—holds that we ought to be skeptical of the reliability of our belief-forming processes. He thinks he can see that what nature inevitably leads us to believe is unlikely, or arbitrary, or at best extremely dubious; hence the right cognitive attitude with respect to the beliefs induced in us by nature is that attitude of ironic detachment. We recognize that we can’t help holding these beliefs; we also recognize that they are not to be relied upon. But if we are skeptical of the reliability of our cognitive processes, then we also have reason to be skeptical of any particular deliverances of those processes, including the beliefs that lead us to be skeptical of them—hence the reflexive, self-referential character of the irony. Now: can we find a possible model in which these beliefs—including the beliefs that what nature leads us to believe is arbitrary, or not to be relied upon—are warranted? More poignantly, can we find a model such that if this belief is true, then very likely it is warranted? Clearly not.
Perhaps someone will think that Hume’s skepticism about his origins and
the origins of his cognitive faculties is not much like Christian
belief; no doubt this is true. So consider instead philosophical
naturalism: the view that there is no such person as God or anyone (or
anything) at all like him. (Contemporary naturalists ordinarily
Still, isn’t there something circular in my argument? According to Paul
Noble, Jonathan Edwards’s “theistic defense of passional reason raises
the spectre of epistemic circularity: the theistic metaphysics grounds
one’s belief in the legitimacy of ‘spiritual perception’, and yet
Edwards also appeals to such perceptions as vindicating the truth of
theism.” “Reason, Religion, and the Passions” (a
review of William Wainwright’s Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon
to a Critique of Passional Reason [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995]),
Religious Studies (December
1996), p. 515.
Now
suppose I proposed the model as indeed the truth (or close
I can’t see how. It is indeed true that I will have to be warranted in accepting Christian belief if I am to be warranted in accepting the extended A/C model as true; that is because the former is included in the latter. It is not the case, however, that if Christian belief has warrant for me, then the model must also have warrant for me. That would be true if I argued for Christian belief by way of an argument one premise of which was the extended A/C model. More exactly, that would be true if such an argument were the only source of warrant, for me, of Christian belief. For then any warrant enjoyed by my Christian belief would accrue to it by way of warrant transfer from the premises of that argument; but one premise of that argument would be a conjunction, one conjunct of which was itself part of Christian belief. There would therefore be a vicious circle in the receives-its-warrant-from relation.
So if the source of the warrant of my Christian belief were this argument, then indeed the project would suffer from vicious circularity. But it isn’t, and it doesn’t. The source of warrant for Christian belief, according to the model, is not argument of any sort; in particular, its warrant does not arise from some argument about how Christian belief can have warrant. To show that there is circularity here, the objector would have to show that any warrant enjoyed by Christian belief must, somehow, have come from argument of some sort; and this, as we have seen, can’t be done. This objection, then, is no more successful than the others.
No doubt there are other objections, perhaps even other sensible
objections. I don’t know of any, however, and am therefore obliged to
refrain from responding to them until I hear about them. In the
meantime, I shall provisionally take it that there aren’t any such
objections. Now the objections
considered in this chapter are objections to the claim that Christian
belief can have warrant in the basic way. They are therefore
philosophical objections to a philosophical claim. Now of course it is
possible that Christian belief could have warrant in this way, even if in
fact it has little or no warrant.
For perhaps there is a source of warrant, for Christian belief, but the
warrant in question is defeated. No doubt the belief that the earth is flat once
had warrant for many. But then people encountered
defeaters for this belief: for
example, there is the peculiar way in which ships disappear over
The philosophical case against theism is rather easily dealt with. There is no philosophical case against theism.
G. K. Chesterton
I’ve argued that Christian belief—the full panoply of Christian belief, including trinity, incarnation, atonement, resurrection—can, if true, have warrant, can indeed have sufficient warrant for knowledge, and can have that warrant in the basic way. There are no cogent philosophical objections to the notion that these beliefs can have warrant in this way. It is easily possible to work out an account—for example, the extended Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model—of how it is that beliefs of these sorts do indeed have warrant. This way does not involve arguments from other beliefs. Rather, the fundamental idea is that God provides us human beings with faculties or belief-producing processes that yield these beliefs and are successfully aimed at the truth; when they work the way they were designed to in the sort of environment for which they were designed, the result is warranted belief. Indeed, if these beliefs are true and the degree of their warrant sufficiently high, they constitute knowledge.
Of
course this hardly settles the issue as to whether Christian belief
(even if true) has or can have warrant in the circumstances in which
most of us actually find ourselves. Someone might put it like this:
“Well, perhaps these beliefs can have warrant, and perhaps (if
they are true) even warrant sufficient for knowledge: there are
circumstances
“On Finding the Foundations of
Theism,” Faith and Philosophy 2,
no. 4 (1985), p. 481. See my “The Foundations of Theism: A
Reply,” Faith and Philosophy 3, no. 3 (1986) pp. 298ff.; and Quinn’s
rejoinder, “The Foundations of Theism Again,” in Rational
Faith: Catholic Responses to Reformed Epistemology, ed. Linda Zagzebski (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993),
pp. 14ff.
In this and the next chapters, I’ll deal with four proposed defeaters for Christian belief. In this chapter, after a brief investigation of the nature of defeaters, I’ll argue that the projective theories Quinn mentions do not in fact constitute a defeater for Christian belief. In chapter 12, I’ll argue that contemporary historical biblical criticism (‘higher criticism’) doesn’t serve as a defeater for Christian belief, even when its alleged results do not support Christian belief and, indeed, even when they go counter to it. In chapter 13 I’ll examine the claim that the facts of religious pluralism constitute a defeater for Christian belief; I’ll also look into the idea that the development of postmodern thought is, in some way, a defeater for such belief. I’ll argue that neither offers such a defeater. Finally, in chapter 14 I’ll consider what has often been seen as the most formidable challenge of all to Christian belief: the facts of suffering and evil. This challenge too, I’ll argue, does not as such constitute a defeater for Christian belief.
Now
what we need initially is some account of what a defeater, for a
belief, is. The fact is there is a great deal to be said about
defeaters. Some of which is
to be found in Michael Bergmann’s Internalism,
Externalism, and Epistemic Defeat (University of Notre Dame Ph.D. dissertation, 1997).
See also John Pollock’s Contemporary
Theories of Knowledge (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman Littlefield, 1986), pp. 37ff.; and my unpublished
paper “Naturalism Defeated.”
Defeaters of this kind are rationality defeaters; given belief in the defeating
proposition, you can retain belief in the defeated proposition only at
the cost of irrationality. There are also warrant
defeaters that are not rationality
defeaters. Thus in Carl Ginet’s fake barn example, as you are driving
through southern Wisconsin, you seem to see many fine barns. Fixing on
a particular one, you say to yourself, “That is a splendid barn!” What
you don’t know, however, is that the local Wisconsinites have erected
many clever barn facades (from the road indistinguishable from real
barns) to make themselves look more prosperous. What you are
actually looking at, however, is a real
Defeaters depend on and are relative to the rest of your noetic structure, the rest of what you know and believe. Whether a belief A is a defeater for a belief B doesn’t depend merely on my current experience; it also depends on what other beliefs I have, how firmly I hold them, and the like. Consider, for example, the above case, where your saying that there are no sheep in the field is a defeater for my belief that I see a sheep there; this depends on my assuming you to be trustworthy, at least on this occasion and on this topic. By contrast, if I know you are a notorious practical joker especially given to misleading people about sheep, what you say will not constitute a defeater; neither will it if I am inspecting the sheep through powerful binoculars and clearly see that it is a sheep, or if there is someone I trust standing right in front of the sheep, who tells me by cell phone that it is indeed a sheep.
As a result of this relativity to noetic structure, it can happen that
you and I both learn a given proposition p, that it constitutes a defeater for another
belief q for me, but does
not do so for you. For example, you and I both believe that the
University of Aberdeen was founded in 1495; you but not I know that the
current guidebook to Aberdeen contains an egregious error on this very
matter. We both win a copy of the guidebook in the Scottish national
lottery; we both read it; sadly enough, it contains the wholly mistaken
affirmation that the university was founded in 1595. Given my noetic
structure (which includes the belief that guidebooks are ordinarily to
be trusted on matters like this), I thereby acquire a defeater for my
belief that the university was founded in 1495; you, however, knowing
about this improbable error, do not. The difference, of course, is with
respect to the rest of what we know or believe: given the rest of
what I believe, I now
have a reason to reject the belief that the university was founded in
1495; the same does not hold for you. You already know that the current
guidebook contains an error on the matter of
A defeater for a belief b, then, is another belief d such that, given my noetic structure, I cannot rationally hold b, given that I believe d. In the typical case of defeat, I will first believe b and then later come to believe the defeater d: I believe that there is a sheep in the pasture before me; then you come along with that information about the sheep dog. I believe that the widget I’m looking at is red; then the shop superintendent tells me about the irradiation by red light. Sometimes, however, I already believe the defeater (or, strictly speaking, part of the defeater), but do not initially realize its bearing on the defeatee. I believe that you were at the basketball game last night at 9:30; I also believe that you are never at a game without your husband, that Sam, whom I trust, reported seeing either Tom or your husband at a bar at that time, and that George, whom I also trust, reports that Tom was not at the bar then. This is sufficiently complicated that I might not initially see the connection between these propositions and my belief that you were at the game then. As long as I haven’t noticed the connection, I don’t have a defeater, although I do have what we might call a potential defeater. Once I see the connection, then I have a defeater: the defeater is the conjunction of those propositions, together with the proposition that if that conjunction is true, then you weren’t at the game at 9:30.
A famous similar kind of case: Frege once believed that
(F) For every condition or property P, there exists the set of just those things that have P.
Bertrand Russell wrote him a letter, pointing out that (F) has very serious problems. If it is true, then there exists the set of non-self-membered sets (because there is the property or condition of being non-self-membered). This set, however, inconsiderately fails to exist. That is because if it did exist, it would exemplify itself if and only if it did not exemplify itself; that is, it would both exemplify itself and fail to exemplify itself, which is wholly unacceptable behavior for a set. Before he realized this problem with (F), Frege did not have a defeater for it. Once he understood Russell’s letter, however, he did; and the defeater was just the fact that (F), together with the truth that there is such a condition as being non-self-membered, entails a contradiction.
We might initially try explaining the notion of a defeater as follows:
(D)
D is a defeater of B for S at t
if and only if (1) S’s noetic structure N (i.e., S’s beliefs and experiences and salient relations
among them) at t includes B, and S comes to believe D at t, and (2) any person (a) whose cognitive faculties
are functioning properly in the relevant respects, (b) whose noetic
structure is N and includes B, and (c) who
comes at t to believe D but nothing
else independent of or stronger than D would withhold B (or believe it less strongly We could use the term ‘partial defeater’ for
defeaters that don’t require withholding B but do require holding it less firmly. A full
treatment would explain degrees of belief (which are not to be thought
of as probability judgments; see Warrant: The Current
Debate, p. 118) and show how
partial and full defeat are related. Here there is no space for that,
but note that full defeat is really a special case of partial defeat,
at least if we stipulate that coming to withhold B
is a special case of coming to
believe B less strongly.
For the sake of brevity I’ll henceforth suppress mention of partial
defeaters, although the application of what I say to them should be
routine.
The idea, roughly speaking, is that belief D is a defeater of B for you if proper function requires giving up belief B when you acquire D. This fits the above examples of defeaters rather well; still, it is nonetheless not quite what we want. To see the problem, imagine a canny Freudian replying as follows:
Consider the ‘optimistic overrider’. You are suffering from what you
know to be a really serious disease; nonetheless, you believe that you
will recover within six months. You then learn some statistics that
accurately fit your case—statistics according to which the
probability that you will recover is very low. Does your belief in
these statistics give you a defeater for the belief that you will
recover? One would think so; but it need not on (D). For perhaps there
is a kind of mechanism that operates in these cases to maintain
optimism about your chances of recovery, just because such optimism
enhances the chances of recovery. That is, what proper function
requires in a case like this is believing that you will recover,
despite your knowledge of the statistics. What proper function requires
in this case, then, is (a) the belief that those statistics are in fact
accurate, but also (b) the belief that you will nevertheless recover. So the
definition is incorrect. It fails to take account of the fact that not
all cognitive processes are aimed at the production of true belief.
Furthermore, this is directly relevant to the case of belief in God.
For, as Freud pointed out, belief in God arises from wish-fulfillment, not from
belief-producing processes or faculties aimed at the truth. The
function of the processes that produce theistic belief is psychological
health, enabling us to carry on in this otherwise grim and threatening
world. The function of these processes is not to provide us with true
beliefs. So suppose you are a believer in
Agreed, the definition is indeed faulty. Here I was greatly helped by a series of
communications from William Talbott.
(D*) D is a purely epistemic defeater of B for S at t if and only if (1) S’s noetic structure N at t includes B and S comes to believe D at t, and (2) any person S* (a) whose cognitive faculties are functioning properly in the relevant respects, (b) who is such that the bit of the design plan governing the sustaining of B in her noetic structure is successfully aimed at truth (i.e., at the maximization of true belief and minimization of false belief) and nothing more, (c) whose noetic structure is N and includes B, and (d) who comes to believe D but nothing else independent of or stronger than D, would withhold B (or believe it less strongly).
A couple of comments. First, it is of course the addition of clause (b) that distinguishes (D*) from (D); very roughly speaking, the idea is that a purely epistemic defeater for B is a belief D that would be a defeater simpliciter for B if the only processes governing the sustaining of B were processes aimed at truth (and not, for example, at survival, or psychological comfort). The point is then that D could be a purely epistemic defeater of B even if proper function requires the maintenance of B, in S’s noetic structure, despite the formation of D; that can occur if the processes maintaining B are not aimed at truth. Second, with respect to clause (a), it is not required, of course, that all of S*’s faculties are functioning properly in every respect. For example, the fact that S*’s memory for names is defective need not be relevant. Further, it isn’t required that D itself arise rationally or by way of proper function; as I’ll argue below, it is possible for a belief that is irrationally acquired to be a defeater, even for a belief that is rationally acquired. Perhaps (D*) is a bit unwieldy; still, in practice there shouldn’t be any difficulty in applying it to the cases of interest. The above canny Freudian, therefore, will presumably hold that the theist does have a purely epistemic defeater in the facts of evil (once she reflects on the facts of evil and sees how they are related to the existence of a perfectly good God), even if she does not have a defeater simpliciter.
And she may go on to make one final claim: once you see that belief in God is not sustained by truth-aimed processes (arising, instead, from wishful thinking), then you will also have a defeater simpliciter for theistic belief. You will have this defeater in two different ways. First, once you see that the cognitive processes responsible for a given belief you hold are not aimed at the truth, and also clearly see the facts of evil, then, she claims, you will be in a situation where the rational response is to give up belief in God. For, she says, you see that you really have evidence against the existence of God, while on the other side your belief in God is without evidence and without warrant. She adds that even if we ignore evil altogether, the theist who sees that her theistic belief issues from wish-fulfillment (or any other cognitive process that is not aimed at the truth) has a defeater for that belief. Merely seeing that the sources of a given belief are not aimed at truth (but at some other desideratum such as survival, psychological welfare, or the ability to carry on in this hostile and indifferent world) is sufficient (in the absence of other evidence), she says, to give you a defeater simpliciter for that belief. The rational response, once you see the source of such a belief, is to give up the belief.
What further conditions (if any) must a defeater belief meet? In particular, must such a belief itself be warranted or rationally formed? Suppose I hold a belief B, but then come to accept a belief D that goes against B in some way, where this belief D I accept has no warrant. Can it still be a defeater for B? I should think so. I’ve believed for years that you were born in Yankton, South Dakota; this belief has a good deal of warrant for me. (I was told this by your uncle, whom I know to be a generally reliable person.) One day, however, you tell me in all seriousness that you were born not in Yankton, but in New Haven (and you add some story as to why your uncle thinks you were born in Yankton). Then (under normal circumstances) I have a rationality defeater for my belief that you were born in Yankton. If there are no special circumstances (if I have no reason to think you were joking, or trying to deceive me, or are misinformed about where you were born, or the like), the rational response would be to give up the belief that you were born in Yankton. Suppose, however, the fact is you yourself were misinformed by your parents; you actually were born in Yankton, but for reasons having to do with academic prestige your parents tell you that you were born in New Haven. Then your belief that you were born in New Haven has little or no warrant. That is because (as I argued in Warrant and Proper Function, pp. 83ff.) a belief acquired by way of testimony has warrant for the testifiee only if it has warrant for the testifier; because your parents don’t even hold this belief, it is not among their warranted beliefs. Hence my newly acquired belief that you were born in New Haven also lacks warrant. Nevertheless, this belief still gives me a defeater for my old belief that you were born in Yankton. So it is quite possible for a belief A to serve as a defeater for another belief B even if A has little or no warrant, and even when B has more warrant than A.
But what if the potential defeating belief is acquired irrationally? Can it still be a defeater? Suppose I’ve always thought you a genial sort who is rather well disposed to me. Unhappily, I start sinking into a paranoid condition; because of cognitive malfunction, it comes to seem to me that you are, in fact, trying to harm me by destroying my academic reputation. Because of the cognitive malfunction, this just seems wholly obvious to me; it has a great deal of what I have been calling ‘doxastic evidence’. Can my belief D that you are trying to destroy my reputation serve as a defeater for my belief B that you are favorably disposed toward me?
Here we must recall the distinction between internal and external rationality. Internal rationality is a matter of proper function ‘downstream from experience’ (including doxastic experience: see above, pp. 110ff.). Given my experience, I am internally rational just if I form the right beliefs in response to that experience. What internal rationality requires, therefore, is the appropriate doxastic response to experience, including doxastic experience. For present purposes, we may think of internal rationality as also including epistemic justification, being within one’s epistemic rights, having flouted no epistemic duties or obligations. External rationality, by contrast, is a matter of the proper function of the sources of experience, including, in particular, the sources of doxastic experience. External irrationality can arise in several ways. For example, it can happen by way of impedance. I write a book on topic X; because of pride and egoism, I think it easily the best book on X, even though your book on X is better, and even though I would have recognized that fact had it not been for the way in which my pride has impeded the proper function of the relevant rational faculties. This is a case of external irrationality: the problem is that, because of my pride and arrogance, my book just seems to me much better than yours; the proposition that it is better has, for me, a great deal of doxastic evidence. In a case like this, therefore, my irrationally formed belief can give me a defeater, I think, for my previous and rationally formed belief that your book is the best book on X.
Return now to the case of paranoia: I think we see a similar situation. My belief that you are out to get me is externally irrational; it arises from sources of doxastic experience that are not functioning properly. By virtue of their malfunction, however, my experience is such that I am powerfully impelled to believe D, that you are trying to ruin me. This now seems to me much more obvious than that you are favorably disposed toward me: the doxastic evidence for D is much stronger than that for B. What internal rationality calls for, under those circumstances, therefore, is my giving up B; I have a defeater for it in D, even though D is arrived at irrationally. I can therefore have a defeater D for a belief B even where B is rationally held and D is irrationally acquired.
There is still another way in which I can acquire a defeater by way of
irrationality. Suppose I believe B, but by virtue of cognitive malfunction do not
believe it nearly as strongly as rationality requires; it isn’t nearly
as resistant to the challenge of other beliefs as it should be. For
example, due to cognitive malfunction (a brain lesion, perhaps) I am
arithmetically challenged: like everyone else, I believe that 2 + 1 =
3,
What we’ve seen so far is that you have a defeater for one of your beliefs B just if you acquire another belief D such that, given that you hold that belief, the rational response is to reject B (or hold it less firmly). What we want to know, however, is (for example) whether the suffering and evil the world displays or the facts of pluralism provide a defeater for Christian belief. Of course they might for some people, but not for others; there is that relativity to noetic structures. So what are we really asking when we ask whether these things constitute defeaters? There are various directions we could go here; suppose we follow Philip Quinn (above, p. 358) in thinking about the noetic structures of “intellectually sophisticated adults in our culture.” We are asking whether these proposed defeaters would in fact constitute defeaters for Quinn’s sophisticated believers. Of course they will constitute defeaters, for a given person S, only if S believes them. And not just any proposition which is such that, if I believed it, I would have a defeater for Christian or theistic belief will do the trick. As we have seen, an irrationally acquired belief can serve as a defeater; but clearly you don’t give me a defeater in the relevant sense for Christian belief by causing me to come to believe something in an irrational way—by hypnosis say, or by injecting mind-altering drugs. You give me a defeater in the relevant sense only if you propose to me a belief which is such that a rational sophisticated believer (rational both internally and externally) would accept it upon being presented with it. Hence you don’t necessarily provide a defeater for theistic belief just by asserting, even loudly or slowly, that belief in God is false, or stupid, or that God is dead, or given electricity and the wireless (below, p. 403), we now know better. Although these propositions, if I accepted them, might provide me with defeaters for Christian belief, they are not, just by themselves, such that rationality would require a sophisticated believer to accept them. Something further is required.
What? One way that could be relevant
would be to give an argument for the falsehood of the
relevant proposition from premises a sophisticated
Is there any other way? Yes; you can put me in a position where I have experiences such that, given those experiences (and given my noetic structure), the rational thing to do is to give up the purported defeatee. I claim that there are no prickly pear cacti in the upper peninsula of Michigan; you take me into the woods up there and show me a particularly luxuriant specimen; rationality requires that I drop my now discredited belief. So another way to provide a defeater for Christian or theistic belief would be to point to or provide a kind of experience such that a sophisticate who underwent that experience would be rationally required to give up the belief in question.
Now we can turn to the projective theories of religious—in particular, theistic—belief Quinn mentions. These theories propose to explain theistic belief and other religious belief in terms of our projecting into the heavens something like an idealized father. Freud proposes such a theory, as do Marx, Durkheim, and others; according to Quinn, such projective theories, along with natural evil, constitute defeaters for theistic and hence Christian belief. I’ll deal with evil in the last chapter; but what about Freud and Marx? Aren’t their theories, as Quinn says, reasons for responsible and informed contemporary Christian believers to give up belief in God, or at any rate accept it less firmly?
I
don’t think so; allow me to explain. The fact is I’ve already given some of
my reasons in chapter 6, pp. 192ff. As I argued there, the heart and
soul of the F&M (Freud-and-Marx) complaint is that theistic belief
lacks warrant: it is not produced by cognitive faculties functioning
properly according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth.
According to Marx, such belief arises from a sort of cognitive disorder
produced by a disordered society; according to Freud, it is produced by
cognitive processes that are aimed at psychological comfort or survival
rather than truth. Now if I believed these things, then
Although, as I argued above (p. 197), it is
possible that theistic belief originates in something like wishful
thinking, but nonetheless has warrant. If I also believe this, then
coming to think that belief in God is a product of wish-fulfillment
would not automatically give me a defeater for such belief.
Projective theories like Freud’s could be a defeater for theistic belief (and hence for Christianity) for some people. Suppose I believe very firmly that if theism is true, there couldn’t be any coherent projective theories of religious or theistic belief; suppose I also accept theism, though not particularly firmly. Now suppose I then come to believe that
(F) Freud’s theory (or some other projective theory) is indeed coherent.
Then (F) will be a defeater—perhaps a partial
defeater—for my theistic belief; as long as I accept it and
continue to accept the rest of my noetic structure (including the idea
that theism is true only if there are no coherent projective theories
of theistic belief), I can’t rationally also accept theism. Of course
that idea is false; but a false belief can nonetheless serve as a
defeater. Or suppose I don’t
realize either that Freud’s theory really presupposes atheism, or that
he gives no argument either for atheism or for his theory. Then too I
might have a defeater, at least a partial defeater, for my theistic
belief. So I could acquire
a defeater in learning about these theories. However, the point is that
rationality does not require that I acquire such a defeater under those
conditions. The point is that a rational person could perfectly well be
a theist, learn about and be well acquainted with Freud’s (and others’)
projective theories, and rationally remain a theist—in particular,
if she sees that Freud’s views are unargued and in any event really
presuppose atheism. Alternatively, a theist for whom Freud’s views did
constitute a defeater could acquire a defeater for that defeater (a
defeater-defeater) by coming to be apprised of these or other
epistemological truths. Here is a
Now Quinn argues that projective theories of theistic belief are defeaters for such belief if they successfully explain theistic belief:
I
believe it is useful to think of projection theories of religious
belief as constituting a research program in the human sciences. . . .
The unifying idea of the research program is that there is in us a
mechanism of belief formation and maintenance that involves projecting
attributes of individual humans or their societies outwards and
postulating entities in which the projected attributes are
instantiated. . . . The existence of the postulated entities is
supposed to play no role in explaining the formation or persistence of
belief in the postulates. If such hypotheses can explain religious
beliefs in a wide variety of circumstances, leaving unexplained no more
anomalies than other good theories, then appeal to some principle of
economy such as Ockham’s razor can be made to justify the conclusion
that the entities whose existence is postulated as a result of the
operation of the projection mechanism do not exist because they are
explanatorily idle. “The Foundations of Theism Again,” in
Rational Faith: Catholic Responses to Reformed Theology
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1993), pp. 41–42.
If I understand Quinn’s suggestion as specified to theistic belief, it is that:
(Q1) the existence of God is not needed in order to explain theistic belief;
hence
(Q2) the existence of God is explanatorily idle;
and
(Q3) that is a good reason for holding that there is no such person as God.
It’s not clear that
Quinn accepts (Q1) through (Q3);
perhaps he is only proposing them as possibilities. (And even if he did
accept them, he might also hold that there are also good reasons
for theistic belief.) In any
event, I believe there are several serious problems with these
suggestions. First, according to the theory in question, believers in
God postulate the
existence of God (“there is in us a mechanism of belief formation and
maintenance that involves projecting attributes of individual humans or
their societies outwards and postulating entities
Second, even if the existence of theistic belief can be ‘explained’ (whatever exactly that amounts to) without postulating the existence of God, it might still be that theism itself explains lots of other things. Theistic belief is only one of the things that theism can be invoked to explain. Theism has also been used to explain the fine-tuning of the universe; the existence of propositions, properties, and other abstract entities; the origin of life; the nature and existence of morality; the reliability of our epistemic faculties; and much else besides. Hence the fact that it is explanatorily idle with respect to theistic belief doesn’t by itself show that it is explanatorily idle tout court; there is no reason, so far, to infer (Q2) from (Q1).
Third, given (Q2), why infer (Q3)? According to Ockham’s famous razor,
entia non multiplicandum sunt praetor necessitatem; “entities ought not to be multiplied beyond
necessity.” As the razor is ordinarily understood. There
is apparently some doubt as to whether Ockham himself ever put it just
this way.
The crucial point, here, is that on the model (and in actuality as well) theistic belief is not ordinarily accepted as an explanation. It is not that the theist sizes up what the world appears to be like (including the existence of theistic belief itself) and then proposes the existence of God as the best explanation of these phenomena. If that were how she was thinking, then the fact that theistic belief is explanatorily idle (if it is) with respect to some range of data might be relevant. But it isn’t. On the model, the believer in God ordinarily believes in the basic way, not on the evidential basis of other propositions, and not by way of proposing belief in God as an explanation of something or other. Hence the fact that there are better explanations of some range of phenomena (if there are) does not so far cast any doubt on belief in God.
Allow me to return to an analogy I have used elsewhere. I apply for a
National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship; realizing I am not really qualified, I offer you five
hundred dollars to write a glowing if inaccurate letter of
recommendation. Perhaps, as they say, everyone has a price; as it turns
out, yours is definitely more than five hundred dollars. You
indignantly refuse, and write a blistering letter to the chair of my
department. The letter mysteriously disappears from her office. One of
the most respected members of the department, however, reports having
seen me apparently trying to enter her office through a second-story
window. I have means, motive, and opportunity. Further, I am known to
have done this sort of thing before. But I clearly remember being on a solitary hike in the
mountains the entire afternoon during which the letter disappeared. I
believe that I did not remove that letter, and that belief has warrant
for me. But I do not propose my belief that I am innocent, or that I
took a walk in the woods, as an explanation of the facts pointing to my guilt. I don’t propose
my innocence or my going for a hike as an explanation of anything at
all: these beliefs enter my noetic structure in quite a different way.
Suppose, then, that these beliefs are, in fact, explanatorily idle; and
add, if you like, that there is a good (if false) explanation of x’s claiming to
have seen me trying to gain entrance to
Granted: if the evidence for my having taken
the letter continues to mount (the letter turns up in my back pocket;
my fingerprints are all over the file it was kept in; the mountain I
thought I was hiking on that afternoon was destroyed by a volcanic
eruption the preceding morning), I may eventually have to conclude that
my memory is playing me tricks. The point is only that the explanatory
idleness of my belief does not constitute any kind of defeater for
it—because it isn’t accepted as an explanation.
Taken as they stand, therefore, Quinn’s claims do not seem to show that projective hypotheses furnish a defeater for Christian or theistic belief. Could it be that a stronger argument of the same sort is lurking in the neighborhood? As Quinn states the objection, the fact that theistic belief is explanatorily idle gives us reason to believe that there is no such person as God, so that the theist who realizes that this belief is indeed explanatorily idle has a rebutting defeater. But there may be another and possibly stronger way to put the objection. Perhaps the problem is not just that belief in the existence of God is explanatorily idle (if it is); after all, many of our beliefs do not function as explanations, or at least don’t function primarily as explanations. Perhaps the idea, instead, is that
(Q4) If S can give an explanation of a certain range of her beliefs without assuming the existence of the entities whose existence those beliefs affirm, then S has an undercutting defeater for those beliefs.
The idea would then be that when the theist learns of these projective theories, she sees that the existence of her theistic belief can be explained without assuming the existence of God; that, according to (Q4), provides her with a rebutting defeater for her belief in the existence of God. This way of putting the objection differs from Quinn’s in two ways. First, what provides a defeater for belief in the existence of God is not the fact that this belief is explanatorily idle (if it is), but rather the fact that there is an explanation of belief in God available that does not presuppose the truth of that belief—that is, does not presuppose the existence of God. Second, the kind of defeater allegedly provided is undercutting, not rebutting.
Still, is (Q4) really true? There are at least two versions of (Q4). On
the one hand, (Q4) could require that the proposed explanation must
involve only entities whose existence S already accepts; on the other, the
explanation could involve either entities whose existence she already
accepts or entities whose existence she does not already accept. Because
the first version is the weaker and hence more plausible, suppose
we confine our attention to it. So imagine that I can give an
explanation of
Of course even if alleged projective explanations of theistic belief do not give me a defeater for such belief, there are many more candidates for that post. In the next chapters, we will move on to a consideration of some of those other alleged defeaters: contemporary historical biblical criticism, pluralism and postmodernism, and the facts of evil.
In chapter 8, I presented a model for the way Christian belief has or can have warrant. According to the model, Scripture is perspicuous: the main lines of its teaching—creation, sin, incarnation, atonement, resurrection, eternal life—can be understood and grasped and properly accepted by anyone of normal intelligence and ordinary training. As Jonathan Edwards said, the Housatonic Indians can easily grasp and properly appropriate this message; a Ph.D. in theology or history or biblical studies is not necessary. Underlying this point is a second: there is available a source of warranted true belief, a way of coming to see the truth of these teachings, that is quite independent of historical study: Scripture/the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit/faith (IIHS for short). By virtue of this process, an ordinary Christian, one quite innocent of historical studies, the ancient languages, the intricacies of textual criticism, the depths of theology, and all the rest can nevertheless come to know that these things are, indeed, true; furthermore, his knowledge need not trace back (by way of testimony, for example) to knowledge on the part of someone who does have this specialized training. Neither the Christian community nor the ordinary Christian is at the mercy of the expert here; they can know these truths directly.
Nevertheless, of course, the serious and scholarly study of the Bible is
of first importance for Christians. The roll call of those who have
pursued this project is maximally impressive: Chrysostom, Augustine,
Aquinas, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and Karl Barth, just for starters.
These people and their successors begin from the idea that Scripture is
divinely inspired in such a way that the Bible constitutes (among other
things) a divine revelation, a special message from God to humankind;
they then try to ascertain the Lord’s teaching
“New Testament Scholarship and Christian
Belief” (hereafter NTS), in Jesus in History and
Myth, ed. R. Joseph Hoffman and
Gerald A. Larue (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1986), p. 193. I therefore concur (for the most part) both
with C. Stephen Evans in his The Historical Christ and the Jesus of
Faith: The Incarnational Narrative as History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and with Peter van
Inwagen in “Critical Studies of the New Testament and the User of the
New Testament,” in God, Knowledge, and Mystery
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1995).
Now
according to the A/C model, Scripture or the Bible figures importantly
into the process whereby the believer comes to believe the great things
of the gospel, and also into the process whereby these beliefs have
warrant for him. Roughly speaking, he reads or hears
Now that belief itself is not one of the great things of the gospel—it is not an essential element of Christian belief. It wasn’t accepted by the earliest Christians and isn’t to be found in the ecumenical creeds. This is partly because there were Christians before these books were written, and, barring divine revelation to them that the books were indeed soon to be written and would indeed be authoritative, they wouldn’t have known about them. The apostle Paul himself, for example, was certainly a Christian believer before he wrote his first epistles; he was a person of faith and held the essentials of Christian belief. Still, he no doubt didn’t believe that the Bible—the Bible as we now have it, in Protestant or Catholic (or Orthodox) version—was divinely inspired. So the belief that God has inspired, say, the New Testament in such a way that it is a communication from God to us human beings—that belief is not itself an essential element of Christian belief. Strictly speaking, therefore, giving an account of how it is that this belief about the Bible has warrant for the Christian, if it does, lies outside the scope of my project, which concerns the way in which traditional Christian belief has warrant. Yet that belief does figure heavily into Christian practice; at millions of worship services every week, Christians all over the world hear passages of Scripture and respond by saying, “This is the Word of the Lord.”
I
shall therefore begin this chapter by inquiring into the epistemology
of the belief that the Bible is divinely inspired in a special way, and
in such a way as to constitute divine discourse—the belief that
the Lord speaks in a special way to us human beings in and through this
book. How does a Christian come
to believe that the Gospel of Mark, the book of Acts, or the entire
New Testament is authoritative because divinely inspired? What (if
anything) is the source of warrant for this belief? There are several
possibilities. For many of us it will be by way of ordinary teaching
and testimony. Perhaps I am brought up to believe that the Bible is, indeed,
the Word of God (just as I am brought up thinking that thousands
perished in the American Civil War), and I’ve never encountered any
reason to doubt this.
See Warrant and Proper
Function, pp. 34–35.
Suppose the apostles were commissioned by God through Jesus Christ to
be witnesses and representatives (deputies) of Jesus. Suppose that what
emerged from their carrying out this commission was a body of apostolic
teaching which incorporated what Jesus taught them and what they
remembered of the goings-on surrounding Jesus, shaped under the
guidance of the Spirit. And suppose that the New Testament books are
all either apostolic writings, or formulations of apostolic teaching
composed by close associates of one or another apostle. Then it would
be correct to construe each book as a medium of divine discourse. And
an eminently plausible construal of the process whereby these books
found their way into a single canonical text, would be that by way of
that process of canonization, God was authorizing these books as
together constituting a single volume of divine discourse. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse:
Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.
295.
So a Christian might come to think something like the above: she believes
(1) that the apostles were commissioned by God through Jesus Christ to be witnesses and deputies,
(2) that they produced a body of apostolic teaching that incorporated what Jesus taught,
and
(3) that the New Testament books are all either apostolic writings or formulations of apostolic teaching composed by close associates of one or another apostle.
She also believes
(4) that the process whereby these books found their way into a single canon is a matter of God’s authorizing these books as constituting a single volume of divine discourse.
She then concludes that indeed
(5) the New Testament is a single volume of divine discourse.
But our question then would be: how does she know, why does she believe each of (1) through (4)? What is the source of these beliefs?
Could it be, perhaps, by way of ordinary historical investigation? I doubt it. The problem, once more, is the principle of dwindling probabilities. In chapter 8 (pp. 271ff.), we saw that this principle is a real obstacle for those who think that Christians might come to know the great things of the gospel by way of ordinary historical investigation—by coming to know, in this way, that the Bible is indeed the Word of God and that God does indeed teach these things. Of course the problem isn’t as severe in the present case. We are imagining the Christian as already convinced of the great things of the gospel; her knowledge of them does not depend on her beliefs about the authority or divine inspiration of the Bible. According to the model, she doesn’t reason thus: the Bible is the Word of God; it says that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself; therefore, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself. It is rather that upon hearing the gospel preached, reading the Bible, or in some other way encountering its message, she comes to believe these things immediately (i.e., not by way of inference), as a result of the work of the Holy Spirit in her heart. So suppose a Christian proposes to give a historical argument for the divine inspiration and consequent authority of the New Testament, say: we are to think of her as already knowing the central truths of Christianity. She already knows that there is such a person as God, that the man Jesus is also the divine son of God, and that through his ministry, passion, death, and resurrection we sinners can have life. These constitute part of her background information and can be employed in the historical argument in question. Her body of background information with respect to which she estimates the probability of (1) through (4), therefore, includes the main lines of Christian teaching. And of course she also knows that the books of the New Testament—some of them, anyway—apparently teach or presuppose these things. So her epistemic condition is much more favorable to (1) through (4) than it would be if she didn’t already know these things. With respect to her background information B, therefore, perhaps each of (1) through (4) could be considered at least quite plausible and perhaps even likely to be true.
Still, each is only probable. Perhaps, indeed, each is very
likely and has a probability as high as
.9 with respect to that body of belief B; more exactly, perhaps the
probability of (1) on B is as high as .9, the probability of (2) on
(1)&B as high as .9, and the same for P((3)/(B&(1)&(2)))
and P((4)/(B&(1)&(2)&(3))) (see above, pp. 272ff.). Even
so, we can conclude only that the probability of their conjunction, on
B, is at least somewhat more than .5. In that case,
belief that
If I believe whatever is quite likely with respect to my
background information or what I know, I will wind up believing
contradictions: for each number n between 1 and 6, it is likely that the die won’t
come up n; but, of course,
it is also likely that the die will come up n
for one of those numbers. I do not mean
to say that historical investigation can never
furnish enough evidence so that the
appropriate attitude is that of belief (rather than just believing
probable). That there was a Holocaust, an American Civil War, a French
Revolution, a war between the Athenians and Spartans, and a Roman
conquest of the Jews are all to be believed, not just believed
probable. But the same doesn’t go for (1) through (4). We don’t have
anywhere near that level of evidence for, for example, the claim that
the apostles were commissioned by God, or that God authorized the books
of the New Testament as constituting a volume of divine
discourse.
Now most Christian communities have taught that the warrant enjoyed by this belief is not conferred on it just by way of ordinary historical investigation. For example, the Belgic Confession, one of the most important confessions of the Reformed churches, gives a list (the Protestant list) of the canonical books of the Bible; it then goes on:
And we believe without a doubt all things contained in them—not so much because the church receives them and approves them as such, but above all because the Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts that they are from God, and also because they prove themselves to be from God.
There is a possible ambiguity here: “we believe all things contained in
them not so much because the church receives them”—to what does
this last ‘them’ refer? The teachings contained in the books, or the
books themselves? If the former, then what we have here is another
example of what we’ve already noted: the Holy Spirit leading us to see,
not that a given book is from
God, but that some teaching—for example, in Christ, God was reconciling
the world to himself—is true. If the latter, however, what we
would be led to believe is such propositions
Jonathan Edwards, The Religious
Affections (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1959), p. 303: “And the opening to view with such
clearness, such a world of wonderful and glorious truth in the gospel,
that before was unknown, being quite above the view of a natural eye,
but appearing so clear and bright, has a powerful and invincible
influence on the soul to persuade of the divinity of the
gospel.”
This
is only one way in which this
belief could have warrant; there are other possibilities. Perhaps the
believer knows by way of the IIHS that the Holy Spirit has guided and
preserved the Christian church, making sure that its teachings on
important matters are, in fact, true; then the believer would be
warranted in believing, at any rate of those books of the Bible
endorsed by all or nearly all traditional Christian communities, that
they are from God. Or perhaps, guided by the Holy Spirit, she
recapitulates the process whereby the canon was originally formed,
paying attention to the original criteria of apostolic authorship,
consistency with apostolic teaching, and the like, and relying on
testimony for the propositions that such and such books were
composed by apostles. There are also combinations of these ways. All
(and still others besides) are consistent with the extended A/C model;
the model need not choose among them. However precisely this belief
receives its warrant, traditional Christians have accepted the belief
that the Bible is the Word of God and that in it the Lord
intends to teach us truths. I don’t for a moment mean to suggest that
teaching us truths is all that
the Lord intends in Scripture: there is also raising affection,
teaching us how to praise, how to pray, how to see the depth of our own
sin, how marvelous the gift of salvation is, and a thousand other
things.
Of course it isn’t always easy to tell what the Lord is teaching us in a given passage: what he teaches is indeed true; still, sometimes it isn’t clear just what his teaching is. Part of the problem is the fact that the Bible contains material of so many different sorts; it isn’t in this respect like a contemporary book on theology or philosophy. It isn’t a book full of declarative sentences, with proper analysis and logical development and all the accoutrements academics have come to know and love and demand. The Bible does, indeed, contain sober assertion, but there is also exhortation, expression of praise, poetry, the telling of stories and parables, songs, devotional material, history, genealogies, lamentations, confession, prophecy, apocalyptic material, and much else besides. Some of these (apocalyptic, for example) present real problems of interpretation (for us, at present): what exactly is the Lord teaching in Daniel, or Revelation? That’s not easy to say. What are we to learn from the imprecatory psalms? Again, not easy to say.
Even
if we stick to straightforward assertion, there are a thousand
questions of interpretation. Just a couple of examples. In
Some of these issues are important to the way the church conducts its day-to-day business: how shall we understand the Eucharist? Should infants be baptized? What is the proper structure of authority in the church? Although these issues are important, the scriptural teaching on them isn’t very clear—which is why Christians of wisdom and good will disagree about them. There are other issues—for example, whether a conversion experience is necessary for salvation, how important glossolalia is to a proper Christian life, the extent to which Christians should live in the world and accommodate to contemporary culture (how to be in but not of the world), what the structure of a worship service should be—on which the scriptural teaching is even less plain. And there are still others—whether it is infralapsarianism or supralapsarianism or neither that is the truth, whether Christ died for everyone or only for the elect, just what and when the millennium will be—on which scriptural teaching is less plain yet.
And
here we must pause to note a serious blemish on the face of
Christendom. Christians have been at each other’s throats and fought
enormously destructive battles over all of these matters. In some
cases, of course, the battles were literal battles; and the sight of
Christians (with their teachings about peace and love and turning the
other cheek) at each other’s throats must surely have been an important
cause of modern and Enlightenment apostasy. And perhaps also of contemporary apostasy. In
explaining why “contemporary theologians” are not interested in the
topics contemporary philosophers of religion discuss, the theologian
Gordon Kaufman proposes that it now seems
that the Christian faith, Christian ways of understanding the world and
the human place within the world, a powerful Christian sense of divine
authorization and thus superiority over other religions, Christian
imperialism, Christian racism and sexism, and other characteristics of
the Christian religion and of “Christian civilization,” bear some
significant responsibility for most of the evils I have just mentioned
. . . two horrible world wars, the Nazi holocaust and other instances
of genocide, the ecological crisis, the use of atomic bombs in World
War II and the ever-present possibility of nuclear obliteration of the
human race. . . . Christian theologians today have thus been driven, in
a way unprecedented historically, to ask some hard questions about
Christian faith, practices and institutions, questions that force close
examination of the very symbols and ideas that have traditionally
informed this faith. (“Evidentialism: A Theologian’s Response,”
Faith and Philosophy [January
1989], pp. 41–42) Kaufman’s essential position here, I think, is that contemporary
philosophy of religion still (or again) takes seriously traditional
Christianity, with its belief in God, incarnation, atonement, and so
on, while contemporary theologians, paying attention to the factors he
mentions, have “gone beyond” all that. See above, chapter 2. (Of
course, as Kaufman acknowledges, he speaks for only some
contemporary theologians.) But I won’t easily forget the sight (in
Belfast) of a Protestant preacher shaking his jowls and roaring about
“the God-cursed blasphemy of the idolatrous whore of Rome!” and looking
for all the world as if there is nothing he would like better than to
sink his sword into the breast of some hapless Roman Catholic.
Scripture, therefore, is inspired: what it teaches is true; yet it isn’t always trivial to tell what it does teach. Indeed, many of the sermons and homilies preached in a million churches every Sunday morning are devoted in part to bringing out what might otherwise be obscure in scriptural teaching. Given that the Bible is a communication from God to humankind, a divine revelation, there is much about it that requires deep and perceptive reflection, much that taxes our best scholarly and spiritual resources to the utmost. This fact wasn’t lost on Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and the others I mentioned above; between them they wrote an impressively large number of volumes devoted to powerful reflection on the meaning and teachings of Scripture. (Calvin’s commentaries alone run to some twenty-two volumes.) Their aim was to determine as accurately as possible just what the Lord proposes to teach us in the Bible. Call this enterprise ‘traditional biblical commentary’ and note that it displays at least the following three features.
First, Scripture itself is taken to be a wholly authoritative and
trustworthy guide to faith and morals; it is authoritative and
trustworthy, because it is a revelation from God, a matter of God’s
speaking to us. Once it is clear, therefore, what the teaching of a
given bit of Scripture is, the question of the truth and acceptability
of that teaching is settled. In a commentary on Plato, we might decide
that what Plato really meant to say was XYZ; we might then go on to
consider and evaluate XYZ in various ways, asking whether it is true,
or
Second, an assumption of the enterprise is that the principal author of
the Bible—the entire Bible—is God himself (according to
Calvin, God the Holy Spirit). Of course each of the books of the Bible
has a human author or authors as well; still, the principal author is
God. This impels us to treat the whole more like a unified
communication than a miscellany of ancient books. Scripture isn’t so
much a library of independent books as itself a book with many
subdivisions but a central theme: the message of the gospel. By virtue
of this unity, furthermore (by virtue of the fact that there is just
one principal author), it is possible to “interpret Scripture with
Scripture.” If a given passage from one of Paul’s epistles is puzzling,
it is perfectly proper to try to come to clarity as to what God’s
teaching is in this passage by appealing not only to what Paul himself
says elsewhere in other epistles but also to what is taught elsewhere
in Scripture (for example, the Gospel of John See, for example, Richard Swinburne
(Revelation [Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992], p. 192), who suggests that Paul’s Christology at Of course this procedure, like most others,
can be and has been abused; that possibility in itself, however, is
nothing against it, though it should serve as a salutary caution.
Third (and connected with the second
point), the fact that the
principal author of the Bible is God himself means that one can’t
always determine the meaning of a given passage by discovering what the
human author had in mind. Of course various postmodern hermeneuticists
aim to amuse by telling us that, in this case as in all others, the
author’s intentions have nothing whatever to do with the meaning of a
passage, that the reader herself confers on the passage whatever meaning it has,
or perhaps that even entertaining the idea of a text’s
having meaning is to fall into “hermeneutical innocence”—adding,
with a certain air of insouciant bravado, that such innocence is
ineradicably sullied by its inevitable association with homophobic,
sexist, racist, oppressive, and other unacceptable modes of thought.
This is, indeed, amusing. Returning to serious business, however, it is
obvious (given that the principal author of the Bible is God) that the
meaning of a biblical passage will be given by what it is that the Lord
intends to teach in that passage, and it is precisely this that
biblical commentary tries to discern. But we can’t just assume that
what the Lord intends to teach us is identical with what the human
author had in mind; A further complication: we can’t simply
assume that there is some one thing, the same for everyone, that the
Lord intends to teach in a given passage; perhaps what he intends to
teach me or my relevant sociological group is not the same as what he
intended to teach a fifth-century Christian.
For at least the last couple of
hundred years, there has also been a quite different kind of scripture
scholarship: historical biblical criticism (HBC). There is much to be grateful for with respect to
HBC; it has enabled us to learn a great deal about the Bible we
otherwise might not have known. Furthermore, some of the methods it has
developed (form criticism, source criticism, others) can be and have
been employed to excellent effect in traditional biblical commentary.
It differs importantly from the latter, however. HBC is fundamentally an Enlightenment project; it
is an effort to look at and understand biblical books from a standpoint
that relies on reason alone; that is, it is an effort to
determine from the standpoint of reason alone what the scriptural
teachings are and whether they are true. Thus HBC eschews the authority
and guidance of tradition, magisterium, creed, or any kind of ecclesial
or “external” epistemic authority. The idea is to see what can be
established (or at least made plausible) using only the light of what
we could call “natural, empirical reason.” The faculties or sources of belief invoked,
therefore, would be those that are employed in ordinary history:
perception, testimony, reason taken in the sense of a
priori intuition together with deductive and probabilistic
reasoning, Reid’s sympathy, by which we discern the thoughts and
feelings of another, and so on—but bracketing any proposition one
knows by faith or by way of the authority of the church. Spinoza
(1632–77) already lays down the charter
for this enterprise: “The rule for [biblical] interpretation should be
nothing but the natural light of reason which is common to
all—not any supernatural light nor any external
authority.” Tractatus
Theologico-politicus,
14.
This doesn’t
preclude, of course, a rational argument (an argument from reason
alone) for the proposition that indeed there has been a divine
revelation, and that the Bible (or some part of it) is precisely that
revelation: exactly this is the Lockean project (see above, pp. 79ff.).
Nor does it preclude a direct argument, one that proceeds independently
of any claim to revelation, for the central claims of Christianity.
Indeed, many critics of the Christian faith seem to take it for granted
that if Christian belief were to be rationally acceptable, it would
have to be held on the basis of just such argument. Christian belief
would have to be or be like a scientific explanation (as they think of
it): any rational justification or warrant it enjoyed would have to be
by way of its being a good explanation of the observed
phenomena. See, e.g., John Mackie, The Miracle of
Theism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1982, pp. 186ff.), and Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s
Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1995), pp. 152ff.; see also my “Is Theism Really a
Miracle?” Faith and Philosophy (1986), and “Dennett’s Dangerous Idea: Darwin, Mind
and Meaning,” Books and Culture (May-June 1996); and see above, pp.
329ff.
This project or enterprise is often thought of as part and parcel of the
development of modern empirical science, and indeed practitioners of
HBC like to drape about their shoulders the mantle of modern science.
The attraction is not just that HBC can perhaps share in the prestige
of modern science, but also that it can share in the obvious epistemic
power and excellence of the latter. To understand historical criticism and its
dominance properly, says David Yeago, one must understand “the historic
coupling of historical criticism with a ‘project of the Enlightenment’
aimed at liberating mind and heart from the shackles of ecclesiastical
tradition. In the modern context, claims to ‘Enlightenment’ must be
backed up with the claim to have achieved a proper
method, capable of producing
real knowledge to replace the pre-critical confusion and arbitrariness
of tradition” (“The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma,” Pro
Ecclesia 3, no. 2 (Spring 1994),
p. 162.) The Virginal Conception and Bodily
Resurrection of Jesus (New York:
Paulist Press, 1973), p. 6. See also John Meier, A Marginal Jew:
Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991), vol. 1, p.
1.
What is it, exactly, to
study the Bible scientifically? That’s
not so clear; as we’ll see below, there is more than one answer to this
question. One theme that seems to command nearly universal assent,
however, is that in working at this scientific project (however exactly
it is to be understood) one doesn’t invoke or employ any theological
assumptions or presuppositions. You don’t assume, for example, that
Nor can you employ a proposition which is
such that the warrant it has for you comes from some proposition you
know or believe by faith; we might put this by saying that in doing
science you can’t employ any proposition whose epistemic provenance,
for you, includes a proposition you know or believe by faith. But
is this really true? Why should we believe it? What is the status of
the claim that if what you are doing is science, then you can’t employ,
in your work, any proposition you believe or know by faith? Is it
supposed to be true by definition? If so, whose definition? Is there a
good argument for it? Or what? See my “Methodological Naturalism?” in
Facets of Faith and Science, ed.
J. van der Meer (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America,
1995). Thus Benjamin Jowett (the nineteenth-century
master of Balliol College and eminent translator of Plato): “Scripture
has one meaning—the meaning which it had to the mind of the
prophet or evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the hearers or
readers who first received it” (“On the Interpretation of Scripture,”
in The Interpretation of Scripture and Other Essays [London: George Routledge, 1906], p. 36; quoted in
Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and
Historical Criticism [Louisville,
Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993], p. 78). Jowett was not a
paragon of intellectual modesty, which may explain a poem composed and
circulated by undergraduates at Balliol: Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), p.
5.
Historical critics thus rightly insist that the tribunal before which
interpretations are argued cannot be confessional or “dogmatic”; the
arguments offered must be historically valid, able, that is, to compel
the assent of historians whatever their religion or lack thereof, whatever
their backgrounds, spiritual experiences, or personal beliefs, and
without privileging any claim of revelation. “The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and
Historical Criticism,” in The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and
Historical Criticism, p. 109. (An
earlier version of this essay was published under the same title
in Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in
Judaism and Christianity, ed. John
Collins and Roger Brooks [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1990].)
Barnabas Lindars explains that
There are in fact two reasons why many scholars are very cautious about
miracle stories. . . . The second reason is historical. The religious
literature of the ancient world is full of miracle stories, and we
cannot believe them all. It is not open to a scholar to decide that,
just because he is a believing Christian, he will accept all the Gospel
miracles at their face value, but at the same time he will repudiate
miracles attributed to Isis. All such accounts have to be scrutinized
with equal detachment. Theology 89, no. 728 (March 1986), p. 91.
And even Luke Timothy Johnson, who is in general astutely critical of HBC:
It is obviously important to study Christian
origins historically. And in such historical inquiry,
faith commitments should play no role. Christianity is no more
privileged for the historian than any other human
phenomenon. The Real Jesus
(San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996), p.
172. (The target of much of Johnson’s criticism is the notorious ‘Jesus
Seminar’.) Here Johnson speaks specifically of
history; he holds that the
historian as such cannot properly employ what he knows by faith. In
personal communication he informs me that, in his opinion, history is by
its nature limited in this way. Proper biblical scholarship, however,
is not; hence the sort of project in which one brackets what one knows
by faith is not epistemically superior but, in fact, epistemically
inferior to biblical scholarship informed by faith. His view,
therefore, resembles the one outlined below, pp. 401ff.
In practice, this emphasis means that HBC tends to deal especially with
questions of composition and authorship, these being the questions most easily addressed
by the methods employed. When was the document in question
composed—or, more exactly, since we can’t assume that we are
dealing with a single unified document here, when were its various
parts composed? How was the Gospel of Luke, for example, composed? Was
it written by one person, relying on his memory of Jesus and his words
and deeds, or was it assembled from various reports, alleged
quotations, songs, poems, and the like in the oral tradition? Was it
dependent on one or more earlier written or oral sources? Why did the
editor or redactor put the book together in just the way he did? Was it
perhaps to make a theological point in a then-current controversy? Where
traditional biblical commentary assumes that the entire Bible is really
one book with a single principal author, HBC tends to give us a
collection of books by many authors. And even within the confines of a
single book, it may give us a collection of discontinuous sayings
and episodes (pericopes), stitched together by one or
more redactors. How much of what is reported as the sayings and
discourse of Jesus really was said by Jesus? Can we
I don’t mean to suggest that the
traditional biblical commentator cannot also investigate these
questions; if she does, however, it will be in the ultimate service of
an effort to discern what the Lord is teaching in the passages in
question.
Of course the idea is also to see, as far as this is possible, whether the events reported—in the Gospels, for example—really happened, and whether the picture they give of Jesus is accurate. Did he say the things they say he said, and do the things they say he did? Here the assumption is that we can’t simply take at face value the Gospels as we now have them. There may have been all sorts of additions and subtractions and alterations made in the interest of advancing theological points. Further, the New Testament books are written from the standpoint of faith—faith that Jesus really was the Christ, did indeed suffer and die and rise from the dead, and did accomplish our salvation. From the standpoint of reason alone, however, this faith must be bracketed; hence (from that standpoint) the hermeneutics of suspicion is appropriate here. (This suspicion is sometimes carried so far that it reminds one of the way in which the CIA’s denial that Mr. X is a spy is taken as powerful evidence that Mr. X is a spy.)
Those who practice HBC, therefore, propose to proceed without employing theological assumptions or anything one knows by faith (if indeed there is anything one knows by faith); these things are to be bracketed. Instead, one proceeds scientifically, on the basis of reason alone. Beyond this, however, there is vastly less concord. What is to count as reason? Precisely what premises can be employed in an argument from reason alone? What exactly does it mean to proceed scientifically? Here I think we find at least three distinct positions.
Many contemporary biblical critics appeal to the thought and teaching of
Ernst Troeltsch. See especially his “Über historische und
dogmatische Methode in der Theologie” in his Gesammelte
Schriften (Tübingen: Mohr,
1913), vol. 2, pp. 729–53, and his article “Historiography” in James
Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics
(New York: Scribner’s, 1967 [reprint of
1909 edition]).
Among theologians these principles received their classic formulation
from Ernst Troeltsch in 1898. Troeltsch sets out three principles . . .
(1) The principle of criticism or methodological doubt: since any
conclusion is subject to revision, historical inquiry can never attain
absolute certainty but only relative degrees of probability. (2) The
principle of analogy: historical knowledge is possible because all
events are similar in principle. We must assume that the laws of nature
in biblical times were the same as now. Troeltsch referred to this as
“the almighty power of analogy.” (3) The principle of correlation: the
phenomena of history are inter-related and interdependent and no event
can be isolated from the sequence of historical cause and
effect. “Is Critical Biblical Theology Possible?” in
The Hebrew Bible and Its Interpreters, ed. William Henry Propp, Baruch Halpern, and
David Freedman (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990), p. 2.
Collins adds a fourth principle, this one taken from Van Harvey’s
The Historian and the Believer, Subtitled The Morality of Historical
Knowledge and Christian Belief (New
York: Macmillan, 1966).
To these should be added the principle of autonomy, which is indispensable for any critical study. Neither church nor state can prescribe for the scholar which conclusions should be reached. (p. 2)
Now the first thing to note is that each of these principles is multiply ambiguous. In particular, each (except perhaps the second) has a noncontroversial, indeed, platitudinous interpretation. The first principle seems to be a comment on historical inquiry rather than a principle for its practice: historical inquiry can never attain absolutely certain results. (Perhaps the implied methodological principle is that in doing historical criticism, you should avoid claiming absolute certainty for your results.) Fair enough. I suppose nearly everyone would agree that few historical results of any significance are as certain as, say, that 2 + 1 = 3; if so, however, they don’t achieve absolute certainty. (The only reasonably plausible candidates for historical results that are absolutely certain, I suppose, would be such ‘historical’ claims as that either Caesar crossed the Rubicon or else he didn’t.)
The
third also has a platitudinous interpretation. Troeltsch puts the
principle like this: “The sole task of history in its specifically
theoretical aspect is to explain every movement, process, state and
nexus of things by reference to the web of its causal
relations.” “Historiography,” p. 718.
I
say the second principle is perhaps the exception to the claim that
each has a banal, uncontroversial interpretation: that is because on
any plausible interpretation the second principle seems to entail the
existence of natural laws. That
there are such things as
natural laws was a staple of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
science and philosophy of science; Thus Descartes, Principles of
Philosophy, part 2: xxvii. The first
law of nature: that each thing as far as in it lies, continues always
in the same state; and that which is once moved always continues so to
move. xxxix. The
second law of nature: that all motion is of itself in a straight
line. An opinion preserved among such contemporary
philosophers as David Armstrong (see his What Is a Law of
Nature? [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984]) and David Lewis (see, e.g., his “New Work for
a Theory of Universals,” Australasian Journal of
Philosophy [1983], pp.
343ff.). See, in particular, Bas van Fraassen’s
Laws and Symmetry (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989) for an extended and powerful argument against
the existence of natural laws.
Among the main problems is the alleged
necessity of these laws.
A natural law is supposed to be a universal generalization. Consider,
for example, Newton’s first law: “Every body continues in its state of
rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled
to change that state by forces impressed on it.” The idea is that this
universal generalization is in some sense necessarily true.
The alleged kind of necessity (‘natural’ or ‘physical’ necessity) is
supposed to be weaker than the broadly logical necessity enjoyed by
truths of logic, arithmetic, and the like (natural laws are ordinarily
thought to be contingent in the broadly logical sense) but necessary in
some sense nonetheless. In what sense? That’s not easy to say, but here is a
picture. Think of natural necessity in terms of the ordinary semantics
for counterfactuals: we imagine the possible worlds as constituting a
space—for simplicity, a three-dimensional space; we somehow
settle on or at any rate postulate the existence of a distance measure
on this space of possible worlds; and the larger the sphere of possible
worlds (centered on the actual world Of course a natural law could be ‘more
necessary’ in some other possible world than it is in the actual world.
Therefore, although a natural law will be true throughout some sphere
centered on the actual world, that sphere may be included in a larger
sphere whose center is not the actual world.
This is a pretty little picture (though both metaphorical and highly speculative); still, why saddle the historian or scripture scholar with an opinion on this topic? It is hard to see that the practice of HBC actually requires allegiance to the view that there is such a thing as natural necessity or, that there are such things as natural laws, explained in this way or in any other. Why must the historian take a hand in this philosophical dispute? But perhaps Troeltsch and Collins don’t really mean to insist that the critical historian has to believe in natural laws; perhaps they could put their claims just as well by saying the same empirical generalizations or physical regularities obtained in the past as obtain now. Newtonian physics (at least approximately, and for middle-sized objects traveling at moderate speed) held then as now; special and general relativity were true then just as now (if indeed they are true now); quantum electrodynamics applied at earlier times (at any rate times not too close to the Big Bang) just as at present. And this whether we think of these as statements of natural law, with that peculiar sort of necessity, or as statements of exceptionless regularities, or as regularities holding for the vast majority of cases, or (as in the case of some quantum mechanical regularities) probabilistic.
So Troeltsch’s principles have platitudinous interpretations; but these are not, in fact, the interpretations given to them in the community of HBC. Within that community, those principles are understood in such a way as to preclude direct divine action in the world. Not that all in this community accept Troeltsch’s principles in their nonplatitudinous interpretation; rather, those who think of themselves as accepting (or rejecting) those principles think of themselves as accepting (or rejecting) their nonplatitudinous versions. (Presumably everyone accepts them taken platitudinously.) So taken, these principles imply that God has not, in fact, specially inspired any human authors in such a way that what they write is really divine speech addressed to us; nor has he raised Jesus from the dead, turned water into wine, or performed miracles of any other sorts. Thus Rudolf Bultmann:
The historical method includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect.
This continuum, furthermore,
cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent
powers. Existence and Faith, ed. Schubert Ogden (New York: Meridian Books,
1960), pp. 291–92. Writing fifty years before Troeltsch, David Strauss
concurs: “all things are linked together by a chain of causes and
effects, which suffers no interruption” Life of Jesus
Critically Examined [Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1972], sec. 14; quoted in Harvey, The
Historian and the Believer, p. 15.)
Many other theologians, oddly enough, chime in with agreement: God cannot or at any rate would not and will not act directly in the world. Thus John Macquarrie:
The way of understanding miracles that appeals to breaks in the natural order and to supernatural interventions belongs to the mythological outlook and cannot commend itself in a post-mythological climate of thought. . . .
The traditional conception
of miracle is irreconcilable with our modern understanding of both
science and history. Science proceeds on the assumption that whatever
events occur in the world can be accounted for in terms of other events
that also belong within the world; and if on some occasions we are
unable to give a complete account of some happening . . . the
scientific conviction is that further research will bring to light
further factors in the situation, but factors that will turn out to be
just as immanent and this-worldly as those already known. Principles of Christian
Theology, 2nd ed. (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), p. 248.
And Langdon Gilkey:
contemporary theology does not expect, nor does it speak of, wondrous
divine events on the surface of natural and historical life. The causal
nexus in space and time which the Enlightenment science and philosophy
introduced into the Western mind . . . is also assumed by modern
theologians and scholars; since they participate in the modern world of
science both intellectually and existentially, they can scarcely do
anything else. Now this assumption of a causal order among phenomenal
events, and therefore of the authority of the scientific interpretation
of observable events, makes a great difference to the validity one
assigns to biblical narratives and so to the way one understands their
meaning. Suddenly a vast panoply of divine deeds and events recorded in
scripture are no longer regarded as having actually happened. . . .
Whatever the Hebrews believed, we believe that the biblical people lived in the same
causal continuum of space and time in which we live, and so one in
which no divine wonders transpired and no divine voices were
heard. “Cosmology, Ontology and the Travail of
Biblical Language,” in God’s Activity in the World: The Contemporary
Problem, ed. Owen C. Thomas (Chico, Calif.: Scholars
Press, 1983), p. 31.
Gilkey says no divine wonders have transpired and no divine voices have
been heard; Macquarrie adds that in this postmythological age, we can’t
brook the idea of “breaks in the natural order and supernatural
intervention.” Each therefore, is ruling out the possibility
A thousand questions arise about these regularities: what sort are we thinking of? Suppose there has never been and never will be a combination of three dimes and two nickels in my pocket, or a freshwater lake the size of Lake Baikal surrounded by mainly Japanese speakers, or heavily glaciated mountains in Australia contemporaneous with a Dutch-speaking population, or dinosaurs and humans at the same time: are these the sorts of regularities in question? Presumably not. What about the fact that none of the Great Lakes has ever been or ever will be filled with single-malt Scotch whiskey? Or that there has never been or ever will be a sphere of gold a mile in diameter? Probably not. How about the fact that there has never been a sphere of plutonium a mile in diameter? Probably so: such a sphere would contain a quantity of plutonium greater than the critical mass and would therefore have exploded. How, precisely, do we characterize the regularities we are talking about? That’s very difficult. At any rate the idea is that there are such regularities; and among them would be that human beings, once they are dead, do not come back to life, that water doesn’t change into wine, and that human beings are not specially inspired by God in such a way that what they write is properly regarded as divine speech and revelation.
Not all who accept and practice HBC accept Troeltsch’s principles, and we
can see another variety of HBC by thinking about an important
suggestion made by Pierre Duhem. Duhem was both a serious Catholic and
a serious scientist; he was accused (as he thought) by Abel
Rey “La Philosophie scientifique de M. Duhem,”
Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 12 (July 1904), pp. 699ff. See the appendix to Duhem’s The Aim and
Structure of Physical Theory, tr.
Philip P. Wiener, foreword by Prince Louis de Broglie (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1954; first published in 1906). The
appendix is entitled “Physics of a Believer” and is a reprint of
Duhem’s reply to Rey; it was originally published in the
Annales de Philosophie chrétienne 1 (October-November 1905), pp. 44ff. and
133ff.
Why did he think so? What did he have against metaphysics? Here he strikes a characteristic Enlightenment note: if you think of metaphysics as ingressing into physics, he says, then your estimate of the worth of a physical theory will depend on the metaphysics you adopt. Physical theory will be dependent on metaphysics in such a way that someone who doesn’t accept the metaphysics involved in a given physical theory can’t accept the physical theory either. And the problem with that is that the disagreements that run riot in metaphysics will ingress into physics, so that the latter cannot be an activity we can all work at together, regardless of our metaphysical views:
Now to make physical theories depend on metaphysics is surely not the way to let them enjoy the privilege of universal consent. . . . If theoretical physics is subordinated to metaphysics, the divisions separating the diverse metaphysical systems will extend into the domain of physics. A physical theory reputed to be satisfactory by the sectarians of one metaphysical school will be rejected by the partisans of another school. (p. 10)
Duhem’s main point, I think, is that if a physical theorist employs metaphysical assumptions or other notions that are not accepted by other workers in the field, and employs them in such a way that those who don’t accept them can’t accept his physical theory, then to that extent his work cannot be accepted by those others; to that extent, furthermore, the cooperation important to science will be compromised. He therefore proposes a conception of science (of physics in particular) according to which the latter is independent of metaphysics:
I have denied metaphysical doctrines the right to testify for or
against any physical theory. . . . Whatever I have said of the method
by which physics proceeds, or the nature and scope that we must
attribute to the theories it constructs, does not in any way prejudice
either the metaphysical doctrines or religious beliefs of anyone who
Duhem’s proposal, reduced to essentials, is that physicists shouldn’t
make essential use of religious or metaphysical assumptions in doing
their physics: that way lies chaos and cacophony, as each of the
warring sects does things its own way. If we want to have the sort of
commonality and genuine dialogue that promote progress in physics, we
should avoid assumptions, metaphysical, religious, or otherwise, that
are not accepted by all parties to the discussion. Of course this proposal must be qualified,
nuanced, sophisticated. It makes perfect sense for me to continue to
work on a hypothesis after others have decided it is a dead end;
science has often benefited from such disagreements. But in these cases
there is ordinarily a deeper agreement as to what the aims of science
are, what counts as genuine science, and what the proper methods to be
employed might be. Furthermore, the disputes can often be settled on
the basis of this deeper agreement; it is possible for one of the
disputants to turn out to be right in a way that is recognized by all
the disputants.
This is an interesting suggestion.
Although Duhem himself didn’t do so, it can obviously be applied far
beyond the confines of physical theory, for example, to scripture
scholarship. Suppose we say that Duhemian scripture
scholarship is scripture scholarship that doesn’t involve any
theological, religious, or metaphysical assumptions that aren’t accepted
by everyone in the relevant community. It may be difficult to specify the relevant
community. Suppose I am a scripture scholar at a denominational
seminary: what is my relevant community? Scripture scholars of any
sort, all over the world? Scripture scholars in my own denomination? In
Western academia? The people, academics or not, in my denomination?
Christians generally? The first thing to see here is that our scripture
scholar clearly belongs to many different communities and may
accordingly be involved in several different scholarly projects. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical
Jesus, vol. 1, pp. 1–2.
Troeltschian and Duhemian HBC do not
exhaust HBC; one can be a practitioner of HBC and accept neither. You
might propose to follow reason alone in scripture scholarship, but
think that the Troeltschian principles, taken in the strong version in
which they imply that God never acts specially in the world, are not, in
fact, deliverances of reason. Reason alone, you say, certainly can’t
demonstrate that God never acts specially in the world, or that no
miracles have ever occurred. If so, you wouldn’t be a Troeltschian. But
you might reject Duhemianism as well: you might
think that, as a matter of fact, there are deliverances of reason not
accepted by everyone party to the project of scripture scholarship.
(The deliverances of reason are indeed open to all;
nevertheless, impeding factors of one kind or another can sometimes
prevent someone from seeing the truth of one or another of them.) Then
you might yourself employ those deliverances of reason in pursuing
scripture scholarship, thereby employing assumptions not accepted by
everyone involved in the project, and thereby rejecting Duhemianism.
You might therefore propose to follow reason alone, but be neither
Troeltschian nor Duhemian. Suppose we use the term ‘Spinozistic
HBC’ According to Spinoza, as we saw, “The rule
for [biblical] interpretation should be nothing but the natural light
of reason” (above, p. 386).
A final point: It is clearly inaccurate to suppose that every scripture scholar falls neatly into one or another of these four categories. Not every work of scripture scholarship is either a clear example of traditional biblical commentary or else a clear example of HBC. Not every work of HBC is a clear example of just one of Troeltschian, Duhemian, or Spinozistic HBC. There are all sorts of halfway houses, lots of haltings between two opinions, many who fall partly into one and partly into another, and many who have never clearly seen that there are these categories. A real live scripture scholar is unlikely to have spent a great deal of thought on the epistemological foundations of the discipline and is likely to straddle one or more of the categories I mention.
There has been a history of substantial tension between HBC and
traditional Christians. Thus David Strauss in 1835: “Nay, if we would
be candid with ourselves, that which was once sacred history for the
Christian believer is, for the enlightened portion of our
contemporaries, only fable.” Of course the unenlightened faithful were
not so unenlightened that they failed to notice this feature of
biblical criticism. Writing ten years after the publication of
Strauss’s book, William Pringle complains, “In Germany, Biblical
criticism is almost a national pursuit. . . . Unhappily, [the critics]
were but too frequently employed in maintaining the most dangerous
errors, in opposing every inspired statement which the mind of man is
unable fully to comprehend, in divesting religion of its spiritual and
heavenly character, and in undermining the whole fabric of revealed
truth.” “Translator’s Preface,” Calvin’s
Commentaries, vol. 16, tr. William
Pringle (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), p. vi. Pringle’s
preface is dated at Auchterarder, January 4, 1845.
Perhaps among Pringle’s complaints were the following. First,
practitioners of HBC tend to treat the Bible as a set of separate books
rather than a unified communication from God. Thus they tend to reject
the idea that Old Testament passages can be properly understood as
making reference to Jesus Christ or to events in his life: “Critical
scholars rule out clairvoyance as an explanation axiomatically. Instead
of holding that the Old Testament predicts events in the life of Jesus,
critical scholars of the New Testament say that each
Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old
Testament, and Historical Criticism, p. 9. Of course clairvoyance
isn’t at issue at all: the question is
really whether the Scripture has one principal author, namely, God. If
it does, then it doesn’t require clairvoyance on the part of a human
author for a passage from a given time to refer to something that
happens much later. All that is required is God’s
omniscience. The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction
(Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press
International, 1994), p. xvii.
Second, following Ernst Troeltsch, HBC tends to discount miracle
stories, taking it as axiomatic that miracles don’t and didn’t really
happen or, at any rate, claiming that the proper method for HBC can’t
admit miracles as either evidence or conclusions. Perhaps Jesus
effected cures of some psychosomatic disorders, but nothing that modern
medical science can’t explain. Many employing this method propose that
Jesus never thought of himself as divine, or as the (or a) Messiah, or as
capable of forgiving sin “The crisis grows out of the fact now freely
admitted by both Protestant and Catholic theologians and exegetes: that
as far as can be discerned from the available historical data, Jesus of
Nazareth did not think he was divine [and] did not assert any of the
messianic claims that the New Testament attributes to him” (Thomas
Sheehan, The First Coming [New
York: Random House, 1986], p. 9). The Real Jesus, p. 144.
Those who follow these methods sometimes produce quite remarkable
accounts—and accounts remarkably different from traditional
Christian understanding. According to Barbara Thiering’s Jesus and
the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco,
1992. Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). What Really Happened to Jesus: A
Historical Approach to the Resurrection (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press,
1995). “The Historicity of Jesus,” in Jesus in
History and Myth, ed. R. Joseph
Hoffman and Gerald A. Larue (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1986), pp.
27ff. The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1970). Sheehan, The First Coming. NTS, p. 193.
So HBC has not in general been
sympathetic to traditional Christian belief; it has hardly been an
encouragement to the faithful. The faithful, however, seem relatively
unconcerned; they find traditional biblical commentary of great
interest and importance, but the beliefs and attitudes of HBC have not
seemed to filter down to them, despite its dominance in mainline
seminaries. According to Van Harvey, “Despite decades of research, the
average person tends to think of the life of Jesus in much the same
terms as Christians did three centuries ago.” NTS, p. 194. Ibid.
What
might these reasons be? Well, one reason might be that skeptical
scripture scholars display vast disagreement among themselves. This lack of accord is especially well
documented by Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of
Faith, pp. 322ff. For example, John Dominick Crosson argues
that Jesus’ body was eaten by dogs; hence he did not rise from the
dead. What is the evidence for the proposition that his body was
eaten by dogs? Just that this is what
ordinarily happened to criminals executed by crucifixion. But then
Crosson could have made a much briefer argument: Jesus didn’t rise from
the dead, because most people don’t. Eleonore Stump criticizes another very good
illustration of this procedure in chapter 3, “Historical Biblical
Studies: Practices,” of her The Knowledge of Suffering
(not yet published). In “Biblical
Criticism and the Resurrection” (not yet published), William Alston
suggests his own version of the fallacy of creeping certitude, and he
also mentions the widespread use of the argument from silence, which,
so to say, promotes the failure to assert p to the assertion of not-p. (For example, Thomas Sheehan says that according
to Matthew, “He [Christ] does not ascend into heaven” [The
First Coming, p. 97], giving as a
reference
Suppose we look into reasons or arguments for preferring the results of
HBC to those of traditional commentary. Why should we suppose that the
former take us closer to the truth than the latter? Troeltsch’s
principles are particularly important here. As understood
If so, they are extraordinarily well hidden.
One common suggestion,
however, seems to be a sort of appeal to force
majeure: we simply can’t help it.
Given our historical position, there is nothing else we can do; we are
all in the grip of historical forces beyond our control (this thing is
bigger than either one of us). This reaction is typified by those who
(like Harvey, Macquarrie, and Gilkey) claim that nowadays,
given our cultural situation, we just don’t have any options. There are
potent historical forces that impose these ways of thinking on us;
like it or not, we are blown about by these powerful winds of doctrine;
we can’t help ourselves. “The causal nexus in space and time which the
Enlightenment science and philosophy introduced into the Western mind .
. . is also assumed by modern theologians and scholars; since they
participate in the modern world of science both intellectually and
existentially, they can scarcely do anything else,” says Gilkey (above,
p. 394); another example is Bultmann’s famous remark to the effect that
“it is impossible to use electrical light and the wireless and to avail
ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same
time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and
miracles.” Kerygma and Myth (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 5. Compare Marcus
Borg’s (Jesus Seminar major domo) more recent comment: “to a large
extent, the defining characteristic of biblical scholarship in the
modern period is the attempt to understand Scripture without reference
to another world because in this period the visible world of space and
time is the world we think of as ‘real’ ” (“Root Images and the Way We
See,” in Fragments of Infinity [Dorset, England, and Lindfield, Australia, 1991],
p. 38; quoted in Huston Smith’s “Doing Theology in the Global
Village,” Religious Studies and Theology, 13–14, nos. 2 and 3 [December 1995], p. 12). On
the other side, note Abraham Kuyper, To Be near unto
God, tr. John Hendrik de Vries
(Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1918). Writing not long after the invention
of the “wireless,” he saw it (along with the telephone) not as
an obstacle to
traditional faith but as an aid to it: “This now comes to the help of our weak
faith” (p. 50); and “There is now a telegraph without wire, which in
its wondrous working has become a beautiful symbol for our prayer.
Fellowship with God without any middle-means” (p. 341).
But isn’t this view—that we are all compelled by contemporary
historical forces to hold the sort of view in
question—historically naive? First, why think we proceed together
in lockstep through history, all at any given time perforce holding the
same views and making the same assumptions? Clearly we don’t do any
such thing. The contemporary intellectual world is much more like a
horse race (or perhaps a demolition derby) than a triumphal
procession, To adapt a remark of Jerry Fodor’s.
The utter obviousness of this fact suggests a second interpretation of this particular justification of Troeltschian HBC. Perhaps what the apologists really mean is not that everyone nowadays accepts this semideism (that is trivially false); it’s rather that everyone in the know does. Everyone who is properly educated and has read his Kant and Hume (and Troeltsch) and reflected on the meaning of the wireless and electric light knows these things; as for the rest of humanity (including, I suppose, those of us who have read our Kant and Hume but are unimpressed), their problem is simple ignorance. Perhaps people generally don’t march lockstep through history; still, those in the know do; and right now they all or nearly all reject special divine action.
Even if we chauvinistically stick to educated Westerners, this is still
doubtful in excelsis. “The
traditional conception of miracle,” Macquarrie says, “is irreconcilable
with our modern
understanding of both science and history”: to whom does this ‘our’,
here, refer? To those who have gone to university, are well-educated,
know at least a little science, and have thought about the bearing of
these matters on
Once
more, however, Macquarrie and the others must know this as well as anyone
else; so what do he and his friends really mean? How can they make
these claims about what ‘we’ We might call this the preemptive
‘we’: those who don’t agree with us on
the point in question are (by comparison with us) so unenlightened that
we can properly speak as if they do not so much as exist. Of course
claiming royalty at the font does not automatically guarantee
legitimacy. Some, however, might see here little more
than an effort to gain standing and respectability in a largely secular
academia by adopting a stance that is, so to say, more Catholic than
the pope.
So this is at best a poor reason for
thinking serious biblical scholarship must be Troeltschian. Is there a
better reason? A second suggestion, perhaps connected with the plea of
inability to do otherwise, is given by the idea that the very practice
of science presupposes rejection of the idea of miracle or special
divine action in the world.
If X were true, it would be inconvenient for science; therefore, X is false
is at best moderately compelling. We aren’t just given that the Lord has arranged the universe for the comfort and convenience of the National Academy of Science. To think otherwise is to be like the drunk who insisted on looking for his lost car keys under the streetlight, on the grounds that the light was better there. (In fact it would go the drunk one better: it would be to insist that because the keys would be hard to find in the dark, they must be under the light.)
But
why think in the first place that we would have to embrace this
semideism in order to do science? Here I can be brief; William Alston has
already proposed a compelling argument for the claim I
support—namely, that one can perfectly well do science even if one
thinks God has done and even sometimes still does miracles. See his
“Divine Action: Shadow or Substance?” in The God Who Acts:
Philosophical and Theological Explorations, ed. Thomas F. Tracy (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 49–50. As Alston argues.
It is therefore difficult to see any reason for supposing that Troeltschian scripture scholarship is somehow de rigueur or somehow forced on us by our history.
Van Harvey proposes another reason for pursuing Troeltschian scholarship
and preferring it to traditional biblical commentary; I think the argument is intended to
support Troeltschian HBC; it could also be used, however, to support
Spinozistic or (less plausibly) Duhemian HBC. NTS pp. 194ff.; a fuller (if older) and
influential presentation of his views is to be found in his The
Historian and the Believer (above,
fn. 475). Described with insight and verve in James C.
Livingston’s monograph The Ethics of Belief: An Essay on the
Victorian Religious Conscience in
the American Academy of Religion’s Studies in Religion
(Tallahassee: Scholars Press, 1978). I
thank Martin Cook for calling my attention to this
monograph.
It wasn’t just that that troubled the Victorians. Had they been confident that both faith and historical investigation were reliable avenues to the truths in question, they surely wouldn’t have thought it immoral to believe on the basis of one of these as opposed to the other or both. Their problem was deeper. They were troubled (among other things) by the German scripture scholarship, about which they knew relatively little; still, they did know enough to think (rightly or wrongly) that it posed a real threat to the Christian beliefs that for many of them were, in any event, already shaky. They suspected or feared that this scripture scholarship could show or would show or already had shown that essential elements of the Christian faith were just false. They were also troubled by what many saw as the antisupernaturalistic and antitheistic bent of science: could one really believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles in the era of the steam engine and ocean liner? They were troubled by the advent of Darwinism, which seemed to many to contradict the Christian picture of human origins. They were convinced, following Locke and the whole classical foundationalist tradition, that the right way to hold beliefs on these topics is by following the (propositional) evidence wherever it leads; and they were deeply worried about where this evidence was, in fact, leading. They were troubled, in short, by a variety of factors, all of which seemed to suggest that traditional Christian belief was really no more than a beautiful story: inspiring, uplifting, perhaps necessary to public morality, but just a story. Given our scientific coming of age, they feared, informed people would regretfully have to jettison traditional Christian belief, perhaps (especially on ceremonial occasions) with an occasional nostalgic backward look.
On the other hand, many of them also longed for the comfort and security
of serious Christian belief; to lose it was like being thrown out of
our Father’s house into a hostile or indifferent world. And of course
many of the Victorians had strong moral opinions and a highly developed
moral sense. They thought it weak, spineless, cowardly to refuse to
face these specters, to hide them from oneself, to engage in
self-deception and double-think. All this, they thought, is unworthy of
a serious and upright person. They abhorred the weakness and moral
softness of the sort of stance in which you suspect the bitter truth,
but refuse to investigate the matter, preferring to hide the truth from
yourself, perhaps hoping it will somehow go away. Many of them thought
this was precisely what some of the clergy and other educators were
doing, and despised them for it. Far better to face the sad truth with
intellectual honesty, manly courage, and a stiff upper lip. So it wasn’t
just that they thought it reprehensible to believe on faith what can
also be addressed by reason or historical investigation. It was rather
that they suspected and deeply feared that the latter (together with
the other factors I mentioned) would undermine the former. And they
scorned and detested a sort of willful head-in-the-sand attitude in
which, out of timidity or fear or a desire for comfort, one refuses to
face the facts. Reasons such as
First published in The Contemporary
Review 29 (1877); reprinted in
Clifford’s Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1879), pp. 345ff.
However things may have stood with the Victorians, Harvey proposes the following bit of moral dogma:
The gulf separating the conservative Christian believer and the New Testament scholar can be seen as the conflict between two antithetical ethics of belief. . . . New Testament scholarship is now so specialized and requires so much preparation that the layperson has simply been disqualified from having any right to a judgment regarding the truth or falsity of certain historical claims. Insofar as the conservative Christian believer is a layperson who has no knowledge of the New Testament scholarship, he or she is simply not entitled to certain historical beliefs at all. Just as the average layperson is scarcely in a position to have an informed judgment about the seventh letter of Plato, the relationship of Montezuma to Cortez, or the authorship of the Donation of Constantine, so the average layperson has no right to an opinion about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel or the trustworthiness of the synoptics. (NTS, p. 197)
“The layperson has simply been disqualified from having any right to a
judgment regarding the truth or falsity of certain historical claims”:
strong words! In an earlier age, priests and ministers, often the only
educated members of their congregations, would exercise a certain
intellectual and spiritual leadership, hoping the flock would
come to see, appreciate, and believe the truth. On Harvey’s showing, the
flock doesn’t so much as have a right to an opinion on these
points—not even an opinion
purveyed by the experts! Harvey complains (p. 193) that many students
seem unreceptive to the results of scripture scholarship. If he’s
right, however, the students don’t have a right to believe the results
of scripture scholarship; they are therefore doing no more than their
simple duty in refusing to believe them. One hopes Harvey remembers,
when teaching his classes, not to put his views on these matters in an
attractive and winsome fashion; after all, if he did so, some of the
students might believe them, in which case they would be
sinning and he himself would be giving offense in the Pauline sense
(
Suppose we sadly avert our gaze from this elitism run amok: why does
Harvey think that only the historian has a right to hold an opinion on
these matters? Clearly enough, because he thinks the only way to
achieve accurate and reliable information on these matters is by way of
Troeltschian scholarship. And that opinion, obviously, presupposes the philosophical
and theological opinion that there isn’t any
As he says in The Historian and the
Believer, “Faith has no function in
the justification of historical arguments respecting fact” (p. 112),
and “Believers have no distinctively Christian justificatory warrants
for ascertaining whether Hitler was mad . . . whether Jesus was raised
from the dead” (p. 242).
This view is not, of course, a result of historical scholarship, Troeltschian or otherwise; nor is it supported by arguments that will appeal to anyone who doesn’t already agree with him—or, indeed, by any arguments at all. Harvey’s view is rather a presupposition, a methodological prescription of the pursuit of Troeltschian historical criticism and proscription of traditional biblical commentary. So it can hardly be thought of as an independent good reason for preferring the former to the latter. What we have are different philosophical-theological positions that dictate different ways of pursuing scripture scholarship. A way to show that the one really is superior to the other would be to give a good argument either for the one philosophical-theological position or against the other. Harvey does neither, simply assuming (uncritically, and without so much as mentioning the fact) the one position and rejecting the other. He assumes there is no source of warrant or knowledge in addition to reason. This is not self-evident; millions, maybe billions of Christians and others reject it. Is it sensible, then, just to assume it, without so much as acknowledging this contrary opinion, without so much as a feeble gesture in the direction of argument or reason?
John Collins recognizes that
Troeltschian scholarship involves theological assumptions not nearly
universally shared. He doesn’t argue for the truth of these
assumptions, but recommends them on a quite different basis.
Criticizing Brevard Childs’s proposal for a ‘canonical’ approach to
scripture scholarship, See, e.g., Childs’s The New Testament as
Canon, pp. 3–53.
If biblical theology is to retain a place in serious scholarship, it must
be . . . conceived broadly enough to provide a context for debate
between different viewpoints. Otherwise it is likely to become a
sectarian reservation, of interest only to those who hold certain
confessional tenets that are not shared by the discipline at large.
Childs’s dogmatic conception of the canon provides no basis for
advancing dialogue. In my opinion historical criticism still provides
the most satisfactory framework for discussion. “Is a Critical Biblical Theology Possible?” in
The Hebrew Bible and Its Interpreters, pp. 6–7. Collins speaks here not of Troeltschian
HBC but of HBC simpliciter; just a couple of pages earlier, however, he
identifies HBC with Troeltschian HBC.
He adds that
One
criterion for the adequacy of presuppositions is the degree to which
they allow dialogue between differing viewpoints and accommodate new
insights. . . . Perhaps the outstanding achievement of historical
criticism in this century is that it has provided a framework within
which scholars of different prejudices and commitments have been able
to debate in a constructive manner. Ibid., p. 8.
So why should we prefer Troeltschian scripture scholarship over traditional Bible commentary? Because it offers a wider context, one in which people with conflicting theological opinions can all take part. We may be conservative Christians, theological liberals, or people with no theological views whatever: we can all take part in Troeltschian scripture scholarship, provided we acquiesce in its fundamental assumptions. This is why it is to be preferred to the more traditional sort.
Now
this would perhaps be a reason for practicing Duhemian
scripture scholarship, but of course
Troeltschian scripture scholarship is not Duhemian: the principles on
which it proceeds are not accepted by nearly everyone. They would be
accepted by only a tiny minority of contemporary Christians, for
example. And this shows a fundamental confusion, so it seems to me, in
Collins’s defense of
The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and
Historical Criticism, p.
120.
We are now prepared to return to Harvey’s original question: why is it that the person in the pew pays little attention to contemporary HBC and, despite those decades of research, retains rather a traditional picture of the life and ministry of Jesus? As to why in actual historical fact this is the case, this is a job for an intellectual historian. What we have seen so far, however, is that there is no compelling or even reasonably decent argument for supposing that the procedures and assumptions of HBC are to be preferred to those of traditional biblical commentary. A little epistemological reflection enables us to see something further: the traditional Christian (whether in the pew or not) has good reason to reject the skeptical claims of HBC and continue to hold traditional Christian belief despite the allegedly corrosive acids of HBC.
As we have seen, there are
substantially three types of HBC. For present purposes, however, we can
consider Duhemian and Spinozistic
Neither of these is remotely persuasive as a reason for modifying traditional Christian belief in the light of Troeltschian results. As for the first, of course, the traditional Christian knows that it is quite false: she herself and many of her friends nowadays (and hundreds of millions of others) do think in precisely that proscribed way. And as far as the implicit claims for the superiority of these Troeltschian ways of thinking go, she won’t be impressed by them unless some decent arguments of one sort or another are forthcoming, or some other good reason for adopting that opinion is presented. The mere claim that this is what many contemporary experts think will not and should not intimidate her. And the second proposed reason (Harvey’s reason) seems to be itself dependent on the very claim at issue. Why does the critic think it immoral to form beliefs about historical facts on grounds other than historical research? Because he believes that the only reliable ground for beliefs of the former type is research of the latter type. Again, however, he offers no argument for this assumption, merely announcing it as what those in the know believe, and perhaps also adopting an air of injured puzzlement about the fact that people in the pews don’t seem to pay much attention.
To see the point here, consider an analogy: suppose your friend is accused
and convicted of stealing an ancient and valuable Frisian vase from the
museum in Franeker. As it happens, you remember clearly that at the
time this vase was stolen, your friend was in your office, defending his
eccentric views about the Gospel of John. You have testified to this in
court, but to no avail. I come along and offer to do a really
scientific investigation to see whether your view here is, in fact,
correct. You are delighted, knowing as you think you do that
Troeltschian HBC, therefore, has no claim on serious Christians; it is wholly reasonable for them to form and maintain their beliefs quite independently of it. How about non-Troeltschian (Duhemian and Spinozistic) HBC? This is a very different kettle of fish. The non-Troeltschian proposes to employ only assumptions that are clearly deliverances of reason (or accepted by everyone party to the project). She doesn’t (for purposes of scholarship) accept the traditional Christian’s views about the Bible or the life of Christ, but she also doesn’t accept Troeltsch’s principles. She doesn’t assume that miracles did or could happen; but that is quite different from assuming that they didn’t or couldn’t, and she doesn’t assume that either. She doesn’t assume that the Bible is, in fact, a word from the Lord and hence authoritative and reliable; but she also doesn’t assume that it isn’t.
Of course that may not leave her a lot to go on. The non-Troeltschian is
handicapped in this area in a way in which she isn’t in such areas as
physics or chemistry. In the latter (apart, perhaps, from a bit of
controversy about the anthropic principle and the principle of
indifference See Ernan McMullin’s “Indifference Principle
and Anthropic Principle in Cosmology,” Studies in the History and
Philosophy of Science 24, no. 3
(1993), and my “Methodological Naturalism?” in Facets of
Faith and Science, vol. 1, ed. J.
van der Meer (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America,
1996). See note 467 above.
A. E. Harvey, for example, proposes the following as beyond reasonable
doubt from everyone’s point of view (i.e., Duhemianly): “that Jesus was
known in both Galilee and Jerusalem, that he was a teacher, that he
carried out cures of various illnesses, particularly demon-possession
and that these were widely regarded as miraculous; that he was involved
in controversy with fellow Jews over questions of the law of Moses: and
that he was crucified in the governorship of Pontius Pilate.” Jesus and the Constraints of
History (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1982), p. 6. It could be that each of the conjuncts is
beyond reasonable doubt but that their conjunction is not. Suppose
(just to arbitrarily choose a number) what is probable to degree .95 or
higher is beyond reasonable doubt. Then if each of the above is beyond
reasonable doubt, their conjunction might still be little more than
twice as probable as its denial.
Or consider John Meier’s monumental A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the
Historical Jesus. (The first volume
has 484 pages; the second has 1,055 pages; a third volume is expected soon.)
Meier aims to be Duhemian, or anyway Spinozistic: “My method
follows a simple rule: it prescinds from what Christian faith or later
Church teaching says about Jesus, without either affirming or denying
such claims” (p. 1). (I think he also means to eschew assumptions
incompatible with traditional Christian belief.) Meier’s fantasy of “an
unpapal conclave” of Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and agnostic
scholars, locked in the basement of the Harvard Divinity School library
until they come to consensus on what historical methods can show about
the life and mission of Jesus, is thoroughly Duhemian. This conclave he
says, would yield “a rough draft of what that will-o’-the-wisp
‘all reasonable people’ could say about the historical Jesus” (p. 2).
Meier sets
“Meier’s treatment, in short, is as solid and
moderate and pious as Historical Jesus scholarship is ever likely to
be. More important, Meier is a careful scholar. There is nothing hasty
or slipshod in his analysis: he considers every opinion, weighs every
option” (Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus, p. 128). Johnson, The Real Jesus, pp. 130–31.
Now what is characteristic of non-Troeltschian HBC is just that it doesn’t
involve those Troeltschian principles: but it also
rejects any alleged source of warranted belief in addition to reason
(Spinozistic) and any theological assumptions not shared by everyone
party to the discussion. Of course one might in fact accept those
additional sources of warranted belief, but be interested in seeing
just how much can be argued from a strictly Duhemian or Spinozistic
point of view; to pursue a Duhemian or Spinozistic project is not
necessarily to believe that there are no such additional sources. It is
only to bracket them for the project in question.
So the traditional Christian needn’t be fazed by the fact that
non-Troeltschian HBC doesn’t support his views about what Jesus did and
said. He thinks he knows some things by faith and the IIHS—that
Jesus arose from the dead, for example. He may concede that if you
leave out of account all that he knows in this way, then with respect
Similarly here. The traditional Christian thinks he knows by faith that Jesus was divine and that he rose from the dead. Hence, he will be unmoved by the fact that these truths are not especially probable on the evidence to which non-Troeltschian HBC limits itself—that is, evidence that explicitly excludes what one knows by faith. Why should that matter to him? So this is the rest of the answer to Harvey’s question: if the HBC in question is non-Troeltschian, then the fact that it doesn’t verify traditional Christian beliefs is due to its limiting itself in the way it does, to its refusing to use all the data or evidence the Christian thinks he has in his possession. For a Christian to confine himself to the results of non-Troeltschian HBC would be a little like trying to mow your lawn with a nail scissors or paint your house with a toothbrush; it might be an interesting experiment if you have time on your hands, but otherwise why limit yourself in this way?
As we saw above (pp. 388–89) E. P. Sanders, Barnabas Lindars, Jon Levenson, and many others all declare that what one knows by faith or theological assumptions not endorsed by all should play no role in proper scripture scholarship; and perhaps we can think of this as a sort of unspecific endorsement of Duhemian scholarship. Why should they play no role? We must rely only on “evidence on which everyone can agree,” says Sanders. “The arguments offered must be historically valid, able, that is, to compel the assent of historians whatever their religion or lack thereof, whatever their backgrounds, spiritual experiences, or personal beliefs, and without privileging any claim of revelation,” says Levenson. “It is not open to a scholar to decide that, just because he is a believing Christian, he will accept all the Gospel miracles at their face value, but at the same time he will repudiate miracles attributed to Isis. All such accounts have to be scrutinized with equal detachment,” says Lindars. Construed as endorsement of non-Troeltschian HBC, the claim here, I think, is that only such scholarship is properly objective.
Is this true, and is objectivity required or desirable in this
enterprise? Here we must go back to a distinction outlined in chapter
1. Objectivity can be thought of as a matter of being oriented toward
or paying attention to the object of knowledge or opinion, as opposed to the subject;
what is objective may be thought of as coming from the object
More generally, then, HBC is either Troeltschian or non-Troeltschian. If the
former, then it begins from assumptions entailing that much of what the
traditional Christian believes is false; it comes as no surprise, then,
that its conclusions are at odds with traditional belief. It is also of
little direct concern to the classical Christian. It offers her no
reason at all for rejecting or modifying her beliefs; it also offers
little promise of enabling her to achieve better or deeper insight into
what actually happened. As for non-Troeltschian HBC, however,
this variety of historical criticism omits a great deal of what she
sees as relevant evidence and relevant considerations. It is therefore
left with little to go on. Again, the fact that it fails to support
traditional belief need not be upsetting to the traditional believer;
given those limitations, that is only to be expected, and it casts no
doubt at all on Christian belief. Either way, therefore, the
traditional Christian can rest easy with the claims of HBC; she need
feel no obligation, intellectual or otherwise, to modify her belief in
the light of its claims and alleged results. Alleged results: because of the enormous controversy and
disagreement among followers of HBC, it is very difficult to find
anything one could sensibly call ‘results’ of this scholarship. Thus
Harold Attridge (in “Calling Jesus Christ,” in Hermes and
Athena, ed. Eleonore Stump and
Thomas Flint [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993], p.
211): There remains enormous diversity among those who attempt to
describe what Jesus really did, taught, and thought about himself. For
some contemporary scholars he was a Hellenistic magician; for others, a
Galilean charismatic or rabbi; for yet others, a prophetic reformer;
for others, a sly teller of wry and engaging tales; for some he had
grandiose ideas; for others he eschewed them. In general, the inquirer
finds the Jesus that her historical method allows her to see. It is as
true today as it was at the end of the liberal quest for the historical
Jesus catalogued by Albert Schweitzer that we moderns tend to make
Jesus in our own image and likeness. The Schweitzer reference is to
his Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906), tr. W. Montgomery as The Quest of
the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to
Wrede (New York: Macmillan,
1956).
Still, she may perfectly properly
pay attention to it, and may even join in the game. Perhaps, for
example, she is convinced (mistakenly, in my opinion) that any
enterprise (like traditional biblical commentary) that makes religious
or theological assumptions isn’t really science; and perhaps she thinks
it is important to engage in science in this area. Perhaps she likes
to pursue scripture scholarship in conjunction with her friends who
don’t make the assumptions she does; or perhaps she thinks much of
interest may emerge from a venture pursued by people of very different
assumptions. Perhaps she concurs with the Thomist of Etienne
Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940;
republished, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), the first
couple of chapters. But see my The Twin Pillars of Christian
Scholarship (Grand Rapids: Calvin
College, 1990); I argue that a common Thomistic reason for so thinking
is not, in fact, a good reason.
Can traditional biblical commentary also be pursued in Duhemian fashion? The traditional Christian wants to know the answer to various questions about the Bible, among others, the questions to which traditional biblical commentary addresses itself. Now the sensible thing to do, in pursuing the answer to a question, is to use all that you believe or think you know (insofar as it is relevant); that will give you the best shot at reaching the correct answer. But suppose you are also convinced that it is important to investigate these matters scientifically, and that if you employ beliefs you accept by faith, the resulting inquiry will not be science. Suppose you decide you want to do science, but also want to work on these questions. What can you do?
You can conditionalize. To borrow a term from Bayesian
epistemologists, who use it to mean something quite different. See
Warrant: The Current Debate, p.
122. For more on conditionalization, see my “On
Christian Scholarship,” in The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic
University (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1994). I hope to go into greater detail on these
matters in a book on Christian philosophy.
But isn’t all of this just a bit too
sunny? Isn’t it a recipe for avoiding hard questions, for hanging onto
belief no matter what, for guaranteeing that you will never have to
face negative results, even if there are some? “HBC is
either Troeltschian or non-Troeltschian: in the first case, it proceeds
from assumptions I reject; in the second, it fails to take account of
all of what I take to be the evidence; either way, therefore, I needn’t
pay attention to it.” Couldn’t I say this a priori, without even examining the results of HBC? But
then there must be something defective in the line of thought in
question. Isn’t it clearly possible that historians should discover facts that put
Christian belief into serious question, count heavily against it? Well,
maybe so. How could this happen? As follows: HBC limits
itself to the deliverances of reason; it is possible, at any rate in
the broadly logical sense, that just by following ordinary historical
reason, using the methods of historical investigation endorsed or
enjoined by the deliverances of reason, someone should find powerful
evidence against central elements of the Christian faith; Or, less crucially, evidence against what
appears to be the teaching of Scripture. For example, archaeological
evidence could undermine the traditional belief that there was such a
city as Jericho. The example is Bas van Fraassen’s; see his
“Three-Sided Scholarship: Comments on the Paper of John R. Donahue, S.
J.,” in Hermes and Athena, p.
322. “Finish it yourself, if you have the heart to do it,” says van
Fraassen. Or think we come up with it; even if we are mistaken about
the evidence in question, it could still precipitate this sort of
problem for us.
However, nothing at all like this has emerged from HBC, whether
Troeltschian or non-Troeltschian; indeed, there is little of any kind
that can be considered ‘assured results’, if only because of the
wide-ranging disagreement among those who practice HBC. We don’t have
anything like assured results (or even reasonably well-attested
results) that conflict with traditional Christian belief in such a way
that belief of that sort can continue to be accepted only at
considerable cost; nothing at all like this has happened. What would be
the appropriate response if it did happen or, rather, if I came to be convinced that it
had happened? Would I have to give up Christian faith, or else give up
the life of the mind? What would be the appropriate response? Well,
what would be the appropriate response if I came to be convinced that
someone had given a wholly rigorous, ineluctable disproof of the
existence of God, perhaps something along the lines of J. N. Findlay’s
alleged ontological disproof? “Can God’s Existence Be Disproved?”
Mind (April 1948).
What is truth?
Pontius Pilate
To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false; while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.
Aristotle
You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.
Jesus
I was planning to title this chapter “Postmodernism and Pluralism”; in fact that is what I did title the chapter. But the title may be a misnomer. Our project, in this fourth and last part of the book, is to evaluate various possible defeaters for Christian belief. The problem with postmodernism, though, is that it is extremely hard to find in it anything that is a sensible candidate for being a defeater for Christian belief. Religious pluralism, perhaps, can be thought with some show of reason to be such a defeater; it’s much harder to find a likely candidate in postmodernism. Permit me to explain.
Postmodernism, of course, is variously characterized. Among the views
that go under this rubric are to be found a rejection of classical
foundationalism; the declaration that there are no foundations of any
sort, classical or otherwise; the claim that there is no such thing as
objectivity (and it’s a good thing too); deconstruction (‘the
deconstruction
Cited in Grace M. Jantzen, “What’s the
Difference? Knowledge and Gender in (Post)modern Philosophy of
Religion,” Religious Studies 32
(December 1996), p. 446. At least according to Richard Rorty; see his
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.
109. “God is thus the proper name of that which
deprives us of our nature, of our own birth; consequently he will
always have spoken before us, on the sly. He is the difference which
insinuates itself between myself and myself as death” (Jacques Derrida,
Writing and Difference, tr. A.
Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], p. 181). Postmodernism, Reason, and
Religion (London: Roudedge,
1992).
Now many of these claims are not sensible candidates for the post of being
defeaters of Christian belief, and indeed some of them are entirely
congenial to it. For example, postmoderns typically reject classical
foundationalism, which has also been rejected by such doughty
spokespersons for Christian belief as Abraham Kuyper, William Alston,
and Nicholas Wolterstorff and, for that matter, in anticipatory fashion
by Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Edwards. (Its rejection is also a
central motif of this book.) Many other themes of postmodernism can
elicit only enthusiastic applause from a Christian
Other postmodern claims, however, do appear to be incompatible with
Christian belief: for example, the claims that God is dead, that there
are no ‘objective’ moral standards, and perhaps also the claim that
there isn’t any such thing as truth, at least as commonsensically thought of. With
respect to rejection of truth, there is an initial problem: what,
precisely, is it to
reject truth? To do that, must you assert that there simply
isn’t any such thing as truth,
or is it sufficient to say that there is such a thing, all right, but
it is very different from what we thought (and there is nothing else at
all like what we thought truth was)? Compare the claim (a) there are no elephants,
with the claim (b) there are elephants, but they are really a variety
of prime numbers (and there is nothing at all like what we thought
elephants were like). Compare the claim (a) that there are no
universals with the claim (b) that there are some, but as it turns out
they are merely names, nomina.
(1) Necessarily, there is such a person as God if and only if it is true that there is such a person as God.
For the postmodern claim
about truth implies that whether it is true that there is such a person
as God depends upon us and what we do or think. But if the truth of
this proposition depends on us, then, given (1) so does the very
existence of God. According to (1) there is such a person as God if and
only if it is true that there
is; hence if its being true that there is such a person as God depends on us
and what
The same goes for the idea that there simply is no such thing as truth. One of our most fundamental and basic ideas is that there is such a thing as the way things are. Things could have been very different from the way they are; there are many ways things could have been, but among them is the way they actually are. There actually are horses; there aren’t any unicorns, although (perhaps) there could have been; there being horses, then, is part of the way things are. Now the existence of truth is intimately connected with there being a way things really are, a way the world is. For it is true that there are horses if and only if there being horses is part of the way things are. Of course a postmodernist might reply, “Well, obviously there is such a thing as the way things are—who could deny that? But when I say there is no such thing as truth, I don’t mean to deny that at all. I only mean to say that there is no such thing as truth understood a certain way. There is no such thing as truth understood, for example, as requiring a sort of detailed structural correspondence between the way the world is and English (or German or Swahili or Chinese) sentences.” This latter would be harmless enough; it would also be uninteresting. Postmoderns sometimes seem to oscillate between a momentous but clearly false claim (there simply is no such thing as truth at all) and a sensible but rather boring claim (there is no such thing as truth, conceived in some particular and implausible way). Taken the strong way, however, as the suggestion there really is no such thing as the way the world is, and hence no such thing as truth, the postmodern claim is incompatible with Christian belief. For it is certainly crucial to Christian belief to suppose that there is a way things are, and that it includes the great things of the gospel; it is crucial to Christian belief to suppose that such propositions as God created the world and Christ’s suffering and death are an atonement for human sin are true.
Various claims plausibly labeled ‘postmodern’ do indeed conflict with
Christian belief. As we saw in chapter 11 (above, p. 366), however,
this is not yet to say that these claims or the making of them
constitute defeaters for
Christian belief. One often hears that this or that element of
Christian belief has been “called into question” by postmodernism or
postmodern ways of thinking, or that postmodernism has
“destroyed” this or that traditional way of looking at the world.
But you don’t automatically produce a defeater for Christian belief
just by standing on your roof and proclaiming (even loudly and
Here someone will point out that many postmoderns would not agree. They typically don’t think arguments are either necessary or sufficient for anything of importance; they may be unsure that there is any such thing as rationality; indeed, they may even reject the whole warrant-and-defeaters structure of our discussion. If so, wouldn’t it be a waste of time to inquire whether postmodern thought does provide a defeater for Christian belief? Not necessarily. Their rejection of the notion of defeaters does not imply that, in fact, they have not provided a defeater. They could certainly provide a defeater even if they (mistakenly) rejected the whole line of thought presupposed by the idea that there are or could be defeaters for Christian belief. You are a card-carrying postmodern and reject all talk about defeaters; I am not. I believe there are no cacti in the Upper Peninsula; you show me one. The fact that you don’t yourself think much of defeaters doesn’t for a minute imply that you haven’t given me one, anymore than the fact that I don’t believe in viruses means that I can’t give you a cold. If I am right about viruses, then I can’t; but I’m wrong. The same goes for the postmodern who doesn’t believe in defeaters: if she’s right about there being no such things, then no doubt she can’t give me one; but perhaps she’s wrong. In adopting the warrant-and-defeaters framework, we are, of course, presupposing that she is wrong. If so, she might be able to produce a defeater for Christian belief, even if she doesn’t think she can.
Still, she can’t do it by bare assertion, no matter how impassioned or
confident. Must it be by way of
argument then? We saw in chapter 11 that you can give me a nonargumentative defeater for certain kinds of beliefs; but could she give
me a defeater for an element of Christian belief without
giving me an argument? Here is a possibility: perhaps she can give me a
defeater by citing the trajectory of her own intellectual and spiritual
life. Perhaps she was raised as a traditional
Are there other possibilities for nonargumentative defeaters here? Postmoderns sometimes point out the involvement of Christians in the injustice and oppression our sad world displays. As I’ll argue in the next chapter, however, the suffering and evil our world contains don’t automatically give me a defeater for Christian belief. Neither does the fact that Christians are responsible for a good bit of it; after all, it is part of Christian belief to see human beings, Christians included, as deeply flawed and sinful. Are there still other possibilities? Perhaps, but it is hard to see what they could be. So it seems that something like an argument is needed. Postmoderns, however, don’t ordinarily give arguments for claims inconsistent with Christian belief. Indeed, they don’t ordinarily give arguments for anything at all, perhaps because they think the whole frame of mind that makes argument seem useful is something we should ‘get beyond’. Still, there are at least a couple of postmodern arguments worth considering here, although neither is such that its relevance to Christian belief is completely obvious.
The first argument appeals to historicist consideration: we are all of us
heavily constrained and conditioned by the society within which we live
and within which we have been socialized. Had I been born at a
different time and place, I would have failed to believe many of the
things I do in fact believe—among them being, perhaps, some of
the things I take most seriously. Perhaps, for example, I wouldn’t have
been a Christian or even a theist; perhaps I would have thought of
those outside my tribe or clan as subhuman; perhaps I would have
thought slavery was entirely acceptable, and so on. So the claim is
that in my doxastic life I can’t transcend my cultural setting—at
any
See John Hick, An Interpretation of
Religion (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989), p. 2.
Why should we accept the argument? There are powerful reasons not to. First, like many such skeptical arguments, it discredits itself if it discredits anything; it falls into the very snare it sets for others. For consider its central premise:
(CP) Suppose a person S holds a religious or philosophical belief B: if B is such that if S had been born elsewhere or else-when, she would not have accepted B, then B is not warranted for S.
But suppose I accept (CP), which is itself a religious or philosophical belief. Isn’t it clear that there are times and places such that if I had been born there and then, I would not have accepted it? If I’d been born in nineteenth-century New Guinea, or medieval France, or seventeenth-century Japan, I would (very likely) not have accepted (CP); so according to (CP), (CP) is not warranted for me; and once I see that it isn’t warranted, I have a defeater for it; so I shouldn’t believe it. Perhaps you think that this argument is just a nasty little dialectical trick, not worth taking seriously. Well, I disagree: if you see that a belief really does defeat itself, then you can’t sensibly hold that belief.
No
matter what you think of that argument, however, why can’t it be that
we know more at some times than at others? Had Einstein been born in
the eighteenth century, he would not have believed special relativity;
nothing follows about special relativity. Many now think it is wrong to
treat someone with hatred or contempt or indifference on the mere
grounds that they are of a different race: their views are not
automatically unwarranted just because they might have believed
otherwise if they had been brought up in Nazi Germany or ancient
Sparta. Perhaps we should think, instead, that if they had been brought
up in Nazi Germany or ancient Sparta, they wouldn’t have known
something they do know. I argued
in Warrant and Proper Function that warrant is relative to circumstances; some
circumstances are warrant conferring and others are not. I could
therefore have been in other circumstances, circumstances that
There is a second argument I wish to consider briefly. Richard Rorty is
widely credited (some might say “debited”) with the view that “truth is
what our peers will let us get away with saying.” What he actually says is: For philosophers
like Chisholm and Bergmann, such explanations must be attempted if the realism of common sense is to
be preserved. The aim of all such explanations is to make truth
something more than what Dewey called ‘Warranted assertability’: more
than what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying.
(Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979], pp.
175–76) It is clear from the context here (and elsewhere) that Rorty sides with
Dewey against Chisholm and Bergmann. And what if my peers are an unusually
tolerant bunch who will also let me get away with saying that there is such a person? Would it then
be true (‘for me’) that there is such a person, and also true that there isn’t?
Similarly, consider the Chinese authorities who murdered those students at Tiananmen Square and then compounded their wickedness with bald-faced lies, claiming they’d done no such thing. From the present point of view, this is a most uncharitable way to think about the matter. For in denying that it ever happened, the authorities were merely trying to bring it about that their peers would let them get away with saying it had never happened, in which case it would have been true that it had never happened, in which case it would never have happened. So the charitable thought here, from a Rortian point of view, is that the Chinese authorities were only trying to bring it about that this terrible thing had never happened: and who can fault them for a thing like that? The same goes for those Nazi skinhead types who claim there was no Holocaust and that Hitler and his cohorts were as gentle as lambs and never harmed a soul; they too should charitably be seen as trying to see to it that those terrible things never did happen. And in your own personal life, if you have done something wrong, no problem: lie about it, get your peers to let you get away with saying you didn’t do it. If you succeed, then in fact you won’t have done it; furthermore, as an added bonus, you won’t have lied about it either!
Now you will no doubt say that all this is belaboring a straw man; Rorty couldn’t mean to assert, as the sober truth, that truth is what your peers will let you get away with saying. That is just a rough-and-ready, informal, and conversational way of conveying his real opinion. Putting it thus informally accords with his idea that philosophy is best thought of as a sort of conversation, and with his scorn for the analytic philosopher’s panoply of definitions, principles, necessary and sufficient conditions, attempts at rigor, and all the rest. (If you and a friend were having a conversation, would you begin a sentence by saying, “Necessarily, a proposition P is true if and only if?” Well, maybe it depends on the friend.)
Perhaps that’s right; unfortunately it does complicate matters. My
aim is to ask whether Rortian thought offers a defeater for Christian
belief; one of the most prominent strands in Rorty’s thought is what he
has to say about truth; but then I need to know whether what he means
to say about truth is or isn’t incompatible with Christian belief. For
that, it would be nice to have a relatively serious way of stating what
this strand of thought might be. What could he mean? Well, presumably
Rorty’s claim is that the truth of a belief or proposition depends in
some important way on social reality of one sort or another; truth is
in some way a function of society and what it does or would do. What is
true ‘for us’, then, will depend somehow on our own society. For any
proposed truth B, there is some property P—some property a
society can have—such that B is true (‘for us’) if and only if
our society displays P. And of course we aren’t thinking of
‘Cambridge’ properties like being such that B is
true. But then precisely what
properties are we
thinking of? It would be entirely out of the spirit of a Rortian
inquiry to answer that question, so I won’t try. The Post Card from Socrates to Freud and
Beyond, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 98.
So our problem is that one can’t easily tell, without further elucidation,
whether Rorty’s view of truth is or is not incompatible with Christian
belief. This problem about determining what Rorty intends here is not
trivial. Gary Gutting, for example, suggests that Rorty doesn’t really
intend to say anything at all shocking or paradoxical about truth, or
anything out of accord with robust common sense. He doesn’t really mean
to say that what is true depends in some way upon properties of
society; instead, he is only rejecting certain eminently rejectable
theories of truth. “The key
point,” says Gutting, “is that our ‘discourse on truth’ should be
limited to an assertion, without philosophical commentary or
elaboration, of the baseline commonplaces about truth; and a review of
the arbitrariness and/or incoherence of efforts to criticize (i.e.,
analyze, modify, or justify) the baseline truths.” “Richard Rorty: The Rudiments of Pragmatic
Liberalism,” in Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of
Modernity (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
So construed, Rorty seems a bit like Thomas Reid transposed into a conversational key, perhaps seasoned with a dash of Wittgenstein. If this is what Rorty means, then he is certainly not vulnerable to those charges of dissolute antirealism and relativism often flung his way. Thus taken, his views aren’t so much as mildly shocking; they certainly don’t constitute defeaters for Christian belief. But could this really be what he meant when, for example, he sided with Dewey in suggesting that truth is what our peers will let us get away with saying? If so, he has expressed himself a little carelessly. And even making all due allowances for the license conferred by his intent to be conversational and not pedantic, wouldn’t it be a bit of a stretch to think that what he intends here is only a rejection of some philosophical criticism of those baseline platitudes? And isn’t it also a little hard to swallow the suggestion that Rorty is ambiguous as between rejecting truth itself, on the one hand, and some particular theory of truth, on the other? This would be a little like being ambiguous between rejecting some theory of kangaroos and rejecting kangaroos themselves. This suggestion, it seems to me, implausibly emasculates Rorty.
What Rorty really opposes, according to
Gutting, is a view ordinarily associated with realism with respect to
truth—that is, representationalism. This is the idea that we (or our minds) possess
and think by way of representations, which are true just if they
“correspond to reality.” The problem with this view, according to Rorty
(according to Gutting), is that it inevitably encounters the question
how we know and whether we know that our representations do, in fact,
correspond to reality. Here further problems arise. According to
Gutting, Rorty endorses all the commonsense, baseline platitudes about
truth and our relation to it; but don’t these platitudes themselves
include this very representationalism? Isn’t
representationalism—at any rate the basic version of
it—itself platitudinous? It is a baseline platitude that beliefs
are about things of one
kind or another; for example, some of my beliefs are about the moon. It
is another baseline platitude that beliefs can represent things as
being one way or another;
for example, one of my beliefs about the moon represents it as a
satellite of the earth. And it is still another baseline platitude that
this belief is true if and only if, in fact, the moon is a satellite of
the earth—that is, if and only if the way that belief represents
the moon as being, is the way the moon really is—i.e., if and
only if the belief about the moon corresponds to what the moon is like.
Representationalism itself seems to be included in that stock of
baseline platitudes; at any rate, there is a platitudinous version of
it. So Rorty really
Could it be that what Rorty is rejecting is
not representationalism as such, but some more specific and detailed
version of it—one, perhaps, in which the correspondence in
question involves some kind of isomorphism between elements of the
representer (thought or sentence) and the represented? Perhaps; but
then (as with truth) Rorty’s rejection of representationalism isn’t
nearly as interesting as it looks at first sight.
On Gutting’s semi-interpretation, then, Rorty isn’t open to those charges of irresponsible antirealism and relativism; on the other hand, his views do turn out to be a bit pedestrian, and of course taken this way they don’t constitute a defeater for Christian belief (or much of anything else). So suppose we take Rorty the more robust way, as making substantive and controversial claims about truth. Let’s take him as claiming that truth is a human construction and that a belief or other candidate for truth is true (‘for us’) just if it stands in a certain relationship to (our) society. As I suggested above, this does indeed seem incompatible with Christian belief. First, it seems to make the truth about God (if only the truth about God ‘for us’) dependent on what we do or think. This is clearly incompatible with Christian views about God, according to which God is not dependent on anything at all. And second, this Rortian doctrine implies that there is some contingent property (some non-Cambridge contingent property) P such that it is true (‘for us’) that there is such a person as God if and only if our society has P. Now presumably our society can have a property only if our society exists; hence it looks as if the existence of God entails the existence of our society, so that if our society had not existed, God would not have existed either. Again, this is clearly incompatible with Christian theism.
Of course this claim on Rorty’s part will constitute a defeater only if he
also makes us aware of some reason why we should believe it; the mere
fact that he or someone else merely makes the claim doesn’t provide a
defeater. Now in general, Rorty is a bit standoffish about arguments;
still, he does present something that could perhaps be construed as an
argument for the conclusion that truth relevantly depends on us as a
society. He begins his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
(hereafter CIS) by claiming,
“About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than
found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe,” thus apparently
contradicting one of those platitudes, the one according to which (in
the general case, anyway) truth is discovered or found rather than
made. This certainly sounds like the nonplatitudinous suggestion that truth is a social
To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.
Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. (CIS, p. 5)
How exactly shall we understand this? It is hard to be sure, but here is a possibility: truths are sentences, sentences are elements of language, and languages are human creations; therefore truths are human creations, and if there weren’t any human beings (or other language-using creatures), there wouldn’t be any truths. According to this thought, we human beings create truths. The way we do this is perhaps not within anyone’s direct control (just as the stock market isn’t within anyone’s direct control), but still we somehow do it. I think this is what Rorty intends to assert; what he actually says, of course, is terse and enigmatic (as befits a conversational contribution). If it is what he means, however, there are two sorts of objections to the argument, one serious and the other fatal.
First, the serious objection. Sentences are indeed true or false, but they aren’t the only things that are. Beliefs are also true or false, as are assertions, claims, suggestions, and the like. Rorty’s argument seems to presuppose that beliefs, assertions, claims, suggestions, and so on are all themselves sentences. Alternatively, perhaps his idea is that it is sentences that are true or false in the primary sense, with other things (beliefs and assertions, for example) being true in a secondary way. (Thus he might say that an assertion is true if it is the assertion of a true sentence.)
This is at best dubious. Here is a reason for thinking that at least some
things true in the fundamental sense are not sentences. Suppose we use
the term ‘proposition’ to denote the things that are true or false in
the primary sense, leaving open just what they are and, in particular,
whether or not they are all sentences. Consider, then, the proposition
(the truth) that 2 + 1 = 3. Now this truth, as we ordinarily think, is
necessarily true; that means,
among other things, that it couldn’t have failed to be true; there are
no possible circumstances in which it is not true. But the
sentence ‘2 + 1 = 3’ could have
failed to be true. That is because it is a sentence, and is true, on
Rorty’s view, because of something we do with it. Furthermore, what we do with it is
something we could have failed to do. Therefore, on Rorty’s view, things
could have been such that this sentence would not have been true;
indeed, before there were human beings, Rorty thinks, there was no such
thing as the sentence ‘2 + 1 = 3’; under those conditions, that sentence
would not have been true. Hence the
Or, indeed, any other contingently existing
object: see Warrant and Proper Function (hereafter WPF), pp. 117ff.
That was the serious objection: at least some of the things that are true or false in the primary sense are not, contra Rorty’s assumption, sentences. I turn now to the fatal objection. Suppose for the moment that sentences were the only things that are true (or false) in the primary sense. Then perhaps we could say that truths are made by us human beings: for we make it the case that a given sequence of sounds or marks is, indeed, a sentence and thus capable of being true or false. (What we make to be sentences, I take it, are types as opposed to tokens.) For take any given truth: it is a sequence of shapes or sounds, and is also a sentence. We don’t make the string of shapes or sounds; perhaps we create tokens of those types, but the types would be there whatever we did or didn’t do. Still, that string of shapes or sounds owes its being a sentence to what we, the users of language, do with it. And perhaps we could express this by saying that truths are made.
Of course it wouldn’t follow that we make a given sentence
true, or that it is by virtue of
something we do that a given sentence is in fact true. We make it the
case that the sequence of marks ‘There once were dinosaurs’ is a
sentence and thus capable of being true or false. It doesn’t follow
that we make it true that there once were dinosaurs. By virtue of our
language-making activity, we bring it about that a certain string of
marks—‘there once were dinosaurs’—is true if and only if
there once were dinosaurs. But that is not sufficient for making that
sentence true. For the sentence to be true, there must once have been
dinosaurs; and that, presumably, is not something we have made to
be the case, by our language-making activities or in any other way.
Taken one way, therefore, the conclusion of Rorty’s argument is that we
human beings are responsible for the existence of sentences
(for the fact that certain strings of
marks or sounds are sentences) and thus for the existence of the things
that are true or false; so taken, the conclusion is unobjectionable,
platitudinous, and certainly not a candidate for a defeater of
Christian belief. Taken the
One
final note. Postmodernists nearly all reject classical foundationalism;
in this they concur with most Christian thinkers and most contemporary
philosophers. Momentously enough, however, many postmodernists
apparently believe that the demise of classical foundationalism implies
something far more startling: that there is no such thing as truth at
all, no way things really are. Why make that leap, when as a matter of
logic it clearly doesn’t follow? For various reasons, no doubt.
Prominent among those reasons is a sort of Promethean desire not to
live in a world we have not ourselves constituted or structured. With
the early Heidegger, a postmodern may refuse to feel at home in any
world he hasn’t himself
created. See CIS, p. 109.
Such Christian thinkers as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Kuyper, however,
recognize that there aren’t any certain foundations of the sort
Descartes sought—or, if there are, they are exceedingly slim, and
there is no way to transfer their certainty to our important
non-foundational beliefs about material objects, the past, other persons,
and the like. This is a stance that requires a certain epistemic
hardihood: there is, indeed, such a thing as truth; the stakes are, indeed,
very high (it matters greatly whether you believe the truth); but there
is no way to be sure that you have the truth; there
is no sure and certain method of attaining truth by starting from
beliefs about which
There is, however, another sort of reaction possible here. If it is
painful to live at risk, under the gun, with uncertainty but high
stakes, maybe the thing to do is just reduce or reject the stakes. If,
for example, there just isn’t any such thing as truth, then clearly one
can’t go wrong by believing what is false or failing to believe what is
true. If we reject the very idea of truth, we needn’t feel anxious
about whether we’ve got it. So the thing to do is dispense with the
search for truth and retreat into projects of some other sort:
self-creation and self-redefinition as with Nietzsche and Heidegger, or
Rortian irony, Although here as elsewhere Rorty is
ambiguous. Note that his ironist thinks there is no intrinsically final
vocabulary; she believes that no way of thinking is intrinsically
closer to the truth than any other (“The difficulty faced by a
philosopher who, like myself, is sympathetic to this
suggestion—one who thinks of himself as auxiliary to the poet
rather than to the physicist—is to avoid hinting that this
suggestion gets something right, that any sort of philosophy
corresponds to the way things really are” [CIS, p. 8]). Paradoxically,
however, the ironist is also nervous about her own final vocabulary,
thinking she may somehow have it wrong: “The ironist spends her time
worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the
wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. She worries that
the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by
giving her a language, may have given her the wrong language, and so
turned her into the wrong kind of human being” (CIS, p. 75). See Rorty on Derrida, CIS, pp. 122ff.
Postmodernism, therefore, doesn’t
offer anything that can sensibly be thought a defeater for Christian
belief. But what about the facts of religious pluralism, the fact that
the world displays a bewildering and kaleidoscopic variety of religious
and antireligious ways of thinking, all pursued by people of great
intelligence and seriousness? There are theistic religions, but also at
least some nontheistic religions (or perhaps nontheistic strands of
religion) among the enormous variety
Colloquium Heptaplomeres de rerum
sublimium arcanis abditis, written
by 1593 but first published in 1857. English translation by Marion
Kuntz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 256. God Has Many Names, p. 27. It is no doubt true that Christian
exclusivism (see below for a definition of that term) is a minority
opinion in the world at large: I suppose there are no more than a
couple of billion or so Christian exclusivists, with the world’s
population perhaps approaching three times that figure. Of course, these
matters are not really settled by counting heads. If they were,
however, it would be of some interest to note that there are perhaps a
million times more of those “dogmatic diehards” than people who accept
anything like Hick’s pluralism.
This is the problem of pluralism, and our question is whether a knowledge of the facts of pluralism constitutes a defeater for Christian belief. The specific problem I mean to discuss can be thought of as follows. To put it in an internal and personal way, I find myself with religious beliefs, and religious beliefs that I realize aren’t shared by nearly everyone else. For example, I believe both
(1) The world was created by God, an almighty, all-knowing and perfectly good personal being (the sort of being who holds beliefs, has aims and intentions, and can act to accomplish these aims)
and
(2)
Human beings require salvation, and God has provided a unique way of
salvation through the incarnation, life, sacrificial death, and
resurrection of his divine son. Note that it is no part of (2) to add that
those—the Old Testament patriarchs, for example, as well as
countless others—who haven’t encountered this way of salvation
cannot share in it.
Now
I realize there are many who do not believe these things. First, there
are those who agree with me on (1) but not (2): there are non-Christian
theistic religions. Second, there are those who don’t accept either (1)
or (2), but nonetheless do believe that there is something beyond the
natural world, a something such that human well-being and salvation
depend on standing in a right relation to it. And third, in the West
and since the Enlightenment, anyway, there are
people—naturalists, we may
call them—who don’t believe any of these three things. Some speak
here of a new awareness
of religious diversity, and speak of this new awareness as constituting
(for us in the West) a crisis, a revolution, an intellectual
development of the same magnitude as the Copernican revolution of the
sixteenth century and the alleged discovery of evolution and our animal
origins in the nineteenth. Thus Joseph Runzo: “Today, the impressive
piety and evident rationality of the belief systems of other religious
traditions, inescapably confronts Christians with a crisis—and a
potential revolution” (“God, Commitment, and Other Faiths: Pluralism vs.
Relativism,” Faith and Philosophy 5, no. 4 [October 1988], pp. 343ff.) See Robert Wilken’s paper “Religious
Pluralism and Early Christian Thought,” so far unpublished. Wilken
focuses on the third century; he explores Origen’s response to Celsus,
and concludes that there are striking parallels between Origen’s
historical situation and ours. “What is different today, I suspect, is
not that Christianity has to confront other religions,” he says, “but
that we now call this situation ‘religious pluralism’.”
Now one way to react to these other religious responses to the world is to continue to believe what I have all along believed; I learn about this diversity, but continue to believe (i.e., take to be true), such propositions as (1) and (2) above, consequently taking to be false any beliefs, religious or otherwise, that are incompatible with (1) and (2). Following current practice, I shall call this exclusivism; the exclusivist holds that the tenets or some of the tenets of one religion—Christianity, let’s say—are in fact true; he adds, naturally enough, that any propositions, including other religious beliefs, that are incompatible with those tenets are false. Here we need a couple of initial qualifications. First, I shall use the term ‘exclusivism’ in such a way that you don’t count as an exclusivist unless you are rather fully aware of other faiths, have had their existence and their claims called to your attention with some force and perhaps fairly frequently, have noted that the adherents of other religions sometimes appear to display great intelligence, moral excellence, and spiritual insight, and have to some degree reflected on the problem of pluralism, asking yourself such questions as whether it is or could be really true that the Lord has revealed himself and his programs to Christians, say, in a way in which he hasn’t revealed himself to those of other faiths. And second, suppose I am an exclusivist with respect to (1), for example, but reasonably believe, like Thomas Aquinas, say, that I have a knockdown, drag-out argument, a demonstration or conclusive proof of the proposition that there is such a person as God; and suppose I think further that if those who don’t believe (1) were to be apprised of this argument (and had the ability and training necessary to grasp it, and were to think about the argument fairly and reflectively), they too would come to believe (1). Then, obviously, the facts of religious pluralism would not furnish me with a defeater for (1). My condition would be like that of Kurt Gödel, upon his recognition that he had a proof for the incompleteness of arithmetic. True, many of his colleagues and peers didn’t believe that arithmetic was incomplete, and some believed that it was complete; these facts did not give Gödel a defeater for his belief; he had his proof, after all. Furthermore, he wouldn’t have had a defeater in these facts even if he were mistaken in thinking he had a proof.
Accordingly, I shall use the term ‘exclusivist’ in such a way that you
don’t count as an exclusivist if you rationally think you know of a
demonstration or conclusive argument for the belief with respect to
which you are an exclusivist, or even if you rationally think you know
of an argument that would convince all or most intelligent and honest
people of the truth of that proposition. And our question is whether it
is possible to be a rational exclusivist in the above sense; our
question, that is, is whether I have a defeater for my Christian belief
in my
Precisely how would such a defeater work? Suppose we begin by
considering a probabilistic antitheistic argument from pluralism. J. L.
Schellenberg asks us to “Consider first the case of one who supposes
there to be a number of mutually exclusive religious alternatives to a
certain religious belief r having probabilities equal to the
probability of r.” “Pluralism and Probability,” Religious
Studies, 33 no. 2 (June 1997), p.
147.
Summarizing (and allowing for a non-uniform assignment of probabilities to alternatives), we can say quite generally that the following may be held by the critic to be a sufficient condition for the improbability of any religious belief r with an epistemic status superior to that of each of its alternatives: r is improbable if the number of times by which its probability exceeds that of each of the available mutually exclusive alternatives (or the average of their probabilities) is exceeded by the number of those alternatives.
By way of example:
Even if a Christian were to suppose her trinitarian belief to be significantly more likely to be true than each of the various Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist . . . alternatives, the application of the approach here described could still yield the conclusion that her belief was probably false. For it might upon reflection seem intuitively obvious or at any rate very likely to the Christian that the degree of superiour probability she could credibly claim would not be sufficient to prevent the combined probability of the relevant alternatives from outweighing that of the beliefs she holds. (p. 148)
The
basic idea, therefore, is that reflection on the facts of pluralism
should lead the believer to think that the probability of her belief is
relatively low, perhaps even less than .5. But here is the crucial
question: probability with respect to what? What is the body of evidence
No doubt there are subsets S of her total set of beliefs with respect to which Christian belief is indeed improbable; perhaps, in fact, it is improbable with respect to the rest of what she believes (supposing, for the moment, that there is some neat way to segregate her Christian belief from her other beliefs). But how is that relevant? The same will be true, no doubt, with respect to many other beliefs she holds in perfect rationality. She is playing bridge and is dealt all the sevens and eights. The odds against this are pretty formidable; there are many alternatives that are at least equally probable; does that mean that her belief that she was dealt all the sevens and eights is irrational? Of course not. The reason, clearly, is that this belief has a source of warrant independent of any it gets by way of its probabilistic relations to her other beliefs. The same goes for Christian belief. If there is a source of warrant for Christian belief that is independent of any it acquires by way of probabilistic relations to other beliefs, then the fact (if it is a fact) that Christian belief isn’t particularly likely with respect to those others doesn’t show anything of much interest. It certainly doesn’t provide a defeater for Christian belief.
This approach, therefore, appears to be a nonstarter. Is there something
else in the nearby bushes that could produce a defeater? Perhaps the
most important suggestion in the neighborhood is that there is
something arbitrary about
accepting Christian belief. This arbitrariness is thought to have
both a moral and an intellectual component: it is thought to be both
unjustified (contrary to doxastic duty) and irrational. The moral
charge is that there is a sort of egoism, perhaps pride or hubris, in
accepting beliefs when one realizes
The moral charge is that there is a
sort of self-serving arbitrariness, an arrogance or egoism, in
accepting such propositions as (1) or (2); one who accepts them is
guilty of some serious moral fault or flaw. According to Wilfred
Cantwell Smith, “except at the cost of insensitivity or delinquency, it
is morally not possible actually to go out into the world and say to
devout, intelligent, fellow human beings: ‘. . . we believe that we
know God and we are right; you believe that you know God, and you are
totally wrong’.” Religious Diversity (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 14. A similar statement from John Hick: Nor can we
reasonably claim that our own form of religious experience, together
with that of the tradition of which we are a part, is veridical whilst
others are not. We can of course claim this; and indeed virtually every
religious tradition has done so, regarding alternative forms of
religion either as false or as confused and inferior versions of
itself. . . . Persons living within other traditions, then, are equally
justified in trusting their own distinctive religious experience and in
forming their beliefs on the basis of it. . . . let us avoid the
implausibly arbitrary dogma that religious experience is all delusory
with the single exception of the particular form enjoyed by the one who
is speaking (An Interpretation of Religion, p. 235). On the topic of epistemic arrogance, see also Paul De Vries, “The
‘Hermeneutics’ of Alvin Plantinga,” Christian Scholar’s Review
(June 1989), pp. 363ff.; Lee Hardy,
“The Interpretations of Alvin Plantinga,” Christian Scholar’s
Review (December 1991), pp. 163ff.;
my reply “Ad De
Vries,” Christian Scholar’s Review (December 1991), pp. 171ff.; and De Vries’s reply
to Hardy and myself, “Intellectual Humility and Courage: An Essential
Epistemic Tension,” Christian Scholar’s Review
(December 1991), pp. 179ff.
I think the answer must be no. Or if the answer is yes, then I think we
have here a genuine moral dilemma, a situation in which no matter what
you do, you are wrong. Given the pluralistic facts of the matter, there
is no real alternative; there is no reflective attitude that is not
open to the same strictures. These charges of arrogance are a
philosophical tar baby: get close enough to them to use them against
the Christian believer, and you are likely to find them stuck fast to
yourself. How so? As follows: as an exclusivist, while I realize that I can’t
convince others that they should believe as I do, I nonetheless
continue to believe as I do. And the charge is that I am, as a result,
arrogant or egoistical, arbitrarily preferring my way of doing things
to other ways. “The only reason for treating one’s tradition
differently from others is the very human but not very cogent reason
that it is one’s own!” (John Hick, An Interpretation of
Religion, p. 235). To speak of choice here suggests that I can
simply choose which of these
three attitudes to adopt, which is wholly unrealistic. Perhaps we have
very little control over our beliefs; then the moral critic of belief
can’t properly accuse the believer of dereliction of moral duty, but he
could still argue that her stance is unhappy, regrettable, a miserable
state of affairs. Even if I can’t help it that I am overbearing and
conceited, my being that way is a bad state of affairs.
So consider the second option: I can instead withhold the proposition in question. I can say to myself: “The right course here, given that I can’t or couldn’t convince these others of what I believe, is to believe neither these propositions nor their denials.” The pluralist objector can say that the right course is to abstain from believing the offending proposition, and also abstain from believing its denial; call him, therefore, ‘the abstemious pluralist’. Does he thus really avoid the condition that, on the part of the exclusivist, leads to the charges of egoism and arrogance? Not really. Think, for a moment, about disagreement. Disagreement, fundamentally, is a matter of adopting conflicting attitudes with respect to a given proposition. In the simplest and most familiar case, I disagree with you if there is some proposition p such that I believe p and you believe -p. That’s just the simplest case, however; there are also others. The one that is presently of interest is this: you believe p and I withhold it, fail to believe it. Call the first kind of disagreement ‘contradicting’; call the second ‘dissenting’.
My claim is that if contradicting others is arrogant and egoistical, so is dissenting. For suppose you believe some proposition p that I don’t believe: perhaps you believe that it is wrong to discriminate against people simply on the grounds of race, while I, recognizing that there are many people who disagree with you, do not believe this proposition. I don’t disbelieve it either, of course; but in the circumstances I think the right thing to do is to abstain from belief. Then am I not implicitly condemning your attitude, your believing the proposition, as somehow improper—naive, perhaps, or unjustified, or unfounded, or in some other way less than optimal? I am implicitly saying that my attitude is the superior one; I think my course of action here is the right one and yours somehow wrong, inadequate, improper, in the circumstances at best second-rate. I realize that there is no question, here, of showing you that your attitude is wrong or improper or naive; so am I not guilty of intellectual arrogance? Of a sort of egoism, thinking I know better than you, arrogating to myself a privileged status with respect to you? The problem for the believer was that she was obliged to think she possessed a truth missed by many others; the problem for the abstemious pluralist is that he is obliged to think that he possesses a virtue others don’t, or acts rightly where others don’t. If one is arrogant by way of believing a proposition others don’t, isn’t one equally arrogant by way of withholding a proposition others don’t?
Perhaps you will respond by saying that the abstemious pluralist gets
into trouble, falls into arrogance, by way of implicitly saying or
Indeed, I think we can see that the abstemious pluralist who brings charges of intellectual arrogance against the believer is in a familiar but perilous dialectical situation; he shoots himself in the foot, is hoist with his own petard, holds a position that in a certain way is self-referentially inconsistent in the circumstances. For he believes
(3) If S knows that others don’t believe p (and, let’s add, knows that he can’t find arguments that will persuade them of p), then S should not believe p;
this or something like it is the ground of the charges he brings against the believer. The abstemious pluralist realizes, no doubt, that many do not accept (3); and I suppose he also realizes that it is unlikely that he can find arguments for (3) that will convince them. Given his acceptance of (3), therefore, the right course for him is to abstain from believing (3), to withhold or disbelieve it. Under the conditions that do in fact obtain—namely, his knowledge that others don’t accept it—he can’t properly accept it. So if (3) is true, nobody can believe it without being arrogant. (3) is either true or false; if the first, I fall into arrogance if I believe it; if the second, I fall into falsehood if I believe it; so I shouldn’t believe it.
I am therefore inclined to think that one can’t, in the circumstances, properly hold (3) or any other proposition that will do the job the objector wants done. One can’t find here some principle on the basis of which to hold that the believer is doing the wrong thing, suffers from some moral fault—that is, one can’t find such a principle that doesn’t, as we might put it, fall victim to itself.
The abstemious pluralist is therefore self-referentially inconsistent; but
even apart from this dialectical argument (which in any event some will
think unduly cute), aren’t the charges against the exclusivist
unconvincing and implausible? I must concede that there are a variety
of ways in which I can be and have been intellectually arrogant and
egoistic; I have certainly fallen into this vice in the past,
So far we have been considering this
charge of moral arbitrariness in abstraction from any actual
presentation of a pluralistic case for the arbitrariness or egoism of
accepting Christian belief. To remedy that defect, I propose to
consider the argument Gary Gutting Religious Belief and Religious
Skepticism (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1982); page references to Gutting’s work are to
this book.
His conclusion, in brief, goes as follows. (1) We must begin by distinguishing “decisive assent” from “interim assent.” When I give decisive assent for p:
I view the present case for p as allowing me to end the search for reasons for or against believing p. Interim assent, on the other hand, accepts p but without terminating inquiry into the truth of p. Its effect is to put me on the side of p in disputes about its truth. However, my endorsement of p is combined with a commitment to the epistemic need for continuing discussions of p’s truth. (105)
That is, I believe that “further discussion is needed for the project of determining the truth of p.” (2) A person has a right to give decisive assent to a proposition that she knows others don’t assent to only if she has a good argument for that proposition. (3) She has a right to give interim assent to a proposition which others reject, even if she doesn’t have good arguments for it. (4) Since there is a good argument (one from religious experience) for the existence of God, taken vaguely as “a good and powerful being, concerned about us, who has revealed himself to human beings” (p. 171), we have a right to give this proposition decisive assent. Finally, (5) there is no argument of this sort for specific Christian doctrines (for the belief, e.g., that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself) or for more specific beliefs about God, such as that he is all-powerful, or wholly good, or all-knowing, or the creator of the heavens and the earth.
Clearly there is much to discuss here, and much to question. I shall restrict myself to the following. (1) What does Gutting mean by ‘justification’? And (2) why am I not justified in giving decisive assent to a proposition for which I don’t have a good argument and about which I know people disagree? As to the first, he clearly thinks of justification in deontological terms, in terms of right and wrong, duty and obligation, being within one’s epistemic rights. Someone who accepts traditional Christian belief in the face of disagreement and without having an argument for her beliefs, he charges, is not satisfying her intellectual obligations. What duty, specifically, is it that she violates? The duty to avoid epistemological egoism. That’s the duty that is violated by the Christian who is aware of disagreement but has no good arguments:
First believing p [when I don’t have
an argument and know that others disagree] is arbitrary in the
sense that there is no reason to
[A] neutral epistemic observer has no intuitions pro or con about p and has not thought about p to an extent sufficient to make his not having any intuitions significant. From the point of view of such an observer, the facts are simply these (taking for simplicity the case of disagreement between two peers): (1) person A has an intuition that p is true; (2) person B has an intuition that p is false; (3) there is no reason to think that either A or B is more likely to be correct in his intuition. Surely the only proper attitude for such an observer is to withhold judgment on p. But even if I am A or B, should I not judge the situation in the same way as the neutral observer? Surely it is wrong to prefer my intuition simply because it is mine. (p. 87)
So there is a moral problem with the believer who knows others disagree with her but does not have an argument for her own views: she is being epistemically arrogant, egoistic, and self-centered in thus arbitrarily preferring the way she thinks things are to the way others think they are. (And perhaps, once she sees this, she will have a defeater for those beliefs.)
Here we must ask some questions. First, is it really true that if I am such a person, then I “prefer my intuition simply because it is mine”? Not really. I think it is wrong to discriminate against someone just because he’s of a different race (even though I know others disagree). I am not aware of any arguments for my belief here, or at any rate any arguments that would convince those dissenters; the view just seems right to me. Still, it isn’t the case that I accept this belief on the grounds that it is my belief or my intuition: that makes no sense. I don’t accept it as the conclusion of an argument, the premise of which is that this is my intuition; I am not reasoning as follows: p seems to me to be right, therefore p. I don’t accept it on the basis of other propositions at all. It is true that I accept it because, when I think about it, it seems right; the ‘because’, however, doesn’t mean that the latter is my reason, or argument or evidence for the former.
If Gutting’s position is to have real
bite, he must tell us more about those arguments the possession of
which protects me from epistemological egoism when I believe something
others do not believe. What kind of an argument is required? Well, such
an argument, he says, must be a good argument. Fair enough; bad arguments won’t do the
job; but what is goodness, for an argument? In the chapter on Rorty to
which I referred above (p. 431), Gutting apparently agrees with Rorty
that a good argument (good ‘for me’) consists in reasons that are
accepted by my epistemic community. If that is how the wind blows,
however, there will be little problem for the Christian; after all, the
Christian epistemic
So let’s suppose he has something more stringent in mind. A good argument, presumably, will be valid, and must also have some nonformal virtues: it must not be circular or beg the question against those with whom I disagree. But then what about its premises? If my argument is valid, won’t the same disagreement break out with respect to the premises? If they are also propositions that wouldn’t be accepted by those who disagree with me, then presumably I won’t have a right to accept them either, unless I have a further argument for them. Of course the premises of that further argument will have to meet the same conditions: if others don’t accept them, then I can’t give them decisive assent unless I have a further good argument for them. The result seems to be that my duty precludes my being party to any ultimate disagreements, at least any ultimate disagreements of which I am aware, and at least as far as decisive assent goes. Can that be right? Perhaps there is no way you can find much moral common ground with a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Perhaps you can’t find any premises you both accept that will serve in a good argument for your views and against his. Would it really follow that you don’t have a right to give decisive assent to the proposition that racial bigotry is wrong? Hardly.
Well, perhaps it is Gutting’s idea that if I don’t have an argument for
p and know that others don’t
believe it, then I am being egoistical, even if I don’t reason in the
above fashion—that is, don’t believe or accept the intuition just
because it is mine. But is this really true? Certainly not just as it
stands. We can see this by going back to an earlier example. The police
haul me in, accusing me of a serious crime: stealing your Frisian flag
again. At the police station, I learn that the mayor claims to have seen
me lurking around your back door at the time (yesterday midafternoon)
the crime occurred; I am known to resent you (in part because I am
peeved about your article in The National Enquirer
according to which I am really an alien
from outer space). I had means, motive, and opportunity; furthermore
there have been other such sordid episodes in my past. However,
I recall very clearly spending
the entire afternoon on a solitary hike near Mount Baker. My belief that
I was hiking there then isn’t based on argument. (I don’t note, e.g.,
that I feel a little tired, that my hiking boots are muddy, and that
there is a topographical map of Mount Baker in my parka pocket,
and then conclude that the best explanation of these phenomena is that I was
hiking there.) Furthermore, I can’t think of any argument or any
other way to convince the police that I was at Mount Baker (sixty miles
from the crime scene) when the theft took place. Nevertheless, I believe
that’s where I was. So I hold a belief for which I can’t give an
argument and which I know is
Why not? Because I remember where I was, and that puts me within my rights in believing that I was off hiking, even if others disagree with me. Well, not quite; strictly speaking, it is, I suppose, my believing that I remember, rather than my actually remembering, that puts me in the right, morally speaking. I am justified, am not going contrary to duty or obligation here, because I believe, and nonculpably believe, that I have a source of knowledge or information about my movements that the police don’t have: my memory. If I thought that I knew no more than they knew, and still held firmly to the belief that I was innocent, then, perhaps, I would be epistemically egoistical. But I think I know something they don’t, and know it by way of a means to knowledge they don’t have. (They know about where they were by memory, not about where I was.) It is because of this that I am not flouting any duties or obligations; this is what confers justification on me. It is because of this that I can’t properly be accused of arbitrariness or egoism in preferring my view to theirs.
Because this is the crucial point here, let’s look into it a bit further. Both rationality and epistemic duty, says the critic, requires that one treat similar cases similarly. The Christian believer, however (she says), violates this duty by arbitrarily believing (1) and (2) (above, p. 438) in the face of the plurality of conflicting religious beliefs the world presents. Well, let’s suppose that rationality and epistemic duty do, indeed, require treating similar cases similarly. Clearly you do not violate this requirement if the beliefs in question are not on a par. And the Christian believer thinks they are not on a par: she thinks (1) and (2) true and those incompatible with either of them false. So they aren’t relevantly similar, as she sees it, and she isn’t treating similar cases differently. To make his case, therefore, the critic would have to argue that Christian belief is, in fact, false; but presumably he doesn’t intend his charge of arbitrariness to depend on the assumption that Christian belief is false.
The rejoinder, of course, will be that it is not alethic
parity (their having the same truth
value) that is at issue: it is epistemic parity that counts. What kind of epistemic parity?
Well, perhaps the critic is thinking initially of
internal epistemic parity: parity
with respect to what is internally available to the believer. What is
internally available includes, for example, detectable relationships
between the belief in question and other beliefs you hold; so internal
parity would include parity of propositional evidence. What is
internally available to the believer also includes the
phenomenology that goes with the
belief in question: the sensuous phenomenology, and also the nonsensuous
phenomenology involved, in doxastic evidence, in the belief’s just
having the feel of being right. Once more, then, (1) and (2) are not on
The next rejoinder: isn’t it likely that those who reject (1) and (2) in favor of other beliefs have propositional evidence for their beliefs that is on a par with that of the Christian for her beliefs; and isn’t it also probably true that the same or similar phenomenology accompanies their beliefs as accompanies hers? So that those beliefs really are epistemically and internally on a par with (1) and (2), and the believer is still treating like cases differently? I don’t think so: I think there really are arguments available for (1), at least, that are not available for its competitors. As for similar phenomenology, this is not easy to say; it is not easy to look within the breast of another; it is hard indeed to discover this sort of thing, even with respect to someone you know really well. Still, I am prepared to stipulate both sorts of parity. Let’s agree for the purpose of argument that these beliefs are on an epistemic par in the sense that those of a different religious tradition have the same sort of internally available markers—evidence, phenomenology, and the like—for their beliefs as the Christian has for (1) and (2). What follows?
Return to the case of moral belief. King David saw the beautiful
Bathsheba, was smitten, sent for her, slept with her, and made her
pregnant. After the failure of various stratagems to get her husband,
Uriah, to think he was the father of the baby, David arranged for Uriah to be killed
by telling his commander to “put Uriah in the front line where the
fighting is fiercest; then withdraw from him so he will be struck down
and die” (
My interest here is in David’s reaction to the story. I agree with David:
such injustice is utterly and despicably wrong; there are scarcely
words for it. I believe that such an action is wrong, and I believe
that the proposition that it isn’t wrong—either because really
nothing is wrong, or because
even if some things are
wrong, this isn’t—is false. As a matter of fact, there
isn’t a lot I believe more strongly. I
And the reason here is this: in each of these cases, the believer in
question doesn’t really think the beliefs in question are
on a relevant epistemic par. She may
agree that she and those who dissent are equally convinced of the truth
of their belief, and even that they are internally on a par, that the
internally available markers are similar, or relevantly similar. Still,
she must think that there is an important epistemic difference:
she thinks that somehow the other person has made a mistake, or has a
blind spot, or hasn’t been wholly attentive, or hasn’t received some
grace she has, or is blinded by ambition or pride or mother love or
something else; she must think that she has access to a source of
warranted belief the other lacks. And of course the pluralist critic must think
the same sort of thing. He thinks the thing to do when there is
internal epistemic parity is to withhold judgment; he knows that there
are others who don’t think so (and won’t be convinced by any argument
he can muster), and, for all he knows, that belief has internal parity
with his. If he continues in that belief, therefore, he will be in the
same condition as the person he criticizes; but if he doesn’t continue
in this belief, he no longer has an objection.
She believes, for example, that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to
himself; she may believe this on the basis of what the Bible or church
teaches. She knows that others don’t believe this and
furthermore don’t accept the Bible’s (or church’s) authority on
this or any other point. She has an explanation: there is the testimony
of the Holy Spirit (or of the divinely founded and guided church); the
testimony of the Holy Spirit enables us to accept what the Scriptures
teach. It is the Holy Spirit who “seals it upon our hearts, so that we
may certainly know that God speaks”; it is the work of the Spirit “to
convince our hearts that what our ears receive has come from
him.” Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic
Epistles, tr. and ed. John Owen
(Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), commentary on Even if she isn’t egoistic in accepting
Christian belief, won’t she nevertheless have a defeater, here, if, in
fact, Christian belief is on an
epistemic par with its denial? Not if she doesn’t believe that it is.
She could perhaps be given such a defeater, if Gutting or someone could
produce a powerful argument for the claim that there is epistemic
parity here. As we saw in chapter 8, however, it is likely that
Christian belief is such that if it is true, then it is warranted for
those who accept it. This means that an argument for the conclusion
that Christian belief is on an epistemic par with unbelief would
require a previous argument that Christian belief is false. But if the
critic already has an argument for the falsehood of Christian belief,
why is he bothering with this charge of arbitrariness?
As a result, of course, the serious believer will not take it that we are all, believers and unbelievers alike, epistemic peers on the topic of Christian belief. She will probably feel considerable sympathy for Cardinal Newman:
in the
schools of the world, the ways towards Truth are considered high roads
open to all men, however disposed, at all times. Truth is to be
approached without homage. Everyone is considered on a level with his
neighbor, or rather, the powers of the intellect, acuteness, sagacity,
subtlety and depth, are thought the guides into Truth. Men consider
that they have as full a right to discuss religious
Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of
Religious Belief, Preached before the University of Oxford
(London, Rivington, 1844), pp.
190–91.
Newman’s idea is that there is something in addition to “the powers of
the intellect, acuteness, sagacity, subtlety and depth” that is needed for a proper discussion of
religious subjects, or at least for a proper grasp of the truth with
respect to them. Here he is echoing Jesus: “I praise you, Father, Lord
of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise
and learned, and revealed them to little children” (
The central question here, therefore, is whether the Christian’s beliefs are or are not on an epistemic par with the beliefs of those who disagree with her. This is the crucial issue. If something like the extended Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model presented in chapter 8 is in fact correct, then there is a significant difference between the epistemic situation of those who accept Christian belief and those who do not; the objector is therefore assuming, unjustifiably and without argument, that neither that model nor any other according to which there is a source of warranted Christian belief is in fact correct and that there is no such source for Christian belief. That assumption has nothing to be said for it; the arbitrariness charge therefore disintegrates.
Now Gary Gutting, to be sure, claims
(p. 84) that the believer does not have a right, in this context, to
the view that he is better off, epistemically speaking, than the
unbeliever. He gives two reasons. As Marie Pannier pointed out in discussion,
perhaps Gutting should really have given a third, which would be to
reapply his principle that one can justifiably give only interim assent
to any proposition she knows is not accepted by others; for presumably
the believer knows that others, such as the objector, won’t agree that
the believer is better off, epistemically speaking, than the
unbeliever.
These arguments seem mistaken. Gutting’s second reason for thinking the Christian doesn’t have a right to think there are such sources of warranted belief seems irrelevant: the fact that some believers do not think belief in God is properly basic does not so much as slyly suggest that there are no such sources. What about the first reason, the claim that the believer is involved in some objectionable form of circularity if she thinks that she is the beneficiary of one of those sources of belief? But how can she be involved in circularity? She isn’t putting forward an argument for anything; nor is she proposing a definition: so how does circularity so much as rear its ugly head? If she were giving an argument for theism and then proposed as a premise that she enjoyed the benefits of one of those special sources of belief, then her argument might be circular. But she isn’t arguing for that; nor need she be arguing for anything else. Am I engaged in objectionable circularity if I appeal to physics to help explain how it is that I can perceive trees and grass—even if my knowledge of physics rests in part on observation? Not if I am not arguing for the conclusion that perception is a source of warranted belief.
But don’t the realities of religious
pluralism count for anything? Is there nothing at all to
the claims of the pluralists? See W. P. Alston, “Religious Diversity and
Perceptual Knowledge of God,” Faith and Philosophy 5, no. 4 (October 1988), pp.
433ff.
Things could go this way, with the exclusivist. On the other hand, they needn’t go this way. Consider once more the moral parallel. Perhaps you have always believed it deeply wrong for a counselor to use his position of trust to seduce a client. Perhaps you discover that others disagree; they think it more like a minor peccadillo, like running a red light when there’s no traffic; and you realize that possibly these people have the same internal markers for their beliefs that you have for yours. You think the matter over more fully, imaginatively re-create and rehearse such situations, become more aware of just what is involved in such a situation (the breach of trust, the injustice and unfairness, the nasty irony of a situation in which someone comes to a counselor seeking help but receives only hurt), and come to believe even more firmly that such an action is wrong. In this way, this belief could acquire more warrant for you by virtue of your learning and reflecting on the fact that some people do not see the matter your way. Something similar can happen in the case of religious beliefs. A fresh or heightened awareness of the facts of religious pluralism could bring about a reappraisal of one’s religious life, a reawakening, a new or renewed and deepened grasp and apprehension of (1) and (2). From the perspective of the extended A/C model, it could serve as an occasion for a renewed and more powerful working of the belief-producing processes by which we come to apprehend (1) and (2). In this way knowledge of the facts of pluralism could initially serve as a defeater; in the long run, however, it can have precisely the opposite effect. The facts of religious pluralism, therefore, like historical biblical criticism and the facts of evil, do not or need not constitute a defeater for Christian belief.
Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why then do you tolerate the treacherous? Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves?
Habakkuk
Our world contains an appalling amount and variety both of suffering and of evil; perhaps no century rivals ours for the magnitude of either. I’m thinking of suffering as encompassing any kind of pain or discomfort: pain or discomfort that results from disease or injury, or oppression, or overwork, or old age, but also disappointment with oneself or with one’s lot in life (or that of people close to one), the pain of loneliness, isolation, betrayal, unrequited love; and there is also suffering that results from awareness of others’ suffering. I’m thinking of evil, fundamentally, as a matter of free creatures’ doing what is wrong, including particularly the way we human beings mistreat and savage each other. Often pain and suffering result from evil, as in some of the events for which our century will be remembered—the Holocaust, the horrifying seventy-year-long Marxist experiment in eastern Europe with its millions of victims, the villainy of Pol Pot and his followers, genocide in Bosnia and Africa. Of course much suffering and evil are banal and everyday, and are none the better for that.
Now the evil and suffering in our world have, indeed, baffled and perplexed
Christians and other believers in God. This bafflement and perplexity
are widely represented in Christian and Hebrew Scriptures, especially,
though by no means exclusively, in Psalms and the book of Job. Faced
with the shocking concreteness of
Now many philosophers and others have argued that knowledge of the amount,
variety, and distribution of suffering and evil (“the facts of evil,”
for short) confronts the believer with a problem of quite another
sort. It is worth noting that many
different problems, questions, and
topics fall under the rubric of the problem of evil. There are, for
example, the problems of preventing suffering and evil, those of
alleviating it (knowing how to
comfort and help those who suffer from it), those of maintaining the
right attitude toward those who suffer, the pastoral or spiritual
problem I mentioned above, and more; and, of course, a proper response
to one of these problems might be totally inappropriate as a response
to another.
Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered.
Is he willing to prevent
evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing?
then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is
evil? Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion, ed. Richard Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 1980), p. 63. Hume puts the argument in the mouth of Philo,
widely thought to represent Hume’s own views.
And the claim is that this argument (more exactly, knowledge of this argument) constitutes a defeater for theistic belief—and if for theistic belief, then also for Christian belief.
Our
question in this chapter, therefore, is whether knowledge of the facts
of evil does constitute a
defeater for theistic and Christian belief. Does knowledge of the facts
of evil, together with the rest of what I know, give me a reason to give
up belief in God? Does this knowledge make it the case that I cannot
continue to hold Christian belief rationally? Note that this is not the traditional problem of
theodicy: I will not be making any attempt to “justify the ways of God
to man” or
Of course the answer need not be the same for all Christians: perhaps the facts of suffering and evil, in our sad world, do not constitute such a defeater for very young Christians, or for culturally insulated Christians, or for Christians who know little about the suffering and evil our world contains, or for those who don’t have an adequate appreciation of the seriousness of what they do know about. Our question, however, is about Philip Quinn’s “intellectually sophisticated adults in our culture” (above, p. 358); can I be mature, both intellectually and spiritually, be aware of the enormous and impressive amounts and depths of suffering and evil in our world, be aware also of the best atheological arguments starting from the facts of evil, and still be such that Christian belief is rational and warranted for me? Could it still have warrant sufficient for knowledge, for me? I shall argue that the right response is, “Yes indeed.” And it isn’t that this can be so just for an exceptional few, perhaps the Mother Teresas of the world. I shall argue that for any serious Christian with a little epistemology, the facts of evil, appalling as they are, offer no obstacle to warranted Christian belief.
Now until twenty or twenty-five years ago, the favored sort of atheological argument from evil was for the conclusion that there is a logical inconsistency in what Christians believe. They believe both that there is such a person as God (a person who is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good), and also that there is evil in the world; it isn’t logically possible (so went the claim) that both of these beliefs be true. Thus the late John Mackie:
I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of
the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not merely that
religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively
irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological
doctrine are inconsistent with one another. “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind
(1955). The article has been widely
reprinted. For difficulties with Mackie’s argument, see my
God, Freedom, and Evil (New York:
Harper and Row, 1974; and Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1977), pp. 12ff.
In Mackie’s posthumous The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), he wavers
between his earlier claim that the existence of God is
straightforwardly inconsistent with that of evil, and the claim that
the existence of evil is powerful but logically inconclusive evidence
against the existence of God. See pp. 150–75, and see my “Is Theism
Really a Miracle?” Faith and Philosophy (April 1986). The claim that the believer in God
(the God of theism) is committed to a contradiction goes back to some
of the French encyclopedists, F. H. Bradley, J. McTaggart, and J. S.
Mill. More recently (in addition to Mackie), see, for example, H. J.
McCloskey, “God and Evil,” Philosophical Quarterly
10 (1960), p. 97; and Henry David
Aiken, “God and Evil,” Ethics 48 (1957–58), p. 79.
Mackie goes on to argue that the existence of God is logically incompatible with the existence of evil; he concludes that since the theist is committed to both, theistic belief is clearly irrational.
At present, however, it is widely conceded that there is nothing like
straightforward contradiction or necessary falsehood in the joint
affirmation of God and evil; the existence of evil is not logically
incompatible (even in the broadly logical sense) with the existence of
an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good
God. For argument for this conclusion, see my
God, Freedom, and Evil, pp. 7ff.
For a fuller and more accurate account, see my The Nature of
Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1974), chapter 9; and Alvin Plantinga (Profiles series), ed. James Tomberlin and Peter
van Inwagen (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), pp. 36–55. Many fascinating
problems and questions have emerged from the discussion of the free
will defense over the last twenty-five years. In particular, there are
arguments against the existence of (true and nontrivial)
counterfactuals of freedom by Robert Adams (“Middle Knowledge and the
Problem of Evil,” American Philosophical Quarterly
[1977]) and by William Hasker (“A
Refutation of Middle Knowledge,” Noûs [December 1986]). One particularly interesting
strand here is the “grounding and founding” objection (according to
which counterfactuals of freedom with false antecedents couldn’t be
true because they are incapable of being properly grounded or founded). This
objection goes all the way back to the Jesuit-Dominican controversy in
the sixteenth century, a dispute whose increasing rancor finally
induced the pope to forbid the disputants to vilify one another in
public (although he apparently didn’t object to vilification among
consenting adults in the privacy of their own quarters). The grounding
and founding objection has been dealt with in magisterial fashion in my
colleague Thomas Flint’s Divine Providence: The Molinist
Account (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1998). Another issue of great interest is the question of “selective freedom”
(David Lewis’s term) (See G. Stanley Kane, “The Free-Will Defense
Defended,” New Scholasticism 50,
no. 4 [1976], and David Lewis, “Evil for Freedom’s
Sake?” Philosophical Papers [November 1993]): couldn’t God have let go forward
those creaturely free choices he foresaw would be right, and cut off
those he foresaw would be wrong? This question is connected with
another fascinating issue, that of backtracking
counterfactuals (see David Lewis, “Counterfactual Dependence and
Time’s Arrow,” Noûs 13, no.
4 [November 1979], p. 455). It is extremely tempting to go into these
issues here, but doing so would take us from epistemology deep into
metaphysics (some would say abstruse and arcane
metaphysics, but of course they would
be mistaken); self-restraint must be the order of the day.
Now
from an atheological point of view, the old argument for inconsistency
in Christian belief had a lot to be said for it. It was short and
sweet; if there is a contradiction in Christian belief, then Christian
belief is false, and that’s all there is to it. It doesn’t matter what
else is or isn’t true, and it doesn’t matter whether there are any good
arguments or evidence of other kinds for Christian belief: if it is inconsistent, it’s false,
and that settles the matter. Furthermore, once you see that a
proposition is false, you can’t rationally continue to believe it; so
such an argument would show at one stroke that Christian belief
is false and that it
is irrational, at least
for those apprised of the argument. But things are very different with
contemporary evidential arguments from evil. First, suppose evil does
constitute evidence, of some kind, against theism: what follows from
that? Not much. There are many propositions I believe that are true,
and rationally accepted, and such that there is evidence against them.
The fact that Peter is only three months old is evidence against his
weighing nineteen pounds; nevertheless I might rationally (and truly)
believe that’s how much he weighs. Is the idea, instead, that the
existence of God is improbable with respect to our total
evidence, all the rest of what we
know or believe? To show this, the atheologian would have to look into
all the evidence for the
existence of God—the traditional ontological, cosmological, and
teleological arguments, as well as many
See my “Two Dozen or So Good Theistic
Arguments,” not yet published.
Another problem for this atheological
argument can be brought out by considering responses to the most
popular contemporary version of the argument from design—the
so-called fine-tuning argument. This argument begins from the
apparent fact that the fundamental constants of physics—the speed
of light, the gravitational constant, the strength of the weak and
strong nuclear forces—must apparently have values that fall
within an exquisitely narrow range for life to be so much as possible.
If these values had been even minutely different (if, for example, the
gravitational constant had been different in even the most minuscule
degree), habitable planets would not have developed and life (at least
life at all like ours) would not have been possible. And this suggests
or makes plausible the thought that the world was designed or created
by a Designer who intended the existence of living creatures and
eventually rational, intelligent, morally significant creatures. One
contemporary response is that possibly “there has been
an evolution of worlds (in the sense of whole universes) and the world
we find ourselves in is simply one among countless others that have
existed throughout all eternity.” Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous
Idea (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1995), p. 177.
In the same way, then, a theist might agree that it is unlikely, given
just what we know about our world, that there is such a person as God. But
perhaps God has created countless worlds, in fact, all the worlds (all
the universes) in which there is a substantial overall balance of good
over evil. In some of these worlds there is no suffering and evil; in
some a good deal; as it happens, we find ourselves in one of the worlds
where there is a good deal. But the probability of theism, given the
whole ensemble of worlds, isn’t particularly low. For
a development of this idea, see Donald
Turner’s Ph.D. dissertation, God and the Best of All Possible
Worlds (University of Pittsburgh,
1994).
Still further, suppose theism were improbable with respect to the rest of what I believe; alternatively, suppose the rest of what I believe offered evidence against theism and none for it. What would follow from that? Again, not much. There are many true beliefs I hold (and hold in complete rationality) such that they are unlikely given the rest of what I believe. I am playing poker; it is improbable on the rest of what I know or believe that I have just drawn to an inside straight; it doesn’t follow that there is even the slightest irrationality in my belief that I have just drawn to an inside straight. The reason, of course, is that this belief doesn’t depend, for its warrant, on its being appropriately probable on the rest of what I believe; it has a quite different source of warrant, namely, perception. Similarly for theism: everything really turns, here, on the question whether, as I have been arguing, theism has or may have some source of warrant—perception of God, or the sensus divinitatis, or faith and the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit (see above, chapters 8 and 9)—distinct from its probability on other propositions I believe.
The important questions with respect to these atheological evidential arguments, therefore, are of the following sort: precisely what are they supposed to prove? That theism is false? Or that it is irrational for any thoughtful person apprised of the facts of evil to accept it? Or that the facts of evil and those probabilistic considerations together constitute a defeater for it? Or for at least some reflective theists, even if not for all? Or that the facts of suffering and evil make it more rational to reject belief in God than to accept it? Or what? One of the main problems here is to make out the proposed bearing of the atheological arguments from evil: precisely what are they supposed to accomplish? We’ll have to bear this question in mind as we look at some of these arguments. Twenty-five years ago, there were no developed atheological evidential arguments from evil; that is understandable because (apparently) nearly all atheologians were of the opinion that the existence of God is flatly inconsistent with that of evil. Since then, however, there have been several attempts to state and develop evidential arguments from evil. Some of these efforts are ingenious and indeed revealing; I shall argue, however, that they are no more successful than the older argument for inconsistency. Indeed, what is most surprising, here, is the weakness of these arguments. I shall then go on to suggest that there is a wholly different (and more promising) way in which the atheologian could claim that the facts of evil constitute a defeater for theistic belief. Promising as it is, however, this claim, in my opinion, also fails.
The last twenty-five years or so have seen the development of several different versions of the evidential argument from evil. In this section I examine a couple of the best.
I
turn first to an argument William Rowe has been proposing and
developing for the past twenty years. See his “The
Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American
Philosophical Quarterly (1979), pp. 335–41, reprinted in
The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996), pp. 1–11; “Evil and the Theistic Hypothesis: A
Response to S. J. Wykstra,” International Journal for
Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984),
pp. 95–100; “The Empirical Argument from Evil,” in
Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); “Evil and Theodicy,”
Philosophical Topics 16 (1988),
pp. 119–32; “Ruminations about Evil,” Philosophical
Perspectives 5 (1991), pp. 69–88;
“William Alston on the Problem of Evil,” in The Rationality
of Belief and the Plurality of Faith, ed. Thomas D. Senor (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1994); and “The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look,”
in Howard-Snyder, The Evidential Argument from Evil
(hereafter EAESL).
P: No good we know of is such that we know that it justifies an
omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being [a perfect
being, for short] in permitting
E1 and E2; Rowe actually states P as “No good we know of
justifies an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being in permitting
E1 and E2”; neither the theist nor the neutral
bystander, however, can be expected to accept this premise because it
could be that some good we know of does justify a perfect being in
permitting E1 and E2, even though we don’t know that it does.
Indeed, Rowe countenances conjunctive goods such as G, the conjunction
of all the goods there are. But G (one supposes) is a good state of
affairs; and if theism is true, G justifies a perfect being in
permitting E1 and E2. Alternatively, the theist might think
that the unthinkably great good of incarnation and atonement—a
good that we know of—justifies E1 and E2. This could happen as follows: God
selects for actualization one of the best worlds; but all the best
worlds include incarnation and atonement (see below, p. 489), and hence
also a great deal of evil—if not specifically E1 and E2, then others just as bad. The most the
atheologian can sensibly claim, therefore (if he is hoping for
agreement from theist and neutral bystander) is that no good we know of
is such that we know that it justifies a perfect being in permitting
E1 and E2. If Rowe insists on his premise as
originally stated, then, it seems to me, the theist should respond that
there is no reason to think it true and good reason to think it
false.
Therefore, probably
Q: No good at all justifies a perfect being in permitting E1 and E2;
Therefore probably
not-G: There is no perfect being.
Here we are thinking of goods and evils as states of affairs. A state of affairs can be actual or nonactual; only an actual good, says Rowe, could justify a perfect being in permitting E1 and E2 (or, indeed, any other evil). So the idea behind P is that we do not know of any good that is actual and is such that we know that it suffices to justify a perfect being in permitting E1 and E2.
There are several problems with this argument. At the simplest level, however, the main
problem, once the others are straightened out or ignored, is with the
inference from P to Q. I look inside my tent: I don’t see a St.
Bernard; it is then probable that there is no St. Bernard in my tent.
That is because if there were one there, I would very likely have seen
it; it’s not easy for a St. Bernard to avoid detection in a small tent.
Again, I look inside my tent: I don’t see any noseeums (very small
midges with a bite out of all proportion to their size); this time it
is not particularly probable that there are no noseeums in my
tent—at least it isn’t any more probable than before I looked.
The reason, of course, is that even if there were noseeums there, I
wouldn’t see ’em; they’re too small to see. And now the question is
whether God’s reasons, if any, for permitting such evils as
E1 and E2 are more like St. Bernards or more like
noseeums. Suppose the fact is God has a reason for permitting a
particular evil like E1 or
E2, and suppose we try to
figure out what that reason might be: is it likely that we would come
up with the right answer? Is it even likely that we would wind up with
plausible candidates for God’s reason? A series of important recent
papers by Stephen Wykstra, William Alston, and Peter van Inwagen argue
(among other things) that it is not. Wykstra: “Difficulties in Rowe’s Argument for
Atheism, and in One of Plantinga’s Fustigations against It,” read on
the Queen Mary at the Pacific
Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, 1983; “The
Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the
Evils of ‘Appearance’,” International Journal for Philosophy
of Religion 16 (1984), pp. 73–94;
“The ‘Inductive’ Argument from Evil: A Dialogue” (co-authored with
Bruce Russell), Philosophical Topics 16, pp. 133–60; Alston: “The Inductive Argument
from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition,” Philosophical
Perspectives 5, pp. 29–67; van
Inwagen: “The Place of Chance in a World Sustained by God,” in
Divine and Human Action, ed. T.
Morris (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); “The Magnitude,
Duration, and Distribution of Evil: A Theodicy,”
Philosophical Topics (1988);
“The Problem of Evil, the Problem of Air, and the Problem of
Silence,” Philosophical Topics
(1991). One hopes these
pieces will put the final quietus to the “I can’t see what reason God
could have for p; therefore,
probably God doesn’t have a reason for p” form of argument. (But of course they
won’t.)
More recently (and partly under the
pressure of some of the works mentioned in footnote 10), Rowe has
himself come to view this argument with a jaundiced eye: “I now think
this argument is, at best, a weak argument.” See EAESL, p. 270.
P’ There is no perfect being and known good such that the latter justifies the former in permitting E1 and E2.
Rowe then assumes that P(G/k) and
P(P/G&k) both equal .5 (where k is our background
information—what all or most of us know or believe.) It then
follows by the probability calculus that P(G/P&k) is considerably
less than P(G/k); hence P disconfirms G. The argument thus simplified
is Rowe’s new evidential
argument from evil. I regret to say, however, that this new argument is,
if anything, weaker than the old. That is because an analysis of purely
formal features of the argument shows that it is counterbalanced by
other arguments of the same structure and strength for a conclusion
inconsistent with Rowe’s conclusion (and hence for the denial of Rowe’s
conclusion). For details, please consult my “Degenerate
Evidence and Rowe’s New Evidential Argument from Evil,”
Noûs 32, no. 4 (Dec. 1998);
see also Rowe’s reply in “Reply to Plantinga,” Noûs
32, no. 4 (Dec. 1998).
First, Rowe’s argument really depends on the fact (as already noted) that the conclusion he proposes to support, i.e.,
not-G There is no perfect being
entails P, the premise of his argument. Now the probability calculus tells us that if a proposition A entails a proposition B, then B confirms A in the sense that the probability of A on B conjoined with our background information k will exceed that of A on k simpliciter (unless either A or B has an absolute probability of 1). Thus any contingent consequence C of not-G will confirm not-G with respect to any body of background information k (k, of course, cannot include or entail C).
But then by the same token, any contingent consequence of G will confirm G with respect to any body of background information k. This means that Rowe’s argument will be counterbalanced by other arguments—for example, one that takes as its premise any of the following propositions:
P* Neither E1 nor E2 is such that we know that no good justifies a perfect being in permitting it.
P** No evil we know of is such that we know that no perfect being is justified by some good in permitting it.
P*** No evil we know of is such that we know that no perfect being would permit it.
Presumably there will be as many arguments of this sort for G as there are arguments of Rowe’s sort against G.
The second problem is like unto the first. Rowe’s argument is really an “argument from degenerate evidence”—an argument in which you take as your new evidence, not the new proposition you learn, but a weaker consequence of it. We can see this as follows. Rowe’s premise P is equivalent to
P' Either not-G or no good we know of is such that we know that it justifies E1 and E2,
where a good g
justifies an evil e
iff if there were a perfect being
b, and
g and e
were actual, then b
would be justified by g
in permitting
e. For the argument, see “Degenerate
Evidence.”
-J No good we know of is such that we know that it justifies E1 and E2.
Clearly enough, -J entails and is
stronger than P’, the premise of Rowe’s argument. And the problem with
arguments of this sort is that, once again, there will be other arguments
of the same structure and strength for an incompatible conclusion. For
example, suppose I win the Indiana
W or -G.
By an argument just like
Rowe’s, Again, for details see “Degenerate
Evidence.”
W or G.
Clearly, neither of these arguments makes any real advance, and that is because they counterbalance each other.
Rowe’s argument from P to -G displays the same structure as this lottery argument. He proposes to argue for -G; our “new evidence” is really -J; but to get his premise P he weakens this new evidence by adding the conclusion of his argument, -G, as a disjunct, so that P is or is equivalent to the proposition -J or -G. That makes this an argument from degenerate evidence. To construct the counterbalancing argument we simply weaken -J by adding as a disjunct G, the proposition that there is a perfect being, rather than -G; this counterbalancing argument will be for the denial of Rowe’s conclusion and will be as strong as his. Arguments from degenerate evidence, clearly enough, do not serve to advance the discussion.
Paul
Draper presents an argument of quite a different sort. See his “Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential
Problem for Theists,” Noûs 23 (1989), pp. 331 ff. (This work is reprinted in
EAESL; page references in the text are to this work). See also
his ”Evil and the Proper Basicality of Belief in God,” Faith
and Philosophy 8 (April 1991), pp.
135ff.; “Probabilistic Arguments from Evil,” Religious
Studies 28, no. 3 (September 1992),
pp. 285ff.; and “Evolution and the Problem of Evil,” in Louis Pojman,
ed., Philosophy of Religion, 3d ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth,
1997).
The problem is not that some proposition about pain and pleasure can be shown to be both true and logically inconsistent with theism. Rather, the problem is evidential. A statement reporting the observations and testimony upon which our knowledge about pain and pleasure is based bears a certain significant negative evidential relation to theism. And because of this, we have a prima facie good epistemic reason to reject theism—that is, a reason that is sufficient for rejecting theism unless overridden by other reasons for not rejecting theism. (p. 12)
What is that statement, and what is the significant negative evidential relation it bears to theism? As for the statement:
Now let “O” stand for a statement reporting both the observations one has made of humans and animals experiencing pain or pleasure and the testimony one has encountered concerning the observations others have made of sentient beings experiencing pain and pleasure. By “pain” I mean physical or mental suffering of any sort. (pp. 13–14)
So O is the statement that bears a “significant negative evidential relation to theism.” Note that O is person relative: each of us will have her own O, and my O may differ from yours. My O, we might say, sets out the facts about the magnitude, variety, distribution, duration, and the like (for short, the ‘disposition’) of pleasure and pain as I know them; yours does the same for you.
But what is this significant negative evidential relation in which O stands to theism? Here Draper bows in the direction of David Hume: most contemporary philosophers of religion (unlike Hume) “fail to recognize that one cannot determine what facts about evil theism needs to explain or how well it needs to explain them without considering alternatives to theism” (p. 13). The important question is “whether or not any serious hypothesis that is logically inconsistent with theism explains some significant set of facts about evil or about good and evil much better than theism does” (p. 13). And the answer to this important question, says Draper, is that indeed there is such a serious hypothesis, one that is both inconsistent with theism and explains some significant facts about good and evil much better than theism does. This is the “hypothesis of indifference” (HI, for short):
HI: Neither the nature nor the condition of sentient beings on earth is
the result of benevolent or malevolent actions performed by non-human
persons. (p. 13) In “Evolution and the Problem of Evil,” he
takes metaphysical naturalism—substantially, the view that there
is no such person as God or anything much like God—to be the
serious alternative hypothesis. My evaluation of Draper’s approach does
not depend on a choice between these two candidates for the post of
serious alternative hypothesis.
HI, of course, is inconsistent with theism (taking the latter to entail that the world has been created by a person who is wholly good as well as omnipotent and omniscient). Draper’s claim is that:
C: HI explains the facts O reports much better than theism does. (p. 14)
He
claims furthermore that if one could show that there is a serious
hypothesis that is incompatible with theism and explains O much better
than theism does, then “one would have a prima facie
good reason to believe that this
alternative hypothesis is more probable than theism and hence that
theism is probably false.” “The Skeptical Theist” in EAESL, p. 178.
I will reformulate C as the claim that the facts O reports are much more surprising on theism than they are on HI, or, more precisely, that the antecedent probability of O is much greater on the assumption that HI is true than on the assumption that theism is true. (p. 14)
I take
it the more precise formulation is the operative one here; we aren’t
really talking about explanation See William Alston’s reply to Draper in “Some
(Temporarily) Final Thoughts on Evidential Arguments from Evil,” in
EAESL, pp. 328–30. Or
perhaps on a noetic structure as similar
as possible to mine that does not contain or entail O. This still isn’t
quite right: the noetic structure in question also can’t contain or entail
some proposition almost as strong as O. Perhaps we should think, then, of a noetic
structure that contains no propositions about the distribution of pain
and pleasure and is otherwise as similar as possible to mine. For
possible difficulties with this notion, see Peter van Inwagen,
“Reflections on the Chapters by Draper, Russell, and Gale” in EAESL, p.
222.
Finally, the probability in question is epistemic probability, not (for example) logical, statistical, or physical probability. And what is epistemic probability?
The concept of epistemic probability is an ordinary concept of probability for which no adequate philosophical analysis has, in my opinion, been proposed. As a first approximation, however, perhaps the following analysis will do:
Relative to K, p is epistemically more probable than q, where K is an epistemic situation and p and q are propositions, just in case any fully rational person in K would have a higher degree of belief in p than in q. (p. 27, footnote 2)
As
Draper says, epistemic probability is an ordinary concept that is
difficult to analyze or explain; suppose we provisionally accept his
proposed first approximation. For a fuller account of a closely related
notion (epistemic conditional probability), see chapters 8 and 9 of
Warrant and Proper Function (hereafter WPF).
Now we see the general shape of the argument: the first premise is C, the claim that the antecedent epistemic probability of O given HI is much greater than the antecedent probability of O given theism. And second, if C is true, says Draper, then “we have a prima facie good epistemic reason to reject theism—that is, a reason that is sufficient for rejecting theism unless overridden by other reasons for not rejecting theism” (p. 12). Here he is apparently relying on a general principle, perhaps something like
(1) For any propositions P and Q and person S, if S believes P and Q and there is a serious hypothesis R that is incompatible with P and such that the antecedent epistemic probability of Q with respect to R for S is much greater than the antecedent epistemic probability of Q with respect to P for S, then S has a prima facie good epistemic reason to reject P.
Draper’s claim is that the antecedent epistemic probability of O on HI is much greater than on theism, and because HI is a serious hypothesis and is inconsistent with theism, we have a prima facie good reason for rejecting theism:
Now suppose I succeed in showing that C is true (relative to our own
and my reader’s epistemic situations.) Then the truth of C is (for us)
a prima facie good (epistemic)
reason to believe that theism is less probable than HI. Thus, since the
denial of theism is obviously
The
claim, then, is that the truth of C gives me a “prima facie
good reason to believe that theism is
less probable than not”—that is, that its probability is less
than .5. Less probable than not with respect to
what? The answer must be K. The
idea is that the truth of C gives me a prima facie
good reason for thinking that theism is
improbable with respect to my noetic situation; hence, unless I can
find some reasons for theism, the rational thing to do is to give it
up. In “Evolution and the Problem of Evil,”
Draper puts the same thought slightly differently; speaking of a
similar argument, he says, “This is why my case against theism is a
prima facie one. I am entitled to
conclude only that other evidence held equal . . . it is highly probable that theism is false.”
What is it to hold other evidence equal? Here’s a suggestion: it would
be to consider the probability of theism with respect to an evidential
situation that was as similar as possible to mine, given that it
contained no evidence for or against theistic belief, or given that the
evidence it contained for theistic belief was precisely balanced by the
evidence it contained against theistic belief.
This is a subtle challenge and a
fascinating new entry into the lists; Draper deploys it with power and
sophistication. Nevertheless I think the argument utterly fails to show
that traditional Christian theism is threatened by a defeater or
epistemologically threatened in some other way. Suppose we take a
closer look. Now Draper’s argument really has two premises, C and (1).
I have argued elsewhere “On Being Evidentially Challenged,” EAESL,
pp. 250ff. “Probabilistic Arguments from Evil,” pp.
315–16.
And it [HI] is at least as plausible initially as G [i.e., theism].
After all, G is a very specific supernaturalist hypothesis with strong
ontological commitments. If, on the other hand, we take the
Indifference Hypothesis to be the hypothesis that the first causes of
the universe, if there are any,
are neither benevolent nor malevolent, then the Indifference Hypothesis
is consistent with naturalism as well as with many supernaturalist
hypotheses and its ontological commitments are much weaker than
G’s. Ibid., p. 316.
So what counts for plausibility are these general facts about relative scope and strength. Still further, if I had to consider the specific evidence I have (propositional or otherwise) for HI to evaluate its plausibility, I would have to take any reasons I have for theism as evidence against HI; HI might then be very implausible for me. So plausibility must abstract from such specific evidence.
Suppose we say that a proposition P is evidentially challenged for S if it satisfies the antecedent of (1): P is evidentially challenged for a person S if and only if S believes P and there are propositions Q and R such that S believes Q, R is a serious hypothesis incompatible with P, and Q is much more probable with respect to R than with respect to P. What (1) claims, therefore, is that if a proposition P is evidentially challenged for S, then S has a prima facie good epistemic reason for rejecting P—for being agnostic with respect to it or believing its denial. Is this really true? Is being evidentially challenged a serious handicap?
Well, how widespread is it? How many of my beliefs are evidentially challenged, for me? More, perhaps, than we might initially think. For example, here are three more propositions related, for me, as are theism, O and HI:
(2) George is a non-Catholic academic,
(3) George is a professor at Notre Dame,
and
(4) George is a Catholic academic.
First, I believe both (2) and (3). Second, (3) is vastly more likely on (4) (relative to K) than it is on (2). (After all, the proportion of Catholic academics who are professors at Notre Dame is many times greater than that of non-Catholic academics who are professors there.) Further, (4) is incompatible with (2). Still further, (4) is a serious hypothesis: it is not ad hoc, and it is as plausible as (2). (True, I have a lot of evidence for (2)—the fact, e.g., that George is an elder in the Christian Reformed Church, which is non-Catholic, the fact that George has always claimed to be a Protestant, and so on—but as we saw above, this specific evidence isn’t relevant to the plausibility of (4).) So (2) is evidentially challenged for me. Does this fact give me a good reason to reject (1)? (Should I reconsider: George is a professor at Notre Dame, after all, and that is much more likely on (4) than on (2); so maybe he’s really a Catholic?) Not clearly.
A similar trio of propositions:
(2*) I am in my study,
(3*) I am within four feet of a dog,
and
(4*) I am at the dog pound.
Again, I believe (2*) and (3*); (4*) is a serious (in Draper’s sense) alternative to (2*), and (3*) is much more likely on (4*) than it is on (2*) (usually there aren’t any dogs in my study); therefore (2*) is evidentially challenged for me. So, incidentally, is (3*) itself:
(3*) I am within four feet of a dog,
(5) I hear no doggie sounds such as barking, growling, panting, or jingling of tags,
and
(6) I am not within earshot of any dogs.
Again, (6) is a serious alternative hypothesis to (3*), and (5) is much more
likely with respect to (6) than it is with respect to (3*). (3*),
therefore, is evidentially challenged for me. A couple of more
examples: my friend has a cat named Maynard; I believe that Maynard
is a cat and
I think you get the picture. It seems likely that most of what we believe—at any rate for propositions that are contingent in the broadly logical sense—is also evidentially challenged. I don’t know how to give a proof of this claim (it probably isn’t worth spending a whole lot of time trying to find a proof); but it certainly seems likely to be the case. And this suggests that a challenge of this sort is not very significant by itself or in the general case. If most of the propositions I believe face an evidential challenge, then I don’t learn much of interest about theism by learning that it, too, faces such a challenge.
Under what conditions (if any) would a challenge of this sort be
significant? What sorts of beliefs are
such that their being subject to an evidential challenge gives us
serious reason to doubt them? Here we think first of scientific
hypotheses. I propose a hypothesis H* to explain the behavior of gases:
you point out that certain data are more probable with respect to
another hypothesis H' incompatible with mine; that certainly seems to
be a strong prima facie reason to doubt my hypothesis. Of course the data
must be relevant data,
the sort of data H* is in the business of explaining. Suppose Sam
presently feels a mild pain in his left knee. That is much less
probable with respect to H* than with respect to the hypothesis
H': Overcome by astonishment at learning that H* is false,
Sam fell and injured his knee; still, that is nothing whatever against H*.
For the typical scientific hypothesis H, there will be a body of
relevant data (past and future as well as present) such that the
success of H depends on how well it explains that data; and many
scientific hypotheses (at least on the most usual stories) get all or
nearly all of their warrant from the fact that they account for the
relevant data. At any rate nearly all of its
original warrant. Special
relativity, for example, gets its warrant for
me, not from the fact that it
properly accounts for those data, but from the fact that I have
been told and
believe that it does (in such
away as to satisfy the conditions for warrant). But if those conditions
are indeed satisfied, then there must be someone at the other end of
the testimonial chain for whom these beliefs have warrant in some way
other than by testimony. See WPF, chapter 4.
As I have argued throughout this book, however, it is an enormous assumption
to think that belief in God or, more broadly, the larger set of
Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) beliefs of which belief in God is a
part, is in this respect like a scientific hypothesis. Not only is this
assumption enormous: it is also false. The warrant for these beliefs,
if they have warrant, does not derive from the fact (if it is a fact)
that they properly explain some body of data. For most believers,
theistic belief is part of a larger whole (a Christian or Muslim or
Jewish whole); it is accepted as part of that larger whole and is not
ordinarily accepted because it is an
explanation of anything; hence its rationality or warrant, if it has some, does
not depend on its nicely explaining some body of
data. See my “Is Theism Really a Miracle?” and see
above, pp. 330ff. I don’t mean to deny, of course, that Christian or
theistic belief can get more warrant by nicely explaining something
else one believes.
Still, does this fact, crucially important as it is, deliver theism from Draper’s evidential challenge? Is it only scientific hypotheses for which (relevant) evidential challenges are serious? No. Suppose you are under the impression that your friend Paul has been vacationing on Cape Cod for the last couple of weeks (you have a rather weak memory that this is where he said he was going), but the postcards you get from him were mailed from Grand Teton National Park; he doesn’t say in the postcards where he is, but he does note the remarkably dry air, as well as the great differences between day and night temperatures. Then I think your belief that he is vacationing at Cape Cod is seriously challenged (a relevant alternative hypothesis being that he is vacationing in the Tetons). And this is true even though the warrant for your belief that he was vacationing on the Cape didn’t arise as a result of its properly explaining data of one kind or another. So it isn’t just scientific hypotheses that can be called into question by virtue of facing a relevant evidential challenge.
Suppose we look a bit deeper here. That I am in my study (and not at
the dog pound), that Maynard is a cat, that you are a human
being—these are all subject to an evidential challenge; of course
that doesn’t suggest for a moment that there is something irrational or
problematic in these beliefs, or that they are improbable with respect
to our epistemic situations. Why not? Because each of these
propositions has a good deal of warrant for me, warrant that is
independent of its probabilistic relationships to the beliefs involved
in the evidential challenges. In cases like this, being evidentially
challenged comes to very little. And it isn’t even necessary that the
belief in question have a high degree of warrant. I believe rather infirmly (I
have a relatively weak memory belief here) that the population
of greater New York City is more than 17 million; I also believe that the area of
Well then, how does it stand with theism? According to Draper, “Establishing
the truth of H [that theistic belief faces an evidential challenge]
would be insignificant if the typical theist could rationally continue
to believe that God exists after learning that H is true.” “Evil and the Proper Basicality of Belief in
God,” p. 138.
Not if that belief has any significant degree of warrant for me. Suppose
Christian and theistic belief has a good deal of warrant for me by way
of faith and the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit (IIHS) (see
above pp. 249ff.); then the fact that theism is evidentially challenged
doesn’t give me a defeater and doesn’t bring it about that
And this is true even if I don’t myself believe that theistic belief has warrant for me. Perhaps I have never thought much about epistemology, have at best a hazy idea as to what warrant is, and have never considered such questions as whether a proposition’s being evidentially challenged gives me a reason for rejecting it. You point out that my belief that Maynard is a cat is evidentially challenged; I continue (in my epistemological innocence) to believe as firmly as before that Maynard is a cat; neither the rationality nor the warrant of that belief is diminished. Again, the same goes for theistic belief, if it has significant warrant for me. You point out that theism is evidentially challenged for me: I agree that that is so and continue to believe as firmly as before; if Christian belief and hence theism do have significant warrant for me, my continuing so to believe is wholly rational and remains warranted. It is perfectly rational, internally, because it still seems obviously true to me; it is perfectly rational, externally, because the belief in question is held under the conditions of warrant. If it had sufficient warrant for knowledge before you made your point about its being evidentially challenged, it still has sufficient warrant.
So if theistic belief has significant warrant for me, then (in the typical case and provided I do not believe that it lacks warrant) my coming to believe that it faces an evidential challenge does not provide me with a defeater for it. Here we see a special case of a pattern we have seen before. I argued in chapters 6 and 8 that if theistic and Christian belief is true, then very likely it has warrant. A consequence is that if Christian belief is true, then very likely (in the typical case) an evidential challenge to theism is an insignificant challenge.
But even if theism has little or no warrant, it could still be (and in the
typical case would still be) that an evidential challenge doesn’t
provide a real challenge or a prima facie defeater. Analogy: perhaps I am once more told by
my friend that she has a pet named Maynard
So when could a belief’s being evidentially challenged (more exactly, my knowledge that it is evidentially challenged) actually offer me a defeater for a belief and make it irrational for me to continue to hold it? I can see two sorts of cases in which learning that theism is subject to an evidential challenge could be a defeater for it. First, suppose I am a theist, am rational in accepting this belief, but hold it with little firmness and furthermore think my reasons for it are absolutely minimal—barely sufficient for holding the belief rationally. Then if I learn that theism is subject to an evidential challenge, perhaps I have a defeater for it. I say ‘perhaps’ advisedly; the situation isn’t really clear.
The second sort of situation is clearer. Consider a belief B
I accept because I think it the best
explanation of a certain range of data D; B has no warrant apart from its properly
explaining D, and I am
aware of this fact. Finding that B is subject to an evidential challenge, one thinks,
gives me a defeater for it—provided that the belief that is more
probable with respect to the alternative hypothesis is one that
B is supposed to explain. I
believe the butler did it: my only reason for so believing is that this
hypothesis best explains all the facts and circumstances of the crime.
Now I come to see that the hypothesis that Lady Fauntleroy did the deed
better explains some of those facts and circumstances. And in this context perhaps we can gloss
‘explanation’ in terms of probability.
So there are some situations in which an evidential challenge—not just any old evidential challenge, but a relevant one—does furnish a defeater: cases where someone believes that the warrant enjoyed by his theistic belief is minimal, and cases where he believes that the warrant theism has for him depends just on its explaining a certain range of phenomena. Most theists, however, are not in either of these conditions. Are there other conditions in which theists often find themselves, conditions in which coming to see that theism faces an evidential challenge really does provide a defeater or a prima facie defeater for theistic belief? I doubt very much that the typical theist is in any such condition. I therefore think Draper’s challenge, subtle and sophisticated as it is, fails; in his own words, “the typical theist could rationally continue to believe that God exists after learning that H [that theism is evidentially challenged] is true.”
In writing this section I am indebted to John Cooper (sermon in South Bend Christian Reformed Church, 2/28/92), John Haas (sermon in SBCRC, 5/5/97), and Leonard Vander Zee (sermon in SBCRC, 1/5/97).
These new arguments by Rowe and Draper are subtle and sophisticated;
many deep and interesting topics come up in considering them. Upon
close examination, however, they fail, and fail resoundingly. They fail
to provide a defeater for
theistic belief and, indeed, give the person on the fence little if any
reason to prefer atheism to theism. They are not much of an improvement
over the older “if I can’t see any reason God might have for permitting
that evil E, then
And perhaps something similar holds with respect to evil. There is no cogent argument for the conclusion that the existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of God; there is also no serious evidential or probabilistic argument from evil; fair enough. It doesn’t follow that suffering and evil do not constitute a serious obstacle to Christian belief or theistic belief, and it doesn’t follow that they do not constitute a defeater for it. I have argued throughout that belief in God can be properly basic; rational belief in God does not depend on one’s having or there being good arguments for the existence of God. Should something analogous be said for the facts of evil, thought of as a potential defeater for theistic belief? Perhaps the defeating power of these facts in no way depends on the existence of a good antitheistic argument (deductive, inductive, abductive, probabilistic, whatever) from the facts of evil.
Clearly enough, suffering and evil do constitute some
kind of problem for at least
some believers in God; the Old
Testament (in particular Job and Psalms) is full of examples. Indeed,
there is the agonized cry uttered by Jesus Christ himself: “My God, my
God, why have you forsaken me?”—a cry in which he is echoing the
words of
Still, perhaps that’s not the only realistic reaction here: perhaps I could react in this way, but aren’t there other reactions in which I would have a defeater? Couldn’t suffering and evil, under some circumstances, at any rate, actually serve as a defeater for belief in God? Think of some of the horrifying examples of evil our sad world displays. Dostoevski’s classic depiction is fictional, but no less convincing and no less disturbing:
“A Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow,” Ivan went on, seeming not to hear
his brother’s words, “told me about the crimes committed by Turks and
Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general rising
of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and children,
they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till
morning, and in the morning they hang them—all sorts of things
you can’t imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s
a great injustice and insult to the beasts: a beast can never be so
cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws,
that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the
ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in
torturing children, too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s
womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points
of their bayonets before their mother’s eyes. Doing it before the
mother’s eyes was what gave zest to the amusement.” The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Constance Garnett (New York: Random House,
1933), pp. 245–46.
The list of atrocities human beings commit against others is horrifying and hideous; it is also so long, so repetitious, that it is finally wearying. Occasionally, though, new depths are reached:
A young
Muslim mother in Bosnia was repeatedly raped in front of her husband
and father, with her baby screaming on the floor beside her. When her
tormentors seemed finally tired of her, she begged permission to nurse
the child. In response, one of the rapists swiftly decapitated the baby
and threw the head in the mother’s lap. Eleonore Stump, “The Mirror of Evil,” in
God and the Philosophers, ed.
Thomas Morris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.
239.
These things are absolutely horrifying; it is painful even to consider
them, to bring them squarely before the mind. To introduce them into
cool philosophical discussion like this is distressing and can seem
inappropriate, even callous. And now the question: wouldn’t a rational
person think, in the face of this kind of appalling evil, that there
just couldn’t be an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good person
superintending our world? Perhaps he can’t give a demonstration that no
perfect person could permit these things; perhaps there isn’t a good
probabilistic or evidential atheological argument either: but so what?
Isn’t it just apparent, just evident that a being living up to God’s
reputation couldn’t permit things like that? Don’t I have a defeater
here, even if there is no good antitheistic argument from evil? Perhaps
I don’t in fact give up belief in God in the face of the facts of evil:
might that not be because I simply can’t bear the thought of living in
a Godless universe? Because of some psychological mechanism not aimed
at the truth, perhaps the sort of wish-fulfillment Freud suggests? If
so, then suffering and evil (or rather, my apprehension of it) would or
could be a defeater, A “purely epistemic” defeater; see above, p.
363.
Something like this, I think, is the best version of the atheological case from evil. The claim is essentially that one who is properly sensitive and properly aware of the sheer horror of the evil displayed in our somber and unhappy world will simply see that no being of the sort God is alleged to be could possibly permit it. This is a sort of inverse sensus divinitatis: perhaps there is no good antitheistic argument from evil; but no argument is needed. An appeal of this sort will proceed, not by rehearsing arguments, but by putting the interlocutor in the sort of situation in which the full horror of the world’s suffering and evil stands out clearly in all its loathsomeness. Indeed, from the atheological point of view, giving an argument is counterproductive here: it permits the believer in God to turn his attention away, to avert his eyes from the abomination of suffering, to take refuge in antiseptic discussions of possible worlds, probability functions, and other arcana. It diverts attention from the situations that in fact constitute a defeater for belief in God.
Suppose we look into this claim. Recall first that a defeater for a belief is relative to a noetic structure; whether my new belief B is a defeater for an old belief B* depends upon what else I believe and what my experience is like. I believe that tree is a maple; you tell me it’s really an elm; that will defeat my belief that it’s a maple if I think you know what you are talking about and aim to tell the truth, but not if I think you are even less arboreally informed than I, or that there is only a fifty–fifty chance that you are telling what you take to be the truth. Coming to see the full horror of the evil the world displays might be a defeater for theistic belief with respect to some noetic structure and not with respect to others.
What I want to argue first is that if classical Christianity is true, then the perception of evil is not a defeater for belief in God with respect to fully rational noetic structures—any noetic structure with no cognitive dysfunction, one in which all cognitive faculties and processes are functioning properly. From the point of view of classical Christianity (at any rate according to the model of chapters 6 and 8), this includes also the proper function of the sensus divinitatis. Someone in whom this process was functioning properly would have an intimate, detailed, vivid, and explicit knowledge of God; she would have an intense awareness of his presence, glory, goodness, power, perfection, wonderful attractiveness, and sweetness; and she would be as convinced of God’s existence as of her own. She might therefore be perplexed by the existence of this evil in God’s world—for God, she knows, hates evil with a holy and burning passion—but the idea that perhaps there just wasn’t any such person as God would no doubt not so much as cross her mind. Confronted with evil and suffering, such a person might ask herself why God permits it; the facts of evil may be a spur to inquiry as well as to action. If she finds no answer, she will no doubt conclude that God has a reason that is beyond her ken; she won’t be in the least inclined to doubt that there is such a person as God. For someone fully rational, therefore, the existence of evil doesn’t so much as begin to constitute a defeater for belief in God.
In an earlier piece of work I explained epistemic conditional probability (roughly, and ignoring complications and qualifications) as follows:
The conditional epistemic probability
of A on B,
then, initially and to a first approximation, is the degree to which a
rational person, a person whose faculties are functioning properly,
would accept A given that
she was certain of B,
knew that she accepted B,
reflectively considered A in the light of B, and had no other source of warrant or positive
epistemic status for A or
for its denial. “Epistemic Probability and Evil,”
in Archivo
di Filosofia, ed. Marco Olivetti
(Rome: Cedam, 1988), p. 574.
Then (no doubt because of youth, inexperience, and epistemic innocence) I went on to say that perhaps the existence of God was in this sense epistemically improbable on the existence of certain sorts of evil (p. 576).
But first, that account of epistemic probability doesn’t have this
result—more exactly, it doesn’t clearly apply in this case, or
any case where a belief has positive epistemic status or warrant for a
person S just by virtue
of S’s being rational in
the sense in question. Here I am deeply indebted to Richard
Otte.
Further: consider a person S in whom the sensus divinitatis
does not, in fact, function properly;
S has only a sort of weak
and pro forma residual
belief in God, left over from the religion of his childhood. Add that
S suffers just from
that cognitive
malfunction (and no other). Now suppose S becomes seriously aware of the facts of evil and thinks
about them in connection with the existence of God: perhaps, given
these conditions, S will give up
belief in God, or come to think it improbable with respect to his
evidence. Would it follow that the facts of evil are in some sense
negative evidence with respect to the existence of God, evidence that
is counterbalanced and outweighed in a fully rational noetic structure
by the positive evidence provided by a properly functioning sensus
divinitatis? No. For perhaps
various modules of the cognitive establishment are designed to work
together. If so, the deliverances of one module m
that isn’t itself subject to
dysfunction might still have no epistemic standing, given the failure
of another module
m*.
m’s functioning in this
way—that is, the way it functions when there is malfunction of
m* but no malfunction in
m, given the malfunction
of m*—might not be
part of the design plan at all. When the electric current is
fluctuating because of a problem in the wiring, the air raid siren emits a
weak and pathetic squeak; it doesn’t follow that the vibrating disk that
produces the sound is designed to produce that squeak under those
conditions. True, it is designed in such a way that in fact it
will produce that squeak
then; but its doing so is not part of the design plan. Its functioning
in this way under those conditions will of course be part of its
maxiplan (WPF, pp.
22ff.). It does not follow that its behaving in this way is part of its
design plan; that behavior might be, instead, an unintended by-product
rather than part of the design plan itself. And the same goes for the
sensus divinitatis and
the other processes actually involved in the production or
On the A/C model, therefore, the facts of evil do not constitute any sort of defeater for theistic belief for a fully rational person, one all of whose cognitive faculties are functioning properly. Nevertheless (so the wily atheologian will claim), that fact is at best of dubious relevance with respect to the question whether Christian believers in God—the ones there actually are—have a defeater for theism in the world’s ills. For according to Christian doctrine itself, none of us human beings enjoys this pristine condition of complete rationality. The sensus divinitatis has been heavily damaged by sin; for most of us most of the time the presence of God is not evident. For many of us (much of the time, anyway) both God’s existence and his goodness are a bit shadowy and evanescent, nowhere nearly as evident as the existence of other people or the trees in the backyard. Relative to a fully rational noetic structure (one of an unfallen human being, say), knowledge of the facts of evil may constitute no defeater for theism; relative to the sorts of noetic structures we human beings actually have, however (so the claim goes), they do. Given the noetic results of sin (see chapter 7), the typical believer in God does have a defeater in the facts of evil.
To pursue this line, however, would be to neglect still another feature of
Christian belief: that the damage to the sensus divinitatis
is in principle and increasingly
repaired in the process of faith (see chapter 8) and regeneration. The
person of faith may be once more such that, at least on some occasions,
the presence of God is completely evident to her. In addition, she
knows of the divine love revealed in the incarnation, the unthinkable
splendor of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, himself the divine
and unique son of God, on our behalf. Of course this knowledge does not
provide an answer to the question, Why does God permit evil? It is
nonetheless of crucial importance here. As Albert Camus (hardly an unambiguous
defender of Christian belief) clearly recognized. Christ, says Camus,
is the solution to the problems of evil and death: His solution
consisted, first, in experiencing them. The god-man suffers too, with
patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him since
he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important in the
history of man only because, in its shadows, the divinity, ostensibly
abandoning its traditional privileges, lived through to the end,
despair included, the agony of death. Thus is explained the Lama
sabachthani and the frightful doubt
of Christ in agony. (Essais [Paris: Gallimard, 1965], p. 444. Quoted in Bruce
Ward, “Prometheus or Cain? Albert Camus’s Account of the Western Quest
for Justice,” Faith and Philosophy [April 1991], p. 213; this passage is translated by
Ward) Another such resource has to do with the fact
that from the point of view of Christian trinitarian doctrine, personal
relationships such as love are to be found at the deepest levels of
reality; see above, pp. 320ff.
There is much to be said about the Christian meaning of
suffering, Some of which is said in Salvifici
Doloris, Apostolic Letter of John
Paul II (Boston: Pauline Books and Media), pp. 30ff., a profound
meditation on suffering and a powerful effort to discern its meaning
from a Christian perspective. Salvifici Doloris, pp. 30ff. As is suggested by Paul’s enigmatic remark:
“Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh
what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions” ( “According to Julian of Norwich, before the
elect have a chance to thank God for all He has done for them, God will
say, ‘Thank you for all your suffering, the suffering of your youth’ ”
(Marilyn Adams, “Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God,”
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 63 (1989), reprinted with
emendations in The Problem of Evil, ed. Marilyn Adams and Robert Adams (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 219. The passage Adams cites is
from Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 14). Paul continues in Thus Abraham Kuyper: “The angels of God have
no knowledge of sin, hence also they have no knowledge of forgiveness,
hence again they have no knowledge of that tender love that is formed
from forgiveness. Nor have they that richer knowledge of God which
springs from this tenderer affection. They stand as strangers in the
face of it, and therefore says the Apostle that, with respect to this
mystery, the angels are, as it were, jealously desirous ‘to look into
it’ ” (To Be near unto God, p.
307).
Accordingly, those who have faith (those in whom the process of
regeneration has taken or is taking place) will also be such that the
presence and goodness of God is to some degree evident to them; so for
them the belief that there is such a person as God will have
considerable warrant. They too, then, like someone in whom the
sensus
They may also enjoy a blessed contentment. Consider, for example, this letter from Guido de Bres to his wife, written shortly before he was hanged:
Your grief and anguish, troubling me in the midst of my joy and gladness, are the cause of my writing you this present letter. I most earnestly pray you not to be grieved beyond measure. . . . If the Lord had wished us to live together longer, He could easily have caused it to be so. . . . Let His good will be done, then, and let that suffice for all reason. . . . I pray you, my dear and faithful companion, to be glad with me, and to thank the good God for what He is doing, for He does nothing but what is altogether right and good. . . .
I am shut up in the
strongest and wretchedest of dungeons, so dark and gloomy that it goes
by the name of the Black Hole. I can get but little air, and that of
the foulest. I have on my hands and feet heavy irons which are a
constant torture, galling the flesh even to my poor bones. But,
notwithstanding all, my God fails not to make good His promise, and to
comfort my heart, and to give me a most blessed content. Quoted in Cornelius Plantinga Jr., A Place
to Stand (Grand Rapids: Board of
Publications of the Christian Reformed Church, 1981), p. 35. De Bres
(1522–67) was the author of the Belgic Confession.
De Bres suffered greatly; yet he enjoyed a most blessed content. The furthest thing from his mind, no doubt, was the thought that maybe there wasn’t any such person as God, that maybe he had been deceived all along. And this continuing to believe, given the model of chapter 8, betrays no irrationality at all: it isn’t as if he had a defeater for theistic belief in his suffering, but somehow suppressed it and (perhaps by way of wishful thinking) continued to believe anyway. No, his belief was instead a result of the proper function of the cognitive processes—a rejuvenated sensus divinitatis, the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit—that produce belief in God.
Of course most of us are not in the spiritual condition of Guido de
Bres. Not nearly all of us enjoy that comfort and content in the face
of suffering. As Calvin points out (Institutes, III, ii, 15, p. 560), most of us sometimes have
difficulty thinking that God is, indeed,
Thus Teresa of Liseaux: I get tired of
this darkness all around me. . . . It is worse torment than ever; the
darkness itself seems to borrow, from the sinners who live in it, the
gift of speech. I hear its mocking accents: “It’s all a dream, this
talk of a heavenly country bathed in light, scented with delicious
perfumes, and of a God who made it all, who is to be your possession in
eternity! . . . Death will make nonsense of your hopes; it will only
mean a night darker than before, the night of mere non-existence.” . .
. And all of the time it isn’t just a veil, it’s a great wall which
reaches up to the sky and blots out the stars.
Well, I should think the right answer is “Probably not.” Consider a person in whom the sensus divinitatis doesn’t work at all well, a person who believes in God in a thoughtless and merely formal way, a person for whom the belief has no real vivacity or liveliness—perhaps such a person, on coming to a deep appreciation of the facts of evil, will ordinarily give up theistic belief. As I argued above, however (pp. 485ff.), that doesn’t show that this person has a defeater for theistic belief. She has such a defeater only if it is part of our cognitive design plan to give up theistic belief in those circumstances; and we have no reason to think that it is. The design plan includes the proper function of the sensus divinitatis; how things actually go when that process does not function properly could be part of the design plan; more likely, though, it is an unintended by-product rather than a part of the design plan.
Nevertheless, let’s suppose, just for purposes of argument, that as a matter of fact such a person really does have a defeater for theistic belief. What it is important to see, here, is that if she does have a defeater, it is only because of a failure of rationality somewhere in her noetic structure (perhaps there is dysfunction with respect to the sensus divinitatis). And now suppose we return to our original question: does a person S who believes that there is such a person as God have a defeater in the facts of evil? We can now see that there is no reason to think so. The very fact that S continues in theistic belief is evidence that the sensus divinitatis is functioning properly to at least some degree in her, and in such a way that knowledge of the facts of evil does not constitute a defeater. It is perhaps possible (if failure to believe in these circumstances is part of the design plan) that she has a defeater; but there is no reason to think so. I conclude, therefore, that in all likelihood believers in God do not have defeaters for theistic belief in knowledge of the facts of evil.
Of course all this is from the perspective of Christian theism. If Christian theism is true, then the existence of the sin and evil and suffering we see does not, in the typical case, constitute a defeater for belief in God. In particular, it doesn’t constitute a defeater for Quinn’s “intellectually sophisticated adult in our culture” (above, p. 358), at least if she has given a little thought to the epistemology of the matter. Now someone who doesn’t accept Christian theism may be unmoved by this fact; he may concede that from the standpoint of Christian theism, suffering and evil do not constitute a defeater for Christian belief; but (so he says) Christian theism is false. Hence this fact—that if it were true, evil would not constitute a defeater for Christian belief—cuts no ice with respect to his claim that, as a matter of fact, evil does constitute such a defeater. But if he is thinking of an internal defeater for theistic belief, then he is mistaken; knowledge of the facts of evil does not constitute an internal defeater, at least for those believers for whom it seems very clear that there is such a person as God and that, indeed, the whole Christian story is true. For such a person, this will seem clear even after he is fully aware of the evils the world contains and has thought hard about them. Therefore there is nothing internally irrational in his believing these things; it is not that he somehow fails to believe what seems to him clearly true or somehow mismanages epistemic matters downstream from experience. So if there is irrationality here, it must be external; it must be that this inclination to believe, this doxastic evidence, is itself a product of cognitive dysfunction, or else of cognitive processes not directed at truth. The Christian or theistic believer, naturally enough, won’t agree: she will see her belief as the product of cognitive faculties functioning properly, functioning in the way God intended them to (and aimed at producing true beliefs).
What
we see here is another instance of a general pattern: once more it
appears that questions about the rationality of belief in God (and in
the whole Christian story) aren’t merely epistemological. What a
rational person will do when confronted with suffering and evil depends
on what the cognitive design plan for human beings is; but from a
filled-out Christian perspective, that design plan will be such that
someone who (like Mother Teresa, e.g.) continues to accept Christian
belief in the face of the world’s suffering and evil displays no
irrationality whatever. Indeed, it is the person who gives up belief in
God under these circumstances who displays cognitive dysfunction; for
such a person, the sensus divinitatis must be at least partly disordered. The atheologian
can properly claim that evil constitutes a defeater for Christian
belief, therefore, only if he already assumes that Christian belief is
false. But then a Christian believer can’t sensibly be expected to
concede that she does have a defeater for Christian belief—at least
until the atheologian produces a good reason or two for supposing
Christian belief is
false. Because she is a Christian
This chapter has been devoted to the
question whether knowledge of the facts of evil constitutes a defeater
for Christian belief. Of course there are many related projects lurking
in the neighborhood. One of particular interest is that of employing
the resources of the Christian faith in thinking about sin and
evil—not in order to defend the epistemic status of Christian
belief but as part of a larger project of Christian scholarship, of
discerning the ways in which Christian belief illuminates many of the
important areas of human concern. This is an extremely important task
that hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves from Christian
philosophers. For interesting and seminal work in this
area, I should like to recommend Salvifici Doloris (see fn. 606), Marilyn Adams’s “Horrendous Evils and
the Goodness of God” (see fn. 609), Diogenes Allen’s The
Traces of God in a Frequently Hostile World (Cowley Publications, 1980), and Eleonore Stump’s
“The Mirror of Evil” (see fn. 600).
There is another distinction that must be made. Perhaps God’s reason
for permitting me to suffer is not that by undergoing this suffering I
can thus achieve a greater good (the good of enjoying his
gratitude, for example: see footnote 609) but because he can thus
achieve a better
The book of Job gives splendid expression to some of the themes of this
chapter. For profoundly insightful comment on the main
themes of Job, see Eleonore Stump’s “Second-Person Accounts and the
Problem of Evil,” Stob Lecture at Calvin College, January 1999 (Grand
Rapids: Calvin College, 1999).
Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed? As I have observed, those who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it. (4:7–8)
All his days the wicked man suffers torment, the ruthless through all the years stored up for him. Terrifying sounds fill his ear; when all seems well, marauders attack him. He despairs of escaping the darkness; he is marked for the sword. He wanders about—food for vultures. . . . Distress and anguish fill him with terror. . . . (15:20–24)
So Job must be wicked indeed to warrant such great suffering:
Is it for your piety that he rebukes you and brings charges against you? Is not your wickedness great? Are not your sins endless? . . . you stripped men of their clothing, leaving them naked. You gave no water to the weary and you withheld food from the hungry, though you were a powerful man, owning land, an honored man, living on it. And you sent widows away empty-handed and broke the strength of the fatherless. That is why snares are all around you, why sudden peril terrifies you, why it is so dark you cannot see and why a flood of water covers you. (22:4–11)
Job must repent and mend his ways:
But if you will look to God and plead with the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, even now he will rouse himself on your behalf and restore you to your rightful place. (8:5–6)
Job is understandably nettled:
Doubtless you are the people, and wisdom will die with you! But I have a mind as well as you. . . . (12:1–3)
Miserable comforters are you all! Will your long-winded speeches never end? (16:2–3)
He knows that the rain falls on the just and on the unjust, that the wicked often prosper:
Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power? They see their children established around them, their offspring before their eyes. Their homes are safe and free from fear; the rod of God is not upon them. Their bulls never fail to breed; their cows calve and do not miscarry. They send forth their children as a flock; their little ones dance about. . . . They spend their years in prosperity and go down to the grave in peace. (21:7–13)
Job also knows he has done nothing unusually heinous or wicked: “my hands have been free of violence and my prayer is pure” (16:17). No doubt “no one does good, no, not one”; but Job is described in the prologue as “blameless and upright”; he knows that he isn’t being singled out because he is so much more wicked than the rest of humanity (in particular, he is no greater sinner than Eliphaz, Bildad, or Zophar). So he begins to accuse God of treating him unfairly in permitting him to suffer in this way:
then know that God has wronged me and drawn his net around me. (19:6)
As surely as God lives, who has denied me justice. . . . (27:2)
He doesn’t fear to speak
his mind to the Lord. Indeed, a certain suggestion of sarcasm sometimes
creeps in: “Does it please you to oppress
Oh that I had someone to hear me! I sign now my defense [after a lengthy recital of his virtues]—let the Almighty answer me; let my accuser put his indictment in writing. Surely I would wear it on my shoulder, I would put it on like a crown.” (31:35–36)
(Again, that note of sarcasm.) But when he ruefully recalls that God would be prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and executioner, he isn’t sanguine about the outcome:
If I say, “I will forget my complaint, I will change my expression, and smile,” I still dread all my sufferings, for I know you will not hold me innocent. (9:27–28)
There are at least two ways we can understand Job here. In the first way, Job’s problem is really intellectual; he can’t see any reason at all why God should allow him to be afflicted as he is; he is inclined to conclude, unthinkingly, that probably God doesn’t have a good reason. The point here is that the reason for Job’s sufferings is something entirely beyond his knowledge or awareness; but then the fact that he can’t see what sort of reason God might have for permitting his suffering doesn’t even tend to suggest that God has no reason. And when God replies to Job, he doesn’t tell him what his reason is for permitting these sufferings (perhaps Job couldn’t so much as grasp or comprehend it). Instead, he attacks the implicit inference from Job’s not being able to see what God’s reason is to the notion that probably he has none; and he does this by pointing out how vast is the gulf between Job’s knowledge and God’s:
Then the Lord answered Job out of the tempest: Who is this whose
ignorant words darken counsel? Brace yourself and stand up like a man;
I will ask questions and you shall answer. Where were you when I laid
the earth’s foundations? Tell me, if you know and understand! Who
settled its dimensions? Surely you should know! Who stretched his
measuring-line over it? On what do its supporting pillars rest? Who set
its corner-stone in place, when the morning stars sang together and all
the sons of God shouted for joy? . . . . Have you descended to the
springs of the sea or walked in the unfathomable deep? Have the gates
of death been revealed to you? Have you ever seen the door-keepers of
the place of darkness? Have you comprehended the vast expanse of the
world? Come, tell me all this, if you know! Which is the way to the
home of light and
Job complains that God apparently has no good reason for permitting the
evil that befalls him. He suspects that God doesn’t have a good reason
because he, Job, can’t imagine what that reason might be. In reply, God
does not tell him what the reason is; instead, he attacks Job’s
unthinking assumption that if he, Job, can’t imagine what reason God
might have, then probably God doesn’t have a reason at all. And God
attacks this assumption by pointing out how limited Job’s
knowledge is along these lines. Thus inviting Job to consider the possibility
that God’s reasons for permitting evil are more like noseeums than St.
Bernards; see above, p. 466.
There is quite another way to understand Job—a way that can be
combined with the first. Taken this second way, the idea is not that
Job suspects or is inclined to think probably God doesn’t have a reason
for allowing his afflictions. It is rather that Job just becomes angry
with God, hates and abhors what God is doing (or not doing),
and is expressing his
displeasure—and all of this quite independent of whether or not
he thinks God has a reason. “Sure, maybe God has a reason—being
God, he naturally would, wouldn’t he? But I can’t see the
slightest suggestion as to what his reason may be; and why do I have to
suffer so that he can attain these no doubt dandy ends of
his—without so much as being consulted? without so much as a
by-your-leave? I hate it! And I’m angry with him! These ‘reasons’ of
his, whatever they are, are wholly inscrutable; and why should I suffer
for these things beyond my ken? I don’t give a fig for those reasons,
and I detest what he is doing!” Here there isn’t the suggestion that
God maybe doesn’t have reasons and is perhaps even
unjust; this thought doesn’t
really enter, or at least isn’t center stage. There is, instead, mistrust
of God, wariness of him and his alleged magnificent ends, hatred of
what this does to Job and requires of him, a hint or more than a hint
of rebellion. And then when God comes to Job in the whirlwind, it is
not to convince him that God really does have reasons (although it may,
in fact, do this); it is instead to still the tempest in his soul, to
quiet him, to restore his trust for God. The Lord gives
No, in
all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor
demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither
height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our
Lord.
It is time, and past time, to bring this book and this trilogy to a close. In Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function, what I argued, essentially, is that the only viable answer to the question ‘What is knowledge?’ lies in the neighborhood of proper function: a belief has warrant if and only if it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at the production of true belief. (This is the basic idea; there is a good bit of fine-tuning required, including some in chapter 6 of the present book.)
In this, the final member of the trilogy, I argued first in part I
(chapters 1 and 2) that there really is such a thing as Christian
belief and that (contra Kaufman, Hick, and Kant under one
interpretation) we can, in fact, talk and think about God. In part II,
the next three chapters, I distinguished de jure from de facto objections to Christian belief; the former are to
the effect that such belief is intellectually or rationally
questionable, even if true. Although de jure objections have been very common ever since the
Enlightenment, it isn’t easy to tell what the objections are supposed
to be. I argued that no viable de jure objection lies in the neighborhood either of
justification or of internal rationality. The only initially promising
candidate for a viable de jure objection to Christian belief, I said, can be approached by way
of Freud’s claim that Christian belief does not have
warrant, or at any rate warrant sufficient for knowledge. Freud,
however, simply presupposes that theistic and hence Christian belief is
false; therefore this alleged de jure objection fails to be independent of the
truth of Christian belief. If
Christian belief were false, perhaps Freud would be right; but
the de jure objection was
supposed to be independent of its truth or falsehood; hence this is not a
successful de jure objection. I argued further that the same fate will
befall any alleged de jure objection formulated in terms of warrant. That is
because if Christian belief is true, it very likely does have warrant;
hence any objection to its having warrant will have to be an objection
to its being true; but in
In part III, chapter 6, I presented the Aquinas/Calvin model of how it is that belief in God can have warrant, and even warrant sufficient for knowledge. In the next chapter, I considered the noetic effects of sin, and the way in which the existence of sin throws a monkey wrench into the A/C model. In chapters 8 and 9, I extended the A/C model in such a way as to deal both with sin and with the full panoply of Christian belief: trinity, incarnation, atonement, resurrection. Chapter 10 dealt with objections to this model. Finally, in part IV, I turned to potential or actual defeaters for Christian belief—possible reasons to give it up or hold it less firmly. There were projection theories (chapter 11), contemporary historical biblical criticism (chapter 12), postmodernism and pluralism (chapter 13), and the age-old problem of evil (chapter 14). None of these, I argued, presents a serious challenge to the warrant Christian belief can enjoy if the model, and indeed Christian belief, is, in fact, true.
But is it true? This is the really important question. And here we pass beyond the competence of philosophy, whose main competence, in this area, is to clear away certain objections, impedances, and obstacles to Christian belief. Speaking for myself and of course not in the name of philosophy, I can say only that it does, indeed, seem to me to be true, and to be the maximally important truth.
Abraham, William, 90, 200, 242n, 292n
A/C Model, the, x, 168–186, 199, 201, 241. See also Extended A/C Model, the
and basicality with respect to justification, 177–178
and basicality with respect to rationality, 175–177
and basicality with respect to warrant, 178–179
models, 168
and perceptual vs. experiential knowledge, 180–184
Plantinga’s claims regarding, 168–170, 325
actualism, 114
affections, religious, x, 202, 290–323
and analogues of rationality, justification, and warrant, 202, 309–311
degrees of, 310
and justification, 310
and sin, 295
and voluntary control, 310n
Aiken, Henry David, 461n
Allegro, John, 401
Allen, Diogenes, 493n
Allison, Henry, 13n
Alston, William, xiii, xiv, 33, 109, 135, 153n, 300, 313n, 336, 402n, 406n, 407n, 423, 466, 471n
and perception (vs. experience) of God, 180–184, 286–289
on practical rationality, 117–134
Alter, Robert, 390
Alvin Plantinga, 26n, 28n, 114n, 461n
Anselm, 303
Apostle’s Creed, 202
Aquinas/Calvin Model. See A/C Model
Aquinas, Thomas, v, x, 13–14, 72, 82n, 167, 168, 170, 176–177, 199, 204n, 205n, 242, 245, 249, 250n, 251, 266n, 269n, 270n, 292n, 293, 374, 383, 439, 440
Aristotle, 13, 72, 109, 146, 424
Armstrong, David, 392n
arrogance. See belief in God, and arrogance
Atonement, the, 201
Attridge, Harold, 418n
Auerbach, Erich, 321n
Augsburg Confession, 202
Augustine, St., v, 26n, 198, 210, 211, 245, 307, 312–313, 320n, 374, 383, 423
Baillie, John, 326
basic beliefs, 83–85, 175–177, 343–349
Beilby, James, 229n
belief
and aesthetic factors, 306–308
a priori belief, 105, 111, 145, 146, 175, 178–179, 183, 194, 264, 331
memory beliefs, 105, 110, 128, 175, 178, 194, 262, 264, 331
perceptual beliefs, 127, 175, 178, 194, 262, 331
and relationship to behavior, 231–237
voluntary control over, 96, 104, 122, 444n
whether God has them, 125n
belief in God. See also sensus divinitatis; faith
and arrogance, 253–254, 443–447
belief in God vs. belief that God exists, 293–294
degree of belief, 265n
and Great Things of the Gospel, 301
as a hypothesis, 91–92, 329–331, 371, 476–477
naturalistic explanations of, 145
objections to. See objections to belief in God
as perceptual knowledge, 180–184, 286–289, 337–338
projective theories of, 358, 367–373
if produced by “ordinary faculties”, 270–271
properly basic, 175–178, 258–259, 262n, 264–268, 342–349
properly basic with respect to warrant, 178–180, 186–190, 343, 346–351
and relationship between the intellect and will, 295–304
and religious affections, 291–323
and religious experience, 326–353
as self-authenticating, 259–262
as supernatural gift, 245, 246n
true but unwarranted?, 189–190
and truth, 169–170, 201, 424–425, 499
voluntary control of belief, 172–173
and wish-fulfillment, 307
Bergmann, Gustav, 429n
Bergmann, Michael, 359n
Bible, the, 201, 205, 243, 249–252, 258–263, 270–280, 284, 374–421, 454
inspiration of, 252, 261, 268n, 270–272, 375–380, 384–385
and proper basicality, 258–263
reliability of, 261
revelation of events or propositions, 251n
as self-authenticating, 259–262
and theological disagreements, 381–382
and traditional biblical commentary, 383–385
Bird, Graham, 12
Bodin, Jean, 438
Bonaventure, St., 242
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 213n
Borg, Marcus, 403n
Bradley, F. H., 461n
Bultmann, Rudolf, vii, 247, 393, 403, 405, 406
Calvin, John, v, x, 131n, 139n, 148, 168, 199, 201, 205n, 206, 217, 240, 242, 244, 245, 256–262, 264n, 269n, 281, 290–293, 294, 305, 374, 383, 423, 454, 490
and the Holy Spirit, 256, 260, 292–293
on knowledge of God’s essence, 46–47
and the sensus divinitatis, 170–174
Camus, Albert, 487
Cantor’s Theorem, 107
Carroll, Michael P., 192
Cavin, Robert, 276n
Celsus, 277n
certainty, 84
Chisholm, Roderick, 95, 110, 429n, 444
Christian Mystical Practice, 117–134
agnosticism about the deliverances of, 131
Chrysostom, John, 374
Cicero, 171n
circularity, epistemic, 118–119
Classical Foundationalism. See Foundationalism, Classical
Classical Package, the. See Foundationalism, Classical; Deontologism, Classical; and evidentialism
cognitive reliability, 222–227,
presumption of, 148, 151, 226–227
coherence, 112
Collins, John, 390–391, 393, 411
conversion, 311
Cook, Martin, 407n
Cooper, John, 481n
counterfactuals, 461n
Creationism, 217n
credulity, 147
Crisp, Thomas, 159n
Crossan, John Dominic, 402n
cultural relativism. See relativism, historical and cultural
Cummins, Robert, 236
Cupitt, Don, 39n, 144, 150n, 215
Daniels, Charles, 144
Darwinism, 408. See also evolution
Davis, Stephen T., 242n
Dawkins, Richard, 42, 150, 177, 200, 227, 245
De Bres, Guido, 490
De Vries, Paul, 443n
defeaters, x–xi, 161, 190n, 224, 243n, 255, 352–353, 358–499,
argumentative/nonargumentative, 426–427
irrational or unwarranted defeaters, 364–366
“optimistic overrider”, 362–363
purely epistemic defeaters, 363–364
rationality defeaters, 359, 368–369
relative to one’s noetic structure, 360–361, 485
undercutting, 359
defeaters for Christian belief, 366–367
historical-critical Scripture scholarship, 374–421
Dennett, Daniel, 42, 113, 150n, 177, 200, 227, 229n, 245, 386, 463
Deontologism, Classical, 81–82, 85–88. See also justification
Derrida, Jacques, 423n, 427, 431, 437
Descartes, René, 21, 71, 75, 84, 94, 98, 111, 124, 129n, 133, 149, 202n, 220 221, 344, 392n, 436
design, argument from, 463
Devitt, Michael, 13
divine discourse, 376. See also Wolterstorff, Nicholas
Dole, Andrew, 257n
Donne, John, 314n
Dostoevski, Fyodor, 483
Dryer, D. P., 13n
Duhem, Pierre, 395–398. See also historical biblical criticism, Duhemian
duty, epistemic, 98–99, 178, 447–448. See also Deontologism, Classical
objective vs. subjective duty, 99
Edwards, Jonathan, 80, 100, 197, 214n, 242, 249, 259, 262n, 287, 290, 294 309, 313, 317, 320, 351, 374, 380n, 423
on intellect and will, 295–304
Ellis, Albert, 192
Enlightenment, the, 71, 85, 147, 152n, 252, 382
Epicurus, 459
eros, 311–323. See also belief in God, and the religious affections
Esterson, Allen, 197n
doxastic (or impulsional), 111n, 183, 264, 333
evidentialism, viii, 70–71, 81–82, 86, 88–91, 102
evil. See also problem of evil
moral, 458
natural, 358
and the sensus divinitatis, 484
evolution, 150–151, 154, 214, 227–240, 330
Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, the, 227–240, 281–284, 350–351
definition of, 440
experience, religious. See religious experience
Extended A/C Model, 241–242, 285, 330, 375, 455, 486
defeaters for. See defeaters for Christian belief
Plantinga’s claims regarding, 201, 325, 351
F & M complaint, the, 137–153, 155, 161–163, 167–168, 178, 192–198. See also Freud, Sigmund; Marx, Karl
faith, 168, 186, 200–201, 206, 246–289, 303, 416
Calvin’s definition of, 248
and evidence, 265
and external rationality, 256–258
and historical biblical criticism, 412–420
and internal rationality, 256
and knowledge, 256
Mark Twain’s opinion of, 246–247
and other belief-forming mechanisms, 262n
and the will and affections, 206, 247, 269, 293
Fales, Evan, 138n
fall, the, 211–213. See also sin
Feenstra, Ronald, 317n
Feldman, Richard, 157n
fideism, 73
Findlay, J. N., 421
Finke, Roger, 193n
Fitelson, Branden, 229n
Flint, Thomas, 461n
Foucault, Michel, 71
Foundationalism, Classical, 81–85, 93–99, 408, 422, 447
relationship to evidence, 82–84
self-referential incoherence, 94–97
Fraser, Alexander, 72n
Freddoso, Alfred, 82n
selective, 461n
Free Will Defense, the, 461–462
Frei, Hans, 247n
Freud, Sigmund, vi, viii, ix, x, 100, 135–140, 142–145, 149, 151–152, 161–163, 167, 184, 186, 188, 191, 192–198, 200, 307, 315–316, 358, 362, 367–368, 427, 484. See also wish fulfillment
Fuller, Margaret, 247
function, 146, 154–155. See also proper function; warrant
Gale, Richard, 90, 300n, 335–342
Gaskin, J. C. A., 90
Gellner, Ernest, 423
genetic fallacy, 194
Gettier example, 156–157, 189, 285–286
Gilkey, Langdon, 394, 403, 404, 405, 413
God
God and Other Minds, 68, 69–70, 81, 136
God, Freedom, and Evil, 460n, 461n
Gödel, Kurt, 440
Goodman, Nelson, 208n
Great Pumpkin Objection, 342–345
Great things of the Gospel, the, 80, 101, 247n, 248–249, 252, 304–305
Greek philosophy and the Bible, 319
Gutting, Gary, 91, 336, 339, 431–433, 447–450, 454n, 455–457
Haas, John, 481n
Hardy, Lee, 443n
Harvey, Anthony E., 415
Harvey, Van Austin, 375, 391, 401, 403–404, 408–410, 413
Hasker, William, 461n
HBC. See historical biblical criticism
Hegel, G. W. F., 141n
Heidegger, Martin, 208n, 423, 427, 436
Heidelberg Catechism, 62n, 122, 195, 202, 208n, 247, 248n, 256, 288
Hempel, Carl, 8n
Herbert, George, 307n
Herodotus, 271
Hick, John, 5, 31, 43–63, 428n, 438, 443n, 444, 498
positive vs. negative properties, 52–55
on religious pluralism, 438
substantial vs. formal properties, 45–49
historical biblical criticism, vi, xi, 243n, 375, 386–401, 411n
disagreements within, 402
Duhemian, 395–398, 407n, 411–412, 415–417, 419
Non-Troeltschian, 414–418, 421
as a project of the Enlightenment, 386–387
and scientific study of Scripture, 387–388
Spinozistic, 398–399, 407n, 412, 415–416, 419
and traditional biblical commentary, 419–420
Troeltschian, 390–395, 404–409, 411–414, 419–421
historical relativism. See relativism, historical and cultural
Holy Spirit, x, 33, 81, 101, 148, 180, 184, 186, 199–201, 206, 241, 243–245, 246n, 247, 249–253, 255–260, 268–269, 277, 280–282, 284, 290, 292 293, 295, 304, 378–380
internal instigation of, 130, 148, 180, 201, 206, 249–252, 255, 268, 330, 334 338, 343, 347, 374, 380, 416, 453, 455, 478
and production of faith, 249–252
Howsepian, Albert, 202n
Hume, David, 9, 75, 92n, 97, 98, 130, 142–143, 155, 185, 200, 215n, 218–227, 239, 241, 261, 284–285, 298, 350, 404, 421, 459, 470n
Huxley, T. H., 232
Iannaccone, Laurence, 193n
IIHS. See Holy Spirit, internal instigation of
Image of God, 204
broad, 204
narrow, 204
Incarnation, the, 201
induction, 147
intellect and will
dependency relations between, 301
introspection, 147
involuntarism. See voluntarism
James, William, 70n, 89, 311, 313n, 326
Jantzen, Grace, 423n
Jeffreys, Derek, 204n
Jesus Christ, 199, 202, 214, 243, 254, 270–277, 280, 290, 375, 377–378, 384n, 385, 389–390
Historical Jesus, the, 399–401, 415, 418n
necessity for salvation, 243n
resurrection of, 275–277, 400–401, 405–406, 413
suffering of, 487
John Paul II, Pope, 488n, 493n
Johnson, Luke Timothy, 389, 400, 416
Jones, E. M., 196
justification (pertaining to epistemology), ix, 70–71, 87–88, 93, 100–102, 108, 177–178, 186, 200, 203, 241–242, 246, 286, 346–347, 448–449
Alston justification, 104–107, 135
objective vs. subjective, 102n, 203
and rationality, 109
justification (pertaining to salvation), 265
Kane, G, Stanley, 461n
Kant, Immanuel, viii, 5, 7–30, 31, 33, 43, 51n, 59, 75, 173, 404, 436, 498
“One World” interpretation, 12–14
reference to the noumenon, 14–20
“Two Worlds” interpretation, 10–12, 16–20
Kaufman, Gordon, 4, 5, 16, 31–42, 382n–383n, 498
connections to Kant, 33
objections to God as personal, 39–42
objections to language about God, 31–38
Keynes, J. M., 78
Kierkegaard, Søren, 436
Klein, Peter, 157n
knowledge, ix, 72, 153, 159n, 248n, 256, 264
Kuyper, Abraham, 314n, 318n, 319n, 404n, 423, 436, 489
Lacan, Jacques, 423
Laplace, 92
Levenson, Jon, 388, 400n, 412, 417
Levine, Michael, 317
Lewis, C. S., 205, 216n, 317n, 318n, 322n
Lindbeck, George, 247n
Livingston, James C., 407n
Locke, John, 71–88, 90, 93–94, 98, 108, 147, 266–268, 271n, 298, 344, 386, 408
on different kinds of knowledge, 75–77
on fideism, 73
regulating opinion and reason, 74, 79
logical positivism, 7
Lombard, Peter, 211n
Lüdemann, Gerd, 401
Luther, Martin, v, 211n, 245, 292n,293–294
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 8n
Mackie, John, 90–92, 100, 103, 200, 332, 335, 386
and evidentialism, 85–86, 91–92
on the problem of evil, 460–461, 463
on religious experience, 328–331
Macmillan, Malcolm, 197n
Macquarrie, John, 253, 394, 403, 404, 405, 406
Marx, Karl, vi, ix, x, 100, 135–136, 140–143, 149, 151–152, 162–163, 167, 184, 191, 192, 358, 367–368, 427
Matthews, H. E., 13n
Mayr, Ernst, 228
McCloskey, H. J., 461n
McFague, Sallie, 5n
McGonagall, William E., 50
McMullin, Ernan, 414n
McTaggart, J., 461n
Meier, John, 387n, 398, 415–416
Meinong, Alexius, 429
Menzel, Christopher, 281n
Merricks, Trenton, 159n
methodological naturalism, 387–390, 396–398
Mill, John Stuart, 21, 195, 461n
miracles, 269n, 284, 394–395, 400, 403–404, 412
Mitchell, Basil, 90
models, 168. See also A/C Model; Extended A/C Model
Moore, Brian, 207n
Mormonism, 202
Morris, Thomas, 281n
Muyskens, James, 263n
natural theology, 69, 130, 171n, 175–176, 179n
the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, 227–240, 281–284, 350–351
Nature of Necessity, The, 26n, 35n, 115n, 461n
New Catholic Catechism, 202
Nicene Creed, 202
Nielsen, Kai, 100
Nietzsche, Friedrich, vi, ix, 58, 100, 123, 136, 142, 200, 291, 423, 427
Noble, Paul, 351
noetic effects of sin, the. See sin, noetic effects of
Nygren, Anders, 319n
O’Hair, Madalyn Murray, 42
O’Hear, Anthony, 90, 326–329, 333
Oakes, Edward T., 215n
objections to belief in God
de facto, vi–viii, x, 3, 167, 169, 191, 194
de jure objection, vii–ix, x, 67–69, 88, 93, 102, 105–108, 113–114, 116–117, 132–133, 135, 167, 169, 191, 194
relationship between the de jure and de facto objections, 190–191
obligation, epistemic. See Classical Deontologism
omniscience, 7n
ontological argument, the, 55n
Origen, 439
Ostler, Blake T., 202n
Ostow, Mortimer, 315n
Otte, Richard, 486
Otto, Rudolf, 183
Paul, the Apostle, 98–99, 167, 171, 177, 181, 198, 210, 216n, 243, 252n, 269, 280, 288, 290
Pauw, Amy Plantinga, 314
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 84, 174n, 215n
Penelhum, Terence, 91
Perrin, Norman, 276
Phillips, D. Z., 8n
Piper, John, 320
Plantinga, Cornelius, 320n, 490n
Plaskow, Judith, 150
pluralism. See religious pluralism
possibility
epistemic vs. logical, 168, 169n
postliberalism, 247n
on argumentation and defeaters, 426
and authorial intent, 385
and the death of epistemology, 72
as defeater for Christian belief, 422–423, 425–437
and historical conditionedness, 427–429
inconsistent with Christian belief?, 423–425
Preus, J. Samuel, 145n
Pringle, William, 399
objective, 105, 107, 188, 223n, 230, 272n
problem of evil, vi, xi, 115, 427, 459
goal of, 464
as nonargumentative defeater for Christian belief, 481–484
as a successful defeater for Christian belief, 480–481, 491
topics under the rubric of, 459n
proper function, ix, 133, 146, 154–155 See also warrant
properly basic belief. See belief in God, properly basic
Quine, W. V. O., 217, 221, 234
Quinn, Philip, 95n, 358, 366–367, 369–373, 460, 492
rationality, ix, 108–134, 179n, 185, 200, 241–242, 345–347
Alstonian practical rationality, 117–134, 286
Aristotelian, 109, 110, 113, 114, 116
and coherence, 112
and the deliverances of reason, 113–115
deontological rationality
external, 112–113, 200, 204, 246, 256–258, 356
internal, 110–112, 200, 203, 246, 255, 365, 492
means-end rationality, 115–117, 121
and theological disagreements, 255n
Rawls, John, 122
Real, the. See Hick, John
realism, theological, 144
“Reason and Belief in God”, 68, 82n, 93n, 136, 173n, 176n, 178, 213n
Reformation, the, 71
Reformed Epistemology, 200n
Reformed Scholasticism, 292
regeneration, 280, 299–300. See also salvation
Reid, Thomas, 97, 98, 118, 130, 147, 216, 218–227, 258, 386, 432
relativism
epistemic, 433
historical and cultural, 423, 427–429
religious experience, 180–184, 258
objections to belief in God receiving warrant from, 326–353
and arbitrariness of Christian belief, 441–44
and the arrogance/egoism of Christian belief, 447–456
effect on Christian belief, 456–457
as a probabilistic defeater for Christian belief, 441–442
resolution condition, 158–161. See also warrant
Rorty, Richard, 112n, 131, 208n, 221, 423n, 427, 437, 449
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 142, 193
Runzo, Joseph, 439n
Russell, Bertrand, 27, 42, 89, 114, 157, 185, 223, 227, 344, 361
Russell, Bruce, 466n
Ryan, Sharon, 159n
Sagan, Carl, 202n
Salmon, Nathan, 114n
Salmon, Wesley, 90
salvation, 201–202, 205, 280–282
and the affections, 208–213, 280, 295
original sin, 207
Sanders, E. P., 388, 397–398, 417
Schmidt, Wilhelm, 138n
Schweitzer, Albert, 418n
Scripture. See Bible, the
Scriven, Michael, 89
self-evidence, 75–76, 113–114, 128, 260–262
self-referential incoherence/inconsistency, 94–97, 446
semantic epiphenomenalism, 233–234
sensus divinitatis, 130, 131n, 139n, 148, 172–176, 178, 180, 182–184, 186, 199, 205, 214–216, 240, 245, 246n, 280–281, 305, 330, 334–335, 343, 347, 453, 455, 484–487, 490–492
resistance to, 205
Seraphim of Sarov, St., 292
serious actualism, 114
Sheehan, Thomas, 275n, 400n–402n
Shope, Robert, 156n
simplicity, 308
sin, x, 190, 199–240, 257–258, 280–283, 316, 427
and consequences of failing to know God, 217–240
and lack of knowledge, 227–240
noetic effects of, 172n, 179n, 189, 190, 206, 213–216, 280–282
as sloth, 215
skepticism, vii, 4, 218–227, 428
Smith, Huston, 404n
Smith, J. M., 232
Smith, John E., 100n
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 443
Sober, Elliott, 229n
Stark, Rodney, 193n
Steup, Matthias, 153n
Strauss, David, 393n–394n, 399
Stump, Eleonore, 82n, 402n, 493n, 494n
Swinburne, Richard, 90, 153n, 261n, 266n, 271n, 272–280, 336, 384n
Sudduth, Michael, 176n
suffering, 458, 493–494. See also problem of evil
sympathy, 147
Talbott, William, 363n
Tamburello, Dennis, 292n
Taylor, James, 153n
Teresa of Liseaux, 491n
Tertullian, 216
Testimonial Model, 266–267, 290–323. See also Extended A/C Model, the necessity of
testimony, 147, 186n, 215, 251–252, 258, 268, 374
and transfer of warrant, 348, 364, 377
theism, 202n
theistic arguments/proofs, 69, 131, 462–463
theodicy, 459
Thiering, Barbara, 400
Thomas, the Apostle, 254, 265–266
Trinity, the, 199, 319–320, 488, 489
Social Trinity, the, 320n
Troeltsch, Ernst, 390–395. See also historical biblical criticism, Troeltschian
truth, 216, 422–423, 436–437, 443–444
as human construction, 423, 429–436
Turner, Donald, 463n
Tyrell, James, 72
Van Cleve, James, 13n
van Fraassen, Bas, 177n, 210n, 227, 233n, 392n, 420n
van Til, Cornelius, 217
Vander Zee, Leonard, 481n
Verifiability Criterion of Meaning, 8, 34n
Vitz, Paul, 196n
Voltaire, François, 193
voluntarism
and affections, 310n
Vos, Arvin, 250n
Wainwright, William, 300n, 336, 351n
Wallace, Anthony F. C., 193n
warrant, ix, 135, 153–161, 167–198, 199–200, 204, 206, 241–242, 246, 346–351, 476
and cognitive mini/maxienvironments, 158–161, 256–257, 360, 480
and a congenial environment, 155
degrees of, 456
and design plan, 154, 156, 486
and evidential considerations, 477–478
and the F&M complaint, 161
and malfunctioning cognitive faculties, 286
and misleading evidence, 158–160
and proper basicality, 178–180
as proper function, 153–154, 155
relative to circumstances/environment, 428–429
and religious experience, 326–353
and resolution conditions, 157–161
and supernatural production of a belief, 245–246, 246n
Warrant: the Current Debate, ix, xii, 68, 71, 82n, 88n, 98, 99n, 104n, 109, 130n, 153, 222, 419n
Warrant and Proper Function, ix, x, xii, 21n, 68, 76n, 78n, 94n, 105n–106n, 110, 111, 113n, 146n–149n, 153, 154n–155n, 156, 159n, 161n, 183, 186n, 188n, 194, 229, 237, 238n, 251n, 258, 261n, 272n, 285n, 328, 332–333, 377n, 428, 435n, 472, 476n
Wells, G. A., 401
Westminster Catechism, 202, 317
Westphal, Merold, 9n, 14, 136n
Wilken, Robert, 439n
will, the, 204, 292. See also affections, religious; intellect and will, priority
Williams, Bernard, 317
Wilson, Warren, 193
wish fulfillment, vii, viii, 101, 139–140, 142, 194–198, 307, 315–316, 362–364, 368n See also Freud, Sigmund
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8n, 118, 432
Wolterstorff, Nicholas, xiii, 8n, 38n, 68n, 71n, 251n, 271n, 377n, 423n
Woozley, A. D., 74
Wykstra, Stephen, 90, 102, 466
Yale School, 247n
Yeago, David, 387n
Zagzebski, Linda, 82n
Zeis, John, 82n
Genesis
2 Samuel
Psalms
18 22 27:4 42:1-2 63:1 84:2 119:75-76 119:131
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Zechariah
Matthew
5:17-20 21:5 22:23 28:16-20 28:16-20
Luke
4:18-21 10:21 15:7 16:31 18:1-13 24:31-32
John
1 3:3 6:44 9:1-3 9:2 12:15 14:11 14:16-17 14:26 14:26 17 19:28-37 20:25 20:29 20:29
Acts
Romans
1 1 1 1 1:4 1:18-20 5:16 7:19 8:16 8:16-19 8:17 8:18 14 14:14
1 Corinthians
1:23 1:23-24 2:12-13 2:14 8:9 15:17
2 Corinthians
Ephesians
Colossians
2 Timothy
Hebrews
James
1 John
iii iv v vi vii viii ix x xi xii xiii xiv xv xvi 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 65 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 165 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495 496 497 498 499 500 501 502 503 504 505 506 507 508