Natural evil consists of any deformity within the natural world that leads to suffering such as: natural disasters, diseases, predatorial animals, and bodily weaknesses.  This article will argue that natural evil can be plausibly explained by appealing to the free will of angels.

According to traditional Judeo-Christian thought, God created angels and gave them the freedom to choose between good and evil.  Furthermore, it is possible that the angels’ freedom could extend to choosing what the laws of physics would be for the universe.¹

So some of the bad angels could have chosen laws of physics that the angels would know would result in natural evil. 

Of course, traditional monotheistic theology teaches that God is the only creator.  However, this explanation is not suggesting that there are other creators in the same sense that God is the creator (since only God gives things their existence and God is still the one creating the laws).  Rather it is suggesting that God did not entirely decide what the laws of physics would be, rather God put in place laws that were decided upon at least in part by the angels.²

One may wonder why God would allow this, but perhaps God wanted to allow the angels to help Him create the world (by helping decide the laws of physics) similar to how God wants to allow humans to co-create through procreation.  Co-creation allows creatures to participate in being like God.  In fact, it is part of God’s love to allow His creatures to participate in co-creating with Him, even though creatures may misuse that gift.

Of course, God could have limited the number of laws that the angels affected, but perhaps due to His love, God did not withhold His gift of co-creation from the angels, but rather He allowed the angels to help decide laws for throughout the universe.

Now the Judeo-Christian tradition does believe that God performs miracles that violate the laws of physics but if God worked miracles that violate the laws of physics all the time then God would simply be abrogating the laws that the angels decided upon.  Yet if the angels were truly given decision over what the laws would be and God were to choose to always override the harmful tendencies, then those tendencies would not have truly been put in place.  God would not have truly allowed the angels to co-create with Him. 

However God can sometimes choose to override the laws, but those are rare exceptions.  Perhaps God can only justify working a limited number of miracles in order to strengthen peoples’ faith and help them attain salvation³, but He cannot justify working miracles all the time, without overriding the tendencies that were put in place.⁴

One may still wonder why God did not just create everyone (humans and angels included) in heaven without the freedom to ever choose evil.  Yet, as has been argued by others, it would be unjust for God to force His creatures (human or angel) to conform their will to His without first giving them some chance at using their will as they choose.  So due to God’s justice, the first round of creation is where humans and (at least for some amount of time) angels can choose between good and evil.⁵

In conclusion, I think it is very reasonable to explain natural evil by appealing to some of the angels’ poorly choosing how to arrange the laws of physics.

I used to be a lawyer before entering seminary to prepare for the Catholic priesthood. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that I’m fascinated by questions about the “burden of proof” in religious questions. For example, does the burden of proof fall on the believer or the atheist? What sort of evidence is permissible to meet this burden of proof? Do “extraordinary” claims require extraordinary evidence? Should they meet an extraordinary burden of proof, above the burden required for other sorts of claims? Here are four ways that those questions are answered incorrectly:

Error #1: The burden of proof falls with theists, and not with atheists.

Frequently, atheists will claim that “atheism isn’t a belief,” and therefore doesn’t require evidence, and that the burden of proof falls solely with the believer. This is false. As Luke Muehlhauser at Common Sense Atheism explains, “I think the burden of proof falls on whoever makes a positive claim.” It’s true, this means that believers should be able to provide support for this, but it also means that if you disbelieve in God, you should also be able to support this belief:

“If you claim that Yahweh exists, it’s not my duty to disprove Yahweh. [….] But most intellectually-inclined atheists I know do not merely “lack” a belief in God – as, say, my dog lacks a belief in God. Atheists like to avoid the burden of proof during debates, so they say they merely “lack” a belief in God. But this is not what their writings usually suggest. No, most intellectual atheists positively believe that God does not exist. In fact, most of them will say – at least to other atheists – that it’s “obvious” there is no God, or that they “know” – as well as we can “know” anything – that God does not exist.
 
Thus, if the atheist wants to defend what he really believes, then he, too, has a burden of proof. He should give reasons for why he thinks that God almost certainly doesn’t exist.”

This is the critical distinction. To go from “I’m not convinced from the evidence that Christianity/theism is true” to “therefore, Christianity/theism is false” is a logical leap not supported by the evidence. Alvin Plantinga has a helpful illustration:

“[L]ack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.”

I don’t believe that there are an even number of stars. But I also don’t doubt that there are an even number of stars. Lack of evidence for X isn’t evidence of its opposite, and in this case, the weight of the evidence is perfectly 50-50.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways in which lack of evidence can be probative: if I claim that it’s been raining all afternoon, the lack of water on the ground would be evidence against my claim. So there’s no reason atheists couldn’t argue that, if God existed, we’d see X and Y, but don’t see those things, and therefore He doesn’t exist. That would be a logical proof, but would take actual intellectual legwork. The alternative of pretending to be agnostic (a phenomenon Muehlhauser rightly treats as widespread) is much easier. It just happens to be intellectually dishonest.

Error #2: Christian Beliefs are either scientifically-evaluable or non-provable / non-falsifiable.

Given that the party making a positive claim (either that there is a God, or that there isn’t) has the burden of proof, what counts as proof? Oftentimes, there’s a false dichotomy that truth-claims (like religious claims) are analyzable in the way that scientific questions are, or else they’re nonsense. Here’s Muehlhauser apparently falling into that trap:

“Christians have done a good job of making it impossible to disprove their God. Yahweh used to be hiding just above the clouds, from where he would throw rocks at the Amorites and do other fun stuff. Now he’s some kind of invisible, transcendent being we couldn’t possibly disprove. But we don’t have to. It’s the duty of Christians to show us some reason to think Yahweh exists. Christians have the burden of proof, because they are making a positive claim. The atheist merely says, “I see no reason to accept your claim, just like I see no reason to accept the claims of Scientology.”

If this is any indication, Muehlhauser’s understanding of Christianity and history is a big part of the problem. He assumes that we used to think that God was “hiding just above the clouds,” because he takes Joshua 10:10-11 embarrassingly literally to mean that God was on a cloud throwing rocks. Further, he claims that Christians did “a good job of making it impossible to disprove their God,” as if the transcendence of God was something we invented as an evasion from these brilliant atheist rebuttals (where does God sit on cloudless days? Shucks!).

In reality, Christian theology has been clear about God’s transcendence for the entirety of Christian history. God’s transcendence can also be shown to be metaphysically necessary from the work of pre-Christian philosophers like Aristotle. Further, you can trace God’s transcendence all the way back to Genesis 1:1, which says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” not “in the beginning, God sat on a cloud in the heavens and created the earth.” It’s true that, out of necessity, the Bible frequently uses anthropomorphic language to describe God and His actions, but what other language could we use? It’s also clear, from the very start, that much of this language is understood by author and reasonably-smart readers alike to be metaphorical and analogical. When God says in Exodus 19:4, “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself,” no reasonable person takes that to mean that Landroval swooped in and brought the Jews out of Egypt. After all, the prior 18 chapters just finished explaining how the Israelites escaped Egypt.

If you read the Bible by assuming that it is written by and for idiots, don’t be surprised if your Biblical exegesis is idiotic. This might seem like a side point (and admittedly is, somewhat), but Muehlhauser goes on from here to conclude that belief in the Christian God is like believing in a being like Odin, a categorical error only made possible by treating God like an artifact of this universe rather than the universe’s Creator.

So that’s part of the problem. The more important point here is Muehlhauser’s implicit admission that he doesn’t even know how to evaluate the Christian claim of a transcendent God. He needs to imagine that God is a silly rock-throwing cloud monster, because that’s the kind of being he understands how to analyze. Elsewhere, he writes that:

“Skepticism and critical thinking teach us important lessons: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Correlation does not imply causation. Don’t take authority too seriously. Claims should be specific and falsifiable."

Underlying this appears to be an attempt to analyze God the way that one would approach the question of whether or not quasars exists. Even the categories of “falsification” assume a particular approach to rational inquiry, an approach well-suited for the natural sciences, but often ill-suited outside of the realm for which it was invented. Take the principle of non-contradiction, for example: it’s a non-falsifiable, untestable logical axiom, but is true nevertheless. This is true of literally all logical axioms. (By the way, without these logical axioms, science is impossible, so this idea that all truth must be falsifiable can be shown to be false). The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism, while in no way favorable towards religion, acknowledges the incompleteness of this worldview:

“12 times 12 is 144 is something you can establish from the comfort of your armchair by reason alone. You can do this with other conceptual truths. It’s possible, for example, to figure out whether my great-grandmother’s uncle’s grandson must be my second cousin once removed by just unpacking these concepts and examining the logical relations that hold between them. Again this can be done from the comfort of an armchair. No empirical investigation is required. Or suppose an explorer claims to have discovered a four-sided triangle in some remote rainforest. Do we need to mount an expensive expedition to check whether this claim is true? No, again we can establish its falsity by conceptual, armchair methods.
 
So, even while acknowledging that science, as characterized here, is an extraordinarily powerful tool, let’s also acknowledge that other non-scientific but nevertheless rational methods also have their place when it comes to arriving at reasonable belief – including armchair methods. Science is merely one way – albeit a very important way – of arriving at reasonable beliefs.”

Given this, consider the kinds of claims that Christians make about God. Unlike, for examples, we’re not claiming that God is a creature that originated from this universe, came into power, and reshaped the universe. We’re saying that God is an uncreated Being (indeed, Being itself) and is the origin of all created reality. By definition, such a God isn’t going to be confined to the law of nature… laws He created. We’re making metaphysical claims, and Muehlhauser, like many atheists, is trying to evaluate them like physical claims. It’s true that we also believe that this God became man (without ceasing to be God), but this is a historical claim, and history doesn’t permit of scientific laboratory testing particularly well, either.

I’m not here attempting to prove either God’s existence or the truth of the Incarnation, only to say that those propositions aren’t claims that the natural sciences is equipped to handle, just as it’s not equipped to handle claims like “John Quincy Adams was a member of the Anti-Masonic Party” or “When an equal amount is taken from equals, an equal amount results” or “beauty is a transcendental.”

Error #3: Extraordinary claims logically require extraordinary evidence.

Carl Sagan was fond of quoting Marcello Truzzi’s saying (alluded to above, by Muehlhauser) that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” If this is meant as a description of the way we normally approach truth-claims, it’s true enough. We tend to hold things we find credible to a much lower burden of proof than things we find incredible. But trying to turn it into a logical rule is a disaster.

For starters, it renders incoherent results. Imagine a murder trial in which three people were in the room with the victim when he was shot, and forensics proves that there were two shooters. All three are brought up on trial. Using Truzzi’s standard, does this mean that the elevated burden of proof is on each of the three defendants (since there’s only a one in three chance that he’s guilty, making innocence more extraordinary in this case) or on the prosecution (because murder is an extraordinary sort of event)?

Worse, almost everything turns on what you consider “extraordinary,” a term that only appears objective (for example, a person who believed that all weather events were caused by the actions of the gods wouldn’t view such divine intervention as “extraordinary). In practice, this is an example of confirmation bias, which refers to “a person’s tendency to favor information that confirms their assumptions, preconceptions or hypotheses whether these are actually and independently true or not.” If something agrees with an atheist’s assumptions, it’s ‘ordinary,’ and held to one standard. If it disagrees, it’s ‘extraordinary,’ and held to a much higher standard.  All of us are prone to confirmation bias, but the “extraordinary claims / extraordinary evidence” mantra only serves to entrench it.

Error #4: Religious claims should be held to a higher burden of proof than other claims.

The final error I want to address is a permutation of the third one: it’s the idea that, as “extraordinary claims,” religious claims should be held to a a higher standard of proof than ordinary claims.

The normal standard for believing in something is what’s called a “50+1” standard. If you think of assent as balance between “belief” and “disbelief,” any tilting of the scales, however slight, points to the proper outcome. And this is how we normally use “belief,” to the point that it appears illogical and incoherent to do otherwise. G.E. Moore’s famous paradox is that statements like “It is raining and I don’t believe that it is raining” don’t mean anything. You’re affirming two contradictory statements. So, too, to say that “God probably exists, but I don’t believe He does” doesn’t appear to mean anything. And if the likelihood of God’s existence is above 50% (however slightly), then He probably exists.

Although apparently incoherent, this error actually points to an important feature of religious belief. Faith isn’t just an intellectual assent to the historical and metaphysical data. It’s also an act of trust, requiring an act of the will. No matter how clear the historical evidence of Jesus’ Resurrection, you can always choose to ignore or deny it. Pope St. Gregory the Great points out that this was even true of the Apostles who encountered the Resurrected Christ, which is why Jesus can still refer to Thomas’ faithful response as “belief” (John 20:29): “Thomas saw a human being, whom he acknowledged to be God, and said: My Lord and my God. Seeing, he believed; looking at one who was true man, he cried out that this was God, the God he could not see.”

This is an important dimension, because it’s easy to pretend that this is all exclusively on the level of the intellect, that belief and disbelief are motivated solely by the weight of the evidence (and that therefore, all wrong opinions in matters of faith are a matter of ignorance or simple mistake). When a person announces that they will choose not to believe in God even if the weight of evidence tips in His favor, they’re announcing something else is at hand.

Conclusions

So there you have it: (1) the burden of proof falls to the party making a claim (whether that claim is that God does or does not exist); (2) this burden should be met in a manner appropriate to the type of claims (so don’t expect scientific claims to be proven in the same way that historical ones are, for example); (3) requiring special evidence for claims you deem “extraordinary” opens the door for confirmation bias [and so you should be extremely cautious about doing so]; and (4) there’s no rational, disinterested reason to hold religious claims to a higher burden of proof than any other kinds of claims.
 
 
(Image credit: Valdosta Today)

Alvin Plantinga famously defends a version of the ontological argument that makes use of the notion of possible worlds. As is typically done, we might think of a “possible world” as a complete way that things might have been. In the actual world I am writing up this blog post, but I could have decided instead to go pour myself a Scotch. (Since it’s still morning, I won’t—I can wait an hour.) So, we might say that there is a possible world more or less like the actual world—Obama is still president, I still teach and write philosophy, and so forth—except that instead of writing up this blog post at this particular moment, I am pouring myself a Scotch. (Naturally there will be some other differences that follow from this one.) We can imagine possible worlds that are even more different or less different in various ways—a possible world where the Allies lost World War II, a possible world in which human beings never existed, a possible world exactly like the actual one except that the book next to me sits a millimeter farther to the right than it actually does, and so forth. Not everything is a possible world, though. There is no possible world where 2 + 2 = 5 or in which squares are round.

Philosophers make use of the notion of possible worlds in all sorts of ways. For example, it is sometimes suggested that we can analyze the essence of a thing in terms of possible worlds: What is essential to X is what X has in every possible world, what is non-essential is what X has in some worlds but not others. It sometimes suggested that modality in general can be analyzed in terms of possible worlds: A necessary truth is one that is true in every possible world, a possible truth one that is true in at least one possible world, a contingent truth one that is true in some worlds but not others, an impossible proposition one that is true in no possible world. Plantinga, again, makes use of the notion in order to reformulate the ontological argument famously invented by Anselm. We might summarize his version (presented in The Nature of Necessity and elsewhere) as follows:

1. There is a possible world W in which there exists a being with maximal greatness.
 
2. Maximal greatness entails having maximal excellence in every possible world.>
 
3. Maximal excellence entails omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection in every possible world.
 
4. So in W there exists a being which is omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect in every possible world.
 
5. So in W the proposition “There is no omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect being” is impossible.
 
6. But what is impossible in one possible world is impossible in every possible world.
 
7. So the proposition “There is no omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect being” is impossible in the actual world.
 
8. So there is in the actual world an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect being.

Plantinga famously concedes that a rational person need not accept this argument, and claims only that a rational person could accept it. The reason is that while he thinks a rational person could accept its first and key premise, another rational person could doubt it. One reason it might be doubted, Plantinga tells us, is that a rational person could believe that there is a possible world in which the property of “no-maximality”—that is, the property of being such that there is no maximally great being—is exemplified. And if this is possible, then the first and key premise of Plantinga’s argument is false. In short, Plantinga allows that while a reasonable person could accept his ontological argument, another reasonable person could accept instead the following rival argument:

1. No-maximality is possibly exemplified.
 
2. If no-maximality is possibly exemplified, then maximal greatness is impossible.
 
3. So maximal greatness is impossible.

In The Miracle of Theism, atheist J. L. Mackie argues that even this concession of Plantinga’s overstates the value of his ontological argument. For it is not at all clear, Mackie says, that a rational person can treat the question of whether to accept either Plantinga’s argument or its “no-maximality” rival as a toss-up, as if we would be within our epistemic rights to choose whichever one strikes our fancy. Why wouldn’t suspense of judgment in the face of such a deadlock, a refusal to endorse either argument, be the more rational option? Indeed, if anything it is the “no-maximality” argument that would be the more rational choice, Mackie suggests, in light of Ockham’s razor.

But though I do not myself endorse Plantinga’s argument, I think these objections from Mackie have no force, and that even Plantinga sells himself short. For it is simply implausible to suppose that, other things being equal, the key premises of Plantinga’s argument and its “no-maximality” rival are on an epistemic par. To see why, consider the following parallel claims:

U: There is a possible world containing unicorns.
 
NU: “No-unicornality,” the property of there being no unicorns in any possible world, is possibly exemplified.

Are U and NU on an epistemic par? Surely not. NU is really nothing more than a denial of U. But U is extremely plausible, at least if we accept the whole “possible worlds” way of talking about these things in the first place. It essentially amounts to the uncontroversial claim that there is no contradiction entailed by our concept of a unicorn. And the burden of proof is surely on someone who denies this to show that there is a contradiction. It would be no good for him to say “Well, even after carefully analyzing the concept of a unicorn I can’t point to any contradiction, but for all we know there might be one anyway, so NU is just as plausible a claim as U.” It is obviously not just as plausible, for a failed attempt to discover a contradiction in some concept itself provides at least some actual evidence to think the concept describes a real possibility, while to make the mere assertion that there might nevertheless be a contradiction is not to provide evidence of anything. The mere suggestion that NU might be true thus in no way stalemates the defender of U. All other things being equal, we should accept U and reject NU, until such time as the defender of NU gives us actual reason to believe it.

But the “no-maximality” premise of the rival to Plantinga’s ontological argument seems in no relevant way different from NU. It is really just the assertion that a maximally great being is not possible, and thus merely an assertion to the effect that Plantinga’s first and key premise is false. And while Plantinga’s concept of a maximally great being is obviously more complicated and harder to evaluate with confidence than the concept of a unicorn, it seems no less true in this case that merely to suggest that a maximally great being is not possible in no way puts us in any kind of deadlock. Unless someone has actually given evidence to think that Plantinga’s concept of a maximally great being entails a contradiction or is otherwise incoherent, the rational position (again, at least if we buy the whole “possible worlds” framework in the first place) would be to accept his key premise rather than the key premise of the “no-maximality” argument, and rather than suspending judgment.

(Mackie’s assumption that Ockham’s razor is relevant here—he speaks of not multiplying entities beyond necessity – also seems very odd to me. Appealing to Ockham’s razor is clearly in order when you are dealing with alternative explanations each of which is already known to be at least in principle possible, and are trying to weigh probabilities in light of empirical evidence. But questions about semantics, logical relationships, conceptual and metaphysical possibilities, and the like—the sorts of issues we are considering when trying to decide whether Plantinga’s key premise or its rival is correct—are not like that. The whole idea of applying Ockham’s razor to such issues seems to be a category mistake. But I won’t pursue the thought further here.)

Other objections to Plantinga are also oversold. There is, for example, the tired “parody objection” that critics have been trotting out against ontological arguments since Gaunilo, and which I suggested in a previous post have no force, at least against the most plausible versions of such arguments. For example, John Hick suggests (in his An Interpretation of Religion) that Plantinga’s reasoning could equally well be used to argue for the existence of a maximally evil being, one that is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally depraved in every possible world. The problem with this objection is that it assumes that good and evil are on a metaphysical par, and as I have had reason to note before, that is by no means an uncontroversial (or in my view correct) assumption.

But defending the idea that evil is a privation would require a defense of the more general, classical metaphysics on which it rests. And there lies the rub. For Plantinga is not a classical (i.e. Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic) metaphysician. That is reflected not only in the way he conceives of God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and “moral perfection”—I’ve noted before that Plantinga is a “theistic personalist” rather than a classical theist—but also in the more general metaphysical apparatus he deploys in presenting his ontological argument. From a classical metaphysical point of view, and certainly from an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view, the “possible worlds” approach is simply misguided from the start (for reasons I’ve also had occasion to discuss before). Many no doubt think that Plantinga’s argument is at least an improvement on Anselm’s. I think it is quite the opposite. In no way do I intend that as a slight against Plantinga; on the contrary, The Nature of Necessity is, as no one familiar with it needs me to point out, a testament to his brilliance. But it is also, like the best of the work of the moderns in general, a brilliant mistake. A sound natural theology must be grounded in a sound metaphysics, which means a classical (and preferably A-T) metaphysics. Within the context of a classical metaphysics, Anselm developed as deep and plausible an ontological argument as anyone ever has. But (so we A-T types think) even he couldn’t pull it off.
 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his blog, including this article, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 
 
(Image credit: Live Science)

Over the coming weeks, instead of exclusively posting articles asserting and defending a particular view, we'd also like to feature open-ended discussion posts that lay on the table a popular argument for or against God and then invite us to discuss it together, as a community, in the comment boxes.

Today, we'll begin with Alvin Plantinga's modal ontological argument for God. Plantinga is one of the most respected and influential philosophers today. He's the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and has written groundbreaking books on the problem of evil, God and science, and philosophical arguments for God.

His modal ontological argument for God relies on modal logic, which deals with the logic of possibility and necessity. Watch the nine-minute video below for a summary of the argument:

The video presents the argument like this:

Premise 1: It is possible that God exists.
Premise 2: If it is possible that God exists, then God exists in some possible worlds.
Premise 3: If God exists in some possible worlds, then God exists in all possible worlds.
Premise 4: If God exists in all possible worlds, then God exists in the actual world.
Premise 5: If God exists in the actual world, then God exists.
Conclusion: Therefore, God exists.

What's interesting about this argument is that it attempts to show that if God's existence is merely possible, then it would be necessary. Or to put it another way, the only way God couldn't exist is if his existence is impossible. Thus if Plantinga is right, any atheist who says "I don't believe God exists but it's at least possible" would, if he properly understands the argument and Plantinga's definition of God, be logically compelled to change his mind.

If the argument holds, it would also mean we can't say there's a 50%/50% chance of God existing, or that the odds are 10% or 90%. The only possibilities are 0% or 100%. Either God's existence is impossible (0%) or it's possible and therefore necessary (100%).

What do you think? Is the modal ontological argument for God a sound proof? If not, how does it fail?

In his brief and (mostly) tightly argued book God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga writes:

"[S]ome theologians and theistic philosophers have tried to give successful arguments or proofs for the existence of God.  This enterprise is called natural theology… Other philosophers, of course, have presented arguments for the falsehood of theistic beliefs; these philosophers conclude that belief in God is demonstrably irrational or unreasonable.  We might call this enterprise natural atheology."  (pp. 2-3)

With all due respect for Plantinga, I’ve always found the expression “natural atheology” pretty annoying, even when I was an atheist.  The reason is that, given what natural theology as traditionally understood is supposed to be, the suggestion that there is a kind of bookend subject matter called “natural atheology” is somewhat inept.  (As we will see, though, Plantinga evidently does not think of natural theology in a traditional way.)

Start with the “theology” part of natural theology.  “Theology” means “the science of God,” in the Aristotelian sense of “science” -- a systematic, demonstrative body of knowledge of some subject matter in terms of its first principles.  Of course, atheists deny that there is any science of God even in this Aristotelian sense, but for present purposes that is neither here nor there.  The point is that a science is what theology traditionally claims to be, and certainly aims to be.

Take the Scholastic theologian’s procedure.  First, arguments are developed which purport to demonstrate the existence of a first cause of things.  Next, it is argued that when we analyze what it is to be a first cause, we find that of its essence such a cause must be pure actuality rather than a mixture of act and potency, absolutely simple or non-composite, and so forth.  Third, it is then argued that when we follow out the implications of something’s being purely actual, absolutely simple, etc. and also work backward from the nature of the effect to the nature of the cause, the various divine attributes (intellect, will, power, etc.) all follow.  Then, when we consider the character of the created order as well as that of a cause which is purely actual, simple, etc., we can spell out the precise nature of God’s relationship to that order.  (For Aquinas this entails the doctrine of divine conservation and a concurrentist account of divine causality, as opposed to an occasionalist or deist account.)  And so forth.

Even someone who doubts that this sort of project can be pulled off can see its “scientific” character.  The domain studied is, of course, taken to be real, and its reality is defended via argumentation which claims to be demonstrative.  Further argumentation of a purportedly demonstrative character is put forward in defense of each component of the system, and the system is very large, purporting to give us fairly detailed knowledge not only of the existence of God, but of his essence and attributes and relation to the created order.  Moreover, the key background notions (the theory of act and potency, the analysis of causation, the metaphysics of substance, etc.) are tightly integrated into a much larger metaphysics and philosophy of nature, so that natural theology is by no means an intellectual fifth wheel, arbitrarily tacked on for merely apologetic purposes to an already complete and self-sufficient body of knowledge.

Rather, its status as the capstone of human knowledge is clear.  The natural sciences as we understand them today (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) are grounded in principles of the philosophy of nature, whose subject matter concerns what any possible natural science must take for granted.  Philosophy of nature in turn rests on deeper principles of metaphysics, whose subject matter is being as such (rather than merely material or changeable being, which is the subject matter of philosophy of nature; and rather than the specific sort of material or changeable world that actually exists, which is the subject matter of natural science).  Natural theology, in turn, follows out the implications of the fundamental notions of philosophy of nature and metaphysics (the theory of act and potency, etc.) and offers ultimate explanations.

Again, you don’t have to think any of this works in order to see that what it aspires to is a kind of science.  By contrast, what Plantinga calls “atheology” could not possibly be any kind of science, and doesn’t claim to be.  For the “atheologian” doesn’t claim to be studying some domain of reality and giving us systematic knowledge of it.  On the contrary, his entire aim is to show that there is no good reason to think the domain in question is real.  You can have a “science” only of what exists, not of what doesn’t exist.  Otherwise “aunicornology” would be just as much a science as ichthyology or ornithology is.  Ichthyology and ornithology are sciences because there are such things as fishes and birds, and there is systematic knowledge to be had about what fishes and birds are like.  “Aunicornology” is not a science, because there is in the strict sense no such thing as a systematic body of knowledge of the nonexistence of unicorns, or of the nonexistence of anything else for that matter.  Suppose someone denied the existence of fishes and tried to offer arguments for their nonexistence.  It would hardly follow that he is committed to practicing something called “aichthyology” in the sense of a systematic body of knowledge of the nonexistence of fish.

Note that I am not saying anything here that an atheist couldn’t agree with.  The claim is not that one couldn’t have solid arguments for atheism (though of course I don’t think there are any).  The point is rather that even if there were solid arguments, they wouldn’t give you any kind of “science” in the sense of a systematic body of knowledge of some domain of reality.  Rather, what they would do is to show that some purported domain of reality doesn’t really exist.
 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his blog, including this article, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.

A religion typically has both practical and theoretical aspects.  The former concern its moral teachings and rituals, the latter its metaphysical commitments and the way in which its practical teachings are systematically articulated.

An atheist will naturally reject not only the theoretical aspects, but also the practical ones, at least to the extent that they presuppose the theoretical aspects.  But different atheists will take different attitudes to each of the two aspects, ranging from respectful or even regretful disagreement to extreme hostility.  And distinguishing these various possible attitudes can help us to understand how the New Atheism differs from earlier varieties.

Consider first the different attitudes an atheist might take to the theoretical side of a religion.  There are at least three such attitudes, which, going from the most hostile to the least hostile, could be summarized as follows:

1. Religious belief has no serious intellectual content at all. It is and always has been little more than superstition, the arguments offered in its defense have always been feeble rationalizations, and its claims are easily refuted.
 
2. Religious belief does have serious intellectual content, has been developed in interesting and sophisticated ways by philosophers and theologians, and was defensible given the scientific and philosophical knowledge available to previous generations. But advances in science and philosophy have now more or less decisively refuted it. Though we can respect the intelligence of an Aquinas or a Maimonides, we can no longer take their views seriously as live options.
 
3. Religious belief is still intellectually defensible today, but not as defensible as atheism. An intelligent and well-informed person could be persuaded by the arguments presented by the most sophisticated contemporary proponents of a religion, but the arguments of atheists are at the end of the day more plausible.

Obviously one could take one of these attitudes towards some religions, and another of them towards other religions.  For example, a given atheist might take a type 1 atheist position with respect to Christianity and a type 2 atheist position with respect to Buddhism (or whatever).  Or he might take a type 1 attitude towards some versions of Christianity but a type 2 or type 3 attitude towards other versions of Christianity.

Now, among well-known atheists, it seems to me that Quentin Smith is plausibly to be regarded as taking a type 3 attitude toward Christianity, at least as Christianity is represented by prominent philosophers of religion like William Lane Craig or Alvin Plantinga. Keith Parsons, by contrast, seems to take at best a type 2 attitude towards Christianity and maybe even a type 1 attitude.  And Jerry Coyne seems almost certainly to take a type 1 attitude, though perhaps on a good day and with respect to at least some varieties of religious belief he’d move up to type 2.  (I’m happy to be corrected by Smith, Parsons, or Coyne if I’ve got any of them pegged wrong.)

Now let’s consider three different attitudes an atheist could take toward the practical side of a religion, going again from the most hostile to the least hostile:

A. Religious practice is mostly or entirely contemptible and something we would all be well rid of. The ritual side of religion is just crude and pointless superstition. Religious morality, where it differs from secular morality, is sheer bigotry.  Even where certain moral principles associated with a particular religion have value, their association with the religion is merely an accident of history. Moreover, such principles tend to be distorted by the religious context.  They certainly do not in any way depend on religion for their justification.
 
B. Religious practice has a certain admirable gravitas and it is possible that its ritual and moral aspects fulfill a real human need for some people. We can treat it respectfully, the way an anthropologist might treat the practices of a culture he is studying. But it does not fulfill any universal human need, and the most intelligent, well educated, and morally sophisticated human beings certainly have no need for it.
 
C. Religious practice fulfills a truly universal or nearly universal human need, but unfortunately it has no rational foundation and its metaphysical presuppositions are probably false. This is a tragedy, for the loss of religious belief will make human life shallower and in other ways leave a gaping void in our lives which cannot plausibly be filled by anything else. It may even have grave social consequences. But it is something we must find a way to live with, for atheism is intellectually unavoidable.

Here, too, a given atheist might of course take attitude A towards some religions or some forms of a particular religion, while taking attitude B or C towards others.  Once again, Jerry Coyne seems to be an example of an atheist whose attitude toward religion lays more or less at the most negative end (A).  Perhaps Stephen Jay Gould took something like attitude B.  Atheists of a politically or morally conservative bent typically take either attitude B or attitude C (though I know at least one prominent conservative who is probably closer to attitude A).  Walter Kaufmann is another good example of an atheist (or at least an agnostic) who took something like attitude B towards at least some forms of religion.  Indeed, he seemed to regard religion as something that speaks to deep human needs and whose moral aspects are of great and abiding philosophical interest.

Now these two sets of possible attitudes can obviously be mixed in a number of ways.  That is to say, a given atheist might take a more negative attitude towards the theoretical side of a given religion and a more positive attitude towards its practical side, or vice versa.  And he might take different mixtures of attitudes towards different religions or forms of religion.  For instance, he might take attitudes 2 and C towards some kinds of religious belief, and 1 and A towards other kinds.  Thus we could classify atheists according to their combinations of attitudes towards the practical and theoretical sides of religion or of a particular religion—A1, B3, C2, and so forth.

An A1 atheist, then, would be the most negative sort, especially if he took an A1 attitude towards most or all forms of religion.  A C3 atheist would be the most positive.  At different times during my own years as an atheist, I would say that I tended to take either a B or C attitude towards the practical side of religion, and perhaps attitude 2 towards the theoretical side (at least until the latter part of my atheist years, when I started to move to 3 before finally giving up atheism).  No doubt I had moments when I probably came across as more of an attitude 1 and/or attitude A type atheist with respect to at least some forms of religious belief—it’s easier to remember specific arguments with people than what one’s general attitude was during a given year, say—but overall I’d say that I probably hovered around B2 territory for at least much of my time as an atheist. (Walter Kaufmann was one of my heroes in those days.  Indeed, Kaufmann’s attitude towards Christianity—which was more negative than his attitude towards other religions—influenced my own, and no doubt helped delay my eventual return to the Church.)

I find that atheists who fall on the most negative ends of these scales—A1 territory—are invariably the ones who are the least well-informed about what the religions they criticize actually believe, and the least rational when one tries to discuss the subject with them. And when you think about it, even before one gets into the specifics it is pretty clear that A1 is prima facie simply not a very reasonable attitude to take about at least the great world religions.  To think that it is reasonable, you have to think it plausible that the greatest minds of entire civilizations—Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Buddha, Adi Shankara, Ramanuja, et al.—had for millennia been defending theoretical and practical positions that were not merely mistaken but were in fact nothing more than sheer bigotry and superstition, more or less rationally groundless and morally out of sync with the deepest human needs.  And that simply isn’t plausible.  Indeed, it’s pretty obviously ridiculous.  Even if all religious belief turned out to be wrong, it simply is not at all likely that its key aspects—and especially those aspects that recur in most or all religions—could have survived for so long across so many cultures and attracted the respect of so many intelligent minds unless they had some significant appeal both to our intellectual and moral natures.

Hence a reasonable atheist should acknowledge that it is likely that attitudes 2 or 3 and B or C are the more defensible attitudes to take towards at least the ideas of the greatest religious thinkers and the most highly developed systems of religious thought and practice.

When one considers the prima facie implausibility of the A1 attitude together with the ill-informed smugness and irrationality of many of those who approximate it, it is pretty clear that its roots are not intellectual but emotional—that it affords those beholden to it a sense of superiority over others, an enemy on which to direct their hatreds and resentments, a way to rationalize their rejection of certain moral restraints they dislike, and so forth.  In other words, A1 atheism is often exactly the sort of ill-informed bigotry and wish-fulfillment A1 atheists like to attribute to religious believers.

And here’s the thing: If there is anything new about the New Atheism, it is the greater prominence of atheists who at least approximate the A1 stripe.  In Walter Kaufmann’s day, A1 atheism was represented by marginal, vulgar cranks like Madalyn Murray O’Hair.  Now, people with similar attitudes like Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Myers, and Coyne are by no means marginal, but widely regarded as serious thinkers about religion.  This is the reverse of intellectual progress.  And we know what Walter Kaufmann would have thought of it.
 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
(Image credit: Religion News)

NOTE: Today's post is in response to Steven Dillon's post, "Why I Don't Think God Exists."

 
I’d like to begin responding to Steven Dillon’s guest post on God’s existence by complimenting his thoughtful and candid writing. I especially appreciated his opening paragraph where, with great vulnerability, Steven acknowledged that he wished God existed.

Some atheists desire just the opposite. The philosopher Thomas Nagel admitted in his book, The Last Word:

“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

By admitting his preference for an all-loving, all-powerful Father who brings life and order to the universe, Steven implicitly confirms his openness to God’s existence, a sign that he hasn't a priori rejected the possibility of God.

But as we all know, wishing something to be true doesn’t make it true. Steven offers what he considers a strong argument against God, one that presumably prevents him from believing. He outlines it this way:

Premise 1: If God exists, there are things that he will have had to have done.
 
Premise 2: God would not do at least one of these things.
 
Conclusion: God does not exist.

After offering this syllogism, Steven moves on to defend its two premises. Regarding the first, he states:

“God is traditionally conceived of as being perfectly good and the ultimate source, ground, or originating cause of everything that can have an ultimate source, ground, or originating cause. . .
 
Moreover, nothing that has happened will have happened without his permission. Each of us would be under his care as he chose to sustain us in existence from moment to moment.”

I commend Steven for accurately defining God as “perfectly good” (though classical theists would likely prefer “the Perfect Good”) as well as “the ultimate source, ground, or originating cause of everything that can have an ultimate source, ground, or originating cause.” No problems there. Moreover, Steven rightly notes that “nothing that has happened will have happened without [God’s] permission.” This aligns with Christian's affirmation of God’s ultimate sovereignty.

However, it’s difficult to see how the above points support or are even relevant to Steven’s first premise. Claiming there are things God “will have had to have done” is to assume some binding duty outside of and above God—some requiring authority which assigns duties to God (like a mother mandating her child to perform certain tasks). Yet this contradicts Steven’s own description of God as “the ultimate source, ground, or originating cause.” God can’t be the ultimate ground of morality and responsible to a higher moral authority. That’s a self-contradiction.

On the other hand, if Steven simply means that God has to perform or refrain from certain moral acts because of his nature (e.g., that God has to love his creation because he is all-loving), then that’s an obvious and unhelpful tautology. It’s difficult to determine which of these two scenarios Steven meant, but it doesn’t seem either supports his first premise.

The real crux of Steven’s argument, however, begins in his defense of his second premise. There he claims:

“If God exists, then due to his role as the ultimate cause, he will have had to have given his permission for every single thing that has ever occurred, including . . . the Holocaust . . . [and] every heinous count of abuse that children have been subjected to. But, this seems beneath God and more like the track record of a morally impoverished deity.”

This is, of course, all true. If God is all-powerful, and if nothing occurs without God’s permission, he will have had to permit these heinous and seemingly indefensible tragedies. It also might seem, from our limited perspective, that permitting such acts would be “beneath God.”

But from there it does not follow that God has no good justification for permitting them.

Christians have consistently pointed out that because of God’s unique, metaphysical position, beyond space and time, he can have morally justifiable reasons to allow certain acts of pain and suffering—reasons that we're just not privy to. Just as we allow our children to experience darkness and hurt sometimes when we know it will bring about a greater good, God could have good reasons to permit apparently heinous acts. (Note: I’m not arguing here that God necessarily does have good reasons in any specific case, only that there’s no logical reason why he couldn’t have good reasons to permit evils in general, reasons we're just not aware of.)

Steven goes on to say:

“Typically, you should not allow children under your care to get beaten and molested. Perhaps there could be an exception to this rule, probably in what I’m guessing is a farfetched scenario. But, it is still a rule, and it thus expresses what is normally the case. To argue against this is to adopt the disturbing position that it is usually not wrong to allow children under your care to get beaten and molested.”

The first two sentences are true and agreeable, but the third does not logically follow. To claim that in some cases it might be possible for someone to have a morally justifiable reason for permitting an evil like child abuse does not necessitate believing that “it is usually not wrong to allow children under your care to get beaten and molested.” That’s simply a non sequitur.

It should be pointed out here that, once again, Steven has failed to provide any support for his second premise. It’s not clear how he supports the claim, “God would not do at least one of these things [that he has to do].” Steven never explains why it’s logically impossible for God to have morally justifiable reasons to allow suffering in one, many, or all cases.

Moving on to his conclusion, Steven acknowledges that his argument isn’t airtight, and thus not logically stable. He candidly admits:

“For all its beauty, our world just seems too ugly to include God in it. I certainly won’t pretend like this is a rationally undefeatable argument, but I also don’t think it’s anything like a pushover.”

I agree with Steven that his argument is not “anything like a pushover.” I agree with Thomas Aquinas who famously concluded that the “problem of evil” constitutes one of only two serious arguments against the existence of God.

I also agree with Steven that his argument is rationally defeatable. For example, Steven claims “our world just seems to ugly to include God in it.” Besides the fact that ugliness in the world is not incompatible with God—Christians have a perfectly logical explanation for moral ugliness: Original Sin—there’s a large difference between what seems to be true and what really is. For example, it may seem to be a remarkable stroke of luck that I was dealt two royal flushes in a row. But as my perspective widens and I’m given more background information, I learn the deck was stacked beforehand—a fact I wasn’t in position to previously know. Thus my perception changes: an apparent truth becomes, in fact, an illusion.

The same holds in the case of evil. Neither Steven, nor I, nor anyone in this world are in the privileged epistemic position to determine whether God has good reasons to allow evil. We simply can’t see the entirety of space and time (past, present, and future) the way God can. We can’t perceive the “butterfly effect” of events that may emerge out of a tragic event. Therefore we must acknowledge, in humility, that we can’t necessarily suppose “what seems to be the case” regarding the moral permissibility of allowing evil may, in fact, not be the case. We must acknowledge that God could have good reasons for allowing evil that we're just unable to glimpse.

Before wrapping up his article, Steven asks:

“How shall a theist respond to this argument? Is it not normally wrong to allow children under your care to be abused? Are we not under God's care? Or perhaps she will simply say the arguments for God’s existence are just too strong.”

To answer Steven’s three questions in turn: it is normally wrong to allow children under your care to be abused (note: God normally does not allow the children under his care to be abused); we are under God’s care; and it’s true that other arguments for God’s existence (like the arguments from contingency, fine tuning, first cause, etc.) are very strong.

Yet none of those three questions reveal how most Christians would answer Steven’s primary argument. The simplest and strongest response, as I’ve noted above, is this:

There is no logical contradiction between an all-loving, all-powerful God who permits evil in the world. To deny this, an atheist would have to show definitively that God could not have morally justifiable reasons for permitting evil in any circumstance. And since we’re in no position to judge whether God has such reasons, the existence of evil (i.e., pain, suffering, abuse, etc.) simply does not pose a strong argument against God’s existence.

In Steven's final paragraph, he writes:

“However we might respond to [the problem of evil], keep in mind that it won’t do to argue that God might allow things like the Holocaust, or human trafficking, or that God could have good reason for doing so. No has said that he couldn’t, that’s not the issue at hand. What needs to be shown is that God would allow these things, theists will need to take the risk of identifying the reason why God would allow the Holocaust, or human trafficking, and seeing whether that identification can stand to reason.”

I'm happy that Steven concedes that God could have good reasons to permit certain evils. But then he makes a subtle, yet significant move in his final sentences. He attempts to shift the burden of proof onto theists, challenging them to disprove his argument against God, instead of assuming the burden himself—instead of marshaling his own evidence in support of his own claims.

But the theist is under no such responsibility. If Steven claims that the existence of evil is logically or evidentially incompatible with God’s existence, he needs to show why. It won’t suffice simply to demand that theists show how God and evil co-exist. To say it another way, it’s fallacious to make a positive claim and then demand others disprove your claim—you have to provide evidence yourself! This is precisely why atheists won’t allow Christians to say, “God exists! And if you don’t agree, you have to show why he doesn’t exist!”

In the end, the honest theist can respond, “Look, we don’t know why God chose to allow the Holocaust. We also don’t know why he chooses to allow human trafficking. We can point to some obvious goods that result—like the gift of free will, a good that would be undermined if God stepped in, usurped human action, and disallowed the Holocaust. But in the end, we’re just not in a position to judge whether God has morally justifiable reasons to allow these things."

That admitted ignorance, a result of our limited knowledge and perspective, does not imply God’s non-existence. It’s simply a fact that we’re in no place to judge the moral permissibility of God’s actions.

For all of the reasons above, Steven’s argument fails. He does not provide substantial support for either of his two premises, and he does not show why evil logically contradicts God’s existence.

(For a longer response to Steven’s claim, I suggest reading Alvin Plantinga’s groundbreaking book, God, Freedom, and Evil. That book has caused many well-known atheists like J.K. Mackie to say, “We [atheists] can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically contradictory with one another.” I also highly recommend chapters six and seven in Trent Horn’s new book, Answering Atheism.)
 
 

(Image credit: Earthy Mysticism)

Since its release last November, Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists has quickly become one of the most popular new books on atheism (as of now it has 200 reviews on amazon.com). As someone who has also recently written a book on atheism, though from a far different perspective, I was eager to see Boghossian’s method for “creating an atheist.” In this book review I’ll cover the good, the bad, and the ugly in A Manual for Creating Atheists.

The Good

 
Surprisingly, this book isn’t about creating atheists...per se. According to Boghossian,

“The goal of this book is to create a generation of Street Epistemologists: people equipped with an array of dialectical and clinical tools who actively go into the streets, the prisons, the bars, the churches, the schools, and the community – into any and every place the faithful reside—and help them abandon their faith and embrace reason.”

Epistemology is a discipline within philosophy that focuses on defining knowledge and analyzing how we know what we know. Rather than blindly shout conclusions (which Boghossian no doubt thinks street preachers do), a “street epistemologist” helps others reliably acquire knowledge about the world. When it comes to that goal he’ll find no opposition from me.

Boghossian’s strength lies in his treatment of the Socratic method, or the artful use of questions in order to lead someone to a particular conclusion. This appears to be something he has a lot of first-hand experience in using. According to Portland State University’s website (where Boghossian teaches), he earned a doctorate in education while developing Socratic techniques to help prison inmates increase their reasoning abilities in order to see the error of their ways and to hopefully commit fewer crimes in the future. Boghossian’s ability to use the Socratic method is on display in most of the chapters through sample dialogues between himself and people who exhibit “poor reasoning abilities.”

Boghossian also gives his would-be street epistemologists advice that I would also give to anyone learning apologetics—you don’t need an answer for every objection and you should humbly admit ignorance when it occurs. In Boghossian’s words, “You need to become comfortable in not knowing and not pretending to know...“

But Boghossian’s street epistemologists have a very specific mission beyond just helping people think more clearly—“Your new role is that of an interventionist. Liberator. Your target is faith. Your pro bono clients are individuals who’ve been infected by faith.”

And that’s where the book starts to go downhill.

The Bad

 
Throughout the book Boghossian says that the quickest way to make someone an atheist is to attack not their religion or their idea of God, but their faith. This is because faith is ultimately what grounds all religious claims. So what is faith? According to Boghossian, faith is belief without sufficient evidence because if you had the proper amount of evidence then you wouldn’t need faith. I’d respond by saying that religious faith is a trust in God and generic “faith” is just a trust in someone or something. For example, we have “faith” that the laws of nature are uniform across time and space even though we don’t have nearly enough evidence to confirm that belief (see the problem of induction).

Now, Boghossian vehemently denies faith is a kind of trust and claims it is instead a kind of knowledge. I disagree and would simply say that faith is the way people justify their claims of religious knowledge. “How do you know Jesus lives?” The believer might say in response, “I have faith in what the Bible or the Church says” or “I have faith in what Jesus has revealed to me in my heart.” Clearly faith is just a trust in a certain kind of evidence that is used to justify religious claims, be it testimonial or experiential.

Boghossian also gives the issue a rather nasty spin when he says faith is, “pretending to know what you don’t know.” The use of the word “pretending” seems inaccurate because it assumes the religious person knows deep down that his beliefs are not justified and he is engaging in a kind of malicious charade. This stands in contrast to the person who "thinks he knows what he knows but is actually mistaken." When it comes to false religious beliefs, I think the overwhelming majority of those beliefs are a product of "thinks he knows, but is mistaken" instead of "pretends he knows, but is wrong."

So this is the main issue Boghossian must answer, “Is the faith religious people have justified? Do they have a rational basis for holding these beliefs?”

I’ll admit sometimes they might not, but you need a serious argument to say religious belief is never justified. Boghossian’s main argument for the claim they are never justified is that because knowledge acquired by faith arrives at contradictory conclusions, such as the Christian’s affirmation of Jesus as the Son of God and the Muslim’s denial of that claim, this means that faith leads many people into error and so it can’t be trusted. But by that logic, reason is unreliable because philosophers use it and arrive at very different conclusions about all sorts of things. All a lack of consensus proves is that some people make faulty inferences based on faith, no that we shouldn’t have faith in either religious testimony or religious experiences.

I also didn’t think that Boghossian interacted enough with Alvin Plantinga (who he refers to as a “Christian apologist” instead of as one of the world’s most famous philosophers of religion). Plantinga’s reformed epistemology claims that if God exists then religious belief in God is justified because God has the ability to make belief in him “properly basic,” or justified apart from inferences based on evidence. In response, Boghossian simply tosses out the “Great Pumpkin” objection to reformed epistemology (an objection Plantinga himself has addressed) and calls it a day. But because the justification of “faith-based” beliefs is the central topic of Boghossian’s book, I think his reply to this kind of epistemology should have been more extensive.

Refutations That Are Greatly Exaggerated

 
What if the street epistemologist encounters someone who has “given a reason for the hope that is within him” (1 Peter 3:15) and doesn’t just rely on a gut feeling?  According to Boghossian, the street epistemologist needn’t worry about those reasons because,

“in the last 2400 years of intellectual history, not a single argument for the existence of God has withstood scrutiny. Not one. Aquinas’s five proofs, fail. Pascal’s Wager, fail. Anselm’s ontological argument, fail. The fine-tuning argument, fail. The kalam cosmological argument, fail. All refuted. All failures.”

That’s quite a claim. I was excited to turn to the footnote and see the evidence for this claim, but when I got there I was dumbfounded. Aquinas’ arguments are simply described. Boghossian neither critiques the arguments nor even provides a reference to such a critique such as Anthony Kenny’s book on the subject or even the terrible critiques Dawkins offers in The God Delusion (although I believe critiques like these have been ably answered by scholars like Ed Feser).

According to Boghossian, Victor Stenger is said to have refuted the fine-tuning argument in his 2011 book The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, but other writers have posted their own rebuttals to his arguments. In addition, Stenger doesn’t refute the fine-tuning argument so much as he attacks its central premise that the universe is finely tuned for life. In doing so, he goes against other well-known non-theistic cosmologists (like Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees) who at least accept that the universe is fine-tuned for life (even though they don’t think God is the fine-tuner). This should give us caution about Stenger’s conclusions.

In regards to the kalam cosmological argument, Boghossian simply says, “The possibility that the universe always existed cannot be ruled out” and then calls this the “death-knell” of the argument. He makes this claim without bothering to critique the scientific and philosophical evidence for the finitude of the past or even reference someone who has done that (like Wes Morriston).

I was hoping that chapter 7, which is called “anti-apologetics 101,” would provide at least some solid answers to arguments in defense of the faith, but here too I was sorely disappointed.¹ In answer to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing,” Boghossian simply quotes Adolf Grunbaum and says there’s no reason to think a state of something has to be explained and pure nothingness does not. To me this just shows a woeful lack of understanding of both the principle of sufficient reason and the philosophers who have addressed the issue.

While there are serious and thoughtful critiques of natural theology, Boghossian fails to make one and, distressingly, doesn’t seem to even be aware of such critiques.

The Ugly

 
Finally, the anti-religious rhetoric in the book is over-the-top. Boghossian says that if a street epistemologist doesn’t convince someone to give up his faith, then the person is either secretly giving up his faith while trying to “save face” or the person is literally brain damaged (chapter 3). In a chapter called “Containment Protocols,” Boghossian says we should stigmatize religious claims like racist claims, treat faith like a kind of contagious mental illness that should be recognized by medical professionals, read apologist’s books but buy them used so they don’t make a profit (“Enjoy a McDonald’s ice cream courtesy of the royalty from my purchase of your book, Pete!”), and promote children’s television shows where “Epistemic Knights” do battle against “Faith Monsters.”

The advice I would give atheists who are interested in this book would be to model the Socratic approach Boghossian teaches but don’t use his rhetoric when you’re talking to believers. For believers, I’d say that this is a good window into the attitude of popular “skeptic-based atheism.” Knowing what’s in this book can help you explain to the “street epistemologist” that you aren’t brain damaged. Instead, you have good reasons to think that what you believe is true and the street epistemologist should examine those reasons with an open mind and charitable attitude.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.

We'd also like to note that Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his own blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 

 
As many friends and readers know, I was an atheist for about a decade—roughly the 1990s, give or take. Occasionally I am asked how I came to reject atheism. I briefly addressed this in The Last Superstition. A longer answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.

I was brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was about 13 or 14. Hearing, from a non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time—“That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc.—I was mesmerized, and convinced, seemingly for good. Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise—sola scriptura itself—has absolutely nothing to be said for it. Unfortunately it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that. Such arguments can survive even the complete loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends.

But I was still a theist for a time, though that wouldn’t survive my undergrad years. Kierkegaard was my first real philosophical passion, and his individualistic brand of religiosity greatly appealed to me. But the individualistic irreligion of Nietzsche would come to appeal to me more, and for a time he was my hero, with Walter Kaufmann a close second. (I still confess an affection for Kaufmann. Nietzsche, not so much.) Analytic philosophy would, before long, bring my youthful atheism down to earth. For the young Nietzschean the loss of religion is a grand, civilizational crisis, and calls for an equally grand response on the part of a grand individual like himself. For the skeptical analytic philosopher it’s just a matter of rejecting some bad arguments, something one does quickly and early in one’s philosophical education before getting on to the really interesting stuff. And that became my “settled” atheist position while in grad school. Atheism was like belief in a spherical earth—something everyone in possession of the relevant facts knows to be true, and therefore not worth getting too worked up over or devoting too much philosophical attention to.

But it takes some reading and thinking to get to that point. Kaufmann’s books were among my favorites, serious as they were on the “existential” side of disbelief without the ultimately impractical pomposity of Nietzsche. Naturally I took it for granted that Hume, Kant, et al. had identified the main problems with the traditional proofs of God’s existence long ago. On issues of concern to a contemporary analytic philosopher, J. L. Mackie was the man, and I regarded his book The Miracle of Theism as a solid piece of philosophical work. I still do. I later came to realize that he doesn’t get Aquinas or some other things right. (I discuss what he says about Aquinas in Aquinas.) But the book is intellectually serious, which is more than can be said for some books written by the “New Atheists.” Antony Flew’s challenge to the intelligibility of various religious assertions may have seemed like dated “ordinary language” philosophy to some, but I was convinced there was something to it. Kai Nielsen was the “go to” guy on issues of morality and religion. Michael Martin’s Atheism: A Philosophical Justification was a doorstop of a book, and a useful compendium of arguments. I used to wonder with a little embarrassment whether my landlord, who was religious but a nice guy, could see that big word “ATHEISM” on its spine when he’d come to collect the rent, sitting there sort of like a middle finger on the bookshelf behind me. But if so he never raised an eyebrow or said a word about it.

The argument from evil was never the main rationale for my atheism; indeed, the problem of suffering has only gotten really interesting to me since I returned to the Catholic Church. (Not because the existence of suffering poses a challenge to the truth of classical theism—for reasons I’ve given elsewhere, I think it poses no such challenge at all—but because the role various specific instances of suffering actually play in divine providence is often really quite mysterious.) To be sure, like any other atheist I might have cited the problem of suffering when rattling off the reasons why theism couldn’t be true, but it wasn’t what primarily impressed me philosophically. What really impressed me was the evidentialist challenge to religious belief. If God really exists there should be solid arguments to that effect, and there just aren’t, or so I then supposed. Indeed, that there were no such arguments seemed to me something which would itself be an instance of evil if God existed, and this was an aspect of the problem of evil that seemed really novel and interesting.

I see from a look at my old school papers that I was expressing this idea in a couple of essays written for different courses in 1992. (I think that when J. L. Schellenberg’s book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason appeared in 1993 I was both gratified that someone was saying something to that effect in print, and annoyed that it wasn’t me.) Attempts to sidestep the evidentialist challenge, like Alvin Plantinga’s, did not convince me, and still don’t. My Master’s thesis was a defense of “evidentialism” against critics like Plantinga. I haven’t read it in years, but I imagine that, apart from its atheism and a detail here or there, I’d still agree with it.

I was also greatly impressed by the sheer implausibility of attributing humanlike characteristics to something as rarefied as the cause of the world. J. C. A. Gaskin’s The Quest for Eternity had a fascinating section on the question of whether a centre of consciousness could coherently be attributed to God, a problem I found compelling. Moreover, the very idea of attributing moral virtues (or for that matter moral vices) to God seemed to make no sense, given that the conditions that made talk of kindness, courage, etc. intelligible in human life could not apply to Him. Even if something otherwise like God did exist, I thought, He would be “beyond good and evil”—He would not be the sort of thing one could attribute moral characteristics to, and thus wouldn’t be the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (Richard Swinburne’s attempt to show otherwise did not work, as I argued in another school paper.) The Euthyphro problem, which also had a big impact on me, only reinforced the conclusion that you couldn’t tie morality to God in the way that (as I then assumed) the monotheistic religions required.

Those were, I think, the main components of my mature atheism: the conviction that theists could neither meet nor evade the evidentialist challenge; and the view that there could be, in any event, no coherent notion of a cause of the world with the relevant humanlike attributes. What is remarkable is how much of the basis I then had for these judgments I still find compelling. As I would come to realize only years later, the conception of God I then found so implausible was essentially a modern, parochial, and overly anthropomorphic “theistic personalist” conception, and not the classical theism to which the greatest theistic philosophers had always been committed. And as my longtime readers know, I still find theistic personalism objectionable. The fideism that I found (and still find) so appalling was, as I would also come to see only later, no part of the mainstream classical theist tradition either. And while the stock objections raised by atheists against the traditional arguments for God’s existence are often aimed at caricatures, some of them do have at least some force against some of the arguments of modern philosophers of religion. But they do not have force against the key arguments of the classical theist tradition.

It is this classical tradition—the tradition of Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists, and Thomists and other Scholastics—that I had little knowledge of then. To be sure, I had read the usual selections from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Anselm that pretty much every philosophy student reads—several of Plato’s dialogues, the Five Ways, chapter 2 of the Proslogium, and so forth. Indeed, I read a lot more than that. I’d read the entire Proslogium of Anselm, as well as the Monologium, the Cur Deus Homo, and the exchange with Gaunilo, early in my undergraduate years. I’d read Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia and De Principiis Naturae, big chunks of Plotinus’s Enneads, Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, Augustine’s Concerning the Teacher, and Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Road to God. I’d read Russell’s History of Western Philosophy -- hardly an unbiased source, to be sure—but also a bit of Gilson. I read all this while becoming an atheist during my undergrad years, and I still didn’t understand the classical tradition.

Why not? Because to read something is not necessarily to understand it. Partly, of course, because when you’re young, you always understand less than you think you do. But mainly because, to understand someone, it’s not enough to sit there tapping your foot while he talks. You’ve got to listen, rather than merely waiting for a pause so that you can insert the response you’d already formulated before he even opened his mouth. And when you’re a young man who thinks he’s got the religious question all figured out, you’re in little mood to listen—especially if you’ve fallen in love with one side of the question, the side that’s new and sexy because it’s not what you grew up believing. Zeal of the deconverted, and all that.

You’re pretty much just going through the motions at that point. And if, while in that mindset, what you’re reading from the other side are seemingly archaic works, written in a forbidding jargon, presenting arguments and ideas no one defends anymore (or at least no one in the “mainstream”), your understanding is bound to be superficial and inaccurate. You’ll take whatever happens to strike you as the main themes, read into them what you’re familiar with from modern writers, and ignore the unfamiliar bits as irrelevant. “This part sounds like what Leibniz or Plantinga says, but Hume and Mackie already showed what’s wrong with that; I don’t even know what the hell this other part means, but no one today seems to be saying that sort of thing anyway, so who cares...” Read it, read into it, dismiss it, move on. How far can you go wrong?

Well the answer is very, very far. It took me the better part of a decade to see that, and what prepared the way were some developments in my philosophical thinking that seemingly had nothing to do with religion. The first of them had to do instead with the philosophy of language and logic. Late in my undergrad years at Cal State Fullerton I took a seminar in logic and language in which the theme was the relationship between sentences and what they express. (Propositions? Meanings? Thoughts? That’s the question.) Similar themes would be treated in courses I took in grad school, at first at Claremont and later at UC Santa Barbara. Certain arguments stood out. There was Alonzo Church’s translation argument, and, above all, Frege’s wonderful essay “The Thought”. Outside of class, I discovered Karl Popper’s World 3 concept, and the work of Jerrold Katz. The upshot of these arguments was that the propositional content of sentences could not be reduced to or otherwise explained in terms of the utterances of sentences themselves, or behavioral dispositions, or psychological states, or conventions, or functions from possible worlds, or anything else a materialist might be willing to countenance. As the arguments sank in over the course of months and years, I came to see that existing naturalistic accounts of language and meaning were no good.
 
 
Originally posted at Edward Feser's blog. User with author's permission.
(Image credit: Daemen)