EDITOR'S NOTE: Dr. Edward Feser just released a new book, titled Five Proofs of the Existence of God (Ignatius Press, 2017). You probably know Dr. Feser from his sharply reasoned posts here at Strange Notions, or from his popular blog, which mainly focuses on the philosophy of religion.

Dr. Feser has written several other excellent books, including:

• Neo-Scholastic Essays (St. Augustine's Press, 2015)
• Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Scholastic Editions, 2014)
• The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (St. Augustine's Press, 2010)
• Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide) (Oneworld Publications, 2009)
• Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide) (Oneworld Publications, 2006)

He is a Thomistic philosopher, meaning he specializes in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, and has written extensively on Aquinas' Five Ways (or five proofs) to God. But in his new book, he examines not just the Thomistic arguments for God, but several more. Here's a brief summary:

Five Proofs of the Existence of God provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God's existence: the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Augustinian proof, the Thomistic proof, and the Rationalist proof.
 
This book also offers a detailed treatment of each of the key divine attributes—unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth—showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs.
 
This book offers as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print. Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past—thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others—that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism which gives aid and comfort to atheism.

We recently invited Dr. Feser to do an #AMA (Ask Me Anything) here at Strange Notions, and after he accepted, the questions poured in from all of our commenters, both believer and skeptic alike. 

We chose several of the most popular questions to ask Dr. Feser below. Enjoy!

QUESTION (Jonathan): I read once on a blog post that the proofs for God were not intended as rhetorical or polemical proofs, in the sense of being intended to persuade unbelievers. They were more like edifying exercises for the faithful, but medieval theologians would not say that such philosophical arguments were sufficient to instill faith. Is this true?

DR. FESER: That is not true, and I suspect that the writers you read who said this misunderstand what “faith” means for a medieval theologian like Aquinas.  The proofs were indeed meant to be completely rationally convincing even to someone who is initially coming to the question as an atheist.  No faith is required at all.

The reason is that faith, as a thinker like Aquinas understands it, is a matter of believing something because it has been revealed by God.  But before you can do that, you first have to establish that God really does exist in the first place and that he really has revealed something.  And that requires evidence and argumentation. 

Showing that God really does exist is where the proofs come in.  So far, faith doesn’t enter the picture.  Then we need to establish that God really has revealed something, and that involves showing that some purported divine revelation was associated with a miracle, because only a miracle – understood as a suspension of the natural order that only God could possibly bring about – could justify the claim that a revelation has really occurred.  That requires a mixture of philosophical and historical argumentation.  The traditional label in Catholic theology for these sorts of arguments for the authenticity of a revelation are “motives of credibility.” 

In traditional Catholic apologetics, it is only after all this argumentation is set out that one can know that something really has been revealed, and so it is only then that the question of faith really arises.  And when it does, what it means, again, is believing something because you have rationally come to know that God really did reveal it.  It is not a matter of believing something just because you want to, or working yourself up into an emotional state, or taking an irrational leap beyond the evidence, or anything like that.

It is true that faith is said to be a gift of God, but in no way does that entail any sort of irrational “will to believe” or any of the other caricatures or distortions of the concept of faith.  If someone says that his eyes are a gift from God, he isn’t saying that he is relying for his vision on a will to believe, or on an irrational leap beyond the visual evidence, or the like.  Similarly, to say that faith is a gift of God in no way implies that it is contrary to reason or involves an irrational leap beyond the evidence.

QUESTION (Bradley Robert Schneider): To what extent are the arguments in your book just different versions of, or different ways of looking at, the same (cosmological) argument? That is, can you rationally reject one of the proofs but accept another? Also, what are some of the other arguments you consider persuasive but did not include among these five?

DR. FESER: Of the five, only four of them – the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Thomistic proof, and the rationalist proof – might be considered variations on the cosmological argument.  However, the expression “cosmological argument” might be a little misleading, because it makes it sound as if the arguments start from some claim about the cosmos or universe as a whole.  And that is not the case.  As I argue in the book, one could in each case start with something much less grand than that.  For example, in the Thomistic proof, you could start with the fact that some particular stone exists here and now, and proceed from that to show that there must be a single eternal, immaterial, immutable, necessary, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good uncaused cause of its existing here and now.  No fancy claim about the universe as a whole is needed as a premise.

The fifth argument, the Augustinian proof, is very different.  It is not a causal argument from the existence of some thing in the world to God as its cause, but rather an argument from mathematical and other necessary truths to an infinite divine intellect.

One could accept one of the proofs while rejecting one or more of the others.  For example, a reader might find the Aristotelian proof compelling but not be persuade by the Neo-Platonic proof, or might find the Augustinian proof powerful but not any of the causal proofs, or vice versa.

There are several other arguments I think are compelling but which I did not put into the book, because I judged that they required just too much in the way of controversial background metaphysical argumentation to be useful for the particular purposes of this book.  For example, I think that all of Aquinas’s Five Ways are sound arguments, and I have defended them all in various other writings.  But to defend the Fourth Way (for example) requires first defending so much in the way of background metaphysical theses well beyond what I already cover in the book that it just isn’t a suitable argument for the kind of audience I intend to address in the book.  In the Further Reading section of the book I direct readers to sources that defend the other arguments that I think are persuasive.

QUESTION (Doug Shaver): Regardless of one's worldview, any proof must, by logical necessity, rest on one or more assumptions, which are premises that are stipulated to be unprovable. Can Dr. Feser list some of the assumptions on which at least one of his proofs of God's existence depends?

DR. FESER: Depending on what you mean by “unprovable,” I don’t necessarily agree with the premise behind your question.  Take, for example, the principle of sufficient reason, which the rationalist proof appeals to as a premise.  Is it “unprovable”?  That depends on what you mean.  If by “provable” you mean “derivable by deductive inference from premises that are more certain or fundamental,” then no, it is not provable.  But if by “provable” you mean “defensible by arguments which any rational person ought to find compelling,” then I would say yes, it is provable.

The reason is this.  The principle of sufficient reason, correctly understood – and as I argue in the book, lots of people don’t understand it correctly – is a “first principle.”  What that means is that it is more clearly correct than anything that could be said either for it or against it.  When we reach claims like this, we’ve hit bedrock.  They are so basic to rationality that they are presupposed by other arguments, but don’t in turn presuppose anything deeper than they are themselves.  Hence we can’t defend them by the same kind of reasoning by which we defend less fundamental claims.

But that does not by any means entail that we cannot say anything in defense of them, or that they rest on faith, or an act of will, or anything like that.  We can rationally defend them in an indirect way.  We can show, for example, that objections to them are mistaken in various ways.  More importantly, we can defend them by the method of retorsion, which involves showing that one cannot deny them on pain of self-contradiction or incoherence.

This method is sometimes misunderstood.  Some people think it merely involves showing that we can’t help thinking a certain way, but where this leaves it open that this way of thinking might nevertheless not correspond to reality. In other words, they think that retorsion arguments are essentially about human psychology.  That is not at all the case.  Rightly understood, such arguments are a species of reductio ad absurdum argument.  They involve defending a claim by showing that the denial of the claim entails a contradiction, and thus cannot as a matter of objective fact (and not merely as a contingent matter of human psychology) be correct. 

QUESTION (Surroundx): When you speak about proofs of God, what epistemic status do you ascribe to the conclusion of each? Are they epistemically infallible, ontically infallible, or something else?

DR. FESER: The word “proof” has, historically, been used in different senses.  Naturally, I don’t mean that the arguments are proofs in exactly the same sense in which a mathematical proof is a “proof.”  They are mostly not a priori arguments, for one thing.  But I used the word deliberately, and I certainly claim a high degree of certainty for the claim that God exists.  For example, I would claim that it is as certain that God exists as it is that the world external to our minds is real and not an illusion foisted upon us by a Cartesian demon or the Matrix.

How can I say that?  Well, the point of the book to show this.  The arguments are “proofs” in that, first of all, the conclusion is claimed to follow deductively from the premises.  They are not mere probabilistic inferences, arguments to the best explanation, or “God of the gaps” arguments.  (I hate “God of the gaps” arguments.)  The claim is that the arguments show, not merely that God is the most likely explanation of the facts asserted in the premises of the arguments, but rather that God is the only possible explanation in principle of those facts. 

Second, the premises are knowable with certainty.  The premises include both empirical premises (for example, the premise that change occurs) and philosophical premises (for example, the premise that everything has an explanation or is intelligible).  The premises in turn can be defended in various ways that show them to be beyond reasonable doubt.  For example, some of them can be defended via retorsion arguments (which, again, are a species of reductio ad absurdum argument).  That is to say, such arguments try to show that anyone who denies such-and-such a claim is implicitly contradicting himself.

So in arguments of the sort I am defending, the conclusion is claimed to follow necessarily from the premises, and the premises are claimed to be knowable beyond any reasonable doubt.  That sort of argument fits one traditional use of the word “proof.”

Naturally, I am aware that some people will nevertheless challenge the arguments or remain doubtful about one or more of them.  But that’s true of every single argument one could give for any conclusion, even mathematical proofs.  A determined and clever enough skeptic will always be able to come up with some grounds for doubt, even if the grounds are bizarre or far-fetched.  That doesn’t mean that the grounds are, all things considered, going to be reasonable ones. 

Anyway, my calling something a “proof” doesn’t entail that I think every reader, even every fair-minded reader, is immediately going to be convinced.  What it is meant to indicate is the nature of the connection between the facts described in the premises and the fact described in the conclusion.  It is a metaphysical claim, not a sociological claim.  Too many people mix these things up. They think that as long as a significant number of people are likely not to agree with some argument, you can’t call it a “proof.”  That just misunderstands the way the term is being used.

QUESTION (Ryan Beren): Is God definable at all? If he is, is the definition one that can be known by humans, or only by God himself? If he is not, then how else can the truth (or falsehood) of the statement "God exists" be guaranteed?

DR. FESER: It depends on what you mean.  For Thomists (i.e. thinkers in the school of thought originating with Thomas Aquinas) to define something, in the strict sense of the term “define,” is always to locate it in a species of thing.  That in turn requires identifying the genus the species falls under and what differentiates it from other species in the same genus.  (Here I am using the terms “species” and “genus” in the broad sense in which they are historically used in logic, not the narrower sense that they later came to have in biology.)

So, take human beings, for example.  The traditional Aristotelian definition of human beings is that they are rational animals.  “Human being” is the species of thing we are defining, “animal” is the genus or more general class to which this species belongs, and “rationality” is what distinguishes them from other species in the same genus.  (Whether this definition is correct, and what exactly it is claiming, are irrelevant to the present point.  It’s just an illustration.  Pick a different example if you like.)

Now, to define something in this way entails attributing metaphysical parts to it.  For example, in defining human beings as rational animals, we are attributing both animality and rationality to human beings.  But anything with parts requires some cause or explanation outside itself to account for why it exists.  With human beings, there needs to be some explanation of how rationality and animality get together so that you have human beings.  These things are not of their nature necessarily co-occurring, after all.

Now, according to arguments of the sort I am defending, God is not like that.  He cannot have any parts at all, but must be simple or non-composite – that is to say, not composed of anything.  For if he were, then he would require a cause just like everything else does, in which case he would not be the primary or ultimate cause of things.

For that reason, there cannot be any distinction in God between some genus he belongs to and some differentiating feature that distinguishes him from other things in that genus.  Again, if there were, then God would have parts and thus require a cause of his own.  Hence, strictly speaking, God is not part of a species of things, he is not in a genus, and thus in the strict sense of the term he is not definable.  That is why the human mind inevitably finds God difficult to grasp.  Our normal mode of understanding things is to define them in terms of the genus they fall under and what differentiates them from other things in that genus, and this method cannot apply to God.

However, that does not mean that we cannot use the term “God” intelligibly, and it does not mean we cannot know anything about God.  We can say, for example, that by “God” we mean the primary or fundamental cause of there being anything at all; that when we analyze what something would have to be like in order to play such a role, it would have to have such-and-such attributes; we can note that those are precisely the sorts of attributes traditionally attributed to God; and so forth.

In short, if you mean “Can we use language about God intelligibly, so that we can discuss the question whether God exists, what he would be like if he exists, etc.?” the answer is Yes.  If you mean “Can we have the kind of penetrating knowledge of God’s nature that we have when we are able to identify the genus a thing falls under and what differentiates it from other species in that genus?” then the answer is No.  Again, it depends on how you define “define.”

QUESTION (Alexander): Is it conceivable that God does not exist?

DR. FESER: It depends on what you mean.  If you mean “Can we coherently form the thought that there is no God?” then yes, we can do that.  To be sure, if we had a complete and penetrating grasp of God’s nature, we would understand that, given that nature, it is metaphysically impossible that he not exist.   In that case we would be contradicting ourselves if we said he did not exist.  We would see that it is inconceivable that he not exist.  However, we mere human beings do not in fact have such a complete and penetrating grasp of the divine nature.  Hence we are unable directly and immediately to see the inconceivability of God’s non-existence and thus cannot deduce God’s existence via an ontological argument.  We have to arrive at knowledge of God in another way.

Now, when we reason to the existence of an uncaused cause of things as we do in arguments like the kind I defend in the book (the Aristotelian proof, the Thomistic proof, and so forth), and then we analyze what something would have to be like in order to play that role, we find that it must be something that of its nature exists in an absolutely necessary way.  We can then deduce that it must be the kind of thing which, if we had a complete grasp of its nature, we would see directly that it could not possibly not exist.  But we had to get there by reasoning from the existence of things in the world to God as their cause.  We can’t skip this procedure and just cut to the chase via an ontological argument, as Anselm tries to do.

So, if you mean “Is God the sort of thing that exists of absolute necessity, so that it is metaphysically impossible that he not exist?” then the answer is Yes.  But if you mean “Can we reason to God’s existence just by carefully unpacking the content of the concept of God, as in Anselm’s ontological argument?” then the answer is No.

QUESTION (Steven Dillon): Monotheism asserts the proposition that "Only one God exists." In quantifying the amount of Gods that exist, this proposition treats of a plurality of "Gods." In denying existence of all but one in this plurality, monotheism separates Gods from "existence", and thus treats of a plurality of abstractions, or "essences" as Thomists may say. It would seem, therefore, that monotheism is committed to a view on which a God's essence is separable from his "existence." But, for Aquinas, the essence of God just is his existence. Was Aquinas thus not a monotheist? If not, what was he?

DR. FESER: Aquinas is a monotheist, and he argues – correctly in my view, as I argue in the book – that there could not even in principle be more than one God.  One of the reasons for this is indicated in the answer I gave above to the questioner who asked about whether we can define God.  As I noted there, given that God is absolutely simple or non-composite, he cannot be defined in terms of a genus and some differentiating feature that sets him apart from other species in the genus.  Now, whenever there is more than one instance of a kind of thing, there is some genus to which it belongs, and something that differentiates it from other things in that genus.  Since these notions don’t apply to God, it follows that there is no way for him to be merely one instance of a kind of thing.  There is no genus or general class to which he belongs.  He is of his nature unique.  We get the same result when we analyze the implications of something’s being purely actual, or its having an essence that is identical to its existence, as I show in the book.

Your question seems to suppose that because we can stick an “s” at the end of the word “God,” that suffices to show that there is a general class of things we call “Gods,” and then we can ask how many things are in that class.  But that is a fallacy.  Essentially, it confuses grammar with metaphysics.  To borrow an example from Chomsky, I can form the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”  But though the sentence is perfectly well-formed, it is still nonsense.  Ideas aren’t green or any other color, if they were then they wouldn’t be colorless, they don’t sleep, and it makes no sense to speak of sleep as something one could do furiously.  Mere grammatical possibilities don’t by themselves entail anything about reality.

Similarly, we can stick an “s” on the end of the word “God” and then go on to ask questions like “How many Gods are there?”  But that doesn’t entail that it really makes sense to think of “Gods” as a class of things that might in theory have more than one member.  Again, in fact that makes no sense when we unpack the implications of what it is to be absolutely simple or non-composite, to be purely actual, and to have an essence identical to one’s existence.  It seems otherwise only if we confuse grammar with reality.

QUESTION (Paul Brandon Rimmer): There has been a new movement in Christian apologetics arguing for idealism, the idea that all of reality is made of minds, and that ultimately there is no such thing as matter. Is this consistent with Thomism? Is this consistent with Catholic doctrine? In each case, if not, what would have to be changed about Thomism/Catholic doctrine, in order to make room for idealism?

DR. FESER: It is not consistent with Thomism.  One reason is Thomism’s Aristotelian conception of matter as what limits form to a particular individual time and place and thus individuates instances of a species of thing.  If you have two or more stones, for example, then you need, in addition to what they have in common – the form of being stone – something to differentiate them, and that’s what matter does.  Different bits of matter instantiate the same form.  For the Thomist, then, it makes no sense to say “There are two stones, and neither one is material.”  Berkeley can say that (given his different conception of matter), but Aquinas cannot.

Furthermore, to get rid of matter you’d really be reducing all of reality to a collection of angelic minds – that is to say, minds which are of their very essence divorced from matter.  That would mean identifying human minds with angelic minds of a sort.  You’d be saying that we are essentially really minds without matter, and what seems to be the material world is really just a collection of our perceptions.  But for the Thomist, that cannot be right, because our minds are simply not like angelic intellects, as Aquinas understands them.  For example, angelic intellects don’t have a stream of sensory experiences, as we do.  Sensation is, for the Thomist, essentially bodily, so that what lacks a body lacks sensation.  For that reason, angels don’t acquire knowledge the way we do, by learning things from a series of sensory perceptions.  Their knowledge is “built in.” 

Neither is idealism compatible with Catholicism, for reasons that might be evident from what has been said already, because Catholic doctrine is deeply committed to the reality of the material world.  That is, for example, what the doctrine of the Incarnation is all about.  The Second Person of the Trinity became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, and if you say that the flesh was really just a collection of perceptions, it is hard to see how that avoids collapsing into Docetism. 

There is also the fact that modern idealism stems from general metaphysical and epistemological premises that Thomists regard as deeply mistaken.  Berkeley’s idealism is a byproduct of the modern empiricist reduction of concepts to mental images.  Leibniz’s idealism is a byproduct of his working within the Cartesian dichotomy of res cogitans and res extensa.  But for the Thomist, these are just bad starting points, and in particular they get badly wrong both the nature of substance and the nature of our knowledge.

This is a large topic, and much more could be said.  Suffice it to say that the divergence between the views is so deep that there is no way to reconcile them, and for the Thomist there is no good reason to want to reconcile them, since idealism is (the Thomist would argue) riddled with philosophical and theological errors.

QUESTION (Camainc): How do you square divine simplicity with the personal God of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures? Are the scriptural references to God changing his mind, getting angry, etc., just anthropomorphic?

DR. FESER: It depends on what you mean.  Take anger, for example.  If by anger you have in mind the way that we human beings go from a state of tranquility to a state of emotional agitation, then no, there is nothing like that in God.  The reason is that, for one thing, emotional states are bodily and God is immaterial.  For another thing, emotional fluctuations entail going from potential to actual, and there is no potentiality in God.  However, by anger you could mean the will to inflict a punishment on an evildoer.  And there is something like that in God. 

Here it is crucial to understand the differences between the univocal, metaphorical, and analogical uses of language, which I discuss in the book.  When we use terms univocally, we are using them in the same sense.  For Thomists and many other classical theists, theological language is not to be understood univocally.  Hence, when we say that Bob is angry and God is angry, we are not to be understood as attributing to God the exact same thing that Bob has. 

Are we speaking metaphorically or non-literally, then?  That depends.  If when saying “God is angry,” you mean that God feels highly agitated, then this cannot literally be true, and so at best could be a metaphor.

But if instead you mean “God intends to punish evildoers,” then this is not metaphorical, but literally true.  However, not all literal language is univocal.  Some of it is analogical.  For example, when I say that the cheeseburger I am eating is good and that the book I am reading is good, I am not using “good” in exactly the same sense – the goodness of a book and the goodness of food are very different – but I am not speaking metaphorically or non-literally either.  Rather, I am speaking analogically.  There is something in the goodness of a book that is analogous to the goodness of food, even if it is not the same thing.

Now, that, for the Thomist, is how to understand a claim like “God intends to punish evildoers.”  There is something in God that is analogous to what we call an intention to punish evildoers, even though in God it doesn’t involve the kind of thing that goes on when we have this intention.  (For example, we have fluctuating emotional states, we weigh various considerations when deciding whether to punish – which involves going from one thought to another, and thus actualizing potentialities – and so on, and none of that exists in God.)

So, some of the anthropomorphic attributes that scripture attributes to God are to be understood metaphorically, but by no means all of them are.  Some of them are to be understood in an analogical sense, which is a kind of literal sense.  The rule of thumb would be: If scripture attributes some bodily characteristic or emotional state to God, that is to be understood merely metaphorically or non-literally.  But if scripture attributes to God something having to do with intellect or will, then that is to be understood literally, though in an analogical sense (which is one kind of literal sense) rather than in a univocal sense.

QUESTION (Brian Seets): I am an atheist. I choose to do what I see as good. That is, I do nothing that could have a negative impact on others. I do this because I want to live in a world where that is the standard behavior and so that (I hope) others will choose to not negatively impact my life. What makes my choice less worthy than a Christian's? Doesn't living well without hope of reward or fear of punishment make God irrelevant?

DR. FESER: Unlike some other theists, I don’t myself think it is quite correct to say that morality could have no foundation on an atheistic conception of reality.  It’s a little more complicated than that.  What I would say is that the possibility of morality presupposes the reality of what Aristotelians call formal and final causes.  We have to be able to say that there is, as a matter of objective fact, such a thing as the nature or essence of a human being, and also that there is, as a matter of objective fact, such a thing as a set of final causes or ends or goals inherent in human nature, the realization of which defines what is good for us.

Now, in theory someone could accept this much while at the same time denying the existence of God.  For example, Thomas Nagel at least flirts with something like this metaphysical position in his book Mind and Cosmos.  For the Aristotelian and the Thomist, morality is grounded in human nature, and human nature would still be what it is, and still be knowable, even if per impossibile there were no God.  Hence, just as you can do chemistry and thereby discover the facts about the causal properties of sulfur, phosphorus, etc. whether or not you affirm the existence of a divine first cause, so too can you, at least to a large extent, know what is good or bad for human beings just by studying human nature.  For morality is not about arbitrary divine commands, but is, again, grounded in human nature.

However, it is also true that this is an unstable position.  Just as, for the Thomist, causality is only ultimately intelligible if there is a divine uncaused cause (for reasons I set out in Five Proofs), so too, final causality ultimately makes sense only if there is a divine intellect which directs things toward their natural ends or goals (for reasons set out in Aquinas’s Fifth Way, which I have defended at length in a couple of places, though it’s not an argument that is covered in Five Proofs).  Still, the issues can be distinguished.  The question “Is there final causality in nature?” is one thing, and the question “Does all final causality presuppose the existence of God?” is another.  If you could defend a Yes answer to the first question while at the same time defending a No answer to the second – and some people have, historically, tried to do this (even if, in my view, such a project at the end of the day won’t work) – then you could have a foundation for morality while avoiding theism.

But very few atheists are willing to do this.  Most of them reject the whole idea of formal and final causality, along with theism.  That is part of the general package of modern philosophical naturalism, even if in theory one could adopt some alternative atheist metaphysics.  And if you reject the whole idea of final causality or teleology, then I think you will not be able to give any rational foundation for morality.  This isn’t a topic I get into in Five Proofs, though I have addressed it elsewhere.  (See my book Neo-Scholastic Essays for treatment of some of the issues I’ve been referring to, such as the foundations of morality and Aquinas’s Fifth Way.)

Now, does that mean that someone who is both an atheist and rejects the whole idea of final causes or purposes in human nature will in fact be without any moral virtue?  Of course not.  Many atheists have many admirable character traits.  But that is not the point.  The question is not whether atheists will in fact sometimes do the right thing – of course they will – but rather whether they can give a rational philosophical justification of morality in the context of a naturalistic metaphysics.  And that, I would argue, is not possible.

Antony Flew’s famous 1950 article “Theology and Falsification” posed what came to be known as the “falsificationist challenge” to theology. A claim is falsifiable when it is empirically testable—that is to say, when it makes predictions about what will be observed under such-and-such circumstances such that, if the predictions don’t pan out, the claim is thereby shown to be false.

The idea that a genuinely scientific claim must be falsifiable had already been given currency by Karl Popper. Flew’s aim was to apply it to a critique of such theological claims as the thesis that God loves us. No matter what sorts of evil and suffering occur in the world, the theologian does not give up the claim that God loves us. But then, what, in that case, does the claim actually amount to? And why should we accept the claim? Flew’s challenge was to get the theologian to specify exactly what would have to happen in order for the theologian to give up the claim that God loves us, or the claim that God exists.

Now, there are several problems with Flew’s challenge. Some of them have to do with specifically theological matters, such as the analogical use of the term “good” when applied to God, the role that divine permission of evil plays in the realization of a greater good, and so forth. Some of the problems have to do with the idea of falsification itself. As Popper himself emphasized, it is simply an error to suppose that all rationally justifiable claims have to be empirically falsifiable. Popper intended falsificationism merely as a theory about what makes a claim scientific, and not every rationally acceptable claim is or ought to be a scientific claim. Hence not every rationally acceptable claim is or ought to be empirically falsifiable.

For example, the thesis of falsificationism itself is, as Popper realized, not empirically falsifiable. This does not make Popper’s falsificationist theory of science self-refuting, because, again, he does not say in the first place that every claim has to be empirically falsifiable. Falsificationism is a claim about science but it is not itself a scientific claim, but rather a philosophical claim (what Popper called a claim of “meta-science”). It is subject to potential criticism—by way of philosophical analysis and argument, say—but not by way of empirical testing, specifically.

Claims of mathematics and logic are like this too. We can analyze and argue about them philosophically, but they are not plausibly subject to empirical refutation, specifically. And metaphysical claims are like that as well. With at least the most general sorts of metaphysical claims (e.g. about the nature of causality as such, or substance as such, or what have you), it is a sheer category mistake to suppose that they do, or ought to, entail specific empirical predictions. The reason is that the claims are too general for that. They are claims about (among other things) what any possible empirically observable phenomena must necessarily presuppose (and any possible non-empirical realities too, if there are any). Naturally, then, they are not going to be undermined by any specific empirical observation. By no means does that make them immune from rational evaluation. They can still be analyzed, and argued for or against, by way of philosophical analysis and argumentation. But as with claims of meta-science, or claims of mathematics and logic, so too with claims of metaphysics, it is a mistake to suppose that they stand or fall with empirical falsifiability.

Now, the fundamental claims and arguments of theology—for example, the most important arguments for the existence and attributes of God (such as Aquinas’s arguments, or Leibniz’s arguments)—are a species of metaphysical claim. Hence it is simply a category mistake to demand of them, as Flew did, that they be empirically falsifiable. To dismiss theology on falsificationist grounds, one would, to be consistent, also have to dismiss mathematics, logic, meta-science, and metaphysics in general. Which would be, not only absurd, but self-defeating, since the claim that only scientific claims are rationally justifiable is itself not a scientific claim but a metaphysical claim, and any argument for this claim would presuppose standards of logic.

There is also the problem that, as philosophers of science had already begun to see at the time Flew wrote, it turns out that even scientific claims are not as crisply falsifiable as Popper initially thought. Indeed, the problem was known even before Popper’s time, and famously raised by Pierre Duhem. A scientific theory is always tested in conjunction with various assumptions about background conditions obtaining at the time an experiment is performed, assumptions about the experimental set-up itself, and auxiliary scientific hypotheses about the phenomena being studied. If the outcome of an experiment is not as predicted, one could give up the theory being tested, but one might also consider giving up one or more of the auxiliary hypotheses instead, or check to see if the background conditions or experimental set-up were really as one had supposed. That does not mean that scientific theories are not empirically falsifiable after all, but it does mean that falsifying a theory is a much messier and more tentative affair than readers of pop science and pop philosophy books might suppose.

Then there are claims that are empirical and not metaphysical in the strictest sense, but still so extremely general that any possible natural science would have to take them for granted—in which case they are really presuppositions of natural science rather than propositions of natural science. For example, the proposition that change occurs is like this. We know from experience that change occurs, but it is not something falsifiable by experience, because any possible experience by which we might test it itself presupposes that change occurs. In particular, in order to test a proposition via observation or experiment, you need to see whether or not your current experience is followed by the predicted experience, which involves one experience succeeding another, which entails change. Natural science itself, then, which involves attempting to falsify theories (even if it involves more than this) presupposes something which cannot be falsified.

Necessary presuppositions of natural science like the one just described are the subject matter of that branch of philosophy known as the philosophy of nature (which, though more fundamental than natural science, is less fundamental than metaphysics as Thomists understand “metaphysics,” and is thus something of a middle-ground discipline between them). For example, the Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality (which is the core of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature) is grounded in an analysis of what change must involve, where the existence of change is presupposed by natural science. Hence the theory of actuality and potentiality is grounded in what is presupposed by natural science. That is why even natural science cannot overthrow it. But the characteristically Aristotelian argument for God’s existence—the argument from change to the existence of an unchanging changer of things (or, more precisely, of a purely actual actualizer of things)—is grounded in the theory of actuality and potentiality, and thus in what natural science itself must take for granted. And thus it too cannot be overturned even by natural science. This “empirical unfalsifiability” is no more a weakness of the Aristotelian argument for God’s existence than the “empirical unfalsifiability” of the existence of change, including the existence of experience itself, is a weakness. It makes the arguments in question (if they are otherwise unproblematic) more rationally secure than empirical science, not less.

Lazy shouts of “unfalisfiability!” against theological claims just ignore all this complexity—the distinctions that have to be drawn between empirical claims on the one hand and claims of mathematics, logic, and metaphysics on the other; between extremely general empirical claims and more specific ones; between philosophy of nature (which studies the philosophical presuppositions of natural science) and natural science itself; and between the testing of a thesis and the testing of the auxiliary assumptions we generally take for granted but conjoin with the thesis when drawing predictions from it.

So, falsificationism is a rather feeble instrument to wield against theology. And in fact, atheist philosophers have known this for decades, even if New Atheist combox commandos are still catching up.

All the same, where we are evaluating a specific empirical claim—rather than a claim of mathematics, logic, or metaphysics, or an extremely general empirical claim like “change occurs”—falsifiability is an important consideration, even if not as decisive as Popper supposed. Take an extremely specific and straightforward empirical claim, e.g. the claim that a large, yellowish triangular shape will suddenly appear in the center of my field of vision within the next few seconds. If no such shape actually appears in the next few seconds, it would be pretty hard to deny that the claim has been falsified. For example, I couldn’t say “Maybe the shape was there in the room, but I didn’t see it because it was behind a bookshelf.” I intentionally phrased the claim so that it was about what I would experience, not about what would be in the room, so appealing to the idea that some physical object stood in the way of my seeing it won’t help avoid falsification. Nor would it help to say “Maybe it will appear an hour from now, or tomorrow,” since the claim referred specifically to the next few seconds.

Of course, that’s not a very interesting empirical claim. Most interesting empirical claims are far less specific than that, even though they are nowhere near as general as the claim that change occurs. There is, needless to say, a large range of cases, some of which are more toward the general end of things, some of them more toward the specific, and the latter are easier to falsify than the former. But even if the more general ones aren’t as crisply falsifiable as a more simplistic application of the Popperian model would imply, they are still far from unfalsifiable.

For example, take the claim that heavy smoking over a long period of time has a strong tendency to cause cancer. Obviously this is not falsified by the fact that some heavy smokers never develop cancer, because the claim has been phrased in a way that takes account of that. It speaks only of a strong tendency, and even a strong tendency needn’t always be realized. But neither is the claim made vacuous by that qualification. If it turned out that only five percent of people who smoke heavily over the course of many years ended up getting cancer, we could reasonably say that the claim had been falsified. Whereas if it turned out that sixty percent of those who smoke heavily over the course of many years end up getting cancer, we would say that the claim had survived falsification, even though sixty percent is well short of one hundred percent. Indeed, even if the percentage were much lower than that—suppose it were forty percent, for example—it would not necessarily follow that the claim had been falsified.

Nor need there be anything like even that strong a link between two phenomena for us reasonably to posit a causal correlation. Take an example often discussed in philosophy of science, viz. the relationship between syphilis and paresis. If syphilis is untreated, it can lead to paresis, though this is rare. But it would be absurd, not to mention medically irresponsible, to conclude that the claim of a causal correlation between syphilis and paresis is falsified by the fact that actually developing paresis is rare. All the same, if there were on record only one or two cases, out of millions, of paresis following upon syphilis, it would—especially if no mechanism by which the one might lead to the other were proposed—be hard in that case to resist the conclusion that the claim of a causal correlation had been falsified.

So, an empirical claim concerning a causal link between two phenomena can be substantive rather than vacuous, and also empirically very well-supported, even if there are many cases in which the one phenomenon is not in fact followed by the other. Considerations about falsifiability, properly understood, do not undermine the point. Indeed, someone who resists such a claim might himself be subject to criticism on the grounds that he has made his position unfalsifiable.

For example, suppose a heavy smoker said, in reply to those who implored him to cut back: “Oh come on, lots of people smoke heavily and don’t get cancer! So how can you maintain your claim that there is a causal link, in the face of all that evidence? Don’t you know that a serious scientific claim should be falsifiable?” In fact, of course, it is the heavy smoker in question who is more plausibly accused of being insufficiently respectful of falsifiability. For there is a very strong link between heavy smoking and cancer, even if the former doesn’t always lead to the latter. And the empirical evidence for that link is so strong that it is those who deny it who are refusing to let their position be falsified by the evidence.

More could be said, but in fact these reflections on falsification are intended merely as a preamble to an application of the idea to a domain very different from the examples considered so far—namely, an example concerning politics and current events. I’ll get to that in another post.
 
 
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.
 
 
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In the combox to a post on another subject, reader Eric asked for my opinion of philosopher Stephen Law’s article “The evil-god challenge.” I had not then read the article and did not have time to do so at that moment, but I commented briefly on the summary of Law’s views that Eric provided. To my surprise, Law posted a response to my (somewhat dashed off) comments in the same combox a couple of weeks later. I did not bother to reply, because Law’s remarks seemed themselves obviously dashed off and unserious – he misspelled my name four times and in two different ways, seemed uninterested in trying to understand or engage in any depth the views he was criticizing, and was apparently just blowing off steam. (I can understand if he was a bit testy, since my own comments in response to Eric were themselves a bit testy, though my testiness was directed not at Law specifically but more generally at atheists who do not understand the difference between classical theism and theistic personalism.) I have since learned that Law had also cited my remarks over at his own blog, and directed his readers to his response. So, evidently he does regard that response as a serious one, to which I should be expected to reply. So, here’s a reply – not only to his combox remarks, but also to his article, which I’ve now had a chance to read.

First, let me summarize Law’s position. Law claims in his article that “even if most of the popular arguments for the existence of God do provide grounds for supposing that there is some sort of supernatural intelligence behind the universe, they fail to provide much clue as to its moral character.” In particular, Law says, even if a design argument could show that such an intelligence exists, it could no more show that the intelligence in question is supremely benevolent than that it is supremely malevolent. In fact, he suggests, the overall evidence such arguments appeal to should lead us away from belief in a supremely benevolent supernatural intelligence. Law allows that what is often labeled the “logical problem” of evil – which supposes that the existence of evil is strictly incompatible with the existence of a good God – may not pose a serious challenge to theism. But he thinks the “evidential problem” of evil – which assumes only that the existence of evil is strong evidence against the existence of a good God – does pose a serious challenge, at least given that there are no strong arguments for the existence of such a God. And the standard theodicies – such as appeals to free will, to soul-making, or to the way in which certain goods presuppose evils – succeed in explaining at most only some of the evil that exists, not all of it, so that the overall evidential situation still fails to point in the direction of a supremely benevolent God.

So far all of that is just standard atheist argumentation, and Law’s overall position takes it for granted. In particular, Law presupposes that there are no strong arguments for God’s existence, that even if there were they wouldn’t lead us to a supremely good God, and that the evidence we do have points away from the existence of such a God. Law’s innovation is to suggest, first, that the hypothesis of an “evil god” – an omnipotent, omniscient, but supremely malevolent intelligence – is at least as well supported as the hypothesis of a supremely good God. And if a skeptic were to pose against such a hypothesis the challenge of an evidential “problem of good” – that is, if a skeptic were to ask why a supremely malevolent intelligence would allow the good that exists in the world – the defender of an “evil god” hypothesis could offer “reverse theodicies” which parallel the theodicies put forward by theists. He could say, for example, that free will makes possible certain evils that an evil god couldn’t realize without it; that certain evils presuppose the existence of good; that the evil god intends the world to be a vale of soul-destruction, which requires that there be some good in it so that we can be tormented by its loss; and so forth.

Now, Law is happy to acknowledge that such defenses of the evil god hypothesis would not be very strong. But he thinks they are no weaker than the parallel attempts to defend the existence of a good God. There is, he says, a conceptual and evidential “symmetry” between the two views. But everyone, including theists, acknowledges that there is no good reason to believe in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and supremely malevolent intelligence. So, shouldn’t they also acknowledge that there is no good reason to believe in a supremely good God? Isn’t the one view as unreasonable as the other? That is Law’s “evil-god challenge.”

So, what should we think of all this? Well, having now read Law’s paper, I must say that I find that my original comments, based on Eric’s summary alone, were exactly on the mark. Law’s argument may be an interesting challenge to a theistic personalist conception of God – I’ll leave it to theistic personalists themselves to figure out how they might respond to it – but it is completely irrelevant to classical theism. And that is no small lacuna. It means that Law’s argument is completely irrelevant to evaluating the truth of theism as it is understood by writers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Anselm, Maimonides, Avicenna, and Aquinas (to name just a few), and as it has been defined within Roman Catholic theology and traditional Christian theology more generally.

The reasons why should be evident from my recent post on the differences between classical theism and theistic personalism (which readers who are unfamiliar with those differences might want to read before continuing on). Consider, first, that central to classical philosophy and to the classical theist tradition that it informed is the thesis that evil is a privation, the absence of a good that would otherwise obtain rather than a positive reality in its own right. Accordingly, for classical theism, there simply is no symmetry between good and evil of the sort that Law’s argument requires. Astonishingly, though, Law’s article does not even consider, much less respond to, this core element of the classical theist position, despite the fact that he evidently regards his argument as a challenge to all forms of theism, and not just to non-classical forms. To borrow an analogy from another recent post, this is like evaluating The Godfather Trilogy without mentioning that the lead characters are Mafiosi, and focusing instead only on one of the romantic subplots in The Godfather Part III.

But Law did have something to say about the subject in his combox remarks. Here are those remarks, quoted in full:

Fesser’s [sic] “refutation” of my evil god argument is awful:
 
(i) it depends on the privation view of evil, which is wrong. (Why not flip this and say good is a privation of evil?!) Actually, *some* evils, like blindness, are best seen as privations of goods. But many appear not merely to be merely privations. And in fact in some cases it is more natural to see the good as a privation of evil (look up “peace” in the dictionary). That evil is in every case nothing more than a privation of some good is a myth that even many theists reject (philosopher Tim Mawson, for example). Fester [sic] is one of those theists who, when asked to justify the privation view, waffle and refer us to Aquinas, Aristotle, etc. Ask him him [sic] to explain, clearly, *exactly* what the argument is.
 
(ii) in any case, the privation view is not obviously incompatible with the existence of an evil God (we are at least owed some explanation for why it is – this is particularly clear if we see good as an abstract Platonic Form, say. (Fesser [sic] at this point just seems to *define* God as good – well, that doesn’t establish the impossibility of an evil God!)
 
(iii) even if the privation view were incompatible with an evil God, and it could thus be shown that an evil God was impossible, the evil God challenge can *still* be successfully run, as I point out in the paper. Perhaps Fesser [sic] should read it.

Let me respond to these points in order. Regarding (i), I cannot resist noting first of all that it is rather silly of Law to complain that I “waffle and refer us to Aquinas, Aristotle, etc.” rather than “explain[ing], clearly, *exactly* what the argument is,” when what he is replying to is something I said in a brief combox response to a reader’s off-topic question, not a formal argument presented in a book, a paper, or even a blog post. This sort of thing is depressingly common on the Internet: “You didn’t prove the truth of [Thomistic metaphysics, Darwinian evolution, quantum mechanics, etc.] to my satisfaction in your latest combox remark; therefore you’re an idiot!” One would hope a professional philosopher like Law would be above it (and perhaps he is – as I have acknowledged, he was probably just blowing off steam, which we all do from time to time). Suffice it to say that I have in fact addressed these issues at length elsewhere, such as in my book Aquinas. To paraphrase someone, perhaps Law should read it.

Second, since Law is the one claiming that his “evil-god challenge” is a threat to theism generally, including classical theism, the burden of proof is on him to show that the “evil as privation” view is false, not on the classical theist to show that it is true. It would be perverse for a critic of The Godfather Trilogy of the sort alluded to above to insist that those who disagree with him have the burden of showing that the organized crime theme really is, contrary to his analysis, a significant part of the story. It is similarly perverse for Law to insinuate – and in a dashed off combox afterthought at that, rather than in his original article! – that classical theists are the ones who need to show that the privation analysis that is central to their position is something he needs to trouble himself with.

Third, that means that Law has a lot of homework to do before he can pretend to have shown that his “evil-god challenge” really threatens theism generally, because it is evident from his remarks that he doesn’t understand the privation view, much less the classical theist tradition of which it is a part. To understand that view, one must first understand classical essentialism, whether of the Platonic or Aristotelian variety. That is a big topic – again, see Aquinas for the details – but it is clear enough how a privation view follows from the thesis that things have essences. For example, if it is of the essence of the visual apparatus – eyes, optic nerves, relevant areas of the brain, and so forth – that it serves the function of enabling an organism to see, then obviously blindness is a defect and it would be silly to suggest that perhaps it is sight that is the defect insofar as it involves the absence of blindness. Law himself acknowledges that the privation view is the most plausible way to understand blindness. He nevertheless insists that such an analysis wouldn’t work in all cases, yet he doesn’t offer any examples, and if some form of classical essentialism is true, the privation analysis would apply across the board.

The only purported counterexample to the privation view Law does suggest is, not a case of an evil which is not a privation, but rather an example of a good – peace – which, appealing to the dictionary, he evidently would define (quite plausibly) as the absence of war. Now, the privation view is certainly not the sort of thing one could refute by appealing to dictionaries, because it is not a theory about how we use words like “good” and “evil,” but rather a theory about the metaphysical status of good and evil themselves. But that is beside the point in the present case, because the privation view doesn’t entail that there are no goods that can be defined in terms of the absence of evil. It holds only that not all goods are so definable, while all evils must ultimately be understood in terms of the absence of some good. That is to say, the bottom level of the analysis of good and evil will include only goods, even if there will also be some goods appearing at higher levels of the analysis. In the case of war, the analysis will involve an appeal to the idea that moral goods are to be understood in terms of the ends set for us by nature. Since among those ends is giving to others what is due to them, war can be analyzed as a certain kind of failure to give others their due, namely by using force to take from them what they have a right to (their lives, property, security of their borders, etc.). Even if peace is the absence of war, then, war itself is the absence of a certain kind of good, a good which cannot in turn be analyzed in terms of the absence of some evil.

Regarding Law’s point (ii), for Law to claim that I “just seem to *define* God as good” – as if what is in question here is some eccentric ad hoc stipulation on my part – and to assert that “the privation view is not obviously incompatible with the existence of an evil God,” is just to manifest his unfamiliarity with, or at least to ignore, the central arguments of the classical theistic tradition and the metaphysical ideas underlying it. For when one takes account of those ideas – the act/potency, essence/existence, and simple/composite distinctions; the doctrine of the convertibility of the transcendentals; the principle of proportionate causality; the doctrine of privation; and so on – there is no mystery at all as to why the classical theist regards a demonstration of God’s existence as ipso facto a demonstration of that which is necessarily devoid of evil. Given the underlying metaphysics, to assert that God cannot possibly be evil is no more a matter of arbitrary stipulation than saying that the Pythagorean Theorem must hold of right triangles is a matter of arbitrary stipulation.

Consider that the classical (Platonic, Aristotelian, and Thomistic) arguments for God’s existence are arguments to the effect that the existence of compounds of act and potency necessarily presupposes the existence of that which is Pure Actuality; that the existence of compounds of essence and existence necessarily presupposes the existence of that which is Being Itself; that the existence of that which is in any way metaphysically composite presupposes that which is absolutely simple; and so forth. Given the doctrine of the convertibility of the transcendentals, on which being is convertible with goodness, that which is Pure Actuality or Being Itself must ipso facto be Goodness Itself. Given the conception of evil as a privation – that is, as a failure to realize some potentiality – that which is Pure Actuality and therefore in no way potential cannot intelligibly be said to be in any way evil. Given the principle of proportionate causality, whatever good is in the world in a limited way must be in its cause in an eminent way, shorn of any of the imperfections that follow upon being a composite of act and potency. Since God is Pure Actuality, he cannot intelligibly be said either to have or to lack moral virtues or vices of the sort we exhibit when we succeed or fail to realize our various potentials. And so on. All of this is claimed to be a matter of metaphysical demonstration rather than probabilistic empirical theorizing, and the underlying metaphysical ideas form a complex interlocking network that is (as anyone familiar with Platonism or Aristotelianism realizes) motivated independently of the problem of evil or the question of God’s existence. That is to say, the concepts are not introduced in an ad hoc way so as to get around objections of the sort Law raises. They are already there in the underlying metaphysics, and rule out from the get-go objections of the sort Law raises, at least insofar as they are directed at classical theism.

Law’s point (iii) – which he develops on p. 20 of his paper – is equally misdirected, because it too simply assumes that good and evil are on a metaphysical par. Law suggests (if I understand him correctly) that any reasons a theist could have for denying that an “evil god” is in principle possible could be mirrored by reasons suggesting that a good God is in principle impossible. But that just begs the question against the classical theist, who holds that evil is metaphysically parasitic on good, and thus (given the convertibility of the transcendentals) on being, in such a way that whatever is Being Itself would have to be Goodness Itself and therefore in no way evil. Hence, since God is Being Itself, the claim “If God exists, then He is good” is metaphysically necessary, while the claim “If God exists, He might be evil” is necessarily false. In any event, since Law is the one raising the “evil-god challenge,” the burden is on him to show that the idea of an “evil God” is even intelligible given the metaphysical presuppositions that classical theism rests on, and not on the classical theist to show that it is not intelligible.

Now, I am not here attempting to convince the uninitiated or hostile reader that this complex metaphysical picture I have been describing is correct or even plausible. That would take at least a book, and since Aquinas is just such a book, I direct the interested reader to that. I am also not saying that no reasonable person who familiarizes himself with it could disagree with that picture. I am merely saying that before one disagrees with it, one ought at least to try to understand it. And the things Law says seem to me to show that he does not understand it. An atheist could intelligibly say “I don’t believe that the God of classical theism exists.” He could intelligibly reject the whole metaphysical picture – the privation view, the convertibility of the transcendentals, God as Pure Actuality, the whole ball of wax. What he cannot intelligibly say is “The God of classical theism might in principle have been evil.” Again, the metaphysical system underlying classical theism simply rules out the very idea of an “evil God” on entirely principled and independently motivated grounds – not as a matter of mere ad hoc stipulation – and thus rules out Law’s “evil-god challenge” on entirely principled grounds. Hence, if you want to reject classical theism and not just theistic personalism, you had better look for grounds other than Law’s “evil-god challenge.” To insist on pressing that challenge against it is just to demonstrate one’s fundamental misunderstanding of the position one is criticizing, like the creationist who rejects Darwinism on the grounds that he just can't see how a monkey could have given birth to a human infant.

The reason theistic personalism doesn’t rule Law’s challenge out from the get-go is that theistic personalism typically rests on a very different sort of metaphysics, and conceives of God in far more anthropomorphic terms. In particular, the theistic personalist tends not to think of God as Pure Actuality, Being Itself, Goodness Itself, or the like, but rather as “a person without a body,” like us but without our limitations, who might intelligibly be said to be morally virtuous and to have duties he lives up to. (Again, see the earlier post of mine linked to above.) Theistic personalism is also often associated with a conception of God’s relationship to the world on which it is at least in principle possible that the world might have existed apart from God, so that the question of whether God is the cause of the world becomes an “evidential” or “probabilistic” matter, rather than a matter of strict metaphysical demonstrations of the sort classical theists typically attempt to provide. Hence it becomes a real question for the theistic personalist whether the balance of probabilities really supports belief in a supremely powerful disembodied person who lives up to all his moral obligations, etc. – a way of framing the issue that is, from a classical theistic point of view, totally wrongheaded from the start. In any event, as all of this indicates, the way Law sets up his challenge to the theist clearly presupposes an essentially theistic personalist construal of theism. He does not seem to be aware that there is any difference between this construal and that of classical theism, or that it is the latter view that has, historically, characterized mainstream Christian theology and philosophical theism.

For those who are interested in exploring in greater depth the classical theist approach to the problem of evil, I recommend, as I have before, Brian Davies’ The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil. There is also the late Herbert McCabe’s God and Evil in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, which I have only just started to read, but which promises to be a useful exposition of the Thomistic approach to the subject.
 
 
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: SlideServe)

We’ve been discussing the thesis that human beings have a natural inclination toward theism, and that atheism, accordingly, involves a suppression of this inclination. Greg Koukl takes the inclination to be so powerful that resisting it is like “trying to hold a beach ball underwater,” and appears to think that every single atheist is engaged in an intellectually dishonest exercise in “denying the obvious, aggressively pushing down the evidence, to turn his head the other way.” (Randal Rauser, who has also been critical of Koukl, calls this the “Rebellion Thesis.”)  In response to Koukl, I argued that the inclination is weaker than that, that the natural knowledge of God of which most people are capable is only “general and confused” (as Aquinas put it), and that not all atheism stems from intellectual dishonesty. Koukl has now replied, defending his position as more “faithful to Paul’s words” in Romans 1:18-20 than mine is. However, I don’t think this claim can survive a careful reading of that passage.

St. Paul’s intent in chapters 1 and 2 of Romans is, in part, to argue that Gentiles are just as much in need of salvation as Jews are. It might seem otherwise because the Gentiles did not have the Mosaic Law or, more generally, any special divine revelation like the one embodied in the Old Testament. Hence one might suppose that their moral failures and theological errors can be excused on grounds of ignorance. But Paul argues that the Gentiles do have available to them knowledge of God’s existence and nature of the sort enshrined in natural theology (1: 19-20), and the moral knowledge embodied in the natural law (2:14-15). Hence, though they lacked the Old Testament, they nevertheless had at least some significant knowledge of moral and theological truth, and are therefore culpable for failing to conform themselves to it.

The example St. Paul gives of the sort of theological error the Gentiles were guilty of is idolatry. He criticizes them for conceiving of God on the model of “mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles” (1:23), even though they should have known that in fact the creator must have attributes of “eternal power” (1:20) and immortality (1:23) and thus cannot properly be compared to such creatures. St. Paul’s chief example of the immorality the Gentiles fell into is homosexual behavior (1:26-27), and he also says that they are guilty of envy, murder, treachery, gossip, disobedience to parents, and many other sins (1:29-31).

Now, there are several things about these chapters that should give pause to anyone hoping to read off the “Rebellion Thesis” from them. The first is that the “Rebellion Thesis” is not even what is in view in the passage. For one thing, St. Paul is not talking about atheism here in the first place, but rather idolatry. For another, his emphasis is not on psychological repression per se but rather on what can be known via natural theology. That is not to deny that what he says is relevant to the issues of whether atheism can be known to be false apart from special divine revelation, and of whether some kind of repression plays a role in atheism. Of course it is relevant. The point is that the psychology of atheism is simply not the topic he is addressing. Again, his topic was rather whether the Gentiles had sufficient moral and theological knowledge available to them to be culpable for their sins, and thus to be as in need of salvation as were those who had the Mosaic Law. To treat Romans 1 as a straightforward statement of the Rebellion Thesis is therefore anachronistic. You might try to argue for the Rebellion Thesis on the basis of the principles St. Paul sets out there, but he is not himself addressing that particular topic.

A second problem is that even where his criticism of idolatry is concerned, what St. Paul gives us is very far from a comprehensive list of which lines of argument demonstrate the existence of God and exactly which of the divine attributes can be known by way of such arguments. He tells us that from “the things that are made” by God, we can know of his power, eternity, and immortality, and therefore can know that he isn’t comparable to a mere man or an animal. And that’s pretty much it. Does God have all power or only a high degree of power? Is he omniscient? Is he perfectly good? Is he timeless, or merely everlasting? Is he simple or composite? Is he immutable? Is he best known by way of an Aristotelian argument from motion? A Neo-Platonic argument from composite things to a non-composite cause? A Leibnizian argument for a Necessary Being? A moral argument? A Fifth Way style teleological argument? A Paley style design argument?

Paul doesn’t address these issues in the passage and, more to the point, he doesn’t say that the Gentiles in general should be expected to know the answers. Indeed, his emphasis isn’t on how much we can know about God by natural means, but rather merely on how we can know at least enough to be able to see how stupid it is to think of God on the model of a man or an animal.

To be sure, we Thomists certainly think that all of these particular questions, and many others, can be answered via purely philosophical arguments. Our claims about natural theology are if anything much more bold than those of most Christian apologists. But the issue here is not what fancy-pants philosophers and theologians can know about God apart from special divine revelation. The issue is what the average person can be expected to know apart from special divine revelation. And contrary to what Koukl implies, what St. Paul actually says in Romans 1 is perfectly compatible with Aquinas’s position that most people are capable of only a “general and confused” knowledge of God apart from special divine revelation.

Then there’s a third problem. Proponents of the “Rebellion Thesis” maintain that each and every single atheist is engaged in an intellectually dishonest, culpable suppression of what he knows deep down to be true. I have argued that that isn’t the case, and that what is true of atheism as a mass phenomenon isn’t true of each and every atheist in particular. Koukl claims that it is the Rebellion Thesis rather than my position that is actually supported by Romans 1:

"[T]hough many atheists are not consciously aware of their rebellion (some are, of course) and may feel they have intellectual integrity in their atheism (some demonstrate a measure of integrity in their reasoned rejection of God), still, when all the cards are on the table in the final judgment, when men’s deepest and truest motives are fully revealed (Lk. 12:2), rebellion will be at the core.  This rebellion-at-the-core, I think, is what Paul had in mind in Rom. 1—a fairly ordinary, run of the mill biblical point, it seems."

Leave aside the point that St. Paul isn’t even addressing atheism, specifically, in the first place. The problem for Koukl is what St. Paul does say. Again, speaking of the Gentiles in general, Romans says that “they… changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man -- and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things” (1:22-23), that “their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature” and that their men did likewise (1:26-27), and that they are also guilty of sins such as murder and inventing evil things (1:29-30).

Now, if the defender of the Rebellion Thesis is going to appeal to Romans 1 in support of the claim that each and every single atheist is guilty of an intellectual dishonest, culpable suppression of what he knows to be true, then to be consistent, he will also have to regard Romans 1 as establishing the claim that each and every Gentile, or at least those who had lived up to St. Paul’s time, was guilty of thinking of God on the model of “birds and four-footed animals and creeping things,” of homosexual behavior, and of murder and of inventing evil things.  And there are two problems with such a claim.

First, we know that it is false. We know that not every single Gentile conceived of God in this crude and idolatrous way. (For example, Xenophanes and Aristotle did not.) We know that not every single Gentile engaged in or even approved of homosexual behavior. And obviously, not every Gentile committed murder or invented some evil thing.

Second, the claim would simply not be a plausible reading of Romans 1 in any case, even apart from this empirical point. For to infer from what St. Paul says about Gentiles in general to the conclusion that each and every single Gentile was guilty of all of the sins he describes is to commit a fallacy of division (as some readers have pointed out in the combox).

But it is no less fallacious to infer from what he says about “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness” to the conclusion that each and every single atheist is engaged in a culpable act of intellectual dishonesty. Nor, I would say, is this much less empirically dubious than the claim that each and every Gentile is guilty of murder. Even Koukl implicitly admits this when he tells us that the rebellious suppression he attributes to atheists is often “sub-conscious” -- thus making his position immune to empirical testing. And some of Koukl’s defenders appear to think that if it seems empirically false to say that every single atheist is being intellectually dishonest, then this empirical evidence is trumped by (their interpretation of) Romans 1. But that is like saying: “Each and every one of the Gentiles must have been guilty of murder, because the Bible says so!” If the text can naturally be read in a way that comports with the actual empirical evidence, then that is a good reason to read it that way -- in the case of atheists who are to all appearances intellectually honest no less than in the case of Gentiles who are to all appearances innocent of murder.

Here is another consideration. When someone calls himself an “atheist,” we need to get clear about exactly what he means by that, exactly what he is denying, before we conclude that he is engaged in some sort of intellectually dishonest suppression. Many religious people themselves have a very crude understanding of God’s nature, and of other theological matters as well. When an atheist who is simply unfamiliar with more sophisticated accounts rightly rejects these vulgar accounts, he may well believe -- mistakenly but sincerely -- that this entails rejecting theism as such. And if so, it doesn’t follow from the fact that he calls himself an “atheist” that he is engaged in any sort of intellectual dishonesty or suppression of the truth. Rather, he may be simply following the limited evidence he has to where he honestly thinks it leads, and rejecting what is in fact false. If presented with a better understanding of theism, be might change his mind. Of course, he might not change his mind even then, and it might turn out that intellectual dishonesty is what prevents him from doing so. But the point is that the fact that someone at some stage of his life calls himself an “atheist” simply doesn’t entail by itself that he is engaged in intellectual dishonesty.

Thus does the Catechism of the Catholic Church, while affirming that “atheism is a sin against the virtue of religion,” also go on to say:

The imputability of this offense can be significantly diminished in virtue of the intentions and the circumstances. "Believers can have more than a little to do with the rise of atheism. To the extent that they are careless about their instruction in the faith, or present its teaching falsely, or even fail in their religious, moral, or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than to reveal the true nature of God and of religion.” (2125)

 
 
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: Pexels)

Christian apologist Greg Koukl, appealing to Romans 1:18-20, says that the atheist is “denying the obvious, aggressively pushing down the evidence, to turn his head the other way, in order to deny the existence of God.”  For the “evidence of God is so obvious” from the existence and nature of the world that “you’ve got to work at keeping it down,” in a way comparable to “trying to hold a beach ball underwater.”  Koukl’s fellow Christian apologist Randal Rauser begs to differ.  He suggests that if a child whose family had just been massacred doubted God, then to be consistent, Koukl would -- absurdly -- have to regard this as a rebellious denial of the obvious.  Meanwhile, atheist Jeffery Jay Lowder agrees with Rauser and holds that Koukl’s position amounts to a mere “prejudice” against atheists.  What should we think of all this?

I would say that Koukl, Rauser, and Lowder are each partly right and partly wrong.  It will be easiest to explain why by contrasting their views with what I think is the correct one, so let me first summarize that.

Do we have a natural tendency to believe in God?  Yes, but in something like the way in which someone might have a natural aptitude for music or for art.  You might be inclined to play some instrument or to draw pictures, but you’re not going to do either very well without education and sustained practice.  And without cultivating your interest in music or art, your output might remain at a very crude level, and your ability might even atrophy altogether.

Or consider moral virtue. It is natural to us, but only in the sense that we have a natural capacity for it.  Actually to acquire the virtues still requires considerable effort.  As Aquinas writes: “[V]irtue is natural to man inchoatively… both intellectual and moral virtues are in us by way of a natural aptitude, inchoatively, but not perfectly… (Summa Theologiae I-II.63.1, emphasis added), and “man has a natural aptitude for virtue; but the perfection of virtue must be acquired by man by means of some kind of training” (Summa Theologiae I-II.95.1).

Now, knowledge of God is like this.  We are indeed naturally inclined to infer from the natural order of things to the existence of some cause beyond it.  But the tendency is not a psychologically overwhelming one like our inclination to eat or to breathe is.  It can be dulled.  Furthermore, the inclination is not by itself sufficient to generate a very clear conception of God.  As Aquinas writes:

"To know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature, inasmuch as God is man's beatitude… This, however, is not to know absolutely that God exists; just as to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching…" (Summa Theologiae I.2.1, emphasis added)

In other words, without cultivation by way of careful philosophical analysis and argumentation, the knowledge of God we have naturally will remain at a very crude level -- “general and confused,” as Aquinas says, like knowing that someone is approaching but not knowing who -- just as even natural drawing ability or musical ability will result in crude work if not cultivated.

Moreover, few people have the leisure or ability to carry out the philosophical reasoning required, and even the best minds are liable to get some of the details wrong.  This, in Aquinas’s view, is why for most people divine revelation is practically necessary if they are to acquire knowledge even of those theological truths which are in principle accessible via purely philosophical argumentation:

"Even as regards those truths about God which human reason could have discovered, it was necessary that man should be taught by a divine revelation; because the truth about God such as reason could discover, would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors."  (Summa Theologiae I.1.1)

Now, these theses—that an inclination to believe in God is natural to us, but that without cultivation it results only in a general and confused conception of God -- are empirically well supported.  Belief in a deity or deities of some sort is more or less a cultural universal, and is absent only where some effort is made to resist it (about which effort I’ll say something in a moment).  But the content of this belief varies fairly widely, and takes on a sophisticated and systematic form only when refined by philosophers and theologians.

Even an atheist could agree with this much.  Indeed, I believe Jeff Lowder would more or less agree with it.  In the post linked to above, he opines that his fellow atheists need to answer the arguments of religious apologists rather than ignoring them because:

"The scientific evidence suggests that humans have a widespread tendency to form beliefs about invisible agents, including gods… I can think of no reason to think such tendencies will go away with a contemptuous sneer."

Now, Jeff’s basis for this claim lies at least in part in evolutionary psychology rather than Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology.  (It wouldn’t be the first time that the two approaches led to similar conclusions.)  But the bottom line is for present purposes the same: The belief toward which we are inclined is inchoate (“invisible agents, including gods”), but the inclination is a natural one.  Indeed, the inclination goes deep enough in our nature that it takes some argumentation to overcome it (rather than the mere “contemptuous sneer” of the New Atheist).

An implicit acknowledgment of an inclination toward some kind of theism is arguably also to be found in some comments from atheist physicist Sean Carroll, recently quoted by Jerry Coyne in a post to which Jeff refers (and to which I recently replied).  In the passage quoted by Coyne, Carroll says:

"[T]he ultimate answer to “We need to understand why the universe exists/continues to exist/exhibits regularities/came to be” is essentially ‘No we don’t.’…
 
Granted, it is always nice to be able to provide reasons why something is the case.  Most scientists, however, suspect that the search for ultimate explanations eventually terminates in some final theory of the world, along with the phrase “and that’s just how it is.”  It is certainly conceivable that the ultimate explanation is to be found in God; but a compelling argument to that effect would consist of a demonstration that God provides a better explanation (for whatever reason) than a purely materialist picture, not an a priori insistence that a purely materialist picture is unsatisfying."

Carroll is essentially acknowledging here that we have an inclination to think that “That’s just how it is” is not an appropriate terminus of explanation, and that we find it “unsatisfying” to leave things there rather than moving on to something which is not a mere unintelligible brute fact but exists of absolute necessity—the God of Scholastic and rationalist theology.  He just thinks we have good reason to resist this inclination.  (As I’ve noted elsewhere, Carroll in fact does not have a good reason to think we should resist it, but that’s neither here nor there for present purposes.  Even if he had an excellent reason, the point is that Carroll seems implicitly to acknowledge that some kind of inclination is there.  To be sure, whether he’d say the inclination is natural, I don’t know.)

So, Koukl is, I think, correct to this extent: We do indeed have a natural tendency to infer from the natural world to a divine cause, and this tendency is strong enough that it takes some effort (in the form of philosophical reasoning) to get ourselves to conclude that we ought to resist it.  And again, I think even an atheist could agree with that much (as Jeff and perhaps Carroll apparently do).

However, Koukl also seems to think that the existence of God is simply blindingly obvious, so that our inclination to believe in God is nearly overwhelming—again, as difficult to keep down as a beach ball under water.  And that, I think, is simply not the case.  He also implies that nothing short of culpable irrationality and blatant self-deception could possibly lead one to resist this inclination.  And that, I think, is simply not the case either.  There is no good philosophical or theological reason to make either of these extreme claims.  And the claims are, I think, pretty clearly empirically false.  For one thing, there are lots of atheists who, though deeply mistaken, are nevertheless intellectually honest and do not have a difficult time resisting belief in God.  (I used to be such an atheist, and I knew, and know, other such atheists.)  For another thing, there are religious believers who have crises of belief—who find themselves doubting even though they don’t want to doubt.

Obviously, such a religious believer is not like someone trying to hold a beach ball underwater; rather, he is like someone trying to get a submerged beach ball with a leak in it to come back up to the surface.  And the intellectually honest atheist is like someone whose beach ball has completely popped and sunk to the bottom.  What each person needs is, not to be told to stop holding the beach ball down, but rather help in repairing it.

Certainly Koukl does not give a good argument for his extreme interpretation of the thesis that a tendency toward theism is natural to us.  The closest he comes is to appeal to Romans 1:18-20.  But “The Bible says so” is, of course, not a good argument to give someone who doesn’t accept the authority of the Bible in the first place (as the atheist does not).  Nor is it a good argument to give someone who thinks you are misinterpreting the passage in question.  And the passage does not, I think, make the extreme claims Koukl seems to be attributing to it.  For one thing, it need be interpreted as claiming merely that we have a natural inclination of the weaker and inchoate sort, rather than of the overwhelming sort (which is how Aquinas seems to understand St. Paul -- soon after the passage from Summa Theologiae I.2.1 quoted above, in Article 2 of the same Question, he quotes Romans 1:20).

For another thing, St. Paul need be understood as claiming merely that atheism and/or idolatry on the large scale, as mass phenomena are maintained by a kind of sinful suppression of the natural inclination in question.  And I think that’s true.  As I argued in a recent post, the New Atheism—not atheism in general, but the shallow, boorish, ill-informed atheism of Dawkins, Krauss, Coyne, et al., which has turned into something of a mass movement—is maintained by intellectual dishonesty, and is fundamentally motivated, not by a genuine concern for truth and rationality, but rather by the pleasure New Atheists take in feeling superior to those they caricature as irrational and ignorant.  It is intellectual pride that drives the New Atheism, and that is, of course, a grave vice.  It is also obvious that many secularists (not all, but many) are motivated by hostility to the sexual morality upheld by traditional religious belief, and that such hostility is (as I argued in another recent post) often extreme and irrational.  Certainly, from a Thomistic natural law point of view, sexual vice is another major component of the hostility to religion found in large sectors of the contemporary Western world.

However, it simply does not follow that every single atheist is fundamentally motivated by pride, lust, or some other vice—as opposed to simply making an honest intellectual error or set of errors—and Romans 1:18-20 need not be read as asserting this.  It is perfectly possible for someone mistakenly but sincerely to believe that there are good arguments for atheism, and thus good arguments for resisting our natural tendency to believe in some sort of deity.  He might think that such a tendency is like our tendency to commit various common logical fallacies—a kind of congenital cognitive defect.  This is in my view completely wrongheaded, but that it is wrongheaded needs to be shown, not merely asserted or proof-texted.

So, while we do have a natural inclination toward an inchoate theism, and while atheism as a mass phenomenon is, I would agree, sustained by grave vices—so that to that extent I concur with Koukl—nevertheless, to dismiss all atheism as such as merely an intellectually dishonest refusal to admit the blindingly obvious would be a serious mistake.  And to that extent I think Jeff is right to hold that the suppression thesis can amount to an unfair “prejudice” against atheists. (In my atheist days, I used to roll my eyes at the suggestion that all atheists are simply sinfully repressing what they know deep down to be true, and I can certainly understand why other atheists would roll their eyes too.)

What about Rauser’s remarks?  Well, to the extent that he thinks Koukl’s position is too glib, I agree with him, for the reasons just given.  However, in fairness to Koukl, I don’t think Rauser’s specific example is really a good counterexample.  Rauser writes:

"Koukl seems oblivious to the fact that his argument turns every failure to believe in God’s existence and nature with maximal conviction into an immoral instance of rebellion.
 
Think, for example, of fifteen year old Emil whose family was just massacred in a home invasion gone awry.  As tears roll down his cheeks, Emil looks to heaven and cries out “God, are you really there? Do you really care?”"

The trouble with this example is that it is not clear that someone like Rauser’s imagined Emil really doubts God’s existence so much as his goodness.  Rauser imagines Emil asking God: “Do you really care?”—and you can only ask such a thing of someone you believe exists.  (No one who comes to doubt the existence of Santa Claus lets out an anguished cry like: “Santa, do you really care?”)  Moreover, Rauser speaks of a lack of “maximal conviction,” which is not the same thing as atheism.  So, Koukl could respond to Rauser: “I’m talking about someone who outright denies that there is a God.  But you’re talking about someone who merely to some extent doubts the existence of God, or even just doubts God’s goodness rather than his existence.  That’s very different.”
 
 
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.
 
 
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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)

"There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible." - Summa Theologiae I.2.3

"If, then, something were its own cause of being, it would be understood to be before it had being – which is impossible…" - Summa Contra Gentiles I.22.6
 
 
Was Aquinas mistaken? Could something be its own cause? Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow seem to think so. In their recent book The Grand Design, they tell us that “we create [the universe’s] history by our observation, rather than history creating us” and that since we are part of the universe, it follows that “the universe… create[d] itself from nothing.”

I examine their position (and the many things that are wrong with it) in my review of the book for National Review. What is of interest for present purposes is their suggestion that future events can bring about past ones. Could this be a way of making plausible “the dreaded causa sui” (as I seem to recall John Searle once referring to the idea in a lecture)? That is to say, might a thing A possibly cause itself as long as it does so indirectly, by causing some other thing B to exist or occur in the past which in turn causes A?

To be sure, Hawking and Mlodinow provide only the murkiest account of how their self-causation scenario is supposed to work, and do not even acknowledge, much less attempt to answer, the obvious objections one might raise against it. But one can imagine ways in which such a scenario might be developed. Suppose for the sake of argument that the doctrine of temporal parts is true. And suppose we consider various examples from science fiction of one temporal part or stage of an individual playing a role in bringing about earlier parts or stages of the same individual.

In his 1941 short story “By His Bootstraps,” Robert Heinlein presents a tightly worked out scenario in which his protagonist Bob Wilson is manipulated by time-traveling future versions of himself into carrying out actions that put him into a series of situations in which he has to manipulate his past self in just the way he remembers having been manipulated. That is to say, temporal stage Z of Wilson causes temporal stage A of Wilson to initiate a transition through various intermediate Wilson stages which eventually loop back around to Z. In the 1952 E.C. Comics story “Why Papa Left Home” (from Weird Science #11), a time-traveling scientist stranded several decades in the past settles down to marry (and later impregnate) a girl who reminds him of the single mother who raised him, only to discover, after his abrupt and unexpected return to the present and to his horror, that she actually was his mother and that he is his own father. Doubling down on this Oedipal theme in what is probably the mother of all time travel paradoxes, Heinlein’s ingenious 1959 short story “–All You Zombies –” features a sex-changing time-traveler (“Jane”) who turns out to be his own father and his own mother. (Don’t ask, just read it.)

Now, if we think of each of these characters as a series of discrete temporal parts – again labeled A through Z for simplicity’s sake – then we might say that each part has a kind of independent existence. A, B, C, D, and on through Z are like the wires making up a cable, in which each wire can be individuated without reference to the others even though they also all make up the whole. The difference would be that while the wires are arranged spatially so as to make up the cable, the stages in question are arranged temporally so as to make up a person. And what we have in the science-fiction scenarios in question is just the unusual sort of case wherein some of the stages loop back on the others, just as some of the wires in a cable might loop back and be wound around the others.

Mind you, I do not in fact think any of this is right. I do not accept the doctrine of temporal parts, and I do not think that such time travel scenarios really are possible even in principle given a sound metaphysics. But as I say, we’re just granting all this for the sake of argument. And if we do, it might seem that we are describing a kind of self-causation.

In fact we are not, at least not in the sense of “self-causation” that Aquinas is ruling out as impossible in principle. For notice that in order to make sense of the scenarios in question, we have had to treat each of the stages of the persons involved as distinct, independent existences. For instance, in “– All You Zombies –” it is, strictly speaking, not that Jane causes herself/himself to exist so much as that the later stages of Jane cause earlier stages of Jane to exist. And since each stage is distinct from the others, we don’t really have a case of self-causation in the strict sense. For none of the stages causes itself – each is caused by other stages. The situation is analogous to the “self-motion” of animals, which Aristotle and Aquinas point out is not really inconsistent with their principle that whatever is moved is moved by another, since such “self-motion” really involves one part of an animal moving another part.

We might also compare these scenarios to the kinds of causal series ordered per accidens that Aquinas is happy to allow might in principle regress to infinity. The stock example is a father who begets a son who in turn begets another. Each has a causal power to beget further sons that is independent of the continued activity or inactivity of any previous begetter. Contrast a causal series ordered per se, the stock example of which is a hand moving a stone with a stick. Here the stick’s power to move the stone derives from the hand, and would disappear if the hand were to stop moving. In the strictest sense, it is not the stick which moves the stone, but the hand which moves it, by means of the stick. By contrast, if Al begets Bob and Bob begets Chuck, it is Bob who begets Chuck, and in no sense Al who does it. The reason the latter, per accidens sort of causal series might in principle regress to infinity, then, is that the activity of any member does not of necessity trace to the activity of an earlier member which uses it as an instrument. But things are different with a per se casual series, in which no member other than the first could operate at all were the first not working through it. (I had reason to say more about the difference between these sorts of causal series, and about what is meant by “first” in the expression “first cause,” in this recent post.)

Aquinas allows for the sake of argument that the universe might have had no beginning, given that the series of causes extending backward in time is ordered per accidens. When he argues for God as first cause of the world, then, he does not mean “first” in a temporal sense. His argument is rather that the universe could exist here and now, and at any particular moment, only if God is conserving it in existence, for anything less than that which is Pure Act or Being Itself could not in his view persist for an instant unless it were caused to do so by that which is Pure Act or Being Itself, to which it is related in a per se rather than per accidens way. In particular, anything which is in any way a compound of act and potency (as all compounds of form and matter are, and, more generally, as all compounds of existence and essence are) must be continually actualized by that which need not itself be actualized insofar as it is “already” Pure Actuality. (See my book Aquinas for the details.)

Now every temporal part of the characters in our hypothetical science-fiction examples is relevantly like the particular moments in the history of the universe. Even if the universe had no beginning but regressed back in time to infinity, it would still have to be sustained in being at any particular moment by God. It could not at any particular moment be causing itself. And even if the temporal parts of the characters in question looped around back on themselves, they would still at any particular moment have to be sustained in being by God. They too could not at any particular moment be causing themselves. In short, the theoretical possibility of a circular temporal series would be as irrelevant to Aquinas’s point as the theoretical possibility of an infinite temporal series is. When Aquinas denies that anything can cause itself given the absurdity of a cause preceding itself, what he is most concerned to deny is, not that a cause can be prior to itself temporally (though he would deny that too), but that it can be prior to itself ontologically, that it could be more fundamental than itself in the order of what exists at any given moment, as it would have to be if it were sustaining itself in being. (And again, in any event no cause strictly exists prior to itself even temporally in the scenarios we’ve been describing; for each temporal part of the characters in question is caused by a distinct temporal part, not by itself.)

Hence, even if the universe were (as it is not) as Robert Heinlein or Stephen Hawking describes it, it would require at any particular instant a cause distinct from it in order for it to exist at that instant. (The same would be true if we consider the universe as a single four-dimensional object. It would still be a composite of form and matter and essence and existence, and thus of act and potency, and could therefore not in principle exist were it not caused by that which is not composite in any of these ways but just is Pure Act and Being Itself.) When we carefully unpack what the scenarios would have to involve, we can see that they do not entail any sort of causa sui, nor anything that could in principle exist apart from a divine first cause.
 
 
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.
 
 
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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.

In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein complained that “in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion.” What he meant is that academic psychologists too often interpret empirical evidence in light of unexamined and dubious metaphysical assumptions. What is presented as good science is really just bad philosophy.

The recent spate of neuroscientific and psychological literature claiming to show that free will is an illusion provides a case in point. Philosopher Alfred Mele’s new book, Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will (Oxford, 2015), is a brief, lucid, and decisive refutation of these arguments. Mele demonstrates that scientific evidence comes nowhere close to undermining free will, and that the reasoning leading some scientists to claim otherwise is amazingly sloppy.

Perhaps the best known alleged evidence against free will comes from the work of neurobiologist Benjamin Libet. In Libet’s experiments, subjects were asked to flex a wrist whenever they felt like doing so, and then to report on when they had become consciously aware of the urge to flex it. Their brains were wired so that the activity in the motor cortex responsible for causing their wrists to flex could be detected. While an average of 200 milliseconds passed between the conscious sense of willing and the flexing of the wrist, the activity in the motor cortex would begin an average of over 500 milliseconds before the flexing. Hence the conscious urge to flex seems to follow the neural activity which initiates the flexing, rather than causing that neural activity. If free will requires that consciously willing to do something is the cause of doing it, then it follows (so the argument goes) that we don’t really act freely.

As Mele shows, the significance of Libet’s results has been vastly oversold. One problem is that Libet did not demonstrate that the specific kind of neural activity he measured is invariably followed by a flexing of the wrist. Given his experimental setup, only cases where the neural activity was actually followed by flexing were detected. Also, Libet did not check for cases where the neural activity occurred but was not followed by flexing. Hence we have no evidence that that specific kind of neural activity really is sufficient for the flexing. For all Libet has shown, it may be that the neural activity leads to flexing (or doesn’t) depending on whether it is conjoined with a conscious free choice to flex.

There’s a second problem. The sorts of actions Libet studied are highly idiosyncratic. The experimental setup required subjects to wait passively until they were struck by an urge to flex their wrists. But many of our actions don’t work like that—especially those we attribute to free choice. Instead, they involve active deliberation, the weighing of considerations for and against different possible courses of action. It’s hardly surprising that conscious deliberation has little influence on what we do in an experimental situation in which deliberation has been explicitly excluded. And it’s wrong to extend conclusions derived from these artificial situations to all human action, including cases which do involve active deliberation.

Even if the neural activity Libet identifies (contrary to what he actually shows) invariably preceded a flexing of the wrist, it still wouldn’t follow that the flexing wasn’t the product of free choice. Why should we assume that a choice is not free if it registers in consciousness a few hundred milliseconds after it is made? Think of making a cup of coffee. You don’t explicitly think, “Now I will pick up the kettle; now I will pour hot water through the coffee grounds; now I will put the kettle down; now I will pick up a spoon.” You simply do it. You may, after the fact, bring to consciousness the various steps you just carried out; or you may not. We take the action to be free either way. The notion that a free action essentially involves a series of conscious acts of willing, each followed by a discrete bodily movement, is a straw man, and doesn’t correspond to what common sense (or, for that matter, philosophers like Wittgenstein or Aquinas) have in mind when they talk about free action.

Other arguments against free will are no better. For example, in psychologist Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments, participants were instructed to administer what they falsely supposed were genuine electric shocks to people who gave incorrect answers to questions put to them. Many participants reluctantly obeyed these commands even when they seemed to be causing severe pain. As with the neuroscientific evidence, some have argued that such data casts doubt on free will. But as Mele says, it’s difficult to see “exactly what the argument is supposed to be.” Is the claim that Milgram’s experimental setup made it inevitable that participants would obey? That can’t be it, because not every participant obeyed the commands. Is the idea merely that situations exist in which people find it difficult to disobey authority figures? If so, what defender of free will ever denied it?

Mele’s book shows that, if anyone has been too quick to follow authority, it’s those who swallow dubious philosophical claims merely because they are peddled by scientists.

Originally posted in the City Journal. Used with permission.
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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.
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