God's doing OK in the polls!!!

You read that right. According to William E. Carroll—a Catholic philosopher currently ensconced as a good old Fellow at Blackfriars, Oxford—a respectable organization conducted a national poll a month ago showing that

...if God exists, voters are prepared to give it good marks. Voters approve of God’s performance by a 52% to 9% margin . . . When asked to evaluate God on some of the issues it is responsible for, voters give God its best rating on creating the universe, 71% to 5%. They also approve of its handling of the animal kingdom 56% to 11%, and even its handling of natural disasters 50% to 13%. Young voters are prepared to be more critical of God on natural disasters with those between 18 and 29 rating it 59% to 26%, compared to 47% to 12% among those over 65.

If such trends continue, God would be a shoo-in to beat Barack Obama next year. At any rate, nobody's confusing the latter with the former anymore.

Now Carroll does say much of what I'd say about this sort of thing, starting with the report's use of the impersonal pronoun 'it' for God. Even on that score, though, his critique should have gone further. How, I'd ask, can an 'it' be evaluated for its performance unless it's a machine (or perhaps a lower form of life), which very few people think God is? Even pollsters need to think through questions like that before asking people about their theological beliefs. Unlike the polling company's writeup, though, Carroll does get the very project's inherent irony. Surely, if there is a personal God, then he (yes, he; but that's another debate) is worthy of worship; granted such an analytic truth, it is God who should be evaluating our performance, not we his. Withal, the mere conduct of a poll asking people their opinion of God's job performance puts us in Monty-Python territory: entertainment, not theology. Our consumerist, democratic selves are ready grist for parody. Self-parody, one supposes, would be too much to expect; I'd be pleasantly surprised if that's what the pollsters were up to.

Yet the still-greater irony here is that, among a people still describing itself in the main as Christian, neither pollsters nor polled seemed to suspect irony.

The late theologian Herbert McCabe, OP, once pointed out: "It needs a kind of cosmic megalomania to suppose that God has the job of saving my soul and is to be given bad marks if he does not do that. Whatever he does for us, like creating us in the first place, is an act of gratuitous love, not something that is demanded of him." Now it is not megalomania to suppose that God has set himself the job of preserving the innocent from ultimate harm, whether the harm be from other people's bad choices or from the forces of nature. In fact, according to Christianity, our first parents were innocent and preserved from harm before their Fall, and we, their unfortunate descendants, are all meant to be blessed forever, free of death and all other harms. But in this in-between time, there is no reliable correlation between virtue and good fortune. The minority who admit to giving God bad marks give them largely for that reason. That may not be megalomaniacal, but I believe it manifests what the psychoanalysts term "infantile narcissism" in people of an age to know better. They're like seven-year-olds complaining "It's not fair!"

Well, so what if it isn't? If it hasn't dawned on you by the age of majority that life is not fair and never will be, then you haven't outgrown your infantile narcissism. The more sensitive and thoughtful narcissists just invest it, on humanity's behalf, in a bitter cosmic complaint against the Almighty. I for one have found that to be the most common cause of atheism. But the problem manifest in the complaint is not God's problem. If you think it is, the joke is on you and the complaint is your problem.

Creation and redemption are about gratuitous love. Hence life in this vale of tears is about mercy, not fairness—even granted that, in the age to come, the two qualities will be as one. When we who are ostensibly Christian fail to recognize that, we neither see nor appreciate the real ironies of life. We just stay angry with God—even when we call ourselves atheists. So long as we think we're in a position to evaluate God's performance, we expose ourselves to that and worse ironies.

Why atheism can be respectable

First Things' web editor Joe Carter argues, pace David Hart, that we must "abandon the politically correct notion" that any form of "atheism is intellectually respectable." As St. Paul implies in Romans 1, atheism is a case of vincible ignorance. Even people who have never been vouchsafed special divine revelation have "no excuse" for failing to know God:

For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened. (20-22)

Carter's argument, then, is roughly as follows. If Christianity is true, then the Bible is divinely inspired, and whatever assertion is divinely inspired is true. So St. Paul is correct in arguing that those who do not believe in the God there is are "without excuse." Hence atheism is vincible ignorance. And vincible ignorance is not intellectually respectable.

To be fair, Hart does not argue that all forms of atheism are respectable. He is particularly, and justifiably, contemptuous of the "new atheism," which never rises to the elegance of a Hume, the nobility of a Voltaire, or the clear-eyed radicalism of a Nietzsche. But his book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, a tour-de-force by almost any standard, does not depend on disparaging the motives of atheists as such. I'm reading it now. What Hart recognizes, and Carter does not, is that atheism is sometimes motivated by moral passion. That passion can be immature and anthropomorphic, but by no means is it always base. And even when it is base, it often arises from unreflective outrage about real wrongs people do in the name of God. We cannot simply assume that atheism is motivated by a desire to escape divine judgment or indulge in base sexual passions. Paul may well have been right about many pagans of his time, but I don't think we need or should read him as condemning all atheism as a moral failing.

For one thing, doing that would lower theists to the level of the new atheists, who can see theism as motivated only by stupidity or ill will. It would also abandon the progress made by most of the Christian world, which no longer sees heresy as explicable only by stupidity or ill will. Even when such claims are true, it is unhelpful to make them.

When the sort of moral passion motivating atheism is immature, anthropomorphic, or base, the best response is usually the example of believers who love as they ought: love primarily for real people, and secondarily for all that is obviously true, good, and beautiful. Evaluating motives is rarely helpful in intellectual debate, and sometimes not even helpful in ordinary life. In politics and private life as well as religion, all sides tend to overindulge in Bulverism. The antidote is the sort of rationality that sustains itself by a love for truth that is greater than one's hatred of enemies. That allows for due objectivity about competing arguments. And in the case of atheism, such an intellectual task must take the form of studying and evaluating the arguments strictly on their merits. The new atheists usually don't come out of that looking good. But intellectually respectable atheism can.

As Thomas Aquinas recognized, the two most common objections to theism are (a) the explanatory superfluity of the supernatural, and (b) the problem of evil. Those objections are worth taking seriously on the merits. As I argued over a year ago, however, even they arise from what are, at bottom, moral objections. The best of the atheists are best engaged when theists recognize that and proceed accordingly. At bottom, the debate is about what humans ought to value, and in what configuration. In turn, a debate like that arises from competing claims about what humanity itself is. Ultimately, then, the best way to combat atheism is to act, not just argue, as though God reveals man to man.

Sometimes it's just easier to do standup...

Wish I'd thought of that. One wonders how much more money I'd make with it though.

Thoughts on the road, especially about atheism

I've often heard it said that if you want God to laugh, tell him your plans. Indeed: which is why it is even more often said that life is what happens when things don't go according to plan. I've given up even trying to figure out what the ancient pagans called fortuna, and what we moderns instinctively call "luck" whether we are religious believers or not. But if we are Christians, we must call the mystery "providence" for those who believe. Luck becomes meaningful as providence to the extent that it becomes a narrative of God's love for us and, through us, for all. And it becomes that to the extent we offer it as such, to him, in faith. Coincidence becomes luck; bad luck becomes good luck; good luck becomes providence. "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28).

I've been thinking about all this because of why I've been travelling again. Over the Easter weekend, I had to interrupt not just my blogging, but also what I thought was my search for meaningful work, in order to deal with a family emergency. Having played my due role in the latter chiefly by my presence, which I've never thought of before as a healing factor for anybody, I found that an even better opportunity for the former was presenting itself. I am now in the process of exploring that opportunity. I wish I could say more and say it publicly; but as usual in my life, whatever it is that's supposed to happen is not happening with the speed and clarity I would prefer. Much depends on the choices I freely make, especially on my choices about the seemingly smallest of practical matters. It is a sore trial for a philosopher who prefers thought and talk to action—thought and talk about Big Things as opposed to little things, which really aren't little when you see them aright, as the youngest Doctor of the Church taught us.

Such is the insight in light of which I've been pondering a combox dialogue between two bloggers who know each other in real life from their time at UC-Berkeley. They do not hide their real names, which are "Arturo" (a Catholic) and "Patrick" (an ex-Catholic atheist). Now I shamelessly admit that I read those guys periodically because they have said nice things about my writings. Arturo often comments here, and Patrick has written favorably about my take on the problem of evil. I also note that the views Arturo expresses in the post heading the combox I've linked to do not surprise or disturb me in the least. I could quibble with him, certainly, in the way professors whose worldviews are very similar quibble with each other in the faculty lounge as a way to avoid real duties for a bit. But Patrick's brief adumbrations of his loss of faith astonished me. I believe they are worth addressing for a wider public.

In the aforesaid combox, he wrote:

...I have seen holiness as a transformative and inspiring power, both first-hand and second-hand; but my knowledge of human nature has expanded to the point where even this holiness seems better explained in natural psychological terms. The most radical avatars of this kenosis (Mother Teresa, Therese of Lisieux, and the examples in my own life) seem to be driven by interior anguish, doubt, guilt and darkness even (and especially) in their most luminous moments to others. Suffering molds character, self-inflicted inner suffering most of all; and the particular nature of the “bad conscience” keeps its bearer on the path of humility we marvel at most in our saints. Catholic theology has explanations for this as well, but I’ve come to find a psychological explanation more and more probable.

Prima facie, what's curious here is the insouciance of the juxtaposition. Patrick fully acknowledges the state of holiness, and understands what it often involves in the souls of the saints; yet he calmly states that he finds "psychological" explanations for the interior struggles of the saints "more and more probable" than those of theology. In a post of his own, Patrick expounds further what he takes to be the relevant concept of probability, and does so as part of a "A Prolegomenon of Prodigious Length to the Further Explanation of my Apostasy."

Reflecting on Patrick's thoughts, though, I find myself astonished by the assumption that "psychological" explanations somehow compete with "theological," which seems to be a particular case of the more general assumption that scientific explanation competes with theological explanation. I find that general assumption simply incomprehensible. I suppose one could assign a Bayesian probability to somebody's coming to believe, or disbelieve, that there is such a God as classical theism holds, given their experience and reasoning ability. This is why Patrick can and does say this:

Thus there is an implicit notion of subjective probability in all the claims we make, even the firmest ones; and the reason that I count myself an atheist today is not because of one knock-down argument against the existence of God, but because the total scope of my human experience leads me to assign the existence of the Christian God a very small probability.

What Patrick is doing in that sentence is stating an undeniable empirical fact about himself. But that is biography, not metaphysics. What I find so astonishing is that Patrick is confusing explanation with justification in a rather elementary way. Given the concepts and experiences Patrick cites, it makes perfect sense that he would be an atheist. But he has said nothing to rule out the live possibility that both scientific and theological explanations of reality could both be true, at different levels of explanation where calculations of probability cannot be univocally made. For a brief take on what that might look like, I suggest this. But that which I and other theists have to say about explanation is less interesting to me at the moment than what Patrick himself is doing.

His aim seems to be to avoid the cardinal sin of "self-deception" and face up to reality with an unflinching concern for objective truth. I applaud that. I have always believed that what really matters is not what matters to any of us as individuals, but what matters period, if there is such a thing and whatever it may be. And I read Nietzsche in college too; I took him seriously enough to write my first philosophy paper about him. But it does not seem to have occurred to Patrick, yet, that being an atheist can be just as much a result of self-deception as being a theist. When discussing the relative rationality of belief and disbelief in God, what matters is not such motives for belief as are peculiar to this-or-that person, which are indeed subjective. What matters is whether both sides can agree on a set of objectively applicable norms for rational assent in such matters, and what those norms are thus taken to be. Much of the difficulty in debates between atheists and theists arises because neither side is as clear about this as they need to be. I don't think Patrick has achieved the requisite clarity yet. But I won't put him down by speculating as to why.

God and evolution: the state of the question

In the October issue of First Things, Cardinal Avery Dulles summarizes the God-and-evolution debate with his usual succinctness and authority. Though necessarily sparing us many details, he seems to me to have got the state of the question right. Given that he alludes to a book I reviewed earlier this year for that same periodical, I want to summarize the part of the summary that exhibits controversy among theists themselves, and to explain why I stand where I do on the question.

Dulles notes a fact with which any such summary must begin. What logically undergirds the arguments of the "new atheists" such as Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Stenger is not their knowledge of theology, which is rudimentary at best, or their passionate humanism, which is not entailed by the scientific facts. The crucial premise of their arguments against "religion" is what many (though not Dulles) have called "scientism": the belief that only what can be known scientifically can be known at all. As Dulles rightly says:

These writers generally agree in holding that evidence, understood in the scientific sense, is the only valid ground for belief. Science performs objective observations by eye and by instrument; it builds models or hypotheses to account for the observed phenomena. It then tests the hypotheses by deducing consequences and seeing whether they can be verified or falsified by experiment. All worldly phenomena are presumed to be explicable by reference to inner-­worldly bodies and forces. Unless God were a verifiable hypothesis tested by scientific method, they hold, there would be no ground for religious belief.

It is at the very least reasonable to question that epistemology philosophically, while accepting that genetic mutations that are "random" from an observational standpoint, and a process of natural selection that winnows them, occur as the mechanism of evolution. Thus:

....theistic evolutionism rejects the atheistic conclusions of Dawkins and his cohorts. The physical sciences, it maintains, are not the sole acceptable source of truth and certitude. Science has a real though limited competence. It can tell us a great deal about the processes that can be observed or controlled by the senses and by instruments, but it has no way of answering deeper questions involving reality as a whole. Far from being able to replace religion, it cannot begin to tell us what brought the world into existence, nor why the world exists, nor what our ultimate destiny is, nor how we should act in order to be the kind of persons we ought to be.

Theism is neither ruled out nor ruled in by the discoveries of natural science. It simply answers a different set of questions.

With that in mind, Dulles distinguishes three schools of thought among theists who accept that macroevolution has occurred at least partly through genetic mutation and natural selection.

The first is what he calls "theistic evolutionism" and is well exemplified by Francis Collins, who once headed the Genome Project, and last year published the influential book The Language of God:

Collins, a world-renowned expert on genetics and microbiology, was reared without any religious belief and became a Christian after finishing his education in chemistry, biology, and medicine. His professional knowledge in these fields convinced him that the beauty and symmetry of human genes and genomes strongly testifies in favor of a wise and loving Creator. But God, he believes, does not need to intervene in the process of bodily evolution. Collins holds for a theory of theistic evolutionism that he designates as the BioLogos position.

Although Collins is not a Catholic, he approvingly refers to the views of John Paul II on evolution in the 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He builds on the work of the Anglican priest Arthur Peacock, who has written a book with the title Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith. He quotes with satisfaction the words of President Bill Clinton, who declared at a White House celebration of the Human Genome Project in June 2000: “Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.”

Theistic evolutionism, like classical Darwinism, refrains from asserting any divine intervention in the process of evolution. It concedes that the emergence of living bodies, including the human, can be accounted for on the empirical level by random mutations and survival of the fittest.

I might as well lay my cards on the table now: Collins' "BioLogos" position, or what Dulles calls "theistic evolutionism," is my position. I'll abbreviate it as 'TE'.

A second, better-known school of thought is Intelligent-Design Theory (ID), best exemplified by Michael Behe, whose arguments are generally careful and technically detailed. ID theorists hold that

...certain organs of living beings are “irreducibly complex.” Their formation could not take place by small random mutations, because something that had only some but not all the features of the new organ would have no reason for existence and no advantage for survival. It would make no sense, for example, for the pupil of the eye to evolve if there were no retina to accompany it, and it would be nonsensical for there to be a retina with no pupil. As a showcase example of a complex organ all of whose parts are interdependent, Behe proposes the bacterial flagellum, a marvelous swimming device used by some bacteria.

...In favor of Behe and his school, we may say that the possibility of sudden major changes effected by a higher intelligence should not be antecedently ruled out. But we may take it as a sound principle that God does not intervene in the created order without necessity. If the production of organs such as the bacterial flagellum can be explained by the gradual accumulation of minor random variations, the Darwinist explanation should be preferred. As a matter of policy, it is imprudent to build one’s case for faith on what science has not yet explained, because tomorrow it may be able to explain what it cannot explain today. History teaches us that the “God of the gaps” often proves to be an illusion.

Dulles evidently shares my reserve about ID. The God of the gaps has a disappointing habit of retreating when the gaps are closed by the progress of science.

The third school of thought is the one least known outside scientific circles, yet also the most popular among professional theologians over the past century or so. It used to be called "vitalism" by philosophers, and is contemptuously dismissed under that name nowadays by the few scientists educated enough to be aware of it. Thus Dulles's description:

Darwinism is criticized by yet a third school of critics, one which includes philosophers such as Michael Polanyi, who build on the work of Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin. Philosophers of this orientation, notwithstanding their mutual differences, agree that biological organisms cannot be understood by the laws of mechanics alone. The laws of biology, without in any way contradicting those of physics and chemistry, are more complex. The behavior of living organisms cannot be explained without taking into account their striving for life and growth. Plants, by reaching out for sunlight and nourishment, betray an intrinsic aspiration to live and grow. This internal finality makes them capable of success and failure in ways that stones and minerals are not. Because of the ontological gap that separates the living from the nonliving, the emergence of life cannot be accounted for on the basis of purely mechanical principles.

In tune with this school of thought, the English mathematical physicist John Polkinghorne holds that Darwinism is incapable of explaining why multicellular plants and animals arise when single cellular organisms seem to cope with the environment quite successfully. There must be in the universe a thrust toward higher and more-complex forms. The Georgetown professor John F. Haught, in a recent defense of the same point of view, notes that natural science achieves exact results by restricting itself to measurable phenomena, ignoring deeper questions about meaning and purpose. By its method, it filters out subjectivity, feeling, and striving, all of which are essential to a full theory of cognition. Materialistic Darwinism is incapable of explaining why the universe gives rise to subjectivity, feeling, and striving.

That is the viewpoint that Dulles professedly favors. Although I find much to sympathize with in such vitalism, I don't think it will quite do. In my review of Haught's book I gave a few reasons why. Here I want to expand on that a bit.

Citing the late Etienne Gilson's book From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again, Dulles points out that modern science has rigorously excluded formal and final causality from its purview, admitting only "material" and "efficient" causes. Quite so. But the history of science teaches that there was a very good reason for that: only consideration of the latter two sorts of "causation"—a term better replaced by "explanation" in this context—allows for rigorous testing of hypotheses by experiment. Formal and final causality may well obtain, and on philosophical grounds I firmly believe they do. But it's too easy for certain theists to forget the reason they were excluded from scientific consideration in the 17th century, and it is quite arguable that science could not have made the progress it has if they had not been so excluded. I think it better to concede that what is nowadays understood as natural science should continue to leave them to the philosophers. That is not to say that formal and final causality are altogether irrelevant scientifically. Citing them can help answer legitimate questions that natural science, as that range of disciplines is understood today, cannot answer, such as the origin of "subjectivity" and "striving." That would place scientific findings about living beings in a fuller context, which would in turn help to illuminate such findings. But that fuller context is philosophical; it cannot replace natural science and should not be done instead of natural science—again, as that range of disciplines is understood today. Scientists as a class are not about to become Aristotelian natural philosophers, nor should they.

Now Dulles recognizes that all "three schools of thought are all sustainable in a Christian philosophy of nature." Nonetheless, the sort of objection Dulles raises against theistic evolutionism calls for a response. He says:

Several centuries ago, a group of philosophers known as Deists held the theory that God had created the universe and ceased at that point to have any further influence. Most Christians firmly disagreed, holding that God continues to act in history. In the course of centuries, he gave revelations to his prophets; he worked miracles; he sent his own Son to become a man; he raised Jesus from the dead. If God is so active in the supernatural order, producing effects that are publicly observable, it is difficult to rule out on principle all interventions in the process of evolution. Why should God be capable of creating the world from nothing but incapable of acting within the world he has made? The tendency today is to say that creation was not complete at the origins of the universe but continues as the universe develops in complexity.

Phillip E. Johnson, a leader in the Intelligent Design movement, has accused the Christian Darwinists of falling into an updated Deism, exiling God “to the shadowy realm before the Big Bang,” where he “must do nothing that might cause trouble between theists and scientific naturalists.”

The Catholic Church has consistently maintained that the human soul is not a product of any biological cause but is immediately created by God. This doctrine raises the question whether God is not necessarily involved in the fashioning of the human body, since the human body comes to be when the soul is infused. The advent of the human soul makes the body correlative with it and therefore human. Even though it may be difficult for the scientist to detect the point at which the evolving body passes from the anthropoid to the human, it would be absurd for a brute animal—say, a chimpanzee—to possess a body perfectly identical with the human.

Dulles' view may be summed up thus: he finds ID too dependent on a God of the gaps, and TE too deistic. Rather, and given the Church's irreformable teaching about the origin of the human soul, we should look to some form of vitalism as a viable option.

Having already explained why I don't think vitalism will do, I should say that I understand why Dulles favors it. It's much more satisfying theologically than TE. Even so, vitalism is a prescription for "a Christian philosophy of nature," not a prescription for natural science. I have no problem with that, so long as it is understood that developing a defensible Christian philosophy of nature is not the same as doing science. Since Dulles does not pretend to be doing science, I'm sure he would agree. Still, TE does seem a tad too deistic unless supplemented by such a philosophy of nature. So perhaps the key to reconciling vitalism and TE is establishing that what is "random" from the standpoint of material and efficient causes is anything but from a fuller explanatory standpoint that would include both Aristotle's four causes and natural theology.

Big Brother Atheist is watching you

Recently, scientist and arch-atheist Richard Dawkins said: "I would free children of being indoctrinated with the religion of their parents or their community." Think about that. Theo Hobson, the British journalist from whose story I culled that quote, remarks:

Is this not amazing? I have seldom read a sentence that has induced such a sharp shiver of revulsion. This man evidently dreams of a state in which it is illegal to take one's children to a place of worship, or to say prayers with them as one puts them to bed.

Indeed. I recall Elton John saying something in the same vein last year, only more extreme: "I would ban religion completely." Ever the rationalist, Dawkins doesn't go quite that far. Even so, it would seem that certain creative types are less tolerant than they would have you believe. These two are less tolerant than the authoritarian government of China, which only persecutes some religions, some of the time.

Scott Carson, to whom I owe a hat tip, adds:

The dreams of folks like Dawkins have inspired many over the centuries, inlcuding the likes of Lenin, Stalin, and others who would have the state mandate what you can, and what you cannot, offer up in the interest of the common good. The results of following up on such dreams have inevitably been far worse for the common good than following up on the theistic dream.

Dealing with the Dawkins gang II

In the combox to my June 12 post Dealing with the Dawkins Gang, a commenter named "arensb" raised objections that he still believes have gone unanswered. Since I find them worth answering, if only for the assumptions they reveal, I shall do so here.

Although the main target of arensb's objections is philosopher Alvin Plantinga's critique of Dawkins' "many-worlds" theory, one of his main objections is to a common theistic doctrine that Plantinga himself has criticized: the doctrine of divine simplicity ('DDS' for short), most notably expounded by St. Thomas Aquinas. As formulated in response to Edward DeVita's defense of Aquinas, arensb's objection is expressed thus (emphasis added):

God is supposed to have designed and created the universe, as well as life on Earth. He is supposed to be conscious, intelligent, to hear and answer prayers, and so forth. All of this implies a brain, sensory organs, hands, etc. (or something equivalent). This is not a simple being.

The above objection assumes that the powers attributed to God by classical theism are to be understood, conceptually, in just the same way as the corresponding powers in us. On this account, if a given entity B is "conscious" and "intelligent" and can "answer prayers," then B must have "a brain, sensory organs," etc. In other words, a conscious and intelligent entity must be embodied and thus material; if so, of course, then no such entity could be "simple," in the sense of 'simple' invoked by Aquinas: not composed of parts. Essentially, then, arensb is holding that the concept of pure spirit is conceptually incoherent. So of course there can be no such thing as analogical use of terms like 'conscious', 'intelligent', etc. which, as such, could apply to a non-material yet actual entity—i.e., to a pure spirit.

Clearly, such an assumption is incompatible with classical theism in general as well as with Aquinas' use of analogical predication re God in particular. But no reason is given why we ought to share that assumption. For the reasons already exhibited, it is taken for granted that Aquinas and classical theists are talking nonsense when they predicate consciousness, intelligence, etc. of God analogically. The stance behind that attitude is a radically empiricist philosophy of language, according to which the meaning of a predicative term is a rule for its use, which in turn can be specified only with reference to empirically describable realities. But invoking such an assumption against classical theism is an exercise in pure question-begging. And that typifies many arguments made by "the Dawkins gang" generally.

Thus, arensb also objects to Plantinga's critique of Dawkins' "many-universes" proposal. According to that proposal, one could explain the existence of our universe as that of one of countlessly many universes that could, and perhaps do, result from some initial state or singularity. Now I believe Plantinga is quite correct to reply, in effect, that even if there are countlessly many such "universes," of which ours is only one, the sort of question in response to which God as creator can be adduced an answer would remain just as it is. My own way of putting the matter is this: the question is not why this universe as distinct from others exists, but why the world exists at all, where 'the world' is the totality of things that undergo real change. If we grant as fact the speculation that there are multiple universes, the question as I pose it remains just as it is—for all the universes in question would belong to said "totality." Indeed, in such a case my question is actually more directly applicable to said multiplicity of universes than it is to any particular such universe. So, Plantinga is right that the many-universes theory misses the point. It does not address the real question to which God as creator can be and has been adduced as an answer. The only way for the atheist as such to deal with that question is to define such terms as 'world' and 'explanation' in a way that would rule out the question. And that, in effect, is what the Dawkins gang does.

While that stance certainly poses a challenge to theists as evangelizers, it does not constitute a philosophical objection to classical theism. It merely represents a decision to talk about these matters from within a purely empiricist, materialistic standpoint. Of course, empiricists and materialists often say that the decision is well-founded because, unlike religion, natural science includes agreed-upon methods for resolving disagreements. But the argument that we ought to limit our knowledge-claims to claims of that kind is a moral one. That's really the sphere where the discussion needs to move forward.

Dealing with the Dawkins Gang

What's often dubbed "the new atheism" by journalists is a godsend (pun intended) to educated theists. The attacks of men such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and their followers on "religion" (a term which, conveniently, covers everything from witch-doctoring to Thomism) contain no new arguments, and their frank, often ill-mannered hostility enables us to appear urbane and judicious by comparison. But most people outside academia, or within it for that matter, don't have time for a point-by-point rebuttal. If you're an educated believer who moves in circles influenced by the new atheism, it's best to have just a few quality resources on hand for dealing with them.

I'm inclined to agree with Maverick Philosoper Bill Vallicella that the following essays are as good as any for the purpose:

Michael Novak, Lonely Atheists of the Global Village.

Alvin Plantinga, The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism Ad Absurdum.

Alvin Plantinga, Darwin, Mind, and Meaning

Read and absorb those, and you'll have invested all the time you need in acquiring your arsenal.

The Dopeler Effect: the atheism file

In his hilarious spoof on contemporary advocates of apophatic theology, the blogger "Siris" cites something called "the Dopeler effect": "the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly." Anybody who's spent much time in academia is all too familiar with that phenomenon. Given my interests, I notice it especially in the attacks on "religion" launched by atheistic philosophers, which have been coming rapidly of late. One such philosopher is the hip, charming Englishman A.C. Grayling, who now holds forth at the University of London and with whom I once spent a delightful evening when I was a graduate student at Penn in the 1980s. I really liked him, but sometimes I wonder where he gets some of his ideas.

Last weekend in the "Comment is Free" section of The Guardian Unlimited, Tony took the occasion to launch a general broadside on religion—hence, and of course, on Christianity in particular. I am undisturbed by such attacks largely because I don't think there is any such entity as "religion" or even "Christianity" that, merely as such, merits either praise or obloquy. Only when we get to specifics do things get interesting, and the critics usually get the specific facts wrong at crucial points, at least when it comes to Christianity. To be sure, Tony does have specific targets, about which he is wrong; but I don't have time to show why, in each such instance, he is wrong. I shall focus on the one specific that occasions his article: the claim made by many religionists that "atheism" is every bit as much a matter of "faith" as theism.

Now in one sense, his rejection of that claim is perfectly justified. For in general, not believing that p—in this case, not believing that there are what Tony calls "supernatural entities"—is not an instance of faith, not even of that human faith we evince when we believe that the Sun will rise tomorrow or that doing science is a good way to learn certain things. So much is indeed obvious. But I doubt that, generally speaking, the sort of religious apologist he's criticizing overlooks that. Sometimes confusedly, the apologists in question are saying that reasoned rejection of belief in supernatural entities depends on some-or-other Weltanschauung that is itself a matter of faith—that is, of human rather than divine faith. In various forms, some more refined and some less so, such a Weltanschauung may well be described as that of scientific naturalism ('SN' for short). While Tony seems to prefer describing himself as a secular humanist, his definitions of 'secularism' and 'humanism' would have me, an orthodox Catholic, being a secular humanist too. So I don't think he quite captures the difference between his Weltanschauung and mine.

SN hinges on two coordinate theses: one epistemological and one metaphysical. The former is that whatever cannot be known scientifically cannot be known at all; the latter is that only that sphere which can be investigated scientifically—that which, for want of a better term, we may call "Nature"—exists at all. Such is the more-or-less explicit worldview of popularly known contemporary thinkers as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris—just as, since at least the late 19th century, it has been for the majority of philosophers in the English-speaking world. It is in the light of such a worldview that atheistic philosophers, Grayling included, make most of the criticisms of "religion" that they do. For them, religion is belief in entities that are both supernatural and fit to explain why the universe is as it is; since there can be no "evidence" for such entities of the sort that scientific naturalists would recognize as evidence, belief that there are some such entities cannot but seem to them both unreasonable and opposed to science.

It is easy to make the case that SN is a matter of faith. Part of the case is made for us by some SNists themselves. Thus Prof. Richard Lewontin of Harvard:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so-stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. (From: “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997).

My ample experience of SNists leads me to believe that Lewontin is thereby being more honest than most. It's not that the evidence intellectually compels them to close the door of knowledge and faith on the Divine Foot; for reasons that vary by the individual case, they just don't want to let a "Divine Foot" in the door. Thus they choose their faith, which is SN.

But we don't even need Lewontin's honesty to learn that. At least as often, the objection of SNists to religion is moral: based, often enough, on the problem of evil. One sees that in Tony's article. But I've rarely found the objections of atheists based on the problem of evil to have the slightest credibility. If there is no God, then morality is a purely human construct whose content will, to some extent, differ from that of this or that religious morality. Atheists cannot fairly fault theists for failing to hold God to a morality on whose content and significance atheists and theists do not even relevantly agree. The so-called problem of evil intelligibly arises only on theistic premises; yet the problem is not one of logical inconsistency among the premises—as even the late philosopher JL Mackie admitted in the end—but of explaining how they are all true. (I expatiate on all that in my paper "The Problems of Evil.") In that case, however, theists face only the explanatory obstacles we must expect if classical theism is true; and in the meantime, the disagreement between theists and atheists remains a moral one, which surely is more a matter of faith than of something called 'science'.

I'd love to have another dinner and beer with Tony Grayling. Since each of us has become more what we once were, the resulting intensity would redouble the delight I once experienced.