Pinning "liberalism" down

My title has the word 'liberalism' in scare quotes because I want to discuss the sort of liberalism that has grown scarier and scarier over the last several decades. I'm not talking about the liberalism of Locke and the American founding fathers, which stressed respect for natural rights and the consent of the governed as necessary conditions for a legitimate polity. I'm not talking about "classical" liberalism, which called for individual liberty, private property, and a free market as the best conditions for promoting the common weal. I'm not even talking about the liberalism of the early-20th-century "progressive" movement, of which New Deal liberalism was the direct heir and whose achievements, like those of prior liberalisms, have the overwhelming support of the American people. As Walter Russell Mead has argued, such liberalisms, while not reducible to each other, intersected in ways that together explain why each unfolded historically within something recognizable as an American moral consensus. That consensus was strong enough to constitute, in Robert Bellah's felicitous phrase, a kind of "civil religion." Requiring both the free exercise and the non-establishment of religion strictly speaking, the old consensus could itself be called 'liberal' in a broad and now-hoary sense. But since the 1970s, it's been unravelling along with the mainline Protestantism that had been its traditional custodian. The result is what I call The Thing that Used to Be Liberalism ('TUBL' for short; with thanks to Mark Shea, who likes referring to "The Thing that Used to Be Conservatism."). As I shall illustrate, TUBL is now out of control.

For that reason, the label 'liberalism', like 'feminism', has become a net political negative. Contemporary liberals and feminists accordingly prefer to eschew those labels in favor of 'progressive', sounding such rhetorically effective themes as "equal rights" and "fairness." And by its very nature, TUBL is hard to pin down philosophically. The main purpose of this post is to show how and explain why.

It is not news to conservatives that, on matters of domestic policy, today's "liberals" are actually authoritarian about everything except sex. On that score, they are as laissez-faire as can be. (E.g., it's become all but impossible to get them to see what's intrinsically wrong with incest and bestiality, apart from the "ick-factor" and the health risks involved. But hey, childbirth can be messy and dangerous too...) It's that discrepancy that's got out of control, and it's not so much liberal as hedonistic. Today's "liberals" want Nanny State to regulate every aspect of life except what goes on in our bedrooms, so that life is safe for the pursuit of a "happiness" understood as maximizing one's preferences consistently with others' maximizing theirs.

In such a scheme, complete sexual autonomy (within the bounds of a vaguely defined "mutual consent") is so important that marriage and family themselves are to be defined simply as what enough people want them to be. They can no longer be seen as having a form or nature prior to what civil law, as the expression of popular will, specifies. And now that all means of birth prevention are available to everybody, nobody should be expected to incur the natural consequence of ordinary intercourse or even cover the full cost of preventing it--unless, of course, one brings a child into the world anyhow, in which case one should be made to pay dearly, especially if one is the father, who might otherwise get off scot-free. But really, there's no reason why things should reach such a pass; if you're poor, they positively should not. Contraception, sterilization, and abortion are much cheaper than children, and if you're poor you'd better have recourse to them, because there's every reason to expect that you and your children, if any, will be net burdens to society (and to yourselves, for that matter). That expectation is not the only reason why "the right to choose" abortion is central to TUBL, but it is why the Obama Administration has decided to require, in the name of "women's health," religiously-sponsored institutions who object to contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs to utilize health-insurance policies covering such things at no charge to the user. Planned Parenthood--which, needless to say, does not help people plan how they will actually parent--is the very embodiment of this mentality. In the bedroom we should all pursue our own vision of happiness, if need be at others' expense; outside the bedroom a de facto utilitarian calculus, enforced by state policy, should govern moral decision-making quite generally.

Except when it shouldn't. I'm always amused when I hear Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cite "universal values" against this-or-that foreign dictator. What makes them think that everybody ought to assign the same weight to certain values as they? The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Why is that more than a piece of paper whose appeal today is understandably weaker than when it was composed? The dignity of the human person? But where are we supposed to find a coherent and reasonable account of human dignity? In philosophy, a discipline whose practitioners cannot agree on whether it affords us knowledge of anything at all? In science, which is morally indifferent in itself? And if in religion, why should we find the deracinated, social-gospel Protestantism of Obama and Clinton more rationally cogent than other forms of religion?

Even John Rawls, whose work has dogged philosophy graduate students for several generations now, admitted late in life that his vision of the ideal polity logically depended on a "comprehensive world view" he could not justify by reason alone. Many writers have indeed argued that secular liberalism is just living off the moral capital of the Judaeo-Christian tradition it's largely repudiated. As a more honest and radical sort of liberal, the late Richard Rorty knew that and admitted it, while rejecting not only Christianity but the very notion of what he called "Truth-capital-T." All that the acolytes of TUBL seem sure of, beyond the paramount importance of sexual autonomy, is that being an accredited "victim" gives one a special moral claim on one's "oppressors," who in most narratives are white, male, and Christian--a class which, by definition, cannot be victimized, because it represents everything about the past that victims are, and the rest of us should be, rebelling against. But that stance is just self-deconstructed Judaeo-Christianity. I postpone exploration of how the sense of sexual entitlement relates to that of victim-entitlement.

In any case, lust and sentimentality are not enough to explain what's going on here. Consider the following two, rather typical examples of TUBL thought.

Last fall, when the HHS contraception mandate for health insurers was drafted, Francis Beckwith argued that President Obama had thereby abandoned the liberalism he had embraced in speeches given in 2006 and 2009. Thus:

What one finds in these speeches are prescriptions for public discourse derived from a widely held understanding of liberalism that is often and correctly attributed to the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls. What the president is saying is that if you want to restrict another’s fundamental liberty based on reasons that those coerced would be reasonable in rejecting, your coercion is unjustified, even if it is not unreasonable for you to embrace those reasons for yourself.

That sounded reasonable enough at Notre Dame, when the President accepted his honorary JD by gamely defending the "pro-choice" position in essentially Rawlsian terms. But the new mandate abandons Rawlsian liberalism by defining 'religious organization', for purposes of granting "religious exemptions" from the rule, as follows:

(1) The inculcation of religious values is the purpose of the organization.
(2) The organization primarily employs persons who share the religious tenets of the organization.
(3) The organization serves primarily persons who share the religious tenets of the organization.

So, according to the U. S. government, a Catholic hospital, university, or charitable organization that believes its purpose is to actualize the moral commandments of Christ, to love its pre- and post-natal Catholic and non-Catholic neighbors as it loves itself, and to do so by welcoming with open arms all in need of its services, has ceased to be Catholic. The absurdity of this is palpable.

But here's the kicker. Not only does that absurdity, just by being absurd, abandon Obama's earlier espousal of Rawlsian liberalism; it contradicts his own current, stated understanding of the mission of religion in society! Recounting Obama's message at the National Prayer Breakfast not ten days ago, Charles Krauthammer points out: "To flatter his faith-breakfast guests and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through [HHS Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they’re doing is not religion at all."

Is such obvious inconsistency a sign of insincerity? Many would presume as much. But I think it more likely that Obama just doesn't see the inconsistency. Why not? Because he's "in the grip of a theory": TUBL. Thus one should not impose on people what they could reasonably reject, unless what's at issue is sexual autonomy, which is not just eminently reasonable but also, on utilitarian grounds, important enough to warrant full subsidy. If the religiously retrograde don't see that, then their "conscience" is so irrational as to be unworthy of consideration, save when giving lip service to it is politically unavoidable. Those in the grip of TUBL see nothing untoward about pretending to be Rawlsian when it suits them and dropping the pretense when it no longer suits them. Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of sexual autonomy.

Among so many I could pick, another example of TUBL run amok was brought to my attention by Paul Cella.

In his new book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010, Charles Murray makes the following observation:

Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded on premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data. Try to think of any new data that would change your position on abortion, the death penalty, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage or the inheritance tax. If you cannot, you are not necessarily being unreasonable.

To be sure, Murray is not in the grip of TUBL. And by 'data', he seems to mean the results of scientific research. If so, I should think that new data could be quite relevant to the questions whether marijuana should be legalized and when the death penalty could be justified. But no amount of new data would change my mind about abortion and same-sex marriage. New data cannot affect the questions whether the fetus qualifies as a person and whether same-sex "marriage" qualifies as marriage. Both are essentially philosophical and theological questions for which the pertinent empirical data are already to hand.

But last week, a correspondent for The Economist who signs him- or herself as 'W.W.' blogged thus about the Murray passage:

I found this exceedingly odd. I can easily imagine what evidence would cause me to change my position on any of these issues....Abortion is far and away the hardest one. I favour legal abortion. I don't think embryos or fetuses are persons, and I don't think it's wrong to kill them. I also don't think infants are persons, but I do think laws that prohibit infanticide are wise. Birth is a metaphysically arbitrary line, but it's a supremely salient socio-psychological one. A general abhorrence of the taking of human life is something any healthy culture will inculcate in its members. It's easier to cultivate the appropriate moral sentiments within a society that has adopted the convention of conferring robust moral rights on infants upon birth than it would be in a society that had adopted the convention of conferring the same rights on children only after they've reached some significant developmental milestone, such as the onset of intelligible speech. The latter society, I suspect, would tend to be more generally cruel and less humane. This is just an empirical hunch, though I feel fairly confident about it. But I could be wrong. And I could be wrong in the other direction as well. If it were shown that societies which ban abortion, or which ban abortion beyond a certain point, exceed societies which don't ban abortion in cultivating a "culture of life", which pays off in terms of greater general humanity and diminished cruelty, I would seriously weigh this moral benefit against the moral cost of reducing women's control over their bodies. Also, if it were shown that abortion tended to damage women's mental and physical health more than forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, I would tend to look more favourably on restrictions on abortion, especially for minors. [Emphasis added]

Now at first I found that passage as "exceedingly odd" as WW finds Murray's. WW never tells us why he doesn't think either fetuses or infants are "persons," but there's nothing to suggest that he finds the very concept of personhood open to revision by new scientific research. Whatever his concept--and I have a fairly good suspicion as to what it is--it's a philosophical one that's "underdetermined" by the data, which only matter for helping determine which entities actually fall under the concept. (I wouldn't be surprised if WW thinks, with Peter Singer, that adult dolphins make it while human babies don't.)

But even odder than such inadvertence is how WW simply takes for granted a particular view about the nature and basis of moral obligation. He thinks, e.g., that "society" can and should have essentially utilitarian reasons for having "adopted the convention of conferring robust moral rights on infants," who cannot be thought merit such rights by nature. But on WW's own showing, such reasons could conceivably be overturned by new data suggesting, somehow, that we'd all be better off for dropping that convention. And the question what counts as "better" cannot be answered, even in principle, by citing anything we should value as distinct from what we actually do value. What's better is simply what's apt to yield what "society" wants. But there's no transcendent criterion for assessing what society--ours or any other--wants. Ultimately, moral reasoning consists in discovering and prescribing the policies likeliest to yield what we want. "Ought" is always hypothetical, never categorical. And so, as Hume put it, reason is and ought to be "the slave of the passions."

The question for the WWs of the world is this: Are there, or are there not, "data" that could determine whether that's the correct view of moral obligation? WW doesn't seem to have considered the question, but those in the grip of TUBL would reject it. It's supposed to be self-evident that freely pursuing the maximization of preferences--whatever they are--is the best we can do, and there can be no obligation higher than, or inconsistent with, the best we can do. Such is the ideal of the radical autonomy of the imperial self. The only admissible limits on such autonomy are those which are necessary in practice for collective preference-maximization. Those turn out to be considerable, of course, which is why TUBL is rather authoritarian. Except about sex.

What makes TUBL so hard to pin down is that it combines sexual libertinism, which is distinctly not Judaeo-Christian, with a statism that's supposedly required for helping the unfortunate. As deconstructed Judaeo-Christianity, the latter requires a discipline and moral earnestness that are otherwise undermined by sexual libertinism and the calculus of preference-maximization generally. Since that combination is ultimately unsustainable, both theoretically and practically, the most fervent prescription of TUBL is to help the poor and the otherwise disadvantaged get rid of themselves by every means of birth prevention. Any amount of philosophical incoherence is accepted for the sake of implementing that prescription. We're only seeing the earliest stages.

A non-trivial way to infer 'ought' from 'is'?

A shibboleth of modern Anglo-American philosophy is a belief to the effect that "one cannot infer an ought-statement from an is-statement." The first explicit formulation of and argument for that occurs in Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, but there's much controversy about how to interpret the relevant passages. So it's not always clear what the statement is supposed to mean, whether it's true on this-or-that construal, or even what the argument for it should be. "No ought from is" just seems to be one of those slogans that entrenches itself in the mind of philosophers when they're young, so that the corresponding, deceptively clear dogma rarely suffers critical scrutiny. Taken seriously, it runs counter to moral philosophies that are both cognitivist and non-utilitarian.

But the matter does get critical scrutiny from time to time, such as in a post I've just come across from Catholic philosopher Alexander Pruss of Baylor University. Pruss uses his blog to germinate and sketch philosophical ideas, with which he positively teems. Here, the general thesis is that "We have prima facie reason to conclude from the fact that something ought to be so that it is so." If that thesis can be further developed, disseminated, and defended, it would go a long way to removing what I consider a major obstacle to doing sound moral philosophy.

It seems to me that Pruss' argument is valid, or can be made so on suitable restatement. What interests me is what his thesis, if true, says about philosophical argumentation generally. To say that one has "prima facie reason" to infer such-and-such is, I take it, to say that one is within one's epistemic rights to infer such-and-such unless a clear defeater is known. I'm uneasy about non-demonstrative arguments of that sort, for their conclusions are of interest less for learning what is the case than in learning what we have justification for believing is the case. It is possible to be justified in believing something that is not actually so, if one lacks grounds for inferring that it isn't so. But the interest of that lies more in its utility for defending one's intellectual virtue than in its utility for discovering facts.

And yet, Pruss' ambitions for this thesis are apparently bigger than that. Thus he muses: "It is an interesting question whether the is-from-ought inference is at all plausible apart from a view like theism or Plato's Platonism on which the world is ultimately explanatorily governed by values. There may be an argument for theism (or Plato's Platonism!) here." If that musing turns out to be true, then the truth of the original thesis would itself serve as a premise in an argument for the existence of God, as well as removing a major de facto obstacle to natural-law and virtue theory in ethics.

I need to think about this more. Do any readers have thoughts in the meantime?

Divine simplicity and divine freedom, Part xn

The topic named in my title is one that I've written about before, for an academic journal, on this blog, and in the course of combox defenses of Catholic doctrine. At his blog Just Thomism, philosopher James Chastek offers a new insight and a new mistake about the relationship between divine simplicity and divine freedom.

The insight is that God's freedom is not that of "indetermination," which is the sort we have in via and, to a lesser extent, even in patria. That's because

If we consider the indetermination of the freedom so far as it does not possess some determinate good, then freedom is not a perfection or a good. The lack of good is not a good. So far as we take freedom in this way, we don’t call God free; and so far as freedom is taken as a perfection, and therefore said of God, we throw out the idea of indetermination-in-the-sense-of lacking-good and keep only the more central perfection (say, self- possession, or being the Lord of ones action.) We might even keep the idea of indetermination so far as we mean that God’s action is not forced by another, or so far as he is responsible for it.

Quite so. But orthodox theology affirms that God is free in some sense. So Chastek says:

Again, the divine freedom, so far as there is a thing, cannot be defined without bringing in the notion of creation. The Son, for example, does not proceed from the Father’s will, but if this is the case, the divine freedom cannot be defined without relation to the imperfection of creation, and divine freedom is not taken as an absolute perfection, as though the possibility of freedom would remain if the imperfect (that is, creation) were not possible.

Now God needn't have created, yet would have been fully free if he had not. Chastek knows that, which why he says that divine freedom entails only the "possibility" of "imperfection,"—a possibility which, given God's absolute perfection, is logically equivalent to the possibility of creation. So God is free just in case he can produce something imperfect, i.e., not fully determined, whether or not he actually does so. And of course, the fact that he has actually done so doesn't make him any more, or less, free.

From the standpoint of natural theology alone, that argument seems attractive. But even at that level, there's a Thomistic worry: since God cannot stand in a "real relation" to actual creation, it isn't even meaningful to say that he stands in a real relation to the possibility of creation, such that one of his essential attributes depends on that relation. That difficulty might be overcome with felicitous distinctions; but from the standpoint of Christian revelation, Chastek's argument surely contains a false premise, namely that God in se, being fully perfect and thus fully determinate, would lack freedom unless he were able to bring about imperfection ad extra.

Although the coming-forth of the Son and the Holy Spirit from the Father is by natural necessity, not by a choice that could have been otherwise, the love shared by the Persons with each other must in some sense arise from free choice, else it would not be love. One might say that such freedom is only the absence of coercion; but then it would be very hard to explain why natural necessity relevantly differs from absence of coercion.

To make such a criticism stick, I needn't give an account of just how the Persons love each other with free choice. I claim no special insight into the inner life of the Trinity, and neither should anybody else reading this. But I do know that our capacities are but faint analogies of God's, and that for us, love entails freedom of the will. It must entail at least that within the Godhead, prescinding from the question of creation.

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.

The argument from desire

As I waded this morning through my overwhelming social-network streams—all of which now integrate into my single Google+ stream—I managed to notice somebody quoting C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." Both in context and in general, that is the nucleus of an argument for the existence of God. Seeing a token of it revived my memory of having found the argument persuasive when I read the book in my teens. I still believe the argument has potential: more than even theists generally acknowledge.

Of course modern and post-modern Western minds scoff.  The only difference between the modern and post-modern minds is that the latter is more consistently cynical, and even that difference does not obtain here. And for good reason: If only for maturation's sake, we are taught not to assume that desiring X is evidence that X exists to satisfy the desire. I desire freedom from death, or failing that, freedom from the natural consequences of sexual license; yet as they're fond of saying in the South, that ain't gonna happen. (The South has some wonderful sayings, such as "Y'cain't win fer losin'...") I desire that the tree in my yard grow money, but that ain't gonna happen either—and if it did, the government and my ex would find a way to get most of it anyhow. We all know that we can and why we should outgrow desires we know cannot be satisfied.

But can we or should we outgrow what the Germans call sehnsucht?  I mean what Lewis meant:

That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.

We've all experienced that. But most of us can't name the desire itself, still less its object; and as we age, most of us tend to forget it. We assume it's the fantasy of children and poets, and fear that dwelling on it would inhibit the "real" business of life. Indeed, as Lewis taught us, even the experience of it cannot be summoned up by wishing or seeking. And so it would seem that sehnsucht tells us nothing about any "beyond." For many of those capable of even discussing the matter, sehnsucht is just part of our makeup, full stop. Perhaps it's our brain chemistry. As such, it may have "adaptive" value, by virtue of causing some people to believe that all the pain and suffering of life is worthwhile in terms of a beautiful Reality beyond what the world has to offer. Such a belief motivates many to carry on and stay relatively sane. But sehnsucht is not, really, evidence of any such Reality. Or is it?

Like Lewis, I think it is. I have always thought so. In general, natural, inescapable desires for good things can and should be satisfied. We have natural, inescapable desires for food, sleep, sex, play, knowledge, beauty, and many other generic goods. It is natural for us to love—even to love specific people, such as our children. Under certain conditions, all the aforementioned goods are available; under certain conditions, we should seek and attain them; when we do, we enjoy them. Why should that natural, inescapable desire called sehnsucht be any different? Is there any reason to believe that "reality" ultimately frustrates that longing, that what's longed for cannot be named because it does not exist? Of course it's logically possible that sehnsucht is futile at the end of the day, or of life; but what's actually the case is only a small subset of what's logically possible, and much more interesting.

One can rule out such an "argument from desire" by stipulating that only what can be known scientifically can be known at all, and thus can be safely said to exist at all. But scientism would have us believe, like Bertrand Russell, that we are evolutionary experiments doomed to frustration and oblivion. To my mind, and that of most of the human race, nihilism is unreasonable as well as boring. Trust your sehnsucht instead. It's the reasonable thing to do.

Back, with evil

Apologies to my vast readership for the weeks of silence. At the beginning of September, I moved from NYC for a new full-time teaching job in Syracuse, which has turned out to be fairly demanding. At the same time, my father is terminally ill and my elder daughter is about to get married—in England. For reasons I won't explain further, my new job makes it much easier to deal with such family matters than staying in NYC would have. So I take this job to be providential. Even so, for the past six weeks I have been kept too busy for blogging. I probably shouldn't be blogging even now, but I can't help it. Another natural-theology issue keeps niggling at me.

I mean, of course, the so-called "problem of evil." I've written about that standard conundrum several times before, most notably here, and I'd love to write a book about it. My excuse for adding to the already staggering literature on the topic would be to show, rigorously, why most of said literature is irrelevant, and to tease out what is relevant. The main purpose of this post is to briefly explain why, and to state the appropriate lesson.

Last month, philosophers James Chastek and Alex Pruss made arguments that serve nicely as a point of departure. But only as a point of departure. First, Chastek's conclusion:

Christianity is utterly incoherent without the doctrine of original sin, which promises and insists upon the suffering and toil of the human race as a consequence of the divine goodness (namely, his justice). We can call this doctrine impossible or absurd, but we can’t very well say that we get the idea that God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent from Christianity and then turn around and say that we have no idea why the human race suffers. Omnipotence and omnibenevolence are a part of a package deal with original sin.

Next, Pruss' conclusion:

In the face of eternity, a finite amount of suffering is just a blip. But does it not beg the question to suppose eternal life in responding to the problem of evil? Not at all. The problem of evil is an argument against theism. Theism makes eternal life for any created persons very likely. Thus, if the problem of evil is to make a significant dent in the probability of theism, the problem of evil has to work even if there is eternal life, or else a good argument against eternal life is needed.

What's helpful about such arguments is their reminder that classical Christian theism, as distinct from a deracinated, generic philosophical theism, goes some way toward showing how an answer to the problem of evil is possible. Such an answer, I argued in the paper linked above, would be defense rather than theodicy. It would not explain how God is justified in presiding over all the unmerited suffering we find in the world, but it would show that his doing so is logically compatible with his being both all-powerful and perfectly good. And if my argument in that paper is sound, then defense is all anybody—theist and non-theist—has a right to expect.

But how, exactly, do Chastek and Pruss help? They invoke the Christian-theist doctrines of original sin and an everlasting afterlife, respectively. I want to argue that, in conjunction with certain other doctrines, that of original sin entails that God could not have prevented our first parents' sin from depriving their descendants of grace without trashing the created order of things. Now Chastek thinks the inheritance of original sin is required by God's "justice." But if that's so, it's only remotely, insofar as God's justice requires that he not trash the created order of things. For the descendants of our first parents did not deserve to inherit such a deprivation: none of us, prior to conception, did a thing to deserve anything, bad or good. But the inheritance of the deprivation is balanced out by the offer to all of an unmerited share in the divine nature. That entails everlasting life. None of us, of course, deserve everlasting life either. If we are all (with the usual few exceptions understood) conceived without grace, we are all called by grace to unmerited glory. That balance is itself just, even though neither end of the scale by itself is fair. This life isn't about fairness. It's about mercy.

Of course none of that shows that God had to set things up in such a way. Nothing could show that. Some would even argue that God is immoral for setting things up that way. Odd as that may sound, it's an argument worth taking seriously. But for the reasons Chastek and Pruss give, it cannot be plausibly argued that such a setup shows that divine omnipotence and omnibenevolence are mutually incompatible on a Christian account of those attributes. That takes the logical sting out of the problem of evil. Raising the problem is a lament and a question; its mere existence is not a logical demonstration of any anti-Christian conclusion.

Resisting the Gnostic impulse

Gnosticism is a perennial impulse. I don't mean all the mythic confabulations that the bewildering variety of Gnostic sects spun during the first three centuries C.E.  I mean a tendency they all had in common. Like the Devil himself, it is deadliest when unrecognized.

To expose that for what it is, however, we need to excavate the two notions that the ancient Gnostics all shared. The first was that the universe as we observe and experience it is evil. It is a prison from which only a few inmates, able to recognize and accept enlightenment about their true situation, have any chance of escape. Second, and on most of the ancient accounts, the world was created by an errant demiurge of some sort who keeps sparks of the divine, our true selves, imprisoned in our bodies. Accordingly, the task of those who want salvation is to escape the clutches of matter altogether and rejoin that ineffable, purely spiritual Pleroma ("fullness") from which the Demiurge had the ill grace to devolve. It all sounds like an elaborate fantasy to most of us today who have heard it at all. And ultimately, that's just what it is. But it actually sprang, and in some forms continues to spring, from a perennial tendency I recognize even in myself: cosmic cynicism.

By 'cosmic cynicism' I mean the attitude which naturally springs up when we disbelieve that the "cosmos," that vast, more-or-less ordered whole we experience, is the product of a Love and a Reason that are one. The cosmos or "universe," in the scientific sense of the term, doesn't care about what we tend to care about most—such as love, goodness, and beauty. Nowadays, of course, many of those who find the universe morally or spiritually wanting tend to be atheists or agnostics. Like most of us, they see much apparently pointless suffering and lament how "the innocent" suffer at least as much, if not more, than the villainous. That fortune and deserts do not seem to coincide is the hard truth motivating believer and unbeliever alike to raise "the problem of evil" as an objection to classical theism. And those who find that objection decisive conclude that, if the universe is created at all, its creator must be immoral, foolish, or both--certainly not the all-perfect God of classical theism. That's what the Gnostics concluded; yet, thanks to the historic monotheistic religions, most moderns don't buy the sort of metaphysics that allows for and requires an errant demiurge. So today's cosmic cynics generally conclude there is no creator in any sense at all. The universe is just a brute fact, brutal in its indifference to our most cherished, sentimental pieties. Humanity is just an evolutionary experiment, probably doomed, and certainly not worthwhile in any objective terms save those of Dawkins' "selfish gene." That is now considered the "enlightened" point of view by most of the culture's clerisies. It's the new Gnosis, sans the old myths and metaphysics.

Yet how much success would a man have if he tried to induce a woman to marry him by pointing out that their genes, together, have a real good shot at beating out many others in the struggle for survival? Not much; and we can't even imagine a woman proposing to a man in such terms. We need our sentimental pieties, if that's what they are, in order to find life worth affirming. But the Gnostic naturalists urge us not to imagine that Reality cares a whit, or is even capable of doing so. And even those of us, the majority, who aren't really naturalist in our philosophy can't help worrying that some version of naturalism might be true. After all, most scientists are naturalists, and science is the most successful form of intellectual inquiry we've ever come up with. Scientists are today's bearers of "enlightenment." So as we go on being human, indulging our sentimental pieties, many of us can't help being at least a tad cynical about it as we take our cues from the enlightened.

That kind of cosmic cynicism, which we might call "tough-minded despair," isn't just modern. In fact, it has always been with us. One finds it in such ancient philosophers as Democritus and Lucretius, and I suspect that their attitude was more widespread than the written record indicates. But the Gnostics had much larger followings than such thinkers. That's because most people have never been able to believe that the universe is just a brute fact which neither requires nor admits explanation in terms of something beyond it. There must be some sort of story behind it, even if the self-styled experts tell us otherwise. Or so most people have always thought. So we might see Gnosticism properly so-called as cosmic cynicism combined with a metaphysics that at least purports to explain why such an ultimately futile setup as the universe came to be.

But when we look at Gnosticism that way, it becomes clear almost at once that the impulse behind it isn't limited to either Gnosticism properly so-called or to secular, metaphysical naturalism. The largest Eastern religions—Hinduism and Buddhism—don't seem to value this life all that much either. For them, the goal is to attain nirvana by escaping the universe, understood as an endlessly cycling wheel of death and rebirth—and we do that, roughly, by accumulating good karma. "We gotta be good here so we can get outta here." That's the same impulse as the one behind Gnosticism. The Christian notion that creation is a positive good, freely created in love by a personal God, whose aim is to unite it to himself through the divinization of his rational creatures, is not really what we get in Hinduism, Buddhism, or in most other religions originating East of Iraq and west of Hawaii. The largest of them incorporate a cosmic cynicism. The Universe is something to be left behind, not elevated and transformed, when we reach whatever our goal is supposed to be. It's just maya, illusion: the Self's hiding from itself.

One even finds cosmic cynicism in the Bible, from the mouth of Qoheleth. Ecclesiastes got included in the canon largely because it's a kind of reverse preparatio evangelica for the Messiah. But it only works that way when messianism becomes apocalyptic and universal—which is just what we find in Judaism as it approached the time of Jesus of Nazareth. Ultimately, the only antidote to cosmic cynicism is the belief that the Universe is both rational and good, because the Reason that created it has a reason based in Love for doing so. That belief was the engine behind the development of modern science, which began in the Christian Middle Ages.

For most of us, though, belief in the goodness and rationality of the cosmos comes only by faith through an authority that transcends human reason. We're pretty cynical about authority these days. And that's the other main reason it's so hard to resist cosmic cynicism. We accept the authority of scientists, more or less, because science works, more or less, in a way that observation and common sense enable us to appreciate. But the things of the spirit? If there is such a thing as "spirit" at all, we seem to face only competing authorities about what it is and what, if anything, it's for.

That is why, I believe, Newman was right to argue that in the end, the only choices are Catholicism and atheism. That choice is not logically exhaustive, but I am convinced the future will show it to be existentially so. Among human beings, only the bishops of the Catholic Church, united with the pope as their chief, claim to be given authority by a God who can neither deceive nor be deceived to say what God has revealed. If there is no such authority, then we cannot know what God has specially revealed, and hence we can maintain no lively sense that God, even if he is Reason in some sense, is Love. We can have only opinions about what various people have said, written, and done about God, assuming there is one. And in the era of postmodernism, we are as cynical about opinions as we are about everything else.

How "choice" devours itself

Lydia McGrew has coined a chillingly apt metaphor for the culture of death: "choice devours itself." She has applied the metaphor to the specific issues of forced abortion, euthanasia, and "organ conscription," which are quite serious enough in themselves. But I believe her metaphor can be generalized to describe the entire direction that the societies of the secularizing West, and increasingly others too, are taking. The modern, secular, Western understanding of freedom sows the seeds of its own destruction.

In The Abolition of Man (1943)—a book I am not alone in seeing as one of the most prophetic of modern times—CS Lewis argued that "man's power over Nature" really means "the power of some men over others with Nature as its instrument." He predicted that scientific and technical progress in "eugenics," "psychological conditioning," and other areas will in due course give some people the power to remake others as they please. The question will then arise: What criteria will they use to determine how to remake humanity itself? Unless "the conditioners" acknowledge a rational, objectively binding set of moral norms governing themselves and everyone else, their only criteria will be subjective: their own desires, impulses, and preferences.  There would be no norms by which to evaluate, and choose accordingly among, those desires, impulses, and preferences themselves. Such a situation would recall Hume's dictum: "Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions." The conditioned would be the slaves of the conditioners' passions, and the conditioners the slaves of their own. In that sense, might would indeed make right.

Now in one way, Lewis' scenario seems quite fanciful. There has never been a time when people, even those who profess moral relativism in principle, have acted without lip service to the belief that at least some of the moral norms they acknowledge have universal and objective binding force, irrespective of whether this or that set of people also acknowledge it.  Callow undergraduates and ugly drunks aside, hardly anybody is willing to come right out and say that might makes right, full stop. Even Hitler spoke as though the might of the Aryan race went hand-in-hand with its general moral superiority, according to a standard that obtained whether non-Aryans, or unreliable Aryans, recognized it or not.  Lenin, Stalin, and Mao held that their atrocities were justified by the direction of history: dialectical materialism assured us that everything would work out in the end for the benefit of the masses. Even the worst megalomaniacs try to rationalize their libido dominandi in objective terms. Or at least they have so far; for such is the tribute that sophistry pays to conscience, where "conscience" is understood, à la Ratzinger, as the human race's collective anamnesis of the most basic moral truths. So we might think it likely, as some of Lewis' critics have, that once scientific and technical progress give us the ability to remake ourselves, the values by which we do so will be those of most of today's scientific community: rational, liberal, humane. In other words: the values taken for granted by the faculties of secular universities. What would be so bad about that?

The problem is that what's happening along the march for ever-increasing "freedom" and "choice" virtually precludes such a result. For what secular liberalism regards as moral progress, which is indeed making its way throughout Western society, contains within itself a pair of performative self-contradictions too basic to be sustainable. That is what the slogan "choice devours itself" ultimately means.

For the secular liberal, moral progress is thought to consist in facilitating what I call "radical autonomy." From this point of view, what's most precious in the human person is the capacity for fully autonomous choice. Within the limits imposed by the laws of nature and others' "right to choose," what is chosen is considered less important for human well-being than that it be chosen autonomously. That idea has much appeal. In a now-famous opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy put it thus:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.

To most Americans, that seems unexceptionable: Who, after all, wants the State to force our adopting beliefs on such matters? But that leaves us with two questions: What should those beliefs nonetheless be, and how would we know them to be justified?

As given by secular liberalism, the answer to the first question is that we ought to believe in radical autonomy. The whole tenor of modernity virtually impels us in the West to hold that moral progress consists in expanding the effective scope of such autonomy. The more "liberty," the better. And of course, if all adults are equal in virtue of possessing such autonomy, then it is an injustice to any of them to hold that some choices in the spheres Kennedy named should not be respected by law.  From thence derives much of the support for abortion, assisted suicide, court-imposed redefinition of marriage and family, and other practices thought to protect or expand people's autonomy.

In practice, though, it doesn't quite work that way. Allowing women to kill in their wombs the human lives they've generated, on the ground that respecting women's autonomy requires that, or allowing people to enlist others in their own demise, on the ground that they should be the judge of when their lives are no longer worth living, encourages a habit of thought which makes life more precarious for everybody. And allowing marriage to be redefined so that parenthood, if chosen at all, becomes a purely legal category rather than a primarily biological category just is going to undermine both the stability and the freedom of the family. Mind you, I am not here addressing the question whether abortion, suicide, or same-sex marriage are intrinsically wrong, or only wrong for the most part, or not wrong at all. My point is just this: a habit of thought in which the value of human life is seen primarily in terms of what we can freely choose to do with it, rather than as a gift from some transcendent source uniting reason and love, is a habit of thought which will lead to more and more people becoming victims of others' "choices."

At first that will be, indeed already is, the most vulnerable: children and the elderly. But no principled line, more secure than that drawn by raw power, can be drawn between lives exempt from such a fate and lives subject to it. It's all a matter of what "we" consider valuable, where "we" are the people with the votes and/or the guns. Once the value of life, and the reality of human nature, are no longer treated as givens but as measurable by some sort of calculus among "autonomous" human agents, no other result is possible. That is why, when the "might" in "might makes right" is that of politically institutionalized "choice," choice devours itself. Such is the first "performative self-contradiction" in the ideology of radical autonomism.

The other question I posed for secular liberalism is how we are to know what basic beliefs about the "mystery" of "existence" and "human life" are the ones we ought to adopt. That question is more difficult for secular liberals than most of them realize.

One might think that a thoroughgoing radical autonomist would simply reject the question, thus insisting that there are no such beliefs we "ought" to adopt, as though there were some philosophical standard other than autonomous "choice" for adopting one set over another. But such a stance is so plainly self-defeating that few proponents of "choice" are willing to defend it openly. For if what chiefly matters is the choosing, so that it doesn't matter what we choose unless we're insanely ignoring the laws of physics or inconsistently infringing others' "right to choose," then my freely choosing to reject radical autonomism must be respected as much as other's freely embracing it. But implausible as it may seem, that seems to be the rationale behind the sort of Western "multiculturalism" which cedes more and more ground to Muslim resident aliens claiming the right to be governed by Sharia law.

In almost every major city of Western Europe, we now have a de facto situation in which domestic violence, and the oppression of women generally, is legal on one side of a street and illegal on the other. Don't think it can't happen here. If such a situation be accepted as legitimate in principle, then radical autonomism is thereby giving up its claim to be objectively and universally binding. It can only be seen, even by itself, as just one more "choice" made without prejudice to any other sort of "choice." But if that judgment applies to Muslim fundamentalism, why not to any other brand of fundamentalism, or indeed to any comprehensive belief-system whatsoever? There is no principled basis for making a distinction.

Now to their credit, a few secular liberals, such as Christopher Hitchens, have seen the problem and addressed it. They attack multi-culti cravenness as just that, urging us to buck up and defend some version of secular liberalism as a universally, objectively binding morality incompatible with "religion." But that focuses attention on the second question I raised: how, without some version of what they call "religion," would we know which morality enjoys such status?

Most secular liberals point to the progress of science and democracy as evidence of the truth of their ideology. Our lives are just better, by a host of measures, for those products of modernity. We know more, we're more comfortable and longer-lived, and accordingly we have a wider array of "choices" befitting our personal dignity than did people before the Enlightenment and its effects took hold. What's cited as evidence here is indeed the case; but what, exactly, is it evidence for, other than the fact that it gives some of us more of what most of us find ourselves wanting? What ought people to value and therefore seek, irrespective of what some or most of them actually do value and seek?

Once again, secular liberals have no principled answer to that question. For answering it requires what John Rawls called some-or-other "comprehensive world-view" which, according to him and secular liberals generally, cannot be enshrined in the public sphere without infringing people's autonomy. We are to order our lives together only by investigating which public norms enable more autonomous human agents to get more of what they want by living together than the alternatives would. It's a purely empirical question of maximizing preferences and thus "choice." Aside from that, no vision of life imposing a universal scale of values on people should be embodied in our political institutions.

Now as we've already seen, such a position is self-defeating in its radical form. But let's suppose it can be suitably qualified to avoid that result. Rawls himself admitted that he too has a "comprehensive world-view" (CWV) in terms of which "political liberalism" is to be justified. So the only question becomes: which world-view?

The problem secular liberals have with answering that question is their naturalism, which can be either methodological or, more strongly, ontological. They're always telling us that people's CWVs are shaped by "culture," which in turn is shaped by the laws of biology generally and of evolution in particular. Now granted that is true to some extent, it leaves untouched the question to what extent various CWVs are themselves true, along with the question whether we can choose our CWVs freely, as Justice Kennedy assumes. If people's CWVs are wholly shaped by factors beyond the individual's control, then as Bertrand Russell once quipped, "some of us are determined to be right; others, to be wrong." Right or wrong, we would not be adopting our several CWVs for the reason that they are true, even if we think we are; for whatever our CWVs, our holding them as true is beyond our control, and hence we do not choose to believe them simply on the ground that they are true. Rather, we believe them to be true because we are causally determined to do so. But in that case, why should our CWVs be respected as those of autonomous agents?

A secular liberalism that avoids epistemological self-cannibalism must say not only that certain propositions and norms are those we ought to adopt as part of a CWV, but also that we can know them to be universally and objectively binding, and choose freely, for that very reason, to guide ourselves by them. Assuming there are such propositions and norms, it cannot be said that they bind on the ground that we choose them. That's because, for purposes of decision-making, we can only be said to choose them for reasons inherent in them—not arbitrarily or randomly, and not because were are causally determined to choose them by factors beyond our control.  If we chose them arbitrarily or randomly, then our choices would be no more worthy of respect than any others, and hence we would have no reason to make them as opposed to others. And if we were causally determined to choose them, then we could not be choosing them because they are true, but simply because we have no choice. That's not what secular liberals claim, or seek to claim, as the basis of personal autonomy.

Hence the second performative self-contradiction. Secular liberalism stands as much in need of self-justification as its competitors. It must explain why certain propositions and norms are those we ought to adopt as part of a CWV, how we can know them to be universally and objectively binding, and therefore why we ought to choose freely, for that reason, to guide ourselves by them. But that is precisely the kind of argument it cannot produce if all CWVs are equally products of culture and biology, with none admitting a justification that transcends both. And so if it is not to seek a justification simply in terms of the might of Western secular democracies, and the cultural preferences of their self-styled "enlightened" citizens, secular liberalism must produce an argument for claiming that "choice," within the limits already specified, trumps what is chosen. As I've argued, the only kind of argument that can do that will end up positing things beyond "choice" as universally and objectively binding criteria for choice. There can be no principled objection to including those as part of a CWV that undergirds the res publica. For excluding them in the name of choice deprives choice of the justification it needs to bind. So choice devours itself, unless something higher than choice must regulate choice without crushing it.

Now if there is an argument that is of the needed sort, elicits general assent among secular liberals, and does more than invoke their own preferences, I've yet to hear it. It is taken as almost self-evident that the sort of society in which secular Princeton philosophers are both possible and comfortable is the best kind. But as I've already argued, a CWV like that cannot explain why human life is intrinsically valuable or even why the values of science and personal autonomy trump all others. It cannot supply a sustainable rationale for itself. All it can do is justify a certain sort of "might" to itself, in its own terms, without reference to any transcendent source of reason and love.

For that reason, Lewis was essentially correct. In a society driven by "choice," the people who gain enough power over human nature will have nothing to prevent them from becoming as much the slaves of their own non-rational appetites as the rest of us. "Man's final conquest will be the abolition of man." Or: choice will have devoured itself. Unless, of course, the laws of "Nature's God" are acknowledged and respected as much as "the laws of Nature" themselves.

Sing(er)ing the "real nitty-gritty"

In the late 60s, I believe it was, a pop song call "The Real Nitty-Gritty" achieved one-hit-wonder status. Several singers have done versions of it since, and I've always liked how it can apply to a variety of situations beyond the merely sexual. That song came to mind again as my agreggator offered up a blog post yesterday from the New York Times: "Should This Be the Last Generation?"

My first instinct was to assume that the intent of the question was only rhetorical, that it was designed to get us pondering the true extent of human depravity. If that's how it had been meant, I would have appreciated it, while still answering it in the negative. But then I saw that the post's author was Princeton philosopher Peter Singer—you know, the guy who sees nothing wrong with euthanasia or even infanticide, but admitted he couldn't bring himself to off his demented grandmother. So at once I inferred that the question was meant seriously by a man who is better than his principles. Those who know Singer's reputation will understand why I inferred as much, and reading the post confirms its title's earnest intent. To be fair to Singer, he affirms his belief that "life is worth living." But he does not take that belief as self-evident. He invites readers to ponder his question along with a bunch of others subsidiary to it. Yet I'm inclined to believe that raising such a question seriously bespeaks an attitude toward life that should be treated primarily as a symptom of spiritual disease rather than as suggesting a serious philosophical thesis.

Since the piece itself is rather short, I shall leave Singer's argument to the reader. I'd rather focus on the premise, plain throughout Singer's work, that makes it possible to raise his post's question: the premise, that is, that the principal good of life is the experience of pleasure and the principal evil of life is accordingly that of pain. Now it's possible to hold, as Singer does, that most people hitherto will have experienced more pain than pleasure in their lives; and if that's right, then a utility calculus could lead one to conclude that most people's lives at this stage of history haven't been worth living. That is what Singer appears to believe. That is what makes it possible to raise his question, which he answers in the negative only by projecting a degree of future human "progress" that will end up shifting the utility balance for most humans to the side of pleasure. But the premise is pretty much stuck on a brand of utilitarianism going back to John Stuart Mill. The arbitrariness and incoherence of Mill's utilitarianism is deftly exposed in a chapter of J. Budziszewski's recent book The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction.

A basic problem with utilitarianism is epistemic: even in its most sophisticated varieties, it requires assessing things from a global, impersonal point of view that we do not and cannot have. (Theodicy in the strict sense of the term is impossible for the same reason, but that's another topic.) There's an additional problem with Mill's and Singer's closely interrelated brands of utilitarianism: the pleasure principle itself. It assumes that the unique and supreme criterion of goodness is undergoing subjectively pleasant experiences rather than doing something of which such experiences, when they occur, would be objectively fitting byproducts. The latter would be the life of love; the former could suffice simply as a life of sensation. But the superiority of the latter cannot be explained in Singer's philosophy. That shows that what we're dealing with is a spiritual disease, not just a philosophically flawed argument. Those who think the superiority of love to pleasant sensation is not evident, or those who think the value of love can be reduced to that of pleasant sensation, share the same disease.

But it's a common enough disease. As the birth rate plummets well below replacement level in much of the "developed" world, it seems many have concluded that no future is better than a present of voluntary sacrifice for the sake of continuing the intrinsic good of human life beyond the present. This, friends, is the real nitty-gritty for the developed world. The choice is between love, understood as holy sacrifice, and nihilism.

Cross-posted at What's Wrong with the World

The concept of "evidence" for divine miracles

Over at What's Wrong with the World, Lydia McGrew announces:

For a limited time only (get yours while supplies last) a draft is available on my personal web site of "History and Theism: Epistemology, Miracles, and the God Who Speaks." This article will eventually appear in a forthcoming Routledge Companion to Theism, edited by Charles Taliaferro and Victoria Harrison. The contributors' articles are due by November of this year, but the release date has not been specified, as far as I know.

I urge my philosophically educated readers to download and read this fine draft for themselves, while they can, before the final product is "entombed" (Lydia's word) in an academic anthology that only the better university libraries can afford. Perhaps my reflections on her thoughts will encourage such readers to do that.

What interests me about Lydia's paper is that it addresses a nest of issues that are practically important and that I've discussed before on blogs, here and there, with Lydia herself and with philosophy professor Scott Carson—who has his own blog too, though it's lain fallow for a while. I have good reason to consider both people friends: they have been immensely kind and generous to me in private correspondence even though, for annoyingly contingent reasons, I have never met either of them in person. Perhaps that's one way the Lord is being merciful to them. In any case, I have disagreed with them both on this topic before. (To be fair, I generally share Scott's skepticism about the value, either scientific or philosophical, of intelligent-design theory, even though Lydia does not.) But the three of us each disagree with one other about the extent to which miracles can be rationally identified as such. My last response to Scott on that issue is here; my discussions with Lydia on related issues are scattered throughout the comboxes at W4 and hence are not worth hunting down. I'm intrigued by the extent to which classical-theist philosophers who are also tradition-minded Christians manage to disagree so strongly with one another about this nest of issues.

This is not to say that I disagree with the main thrust of Lydia's article. I think she does a good job of showing, pace many liberal Protestants and Catholics, that once can reasonably identify some event as a miraculous revelation of God's nature and purposes without being fideistic, unhistorical, or anti-scientific. In my opinion, of course, neither historical nor scientific methods of investigation can ever suffice to demonstrate that some observed or observable event is a miraculous revelation. But in some cases at least, such methods can make it reasonable to believe that certain reports are in fact reports of miraculous events revelatory of God and his purposes. On this question, I stand midway between fideists and rationalists, which seems to satisfy neither Scott nor Lydia.

The most intriguing part of Lydia's paper consists in her reply to philosopher of science Elliot Sober, who argued that theists who want to present certain events are miraculous in the relevant sense face a dilemma. Although Sober's argument is directed explicitly only against intelligent-design theory, his argument can be generalized to miracles.

Sober presents his opponents, tacitly, with a dilemma--either the theistic hypothesis is completely uninformative about the evidence (and therefore cannot be the best explanation of the evidence) or it is ad hoc.

"The problem" [says Sober] "is that the design hypothesis confers a probability on the observation only when it is supplemented with further assumptions about what the designer’s goals and abilities would be if he existed....There are as many likelihoods as there are suppositions concerning the goals and abilities of the putative designer. Which of these, or which class of these, should we take seriously?"

"It is no good answering this question by assuming that the eye was built by an intelligent designer and then inferring that the designer must have wanted to give the eye features F1 ... Fn and must have had the ability to do so since, after all, these are the features we observe. For one thing, this pattern of argument is question-begging. One needs independent evidence as to what the designer’s plans and abilities would be if he existed...."

"This objection to the design argument is...continuous with the precepts of “negative theology,” which holds that God is so different from us and the world we already know about that it is impossible for us to have much of a grasp of what his characteristics are....We are invited...to imagine a designer who is radically different from the human craftsmen we know about. But if this designer is so different, why are we so sure that this being would build the vertebrate eye in the form in which we find it?" (Sober 2007, pp. 10-11)

Just before this passage, Sober merely says that we need to have “an argument that shows that this probability [that design gives to the observation] is indeed higher than the probability that Chance confers on the observation.” But elsewhere, his demands are less modest.

Sober’s approach involves making a clear separation between a “main hypothesis”--for example, that God exists--and “auxiliary assumptions,” which he says in theistic design inferences must be assumptions about what God’s goals and abilities would be if he existed. (Sober focuses most on the problem of knowing God’s goals, since he acknowledges [2007, p. 13] that the God of traditional theism is usually assumed to be omnipotent.) Repeatedly, Sober claims that one must have independent, solid support for these auxiliaries. Just a few pages after the more modest characterization of his requirement, he ups the ante, implying that we must be able to “justify [auxiliary assumptions] independently” (Sober 2007, p. 13). Elsewhere he endorses as normal scientific practice the use of auxiliary assumptions that scientists “already have good reason to think are true” (Sober 1999, p. 54). He also characterizes his position as “the demand that one have independent reason to think that one’s auxiliary assumptions are true” (Sober 1999, p. 57), he says that “testing the design hypothesis requires that we have information about the goals and abilities the designer would have, if he existed” (Sober 1999, p. 54), and, in his most recent work on the subject, he states that one hypothesis can be tested against another only if there exist true auxiliary assumptions which we are “now justified in believing” (Sober 2008, p. 152). These are very strong requirements for independently justified information about the Divine mind.

And Lydia goes on to show, convincingly, that Sober's requirements are unreasonably strong, so that the dilemma he poses is an artificial one which the theist need not take seriously.

So far, so good. But my question for Lydia has always been the same, and remains so here: granted that one can show it reasonable to believe in miracles, at least in the relevant sense, we should we regard some of the arguments for miracles as strong enough to make it unreasonable to deny one or more of them?

Lydia seems to think they should be, at least if her comments in the combox to her announcement are any indication.  But I have never found that convincing, at least as a general proposition, as distinct from a proposition about special experiences available only to very few people, such as Saul on the road to Damascus. Certainly, she and her husband Tim have gone to great lengths to show, using sophisticated probability theory, that the case for the Resurrection is very strong. And I have long granted that, if what they treat as their historical dataset should be treated as, itself, veridical, their inductive case for the Resurrection is powerful enough to make it unreasonable to deny the Resurrection. But that of course is a big 'if'. For the conceptions of scientific and historical methodology to which their opponents severally adhere would not justify taking the data as veridical to the degree the McGrews do. It is reasonable, of course, to reject such conceptions; but it is by no means evidently unreasonable to accept them. What goes for the central miracle of the Resurrection goes a fortiori for other reported miracles taken to confirm specifically Christian faith.

Why can't God do his best?

The notion that this is the best of all possible worlds (BAPW) is like a pesky kid brother who thinks he belongs with your crowd: one of those aggravating philosophical conceits that just won't go away. Those who have studied some philosophy know that the phrase comes from Leibniz, a 17th-century Renaissance man as distinguished in mathematics and diplomacy as in philosophy. But the notion itself, in this-or-that form, is far older. Literati will readily recall Alexander Pope's line "Whatever is, is right," which may have been a bit tongue-in-cheek, but certainly manifests an attitude at least as old as the Stoics. It's the mirror opposite of the equally old notion that things could have been better if only God, or whatever errant demiurge made this mess, had known or cared more. If things are as good as they can possibly be, then neither God nor anything else can be blamed for reality's less attractive features. Unfortunately—not just for Leibniz, but for all who favor his brand of theodicy—there can be no such thing as BAPW.

One way it's been argued that ours is the best possible world is to argue that it is the only possible world. That there is only one possible world, i.e. the actual world, is the thesis I have called monomodalism. It means that nothing at all could be, or could ever have been, otherwise. There is only one real "modality," that of necessity. Of course, if monomodalism is true, then freedom of choice is an illusion. At most, freedom of choice could mean the absence of coercion by other people; but it could not mean that the past and the laws of nature ever permit us to choose other than as we do. In fact, if monomodalism were true, not even the laws of nature could have been otherwise. But natural science affords no evidence of that, and there is no other uncontroversial reason to believe it. Monomodalism, when it turns up in philosophy, is generally a logical excrescence of other pet theses, whose credibility is severely compromised just on that account. The best example of such a system of thought is Spinoza's, which gets a great deal of mileage from stipulative definitions of such terms as substance, mode, attribute, and cause. Einstein admired Spinoza, and he hasn't been the only one. But Einstein still believed in the freedom of the will, and most people who deny they do don't really mean it. If they did, who would be left to blame for anything?

Even so, another, more common reason for thinking ours is the best possible world is that it is created by the best possible being, i.e. God. Now of course it is misleading to talk about God in that way, as if he were just the best and most powerful being there is, rummaging through his immeasurably large file of world-possibilities to select the best one for actualizing. It is better to say, with Aquinas, that God is Being and that "beings" are mere derivatives, existing by a kind of participation in Being. Influenced by the Neoplatonists, especially the Christian Pseudo-Dionysius (5th-6th century AD), some theologians even go so far as to insist that God is "beyond being," so that nothing meaningful can be said about what God is in se. That, it seems to me, makes nonsense of a lot of what such theologians do go on to say about God, but that is a separate topic. The instinct behind their apophatic stricture is sound enough: it just won't do to talk about God as if God were a much bigger, better version of ourselves or any other beings in the world. But fans of the BAPW thesis don't have to talk in that way. They can, and often do, argue that a perfectly good creator can do nothing other than create BAPW. For a perfectly good creator, after all, would be less than perfectly good if he didn't create BAPW.

Over at Prosblogion, Mike Almeida has a nice answer to that. I quote only the formal part of the argument, which is a reductio ad absurdum:

1. Necessarily, a perfect being actualizes the best possible world. Assume for Reductio
2. W is the best possible world. Assumption
3. A perfect being exists. Assumption
4. W includes a great deal of natural and moral value. From def. of ‘best world’
5. W is the only possible world. From 1,2,3
6. Everything possible is actual in W. From 5
7. W is a fatalistic world. From 6
8. No moral agent is libertarian or compatibilist free in fatalistic worlds. Fact
9. No moral agent is free in W. From 7, 8
10. There is no moral value in W. From 9
11. W is not the best possible world. From 10, 4. Contradiction 11,2
∴ 12. It is not necessary that a perfect being actualizes the best possible world. From 11,2

The key move in that argument is that, if there were a BAPW, then monomodalism would be true, and hence there would be no freedom. Lacking freedom, BAPW would lack "moral value" and hence not be BAPW.

I think that pretty much hammers the last nail in the coffin of BAPW as a thesis. And that's important theologically inasmuch as, if there could be no BAPW, then God can't be blamed for failing to create it.

What's exceptional about conservatism?

During the 2008 presidential campaign, I posted an essay called "Why I am a Conservative." Along with five or six other people, I found it quite relevant at the time. My reasons for calling myself a conservative remain the same, but I now doubt that they suffice. That's because it's beginning to seem that what mainstream American "conservatives" want to conserve amounts to little more than the rotten core of liberalism. That’s relevant to everybody now and for some time to come.

I am reacting in particular to an already much-discussed NRO essay by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Pannuru, published a few days ago and entitled "An Exceptional Debate: The Obama administration’s assault on American identity." To be sure, I agree with a good deal of what they wrote—mostly, the parts about the threat posed by the Obama Administration to what is distinctively American. But Paul Cella, editor of a blog I occasionally write for, has undertaken the first two parts of a four-part critique. I don't want to anticipate his overall argument, but I do agree with a good part of what he’s said so far. I want to explain here why all who want to preserve this republic—which is by no means everybody, whatever they may say—need to understand what is at stake.

This is not just one of those tiresome terminological tussles that only debaters enjoy. I am well aware that, for decades now, many American conservatives could rightly be called "liberals" in the old-fashioned sense of term: the sort of liberal who could say, with the late Senator Barry Goldwater, that "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." In that sense, the deist revolutionary Thomas Paine was a liberal, but so was the theist, non-revolutionary Abraham Lincoln. He didn't seem that way to many at the time, of course. As a virtual dictator, at least in Southern eyes, he prosecuted a calamitous civil war that obliterated a beloved, established way of life in the South. And his purpose seemed conservative: to preserve the federal union of the states. One result of the war was that the phrase 'the United States' became a grammatical singular rather than a plural. In "liberal" terms, though, the utility of the reborn Union was its power to crush slavery, and thus to achieve something a bit closer to liberty for the oppressed. That was an advance of liberty which even today's "liberals" take for granted as a good. But a few decades later, another American president, William McKinley, exemplified liberalism in an less edifying sense: his laissez-faire economic policies ushered in the era of the Robber Barons and the trusts along with the exploitation of the poor, especially the waves of new European immigrants. Coming on the heels of the rather cynical “Reconstruction,” that sort of liberalism was highly selective, and was uncomfortably closer to what many in America today would call conservatism than to what is now called liberalism.

But when I speak of "the rotten core of liberalism," I do not refer to either Lincolnian nor McKinleyian liberalism. I speak of the chimera of "the open society," a term first coined by the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill. The phrase became common currency among Western thinkers thanks to the philosopher of science Karl Popper, whose 1946 book The Open Society and its Enemies became a rallying point for classical-liberal thinkers against the blandishments of totalitarianism, especially during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and its Western fellow-travelers. There was considerable truth in Popper’s critique of the sort of “historicism” that motivated modern forms of totalitarianism. But like Mill’s liberalism, which suffered from the added disadvantage of an incalculable utility calculus, Popper’s was little more defensible philosophically than what it rejected.

At its core, their brand of liberalism—and its heir, that of Harvard’s John Rawls—maintained the pretense that the purpose of the state was not to embody any particular vision of the good for humanity, but merely to maintain the conditions under which individuals could pursue their own, several visions of the good without unduly interfering with each other. The purists of that blinkered vision are today called ‘libertarians,” but its appeal is by no means limited to them. It influences the thinking of many Americans who, like many of the tea-partyers, are more socially conservative than libertarians. Whether held explicitly or just bowed to implicitly, however, liberalism so understood is neither entirely coherent or entirely honest.

It is not entirely coherent because it cannot avoid propounding some vision of the good for humanity: in this case, the literal “autonomy” of the presumptively free individual. The word ‘autonomy’, as Kant recognized, comes from the Greek meaning “making oneself the law.” The idea is that the adult human individual, endowed with freedom of the will, can be truly self-legislating, and thus self-directing, according to self-evident principles of practical reasoning. Hence, the purpose of a polity should be ensure, by similarly objective reasoning, that the life-projects such individuals fashion can be pursued in peaceable, mutual cooperation. As has often been pointed out, that vision posits a good for humanity, and as such it is rather controversial in most of the world, at least outside the universities of the West. But as C.S. Lewis brilliantly showed in The Abolition of Man (written at the same time, and almost in the same place, as Popper’s book), the idea of the free, self-legislating individual is a chimera unless severely qualified. One can freely decide what’s worth pursuing only when one knows, through developed practical wisdom and other virtues, what is objectively valuable; and one can flourish only if one knows how objective values in tension can be ordered and balanced in the concrete conditions of life. That is the form of any real “pursuit of happiness.” But nobody can freely decide for themselves what is objectively valuable in itself. The only basis for such a “decision” would be subjective whims and preferences, which make the individual first the slave of his passions, and ultimately the slave of the passions of the stronger. An autonomy as radical as many of today’s so-called “liberal” advocates of an “open society” seem to want—e.g., advocates of abortion “rights” and of the “right” to same-sex “marriage”—is thus, and paradoxically, a radical enemy of authentic freedom. Perhaps that’s why people who call themselves liberals today tend to be authoritarian about everything except sex.

Now aside from the libertarians, hardly any so-called “conservatives” in America today subscribe to such radical autonomism. More generally, Paul Cella is right: America as a whole is not and never has been an “open society” in the sense in question. His argument is unassailable; read it. But neither Lowry and Ponnuru, nor other mainstream “conservative” and “neo-conservative” advocates for an open society, seem able to give an account of what a sustainably open society would have to be, if not a radical-autonomist society of the sort most Americans, and most conservatives, would abhor. And so a historically unrealistic and philosophically squishy “open society” forms no part of the “American exceptionalism” that conservatives supposedly want to defend from the social-democratic internationalism of the Obama Administration.

For the reasons already stated, today’s liberals, such as Obama and his supporters in our cultural and intellectual elites, are not fully honest about their radical autonomism. For they either can’t or won’t acknowledge its internal incoherence and its disastrous consequences, which we see all around us in the breakdown of the family and the erosion of individual liberty at the hands of the state. But conservatives aren’t being fully honest either. The conservative “movement” in America has long been an uneasy alliance of classical liberals and religious conservatives, and it has never tried to resolve that tension. It is united only in its opposition to what has come, since the New-Deal era, to be called liberalism. But without a way of at least addressing the tension creatively, conservatives are doomed to fighting a long retreat, a rear-guard action against liberalism that never really takes on that enemy at its core.

And that, in the last analysis, is why I’m uneasy about calling myself a conservative. Until conservatives can agree on the kind and meaning of the liberty that makes America exceptional, they won’t be able to agree on what’s worth conserving, and hence on an alternative to an ever-advancing but profoundly corrosive liberalism.

Why the arguments for atheism are moral arguments, and why that matters

At ST Ia Q2 A3, where Aquinas offers his well-known "five ways" of proving God's existence, he notes and replies to two objections. To paraphrase, the first is that "infinite goodness" is incompatible with the existence of "evil"; the second, that citing God is "superfluous" as an explanation for the world's existence. It's pretty evident that the problem of evil and the superfluity of God qua explanation are posed as the most common objections even today to classical theism. Aquinas presents them, in effect, as metaphysical objections and answers them accordingly. But I shall argue instead that they are, at bottom, moral objections. If I'm right, that has great significance for natural theology and apologetics.

My claim that people pose the problem of evil as a basically moral objection to classical theism ought to be uncontroversial. The most common way of pressing the objection is to argue that God's permitting some people to suffer horribly beyond their deserts, when he could prevent it, is immoral. That is taken to be incompatible with God's being perfectly good, a quality classical theists ascribe to God. Of course, another way to pose the problem of evil as an objection is to argue that, although a perfectly good God might well want to prevent such suffering, he is powerless to do so. That is taken to be incompatible with omnipotence, another attribute classical theists ascribe to God. But that way of pressing the objection is fairly easy to answer. Although an omnipotent God could well have created a world in which suffering does not far outstrip deserts, God has not done so; given the natural order God has willed, it is logically impossible to prevent such presumptively disproportionate suffering without divine intervention so regular as to destroy the natural order of things. And omnipotence neither need nor should be thought to include the ability to do the logically impossible. So much is, or ought to be, obvious. Of course, the standard reply to that defense is to argue that God is immoral for creating and sustaining such a natural order of things in the first place when, as granted, God could have done otherwise. But that's essentially the same as the first way of pressing the problem of evil as an objection to classical theism.

My claim that the superfluity objection is also, at bottom, a moral one is much more controversial. Most of what follows provides my argument for it.

Metaphysical (as distinct from methodological) naturalists typically hold that the sorts of explanation of the world's existence proffered by classical theists—chiefly, by means of a posteriori cosmological and teleological reasoning—cannot do the sort of work that explanations in general are supposed to do. If so, then citing God as creator and/or designer of the world fails to explain anything; therefore, there is no reason to hold that God as explicans exists. But what does it mean to say that theistic explanation of the world's existence doesn't do the sort of work that explanations are supposed to do?

Classical theists should not, and the most intelligent among them do not, argue that presenting God as creator and/or designer does better explanatory work than the natural sciences. Those sciences have their own explanatory aims and canons which, though not immune to revision, remain exactly as they are whether or not classical theism is true. The theistic argument is, rather, that citing God as explicans does a different sort of explanatory work than natural science. The naturalist reply is that no such alleged "explanation" should be counted as explanation. What is the argument for that reply?

To explain something is to account for why it thus and not otherwise. In order do that, one must show that the explicandum would have been different if the explicans had been different. But classical theism does not claim that the world would have been different if God did not exist; the claim is that the world would not exist at all if God did not exist. That requires holding, among other things, that the world can and should be conceived as a certain totality which counts as an explicandum, such that only the action of something not comprised by that totality could account, in some non-trivial way, for why just that totality exists. But it will not do to characterize said totality simply as the physical universe studied by natural science, even at some hypothetical state before the Big Bang. For all we know, the primordial universe might have been the product of something else which could not qualify as the God of classical theism, but which might turn out to be identifiable by means of natural science—if not our science, then somebody else's. No, the totality that divine activity supposedly explains must be the totality-of-things-that-happen. Call that 'T'. Granted we do not know its full extent, T certainly exists. But such a totality, the naturalist would say, cannot admit of non-trivial explanation. We can explain its existence simply by noting that each of its constituents exist; but that would be trivial, and certainly not what the classical theist is after. And the reason we cannot have what the theist is after is that the theist cannot say what would have been different about T if God did not exist. T remains just as it is, whatever it is, whether or not God exists. Hence, goes the argument, citing divine activity to explain T's existence does not and could not really explain anything. There is no non-trivial explanation of T's existence. As Laplace said, there is no need of the God-hypothesis. It is superfluous.

From this point of view, it will not do to cite some version of "the principle of sufficent reason" as a premise in an argument for the claim that something not comprised by T accounts for T's existence as a totality. There's already "reason enough" for T's existence as a totality: that of each of its constitutents. But that is hardly germane. What the theist must do instead is show that T is the sort of entity whose existence calls for another sort of explanation altogether. Yet how is the theist to do that? The only way he can do it is to show that, whatever the extent of T as a totality, its constituents cannot, either individually or collectively, account for the general causal regularities that must be cited in some explanation of how things happen as they do—i.e., the constituents of T cannot account for the "laws of nature." But that sort of explanation would have to show that such laws would have been different if God as creator and/or designer did not exist. And that in turn would have to cite some sort of causal regularity. But given that such regularities are supposed to be part of what's being explained, such an explanation cannot qualify as an explanation at all.

It might seem that the way for the theist to begin countering that line is to point out that it premises scientism: the thesis that only what can be known scientifically can be known at all. He can then go on to argue that there is no good reason to believe scientism. And he would be quite right. Humans have always known various things non-scientifically, and no scientific argument for scientism can be given. But that will not suffice by itself. For the naturalist can always argue that, even if scientism is false, his point about explanation remains untouched. Even if there are things natural science cannot explain, and thus cannot know, that's no reason to believe that T's existence can be explained in some other way. Unless and until the theist can show that his "explanation" of T's existence does what explanations do, he hasn't explained anything.

As I've suggested, the debate is really about the nature of explanation. It is evident that there are successful explanations in the contexts of ordinary life and natural science, but it is by no means evident that there can be a kind of explanation which doesn't tell us how things would have gone differently if the explicans did not exist. To be sure, the theist must say that, if God did not exist, then T would not either—a conditional statement which, if true, would be a non-trivial truth. But that doesn't tell us that things would have been different if God did not exist; it only tells us that there would have been no "things" to be either the same or different if God did not exist. Absent some account of explanation which shows that such a peculiar result can function as explanations do, the theist has not established that he's explained anything. Nor will it do for the theist to insist that T is the sort of thing whose existence is explicable; for the only "sorts" of things we are familiar with are the sorts of things already comprised by T.

The only honest way for the theist to proceed is to argue that the question "Why does T exist?" is meaningful in such a way that one could reasonably entertain a non-trivial answer to it. That would show that we cannot rule out T's existence being explicable in terms of something which T does not comprise. And the only way to develop such an argument is to show that (a) one cannot rule out that T's existence embodies an intention, because (b) intentional explanations need not be thought reducible to causal explanations, which perforce cite natural regularities. That kind of argument has been given from time to time. In my hoary PhD thesis, I developed along such lines a book-length argument that it's more reasonable to allow for a unitary explicans of T's existence than to rule out the possibility of such an explicans on epistemological grounds. I still would argue to that effect.

As I've discovered over the years, however, the naturalist objection to that move is an essentially moral one. In ordinary life, natural science, and especially in formal disciplines such as logic and mathematics, there are reliable, agreed-upon methods for evaluating explanations as successful or unsuccessful. Prima facie at least, there are no such methods in natural theology—a discipline that not even the majority of religious believers find helpful. Given as much, naturalists typically argue that one ought not to expect people to find any of the putative explanations of natural theology cogent as explanations. Expecting people to do so is, in fact, morally defective. For such "explanations" necessarily transcend the sorts of considerations that it's reasonable to count as evidence; expecting people to go beyond the evidence in forming their beliefs is expecting what's unreasonable; and expecting from people what's unreasonable is a sign of disreputable motives that are themselves all too evident in the history of religion.

To judge from the recent literature of the "new atheism," which is really the old atheism with shoddier arguments, that's the kind of objection, other than that from the problem of evil, which motivates people to be atheists. I have no doubt, of course, that some atheists are such because they very much don't want to consider the implications for their lives if Christianity or some other form of classical theism is true. But that only serves to supply theists with a moral argument against atheism that is too ad hominem to be worth pressing. The real interest of the moral arguments against theism is that they steer the debate into a channel where the theist is on firmer ground. What is that ground?

Regarding the problem of evil, the theist can and ought to argue that the atheist has no moral legs to stand on. If a given atheist is an emotivist or some other sort of non-cognitivist in moral philosophy, he has no reason to believe that there are objectively binding moral norms which God fails to satisfy. If a given atheist is a utilitarian or some other sort of consequentialist in moral philosophy, he has no reason to believe that God's utility calculations, if there is a God, are inferior to his own. If a given atheist is some sort of deontologist in moral philosophy, he must show several things: that the moral norms he believes bind humans absolutely do so even though there is no God; that even if there were a God, those norms would bind God in pretty much the same fashion as us; and that God, if there were a God, cannot be said to observe them. All that is, at the very least, a tall order.

Regarding explanation and evidence, the atheist needs to show more than merely that it's unreasonable to expect people in general to find classical-theist natural theology persuasive. That people in general do not find such theology persuasive is easily accounted for by factors other than the objective quality of its arguments. Most people lack the happy combination of time, talent, and education to study and evaluate such arguments, so that whatever the reasons this-or-that person might have for believing in God, they cannot be faulted for leaving natural theology alone. For that reason, classical-theist philosophers don't expect most people to follow and evaluate their arguments. So the debate is really among philosophers, and the question whether one ought to go beyond what's generally recognized as evidence is a debate in moral philosophy and psychology.

About that debate, I shall conclude by noting that the atheist has a lot more work to do than simply pointing out that something called "religion" violates his moral norms. There are many different forms of religion, and some are more capable of moral self-reformation than others. But what is such "moral self-reformation" supposed to amount to? Before a charge of immorality can be made to stick, there has to be antecedent and common agreement about what morality requires. A person who wants to press a moral argument against theism, but who believes that the universe is morally indifferent and that no transcendent lawgiver underwrites morality, is burdened with showing that the moral norms he upholds are objectively binding as such. For unless and until he can do that, his moral arguments against theism can do no more than beg the question.