Maverick Philosopher

First of all, I agree that God is a metaphysically necessary being (one that exists in all metaphysically possible worlds) and also a concrete being (one that is causally active/passive, though on some theories God is impassible: active but not passive). You seem also to be assuming that God is an individual, perhaps in the sense that he has properties but is not himself a property. As I understand the ontological (as opposed to epistemological) problem of individuation, it is the problem of specifying what is it about an individual that makes it numerically distinct from all other individuals, if any. And I take you to mean by an individuating property a property possession of which by an individual x would make x distinct from every other individual y in the actual world and from every other individual y in every possible world in which x exists.

Now God, who exists in every world, creates a universe only in some worlds. (Let's stipulate that a universe is a totality of contingent concreta, whether minds or bodies.) God's creating a universe in only some possible worlds is a consequence of the divine freedom construed in a robust 'could have done otherwise' sense. So in some worlds God has the property of creating a universe, and in the rest of the worlds he exists but lacks this property. So the property in question is an accidental property of God.

Assuming I understand your problem, it can be put in the form of an inconsistent tetrad:

1. God exists in all worlds. (Because he is a necessary being)
2. God creates a universe in only some worlds. (Because he is libertarianly free)
3. If P is an individuating property of x, then x has P in every world in which x exists. (Your understanding of 'individuating property')
4. Creating a universe is an individuating property of God. (Because it distinguishes God from all else)

But (3) and (4) entail

5. God creates in every world in which he exists.

And (5) in conjunction with (1) entails

6. God creates a universe in all worlds.

But (6) contradicts (2), which shows that the tetrad is inconsistent.

Well, if this is your problem, then I solve it by rejecting (4): creating a universe is not an individuating property of God in the sense of 'individuating property' that is requisite to make (3) true. For although creating a universe distinguishes God from all else in a given world such as the actual world, it is not a property God has in every world.

I think you are becoming confused though a failure to distinguish two senses of 'individuating property.' If Seldom Seen Slim is the meanest man in the Superstition Mountains, then this is a property that individuates him in the sense that nothing else in the actual world has it. But there are worlds in which Slim exists but lives in the Goldfield Mountains and is the meanest hombre there. The property of having sprung from a certain sperm cell S and a certain ovum O, however, is a property that individuates Slim in every world in which he exists. (Assuming the essentiality of origin.) Thus we ought to distinguish:

A. P is an accidentally individuating property of x =df x and nothing distinct from x instantiates P in some but not all of the worlds in which x exists.

B. P is an essentially individuating property of x =df x and nothing distinct from x instatiates P in every world in which x exists.

In other words: creating a universe is an accidentally, but not an essentially, individuating property of God. Hence there is no incompatibility as between God's being a necessary being and God's being a free creator.

It looks as though the theistic hypothesis is an empirically refutable one, so that theism becomes a refuted scientific theory. The argument goes: (1) If God exists then there is no evil, (2) There is evil, therefore (3) It is not the case that God exists. Premiss (1) seems to follow from our characterization of God as an omnipotent, omnsicient and benevolent being. (2) is empirical. We can hardly reject (2). It seems therefore that the theist has to find something wrong with (1) and this is not easy. (J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism, Blackwell 2003, 2nd ed, p. 60)

Smart's argument from evil is plainly valid, being of the form modus tollens. But for an argument to be probative, other conditions must be met. One of these conditions is that the premises be true. Another is that the argument involve no 'informal fallacy' such as equivocation.

So let us ask: how would 'evil' in (1) have to be construed so that (1) comes out true? I suggest that 'evil' must be short for 'gratuitous evil.' But then, to avoid equivocation, we would have to replace 'evil' in (2) with 'gratuitous evil.' The result would be:

1*. If God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil.
2*. There is gratuitous evil.
---
3. It is not the case that God exists.

The resulting argument is valid, and (1*) is plainly true, unlike (1) which is not plainly true, but false. That (1) is false can be seen from the fact that an omniqualified God could easily permit the existence of an evil that was necessary for the attainment of a greater good. So it is just false to say, 'If God exists, then there is no evil.'

But (1*) is plainly true. Now it may be — it is epistemically possible that --(2*) is also true. The reformulated argument would then be sound. A sound argument, by definition, is a deductive argument that is both valid in point of logical form and whose premises are all of them true. And for the record, a proposition p is epistemically (doxastically) possible for a subject S if and only if p is logically consistent with what S knows (believes).

But note that a sound argument will be probatively worthless if it begs the question, if it is such that one cannot know a premise to be true without already knowing the conclusion to be true. So let us ask a very simple question: How does one know that (2*) is true? Smart tells us that (2) is empirical. 'Empirical' is a term of epistemology. It is applied to those propositions that are known from experience, by observation via the senses and their instrumental extensions (microscopes, telescopes, etc.) Now I am willing to grant that (2) — There is evil — is an empirical truth. (2), however, is not what Smart needs to make his argument work. He needs (2*). But is (2*) an empirical truth? Can one know from experience (whether inner or outer) that there is gratuitous evil? Is gratuitousness an empirical attribute of the evils one experiences?

Consider the evil of intense pain. I am acquainted with pain by 'inner sense.' And I am willing to grant arguendo, though it is not quite obvious, that I am acquainted empirically with the evil of intense pain. But I am surely not acquainted empirically with the gratuitousness of experienced evils. Gratuitousness is no more an empirical attribute than the createdness of the natural world. It is not evident to the senses that nature is a divine creation. Similarly, it is not evident to the senses that instances of evil are gratuitous. Is it not epistemically possible that they are all non-gratuitous?

To say that an evil is gratuitous is to say in effect that it is an evil inconsistent with the existence of the omniqualified God. It is to say that it is an evil that no such God could have a morally sufficient reason for permitting. Clearly, one cannot 'read off' such a complex relational attribute from any instance of evil.

The conclusion I am driving towards is that Smart's argument supra is question-begging. For in order to know that premise (2*) is true, I must know that the conclusion is true. That is, to know that there are gratuitous evils, I must know that God does not exist. For if God exists, then then there are no gratuitous evils.

Smart tells us above that the theistic hypothesis is empirically refutable. But I say Smart is mistaken: he needs (2*) for his argument to work, but this proposition -- There is gratuitous evil -- is not empirical. It may be true for all that, but it is not knowable by experience. You may be convinced that it is true, and I won't blame you if you find it much more plausible than the truth of 'God exists'; but it is not an empirical truth, if it is a truth. It is an interpretation imposed upon the data. It is as metaphysical as 'God exists.'

1. If religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers.

2. Atheists are not less moral than believers.

Therefore

3. Religious faith does not offer the only real basis for morality.

The problem with this argument lies in its first premise. It simply doesn't follow that if religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than theists. This blatant non sequitur trades on a confusion of two questions which it is essential to distinguish.

Q1. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are people who profess some version of theism more 'moral,' i.e., more likely to live in accordance with the agreed-upon code, than those who profess some version of atheism?

The answer to this question is No. But even if the answer is Yes, I am willing to concede arguendo to Harris that it is No. In any case (Q1) is not philosophically interesting, except as part of the run-up to a genuine philosophical question, though it is of interest sociologically. Now contrast (Q1) with

Q2. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are atheists justified in adhering to the code?

The agreed-upon code is one that most or many atheists and theists would accept. Thus don't we all object to child molestation, wanton killing of human beings, rape, theft, and lying? And in objecting to these actions, we mean our objections to be more than merely subjectively valid. When our property is stolen or a neighbor murdered, we consider that an objective wrong has been done. And when the murderer is apprehended, tried, and convicted we judge that something objectively right has been done. Let's not worry about the details or the special cases: killing in self-defense, abortion, etc. Just imagine some minimal objectively binding code that all or most of us, theists and atheists alike, accept.

What (Q2) asks about is the foundation or basis of the agreed-upon objectively binding moral code. This is not a sociological or any kind of empirical question. Nor is it a question in normative ethics. The question is not what we ought to do and leave undone, for we are assuming that we already have a rough answer to that. The question is meta-ethical: what does morality rest on, if on anything?

There are different theories. Some will say that morality requires a supernatural foundation, others that a natural foundation suffices. Here you can read the transcript of a debate between Richard Taylor and William Lane Craig on this topic. I incline toward the side ably defended by Craig. Although I respect Taylor very much as a philosopher and have learned from his work, he seems to me to come across in this debate as something of a sophist and a smart-ass.

But the point of this post is not to take sides on the question of the basis of morality, but simply to point out that Sam Harris has confused two quite obviously distinct questions. For if he had kept them distinct, he would have seen that the question whether morality requires a basis in religion is logically independent of the question whether theists are more moral than atheists. He would have seen that invoking the platitude that atheists can be as morally decent as theists has no tendency to show that morality does not require a supernatural foundation. He would have seen that (1) is false.

See Is Religion the Problem? for further criticism of Sam Harris.

My quietism ended when current events taught me the dangers of religion. I had always known how religions, including Christianity, led to wars in the Middle East, Ireland, and so on. Many wars, of course, are not based on religion. Even religious wars result from non-religious forces as well. Nonetheless, it is hard to deny that many wars have been and continue to be fueled in large part by religious beliefs. It is no coincidence that terrorists are so often motivated by religion, since it is hard to get non-religious people to volunteer as suicide bombers. (76)

It is true that people holding religious beliefs have used, and are using, their religious beliefs to justify war, terrorism, and such other evils as forced conversions and inquisitions. No reasonable person can deny this. But what Sinnott-Armstrong (S-A) says above in the second sentence is that religions lead to wars. Does he really want to say that all religions lead to wars? Buddhism? I understand that there are some Buddhist terrorists. But surely a professional philosopher such as S-A can see the difference between (i) Some Buddhists are terrorists and (ii) Buddhism causes war and terrorism. If a Buddhist is a terrorist, this is an accidental fact about him; there is nothing in the essence of Buddhism that enjoins terrorism. No Buddhist qua Buddhist is a terrorist. It escapes me how the doctrines, precepts and practices of Buddhism cause war, terrorism and kindred evils. Similarly for Christianity. Plenty of atrocities have been committed by people who identify themselves as Christians. But that is not to say that the characteristic doctrines, precepts and practices of Christianity cause war, terrorism and the like. It is rather the opposite: when the doctrines and precepts of Buddhism and Christianity are acted upon they tend to mitigate human savagery.

And then there is the case of Gandhi whose principle of ahimsa (no-harm) derives from his Hinduism. Hinduism as understood and practiced by him surely did not lead to war and terroism. Did he perhaps not understand the principles of his religion? So it cannot be religion as such that causes war and terrorism.

A second obvious point that needs to be made is that even if (some? all?) religious beliefs cause wars and other evils, or rather are part of the motivational framework of individuals who are bellicose and terroristic, this is also true of other belief-systems, belief-systems that are anti-religious. Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism are examples. According to the Black Book of Communism, Communists in the 20th century murdered close to 100 million people. Now Communism is virulently anti-religious. It is a political ideology that is committed to the destruction of religions as to the destruction of an 'opiate' in Marx's famous simile, one that keeps people from realizing the worker's paradise here on earth.

So my question to Sinnott-Armstrong et al. is: If you oppose religion because of its tendency to cause bloodshed, why do you not oppose political ideology as well and for the same reason? Indeed, if you believe that religion is the problem, why do you not hold that belief as such is the problem, or all belief that transcends matters of obvious empirical fact? After all, people fight bitterly over all sorts of beliefs religious and non-religious. (Some believe in wealth redistribution, other do not; some believe in anthropogenic global warming, others do not, etc.)

If one opposes a religion such as Christianity because it causes wars despite its preaching of 'Thou shalt not kill' and 'Love thy neighbor,' but does not oppose anti-religious political ideologies like Communism that also cause wars but which preaches that any end is justified including murder if it leads to the socialist paradise, then the 'reason' proffered for rejecting religion is bogus. It is simply no argument against religion to say that some people use it for murderous ends; for it is also the case that some people use anti-religious ideologies for murderous ends. A good reason for rejecting religion cannot be a reason that would also apply to non-religions and indeed to any belief-system that inspires contention and could be used by someone to kill and commit kindred evils. It is absurd to say: I object to religion because it leads to bloodshed but I have no problem with non-religious belief-systems that also lead to bloodshed.

Sinnott-Armstrong senses the difficulty in his position for he goes on to say:

Of course, atheists kill, too. Russian and Chinese Communist governments are famous examples. However, these atheists killed in the name of communism, not atheism. (p. 76)

The difference, then, is that theists who kill kill in the name of theism, whereas atheists who kill do not kill in the name of atheism. Now surely this is an example of special pleading. For although it is true that some theists kill in the name of theism (e.g. some Christians kill in the name of Christ; some Muslims kill in the name of Allah, etc.), it is also true that some atheists kill in the name of atheism: there are cases of atheists who have tortured and crucified Catholic priests in order to show them that there is no God. These atheists tortured in the name of atheism, whrether they were Communists or Nazis.

To say or imply that no atheist kills in the name of atheism is blatant special pleading. It amounts to saying that atheism is by definition a belief-system that cannot be misused by anyone, and if anyone were to misuse use it that would show that he is not an atheist! If a Communist crucifies a priest to prove to him the nonexistence of God, one cannot reasonably say that it was the Communism but not the atheism of the torturer that was responsible for the crime.

Now the point I want to make is that, just as we ought to distinguish between generic theism and specific theisms, we ought to distinguish between the generic problem of evil and specific problems of evil. The generic problem of evil is the problem faced by the generic theist of reconciling his belief in a God possessing the standard omni-attributes with the existence of evil in the kinds and amounts encountered in the actual world. A specific problem of evil, on the other hand, is the problem a specific type of theist has in reconciling the existence of God with the existence of evil.

We need to examine whether the problem a theist of a specific stripe has in reconciling God and evil is easier to solve or perhaps harder to solve than the problem a generic theist has.

To see what I am driving at, imagine a version of theism — call it version A — that affirms God, immortal souls, and the eventual blissful communion of all souls with God. On this version of theism there is purgatory, but no hell defined as a state of everlasting separation from communion with God. Thus on this version of theism there is post-mortem evil, the pain of purgatory, but this purgatorial evil is instrumental for the achieving of a higher good and is to that extent redeemed by this higher good.

Now compare this theism-A with a theism-B which affirms God but denies post-mortem existence whether in the form of immortal souls or in the form of resurrected bodies. On this alternative the God of the generic theist (defined above) exists, but for human beings this life is all there is: at death a human being ceases to exist utterly. Now does it not seem that the theist-B faces a much tougher problem than the theist-A when it comes to reconciling a good God with the fact of evil?

For the theist-B, the horrendous evils of this life are not compensated for by any life to come. But for the theist-A, the transient evils of this short life are as nothing compared to the endless bliss of the soul's communion with God and with other purified souls. Thus gratuitous evil for the theist-A is a vanishing quantity.

Most atheists share the very strong intuition that the probability of this world's containing the amount of evil it does is much greater on the hypothesis that God does not exist than it is on the hypothesis that God exists:

Prob(E/~G) >> Prob(E/G).

But to properly evaluate this inequality, how can one leave out the rest of what most theists believe? The amount and kinds of evil in this world enters the calculation, no doubt. But the absence of gratuitous evil, and the presence of unending bliss in the next world, are also relevant if the question concerns reconciling God and evil within theism-A.

To sum up:

1. Real live theists are not generic theists, but theists of some particular stripe or other. Generic theism is an abstraction.

2. The problem of evil, if it is to be a genuine existential conundrum and not a mere logic puzzle, is the problem of reconciling the existence of the God of a particular religion with the fact of evil as evil is understood from within this religion.

3. A theism that affirms God, post-mortem existence, and the eventual unending blissful communion of all souls (or resurrected persons) with God does not face the same problem of evil as a version of theism which denies post-mortem existence.

4. It is dialectically unfair for atheists to argue against all (classical) theists from the fact of the evil in this world when (i) not all theists are generic theists, and (ii) some theists believe that the transient evils of this short life are far outweighed by the unending bliss of the world to come.

5. It is arguable that there is no insoluble problem of evil for theists-A. Suppose this world is a vale of soul-making in which human beings, exercising free will, make themselves worthy, or fail to make themselves worthy, of communion with God. Combine this soul-making idea with post-mortem existence, and the existence of purgatory but not hell, and we have perhaps the elements of a solution to the problem of evil. (Cf. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, Part IV)

Let me conclude by noting that a theism-C which holds to eternal damnation for some may exacerbate the problem of evil. Here I refer you to David Lewis' posthumous "Divine Evil" in Louise Antony, ed., Philosophers Without Gods, Oxford 2007, pp. 231-242. Lewis, may God rest his soul, maintains that the usual logical and evidential arguments from evil are a "sideshow" compared to a "simpler argument, one that has been strangely neglected" (p. 231) that focuses not on the evils that God fails to prevent, but on the one's he perpetrates. And then he goes on to speak of hell and eternal torment. You can guess what conclusion he comes to.

We shall have to examine Lewis' simpler argument from evil in a separate post. But I am happy that he in effect concedes one of my points, namely, that a serious discussion of the problem of evil must address the whole of a theistic position and not focus merely on God and his attributes.

Other members of the Dawkins Gang as I call them, including Richard Dawkins himself, see here, often employ this piece of silliness. The idea is that since we are all atheists about some god or goddess, we should be atheists about all gods. A howling non sequitur, of course. Consider this parallel 'argument':

We are all anti-scientific about some scientific claim or other in the sense that all of us deny some scientific claim or other and with justification. Thus I deny, and I hope you do as well, Dalton's assertion that water is HO and the pre-Michaelson and Morley contention that light requires for its propagation a medium, the so-called luminiferous ether. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. But presumably no one will think that one ought to be anti-scientific about every scientific claim.

No one thinks that because many once well-established scientific assertions have been abandoned as false that all scientific assertions ought to be abandoned as false or will be. No one takes the Hitchens-Dawkins 'further step' when it comes to scientific claims. Why should it be any different in matters of religion?

"Because religion is buncombe from start to finish!"

But of course this response simply begs the question against the theist. Anyone who just assumes that the crudest forms of polytheism and the most refined forms of monotheism are on a par simply disqualifies himself from being taken seriously in a discussion like this. Was Democritean atomism the last word in atomic theory? What people like Daniel Dennett, another key Dawkins Gang member, cannot get through their heads is that religion might be subject to development and refinement just as science is. Such people cannot understand development of the God concept as anything different from deformation. They think, quite stupidly, that the crudest anthropomorphic conceptions are those with which religion must remain saddled. But they would never say something similar with respect to science. Why the double standard? See Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

One is no doubt free to adopt a scientistic metaphysics -- which, nota bene, science does not and cannot justify -- but then one ought to admit that one thereby (i) adopts a metaphysical stance not entailed by science proper, and (ii) begs the question against theists.

The chapter on Science and Religion in A. N. Whitehead's Science and the Modern World is relevant here. He sees that "religious thought develops into an increasing accuracy of expression, disengaged from adventitious imagery [and that] the interaction between religion and science is one great factor in promoting this development." (p. 170)

1. Evil exists.
2. God exists.
3. God possesses the standard omni-attributes (omniscience, omnibenevolence or moral perfection, and omnipotence).

The auxiliary premises specify what it is to be omnipotent, omniscient and morally perfect. Thus one of the auxiliaries is something like:

4. If a being is morally perfect, then it eliminates or prevents every evil that it is aware of and can eliminate.

Since the soundness of LAFE requires the truth of (4) or rather the truth of (4)'s necessitation -- Necessarily, if a being is morally perfect, etc. -- theists have questioned whether (4)'s necessitation is true. It seems not to be since it is surely possible that a mother, for example, be morally perfect but not prevent her child's suffering from a painful medical treatment in circumstances in which the outcome of not subjecting the child to the treatment would be far worse than the treatment. A theist who argues in this way against (4) assumes the principle Lupu labels 'PMP,' Pike's Moral Principle, and formulates as follows:

PMP. Under certain circumstances it is justified for any moral agent to permit preventable suffering, and even to bring it about, provided there are legitimate moral reasons for doing so, the person knows about such reasons, and permits (or brings about) suffering only for such reasons.

I concede for now that if (PMP) is false or incoherent, then the standard theistic objection to LAFE is untenable. But Lupu has an argument against (PMP) and a related principle (PMP*). The argument seems to proceed as follows

5. Every instance of evil is an instance of suffering.
6. Every instance of suffering is an instance of wrongful suffering.
Therefore
7. 'Wrongful suffering' must be substituted for 'suffering' in each of the latter's occurrences in (PMP).
8. The result of this substitution is incoherence, for under no circumstances is it justified for a moral agent to permit preventable wrongful suffering.

Now Lupu can tell me whether or not this is a fair representation of what he is arguing. If it is, then I reject the argument by rejecting both of (5) and (6). My argument against (5) was given in a previous post wherein I gave examples of evils that do not in any way involve the suffering of sentient beings. There was the 'cliff dwelling' example in the main post, and the 'Reefer Man' example in the Comments. Note that Lupu needs (5) in order to make (PMP) relevant to the problem of evil.

As for (6), it strikes me as false that every instance of suffering is morally objectionable. Suffering is an unavoidable concomitant of athletic performance as well as a means to the end of getting oneself into good physical shape; but sufferings of either of these two sorts which a person inflicts upon himself are not morally objectionable.

Revelation is the continuation of creation since man as the rational and moral being comes into being, i.e., is constituted, by revelation. Revelation is as little miraculous as creation. (Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, U. of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 237.)

This is an extremely interesting suggestion in that it gives us a way to make sense of the notion that God creates man in his image and likeness but without interfering in the evolutionary prcoesses which most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal. Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms. In Adam and Inerrancy, I explained this in greater detail: As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine fiat without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically. What 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through an encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.

But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone. This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a spiritual event, and its transmission is not by semen, pace the Pauline passages cited above [in Adam and Inerrancy].

If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message. Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other -- but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)

Returning to Hermann Cohen's suggestion above, as mediated by Leo Strauss, we can say that the divine-human encounter whereby the animal man becomes spirit is God's revelation to man. God's revealing himself is at the same time a creation of man as a spiritual being. In Heideggerian terms, at the moment of encounter moment man becomes Dasein, the Da of Sein, the site where Being achieves finite self-understanding. But there is nothing ontically miraculous in this, no contravention of any law of nature.

Revealing himself to man as Being itself -- Exodus 3:14 "I am who am" -- God creates man as understandor of Being.

It seems therefore that this unfortunate state [the one brought about by the infirmity of reason] is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one. This is a great step toward the Christian religion; for it requires that we look to God for knowledge of what we ought to believe and what we ought to do, and that we enslave our understanding to the obeisance of faith. If a man is convinced that nothing good is to be expected from his philosophical inquiries, he will be more disposed to pray to God to persuade him of the truths that ought to be believed than if he flatters himself that he might succeed by reasoning and disputing. A man is therefore happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. (206, emphasis added)

Now how is this a solution to the alleged infirmity of reason? A Christian fideist, acquiescing in pure blind (purblind?) faith, accepts the Trinity while a Muslim fideist, equally subjectively certain of his faith, rejects the Trinity while intoning that God is one. Blind conviction butts up against blind conviction of the opposite kind and all too often strife and bloodshed is the upshot.

Admittedly, reason is weak and inconclusive. But fideistic faith is blind: the certitude it provides is merely subjective. For if the Christian's subjective certitude of the Trinity were also objective, then the same would hold for the Muslim's subjective certitude of the opposite, with the result that one and the same proposition would be both objectively true and objectively not true. To avoid this result one would have to throw out the Law of Non-Contradiction. But then one would have taken one step too far.

Although there is scholarly debate as to what exactly Pierre Bayle's ultimate philosophical position is, the following argument can be attributed to him (cf. Richard H. Popkin, "Pierre Bayle's Place in 17th Century Scepticism" in Paul Dibon, ed. Pierre Bayle: Le Philosophe De Rotterdam, Elsevier, 1959, pp. 1-19):

1. Reason is too weak and confused to discover the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

Therefore

2. One must rely on faith as the guide to, and divine revelation as the measure of, the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

This is a non sequitur for a couple of reasons. First, one response to the supposed truth of (1) might be a universal epoché (εποχη) of all contention-inspiring beliefs and a resolve to stick to the mundane and follow the customs of one's time and place, and in the relaxed manner in which worldly people do this: one goes along to get along without getting too worked up over anything. Among meat-eaters one eats meat, among vegetarians vegetables only. Above all, one does not dogmatize about the evils of factory farms, the health dangers of red meat, etc. Second, the argument gives one no reason to accept the Christian faith and the Christian revelation as opposed to, say, the Muslim faith and revelation. (See the Bayle quotation above.)

My tentative conclusion, then, is that the infirmity of reason, though a fact, does not straightaway license any embrace of fideism which, for present purposes, can be characterized roughly as reliance on pure blind faith in matters of religion. (Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is a good 19th century example of a fideist.) Fideism comes in different varieties. There is Wittgensteinian fideism, to mention just one variety.

What are our options? Perhaps only these:

A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others that point to the infirmity of reason.

B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.

C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane if not on all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tripersonal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)

D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosphy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.

I recommend (D). Or are there other options?

1. Revelation is the communication to man by God of truths the knowledge of which is not possible to man without divine initiative. Whether or not God exists, and whether or he reveals anythiing to man, this is what we mean by 'revelation.' Philosophy cannot establish either the fact or the content of revelation. But philosophy can and must reflect on the concept, the possibility, and the intelligibility of revelation and its relation to other modes of knowledge.

2. According to a standard way of thinking, miracles are violations of laws of nature. This approach has an impressive pedigree. Thus Thomas Aquinas writes, in the Summa Theologica (Q. 110, art. 4, respondeo), "A miracle properly so called takes place when something is done outside the order of nature." Thomas also alludes (in Reply Obj. 2) to a distinction between miracles ontically and epistemically construed. This is not his terminology. He speaks of miracles "absolutely" considered and miracles "in reference to ourselves." Something that occurs by a power unknown to us may appear miraculous to us and yet not be miraculous absolutely.

A miracle ontically construed is a violation, contravention, "transgression" (Hume's word) of a law of nature. A number of great thinkers have questioned whether there can be miracles in the ontic sense and have proposed epistemic theories of miracles. Augustine is one and Spinoza another:

. . . the universal laws of nature are decrees of God following from the necessity and perfection of the Divine nature. Hence, any event happening in nature which contravened nature's universal laws, would necessarily also contravene the Divine decree, nature, and understanding; or if anyone asserted that God acted in contravention to the laws of nature, he, ipso facto, would be compelled to assert that God acted against His own nature — an evident absurdity. (A Theologico-Political Treatise, tr. Elwes, Dover, p. 83)

It follows from this that miracles are to be construed epistemically:

Further, as nothing happens in nature which does not follow from her laws, and as her laws embrace everything conceived by the Divine intellect, and lastly, as nature preserves a fixed and immutable order; it most clearly follows that miracles are only intelligible as in relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle. (p. 84, emphasis added)

In sum, since the course of nature, being ordained by God, cannot be contravened, miracles ontically construed, for Spinoza, are impossible. Talk of miracles, therefore, is simply talk of events we cannot explain. Miracles are thus parasitic upon our ignorance. They are natural events that simply surpass our limited human comprehension. To a perfect understanding nothing would appear miraculous.

3. We now have a tolerably clear idea of what we mean by 'revelation,' 'ontic miracle' and 'epistemic miracle.' Now from the definition of 'revelation' it follows that revelation is something supernatural: its agent is God and God is a supernatural being. But if revelation is supernatural, does it not straightaway follow that revelation is miraculous? Not obviously. It depends on what is meant by 'supernatural.'

The supernatural is that which is above, beyond, or transcendent of nature. But what is nature? Nature is the system of space-time-matter. A natural entity is one whose being is exhausted by its occurrence in nature. (One of David Armstrong's immanent universals is therefore a natural entity since its entire being is exhausted by its occurrence in nature; a Platonic unexemplified universal is not a natural entity.) A supernatural entity, then, is one that is either not in nature at all, or, if manifested in nature, not such that its being is exhausted by its manifestation in nature.

Clearly, God (as classically conceived) is not a natural entity by the above definitions. So he is a supernatural entity. But that is not to say that God's existence is ontically miraculous: God's existence does not violate any natural law. Nor is it a law of nature that only nature exists. It is a mistake to confuse the supernatural with the (ontically) miraculous. It is a mistake that Dennett makes.

4. God, a supernatural being, is not a miraculous being. It is not a miracle that God exists since God's existence does not contravene any law of nature. Nor is it obvious that the action of God must be miraculous. God can act on nature without intervening in nature. He could sustain it in being 'vertically' without interfering with any of the causal chains that occur 'horizontally' in nature. So it is false that God's action must involve the violation of natural laws.

5. But if God reveals the Ten Commandments to Moses, say, imparting to his mind the content of the Decalogue, then this is not an acting on nature as a whole, but an imparting of epistemic contents to a mind in nature, the mind of a prophet or mystic. Nevertheless, it is not clear that this need involve the violation of any natural law. A mind in nature need not be a natural entity since a mind in nature need not be an entity whose being is exhausted by its occurrence in nature. Suppose substance dualism is true. Then the creature's mind is a supernatural entity, and it is not clear that a divine supernatural mind communicating with a creaturely supernatural mind need involve any violation of a law of nature.

Another sort of case to be examined is the mental grasping of so-called abstract objects. They are supernatural; but their grasping is presumably non-miraculous.

6. In Exodus 3:2 God gets Moses' attention with a burning bush that is not consumed in its burning. This is a miracle, whether ontic or epistemic. Then in 3:14 God reveals himself to Moses as "I am who am," as Being itself. My point is that this profound revelation needn't be construed as involving any miracle, and could have occurred without the miraculously burning bush. My tentative conclusion, then, is that there are or can be cases of revelation that do not involve violations of laws of nature.

. . . if God should really speak to man, man could still never know that it was God speaking. It is quite impossible for man to apprehend the infinite by his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such. But in some cases man can be sure that the voice he hears is not God's; for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion. (115)

A footnote to this paragraph reads:

We can use, as an example, the myth of the sacrifice that Abraham was going to make by butchering and burning his only son at God's command (the poor child, without knowing it, even brought the wood for the fire). Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: "That I ought not kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God — of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even is [read: if] this voice rings down to me from (visible) heaven." (115)

Here is what I wrote the other day:

Which is more certain, that I should not kill my innocent son, or that God exists, has commanded me to kill my son, and that I must obey this command? That I must not kill my innocent son is a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense. But wouldn't a command from the supreme moral authority in the universe trump a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense? Presumably it would — but only if the putative divine command were truly a divine command. How would one know that it is?

Kant's argument, put as concisely as possible, is that:

1. It is certain that one ought not kill one's innocent son.
2. It is not certain that a seemingly divine command to kill one's innocent son is truly a divine command.
Therefore
3. One ought to trust one's moral sense and not the putative divine revelation.
Therefore
4. ". . . if it [a scriptural text] contains statements that contradict practical reason, it must be interpreted in the interests of practical reason." (65)

Whether or not one accepts this argument that I am attributing to Kant — you are invited to note that I cobbled it together from disparate passages — you must, if you are rational, see that there is a problem here, one that cannot be ignored, namely, the problem of adjudicating between putative personal and Biblical revelation, on the one hand, and (practical) reason on the other. Something has to give. My judgment is that Kant is right in the passage just quoted, and that our sense of the moral law trumps any contra-moral personal revelation (e.g. a voice commanding an immoral act) and also any Bible passage that seems to endorse the acquiescence in a personal revelation that commands an immoral act.

But why not say that the Bible passage trumps our sense of the moral law? The short answer is that our sense of the moral law has superior epistemic credentials. If we know anything about morality, we know that we ought not kill our innocent children. If we don't know that, then we don't know anything about morality. But a voice commanding one to kill an innocent child has no claim on our belief.

1. The problem here is epistemological and is an aspect of the more general problem of revelation. The problem concerns the criteria whereby we judge whether a putative bit of revelation such as a putative divine command is a genuine bit. 'Putative' is from the Latin, putare, to think. So a putative bit of revelation is a deliverance that is supposed to be or thought to be a bit of revelation, but might in fact not be a bit of revelation at all. Thus 'putative' is an alienans adjective: if x is a putative F, it does not follow that x is an F. (The general problem of revelation is itself a special case of the still more general problem of the validation of any source of knowledge whatosever, whether it be sense-perception, testimony, memory, inference, whatever. But let's stick to the problem of revelation.)

2. It is important to understand that the having of an experience does not guarantee the veridicality of the experience had. Suppose you are having an out-of-the-body experience right now. You see yourself lying on the couch from the point of view of the ceiling. (I am not using 'see' as a verb of success whereby that which is seen eo ipso exists; I am using it in the phenomenological sense which allows that that which is seen may or may not exist.) Your having of the experience will be indubitable to you. But the indubitability of the experience is no guarantee that you are in fact out of your body. The having of the experience is consistent both with being out of your body and being in your body. The same goes for an experience of being commanded by God to do something. A person who has such an experience cannot doubt that he is having it while he is having it. It does not follow, however, that the experience is veridical. So the subject of the experience can and should question whether the experience is of anything real.

3. But why should one question the veridicality of the experience of being commanded by God or otherwise spoken to by God or by any supernatural being? The answer should be obvious if we reflect on the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham has an experience of a command by God to kill Isaac. Now it could be that the experience is veridical: it could be that God really exists and is really commanding Abraham to kill his son, and that somehow it is morally obligatory that Abraham kill Isaac. But since the content of the command directly contradicts the ordinary moral deliverance that it is always and everywhere wrong to kill innocent children, a deliverance that is also in line with the presumably divine command "Thou shall not kill," there is an excellent positive reason to doubt that the experience is veridical.

4. I suggest that our immanent moral sense must serve as a check on religion with its propensity for excess and fanaticism. We need revelation, but we also need to evaluate whether it be true revelation. With respect to putative divine commands, is it not self-evident that we must check their source? Perhaps we need to subordinate ourselves, submitting ourselves to the Higher, and perhaps without such 'Islam' (submission) there is no religion at all; but not in such a way as to abdicate our autonomy and responsibility.

One can see that there is a tension here. How balance our autonomy and our creatureliness? It is but another form of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. The tension between morality and religion shows once again the unavoidability of philosophy. For only philosophy can mediate this dispute.

1. Concern for Salvation as Essential to Religion. It is very difficult to define religion, in the sense of setting forth necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct application of the term, but I agree with Royce's view that an essential characteristic of anything worth calling religion is a concern for the salvation of man. (The Sources of Religious Insight, Charles Scribner and Sons, 1912, p. 8) Religious objects are those that help show the way to salvation. The central postulate of religion is that "man needs to be saved." (8-9) Saved from what? ". . . from some vast and universal burden, of imperfection, of unreasonableness, of evil, of misery, of fate, of unworthiness, or of sin." (8) In an earlier post on Simone Weil I spoke of generic wretchedness. It is that we need salvation from.

2. The Need for Salvation. "Man is an infinitely needy creature." (11) But the need for salvation, for those who feel it, is paramount. The need depends on two simpler ideas:

a) There is a paramount end or aim of human life relative to which other aims are vain. (12)

b) Man as he now is, or naturally is, is in danger of missing his highest aim, his highest good. (12)

To hold that man needs salvation is to hold both of (a) and (b). I would put it like this. The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. If this doesn't strike a chord in you, then I suggest you do not have a religious disposition.

3. Religious Insight. Royce defines religious insight as ". . . insight into the need and into the way of salvation." (17) No one can take religion seriously who has not felt the need for salvation. But we need religious insight to show that we really need it, and to show the way to it.

4. Royce's Question. He asks: What are the sources of religious insight? Of insight into the need and into the way of salvation? Many will point to divine revelation through a scripture or through a church as the principal source of religious insight. But at this juncture Royce discerns a paradox that he calls the religious paradox, or the paradox of revelation.

5. The Paradox of Revelation. Suppose someone claims to have received a divine communication regarding the divine will, the divine plan, the need for salvation, the way to salvation, or any related matter. This person can be asked, "By what marks do you personally distinguish a divine revelation from any other sort of report?" (22-23) How is a putative revelation authenticated? By what marks or criteria do we recognize it as genuine? The identifying marks must be in the believer's mind prior to his acceptance of the revelation as valid. For it is by testing the putative revelation against these marks that the believer determines that it is genuine. One needs "a prior acquaintance with the nature and marks and, so to speak, signature of the divine will." (p. 25) But how can a creature who needs saving lay claim to this prior acquaintance with the marks of genuine revelation?

The paradox in a nutshell is that it seems that only revelation could provide one with what one needs to be able to authenticate a report as revelation:

Faith, and the passive and mysterious intuitions of the devout, seem to depend on first admitting that we are naturally blind and helpless and ignorant, and worthless to know, of ourselves, any saving truth; and upon nevertheless insisting that we are quite capable of one very lofty type of knowledge -- that we are capable, namely, of knowing God's voice when we hear it, of distinguishing a divine revelation from all other reports, of being sure, despite all our worthless ignorance, that the divine higher life which seems to speak to us in our moments of intuition is what it declares itself to be. If, then, there is a pride of intellect, does there not seem to be an equal pride of faith, an equal pretentiousness involved in undertaking to judge that certain of our least articulate intuitions are infallible?

Surely here is a genuine problem, and it is a problem for the reason. (103)

Is it a genuine problem or not? Can the church's teaching authority be invoked to solve the problem? Suppose a point of doctrine regarding salvation and the means thereto is being articulated at a church council. The fathers in attendance debate among themselves, arrive at a result, and claim that it is inspired and certified by the Holy Spirit. By what marks do they authenticate a putative deliverance of the Holy Spirit as a genuine deliverance? How do they know that the Holy Spirit is inspiring them and not something else such as their own subconscious desire for a certain result? But this is exactly Royce's problem.