The Maturing of Monotheism: A Dialectical Path to Its Truth 9781350089358, 9781350089389, 9781350089365

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The Maturing of Monotheism

Also available from Bloomsbury Free Will and Epistemology, by Robert Lockie Evidentialism and the Will to Believe, by Scott F. Aikin Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics, edited by Mikel Burley God, Existence, and Fictional Objects, by John-Mark L. Miravalle

The Maturing of Monotheism A Dialectical Path to Its Truth Garth Hallett

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 This paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Garth Hallett, 2019 Garth Hallett has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

Cover image: ‘Garden’ by William W. Huggin, acrylic on canvas © William Huggin / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Truth Theism Diversity Freedom Goodness Evil Afterlife Eternity Focusing Convergence

Notes Works Cited Index

vi 1 17 27 43 59 73 85 103 117 131 177 195 211

Preface I am curious, however, whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God—anyone who, whatever his actual belief about the matter, doesn’t particularly want either one of the answers to be correct (though of course he might want to know which answer was correct). —Thomas Nagel, The Last Word1 In many domains including the religious, humanity’s perspectives have steadily broadened and deepened. Within this evolving context, the present work speaks, in ways often new, for the existence of a transcendent being such as the world’s principal monotheistic religions have long worshipped and successive generations have intensively debated and discussed:  the supremely powerful, wise, good creator of our ever more astonishing universe. Since most of humanity’s major issues interrelate one way or another with the existence of such a deity (here usually referred to, for convenience, by the single name “God”), the present exposition will be holistic—that is, both broadly cumulative and coherently interconnected, as in a court case where the pieces of evidence not only link item by item with the verdict but are mutually reinforcing. Differing importantly from its predecessor, A Middle Way to God (Oxford University Press, 2000), for instance in its more ecumenical focus, the breadth of the case it makes, and its consequent organization, the work unfolds as follows. Two preparatory chapters focus first on truth, so basic a human value in theology as elsewhere yet so variously conceived and so radically contested, then on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim monotheism as a plausible claimant to this rightly prized status. The next six chapters respond to major antitheistic challenges— materialism, determinism, the denial of objective value, the pervasiveness of evil, and predictions of eventual human individual and collective extinction. The final two chapters, shifting back from the negative to the positive, first review traditional metaphysical ways of making a case for monotheism, then, at greater length, adopt and employ a cumulative, more experiential approach. The quick synopses at the start of each chapter, supplementing the present preliminary sketch, provide a somewhat fuller, step-by-step picture of the work’s dialectical development.

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Its historical aspect can be suggested through a comparison. On the one hand, [a]s the history of science unfolds, science exhibits an increasing knowledge of what is the case. That in turn suggests a thesis about how scientific belief is to be interpreted. It is in significant measure the outcome of genuine realworld influences. So that, if we are giving an account of how scientific ideas come and go, we will have to make reference to the fact that scientific thought and practice are shaped by cognitive contact with natural reality. The story of science is a human story, but one which is comprehensible only if we assume that human theory and practice are being in part, at least, shaped by what the world is really like.2

Similarly, as the present account unfolds, it too will exhibit, but within still broader horizons, our growing understanding of what is the case and how it should be interpreted. For the story of theism is likewise a human story, but one which is more fully comprehensible if we assume that here, too, human thought and practice are progressively being shaped, at least in part, by what reality is actually like. As science, looking closer and deeper, has gradually shed various myths and misconceptions, so has theism. And, given the strong connections between these two perspectives, the scientific and the theistic, this extensive parallel is not entirely fortuitous. The human search for transcendent truth is, however, far from being purely intellectual. Thus the philosopher Albert Camus’s existentialist perspective invites a complementary comparison: If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest of ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense he did right. That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.3

“The most urgent of questions” for us humans, it might be suggested, but far from the largest or most important question overall. We, here on this little planet of ours, are not the measure of all things. However, this contrast tends to weaken, even evanesce, within a theistically holistic perspective. There, for the personal

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Preface

and the cosmic, for the factual and the evaluative, for the totality of our vast interrelated universe, the saying applies, “Light dawns gradually over the whole.” Gradually, and also with great difficulty. So in this present far-reaching endeavor I  am grateful for the insightful, eloquent words of many authors (evident already here) and for the comments and suggestions of numerous friends, including Bryce Deline, Mary Domahidy, John Greco, Rosemary Jermann, Jack Marler, Daniel O’Connell, Joseph Tetlow, and Brother John of Taizé. My special thanks go to William Rehg for his helpful comments on the whole work; to Rosemary Jermann for her diligent, expert stylistic editing; and to Douglas Marcouiller for his timely encouragement and support at a critical early stage. Garth L. Hallett St. Louis, Missouri

1

Truth

The nature and importance of truth have long been obscured by the complexity of language, so notably exemplified by its truth-terms. Now, however, the shift in Western philosophical reflection, still incomplete, from the truth of thoughts to the truth of written or spoken statements as conceptually primary dictates a decisively different approach to the formulation and cognitive appraisal of theism. Rightly understood, everyday linguistic analogy can supplement and surpass alternatives—poetic evocation of the ineffable, mental imagery, models, figurative speech, loose linguistic pragmatism—as a normal, effective way of expressing transcendent truth. Pervasively, fundamentally, and perhaps nowhere more notably than with regard to the question of God, truth matters. Yet such obscurity still enshrouds the ancient query “What is truth?” that some, abandoning the search, have concluded that calling a proposition true amounts merely to affirming it: “P is true” says no more than “P.” Hence, we are told, “truth is not, as often assumed, a deep concept and should not be given a pivotal role in philosophical theorizing.”1 It is “a parochial topic, one about which only philosophy professors find it profitable to reflect.”2 Such dismissals, and the sort of practice they reflect and widely foster, mark the antithetical stage in a dialectical development, with the moment now ripe for synthetic clarification. For truth, true, and their linguistic kin are far from vacuous, but their complexity and the consequent invisibility of their mode of operation continue to veil their significance. The index of many a work on knowledge, truth, and the like contains no reference to language. So this opening chapter, looking in this still much-slighted direction, will comment on truth’s well-concealed nature, on the multilayered manner of its concealment, and on how, once its nature is more clearly revealed, the truth regarding the existence and nature of God can and should be sought, identified, and communicated. These clarifications, carried further in Chapter  9, will be

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The Maturing of Monotheism

fundamental for all that follows. For truth, so elusive and debated yet so desired and sought, does indeed matter as greatly as multitudes, learned and unlearned, have long supposed.

A historical dialectic In the Western philosophical tradition, mental, nonverbal truth was long and widely accorded representational primacy vis-à-vis verbal truth. For words do not relevantly resemble the realities they refer to, whereas nonverbal thoughts, it seemed clear, frequently do. The thinking of an influential representative, Thomas Aquinas, can here briefly illustrate this general point of view. True judgments, Aquinas taught, typically reveal two levels of correspondence with reality. First, the individual concepts that judgments employ and that general terms express are mental likenesses (similitudines) of the essences of things.3 Thus, whereas, for example, the sense of sight forms likenesses of the various shades and intensities of white, the intellect forms a likeness of the essence common to all whites; whereas various senses form likenesses of human beings, the intellect forms a likeness of the essence common to all human beings; and so forth. These intellectual likenesses furnish components (subjects, objects, etc.) of affirmation and negation in judgments. What then distinguishes true judgments from false is a second level of correspondence, built on the first: true judgments join what reality joins (e.g., humanity and rationality) or disjoin what reality disjoins (e.g., humanity and omniscience). Without this further correspondence of thought and reality, there would not be truth in the primary sense of the term; and without correspondence at the underlying concept-by-concept level, there would be neither truth nor falsehood in that primary, mentalistic sense. Such, quickly stated, was for Aquinas the usual configuration, but not in theological discourse. For God, he believed, shares no essence with us creatures. Thus such terms, for instance, as good and wise are not predicated univocally of God and of beings like ourselves, but analogically; when they are applied to us, their meaning differs, dramatically. Nonetheless, though God’s goodness and wisdom far transcend ours, Aquinas believed that the resemblance between the divine and created versions suffices to legitimate application of such terms to us creatures as well as to God. “Thus God is called wise,” he explains, “not simply because he begets wisdom but because, insofar as we are wise, we imitate to some extent the divine source of our wisdom.”4 W.  H. Vanstone’s illustration nicely captures the basic balance of this long-popular position: 

Truth

3

If the love of God is altogether different from human love, then it would be better to use for it the name of something from which it is not altogether different—the name of something within our experience to which it bears some likeness: and if there is nothing within our experience to which it bears some likeness, then we are speaking of a wholly unknown “something” of which it is unprofitable to speak.5

Still, problems remain. Aquinas speaks of resemblance “to some extent,” Vanstone of “some likeness.” So one wonders: plates resemble saucers to some extent but cannot truthfully be called saucers; bees resemble hornets to some extent but cannot truthfully be called hornets; and is not the difference between God and creatures far greater than any such discrepancies as these? Something was still seriously amiss in this account of Aquinas’s, as in others he proposed and in the more-than-millennial mentalistic tradition they represent. Hence much thinking about truth has swung in other, strongly antithetical directions. Anthony Kenny’s recent critique of Thomistic analogy can illustrate this broad reaction.6

Antithesis Kenny has problems with two varieties of analogy stressed by Aquinas. By “analogy of attribution,” he points out, we can, for example, call a diet “healthy” because it leads to good health in those who adopt and follow it, but we cannot say truly of God whatever we can say of the things God causes or creates (for instance, that God is heavy, dark, spherical, or blue). Kenny illustrates “analogy of proportionality,” which is more complex, with the term good:  A good knife is a knife that is handy and sharp; a good strawberry is a strawberry that is soft and tasty. Clearly, goodness in knives is something quite different from goodness in strawberries; yet it does not seem to be a mere pun to call both knives and strawberries “good,” nor does one seem to be using a metaphor drawn from knives when one calls a particular batch of strawberries good.7

Similarly, but more metaphysically, one might suggest with Aquinas that, for example, talk about God’s goodness is made meaningful by the fact that God’s goodness relates to God’s essence as our goodness relates to our essence. Here, however, notes Kenny, “[t]he difficulty in applying this pattern of analogy in the case of God is that we have no idea what his essence is. Even those who have thought we had, in a fairly strong sense, a concept of God have fallen short of saying that we have any grasp of God’s essence.”8 So, turning from

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The Maturing of Monotheism

these traditional accounts, Kenny opts for a metaphorical alternative: as “He is a mouse,” “She is a tiger,” or “Don’t be such a dog in the manger” are merely “figurative,” so, too, are statements about God. Here, for Kenny as for many, the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein may have proven influential. “According to him,” as Lorenz Puntel recounts, “religious expressions are ones that are understandable and interpretable only within the contexts of religious forms of life and religious language games. The chief consequence of this is that religious sentences that express religious convictions are not descriptive, i.e., do not express states of affairs or facts.”9 In a similar vein, Bob Becking recently writes, “I can only agree with Korpel and De Moor, when they state that all language about God has a metaphorical character . . . This view on religious language has become the dominant position in contemporary theology, philosophy of religion and biblical interpretation. There is no need to ponder on this point much further.”10 But there is. For where should we draw the line, and why? Should the theoretical writings of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Whitehead, and many others, ranging still more widely, be similarly reclassified as merely metaphorical? Should relativity theory, quantum mechanics, contemporary other-worlds speculation, far-reaching eschatological surmises, and the like be classified in this manner too?

Synthesis Kenny, I first suggest by way of synthesis, is right to stress the radical shift, from the literal to the figurative, in linguistic examples such as those he cites. But he appears not to recognize how flexible, and in what way, the ordinary factstating, nonmetaphorical use of language needs to be and often legitimately is. When, for instance, scientists believed that atoms could not be split, then discovered that they could be, they naturally and reasonably concluded that atoms could be split, and not that there were not and never had been any atoms. In their defense I  suggest that, despite the unforeseen atomic splitting, the word atom still satisfied the following rough “Principle of Relative Similarity” (PRS): a statement is true if, and only if, its use of terms (e.g., atom) resembles more closely the established (standard or stipulated) uses of terms than would the substitution of any rival, incompatible expression (e.g., molecule). By this reasonable, usage-reflecting norm (which I have discussed more fully in earlier works11 and will here now briefly unpack, assess, and recommend) it was and is still true to say that atoms can be split. In sharp contrast, “He is a mouse” or “She is a tiger” does not come close to satisfying this PRS requirement. Taken

Truth

5

nonfiguratively, in reference to a human being, both are obviously false; he is not a mouse, she is not a tiger. Thus there are indeed limits; not everything goes:  PRS analogy is tighter than mere metaphor. Regarding the latter David Brown writes that “liturgical theologians are quite right to play on the variety of possibilities inherent in Christianity’s classical metaphors:  water not just as cleansing, for example, but also as destructive on the one hand and on the other as refreshing, reinvigorating, and renewing. The metaphor should rightly be allowed to put in play more than one meaning at any one time.”12 Perhaps so, on some occasions for some purposes. But for theological purposes, PRS analogy permits a sharper focus. Theologians might, for instance, want to say more explicitly that grace is destructive of sin, on the one hand, and spiritually refreshing, reinvigorating, and renewing, on the other. However, despite such tightening, without some further dotting of i’s the PRS, keyed to linguistic usage, may still appear too accommodating a test of truth. It may be objected, for example, that people used to say that the Sun goes around the Earth, but their saying it did not make it true. However, notice in reply that that single saying, however popular, did not constitute, nor did it agree with, English usage—specifically, with the familiar use of around in that language, on countless occasions, for countless configurations—or with how deviations from that pattern were typically received and assessed. For “going around” to agree with this vast, varied usage and be right, the subject and the object terms would have to be reversed (from “The Sun goes around the Earth” to “The Earth goes around the Sun”), as they eventually were when astronomers finally got things right. Perhaps no oversight is more basic for human thinking generally than the widespread blurring, in countless ways, of the medium-message distinction thus illustrated.13 The medium (e.g., the English language) is neither true nor false; what we say with it is. Although no sharp borders are discernible or obligingly drawn for us, clearly delimiting one from the other—the medium from the message—or suggesting how fundamentally significant the distinction is, the difference is real, and important! As real as the comparable distinction between money and the endlessly varied things we can, wisely or unwisely, do with it. The PRS may also elicit fears that here, with respect to God, “[t]ranscendence that fits our categories has been domesticated”:14 mystery is being tamed. But this concern, too, would be groundless, for the Principle is both sufficiently precise and sufficiently flexible: both precise enough to decide between atom and molecule and flexible enough to warrant talk of our “making” breakfast and God’s

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The Maturing of Monotheism

“making” the world (without any suggestion that God used a skillet!). To sum up, then: traditional essentialism was too tight; traditional analogy was too loose; and here, at last, in the PRS, is a happy mean. We can still speak meaningfully and truly about the transcendent, while recognizing its transcendence. Although, as Chapter 9 will further indicate, this flexibility blurs conceptual borders, and thus hinders the formulation of theories that are both precise and true, in general it is, as just noted, a virtue not a vice. For the PRS’s wording aims to capture, suggestively but helpfully, the sense of true, its variants, and its near-equivalents in the languages to which they belong; and there in those languages, these terms, like most, are employed with desirable flexibility, as new circumstances and applications arise. The Principle formulates this flexibility, flexibly. If, for instance, we encounter some new insect or disease, we need not, before applying the term, carefully check for the presence there, too, of an essence shared by all and only those things we have been calling “insects” or “diseases.” And if special, perhaps more precise word senses are desired for the purposes of a given work, theory, or discipline, we can stipulate them (as word meanings, not theories), and the PRS, as formulated, will still cover their application. The equation of statements’ truth with PRS correspondence does not signify automatically that truth, so defined, is something to be prized and striven for. However, once it is clear what speaking the truth consists in, it becomes clear why the practice of speaking it should be valued and adopted. In illustration, consider again the terms now italicized in the sentence above:  “when, for instance, scientists believed that atoms could not be split then discovered that they could be, they naturally and reasonably concluded that atoms could be split, and not that there were not and never had been any atoms.” In the circumstances, theirs was a natural way of speaking. Because it was natural, it was widespread. Because it was both natural and widespread, it was readily understood. Because being understood is reasonably desired on most occasions by most speakers of any language in any age on any topic, such linguistic correspondence has been honorifically labeled (e.g., truth, veritas, Wahrheit) and has been widely sought, in theology as elsewhere. Statements’ uses of words not only do, as a matter of fact, repeatedly conform to the words’ established uses, in the manner the PRS describes, but they typically should do so, for the reasons here briefly suggested, of ready, effective communication. Kenny’s further remarks illustrate this broad relevance. Apparently unacquainted with an analysis such as that in the PRS, or perhaps unconvinced of its merits, he writes,

Truth

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If we reflect on the actual way in which we attribute mental predicates such as “know,” “believe,” “think,” “design,” “control” to human beings, we realize the immense difficulty there is . . . applying them to a putative being which is immaterial, ubiquitous and eternal. It is not just that we do not, and cannot, know what goes on in God’s mind; it is that we cannot really ascribe a mind to God at all. The language that we use to describe the contents of human minds operates within a web of links with bodily behaviour and social institutions. When we try to apply this language to an entity outside the natural world, whose scope of operation is the entire universe, this web comes to pieces, and we no longer know what we are saying.15

Here, too, the PRS reveals its helpful, fundamental pertinence. Consider a comparison. When, for example, we speak of our perhaps one day being able to generate abundant, usable energy by controlling nuclear fusion, there, too, we recognize “immense difficulty” in finding some application for the words. And if put to the same test, this web, too, with its talk of materials, designs, configurations, operations, and results, “comes to pieces, and we no longer know what we are saying.” Or, as some version of the notorious Verification Principle of old might suggest, we have no idea how we might verify this general hypothesis, and it therefore makes no sense. But it does. The hypothesis not only makes good PRS sense but may be worth pursuing, and may end up being verified, in some way we cannot presently surmise.16

True’s linguistic family The picture here just sketched and developed much more fully in other works of mine is not one the reader will find discussed, approvingly or disapprovingly, in the abundant philosophical literature regarding truth. This fact further illustrates remarks of Thomas Nagel that already here apply with striking aptness:  We find the familiar unfamiliar by reflecting on features of our situation, or forms of thought and action, so central and pervasive that they are ordinarily submerged in them without paying any notice. Philosophy in general is the most systematic form of self-consciousness. It consists in bringing to consciousness for analysis and evaluation everything that in ordinary life is invisible because it underlies and pervades what we are consciously doing.17

To appreciate still more fully, now, the validity and broad significance of the preceding analysis of true, truth, and their linguistic kin, and to become more

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The Maturing of Monotheism

reflectively, handily familiar with their use, it will help to locate these muchpuzzled-over terms on the map of language. For at the present point in this exposition it may not yet be clear why the account just given, rather than others cited, is correct and, if it is, why and how that secret has been so well hidden for so long. An answer to this mystery can be sketched in four steps, at four levels: first, with regard to language in general; second, with regard to the large class of expressions to which such truth-terms belong; third, specifically with regard to these terms themselves; and, fourth, with regard to the layer of obscurity added by the history of Western thought, so concerned for so long about the nature and significance of truth. Most of us, including most philosophers, are not linguists, observing, pen in hand, how people employ the expressions of our own or any other language. We may be masters of our mother tongues, but practical mastery does not imply or usually require full reflective awareness. Human natural languages are far too complex for that; so for the most part we do and must acquire them unreflectively. Then, as a language gradually becomes second nature to us, we typically direct our attention, not to that medium but to the various matters, often complex, that we discuss by its means. From this gradual process of an individual’s language acquisition, resembling and reflecting the linguistic group’s, there results the situation that prompted young Wittgenstein to observe, with only slight exaggeration: “Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is—just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced.”18 In illustration, think, for instance, of the debate here just sketched, regarding truth. The term true, like many variants in many different languages, finds its natural place as a notably complex member of a class of expressions which in earlier writings I have labeled “cognitive comparatives.”19 In simple illustration of this vast, hugely practical, yet generally invisible, unrecognized class, consider the word big. For this a dictionary may suggest the equivalent “large,” or, more fully, “of considerable size, number, quantity, magnitude, or extent.” One may wonder, how considerable? So a more enlightening entry would note that “big” things are big relative to members of their named class—that, for instance, big ants are big relative to other ants but tiny in comparison, say, with even small elephants. Thus three things determine application of the term: the size of the thing described, the size of the members of the named class, and the relationship between those sizes. Roughly:  big ants or elephants are larger than most ants or elephants, small ants or elephants are smaller than most, and the like holds,

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in differing proportions, for monster, huge, tall, short, small, tiny, stupendous, and countless other expressions. The comparisons, though not made explicit, as in “bigger than most” or “smaller than most,” determine the application of the terms. To rightly apply big to an ant, a speaker must know the size not only of that individual ant but of ants in general. And so it is for elephants, trees, buildings, debts, storms, and the rest. Big ones are thus rated in comparison with other members of the named class. Speakers do not, of course, consult or think about such truth conditions every time they use the word big, any more than they do for other terms they employ with equal unreflective ease. They just need to know, not think about, the language spoken. Countless terms, of different languages and different grammatical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.), some relatively simple and some complex, work this way, while countless other terms (red, square, tin, bifocal, prose, calendar, etc.) do not. True, in its common uses most pertinent here (e.g., “true claim” or “true statement,” not “true north” or “true friend”), does. This kinship, however, is deeply, multiply hidden: by the relative invisibility of the whole class of cognitive comparatives, to which the term belongs; by the relative complexity of the subclass to which it belongs (true, wahr, vrai, etc.); and in particular by its focus (unlike that of the vast majority of expressions) on language, the instrument of description, in addition to and along with the realities described. When thus employed, it too, like other cognitive comparatives, might be termed a “three-pole” concept. For to correctly characterize a statement or factual utterance as true, we need to know three things—the statement’s use of the terms uttered, the use of the uttered terms in the language spoken, and the relationship between the two uses, verifying the PRS test: a statement is true if, and only if, its use of terms resembles more closely the established (standard or stipulated) uses of terms than would the substitution of any rival, incompatible expression. Here terms’ “use” is not restricted to grammar, syntax, semantics, context, or any narrow combination thereof, but is left suitably open; for details affecting statements’ truth and its assessment vary greatly. This complexity is neither explicitly stated nor consciously thought out when the word true is uttered, any more than is the similar, comparative content of huge, tiny, smart, expensive, or typical. True, like these and many other terms in many languages, is a cognitive comparative. Such is the knowledge, usually unreflective and deeply buried, that the word’s standard, everyday application both requires and conveys.20 The handy practicality of this class of expressions, and especially of truthterms, explains their popularity. Think again of big, small, tiny, short, and the

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The Maturing of Monotheism

like. It is not feasible to measure everything whose size we wish to indicate, but, regardless of the object, if it can be descriptively labeled we can give some idea of its size by means of comparative expressions such as these and speak of a “tiny” insect, “huge” debt, “tall” mountain, “short” trip, “speeding” train, and the like. Similarly but still more obviously, we cannot ascertain and report, term by term, how closely the use of each expression in a given statement corresponds to the extensive, perhaps worldwide, use of that expression in that language; neither is it readily conceivable that we would ever need to do so. But we often do need to know and to state that some assertion adequately achieves the usual purposes of statements, and this a statement will usually do if and only if it satisfies the PRS. For here, too, on the one hand, as for big, some elasticity is and must be countenanced. And here, too, on the other hand, as for big, not everything goes. To violate the Principle, whether knowingly or unknowingly, is typically (and often more or less seriously) unfortunate. (Told that the water is deep, a boy dives from the high branch. Told that the stock is sound, an investor buys it.) The PRS, the class of cognitive comparatives, and true’s membership in that class, being so little recognized, have on the whole been absent, reflectively, from philosophy, theology, and discussions of theological discourse. Yet the Principle’s relevance, there as elsewhere, is clear. Take Aquinas’s examples. Good, for instance, can be truly predicated of God if, despite the great difference between human goodness and divine, the term still comes closer than would any rival, incompatible expression, such as wicked, bad, nasty, depraved, corrupt, or morally deficient. The same holds for other theistically handy terms, such as wise, just, merciful, powerful, forgiving, loving. Indeed, thanks to the PRS, the whole of theology is largely covered semantically. So understood, analogy can work; and the more consistently the need for that coverage is recognized and heeded, the more widely and consistently is talk about God and the transcendent in fact likely to succeed.

Theistic discourse Truth, we may be told, “is first and foremost a property of statements or beliefs which they possess when things are as they state or hold them to be. Moreover the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ retain precisely the same meaning whatever we are talking about, however great the differences between the various objects of discourse.”21 In the light of the foregoing discussion, consider this

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11

comparison: “Health is first and foremost a property of people or other living things (not, for instance, of food, climates, or complexions). Moreover, the word ‘healthy’ retains precisely the same meaning whatever we are talking about, however great the differences between the various objects of discourse.” Not likely. True, like healthy, is an analogical term, its sense shifting from application to application, analog to analog. Its semantically primary application however is, in the manner explained, to statements (discourse) and not, for instance, to beliefs (see below). And clearly the preceding account, if roughly accurate, has basic significance for theistic discourse. Radically revising mentalistic and antimentalistic conceptions of truth such as those just dialectically reviewed and found wanting, it rescues such discourse not only from current critiques such as Kenny’s but also from the comparably negative views of many other thinkers through the centuries—for example, those, long ago, of Moses Maimonides. For Maimonides, writes David Shatz, to say that God is knowing is to say that he is not not-knowing, and so forth for the other attributes. But—and this is a critical clarification—this negation is to be understood like the negation in “the wall does not see.” What is being negated is the entire determinable, the general category of knowing/being ignorant. The true upshot of negative theology, then, is that God lies beyond our conceptual repertoire, and “Silence is praise unto Thee” (Ps. 65:2). We are left with no way of describing God.22

The PRS, answering Maimonides’ worries but unsuspected by him, too, as a general principle of truthful predication, disagrees. We do have the means for describing God. Mental imaging cannot do it any more than it can picture goodness, gravity, intelligence, or mortgage rates, but linguistic predication may, in its typically loose but nonetheless effective way. In more recent versions of Maimonides’ agnostic verdict, it has been said that “the reality we name God cannot be put into words,”23 indeed that “since we cannot know what God is like, it makes no sense to ask whether or not one has a true notion of him. This is but another way of remarking that any notion we have of God is inadequate, and hence none could be said to be true.”24 Our notion of practically any reality—dreaming, gravity, electricity, matter, inflation, truth—is inadequate, in the sense of being limited, mixed with error, or both. Nonetheless, to take the same examples, we may truthfully affirm and believe that we dreamed last night, that planets move, that lightning just lit up the sky, that inflation will soon worsen, or that a given theological assertion is true. The PRS aptly characterizes human predication, not angelic or divine.

12

The Maturing of Monotheism

Given the inevitable stretching on the part of those who wish to go beyond double negation, images, or figures of speech but who envisage no such norm as the PRS by which to judge the stretching, there frequently results a war of conflicting “intuitions.” With regard to God’s properties, say, what precisely those properties are thought to be will be a function of our intuitions concerning what properties are great-making properties, as well as concerning when an array of such properties is compossibly exemplified, and, if so, whether it is or is not surpassable in value. It is a well known and often lamented fact that philosophical intuitions differ. And even those who are relatively sanguine about the trustworthiness of such intuitions must admit that they provide, at best, defeasible epistemic warrant.25

Though knowledge of a sound principle of analogy cannot provide automatic answers to all mysteries, ignorance of such a principle guarantees and largely explains this warring of intuitions. For without such guidance, if neither the transcendent realities that we discuss, by themselves, nor the linguistic medium that we employ, by itself, can provide true answers to our questions, yet somehow, somewhere (we rightly sense) true answers do exist, how or where might we seek enlightenment other than through such transcendent “intuitions”? Without reflective understanding of true, truth, and the like and the fundamental value they highlight, it is understandable that other theorists, taking a more pragmatic direction than that of linguistically dubious “intuitions,” have, for instance, written that “the main criterion for a ‘true’ theology is pragmatic, preferring those models of God that are most helpful in the praxis of bringing about fulfillment for living beings.”26 Now, models may be useful, and not just for “bringing about fulfillment for living beings”; but that does not guarantee their veracity. False conceptions may sometimes prove useful (think of Columbus’s misconception that he had reached Asia) and true conceptions may sometimes have disastrous consequences (think of the formulae for atomic and hydrogen bombs). Even were truth and utility more closely, clearly, consistently aligned, true statements would typically still be clearer and more helpful than models. The diver who thinks the shallow water is deep or the investor who thinks the shaky bonds are sound does not need a contrary model, intuition, or figure of speech. Straight statement of the facts (“It’s shallow,” “They’re worthless”) will doubtless serve better, and the like holds much more frequently in theology than the massive obscuration of true and its workings, here briefly sketched, suggests.

Truth

13

Theology’s medium In Beyond “Justification,” William Alston writes, with urgent emphasis, I don’t know how to prove that the acquisition, retention, and use of true beliefs about matters that are of interest and/or importance is the most basic and most central goal of cognition. I don’t know anything that is more obvious from which it could be derived. But I suggest that anyone can see its obviousness by reflecting on what would happen to human life if we were either without beliefs at all or if our beliefs were all or mostly false. Without beliefs we would be thrown back on instinct as our only guide to behavior.27

I would have fewer misgivings about this strong stress on the importance of true beliefs were it not for one of Alston’s likely targets. In Divine Nature and Human Language he speaks for centuries of thinking and is therefore worth quoting rather fully when he writes: The basic aim is to get an adequate fix on what we are saying when we utter such sentences as “God created the heavens and the earth” or “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.” But that means that what we are essentially concerned with is to make explicit, elucidate, drag out into the open, the thoughts, the conceptions that are expressed by that talk . . . If we were clear about that we would not need to worry about the details of the ways in which these thoughts are verbally encoded. We have to refer to the linguistic vehicles of our thoughts because they are the overt expressions of those thoughts . . . But does the linguistic vehicle have any importance other than as an aid to reference?28

This closing query expresses widespread doubts. So, comparable with the PRS in its significance is a broad response that has here been emerging and that can be stated succinctly, in first approximation, as follows:  it is highly questionable whether any thoughts stated linguistically are, have been, or could be first entertained and evaluated nonlinguistically. This assertion, which may appear counterintuitive at first sight and will have to be unpacked, suggests why no statements, theological or other, in this present work will be analyzed or discussed as though they were linguistic translations of nonlinguistic thoughts. In the contrary, broadly representative Thomistic perspective critiqued above, mental truth enjoys primacy relative to verbal truth: the verbal translates the mental and not vice versa. Granted, in terms of mere verbal matching, we might either define true statements as those which express true judgments or

14

The Maturing of Monotheism

define true judgments as those expressed by true statements; the equivalence works either way. But is there no exit from this charmed circle? On what side can understanding be found? For millennia, most philosophers—whether rationalist, empiricist, or other—agreed in replying, “On the mental side.” Aquinas here figures as their representative. More specifically, he represents what is perhaps the most plausible and historically widespread version of mental primacy, matching universal terms with universal concepts, and universal concepts with universal essences or natures, then combining the concepts in true judgments expressed by true statements.29 At both levels of this matching, first conceptual then judgmental, similarity plays a crucial role, in the manner here already noted. In such accounts this notion of truth-making likenesses in the minds of speakers and hearers is also crucially problematic. Only the notion of essences— common to all members of a named class, shared by them alone, and mirrored, term by term, by universal concepts—enabled Aquinas’s overall, once widely representative conception of speech and thought to appear at all plausible. But even for the individual terms in some pedestrian, nontheoretical verbal sample (e.g., “Stocks edged higher today”) no such essences are discernible. And even a perfect verbal match of defined term and defining formula, if ever discovered, would not establish their existence. (Think of the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, their contents varying freely, independently of their shapes.) For theological discourse the problems become still more serious. What mental likeness might provide meaning for omniscience, grace, transcendence, soul, predestination, or the like? Still, we may and do have largely nonlinguistic thoughts, some of them fairly complex, say regarding a rearrangement of furniture, the planting of a garden, the shading in a painting, or, as in Wittgenstein’s example, regarding the similarities and dissimilarities of the varied things called “games.” So of interest here is the question whether there are or can be any theological thoughts other than the linguistic variety. If valid, the claim that no thoughts encountered in theological discourse have nonlinguistic equivalents is already a momentous one. But if, more generally, there can be no nonlinguistic theological thoughts, of this or any other variety, the significance of language for theological inquiry becomes still more unmistakable. In that case, yes, we can meaningfully think and speak about the transcendent (the PRS still suffices), but we cannot represent the transcendent at all in the purely nonlinguistic manner long supposed. An intriguing passage in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations raises this very issue. William James, in order to show that thought is possible without speech, had quoted the recollections of a deaf-mute, Mr. Ballard, who wrote that

Truth

15

even before he knew any language he had entertained thoughts about God and the world. “It was during those delightful rides,” Ballard recounted, “some two or three years before my initiation into the rudiments of written language, that I began to ask myself the question: how came the world into being?” Wittgenstein found this puzzling: Are you sure—one would like to ask—that this is the correct translation of your wordless thought into words? And why does this question—which otherwise seems not to exist—raise its head here? Do I want to say that the writer’s memory deceives him?—I don’t even know if I should say that. These recollections are a queer memory phenomenon—and I do not know what conclusions one can draw from them about the past of the man who recounts them.30

Here two questions need to be distinguished:  (1) Did Ballard’s account give a “correct translation” (as Wittgenstein puts it) of Ballard’s earlier wordless thoughts into words? Previous remarks here suggest that it did not and could not have done so. Ballard did not first know another language, mentalese, then later translate from that language into English.31 (2)  Could Ballard have had nonlinguistic philosophical thoughts that he later aptly recounted or expressed in English but did not translate into English? An anecdote may help to clarify this distinction between apt expression and accurate translation. One Sunday, his wife could not accompany Calvin Coolidge to church. When he returned, she asked the notoriously taciturn US president what the minister had preached about. “Sin,” Coolidge replied. “Yes, Cal, but what did he say about sin?” his poor wife insisted. So Cal amplified: “He was agin’ it.” Although this reply did not translate any one of the preacher’s remarks, or all of them combined, it may have faithfully communicated their general drift. So, could something somewhat similar have occurred in Ballard’s case? Did he perhaps have nonlinguistic thoughts about God and the world and later express (not translate) them verbally? With regard to such thoughts as he reported, consider a possible comparison. People familiar with ducks and rabbits can see Joseph Jastrow’s famed duckrabbit drawing now as a duck, now as a rabbit, wordlessly. (In the first case the protruding appendages are a duck’s open bill, in the other they are a rabbit’s ears.) Might Ballard, familiar with making and with things made, perhaps see the world as something made, likewise wordlessly? I  would not exclude the possibility, a priori. I  suggest, however, that it has slight relevance for philosophical or theological method. For as just argued and explained, we who possess language can have such thoughts linguistically, about God, creation,

16

The Maturing of Monotheism

and the like. Surmises about the possibility of having comparable or equivalent thoughts nonlinguistically would not clarify the subject of discussion but would likely only lead, fruitlessly, here and elsewhere, to puzzlement such as Wittgenstein expressed. I say “fruitlessly” because, if the words thus investigated accurately expressed the originating thoughts, a search for the nonlinguistic version would offer no clear advantage, whereas if the words expressed some other thought than the one intended, that would not discredit the linguistic medium as a vehicle of thought but rather its incompetent user. The speaker would need to pay more attention to language.

2

Theism

As speakers can differ profoundly in what they believe and say about some person yet still be referring to the same individual, so they can differ in their beliefs and statements about the transcendent and still be referring to the same reality. Thus the present study focuses on Yahweh, God, and Allah, so variously described, because these names (plus perhaps others) arguably refer to the same reality and, if so, billions of people, past and present, have worshipped that same deity. As the preceding chapter noted, the question of truth—what it is, whether it is, how much it matters and why—is fundamental for human thought in general, for philosophy in particular, and especially with regard to God. Many might agree but see no reason for all the fuss. “To say that it is objectively true that the earth is not flat is to say that the earth really is not flat, and would not be flat even if everyone thought it were flat.”1 So simple! The concept’s full, puzzling significance can clearly emerge only when linguistic truth is recognized as conceptually primary; and such a “linguistic turn” can occur only when it is rightly understood, not as a simplifying falsification, shifting attention from reality to mere linguistic signs, but as a realistic amplification, revealing the rich complexity and relevance of language. With this foundation now laid, the following issue can and must be addressed, right at the start. The Preface explained that this book will speak for the existence of Yahweh, God, and Allah, each described as supremely powerful, wise, and good. But why, readers may have wondered, are these three divinities and only these three thus singled out? And why these three traits, so stated, and not others? Might not the same deities be described in other terms—for instance, perhaps quite aptly, as “one personal, active, and transcendent being with a moral goal for the universe”?2 The answer, succinctly put, is that these three divinities, as understood by their believers, more plausibly and probably than most possess

18

The Maturing of Monotheism

these three traits, so stated; that these believers are in fuller agreement regarding these three traits than regarding some others often cited; that this agreement suffices to strongly suggest these divinities’ mutual identity; and that, since the assessment of even this simplified identity hypothesis, for Yahweh, God, and Allah, will prove complex, it is desirable here to thus keep matters relatively simple.

A comparison In recent ecumenical literature, broad identity claims have been numerous and varied.3 We read, for instance, that “there is ground for saying that all major traditions designate one and the same sacred”4 and that “that ultimate frontier of human existence, in whichever way religions may conceive it, is what the word ‘God’ signifies.”5 Such assertions have also been widely called into question, and, at the other extreme, even monotheistic identities have been challenged. Veli-Matti Kärkkäīnen, for instance, writes that “[f]or Muslims, the Trinity is nothing other than tritheism. Therefore, Christians are really not monotheists, but ‘associators,’ having committed the sin of shirk, that is, associating other deities with God.”6 Many Muslims agree that “most Christians, despite their lip service to monotheism, in fact are unwitting polytheists.”7 For their part, Christians have long been aware of, and grappled with, this perceived problem. “All theologians,” A.  P. Martinich has observed, “understand that the central problem involving the mystery of the Trinity is to explain the possibility that there is one God but three persons in God without falling into contradiction.”8 In Martinich’s view, many solutions, analyzing the concepts of person, nature, substance, God, and the like, or envisaging ontological mechanisms within the Trinity, “mislocate the source of the problem, which is that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are somehow identical and yet not identical. As the notion of identity is generally construed, this is incoherent no matter how ‘person,’ ‘nature,’ or whathave-you is analyzed.”9 Classical Leibnizian identity allows no wiggle room; if each of the three persons is identical with God, who is one, then by transitivity the three persons are all identical with one another—which is to say, according to this line of thinking, there are not three persons but only one divine being, whose singleness is veiled by multiple names. Even within a single religious tradition, such back-and-forth questioning can and does arise.

Theism

19

Take, for example, the difference between those who conceive of God as impassible, immutable, atemporal and metaphysically simple, and those who reject such claims outright, thinking of God rather as a ceaselessly changing, perfectly responsive temporal agent continually interacting with created, temporal beings. An onlooker can begin to wonder whether disagreements so deep and many can be disagreements about one and the same subject-matter.10

Clearly, this issue is of such depth and breadth that it must be addressed right at the start of the present inquiry into theism and its merits. A first clarifying step is to recognize how seriously descriptions may disagree and still pick out a single, identical reality. A vivid illustration appears in half a dozen pages of William Manchester’s The Glory and the Dream, which, recounting the days before Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election in 1932, reveal the following diverse perceptions of the US president-to-be: “a magnificent leader,” “no leader,” “wishy-washy,” “another Hoover,” “another weak man,” “an apostle of progress,” “a great borrower,” “the only politician in the country who thought of economics as a moral problem,” “not a man of great intellectual force or supreme moral stamina,” a “corkscrew candidate of a convoluting convention,” “magnanimous and sure of himself,” “too soft,” “too eager to please and be all things to all men,” “the image of zest, warmth, and dignity,” “weakness and readiness to compromise,” “a kind of universal joint, or rather a switchboard, a transformer,” “a pill to cure an earthquake,” and “a vigorous well-intentioned gentleman of good birth and breeding.”11 No two of these descriptions are identical. Some are mutually contradictory. Others differ greatly yet are compatible. Still others are neither clearly compatible nor clearly incompatible. Furthermore, the descriptions, reflecting the diversity and fallibility of those who proffered them, are more or less true, more or less plausible, more or less objective and unbiased. Nevertheless, despite their many disparities, all of the descriptions are of the same person; all have the same referent, FDR. A second clarifying step is to notice that somehow or other this multiplicity of views and descriptions did not throw the populace into confusion. They knew who they were talking about and that he was a single, identical man. If one person described “Roosevelt” as president, husband of Eleanor, and a great man and another described “Roosevelt” as president, husband of Eleanor, and a rascal, they knew they were talking about the same man but disagreed in their appraisal of him. If, however, one person described “Roosevelt” as president, resident of New York State, and a rugged Rough Rider and another described “Roosevelt” as president, resident of New  York State, and physically disabled,

20

The Maturing of Monotheism

they knew they were talking about two different men—two different Roosevelts (Theodore and Franklin). In ecumenical discussions, however, concerning various divinities, such sameness or difference of reference is often far from evident and so must here be clarified. Otherwise, some readers, questioning the identity of Yahweh, God, and Allah with one another, may consider this book’s focus too broadly inclusive, while others, viewing a wider, more varied spectrum of transcendent referents as one and the same entity, may consider the focus too narrow. Here then, since an understanding of this issue has implications not only for the validity of the present inquiry but for the relevance and plausibility of theism, are reasons for making the present study’s focus both as broad and as narrow as described: Yahweh, God, and Allah.

Possible identity In “How to Tell Whether Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God,” Tomas Bogardus and Mallorie Urban acknowledge, with regret, that “pinning down an exact, detailed theory of reference is beyond the scope of this paper.”12 Detailed exactness would be desirable, they believe, and so would a general theory; but an “exact, detailed theory of reference”—that would be ideal. As it is, the nebulosity of their results is not surprising, for reasons such as those already here suggested. Scientific precision cannot be achieved without doing science—physics, chemistry, mathematics, or the like—and there developing and employing appropriate technical terminology. But, as the previous chapter suggested and Chapter  9 will argue more fully, a discipline such as philosophy neither possesses nor, given the breadth and depth of its focus, can it successfully develop comparably precise terminology of its own. Thus the dream of doing philosophy scientifically, though understandable, is not realistic. The Principle of Relative Similarity, so essential for the whole of philosophy, including philosophical theology, points in a more discursive, more feasible direction. Here then, for a start, consider the following assertion:  if it is claimed that Christians and Muslims worship and believe in the same God while they continue to claim either the Qur-an or Jesus Christ as the ultimate revelation of truth . . ., and both hold that these beliefs are incompatible, this undermines any truth claim that could be associated with God or any meaningful use of the notion of “sameness” and “otherness.”13

Theism

21

This conclusion does not follow from these premises; for, as noted above, many equally incompatible assertions made about FDR do not exclude identity of reference. One may wonder, though, just how basic disagreement can be without precluding identity. “For Israel,” it has been urged, God cannot be man or become man. For the Church, God can be man and does become flesh. Here is the deep gulf: for Judaism God’s holiness and power, so to speak, forbid him to be man; for Christianity God’s holiness and power, so to speak, enable him to be man. Two different understandings of God are here at stake; which understanding of God is the true one?14

Here the conflict is made to seem sharp by the frequent but typically unreflective, unspoken assumption, by Christians as well as non-Christians, that the asserted Jesus-God relationship is one of strict identity, which would exclude any difference between the terms, human and divine, of the relationship. At least as frequent, however, are the equally unreflective, unspoken assumptions that no two members of the Trinitarian triad are perfectly identical with one another and that none of them is perfectly identical with the man Jesus Christ. All these relationships are recognized as profoundly mysterious. And neither Christian scripture nor authoritative Christian teaching (e.g., the Council of Chalcedon) supports the strict identity too readily suggested by the word is in the statement “Jesus is God.”15 Thus the “deep gulf ” just spoken of is not as deep as it appears—not deep enough, in its mystery, to indicate that the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” is any other than the god of Jewish and Muslim belief. A similar assessment seems warranted with regard to alleged conflicts between monotheism and Christian Trinitarian doctrine. David Brown observes that for the Trinity as for the Incarnation “the central difficulty concerns what is commonly labeled the problem of identity, namely the question of what would justify us in speaking of one entity rather than of a plurality of entities; that is to say, talking of one person rather than two in the incarnational case and of one God rather than three in the trinitarian instance.”16 Here, if Christians believed that the three divine “persons” were such in the full, familiar sense of the term, then, despite the singular expression “God,” they would be using it as the name for three gods. However, though communitarian theologians sometimes veer in this direction before stopping short, Christian doctrine in general does not countenance or imply such a view.17

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The Maturing of Monotheism

Probable identity For FDR all those varied descriptions, by friend and foe, do not exclude identity of reference. Neither, however, do they establish it. That would require systematically collating much fuller evidence, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, which would prove complex. Still, we might pull it off. With regard, however, to the monotheistic divinities Yahweh, God, and Allah both types of demonstration, the linguistic and the nonlinguistic, prove more problematic. Greater clarity can be achieved in several steps. The first concerns the strictness of the sameness asserted. Two people may, for example, sing the “same song” in different voices, different keys, different tempos, and so forth; the sameness is not total. But strict, logical identity is perfect, and that is the kind here being suggested and tested: as FDR did not differ from the thirty-second president of the United States in any detail, so, too, it may be for Yahweh, God, and Allah. In that case, whatever can be said truly of one can be said truly of the other two. Only the names vary. A second step concerns the Preface’s formulation of this particular identity claim, describing Yahweh, God, and Allah as “the supremely powerful, wise, good creator of our ever more astonishing universe.” The term supremely strikes a strategic mean. On the one hand, it is weaker than infinitely would be, but also less deeply problematic in its meaning. On the other hand, supremely is stronger than extremely would be, for multiple divinities might fit that description, whereas only one creator of the universe could qualify as supremely powerful, wise, and good. Even if there were multiple creators of the universe and they were ever so wise, good, and powerful, they could not all be supreme in each and all of these respects. Though by analytic standards this formulation may appear rather minimal and fuzzy, in the present context such brevity and vagueness are virtues not defects. For the fuller and more precise the description substituted for this one, the more probable it is that it would introduce some error and conflict with the views of some believers, whereas this more jejune description resembles, for example, the description of FDR as “the 32nd president of the United States.” On that much, all the commentators quoted above would agree, despite their disagreement about many other details; and the phrase therefore succeeds in pinpointing the person they all were speaking of. Similarly, the informed populace—Jews, Christians, and Muslims as well as unbelievers—would agree that the divinity these theists worship can be described as most powerful, wisest,

Theism

23

and best; and (on reflection) that there is no reason to suppose the existence of more than one such being; and (on further reflection) that there cannot be more than one being that fits this description. Remarks of Amy Pauw suggest how extensively this abstract summation may be amplified in ways that do not weaken but rather strengthen the impression of identity: The grounds I offer for the claim that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God are an implication of my belief in God as creator of all. In the words of the Presbyterian Brief Statement of Faith (1993), I believe in “One God, maker of heaven and earth, whom alone we worship and serve.” This Christian affirmation is of course indebted to the theological tradition of Judaism, and is also shared with Muslims. It functions as the theological precondition for the distinctive stories each tradition tells of God’s relation to humanity: the Jewish, the Christian, and Muslim narratives of God’s revelation to and blessing of humanity are each built on the conviction that the one God is the source and ongoing sustainer of all life. That this affirmation, at least in its thin, abstract form, is something the three traditions can agree on makes it reasonable for Christians to be favorably disposed at the outset to the claim that Jews and Muslims worship the same God.18

Continuing in this vein, Pauw concludes: “Because of the particularities of my Christian faith, not in spite of them, I am justified in taking Jews and Muslims at their word when they profess to worship the ‘One God, maker of heaven and earth.’ ”19

Too narrow? I will not venture to suggest which of the world’s many divinities, past and present, may be identical with the trio so far named. Still, in a general way, one may wonder whether uniformity of reference prevails where theistic descriptions are still more disparate; where cultural conditioning is still more diverse; where no shared proper name indicates or even suggests a common referent; where the reality or realities in question lie far beyond our shared, sensible experience; and where, again, not even the existence of all the referents is assured. Do all religions worship the “same” deity? As already noted, to this query, or variants thereof, many in recent decades have replied affirmatively: not only is a single transcendent reality present or active in the

24

The Maturing of Monotheism

most diverse religions, but all religions, or at least all the major religions, using names such as Allah, Krishna, Tao, God, Nirvana, Vishnu, Yahweh, and Brahman, refer to that one reality. The claim of identity between the multiple impersonal ultimates of Buddhism (Dharmakaya, Sunyata, and Nirvana), on the one hand, and the single personal deity of Christianity, on the other, appears particularly problematic.20 According to Keith Yandell and Harold Netland, [C]areful examination of both the implications of Buddhist metaphysics and Buddhist texts themselves indicate that Buddhism is more than merely agnostic on the question of a creator God; it rules out the possibility of there being such a God. Williams observes that, “To portray Buddhism as agnostic in this way seems to me a modern strategy. In ancient times Buddhists were quite clear that they denied the existence of a personal creator God as taught in rival theistic systems.” Moreover, there is the deep-seated Buddhist teaching that, nirvana aside, nothing enjoys independent existence, that is, an existence not dependent on the existence and activity of something else. This, of course, rules out the Christian understanding of God, since nirvana is not conceived as personal or capable of action.21

In such terms the contrast continues; here, again, as for FDR, the descriptive differences are many and strong. But here, too, as for the claims for and against the identity of Yahweh, God, and Allah, no attempt is made to distinguish between descriptive differences that do and those that do not indicate, or strongly suggest, referential difference. And, in addition to nirvana, what about Buddha, Dharmakaya, and Sunyata and their possible identity with the Western trio? Even if two religions have radically different views about the nature of the Ultimate, as Buddhism and Christianity appear to, they may still be worshipping or relating to the same supreme reality. This would just be a striking example of the general truth that people can disagree, even radically, about the nature of some referent, yet all be describing the same entity. However, what sense could it have to say that any of the Buddhist ultimates is identical with any of the theist deities? In Paul J. Griffiths’s summation of Buddha’s attributes22 we read, at the start, “Buddha is maximally salvifically efficacious,” “Buddha is single,” and “Buddha is omniscient,” but then, “Buddha has no beliefs.” This sounds different. However, Griffiths explains that it “is required because of the usual understanding of what it is to have a belief (that is, to have a propositional attitude); believers are related to the states of affairs about which they have beliefs indirectly through their beliefs, and this is not something properly said of Buddha.” And have not many

Theism

25

theists similarly stressed divine simplicity? The rest of Griffiths’s listing (“Buddha has no nonveridical awareness,” “Buddha’s awareness requires no volition, effort, or attentiveness,” etc.) sounds equally compatible with much theistic theorizing. Pressing further in this conciliatory direction, we might envisage the following convergence.23 Buddhists and theists view ultimate reality as far transcending the merely human. This it would not do if it resembled us too closely (the Buddhist concern) or resembled us too little (the theist concern). (As David Ray Griffin has remarked, “If deity . . . is ultimately devoid of attributes or qualities such as love and knowledge, how can we say that deity is ‘superior to ourselves by every measure of worth we know’?”24) Now, conceivably the Principle of Relative Similarity might accommodate this tension. A literal, too human understanding of transcendent “love,” “knowledge,” “beauty,” “truth,” “goodness,” and the like must indeed be repudiated; but analogical understanding need not be—that is, understanding which allows leeway both for close resemblance and for distant, provided that the term employed comes closer than any rival, incompatible expression. However, given the complexities from which this surmise abstracts and the transcendence of the convergence which it envisages, it must remain at best a deep mystery whether Buddhist and theist beliefs do so converge on a single transcendent reality. Probing further, Paul Griffiths finds the following “peculiar irony”: While on the one hand Buddhist philosophers are keen to reject the idea and the actuality of God, on the other they devote a great deal of intellectual energy to considering Buddha, to developing theories of what Buddha must really be like in order to have done the things the tradition claims him to have done. And as this intellectual tradition developed it came to look more and more like what Christians have called “theology” in the sense of reasoned discourse about God. Buddha came to be seen as omniscient, omnipotent, and even as coextensive with the limits of the cosmos. And the arguments in support of these views about the nature of Buddha often look very like Christian discussions of the attributes of God. Sometimes the tension between the rejection of theism and a strong view of the nature of Buddha is dramatic, as when a single thinker spends time demolishing arguments about God’s omniscience, and then resurrects what look like very similar arguments whose conclusion is that Buddha is omniscient . . . Theology, understood as ordered and systematic reasoning about what a maximally significant being must be like, here makes a re-entry even when the door has apparently been firmly closed against it.25

Although this comparison of God and Buddha looks more promising than some other possible pairings, it still raises acutely the general question of

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relevance: how existentially significant for individual believers or their religions is an unverifiable, problematic hypothesis of a deeply hidden identity between Buddha, Dharmakaya, Sunyata, and/or Nirvana, on the one hand, and God, Yahweh, and/or Allah, on the other—especially when an expert of the stature of John Bowker can declare so apodictically about Buddhism:  “What there certainly is not is any God who is independent of this universe and creates it”?26 Fortunately, this maximally complicated question lies beyond this chapter’s two guiding queries, namely, (1) why, in this study regarding the plausibility of theism, is the focus both as narrow and as broad as it is (historically, demographically, ontologically); and (2) how do these parameters affect the study’s significance? Answers to these two questions have now emerged. The study embraces Yahweh, God, and Allah because they, at least, are arguably identical, in which case billions of people, past and present, have worshipped that same deity, whose existence is therefore humanly as well as ontologically a question of the greatest significance. And if there is such a deity, then regardless of whether it can be identified, plausibly or surely, as the object of still wider worship, beyond the three religious traditions here considered, it is arguably the supreme object of human aspirations and the terminus of human hopes, both individual (see Chapter 7) and collective (see Chapter 8).

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Reductive philosophical materialism, excluding any transcendent, immaterial being, lacks philosophical backing and depth. A  more realistic range of metaphysical possibilities leaves room for “spirit,” human or divine, and for the freedom the next chapter will consider. Philosophical materialism notably exemplifies one of the broadest and most problematic tendencies in human thought, a tendency sometimes evident, sometimes the focus of attention, and often neither. Yet there it is, persistently:  the pull of unifying simplicity, vying with real-life diversity and complexity, as though a vast Platonic Form were powerfully attracting all things to itself. We have already encountered important illustrations of this trend, first in simplifying, unifying accounts of truth, then of religious pluralism. Stephen Barr cites other examples, pertinent here: Francis Crick famously asserted that human life is “no more than the behavior of . . . nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, once described people as “machines made of meat.” Neuroscientist Giulio Giorelli announced that “we have a soul, but it is made up of many tiny robots.” And biologist Charles Zuker has concluded that “in essence, we are nothing but a big fly.”1

Given its record, I suggest that this reductive propensity merits a stronger word of warning than that issued by Nicholas Rescher: Methodological Simplificationism—the presumption of simplicity—is an important, common, and legitimate instrument of inquiry. But it has to be acknowledged as being no more than that—a mere presumption. And we recognize full well that the realities of a difficult world will often fail to accommodate us in this regard: often—though fortunately not predominantly, let alone always. For intelligence could not emerge and make its evolutionary

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The Maturing of Monotheism way in a world where it could get no purchase and its efforts proved constantly abortive.2

The chief problem I  sense with Rescher’s a priori tilt, favoring simplification, appears here at the end. As the history of thought amply testifies, intelligence can emerge and make its evolutionary way in a world where it can get some purchase, and its efforts therefore do not prove constantly abortive. With time and many hits, misses, and approximations, the truth may eventually emerge; but the historical record suggests that truth’s emergence is more often impeded than speeded by a general preference for simple solutions, especially when the simplification is multiple. In pertinent illustration, Basil Mitchell could write, back in 1973, that the [antitheistic] charge most commonly made, to which Kai Nielsen in his recent book gives a great deal of attention, is that it is inconsistent to assert both that God is incorporeal and that he loves or judges or forgives or is the subject of any other psychological predicates. For such predicates can only be ascribed to a being who is capable of action, and action is not possible without a body. In other words divine agency has to be understood on the analogy of human agency; and all human agency can be traced back to the agent’s body.3

This double reductive simplification, first regarding divine agency, then regarding human agency, fits within a third such reduction, namely, a generalized materialism. The present discussion might therefore begin at this most general level; but many, trusting more in science than in muddy metaphysics, may see no need to look in that direction. I will therefore start with experience and its mysteries.

Empirical puzzlement Intoxication, delirium, senility, insanity, and the like have long called into question the operational independence, if not the existence, of a spiritual soul, pure Cartesian ego, or the like residing in the body; and contemporary science, pressing on in the same direction, has cast increasing doubt on the existence of any such mysterious “ghost in the machine.” Although counter-phenomena have long been experienced and reported, only recently have they been widely, closely scrutinized, with increasingly striking results. Here, in illustration, is one better-known example. In 1991, Pam Reynolds, a songwriter from Atlanta, was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of her brain and was given a short time to live. At

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the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, she underwent an experimental surgery nicknamed “operation standstill.” In this operation, the patient’s body is chilled to between 50 and 60 degrees, all heart and brain activity is stopped, the blood is drained from the brain, the aneurysm is repaired, the blood is pumped back into the patient, and the heart is restarted. This is what happened to Reynolds. She was fitted with instruments to measure her brain waves, heart rate, blood pressure, core body temperature, brain temperature, and blood oxygen levels. Her eyelids were taped shut, and speakers were placed in her ears, which emitted repeated loud clicks to test the responsiveness of the auditory nerve in her brain stem. Thus even if she had been conscious, she could not have seen or heard anything. She was placed under general anesthesia through the use of pentathol, her skull opened with a saw, and the brain cut into so as to gain access to the aneurysm. At the same time, the blood was drained from her body and her body chilled. Her heart was arrested and brain function stopped— the instruments indicated no measurable brain activity.4

After the operation, which lasted four hours, Reynolds gave a very full account of her out-of-body experiences during that time, including many details regarding the operation. Of her account, Dr. Michael Shalom, who was involved in the case, testifies that he at first thought her description of the tool the surgeon used—the bone saw—must be wrong. But he sent for a picture of the saw and in fact it looked just like an electric toothbrush (or a high-rpm handheld drill). It also had many attachments, which were contained in a case that looked just like a socket wrench set. Reynolds’s description of this tool and its attachments, therefore, was accurate. She had expected to see a saw, but the tool she actually observed did not look like a saw. But at the time she observed the tool in use, her body was under general anesthesia, her eyes were taped shut, her ears were plugged, and her brain was inactive.5

From a strictly empirical, scientific point of view, all of this is extraordinary, indeed so incredible that its accuracy is sure to be doubted. But as this incident already suggests in its limited way, such a narrow perspective is hardly realistic. Its limitations can be more fully suggested through the following comparison.

Mysterious matter We have no way of knowing the nature or extent of a bat’s conscious life or even whether it has one. But suppose that, rising to the challenge, we undertook

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to probe this mystery and, focusing our inquiry on bats’ visual experience, targeted specifically that of the Megachiroptera, which, we are told, “are known to see color.”6 Some theorists might take this to mean that these bats have conscious visual representations just like our own. Others might admit equal chromatic richness but doubt chromatic matching, shade for shade, with ours. Still others might retain some conscious visual content in these creatures’ sense experience but profess complete ignorance about that content’s similarity to our own. Going even further, bat behaviorists might question whether the bats have any conscious visual experience of their surroundings. While such philosophical surmises proliferated, scientists, expanding boundaries in their own distinctive style, might study what neural mechanisms, and specifically what optical ones, underlie the bats’ external behavior. And as their discoveries multiplied, some of these scientific researchers might imagine that they were answering the philosophers’ question for them. Yet we can sense that neither the philosophers’ nor the scientists’ efforts would remove the mystery regarding the existence, nature, and extent of the bats’ conscious optical experiences. These Megachiroptera resemble us sufficiently to suggest some conscious visual experience similar to ours and differ from us sufficiently to raise doubts about the closeness of that similarity. This excursion into batland has a serious point, for theories regarding the correspondence of our human visual sensations with the objective world have displayed a comparable range of views. And although in some respects the parallel may not be close, beneath the differences a similar impassable boundary is discernible and a similar ultimate judgment:  the relationship between our world and our visual perception of it, like the relationship between bats’ world and their visual perception of it, is and must remain a mystery to us. Here, in illustration, is a sampling of Western humanity’s widely varying cosmological theories and their grounds. Though distance may affect our perception of objects’ size, and lighting may affect our perception of their color, such variations have not prompted most people to question the reality either of sensible sizes or of sensible colors, pretty much as they appear. With regard to both, one may surmise that through millennia the majority have been “naïve realists.” Moderate realists such as Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Isaac Newton, taking more account of such fluctuations and of causal connections between our senses and their objects, distinguished between our ideas of “primary” properties (size, shape, movement, etc.), which in their view resemble physical things, and those of “secondary” properties (color, taste, smell, feel), which do

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not. They did not make that distinction, however, because they had spotted a clear rationale for tracing such a border. Rather, the arguments they advanced were so varied and so dubious that one can sense a powerful factor operating out of sight, dictating their common verdict. The mentioned thinkers were all philosopher-scientists, and their science was now mathematical. Such was the way they viewed the world and such, accordingly, was the world that resulted. All that remained of color, there in that abstract universe, were wavelengths or the like, and those who did the describing did not seriously question the verdict suggested by the spectacles they wore. Kant did. According to his first Critique, the so-called primary and secondary qualities of bodies are all on a par with regard to their objectivity. All belong to the world as we experience it, and none, so far as we can tell, belong to the world experienced. Indeed, Kant appears to have gone further, denying that things in themselves are in any sense spatial or temporal.7 And why suppose their existence at all if, for Kant, causal relations hold, not between external realities and their appearances, but only between the appearances? Thus the residual realm of nebulous things-in-themselves, which in Kant’s Opus Postumum may already have been fading away, was soon widely challenged. For transcendental idealists, “If the thing in itself is incoherent or nullifies the value of the Copernican revolution, this problem can be overcome by supposing that the ‘matter’ of empirical objects, the content of our representations, has its source in the subject as much as their form [does].”8 And George Berkeley’s idealism had already gone further: “there is an omnipresent, eternal Mind,” he had written, “which knows and comprehends all things, and exhibits them to our view in such a manner, and according to such rules as He Himself hath ordained, and are by us termed the Laws of Nature.”9 As Berkeley saw it, in rejecting Locke’s primary-secondary dichotomy and his mysterious material substances, he had removed all grounds for Lockean skepticism regarding colors or other sense qualities. Things are simply as we perceive them, and we perceive no Lockean substances or substrates. Thus the world (if not reality as a whole) was much simpler than Locke and like-minded thinkers had supposed. Phenomenalism of various kinds, eschewing metaphysics, has tried to make sense of what remained. “Can my present view of the table,” asked A. J. Ayer, “considered purely in itself as a fleeting visual experience, conceivably guarantee that I am seeing something that is also tangible, or visible to other observers? Can it guarantee even that I am seeing something which exists at any other time than this . . .? I think it evident that it cannot.” Hence a strict account, say of the table, “is one that is tailored to the experience, in that it describes the quality

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of what is sensibly presented, without carrying any further implication of any sort.”10 One naturally wonders, however, not only about the table but about the I, the seeing, the describing, and the rest. Matters become—and continue to be— very complicated. On reflection, it is not surprising that no agreed solution or standard account has emerged from this metaphysical morass. For consider the bat comparison. Neither deductive nor inductive reasoning nor close analogy with comparable cases (e.g., birds or mice) can bridge the gap between our sense-perception of bat physiology and activity, on one side of the empirical divide, and bats’ consciousness (if any), on the other. And the like holds here, regarding the relationship between our human sensations and our world. There is sometimes something to be said for arguments from analogy, broadly construed (concluding, say, that somehow or other, in some sense or other, bats optically perceive their surroundings), but how, either for the Megachiroptera or for physical things in themselves, could such analogical reasoning succeed in establishing any one of the varied options just cited? Even Berkeley’s position, denying the external existence of bodies, might pass the test that Alan Musgrave proposes (with his own preferred version of sense realism in view): “Suppose we form some belief and make several serious attempts to show that belief to be false, all of which fail. Are we not then justified in believing the proposition in question?”11 No, we are not—not if a range of alternative solutions such as those cited, when formulated with equal care, prove equally immune to refutation. As A. D. Smith has acknowledged concerning his own noble effort, “I do not claim to show that Direct Realism is true, or even possibly true. What I do claim is that Direct Realism cannot be shown to be false within that area of philosophy known as the Philosophy of Perception.”12 The sciences that eventually emerged from philosophy troubled themselves less with such metaphysical disputes. However, as scientists pressed ever further and deeper beyond the immediate data of their human senses, the distinction between science and philosophy remained difficult to draw. It has therefore been too easy to suppose that empirical science has brought insight into transempirical reality and that Kant’s noumenal-phenomenal distinction has been transcended. In this view, it is not necessary to give way to such metaphysical despair. Of course there is no deductive way of going from epistemology to ontology. In fact, an important aspect of the connection is precisely the problem of induction: what degree of knowledge could lead to an ontological conclusion? Yet  almost all scientists

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believe that they are learning about the actual nature of the physical world that they investigate.13

So they might be justified in believing if an inductive, scientific demonstration could beget a metaphysical conclusion. But as science advanced from Newton to Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, and beyond, at no point did its progress, based on human observation and calculation, become metaphysical and reveal how sensible things are in themselves. And no such development can be expected. For as, no matter how full and complex are the details we discover of a bat’s nervous system, they will not reveal the conscious contents, if any, of its visual experience, so too, no matter how full and complex are the details that scientific observation accumulates, they will not tell us how the world is in itself. There lingers, however, the myth now modestly stated in minimal terms such as these: Given “the facts of life” in empirical inquiry, we have neither the inclination nor the justification to claim that the world is as our present science describes it to be. Nor, as we have seen, does it make sense to identify “the real truth” with “the truth as science-in-the-limit will eventually see it to be.” The best that can be done in this direction is to say that the world exists as ideal or perfected science describes it to be.14

The bat comparison suggests a plausible explanation of this residually optimistic outlook. It is one thing to observe a bat and make surmises about its optical experience. It would be quite another matter to observe closely the bat’s inner physical workings (eyes, optic nerves, brain, etc.) and correlate them with its outer movements. That would be more impressive. And, one way or another, it might enable us to interact more successfully with the animal. Yet neither our inner and outer observations of the bat nor our improved interactions with it would cross the sense barrier and reveal what, if anything, consciously transpires “in the bat’s head.” An equally insurmountable barrier blocks our perception of the universe as it is in itself. We may feel that if we discern ever more regularities, on an ever vaster scale, and if our discoveries enable us to interact ever more successfully with our surroundings, then surely those regularities must reveal, at least to some extent, how things are in the universe itself and not only in our experience of it. Yet this leap, too, looks deeply problematic—not only for our other senses but also for our handier, apparently more revealing sense of sight. We are aware, say, of the blueness of some sense phantasm—for instance, of a blue sky—and (most people presently believe) we are indirectly aware through

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our instrumentally aided senses of the nervous system and cerebral processes that beget such experiences. Indeed, we know their workings in ever fuller, more impressive detail. We are far, however, from knowing precisely what cerebral events correlate in what way with what shade of what color. More to the point, our surmises regarding the nervous system have already passed to the physical world that, we believe, lies beyond our direct acquaintance. M. A. Jeeves thus describes the complexity involved: First, there is a pattern of light and dark patches falling on the retina of your eyes. Basic processing of this input goes on initially at the retinal ganglia level, where several computations are performed on the physiological signals combining the information from a number of different photoreceptors. Thus, by the time the sensory signals leave the eye on their way to the brain, a good deal of processing has already been done. The retinal neurons that project from the eye travel to a number of distinct areas in the brain. They do not form a set of parallel lines of information projecting together from one complex processing station to another, but instead diverge to very different processing targets right from the outset.15

Mystery only deepens when we move on to consider the object of our blue sensation. Now, in the link between our nerves and the sky, neither term of the relationship (intra- or extra-bodily, nerves or sky) is directly apprehended or apprehendable, and we are left with the realization that, no matter how full and detailed our scientific knowledge becomes, the resemblance between our conscious sense experience and our inner or outer world may be as slight as, for instance, that between a tooth and a toothache, a singer and the singer’s song. And once we have inwardly crossed the threshold from experienced object to sensible experience, so long as the appearances remain the same, there is no scientific or philosophical reason to privilege closer over more distant resemblance. The only requirement (if that), for science to stay in business, is that there be some regularity, somewhere, in the relationships between the two realms, noumenal and phenomenal. Here, I suggest (with a touch of lingering realism), the Kant of the first Critique was basically right. We inhabit a world of more than scientific mystery. As Barr has noted, Kant’s problem refuses to go away: In the traditional interpretation of quantum theory—sometimes called the “Copenhagen,” “standard,” or “orthodox” interpretation—one must, to avoid paradoxes or absurdities, posit the existence of so-called “observers” who lie, at

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least in part, outside of the description of the world provided by physics. That is, the mathematical formalism that quantum theory uses to make predictions about the physical world cannot be stretched to cover completely the person who is observing that world. What is it about the “observer” that lies beyond physical description? Careful analysis suggests that it is some aspect of his rational mind.16

Noting how strongly this suggestion has been resisted by the materialistically minded, Barr concludes:  “The controversy over quantum theory will not be resolved any time soon, or perhaps ever. But, even if it is not, the fact will remain that there is an argument against materialism that comes from physics itself, an argument that has been advanced and defended by some leading physicists and never refuted.”17 In a “no-miracles” response offering “intellectual and moral support to those who have realistic sensibilities in science,” Hilary Putnam has observed “how strange it is to suppose that a bunch of equations involving various parameters should give us successful predictions if not a single one of those parameters corresponds to anything real.”18 And yet, even in this broadly realistic perspective how are the most relevant, realistic parameters to be determined, scientifically? In each of the bat visual hypotheses, the bats’ movements “correspond to” or correlate with something real, but these alternatives offer a spectrum of mutually incompatible theories. And the like holds for philosophers’ competing accounts of sense knowledge. Indeed, the less theories such as Berkeley’s or phenomenalists’ distinguish between the phenomenal and the real, the less relevant becomes Putnam’s requirement of some correspondence between the phenomenal and the real. “According to experimental psychologists,” writes Brian Davies, “our subjective impression is never of the object as it is. It is a construction which enables us to behave appropriately in almost all ordinary circumstances. Evolution has ensured that our constructions give us a useful picture of reality, one which generally helps us to survive.”19 So it may be. The reminder is relevant. But one may now wonder how these experimental scientists know what the object is like in itself, so as to draw their antirealistic contrast. That, too, would require some competing, questionable metaphysics. So yes, the Kant of the first Critique might observe, something in the world may correspond, somehow, to some extent, with one of our theories; but which theory, if any, that is and how close that theory comes to the actual state of things is beyond all empirical, experimental, scientific determination. For all our physical science can demonstrate, even Berkeley may be right.

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To common sense, left clutching at physical phantoms, all of this may sound far-fetched—until perhaps we recall our readiness to accept that the scent of violets, the taste of chocolate, the feel of velvet, the blaring of trumpets, and the like are in us and not in the violets, chocolate, velvet, trumpet vibrations, or the like and may bear slight resemblance to anything there in their source. Yet each of these other senses plays a role in helping us find our way about this deeply mysterious universe of ours. So it is for sight.20 Our visual perceptions may differ as greatly from their sources as do our other perceptions from their sources— however much that may be.

Mysterious materialism The general lesson from all this, for materialism and its antitheistic challenge, should by now be apparent. Kant was right about the world and its deep mystery. To the question, “What is the whole of reality like in itself?” there is no clear answer, no likely eventual answer, and certainly no definitive materialistic verdict. Indeed, for Kantian agnosticism the question has no clear sense. And yet it has been said that “if there is anything at all, there must be matter.”21 Such a statement reflects a related, perhaps still deeper mystery—the multilayered mystery, not of matter, nor of the material world, but of contemporary materialism. At a first level, David Armstrong, writing back in 1980, spoke and still speaks for many:  What does modern science have to say about the nature of man? There are, of course, all sorts of disagreements and divergencies in the views of individual scientists. But I think it is true to say that one view is steadily gaining ground, so that it bids fair to become established scientific doctrine. This is the view that we can give a complete account of man in purely physico-chemical terms.22

More recently we read that if physicalism “is treated as a scientific hypothesis rather than a philosophical doctrine we see that it has all of the confirming evidence one could hope for.”23 All that metaphysical mystification before, during, and after Kant will be shown to be irrelevant. In due time, “A certain finite stretch of the DNA will tell us how a self-conscious thinking brain is constructed.”24 Thus, “[s]cience has provided us with an island of truths, or perhaps one should say, a raft of truths, to bear us up on the sea of our disputatious ignorance.”25 Deep in that ignorance, a beckoning light still shines!

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Charles Taliaferro quotes Georges Rey as arguing, in a more philosophical vein, that any ultimate explanation of mental phenomena will have to be in non-mental terms, else it won’t be an explanation of it. There might be explanations of some mental phenomena in terms of others—perhaps hope in terms of belief and desire—but if we are to provide an explanation of all mental phenomena, we would in turn have to explain such mentalistic explainers until finally we reached entirely non-mental terms.26

Thus, “by Rey’s lights, a thorough explanation of the mental must dig down to a physical account that is not itself mental.”27 However, if applied to physical phenomena, the same requirement of explanatory otherness would then have to pass further, into Kant’s realm of “things in themselves.” That is, it would lead to complete mystery. And such, indeed, is the outcome of all strictly materialistic theorizing. In view of the preceding section’s review, it could hardly be otherwise. Undeterred, many in our scientific age have shared thoughts like Bertrand Russell’s: “All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organized bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases.”28 Chapter 7 will turn to this supposition, but here we can ask in what sense mental life is “bound up” with bodily life. At one time many answered, as did J. J. C. Smart, that the mental simply is the physical. Sensations, for example, simply are brain processes, pains simply are c-fiber firings, and so for daydreams, sudden insights, pangs of regret, mental calculations, introspective observation, and all the varied aspects of our conscious mental life; all can be identified with physical occurrences. This view occasioned much bafflement. What does it mean to say such a thing—that, for instance, a sudden thought is a brain process?29 Subsequently, various refinements clarified and sharpened the mind-body identity thesis. A shift occurred, for example, from type-type identities (e.g., of pains in general with c-fiber firings) to token-token identities (e.g., of this pain with this c-fiber firing). Still, problems of meaning remained. “It is here,” observed John Foster, “that we encounter the most fundamental issue. Can we really make sense of the psychophysical identities which the theorist is postulating?”30 Many, myself included, have been inclined to answer with E. J. Lowe: Unless . . . mental typology and physiological typology can be shown to be capable of being appropriately matched, the proposal that one might (“barely,” as it were) identify particulars of the relevant types (mental and physical) is devoid of determinate sense; and in the absence of the required arguments, such an

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The Maturing of Monotheism ‘identity theory’ of mind and brain amounts to nothing more than an empty gesture, which may give emotional satisfaction to the committed materialist but has no intellectual substance to it.31

By way of comparison, what would it mean to say, as one writer has surmised, that love and truth are identical?32 The terms love and truth are not synonymous. Not all instances of love appear to be instances of truth or vice versa. If, nonetheless, the claim were advanced that all instances of the one are in fact instances of the other since, deep down, love and truth are identical, the chief problem for the theory would be one not of verification but of meaning. “But surely,” the identity theorist might object, “you know what is meant by saying that the Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star, or that Donald Trump is identical with the President of the United States. Well, just the same relationship is being asserted here.” This answer works no better for mind and body than it does for love and truth. The most one might say for the asserted identity is that it involves no evident contradiction. However, neither is its freedom from hidden contradiction at all evident. We know that a star that appears in the morning may be the same as one that appears in the evening. We know that a person named Trump may be the same person as the person elected president. But we have no assurance that the strict identity of mind and body, or of mental events with bodily events, is a genuine possibility. Indeed, such a hypothesis does not even make discernible sense. What makes it preferable to the love-truth surmise? Within a larger historical and theoretical perspective this strict materialistic theory stands in antithetical opposition to the strict dualistic theory of René Descartes, and both extremes illustrate a debate still groping for resolution. Descartes, in search of a sure starting point, after managing to doubt the material world, including his body, finally settled on “I think.” There was no doubting that. There was, however, every reason to doubt whether the sort of thinking that Descartes went on to describe, in his hypothesized mental, extracorporeal isolation, could be nonlinguistic; and introducing language would have quickly dissolved the firm certainty he sought. For was his undeniable, residual self doing all this thinking in Latin? In mentalese? In essentialistic, nonlinguistic thought translatable into Latin? In nonessentialistic thought expressible in but not translatable into Latin? Or, despite Descartes’ doubts, was his bodily, linguistically equipped self the “I” in question? None of these alternatives would have been satisfactory for Descartes’ foundational, certainty-seeking purposes, but he did not consider any of them. He did not take such a linguistic turn.33

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On the other side of the dualist-materialist divide, comparable problems arise. “Through the -70s and -80s and down to this day,” wrote Jaegwon Kim in 1998, “the mind-body problem—our mind-body problem—has been that of finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally physical.”34 In failing to note and stress, as above, how profoundly mysterious is the nature of the “physical,” this summation is representative of much current discussion. Yet as Kim and others have come to recognize and Barbara Montero spells out convincingly, “[I]f we cannot even conceive of something being nonphysical, it is difficult to grasp what physicalists could be arguing for—to say nothing of what they could be arguing against.”35 Kim’s 1998 discussion proceeds already, pertinently, as follows. Many philosophers, seeking a materialist solution somewhere between reduction of the mental to the physical, on the one hand, and mere interaction between them, on the other, have had recourse to some form of psychophysical “supervenience.” Reviewing variations of this hypothesis, Kim formulated a strong version thus:  “Mental properties supervene on physical properties, in that necessarily, for any mental property M, if anything has M at time t, there exists a physical base (or subvenient) property P such that it has P at t, and necessarily anything that has P at a time has M at that time.”36 “For example,” Kim explains, “if a person experiences pain, it must be the case that that person instantiates some physical property (presumably, a complex neural property) such that whenever anyone instantiates this physical property, she must experience pain.”37 As Kim recognizes, the key question here concerns the nature of this “must.” In his strong-supervenience formulation, how should the recurring term “necessarily” be understood? The next chapter will turn in this direction.

Transition Revealingly, in multiple ways, John Hick links this chapter with the coming one, on freedom. Most neurophysiologists, he writes, are not particularly interested in the philosophical issue, as they see it, of the relationship between brain and consciousness. For it does not make any practical difference to them whether consciousness is identical with, or caused by, or only correlated with brain activity. But those who do concern themselves with this fundamental question distinguish between the easy problem and the hard problem. The easy problem—easy in principle—is to trace precisely what

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The Maturing of Monotheism is going on in the brain when someone is consciously perceiving, thinking, writing, willing, experiencing some emotion, creating a work of art, etc. The hard problem is to find out what consciousness actually is and how it is caused— assuming, as they mostly do, that it is somehow caused—by cerebral activity.38

In view of this chapter’s discussion, it appears paradoxical to claim that it is easy, in principle, “to trace precisely what is going on in the brain.” We have no direct, unmediated access to anything in the physical world, including our brains, and of that world the most varied accounts have been given—fully realist, fully idealist, and everything in between. David Hume, as the next chapter will note, spotted in that physical world only happenings and their regularities, not one thing necessitating another thing’s occurrence. As for Hick’s examples—writing a book, experiencing an emotion, creating a work of art, and the like—what a confusing physical-cum-mental mix they are. And if we write off even thinking, willing, and the like as Humean events deceptively camouflaged as something more dynamic, no paradigms will remain to supply dynamic, more-thanHumean meaning to any of our causal talk about ourselves or our world. Hick’s further remarks invite similar anticipation. Having dwelt on widely recognized problems for “the simple mind/brain identity thesis,” he writes: “So epiphenomenalism departs from identity theory in being a modified form of brain/consciousness dualism, though one in which the mental life has no volitional effect. It is a dualism in which the two elements have a very different status—the brain does things and consciousness simply reflects what the brain is doing.”39 To this, Hick objects: “But supposing, as all forms of epiphenomenalism require, that consciousness is devoid of causal power, is it not then totally redundant? In that case, it cannot have come about because of any evolutionary advantage. If it makes no behavioral difference, but simply reflects the activity of the brain, how can consciousness have any survival value?”40 So here Hick spots a scientific as well as a philosophical challenge:  If we were essentially computers, consciousness would be a mysterious add-on with no function. If it does not exercise executive power, with conscious decisions affecting behavior via the brain, consciousness becomes functionless and inexplicable. So far, then, from providing an argument for a physicalist account of consciousness, cognitive science progressively constitutes a powerful argument against it! This is something that many naturalist thinkers have yet to take on board.41

Though Hick probes this apparent problem more thoroughly, he might carry the story further and note, still more fundamentally, how paradoxical the

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materialist situation becomes: The only source for a notion of “doing things” that transcends the flux and flow of sensible experience, namely, conscious human activity, is relegated to an inactive status, thereby semantically deactivating the whole empirical system. Emptied, as it were, of its borrowed air, the system’s metaphysical pretensions are deflated. This reversal becomes more fully understandable, the next chapter will suggest, in view of deterministic thinkers’ critical reception of Hume; for their materialism, critiqued in this chapter, links closely with their determinism, which Hume took as his target.

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Though potent in its challenge to natural necessity, the reductive analysis of efficient causality in terms of Humean regularities leaves neither dynamism nor freedom. Exemplifying both, pertinent samples of mental activity provide dynamic content for causal talk about both humans and God. “A French politician once wrote,” recounts Wittgenstein, “that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.”1 Other languages, this proud patriot would apparently have maintained, are misleading; to see the thoughts portrayed as they line up in our heads, one must translate them into French. Similarly, for many a scientific patriot it is a peculiarity of scientific discourse—in contrast, for instance, with the metaphysical musings sampled in the previous chapter—that in that discourse thoughts are ordered much more as are the realities the thoughts portray. And there in that privileged idiom, it has seemed, neither human freedom nor divine can be meaningfully formulated. Things have to happen the way they do. This deterministic way of thinking has deep historical roots, theistic as well as nontheistic. “Since St. Augustine, at least,” writes Karl Popper, “Christian theology has for the most part taught the doctrine of indeterminism; the great exceptions are Luther and Calvin.”2 In Islam the exceptions are the rule. There, in a work of “unimpeachable orthodoxy,” we read regarding Allah: “He—exalted be He—is the One who wills that existing things be, who manages the things that come to pass, so that no affair happens in the world visible or the world invisible except by His determining, His decree, His decision, His will.”3 So here right at the start we might wade into deep waters regarding the theistic relevance of the issue of free will; for as Popper goes on to comment, “Religious determinism is connected with the ideas of divine omnipotence—complete power to determine the future—and of divine omniscience, which implies that the future is known to God now, and therefore knowledge in advance, and fixed in advance.”4 Since,

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for reasons I shall suggest, I believe that today’s widespread natural determinism poses a more serious challenge to theism than does the theological variety, I will focus on it.

A three-part dialectic Frequent talk about the “laws” of nature suggests something more than mere regularities, and sometimes that something more receives explicit expression. I recall, for example, a physicist who expressed to me his belief that eventually, when science had progressed still further toward its goal, it would become clear why the physical world must behave the way it does. He was not alone. “Following Descartes,” writes Mario Livio, “most physicists dream, above all, of a uniquely self-consistent mathematical theory that explains and determines all the microphysical constants, as well as the entire cosmic evolution.”5 Indeed, to many it has seemed that “without unvarying constants of Nature and fixed principles of science, no objective advance can be made in understanding.”6 For those who wear such spectacles as these, it is easy to miss the empirical, contingent nature of this hoped-for explaining and determining. Strongly necessitarian thinking is of long standing. It appeared already in Aristotle, and, strengthened by the new prominence of mathematics in the study of nature, was expressed in early modern times by such varied thinkers as Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Spinoza. Locke, for example, though he acknowledged the difficulty of detecting more than regular connections in the ordinary course of things, nonetheless maintained, emphatically, that, whatever theories may be proposed, “our Knowledge concerning corporeal Substances, will be very little advanced by any of them, till we are made to see, what Qualities and Powers of Bodies have a necessary Connexion or Repugnancy one with another.”7 For even “the highest Probability, amounts not to Certainty; without which, there can be no true Knowledge.”8 With such thinking as this in his sights, Hume scrutinized the notion of “power or necessary connexion . . . which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other.”9 Our knowledge of the world, he noted, derives from our sense impressions—of shapes, sizes, movements, and the like. But what experience reveals any necessity in the world or its occurrences? Viewing one billiard ball colliding with another, he, too, was sure that the second ball would rebound, and was willing to recognize the collision as the “cause” and the rebound as its “effect.” But the closest thing he could spot, to at least provide

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some content for necessitarian talk about nature, was his strong inclination to connect one event with another. Conditioned this way, he suggested, people “acquire, by long habit, such a turn of mind, that, upon the appearance of the cause, they immediately expect with assurance its usual attendant, and hardly conceive it possible that any other event could result from it.”10 Thus Hume not only failed to spot any “necessity” in nature, beyond mere regularity; he failed to find any experience that would provide appropriately objective or objectifiable meaning for such talk. Billiard balls do not “immediately expect” anything with assurance, nor would it make good sense to suggest that they do. A habitinduced human demand is just that; it does not describe the world. The validity and importance of Hume’s negative verdict could be obscured by flaws in his reasoning, the empiricist perspective it reflected, his departures from idiomatic word usage, his neglect of nontemporal causation, the naïve simplicity of his examples, defects in the details of his resulting analysis, his reductive treatment of human causality, and, more recently, by more impressively complex patterns of causal analysis (“whole-part constraints,” “structuring” causes, “topdown” and “bottom-up” explanations, etc.). Yet, as the course of subsequent discussion has attested, he was right to consider more attentively just what might be meant by such talk about causal “necessities.” He was right to look both inside and outside himself for any relevant data, and right about what he there detected (his natural human inclination) and what he did not (any necessity). He was basically correct as well in his methodology—not in his narrow empiricism but in his desire to get down to cases and discover just what such talk might signify. And I believe, for reasons I will briefly suggest, that his verdict has stood the test of time. Kant, for example, did nothing to invalidate it. Pertinently, for him true propositions do not divide into just analytic (e.g., “All squares have sides”), verified by word meanings alone, and synthetic a posteriori (e.g., “It rained heavily in March”), requiring experiential as well as linguistic backing. To these he added propositions of a third variety, not recognized by Hume, whose truth, Kant believed, is neither tautological, as for analytic propositions, nor contingent, as for synthetic a posteriori propositions, but both synthetic and a priori. For Kant, the possibility and existence of such propositions was clear from mathematics, but less evident, for example, in situations such as Hume cited. Still, we can be sure that the billiard balls do not bounce, or bounce as they do, by mere chance. For the natural world must behave regularly. At this point, Kant might seem to disagree with Hume. However, the necessity in question turns out to be subjective: among the a priori categories of

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human understanding that Kant listed, there figures prominently the category of causality, and that category decides, in the manner described, what is real and what is not. Erratic behavior on the part of the billiard balls (e.g., the moving ball bouncing backward, the second ball not budging) would not pass muster. We would automatically take it for an illusion, or look to see how the second ball was immobilized. Thus on closer scrutiny Kant can be seen to agree basically with Hume that the search for natural necessity ends not in nature’s objects but in its human observers. And even there, one might add, the necessity is not of the uniform kind Kant supposed. Many people have believed in miracles, quantum physicists have believed in natural irregularities, cosmic evolutionists have postulated an initial brief development originating our familiar regularities but not subject to them. So Hume’s negative point not only stands but is reinforced. The regular flow of events reveals no objective necessity such as many have supposed nor, therefore, any experience that gives meaning to such talk about “necessary connections” in nature. Some more recent thinkers have argued for the existence of synthetic a priori propositions, but their arguments and illustrations, even if valid, would not cover Hume’s billiard balls. Consider the sort of statement often proposed as synthetic a priori, for example, “All green things are spatially extended.” Here, is the “concept of the predicate” (as Kant might put it) “already thought beforehand in the concept of the subject”?11 That depends on how one conceives the “concept.” If one thinks of it as some conscious mental content accompanying the word, there is no telling. If one conceives it as the cognitive content of the word in the brain of a typical thinker or speaker, the predicate will surely, in some sense, be “thought beforehand” together with the subject, and the statement may therefore qualify as analytic, not synthetic a priori. And however the example is analyzed, it is not by chance or oversight that it and its kin have not been listed among the laws of nature. “Most philosophers,” writes Alexander Rosenberg, continue to search for some causally relevant difference in the objects themselves, and not just in our beliefs about them, a difference that provides an objective foundation for the distinction between law-governed and accidental sequences. Mostly, the search for such differences has focused on certain counterfactual conditional statements [e.g., “If George Washington had spent his whole life in Florida he would not have fought in the American Revolution”] and what makes some of them true and others false. For it is the difference between true and false counterfactual conditionals that reflects our strong commitment to the existence of some sort of causal necessity, not merely in our beliefs, but in the world.12

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The commitment does indeed continue strong, but the commitment’s strength is, I suggest, all that such an enquiry is likely to reveal. The game of counterfactuals is either empirical or conceptual. It cannot validate, but can at most reflect, belief in synthetic a priori necessities of nature.13 Not even if it takes a “metaphysical” turn. “I will assume,” writes Brian Ellis, that it is impossible—metaphysically impossible—for a proton or any other fundamental particle to have a causal role different from the one it actually has. The assumption is plausible, I suggest, because a proton would appear to have no identity at all apart from its role in causal processes. If this is right, then the laws concerning the behavior of protons and their interactions cannot be just accidental—that is, laws which could well have been otherwise.14

Clearly, a likely alternative has here been overlooked, namely, the semantic nature of this plausible assumption. As for a triangle and its having four sides, so, too, but less surely and obviously, it might not make intelligible, uncontradictory sense to speak of a proton and its behavior in these imagined circumstances. However, the mere straddling of a semantic border offers no validation for Ellis’s metaphysical alternative.15 The like holds for Donald Davidson’s widely debated suggestion of mindbody “supervenience,” already mentioned, of which he wrote:  Although the position I  describe denies there are psychophysical laws, it is consistent with the view that mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respects, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect.16

Mind and matter cannot come uncoupled. Here, once again, Hume awaits an answer: in what sense is this repeated little word cannot to be understood? Speaking vaguely of “some sense” does not answer this persistent question, and so does not answer Hume.17 While many have sought to defend science against Hume, science itself has lent powerful support to his position. For that Humean view fits very naturally within contemporary evolutionary and cosmological perspectives. From an evolutionary perspective, it is evident how and why humans have been programmed to believe unreflectively, unquestioningly in the uniformity of nature. Doubt or hesitation could be fatal. Within a cosmic perspective, where

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scientists envisage a mysterious beginning of present familiar regularities and philosophers freely envisage the possible existence of other, alien universes, that conditioning now steadily weakens its grip. And so it should. For within this contemporary context one can imagine a present-day Hume pressing his case: “Do you believe that this universe of ours had to exist, with the regularities (‘laws’) it so quickly developed? Do you believe it has to continue? Do you believe, then, that it has to continue long enough to let those billiard balls bounce in the way you feel so sure that they will—and must? Why, then, is that assurance of yours so strong, other than for the reason I have suggested, namely, that so it has always been, for bouncing balls and the rest, within our limited human experience?” An anti-Humean response to such queries as these would reveal not fidelity to science but a strong ideological commitment. So, how might that be explained?

Etiology Concerning the time “when Newton’s mechanics was undisputed for truth” Elizabeth Anscombe has suggested that “[i]t was the impression made on . . . later philosophers by that mechanics, that gave them so strong a conviction of the iron necessity with which everything happens, the ‘absolute fate’ by which ‘Every object is determin’d to a certain degree and direction of its motion.’ ”18 Though some more recent scientific developments may have challenged this conviction, it is clear why philosophers and scientists might still wish to go beyond Hume’s mere de facto regularities and climb the unending stairs that lead to ultimate, deterministic clarity. Indeed, “science now seems poised,” we are told, “to address the origin of the primal energy at creation itself, and thus to tackle the fundamental query: Why is there something rather than nothing?”19 Along the way to that goal, J. P. Moreland has suggested, It should be obvious why free will is a feature of the world that a naturalist must deny. There is not nor will there ever be a plausible explanation as to how one can start with dead, brute, non-teleological, law-governed matter with passive liabilities and generate the sort of ontological agent required for libertarian freedom by simply rearranging parts into new external relations.20

In this instance as in others, more than wishful thinking has been at work. How revealing, for example, are the words of Albert Einstein: “The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation

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cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events—that is, if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously.”21 Here as elsewhere, the spectacles through which we view reality—the methods, the questions, the preoccupations, the foci of inquiry—beget a corresponding conception of reality. Thus, in A. R. Peacocke’s example, it is extraordinarily easy for the scientist—say, a molecular biologist, who employs methodologically reductionist concepts . . . in order to pursue his particular kind of research—to carry over that attitude into a more general philosophical position. Then the procedure of analyzing a biological organism, or part of it, by means of physical and/or chemical techniques becomes a philosophical belief that a biological organism is “nothing but” a physicochemical system.22

Paul Davies’s illustration strikingly attests the coercive power of such methodological spectacles:  “Because of its indispensable role in science, many scientists—especially physicists—invest the ultimate reality of the physical world in mathematics. A colleague of mine once remarked that in his opinion the world was nothing but bits and pieces of mathematics.”23 But mathematics, it has long seemed, is a realm of absolute necessity, and a world conceived in mathematical terms, as by Descartes, Hobbes, Newton, and others, understandably became invested with something of that same necessity. So Alvin Plantinga’s reminder is therapeutically apropos: “[I]t is no part of Newtonian mechanics or classical science generally to declare that the material universe is a closed system. You won’t find that claim in physics textbooks—naturally enough, because that claim isn’t physics, but a theological or metaphysical add-on. (How could this question of the causal closure of the physical universe be addressed by scientific means?)”24 Some may detect in all this back-and-forth a failure to communicate. “What ‘cause’ is and is not,” we may be advised, “what ‘time,’ ‘space,’ ‘matter,’ etc. are, must be formulated with an understanding of what contemporary physics and cosmology reveal about these concepts. Otherwise they will be inadequate to the task imposed upon them—facilitating the dialogue between two radically different and fundamental disciplines.”25 Here Wittgenstein’s remark “ ‘Concept’ is a vague concept”26 is pertinent. The quotation marks for “cause,” “time,” and the rest suggest a linguistic focus, on word meanings, whereas the reference to “what contemporary physics and cosmology [not linguistics] reveal about these concepts” points in a more substantive direction, to the realities studied. Neither focus, if clearly adopted, would beget a verdict for or against determinism, but conflating them might, and the conflation of word sense and word reference is so common that it merits a cautionary word of warning.

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A comparable conflation, with regard to Kant’s treatment of causality, holds similar interest. There, Kant’s motivation was clear. He had to save science from Hume, and that, he believed, he could accomplish in the manner described: add synthetic a priori propositions, overlooked by Hume; recognize the principle of causality as such a proposition; and apply it to billiard balls or whatever other natural phenomena Hume might care to cite. Then the necessity Hume failed to spot would reappear. However, the necessity thus reintroduced was of the subjective variety Hume recognized, not the objective kind he looked for but could not detect. With this negative verdict, Kant in fact more than agreed. For concerning things in themselves he held that we have no intrinsic knowledge whatsoever, and the science that he aimed to defend was not concerned about their metaphysical properties. It has been claimed, revealingly, that to accept Hume’s account of causality “is to be forced in the long run to admit the irrationality of science and to acknowledge the impossibility of accounting for the common-sense view of the world.”27 His position “is the ruin of all science and all certitude.”28 To this I  suggest on Hume’s behalf, first, that if our scientific certitude has resulted as mindlessly from evolutionary contingencies as materialistic determinism suggests, it may be leading us blindly, like well-fed cattle heading to the slaughterhouse, to evolutionary disaster; second, that, nonetheless, science would be unreasonable if it did not take the only path available to it and follow the lead of empirical regularities; third, that to the extent that the commonsense view of the world is the one Hume’s insight corrected, it is the Lockean view of necessary connection, for which I have here given an accounting (how easy it is to pass from a psychological “certainly will” to an ontological “must”); fourth, that Kant’s putative synthetic a priori truths provide no answer to Hume’s critique; fifth, that regarding the popular conviction that the sun will rise each morning and billiard balls will continue to behave as they typically do, Hume himself gave a plausible explanation. Before and after Hume, motives for resistance to his thought can also be sensed in another quarter. As many believers in science have aspired to a firmer foundation than Hume allowed, so have many believers in God. A priori proofs like Descartes’ ontological argument for God’s existence had need of something more than Hume’s analytic-empirical dichotomy permitted, and a posteriori arguments such as Descartes’ argument from design required causal reasoning of a kind Hume demoted. Thus, it appeared that, at best, from a Humean perspective, “Our emotions and practical drives force us to adhere strongly to the existence of God, even though philosophical analysis assures us

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that we lack the means to ascend to a knowledge of Him with demonstrative certainty.”29 Rational faith will have to suffice. Clearly, though, many believers in God, like many believers in science, have not wished their aspirations to be thus circumscribed; and present attitudes toward Hume make it easier to ignore him. And yet, as Wesley Wildman has noted, “if laws were ontologically real, natural regularities did not depend on God to make everything regular moment by moment, place by place.”30 More precisely and strongly: if natural regularities were intrinsically necessary, God could not cause them (any more than God could cause two plus two to equal four); if they were extrinsically necessary, God had to cause them. Neither alternative should appeal to theists. A text of Aquinas is revealing in this regard: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity, happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency.”31 Where, then, is the problem? It is well veiled, and has so remained:  God here freely ordains what will happen of necessity. No wonder Hume couldn’t spot the necessity! It wasn’t in the billiard balls and neither was it in God. This sampling suggests not only the etiology of the views Hume countered, but also the significance of the issue he addressed. As Angela Coventry has observed: “Causation has always been a topic of central importance in the history of philosophy. This is perhaps because the concept of causation pervades the way we think about ourselves, about our environment, about the entire universe we live in and of [sic] our own relation to it.”32 Thus Hume himself remarked, “[W]hat stronger instance can be produced of the surprising ignorance and weakness of the understanding than the present? For surely, if there be any relation among objects which it imports to us to know perfectly, it is that of cause and effect.”33 Consider here, for example, Daniel Dennett’s assertion that “an impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.”34 Notice where this series starts: “all the agency.” And notice how correspondingly broad are the issues and concerns raised in Plantinga’s reply: “Is it really so much as possible that language, say, or consciousness, or the ability to compose great music, or prove Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, or think up the idea of natural selection should have been produced by mindless processes of this sort?”35

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A theistically friendly alternative Though Hume accurately critiqued the widespread notion of necessary connections in nature, such thinking still persists, indeed flourishes. Thus the “core idea” of contemporary as of earlier determinism has been summarized as follows: An event (such as a choice or action) is determined when there are conditions obtaining earlier (such as the decrees of fate or the foreordaining acts of God or antecedent causes plus laws of nature) whose occurrence is a sufficient condition for the occurrence of the event. In other words, it must be the case that, if these earlier determining conditions obtain, then the determined event will occur. In more familiar terms, we say that a determined event is inevitable or necessary (it cannot but occur), given the determining conditions.36

The italics, all original, highlight the puzzle:  what has happened to Hume’s critique of causal necessitation? Why does it now make no appearance in so many discussions of determinism and free will? Despite attempts such as some already noted, it has not been refuted; but the scientific thinking that nourished the determinism of Hume’s day has continued to have its effect. Even when Hume’s point is conceded, talk of causal “necessity” or “determination” may persist. So his reminder retains its relevance: having detected many regularities in human and nonhuman bodies and many fewer in human thoughts and actions, we should resist the inclination to classify any of them as necessary or to insist that the kind of regularity we find in billiard balls must also pervade our human lives. Non-Humean terms such as those in the above quotation—must, determined, inevitable, necessary, cannot—should be excised (or perhaps: “exorcised”). What then remains? Where, seeking a happy mean, might we discover more dynamic but less necessitarian content for our causal terminology? As a start, from Hume’s focus on physical acts we might perhaps turn to what G. E. Moore termed “mental acts” and scrutinize them. For of these he wrote, [O]ne of the chief things which we mean, by saying we have minds, is, I think, this: namely that we perform certain mental acts or acts of consciousness. That is to say, we see and hear and feel and remember and imagine and think and believe and desire and like and dislike and will and love and are angry and afraid, etc. These things that we do are all of them mental acts—acts of mind or acts of consciousness: whenever we do any of them, we are conscious of something.37

Thus is the mental jungle often tidily portrayed. A reader is tempted to suggest forget or overlook and ask if that too would count as the name of a mental “act.”

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As Wittgenstein remarked, “A false—falsely simplified—conception of their meaning, that is of their grammar, seduces us into thinking that a specific, characteristic experience must correspond to the word.”38 Some psychological verbs (e.g., consider) typically do denote conscious mental activity; some (e.g., believe) do not; and some (e.g., think) often do and often do not. Amid this (and much more) diversity, the likeliest place to search for something beyond mere regularities to give sense to our causal talk, and the source that subtly but strongly affects such talk, is purposeful, deliberate mental activity such as Wittgenstein described and prescribed (handily for present purposes as well as for his different ones) in his famed discussion of “games.” There he wrote: “Don’t say: ‘There must be something common, or they would not be called “games” ’—but look and see whether there is anything common to all—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!”39 If, on reflection, we follow this repeated urging, it appears far from obvious that the resulting behavior—this mental searching, scrutinizing, comparing—and its motivation can adequately be cashed out in terms of Humean regularities somewhere in our nervous system. Certainly we do not experience any such linkage. So if we are seeking a way to give stronger-thanHumean meaning to our causal terminology, in whatever field of discussion, here is the likeliest direction to look: purposeful, deliberate mental activity. That can be our prime analog. For such an example Galen Strawson’s suggestion seems pertinent but incomplete. “Mental action in thinking,” he writes, “is restricted to the fostering of conditions hospitable to contents’ coming to mind. The coming to mind itself—the actual occurrence of thoughts, conscious or non-conscious—is not a matter of action.”40 The activity Wittgenstein describes consists of more than such “fostering of conditions”: there is also the comparing. In this search, different games “come to us” and we then reflectively compare them. A comparable active-passive distinction is evident in a case such as Sacks describes, of a Chamorro patient named Jesus sitting at home on his porch, actively observing the world before him: [N]ow that he had become almost petrified with [an illness called] the bodig, this was where he loved, above all, to sit all day. I was told he had “man-man”—the Chamorro word for staring blankly into space—though this was not a blank staring, a staring at nothing, but an almost painfully engrossed, wistful staring, staring out at the children who played in the road, staring at the occasional

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The Maturing of Monotheism passing cars and carts, staring at the neighbors leaving for work each morning, and returning late in the day. Jesus sat on his porch, unblinking, unmoving, motionless as a tortoise, from sunrise till midnight (except on the rare days when high winds or rain lashed across it), forever gazing at a constantly varying spectacle of life before him, an enraptured spectator, no longer able to take part. I was reminded of a description of the aged Ibsen after his stroke, aphasic, partly paralyzed, no longer able to go out or write or talk—but insistent, always, that he be allowed to stand by the tall windows in his room, looking out on the harbor, the streets, the vivid spectacle of the city. “I see everything,” he had once murmured, years before, to a young colleague; and there was still this passion to see, to be an observer, when all else was gone. So it was, it seemed to me, with old Jesus on his porch.41

So: between Lockean necessities on the one hand and Humean regularities on the other, both devoid of discernible dynamism, lies deliberate mental activity such as Wittgenstein and Sacks, with their different interests and audiences in mind, describe. There, we can discern doing, not just happening. And we discern it on a vast scale: “The mind of one who is conscious [i.e., awake] is necessarily a mind actively governing the movement of its own attention and thinking processes . . . In general the direction taken by our thoughts and attention is in the conscious actively self-determined.”42 What might tell against this move, this clarifying third option? Empirical verification for a Humean-regularity reading of all human activity, mental or other, retaining Hume’s experiential residue of determinism but revealing nothing more dynamic, is clearly out of the question. Even for some single deliberate act of some single individual—for example, we ask him to wiggle his right thumb and he, apparently hearing and understanding us, obligingly wiggles it—we could not map all possibly pertinent inner and outer conditions and events prior to the action, then apply all possibly pertinent “laws of nature,” knowing that they are all and that we have rightly applied them. A priori arguments for such Humean reductionism have therefore predominated, of which perhaps the best-known is anti-Cartesian. Descartes distinguished sharply between the human body and the human thinking self, the latter freely interacting with the former; and a principal reason for the demise of this Cartesian dichotomy was the alleged impossibility, indeed incomprehensibility, of interaction between entities as disparate as a material body and an immaterial ego. What held for Hume’s billiard balls—the ballto-ball, movement-to-movement similarity as well as the constancy—would have to hold universally, for light waves, cosmic origins, human choosing and

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deciding, or what-have-you. Thus the “must” syndrome targeted by Hume did not disappear but just broadened its scope, and now two powerful models, conscious human deliberation and Humean constancy, remain in tension, without any resolution in sight. Neither, realistically, is any such resolution readily conceivable. For this tension, as both Hume and Kant would agree, lies not in our mysterious world but in ourselves, and has acquired such strength that a conundrum now confronts our humanistic-cum-scientific culture. One option is metaphysical, treating all human experience of agency as illusory and invoking a “deterministic” notion of causality (beyond all experience or conceivable analogy with experience that might at least make such a notion intelligible) to explain all human activity, mental or corporeal. Regarding this option, Wittgenstein’s words seem apposite: “Being unable—when we surrender ourselves to philosophical thought—to help saying such-and-such; being irresistibly inclined to say it—does not mean being forced into an assumption, or having an immediate perception or knowledge of a state of affairs.”43 Indeed, far from it. Thus Nancy Cartwright, updating Hume’s doubts, has written, The laws that describe this world are a patchwork, not a pyramid. They do not take after the simple, elegant and abstract structure of a system of axioms and theorems. Rather they look like—and steadfastly stick to looking like—science as we know it:  apportioned into disciplines, apparently arbitrarily grown up; governing different sets of properties at different levels of abstraction; pockets of great precision; large parcels of qualitative maxims resisting precise formulation; erratic overlaps; here and there, once in a while, corners that line up, but mostly ragged edges; and always the cover of law just loosely attached to the jumbled world of material things. For all we know, most of what occurs in nature occurs by hap, subject to no law at all.44

And then there are ourselves—our apparently so active, so lawlessly active selves. Nonetheless, the deterministic stance that Hume critiqued has steadily gathered strength since his day. The alternative, more empirical option treats such deterministic talk as semantically vacuous, accepts our experience of conscious human agency as veridical, and thereby disturbs the uniform vision that many find attractive and/or compelling. However, despite its semantic and epistemic advantages, this competing, humanistic perspective does not enjoy the scientific prestige or seeming obviousness of its rival. As Samuel Johnson kicked a stone to demonstrate its solidity and thereby refute various transempirical theories, so a present-day determinist might expostulate, in refutation of Hume, “Just step

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in front of a speeding locomotive and you’ll learn what ‘power’ means!” That response, like Johnson’s, would be semantically and epistemically shallow. The empirical paradigm of something more dynamic than just motion, change, or phenomenal regularities is human, not inhuman. And that paradigm cannot be invoked, semantically or epistemically, to disprove its own status (as one cannot, e.g., display a red sample to clarify the meaning of one’s claim that nothing is red).

Still deeper “It will probably never be possible,” writes Keith Ward, “to trace in detail all of the causal factors that go to determine the evolutionary process. So if theistic evolution posits that God causally influences evolution in order to ensure, for example, that it results in the existence of free moral agents, it is virtually certain that the natural sciences could not falsify the claim.”45 No doubt attempts to verify the claim would encounter at least comparable difficulties. But Ward continues, “If this were a strictly scientific dispute, the victor would be the most economical hypothesis, the one without God. But it is not. It is a dispute about the ultimate nature of reality, and about whether the natural sciences alone give an adequate account of that nature.”46 The preceding discussion, like preceding chapters, has shown reason to question even Ward’s hypothetical concession in favor of “the most economical hypothesis.” And it points to still deeper problems. If contemporary determinists pay slight attention to Hume, it may be because they think his challenge has been met. If they pay slight attention to the challenge posed to determinism by determinism itself, it may be because the seriousness of that challenge has not been sensed. And yet, if all human activity is causally determined, that includes all human thinking—for instance, all deterministic thinking. So, is determinism just something that certain human beings are forced to believe, regardless of its truth or falsehood, while other people are tugged ineluctably in other directions? Or are deterministic beliefs somehow exempt, existing in dynamic isolation? No, the preceding discussion suggests how implausible such a saving hypothesis is, from within a deterministic outlook. Why has Hume been so strongly resisted? Because people believe so strongly in causal necessitation. Why do they believe so strongly in that? Because their survival depends on it. (Yes, that tiger, or that tidal wave, definitely, indubitably will kill you. Run!)

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Here, then, there emerges a certain parallel with the previous chapter. As neural accounts of sensation are self-implicating (nerves themselves being as mysterious as any other physical objects) and therefore raise doubts about their own world-depicting accuracy, so deterministic accounts of all action are self-implicating (the accounts themselves being actions) and therefore raise doubts about their own accuracy. However, given our scientific conditioning, whereas in the former case we readily accept the existence of bodies distinct from our sensations, in the latter case we less readily accept the existence of free actions distinct from strictly determined ones, for they would complicate our uniform, scientific accounts. But, as idealists’ simplifying elimination of bodies does not force us to be idealists, so determinists’ simplifying elimination of free action does not force us to be determinists. Indeed, the libertarian option has the advantage of freeing our every thought from the threat of survival-serving falsification. Much the same point has also been put this way. A computer can make calculations, check figures, and prove theorems, but it cannot check the validity of its own programming. And if we too are programmed we cannot check the validity of our own theories of knowledge. If our minds are physically determined then we have no way of deciding between the merits of different theories of knowledge, for any conclusions we might come to would merely indicate the nature of our brain’s programming and not whether its conclusions were true or false.47

As it is (we had better suppose, before declaring intellectual bankruptcy), we may actually get things right regardless of whether nature wants us to. And one of the things we may be right about is the existence of a creator who freely wishes to share with us some creative freedom.48

5

Goodness

To deny the existence of any objective goodness is to deny the existence of any divine source, exemplar, or proponent of such goodness, whether Jewish, Christian, Islamic, or other:  a being such as Yahweh, God, or Allah, as long conceived, does not exist. Paradigmatic values and disvalues ground a clearer reply to such ethical nihilism than do moral norms or character assessments based on such values and disvalues. In theism, supreme goodness is a defining trait of what God is, wills, and does. Thus the Genesis account of creation recounts that day by day, increment by increment, “God saw how good it was,” and that finally “God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good” (Gen. 1:31). In the Johannine summation of Christian beginnings, “[T]he Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14). In Al-Ghazālī’s “Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God,” culled from the Qur’ān, Allah is “The Merciful,” “The Holy,” “The Flawless,” “The Faithful,” on through “The Benevolent,” “The Most High,” “The Generous,” “The Lord of Majesty and Generosity.”1 Hence moral skepticism, denying objective goodness in all its forms and varieties, deeply implicates the existence of such a divinity. Already in ancient Athens, Socrates engaged heavily with the moral skeptics of his day, and in retrospect we can sense why. As the Athenians’ world expanded they became more aware of other customs, norms, and ways of judging behavior. And this natural way of describing the diversity—in terms of customs, norms, and behavior—goes far to explain it. The focus, repeatedly and understandably, has been on human conduct. People have wanted to know what they should or should not do. But they and their circumstances have varied so from time to time and place to place, and that diversity and its relevance have become so increasingly evident that it has proved difficult to formulate universally valid

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norms of moral conduct. Deep doubts about the existence of such norms— and concerning the validity of ethics in general—have therefore persisted. And doubtless they have been greatly reinforced by the materialistic, deterministic thinking critiqued in the last two chapters, which leaves no place for such things as objective values or disvalues and their playing a major role in human decision-making. Responses to moral skepticism have shifted in various directions:  from universal precepts (e.g., “It’s always wrong to lie”), with their possible exceptions, to rules of thumb (e.g., “It’s usually wrong to lie”); from rules of either variety, with their still broad coverage, to verdicts in specific situations (e.g., “On this occasion, in these circumstances, it is wrong to speak this falsehood to this person”); from prescribing actions at any of these levels to assessing agents, their intentions, and their dispositions (e.g., their charity, honesty, justice, trustworthiness, prudence); from all these—precepts, rules, agents, intentions, dispositions, behavior—to the values they should promote (e.g., peace, friendship, mutual trust, happiness); and so forth. The lack of agreement regarding these and other options, both in general and in detail, has fed further doubts regarding the validity of ethics as a whole. And these doubts relate in similarly complex ways with the question of the existence of God. Janet Martin Soskice’s evocation of the nineteenth-century climate suggests how subtly and pertinently complicated these ways are: Romantic soul-searching was not simply nostalgia, or hostility to progress, but was motivated by fear that, despite the benefits that science brought, science was suggesting that its description of the world was the only one and that the real world was a world of brute facts to which values, whether aesthetic or ethical or religious, were merely inessential decoration. It was, they feared, being suggested by the ideology of science, if not by science itself, that the real accounts of the world were those subsumable under laws and generalities and the real truths about the world were quantifiable and susceptible to formal analysis. In this the particular, the singular, and the individual were lost. As I  have said, not just religion but ethics and aesthetics—all merely human values—on this account looked fake.2

With regard to ethics and values, Nagel draws a more hopeful historical comparison: Just as there was no guarantee at the beginnings of cosmological and scientific speculation that we humans had the capacity to arrive at objective truth beyond the deliverances of sense-perception—that in pursuing it we were doing anything

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more than spinning collective fantasies—so there can be no decision in advance as to whether we are or are not talking about a real subject when we reflect and argue about morality. The answer must come from the results themselves.3

Consider, for example, the case that Paul Bloomfield recounts, of three Ku Klux Klan members, who on June 7, 1998, in Jasper, Texas, dragged from the back of their pickup truck a kidnapped and innocent black man by the name of James Byrd, Jr., who was dismembered and decapitated as a result of their actions. We may all agree that what occurred is morally wrong or bad, but we may ask further to what this wrongness or badness amounts. Were we to have been in Jasper, Texas, at the time, and perhaps even been witness to the horror, we might have made an empirical, forensic inspection of the scene: we would find the murderers, with their drunken brains, false beliefs, and twisted psychologies (to beg the question just a bit); Byrd, with his battered body and brain, his physical pain, but nowhere do we directly observe or discover any wrongness or badness per se. Indeed, it is senseless to say that one directly observes wrongness (even the intuitionists denied direct empirical observations of moral properties).4

In this tale, so told, a path to greater clarity may be discerned. The immorality of the Klansmen’s actions was not directly observable, nor were the beliefs or twisted psychologies that motivated them. But there could be no doubt about their victim’s “battered body and brain, his physical pain.” These were not “moral properties,” but evils such as underlie and explain our judgments of these and other such actions’ immorality. And not just our fallible human judgments. Within a theistic perspective, as, for instance, in the following succinct summation, value-centered ethics rather than precept-centered ethics have long been conceived as the fundamental ethics of God. Thus we read: The universe was created for a purpose, and this purpose is to realize intrinsic values among persons in relationship and community. Further, this is the purpose of a supremely good (worthwhile and desirable) being, whom it is our deepest fulfillment to know and love. I should aim at goodness because that is the objective purpose of my existence. This purpose, for the theist, is real and rooted in an objective cosmic mind. It is not just a projection of human motives on to a neutral universe. I should follow that purpose because I can see that it is a good purpose which can and will be realized, and also because in doing so I will have a good chance of realizing one of the greatest human goods, which is an obedient relationship of love with God.5

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Within this same value-focused perspective, in answer to the problem posed by the many evils that God has permitted or caused theologians have traditionally answered that doubtless the evils we notice are balanced by the values we often do not and cannot adequately perceive or assess. No formula of ours permits us to dictate what God should or should not do on each occasion, hence no individual occurrence of evil disproves God’s loving providence. As for ourselves, if our charity is to resemble the divine, the knowledge and values which guide Providence should inspire and guide us, too, with like results, so far as we can approach that ideal. Rules we do need, and profit by, given our human limitations, but to honor rules above values and thereby make them absolute would entail an inferior ethics. It would mean resembling less our heavenly Father, whose wise, loving dispensations elude our sure prevision.

A value-based approach This comparison between the problem of evil and the problem of objective morality, in terms of objective values and disvalues guiding both divine providential activity and human attempts at imitation, focuses attention on those underlying values and disvalues and their objectivity. If there is no such thing as objective value or disvalue, there is no problem of objective evil for the next chapter to address, but neither is there any objectively good God that the existence of evil might call into question. If, however, objective values and disvalues do exist and do determine the morality of actions, human and divine, but sufficiently comprehensive value assessment of actions lies beyond our human calculation, how can we judge those actions, human or divine? Though any moves toward greater clarity on such deep matters as these may mitigate moral skepticism, the broad, general response I will now propose goes as follows. This tangled state of affairs in ethics invites comparison with the situation Chapter  1 sketched apropos of truth. For in these two areas we find comparable complexity, comparable confusion of views, and consequent skepticism regarding any satisfactory answer to the query, “What is truth?” or “What should we do?” And in each case, this perplexity suggests a need to shift analysis from the whole to the parts—from whole statements and their truth to the statements’ individual terms and their meanings, and from whole acts and their rightness to the acts’ constituent values and disvalues. Thus, in response to moral skepticism I  propose (more briefly here than I  have elsewhere) the following broad path to basic clarity:  As the truth of a statement cannot

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be determined without knowing the meanings of its individual terms, so the morality of a contemplated course of action cannot be determined without consulting the values (trust, knowledge, beauty, understanding, pleasure, health, friendship, prosperity, etc.) or disvalues (distrust, ignorance, error, ugliness, fear, illness, pain, animosity, poverty, etc.) that it is likely to embody or bring about. Will the contemplated action maximize value over disvalue?6 Different kinds of values can be distinguished, and need to be, but first here is an overall scheme within which they and their relation to the morality of actions can be assessed. 1. Objective values and disvalues exist. (They are no more a mirage than are the physical bodies disclosed, so problematically, by our senses.7) 2. All objective values and disvalues make positive or negative claims on prospective action. 3. Only objective values and disvalues make such claims. 4. Hence the greater the value or disvalue likely to be realized by alternative prospective actions, the stronger is the claim—the objective claim—for or against the actions. In earlier works I took this value-based assessment of actions two steps further: 5. The term right (being weaker than obligatory) aptly characterizes any action whose claim is at least not notably weaker than that of any incompatible alternative. 6. More fully and specifically: within a prospective, objective focus, and in the sense thus specified, an action is right if and only if it promises to maximize value as fully, or nearly as fully, as any alternative action, with no restriction on the kind of value concerned, whether human or nonhuman, moral or nonmoral,8 consequential or nonconsequential, the agent’s or others’. Going still further, I related this assessment of actions with the assessment of agents, and vice versa, and will briefly do so here. First, however, I will suggest the sort of inferences that can validly be made regarding moral norms once objective values and disvalues are acknowledged. For here I can make the words of Peter Railton my own: If anything like the approach I suggest to intrinsic value is viable, then we have an entry point: ethics has something real to work with, something that answers to important human concerns and might provide an infrastructure to support

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The Maturing of Monotheism some moral practices. This in itself could mitigate certain worries about “the reality of ethics,” but we would still need to connect intrinsic value to the rest of ethics—for example, to judgments of what is right and wrong, obligatory or permitted, virtuous or vicious. How to make the connection?9

At the simplest level, consider, for instance, physical pleasures and pains—say the torments suffered by a person with terminal cancer. The person enduring the pain considers it a bad thing, and so do those caring for her. In fact, there is general agreement that physical pain is, in itself, a bad thing, and the more severe the pain, the worse a thing it is. This belief dictates a variety of appropriate actions to prevent or lessen such pain. In the absence of mitigating circumstances, it is judged wrong to cause physical pain or, where they are feasible, to take no measures to end or at least reduce it. Similarly, there is wide agreement that physical pleasure is, in itself, a good thing; and this belief, too, dictates a variety of appropriate actions. If, for example, the cancer patient asks for her favorite food, or a tot wants an ice-cream cone, and there is no good reason to withhold it, give it to her! These samples are comparable, in their relative simplicity, to Hume’s billiard balls in the previous chapter, but dissimilar in other respects. A  fundamental dissimilarity is that in the case of pleasure or pain there is no distinction between its inner and outer reality—that is, nothing comparable, say, to Hume’s distinction between the billiard balls’ movements and the way we inwardly experience them; there are simply the personal pleasures or pains. Nor is there within us any distinction between conscious and unconscious pleasure or pain, or any differentiation between those who find pains pleasurable or pleasures painful and those who do not. Penitents who whipped themselves did so because it hurt. Next, as this example suggests, to physical pleasures and pains we can add psychological pleasures and pains, with objects, and these too we can to some extent bring about in ourselves and in others. Thus gladness at someone’s innocent pleasure and the desire to increase it add another level of value, as do sadness at someone’s unmerited pain and the desire to reduce it. Contrarily, pleasure derived from performing a cruel action makes the action worse, not better, while the painfulness of some charitable action may make the action better, not worse. Similarly, complex values such as friendship, fairness, and understanding may also have intrinsic value. Connecting these varied values and disvalues with actions that directly or indirectly promote or hinder them, we can recognize such connections as telling for or against the actions. Such steps as these, from the simple to the ever more complex, take us well on our way toward establishing

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a basis for morality such as the one abstractly sketched in the overall rationale above. On such an objective foundation we can build an objective ethics, both for agents and for their actions. For, as John Polkinghorne has observed, “From the practice of science to the acknowledgement of moral duty, on to aesthetic delight and religious experience, we live in a world which is the carrier of value at all levels of our meeting with it.”10 Clear in their relative simplicity but not implicitly reductive or narrowly defining of value and disvalue, the examples of pleasure and pain lead into these wider, more varied perspectives. Fortunately, value sometimes becomes evident enough in human behavior, where, as Eleonore Stump has observed, [w]e recognize acts of generosity, compassion, and kindness, for example, without needing to reflect much or reason it out. And when the goodness takes us by surprise, we are sometimes moved to tears by it. Hallie describes his first acquaintance with the acts of the Chambonnais in this way: “I came across a short article about a little village in the mountains of southern France . . . I was reading the pages with an attempt at objectivity . . . trying to sort out the forms and elements of cruelty and of resistance to it . . . About halfway down the third page of the account of this village, I  was annoyed by a strange sensation on my cheeks. The story was so simple and so factual that I had found it easy to concentrate upon it, not upon my own feelings. And so, still following the story, and thinking about how neatly some of it fit into the old patterns of persecution, I reached up to my cheek to wipe away a bit of dust, and I felt tears upon my fingertips. Not one or two drops; my whole cheek was wet” (p. 3). Those tears, Hallie says, were “an expression of moral praise” (p. 4); and that seems right.11

Objections A chief challenge to a value-based sketch like the preceding comes at the start. There is no difference, it has sometimes been claimed, between questions of value and questions of taste. Whatever hidden truth such an assertion may contain, it does not negate the objectivity of values. If, for example, one person finds the taste of watermelons unpleasant (as I once did) and another finds it delightful, they are not reacting differently to an identical experience: the first experience is indeed unpleasant and the other is indeed pleasurable. And that difference—that objective difference in the experiences—should be taken into account (as, long ago, my mother did in picking cantaloupes over watermelons when the huckster came by).

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In actual moral discourse, even at this basic level matters become more linguistically, conceptually complex and obscure. To illustrate: of A. J. Ayer’s stance regarding ethical statements it has been said, “He is willing to accept that in so far as these statements are evaluative they are not empirical, and that in so far as they are not empirical they are not, in the literal sense, significant . . . The utterer is not making a statement, but evincing his feelings.”12 Such restrictive uses of evaluative, empirical, literal, significant, and statement effectively submerge the question whether, for example, there is really anything intrinsically bad about physical or mental agony. No, Ayer might reply; to call pains disvalues is simply to express our dislike of them. It just so happens that, whereas some people like and others dislike melons and turnips, everybody dislikes toothaches and migraines. In answer, one may note, somewhat as above, that all aches and pains are intrinsically unlikeable:  there is no distinguishing the pain from its nastiness. Objective values and disvalues are like that. A pain that, by a special gift of nature, was pleasantly nice in itself would not be a pain. Objections have also been urged against the notion that values and disvalues, especially those of different kinds, can be compared as greater or less. On what scale can toothaches be measured? On what scale can they be weighed against various other disvalues (terror, ignorance, injustice, infidelity)? Without here venturing full replies to such objections as these against the theory and practice of value-maximization, I will just note, for example, that we need have no pain units or scales in order to judge that one pain is worse than another, nor pleasure units or scales in order to judge that one pleasure is greater than another, nor universal units or scales of evil in order to judge that the Holocaust was a greater evil than a bad night’s sleep, nor units or scales of value in order to judge that the discovery of penicillin was a greater good than the gift of a cookie to an eager child. Other objections arise from the conflation of objective and subjective perspectives. It is sometimes objected, for example, that this value-balancing approach, focused on actions, ignores morally relevant aspects of behavior such as an agent’s knowledge or intention. But this objection, on inspection, suggests its own response. Subjective and objective aspects often don’t harmonize: people may do bad things for good reasons, and good things for bad reasons; these two perspectives are far from agreeing in any general way. So, to avoid basic confusion, the Principle of Value-Maximization focuses on just the objective aspect—the contemplated behavior and its merits—and leaves the subjective aspect for separate (though closely related) consideration.

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Though the overall perspective here sketched differs from much current ethical theorizing, I believe, for the reasons briefly noted, that it is sound. If so, how should we account for the perspective’s relative rarity and, more generally, for the moral skepticism it addresses? How may the widespread doubts about the objectivity of ethical judgments (including those concerning a morally perfect deity) be explained?

Skepticism’s further sources One familiar source of moral skepticism reveals not-so-subtle self-contradiction. We should be tolerant, people sometimes urge, and not impose our moral views on others. We have a right to our opinions, they have a right to theirs. Such partisans of tolerance do not notice the moral nature their own urgings and assertions must possess if they are to have any weight. They stress some values more, other values less, and draw this ethical verdict. Ward cites a more recent development:  taking what I have called the pessimistic view of evolution, it can seem that now science has undermined all religious arguments for the objectivity of morality, and shown moral beliefs to be the result of successful early evolutionary strategies that are now often counter-productive. The way is open to the naked pursuit of power, the triumph of desire and the supremacy of the will.

Ward finds this development paradoxical, for at its best, science “expresses an absolute commitment to truth and understanding, even when it seems to threaten the traditional foundations of morality.” This paradox can find resolution, he suggests, “in the perception that the undermining of any justification for a truly binding morality does not belong to practice of science itself. It belongs to the realm of pessimistic evaluations of scientific theories, to a form of reductionism that, if pursued relentlessly, would undermine the scientific enterprise itself.”13 Another major source of moral skepticism, related to these, is the conceptual complexity to which preceding sections here have offered a response. In handy illustration, consider the following remarks on moral diversity, at the start of a defense of moral relativity:  “Members of different cultures often have very different beliefs about right and wrong and often act quite differently on their beliefs. To take a seemingly trivial example, different cultures have different rules of politeness and etiquette:  burping after eating is polite in one culture, impolite in another.”14 This sounds very “relativistic”:  “beliefs about right and

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wrong” are illustrated by “different rules of politeness and etiquette” and people’s reactions to the rules’ observance and nonobservance. In response it might be objected that morality and etiquette are here being conflated. But regard for objective value would agree that people’s likes and dislikes, whether personal or social, should not be ignored. If some people find bright lights painful, turn them down. If they find burping offensive, refrain. The Principle of ValueMaximization, realistically applied, requires attention to such differences. Turning more explicitly, analytically in the direction of underlying values, the same author writes, In the contemporary United States, deep moral differences often seem to rest on differences in basic values rather than on differences in circumstances or information. Moral vegetarians, who believe that it is wrong to raise animals for food, exist in the same community as nonvegetarians, even in the same family. A disagreement between moral vegetarians and nonvegetarians can survive full discussion and full information and certainly appears to rest on a difference in the significance assigned to animals as compared with humans. Is there a nonrelative truth concerning the moral importance of animals? How might that “truth” be discovered?15

To this query I would reply: By going much further, in the direction of analytic simplicity and clarity, than “the moral importance of animals”—indeed, much further than any actual discussion between disagreeing parties is likely to lead. The human cognitive, emotive, genetic, experiential mix is just too rich. Thus, with simple pleasures and pains, for instance, in mind, as above, I suggest the following comparison. In nature, gold nuggets can sometimes be found, but often much refining of ore is required in order to isolate the pure metal. Value ore is far more complex, and so is the refining process; and the miners are far more divided in their interests, desires, and beliefs about the ore, and so about whether it can or should be refined, and how. Much moral skepticism can also derive, Jenny Teichman suggests, from a general distrust of authority, antagonism to unfamiliar ideas, or hostility to certain conventions and traditions. “In modern times,” she adds, “the most common form of anti-traditional scepticism has to do with morality and is connected both personally and historically with a loss of religious belief.”16 A familiar underpinning is removed. The above four-point schema for assessing the morality of actions suggests that the logical connection between morality and religious belief is not as tight as is often supposed; but at a certain stage of moral development and in society at large, the psychological link between the two

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may be strong. Think, for instance, how violently the Jewish authorities reacted to Jesus’s questioning, not of the Ten Commandments, but of all the minute prescriptions of the Law and their mandatory force on all occasions. Or recall, in this connection, the famous thought of Ivan Karamazov, one of Dostoevsky’s finest character creations, that if God is dead, then everything is permitted. Further reflection reveals the dialectical path that discussion of moral meanings has taken. Ethicists long tended to view moral assertions as statements resembling those in other areas and differing only in their content. As there are historical statements, scientific statements, philosophical statements, theological statements, and others, so there are ethical statements. They, too, are factual; they, too, are descriptive. Statements of all kinds are on a par. Reacting to this assimilation, with its one-sided emphasis on the cognitive aspect of ethical utterances, thinkers such as A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap swung to the opposite extreme. Moral statements, they maintained, are veiled cheers or jeers (mere expressions of favorable or unfavorable attitudes) or camouflaged commands. Subsequently, philosophical opinion has shifted back toward fuller recognition of the descriptive aspect of ethics, while retaining the element of truth in the noncognitive accounts. Moral expressions may not be purely emotive or actinducing, but they are that, too. More typically than descriptive terms such as red or rough, words such as right and wrong express the feelings and attitudes of those who utter them. More characteristically than such descriptive terms, they serve to evoke kindred sentiments in those addressed. More frequently, again, they function to elicit or curb behavior (either having that effect, or being intended to, or both). Their meanings, we might say, are multidimensional—not just descriptive or cognitive, but emotive and dynamic as well. Such is the linguistic morass in which moral philosophy has long struggled. None of this complexity was recognized or addressed in, for example, the famed discussion of justice (dikaiosynē) in Plato’s Republic. We today might speak of different senses of the word just when it is applied to people, actions, laws, societies, and institutions; but not so Plato. As one commentator has noted, Plato does not talk as though there is anything involved that he would readily call a difference of sense or meaning, and he plainly links all of his applications of the word to a single entity, the Form of Justice . . . And indeed he has emphasized that justice in the city and justice in the soul must be the same thing (434d-435a-c, esp. 435a and 442d; cf. 444a).17

In Plato, not only this pertinent diversity but also the relevance of language is well hidden. And that hidden aspect is more than purely descriptive. The

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word just commends as well as describes, with the commending affecting the describing, and vice versa. Within this overall complexity of moral judgments—cognitive, emotive, pragmatic, prescriptive—the huge complexity of the cognitive component has brought further obscurity. No other problems in any single field are as difficult as are the issues often faced in ethics. For their clarification and solution, problems within problems must be addressed—some by historians, some by sociologists, some by psychologists, some by political scientists, some by philosophers or theologians, some by specialists from several fields working together. And some of the pertinent problems are so difficult that no answers to them are available. Nevertheless, without duplication or falsification, once all pertinent values and disvalues are identified, all these data must be coherently related in order to arrive at a final solution. Highlighting all this complexity more than does a precept-based ethics, a value-centered ethics may thereby cast doubt on its own validity. Where no sure answer can readily be found, the existence of an answer may be doubted.18 The frequent conflation of act-centered and subject-centered perspectives casts additional doubt on the objectivity of moral norms. If a person does not think an action wrong, then it is not wrong for that person to perform it. But this subject-focused verdict warrants no inference as to what the situation in fact requires. Perhaps even Hitler or Himmler thought he was doing the right thing in ridding the world of so many Jews; but if so, he was dreadfully mistaken. A pervasive scientific mind-set can hardly fail to further affect assessments of morality:  as “secondary” qualities such as color, taste, and feel, having less significance in the hard sciences than do “primary” qualities such as shape, size, and movement, have often been regarded as more subjective, so, too, values find no evident place in a scientific worldview and are therefore easily regarded as likewise subjective.19 Moral skepticism in general has had appeal for a wide range of thinkers, especially those with an empiricist turn of mind.

Deeper dialectics A vexing dilemma is raised by the familiar tale in which the loss of a nail in a horse’s shoe leads to the loss of the battle, therewith to the loss of the war, and eventually to the loss of the kingdom. For moral judgments about prospective actions cannot ignore consequences (e.g., the loss of the war and the kingdom), but the consequences of any action are largely unpredictable (e.g., such dire results from

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such a tiny detail as that nail). So, do valid moral judgments require humanly impossible calculations? If so, what are we to make of such a desperate human predicament and its putative theistic source? Unable to solve the dilemma posed by the need for, yet impossibility of, adequate human value-calculation, should we infer that this dilemma has no solution and so conclude against the existence of an all-good, all-wise, all-powerful creator? Or, realizing again our cognitive limitations, should we recognize their present basic relevance—that no world we can conceive that would remotely resemble our own, with creatures remotely resembling ourselves, that God could still mysteriously bring about, would be an evident, feasible improvement? Even in our familiar universe, an infant might more readily fine-tune the theory of general relativity than even the greatest human genius might trace the total fallout of any single human action. (We read, for example: “quantum theory shows that events in the universe are entangled, so that events light years away, and unknown to us, can produce changes of state in phenomena that we are observing. That entails that we cannot have exhaustive knowledge of any local physical state without having exhaustive knowledge of the whole universe, which is impossible.”20) But how then, we may wonder, are we, who are so ignorant, to rationally choose any course of action, large or small? If we are unbelievers, we will have no evident grounds for supposing that feeding the hungry or nursing the sick will not have disastrous consequences: one of the needy may be a struggling young Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin. If, however, we are believers, we will trust that in so acting, humanly, fallibly, we are doing our part within a larger providence than we can readily imagine or take as our guide (though later chapters will make some relevant attempts to do so). This split verdict, in response to moral nihilism, leads to the next chapter’s discussion and Chapter 10’s concluding remarks regarding the problem of evil. If, as here now argued, goodness and evil are real, that problem is real.

6

Evil

The problem of evil has been urged as the principal objection to the existence of God. Yet in view of reality’s complexity in all its dimensions—actual and possible; popular and scientific; linguistic and nonlinguistic; physical and metaphysical; factual and evaluative; past, present, and future—reflected in the endlessly varied perceptions of the fallible, ignorant, dissident, deeply perplexed human beings who sometimes venture to sit in judgment on the world, a comprehensive verdict, or even rough estimate, for or against the overall goodness of the universe, hence of the goodness of a creator of such a universe, clearly lies far beyond us. The final chapter, returning to this question, will therefore address it differently. Scientists have dreamed of eventually formulating a “theory of everything,” combining general relativity and quantum mechanics in a single coherent framework embracing all aspects of the physical universe. Though they have not yet succeeded and have no assurance that they ever will, they have not concluded that no such feat is possible. That, they realize, would betray an exaggerated estimate of their human cognitive abilities. So here is a striking paradox:  the notorious “problem of evil” is larger, more complex, and more truly allembracing than this strictly scientific challenge, yet the absence of any evident answer to the question it poses has begotten antitheistic conclusions that appear far more premature than would a comparable negative verdict, of insolubility, regarding the scientific puzzle. The answer here proposed for this conundrum may have a still more paradoxical sound: with regard to the problem of evil, I will suggest, not only an answer but also the impossibility of an answer is hidden by the problem’s still greater, indeed maximal complexity. A closer parallel, with a situation described in Chapter  3, may clarify this suggestion and make it sound less counterintuitive. From Descartes to Locke to Kant to Ayer and beyond, the chapter noted, theorists have ventured to spell out

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the relation between our human sensations and our world. Only gradually has the realization dawned that the solution to this problem lies entirely, definitively beyond us. The best we can do is to venture coherent surmises and wonder which of them, if any, may be true. So this situation may offer a more realistic comparison with the problem of evil. For it is more than a comparison:  the mystery regarding our physical world is itself just one part of the overall puzzle that we would have to clarify in order to reach any verdict regarding the allembracing question of good versus evil in the universe. If we have no prospect of solving even this part of the puzzle, what are the chances of our reaching a judgment regarding the whole?

Atheists’ case Atheists’ favorite argument sounds impressive. What possible reason could a merciful God have to permit, for example, the agonizing death of a fawn caught in a forest fire or of an innocent child tormented by cancer? The child’s parents weep and wring their hands, but God does nothing. On a broader scale, what sort of divinity would permit so many and such dire evils—war, famine, pestilence, bereavement, corporate greed, earthquakes, tornadoes, the Holocaust, depression, despair, drought, dementia? How can such horrors be compatible with the existence of a God who (being all-good) desires to minimize evil, who (being all-wise) knows how to do so, and who (being all-powerful) could supposedly bring it about? James Cornman and Keith Lehrer pose the problem this way: “If you were all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful and you were going to create a universe in which there were sentient beings—beings that are happy and sad; enjoy pleasure; feel pain, express love, anger, pity, hatred—what kind of world would you create? . . . Would it be like the one which actually does exist, this world we live in?”1 A reasonable response would be that we, their readers, have no way of knowing; for the stated supposition is extremely counterfactual. We, who are invited to assess the universe, are in fact very far from being either all-good or all-knowing. But Cornman and Lehrer see no problem. “If your answer is ‘no,’ ” they continue, “as it seems it must be, then . . . it seems we should conclude that it is improbable that [the world] was created or sustained by anything we would call God.” Richard Dawkins goes farther. With remarkable assurance he declares, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but

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blind, pitiless indifference.”2 Having seen all the way to the bottom (say, of the preceding five chapters here, for a start), Dawkins draws his negative, atheistic conclusion. These authors’ failure to note the relevance of our human cognitive condition is symptomatic of much writing on the problem of evil; their oversight just takes more flagrant forms than usual. Regarding “vehement ethical protests against pain and perishing,” John Haught suggests that “such sensitivity seems entirely appropriate, an expression of deep humaneness and compassion.” However, “in order to arouse a genuinely ethical resistance to unnecessary suffering across many generations, the evolutionists’ disapproval of pain must be backed up by something more substantive and permanent than a mindless evolutionary past or by purely conventional cultural habits.” After all, “the protest is just as much a part of the cosmos as is the pain, and if the pain deserves to be explained, so does the protest. Yet it is precisely in giving a full accounting of the human outrage against suffering that purely evolutionary or, for that matter, sociocultural explanations will turn out to be insufficient, and a theological world-view will become relevant.”3 This challenge of Haught’s sounds plausible, and the limitations of the argument from evil would be still more manifest had anyone, going farther, ventured to spell out a comprehensive “proposal for everything,” covering all aspects of the universe and improving it overall. Not surprisingly, no one has made the attempt. “Think,” Michael Ruse suggests, of trying to make physical processes entirely pain-free. Start with fire. It could no longer burn or produce smoke. But if this were the case, would it still be hot? If so, then how could this be? There would have to be wholesale changes at the molecular level. If fire were not hot, how would we warm ourselves and cook our food? One change by God would require a knock-on compensation, and another and another. And even then, could we get a system that worked properly?4

Any serious attempt of this sort would quickly reveal the relevance of the following comparison. Suppose a small boy were to say, “My father never lets me stay up for parties, so he mustn’t love me.” We would know how to judge that inference. The boy’s failure to discern a reason for his father’s ruling might carry some slight weight, for he might have considered and found wanting one or two possible explanations. However, he would have been unable to conceive or assess so many other possibilities (with regard to his health, his training, the guests, his timely rising in the morning, etc.) that his failure to spot a reason might carry little weight. So the basic question for us is this: Where do we adult,

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present-day humans stand, intellectually, relative to the problem of evil? Are we cognitive infants, cognitive adolescents, or cognitive adults? Stories can be told that place us low and others that place us high, but the simple answer is that we have no way of knowing where we fall on such a scale. Somewhere along the continuum between infancy and adulthood—between minimal understanding and omniscience—the balance would tilt, and our failure to spot a justifying rationale would not merely lessen the probability of a loving God but would make that hypothesis improbable. However, where that point lies and where we stand in relation to it, we have—quite simply—no way of knowing. This twofold ignorance shows the weakness of any antitheistic argument based on the amount of evil in the world.5 So succinct a response to a vexing, complex issue may appear simplistic. So let me expand the response, starting with some remarks of Rescher. In Nature and Understanding, without reference to the present topic, he writes, “Natural systems can be classified into two types: the linear and the non-linear. Linear systems admit of approximation. If we oversimplify them we change nothing essential:  the results we obtain by working with the simplified models will approximate the condition of their more complex counterparts in the real world. Small-scale departures from reality make no significant difference.”6 Here, within a linear system, we need not fear that, as in the familiar tale, the loss of the horse’s shoe may lead step by step to the loss of the kingdom. However, as Rescher then notes, “non-linear systems behave differently. Here small variations— even undetectably small ones—can make for great differences. Accordingly, simplification—let alone oversimplification—can prove fatal: even the smallest miss can prove to be as good as a mile as far as outcomes are concerned.” Once that horse’s shoe comes off, everything—horseman, skirmish, battle, war, kingdom— may be lost. And so, Rescher concludes, “perhaps the most fundamental question that can be asked of any natural system is: Is it linear or non-linear?” Relevantly here, with regard to the problem of evil, the latter answer clearly applies to the world process and its components. “Intricately convoluted complex systems such as biological evolution or human history or electoral politics—processes where seemingly haphazard and ‘external’ events can continually affect outcomes—are so complex that the questions they pose for us defy calculation and foreclose the prospect of computational problem-solving.”7 A familiar response simplifies matters:  “No plausible theistic view countenances evil as an entity self-existent in its own right. Rather, evil is seen as ‘privation of good,’ as the absence of some good state of affairs that would reasonably be expected to obtain. (Blindness is the absence of the power of

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sight in a being that would normally be able to see.)”8 Continuing, one perhaps thinks of deafness, ignorance, thirst, hunger, loneliness, forgetfulness, failure, boredom, insomnia, idleness, lameness, paralysis, and so on—but also, for example, of endlessly varied forms of physical and mental suffering (toothache, terror, angina, depression, etc.), which are not mere privations of their contraries (pleasure, peace, comfort, joy, etc.). Neither are many of their causes (e.g., mockery, betrayal, false accusation, injustice, ugliness in all its forms). The handy simplification fails.9 It might appear, nonetheless, that a popular line of reasoning can go some distance toward resolving the problem of evil. Nancey Murphy, for example, citing the catastrophic tsunami of December 26, 2004, and wondering where Providence was on that dire occasion, suggests in reply: God is creator of a universe intended to support life, particularly life with the capacity to respond to him in love. The tsunami was an unwanted by-product of the natural conditions that make life possible on Earth. This is but one illustration of the basic assumption on which this paper is based: The better we understand the interconnectedness among natural systems in the universe, and especially their bearing on complex life, the clearer it becomes that it would be impossible to have a world that allowed for a free and loving human response to God, yet one without natural evil.10

This line of defense sounds plausible for the problem of natural evil in “the universe”—that is, in our universe—but it here passes to a verdict regarding any possible world “that allowed for a free and loving human response, yet one without natural evil.” Granted, we cannot conceive just how such an alternative universe might work, but, as the preceding chapters have already strongly suggested and the present discussion will make increasingly clear, neither are we in a position to determine whether a universe without natural evil, or somehow preferable to ours, is or is not possible. The overall mystery regarding conceivable worlds, conceivable world-making, and conceivable world-makers is far too deep for such a human pronouncement to have any plausibility. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik has added a pertinent twist which David Shatz sums up as follows:  The problem with asking why God allows evil is not simply that we don’t know (though in fact we don’t). The problem is that the better the explanation we have of evil—the more beautifully evil is thought to fit into and contribute to a whole that is good—the less reason we have to engage in moral and social

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The Maturing of Monotheism action to fight evil or react to it negatively. Theodicy and moral responsiveness (behavioral or attitudinal) are in conflict.11

It may be inadvisable for us to suppose that everything will turn out for the best regardless of what we do. There is still little metaphysics here, or theory of values, with their further complications. Yet neither can be ignored. A  popular passage from Plantinga can illustrate, to start with, the relevance of metaphysics for the problem of evil: A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren’t significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so.12

This argument may not be obviously right in all its parts but neither is it obviously wrong, and it is plausible to surmise that it never will be decisively assessed, one way or the other, for it nicely illustrates our human epistemic limitations. Still, it is only a beginning. Turning from human freedom to its implications, J. R. Lucas writes: God, having vicarious first-personal knowledge of our future actions, and knowing also the ways and waywardness of man, can foreknow much, but in a non-threatening, because in a not external and infallible, way, and always subject, so far as particular actions of particular individuals are concerned, to a homine volente clause. But still we may press specific questions. Did God foreknow the Second World War? The misery of the Germans during the slump, the wickedness of Hitler, the blindness and irresolution of Britain and France, were grounds enough for predicting war, if not over the Sudetenland then over Danzig, if not over Danzig then over the Saar, or Denmark, or Alsace-Lorraine. But always there was the possibility of things going differently. If Britain had not caved in at Munich, and if the General Staff had then succeeded in removing Hitler, then the inevitable would not have happened, and foreknowledge, even God’s Foreknowledge, would have proved not knowledge after all.13

Here reference to God’s foreknowledge raises pertinent, much-debated questions regarding God’s temporal or nontemporal mode of being—questions far beyond our ken.

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When we turn more fully from metaphysics to values, the clouds of cognitive obscurity thicken, if possible, still further. Some people maintain the existence of objective good and evil, while others deny it and thereby eliminate both an all-good God and the problem of evil. Some people maintain the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic good and evil, while others deny it and thereby profoundly reconfigure the problem of evil. Some people maintain the general comparability of disparate goods and evils, as greater or less, while others deny it and thereby preclude the sort of answers commonly proposed for the problem of evil. Some people maintain, and others deny, the comparability of certain specific goods and evils, or classes of goods and evils, thereby affecting what solutions are available. Some people maintain, and others deny, that certain things are unconditionally evil, thereby precluding or permitting justification of those evils. Some people maintain, and others deny, that aesthetic values— beauty, order, variety, simplicity, and so on—are relevant to the problem of evil. Of those who acknowledge the existence of objective values and disvalues, or intrinsic values and disvalues, some offer one listing of what these include, others another. Of those who acknowledge the comparability of disparate values and disvalues, some accept, and others contest, the feasibility of general value rankings. Of those who accept the possibility of such rankings, some adopt one set, others another, while most people, including the majority of those who discuss the problem of evil, have not even envisaged, much less attempted, any such sorting. Such are the beings—ignorant, fallible, discordant, deeply perplexed—who would sit in judgment on the universe. In a moment I will pass farther, for much relevant mystery remains, at ever deeper levels. But let me first dwell briefly on this beginning and suggest its relevance, starting with the views of Jerry Coyne, whom Haught describes as “an evolutionist and militant atheist at the University of Chicago” and whose critical perspective he further indicates as follows:  “if organisms were designed by ‘a beneficent Creator,’ living beings should have no ‘design flaws.’ A perfect God, he maintains, would have created a perfectly engineered world. Yet evolutionists have observed that most organisms are not perfectly designed. Design flaws, Coyne insists, are abundant. Hence God cannot possibly exist.”14 Coyne’s God would, as it were, plant only geometrical French gardens, not messy, disorderly English ones. This narrow perspective does not consider for whom, under what constraints, and for what purposes the whole cosmic plan was, or may have been, conceived. A French-style cosmos might, for instance, require much more intervention—much more clipping, planting, cultivating, irrigating, digging up, as it were—than an English one, and flawless human beings, all playing their

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prescribed roles, might all be perfect robots. In view of the last two paragraphs’ multiple, interrelated complexities and perplexities, Coyne’s critique appears, again, far too simplistic. Michael Peterson’s indictment invites a complementary response:  “Our common humanity, accessed by careful introspection and by acceptance of the wisdom of the race, grounds a generally reliable and widely agreed upon understanding of the types of goods and evils and their possible interrelations that are relevant to the kind of flourishing which is appropriate to our nature. We are not hopelessly in the dark about such matters.”15 For example, “Even in cases of animal suffering, it is not as though we are completely at a loss to imagine what sorts of goods might justify the sufferings of these nonhuman sentient creatures.”16 Indeed we are not; and if we spot a young child tormenting a cat, we may rightly remonstrate. But what, for instance, of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam and the warring arguments for and against its legitimacy? As I have observed elsewhere,17 that situation was far more morally complex than those typically one-sided arguments, pro or con, reflected; and this comparison only hints at the complexity of the universe and that complexity’s moral relevance. In another antitheistic twist, J. L. Schellenberg has suggested a “hiddenness argument”:  “when the evidence for God is inconclusive, this itself should be taken as a conclusive reason for disbelief, because God would never allow the evidence to be thus inconclusive.”18 Schellenberg insists that this argument “can’t be assimilated to the problem of evil”19 (and, to be sure, no argument can be assimilated to a problem); but the same overall verdict still applies to such beings as ourselves “who would sit in judgment on the universe.” In relation to Schellenberg’s objection, consider, for instance, just the first item in the long listing above:  some people maintain the existence of objective good and evil while others deny it and thereby eliminate both an all-good God and the problem of evil. How might a more adequate providence deal with this basic mental block? By sharpening the agony of toothaches? By offering seminars? Would any omnisciently satisfactory solution for this comprehensive problem be communicable to humans (or would that be like teaching quantum theory to third-graders)? More broadly, would an answer to this first question, if communicable, take care of all the remaining questions, or would it just complicate matters? Without sure answers (far beyond our human horizons) to every interrelated item in the bundle, there is no telling. So the overall verdict could hardly be clearer; we humans are incompetent to decree what a good, wise, omnipotent God would or would not do.

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For Richard Gale, the chief problem for such an appeal to ignorance, precluding our passing judgment on the dispositions of Providence, is that it seems to require that we become complete moral skeptics. Should we be horrified at what happened to Sue? Should we have tried to prevent it or take steps to prevent similar incidents in the future? Who knows?! For all we can tell it might be a blessing in disguise or serve some God-justifying reason that is too “deep” for us to access: for example, it might be a merited Divine punishment for some misdeed that Sue will commit in the after-life. The result of this moral skepticism is paralysis of the will, since we can have no reason for acting, given that we are completely in the dark whether the consequences of our action are good or bad.20

Such queries and misgivings indicate the gravity of the problem but not its solution. It does not suffice to note, in response, that the result of such antitheistic skepticism, leaving us equally in the dark regarding the overall goodness or badness of our actions, is equally dire. Neither does it suffice to reply that God knows the answer though we don’t; for if human morality requires us, too, to maximize good and minimize evil, in imitation of God’s inscrutable providence, how is that possible? For all we know, firing a young Adolf Hitler may eventually trigger a world war. So the available responses to Gale’s dilemma look stark: (1) We might adopt an ethic—say along Kantian lines—that ignores the consequences of our actions. (Hundreds or thousands will suffer if you tell the Gestapo the truth? Never mind: tell it!) (2) Not knowing what overall, long-term effects our actions are likely to have, we might give up on ethics and do what is personally appealing or comes naturally. Or, as the last chapter suggested, (3) adopting the theistic option of a transcendent providence, we might trust that within a larger scheme of things—a moral universe (with humans, possible cosmic kin, and their moral development perhaps of chief concern)—doing our human best will best maximize good over evil. Such are the stakes in this present discussion. Here, already, is a sample expansion of that quick initial demonstration suggesting the weakness of any antitheistic argument based on the amount of evil in the world. A full reply would have to look much farther. We could consider again, for example, the implications of the material in Chapter 3, with its range of metaphysical options from naïve realism to radical idealism. Whatever the system chosen, it could hardly fail to affect the working of our world in ways profoundly relevant to an overall providence; yet such a metaphysical verdict lies beyond human detection or comprehension. Again, suppose (as many do) that our present lives precede and prepare a later existence whose possibility and nature “eye has not seen and ear has not heard.” Such a future life might reveal

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undreamed of possibilities of unimagined relevance for our present existence, in view of which all the apparently cumulative evidence against the existence of God might have slight if any weight. (I can imagine a fretful fetus asking, “Why is it so dark and cramped in here?” to which the reply would be: “It’s the best place, right now, for you to grow.”) Going still further, we may distinguish between imagining a better overall universe and having the slightest inkling how any universe, good, bad, or indifferent, might be brought about, hence what value-maximizing possibilities may be metaphysically available. If this further perspective is seldom distinctly envisaged and addressed, no doubt one reason is its deep obscurity, precluding much discussion. Still, suppose by distant analogy that we conceived of some desired biological result in our actual universe but did not know whether it was to be achieved by cell division, photosynthesis, radiation, or sexual intercourse. How the desired effect was to be brought about might make a difference! So yes, the situation becomes increasingly unmistakable. Our universe is deeply mysterious not only in its complexity but also in its origin and its destiny, and between them these related mysteries go far toward explaining not only why, in the face of evil, no negative answer can be given to the question about the existence of God, but also why this verdict, though so decisive, is so well hidden. By now the response to Robert Prevost’s assessment should be clear. For after balancing one way then the other, he concludes, at variance with what has here just been said, “The materialist, on the other hand, will point to the existence of evil as evidence against the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God, and the theist must admit that there is here a discrepancy; there is something that he cannot fully explain. This lack of completeness in the theist’s case counts against his position.”21 How striking is this alleged imbalance between atheist and theist. For neither, in the same sense, can the atheist “fully explain,” pro or con, any evil cited in evidence against the existence of God. That notorious missing nail in the horse’s shoe might, as the tale suggests, bring the kingdom’s downfall, or it might just as unforeseeably save the kingdom—or the whole human race—from utter ruin. The mystery of the universe, overall and in detail, is as great for the atheist as it is for the theist. Neither can assess, philosophically, the overall balance of good and evil in the world.

Diagnostic probing Logically, the advance of human understanding—scientific, philosophical, and other—might serve as a recurring, inductive intimation of the vastness of our

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ignorance. Psychologically, it is more likely to have the opposite effect and foster an assumption of near-omniscience. And, complementing this source, our self-assurance has another basic one. It is often supposed that in dealing with the problem of evil we have little need of factual knowledge. We need merely know possibilities, and to know possibilities we need merely know logic. For an omnipotent agent is not restricted by the actual laws or constitution of the universe but can realize any state of affairs which can be expressed without contradiction. So we can freely hypothesize improvements on the universe, note their nonrealization, and from their absence infer God’s nonexistence. Such is the reasoning in the following important illustration: The arguments of Mackie and Flew rest on the contention that it is logically possible that humans be created with or have such a nature or character that they always freely choose the good. Since God is omnipotent, he can do anything that is logically possible, and since a world in which people only do good is clearly a superior world to one in which people do evil as well as (or instead of) good, we would expect that God would have created a world populated only with people who always and only do the good.22

In a Humean world like ours, freed from universal necessitation, such reasoning may sound plausible; yet in such a world, how extraordinary it also appears. We, who can only describe our world’s regularities, not explain them, are invited to imaginatively alter them at will. It is somewhat as though, to tidy up the quantum world that Einstein found distressing, we proposed that God simply eliminate quanta. What contradiction would there be in that? Still, it is easy to see how such thinking might arise. We have had repeated experience of envisaging things—submarines, flying machines, hydrogen bombs, and so on—without seeing whether or how they were possible, and then discovering both that they were possible and how they were possible. But outside of mathematical examples such as that of trisecting an angle with just ruler and compass, there are no equally well-known examples of our having envisaged things, then finding that they are, nonetheless, not physically possible. Neither, to be sure, have we ever had the experience of envisaging something, without evident contradiction, then finding it to be not just physically but metaphysically, comprehensively impossible—impossible even for an all-good, all-knowing, omnipotent God. Consequently, when asked for some illustration of what it would be like for a nonmathematical hypothesis that made sense to nonetheless state such an impossibility, we can—predictably and understandably—offer no example. So, all things being possible, God (we infer) has no defense.

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To be fully realistic, however, etiology cannot remain at this abstract, theoretical level. Experience of evil begets the problem of evil, and then, psychologically, the response to that problem can go either way, for or against God. Such, for example, was the choice that one Marietta Jaeger faced when her seven-year-old daughter, Susie, was kidnapped. What kind of God would allow this? Was belief in God a mere psychological crutch? Did she believe in God? Alone in her bedroom, she recounts, she was struggling with such thoughts as these when suddenly I  felt as if somebody reached over and pulled me onto safe ground. I began to pray and pray, made a commitment to God, and he came to me. I felt as if I was absolutely surrounded, almost a physical feeling of love of God. It was incredible. I couldn’t believe anyone could love me that much. I found him absolutely irresistible, and I had no choice but to love and serve him.23

Even when Susie was murdered, her mother continued to believe in God’s love—largely, no doubt, on the strength of that memorable experience in her bedroom. Now, was she right to persist in her belief? Who can give the most expert, veridical account of such an experience as hers? She who had it? Someone who reads about it? A psychologist to whom she recounts it? On reflection, this query proves as perplexing as the problem of evil (if not more so, since the problem of evil is itself a highly significant aspect of the query). The next two chapters, focusing on the future, first of individual humans, then of the human race, will confirm the present chapter’s overall agnostic verdict. Here, too, in these forward-looking directions, human perspectives meet irresolvable mystery. So the final chapter will take a different approach to the problem of evil.

7

Afterlife

These days, still more than in the past, the prospects hereafter for individual human beings are buried beneath deep, multiple layers of mystery and mystification—popular and theoretical, factual and conceptual, proximate and distant—which, though they obscure human possibilities, do not negate the life-giving power, suggested by numerous clues, of a transcendent deity such as theists worship. Back in earliest biblical times, we find a small God, for a small people, in a small world, in a small time frame—namely, Yahweh, the God of Israel, for just this present life, on just this planet, in just this tiny region of the cosmos:  hardly a fitting deity for our day. So, how do modern theological perspectives differ from those ancient ones? How large in its significance, individual and collective, present and prospective, does the question of theism currently appear to and for humankind? Since several chapters here have already scanned the present terrestrial scene, we can turn now from the present to the future and consider the long-term prospects, from a theistic versus a nontheistic point of view, first for individual human beings, in this chapter, then for the human race, in the next. Do these expanded vistas speak for or against theism, or—given their great depth—do they suggest no verdict either way? Belief in God and belief in an afterlife have been closely tied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The New Testament conveys nothing more clearly than God’s love, nothing more firmly than life to come, and the link between that love and that life is equally clear. “For I am convinced,” writes Paul, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39). Dale Allison Jr. evokes the larger setting of the apostle’s firm belief:

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The Maturing of Monotheism The emergence in . . . Judaism of a robust faith in an afterlife of rewards and punishments was a way of maintaining belief in God’s goodness and justice despite the agonies and unfairness of this world, a way of maintaining “that even a mortal life of disprivilege can have meaning and value.” The move is theologically compelling. In Michael Wyschogrod’s words, “Either death wins or God saves.” John Hick is fully justified to argue that the denial of a life after this one is “the worst possible news for humanity as a whole,” for it implies that “the human situation is irremediably bleak and painful for vast numbers of people.” God cannot be thought good in any authentic sense of that word if the world as it is, this desert in which so many briefly live, suffer, die, and are forgotten, is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.1

It is therefore not surprising that, as Muhammad Haleem notes, in Islam, too, [t]here is a reference, direct or indirect, to one aspect or another of after-life on almost every single page of the Qur’an. This follows from the fact that belief in it is an article of faith which has bearing on every aspect of the present life and occurs in the discussion of the creed, the rituals, the ethics and the law of Islam.2

Mysterious depths From a purely human cognitive perspective, the post-death prospects for presently living people, like the long-term prospects for the race, are buried beneath cumulative layers of ever-mounting mystery: Sensible. So far as our bodily senses go, when people die, they are buried, cremated, or otherwise disposed of and that is the end of them. And these senses of ours speak to us far more powerfully than do the theories—many, varied, vast, profound—debated in philosophical circles regarding deeper aspects of our human reality and our corresponding prospects. Commonsensible. Although, long ago, Hume in his study might momentarily free himself from a deterministic way of thinking, restricting human possibilities (Chapter  4), for most people life still flows on less reflectively, in accordance with nature’s mighty “laws.” Still more fundamentally, most of us most of the time are far from viewing our ongoing existence and that of our universe as a metaphysically inexplicable gift—one which might, just as mysteriously, be discontinued at any moment or be continued indefinitely. Terminological. Like many expressions, people’s proper names carry thisworldly connotations, while the term soul (as in “the souls of the faithful

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departed”) is heavy with religious history and hylomorphic theory. Unfortunately yet understandably, the debates of centuries have yielded no technical, less problematic, substitute expressions for use in discussing personal survival. Physiological. Regarding the split-brain cases which drew him into philosophy and the tests that revealed them, Derek Parfit writes, These tests made use of two facts. We control each of our arms, and see what is in each half of our visual fields, with only one of our hemispheres. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.3

Crazy! Transempirical. “In a sense,” suggests Ward, “modern science has, in a strange and unexpected way, returned to a form of Platonism. An important part of Platonism says the senses provide only appearances, whereas reality is purely intelligible and knowable, if at all, only by mind. Platonism, it seems, has returned in triumph.”4 Far beyond the sensible, scientists have, for example, encountered “dark matter,” so called because, although it apparently comprises most of the universe, they have no clue as to what it is like in itself. (One wonders whether, being so mysterious, it may one day go the way of the “ether” that scientists eventually found they could do without.) Evolutionary. The doctrine of evolution, viewed in scientific isolation, suggests basic continuity all the way from subatomic particles to our present selves. Despite appearances, we were, are, and ever will be nothing but matter. Nowhere along the way is there any possibility for “spirit” or the like to make a sudden appearance. The strength of this impression reflects the scientific perspective that begets it; and Chapters 3 and 4, in particular, suggest how much underlying metaphysical complexity and mystery that perspective ignores. It is as though, holding a camera, not a microphone, and having photographed a bird from egg to chick to adult, we were to question its ability ever to sing a note. How could so silent a creature suddenly burst forth into song? Psychological. “If we are nothing but animals,” Lynne Rudder Baker has observed, “then either goals that people die for—for example, extending the rule of Allah, furthering the cause of democracy, or something else—should be shown to promote survival or reproduction or those people who pursue such goals should be deemed to be malfunctioning. Neither seems plausible.”5 What sort of creatures are we?

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Subconscious. Citing some striking examples, Oliver Sacks observed: It seemed clear, as Poincaré wrote, that there must be an active and intense unconscious (or subconscious, or preconscious) activity even during the period when a problem is lost to conscious thought, and the mind is empty or distracted with other things. This is not the dynamic or “Freudian” unconscious, boiling with repressed fears and desires, nor the “cognitive” unconscious, which enables one to drive a car or to utter a grammatical sentence with no conscious idea of how one does it. It is instead the incubation of hugely complex problems performed by an entire hidden, creative self.6

Paranormal. A  great many appearances and communications, of varying credibility, of dead people to the living, and of divinity with humanity, have been reported (see Chapter 10), with little consensus regarding the nature, likelihood, extent, and objectivity of such occurrences. But if the reports contain any truth, “any view is mistaken which identifies reality with the world of science and common sense.”7 Linguistic. When and if discussion passes beyond the directly or indirectly perceptible, language’s role as a determinant of intelligibility and truth, though still often ignored, downplayed, or obscured, becomes increasingly crucial. There is presently no agreement, for instance, regarding whether it does or might make sense to suggest that somehow or other when a person dies she may or will survive. Still more fundamentally, there is much disagreement as to what the truth of such a claim might consist in and whether the truth-question matters (see Chapters 1 and 9). Epistemological. In the realist/antirealist debate regarding the physical universe, glimpsed in Chapter 3, positions range from realism to nonrealism, with constructive empiricism, pragmatism, operationism, phenomenalism, and the like bespeaking further, unfathomable mystery in between. Metaphysical. Deciding for or against the reality or realizability of theistic surmises is more than a matter of words and, in view of the deeply agnostic verdict regarding the relation between the sensible and the real in Chapter 3 and equally agnostic verdict regarding the relation between dynamic human thought and nondynamic physical phenomena in Chapter 4, metaphysical speculation may prove still more perplexing than the preceding varieties. If, for instance, divine action resembles more the dynamic sort of human action than it does mere Humean regularity (Chapter 4), and the human variety is itself metaphysically mysterious, and the resemblance between the human and the divine is far from perspicuous, divine action (for instance, possible salvific action in our regard) is and must remain still more deeply mysterious.

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Behind these mysteries of activity, and intimately, perplexingly related to them, there lie further mysteries, for example, regarding time. According to one theory, temporal becoming is real: temporal things come to be and cease to be. According to another theory, such becoming and ceasing are illusory. And so the debate continues, with no prospect of its ever being resolved. Moral. It has been suggested that once we take seriously that human beings are part of the evolutionary scheme, we cannot deny the legitimacy of trying to explain why we have certain ethical ideas by relating them to our evolutionary history. So the search for a biological explanation of morality seems to fall within the scope of the natural sciences, and this explanation must be allowed to compete with any other explanation given of the phenomena of morality that can be found within the social sciences, the humanities or theology.8

But if Chapter 5 is right about the objectivity of values and the transhuman complexity of moral issues, biological or other scientific explanations will hardly suffice to explain this fundamental aspect of reality or how it might figure within the dispositions of a wisely beneficent Creator. Difficult to classify. The philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen has relevantly remarked, “Do concepts of the soul . . . baffle you? They pale beside the unimaginable otherness of closed space-times, event horizons, EPR correlations, and bootstrap models.”9 In Barr’s illustration, Given a set of electrons, say, there is no meaning to saying which electron is which—for example, asking whether the electron over here now is the same one as the electron over there later. So we see here a case where a fact of physics has relevance to an issue in philosophy (identity of things through time), which in turn has relevance to a theological question (in what sense our resurrected bodies will be the same).10

In another direction, reading regarding the “meaning of life” that “[i]f there’s any point at all to what we do, we have to find it within our own lives,”11 we may wonder:  our own present lives, or perhaps also our lives hereafter? Our own individual lives, or perhaps also our social, collective lives? “Any point” objectively, or just subjectively? Later, the author himself notes some comparable, equally pertinent cloudiness, which “seems to arise if God and His purposes are offered as the ultimate explanation of the value and meaning of our lives. The idea that our lives fulfil God’s purpose is supposed to give them their point, in a way that doesn’t require or admit any further point.”12 And so perhaps it

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might—once the sense of such queries as these was clarified. (What is a mother’s or father’s “point” in begetting and rearing a child?) Cumulative. The perspectives thus roughly distinguished are so interrelated and their interrelationships so complex that obscurity, confusion, ignorance, or error in any one of them is likely to affect the others. And when these subjective complications are added to the objective ones uncovered by our ever more sophisticated instruments, experiments, and observations, it becomes wellnigh impossible, even if desired and sought, to distinguish clearly between the objective and the subjective. There is, for example, much disagreement on what constitutes a scientific understanding—the kind that is an upshot of successful scientific theorizing. Some would say that we understand phenomena, such as those of human behavior, only if we can predict them from underlying states or processes. There would, however, be disagreement about whether the relevant underlying states or processes are causal. There is even disagreement over whether the basic, unobservable items that, at any given time, are explanatorily fundamental are real or, instead, to be understood instrumentally, say as posits that facilitate the activities of explanation and prediction crucial for negotiating the world. There is also disagreement over the status of scientific generalizations:  do they express necessary connections or simply de facto regularities?13

It can therefore be surmised that, given such deep, multiple perplexities as these, any sure estimate of the possibility of human afterlife lies far beyond us. However, this is all quickly, abstractly stated. More experientially, consider the following account by J. B. Phillips, who describes himself as incredulous by nature and as unsuperstitious as they come: The late C.  S. Lewis, whom I  did not know very well, and had only seen in the flesh once, but with whom I had corresponded a fair amount, gave me an unusual experience. A few days after his death, while I was watching television, he “appeared” sitting in a chair within a few feet of me, and spoke a few words which were particularly relevant to the difficult circumstances through which I  was passing. He was ruddier in complexion than ever, grinning all over his face, and as the old-fashioned saying has it, positively glowing with health. The interesting thing to me was that I had not been thinking about him at all. I was neither alarmed nor surprised nor, to satisfy the Bishop of Woolwich, did I look up to see the hole in the ceiling that he might have made on arrival! He was just there—“large as life and twice as natural”! A week later, this time when I was in bed reading before going to sleep, he appeared again, even more rosily radiant than before, and repeated to me the same message, which was very important

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to me at the time. I was a little puzzled by this, and I mentioned it to a certain saintly Bishop who was then living in retirement in Dorset. His reply was, “My dear J—this sort of thing is happening all the time.”14

“What is impressive here,” William Abraham comments, “is the integrity of the witness and the apparent purpose in Lewis’s appearance and communication.”15 Yet notice Phillips’s scare quotes for “appeared” and their absence in Abraham’s allusion to “Lewis’s appearance.” Was it Lewis himself in that apparition, or a simulacrum? Was the appearance God’s mysterious doing or a comparably extraordinary efflorescence of Phillips’s unconscious? As earlier chapters noted, the reality of the universe reaches far deeper, metaphysically, than anything that human exploration has yet revealed or conceivably ever will. And had those chapters addressed the question of after-death survival, they might have reached an equally agnostic conclusion. Consider, for example, in the account in Chapter 4, the mental comparing and contrasting of games that Wittgenstein suggested, or the immobilized Chamorro patient’s active perusal of the passing scene. These activities could not plausibly or even meaningfully be identified with any physiological events, but neither could any Cartesian spiritual agent be detected or surmised performing the activities. Single, whole human beings revealed these experiential splits between the physical and the mental, suggesting some deep, underlying difference. But within the general Kantian verdict that Chapter 3 endorsed regarding thingsin-themselves beyond the reach of human clarification, what realistic account might we possibly offer, much less verify, of that underlying, mysterious realm?

Glimpses The impossibility of any such comprehensive, in-depth account does not preclude here taking some basic clarifying steps regarding the prospects for personal survival, even though, at the present point in this book’s progression, these steps cannot yet presuppose the existence of a transcendently powerful, benevolent divinity, whose existence might, to be sure, make a considerable difference.

Popular perceptions Not surprisingly, a noted brain surgeon’s summation of our human condition shows little awareness of the philosophical debates surveyed in Chapters  3 and 4. “Neuroscience tells us,” writes Henry Marsh, “that it is highly improbable that

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we have souls, as everything we think and feel is no more or no less than the electrochemical chatter of our nerve cells. Our sense of self, our feelings and our thoughts, our love for others, our hopes and ambitions, our hates and fears all die when our brains die.”16 How striking! And how revealing. Philosophers have been far from agreeing that “everything we think and feel is no more or no less than the electrochemical chatter of our nerve cells.” Their views, however, are not widely known by the general populace and there carry little weight. Science, many people nowadays suppose, is more serious than abstruse philosophical speculation. As for “souls,” theism’s sacred writings say little or nothing about them. So, with evident regret, Marsh can convey only as follows the contrast between a home for incurables run by Catholic nuns and a public hospital where he had also worked: “The devout Catholic staff did not accept the grave lesson of neuroscience—that everything we are depends upon the physical integrity of our brains. Instead, their ancient faith in an immaterial human soul meant that they could create a kind and caring home for these vegetative patients and their families.”17 Further removed from popular acquaintance than these contrasting perspectives of neuroscience and religious faith are the thought-worlds of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and other philosophers here critiqued in earlier chapters. For Aquinas and like-minded thinkers, abstract, universal concepts play a central role in our thinking, and that role reveals their nature. Our senses can depict the colors, smells, tastes, shapes, weights, and sizes of things, but not, for instance, what is common to all colors, all smells, all tastes, all sizes, and the like. Finding what is common requires abstraction, and abstraction requires an intellect. Such, then, are human beings:  nonmaterial as well as material. Wittgenstein’s critique of essences, hence of abstract concepts, undid this argument and its dualistic metaphysical conclusion. However, as Chapters 1 and 4 suggested, it did so dialectically. The conscious, discriminating thinking that searched for essences and failed to find them could not be performed by the senses, nor could it meaningfully be equated (in Marsh’s phrase) with “the electrochemical chatter of our nerve cells.” Marsh shows some awareness of these depths when, venturing some philosophy of his own in defense of his reductive remarks, he writes, “Many people deeply resent this view of things, which not only deprives us of life after death but also seems to downgrade thought to mere electrochemistry and reduces us to mere automata, to machines. Such people are profoundly mistaken, since what it really does is upgrade matter into something infinitely mysterious that we do not understand.”18 Yet how, one wonders, if the mystery really is that profound, can Marsh’s negative verdict stand, excluding life after death?

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Conceptual depths After a quick review of three basic conceptions of “what it means to be a person,” Peter Vardy concludes, Whichever of the three models is adopted, the identity problems involved in claiming that individuals survive death are grave and there is no straightforward way of showing that what survives death is the same as the person who died. However, the philosophic difficulties in this area are no more serious than the problems that arise for the philosopher in trying to decide whether he or she is the same person he or she was yesterday, and we seem to be able to live with these latter difficulties without undue stress!19

If, for example, some philosophers, citing constant changes in a person’s physical and mental makeup, have questioned the supposition that, year by year and decade by decade, a single person survives them all, such far-out challenges to our customary notions can, it seems, be dismissed. And so they can, but why, and how? A reply in the light of Chapters 1 and 2 can proceed as follows: (1) the rejected theories, speaking as they do of “persons,” their “sameness,” and the like, are all linguistically expressed; (2) the theories are not, however, translations of mental, nonlinguistic versions by whose truth the theories can or should be judged; (3) their truth must therefore be assessed linguistically as well as nonlinguistically, in accordance with the Principle of Relative Similarity; (4) the outcome of such an assessment clearly favors Vardy’s commonsense view that personal identity persists through the years; (5) this agreement with Vardy on the persistence of personal identity is no mere coincidence or fortunate accident, for Vardy both knows and here appropriately uses the English language; (6) however, he sees no need to cite or invoke the support of this tacit linguistic backing; (7) he may therefore not always be so fortunate in his assertions—for instance, when he writes as follows concerning postmortem survival: One necessary condition, however, would be for the existence of memory. If spatio-temporal continuity is broken (as it is when we die and our human bodies decay) then some identity criteria are essential. Memory must be one essential component of this. Our lives may contain painful memories, but in the absence of these memories or of the spatio-temporal continuity of our bodies, we could not claim to be the same person. Memories are essential—even though we may see the painful memories in a new light.20

If memories are essential, what about people who in this life lose their memories? Are they then different people? Do they lose their identity, or do their bodies

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come to the rescue and save it, at least here in this life if not hereafter? There is no telling so long as we keep using language while ignoring its relevance for the truth of what we say. So what happens if, broadening our horizons, we take account, here as elsewhere, of language’s role as a basic codeterminant, together with the reality described, of the truth of our assertions?

Persons “If the flesh cannot be saved,” writes Irenaeus, “then the Lord did not redeem us with his blood.” Irenaeus’s shift from “the flesh” to “us” is worth noting, for, continuing the resurrection theme, this early theologian writes, “A grain of wheat, falling into the earth and decomposing, rises with plentiful increase through the Spirit of God who contains all things.”21 In the process thus described, is it the grain of wheat that rises? Or, more accurately, has it ceased to exist in giving birth to this new life? As noted, a similar identity query has been raised even regarding our present, bodily existence. Thus Wendell Johnson has written (indicating, when relevant, the year referred to by each “I”): “ ‘I was a shy and homely child’ involves, as it stands, a fantastic misstatement of fact. I1946 never was a child. It was I1910 who was shy and homely. Certainly I1946 and I1910 are not the same . . . This is one of those perfectly obvious things that we so commonly overlook.”22 Clearly, conceptual scrutiny that yields such a bizarre conclusion, itself merits scrutiny. But Susan Blackmore goes even further:  “[E]very time I  seem to exist, this is just a temporary fiction and not the same ‘me’ who seemed to exist a moment before, or last week, or last year. This is tough, but I think it gets easier with practice.”23 It shouldn’t. For here in these remarks is a further illustration of the relevance of Chapter 1 and the need for its reminder: A statement is true if, and only if, its use of terms (e.g., “I,” “me”), comprehensively considered, resembles more closely the established (standard or stipulated) uses of terms than would the substitution of any rival, incompatible expression (e.g., “he,” “him”). This is not mere “folk psychology” but linguistic sanity; the alternative is conceptual chaos.24 As native speakers of a language, for instance, English, we know unreflectively more or less what determines the “self-sameness” of a table (e.g., spatiotemporal continuity), a day (e.g., the date), a river (e.g., having the same name), a tune (having the same distribution of notes, regardless of timbre, pitch, instrument, or loudness). Such linguistic criteria differ widely from class to class, for those classes that have identity criteria in the language. But what counts, in English, as being the same thought, the same dream, the same experience, the same

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mistake, the same mystery? On occasion, the answer may be clear from the context. But language-wide, in English as in other languages, for many such terms as these there are no criteria either of individuation (accounting for the singular) or, less basically, of identity (determining the sameness of individuals thus individuated); and without such criteria, there is no point arguing for or against an identity. So a relevant question, it appears, is whether criteria of either individuation or identity are or could still be applicable, postmortem, to people. It would seem that they cannot. For inner indications of people’s identity are, on the whole, more variable, less accessible, and less reliable than outer indications. There Sally is, unmistakable, all five feet six inches of her, minute by minute and hour by hour. Yet regarding what she may wordlessly be thinking we typically have no clue. Even if she speaks, she may not believe a word she utters for our benefit. So, how could linguistic criteria of identity or individuation ever develop or survive in a linguistic community if those criteria were attached to such a chaotic, inaccessible flux and flow of inner experience? We might as well try attaching proper names to passing clouds. If, then, we wish to distinguish between linguistic criteria of identity and mere fallible clues of such identity (e.g., a person’s signature), or, still more basically, between criteria of individuation and criteria of identity, we had better in the case of human beings consider not the fluctuating contents of their consciousness but, for instance, such matters as their parents, sex, blood type, and life history. And yet, for present purposes, do all these linguistic niceties really matter? Compare the identity of a person with that of a caterpillar which weaves a cocoon, gestates within it, and emerges as a butterfly. Would it perhaps be more accurate to say that the butterfly emerges from the caterpillar rather than as a butterfly? After all, the butterfly is not a caterpillar, much less the same caterpillar. But is it perhaps the same insect? Or the same living thing? Who is to say? Where can pertinent linguistic backing be discovered for a claim either way? And again, does it matter? Similarly, the human significance of postmortem identity looks as mysterious as its nature or possibility. On these matters philosophers have, I fear, shed more obscurity than light.25

Near-death experiences Though many investigators into “near-death experiences” were at first highly skeptical, such reports became so numerous that, as Terence Nichols suggests, to call them all into question “one would have to suppose a worldwide conspiracy among investigators and experiencers, all of whom have nothing to gain from

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such a conspiracy but have a lot to lose, namely, their professional credibility.”26 Thus one of the earlier doubters, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, more recently wrote, I have studied thousands of patients all around the world who have had out-ofbody or near-death experiences . . . The common denominator of these out-ofbody experiences is that these people were totally aware of leaving their physical body. There was a rush of air or wind, and then they found themselves in the vicinity of where they were originally struck down: the scene of an accident, a hospital emergency room, at home in their own bed . . . They described the scene of the accident in minute detail, including the arrival of people who tried to rescue them from a car or tried to put out a fire, and the arrival of an ambulance. Yes, they described accurately even the number of blowtorches used to extricate their mangled body from the wrecked car.27

Among the examples Kübler-Ross provides of such experiences, some are more directly related than others to the question of an afterlife. For instance, she writes of a family involved in a serious car accident: “Yes, everything is all right now. Mommy and Peter are already waiting for me,” one boy replied. With a content little smile, he slipped back into a coma from which he made the transition which we call death. I was quite aware that his mother had died at the scene of the accident, but Peter had not died. He had been brought to a special burn unit in another hospital severely burnt, because the car had caught fire before he was extricated from the wreckage. Since I was only collecting data, I accepted the boy’s information and determined to look in on Peter. It was not necessary, however, because as I passed the nursing station there was a call from the other hospital to inform me that Peter had died a few minutes earlier.28

Regarding such episodes and their significance, Kübler-Ross comments, In all the years that I  have quietly collected data from California to Sidney, Australia; from white and black children, aboriginals, Eskimos, South Americans, and Libyan youngsters, every single child who mentioned that someone was waiting for them mentioned a person who had actually preceded them in death, even if by only a few moments. And yet none of these children had been informed of the recent deaths of the relatives by us at any time. Coincidence? By now there is no scientist or statistician who could convince me that this occurs, as some colleagues claim, as “a result of oxygen deprivation” or for other “rational and scientific” reasons.29

Nichols pertinently notes that “one of the most frequent consequences of an NDE is a radical change in attitude and lifestyle. NDE patients typically become less

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materialistic, less selfish, less competitive, more altruistic, and more concerned with persons and with spiritual things.”30 One student of these matters “tells of a colleague who admitted fascination with NDEs but could not embrace them because they seem to imply body-soul dualism. He felt he had to reject either the empirical data in favor of NDEs or give up his philosophical sophistication.”31 Pertinently, earlier chapters here have already suggested what mystery-accommodating depths lie between, beneath, or beyond the alternatives of body-soul dualism and reductive materialism.

Factual impoverishment Jerome Shaffer has cited “a sort of negative evidence against [afterlife] survival”:  If there were such a thing, would it not be likely that there would be more positive evidence for it than there is? Would we not expect more in the way of messages from these disembodied survivors? Is not lack of such evidence further reason to think that it does not exist, or, at the least, that it is powerless to affect the physical world?32

Shaffer does not suggest why we should expect messages or visits from those in the afterlife (butterflies, e.g., do not return to the cocoon), and his remarks are of interest for that reason. Of still greater interest is his ignorance or unquestioning dismissal of the kind of evidence he deems necessary. Allison, reviewing accounts of encounters with the departed, which are so numerous and so varied, at one point cites, with understandable hesitation, some experiences of his own. The following one resembles somewhat the experience of J.  B Phillips, mentioned earlier here in this chapter: One of my best friends was, in 1987, tragically run over by a drunk driver. After several weeks in a coma, she died, along with her unborn baby. About a week after this, I awakened in the middle of the night. There, standing at the end of my bed, was my friend Barbara. She said nothing; she simply was there. Her appearance did not match the traditional lore about ghosts. She was not faint or transparent or frightening. She was to the contrary beautiful and brightly luminous and intensely real. Her transfigured, triumphant presence, which lasted only a few seconds, gave me great comfort. Although she said nothing, this thought entered my mind: this sight is ineffably beautiful, and any person in that state would be ineffably beautiful. Whatever the explanation, this is just exactly what happened.33

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Such experiences can no more readily be dismissed out of hand or explained away than can, for example, Marietta Jaeger’s theistic experience, described in Chapter 6, or comparable experiences still to be considered, in Chapter 10.

The mystery of personal afterlife We have no problem accepting that a rock can last for billions of years, despite its being far from simple—composed as it is of millions of atoms, and those of trillions of subatomic particles—and despite great remaining physical puzzles and irresolvable metaphysical mysteries regarding the realities we facilely refer to as “atoms,” “subatomic particles,” and the like. Yet regarding the possibility of meaningful talk about the survival of ourselves, who pose a still greater mystery—physical, metaphysical, spiritual, or whatever—we can and do express serious difficulties. So here is a puzzle worth parsing. There is no contradiction in the notion of life following death or of one person succeeding another, but, as a dying woman puts it in John Perry’s “Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality,” “In a few days I will quit breathing, I will be put into a coffin, I will be buried. And in a few months or a few years I will be reduced to so much humus.”34 This she takes as obvious, as given. What sense does it make to suggest that she will survive? And yet, according to Christian belief the Father’s love for Jesus is shown by raising Jesus, not some other individual; and God’s love for those whose very hairs are numbered is shown by raising those people, not look-alikes. Thus, the Christian does not merely hold that there shall be people living a blessed life in the world to come, nor even that such people will in some way or other be very much like some people who have lived here. He believes that it is these very people themselves, the people who have begun their careers in this world and here suffered the agony of death, who will share that blessed life. And when he believes in or hopes for that destiny for himself it is indeed for himself.35

As Gerald O’Collins remarks, in Luke the risen Lord “does not say, ‘I was Jesus,’ still less, ‘I come in place of Jesus,’ but he announces, ‘It is I myself ’ (24:39).”36 Hence it seems that a crucial problem regarding afterlife, facing Christians, Muslims, and others, is that of identity: can personal sameness persist beyond this present life? Once we leave our familiar world behind, the deeper becomes the significance of Paul’s words, “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). We need not have

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a name for it. And how important will it be to know that, in our once-native tongue, we can truthfully say, “It’s still me,” or, “It’s mine”? How important, we might ask regarding Jesus’s parable, was the mine-thine distinction for that Good Samaritan who shared his time, care, mount, oil, and money with that half-dead traveler by the wayside? Self-concern evanesces still more completely in the Pauline vision of a Mystical Body in which the individual members, from Head to outermost extremities, turn in attentive interest and regard toward one another and toward all. Personal concerns about an afterlife may be somewhat mitigated by such reflections as these, but not entirely; for here, as often, the conceptual and the factual tend to get conflated. Linguistic criteria of identity, being mainly bodily, do not readily apply to existence with a new or basically altered body, and still less to a bodiless existence. So no matter how real and satisfying such a prospective state may be or how satisfyingly continuous it may be with our present existence, if the linguistic (“conceptual”) link is snapped or questioned and is not recognized as being linguistic, that future state may lose significance for us. The same concern is likely to persist even within the perspective of a bodily afterlife: if the future body is not the same body, will that future person still be me? But again: will it matter? Was Saint Teresa in ecstasy concerned about whose body she was in? How much difference does it make whether the limb in which we feel a pleasant sensation is the one we were born with or a transplant? Consider again the case of C.  S. Lewis. Was it Lewis himself, I  queried, in that appearance to Phillips, or was it a simulacrum? If it was Lewis himself, it was a very different Lewis—different enough to start us wondering again about criteria of personal identity and their satisfaction or nonsatisfaction. However, becoming still more general, we might instead recall the Principle of Relative Similarity and notice that, according to that elastic norm, Lewis might be very greatly changed and still qualify as a “person” and as the “same person.” So yes, Lewis himself may have appeared to Phillips.

Variations Wittgenstein’s diagnosis has strong relevance here:  “A main cause of philosophical disease—a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example.”37 Drawing on our experience, we can readily surmise a great many ways in which people may alter, perhaps quite radically—physically, emotionally, intellectually—and still remain the same people. But, nourishing our thinking with only such this-worldly variances as these, we may find no

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place for afterlife hypotheses. Here, the butterfly comparison above has suggested a first broadening of perspectives. Without observing the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, we would never dream of such a possibility. But now we have observed it, and some of us have explained it. We have not puzzled ourselves, however, regarding the “identity” of the butterfly with the caterpillar. Why should we? There is sameness, there is difference, there is continuity, and life continues. Following Wittgenstein’s advice further, we can change the comparison. Think, for example, of a symphony that is performed, recorded, then played from the recording. Think of a movie that is acted, filmed, then shown to audiences. To our ancestors all this would be magic, whereas to us it is familiar. But here, too, we have not troubled ourselves with questions of identity, nor have we seen the need to do so: there is sameness, there is difference, there is continuity, and the symphony, the movie, continues. Now, which of these comparisons is here perhaps most apt? Who is to say? Still, accounts such as those just cited and others still to come are suggestive, and should not be too readily dismissed as illusory. I recall in this regard the tale told me by a Belgian friend who taught long ago in Rwanda. On a visit with his young charges to Lake Kivu, spotting a distant ship disappearing over the horizon, he pointed it out in confirmation of their geography lesson about the spherical shape of the Earth. Eyes bugging, one youngster gasped, “It’s true!” Without the experience, he had not believed a word of the white man’s nonsense. With it, his attitude changed.

“Tedious”? Particles may persist and planets may pursue their paths for countless ages without any risk of their getting bored, but what of us human beings? In “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” Bernard Williams recounts the tale of EM (Emilia Marty), the protagonist in a play, who lives for hundreds of years and ends up bored to death. “In general we can ask,” writes Williams, “what it is about the imaged activities of an eternal life which would stave off the principal hazard to which EM succumbed, boredom.”38 Doubtless the most appropriate answer would again be Paul’s: no eye has seen, nor human heart conceived what God has in store, either for individual human beings or for the human race. And indeed, what divinity, we may wonder, would so fail in creative imagination that even such limited beings as ourselves would grow tired of the result? Has God written a book with no satisfactory ending? Here,

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focusing as Williams did on individual people, I will just note several of the more interesting possible responses to Williams’s quandary.39 To begin with, in accounts such as Saint Teresa’s of her mystical experiences, in which time and boredom were swallowed up, we may glimpse a reply to the objection that an unending life would be a life of tedium. Even at a more homely, terrestrial level, I recall, for instance, once losing track of time when listening to a professional raconteur of Irish folk tales recite story after story. At the end I could hardly believe I had been listening for two hours! Teresa’s recollections suggest that God, not surprisingly, might do still better: That cannot be told which [the soul] feels when our Lord admits it to the understanding of His secrets and of His mighty works. The joy of this is so far beyond all conceivable joys, that it may well make us loathe all the joys of earth; for they are all but dross; and it is an odious thing to make them enter into the comparison, even if we might have them forever. Those [joys] which Our Lord gives, what are they? One drop only of the waters of the overflowing river which He is reserving for us.40

The inexhaustible, ever-flowing river, we might add. For otherwise, as presently constituted, we might not experience forever the joy that Teresa describes. However, what needs to be questioned, more basically, with regard to the possible tedium of immortality, is whether boredom with the familiar is an inalienable or eternally desirable aspect of our human nature. As an adult, I would not want the storyteller to tell the same tale over and over again (still less in identical words), but a child might. And this would indicate a deficiency not in the child but in me. Chesterton draws the contrast with characteristic vigor:  A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.41

“Strong enough” may not be quite the right phrase, but it is true that what appeals to children a tenth time may not appeal to us adults even a third or fourth time. We more readily tire of the game, the story, the song. Eventually, we may weary of a world as fantastic as this one, because it has grown familiar. Why this is so, invites conjecture. However, whatever the explanation, we need only imagine ourselves experiencing things—flowers, fields, stories, people, seasons,

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symphonies, sunsets, games, elephants, stars, hobbies, tasks, festivities—with the freshness of children, to take a long first stride toward conceiving what heaven might be like. Two further strides would take us still closer. Imagine away all present pains, tribulations, and anxieties, then heighten our experiences and activities to the ecstatic level suggested, for example, by Teresa, and that would be heaven. Extend the experiences and activities indefinitely, without loss of youthful appreciation, and that would be eternal life. If, then, God’s love is eternal, this is what we may expect. We shall dwell in the house of the Lord for endless years to come (Psalm 23). Let this suffice regarding our individual human prospects, here viewed in abstraction from the actual existence but not the possibility of God. Before the next chapter’s shift to the global, long-term prospects of the race, similarly viewed, the cumulative picture presented by Chapter  3, Chapter  4, and the present survey can be summarized as follows: ●

● ●

●

●

The nature of the material world, including our bodies, is deeply mysterious to us. The nature of our mental world is equally mysterious. More obscure, therefore, is the relationship between these domains. We, being both bodily and mental, are deeply, multiply mysterious to ourselves. Hence our individual human possibilities are equally obscure and, when viewed collectively, historically, and transhistorically with reference to the question of God, as in the coming chapter, they still more obviously exceed our human grasp or estimation. Yet there, too, possible intimations can be spotted of things to come.

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Given surprise after major surprise in the history of scientific inquiry, on the one hand, and the deep, enduring mysteries of metaphysical theorizing, on the other, neither the possibilities of terrestrial catastrophe nor continuing predictions of eventual cosmic demise negate theistic visions of a transcendent future for humankind nor, therewith, rational belief in a transcendently powerful, provident God. What kind of a divinity would start a world as astonishing as ours and not finish it in more transcendent style than the closing cosmic whimper Bertrand Russell envisaged? “So far as scientific evidence goes,” wrote Russell, “the universe has crawled by slow stages to a somewhat pitiful result on this earth and is going to crawl by still more pitiful stages to a condition of universal death. If this is to be taken as evidence of purpose, I can only say that the purpose is one that does not appeal to me.”1 As Jerry Walls observes, What is troubling about Russell’s picture and what requires ‘unyielding despair’ is the certainty that everything we deeply cherish, everything that has made life worth living, will come to ruins in the end. The specter of everything coming to such an end forms a dark, foreboding cloud hovering over all of life and raises inevitable questions about its very meaning and purpose, and indeed, of whether it has any at all.2

Theistic long-term perspectives, such as this personal one penned long ago in Italy, tend to be more optimistic: From high up, on the ancient crater’s rim, the scene is one of peaceful beauty: Lake Albano sparkling below, a boat or two dotting its surface, slopes verdant with pines and other vegetation, Castel Gandolfo nestled to the west, villas sprinkled round the other sides, puffs of cloud floating serenely overhead. Idyllic! Then the thought comes:  How different everything looked when this

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crater was being formed and harsh lava flowed that later became this fertile soil! How raw, rough, and violent the scene was then! So now, in our troubled times of human ugliness, violence, and sin, with volcanic bubblings everywhere, this contrast can be reassuring. For how, we might naturally wonder, can the Kingdom—“a kingdom of justice, love, and peace”—ever emerge from such colossal chaos as this!?

Facing similarly troubled times, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—philosopher, theologian, paleontologist, and prophet of a future discernible, he believed, not only in Christian scripture or human history but more clearly in the entire unfolding of the universe—offered a fuller forecast of better things to come.

Omega? Teilhard distinguished between an “inner” and an “outer” aspect of our universe’s history and, bypassing the deep philosophical perplexities of the previous chapter, focused more closely on the latter, “outer” aspect. The result has sometimes been criticized as “empty rhetoric with nothing to offer on the actual causes of evolution,”3 but Teilhard’s chief interest lay elsewhere. “Do not, therefore,” he advised at the start of The Human Phenomenon, “look in these pages for an explanation of the world, but only an introduction to an explanation.”4 Though the resulting account, focused “wholly and completely in the context of appearance,”5 differs greatly from what has been termed the “archetypal illustration of cosmic evolution”—“galaxies first, then stars, followed by planets, and eventually life forms,”6 it does not contradict it. Viewing our world in three dimensions, Teilhard first noted, we see human societies composed of individual human beings, human beings composed of cells, cells composed of molecules, molecules composed of atoms, atoms composed of a confusing variety of subatomic particles. Adding the time dimension, we recognize each of these levels as representing a stage of cosmic evolution: atoms grouping into ever more complex molecules, molecules then grouping into ever more complex cells, cells then grouping into ever more complex organisms, humans then grouping into ever more complex societies. But now, Teilhard surmised, this process has reached its final terrestrial stage and is heading toward a new threshold. For at each step, at each breakthrough to a new level, the resulting configurations have been larger and their worldwide spread has been speedier, so that now, at the present level of near-maximum complexity and size, some human societies already girdle the globe. What we can therefore

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nal breakthrough to a new nitive because evolution continuing on a galactic scale appears unfeasible). Conceiving this ultimate terrestrial goal in theistic, Christian terms, he labeled the endpoint “Omega.” Teilhard viewed this futuristic vision of his not just as Christian prophecy c inference. For, much as scientists seek repeated patterns which they may then extrapolate and label “laws,” so here we discern cosmicterrestrial regularities which, Teilhard believed, merit comparable recognition. gure, held special interest. At the stage preceding human evolution, biological organisms developed profusely, in ever greater complexity and diversity, from single cells to plankton, sea urchins, birds, mammals, humans. Now, at our stage, we see human social forms developing in similar profusion, from families to tribes, city states, nations, regional confederations, and world organizations. And as the ever-mounting complexity and size of biological formations required ever more developed nervous systems, so we observe ever more complex systems of social communication (telegraph, telephone, radio, airmail, television, e-mail, Google, twitter, etc.) proliferating at an ever-quickening pace and facilitating ever more rapid, worldwide interaction. From within the biosphere there has emerged and continues to rise this global “noosphere.” y outlined? erences have consistently arisen, the parallel just sketched between the biological and the human levels does not preclude new freedom at the human level, and such freedom may cast doubt on Teilhard’s predictions. For in the past, tugged this way and that, humanity has er another; and doubtless it will continue to re, build a bridge, harness electricity, or introduce a better form of government, and people will use it. So, too, full awareness of our cosmic and terrestrial past by the assurance, vastness, or ultimate optimism of Teilhard’s predictions. Others, for instance Harvey Cox, have written with similar assurance that, “for blessing or for bane, we will have a world civilization. When Hocking and Toynbee and their cohort talked about a world civilization, it was still a surmise or a hope. Today we are there, or nearly so.”7 Should such expectations appear mere pipedreams, recall that placid present lake where, like so many so widely, a volcano once spewed devastation. Still, we may wonder. What about possible comet impacts, perhaps as globally lethal as some in the past? What about the

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threat of worldwide nuclear conflagration? Will a worldwide federation, similar to the union of the previously warring European Union nations, perhaps take shape in time to forestall nuclear disaster? Comparing Teilhard’s “metaphysics of the future” with the less theological but equally positive vision of John Stewart, Hugh McElwain has written, “The primary critical factor here is the acquisition, with the appearance and continuous evolution of humans, of the ability to project and give direction to our future. More specifically, we must engage in conscious/self-guided evolution and develop an evolutionary path which leads us to the design of a civil society that will sustain and nourish the community of life on earth.”8 History, alas, is full of such calls to higher wisdom. One thinks of Woodrow Wilson, the Treaty of Versailles, and the world war that Wilson sought to avert and that Versailles largely brought about. No doubt higher wisdom may get some help from a lower, pragmatic variety—the kind of basic good sense that keeps drivers on the prescribed side of the road and makes citizens ready, if not eager, to finance fire departments. Still, looking back on the world wars of the past century and how they arose, one cannot feel sanguine about humanity’s collective, largescale common sense. What human beings must do in order to survive, they may nonetheless one day fail to do. In response, McElwain (continuing his Teilhard/Stewart comparison) suggests that this would/could all change once humans become aware of the direction of evolution and the capacity to use it to guide their own future evolution. As humans begin consciously to pursue future evolutionary success and to learn to bring their personal values in line with this objective, they will produce a planetary society that also pursues evolutionary goals. And since this planetary society would manage matter, energy, and life to serve the needs and values of its members, it would also serve their evolutionary needs and objectives. The society as a whole would develop plans, strategies, projects, and goals designed to maximize its contribution to the successful evolution of life in the universe.9

So it might turn out. But with this “would/could” alternative left undecided, it appears that for Teilhard’s optimistic assurance about the future he had need of something more than his scientific vision of past, present, and future. Believing in Alpha—a purposeful creation—he believed also in Omega beckoning evolution forward. Of such belief in its more traditional form, Nagel has observed,

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A theistic self-understanding, for those who find it compelling to see the world as the expression of divine intention, would leave intact our natural confidence in our cognitive faculties. But it would not be the kind of understanding that explains how beings like us fit into the world. The kind of intelligibility that would still be missing is intelligibility of the natural order itself—intelligibility from within.10

Such, aptly expressed, is the perspective that Teilhard offered, and such is its interest. Its specific interest here is as a response to Russell’s cosmic, atheistic pessimism. Looking far ahead, as did Russell, Teilhard wrote, The radical defect of all forms of faith in progress as expressed in the positivist creeds is that they do not definitively eliminate death. What is the use of having detected some kind of focal point at the forefront of evolution if it can and must someday come apart? To satisfy the supreme demands of our action, Omega must be independent of the collapse of the powers with which evolution is woven.11

Yet Teilhard, his trust fixed above and beyond the present scene, saw no reason for despair:  “No one who has ever had the slightest glimpse of the incredible potential for the unexpected accumulated in the spirit of the Earth would dare to portray what the final appearance of the noosphere will be.”12 Russell himself prefaced his dire predictions with the qualifying phrase “so far as scientific evidence goes.” And when we shift from the universe’s history to science’s history, a different scenario comes into focus, of ever-new discoveries, ever-new possibilities, in ever-broadening perspectives and horizons.

Scientific paradigms The story of the rejection, then eventual acceptance, of Alfred Wegener’s theory of drifting continents is instructive. Wegener, an astronomer and meteorologist but not (he was pointedly reminded) a professional geologist, was not the first scientist to conceive that continents might move, but he was the first to compile extensive geological, geodetic, and paleontological evidence in the theory’s favor—enough to convince him of its basic correctness. He was particularly impressed by the “jigsaw puzzle” fit of the west coast of Africa with the east coast of South America. Another clue was the discovery on different continents of fossils of identical plant and animal species that apparently lived at the same

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time. The theory of drifting continents could also explain the pressures that created mountain ranges such as the Appalachians and the Himalayas. Again, the Paleozoic glaciation in such locations as southern Africa, South America, and India could be accounted for by positing that the continents had once been a single landmass which then gradually split apart to form our present continents. The hypothesis of continental drift made sense of so much evidence that Wegener was convinced of its general validity. His book, issued in 1915 and in successive, expanded editions, caused a stir. “No previous suggestion of continental movements,” notes Roger McCoy, “had ever evoked such strong response as did Wegener’s, probably because no one had ever presented such a comprehensive body of supporting and converging evidence.”13 Yet, although a London convention received Wegener’s theory with cautious interest, its negative reception at a later gathering, in Atlantic City in 1926, proved a turning point. There, speaker after speaker expressed sharp dissent, attacking Wegener personally and finding fault with his thinking, writing, and research. As McCoy comments, “Wegener’s hypothesis was too comprehensive and covered too many lines of evidence for any one person to disprove it totally. So critics put attention on the details, not the overriding question of lateral mobility of continents. The details of the drift hypothesis had numerous flaws that became easy targets for criticism without consideration of the broader issue.”14 So Wegener’s ideas became the butt of jokes in university classes. In explanation of this negative reception, McCoy suggests that Wegener had proposed an idea that ran exactly counter to the thought of most geologists and geophysicists of his time. For him to even suggest that the continents could move laterally was absurd in most minds. His hypothesis suggested that the earth was not rigid and that tremendous unknown forces (much greater than those he proposed) were at work moving continents. He was a heretic storming the established thinking.15

And yet, as it turned out, he was right. This incident is no oddity in the history of innovative thought. In a review of Pagan Kennedy’s Inventology:  How We Dream Up Things That Change the World, Clive Thompson pertinently writes, “Why would outsiders be the ones to grasp the answer? Because when we’re insiders, we suffer from déformation professionnelle—the gorgeous French phrase Kennedy unearths that describes industrial groupthink. You get stuck in your discipline’s intellectual ruts. The inventors whom Kennedy profiles invariably have fingers in many pies”16—as Wegener so notably did.

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It can hardly come as a surprise, this tale suggests, if futuristic surmises such as theists like Teilhard have entertained are in certain circles received with similar skepticism. Yet those conjectures resemble and extend an impressive series of cases comparable to Wegener’s. How wrong, for example, so many were for so long regarding the movement of the sun relative to the Earth. More broadly, “There was a time,” writes Ernan McMullin, when mechanical agency was thought to be of a simple push-pull sort; in that perspective, the action of the Creator, particularly in the context of human free choice, seemed deeply puzzling. But, gradually, progress in astronomy and later in mechanics more generally has forced the realization that mechanical agency is far more complex than that, indeed that it stretches almost unbearably the very boundaries of the human imagination to grapple with the ontologies that now suggest themselves.17

The behavior of Foucault’s pendulum, swinging relative to the Earth’s rotation, forced us to conclude that, contrary to strong preconceptions, “there exists a sort of interaction totally different from those described by recognized physics, a mysterious interaction that does not involve any force, nor exchange of energy, but that connects the whole universe together.”18 Louis Pasteur’s discovery of microscopic agents of illness and infection elicited initial incredulity, as did the Curies’ equally unexpected detection of elements that steadily, systematically decompose, forming new combinations. The narrow, static world of Genesis has become the great, evolving biosphere of Darwin and the vast, expanding universe of contemporary astronomy. With Einstein, Newton’s world was relativized. With Bohr, Einstein’s world became unpredictable. In 1933 Ernest Rutherford, who had discovered that heavy elements produce radiation by atomic decay, could declare that “anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine”19; yet now development of that power source is familiar history. A more inventive term, codswallop, was applied to the Alvarezes’ hypothesis of a great extinction caused by a meteor strike, but then the Chicxulub crater was discovered off the Yucatan Peninsula. Only recently have we come to realize how much company that meteor then had, and that even now, as Earth speeds on its apparently solitary path around the Sun, it plows through hundreds of tons of celestial debris per day. Again, [u]ntil recent decades, the cell was a “black box,” which evolutionary biologists could assume would produce the postulated mutations. But . . . due to the patient and clever work of generations of scientists, this black box has been opened. And one finds that, as life is examined at smaller and smaller scales, the structures and

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processes seem not simpler and more elementary, but increasingly complicated. Indeed what goes on in the simplest cell is of staggering complexity.20

Repeatedly, and ever more rapidly, new perspectives keep opening. Physicists thought they could explain light in terms of particles, then of waves, but now it appears that light cannot be defined in terms of anything simpler than itself. Quantum mechanics has raised its own deep puzzles. For example, “A careful analysis of the logical structure of quantum theory suggests that for quantum theory to make sense it has to posit the existence of observers who lie, at least in part, outside the description provided by physics.”21 This controversial claim helps to explain why, regarding the future of quantum mechanics and its mysteries, Steven Weinberg concludes, “I have to echo Viola in Twelfth Night:  ‘O time, thou must untangle this, not I.’ ”22 Similarly, astronomers knew nothing about the Big Bang, and now have no explanation for it; it breaks the cosmic continuity in a manner more radical than any that Russell, gazing ahead, conceived or could imagine. So cosmologists now busily speculate about extra, unperceived, perhaps unperceivable dimensions of the physical universe. “What could be more an unquestionable fact, for example,” comments Barr, “than the number of dimensions of space? And yet physicists now routinely study hypothetical universes that have only one or two dimensions of space, or that have dozens of dimensions. Indeed, the leading candidate for the ultimate unified theory says that there are in reality ten space dimensions.”23 And as I  write, Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space turns speculation in a different direction: “Even as he dethroned us from the center of the universe, Galileo couldn’t envision the galaxies and faraway marvels that astronomers would see with more powerful telescopes. The sonic universe might serenade mysteries just as enormous and just as unimaginable to us today.”24 Thus “it is somewhat paradoxical,” writes Marcelo Gleiser, “that the more we know about the universe, the more we seem not to know.” For example, “We know the amounts that go into the cosmic recipe”—“ordinary matter, like protons and electrons, which make up no more than 5 percent of the total; an unknown form (or forms) of dark matter, making up about 30 percent of the total; and an unknown form (or forms) of dark energy making up the rest”—“but not most of the ingredients.”25 Indeed, present perplexity about dark matter is so profound that it may one day be judged as superfluous as science’s once-popular ether. Yet even then, “as Krauss and Turner gloomily remarked, ‘We may never be confident that any presently inferred dynamical evolution can be extrapolated indefinitely into the future.’ ”26 For chaos theory distressingly

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chimes in to suggest that “[l]aws constrain randomness in such a way that their mutual entanglement produces enormously complex systems with ordered regimes of higher-level, stable behavior emerging from specially organized, stable, lower-level components. Subtle changes in environmental conditions can flip components into spectacularly different regimes of behavior, thereby changing the tuning of systematic components all the way up the hierarchy of complexity.”27 Lurking in the background, “What scientists have stumbled upon, in superstrings, is a mathematical structure of such towering grandeur that they cannot help but call it ‘miraculous.’ It is of a beauty that only a few mathematicians are able to discern, and even the greatest experts feel that they are seeing only a small part of it.”28 Clearly, we have traveled far from a simple Russellian view of the universe, crawling in “pitiful stages” toward “a condition of universal death.” What we can now predict with some assurance is such continuing, colossal surprises that were St. Paul writing today he would have reason to amplify his words: “Truly, eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor mind conceived what God has in store, not only for humans individually but for the human race and the universe it presently calls home.” Yet even the preceding paragraphs’ broad empirical sketch is barely half the story, for it skirts the metaphysical depths here noted in earlier chapters. William Stoeger, after sketching a different collection of basic scientific discoveries (“The Quantum Physics Constellation”), casts a rapid glance in this further direction. From these somewhat startling discoveries, it is now clear that we, as human knowers, do not have a purchase on physical reality as it is in itself. What we know about it, particularly at the quantum level, is inextricably convolved with our observation of it. Our knowledge is founded on the reality that is “out there,” but we can never compare how it is in itself with how we observe it, because we have no independent handle on the former. These surprising and somewhat unsettling developments have served to underscore in a new way the limits to our knowledge about the physical reality we investigate, our essential distance from it, and the essentially evanescent and indeterminate characteristics it manifests at these submicroscopic levels. This has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on other types of knowledge, on our understanding of human knowledge itself, and on the character of physical reality in general.29

Still deeper perspectives beckon beyond these, but with regard to human beings and their prospects, there is already a strong, clear lesson in all this. Looking at a caterpillar, we might never imagine that, some day, somehow, a

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butterfly would or could emerge from it. Indeed the suggestion might sound farfetched. But then, to our astonishment, we see it happen and, seeing it, we may then (with difficulty) scientifically explain it. No comparably precise experiential or scientific discovery is conceivable, however, with respect to human beings and their ultimate possibilities. Chapter  3, with its irresolvable multiplicity of conflicting cosmological theories, has indicated one enduring obstacle. Chapter  4, with its irresolvable dichotomy of matter and mind has indicated another. And Chapter 10 will pass to pertinent realms of still deeper mystery. So, in the end, on fuller consideration Teilhard’s words ring still truer: “No one who has ever had the slightest glimpse of the incredible potential for the unexpected accumulated in the spirit of the Earth would dare to portray what the final appearance of the noosphere will be.”

Beyond the beyond Were humans as simple as materialism and determinism portray them, their prospects, whether individual or collective, would be clearer—namely, their eventual extinction. As it is, not only do this and the preceding chapter open deep mysteries, but between them they point to still greater depths. How, we may now consider, do these chapters’ two perspectives, regarding individual and collective humanity, perhaps interrelate? Will human individuals, if they survive, go their separate, mysterious ways, century after century or millennium after millennium, with the human race then taking a separate, different direction at the end? Will there, instead, perhaps be some kind of final grand reunion? Or will convergence start occurring earlier, somehow, along the way? These flailing queries invite comparison with contemporary science. For there, as Stoeger recounts, Relativity and cosmology typically deal with physical reality on the very largest scales, and treat the geometry and evolution of space-time through the gravitational interaction and its intimate relation with mass-energy. Quantum physics and fundamental particle and field theory, in contrast, focus on physical reality on microscopic and submicroscopic scales, and particularly on the interactions mass and energy, in their different forms, exhibit at higher and higher energies through the electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear interactions.

There in science “the developments in these two constellations have proceeded independently from one another for many decades . . . There was little need for

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unification or even dialogue between the two at a fundamental level.” And yet, “there was the dawning realization, present even at the time of Einstein and his contemporaries, that ultimately the two realms must fit together in a unified scheme.”30 So it is for theistic eschatology, short-term and long-term, individual and collective, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. I  am therefore presented with the option of either prudently foregoing any speculative response regarding the future of humanity or turning, instead, from theory to suggestive allegory. For those with an interest in the latter, I offer the following broad vision. Beyond even Teilhard’s surmises of what lies in the distant future, a contemporary theistic visionary might develop somewhat as follows, in successive steps, the early Christian metaphor of death as second birth. 1. As within the womb the manner of conception is beyond surmise, so within our universe its origin is shrouded in deepest mystery. To cover that mystery (in both senses of the word “cover”), scentistic atheists often speak of, and aspire to eventually understand, the world’s “necessary” existence (see Chapter 4), while theistic philosophers, plumbing similar metaphysical depths, often speak instead of God’s existing “necessarily.” 2. The beginning of the cosmos is so distant and its resulting regularities have become so familiar that the regularities are now often viewed as “laws of nature.” Prospectively, therefore, the regularities and the limits of our world-womb may suggest, as they did for Russell, the eventual end of all life, individual or collective. For without the natural intra-world umbilical that presently sustains us, how can there be any further life? 3. This impression of a radical break has another, related source. This-world regularities are so familiar that we forget their strictly empirical nature, hence the mystery of the transempirical realm that (we believe) lies beyond them (Chapter 3), and hence our total ignorance of how much continuity might connect this world and another. 4. Though the difference between life inside and outside the womb is vast, both internally and externally to the person to be born, there is nonetheless much continuity from one to the other. And so it may be for present life, here in this world, and life hereafter. 5. As predictions, however veridical, of the fetus’s future both within and beyond the womb would, there in the womb, appear far-fetched, so, too, must our best surmises, however prescient, of what lies ahead for humankind, within or beyond the womb of time.

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6. And yet, as fetal growth continues within the maternal womb and intimations (pressures, sounds, even occasional bumps or blows) of an enveloping reality beyond that closed inner world there multiply, so it is for our closed terrestrial, this-worldly experience, where fleeting “intimations of immortality” may already be sensed. 7. On the whole (and quite naturally for us fearful descendants of early human times) the deep mystery thus suggested tends to be viewed as a dark mystery. A comparison such as this present one, between dark womb and radiant outer world, may counteract, if it does not remove, this fearful human outlook. (What a revelation to a Helen Keller would have been the gift of sight!) 8. Whether negative or positive, intrauterine hypothesizing about another world would have to be far from scientific. And with the unborn infant’s eyes covered by closed lids and the sun and its rays still so far beyond imagining, any suggestion of eventual “vision,” or visible objects, beyond the womb, would appear fanciful, “metaphysical,” out of the question. 9. Still more unrealistic might appear the suggestion that others, who had dwelt in that same womb and left it, now await “outside,” in a realm from which no one returns. (How, realistically, in either the uterine or a comparable cosmic scenario, could they return?) 10. Linguistically, as, in the absence of clear backing from usage, it may, for instance, be unclear whether a five-year-old child is the “same person” as an earlier five-month-old fetus, so it may be in the case of pre- and postdeath human beings. 11. Neither the womb nor the cosmos (it appears) will be fruitful forever. The time will come for cosmic, as for individual, menopause. But by then, this extended analogy suggests, the action will have moved elsewhere. Life will not end but will be transferred and transformed, in ways we could not possibly have imagined there within the womb. 12. As the temporal limitations of life within the womb cannot be extrapolated to life beyond the womb, so too for life beyond this present world. But here we can learn from the past. The Old Testament’s few thousand years of world history have become not just millions but billions, and our speculative groping now reaches still farther back. Similarly, the New Testament’s few remaining years for our world have become billions ahead, with equal mystery beyond. On reflection, these massive shifts, in us and our perceptions, make the message unmistakable: What lies ahead for humankind exceeds all human estimation.

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Here I have ventured a point-by-point analogy between our limited view of reality and the limited view within the womb. Jesus, teller of parables, might prefer a simpler version. But the realistic message in either case would be the same: transcendent mystery. Who, gazing ahead back in volcanic times billions of years ago, could have glimpsed or guessed pine-skirted Lake Albano, let alone Castel Gandolfo? As for the future, to us who are slow of understanding the thought may come:  what author of any skill, when writing the greatest, most engrossing tale of all, would make clear hundreds or thousands of years in advance just how the story would turn out? Indeed, what author could do so who, page by page, chapter by chapter, kept enlisting co-authors along the way? What author could do so who, in the end, perhaps planned to exercise authorial mastery in the radical way Christoph Schwöbel envisages:  In raising Jesus from the dead God reveals that even where all created possibilities have come to an end he will maintain his creative relationship to creation, which [relationship] is not dependent on any conditions apart from God’s power and which can therefore create ex nihilo. The resurrection of Jesus witnesses to the assertion of God’s unconditional creativity over against the exhausted possibilities of created matter to maintain its life.31

Most theists, Christian and other, would recognize that power and therefore that possibility.

9

Focusing

A survey of the problems with philosophical proofs in general, then with theistic proofs in particular, here explains and prepares for the more holistic approach of the coming final chapter. Whatever truth the individual classical theistic proofs contain must be situated within a larger framework. Chapter 1 sketched a dialectical movement, from mentalistic to antimentalistic to linguistic perspectives regarding truth, that is still far from complete. Cognitive comparatives, the class of expressions to which truth-terms belong, are still reflectively unrecognized by most people, and these terms, being probably the most complex members of that vast class, are shrouded in deep obscurity. Not surprisingly, then, many have given up on truth, truth-terms, and their supposed importance and, abandoning the “linguistic turn” of the past century, have turned their attention back from language to the nonlinguistic world, where (they have often insisted) attention belongs. Closely related to this stalled movement regarding truth, but doing somewhat better as I  write, is a shift from attempted rigorous, premise-by-premise proofs to less syllogistic forms of theistic demonstration. In preparation for the next chapter’s turn in this more realistic direction, the present chapter will situate and explain that shift in relation to major antecedents and alternatives.

Proofs A valid proof of God’s existence would require at least one universal premise, positive or negative, explicit or implicit, that was both pertinent and true. With regard to such an existential, more-than-conceptual matter, such premises are typically hard to come by; and, in view of the first chapter’s stress on the relevance of language for truth and on the vagaries of any natural language, such premises

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are still more elusive than has often been realized. Only a scientific “form of life” (as Wittgenstein might call it), involving agreed-on measures, procedures, and results, as in physics, chemistry, astronomy, and the like, can, with much labor, gradually generate an idiom in which natural regularities can occasionally be captured in fairly precise general propositions. Philosophers, however, being far from inhabiting such a milieu, are far from possessing such an idiom. Nor can mere verbal definitions, replacing fuzzy terms with other fuzzy terms, beget such scientific precision, for the requisite language-sharpening form of life is lacking. This state of affairs has restricted the theoretical possibilities, if not always the aspirations, of philosophers, theologians, and others. So in preparation for the next chapter, in the following sequence I will first sketch more fully this overall situation, then locate within it the question of the existence of God. 1. In practically any area it is easy enough, as an idle exercise, to fashion universal propositions that are true without exception (“All rocks are solid,” “No frogs have wings,” etc.), which might then serve as premises in formally valid proofs of some sort. But for purposes of serious theoretical demonstration, the attempt to formulate airtight general premises using nonscientific terms may be compared to the attempt to match the contours of one cloud by combining several others. In traditional, less linguistically attentive thinking, the problem of precision looked less daunting; and Wittgenstein’s youthful “picture theory” of language made the problem largely disappear. For according to that theory, a statement such as “The ground looked roughly like this” might indeed sound fuzzy, but as meant or thought out by a typical speaker it would portray reality with laser-like precision. So Wittgenstein later queried, “Then were just this grass and these leaves there, arranged just like this? No, that is not what it means. And I should not accept any picture as exact in this sense.”1 Our thinking, too, like our speaking, is cloudlike not laserlike. 2. In pertinent illustration, consider the implications of Wittgenstein’s famed remarks about the term game: “How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine that we should describe games to him, and we might add: ‘This and similar things are called “games.” ’ ”2 So analogy comes into play, and how flexible that is—even for an everyday, nonethereal expression such as game. For there is no single essence of games, but the term reveals a loose family resemblance, and the family traits themselves (skill, competition, enjoyment, rules, players, etc.) are multiply indefinite, as to their total number, the number required in any instance, and

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their individual contours. In checkers there is competition, but not in hopscotch; in solitaire there is luck, but not in chess; in solitaire there is a single player, whereas in soccer there are many; and even otters may “play games.” 3. Here, in answer to Fregean conceptions regarding the sharpness, actual and ideal, of word meanings, Peter Hacker might note that “the idea that vague concepts are intrinsically defective is itself misconceived—for often that is just what is needed. (As Wittgenstein ironically remarked, ‘I asked him for a bread-knife and he gives me a razor-blade because it is sharper!’)”3 4. Going farther, Fogelin remarks, “There are, however, even more radical forms of indeterminacy, where we would be at a loss to know what to say at all. They do not involve borderline cases but what we might call bizarre cases”4—for instance, Wittgenstein’s fantasy:  I say “There is a chair.” What if I  go up to it, meaning to fetch it, and it suddenly disappears from sight?—“So it wasn’t a chair, but some kind of illusion.”—But in a few moments we see it again and are able to touch it and so on.—“So the chair was there after all and its disappearance was some kind of illusion.”5

To some thinkers such busy imagining may appear mere frippery, but not to sharply analytic philosophers, including Wittgenstein’s earlier self, such as he here had in mind. 5. Playful otters, off-and-on chairs—are there no limits? In reply, Chapter 1’s Principle of Relative Similarity sets a realistic one: with possible rare exceptions, a statement is true if, and only if, its use of terms resembles more closely the established uses of terms (whether standard or stipulated) than would the substitution of any rival, incompatible expression. Yet how complex can semantic adjudication therefore become, and how far can truth reach when, as often in philosophical and other speculative discourse, terms are stretched into relatively unoccupied semantic territory! What there, in those far reaches, counts as a “rival, incompatible expression”? 6. Even in better-occupied territory, consider some ordinary utterance about some familiar object—for example, “Watch out, I just varnished that table.” According to the dictionary, a table is (among other things) “a piece of furniture,” that is (though the entry takes it for granted), a physical object.

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And none of the existing physical-object theories sampled in Chapter 3, or other such theories doubtless still to come, are so universally, rigidly entrenched in the English-speaking population as to restrictively define either physical object or table. And the like holds in countless other instances, in countless languages. The Principle of Relative Similarity, so flexible, applies to all statements—the familiar-sounding as well as the far-out. 7. Still further, consider that principle itself. How, for example, are degrees of similarity to be calculated and compared? Precisely how much weight should be accorded to this or that aspect of this or that kind of expression in these or those circumstances? Though adequate for most linguistic, factstating purposes, the Principle is merely a handy approximation—a rule of thumb pointing, like a roadside sign, in the right general direction and useful despite its lack of specificity. 8. In philosophical practice, even the semantic cloud formations—the fuzzy conceptual limits—that still linger at this point in this progression may entirely dissipate, leaving no discernible border between language and theory, truth and falsehood. For in philosophy, where the past century’s linguistic turn has been strongly resisted, often not even an implicit standard such as the Principle of Relative Similarity, recognizing language as a codeterminant of truth, still operates. This resistance to the principle highlights and heightens the need for the principle. Those, for instance, who struggled so earnestly but unsuccessfully to define precisely the nature of knowledge did not appeal to the familiar usage of know, knowledge, and the like for guidance. Doubtless they realized that such usage would not reveal any conceptual borders as precise and uniform as they desired. Perhaps, too, they sensed that if they did discover precise linguistic borders and based their definition of knowledge on them, the definition would have no metaphysical, nonlinguistic interest of the kind that motivated their search. They did not wish to know how people happen to employ the term knowledge or its kin; they wanted to know the nature of knowledge.6 9. This nonlinguistic focus of many, perhaps most, philosophers is widely taken, paradoxically, as a sign of greater seriousness. My reasons for saying “paradoxically” can be glimpsed from Plantinga’s query and response in Warranted Christian Belief. “What exactly,” he asks, “is the property that distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief?”7 As becomes clear from Plantinga’s reply, no precise answer to such a question

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can be discovered in the linguistic usage of true, knowledge, or belief; nor does he seek it there.8 “A belief has warrant,” he concludes, “just if it is produced by cognitive processes or faculties that are functioning properly, in a cognitive environment that is propitious for that exercise of cognitive powers, according to a design plan that is successfully aimed at the production of true belief.”9 All these desiderata—these processes or faculties, their proper functioning, their propitious environment, their design plan, and so on—are matters of epistemological interest, as are their varied degrees, forms, and combinations. But at just what point, to what precise truth-related combination, the label “warrant” gets theoretically attached may hold no comparable interest. And the like holds for familiar, nontheoretical usage. After discerning what linguistic reality (among its varied referents) the word “truth” picks out, Chapter 1 had to take a second look to ascertain whether, how, and to what extent that reality lived up to its reputation. 10. Resistance, whether of analytic or nonanalytic thinkers, to claims of language’s relevance for finding and identifying truth may become explicit. “I will begin,” we may read, “with a clarification of the kind of modality that we are after: metaphysical modality rather than strictly logical modality. For we are interested in the kind of modality that is objective and independent of the vicissitudes of our language, and as shall be argued, this kind of modality is metaphysical modality.”10 Chapter 4 has been there. In a different direction, Rorty, having rejected traditional correspondence accounts of truth and having envisaged no more linguistically satisfactory replacement, took the pragmatic turn Chapter 1 noted. In an equally pragmatic vein, more recently we read that a statement passes for true when, whether by the authority of its source, or by formally sustaining evaluations for truth, or by any other means (for example, mass media advertising), it passes from a source to a receiver, successfully soliciting belief, penetrating practical reasoning, and thus to an infinitely variable degree modifying the subjective representation of options and necessities for belief and choice.11

Thus, “[s]tatements are not made to be true at all; instead, they are made to circulate, to pass for true.”12 Here, too, any effective semantic guidance has vaporized.

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11. The “persuasive definitions” of philosophers, theologians, and others have long illustrated where such linguistic insouciance can lead, and how. “Theology, properly so called,” we may read, “is the record of a man’s wrestling with God.”13 So if, for example, a Plotinus, Ockham, Calvin, Tillich, or Barth did not wrestle with God, or no record was kept of it, we are invited to deny or call into question his status as a genuine theologian, “properly so called.” Often, when linguistic usage and its relevance thus carry negligible weight, varying values dictate essences, and the essences dictate linguistic boundaries. 12. Sometimes the practice of persuasive definition is explicitly defended. Concerning “a proper definition of religion,” Philip Devine, for instance, writes: Anyone who can find a useful set of necessary and sufficient conditions distinguishing Homeric religion and the more austere forms of Buddhism from all non-religious forms of belief and action will have performed a remarkable feat. But merely to list religion-making characteristics is to leave the subject in as much chaos as one found it: unless we can say that the idea of salvation is more central to religion than the existence of sacred objects, little understanding of religion will be possible.14

This said, Devine takes “the standard forms of Christianity rather than Judaism or the movement headed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon” as his paradigm from which defining traits of religion can be educed.15 If, however, as Devine claims, understanding of religion requires us to say that salvation is more central to religion than the existence of sacred objects, we can say precisely that (while explaining both the meaning and the basis of the claim) without conflating such a theory with the analysis or definition of the word religion. 13. From fuzziness to family resemblance to bizarre cases and beyond, this quick survey of language’s protean complexity has now passed, appropriately, beyond the factual to the ethical and evaluative. “We are in a similar position,” Bryan Magee suggests, with statements of aesthetic value, though the stakes are usually not so high. Nearly all music lovers are agreed that Mozart is a great composer and, what is more, a greater composer than Schumann. We are constantly saying things like

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this, but what it is that the words actually mean is something we find impossible to spell out, let alone agree on. In art neither greatness nor depth can be pinned down, but we find the concepts indispensable. We regard Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hamlet as plays of incomparable depth, and indeed they are, but what does “depth” mean here? Can anyone tell us? We use such statements all the time, but a satisfactory justification for them, or even a clear explanation of what they mean, eludes us.16

Still more broadly, Christopher Hill proposes, consider the class of normative thoughts—the class comprising ethical thoughts, aesthetic thoughts, and such low level commendations and derogations as mocha ice cream is outtasight and mean people suck. It is far from clear that the members of this class correspond to states of affairs, for it is far from clear that the normative concepts that figure in such thoughts can be said to express or to refer to real properties.17

The huge, amorphous class thus evoked is characterized by much mixing, in varying proportions, of cognitive and noncognitive factors; by much consequent complexity; hence by much disagreement as to when, on a given issue, the cognitive aspect is sufficiently prominent and agreement is sufficiently great as to invite extension of “true” or “false” to widely accepted verdicts. 14. Magee’s further remarks have still sharper pertinence here: “Experience leads me to suspect that among the causes why so many people deny that ethical statements and value statements can be true, and give as their reason the fact that such statements cannot be rationally validated, is a fear of letting religion in by the back door.”18 We have been here before. But Magee adds, “It is a baseless fear. In any honest intellectual enquiry there is no place for religion.” End of discussion: the God question can be ignored. Others, to be sure, disagree. This series, illustrating the futility of trying to emulate in other areas of inquiry the precision that is feasible in certain scientific fields, could be continued. The alternative, for instance, here in natural theology, is not sloppy thinking, but realistic thinking. So, how does this quick preparatory survey there apply?

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Theistic proofs It is understandable why for Aquinas and like-minded thinkers theistic proofs might seem feasible. Essences appeared to be sharp, universal, and unchanging, as did the concepts that mentally captured those essences. So the terms that expressed the concepts could, as required, readily retain the same sense in the premises and conclusions of the proofs. However, whatever the explanation, till fairly recently theistic proofs have abounded, passing, for example, ● ●

● ● ● ● ● ●

● ● ● ● ● ●

● ● ● ● ● ●

from eternal and necessary truths to their immutable and eternal ground; from quasi-universal theistic belief to the existence of the divinity believed in; from motion to a prime mover; from the complex to the perfectly simple; from the limited to the limitless; from the intelligible universe to an intelligent source; from the concept of God to the existence of God; from the distinction between essence and existence to the being in whom they merge; from the desire for happiness to the supreme good; from desire for the infinite to the existence of the infinite; from sensible “ideas” to the mind from which we receive those ideas; from the idea of the infinite to the infinite cause of the idea; from the act of judgment to the Absolute implicit in all judgment; from the demands of the moral order to the one who can satisfy those demands, by reconciling virtue and happiness; from moral obligation to a divine lawgiver; from grades of perfection to a supremely perfect being; from being to Being, via a Hegelian dialectic; from I-thou to a supreme Thou; from the value, or need, of God’s existence to God’s existence; from the logical possibility of God to the actual existence of God.

Though this listing is not complete, and many of these examples have variants, for such theistic demonstrations Kelly Clark’s appraisal sounds generally pertinent:  “Unfortunately as the arguments have been increasingly refined under legitimate criticism they have correspondingly grown increasingly

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complex, obscure and inaccessible. Their worth as apologetics, to all but the most intellectually sophisticated, is suspect at best.”19 A problem for many such demonstrations has been the narrowness of their conclusions. If successful, they might, for example, reach an immutable and eternal ground, or a prime mover, or a perfectly simple being, or a supreme Thou, as in the listing above. But, if thus narrowly focused, the proofs would not reach the supremely powerful, wise, good creator of the universe worshipped by theists and identified in the Preface as the focus of the present inquiry. Another frequent problem, here as elsewhere, has been the generality of the premises needed for syllogistic success. For example, if we evaluate two hypotheses, theism and materialism, on the basis of simplicity, we . . . find that, though they both simplify, they simplify in different ways. Theism simplifies by making everything depend upon the power and will of God. The decision of an infinite immaterial Spirit explains all contingent reality with its various characteristics. But theism implies a certain kind of dualism: spirit and matter. Materialism, in contrast to theism, eliminates this dualism by construing everything which exists as composed of matter governed by natural laws.20

Sometimes, in some contexts, arguments from simplicity have some merit, sometimes they do not. Some arguments to the de facto simpler have merit, but for some reason other than the verdict’s simplicity. And often it is unclear how simplicity should be assessed, hence what the verdict based on simplicity would be. It may be asked, for example, “whether a system’s simplicity should be determined by the number of its basic assumptions or by the number of its basic concepts or by some combination of the two. Nor is it clear how we count assumptions or concepts.”21 How simple, for example, would a divinity be who knew in detail not only a world as complex as ours but also, as has often been supposed, a full range of alternative, creatable worlds to choose from? Though these problems are serious, Chapter 6 conveys a still more decisive response regarding the prospects of theistic proofs. An assessment of the universe’s overall mix of good and evil, hence an overall judgment on God’s providential benevolence, hence a syllogistic demonstration of God’s existence, is beyond us. Given traditional expectations, this verdict may sound distressing. And yet, how reasonable would it be, and how conducive to a natural, loving relationship, for a child to seek sure arguments for the existence—the full corporeal, personal, metaphysical reality—of a human parent with whom the child sensibly interacts?

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Equally relevant here is the vehemence with which many critics would react to any such parent-child comparison. Near the end of his Atheism and Alienation Patrick Masterson pertinently writes: [W]e have seen how the development of contemporary atheism, nourished by the modern ideal of human freedom and autonomy, has construed the conception of human dependence upon God as a threat to the claims of human subjectivity and thus as a source of human alienation. Hence the affirmation of God as an ultimate principle of dependable intelligibility no longer appears as a human goal to be pursued or hoped for. On the contrary such an affirmation appears as unavailable to any man of authentic subjectivity, even as odious and to be positively avoided. The metaphysical desire for a principle of ultimate intelligibility is confronted with the objection that the affirmation of such a principle would be destructive of human subjectivity.22

“Hence,” Masterson observes, “the root of the philosophical problem of God today lies at a deeper level than the consideration of how one might show that, irrespective of the challenge of modern atheism, a valid metaphysical proof for His existence can still be formulated.”23

Holistic alternatives Finding merit in the general viewpoint associated with D.  Z. Phillips, so downplaying the relevance of proofs, Paul Chung suggests that “the differences between the diverse theist and the atheist positions in the contemporary debate about the existence of God are not merely incompatible, but incommensurable.” For they (a) consist of different belief systems, rather than a particular belief proposition, and (b)  have intelligible disagreements—that is, hold incompatible views regarding what both understand as the same “subject-matter”—yet (c) inhabit a different conceptual scheme, and more importantly, (d)  have “radically different” standards to judge the truth or falsity, or rationality or irrationality, of their beliefs. Thus, a rational debate between incommensurable positions tends to become interminable and sterile.24

Instead, in the approach Chung commends and adopts, “what is being proposed is quite literally a Gestalt-switch from one picture to the other.”25 Although previous chapters here—reviewing a medley of conflicting truth-conceptions, in Chapter 1, then addressing the question of God from

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various perspectives—suggest how much truth this holistic approach may perhaps contain, they more clearly reveal its limitations. The positions critiqued in the preceding six chapters do not all entail one another, so do not function as a single overall rebuttal of theism. If, individually, either universal materialism, or universal determinism, or value nihilism, or the argument from evil is correct, there is no such divinity; and humanity’s eventual personal or collective demise would, by itself, suggest a similar verdict. So an answer to one objection does not answer all. Neither does theism win by default once all are dealt with. A positive case—for God’s existence—still remains to be made.

A probabilistic calculus? Swinburne, too, does not believe in the deductive validity of any arguments to God from premises evident to most rational people. In his alternative approach a calculus of probabilities replaces deductive rigor; and, since no single argument can any longer do the job, the calculus is applied to cumulative evidence. “The real issue,” he writes, “is whether there is enough inductive force in those [traditional] arguments from such premises which can be represented as inductive arguments, taken together, to render the conclusion that there is a God more probable than not.”26 By this path (plus a crucial addition which he entitles the “Principle of Credulity”), he is led to the conclusion, “On our total evidence theism is more probable than not.”27 Though the apparent rigor of Swinburne’s approach makes it attractive, preceding chapters here suggest how problematic that aspect of it is. Consider just Chapter  6. How heavily does, or should, the problem of evil weigh in a Swinburnian calculus of probabilities? Some have argued that it tells decisively against the existence of God, others that it just tips the scales somewhat in that negative direction, whereas Chapter 6 concluded that the mystery is too deep for such philosophical argumentation to tip the scales either way, for or against. The next chapter will therefore take a different approach—one for which a Swinburnian calculus is equally unsuited.

A plausible system of belief Gerald Bray indicates the general direction that I, too, will take when, after his “brief examination of the different arguments which are put forward to prove the existence of God,” he comments,

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It is a fact that these arguments have only ever been really successful in reassuring people who are already believers of one kind or another. Sceptics have never had ering alternative explanations for the phenomena which Christians cite as evidence for the existence of God. As evangelistic arguments the proofs have only a limited value, although it can be argued that taken together, rather than considered separately, they add up to a powerful argument in favour of the probability that there is a God whose nature is consistent with that of the God revealed in the Bible. Christian theology does not deny the positive assertions which the classical proofs make, but it is careful to place them within the framework of a system of belief which does not depend on them as evidence for its claims.28

What, then, is the nature of that underlying “system of belief ”? Where can it be found, how be discovered? Earlier chapters have already taken major steps in this holistic direction. In three instances, without yet establishing any answer to a pertinent mystery—

verdict. In other instances they went further and, by answering three basic objections, contributed more strongly to a cumulative case for theism. First, reductive materialism, embracing all reality, human or divine, is semantically to an analogy with divine creative activity, it does provide semantic backing ird, thanks to an analogy with human goodness, belief in transcendent divine goodness is likewise intelligible e way is therefore cleared for the next chapter’s complementary, positive part of the overall case for theism. Already, this sketch can bring the Preface’s broad forecast into sharper, more strategic focus. For, comparing the history of monotheism with that of science, Similarly, as the present account unfolds, it too will exhibit, but within still broader horizons, our growing understanding of what is the case and how it should be interpreted. For the story of monotheism is likewise a human story, but one which is more fully comprehensible if we assume that here, too, human thought and practice are progressively being shaped, at least in part, by what reality is actually like. As science, looking closer and deeper, has gradually shed various myths and misconceptions, so has theism. (p. vii)

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This may have appeared a loaded comparison. As monotheism’s scientific aspirations and pretensions crumble, science marches on from triumph to triumph. But the preceding chapters have already started to reverse this overall perception. For theologians are, it seems, farther along in their reassessment of their epistemic situation than are scientists of theirs. Many theologians would agree with this chapter’s critique of theological fundamentalism, but would a comparable percentage of scientists agree with earlier chapters’ equally basic critique of scientific (materialistic, deterministic, naturalistic) fundamentalism?

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In final synthesis, a strong cumulative, experiential case—ranging from private experiences to public events to cosmic beginnings; continuing earlier chapters’ replies to antitheistic objections; countering atheistic currents still running strong today; complementing ever wider, deeper scientific perspectives; opening more promising human horizons—can now be made for theism. Long ago, the evangelist recounts, Zechariah proclaimed “the tender mercy of our God by which the daybreak from on high will visit us to shine on those who sit in darkness and death’s shadow, to guide our feet into the path of peace” (Lk 1:78–79). Previous chapters here, addressing the bleak materialism, determinism, value denial, value minimization, and personal and cosmic pessimism in which many presently sit, may have made some strong countersuggestions, but Kenny sees agnosticism, not theism, as offering a surer theoretical—if not human, psychological—path to peace. For, he explains in The Unknown God, from the viewpoint of humility it seems that the agnostic is in the safer position . . . The theist is claiming to possess a good which the agnostic does not claim to possess: he is claiming to be in possession of knowledge; the agnostic lays claim only to ignorance. The believer will say he does not claim knowledge, only true belief; but at least he claims to have laid hold, in whatever way, of information that the agnostic does not possess . . . Since Socrates philosophers have realized that a claim not to know is easier to support than a claim to know.1

These remarks of Kenny’s, prudently modest in appearance, stand in dialectical tension with Plantinga’s observations in Other Minds regarding our basic beliefs—theoretically fragile yet rarely questioned or contested—in physical bodies, other people, their minds, the past, the future, and the like. Should we “play it safe” in their regard, too, so disclaim any knowledge of their existence?

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Does Kenny? Does anyone? The underlying issue here is not merely verbal, as Kenny’s wording might suggest. It does not concern a claim to “know,” in some strict sense of the term, that God exists, but rather the strength of the reasons for so believing and, more fundamentally, the standard by which their strength should be judged. Though epistemologically our Plantingian basic human beliefs may appear “unsafe,” psychologically they are ever so natural and existentially we could not live without them. So, to what extent does something similar perhaps hold for belief in God? In what sense, if any, is the prudent agnostic “in the safer position” with regard to any of humanity’s most foundational beliefs, including this theistic one? In its regard, a first step toward clarity can take the general direction Basil Mitchell recommended long ago. Concerning demonstrations for the existence of God such as those probed and critiqued in the previous chapter, he remarked that “what has been taken to be a series of failures when treated as attempts at purely deductive or inductive argument could well be better understood as contributions to a cumulative case” for theism. On this view, he explained, “the theist is urging that traditional Christian theism makes better sense of all the evidence available than does any alternative on offer, and the atheist is contesting the claim.”2 Here Mitchell’s shift from “the theist” to “traditional Christian theism” sounds too narrowing for the present inquiry, which embraces varied forms of monotheistic theism, and his reference to “all the evidence available” sounds too dauntingly expansive. Plantinga’s approach in God and Other Minds appears more feasible. There he proposed that, from among the beliefs which we tend to take for granted and without which our whole human cognitive structure would collapse, we focus on our belief that, like our individual selves, “there are other beings who think and reason, hold beliefs, have sensations and feelings”3 much as we do, and see how belief in God compares with that human, ever-so-basic belief epistemologically. Applying this strategy, he reached the tentative conclusion: “If my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God. But clearly the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latter.”4 Given the well-attested difficulty, indeed impossibility, of proving to oneself that conscious minds other than one’s own exist, this suggestion sounded plausible. However, the very title of Plantinga’s book signals a possible problem. Comparing belief in a single God with our belief in billions of endlessly varied candidates for endlessly varied forms of human conscious mindfulness complicates matters and might tip the scales unduly one way or the other. Nicholas Wolterstorff has expressed similar misgivings:

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It has long been the habit of philosophers to ask in abstract, non-specific fashion whether it is rational to believe that God exists, whether it is rational to believe that there is an external world, whether it is rational to believe that there are other persons, and so on. Mountains of confusion have resulted. The proper question is always and only whether it is rational for this or that particular person in this or that situation, or for a person of this or that particular type in this or that type of situation, to believe so-and-so. Rationality is always situated rationality.5

Such will be my procedure and motivation here. While keeping Plantinga’s overall comparative approach, I  will focus at the start on a single, specific, representative, well-grounded other-minds belief as the nontheistic term of comparison in such an epistemological pairing. Then, step by step, heeding Mitchell’s tactical advice, I  will extend my sampling of theistic evidence ever more broadly, till, here at the end of the present dialectical path, a synthesis will emerge of the old and the new.

An opening comparison Early in my first visit with Mrs. M (as I shall call her), she changed her baby daughter’s diaper, then handed the child to her husband. At that moment, the infant crowed with delight, and I caught such tenderness in the mother’s look as she glanced at her daughter that there was no mistaking her fondness—in that moment and doubtless more than that moment—for this child of hers. Although looks so unmistakable may be relatively rare (in my own experience I recall only a couple of others of comparable clarity—on one occasion a look of intense pity, on another a look of utter terror), no doubt readers can recall similar experiences of their own. And in important respects, I suggest, belief in God may and often does resemble my belief in that mother’s love for her child. This suggestion may sound rather odd, but consider the interest of this maternal incident relative to other evidence I might on fuller acquaintance have cited. Mothers, I knew, change their infants’ diapers, and feed, clothe, and shelter them whether or not they love them. They might be taken to court if they didn’t thus attend to their basic needs. And these and other things they might do, not so much out of deep affection but from a sense of duty; they may not have wanted the children but now do their best by them. On the other hand, mothers may get cross with their children, scold them, even spank them—and still love them. (I recall one father who, when he felt obliged to spank one of his wayward children,

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would weep as he did so.) Thus I might have made many visits to Mrs. M and observed many of her interactions with this child of hers without being able from these interactions to construct a convincing case for her love of the child. So my glimpse of that single but convincing maternal glance, though perhaps not epistemologically infallible, was nonetheless special. How fragile, though—how “easily resistible”6—that clue might appear on closer scrutiny. Clearly there was no possibility of inferring to her case from my own male, unmarried, childless experience (say, by having observed my gaze in a mirror as I related with sure inner love to a child of my own). And, for possible confirmation of my intuition of the love revealed by her glance, a third-person, scientific approach looks equally unpromising. Given the complexity and variability both of emotions and of expressions of emotion and the limited development of data and theory in this area, particularly with regard to expressions of love (how might such expressions reliably be elicited for careful scrutiny?), it is safe to surmise that not even the world’s foremost specialists, if furnished a frame-by-frame rerun of Mrs. M’s expression, could establish scientifically that her look was or was not a look of tender love for her child.7 I, however, being no such expert and having no photographic record of any kind to consult, cannot even furnish the raw data from which specialists might someday conceivably attempt to construct a case for her love. Yet my conviction, I submit, though doubtless not infallible, was—and is—well founded. It is evident, then, with what reserve requirements such as Matthew Bagger’s for the justification of belief should be read: “A justified belief is one for which someone has offered explanatory reasons, reasons that contribute to the best overall explanatory account of the relevant phenomena.”8 In support of their Plantingian beliefs in the existence of bodies, other people, their conscious thoughts, and the like, most people have suggested no explanatory reasons; and philosophers have offered widely varying arguments for widely varying interpretations of the data, without reaching any consensus. So, if a justified believer is one who has offered, or is prepared to offer, an optimal “overall explanatory account,” it may be doubted whether anyone holds justified beliefs about anything covered by these basic categories or inferred from them—that is, about practically anything whatsoever. Concerning, for example, my simple belief in Mrs. M’s love of her child I had some relevant but very fragmentary evidence, with no prospect that even from more ample data specialists might one day be able to construct a convincing case for or against my ready reading. Yet Bagger argues that “if one claims an experience justifies a belief . . . one must

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make its implicit explanation explicit and submit it to debate based on shared values.”9 The relevance of Bagger’s attitude for the present inquiry becomes still more evident when he traces that attitude’s history. In earlier times, he explains, “religious experiences might well have justified religious beliefs,” but not now; for, “given the present condition of Western culture, the explanations of experience licensed and encouraged in some sub-communities within the modern West nonetheless fail to exemplify the culture’s larger commitments and values. The implicit religious explanation of religious experience no longer represents the best explanation of the event experienced religiously.”10 For many nowadays the best explanation would be scientific, not philosophical, still less theological. And in all that follows, such a stance, if left unchallenged, would tilt the scales case by case against a theistic explanation. So here at the start is the place for a reminder, not only of the perspectives just introduced regarding our most basic beliefs but also of earlier chapters’ critiques of the thinking so characteristic of what Bagger terms the “culture’s larger commitments and values.” The materialistic, deterministic, positivistic, scientistic blinkers through which religious experience is so often viewed must be removed and laid aside. Lacking philosophical breadth and depth, they constrict perception. William Dembski spots, nonetheless, something heroic in such underlying sentiments: Given a difficult problem, the proper attitude is not to capitulate and admit irremediable ignorance, but rather to press on and struggle for a solution. What’s more, even if no solution exists, we are to follow the example of Sisyphus, forever trying to roll the rock up the hill, ever striving to obtain a naturalistic solution rather than lapsing into the easy comforts of a sybarite and gratuitously invoking divine agency. Better to attempt the impossible than take the easy way out. Above all, we are to be ever mindful of C. S. Peirce’s celebrated dictum “Do not block the way of inquiry.” Among naturalists, any appeal to God or the supernatural represents not just a violation of this dictum but a descent into rank superstition.11

In illustration of such an attitude, here again is the atheist Smart, met in Chapter 3. “What about prayer?” he asks. “Are there spiritual photons that are exchanged between God and a soul? Perhaps the theist could say that God is able to influence the human brain directly by miraculous means and that he can know directly without physical intermediaries the worshipful thoughts in Mary’s mind or brain. This story will just seem far-fetched to the deist or atheist.”12

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It may indeed seem far-fetched (especially as thus tendentiously formulated) to those who wear strictly scientific spectacles, but those spectacles will have to be very narrow. As Chapter  4 noted, in some mysterious sense—Humean or non-Humean, unverified and unverifiable—of the verb “act,” one body may act on an adjoining body. In some equally or still more mysterious way, one body may, we believe, act on a far-distant body, gravitationally, without any “physical intermediaries.” Mystery deepens, as Chapter 4 also observed, when to the physical we add the mental and the relationship between them. And the dynamics become even more nebulous in the wide-open otherworlds surmises taken very seriously by cosmologists of late. But to suppose any equally or—were that possible—still more mysterious action on the part of God would “just seem far-fetched to the deist or atheist” for whom Smart speaks. That would be out of the question—“miraculous”! Such narrow, confining spectacles as these are, I again suggest, now long out of date.

Comparable experiences To the account of evident maternal love that has elicited these preliminary reflections, Marietta Jaeger, back in Chapter  6, would doubtless react very differently. “Yes,” she might comment regarding my instinctive sureness of Mrs. M’s love for her child, “that is the sort of direct certainty I had. I ran through no argument, could formulate no proof, there in my room as I prayed in anguish after my child’s abduction, but God’s loving presence was evident to me in a similarly direct, unmistakable way.” Such an assimilation should not be too readily dismissed. For one thing, in neither case, the maternal or the mystical, need there be any supposition of physical or metaphysical directness (bypassing light waves and external, bodily indications of Mrs. M’s love or supposing a similarly intimate relationship with God’s love in Jaeger’s case). Nor need there be any assumption of the perception’s completeness (e.g., encompassing the whole of Mrs. M, the whole of God, or the entirety of their more-than-momentary love). Human perceptions are seldom, if ever, so holistic. “I can see a physical object,” Kai-man Kwan suggests, and a physical object is essentially a three-dimensional object, having a front and a back, which cannot be given in our visual experience at the same time. So can I really see the object? Moreover, suppose Kripke is right that water is essentially H20. Then we need to ask: when we see water, how can the property of being H20 be given in our experience?13

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Not surprisingly, then, as Alston has noted, “Frequently what is explicitly presented in putative experience of God fails to uniquely identify the object as God. One is aware of God’s being very loving and powerful but not infinitely loving and powerful.”14 Neither should we be troubled by the fact that we cannot spatiotemporally locate either Mrs. M’s love (somewhere in her body?) or God (somewhere in the universe?). Again, as there was no sign in Mrs. M of multiplepersonality disorder, complicating matters, so there is no sign of multiple divinities active in our single universe. Indeed, in neither case, understandably, have our human languages developed criteria of individuation determining what counts, linguistically, as a single personality or a single divinity. Still further, we recognize even human loving looks by, as it were, loose analogy and not strict identity. Thus in Mrs. M’s case her facial features did not closely resemble those of any other woman I  knew; and I  see no reason to suppose that her loving look closely resembled that of some other, unremembered, more similar woman whom I  perhaps observed in comparable circumstances and whose look somehow lodged in my mind, paradigmatically, as a loving one. Finally, I  did not on that occasion run through all these facts and more and thereby somehow reassure myself about my epistemic credentials. Neither, on reflection, could I  have stated such credentials, either for this specific occasion or more generally. Yet I was sure of the love I perceived, and perhaps Marietta Jaeger, in her analogous case, was as legitimately sure of the love she experienced. If so, her experience, like those described below, contrasts strongly and favorably, as Hick has stressed, with the sort of abstract proofs long favored in theistic demonstrations. “Could a verbal proof of God’s existence,” he queried, compel a consciousness of God comparable in coerciveness with a direct manifestation of divine majesty and power? Could anyone be moved and shaken in their whole being by the demonstration of a proposition as men have been by a numinous experience of overpowering impressiveness? . . . Indeed could a form of words, culminating in the proposition that “God exists,” ever have power by itself to produce more than what Newman calls a notional assent in the minds?15

The difficulties that the last chapter cited have not now taken us in a problem-free direction, but neither have they led to our settling for secondbest. A personal God is greater than an impersonal God, and a personal God communicates. Besides, one can sense some truth in William Ernest Hocking’s observation, “There would be something wrong with a world in which finding God, if there is a God, would be reserved for men of high speculative talent.”16

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It is instructive to note how unsuccessful, by his own admission, are Nicholas Everitt’s attempts to cast a priori doubt on experiences such as Jaeger’s.17 However, since her account is rather sketchy, let me quote from Henri Nouwen’s fuller description of a comparable experience that he had when, having been very seriously injured, he was about to be operated on: What I experienced then was something I had never experienced before: pure and unconditional love. Better still, what I  experienced was an intensely personal presence, a presence that pushed all my fears aside and said, “Come, don’t be afraid. I love you.” A very gentle, non-judgmental presence; a presence that simply asked me to trust and trust completely . . . The words that summarize it all are Life and Love. But these words were incarnate in a real presence. Death lost its power and shrank away in the Life and Love that surrounded me in such an intimate way, as if I  were walking through a sea whose waves were rolled away. I was being held safe while moving toward the other shore. All jealousies, resentments, and angers were being gently moved away, and I was being shown that Love and Life are greater, deeper, and stronger than any of the forces I had been worrying about.18

Nouwen, like Jaeger, would reject a reductive explanation of his experiences, in terms of the unconscious; and, knowing the experiences first-hand, he might well be right to do so. To illustrate the possible legitimacy of such a rejection, let me alter the case. Suppose that I, neither a musician nor high on drugs, suddenly heard in my mind a marvelous symphony I had never before heard, superbly performed as though by the finest symphony orchestra. I might be nonplused, but I would not suppose that a sudden shift in my body’s chemical balance had brought about this effect, nor that my love of music had surreptitiously begotten the object of my desire. After all, it took Brahms and Beethoven long labors to compose such music, and it takes symphony orchestras long hours of practice to perform it. The unconscious may be good, but it isn’t that good—not better than Beethoven, not better than the New York Philharmonic. Thus the very content of my experience might lead me to seek some external source for the experience. And the like might hold for a mystical experience. I suggest this particular comparison because of an episode Plantinga recalls from his student days at Harvard: One gloomy evening (in January, perhaps) I was returning from dinner, walking past Widener Library to my fifth-floor room in Thayer Middle (there weren’t any elevators, and scholarship boys occupied the cheaper rooms at the top of the building). It was dark, windy, raining, nasty. But suddenly it was as if

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the heavens opened; I heard, so it seemed, music of overwhelming power and grandeur and sweetness; there was light of unimaginable splendor and beauty; it seemed I could see into heaven itself; and I suddenly saw or perhaps felt with great clarity and persuasion and conviction that the Lord was really there and was all I had thought. The effects of this experience lingered for a long time.19

To assess the cognitive weight of experiences such as Jaeger’s, Nouwen’s, and Plantinga’s, it helps to have had somewhat comparable experiences, and many people have, though perhaps theirs have not always been quite so strikingly memorable.20 Many experiences of Saint Teresa of Avila (likewise a person of sound psyche) were apparently at least comparable in their transcendence, for of the reality she encountered in them she writes, “Because it so far exceeds all that our imagination and understanding can compass, its presence is of such exceeding majesty that it fills the soul with a great terror. It is unnecessary to ask here how, without being told, the soul knows Who it is, for He reveals Himself quite clearly as the Lord of Heaven and earth.”21 In Jaeger’s and Nouwen’s accounts of the loving presence they experienced, there is no imaginative aspect; they do not mention any vision. Plantinga’s account is more tentative in this regard; he “suddenly saw or perhaps felt with great clarity” that the Lord was truly there. Regarding this aspect of mystical experience Caroline Franks Davis notes that the author of The Cloud of Unknowing says that visions are generally sent to demonstrate religious truths to those who would have difficulty grasping them in any other way, so that St Stephen’s vision in martyrdom of Christ standing in heaven was as if Christ had said to him, “I am standing by you spiritually”—not to show the actual posture of the heavenly Christ.22

Chapter 2 indicated that different religious traditions can speak in different ways of one same divinity. Here, in keeping with that conclusion, it deserves note that accounts such as those so far reviewed, though appropriately Christian, are often not restrictively Christian in their content. A  communication basically similar to, for instance, the ones that Jaeger and Plantinga recount might be quite differently but no less impressively conveyed to a Jewish, Muslim, or other believer. Thus, after a review of apparently conflicting accounts of mystical experiences, Davis observes that “we would do well to remember the ancient analogy of the six blind men describing an elephant:  we are like blind men groping after an elusive and many-faceted reality, and perhaps we should be more surprised at the amount of agreement there is in religious matters than at any disagreements we find.”23

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Complementing Davis’s view, Geoffrey Parrinder has observed that “mysticism is not now generally thought to be confined to a few athletic heroes of spiritual life, monks in desert cells or yogis on mountain peaks.”24 Yet it is not entirely by chance or by personal preference that these illustrations of mine are of Christian origin. Regarding the Jewish tradition, Gershom Scholem has written, The ecstatic experience, the encounter with the absolute Being in the depths of one’s soul, or whatever description one may prefer to give to the goal of the mystical nostalgia, has been shared by the heirs of rabbinical Judaism. How could it be otherwise with one of the original and fundamental impulses of man? At the same time, such differences as there are, are explained by the existence of an overwhelmingly strong disinclination to treat in express terms of these strictly mystical experiences. Not only is the form different in which these experiences are expressed, but the will to express them and to impart knowledge of them is lacking, or is counteracted by other considerations . . . On the whole, I  am inclined to believe that this dislike of a too personal indulgence in selfexpression may have been caused by the fact among others that the Jews retained a particularly vivid sense of the incongruity between mystical experience and that idea of God which stresses the aspects of Creator, King and Law-giver.25

Yahweh was more distant, less incarnate, than the God of Christendom. And Islamic thought (if not always Islamic piety) has stressed divine transcendence still more strongly: [W]hereas within Judaism, in the notion of the election of a covenant people, there was always the possibility of the Divine manifesting itself in a holy community or in a person who would represent that community, in Islam the Prophet does not express God; he is a channel through whom God speaks. Thus the gulf between the world and God remains absolute and no finite thing can be associated with God in any way—the grievous sin of shirk is that of associating any other thing with God.26

Alston counsels that in evaluating experiences such as those here considered thus far, “The first thing to consider is whether mystical experience can be given an adequate explanation in terms of purely natural causes. If we consider the actual attempts to do this (and this is not a popular research field for social and behavioral scientists), we must judge them to be highly speculative and, at best, sketchily supported by the evidence.”27 Imagine, in our comparison, how ill-founded would have been any attempts on my part to assign a different

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interpretation of Mrs. M’s loving look. And such the situation often is in the vast, varied realm of mystical experience. There are various possible subjective and objective reasons for doubting accounts of the general kind I  have been citing,28 but none of those reasons, I  judge, here apply. My knowledge of the people recounting the present experiences reassures me regarding the reporters’ veracity. Earlier chapters here have defused the chief a priori reasons for doubting such reports’ relevance and truth. And regarding the “traditional (but not necessarily current) psychoanalytic assumption . . . that religious experience is a symptom of neurosis or temporary psychosis” David Hay notes that Andrew Greely’s research in the United States and his own research in Britain found that the reverse was true: “people claiming spiritual experience scored more highly on average on psychological well-being than others.”29

More varied intimations Had I later had still fuller, more varied contact with Mrs. M than I eventually did, I might on some occasion have noted some other, equally striking intimation of her love for her child. And had I become still more thoroughly acquainted with her whole life, patterns of evidence might gradually have emerged that, in the absence of strong counterindications, were cumulatively still more convincing. Although those patterns would doubtless be extremely complex, certain episodes or configurations within the whole weave of her life might stand out. And so it is with regard to the evidence for God, within a far-reaching continuum such as I have here begun and will now continue to trace. What Jaeger, Nouwen, Plantinga, and Teresa experienced was internal to them. Other suggestively transcendent experiences have been partly internal, partly external. Thus in Saint Augustine’s famed account of his conversion experience, he relates how he prayed desperately for release from his erring way of life, heard a child’s voice mysteriously chant “Pick up and read, pick up and read,” hurried to where he had left his book, opened it at random, and read the first words that met his eyes—words so perfectly suited to the moment, his condition, and his need that his life was forever changed. “I neither wished nor needed to read further,” he recounts. “At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.”30

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More complex and slightly more public is a sequence of events that James Martin recounts in the life of Brother Bill, renowned apostle to Chicago’s violent gangs and a personal friend and hero of Martin’s. In 1983, having been offered two lucrative jobs, one as a hospital therapist and the other as an executive trainer with a major airline, Bill passed a church and went inside, thinking it would be a good place to pray about his decision. As he entered the church, he described everything as going fuzzy except for the face of Christ, which he noticed on a painting. “Love,” said Jesus, in what Bill described to us as a vision. “You are forbidden from doing anything else.” Then Bill said that he heard, “I’ll lead; you follow” repeated three times, and “Never be afraid. All your trust.” He told Dave and me that, at that time, he didn’t know what to be afraid of.31

A few months later, he opened a Bible at random and came upon the words “Take nothing with you for your journey.” Two hours later, he again opened at random to the same words, but in a different section of the Bible. And so it went. Turning to a priest for guidance, he was told, “It means you are to give up your possessions.” Not surprisingly, continues Martin, Bill considered all this, in his words, “a lot of baloney.” But at his parents’ home that night he opened an art book and saw a picture of a book of the Gospels with the caption “Take nothing with you for your journey.” After this kind of thing happened a few more times, Bill knelt down to pray. “Seven is supposed to be a lucky number, so if you show this to me for a seventh time, I  will give away all my possessions.” For the seventh time, he opened the Bible to another page and came upon the same sentence. Seeing this as an invitation from God, Bill decided to give away all of his possessions, moved into the basement of a friend’s house, and slept on a cardboard mat.32

A more fully public experience played a similarly decisive role in the life of Pedro Arrupe, later widely known and esteemed as the world leader of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). During a break from his medical studies, Arrupe visited the religious shrine of Lourdes. One day, shortly before the daily procession of the Blessed Sacrament, his sister drew his attention to a young man, twisted and contorted with polio, in the expectant crowd. Soon, Arrupe recounts, “The moment came when the bishop was to bless the young man with the host. He looked at the monstrance with the same faith with which the paralytic mentioned in the Gospel must have looked at Jesus. After the bishop made the sign of the cross with the Blessed Sacrament, the young man rose cured from the cart.” Thanks to the special access he had as a medical student, Arrupe was later able

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to assist at the medical examination of this case and verify the cure. When, he writes, he returned to his studies, I was like one stunned by that impression which every day grew more disconcerting. The one thing that remained fixed in my mind and in my heart was the image of the host as it was raised in benediction and of the paralyzed boy who had leapt from his cart. Three months later I entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Loyola, Spain.33

This young man’s recovery was apparently instantaneous. Only slightly less abrupt but still more stunning, in its different way, was the earlier cure experienced by Alexis Carrel, thus described by Craig Keener: Carrel, not believing in miracles himself but learning of his patients cured at Lourdes, decided to investigate. On the train he cared for a dying girl, Marie Bailly, who was also traveling there, noting that her abdomen was swollen and that she was in danger of dying at any moment. She had peritonitis and was deathly pale and skeletal. At Lourdes, she was removed from the train by a stretcher, with almost no pulse. To the “stupefaction” of the physicians, she was cured, the “tumors” vanishing in front of them; one astonished medical observer added that such a serious affliction “has never been cured [naturally] in a few hours like the case on record here.” Because Carrel had become interested in miracles, the University of Lyons medical faculty rejected him in 1905; he joined the Rockefeller Institute instead and in 1912 received the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine, his memoir of the healing being published only later.34

One scholar, Keener reports, readily grants that “some utterly extraordinary cures” have occurred at Lourdes and that the collocation of natural factors in Bailly’s case might occur only once in ten million times. Yet that observer, like many who view miracles as impossible, prefers a natural explanation. If only we had fuller evidence, he feels sure, a naturalistic reading of the data would emerge.35 (Otherwise, his whole worldview would be called into question.) Moving on from these single incidents, each witnessed by many, I  recall a sequence of occurrences recounted by Corrie ten Boom in her much-read memoir, The Hiding Place. In the last and worst of the Nazi prison camps in which Corrie and her sister Betsie were confined, a tiny, opaque bottle of vitaminconcentrate that they had managed to smuggle in continued, astonishingly, to yield its potent drops. “It scarcely seemed possible, so small a bottle, so many doses a day. Now, in addition to Betsie, a dozen others on our pier were taking it.” Despite her Christian faith, Corrie’s instinct was to hoard their supply, for Betsie was growing very weak. “But others were ill as well. It was hard to say no

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to eyes that burned with fever, hands that shook with chill. I tried to save it for the very weakest—but even these soon numbered fifteen, twenty, twenty-five.” And so the mysterious drops continued until, a new supply having been slipped to them, the tiny container was found empty.36 These entirely public events (the cures at Lourdes, the multiplying drops), representing many,37 come more fully within range of Humean objections. For the events resemble those “miracles” concerning which Hume famously wrote, “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.”38 Here two points must be noted. First, an unjustified addition to the Humean critique approved in Chapter  4 is the word unalterable. Once that is excised, the “laws” Hume cites become just repetitious patterns which, for reasons he suggested, we tend to generalize, as coercive, beyond our very limited experience. Second, the “firm experience” Hume has in mind is of the strictly physical kind that more typically reveals regularities. Human actions, their many irregularities, and their possible freedom are ignored. Yet with regard to divine action in the world, human actions are more appropriate analogs to consider than are floating clouds or bouncing billiard balls. Such selective Humean narrowing accords well with Antony Flew’s description of Hume as “the first thinker of the modern period to develop systematically a world outlook that was thoroughly skeptical, this worldly, and human centered.”39 For Flew himself (in 1997, before his later shift toward theism), “The heart of the matter is that the criteria by which we must assess historical testimony, and the general presumptions that alone make it possible for us to construe the detritus of the past as historical evidence, must inevitably rule out any possibility of establishing, on purely historical grounds, that some genuinely miraculous event has indeed occurred.”40 This has an impressive sound, and even some theists, influenced by their milieu, have drifted far in the same direction. But suppose that, shifting our paradigm, we changed the two key words near the end and said: “The criteria by which we must assess historical testimony, and the general presumptions that alone make it possible for us to construe the detritus of the past as historical evidence, must inevitably rule out any possibility of establishing, on purely historical grounds, that some genuinely intentional action has indeed occurred.” How high, one would now want rather urgently to know, is the bar being set, and why? And such is the situation with regard to Flew’s restrictive reading of the past. What count as “purely historical grounds” and what as “establishing”? Did any of the preceding accounts (Jaeger’s,

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Augustine’s, or others’) “establish” a transcendent source of the experience or did they just suggest or recommend it? Did they do so on “purely historical grounds”? Would that restriction make good sense for such a philosophical, transempirical question?41 A  good explanatory hypothesis is one that is, first, accurate with regard to the facts; second, plausible in the circumstances; and, third, consistent with a sound overall worldview. These factors present a continuum of possibilities, not a sharp dichotomy such as Joseph Houston has posed. “Either,” he writes, you are a religious sceptic in which case you discount miracle-stories because of your premisses, or else, because you have faith in the supernatural, you have different premisses, and so you may accept at least some miracle-stories. However, miracle-stories cannot on this account of the matter, lead you, in reason, from scepticism to belief, nor can belief rest on attestations by miracles.42

The histories here recounted belie such simplification. Take Arrupe:  yes, he believed before and after his experience at Lourdes, but what a difference that experience made. There is believing and believing, and many a gradation separates Houston’s selective extremes. Remarks of Richard Purtill suggest a further relevant consideration. He tells of a time when, having pulled over on the freeway and begun to change a flat tire, he lost consciousness and, as he later learned, his heart actually stopped beating. Both motorists who stopped to help knew CPR. One called paramedics who, with the help of two highway patrolmen, restarted his heart. Looking back on the incident, Purtill writes, “I do indeed believe that God was, as usual, hiding divine action in plain sight amid the ordinary course of events. The various elements in my experience . . . can all be explained in terms of purely natural factors.”43 That is, they suggest no reason to suppose or even consider the contrary possibility, of special, providential divine intervention. Perhaps still better hidden is the sort of influence Plantinga describes: “Aquinas and Calvin concur in the thought that God does something special in enabling Christians to see the truth of the central teachings of the gospel . . . This too would be action beyond creation and conservation, although presumably not miraculous, if only because it is so widespread.”44 Thus, as human actions strongly suggesting free choice may be a decided minority, so, too, may be divine actions such as the candidates so far reviewed that strongly suggest a transcendent source. Their relative rarity does not count against them. And the same comparison between the rare and the common backs Davis’s warning: “One must not make the mistake of thinking that only spectacular, intense revelations have evidential

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force . . . It is these minor religious experiences—many of them interpretive— which demonstrate that religious doctrines are appropriate to the world we live in, and not merely to some esoteric ‘realm of the spirit.’ ”45

Broader horizons The “intellectualist,” William James suggested, is content with generalities, whereas the “pragmatist” wants to know the “particular go” of things. Give him examples! So here I have cited a number, to which many others might be added. Again, whereas the previous chapter suggested the likely fate of abstract, syllogistic demonstrations, here, without similar problems, real-life samples point in a theistic direction. And now, at the present point in the sequence I have been tracing from private to semi-private to public and widely publicized experiences, we can pass still more broadly, for example, to the words in which St. Paul summed up the experiential heart of his Christian faith:  For I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; that he appeared to Kephas, then to the twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. After that he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one born abnormally, he appeared to me. (1 Cor. 15: 3–8)46

The debate about the reality of the events that this passage recounts invites comparison with the debate in Chapter  3 regarding the physical world. Here too, as there, readings have ranged from full, unquestioning realism to basic skepticism. Here too, direct contact with the interpreted facts is not possible. Here too, a case can be made for some degree of realism, with the strength of the claim varying inversely with the specificity of the claim. And this parallel is more than happenstance: both of these mysteries plumb the same metaphysical depths, evoked in Chapters  3–5. So in general, Paul’s quoted summation merits the attention accorded it: “If the earliest Christians, some of whom were eyewitnesses of the life and ministry of Christ, were firmly persuaded that he had indeed risen from the dead and appeared to known and named disciples who were active in the church, then the mythic option is ruled out.”47 Yet for many people nowadays “we can no longer take the statements about the resurrection of Jesus literally” but must conclude that, on the contrary, “the

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tomb of Jesus was not empty, but full, and his body did not disappear, but rotted away.”48 Such, we are told, is the judgment of the “revolution in the scientific view of the world.”49 The gaps in our knowledge regarding these matters in the distant past “are no reason to give up well-established physics on the basis of decades-old reports by self-interested parties who faced social pressures and promptings with predispositions to believe.”50 Notice how these cards are stacked. In the resurrection hypothesis, as in the hypothesis of human freedom, there is no question of giving up “well-established physics” but of distinguishing between physics and deterministic metaphysics. And the “scientific view of the world” cited in refutation—though often not fully, clearly recognized as such—is philosophical, not scientific. So it is worth recalling again how earlier chapters of this book revealed the weakness of a narrowly materialistic, deterministic conception of reality. Once the paschal mystery of which Paul speaks was planted in the historical soil of its day, it became central to a new monotheistic religion, and, having there taken root, worked powerfully. David Hart notes how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues.51

Here, remarks of Alston become relevant. “I have thought of the Christian,” he writes, “insofar as his epistemic situation depends on reasoning, as engaged only in post hoc explanation of religious, and nonreligious facts. I have put nothing into the picture analogous to the active, interventionist, experimental attitude of modern science.” Yet that perspective too is pertinent, Alston suggests, since “the final test of the Christian scheme comes from trying it out in one’s life” and experiencing where that leads. “From this standpoint,” he writes, the perception of God, and the personal communion with God that requires such perception, is a central aspect of the total fabric of Christian experience that makes up the new life promised to those who would open themselves up to the Holy Spirit and cooperate with His transforming activity. When all is said and done, this fulfillment in the total experience of leading the Christian life is the most fundamental contribution made by experience to the grounds of Christian belief.52

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Here, episode by episode, some such evidence has already been cited, but when that evidence spreads (as Alston puts it) to the “total fabric” of numerous theist lives and other people encounter it, it contributes importantly to the case for theism. Unsurprisingly, whatever the theistic denomination—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or other—many less dedicated, less admirable members can there be found. Any worldwide movement is similarly mixed in its members and their motivations. But without the many whose goodness reflects their theistic convictions, the case for theism would be notably weakened. In stronger reply to atheistic critics of religion and its evils, Barr has pertinently written: Without religion, says Dawkins, we would not have wars of religion or religious persecution. True. And without sex, fathers, families, material possessions, and governments, we would not have sex crimes, abusive fathers, dysfunctional families, greed for material possessions, and oppressive governments. Every natural and necessary thing can be perverted; even reason. Religion has led to hateful ideas, but no Christian writer has ever published ideas as hateful as the social Darwinism of H.  G. Wells. Religion has led to persecutions, but none more massive than those produced by militant irreligion. More people were killed by the “scientific atheism” of Communism on an average day than the Spanish Inquisition killed in an average decade. And largely responsible for this fact was a teaching of contempt for religion of exactly the kind that Dawkins propagates.53

Evil in final focus The present sampling has increasingly suggested a response to the problem of evil, which, among people generally, appears to be the foremost objection to the existence of God. Chapter 6 answered the objection in a negative way, by noting our human inability to pass judgment, pro or con, on the overall workings of the universe. Though that chapter did not go further and provide a positive verdict, it did promise a different, more suitable approach to the problem, here in the present chapter. The moment has now come to redeem that promissory note. As Chapter 6 noted, evil of itself no more proves the nonexistence of God than good of itself proves the existence of God. What is the overall balance, the overall mixture, the overall interaction and interdependence, of good and evil in the universe? Having no way of knowing, we have no prospect of ever

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answering such a question. That was our problem. But, as theists may sense, it is also God’s problem. For how, to creatures such as ourselves, could God conceivably communicate a convincing explanation or demonstration of God’s loving, all-wise providence for us and for our universe? Not, the last chapter suggested, by means of any abstract, premise-by-premise demonstration. Nor, Chapters 2–8 made clear, by revealing in sufficient detail the divine blueprint or plan of action for the universe. So at this point the comparison with Mrs. M again proves helpful, by suggesting in its clear and simple way what appears to be the only feasible solution to this problem of divine-human communication. Mrs. M’s loving glance, in that initial experience of mine, was special. For as I came to know her better, it remained the most striking evidence I encountered of her love for her child. And I can think of no clue that might have been more convincing. Given my necessarily far from comprehensive acquaintance with this woman, her life story, and her dealings with that one of her several children, and the inevitably spotty, incomplete, conflicting evidence I might have gathered from various acquaintances of hers, any attempt I might have made to prove her love of that child, on that occasion, would have been murkily inadequate, to say the least. Now, just as Mrs. M did not set out to demonstrate unmistakable love for her child, so God may not, for example, have aimed to demonstrate unmistakable, loving approval of the generosity with which Betsie ten Boom shared the vitamin drops that she and her sister so desperately needed for their own survival. But one may wonder how, in a universe as complicated as ours, to creatures as limited as ourselves, God’s presence, loving approval, and very nature and existence could have been more clearly communicated than by those multiplying, constantly flowing, life-sustaining drops. A Christian might suggest that it has been done still more widely and impressively in, through, and by Jesus Christ. In him and his life, “we see what we desperately need to see: God close to us, God active among us, God loving us, God forgiving our sin, God opening up a way to a new life of everlasting love.”54 In the ten Boom sisters’ case I have spoken of their generosity as a likely divine motive for replenishing the vitamin drops, but there was also their need, and we have sensed that motive in Plantinga’s, Nouwen’s, Jaeger’s, and Augustine’s cases. But no doubt God’s reasons for intervening would vary, according to the circumstances. At Lourdes, the stricken boy’s faith and trust, more than the need he shared with so many others, catch our attention. In the case of the crucified and resurrected Christ, these features plus others stand out as likely motives for divine saving intervention—approval of such generosity as the gospels depict

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(“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves and for your children”), of such compassionate charity (“Father, forgive them, they know not what they do”), of such trust (“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”), of such obedience (“still, not my will but yours be done”). And in all this, Christians believe, we have seen revealed “the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14). Overall, from such varied indications as these a far richer, more detailed portrait of the Divinity emerges than the one the Preface initially sketched, in abstract terms, of supreme power, wisdom, and beneficence. At this point, the general outlines appear of a response to the problem of evil such as William Hasker and others have proposed: God knows, to be sure, that evils will occur, but for the most part he will not have specifically decreed or incorporated into his own prior plan for the world the particular instances of evil which actually occur. And this opens up for us the possibility of attributing to God certain general strategies by which he governs the world, strategies which are, as a whole, ordered for the good of the creation, but whose detailed consequences are not foreseen or intended by God prior to the decision to adopt them.55

Still, we may wonder. Why, according to such evidence as that here cited, has God intervened, so strikingly, for these people on these occasions and not for other people on other occasions? Have not countless other people had comparable needs and not been comparably assisted? Jesus was not the only man the Romans crucified. To such queries as these, the case of Mrs. M suggests a relevant reply. Why, I  might similarly wonder, did she react so revealingly, in that way, at that moment, and not on other occasions, in similarly striking ways, when I observed her interacting with her infant daughter? Why that one singularly significant glance, then, there, in my presence? I have no reply. Indeed, I doubt whether she herself could have reliably answered such a question. But that does not lessen the force of that experience on that occasion. Holistic parsing of divine providence, in striking instances such as those here recounted, lies still farther beyond us; but, similarly, this ignorance does not affect those instances’ significance or lessen their impact. How futile, we might note before continuing, any attempt would be to turn that glance of Mrs. M’s into a premise-by-premise proof of her love for her child. How senseless such a syllogistic demonstration would be as a proof formulated by myself for myself, the viewer. How senseless it would be as a proof formulated by myself and offered to others (“I noted such a special glisten in her eyes, such

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a tilt to her head in her child’s direction”). So let us continue now, after this pertinent pause, on our different, far-reaching, step-by-step path.

Still wider perspectives The history of our cosmos offers still wider evidence for the existence of God than do the preceding ever fuller, more complex indications. For in response to recent scientific findings, the teleological argument of old has undergone dialectical development.56 The flora and fauna that once appeared products of intelligent design now appear results, largely or wholly, of natural evolution; but that development itself—from Big Bang to life, sentient beings, and homo sapiens— now looks like the product of supremely intelligent design. To construct whole villages from Tinkertoys would be clever, but to construct Tinkertoys that form villages on their own—that would be prodigious. And such is the impression that the new creation story may, by analogy, spark in us. “As for divine providence,” Haught might add, “we know from our limited human experience that genuine care for others does not control or compel, but instead provides sufficient scope for others to become themselves.”57 And the cosmic situation is still more complex. “An evolving world,” suggests David Fergusson, “is one that is consistent with an immanent divine presence that accompanies and works within the changing patterns of life. Rather than mechanically coercing the world or establishing an original immutable state, God works gradually towards the fulfillment of intended outcomes.”58 For its part, the scientific theory of evolution says nothing about whether mind can arise from pure matter; nor does it address the closely related mysteries regarding matter and causality here probed in Chapters 3 and 4. Thus these broadening perspectives suggest more “a grand improvisation than . . . the performance of an already-written score.”59 The overall impression of creative intelligence at work is heightened by the critique of natural necessity in Chapter 3. As G. K. Chesterton forcefully observed, “All the terms used in the science books, ‘law,’ ‘necessity,’ ‘order,’ ‘tendency,’ and so on are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.”60 Varying the comparison, of the “rhythms and patterns which we call ‘Physical Laws’ ” Philip Clayton writes,

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To the artist’s eye a Rembrandt portrait or a sculpture by Michelangelo expresses perfect beauty; musicians find beauty in the simplicity and balance of a Mozart violin concerto; but for a physicist these “rhythms and patterns” among vastly disparate phenomena are among the most beautiful things we know. It takes a special language to communicate these patterns, the language of mathematics, since without the mathematics something is irreparably lost in translation. For those who read the native language of the Book of Nature, however, the laws of mathematical physics are fully as beautiful and astounding as any creation ever produced by the hand of an artist.61

From a complementary perspective Dorothy Sayers suggests, as have others, that we consider God “as a living author whose span of activity extends infinitely beyond our racial memory,” and the temporal universe “as one of those great serial works of which installments appear from time to time, all related to a central idea whose completeness is not yet manifest to the reader. Within the framework of its diversity are many minor and partial unities—of plot, of episode, and of character.”62 So viewed, the cosmic indications converge still more readily with the personal ones—the God of creation with the God experienced by Jaeger, Nouwen, Plantinga, Teresa, Augustine, Brother Bill, Arrupe, the ten Boom sisters, Paul, and many, many others—in a coherent web suggesting, in different ways and to varying degrees, transcendent knowledge, power, and goodness. The significance of this linkage may be highlighted as follows. Suppose my only acquaintance with other human beings was observation of their buildings, roads, power plants, aircraft, ocean liners, computer systems, satellites, and similar technological accomplishments. Impressed by their achievements, I  might recognize and admire their intelligence but have little sense of their goodness or of their being persons with whom I might form ties of friendship or affection. They might appear as coldly remote as the God of deists. But let me interact with them person to person—let us, for example, make and grant requests of one another—and the coldness and remoteness would dissipate. In like manner, the experience of Jaeger and the many others I  have cited is, unmistakably, the experience of a God who cares. And yet, as this evidential web regarding God spreads, deepens, and complexifies, with each strand reinforcing and reinforced by the whole, the case it makes still is not neatly demonstrative, either logically or scientifically. Indeed, it is not readily conceivable that it could be. For think again of Mrs. M’s love of her daughter and what made it so clear. Her glance, in isolation, entirely by itself, would carry little weight as proof of her love. There was also

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the fact that this was her child, that she was looking at her, that the child chirped the way she did, which her mother doubtless took, as I did, as a sign of infant delight. But do all mothers love their children, and do the loving ones react so strongly, in this visible way, whenever they see their children express pleasure, or at least whenever they see them express it in (more or less) this manner? Does experience of just their own children, to whom they are specially attuned, trigger such recognition, or do they react this way to children generally? Can answers to any of these queries be ascertained a priori, or must they all be obtained through experiment or observation? But how might that be accomplished, in view of both individual and collective, person-to-person variations? Mysteries within mysteries: what polemics such research might provoke if much were at stake! Even in this relatively simple, human-level, observable scenario, there in Mrs. M’s apartment, scientific demonstration was out of the question. Yet for me who observed it there was no mistaking that look. Had I been aware of any strong counterevidence I might have had doubts, but I wasn’t, and something similar here now holds for theism. For preceding chapters have reviewed the chief evidence alleged against the existence of God and have found it wanting. And regarding favorable evidence such as that now cited for God’s existence a further observation has comparable significance. It has been said that “numerous weak proofs remain an assemblage of weak proofs. They do not together make one convincing proof.”63 So it may be for “proofs,” but not for pertinent evidence. I recall in this regard some memorable lectures on historical research in which the professor noted that, though no single detail proves the presence of the apostle Peter in Rome, many varied bits of evidence, when combined, leave so little doubt about his having gone there that few if any experts doubt that he did. Similarly, in a court of law cumulative details, though individually inconclusive, can add up to a very strong case. And so it may be with regard to the evidence for theism. For the cumulative case I have sketched is much stronger than any evidence I have offered, or could have offered, based on my limited experience, for Mrs. M’s love of her child, strongly suggested though that was by her single loving glance. Of “natural glimpses of the divine” comparable to those here cited, John Cottingham has written, even if they are not themselves arguments or intuitions of the intellect, can these glimpses at least be the basis for intellectual inference to God? Well, . . . perhaps they can, in the following sense: since it is a rational requirement, a requirement of intellectual integrity, to take proper account of all aspects of our experience, any worldview that wantonly ignores, or fails properly to accommodate,

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these aspects of our experience is to that extent intellectually weakened in comparison with its theistic competitors. Yet in another sense I  am inclined to say that construing such experiences as grist for an inferential mill would be a distortion. For if we take on board the lessons of Pascalian epistemology, we should see that there is not here a body of evidence from which there is a logical or probabilistic conclusion to be drawn by anyone who responsibly attends to the data. In the first place, no one can be compelled to have, or to acknowledge, such experiences: they require a certain kind of focused attention, a certain motivational stance which might best be described as a listening or attunement.64

For, as the same author elsewhere adds, “philosophizing about religion is no mere academic exercise but something that engages every part of us, and impinges in the closest possible way on who we are and how we lead our lives.”65

Counterpoint A likely source of resistance to the case thus summarized is the long habituation, already noted, to a priori demonstrations regarding such philosophical matters; “proof ” of God’s existence has been expected and required as a condition for rational belief. Yet on what question of any moment has general agreement ever been reached by this cherished approach? On the mind-body relationship? Human freedom? Moral objectivity? The origin of the universe? The origin of terrestrial life? Again, I need not insist. Doubtless there are correct answers to these questions but not such as any valid, knock-down demonstrations are likely to establish any time soon. However, here too, Nichols’s words apply: The problem is deeper and originates further back—with the separation of God from nature, a split that began in the late medieval and early modern period. This resulted in the (perceived) separation of God from everyday life that is so characteristic of contemporary secular societies. The main carrier of this has been modern natural science. Science came to understand nature as a mechanical system that operated more or less independently from God. God was thus gradually (over centuries) removed from the cosmos.66

So now theistic explanation has widely been replaced by scientific. “We take the side of science,” one devotee explains, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a

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material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.67

Given such a mind-set, if, as might be expected, many of those who have reported experiencing the transcendent were mistaken, then doubtless all were. Even a Hume, despite his critique of natural necessity, would automatically look in a less transcendent direction and, case by case, could doubtless imagine some more scientific explanation and, since it was more scientific, would prefer it. “Rather than invoke the supernatural,” a contemporary writer suggests, “we can always adjust our knowledge of the natural in extreme cases.”68 No one, however, has succeeded in advancing good a priori reasons for thus discounting all or even most intimations of the transcendent. And Chapter  4, turning to human agency to detect something more than mere empirical regularities, has now gone farther than Hume in its critique of deterministic thinking. Not only is there slight prospect of reducing all human agency to physical agency, but such a reduction would empirically, semantically cancel all agency, leaving only limited, selective regularities. As it is, human agency provides a paradigm by analogy with which divine agency can be conceived, and therewith makes such agency a live option. Or at least it starts to, for divine action here on earth is often viewed as divine “intervention,” troubling the rigid regularity of nature. But once genuine human activity is acknowledged, indeed recognized as paradigmatic, that supposed rigidity dissipates and, with it, the oddness of genuine divine activity. If human beings can act, and not just instantiate Humean regularities, it is hardly far-fetched to suppose that the Creator of the universe might do likewise. Nonetheless, in the absence of “proofs,” the evidence here offered may seem rather thin. So in response to this impression, and in explanation of it, I suggest the following comparison. Chapter 3 reviewed a wide range of theories, from naïve realism to idealism, regarding the physical universe. The probative weakness of each rival theory when taken by itself (which even proponents may recognize) might suggest Kant’s agnostic conclusion, which in turn might prompt the denial of any realism; the physical world is just our projection or subjective impression. One way to slow or arrest the slide down this slippery slope is to distinguish between the weight of any one realistic account and the weight of the realist alternative as a whole. But the problem then is how this saving distinction can be made in convincing detail without opting for one or the other more

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detailed account, proper to this or that thinker, tradition, or school of thought. How can the general conclusion about the physical universe be successfully defended without remaining very general? Such, I  suggest, is likewise the situation with regard to any fully satisfying theistic demonstration. For the fuller the description of the divinity in question (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or other, as conceived by this or that individual, council, sect, speculative tradition, or school of thought), the more numerous will be the possibilities of inconsistency, incoherence, or error, hence the more contestable will be the demonstration, whereas the thinner the description the thinner may be the pertinent, usable evidence. So note the middle course traced here thus far. A broad summation such as the following, much of it already touched on in this chapter, agrees with all three of the monotheistic faiths just named: “Faith in God the creator is a living and trusting relationship to the shaping, judging and saving power; to the personal will which keeps together nature, culture and history, and in all this, our lives; and to the personal instance which directs the creaturely being and life and gives it its meaning, direction, and destination.”69

Further dialectic Overall, from such varied indications as these a richer, more detailed portrait of the Divinity emerges than the one the Preface initially sketched, in abstract terms, of supreme power, wisdom, and beneficence; and its comparisons between theistic and scientific perspectives are thereby enriched. Many, however, reluctant to accept such enrichment, might respond in various antitheistic ways, including the following.

A tailored target Concerning the cognitive validity of “religious claims,” Magee writes:  If someone tells me that he knows that God exists because he has direct experience of God, I do not (usually) question his sincerity, or question that he is having an exceedingly powerful experience; what I question is the interpretation he is putting on that experience. He is claiming that because he has it he knows for certain that a particular being other than himself exists; and this does not follow.70

True, but none of this chapter’s accounts of religious experiences spoke in this way. In none of them did the recipients, or I, cite the experiences as establishing

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the existence of God and yielding “certain knowledge” thereof, all by themselves. Had they done otherwise—had they (more carefully than Magee) distinguished “rational belief ” from “knowledge” and “knowledge” from “certain knowledge” and claimed one or the other or all three on the strength of experiences, single or multiple, that they cited—the quibbles that might well have resulted regarding the accounts’ soundness would have done little or nothing to discredit the experiences. As it is, none of the accounts made such moves.

A contextual contrast There is power, Charles Taylor has suggested, in the following configuration. On the one hand, “the appeal of scientific materialism is not so much the cogency of its detailed findings as that of the underlying epistemological stance, and that for ethical reasons. It is seen as the stance of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality,”71 for indeed “[i]f our faith has remained at the stage of . . . immature images, then the story that materialism equals maturity can seem plausible.”72 Such an assessment sounds both psychologically and epistemologically apt. And, to be sure, if our perspectives are thus limited we may be thus misled. But they can, instead, be much broader and have been here.

The problem of religious pluralism A comparable a priori slant has comparable significance: Here is an obvious fact about the Christian religion (and others): it displays an inveterate tendency to sectarianism. Groups and sects split off, motivated by differences over doctrine and/or practice. Some survive, some do not. Each one claims that it genuinely has the witness of God and true faith. Yet there is no established means for eliminating some sects on intellectual grounds. The ones that do not survive, like Arianism, are often as not defeated by processes which are not truth-directed. We can contrast this inveterate sectarianism with what happens in science.73

Indeed we can, but the appropriate level of comparison would cancel the contrast. For at that metaphysical level, underlying both science and theology, the contrast disappears. There, for both, we find “an inveterate tendency to sectarianism.” There, for both, we discover no “established means” for eliminating rivals. But were we to eliminate all the more or less realist metaphysical positions, from the naïve to the Kantian, the whole of science would go with them.

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Hick offered a complementary response to objections from religious pluralism: Atheists frequently point out that there are many rival religions teaching mutually contradictory doctrines and each claiming to be the only true faith. At most therefore, they conclude, only one of them can be true. But there is no agreement about which this is and there are always fewer religious people affirming the truth of any one particular faith than there are who deny this on the ground that their own is the only true faith.74

It seems likely, some might therefore urge, that none of the faiths is true. This challenge might be amplified by noting both the role of location and upbringing in determining people’s religious affiliations and the absoluteness with which competing faiths are nonetheless often proclaimed. However, in Hick’s view, the pluralist understanding of religion nullifies these powerful secularist arguments. It proposes that the great world religions constitute different human responses, reflecting the different ways of being human that are the great cultures of the earth, to the ultimate transcendent Reality. They have been formed within different historical and cultural contexts, employing different conceptual systems, producing different forms of religious experience and different forms of personal and social life. On this basis their plurality does not suggest that they are all false but on the contrary opens up the possibility that they may all be true as contexts within which the transformation of human life from natural selfcentredness to a new orientation to the transcendent divine reality can occur.75

It may be as for the sun:  people in different times and places have disagreed about its origin, size, distance, age, composition, and movements relative to the earth, but they have not erred in their shared belief that a single body, of some sort, is shining off there in the firmament, imparting light, warmth, and life to humankind. Similarly, Chapter  2 suggested, adherents of the world’s major monotheistic religions may plausibly be viewed as worshipping a single supremely powerful, wise, benevolent creator of the universe.

Theistic mirage The comparison of belief in God with belief in a single sun, variously described, may look apt for the world’s monotheistic religions, but not for the full range of religious referents that pluralists often include in their identity claims. Thus, in order to accommodate God, Allah, Vishnu, Tao, Buddha, nirvana, Krishna, and other transcendent realities in his pluralistic unification, Hick, like some others,

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has favored solutions that empty religions of much or all that makes them meaningful to their adherents. For, on the one hand, he says that the religions each speak in their different ways of the wrong or distorted or deluded character of present human existence in its ordinary unchanged condition. It is a “fallen” life, lived in disobedience to God, or it is caught in the illusion of maya, or it is pervaded throughout by dukkha. But they also proclaim, as the basis of their gospel, that the Divine, the Real, the Ultimate, with which our present existence is out of joint, is good, or gracious, or otherwise to be sought and responded to: the ultimately real is also the ultimately valuable. It is a limitlessly loving or merciful God; or the infinite Being-Consciousness-Bliss of Brahman; or the ineffable “further shore” or Nirvana; or Sunyata, in whose emptiness of ego the world of time and change is found again as fullness of “wondrous being.” And, completing the soteriological structure, they each offer their own way to the Real—through faith in response to divine grace; or through total submission to God; or through the spiritual discipline and maturing which leads to moksha or to Enlightenment.76

On the other hand, in the perspectives Hick most favors,77 the Divine, the Real, the Ultimate, is not, in fact, good or gracious or valuable. It is not limitlessly loving or merciful. It is not conscious or blissful or empty or full. It lies beyond all such characterizations. For otherwise, he says, it would be difficult to make sense of the claim that the world’s faiths, despite their differences and apparent disagreements, all target the same transcendent reality. Thus it often appears that for Hick most of what makes life most meaningful for believers and that is believed to work salvifically in their respective traditions should be regarded as illusion. This challenge looks as significant as the preceding one. That questioned the existence of any divinity or religious ultimate; this one questions the existence of an ultimate such as any religion has believed in. Not surprisingly, many believers have resisted such accounts, with their seemingly dire implications for their faiths. And well they might, for to this challenge, too, Chapter 2 has offered a response. There is no need for Hick’s radical solution. The identity of Buddha, say, with Yahweh, God, and Allah may not be at all evident, but neither is it excluded; and the mutual identity of the deities in this monotheistic trio is arguably quite plausible.

Conflicting experiences “There is no doubt,” writes Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, that many people have experiences that seem to them to come from a higher power outside of themselves. The problem is that too many people have such

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experiences. Different people with different religious beliefs have different experiences that seem to come from different gods, even though the experiences seem quite similar from the inside. The resulting beliefs conflict, so they cannot all be right. Indeed, the majority of them must be wrong, if only Christian experiences are correct, as traditional Christians claim. It follows that religious experience in general cannot be reliable, according to the Christian perspective itself.78

This complaint is problematic in more ways than I shall try to address, but preceding discussions suggest the following difficulties:  (1) I  have tried and failed to make clear, relevant, accurate, or at least plausible sense of the claim that the majority of those who report religious experiences “must be wrong, if only Christian experiences are correct, as traditional Christians claim.” (2) As for the beliefs that conflict “so cannot all be right,” recall the collection of beliefs about FDR in Chapter 2, which, though often conflicting and mistaken, nonetheless referred to the same, real, non-imaginary person. (3) Furthermore, the familiar comparison cited above, with a single elephant touched in various parts, recalls the possibility that varied descriptions of a single reality, though apparently conflicting, may nonetheless all be accurate. (4) Going still further, the review of our varied, conflicting views of the physical world seen in Chapter 3, none of them known to be true, does not rule out the possibility or likelihood that there may indeed be a physical world of some sort and that we are physical beings who inhabit it.

The perils of commitment “Commitment to retain theism in one’s philosophy,” Brian Leftow suggests, “is like commitment to retain belief in material objects. It is not impossible to find reasons to give up either. But it is entirely rational and can be entirely honest to resist doing so. If commitment to material objects does not unfit one to do fair, honest philosophy, why should commitment to theism?” Are material realists of every stripe, from Aristotle on, likewise disqualified? One plausible reply, Leftow surmises, is that there are personal, emotional, and moral dimensions unique to the theist case. Christian commitment, for instance, is not just abstractly intellectual. It is passionate. It involves hopes, ideals, self-discipline, and personal sacrifice. Passions can tempt one to intellectual dishonesty. Further, the more hope and effort one invests in a religious belief, the more it would hurt to find that belief false, and the more foolish one would feel. So depth of Christian commitment

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can also tempt one to intellectual dishonesty—for example, weighing antiChristian arguments unfairly. There is no passion, hope, or effort in our belief in material objects. We do not invest ourselves in this as we do in a religious belief.79

Leftow develops this critique more fully, then answers it realistically, for instance, as follows: Love, commitment, and invested effort do create a temptation to intellectual dishonesty. Few men want to believe that their wives are cheating. So too, if we love the Christian picture of the world we carry about in our heads, we will be loath to give up any part of it. But love can also make you want to be the best person you can be for the sake of the one you love. This applies particularly in God’s case. Loving someone involves identifying that person’s interests with your own. God’s interest in each of us is our own moral and intellectual perfection. If so, love of God works against intellectual dishonesty.80

A defective theistic believer is a theistically defective believer. True, not all theists are morally, intellectually ideal believers, but neither are most believers, pro or con, on any matter of great moment. And, with Leftow’s comparison in mind, one may wonder how many people, on becoming acquainted with the widely conflicting theories that Chapter 3 reviewed, give up their belief in the reality of physical bodies. More to the point, how many should? No belief is discredited by the mere fact that human believers humanly hold it.

The puzzle of creation This allusion to the deep mystery surrounding the nature of physical bodies, and to our acceptance, nonetheless, of their reality invites comparison with a lingering problem not yet here addressed, regarding God’s creative relation to the universe. Chapter  4 took a step beyond mere Humean regularities to the dynamism recognizable in free human mental activity. That paradigm could then provide an analog for free divine activity. In their different, complementary way, remarks of Austin Farrer are also suggestive regarding the mystery of creation: The religious mind goes direct from the divine handiwork to the divine maker; it is like the amateur’s identification of a work of art. This, he says, is surely a Rembrandt; in style, merit and feeling it is his. He knows nothing of Rembrandt’s methods. Let us suppose that the picture is an ideal composition. Did the artist paint out of his head, or did he set the scene with

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models dressed and posed, and the light carefully arranged? How many basic pigments did he use, and how did he lay his brush-strokes? Did he follow set precepts or recipes in the grouping of shapes and colours? Here are questions which the art-historian can very likely answer, but in which the amateur may be utterly at sea; and yet he may be talking good sense when he says “This is a Rembrandt.”81

Regarding the possibilities of divine creation, we are all rank amateurs; and such, no doubt, we shall remain. For, as Farrer observes, “The artistic amateur could become an art-historian and pry into technique; the religious mind cannot do anything of the sort.”82

The adequacy of science Back in the late 1960s, recounts Haught, the noted biochemist and atheist Jacques Monod claimed that the “ethic of knowledge” must be the foundation of all moral and intellectual claims. He declared that it is unethical to accept any ideas that fail to adhere to the “postulate of objectivity.” In other words it is morally wrong to accept any claims that cannot be verified in principle by “objective” scientific knowing.

So belief in God was morally unacceptable. “But, then,” asks Haught, “what about that precept itself? Can anyone prove objectively that the postulate of objectivity is true?”83 Monod recognized the problem. “He admitted that an exception must be made for the postulate of objectivity. The ethic of knowledge is itself an ‘arbitrary’ choice, not a claim for which there could ever be sufficient scientific evidence. Faith, it seems, makes an opening wide enough for atheism too.”84 Of other, less flexible atheists Haught writes: Theology for Dennett, as for Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, is now completely superfluous. Science alone can tell us what religion is really about and it can provide better answers than theology to every important question people ask. According to Dawkins, science is even qualified to decide whether or not God exists. Although Dennett is not quite that self-assured, he shares the belief that science’s cognitional sweep is exhaustive, and hence that it leaves no meaningful space for a theological explanation of religion.85

I have addressed the narrowness of such an outlook by expanding horizons beyond empirical to metaphysical and theological discourse (Chapter 1); beyond surface interfaith disagreements to underlying agreements (Chapter 2); beyond

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sense experience to Kantian, metaphysical obscurities (Chapter 3); beyond mere scientific regularities to experienced human agency (Chapter 4); beyond factual to evaluative perspectives (Chapter  5); beyond narrow value perspectives to holistic ones (Chapter  6); beyond the present moment to humanity’s and the universe’s distant, long-term prospects (Chapters  7 and 8)—all of which have taken us far beyond “science.”

Blind evolution Plantinga has suggested, more specifically, that “if you confuse Darwinism with unguided Darwinism, a confusion Dennett makes and Dawkins encourages, you will see science and religion as in conflict at this point.” And he has surmised, more generally, that this “confusion or alleged connection between Darwinism and unguided Darwinism is perhaps the most important source of continuing conflict and debate between science and religion.”86 There is so much to be said for this weighty double surmise that it, too, merits a moment’s scrutiny in this etiological series. According to some, evolution reveals a universe without design.87 Others argue the need for design to account for gaps in the natural process. But the truth, it seems clear, lies beyond all human calculation. At a first, empirical level, there is, for instance, “surely no guarantee that there is a not-too-improbable path through organic space from some early population of unicellular organisms to human beings, or, for that matter, to fruit flies. It might be, as Michael Behe claims, that some structures simply can’t be reached by way of small steps (each advantageous or not too disadvantageous) from preceding life forms.”88 At the second, more dynamic level that Chapter  4 considered, transcending mere Humean regularities, God might guide every step of evolution without science ever knowing the difference, or just intervene at many a crucial point, likewise incognito, or program the whole process at the start. At a third level, it is difficult to suppose that the range of metaphysical possibilities reviewed in Chapter 3, from naïve realism to Kantian idealism and beyond, is irrelevant to the question of the world’s evolution, and there is no prospect of our ever solving Kant’s problem. As we have seen, many just choose to ignore it. So at this point I am led to wonder about the saying that science doesn’t make it impossible to believe in God but just makes it possible not to believe in God. How does science do that? How could it? “Prejudice” is one possible reply; so is “habituation” (such are the spectacles scientists wear); and so is the following.

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The scientific necessity of the universe Although, as some quotations above have illustrated, scientistic perspectives may be narrow, the aspirations that they reflect and motivate are often far from narrow. “Science,” we read, “now seems poised to address the origin of the primal energy at creation itself, and thus to tackle the fundamental query: Why is there something rather than nothing?”89 Here Chapter 4 agreed with Hume. Science, transcending experience and turning philosophical, will do no better here than philosophy has; it will discover no such necessity in the world—just empirical regularities.

Freedom’s threat “It is sometimes asserted,” writes Hasker, that God as we conceive him would not be able to ensure the fulfillment of his plan even in the most general respects. If every single human being has it in her power to accept or reject God’s offer of salvation, and if God has no advance knowledge of how a person will respond, then it would be possible for every person without exception to reject salvation—and if this were to occur, there would be no “people of God,” no Church, and a key element in God’s plan would be frustrated. As things naturally stand, to be sure, this has not happened, but it could have happened; that it has not, is attributable to nothing but “God’s luck.”90

In response, Hasker offers a parallel: According to modern physics, there is a finite probability that all of the oxygen in a room should concentrate itself in a small volume, leaving the rest of the room devoid of oxygen and unable to sustain life. But the probability of this happening is so minute that rational persons can and do disregard the possibility in conducting their lives; I am completely confident that not a single one of my readers goes about with bottled oxygen in order to protect himself in the event of such an occurrence! So why should our inability to show how God can logically guarantee that humans will respond to his love constitute a serious objection?91

Similarly, we might suggest, there is a finite probability that all or most human beings should commit suicide, thereby frustrating God’s plans for the race; but that possibility, too, is so remote that it can be disregarded. More realistically, recall, with regard to our individual selves, how much physical and psychological determinism, how much sheer habit, Chapter  4 waded through before it could locate something more by way of genuine activity and not just Humean

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regularity. With regard to our social selves, as seen in Chapter  8, recall the contrast between the vagaries of individual preferences on the one hand and the tendencies so advantageous that they have decisively determined large historical developments on the other.

An alternative single universe Seeing a computer run off a remarkable tale, we would assume someone had programmed the computer. Told that it ran on a program different than the one supposed, we would not change our minds. So perhaps, it is true, some future theory may differ as greatly from the Big-Bang account as Einstein’s theory did from Newton’s, or Bohr’s from Einstein’s; but no theory in such a series would weaken the impression of overall design. As for more adventurous imaginings, “Models that seek to avert the predictions of the Standard Model of an absolute beginning of the universe have time and again been shown either to be untenable or else to imply the very beginning of the universe that their proponents sought to avoid.”92 Thus, in Stoeger’s words, The Big Bang as a relative, model-dependent limit to the hotter and denser phases of the universe as we travel back in time, is a powerful symbol of contingency and of ultimate origins, but, as we have seen, it cannot be accepted as an adequate description of that origin, nor as proof that it constituted a beginning in time, whatever that might mean.93

The multiple-universes hypothesis Some thinkers have suggested that ours may be just one of an infinity of universes—antecedent, concurrent, or temporally unrelated—in which all possible arrangements are, have been, or will be realized. By sheer chance, not by any plan, we happen to have drawn this one. But in such a cosmic lottery why not, for example, suppose an infinity of duplicate universes, or a random assortment of half a dozen varieties? As Paul Davies, like others, has noted, the endless-variety hypothesis looks contrived:  To postulate an infinity of unseen and unseeable universes just to explain the one we do observe seems like a case of excess baggage carried to the extreme (or, less figuratively, an attempt to escape from the contingency of our cosmic condition into the realm of a priori necessity dreamed of by Locke and company). It is simpler to postulate one unseen God.94

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What the theory, like others of its kind,95 does attest by its extravagance is the strength of the impression made by the recent findings. Such a universe cries out for explanation. “Chance alone is virtually impossible to have played a role,” Amir Aczel writes, “since . . . the odds against a universe with life and intelligence are at most one to a number that has 1 followed by 10 raised to the power 117 zeros (based on the requirements of only one of the parameters!)—the odds are so staggeringly high against our existence that even talking about probability and chance in this context is unproductive.”96 As Barr comments, “[I]f the universe is orderly and highly structured simply by the luck of the draw, then it is a miracle that miracles do not happen all the time.”97 So yes, how extraordinary it all seems! Yet when the attempt is made to spell out this impression in terms of an explicitly articulated argument from design, it proves difficult, and the result seems to lack the strength of the original impression. After all, in terms of sheer logical odds, our universe is no more unlikely than any other that we might conceive—two planets, three random buckets, fifteen carbon atoms, you name it (why so many, why so few, why any?). However, as noted, a case like that of Mrs. M raises the same issue in much the same way. In that instance, too, the impression (of her love) is strong and the evidence convincing, yet no attempt to articulate the evidence in argument form is equally (or at all) convincing. We might infer that the impression of epistemic solidity is deceptive; or we might, instead, be led to question the demonstrative requirements we tend to impose on the evidence. One size does not—and should not be expected to— fit all. In many cases, Plantinga has suggested and argued very fully, “the belief that something is a product of design is not formed by way of inference, but in the basic way; what goes on here is to be understood as more like perception than like inference.”98 And, as in Mrs. M’s case, such perception is holistic. Offering his own comparison, Dembski takes it further. Think of Mount Rushmore, he suggests, with its presidential sculptures by Gutzon Borglum. What about this rock formation would provide convincing circumstantial evidence that it was due to a designing intelligence, and not merely to wind and erosion? Designed objects like Mount Rushmore exhibit characteristic features or patterns that point to an intelligence. Such features or patterns constitute signs of intelligence. Proponents of intelligent design, known as design theorists, purport to study such signs formally, rigorously, and scientifically. In particular, they claim that a type of information, known as specified complexity, is a key sign of intelligence. An exact formulation of specified complexity first appeared in my book The Design Inference and was then further developed in No Free Lunch.99

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Not surprisingly, such “exact formulations” have been contested, as similar demonstrations would be, no doubt, if attempted in proof of Mrs. M’s love. But that, the previous chapter suggested, is what we should expect. It is unrealistic to suppose that any such issues as these can be decided “formally, rigorously, and scientifically.” In confirmation, think, for instance, of solipsism and its particular form of irrationality. Instead of multiplying universes at will without any inconsistency, the solipsist limits them to one—his own—without any inconsistency. How might he be answered “formally, rigorously, scientifically”? Well, trick him into debating the matter with you, and thereby acknowledging your existence. But no: you are just a dream of his. Anything goes. And so it is for the multiverse theorizer. “Such ontological prodigality,” remarks Polkinghorne, “goes far beyond anything for which sober scientific motivation might be offered. It is a metascientific strategy of what seems to me to be a pretty desperate kind.”100

Basic, unjustifiable evil Many antitheists have a problem with the description of God as “beneficent.” Granted, Chapter  6 may be right that we cannot second-guess a cosmic providence. But perhaps on reflection we might agree with Jerome Gellman that “just as there is a human experience of God’s existence, there is likewise and just as surely a human experience of God’s non-existence. And the latter is to be found in humanity’s experience of evil.”101 What people perceive in evil, especially in its more extreme forms, Gellman suggests, “is that the world is Godless, without a God. God’s non-existence is made manifest to them. And they perceive this non-existence of God in the utter repugnance and revulsion of the evil that they know. This is not unlike the poet who sees infinity in a grain of sand, or ordinary mortals who see God in the beauty and symmetry of a snowflake.”102 More pertinent, I suggest, is the dire evil Mrs. Jaeger experienced— the loss of her child—and how she viewed it. In her grief, she wavered back and forth: Is there a God? How could there be? Then she had, not a cosmic insight, but an experience (“I couldn’t believe anyone could love me that much”) and that made all the difference. So did Plantinga’s experience, Augustine’s, Teresa’s, Brother Bill’s, Arrupe’s, Carrel’s, Corrie’s, Paul’s. None of these people, or the many they represent, pondered the mystery of the universe and, in a burst of holistic, all-embracing insight, hit upon the cosmic verdict regarding their experience. Given human limitations, Providence does not, and cannot, work that way. Neither, in reverse, can it so act as to communicate with all-embracing

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clarity its nonexistence. To some, Jesus’s agonizing death might appear an utterly repugnant, unredeemable evil, but how radically Christians disagree with such a verdict!

A futuristic perspective “I suspect,” writes Wildman, “that the appeal of the cosmological design argument may be cresting at the moment. We can expect quantum cosmology, especially string theory and multiverses in some form or another, to relativize the superficially astonishing fine-tuning of laws of nature. This will weaken the cosmological design argument in the same way evolutionary theory weakened the biological design argument after Paley’s time.” So it may conceivably turn out (though strong doubts have set in). However, in an equally speculative, futuristic vein, Wildman surmises that the design argument in both its biological and cosmological forms will return to the mode in which it is most compelling, namely, insisting that the ultimate contingency of nature itself, along with the principles by which we attempt to explain nature, demand a deeper metaphysical explanation. It is in this mode that the design argument has abiding significance for metaphysics and theology.103

In general, then, there is much to be said for theism and, given the weakness of the antitheistic arguments reviewed here and in earlier chapters, there is little to be said for atheism. Arguments, however, are only half the story. What role does, legitimately may, or should the will play in such matters?

Wider etiology As already noted, resistance to belief in a divine being derives in part, for example, from materialistic, deterministic thinking of the kind widely fostered, though not evidentially supported, by a scientific milieu. Less reflective factors, perhaps still more potent, now merit consideration. In their regard, Nagel’s remarks, turning from social perspectives to candid personal analysis, seem specially revealing. Of the former, he writes: “The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.”104 Becoming more personal, Nagel explains that

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in speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I  am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and wellinformed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.105

Here one can sense the etiological relevance of Barr’s observation:  [A] key point, which Nagel at times seems to forget, is that natural explanation and theism are not alternatives to each other. The idea that all the various aspects and components of the natural order fit together in some internally coherent way and the idea that some mind conceived of the natural order can be seen themselves to fit together in a coherent way.106

Pertinently for present purposes, Nagel himself remarks, “My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.”107 Who is in charge? Who has the last word? Bryan Frances’s related surmise likewise sounds plausible: [T]he esteemed scientist Dawkins suffers from a malady that afflicts a surprisingly large percentage of outstanding scientists:  the idea that he can succeed at philosophy because he has succeeded at science. It is easy to see how training in philosophy but not science would leave one utterly unprepared to do competent science—even if one is excellent at philosophy. What Dawkins misses is that the reverse is true as well: training in science but not philosophy leaves one utterly unprepared to do competent philosophy—regardless of how good one is at science.108

Paul Davies is revealingly self-aware regarding his own scientistic perspective:  “I would rather not believe in supernatural events personally. Although I  obviously can’t prove that they never happen, I  see no reason to suppose that they do. My inclination is to assume that the laws of nature are obeyed at all times.”109 So, obeyed at all times even by humans. Their freedom, too, would threaten the hegemony of natural science. Thus, as I  have already observed, such thinking exemplifies one of the broadest and most problematic tendencies in human thought, namely, the tendency to simplify. Though this a

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priori preference may be questionable in science and elsewhere, Rescher, as we have seen, defended it as “an important, common, and legitimate instrument of inquiry” which, as such, should be given the benefit of the doubt. With this I  disagreed. Yet, while regrettable, this tendency does not discredit science. Neither, likewise, does the readiness of believers to multiply signs of the divine discredit theism. So my earlier suggestion holds analogously here: with time and many hits and misses, the truth may eventually emerge; but the historical record suggests that truth’s emergence is more often impeded than speeded by a general preference for simple solutions. Likewise at a largely pre-reflective, unarticulated level, two deep-seated, apparently contrary factors work against acceptance of a transcendent divinity. First, subtly or blatantly, in business, sports, politics, academe, and other areas, to varying degrees around the globe, competiveness pervades our human cultures. Even most Christians, who revere one who abjured such competitiveness and so instructed his followers, perceive little problem with it.110 Predictably, then, so it is here: human egoism plays a role, one way or the other, in theisticatheistic disputation. Atheists, like theists, want to be right. Furthermore, for many people, in many ways, to differing degrees, God can seem the great rival, the great competitor, whose existence is therefore resisted. Paradigms of selfcentered self-reliance such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin exemplify more blatantly tendencies common to many human beings, which a theorist such as Ayn Rand just urged more explicitly and strongly than most: “the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.”111 “His own”: me first!112 Countering this human sense of self-importance, growing awareness of our quasi-infinite universe begets correlative awareness of our individual and collective human insignificance. What a grandiose pretension it can therefore seem, to suppose a creator of such a universe being attentively, intimately concerned about the likes of us! And yet, it is these little specks of nothingness that now gaze out at that immensity and take its measure. And the more striking is the world’s appearance in all its vastness, the more striking are the tiny observers to whom it ever more fully reveals itself. But the more those inquisitive observers fix their gaze on their own physical makeup and their physical, cosmic surroundings, the less likely they are to glimpse and fully appreciate their own transcendent mystery. So their too-ready self-estimate may be, as it is for many: “Just some more—albeit intriguingly complicated—matter.” And yet, as previous chapters have suggested, our conscious life cannot meaningfully be equated with neural events. Neither can neural or other physical events meaningfully be viewed as necessary, predetermined, or even conceived

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as dynamic in a more than Humean sense of their regular occurrence, save by analogy with mental events of kinds whose freedom they are often invoked to deny. Neither, therefore, can correlative limits of necessity be set on human existence or on the existence of a divinity that might give point and possibility to a future life. Once this vast negative, limiting network of materialistic determinism dissolves, empirical evidence of kinds here cited for such a human future and such a divinity can start to emerge more forcefully without that evidence being dismissed out of hand; and the problem of evil can then be more sharply, realistically addressed. In the whole bundle of contrary, antitheistic thinking here reviewed, one can sense something more than theory at work. As James remarked long ago concerning the budding monistic spirit: “When a young man first conceives the notion that the whole world forms one great fact, with all its parts moving abreast, as it were, and interlocked, he feels as if he were enjoying a great insight, and looks superciliously on all who still fall short of this sublime conception.”113 By James’s time, what he called an initial “vague impression” had become much more and, powerfully amplified, had fostered materialistic, deterministic, atheistic, nihilistic thinking such as that we have reviewed and found wanting. Thus it appears that a strong psychological obstacle to belief in God has been a widespread attitude which regards such belief as unscientific (hence intellectually second-rate) or even anti-scientific—as “credulity,” or “wishful thinking.” Adopting such expressions would veil the recognizable, human reality. Hungry people sometimes dream of food, but they do not invent food. Thirsty people sometimes see watery mirages in the desert, but there is such a thing as water. Mathematicians have been known to view the whole world as mathematical, but there is such a thing as quantity and it can be treated mathematically. Materialists and determinists have spotted matter and necessity everywhere, but few have accused them of inventing matter or necessity. Human beings are, in general, believers, one way or another, and their interests and desires affect their beliefs. Of comparable significance for theism’s reception, one may surmise, is the contrast between the sharp clarity for which the natural sciences are admired and the general nebulosity for which theological discourse has often been disparaged. Although this contrast has often been exaggerated, theoretically it is entirely appropriate. For empirical science is not and should not be as broadly indefinite as theology, while theology cannot and should not be as narrowly precise as empirical science. In speaking of God, it has special need of (and may

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often satisfy) the Principle of Relative Similarity—as does the philosophy of science. Further countering negative perceptions of theistic belief, Chapter  3 has stressed the profound limits of science, while Chapter 4 has suggested theism’s basic theoretical support of science. For, if troubled by our human cognitive limitations, we could, for instance, wonder:  Did I  in fact mow the lawn this morning, as I uncritically suppose? Indeed, did the lawn exist this morning—or my body, or my observing self, or other people, or the world? To such radical queries as these, empirical science has no answer; but other thinking might, if and perhaps only if it led to a benevolent Creator. For suppose, writes Plantinga, you find yourself doubting that our cognitive faculties produce truth: you can’t properly quell that doubt by producing an argument about God and his veracity, or indeed, any argument at all; for the argument, of course, will be under as much suspicion as its source. Here there is no argument that will help you; here salvation will have to be by grace, not by works. But the theist has nothing impelling her in the direction of such skepticism in the first place; no element in her noetic system points in that direction; there are no propositions she already accepts just by being a theist that together with forms of reasoning (deductive, inductive, or abductive) she accepts lead to the conclusion that our cognitive faculties do not have apprehension of truth as their purpose—or to the doubt that they do.114

Why, then, is there nonetheless reason to doubt whether any time soon such reflections as these will effect a broader rapprochement between theistic believers, scientific or other, and scientific unbelievers? On one side it can be anticipated that many theists will continue to resist the siren call of reason (as many have conceived it) and will thereby continue to suggest, in a general way, the irrationality of their faith. “To many,” Frank Sheed remarked, “the idea of bringing the intellect fully into action in religion seems almost repellent. The intellect seems so cold and measured and measuring, and the will so warm and glowing.”115 Worse, the intellect, when busy on its own, often appears inimical to faith. On the other hand, one can also anticipate that the narrowly scientistic spectacles which, selectively filtering out the transcendent, have weakened religious belief will to a considerable extent continue to have that effect. For most people are not philosophers, and even philosophers, as they themselves may admit, are profoundly affected by their surroundings. Jean Paul Sartre, for example, admitted that he “was led to disbelief, not by the conflict of dogmas, but by my grandparents’ indifference.”116 And behind that indifference, as he

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further noted, lay something larger than his familial milieu:  “My family had been affected by the slow movement of dechristianization that started among the Voltairian upper bourgeoisie and took a century to spread to all levels of society.”117 Thus Sartre’s individual disbelief can be traced—at least in large part118—to the Enlightenment. And that historical development can, in turn, be traced to largely nonepistemic influences.119 Whereas a wise, powerful, caring divinity is reassuring, a distant deistic divinity is less so, and a Sartrian despotic divinity is positively threatening. “What a horrible idea!” exclaims Rush Rhees. “Like a Frankenstein without limits, so that you cannot escape it. The most ghastly nightmare!”120 One can therefore sense the plausibility of Michael Buckley’s surmise regarding the origins of modern atheism. Such an atheistic turn can be predicted, he suggests, when two things coincide: “First, when the culture insists that god is preeminently personal, intimately involved with human subjectivity and history, and the argument takes as its fundamental evidence for this assertion something impersonal. Second, when religion attempts to maintain the god of religion without reference to religious experience or personal witness, history, or event, and the argument becomes irreducibly inferential.”121

Ultimate horizons Here in this closing chapter, no syllogisms have figured, nor arguments from motion to a prime mover, from contingent beings to a necessary being, from grades of being to a supremely perfect being, or the like. How could they, if relevant, abstract, synthetic a priori premises would be required? Instead, Mrs. M and her infant daughter led the way from personal experiences to social occurrences to historical developments to the wonder and drama of creation. And, looking back more broadly now to earlier discussions here, we can glimpse a possible dialectical movement presently under way toward fuller, wider recognition of the transcendent. As scientific exploration continues on its separate way, most people, being mere interested bystanders, remain immersed in their world of sense. Scientists however, leaving that world far behind, plunge ever deeper into realms of growing awe and wonder. “Through my scientific work,” writes Paul Davies, “I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation.”122

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The general impression such a universe evokes is one of fantastic fine-tuning, signaling fantastic intelligence and power. It does so more clearly in the light of a converging development, in tension with a narrowly scientific focus. J. J. C. Smart and like-minded thinkers favored reducing the mental to the physical, but that simplification did not make good sense (Chapter 3). The alternatives, being more speculatively metaphysical, have prompted Nagel to remark: “Strangely enough, we may have evidence for the truth of something we cannot really understand.”123 Chapter 4, probing for some minimal understanding, noted that without human agency we would have no intelligible notion whatever of agency—physical, metaphysical, or other—as distinct from mere empirical regularity. And once the events in question are at the cosmic level, comparable causal agency will have to be of the transcendent order just signaled: fantastic intelligence, phenomenal power. Such suggestions find their place in a convergence such as Polkinghorne envisages: “the new-style natural theology in no way seeks to be a rival to scientific explanation but rather . . . aims to complement that explanation by setting it within a wider and more profound context of understanding.”124 This dialectical development fits within a still larger one which may be sketched, very roughly, as follows. In ancient times, various divinities, from the Greek gods with their battles and amours to the not-to-be-gazed-upon Yahweh high on the mountaintop, were conceived in bodily forms that, in Yahweh’s case, were gradually transcended. Likewise, till modern times the physical world was conceived in solidly sensible, corporeal terms that, as science advances, are still in the process of being far transcended. A merging of these developments has, it seems, been slowed by two obstacles:  first, by the lingering naively realistic mentality of the general population, for whom a transcendent deity can now, by comparison with the still so-solid-seeming physical universe, appear unrealistically ethereal; second, by the scientistic mentality fostered, especially in many of those most involved, by the impressive advances of physical science. Although that science reveals ever more its own deep mysteries, beyond the reach of any purely empirical explication, for their solution many practitioners sense no need of extrascientific hypotheses, especially of the supposedly longdiscredited theistic variety. If an answer to the cosmic puzzle is to be found, science will—somehow, in some presently inconceivable manner—eventually uncover it. Such, broadly stated, seems still today to be a widespread attitude. One deep metaphysics vies with another. These large dialectical perspectives can be given a sharper focus. The present chapter shifted from an abstract, proof-by-proof approach regarding God, which

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the previous chapter found problematic, to an approach both more concretely empirical and more holistically cumulative. Within this basic shift, the chapter opted for a Plantingian approach comparing belief in God with belief in other minds, then both focused it more sharply and expanded it more widely. Therewith, a positive, God-affirming verdict appeared plausible. Notice, though, how Plantinga stated his claim: “If my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God. But clearly the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latter.” Fuller reflection now suggests a reversal of epistemic priorities: if my belief in God is rational, so is my belief in other minds, other bodies, the past, the future, and the like. For these beliefs, too, are not scientifically grounded. On the contrary, they ground whatever rationality science possesses—provided we can count on their veracity. Belief in God gives us reason to believe that we can. Supplying oxygen for the thinning intellectual air we breathe these days, belief in God extends its support still further. As Chapter  6 noted, left to ourselves and our limited human perspectives we have no solid nontheistic reason to believe that our most earnest efforts for ourselves and our race will not eventually be catastrophic in their consequences. The horse’s notorious missing shoe may make all the difference—one way or the other. So, is the whole of morality without firm foundation, and is the whole of life just one great Pascalian wager? Not if there exists a divinity such as Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others have believed in. Here, in this support, is a further motive, if not a further argument, for believing that there does. Belief in God, like those other Plantingian basic beliefs, without which we could not live our lives, is desirable as well as reasonable. Thus one of the strongest arguments that might be made for theistic faith is this, that the commonsense notions of reason which we tend to take for granted make good sense only in relation to faith in a Providence that has rationally ordered creation and continues to do so. Mindless evolution, issuing from some mysterious, equally mindless source, would offer no such reassurance.125 For, as Robert Jensen has observed, “Neither you nor I nor all of us together can so shape the world that it can make narrative sense; if God does not invent the world’s story, then it has none.”126 Such, it appears, is the answer to this chapter’s opening query about the wisdom Kenny claimed for his neutral, noncommittal stance regarding the existence of God. No, it now seems clear, such agnosticism would not be “the safer position” with regard to any of humanity’s most foundational beliefs, and least of all with regard to this theistic one. Epistemologically, metaphysically, cosmically, ethically, and vis-à-vis the individual and collective prospects of us wayfaring, wondering, wide-eyed human beings, no question is more basic. And

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The Maturing of Monotheism

Abraham Varghese comes close to succinctly summing up the present work’s overall affirmative response when he writes, “The theistic world-vision sees the Ultimate Reality as personal, recognizes the irreducible nature of consciousness, affirms the ultimacy of distinct personal identity, and views the meaning and purpose of human existence in terms of union with the Ultimate Reality.”127 Should, in our day of ever broadening, deepening horizons, such a vision nonetheless appear far-fetched, that by now should not surprise us. How else than fantastic, to tiny creatures like ourselves, could any plausible explanation appear for mysteries as profound as our human selves, our terrestrial story, and the universe in which we find ourselves journeying ever onward? Yet here too, at this deepest level of all, there still is room—indeed, ever more ample room—for rational, theistic faith.

Notes Preface 1 Nagel, The Last Word, 130, note 8 (original italics). 2 Byrne, God and Realism, 156. 3 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 3–4.

1 Truth 1 Horwich, “Truth,” 455 (original emphasis). For a critique of this reductive view, targeting its varied formulations, see Hallett, Linguistic Philosophy, 49. 2 Rorty, “Taylor on Truth,” 21. 3 See Hallett, Invisible Language, 32, and the many citations in note 9. 4 Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles 1.31 (author’s translation). 5 Vanstone, The Risk of Love, 39. 6 Kenny, The Unknown God, chapter 3. 7 Ibid., 37–38. 8 Ibid., 38. 9 Puntel, Being and God, 52. 10 Becking, Reflections on the Silence of God, 2–3. Of such thinking, Elizabeth Newman has observed, “These assumptions are so deeply ingrained in our cultural imagination that it seems commonsensical to describe scientific statements, such as E=MC2, as real (Judson) or direct (Kaufman), and religious statements, such as ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,’ as only symbolic and indirect. Indeed to suggest otherwise seems, to some, counter-intuitive” (“E=MC2,” 259). 11 See, principally, Hallett, Language and Truth; Linguistic Philosophy; and Theology within the Bounds of Language. 12 Brown, God and Mystery in Words, 7. 13 See, for instance, Hallett, Language and Truth, 115–18 (“Established Uses and Established Opinions”); Linguistic Philosophy (chapters 11 and 12); and One God of All? 72–75 (“A Well-Hidden Distinction”). Terms such as “concept” and “conceptual” are particularly prone to similar medium-message conflation. 14 Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence, 10. 15 Kenny, What I Believe, 52–53.

178

Notes

16 For a quick, complementary review of excessive linguistic diffidence in theology, see Hallett, Theology within the Bounds of Language, 211–13. 17 Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, 9. 18 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.002. 19 Most notably, see Hallett, Language and Truth, 70–129. 20 On true’s secondary, derivative application, to mental entities such as beliefs and abstract entities such as propositions, see Hallett, Language and Truth, chapter 4. 21 Hebblethwaite, The Ocean of Truth, 102–103. 22 Shatz, “Judaism,” 57. 23 Boeve, “Naming God Today,” 14. 24 Burrell, Aquinas, 68. 25 Morris, “Introduction,” 9. 26 McFague, Models of God, 196, n. 13. 27 Alston, Beyond “Justification,” 30 (emphasis in the original). 28 Alston, Divine Nature and Human Language, 13 (emphases in the original). 29 See Hallett, Language and Truth, chapters 1 and 2. 30 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §342 (italics in the original). 31 See, for instance, Hallett, A Companion to Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations,” 108–109, 306–307, 313–15, 398.

2 Theism 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Detmer, “Rorty on Objectivity and Truth,” 368. Ward, Religion and Revelation, 134. See Hallett, One God of All? chapter 1. Byrne, Prolegomena to Religious Pluralism, 191. Silva, The Problem of the Self, 9. Kärkkäinen, Trinity and Religious Pluralism, 156 (emphasis in the original). Watt, Islam and Christianity Today, 45. Martinich, “Identity and Trinity,” 169. Ibid. Morris, “Introduction,” 6. Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, 47–53. Bogardus and Urban, “How to Tell,” 185. Schwöbel, “The Same God?,” 8. Quoted, without exact reference, in Cohn-Sherbok, “Between Christian and Jew,” 91. 15 See Hallett, Identity and Mystery, chapters 2 and 3. 16 Brown, The Divine Trinity, 223.

Notes

179

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Cf. Hallett, Identity and Mystery, chapter 4; Ward, Religion and Revelation, 173–81. Pauw, “The Same God?,” 38–39. Ibid., 44. See Yandell and Netland, Buddhism, 183–87. Ibid., 183. Griffiths, “Nontheistic Conceptions of the Divine,” 75–77. Cf. Thelle, “Religious Pluralism,” and Schmidt-Leukel, “Skizze einer Theologie der Religionen,” 457–59. 24 Griffin, “Premodern and Postmodern,” 24 (quoting and critiquing Huston Smith). 25 Griffiths, “Buddhism,” 23. 26 Bowker, “Creation, Law and Probability,” 181.

3 Diversity 1 Barr, The Believing Scientist, 159. 2 Rescher, Nature and Understanding, 24 (emphasis in the original). In the preliminary remarks of his The Best Argument against God, Graham Oppy spells out this test as follows: If everything else is equal, we should prefer the more simple theory to the less simple theory. If everything else is equal, we should prefer the theory that postulates fewer (and less complex) primitive entities. If everything else is equal, we should prefer the theory that invokes fewer (and less complex) primitive features. If everything else is equal, we should prefer the theory that appeals to fewer (and less complex) primitive principles. (7–8)

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Matters are simpler that way. Adding a creator might complicate them. (For apt remarks on “Idols of Simplicity, Systemism and the True World,” see Bruce Benson, Graven Ideologies, 60–64.) Mitchell, The Justification of Religious Belief, 7. Nichols, Death and Afterlife, 92–93. Ibid., 94. Fenton, Bats, 55. Waxman, Kant’s Anatomy of the Intelligent Mind, 196–97. Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, 333. Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 231 (italics in the original). Ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy, 81. Musgrave, Common Sense, Science and Scepticism, 282. Smith, The Problem of Perception, 5. Polkinghorne, “The Metaphysics of Divine Action,” 147–48 (italics in the original).

180

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Rescher, Empirical Inquiry, 224 (italics in the original). Jeeves, Human Nature, 42–43. Barr, The Believing Scientist, 19. Ibid., 20. Putnam, Philosophy in an Age of Science, 93. Davies, Science in the Looking Glass, 17 (emphasis in the original). On “our enamoration with visual criteria,” see Newman, “E=MC2.” Rundle, Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, ix. Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, 1 (italics in the original). Murphy, Bodies and Souls, 5. Ulmschneider, Intelligent Life, 191 (italics in the original). Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, 3. Taliaferro, “The Soul of the Matter,” 28 (the quotation not found in the reference given). Ibid., 28–29. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, 51. Malcolm, “Scientific Materialism,” 171–72 (italics in the original). Foster, “The Token-Identity Thesis,” 300. Lowe, Kinds of Being, 114 (emphasis in the original). Cf. Ebeling, Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language, 179–80. For a fuller account of this thumbnail critique and its significance, see Hallett, Invisible Language, chapter 3. Kim, Mind in a Physical World, 2 (emphasis in the original). Montero, “Post-Physicalism,” 137. Ibid., 9 (emphasis in the original). Ibid. Hick, The New Frontier, 81. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 101.

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

4 Freedom 1 2 3 4 5 6

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §336. Popper, The Open Universe, 5. Jeffery, Islam, 91. Popper, The Open Universe, 5. Livio, Brilliant Blunders, 263. Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution, 6.

Notes 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18

181

Locke, Essay, IV, ch. 3, §16 (548) (emphases in the original). Ibid., §14 (546). Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 59. Ibid., 64–65. Kant, Prolegomena, 62 (§2). Rosenberg, “Hume and the Philosophy of Science,” 74. Cf. Beauchamp and Rosenberg, Hume and the Problem of Causation, 156–57; Hallett, Linguistic Philosophy, chapter 15. Ellis, Scientific Essentialism, 2. Compare Lierse, “The Jerrybuilt House of Humeanism,” 31 (“if a property’s causal powers are to have any relevance to the identity of the property, then the connection between the nature of the property and the kind of behavior it displays must be more than merely contingent”). On the interest of such straddling, see Hallett, Linguistic Philosophy, 144–46 (e.g., on 145: “if, however, as Nielsen’s sampling suggests, the difference between verbal and empirical truth is often much more difficult to detect than in the paradigm examples that establish its existence, the distinction may have frequent, important application . . . In how many instances does language by itself determine truth or assertability, in how many instances does it not, and in how many instances, perhaps, is it indeterminate whether it does or does not?”). Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 214. See Kim, Mind in a Physical World, 9–10. Anscombe, “Causality and Determination,” 139, quoting Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III, section I. Cf. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, VI, 396–97:  the successful application of mathematics in physical science naturally suggested that the world is intelligible or “rational.” Thus for Galileo God had written the book of nature in mathematical characters, as it were. And, indeed, if philosophy is to be a deductive system and at the same time to give us certain factual information about the world, it is obviously necessary to assume that the world is of such a kind that it is possible to do this. In practice this means that the causal relation will be assimilated to the relation of logical implication. And we find among the rationalist philosophers the tendency to make this assimilation.

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution, 5–6. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei, 51. Einstein, “Religion and Science,” 26. Peacocke, “Reductionism,” 307. Davies, The Mind of God, 93 (emphasis in the original). Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 79. Stoeger, “Contemporary Cosmology,” 241.

182

Notes

26 Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, 123. 27 Harré and Madden, Causal Powers, 1. 28 Klocker, God and the Empiricists, 63. Compare the following, with its hidden suppositions: “Leibniz, himself a mechanist and a great mathematician, opposed nearly as much to Descartes as he was to Newton, demanded of Clarke a resolution of the intellectual dilemma of the seventeenth century: if the universe is wholly mechanical God has no part in it; if God controls the universe, then it is not mechanical nor governed by laws” (Hall, From Galileo to Newton, 318). (If, like a car, the universe is mechanical, it cannot be driven; and if, like a car, it can be driven, it cannot be driven predictably.) 29 Collins, God in Modern Philosophy, 120. 30 Wildman, “From Law and Chance,” 157, n. 5. 31 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, 22, 4 ad 1, as translated in Barr, The Believing Scientist, 51. 32 Coventry, Hume’s Theory of Causation, 1. 33 Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 70. 34 Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 203. 35 Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 35. 36 Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, 5–6 (italics in the original). 37 Moore, Some Main Problems of Philosophy, 4 (italics in the original). 38 Wittgenstein, Schriften, vol. 5, 219. 39 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §66. 40 Strawson, Selves, 192. 41 Sacks, The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island, 156–57. 42 O’Shaughnessy, Consciousness and the World, 89. “The agency involved in perceptual activities such as looking and listening is something that Shaughnessy discusses at length, and his account of ‘activeness’ in perceptual function plays an important role in his account of the ‘mental will’ in consciousness” (Soteriou, The Mind’s Construction, 220). 43 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §299 (italics omitted). “For Wittgenstein,” notes Robert Fogelin (appositely here), “the inherent danger in responding to a philosophical question with what we are unhesitatingly inclined to say is that the response may inherit a conceptual confusion embodied in the question itself . . . When we philosophize, there seems to be an inherent tendency to start off on the wrong foot” (Taking Wittgenstein at His Word, 169). 44 Cartwright, The Dappled World, 1. 45 Ward, “Theistic Evolution,” 273–74. For a helpful account of the complexities of the related Intelligent Design debate, see Menuge, “Who’s Afraid of ID?” 46 Ward, “Theistic Evolution,” 274.

Notes

183

47 Badham, Christian Beliefs about Life after Death, 126, in a chapter entitled “Why Materialism Is a Self-Refuting Theory.” 48 Cf. Menuge, “Who’s Afraid of ID?” 42: “a number of philosophers have pressed the case that naturalism, and particularly the Darwinian variety, threatens human rationality and the very enterprise of science. Alvin Plantinga (1993, chapter 12; 2000, chapter 7) has suggested that evolutionary naturalism is epistemically self-defeating, because, if it were true, we could never have sufficient warrant to believe it.”

5 Goodness 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Al-Ghazālī, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, 49–51. Soskice, “The Ends of Man,” 82. Nagel, The Last Word, 102. Bloomfield, Moral Reality, 23. Ward, God, Chance and Necessity, 175. For a full exposition and defense of this value-maximizing approach in ethics, see Hallett, Greater Good. For a similar perspective differently developed, see Audi, The Good in the Right, chapter 4 (“Rightness and Goodness”). Cf. FitzPatrick, “Robust Ethical Realism,” for example, 179–83 (“Objective Values and Irreducible Normativity”). There is no incoherence here, no empty tautology. Given other, weighty considerations, some unfairness, say, of an action may not count decisively against the action. See Hallett, Christian Moral Reasoning, 127–28. Railton, Facts, Values and Norms, xv. Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, 19. Stump, “The Mirror of Evil,” 240, quoting Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, regarding the villagers of Le Chambon in southern France who during the Second World War, at peril of their own imprisonment and death, rescued many Jews from their pursuing Nazi persecutors. Foster, Ayer, 74. Ward, Pascal’s Fire, 54. Harman, in Harman and Thomson, Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity, 8. Ibid., 10–11. Teichman, Ethics and Reality, 3. White, Companion to Plato’s Republic, 134. For full illustration of these points (using the Vietnam War as a case study), see Hallett, Reason and Right, 40–44.

184

Notes

19 Here the word “evident” should be stressed. Putnam recounts that when he spoke to an audience that contained at least fifty Nobel Prize winners on the thesis “that even when the judgments of reasonableness are left tacit, such judgments are presupposed by scientific inquiry,” not one of them disagreed with him (Philosophy in an Age of Science, 47–48). 20 Ward, Pascal’s Fire, 95, citing John Polkinghorne, The Quantum World, chapter 7.

6 Evil 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Cornman and Lehrer, Philosophical Problems and Arguments, 398. Dawkins, River out of Eden, 133. Haught, “God and Evolution,” 710. Ruse, Darwin and Design, 332. More fully in this line, see Hallett, A Middle Way to God, 96–101. Summing up his response to a simpler version of the argument from ignorance, William Rowe writes, “I think we are justified in concluding that we’ve been given no good reason to think that if God exists the goods that justify him in permitting much human and animal suffering are quite likely to be beyond our ken” (“The Evidential Argument from Evil,” 276). To be sure. And neither has Rowe or anyone else given good reason to think the contrary. Such is our ignorance. Rescher, Nature and Understanding, 23. Ibid., 24. Cited in Hasker, The Triumph of God over Evil, 75. For lengthy attempts on behalf of a privative account of all evil, in response specifically to “The Pain Objection,” see Alexander, Goodness, God, and Evil, 100–108, for example: “Pain sensations are identical to negative commands, and negative commands are prescriptions against doing such-and-such. Hence, pain sensations, including their phenomenology, are prescriptions against doing suchand-such. The experience itself is a command against” (106). Murphy, “Science and the Problem of Evil,” 132. Shatz, “Judaism,” 59, citing Soloveitchik, Out of the Whirlwind, 86–115. Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 30 (emphases in the original). Lucas, The Future, 222. Haught, Darwin, Teilhard, and the Drama of Life, 2, on Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, 81–85. Peterson, “Christian Theism and the Evidential Argument from Evil,” 172. Ibid., note 16. Hallett, Reason and Right, 40–44. Schellenberg, The Hiddenness Argument, 25.

Notes

185

19 20 21 22

Ibid., 31. Gale, “Evil as Evidence against God,” 205. Prevost, Probability and Theistic Explanation, 107. Reichenbach, “Evil and a Reformed View of God,” 68. Mackie comments, “This was the central thesis of my ‘Evil and Omnipotence’ . . . and of A. Flew’s ‘Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom’ ” (The Miracle of Theism, 164n14). 23 Toner, Spirit of Light or Darkness, 60, quoting from The Michigan Catholic, December 2, 1977, 7.

7 Afterlife 1 Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 218, quoting from Wyschogrod, “Resurrection,” 109, and Hick, The Fifth Dimension, 24–25. 2 Haleem, “Life and Beyond in the Qur’an,” 66. 3 Parfit, “Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons,” 229. 4 Ward, Pascal’s Fire, 99. 5 Baker, Persons and Bodies, 14. 6 Sacks, The River of Consciousness, 144. 7 Wainwright, Mysticism, xiii. 8 Stenmark, Scientism, 38 (emphasis in the original). 9 Quoted in Taliaferro, “Emergentism and Consciousness,” 69. 10 Barr, The Believing Scientist, 140. 11 Nagel, What Does It All Mean? 96. 12 Ibid., 99. 13 Audi, “Theism and the Scientific Understanding of the Mind,” 434. 14 Phillips, Ring of Truth, 118–19 (emphasis in the original). 15 Abraham, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 207. 16 Marsh, Do No Harm, 200. 17 Ibid., 203. 18 Ibid., 200. 19 Vardy, “A Christian Approach to Eternal Life,” 16. 20 Ibid., 26. 21 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5:2,3, in Payton, Irenaeus on the Christian Faith, 158. 22 Johnson, People in Quandaries, 118. 23 Blackmore, Consciousness, 81. 24 On the similar, related chaos regarding “selves,” see Eric Olson, “There Is No Problem of the Self.” More generally, on the neutrality of “language” as medium but not as activity (the word’s two principal uses, which often get conflated), see Hallett, Language and Truth, 117–18; Linguistic Philosophy, 8–9, 98–99; One God of All? 70–71.

186 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Notes More fully, see Hallett, Identity and Mystery, chapter 8. Nichols, Death and Afterlife, 106. Kübler-Ross, On Children and Death, 207. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 210–11 (paragraph break omitted). Nichols, Death and Afterlife, 99. Walls, Heaven, 141, on Carol Zaleski. Shaffer, Philosophy of Mind, 74. Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 275. Perry, “A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality,” 321 (italics in the original). Mavrodes, “The Life Everlasting and the Bodily Criterion of Identity,” 30 (italics in the original). O’Collins, The Resurrection, 115. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §593. Williams, Problems of the Self, 94. For a fuller, wider sampling, see Hallett, “The ‘Tedium of Immortality.’ ” Teresa of Avila, in Life of St Teresa of Avila, 203. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 108.

8 Eternity 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, 32–33. Walls, Heaven, 174. Bowler, Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons, 220. Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, 1 (emphases in the original). Ibid., 3. Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution, 3. Cox, “Thinking Globally about Christianity,” 250 (emphasis in the original). McElwain, “Teilhard and John Stewart,” 161. Ibid., 157 (emphasis in the original). Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 26 (emphasis in the original). Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, 192. Ibid., 195. McCoy, Ending in Ice, 31. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 41. Thompson, New York Times book review section, February 21, 2016, 15. McMullin, “Formalism and Ontology in Early Astronomy,” 77–78.

Notes

187

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Thuan, The Secret Melody, 272. Khatchadourian, “The Doomsday Invention,” 75. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, 65–66. Ibid., 28. Weinberg, “The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics,” 53. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, 24. Maria Popova, New York Times book review section, April 24, 2016, 18. Gleiser, The Prophet and the Astronomer, 233. Ibid., quoting Krauss and Turner, “Geometry and Destiny,” 232–33. Wildman, “From Law and Chance,” 165–66. Barr, The Believing Scientist, 119. Stoeger, “Key Developments in Physics Challenging Philosophy and Theology,” 186 (italics in the original). 30 Ibid., 195. 31 Schwöbel, “The Church,” 115.

9 Focusing 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §70 (emphases in the original). Ibid., §69 (italics in the original). Hacker, The Intellectual Powers, 125. Fogelin, Taking Wittgenstein at His Word, 50. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §80. On the many attempts to define “knowledge,” see Hallett, Essentialism, 34–42. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, xi (emphasis in the original). In further illustration of this presently favored approach (offered for that reason), see the section entitled “Defining knowledge,” in the chapter entitled “The Nature of Knowledge,” in Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind. “My aim,” she writes, “in defining knowledge [not the word] is to give necessary and sufficient conditions for having knowledge that are both theoretically illuminating and practically useful” (264). This, she recognizes, is difficult. “However, I will begin such a test in this book, bearing in mind that precision is but one virtue of a definition, one that must be balanced against simplicity, elegance, conciseness, theoretical illumination, and practical usefulness” (266). There is no mention of the word knowledge, its meaning(s), its relevance, variants in various languages, possible redefinitions, their familiar or technical utility, or the like; nor are such linguistic considerations and their relevance presupposed. The focus is “scientific,” not linguistic. As scientists can study gravity, so philosophers can study knowledge. 9 Ibid.

188

Notes

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Pruss, Actuality, Possibility, and Worlds, 5. Allen, Truth in Philosophy, 4. Ibid., 5 (emphasis in the original). H. A. Williams, in Vanstone, The Risk of Love, xi. Devine, “On the Definition of Religions,” 272. Ibid. Magee, Ultimate Questions, 28–29. Hill, Thought and World, 54 (emphasis in the original). Magee, Ultimate Questions, 29–30. Clark, “Introduction,” 2. For a kindred, fuller, more recent critical appraisal, see Menssen and Sullivan, The Agnostic Inquirer, 51–61. Prevost, Probability and Theistic Explanation, 106. Wainwright, “Doctrinal Schemes,” 81. Masterson, Atheism and Alienation, 156. Ibid., 157. Chung, God at the Crossroads, 10 (emphases in the original). Ibid., 207. Swinburne, Review, 46. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 291. Bray, The Doctrine of God, 76.

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

10 Convergence 1 Kenny, The Unknown God, 109. 2 Mitchell, The Justification of Religious Belief, 39–40. Cf. Abraham, “Cumulative Case Arguments for Christian Theism.” Abraham there comments:  In a way it should have been obvious that a cumulative case argument for theism should have been explored, for, ironically, both classical natural theology and fideism often share the common assumption that unless an argument is strictly formal in character then we do not really have an argument at all. This is surely an extremely odd assumption to make given the extent to which our arguments even on non-metaphysical issues fail to reach that goal. Hence the attempt to read the enduring debate about the rationality of theism as the embodiment of a cumulative case argument was thoroughly natural and long overdue. (19) 3 Plantinga, God and Other Minds, 188. 4 Ibid., 271. 5 Wolterstorff, “Can Belief in God Be Rational If It Has No Foundations?” 155 (italics in the original). On this theme, see also Mavrodes, Belief in God.

Notes

189

6 “Stephen Evans . . . has argued that [comparably] we ought to expect knowledge of God to be (i) widely accessible (given the deity’s benign purposes), but also (ii) easily resistible (as it ought to be if human freedom is to be respected” (Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion, 58, citing Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, 13 and 15 [emphases in the original]). 7 Cf. Ekman and Oster, “Facial Expressions of Emotion,” 542–44. 8 Bagger, Religious Experience, Justification, and History, 6. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 12. 11 Dembski, “On the Very Possibility of Intelligent Design,” 132. 12 Smart and Haldane, Atheism and Theism, 9. 13 Kwan, “The Argument from Religious Experience,” 519–20. 14 Alston, Perceiving God, 293 (emphasis in the original). 15 Hick, “Introduction,” 17. 16 Hocking, “The Mystical Spirit and Protestantism,” 193. 17 Everitt, The Non-existence of God, 160–65 (concluding: “This line of thought clearly raises some deep, controversial, and puzzling metaphysical assumptions, and as sketched here is plainly at best inconclusive”). 18 Nouwen, Beyond the Mirror, 35–37. 19 Plantinga, “A Christian Life Partly Lived,” 51. 20 For fuller discussion and bibliography than here, see, for instance, Kwan, “The Argument from Religious Experience.” (On the high frequency of reported religious and theistic experiences in the contemporary world, see pp. 514–15.) 21 Saint Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, 186. 22 Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience, 38. 23 Ibid., 191–92. 24 Parrinder, Mysticism, 4. 25 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 15–16 (emphasis in the original). 26 Ward, Religion and Revelation, 176 (emphasis in the original). 27 Alston, Perceiving God, 230. 28 For a quick listing, see Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience, 106. David Hay adds: “People belonging to the poorest and most oppressed sectors of society, at least in the Western populations so far studied [,] are on the whole much less likely than others to report having spiritual experiences. This is not what would be predicted from a straightforward interpretation of Marx’s famous ‘opium of the people’ account of religion” (Something There, 46). 29 Hay, Something There, 46–47. 30 Augustine, Confessions, 152–53. 31 Martin, My Life with the Saints, 276. 32 Ibid.

190

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Arrupe, Essential Writings, 52–53. Keener, Miracles, 683. Ibid., 685–86. ten Boom, The Hiding Place, 213–14. For a full, striking sampling, see chapters 14–15 in Keener, Miracles. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 100 (10.1.12). Flew, “Neo-Humean Arguments about the Miraculous,” 45. Ibid., 49. For a fuller response, see, for instance, Geisler, “Miracles and the Modern Mind.” Houston, Reported Miracles, 2. Purtill, “Defining Miracles,” 62. Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 68. Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience, 248. On this passage and its importance, see, for instance, Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, 81–96. William Lane Craig comments: “It is nothing short of amazing that we have here information from a man who spoke with both Jesus’ younger brother and his chief disciple, each of whom claimed to have seen Jesus alive from the dead and who went to his death because of that conviction” (“Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?” 153). 47 McGrew and McGrew, “The Argument from Miracles,” 604. Of N. T. Wright’s monumental The Resurrection of the Son of God, Avery Dulles writes:  After a meticulous sifting of the canonical and noncanonical sources, Wright concludes that “the historian has no option but to affirm both the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’ with Jesus as ‘historical events’ [709].” The bodily Resurrection of Jesus provides not only a sufficient condition, but a necessary condition of these two facts. “All efforts to find alternative explanations fail, and they were bound to do so” [717]. (A History of Apologetics, 361)

48 49 50 51 52

More briefly, see, for instance, Gary Habermas, “The Case for Christ’s Resurrection.” Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus? 134–35 (original italics). Ibid., 135. Sinnott-Armstrong, in Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong, God? 38. Hart, Atheist Delusions, xi. Alston, “The Place of Experience in the Grounds of Religious Belief,” 107–108. Of Alston himself Plantinga has pertinently written: As many of his friends know, in 1975 Bill Alston had a powerful religious experience at evensong in Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford. This experience led to his return to the Christian faith. It also led to deep personal change in other ways: he became much more confident, much more open with other persons,

Notes

191

with a much greater sense of focus and direction. Bill prayed repeatedly for the Lord to show him how he wanted Bill to spend the remainder of his life. He came to the conclusion that God wanted him to work at philosophy of religion—a subject he had only addressed fitfully before. Bill then worked at philosophy of religion with a dedication, seriousness, focus and energy that is unmatched in my experience. (“In Memoriam: William Alston 1921–2009,” 359) 53 Barr, The Believing Scientist, 40 (with a footnote backing his statistics). 54 Stackhouse, Can God Be Trusted? 104. 55 Hasker, Providence, Evil and the Openness of God, 118 (emphases in the original), citing, as further illustrations of “an approach to theodicy which stresses the notion that God employs such general strategies”: Hasker, “Suffering, Soul-Making, and Salvation,” 3–19; Farrer, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited; and Peterson, Evil and the Christian God. 56 See Davis, God, Reason and Theistic Proofs, 97–115. 57 Haught, “God and Evolution,” 708. 58 Fergusson, Creation, 84. 59 Polkinghorne, Science and Creation (2006 edition), xi. Polkinghorne adds: “This insight corresponds to an important theological realization, very widely acknowledged in the second half of the twentieth century, that creation is an act of divine kenosis, an expression of the self-limitation exercised by love, through which the Creator allows creatures to be themselves and to make themselves.” 60 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 94. 61 Clayton, “Contemporary Philosophical Concepts,” 38. “One of the greatest physicists of our time,” writes Barr, “in describing superstring theory to a layman, felt frustrated by his inability to communicate the grandeur and magnificence of what his research had revealed to him. ‘I don’t think I’ve succeeded in conveying to you,’ he said, ‘its wonder, incredible consistency, remarkable elegance and beauty’ ” (Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, 106). 62 Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 57–59. Cf. MacKay, Science, Chance and Providence, 42, 60–62; Webb, God and Rationality, 267–70; Haught, Darwin, Teilhard, and the Drama of Life. 63 Gillman, The Death of Death, 129. 64 Cottingham, “Knowledge of God,” 31 (emphasis in the original). 65 Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion, xii. 66 Nichols, Sacred Cosmos, 9. 67 Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” 31. 68 Bagger, Religious Experience, 13. 69 Polkinghorne and Welker, Faith in the Living God, 28 (italics in the original). Compare the broadly analogous conception in the philosophy of science: “The auxiliary hypotheses form a ‘protective belt’ around the hard core because they are

192

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102

Notes to be modified when potentially falsifying data are found” (Murphy, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning, 59). Magee, Ultimate Questions, 114. Taylor, A Secular Age, 365. Ibid., 364. Byrne, God and Realism, 167. Hick, “A Response to Andrew Kirk,” 226. Ibid., 227. Hick, Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion, 6. See Hallett, One God of All? chapter 4. Sinnott-Armstrong, “There Is No Good Reason,” 38–39 (emphasis in the original). Leftow, “From Jerusalem to Athens,” 199. Ibid., 201 (emphases in the original). Farrer, “Grace and Freewill,” 197–98. Ibid., 198. Haught, God and the New Atheism, 5. Ibid. (citing Monod, Chance and Necessity, 160–80). Haught, God and the New Atheism, x. Plantinga, “Science and Religion,” 115. Cf. Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 17. Ibid., 22 (emphasis in the original). Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution, 5–6. Hasker, Providence, Evil and the Openness of God, 102. Ibid., 103. Craig, in Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong, God? 60. Stoeger, “Key Developments,” 198. Davies, The Mind of God, 190. See Swinburne, “Argument from the Fine-Tuning,” 170–72. On what he terms “this exercise of prodigal conjecture,” see Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, 7–9, as also Barr, The Believing Scientist, 129–36; Geisler, “Miracles and the Modern Mind,” 19–20; Nichols, Sacred Cosmos, 72–78; and Thuan, The Secret Melody, chapter 9. Aczel, Why Science Does Not Disprove God, 247. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, 108. Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 245 (emphases in the original). Dembski, “In Defence of Intelligent Design,” 717 (parenthetical references omitted) (emphases in the original). Polkinghorne, One World, xi. Gellman, “A New Look at the Problem of Evil,” 211–12. Ibid., 213.

Notes 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117 118

193

Wildman, “From Law and Chance,” 168. Nagel, The Last Word, 130. Ibid. Barr, The Believing Scientist, 109 (Barr’s emphasis). Nagel, The Last Word, 131. Frances, Gratuitous Suffering and the Problem of Evil, 5. Davies, The Mind of God, 15. See Hallett, Christian Neighbor-Love, chapter 4, “The New Testament’s Preference,” 53. Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, 23 (italics in the original). In this connection, Haught’s observation merits reflection: “it is not unlikely that the foremost stumbling block that scientifically enlightened people will have in relation to Christian faith is not the sad history of its conflict with science, but the ‘inconceivable’ descent and humility that are fundamental to its understanding of God” (“God and Evolution,” 699). James, Pragmatism, 65. Plantinga, “An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism,” 61. Sheed, Theology and Sanity, 9. Sartre, The Words, 100–101. Ibid., 97. For a fuller, more contemporary account of this continuing process, see Houtepen, God, 1–6. Alasdair MacIntyre’s alternative etiology stresses social factors less directly linked with the history of thought. For a summary culled from MacIntyre’s writings, see Nielsen, God, Scepticism and Modernity, 79–80, for example:  In such a society with such class divisions and such class conflict, religious concepts came to lose their point and so their intelligibility (rationality), for they cannot in that environment do what they exist (at least in part) to do, namely to provide a framework for the activity we call “religion” which in turn gives symbolic and ritualistic expression to a culture’s moral unity. Religion can no longer give expression to our society’s moral unity or to the moral unity of the society of the Industrial Revolution for the very simple reason that such societies have no moral unity.

119 For an account that complements mine, see Hay, Religious Experience Today, 91–96. Like Hay, “I am not competent to make an informed judgement on how the longstanding and increasingly powerful rejection of the religious dimension of life came about.” Like him, I mention only “some straws in the wind,” illustrative of the influences—here the nonepistemic influences—that I find significant. 120 Rhees, Without Answers, 112. 121 Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 363.

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122 123 124 125

Davies, The Mind of God, 16. Nagel, Mortal Questions, 177. Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, 10. In this connection, regarding what he terms “Darwin’s doubt,” see Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 316–25. 126 Jensen, “How the World Lost Its Story,” 21. How badly a scientific view needs such support can be sensed from remarks like Don Cupitt’s:  There is not any Reality or Truth in the old sense; there are only the endlessly varied visions and values that human beings project out upon the flux in order to give their lives a kind of meaning. We constructed all the worldviews, we made all the theories. They are ours, and we are not accountable to them. They depend on us, not we on them. (Only Human, 9) (All this—this global appraisal of reality—Cupitt states with great assurance. He, too, is a strong believer, of a certain sort.) 127 Varghese, “From Cosmic Beginnings to Human Ends,” 403.

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Index Abraham, A. 91 action 136 Aczel, A. 166 afterlife conceivability of 98–100 conceptual depths 93–4 materialist verdict 86 metaphysical depths 86–91 near-death experiences 95–7 personal identity 94–5, 98–9 popular perceptions 91 post-death appearances 97–8 St. Paul on 85 “tedious”? 100–2 theistic belief in 85–6 theistic significance of 85–6 agency, activity 155 agnosticism 131 Allison, Dale, Jr. 85–6 Alston, W. 13, 137, 140, 147 analogy 4–5, 118–19 Anscombe, E. 48 Aquinas, St. T. 2, 3, 13–14, 51, 92 Armstrong, D. 36 Arrupe, P. 142–3 atheism, origins of 172–3 Augustine, St. 141 Ayer, A. J. 31–2, 66 Bagger, M. 134–5 Bailly, M. 143 Baker, L. 87 Barr, S. 27, 34–5, 89, 110, 148, 166, 169 Becking, B. 4 Behe, M. 163 belief, justified 134, 171 Berkeley, G. 31 Bill, B. 142, 152, 167 Blackmore, S. 94 Bloomfield, P. 61 Bogardus, T. 20

Bowker, J. 26 Bray, G. 127–8 Brown, D. 5, 21 Buckley, M. 173 Buddhism and theism 24–6 Camus, A. vii Carrel, A. 143 Cartwright, N. 55 causation 45–6, 52 Chesterton, G. K. 101, 151 Chung, P. 126 Clark, K. 124–5 Clayton, P. 151–2 cognitive comparatives 8–9 competitiveness 170 consciousness 39–40 Cornman, J. 74 cosmological argument 168 Cottingham, J. 153–4 counterfactuals 46–7 Coventry, A. 51 Cox, H. 105 Coyne, J. 79 creation 161 cumulative approach to belief 174–6 Davidson, D. 47 Davies, B. 35 Davies, P. 49, 165, 169, 173 Davis, C. 139, 145–6 Dawkins, R. 74–5, 163 death as second birth 113–15 definition, persuasive 122 Dembski, W. 135, 166 demonstration, proof 155–6 Dennett, D. 51 Descartes, R. 38, 54 design 165, 173–4 determinism 49, 155 Devine, P. 122

212 “economical” hypotheses 56 Einstein, A. 48–9 Ellis, B. 47 essences 14 eternity beyond scientific perspectives 112–15 death as second birth 113–15 scientific perspectives 107–12 Teilhardian perspectives 104–7 ethics cognitive aspect 69 complexity of 69–70 value-focused 60–2 Everitt, N. 138 evidence, theistic 147–8 evil and afterlife 81–2 alternative worlds 82 atheistic arguments from 74–5, 82, 167–8 and creation 79 a deep mystery 73–4, 82 etiology of the objection 82 and evolution 79–80 and freedom 78 and metaphysics 81 positive and privative 76–7 problem of 71, 125, 148–51 and providence 79–81 relevance of metaphysics 78 value and disvalue 79 evolution 56, 104–15, 163 experience, religious 135, 137, 159–60 Farrer, A. 161–2 Fergusson, D. 151 Flew, A. 144–5 Fogelin, R. 119 Foster, J. 37 Frances, B. 169 freedom cosmic 48 determinism a self-implicating theory 56–7 dialectical history 44–8 etiology of determinism 48–51 experience of 53 relationship to science 48–51 relevance of Hume on 44–56 scientific relevance of 50

Index theological relevance 43–4 future, unpredictability of 112 Gale, R. 81 Gellman, J. 167 Gleiser, M. 110 goodness our cognitive limits 70–1 the complexities of moral discourse 66– 70, 79, 89–90, 122–3 a defining trait of divinity 59 a divine perspective 61 a historical, dialectical sketch 69–70 moral skepticism 59–60 the problem of value complexity 62–3 the objectivity of values and disvalues 63–5, 68, 70, 79, 82, 89, 106, 122–3, 135 the relevance of and for theistic perspectives 134–5 skepticism’s sources 62–9 a value-centered moral perspective 60–2 values versus tastes 65 Greely, A. 141 Griffin, D. 25 Griffiths, P. 24–5 Hacker, P. 119 Haleem, M. 86 Hart, D. 147 Hasker, W. 153, 164 Haught, J. 75, 151, 162 Hay, D. 141 Hick, J. 39–41, 137, 158–9 Hill, C. 122 Hocking, W. 137 holism 125, 171 Houston, J. 145 Hume, D. 40, 44–56, 144 identity mind-body 31–2, 37–40 relevance of Principle of Relative Similarity 20, 25 strict 18, 21–2 of world divinities 23–6 of Yahweh, God, and Allah 20–3 incommensurability 126 individuation 94–5

Index intuitions 12 Irenaeus 94 Jaeger, M. 84, 136 James, W. 14–15, 146, 171 Jeeves, M. 34 Jensen, R. 175 Johnson, W. 94 Kant, I. 31, 45–6, 50 Kärkkäīnen, V. 18 Keener, C. 143 Kennedy, P. 108 Kenny, A. 131 Kim, J. 39 know, knowledge 120–1 Kübler-Ross 96 Kwan, K. 136 language complexity of 8–9 relevance of 37–8 sensible versus mental 13–15 and truth 121 Leftow, B. 160–1 Lehrer, K. 74 Levin, J. 110 Lewis, C. S. 90, 99 Livio, M. 44 Locke, J. 39, 44 Lourdes 142–3 Lowe, E. 37–8 Lucas, J. 78 Magee, B. 122, 123, 156 Maimonides, M. 11 Marsh, H. 91–2 Martin, J. 142 Martinich, A. P. 18 Masterson, P. 126 materialism contrary experience 28–9 epiphenomenalism 40 history of 154–5 Kant’s agnostic verdict vindicated 32–6 the mystery of consciousness 28–36 mysteries of matter 29 mysteries of materialistic theory 36–9 mysteries of sense processing 30–2

213

the narrowness of scientific perspectives 31, 162–3 recourse to “supervenience” 39 reductive, simplifying thought 40 McCoy, R. 108 McElwain, H. 106 McMullin, E. 109 meaning, of words 122 metaphor 5 Mitchell, B. 28, 132 monotheism characterized vi Christian 21–3 convergence 17–26 cosmological argument for 168 counterarguments 156–68 creative activity 161 cumulative case for 127–8, 133–71 divine names vi Jewish 21–3 Muslim 21–3 “proofs” of 51, 124–6, 137, 154 and science 160–1, 163, 168–70 Montero, B. 39 Moore, G. E. 52 moral judgments, complexity of 66–71, 79, 89–90, 122–3 skepticism 60, 67 Moreland, J. 48 Mrs. M., comparisons with 133–5, 136, 141, 166, 167 Murphy, N. 77 Musgrave, A. 32 Nagel, T. vi, 7, 60–1, 106–7, 168–9, 174 necessity 48, 52 Netland, H. 24 Nichols, T. 95–7, 154 Nouwen, H. 138 O’Collins, G. 98 Parfit, D. 87 Parrinder, J. 140 Paul, St. 146 Pauw, A. 23 Peacocke, A. 49 Peterson, M. 80 Phillips, J. 90, 97, 99

214 Plantinga, A. (determinism) 49, 51, 78, 120–1, 132, 145, 163, 172 Plato 69–70 pleasure and pain 64 pluralism, objection from 158 Polkinghorne 167, 174 Popper, K. 43 Prevost, R. 82 Principle of Relative Similarity (PRS) 4–5, 6–7, 9–12, 20–5, 93, 99, 119, 120, 171–2 proofs the crucial relevance of language 117–23 difficult in science, far more so in philosophy 117–23 general difficulty 150–1 limitations of 173 more promising directions 127–8 problematic alternatives 126–7 “proofs” 154 theistic 124–6, 132 providence (versus determinism) 163 Puntel, L. 4 Purtill, R. 145 Putnam, H. 35 Railton, P. 63 Rand, A. 170 religion and science 157 Rescher, N. 27–8, 76 Rey, G. 37 Rhees, R. 173 Rosenberg, A. 46 Ruse, M. 75 Russell, B. 37, 103, 107 Sacks, O. 53–4, 88 Sartre, J.-P. 172–3 Sayers, D. 152 Schellenberg, J. 80 Scholem, G. 140 Schwö-bel, C. 115 science effects of 31 and monotheism 160–1, 163, 168–70 narrowness of 162–3 and religious belief 171–2 science-religion complementarity 174 theism’s support of 172

Index and theology 154–5 sectarianism 157 sensation, objectivity of 30–2 Shaffer, J. 97 Shatz, D. 11, 77–8 Sheed, F. 172 simplicity, simplification 27–8, 169–71 Sinnott-Armstrong, W. 159–60 skepticism, moral 67 Smart, J. 37, 135–6, 174 Smith, A. D. 32 Socrates 59 Soloveitchik, J. 77–8 Soskice, J. 60 Stewart, J. 106 Stoeger, W. 111, 112, 165 Strawson, G. 53 Stump, E. 65 supervenience 39, 47 Swinburne, R. 127 Taylor, C. 157 Teichman, J. 68 Teilhard de Chardin, P. 104–7, 112 teleological argument 151 ten Boom, C. and B. 143–4 Teresa of Avila, St. 101, 139 theism cumulative case (versus proofs) 152–3 and morality 175 teleological argument for 151 Thompson, C. 108 Trinity 18, 21 truth analogical 11–13 Aquinas on 2–3, 13–14 versus consensus 5 dialectical history 2–4 importance of 6, 13–15 intuitive account of 12 Kenny on 3–4, 6 linguistic versus mental 2–4, 45–6 versus metaphor 5 pragmatic account of 12 Principle of Relative Similarity (PRS) 4– 5, 6–7, 9–12, 93, 99, 119, 120, 171-2 theological relevance of 13 transcendent 6–7 Wittgenstein on 4

Index “truth” cognitive comparative 8–9 the concept’s importance 17 Maimonides on 11 universes (plural) 165–7 Urban, M. 20 value 62–6 Van Fraassen, B. 89 Vanstone, W. 2–3 Vardy, P. 93–4 Varghese, A. 176

215

Walls, J. 103 Ward, K. 56, 67, 87 Wegener, A. 107 Weinberg, S. 110 Wildman, W. 51, 168 will, influence of vii-viii, 169–70 Williams, B. 100 Wittgenstein, L. 4, 14–15, 53–5, 99–100, 118 Wolterstorff, N. 132–3 Yandell, K. 24