This week, I’ve decided to take a break from reviewing books that specifically deal with Dawkins et al. and look at a book on religious epistemology with no particular target: Paul K. Moser’s _The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology_. The presentation can be clumsy and confusing at times, but it provides some interesting variants on existing ideas about the subject, and so worth a look.

Some background for people who aren’t up on philosophy of religion: in the 90′s, a couple books came out arguing that the existence of nonbelievers is a problem for traditional theism in much the same way that evil is: if God is all-powerful, and wants badly for everyone to believe (as both the New Testament and the Qur’an seem to indicate) then why doesn’t everyone believe? The Bible and Qur’an themselves provide an answer for this problem–that infidels are evil–but stated baldly, this explanation will hardly be convincing to non-believers.

Enter Moser. Moser explains unbelief in part in terms of bad ideas about how to apply reason to religion. While he lashes out at followers of Alvin Plantinga who think religious beliefs require no evidence at all (pp. 243-244), he thinks skeptics of religion look for the wrong kind of evidence. Moser argues that a loving God would not provide the conclusive evidence, but would provide evidence for those open to it, and many skeptics go wrong by failing to even consider that such evidence might exist.

The main sort of evidence Moser is interested is evidence from religious experience–you could describe the book as based around the argument from religious experience, but Moser doesn’t care for the term “argument.” The most notable part of the rest of book is the repeated attempts to deflect doubts about Moser’s position.

He claims skeptics fail to see that “We are, of course, in no position to serve as cognitive judges over a perfectly loving God, despite our uncritical assumptions to the contrary” (p. 24). Bertrand Russell’s claim that there isn’t enough evidence is dismissed with the question “Insufficient for _what_? For Russell’s highly questionable expectations of God? In any case, Russell’s charge against God sounds blaming, to put it mildly.” On the same page, there’s a dismissive remark about what evidence “we humans happen to prefer.” (p. 37) It is dangerous to ask exactly what kind of evidence God would provide. (p. 54) Moser dismisses the work of many historically significant philosophers because they risk of “begging the question… with dubious cognitive standards.” Skeptics “would do well, accordingly, to supply evidence that they aren’t in a position akin to that of the willful child who refuses to receive the challenging available parental evidence regarding his troubled situation.” (p. 79) There’s also a revealing reference to how, supposedly, “We hoard resources while others suffer and die, and, when pressed, we also promptly change the subject or invoke self-serving principles.” (p. 152)

The overall effect is that dismissive rhetoric takes the place of real arguments. For example, skeptics don’t complain that the evidence for God doesn’t meet their preferred standards, but rather that it doesn’t meet the correct standards. Though that last quote is somewhat besides the point, it’s such a clear example of the entire book’s rhetoric: saying that certain moral principles are “self-serving” isn’t an argument that they are incorrect.

At one point, Moser does concede that there is such a thing as a situation where the evidence wouldn’t support the existence of God, but with everything he says, it’s not clear how we’re supposed to ever be able to tell if we’re in such a situation without Moser claiming “cognitive idolatry” or some such. None of Moser’s arguments do much to avoid standard skeptical criticisms, of, for example, religious experience. My overall response is “nice try, I can see why Moser feels the need to say the things he does about skeptics, but none of it works.”