Letters to Doubting Thomas (a review)

When Lukeprog posted his Ultimate Truth Seeker Challenge, I read over his reading list and saw that it was mostly books I had already read. But I put my name down anyway, because I figured the books I hadn’t read would be a good way to round out my philosophy of religion reading, and reviewing them would make blog fodder. After finishing my first self-imposed reading assignment, C. Stephen Layman’s Letters to Doubting Thomas, I’ve also realized it’s a good excuse to write about things I’ve been thinking about for awhile but never gotten around to writing about–in particular, the question of what makes a good explanation, and the problem of evil. What follows isn’t a comprehensive review–for the sake of my time and yours, I won’t worry about Layman’s comments on religious experience and the moral argument, which I don’t think are the most interesting material in the book.

Presentation and General Thoughts

Though this has nothing to do with the ideas in the book, from a book-recommender’s point of view the book does have a serious flaw that would prevent me from really recommending it: the book is written as a letter exchange between Zach (an author stand-in) and Thomas (a doubter). And the execution is awful. Much of the book consists only of little bits intended to make it sound “conversational,” but which generally just waste space on the page and don’t even make it sound like a real letter exchange. The “letters” tend to be short; Thomas’ are often only a sentence or two. This increases the percentage of space spent on conversational niceties, and is part of what keeps it from sounding like a real letter exchange: in a normal letter exchange, if you have something to say, you don’t put off saying it until you’ve gotten an “uh huh” from the person you’re writing too. Also, the course of the conversational back-and-forth often sounds a lot like Plato’s proof that p.

That said, the book isn’t a total loss. In particular, there’s a real effort to avoid common pitfalls of theistic arguments. The results aren’t great, but if you wade through the bad presentation, you can find arguments with some improvements over the ones heard most often in debates about God–even arguments presented by apparently sharp defenders of theism like William Lane Craig. But this feature of the book isn’t strong enough for me to recommend it over Craig’s Reasonable Faith, which I still think, in spite of its flaws, is probably the best single book defending theism and traditional Christianity currently available.

Theism and Naturalism

The first chapter, which sets up the frame work for rest of the book, proposes understanding the question about the existence of God as a contest between Theism and Naturalism. The justifications for this framework, however, are extremely flimsy. For example, Layman asks “what do you see as the main positive alternative to the belief that God exists? I mean, if we deny that God exists, what should we affirm?” (p. 11) Well, if we deny that God exists, we should affirm all kinds of things, such as, for example, that the sky is blue. Layman’s question may sound important, but doesn’t actually have anything to do with anything. You can have an opinion on the existence of the Christian god, or fairies, or the validity of astrology, or whether extraterrestrials have visited Earth, without taking up a grand philosophical thesis as a replacement for these ideas.

Similarly, Layman argues that:

…for those of us living in a culture heavily influenced by science, the most serious rival to traditional Theism is probably not some other form of Theism, but Naturalism. The really big metaphysical dispute of the day, in our culture, is surely the dispute between traditional Theism and Naturalism. So I think that the rivalry between Theism and Naturalism should be our central concern. (p. 16)

The problem with this line of thinking is that it invites the fallacy of thinking that any troubles with naturalism are reasons to accept theism. After all, if there had ever been a point in Greek history where most people were either believers in anthropomorphic gods like those in Homer, or Democritean atomism, it wouldn’t follow that problems with Democritiean atomism would be reason to accept Homeric polytheism.

Finally, consider Layman’s repeated contention that naturalism is supposed to explain things. Certainly, many naturalists have defended various naturalistic hypotheses about why this or that feature of the world is the way it is. But naturalism itself is an extraordinarily vague idea that doesn’t look like a good candidate for a hypothesis to explain anything. If there’s a good reason to be a naturalist, it’s because our most successful explanations are naturalistic, not because naturalism itself is a successful explanation.

In practice, the problems with the book’s framework don’t completely cripple it, because Layman often is willing to consider hypotheses more specific than the extraordinarily vague notion of “naturalism.” Still, the confusions in the theism vs. naturalism set up hint at the confusions that appear later in the book.

Necessity and Contingency

Layman’s discussion of the cosmological argument for the existence of God makes an extraordinarily modest claim for the argument: the argument only erases any initial improbability theism has due to postulating things, kinds of things, and so on not found in naturalism. Layman’s claim is that it seems like we need a necessary being (one that couldn’t have not existed) to explain the existence of contingent things (ones that might not have existed). Layman concedes that we can’t simply assume that any necessary being would have to be the god of traditional theism, but he thinks that if we postulate a necessary, naturalistic entity to explain contingent things, we end up with a version of naturalism that has no advantage, simplicity-wise, over theism.

I admit the claim that there must be a necessary being seems initially tempting, but on reflection, I seriously doubt that there could be any such thing. As many defenders of the cosmological argument have pointed out, it seems very implausible to suppose I could be a necessary being. The same goes for my parents, my grand parents, and in fact the whole chain of things leading from me back to the big bang. And it seems implausible that the big bang could have happened of necessity. This doesn’t lead us to God, though, because it’s not clear God is an especially good candidate for a necessary being–that much Layman concedes. But furthermore, it’s not clear what would make any candidate for the necessary being role better than any other. That realization, combined with the fact that some candidates for necessary beings (like Chris Hallquist) are awful candidates, suggests there are plausible candidates for being a necessary being.

This conclusion is further reinforced by the fact that there seems to be a genuine possibility of there being no god of any kind–yet if something is supposed to be a necessary being, then it can’t be that it exists, but might not have. If it’s even possible that there might not have been any god of any kind, then there couldn’t possibly have been a necessarily existing god. The same goes for any other candidate for the necessarily-existing explanation of contingent things. So, I think we just have to leave the existence of contingent things unexplained.

Layman’s reasons for thinking we need an explanation of contingent things is very weak. One, he says that the existence of contingent things seems in principle explicable, and therefore can’t be a brute fact, because brute facts are by definition facts that cannot be explained. (p. 92) But what if we define brute fact as one that happens not to have an explanation? Certainly the whole collection of actually existing contingent things might have had an explanation–consider a hypothetical in which there is some other contingent thing that caused the collection. That doesn’t justify the assumption that there must be some thing that caused the collection, and I think we should reject that assumption, because it seems to lead us to the idea of a necessary being, but we have good reasons to reject the idea of a necessary being.

Layman also says:

Naturalists can stick with Basic Naturalism [naturalism without commitment to a necessarily existing natural entity] if they so desire. But the cost is failure to explain the presence of contingent beings. How great is that cost? The best way to ascertain the cost is to do what we have just done: Determine what needs to be added to Naturalism to enable to explain the presence of contingent beings.

What Layman is implying with his cost-determining proposal is that the cost of leaving something unexplained is equal to whatever you need to explain it, so naturalism is no better or worse off with or without some necessary cause of contingent things. But this is wrong–sometimes adding to a hypothesis to fill an explanatory gap makes things worse. Prior to Newton’s explanation of Kepler’s laws in terms of gravity, it wouldn’t have made sense to add angels to your astronomical hypotheses to explain why the planets move in accordance with Kepler’s laws. Not only would it not have been an improvement, it would have made a theory worse off. Sometimes, it’s better to just accept that you don’t have any good explanation for something, and the existence of contingent things seems to be such a case.

This has been a fairly long discussion of an argument Layman doesn’t seem to put much stock it, but it makes the point that sometimes, we may have to accept that there is no good explanation for something, and that a bad explanation can be worse than no explanation at all.

Explaining Us

Layman’s main argument, divided into several bits over the course of chapters 5, 6, and 8 but really condensable into one argument, runs as follows: If God existed, we would expect him to do good things. It’s good for there to be living, sentient, free-willed beings. So if God existed, we would expect there to be such beings, but naturalism doesn’t give us any particular reason to expect the existence of such beings. Therefore, theism has a significant explanatory edge over naturalism in explaining why we exist. And that’s all I really think there is to Layman’s argument in the largest chunk of the book. There are occasional gestures in the direction of possibly-relevant scientific findings, but Layman generally ends up saying they’re not important–for example, in chapter 5, to deflect the possibility of future scientific explanations for the phenomenon of interest, he stipulates that what he cares about is explaining why the most basic physical structures of the universe are life-supporting (p. 112).

This way of putting the argument saves Layman the trouble of having to rely on any dubious claims about what the scientific evidence says (and current discussions of design-type arguments tend to be full of those). But Layman’s statement of the argument, cut down to the core with out all the back and forth fluff of his fictional dialog, also makes prominent why this style of argument is unconvincing. You may feel that, if there is no story to tell about why our universe is the sort of universe that makes the emergence of life likely, then we got extraordinarily lucky. But the appeal to God doesn’t really solve this problem, because you can also ask how we got so lucky to find ourselves in a universe with a benevolent God in it. And unlike any good scientific hypothesis, the “predictions” that Layman claims for the God hypothesis are extraordinarily vague. Theism isn’t supposed to predict any particular details of how life exists or came to be in the universe, it’s just supposed to predict some kind of life-containing universe or other. It’s like the angels-pushing-the-planets hypothesis: utterly useless.

The Problem of Evil

My final verdict on Layman’s discussion the problem of evil is: it’s bad, but not necessarily any worse than most other discussions of the problem that have been written. The trouble is this: people who think the problem of evil is a really seriously good reason not to believe in God generally think of it in terms like “How could a loving God have allowed the Holocaust to happen?” or “How could a loving God have allowed the 2004 Asian Tsunami to happen?” But such statements are usually only made in popular venues where there isn’t much emphasis on logically tidy arguments. In philosophical circles, though, while there’s a laudable concern for logically tidy arguments, discussion of the problem of evil usually takes the form of questions like “what is the conditional probability of X units of evil existing in the world on the hypothesis that God exists?”–questions don’t at all intuitively sound like they could create a serious challenge to theism.

Layman’s discussion clearly follows the more academic approach to the problem of evil–it’s representative of what a typical theistic philosopher says about evil these days. For a first-rate example a more popular approach, consider the opening words of Sam Harris’ “Atheist Manifesto”:

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

No.

From a philosophy professor’s point of view, these hundred and four words contain one serious defect: they don’t address the question of whether God exists. They deny that it is right or good for people in a particular situation to believe a particular claim, but they don’t directly address whether the claim is true.

This problem is easy to remedy, though. We can instead ask: would a being who had all the traditional attributes of God except (maybe) moral perfection, who chose not intervene in the rape, torture, and murder of a little girl, have behaved in a way compatible with moral perfection? If the answer is no, God, as usually defined in philosophical theology, doesn’t exist. To me, it seems obvious that the answer to that question is no. And while most people probably haven’t thought of the question in quite those terms, if you feel the pull of popular statements of the problem of evil, then probably when you think about this particular question, you’ll realize that you, too, think the answer is “no.”

Do we have any business taking such judgments as just obvious? It would be extremely awkward for most philosophers of religion deny to deny that we do, because philosophers make such moves all the time. For example, Peter Singer famously pointed out that we would think someone who chose not to save a drowning child because he didn’t want to get his shoes wet would be thought morally callous, and argued that we should extend this judgment to the question of how much we should sacrifice to help the world’s poor. While many reject Singer’s conclusion, few reject his premise.

Outside academia, everyone was shocked when it was reported in the 60’s that a New York woman, Kitty Genovese, had been raped and murdered outside her apartment while her neighbors listened, doing nothing. What was wrong with them? Such moral judgments are entirely natural. Why suddenly be suspicious of them when made of a hypothetical omnipotent being?

Notice, furthermore, that for this sort of argument against the existence of God doesn’t depend on any general conclusions about, say, the required action on all rapes and murders. If there is any actual case where we are confident that divine inaction is incompatible with perfection, then we must conclude that God does not exist.

This is important when it comes to evaluating proposed explanations for why God allows evil (such as respect for free will, Layman’s favored explanation). However plausible such explanations may seem in the abstract, if they fail in a particular case, they just fail period. In the Kitty Genovese case, for example, no one would think respect for the murder’s free will a good reason for not calling the police, so glib mentions of free will in that case are at best incomplete–they don’t tell us why free will is a bad reason for humans to intervene, but a bad reason for God to intervene.

The question of where to draw the line in demanding God prevent evil (another point pressed by Layman) is similarly irrelevant: one can agree it would be wrong for humans to prevent crime through a Brave New World dystopia and admit not knowing where to draw the line on the cost of crime prevention, and still confidently think Genovese’s neighbors should have called the police.

I don’t know that the way of presenting the problem of evil given here will catch on among professional philosophers of religion. These days, philosophers (and academics in general) sometimes seem to think that the only arguments worth considering are subtle and hard to evaluate (perhaps because this policy helps us know who the impressive minds are). And in a sense the argument I’ve presented is very easy to respond to: all the theist has to say is “I don’t find it obvious that a god-like being who failed to intervene in the Kitty Genovese case would be morally imperfect.” Indeed, it’s obvious that this is the best response. The theist doesn’t have many other choices. It makes the debate boring–my argument isn’t going to spawn a vast philosophical literature.

But my argument has these virtues: it follows logically, and appeals to only down-to-earth assumptions that seem obvious to many people. I’m not sure what more one can ask of a philosophical argument. It won’t convince committed religious apologists, but what criticism of religion ever has? On the other hand, by providing a tidy logical statement of common-sense worries about God and evil, this argument will probably sway a lot of people who find the problem of evil obviously troublesome, but are tempted to buy the line that it is merely an emotional worry.

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