If you aren’t denying its validity (and by your apparent admission in the comment I replied to above, you aren’t), then you’re admitting that it is, at least, “halfway good” (as is all Plantinga claims within that text) and you aren’t criticizing anything in the actual text of ‘The Ontological Argument’ at all.

This is going to be another exercise in explaining some slightly esoteric concepts which may end up in the new book, and I’m not sure if my explanation will end up being clear enough. So I’m hoping for lots of comments on this.

First, some definitions from Wikipedia:

A necessary condition of a statement must be satisfied for the statement to be true. In formal terms, a statement N is a necessary condition of a statement S if S implies N (S => N).

A sufficient condition is one that, if satisfied, assures the statement’s truth. In formal terms, a statement S is a sufficient condition of a statement N if S implies N (S => N).

In other words: if X is a necessary condition for Y, you can’t have Y without X. If X is a sufficient condition for Y, then if you have X, you have Y.

Now, validity and soundness. Here, I will be talking in these terms in the special sense used by philosophers, not their ordinary English meanings. Here are the definitions, again from Wikipedia:

“An argument is valid if and only if the truth of its premises entails the truth of its conclusion. It would be self-contradictory to affirm the premises and deny the conclusion.” Or, most importantly, if an argument is valid that means that if its premises–the assumptions the argument makes–are true, then the conclusion is true. And “An argument is sound if and only if (1) The argument is valid. (2) All of its premises are true.”

Philosophers define “valid” and “sound” this way because doing so is useful, but is also very confusing because it has no basis in how the words are ordinarily used. Because if this, if you are confused by these terms, I sympathize with you. When this happens, look back to the definitions of the “valid” and “sound” I’ve given. Don’t try to go on what they seem like they ought to mean.

What makes validity and soundness useful is just that if an argument is sound, then its conclusion must be true. Thus, if you can make a strong case that an argument is sound, you have made a strong case that the conclusion is true. However, it is important to emphasize that neither validity nor soundness, as defined by philosophers, mean an argument is a good argument. In fact, it is pretty uncontroversial soundness is not a sufficient condition for an argument’s being good. In other words, it takes more than being sound to make an argument good.

First, take a closer look at validity. Nothing in the definition of validity prevents the premises of an argument from being completely crazy. “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal” is a valid argument, but so is “All cups are green, Socrates is a cup, therefore Socrates is green.” If the premises of the second argument were true, the conclusion would have to be true, but in fact the premises are completely crazy. The argument is valid but not sound.

It may be tempting to think that if an argument is valid, this must at least count for something, that this must mean the argument is at least not terrible. But this is wrong. The argument that assumes Socrates is a cup is not even halfway good. Also, as one of my professors used to say, validity comes cheap. All it takes to turn an invalid argument into a valid one is to add a premises that says, “if all of the above premises are true…” followed by the argument’s intended conclusion. But obviously it takes more than that to make an argument even halfway good.

Though it is slightly less obvious, an argument can be sound and still not be any good. Imagine arguing with someone who believes that the Sun orbits the Earth rather than the other way around. Now imagine giving them the following argument: “Premise: the Earth orbits the Sun. Conclusion: the Earth orbits the Sun.” If the premise of this argument is true, the conclusion must be true, and the premise is true. Thus the argument is sound. Yet you couldn’t blame anyone for not being persuaded by that argument. The argument is circular, which is to say it assumes what it is trying to prove.

(Edit: so the moral of circularity is that an argument’s being sound is not enough if you, or the person that you’re trying to persuade with the argument, can’t see that the argument is sound.)

Thus, the reason it is useful to ask whether an argument whether an argument is sound is not because all sound arguments are good arguments. Rather, the reason is that if an argument can be shown to be sound, then you have shown the conclusion of the argument to be correct.

Everything I’ve said so far is, to the best of my knowledge, uncontroversial, rare as that is in philosophy. But now I’m am going to say something more controversial: soundness is not a necessary condition for being a good argument. That is to say, there are good arguments which are not sound in the special sense of “sound” that philosophers have defined.

Here’s why: Arguments that aim at being sound are known as deductive arguments. However, some arguments do not even try to be sound, for example, the argument, “The sun has risen every day for all of recorded history, therefore the sun will rise tomorrow.” This argument is invalid, because there’s no contradiction in imagining that the sun does not rise tomorrow, even though it has always risen in the past. Arguments like this argument about the sun are known as inductive arguments. (There is some disagreement about how broadly or narrowly to define “inductive argument,” though that won’t matter for my purposes.)

The argument about the sun seems to me to be a good argument, even though it is not valid. Some philosophers disagree. The usual way to frame the issue is in terms of “solving the problem of induction,” but this is a bad approach because it assumes from the start there is a problem with induction. This problem is helped only a little by clarifying what is meant by “the problem of induction.” For example, defining “the problem of induction” as the question of “can induction be justified?” encourages us to skip over questions like “does induction need justification?” and “does it even make sense to talk of justifying induction?”

The real question, in my view, is whether we have any reason to doubt that the argument about the sun, and arguments like it, are good arguments. And philosophers don’t often try to give such a reason. David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding–usually cited as the source for the problem of induction–does try to do something like that, though his actual conclusion is not about which arguments are good, but rather that, “All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning.”

Hume’s argument for this conclusion, though, is unclear. One thing he says is that “all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past,” and from there he argues that there is no way to prove this without circularity. But it’s not clear why he thinks that all inferences from experience suppose this. Maybe what he thinks is that reasoning, to be reasoning at all, must be deductive reasoning, so the only way an inductive argument can count as “reasoning” is if it has a hidden premise that turns it into a deductive argument.

But why think that? It seems to me that some inductive arguments are perfectly good as-is. Because of that, I think soundness is not necessary for being a good argument. That is to say, there are good arguments that are not sound in the special philosopher’s sense of “sound.”

And now I’m blanking on how to end this post, because I feel there must be something more to be said about induction, but I can’t think of what. I say this as someone who used to accept the common line on the “problem of induction,” but who upon re-reading the books I got this idea from, can’t see why I thought them so persuasive. But as I said at the beginning: does all of this make sense to people?

And incidentally, does anyone know of an example of a philosopher who thinks soundness is sufficient for being a good argument?

One question I’d like to see answered in the comments: who honestly believes Craig isn’t aware of a single one of the mistakes he’s making in his article? I can’t. At the end of his post, Law says Craig is a “genuine guy,” so I guess Law does, though he doesn’t say why.

I suspect Law is being led astray by Craig’s superficially pleasant demeanor. The sort of misrepresentations Law complains about are totally routine for Craig. The contrast between Craig’s superficial niceness and his sleazy attacks on his opponents prevent me from giving much weight to the former. In fact, I wonder if it’s just another tactic, if Craig knows that by being outwardly pleasant he can ultimately get away with a lot more sleaze.

I also liked this comment from Law:

Craig’s an OK philosopher, though he likes to stick to his scripted answers rather than think on his feet, when he can get out of his depth if someone takes a line for which Craig has no script (which is why he is always weaker in QandA sessions – see e.g. the Shelley Kagan debate). Debating Craig is a little like talking to someone who is trying to sell you double-glazing down the phone. Almost any comeback from you is already anticipated, with a scripted response, and a response to your likely response. So he sounds very, very confident and polished. Spend 20 mins on the phone with the double glazing guy, and you’ll find his script allows no other ultimate response than the one he wants – “Why yes, I’d like to buy double glazing”.

It’s a similar experience debating Craig. I spent a lot of time mapping his responses in advance, and little he said on the night was new. The thing about the evil god challenge is, it did pull him off his usual script a little bit – or at least made it look rather threadbare. Especially in the QandA. That Craig’s got remarkably little in the way of response to the evil god challenge is apparent in the text above. There’s very little argument – just assertion. As to who won – make up your own minds…

I’d go further than that. There’s usually little question of pulling him off his script, because Craig has no problem responding to anything whatsoever his opponent says by just circling back to one of his main talking points. Even if the talking point is irrelevant. Even if his opponent has already said what they think is wrong with the talking point. Hence Craig’s repeated hammering of, “but my moral argument beats Stephen Law’s argument!” while totally ignoring Law’s actual criticisms of the moral argument.

Skepticism is not some ideology where one cannot know anything. And before someone runs in screaming “No true Scottman!” – you could claim skepticism means you enjoy picking your nose while riding elephants, but that wouldn’t make it so. Skepticism is, at the very core, the application of the scientific method. To relabel it as some bizarro philosophy in where there is no such thing as knowledge is ridiculous.

Cue commenters pointing out that the Feministe blogger’s definition of “sketpcism” is in fact an accepted meaning of the term (indeed the older meaning, dating back to ancient Greek philosophy). Jen’s semantic blunder is a shame, since it distracs from more important points.

Namely, skepticism–in the ancient Greek sense–is false. Obviously false. We can, in fact, know things. I know I’m in a hostel typing on my laptop right now, for example. And the Feministe blogger’s attempts to argue to the contrary are pretty flimsy:

There are a lot of reasons that Certainty, or at least certainty of the world outside ourselves, doesn’t work. There are the limits of human cognition. The limits of human perception. The unbridled arrogance of dogmatism. The centrality of certitude in the oppression of many, many people. But the one I want to talk about today is that dogma means that you stop learning, you stop listening to other people.

To state the obvious: the fact that there are limits to human perception and cognition, and the fact that dogma is bad, do not entail that we don’t know anything. My knowing where I am and what I’m doing doesn’t contribute to oppressing anyone. And I can know some things without stopping learning about other things or listening to other people.

The question that really gets me here is why on Earth does skepticism appeal to anyone? Jen treated the Feministe post as basically an anti-science post, and if that’s what it had been, I would be able to understand to an extent. If the blogger had merely had a political axe to grind against science and written an anti-science post as a result, that would make a certain amount of sense.

But instead, the blogger at Feministe decided to take the pointlessly absurd position that we can’t know anything, ever. Which, if you take her words at face value, would include me not being able to know I’m in a hostel typing in my laptop. What on Earth is the appeal of saying something so silly?

The question bothers me in particular because the ranks of skeptics (still using the ancient Greek sense) include David Hume and Bertrand Russell, two of my favorite writers. Hume was great as a critic of religion and observer of human nature, and I think Russell was great all-around as long he wasn’t trying to do “serious” philosophy. Both, however, defended skepticism with arguments that now strike me as so flimsy as to be dubiously deserving of discussion.

So what’s the appeal? One answer, of course, is that this is a case of people trying to show they’re not just any idiot. In which case, it’s worth pointing out the obvious occasionally to make that tactic less appealing.

As an explanation for my comment, I’m going to do a three-part blog review of Gutting’s book. The first part of my review will correspond to part I of the book, which is subtitled “The limits of philosophical argument.” Gutting conveys the main point of the section when he says:

How often have we heard (or told others) that Quine refuted the analytic-synthetic distinction, that Kripke proved that there are necessary a priori truths, and that Gettier showed that knowledge cannot be defined as justified true belief? But, although I entirely agree that Quine, Kripke, and Gettier have achieved something of philosophical importance, a careful reading of their exemplary texts does not reveal any decisive arguments for the conclusions they are said to have established.

I think Gutting’s selection of the three claims (about Quine, Kripke, and Gettier) represent a nice variety, in terms of how plausible the claims are. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who thought Quine refuted the analytic-synthetic distinction, and based on the PhilPapers survey, the analytic-synthetic distinction seems to be alive and well. With Kripke, on the other hand, I do get the impression that a lot of philosophers think Kripke’s arguments are decisive, though I’ve personally never found them convincing. With Gettier, though, his critique of the JTB analysis of knowledge seems to me about as good a candidate for a conclusive philosophical argument as there could be. (Non-philosophers: don’t take my word for it. The Gettier paper is short and easy to read, so go read it!)

For this reason, I find the discussion of Gettier especially interesting, and I actually think Gutting makes a good point:

If I say that all women are under six feet tall, then the fact that a women is six-foot-four refutes my claim. But the force of the argument depends on the obviousness of the counterexample. In just what sense are the Gettier cases obvious? I suggest we can fruitfully judge the obviousness of a claim by the epistemic price of refusing to accept it. If I’m presented with a woman who certainly looks well over six feet and whose height has just been measured (by competent judges) as over six feet, denying her height requires me to deny the evidence of my own senses and the validity of a measurement I have every reason to think is reliable. To maintain my claim that there are no women over six feet will involve me in a cascade of epistemic absurdities that makes holding on to my claim a common-sense impossibility.

Gettier counterexamples do not have this sort of obviousness.

Gutting reinforces his point by giving examples of philosophers who’ve defended the justified true belief analysis of knowledge in spite of Gettier, and by noting an x-phi study showing that “non-philosophers are far from unanimous regarding Gettier intuitions.”

I think all of that is right, and I’d add that not only is Gettier’s argument not as decisive as our evidence that there are women over six feet tall, it’s hardly as decisive as the evidence for the major findings of 20th-century science. I say this in spite of the fact that it still seems to me that the Gettier cases are cases of justified true belief without knowledge. The distinction here is between what seems true and what’s genuinely obvious. I know in my past thinking about philosophy, I haven’t always paid enough attention to that distinction, and I suspect many philosophers are guilty of the same failing.

I find Gutting less convincing, though, when he claims that philosophical reflection on the work of Quine, Kripke, and Gettier has generated some knowledge other than what those philosophers claimed. Gutting claims, for example, that Quine has showed us that the analytic-synthetic distinction cannot be defined in non-modal terms, and that in most cases “justified true belief” is the correct definition of knowledge.

An obvious worry, which (unless I’ve missed something) Gutting doesn’t address is this: if Gettier’s arguments aren’t decisive, what are the chances that there will be better reasons for accepting claims like these? If we use the standard “to deny it involves as much absurdity as denying that there are women over six feet tall,” what are the chances that Gutting has reasons his claims that meets that standard?

Indeed, I can think of specific reasons to be skeptical. Maybe no one has given a good definition of the analytic-synthetic distinction in non-modal terms, but I think that’s at best weak evidence that no such definition could be given. And it seems confused to talk about a definition working in most cases: if you go around trying to determine whether things are human by checking whether they’re featherless bipeds, you’ll get the right answer most of the time, but it would be a mistake to say “the featherless biped definition of humanity works in most cases.”

Now, I don’t claim these criticisms are decisive rebuttals to what Gutting says about the analytic-synthetic distinction, or what he says about knowledge. I do think it’s clear, though, that Gutting’s reasons for his claims aren’t any more decisive than Gettier’s reasons for denying that justified true belief is knowledge. And I don’t think Gutting has shown that there are very many philosophical claims that are well-established in any sense, or that there are any philosophical claims with truly decisive arguments in their favor.

However, the justifications for Plato’s views often come from philosophical problems that philosophers haven’t stopped discussing. Here are three examples:

A priori knowledge

It seems like there are some things we know a priori. That is, we can discover some things just by thinking about them–mathematics, for example. But how could this be so? In his dialog Meno, Plato gives the crazy-sounding answer that we’re really just remembering things that we knew before we were born. But since Plato’s time, lots of philosophers have tried to give better explanations of how a priori knowledge is possible. There’s been talk of innate ideas (in a sense that doesn’t require reincarnation), Descartes’ “clear and distinct perceptions,” and more empiricist accounts where a priori knowledge really just comes from reflecting upon our own ideas (that’s a very crude summary of the history I just gave, it’ll do for my purposes, but don’t quote me on it).

On the other hand, if you read contemporary discussions of the a priori, there doesn’t seem to be much concern for explaining how a priori knowledge is possible, in the sense that Plato or Locke would have understood the question. Reactions to previous theories of the a priori often take the form of noticing some apparent problems, and then dismissing the theory, without worry about what else might be put in its place. Contemporary philosophers might worry a bit more if they came in at least able to appreciate the mind set this is such a big puzzle we might need reincarnation to explain it!

The Indefinite

If you’re reading this post (i.e. alive today and fluent in English) you’ve probably heard the phrase “well, yes and no” quite a few times. Probably some of these times the answer seemed appropriate. But it would be completely insane to answer every “yes or no?” question this way. At some point, either a straight “yes” or a straight “no” has to be sufficient. It would be nice to say something about when “yes and no” can be an appropriate answer, what makes it an appropriate answer when it is, and what we’re really saying when we say it.

Furthermore, lots of philosophers have felt the appeal of the idea that every claim about the world is either true or false, not both (that part is the logical law of noncontradiction) and not something in between (that part is the law of the excluded middle). Aristotle argued that anyone who claims to reject the law of noncontradiction will refute themselves as soon as they open their mouth, and if they avoid this problem by refusing to say anything, they will be “no better than a vegetable” and not worth talking to. William of Ockham went further: people who deny the law of noncontradiction, he said, should be beaten and burned until they realize that there is a difference between being beaten and burned and not being beaten and burned.

The common way of talking, though, remains, and even Aristotle seems to fall into it at times. Worse, to take the common way of talking at face value can be especially tempting when faced with philosophical paradoxes where both a straightforward “yes” and a straightforward “no” seem to get us into trouble. It inspired another surprising conclusion on Plato’s part: since all the things of ordinary experience can be, for example, beautiful from one perspective and not beautiful from another perspective, they must not be fully real. It is only things like Beauty itself that are fully real and proper objects of knowledge. This theory, like Plato’s theory of a priori knowledge, seems silly, but it’s a testament to how seriously he took the problem.

Change

The problem of change, as understood by the ancient Greeks, may be the least inutitive to modern philosophers. Some ancients, you see, appear to have been awfully worried about the question “how can a thing change and remain the same thing it once was?” Plato’s answer, again, is that this is a serious challenge to the reality of familiar, perceptible objects, but the Forms are unchanging and fully real. Here, though, the initial question sounds a bit silly. A quick answer is that it chances in some respect but remains the same in another respect.

Perhaps the original question can be touched up a bit to show that that response is too quick, but there’s another question in this vicinity we might shift to instead: “how much can a thing change and remain the same thing it once was?” This, in forms like the sorites paradox, Ship of Theseus, and so on, gets surprisingly large amounts of attention in current anglophone metaphysics. It also can turn into the problem of the indefinite if we’re at any point tempted to answer the relevant questions with “yes and no.”

I could say quite a bit more about any of these three problems, but this post is just an introduction. Anyway, understanding the longevity of these problems, and the weird doctrines they’ve motivated, makes me more willing to take the problems seriously, and want to try to consider them from more angles than they’ve generally been considered from in any one time period.

Martin was a fideist, and he defended that belief in his usual calm, direct fashion. When I questioned him on the subject he told me that he had no really good evidence to support his belief, but that it simply made him feel better to adopt it. He said that I — and other curmudgeons — had far better evidence for our convictions, but that he just felt more secure in his acceptance. He admitted — easily — that he could not convincingly argue his case… That was Martin, and I love him for being Martin.

What Randi is describing fits very well with Gardner’s discussion of religion in Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener.

Gardner’s skepticism was a matter of responding to people who claimed to have proven things they hadn’t, not about trying to disprove anything. This has actually been a popular stance in anti-pseudoscience circles, and Michael Shermer has made especially strong use of it when he turns to talking about God. What’s striking about Gardner’s version of fideism, though, is the way blocks arguments. On atheist blogs you’ll hear complaints about attempts by theists to stop debate entirely, but that’s actually very different than Gardner’s position. But these complaints are a response to people who want the conversation to go on just long enough for them to get your immediate concession that you were wrong to bring the issue up in the first place. Gardner, though, usually just said “here’s what I believe and why,” where the “why” wasn’t much to argue about.

The fact that there isn’t much to argue about when people express there beliefs this way is evidence for the an idea in philosophy that often doesn’t come into rationality-of-religion discussions. The idea is that demands for rational reasons for belief are partly a matter of norms for assertion: we don’t much care whether other people have good reasons for their beliefs, but once they’re going around telling us certain things are true, then we expect them to have good rational reasons for their beliefs. That can’t be all of it, though: there’s something profoundly odd about saying “I believe this and don’t have any reason for believing it, got a problem with that?” which is what some defenses of religion amount to (I’m thinking of Alvin Plantinga especially here, though he wouldn’t put it like that). Notice that the oddness of that statement isn’t shared by the appeals to non-rational reasons like Gardner’s, even though non-rational reasons for belief don’t seem to satisfy norms of assertion.

Probably when we talk about needing reasons for beliefs, we’re talking about more than one thing. We’re talking about rational reasons backing up assertions, and reasons in general accounting for beliefs. And that’s not all. We also want good rational reasons for our own beliefs, in part because we want our own beliefs to be true. That need pretty clearly doesn’t trump all others–if no other example will convince you, just imagine you need to take a false-belief pill to get through an interrogation without sparking a nuclear war. All else being equal, though, I’m with Carl Sagan preferring to know what the world is really like rather than persist in a satisfying delusion.

More than that, in my personal experience pragmatic fideism becomes impossible when you think too hard about it. At some point in high school I admitted to myself that I had no good reasons for believing in God, and moreover didn’t even really believe. I was vaguely attracted to the idea that there might be pragmatic reasons for believing even if the chances were small, but if I had just admitted the chances were small I didn’t believe, and I didn’t see any way to change that. I’ve been told I’m abnormal for finding it difficult to believe things I know ain’t so, though, so the psychological ineptitude for certain kinds of fideism can’t be an issue with everybody.

Anyway, I find Gardner’s position psychologically impossible and really not all that good a policy, though. It’s a bit of an odd feeling, though, realizing I don’t have the same visceral reaction to it that I do to apologetic cliches or baseless assertions.

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.

Pigliucci’s position actually isn’t all that different from that of his targets, though: he thinks that there are good, scientifically informed reasons to be an atheist, it’s just that science doesn’t absolutely determine the God question. But even then, he’s trying to make a pretty dubious distinction. There’s a weird, disparaging comment about the idea that particular religious claims, at least, can be disproven, which is “funny,” because Karl Popper’s falsificationism is no longer widely accepted in philosophy of science. That’s a weird argument: the idea that science can sometimes show an idea is wrong doesn’t depend on any particular theory of how science works.

Then Pigliucci gives a more substantial argument that particular religious claims are never disproved by science: there’s always the possibility that God rigged the world to look one way, even though it really is some other way. The trouble with this response is it can be used to undermine any scientific claim, not just alleged refutations of religious doctrine. If Pigliucci’s argument shows that science doesn’t determine the answer to any religious questions, it also shows that it doesn’t determine the answer to any scientific questions.

That sounds wrong, but on the other hand there’s a sense in which we should embrace the conclusion: scientific ideas are always vulnerable to goofy objections that can’t be answered just by quoting an experimental result, objections that require you to think in broader ways about what makes an idea good or bad. So in a sense, science doesn’t determine the answer to scientific questions. But if that’s true, the fact that it doesn’t determine the answer to religious questions doesn’t make religion especially safe from science–even if it’s not as vulnerable as one might think, it’s still as vulnerable as any scientific claim.

When I try to talk about these issues, I instinctively reach for Descartes and Hume–I want to say something like “If you look at the fate of their philosophical projects, you’ll see that efforts to provide evidence for everything we believe are doomed to fail.” But a lot of people would be justifiably annoyed by such a facile appeal to famous names, so let me try to be a little more precise:

Descartes: Descartes’ project was to try to forget everything he knew and build up an edifice of certain knowledge from nothing, and he was working with a notion of “certainty” highly influenced by mathematics. Most philosophers now think Descartes’ project was a dismal failure, not only because of flaws in the particular arguments he used (like his attempted proofs of the existence of God, and his insistence that God wouldn’t allow us to be wildly deceived about what the world is like), but also because he set impossible standards for himself: he purports to be willing to consider (and later, able to refute) the possibility of a deceiving demon who has him confused even about the most seemingly obvious mathematical truths, which seems to make impossible Descartes’ attempt to escape skepticism by arguments, because the demon might be tricking him into thinking he has good arguments when he doesn’t (which is plausible in part because lots of philosophers think Descartes didn’t have good arguments).

Hume: Hume was trying to work out the implications of some assumptions about what we can know known as empiricism: all we can know is what we experience directly, and what is logically deducible from our concepts and what we experience directly. As Hume pointed out, very little is logically deducible from what we experience directly–notably, nothing about our future experiences is logically deducible from those experiences. So, if empiricism is true, we don’t know an awful lot of the things we think we know. Though Hume admitted he found this conclusion psychologially impossible to take seriously, he presented it as his official philosophy.

In light of these disappointing predicaments, most analytic philosophers today implicitly adopt an approach to understanding the world radically different than that of Descartes and Hume: instead of trying to start with nothing and passing everything through strict standards of epistemic legitimacy, we just take whatever seems obvious to us as working assumptions until given reason to think a given assumption is mistaken. This isn’t license to go on merrily believing whatever we happened to believe freshmen year; the idea is we have to think about what we can infer from the most obvious truths about the world, and more importantly think about what contradictions there might be in our starting assumptions, and put in the effort figuring out which assumption to jettison when we do find contradictions.

Luke doesn’t give much indication of what his own thoughts on these issues are, beyond “all these people are wrong.” There is one sentence from the moral realism post that does seem to shed some light on his position: “it’s the duty of the person making a claim to prove it is correct.” This sounds like like a conversational norm (if you’re going to tell someone something, you’d better prove it) but my guess is that what Luke really has in mind is a norm governing private belief (if you believe something, you’d better be able to prove it). To extrapolate a little, I would say that Luke’s position resembles that of Descartes and Hume in that he wants there to be a fundamental, quite strict standard to which all belief is held, but a standard which is more meetable than Descartes’ or Hume’s.

If that’s the claim, the key to evaluating it is knowing what “proof” here means. The sort of epistemological position I am defending owes a lot to G. E. Moore (one of the founders of the analytic tradition), and while he rejected the standards involved by the Descarteses and Humes of the world, he did talk about being able to prove things: he thought all you needed to do to prove the existence of an external world was to hold up your hands and say “here are two hands.” The sense of “proof” used here is highly intuitive: normally, if you ask me to prove that I have an X (pair of hands, roll of $100 bills, spaceship, whatever) showing you my X is proof enough. If this is what Luke means by “proof,” then there are a lot of things we have which may be in trouble under Descartes’ or Hume’s standards for what we can believe, but are not in trouble under Luke’s standard.

This “here let me show you” approach to proof is interesting, because it suggests a reason for being much more confident in our knowledge about the physical world than, say, philosophical opinions. But if you think about this for a moment, this is not at all a good thing for Luke’s standard of legitimate belief. Most importantly, it raises the question of how we can believe statements in epistemology, like, “our senses are generally reliable” or “you shouldn’t believe what you can’t prove.” Probably there are interesting ways of understanding “proof” in which such statements are provable, but I would be curious to know what specifically Luke has in mind here (if he does have a well-developed idea in mind). Moore’s approach to these problems was to say that admit that only some of our common-sense beliefs are provalbe, but that there are things we can know without proving. For now, I’m cautiously skeptical of the possibility that any such approach could work.

A better response to Plantinga is just to point out that belief in the Christian God isn’t very much at all like most of the common-sense beliefs commonly cited as threated by Descartes & Hume-style skepticism (like belief in the reliability of our senses), but is an awful lot like beliefs most Christians wouldn’t accept without evidence–namely, the beliefs of other religions. That kind of response is very hard to reject without special pleading on behalf of Christianity, and doesn’t involve commitment to any potentially troublesome epistemic principles.