Suppose materialism were true: then, as we’ve seen, my belief will be a neural structure that has both NP [neuro-physiological--Hallquist] properties and also a propositional content. It is by virtue of the NP properties, however, not the content, that the belief causes what it does cause. It is by virtue of those properties that the belief causes neural impulses to travel down the relevant efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, causing them to contract, and thus causing behavior. It isn’t by virtue of the content of this belief; the content of the belief is irrelevant to the causal power of the belief with respect to behavior (p. 336).

Plantinga argues that therefore, if materialism is true, then there’s no reason for evolution to produce reliable belief-forming mechanisms, and therefore it’s unlikely that evolution would produce reliable belief-forming mechanisms. This strikes me as utterly bizarre. As far as I can tell, it makes no more sense than saying that if materialism were true, it is by virtue of the arrangement of subatomic particles that our digestive system digests food, and therefore whether or not those particles are arranged into a stomach, intestines, etc. is irrelevant with respect to digestion, and therefore evolution is unlikely to produce those organs.

My guess is that that is what most non-eliminative materialists would say in response to Plantinga. In fact, hardcore non-reductive materialists like Hilary Putnam would say that the higher level explanation is crucial, and the lower level explanations aren’t even really explanations. Plantinga shows no curiosity about any of this; there’s not the slightest mention of how materialist philosophers might respond to his central claim. And that looks like a bigger problem than ignoring evolutionary biologists.

But… I recently (more recently than I read Plantinga’s book) re-read Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works, which talks about the cognitive revolution in psychology, which happened decades ago, and which in the mind of many psychologists has demystified things like beliefs and their relationship to the brain.

Because of this, I don’t think there’s any reason to see the relationship between the brain and beliefs as any less a scientific issue than the relationship between atoms and macroscopic objects. And it means that by ignoring what materialists might say about his argument, Plantinga isn’t just ignoring other philosophers, he’s also ignoring scientists. As I explained in my previous post, that really shouldn’t be acceptable anymore.

Basically the book starts off with three chapters of preliminaries talking about the sort of silly knee-jerk reactions that people have to criticism of religion, talking about why it’s okay to criticize religion, talking about the differences between what most religious people believe and what left-wing theologians believe, stuff like that. And then I have five chapters talking about the truth of religion, arguments for the existence of God, arguments against the existence of God, stuff like that.

Essentially that’s what I that written so far and the plan was to make the last chapter to chapter about the moral side of religion and the harm that religion does. But I’ve sort of got writer’s block on this chapter because I’m not sure how to make it interesting. Because I’m not sure there’s anything interesting that can be said in defense of the moral side of religion.

So, for example, I think Plantinga’s ontological argument isn’t it all a good argument in the sense that I don’t think it does anything for the credibility of theism. But it’s an interesting argument insofar as there’s an interesting explanation of why it’s a bad argument, and I can write 2500 words about it and not feel like I’m wasting my reader’s time. But I’m not sure there are any comparably interesting defenses of moral side of religion.

Perhaps a better way to explain it is that William Lane Craig’s arguments for the existence of God are terrible arguments, but when you put him up on stage against an opponent he can use all his rhetorical prowess and high school debate team skills to impress the audience. But Craig rarely does debates on things like the morality of hell, and he probably would never agree to a debate on a topic like, say, “resolved, that the Bible is full of immoral teachings” because any halfway competent opponent would win in spite of Craig’s debating skills. That’s an indicator that the question of the morality of many religious teachings is one-sided, in a way that the argument over the existence of God is not one-sided.

So when Dawkins says that the God of the Old Testament is a homophobic, misogynistic, genocidal, bully and so on and so forth, that’s something that’s just obvious anyone who’s actually read the Old Testament. That’s a paragraph that all of Dawkins’ critics cite as evidence of what a terrible person Dawkins is, but their attempts to explain what is wrong with that statement are just absolutely pathetic. For example, Alastair McGrath says well, that’s not the God I believe in or anyone I know believes in, which may be true but it’s still the God described in the Old Testament.

Or you have Alvin Plantinga who makes the really insulting claim that the fact that Dawkins would dare say such a thing about God (or the God of the Old Testament, rather) indicates that Dawkins’ book contains no “evenhanded than thoughtful commentary,” even though Plantinga ought to know the basis for Dawkins statement. And instead of actually trying to rebut it he just dismisses it, which I think is a much more serious indicator of a lack of thoughtful commentary.

When Christians aren’t talking about what a big meanie Richard Dawkins is, the usual approach to talking about the Old Testament seems to be to go on and on about context. (I won’t get into what Jews say, they have somewhat different strategies.) Both conservative Christians and liberal Christians do this, and it’s just an evasion. The Old Testament, remember, contain commandments to kill men for having gay sex, commandments to kill people for blasphemy or for trying to get you to worship other gods. It even contains a part where Moses has a man killed for picking up sticks on the Sabbath of all things. It contains commandments to exterminate entire tribes.

Lots of awful stuff. Stuff that is on the face of it horrendously immoral. And when Christians talk about the context of the Old Testament, they never actually get around to explaining why that should stop us from thinking that these things in the Old Testament are horrendously immoral.

Similarly, there are verses in the New Testament, which taken together seem to suggest that anyone who does not believe in Christianity will be punished forever in hell. I called the Old Testament horrendously immoral; this goes beyond horrendously immoral. In fact I don’t even think there are words in the English language to express how evil this doctrine is, except perhaps, for “hellish.”

Some Evangelical Christians address this problem by saying, no, this misinterpretation of the Bible and try to interpret the Bible in a way that allows some non-Christians to go to heaven or even allows everybody to go to heaven. There are a serious Evangelical Christians who seriously argue that the Bible teaches that, and part of me says fair enough, because I think the Bible contradicts itself on what you have to do to get salvation.

However, a lot of Evangelical leaders think the all non-Christians go to hell thing is nonnegotiable. How they deal with the problem of hell is first of all, the avoid talking about it. Second of all if they do have to talk about it, they downplay it. One thing they’ll say is that hell isn’t literal flames hell is just separation from God.

Of course this doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, it might even be a blessing in disguise since a lot of times the God of Evangelical Christianity he sounds like a bit of a weirdo, who I might want to stay far, far away from, if, for example, he’s really that obsessed with getting people to believe things for which there is very little evidence.

On the other hand, if you ask the “hell is separation from God” folks, “how bad is hell?” they’ll tell you that hell is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. So if the belief is also that all non-Christians go to hell, that’s still saying that all non-Christians (if they die without coming to the truth and accepting Jesus as their Savior) will meet the worst fate imaginable. It’s saying that all of Hitler’s victims, with the exception of minority of converts to Christianity, all of them once they were killed in the Holocaust then went on to a fate even worse than Holocaust, ordained for them by the Evangelical Christian God. Good news indeed.

So there’s just no good defense of these doctrines. The other defensive strategy is that oh well we should ignore these doctrines because of the overriding message of love that is the true core of Christianity. This is very popular among liberal Christians, but surprisingly you also hear it sometimes from Christians who claim to be Evangelicals, claim to believe everything in the Bible.

My response to that is that, well, it’s true the Bible talks about love, but in so far as a particular biblical author combines talk about love with these horrible teachings and that’s evidence that that particular author did not really understand love. If a modern cult leader who advocated both stoning gays to death and also said some nice things about love, we wouldn’t think that the nice things about love overrode the horrible things about stoning gays to death.

Maybe the reason some Christians are so impressed the idea of a message of love and the Bible is they are under the impression that without the Bible, people wouldn’t know to love each other, which is maybe understandable if your moral education has been totally limited to the Bible. But once you know even a tiny little bit about ethical traditions outside of religion it becomes totally obvious that that’s false. For example, just look at Stoic teachings about the brotherhood of all men which, predate Jesus.

So that’s my stream of consciousness thoughts about the moral side of religion. I could go on, I’ve got more to say, but I’m not sure I have a book chapter worth of things to say. I think it’s a very important point and I don’t want to sell it short in the book, so give me advice on this one. When I talk about the moral side of religion, what should I be talking about? Yes, I can talk about the lie that Hitler was an atheist, and I can talk about communism, and I can talk about the Inquisition, and I can talk about the horrible treatment of women in Muslim countries today, but I think those issues are as straightforward and can probably be dealt with just as briefly as the things I’ve been talking about this post.

So what do I do to fill this chapter I’m trying to write?

I agree that Leprechaunology is not a great analogy for the work of Aquinas or Leibniz. But it’s easy to suggest better analogies: how about Spinozism or Hegelianism? I’d be surprised if Feser took either of those doctrines terribly seriously.

The dirty little secret of philosophy is that just because a philosopher is held up as “great” to the public and considered required reading in undergraduate courses does not mean professional philosophers think his work is very good, or that they’re obliged to study him carefully before thinking his work is not very good.

Feser bemoans this when his colleagues do it to Aquinas, but he himself does it with plenty of modern and contemporary philosophers. The brand of rhetoric that Feser has made his name on strikes many professional philosophers as utterly bizarre, and with good reason.

Let me expand a little. Feser seems to rely on the assumption that people like Augustine and Aquinas were great thinkers, and there’s no need to argue this, because everyone knows who history’s great thinkers are. And if what you mean by a “great” thinker is an influential one, then there’s no question that Augustine, Aquinas, etc. were “great” thinkers. The problem is that there’s little reason to think believing nonsense is a barrier to becoming influential, so the “greatness” of Augustine and Aquinas in this sense is no evidence that they didn’t believe a lot of nonsense.

On the other hand, if what you mean by “great” is the quality of a thinker’s insights, the quality of his contributions to the intellectual tradition, then there’s no agreement as to who the “great” thinkers are. For example: Georg Hegel (1770-1831): greatest philosopher whoever lived? Or was his work, as Schopenauer (1788-1860) said, “a colossal piece of mystification” featuring “the most outrageous misuse of language”? Informed people disagree. Then there’s the fact–as mentioned above–that Feser himself has little regard for most of the philosophers in the standard list of greats from Descartes onwards.

A third thing people might mean when they talk about “great” philosophers is that when we read Augustine or Aquinas, it’s just obvious that these were very smart men, and any idea had by a very smart man must be at least somewhat good. Now, I don’t think it really is so obvious that Augustine and Aquinas were that smart (Augustine’s The City of God is on the face of it a rambling piece of hack polemic), but let that pass.

The bigger problem here is that intelligence isn’t much of a barrier to believing nonsense. Indeed, it isn’t even always a barrier to supporting downright evil causes–as we learned from Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and the other German intellectuals who supported the Nazis. Part of the problem, as Michael Shermer said, is that “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” But the problem is even worse than that: there are some kinds of nonsense that only smart people are capable of producing.

This is related to the points I’ve made previously, but let me give an especially clear example: physicist Alan Sokal’s paper Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Here is a sample:

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz’s analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross’ discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray’s and Hayles’ exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding’s comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.

Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, existence itself — become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.

There’s no question that this is nonsense. When the journal Social Text published the article in 1996, Sokal immediately revealed that the article was “a parody,” which he had submitted to the journal to test the question “would a leading North American journal of cultural studies… publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?”

However, while Sokal’s article was “liberally salted with nonsense,” it was not nonsense that just anyone could have written. To write an article like that you’d need, at minimum, some knowledge of physics, some knowledge of postmodern literary theory, and a certain knack for imitating other people’s writing style. In other words, it’s something Sokal might have published even if he hadn’t had a point to make and just wanted to show off. And if he had just wanted to show off, he might have been better off not revealing the hoax.

This is not to say that any famous philosophers have consciously perpetrated Sokal-style hoaxes and just not told anybody. I suspect that the worst nonsense producers do want to impress people but also manage to convince themselves they’re talking sense. But whatever is going on inside the heads of certain people, the Sokal hoax shows that a piece of writing can display intelligence and learning and still be arrant nonsense.

Now, while there are lots of important differences between science and philosophy, most of what I’ve said here applies to scientists as much as philosophers. Newton’s work in physics is held in high regard not because Newton was obviously such a great guy, but because Newton did an impressive job of drawing inferences from the evidence (even though we now know some of his ideas about physics were wrong). Newton also put a lot of effort into occultism and finding hidden messages in the Bible, but scientists don’t feel obligated to respect that part of Newton’s work simply because he was a “great thinker.”

What I’ve written so far has been about philosophers and “thinkers” in general, but there’s an additional problem with defending Christianity with appeals to great Christian thinkers: for much of the history of Christianity, it wasn’t safe to be anything other than a Christian in Christian lands. Augustine argued that heretics should be corrected with torture and imprisonment, and there is a place in The City of God where he gloats about the fact that some people had written rebuttals to his work, and then refrained from publishing them out of fear for their own safety. Aquinas went a step further and argued that heretics should be executed.

Things improved only gradually after the scientific revolution. Hobbes was tried for heresy and could have been executed if found guilty, but escaped with only a ban on future writings. Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise (which argued for “freedom to philosophize”) had to be circulated clandestinely, and Spinoza was unable to publish his Ethics during his lifetime.

Hume lived after the last execution for blasphemy in Britain, but lost out on a teaching position at the University of Edinburgh in part because his Treatise of Human Nature was perceived as threatening the traditional arguments for the existence of God. Hume later discussed the arguments for the existence of God in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and though he concealed his own views behind the characters in the dialogue his friends persuaded him not to publish the book during his lifetime. Only in the 19th century did it become truly safe to openly reject all religion, and at that point you got prominent thinkers openly rejecting all religion.

One reason this last point is important is that it’s tempting to say, “The arguments for the existence of God given by people like Thomas Aquinas and Samuel Clarke were convincing to people back then because people back then accepted the arguments’ assumptions, but today we reject those assumptions.” But I wonder if people found the arguments all that convincing even back then. Maybe they were just afraid to disagree.

(1) Is morality reducible to what somebody (or bodies) says or thinks is moral?
(2) Is morality reducible to something contingent and local to planet Earth?

There’s an obvious way to say “no” to both questions: if moral truths are written in some Platonic realm. There’s also an obvious way to say “yes” to both questions: if morality is reducible to what humans say or think is moral. But there’s a famous moral view that says “yes” to (1) and “no” to (2), namely the sort of divine command theory endorsed by William Lane Craig, which makes morality reducible to what God says.

Now here’s Ruse:

How does a non-realist like me proceed? One could be some kind of social contract theorist and think that a group of wise old people sat down one day and made up the rules of morality. This seems to me to be unsatisfactory both as history and philosophy. I go rather with the late John Rawls in his Theory of Justice, thinking that natural selection put morality into place. Those proto-humans who thought and behaved morally survived and reproduced at a better rate than those that did not. (There are all sorts of good biological reasons why cooperation can be a much better strategy than just fighting all of the time.)

So what does this make of morality? Sure, it is something that is part of our psychology. Frankly, who would ever doubt that? If you like, the controversial part is that it is only part of our psychology. I think that is the world into which David Hume pushed us. But because it may be the case that we can do what we like, it doesn’t follow that we should do what we like. As evolved human beings, the rules of morality are as binding on us as if we were the children of God and He had made up the rules.

So that is why what Jerry Sandusky allegedly did was wrong – really and truly wrong. That is not a matter of opinion.

This sounds puzzling, but maybe Ruse wants to say “no” to (1) and “yes” to (2), by making morality rooted in human psychology (though not, apparently, in a way that’s open to straightforward scientific study). And it’s not really obvious saying “yes” to (2) in this way requires you to say “yes” to (1). Just because a fact is psychological doesn’t mean it can be changed by getting people to agree to say something different about it. If that’s right, it’s wrong for Craig to insinuate that on Ruse’s view, morality would be changed “if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them.”

My gut inclination is to want to say “no” to both (1) and (2), to follow G. E. Moore and Russ Shafer-Landau if not Plato. But maybe Ruse (if I understand him correctly) has the right approach, “no” to (1) and “yes” to (2). That could be right even if Ruse doesn’t have the most plausible view of this sort. Russell Blackford has complained that “too many people assume that the only alternatives are a very crude moral relativism or a naive moral realism.” And I’ve been thinking of picking up Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project, which I’m told treats morality as a kind of technology (and facts about technology aren’t automatically changed by what people say or think).

Many specialists in philosophy of science have actual degrees in the area of science they write about, even if it’s just a bachelor’s. Of course, it’s possible to know quite a bit of science without formal training, but I think it’s safe to say that if you’re going to do serious academic writing on science without such formal training, you’ll need to put in a fair amount of effort educating yourself.

How much? Well, enough that you don’t make any mistakes that would be obvious to an undergraduate studying the field you’re writing about. Enough that you call tell the difference between something one scientist said once, and something most scientists in the relevant field consider a well-established finding. Popularizations can be useful, but you’d be wise not to rely too much on them. Certainly, if you find a particular popularization’s description of the evidence for a scientific claim lacking, you should do more research, rather than assume it is the science and not just the popularization that is flawed.

In fact, the safest policy is probably is to assume the experts are right when they can agree that something is certain (or nearly certain). But if you must disagree, or come to the defense of views generally regarded as fringe, at least be careful. Don’t rush in as you might rush in to a debate in your area of expertise. First make a real effort to understand why the experts think what they do. Be ready for the possibility that their reasons will be stronger than you thought at first. And if you do that and still aren’t convinced, be willing to clearly explain why you aren’t convinced.

Things not to do include: hand waving dismissals of the evidence for widely-accepted findings, jumping to the conclusion that the opinion of the experts is merely the product of bias, and declaring that none of the scientists who’ve criticized the fringe view you favor are worth responding to.

These rules should be common sense, and I think most philosophers who write about science follow them. Plantinga, however, has a long history of breaking them when writing about evolution. An early example is Plantinga’s paper, “When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible.” It opens with a tidy statement of how religion and science at least seem to conflict:

Taken at face value, the Bible seems to teach that God created the world relatively recently, that he created life by way of several separate acts of creation, that in another separate act of creation, he created an original human pair, Adam and Eve, and that these our original parents disobeyed God, thereby bringing ruinous calamity on themselves, their posterity and the rest of creation.

According to contemporary science, on the other hand, the universe is exceedingly old-some 15 or 16 billion years or so, give or take a billion or two. The earth is much younger, maybe 4 1/2 billion years old, but still hardly a spring chicken. Primitive life arose on earth perhaps 3 1/2 billion years ago, by virtue of processes that are completely natural if so far not well understood; and subsequent forms of life developed from these aboriginal forms by way of natural processes, the most popular candidates being perhaps random genetic mutation and natural selection.

He then discusses a number of ways of handling this apparent conflict. He notes that some Christians think they should always be willing to reinterpret the Bible to accommodate science, but says this view is “deplorable.” In fact, though Plantinga says he accepts that the Earth is old, he also says that “One need not be a fanatic, or a Flat Earther, or an ignorant Fundamentalist” to be a young-Earth creationist.

Then Plantinga says he thinks the theory of evolution is probably false, and tries to argue that the evidence for it is weak. This section of the paper is by Plantinga’s own admission “hand waving,” and includes at least one howler: Plantinga complains of “the nearly complete absence, in the fossil record, of intermediates between such major divisions as, say, reptiles and birds, or fish and reptiles, or reptiles and mammals.”

This is an idea creationists seem to have gotten from a misunderstanding of Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibria, and Gould has put a lot of energy into correcting this misunderstanding. One place he corrects it is his essay “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” which happens to be the one piece of Gould’s writing that appears in Plantinga’s bibliography. Gould explains that “Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.” Plantinga’s mistake is so big, and so avoidable, that it suggests he wasn’t really even trying to get his science right.

After making a mess of discussing the evidence for evolution, Plantinga decides that the confidence scientists have in evolution must be due to philosophical prejudice and confusion. This, of course, is not something you can actually infer from a “hand waving” discussion of the evidence, but it may explain the sloppiness of that discussion. Why read Gould carefully, or take him seriously when he tells you you’re suffering from a serious misconception, if you can dismiss him as philosophically prejudiced?

In more recent years, Plantinga has backed off from his stronger anti-evolution comments, but is still uncomfortable with evolution, just in denial about his discomfort. In 2010, Michael Ruse wrote an article describing Plantinga as having “long harbored a distrust, even an ardent dislike, of evolutionary theorizing in general and of Darwinian thinking in particular.” Plantinga replied that this was a “misrepresentation” showing Ruse’s “distressing inability to make relevant distinctions,” because Plantinga’s view wasn’t that the theory of evolution is false, just that it’s a “modern idol of the tribe” and a “shibboleth.”

This reply makes no sense. It’s possible dislike an idea without being confident enough to say it’s false. Also, Plantinga’s rationale for calling evolution an “idol of the tribe” seems to have been that some people have said you are ignorant if you doubt evolution. But if people say you are ignorant if you doubt that the Earth is roughly spherical, that doesn’t make round-Earthism an “idol.” That Plantinga would give such a lame excuse for calling evolution an “idol” does suggest a dislike of the theory.

Plantinga’s latest book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism is surprisingly unforthcoming about what he now thinks about evolution. A New York Times article on the book says that “Mr. Plantinga says he accepts the scientific theory of evolution, as all Christians should.” But I can’t find anything to that effect in the book, so presumably the NYT’s claim is based on an interview.

Also, in the book (marked as pp. 8-9 in the Kindle edition), Plantinga makes a point of defining “evolution” to include common ancestry but exclude Darwin’s theory of natural selection. This, combined with various negative remarks about Darwin’s theory, makes me think that Plantinga now accepts common ancestry but still rejects natural selection (or at least thinks natural selection can’t explain very much). But Plantinga isn’t forthcoming about any of that. This is significant, partly because it avoids the question of whether he was too careless in his previous writing on evolution.

Now I don’t know how to talk about the handling of science in Where the Conflict Really Lies without talking about Plantinga’s really appalling hypocrisy about matters of “tone.” Russell Blackford has complained about this with respect to John Haught and Alister McGrath, but Plantinga is even worse here. He complains about “invective, mockery, ridicule, and name-calling” used by his opponents, but indulges in plenty of it himself.

For example, Plantinga describes Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins as “dancing on the lunatic fringe” and describes Dawkins’ argument in The Blind Watchmaker as taking the form “p is not astronomically improbable therefore p.” Daniel Dennett is described as wanting to keep Baptists in “something like zoos,” apparently a reference to this paragraph in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea:

I love the King James Version of the Bible. My own spirit recoils from a God Who is He or She in the same way my heart sinks when I see a lion pacing neurotically back and forth in a small zoo cage. I know, I know, the lion is beautiful but dangerous; if you let the lion roam free, it would kill me; safety demands that it be put in a cage. Safety demands that religions be put in cages, too—when absolutely necessary. We just can’t have forced female circumcision, and the second-class status of women in Roman Catholicism and Mormonism, to say nothing of their status in Islam. The recent Supreme Court ruling declaring unconstitutional the Florida law prohibiting the sac-rificing of animals in the rituals of the Santeria sect (an Afro-Caribbean religion incorporating elements of Yoruba traditions and Roman Catholi-cism) is a borderline case, at least for many of us. Such rituals are offensive to many, but the protective mantle of religious tradition secures our toler-ance. We are wise to respect these traditions. It is, after all, just part of respect for the biosphere.

There’s a big differences between saying “religions should be put in cages” and saying “religious believers should be put in cages”–you can’t literally cage a religion, which makes it obvious that Dennett was speaking metaphorically. Maybe Plantinga knew what Dennett meant, wasn’t trying to deceive anyone, and just thought it would be funny to twist Dennett’s words. Even granting that, though, Plantinga’s antics strike me as bizarre. (In mentioning this bit involving Dennett, I worry that such nonsense isn’t worth anybody’s time, but I want to give a taste of just how strange this book sometimes is.)

Plantinga frequently complains about anti-evolutionists being called ignorant. And I’ve called Plantinga ignorant in the past. But now I think the problem isn’t ignorance–it’s something much worse. He’s clearly done a lot of reading on evolution. Maybe he doesn’t know the topic as well as one really should to write about it academically–his reading list is weighted towards popular works and works written by philosophers–but he’s doing pretty well for a layman.

The problem, rather, is that he seems to have been reading less for understanding, and more to find things to snark about. Not that snark is always bad! Sometimes it’s deserved, and it can be fun to snark! But being eager to snark about a topic you don’t understand very well is setting yourself up to look like a fool, and that’s what Plantinga has done.

There’s much to criticize in Where the Conflict Really Lies, but I’ll limit myself to one more especially clear illustration of my main point. Plantinga devotes an entire chapter to the work of Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe. His final assessment ends up being cautions but positive: Behe’s work doesn’t provide “irrefragable arguments for theism” but does “support theism.” But in reaching this conclusion, Plantinga barely bothers to discuss what other scientists have had to say about Behe’s claims.

Here is how Plantinga describes the response to Behe’s first book, Darwin’s Black Box, which argues that certain biochemical structures couldn’t possibly have evolved through random mutation and natural selection:

Not everyone is pleased. We are in the neighborhood of cultural conflicts (“culture war”) where feelings run high; the level of vitriol, vituperation and contempt heaped on Behe’s unsuspecting head is really quite remarkable. There are screams of hysterical anguish, frenzied denunciations, accusations of treason (how could an actual scientist say things like this?), charges of deceit, duplicity, deviousness, tergiversation, pusillanimity, and other indications of less than total agreement. One is reminded of the medieval philosopher Peter Damian, who said that those who held a certain position (oddly enough, one different from his own) are contemptible, not worthy of a reply, and should instead be branded. Many of those who comment on Behe seem to think along similar lines. These screeds are not of course the sort of thing to which one can give an argumentative reply: they aren’t so much arguments as brickbats.

Again, notice the hypocrisy: describing criticisms of Behe as “screams of hysterical anguish” is pointlessly insulting. No one is literally screaming in anguish. (Contrast Dawkins’ infamous description of the God of the Old Testament: the Old Testament really does contain commands to kill gay men, exterminate entire tribes, etc.) Similarly, I’ve never heard anyone dismiss Darwin’s Black Box as unworthy of reply or suggest Behe be branded.

Well, maybe Plantinga knows of attacks on Darwin’s Black Box that are as bad as he says. It’s hard to tell, since the footnotes only cite a single example, an online article written by physical chemist Peter Atkins. Atkins doesn’t discuss Behe’s arguments in any detail, explaining “Specialists far more competent than me,” have already done so and providing a couple hyperlinks.

Atkins does, however, make one serious and strictly scientific criticism of Behe: Behe falsely claimed that the scientific literature is largely silent on molecular evolution. This is a criticism Plantinga could have given an “argumentative reply” to (except maybe in the sense that there is no good defense of Behe on this point). Thus, Plantinga’s description of the scientific response to Darwin’s Black Box turns out to be untrue even of the one example he gives.

Plantinga does decide one critic of Darwin’s Black Box is worth replying to, philosopher Paul Draper. That suggests he could not find a single scientist worth replying to, but that can’t possibly be right. The instant I began reading Plantinga’s discussion of Draper, I recognized Draper’s criticism of Behe as one that’s also been made by many scientists (H. Allen Orr, for example). And Plantinga ends up admitting that Draper’s criticisms of Behe are correct, but tries to minimize the damage:

It’s important to note that the possibilities Draper suggests are merely abstract possibilities. Draper doesn’t argue or even venture the opinion that in fact there are routes of these kinds that are not prohibitively improbable; he simply points out that Behe has not eliminated them…

As far as I can make out, Draper is right: Behe’s argument, taken as Draper takes it, is by no means airtight. Behe has not demonstrated that there are irreducibly complex systems such that it is impossible or even monumentally improbable that they have evolved in a Darwinian fashion—although he has certainly provided Darwinians with a highly significant challenge.

Unfortunately, scientific critics of Darwin’s Black Box have argued that there are worse problems with the book than mere lack of logical airtightness. These are criticisms Plantinga could have given an “argumentative reply” to, but he chose not to. Whatever you think of Behe or his critics, this is no way to do serious academic writing on a scientific subject.

I’ve addressed only a fraction of Where the Conflict Really Lies, but I’ve made my point: Plantinga is an embarrassment to philosophy. Not for giving bad philosophical arguments–I’m not arguing that here, and anyways plenty of influential philosophers have occasionally been guilty of bad arguments. No, what’s embarrassing is that Planting has persistently screwed up something that academic philosophers nowadays mostly get right: understanding the science before you try to philosophize about it.

I’ll begin with what William Lane Craig says about Plantinga’s argument in the third edition of his book Reasonable Faith (just because I’m writing this with a view towards including it in the book, which will have a whole chapter on Craig):

Now in his version of the argument, Plantinga conceives of God as a being which is “maximally excellent” in every possible world. Plantinga takes maximal excellence to entail such excellent-making properties as omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection. A being which has maximal excellence in every possible world would have what Plantinga calls “maximal greatness”…

1) It is possible that a maximally great being exists.
2) If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3) If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4) If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5) If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.
6) Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

In my view, the jargon Plantinga uses in this argument is needlessly confusing. Instead of talking about “maximal excellence” and “maximal greatness,” he could just define God as “an omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect, necessarily existent being.” Similarly, there’s no need to invoke possible world talk, we can state the argument talking just about possibility and necessity (where “necessary” just means “couldn’t possibly be otherwise”). That condenses the argument to:

1) It is possible that God exists. (Craig’s premise 1)
2) If it is possible that God exists, then it is necessary that God exists. (Craig’s premise 3)
3) If it is necessary that God exists, God exists. (Craig’s premise 4)
4) Therefore, God exists.

Working backwards: (3) is obvious once you know what “necessary” means. If God couldn’t possibly have not existed, then of course God exists. Premise (2) is supposed to come from a combination of two things: the definition of God as a being who exists necessarily, and the S5 axioms of modal logic.

Some people are going to object about simply defining God as a necessary being. However, among atheist philosophers, the attitude generally seems to be, “Oh, theists can define ‘God’ however they want. For example, if they want to define ‘God’ as ‘the greatest possible being,’ they can do that.”

Now, after granting theists their definition of God as a starting point, some atheist philosophers, Michael Martin for example, might argue that the concept of a greatest possible being is incoherent, or incompatible with other things commonly believed of God, but the point of that sort of attack isn’t to show that it’s wrong to define God that way, it’s to show that if we define God that way, then God can’t possibly exist.

In fact, in the philosophy world it seems to be generally regarded as OK to just announce that you’re going to use some word to mean such-and-such. As long as it isn’t needlessly confusing, and you don’t equivocate between two different meanings of a word, you can define words however you want. So I think most philosophers are going to give Plantinga the OK on the first piece of support for premise two.

Now the other piece: in a system of formal logic, axioms are things you’re allowed to just assume when working within the system. So for example, when I was in graduate school, the homework problems for my formal logic class generally involved proving some theorem or other. If we were working within a particular system of logic, we were allowed to have a step in our proofs be writing down an axiom with a note indicating “this is an axiom.”

The S5 axioms for modal logic–the logic of possibility and necessity–have the important consequence that if something is possibly necessarily true is necessarily true. This, when combined with the definition of God as necessarily existing, is where the otherwise bizarre-looking premise (2) of my restatement of Plantinga’s argument comes from. Philosophers have disagreed on which axioms are the right axioms to use when doing modal logic. And I don’t know of any decisive argument to show that the S5 axioms are the right axioms.

However, my understanding is that most philosophers nowadays accept the S5 axioms, and Plantinga’s key claim seems plausible enough to me. To say that what’s possibly necessarily true is necessarily true is to say that it makes no sense to think the following: “well, this could be false, but it could also be such that it couldn’t possibly be false.” And I don’t see how that makes any sense, if we’re talking about genuine possibility (what Plantinga calls “broadly logical possibility”) rather than possibility-for-all-I-know (often called “epistemic possibility,” from the Greek word for knowledge).

At this point, Plantinga’s argument may look pretty good. He’s got the first two key claims, and of course it’s at least possible that God exists, right? Not so fast. Once you accept the S5 axioms, it becomes completely crazy to think you can just assume things are possible. Or at least, it becomes completely crazy to assume things are possibly necessary. This is because S5 allows for Plantinga-style arguments for any purported necessary truth. The fact that the argument involves God isn’t actually an important feature of the argument.

So for example, philosophers generally claim that mathematical truths are, if true, necessarily true. Two plus two not only equals four, it could not possibly equal anything other than four. Because of this, if you accept S5 and also are willing to just assume a given mathematical claim is possibly true, you can “prove” that mathematical claim through a Plantinga-style argument.

For example: the Goldbach conjecture is an oft-cited example of a mathematical claim that nobody has been able to prove or disprove. If you accept the S5 axioms, and also assume that the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true, you can reason like this: “Possibly the Goldbach conjecture is true. But it is if true, necessarily true. So possibly the Goldbach conjecture is necessarily true. Therefore, by S5, the Goldbach conjecture is true!” Obviously, it is absurd to think you can prove the Goldbach conjecture that way.

It’s important to be clear on where the absurdity comes from. It does not come from the S5 axioms alone, nor does it come solely from assuming that the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true. Rather, it comes from the combination of those two things. S5 and taking possible necessities for granted are two things that do not go well together. My inclination is to accept S5, but reject assuming such possibilities. (Note that you could claim that while it’s not okay to assume mathematical claims are possible, but is okay to assume God is possible. But why would you think that?)

It’s also important to emphasize the distinction between genuine (“broadly logical”) possibility and (“epistemic”) possibility-for-all-we-know. I suspect that’s where part of the appeal of just assuming possibilities comes from. The Goldbach conjecture might be true for all we know, but it might be false for all we know. In that sense, both are possibilities. But, according to the conventional wisdom about mathematics, if the Goldbach conjecture turns out to be true, there was never a genuine possibility of it being false. There was only “possibility for all we knew.”

Craig does not deal with the Goldbach Conjecture objection, but he does deal with the objection that you might use a Plantinga-style argument to prove the existence of “a necessarily existent lion.” In response, Craig argues that “does not seem even remotely incoherent,” which means we should think it is possible that God exists. In contrast:

The idea of something like a necessarily existent lion also seems incoherent. For as a necessary being, such a beast would have to exist in every possible world we can conceive. But any animal which could exist in a possible world in which the universe is composed wholly of a singularity of infinite spacetime curvature, density, and temperature just is not a lion.

But it makes just as much sense to argue that we can conceive of a world containing only physical objects is not a world with a god in it, therefore it is possible that God does not exist. This, incidentally, entails that if God is defined as existing necessarily, we have just proved that God does not exist. Incidentally, this makes me think that theists ought not define God as existing necessarily, because it makes the existence of God too easy to attack.

To see that this is a problem with the ontological argument, though, you do not have to agree with the argument that God is possibly nonexistent, and therefore nonexistent. You need only think we have no more business assuming a possibly necessarily existent God than we do assuming a possibly necessarily existent lion.

Now unlike Craig, Plantinga is not so crazy as to claim that his argument actually proves the existence of God, or to insist people must grant his assumption that God is possible. Instead, he says, of ontological arguments:

They cannot, perhaps, be said to prove or establish their conclusion. But since it is rational to accept their central premiss, they do show that it is rational to accept that conclusion.

But again, by analogy with mathematics, we can see that this is a silly way to argue.

Imagine two mathematicians, Alice and Bob, arguing over whether it’s reasonable to believe the Goldbach conjecture. Alice argues that the Goldbach conjecture is unproven, and we should not believe unproven mathematical claims. Bob concedes that it is unproven, but says the Goldbach conjecture seems true to him, and it’s reasonable for him to believe it on that basis.

Now, you may agree with Alice here, or you may agree with Bob, but imagine Bob tried to strengthen his position by saying, “Well, surely you agree that it’s at least reasonable for me to believe that the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true. But if I believe the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true, S5 allows me to infer that it is true. So it’s reasonable for me to believe the Goldbach conjecture.” This is a silly argument. Even if you think Bob is reasonable to believe the Goldbach conjecture, this can’t be the reason why.

Once again, we need to be very clear on what the problem is. The problem is not necessarily that it is unreasonable to think that the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true. Maybe Bob is right about that. The problem, instead, is that Bob cannot expect Alice to agree. Given that Alice thinks it is unreasonable to accept the Goldbach conjecture, she probably will not think it is reasonable to believe the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true, especially if she accepts the S5 modal axioms. Bob’s argument is, if not quite circular, an example of an argument that would be bad even if it were deductively sound.

So, not only does Plantinga’s argument fail to prove the existence of God, it fails even in Plantinga’s stated goal of showing that belief in God is reasonable. Nor, I think is it especially insightful in any other way. Plantinga did not invent the S5 axioms, he was not the first person to suggest they are the right modal axioms, and I do not think he provided any decisive argument for them (I don’t think such a decisive argument exists.)

The argument could work as a clever illustration of the S5 axioms–the sort of thing a professor might mention to his student while explaining modal logic, or that might end up on a whiteboard of a grad student lounge as a joke. But it does nothing whatsoever to establish the intellectual respectability of theism.

On a semi-related note: Anyone willing to buy me Plantinga’s new book so I can review it? Link to my Amazon wishlist here. Based on Michael Ruse’s review, I expect that the book will be terrible, but terrible in ways that I feel a need to be able to comment on first-hand. That means reading it, yet I don’t want to spend my own money on something I’m so sure will be terrible. So who’s willing to help me out?

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?

Here’s my view of the argument: Plantinga’s argument uses some esoteric ideas, and I don’t expect anyone unfamiliar with these ideas to understand what is wrong with the argument. However, I do claim that once you understand the underlying ideas, it becomes totally obvious that the argument is not a good one. Plantinga’s ontological argument does not reflect well on Plantinga as a thinker, nor does it something people should be pointing to to say “look, theism isn’t so crazy, there are sophisticated arguments for it!”

Plantinga’s ontological argument makes three key moves: (1) defining God as a necessary being, that is to say, a being who if he exists exists necessarily (2) using the S5 axioms for modal logic , which have the consequence that if something is possibly necessarily true is necessarily true and (3) assuming that it is possible that God exists.

Two key pieces of jargon here: First “necessary,” which means, “cannot possibly be otherwise.” A necessary truth is something that could not possibly be false; for God to exist necessarily is for it to be impossible that he not exist. Second, “modal,” which means “having to do with possibility and necessity.” Modal logic is the logic of possibility. In both cases, the “possibility” is supposed to be genuine possibility, not merely “possibility for all I know.”

Now, some people are going to object about simply defining God as a necessary being. However, among atheist philosophers, the attitude generally seems to be, “Oh, theists can define ‘God’ however they want. For example, if they want to define ‘God’ as ‘the greatest possible being,’ they can do that.”

Now, after granting theists their definition of God as a starting point, some atheist philosophers, Michael Martin for example, might argue that the concept of a greatest possible being is incoherent, or incompatible with other things commonly believed of God, but I don’t that sort of attack actually depends on granting theists their definition of “God.”

In fact, in the philosophy world it seems to be generally regarded as OK to just announce that you’re going to use some word to mean such-and-such. As long as it isn’t needlessly confusing, and you don’t equivocate between two different meanings of a word, you can define words however you want. So I think most philosophers are going to give Plantinga the OK on his first step.

For the second step, in a system of formal logic, axioms are things you’re allowed to just assume when working within the system. So for example, when I was in graduate school, the homework problems for my formal logic class generally involved proving some theorem or other. And if we were working within a particular system, we were allowed to have a step in our proofs be writing down an axiom with a note indicating “this is an axiom.”

Historically, philosophers have disagreed on which axioms are the right axioms to use when doing modal logic. And I don’t know of any decisive argument to show that the S5 axioms are the right axioms. However, my understanding is that most philosophers nowadays accept the S5 axioms, and Plantinga’s key claim seems plausible enough to me. To say that what’s possibly necessarily true is necessarily true is to say that it makes no sense to think the following: “well, this could be false, but it could also be such that it couldn’t possibly be false.” And I don’t see how that makes any sense. (Remember, we’re supposed to be talking about genuine possibility here.)

At this point, Plantinga’s argument may look pretty good. He’s got the first two key claims, and of course it’s at least possible that God exists, right? Not so fast. Once you accept the S5 axioms, it becomes completely crazy to think you can just assume things are possible. Or at least, it becomes completely crazy to assume things are possibly necessary. This is because S5 allows for Plantinga-style arguments for any purported necessary truth. The fact that the argument involves God isn’t actually an important feature of the argument.

So for example, philosophers generally claim that mathematical truths are, if true, necessarily true. Two plus two not only equals four, it could not possibly equal anything other than four. Because of this, if you assume S5 and also are willing to just assume a given mathematical claim is possibly true, you can “prove” that mathematical claim through a Plantinga-style argument. But obviously it’s absurd to think you can prove anything in mathematics that way. Thus, if we accept S5, we have to refrain from assuming possibly necessities to avoid such absurdities.

Where some people might go wrong here is thinking of possibility as “possibility for all we know.” There are many claims in mathematics which we have yet to either prove or disprove. The Goldbach conjecture is an often-mentioned example (look it up on Wikipedia if you’re curious about what the Goldbach conjecture is, but the details don’t matter here). The Goldbach conjecture might be true for all we know, but it might be false for all we know. But, according to the conventional wisdom, if the Goldbach conjecture turns out to be true, there was never a genuine possibility of it being false, there was only “possibility for all we knew.”

Now Plantinga is not so crazy as to claim that his argument actually proves the existence of God, or to insist people must grant his assumption that God is possible. Instead, he says that it’s reasonable to believe that it’s possible that God exists, and therefore it’s reasonable to think that God exists. But again, by analogy with mathematics, we can see that this is a silly way to argue.

Imagine two mathematicians, Alice and Bob, arguing over whether it’s reasonable to believe the Goldbach conjecture. Alice argues that the Goldbach conjecture is unproven, and we should not believe unproven mathematical claims. Bob concedes that it is unproven, but says the Goldbach conjecture seems true to him, and it’s reasonable for him to believe it on that basis.

Now, you may agree with Alice here, or you may agree with Bob, but imagine Bob tried to strengthen his position by saying, “Well, surely you agree that it’s at least reasonable for me to believe that the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true. But if I believe the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true, S5 allows me to infer that it is true. So it’s reasonable for me to believe the Goldbach conjecture.” This is a silly argument. Even if you think Bob is reasonable to believe the Goldbach conjecture, this can’t be the reason why.

So, not only does Plantinga’s argument fail to prove the existence of God, it fails even in Plantinga’s stated goal of showing that belief in God is reasonable. Both of those points are totally obvious once you realize that you could give a Plantinga-style argument for any purported necessary truth, in particular truths of mathematics. If Plantinga’s argument had been something tacked to a bulletin board on a graduate student lounge as a joke, it wouldn’t have been bad as academic in-jokes go. But as a serious argument it’s worthless.

Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires. We act of our own free will to the extent that we have the opportunity to exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure. We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities and we have opportunities to exercise them.

[snip]

This conception of free will represents a longstanding and dominant view in philosophy, though it is typically ignored by scientists who conclude that free will is an illusion. It also turns out that most non-philosophers have intuitions about free and responsible action that track this conception of free will. Researchers in the new field of experimental philosophy study what “the folk” think about philosophical issues and why. For instance, my collaborators and I have found that most people think that free will and responsibility are compatible with determinism, the thesis that all events are part of a law-like chain of events such that earlier events necessitate later events. That is, most people judge that you can have free will and be responsible for your actions even if all of your decisions and actions are entirely caused by earlier events in accord with natural laws. [This view is known as compatibilism - Hallq]

Our studies suggest that people sometimes misunderstand determinism to mean that we are somehow cut out of this causal chain leading to our actions. People are threatened by a possibility I call “bypassing” — the idea that our actions are caused in ways that bypass our conscious deliberations and decisions. So, if people mistakenly take causal determinism to mean that everything that happens is inevitable no matter what you think or try to do, then they conclude that we have no free will. Or if determinism is presented in a way that suggests all our decisions are just chemical reactions, they take that to mean that our conscious thinking is bypassed in such a way that we lack free will.

And here’s Coyne’s reply:

How do people conceive of free will, though? My own definition, which I think corresponds to most people’s take, is that if you could rerun the tape of life back to the moment a decision is made, with all the concatenations of molecules at that moment, and the circumstances leading up to it, remaining the same, you could have chosen differently. If you couldn’t, then determinism reigns and we’re not free agents, at least as most people think of them.

Philosophers don’t like that notion—the idea that we’re all puppets on the strings of physics. So they do what theologians do when a Biblical claim is disproven: they simply redefine free will in a way that allows us to retain it. Like the story of Adam and Eve, it becomes a metaphor, with a meaning very different from how it was once used.

I’m sympathetic to much of what Coyne says about philosophy and theology, but here he’s completely missing the point. The problem with a lot of liberal theology is that there’s no motivation for it, aside from a desire to somehow save tradition from scientific and moral advances. And in the worst cases, left-wing theologians end up saying things about “God” that make “God” unrecognizable to the vast majority of religious believers. We know this because surveys show that in the US, at least, a larger percentage of the population still adheres to a relatively conservative brand of Christianity.

However, while Coyne asserts that his view of free will is the one most people have, he presents no evidence for this, whereas Nahmias has done actual research on what ordinary people (or at least undergraduates untutored in philosophy) think about free will. Nahmias doesn’t say as much as he could about his research, but anyone who’s curious about it can find free PDFs of some of his papers online (Google Scholar will do better than ordinary Google here).

Nahmias’ research is part of a movement known as “experimental philosophy,” and takes a totally different approach to understanding concepts like “free will” than the one taken by most philosophers and theologians. This means that he shouldn’t be lumped in with them–and I should mention that when I’ve talked negatively about philosophy on this blog, I’m not mainly talking about Nahmias and his fellow experimental philosophers. (Unfortunately, they haven’t solved the problem of philosophers being unable to agree on anything, though.)

I could go over some of the examples Nahmias gives subjects in his research, but instead let me repurpose one of Alvin Plantinga’s examples to make my point. Suppose Curley Smith, mayor of Boston, is offered a $35,000 bribe, and given his venality (and various other conditions, including his financial situation and estimate of the odds of getting caught), it’s a forgone conclusion that he’ll accept the bribe. Maybe if he were less venial, or he felt certain he’d be caught, he’d reject the bribe, but given how things actually are, there’s no way he’s going to reject it.

Now, given this, once Curley accepts the bribe, can we say he chose to accept it? Can we say he could have rejected it? I think the answer to both questions is “yes.” And I think the answer to these questions is still “yes,” even if what guaranteed Curley would accept the bribe was a matter of the laws of psychology. But being people’s actions being determined by initial conditions and laws is just what determinism is. So it seems determinism is compatible with choice, even compatible with being able to do otherwise in a sense.

I say “in a sense” because there’s a sense in which determinism means being unable to do otherwise. It means being unable to do otherwise holding relevant all initial conditions and laws exactly fixed. But in these contexts, I think it’s natural to say “he could have done otherwise” if what we mean is, “he might have rejected the bribe if he were less venal, etc.” And the majority of Nahmias’ subjects seem to agree.

Of course, I’ve described this example at the level of psychology, in terms of personality traits and so on. So you might think bringing in neuroscientific explanations of behavior changes things. But what Nahmias is reporting is that people are mainly bothered by the idea of their actions being the product of chemistry because they think that means the psychological stuff doesn’t matter. And what neuroscience actually does is explain the psychology in terms of chemistry and cell biology. It doesn’t make the psychology irrelevant.

Note: this post rambles quite a bit. If you just want the red meat where I stick it to Evangelicals, scroll to the bolded section at the bottom.

While some self-described Evangelicals reject the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, a number of influential Evangelical organizations such as the Evangelical Theological Society and the seminary that formerly employed Licona define themselves in terms of the doctrine, and it’s generally a safe bet that if someone says they’re an Evangelical, they accept inerrancy. This is supposed to mean that the Bible is totally without errors of any kind, but comes with a big escape clause: it only applies to the intended meaning of the text.

So, for example, even most young earth creationists would say that when the Bible talks about the four corners of the Earth, that isn’t meant to be taken literally. The intended meaning was not that the Bible is literally a flat square. You’ll find more young earth creationists who reject Galileo, but others accept that verses implying the Earth doesn’t move also weren’t to be taken literally. Many Evangelicals have even reconciled themselves to evolution. In his book Inerrant the Wind, Biblical scholar Robert M. Price gives J. I. Packer as an example of someone who’s considered an Evangelical in good standing, but who allows that Adam and Eve might be “allegorical ciphers.”

This means that, within Evangelicalism in the United States today, a pretty good range of theological views are accepted as legitimate options for Evangelicals. You can see this, for example in the Counterpoints book series put out by the Evangelical publishing house Zondervan, which features debates whose participants are mostly Evangelical theologians arguing that their views are the best interpretation of scripture. Contributors include Clark Pinnock, an Evangelical who argues that non-Christians can be saved and that Hell does not involve eternal torment.

Because of all this, my initial reaction to the Licona kerfluffle was, “wow, that’s weird.” Licona is the author of The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach which is basically a 700-page version of Gary Habermas’ and William Lane Craig’s Resurrection apologetics. And the book is what got him in trouble. Not because of the main apologetic point of the book, but because of a few pages where Licona suggests that the story of a mass resurrection in Matthew 27:52-53 might be best interpreted as a “poetic device” (p. 553). Licona seems to have reasoned that if other Evangelicals could read Adam and Eve non-literally, he could read that bit of Matthew non-literally.

It’s a little unclear to me how this led to Licona losing his two jobs. Randal Rauser claimed it was “a direct result of the campaign carried out by cranks like Norman Geisler and Al Mohler.” However, I can’t find anywhere where Geisler (who wrote several follow-ups to his initial “open letter”) or Mohler said Licona ought to lose his jobs. In a response to Christianity Today’s reporting on the issue, Geisler insists that Licona did not resign, but was fired, and he was fired for “his denial of inerrancy.” Geisler doesn’t seem to have a problem with that outcome, but he doesn’t admit to having campaigned for it either.

Even so, Geisler’s involvement in particular surprised me. True, for several decades now, Geisler has be perhaps the most vocal defender of inerrancy among Evangelical Christians in the US. However, in his Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, he takes pains to emphasize the difference between the Bible and interpretations of the Bible, and to say that you can accept inerrancy without being a young earth creationist:

Indeed, since the Bible does not say exactly how old the universe is, the age of the earth is not a test for orthodoxy. In fact, many orthodox, evangelical scholars hold the universe is millions of billions of years old, including Augustine, B. B. Warfield, John Walvoord, Francis Schaeffer, Gleason Archer, Hugh Ross, and most leaders of the movement that produced the famous “Chicago Statement” on the inerrancy of the Bible. (p. 273)

Based on this, I’d have expected Geisler to cut a fellow Evangelical more slack over differences of interpretation. On the other hand, I can’t find much evidence of Geisler being flexible about anything other than the age of the universe. He insists strongly on the historicity of Adam and Eve, for example. Geisler has also apparently campaigned to have people kicked out of the ETS in the past, I guess this isn’t out of character for him.

Whatever was going on with Licona’s former employers and with Geisler, this is a pretty clear sign that in some corners of the Evangelical world, Biblical interpreters do not have as much freedom as one might have thought. It’s also a sign of how seriously Evangelicals take inerrancy. Licona has a lot of prominent Evangelicals defending him, but there defense is “he never denied inerrancy,” not “inerrancy doesn’t matter.”

In fact, for the most part I think Geisler and the Evangelicals defending Licona have pretty similar views. Geisler is a bit unusual in his enthusiasm about defending inerrancy. For many Evangelicals, inerrancy is a doctrine they subscribe to but don’t like to talk about. Geisler has written at least one entire book dedicated to trying to refute alleged errors in the Bible one at a time. William Lane Craig would never think of doing that, even though he is an inerrantist (see i.e. this reference to “we inerrantists”). But Geisler’s views, I don’t think they’re unusual, not among Evangelicals.

Randal Rauser has denied that this incident shows that lack of freedom of thought is a special problem for Evangelicals. here he writes:

Incidentally, where the gloating skeptics go critically wrong is in thinking that this opposition to free thought is tied to religion in particular. On the contrary it is tied to ignorance, fear, and power politics. And the same problems can be found in the secular university or the back benches of most political parties. You just have to find the right issue to feel the sting of public censure from the powers that be.

In a follow-up defending this claim he says, “My simple observation in response is that every community is open to the discussion of some controversies and not of others. This was a point I made briefly in my last post. I’ll say a bit more about it here,” and gives examples from a hypothetical university to illustrate this claim. He then concludes:

It doesn’t matter where you go in the university: certain conversations are not tolerated. Diversity of opinion, academic freedom, so-called free thought, is always qualified. Needless to say, the same dynamic is at play in the work place and wider society. Thus, it is completely unfair to suggest that these dynamics are uniquely or especially operative in churches and para-church organizations.

I want to comment on Rauser’s hypothetical philosophy department, because philosophy departments are something I have experience with. Here’s how Rauser describes it:

The philosophy department is chock full of analytic philosophers (Heidegger is considered a bad joke) who are atheists. The last graduate student who was openly Christian only survived because she opted to write her thesis on environmental ethics. The departmental head recently referred to philosophy of religion as a complete waste of time.

This strikes me as a little exaggerated, but only a little, and I don’t mind that because it’s a hypothetical example created to make a point. However, the bit about how the Christian graduate student “only survived” by writing a thesis on “environmental ethics” is misleading in that it makes it sound like there’s an informal rule that that’s the only subject Christians are allowed to write about.

What Rauser really means to say is that philosophy graduate students are discouraged from writing dissertations on philosophy of religion. I can confirm that that’s true–at least it was true at Notre Dame. But at Notre Dame, it wasn’t because the department was anti-Christian, but rather because there simply isn’t a demand for specialists in philosophy of religion. Obviously, that’s something that students hoping to get jobs as philosophy professors need to know. There’s a huge difference between not thinking highly of a certain sub-field, and declaring certain views off-limits.

More obviously, the seminary where Licona lost his job has a doctrinal statement affirming inerrancy. Such doctrinal statements are common not just at seminaries, but at Evangelical universities in general. They are something that no secular university, or secular university department, would ever have, because they are so obviously at odds with academic freedom.

On top of that, Licona is a champion defender of Evangelicalism who lost his job over a relatively small deviation from the party line. Even the most ideological secular department would never fire one of its rising stars over something so trivial. And tenure denial is one thing, but Licona appears to have lost his job suddenly after only a few months of discussion. Rauser may be right that the problem is not unique to Evangelicalism, but if he thinks the problem isn’t “especially” bad among Evangelicals, he’s deeply in denial.