Atheism—and contra-atheism—is a much overpublished topic, and Reitan, a professor of philosophy at Oklahoma State University, is late to the party. Nonetheless, he makes an elegantly argued response to
Christopher Hitchens et al. that is refreshing in several respects.
Neither polemical nor defensive, he writes primarily as a logician,
rather than a believer. He brings into the contemporary fray many
philosophers who reasoned well about God long ago: Anselm, Aquinas,
Leibniz, Schleiermacher. He explains so many arguments so clearly that
the book could function as an introductory philosophical text on the
perennial subject of God’s existence. He also looks squarely in the
face of the contemporary horrors that many have used to argue for God’s
non-existence and still comes off the theodicy battleground with a
sense of God as ethico-religious hope, the substance of things hoped
for. The clarity of his presentation should make this book useful after
atheism has finished its moment in the sun. ~ Publishers Weekly
It can be difficult to answer questions about the Christian faith-even for Christians who regularly read their Bibles and attend church. What can they say to a skeptic who questions Christian doctrine or truth claims? What about young Christians who want answers to their tough questions? Without a Doubt covers questions on everything from the doctrine of the incarnation to religious pluralism, from evolution to moral relativism, with rational answers for even the most stubborn skeptic. Chapters contain charts, relevant biblical texts, and outlines to help readers grasp key ideas relevant to proclaiming the gospel to an unbeliever or discussing doctrine with another Christian. ~ Product Description
In response to Robert A. Larmer, Basinger argues: "There is little basis upon which to claim that all proponents of solely natural causation are guilty of dogmatic, uncritical, question-begging reasoning. To claim emphatically that there is in fact no God (and thus
no divine causal intervention) may be an unwarranted metaphysical contention. But the nontheist need not be making any such ontological claim. She can simply be saying that, while this epistemological
contention is debatable, its affirmation is not necessarily any more
dogmatic or question begging than the belief that the ‘total’ evidence
makes theistic belief (and thus the possibility of divine intervention)
most reasonable."
Over the past thirty years, analytic philosophers of religion have defined the problem of evil in terms of the prima facie difficulty in consistently maintaining
(1) God exists, and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and (2) Evil exists. (In a crisp and classic article Evil and Omnipotence, J.L. Mackie, "Evil and Omnipotence", Mind no. 254 (1955); reprinted in Nelson Pike, God and Evil, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964, pp. 46-60.J.L.)
J.L. Mackie emphasized that the problem is not that (1) and (2) are logically inconsistent by themselves, but that they together with quasi-logical rules formulating attribute-analyses — such as
(P1) A perfectly good being would always eliminate evil so far as it could, and (P2) There are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do — constitute an inconsistent premise-set. He added, of course, that the inconsistency might be removed by substituting alternative and perhaps more subtle analyses, but cautioned that such replacements of (P1) and (P2) would save ordinary theism from his charge of positive irrationality, only if true to its essential requirements. Mackie, op.cit., p.47.
In an earlier paper "Problems of Evil: More Advice to Christian Philosophers", Marilyn McCord Adams, (Faith and Philosophy, April 1988, pp. 121-43.) I underscored Mackie’s point and took it a step further. In debates about whether the argument from evil can establish the irrationality of religious belief, care must be taken, both by the atheologians who deploy it and the believers who defend against it, to insure that the operative attribute-analyses accurately reflect that religion’s understanding of Divine power and goodness. It does the atheologian no good to argue for the falsity of Christianity on the ground that the existence of an omnipotent, omnscient, pleasure-maximizer is incompossible with a world such as ours, because Christians never believed God was a pleasure-maximizer anyway. But equally, the truth of Christianity would be inadequately defended by the observation that an omnipotent, omniscient egoist could have created a world with suffering creatures, because Christians insist that God loves other (created) persons than Himself.
The extension of ‘evil’ in (2) is likewise important. Since Mackie and his successors are out to show that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with each other, Mackie, op.cit ., pp. 46-47. they can accomplish their aim only if they circumscribe the extension of ‘evil’ as their religious opponents do. By the same token, it is not enough for Christian philosophers to explain how the power, knowledge, and goodness of God could coexist with some evils or other; a full account must exhibit the compossibility of Divine perfection with evils in the amounts and of the kinds found in the actual world (and evaluated as such by Christian standards).
The moral of my earlier story might be summarized thus: where the internal coherence of a system of religious beliefs is at stake, successful arguments for its inconsistency must draw on premises (explicitly or implicitly) internal to that system or obviously acceptable to its adherents; likewise for successful rebuttals or explanations of consistency. The thrust of my argument is to push both sides of the debate towards more detailed attention to and subtle understanding of the religious system in question.
As a Christian philosopher, I want to focus in this paper on the problem for the truth of Christianity raised by what I shall call horrendous evils. Although our world is riddled with them, the Biblical record punctuated by them, and one of them — viz., the passion of Christ; according to Christian belief, the judicial murder of God by the people of God — is memorialized by the Church on its most solemn holiday (Good Friday) and in its central sacrament (the Eucharist), the problem of horrendous evils is largely skirted by standard treatments for the good reason that they are intractable by them. After showing why, I will draw on other Christian materials to sketch ways of meeting this, the deepest of religious problems.
II. Defining the Category
For present purposes, I define ‘horrendous evils’ as ‘evils the participation in (the doing or suffering of) which gives one reason prima facie to doubt whether one’s life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to one on the whole’. Stewart Sutherland (in his comment Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God-II, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , Supplementary Volume LXIII, 311-23; esp. 311) takes my criterion to be somehow first-person. This was not my intention. My definition may be made more explicit as follows: an evil e is horrendous if and only if participation in e by person p gives everyone prima facie reason to doubt whether p ‘s life can, given p ‘s participation in e , be a great good to p on the whole.
Such reasonable doubt arises because it is so difficult humanly to conceive how such evils could be overcome. Borrowing Chisholm’s contrast between balancing off (which occurs when the opposing values of mutually exclusive parts of a whole partially or totally cancel each other out) and defeat (which cannot occur by the mere addition to the whole of a new part of opposing value, but involves some organic unity among the values of parts and wholes, as when the positive aesthetic value of a whole painting defeats the ugliness of a small color patch) Roderick Chisholm, The Defeat of Good and Evil, chapter 3 of this volume, horrendous evils seem prima facie, not only to balance off but to engulf the positive value of a participant’s life. Nevertheless, that very horrendous proportion, by which they threaten to rob a person’s life of positive meaning, cries out not only to be engulfed, but to be made meaningful through positive and decisive defeat.
I understand this criterion to be objective, but relative to individuals. The example of habitual complainers, who know how to make the worst of a good situation, shows individuals not to be incorrigible experts on what ills would defeat the positive value of their lives. Nevertheless, nature and experience endow people with different strengths; one bears easily what crushes another. And a major consideration in determining whether an individual’s life is/has been a great good to him/her on the whole, is invariably and appropriately how it has seemed to him/her. Cf. Malcolm’s astonishment at Wittgenstein’s dying exclamation that he had had a wonderful life, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, (Oxford University Press, London, 1962, p.100.)
I offer the following list of paradigmatic horrors: the rape of a woman and axing off of her arms, psychophysical torture whose ultimate goal is the disintegration of personality, betrayal of one’s deepest loyalties, cannibalizing one’s own off-spring, child abuse of the sort described by Ivan Karamazov, child pornography, parental incest, slow death by starvation, participation in the Nazi death camps, the explosion of nuclear bombs over populated areas, having to choose which of one’s children shall live and which be executed by terrorists, being the accidental and/or unwitting agent of the disfigurement or death of those one loves best.
I regard these as paradigmatic, because I believe most people would find in the doing or suffering of them prima facie reason to doubt the positive meaning of their lives. Once again, more explicitly, most people would agree that a person p’s doing or suffering of them constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether p’s life can be, given such participation, a great good to p on the whole. Christian belief counts the crucifixion of Christ another: On the one hand, death by crucifixion seemed to defeat Jesus’ Messianic vocation; for according to Jewish law, death by hanging from a tree made its victim ritually accursed, definitively excluded from the compass of God’s people, a fortiori disqualified from being the Messiah. On the other hand, it represented the defeat of its perpetrators’ leadership vocations, as those who were to prepare the people of God for the Messiah’s coming, kill and ritually accurse the true Messiah, according to later theological understanding, God Himself.
III. The Impotence of Standard Solutions
For better and worse, the by-now-standard strategies for solving the problem of evil are powerless in the face of horrendous evils.
3.1. Seeking the Reason Why
In his model article "Hume on Evil" (Philosophical Review LXXII (1963), pp.180-97; reprinted in God and Evil, p.88.) Pike takes up Mackie’s challenge, arguing that (P1) fails to reflect ordinary moral intuitions (more to the point, I would add, Christian beliefs), and traces the abiding sense of trouble to the hunch that an omnipotent, omniscient being could have no reason compatible with perfect goodness for permitting (bringing about) evils, because all legitimate excuses arise from ignorance or weakness.
Solutions to the problem of evil have thus been sought in the form of counter-examples to this latter claim, i.e., logically possible reasons why that would excuse even an omnipotent, omniscient God! The putative logically possible reasons offered have tended to be generic and global: generic insofar as some general reason is sought to cover all sorts of evils; global insofar as they seize upon some feature of the world as a whole. For example, philosophers have alleged that the desire to make a world with one of the following properties — the best of all possible worlds, Following Leibniz, Pike draws on this feature as part of what I have called his Epistemic Defense (Problems of Evil: More Advice to Christian Philosophers, pp. 124-25. a possible world a more perfect than which is impossible, a world exhibiting a perfect balance of retributive justice, Augustine, On Free Choice of Will III.93-102, implies that there is a maximum value for created worlds, and a plurality of worlds that meet it. All of these contain rational free creatures; evils are foreseen but unintended side-effects of their creation.
No matter what they choose, however, God can order their choices into a maximally perfect universe by establishing an order of retributive justice. A world with as favorable a balance of (created) moral good over moral evil as God can weakly actualize. Plantinga takes this line in numerous discussions, in the course of answering Mackie’s objection to the Free Will Defense, that God should have made sinless free creatures. Plantinga insists that, given incompatibilist freedom in creatures, God cannot strongly actualize any world He wants. It is logically possible that a world with evils in the amounts and of the kinds found in this world is the best that He could do, Plantinga argues, given His aim of getting some moral goodness in the world. –would constitute a reason compatible with perfect goodness for God’s creating a world with evils in the amounts and of the kinds found in the actual world. Moreover, such general reasons are presented as so powerful as to do away with any need to catalog types of evils one by one, and examine God’s reason for permitting each in particular. Plantinga explicitly hopes that the problem of horrendous evils can thus be solved without being squarely confronted. Alvin Plantinga, Self-Profile, in Alvin Plantinga , edited by James E. Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen, D. Reidel Publishing Company (Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster, 1985), p.38.
3.2. The Insufficiency of Global Defeat
A pair of distinctions is in order here: (i) between two dimensions of Divine goodness in relation to creation — viz., producer of global goods and goodness to or love of individual created persons ; and (ii) between the overbalance/defeat of evil by good on the global scale, and the overbalance/defeat of evil by good within the context of an individual person’s life. I owe the second of these distinctions to a remark by Keith DeRose in our Fall 1987 seminar on the problem of evil at UCLA. Correspondingly, we may separate two problems of evil parallel to the two sorts of goodness mentioned in (i). In effect, generic and global approaches are directed to the first problem: they defend Divine goodness along the first (global) dimension by suggesting logically possible strategies for the global defeat of evils. But establishing God’s excellence as a producer of global goods does not automatically solve the second problem, especially in a world containing horrendous evils. For God cannot be said to be good or loving to any created persons the positive meaning of whose lives He allows to be engulfed in and/or defeated by evils–that is, individuals within whose lives horrendous evils remain undefeated. Yet, the only way unsupplemented global and generic approaches could have to explain the latter, would be by applying their general reasons-why to particular cases of horrendous suffering. Unfortunately, such an exercise fails to give satisfaction. Suppose for the sake of argument that horrendous evil could be included in maximally perfect world orders; its being partially constitutive of such an order would assign it that generic and global positive meaning. But would knowledge of such a fact, defeat for a mother the prima facie , reason provided by her cannibalism of her own infant, to wish that she had never been born? Again, the aim of perfect retributive balance confers meaning on evils imposed. But would knowledge that the torturer was being tortured give the victim who broke down and turned traitor under pressure, any more reason to think his/her life worthwhile? Would it not merely multiply reasons for the torturer to doubt that his/her life could turn out to be a good to him/her on the whole? Could the truck-driver who accidentally runs over his beloved child find consolation in the idea that this middle-known Middle knowledge, or knowledge of what is in between the actual and the possible, is the sort of knowledge of what a free creature would do in every situation in which that creature could possibly find himself.
Following Luis de Molina and Francisco Suarez, Alvin Plantinga ascribes such knowledge to God, prior in the order of explanation to God’s decision about which free creatures to actualize (in The Nature of Necessity , Oxford University Press, 1974, chapter IX, pp. 164-93. Robert Merrihew Adams challenges this idea in his article Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil, American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977); reprinted in The Virtue of Faith , Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 77-93. but unintended side-effect was part of the price God accepted for a world with the best balance of moral good over moral evil He could get?
Not only does the application to horrors of such generic and global reasons for Divine permission of evils fail to solve the second problem of evil; it makes it worse by adding generic prima facie reasons to doubt whether human life would be a great good to individual human beings in possible worlds where such Divine motives were operative. For, taken in isolation and made to bear the weight of the whole explanation, such reasons-why draw a picture of Divine indifference or even hostility to the human plight. Would the fact that God permitted horrors because they were constitutive means to His end of global perfection, or that He tolerated them because He could obtain that global end anyway, make the participant’s life more tolerable, more worth living for him/her? Given radical human vulnerability to horrendous evils, the ease with which humans participate in them, whether as victim or perpetrator, would not the thought that God visits horrors on anyone who caused them, simply because s/he deserves it, provide one more reason to expect human life to be a nightmare?
Those willing to split the two problems of evil apart might adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy, by simply denying Divine goodness along the second dimension. For example, many Christians do not believe that God will insure an overwhelmingly good life to each and every person He creates. Some say the decisive defeat of evil with good is promised only within the lives of the obedient, who enter by the narrow gate. Some speculate that the elect may be few. Many recognize that the sufferings of this present life are as nothing compared to the hell of eternal torment, designed to defeat goodness with horrors within the lives of the damned. Such a road can be consistently travelled only at the heavy toll of admitting that human life in worlds such as ours is a bad bet.
Imagine (adapting Rawls’ device) persons in a pre-original position, considering possible worlds containing managers of differing power, wisdom, and character, and subjects of varying fates. The question they are to answer about each world is whether they would willingly enter it as a human being, from behind a veil of ignorance as to which position they would occupy. Reason would, I submit, dictate a negative verdict for worlds whose omniscient and omnipotent manager permits pre-mortem horrors that remain undefeated within the context of the human participant’s life; a fortiori, for worlds in which some or most humans suffer eternal torment.
3.3. Inaccessible Reasons
So far, I have argued that generic and global solutions are at best incomplete: however well their account of Divine motivating reasons deals with the first problem of evil, the attempt to extend it to the second fails by making it worse. This verdict might seem prima facie tolerable to standard generic and global approaches and indicative of only a minor modification in their strategy: let the above-mentioned generic and global reasons cover Divine permission of non- horrendous evils, and find other reasons compatible with perfect goodness why even an omnipotent, omniscient God would permit horrors.
In my judgment, such an approach is hopeless. As Plantinga Alvin Plantinga, Self-Profile, Alvin Plantinga , pp.34-35. points out, where horrendous evils are concerned, not only do we not know God’s actual reason for permitting them; we cannot even conceive of any plausible candidate sort of reason consistent with worthwhile lives for human participants in them.
IV. The How of God’s Victory:
Up to now, my discussion has given the reader cause to wonder whose side I am on anyway? For I have insisted, with rebels like Ivan Karamazov and John Stuart Mill, on spot-lighting the problem horrendous evils pose. Yet, I have signaled my preference for a version of Christianity that insists on both dimensions of Divine goodness, and maintains not only (a) that God will be good enough to created persons to make human life a good bet, but also (b) that each created person will have a life that is a great good to him/her on the whole. My critique of standard approaches to the problem of evil thus seems to reinforce atheologian Mackie’s verdict of positive irrationality for such a religious position.
4.1. Whys versus Hows
The inaccessibility of reasons-why seems especially decisive. For surely an all- wise and all-powerful God, who loved each created person enough (a) to defeat any experienced horrors within the context of the participant’s life, and (b) to give each created person a life that is a great good to him/her on the whole, would not permit such persons to suffer horrors for no reason. This point was made by William Fitzpatrick in our Fall 1987 seminar on the problem of evil at UCLA. Does not our inability even to conceive of plausible candidate reasons suffice to make belief in such a God positively irrational in a world containing horrors? In my judgment, it does not. To be sure, motivating reasons come in several varieties relative to our conceptual grasp: There are (i) reasons of the sort we can readily understand when we are informed of them (e.g., the mother who permits her child to undergo painful heart surgery because it is the only humanly possible way to save its life). Moreover, there are (ii) reasons we would be cognitively, emotionally, and spiritually equipped to grasp if only we had a larger memory or wider attention span (analogy: I may be able to memorize small town street plans; memorizing the road net-works of the entire country is a task requiring more of the same, in the way that proving Goudel’s theorem is not). Some generic and global approaches insinuate that Divine permission of evils has motivating reasons of this sort. Finally, (iii) there are reasons that we are cognitively, emotionally, and/or spiritually too immature to fathom (the way a two-year old child is incapable of understanding its mother’s reasons for permitting the surgery). I agree with Plantinga that our ignorance of Divine reasons for permitting horrendous evils is not of types (i) or (ii), but of type (iii). Nevertheless, if there are varieties of ignorance, there are also varieties of reassurance. Contrary to what Sutherland suggests ( op.cit. , 314-15), so far as the compossibility problem is concerned, I intend no illicit shift from reason to emotion. My point is that intimacy with a loving other is a good, participation in which can defeat evils, and so provide everyone with reason to think a person’s life can be a great good to him/her on the whole, despite his/her participation in evils. The two year old heart patient is convinced of its mother’s love, not by her cognitively inaccessible reasons, but by her intimate care and presence through its painful experience. The story of Job suggests something similar is true with human participation in horrendous suffering: God does not give Job His reasons-why, and implies that Job isn’t smart enough to grasp them; rather Job is lectured on the extent of Divine power, and sees God’s goodness face to face! Likewise, I suggest, to exhibit the logical compossibility of both dimensions of Divine goodness with horrendous suffering, it is not necessary to find logically possible reasons why God might permit them. It is enough to show how God can be good enough to created persons despite their participation in horrors–by defeating them within the context of the individual’s life and by giving that individual a life that is a great good to him/her on the whole.
4.2. What Sort of Valuables?
In my opinion, the reasonableness of Christianity can be maintained in the face of horrendous evils only by drawing on resources of religious value theory. For one way for God to be good to created persons is by relating them appropriately to relevant and great goods. But philosophical and religious theories differ importantly on what valuables they admit into their ontology. Some maintain that what you see is what you get, but nevertheless admit a wide range of valuables, from sensory pleasures, the beauty of nature and cultural artifacts, the joys of creativity, to loving personal intimacy. Others posit a transcendent good (e.g. the Form of the Good in Platonism, or God, the Supremely Valuable Object, in Christianity). In the spirit of Ivan Karamazov, I am convinced that the depth of horrific evil cannot be accurately estimated without recognizing it to be incommensurate with any package or merely non-transcendent goods and so unable to be balanced off, much less defeated thereby. Where the internal coherence of Christianity is the issue, however, it is fair to appeal to its own store of valuables. From a Christian point of view, God is a being a greater than which cannot be conceived, a good incommensurate with both created goods and temporal evils. Likewise, the good of beatific, face-to-face intimacy with God is simply incommensurate with any merely non-transcendent goods or ills a person might experience. Thus, the good of beatific face to face intimacy with God would engulf (in a sense analogous to Chisholmian balancing off) even the horrendous evils humans experience in this present life here below, and overcome any prima facie reasons the individual had to doubt whether his/her life would or could be worth living.
4.3. Personal Meaning, Horrors Defeated
Engulfing personal horrors within the context of the participant’s life would vouchsafe to that individual a life that was a great good to him/her on the whole. I am still inclined to think it would guarantee that immeasurable Divine goodness to any person thus benefitted. But there is good theological reason for Christians to believe that God would go further, beyond engulfment to defeat. For it is the nature of persons to look for meaning, both in their lives and in the world. Divine respect for and commitment to created personhood would drive God to make all those sufferings which threaten to destroy the positive meaning of a person’s life meaningful through positive defeat. Note, once again, contrary to what Sutherland suggests (op.cit ., 321-23) ‘horrendous evil e is defeated’ entails none of the following propositions: ‘e was not horrendous’, ‘e was not unjust’, ‘e was not so bad after all’. Nor does my suggestion that even horrendous evils can be defeated by a great enough (because incommensurate and uncreated) good, in any way impugn the reliability of our moral intuitions about injustice, cold-bloodedness, or horror. The judgment that participation in e constitutes prima facie reason to believe that p’s life is ruined, stands and remains a daunting measure of e’s horror.
How could God do it? So far as I can see, only by integrating participation in horrendous evils into a person’s relationship with God. Possible dimensions of integration are charted by Christian soteriology. I pause here to sketch three. In my paper "Redemptive Suffering: A Chrisian Solution to the Problem of Evil, Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment": New Essays in Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright, Cornell University Press, 1986, pp. 248-67, I sketch how horrendous suffering can be meaningful by being made a vehicle of divine redemption for victim, perpetrator, and onlooker, and thus an occasion of the victim’s collaboration with God. In Separation and Reversal in Luke-Acts, forthcoming in Philosophy and the Christian Faith, ed. by Thomas Morris, Notre Dame University Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1988. I attempted to chart the redemptive plot-line there, whereby horrendous sufferings are made meaningful by being woven into the divine redemptive plot. My considered opinion is that such collaboration would be too strenuous for the human condition were it not to be supplemented by a more explicit and beatific divine intimacy.
(i) First, because God in Christ participated in horrendous evil through His passion and death, human experience of horrors can be a means of identifying with Christ, either through sympathetic identification (in which each person suffers his/her own pains, but their similarity enables each to know what it is like for the other) or through mystical identification (in which the created person is supposed literally to experience a share of Christ’s pain For example, Julian of Norwich tells us that she prayed for and received the latter ( Revelations of Divine Love , chapter 17). Mother Theresa of Calcutta seems to construe Matthew 25:31-46 to mean that the poorest and the least are Christ, and that their sufferings are Christ’s Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York 1960, pp.72-75). ).
(ii) Julian of Norwich’s description of heavenly welcome suggests the possible defeat of horrendous evil through Divine gratitude. According to Julian, before the elect have a chance to thank God for all He has done for them, God will say, Thank you for all your suffering, the suffering of your youth. She says that the creature’s experience of Divine gratitude will bring such full and unending joy as could not be merited by the whole sea of human pain and suffering throughout the ages. Revelations of Divine Love , chapter 14. I am grateful to Houston Smit for recognizing this scenario of Julian’s as a case of Chisholmian defeat.
(iii) A third idea identifies temporal suffering itself with a vision into the inner life of God, and can be developed several ways. Perhaps, contrary to medieval theology, God is not impassible, but rather has matched capacities for joy and for suffering. Perhaps, as the Heidelberg catechism suggests, God responds to human sin and the sufferings of Christ with an agony beyond human conception. Cf. Plantinga, Self-Profile, Alvin Plantinga , p.36. Alternatively, the inner life of God may be, strictly speaking and in and of itself, beyond both joy and sorrow. But, just as (according to Rudolf Otto) humans experience Divine presence now as tremendum (with deep dread and anxiety), now as fascinans (with ineffable attraction), so perhaps our deepest suffering as much as our highest joys may themselves be direct visions into the inner life of God, imperfect but somehow less obscure in proportion to their intensity. And if a face-to-face vision of God is a good for humans incommensurate with any non-transcendent goods or ills, so any vision of God (including horrendous suffering) would have a good aspect insofar as it is a vision of God (even if it has an evil aspect insofar as it is horrendous suffering). For the most part, horrors are not recognized as experiences of God (any more than the city slicker recognizes his visual image of a brown patch as a vision of Beulah the cow in the distance). But, Christian mysticism might claim, at least from the post-mortem perspective of the beatific vision, such sufferings will be seen for what they were, and retrospectively no one will wish away any intimate encounters with God from his/her life-history in this world. The created person’s experience of the beatific vision together with his/her knowledge that intimate Divine presence stretched back over his/her pre-mortem life and reached down into the depths of his/her worst suffering, would provide retrospective comfort independent of comprehension of the reasons-why akin to the two-year-old’s assurance of its mother’s love. Taking this third approach, Christians would not need to commit themselves about what in any event we do not know: viz., whether we will (like the two year old) ever grow up enough to understand the reasons why God permits our participation in horrendous evils. For by contrast with the best of earthly mothers, such Divine intimacy is an incommensurate good and would cancel out for the creature any need to know why.
V. Conclusion:
The worst evils demand to be defeated by the best goods. Horrendous evils can be overcome only by the goodness of God. Relative to human nature, participation in horrendous evils and loving intimacy with God are alike disproportionate: for the former threatens to engulf the good in an individual human life with evil, while the latter guarantees the reverse engulfment of evil by good. Relative to one another, there is also disproportion, because the good that God is, and intimate relationship with Him, is incommensurate with created goods and evils alike. Because intimacy with God so outscales relations (good or bad) with any creatures, integration into the human person’s relationship with God confers significant meaning and positive value even on horrendous suffering. This result coheres with basic Christian intuition: that the powers of darkness are stronger than humans, but they are no match for God! Standard generic and global solutions have for the most part tried to operate within the territory common to believer and unbeliever, within the confines of religion-neutral value theory. Many discussions reflect the hope that substitute attribute-analyses, candidate reasons-why and/or defeaters could issue out of values shared by believers and unbelievers alike. And some virtually make this a requirement on an adequate solution. Mackie knew better how to distinguish the many charges that may be leveled against religion. Just as philosophers may or may not find the existence of God plausible, so they may be variously attracted or repelled by Christian values of grace and redemptive sacrifice. But agreement on truth-value is not necessary to consensus on internal consistency. My contention has been that it is not only legitimate, but, given horrendous evils, necessary for Christians to dip into their richer store of valuables to exhibit the consistency of (1) and (2). I develop this point at some length in Problems of Evil: More Advice to Christian Philosophers, pp. 127-35. I would go one step further: assuming the pragmatic and/or moral (I would prefer to say, broadly speaking, religious) importance of believing that (one’s own) human life is worth living, the ability of Christianity to exhibit how this could be so despite human vulnerability to horrendous evil, constitutes a pragmatic/moral/religious consideration in its favor, relative to value schemes that do not.
To me, the most troublesome weakness in what I have said, lies in the area of conceptual under-development. The contention that God suffered in Christ or that one person can experience another’s pain require detailed analysis and articulation in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. I have shouldered some of this burden elsewhere, For example in The Metaphysics of the Incarnation in Some Fourteenth Century Franciscans, Essays Honoring Allan B. Wolter, edited by William A. Frank and Girard J. Etzkorn, (The Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure, N.Y. 1985, pp. 21-57) but its full discharge is well beyond the scope of this paper.
Notes
1. The Reverend Professor Marilyn McCord Adams (1943— ) is an American philosopher of religion, a theologian and a writer on medieval philosophy. She has since 1 January 2004 been the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. Before that, she was Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale University and also taught at UCLA for a number of years. She was ordained priest in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America and is a Canon of Christ Church, Oxford.
Her work in philosophy has focused on the philosophy of religion, especially the problem of evil, philosophical theology, metaphysics, and medevel philosophy. Her husband is the philosopher Robert Adams.
* In the development of these ideas, I am indebted to the members of our
Fall 1987 seminar on the problem of evil at UCLA — especially to Robert
Merrihew Adams (its co-leader) and to Keith De Rose, William
Fitzpatrick, and Houston Smit. I am also grateful to the Very Reverend
Jon Hart Olson for many conversations in mystical theology. This paper
was presented at the 1989 Joint-Session of the Mind-Aristotelian
Society in Swansea, where Professor Stewart Sutherland was the
commentator. I have added a few notes that respond to his comments.
Atheological objections to the belief that there is such a person as God come in many varieties. There are, for example, the familiar objections that theism is somehow incoherent, that it is inconsistent with the existence of evil, that it is a hypothesis ill-confirmed or maybe even disconfirmed by the evidence, that modern science has somehow cast doubt upon it, and the like. Another sort of objector claims, not that theism is incoherent or false or probably false (after all, there is precious little by way of cogent argument for that conclusion) but that it is in some way unreasonable or irrational to believe in God, even if that belief should happen to be true. Here we have, as a centerpiece, the evidentialist objection to theistic belief. The claim is that none of the theistic arguments-deductive, inductive, or abductive-is successful; hence there is at best insufficient evidence for the existence of God. But then the belief that there is such a person as God is in some way intellectually improper-somehow foolish or irrational. A person who believed without evidence that there are an even number of ducks would be believing foolishly or irrationally; the same goes for the person who believes in God without evidence. On this view, one who accepts belief in God but has no evidence for that belief is not, intellectually speaking, up to snuff. Among those who have offered this objection are Antony Flew, Brand Blanshard, and Michael Scriven. Perhaps more important is the enormous oral tradition: one finds this objection to theism bruited about on nearly any major university campus in the land. The objection in question has also been endorsed by Bertrand Russell, who was once asked what he would say if, after dying, he were brought into the presence of God and asked whyhe had not been a believer. Russell’s reply: "I’d say, ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’" I’m not sure just how that reply would be received; but my point is only that Russell, like many others, has endorsed this evidentialist objection to theistic belief.
Now what, precisely, is the objector’s claim here? He holds that the theist without evidence is irrational or unreasonable; what is the property with which he is crediting such a theist when he thus describes him? What, exactly, or even approximately, does he mean when he says that the theist without evidence is irrational? Just what, as he sees it, is the problem with such a theist? The objection can be seen as taking at least two forms; and there are at least two corresponding senses or conceptions of rationality lurking in the nearby bushes. According to the first, a theist who has no evidence has violated an intellectual or cognitive duty of some sort. He has gone contrary to an obligation laid upon him-perhaps by society, or perhaps by his own nature as a creature capable of grasping propositions and holding beliefs. There is an obligation or something like an obligation to proportion one’s beliefs to the strength of the evidence. Thus according to John Locke, a mark of a rational person is "the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proof it is built upon will warrant," and according to David Hume, "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence."
In the nineteenth century we have W.K. Clifford, that "delicious enfant terrible" as William James called him, insisting that it is monstrous, immoral, and perhaps even impolite to accept a belief for which you have insufficient evidence:
Whoso would deserve well of his fellow in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.[1]
He adds that if a
belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a stolen one. Not only does it deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of power which we do not really possess, but it is sinful, stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence, which may shortly master our body and spread to the rest of the town. [2]
And finally:
To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.[3]
(It is not hard to detect, in these quotations, the "tone of robustious pathos" with which James credits Clifford.) On this view theists without evidence-my sainted grandmother, for example-are flouting their epistemic duties and deserve our disapprobation and disapproval. Mother Teresa, for example, if she has not arguments for her belief in God, then stands revealed as a sort of intellectual libertine-someone who has gone contrary to her intellectual obligations and is deserving of reproof and perhaps even disciplinary action.
Now the idea that there are intellectual duties or obligations is difficult but not implausible, and I do not mean to question it here. It is less plausible, however, to suggest that I would or could be going contrary to my intellectual duties in believing, without evidence, that there is such a person as God. For first, my beliefs are not, for the most part, within my control. If, for example, you offer me $1,000,000 to cease believing that Mars is smaller than Venus, there is no way I can collect. But the same holds for my belief in God: even if I wanted to, I couldn’t-short of heroic measures like coma inducing drugs-just divest myself of it. (At any rate there is nothing I can do directly; perhaps there is a sort of regimen that if followed religiously would issue, in the long run, in my no longer accepting belief in God.) But secondly, there seems no reason to think that I have such an obligation. Clearly I am not under an obligation to have evidence for everything I believe; that would not be possible. But why, then, suppose that I have an obligation to accept belief in God only if I accept other propositions which serve as evidence for it? This is by no means self-evident or just obvious, and it is extremely hard to see how to find a cogent argument for it.
In any event, I think the evidentialist objector can take a more promising line. He can hold, not that the theist without evidence has violated some epistemic duty-after all, perhaps he can’t help himself- but that he is somehow intellectually flawed or disfigured. Consider someone who believes that Venus is smaller than Mercury-not because he has evidence, but because he read it in a comic book and always believes whatever he reads in comic books-or consider someone who holds that belief on the basis of an outrageously bad argument. Perhaps there is no obligation he has failed to meet; nevertheless his intellectual condition is defective in some way. He displays a sort of deficiency, a flaw, an intellectual dysfunction of some sort. Perhaps he is like someone who has an astigmatism, or is unduly clumsy, or suffers from arthritis. And perhaps the evidentialist objection is to be construed, not as the claim that the theist without evidence has violated some intellectual obligations, but that he suffers from a certain sort of intellectual deficiency. The theist without evidence, we might say, is an intellectual gimp.
Alternatively but similarly, the idea might be that the theist without evidence is under a sort of illusion, a kind of pervasive illusion afflicting the great bulk of mankind over the great bulk of the time thus far allotted to it. Thus Freud saw religious belief as "illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most insistent wishes of mankind."[4 ] He sees theistic belief as a matter of wish-fulfillment. Men are paralyzed by and appalled at the spectacle of the overwhelming, impersonal forces that control our destiny, but mindlessly take no notice, no account of us and our needs and desires; they therefore invent a heavenly father of cosmic proportions, who exceeds our earthly fathers in goodness and love as much as in power. Religion, says Freud, is the "universal obsessional neurosis of humanity", and it is destined to disappear when human beings learn to face reality as it is, resisting the tendency to edit it to suit our fancies.
A similar sentiment is offered by Karl Marx:
Religion . . . is the self-consciousness and the self-feeling of the man who has either not yet found himself, or else (having found himself) has lost himself once more. But man is not an abstract being . . . Man is the world of men, the State, society. This State, this society, produce religion, produce a perverted world consciousness, because they are a perverted world . . . Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The people cannot be really happy until it has been deprived of illusory happiness by the abolition of religion. The demand that the people should shake itself free of illusion as to its own condition is the demand that it should abandon a condition which needs illusion.[5]
Note that Marx speaks here of a perverted world consciousness produced by a perverted world. This is a perversion from a correct, or right, or natural condition, brought about somehow by an unhealthy and perverted social order. From the Marx-Freud point of view, the theist is subject to a sort of cognitive dysfunction, a certain lack of cognitive and emotional health. We could put this as follows: the theist believes as he does only because of the power of this illusion, this perverted neurotic condition. He is insane, in the etymological sense of that term; he is unhealthy. His cognitive equipment, we might say, isn’t working properly; it isn’t functioning as it ought to. If his cognitive equipment were working properly, working the way it ought to work, he wouldn’t be under the spell of this illusion. He would instead face the world and our place in it with the clear-eyed apprehension that we are alone in it, and that any comfort and help we get will have to be our own devising. There is no Father in heaven to turn to, and no prospect of anything, after death, but dissolution. ("When we die, we rot," says Michael Scriven, in one of his more memorable lines.)
Now of course the theist is likely to display less than overwhelming enthusiasm about the idea that he is suffering from a cognitive deficiency, is under a sort of widespread illusion endemic to the human condition. It is at most a liberal theologian or two, intent on novelty and eager to concede as much as possible to contemporary secularity, who would embrace such an idea. The theist doesn’t see himself as suffering from cognitive deficiency. As a matter of fact, he may be inclined to see the shoe as on the other foot; he may be inclined to think of the atheist as the person who is suffering, in this way, from some illusion, from some noetic defect, from an unhappy, unfortunate, and unnatural condition with deplorable noetic consequences. He will see the atheist as somehow the victim of sin in the world- his own sin or the sin of others. According to the book of Romans, unbelief is a result of sin; it originates in an effort to "suppress the truth in unrighteousness." According to John Calvin, God has created us with a nisus or tendency to see His hand in the world around us; a "sense of deity," he says, "is inscribed in the hearts of all." He goes on:
Indeed, the perversity of the impious, who though they struggle furiously are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of God, is abundant testimony that his conviction, namely, that there is some God, is naturally inborn in all, and is fixed deep within, as it were in the very marrow. . . . From this we conclude that it is not a doctrine that must first be learned in school, but one of which each of us is master from his mother’s womb and which nature itself permits no man to forget.[6]
Were it not for the existence of sin in the world, says Calvin, human beings would believe in God to the same degree and with the same natural spontaneity displayed in our belief in the existence of other persons, or an external world, or the past. This is the natural human condition; it is because of our presently unnatural sinful condition that many of us find belief in God difficult or absurd. The fact is, Calvin thinks, one who does not believe in God is in an epistemically defective position-rather like someone who does not believe that his wife exists, or thinks that she is a cleverly constructed robot that has no thoughts, feelings, or consciousness. Thus the believer reverses Freud and Marx, claiming that what they see as sickness is really health and what they see as health is really sickness.
Obviously enough, the dispute here is ultimately ontological, or theological, or metaphysical; here we see the ontological and ultimately religious roots of epistemological discussions of rationality. What you take to be rational, at least in the sense in question, depends upon your metaphysical and religious stance. It depends upon your philosophical anthropology. Your view as to what sort of creature a human being is will determine, in whole or in part, your views as to what is rational or irrational for human beings to believe; this view will determine what you take to be natural, or normal, or healthy, with respect to belief. So the dispute as to who is rational and who is irrational here can’t be settled just by attending to epistemological considerations; it is fundamentally not an epistemological dispute, but an ontological or theological dispute. How can we tell what it is healthy for human beings to believe unless we know or have some idea about what sort of creature a human being is? If you think he is created by God in the image of God, and created with a natural tendency to see God’s hand in the world about us, a natural tendency to recognize that he has been created and is beholden to his creator, owing his worship and allegiance, then of course you will not think of belief in God as a manifestation of wishful thinking or as any kind of defect at all. It is then much more like sense perception or memory, though in some ways much more important. On the other hand, if you think of a human being as the product of blind evolutionary forces, if you think there is no God and that human beings are part of a godless universe, then you will be inclined to accept a view according to which belief in God is a sort of disease or dysfunction, due perhaps, to a sort of softening of the brain.
So the dispute as to who is healthy and who diseased has ontological or theological roots, and is finally to be settled, if at all at that level. And here I would like to present a consideration that, I think tells in favor of the theistic way of looking at the matter. As I have been representing that matter, theist and atheist alike speak of a sort of dysfunction, of cognitive faculties or cognitive equipment not working properly, of their not working as they ought to. But how are we to understand that? What is it for something to work properly? Isn’t there something deeply problematic about the idea of proper functioning? What is it for my cognitive faculties to be working properly? What is it for a natural organism-a tree, for example-to be in good working order, to be functioning properly? Isn’t working properly relative to our aims and interests? A cow is functioning properly when she gives milk; a garden patch is as it ought to be when it displays a luxuriant preponderance of the sorts of vegetation we propose to promote. But then it seems patent that what constitutes proper functioning depends upon our aims and interests. So far as nature herself goes, isn’t a fish decomposing in a hill of corn functioning just as properly, just as excellently, as one happily swimming about chasing minnows? But then what could be meant by speaking of "proper functioning" with respect to our cognitive faculties? A chunk of reality-an organism, a part of an organism, an ecosystem, a garden patch-"functions properly" only with respect to a sort of grid we impose on nature-a grid that incorporates our aims and desires.
But from a theistic point of view, the idea of proper functioning, as applied to us and our cognitive equipment, is not more problematic than, say, that of a Boeing 747’s working properly. Something we have constructed-a heating system, a rope, a linear accelerator-is functioning properly when it is functioning in the way it was designed to function. My car works properly if it works the way it was designed to work. My refrigerator is working properly if it refrigerates, if it does what a refrigerator is designed to do. This, I think, is the root idea of working properly. But according to theism, human beings, like ropes and linear accelerators, have been designed; they have been created and designed by God. Thus, he has an easy answer to the relevant set of questions: What is proper functioning? What is it for my cognitive faculties to be working properly? What is cognitive dysfunction? What is it to function naturally? My cognitive faculties are functioning naturally, when they are functioning in the way God designed them to function.
On the other hand, if the atheological evidentialist objector claims that the theist without evidence is irrational, and if he goes on to construe irrationality in terms of defect or dysfunction, then he owes us an account of this notion. Why does he take it that the theist is somehow dysfunctional, at least in this area of his life? More importantly, how does he conceive dysfunction? How does he see dysfunction and its opposite? How does he explain the idea of an organism’s working properly, or of some organic system or part of an organism’s thus working? What account does he give of it? Presumably he can’t see the proper functioning of my noetic equipment as its functioning in the way it was designed to function; so how can he put it?
Two possibilities leap to mind. First, he may be thinking of proper functioning as functioning in a way that helps us attain our ends. In this way, he may say, we think of our bodies as functioning properly, as being healthy, when they function in the way we want them to, when they function in such a way as to enable us to do the sorts of things we want to do. But of course this will not be a promising line to take in the present context; for while perhaps the atheological objector would prefer to see our cognitive faculties function in such a way as not to produce belief in God in us, the same cannot be said, naturally enough, for the theist. Taken this way the atheological evidentialist’s objection comes to little more than the suggestion that the atheologician would prefer it if people did not believe in God without evidence. That would be an autobiographical remark on his part, having the interest such remarks usually have in philosophical contexts.
A second possibility: proper functioning and allied notions are to be explained in terms of aptness for promoting survival, either at an individual or species level. There isn’t time to say much about this here; but it is at least and immediately evident that the atheological objector would then owe us an argument for the conclusion that belief in God is indeed less likely to contribute to our individual survival, or the survival of our species than is atheism or agnosticism. But how could such an argument go? Surely the prospects for a non-question begging argument of this sort are bleak indeed. For if theism-Christian theism, for example-is true, then it seems wholly implausible to think that widespread atheism, for example, would be more likely to contribute to the survival of our race than widespread theism.
By way of conclusion: a natural way to understand such notions as rationality and irrationality is in terms of the proper functioning of the relevant cognitive equipment. Seen from this perspective, the question whether it is rational to believe in God without the evidential support of other propositions is really a metaphysical or theological dispute. The theist has an easy time explaining the notion of our cognitive equipment’s functioning properly: our cognitive equipment functions properly when it functions in the way God designed it to function. The atheist evidential objector, however, owes us an account of this notion. What does he mean when he complains that the theist without evidence displays a cognitive defect of some sort? How does he understand the notion of cognitive malfunction?
Endnotes
1 W.K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief," in Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 183.
2 Ibid, p. 184.
3 Ibid, p. 186.
4 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 30.
5 K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3: Introduction to a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, by Karl Marx (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975).
6 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.3 (p. 43- 44).
The most important word in this entire book is the noun in the subtitle; this is a "novel"-a work of fiction. That is important to remember, especially after the statements on page 1, which move the work slightly into the arena of historical fiction, but only slightly. It is true that there are such organizations as the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei. It is true that the author has worked hard to describe accurately the contemporary European locations, including city layouts, buildings, and artwork, in which the plot is set. The statement that "all descriptions of… documents… in this novel are accurate" is, however, highly inaccurate!
Encyclical letter from Pontiff John Paul II to the bishops of the Catholic church on the relationship between faith and reason. Faith and reason, teaches John Paul, are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth — in a word, to know himself — so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
Go
Thomas Jefferson drafted The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1779 three years after he wrote the Declaration of Independence. The act was not passed by the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia until 1786. Jefferson was by then in Paris as the U.S. Ambassador to France. The Act was resisted by a group headed by Patrick Henry who sought to pass a bill that would have assessed all the citizens of Virginia to support a plural establishment. James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments was, and remains, a powerful argument against state supported religion. It was written in 1785, just a few months before the General Assembly passed Jefferson's religious freedom bill.
In 1756, John Wesley delivered an address to a gathering of clergy on how to carry out the pastoral ministry with joy and skill. In it, Wesley catalogued a number of things familiar to most contemporary believers the cultivation of a disposition to glorify God and save souls, a knowledge of Scripture, and similar notions. However, at the first of his list, Wesley focused on something seldom expressly valued by most pastoral search committees: Ought not a Minister to have, First, a good understanding, a clear apprehension, a sound judgment, and a capacity of reasoning with some closeness?1 Time and again throughout the address, Wesley unpacked this remark by admonishing ministers to know what would sound truly odd and almost pagan to the average congregant of today: logic, metaphysics (including the first principles of being), natural theology, geometry, and the ideas of important figures in the history of philosophy.
Wesley’s remarks were not unusual in his time. A century earlier, the great Reformed pastor Richard Baxter was faced with lukewarmness in the church and unbelief outside the church. In 1667 he wrote a book to meet this need and in it he used philosophy to argue for the existence of the soul and the life to come. The fact that Baxter turned to philosophy instead of small groups or praise hymns is worth pondering. Over a millennium earlier, Augustine summarized the view of many early church fathers when he said that We must show our Scriptures not to be in conflict with whatever [our critics] can demonstrate about the nature of things from reliable sources.2 Philosophy was the main tool Augustine used in this task.
Today, things are different. Most evangelical seminaries with which I am familiar do not have professional philosophers on their faculties nor do they train ministerial candidates to do philosophy or motivate them to see philosophical acumen as part of their calling. And in my experience of speaking in literally hundreds of churches, the first thing that comes to many Christian minds when they hear the word philosophy is that Colossians 2:8 (on their view) warns them to stay away from it. It is no accident that these facts run concurrently with an increasingly marginalized Evangelical community which, as a result, is struggling with a crisis of self image as the culture turns neo-pagan.
I do not pretend to have a thorough answer to these latter two difficulties, but I do believe there is a causal connection between them and the diminished role of philosophy in our collective Evangelical worship and witness. Social historian John Gager has pointed out that even though the early church was a minority movement that faced intellectual and cultural ridicule and marginalization, the early church maintained internal cohesion and a courageous witness thanks in no small measure to the powerful role in the broader Christian community of the philosophically trained apologists in the first centuries of the Christian faith.3 The same point applies with real force to our current condition. In my view, if the evangelical community would give greater attention to philosophy, especially philosophical apologetics in both formal educational settings, publishing, and local church life, this could help a great deal in our efforts to penetrate effectively our culture and proclaim Christ and a Christian world view to outsiders and to our own brothers and sisters. However, if we continue to eschew philosophy, we will continue to speak largely to ourselves and our dialect will, I fear, be fideistic.
Space does not permit me to attempt to prove this claim directly. Instead, I shall do three things: first, clarify the nature and tasks of philosophical apologetics, describe the current scene in order to surface areas where we need to focus our attention as a community, and offer some brief remarks about a strategy for the future. I hope that my discussion of these three desiderata will show, even if only implicitly, just why we need to be more intentional and intense about promoting philosophical apologetics within our ranks. Let us begin with fullness of heart, then, and look first at the different purposes of philosophical apologetics.
Different Types of Philosophical Apologetics
If philosophy is hard to define, philosophical apologetics is harder still. Nevertheless, as a working definition, let us characterize philosophical apologetics as a philosophical activity which has as its goal (or perhaps as its result) the increasing or maintaining of the epistemic justification of a Christian world view in whole or in part.4 Let us accept this gloss as adequate. Note two things about the definition. First, philosophical apologetics involves the direct use of philosophy. Thus, historical evidences per se are not part of philosophical apologetics. Second, philosophy, as well as its employment by Christians, go beyond philosophical apologetics. All cases of philosophical apologetics are cases of philosophy but the converse does not hold. As I see it, there are at least four different types of philosophical apologetics. My aim in delineating these is not simply informational. My hope is that when these are clarified, they can help all of us be more intentional in trying to relate our academic work to philosophical apologetics, whatever other purposes we may have.
1. Direct Defense. In direct defense, one uses philosophy with the primary intend of enhancing or maintaining directly the epistemic justification of Christian theism or some proposition taken to be explicit to or entailed by it (hereafter I will simply refer to Christian theism). There are two basic forms of direct defense, one negative and one positive.5 The less controversial of the two is a negative direct defense where one attempts to remove defeaters to Christian theism. If you have a justified belief regarding some proposition P, a defeater is something that weakens or removes that justification. Defeaters come in two types.6 A rebutting defeater gives justification for believing ~P, in this case, that Christian theism is false. For example, attempts to show that the Biblical concept of the family is dysfunctional and false or that homosexuality is causally necessitated by genes or brain states and that, therefore, it is not a proper object for moral appraisal are cases of rebutting defeaters. An undercutting defeater does not give justification for believing ~P, but rather seeks to remove justification for believing P in the first place. Critiques of the arguments for God’s existence are examples of undercutting defeaters. When defeaters are raised against Christian theism, a negative defense seeks either to rebut or refute those defeaters.
By contrast, a positive direct defense is an attempt to build a positive case for Christian theism. Arguments for the existence of God, objective morality, the existence of the soul, the value and nature of virtue ethics, and the possibility and knowability of miracles are examples. This type of philosophical apologetics is not accepted by all Christian intellectuals, e.g., various species of what may be loosely called Reformed epistemology run the gamut from seeing a modest role for a positive direct defense to an outright rejection of this type of activity.
2. Philosophical Polemics. In philosophical polemics, one seeks to criticize views that rival Christian theism in one way or another. Critiques of scientific naturalism, physicalism, pantheism, and normative ethical relativism are all cases of philosophical polemics.
3. Theistic explanation. Suppose we have a set of items xi through xn that stand in need of explanation and we offer some explanans E as an adequate or even best explanation of the explananda. In such a case, E explains xi through xn and this fact provides some degree of confirmation for E. For example, if a certain intrinsic genre statement explains the various data of a biblical text, then this fact offers some confirmation for that statement. Now Christian theists ought to be about the business of exploring the world in light of their world view and, more specifically, of using their theistic beliefs as explanations of various desiderata in the intellectual life. Put differently, we should seek to solve intellectual problems and shed light on areas of puzzlement by utilizing the explanatory power of our world view. For example, for those who accept the existence of natural moral law, the irreducibly mental nature of consciousness, natural human rights, or the fact that human flourishing follows from certain biblically mandated ethical and religious practices, the truth of Christian theism provides a good explanation of these phenomena. And this fact can provide some degree of confirmation for Christian theism. I will mention shortly how the discipline of philosophy enters into this type of intellectual practice because it overlaps with the way philosophy is relevant to the next type of philosophical apologetics.7
4. Integration.
A. The Nature of Integration
The word integration means to form or blend into a whole, to unite. The human intellect naturally seeks to find the unity that is behind diversity and, in fact, coherence is an important mark of rationality. In conceptual integration, one’s theological beliefs are blended and unified with propositions judged to be justifiably believed as true from other sources into a coherent, intellectually satisfying world view. One of the goals or results of integration is to maintain or increase both the conceptual relevance of and epistemological justification for Christian theism. To be engaged in the task of integration is to embark on a journey that is at once exciting and difficult. Integration is no easy task and it is a life-long project that should occur within an individual believer’s life and among the various members of the Christian community working together. Part of the difficulty of this journey is due not only to the massive amount of information and vast array of studies that need to be consulted, but also the fact that there are many different aspects of and attitudes toward integration itself. It is beyond my present scope to attempt to give anything even approximating a topology of these aspects and attitudes.8 However, it may be helpful to list some examples where the need for integration arises, as well as some of the different ways that Christian theology interacts with other disciplines in the process of developing an integrated Christian world view.
B. The Need for Integration
Here are some cases that illustrate the need for integration:
A biblical exegete becomes aware of how much her own cultural background shapes what she can see in the biblical text, and she begins to wonder whether meanings might not reside in the interpretation of a text and not in the text itself. She also wonders if certain hermeneutical methodologies may be inappropriate given the nature of the Bible as revelation.
A psychologist reads literature regarding identical twins who are reared in separate environments. He notes that they usually exhibit similar adult behavior. He then wonders what free will amounts to, if there is really any such thing, and if not, he ponders what to make of moral responsibility and punishment.
A political science professor reads John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and grapples with the idea that society’s primary goods could be distributed in such a way that those on the bottom get the maximum benefit even if people on the top have to be constrained. He wonders how this compares with a meritocracy wherein individual merit is rewarded regardless of social distribution. Several questions run through his mind: What is the state? How should a Christian view the state and the church? What is justice, and what principles of social ordering ought we to adopt? Should one seek a Christian state or merely a just state?
A neurophysiologist establishes specific correlations between certain brain functions and certain feelings of pain, and she puzzles over the question of whether or not there is a soul or mind distinct from the brain.
An anthropologist notes that cultures frequently differ over basic moral principles and wonders whether or not this proves that there are no objectively true moral values that transcend culture.
A businessman notices that the government is not adequately caring for the poor. He discusses with a friend the issue of whether or not businesses have corporate moral responsibilities or whether only individuals have moral responsibility.
A mathematician teaches Euclidean geometry and some of its alternatives and goes on to ask the class if mathematics is a field that really conveys true knowledge about a subject matter or if it merely offers internally consistent formal languages expressible in symbols. If the former, then what is it that mathematics describes? If mathematical entities exist and are timeless, in what sense did God create them?
An education major is asked to state his philosophy of education. In order to do this, he must state his views of human nature, truth, how people learn, the role of values in education, and so on. He wonders how his Christian convictions inform these issues.
C. Different Ways Integration is Done
In each of the cases listed above, there is a need for the person in question, if he or she is a Christian, to think hard about the issue in light of the need for developing a Christian world view. When one addresses problems like these, there will emerge a number of different ways that theology can interact with an issue in a discipline outside theology. Here are some of the different ways that such interaction can take place.
The Two Realms View. Propositions, theories, or methodologies in theology and another discipline may involve two distinct, non-overlapping areas of investigation. For example, debates about angels or the extent of the atonement have little to do with organic chemistry. Similarly, it is of little interest to theology whether a methane molecule has three or four hydrogen atoms in it.
The Complementarity View. Propositions, theories, or methodologies in theology and another discipline may involve two different, complementary, non-interacting approaches to the same reality.9 Sociological aspects of church growth, certain psychological aspects of conversion may be sociological or psychological descriptions of certain phenomena that are complementary to a theological description of church growth or conversion.
The Direct Interaction View. Propositions, theories, or methodologies in theology and another discipline may directly interact in such a way that either one area of study offers rational support for the other or one area of study raises rational difficulties for the other. For example, certain theological teachings about the existence of the soul raise rational problems for philosophical or scientific claims that deny the existence of the soul. The general theory of evolution raises various difficulties for certain ways of understanding the book of Genesis. Some have argued that the Big Bang theory tends to support the theological proposition that the universe had a beginning.
The Presuppositions View. Theology tends to support the presuppositions of another discipline and vice versa. Some have argued that many of the presuppositions of science (e.g. the existence of truth, the rational, orderly nature of reality, the adequacy of our sensory and cognitive faculties as tools suited for knowing the external world) make sense and are easy to justify given Christian theism, but are odd and without ultimate justification in a naturalistic world view. Similarly, some have argued that philosophical critiques of epistemological skepticism and defenses of the existence of a real, theory independent world and a correspondence theory of truth offer justification for some of the presuppositions of theology.
The Practical Application View. Theology fills out and adds details to general principles in another discipline and vice versa, and theology helps one practically apply principles in another discipline and vice versa. For example, theology teaches that fathers should not provoke their children to anger and psychology can add important details about what this means by offering information about family systems, the nature and causes of anger, etc. Psychology can devise various tests for assessing whether one is or is not a mature person and theology can offer a normative definition to psychology as to what a mature person is.
These are some of the ways that integration takes place. From the examples and models listed above, it should be clear that philosophy is central to the task of integration. Nevertheless, that task of forming an integrated world view is a very difficult one, and there is no set of easy steps that exhaustively describes how that task is to be conducted or what role philosophy should play in the quest for integration. With this in mind, the following is a list of principles that can aid someone unfamiliar with philosophy to think more clearly about its role in integration.
D. The Role of Philosophy in Integration
1. Philosophy can point out that an issue thought to be a part of another, discipline is really a philosophical issue. It often happens that scholars, untrained in philosophy, will discuss some issue in their field and without knowing it, cross over into philosophy. When this happens, the discussion may still be about the original discipline, but it is a discussion within philosophy.
For example, attempts to put limits on a given discipline and attempts to draw a line of demarcation between one field of study and another, say between science and theology, are largely philosophical matters. This is because such attempts assume a vantage point outside and above the discipline in question where one asks second- order questions about that discipline. Philosophy focuses on these kinds of second- order questions.
Consider the following six propositions that seek for science to place a limit on theology and vice versa:
(Sl) Theological beliefs are reasonable only if science renders them so.
(S2) Theological beliefs are unreasonable if science renders them so.
(S3) Theological beliefs are reasonable only if arrived at by something closely akin to scientific methodology.
(T1) Scientific beliefs are reasonable only if theology renders them so.
(T2) Scientific beliefs are unreasonable if theology renders them so.
(T3) Scientific beliefs are reasonable only if arrived at by theologically appropriate methods.
Contrary to initial appearances, these propositions are not examples of science or theology directly placing limits on the other, for none is a statement of science or theology. Rather, all are philosophical statements about science and theology. Principles about science and theology are not the same as principles of science and theology. These six principles are philosophical attempts to limit science and theology and show their relationship.
Here is a second example of where a discussion crosses over into philosophy almost unnoticed.
Evolutionist: The origin of life from inanimate matter is a well established scientific fact.
Creationist: But if life arose in the oceans (abiogenesis) as you claim, then dilution factors would have kept the concentration of large, macromolecules to levels so small as to have been negligible.
Evolutionist: Well, so what? I do not think abiogenesis took place in the ocean anyway. Rather, it took place in some isolated pool that had some concentrating mechanism in place.
Creationist: But there is no geological evidence for such pools. Further, the probabilities for such a process are incredibly small, and in any case, evidence appears to be coming in that the early earth’s atmosphere was a reducing atmosphere, in which case the relevant reactions could not occur.
Evolutionist: Give us more time, and we will solve these problems. The only alternative, creationism, is too fantastic to believe, it involves religious concepts and is not science at all.
Creationist: Well, neither is evolution science. Science requires firsthand observation, and since no one was there to observe the origin of first life, any theory about that origin is not science, strictly speaking.
The discussion starts out as a scientific interaction about chemical reactions, probabilities, geological evidence, and so on. But it slides over into a second-order philosophical discussion (one that represents a misunderstanding of the nature both of creationism and science) about what science is and how one should define it. These issues are surely relevant to the debate, but there is no guarantee that two disputants trained in some first- order scientific discipline have any expertise at all about the second-order questions of what science is and how it should be practiced. If scientists are going to interact on these issues, then philosophy will be an essential part of that interaction.
2. Philosophy under girds other disciplines at a foundational level by clarifying, defending, or criticizing the essential presuppositions of that discipline. Since philosophy operates as a second- order discipline that investigates other disciplines, and since philosophy examines broad, foundational, axiological, epistemological, logical, and metaphysical issues in those other disciplines, then philosophy is properly suited to investigate the presuppositions of other fields. Thus, philosophy plays a regulative role for Christian intellectual activity, including apologetics, and is critical to our community if we are to articulate and defend our theology to thinking people, especially to those outside the church. Philosophy can provide structure and sharpness to our discourse in the public square.
For example, in linguistic studies, issues are discussed regarding the existence, nature and knowability of meaning. These issues, as well as questions about whether and how language accomplishes reference to things in the world, are the main focus of the philosophy of language and epistemology. Again, science assumes there is an external world that is orderly and knowable, that inductive inferences are legitimate, that the senses and mind are reliable, that truth exists and can be known, and so on. Orthodox theology assumes that religious language is cognitive, that knowledge is possible, that an intelligible sense can be given to the claim that something exists that is not located in space andtime, that the correspondence theory of truth is the essential part of an overall theory of truth, and that linguistic meaning is objective and knowable. These presuppositions, and a host of others besides, have all been challenged. The task of clarifying, defending, or criticizing them is essentially a philosophical task.
If evangelicals wish to speak out on issues and move beyond a surface analysis of them, we need philosophy. I grow weary of laymen who have no clue about what Christian ideas have to do with the issues that constitute their vocations. Training in logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics are crucial parts of local church discipleship in this regard.
3. Philosophy can aid a discipline by helping to clarify concepts, argument forms, and other cognitive issues internal to a field. Sometimes the concepts in a discipline appear to be contradictory, vague, unclear, or circularity defined. Philosophers who study a particular discipline can aid that discipline by bringing conceptual clarity to it. An example would be the wave/particle nature of electromagnetic radiation and the wave nature of matter. These concepts appear to be self- contradictory or vague, and attempts have been made to clarify them or to show different ways of understanding them.
Another example concerns some conceptions of the mechanisms involved in evolutionary theory. Some scientists have held that evolution promotes the survival of the fittest. But when asked what the fittest were, the answer was that the fittest were those that survived. This was a problem of circularity within evolutionary theory, and attempts have been made to redefine the notion of fitness and the goal of evolution (e.g., the selection of those organisms that are reproductively favorable) to avoid circularity. Whether or not these responses have been successful is not the point. The point is, rather, that philosophers have raised problems for a scientific theory regarding issues of conceptual clarity. In these and other examples like them, philosophy can help to clarify issues within a discipline. When philosophy is brought to bear on questions of this sort, the result may be that the theory in question is problematic because it involves an internal contradiction or is somehow self- refuting.
For example, the sociological claim that there is no difference between intellectual history (roughly, the attempt to trace the development of ideas through history by focusing on the rational factors involved in the ideas themselves, including their own inner logic and relationships to ideas coming after them, e.g., the development of empiricism from John Locke to George Berkeley to David Hume) and the sociology of knowledge (the attempt to trace the development of ideas as a result of non rational factors in a given culture, e.g. social status, economic conditions, and so on) is sometimes justified by an appeal to conceptual relativism. The claim is made that different cultures have different language games, different views of the world, and so forth, and that all of one’s views are determined by non rational factors and thus are not to be trusted. Such a claim is self- refuting, for presumably this theory itself would be untrustworthy on its own terms.
By way of application, Christians need to be involved in political, social, and ethical issues. However, the evangelical voice in this regard often sounds tinny and sloganistic because our proclamations do not express a well developed political, social, or ethical theory. And we do not have the latter because we don’t know the philosophical issues necessary to developing these theories.
4. Philosophy provides a common language or conceptual grid wherein two disciplines can be directly related to one another and integrated. Sometimes two different disciplines will use a term in a slightly different but not completely unrelated way. When this occurs, philosophy can help to clarify the relationship between the different disciplinary uses of the term in question.
For example, sometimes an operational definition of some notion can be related to an ordinary language definition of that notion or a definition from another field. An operational definition is, roughly, a definition of some concept totally in terms of certain laboratory or experimental operations or test scores. Thus, one could operationally define a number of sociological concepts (minority group, traditional family roles, group leadership) or psychological terms (depression, intelligence) completely in terms of some operation or test score. A person could be said to be depressed if and only if that person would score between such and such a range on some standard psychological test.
Now these operational definitions may be related to our ordinary language notions of the relevant concepts in question; but they may not be clearly related, and in any case, they are certainly not identical to them. So philosophical clarity needs to be given before we can specify the relationship between depression as it is understood in ordinary language and depression as it is operationally defined in some test.
This type of philosophical elucidation is especially important when the term in question appears to be normative in nature. Thus, if one tries to give an operational, psychological definition of a mature or healthy adult, then all one can give is a descriptive definition, not a prescriptive one, for psychology as it is currently practiced is a descriptive field. Philosophy focuses on moral prescriptions and oughts; psychology focuses on factual descriptions. So philosophy becomes relevant in clarifying the relationship between a mature adult, psychologically defined, and a mature adult taken as a normative notion (i.e., as something we ought to try to be like).
Philosophy also helps to clarify and relate the different disciplinary descriptions of the same phenomenon. For example, biologists describe a human being as a member of the classification Homo sapiens. Philosophy, theology, law, and political science (to name a few) treat a human being as a living entity called a human person. It is a philosophical question as to whether the two notions are identical and, if they are not, how they relate to one another.
5. Philosophy provides external conceptual problems for other disciplines to consider as part of the rational appraisal of theories in those disciplines (and vice versa). A philosophical external conceptual problem arises for some theory T, in a discipline outside of philosophy, when T conflicts with some doctrine of some philosophical theory P, when P and its doctrines are rationally well- founded. For example, suppose there were a good philosophical argument against the view that history has crossed an actual number of events throughout the past to reach the present moment. If this argument is a reasonable one, then it tends to count against some scientific theory (e.g., an oscillating universe) which postulates that the past was beginningless and actually infinite. If there were a good philosophical argument for the claim that space and time are absolute, then this argument would tend to count against scientific theories to the contrary.
Again, if there are good philosophical arguments for the existence of libertarian freedom and agency or arguments for the existence of real moral responsibility and the necessity of libertarian freedom as a presupposition of moral responsibility, then these would tend to count against sociological, economic, or psychological theories which entail the sufficiency of event causality. In cases like these, a rationally defensible position is present within philosophy, and it runs contrary to a theory surfaced in another field. The philosophical external conceptual problem may not be sufficient to require abandonment or suspension of judgment of the theory in the other discipline; it may merely tend to count against it. Even so, these kinds of conceptual problems show that philosophical considerations are relevant to the rationality of theory- assessment in other disciplines.
Areas of Focus for Philosophical Apologetics
Happily, the state of Christian philosophy in general, and philosophical apologetics in particular, is stronger today than at any other time in the last half century.10 As Mark Noll correctly points out, Christian philosophers have made their presence felt in the world of scholarship more substantially than intellectuals in any other discipline.11 The incredible growth, vitality, and influence of the Society of Christian Philosophers alone is nothing short of a miracle given the intellectual climate since its inception in April of 1978. It is now one of the most influential groups among professional philosophers in the west and its journal Faith and Philosophy is widely recognized as one of the top journals in the discipline.
In spite of these gains, however, it would be misleading to speak as if all were well on the battle front. There is much work to be done and it would be wise for us to think carefully about where our efforts are most needed. But how is one to think about this since there are dozens of branches and sub-branches in philosophy that could be fruitful realms of philosophical apologetical activity? Any taxonomy here would likely express the interests and biases of the taxonomist and I am no exception to this rule. Still, I think the following reflections are not too wide of the mark and I have used three criteria in formulating them. First, philosophical apologetics should be focused on those areas of study that seem to be intrinsically more central or foundational to the Christian theistic enterprise. For example, work in religious and moral epistemology would get high marks on this criterion. Second, philosophical apologetics should be focused on areas that are currently under heavy attack. Philosophy of mind comes readily to mind in this regard. A third and, perhaps less important criterion is this: philosophical apologetics should be focused on those areas of study in which such activity is under-represented relatively speaking. Political and social philosophy would get my vote here.
With this in mind, here are some areas where I think more concentrated efforts would bear fruit for the kingdom of God.
1. Two important intellectual trends.
There are two broad approaches to the intellectual life that are, in my view, dangerous rivals to Christian theism even if we grant that some modest positive value is to be found in each. First, there is philosophical naturalism, roughly, the view that the spatio-temporal physical universe studied by natural science especially physics is all there is.12 Many or even most philosophical naturalists would take this view to entail the following: 1) Scientism as a approach to epistemology along with a denial of first philosophy and an attempt to naturalize philosophy as a discipline. 2) The denial of universals and other abstract entities as well as the type of metaphysical necessity traditionally thought to be expressed in the so-called synthetic apriori first truths of reason. 3) A view of living organisms as ordered aggregates with or without non-physical emergent properties instead of seeing them as substances with natures that place them in natural kinds. 4) Acceptance of some version of either strict or supervenient physicalism. Either way, substance dualism is anathema. 5) An assimilation of personal identity to the identity of physical artifacts with the result that persons do not possess absolute, primitive unity at or through time but, rather, are four dimensional space-time worms. 6) An eschewal of libertarian free will and agency.
It is hard to over-estimate the damage that philosophical naturalism has done to our culture. Christian philosophers need to go to work on criticizing this view and articulating alternative positions. More specifically, we need to place more efforts in defending substance dualism (either the Thomist or Cartesian version) and we need more Christian theologians and Biblical scholars to follow John Cooper’s lead by showing that this is, in fact, the correct Biblical position instead of labeling this a Greek intrusion into Biblical thought and opting for a facile Christianized physicalism.13 The over-stated false dilemma between Hebraic holism and Greek dualism is one of the worst ideas in western thought since Descartes claimed that animals were mere machines. In fact, I think we need more work in essentialism and philosophy of biology to show that there is, in fact, a theological and philosophical contribution to our description of what is real about living things. We abandon a philosophy of nature to our own peril and then wonder why the general culture has either a diminished or superstitious set of beliefs about the afterlife. Reductionism, mechanism, and physicalism are dangers for horses as much as for humans. It is interesting to note that scientists are increasingly coming to see that DNA is not the genetic blueprint for the organism but, rather, is an important physical part or tool that presupposes the organism as a whole for the existence and functioning of DNA in the first place.14 This should come as no surprise to Christian philosophers and theologians who take the soul seriously as the fathers in the church did before us.
A second intellectual movement is postmodernism. For those who love truth, reason, the good life, and the Christian God, postmodernism must be criticized and judged inadequate.15 The postmodernist rejection of direct access to the mind (language, theory) independent world, the correspondence theory of truth, the paradigm independence and objectivity of rationality and justification, the objectivity and availability of authorial intent, and the appropriateness of an all-encompassing meta-narrative fall short of what I believe to be the commitments entailed by Evangelical faith. In a related point, I think epistemological foundationalism has been widely rejected because it came to be associated with 1) the empiricism and logical positivism that flourished in the first half of this century and 2) the need for incorrigible foundations for knowledge coupled with a view of knowledge as entailing Cartesian certainty. However, neither of these is essential to foundationalism and, in my view, sophisticated versions of it are still the best way to describe the structure of epistemic justification and to respond to the extreme claims of certain postmodernists.16 Whether or not you agree with me here, one thing seems clear: more work needs to be done by Christian philosophers in this area.
2. Philosophy of religion.
Three areas of philosophy of religion need more attention by philosophical apologists. First, we have Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and their friends to thank for bringing religious epistemology to the forefront of philosophical discussion.17 However, I remain unconvinced that either the proper basicality of belief in God or epistemic externalism is the way to go. I may be wrong about this, but I would like to see more efforts directed towards defending epistemic internalism and relating it to philosophy of mind. We also need to give more thought to the important of natural theology for the justification of theistic belief. I also think that insights gained from work in moral and religious epistemology could provide defeaters for a naturalistic evolutionary view of the origin and functioning of our noetic equipment. These and other desiderata are needed areas of exploration in religious epistemology. A second and related point is that we need to update, develop, and strengthen the arguments for God’s existence. William Lane Craig has already done this for the cosmological argument.18 Currently, Philip Johnson, Steve Meyer, Paul Nelson, and Bill Dembski are heading up a group doing work on the design argument. And while we are in the neighborhood of theistic arguments, let me say that more attention needs to be given to the argument from consciousness and the moral argument.
Third, philosophers should continue to apply their craft to the clarification and defense of various Christian doctrines. Much is already being done regarding the concept, attributes, and works of God, the trinity, and the hypostatic union. I also think that the issues of Christian particularism and the morality of everlasting punishment are not going to go away in the near future.19
3. Christianity and science.
In the last few years, a battle has been raging about the nature of science itself and how to best integrate it with Christianity. Many Christian intellectuals follow Richard Bube and Howard J. van Till who say that science must embrace methodological naturalism and that the complementarity view is the best way to integrate science and Christianity in areas of dialogue like creation and evolution.20 I am on the other side of the divide.21 Be that as it may, it is clear that we need to have more philosophers work on these issues because, in spite of what some Christian scientists say, the issues are largely within the purview of the history and philosophy of science.
Two other issues need to be explored more fully with an eye on integrating science and theology. First, the realism/anti-realism debate in philosophy of science needs to be explored to develop applications from it to questions of integration. Second, as I have already said, certain views of living organisms (that they have irreducible, immaterial essences that give them their unity, their kindedness, and ground their teleological development and the functions of their parts and that are what direct the development of the organism’s body and phenotypes) set easily with Biblical concepts of creation, created kinds, and so forth. Christians have been too frightened by the charge of vitalism a notion that is itself grossly misunderstood and should not abandon the philosophy of nature as a legitimate part of our search for the knowledge of true descriptions of natural living organisms.
In all of this, one thing is of paramount importance. Many today, including many Christians, think that science is the king of the hill, epistemologically speaking, and have settled on something that bears a family resemblance to fideism in the area of religious knowledge and on the view that theological claims are in some way or another, claims about a spiritual realm, a religious way of seeing, and the like. This has contributed to the marginalization of Christianity in the culture and to a view of theology as a language game for the faithful. Whatever we do in the area of science and Christianity, we must vouchsafe a reply to this bifurcated epistemology and defend the objectivity and public assessability of Christian truth claims and the rational justification for them.
4. Ethics.
How can I say something meaningful about ethics in one or two paragraphs? Obviously, there is great need for Christians to intensify their efforts to develop articulate positions on the issues of our day. However, one word of caution is in order here. If we direct too much attention to ethics at the exclusion of metaphysics and epistemology, then we may inadvertently contribute to the cultural perspective that, somehow, ethics is not a field of real knowledge grounded in the way things are, but is instead an attempt to clarify and bring order to the various traditions and paradigms that, in the final analysis, are relative to individuals and communities and only involve the expression of private, subjective beliefs.
Having said this, two other things come to mind in this area. First, more work needs to be done in integrating deontological approaches to normative ethics with virtue theory. What we need is a better way of showing how moral rule following is related to the good life of human flourishing which, in turn, is metaphysically grounded in the way we are by nature as creatures made in God’s image. Second, the whole issue of human personhood is widely discussed in a way that I do not find adequate. Many think that, absent God and the doctrine of creation in his image, the notion of being human is merely a biological one and anyone who thinks we are valuable because we are human is guilty of speciesism. The locus of moral worth has come to be personhood viewed as the emergence of a set of properties on a properly structured functioning human brain that satisfy the criteria of personhood. On this view, one can be a human non-person. Some Christians have come close to accepting the spirit if not the letter of this approach. I have argued elsewhere that this is just a mistake.22 The image of God is possessed by all human persons who are such by nature not by functioning. I think we need to take the image of God more seriously as a metaphysical reality and not leave definitions of being human or being a person to scientific naturalists or Christianized appropriations of a scientistic approach to these issues.
As I said, these are my own reflections about the current state of things and whether or not you agree with the details, I hope I have said enough to show that philosophical apologetics is critical to the vitality of the church and her mission in the world as we approach the twenty-first century. The question that remains is how we can be more effective and intentional in supporting the practice of philosophical apologetics among us.
Suggestion for Future Strategy
In light of all that has been said to this point, where do we go from here? What do we need to do as an evangelical community engaged in a culture war trying to glorify God and spread the gospel? Mark Noll wryly bemoans the fact that [w]hen faced with a crisis situation, we evangelicals usually do one of two things. We either mount a public crusade, or we retreat into an inner pious sanctum.23 By contrast, I suggest we rethink the role of the intellectual life, and specifically, of philosophy in that life, for the health and mission of the church. One of the most important things we can do is to reexamine the way we plan, spend our time, and direct our resources in light of the following two facts. First, we are involved in a war of ideas for people’s minds and hearts. This war is critical because individual and communal forms of life are governed not my mere belief, but by what people take to be known or reasonably believed. Moreover, we are living in a Zeitgeist that denies that religious knowledge is possible and that religious claims, like most factual claims, are publically assessable and objectively rational. Second, the evangelical community largely speaks to itself in a religiously isolated language game, most of our ministry efforts focus on in-house issues, and we are just not part of public discourse. In light of this, we simply must find ways to re-appropriate the importance of philosophy in general, and philosophical apologetics in particular. Here are some suggestions for doing this:
1. Seminaries should hire a professional philosopher to its faculty or even better, hire a group of them to start a graduate program in philosophy and ethics. At Talbot School of Theology, we started such a program three years ago, and we currently have four philosophers and ethicists on our faculty and close to seventy graduate students. Our presence has increased the spirit of intellectual depth and precision, as well as the courage to be informed activists in the culture among the rest of the seminary community. Our goal is to place 100 students in Ph.D. programs in philosophy who will become college professors in the next 20 years and to see a steady stream of philosophically trained graduates pour into parachurch ministries or become ministers of evangelism and discipleship.
2. We need to teach pastors to start institutes for study and activism in their churches. I have already been a part of starting such an institute and I cannot go into details here about how such a center operates. But regardless of details, an institute for study and activism seeks to equip believers to think about how Christianity relates to their vocation at the level of ideas and to be able to understand and critique contemporary culture to spread Christ’s influence and to win other to Christ. The standard seminary curiculum absent the chance to be trained in philosophical apologetics is simply not producing ministers who are equipped for war and have the courage to get involved in the conflict of ideas raging all about us. People in our churches have virtually no idea how their Christian beliefs relate to ideas intrinsic to their vocations. It is well past time for us to put aside this dichotomized vision of Christian piety.
3. Parachurch ministries like Campus Crusade should designate certain staff members whose job it is to form centers of apologetical research at different cites around the country to equip their own staff and students and to penetrate the secular campuses that constitute their mission fields. It is unconsionable that the very ministries that target the citadels of learning have been so out of touch with the world of ideas.
4. Foundations need to be set up to fund evangelicals who wish to do Ph.D.’s in philosophy or ethics. I think we need to pay special attention to these disciplines for two reasons. First, due to their very nature, these fields are absolutely foundational in mobilizing believers to be effective in getting at the bottom of systems of thought that are harming the progress of the gospel and the nurturing of the saints. And the hot issues of the day are largely ethical and philosophical. Second, philosophy has a public relations problem among us and there is little effort and virtually no felt need to raise up a new generation of evangelical philosophers compared to, say, Christian psychologists or biblical scholars.
5. Finally, the evangelical community has far more biblical and theological scholars than it does philosophers. Happily, however, their is a growing number of well trained philosophers who are solid evangelicals. We need theologians and old testament and new testament scholars to take the lead in identifying crucial issues we need to address and to set up institutes, conferences, or multi-authored volumes to address them. And I urge us all to be sure that we bring more Christian philosophers into this networking process.
In closing, it is urgent that we rethink the importance of the intellectual life for the health of the church and the effectiveness of her outreach. And when we do this, it will be obvious that philosophy is now, as it always has been in our history, a crucial component in our collective Christian concerns. We now find ourselves largely marginalized in the culture and ingrown in the issues we address, the activities we perform, the books we read, and the categories in which we think and speak. Our marginalization and ingrown texture are the result of several decades of academic bullying from the outside and intellectual cowardice or indifference on the inside. For sometime now, with rare and notable exceptions, Christian intellectuals have largely focused their studies on religious issues within the church or on technical minutiae regarding Biblical exegesis. As important as exegesis is, we don’t need another commentary on Ephesians or a new book on the doctrine of salvation. Instead, we need a renaissance of evangelical statements of and defenses for what we believe about the broad issues being debated in the academy and the broader culture. And we will never succeed at this if we do not give philosophical ability and training a central place in church and seminary education. If the giants of the past like Wesley and Baxter saw philosophical apologetics as crucial in this regard, we neglect this activity to our own peril. Failure to re-think church life and seminary education in this context will only contribute to our increased marginalization and the ingrown texture of our presence in an increasingly secular and alien culture.24
Endnotes
1 John Wesley, “An Address to the Clergy,” in The Works of John Wesley: Third Edition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979; first ed., 1972), p. 481.
2 St. Augustine, De genesi ad litteram, 1.21.
3 John G. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), pp. 86-87.
4 Does an atheist who offers good arguments for the soul (assuming as I do that Christianity teaches that souls exist) practice philosophical apologetics? Not if the latter is defined by good epistemic intentions towards Christianity. Still, such arguments have the result of increasing our justification for believing in the soul and may be counted as philosophical apologetics, at least in a secondary sense. Yet in this case would these arguments have to be used by a Christian theism to support a Christian doctrine before they would count as philosophical apologetics? I leave the matter open.
5 See Ronald Nash, Faith and Reason (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), pp. 14-18.
6 For a useful discussion of various types of defeaters, see John Pollock, ContemporaryTheories of Knowledge (Totowa, N. J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), pp. 36-39; Ralph Baergen, Contemporary Epistemology (Fort Worth, Texas: Hartcourt Brace and Company, 1995), pp. 119-24.
7 Explanation can be seen as one purpose for certain types of integrative practices. But because of its importance, I make it a category of its own.
8 For a brief typology of different aspects of integration, wee William Hasker, “Faith-Learning Integration: An Overview,” Christian Scholar’s Review 21 (March 1992): 234-48.
9 Richard Bube has complained that my characterization of complementarity is confused and is actually a description of what he calls compartmentalization. See his Putting it All Together (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1995), p. 168. Cf. chapters 6 and 10. For Bube, compartmentalization treats science and theology as different descriptions about different kinds of things with no common ground or possibility of conflict. Complementarity views science and theology as different descriptions of the same reality. Unfortunately, Bube is simply wrong in this complaint towards my position. What he calls compartmentalization is close to what I call the two realms view of integration and my description of complementarity is an accurate one. The source of Bube’s confusion is revealing. I claim that the complementarity view eschews interaction between science and theology and Bube says that it embraces such interaction. However, Bube equivocates on what interaction’ means in this context. For me, it is epistemic interaction, roughly the same description of the same reality that can be in conflict or concord to varying degrees of strength. For Bube, interaction amounts to taking two different (non-interacting in my sense) perspectives and forming them into a whole. For example, a completely scientific description of the origin of life in natural terms could be described in theological terms as God’s activity in bringing life into being. It is clear that his notion of interaction is not the one I deny in explicating complementarity. Moreover, my use of interaction is crucial in understanding the significance for scientific methodology of gaps in the natural causal fabric due to libertarian agency and primary causal activity on God’s part.
10 See Kelly James Clark, ed., Philosophers Who Believe (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1993).
11 Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 236
12 For a clear statement of naturalism, see Reinhardt Grossmann, The Existence of the World (London: Routledge, 1992). Defenses of naturalism include Werner Callebaut, Taking the Naturalistic Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)and David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993). A good critique of naturalism is Steven J. Wagner, Richard Warner, Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).
13 See John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, & Life Everlasting (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989. For the distinction between Cartesian and Thomistic Substance Dualism, see J. P. Moreland, Stan Wallace “Aquinas vs. Descartes and Locke on the Human Person and End-of-Life Ethics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 35 (September 1995): 319-30.
14 Cf. Jonathan Wells, The History and Limits of Genetic Engineering, International Journal on the Unity of the Sciences 5 (Summer 1992): 137-50; H. F. Nijhout, Metaphors and the Role of Genes in Development, BioEssays 12 (September 1990): 441-45; J. M. Barry, Informational DNA: a useful concept? Trends in Biochemical Sciences 11 (1986): 317-18.
15 For an evangelical discussion of postmodernism, see Timothy R. Phillips, Dennis L. Okholm, Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1995).
16 See Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 3d. ed., 1989); Robert Audi, Belief, Justification, and Knowledge (Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth, 1988).
17 See Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (N. Y.: Oxford, 1993); Warrant and Proper Function (N. Y.: Oxford, 1993). For a response to Reformed epistemology, see Linda Zagzebski, ed., Rational Faith: Catholic Responses to Reformed Epistemology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).
18 See William Lane Craig, Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
19 Dennis L. Okholm, Timothy R. Phillips, eds., More Than One Way? Four Approaches to Salvation in a Pluralistic World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995).
20 See Howard J. Van Till, The Character of Contemporary Natural Science, in Portraits of Creation, ed. by Howard J. Van Till, Robert E. Snow, John H. Stek, and Davis A. Young (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), pp. 126-65; Howard J. Van Till, Davis A. Young, Clarence Menninga, Science Held Hostage (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1988); Howard J. Van Till, Categorical Complementarity and the Creationomic Perspective, Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 37 (September 1985): 149-57; Richard Bube, Putting it All Together (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1995).
21 See J. P. Moreland, ed., The Creation Hypothesis (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1994), chapters 1,2; Creation Science and Methodological Naturalism, in Man and Creation, ed. by Michael Bauman (Hillsdale, Michigan: Hillsdale College Press, 1993), pp. 105-139; Christianity and the Nature of Science (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), chapters 1,6; Conceptual Problems and the Scientific Status of Creation Science, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 46 (March 1994): 2-13.
22 J. P. Moreland, “Humanness, Personhood, and the Right to Die,” Faith and Philosophy 12 (January 1995): 95-112; J. P. Moreland, John Mitchell, “Is the Human Person a Substance or Property-Thing?” Ethics & Medicine 11 (forthcoming 1995).
23 Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, p. 141.
24 I wish to thank R. Douglas Geivett and John Mark Reynolds for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.