Class IV

Notes for the meeting on April 17 

 

Readings 

 

Brian Davies, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Chapter Two, p. 21-33. 

Excerpt from J.L. Mackie, "Evil and Omnipotence". 

Elmar Kremer, Notes on Evil.

It would be helpful to review Talk 6 and 7 in the set of talks on Classical Theism that was part of the reading for Class III. (They can be found at www.wi-phi.com (look for my name under "contributors").

A time-efficient way to prepare for the class would be to listen to Talk 6 and 7, then read Notes on Evil, then read the rest of this posting, using the excerpt from Davies, Chapter 2, to flesh out points made in the posting, and finally reading the excerpt from Mackie. 

I: Attempts to discredit belief in God 

Attempts to discredit belief in God can be divided into two kinds: Attempts to show that religious belief is false, and attempts to show that religious belief is irrational, or unworthy of grown up people, or outdated or substandard in some other way. We will study two attempts to prove that religious belief is false, which have been prominent in philosophy since the 1950s: J. L. Mackie's argument in "Omnipotence and Evil," and William Rowe's argument in "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism." 

But first we will consider two attempts of the second kind to discredit religion: Logical Positivism and Enlightenment Evidentialism. Then I will briefly introduce Mackie's argument. 

A: Logical Positivism

Logical positivism was an attempt in the 1930s to revive and defend a core principle of the philosophies of David Hume and Emanuel Kant. Both Hume and Kant held that it is impossible for human beings to have knowledge of any reality beyond what is observable. So they held that it is impossible to arrive at any knowledge of God. But Hume went further and said that "divinity" (i.e., theology), as well as metaphysics, is "sophistry and illusion." (See the passage from Hume quoted by Davies on p. 23.) The logical positivists saw themselves as the true descendents of Hume and Kant. They set out to develop a more rigorous and defensible form of the doctrine that human knowledge of the world is limited to what is observable. They also sought a way to include mathematics within legitimate human knowledge, because of the importance of mathematics in empirical science. 

The logical positivists ended up formulating a criterion for a sentence having "cognitive meaning," i.e., being true-or-false: A sentence is cognitively meaningful if and only if it either (a) can be confirmed or disconfirmed by observation, or (b) is true or false by virtue of the meaning of the terms in the sentence. Regarding clause (a), a sentence can be confirmed or disconfirmed by observation just in case observation can provide reason to think the sentence is true or false. (Note the distinction between strong and weak versions of the principle, in Davies, p. 23.) Regarding clause (b), a favourite example was the sentence "All bachelors are unmarried." (The positivists thought that "bachelor" just means "unmarried man.")   Mathematical statements, they claimed, are true or false by virtue of the meanings of the words in the statements. Mathematics, therefore, does not provide knowledge of the world, although it is a useful tool in physical science. Examples of sentences which are neither true nor false are "Hurray for Kenya!" "Do not run out into the street!" and "What a beautiful sunset!" 

The positivists allowed that the sentences of metaphysics (and religion) may have emotive meaning or some other sort of non-cognitive meaning. But, so the positivists maintained, they are neither true nor false. As Davies says, "All its proponents held that its implications are devastating for belief in God" (p. 24). But it is far from obvious that the sentence "God exists" cannot be confirmed to any extent by observation. Here the positivists would respond with one of two claims. The first is a claim about the meaning of words rather than whole sentences: A word for a kind of thing has meaning only if things of that kind are not “beyond experience.” (See the quotation from Carnap in Davies, p. 24.) But this claim is false, as later logicians realised. Thus the Harvard logician W.V.O. Quine points out, "Such a compound [expression as "smaller than any visible thing'] . . . does not even purport to denote things to which we could point if they came our way. The relative term "smaller than" has enabled us to transcend the old domain, without a sense of having fallen into gibberish. The mechanism is of course analogy, and more specifically extrapolation" (Word and Object, p. 109). Words referring to God can similarly be formed by analogical extrapolation from words for observable objects. But the positivists have a second weapon in their arsenal. It depends on a distinction between sentences that can be verified or falsified directly by observation (called "observation sentences") and sentences that can be verified or falsified (or confirmed or disconfirmed) only indirectly by reasoning that begins with observation sentences. An example of a sentence that can be indirectly confirmed or disconfirmed by observation might be "There are craters on the back side of the moon." The positivists' second weapon is the claim: A sentence can be indirectly confirmed (or disconfirmed) by observation sentences only if it makes it possible to predict the truth of sentences that can be directly confirmed (or disconfirmed) by observation. On this theory, "There are craters on the back side of the moon" would be understood as a statement about what would be observed by someone in space behind the moon. That is the positivist's understanding of how theories in the empirical sciences work: they enable us to predict what will or would be observed in particular circumstances. Positivists who made use of this distinction said that a sentence is cognitively meaningful if and only if it is (a) verifiable or falsifiable directly or indirectly by observation or (b) true or false by virtue of the terms in the sentence.

There are, however, convincing counterexamples to that claim. For example, I may have good reason to say, "My mother's dying thoughts were about God," even though that sentence does not enable me to make any empirical prediction. In addition, there is an objection of great force to the positivists' general principle of cognitive meaning. The difficulty is that the principle is not consistent with itself. For the principle cannot be confirmed by observation, nor is it true by virtue of the meaning of the terms in the principle. (See the attempt of Moritz Schlick to maintain the opposite, reported in Davies, p. 27-28.) In other words, the positivists' principle is self-referentially incoherent.

Although logical positivism proved impossible to defend, a similar view remains popular outside of philosophy. It is the claim that empirical science is the only serious, worthwhile way of finding out about the world, beyond what we can discover directly by observation. For example, in the recent (2010) book, The Grand Design, the authors, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, begin by listing several large questions: "How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator?" (p. 5). They go on to say, "Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the torch bearers of discovery in our quest for knowledge." A few pages later, they give a slightly different list of questions: "Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist?" (p. 10). Although they do not mention religion, they clearly think that in the modern world, religion, like philosophy, is irrelevant to the important questions. In sum, they think that philosophy and religion are out-of-date. 

Hawking and Mlodinov say that the questions they mention are answered within science by a highly speculative development of quantum mechanics they call the “M-Theory” (p. 8). They say this theory is "rooted in scientific determinism," the proposition that "given the state of the universe at one time, a complete set of laws fully determines both the future and the past" (p. 30). They do not consider the question of where the laws themselves and what the laws govern come from. As they understand the question, "Where did all this come from?", "all this" does not include the laws of nature or what the laws operate on. They mean just the actual state the material order we inhabit. That’s a far cry from explaining why the material universe exists.

Someone may ask, "Don't the actions of human beings have some place in explaining what happens in the material world?" The authors seem to think they do, but that human actions are merely parts of how the "system" develops. For that reason, they say that "free will" is an illusion: "Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patients the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion" (p. 31-32). Notice that the study they mention gives no reason to think that our behavior is determined by physical law. That claim seems to rest only on the authors' "scientific determinism."

In sum, Hawking and Mladenow do not even attempt to answer the "big questions" they mention, as those questions are normally understood. Rather they replace them with questions phrased in terms of quantum mechanics and then invoke the assumption of "scientific determinism" as a reason for saying that a theory can be developed which will explain how the world as we experience it arose through the working of natural laws. 

II: Evidentialism

Evidentialism is the view that religious faith is irrational or wrong because it is not based on "sufficient evidence." Although this view is discussed only briefly by Prof. Davies, it is very widely held both within philosophy and in popular discussion. A famous example is W. K. Clifford's article, "The Ethics of Belief." Clifford holds that it is in general morally wrong to hold any belief without sufficient evidence. As he formulates his conclusion, "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence" (p. 273). Clifford offers the following argument for this ringing conclusion: 1. It is always wrong to believe anything upon insufficient evidence when doing so is harmful to others. 2. For anyone at any time and place, to believe anything on insufficient evidence is harmful to others. Therefore, 3. It is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. Clifford does not explicitly develop the idea that religion, in particular, involves believing things on insufficient evidence, but it is quite clear from the last few paragraphs of his essay, where he quotes Milton and Coleridge, that that is his view. Clifford's argument seems to be valid. (See the notes on logic.) It is natural, then, to turn to the premises and to ask whether they are true. Clifford offers a better defence of the second premise than he does of the first. He says that if a person forms or maintains a belief on insufficient evidence, this contributes to a habit of believing in a careless, sloppy way, and that makes a person dangerous to those he or she lives with. Here Clifford has a point. A decent community life would be impossible if we could not count on one another as sources of truth. But if people are careless in the way they form and maintain their beliefs, then they cannot be counted on to express true beliefs, and that is detrimental to the good of the community. Clifford's defence of the first premise, however, is weak. He simply gives two examples of moral wrongdoing by people who form beliefs without considering all the available evidence. In one example, a shipowner voluntarily ignores evidence that his ship needs expensive repairs and goes so far as to convince himself that the boat is seaworthy. His clients die when the ship goes down. In the second story, certain people in a society band together and spread accusations against others who are supposed to have indoctrinated children in particular religious beliefs in an unfair manner, and even to have kidnapped some children. It turns out that those spreading the accusations really believed them, just as the shipowner really believed that his ship was seaworthy. But in both cases they had formed their belief on insufficient evidence. These examples are supposed to make it clear that it is wrong to hold a belief on insufficient evidence if doing so jeopardizes the welfare of others; in other words, that the first premise of the argument is true. You may want to read the article and decide whether the examples really do make the first premise evident. It is clear that the shipowner and the accusers acted wrongly when they formed their beliefs. But was their belief-forming practice wrong precisely because they did not have "sufficient evidence"? There are reasons of two kinds for answering in the negative. First, in both examples the ones forming the belief violated a special moral obligation that does not apply to all cases of forming beliefs. The shipowner violated his special contractual obligation to his clients. When a shipowner contracts with his clients to transport them to a given destination, he or she is under a special obligation to make sure the ship is safe--an obligation that obviously does not apply in every case of belief formation. In the second example, the accusers violated the special moral obligation we all have not to spread stories about people which we know are not true.

A more general problem with Clifford's defence of the first premise is that he nowhere specifies what he means by sufficient evidence. The same problem occurs in virtually all forms of evidentialism. In fact there is no one standard of "sufficient evidence" that all beliefs ought to meet. A surgeon would normally be obliged to form his diagnostic belief on the basis of a more careful consideration of "the evidence" than, say a plumber considering how to clear a block in the drain of your kitchen sink. But the surgeon's obligation would be less if he or she were operating on a battlefield. Indeed, in some circumstances a person might be obliged not to seek all the evidence he or she could seek before forming or maintaining a belief. For example, a young married woman who is told by a jealous friend that her husband is "cheating" on her might be obliged, out of loyalty to her husband, not to look into the matter. So it seems that there is no single standard of carefulness one has to meet in order to morally justified in forming or maintaining a belief. Yet another problem with the argument of the evidentialists is that they do not explain what they mean by evidence. In one meaning of the term, one has evidence for a belief if one can produce a good argument in its favor. But all arguments require premises, so one cannot in this sense have evidence for a belief unless one accepts some premises without having evidence for them. In a different sense of the term, evidence is a psychological state a person to whom it is apparent that something or other is the case. This would include the state you are in if you see a tree in front of you in plain daylight (and accordingly believe that there is a tree in front of you), or if a principle of geometry, say the Pythagorean Theorem, becomes evident to you (and accordingly you accept it. How, then, can it be shown that someone does not have sufficient evidence if, while praying in a church, they think they see that the world of ordinary objects is created by an eternal, intelligent being?

Another evidentialist, Anthony Flew, in a famous paper, "The Presumption of Atheism," claims that in any discussion between a theist and a non-believer, it is reasonable to begin with the refusal to believe that God exists. Flew calls this claim, rather misleadingly, the presumption of atheism. He does not give a clear defence of the claim. But as Alvin Plantinga has pointed out, Flew’s view seems to be based on two claims: First, what can reasonably be believed can be divided into two sorts (a) what can be reasonably believed without argument (properly basic beliefs), and (b) what can be shown to be reasonable by a sound deductive argument or a strong non-deductive argument whose premises are properly basic. Second, properly basic beliefs are limited to those which are either (a) self-evident or (b) evident to the senses. Now the belief that God exists, Flew seems to hold, is neither self-evident nor evident to the senses. Therefore, it can be reasonably held only if it can be shown to be reasonable by an argument beginning with properly basic beliefs. So until the theist produces a convincing defence of the belief that God exists, the right position is not to accept that belief. 

Alvin Plangtinga has argued that classical foundationalism is false. His argument is summarized by Davies: For one thing, [Plantinga] suggests, it is not always unreasonable to believe without evidence. Second, he argues, we do not arrive at all of our day-to-day beliefs in ways sanctioned by classical foundationalism. And finally, says Plantinga, classical foundationalism is just self-referentially incoherent. Why? Because, notes Plantinga, it is not self-evidently true. Nor is its truth evident to the senses or derivable from what is self-evidently true or evident to the senses (Davies, p. 37-8). 

Nor does Flew consider seriously the possibility that God's existence could be properly basic for a person in certain circumstances. Consider the conversion story of the famous French poet, a dramatist and diplomat Paul Claudel, as reported by Fr. Fred Dolan in a podcast: [As a young man] Claudel wrote the following: ‘Catholic faith was for me a collection of absurd anecdotes.’ One day - he was eighteen years old at the time, Christmas Day, 1886 - a taxi dropped him off at the gate of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. From there he heard the hymns of the Christian- Christmas vespers and so he decided to go in. They were singing the Magnificat. Later, he was to explain, ‘I was standing amid the crowd and in an instant something touched my heart and I believed. I believed with such force, with so much agitation in my being, with a conviction so strong that there was no place for doubt. Suddenly, I thought, how happy are the people who believe, and what if it is true? But it is true. God exists. He is there. He is someone and he loves me. He calls out to me. Tears and sobs came to me, and the singing of the Adeste Fideles only increased my emotion.’ (Claudel's experience is reported at greater length at https://www.dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/18209/the-virgin-of-paris-and-the-conversion-of-paul-claudel-on-christmas-eve-1886.) Could it be that Claudel's belief, in those circumstances, was properly basic for Claudel? How could Flew rule out that possibility?

II: Mackie's Argument in "Evil and Omnipotence"

Mackie does not try to prove, explicitly, that there is no God. Instead he tries to prove that "the essential theological position" (a position which includes the propositions that God is wholly good, that God is omnipotent, and that evil exists) is self-contradictory and hence false. By limiting his aim in this way, he avoids any need to give any account of what evil is.

Mackie assumes that his reader has enough grasp of what evil is to accept his first premise, (1) Good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can.  He also assumes, as his second premise, (2) There are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do. From these two premises, he concludes that an omnipotent, wholly good thing eliminates evil completely. In other words, if there is an omnipotent, good thing, then there is no evil. Absolutely none. As Mackie says, it would follow that "the propositions that a good, omnipotent thing exist and that evil exists are incompatible" (p. 26). But he assumes that religious believers are committed to both propositions. So they are committed to a belief which cannot be true. To get the full meaning of Mackie's argument, it is important to note that he not only claims that his premises and his conclusion are true, but that they are necessarily true. He makes that stronger claim when he says that his two premises are "quasi-logical rules connecting the terms 'good'. 'evil'. and 'omnipotent', and that his conclusion establishes the incompatibility of the proposition that a good omnipotent thing exists and evil exists (p.26). Alvin Plantinga responded to Mackie's argument with a famous, and decisive, refutation, presented in a scholarly book, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford U. P., 1974), and in a simpler book aimed at a general audience, God, Freedom, and Evil (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1974). I am going to follow the steps of his refutation in the second text. 

Plantinga begins by attacking Mackie's first premise: The first premise is not necessarily true because there might be some evils which cannot be eliminated without thereby eliminating an outweighing good. To take Plantinga's example: "Certain kinds of values, certain familiar kinds of good states of affairs, can't exist apart from evil of some sort. For example, there are people who display a sort of creative moral heroism in the face of suffering and adversity--a heroism that inspires others and creates a good situation out of a bad one. In a situation like this the evil, of course, remains evil, but the total state of affairs--someone's bearing pain magnificently, for example--may be good. If it is, then the good present must outweigh the evil, otherwise the total situation would not be good. But, of course, it is not possible that such a good state of affairs obtain unless some evil also obtains. It is a necessary truth that if someone bears pain magnificently, then someone is in pain" (God, Freedom and Evil, p. 23). This implies, as Plantinga points out, that a good omnipotent may possibly not be able to properly eliminate every evil; it is possible that eliminating all evil would involve eliminating some outweighing goods.

It might be objected that an omnipotent being could eliminate the suffering without eliminating the magnificant bearing of the suffering. After all, there are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do! But there is a limit to what an omnipotent thing can do. It cannot make a self-contradictory statement true.  An omnipotent thing cannot bring it about that a particular instance of suffering occurs and does not occur, and so cannot bring it about that a particular instance of suffering is heroically endured and yet does not occur. 

So Mackie's argument proves nothing. Though valid, it has a false premise. Plantinga is aware that his refutation of Mackie's argument leaves open the possibility that someone should come along tomorrow and prove Mackie's conclusion with a different argument having different premises. In order to rule out that possibility, Plantinga says, it is necessary to prove that it is possible for both an omnipotent, good thing and evil to exist. This further development is known as Plantinga's "free will defense." We will look into it in the next class.