Logic Matters

Where have we got to, then, a bit over half way through Murray and Rea’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion?

Religious belief has been tied (I’d say pretty misguidedly) to “perfect being” theology. Murray and Rea have a shot at making metaphysical sense of talk of a perfect being in the first couple of chapters — which I haven’t discussed enough here, and really should come back to. But the notion is (unsurprisingly) left pretty murky. Their attempts in Ch. 3 to make sense of the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation are based on hopeless analogies. They seem to place some weight on “religious experience” in Ch. 4 but are remarkably silent on what that might consist in — and they give no good reasons for supposing that such experiences are a reliable guide to anything. And in Ch. 5 our authors themselves defeat most of the standard arguments they consider for theism, except for the fine-tuning argument; and if that last one is still in play, it’s arguably because they don’t properly examine the probabilistic reasoning on which it depends.

So where do we go from here? The story continues …

In Chapter 6, Murray and Rea turn to “Anti-theistic arguments”. But, at this stage in the game, in what sense does the atheist need anti-theistic arguments? She might well muse along the following lines:

“Burden tennis”, batting the burden of proof to and fro over the net, is rarely a very profitable pastime! But still, maybe this case is an exception. After all, “perfect being” theists, when you come down to it, are making some highly exotic claims, claims that aren’t that much clearer after Murray and Rea’s labours, and which make the beliefs, say, of ancient Greek religion look very modest and humdrum. Not just powerful gods, but an omnipotent god. Not just gods intermittently casting an amused eye over mortal folly, but an omniscient god. And one not just occasionally taking a passing interest in some of us, for good or ill (and occasionally, understandably, running off with a particularly pretty nymph) but loving us all equally. And on it goes, wilder and wilder (e.g. the three-for-the-price-of-one Trinity). By the workaday epistemic standards we use in most of our lives, those extravagant claims look quite extraordinarily fanciful. So we can reasonably insist that someone who advances such claims literally (not, for example, as inspiring myth) and expects to be taken seriously, had better have some very, very, good arguments. Pending such arguments, which we haven’t been given yet, we atheists don’t have much to do.

Or at any rate, recalling Russell’s teapot, we needn’t do much by way of coming up with additional reasons against a perfect being to add to the lack of weighty enough reasons for believing in any such a thing. But of course — in a spirit of human curiosity — we might well be interested in reflecting about what it is about our minds and about human societies that make us rather prone to be gripped by such fanciful ideas. What role do they play for us? What sustains religious belief in our emotional and social life in the absence of weighty reasons? Well, there’s a very long tradition of intriguing enquiry about this — the “natural history of religion”, if you like — which seeks to explain the role of religious belief. Thus, for example, Dennett’s speculations about the evolutionary advantages of a tendency to over-interpret agency in our environment are just the latest ingredient in a long and complex story. And this evolving story seems to make a pretty good stab at the beginnings of explaining the role of religious beliefs without sustaining their truth-claims

Now, you might well have expected Murray and Rea to have addressed this sort of calm “default atheism” head on and at length at this point. For in a highly secularized society like large swathes of “middle England”, inchoate versions of this kind of detachment from religion are nowadays very widely shared.

But at the beginning of the “Anti-theistic arguments” chapter, they in fact say that “we will set aside arguments which claim that the absence of evidence makes belief in atheism more reasonable or obligatory since that issue was addressed in chapter 4.” However, chapter 4 doesn’t address default atheism. It talks about the notion of faith and about whether “religious experience” might be the result of a reliable belief-acquiring mechanism — but we saw that the discussion of the latter was vitiated by a failure to properly discuss naturalistic stories about our proneness to such “experiences”. As I noted before, Dennett (for example) is nowhere mentioned. Nor is the Hume of the Natural History mentioned. Nor are Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx in the index (to take names from just one other familiar strand of enquiry about the roots of religion). It looks as if Murray and Rea are just not interested in engaging with the naturalizing default atheist.

Glancing ahead just at the subsection titles, however, I notice the next chapter “Religion and science” does in fact say something about evolutionary psychology and religious belief. So I’d better suspend judgement for a bit here. It may be that the complaint is only going to be that key bits of missing discussion come not in Ch. 4 but later in Ch. 7 (which might be pretty ill-judged arrangement, but that’s better than a disastrous lacuna). We shall have to see! For the moment, then, I just note that default atheism, seemingly the position of most of the students I’ve taught over the years, is not yet getting the kind of direct discussion that I’d have expected (at the point I would have expected it given what’s gone before). I wonder: does this betoken the fact that North American authors are more used to dealing with students who are, as they say, coming from somewhere else? Anyway, we’ll move on to consider what they do discuss in Chapter 6, which is mostly the argument from evil. (But I need to gather my strength for that, so don’t hold your breath ….)

Chapter 5 of the Murray/Rea Introduction is called “Theistic arguments”. They start off — perhaps rather too predictably — by considering at length the tricksy argument which philosophy of religion courses seem to get obsessed with, but which (at least in my experience) has the least to do with the actual reasons real-world believers give for their beliefs. That’s our old friend the ontological argument, of course.

Murray and Rea have no trouble in kicking into touch a classical version of the argument (their pp. 129-130 explanation is exemplary). Though they are a bit feeble earlier when talking about the existence-isn’t-a-property objection. For they just don’t mention how you might try to make sense of what is going with that objection by linking existence talk to the existential quantifier, etc. (an odd omission, as the intended readers’ intro logic lecturer has probably been mentioning that very point — why not make the connection?).

But instead of leaving well alone, Murray and Rea next go on to consider a Plantinga-style modal version of the argument (which even Plantinga doesn’t think is probative). But if their readers aren’t supposed to know enough logic to be in a position to cope with the existential quantifier in discussing responses to the classical argument, they are surely just going to be flummoxed by this! They certainly aren’t going to be in a position to discuss it properly (e.g. by evaluating the S5 principle for the needed metaphysical modality, discussing whether freedom from self-contradiction is a ground for attributing the requisite kind of metaphysical possibility, and so on — certainly Murray and Rea don’t give them the tools to do this).

Anyway, leaving the modal argument rather in the air, our authors go on to consider cosmological arguments. And again they have no great problem disposing of some classical varieties, perhaps after unnecessary palaver. (Though another odd omission is that they don’t explicitly connect what they say to the quantifier shift fallacy exposed in intro logic courses, where various cosmological and design arguments are typically offered as a prime illustration.)

Finally, Murray and Rea discuss design arguments, ending up with a weak treatment of the “fine tuning” argument. I say weak, because they rightly present the argument as a probabilistic one — but say nothing about the kind of probability involved or the probability principles being applied. Since critics have suggested that the argument confuses different kinds of probabilities, and/or argued that the principles involved about distributions of the values of physical constants in possible ranges are fallacious, this is a pretty serious omission. And worryingly so, given that of all the arguments mentioned in the chapter, this is the one that actually has some currency in half-informed thinking outside the academy. You might have thought that Murray and Rea would really want to be wrestling with it, and pushing a lot harder on its probabilistic credentials. To say the least, an opportunity badly missed here.

No. I’m not giving up my day job. A new logic book project is under way and taking nearly all my attention. When I’m more confident that it is “taking off” and going places, I’ll say more about it here: but not yet — after all, I don’t want to … erm … tempt fate! I also must finish Absolute Generality in the next week or two. So the Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion is just a bit of late-evening reading, and the comments are dashed off quickly for fun.

Anyway: I’ve just been looking at the section where Murray and Rea wonder whether the fact that religious experience seems to tell different people such different things might rationally rather undermine an inclination to take our own experiences at face value. To which you’d think the answer is a plain “yes”. But ah no, they say, that would be a mistake.

Suppose you are a Christian who thinks that only those like you who, by special grace, have been granted a revelation of the divine have access to reliable religious experiences: then widespread disagreement among the heathens is only what you’d expect. “Far from being evidence of unreliability, her particular circumstances are precisely what she should expect” if she were among the elect.

Indeed. But beside the point.

The issue isn’t whether someone can have an internally coherent set of beliefs which enables her to “explain” to herself why — in the face of massive disagreement — hers are the correct views and everyone else is out of step. That’s only too easy (though also that way madness lies).

The issue at stake is surely this. I don’t already believe I am one of the elect, because I don’t yet know what to believe. Perhaps I’m seeking God, but at this point I’m unsure about the path. But here I am having certain experiences which seem to intimate some kind of divine presence, seem to have religious content or whatever. Initially, let’s suppose, I’m rather inclined to accept the experiences as veridical. But in a calmer moment I start reflecting. I want to know how trustworthy these experiences are. Am I just suffering some kind of illusion? Satan’s stratagems are many. I try to crosscheck with others (as I might crosscheck with others about other surprising experiences). I find — at least if I look outside those subject to the same immediate cultural influences — unending disagreements about their experiences. Some give quite different religious interpretations, some seem to give interpretations freighted with aesthetic concepts, or other non-religious readings. It certainly now seems that this diversity should rationally lead me to reduce my initial higher degree confidence in how to interpret what is happening to me. Why not?

Noting that such disagreements needn’t reduce the confidence of someone else who already “knows” that she is one of the elect and “knows” that her experiences are reliable is neither here nor there. The question is how someone who doesn’t already know their religious experiences are trustworthy should change their rational degrees of belief in the light of finding that initially compelling-seeming experiences don’t readily crosscheck.