As a professional philosopher my first question naturally is: “What or who is an atheist?” If you mean someone who absolutely and utterly does not believe there is any God or meaning then I doubt there are many in this group.

Eh? Where on earth has that “or meaning” come from? In what coherent sense of “meaning” does an atheist have to deny meaning?

It gets worse. Eventually a lot worse.

If, as the new atheists think, Darwinian evolutionary biology is incompatible with Christianity, then will they give me a good argument as to why the science should be taught in schools if it implies the falsity of religion? The first amendment to the constitution of the United States of America separates church and state. Why are their beliefs exempt?

That is so mind-bogglingly inept it is difficult to believe that Ruse means it seriously. Does Ruse really, really, think that the separation of church and state means that no scientific fact can be taught if it happens to be inconsistent with some holy book or religious dogma?

Ruse is upset by the stridency of Dawkins and others, and there is indeed a point to be argued here. But it is ironic that philosophers often complain that Dawkins misrepresents too many practising Christians (or Muslims, or whatever). For related misrepresentations — if that’s what they are — are to be found in more or less any philosophy of religion book. I blogged here a while back about the Murray/Rea introduction, and remarked then about the unlikely farrago of metaphysical views it foisted upon the church-goer, views which have precious little to do with why you actually go to evensong or say prayers for dying, and which indeed deserve to be well Dawkinsed.

It’s a salutary reminder for philosophers who are wont to over-intellectualize religion. That was part of my beef about the Murray/Rea book on the philosophy of religion which I blogged about here. They seem to take Christian belief, at any rate, as essentially replete with detailed metaphysical commitments (commitments articulated by early Councils of the Church imbued with late Greek philosophy), and so feel that defending the coherence of religious practice involves having to dodge and weave their way through some pretty murky metaphysics. Somehow I don’t think that the local signore going along to say their rosary think of it quite like that.

Anyway, back to logic. I’ve pretty much finished correcting IFL: I’ll just make a new pdf file of the whole book from the FrameMaker files and check through that again and then I’ll send it off and forget about it. So there’s time for the serious stuff again — after all, I am supposed to be on sabbatical research leave! I’ve brought a couple of books with me for when I’m in a logical mood, Steve Awodey’s Category Theory (because I want to give it a second chance and get another perspective of the role of the concept of an adjoint functor in category theory), and Charles Parsons’s Mathematical Thought and Its Objects (because I have agreed to write a critical notice of it). So the plan of action is to comment a bit here on the Awodey book — but just as a consumer, so to speak, representing one segment of his target audience (i.e. someone who knows a little logic and wants to get to know a bit more about category theory). And I’ll start blog-reviewing the Parsons book too, which looks as if it should be a pretty rewarding read. So watch this space.

There are no very persuasive arguments against dualism … Dualism is commonly mocked rather than argued against.

Then we’d berate this exhibition of sheer ignorance. We’d send the student away with a long reading list. Start, say, with the second chapter of Armstrong’s classic Materialist Theory of the Mind. Or perhaps chapters II to V (over fifty pages of careful unpicking and assessment of various arguments, pro and con) of Smith and Jones’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (yes, folks, it is still in print after 22 years: buy, buy while stocks last!). And we can, of course, add a lot more. The reason the vast majority of contemporary philosophers of mind reject naive substance dualism has nothing to do with mockery, and everything to do with the fact that that there are so many weighty problems with it that it has long since become, at the very least, a badly degenerating research program.

But that quotation doesn’t come from a first year student but from Murray and Rea’s book, at p. 266. I boggled when I read it, and despair. It really is pretty difficult to take authors who can write something like that seriously any more. My patience is at an end, so I’m going to stop. I’ll not say anything then about their feeble discussion of “evolutionary models of religious beliefs”, where they don’t even mention Dan Dennett. And I’ll not say anything about their equally feeble discussions of the status of morality.

This is not a good book. In fact, as readers of this blog will have come to suspect, I think it really is overall a rather bad, too often weakly argued, one. It is published in a prestigious series, and — especially since student texts don’t tend to get widely reviewed — it could end up being widely read (no doubt a lot more widely read than my Gödel book which rubs shoulders with it in the series!), corrupting the minds of the youth. What was CUP thinking of?

But in the meantime, back to Murray and Rea’s Ch. 7, “Religion and science”. There’s a central section on miracles, which makes some sound points against arguments which purport to show too quickly that the very idea of a miracle is incoherent. I won’t discuss those. They then offer the following suggestion: a miracle is “an event (ultimately) caused by God that cannot be accounted for by the natural powers of natural substances alone”. OK, let’s work with that.

Could we have evidence of the occurrence of such events? Murray and Rea imagine being present at the parting of the Red Sea (assuming it happened for the sake of argument). “If we were present for the occurrence of the event, none of us would think it more plausible that this event is to be explained by no-cause rather than a supernatural cause. … In this context it seems very plausible that the event was caused by a supernatural agent looking to rescue the Israelites.” Not so. Don’t Murray and Rea ever read any science fiction? Sure, in the described context it seems very plausible that the event was caused by some non-human agency of super-human powers. But — to borrow from the immortal Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — a Vogon constructor fleet is just as good as a hypothesis as something supernatural, if that means divine (which it does in the context). In fact it’s a better type of hypothesis, because we have some inkling how something like a Vogon constructor fleet might pull off the trick of parting the Red Sea (big engineering works being its forte) and have no clue at all about how a disembodied being gets to do major physical interventions.

Of course, if you already believe in God and don’t already believe in Vogon constructor fleets, then of course you’ll be inclined to put down the parting of the Red Sea to the first, not the second. But overlooking the possibility of rival hypotheses (not about Vogons in particular, of course, but of super-human but non-divine agency) is not exactly an intellectual virtue! The point remains that being present at the parting of the Red Sea at most gives you evidence of super-human agency, and no more. It is no evidence per se of the supernatural or divine. And hence no evidence per se of a miracle defined as an event caused by divine agency (unless you already have an argument that the only super-human agency is divine — which of course we haven’t).

But of course, most of us aren’t present at such events anyway. Beliefs in miracles usual rely on testimony. And discussions of miracles usually consider how to weigh up the likelihood of reliability of testimony when what is testified is in itself highly unlikely (and, perhaps, we also know we are in area where fraud, wishful thinking, and foolish credulity abound). Weirdly, Murray and Rea opt not to discuss this at all. For arguments of this sort “involve an examination of the integrity of historical evidence for the occurrence of particular miracles that is more appropriate for the domain of history than philosophy”. Eh? Really? So much for the philosophical discussions of testimony, then.

I don’t at all see that the steady state theory is incompatible with ideas about divine creation, if you buy a view of an eternal God who is “outside” our universe’s time frame. But I suppose that the Big Bang theory fits more immediately with a biblical view of creation (taking the Genesis story about “days” of creation with a huge pinch of salt!).

Suppose a religious apologist noted that the Big Bang theory (compatible with the bible) was eventually preferred to the steady state theory, and wrote:

Here is a case in which a conflict between science and religion was resolved by science retreating and adopting a position more congenial to a religious persective.

That would, of course, be an utterly absurd way of describing the situation, pathetically clutching at straws. “Science” in no way “retreated” (and certainly didn’t retreat “in a conflict between science and religion”, as if religion won the day). The steady state theory was never the only scientific game in town, and it was of course more scientific work that settled the battle of conjectures in favour of an inflationary cosmology. No retreat at all, but a resounding triumph for the theoretical cosmologists to be able to develop their hugely general theories to the point where esoteric empirical findings could get traction.

That claim above, however, is actually a quotation from Murray and Rea (p. 196, in case you think I’m making this up). To find that in a philosophy book is really quite extraordinary, and beggars belief.

Well, they do qualify their claim:

Of course, scientists did not retreat from the steady state model because it was incompatible with religion. … Nonetheless, this case shows us just one somewhat recent instance in which conflict between science and religion was resolved and in which religion did not simply back down and revise its claims.

But that’s still a bizarre way of describing the situation. A scientific theory that was inconsistent (let’s suppose) with biblical stories about creation was proposed and then pretty quickly refuted — all without reference to religious concerns. That’s not a case of “resolving a conflict”, which suggests give and take between battling factions. Rather a scientific theory came and went, and it turned out that one particular potential locus of conflict wasn’t there after all. To talk here of science “retreating” remains an outrageous misdescription.

Half way through the chapter, Murray and Rea make a distinction between what they call a defence (”a possible reason, without concern for its believability, why God might permit evil” — “a defence aims just at demonstrating the possibility of God’s coexisting with evil”), and a theodicy (“a believable and reasonably comprehensive theory about why God might have permitted evil of the amount and variety we find in our world.”).

That’s an excellent distinction to make. But they miss the opportunity to add that a “defence”, so called, is of course typically no defence at all; it’s just an ad hoc patch with no virtue other that saving the appearances. A classic version of this sort of “defence” is found, of course, in Plantinga’s daft ruminations about transworld depravity and so forth. This game-playing is of no more value to the struggling Perfect Being theist than any other bout of ad hockery used to save theories from potentially fatal anomalies. And students should be told so. The philosophy of science in particular has, post Lakatos, a rich literature on what makes for an ad hoc move, and why such moves are intellectually disreputable and to be roundly criticized. It would have been good to see Murray and Rea engage with this literature and similarly lambast ad hoc “defences” in the debate on the problem of evil. But they don’t.

Anyway, we needn’t take mere “defences” seriously — once the Perfect Being theist is reduced to relying on those, he’s as lost as anyone else in a badly degenerating research programme who has to rely on ad hockery to fend off final refutation.

So what about the theodicies that Murray and Rea consider?

1. The punishment theodicy Evil is a result of divine punishment for human wrong-doing. Murray and Rea don’t like this, but they are almost offensively gentle about this horrible idea. Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children just makes out God to be vilely vindictive.
2. Natural consequence theodicy Some evils are just the natural consequences of wrong doing. But as Murray and Rea note, that doesn’t even get into the right ball-park for explaining the vast amount of suffering produced in the world without the intervention of moral agents.
3. Free will theodicy It is a good that there are free agents, and some free agents will (regretably) go wrong. But as Murray and Rea note again this doesn’t get into the right ball-park for explaining natural evil. And of course, it doesn’t get God off the hook even with respect to the actions produced by free agents. A powerful enough ominiscient being could snuff out a few conspicuously evil agents, a Hitler here, a Stalin there, and nudge down the amount of evil.
4. Natural law theodicy. Evil arises out of preconditions that must be in place for creatures to exercise their freedom. But this smacks of ad hockery again. We haven’t the foggiest reason to suppose that a world with free agents has to be a world with particularly nasty terminal cancers. Why shouldn’t God have created a world with a patchwork of laws of relatively local extent (actually some like Nancy Cartwright think that is what he created!) which allows rather less suffering? And if that means intervening a bit more to keep the show on the road, well an omnipotent being who cared could do and would do that. As, in effect, Murray and Rea note.
5. Soul-making theodicies We need some evil around to build a bit of moral character. But again, that’s a quite ghastly idea, that a baby’s terrible suffering should be there to help me make my soul better. And of course, there isn’t the foggiest reason to suppose that all the evil there is in the world is needed for those supposed good purposes. Again, Murray and Rea are rather offensively silent on this singularly nasty idea.

So where have we got to? We’ve five theodicies mentioned, and even by Murray and Rea’s own count, four of them are hopeless, and the fifth is equally bad.

Very oddly, however, they sum up the situation at the end of the chapter like this: “Are the arguments against the existence of God … powerful? Some think so. However, as we have seen, these arguments rely on assumptions that are open to some serious challenges. How serious those challenges are is a matter for each of us to decide.” Which is inept, twice over. Firstly, it misrepresents how their arguments have actually gone. But worse, beginning students — as Murray and Rea must know — don’t need invitations to “decide” for themselves. They need precisely the opposite, injunctions to follow arguments carefully, and apportion their credences to the weight of arguments. Especially in this sort of area, students are only too willing to avail themselves of any get-outs.

To start with, there’s the particular problem for those whose religion is Bible-based. Because there is the evident sheer moral nastiness of the God of the Old Testament, who is sadistically keen on the killing of those who lapse into a bit of adultery, homosexuality, or who blaspheme, or even do a bit of work on the sabbath — and who commands the Israelites to wholesale slaughter and genocide. True, we like to think that the God of the New Testament has mellowed a bit: but even so, he still has some decidedly vicious tendencies. A violent end is still prophesied for those who haven’t got round to seeing the light by the time of the second coming. The Bible is a bit undecided whether it is going to be a mass drowning (as in the time of Noah), or whether the destruction of the ungodly is to be by fire. But it is going to be very nasty either way. And let’s not even visit the entirely repellent doctrine of eternal damnation in the fiery furnace. The Biblical God is an unpleasant piece of work, and Mill’s attitude is the morally decent one: “I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.”

Of course, most modern believers — leaving aside the more dingbat types of fundamentalist — do sit fairly loose to the most morally offensive bits of the Bible, cherry pick the attractive episodes, and claim to believe in a deity not given to capricious rage and cruelty. Still, “by their fruits you shall know them” presumably applies to deities too. And the world as we find it is a ramshackle, mismanaged affair, full of suffering and pain for very many of God’s creatures. And many find it very difficult to come to believe that we should worship God for his botched efforts, or think particularly kindly of the arrangements he has so cackhandedly put in place which involve so much pointless misery and worse. Didn’t he care about making a world where things ran at least just a bit better (a bit less agony in some terminal cancers, for example)? It seems not. Moral rejection again seems to many the proper stance for decent grown ups.

However, I’m not going to pursue these two familiar strands of thinking about religion and evil here, for Murray and Rea don’t pursue them either. They don’t discuss the sheer unpleasantness of the Biblical God (you’d have thought this might have mattered more to them, given their focus of historically-rooted Christianity). Nor do they really explore the kind of moral rejection of God because of encounters with evil that often leads people to lose their faith. Though surely this is very often the way: someone — perhaps witnessing the prolonged death agony of a close relative — comes to think “this just makes no sense; if accepting God is accepting this, then I want no more part of it”, and she stops praying, stops religious observance, stops thinking in terms of God’s purposes, and so on. It would be procrustean to construe this as a change in her metaphysical views, a revision in her catalogue of the ontology of the world: it is more that — so to speak — thought and talk about God becomes an irrelevance to her. But as we’ve noted before, Murray and Rea aren’t in general much interested in these sorts of phemomena of religious life.

No, what they do discuss is what we might call “the metaphysical problem of evil”. Is the existence of the God of the Philosophers — the Perfect Being of Murray and Rea’s opening chapters — incompatible with, or is it at least rendered probabilistically improbable by, the existence of so much evil in the world? Well, this is familiar territory. How do they cope? The story continues …