Religion

In my post about the LHC, I mentioned John Polkinghorne (that’s the Reverend Professor Sir John Polkingorne to you). He taught me quantum mechanics a long time ago, and he was a terrific lecturer and expositor. Since then, he’s become perhaps a more famous theologian than scientist, and keeps writing books trying to square his distinctly conservative theology with science. They are philosophically pretty awful. For a fun read, try my colleague Simon Blackburn lambasting a couple of Polkinghorne’s books.

Suppose a first year student wrote this (about mind-body substance dualism):

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?

Those who are getting fed up with me banging on and on about the Murray/Rea Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion and are waiting for some serious stuff can rest easy. This will be the penultimate post on that book. And then it’s back to Absolute Generality (as I must finish that and write a review in the next few days). Maybe I’ll also post something elementary and expository here on Galois connections if I can sort an annoying bug in my thinking. And — if the discussion goes well enough tomorrow — I’ll post the informal talk on Szabo on “Believing in things” here too. And there’s more in the pipeline. I will return to logic matters, promise!

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.

In the 1950s and earlier 1960s, there was quite wide support for the Hoyle/Gold/Bondi “steady state” cosmology as a rival to what we now think of as a Big Bang model. The basic idea is that the universe, on the big scale, “looks the same” at every time, as well as in every direction. And this temporal isotropy is reconciled with the observed recession of the galaxies by postulating the continuous creation of matter, to keep the matter density of the universe constant over time. (The creation rate needed is surprisingly low: about one hydrogen atom in the volume of a skyscraper per hundred years.) This is one of those beautiful ideas in physics which ought to have been true. But the discovery in the later 1960s of the cosmic microwave background radiation — not easy to reconcile with steady state theory, but predicted as the “echo” of the Big Bang on the standard cosmology — led to the abandonment of the theory by all except a few diehards. (Qn: has anyone written a Lakatosian history of this episode?)

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.

Chapter 6 of the Murray/Rea book concentrates on the familiar argument that the existence of a “Perfect Being” God can’t be squared with the amount of apparently utterly superfluous evil to be found in this sublunary world.

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.