Reason and Religion 9783110320725, 9783110320510

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Chapter 1: REASON AND RELIGION
Chapter 2: ISSUES OF BELIEF
Chapter 3: RELIGION AND SCIENCE
Chapter 4: GOD AND THE GROUNDING OF MORALITY
Chapter 5: WHY ISN’T THIS A BETTER WORLD?
Chapter 6: AUTHORITY
Chapter 7: THE “FIVE WAYS” OF ST. THOMAS
Name Index

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Nicholas Rescher Reason and Religion

Nicholas Rescher

Reason and Religion

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Reason and Religion CONTENTS Preface 1. Reason and Religion

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2. Issues of Belief

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3. Relgion and Science

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4. God and the Grounding of Morality

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5. Why Isn’t This a Better World?

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6. Authority

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7. The “Five Ways” of St. Thomas Aquinas

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Index of Names

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PREFACE This book is avowedly written in what has been rather patronizingly called “the affable spirit of compromise or conciliation” between science and religion.1 Its key thesis is that these two enterprises can— and should be—seen as complementary in addressing different albeit interrelated questions: on the one side the nature of the natural world and our place in it, and on the other how we should proceed and act so as to capitalize on the opportunities that our place in the world affords to us for shaping our lives in a meaningful and satisfying way. How the world works is the crux of the one enterprise and how we are to live is that of the other. In the course of these deliberations there unfolds a cohesive line of thought whose overall thread of argumentation is that • theism and religiosity is a significant human project which • has a basis of rational warrant that • is not somehow obscurantist through being at odds with reason, science, or common sense, but rather • admits of plausible defenses against a wide range of standard objections, but • needs to be concretized in a particular religion through a personal choice that • has to be made and validated on a basis of personal experience. Overall, the deliberations unfold an account designed to substantiate the availability of religious faith to sensible people living in an era of scientific knowledge. NOTES 1

Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Once Born and the Twice Born” in The Wall Street Journal, Saturday/Sunday, September 29-30, 2012. Pp. C5-C6 (see p. C6).

Chapter 1

REASON AND RELIGION 1. SCIENCE DOES NOT REQUIRE GOD Three points should be clear from the outset: 1. Science does not require God. To answer our scientific questions about the world we need not bring theology into it. 2. Science cannot prove God’s existence. We cannot ground theism on scientific facts regarding the observable features of the universe. 3. Scientists are nowadays largely atheists. Many or most of them manage to live successful lives without any religious commitments. But once these facts are granted we are at the beginning of the story, not at its end. For in the end the salient question is not whether science involves and requires religious commitment but whether it is compatible—or even congenial—with religion. Granted, science as such does not require God. (Neither does architecture!) But that of course does not mean that scientists do not need God (or for that matter architects). Human life is replete with important issues that do not belong to science. For science is limited by being the very thing it is: as a functional enterprise of a certain particular sort. It is defined by its own characteristic aims and objectives, this being to explain how things work in the world—how a recourse to the laws of nature can account for the world’s phenomena. But it is (or should be) clear that man does not live by knowledge alone. There is, of course, more to human life than that—more than grasping how nature works. We are creatures not only of understanding but also of doing, not only of thought but of action. Science and religion have different jobs to do: they are human enterprises whose aims and objectives differ. Science deals with the

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matter of how things happen in the world—that is with issues regarding the explanation, prediction, and control of the world’s occurrences. Religion, by contrast, addresses normative issues and involves questions of meaning and value—questions bound up with the master question of what we ought to do within our lives and how we ought to conduct them. Regarding the universe that is our home science takes a cognitive approach of asking about the world and its doings. Religion by contrast takes an appreciative approach of affinity, awe, and wonder. The concern of religion is not from the world as such but from our personal place within it in relation to what is important and meaningful for us. Different enterprises with different goals are at issue: religion cannot do the job of science, nor science that of religion. Overall, both understanding and affectivity have a role in the human scheme of things. And so there is no need for the scientist to scorn religion. For if he is smart he will realize that his lab relates to the work of the inquiring mind but that beyond this there yet remains the work of the appreciative spirit. Religion brings an entire array of non-cognitive contemplation to the fore: appreciation for the good things that existence in this world can offer us, gratitude for the opportunities that are put at our disposal, hopeful prayers that such opportunities may be realized, and the like. The spiritual domain of thought and action at issue here is oriented towards fostering what is good in and for ourselves and our fellows in the final format of such religiosity. A science oriented at understanding and control can and should facilitate this pursuit, but it does nothing to substitute for—let alone replace—it. Proceeding rationally with respect to those resources that we acknowledge as judgmentally—rather than cognitively—authoritative is critical for the constituting of acceptable belief. And this has critical implications for the relation of science and religion. All of our knowledge— is ultimately empirical in the sense of being founded on experience. But the range of experience that is rationally determinative in scientific context is ultimately a matter of sensory observation and the range of experience that is in the final analysis rationally determinate in matters of religion is the affective, normative, judgmental experience that is crucial for matters of significance, priority, and val-

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ue, that is to say axiological (value-geared) rather than sensory (description-geared) in nature. Knowledge, after all, is just one component of the constellation of human goods—one valuable project among others, whose cultivation is only one component of the wider framework of human purposes and interests. Human life is a complicated business, replete with many needs and wants, necessities and possibilities. The prospect of understanding and explaining the world’s ways—of science in sum—is only one of these, the business of leading a satisfactory life: of achieving personal as well as intellectual (cognitive) satisfactions. The quality of our lives turns on a broad spectrum of personal and communal desiderata such as physical well-being, human companionship, environmental congeniality, social harmoniousness, cultural development, spiritual satisfaction, and so on—values toward whose attainment the insights afforded by science can often help us, but which themselves nevertheless fall outside its domain. 2. SCIENTIFIC REASON IS NOT ENOUGH: THE IMPETUS TO TRANSCENDENCE

The longstanding supposition of a conflict between science and religion requires two complementary responses. On the one hand religionists require assurances that they have nothing to fear from science—that the scientific investigations of nature and our place upon its stage is not going to somehow invalidate faith. On the other side, those who adhere to a science-grounded world picture need to be assured that there is nothing irrational and unreasonable about theistic belief. The following pages are written in the conviction that both of these assurances can be given—that religious faith and scientific reason can achieve peaceful coexistence in the irenic consideration of being no more at odds than biochemistry and landscape architecture. The stage for the present deliberations is conveniently set by two transcendental questions put on the philosophical agenda in the seventeenth century by G. W. Leibniz: I.

Why is there anything at all in the world?

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II. Why are things as they are in the world? These questions can in turn be elaborated into four: • How is it that there are actual states of affairs at all? • How is it that there are laws of nature? • Why do the actual states of affairs have the character they do? • Why do the laws of nature have the character they do? Clearly, these questions pose issues of fundamental importance for any adequate philosophy of nature.1 Now it simply will not do to argue—as some recent cosmologists have done—that things exist, and exist in the way they do—because the laws of physics require it. For this just does not really accomplish the necessary job, seeing that it immediately raises the question of why those laws are as they are. The law-based explanation of reality would be much like that of the Indian sage who explained the earth’s place in space by maintaining that it was emplaced on the back of a large elephant who in turn stood on the shell of an enormous turtle. But it is, or should be, clear on the very surface of it that this state of affairs means that natural science will in the final analysis be unable to resolve those matters of ultimate explanation. It is, after all, the facts of science which themselves are at issue here. For those “ultimate questions” are to be seen as transcendental because they do not, by their very nature, admit of explanation on a naturalistic basis. Seeing that the very materials of scientific explanation themselves are at issue—this standard line of procedure is simply unavailable because such explanations require as inputs the very materials whose explanation is in question.

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3. THE TURN TO RELIGION Science does not require God. And yet by itself it does not satisfy our cognitive needs. After all, human agency is in this sense analogous to the divine. When I act within nature—say by moving this piece of paper about—I proceed by natural means. Of course it was I that moved the paper. But I did it by means of hands and arms, of muscles and bone and flesh. To explain that the paper moved then and there and how the paper moved then and there you need only refer to physical agencies. Only with the ultimate why that reaches outside the course of physical events need you ever make mention of me and my choice. But when the questions are about what happens within physical nature the answers are forthcoming in commensurate terms relating to the doings of nature itself. From the standpoint of philosophy those fascinating facts that emerge in the scientific study of nature always have larger ramifications. Science addresses such issues as: • How is it that processes of evolution by natural selection have unfolded in such a way that we humans have emerged on nature’s stage? But over and above such how questions that preoccupy science there are also such science-transcending why questions as: • Why is it that the world is such that within it there are processes of evolution by natural selection that have unfolded in such a way as to engender our human presence. These why questions that emerge for our scientific inquiries post different (extra-scientific) issues that have to be addressed by different (extra-scientific) means. And the “ultimate why question” is that which asks not just “why does the universe exist,” but rather “why does the universe exist as it is: why is it that the nature of physical reality is as we find it to be?” Now for better or for worse this is a question that cannot be answered solely on scientific principles. And there is a simple and deci-

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sive reason why this is so. For scientific explanations, by their very constitution as such, must make use of the laws of nature in their reasoning. But this strategy is simply unavailable in the present case. For those laws of nature required for scientific explanation are themselves a part—an essential and fundamental part—of the constitution of physical reality. And they are thereby a part of the problem and not instrumentalities available for its resolution. Natural science by its very nature operates within nature: its laws relate to what goes on on nature’s stage of actual occurrence. Why it should be that those laws are as they are—why they operate on principles of uniformity, economy, harmony, etc.—are questions that are simply not within its range. From this standpoint, the prime substantiating indications of the existence of a benign creator God are that the world (1) exists, (2) exhibits an intelligibly lawful order, (3) contains intelligent beings able to come to terms with item (2). But where would the circumstance that those big transcendental questions outrun the limits of naturalistic understanding leave us in the endeavor to get a cognitive grip on the issues? What other options are available to us when we are confronted with such scientific insolubilia? 4. SCIENCE IS NOT INCOMPATIBLE WITH BELIEF Scientific inquiry explains the way of what is. How and why it got to be that way is ultra vires, beyond its powers and its production. To explain the existence and operations of nature requires ultimate recourse to something else—something nature-transcendent. And God is far and away the best-available candidate for accomplishing this job. Scientific rationality cannot block the way of belief. On the contrary—in the final analysis it cannot but acknowledge its own limits and limitations. Viewed in its proper light it involves rather than impedes the turn to transcendence. Questions such as those posed by our deepest metaphysical and religious concerns are clearly not answerable via the observation-based methods familiar from the natural sciences. This of course is not

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news, the German logical positivists of the 1920-30 era emphatically insisted on this selfsame point. However, their conviction that scientific knowledge is solely and alone valid led them to dismiss these “transcendental” questions as inappropriate and intelligible. But another very different conclusion can also be drawn from this premiss, namely that answering such questions is indeed possible but calls for methods of deliberation different from those of the observational sciences. It is exactly this second sort of position that we purpose to take here, seeing that the idea that scientific inquiry is our sole source of meaningful information is no more and no better than an unsubstantiated prejudice. That which lies behind nature—that which accounts for its existence and substance—cannot be found within it. Its being and character cannot be discerned by observation—which is always oriented to nature as it is—but must be postulated on the basis of considerations regarding nature’s nature. Not observation alone but the overall substance of our experience—affective as well as observational experience included—must provide the rational basis of that postulation. Granted, Laplace was right. To do its own proper explanatory work, science does not need to bring God into it. It is, no doubt, part of scientific wisdom to discount the idea of God as an operative agency—a God-of-the-gaps whose intervention is invoked to offer a surrogate explanation of the things we do not otherwise understand. Yet the proper role of faith is not to provide a rational explanation for what happens in the universe, but rather to underwrite the idea that such an explanation is always in principle available—something which science cannot quite manage on its own. 5. THE ROLE OF VALUE The natural scientist deals with the workings of the universe; the fate of particular individuals, be they protozoa or people, does not concern him. But the fate of individuals does concern us—and in particular the fate of ourselves as intelligent agents with individual feelings and experiences, individual needs and morals, individual opportunities and aspirations. Science is based on generalizations that cap-

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ture the structural relationship of natural processes. Religion is based on appreciations and inspirations (revelations included)—on personal experiences that endour reality and our relationship to it with meaning, significance, and value. This “existential” level of our personal life and its spiritual attainment to existence at large does not concern science but nevertheless our religious sentiments can and should paint its enlightening picture. It is not as inquirers but as agents that religion addresses us. Science looks on us—as it looks on all else—as instances of types. The uniqueness of particulars eludes our generalitygeared science. And yet that is just exactly what we are: unique particulars. Religion addresses us as individuals. As far as science is concerned, there is nothing special about your parents, your siblings, your children. But the affective dimension of our nature takes a very different line. For religion, unlike science, does not so much inform as orient. In confronting us within the implications of our own being, it challenges us to ponder the challenges of opportunity and to consider the values defining the aims and goals that channel our actualities in this world. An objector may well ask: “But is religious experience and sensibility not itself a proper subject of scientific study?” An affirmative response is clearly in order here. Of course science can study us humans, and submit our thoughts and actions to its objectifying scrutiny. But now the normative dimension of things that is critical to the actual being of a person will be left by the wayside. For observation can report “People think that X,” but of course “People rightly think that X” is something else. Again “People disapprove of Y” can be a perfectly appropriate as a scientifically factual report, but “People quite properly disapprove of Y” is something very different. It is one thing to repute and examine experiences and something quite different to have them. (There is little to optics that a blind person cannot learn— but he nevertheless missed out on something crucial.) The internalities of reflection and judgment enrich human existence with something that science does not touch. The affective and spiritual dimension that is critically formative to our status as human persons addresses issues that just are not on the scientific agenda. Psychological science can say: “Those who have a religious or mystical experience claim that it gives them contact with a nature-

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transcendent sphere of concern.” But of course it is only those who actually have this experience who will so claim. What people make of their experiences—observational or interpersonal of religions—is up to them—and not up to the external observers who report about it. A crucial difference in “point of view” is at issue in the contact between those who actually experience and those for whom these experiences are mere “phenomena.” And so while science is a crucially important realm of human endeavor, what it will not—and from its own resources cannot—do is to take a position on this issue of experimental significance and meaning. When science considers religion, it does so ab extra and not from within the experiential domain of the believer himself. And not only appreciation and evaluation, but also agency becomes a crucial factor with respect to religious orientation. Science tells us what we can do—can possibly manage to realize—given the talents and resources at our disposal. But it does not and cannot tell us what we should do. After all, religion is not a source of factual information about how things stand and work in the world. We will indeed need science to accomplish that job. But there is another job that has to be done: the job of life-orientation, of guiding us to a realization of the things that are important, to help us achieve appropriate goals, values, interests. And here it is religion that seeks to direct our efforts and energies in directions that endow our lives with meaning and rational contentment, to satisfy not just our wants but our deepest needs, to confirm and consolidate the spiritual side of our lives, to encourage us to make the most of choices and to be able to face the inevitable end of our worldly existence without regret and shame at the loss of opportunities to contribute to the greater good of things. Certainly, religion is not, or should not be, viewed as a substitute for science; rather it should—by rights—provide a goad and encouragement to scientific work—to motivating the effort to comprehend more fully the nature of God’s universe and to avail ourselves of the opportunities that existence upon its stage puts at our disposal. Truth as such is not its own reward. The reason—the excellent reason—for the pursuit of truth is that truth is a better guide than falsity to successful living. Only the truth of things enables us to function in a difficult world with the rational hope of achieving our objectives.

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But this principle reaches beyond the realm of scientific fact into a larger realm of belief as well—belief grounded in experientially sustained affectivity. Those commitments which experience teaches to be conducive to satisfying and successful living are also based on reason—a decision based not just on the systematization succession transaction but a reason based on systematizing our experience at large—affective and “spiritual” experience included. As good a reason as any for doing something is that it facilitates the realization of a good and satisfying life, and this holds not just for our scientific convictions but our convictions at large. So the question becomes: Given the sort of world that our overall experience indicates this one to be, what sort of explanatory proceeding seems best suited to account for this situation? At this stage, however, the experience at issue will no longer be only the observational experience of our (instrumentality augmented) human senses. Rather in matters of the sort now at issue this evidence will be a matter not just of observation, but of the cumulative evidence of the aggregate totality of one’s life experience. And of course this “experience” has to be construed in the broadest possible sense, including not only the observational but also the affective, not only the factual but also the imaginative, not only physical experimentation but also thought experimentation, not only the personal but the vicarious. And since we ourselves are here as parts of nature and able in some degree to understand and appreciate it we are led to regard nature as a substantially user-friendly arrangement for intelligent beings. We are led to suppose that nature is congenial alike to the physical conditions for the existence of and the intellectual conditions for understanding by intelligent beings—that its scheme of things not only possibilizes but to some extent supports the existence and thriving of beings of our sort. 6. A CHANGE OF SUBJECT Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea that religion and science are simply different forms of discourse (“language games”)—different modes of linguistic activity does not do justice to the situation. For the difference does not lie in how we speak about things but in what we say

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about them: it is substantive rather than procedural in nature. For the two enterprises address different questions and deliberate different issues. They involve a change of subject rather than simply a change in the mode of discourse. Science seeks to know what the world is like; religion seeks for an answer to the question why it should be that the world is like that. Different projects are at issue and a division of labor is at work here. There are, at bottom, two prime modes of mental concern: cognition and evaluation—understanding and judgment. Scientific inquiry for its part addresses “just the facts”: the actualities of things. And it proceeds on a basis of observation. But judgment, by contrast, goes further to address also mere possibilities (hypotheticals). It requires imagination and needs to contrast what is with what might be. Its judgments over the +/- range of good/bad, nice/nasty requires the reactivity of both thought and feeling. What is at issue with the preeminently conceived understanding/judgment distinction is not Pascal’s contrast between mind and heart. For both of the previously contemplated modes of experience— both the observational and the affective—relate to the modus of mind. There is both cognitive and evaluative thought and reasoning, and judgments based on both are subject to rational norms. The commonplaces of ordinary experience reach us via the actualities of observation. But behind and beyond this there lie the possibilities of understanding, the extra-ordinary arrangements that are required for understanding why those ordinary realities are as is and what this means for us. Natural science, as we humans cultivate it, is an inherently progressive enterprise. Its inherent nature is such that it cannot reach a final definitive conclusion.2 But even if it did so, the nature of its work as defined by a particular range of issues (viz. how this world’s processes function so as to engender its phenomena) would not address— let alone resolve—the questions that figure on the agenda of theology viz. the world-transcending extramundane factors that account for the world’s being as is. The ultimate integration of these two projects—a comprehensive account of the what and the why of things—is accordingly not realiz-

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able. Its lineaments can at best be discerned “as through a glass, darkly.” The perfection we seek lies beyond our reach: here as elsewhere we must do the best we can and take in stride whatever risks such a policy entails. But, far more, the one thing that can be said is that there is no basis for insisting that the integration of these two actual domains of cognitive endeavor can be written off from the outset as an invariable impossibility. What has Nature done for you lately? It has ensured that you are here. It ill behooves us to question the benignity of a Nature which through endless twists, turns, and vicissitudes has managed to bring us ourselves upon the stage of realization. William James was doubtless right in that believers can and often do base their faith not upon evidence but upon the resolutions of a “will to believe.” Yet nothing like this is at issue here. The present approach to theism views it as grounded in authentic knowledge but not knowledge of the observational sort (characterized by the Soviet ideological who remarked astronauts returned from flight in space without encountering angels) but rather knowledge of the inferential sort that is not of the best-available explanatory systematization of our overall experience, with affective experience emphatically included above and beyond the observational. The concatenation of understanding (cognition) and judgment (evaluation) leads to the idea of a synoptic satisfaction—a world view that satisfies the demand of both forms of thought. And there need be—indeed should be—no antagonism here. There is no reason why there cannot be a synoptically satisfactory position that meets the demands of both inquiry (empirical) and judgmental (normative) reason. And religiosity is—or can be—a part of this holistic (synoptic, symbiotic) world-view—one that satisfies the demands of both sides of our intellectual constitution. On the one hand it can serve to alternate the cognitive mystery of cosmic existence; and on the other it can serve to enhance our affective confidence in the meaningfulness and ultimate value of our personal existence. Both observations and affectivity (feeling) are catered for by a nature that supports both quality of life and quality of thought. The world provides for a user-friendly existential context for beings like ourselves.

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And this theoretical fact rather than anything specifically observational in nature provides the basis of warrant for a postulation that transcends beyond the sensory domain. It is here that we find the rationale that points beyond the observational domain in the circumstance of the emergence of intelligent beings for whom that domain can serve as a springboard for larger ventures in understanding that are colored by issues of appreciation and value. These circumstances bring religion into the foreground.3 NOTES 1

To be sure, these questions relate to contingent existence. The theological issue of a necessary being remains outside the purview of present discussion. The literature of this topic is vast. An instructive recent discussion is Michael Heller, Ultimate Explanations of the Universe (Berlin: Springer, 2009). The present author’s position was articulated in The Riddle of Existence (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984).

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The reasons for this claim are set out in detail in my 1976 book on Scientific Progress. They are distinct from but not incompatible with Max Planck’s statement that “Science cannot solve the ultimate why story of nature”. And this is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve. Where is Science Going? (Tr. J. Murphy, New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1932).

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The contemporary literature of the subject is immense. A useful entryway is afforded by J. B. Stump and A. O. Padgett (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Chapter 2

ISSUES OF BELIEF 1. ACCEPTANCE OF GOD: THE IMPETUS TO BELIEVERSHIP Religion is not something whose nature is unmixedly positive, seeing that when people are intent on doing evil they will grasp at any straw to justify themselves—religion emphatically included. But when this occurs they have ill-advisedly discarded the essential hallmarks of authentic religiosity—due appreciation of the creative works of God and supportive respect for one’s fellows. (The sins of envy, exclusivity, and selfishness all come into operation here.) Religion’s core task is something positive. Issues of purpose significance and value—of the significance of the challenges of life in a difficult world confront us and demand our heed. Our efforts to comprehend the facts of sense-based experience reach out toward the larger possibilities of purpose and meaning—their orientation becomes transcendently directed beyond Nature to Nature’s God. In relation to belief there are two distinctly different questions: What God is, and what God does—and in specific does in relation to ourselves. As regards what God is, the short response is that he (or she or it) is a power or potency that ultimately accounts for the world’s existence and make-up in a way that reflects his loving care for what there is. Just this induces us to characterize that formative agency as a person, seeing that persons are the only items within the range of our experience that combine the factors involved here: reason, creativity, and caring. As regards what God does, he is the pivot of their ultimate explanation of why things are as is. As such he mediates our grasp, inadequate though it may be, on the “meaning” of it all—of our place and our role in reality’s scheme of things and of the challenges and opportunities that this condition of affairs puts at our disposal. Accordingly, one of the prime things that God does for us is to facilitate our understanding of the world we live in and our place within it. And another is to enable us to see more clearly the challenges, the opportunities,

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and the obligations that this condition of things makes incumbent upon us. And in correlation with these to indicate that our effects towards the good are not in vain—that reality in some way both encourages and appropriates our efforts to enhance the good of things. Many an aficionado of scientism argues: “Evolution by natural selection puts nails into the coffin of religiosity. For how could a creature that emerges from its operation possibly carry the hallmark of divine origins?” But the believer can easily turn the table here by asking: “How can a spark of divine be denied to a world possessed of laws that enable the natural emergence of being sufficiently intelligent to grasp the features of its own lawful operations?” And “How could a Nature that so functions as to have a being with God-like capabilities—capacities not only for thought and knowledge but for appreciation, caring, and love—emerge by its natural processes from the primal slime possibly not operate on principles instituted under divine supervision?” The argumentation of evolutionary atheism can be turned upside down as well. 2. GOD AS LOVE It is possible—and plausible—to distinguish between two very different approaches to the issue of someone’s stance towards the existence of God—approaches which, for reasons of abbreviative convenience, may be characterized as doxastic (belief-oriented) and axiological (value-oriented), respectively. On the one hand, one can ask the following family of questions: (1) Does X believe or disbelieve in the existence of God? (2) Just what sort of God is it in which X believes or disbelieves? (3) On the basis of what sorts of reasons does X believe or disbelieve in God? The approach reflected in these decidedly different questions is what will here be characterized as doxastic, because of their focus on the issue of belief. (Greek doxa = belief, opinion.) By contrast, the value-

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oriented axiological approach takes a very different, distinctively evaluative line. (Greek axio = to deem worthy, to value.) It pivots on the three related, but nevertheless very different questions: (i) Does X want God to exist—is this something seen as desirable (yearned for or hoped for)? (ii) Just what sort of God is it that X desires (yearns or hopes for)? (iii) For what sorts of reasons is it that X desires (yearns or hopes for) the existence of God? It is clear that distinctly divergent approaches are involved here, seeing that the first set of questions looks to beliefs, and the second to wishes—to hopes or desires with regard to the sort of God someone would want if they could have their way in the matter. The former issue pivots on a person’s convictions. But the latter pivots on a person’s values. Very different things are at issue. In principle, one can believe in the reality of a God whose existence one does not welcome, or on the other hand, one can yearn for the existence of a God in whose reality one does not believe. In a way, axiological atheism is a far more drastic position than doxastic atheism, since the axiological atheist is someone who, irrespective of whether or not he believes in God, would prefer to have him nonexistent, and would do away with him if he could. The axiological theist sees commitment to God as a matter of value-based desire and, at most, hope rather than a probatively assured confidence derived from the evidential impetus of revelation, a mystical encounter, or rational demonstration. With axiological theism there looms the large and absorbing issue of what sort of God one would have if one could get one’s way. This question looks towards something that is essentially utopian—a mind’s-eye view towards an ideal order that one would have to exist if only one could manage it. A fundamentally evaluative position is at issue rather than one that bears on existence as such, a position that reflects one’s deepest hopes, wants, and fears. Does one want a God who would avenge one’s wrongs and wreak havoc on one’s enemies, a God who labors

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for the advancement of one’s tribe or clan (or who assures victory to one’s side in battle), a God of justice to punish wrongs and reward good deeds, or a God of love, understanding and forgiveness? Clearly, a great range of variation exists, and people betray much about themselves when they position themselves in such a spectrum. Even atheism does not as such relieve its exponent of the burden of articulating a conception of God. Denying the existence of God does not free one from coming to grips with the conception of God. Quite regardless of the matter of believing or disbelieving in God’s existence, there remains the significant, preliminary issue of the descriptive ideas that someone has regarding the God whose existence or nonexistence this person is disposed to endorse. Is it the God who dwells on the pinnacle of the Homeric Mount Olympus, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of Plato’s Timaeus, the God of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the God of a neo-Aristotelian St. Thomas Aquinas, and so on. There is of course enormous scope for variation here across the spectrum from crudity to refinement. In fact, from the standpoint of a thoughtful believer there is something to be said for preferring a disbeliever with an enlightened conception of God to a believer who conceives of God crudely, as a partisan Oriental potentate whose prime object is to promote this believer’s own personal interests and power and to punish his enemies. 3. THE PRAGMATIC DIMENSION The timeless distinction between self-centered possession-desiring love (eros) the benignly affectionate love grounded in unselfish care for the best interests of the beloved (agapê) is too familiar to require elaboration. The crux for present purposes is the biblical idea that “God is love”—an idea grounded in the conception of a benign and benevolent God as a creative agency whose deepest care is for the best interest of the creation, a being whose very nature is geared axiologically to the realization of what is the overall achievable best for this world. Belief in God brings many benefits in its wake. Not only does it enable us to make more sense of things, but it enables us to face the

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challenges of a difficult world with the confidence that the force of good will prevail in the end. Against these beneficial considerations there stands the commonplace objection that such a pragmatic standpoint cannot provide for authentic religiosity because (so it is held) it pivots on matters of benefit and advantage. Now, to be sure, it is indeed on this basis that people have often argued in favor of religion. The religious person, so they maintain, is likely to be happier and more content with life, better adjusted, less discontent, fraudulent and neurotic. Yet clearly, anyone whose commitment to religion is motivated by such crass and self-profiting benefits is not an authentically religious person, seeing that for him religion is merely a means to some effectively selfish end. But this train of thought overlooks two important theoretical distinctions. The first of these key distinctions is that between two sorts of benefits: the crassly self-interested and the benignly self-regarding. The former relates to those matters that make a person better off, the second (by contrast) relates to those that make someone a better person. These are decidedly different questions. Now as regards the former the individual whose religiosity is merely a self-interested means to crass self-advantage is clearly not an authentically religious person. But that, of course, is not necessarily the case with someone whose religiosity is motivated with the second sort of potentially far more worthy objective. And when the benefits at issue with religious commitments are seen at spiritually benign rather than materially selfinterested terms, there is no longer a basis for dismissing the prospect of viewing religion in a pragmatic light. And here we come to the second important distinction that should be brought to bear in rebutting the crassness of religious pragmatism, namely that between the collateral benefits that may result from some measure and the motivating reasons that impel someone to take it. For example, someone may eat a particular meal because it is healthy, while the fact that it is also both hunger-alleviating and tasty may be incidental or even left wholly out of consideration. And just this sort of thing can and doubtless will figure in the religious commitments of people. The motivating benefit to authentic religiosity can properly be

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that this makes one a better person; the fact that it may well also make one better off through psychological benefits may be entirely outside the range of motivating considerations. And should this be the case and the individual acts out of considerations of what is the right thing to do—if what is truly beneficial rather than crassly selfadvantaging—then there is nothing incongruous of inappropriate about the pragmatics at issue. For acting out of a recognition that doing something is the best way to realize larger desiderata is something quite different from acting solely for narrowly constituted benefit of a crassly self-interested sort. And even when such benefits do (sometimes or always) result as an incidental and motivationally inert consequence of a certain measure this will detract nothing from its justifacating appropriateness in the larger scheme of things. The point is that pragmatism as a broader program is geared to the realization of aims and in the context of religion those ends can and actually should be spiritually positive rather than crass and materially self-concerned. The yearning for knowledge and for an understanding of the nature of things is a salient fact of our human condition. 4. THE CALL OF OPPORTUNITY The human quest for understanding has both a cognitive and a spiritual side: we want to understand not only how things work but why it is that they work that way. But fact and “meaning” are at the core of our concerns. We sometimes do—and generally should—seek out opportunities for the good which our presence on the world’s stage has put at our disposal. The forces and factors that have so functioned as to create the Reality that exists about us have so worked themselves out as to afford us the opportunities provided by existence in this world as the sorts of beings we are. Most prominent and impressive among these is the choice to do something of value, something to make this world a better place than it would be but for our presence within it. And the striking fact of it is that our efforts in this direction are guaranteed to be successful. For the fact of it is that even in merely

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trying to make the world a better place we automatically achieve our goal. For the very fact of our trying in and of itself make the world a better place than it otherwise would be, and makes us ourselves into better persons than we otherwise would be. Seeing ourselves as intelligent agents—beings that can to some extent understand the word and their place in it, and in virtue thereof having a special place in the scheme of things—specifically a responsibility to our kind (intelligent beings) and their well-being. Life affords us an unique opportunity, the opportunity and the obligation to self-improvement—to make ourselves better. And “better” here is not matter of being better than others (life is not a competition) but rather better than we ourselves would otherwise be. And so even acknowledging this obligation and making this effort we automatically succeed since this itself accomplishes the job. Things do not wear their meaning on their sleeves: they constitute their own explanation. The ordinary cannot account for itself. In the final analysis, efforts to account for the nature of ordinary experience requires as to reach out beyond this realm itself—out toward the extra-ordinary. The most fundamental fact of experience is that which stands at the basis of Descartes deliberations, viz. the fact of our existence. And the next is that is the fact that I think—and that in my thought I can comprehend at least some of the aspects and features of this world. Reality’s powers that be have brought these facts to realization are a prime concern of human thought and inquiry. This quest impels us inexorably toward the transcendental domain of things and thereby confronts us with a daunting task. Religion faces the problem of conveying in ordinary language something outside of what is encompassed in the range of ordinary experience for whose sake ordinary language was developed. The difficulty here lies in the trivial fact that “An X that is not an ordinary X” seems inevitably to relate to something that is not an X at all. The fact of it is that man (homo sapiens) is an amphibian. On the one side he lies in the world of the commonplace, the humdrum reality of ordinary experience. On the other side he can also dwell in the sphere of the transcendental and spiritual and normative—of what can, should, and must he, rather than of that which merely is. We are

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impelled toward a sphere of meaning, value, and purpose—vision beyond the reality of the senses toward one of the possibilities of thought. But why do I see myself as rationally entitled to believe in the existence of an invisible (and indeed for most of us inaudible) God? As I see it, there are both probative and pragmatic reasons for this. The probative reasons lie in the considerations that this belief forms part of what I see as the best-available systematization of the body of fact whose salient members and two patent feature of the world, namely (1) that it exists as what it is, and (2) that I am present within it as the being I am. The pragmatic reasons, by contrast, pivot on the beneficial rather than the explanatory, addressing the benefits that belief carries in its wake by enhancing one’s capacity to feel at home in a complex and difficult world. Religion supports and energizes the productive and constructive impetus that is indispensable to rational contentment with one’s existence. 5. FROM RELIGIOSITY TO CONCRETE RELIGION At this point a sceptic may well object as follows: Abstract religiosity and theism are all very well as far as they go. But they go no further than bloodless abstraction. What of a particular religion, a concrete faith, an “establishment”? How do you propose to move on from generic religiosity to concrete religion? Religiosity—theism, broadly speaking—is something generalized, indefinite, and schematic. Religion by contrast is concrete and laden with creedal and liturgical detail. Religiosity is theistic and perhaps even generally deistic. Religion by contrast is doctrinally laden—it is Catholicism, or Judaism, or Buddhism: shaped with detailed messages, transmitted through messengers (prophets) and leaders, or through sages (gurus, saintly role models). A religion is to religiosity as a meal is to cookery or a library to literature: the concretization of something inherently general and generic. There are alternatives here, and as ever in such matters the question arises: What is the right and proper alternative for me? The answer here will clearly depend upon how one is related in an historical and cultural context. You cannot be a Christian if you live

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in China in the 5th Century BC. You cannot be a Buddhist if you live in Peru in the time of Columbus. And you are not likely to be a Hindu if you live in the Spain of Philip II. The question is one of which William James called live options. And here there is no “one size fits all” here that is invariant across the range of historical and cultural settings. In these matters a rational person’s choice is shaped by the structure of his experience. The shamanism of 18th century central Africa is no longer available as a real option for 21st century Americans— unlike the various forms of Mediterranean religiosity. The first and most critical aspect of experience is encompassed in the Descartes-reminiscent realization of self-aware existence: cogito et sum. The combination of cognition (and ultimately science) and world-participation (and ultimately religion) gives us assurance of the compatibility of the comparability and symbiosis of these two salient aspects of intelligent being. Religious faith should, in the final analysis, not merely be the avowal of a personal perspective but should be seen as figuring as integral to the thought life of beings situated as we humans are in the world’s scheme of things via the manifold of experience that life’s vicissitudes have put at our disposal. Experience is the crucial determinative factor in relation to our thought and belief. The crux throughout issues of intellect here is alignment with our experience: coherence with credible beliefs on the epistemic side and harmonization with our evaluative reactions on the judgmental side, throughout the critical standards from cogent thought is aligned with the experience of the thinker.

Chapter 3

RELIGION AND SCIENCE 1. ANSWERING OBJECTIONS Any discussion aimed at reconciling religion with science opens the door to an array of possible objections. But these are not so decisive as to preclude plausible replies. It is instructive to examine this landscape of controversy somewhat more closely. “Is a scientist’s dedication to knowledge not paramount to a degree where he could only accept a religion whose creedal commitments he would conscientiously consider as truths?” This is doubtless so. But even a conscientious scientist would do well to distinguish between literal and figurative truths, factual and normative truths, informative and orientational truths. After all, the question of what we as individuals should do with our lives and make of the various opportunities at our disposal is not a scientific issue. Once we decide this sort of thing science can undoubtedly help us to get there. But what our destination should be is a matter not for science but rather for our commitment to goals and values. And this sort of thing is simply outside the province of science which tells us what the world is like but not what we should do with our lives. There will, of course, be overlapping issues where both religion and science will enter interactively. Religion calls on us to honor human life by according special treatment to the dead. By science will be needed to decide the question of whether Smith is in fact now dead so that these special procedures should be instituted. And so, while religion and science are distinct enterprises they certainly can and should interact with one another. A further objection may well arise at this point: “Granted, science and religion have different roles to play and different questions to address. But there may well arise some issues in which they come into conflict, the age of the universe, the origin of the world, the origin of man, and perhaps others.” Now the first thing to note here is that such seeming disagreements are mostly or even generally the products of misunderstandings (as is often the case with disagreements of all

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sorts). A deeper understanding of just exactly what the religious claims are and a fuller understanding of the scientific issues will often or even generally dissolve the conflict as the product of insufficiently deep understanding, and thereby as more apparent than real. But even were this not the case, there remain various options for coming to terms with such disagreements: • Make religion give way to science. Reconstrue those scientifically problematic religious claims as symbolic, figurative, or metaphorical. • Defer judgment. Realize that scientific understanding is a work in progress which has often changed its mind about things and thus await with hopefulness a change that will put matters into alignment in the wake of further scientific innovation. • Simply combine the two and accept the resulting “inconsistency.” Take the line that we live in a complex, multifaceted world where science and religion are both true from their own perspectives, and accept that the two just don’t jibe—that different conceptual perspectives can be combined no more than different visual ones can. This in effect leaves their fusion as a mystery that passes our understanding. • Take recourse in humility. Acknowledge that there are many things we just don’t understand and that reconciling apparent divergences at the moment between science and religion may just be one of them. (After all, who knows how hypnotism or acupuncture work.) Clearly, the “conflict between science and religion” does not leave one without options, seeing that a position can be developed to the effect that in cases of conflict some sort of reconciliation will in the end prove possible. After all, science and religion are different enterprises that address different issues and concerns. Science answers questions about how the world works, religion answers questions about what we should do

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within the scope of what if affords us. Science deals with what are the actual workings of nature; religion deals with what are the appropriate doings of man. Different problems are at stake and neither serves the purposes of the other. But now consider the objection: “I want to be a modern, scientific person, who bases his belief on the teachings of science. And science does not speak for religion: one cannot base theism on scientific facts.” Well, so be it. But the reality of it is that we stand committed to lots of things that we cannot base on scientific facts. Are the challenges and rewards of living ideas we base on science? We do—or should—bear a special responsibility for concern and care for our parents, brothers, spouses. Does science establish them as more lovable and worthy of our affection than other people? We try to earn the respect of others. Does science teach us that other-respect—or selfrespect for that matter—is a paramount value? Do we base our values on the teachings of science rather than the impetus of our natural human feelings? It is simply not through science that we configure out loyalties, our allegiances, our values. Science tells us about facts; but their significance—religious significance included—will and must come from somewhere else. And it is just here that religious commitment comes into it. With regard to the question of the existence of God, the great physicist Laplace offered the remark that “I had no need for that hypothesis.” And this is certainly correct. For scientific questions have to be addressed on scientific principles. With respect to how things work in the cosmos the authority of science will be complete. If we want to know how it is that there are microbes in the world, we had best turn to biological science. But there are also questions which lie above and beyond the voice of science. And the question of why it is that that world is such that there are microbes in it is one of these. For what is basically at stake here is a value issue, presumably to the general effect that a world with microbes in it has some significant advantage over alternative publications. Of course someone might say that such a question is improper and illegitimate—that if an issue makes sense at all then science can resolve it. But this decidedly radical stance of scientism (as it is usually called) is matter not of good sense but of a rather radical and decidedly problematic ideology.

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Science-inspired anti-religionists often support their position by portraying theism as merely the response to a psychological need. Their reasoning goes essentially like this: “Man is a weak and vulnerable creature existing in a difficult and often seemingly hostile world. As such he has a psychological need for reassurance that the world is a user-friendly habitat functioning under the auspices of a benign creative agent or agency.” Now for one thing, to speak of something as “a mere psychological need of man” verges on self-contradiction. For there is nothing “mere” about such needs. When a psychological need achieves generality it thereby achieves a sort of objective validity as well. Given the realities of human development it is bound to reflect something that has survived in the operations of a rational creative, thereby betokening an efficacy that serves to evidentiate objective validity. Even as our felt need for food would not be there if our bodies were not sustained by nourishment so our felt need for spiritual sustenance could not be there if the world’s spiritual forces did not sustain it. But there is also another problem about consigning religions to the limbo of a “mere psychological need.” For this argument effectively shoots itself in its own foot. The unbeliever who deploys it uses in defense a weapon that equally threatens himself, since it can just a readily be used against his own position. “Man is a willful and arrogant being for whom the thought of an all-observing and stern judge who condemns his wicked ways is intimidating and daunting. As such he has a psychological need to be liberated from the prospect of a sternly paternal judge who realizes and condemns the evil of his ways, accordingly it is no more than the response to a psychological need.” The upshot is clear: The Argument from Psychological Need is a two-edged sword that cuts both ways—usable against theism and atheism alike. In the quarrel between the atheist and the theist, argumentation from need is a wash. “But where is the evidence that speaks for the truth of religion?” This question has to be approached from the opposite end—from the angle of the question “If those religious contentions were indeed true, what sort of evidence for this fact could we reasonably expect to obtain for it?” After all, belief in God is the sort of thing that is not a matter of scientific observation and theory. We do not, cannot, should not expect astronauts to come back with reports of angelic encounters

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in outer space. (As Nikita Khrushchev once complained they did not.) It has to be through inner urgings and impetus of thier hearts that people are led to religion, not through outer observation. So if there were indeed a benevolent God we would expect that at least in the long run (and not necessarily the short) and at least in the aggregate (and not necessarily everywhere) those who live lives mindful of God’s suppositions would derive some benefit thereby. And if it is miracles we demand, then is not our very life itself a constant reminder of the miracles in nature? Is not this sort of evidentiation the best and most one could reasonably expect? What is it you want? Tablets from the mountain? Voices from the clouds? Been there; done that; you just missed it, sorry. The best available evidence for physical theories is experimentation in the physical laboratory; the best available evidence for medical drugs is by clinical trials; the best available evidence for religion is by experimentation and testing in the laboratory of life. Are nonbelievers happier, better, more contented people than believers? Or is it the other way round? Look about and see for yourself. Here as elsewhere we must allow the indications of the evidence to speak. The reality of it is that science itself is not exempt form “faith in things unseen.” Nothing guarantees that the phenomena are always and everywhere as they are within our range of observation. Nothing guarantees that the laws and regularities that have been in operation in cosmic history heretofore will continue unchanged in the future. Nothing guarantees that other universes (if such there are—and we presumably cannot get there from here) have any even remote resemblance of ours. That nature’s laws are as we think them to be is something we cannot know for sure but can only ... hope. To be sure, the hope that underpins the inductive proceedings of science are geared to the objectives of the enterprise—to expecting enhanced cognitive returns. And it is not for the sake of enhanced knowledge of world-explanative facts that we turn to religion but rather as a ways of situating oneself meaningfully within a difficult and complex world. “But surely scientists are among the smartest people there are, and for the most part they are not religious.” This objection, too, is inappropriate. For one thing, religiosity just is not a matter of smarts—of

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calculation, of figuring things out by brain power! It is, rather, a matter of having a reflective perspective on matters of life, death, and man’s place in Reality’s great scheme of things—of having a certain stance toward the world we live in and in which reactions like awe and wonder are significant and responses like worshipful humility figure significantly. The idea that it is inappropriate for a scientist to be religious because the majority of scientists are not theists is quite misguided. After all, scientists themselves do not proceed in this manner. It is not part of the scientific mentality to “go with the flow” and accept what the majority thinks. Scientists try to figure things out for themselves as best they can. Moreover, the reality of it is that while the majority of scientists are (probably) atheists nevertheless a very sizable minority of them are theists of one sort or another. Certainly this has been so traditionally from Galileo to Newton to Maxwell to Einstein. But even today many fine scientists are theists, and in some fields—cosmological physics in particular—they often even put their theism in touch with their scientific work. “But the idea of an intelligent creator just doesn’t make sense. After all, the universe has developed by some sort of cosmic evolution. And any sort of evolutionary product is inefficient, slow, wasteful. Surely an intelligent creator would do better.” This sort of objection is predicated on the idea that an intelligent creator would not opt for getting the physical reality under way by a process of cosmic evolution proceeding developmentally from some un-state inaugurated in a big-bang-like initiation event. The objector seems to think it would only be fitting to the divine dignity to inaugurate a universe by zapping it into existence in medias res, as a development-dispensing concern. It is, however, not readily apparent why this would be preferable. And it poses some distinctive problems of its own—for example, why the universe should not have been created five minutes ago completely fitted out with geological traces, human memories, etc. With a view to evolution by a selection “rough in tooth and claw” John Stuart Mill viewed the ordinary course of Nature as ongoingly involved what in humans would be utterly abhorrent.1 And T. H. Huxley held that men should not imitate Nature but should liberate them-

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selves from it by substantiating ethical conduct for natural eventuations. Neither thinker was ready to look at the matter holistically and thus give Nature credit for operation in natural processes that brought into being creatures capable of this superior mode of comportment. Yet what of slowness? What of wastage? Well, where our objector complains of wastage a more generous spirit might see a Leibnizian Principle of Fertility at work that gives a wide variety of life forms their moment. (Perhaps the objector wouldn’t think much of being a dinosaur, but then many is the small child who wouldn’t agree.) Anyway, perhaps it is better to be a microbe than to be a “Wasn’t that just Isn’t,” to invoke Dr. Seuss. But what of all that suffering that falls to the lot of organic existence? Perhaps it is just collateral damage unavoidable in the cosmic struggle towards intelligent life. But this is not the place or time for producing a Theodicy and address the theological Problem of Evil. The salient point is simply that the Wastage Objection is not automatically telling and that various lines of reply are available to deflect its impact. And as to slowness, surely the proper response here is to ask: What’s the hurry? In relation to a virtually infinite vastness of time, any finite initial timespan is but an instant. Overall, it would be profound error to oppose evolution to intelligent design—to see these two as somehow conflicting and incompatible. For natural selection—the survival of forms better able to realize self-replication in the face of challenges and to overcome the difficulties posed by the world’s vicissitudes—affords an effective means to to intelligent resolution of unavoidable problems. (It is no accident that whales and sophisticated counter-designed submarines share much the same physical configuration or that the age of iron succeeded that of bronze.) The process of natural relation at work in the unfolding of biological evolution is replicated in the rational selection we encounter throughout the history of human artifice. On either side, evolution reflects the capacity to overcome obstacles and resolve problems in the direction of greater efficiency and effectiveness. Selective evolutionary processes—alike in natural (biological) and rational (cultural) selection—are thus instrumentalities that move the developmental course of things in the direction of increasing rationality.

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“But in the light of such utilitarian considerations religion is perhaps simply a matter of evolution-engendered impetus to belief, leaving truth altogether by the wayside, and thereby bereft of rational legitimacy.” Yet does this conclusion really follow? Is conceding that a certain instinct has evolution’s Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval not already to concede to it a solid basis in fact? To say that religious belief is “no more” than the product of an evolutionary instinct is to have a strange idea about what can be considered “no more.” For to say of a belief-instinct that it is grounded in evolution is automatically to concede to a significant evidential basis in the world’s operative realities. Evolution is not a process that favors the misguided, deceitful, and false. As Darwin himself already noted in his Descent of Man, “belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal.” And on the basis of evolutionary principles it is difficult to imagine that this would be so if such a belief were not somehow survival conducive. Belief in an ultimately benign cosmos is clearly likely to benefit agents of finite intelligence who must constantly act in the expectation that things will turn out well. And this is going to require the suitable backing of fact. Are things that taste good generally edible and things that taste bad not generally harmful? Is not the tendency to believe that things as are our experience indicates them to be not in general correct as well as essential to the conduct of life? Does evolution itself not proceed via a systemic coordination of utility and correctness? Evolutionary grounding surely constitutes a positive credential rather than a refutation. After all, evolution will not back losers. For belief-motivated agents, cognitive adequacy is bond to prove survival conducive. Evolution will not—cannot—imprint us with tendencies that are systematically counterproductive—even optimal illusions root in processes that work to our advantage. Its motto is: survival of the most advantageous. And which is more advantageous for us: truth or falsehood? Will it advantage us to think that hostiles are friends and friends friendly, that poisons nourish and nourishments poison, that small objects are large and large ones small? There may be forces at work in the universe that engender tendencies to systematic error, but evolution is not one of them.

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“But what of the untold suffering that has been—and is—imposed on mankind in the name of religion?” All one can say here is that condemnation by associates is not sensible—any more than guilt by association is. Pretty well anything useful in human affairs has the potential of abuse as well. The knife that helps to feed us can murder as well. The medicine that can cure can also poison. The police that sustain our peace can be an instrument of oppression. The religions which should by rights sustain brotherhood can make for enmity. All this is true and regrettable. But there is nothing unique or different here—we confront a fact of life that obtains throughout the realm of human affairs. If we refrain from resort to those things which admit of abuse there is little we would be able to accomplish in this life. Moreover, people in glass houses should not throw stones. When complaining of harm due in the name of religion, one should not overlook entirely harm done under the auspices of science. Those greatest of all physico-experiments, atomic bombs, have killed far more people than the crusades. The medical experimentation of the German extermination camps killed more people than the Spanish Inquisition. The complex machinery of informed consent in matters of pharmacology and medicine represent so many ventures in closing barn doors after fled horses. “But what of all the wicked and even crazy things that people have done—and are doing—in the name of religion?” Here again condemnation by association does not work. Because some people pursue a project in evil ways does not mean that everyone need do so. The situation is akin to the injunction Find yourself a profession. Clearly, the existence of wickedness in the group should not deter one from being a doctor, baker, or candlestick maker. One need not be estranged from religion by the fact that some practitioners are nasty any more than an accountant or professor need be. And of course the same thing goes for scientists as well. The proverbial “mad scientist” does not annihilate the value of the whole venture. To reject being affiliated to the wicked is to resign from the human race. “But so far it has only been argued that a scientifically minded person can be religious: that various obstacles and objections can be removed. But it is one thing to hold that something can be done, and something else to hold that it should be done. So why should a mod-

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ern scientifically-minded person adopt a religion?” The answer is that one should only do so if one wants to: only if there is urging in one’s inner nature that impels one in this direction. But of course human nature being what it is, this is something that is likely to be the case—at least potentially—with all of us. For when we consider our place in the world’s vast scheme of things, all of us are liable to that sense of awe and wonder that lies at the basis of religiosity and to yearn for a reassurance of our worth and dignity only faith (and not knowledge) can provide for us. Man—homo sapiens—is a rational animal. And what lifts us above the level of animality, is this very reason through which we come to knowledge—and preeminently scientific knowledge that includes us regarding the limits and limitations which call for a confirmation of meaning and value to which religious faith alone can adequately respond. “But can’t I lead an ethically good and evaluatively fruitful life without religion?” Certainly you can! Many people manage to do so. But it’s a bit harder. It’s like asking “Can’t I be a good violin player without lots of practice?” or “Can’t I be a fluent Mandarin speaker if I only start learning at 30?” It can be done. Some very fortunate people can bring it off. But it is not easy—and scarcely practicable for most of us. “But all these considerations are vague and directionally inconclusive. They speak for having a religion but do not resolve the issue of which one.” True enough. So what is one to make of the plurality of religions? The reality of different religions is a fact of life. Throughout the history of human civilization, different forms of religious commitment have co-existed on our planet. And it is perfectly clear why this should be so. For religions at once reflect and actualize how people relate to transcendent or “ultimate” realities that create and shape the world we live in and our destiny within it. But of course here as elsewhere how people relate to things is determined by their issue-relevant experience. And since people differently situated in variant historical and cultural contexts have different courses of experience, there are bound to be different religions. After all, some religions are simply unavailable to people for historical reasons. The ancient Greeks of Homer’s day could not have become Muslims or Christians. And cultural context will clearly be another limiting fac-

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tor. Some religions are inaccessible to people because the whole issue of their experience points them in altogether different directions. The Englishmen of the era of Pusey and Newman could be Nonconformist or Anglican—or Roman Catholic. They could not really have joined the Shinto faith, let alone that of the Mayans or the Aztecs. Cultural contexts limit the range of available options. And for particular individuals even one’s personal and idiosyncratic temperament will limit the alternatives that are realistically available to people. So it seems as though the issue of religious pluralism is going to have to be personalistically relativized. There being many religions, the question—seemingly—will be “Which one of these various possibilities is going to be right for me—or for X? For the individual there is going to be a limit to the range of what William James characterized as “live options.” In his characteristically vivid prose he wrote: Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that the lives of all men should show identical religious elements? In other words, is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds regrettable? To these questions I answer “No” emphatically. And my reason is that I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions. Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner . . . If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer.2

So while there indeed are various religions, nevertheless the reality of it is that the range of religions that are realistically available to a given individual is drastically curtailed. In adopting a religion as in adopting a profession or selecting a place to live you have to make up your own mind on the basis of the best information you have the time and energy to collect. And the range is confined by potent constraints and depends upon the person’s culture, environment, familial situation, personal disposition, and the like, to an extent that often as not narrows the range of alternatives down to one. The question “What religion is right for me?” is for most of us analogous to that of choos-

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ing a language. One’s culture context does the job for most of us. Of course there is some modest degree of choice—we can with great effort tear ourselves loose to go elsewhere. But only if you do so as a small child will the result ever be completely natural. The individual who shifts to another language as an adult will never speak it entirely as a native. And those who are able to make even a halfway successful job of it are comparatively few and far between. “But is this sort of position not that of an indifferentist relativism (‘its all just a matter of taste and inclination—there is no rhyme or reason to it.’)?” No. It certainly is not. Rather, it is that of a reasoned contextualism based on what is appropriate for people given circumstances of their particular situation. And contexts can grow— especially under the impetus of expanding experience—personal and vicarious. And there is, of course, no reason why these circumstances should not include a critical scrutiny of the alternatives. For religions are not created equal. An intelligent and enterprising person should not hesitate to explore the options: a religion is not a gift horse into whose mouth one should not look critically. But what sense can one make of the question “Is there one single, uniquely best and appropriate religion?” What sort of cogent case could the antipluralist advocate of “one uniquely true religion” possibly have in view? To all visible intents and purposes this question comes down to: “Is there one religion which any rational person would accept given the opportunity—that is, would freely choose in the light of full information about it and its alternatives?” We are, to all appearance, driven back to Kant’s question about “religion within the limits of reason alone.” On this basis someone could well protest: “Does not this very approach seriously prejudice matters by prejudging a very fundamental issue. For does it not put Reason in the driver’s seat by putting it in the role of the arbiter of religion. And does it thus not ride roughshod over Pascal’s insistence that some human fundamentals are properly matters of the Mind and others of the Heart?” But this objection simply has to be put aside as contextually inappropriate. If that question about the one true and optimal religion is indeed meaningful then there will and must be a pre-commitment

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neutral, rationally cogent answer to it that is being demanded. We have no sensible alternative here. What sort of answer to our question could we want that is not reasonable? For sure, it would make no sense to assess the merit of a religion on its own telling. Some commitment-neutral standpoint is needed. And what better place is there to go than the realm of reason? So what is it that our rationality has to say on the matter? If it is our intent and purpose to proceed objectively and appraise religions on a basis that involves no prior substantive religious commitments and proceeds from a standpoint entirely devoid of substantive religious precommitments, then we have no real alternative but to proceed functionally—to go back to square one and begin with the question of the aims and purposes that religions serve as modes of human belief and practice. And so there is really only one path before us. It is— prepare for a shock!—the way of pragmatism, that is, of a functionally oriented inquiry into the question of which religion it is which optimally accomplishes the aims and purposes for which religions are instituted as operative practices within human communities. For if what lies before us is the question of religious optimality—of which of those multiple religions is to qualify as best—then the question of “How for the best?” simply cannot be avoided. At this stage we have no realistic alternative but to view religions in a purposive light and inquire into the aims and purposes for which religions are instituted in human communities. We will—here as elsewhere—have to confront the question of the aims of the enterprise, asking: “Why is it that people should undertake a religious commitment at all? What sensible human purpose is realized by making a religious commitment a significant part of one’s life? What’s in it for us—to put it crassly.” In approaching religion from such a practicalist point of view—inquiring into the human aims and objectives which adherence to a religion can and should facilitate—one is going to come up with some such list as: • Providing a framework for understanding the world and our personal place within it that energizes what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

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• Providing a focus for the sense of awe, wonder, and worship as we puny creatures confront a natural world of vast extent and power, giving a sense of comfort in the face of the vast forces beyond our control. And possibilizing constructive interaction with an agency that govern the fate of all we hold dear. • Providing for an evaluative appreciation of the universe and giving an impetus to human productivity and creativity within it. Enabling a frail and vulnerable creature to feel “at home” in the universe and strengthening the sense of opportunity to have a “meaningful life.” • Providing people with a perspective that gives their lives a meaningful position in the universe’s grand scheme of things, providing them a world-view supportive of human aspirations and diminishing any sense of futility, alienation, and dehumanization. • Providing for a sense of social solidarity with our fellows and for an appreciation of the worth and dignity of human potential in a way that strengthens the fabric of mutual concern, care, and respect for one another and a diminishing of man’s inhumanity to man. Then too, there is the role of religion in easing people’s anguish and anxiety in the face of life’s frustrations and difficulties. The spiritual impact of “lifting people’s spirits” is a vibrant reality. In augmenting the quality of their lives and enhancing their performance in meeting life’s challenges religion can and should make a positive contribution to the quality of life. On this basis, it emerges that a complex fabric of potential psychological, social, and cognitive benefits are at issue with a person’s commitment to a religion. In other words there is—or can be— something in it for us. And a chain of natural connections links all of these by a line that runs from cosmic congeniality to individual selfworth, to the worth of our peers, to human solidarity at large. More than any other ideological posture, religious faith makes manifest “the

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power of positive thinking.” Without religion, in sum, it is somewhere between difficult and impossible to realize various salient positivities that are conducive, and perhaps even to some extent indispensable, to human flourishing. We confront the question of compassion where to all appearances the best we can then do is to apply the standard of humanity itself and ask: What form of religion is it that most effectively succeeds in calling forth the best in people and most supportively energizing them into a way of life that deserves our admiration and respect? Within the narrow confines that are now upon us this seems to be the best and most one can do to effect and “objective” comparison. For without serious commitment to cultivation of the great goods whose pursuit is an opportunity afforded us by human existence—goodness, happiness, virtue, beauty, knowledge—a religion builds on sandy ground. Even without question-begging precommitments we can look at religions not only subjectively in terms of their capacity to speak to us personally but more impersonally in terms of their capacity to address that larger issue that confront all of us humans relative to the challenges of creating an intellectually and emotionally satisfying life within the circumstances of a complex and often difficult world. Where entry into a community of faith is concerned, we humans, as rational beings, are not just entitled but effectively obligated to look for a religion that is intellectually satisfying, personally congenial, and socially benign. A religion whose theologians avoid the difficult questions, whose preachers do not engage the sympathy of our hearts, and whose practitioners are not energized to exert effort for the general good of mankind and the alleviation of suffering is surely thereby one unworthy of enlisting the allegiance of sensible and sensitive people. Admittedly, there is little doubt that, judged by the aforementioned standards, the record of all of the world’s major religions is rather spotty. Unquestionably, our religions—like all other human enterprises and mutilations—will reflect the frailties and imperfections of our species though the fact of its being a structure built up of and by the crooked timber of humanity. But the issue is not one of perfection. It is a matter of the seriousness of effort and the comparative extent of success.

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To be sure, someone who becomes religious only from considerations of “What’s in it for him” is not an authentically religious person at all. But the crux is that religious commitment is transformative. No matter how you enter in—be it for reasons of human solidarity, or even for crass and self-advantaging motives—you will not manage to remain there. Commitment, no matter how modest at first, will undergo a natural process of growth. “But what if I can’t get myself to believe all those creedal doctrines and teachings that go with a religion?” You might begin by realizing that getting into a religion is not a matter of all-at-once. Make a start! Give God a chance! The odds are that he’ll help you work things out as life moves along. And get to know and interact with other believers; solidarity of association will help. (Reading Blaise Pascal’s Thoughts (Pensées) may give you good guidance here!)3, 4 2. ANTITHEOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGIZING The fact of it is that atheism admits of demonstrative proof as little as does theism itself. And given our natural yearning for an explanation of nature’s nature and the inevitability of transcendence here, it cannot be plausibly maintained that the bodies of proof automatically on atheisms side. Here atheism stands on pretty much the same footing as religion as itself a version of faith and indemonstrable belief. (In this regard the situation is pretty much that of a coincidence of oppositions and it is little exaggeration to saying that atheism is itself something of a religion.) Of course, there still remains the well-trodden prospect of antitheological psychologizing. The general line is all too familiar: “You see the traditional monotheistic God as desirable merely because he answers a psychological need of yours. You have a psychological yearning for acceptance, validation, support. Your God is a mere parentsubstitute to meet the needs of a weak and dependent creature.” So argues the psychologizing opponent of axiological theism. But this sort of facile sort of psychologizing ultimately cuts both ways. For the axiological theist can readily respond along the following lines:

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You see the traditional monotheistic God as undesirable because you find the very idea threatening. You atheists too are “God fearing,” but in a rather different sense. You are afraid of God. You have an adolescent’s fixated fear of and a condemnation by authority. Your atheism roots in self-contempt. Recognizing what an imperfect creature you yourself are, you have a fear of being judged and found wanting. The very idea of God is threatening to you because you fear the condemnation of an intelligent observer who knows what you think and do. You are enmeshed in an adolescent aversion to parental disapproval. So runs the psychologizing counterargument. And this line is not without surface plausibility. Many people are in fact frightened by the prospect of a belief in God because they ultimately have a contempt of themselves. They feel threatened by a belief that God might exist, because they feel that, were it so, God would not approve of them. For them, atheism is a security shield of sorts that protects them against an ego-damaging disapproval by somebody who “knows all, sees all.” Atheists are not infrequently people on whose inmost nature the vice of self-contempt has its strongest hold. Pretentions to the contrary notwithstanding, the atheist’s actual posture is generally not a self-confident independence of spirit, but a fear of being judged. In this regard, then, there is simply a standoff in regard to a Freudstyle psychologizing about religion. Those psychologizing arguments that impute rationally questionable motives that can be deployed against the believer are not difficult to revise and redirect as arguments against the atheists. Psychologizing is a sword that cuts both ways in regard to axiological theism. Both sides can easily play the game of projecting, on a speculative basis, a daunting variety of intellectually non-respectable motives for holding the point of view that they oppose. NOTES 1

John Steward Mill, “The Claims of Labor,” Dissertations and Discussions, 15 vol’s, (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867), Vol II, pp. 288.

2

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York & London: Longmans Green, 1902), p. 487.

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A vast body of excellent material is available on the topic of this lecture. Michael Ruse’s Can a Darwinean be a Christian (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) is a good example and the writings of William James afford a classic source. A fine contemporary anthology is A. R. Peacock ed., The Science and Theology in the Twentieth Century (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1985). The website of an organization of Christians in Science and engineering of the American Scientific Association (ASA) at http://www.asa3.org/asa/topics/empty/WebList/List1WebBooks.html points to many excellent discussions of these topics. Some stimulating deliberations are offered in such personal statements of Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006) and Owen Gingerich God’s Universe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). An interesting collection of interviews with twelve leading scientist is presented in P. Clayton and J. Schaal (eds.) Practicing Science, Living Faith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Two scholarly journals of excellent quality are devoted to cognate issues: Faith and Philosophy and Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. The Templeton Foundation has sponsored numberless conferences and workshops for constructive interchange between scientists and theologians. Many scientific investigators are nowadays pursuing lines of research that have religious ramifications. An example of a scientifically sophisticated paper of theological bearing whose general drift, at least, may be accessible to a scientifically untutored reader is Euan J. Squires, “Do We Live in the Simplest Possible Interesting World?” The European Journal of Physics, vol. 2 (1981), pp. 55-57.

4

This essay is dedicated to my daughter Catherine, who encouraged me to discuss the question that it addresses. I am grateful to Robert Kaita, James V. Maher, and Aug Tong for constructive suggestions.

Chapter 4

GOD AND THE GROUNDING OF MORALITY 1. THE BEST-INTEREST THEORY OF MORALITY The question of the grounding of morality has been on the agenda of philosophy ever since the Ring of Gyges episode of Plato’s Republic which pivots on the challenging question: Why be good in cases where you can be sure of getting away with an advantage by being bad? There are two substantially different ways of posing the issue because the question “Why be moral?” can take two very different forms: 1. Why should I be moral? How is it that I am well advised to act as morality requires? How is morality-conformable action really in my best interests? 2. Why must I be moral? How is it that acting morally is required of me—through its being actually obligatory rather than merely somehow advantageous—mandated rather than merely advisable. As regards the first question the general line of answer is familiar. It runs essentially as follows: Morality is a matter of rational selfinterest. In acting morally one supports and promotes a system of action from which all of us benefit. Avoiding a bellum omnia contra omnes is the essence here. (Think of orderly queuing to avoid a freefor-all.) Peoples honoring the strictures of morality engenders a userfriendly system of procedure by which all of us benefit. (Kurt Baier’s classic Moral Point of View sets out the details of such an approach.) What we have here is what might be called the Best-Interest Theory of morality.

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The Achilles heel of this theory is that its line of reasoning shows only that one is well-advised to be moral—that meeting the demands of morality is conducive to one’s best interests. What it does not do is to show why one is obligated to be moral: why it is a matter of duty and obligation to do so—are not just one of advantage and selfinterest. We are still left to wonder why transgressions are not just illadvised and counterproductive, but actually wrong or wicked. This later issue calls for an altogether different approach—one that is not geared to deliberations regarding Question 1, but requires a shift of orientation to Question 2 with its concern for duty and obligation. 2. THE DIVINE-COMMAND THEORY OF MORALITY Now in this regard there enters a by-now familiar doctrine that connects God and morality—the so-called “Divine Command Theory” which has it that actions become wrong through the prohibitions of God—that various human doings are rendered morally unacceptable by the fact that God forbids them. Duty on such an approach issues from the mandates of the divine will. Notwithstanding its surface plausibility this position is ultimately untenable. For one cannot but acknowledge that God, as a preeminently rational being, would necessarily have good reasons for his whatever he wishes and commands. And these good reasons of his will by virtue of their very nature as good reasons thereby automatically serve as such not just for God but for us as well. On this basis morality’s rationality is going to be something that is merely ratified rather than created by the circumstance of being commanded by God. Divine commands can certainly identify the demands of morality and confirm the moral norms. But those norms have a raison d’être of their own. God’s commandments prohibit misdeeds because they are wrong in their nature: they do not somehow wrongify otherwise morally indifferent acts. And so the divine mandate is not the ultimate basis here. And so, the ultimate source of obligation can neither lie in selfinterest and a self-involving benefit nor yet in the existence of a divine command. Where then does obligation come from?

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3.

A DIFFERENT TURNING

Now what I propose to argue here is that the basis of moral obligation is not a duty of obedience but rather a duty of gratitude. And so on this present account it is not God’s role as ruler but God’s role as creator that is crucially indispensable in an adequate account of morality. Accordingly the crux of moral obligation lies not in the will of God—in divine decrees and mandates. Rather, it lies ultimately in the beneficence of God—in debt incurred through benefit bestowed: a benefit that is not a contractual product but a freely bestowed boon. Precisely because the benefit of existence is freely bestowed and not the product of a bargain, it is the source of obligations of honor rather than of obligations of contract. The inherent propriety of a due acknowledgement of benefits received is at issue. Morality’s mandate is not grounded in a social contract of sorts, but in due acknowledgment of benefits received—in appropriate gratitude to the author of all. On this perspective, moral obligations (dutifulness) is not inherent in a divine mandate—orders as such do not constitute moral obligations. Rather moral obligation inheres in a debt of gratitude—a response of due acknowledgment of benefits bestowed. We are well advised to be moral because it is to our (individual and collective) advantage; we may well be required to be moral because of a divine mandate; but we are obligated to be by so to make a due acknowledgement of gratitude for benefits bestowed. On such a perspective the ultimately pivot for the grounding of morality is neither self nor society but God. And rationale of morality lies in the consideration that it represents something that we owe to the power, force, potency that has brought us into being as a debt of gratitude for affording us this opportunity. And it is exactly this debt of gratitude—a gratitude to God, if you will—which in the final analysis is the basis of moral obligation, the ground of that mandatory ought which is the hallmark of moral obligation.

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4. BUT ARE THOSE OPPOSITES FOR THE GOOD REAL? Conforming to morality’s demand for honoring the claims of others represents a debt of gratitude. We owe it to the creative forces that have brought us into being to make the most of our opportunities for the good. And on the endeavor to meet this obligation we are called in to make the most and best of ourselves: to proceed in our action to produce the very best version of ourselves that we can possibly realize. And it is this obligation that is the ultimate basis for our commitment to morality. We are part of a world not of our making that puts at our disposal a multitude of unearned benefits by way of resources and opportunities for the realization of good things. A closer look at duty indicates that three levels are at issue here: duty to ourselves:

reflexive [1st person]

duty to others:

donative [2nd person]

duty to God: (creator of the cosmos)

recognitive [3rd person]

Morality—duly honoring the claims of others—looks at first glance to function as the middle level above. But matters clearly do not end here. For in the first place morality forms part of what we owe to ourselves—viz. making the most of our opportunities for the good. And this obligation in turn emanates from the third—from our debt to God, the creator and course of all existence, our own included—in recognition for the opportunities that have been afforded to us for realizing good things. But why should our being here (Dasein)—our existence in the world—be seen as a boon that mandates acknowledgement and gratitude? Why not join Schopenhauer and some Eastern thinkers in seeing our existence as a test—and perhaps even as a punishment or penalty? The answer to this question lies in the fact that our presence here affords us an opportunity to contribute to the good of the world. Our

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very existence provides an opportunity beyond price—the chance to act and function as a free rational agent able to make contributions to the goodness of the world. But do we really have this opportunity? What if the realization of good results is just beyond our power by adverse circumstance? What if—to put it in Kant’s terms—“a stepmotherly nature” does not accord us the resources and opportunities to achieve good things? After all, the world is not designed for our personal convenience. Never mind! The answer here lies in the consideration that contributing to the world’s good is not a matter of actual achievement and success in this endeavor. To be sure, an uncooperative nature may render the realization of our opportunities for the good beyond our reach, but we can certainly try. We owe it to the forces and potencies that have afforded us these opportunities—to God if you will permit—to make such an effort. And the benevolent fact is that even merely to try to be a good person is to succeed in making us one. The critical consideration here is this: even in merely trying—in setting ourselves to make the effort—we automatically succeed in making the world a better place that it otherwise would be. Contributing to the good of the world is, in the final analysis, a matter of effort—an actual trying that goes beyond mere good intentions but stops well short of success. In this regard we are going to earn an A for effort, irrespective of the issue of ultimate realization. 5. SUMMARY To summarize. What has been canvassed here is a simple yet powerful argument, proceeding as follows: 1. No invocation of self-advantage can reach beyond prudence to establish actual obligation. 2. Nor can moral obligation be rooted in a contract entered into with a view to self-oriented benefits.

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3. The only viable source of moral obligation is a debt of gratitude in acknowledgement of unmerited benefits. 4. At the level of morality at large this indebtedness cannot be oriented to particular finite agents (e.g., one’s parents or fellow citizens), where a finite and limited indebtedness is always involved. 5. It can only directed to the larger creative powers and potencies that have put the boon of actual being (i.e., existence in this world) at one’s disposal. 6. In the setting of the deliberations, these larger creative powers and potencies comprise what for other, more traditionally theological points of consideration is called God. And so, the upshot of these deliberations is the conclusion that in the final analysis, morality must be grounded in God because he is the ultimate source and focus of the obligations that are characteristic of morality as such. For in the end what a recourse to God manages to ground is not the nomic substance of morality (what it asks of us by way of its requirements and demands), but rather the normicity of this manifold: the rationale that accounts for why it is that they exert a properly mandating force upon us. 6. THE POSTSCRIPT ON THE INSUFFICIENCY OF DIVINE COMMAND THEORY In closing it is instructive to look again to The Divine Command Theory of morality which effectively has it that we should be moral because God commands it. The fatal flaw of Divine Command theory lies in the circumstance that it picks up the wrong end of the stick. For the fact of it is not the acts become wrong through God’s forbidding them, but rather that God forbids them because they are wrong. Divine Command theory rightly coordinates wrongdoing and sin with divine prohibition, but goes amiss in having the ground/consequent relationship go awry in

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putting the cart before the horse. God’s commandments prohibit various misdoings because they are wrong in their nature: they do not somehow wrongify various otherwise morally indifferent actions. The moral status of acts is not created by divine mandate but ratified by it. With any commander, the question invariably arises: Why is it that this commander should be obeyed. In very general terms, the answer here will have to take the form: Because if the commander is not obeyed, something negative results as a consequence. And there are three prime possibilities here: (1) Punishment. The commander must be obeyed because his injunctions are enforced by force majeure. He has the power exact some sort of penalty for disobedience. (2) Misfortune. The commander has our best interests at heart. In disobeying we cause or at least risk incurring a negativity of some sort for ourselves. (3) Indebtedness. We owe obedience to the commander because of either (a) a contractual agreement between us, or (b), a debt of gratitude for goods freely bestowed on us. In issuing the command the commander effectively “calls in a chit.” Thus in the end there are just three possibilities here: punishment, misfortune, and indebtedness. Let us look at these one by one in our present case of Divine Command Theory. The first of these—the punishment route—is now not available. For surely God is not an arbitrary oriental potentate of who exacts obedience by the threat of wrathful punishment. As to the second route via misfortune, there can certainly be no question that divine commands are given in our best interests— individually and collectively. But as already noted this circumstance merely means that we are well advised to obey, not only we ought to do so in the sense of a moral obligation. Again one cannot root the obligation to obedience in a contract of some sort. For such a compact—a Divine Contract on analogy with a Social Contract—is an unrealistic fiction. The question “When, how,

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and with whom was this contract made” alone suffices to show that resolution is impracticable. And so the only workable way to ground the moral obligatoriness of a divine command is the very last—the route for a debt of gratitude. We are doubtless required to be moral because of a divine mandate, but we are morally obligated not by obedience and subordination, but by a due acknowledgement of gratitude for benefits bestowed. In the final analysis, an acceptable working out of the logic of the Divine Command Theory itself becomes constrained to taking the very route already indicated above. In the end it too must wind up grounding morality in a due acknowledgment for the benefit of opportunities afforded.

Chapter 5

WHY ISN’T THIS A BETTER WORLD? 1. THE IMPROVABILITY THESIS AND THE ISSUE OF “NATURAL EVIL”

Since classical antiquity, theorists of the atheistic persuasion have deployed the argument that if this world indeed were the product of the productive agency of an intelligent creator, then it would be far better than it is. As they see it, the world’s imperfection in encompassing such “natural evils” as cataclysmic disasters, epidemic diseases, accidental injuries, and the like, mark it as improvable, and thereby countervail against the prospect of an intelligent creator. (The world’s moral imperfection rooting in the wicked misdeeds of its intelligent agents—that is, the “problem of moral evil”—poses separate and distinct issues.1) The imperfection of the natural world—its potential for improvement—was accordingly adduced as a decisive obstacle to divine creation. After all, if even we mere humans can envision ways to improving the world how can it possibly be the product of divine creation? As per the Genesis account, Judeo-Christian theology contrasts the perfection of God with the imperfection of heedless man. But the world as we have it after the Fall is a thing of two aspects—the product of the work of God, its creator, and of Man, its designer. And however flawed the doings of Man may be, it would seem that Nature, as the Work of perfect God, should reflect the nature of its Maker. And here the problem of how a perfect God can create an imperfect world looks to be a faith-defying paradox. The idea that the actual world as we have it is the best possible goes back to Plato’s Timaeus. Here we are told (29A) that the cosmos is “the best thing that has come into being” ho kallistos tôn (gegomotôn) and is most perfect (teleôtatos), this being so because we are told that the cosmos is “most perfect” (teleôtatos). The divine being (theos) wished that everything should be good and nothing imperfect AS FAR AS POSSIBLE (kata dunamin) . . . since He

52 judged that order (taxis) was better than disorder. For Him who is the supremely good, it neither was nor is permissible to do anything other than what is the best [among the possibilities].2

Plato envisioned a world which, imperfections notwithstanding, is nevertheless “for the best” in being just as perfect as the conditions of a physically realized world will permit. Voltaire was not alone in thinking it absurd of Leibniz to deem this vale of tears to be the best of possible worlds. From his day onwards, such optimalism has faced the charge of representing a Dr. Pangloss who will acknowledge no evil in the world—much like that familiar trio of monkeys who “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” And what principally gives people pause here is that they see this world as imperfect on grounds of potential remediation. One theorist after another has maintained that, given the chance, he could readily improve on the natural world’s arrangements. It is perfectly clear, so they say, that this, that, or the other modification would make this a better world. And from there it is only one short and easy step to the conclusion that a benevolent creative deity does not exist.3 Thus, as Lucretius insisted, the world must be the product of inexorable necessity rather than intelligent contrivance by a benign creator. As he saw it, it is not the agency of gods but the inexorable operations of Natural Necessity that must be taken to account for the existing order of things. Were divine design at work, the world ought to be better! “Why could not nature produce men so large that they could ford its deep sea afoot and tear asunder great mountains with bare hands and outlive many generations in one lifetime.”4 If the thriving condition of intelligent beings were indeed the aim of an intelligent creator then—so the argument goes—the existing cosmos does not make a good job of it and its improvement can easily be envisioned. In just this way, David Hume insisted that, if the world were indeed the product of a benevolent and omnipotent Creator its arrangements would be far better than they are: A being, therefore, who knows the secrets principles of the universe, might easily, by particular volitions, turn these accidents to the good of mankind, and render the whole world happy, . . . Some small touches, given to Caligula’s brain in his infancy, might have converted him into

53 a Trajan. One wave, a little higher than the rest, by burying Caesar and his fortune in the bottom of the ocean, might have restored liberty to a considerable part of mankind.5

And he goes on to offer some helpful suggestions: The author of nature is inconceivably powerful: His force is supposed great, if not altogether inexhaustible. Nor is there any reason, as far as we can judge, to make him observe this strict frugality in his dealings with his creatures. It would have been better, were his power extremely limited, to have created fewer animals, and to have endowed these with more faculties for their happiness and preservation.6

In his discussion of the Problem of Evil, Alvin Plantinga considers the idea that God could have improved upon this world by arranging for Hitler to die in his sleep prior to inaugurating the Holocaust genocide of European Jewry.7 In a not dissimilar vein, Voltaire had long before insisted that a benign Creator would certainty have averted the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that killed so many of his most dedicated devotees. And in much the same vein, predicating his reasoning on the doctrine of evolution, Bertrand Russell wrote: “If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of my efforts.”8 And in another place he writes “If God really thinks well of the human . . . . why not proceed as in Genesis to create man at once?”9 Russell bolters this anti-theistic argument with the acid comment that “An omnipotent Being who created a world containing evil not due to sin must Himself be at least partially evil.”10 Throughout the ages, the world’s imperfection has been taken take to undermine one of the pillars of traditional Judeo-Christian theology. And the idea of the world’s improvability also finds enthusiastic acceptance among the opponents of intelligent design theory, seeing that insofar as natural reality is imperfect and improvable, the case for its creation by an intelligent creative power is clearly undermined.11 After all, it seems only plausible to suppose that if there indeed is a deity acting as the intelligent contriver of the universe, he/she/it would have prevented all sorts of misfortunes and disasters. And so,

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the existence of imperfection in the world is often seen as a decisive inexistent to divine omnipotence. Thus J. S. Mill wrote: The evidences . . . distinctly imply that the author of the Kosmos worked under limitations; that he was obliged to adapt himself to conditions independent of his will.

A simple syllogism seems to be at work: a divine creator would create a perfect world: this world of ours is imperfect; ergo, it is not the work of a divine creator. To be sure, the demi-theist who envisions a God merely of limited power has a straightforward answer here: The world is not free from imperfection because even with “all the good will in the world” God lacks the power to make it so.12 But this is not an option available to traditionalistic theists. With this line of thought in view, we will here address the issue of putative negativities in nature’s composition and modus operandi— that is, the Problem of Improvability regarding a reality that admits of unfortunate-seeming arrangements that are “acts of God”. The cognate problem posed by a reality that permits wicked actions by its agents—the classic Problem of Evil posed by sinful “acts of man”—is something else again. Different problems need to be addressed by different means—and are best dealt with one at a time. To be sure, perhaps those “acts of God” that we deem so unfortunate—earthquakes, tsunamis, and the rest—are not really imperfections at all. Perhaps they serve as a positive and constructive function. For perhaps the aim of the enterprise is not the temporal condition of man but his spiritual well-being, and perhaps what those natural disasters are designed to serve as are admonitions warning us to mend our wicked ways. But this theological “justification of the ways of God to Man” is something we shall put aside for the moment. Conceding that they are negativities, we shall pursue the issue of their diminution removal—the question of the world’s imponderability. Granted, modern theologians often exhibit an understandable reluctance to face such questions directly and address them on their own terms. Thus Paul Tillich, for example, sees them as serving to “drive reason to the quest for revelation”.13 Nevertheless, it seems only sen-

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sible to make the effort to see just how far reason can take us in this direction.14 2. THE TURN TO OPTIMALISM The present deliberations will endeavor to cast doubt upon this idea of the world’s improvability. They endeavor to rebut the Improvability Thesis which takes the seemingly common-sensical approach to world emendation, based on the following line of thought: There are, quite obviously, a great many things wrong with the world as it stands. And we can straightforwardly get a better world by improving matters through fixing some of them.

While the Improvability Thesis may on first view look to be decidedly plausible, it is actually mired in deep difficulty. The task of the discussion is to show how this is so. But what is it that could possibly incline someone favorably to Leibniz’ contention that this is the best of possible worlds? Well—there is, to begin with, the consideration, to which none of us can be wholly indifferent, that this is the world in which we ourselves exist. One can hardly avoid seeing this circumstance in a favorable light. The children’s poem by Dr. Seuss captures the point admirably: Worse than all that . . . You might be a WASN’T A wasn’t has no fun at all No it doesn’t A wasn’t just isn’t He just isn’t present But you . . . YOU ARE HERE And now isn’t that pleasant15

Then there is also the more impersonal consideration that this is a world whose development processes have brought intelligent beings into existence. This too one cannot but see as a good thing.

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To be sure, such considerations merely argue for seeing the world as good and not yet for best. This is something that has to be based on more complex considerations. For one thing, both the improvementist and his optimalist opponent must be in agreement on one fundamental point, namely that there is a cogent and objective standard for world assessment. Saying that the world is possible and saying that it is optimal call for specifying a standard of assessment. This is something that often drops from sight in the heat of controversy and receives insufficient attention. However, for present purposes we will take this standard to be the best real interest of that world’s intelligent beings—emphatically including their interest in the world’s intelligibility along with their own welfare and well-being. The pivotal idea here is that for an alternative world to constitute an improvement over this one would mean that its intelligent beings will on balance and on the whole fare better. It is, of course, theoretically possible to contemplate a different standard of world-merit, one which looked, for example, to the proliferation of the different varieties of organic life. But this is not the sort of thing that those who complain about the world’s imperfection have in mind. They tend to be much more parochial about it and see our human condition as pivotal. The shift from humans to intelligent creatures at large is doubtless as far as they would be prepared to go, and for dialectical purposes this is the view to be adopted here.16 3. ON THE INFEASIBILITY OF LOCAL TINKERING: BURLEY’S PRINCIPLE AS A LOGICAL OBSTACLE

Imperfection is built into the very nature of things. Limitedness is unavoidable with finite beings. Humans cannot be super-human—if there at all they have to be there as the type of things they inherently are. But all the same, imperfection does not preclude optimality. All that is required here is that—notwithstanding whatever imperfections there are and whatever positivities there might be—no other possible world arrangement ranks higher overall. An imperfect world is not thereby automatically improvable. For the reality of it is that improvement faces major obstacles.

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What ultimately stands in the way of the Improvability Argument is the pervasive interconnectedness of things. Man is, as the ancients have it, by nature an intelligent animal, and this automatically carries with it the inherent limitation of the frailties of the flesh. Imperfections of various sorts accompany any class of items, so that a world cannot be devoid of imperfections—if imperfection indeed is—as it must be—an involvement with limitations of some sort. If you want animals you must provide them with organic food. And a food chain brings with it a Nature rough in tooth & claw. All worldly arrangements have a down-side that involves imperfection. But consider a somewhat more drastic alternative. What if we lived in a Berkeleyan world whose “Nature” is not material and whose intelligences are disembodied spirits? Such a world would of course dispense with physical evils and injuries (and with physical pleasures as well). All the same, affective anguish and psychic distress would certainly remain. Alienation of affection can cause greater anguish than physical injury. And who is to say that in a psychical world spiritual injuries are not felt even more acutely, and that disembodiment would do finite beings a disfavor. There is no real prospect of local tinkering with the world without wider ramifications. In this world—and indeed in any possible world—states of affairs are interconnected and local changes always have pervasive consequences. Any local “fix” always has involvements throughout, and in consequence no tweaking or tinkering may be able to effect an improvement. This very important fact can be seen from two points of view—the logically-theoretical and the empirically-substantive. Let us begin with the former. The logical interlinkage of the facts of the real is such that contriving suppositions always function within a wider setting of related facts F1, F2, . . . , Fn of such a sort that, when one of them—for simplicity say F1—is abandoned owing to a hypothetical endorsement of its negation, nevertheless the resulting group ~F1, F2, . . . , Fn still remains collectively inconsistent. And the reason for this lies in the logical principle of the systemic integrity of fact. For suppose that F1. Then let F2 be some arbitrary falsehood that ~ F2. However, since F1 obtains, so does F1-or-F2. But now consider the group F1, F1-or-F2, not-F2. When we drop F1 here and insert ~ F1 in its place, we obtain ~

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F1, F1-or-F2, ~ F2. And this group is still inconsistent. And reasoning from not- F1 and F1-or-F2 to F2 now establishes an arbitrary fact. The structure of fact is an intricately woven fabric. One cannot sever one part of it without unraveling other parts of the real. Facts engender a dense structure, as the mathematicians use this term. Every determinable fact is so drastically hemmed in by others that even when we erase it, it can always be restored on the basis of what remains. The logical fabric of fact is woven tight. Facts are so closely intermeshed with each other as to form a connected network. Any change anywhere has reverberations everywhere. The domain of fact has a systemic integrity that one disturbs at one’s own peril: a change at any point has reverberations everywhere. Once you embark on a reality-modifying assumption, then as far as pure logic is concerned all bets are off. At the level of abstract logic, the introduction of belief-contravening hypotheses puts everything at risk: nothing is safe anymore. To maintain consistency you must revamp the entire fabric of fact, which is to say that you confront a task of Sisyphusian proportions. (This is something that those who make glib use of the idea of other possible worlds all too easily forget.) The world is something too complex to be remade more than fragmentally by our thought, which can effectively come to terms only with piecemeal changes in reality, but not with comprehensive changes of reality. Reality’s reach has a grip that it will never entirely relax: it is a tight-woven web where the cutting of any thread leads to an unraveling of the whole. 4. THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT AS A SUBSTANTIVE OBSTACLE TO TINKERING

It cannot be too emphatically stressed that evolution is not in conflict with intelligent design—that these two doctrines are somehow conflicting and incompatible. For natural selection provides a pathway to intelligent resolutions. (It is no accident that whales and sophisticated computer-designed submarines share much the same physical configuration.) Selective evolutionary processes are instrumentalities that move the developmental course of things in ways selective of increasing the scope for rationality on nature’s stage. For in the ag-

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gregate the world’s processes provide for an intelligent alignment of physical reality within the bounds of effective natural law. “But surely, envisioning world improvement would not be all that hard. After all, it wouldn’t have taken much to arrange some small accident that would have removed a Hitler or a Stalin from the scene. To figure out how this sort of thing could be arranged—to the world’s vast improvement!—is not Rocket Science!” Alas, dear objector, even Rocket Science is not good enough. For what stands in the way here is the massive obstacle of what is known as the Butterfly Effect. This phenomenon roots in the sensitive dependence of outcomes on initial conditions in chaos theory, where a tiny variation in the initial conditions of a dynamical system can issue in immense variations in the long term behavior of the system. E. N. Lorenz first analyzed the effect in a pioneering 1963 paper. Leading to the comment of one meteorologist that “if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull’s wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever.”17 With this process, changing even one tiny aspect of nature—one single butterfly flutter could have the most massive repercussions: tsunamis, droughts, ice ages, there is no limit. With this phenomenology in play, re-writing the course of the cosmos in the wake of even the smallest hypothetic change is an utter impracticability.18 A chaotic condition, as natural scientists nowadays use this term, obtains when we have a situation that is tenable or viable in certain circumstances but where a change in these circumstanceseven one that is extremely minutewill unravel and destabilize the overall situation with imponderable consequences, producing results that cannot be foreseen in informative detail. Any sufficiently hypothetical change in the physical make-up of such a worldhowever smallsets in motion a vast cascade of further such changes either in regard to the world’s furnishings or in the laws of nature. For all we can tell, reality is just like that. And now suppose that we make only a very small alteration in the descriptive composition of the real, say by adding one pebble to the river bank. But which pebble? Where are we to get it and what are we to put in its place? And where are we to put the air or the water that this new pebble displac-

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es? And when we put that material in a new spot, just how are we to make room for it. But how are we to make room for the material that is displaced. Moreover, the region within six inches of the new pebble used to hold N pebbles. It now holds N + 1. Of which region are we to say that it holds N – 1. If it is that region yonder, then how did the pebble get here from there? By miraculous instantaneous transport? By a little boy picking it up and throwing it. But then, which little boy? And how did he get there? And if he threw it, then what happened to the air that his throw displaced which would otherwise have gone undisturbed? Here problems arise without end. As we conjure with those pebbles, what about the structure of the environing electromagnetic, thermal, and gravitational fields? Just how are these to be preserved when those pebbled are moved or abolished? How is matter to be readjusted to preserve consistency here? Or are we to do so by changing the fundamental laws of physics. Limits of necessity can root not only in the fundamental principles of logic (logical impossibility) but also in the laws of nature (physical impossibility). For every scientific law is in effect a specification of impossibility. If it indeed is a law that “Iron conducts electricity,” then a piece of non-conducting iron thereby becomes unrealizable. Accordingly, limits of necessity are instantiated by such aspirations as squaring the circle or accelerating spaceships into hyper-drive at transluminal speed. Many things that we might like to do—to avoid ageing, to erase the errors of the past, to transmute lead into gold—are just not practicable. Nature’s modus operandi precludes the realization of such aspirations. We finite creatures had best abandon them because the iron necessity of natural law stands in the way of their realization. “But is the Butterfly Effect not an artifact of the ‘laws of nature’— the rules by which Nature plays the game is the production of phenomena: And would not an omnipotent God alter those rules so that the world’s occurrences are no longer inextricably intertwined?” This is a tricky question that requires some conceptual unraveling. An omnipotent creator could ex hypothesi create a chaos. But he could not create a Cosmos that affords a user-friendly home for intelligent beings without thereby creating the sort of coordinated fabric of intelligible lawfulness that carries a Butterfly Effect in its wake. For how

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else could those intelligent agents make their way in the world? An existential manifold could possibly dispense with the lawful coordination that underpins the Butterfly Effect, but an intelligence-supportive (“noophelic”) Nature could not possibly. The lawful order inherent in the Butterfly Effect could not be abandoned without massive collateral damage to the intelligible order of things. The fact of it is that a world is a package deal whose plusses and minuses are inseparably interlinked: it does not admit of tinkering. To “fix” some negative aspect of the world would involve a change of how things happen within it, i.e., altering the laws of nature under whose aegis things happen as they do. And the effects of this will prove imponderable. As one writer has cogently argued: To illustrate what is here meant: if water is to have the various properties in virtue of which it plays its beneficial part in the economy of the physical world and the life of mankind, it cannot at the same time lack its obnoxious capacity to drown us. The specific gravity of water is as much a necessary outcome of its ultimate constitution as its freezing point, or its thirst-quenching and cleansing functions. There cannot be assigned to any substance an arbitrarily selected group of qualities, from which all that ever may prove unfortunate to any sentient organism can be eliminated especially if . . . the world . . . is to be a calculable cosmos.19

What the Butterfly Effect means is that we can no longer be glibly facile about our ability to tinker with reality to effect improvements in the world by somehow removing this or that among its patent imperfections through well-intentioned readjustments. For what would need to be shown is that such a repair would not yield unintended and indeed altogether unforeseen consequences resulting in an overall inferior result. And this would be no easy task—and indeed could prove to be one far beyond our feeble powers. “But could this situation not have been avoided altogether. After all, that Butterfly Effect is the result of the fact that, in certain respects, the laws of nature have yielded a system of the sort that mathematicians characterize as chaotic. Surely one could change the laws of nature to avoid this result.” It is no doubt so. But now we have leapt from the frying pan into the fire. For in taking this line we pro-

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pose to fiddle not merely with this or that specific occurrence in world history, but are engaged in conjuring with the very laws of nature themselves. And this embarks us on the uncharted waters of a monumental second-order Butterfly Effect—one whose implications and ramifications are incalculable for finite intelligences. But the salient point is simple: Yes, the world’s particular existing negativities are indeed remediable in theory. But to avert them in practice might well require accepting an even larger array of negativities overall. The cost of avoiding those manifest evils of this world would then be the realization of an even larger mass of misfortune. And the very possibility of this prospect shows that the Improvability Argument does not suffice to accomplish its aim. 5. THE PACKAGE-DEAL PREDICAMENT “But surely if one effected this-or-that modification in the world without changing anything else one would improve matters thereby.” Perhaps. But the difficulty lies in that pivotal phrase “without changing anything else.” In anything worthy of the name “world” the constituent components are interrelated and interconnected. You cannot change one without changing innumerable others. The situation is not unlike that of language. Change the U of GUST to I and you do not leave the rest unchanged. Everything changes, shape, meaning, pronunciation. Most of us would have little difficulty in conjuring up a few of our fellows without whom the world would be better off—or so we think. But the problem is that in a lawful world getting rid of them would have to be achieved in a way that effects broader changes—more virulent diseases, more enterprising murderers, stronger impetus to suicide—all of which have wider and potentially deleterious consequences. A world will have to be an infinitely complex arrangement of interrelated factors. And the world we actually have—and indeed any possible alternative to it—is a package deal. Once we start tinkering with it, it evaporates. In seeking to change it, we create conditions where there is no longer any anaphoric “it” to deal with. To tinker with a world is to annihilate it. Perhaps something else, something altogether different might take its place. But this something else could

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readily prove to be worse overall. To render this idea graphic, one should consider W. W. Jacobs’ chilling story of The Monkey’s Paw, whose protagonist is miraculously granted wishes that actually come true—but always at a fearsome price.20 But if the world indeed is a package deal, then the prospect is open that those “natural evils” are simply the price of achieving a greater balance of positivity over negativity—be it by way of causal facilitation (as the extinction of earlier species paved the way for the rise of Homo sapiens) or by way of outright substation (as the fixing of those initial conditions of cosmic evolution has possibilized a world featuring organic existence. Either way, this world’s natural evils are actually a means towards the greater good—as per the traditional theodices. What is crucial in this regard is the operation of the natural laws which render the universe an orderly cosmos instead of an anarchic jumble. For only this can provide a home for beings whose actions are grounded by thought. Only through some degree of understanding of the orderly modus operandi of a world can an intelligent being whose actions are guided by beliefs come into operation. And in a realm in which what happens proceeds in accord with natural laws, a finite embodied is inevitably at risk of mishap. Bruce Reichenbach has it right: “Natural Evils are a consequence of natural objects acting according to natural laws upon sentiment, natural creatures.”21 It lies in the nature of things that natural order cannot be perfect. For as Plato already insisted, the imperfectability of the natural universe is an inevitable aspect of its physical materiality, its embodiment (somatoeides, Politikos 273B).22 And he is followed in this view by the entire neo-Platonic tradition.23 “But could not the amount of human suffering that there is in the world be reduced?” For sure it could. But the question is: At what cost? At the price of there being no world at all? At the price of there being no humans in the world? At the price of having all humans be ignorant, dull, and unintelligent? At the price of having only humans without empathy, sympathy, and care for one another? The proper response to all of these questions is simply: Who knows? No-one can say with any assurance that the cost of such an “improvement” would be acceptable. Granted, the world’s particular negativities many in theory be remediable. But to arrange for this will likely require ac-

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cepting an even larger array of negativities overall. (The Monkey’s Paw effect). The cost of avoiding those manifest evils of this world would then be the realization of an even larger volume of misfortune. The thesis here is effectively that of Leibniz: it is not intended to claim that the world is perfect, but just that it is optimal—the best possible with the emphasis not on best but on possible. The upshot of these considerations is thus clear. The idea that the world’s defects can be fixed by tinkering is decidedly implausible. And given the fact that re-engineering the world-as-a-whole lies beyond our feeble powers, we have to face up to the consideration that—for all we can tell—this is indeed the best of possible worlds, and that changing the existing condition of the universe in any way whatsoever—will diminish the sum-total of its positivities. We have to face the prospect that there is no “quick fix” for the negativities of this world. The reality of it is that merit-maximization at the global level viewed collectively, neither entails nor requires merit maximization at the local level viewed distributively. The world’s constituent components are certainly not as perfect as can be. But there is nevertheless reason to think that they are interconnected (via the Butterfly Effect) in such a way that improving one substantial element or aspect can be achieved only at a dispositionality higher cost in times of meritdiminution elsewhere. As concerns merit, the existing situation could well be the best overall arrangement of things—its manifest defects to the contrary notwithstanding. For the sake of a (certainly crude) illustration of the sort of situation at issue consider a hypothetical 4-square grid microworld subject to the following requirement: Let A represent a factor of positive merit. Let X be a lawful environmental condition of an A’s realization to the effect that an A can only be sustained in being when three X’s are laterally adjacent.

In these circumstances, the optimal arrangement of affairs can only take the form

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X X A A X X A

A X X A A X X

or its variants by 90° rotation. Now, to be sure, matters can indeed be improved upon locally—any one of these X-occupied positions could in theory accommodate an A. But globally matters could not be improved upon. Any attempt to replace an X by an A would impel matters into an inferior result overall. The fact that this or that particular local imperfection could be improved upon does not mean that the overall condition of things would benefit thereby. It is all a matter of how those local changes interact with and ramify over the larger conditions of things. World optimization is always maximization under various existential constraints imposed by the taxonomic nature of the things whose realization is being contemplated. And such constraints mean that while the world may well be as good as it can be as a whole—i.e., is aggregatively merit-maximizing—nevertheless it is not correspondingly merit-maximizing in its parts taken distributively. The condition of many of these parts is far from optimal and can certainly be improved. It is just that the merit of the parts is so interconnected and intertwined that improvement in one area is bound to carry with it diminution in another. 6. THE TEETER-TOTTER EFFECT We shall characterize as a Teeter-Totter Condition any arrangement where an improvement in regard to one aspect can only be achieved at the cost of worsening matters in another respect. And whenever two inherently positive factors are (like familiarity and novelty) locked into such a teeter-totter relationship we cannot have it both ways. Whenever this situation is in play, it stands decisively in the way of absolute perfection. Whenever the overall merit of a complex whole requires a harmonization among different and systematically competitive aspects of

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merit, it makes no sense to require perfection (i.e., maximization with respect to every aspect of merit). We will have to settle for optimization—the optimal harmonization among those different aspects represented by their holistically best-achievable overall combination. Accordingly, optimalism emphatically does not demand that everything must be perfect—it only requires that things be as perfect as the circumstances of their situation permits. Changes to the existing order of things do not come cost-free. Could Homo sapiens be improved by yet another pair of eyes at the back of the head? Presumably not. The redesign of this bio-system could not be effected without incurring additional vulnerabilities. And the mechanisms for processing the additional information provided would involve added complications that would doubtless not be costeffective in added benefit. Nature has doubtless seen to it that we are as well adjusted to our bio-niche as the world’s fabric of natural law permits. And there is no reason to refrain from seeing this sort of situation replicated on a cosmic scale. This line of thought vividly indicates how it can transpire that “fixing” local imperfections can readily fail to tell against global optimality. The medieval schoolmen inclined to look on perfection as a matter of completeness. For them, “perfect” and “whole” were virtually identical concepts.24 However, they went on to insist that a perfect whole need not be perfect in each of its constituent aspects, and that increasing the perfection of some part of aspect will throw the whole out of balance. As St. Thomas put it “God permitted imperfections in creation when they are necessary for the greater good of the whole.”25 As the medieval schoolmen already emphasized, God’s omnipotence consists in an ability to do anything that is possible; the impossible is not at issue. Neither can God make one selfsame proposition both true and false, nor can he make 2 plus 2 come out 5, nor can he forget facts. Nor can God make the lesser number exceed the larger, nor turn virtue into vice, nor make an inferior state of things into a superior. The truths of logic and mathematics, and the conceptual truths about the nature of things are not alterable and this holds for God as much as anyone. But—and this is crucial—the impossibility of God’s doing the impossible is not an obstacle to his omnipotence. God can

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certainly create a good world, and indeed an optimal one. But even He cannot make one that is flawless and perfect. Perfection is unattainable with respect to created worlds. One salient reason for this is the phenomenon of what might be called desideratum conflicts where in advancing with one positivity we automatically diminish another. What we have here is vividly manifested in the phenomenon of positivity complementarity that obtains when two parameters of merit are so interconnected that more of one automatically means less of the other, as per the following diagram:

Positivity 1

Positivity 2

The systemic phenomenology at issue here is such that one aspect of merit can be augmented only at the price of diminishing another. Consider a simple example, the case of a domestic garden. On the one hand we want the garden of a house to be extensive—to provide privacy, attractive vistas, scope for diverse planting, and so on. But on the other hand we also want the garden to be small—affordable to install, convenient to manage, affordable to maintain. But of course we can’t have it both ways: the garden cannot be both large and small. The desiderata at issue are locked into a see-saw of conflict. Again, any criminal justice system realizable in this imperfect world is going to have inappropriate negatives through letting some of the guilty off while also admitting false positives by condemning some innocents. And the more we rearrange things to diminish one flaw, the greater scope we give to the other. And so it goes in other situations without number. The two types of errors are locked together in a see-saw balance of complementarity that keeps perfection at bay. Throughout such cases we have the situation where realizing more of one desideratum entails a correlative decrease in the other. We cannot have it both ways so that the ideal of an absolute perfection that maximizes every parameter of merit at one and the same time is out of reach. In the interest of viability some sort of compromise must be

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negotiated, seeing that the concurrent maximization of desiderata is now unavoidably unrealizable. As Leibniz acutely maintained, optimality is one thing and perfection another. And our world can abandon any claims to the latter without compromise to its claims to the former. 7. MOVING FROM IMPROVEMENT TO REPLACEMENT Consider the following diagram: • • A

B

Think of it as the cross-section of a mountainous terrain. Note that in whatever direction you move away from the peak of A, you go downhill. But nevertheless A’s peak is no more than a local maximum. If you abandon A altogether and shift to B you can achieve a greater height. And so, even when dealing with a world that cannot be bettered by way of improvement, one might nevertheless realize a superior condition of things by way of replacement. The situation that is now under consideration is closely analogous. For it can transport that: If you “fiddle” with the description of the actual world (A) by changing some of its features in any direction, you may indeed make matters worse. But by abolishing this world altogether and shifting over to some entirely different world (B) you may nevertheless improve matters, so that even a world that cannot be improved by change might nevertheless be improved upon by all-out replacement. The fact that this world may not be improvable does not automatically mean that it is “the best of all possible worlds.” Nonimprovability is not the same as all-out optimality. The considerations presented so far show that a good case can be made against the idea that the world is improvable by alteration. But what now of replacement? Could we not argue that another world— one radically different from ours—might be superior to it. However, to carry this line of thought through to a cogent and convincing conclusion would require invoking some world or other that could reasonably be seen as superior to ours. And this is a task that

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confronts us with impossible difficulties. For how could such a world possibly be put on the agenda of consideration? So if someone wants to argue that there is some other better world that could replace this one we are entitled to challenge him to specify such a world. And this would be no mean task. An important distinction is at issue here. Two forms of worldamelioration can and should be contemplated: modification and substitution. With the former, one “fiddles” with the existing world in an endeavor to effect its improvement by some sort of repair or fix. With the latter, one replaces the existing world with something altogether different that is presumed to be better. Improving a world is a matter of taking that selfsame world and changing it for the better. By contrast, improving upon a world is a matter of abandoning it altogether and replacing it by another that is putatively superior. And to effect the latter in a convincing way is not just a matter of issuing various complaints about that natural world but actually identifying some replacement that is different and better. And now comes the critical point: improving upon the actual world calls for identifying some other, different and alternative nonexistent world that is demonstrably superior. And just this is a task which—as we shall now proceed to argue—cannot possibly be effected by finite intelligences. 8. PROBLEMS OF IDENTIFYING POSSIBLE WORLDS To provide a cogent refutation of optimalism it will not do to maintain that there might possibly be some alternative world superior to the actual one. The opponent has to make good on that improvability by presenting a convincing case for contending that some definitely identified possibility would be superior. In an organically complex world, the interests of some species may have to be subordinated to those of others (e.g., as providers of food). Moreover, the interest of particular individuals may have to be subordinated to those of the entire species as a fire that destroys some trees may nourish the soil for the ampler developments of others later on. But surely it is possible for there to be a world without earthquakes! Indeed so. But the move from a descriptive possibility (no earthquakes) to an authentic world requires a lot of fleshing out. (For

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example—no earth no earthquakes.) The problem here lies in the move from possible states (no earthquakes) to possible worlds. At this juncture an important point comes into play with respect to actual vs. possible. With actuals there is a crucial difference between generic and specific knowledge—between knowing that something has a feature and knowing which item has that feature. Here K(∃x∈S)Fx—that is, knowing that some x in S has the property F—is possible without knowing of some specific x that it has F: (∃x∈S)KFx. But with mere possibilities the preceding distinction does not apply. The only way of knowing that some mere (nonexistent) possibility has a certain feature is by specifying the possibility that possesses this feature. Real objects have an identity apart from their specification, but mere possibilities do not. “Surely some alternative world would be superior to ours—though I concede an inability to provide an illustrative example.” This sounds plausible enough. Surely some general officer is in the Pentagon right now—though I don’t have a clue as to who that individual might be. But this sort of response will not work, being based on a seriously flawed analogy. For one knows a great deal about the Pentagon and its general modus operandi. But there is nothing comparable going on with respect to merely possible worlds—no general principles of functioning that would lead to a comparable result. Granted, it might be possible that optimalism fails and that some alternative world might be superior to this one. But this does not bear the weight required in the dialectical situation at hand. For the argumentation at issue here is that of the atheist who insists that this world cannot be a divine creation on grounds of its imperfection. “Even I, he says, with my imperfect intellect can come up with ways of improving upon this world.” And in this dialectical context the mere possibility invoked above will not do the job. To meet the dialectical needs of the situation it will not do to invoke the mere possibility of a superior world. The objector will have to make good his challenge by specifying one in detail. To be sure, the identification of our (actual) world is no problem. The matter is simplicity itself. All we need do is to indicate that what is at issue is this world of ours (thumping on the table).26 The very fact of its being the world in which we are all co-present together ren-

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ders such an essentially ostensive identification of this world unproblematic in point of identification and communication. However, the matter is very different with other “worlds” that do not exist at all. One clearly cannot identify them by an ostensioninvolving indication that is, by its very nature, limited to the domain of the actual. Identification would have to be effected by other and different means. And here comes the difficulty. For the only practicable way to identify an unreal possible world is by some sort of descriptive process. And, as the preceding chapter has argued, this procedure is simply not practicable, since its unavoidably schematic character cannot provide for the uniqueness indispensable for the identification of a possible world. For what it would have us do is to project hypotheses specifying the make-up of that nonexistent possible world. But as noted above, such hypotheses can never be elaborated to the point of definiteness—that is, to the point where only a single unique realization of such a specification is available. Only a master intellect capable of synoptic totum simul thinking could possibly effect the requisite determination of such a manifold and its members. As contemporary possible world theorists generally see it, there can and should be a shift to altogether different worlds, worlds removed from and indeed incompatible with our own in their make-up and their modus operandi.27 What do such worlds involve? For one thing, they must be worlds. As such they will have to be manifolds of concrete reality via definite content. To qualify as such, its constituent individuals must also be concrete as regards the definiteness of its makeup. Specifically, a world must be descriptively definite and completethat is, any descriptively specifiable feature either must hold of the world or fail to hold of it; there is no other alternative, no prospect of being indecisive with regard to its make-up.28 A world must “make up its mind” about what to be like. In consequence the Law of Excluded Middle must apply: the world and its constituents must exhibit a definiteness of composition through which any particular sort of situation either definitely does or definitely does not obtain. A possible world must be decisive in its composition: its leaves cannot just be greenishthey have to pick out a particular shade; its rooms cannot contain around a dozen peoplethey have to commit to a definite number. Such a possible world is therefore a sat-

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urated (or complete or maximal) state of affairsone which must either include or preclude any state of affairs that can be described coherently.29 The individuals of such a possible world must, also, of course, satisfy the condition of “compossibility” in being capable of being copresent in one common world.30 A possible world must accordingly be consistent: the “possibility” at issue demands logical coherence and any descriptive statement about such a world or its constituents cannot be both true and false. (The Law of Contradiction must apply.) If, as Ludwig Wittgenstein maintained, the actual world is the totality of actually existing states of affairs, then a merely possible world would presumably have to be a suitably comprehensive totality of compossible albeit inexistent states of affairs. After all, a world is not just some sketchily described state of affairs, but will have to be a “saturated” or “maximal” state of affairsat-largea state that affairs-in-toto can assume, a synoptic totality that suffices to resolve if not everything then at least everything that is in theory resolvable.31 (Unlike the state of affairs that “A pen is writing this sentence” a world cannot leave unresolved whether that pen is writing with black ink or blue.) If an authentic world is to be at issue (be it existent or not) this entity must “make up its mind,” so to speak, about what features it does or does not have.32 Any assertion that purports to be about it must thus be either definitively true or definitively falsehowever difficult (or even impossible) a determination one way or the other may prove to be for particular inquirers, epistemologically speaking. Authentic worlds do and must accordingly have a wholly definite character.33 And just here lies the problem. For we can never manage to identify such a totality. Consider a state-of-affairs indicated by such a claim as “The pen on the table is red.” An item cannot just be red: it has to be a definite shade of redgeneric redness will not do.) Nor is it a state of affairs that “There are two or three people in the room”that state of affairs has to make up its mind. Nor again is it a state of affairs that “The butler did not do it”it being the wicked gardener who did the sort of thing that a state of affairs requires. No matter how much we say, the reality of concrete particulars will go beyond it.

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As regards those merely possible worlds, we simply have no way to get there from here. Seeing that we can only get at it with unreal possibilities by way of assumptions and hypotheses, and that such assumptions and hypotheses can never succeed in identifying a concrete world, it follows that we can only ever consider such worlds schematically, as generalized abstractions. Once we depart from the convenient availability of the actual we are inevitably stymied regarding the identification of nonexistent particular worlds. Whatever we can appropriately say about such “worlds” will remain generic, able to characterize them only insofar as they are of a certain general type or kind. Possible-world theorists have the audacity to employ a machinery of clarification that utilizes entities of a sort of which they are unable to provide even a single identifiable example.34 Even when viewed epistemically as mere methodological thoughttools, possible worlds remain deeply problematic. For once we start to play fast and loose with the features of the world we cannot tell with any assurance how to proceed. Consider its law-structure, for example. If electromagnetic radiation propagated at the speed of sound how would we have to readjust cosmology? Heaven only knows! To some extent we can conjecture about what consequences would possibly or probably issue from a reality-abrogating supposition. (If the law of gravitation were an inverse cube law, their significantly lesser weight would permit the evolution of larger dinosaurs.) But we cannot go very far here. We could not redesign the entire world—too many issues would always be left unresolved. In a well-articulated system of geometry, the axioms are independent—each can be changed without affecting the rest. But we have little if any knowledge about the interdependency of natural laws, and if we adopt a hypothesis to change one of them we cannot concretely determine what impact this will have on the rest. The specification of alternative possible worlds is an utterly impracticable task for us finite mortals. Their limitless comprehensiveness makes it impracticable to get a descriptive grip on the identifactory particularity necessary for anything worthy of being characterized as a nonexistent world. And so the challenges of substantiating the existence of an alternative, nonexistent possible world that is superior to this one is not just

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formidable—it is unrealizable. For as Bruce Reichenbach has cogently maintained: To conceive a better world . . . [one] must . . . first develop other possible world-systems of natural laws and/or different components, and, secondly show that a given system (not an event or class of events, but the system) would result in less evil than the present world system. This project, rather than being flippantly affirmed as conceivable, seems quite impossible . . . To do this would necessitate knowing all the implications of both natural systems, a task suited only for an omniscient mind.35

To be sure, at this stage an objector might well ask “Why would we need to identify a superior world: why not just describe it as being of a certain type or kind? Surely those negativities would then be avoided. After all, a world without sentient creatures would be a world without pain. A world without intelligences would be a world without error.” The problem here is that an incomplete world-description will have to be general and come to: • Any world of type T would . . . And any idea of world improvement on this basis has to be abandoned. For irrespective of the type T at issue, it will be clearly false to claim that any world of type T—no matter how we might go on to load its characterization up with horrors—would be better than this one. To preclude this prospect of supplementing degeneration you must be unendingly specific. A resort to merely schematic rather than finally identified worlds will not do the job. 9. THE SPECTRE OF SPINOZISM But just where does this leave matters? One salient consideration is that at this point the threat of Spinozism looms large here. For the contention that this is the best of possible words—that for better or worse this is as good as it gets—is clearly preempted by the Spinozistic idea that this is the only possible

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world—that there are just no alternatives to it and the issue of its optimality thus rendered moot and immaterial. At this point it is needful to draw a distinction that was already stressed by Leibniz. For such necessities are certainly not tenable if we look to logical possibility and necessity. Alternative worldmanifolds are always logically possible, seeing that logic confines itself to generalities—all of its theses and structure being abstract and universal in nature—it cannot mandate the existence of something unique and concrete. However, a specific existent world that contains concreta lies beyond the reach of logical necessity on anything like the standard conception of logic.36 In the end, any coherent manifold of particular truths is bound to have logically coherent alternatives.37 And so if necessity is to be realized, it will have to be not of the strictly logical mode but rather of the metaphysical—and indeed as presently contemplated axiological mode. And here the story will be quite different. For what we now have is, in effect, a Leibnizian theory of the metaphysical necessity of world optimization. For, as Leibniz argued, God’s creation of the best possible world needs to be seen not as a constraint of his inherent nature, but as the fruit of his benevolence as rooted via free will in his moral nature.38 The nature of that uniquely eligible possibility will now pivot not on theoretical necessity but on evaluative optimality. 10. OPTIMALISM DOES NOT DEMAND PERFECTION Does optimalism require perfection? In Book ∆ of the Metaphysics, Aristotle distinguishes four meanings for perfect, namely (1) complete as to its proper parts, (2) most meritorious of its kind, (3) evaluatively optimal, and (4) fully realizing its aim or telos. The first of these addresses the issue of mereological completeness. In its regard, universe-as-a-whole is of course perfect. The others in one way or another all address the issue of qualitative optimality. In this regard the world’s perfection is a potentially debatable issue. Now if—as seems usual—perfection is understood as freedom from defect and deficiency, then optimality clearly does not require

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perfection. It just requires being as good as possible—not the absence but just the overall minimality of defeats. Yet what is one to make of such an optimalism? Note, to begin with, that the idea that this is the best of possible worlds is not an occasion for unmixed delight and unalloyed rejoicing. For to characterize the world as the best possible is not necessarily optimism but is perfectly compatible with the decidedly pessimistic lament that, notwithstanding the many manifest imperfections of this word, the sobering fact remains that all of its available alternatives are yet worse. So the world cannot be perfect and exhibit all possible positivities in maximal degree. But why should it not be better? From Leibniz onwards, the optimalist has faced the charge of being a Dr. Pangloss who is oblivious to the evils of this world—much like that familiar trio of monkeys who “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” The traditional line of response to this sort of objection has two parts that respectively pivot on the distinction between moral and physical evil—between misfortunes that originate through the deliberate agency of intelligent beings, and those which, like earthquakes, storms, and other natural disasters, originate through the impersonal operations of nature. Human misdeeds and the associated problem of free will call for separate treatment with moral evil seen as the unavoidable price to be paid for a world whose agents combine finite capabilities with willful freedom of choice. As indicated from the outset our concern here is confined to misfortunes that root in the arrangements of nature. And the traditional approach to natural evils looks to several alternative ways of addressing the problem. •

An illusionism that dismisses natural evil as only apparent but not real. This is the illusionism of Oriental mysticism and of the Panglossian unrealism which Voltaire mistakenly attributed to Leibniz.

•

A finalism that sees natural evil as part of the indispensable causal means to a greater good. (The melodrama must have its villain so that the threatened maiden can fully appreciate the delights of a heroic rescue.)

77 •

A compensationism that sees natural evil as compensated for in the larger scheme of things—i.e., either in this world or the next. (This, according to Kant, is the rationale for belief in an after-life.)

•

A holism that sees natural evil as the collateral damage that is unavoidable in even the best of possible arrangements contrived with a view to the realization of salient positivities. (The universe is a package deal that inextricably links the positive and the negative.)

These four approaches accordingly pivot on the factors of illusion, mediation, compensation, and integration. The present discussion’s optimalistic approach effectively adopts the last of these options. It takes the line that physical evil represents the price of an entry ticket into the best of arrangements possible within the limits of inevitable constraints. The world’s physical evils are seen as the inescapable consequences that are bound to occur when intelligent beings of limited capacity come to be emplaced within a world-order whose lawfulness is complex enough to permit their rational development but simple enough to afford them cognitive access for the management of their affairs. The crux of the matter is that a world—a viable world-setting for intelligent agents—must be an existential manifold with laws to provide for order in the unfolding of its phenomena. But in and of themselves, rigid regularities and laws will not always produce the best conceivable results. Perhaps the best process will indeed often or usually or normally produce the best end-product—but by no means always and inevitability. Optimality of process is compatible with suboptimality of product.39 On this basis, it is clear that if the world, taken as a whole, is indeed optimal, and represents an integrated “package deal” in which the bad has to be accepted along with the good, then whatever evil it contains will at least not be gratuitous but will be inextricably linked to the greater good of the whole. All in all, then, there is no cogent reason against seeing the world as optimal in point of a minor study of “natural evils.” Such lines of reasoning, then, can in principle account for the existence of physical evil even in a world that is favorable to the welfare of

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intelligent beings. However, a further and more difficult problem looms, namely the question not just of why there is some evil in the world, but rather why there is so much of it. “Surely”, so critics have ever argued, “it is easy to see that this or that arrangement can be improved upon. After all, one could simply have more of something good.” But is this actually so? Consider the allocation of time during one’s day. Say (for the sake of discussion) the proper and appropriate allocation to be: one-third Resting, one-third Working, and one-third Other (eating, exercising, recreating, etc.). Now someone might say: This really cannot be the perfect allocation. For one could and should increase the allocation allotted to the desideratum of Resting. The obvious response there is: “Yes. Of course this increase could be made. But this can only be done at the expense of diminishing some other desideratum.” For those desiderata are locked in an inescapable interaction. What critically matters here is not their individual maximization, but rather their collective harmonization. And so it is with our situation of world design. A world is not rendered imperfect by the consideration that the extent to which it realizes this or that desideratum could be improved upon. For here too those desiderata are actually locked in a situation of inextricable interaction—they play a zero-sum game with one another. And here too optimalization is a matter of harmonization. A world is assuredly not rendered imperfect by the consideration that this or that desideratum could be enhanced. With those various desiderata it is emphatically not the case that: More [of it] is better [for the whole].” Tinkering with respect to this or that desideratum is not a promising pathway to world improvement. Of course moral evil is something else again. Certainly free agents could act so as to make the world a better or worse place than it otherwise would be. It is, presumably, exactly to create a sphere where such agents can be operative that room has to be made in the world for the existence of (a due minimum of) natural evil.

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11. OPTIMALISM DOES NOT DEMAND OPTIMISM The idea that maintaining this to be the best of possible worlds commits one to taking an overly rosy view of its merits has long prevailed in the philosophical community. But in fact this is far from so. To be realistic about it is to acknowledge that optimalism need not be all that optimalistic. It does not require seeing this world as all that splendid: all that is required is to see the other alternative (change alternatives and replacement alternatives alike) as being even worse. Philosophers are often inclined to holding that “If God exists, then . . . he would allow an evil only if doing so served some outweighing good.”40 But this is not really correct. For one would just as well refute that via “if doing so serves to avert come yet greater evil.” No doubt a world produced by a benign creator would exhibit on balance and in the whole a greater amount of good than evil. But even then the best possibility might achieve this optimality not by having all that much positivity but rather by minimizing the amount of negativity that it contains. For the matter looks rather different when approached from a negatively-oriented pessimistic rather than a positivelyoriented optimistic perspective. For then the contention is not that this world is so good as to excel over all other collaborative possibilities. Rather, what optimalism maintains is that this world, however imperfect, is such that any other possible world (and thus an actively fleshed out world and not just some incomplete scenario) will involve a still greater balance of negativity over positivity. What is thus maintained is a rather bleak view of the manifold of (real) possibility overall. None of those traditional plaints about this world’s evils and deficiencies refute the prospect of its being the best of possible worlds. For being the very best of the possibilities need not and will not call for being perfect. What matters here is that thanks to the inherent and unavoidable interconnection of things in a complex world, it may transpire that, the only possible way to achieve a diminution of negativity at one point demands a more than compensatory argumentation of negativity at another. Even the best of possible worlds can admit all manner of imperfections can indeed be there: it is just a matter of

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there being fewer of them, on balance, than is the case with any of the other alternatives. Pursing the better and averting the worse are two sides of the same coin. To favor the superior is to shun the inferior—and conversely. Striving to realize the better (insofar as possible) and striving to avert the worse (insofar as possible) amount to one and the same thing— albeit viewed from different angles. And so to say that this is the best of possible worlds is not necessarily to give it unqualified praise, and actually stakes no claim whatsoever about the world’s categorical merit. It simply maintains that the other alternatives are inferior—that no matter how defunct the world may be the other alternatives are even worse. As an argument against the Leibnizian view, the lucubrations of Voltaire’s Candide are a non-starter. For Dr. Pangloss’ sceptical pupil pressed him with the question Si c’est ici le meilleur des mondes possibles, que sont donc les autres? (“If this be the best of possible worlds, then what in heaven’s name will the others be like?”)41 And here a perfectly good answer was available to the good Doctor, which despite its cogency he was reluctant to give, namely the reply: “Even worse!” But the facile optimism of Dr. Pangloss, the butt of Voltaire’s parody Candide, misses the mark if Leibniz (and not some naive and simple-minded Leibnizian) is intended as its target. And it deserves emphasis that optimalism is not really a matter of unqualified optimism. But is it fair that a few should be worse off for the betterment of many others? Is it fair that many should be less well-off for the betterment of a few? The line of thought developed here might be called the Best Achievable Outcome (BAO) theory of natural evil. And the seemingly most cogent objection to such a theory is the challenge of fairness which effectively runs as follows: Even if one grants that the actual world represents the most achievable resolution to the problem of world creation, is it not deeply unfair and unjust that some of its members should occupy, for no failing of their own making and responsibility, a position inferior to that of others?

The proper handling of this objection is not simple and requires recourse to a rather suitable distinction between:

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• a valueless claim i.e., a claim to something of no value, effectively a claim to nothing. • the absence of any claim at all. Fairness, in the end, is a matter of proportioning results to claims. If you have a claim of size zero and I do as well, and you are awarded something, then that is indeed unfair. But if the situation is such that neither of us has any claim whatsoever, and it somehow transpires that something positive comes your way, then I can perhaps complain of being unlucky, but the issue of unfairness does not enter in. Unfairness only arises with preexisting claims. And in the matter of realizing would-possibilities there simply are none. 12. CONCLUSION The upshot of these neo-Leibnizian deliberations runs as follows: First, that in relation to natural evil there is good reason to think that the world cannot be improved by modification and tinkering. Second, that the variant complaint that the actual world could be improved upon by replacement confronts the effectively unmeetable challenge that no such putatively superior replacement can possibly be identified. Third, that the idea that this world’s manifest imperfection stands in the way of its optimality is quite erroneous. It emerges against this background that the argument that the world’s imperfection precludes any prospect of divine creation cannot be sustained.42 NOTES 1

Some of the classical texts on this issue are presented in Mark Larrimore (ed.), The Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). The religious dimension of the problem is the subject of a vast literature. On its history and (very extensive) bibliography see Friedrich Billicsich, Das Problem des Übels in der Philosophie des Abendlandes, 3 vols (Wien: Verlag S. Sexl, 1952-59). However, this classic study of the history of the Problem of Evil devotes only one somewhat perfunctory chapter (Vol. III, pp. 195-205) to the issue of evil in nature. Its focus however is the negative aspect of the struggle of organic existence inherent in the Darwinian survival of the fittest. The issue of the prospect of imperfect design is that physical order of nature does not figure in this otherwise monumental work.

2

Timaeus, 298 and also 29E-30B. Emphasis supplied.

82 NOTES 3

See, for example, R. K. Perkins, Jr., “An Atheistic Argument from the Improvability of the Universe,” Nous, Vol. 17 (1983), pp. 239-50.

4

cur homines tantos natura parare non potuit, pedibus qui pontum per vada possent transire et magnos manibus divellere montis multaque vivendo vitalis vincere saecla Lucretius, De rerum natura, I, 199-203.

5

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 11.

6

Ibid. For a modern perspective on the issues see John R. Hick, Philosophy of Religion (4th ed., Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990).

7

Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (New Haven: Harper Torch Books, 1974). See also Roderick M. Chisholm, “The Defeat of Good and Evil,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 42 (1968-69), pp. 26-38.

8

Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 222.

9

Bertrand Russell, op. cit., pp. 194.

10

Bertrand Russell, ibid.

11

On Intelligent Design Theory see J. H. Davis and H. L. Poe, Chance and Dance: The Evolution of Design (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation, 2008); William A. Dembski, Intelligence Design (Downer’s Gove, Ill, 1999); Ernan McMullin (ed.), Evolution and Creation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Roger Penrose, Tower of Babel: Scientific Evidence and the New Creations (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998); Del Ratsch, Nature, Design, and Sciences (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001); Michael Ruse, The EvolutionCreation Struggle (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000); as well as Elliot Sober, Philosophy of Biology (2nd ed., Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 2000);

12

Thus Charles Hartshorne for one has it that divine omnipotence constitutes one of the key mistakes of classical theism. See his Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984). However, Hartshorne did not give due weight to the fact that even the theologians of classical theism did not hold that God could do anything the impossible impracticable included (e.g., destroying himself). They construed omnipotence as the capacity to do anything possible (with an abrogation of the laws of logic empirically excluded).

13

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 210.

83 NOTES 14

A cogent recent treatment of issues of natural evil is Bruce R. Reichenbach’s Evil and a Good God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982). It should be noted that theoretical argument for the existence of God are nowise at issue here. The present discussion is concerned only with the merits of one particular argument against the existence of God.

15

Dr. Suess, Happy Birthday to You (New York, Random House, 1959).

16

Admittedly cashing in this loose reference to “the condition of intelligent beings” will need a good deal of fleshing out. Is one to be a Rawlsian maximin theorist for whom the standard is set by the condition of the worst (the least well-off). Is one to be an elitist from whom the standard is the condition of the best, the most able and highly developed? Or is one to be a democrat whose standard is the preponderant condition of the middle run? And is the standard—however otherwise construed— to be applied at the level of individuals or at the level of species? Clearly larger and deeper issues lurk behind these questions. But we need not pursue them here because the thrust of the considerations of the present deliberations will apply across the board—mutatis mutandis—no matter which specific standard is chosen.

17

Lorenz’s discussion gave rise to New Line Cinema’s 2004 feature film The Butterfly Effect starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart.

18

Think here of the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of cosmic evolution that plays so prominent a role in the setting of the Anthropic Hypothesis.

19

F. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology, 2 vol. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), vol. II, p. 201.

20

An intriguing example of the adverse consequences of “improving” matters in the world is afforded in Kenneth Boulding’s intriguing study of the unhappy consequences of significant life prolongation: “The Menace of Methusalah” in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 55, no. 7 (March 1965), pp. 171179.

21

Reichenbach, Evil and a Good God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), p. 106. I myself would amend the passage to read “the inevitable consequences.” The issue is one of the “collateral (damage)” that is (unavoidable) in pursuing the greatest achievable measure of the good.

22

See Timaeus 28Cff, 35A, 50Dff.

23

Even—indeed especially—in the sunlight, material objects will cast a shadow. Cf. Plotinus, Enneads, III 2.5.

24

“Totum et perfectum sunt quasi idem” Duns Scotus maintained. (Quoted from W. Tatarkiewicz, On Perfection (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 1992), p. 47. St. Thomas maintained that perfectum dicitur cui nilil deest secundum modum suae perfectionis (Summa Theologiae I 4.1 ad resp.). The substantial study of The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) by R. N. Flew addresses the issue of human imperfection only; the idea of imperfec-

84 NOTES

tion in physical reality is not considered. On larger aspects of the concept of perfection see Tatarkeiwicz 1992 as well as M. Foss, The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946). 25

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I. 4.1.

26

Since theorists question that we can uniquely ostend “the” world we live in, since they hold that actual individuals can also exist in other possible worlds. But this turns matters upside down. For unless one has a very strange sort of finger a hereand-now pointing gesture does not get at things in those other worlds. There is no way of getting lost enroute to a destination where we cannot go at all. Cf. the author’s Imagining Irreality [Chicago, Ill: Open Court Publishing Co, 2003], p. 275.

27

On possible worlds in literary theory in their interrelationship with philosophical issues, see Mihailesau and Hamarneh (eds.), Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977.)

28

On this feature of concrete worlds see the author’s “Leibniz and Possible Worlds,” Studia Leibnitiana, vol. 28 (1995), pp. 129-62.

29

See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). An alternative perspective could be mereological: a possible world now being seen as simply the sum-total of the possible individuals that exist within it. (The two approaches come to the same thing if we adopt a theory of reductive particularismor “methodological individualism” as it is sometimes calledaccording to which every state-of-affairs regarding things-in-general reduces to a collection of facts about some set of individuals.)

30

Individuals described as “the elder of twin elephants” and “the one and only elephant ever” cannot coexist in one selfsame world. This idea of coexistence is due to Leibniz who first introduced philosophers to talking about possible worlds.

31

“A possible world, then, is a possible state of affairsone that is possible in the broadly logical sense.” (Plantinga 1974, p. 44).

32

Some logicians approach possible worlds by construing them as collections of statements rather than objects. And there is much to be said for such an approach. But it faces two big obstacles: (1) not every collection of (compatible) statements can plausibly be said to constitute a world, but rather (2) only those can do so which satisfy an appropriate manifold of special conditions intending that any “word characterizing” set of propositions must both be inferentially closed and descriptively complete by way of assuring that any possible contention about an object is either true or false. And such macro-sets of statements lie beyond our grasp.

33

Authentic worlds thus differ from the schematic “worlds” often contemplated by model logicians. These are not possible worlds as such but conceptual constructs, while, insofar as we can provide them, they are inadequate to the needs of the situation.

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Leibniz, to be sure, was entitled to conjure with alternative possible worlds because they were, for him, theoretical resources as instances of God's entia rationis. Were one to ask him where possible worlds are to come from, he would answer “Only God knows.” As that is exactly correct—only God does so. We feeble humans have no way to get there from here.

35

Bruce Reichenbach, Evil and a Good God (op. cit.), p. 116.

36

Even the Ontological Argument for God’s existence—controversial as it is—does not rest on considerations of mere logic, but involves a “creative definition”—a substantially laden specification of the nature of the deity.

37

This line of objection to Spinoza’s argumentation is admittedly sketchy and in need of a great deal of development. Moreover its potentially controversial nature inheres in the consideration that it is effectively identical with St. Anselm’s proof of God’s existence, save only for the substantiation of natura for deus.

38

See Sven K. Knebel, “Necessitas moralis ad optimum” in Studia Leibnitiana, vol. XXIII (1991), pp. 3-24 and 78-92, and Vol. XXIV (1992), pp. 182-251. See also Stefan Lorenz, De mundo optimo (Stuttgart: Flener Verlag, 1997; Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa, vol. XXXI).

39

The crucial difference between product optimalism and process optimalism is often neglected.

40

See Stephen Wykstra and Bruce Russell, “The Inductive Argument for Evil,” Philosophical Topics, Vol. 16 (1988), pp. 133-60. See also William L. Rowe “Ruminations about Evil,” Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 5 (1991), pp. 69-88.

41

“Discourse of Metaphysics,” §6. Compare ibid, §5, and also “Principle of Nature and of Grace,” §10; Theodicy, §208.

42

This chapter draws on the author’s essay “On the Improvability of the World,” The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 64 (2011), pp. 489-514.

Chapter 6

AUTHORITY 1. WHY AUTHORITY? Has science not superseded religion—is the authoritativeness of scientific thought not such as to annihilate the validity of religious teaching? To answer this question we have to go back to basics and probe into the underpinning of the very idea of rational authoritativeness itself. Alexis de Tocqueville sagely observed that: A principle of authority must . . . always occur, under all circumstances, in some part or other of the moral and intellectual world . . . Thus the question is not to know whether any intellectual authority exists in an age of democracy, but simply by what standard it is to be measured.1

To be sure, authority is usually considered only in its socio-political dimension of communal authority, and it is generally viewed in its coercive aspect with a view to the power of some to control the doings of others. But this sort of thing is not the main subject of present concern. Rather, the sort of authority that will be at the forefront here is that which is at issue when we speak of someone as being a recognized authority in some field of endeavor—the kind of authority that is at work when we acknowledge someone as an expert with regard to some sector of thought and action. It occasions surprise that this sort of authority is an unduly underdeveloped topic. Important though it is, alike in ordinary life, in the theory of knowledge, and in ecclesiastical affairs, there is a dearth of serious study of the topic. For example, philosophical handbooks and encyclopedias—even those that are themselves deemed authoritative—are generally silent on the subject.2 All the same, authority is a complex and many-sidedly significant issue that deserves closer examination.

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2.

COGNITIVE VS. PRACTICAL AUTHORITY

Epistemic or cognitive authority is a matter of credibility with respect to claims regarding matters of fact! We acknowledge someone as an authority insofar as we are prepared to accept what they say. By contrast, practical or pragmatic authority is at issue in regard to action: it is a matter of guidance not in relation to what we are to accept or believe, but in relation to what we are to do. There are, accordingly, two prime forms of authority, the cognitive and the practical, the former relating to information and the latter to action. Practical authority can be either mandatory or advisory: it can be exercised either persuasively or coercively. And it can arise both with the question “What must I do?” and the question “What should I do?” But only mandatory authority can be delegated (e.g., by the captain of a ship to his first mate). With advisory authority, authoritativeness must be acknowledged by the recipient; it cannot simply be transferred by someone else’s delegation. Both cognitive authoritativeness and epistemic authoritativeness have to be acknowledged freely. Unlike practical authority they cannot be imposed. Whatever be their subject matter—mathematics or chemistry or philosophy or theology—our information can incorporate only those things in which we place credence. But credence is a form of trust. To acknowledge the cognitive authority of someone (in a certain domain) is in effect to trust his judgment in matters relating to this domain. Whatever be the subject-matter domain—our knowledge can comprise no more that those claims that we accept as true. And so in constituting our knowledge be it in matters of science or religion, whenever we trust a resource—be it personal or documentary—we act on our own account. And this fact has important implications for the nature of authority. Authority is something that lies in the eyes of the recipient. Unlike expertise it consists of being acknowledged as such. We acknowledge some person or source as a cognitive authority when we incline to accept their informative claims as true. Now there are basically two sorts of epistemic issues: issues of fact and issues of interpretation. “What did George Washington’s Farewell Address say and where did he deliver it?” is a purely factual issue. “What was the

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objective of Washington’s Farewell Address and what effect did it have on American policy?” involves a good deal of interpretation. Being authoritative with respect to facts is a relatively straightforward and objective matter. Being authoritative on matters of interpretation is something more complex that turns on factors not just of information but of judgmental wisdom. Behavioral authority consists in inducing people to act in certain ways, and such authority can be either coercive (“making someone do something”) or inspirational (“setting a role model”). Inspirational or judgmental authority need not proceed via evidentiated expertise but can be based on considerations of character. For judgmental authority can approximately be acknowledged in those whom we see as admissible—as role models whose way one would willingly emulate. Epistemic authority, by contrast, cannot be coerced or constrained: it is fideistic in nature and requires voluntary acceptance, via trust. As such it must be conceded and freely accepted. Trust is the core of epistemic authority: here one is led willingly along the path of belief. In general, epistemic authority is limited, communal, and earned. Limited in being confined to a particular subject-matter domain. It is communal in being generally conceded. And it is earned, with an established track record of reliability. Generally, but not always. For in the end, one must give trust not by evidentiation but by presumption: by accepting the data of some source provisionally, until something conflicting comes to light. In epistemic matters one must at some point give unevidentiated trust—at least provisionally and presumptively—because otherwise we would embark on an informal regress that would render us unable ever to evidentiate anything. The scientific community is itself the prime arbiter of cognitive authority. Peer acknowledgment by fellow experts is the crux here. But practical authority is more democratic. It is generally established through public acknowledgment at large. The honorific of being a “recognized authority” tends to stay linked within the several bodies and specialties of science but is common there. In practical matters the description is something extremely rare. However, authority is not something that operates across the board. It is logically and theoretically limited in scope.

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3. SCIENTIFIC AUTHORITY AND ITS LIMITS Scientific authority has two prime aspects. First there is the issue of authority IN science. This pivots on the expertise of individuals. But there is the issue of the authority OF science as an enterprise. This is a matter of its capacity to resolve adequately the questions that intrigue us and the problems that confront us. Either way, the authority of science is immense. It is grounded in the splendid success of the enterprise in matters of explanation, prediction, and technological application. There is no (reasonable) way to deny the epistemic authoritativeness of science in its own sphere. But nevertheless, it is a decidedly limited authority—ardent enthusiasts to the contrary notwithstanding. For science as a human enterprise addresses issues of what is and can be in nature—of actual and potential fact. However, issues of value—not of what the facts are, but what they ideally should be—lie outside its scope and province. Accordingly science is effectively authoritative in issues of means—of how to go about getting ourselves from here to there. But matters of ends and goals—of where it is that we should endeavor to go with our efforts in this world—are questions on which the scientists speaks with no more authority than anyone else. 4. THE VALIDATION FOR ACKNOWLEDGING AUTHORITY The acknowledgment of cognitive authority must be earned. And the rationale for acknowledging authority in a given domain is substantially uniform—it is a matter of the beneficiary’s demonstrated competence in facilitating a realization of the ends of the particular domain at issue. With cognitive authority there must be demonstrated evidence of a capacity to provide credible answers to our questions. With practical authority there must analogously be a capacity to afford effective guidance. Unfortunately, in matters of credibility authorities are all too often pitted against authorities. (Think here of Raphael’s famous painting of “The School of Athens.”) How, then, is one to proceed? In practical matters controlling authority can come to an individual simply by commission—by being “put in charge.” But advisory au-

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thority must be earned via trust. And authority in cognitive matters has to be earned. Acknowledging someone’s epistemic authority is a matter of trust. And with trust one risks error, misinformation, deceit. And in conceding (epistemic) authority to someone I risk that they may be “talking through their hat.” But in conceding practical authority to someone, I risk not just being wrong but actual damage, injury, misfortune to myself and others. I trust someone with respect to a practical issue. I entrust to them some aspect of my (of somebody’s) interests and involve not just error but injury. So why do people ever accept the authority of some person or source—why do they concede it to some other person or agency? The key here is the inescapable fact of the limitedness of our personal capabilities. We simply cannot manage in this world all by ourselves. Neither in matters of cognitive know-that nor in that of practical know-how are we humans sufficiently competent as individuals. In both cases alike we concede authority to the experts because we acknowledge them to be more competent than ourselves. We resort to them because we believe them to afford a more promising path to issue-resolution than the one we would contrive on our own. All this is simply a matter of common sense. Division of labor is inevitable here and means that we must, much of the time, entrust our own proceedings at least partially to others. The “authority” of teachers is a paradigm version of the concept. And it covers a considerable range—from those who teach children in the classroom to the Church Fathers whose “teachings” spread across the pages of profound philosophical treatises. And their very nature as such “authoritative” discourses have to seek for the optimum of relevant knowledge. However, the acknowledgement of authority is not an end in itself—it has a functional rationale. It is rationally warranted only when it conduces to some significant good—when it serves a positive role in facilitating the realization of a better quality of life, enabling its adherents to conduct the affairs more productively and have them lie as wiser, happier, and better people. But is relying on the authority of others not simply taking “the easy way out”? Is someone who concedes the authoritativeness of another person or agency not simply shirking his responsibility? By no

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means! In these matters of decision, responsibility cannot be offloaded. It stands to the individual like his own shadow. The individual himself is always the responsible decider. It is he who acknowledges that authority, seeks its counsel, and adopts it on this occasion. The “just following advice” excuse is even less exculpatory of responsibility than is its cognition of “just following orders.” The fact is that in conceding authoritativeness to some individual or source we never leave responsibility behind. We are justified in acknowledging authority only where we ourselves have good ground for imputing authoritativeness. But what can be the rationale of such a step? In the final analysis it is self-interest. For there is no point in ceding authority to someone for the guidance of one’s own actions unless one has good reason to believe that this source has one’s own best interest at heart. Conceding practical authority makes good sense only in the presence of substantial indications that acting on this source’s counsel will actually conduce to our best interests. As best one can tell, the ultimate goal of human endeavor and aspiration here on earth is to make us—individually and collectively— into wiser, better, happier people. These correspond to three fundamental sectors of our condition: the cognitive, moral, and affective. And these in turn are correlative with knowledge, action, and value, the concerns of the three prime branches of traditional philosophizing, namely epistemology (“logic” as usually conceived), ethics, and value theory (axiology). Man’s overall well-being—eudaimonia, as Aristotle called it—is spanned by the factors of this range. As philosophers have stressed from antiquity onward, how we fare in regard to this trio of prime desiderata—i.e., in terms of wisdom, goodness, and happiness—provides the basis for rational endeavor. And the concession of authority is part and parcel of this project. 5. ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITY Does the validation of faith—of belief in a benevolent God—rest its evidentiation upon cognitive reason or upon the substantiation of judgmental reason?

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Actually the matter is not one of either-or, but of a consilience of both. Cognitively, theism rests (not on scientific inference but) on the deliberations of philosophical consideration of systemic harmonization. And judgmentally it rests on considerations of judgmental authority—on its affording resources for comprehending the normative and evaluative dimensions of reality. (Also not entirely dismissible here is also the issue of judgmental authority—of the probative weight of the collective convictions of those whose claims to qualify as role models for well-intentioned people are the strongest.) Do not the “cloud of witnesses” that have spoken for religiosity throughout the ages provide substantiation for the enterprise? Does the authority of saints and sages priests and prophets provide grounding here? The answer is yes-and-no. The acceptance of religion like the acceptance of pretty well anything else must ultimately rest in experience. And this experience insists in the final analysis, on being personal and not vicarious, individual and not impersonal. For in religious matters, it is, in the final analysis faith that engenders authority rather than authority that creates faith. Authoritativeness, like trust, lies with the acceptance not with the accepted. The person who accepts the authority of a cognitive resource acts on his or her own responsibility. To acknowledge authority is to act on one’s own account. Authoritativeness does not engender credence except where credibility is conceded. Authority cannot substantiate belief save when belief has already spoken for authority. Let us now turn to the issue of specifically ecclesiastical authority and begin at the beginning here. Where does ecclesiastical authority come from? And why is it needed? Ecclesiastical authority roots in “the consent of the governed.” Here to be authoritative is to be accepted as such within a given section of religious commitment. The endorsement of a faith community is the ultimate basis for ecclesiastical authority. And as the history of Catholicism shows, religious authority is by its very nature something that cannot be adequately established by claims, but only by desert. But why is such authority needed?

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If a Church is to be more than a social fellowship of kindred spirits it requires a coordinating manifold of doctrinal and behavioral principles; and at this point a stabilizing magisterium of shared commonality, whether by gentle suasion or firm discipline, some sort of coordinative agent must be provided for. And just here lies the locus of authority. But just why is it that individuals should acknowledge the teaching authority (“magisterium”) of his or her particular religion—at any rate in those religions that lay a claim thereto? The answer here lies in the fact that such acceptance is simply part and parcel of being a member of that particular religion. This is not the place to pursue this issue itself. (Why should one be a religious person—and indeed one of his or that particular faith?) The crucial point for present purposes is that the issue of relevant authoritativeness is automatically encompassed and resolved within this larger issue of enrollment in a religious tradition. To be sure, if I am to put my trust in a bank or in an encyclopedia—or in a Church—I must have good reason to think that they have at heart the best interests of people like me. And so, if I am to be rational about conceding authority over myself in matters of faith and morals to the teachings of some religious community, there will have to be good grounds for thinking that its exponents and expositors have given hard and cogent thought to how matters can and should be taken to stand in the relevant range of issues with regard to people like myself. But if adopting a religion involves commitment taken “on faith” that goes beyond what rational inquiry (in its standard “scientific” form) can manage to validate, how can a rational person ever appropriately join in? How can there be a cogent rationale for a faith whose doctrines encompass reason-transcending commitments? The answer lies in the consideration that factual claims are not the crux here. For religious commitment is not a matter of historically factual correctness so much as one of life-orienting efficacy, since the sort of “belief” at issue in religion is at bottom a matter of lifeorientation rather than historical information. After all, religious narratives are by and large not historical reports but parables. The story of the Good Samaritan is paradigmatic here. From the angle of its role in Christian belief, its historical accuracy is

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simply irrelevant. What it conveys is not historical reportage but an object-lesson for the conduct of life. And much of religious teaching is always just like that, a resource of life-guidance rather than one of information. Just this is the crux of the authority in relation to the “faith and morals” at issue with the putative authoritativeness of the Church. What is at issue looks not to historical factuality but to parabolic cogency—the ability to provide appropriate life-orientation for us—putting people on the right track. It is a matter of achieving appropriate life-goals, realizing rational contentment (Aristotelian eudemonia), getting guidance in shaping a life one can look back on with rational contentment. What, after all, is it that conscientious parents want for their children? That they be happy and good! (Some will say rich, but that clearly is a desideratum only insofar as it will conduce to happiness!) And so effectively when one asks for expert guidance the issue of effectiveness will have to be addressed in these terms. And so, ultimately the rationale for conceding authority will inhere in the consideration that in so doing we facilitate and foster the realization of those prime human desiderata. So two considerations will clearly be paramount here: • Leading satisfying lives, • becoming good people. And on this basis what religious authority properly seeks to provide is not historical information but direction for the conduct of life. After all, why “must” one accept the teaching of science? The answer is not categorical but conditional: one must do so if one wishes to maximize one’s chances for successful action in this world. And something of the same can be said of theism. It maximizes one’s chances for a life of rational contentment. But there is nothing absolute about it. In neither case do we have any guarantees. In both alike, the issue is one of estimation—of doing the best we can in resolving our problems. Religion has many dimensions. But one of them is as a purposive venture. Insofar as based rationally (rather than just emotionally or

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simply on traditionary grounds), it is something we do for the sake of ends—making peace with our maker, our world, our fellows, and ourselves. And ample experience indicates that motivation to think and act toward the good flourishes in a community of shared values. In this context it makes sense to see as authoritative those who—as best we can tell—are in a good position to offer us effective guidance towards such life-enhancing affiliations. So why would a rational person subscribe to the authority of a church (an “organized religion”) in matters of faith and morals? Why would such an individual concede authority to those who speak or write on its behalf? Effectively, for the same reason that one would concede authority in other practical matters that one deems important to resolve, namely when (1) one recognizes one’s own limitations in forming a cogent resolution, (2) one has grounds for acknowledging the potential authority as thoughtful and well informed with respect to the issues and finally, (3) one has good reason to see this authority as well-intentioned. And it is clear that ecclesiastic authoritativeness can and should be appraised on this same basis. On Christian principles, the doctrinal and moral authority of the Church is based on biblical, revelatory, and rational considerations. The first two of these are evident. And the last line roots in the fact that for the sake of communal unity and integrity there must be some unifying authority. And so, the ceding of authority in matters of faith and morality is rationally appropriate where it serves effectively in the correlative range of humans ends—is life-enhancing in serving to make us wiser, better, happier people. And this is so with ecclesiastical authority as much as with authority of any other kind. But is ceding authority not a gateway to disaster? What of the imams who turn faithful devotees into suicide bombers? What of cults and their deluded and abused adherents? The point here is simply that like pretty much anything else, authority-concession is a resource that can be used and misused. The knife that cuts the bread can wound the innocent. The brick that forms the wall can smash the window. Authority too can be ceded reasonably and inappropriately. Here, as elsewhere, the possibility of abuse

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calls for sensible care with regard to such prospects, not for their abandonment. 6. WHICH ONE? Faith and the sense of human solidarity that comes in its wake is— or can be—a salient factor in the realization of a rewarding, satisfying, self-fulfilling life. This, of course, constitutes a reason of sorts why people are well-advised to have faith. But this sort of behavioral reason for having faith is not an evidential reason that substantiates the truth of the substantive beliefs that faith involves. The long and short of it is that beneficial or prudential reasons are something rather different from evidential ones. They do not argue for God’s existence as a matter of evidentiated fact, but rather cast belief in the role of a warranted endeavor. In regard to religion, we face two fundamental choices: I. Whether to buy in on the religious project at all. Whether to accept divine being in some manner, shape, or form. Whether to be a believer, or atheist or agnostic. II. If we do become believers. What particular version, form, or tradition in religion are we to accept. The former is the issue of generic religiosity; the latter is the issue of a specific religion. One sensible way of approaching the former questions regarding religiosity is to proceed from the recognition that the choices we make in life serve to define and constitute the sort of persons we are. Without choices seen in this light, as instruments of self-constitution, it emerges that the issue here, as elsewhere, comes down to the question: what sort of person do I want to make of myself? And this means that we have to look at the three groups at issue—viz. believers, atheists, and agnostics—and ask ourselves what we think of them, in each case looking not to the average, let alone the worst, but the best and ethically worthiest examples of that type.

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The choice at issue here represents a project of assessment and evaluation that it is impossible for one person to carry out appropriately on behalf of another. It is something that all of us are called on to carry through on our own behalf. We can delegate our valuing to others no more that we can delegate our eating. So all one can do here is to look to the substance of one’s own deliberations. Only we ourselves can make our choices—even as only we ourselves can make our mistakes. But the choice is not something arbitrary or indifferent. It can and should be made rationally—with careful reference to our own interaction in matters of factual cognition and evaluative judgment. So—just which religion are individuals to deem authoritative for themselves! Granted, there are always alternatives, and on casual thought it may seem plausible to think of them as being spread out before us as a matter of choice. But this is quite wrong. The fact of it is that in matters of religion, the issue of reasonable choice is in general not something people face prospectively by overtly deciding upon a religious affiliation. On the contrary, it is something they can and generally will do only retrospectively, in the wake of an already established commitment. And, perhaps ironically, the very fact that a commitment is already in place as a fait accompli itself forms a significant part of what constitutes a reason for continuing it. At this point William James’ classic distinction between live and dead options comes into play. Never—or virtually never—do people confront an open choice among alternative religions. For one thing, the realities of place and time provide limits. Homer could not have chosen to be a Buddhist. And cultural accessibility also comes into it. The Parisians of Napoleon’s day could hardly become Muslims. Once one has “seen the light” and adopted a religion, one cannot but take the view that there is “one true religion.” To do otherwise would be being unserious. Yet to say this is not to say that there are not alternatives. But in such matters, they are blocked by personal background and disposition. Benjamin Disraeli could hardly have become a Mormon. Authoritativeness must be something underpinned by a basis of personal experience. How will these present deliberations about authority apply to the Church of Choice?

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To exert ecclesiastical authority, an agency must secure from its catchment of co-religionists a fairly-earned recognition as a reliable guide in matters of religious faith and practice. Appropriate acknowledgment in matters of ecclesiastical authority is—and must be—a matter of free acceptance, just as in the case with cognitive authority. And if such acceptance is to be rationally warranted, then it has to be rooted in a cogent rationale. First there has to be a determination of thematic range. The Church makes no claims to authority in matters of chemistry, of numismatics, or of Chinese literature, and there is no reason to attribute to it any authoritativeness in those matters. But things stand rather differently in matters of doctrine and works. These are issues to which the doctors and theologians of the Church have given careful, devoted, and serious attention for generations, and insofar as the teaching institutions of the Church have reached a significant consensus in these matters it is only reasonable to acknowledge its teachings as reasonably based. The Catholic Church teaches that the Pope is the ultimate authority in matters of faith and morals, and holds every Catholic to be obliged through his faith to accept this fact. It bases this position partly on grounds of revelation and tradition and partly on grounds of substantiating reason. And it teaches that the doctrinal claims of the papacy are maximal in this regard. It is thus the Church’s position that in the existing circumstance the reasonable person is bound by virtue of this very reasonableness, to see the matter in the Church’s way, not because the Church is the Church, but because the Church is seriously committed to being as rational about these issues as the nature of the case permits. At bottom, then, there is a uniform basis for the acknowledgment of authority, to wit the beneficial result of such a step in facilitating a realization of the particular enterprise at issue. With cognitive authority this relates to the accession of information; with practical authority this relates to effective action, and with ecclesiastical authority it is a matter of achieving a life of spiritual contentment. In every dimension the crux is the realization of a significant benefit. But this functionally rational aspect of the matter is not the whole of it.

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Man does not live by reason alone. And there is no ineluctable necessity for religious commitment to require reason’s Seal of Approval. True, from the strictly rational point of view religion exists to serve the interests of life. But other factors are at work in the good life apart from reason, factors that can lead a person to undertake commitment to a particularly mode of religiosity: family tradition, social solidarity, personal inclination, the impetus of one’s experience, and so on. Nevertheless, religious commitment, and with it the acknowledgement of ecclesiastical authority, is rational insofar as there can be brought to bear the goal-oriented perspective of life-enhancement in the largest and most comprehensive sense of the idea.3 7. WHY AM I CATHOLIC The logical consequence of religious belief is—or should be— a sincere respect for the world and the intelligent agents that exist within it. Sensible believers cannot but see their fellows in a respectful and appreciative light and cannot be blatantly indifferent to their fate and fortune. Appreciative care for others is among the prime features of authentic believership. And I myself see more of this in the Christian tradition than anyplace else. But at this point the discussion will have to turn from issues of generalized analysis and explanation to issues of personal avowal and self-exposition. The fact of it is that since my earliest adulthood I have been a philosopher, someone whose concern has been the history of Western humanity’s efforts at understanding the world we humans live in and our place within it—both generally as a species and personally as individuals. The practice of inquiry aimed at understanding and explanation has been at the forefront of my concern. And when I look at the various religious traditions that are exemplified in people about me, and at the various sorts of teaching and beliefs that have arisen within these religious traditions, I could not avoid being struck by the fact that far and away the most serious concern for and engagement with the issues that engage my attention and interest on the philosophical side have been manifested on the religious side as within the sphere of Roman Catholicism. The Neo-

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Platonism of the Church Fathers, the Neo-Aristotelian of the scholastics, and the theologically based scientism of such giants of 17th Century philosophizing as Descartes and Leibniz all indicate that the most serious and instructive symbiosis between philosophy and religion have functioned within the Catholic tradition. And so for me, the ultimately most vividly live option among the available modes of religiosity is that represented by the Church of Rome. The parish to which I belong is that of St. Bede in the East End of Pittsburgh, and the well-known apothegm of that venerable scholar would be my own: “It has ever been my delight to learn or teach or write.” NOTES 1

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. by Thomas Bender (New York: Random House, 1982; Modern Library College edition), p. 299.

2

The only philosophical treatise on authority I know of is Was ist Autorität? by Joseph M. Bochenski (Freiburg im Breisgau; Basel; Wien: Herder, 1974). Curiously, seeing that its author is a priest, the book treats ecclesiastical authority in only a single rather perfunctory paragraph.

3

Some of this material was originally published in the Blackwell’s Companion to Science and Christianity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012).

Chapter 7

THE “FIVE WAYS” OF ST. THOMAS 1. AQUINAS’ FIVE WAYS Ever since their enunciation in the 13th century, the “Five Ways” projected by St. Thomas Aquinas for establishing the existence of God have been a mainstay of Christian theology. Particular interest attached to the commonalities of these arguments—the fundamental studies of the reasoning at issue. To explore this one must begin by looking at each of these arguments in some detail. I. The “Prime Mover” Argument: Primal Cosmic Origination This argument goes back to Aristotle’s idea of a premium mobile, a first, originative, and thereby itself unmoved mover. Here “motion” is paradigmatic and spreads out over physical change in general. The idea is that there must be an initial origination of process, change, and motion in the world because the progression of motive agents cannot stretch on ad infinitum. And change requires a change-producer—an agency (i.e. agent or power) that produces nature’s changes. The world needs a creator, a primordial generator, an ens originarium. And this process-inaugurator this originative agent, is nothing other than God. If an infinitude of motive agents had to lie in back of the ongoing motions of the present, then there would be no way of getting here, seeing that such an infinitude simply could not be competed. The regress of motive change accordingly has to terminate in something unchanging. This series of change-origination has to be ascribed to God as the creator of the world. II. The Creator Argument: The Primal Efficient Cause As with motion, so—according to Aquinas—efficient causation cannot go back ad infinitum. Efficient causation—the unfolding of or-

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derly process—of productive agency must meet the end of the line: and just here lies God, the ultimate change-agent. The efficient causation at issue here is not a matter of productively requisite temporal antecedence. A regression in time is not at issue, and Aquinas explicitly sidelines the controversy over the extent of the world’s temporal history as a theological issue.1 Rather, the matter is one of requisite preconditions in the explanatory (and so not inherently temporal) order. (For there to be elephants there must be trunks, but they need not preexist them.) III. The Argument from Contingency That the world exists—and exists as is—is a patent fact and moreover a contingent one. For the world as it is can either be or not be— with possibility going either way. However, we must suppose that the real is rational and that when something is as is, there is a reason for it—an explanation for why it is as is. The grounding relation of reasons for being cannot continue ad infinitum and still provide tenable reasons. And in the case of the world, the regress of reasons for its contingent facts must ultimately terminate in a final and fundamental reason of categorical necessity. Those relative or conditional necessities must ultimately issue in something whose necessity is absolute and unconditional. Contingency must have a non-contingent grounding. And this can only be found in the functioning of a necessary being whose existence and nature lies entirely outside the range of contingency. The existence of a necessary being is thus an indispensable requisite for the existence of a contingently constituted world. IV. The Ontological Argument: Primal Formal Cause Value, merit and worth are matters of degree and must ultimately be embodied in something imperative. Quantitative merit must have its perfected realization: “there is the cause of the existence and the goodness and all perfections in everything, and this, we say, is God.” The pivotal premiss of this argument is that God is by definition the perfect being (ens perfectissimum) the embodiment of positivity. Since being real (actual existence) is among the requisites of such per-

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________________________________________________________ Display A The Argument and its Nature

Mode of Dependency

God as

I

Physical motivity

material processuality

prime mover: creator

II

Productive agency

efficient causality

operational ultimacy

III

Contingent grounding

modal dependency

necessitating ground

IV

Perfection

formal causality

highest or perfect being

V

Finality

final causality

ultimate being

________________________________________________________ fection, God as the embodiment of all positivity (omnitudo realitatis) is also the supreme reality (ens realissimun as Kant called it). This reasoning at issue here is, in effect, that of St. Anselm’s “Ontological Argument.” Some writers here object that not everything capable of degrees admits of superlative: even as, there is no greatest length of greatest duration.2 So there might not be any greatest perfection. But—so Aquinas would insist—this lack of superlativeness cannot hold with those items the medievals called “transcendentals” which—like good, true, noble—elate to value. For something can be better than another only by exceeding it in point of goodness, and this requires a standard of perfect, competent, unadulterated goodness which must—as least in theory—admit of being exhibited. But this is something that only a being that actually possesses these quantities would possibly be able to do. Thus in the case of these transcendental merits the transit from possibility to actuality will have to be feasible. V. The Argument for Design: Primal Final Cause God is the purpose-provider for existence the ultimate ground of the value of existence (ens summum), the teleological embodiment of value in creation. He is accordingly the primal final cause—the being

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in response to whose evaluations the world has been brought into existence: the agent through whose intention all that is good and worthy in the world has been brought into being. “There is some being with understandings which directs all things toward their end, and this, we say, is God.” Accordingly, the factors that figure pivotally in those five arguments are respectively: change/motion (I), productive agency (II), modality status (III), perfection/value (IV), and finality/purpose (V). 2. THE RATIONAL STRUCTURE OF AQUINAS’ ARGUMENTATION Several distinctions are critical for understanding Aquinas’ position in its historical context. The first is the distinction between the cosmological arguments for which the existence of this world provides a crucial premiss, and the others. There we have [A] Cosmological Arguments I.

Prime Mover: creator: ultimate ground of the world’s physical nature

II. Primal Efficient Cause: ultimate productive source of the world’s processes and modus operandi III. Root of Contingency: ultimate necessary grounding of the world’s contingent nature. [B] Ontological Argument IV. Self-engenderer: source of his own being (causa sui): necessary being (ens neccessarium) [C] V. Finalizer: primal final cause: ultimate ground of value in the scheme of things (ens summum)

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The second salient distinction is that between the purely conceptual Ontological Argument and those arguments that pivot on Aristotelian causation: • primal material cause: God, ultimate cause of physical existence (I) • primal efficient cause: God as ens originarum (II) • primal formal cause: God as primal final cause: ens perfectissimum (IV) • primal final cause: God as optimal final cause (ens summum) (V) On closer inspection all of these arguments hinge on God’s priority and primacy in relation to modes of dependency and grounding. This is made clear in Display A, which highlights in particular the rooting of Aquinas’ argumentation regarding the Aristotelian doctrine of causation. Each of Aquinas’ five ways pivoted on one or another of God’s definitive (essential) features. (So, in a way, the tract on “The Divine Names” of Dionysius the Aereopagite provides a key factor in Thomas’ thinking.) The relationship at issue here is laid out in Display A. In his insightful and informative study of Aquinas’ thought C. F. J. Martin wrote that “the conclusion of each of the Five Ways is that the explanation of the word of the kind which that Way demands is something which we call God.”3 As I see it, there are two problems to this claim: (1) Only three of the arguments—the three “cosmological” ones in particular—relate to “the explanation of the world”, while the other two relate to the inherent nature of God. And (2) that insofar as explanation is concerned, each Way has resort not to God as such, but to one or another specific attribute or feature that is traditionally seen as divine (i.e., God-appertaining).

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________________________________________________________ Display A Argument

Rationale

Divine Characteristic

Prime mover

primal generator ultimate source of existence

God’s creativity

II. Ground of Efficient Causation

primal efficient course

God’s productive power as omnipotent (all-effecting) being

III. Ground of Contingency

primal (ultimate) rationale ground of contingency

God’s inherent existential necessity

IV. Ground of Formal Causation

primal (ultimate) formal cause

God’s perfection

V. Teleological

primal (ultimate) final cause

God’s goodness as omni-benevolent

I.

________________________________________________________ 3. THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF REGRESSION God’s role in the scheme of things is based on the idea that Realityas-a-whole exhibits five definitive factors Themes I

Modes of Dependency

motivity/change

material

II productivity/agency

efficient

III modality/explanating status

modal

IV factuality/descriptive fundamentality

formal

V finality/value

final

And all of Aquinas’ arguments are predicated on the idea that all modes of regression dependency must ultimately have a stop. There is no real infinity to be had here: there must be a regress stepper. And in every case this is God, albeit under different aspects of his nature, to wit

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I

prime mover: premum mobile

II productive agent: ens originarium III necessary good: causa sui IV highest being: ens summum V perfect being: ens perfectissimum To see why Aquinas deemed it necessary to reject infiniteregression in these arguments we must distinguish between • Productive regression as regards HOW something recedes regressively and • justifactory regression as regards WHY something recedes regressively. The former, productive mode of regression is in principle harmless. In principle, every mouse can have a mouse mother. But justifactory or explanatory regression is something else again. To explain why the earth remains fixed in its place in the cosmos, we cannot sensibly emplace it on the back of an elephant who stands on the back of a turtle who stands on the back of an alligator, “and so on.” Explanatory regresses must in principle terminate: one does not validate conclusions in reasoning for premisses whose validation is incomplete or inexistent. As Aristotle taught, explanatory regression must have a stop. And all of those different dependency regresses at issue in the Five Ways have an explanatory dimension in a world in which “the real is rational.” So as Aquinas sees it, infinite regress is not a viable prospect in this context of thought.

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As this exposition of the reasoning shows, this entire group of arguments exhibits the same logical form. For all of them are institutions of the reasoning: 1. Reality-as-a-whole exhibits dependency in point of the factor X [where X can be motivity, agency, modality, descriptive fundamentality, or finality]. 2. No mode of dependency can continue onwards in an ad infinitum regress. For each there must be an ultimate terminus: a regressions-stopper. 3. And this ultimate ground in which such regress stops is in every case God, viewed under some aspect or other of his essential nature. 4. WHY FIVE? Modern theorists sometimes express puzzlement as to why Aquinas should have projected five different and distinct arguments for God’s existence. Why should there be such redundancy when one telling argument would suffice? Did this proliferation perhaps mask one subsurface lack of confidence, betraying a felt need for a plan B (or C or D or E) in argumentation, in case plan A should prove insufficient? It is—or should be—clear that such an appraisal of the situation is quite wrong. What Aquinas’ many-faceted reasoning is designed to accomplish is to show that God is the ultimate sustainer of every aspect of existence/reality. On Aquinas’ approach he is the ultimate answer to every fundamental question. For we can and do confront the question-cluster: What is the ultimate basis of the various facets of existence? Where is it that we must ultimately look for the reason-for-being of • motion? • change?

111 • necessity? • value? • purpose?

And the answer throughout is uniformly one and the same, viz. God. As Aquinas saw it he is the focus at which all of those fundamental questions converge. And it is this commonality of ultimacy that those Five Ways are designed to exhibit. The point of calling them “ways” is bound up with the fact that they all converge on the same destination. 5. THE REACTION OF LEIBNIZ Leibniz objected to several of the Thomistic arguments— specifically those construing God as (I) prime Mover, (II) primal efficient cause, (III) root of contingency, and (V) finalizer—that all of them were predicated upon premisses relating to the world and its condition. As he saw it, this based the argument upon a promise whose standing is contingent, and led to the anomaly of basing the existence of a necessary being upon a contingent fact. However, Leibniz wanted to retain the Ontological Argument, albeit subject to one corrective, viz. that the conception of “necessary being” is logically self-consistent so that such a being is possible. This qualification is necessary, so he held, to avert the objection of XXX to the reasoning of Descartes that arguing the necessary existence of a perfect being is like arguing to the necessary existence of a perfect mountain. Additionally Leibniz also sought to revise the Root of Contingency argument (No. III) with its argument that God is a necessary precondition for existence—i.e., for the realization of the world. This, as he saw it, pivots the reasoning on a contingent fact. But, so Leibniz argued, God is not only the ground of existence/reality but the ground of possibility as well: where there is no God, there will be no manifold of possibility either. But this manifold—unlike the world—exists of necessity. Accordingly with a shift to the presuppositional argumentation for reality to possibility we effect a shift from contingency to ne-

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cessity. Thus Leibniz proposed to replace argument III with one that cast God in the role of the grounding root of possibility. 6. KANT AS CRITIC Throughout the argumentation of the Five Ways, Aquinas has it that any regress of preconditions must ultimately terminate in an unconditional limit, that where an infinite regress looms, there must ultimately be something—a regression-ending terminator that does the stopping. In opposition to this view, Kant insists that we can validly claim substantiality—a thing of some kind that ends the regression— only when this regression-stopper is something we do (or at least can) encounter in experience. And in pursuance of this idea he writes: In the empirical (i.e., experienced) regress we can have no experience of an absolute limit, that is no experience of any condition as itself being . . . absolutely unconditioned. The reason is that . . . an experience would have to contain a limitation of experienced appearance by something, or by the void, and be a continued regress . . . we should be able to encounter this limitation [experientially]—which is impossible [in the regressive circumstances]. (CPuR, A547=B545)

For Kant, thought and reasoning cannot of itself identify individuals: they must admit of experiential encounter, and this is something that regress reasonings cannot achieve: When a whole is empirically given, it is possible to proceed back in the series of its inner conditions ad infinitum. But when the whole is not given . . . we can only say that the search for still higher conditions is possible in infinitum. (CPuR, A514=B542)

As Kant saw it, projecting a regress-stopper will plunge us into contradiction. For any such putative termination cannot satisfy the demand for objectivity that our mind imposes upon whatever it is prepared to identify as a real existent. So our cognitive commitments would here come into collision with themselves, with nothing but selfintroduction as a result:

113 All these questions [of ultimacy] refer to an object which can be found nowhere save in our thoughts, namely, to the absolutely unconditioned totality of the synthesis of appearances . . . . Since such an object is nowhere to be met with outside our idea, it is not possible for it to be given. The cause of failure we must seek in our idea itself. For so long as we obstinately persist in assuming that there is an actual object corresponding to the idea, the problem, as thus viewed, allows of no solution. (CPuR, A482 = B510.)

Where Aquinas takes a realistic view of regression, holding that ontological regression ad infinitum is impossible and any such regress must terminate in a being, Kant takes an idealistic view of the matter, holding that thought-regression ad indefinitum is possible and can— and must ever continue without ontological implications. NOTES 1

ST1a462.

2

See C. F. J Martin, Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 176.

3

Martin, op. cit., p. 125.

Name Index Anselm, St., 85n37, 105 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 18, 66, 83-84n24, 84n25, 103-113 Aristotle, 18, 92, 103, 109 Baier, Kurt, 43 Billicsich, Friedrich, 81n1 Bochenski, Joseph, 101n2 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 98 Boulding, Kenneth, 83n20 Caesar, Julius, 53 Caligula, Gaius Germanicus, 52 Chisholm, Roderick M., 82n7 Collins, Francis S., 42n3 Darwin, Charles, 32 Davis, J. H., 82n11 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 87, 101n1 Dembski, William A., 82n11 Descartes, René, 12, 23, 101, 111 Dionysius, 107 Disraeli, Benjamin, 98 Einstein, Albert, 30 Emerson, R. W., 35 Flew, R. N., 83n24 Foss, M., 84n24 Galilei, Galileo, 30 Gingerich, Owen, 42n3 Hartshorne, Charles, 82n12 Heller, Michael, 13n2 Hick, John R., 82n6

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Himmelfarb, Gertrude Hitler, Adolf, 53, 59 Homer, 34, 98 Hume, David, 52, 82n5 Huxley, T. H., 30 Jacobs, W., W., 63 James, William, 12, 23, 35, 41n2, 42n3, 98 Kaita, Robert, 42n4 Kant, Immanuel, 47, 105, 112-113 Khrushchev, Nikita, 29 Knebel, Sven K., 85n38 Kutcher, Ashton, 83n17 Laplace, P.S. de, 7, 27 Leibniz, G. W., 3, 52, 55, 64, 68, 75-76, 80, 84n30, 85n34, 101, 111112 Lincoln, Abraham, 37 Lorenz, E. N., 59 Lorenz, Stefan, 83n17, 85n38 Lucretius, 52, 82n4 Maher, James V., 42n4 Martin, C. F. J., 107, 113n2, 113n3 Maxwell, J. C., 30 Mill, John Stuart, 30, 41n1, 54 Moody, Ernest, 35 Newman, J. H., 35 Newton, Isaac, 30 Pascal, Blaise, 11, 36, 40 Penrose, Roger, 82n11 Perkins, R. K. Jr., 82n3 Planck, Max, 13n2 Plantinga, Alvin, 53, 82n7, 84n29, 84n31

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Plato, 18, 43, 51-52, 63 Plotinus, 83n23 Poe, H. L., 82n11 Pusey, E. B., 35 Raphael, (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), 90 Ratsch, Del, 82n11 Reichenbach, Bruce R., 63, 74, 83n14, 83n21, 85n35 Rescher, Catherine, 42n4 Rowe, William L., 85n40 Ruse, Michael, 42n3, 82n11 Russell, Bertrand, 53 Russell, Bruce, 82n8, 82n9, 82n10, 85n40 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 46 Scotus, Duns, 83n24 Smart, Amy, 83n17 Sober, Elliot, 82n11 Spinoza, Benedict de, 85n37 Squires, Euan, 42n3 Stalin, Joseph, 59 Suess, Dr. (Theodore Suess Geisel), 31, 55, 83n15 Tatarkiewicz, Władysław, 83-84n24 Tennant, F. R., 83n19 Tillich, Paul, 54, 82n13 Tong, Aug, 42n4 Voltaire, de, 52-53, 76, 80 Wesley, Charles, 35 Whitman, Walt, 35 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10, 72 Wykstra, Stephen, 85n40