Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has posted a review of the second edition of Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God by Joshua Golding, Bellarmine University. Apparently this edition is a substantial update over the 1991 revised edition. Tighter arguments are always nice, but it is a bummer that I will now have to purchase a new copy of the book. The review does a good job of summarizing the structure, aim, and flow of the book, and I find myself in agreement with his criticism of Swinburne's reliance on the principle of simplicity. Of possible interest to some of our readers (Clayton) it looks like Swinburne has changed some of his views on the problem of evil; conceding that that evil reduces the probability that God exists.
Golding offers some other questions and criticisms that I think the theist philosopher probably has a ready answer to. I want to shine light on one passage that struck me as odd. Golding says that, "It seems very plausible that even if God did not exist, people would be inclined to imagine that there is a God and even imagine that they are having experiences of God, when in fact their experience is not veridical." Perhaps I'm simply conceptually blocked, or I give the ontological argument to much credence, but I don't find it plausible at all that in a world where God did not exist people would simply imagine that he existed anyway. Not only would they imagine that he existed but they would imagine that they were having experiences of him. What good reason do we have for thinking that this is true? You might object that it isn't logically impossible that such a world exist, but that doesn't rise to the level of making such a view plausible. Golding goes on to suggest that our "tests and checking procedures for a religious experience should be more rigorous than in other cases," but why should religious claims have a special burden. There are plenty of people who base some of their everyday beliefs on wishful thinking, but we don't subject them to an extra burden in order to justify their belief. Further, to borrow from Alston, why think that our religious perceptual practices are, or should be, subject to the same kinds of tests and standards as our regular perceptual practices.
On the plausibility of people imagining God in a world where he does not exist (which is sort of like the flip side of the problem of divine hiddenness):
1. people have conscious first person experience; 2. they feel the immensity of the universe beyond themselves, and 3. they anthropomorphically project consciousness of their own sort out onto the universe. First pantheism, then polytheism and monotheism.
Seems very plausible to me. Divine hiddenness, on the other hand, seems very implausible.
I discuss some similar issues in my post on Religious Experiences.
These experiences are the result of neurological activity in an evolved module of our brain. This raises two questions: (1) why did we evolve such a module?; and (2) what characteristically causes this neural activity?
Given a choice between natural or supernatural causes, the former strikes me as eminently more plausible.
Steve-
Your projective suggestion is an interesting story, but I don't see good reason to think that it is true or remotely possible. It doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that is very worthy of belief. Your second religious evolution sounds much like the kind of Golden Bough accounts the contemporary anthropologist reject.
Matthew -
Not "remotely possible" seems strong. It seems we do this kind of projection of human attributes (in a smaller way) alot, for instance with our pets, with corporations, etc. You are right, of course, about the religious evolution - I just meant that all of those theisms could be seen as different forms of projection.
And I haven't read the literature on this except for W. James years ago, but isn't is the case that equivalent experiences are interpreted mostly through the lens of the subject's preconceptions with regard to whether a personal god is encountered?
People have spent quite a lot of time imagining life on other planets. Nobody thinks that's a good reason to doubt there is any.
People are weird, no?
Cicero, as Fox Mulder says, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. I think you're right, but I also think those who believe in Freudian explanations of religious belief would consider your point to be true. No one thinks Freudian accounts of theistic belief constitute an argument that God doesn't exist. They're just supposed to be an explanation of why people would believe in God even if there's no God, something the atheists needs to explain to make the theory complete.
"even if God did not exist, people would be inclined to imagine that there is a God"
I wondered about that idea too. But there is this argument in favour of its plausbility: lots of people throughout human history have had experiences which they've taken to be experiences of various different gods. Now either you take an extreme universalist view of God, or you have to admit that plenty of these apparent religious experiences must be false. (Animists have religious encounters with animist spirits, Christians with the Christian God, Hindus with the Hindu deities, and so on; they can't all be right.)
So in that case, people clearly _do_ have a tendency to misidentify experiences as religious. That might not be an argument against God's existence, but I think it does undermine (to some extent) the evidence of religious experience which would otherwise count in His favour.
Hi, by the way - just found this blog and it looks very interesting! Will keep an eye on it in future.
Toby, isn't it possible that they're all experiencing something of a spiritual reality and are thus having a veridical experience but that some of them misidentify it as about what their own religious tradition considers such experiences to be about? You could be an inclusivist and say these are all about God, but some of them say false things about God as a result. You could be an exclusivist and say they've experienced something of God but not something sufficient for salvation. You could even think that some of these are experiences of demons who disguise themselves as angels of light. There are plenty of interpretations that take them all as veridical that don't lead to universalism or inclusivism.
True enough. But the possibility sits a bit uncomfortably with me. Don't many spiritual experiences have religion-specific, or denomination-specific, content? I can see how, as a Hindu, I might interpret a _general_ spiritual experience as a Hindu-type one because of my own religious background. But context will only take me so far. If I have a vision of Christ on the cross, or hear a divine voice quoting or prompting me to read the gospels, I can't really see how that could be anything other than Christian.
So the fact that some people have experiences that are very specific to one faith, while others have experiences very specific to another, still suggests to me that at least some of those visions are non-veridical. Therefore, people do have religious experiences independently of the existence of the god in question.
(Barring mischievous demons, of course.)
Steve-
I suppose it was your first… then… and formulation that lead me to infer a form of religious evolution, which your account would seem to need.
Let me say a little more on this topic... It seems that sometimes people confuse plausible for possible. I take it that when we say it is plausible to believe X we mean it is reasonable to believe X or X is worthy of belief. Golding takes this a step further and asserts that his claim is very plausible, or it is very reasonable to believe that "if God did not exist, people would be inclined to imagine that there is a God and even imagine that they are having experiences of God." I certainly don't think that there is any evidence that shows that this accounts for religious belief in our world. One route taken to justify such an account is to argue for some kind of projection, but while projection is an interesting story it lacks any evidence and it would seem to require a Golden Bough type account of religious evolution. You might object that we do anthropomorphize things at times, which is true, but generally we don't think that we are asserting a metaphysical truth but a metaphorical one. We might talk about, and treat, the anthropomorphized object as a person in some sense. However it doesn't seem that we ever really confuse our person talk for thinking that the anthropomorphized object really is a person. It is also a long leap from an anthropomorphized object to a conception of a monotheistic divine being who is totally other. I just don't see any good evidence to think that people have done this sort of thing. You might object that projection may not account for where religious belief originated in this world, but there may be some possible world where it is true. Well maybe, but why think that possible world is close to this one, which is what you would need for the account to be plausible.
Seems perfectly plausible that in a world not created by God that people may well imagine God's existence, but there seems to be three very critical problems with this presentation, not the least of which is the rather ad hoc "there isn't a world not created by God."
Beyond that, we simply ask "so what?" Just because in a world not created by God people would imagine God, why would it be that this argumentation has any position in a polemic against God's existence? Honestly, who cares that people imagine there is a God? That doesn't have anything to do with the fact or its refutation. I believe there is a New York City, though I have never seen it. In my own experienced world, New York City does not exist. But I take the word of those I trust that New York does exist. If I imagined New York City, that would have very little to do with existence.
Finally, it seems to me that you must first assume the lack of a God to call into question religious experience. If one who does not believe in God makes claims to some sort of religiosity, that seems to be far more indicative than we "silly religious-types" that don't question our experience. It's circular reasoning to say first there is no God and then go out and find little flaws to affirm that stance, even if such flaws could be bent to support his existence.
And I am rather a fan of the Principle of Parsimony.
True, if people in a world not created by God would imagine God (e.g. in what they thought were religious experiences), this is not evidence against God's existence in this world. But it is a reason to take claims of God's existence with more of a pinch of salt than we might otherwise do.
Compare: if we had good reason to think that that shepherd boys frequently cried "Wolf" when wolves were nowhere to be seen, this might not be evidence against the existence of a wolf on any specific occasion, but it is reason to take specific cries of "Wolf" with more of a pinch of salt than we might otherwise do.