The Elusive God, Chapter 1, Sections 5-8

The goal of "Volitional Knowing" is to explicate "volitionalism", the view that the human will is an avenue through which we can have "conclusive evidence and knowledge of God's reality" (59-60). Moser contrasts volitionalism to pure rationalism, which claims that "human reason is the source of knowledge of God's reality", and pure empiricism, which holds that "human (sensory or perceptual) experience is the source of knowledge of God's reality" (59-60, Moser's italics). (I assume that Moser holds to volitionalism, not pure volitionalism--that is, he thinks that the will is part of the way we come to know God, but so too are human reason and sensory experience.)

The problem with pure rationalism/empiricism is that both aver that the only evidence regarding God's existence and nature is "spectator evidence", which is (generally) publicly available and non-challenging--in coming to know something via spectator evidence, you can analyze it, discuss it, and just, well, look at it, all from a safe distance. If pure rationalism/empiricism were true, then the only way to come to know God would be natural theology, testimony, and religious experience (the kind where you can just sit back and let it wash over you, I suppose). None of these ways of coming to know about God challenges us.

By contrast, on the volitionalist model, God provides us with perfectly authoritative evidence--"evidence demanding that we yield our wills to (the will of) the divine source of the evidence in question" (46). God wants to provide us with authoritative rather than spectator evidence because His ultimate goal is for us to come to live with Him in loving fellowship; and the way to reach that is to noncoercively have us come to know Him in a way that changes our wills for the better. (If God coerced us into fellowship, not only would it not be true fellowship, but it would depersonalize us (57).)

Why doesn't God use both authoritative and spectator evidence to move us to come to know Him? Because having spectator evidence could actually interfere with God's goals of having us come to be in loving fellowship with Him: "Spectator evidence of God's reality would ... allow for volitionally casual access to God, with no demand on our wills relative to God's will to call us to repentance and divine-human fellowship. It would thereby neglect God's exalted status as perfectly and thus supremely authoritative for us in terms of the direction of our wills" (56, boldfacing in all passages from Moser is my own). If I understand Moser correctly, he's arguing that spectator evidence for God's existence, at least to unredeemed creatures like most of us, would make us think of God in non-authoritative terms--thinking of God as a being whose existence is to be proved by allegedly neutral considerations could tempt us into thinking of God as just one being among others, rather than a being that is supposed to be authoritative over us. (Even if you had an ontological argument that proved to your satisfaction that God is the greatest conceivable being, such an argument would not of necessity challenge your volitions in the same way an authoritative call would--you could easily accept such an argument while still sinning in the same ways you did before encountering the argument.)

One worry for this claim is that devils, if they exist, presumably believe in God's existence without being redeemed by Him. That is, they have spectator evidence for God's existence without accepting authoritative evidence from Him.

Perhaps devils, though, are unredeemable, in which case neither authoritative nor spectator evidence will get them to endorse God as authoritative over them. Thus, allowing them spectator evidence will not interfere with God's goal of recruiting them into fellowship with Him. Moreover, if retributivism is right, then devils' having constant reminders of the existence of a being sovereign over them might be part of their punishment.

A second worry for this claim has to do with people in the past. As legend has it, our more primitive ancestors believed in God (along with countless other spirits) as much as any of us believe in unobservable but mathematically robust scientific entities. Why did so many of them have these beliefs? The worry is that they had lots of spectator evidence for God's existence, which would run counter to Moser's thesis that God isn't interested in providing such evidence to people who haven't started to be significantly volitionally changed.

Perhaps, though, a lot more of them than us accepted purposively intended authoritative evidence, and so a lot more of them were volitionally better than we. Alternatively, maybe what they believed in was not God, but a false God--say, spirits much more like them than like God, or the God of the philosophers. What about a third possibility, though--they thought they had spectator evidence of the same kind of God that Moser thinks exists and that skeptics should believe in, and they believed in God because of that alleged evidence, but it turns out they really didn't have it. In such a case, we should ask: what conditions made them think they had such spectator evidence, and are such conditions compatible with what a loving God would permit, given that spectator evidence can harm God's goals for us?

"Volitional Knowing" explains why we should think that our receiving evidence of God's existence would depend on the disposition of our wills. "Skeptical Tests" explains how to test whether this putative evidence is reliable, i.e., why we should treat it as evidence to begin with.

Moser plausibly claims that we shouldn't endorse cognitive norms that make evidence of a worship-worthy God inadmissible simply because it isn't spectator evidence. So, tests that rely on the principle that, say, the only things that we can justifiably say exist are things that are publicly observable by means of our senses are illegitimate.

So what tests are admissible? Moser lists two. First, there are tests based on a baseline set of expectations about God's character, namely, that anything that fits the title, "God", is worthy of worship. Thus, you can be sure that, if "a call promotes hate toward people, it isn't from a perfectly loving God" (65).

This first test raises some questions. First, what role does interpretation play? Can't it happen that I misinterpret a call of God into thinking He is promoting hate, when really there is something in me that disposes me to interpret it that way? And if so, is Moser OK with this possibility? If he's not, then perhaps he can say that to be able to receive a call from God you have to be volitionally changed in such a way that you aren't tempted to promote hate while thinking that you are obeying God's call.

Second, how can we be sure what is and isn't in God's character? The Bible includes many passages that some see as hateful and that others see as evidence that our culture is now morally corrupt. And Moser himself writes, "humans, with their very limited cognitive and moral resources, would be in no position to serve as reliable judges over a perfectly loving God" (60).

Let's get to the second test. This is a test of us. Moser lists four conditions that we need to meet before we can dismiss a purported revelation of God as illusory:

(1) Are we willing to receive a perfectly loving God's authoritative call to us for what it is intended to be, including a challenging call for enemy-love and enemy-forgiveness? (2) Are we willing to engage in the attentive discernment integral to receiving with due care and respect a perfectly loving God's authoritative call? (3) Having received God's authoritative call for what it is intended to be, are we willing to be correctively judged and then remade by the power of a perfectly loving God's unselfish love? (4) Are we willing to let a perfectly loving God be God even in our own lives, that is, the Lord whose will is perfectly authoritative and supreme for us regarding our own attitudes, actions, and lives? (65-66)

If I'm not mistaken, Moser reasons like this: you can be a skeptic about God's existence, but in order to do so in good cognitive standing, you have to meet a few demands: in a nutshell, you have to seek out God, not in the hopes of disproving Him, but in the hopes of serving Him. If you seek but do not find, then you can legitimately be a skeptic about God's existence. How, though, can you be sure that you were ever really willing to serve God? And if you are seek and don't find, then does that undercut my evidence for God if I seek and do find? And how should a person who has no evidence but who has not sought react to you?

Those are the two tests of the reliability of authoritative evidence. But it is worth saying something about what it is like to receive authoritative evidence. "One's firsthand experience of what is evidently God's authoritative call ... would be experiential acquaintance, involving attention-attraction, with what is evidently God's authoritative call on a person's life, via that person's conscience" (65). Authoritative evidence appears to a person to be evidence of a kind of reality that makes demands on you to improve your behavior; it is not surprising, then, that this evidence should appear to you as a tug on your conscience to do something you think of as right and as so far left undone by you.

The worry, though, is that Moser doesn't distinguish evidence of God's making a call on you from your own highest values making a call on you. Take a look at Moser's description of a concrete example of God's calling you:

I have, let's assume, a hard time loving my enemies, especially those I have to face directly in my life.
In the imagined case ... I have no indication either that I am calling myself to repent or that I even want to repent; nor do I have any indication that the call to repentance is coming either from my own history or from some other merely human or worldly source. ... In addition, I evidently am in a volitional interaction, an experienced give-and-take of wills, where my will is being challenged repeatedly by a morally superior will that calls for perfect love even for one's (including my) enemies. (69)

Now, Moser says that God's pulling on your attention does not feel to you either as a call by you to yourself to repent or as a desire to repent. Does my conscience confronting me with my failure to live up to my obligations, or imploring me to read the Bible, especially when I don't want to think about or do either of these things, count as God calling me? If not, then I can't think of what it would be--does it feel like being taken over by an alien force? If so, I'm skeptical that I've ever experienced, even in a glimmering way, being moved to do something by an alien force that is clearly not part of me. So I think Moser must mean what Kant would call "the moral law within me" (note that Kant, who I see as operating in the Pascalian tradition Moser commends, said we must always experience our moral obligations as divine commands, so I don't think I'm putting an obviously absurd view into Moser's mouth here). If that's true, though, why think of this as a command by God instead of a person's confronting herself with her own highest values? (This has always confused me about Kant as well, I should note.)

Moser addresses this question, or some close variant: "Is there really a divine agent who calls one to repentance and fellowship, or, alternatively, is the call in question illusory?" (67) Moser's answer is that "if I have no indication whatever that 'some buried element of [my] own early life' is now generating my religious experience, I'll lack evidence that the experience is illusory on that basis regarding divine reality, even if the experience is illusory. ... In the absence of any indication of an illusory experience, I can't justifiably infer that my experience is illusory." (68) In response to this, I should note that most of Moser's readers have grown up in a Christian, or a post-Christian, culture with the concept of a divine call. Moreover, many of us have read parts/all of the Bible and/or been exposed to it in various contexts. Given these facts, how could you ever conclude that those facts aren't responsible for your experience of a divine call, especially if that divine call felt the same as your experience of being confronted in your conscience by your moral obligations? (One way would be to grow up in an atheistic culture that doesn't even worry about a God to the point that it has to deny Him, and yet still to feel a divine call. But obviously few of us are in this position.)

However the above is resolved, one of the upshots of Moser's discussion of authoritative evidence is that non-propositional evidence of God's existence is foundational, and the way people would come to know a worship-worthy God. Consequently, people don't need an argument to have justified belief in God; they can simply rely on the authoritative evidence they have, though that foundational evidence can be supplemented by abductive arguments for God's existence (see 64 for more on this).

1.5 forwarded the claim that evidence of God can come to us only if our wills are open to it; 1.6 described a test we can use to determine the authenticity of any purported revelation from God (i.e., is it compatible with what a worship-worthy being would want?), as well as tests we need to apply to ourselves before we can legitimately claim that there is no evidence for God's existence. 1.7 appears to begin, at least for argument's sake, from the position that we have authoritative evidence of God's existence and moves to the point of asking about the attitude we're supposed to have to the being for whose existence we have authoritative evidence. Moser concludes that we're supposed to have an attitude of trust towards God.

What are we supposed to trust God with, though? "God, if real, could be trusted for what God has actually promised, in keeping, of course, with God's perfectly loving character" (71). And what has God promised? According to Jews and Christians, he has promised "to remain forever in fellowship with God's human children who are willing to be in such fellowship as God frees them deadly idols by bringing them into volitional conformity with God's self-giving crucified and resurrected human Son, Jesus" (71).

I have two questions about this: first, how are we supposed to establish that Christian and Jewish takes on what God has promised are the ones we're supposed to believe? Second, why do we have to trust God only for what He has actually promised? Couldn't I conclude, based on God's character, that he would ensure x, y, and z and so trust Him to provide x, y, and z? Moser thinks not, on the basis that God is not a divine vending machine set up to satisfy our fleeting desires--if He did so, that wouldn't move us into a loving fellowship with Him where we are ready to yield our will to His. But this just raises my earlier question: how can Moser be so sure that a perfectly good being would be enemy-loving and -forgiving, but not that such a being could be counted on to provide x, y, and z?

At any rate, our trust in God should have two features: it should be "purposively ultimate" and "cognitively ultimate". Here's what Moser says about purposively ultimate trust: "Purposively ultimate trust in God would be trust in God, but wouldn't be merely a means to another end. ... It would be trust in God as an end in itself, for its own sacred value owing to God's sacred value. Such trust would exclude trusting in God solely as a means to another end, and accordingly would give God the honor worthy of God inherently in the area of human trust" (74). I don't know what this means. My guess is, it means that we should foster an attitude of trust in God, not because such an attitude gets us anything, but because that attitude is good in itself. I suspect it's supposed to be seen as good in itself because it displays the attitude appropriate to a worship-worthy being.

I think we have cognitively ultimate trust in God when our belief in God is based on acquaintance with Him rather than on arguments for His existence (see 74-75). We should have such trust, I take it, because this is the way in which God wants us to first come to know Him, and moreover having such trust transforms our wills in the direction of God's.

"Voice Lessons" appears to be about how to recognize God's call. Moser says that, since God is loving, the call would be for us to repent of our selfish ways and to join in fellowship with Him. Also, since God is perfectly authoritative, the call would be one that would appear to a person (barring some cognitive defect) as having authority to her will.

Since this is the nature of God's call, it will be unpleasant for those of us not in fellowship with God, for those of us not in fellowship with God will ultimately privilege their own desires over God's. Consequently, many people will claim not to have heard God's call, not because they didn't hear it, but because it was unpleasant for them; so they wrote it off as coming from somewhere else (77-78).

Moser deals with an important objection in this section: aren't people who receive authoritative evidence of God biased in favor of theism? After all, they take the question of God's existence seriously, they have to seek out God, and finally, they must be willing to obey Him should they find Him. The worry is that such people invent, rather than receive, evidence of God's existence.

Moser replies, "skeptics in question would need to argue that willingness to submit to God's will yields a tendency to fabricate evidence of divine reality in the absence of such evidence. [However, r]eligious frauds are typically unwilling to submit to a perfectly loving God's will. They characteristically put themselves first, and their god ... becomes just a means to their own selfish ends" (80). This is true, but it seems misdirected. The worry is not that people who find evidence of God's call are liars, but are self-deceived, or wishful thinkers. The real question is: is a tendency to fabricate evidence of divine reality incompatible with the tendency to submit one's will to that of a perfect being's? The answer to this doesn't seem obvious to me.

Since this is a long post with a lot of criticisms, I think it will be helpful to lay all the criticisms out:

Diabolical Question: Do devils have spectator evidence of God even though their wills are irredeemably bad?

Primitive Peoples' Question: Since people in the past more likely to believe in God than we are today, does this mean they were better people, or had more spectator evidence, than we do, or were they not in fact more likely to believe in God than we are today?

Interpretation Question: How susceptible is God's call to our own interpretation of it?

God's Character Question: Given our meager cognitive and moral resources, how can we be sure what is and isn't in God's character?

Trustworthy Seeker Question: If you fail to have authoritative evidence of God, can you ever be sure that you really looked for it?

Phenomenological Question: What's the phenomenological difference between God's calling you and your being confronted by your own conscience with your inadequacies?

Bible Question: What is the basis for believing Jews' and Christians' claims about what God has actually promised?

Promise Question: Why should we trust God only for what He has actually promised rather than for what we conclude a worship-worthy being would do?

Wishful Thinker Question: Is a tendency to fabricate evidence of divine reality incompatible with the tendency to submit one's will to that of a perfect being's?