Recently in Existence of God Category

I'd like to thank Matthew Mullins for inviting me to post at Prosblogion. My first entry is going to be a request for help. I would be very grateful if Prosblogion readers could fill out the following, very brief survey: https://surveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_6XKYbWbsP5SBsBS

It will take only about three minutes of your time. The survey is part of my current project on cognitive science and natural theology. The aim is to get a better idea of how philosophers today evaluate natural theological arguments for or against the existence of God. Note that you do not need to be a philosopher of religion or a faculty member to complete this survey. I will post a digest of the results in a few weeks. The survey will be active until I have gathered a predetermined number of responses that would allow for statistically robust results or until two weeks have elapsed.

Too often, discussion about skeptical theism focuses on whether there are likely to be unknown goods which could outweigh the evils we know of (Officially, I have problems with the notion of "knowing of" an evil, but I'll set that aside). That can create the impression that an affirmative answer is reached, skeptical theism wins. But that would be a misunderstanding.

Dustin Locke asks the following questions:

I was wondering if anyone could help me with another scholarship question. I'm looking for texts that concern theistic accounts of moral epistemology. Of course there are all the texts on divine command theory. But these discuss divine command theory primarily as an account of what moral facts are, rather than accounts of how we know about them--in other words, they're accounts of the metaphysics of morality, not the epistemology. The obvious theistic contenders for the latter would be things like scripture, personal revelation, God-given innate moral beliefs, etc. Does anyone know of a good text that explores the possibilities here and perhaps argues for one over the others (or at least argues that one is no good)?

Any help?

Some responses to the Problem of Evil involve defending the proposition that it is on balance a good thing that the world was created. I want to propose a Problem of Mediocrity or Problem of the Just-Good-Enough or more broadly the Problem of the Not-Great world. As I envision it, it's disconfirmation of theism is compatible with the world being on balance good. It goes like this:

(1) Being the kind of Being God is, we expect greatness in everything He does.
(2) The world is not great.
(3) Hence, theism is disconfirmed.

I'll refine it a bit below and raise an objection below the fold

Emanuel Rutten sent me the following interesting argument which I am posting with his permission. Please make sure to be clear that if you cite this post, everything except the title, the preceding sentence and this sentence, is taken verbatim from Rutten. He has some other interesting arguments on his blog, some of which alas are in Dutch.

Take the following metaphysical principle, connecting possible worlds, knowledge and truth: 'If it is impossible to know that p, then p is necessarily false'. This principle seems cogent. For, if a given proposition p could be true, then, plausibly, there is some possible world in which some subject knows that p is true. In other words, if in *all* possible worlds *all* subjects do not know that some proposition is true, then, plausibly, that is because that very proposition cannot in fact be true.

Well, on a Cartesian view of knowledge, that is, to know p is to be certain that p is true, the above principle has an interesting consequence. For, take for p the proposition 'God does not exist'. It seems reasonable to hold that it is impossible to know that God does not exist. For, whatever the arguments against God, there will always be some (perhaps an extremely remote) possibility that God does exist after all, so that we can never truly say, on the Cartesian view, that we know that God does not exist. But then it follows that it is necessarily false that God does not exist. Hence, it is necessarily true that God exists. The principle thus entails theism. Is this new argument for theism convincing?

I've just finished a literature survey in preparation for my SEP entry on Skeptical Theism, and I've noticed a bit of a loose end. Consider two kinds of possible worlds including God and evil (from Russell and Wykstra's 1988 dialogue). One kind of world is the "morally transparent" world where the reasons God allows suffering are "near the surface" and so fairly easily discernible by us. Another kind is a "morally inscrutable" world where the reasons why God allows evil are either buried "beneath the surface" or in the distant future.

Wykstra's original 1984 debut of CORNEA (man there is a lot of philosophy in that paper!) advanced the thesis that it is more likely that God would create a morally inscrutable world. Russel and Rowe give reasons for the opposite claim. Below the fold I'll briefly summarize their arguments and suggest why it seems to me the atheist has the upper hand in this argument, and issue a call for attention to the research project of defending the goodness of a morally inscrutable universe.

Christine Overall famously argued that miracles, conceived as violations of the laws of nature, would be evidence against the existence of the traditional God. A lengthy debate with Robert Larmer ensued, in which Larmer argued that only slight modifications to the law-breaking account of miracles are necessary in order for miracles to serve as evidence for, rather than against, the existence of God. Larmer tries to argue that miracles do not violate the laws of nature, but nevertheless holds that they are different from ordinary events in that they don't follow from the laws of nature. (I don't have Larmer's book handy to remember the exact details of his account.)

The Overall-Larmer debate in some respects replays one dialectical thread from the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence: Clarke defends the view that any sufficiently widespread natural regularity should be regarded as a law, and any event that violates such a regularity should be regarded as a miracle. Furthermore, Clarke argues, miracles of this sort occur from time to time. Leibniz argues that God, as traditionally conceived, would not create a world of the sort Clarke envisions and, furthermore, that Clarke's weak conception of laws does not allow a theologically adequate distinction between miracles and ordinary events.

I think Overall pretty decisively won the debate with Larmer, and Leibniz pretty decisively won the debate with Clarke on this and most other points. (One point where Leibniz clearly loses: his insistence that if there were not a unique best possible world God would be unable to create a world is clearly false.) However, there are a lot of people who seem to disagree, who continue to hold that miracles are best understood as somehow in tension with laws, and that such events can serve as evidence for the existence of the traditional God. I in fact think that miracles should not be conceived as in any sort of tension with laws, so, instead of speaking of miracles, I'll speak of 'lawless events'. Lawless events are those which don't follow, either probabilistically or deterministically, from the laws of nature. (interpret 'follow from' in whatever sense your favorite theory of laws requires.) In this post I am concerned with arguments from the traditional divine attributes against the occurrence of lawless events. These arguments will of course work backward to show that lawless events would be evidence against the existence of a being with those attributes.

I want to give this argument in part to provoke a bit of discussion of the role of FOL in philosophy. I don't think the argument carries great weight, in large part because of Objection 2 (see the end).

1. (Premise) The inferences allowed by classical First Order Logic (FOL) combined with a modal logic that includes Necessitation are valid.
2. (Premise) If every being is contingent, then possibly nothing exists. (A material conditional)
3. Necessarily something exists. (By 1)
4. So, there is a necessary being. (By 2 and 3)

The proof of (3) is as follows. Classical logic allows (Ex)(x=x) to be inferred from (x)(x=x). Since (x)(x=x) is a theorem, so is (Ex)(x=x), and hence by the rule of Necessitation, we have: Necessarily (Ex)(x=x). And thus (3) follows. And of course Necessitation is a part of standard modal systems like M, S4 and S5.

I think (2) is intuitively plausible. Here is one way to try to argue for it:
5. (Premise for reductio) Premise (2) is false.
6. (Premise) The non-existence of non-unicorns does not necessitate the existence of unicorns.
7. Every being is contingent and it is necessary that at least one thing exists. (By 5)
8. Necessarily, if no non-unicorns exist, then at least one thing exists. (By 7)
9. Necessarily, if no non-unicorns exist, then at least one unicorn exists. (By 8)
Since (9) contradicts (6), our reductio argument for premise (2) is complete.

(I am grateful to Josh Rasmussen for simplifying my original argument.)

Suppose we make an ontological argument with the following general form:

1. D (for divinity) is a consistent concept


2. Every consistent concept is possibly instantiated


3. D entails necessary existence

Therefore,

4. D is actually instantiated


5. A being who instantiated D would be God

Therefore,

6. God exists

This sort of argument has a problem: If (3) is trivial, given how D is defined (for instance, if D is defined as the concept of necessary existence), then the argument is question-begging, for no one who didn't already believe that D is instantiated would ever accept premise (1). However, if (3) is a surprising result, for which a sophisticated argument is required, then we might worry that D has other surprising consequences, some of them contradictions, and so reject (1).

Furthermore, it seems to me that for most theists the existence of God is more certain than any of the premises in the argument, so it doesn't seem that the argument can be used to increase the confidence of someone who is already a tentative theist.

So can the ontological argument do anything? I say it can. Suppose we grant that the argument is question-begging, and that, for the theist, the conclusion is already more certain than the premises. Now, all question-begging arguments are valid, and some are sound, the problem is just that they can't be used to convince people of the conclusion. A parallel case to this can be found in work on the foundations of arithmetic. When axiomatic set theory was being developed, people were coming up with axioms, which they weren't sure were right, and using them to prove that 2+2=4. Now, since the premises of these arguments were quite questionable, and the conclusion was already known certainly to be true, this procedure can't possibly have been intended to increase anyone's confidence in 2+2=4. So what was the point? Well, they were trying to construct an axiomatic foundation for arithmetic, and 2+2=4 is a truth of arithmetic, so if the axioms don't entail it they are obviously not the axioms we are looking for, and if they entail its contrary they are obviously false. However, if we can come up with axioms that have all the right entailments, we'll have a reason for thinking our axioms are true, and we'll be able to use them to answer the questions we weren't sure about to begin with, and we also will have a much more systematic understanding of arithmetic. (Note that the method of 'reflective equilibrium' employed by many philosophers, especially in value theory, has a similar structure: you start by making up some proposed rules and seeing if they get the right answers in the cases where we know what the right answer is, then, if they do, apply them to the cases we aren't sure about.)

I propose that the ontological argument might play a similar role in a theory of metaphysical theology. (Indeed, I think it does play a role somewhat similar to this in James Ross's Philosophical Theology.) On this view, the ontological argument is not used directly to convince people of the existence of God. Rather, its premise (1) is proposed as a sort of axiom, on which a metaphysical system is to be built. This system is to be judged by its overall coherence and the plausibility of its consequences. The ontological argument might still have an indirect role to play in convincing people of the existence of God: if it turns out that assuming that the concept of, e.g., a being than which none greater can be conceived, or an infinitely perfect being, or whatever, is consistent leads to a highly attractive and systematic theory of metaphysics, wouldn't that be a reason for accepting it? Next question: what are the consequences (apart from the existence of God) of supposing the candidate concepts to be consistent?

[cross-posted at blog.kennypearce.net]

Many people believe that there is: 1) no greatest number, 2) no greatest possible world, and 3) a greatest being (person, agent). The reason many people believe 1 and 2 is that there seems to be procedures to take a number (or world) and return a larger (or better) one. For any number (cardinal), take the powerset to get a larger number. For any world, stick some happy people in a far off corner to get a better world. (Of course, there is far from universal agreement on this second point.) The question arises: Is there any way to take a being, and return a better one?

One way is to try and link beings with the worlds they create. The idea would be that a being who creates a surpassable world is a surpassable being. This line of thought gives rise to a whole body of literature, some quite recent. Going in a different direction, here is another way that any being might be surpassable. Let us imagine that some virtues, e.g. courage, are traits wherein one wants to be at the mean that lies between extremes. We might imagine that 'courage-level' runs along a continuum from 0 (totally cowardly) to 1 (totally rash). Then, speaking loosely, somewhere in the middle is best. But, is it clear that any specific point is best? That is, what if the function, F, from courage-level (which runs from 0 to 1) to the value or goodness of the being goes as follows: F(x) = x for x in [0, 0.5] and F(x) = 1.01 - x for x in (0.5, 1]. Then there is no greatest being, as for any being, there is a better one. There is no greatest being, as beings get better as they approach 0.5 from the right on courage-level.

If there is an optimal point on a trait, call that trait 'closed'. If there is not an optimal point on a trait (for any level a being takes on the trait, there is a better level), as in the courage example above, call that trait 'open'. The question is, are all traits are closed? Or, what is the best argument to the conclusion that all traits are closed? In the absence of an argument regarding open and closed traits, the principle of indifference might suggest that courage is open with 50% probability and closed with 50% probability.

(One way to respond is to argue along these lines: certain traits/properties are fundamental (e.g., power, knowledge, freedom, goodness), these traits take maximal levels (individually and together), all other traits follow logically from these, and thus all traits take optimal levels and so are closed. Is there a relatively simple and convincing argument along these lines? Also, are there other ways to argue that all traits are closed? In particular, and thinking of approaching the question from a non-theistic angle, am I missing some sort of simple argument or reason as to why all traits are closed?)

Here at the University of Saint Thomas Summer Seminar, (what a beautiful campus!), we've just completed our first week, the topic of which was the Fine Tuning argument for God's existence. There were a lot of great presentations and comments pro and con, but I find myself mostly a Swinburne guy here. So I wrote a note to my colleagues here giving a bare-bones summary of his perspective. It is below the fold as a basis of further discussion or just for the record.