Do theists need to explain God’s existence? Part 2

Why does the world exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? It is a non-trivial fact that people have been fascinated by such questions for thousands of years. Some theists believe that they have the answer: God. Randal Rauser, in the post that I began examining in my most recent post, says this:

And so for the person who wonders “But why should anything exist at all?” the answer comes: “Because the omnipotent, necessarily existent God brought it into being.”

Is this a satisfactory answer? If God does exist, is he the ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing? At first glance, it seems obvious that this cannot be the answer. The theist’s answer presupposes the existence of something, God, and thus can hardly be taken as an explanation for why there exists anything whatsoever. If we are curious about the whys and wherefores of the universe, don’t we have to ask our why questions about every existing being? Doesn’t even the theist have to ask why there is a God (rather than no God)?

Rauser thinks that this reaction and the accompanying demand for an explanation for the existence of God involves a significant misunderstanding about the nature of God. God, says Rauser, is the terminus of explanation, he is the prime mover, the uncaused cause. God exists necessarily and so there is no question of explaining his existence; God just is. Here is Rauser explaining that some things just exist and need no explanation for their existence:

we should note that not all our intuitions about things are weighted toward asking “why”. In other cases our first intuition (at least the first intuition of philosophers who have thought long and hard about the relevant issues) is to reject the very appropriateness of the why question. The reason? Because it seems that some things just are.

Examples? Here’s a simple one. Think about the number “5″. What is this thing that was the object of the previous sentence? What were you thinking about when you thought about the number 5? The realist proposes that you are thinking of an abstract object or, to use a more traditional term, a universal. That is, 5 is a non-physical, atemporal object that can be multiply exemplified in concrete things (such as the conventional inscription “5″ on the chalk board). But it is itself distinct from all those concrete exemplifications.

Whether Rauser is correct about numbers is a topic for a different discussion. The point here is that he thinks that God exists necessarily in a way analogous to the existence of numbers. Just as numbers could not but exist, so too, God cannot but exist. But how does Rauser know this? How could we know that the creator of our universe, the inspiration for the Bible, the father of Jesus, is Himself uncaused? That he exists necessarily? That he just is? Rauser’s answer is that it is part of the very definition of ‘God’:

You see, theologians define God as existing a se, that is existing of and in himself and not drawing his life from anything else. Put another way, they have always understood him to have the property of independence or necessity, and thus to be the unmoved mover or first cause.

God exists necessarily. And, importantly, Rauser says that there is no need to argue for this conclusion and no question of providing evidence for it because God is a necessarily existence causal agent by definition.

In my previous post I tried to cast some suspicion on the concept of aseity and I also argued that the fact that a being exists a se does not imply that there is not a fuller explanation of its existence. Now I want to consider a different issue: Is it true that it is part of the concept of God that he exists a se?

I think that it is possible that there is a such a conception of God according to which it is just part of the concept that he exists of his own nature. However, I don’t think that this is the concept that most theists use. And, despite that fact that I am sure that he would vehemently protest, I am skeptical of the claim that this is the conception of God that Randal Rauser uses. Here is why:

If it is part of the concept of God that he exists of his own nature, then, if there is nothing that exists of its own nature, then nothing answers to the concept ‘God’ and hence God does not exist. Assume, then, that tomorrow scientists announce the discover of an omnipotent, omninbenevolent, omniscient, creator who sent his only begotten son to die for the forgiveness of since but that he does not exist of his own nature. I highly doubt that, in such an unlikely eventuality, Rauser would announce that he was wrong and that atheism has been vindicated.

Of course scientists are never going to announce such a discovery, but the point stands. By committing himself to the claim that God exists a se by definition, Rauser is committing himself to rejecting theism if it turns out that there is no being that exists a se. If Rauser is right about the meaning of ‘God’, then even if there exists a creator of the universe who inspired the Bible and sent his son Jesus to be crucified for the forgiveness of sins, if this creator does not exist a se, then he is not God (and, by the way, people who believe in such a being are, if Rauser is correct, atheists since they don’t believe in God). But, again, a world in which such a being exists is not a world in which atheism is true. Since I don’t think that Rauser would say that a world in which such a creator exists is a world without God, I find it hard to take seriously Rasuer’s claim that God is, by definition, a being that exists of his own nature.

Theists often want to build a lot of content into their conception of God. Rauser thinks that by building aseity into the concept of God, the theist is relieved of the responsibility of explaining God’s existence. But I think that this is a bit of a lazy way out of a really interesting problem: the problem of why there is something rather than nothing. Maybe there is a self-existent being and maybe there is not, maybe a self existent being created the universe, maybe the creator of the universe was himself created  by some other being (maybe even a self-existent one), maybe a self-existent being sent his only son to die on Earth, or maybe a created being did, or maybe nobody did. Maybe the concept of self-existence makes sense and maybe it does not. But we don’t get to go around saying that we know that there is a self-existent being, that we know why there exists something rather than nothing, just because we have a concept with the very notion of existence built into it.

Do theists need to explain God’s existence? Part 1

I have been reading The Mystery of Existence recently which reminded me of a recent conversation that I participated in at Randal Rauser’s blog on a topic that, for one reason or another, got connected to the larger issue of divine causation. At one point in the conversation Rauser linked to one of his past posts in which he explains that God is a necessarily existent causal agent. In that post, Rauser takes issue with the claim that theists need an explanation for the existence of God:

You see, theologians define God as existing a se, that is existing of and in himself and not drawing his life from anything else. Put another way, they have always understood him to have the property of independence or necessity, and thus to be the unmoved mover or first cause.

It is at this point that we can see the glaring error of Sam Harris. When he asks, “If God created the universe, what created God?” he shows that he does not really understand what “God” means. (Maybe he has gleaned his doctrine of God from congregants who attend church weekly rather than theologians. But that is as mistaken as deriving one’s definition of matter from the lay person rather than the physicist. The congregant or lay person may provide a good practical definition but not the technical one this kind of conversation requires.) After all, it makes no sense to ask “If the unmoved mover created the universe then what moved the unmoved mover?” or “If the first cause created the universe then what created the first cause?” or “If a necessarily existent agent created the universe then what created the necessarily existent agent?” All of these questions reveal nothing more than Sam Harris’ failure to understand what is meant by God since God is, by definition, necessarily existent and thus the terminus of explanation.

I am going to write a series of posts on this passage (and Rauser’s larger argument) because there is a great deal of confusion and error contained therein. In this post I am going to focus on the content of the concept of aseity and whether it does the work that Rauser wants it to do.

Randal seems to assume that the notion of aseity is the same as the notion of necessary existence. In other words, he assumes that a being that exists a se also exists necessarily. However, I am not sure that he is correct about this. Let’s start by noticing that the concept of aseity is, I think, a combination of two distinct notions: (1) the concept of absolute independence; (2) the concept of having the reason for one’s own existence in one’s own nature. I don’t think it is too difficult to show that these are distinct notions:

Suppose that there exists a being whose nature guarantees that it will be created. That is, the being is of a nature to be created. Thus, in every possible world in which one or more creators exist, this being will exist because it will be created. Let’s call the property that such a being would have, ‘compulsory createdness.’

Now, maybe you think that compulsory createdness is an absurd notion, that it is a property that no being could have. I sympathize. However, if we assume that aseity (in particular the idea of a being whose nature contains the reason for its own existence) is a coherent notion (or, indeed, that at least one being exists a se), I don’t see why we would not assume that essential createdness is equally coherent. If anyone thinks that aseity is a coherent notion but that complusory createdness is not, I invite them to provide us with an argument to this effect.

Here is the point: A being that is compulsorily created has the reason for its existence in its own nature. It exists because it is of a nature that guarantees that it will be created. However, it is not an absolutely independent being since, in every world in which it exists, its existence will be dependent on the being or beings that create it. This shows that the concept of aseity contains more than the concept of having the reason for one’s own existence in one’s own nature. This is something that we need to bear in mind when we consider questions about what the (alleged) aseity of God implies about God’s necessary existence and about whether there must be an explanation for God’s existence.

Let me talk briefly about necessary existence, understood as existence in all possible worlds. Does a being that is compulsorily created exist in all possible worlds? Obviously such a being would exist in every world that contains creators. But if there are worlds in which there are no creators, a compulsorily created being would not exist. So, unless it can be shown that there are no worlds that lack creators, it is false that a being whose nature contains the reason for its own existence must also be a necessarily existing being.

But what does this have to do with God? Well, Randal says that God, since he exists a se, not only has the reason for his existence in his own nature, God is also absolutely independent. If this is true, God cannot be a compulsorily created being. If he were created, he would not be absolutely independent. But now there are two questions to ask: Does the combination of (1) absolute independence, and (2) having the reason for his existence in his own nature, guarantee that God exists in all possible worlds? And does the combination of (1) and (2) show that the demand for an explanation of God’s existence is confused?

I’ll take the second question first. If God is absolutely independent, then there can be no explanation for his existence in terms of things that exist external to him. But I don’t see that this means that there can be no further and deeper explanation of his existence. Furthermore, merely saying that God’s own nature contains the reason for his existence does not tell us what that reason is. As we saw with the notion of a compulsorily created being, that a being contains the reason for its existence in its own nature does not entail that there is not, in addition, a further robust explanation of the existence of that being.

Suppose there exists a compulsorily created being, let’s call him Got. Since Got is compulsorily created, in any particular world in which he exists, Got has a cause. But here is the interesting point: in some worlds the cause of Got’s existence is different than in other worlds. Nothing about Got’s nature guarantees that he will be created by the same being in every possible world. Thus, there will be different explanations for Got’s existence in different possible worlds.

Again, God is not Got (at least not according to Rauser); God is not compulsorily created. But, and this is the key point, we don’t know the reason for God’s existence. We know that his nature contains the reason for his own existence. But, unless we have some inkling concerning what that reason is, we have no way of knowing whether, like Got, in the worlds in which he exists, there may be some further explanation of God’s existence.

What I am saying is this: Having the reason for one’s existence in one’s own nature is not enough of an explanation. All that it tells us is that part of the explanation for the being’s existence comes from that being’s nature. But that doesn’t exclude there being more to the explanation.

Now, my argument here is exploiting an ambiguity in the word ‘reason.’ Reason can mean ‘justificatory reason’ ‘motivation’ or ’cause.’ (Shopenhauer says there are four meanings of ‘reason.’ That is a story for a different day). But the ambiguity is not my creation, it is a feature of the word ‘reason.’ And, I think, that this ambiguity is exploited, wittingly or unwittingly, by theists who argue that God is the terminus of explanation.

In any event, let’s try to be more careful with our use of ‘reason.’ Got obviously does not contain the cause of his own existence in his own nature. Nonetheless, it is true that Got’s nature contains the reason for his own existence.

What we might say about Got is this: His nature provides a creator with a sufficient motivation to create him.  This would be part of the explanation for his existence, but not the full explanation. The fuller explanation would include who created Got and how. Again, God is not Got, so the kind of further (causal) explanation offered for Got will not apply to God. However, once we understand the ambiguity inherent in ‘reason’ we need to think more carefully about what it means to say of God that his nature contains the reason for his own existence.

So, the question to ask about God is: What kind of reason is contained in his own nature: Is it a cause? Are we then to think of God as causing himself? Is that coherent? Or is the reason a motivational reason? For whom is it a motivation? If he is absolutely independent, it is hard to see how it could be a motivation for some other being. On the other hand, it is hard to see how a motivation, by itself, is sufficient to bring it about, without the assistance of anything external, that a being exists.

Until these questions are answered (and if they have been, I am not aware of the answers), it is difficult to know what to make of the claim that God exists of his own nature. At the very least, I think that I’ve shown that it is perfectly coherent to ask the theist to explain the existence of God even given the assumption that God exists a se.

Now, what about the question of God’s alleged necessary existence? Well, without knowing something more about the explanation for God’s existence, I don’t see how his aseity guarantees that God exists in every possible world. Again, since we know that Got is created, we know only that he exists in every possible world in which there is a creator; not that he exists in every possible world. Without knowing something more about the reason for God’s existence, how can we know whether he exists in every possible world?

So, the idea of being having the reason for its existence in its own nature is far too thin a notion to do the work that Rauser wants it to do.

In my next post I will ask whether Randal is right that it is part of the meaning of ‘God’ that God exists a se.

Lewis, Lords, Liars, Lunatics, and Ad Hominem Fallacies

At the Georgia Philosophical Society meeting this past Saturday, Dr. James Sennett presented a paper evaluating C.S. Lewis’ famous “Lord, Liar or Lunatic” argument. Very briefly, Lewis’ argument is directed at admirers of Jesus who would have us believe that even though Jesus was not a divine being, nonetheless he was a good moral teacher. In Mere Christianity, Lewis says that this is “the one thing we must not say” because, given the things that Jesus says about himself (e.g., to the effect that he is the Lord), Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic of the highest order, or else precisely who he says he is. If we reject Jesus’ claims to divinity as untrue, then there is no room to claim that he was a good moral teacher; for a person who falsely claims to be God is either liar or a lunatic on the order of someone who claims to be a poached egg.

Sennett argued that Lewis is appealing to a false trilemma; lord, liar, and lunatic-of-the-highest-order do not exhaust the possibilities. We can reject Jesus’ claims to divinity as the untrue, though sincere, delusions, not of a raving lunatic, but of someone suffering from a much milder form of delusional disorder. Sennett calls this fourth option “lunatic-lite.” The point is that if Jesus was merely suffering from delusion disorder of the grandiose type that would not necessarily impugn his moral wisdom or his moral character.

Undoubtedly Sennett is correct that the “lord, liar, or lunatic” trilemma is a false one. Others (e.g. Bart Ehrman) have suggested the possibility that the notion that the historical Jesus claimed to be God is merely the invention of early Christians (and thus we must add the option legend to the list). But I think that there is a serious flaw with the argument that has nothing to do with its logical form.  This has to do with what it means to say of Jesus that he was a good moral teacher.

When we say of someone that he is a good moral teacher are we expressing admiration for the person or for his teachings? If “Jesus was a good moral teacher” is meant to convey admiration for the content of what he taught, any concern with the man (or God) is completely irrelevant. There is no inconsistency in admiring Jesus for what he taught while simultaneously rejecting his claims to divinity. If Lewis believed that we cannot do this because, in rejecting Jesus’ claims to divinity we are committing ourselves to believing that Jesus was either a liar or a lunatic, then Lewis is guilty of an ad hominem fallacy.

From this perspective, Lewis’ argument looks something like this:

(1)    If you believe that Jesus was not divine, then you believe that he was either a liar or a lunatic.

(2)    The moral teachings of a liar or lunatic are not admirable.

Thus,

(3)    If you believe that  Jesus was not divine, you cannot reasonably believe that his teaching were admirable.

Premise (2) is clearly false and based on the fallacy that the truth of what a person says has something to do with the character of the person. But this is obviously not true; the truth of any claim is completely independent of the person who makes the claim. The content of most statements is something totally independent from the particular utterance of the statement (the exceptions involve certain peformative utterances that are successful only because of the person who utters them, as when a priest says “I now pronounce you husband and husband”).  Thus the moral teachings of Jesus can be completely divorced from the person and admired in their own right.

Romney’s tax plan (my confusion about)

Before last week’s Presidential debate, I thought that Romney’s tax plan didn’t make sense. He said that he wanted to cut tax rates across the board by 20% and yet he also claimed that it would be revenue neutral because he would eliminate deductions and close loopholes that would make up for the lost revenue caused by the rate cut. Now I am well aware that several studies have suggested that this cannot be done; that is, that you can’t cut rates by that much and make up the lost revenue by eliminating deductions and loopholes because there just isn’t enough money to be saved even if all deductions and loopholes were eliminated. This is a sound criticism. However, I had a different concern and that is that this whole plan didn’t make sense. That is, I didn’t see the logic of it. Presumably, I thought, the reason you cut tax rates is to let people keep more of the money that they acquire. And there might be various reasons for this: claiming that doing so is fairer, that it will stimulate the economy, that it will reduce the size of government. But Romney’s plan, if it is revenue neutral, won’t put more money in the hands of American consumers. Sure, some people might end up paying less in taxes, but, if the plan is revenue neutral, this would require that other people end up paying more. But after Romney’s plan is implemented, it seems that, overall, the government will still be taking the same amount of money from American consumers as before. If the government is still taking the same amount of money, how would that stimulate the economy? How would that be fairer? How would that reduce the size of government? For example, I don’t know why we should think that any stimulative effect would occur unless we thought that, overall, American consumers would keep more money. But if the plan is revenue neutral, how does this happen?

I think that the only answer to my concern is to agree that the rate cut will reduce the amount paid in federal taxes (and thus reduce the income of the federal government) but that this reduction will only be temporary because this very reduction in the amount of money paid to the government will stimulate the economy to the extent that the government will ultimate end up with more tax income (because more people will be employed, e.g.). I suppose this is fine, except for the fact that the studies that I mentioned earlier have also suggested that even if you assume a large stimulative effect, you still can’t make the plan revenue neutral.

In the debate, Romney said that he rejects those studies and that he will not support a plan that is not revenue neutral. But he also said that he wants to cut the tax rates across the board. He has been criticized for not offering specifics about how he would accomplish this, and he deserves that criticism. But notice that, regardless of the details of his plan to stimulate the economy via tax cuts, the plan requires that some people pay less money to the federal government in taxes than they previously had and that, in aggregate, the government takes less money in taxes than it previously had (at least at the outset). This is the only way to put more money in the pockets of consumers and job-creators who could stimulate the economy.

So the perhaps somewhat simple-minded concern that I had last week before the debate was why would you want to pass a tax-cut that is revenue neutral? Why cut all these rates if, at the end of the day, people are still going to be paying the same amount in taxes (since their deductions will have been eliminated or lowered) and the government will still be taking the same amount of money from American consumers and job-creators? What is the point of shuffling things around like this?

In the debate, Romney answered my question directly:

And number three, I will not, under any circumstances, raise taxes on middle-income families. I will lower taxes on middle-income families. Now, you cite a study. There are six other studies that looked at the study you describe and say it’s completely wrong. I saw a study that came out today that said you’re going to raise taxes by 3(,000 dollars) to $4,000 on — on middle-income families. There are all these studies out there.

But let’s get to the bottom line. That is, I want to bring down rates. I want to bring down the rates down, at the same time lower deductions and exemptions and credits and so forth so we keep getting the revenue we need.

And you think, well, then why lower the rates? And the reason is because small business pays that individual rate. Fifty-four percent of America’s workers work in businesses that are taxed not at the corporate tax rate but at the individual tax rate. And if we lower that rate, they will be able to hire more people.

So the answer to my concern is that Romney wants to lower the rates across the board because that will lower the amount of money paid in taxes by small businesses. So, great! We have an answer and it is the one I sketched above: cutting the rates will stimulate the economy by putting more money in the hands of small businesses. Initially I thought this was a decent answer even though it still requires the assumption that the rate-cut will reduce the amount paid by taxpayers and that the revenue lost thereby will be made up for via the stimulative effect. But then as I thought more about it, it still didn’t make sense. Why, I thought, if what we want to do is to lower the taxes on small businesses do we not just lower the tax rates paid by small businesses (or add deductions to lower their taxes)? Why the across the board rate cut?

Romney was adamant in the debate that he did not want to lower the taxes on the wealthy. He said, for example “I will not reduce the share paid by high-income individuals.” Now part of the problem is that this is ambiguous or else highly misleading language (in addition to being vague). Is Romney saying that he doesn’t want to reduce the amount of taxes paid by the wealthy or is he saying that he doesn’t want to reduce the portion of the American tax burden paid by the wealthy. The latter is consistent with the wealthy getting a significant tax break since they can pay less in taxes and still pay the same portion of the tax burden if that burden goes down. But he also said, “I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans.” This makes it sounds as if he wants high income Americans to pay the same amount in taxes as they pay now, regardless of whether that affects the percent of the tax burden that they pay in aggregate. So it is not obvious what he wants to do, especially when he insists that he will not pass a tax plan that adds to the deficit (which would seem to require that the tax burden not go down, or at least not significantly).

In any event, if Romney’s only concern was to reduce the amount of taxes paid by small business, then he wouldn’t need an across the board rate cut to accomplish this. He could suggest that we reduce the rates only on small businesses. Unless I am widely wrong about tax laws, there is no reason that we could not treat individual rates differently than rates paid by businesses. So, if Romney’s concern really is with small business, then why does he not propose tax cuts targeted at small business? Why the across the board rate cuts? In short, his answer does not justify his plan.

 

Rowe on Clarke’s Cosmological Argument

In chapter II of William Rowe’s The Cosmological Argument, Rowe presents Samuel Clarke’s argument for the conclusion that something has existed from eternity as follows:

1. Something now exists.

2. If something now exists and it is not the case that something has always existed then something has been produced out of nothing.

3. The proposition “Something has been produced out of nothing” is a contradiction.

Therefore:

4. Something has always existed. (pp 61-62)

Rowe’s criticism of the argument involves attacking premise (3). He provides the following quote that is supposed to capture Clarke’s reasoning in favor of premise (3): “For, to say a thing is produced, and yet that there is no cause at all of that production, is to say that something is effected, when it is effected by nothing; that is, at the same time when it is not effected at all.” And Rowe paraphrases that reasoning as follows:

3a. “Something has been produced out of nothing” entails “Something has been produced and not produced.”

Therefore:

3. “Something has been produced out of nothing” is a contradiction.

Rowe finds this reasoning unacceptable because (3a) is false: “although ‘Something has been produced out of nothing’ entails ‘Something has not been produced,’ it surely does not entail ‘Something has been produced.’”

William Rowe is clearly a philosopher of the highest caliber, and I agree with a great deal of what he says (especially in this book), however this has got to be one of the strangest things that a terrific philosopher has ever said. Just on the face of it, is it not obvious that “Something has been produced out of nothing” entails “Something has been produced“? “Something has been produced out of something” certainly entails “Something has been produced.” The very obvious parallel of form between “Something has been produced out of nothing” and “Something has been produced out of something” strongly suggests that the former should be interpreted as entailing that something has been produced.

I feel that this is fairly obvious, so much so that I find it incredible that Rowe would have asserted otherwise. I might be less sure of this conclusion were it not for the fact that there is a much more plausible line of criticism of Clarke’s argument that does not require making the odd claim that Rowe makes. Rowe’s reasoning is garbled because he denies an obvious entailment, however, his criticism is ultimately significant.

Rowe says,

To say ‘Something has been produced out of [by] nothing’ us to say no more than ‘Something exists which has not been produced.’ If I say of something, a stone, for example, that nothing produced it, I certainly am not saying–nor does what I say entail–that the stone was produced. What I am saying of the stone is that it was not produced at all. (p. 63)

If you cut out the first sentence of this passage, then what Rowe says is completely cogent. But I do not see how Rowe is warranted in taking (I) Something was produced out of nothing to be equivalent to (II) Something exists which has not been produced. I need to be completely clear. I agree that it is possible that someone who asserts (I) might mean to assert (II), but it is also clear that, on its face, (I) is equivalent to (III) Something exists which was produced and it was produced out of nothing. So if someone wanted to assert (II), saying “Something was produced out of nothing” would be a poor choice of words. It seems fairly clear, in virtue of what he says about (I), that Clarke takes it to be equivalent to (III). And, given the parallel to “Something has been produced out of something” that I noted above, I think that (III) is the more obvious way to understand (I).

Clarke is claiming that (I) is a contradiction. And it certainly is if it entails that something has been produced. And it is completely natural to interpret (I) as entailing this. Rowe is merely substituting an alternative interpretation of (I) (an interpretation that involves denying that it says what it clearly does say) and showing that this interpretation does not entail a contradiction. This is not a model for the coherent analysis of an argument.

Fortunately, we can use what Rowe says about (II) “Something exists which has not been produced” to provide a coherent criticism of Clarke’s argument that allows us to grant Clarke’s interpretation of (I).

Premise (2) of Clarke’s argument is “If something now exists and it is not the case that something has always existed then something has been produced out of nothing.” Rowe says that this premise “seems to be a necessary truth.” But it certainly is not if we grant Clarke’s interpretation of (I). If something exists and it is not the case that something has always existed, then it does not follow that something has been produced out of nothing. What follows is that either something has been produced out of nothing or else (and here is where we apply Rowe’s insight) something exists that has not always existed and was not produced. So premise (2) is false.

So, the correct version of (2) would be “If something now exists and it is not the case that something has always existed then either something has been produced out of nothing or else something exists that has not always existed and was not produced.” Furthermore, the fact that “Something has been produced out of nothing” entails a contradiction does not imply that something has always existed. To arrive at this claim we would have to also show that “Something exists that has not always existed and was not produced” is false.

Church Signs

My running route takes me past a church that regularly changes the message on its sign. I always look forward to the new bits of wisdom that the church will throw my way as I jog past. Currently the sign displays the following seasonally appropriate message:

If Evolution’s true then mothers would have more than two hands.

The inanity of this is hard to overstate. I am thinking of nailing the following message to the church doors:

If God designed humanity, then mothers would have more than two hands.

New Paper: “Do Atheists Need a Moral Theory to be Moral Realists?”

I have a paper that has just been announced at The Secular Web (infidels.org) called “Do Atheists Need a Moral Theory to be Moral Realists?”

It might not surprise you to learn that my answer to that question is “no.” If you read the paper and have comments or complaints, feel free to offer them here.

Euthyphro and Omnipotence Part 2

This is the second part of my response to Brian Zamulinski’s criticism of my post from last October on the Euthyphro dilemma.

First, I want to point out that Zamulinski rejects the Divine Command Theory; his point in the post I am responding to is that my defense of the Euthyphro argument is unconvincing. However, he also criticizes the DCT for other reasons. (He also offers an interesting objection to Adams’ version of the DCT in a comment to Matthew Flannagan’s most recent article on the subject. And here on his own blog.)

Regardless, Zamulinski does believe that my arguments in support of the Euthyphro objection are unsuccessful. Here is the relevant quote again:

To repeat, Adam’s reformulated divine command theory is that morality is constituted by the commands of an essentially loving God.  Now, if E (for “entity”) essentially possesses P (for “property”), then E possesses P in all possible worlds in which E exists.  So, by hypothesis, God is loving in every world in which He exists.  God is not just contingently loving, that is, loving in at least one possible world in which He exists

On the basis of an analogy, Thibodeau claims that “we may know with certainty that an all-loving being will not issue a command to torture children, but, given that he is omnipotent, it remains the case that he can issue such a command.”  The analogy is to someone who will not but who could jump from the Empire State Building.  The analogy is irrelevant because the possible jumper is only a contingent jumper.  For the parallel to hold, it must be possible for an essentially non-jumping person to jump.  Thus, Thibodeau equivocates between an essentially loving being and a contingently loving being.

Zamulinski’s point, in essence, is that I can either claim that God can command torture or that he is essentially loving, but not both. In claiming that God is essentially loving and that he can command torture I have contradicted myself. Since there is no world in which an essentially loving being commands torture, it is not possible that he commands torture; to assume otherwise is incoherent. Now I actually did not say that an essentially loving being can command torture (though perhaps I implied it; and I’ll argue below that perhaps it really is true). What I said is that an all-loving being that is also omnipotent can command torture.

There are actually two distinct points to be made here. One point concerns the meaning of ‘can’ and the relationship between motive and ability/capacity; the other concerns how we ought to conceive of the motivational attributes of an omnipotent being. Let’s take the issue of ‘can’ first.  The original example that I chose was meant to show that the fact that a person may be unmotivated to do something does not imply that he cannot do that thing. That I am unmotivated to do something might imply that I won’t do it but it does not imply that I can’t. And even if my lack of motivation is due to some essential characteristic, while this does imply that there is no possible world in which I do that thing, it still does not follow that I can’t do it.

When we talk about God being all-loving, we are talking about the range of motives he will act from (or, perhaps more aptly put, the range of motives he can have). The point of claiming that God is essentially loving is that in every possible world his motivational set is such that he would never form the necessary motive to command something horrible like the gratuitous torture of a child. Given the plausible assumption that, for a free and rational being, performing an action requires having an appropriate motive (or pro-attitude) toward the action, it follows that if, in every possible world, God lacks pro-attitudes toward gratuitous violence (which is supposed to be a consequence of his all-loving nature), then, in every possible world, God does not command the gratuitous torture of children.

Does this imply that God cannot command the gratuitous torture of children? It seems to me that it does only if it is true that any statement of the form “P can a” (where ‘P’ is a person and ‘a’ is an action) implies that there is some possible world in which P does a. But I am not convinced that this implication holds.

It seems to me that it is possible for there to be a person who is constitutionally incapable of killing his own mother (in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if there are many such people). To be more specific, such a person is such that he cannot form a pro-attitude toward the killing of his mother and this is true of him essentially. Call this person Smith. Even though it is impossible for Smith to form the requisite motive, and even though I just said that he is constitutionally incapable of killing his mother, I think that strictly speaking it remains the case that he can kill his mother. That is, he has the ability to acquire a gun and take it to his mother’s house, point it at her, and shoot it. This is something that Smith can do and that, for example, his dog cannot do.  It is true that we might describe Smith as being incapable of killing his mother but when we compare this alleged inability to other things that Smith cannot do (such as fly unassisted, dunk on a 15 foot rim, swim across the Pacific Ocean, survive in a vacuum, etc.), I think that it is appropriate to make a distinction between the things that Smith can’t do because of physical (non-motivational) limitations, and things that he can’t do because of his motivational nature. About the latter group, it is more accurate to say that Smith won’t do those things than that he can’t, full stop.  To say that Smith won’t is to say that he will never form the requisite pro-attitude; and it follows from this being an essential characteristic of Smith that, in every possible world, he won’t kill his mother. However, it remains true that, in many possible worlds (all those in which Smith is not severely incapacitated), he can kill his mother.

If I am right about this, then the fact that there is no possible world in which God commands torture has nothing to do with whether God can command torture. However, there is no immediate upshot as far as the Euthyphro dilemma goes. After all, even if we adopt my understanding of ‘can’ and the distinction between ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t’, it still remains the case that an essentially loving God won’t command torture, in every possible world. Zamulinski is certainly right about this much. However, there are some loose ends here that need to be cleared up, and in attempting to do so, I hope to show that this distinction between ‘won’t and ‘can’t’ really does reinforce the Euthyphro objection.

I’m arguing that ‘P can a’ does not imply ‘There is some possible world in which P does a.’ This is problematic because ‘It is possible that P does a’ is plausibly equivalent to (or at least implied by) ‘P can a.’ How can we maintain the intuitive link between ‘can’ and ‘possible’ given what I’ve said? One possibility is to lean on the notion of close counterparts. Let’s return again to Smith. Presumably, even though there are no worlds in which Smith kills his mother, there are worlds in which some person who is very much like Smith (is a male child of Mrs. Smith, born on Smith’s birthday, with many similar memories to Smith, the same of similar physical characteristics, etc.) who does form the motivation to kill his mother. Again, on the assumption that Smith is essentially incapable of having such a motive appear in his mind, any counterpart of Smith who does form such a motive would not be Smith. But this does not exclude the possibility that, in some world, there is a very close counterpart to Smith who does want to kill his mother.

So, my suggestion is that  ‘P can a’ implies either ‘There is some world in which P does a’ or ‘There is some world in which a close counterpart of P does a.’*  Where a-ing involves doing something that would entail the existence of a motive that is excluded from P’s motivational set because of P’s essential motivational traits,  to say that P can a is to say that there is some possible world in which a close counterpart to P (who has the appropriate motivational set) does a.

Now obviously the notion of close counterpart needs some fine-tuning. How close does a counterpart need to be in order to be a close counterpart? But I don’t think that I need to worry about that here in order to make my point. On my analysis, to say that God can command the gratuitous torture of children is to say that there is some world in which a close counterpart to God (who is not God, given the requisite changes to His motivational characteristics) does command the gratuitous torture of children.

Now I think that if there is a possible world in which a close counterpart to God commands the gratuitous torture of a child, then the divine command theory implies that, in this world, torture is obligatory. I am certain that Matthew Flannagan will disagree with this claim. But rather than trying to predict the nature of his objection, I will let him respond (if he wants to).

I said that there are two points to be made in response to Zamulinski, and so far I’ve only made one. The second concerns the question of whether an omnipotent being can have essential motivational characteristics. I am going to put off this discussion for another post.

*We can probably clean this up with a suitable definition of ‘close counterpart.’ If ‘counterpart’ is defined so as to not excluded identity (but not require it either) then we can get rid of the first disjunct. I ought to point out also that by using the term ‘counterpart’ I am not intending to suggest a commitment to Lewis’ Counterpart Theory.

Euthyphro and Omnipotence part 1

I recently came across a response to my October post on the Euthyphro Dilemma, which I thought it worth responding to. The response, written by philosopher Brian Zamulinski, was itself written in October, but I missed it until just a few days ago. In it Zamulinski says that my arguments defending the strength of the Euthyphro objection to the divine command theory are unsuccessful:

To repeat, Adam’s reformulated divine command theory is that morality is constituted by the commands of an essentially loving God.  Now, if E (for “entity”) essentially possesses P (for “property”), then E possesses P in all possible worlds in which E exists.  So, by hypothesis, God is loving in every world in which He exists.  God is not just contingently loving, that is, loving in at least one possible world in which He exists

On the basis of an analogy, Thibodeau claims that “we may know with certainty that an all-loving being will not issue a command to torture children, but, given that he is omnipotent, it remains the case that he can issue such a command.”  The analogy is to someone who will not but who could jump from the Empire State Building.  The analogy is irrelevant because the possible jumper is only a contingent jumper.  For the parallel to hold, it must be possible for an essentially non-jumping person to jump.  Thus, Thibodeau equivocates between an essentially loving being and a contingently loving being.  Thibodeau has a second objection that also fails:  it begs the question in that it presupposes that a non-loving being can create morality.

In my original post, I gave two arguments for the conclusion that the Euthyphro Dilemma defeats to the divine command theory (DCT) because it shows that the DCT implies that morality is arbitrary and contingent. My first argument was supposed to show that even an all-loving being is able to make cruel commands, and thus that the DCT implies that it is metaphysically possible that a cruel act such as torturing a child is morally obligatory. The second says, essentially, that even if we thought that an all-loving being cannot command torture, this does not help the DCT since it is possible that there exists a divine commander who enjoys (and commands) cruelty for its own sake. If it is possible that such a being (whom I called Asura) exists, then it is possible that torturing children is morally obligatory. Zamulinski says that both of these arguments fail; the first because I have misunderstood or misinterpreted Adams version of the divine command theory, the second because I have begged the question. In this post I will respond to the second of Zamulinski’s criticisms and I will follow up with a later post that will address his first criticism.

For now what I am particularly interested in is the following statement:

Thibodeau has a second objection that also fails:  it begs the question in that it presupposes that a non-loving being can create morality.

This claim strikes me as incredibly odd. Why, if Adams is permitted to assume that an all-loving being can create morality, am I not permitted to assume that a non-loving being can do the same thing? Now, it is true that I actually don’t believe that a non-loving being can create morality, I am assuming it only for the sake of creating a reductio of the divine command theory. But I cannot see that there is any problem with this assumption.

Adams version of the divine command theory assumes something that I believe is false: that an all-loving being can create morality. I believe this is false because I believe that no person, loving or otherwise, could have control over moral facts (that is, have the capacity to change moral facts or to bring them into existence). But I am not and was not trying to make this point. My point was only to draw out the absurd consequences of the divine command theory. My tack was to say that if we are permitted to assume that an all-loving being can create morality, then surely we are permitted to assume that a non-loving being can create morality. Zamulinski has not shown that this is an unreasonable argumentative move.

If we knew how God is able to create morality, then maybe we would be in a position to say that a non-loving being cannot do it (or at least that we are not warranted in supposing that he can). Maybe being all-loving endows God with some special capabilities that a non-all-loving being would not have. But has Adams actually shown how God creates morality? Well, the divine command theory says that God does it by issuing commands. But a non-loving omnipotent being can certainly issue commands. Then is there some reason to believe that the commands of a non-loving being would be ineffective, that they wouldn’t actually create morality even though God’s commands can? If this is what Adams or Zamulinski or anyone else believes, then we need an argument for it. We need to know why it is that being all-loving endows God with the capacity to create morality; we need to know how it works. There is no such argument that I am aware of. As it stands, given that Asura (the evil Creator from my example) is at least as powerful as God, it is reasonable to think that if there is something that God can do, then Asura can do it as well.

The structure of my argument, to which Zamulinski objects, is as follows:

(1)    If God can create morality, then so can Asura.

(2)    There is some possible world in which Asura commands the torture of children

Thus, (3) In that world, the torture of children is morally obligatory.

Thus, (4) There is some world in which the torture of children is morally obligatory.

Therefore, (5) It is metaphysically possible that the torture of children is morally obligatory.

I cannot see how premise (1) begs the question. The question is not, “Can a non-loving deity create morality?” but “Does the divine command theory have the consequence that morality is arbitrary and contingent?” Remember, Adams modification of the divine command theory was motivated by a need for a reply to the Euthyphro Dilemma, not because it is somehow difficult to believe that a being who is not all loving can create moral properties.

Again, my working assumption is that if there is some feat that God (assuming he exists) can accomplish, then, absent any obvious reason to think otherwise, we are justified in believing that any being that is omnipotent will be able to accomplish the same task. It is worth pointing out, however, that Adams’ God is limited in the things that he can do. According to Zamulinski, God cannot command the torture of children, for example. Thus, a being who is not essentially limited, in the way that Zamulinski, Adams, and Matthew Flannagan all agree that God is, can do more than God can do.

With this in mind, I will now reformulate my argument to explicitly refer to a being who is essentially unlimited rather than to the non-loving being Asura:

Conisder the supernatural being who we’ll call Yod: Yod is the omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving creator. In fact the only way in which Yod differs from God is that Yod is not essentially all-loving. There are worlds in which Yod is all-loving, but there are also worlds in which he is not. Yod is not essentially all-loving because he is omnipotent. Being omnipotent, it is possible for him to do anything, including issue cruel commands, such as that children be tortured. Issuing such a command may entail changing his character traits, but being omnipotent means being unlimited, which in turn entails not being limited by one’s own character traits. Since Yod is omnipotent, he can change his own character. Thus there is no problem in supposing that Yod, even though he is actually all-loving (and thus has not actually commanded the torture of children), can command the torture of children. Since Yod can command torture, there is some possible world in which he does command torture and thus, if the divine command theory is true, there is some possible world in which torturing children is morally obligatory.

Notice that this version of the argument does not assume that a non-loving being can create morality, it assumes that an all-loving being who is not essentially loving can create morality. This is not so far from Adams’ presupposition that an essentially loving being can create morality. And until we have some argument that shows why only an essentially loving being can create morality, if Adams’ presupposition is allowable, mine must be as well.

Notice also that I have claimed that Yod’s being omnipotent requires that he not be essentially loving. This observation, which is the basis of my claim that an omnipotent being is able to command torture, will be expanded and defended in my next post.

Maybe Andrew Sullivan is an Atheist

Andrew Sullivan recently linked to an article by Jennifer Fulwiler in which she argues that her atheism and her belief that life is meaningful were in irreconcilable conflict and that the only way to resolve the conflict was to renounce atheism (she converted  to Catholicism). The best criticism of her implicit argument, that atheism implies that life is meaningless, that I have come across is from Will Wilkinson. Sullivan also published some of his readers’ comments, a few of which took the opportunity to express disagreement with Fulwiler about what makes life meaningful. In response to one reader’s comment, Sullivan said something that I found rather odd. I’ll quote the relevant portion of the reader response, followed by Sullivan’s rejoinder:

“We have a constant explosion of love and sadness through the enormous sweep of the cosmos and it makes us feel without meaning? If the Universe is anything, it is proof that meaning can be found in the smallest of existence, from atoms to neutrinos and down beneath it. It can be found in a virus if one has to look. The lesson of the Universe is not insignificance, the lesson of it is our mutual enormity. The Universe is loud with it.”

But this is God. It is certainly what I understand as God. Nonbelievers need to let go of anthropocentric, grey-bearded beings in the sky for God itself, the highest consciousness of all, and the force that gives this staggering beauty, available to us all, love.

It is very odd that nonbelievers are being admonished to let go of something that they explicitly don’t believe in. But what Sullivan thinks he means is that nonbelievers are confused about the real nature of God and that if they understood what God really is, then they (or at least many of them) would realize that they do believe in God. But this is deeply confused. Atheists have let go of the anthropomorphic sky deity because that is what an atheist is: someone who thinks that there is no such thing. Whatever else he may believe about the source of meaning, and whatever he may want to call that source, what the disbeliever disbelieves in is a personal creator.

Theism is the belief that there is an almighty person who created and sustains the universe. And thus atheism is the belief that there is no such almighty person.

Now, if Sullivan himself has let go of the anthropomorphic conception of God, and if he means by “letting go of” that he believes that this conception is false, then Sullivan is an atheist. Atheism is just the rejection of theism, and theism, to repeat, really is the belief that the world was created by an almighty person.  And so if Sullivan thinks there is no such almighty person, then he is an atheist (despite his repeated assertions that he is a Catholic). If he does believe that there is an almighty person, then it is very peculiar that he is admonishing atheists to give up the anthropocentric being.

But actually the above quote suggests that Sullivan has not completely let go of the anthropocentric being, for he tells us that God is “the highest consciousness of all.” This is an enigmatic phrase, to say the least, and its occurrence in this sentence is highly ambiguous. Is he saying that God is that consciousness that is highest of all, that is, higher than any other consciousness? Or is he saying that God is the highest consciousness of everyone; asserting that there is some kind of collective consciousness? Well, he doesn’t make this clear. But if he is claiming that there is some kind of highest consciousness, higher than any other, then it is pretty obvious that he has not completely let go of the anthropocentric bearded guy. For Sullivan is, on this interpretation, asserting that there is some kind of greatest conscious being, which is really not far from claiming that there is an almighty person.

But suppose he really does want to assert the proposition that there is some kind of collective or underlying consciousness of all of us. It is not at all clear why Sullivan would call that God. Did this consciousness create the universe? Did it send its only son to die for the sins of humanity? Did it die on the cross? And if he does want to say that this consciousness did all of these things, then he is most definitely conceiving of it as a kind of person.

Here is the upshot: Atheists deny that there is an almighty conscious creator. (They also, by the way, generally want to add that the supposition that there is such a conscious being does not at all help us account for any of the important aspects of life, including that life is meaningful). Theists assert that there is such a being. I don’t really know whether Sullivan is an atheist or a theist, and it doesn’t really matter. But when anyone asks questions such as, “Can life be meaningful on the assumption that there is no God?” or “Can atheism account for the fact that life has meaning?” we need to be clear about what we are talking about. When an atheist claims that life is meaningful even if there is no God, what this means is that the existence of an almighty person is not required for life to have meaning.