Reason for God - Initial Thoughts

First, sorry about the dearth of posts. I've been moving and practicing law - a time consuming combination if there ever was one - with a lack of Internet access thrown in for good measure.

Yesterday I began reading a book titled Reason for God. This book attempts to engage atheists' and skeptics' arguments and provide a defense of the rationality of believing in God and Christianity.

Ordinarily, these kinds of books disappoint me. The arguments contained in them lack genuine philosophical rigor, but are still good enough to generate believer confidence that we are on solid philosophical grounds. This bothers me a great deal - perhaps because Jesus said "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." Maybe I'm a "Truth worshiper?" I don't know.

For an example of what I'm talking about, the author of Reason for God has a central premise: he argues that every reason that a person can give for rejecting a faith based acceptance of Christianity presupposes an equally faith based acceptance of some other unprovable premise. The author then cites examples of reasons that people give for rejecting Christianity that do in fact presuppose some other faith based assumption.

Philosophers encountering such arguments will immediately suspect that straw men are afoot. This is because all the examples in the world won't save this premise from a single counter-example. And there is an obvious counter-example. What if someone claims to reject Christianity because it seems implausible - or because the evidence, as they see it, is insufficient to justify belief in Christianity?

I don't see any faith based unprovable assumption in this response - so there goes the book's central premise.

Okay, Okay. As Alvin Plantinga will insist, the atheist is still relying on one unprovable premise: he's relying on the assumption that his analytical faculties are reliable indicators of what constitutes a sound argument and/or sufficient evidence. And Plantinga will argue - in fact, has argued - that only a belief in God can justify that belief, given the possibility that evolved faculties could merely be leading us to conclusions that cause us to act in ways that keep us alive, without actually revealing "the truth."

I don't buy this argument. For one thing, it is a recognizable variant of skepticism. It presupposes that the only way we can know for sure that our senses and mental faculties are reliable (albeit fallible) is to believe in God; otherwise we have to refrain from any assertion on the matter, given that an evolutionarily produced faculties might be "successful" - they might present us with images that cause us to act in ways that keep us alive and aid reproduction - without giving us "accurate" information - Recall the movie "Shallow Hal" for reference.

But what if we don't equate knowing with certainty - which we don't? In that case the many successes of our senses and/or mental faculties are transformed into adequate evidentiary justifications for our conviction that they give us reliably accurate information about the world and/or the soundness of arguments (at least most of the time). If we don't need to "know for certain" in order to "know," Plantinga's argument falls apart.

But I digress. The point is that the central premise of the book is demolished by a single counter-example - and a counter-example which occurred to me less than one minute after reading the sentence. And why did it occur to me? Not because I am smarter than everyone else. It occurred to me because I have philosophical training. I was trained to read sentences like "every reason that a person can give for rejecting a faith based acceptance of Christianity presupposes an equally faith based acceptance of some other unprovable premise," and to then ask, "is that right?" I was also trained to recognize that, in my hope that it might be right, I will be inclined to accept its truth uncritically, and I should, therefore, increase my vigilance in such circumstances in order to avoid being taken in by bad arguments.

Another example is the author's take on the problem of evil. He initially derides those who argue that God's allowance of "pointless suffering" indicts the very idea of an all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful God. He points out, correctly, that what appears to be pointless to a particular observer may not be pointless at all. But he then accuses those of us who conclude that particular instances of suffering are pointless, of arrogance. He accuses us of being unjustifiably confident in our own judgment.

But that is utter nonsense. The fact that what appears to be pointless, based on all the available evidence, may not actually be pointless, is no reason for us not to conclude that certain cases of suffering are pointless unless proved otherwise. The underlying premise to the author's argument is that I'm not justified in concluding that X is Y, or using X is Y in an argument, until I'm absolutely certain that X is Y. But there is very little in the world that we can be absolutely certain about, so this premise would preclude belief, assertion and argument altogether.

What the author attempted to do was to shift the burden of proof. He argued that you can't assert the premise "God allows pointless suffering" unless you rule out every possible way in which each instance of suffering might be meaningful. But if there are instances of suffering that appear to be obviously gratuitous and/or pointless, shouldn't the presumption be that they are pointless and gratuitous unless shown to be otherwise?

Anyway, I did think the author's discussion of Plantinga's argument from "Evil to the existence of God" was interesting. I'll take that up in my next post.

Joe H