One historically popular way of responding to the evidentialist challenge has been to grant the nature of the challenge and try to meet it head-on. In particular, some have tried to offer a defence of religious knowledge which does not make appeal to any kind of divine revelation, including that written down in scripture. This general way of answering theological questions is known as natural theology, in contrast to the alternative approach that appeals to divine revelation, which is known as revealed theology.
The reason why natural theologians restrict themselves to these sources of evidence is not because they do not believe in divine revelation, or do not endorse the word of scripture. It is rather because they hold that the appropriate epistemic standard by which to assess religious claims is in terms of the evidence that one can cite in support of them that does not appeal to these sources of religious belief. If this pro- ject is successful, it will supply a rational basis for religious belief which any rational agent could recognise as being sufficient, with true belief, for religious knowledge.
What kinds of epistemic support do proponents of natural theology offer for reli- gious belief? Well, in its most heroic form, proponents of this view try to offer a priori proofs of God’s existence. There are three main attempts at rationally proving the existence of God, and we will here briefly consider all three.
The first is the ontological argument, which is usually attributed to St Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), but which has subsequently been defended in vari- ous forms by a number of important philosophers, most notably René Descartes (1596–1650). The argument purports to show that it follows from the very concept of God that God must exist. The reasoning behind this argument goes as follows.
God is, by definition, the greatest being that can be conceived of. If God didn’t exist, then one could conceive of an even greater being (i.e. a being with all the attributes of God and which in addition existed). That would, however, be absurd, since God is by definition the greatest being that could be conceived. It follows that God must exist, since to suppose otherwise is to lead to absurdity.
The ontological argument is a highly abstract way of proving God’s existence. The flaw in the argument, as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) famously noted, is that it treats existence as being an attribute that something might have, like being red all over or being larger than the Empire State Building. But existence is not an attribute like other attributes. It’s not as if a house that has been destroyed continues to be a house with all the attributes as before, except that it no longer has the attribute of existence. Or, if you prefer, take two houses, identical in every respect except that one exists and one doesn’t. Is the non-existent house just lacking an attribute that the existent house possesses, as if we are comparing two existent houses, identical in every respect except that one of them is red and one of them is blue?
The moral to be drawn is that whether something exists is not a further attribute, like being red or blue. Rather, it concerns whether a description of something (i.e.
a list of attributes) corresponds to something in the world. To take a further exam- ple for illustration: a unicorn that exists is not like a non-existent unicorn in every
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religious knowledge 127 respect except that it in addition has the attribute of existence. Rather, both the existent and the non-existent unicorns are identical in terms of their attributes; it’s just that the existent unicorn corresponds to something in the world in a way that the non-existent unicorn doesn’t. If that’s right, then something with all the attrib- utes of God and who in addition exists is not superior to something with an identical list of attributes which doesn’t exist. Rather, they are equivalent items; it is just that one of them exists and one of them doesn’t.
A second popular proof of the existence of God is the cosmological argument.
There are various versions of this argument, but in its most basic form, the cos- mological argument contends that there must, by definition, be a creator of the universe, something that stands outside of the normal causal order of the world and who, as it were, sets alight the blue touch paper of creation. For imagine if there were no creator. What would then have to be the case? One option would be that the universe came into existence all by itself, but how could that be? That is, how could something arise out of nothing? Another option would that the universe has always been in existence. Is that even coherent? How could the universe stretch back infinitely without ever having been started by anything? But if the universe did not exist eternally, and did not come into existence all by itself, then how else could it have come into being without being created by a divine being like a God?
Of course, one way of responding to the cosmological argument is to dispute the key premise that the universe hasn’t always been in existence. Is this really so unaccept- able? Of course, we know that our particular universe came into being at a certain point in time (if the concept of time makes any sense independently of a particular existing universe), but it’s consistent with this that something existed even prior to our particular universe coming into being. Perhaps our universe dies and in dying it brings itself into existence again, on an eternal loop. Is this possibility inherently incoherent? Put more pointedly, is this explanation of how our particular universe came into being any less coherent or less informative than the competing explana- tion that God created this universe from scratch?
Here we get to the nub of the problem with the cosmological argument. This is that none of the available explanations for the existence of the universe are very compelling, including the one offered by proponents of the cosmological argument.
This is because it is a mystery that the universe exists. More precisely, it is a mystery that something exists rather than nothing at all, in the sense that nothing seems to be a good explanation of why there is a universe in the first place. That God exists is one possible explanation of why the universe exists, but it doesn’t seem to be an inherently better explanation of why the universe exists than any one of a number of alternative explanations, such as that our particular universe keeps dying and coming back to life on a perpetual loop.
The third historically popular proof of God’s existence is the so-called design argu- ment (sometimes referred to as the teleological argument, in that it appeals to an apparent purpose, or telos, to nature). In a nutshell, the idea behind this argument is that the universe at least appears designed. Nature is highly complex, whether one considers the intricacies of the human eye or the minute detail found in insects.
Such complexity implies design, which in turn implies a designer, and who would be a better candidate for being the designer of nature than God?
‘The God Wars’ and the new atheists
‘The God Wars’ is a phrase that is used to characterise a specific upsurge in contemporary public debate regarding the existence of God, particularly in the USA, that occurred in the early 2000s. This debate attracted a number of high-profile intellectuals, including several philosophers. In the one camp, the detractors of religion – or the ‘new atheists’, as they were known – included the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the (late) journalist Christopher Hitchens, and the philosopher Daniel Dennett. In the opposing camp, one can find philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga.
There are several elements to the new atheism movement, over and above the claim that God does not exist. The new atheists typically claim, for exam- ple, that religion is not a force for moral good in the world but rather a force for ill. Relatedly, they also claim that religion has negative epistemological consequences, in that it turns people’s attention away from rational ways of thinking, as embodied in science, and towards irrational and mystical ways of thinking. Finally, the new atheists often have a practical focus on what they see as the deleterious role of religion in public life.
This last point is very apparent in the public debate about whether creationism – the view that the world was created and designed by a divine being just a few thousand years ago – should be taught as a scientific alternative to evo- lutionary theory as part of science lessons in schools (this is an issue that we touched upon in the last chapter). This debate has a particularly sharp focus in the USA, where the constitutional division of religion and state means that religion ought not to be advocated within publicly funded schools. Thus, inso- far as creationism is a religious doctrine rather than a scientific proposal, then it ought not to be taught as an alternative to evolutionary theory in publicly funded schools (indeed, perhaps it ought not to be taught in any schools, pub- licly funded or otherwise, but this is a further issue). Conversely, if it can be shown that it is a scientific theory, then there is nothing to stop it being taught as an alternative to evolutionary theory in publicly funded schools.
The new atheists have been keen to dismiss the putative scientific credentials of creationism, and to demonstrate the malign effects, particularly of an epis- temic variety, that would accrue were it to be taught to schoolchildren as a scientific viewpoint alongside evolutionary theory. In contrast, the opponents of new atheism, while not necessarily willing to endorse creationism as a sci- entific theory, have tended to argue that such a view ought to be presented to schoolchildren as an alternative account of the origins of the universe and the complexity of the natural world around them.
religious knowledge 129 In his 1802 book, Natural Theology (a book that was tremendously influential in the nineteenth century), the philosopher William Paley (1742–1805) offered a famous example to illustrate the design argument. Paley asked what one would suppose were one to find a watch on a heath. A watch is clearly a complex mechanism which has been designed to serve the particular purpose of telling the time. Finding such an item, wouldn’t we suppose that there must be a watchmaker who created the watch? That much seems right, since it is not plausible that such a sophisticated entity should spring into existence by chance, in the way that a certain shape might by chance be over time carved out of a rock by the elements. Paley’s idea, however, is that once we recognise the complexity inherent in nature, then what goes for the watch will go for nature itself, and hence we will be rationally led towards belief in a God who created nature.
The appeal of the design argument is in the idea that the best available explanation of the complexity of nature is the existence of a creator who designed nature to be this way. There are two key problems with this kind of strategy for defending the existence of God. The first is that even if we grant that the best explanation of the complexity of nature 200 years ago was a divine creator and designer, one would be hard pressed to argue that this is the best explanation available for the complexity of nature today. After all, we now have evolutionary theory, a theory which has been able to successfully explain many of the complexities found in nature without appealing to anything outside of normal natural mechanisms.
Note that this isn’t to say that there is nothing that evolutionary theory struggles to explain. Indeed, as we noted in the last chapter, all scientific theories – even the ones that are most successful and enjoy very high levels of empirical support – face some
‘recalcitrant’ data which they struggle to accommodate, so it would be surprising if evolutionary theory were any different on this score. The point remains that even a theory which is sub-optimal in some minor respects can still offer a far more sophis- ticated explanation of a natural phenomenon – in this case the complexity inherent in nature – than rival proposals (such as the suggestion that nature was created and designed by a divine force).
This brings us to a second worry about the design argument, which is that it is far from clear whether appealing to the existence of a divine creator does offer very much by way of explanation of the complexity of nature. Think again about the watchmaker analogy that Paley offers. While it is surely reasonable to suppose that there must be a watchmaker who created the watch, isn’t this because we know full well that there are watchmakers that construct such items? Given that what is in question is whether the complexity found in nature is attributable to divine agency, it is a big leap to conclude that this complexity in nature is relevantly akin to the complexity of a watch, which we independently know to be designed. Why couldn’t the complexity in nature be entirely due to natural processes?
Moreover, insofar as we struggle to explain this natural complexity by appeal to purely natural processes, then how helpful is it to conclude that a divine being must have created and designed nature? To bring this point into sharp relief, consider the matter put this way: to what extent is this divine ‘explanation’ of the complexity
of nature any less mysterious as conceding that one can offer no explanation at all?
Remember, after all, that the design argument doesn’t tell us anything at all about this divine creator, only that he (she? it?) must exist if we are to explain the com- plexity in nature. But isn’t that just to trade one mystery (i.e. why is there complex- ity in nature?) with another (why did a divine being create nature in the particular manner in which we find it?)?