Subjectivism and the argument from evil as a reductio

The reductio requires that you establish that a particular conception of goodness is essential to Christianity. I think it's a mistake to just say "no problem, it's just a reductio." Even if you argue that a theist must accept an objective standard of right and wrong, you then have to show that the standard that God supposedly violates by allowing the type of evil you are highlighting is a standard that Christians, in virtue of being Christians, are committed to. That's a bit of a demanding chore, in my book.

If you're a subjectivist, you can't say "This is the true standard of right and wrong, God violates that in virtue of allowing the evil he does allow, therefore, an omnipotent being, if he exists, can't be good." What you have to say is that Christians are committed to the standard that God is violating. Showing that commitment on the part of Christians is bound to be difficult.

A two or three years back on DI I got into some dialogue with Calvinists, in which I argued that a God who predestined some to heaven and some to hell would not be a good being in any recognizable sense. I still think that's right, but they argued that what it is for God to be good is that God's actions promote his own glory, and by glory they mean that God acted in such a way as to be able to exercise as many of his attributes as possible. God's goodness, as they understood it, required him to required him to exercise both his merciful forgiveness of sinners, which he does by giving them saving grace and welcoming them into heaven, but also by leaving people in sin and exercising his attribute of hostility to and punishment toward sin, which he exercises by punishing people eternally in hell. The Calvinists I was discussing with denied that they were theological voluntarists. God is seeking glory in this sense is, on their view, satisfying an objectively true standard of ethical conduct. Nor would I make the case that Calvinists aren't Christians.

I still think that this leaves us with too big of a disconnect between goodness as we understand in human relationships and goodness as practiced by God. But making that case as someone who believes in an objective moral standard is difficult enough. Making such a case if you are an ethical subjectivist strikes me as being just plain impossible.

Rational Dialogue and Ridicule

One rational dialogue begins, there are rules that have to be followed, like the principle of charity. You can do ridicule, or you can do rational dialogue. You just can't mix them, without breaking the rules.

Of course, our sense of what is ridiculous is largely determined by our views. Thus, what seems absurd to an atheist might seem perfectly sensible to a theist, and vice versa. 

Of course, one of the techniques of rational discourse is reductio ad absurdum. Unfortunately, other than the law of non-contradiction, there isn't any way to distinguish between the genuinely absurd and that which is merely counterintuitive. Many people consider it to be a reductio against utilitarianism that it results in the possible conclusion that we should under some circumstances, frame and execute an innocent person to prevent deaths as a result or rioting. J. J. C. Smart, however, simply accepted this implication of utilitarianism, hence the term "outsmart" in the Philosopher's Lexicon:

outsmart, v. To embrace the conclusion of one's opponent's reductio ad absurdum argument. "They thought they had me, but I outsmarted them. I agreed that it was sometimes just to hang an innocent man."

Three uses of ridicule

There has been a lot of discussion about the use of ridicule in debates about religious belief. It is my conviction that discussion of this tends to conflate three different ways in which ridicule is used.

The first way is simply to entertain ourselves. Think of the Dennett Lexicon, which lampoons various philosophers by giving humorous definitions to their names. Everyone is getting hit, so the Lexicon isn't really designed to change anyone's mind or get them to reject the views of any philosophers as opposed to another. Mostly, it's about having fun. I even once made up a Dennett Lexicon entry making fun of me.I find it easy to make fun even of ideas that I think are true, but has a ridiculous side to them.

Or consider Saturday Night Live spoofs of politicians. Sure Sarah Palin was lampooned by Tina Fey's impersonation, but Obama doesn't get off scot free either. Now it is quite true that the treatment of Palin in particular did play a role in many people seeing what was problematic about her place on the Republican ticket in 2008. But can you really say that Republicans are lampooned more severely there than Democrats? I understand that George H. W. Bush loved the impersonations Dana Carvey did of him.

There is also the colorful use of reductios ad absurdum. These are really designed to refute positions. But these have to be tested as to their adequacy and accuracy. In addition, what you think seems absurd might be cheerfully accepted by your opponent. I happen to think that materialistic atheism leads to absurd conclusions, namely, I think it leads to the conclusion that no one ever believes anything for a reason. However, obviously materialistic atheists themselves think that they do believe what they do for reasons. This is not ridicule in he sense that I would consider to be offensive. 

This is from RationalWiki, hardly a pro-theistic source: 

Reductio ad absurdum is only valid when it builds on assertions which are actually present in the argument it is deconstructing, and not when it misrepresents them as a straw man. For example, any creationist argument that takes the form of "if evolution were real, we'd see fish turning into monkeys and monkeys turning into people all the time" only serves to ridicule itself, since it mischaracterises the theory of evolution to an extreme degree.

Reductio ad absurdum should also not be confused with appeal to ridicule, although both see extensive use in satire. Appeal to ridicule simply dismisses a position as ridiculous, without explaining or arguing why, while reductio ad absurdum actually pursues the logical consequences of an argument.

Here is a treatment from Freethoughtpedia: 

It's no secret you can short-circuit somebody's brain with shame. How many of us were shamed into doing something stupid in high school?

But why does it work? There are these primitive, lower parts of your brain called amygdalae that controls base, emotional reactions. That's where things like contempt and shame come from, and stimulating it can completely shut down the analytical part of your brain. The gang calls you a coward and the next thing you know, you're wedging a roman candle between your buttcheeks. You'll show them!

You can thank evolution for that. Way back when humans started forming groups and tribes, social status was everything. It's what guaranteed you food, protection and ladies (that is, a chance to pass on your genes). Mockery developed as a "conformity enforcer" to keep people in line.

Making a person, idea or behavior the target of mockery gave it a lower social position, and made it clear that anybody who associated with it would share that lower position, leaving them out of the hunting/eating/fucking that made life in the tribe worthwhile. Thousands of years later, a good dose of mockery can shut down critical thinking and make us fall right in line, no questions asked.

Now let's look at the Dawkins statements I alluded to in a previous post. 

Dawkins: Michael Shermer, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott and others are probably right that contemptuous ridicule is not an expedient way to change the minds of those who are deeply religious. But I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are – irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven’t really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt.

I must ask, isn't he doing EXACTLY what the Freethoughtpedia says is the Appeal to Ridicule, a fallacy? Getting people to the right result is more important to him than fostering critical thinking and getting to the right result for the right reason. I do find this offensive, which is why my reactions to New Atheists are different from my reactions to atheists of another stripe. 

Reductio ad absurdum versions of the argument from evil

Earlier I posed the question of whether a naturalist could use the argument from evil, if that naturalist was not a moral realist. Some commentators have pointed out that the argument could be advanced by someone who rejected moral realism used moral realism as a reductio ad absurdum argument against theism.

Let's look at the argument from evil again.

1) Gratuitous evils probably exist.
(2) Gratuitous evils are incompatible with the God of theism (omnipotent, omniscient, all-good).
(3) Therefore, the God of theism probably does not exist.

If the defender of the argument from evil is unwilling to argue that 2 is true, she must at least argue that 2 is entailed by theism. In other words the defender of the reductio must do more than show that theism entails moral realism. I am personally inclined to think that that is true. A theist who believes that God gives commandments cannot maintain that one person's opinion is just as good as another's where conduct is concerned, if one of the persons is God.

But all you need to be a moral realist is to hold that there are at least some moral truths. It's perfectly possible to be a moral realist and to deny 2. An atheist using this version of the problem of evil must show that someone who is a theist and a moral realist but denies to is contradicting herself. That's a tall order.

Propaganda, Mockery, and Following the Argument

An important distinction has to be made about the whole mockery issue. If we are talking about mockery in and of itself, I don't see the harm in that. When I watch Life of Brian, for example, I see things within Christianity that no doubt deserve to be mocked. However, I don't think people should be making decisions about something as serious as religion based on mockery. You can mock, for example the theory of evolution with no trouble. And you can certainly mock people who have a quasi-religious devotion to the theory of evolution. The trouble is that perfectly good ideas can be made to look ridiculous.

Usually when I hear people mocking what I believe, it makes it seem less likely that they understand what they are mocking. I could be wrong, the could be capable of taking the time and effort to engage in a serious critique. But evidence of mockery points the other way. Of course, the mocker can come back with the Courtier's Reply: Your position is so ridiculous that I don't even have to understand it to critique it." I think there are difficulties inherent in the situation when you want to criticize something, but you don't want to give it a place at them table of dialogue. If atheists want real dialogue with believers, they have to treat them with respect at least in the interests of the discussion. If they just want to engage in propaganda, they can do that, but they should at least have the honest to call it what it is.

In philosophy we do have a argument method called reductio ad absurdum. But if absurdum doesn't involve an actual contradiction, then it's always possible to just say "So? Not that there's anything wrong with that!," and just reject the reductio. That's just life in the world of thought.

But I have a real problem with mockery as a strategy of persuasion. It functions pretty much like peer pressure, which is always a lousy way to decide what to do. I also think it undercuts dialogue and drags discussion down. It is tempting to think that what we believe is so important that whether someone comes to believe it for good reasons or bad, the important thing is that they believe what we agree with. But that is a huge mistake.

Real dialogue just follows the argument where it leads. What someone does with the argument once you are done is up to them. I think Lewis had a point when he separated apologetics from evangelism. These are two different operations, whether you are on the theist side or the atheist side.

I think Dawkins' strategy also leads to something else--people treating the person with whom they are engaging the discussion almost as if they weren't there, and shouting over them to possible "fence-sitters" who will be somehow peer-pressured into accepting atheism through the display of naked contempt. The message is "You're a hopeless faith-head who won't listen to reason. But maybe if I express enough contempt for what you believe, people who are thinking of agreeing with you will tip my way instead, since they don't want to be laughed at." The process matters, and if we are engaged intellectual dialogue, we have to respect that process. Propaganda is essentially anti-intellectual, regardless of what propositions are being supported by it.

C. S. Lewis was the first president of the Oxford Socratic Club, dedicated to following the argument where it leads. His time there led to two things that might be regarded as setbacks: his exchange with Elizabeth Anscombe, and the launching of Antony Flew's career as an atheist philosopher. But, in neither case was the setback the end of the story.

I think we have to face the fact that the most intelligent people in the world are divided on these religious issues, for whatever reason.

Mark Nelson on reductio versions of the Argument from Evil

A redated post.

The is from Mark Nelson's paper Naturalistic Ethics and the Argument from Evil,' Faith and Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 3, 1991.

Nelson argued in this paper that the moral premise of the argument from evil is undermined if the atheist construes that premise in a non-realist way, that is, he does not think that any propositions about what one ought to do can be true.
For reference, here are 1, 2 and 4 to which he refers in the paper.

1) if there were an all-good, all-powerful God, then there would be little or no evil in the world.

2) But there is much evil in the world.

4) If there were an all-good God, he would want there to be little or no evil in the world.

He writes, concerning the possibility of a reductio version of the argument:

Third, while not taking the argument as a reason for atheism itself, the naturalist can still try to offer the argument as an ad hominem argument that anyone who holds the non-relativistic ethical theory that the theist in fact holds should reject theism. That is, even if the naturalist does not believe premises 1 and 2, she can argue that the theist must (or at least does) hold premises 1 and 2, and that these jointly entail 3 (atheism-VR). Since few theists these days deny 2, the real issue is whether the naturalist can show that the theist must, or does, accept 1. In the present context, this boils down to whether the naturalist can show that the theist must, or does, accept 4, and this is a tall order. While some theists accept 4 or ought to, given their other philosophical commitments, it is by no means obvious that all do or even should, since, for theists, the acceptability of 4 depends to some extent on the truth about morality, and even among theists there is considerable disagreement about what this is. In sum, it's not as if the naturalist can point to a set of moral propositions to which all theists must share and say "See! These commit you to 4!" And the theist should be wary of letting her critic pin some definite moral theory on here, since it may be difficult to say what moral theory a world view commits us to, except from a vantage point "inside" it, as it were. Moreover, the theist might regard the ability to handle the problem of evil as a condition of adequacy for any theistic theory of morality. Finally, such an ad hominem argument does not satisfy the conditions for a disproof of the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God.

How subjectivism undercuts the argument from evil

A redated post from 06.

I have been arguing 1) that there are arguments from naturalism to moral subjectivism ( I have more to say about that later) and 2) moral subjectivism undercuts the argument from evil. Now I agree that if the atheist can show that his theist opponent is a moral objectivist who somehow implicitly accepts the moral premise of the argument from evil, then he would have a reductio ad absurdum argument against that theist. But once the reductio is done, the theist may not reject theism, he may just deny the moral premise of the argument from evil, in order to make his position consistent. What you actually have to show is that theism, or Christian theism entails that moral premise, but showing that would be a tall order.

It's not true that no theists defend moral subjectivism; I got the impression that Marilyn McCord Adams, a leading Christian philosopher first at UCLA and later at Yale, is a moral subjectivist of some kind. Her husband Robert Merrihew Adams (making the two of them the philosophical Adams family) is a moral objectivist, (see, a philosopher couple can disagree about a few things!) but in a paper originally published in Philosophical Review which later appeared in his book The Virtue of Faith, entitled "Must God Create the Best," argued that God did not have the obligation of creating the best of all possible worlds, or even the best world that he had the power to create. In that essay, and in another essay entitled "Existence, Self-interest, and the Problem of Evil" Adams argues " that ethical views typical of the Judeo-Christian tradition do not require the Judeo-Christian theist to accept the view (that this is the best world God could create). He must hold that this world is a good world. But he needs not maintain that it is the best of all possible worlds, or the best world that God could have made." Now if you're a moral objectivist, you can argue that this position is morally unacceptable based on a moral standard you share with Adams and other theists. If you are a subjectivist, you're out to lunch in the face of an argument like this.

William Lane Craig, in a debate with Keith Parsons, argued that since God had created the Amalekites, he had the right to have them slaughtered down to the last man, woman and child. Parsons expresssed "outrage" at this position. I don't buy Craig's theology here at all, but as a subjectivist, I would have no right to complain about it. I could not argue that Craig was being irrational in accepting this kind of a moral position. I don't know if Parsons is a subjectivist or not, but if he is, his outrage is just his personal feeling, and there is no way he can make it binding on Craig.

So I think that even though it is theoretically possible to use the argument from evil as a subjectivist, the theist has some counter-moves which look awfully difficult to stop, consistent with moral subjectivism.

Somebody actually advocated revising the Preamble with the exact words I gave years ago

"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are evolved equal, that they are endowed by evolution with certain inalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

It's bad enough that creationism is creeping up in public schools but it especially doesn't need to be in our own constitution. Just because our slave-owning, bigoted founding fathers were creationists doesn't mean that we should let our most important legal document reflect that. That has to be a violation of the separation of church and state clause that's also in the constitution.

Here's what I present years ago....as a reductio ad absurdum. 

The Last Post by Thomist Blogger Doug Benscoter

Who passed away last May at 30. Sad, I still remember when my good friend and Thomist Joe Sheffer passed away at 36, in 1989.  This is his argument.

Among other arguments I've defended in favor of classical theism, I have also defended a Thomistic modal argument inspired by Robert Maydole.  Let's first define two terms:

Something necessary is something that exists and cannot possibly-not exist.

Something contingent is something that possibly exists and possibly does not exist.  Contingency should not be conflated with "dependency."

Here is the argument:

1. Something presently exists. (Premise)

2. Something cannot come from nothing. (Premise)

3. Either everything that exists is contingent, or else there exists at least one necessary entity N. (Definition)

4. Necessarily, there was never a past time at which nothing existed. (From 1 and 2)

5. Possibly, there was a past time at which nothing contingent existed. (Premise)

6. Therefore, a necessary entity N exists. (From 4 and 5)

Consider this reductio ad absurdum (reduction to the absurd):

7. N does not exist. (Assumption)

8. Possibly, there was a past time at which nothing existed. (From 3, 5, and 7)

9. (8) contradicts (4).

10. Therefore, (7) is false. (From 8 and the law of non-contradiction)

Chesterton beat me to it

I have been using the reductio ad absurdum "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are evolved equal, and that they were endowed by evolution with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 

It seems as if G. K. Chesterton beat me to it by a few decades. 

“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”

― G.K. Chesterton

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/229497-the-declaration-of-independence-dogmatically-bases-all-rights-on-the

It comes from What I Saw in America.

Aw, shucks.

Reply to Ron on the problem of evil

Ron wrote: The AFE is a 'defeater' argument designed to show that there are internal contradictions in the theistic position. So while Lewis is correct technically, he misses the point that the AFE is concerned only with the rationality of the theistic position. The position of the atheist (or anyone else who uses the AFE) is not relevant. I think this is a mistake I've seen Christian apologists make.

VR: It is quite true that you can advance the argument from evil as a reductio against one's Christian opponent. What that entails is showing that as a Christian one must accept the moral premise of the argument (typically, a perfectly good being will prevent unnecessary suffering if possible, unless that suffering is necessary for a greater good), even though the atheist objector considers it subjective. But can you count on the Christian theist to accept that premise? Even if the theist accepts that premise in human contexts (and even that's not clear) it doesn't follow that the theist is inconsistent in not applying it to God.

In his debate with Keith Parsons William Lane Craig says that God is justified in ordering the Amalekites to be slaughtered down to the last man, woman and child, because God is the author and giver of life and therefore can take life as he chooses. Of course, Parsons found this shocking, and I personally find it counterintuitive. But I don;'t find Craig's position inconsistent. I don't see how an atheist can object to Craig's position without appealing to an objective standard that both the atheist and the theist share.

I've covered and discussed this point on here quite a bit, as the link should show.

The explanation that doesn't explain: Hays on the argument from appreciation

Steve: You just don't get it. You just don't get it. What I presented was an *argument* against the claim that the argument from appreciation explains why God reprobates some people. A reductio ad absurdum as it were. I elaborated the argument in a comment in response to Bnonn, but let we spell it out here.

1) If Calvinism is true, then God can, by his sovereign will, determine whether there will be reprobates or whether universalism is true. (I don't have to believe that this is sovereignly up to God, but you do).

2) God has selected that there be millions of reprobates.

3) You say Scripture teaches that this choice of a reprobate world is explained by the fact that in a reprobate world the blessed in heaven will appreciate the graciousness of their salvation to a greater extent than in a non-reprobate world.

My claim is that this would not be an explanation. The blessed in heaven have received God's gift of salvation through Christ. They are as open to God's teaching as they can be. God can produce in them all the appreciation he wants to of the graciousness of their salvation without damning anybody. God can show movies of fictitious persons in hell if he wants to, but even that doesn't seem necessary. God, after all, is supposed to be absolutely sovereign. So it stands to reason that God could use a little of that sovereignty to produce whatever appreciation the blessed he might need, even if universalism is true. It is absurd, therefore, to suppose that this "explanation" explains anything. We might, paradoxically, ask the Calvinist "What part of sovereign don't you understand?"

I had been arguing that there is no explanation available to us for God's choice of a reprobate world over a universalist world. By the way, I am not arguing that God couldn't possibly have a reason for reprobating people. What I am saying is that the position requires a mystery maneuver at this point, and that mystery maneuvers are invariable epistemically expensive. If there is a mystery, why not it be in our understanding of the passage (notice I don't even need to break with inerrancy here) rather than in the character of God.

I said nothing about not using the grammatico-historical method. I just said I hoped we could avoid interpretations of Scripture that commit biblical authors to absurd statements. And I gave an argument for why such an explanation would be absurd.

As you rightly point out with the missed plane story, seeing others killed in a plane accident is one way that someone might appreciate their earthly life. But a sovereign God has other ways to of producing in the blessed an appreciation for the graciousness of their salvation, so as an explanation for why God reprobates, it is completely worthless.

Now in fact, you really have to stretch the interpretation of the Romans passage you cite to get an actual teaching of this doctrine. After all, the passage begins with the phrase "What if," and is loaded with figurative language. If any other possible interpretation of the passage can be offered on the basis of exegesis, then that explanation would have to be preferred to this one. In fact, it would be preferable to say that we do not understand the passage than to give it this kind of an interpretation. It's the principle of charity.

Is there a consensus amongst competent exegetes on this passage? Thought not.

Reductios and the argument from evil

This links to a bunch of posts I did on the topic of the argument from evil as a reductio. What happens when someone who doesn't believe in moral objectivity defends the argument from evil?

The problem arises when the argument requires are fairly finely tuned moral claim. Someone might say "If God is good, then he can't allow gratuitous suffering. The theist answers "Why? What's wrong with permitting gratuitous suffering?" The atheist can't say that it's objectively wrong for God to do that, so he has to argue that the theist believes that it is wrong for God to do that? The atheist then has to work from inside the moral belief system of the person with whom he is arguing. But moral belief-systems amongst theists, and even Christians differ from one another.

Calvinists think that God is justified in creating people for the sake of reprobating them in hell forever, for the sake of God's own glory. I happen to disagree with them, but I believe in objective moral values. How can a subjectivist argue with them?

More on reductios and the AFe

I'm Skeptical wrote: 


If I understand Victor's position, a skeptic can't defend the argument from evil unless he concedes that there are objective moral values. This is a parlor trick. It's equivalent to saying that if I want to make the statement "If A then B" I must first concede that A is true.

If you accept Victor's position, why not take the same logic one step further and demand that the skeptic concede that God exists before he can defend AE?


VR: No, you don't understand my position. I admitted that reductio versions of the argument from evil are possible, even for those who don't believe in moral objectivity.  The problem is going to arise when the atheist/subjectivist tries to defend the moral premise of the argument. The subjectivist can't appeal to his own value theory to argue about what it is for God to be good. 


Let's take this statement from Rowe:


An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.


Now, does  theist necessarily have to believe this? And if they do believe it, do they have to agree with the atheist about what would be a greater good or the prevention of some evil equally bad or worse? If there are any value-theoretic conflicts, someone committed to objective moral values can argue that the theist's value system is faulty. They can argue that the theist has some misplaced values, and in particular, perhaps, undervalues the prevention of intense suffering and makes inflates the legitimacy of other values which, he argues, are not sufficient justifiers for intense suffering. A subjectivist can't do that. The logic of his argument forces him to concede the value-theoretic position of his theist opponent at every turn, since he cannot


The most serious objection to this line of argument comes in the Mark Nelson  post, from Thrasymachus. I will need a separate post to respond to that. 

Donald Trump and the baker

President Donald Trump divorces Melania, and becomes engaged to the beautiful Svetlana Putina, the 27-year-old daughter of Vladimir Putin. He contacts Fabulous Cakes and Designs, owned by evangelical Christian baker Jack Graham, who is asked to bake a YUGE cake for a wedding at Trump Tower. Graham refuses, on the grounds citing Matthew 9:19. 

I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery."

Besides, the President is a known serial adulterer and p**** grabber, whose disrespect for the institution of marriage is well-known. 

The infuriated President files a suit with the Civil Rights Commission, claiming discrimination on the basis of marital status. 

Reductio? No, the defender of religious freedom can just support the baker, not Trump. 

A secular outpost discussion of some of my objections to the argument from evil

A redated post. I should say that I don't endorse the claim that "if no one gets unjustly damned then whatever God dishes out is OK." At least not in my present state of mind. But if I held to such a theory, how would you refute me?

Jeff Lowder responds in this and in a previous post to some discussion of mine on the argument from evil. It seems to be a matter of figuring out the "scope" of arguments. I suppose you can have one argument that says that consciousness itself is more probable on theism than on naturalism. You might have another that says the fact that consciousness depends on the brain as much as it does confirms naturalism over theism. And then you have another argument that says that, given that it exists, the degree to which our conscious life is unpleasant and painful is more probable on naturalism than on theism. I still maintain that important phenomena that give rise to the problem of evil are themselves deeply problematic for naturalism, including consciousness, objective moral values (and yes I know all about running it as a reductio without presupposing objective moral values--I still think subjectivism undercuts the argument), and rational inference (we couldn't argue from evil if we can't infer). I'm agnostic as to whether an argument from evil can be made that disconfirms theism to some extent. What I object to is the claim that the argument from evil is a single, overriding reason for rejecting theism, that justifies irrationality charges against believers in God. At best it's one piece of the puzzle that goes the naturalist's way. Why is it supposed to me more important than all the other pieces?

More on Clayton and evil

The problem here, Clayton, is that we aren't getting the logically conclusive argument that there couldn't be justifying reasons for God to permit horrific suffering. I admit that there is a pull on my moral intuitions to say that God should intervene in such situations, but when this is spelled out in more detail this is not so clear. There is a special burden that falls on people who claim a silver bullet. And I can see how God's intervening in too many cases might result in our not taking responsibility for doing what is right in the world as we find it. My moral intuitions are exactly the opposite of those of Ivan Karamazov: if God can make it the case so that even the most horrific and senseless-seeming suffering can work out the best in the long run, then more power to God for doing so. Further, I can even see the sufferer in eternity thanking God for the privilege of being allowed to suffer so much on earth. If you don't like my moral intuitions, I don't know how to argue with you.

In order for the reductio to go through, you have to be sure that I really have the moral beliefs in question, and that I feel confident in applying them in the way that you insist that I must. The mere fact that theism entails that there are objective moral values (and I think that it does imply that) does not tell you what objective moral values the theist believes in. God has many more things to take into consideration than does a human being in deciding what ought to be done. Humans invariably truncate our thinking, confining ourselves to the realtively short-term temporal consequences of our own actions. God, on the other hand, has eternal consequences to consider as well as temporal ones.

I would not consider allowing terrible pain and suffering in order to achieve a good final outcome. But I have a limited understanding which makes it wicked for me to play God. On the other hand, God is supposed to be up to the challenge of playing that role, since He (she) is God. If God exists, of course.

The argument against exclusivism

E= Exclusivism
C= Calvinism
U= Universalism

1. E (assumption for reductio).
2. E -> C (the argument of the Triabloggers).
3. C -> U (Johnny-Dee's argument).
4. E -> U (chain argument).
5. E -> ~U (true by definition)
6. E -> (U ^ ~U) 4, 5
7. ~ E

But of course for this argument to work premise 2 has to get around Craig's argument to the contrary, based on Molinism.

Exbeliever on the Argument from Reason

A lot of people seem to want me to take a swing at Exbeliever's response to my argument from reason. I should begin by saying that I didn't invent the argument. It was most famously defended by a Christian apologist that Exbeliever can be perhaps be excused for never having heard of, C. S. Lewis. A version of the argument can be found in the book Scaling the Secular City by another obscure apologist by the name of J. P. Moreland. And there's a really obscure philosopher from the University of Notre Dame who has developed what is known as the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, which bears a family resemblance to the arguments from reason that I defend. His name is Alvin Plantinga.

In general, the argument makes a distinction between naturalistic world-view, in which the fundamental entities of the universe lack mental characteristics (atoms, or maybe something else, but not something that at all resembles a mind), and world-views such as theism, but also pantheism and absolute idealism, according to which the fundamental causes of the universes are mental, or as Lewis would say, more like a mind than anything else. The argument from reason, if successful, gives us a good reason to suppose that one of the mentalistic world-views must be true and that naturalism is false. It is designed to enhance the likelihood that theism is true by eliminating some alternatives, alternatives that are in fact the most popular non-theistic world-views.

It's a good idea to look at what happened in Lewis's own case to see how the argument contributed to his coming to belief in God. Lewis had been what was then called a "realist", accepting the world of sense experiece and science as rock-bottom reality. Largely through conversations with Owen Barfield, he became convinced that this world-view was inconsistent with the claims we make on behalf of our own reasoning processes. In response to this, however, Lewis became not a theist but an absolute idealist. It was only later that Lewis rejected absolute idealism in favor of theism, and only after that that he became a Christian. He describes his discussions with Barfield as follows:

(He) convinced me that the positions we had hitherto held left no room for any satisfactory theory of knowledge. We had been, in the technical sense of the term, “realists”; that is, we accepted as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed to the senses. But at the same time, we continued to make for certain phenomena claims that went with a theistic or idealistic view. We maintained that abstract thought (if obedient to logical rules) gave indisputable truth, that our moral judgment was “valid” and our aesthetic experience was not just pleasing but “valuable.” The view was, I think, common at the time; it runs though Bridges’ Testament of Beauty and Lord Russell’s “Worship of a Free Man.” Barfield convinced me that it was inconsistent. If thought were merely a subjective event, these claims for it would have to be abandoned. If we kept (as rock-bottom reality) the universe of the sense, aided by instruments co-ordinated to form “science” then one would have to go further and accept a Behaviorist view of logic, ethics and aesthetics. But such a view was, and is, unbelievable to me.

C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1955), 208.

So did the argument he accepted make theism more likely? It certainly did. In his mind it gave him a reason to reject his previously-held naturalism. Now you might think of Absolute Idealism an atheistic world view; I don't think you would want to call pantheism atheistic, but the argument runs a reductio absurdum against non-mentalistic world-views.

Consider the following argument:

1. Either the fundamental causes of the universes are more like a mind than anything else, or they are not.
2. If they are not, then we cannot make sense of the existence of reason.
3. All things being equal, world-views that cannot make sense of the existence of reason are to be rejected in favor of world-views that can make sense of the existence of reason.
4. Therefore, we have a good reason to reject all worldviews reject the claim that the fundamental causes of the universe are more like a mind than anything else.

Now if you want to hold out the idea that a idealist world-view is nevertheless atheistic, then my argument merely servces to eliminate one of the atheistic options. But suppose someone originally thinks that the likelihoods are as follows.

Naturalism 50% likely to be true.
Idealism 25% likely to be true.
Theism 25% likely to be true.

And suppose that someone accepts a version of the argument from reason, and as a result naturalism drops 30 percentage points. Then those points have to be divided amongst theism and idealism. So the status of theism is enhanced by the argument from reason.

Exbeliever writes:

Notice that the skeptic is simply to assume that something like a god can exist and after assuming this, it can be posited as an explanation of a phenomenon like reason. Much like presuppositionalism and its TAG argument, Reppert demands that the skeptic presuppose the most controversial aspect of his worldview (i.e. the existence of a non-corporal being who reasons without a physical brain) and then accept this presupposition as a valid "solution" to a "problem" of epistemology.

Now we have to tease out what he means by can. If "can" means logically possible, then all I need to show that is that there is no contradiction in the assertion "God exists." And I think that's pretty clear. If on the other hand, he means "it is plausible that God exists," well, the plausibility of a belief differs from person to person. There is no person-independent way of assessing antecedent probabilities, at least as I see it. So yes, if someone thinks that the existence of God is hopelessly implausible, he might conclude either that there must be some naturalistic understanding of the phenomenon of reason that has not yet been discovered, or he can conclude that some non-theistic mentalistic world-view must be true. But that does not alter the fact that the argument provides a substantial reason for believing in God. I have never said that the argument is absolutely decisive, in fact I have disappointed some supports of the argument with the modesty with which I present my arguments.

In EXB's discussion of the explanations for computer malfunctions, it seems we have a reason for preferring computer sprites to infallible designers. If these really are the only options, then evilcomputerspiritism must be accepted. It's just that we all know perfectly well that there are more alternatives, and the most plausible explanations are not on the table. So the argument is a false dilemma. In the case of my argument, where are the "third alternatives" other than what I have identified, namely, pantheism and idealism?

EXB writes: What Reppert has done in his argument is hidden the fact that the idea of a god, itself, must be plausible if it is to be called on as a "solution" to an epistemological "problem." To solve an extraordinary problem, he has posited an even more extraordinary solution. Simply having any old "solution" does not make a worldview superior to one that can offer no solution. The solution, itself, must be plausible; otherwise, it is simply magnifying the problem of the existence of a phenomenon by requiring justification of the existence of an even greater phenomenon.

Now here, instead of saying that the existence of God needs to be possible, he is now saying that it needs to be plausible. But of course I am trying to render it plausible by attempting to show that it makes sense of reason. In doing so I am at least attempting to enhance the plausibility of theism. So to say that I must first show that the existence of God is plausible before I can present an argument that the existence of God is plausible is to involve me in an infinite regress. EXB is just begging the question here.

As for what is "oustide my experience" the existence of an external physical world is, strictly speaking, outside my experience, in that it is consistent with all my experiences that there is no external world and that I am a brain in a vat being given experiences of objects that have no external reference. In other words, it is perfectly possible for me to have the relevant experiences in a world in which the objects do not exist, just as it is possible for me, after using a liberal amount of Jack Daniels to be, as philosophers would say, "appeared to red-goatly" even if there is no red goat in my presence. So EXB's burden of proof argument is a road to radical skepticism about a lot more than just religion.

I will leave EXB"s criticisms my critique of materialism for another occasion, pointing out only that I have dealt in some detail with criticisms of the various arguments from reason on this blog, including those of Richard Carrier. In fact, I redated three of those responses to the past month.

Redated post on the Psychological Relevance of Logical Laws

IV. Argument from the Psychological Relevance of Logical Laws
My fourth argument concerned the role of logical laws in mental causation. In order for mental causation to be what we ordinarily suppose it to be, it is not only necessary that mental states be causally efficacious in virtue of their content, it is also necessary that the laws of logic be relevant to the production of the conclusion. That is, if we conclude “Socrates is mortal” from “All men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man, then no only must we understand the meanings of those expressions, and these meanings must play a central role in the performance of these inferences, but what Lewis call the ground-and-consequent relationship between the propositions must also play a central role in these rational inferences. We must know that the argument is structured in such a way that in arguments of that form the conclusion always follows from the premises. We do not simply know something that is the case at one moment in time, but we know something that must be true in all moments of time, in every possible world. But how could a physical brain, which stands in physical relations to other objects and whose activities are determined, insofar as they are determined at all, by the laws of physics and not the laws of logic, come to know, not merely that something was true, but could not fail to be true regardless of whatever else is true in the world.
We can certainly imagine, for example, a possible world in which the laws of physics are different from the way they are in the actual world. We can imagine, for example, that instead of living in a universe in which dead people tend to stay dead, we find them rising out of their graves on a regular basis on the third day after they are buried. But we cannot imagine a world in which, once we know which cat and which mat, it can possibly be the case that the cat is both on the mat and not on the mat. Now can we imagine there being a world in which 2 + 2 is really 5 and not 4? I think not.
It is one thing to suggest that brains might be able to “track” states of affairs in the physical world. It is another thing to suggest that a physical system can be aware, not only that something is the case, but that it must be the case; that not only it is the case but that it could not fail to be the case. Brain states stand in physical relations to the rest of the world, and are related to that world through cause and effect, responding to changes in the world around us. How can these brain states be knowings of what must be true in all possible worlds?
Consider the difficulty of going from what is to what ought to be in ethics. Many philosophers have agreed that you can pile up the physical truths, and all other descriptive truths from chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology, as high as you like about, say, the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and you could never, by any examination of these, come to the conclusion that these acts we really morally wrong (as opposed to being merely widely disapproved of and criminalized by the legal system). Even the atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie argued that if there were truths of moral necessity, these truths, and our ability to know those truths, are do not fit well into the naturalistic world-view, and if they existed, they would support a theistic world-view. Mackie could and did, of course, deny moral objectivity, but my claim is that objective logical truths present an even more serious problem for naturalism, because the naturalist cannot simply say they don’t exist on pain of undermining the very natural science on which his world-view rests.
Arguing that such knowledge is trivial because it merely constitutes the “relations of ideas” and does not tell anything about the world outside our minds seems to me to be an inadequate response. If, for example, the laws of logic are about the relations of ideas, then not only are they about ideas that I have thought already, but also they are true of thoughts I haven’t even had yet. If contradictions can’t be true because this is how my ideas relate to one another, and it is a contingent fact that my ideas relate to one another in this way, then it is impossible to say that they won’t relate differently tomorrow.
Carrier responds somewhat differently. He says:
For logical laws are just like physical laws, because physical laws describe the way the universe works, and logical laws describe the way reason works—or, to avoid begging the question, logical laws describe the way a truth-finding machine works, in the very same way that the laws of aerodynamics describe the way a flying-machine works, or the laws of ballistics describe the way guns shoot their targets. The only difference between logical laws and physical laws is that the fact that physical laws describe physics and logical laws describe logic. But that is a difference both trivial and obvious.What this amounts to, it seems to me, is a denial of the absolute necessity of logic. If the laws of logic just tell us how truth-finding machines work, then if the world were different a truth-finding machine would work differently. I would insist on a critical distinction between the truths of mathematics, which are true regardless of whether anybody thinks them or not, and laws governing how either a person or a computer ought to perform computations. I would ask “What is it about reality that makes one set of computations correct and another set of computations incorrect?”
William Vallicella provides an argument against the claim that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations:
1. The laws of logic are empirical generalizations. (Assumption for reductio).
2. Empirical generalizations, if true, are merely contingently true. (By definition of ‘empirical generalization’: empirical generalizations record what happens to be the case, but might have not been the case.)
3. The laws of logic, if true, are merely contingently true. (1 and 2)
4. If proposition p is contingently true, then it is possible the p be false. (True by definition)
5. The laws of logic, if true, are possibly false. (From 3 and 4)
6. LNC is possibly false: there are logically possible worlds in which p & ~p is true.
7. But (6) is absurd (self-contradictory): it amounts to saying that it is logically possible that the very criterion of logical possibility, namely LNC, be false. Therefore 1 is false, and its contradictory, the clam that the laws of logic are not empirical generalizations, is true.Logic, I maintain, picks out features of reality that must exist in any possible world. We know, and have insight into these realities, and this is what permits us to think. A naturalistic view of the universe, according to which there is nothing in existence that is not in a particular time and a particular place, is hard-pressed to reconcile their theory of the world with the idea that we as humans can access not only what is, but also what must be.