Is Faith in God Reasonable?

Debates in Philosophy, Science, and Rhetoric

Corey Miller, Paul Gould, Corey Miller, Paul Gould

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415709408
• eBook ISBN: 9781134630448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The question of whether faith in God is reasonable is of renewed interest in today's academy. In light of this interest, as well as the rise of militant religion and terrorism and the emergent reaction by neo-atheism, this volume considers this important question from the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and in a more novel fashion, of rhetoricians. It is comprised of a public debate between William Lane Craig, supporting the position that faith in God is reasonable and Alex Rosenberg, arguing against that position. Scholars in the aforementioned fields then respond to the debate, representing both theistic and atheistic positions. The book concludes with rejoinders from Craig and Rosenberg.

Part I Introduction and Debate

1 Introduction Faith, Reason, and God

Corey Miller

Paul Gould

DOI: 10.4324/9781315885544-1

“In our Western academic philosophy, religious belief is commonly regarded as unreasonable and is viewed with condescension or even contempt.”

—Norman Malcolm

Rhetoric to the contrary, God is no longer dead in the Western academy. In 1966 Time magazine put forth an issue with a notoriously pitch-black cover with three bright red words bellowing the question, “Is God Dead?” But in 1967 a new generation made its debut with Alvin Plantinga’s God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God. Belief in God was respectable again. Following in Plantinga’s wake was a resurgence of Christian philosophers flooding the subfield of philosophy of religion in academia with a firestorm of fresh publications.

The question about the reasonableness of faith in God is as intellectually, morally, and existentially important now as it ever has been in history. It is an extremely hot topic in today’s academy. Christian academic and professional societies flourish in every discipline of the university. To cite but one example, consider the discipline of philosophy. Within the American Philosophical Association two of the largest subgroups are the Philosophy of Religion Group and the Society of Christian Philosophers. Publications have blossomed with a number of journals in play including Faith and Philosophy, The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Religious Studies, Sophia, and Philosophia Christi. Indeed, one of the largest graduate schools in philosophy on the North American continent (Biola University, Talbot School of Theology) is built solely upon a master’s degree in philosophy of religion.

The God debate is also a hot topic in today’s popular world. The scholarly debate has spilled over into the highways and byways of our everyday lives through popular websites, blogs, media outlets, and publishing houses. Best-selling books by believers (e.g., Tim Keller’s The Reason for God) and unbelievers (e.g., Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion) sit atop The New York Times best seller lists for months (as we write this, Reza Aslan’s Zealot, a revisionist tome about the historical Jesus is number one on the list). In addition, “documentaries” with titles such as Religulous, The Unbelievers, Expelled, and Jesus Camp keep the issue before a non-reading public that shows no sign of listener’s fatigue.

This immense interest is also evidenced most recently by the widespread public discussion of the connection between militant religious belief and terrorism since 2001, noting that there is perhaps no greater motivation to action than religious motivation by the faithful. This makes the question concerning the reasonableness of faith in God no mere academic matter. The relevance of the God question is also demonstrated in the culture wars in America with regard to the public square, namely, the question of the relationship of church and state in matters of public policy. The secularist wants to preclude religious belief from entering the public square on account of its lack of rationality and its commitment to blind or parochial faith; the believer, in a desire to maintain personal integrity, seeks to carve out a role for religious belief in the public square.

In light of this renewed and vigorous interest, as well as the rise of militant religion and terrorism and the emergent reaction by neo-atheism, the God debate is vibrant and alive today. In the academy, this development has been accompanied by a plethora of monographs, recent introductory texts, and general anthologies addressing a variety of issues such as the existence and nature of God, religious diversity, the problem of evil, religious experience, the problem of divine hiding, the relationship between God and ethics, the relationship of science and religion, and the rationality of religious belief. Most of these topics have recent, specialized anthologies.

In the last decade or so the problem of evil has been the subject of several recent anthologies, notably, William Rowe’s God and the Problem of Evil (Blackwell, 2001). Paul Moser and Dan Howard-Snyder have published a slew of recent essays on the problem of Divine Hiddenness (Cambridge, 2002). Paul Copan and Paul Moser have published a collection of essays extending attention to arguments for and against God’s existence in The Rationality of Theism (Routledge, 2003). Michael Martin has put together a fine anthology trumpeting atheism, The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge, 2007). In partial response we have by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland the most up-to-date anthology on natural theology, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Blackwell, 2009). On religious diversity, we find Chad Meister’s excellent text, The Oxford Handbook of Religious Diversity (Oxford, 2011). On philosophy of religion proper we have the work by Louis Pojman and Michael Rea, Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology (Cengage Learning, 2011). And noteworthy essays on science and Christianity are included in the work by J. B. Stump and Alan Padget, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Absent from this list of recent anthologies, however, is a fresh, up-to-date text centering exclusively on whether faith in God is reasonable as considered from the contemporary vantage points of science, philosophy, and rhetoric. Indeed, there is virtually no major work of this sort, especially not concerning a live debate examined under the rhetorical rubric. A signpost work on the rhetoric of religion was put forth in 1961 by Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion (University of California Press, 1961). Although there are journals that segue some of the fields mentioned (Philosophy and Rhetoric, Journal of Communication and Religion, etc.) and works exist on the relationship of rhetoric and biblical studies, politics, religious literature, pulpit rhetoric, and so on, we aren’t aware of any recent text examining a public debate by two highly published philosophers of religion or science and further analyzed under the lenses of recent philosophy, science, and rhetoric.

This project will consider this important question of the reasonableness about faith in God in light of, and by those working in the fields of, contemporary science, philosophy, and in a more novel fashion, rhetoric, or the art of persuasion and use of particular evidence or reasons. Hence, in debating the question of whether faith in God is reasonable through such lenses, it will give the reader a broader and more credible scope for answering the question and considering the resultant implications of such an answer for him- or herself.

The God Debate: Craig vs. Rosenberg

This book centers on a formal public debate that took place at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, on February 1, 2013 over the question, “Is faith in God reasonable?” With over 14,000 live or live-stream viewers from over 60 countries and with over 100,000 hits on YouTube by this volume’s publication, the debate between William Lane Craig and Alex Rosenberg ranks as one of the most highly watched debates of the decade. The atmosphere that night was charged with anticipation: two leading defenders of Christianity and atheism were going to present their case, standing toe-to-toe with each other to debate the rationality of belief in God. And debate they did. The interchange was lively, relevant, heated at times, and informative. We have included the full debate transcript in Part One of this book.

The motivation for this book, however, began when a search for debate opponents on the topic revealed an aggressive interest on atheistic blog sites about the nature and effectiveness of atheists debating with Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. Surprisingly, we discovered that many bloggers on these sites, a few of whom are well-known atheists (academic and non-academic) seek to discourage such debates (indeed, attempts were made to dissuade Dr. Alex Rosenberg from debating weeks before the actual event). The basis for such discouragement is the claim that Dr. Craig, while a noted philosopher in his own right, wins debates proffering his Christian deity not on the basis of rational content but, charitably, on the basis of his oratory and debate skills or, less charitably, because he is a charlatan who lies, cheats, or manipulates to win.¹ In short, his skill obscures the truth about ultimate reality. In any case, it is thought that one ought not to enter a debate with Craig because even if it is thought that atheism is true, Craig’s opponents aren’t successful in showing this in these venues solely because of a lack of training and skill. So part of the formal debate judge team includes highly regarded rhetorical scholars, atheist and Christian alike, to weigh in as some of the contributing authors.²

This collection will be of value in ways that are important and distinct. First, the book—via Part One—will provide an entry to the topic of the reasonableness of faith in God in a way that will prepare readers for the more advanced reading and reflection they will encounter in the respondents’ essays. Second, given its interactive format, the book will undoubtedly advance discussion related to the reasonableness of faith in God as leading thinkers in diverse academic fields interact with each other. Given the high quality and diversity of the contributors (over 100 books and 1,000 articles among them) there is every reason to think that the essays in this collection will advance the current discussion and highlight important, even new, connections related to the topic of God, faith, and rationality.

On Defining Terms

It is customarily appropriate to provide at the beginning of a work like this extensive and substantive discourse on key notions. This is a case, however, where it is not so appropriate given that the bulk of the work is done by respondents replying (in part) to the debate itself, where the debaters are the ones with the onus to define their terms. Hence, we’ll only briefly address the concomitant notions of “faith,” “God,” and “reasonable,” in terms of framing the question for debate, but will leave it to the debaters and respondents to clarify and evaluate these respective notions.

What of the notion “God,” then? It was once thought that any God-talk was meaningless gibberish. But while difficulties may persist, that era is now largely obsolete in contemporary philosophy of religion. Obviously any meaningful discussion of the reasonableness of faith in God relies on some basic target concept of “God.” It is a matter of controversy whether the “God of the philosophers” is the same as the “God of the prophets.” In other words, what hath Athens to do with Jerusalem? Even so, common conceptions surface. The deliverances of philosophy provide us with a concept of God as the greatest conceivable being; a being whose supremacy is unassailable and matchless. As a supreme being, God exhibits certain great-making characteristics such as omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. This conception of the divine finds remarkable convergence with the deliverances of biblical revelation: the God of the Bible, likewise, is a being of unassailable and matchless greatness that exhibits the traditional great-making attributes. “Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit,” declares the Psalmist (147:5). In the debate and subsequent discussion among the contributors of this book, it is clear that the God in question is the God of biblical revelation. Thus, we have a concept of God robust enough for the religious believer to recognize and the scholar to analyze; a being such that if He exists, is worthy of worship.

The notion of “faith” in God is also something of a controversy because most often it is confused with “belief,” and the two notions are actually non-identical. For instance, something like “2 + 2 = 4” can be believed exclusively in terms of intellectual assent, but the Judeo-Christian notion of faith also involves volitional consent. So faith is more than mere belief. Or again, faith is often rendered contrary to reason (e.g., see any of Richard Dawkins’ vitriolic works for salacious quotes) and/or requires a blind leap (akin to some version of Kierkegaardian fideism where faith is embraced wholly apart from and sometimes even in defiance to what some consider to be trustworthy evidence for God’s existence), something most religious thinkers demur as to their understanding of “faith.”

Historically speaking, faith is part of a knowledge tradition. The Medieval philosophical/theological tradition in the West was largely a project in “faith seeking understanding” (Latin, fides quarens intellectum). Indeed, the greatest philosopher and legal scholar of the Jewish tradition, Moses Maimonides, considered faith (Hebrew, emunah) to be a virtue, a moral virtue in particular but a virtue nonetheless, required for moral perfectibility instrumentally leading to intellectual perfection. Thomas Aquinas likewise considered faith (Latin, fides) to be a virtue, but an intellectual virtue without which none of the other virtues are fully virtuous. Human faith in God is cognitively grounded in humanly experienced evidence of its divine personal object. Biblically speaking, faith is connected with knowing, believing, and obeying, and so while there is more than mere intellectual assent, it isn’t construed, at any rate, as contrary to reason. This leads us to the topic of reasonableness.

The question of the “reasonableness” of faith in God may seem, on the one hand, to be person relative, and in some sense it is, but on the other hand, reason as universally understood ought to be to some extent objective. The notion “reasonableness” is itself controversial if for no other reason than that “reasonable” is to “reason” like “desirable” is to “desire,” namely, the former of the couplets are normative instead of merely psychologically descriptive. That is, one may have a personal subjective desire for something, but that doesn’t imply that it is in itself desir able in any objectively normative sense. For example, one may desire to eat nothing but candy, but one’s body will soon notify us that it is not desirable for good health. One may not subjectively desire to eat spinach, but the consumption of spinach is objectively desirable for good health.

Likewise, reasonableness cannot be understood apart from its normative content. This is a salient point in current discussions of the elusiveness or hiddenness of God admitted by atheists and theists alike in what is known as “the problem of divine hiddenness.” John Schellenberg, for example, has argued that God doesn’t exist on the evidentiary basis of reasonable non-belief as held by many where “reasonable” is taken in a normative sense closely connected to “culpable.”³ If God exists, He’d ensure for the sake of the divine–human relationship that His existence was more obvious to all reasonable seekers who, through no fault of their own, have honestly sought to the best of their ability to discover if God is real and came up empty handed. But since such evidence for God seems to be lacking, at least according to the report of many “reasonable” non-believers, then this fact constitutes “revelation of God’s non-existence.” But such a conclusion may be hasty. While there are indisputably many non-believers reporting the unreasonableness of faith, what is contested is whether the non-belief itself, not its self-report, is reasonable. What is the basis for drawing conclusions as to who is reasonable or unreasonable?

As Alvin Plantinga argues, the dispute as to who is rational ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• PART I Introduction and Debate
• PART II Respondents
• PART III Rejoinders
• Contributors
• Index