Is There a God?

A Debate

Graham Oppy, Kenneth L. Pearce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000456349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Bertrand Russell famously quipped that he didn't believe in God for the same reason that he didn't believe in a teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars: it is a bizarre assertion for which no evidence can be provided. Is belief in God really like belief in Russell's teapot? Kenneth L. Pearce argues that God is no teapot. God is a real answer to the deepest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? Graham Oppy argues that we should believe that there are none but natural causal entities with none but natural causal properties—and hence should believe that there are no gods. Beginning from this basic disagreement, the authors proceed to discuss and debate a wide range of philosophical questions, including questions about explanation, necessity, rationality, religious experience, mathematical objects, the foundations of ethics, and the methodology of philosophy. Each author first presents his own side, and then they interact through two rounds of objections and replies.

Pedagogical features include standard form arguments, section summaries, bolded key terms and principles, a glossary, and annotated reading lists. In the volume foreword, Helen De Cruz calls the debate "both edifying and a joy, " and sums up what's at stake: "Here you have two carefully formulated positive proposals for worldviews that explain all that is: classical theism, or naturalistic atheism. You can follow along with the authors and deliberate: which one do you find more plausible?"

Though written with beginning students in mind, this debate will be of interest to philosophers at all levels and to anyone who values careful, rational thought about the nature of reality and our place in it.

Opening Statements

Chapter 1
Classical Theism

An Exposition and Defense^*

* In addition to Graham, I thank Tyron Goldschmidt, Frederick Choo, Scott Hill, Tim Troutman, Jay Hoeflinger, and the students in my autumn 2019 philosophy of religion lecture at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) for helpful comments on previous drafts of this opening statement. My work on this debate was also supported by a spring 2020 sabbatical from TCD, during which I was an academic visitor at the University of Pittsburgh. I thank both universities for their support.

Kenny Pearce

DOI: 10.4324/9781003216797-3

Contents

1 Theism Versus Naturalism

2 Classical Theism

2.1 What Is Classical Theism?

2.2 Objections to Classical Theism From Other Theists

2.3 A Formulation of Classical Theism

3 An Argument for Classical Theism

3.1 The Argument

3.2 History Needs an Explanation (Defense of Premise 1)

3.3 Classical Theism Can Explain History (Defense of Premise 2)

3.3.1 A Grounding Explanation

3.3.2 A Non-necessitating Explanation

3.3.3 An Ultimate Explanation

3.3.4 Conclusion

3.4 Naturalism Can’t Explain History (Defense of Premise 2n)

3.5 Conclusion

4 Classical Theism and Religious Belief

4.1 Religion, Religious Belief, and Religious Experience

4.2 Reidian Religious Epistemology

4.3 The Problem of Hallucination

4.4 The Reliability of Religious Experience

4.5 Resolving Conflicts

5 Conclusion

Bertrand Russell ([1952] 1997, 547–548) famously remarked that he didn’t believe in God for the same reason he didn’t believe that there was a teapot in orbit between Earth and Mars. According to Russell, there’s no need to disprove the existence of the teapot since there’s no reason to take the teapot claim seriously in the first place. The same, Russell claims, goes for God.

In a similar vein, Graham Oppy (my opponent in the present debate) has compared belief in God with belief in fairies (Oppy 2018a, §3). It is surprisingly difficult to disprove the existence of fairies (see Clark 1987), and some arguments could even be given in their favor.¹ Nevertheless, according to Graham, there is no obligation to take fairy claims seriously. In the absence of powerful evidence—much more powerful than any that has been produced so far—it is rational to believe that there are no fairies. The same, Graham claims, goes for God.

1. Tiddy Smith (2020) discusses a philosophical argument for the existence of nature spirits. Perhaps fairies should be considered a species of nature spirits.

I think that this perspective underestimates the strength of the case for theism. I do not claim that the existence of God can be proven so that every rational person must believe in God. I do claim that theism provides a better explanation of the world than certain competing views, including the view endorsed by Graham. This provides us with a good reason for believing in God. However, one good reason for believing in God certainly does not amount to a proof of God’s existence. Deciding whether we should, in the end, believe in God requires a comprehensive ‘weighing up’ of the pros and cons of theism and its competitors. I hope that this debate will help the reader to begin this task.

The plan of this opening statement is as follows. After some preliminaries (§1), I introduce a way of thinking about God known as ‘classical theism’ (§2). Then, in §3, I show that classical theism provides a satisfying explanation of the universe as a whole, while many competing views (including Graham’s) necessarily leave this unexplained. Finally, in §4, I discuss the relevance of this philosophical theory about God to ordinary religious belief. I argue that, although classical theism differs from ordinary religious belief in certain important ways, these two kinds of belief about God can be combined to form an intellectually satisfying picture of the world.

1 Theism Versus Naturalism

In a number of publications, Graham has argued that the correct approach to philosophy of religion is worldview comparison (Oppy 2013a, ch. 1; 2013b, §5; 2018a, §2). I agree. In this section, I explain this approach and its application to the present debate.

Theism is a broad family of views, including every view that holds that there is a God (or god) of some sort or other. Since the word ‘God’ (or ‘god’) is extremely flexible, the variety of theisms (beliefs in God/gods) is almost limitless. Atheism is just the view that every one of these many theisms is false. In other words, atheists think that there are no gods of any kind.

Theism: the thesis that a God (or god) of some sort or other exists.

Atheism: the thesis that there are no gods of any kind.

Philosophers support their positions with arguments.

Arguments and Validity

An argument is a collection of beliefs (the premises) that are meant to provide rational support for some other belief (the conclusion). The strongest kind of rational support is known as validity. A valid argument is one where, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must necessarily be true. In other words, it is impossible for the premises of a valid argument to be true when the conclusion is false.

It is hard to imagine an argument that supported the claim that some form of theism is true without supporting a claim that is at least a bit more specific than this. That is, philosophers might construct arguments for a creator of the universe, or for an infinitely perfect being, and so on, but it’s hard to see how they could make arguments for God (or a god) without making some specific claims about what God is like. An argument for God will be an argument for some particular sort of God.

On the other side, if the atheist confines herself to arguing against the theist’s claims without setting up some positive view of her own, then it is hard to see how the atheist could argue against all of the theisms at once (see Diller 2016). Objections to theism are always objections to some particular form of theism. For instance, those who argue that if there were a God then there wouldn’t be so much suffering in the world are typically arguing against the existence of a God who is both all-powerful and perfectly good (see Hume [1779] 2002, pt. 10). If a particular theist doesn’t hold that God is all-powerful or doesn’t hold that God is perfectly good, then that theist doesn’t have to worry about this problem.

A defense of theism, then, should be a defense of a particular ‘big picture’ of the world that somehow involves or implies the existence of some particular God or gods. Similarly, a defense of atheism should be a defense of some ‘big picture’ that implies that there are no gods of any kind. These ‘big pictures’ are known as worldviews.

The method of worldview comparison proceeds by elaborating particular theistic and atheistic worldviews and examining their relative plausibility. In the first stage, we examine each worldview for internal coherence. That is, we ask, does this view make sense on its own terms? We are particularly concerned, at this stage, with whether a worldview contains internal contradictions. Many of the standard objections to theism allege such contradictions in traditional Western monotheistic worldviews. For instance, the so-called ‘logical problem of evil’ (Mackie 1955) alleges that it is contradictory to suppose that an all-powerful and all-good God exists and also that evil exists. Both of these beliefs are part of traditional Western monotheistic worldviews, so this objection is claiming that these worldviews have an internal contradiction.² Similarly, the Stone Paradox alleges that a believer in an all-powerful God is unable to give a consistent answer to the question, can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it?³

2. For an influential theistic response to this problem, see Plantinga (1977). 3. For an overview of this problem and the various solutions that have been proposed, see Pearce (2011).

A variety of solutions has been proposed for each of these problems. I agree with Graham that, while it is very hard to be sure that a worldview is internally consistent (someone might always find a new problem!), it is very likely that there are at least some theistic worldviews and at least some atheistic worldviews that are internally consistent. At least, no one has come close to proving that all theistic worldviews or all atheistic worldviews are inconsistent.

While consistency is an all-or-nothing matter (a worldview either contains contradictions or it doesn’t), coherence comes in degrees. It is difficult to give a precise definition of ‘coherence’, but intuitively we can say:

A coherent worldview is one whose different pieces fit together neatly.

A contradiction is the very worst kind of lack of coherence, where the pieces of the view actually conflict. However, worldviews also have internal tensions that fall short of contradiction.

A tension is a case where a person who holds a certain world-view is pulled in both directions on a certain question.

(Pay attention to the metaphor: it’s like the tension on the rope in a tug-of-war.) The problem of evil is probably best understood in this way within most traditional theistic worldviews: on the one hand, if God is all-good and all-powerful, one might not expect evil to exist. On the other hand, our life experience (and perhaps also the teaching of our religion) gives us very strong reason to believe that there is evil in the world. So the believer is pulled in both directions here.⁴ Good worldviews are entirely free from contradictions, but all worldviews have some tensions. The less tension, the better.

4. Arguments that use this kind of tension as a reason against theism are known as ‘evidential arguments from evil’. See Howard-Snyder (1996).

In the next stage of worldview comparison, we attempt to determine whether one worldview makes better sense of the world than another. There are two main criteria here: simplicity and explanatory comprehensiveness.

One worldview is simpler than another to the extent that it posits fewer things, or fewer kinds of things, or is in other respects more elegant and less convoluted.

One worldview has greater explanatory comprehensiveness than another to the extent that it explains more things and leaves fewer unexplained.

As Graham has emphasized (Oppy 2018a, §2.3), a worldview that posits extra things should not get credit for explaining those things. In a comparison between two worldviews, each one gets credit only for explaining things that both worldviews agree exist.

Ideally, if we were trying to assess whether it is more reasonable to be theists or atheists, we would compare the best theistic worldview with the best atheistic worldview. The debate format of this book means that we will be comparing the theistic worldview I think is best against the atheistic worldview Graham thinks is best. Other philosophers will not agree with us about which version of each view is best. (The reason for this is simple: philosophers never agree about anything.)

Graham, like most atheist philosophers today, holds that the best atheistic worldview is a version of naturalism.

Naturalism

Different philosophers give different definitions of ‘naturalism’, but the core idea in all of them is that the natural sciences (physics, biology, etc.) provide the correct methods for knowing about the world, so that philosophers need to take their cues from scientists. For most of our purposes here, this general characterization of naturalism will suffice. However, I will also sometimes refer to Graham’s own more precise definition: “Naturalism is the view that (a) there are none but natural entities with none but natural causal powers, and (b) well-established science is the touchstone for identifying causal entities and causal powers” (Oppy 2018a, 13).⁵ Graham does not define ‘natural’ here. We may say, at least as a rough approximation, that natural entities and natural causal powers are entities and causal powers of the sort studied by science.

5. Graham has given other definitions of ‘naturalism’ in other works (e.g. Oppy 2013a, 6; 2013b, 50), but I think this one best captures our disagreement.

Naturalism, as a component of an atheistic worldview, does the work it needs to do. It is not just a denial of (some particular version of) theism, but a broader view of the world that implies the non-existence of God/gods: God is not among the entities studied by science, so anyone who believes in God is going beyond science in the way naturalism says we shouldn’t.

My aim in this opening statement is to argu...