Copyright © 1974 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Purtill, Richard L. 1931-
Reason to believe.

Bibliography: p. 163

To PAUL MAGNANO

Priest     Philosopher       Friend

                      Acknowledgments

My thanks to the Bureau for Faculty Research at Western Washington State College for assistance in the typing of this book, to Mrs. Ann Drake and Mrs. Mary Sutterman who did the typing. Thanks also to the editors of the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company and to Professor Richard J. Mouw of Calvin College for their helpful comments and criticisms.

I. Objections

 6. The nature of faith
 7. The nature of the universe
 8. The nature of morality
 9. The nature of happiness
10. The world with God in it


III. Revelation

11. The credentials of revelation
12. God
13. The Son of God
14. Organized religion
15. Last things

This is a book about philosophy of religion. Since philosophy and religion are both words of many meanings, I will begin by trying to clarify the two terms.

Philosophy, as it is understood by most contemporary philosophers, has the following characteristics.

1. An effort is made to state the point under discussion as clearly and understandably as possible. Thus a concept may be defined or explained, various possible interpretations of a thesis or statement may be discussed, an argument may be laid out formally or informally, and the relation of its premises to its conclusion discussed. Philosophers characteristically ask, "What do you mean?"

2. An effort is made to examine the point under discussion critically. Thus assumptions may be brought out into the open and examined, possible objections to a thesis stated as fairly as possible, counterarguments may be invented or drawn from the arguments of opponents. Philosophers characteristically ask, "What are the objections?"

3. An effort is made to decide questions on the basis of arguments. Arguments for a thesis may be shown to be valid and their premises true. Counterarguments may be refuted or shown to be irrelevant. Definite conclusions may be reached or it may be concluded that there is no conclusive argument for or against a position. Philosophers characteristically ask, "How can you show that?"

The above concerns are characteristic of philosophical method. When applied to trivial or specialized subject matter philosophical method may not lead to philosophy in the full sense. Thus we must add to the above list something about subject matter.

4. The subject matter of philosophy can be roughly divided into Logic and Epistemology, which investigate the grounds of our knowledge; Ethics, Political Philosophy, and Aesthetics, which investigate questions of value; and Metaphysics, which investigates questions about Man, the Universe, and God. Typical philosophical questions are, "Do we know anything?" "Do we have free will?" "Does God exist?" "Is there an objective standard of morality?" Notice that dogmatic answers to such questions do not constitute philosophy. The answers must be supported by means of the philosophical method described above.

These four characteristics can be observed in the work of the great philosophers of the West, e.g., Plato, Aristotle, · Aquinas, Scotus, Hume, Berkeley, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Peirce, Moore, Wittgenstein, while it is not certain that they can be observed in any Eastern philosopher. There are also some philosophers in the Western tradition to whom these criteria do not clearly apply, e.g., Nietzsche, Schopenhauer. Thus the sort of philosophy we have described is sometimes called Analytic Philosophy rather than simply Philosophy. It should be understood, however, that Analytic Philosophy thus understood is a very broad term and is intended to apply to the whole history of Philosophy.

Religion can be defined so widely as to mean whatever a man is deeply concerned about, but it is more useful to restrict the term to its primary meaning of "belief in a divine or superhuman power or powers, to be obeyed and worshiped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe." As this definition suggests, religion can be monotheistic, holding belief in one God, or polytheistic, holding belief in more than one God. There is also the view called pantheism, which holds that in some sense everything is divine or shares in divinity. There are two main nonreligious views: agnosticism, which holds that we do not know that any religious view is true, and atheism, which holds that we know that every religious view is false. We can, of course, distinguish various kinds of pantheism and panentheism (God is the world; God includes the world), varieties of agnosticism (we can't know; we don't as a matter of fact know).

Most readers of this book will not regard polytheism in its various forms as a serious possibility, though some may be tempted by the view that there are two "Gods," a good God and an evil "God." This view, which is called dualism, is suggested by the existence of evil in the world, and will be discussed later in connection with the problem of evil. Some people nowadays are impressed by some form of pantheism, especially as it appears in one of the Eastern religions. We will discuss pantheism later in connection with ideas and arguments about the existence and nature of God.

Most people in the Western world, however, will have been influenced in their religious views by traditional Christian monotheistic religion. Some may agree with this religious tradition, others may disagree, others may partly agree and partly disagree. But most people brought up in this country or in countries of similar history and tradition will have formed their ideas about religion on the basis of the Christian religious tradition. For this reason, it seems appropriate to concentrate most of our attention on attacks on and defenses of monotheism as understood by Christians. Of course, Christians differ among themselves in their views about God, but it seems reasonable to begin with what might be called the traditional Christian idea of God as the Creator of the world, all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good, able to interfere miraculously with the course of nature, able to reward or punish human souls for deeds done before their death. Whether this traditional account must be abandoned or seriously modified in the face of criticism is one of the main questions which we will consider.

Traditionally, it has been thought that there were two ways of getting to know about God: the unaided efforts of our own minds, and some form of revelation to man from God. Philosophy is obviously relevant to efforts to obtain information about God by our own thinking, but it can also ask questions about the meaning and justification of statements that are claimed to be revelations from God. These two enterprises, the attempt to find answers to questions about God by thinking and argument, and the attempt to criticize rationally alleged revelations, are main concerns of the philosophy of religion.

It may be worthwhile to separate carefully philosophy of religion, so understood, from related enterprises. Theology accepts some body of revelation as a starting point and attempts to use reason to understand the revelation, draw out its consequences, and systematically relate its elements. Apologetics is the effort to defend some religious revelation against criticism, using arguments of various kinds, not only philosophical but historical and sometimes scientific. It is thus more restricted than philosophy of religion in its purposes, and less restricted in the kind of arguments it uses. Philosophy of religion differs from theology by not accepting revelation as a starting point, and from apologetics by "following the question wherever it leads" rather than defending some view against attacks.

Of course, a given philosopher of religion may come to the conclusion that a certain religious tradition is true and ought to be accepted. He may then use arguments very much like the theologian's or the apologist's to convince others of what he has become convinced. But this is because he has become convinced by a kind of inquiry that starts out without commitment to the truth of a given view. The philosopher of religion is thus, in theory at least, like a judge, who starts a case without having decided the question before him. The apologist, and to some extent the theologian, are more like the lawyer who pleads one side of the case.

In practice, of course, many philosophers of religion have made up their mind on one side or the other of the question. But in discussing the problems of philosophy of religion they will make every effort to present both sides as fully and fairly as possible. They will act as philosophers, not as advocates. They will seek to convince by presenting the evidence fairly, not to persuade by presenting only one side of the case. Someone who does not act in this way has ceased to function as a philosopher of religion and has become an apologist or an "anti-apologist," an advocate of the antireligious side.

Until fairly recently, many philosophers of religion felt they could present both sides fairly only by carefully concealing their own points of view, and their own conclusions about the questions at issue. This was always somewhat unrealistic, and with the emphasis on honesty and commitment in recent years it is no longer seen as desirable by many philosophers. They feel it is fairer and more honest to make clear on what side of a question the philosopher's own convictions lie, and then to present the arguments pro and con. If students were ever inclined docilely to accept their teachers' ideas without critical examination, they are certainly not so inclined now.

My own convictions on the matters discussed in this book are quite clear-cut. I am a professional philosopher, and consider myself to be working within the "analytic" tradition of modern philosophy, a tradition influenced by the Logical Positivists, by Wittgenstein, and by the "Oxford" or "Ordinary Language" school of Austin and Ryle. Like a number of such philosophers, a number that includes some of the most able representatives of the tradition, I am also a Christian. I have published a number of technical articles having to do with metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and logic, as well as two books on Logic. I find no contradiction between analytic philosophy and traditional Christianity, between logic and the love of God. It is the theme of this book that no such opposition exists, and that clear and logical thinking leads us not in the direction of unbelief, not in the direction of "liberal" reinterpretations of Christianity, but rather leads us back to traditional Christian answers to the problems that confront us. Logic alone cannot lead us all the way to Christian belief. But like Dante's Virgil, it is an incomparable guide so far as it goes. And like Dante, I believe that if we go this far with honesty and good will, help will be given to us to finish the journey.

As you will see from the Contents, my strategy in this book is to consider the negative side first and answer common objections to religious belief. In the second part of the book I consider the positive arguments in favor of Christian belief, which might not gain a hearing until some answer had been given to the objection. In the third part I turn to certain puzzles about the Christian revelation, both to answer objections and to give a fuller understanding which can give grounds for belief. To answer objections and to give grounds for belief will not necessarily lead to religious commitment, but it is an important first step toward such commitment.

One final point: Any vigorous argument that comes to definite conclusions is bound to seem one-sided at times, and any attempt to cover a number of important issues in a limited space is bound to simplify and to ignore some ambiguities and qualifications. Sometimes in trying to be clear and brief this book may sound dogmatic. Let us make it clear then that many sincere and intelligent people do have what seem to them to be good reasons for agnosticism or atheism. Not every objection to theism can be considered in a single book, and many people may feel that they have satisfactory replies to some of the arguments given in what follows. Thus a single book, a single class, a single teacher, may be only the start of a long dialogue, with oneself and with others. But reason, like every good thing, leads us ultimately to God. The better we reason the nearer we come to Truth.

    Part I

The idea that "science" has disproved traditional religious ideas can mean one of two things. It can mean that some specific scientific discovery or discoveries has disproved some specific traditional doctrine or doctrines. This claim has sometimes been made, but there are not many plausible candidates for such a discovery. Rightly understood, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and other key ideas of traditional religion, can be neither proved nor disproved by experiment or observation. The method of science is the statement of clear and exact hypotheses, often in mathematical form, the deduction of precise consequences from such hypotheses, and the testing of these consequences by controlled observation. This method is not applicable to philosophical questions. As Socrates pointed out long ago, questions that can be settled by calculation or observation are not those about which philosophical disputes arise.

To some, this may seem an evasion. They have in the back of their minds the ideal that all "real" or "meaningful" questions should be questions that can be settled by the methods of science or mathematics. This, however, is not a scientific theory or discovery but a philosophical theory. It is, in fact, the philosophical theory known as Logical Positivism. This theory seems plausible because of its confusion with a common-sense standard of meaningfulness. We ordinarily think that if a statement is meaningful then there must be some way of deciding whether it is true or false. Someone who claims to have made a meaningful statement but cannot tell us what would count for or against the truth of that statement, is rightly regarded with suspicion. What the Logical Positivist does is to take this common-sense position and modify it in an apparently minor way. He inserts the requirement that a meaningful statement must be provable or disprovable only in certain ways—roughly speaking, by the methods of empirical science or by the methods of mathematics. In fact, it turns out that when we try to make this more specific we find there is no way to rule out metaphysical hypotheses about the existence of God and the soul with out at the same time ruling out scientific hypotheses about things like subatomic particles, which cannot be directly observed.

A subatomic particle, for example, especially one such as neutrino which has no charge and no mass when at rest, cannot be directly observed. If we are to admit its existence, we can do so only because of its effect on other things. Of course our reasons for believing in the existence of neutrinos are quite different from our reasons for believing in the existence of God or the soul. But if we admit in direct arguments for the existence of neutrinos from the behavior of observable material objects, no amount of ingenuity has so far succeeded in logically ruling out the possibility of arguments for God or the soul on the basis of the behavior of observable objects.

But there is a more serious objection to Logical Positivism. Its own basic principle—that a meaningful statement must be provable or disprovable by the methods of science or mathematics—cannot itself be proved or disproved by the methods of science or mathematics. Thus the principle is meaningless by the standard it itself lays down, and is thus self-refuting.

The Positivists exerted great ingenuity in trying to justify their principle in some plausible way—as an analysis of what we ordinarily mean by "meaningful," as a necessary presupposition of science, as a recommendation rather than a statement, and so on. But all these attempts leave the door open for philosophy, and therefore for ethics and metaphysics, and therefore ultimately for religion. If we are to analyze meanings of words in ordinary use, some of such analyses may favor religious or metaphysical ideas (as an analysis of our ordinary language about mind, for example, arguably does). If we are to examine presuppositions, even science may have presuppositions that accord with religion—for example, a presupposition that the universe is intelligible and orderly. If the Positivist's principle is merely a recommendation as to how we should use language, believers may find reasons for rejecting the recommendation, or have recommendations of their own.

Thus Positivism, as an attempt to shortcut the discussion of philosophical and religious questions by dismissing certain statements as meaningless, is a failure. For modem philosophy it was an interesting and even a productive failure, but hardly any philosopher would not deny that it was a failure.

A somewhat subtler attack on the credibility of religion came from the later work of the influential modem philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. His earlier work had shared the assumptions of the Logical Positivists, and stimulated some of their thinking. But he became dissatisfied with positivism and began to look at ordinary language rather than at science in his attempt to solve philosophical problems. He arrived at the view that a great many philosophical problems arise from trying to use ordinary language in inappropriate ways, and that the business of philosophy is to "cure" the confusions that arise in this way. This view, sometimes called Therapeutic Positivism, is still held by some followers of Wittgenstein, though it has been extensively criticized and rejected by many contemporary philosophers.

Given Wittgenstein's objections to "inappropriate" uses of ordinary language, the objections to religious belief developed by some philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein could perhaps be guessed. When we apply words like "good" or "wise" or "powerful" to God, we apply terms we have learned in everyday contexts to a being completely beyond our experience. Wittgensteinians have suggested that when we use such words in this way they are not meaningful. Similarly, all our experience of persons has been of "embodied" persons, and our language about persons was learned from such cases. So Wittgensteinians have argued that the very concept of a disembodied person—a soul without a body—is meaningless, and that we can say nothing meaningful about such a being.

Wittgensteinians, partly because of Wittgenstein's ideas about the nature of philosophy, have not clearly stated their standard or criterion of meaningfulness. But insofar as we can reconstruct such a standard from their arguments, it seems to be open to objections, some of which are parallel to those which were fatal to the Positivist principle.

The Wittgensteinian criterion of meaningfulness rests on making a close connection between meaning and use. We can only understand a word or sentence by understanding its use in language, said Wittgenstein. From this it seems to follow that if we use words or sentences in ways very different from their ordinary use in language, we may not be making sense.

But when we try to state this more precisely, we find that it falls to pieces. What is the ordinary use, and how different must a use be from the ordinary use before it becomes nonsense? What if it is argued that the use of "good" as applied to God, or "happy" as applied to disembodied souls, are ordinary uses?

Furthermore, Wittgenstein's idea of meaningfulness, or at least that of some of his followers, seems to rest on an absurdly oversimplified idea of how we learn and use language. Norman Malcolm, for example, is generally recognized as one of Wittgenstein's foremost followers and interpreters (although it is only fair to say that other Wittgensteinians reject Malcolm's interpretations violently). In his book Dreaming (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1959), Malcolm argues that it is absurd to apply concepts such as fearing, judging, liking, etc., to dream experiences. For, argues Malcolm, if a concept is to be meaningful, it must be possible to apply it correctly; and if it is possible to apply it correctly it must be possible to apply it incorrectly. But correct and incorrect application of concepts can be learned only by being in a situation where someone can observe your use of a concept and correct you if you use it incorrectly. Since dreams, as usually conceived, are necessarily private experiences which no one can share with you, it follows that you can never be in a situation where someone is in a position to observe your use of a concept such as 'judging in a dream," "fearing in a dream," etc., and to correct your misuses. Thus such concepts are meaningless. Malcolm seems to conclude, in fact, that we can never really have such experiences as dreams are usually thought to be— completely private and completely insulated from the out side world. Dreams, for Malcolm, become essentially false memories; on awaking we seem to remember judging, fearing, walking, but these supposed memories correspond to no real experiences.

This bizarre conclusion, which directly contradicts what most people would say about their own experience of dreams, is evidently arrived at on the basis of a requirement that to learn a concept properly we must be able to apply it and to receive correction on our application of it at the time we are having the experience. We can easily think of experiences (orgasm, excruciating pain, complete paralysis) in which this requirement seems ridiculous, for one reason or another. But perhaps Malcolm can modify his requirement in this way: the experience must be such that someone else can observe us having the experience, and at some later time can correct our application of a concept to that experience. This amounts to a ruling out of essentially private experiences (like dreams) as "real" experiences. Since concepts cannot be meaningfully applied to such experiences, we cannot meaningfully talk about them.

But this requirement in either form is vastly implausible. It is not self-refuting, and in this it is unlike the Positivist's principle. But there seems no good reason to adopt such a stringent principle, and one that has such odd consequences. For example, most people have had dreams in which they are able to float or fly through the air. This is quite a recognizable sensation and any two people who have had this dream can compare notes and be quite sure that they have had the same experience in their dreams. But on Malcolm's theory this is impossible, since in the nature of the case the two cannot observe each other having the experience. Furthermore, since many of our emotions, daydreams, and thoughts seem to be unobservable by outside observers, either they also must be rejected as genuine experiences, or their apparent privacy must be denied. Many Wittgensteinians have taken the second course, leading them to a philosophical position akin to Behaviorism. But the denial that we have interior states and the denial that these states are in a certain sense inaccessible to others, are both so implausible that any philosophical theory that purports to prove such conclusions must be mistaken. It must rest on premises less certain than our certainty that we have private experiences.

Further difficulties in the Wittgensteinian theory of meaningfulness can be seen when we reflect on the way in which we actually acquire concepts. Consider, for example, the way we in fact learn to use any reasonably complex and abstract concept, for example "power," "prestige", or "privacy." Consider the way words are metaphorically extended from their original use, the way concepts learned in one context can be applied in a completely new context. With all this in mind, we can see that the picture that is apparently back of the Wittgensteinian theory is one that applies only to some very simple kinds of concept learning. Little Johnny and his father in the presence of a cat, with Father saying, "No, Johnny, that's a kitty, not a doggie," seems to be the paradigm they have in mind. But very little language learning is really like that.

If the Wittgensteinians say that observability in principle by a person other than the concept user is a sine qua non for meaningful use of concepts, there seems to be no reason to accept this requirement. The requirement is not self-evident, and so far as I can see the Wittgensteinians have no argument to support it.

There is also a difficulty like the difficulty about the Positivist's principle: How far is observability of experiences "in principle" to be stretched? If we stretch it far enough we let in experiences the Wittgensteinians wish to rule out; if we resist stretching it we may rule out experiences anyone would wish to admit.

We must conclude, then, that the Wittgensteinian theory of meaning runs into such serious difficulties that its use to criticize religious concepts need not worry us much.

The final criticism of religious belief from the point of view of contemporary philosophy that we shall consider is a modification of the Positivist's principle which has been urged by some "Oxford" or "Ordinary Language" philosophers. They argue that a belief that is consistent with any observable state of affairs is empty or meaningless. Any meaningful statement excludes something, rules out some state of affairs. If a thing is green it is not red, blue, or purple. If a thing is colored it is not colorless, and so on. A theory which is unfalsifiable, which cannot be disproved by any possible turn of events, can only be a tautology, on the order of "Either it is raining or it isn't raining," or else is an empty statement which says nothing. Suppose, for example, two people disagree about whether a garden, which shows some signs of being taken care of, is being tended by a gardener. They watch and see no gardener. The person who believes there is a gardener suggests that the gardener is invisible. They set trip wires and traps—no result. The believer suggests that the gardener is intangible, too. At some point the skeptical member of the pair can ask how an invisible, intangible, undetectable gardener is different from no gardener at all.

These philosophers argue that Christian beliefs, for example the belief that God is loving or good, are in a similar position. Doesn't the goodness of God mean that he will take care of us? But all kinds of disasters occur to us. Perhaps these are in some way means to a greater good.

But suppose things get worse and worse. Surely, it is argued, at some point we might as well say that God hates us, as that he loves us. Unless a belief can be disproved by some state of affairs it is meaningless. But, they argue, the Christian is committed to belief in God "no matter what." Thus, he will allow nothing as disproving his beliefs, and so his belief is empty or nonsensical.

A complete answer to this objection would require an analysis of religious belief, which we shall attempt later. A short answer which can be given at this point is that the objection rests on a confusion. The religious believer is told to expect suffering for himself and for others in this life. Keeping his faith despite this suffering is, he knows, part of his task. He expects vindication not in this life, but after death. The idea that the good man should expect to be plentifully rewarded with material goods, security, and settled happiness in this life was to some extent an Old Testament idea, although the book of Job is a powerful rebuke to this expectation. Some Christians, and some groups of Christians, seem to have had such an expectation, but it is a Christian heresy rather than a part of Christian belief. Certainly Christ's own words would lead his followers to expect trials and suffering.

Thus, if the argument is, "If Christianity is true, good Christians should be prosperous, secure and content, but they are not, so Christianity is false," the first premise would simply be denied by most Christians. But the argument we are speaking of is not so simple. Rather, the argument is: "You say that God is good and loves men. But apparently this 'love' is compatible with inflicting great sufferings on those he 'loves,' sufferings no good human being would inflict on those he loves. So apparently God's 'goodness' and 'love' mean nothing, or mean something entirely different from what goodness and love mean when we talk about human beings."

Again, there is a long answer, which we will consider in our chapter on the problem of evil, and a short answer which we can give now. The short answer is that, on the Christian view, great suffering in this life has a purpose—to create characters of a certain sort. What would be inconsistent with Christian beliefs in God's love and goodness, would be a failure of their expectations about life after death; to take an extreme example, the eternal punishment of all good men, and eternal reward for all bad men. A less dramatic example would simply be annihilation for the souls of all, good or bad, at death.

To those who make the objection we are discussing, this seems an evasion. "The proof or disproof of your ideas lies comfortably beyond immediate verification," they would say. But of course, the same may be said about any statement about the future. Unless there is some special difficulty about life after death the accusation of meaninglessness because of unfalsifiability must be abandoned. Some defenders of the objection we are considering then fall back on Positivist or Wittgensteinian objections to the concept of life after death. But as we have seen, these objections are open to serious and probably fatal counter-objections.

One further line of argument must be examined on this point. Recently some analytic philosophers have produced a new argument against the meaningfulness of survival after death, which can be stated as follows: "The idea of disembodied survival is meaningless, for there can be no standard by which we could identify a disembodied soul and say that it was the soul of a given person who had died. The only possible standards for identifying someone as the same person are bodily continuity and memory. But memory is not an independent criterion. It depends on bodily continuity. Since bodily continuity is ruled out by the very hypothesis in disembodied survival, no possible standard remains."

Let us expand this argument somewhat. It is of course true that our normal way of re-identifying someone after a period of time is bodily continuity. Even if he has lost his memory or changed his habits or his character, if the body we now encounter can be traced back to the body we previously encountered, we regard him as the same person. It is also true that supposed memories can be mistaken, and that our ordinary ways of deciding whether a memory is true or false include checking on whether the body of the person making a memory claim was in a place where and at a time when the experiences alleged to be remembered occurred. If you claim to remember meeting me at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, but your body was not in England when the coronation occurred, we would reject your claimed memory, no matter how detailed and circumstantial it was. Thus, memory is not an independent criterion, but is subordinate to bodily continuity.

Now this argument is a very curious one. From a few commonplace observations about the way we in fact re-identify persons in everyday life, the consequence is drawn that a belief held for most of the history of the world by most of the people in the world is not only false, but meaningless!

It can be noticed that the argument is in the form of a dilemma. As with most dilemma arguments we can deny that the alternatives posed are exhaustive ("going between the horns" of this dilemma), or we can accept one of the alternatives despite the apparent difficulties ("grasping one horn" of the dilemma). Or we can do both. Let us explore the first possibility.

The first thing to consider is that there may be some standard of personal identity other than bodily continuity and memory. An obvious choice is personality or character, in the wide sense. Consider some strongly marked personality, such as that of Dr. Samuel Johnson. His character undergoes important changes. At one time he is a young man, at another an old one. He is converted from an immoral life to a devout one; he changes some of his opinions and habits. But all of his actions are "characteristic" in a certain sense; they hang together. Many of his actions and sayings are "characteristic" in that while they are not predictable beforehand, once said or done they can be seen to fit into his character. Arguably, each person has this sort of individuality to those who know him or her well, and this is an important standard for judging personal identity.

There are several difficulties about this view. First, it might be argued that two people, say a father and a son, can have the same character or personality. As a claim about what has in fact ever happened this might be rejected, but it could be claimed that it only need be theoretically possible that this should occur. Then if a given disembodied spirit had the same character or personality as a recently deceased person, this would not prove that the spirit was the soul of the dead man.

At this point it is tempting to appeal to probability. If a disembodied spirit has the exact personality or character of a given dead man and remembers all that this man experienced, does this not put his identity with the dead man beyond reasonable doubt? The reply that would be made to this suggestion by the proponents of the sort of view we are considering would, I think, be something like this: "It makes no sense to apply the concept of probability unless we know what it would be like to have certainty. We can talk of a 10 percent probability of rain because we know what it would be like to have rain. But we cannot talk of probability where we have no idea of what it would be like to have certainty. And that is the case here: the point in question is whether there is any state of affairs that would constitute a disembodied spirit being the soul of a dead man. But if we have no idea of what would constitute a state of affairs, we cannot meaningfully talk about the probability of that state of affairs."

The challenge, then, is to describe a state of affairs that would constitute a disembodied person being the soul of a dead man, that would count as an instance of this in the same way many drops of water descending from the clouds count as an instance of rain. Can this challenge be answered? If so, then a disembodied spirit with the same character and memories as a dead man might make it probable that the disembodied spirit was the soul of the dead man in the same way that various pieces of evidence might make it probable that it would rain.

Note that the state of affairs that is to count as an instance need not be directly observable by us, and it may be a potential rather than an actual property of the thing. Otherwise we would have no standard for identity in the case of subatomic particles, magnetic fields, etc. But the state of affairs that is to count as an instance must, apparently, be coherently describable without reference to those things which are said to make it probable, just as rain is describable apart from the signs of rain.

To this modern dilemma a traditional Christian belief provides the answer. On the Christian view (as opposed to neo-Platonic misinterpretations of this view) a soul alone is not a whole person. A person consists of a soul and a body, and traditional Christianity offers the hope of bodily resurrection. Thus, a disembodied soul is only part of a person, and disembodied soul A can be distinguished from disembodied soul B by the fact that disembodied soul A has animated and will again animate body A and disembodied soul B has animated and will again animate body B. True, in the disembodied state this is a potentiality rather than an actuality, but any attempt to rule out potentialities as grounds for distinguishing entities would be as troublesome in microphysics as it would be in religion.

It might be argued that in theory two souls might at different times animate the same body. But on the Christian view this is a logical impossibility, not just a physical possibility. A given soul has certain capacities, which include knowing, willing, etc., but also animating a given body. The possibility that two souls might have the capacity to animate the same body can be ruled out on the same grounds that we rule out two independent omnipotent beings. For, if "omnipotent" being A and "omnipotent" being B desire different things, they cannot both have their way. Thus, at best, only one of them is omnipotent. Similarly, if soul A and soul B are both "the" soul of body C, they could will different things and the body could not do both. Thus, at most one of them is the soul of that body. For just as it seems reasonable to call a being omnipotent if and only if whenever it wills X to occur, X occurs, provided that X is logically possible, so it seems reasonable to call A the soul of body B, if and only if whenever A wills X to be done by B, B does X, provided that X is within the capacities of B.

This provides an answer to our problem, for it supplies an independent specification of a state of affairs which would count as a disembodied soul being the soul of a dead man. It is the soul of that man if and only if it at one time animated the body of that man and will at some future time animate that body again. Of course the body it animates again will not necessarily contain the same particles of matter as the body that soul animated at the time of death, but my body now does not contain the same particles of matter it contained ten years ago. And if a soul has the power to organize matter in such a way that new particles of matter can become part of that body over a period of time, there seems no reason to deny that it could conceivably do this instantaneously.

Does this lead to circularity? Is body B² the same body as B only because it is animated by the same soul? On the traditional view this is not the case. The resurrection body will be recognizably the same as the pre-death body in appearance, mannerisms, etc. According to the Christian story, this was the case with the resurrected body of Christ, and according to Christian belief it is Christ's resurrection that sets the pattern for all others. Thus, the identity of the resurrected body with the pre-death body will not merely be a matter of being animated by the same soul.

Of course our usual standard of bodily identity, namely continuity, will not be satisfied. But we can easily imagine technological developments that would cause us to abandon this standard in everyday life, for example the "transporter" depicted in the television series "Star Trek." If Captain Kirk steps into the transporter at one place, and disappears, and a body identical with his, with the same memories and character, appears at another place, there seems no good reason to deny that it is Captain Kirk who has appeared, even though the standard of bodily continuity has been violated. At any rate, the many thousands of people who enjoyed this program seemed to have no difficulty in accepting this situation.

We might be tempted to say that distance in time is no barrier to identifying a resurrected body as the same as a body that had died, and therefore in identifying a person with that body and the appropriate memories and character as the same person as the man who died. But the discontinuity, the long period of time during which there is nothing in the universe that can be identified with the individual in question, is troubling. The Christian picture in which the disembodied soul bridges the gap between the pre-death body and the resurrected body, avoids this difficulty.

Let us recall the reason for this discussion. It was argued that belief in God's love was meaningless since no conceivable experience could disprove it. But, it was replied, experience after death could disprove God's love. The meaningfulness of experience after death was then challenged, and the discussion just concluded would seem to take care of this challenge.

Now nothing that we have said so far gives any positive reason for believing in God or in an afterlife. All we have shown is that we must come to grips with these questions. We cannot dismiss them as meaningless. And this, after all, is what we would reasonably expect of questions which have been discussed so long and which have engaged the attention of so many first-rate minds.

                      2

The accusation of wishful thinking

A possible reply to the statement in the last chapter that scientific discoveries do not disprove religious doctrines might go as follows: "There is one science whose findings are diametrically opposed to religion. That science is Freudian psychology, which has shown us that the ideas of God and of an afterlife are merely projections of our desires and fears." It is this accusation we will consider in this chapter.

We begin by making a few points of a mainly logical nature which will enable us to deal with some popular versions of this argument. We will then tackle the alleged scientific argument.

The first point to make is that merely offering an alternative explanation does not disprove any theory or idea. There are, for example, literally dozens of alternative theories about just how and why and by whom President Kennedy was assassinated. Besides offering such an alternative theory it must be shown to be coherent and be shown to fit the known facts. Once this has been done we are faced with two possible explanations. We can reasonably reject the established theory in favor of a new theory only if the new theory can be shown to be superior on some grounds to the established theory. As applied to a theory of "projection," which claims to account for our ideas of God and an afterlife, this means that the projection theory must first establish its credentials as a possible explanation and, second, establish its superiority to the theory that the belief in God and in a future life is rationally grounded.

The second logical point is that in general the question of the origin of our beliefs is logically irrelevant to the truth or falsity of those beliefs. If, for example, Mark Lane comes up with a plausible theory about the Kennedy assassination, the theory must be proved or disproved on its own merits. Attempted psychoanalysis of Mr. Lane, or of the supporters of the Warren Commission report, neither proves nor disproves the proposed theory. The appeal to the alleged origins of our beliefs as a substitute for arguments pro or con about the beliefs themselves is called by logicians the genetic fallacy, and is condemned in most elementary logic books. It is a lazy man's argument; "Don't listen to him, he's a nut," has greeted a number of pioneers in ideas, and has served as an excuse for not examining novel claims or uncomfortable ideas.

The final logical point is that plausible explanations of ideas in terms of their psychological origins can almost always be given on both sides of an argument, and tend to cancel each other out.

The force of these last two arguments is that even if Freudian psychology were able to give a completely plausible explanation of our religious beliefs in psychological terms, this would not settle the question of the truth or falsity of those beliefs. Unless we begin with a prejudgment that a belief is false and a predisposition to accept any other possible explanation, psychological explanations of our beliefs carry little weight. The Jews of Germany in the 1930's, for example, feared persecution. It might well have been possible to explain this fear in terms of projected insecurities, etc. But unfortunately, the concentration camps were real. So unless we have already prejudged the issue of the truth of religious beliefs, we are not likely to turn to psychological explanations of such beliefs.

So far we have assumed that the psychological explanation is completely satisfactory. But if we consider the popular version of these explanations, we find immediate difficulties. One popular view, for example, is that belief in God and an afterlife is merely "wishful thinking." We believe in these things because we find it consoling or flattering to do so. This might be plausible if religion gave us a uniformly flattering or consoling picture of ourselves and our situation. But consider the view that traditional Christianity in fact gives us. Man in relation to God is not only infinitely feeble and dependent, but is also condemned by his own sinfulness. God's infinite power and his perfect justice leave us in no very flattering position. True, there is also infinite mercy, but to be an object of mercy is hardly comforting to the ego. Furthermore, if our idea of the afterlife is the traditional one, it not only presents us with a real chance of terrible and eternal failure, but it also makes us responsible for even the seemingly most trivial of our actions. Now if there is one thing we all hate, it is responsibility. A good deal of our lives is spent in trying to evade one sort of responsibility or another. We can be bribed or flattered into accepting responsibility by being given power or admiration; but complete responsibility for our actions to a power infinitely superior to ourselves, without compensating power or admiration, is completely repugnant to us. If there is anyone reading who does not believe that this is true of himself, he may be superhuman, but he is much more likely to be extraordinarily good at self-deception.

The secular view of mankind, on the other hand, leaves man himself as the highest known being, the pinnacle of the universe. He is responsible only to himself, which is to say that he is not responsible. I know that the existentialists, for example, talk about man's "responsibility"; but by excluding any higher authority to be responsible to or any real standards by which responsibility is to be judged, they effectively make the idea of responsibility an empty one. Some humanists feel a sense of responsibility to or for mankind as a whole, and thus give some real content to the idea of responsibility. But "mankind as a whole" cannot call us to account or judge us; being responsible to mankind seems to mean no more than trying to live up to our own ideas of what is good for mankind, of which we are the only real judge. Of course we can really be responsible to individuals or to groups small enough to take account of our actions. But all such responsibilities are limited and most can be opted out of.

Traditional Christianity has compensating advantages. A meaningless life, ending in annihilation, has its own terrors, and Christianity offers us both meaning and hope of survival. But two things should be noted. First, if Christianity is to be discounted as wishful thinking because it removes fear of meaninglessness and of annihilation, then secularism should be open to the same charge, since it removes the hated ideas of an absolute superior and of real responsibility. Second, if Christianity is a mere consoling dream, one would expect it to be more uniformly consoling. It should threaten no punishments, impose no burdens. True, some modern waterings down of Christianity have just this quality. But I am not defending them.

So much for the easy popular explanation of Christianity as mere consolatory dreaming. We must now face the difficulty at a somewhat deeper level. The new attack might go this way: "We project our fears and repressions as well as our desires. The elements in traditional Christianity which you point to can be explained in this way."

The first comment is that this seems to be an exercise in having it both ways. All the pleasant elements in Christianity are explained away as wish-fulfillment, all the un pleasant ones as fear-fulfillment. Obviously we could explain away any view that has pleasant and unpleasant aspects in this way. The method is just as applicable to secularism as to Christianity. But if it applies equally to any view, it favors no one view over another.

Also, we face a difficulty here. Is Freudian psychology to be exempt from this sort of criticism or not? If it is not, then Freud's own theories can be discounted as easily as any other theory as a projection of our hopes and fears. It is thus self-refuting, like the Positivists' theory. But if it claims exemption, on what grounds does it claim exemption, and how are we to be sure that other theories, even metaphysical or religious ones, cannot claim the same exemption?

As C. S. Lewis says in Pilgrim's Regress, *

Ask them if any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits; for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.

In reply to this we get, I think, the final reply on behalf of this sort of theory. It is the claim that the conclusions of Freudian psychology are scientifically established, and that they enable us to see in detail how certain inadequacies in ourselves lead to religious beliefs. We long, for example, for a return to the childhood state where a parent demanded certain behavior and rewarded and punished us, giving us a sense of "belonging" and security.

Let us make our reply in stages. First, the claim to "scientific" status for the Freudian theory may simply be a return to the confusions we discussed in the last chapter. Next, in any science we must distinguish those elements which are properly part of the scientific theory and those philosophical ideas which may be added to these. For example, we might mention Newton's ideas of absolute space and time, which appear interspersed with the principles and calculations in his Principia. Now such philosophical "extras" can be distinguished from the "working" part of the theory in that they can be removed without really affecting the rest of the theory. Scientists who held quite different views of space and time from Newton's, or no views at all, could agree with Newton's treatment of planetary motion, etc. Now, arguably the views about religion held by Freud and some of his disciples occupy this position. They are not a "working" part of Freudian psychology, and someone with quite different views on these matters, or no views at all, could agree with Freud on treating mental illness. Some of Freud's rivals, for example Jung, were a good deal more sympathetic to religion and equally successful in treating patients. (This is not to set up Jung as an opposing authority, but to point out that neither Freud nor Jung has any special authority in this area.)

As for specific theories of the mechanism behind specific religious beliefs, they often have a suspiciously ad hoc flavor. One suspects that if the beliefs were different the theory could easily "explain" the differences. While it is unrealistic to expect the sciences of man at present to meet the scientific standards of the physical or even of the biological sciences, a theory that can be twisted with equal facility to "explain" any state of affairs really explains none.

Again, some of the specific mechanisms described by Freudians seem equally apt as an explanation for a lack of religious belief. If the Oedipus complex is as basic as Freud thought it to be, any rejection of God can surely be explained on good Freudian grounds as the desire to reject and abolish the father and have undisputed possession of "mother" earth. ("Man," say the secularists, "has come of age.")

I anticipate two sorts of reply from the defenders of the view that we have been discussing. The first would be an attempt to explain my opposition to this view on psychological grounds. A short meditation on the quote from Lewis earlier in this chapter should dispose of this not uncommon ploy.

The second defense would be a charge of superficiality or lack of expertise against my treatment. And of course, if the questions we have been discussing are psychological ones, the qualified psychologist is the expert whose opinions must be respected. If, however, they are philosophical questions, as I have suggested, then the philosopher is the expert and they the amateurs. Now the question is, which sort of questions they are. And if either side can claim expertise here, it is philosophers, not psychologists, who have occasion to consider questions about the boundaries of science, the logical status of various theories, and similar matters. But we can waive any such claim of expertise here and simply ask that the arguments be considered.

* Eerdmans, 1958, pp. 71f.

3


 

The accusation of credulity

Christians believe in fairy-stories. They think that a child was born without a father, that a man rose from the dead, that all kinds of unheard of events occurred. This represents a pre-scientific, "magical" view of the universe. But science has learned that there are scientific laws which make such things impossible. Furthermore, there is no historical basis for believing in these events. And experience shows that miracles just don't happen.

This is the kind of accusation we will examine in this chapter, both in the popular form which is summarized above and in more sophisticated forms.

Let us begin with the accusation that Christianity represents a pre-scientific, "magical" view of the world. Of course Christianity is pre-scientific in the sense that it began before modern science began. So, for that matter, did mathematics, logic, history, and a great many other things. But that Christianity is opposed to a genuinely scientific view of the universe we will deny. As for the accusation that Christianity represents a "magical" view of the universe, "magical" here either just means un- or antiscientific, or else it has some connection with historical beliefs in magic. This is a confusion. Magic, as believed in for many centuries, was an attempt to exert power over nature by means of words, ceremonies, mixtures of materials, etc. It was essentially an attempt of a sort of technology, an attempt to master forces that would give men power, wealth, and secret knowledge. Insofar as it was an attempt to satisfy curiosity and give power over nature, it was the ancestor of science rather than of religion.

Christianity, on the other hand, believes that certain wonderful events have occurred, sometimes as an answer to prayer. But these events were the result of the will of the Person who created nature and its laws, and could not be predicted, demanded, or forced. The effects of these events may sometimes be beneficial to men but their purpose is to reveal something about God or to authenticate such a revelation. The whole attitude and atmosphere of magic and of Christianity are opposed. On the one hand you have the magician, with his secret knowledge, forcing certain things to occur by his spells or potions. On the other hand you have the Christian saint with his message for all men, praying that God's will be done, and some times finding a marvelous response to his prayer. The two things are poles apart.

But this is merely preliminary skirmishing. The real point of this accusation is that the miraculous events believed in by Christians are: (1) unscientific; (2) unhistorical; (3) contrary to experience.  We will consider these accusations in order.

Consider first the accusation that the Christian view of the world is unscientific or even antiscientific. This may, of course, just be the Positivist objection we considered in the first chapter. But if it is not, let us see what else it may be. We will begin by briefly sketching four views of the world, and what they have to say about science.

I. The Christian View. On this view the universe is the creation of a Person, whose mind has some resemblance to our own minds (because we are made "in his image and likeness"). The universe, therefore, is intelligible; it is like a lesson set for us to master. When we discover the laws of nature, we are discovering patterns which are objectively in the universe, put there by God. But since God has established these patterns, he has the power to suspend them; and these suspensions are what we call miracles.

Christian view, then, gives us a general confidence in the possibility of scientific discovery and the possibility of reaching a real understanding of the universe, but leaves open the possibility of a miracle. On this view our understanding of the universe is like our understanding of a book by an author whose intelligence we respect; the book may give us surprises but we expect it to "make sense." It is only fair to note that this is the view of the world under which science originated, and under which it developed. Scientists began looking for natural laws because they believed in a Lawgiver, and their initial success in finding laws confirmed them in this belief.

II. The Chance View. On this view the universe is the result of random changes in some underlying material. The basic stuff of the universe is simply and inexplicably "there" and there is no reason for any of the combinations, dissolutions, and recombinations that bring into existence suns, planets, mountains, men. On this view scientific laws are merely patterns we impose on the universe, and no event is more to be expected than any other. On this view sudden violations of established patterns are no more unexpected, and no more meaningful, than any other event. Our "understanding" of the universe is illusory. It is like reading a book produced by monkeys pounding on a typewriter; even if we can make some sort of sense of what we have read so far we have no reason to suppose that the next page will not be meaningless gibberish. It is hard to see how this view could be held by any scientist, or how science could develop if such a view were widely held. (A view rather like this seems to be held by some existentialists.)

III. The Deterministic View. On this view the universe is the result of the inexorable working out of laws somehow inherent in its very nature. The laws are objective, and in discovering them we are discovering something that is really there, but they are not the result of a mind. Rather minds, our own and any others that may exist, are the results of the working out of these laws. That minds will appear at a certain stage of the development of the universe is a consequence of the laws. Indeed, everything that happens is the result of the working out of these laws. Strange and seemingly inexplicable events may sometimes occur, but they cannot be suspensions of the laws, for the laws cannot be suspended. They are explicable, and can eventually be explained as the workings of laws we have not yet discovered. On this view, understanding the universe is like learning the structure of an organism which has grown in accordance with a pattern that is in its own nature and has no external cause. (Those who hold this view are often attracted to cyclical theories of the universe, because they seemingly avoid questions about beginnings and ends.)

IV. The Mixed View. On this view the universe is again the result of the inexorable working out of laws somehow inherent in its nature, but now these laws are statistical laws; they allow some scope for random variation. No more than on the deterministic view is there any conscious plan or purpose for the universe. Minds are a result, not a cause, of the universal process. But there is some "play," some variation, in the working out of the pattern; the possibility of minds is a consequence of the laws, but when minds appear, or perhaps whether or not they appear at all, depends on random factors. When strange and seemingly inexplicable events occur they may be rare chance variations, like those rare "perfect" hands at cards.

The random variations might, however, accumulate in such a way as to cause a radical change in the course of the universe, unlikely as this may be. On this view, understanding the universe is like watching a heavy cart rolling down a rocky, bumpy hill. It is almost certain to reach the bottom, but the exact path it takes will be decided by random collisions with bumps and rocks. Still it is just barely possible that the cart will hit a bump in such a way as to overturn and come to a halt, and never reach the bottom at all. On any Mixed view (of which there are many variations) the exact relation of the laws to the random variation is a very tricky point. A mixed view can in practice approach a Chance view unless the laws are said to rule out absolutely some eventualities.

A point worth noting about both the Deterministic view and the Mixed view is that their supporters are constantly slipping into the language of the Theistic view or the Chance view. They often talk as if a universe allegedly without plan or purpose can "try out" or even "plan" or "force" sequences of events. They may claim to be using such language metaphorically or out of habit, but the claim is not always plausible. Similarly, even supporters of the Deterministic view sometimes use language only appropriate to a Chance view, and talk of events "just happening" to fall out one way rather than another. Perhaps the Deterministic view and the Mixed view are not in the final analysis coherent views—there may be nothing at their basis but a confused mixture of elements of the Theistic view and the Chance view.

Sometimes supporters of a Deterministic or a Mixed view challenge the Theistic view on the grounds that the apparent order and understandability of the universe do not imply a personal mind in the universe. Why not, they say, a nonpersonal mind or reason, a something rather than a someone? But the notion of a nonpersonal mind would seem to be incoherent. Anything with awareness and choice would be a person, anything without awareness or choice could not be called a mind, nor would such a supposed "nonpersonal mind" offer any explanatory advantage over the idea of forces with inherent laws or patterns. (Of course someone who prefers to talk about a Divine Reason rather than a "personal God" is usually merely trying to reject anthropomorphic ideas of God.)

Both the Deterministic view and the Mixed view have often been held by scientists, and one or the other of them is often called the "scientific" view of the universe. When the Christian view is called "unscientific," I think what is often meant is that it contradicts the Deterministic view or the Mixed view. But the first thing to notice about these four views is that three of them, the Christian view, the Deterministic view, and the Mixed view, seem to permit and perhaps to favor the development of science. All three views have been held by scientists in the past and all three views are held by scientists now. Despite the claims of supporters of the Deterministic view and the Mixed view they are, on the face of it, no more "scientific" than the Christian view. The second thing to notice about these views is that any choice between them cannot be a scientific choice. There is no crucial experiment that will decide between them. No amount of observation or experiment will decide among their claims. They are theories about science, not scientific theories. They are, in fact, philosophical theories and any choice between them must be on the basis of philosophical arguments.

When we consider the four views on this level we find that there is an unsurmountable objection to the second, third, and fourth views. On all of these views, our own thought-processes are the result of nonrational causes which are completely beyond our control. On the Chance view these causes are random combinations and recombinations of the basic stuff of the universe. On the Deterministic view the causes are the workings of laws that existed and were at work long before any minds existed. On the Mixed view our minds are the result of a combination of law and chance. But if our thinking is caused by nonrational forces of any kind, there is no reason to suppose that our thinking is valid. It might happen to be valid, but we would have no way of knowing that it was. As C. S. Lewis points out,

It is clear that everything we know, beyond our own immediate sensations is inferred from those sensations.... All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things stand outside our own minds really "must" be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them—if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work—then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.¹

The point about the Chance view, the Deterministic view, and the Mixed view is not that they make it impossible for our reasoning to be valid, to be a true insight into realities beyond our minds. But they give us no reason at all to suppose that our reasoning is valid. Only conscious minds can have plans or purposes, so there is no plan or purpose that will ensure that our reasoning will attain truth. Forces that are without mind might happen to give us powers of valid reasoning, but they equally might happen to give us defective or invalid reasoning powers. And there is no reason to suppose that they would give us powers of valid reasoning rather than defective powers. Thus the views we have been considering are self-defeating in the sense that even if they were true we could never have any good reason to think that they were true.²

If I pose a mathematical problem and throw some dice, the dice may happen to fall into a pattern which gives the answer to my problem. But there is no reason to suppose that they will. Now on the Chance view, all our thoughts are the result of processes as random as a throw of dice. On the Determinist view, all our thoughts result from processes that have as little relation to our minds as the growth of a tree. On the Mixed view our minds are the result of a combination of chance and nonnatural forces.

Thus the result of these theories is to destroy our confidence in the validity of any reasoning—including the reasoning that may have led us to adopt these theories! Thus they are self-destructive, rather like the man who saws off the branch he is sitting on. The only cold comfort they hold out is that some of our thought might happen to agree with reality.

It is sometimes argued that on a Mixed view minds capable of grasping truth might evolve by a process of natural selection. But natural selection works by a process whereby random variations that favor survival in a given situation enable the survivor to pass on the favorable characteristic to descendants. Even if this accounted for some practical cunning in the human species, it would be hard to show that the ability to reason theoretically has any direct survival value, especially at an early stage in the history of the human species. Again, natural selection selects out not factors that are beneficial in some general fashion, but factors that are useful in surviving in a given situation, and may be harmful if the situation changes. In many situations where human survival was precarious and threatened, a capacity for accepting comforting falsehoods about the universe might be more pro-survival than a capacity to search out the truth. It is only by confusedly thinking of "nature" or "the universe" as if it had conscious plans or purposes that we can make plausible an evolutionary account of man's ability to "know the nature of things."

Consider the problem in this way. Mindless forces may produce an understanding of the nature of the universe in us, or they may produce a misunderstanding of the nature of the universe in us, just as a computer programmer may program a computer to solve problems correctly or to solve them incorrectly. Since the programmer has a mind, we presume that he would have reasons to program the computer correctly. But mindless forces cannot have reasons. If we are "programmed" by the nature of the universe, we have no more reason to suppose that we are programmed correctly than to suppose that we are programmed incorrectly. Thus, no matter how we try to evade the conclusion, the Deterministic view and the Mixed view are bound to destroy our confidence in the validity of our reasoning. But if no reasoning is valid, there cannot be valid reasons for accepting the Deterministic view or the Mixed view, or any other view. Thus, every view except the Christian view destroys our confidence in reason, and therefore in science. Therefore the Christian view is the only view that is not antiscientific.

Of course we have not considered all possible views. If anyone, however, wishes to put forward a view other than those examined, he would have to specify that view and show how it offers explanatory advantages of the three views considered, and how the new view avoids the disadvantages of the others. But only some view that, like the Christian view, attributes our reasoning powers to a Mind which is the cause and not the result of nature, can escape the objections we made to the other views. A pantheistic conception of an "immanent" God, a "World-Soul," is open to the same objections that were fatal to the other views. For such an immanent God would be the result of irrational forces just as much as human minds are on the Deterministic view. We might try to imagine a God independent of Nature, neither the cause of Nature nor caused by Nature. But how could such a God serve any explanatory purpose? If nature is supposed to be totally independent of such a God, how does this guarantee the validity of our thinking? And if our thinking is not valid how could we know of the existence of such a God? There really seems no alternative to some solution along the lines of the Christian view: either we admit a God who is the Lord of Nature, or Nature is our lord. And if Nature is our lord we could never know this—or anything else—to be true.

The objection that Christianity is unhistorical can be dealt with more briefly, for it really depends on the previous objection. If miracles are impossible, then any historical account that tells of the occurrence of miracles, as the New Testament plainly does, must be rejected as unhistorical. If miracles are tremendously improbable, then we must reject any account of them unless we get evidence of a kind which, in the nature of the case, history almost never gives us. But if the conclusions we have just reached in our discussion of the "unscientific" objections are correct, then only a view in which God is the Lord of Nature can guarantee the truth of any reasoning, including historical reasoning. And if God is the Lord of Nature, then miracles are not impossible, and unless we have some argument to show that they are improbable, then we cannot assume that they are. This undercuts most of the "historical" objections to miracles, for if we have no metaphysical objections to miracles, then we will have to examine the historical evidence for miracles on its merits. And if we do this we may find, as many reasonable and hardheaded men have found, that miracle is the best explanation for certain recorded events.

There may, of course, be historical objections to certain accounts of miracles—for example, one account may seem to be a mere imitation of another, or other historical evidence may render that particular supposed miracle improbable, and so on. But the general objection to miracles is not based on anything peculiar to history as such, but on philosophical grounds.

The final objection to miracles is the supposed objection from experience. Most versions of this objection trace back more or less indirectly to a famous objection by David Hume, which goes as follows:

Obviously, we must interpret Hume's objection in such a way that it is not an objection to any unique event. After all, up to a certain date, there was "uniform experience" against a man setting foot on the moon. It must, therefore, be a certain class or kind of events we are eliminating. But what class? Miracles? But this begs the whole question. As an "argument" against the allegation that miracles occur, we have the assertion that there is uniform experience against miracles—in other words, the unsupported assertion that miracles don't happen!

The only respectable way of interpreting what Hume says here, I think, is to take him as arguing that past experience gives us some kind of assurance that laws of nature cannot be suspended. (If it merely alleges that they have never been suspended, it is just "miracles don't happen" in a new guise.) We interpret Hume, then, as saying that experience proves that natural laws are "unsuspendable." But how could experience show any such thing?

So we conclude that the "unhistorical" and "contrary to experience" objections depend essentially on the "unscientific" accusation, and that far from being antiscientific, the Christian view is the only one that gives us any reason to trust any kind of reasoning, including scientific reasoning. Thus it would seem that the whole line of objections sketched at the beginning of this chapter fails.

¹ Miracles, revised ed., Fontana Books, 1960, p. 18.

² For a very good development of this line of argument as applied to a Deterministic view see James N. Jordan, "Determinism's Dilemma," Review of Metaphysics, XXIII, No. 1, September, 1967.

³ Enquiries, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford U.P., 1955, pp. 114f.

             4


 

The accusation of immorality

Since we have here an essentially moral problem, let us consider the main theories about morality, and their bearings on this problem. For our purposes we can simplify these theories down to three main alternatives:

I. The Relativist Theory. On this theory, moral judgments are completely relative to the individual. This does not just mean that it may be wrong for you, but not for me, to sell my car, spank my children, or make love to my wife; that would be common ground for many moral theories. Complete relativism means that moral judgments are no more than individual opinions, with no validity for anyone but oneself. This theory grants that groups or tribes or nations may share opinions, and may attempt to enforce them by laws, by group pressures, and so on. But it denies any objective validity to these opinions. Murder is wrong for me if I think it is, right for you if you think it is. On one interpretation of them, Hamlet's words express this theory exactly: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Some exponents of this theory seem to feel that a man can do evil, by violating his own standards. But the majority of the supporters of this theory seem to feel that no one does wrong in his own eyes. When we do a thing we believe it to be right, otherwise we would not do it. On either interpretation this theory renders moral indignation impossible; for on the one interpretation, no one (not Hitler, not Stalin, not Judas) ever does anything wrong, and on the other interpretation anyone who has done wrong has done so by violating his moral code, which may be very different from yours. Thus we can never condemn anyone else as evil.

But of course, if we can condemn no one, we cannot condemn God. The relativistic view is incompatible with any moral objection to the universe, or to anything else for that matter. Thus the man who feels moral indignation at the evil in the world and rejects Christianity on that account, is either not a relativist, or he is a very inconsistent one. Of course the relativist may claim to be merely pointing out inconsistencies in the Christian position, but we then move to another realm of discourse; the objection becomes a logical one, not a moral one. It is an accusation of illogicality, not of immorality.

II. The Theistic View. On this view, morality somehow has its origin in God. On one simple but not very satisfactory version of this view, what is right is simply what God commands, whatever that may be. God has enjoined love and forbidden hatred, but he might just as well have commanded hatred and forbidden love. No problem of evil can arise on this view, since whatever God wills to happen is good, and thus all the apparent evils about us are good, since nothing happens without God's will.

This view has been held by some Christians, but it is not the Christian view. On the Christian view morality depends on the nature of God and on the nature of the things he has made. It is part of the Christian message that God is Love, and a Being who commanded hatred and forbade love could not be God. If it is a moral truth, grounded in the nature of a God who is love, that to allow or inflict useless suffering on innocent people is always wrong, and if it is a physical fact that slowly burning the body of a person causes suffering, then allowing or causing an innocent person to be slowly burned for no good reason would always be wrong. This could be changed by changing physical facts (e.g., God could make slow burning delightful or beneficial). If the moral truths are changeable (e.g., if they rest on a commanded duty, such as circumcision, which could be made not a duty by a changed command) then the consequential wrongness could be changed. But unless one or the other were changed, the wrongness could not be taken away.

Now on this view there can be a problem of evil, since some things that happen in the world seem to be contrary to what a loving God would permit. But the problem must somehow be soluble, since the events we condemn and the moral law by which we condemn them are both traceable to the same Source. If God is what Christianity says he is, he is the God of Love and Justice, and also the God who permits apparently useless suffering. It must be, then, that there is a reconciliation. (Perhaps the suffering is not useless, for example.) Thus evil is a problem for Christianity, but not an objection to it. The view that admits a problem holds out the hope of a solution.

III. The Absolute Moral Law View. On this view, there is a moral law which is objective and does not depend on individual opinions, but which is also independent of God. If causing useless suffering is wrong, it would be wrong whether God existed or not. Supporters of this view often think of the Moral Law as impersonal and inexorable, rather as we sometimes think of Nature. Disagreeing with the Moral Law is as useless and as silly as disagreeing with any fact of nature—entropy or atomic energy, for example. The Moral Law exists whether we like it or not.

On one interpretation of this view God does not exist. The Moral Law itself is the Ultimate Reality or Highest Thing. What must be obeyed is an It, not a He. Obviously no problem of evil can exist on this view, for you can only blame persons, not facts. If a man goes unprotected into space, he dies. If a man disobeys the Moral Law, he suffers for it, and so do others. It is equally silly to blame the Moral Law as to blame Space.

The second interpretation says that God coexists with the Absolute Moral Law without either depending on the other in any way. One way of making sense of this is to think of the Moral Law as something God transcends. He is not limited by the Moral Law just as he is not (on the view of many philosophers and theologians) limited by space or time. On this view, God is "beyond Good and Evil." But it is hard to see how there could be any problem of evil on this view. For, if God transcends Good and Evil, it is as useless to judge him by moral standards as to judge him by spatial standards.

The final interpretation of the Absolute Moral Law view says that a God exists, but is subject to the Moral Law. There is a Creator of the universe, but this Creator may be imperfect in some ways. His imperfections may include moral imperfections, as measured by the standards of the Absolute Moral Law. On this view the existence of evil is incompatible, not with the existence of God but with the moral perfection of God. We could, of course, quibble about whether a morally imperfect being would deserve the name of God. So long as we are clear about what we mean we can say whichever we like. On the one meaning the question will be, "Given the evil in the world, is God good?" while on the other meaning the question will be, "Given the evil in the world, is the Creator of the universe God?"

Now that we have surveyed the main possibilities, we can see that only the fourth and seventh—the second interpretation of the Theistic view and the last interpretation of the Absolute Moral Law view—give us a problem of evil. If there is no real standard of Good and Evil, or if the standard is whatever God arbitrarily says it is, or if the Highest Reality is impersonal, or if God is "above" good and evil, there is no problem. I will discuss some of these possibilities in due course. But for the remainder of this chapter I am going to go on the assumption that there is a problem of good and evil, and I will try to do what I can to solve it. In a way, it does not matter at this stage which of the two alternatives that give us a problem we prefer. In either case we have an apparent incongruity between the moral law as we understand it, and what God does or permits.

Let us begin by clearing up some misunderstandings. What evils or apparent evils are we to consider as counting, or apparently counting, against the goodness of God?¹ Almost anyone who admits the existence of an objective moral law at all, thinks that one of the principles of that moral law is that one person cannot be blamed for what another is responsible for. And a person cannot be responsible unless he has a genuinely free choice. Thus, if some evil consists of genuinely free choices by persons who are responsible for these choices, God cannot be responsible for these choices. Of course, someone may wish to hold that no human actions are genuinely free and that no human being is ever responsible for his choices. This is the view called hard determinism, and if it is true then we are merely puppets in God's hands. But if this view is true, then human beings are not moral agents, and moral evil, as usually conceived of, does not exist. No man lies, as we ordinarily conceive of lying, he merely utters whatever God makes him utter. No man is cruel, as we ordinarily conceive of cruelty, he merely acts in certain ways in which he is made to act by God. Thus, if hard determinism is true, God is the only moral agent. But, although some Christians have been hard determinists, hard determinism is not the Christian view. It is, in fact, incompatible with Christianity, for Christianity rests on human responsibility. Its basic call is to repentance, its basic doctrine is the redemption of sinful mankind. If only God is a moral agent, then these doctrines are nonsensical.

Of course, Christianity is not incompatible with the idea that many persons are less responsible than they appear. Christ forbade his followers to judge others, lest they be judged. He specifically said that many of the first would be last and the last first, that whores and traitors would enter the kingdom ahead of respectable religious teachers and officials. But unless the normal situation is that most of us are responsible for most of our actions, Christianity makes no sense at all. It promises forgiveness to sinners, and unless we are moral agents we cannot be sinners, and forgiveness is a charade.

Thus, for all moral evil, that is, for all choices made by persons other than God, the Christian response is that these persons are genuinely free moral agents and the responsibility for their actions rests with them. Where this is not true, e.g., in the case of a falsehood or a killing by an insane person, there is no moral evil.

However, it might be argued that God is morally responsible for choosing to create free moral agents who he knew would make evil choices. He might, as an alternative, have (1) created no free agents, or (2) created only those free agents whom he foresaw would make no evil moral choices. Let us grant that God could have done the first of these. To show that he was morally blameworthy for creating free agents, it would be necessary to prove that a state of affairs with free moral agents, some or all of whom make some evil choices, is not morally preferable to a state of affairs with no free agents. I do not see how this could be proved, and I have never seen any attempt to prove it, though I have sometimes seen it assumed. It seems to me that very few would choose, either for themselves or for their children, a state of being a robot rather than a free moral agent, even a free moral agent who sometimes sinned.

The second possibility may not in fact make sense. It seems to envision a sort of precensorship, as if God could review "possible people" and not create any who would commit any sin whatever. This may be a totally inadequate notion of God's mode of choice. But, supposing that it does make sense, it seems to contain a hidden assumption. This assumption is that a world of persons who never make bad moral choices is preferable to a world in which bad moral choices are made, but become means of moral and spiritual growth. Or, putting it another way, the assumption is that a good God would prefer sinless people to saints who were at some times sinners. It seems to me that we have no positive evidence for this assumption at all, and the Christian who reflects on Christ's choice of apostles and on the great saints through the ages, may find some evidence in his religious beliefs for the contrary of this assumption.

In fact, I suspect that if we are to make any imaginative effort to understand God's choice of what persons to create, we would do better to imagine him creating Peter or Augustine or Thomas or Gilbert or Jack, preferring in some sense that they should never sin, but loving them as persons and striving mightily to turn even their evil choices to eventual good.

I conclude, then, that the effort to make God responsible in any way for moral evil cannot succeed, and that if any moral charge is to succeed as against the goodness or the existence of God, it must be the charge that he permits or even causes unnecessary "physical evil," that is, unnecessary pain or suffering.

I take it that most people would be willing to grant that there is necessary suffering, suffering that could not be eliminated without eliminating a good thing of which that suffering is a necessary condition. Let us begin with some trivial but relatively uncontroversial cases.

Consider, for example, the mountain climber, or the football player. The climber could reach the top of the peak by helicopter with no pain at all. The football player could reach the goal unhurt and unthreatened, by bribing all the opposing players to let him slip by them. But neither would find reaching their goal in this way worth doing. Unless they had genuinely overcome the obstacles themselves, in the face of pain and danger, they would feel no sense of accomplishment. Since these objectives could be obtained without pain, however, they are perhaps not a good example. A game can be defined as an activity whose end result has no intrinsic value, and life is not a game.

A better image is the efforts, pains, and frustrations necessary to master any art or science or discipline. To be able to play like Heifetz, or philosophize like Wittgenstein, is not really separable from the long years of practice and playing, or the long years of wrestling with philosophical problems. But even if the end result could be achieved without pain, it would thereby be less valuable.

But the best examples come from the area of personal relations. Anyone who has been sincerely in love has felt the impulse to do something for his beloved that costs him pain or effort. The greater the love the greater the willingness, even the desire, to suffer and endure for the beloved. The love of a young man for his betrothed may make him happy to give up smoking to buy her an engagement ring. Beyond and above this easy sacrifice are the heights of self-sacrifice and martyrdom.

Now the whole Christian answer to the problem of apparently useless suffering is that no suffering is really useless. Our examples have shown us that suffering can be necessary to a greater good. The Christian belief is that the point of our whole existence, immeasurably more important than climbing a particular mountain, mastering a certain discipline, marrying a certain woman, is to become a person of a certain sort. To become a person of this sort sacrificial love, love that genuinely costs us something, is necessary. And pain is a necessary condition of such love. All the suffering in this world is bound up with this aim and this necessity. That is the Christian answer to the problem of pain. Christianity has no other answer. We can explore this answer in all its dimensions, we can understand it more and more deeply, but we cannot go beside it or behind it or beyond it. This is the Christian answer.

The immediate reply to this Christian answer to the problem of pain is to argue that it is immensely implausible as an answer to the question of why this, or this, or this particular piece of suffering was permitted. And this is quite true. Christianity does not have, and does not profess to have, an answer to each particular question as to why each particular piece of suffering was permitted. It has a general answer, but not many particular answers. In many cases where the suffering is our own, we can see, or think we can see, the good results. We can sometimes see results in other cases. But if we are curious about such results in others, our only answer is likely to be, "What is that to you? Follow me!" (John 21:20).

It might also be claimed that the general answer is implausible or improbable. This may mean one of two things. It may mean that there is some a priori unlikelihood in the solution. But I do not know how this could be established. Or it may mean that it is implausible in case 1, in case 2, in case 3, etc., and so that finally it is implausible in the majority of cases.

Let us examine this second idea. Suppose that I claim that most Americans marry for money. You may disprove this by showing that in case 1, John and Mary married for love; in case 2, that Sam and Sally married because Sally was pregnant; that in case 3 Dick and Betty hadn't a penny between them when they married, and so on. You give, in other words, an alternative explanation in each case. But in the case of apparently useless suffering nothing positive is put on the other side of the question.

The situation is rather like someone who challenged the claim that most Americans marry for love by professing himself unsatisfied with that explanation in a number of cases, but without any alternative explanation. The fact that in the nature of the case he could have very little information in most cases, and the fact that he proposed no alternative explanation, would both be against him. Yet this is very like the case of pain. I know little enough about the effects of suffering on my own character, and very little of its effects on anyone else. If I accept the Christian explanation, it is not because of an accumulation of evidence from particular cases, but because a general view of the universe, of which this explanation is a part, makes sense to me. I suspect that the critic's charge of implausibility means no more than that a different theory makes sense to him. This can be debated, but it must be debated on the level of the whole theory in question.

One final point: some have seen in dualism, the theory of a good "God" and a bad "God" in eternal struggle, a solution to the problem of evil. As we saw on page 28, there cannot be two omnipotent beings, so neither "God" would be all powerful; this removes one element of the problem of evil since the good "God" might not be able to prevent evil. But what would we mean by calling one "God" good and the other evil? There would have to be some more ultimate source of morality to justify this judgment, as there would have to be some more ultimate source of existence to account for the existence of the two limited "Gods." So dualism, far from solving the problems of evil, forces us back to the same problems and solutions we have discussed.

In the second part of this book I will try to say some thing more positive about the Christian view of suffering and its uses. But for the moment I conclude that the Christian acceptance of suffering does not justify the charge of immorality, and that the problem of evil is not fatal to the idea of God's love.

¹ On any view that, like Christianity, holds that the soul is immortal, death will not be an evil in itself, though suffering caused by death may be.

         5


 

The "empirical bogey"

Christianity arose when the universe seemed a smaller and cozier affair. Now that science has shown us the true age and size of the universe, we can no longer accept the idea of a God who is personally concerned with our conduct or our consciences. If any creative power is the cause of the physical universe it has no interest in us. The idea of God explains nothing and changes nothing. For modern man, God is dead.

Now this is hardly worthy of the name of argument. From "The universe is very large and old" it does not follow that "God takes no interest in man" unless we add further premises. And as we will see, these further premises have no plausibility at all. But the emotional force of the size and age of the universe, once it is imaginatively grasped, is very great. To many people the universe, as science shows it to us, does not feel like the sort of universe which would be made by a personal god. And since many people think mainly with their emotions, there seems to them to be an argument. C. S. Lewis once called this "argument" the "empirical bogey."

If we analyze the image or idea that seems to bridge the gap between the age and size of the universe and God's supposed indifference to man, I think that we find something like the following: In our own experience the larger a thing is or the longer it lasts, the more difficult we find attending to the details or parts of that thing. The bigger a thing is the more we have to deal with it in a general, abstract, impersonal sort of way. This is because we cannot perceive all of it at once, and when we are attending to one part we cannot attend to other parts. By the time we get to Z we have forgotten A. We find we cannot see the forest for the trees, and so we are forced to forget the individual trees and think of the forest in general terms.

This experience of our own makes us tend to think of God as a sort of harried executive, with many problems. Naturally, with a universe as big and old as ours, many things must be attended to, and a small, obscure planet like ours, much less any individual on it, will be lost in the shuffle.

However, not only the Christian idea of God but also any even moderately sophisticated philosophical idea of God, shows how silly is this image of God as the harried Chief Executive of the universe. Even if God were a very great but still limited being, a closer look at our own experience should show us that a creator can grasp his work as a whole and in all its details, even when the work is as rich and complex as, for example, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. An executive, after all, is trying to deal with beings he has not made and which he does not completely control. But if God is the Creator of the universe, he is much more like the author than the executive.

But, of course, both religion and philosophy give us the idea of God as a Being without any limitations at all. A dull man can attend to only one thing at a time—he cannot both drive and talk, for example. A somewhat more intelligent man can deal with more than one thing at a time, and so on. Every man has limitations, and perhaps none of us can give completely adequate attention to even two things. Similarly, one man forgets easily, another has a better memory, and so on. But if God exists at all, he has no limitations at all. As we shall see, God may transcend time altogether. But even if we find this idea too puzzling, any adequate idea of God will be an idea of a being who can simultaneously give his full attention to any number of things, who never forgets or neglects anything. Any being with less than these capabilities would not be God.

Now, it might be granted that God is aware of our doings and thoughts and desires, but, to put the objection crudely, why should he be interested in us? Aren't we pretty small fish in a very vast sea? Doesn't he, so to speak, have more important things to worry about? The assumption here is somewhat more subtle. Instead of foisting human limitations onto God, we are attributing to him a human scale of values. We think of God as perhaps interested in galaxies but not in planets, or, if he is interested in human beings at all, as being interested in Hitler or Churchill but not in the ordinary soldier or peasant.

Philosophy can take us a certain way here. It can point out that importance is not proportional to size. A six-foot man, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, is not more important than a five-foot man. But if there were a logical relation between size and importance, even a small difference in size should make a small difference in importance. Furthermore, we can see that the qualities we tend to think important, such as being the political leader of a large country, may not be the qualities God thinks important. So far philosophy can take us.

But Christianity goes further. It makes the astonishing claim that God cares intensely for each one of us, that he loves us and wants our love. If this is true then it does no good to say that we are "not interested in God"; he is interested in us, and that is what counts. Christianity leaves no ground at all for the comfortable idea that God doesn't care for us and that we needn't care for him, and that we can go our separate ways like polite strangers. If Christianity is true, then there is no question of going our separate way. Our separate way to where? All roads lead either toward God or away from him. We exist only because God has created us and sustains us in existence. He has a purpose for us, a purpose we can reject, since we are free. But to ignore the whole question is the height of folly.

Of course, if Christianity is false, it doesn't matter how relevant it would be if true. But if someone says, "It doesn't matter whether God exists or not," then he or she either is not understanding the Christian idea of God, or else is incredibly confused. (In many cases both are true.)

What some of these people seem to mean is that even if God existed we would have to make our own moral decisions. In a way, of course, this is true. If we are genuinely free we are free to choose for or against morality or conscience. But the existence of God obviously makes a great difference in what morality is.  Many of the people we are talking about hold the view we called the Relativist view, in one of its two forms. But if God exists, not all ideas of right and wrong are relative. God's ideas would occupy a privileged position to say the least.

Another thing that might be meant by saying God's existence would change nothing might be this: "If we hold what I called the Absolute Moral Law position, then the moral law ought to be obeyed whether or not God exists, for God is either independent of or subordinate to the moral law. As we will see, there is an element of misunderstood truth in this position.

But I think that very often the idea that God's existence "wouldn't matter" rests on just the confusion we have been discussing. What is meant is that even if some Creator or Ruler of the universe did exist, he would be far too busy to bother with us. A good deal of the modern talk about the "irrelevance" of God seems to me to rest on just this basis. And we have seen how inadequate this basis is.

The objection that the idea of God explains nothing is more complex, and we will not be able to deal with it fully until our discussion of God in a later chapter. But some preliminary things can be said now. This objection often rests on a certain pseudo-historical idea of the relation between science and religion. According to this idea, man starts out by attributing all striking phenomena to a God or gods—the lightning is the spear of a god, the thunder the voice of a god, and so on. As science discovers the cause of these phenomena, man has to abandon the idea that God or gods are responsible for these phenomena. He then uses God as an explanation for other events he does not understand—the origin of species of animals, for example. But science again provides a "natural" explanation of this, and religion retreats. According to this view, God is only brought in to fill gaps in our scientific knowledge: he is "the God of the gaps." But the few gaps that remain in our scientific knowledge, such as the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, are now being closed, leaving no place for God.

This story is, in fact, historically false (as, by the way, is the idea that educated men at the time of Christ did not believe that the universe was tremendously vast and ancient). For example, phenomena like lightning and thunder were not scientifically understood until quite recent times, but educated believers had long abandoned primitive ideas of thunder as God's voice, etc., by the time of Christ. But this is relatively unimportant. More important is what believers actually believed, and the bearings of science on what they believed. A Jew at the time of Christ believed that God was the ultimate explanation of all phenomena. In some cases, for example human conception and birth, he knew some of the "secondary causes," some of the means God used to bring about a result. But he gave thanks to God for the birth of a child even though he knew that certain actions of his own had been part of the cause for the birth of that child.

In other cases he did not know the secondary causes of an event, and he might in that case quite reasonably have attributed these events to the direct action of God. If you believe that all the pictures in a room were painted either by the teacher or by one of his pupils with the help of the teacher, it makes sense to compliment the teacher on any pictures you think are good, and if you don't know that a pupil painted a given picture it is reasonable to believe the teacher himself painted it. The Jews also believed that certain wonderful events, such as the Deliverance from Egypt, had occurred by the direct intervention of God, just as you might believe that a certain picture in the room was so good that it must be by the teacher.

What science can show us about this is that there are in fact certain secondary causes which we were unaware of. Thunder is not ordinarily caused by the direct action of God, but by masses of air striking together, just as conception is not ordinarily caused by the direct action of God, but by the coming together of a man and a woman. But science has nothing to say about the question of whether the ultimate cause of all these events is God or whether God sometimes does things directly that he ordinarily does by means of secondary causes. Both of these are philosophical or religious questions. Finding that more pictures than you thought were painted by the pupils does not disprove the existence of the teacher: it may be that the activity of the pupils can be explained only by the presence of a teacher. Knowing that the pupils ordinarily do something, e.g., do the lettering on signs for the pictures, does not show that the teacher may not occasionally do it himself.

Some people seem to feel that a God who "wound up" the universe and left it to tick away according to unchangeable laws would be tolerable, but a God who "interferes" with the universe at any point would somehow render the universe chaotic. But if we think about our own experience with our fellow human beings, we realize that even the best set of unbreakable rules cannot handle all the situations free human beings can create. We can, of course, make individuals slaves to the rules, but can we imagine God doing this? Christ said in another context that the law was made for man, not man for the law. Even sillier than the idea of God as the harassed Chief Executive is the idea of God as the Great Bureaucrat saying, "I'd like to help you, but rules are rules."

And, of course, we can see that in our own experience a state of affairs where rules that take care of ordinary situations, but can be suspended in special cases, is far from chaotic. It is, in fact, far more reasonable than a state of affairs where rules are absolute.

To take two examples of the difficulty: First, God may or may not have intervened directly in some way to create life. We may never know whether he did, or science may discover some secondary causes by which God brought life into the universe. But in either case we may have good reasons for believing that God is the ultimate Source of life.

Second, there is the question of the origin of the human soul. We know the secondary causes by which human bodies come into existence, and we believe that every human body "comes equipped with" a human soul. Thus, in one sense we understand how human souls originate: the process follows laws we can understand and use for prediction. But if Christians are right in believing that the soul is a nonmaterial substance which can exist without a body (and does, between death and resurrection), then we do not understand the origin of the soul at all. We simply find a soul with each body born. It is a very old Christian belief that God directly creates the human soul before birth. The emergence of a human soul is a predictable event, following certain regular rules and patterns, but this does not mean it is not due to the direct intervention of God. In other cases, we know that secondary causes are ordinarily the immediate cause of certain events, e.g., thunder; but this does not mean either that God is not the ultimate cause of these events or that in some cases God may not be the direct cause of these events.

Of course we may deny that events have any ultimate explanation. But if there is no ultimate explanation, this leaves the intermediate explanations in a peculiar position. If young Johnny asks his mother for an explanation of something, and doesn't understand the explanation, he can ask for an explanation of the explanation. If this happens several times his mother, in exasperation, says, "Just because" to his latest request for an explanation. But if the chain of explanation ends in a 'just because," do the intermediate explanations really explain? Consider a short series of this kind: "Why did you buy that soap, Mommy?" "Because the man on television said it was the best soap." "Why did he say it was the best soap?" "It was written down for him to say." "Why was it written down for him to say?" "Just because, Johnny, go run and play." Does Johnny really have a satisfactory explanation of why his mother bought the soap? A chain of explanations ending in midair is not a great deal better than no explanation at all.

So I conclude that not only is an ultimate explanation needed, but unless one is forthcoming, all intermediate explanations are left "suspended in midair." As we have seen, Chance or Absolute Natural Law cannot be the ultimate explanation, and God seems to be the only possibility left.

Let us be clear what we have and have not accomplished in the first part of this book. We have repelled certain common attacks on Christianity, and in repelling some of these attacks we have begun to find some positive reasons for accepting Christianity, or at least theism, as the only account of the universe that leaves room for science, for moral responsibility, for an ultimate explanation. But even if all these attacks have been successfully repelled, we need to say much more about the positive reasons for accepting Christianity. To these positive reasons we shall turn in the second part of this book.

Part II

Reasons

              6

The nature of faith

In. the first part of this book we showed that the Christian faith is not nonsensical and that none of the common arguments against it is successful. Thus we showed that it is not unreasonable to believe in Christianity. Some Christians seem to feel that this is all reason can be expected to do in this area, and that then faith must take over. That this is not the biblical view nor the traditional Christian view is, I think, clear from a study of the scriptures and a study of history. It is also, I believe, based on a misunderstanding of the nature of faith. Faith must be based on reasons, and the reasons must be good ones. I shall argue in the second half of this book that there are good reasons for accepting the Christian faith, and that we need not fall back on some "will to believe," which does not rest on any evidence.

First, however, let us consider the nature of faith itself. Faith is a special kind of belief, and the best way to understand faith is first to understand the nature of belief. The weakest sort of belief is what I will call "mere belief." When we are asked a question we sometimes give an answer in a qualified way, not claiming to know or even to be sure of our answer: "What is the distance between the earth and the sun?" "Ninety-three million miles, I believe." By saying "I believe," we emphasize that we merely believe—we don't know. We also use "I think" for this sense of belief: "I think it's ninety-three million miles (but I don't know for sure)." In this use of belief, we would be surprised but not dumbfounded, to find we were wrong. We are not absolutely certain, and we are not giving our authority for what we say. If someone tells us afterward that he or she relied on our statement and it was incorrect, we reply, "I only said I believed (thought) it was ninety- three million miles; if it was important you should have checked." Belief in this sense of "believe" has little to do with religious faith.

Belief in the stronger sense, where we are confident in what we believe and would be astounded if we were wrong, seems to have three major characteristics: (1) We must have some understanding of what we claim to believe; (2) we must be prepared to take action appropriate to our stated belief; and (3) we must have some reason for our belief. The first condition is obvious enough. If I claim to believe some statement and it later turns out I don't even know what that statement means, you do not take my claim to belief very seriously. I am merely repeating a form of words, not really believing anything.

The second condition is one we constantly invoke in practice. If someone claims to believe that some kind of behavior, smoking, for example, is very undesirable and should be avoided, but goes on smoking, we say, "He doesn't really believe what he says. If he did, he'd stop smoking." Of course a person may act as if something were true without believing it (for example, because he is pretending), and a person may believe something and still not act in ways in which people who believe that thing act. But some connection between belief in the stronger sense and action seems to exist and to be acknowledged in everyday life.

The third condition, that we must have some reason for belief in the strong sense, is less obvious. The point is that if we merely have a hunch or a feeling, we may say that we believe in the weak sense: "I believe that man is dishonest." "Why?" "No reason I can put my finger on. I just have a feeling." But unless we are either unreasonable or very confident of our hunches or feelings, we do not base a claim to certainty on such grounds. Ordinarily, "Why do you believe that?" is a question that requires a reasonable answer, and "For no reason" is not an acceptable answer.

Religious faith plainly shares these characteristics of belief in the strong sense. We might very well challenge a claim that a child had faith in the doctrine of the Trinity on the grounds that the child was too young to understand it. The child might, of course, have faith that whatever it was taught was true, whether it could understand it or not; but this is not the same as having faith in the Trinity. We often use the connection between faith and action to judge the faith o