Swinburne

Critically assess the belief that God is omnipotent. (40)

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Omnipotence is a central attribute of the Christian God; as the Nicene Creed affirms

“we believe in One God, the Father, the Almighty…”

Nevertheless, Christians struggle to agree on precisely what it means.  Broadly, there are two approaches to understanding God’s omnipotence.  Classical Theists, including many Roman Catholic scholars, argue that God exists eternally in the sense of being outside time and space and so wholly simple.  By this definition, God’s omnipotence means that he caused everything, even time and space, to exist but it does not necessarily mean that God can act directly in time, such as by performing a miracle in response to prayer.  By contrast, Theistic Personalists reject the timeless-eternal model of God because it makes God too remote for most Christian doctrines and practices to make sense.  If God is wholly simple, how can he also exist in three persons?  If God is beyond time and space, how can he know when He is being worshipped or understand the contents of peoples’ hearts, let alone speak to or appear to people through mystical experiences?  As Nelson Pike observed, the actions of the God of the Bible are “unavoidably tensed”. For Theistic Personalists, including many Protestant Christians, God must be everlasting but within time.  This means that God has the power to act responsively and directly to change aspects of creation, but this comes at the price of making God’s understanding of the world and his actions depend on time and space and events within them, seemingly making him less than supremely powerful.  It is clear, therefore, that both approaches to understanding God’s omnipotence entail God’s power being limited in some way.  Either God’s power to act responsively in time is limited by God’s timeless nature, or God’s power is not supreme because his actions are bounded by time and dependent on events outside of God.  In this way the belief that God is omnipotent is incoherent.

Controversially, Rene Descartes argued that God’s supreme perfection entails omnipotence to the point whereby God could make 2+2=5 if He so wished, suggesting that God can do the logically impossible, such as by creating a stone too heavy for him to lift… and then lifting it anyway.  Descartes wrote, “God could have brought it about … that it was not true that twice four make eight” (Descartes 1984-1991: 2:294).  Nevertheless, even Descartes had to accept that God’s power is limited in the respect that God cannot lie or will his own non-existence.  Tacitly accepting St Anselm’s argument, He wrote to a correspondent “God does not have the faculty of taking away from himself his own existence.”  Later proponents of the Ontological Argument Leibniz and Ross both developed this point, arguing that God exists necessarily in any possible world.  Further, as well as not supporting God’s omnipotence entailing unlimited power, Descartes position suggests that the laws of logic and nature are arbitrary, raising questions about God’s goodness.  As Plato pointed out in Euthyphro and as Bertrand Russell later argued, a God who decides what is good and bad arbitrarily, going on to reward and punish people eternally for jumping or failing to jump through a meaningless moral hoop, is no better than a tyrant and certainly not worthy of worship.  In this way, believing that God’s omnipotence means that he can do the logically impossible is both incompatible with the Christian belief that God is all-good and incompatible with God’s supreme perfection.  This demonstrates that the belief that God is omnipotence is incoherent when defined in this timeless-eternal sense.

St Thomas Aquinas argued that God is eternal in the sense of being wholly simple and outside time.  In this way, God’s creative action must be single, limiting God’s power to what is actually possible, logically possible and compatible with God’s timeless nature.   Much as Descartes later did, Aquinas argued that God could not act in a way that conflicts with his God-like nature, such as by doing what is evil.  For Aquinas, God’s actions are also limited by what is possible in this world, so it is not possible for God to create a square circle or make 2+2=5 within this world. Because his creative act is timeless and so single and simple, God cannot do x and not x in the same timeless act of creation.  Nevertheless, Of course, Thomist scholars like Gerry Hughes SJ have reasoned that God’s omnipotence means that He could have created another world in which different logical rules apply, but only if such a world was consistent with what Richard Swinburne has called the Best Possible World Type. It would not be actually possible (consistent with God’s nature) to create a substandard world, so God’s power to create a world with different logical laws in which 2+2 could =5 depends on that world being equivalent to this in terms of fulfilling God’s purpose for it.  Aquinas’ argument is problematic in this respect.  How could God create more than one world if He is indeed timeless and spaceless?  Multiple acts of creation imply a separation in time and space that is inconsistent with God’s timeless nature, making it not actually possible for God to have created any other world.  In the end, Aquinas’ argument is no better than Descartes when it comes to defending God’s unlimited power.  For both Descartes and Aquinas then, God’s power is significantly constrained by His own nature, making the belief in omnipotence, when understood to mean having timeless-eternally unlimited power, uncoherent. 

Theistic Personalists such as Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig have sought to make sense of the belief that God is omnipotent by arguing that God is everlasting in time.  They reject the Classical Theist argument that God can be timelessly eternal on the basis that such a God is inconsistent with the Bible and tenets of Christian doctrine like God existing in three persons or becoming incarnate and because, as Sir Anthony Kenny argued, the idea of God existing or acting in a timeless way is “radically incoherent” given that the matrix which makes existence and action possible is time.  The idea that God is everlasting in time is supported by the Bible, in verses such as

“The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary” Isaiah 40:28

In this case, God’s omnipotence entails being able to do everything that it is logically possible to do from a point in time.  As Swinburne wrote in 1973

“[God] is omnipotent at time t = if  [God] is able at t to bring about any state of affairs p such that it is consistent with the facts about what happened before t that, after t, [God] should bring about p…”

By this analysis, given the facts the go before the present moment t, in this moment God could not create a square circle or create a rock too heavy for him to lift and nor could God do something evil or act so as to bring about a worse result.  Also, God cannot change the past or, arguably, know the future outcome of free actions. Despite this, both Swinburne and Leftow argue that God is omnipotent.  They reject the claim that not being able to do something logically impossible or inconsistent with one’s nature is a real limitation on power.  Nobody thinks Donald Trump is not powerful because he cannot fly, give birth or make square circles!  By this definition, God being omnipotent entails him having power in much the same way as human beings have power, only to a much greater degree.  Nevertheless, surely this univocal interpretation of God’s omnipotence is unsatisfactory.  Not only does it seem to anthropomorphise God and sell short the belief that he is supremely powerful, but it is also inconsistent with the Bible, as in Isaiah 55:8

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.

In this way as well, believing in an everlastingly omnipotent God is incoherent. 

Further, when it comes to an everlasting God in time, what evidence is there to support belief in the existence of a God who exists and acts like an invisible superman?  The arguments for God’s existence do nothing to support the existence of such a God and, if William James’ analysis of genuine mystical experience is to believed, neither do Religious Experiences.  It is true that the everlasting God of the Theistic Personalists makes far more sense of God’s actions as recorded in the Bible (if not all of God’s words) than does the eternal God of the Classical Theist tradition, but what is the rational basis for accepting the Bible as the primary, in fact almost the only, authority for the existence of such a God?   Given the insights of Biblical Criticism, it seems that having faith that God exists – and is omnipotent – on the basis of scripture alone (Sola Scriptura) cannot be rational.  Further, even if faith is “assurance about what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1, the Bible is inconsistent in what it suggests about God’s omnipotence.  In Genesis 2 God searches for a helper for Adam, trying out each animal before settling on making woman out of Adam’s rib… not even very competent!  Yet, in Matthew 19:26 Jesus affirms that “with God all things are possible.”  It seems that believing that God exists and is omnipotent in a way that is everlasting in time on the strength of the Bible is incoherent. 

In conclusion, believing that God is omnipotent remains a central part of Christian doctrine and yet is it an incoherent belief.  This demonstrates the extent to which faith is not a rational position to hold.  Of course, this makes little difference to those believers who understand faith to be non-propositional, constituting…

“confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1

Yet, for those looking for propositional faith, faith that is well supported by evidence and argument, the incoherence of omnipotence as a key attribute of God and its lack of compatibility with either God’s goodness or the Bible will make it difficult to remain a Christian. 

Critically evaluate the view that religious experience is the best basis for belief in God. [40]

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When compared with the classical arguments for God’s existence – Cosmological, Teleological and Ontological – Religious Experience might seem like the best basis for believing in God, because the God revealed through well-known experiences is more obviously what Pascal called “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” than the abstract “God of the Philosophers”.  In this way, Religious Experience would better support Religion or Classical Theism than the other arguments, which seem to support deism at best.  Nevertheless, on closer analysis Religious Experience does little more to support belief in the God of Religion, a personal deity, than the other arguments.  Because of this, coupled with the unique difficulties which beset Religious Experience as an argument for God’s existence, Religious Experience is not the best – or even a good – basis for belief in God.

Firstly, as William James argued in his “Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902) genuine religious experiences are ineffable and resist description in what Ramsey called “ordinary language”.  When somebody reports having “seen” the Virgin Mary or having “heard” the voice of God, the experience is not really like other sense-experiences through the eyes or ears.  Further, the object that people experience is not really personal.  As Otto argued, genuine religious experiences are of “the numinous”, “the Absolute” rather than any anthropomorphic being.  Stace concurred, arguing that genuine mystical experiences are of “an ultimate nonsensuous unity in all things, a oneness or a One to which neither the senses nor the reason can penetrate.” Happold agreed, arguing that genuine mysticism is characterized by a sense of love and union with all other beings which overcomes the anxiety we all feel at being separate and alone.  For James, Otto, Stace and Happold Religious Experiences point not towards the existence of “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” but to a “higher power” which, as James pointed out, “need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self…” (Varieties of Religious Experience, Postscript) In this way, Religious Experience does not really serve to support belief in the God of Religion or even Classical Theism any more than the classical arguments do and so it is not the best basis for belief in such a God.

Secondly, Religious Experience is a weaker basis for belief in a “higher power” God than the classical arguments are.  This is because:

  1. Religious Experience is difficult to define.  While James, Otto and Stace recognize only solitary experiences, Richard Swinburne and Caroline Franks-Davis allow for corporate experiences as well.  While James, Otto and Stace suggest that all genuine experiences are beyond literal description, Swinburne and Franks-Davis allow for experiences which can be described using everyday language.  Because scholars differ about which experiences are possibly “authentic” and which are not, Religious Experience as a phenomenon is a less convincing basis of observation on which to build an inductive argument for God’s existence.  When compared with the Cosmological Argument, nobody questions Craig’s first premise “everything that begins to exist has a cause” even if they go on to criticize other premises or the conclusion of his argument. It follows that because of the difficulty in defining Religious Experience, is a weaker basis for an inductive argument for God’s existence than the classical arguments are
  2. As Swinburne points out, the argument from Religious Experience depends on assuming the Principles of Credulity and Testimony.  While it is far to say that the other arguments from observation also depend on the Principle of Credulity, Hume’s critique of Miracles in “An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding” Section X (1758) fatally undermines the Principle of Testimony as it applies to reports of religious experiences.  It is always more likely that somebody has made a mistake than that their experience, which goes against the established laws of nature, is genuine.  While it is, as Hick pointed out, bad science to ignore such reports, it is, as James pointed out, impossible to exclude the possibility that the person reporting a religious experience is mistaken because credible physiological and/or psychological explanations exist to account for everything reported.  For examples, as James discusses in his chapter on Conversion Experiences, psychiatry might account for very many of these including those of St Paul (as a response to a moral crisis according to Leuba) and of St Augustine (as a delayed adolescent crisis according to Starbuck).  While St Paul or St Augustine might themselves be convinced that their experience was authentic and be justified in believing in their object, there is no necessity for other people to believe either in the authenticity of their experiences or in what they seem to refer to.  So, because testimony always lacks credibility, an inductive argument based on Religious Experience will be weaker than the classical arguments in establishing a basis for belief in God.
  3. Finally, as Swinburne points out, accepting accounts of Religious Experience as possibly genuine depends on prior probability.  If you are what James called a “medical materialist“, reports of religious experience would be their very nature incredible.  In this way, reports of will only be entertained as the basis for belief in anything by those who are already open to the existence of that thing and the argument from Religious Experience is shown to be circular and so not as persuasive as the other classical arguments.

Clearly, Swinburne would disagree and would argue that Religious Experience is a better basis for believing in God than the other inductive arguments.  In his “The Existence of God” (1979) he set out a cumulative argument for God’s existence which employed Bayes’ Theorem to assess the relative probabilities of God and natural causes as explanations of causation, order and purpose, beauty and morality in the universe.  None of these arguments is conclusive in itself, argued Swinburne.  It takes Religious Experience to tip the balance in favour of God’s existence and provide a basis for believing in God.  Nevertheless, Swinburne’s cumulative argument has been widely criticized, not least by Anthony Flew, who compared it with “ten leaky buckets”.  A lot of bad arguments, each of which fails to justify belief in God in itself, are together not significantly better than one bad argument and so fail to justify religious belief.  Further, Swinburne’s contention that Religious Experience is the strongest argument, the argument which tips the balance of probability in favour of God’s existence, seems odd given that it depends on prior probability and so has no force without the other arguments having already established that God is slightly more probable than the natural alternative.  To what extent can an argument which is circular in itself be the deciding factor?  If the other arguments succeed in justifying an openness to the existence of God without depending on Prior Probability or the Principle of Testimony, then surely they are better bases for belief in God than Religious Experience.  For Swinburne, Religious Experience is a better basis for belief in God than the other arguments from observation even though it depends on Prior Probability and the Principle of Testimony because, as he sees it, Religious Experiences support belief in the personal God of Religion.  However, as has already been established here, this is not necessarily the case.  On close analysis, for those who have had no experience themselves, Religious Experiences can support openness to the existence of a “higher power” at most.  By contrast, the cosmological argument supports belief in a necessarily single, all-powerful creator God and the teleological argument supports belief in an omni-benevolent intelligent designer God, at least when “good” is understood in the purely Aristotelian sense.  In this way, Religious Experience is a worse basis for belief in God than either of the cosmological or teleological arguments, even when it comes to believing in “the God of the Philosophers” with the classical attributes.

In conclusion, Religious Experience is very far from being the best basis for belief in God. On close analysis, reports of such experiences fail to justify anything more than an openness to a “higher power” which would not have to have any of the classical attributes of God.  It is as impossible to exclude naturalistic explanations for Religious Experiences as it is to exclude the possibility that they have been caused by God, so the question of what they point towards must remain open.  Further, as an argument for God’s existence, Religious Experience is beset by problems of definition, credibility of testimony and circularity.  It is certainly not the decisive factor in demonstrating the existence of God that Swinburne claims, but is a bucket that is more leaky than most.

“Although it is reasonable to believe in God on the basis of a religious experience you yourself have had, it is wrong to believe on the basis of other peoples’ reports.” Critically evaluate this statement. [40]

/ vardycharlotte / 1 Comment

This statement largely reflects the conclusion William James came to in his “Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902).  James argued that the people who have a religious experience are perfectly justified in believing in the object of that experience, but maintained that reports of other peoples’ religious experiences could not justify belief in anything more than “a higher power.”  On the basis of James’ conclusion and WK Clifford’s famous 1877 essay “The Ethics of Belief” it  would be fair to say that believing in the God of religion on the basis of others’ reported experiences is wrong because

“it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”

As Clifford pointed out, belief is not a private matter because belief affects how we act.  He gave the example of a ship owner sending an un-seaworthy vessel to sea on the basis of a belief that the hull was sound.  If the belief is not supported by sufficient evidence and not properly justified, it is morally wrong of the ship owner to hold that belief.  In the case of the title statement, a person who believed in anything more than “a higher power” on the basis of other peoples’ religious experiences would be morally wrong to do so because this belief affects their actions.  For example, a Christian who believed in the Christian God on the basis of the religious experiences described in the Bible would be morally wrong to do so because that belief would direct them to look down on non-Christian religion and make efforts to convert Muslims, Jews and Hindus on the grounds that St Paul reported a vision of the risen Jesus who directed him (via Ananias) to be baptized.  The reported vision in Acts 22 would be insufficient justification for the belief of the Christian today and the Christian would be wrong to believe in more than the existence of a “higher power” on the strength of such reports.  By this analysis, the title statement is correct.

In William James’ Gifford lectures, given between 1901 and 1902, James explored the topic of Religious Experience in detail, considering conversion experiences and mystical experiences in particular depth, before evaluating the extent to which these experiences could be used as evidence to support belief in God.  In Lecture I James challenged the dominant medical materialism, arguing that it is reductive and fails to do justice the the richness of human experience.  He later built on this theme in Lecture III pointing out the naivety discounting any claimed experience of anything which cannot be sensibly perceived because indeed all sense-experiences are mediated through the mind and its categories, none of which can themselves be perceived through the senses. In Lecture II James went on to limit the scope of his inquiry to address only

“the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” p.32

His inquiry did not, therefore, address corporate religious experiences despite the fact that most previous work had focused on what Durkheim called

“an effervescent group phenomenon”

This was because corporate experiences are more plausibly explained in terms of mass hysteria.  After exploring the important place of religious experience in religiosity and outlining the common features of conversion experiences and mystical experiences, James concluded that there are religious experiences that are not easily reduced to medical or psychological phenomena.  In these cases, James argued, the people who have a religious experience are perfectly justified in believing in the object of that experience.  In fact, they can do no other.  Nevertheless, this left open the question of whether other people would be justified in believing in God on the strength of what recipients of mystical experiences report.  In Lecture XVIII James began to consider this question, discounting the efforts of Philosophers of Religion in proving God’s existence through reason and then pointing out that religious experiences neither support belief in the classical attributes of God nor evidence standard theological doctrines.  For James, then, belief in God as the object of Religion lay beyond rational proof and beyond what can be justified through religious experience either.  Nevertheless, as James concluded in Lecture XX, Religious Experience can and does justify belief in something other and larger than our conscious selves.  As James wrote in his Postscript,

“the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that… there exists a larger power… both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do… It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self…. … my only aim at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience clearly within its proper bounds.”

It is clear, then that James would have accepted the title statement insofar as “God” refers to the God of any specific religion.  There is no sense that others’ reports of religious experiences justify belief in anything beyond some larger power; certainly not being a Christian or defining God in terms of the classical attributes.  It follows that the title statement is correct insofar as others’ reports of religious experiences could not justify belief in God and so would render such a belief wrong by Clifford’s argument.

James’ argument that the human phenomenon of religious experience only justifies belief in a higher power and not the God of religion  is persuasive.  Firstly because Rudolph Otto in his The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (1917) argued that all genuine religious experiences are encounters with “the numinous” rather than either of what Pascal famously called “the God of the Philosophers” or “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”.  While Otto’s description of the marks or characteristics of genuine religious experiences seems more tightly drawn than James’, his argument supports James’ conclusion that the phenomenon that some people experience for themselves and which others hear or read about points towards a more abstract “higher power” rather than the God of any particular religion.  Secondly because Walter Stace in The Teachings of the Mystics (1960) argued that:

“the central characteristic in which all fully developed mystical experiences agree… is that they involve the apprehension of an ultimate non-sensuous unity in all things, a oneness or a One to which neither the senses nor the reason can penetrate. In other words, it entirely transcends our sensory-intellectual consciousness.” p14-15

Stace’s description of mystical experiences as an encounter with larger reality supports James’ conclusion that religious experiences justify the belief that:

“there exists a larger power… both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do… It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary.” Varieties of Religious Experience, Postscript, p.515-6

In this way James, Otto and Stace all support the title statement and agree that other peoples’ religious experiences could not justify belief in the “God” of any particular religion.  It follows that the title statement is correct insofar as others’ reports of religious experiences could not justify belief in the God of Religion and so would render exclusive Religious belief on the basis of reports of others’ experiences wrong by Clifford’s argument.

Clearly, Richard Swinburne would take issue with this conclusion.  In “The Existence of God” (1979) Chapter 13, Swinburne agreed with James that it is reasonable to believe in God on the basis of one’s own experience.  He pointed out that in the absence of any reason to disbelieve it, one should accept what appears to be true and called this the “Principle of Credulity”.  On this basis, Swinburne would disagree with Richard Dawkins who claimed in “The Blind Watchmaker”(1986) that if he saw a marble statue waving at him across a museum, he would sooner check into his local psychiatric hospital than believe his own eyes.   Swinburne also agreed with James’ broader critique of medical materialism, pointing out that accepting his arguments depends on “prior probability” and that those who have already excluded anything supernatural on ideological grounds will remain unconvinced by any evidence for God.  Nevertheless, Swinburne was more open than James to trusting the testimony of others as evidence for the existence of not only a higher power but more specifically the God of Religion.  Swinburne claimed that with the absence of any reason to disbelieve them, one should accept that believers are telling the truth when they testify about religious experiences.  On the basis of this “Principle of Testimony” Swinburne argued that the common occurrence of those Religious Experiences which conform to his broad, five-fold classification makes the existence of a single “God” (with at least the classical attributes of omnipotence and omnibenevolence) more probable than any alternative explanation of the universe.  For Swinburne, believing that God is single is a simpler, more elegant explanation than believing in multiple higher powers.  In this way (by the commonly accepted principle of Ockham’s razor) he reasons that whatever caused and designed the universe and whatever people encounter through religious experiences is more likely to be one God than several.  Further, by calling on the evidence of the Cosmological and Teleological arguments for God alongside Religious Experience, Swinburne reasons that the single God must be both the cause of everything and so be all-powerful and responsible for the order and purpose evident in the universe and so be omnibenevolent.  Swinburne would, therefore, disagree with the title statement and argue that Religious Experiences justify belief in a single all-powerful, all-good “God”, whether you have had one yourself or not.

Nevertheless, Swinburne’s argument is open to a number of criticisms.  Firstly, his cumulative approach was rejected by Anthony Flew, who compared it with “ten leaky buckets”.  A lot of bad arguments, each of which fails to justify belief in God in itself, are together not significantly better than one bad argument and so fail to justify religious belief.  Although JP Moreland attempted to defend Swinburne, pointing out that:

‘clearly if you jam ten leaky buckets together in such a way as the holes in the bottom of each bucket are squashed close to the solid parts of neighbouring buckets, you will get a container that holds water.’

That is pushing the analogy too far.  Flew’s point that Swinburne’s cumulative approach fails to provide sufficient justification for believing in God still stands.  As Carl Sagan and later Christopher Hitchens pointed out, “exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence“.  The existence of the God of religion is certainly an exceptional claim and the evidence provided by Swinburne’s list of inductive arguments in the Existence of God fails to provide sufficient justification for anything beyond being open to a higher power as James, Stace and Otto argued.  Secondly, as David Hume and much later Richard Dawkins have pointed out, when people claim to have experienced something exceptional it is always more likely that they have made a mistake than that they are telling the truth.  While Swinburne criticizes this argument as bad science, it is reasonable for a scientist to explore whether statistical anomalies might be explained as mistakes first, before exploring other possibilities.  In the case of those people reporting religious experiences, there are established and credible physiological or psychological conditions which could explain the experiences without reference to a higher power, let alone a “God”.  This is why James rightly rejects the attempt to use other peoples’ Religious Experiences as proof for God.  Alternative explanations for the experiences can never be excluded, not least because experiences are ineffable, so descriptions of them are imprecise and can’t bear the weight of being used as evidence to justify belief in the God of Religion.  It follows that the title statement is indeed correct insofar as others’ reports of religious experiences could not justify belief in the God of Religion and so would render exclusive Religious belief on the basis of reports of others’ experiences wrong by Clifford’s argument.

In addition, while Swinburne’s reasoning that the “higher power” is more probably single than plural seems sensible, his claim that the higher power must have the attributes of omnipotence and/or omnibenevolence is not.  Firstly, Swinburne accepts that neither the Cosmological nor the Teleological Argument justifies belief in the existence of God in itself.  How then can he rely on the reasoning of the Cosmological argument to support that element of his conclusion which relates to God’s omnipotence or on the reasoning of the Teleological argument to support that element of his conclusion which relates to God’s omnibenevolence?  If an argument can’t justify belief in God’s existence why should it justify belief in God’s omnipotence or omnibenevolence?  Secondly, there is specific evidence against God’s power and goodness.  If God really was all-powerful, why would he need to break the laws of nature periodically to reveal His existence and His will or correct a sequence of events?  Further, if God really was all-good then why would he be so selective and arguably arbitrary in how, when, where and to whom he grants religious experiences?Why would he make eternal salvation dependent on that which only some people have the opportunity to demonstrate, namely having faith that goes beyond the evidence?  Swinburne argues that in the absence of a reason to believe otherwise we accept what we experience and what others report about their own experiences, but surely the fact that these experience point to what is inconsistent and incoherent should count as such a reason to believe otherwise.  It follows that the title statement is indeed correct insofar as others’ reports of religious experiences could not justify belief in the God of Religion and so would render exclusive Religious belief on the basis of reports of others’ experiences wrong by Clifford’s argument.

In conclusion, the title statement “although it is reasonable to believe in God on the basis of a religious experience you yourself have had, it is wrong to believe on the basis of other peoples’ reports” is correct.  In terms of believing an experience you yourself have had, both James and Swinburne suggest that it would be unreasonable to disbelieve the evidence of your own experience.  As William Alston wrote:

“It is clear that if I have directly experienced a personal deity… I have the strongest possible basis for believing that such a being exists; just as I have the strongest possible basis for believing that yaks exist if I really have seen one”

Richard Dawkins skepticism on this point seems at odds with the scientific reliance on personal experience and the fact that the whole of science depends on the cosmological principle, that things are the way they appear to be.  In terms of believing on the strength of others’ reported experiences, the reasoning of James, Otto and Stace that the most other peoples’ experiences can justify is being open to a “higher power” is more persuasive than that of Swinburne, that others’ religious experiences could justify belief in a single, all-powerful, all-good God.  Swinburne’s argument does appeal to common sense.  In normal circumstances it is fair to assume the Principle of Testimony because as Dean Inge pointed out:

“If a dozen honest men tell me that they have climbed the Matterhorn, it is reasonable to believe that the summit of that mountain is accessible, although I am not likely to get there myself.” 

Yet, as Sagan and Hitchens suggest, the exceptional nature of the claims people make about religious experiences mean that a higher standard of evidence is demanded.  By Clifford’s argument, it is wrong to base belief in the God of any specific religion on other peoples’ reports of religious experiences.  It is impossible to exclude a psychological or physiological explanation, people could have made a mistake, be wishful-thinking or outright lying however honest they may appear.  When religious beliefs dictate actions which can harm or even kill other people, it is wrong to hold them on such a basis.

Can God act in the world? [40]

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

This question is of huge significance for religious faith and goes to the heart of issues arising from the concept of God. If God can act in the world, this implies that He is in time, which raises questions about his perfection because acting in time suggests that God depends on the passage of time to frame His action. Further, if God can act in time and chooses not to, then can He be all good… and if God can and does act in time, can He justly hold people responsible for moral evil? On the other hand, if God cannot act in the world (either because He is outside time or because he is limited in His powers, by His own nature or by his decision to allow human free-will) then can God be understood to be omnipotent? Also, can a God who cannot act in time be the God of the Bible or the object of Christian worship? How could an inactive God answer prayers, be addressed by Jesus as “Abba”, care if people attend Church-services or be understood to work miracles and Religious Experiences? It seems that either answer to this question will cause problems for believers. Further, there is no way to know the answer definitively. Nevertheless, the claim that God cannot act directly in the world is easier to sustain philosophically than the claim that God can act in the world as this claim would usually be understood.

The rational arguments for God’s existence from observation – the cosmological and teleological arguments – point to a God who is eternal in the sense of being outside the space-time universe we inhabit. As St Thomas Aquinas argued, a God who is the Prime Mover, uncaused cause and necessary sustaining cause of the universe is “neither something nor nothing.” The God of Classical Theism is not a person or object and has no physical presence within space and time, yet God is the necessary creator and effects everything. If God is timeless and space-less, then God must be wholly simple and unchanging. This supports the idea that God is perfect and all-good in the sense that He must be 100% whatever it is to be God and containing no evil (understood as potential, falling short). If God is timeless and space-less, God cannot be other than He is. Yet if God is the wholly simple, timeless being that Aquinas’ arguments suggest and support, there are natural questions about His ability to act. Action implies time – a time before the action, a time during it and a time after it. Action might also imply some choice to act or not to act, or to act in different ways. Clearly, if God is timeless and unchanging, the degree to which “action” is compatible with the concept of God, God’s nature, is unclear. St Thomas Aquinas argued that the word “action”, when applied to God can only be understood analogically. What it means for God to act is not the same as what it means for a person to act. Certainly when a person acts, it implies time and choice, but these cannot be part of God’s action because they are excluded by God’s necessarily timeless, wholly simple nature. For Aquinas, God’s timeless action can be understood to mean only that God is the original cause of everything in the universe. As in the Cosmological Argument, God is the Prime Mover, the uncaused cause and the necessary sustainer of the universe and everything in it. For Aquinas, God can act in the world only by causing it through his single, simple creative act, and not by responding to events as they happen in time. Aquinas’ understanding of God’s action being timeless and limited to a single, simple creative act is consistent with his definition of God as eternal and wholly simple. This God, in turn, is relatively well-supported by rational arguments, in a way that an everlasting God-in-time – who might more reasonably be said to act in time – is not. It follows that strictly limiting God’s action in the world to his general providence in creation is easier to sustain philosophically than a claim that God can act in the world.

In addition, Aquinas argued that God can – and as the Scriptures reveal, did – create beings who can act directly in the world on God’s behalf. Firstly, God created angels, who repeatedly deliver God’s message to Prophets. In addition, God ordained that Saints can also work miracles and later respond to petitionary prayers. Further, as is affirmed in the Nicene Creed, Christians uphold that God became incarnate in the Virgin Mary and was made man. The Incarnation was part of God’s general creative action but made it possible for God to act very directly in the world for a time by self-limiting. John Macquarrie and later Peter Vardy argue that God’s omnipotence must include His ability to enter time and act in the world, even though that appears to compromise God’s perfection by making him and his actions depend on the passage of time. Remember, an eternal, timeless God created all natural laws, including the laws of logic. Our understanding of natural laws and logic depends on partial, subjective experience and can never be complete or 100% certain. It is, therefore, possible that God’s single, simple creative act included some occurrences “not commonly seen in nature” which appear to break the laws of nature and logic to us, but which are within these laws when seen from God’s point of view. One such unusual occurrence could have been the Incarnation, where God took temporary human form to act in the world, making sure to limit His own powers so that they did not cause too much disruption to the usual operation of nature and logic. Other such occurrences could include miracles, religious experiences and even instances of extreme beauty, all of which could have been built-in to God’s single, creative act with the intention that these would point people back towards the existence of God. In this way, maintaining a belief that God acts in the world only through general providence and not directly by “breaking” the laws of nature or logic, is consistent both with Christian precepts and with the concept of God as eternal and wholly simple. St Thomas Aquinas was careful NOT to argue (as Hume later did) that a miracle must breaks the rules of nature by particular volition of the deity. Not only did Hume’s definition of miracles block the possibility that any event could legitimately be called a miracle – because nobody has certain knowledge of the laws of nature and nobody can know of or observe God’s particular volition – but it also pushes believers to choose between believing that the existence of God is supported by the existence of natural laws and believing that God can act in the world. Aquinas’ definition allows for extremely uncommon events to be called miracles and does not demand that they result from a special act of God. Through Aquinas’ argument God can “act in the world” without responding to events in time or doing anything other than the simple, single original act of creation, so God can both be eternal and wholly simple – and so well supported by arguments – and be the object of Christian faith – able to act in the world. Aquinas showed that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It follows, therefore, that Aquinas’ position in limiting God’s direct actions to those ordained as part of the single, simple, creative act is easier to sustain philosophically than the claim that God acts directly in the world in a more spontaneous and responsive way.

Of course, Aquinas’ understanding of God as wholly-simple and eternal, limited to timeless action, is not without problems. As Nelson Pike observed, the Bible refers to God in language which is “unavoidably tensed”, so claiming that God cannot act in the world makes it impossible to use the Bible as evidence for his existence and nature and undermines using the Bible as the basis for other aspects of Religious faith and practice. Further, if God is eternally wholly simple and his actions – including the Incarnation, miracles and religious experiences – are limited to the single, simple act of creation, then the course of the world and of human lives seems determined and there can be little room for free will. Aquinas recognised this and sought other explanations for the existence of suffering than that it resulted from free human actions. He argued that evil is only a lack of goodness and that creation benefits from it, in the way that “the silent pause adds sweetness to the chant.” In addition, Aquinas saw no necessary contradiction between God’s goodness and his creating a world that included suffering, because God’s goodness is not moral goodness but only that goodness compatible with His wholly simple nature, the goodness that comes from God being eternally simple and unchanging, being 100% whatever it is to be God and not falling short in any way, and from God being the source of all good things in the universe, remembering that as evil is a lack and not a substance, a function of how we experience God’s creation through time and space and not a property necessary to the universe as seen from God’s timeless perspective, then God cannot reasonably be held to be the source of it. Nevertheless, Aquinas’ explanation of evil and suffering and the lack of room for genuine human freedom within his philosophical system is problematic. It leaves God choosing to send miracles and religious experiences to affect some people and situations but not others and God sending some people to hell for choices that were largely determined. Aquinas’ understanding of God’s goodness is a very long way from the understanding held by most Christians, so although his position might be easier to sustain philosophically than the position that God is everlasting in time and more directly active in the world, it is far from being the easiest position to sustain theologically, let alone pastorally. The sheer length of the Summa Theologica, which tries to reconcile Aquinas’ concept of God with the precepts of Christian Theology, is a good demonstration of this.

Nevertheless, even if God is not seen to be timeless and unchanging, but is understood to be everlasting in time in the way that Theistic Personalists such as Richard Swinburne have argued, there could be problems with claiming that God can act in the world.

Firstly, in the absence of sufficient rational arguments for the existence of an everlasting God in time, a lot depends on taking the Bible as evidence for both the existence and nature of an everlasting God. The Bible undeniably claims that God acts in the world but offers no clear or conclusive explanation of why God sometimes does not act and how God holds people eternally responsible for actions he could ultimately have prevented. Baruch Spinoza pointed out that if God CAN act, but CHOOSES NOT TO prevent the worst suffering, then it seems that God cannot be omnibenevolent. Surely it would be better for a Christian to believe that God is constrained and cannot act in the world than to believe that He chooses not to and consciously allowed the Holocaust to happen. Maurice Wiles, a leading Anglican Theologian, certainly thought so, along with many Protestant thinkers who have preferred to see God as limited in power than limited in goodness. Jurgen Moltmann is a classic example of this approach, arguing that God can act sometimes but cannot always do anything to stop suffering. Moltmann’s God expresses His perfect knowledge and love by suffering with people, although this raises fair questions about whether such a God, if also held to be the creator, would be worthy of worship. Would a teacher be praised for suffering along with her students even if she organised the trip down the mine which led to their suffering?

Secondly, if God CAN act and DOES act, then again the extent to which human beings are free and can justly be held responsible for moral evil must be in question. It is not a simple choice between Aquinas’ eternal God and determinism on one side and Augustine’s everlasting God and Free Will on the other; whether God is in time or outside it, it is impossible to reconcile God’s ability to act in the world – whether just through general providence or through direct interventions – with genuine human freedom and so with moral responsibility. St Augustine places God in time, if observing it from a great distance – as though from a mountaintop – and still struggles to explain how genuine human freedom is compatible with God’s absolute power and creative action and has to resort to calling how this works a mystery. Placing God in time and claiming that He can act directly in the world is incompatible with any idea of human free will or divine justice, so it remains easier to sustain Aquinas’ timeless God and very limited understanding of divine action.

Further, if God can act because he is in time and has the sort of knowledge that enables him to respond directly to events, then God’s detailed knowledge of events, even if God does not interfere in them, makes believing in human free will and the justice of human beings being held morally responsible difficult. Through the “Consolations of Philosophy” Book 5 Boethius attempted to dissolve the tension between God’s knowledge and human free will, suggesting that God’s knowledge of events is conditional on those events taking place, that God’s knowledge does not necessitate events happening as they do. However, suggesting that God is not only in time, but that his knowledge depends on events and thus changes continually is a long way from any idea of divine perfection or immutability. Is the object of Christian worship any more comfortably said to be contingent and ever-changing than He is said to be wholly simple and impassive? It seems that defining God as everlasting and placing Him in time fails to resolve either the philosophical or the theological problems raised with claiming that He acts in the world, so although Aquinas’ wholly simple eternal concept of God and limitation of God’s action to what can be considered timeless and part of His single, simple act of creation comes with significant theological problems, it is still easier to sustain than the claim that God is everlasting in time and able to act directly in the world.

In conclusion, the claim that God cannot act directly in the world is easier to sustain philosophically than the claim that God can act in the world, at least as this claim would usually be understood. Nevertheless, limiting God’s action to what is timeless and part of a single, simple, general act of creation is difficult to reconcile with the Bible and precepts of Christian faith as outlined in the Nicene Creed, let alone with apparent acts of special revelation like miracles and religious experiences. St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica is a masterful attempt at such a reconciliation and was rightly hailed as being every bit as good as a miracle at his beatification, however his explanation of how God can be both eternal timeless and have been Incarnate and Immanent through history remains contentious. Perhaps, in the end, Christians need to accept that both God’s nature and how God acts in the world must remain a mystery, however unsatisfactory this is for Philosophers of Religion.

 

 

“Boethius proved that God’s omniscience is compatible with human free will.” Discuss (40)

/ vardycharlotte

Boethius’ discussion of Divine omniscience can be found in his Consolations of Philosophy, Book 5.  Facing his own death, Boethius reflects on the human condition and imagines a dialogue with Lady Philosophy, who points out the vast web of Aristotelian causation in which our lives are caught. In Part I Boethius asks…

“in this series of linked causes is there any freedom left to our will, or does the chain of fate bind also the very motions of our souls?’

pointing to a problem that has always dogged Classical Theism.  If God is Omnipotent, and if Omnipotence entails omniscience, then it is difficult to maintain any meaningful degree of human freedom.  Without freedom there seems to be no convincing way of defending God against charges of creating or at least allowing gratuitous suffering.  A God who is omniscient cannot also be benevolent.  Boethius proceeds to explore this problem and then attempts to resolve it by clarifying the very nature of God and therefore the nature of His foreknowledge, yet his resolution fails to show how Omniscience and human freedom are compatible in the end.

In Book 5 part III, Boethius sets out the paradox of omnipotence in some detail.  Drawing on Platonic philosophy, and the eternal model of God suggested to Christian Neoplatonists by the Timaeus, Boethius saw God’s eternal existence and nature as a necessary conclusion of rational reflection on a contingent world.  However, accepting God’s eternity comes with problems.  Boethius pointed out…

“if from eternity He foreknows not only what men will do, but also their designs and purposes, there can be no freedom of the will”

and explained how neither the suggestion that God’s knowledge of them makes future events necessary nor the suggestion that God’s knowledge is contingent on events in time are satisfactory.  J.M.E. McTaggart (1866–1925) differentiated between a God whose knowledge of events is from a perspective in time (A series eternity) and a God whose knowledge of events is from a perspective outside time whereby all events are simultaneous in the mind of God (B series eternity).  Boethius argued that putting God’s perspective in time, giving him A series eternity, makes God’s knowledge depend on time and the things that happen within it.  If I watch a bus arriving at its stop, my knowledge of it happening depends on the bus doing what it is doing and on time passing to facilitate what it is doing.  Clearly, in this scenario my knowledge of the bus does not determine the bus in doing what it does – I could not reasonably be held responsible for the bus being early, late or punctual – and yet it is also true that my knowledge of the future is limited because I cannot know what has not yet happened.  This sort of A series eternity fails to support the supreme knowledge and power that Classical Theists impute to God.  However there are also problems with B series eternity, as Boethius pointed out.  If God has a timeless perspective and knows all things and events simply and singly, then it seems to follow that future events happen necessarily because they are known by God before they happen and because they cannot not happen.  Consequently,

“what an upset of human affairs manifestly ensues! Vainly are rewards and punishments proposed for the good and bad, since no free and voluntary motion of the will has deserved either one or the other… And therefore neither virtue nor vice is anything, but rather good and ill desert are confounded together… Again, no ground is left for hope or prayer, since how can we hope for blessings, or pray for mercy, when every object of desire depends upon the links of an unalterable chain of causation?”

Boethius sets out how if God knows things that might not come to pass, then His knowledge is limited and if God’s knowledge depends on how things are in time, His power is limited.  He accepts that on the issue of omniscience rests the plausibility of Religion – for without genuine human freedom there can be no morality, no hope for meaningful salvation and no real communication with the Divine. In Part IV Boethius addresses this fundamental problem by attempting to show that God’s foreknowledge of events is not necessary by pointing out that God’s knowledge is not like human knowledge, and suggesting that freedom and foreknowledge could be compatible for God in a way that they do not seem to be to us. God’s knowledge, argues Boethius, is not due to physical senses, nor to imagination, nor to thought, but is instead the knowledge of pure intelligence which understands the very underpinnings of reality

“by surveying all things, so to speak, under the aspect of pure form by a single flash of intuition.” 

For Boethius,

“eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment… since God abides for ever in an eternal present, His knowledge, also transcending all movement of time, dwells in the simplicity of its own changeless present, and, embracing the whole infinite sweep of the past and of the future, contemplates all that falls within its simple cognition as if it were now taking place. “ (Book 5, Part VI)

This is persuasive; St Augustine discussed something similar in The Confessions (354–430) and St. Thomas Aquinas extended and developed a very similar position in the Summa Theologica (1264).   However, the price of resolving the conflict between foreknowledge and free-will seems to push God far into timeless abstraction and seeming unknowability.  Arguably, this approach preserves the technical plausibility of Religion by sacrificing the practical plausibility of Religion and so achieves, at most, a pyrrhic victory.  Surely, it is no more meaningful to pray to “pure intelligence” – whose knowledge of individual circumstances is limited to part of a single flash of intuition unsullied by sight, imagination or thought – than it is to pray to a being who has determined the prayer, its cause and its outcome by His very existence?  Further, the meaning of the divine attributes would be severely restricted by pushing God outside the spatio-temporal framework that describes ordinary human language.  What can the words “benevolence” or “power” really mean in a timeless sense?  A timeless God cannot have choice – because choice implies a time before and after a choice is made and the possibility of things being other than they are.  A timeless God cannot act – because action implies a time before and after at the very least.  As Sir Anthony Kenny pointed out that the concept of a timeless God seems “radically incoherent.”  He wrote…

“my typing of this paper is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Again, on this view, the great fire of Rome is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Therefore, while I type these very words, Nero fiddles heartlessly on.” (Kenny, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford, Clarendon Press) 1979, 38–9)

The idea that a timeless God can do or be anything that is comprehensible through normal concepts and words is ridiculous.  There is no shared analogical meaning between words applied to God and the world, whatever Aquinas tried to argue.

Boethius was aware of this problem in positing a completely timeless God and tried to reconcile his claim that God exists in a timeless eternity with God having the ability to know events as they happen and a degree of freedom or openness in the future.  In Part VI he argued that while God sees events an eternal present, God’s knowledge cannot be understood to cause them to happen.  God can know an event or action that is genuinely free because his knowledge is of an eternal present rather than a future as we would understand it…  Taking the bus analogy again, God witnesses its journey like a single stack of still photographs.  Every step of the journey is known as if in the present – God’s knowledge is not constrained by time because he sees everything now, but God’s knowledge still depends on the way things are rather than making them the way that they are and removing all freedom. God’s knowledge is neither conditional (as ours usually is) nor simply necessary (as would be the case with a completely timeless God who would be unaware of any present).  God’s knowledge is unlike any form of human knowledge in that it is conditionally necessary.  The very categories “contingent” and “simply necessary” suggest temporal and logical frameworks that do not apply to God who creates these frameworks and exists outside them.  While this is persuasive, God’s conditionally necessary knowledge of events seems little more religiously satisfying than God’s timeless knowledge of events.  God’s experience of an eternal present is almost as different from human experience as a genuinely timeless experience would be.  The preservation of free will, moral responsibility and divine benevolence is by no means clear either.  If God knows future events now and they cannot be other than how they are, then whether God knows them as if in an eternal present or otherwise, it is difficult to see how anything can really change by human agency.

EL Mascall tried to suggest that quantum science could provide a model for understanding how God’s actions could both be timeless and have an appearance of being in time if each action could be conceived to have a timeless and a temporal pole which are interrelated, this does not advance the discussion by much.  Mascall is just restating the assertion that things would look different from God’s point of view in different language.  He doesn’t seem to do more explain how God can both know the future in a way that God ensures that nothing but what God knows can happen and not be responsible for what happens.  Other contemporary writers, such as Eleonore Stump, Norman Kretzmann, and Brian Leftow, have also tried to modify the timeless model of God by insisting that God’s timeless eternity has some of the features of temporal duration.  The project that Boethius started retains its interest because arguably, the plausibility of religion depends on its success.  However, the project has yet to yield conclusive results.

In addition, Protestant scholars Nelson Pike and Richard Swinburne have developed related arguments.  For Nelson Pike the idea that God’s knowledge can be that of pure intelligence taking in the whole of reality in a single flash of intuition is incompatible with the God revealed through the Bible.  The God of the Bible – of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to borrow Pascal’s phrase – is active and responsive and seemingly possessed of the ability to see, hear, imagine, think and even feel.  In his essay “Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action” (1965) Pike points out that whatever metaphorical interpretations are put on Biblical accounts of God wrestling Jacob or speaking with Moses or acknowledging Jesus at His Baptism, God’s knowledge is inescapably tensed.  If this is true, then it is difficult to see how Boethius model of a God experiencing an eternal present could be acceptable to people of mainstream Christian faith. A timeless model of God – even the modified timeless model proposed by Boethius – conflicts with the Biblical account of His creative action and nature.  Swinburne agreed, pointing out that…

“The God of the Hebrew Bible… is pictured as being in continual interaction with humans – humans sin, then God is angry, then humans repent, then God forgives them…” (The Coherence of Theism 2nd ed. 2016 p233)

Without the idea of God responding to human sin and human repentance, there is no obvious way to preserve what is meaningful about Christianity.  Swinburne adds that…

“The Hebrew Bible shows no knowledge of the doctrine of divine timelessness… God is represented as saying “I am the Alpha and the Omega…”  … but it seems to me to be reading far too much into such phrases to interpret them as implying the doctrine of divine timelessness.”  (Ibid. p230)

Although the ideas of God’s timelessness or eternity are philosophically useful in that they provide possible means of defending God against responsibility for suffering – including inflicting endless fiery punishment arbitrarily – the ideas find no support in Scripture and conflict with essential Christian beliefs and teachings.

There seems to be a contradiction between the Philosophical model of God suggested by Boethius, developed by Aquinas and enshrined in Catholic doctrine and the everlasting God described by the Bible and proposed by Theistic Personalists, many of whom are Protestant.  Further, neither model of God really avoids the problem of Omniscience outlined by Boethius in Book 5 of The Consolations of Philosophy.  The God of Theistic Personalists must either be limited in knowledge or power (and so is Philosophically unsatisfying) and the Timeless God is limited in terms of not being able to witness, experience, respond or act in any recognizable sense (and so is religiously unsatisfying.)  Boethius failed to prove that God’s omniscience is compatible with human free will, but he succeeded in outlining the inescapability of the problem and the importance of addressing and ultimately resolving it.  While Nelson Pike was careful to open his 1965 essay Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action by disassociating himself from the implications of his contribution to the project Boethius started, it is difficult to ignore these implications for long.  Either God is limited (i.e. not Omnipotent, Omniscient or Benevolent) or human beings are determined… but in any case Classical Theism is incoherent.

 

 

Religious experience is a good pointer to the existence of God! Discuss (40)

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

Religious experience, whether that is the general experience of living a religious life or specific, direct experiences of the divine, is very commonly cited as the basis for religious faith.  Nevertheless, William James and William Alston have both argued that although Religious Experiences are reasonably authoritative for the people who have them – and for those people may serve as more than a pointer to the existence of God – because of plausible non-religious explanations there can be no duty on other people to accept the authenticity of religious experiences or see them as pointers to anything supernatural. Richard Swinburne went further, noting that whether one accepts religious experiences as a good pointer to the existence of God will depend on one’s assessment of prior probability.  Responses to the claim “Religious experience is a good pointer to the existence of God!” depend to some extent on one’s own relationship with religious experience(s), whether one has had a direct experience or must rely on others’ reports, but depend mostly on one’s world-view.  Atheists and materialists are unlikely to accept the claim, even if they have had an experience that might otherwise be categorized as religious, whereas those who are open to the existence of God on other grounds are more likely to accept the claim, even on the strength of anecdote.

Direct religious experiences are notoriously difficult to define or categorise.  William James identified four marks that most experiences seem to have – transiency, a noetic quality, ineffability and passivity – and yet there are well-known experiences which do not have these marks.  Thomas Merton had relatively regular experiences over a long period.   Teresa of Avila’s experiences were sustained and seemingly the result of practices designed to provoke them.  Further the Religious canon is packed with descriptions of religious experience.  Other scholars have defined religious experiences in different ways.  Scholar of mysticism Rudolph Otto took a more general approach, saying only that authentic religious experiences are those of mysterium tremendum et fascinans.  In some ways Otto’s definition accords with Martin Buber’s description of religious experiences as I-thou encounters.  Walter Stace excluded classic visions and voices altogether and argued that genuine religious experiences are non-sensuous and mystical in character.  Richard Swinburne, on the other hand, listed five different types of religious experience in two categories, public and private, in an attempt to be inclusive. The difficulty in defining religious experiences is a seemingly insuperable obstacle to using them as the basis for an inductive argument for the existence of God.

Direct religious experiences are also open to alternative, non-religious explanations. Ludwig Feuerbach and Sigmund Freud both noted how religious belief tends towards wish-fulfilment.  Some religious experiences fit in most conveniently with the wants and needs of the person who has them and could be explained as creations of the subconscious mind. For example, Joan of Arc’s experiences fit in with the French nationalistic mood of the time and provided Joan with a credibility that she could never otherwise have had.  Might she have invented the experiences – or have interpreted them creatively – for her own (side’s) political advantage?  The Emperor Constantine’s vision before the battle of Milvian Bridge and the visions leading to the discovery of the True Cross on the First Crusade could be seen in similar terms. Alternatively, other religious experiences might be explained in physiological terms.  It is more common for those experiencing extreme physical stress or hormonal change to claim religious experiences – could the physiological changes associated with puberty or the suffering involved in a life-threatening illness be causing out-of-body sensations that are later interpreted as religious?  Julian of Norwich experienced visions while close to death, St Paul seems to have been an epileptic subject to grand-mal seizures and many other visionaries and mystics have exhibited physiological symptoms which might account for their altered state.  Of course it is difficult to disprove religious experiences in these ways – not least because an account of HOW the experience might have happened does not rule out God as the reason WHY it happened.  Nevertheless, the existence of non-religious explanations for religious experiences does undermine their status as a good pointer to the existence of God, both individually and otherwise.

Although Swinburne incorporated an argument from Religious Experience into his cumulative case for God, set out in “The Existence of God” (1991), he accepted that unlike accepting the natural observations that other inductive arguments start with, accepting religious experiences as even a pointer to the existence of God depends on prior probability.  People who already accept the possibility of God’s existence will accept that religious experiences are a feature of the world which require explanation while those with an atheistic world-view will reject religious experiences as delusions or at least claim that psychology and/or physiology explain away the phenomenon without any need to suggest a supernatural cause. It is fair to say that religious people, or at least those who are open-minded, will be more likely to accept that Religious experience is a good pointer to the existence of God than those who are committed to an atheist or materialist world-view and this suggests that there will always be disagreement on whether Religious Experiences constitute a good pointer to the existence of God that is little to do with the experiences themselves or what causes them.

Swinburne went on to argue that it is reasonable to accept reports of religious experiences – defined very broadly so as to include both public and private experiences – and to take them as pointers to the existence of God because of the principles of credulity and testimony.  In everyday life we believe what we see or experience ourselves and believe other people unless we have a good reason not to.  Why should these principles not apply to religious experiences?  Given the large number of people who claim to have had experiences that might be classed as religious experiences – around 1 in 3 people according to Alister Hardy Centre research – they need to be explained.  What reasonable grounds are there for dismissing either the occurrence of these experiences or the explanation proffered by those who have had them when we have no clear reason to doubt?  Nevertheless, Swinburne’s principles do little to advance his argument beyond prior probability.  Those with an atheistic or materialist world view are likely to respond to Swinburne by arguing that the very fact that somebody claims to have had a religious experience is evidence of their irrationality and good reason to be suspicious of their testimony. As Carl Sagan said “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – by their nature religious experiences are out of the ordinary and demand more rather than less evidence both to support their authenticity and their interpretation.

In conclusion, the claim “Religious experiences are good pointers to the existence of God” will only be accepted by those who are open to the existence of God on other grounds and is unlikely to persuade non-religious people of God’s existence. As Anthony Flew wrote in God and Philosophy (1966), responses to religious experiences… ‘seems to depend on the interests, background and expectations of those who have them rather than on anything separate and autonomous…” Take AJ Ayer’s conversion experience.  Even the medically documented experience of a committed atheist and expert Philosopher is explained away in physiological and psychological terms by those who see it as impossible. Ayer eventually denied his own experiences, attributing them to the effects of cerebral anoxia or shock, rather than change his prior assessment of probability.  In “The Blind Watchmaker” Richard Dawkins wrote that if he witnessed a marble statue waving its hand at him he would prefer to check himself into the nearest psychiatric hospital than accept that he had witnessed a miracle. What better demonstration can there be of the effects of prior probability on the likelihood of people accepting religious experiences as a good pointer to the existence of God?

Further Reading

Richard Gale on Swinburne’s Argument from Religious Experience

 

Irenaeus successfully defends God against charges of creating or allowing evil and suffering. Discuss (40)

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

The problem of evil and suffering continues to trouble all those with conventional Christian faith.  If God is, as Christian doctrine suggests, both omnipotent and omnibenevolent then why would evil and suffering exist within His creation?  David Hume pointed out an “inconsistent triad” of beliefs underpinning Christian faith and in the 1980s JL Mackie went so far as to call anyone basing faith on the propositions

  • P1: God exists and is omnipotent (and omniscient)
  • P2: God exists and is omnibenevolent
  • P3: Evil exists

“positively irrational.”  Because of this it is of the utmost importance for Christians – at least those with propositional faith – to address the problem of evil and suffering and defend God against the charge of creating or allowing either.  Such defences have traditionally been called theodicies, from the Greek words for God and defence.  One attracting attention in the past few decades is the Irenaean theodicy, as developed by John Hick and more recently by Richard Swinburne.  However, while the Irenaean theodicy might offer Christians ways of reconciling their faith with the real experience of suffering, Irenaeus’ original arguments offer little to the modern believer because they are unsuccessful in defending the concept of God that most Christians uphold. 

Back in the 2nd Century AD at a time of persecution and pogrom St Irenaeus was one of the first Christian writers to attempt a theodicy and explain why God would allow good people to suffer along with – and often more acutely than – sinners.  In Against Heresies, published around 186AD, Irenaeus argued that human beings were created by God in an infantile state and had to grow and develop through experiencing suffering, to fulfil their God-given natures.  In Book IV Chapter 38, Irenaeus explained how

“created things must be inferior to Him who created them, from the very fact of their later origin; for it was not possible for things recently created to have been uncreated.”

It seems that Irenaeus conceived of a God whose omnipotence does not include the ability to do what is logically impossible.  Atheist philosophers like JL Mackie would dispute this and ask why an all-powerful God could not create a world in which the laws of logic ran differently, especially if doing so would make the world a better place?  Of course, Irenaeus would not be alone in arguing that God could not create a world that is so substantially different from this one. St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas would both agree that because God’s creation must have been single and simple and this world exists it follows that God would not have created multiple different types of world.  Further, if God is perfect it follows that God would only have created worlds of the best-possible type and as this world exists, this world must be of this type.  Nevertheless, the atheist objection to the supposed compatibility between God’s omnipotence and his being constrained by the laws of logic still seems persuasive.

Irenaeus continued by arguing that as mankind depends on God, human beings are contingent and necessarily less than perfect.  It is fair to say that this point betrays Irenaeus’ anthropomorphic understanding of God and His act of creation.  He wrote…

“Because, as these things are of later date, so are they infantile; so are they unaccustomed to, and unexercised in, perfect discipline.”

For Irenaeus, God’s creations are like God’s children and are affected by the type of imperfections that we know that children are affected by.  While this is appealing on one level, it is difficult to maintain the idea that the atrocious suffering of the 20th century could be justified as consequences from childish mistakes or opportunities to develop resilience.

To push the analogy that Irenaeus suggests, what sort of parent would allow the Holocaust to happen… whatever message it might send to their children about making sensible choices? Surely there are limits.  Irenaeus has difficulty in accounting for the extent of suffering in the world without supposing that inequalities in our experiences could be made right through the afterlife.  John Hick later develops this aspect of Irenaeus’ thinking, but even in his account it is difficult to accept that the appalling and apparently pointless suffering of a young child with an agonising cancer or animals undergoing vivisection can be justified as part of some lesson that God is trying to teach people. Any amount of heavenly bliss would be inadequate – if the person or animal in heaven remembered their former agonies then an eternity in heaven might be a continuance of their suffering and if their memories were erased then it is difficult to see how heaven could be any sort of mitigation for the unjust pointless suffering that individuals experience.  If a wrongly-convicted prisoner was told that somebody else would be compensated for their suffering – or that they would receive compensation only after they had advanced dementia and could not connect the compensation with the miscarriage of justice – they would hardly be satisfied.

Irenaeus argued…

“For as it certainly is in the power of a mother to give strong food to her infant, [but she does not do so], as the child is not yet able to receive more substantial nourishment; so also it was possible for God Himself to have made man perfect from the first, but man could not receive this [perfection], being as yet an infant.”

The implication is that God could have created human beings perfect but chose not to because human beings could not cope with the weight of perfection.  This makes little sense.  If it was within God’s power to make man perfect from the start, should it not be within God’s power to create man with the capacity to receive perfection?  God is supposed to be omnipotent and not just like any human mother. Either God is as limited as anybody, in which case He is probably not worthy of worship, or God is culpable for the consequences of creating substandard human beings.

John Hick, in his “Evil and the God of Love” (1966) argued that Irenaeus’ writings offer the germ of a Theodicy which might satisfy modern Christians better than the traditional Augustinian Theodicy.  It might be argued that Hick’s development of Irenaeus’ ideas shows that they might offer a successful defence of God against charges of creating or allowing evil and suffering.  However, Hick’s “Irenaean Theodicy” draws on Origen and Schleiermacher as much as on Irenaeus and anyone who takes the trouble to read Against Heresies for themselves will see the distance between what Irenaeus argues and what Hick’s Irenaean Theodicy argues.   Irenaeus focusses on God’s justice and the idea that human beings deserve any amount of hell-fire and is far from being the gentle, comforting writer that Hick was.  For Irenaeus, life is less a “vale of soul making” than an annealing process, the human body being like iron quenched in fire and icy water to make it hard. In its original form, it is probably fair to say that Irenaeus’ Theodicy is at least as abhorrent as Augustine’s to the modern reader.

In conclusion, it seems that Irenaeus fails to defend God from charges of creating or allowing evil and suffering.  Firstly, unlike Augustine, Irenaeus leaves the nature of evil open and fails to head off the argument that God actively created evil.  Secondly, Irenaeus offers no convincing explanation for the inequality in our experience of suffering or for its pointless and unjustifiable extremes.  John Hick had a good go at reawakening interest in Irenaeus, but that interest is unlikely to survive the process of going beyond Hick’s account of Irenaeus to the original work.

Further Reading

Irenaeus: Against Heresies (New Advent)