Atheist Purification and the Case of Ryan Bell

I’ve been following with some interest the year-long journey of former Seventh-Day Adventist preacher Ryan Bell, who made the decision a little over a year ago--in the midst of a crisis of faith--to try on atheism for a year. His Year Without God has generated some strong reactions and is nicely chronicled not only in various media pieces but on his own blog.

Bell, at the conclusion of his year-long journey, has announced that he isn’t going back. "I don't think God exists,” he told NPR's Arun Rath. His year without God will be, it seems, longer than a year.

So what do I think of this? Do I share William Lane Craig's catastrophizing view that Bell's journey is "spiritually disastrous" and that "If this man really does consistently live out an atheistic lifestyle, it could do irreparable harm to the Christian church"? 

No. In fact, it may do the church some good. Much hinges, I think, on whether Bell's journey towards atheism reflects more of the spirit of Simone Weil, or more of the spirit of Blaise Pascal. Let me explain. 

When I first heard of Bell's existential experiment, one thing that immediately came to mind was Simone Weil’s notion that atheism can be a “purification.” This idea may seem strange coming from a religious mystic committed to relinquishing herself to God. But it makes more sense once we pay attention to the terrifying danger she saw in gods of the imagination. 

As Weil puts it, “The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.” Put another way, our imaginations are very good at constructing false gods that block the pathway through which the genuinely divine might enter our souls. (I would add that cultures are good at it, too, so if we simply adopt our notion of God from cultural institutions rather than our own imaginations, we aren't any better off.)

The divine, as Weil sees it, defies conceptualization. At one point Weil says, “I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word.” But she pairs this atheistic assertion with a contrasting claim that is more suggestive than clear: “I am quite sure there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory.”  And as she puts it, “that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion.”

Weil’s theistic counter-claim becomes clearer when we recall key features of her spiritual journey. Her love of God was sparked by unexpected mystical experiences that shattered her understanding of what was possible—mystical encounters with a love “like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.” But she still “half refused” to accept what she had experienced. As she put it in a letter to her friend and confidante, Father Perrin, 

For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.

Weil made it clear to Father Perrin that it was her intellect, not her love, that resisted the urgings of her mystical experiences. I get the sense that her intellectual resistance was in service to her love. She did not want her love to fall on a false object. She wanted her love to be true. And to keep it true, she had to be rigorously critical of any particular conceptualization of the divine. 

On Weil's view of things, all false images of God must fall before the critical scrutiny of the intellect. Only then will the true God—who transcends our concepts but comes to us in profound experiential encounters—be the object of our love. This isn’t to say that nothing can be said about that to which mystical experience points. After all, Weil herself had things to say. But to treat what one has to say as adequate, and to place one’s hope and devotion in the image one has constructed through one’s words and thoughts—that is, for Weil, the real spiritual disaster.

Weil reminds me here of Socrates. Socrates famously held that one of the greatest impediments to knowledge was false certainty. To dislodge someone’s certainty, to cast them into a place of doubt, was for him a necessary first step in the journey towards truth. Paradoxically, this is so even if the belief happens to be true. If we have a true belief but our certainty exceeds what is warranted, then we are further from the truth than the doubter. We aren’t connected to the truth as the truth, because we cling to it in a manner that's indifferent to truth.

This is essentially the point Simone Weil is making about belief in God. It is what she means when she says, “Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other. The false God who is like the true one in everything, except that we cannot touch him, prevents us from ever coming to the true one.”

Ryan Bell’s journey towards atheism might be just the kind of purification that Weil is talking about: a step in a journey towards truth, whatever that in the end may prove to be. If we are lovers of the truth about the divine, as opposed to lovers of our particular conception of God, then we have nothing to fear from such journeys and everything to gain.

Of course, Bell's atheism might be something else. It is possible that Bell’s shift towards atheism is a product of the kind of self-indoctrination that Blaise Pascal recommends at the conclusion of his famed “wager.” After arguing that we should bet on God’s existence because the costs of doing so are trivial and the potential payoff infinite, Pascal confronts the reality that beliefs aren’t so easily controlled by our decisions. It’s one thing to tell skeptics, “It’s a good pragmatic bet to believe in God”; something else for them to actually shake off their skepticism and believe. 

And so Pascal offers a strategy for attaining faith. And how do skeptics attain faith? “(B)y acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc.” In other words, by immersing themselves in the life of the believer, surrounding themselves with believers and doing as they do. Simone Weil despised this method, by the way, precisely because it could instill belief in anything.

The same method, of course, can be pursued to promote unbelief. As Kurt Vonnegut said in Mother Night, if you pretend to be something long enough, you become what you pretend to be—whether it be a Nazi (as in Vonnegut’s novel), or a Christian…or an atheist. Is that what’s going on in Bell’s case? After a year of operating as if he were an atheist, did atheism sink in like an Aristotelian habit?

Only Bell can answer that for sure. But I doubt it. I doubt it in part because of the trajectory of his spiritual journey. According to one article, Bell was once so religiously conservative, so steeped in the anti-intellectual warnings of fundamentalist Christian culture, that in college he refused to read Voltaire because “writing such as Voltaire’s defiles the soul.”

There is a difference between immersing oneself in a particular worldview to the exclusion of rivals, with the aim of becoming a believer, and exploring an alternative worldview with an openness to being moved and transformed by it. The former treats the worldview in question as a final destination. The latter treats it as part of a journey whose final goal is not entrenchment into the worldview in question, but a deeper insight into the world. 

Pascal is recommending something more like the former—and it is something more like the former which motivated the young Ryan Bell to resist “defiling” his mind with ideas at odds with the worldview he’d chosen as his final destination. But at some point Bell broke away from that Pascalian pattern of belief-reinforcement. He left the rigid domain of false certainty for the realm of doubt and questioning. It seems to me unlikely that, in exploring atheism during his Year Without God, Bell would do so in the spirit of the very self-indoctrination he’d left behind. More likely, I think, is that his existential experiment and its outcome represent an ongoing journey.

In other words, I see Bell’s shift towards atheism as reflecting more of Simone Weil’s spirit than Pascal’s--more an exercise in spiritual purification than atheist indoctrination. Whether this is true or not will be seen in where his journey takes him next—whether he continues his exploration in the spirit that motivated his Year Without God, or whether he takes someone like Richard Dawkins as his model, and sets his heels into atheist ground as trenchantly as he once did into conservative Christian soil. 

But much of what Bell is saying these days reflects more of Simone Weil than Pascal. In one interview, he resists calling his expression of atheism a conclusion, because "conclusion is too strong a word for the provisional place I now stand and work from." This sounds as if atheism is not so much a final destination into which he intends to dig his heels, as it is a place he has come to on his journey. 

And finally, there is this sentiment from his NPR interview: "I think before, I wanted a closer relationship to God, and today I just want a closer relationship with reality." Again I cannot help but think of Weil's words: "If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms."

If there is a God who transcends our understanding, Bell may be closer to that God now than he was a year ago. 

The State of the God Debates: Some lessons from Shook vs. Craig

Back in December, I was given two opportunities on the same day--and they conflicted.

That morning I got a phone call from John Shook, a friend of mine from graduate school and a former OSU colleague who now works for the Center for Inquiry (a kind of atheist think tank). He invited me to debate him at an event in California in February--perhaps on the topic of God and morality. Later that day, I was handed the violin part for "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change." It was to run during February--encompassing the weekend of the event John had invited me to participate in.

My father having passed away just over a month earlier, I was thinking a lot about life priorities, about what goals matter the most for living a full, rich life. Participation in a debate about God and morality could certainly fit into a rich life, especially given my interests and profession. But so, too, could participation in the musical. The question was which would do more for me, at this point in my life, to help me build the best kind of life I am capable of.

I've been a violinist since the second grade--far longer than I've been a philosopher. In high school, playing the violin was central to my identity, and I very seriously considered a career in music. I've been involved with the local community theatre for far less time, but it has been a rich source of creative opportunity and community. And here was a rare chance to bring my long training as a violinist into the communal creativity of community theatre.

That's what I chose, and I haven't regretted it. In fact, the experience of connecting with this particular cast has been a great gift. I've made new friendships, deepened old ones, and laughed more these last few weeks than I have in years. The experience has also opened further doors for musical creativity. I've come to know the keyboardist, a very talented musician who does music (among other things) for a living and is eager to have me play with her band on numbers which call for a violin or fiddle part.

The debate with John would've looked better on my professional CV. It might have sold some of my books and helped get some of my ideas out to audiences who otherwise would've have heard them. These aren't trivial things, and I hope to have other opportunities to pursue these things.

But I doubt that flying out to California for a debate would've fed my soul the way that the last few weeks of communal, playful, joyful creativity have done. Part of the reason for that has to do with the current state of the God debates.

This morning, with the date for the debate-that-might-have-been drawing near, I found myself thinking about the option I turned down and I took another look at parts of John's debate with William Lane Craig from a couple of years ago. It reminded me of why debates of the sort exemplified there don't feed my soul (and why I wouldn't want to debate Craig).

Let me say, first, that intellectual exchange with those who disagree with me can feed my soul quite richly. I really enjoy going to professional philosophy conferences to present papers. And at such conferences, there is always a designated commenter on the paper you present. The commenter typically raises objections and critical questions. Sometimes the exchange that follows has some of the character of a debate. But it's also constructive. Each is afforded the space to develop his or her thoughts. If someone makes a good point, it is (usually) quickly acknowledged. And if someone is trying to make a potentially good point but is having some trouble finding the best way to articulate it, others will sometimes jump in (perhaps even a philosophical opponent) with a clarifying question: "Is this what you're trying to say?"

At its best, the aim at a philosophy conference is to increase clarity and deepen the collective understanding of the philosophical problem and the best arguments for alternative solutions.

That isn't the aim in most of the current God debates--where the objective is to win. When John first proposed a debate, my counter-offer (this was before I was invited to be part of the musical) was to have a philosophical conversation--that is, something more like what happens at a philosophy conference than like what happens in typical God debates. John thought that sounded great. But I know that even if we went into the event in that spirit, we would be doing so in a context defined by a different spirit--one in which the zero-sum model of a sporting event seems to prevail. And it's easy to get sucked in by that broader spirit--especially if you have an ego (as both John and I do).

One clip I looked at this morning from the Shook-Craig debate strikes me as instructive here. It appear on youTube under the belligerent title "Dr. William Lane Craig humiliates Dr. John Shook." Here's the clip:



There are a few lessons I want to extract from this clip. First off, the title of the clip is misleading. What appears here is a brief moment in a considerably longer exchange in which neither debater humiliated themselves, even if Craig did manage to trip John up a couple of times here. I'm not saying that Craig didn't make some legitimate points that should have been made--but the title of the clip treats this as equivalent to scoring points against an opponent in a win/lose sporting match. It's as if the video's poster is delighting in a good blow landed by a favored boxer in a title fight.

And then there's the applause. That doesn't happen at philosophy conferences. And when, in this clip, does the applause happen? When one debater "scores a point" against the other.

But the most important point I want to make is this: Presumably because Craig was interested in winning the debate, he didn't display any interest in unpacking the analogy that John was trying to invoke, to understand that analogy within the larger context of John philosophical convictions. Adept at debate, Craig piped in with telling questions or comments (verbal jabs) before John could fully develop his line of thought. This put John into a defensive posture which made it hard for him to collect his thoughts so as to be able to connect the example to its larger philosophical context.

Since I know John, I know that larger context. I pretty sure I know what he was trying to do. John is a specialist in John Dewey, an American pragmatist. Put in somewhat oversimplified terms, what matters most for pragmatism is how our ideas and beliefs are related to behavior. If two seemingly different philosophies have the same pragmatic impact--if they affect how we behave in identical ways--then they have the same pragmatic meaning. The test of truth, for pragmatism, is how an idea works in practice.

So how does that connect with the analogy John was trying to use, about investing money in the stock market? Here's the thing: If I have my money in the bank and I have no good reason to suppose that moving it to the stock market will be to my advantage--and I am risk-averse--then I will behave in the same way that I would if I have my money in the bank and believe that putting it in the stock market would be a bad idea, ultimately losing me money.

Craig is clearly correct to say that the lack of evidence for the view that the stock market will rise in the coming months is not evidence that it won't. But for the hypothetical potential investor with a conservative disposition, the absence of such evidence will have the same pragmatic significance as evidence that the stock market won't rise in the coming months. The belief clusters here are pragmatically the same. For someone who is a pragmatist, these two belief clusters have the same pragmatic meaning.

So, from this perspective, consider someone who (a) operates as if the natural world is all that exists until convinced otherwise by evidence of a supernatural reality, and (b) hasn't yet been convinced otherwise. Even if this person acknowledged that one cannot know that the natural world is all there is, this person would qualify as a naturalist from a pragmatic perspective. Why? Because the person operates practically in the same way that someone who is convinced that there is no supernatural reality would operate. Such a person is a pragmatic atheist. John has said to me before (not in these precise words) that he isn't big on the category of agnosticism precisely because self-professing agnostics typically operate as if there is no God--and so, from the standpoint of pragmatic philosophy, they are atheists.

John may very well have defined naturalism as the belief that the natural world we know through empirical inquiry exhausts what's real. But if he was operating with a pragmatic understanding of "belief," being a naturalist in this sense is consistent with being agnostic (in a more conventional sense) about the existence of a supernatural reality.

John is perfectly capable of making these points. But Craig's debating style, evidenced in this clip, interfered with rather than facilitated John's ability to lay out what he was really wanting to say. This made it possible for Craig to invoke more traditional terminology--which does recognize a distinction between agnosticism and atheism even when a person who professes not to know behaves as if there is no God. The result is that John's position could be neatly knocked down--but it was a mischaracterization that was being knocked down.

What John is committed to is the idea that, in the absence of compelling reasons to believe in a supernatural reality, we should operate as if there is none. We should be naturalists or atheists in the pragmatic sense. He is also committed to the view that there are no good reasons in favor of the idea that there are supernatural realities. Now, I disagree with John on both points. My first book, Is God a Delusion?, can in some ways be seen as an extended critique of both of John's commitments here, with special emphasis on the first.

But my point is this: We don't do the pursuit of wisdom a service by using the sort of debate techniques that interfere with the ability of others to lay out their position with the clarity needed to assess it on its own terms. Were Craig operating in professional philosopher mode rather than debate mode, he might have said, "If we take your investing analogy in such-and-such a way, it just seems silly. So I suspect you might mean something else by it. What would that be?"

But the current state of the God debates discourages that more philosophical approach. And it's not just theists who are guilty of favoring the pursuit of victory over the pursuit of philosophical clarity, even if in this clip it is the theist who's doing it. The new atheists offer plenty of examples of the same sort of thing.

Now none of this is to say that there isn't a place for debate. I think debate can be helpful in sparking more meaningful critical dialogue. Debates are exciting, and can attract interest in  toipc. The seductive power of the competition, the zero-sum face-off, can draw people into an issue in a way that exposes them to opposing arguments they wouldn't otherwise have heard, perhaps stimulating deeper reflection and more substantive dialogue. Unfortunately, this very same seductive power of zero-sum confrontation makes it always in danger of eclipsing and replacing more productive dialogue.

This is not just a danger in the contemporary God debates. Too much of what goes on in the exchanges between theists and atheists has just this zero-sum character. And that is why community theatre does more to feed my soul.

But real dialogue between people of opposing views can be deeply rewarding. It can be a creative and communal activity every bit as rich as working to create a theatrical production. I like to think that this blog is one place where such deeper dialogue can happen on issues about religion and God and ethics. The question is how we work to make that kind of dialogue happen more. How do we make meaningful critical discourse the natural outflow of those more sexy "debates" that bring attention to the issues--as opposed to allowing such discourse to be eclipsed by the debates?

Thoughts?

Craig Debates an Empty Chair

It’s the dream match-up, the ultimate showdown in the contemporary God debates: In one corner we have William Lane Craig, a prolifically published professor of philosophy with dual PhD’s in philosophy and theology, and arguably the most prominent living Christian apologist.

In the other corner we have Richard Dawkins, Oxford biologist, bestselling author of books explaining and defending evolutionary biology to a general readership, and—largely by virtue of his hugely bestselling The God Delusion—arguably the most prominent living apologist for atheism.

Or not.

When Craig began to plan a fall 2011 series of debates and lectures in the United Kingdom, many thought it was the ideal opportunity for Craig to finally face off, one on one, against Richard Dawkins. Instead, on Tuesday evening Craig--at least if the event lived up to its billing--lectured opposite an empty chair, one symbolically placed to remind the audience of Dawkins’ absence.

It is true that the two have appeared once before on opposite sides of a debating stage. The event, however, was a tag-team panel debate in Mexico between three atheists and three theists, on the question, “Does the Universe Have a Purpose?” And that event gave little opportunity for either of them to probe the other’s views.

The most substantive interaction in Mexico was a kind of straw man exchange. Craig, focusing narrowly on the topic of the debate (as he is wont to do), defended the view that theism makes life objectively meaningful in a way that atheism does not. He made sure to note explicitly, however, that this conclusion does not as such give us reason to believe that God exists—a view that Craig defends on other grounds. Dawkins responded by attributing to Craig the argument that God must exist because a universe without God is too unpleasant to contemplate.

Theists and atheists alike have been hungry for something more substantive—an opportunity for Dawkins to respond explicitly to the objections Craig has been leveling against The God Delusion for the last few years; or a chance for Dawkins to directly challenge the arguments for God’s existence that Craig didn’t have a chance to develop in Mexico.

But Dawkins has steadfastly refused to play. The pressure to debate Craig during his UK visit was strong. There were separate debate invitations from the British Humanist Association, the Cambridge Debating Union, the Oxford Christian Union, and Premier Radio. There was even a much-publicized insinuation of cowardice by a fellow atheist and Oxford don, Daniel Came.

But the final blow to those hoping to see a face off between Dawkins and Craig came last week, days before Craig’s scheduled Oxford lecture, when Dawkins felt called to make a public defense of his decision. It appeared in the form of an essay in The Guardian, “Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig.”

In that essay, Dawkins begins by minimizing the significance of Craig as a public intellectual and defender of Christianity. “Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig,” he begins. “He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name either.”

To get this result from a consultation of philosophy professors, Dawkins must have been careful to consult only philosophers long dead. Indeed, as a professional philosopher myself I would be hard-pressed to find colleagues who haven’t at least heard the name of William Lane Craig. And in the sub-field of philosophy of religion, it would be hard to find any who weren’t well-acquainted with at least some of his work.

This is not to say he enjoys universal respect. In fact, many would likely make a low growl or roll their eyes on hearing his name. Some might say he’s not really a philosopher in any true sense, because he uses what are admittedly substantial philosophical skills mainly in the service of Christian apologetics.

But in a discipline that still practices blind refereeing in professional journals, Craig has enjoyed enormous output. And few would deny the significance of his scholarly contributions to the philosophy of religion, especially in connection with his revival and defense of the so-called Kalam Cosmological Argument.

And over the years, Craig has had one-on-one debates with a veritable who’s-who list of academically astute atheists: Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchen, Victor Stenger, Paul Kurtz, Anthony Flew, just to name some of the more renowned. Indeed, one might make the case, given Craig’s reputation as a formidable debater, that Dawkins’ absence from this list is a bigger credit to Craig’s reputation than would be his appearance on it.

Nevertheless, in his account of why he refuses to debate Craig, Dawkins dusts off the dismissal he’s borrowed from a former Royal Society president to rebuff creationists’ debate invitations: “That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine.”

When the debate invitations come from creationists who want to attack the theory of evolution, this rebuff actually makes sense. Such creationists are people with little or no legitimate scientific background who want to challenge the credibility of evolutionary theory in debate with a renowned evolutionary biologist. Even if Dawkins could easily wipe the floor them, the act of dignifying them a place next to him on a podium would lend a false stature to their arguments and credentials.

But in this case the proposed debate has almost the opposite character (and not just because Craig is uninterested in denying the science of evolutionary theory). In this case, what we have is an established professional in the philosophy of religion inviting Dawkins—who has no philosophy of religion training but who’s nevertheless written a popular book on the topic—to discuss issues in the philosophy of religion. Let me say that another way: Dawkins, a non-philosopher, is being invited to take the stage with an accomplished philosopher to discuss philosophical arguments. Under these conditions, Dawkins’ invocation of the Royal Society president’s rebuff rings hollow.

But Dawkins saves his main argument for last, when he points to some deeply troubling dimensions of Craig’s apologetics: specifically, Craig’s effort to defend Old Testament reports of God commanding genocide. Craig seeks to argue that these reports might be taken as veridical, as genuine accounts of divine commands, without thereby undermining the moral perfection of God.

These arguments are hardly central to Craig’s public apologetics. The passages Dawkins quotes don’t come from Craig’s published works or lectures, but from the Q&A section on his website, practically buried among hundreds of questions on more traditional apologetic topics (one wonders how and why Dawkins came across them). Nevertheless, Craig said the things he said there, and he stands by them—and Dawkins largely lets them speak for themselves. He quotes them and invites us to look upon them with horror.

Like Dawkins, I find Craig’s efforts seriously disturbing—even after looking at the quoted passages in their broader context, in which Craig (among other things) confesses that they “offend our moral sensibilities” and then roots this aversive response in the jarring contrast between the genocide passages and what he takes to be the holistic ethical message of Scripture.

In my view he should’ve stopped there. In purely pragmatic terms, do we really want to say, as Craig does, that since children are innocent and will be ushered into heaven at death, God might very well command their slaughter since such slaughter would do them no harm (and might do them some good by taking them out of the world before they can fall into mortal sin)? Do we really want to lend this sort of presumptive credibility to the claim that indiscriminate slaughter of children and adults can enjoy divine sanction? What implications does Craig’s argument here have for how we should assess contemporary terrorist claims to be acting on God’s will?

If this were legitimately Dawkins’ reason for refusing to share a stage with Craig, one might at first see it as principled, even heroic. Can we really dignify such apologetics-run-amok with a public platform?

Of course, this argument may be nothing but a pretext. Perhaps, as one author recently insinuated, the obscure source of these quotations suggests that  Dawkins did "a little internet trolling" in order to dredge up a rationale for a decision already made. There is, after all, a much more obvious reason why Dawkins might refuse to debate Craig: He was afraid he'd lose.

This wouldn't be an idle fear, given Craig’s years of experience debating atheists, and his extensive training in philosophy and theology. He's a more formidable debating opponent than, say, the bishops Dawkins has expressed a willingness to take on (since the latter are devoted to ministerial and administrative tasks rather than to honing their arguments for theism). And even though Dawkins is clearly convinced that he has the truth, he knows full well that in a debating context, having the truth doesn't guarantee a win.

If so, I’m not at all convinced that “cowardice” is the right word for such motivations. Consider: In the recent book that John Kronen and I wrote defending Christian universalism, one of our targets was Craig. I’ve challenged Craig’s views on hell before—in what I think is one of my best philosophical articles. I still think my critique of Craig is brilliant and devastating. In broader terms, I’m pretty darned confident that, on the issue of hell, my arguments are better than Craig’s.

But if he challenged me to a public debate on the doctrine of hell, I think I’d refuse. Why? First, because I don’t think the public debate format is the best way to explicate and assess the arguments on both sides with the degree of precision that’s required. Second, because I’m a plodding thinker who needs to consider and think about arguments for awhile before responding to them, and who generally feels compelled to rewrite and revise what I say multiple times before I’m confident it expresses what I really mean. I feel an obsessive need to qualify and nuance my remarks, sometimes to the point of losing my audience.

And I say “Um” a lot.

And so, in a debate with Craig, I’d be trounced. And I’d lose convinced I had the better arguments on my side—and I’d rush home and write up what I should have said, publishing my crushing refutation of Craig in a book that nobody will read.

Knowing this, is it cowardice to refuse to debate Craig? Or is it simply an honest recognition of my own limitations, and a recognition of the fact that debates are sometimes lost by people with the better arguments on their side, simply because the opponent is the better debater? Perhaps Dawkins, although convinced he has the truth on his side, knows full well that the debate format will favor Craig and thus hurt Dawkins’ cause and hence the truth as Dawkins sees it.

If so, this the decision not to debate isn’t cowardice but an expression of certain virtues—among them, honesty with oneself.

But if this is Dawkins’ real motivation, he isn’t being honest with the rest of the world. While his decision not to debate for reasons of this sort may be legitimate, his overall behavior remains less-than-admirable. So let’s assume that his stated reasons are honest: He is so offended by what Craig stands for that he doesn’t want to lend those ideas the kind of platform that a public debate with Dawkins would generate.

The problem, of course, is that Craig already enjoys an enormous public platform. The controversy around Craig’s visit to the UK virtually guaranteed a large audience for his UK lecture/debate tour, whether Dawkins was a part of it or not. And while there’s something to be said for refusing to dignify certain arguments with a response, it’s sometimes necessary—and, we might think, the job of public intellectuals—to take on bad arguments and explain why they are bad. This is especially true when the bad arguments are being voiced by prominent figures who happen to enjoy a substantial audience. Do we really want to allow their claims to stand unchallenged?

But there is, a think, a deeper reason why, if Dawkins was being sincere about his reason for not wanting to debate Craig, he should’ve reconsidered. As a reason to refuse a debate with Craig, his moral objection comes off sounding like a smokescreen whether it is or not. It’s painfully easy for a jaded public to roll their eyes, dismiss his moral indignation seriously, and conclude, “He’s just afraid he’ll lose.” And under those circumstances, his moral message itself is lost behind its perceived insincerity.

Another, more powerful gesture in support of this moral message would have been possible if Dawkins had actually shown up for the debate. Dawkins says he doesn’t want to shake Craig’s hand. But one needn’t shake someone’s hand to debate them. Consider the impact of showing up for the debate—a context in which handshakes are customary—and refusing to shake Craig’s hand…and then explaining why with all the moral indignation of which Dawkins is so eminently capable.

Rude? Yes. But people couldn’t cynically dismiss the moral message as nothing but a smokescreen for cowardice. The refusal, precisely because of its deliberate violation of normal etiquette, would carry no small measure of symbolic weight. In fact, this is why I think it's sometimes morally right to be rude.

As it is, the weightiest symbol of this event may have been an empty chair.

Who's an Apologist?

Am I one? My first book, Is God a Delusion?, was called a work of Christian apologetics often enough—but I think the assumption that it was such a work lies behind many of the more uncharitable misreadings of it.


I certainly don’t think of myself as an apologist. Nor do I want that label for myself. Most of my work in Christian philosophical theology has involved adopting a critical stance towards such traditional Christian teachings as the just war tradition, the doctrine of hell, the doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration, and the categorical condemnation of homosexual intimacy.

But this critical stance has also been an internal one. That is, I have criticized Christian teachings from within. And when I first started reading the New Atheists, I found myself in the odd position of strongly disagreeing with their overall perspective towards theistic religion while, in fact, agreeing with many if not most of their most explicit criticisms. New Atheists like Richard Dawkins struck me as a bit like a tone-deaf person in the 1940’s who has never experienced the joys of opera but who is well schooled in human health issues—and who proceeds to scathingly denounces opera because the singers are on average too fat.

In my recent interview for the [ad hoc] Christianity podcast, the topic of apologetics came up, and I had the chance to try to formulate my thoughts on the topic. I suggested that apologists such as William Lane Craig operate like defense attorneys in a courtroom. Their goal is not to find the truth, but to vigorously defend their client. While such vigorous defense of a position can have a place in intellectual life—and while people such as Craig have much to say that is worth listening to—I would much rather be an explorer than a defense attorney.

That is, I have always seen myself as on an intellectual journey of discovery. This doesn’t mean I’m not prepared to vigorously defend a position (“This seems like a much more promising path if we want to find the lake, since it tracks the stream’s course, and there’s reason to think the stream is emptying into the lake”; “That strikes me as far too dangerous a road to travel; just look at the recent signs of rockslides, not to mention the bear prints!”). But it does mean that I don’t see myself as primary in the business of “defending the faith.” Living the faith, yes—but living it in the sense of living in it—in a rich landscape full of treasures as well as traps, wonderful vistas as well as bear caves.

This analogy is imperfect, since living the faith is, in another sense, a matter of seeing the same landscape that others live in through a distinctive set of glasses—and since what I want to explore is not merely the landscape, or the landscape as seen through this set of lenses, but the issue of “fit.” How well does this "prescription" help me to navigate on my journey? How well does it help me to see and appreciate the scenic overviews? What do others profess to see that I don’t, and what do I see that they don’t? How might these lenses be refined in the light of these insights? I don’t see how I can pursue these questions if I don’t put on the glasses. Nor, however, do I see how I can pursue these questions if all I care about is defending the glasses against all challenges to their adequacy.

But insofar as I am that kind of explorer, I do feel compelled to defend the validity of the kind of exploration I am doing when it is challenged. Do I then become an apologist?

I have a feeling that the glasses analogy is about to reach the end of its usefulness, so let me leave analogies behind for now and address explicitly what sparked this reflection. In response to my [ad hoc] Christianity interview, a regular commenter on this blog, Burk, posted here the following challenge:

I appreciated your consideration of William Lane Craig, for putting his cart before his horse. But then you also state your aim at the outset of your own polemical exercises, which is to show that religion can be intellectually respectable. Statements to this effect pepper your book and blog.

What if it isn't intellectually respectable? What if you are presuming what you seek to show, for reasons that are palpably emotional and inchoate? Sure, you may wish for intellectual respectibility, but have you gotten there? The whole idea of god is very much in question and remains to be shown in any "intellectual" sense. Thus the various projects of going beyond this towards "him" keeping "his" hand out to all sinners, saving them from "hell" and taking them to "heaven".. it is all risible- very much beneath intellectual respectibility.

Let me try to restate this challenge by first explicating what I take to be two characteristic features of apologists: first, they take the truth of a traditional body of doctrines as a given and then direct their intellectual resources to the task of defending that body of doctrine against challenges; second, their aim is to show not merely that their belief system is reasonable, but that—at least when it comes to its most central pillars—their system offers the most reasonable position, or perhaps the only reasonable one. Those who deny these pillars are therefore defective in their rationality. Put another way, the apologist is engaged in a kind of zero-sum contest of the sort one sees in sporting competitions and courtrooms, and is attempting to come out the winner.

Let me say a few things about these two features. The first seems to me a necessary condition for being an apologist: You have to be playing the intellectual game of defending your belief system against challenges—as opposed, for example, to critically examining those challenges to decide whether they have merit, and if so what changes in one’s belief system are called for. This feature may also, I think, be a sufficient condition for being an apologist—that is, even if the second feature doesn’t obtain, you might still be classified as an apologist. That said, the second feature is certainly very typical of apologists even if not strictly necessary. My own inclination is to treat it as characteristic but not necessary, and thus to distinguish between two kinds of apologists: the more common “adversarial apologist,” and what we might call the “friendly apologist.”

But even if we regard the second feature as necessary, it is clearly not sufficient. Every one of us views some positions we hold as not only reasonable, but as more reasonable than the alternatives. For example, I think the earth is roughly spherical, and I think any Flat-Earthers out there are being unreasonable in denying this. Am I therefore an apologist for the ball-shaped character of our planet? Not necessarily. First off, I might not feel inclined to defend my view about the earth's shape against Flat Earth challenges.

But even if I did defend my position, I wouldn't necessarily be an apologist for it. After all, I might consider the weight of the Flat Earth objections, decide after a fair and balanced reflection on them that that they are uncompelling, and then explain why. While I end up defending Round-Earthism, I'm not operating as a defense attorney for it, since I first considered the arguments against it fairly before deciding that they didn't work--and might have decided the other way.

But what if I roll my eyes dismissively, never taking the Flat-Earther argument seriously as I demolish it. Am I an apologist then? Not necessarily. Suppose (as I think is true) my commitment to the roundness of the Earth—and my belief about the selective irrationality of Flat-Earthers—is based on exposure to an enormous body of intellectually compelling evidence. There was a time, perhaps, when the Flat-Earth position was credible in the light of the available evidence. But as our body of evidence grew there were debates and discussions about the significance of that evidence. The Round-Earth theory grew in strength and plausibility, and the objections to it from the Flat-Earth camp proved themselves to be based on unsound thinking or incomplete knowledge.

And today, if the objections coming from the Flat-Earth camp are the same old ones that have already been thoroughly discredited, I'm not being an apologist even if I start out the debate convinced that the objection to my view is empty. My attitude is not “This objection *must* be vapid, since it conflicts with my belief; the task at hand is to figure out how and why it is vapid.” My attitude is, instead, “This objection has been shown to be vapid eight hundred times already, and there’s no reason to think it will suddenly become a credible objection this time, given that the Flat-Earthers putting it forward are offering nothing new.”

The former attitude is what is most definitive of the apologist: conviction that an objection to the apologist’s view that hasn’t yet been rationally refuted has simply got to be misguided precisely because it calls into question the apologist’s view. The apologist starts from this conviction and proceeds to look for the refutation that must be there.

I’m speaking of attitudes here because I want to stress that what is important for defining someone as an apologist is the subjective approach of the individual. If Joe sincerely believes, based on his exposure to the evidence and the history of dispute about the evidence, that a certain objection to his Flat-Earth position has been decisively refuted and for this reason dismisses it, he may be a dummy or an ignoramus or a dupe, but he isn’t an apologist for the Flat-Earth position. That label is reserved for those who assume the objection must be misguided simply because it challenges Flat-Earth-ism—and then set out to make that case (rather than being convinced, however mistakenly, that the case has been effectively made).

There are, however, some fine lines here. Suppose I am presented with novel evidence against the Round-Earth view, evidence that is legitimately hard to fit with the thesis that the earth is ball-shaped (no idea what such evidence would look like, but let’s pretend). I might approach this objection with extreme skepticism, pretty sure there must be something seriously wrong with it—because the case for the Round-Earth view is so overwhelmingly strong that rejecting that view on the basis of this new bit of evidence would require me to throw out a view with massive explanatory power. Thus supported by the strength of the Round-Earth view, I look for the problem with the objection to it, sure it must be there.

Am I an apologist?

My inclination here is to say that since “apologist” is a term of art it doesn’t much matter what answer one gives, so long as one makes the right sorts of distinctions. We could say that, in this case, I am being an apologist—but a very different sort of apologist than the ones who are convinced the objection to their view must be wrong out of pride or group loyalty or wishful thinking or something else along these lines. We might distinguish, then, between apologists who base their apologetic stance on the (perceived) weight of the evidence (call them “evidentially motivated apologists”), and those who base their stance on emotions or desires or other more affective motives (call them “affectively motivated apologists”). Or we might decide that the former isn’t an apologist at all, and reserve that term exclusively for the latter.

Either way, not all people of faith who have come to the intellectual defense of religion should be characterized as apologists. For example, I am a Christian theist who has defended the intellectual respectability of theistic religion—but with respect to the first and most significant feature of apologists, I don’t see myself as a good fit, since I am more than prepared to question very traditional Christian doctrines when my experience or exposure to critical challenges strikes me as warranting it.

This is not to say that I find every objection to Christian teachings to be credible. And some strike me as the same old unsound objections that have been decisively discredited before. But even then I try to take the time to explain why I think the objection doesn’t work…in part because my conversation partner may not have heard the reasons before even if they’re old hat to me, and in part because I want to make sure the reasons for setting aside the objection really are as convincing as I think.

With respect to the second characteristic feature of apologists, while I want to argue that theistic religion can be “reasonable” or intellectually respectable (although it needn’t be), I do not strive to show that intellectual respectability is limited to the theistic position. I know thoughtful, decent people from a range of religious standpoints: atheist, agnostic, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, etc. That theism can be intellectually respectable does not, on my view, entail that atheism cannot be. This is not a zero-sum contest where the reasonableness of my position depends on the unreasonableness of its alternatives. If I’m an apologist at all, then, I’d be a “friendly” apologist. (Not that I think of myself as an apologist at all, since I’d rather be an explorer than a defense attorney).

But here is where Burk’s challenge comes in. Burk argues, in effect, that I am presuming that religion can be intellectually respectable and then directing all my intellectual energies to the task of defending this position. But all the while I am unwittingly demonstrating the intellectual risibility of religion by making pronouncements for which there is no evidence (about such things as the universal benevolence of God)—a paradigmatically irrational thing to do that is utterly characteristic of religion in all its forms, even the one that I am trying to defend. In this sense, then, I am revealing myself as an apologist—so fixated on defending a position rather than investigating its merits that I fail to see what is plain to anyone looking at the position objectively.

If this is right, I embody the first and most central feature of an apologist—not with respect to traditional Christian doctrine, but with respect to the idea that theistic religion in a broad sense can be intellectually respectable. And when this idea is at issue, I might not even qualify as a friendly apologist. Burk doesn’t address this, but there’s certainly a case for saying that I embody the second characteristic feature of apologists when it comes to the question of whether religion can be intellectually respectable. After all, I think that those who challenge the intellectual respectability of religion in all its forms are not only mistaken but are making indefensibly sweeping generalizations. I have accused them of attacking religion from the outside, and hence from a stance defined by their own starting points which are not themselves being criticized but which are employed as the basis for condemning religion. I have said that this is the wrong way to make intellectual progress. In short, I am accusing those who regard all religion as irrational of being irrational.

In short, it might be argued that I am an adversarial apologist after all—not for the truth of traditional Christian doctrine, but for the view that religion in general, and theistic religion in particular (including Christianity) can be intellectually respectable (even if it isn’t always so).

In fact, I don’t think the argument for this conclusion works--primarily because I don't think Burk's case for attributing to me the central feature of an apologist works. But since this post has gotten plenty long already, I won’t tell you why (at least not here). Instead, I’ll ask you what you think (about these classifications, about where various people fall within them, and—if you like—about what you suspect I’d say in response to the argument pinning me as an adversarial apologist).

The Final Outcome Argument

Theists often claim that naturalism strips life of positive meaning by implying that all of our activities, all of our aspirations and efforts, all of our accomplishments, are in the end swallowed up by the void. Not only does every human life end in death (meaning oblivion or non-existence); but every civilization collapses, and even the Earth itself will come to be destroyed, and the universe become a lifeless expanse of so much celestial flotsam.

William Lane Craig expresses this objection in the following terms:

Scientists tell us that everything in the universe is growing farther and farther apart. As it does so, the universe grows colder and colder, and its energy is used up. Eventually…there will be no life, only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever-expanding into the endless darkness and the cold recesses of space, a universe in ruins… If there is no God, then man, and the universe, are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death row, we stand and simply wait for our unavoidable execution. If there is no God, and there is no immortality, then what is the consequence of this? It means that the life that we do have is ultimately absurd. It means that the life we live is without ultimate significance, ultimate value, ultimate purpose.

In his book, Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, philosopher Erik Wielenberg responds to this objection to naturalism (as well as a number of others). He calls Craig’s argument “the final outcome argument” against the meaningfulness of life. And its key premise, Wielenberg points out, is that the value that attaches to something’s final state is the value that we should attach to the whole thing. This, Wielenberg rightly notes, is a mistake. If some activity is intrinsically worthwhile, then it remains intrinsically worthwhile even if it comes to an end. If my life is full of such worthwhile activities, then my life has value—intrinsic value—even if it should come to a final and irrevocable end.

Wielenberg’s point can be made by thinking of matters in reverse: If my life has no value if it ends, then it will have no value if it is made endless. An infinite sum of zeros has the same value: zero. And so, for an immortal life to have value, the finite slices of that life must have value too—which implies, in turn, that a mortal life can have value even if what lies beyond the boundary of death is nonexistence.

In short, this particular objection to atheistic naturalism isn’t very strong. If life can have value at all, then it can have value if it comes to an end. And so belief that life comes to an end—in the limited sense of a particular organism’s inevitable death, or in the cosmic sense of the universe winding down until it, too, is dead—is not as such a reason to think life has no significance, value, or purpose.

But perhaps Craig, and others who put forward arguments of this sort, just aren’t expressing themselves very well. Maybe the problem isn’t that, if life and love and laughter must end, then they have no value while we are living and loving and laughing. Maybe the worry is better expressed in terms of Karl Barth’s Das Nichtige—the “nothingness” that lies beyond the boundaries of finite existence. This is a concept I’ve talked about before. For Barth, Das Nightige has a power, a force, that no finite creature can ultimately confront head-on without the support of an infinite God. The problem, put subjectively, is this: If you look beyond your limits, what you are not utterly dwarfs what you are. Perhaps the problem that Craig and others like him are pointing to is this: Given a naturalist universe, life and love and laughter, while intrinsically valuable, are a speck in an endless ocean of non-life, non-love, non-laughter. The value of these goods is utterly swamped by that which is entirely devoid of value, making the goods of this life of trivial significance in comparison. It’s not just that you’re dead for a lot longer than you’re alive. It’s that your dead forever. The finite value of one’s life, set against this infinite void of non-value, has a relative significance that is infinitesimally small.

In a way, of course, the same can be said of a theistic universe: Whatever value my existence has, it is swamped by the infinite value of God. But in that case, what dwarfs the finite value of my existence is positive value—and so the ultimate message is that value wins. Not my value, but value. Not my goodness, but goodness. And so, if I stop being self-absorbed and simply treasure the good wherever it is to be found, then I find myself in a world overflowing with the good, overflowing with significance. The same is not true in a reality where there is no infinite good, no infinite reality, to set against the non-being that swamps the finite reality of each creature here below. In that case, to live beyond myself, to embrace ultimate reality and live for the whole, is to live as if all positive values are, relatively speaking, trivial.

And so, in that case, I need to resist all temptation to set my worldly life against reality as a whole, to attend to its relative significance—because to do so is like stepping back from a patch of color to see that it is but a speck set against an endless sea of blackness. To appreciate the color, I have to come in close, so that the patch fills my entire vision, so that I don’t see that which swamps it. Coming in close doesn’t mean paying attention only to my own life, or only to human life. It could mean immersing oneself in the diversity of life on earth, studying it, focusing on it. Or it could stretch beyond the boundaries of this planet to the teeming galaxies and mysteries of time and space and the origins of the cosmos. What it won’t allow is dwelling on what lies beyond the borders of this finite treasure of goods. Because what lies beyond a finite reality—in the absence of an infinite source of being such as God—is the all-consuming maw of Das Nichtige.

Given a theistic universe, stepping back and taking in the whole has a different implication. Doing so will, as before, render that patch of color just a speck—but it will be a speck in an endless sea of vibrant color and beauty, one tiny fragment of a vast masterpiece.

But let’s assume that none of this is sufficient to strip life of meaning on naturalistic assumptions. Let us suppose that naturalists can preserve a sense of subjective meaning by, in effect, saying, “The great sea of nothing is nothing, and hence nothing to worry about.” If there’s nothing beyond the patch of color, then staying focused narrowly on the patch of color is staying focused on what is. And that is where we should stay focused. To set what is against everything that it is not is to set it against what we should ignore because, well, it’s nothing worth paying attention to.

If this approach can be defended successfully, then the modified version of the “final outcome argument” might admit of an effective naturalist response. Whether such a response can be adequately developed I won’t pursue here, because there is one other point I want to make about Wielenberg’s response to the “final outcome argument”: it succeeds in doing more than neutralizing a specific theistic objection to naturalism. It also neutralizes a common naturalist objection to theism, one that Wielenberg himself articulates. Here’s how Wielenberg puts it:

If we know that God will make the universe perfectly just in the end, we lose one reason for trying to promote justice, namely that if we do not, no one will—though we still have a self-interested reason to promote justice, since presumably God rewards the just.

This idea is sometimes put less cautiously that Wielenberg puts it. Essentially, the atheist asks, “If God’s providence ensures that justice will prevail in the end, then why should anyone on earth care about promoting justice? Let God do it! And if there is a reason to promote it, it can only be because we don’t want to be on the receiving end of the uglier side of God’s justice. But if we promote justice simply because we don’t want God to smite us, are we really being just at all? We’re just doing the right thing out of fear of punishment. Caring about justice simply can't be a motive for theists to pursue it, since they think it will be realized even if they do nothing. And so theists who do pursue justice can only be doing it for self-serving motives.”

But notice, if the value of something here and now isn’t erased by its coming to an end, then the disvalue of injustice here and now isn’t erased by its coming to an end. An assurance that all will be well in the end doesn’t erase the reasons we have for seeking to eliminate or reduce the severity of the evils that afflict living creatures in this life. Even if we live in the assurance that God ultimately will realize perfect justice, that doesn’t change the fact that there are injustices here and now and that it would be better here and now if there weren’t.

And so, those who care about justice would have a reason to seek to reduce or eliminate the injustices that prevail around them, even if they believe that there is a divine guarantee that all injustices will be eliminated in the end. More broadly, theists have reasons to care about reducing earthly suffering, promoting happiness, and making the world a better place—even if they’re universalists who think that in the end, all will be saved, every tear will be wiped away, and the lion will lie down with the lamb.

If this is right, then ultimately our conclusion should be this: Whatever lies beyond this life and the finite boundaries of the physical reality in which we live, whether it be Das Nichtige at one extreme or the infinite and all-redeeming God at the other, the intrinsic worth of goods in the life and the intrinsic disvalue of evils provide reasons here and now to act.
 
(Assuming, of course, that there can be intrinsic goods and intrinsic evils if Das Nichtige is all that lies beyond the borders of physical reality--but for the moment, at least, I will grant Wielenberg's assumption that this can be true even if reality is conceived in broadly naturalistic terms).

Excerpt from That Damned Book: Efficacious Grace and Rational Freedom

Since participants on this blog seem to have an ongoing interest in issues of free will, I thought I'd share something from the chapter I'm working on right now from That Damned Book. The excerpt is from the first of two chapters in which we critically assess the argument that God will not save all because to do so would require Him to trump the freedom of the unregenerate in a morally unacceptable way. In the chapter from which this excerpt is drawn, we consider the first of two responses to this "liberal" justification for the doctrine of hell--namely, the response which invokes the concept of "efficacious grace" (roughly, a divine act which guarantees the salvation of the sinner by ensuring that the sinner responds favorably to God's offer of loving union with Him). In this excerpt, we begin to consider the case for the view that it is possible for God to bestow efficacious grace. Once we narrow in on the "Thomistic" view on this matter (meaning the view endorsed by followers of St. Thomas Aquinas), we offer an account of the Thomistic view of freedom. It is this part of the excerpt that I think may be of special interest to readers of this blog.


That God can bestow efficacious grace was assumed by most older dogmaticians, whether Protestant or Catholic, who discussed the matter. But the Catholics were divided over the nature of efficacious grace. Adherents to the older Thomist and Augustinian tradition took such grace to differ in kind from so-called “merely sufficient grace” (which gave sinners all they needed for salvation other than the appropriate subjective act of will). Followers of Molina, however, held that efficacious grace does not differ in kind from sufficient grace, but differs only in virtue of the fortuitous situation the creature is placed in when receiving sufficient grace.

While volumes of scholastic theology have been written on this dispute, for our purposes a brief overview is sufficient. According to the Thomists and their Protestant followers, when God grants efficacious grace, what He does is guarantee conversion and regeneration by putting creatures in a state that influences their motives such that they have every reason to respond favorably to the offer of salvation and no reason not to. But if this is what efficacious grace involves, it raises important questions about the nature of creaturely freedom. Most significantly, one may wonder if efficacious grace is consistent with libertarian freedom—by which we mean, roughly, the power to act or not act on motives that incline but do not determine the will. Freedom in this libertarian sense exists only if, when one makes a choice, one could have chosen otherwise—that is, there is some possible world in which one chooses otherwise.

In affirming that God can grant efficacious grace, the Thomists did not mean thereby entirely to deny creatures freedom in something like this sense. Rather, they meant simply to limit its scope. Specifically, the Thomistic view is that what we call libertarian freedom is a coherent understanding of freedom only when the creature confronts conflicting motives for action. It does not extend to circumstances in which the creature has every reason to pursue a given course of action and no reason not to. Under such circumstances the Thomistic view is that the will of the creature is not merely inclined towards the given action but determined to do it. The action remains wholly voluntary, but there is no possible world in which an agent who has every motive to do A and no motive not to nevertheless refrains from doing A—and so, it seems, the action is determined even though voluntary, and so conforms to what is usually labeled “compatibilist freedom” by contemporary philosophers.

But it strikes us that this contemporary language implies something Thomists did not mean to imply—namely that there are two kinds of freedom, compatibilist and libertarian. We find it more in tune with Thomistic ideas to say that freedom simply operates differently under conditions of uniformity of motives than it does under conditions in which motives conflict. In the latter case, free choice looks like what we think of when we speak of libertarian freedom, whereas in the former case it looks like what we think of when we speak of compatibilist freedom.

If this is right, God could guarantee that the unregenerate freely-but-inevitably make the subjective choices necessary for salvation. For Thomists, this is the essence of how efficacious grace works: it brings all the creature’s motives into conformity with the choice of pursuing loving union with God above all things.

The Molinists, however, objected to the Thomistic view of efficacious grace because they took it that freedom has a libertarian character even under conditions of uniform motives. Granted this strong notion of libertarian freedom, it would initially seem impossible for God to give efficacious grace without first extinguishing the creature’s freedom. But the Molinists argued, on the contrary, that (i) God has middle knowledge, and (ii) for every rational creature there is a possible world in which she would freely (in the strong libertarian sense) respond favorably to God’s offer of salvation. That God has middle knowledge means He knows, for any creature X He might create, what X would freely do in any circumstance God might put X in. Thus God can give efficacious grace to X by creating that world in which He knows, by middle knowledge, that X would favorably respond to grace.

For a number of reasons we are unconvinced by this Molinist doctrine. First, we are not convinced that divine omniscience entails middle knowledge. It is not clear to us that, in the absence of an actual (libertarian) free choice made under an actual set of circumstances, there is any truth of the matter with respect to what the agent would freely choose in the libertarian sense. Furthermore, as William Lane Craig has shown, supposing that God does have middle knowledge does not, by itself, demonstrate that He can give efficacious grace. Hence, we will not argue here that efficacious grace is possible on the Molinist view of freedom. Given the strong libertarian perspective of the Molinists, we think a different argument for universalism (which we discuss in the next chapter), is more compelling than the argument from efficacious grace developed here.

In this chapter, then, we will argue that God has available to Him a morally permissible means of bringing it about that all a creature’s motives uniformly favor conversion. If so, then on a Thomistic view of freedom there is a morally permissible means for God to guarantee that all freely make the choices necessary for salvation.

So, is there a means whereby God could, without moral fault, bring about in a creature uniformity of salvation-inducing motives? To answer this, we think it may be helpful to develop a fuller picture of the Thomistic view of freedom by way of a contemporary philosopher—Thomas Talbott—whose thinking is very close on this matter to that of the Thomists.

Like the Thomists, Talbott insists that one cannot imagine anyone freely choosing what they have no motive to choose and every motive not to choose. Such a choice, for Talbott, is incoherent. If one is in a condition such that all of one’s motives converge on a single choice, then Talbott thinks this choice becomes inevitable.

On Talbott’s view such a choice may nevertheless be truly free—but only if certain conditions are met. Talbott argues that if ignorance or deception entails that one chooses based on misrepresentations of the alternatives (such that what one thinks one is choosing is different from what one is actually doing), then one’s freedom is impeded. And if controlling affective states entail that an agent is determined to choose one option even if informed deliberation would come down in favor of another, then the agent is “in bondage to desire” and, again, not truly free. But if someone is “freed from all ignorance, deception, and bondage to desire,” the agent’s choice is free even if all motives converge on a single option, thereby making the choice of that option inevitable.

But if all of this is right, then there will be different ways to produce conformity of motives, not all of which should be assessed in the same way. Consider the following case. Suppose Jenny grows up in a dystopian future where all children are fed a highly addictive drug from infancy. They are taught (falsely) that the drug is a medicine they need to stay healthy—while in fact it is used by a tyrannical regime to control the people. Given her addiction and beliefs, Jenny’s motives all converge on the choice to continue taking the drug. But insofar as this choice is governed by deception and addiction, it is not free in Talbott’s sense.

But suppose a resistance group reveals to Jenny the truth, so that she now knows the drug is harmful but remains addicted. She now has reason-based motives to stop taking the drug, but they are impotent because she is in bondage to her addiction. Perhaps the resistance gives her a counter-drug that weakens the strength of her addiction but does not shut down the cravings. Now, whenever she is in the vicinity of the drug, she faces an inner struggle. Sometimes, with the right help and support (and a bit of luck) she can resist her craving; but usually she falls prey to it, weeping in horror at her own weakness. At this point we might say she has some measure of freedom—but it remains constrained by the hold the drug continues to exert.

But then imagine the resistance group finds a way to break her addiction. Now she neither craves the drug nor thinks taking it is a good idea. Let’s suppose, further, that she has no other motive to continue taking it but many reasons not to: concern for her health and continued freedom from addiction, gratitude to her liberators, a desire to oppose the unjust regime, etc. Suppose, in other words, that once she is finally freed of her addiction all her motives converge on a single choice: not to take the drug. Even if this means (as Talbott and the Thomists believe) that her rejecting the drug is inevitable, we wouldn’t want to say her choice isn’t free. Rather, we’d say that, with respect to this issue, she is truly free for the first time.

This example shows, we think, that the “libertarian” and “compatibilist” labels are both inadequate for the sense of freedom that Talbott champions. Prior to help from the resistance, Jenny’s choice to take the drug would be free in the compatibilist sense—but not free in Talbott’s sense. After her final liberation, her choice to refuse the drug is free in Talbott’s sense—but not in the libertarian sense (which assumes the possibility of having chosen otherwise). What makes the choice free in the one case but not in the other is that reason is no longer impeded from playing the role it ought to play in decision-making. Hence, we think the best label for this conception of freedom is “rational freedom.” And given Aquinas’s emphasis on the natural ordering of the will to follow reason, we think such “rational freedom”—which treats only some cases of uniform motives determining one’s choices as free—best captures the Thomistic view.

Underlying this view of freedom are several presuppositions, which can be summarized as follows: (i) Values are objective, such that there are objectively good or best choices and objectively bad ones; (ii) the rational faculty makes judgments in accord with its finite grasp of this objective order of values; (iii) the will can be controlled by non-rational forces (such as addictions, childhood coping mechanisms, entrenched habits); (iv) the will is naturally ordered to choose in accord with rational judgments, such that in the absence of non-rational controlling factors the will always chooses in accord with reason.

These presuppositions imply, in brief, that the will is naturally ordered to follow reason (its “default setting,” if you will, even if the will can be reprogrammed), and that reason in turn is naturally ordered to discern the objective good. On this view, choices are free to the extent that both will and reason can operate in accord with their nature—that is, there is nothing (such as “ignorance, deception, or bondage to desire”) that impedes them from acting on their natural teleology. This, we think, captures the essence of freedom as it is understood both by the Thomists and, more recently, by Talbott.

In any event, what all of this shows is that one can bring about uniformity of motives both in ways that impede “rational” freedom and in ways that do not. As such, if efficacious grace is a divine act of producing uniformity of salvation-favoring motives in the unregenerate, this divine act may or may not impede freedom in the Thomistic sense—depending on whether this uniformity is produced by inducing false beliefs and/or affective states at odds with reason, or whether it is produced by revealing truth and removing affective barriers to acting on what reason discerns.

Given this perspective, the question is not only whether God can bring about uniformity of salvation-favoring motives in the unregenerate, but whether He can do so in a way that promotes rather than impedes rational freedom. In fact, we think it falls within the power of an omnipotent being to do both. Hence, not only do we think it is within God’s power to bestow efficacious grace. We think it is within God’s power to do so in a way that does not violate the freedom of the unregenerate—at least if “freedom” is understood in this Thomistic sense.

The Promise and Perils of Authorial Voice--Academic Edition

Recently I’ve been thinking about how the literary concept of authorial voice relates to my scholarly life. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about how authorial voice influences what I read, and by implication the direction of my research.

In a world where you can’t possibly read everything (especially if you’re a slow reader like me), you have to decide what you’ll read closely from cover to cover, what you’ll skim, and what you won’t read at all. The reality is that, for me, most books (even in my own field) fall into the last category. And at least in my own case, many end up there because of the author’s voice.

Here’s the idea behind authorial voice: authors have personalities, and reading their work can be as much an exposure to them (or at least to the personality they convey) as it is to the topic of their writing. An author has a “voice” in the literary sense to the extent that her personality comes out on the page—or even, I suppose, to the extent that it doesn't (generating the cold, impersonal voice characteristic of some academic writing). When I read, I’m exposed not only to ideas or thoughts or stories, but to the personalities that animate them.

Sometimes what this means is that I really enjoy reading the work of people I disagree with immensely. Sometimes it means that even though I don’t enjoy what they write, I’m captivated by it. And sometimes it means that reading a book is like spending an entire day with someone I can’t stand. Some people I can only take in small doses, and the same goes with their writing—I can manage an article, but an entire book would drive me mad.

There’s no question that the most successful “new atheist” authors—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—all have distinctive authorial voices. And those voices are part of what makes their books so successful. As much as I disagreed with The God Delusion, I enjoyed reading it. Dawkins’ wit and energy made it not merely an irritating read but a fun one. And while Sam Harris’s The End of Faith often made me irate (because of how I think it promulgates the kind of in-group/out-group ideological framework that I find so dangerous), the writing was elegant and compelling. Whatever else might be said about Harris, his written work has a certain charisma.

And I must confess to having a real soft spot for Christopher Hitchens. His book, god is not Great, is probably the least well-argued of the recent atheist bestsellers; but Hitchens himself may be the most compelling character. And that character comes out in his writing. While he’s prone towards pugilistic excess, it’s the sort of excess I’m inclined to forgive because of the passionate personality that motivates it. Although I not only disagree with what he says but also with the zero-sum approach he takes to debate, Hitchens nevertheless has a personality I’m drawn to. He seems like someone I’d enjoy hanging out with at a bar.

In short, "authorial voice" refers precisely to one of those things that, as a philosopher, I'm supposed to ignore so as to be able to focus on such things as the defensibility of the author's assertions, the soundness of the arguments, etc.

It is true that I have learned the art of extracting the argument in a piece of writing, then formally laying it out premise by premise, so as to assess its validity and identify possible objections. And once this work is done, I can look at the resultant argument as an artifact divorced from the personality of its originator. But even though I have been schooled in doing this, that doesn't mean authorial voice has no impact on my scholarly work. Most significantly, it impacts what I decide to read--and hence, which arguments I end up stripping of their authorial voice so that I can look exclusively at their logic.

When you commit yourself to reading a book, part of what you commit to is spending extended time in the author’s company. And if the author’s voice has the drone of that Chemistry professor who mumbled into the board every class period, then you’d better be darned sure the substance of what he has to say is worth the time, because you won’t enjoy his company.

And then there are the times when I confront what amounts to a personality clash. Despite myself, there are people in the world I just don’t like. Being in their presence is like being around an ex-spouse from a marriage that didn’t end well (but without the history to back up the feelings). Other people may get along famously with this person, but I’d just as soon eat raw chicken liver as spend an afternoon with them.

Often I can’t quite pin down the reason. Of course, they often stand for things I oppose, and this is part of my negative reaction. But there are others with the same opposing views or allegiances who don’t inspire such aversion. My aversion has to do with their character—or at least with prominent aspects of it that clash with my own.

But let me be clear. There are some people whose character I disapprove of in all sorts of ways, but I still find them fascinating. If they are authors, this personality is so arresting, and comes out so vividly, that I'm swept up by it even as I say to myself, "What a horrible person."

These are authorial voices that should repel me but don't. What I want to focus on here are the authorial voices that really do repel me. While these voices usually express character traits that I'd classify as vices, the vices aren't always those I find the most abominable on an intellectual level. Rather, they're the vices that grate most strongly against me--perhaps because they clash with vices of my own.

Sometimes this fact poses a scholarly challenge, because I find myself facing a strong aversion to reading things that, professionally, I probably ought to read.

I'm hesitant to give examples because talking about authorial voice--unlike talking about ideas and arguments--is necessarily personal. If I say that I don't like your ideas or I think your argument is fallacious, I'm not talking about you, whether or not you decide to take it personally. But when I discuss authorial voice, I'm talking about the personality of an author, at least as it comes across to me on the page.

But the grim reality is that no matter how much we might pretend otherwise, personality matters, even in academia. We are persons, affected by our perception of the personality of others--sometimes drawn together, sometimes repelled. And so, despite my hesitance, I'm going to give some concrete examples--not of people especially likely to read this blog, but of people that at least some readers of this blog are likely to have encountered and had their own reactions to (likely different from my own).

Let's begin with the conservative Christian apologist and philosopher, William Lane Craig. Whatever else might be said of him, Craig is a very smart man well schooled in philosophy who often (if not always) offers arguments worth wrestling with. And sometimes I do engage with them. For example, I challenge one of his arguments (effectively, I think) in my 2002 Religious Studies article, “Eternal Damnation and Blessed Ignorance.”

But I hate to read Craig’s work. Why? I might point out that his philosophical arguments are rigidly constrained by strict allegiance to conservative Christian dogma, and that this allegiance sometimes forces him to seriously entertain some deeply disturbing views (about, for example, the eternal fate of those who died without ever having encountered the gospel message). But there are other Christian philosophers about whom I’d be inclined to say the same, and to disapprove of for the same reason—and yet reading them doesn’t leave me feeling as if I’ve spent time with a particularly unpleasant relative.

The problem, in this case, lies with the personality on the page. There are many things that reveal that personality even in academic philosophical writing--obvious things like choice of topic, positions held, views expressed; less obvious things like word choice, strategy of argument, which objections and alternative views are taken seriously and which ignored, which metaphors or analogies are used, which ideas connected, which distinctions made.

But the truth is that when it comes to authorial voice, one doesn't deduce it from an assessment of these factors. Rather, one takes it in on an intuitive level. It's an holistic effect of the writing--sometimes one that emerges gradually, after reading quite a bit from the same author; sometimes one that hits after only a couple of paragraphs. One finds the author's voice agreeable, engaging...or not.

In the case of Craig, if I read enough for the voice to emerge (usually several pages), what strikes me is best captured by a series of personality snapshots. The first comes from my childhood. Back when I was growing up in Buffalo, NY, Michael Tilson Thomas (now music director for the San Francisco Symphony) was the conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic. Once, as I recall, I was at some fairly snooty gala event when Tilson Thomas swept in.

The impression he gave in that moment is surely not representative of his overall personality. It's just a snapshot of one small piece of it. But it's a piece that stuck with me. It wasn’t precisely arrogance. It wasn’t exactly showmanship. It had something to do with a sense of being entitled to the eyes that turned his way as he entered, as if he really believed himself to be somehow more real than everyone else in the room.

Such a personality trait, when it finds its way onto the page, isn't enough to repel me. But let's combine it with another, captured in a second snapshot--this one from an ancient philosophy class in college. The class didn't have any prerequisites, and hence was filled with students from other majors who were satisfying an upper level general education requirement. There was a philosophy major there who clearly longed to be up in front doing the teaching, and made every possible effort to achieve that dream from his seat at the back.


Three or four times every class period his hand would shoot up, all eyes would roll, and he’d begin (in a nasally voice), “This reminds me of…”—followed by a lengthy discourse on some 20th Century philosophical work nobody else had heard of. We stopped paying attention to his actual words fairly early in the semester. What we heard instead went something like this: “Look at how smart I am, and how much more I know about this stuff than any of you. I’m going to shove all your faces in my genius just the way people like you used to shove my face in the toilet back in middle school. Take that, you fools! And that! And that!”

If I weren’t so annoyed at him for hijacking the class, I’d have felt sorry for the guy. Without other characteristics woven in with it, a voice like that wouldn't repel me, although I'd tire of it pretty quickly.

But let's add a third snapshot. It comes from an event I’ve already talked about on this blog, when I was giving a talk about my book for OSU’s Fellowship of Christian Faculty and Staff. I had an exchange with a conservative member of the group, a conversation which came to a crashing halt when I expressed disagreement with him and he replied, “Then you disagree with God.” There was an expression on his face at that moment, a tightening of his lips, that sent all the blood to my face.

Weave these three things together, and you have the authorial voice of William Lane Craig, at least as it presents itself to me. It may be that the impression he gives when you meet him in person is nothing like this—but the impression that comes to me off the page is just like that.

Any of the elements by themselves wouldn’t generate the level of aversion I experience, although the "If you disagree with me you disgaree with God" trait comes close. (These words, by the way, are something Craig has the good sense never to actually voice out loud, but I nevertheless hear them in the background). But when woven together, these traits so grate on my nerves that I want to reject everything the author says—even when, as does occasionally happen in Craig's case, I agree with him.

And I suspect that my research program is influenced by this. Among other things, I simply haven’t done any scholarly work on the Kalam Cosmological Argument. None. Because there’s no possible way to do so without seriously engaging with Craig's work.

Consider another case. This one relates to a book that it seems to me I ought to read but haven’t. The book (which I think came out at around the time I was finishing my manuscript of Is God a Delusion?) is John Loftus’s Why I Became an Atheist . Loftus is a former evangelical Christian apologist and preacher who “de-converted” to atheism, and who now energetically pursues what he calls “counter-apologetics,” not only through his books and speaking engagements but through his blog, Debunking Christianity , which I make an effort to check out every once in awhile. In these respects he's very similar to the young atheist who maintains the Common Sense Atheism blog, Luke Muehlhauser. But whereas I really enjoy Luke's authorial voice and can spend considerable time reading his stuff, the same cannot be said for Loftus.

Why I Became an Atheist tells the story of Loftus’s intellectual journey from Christian apologist to proselytizing atheist, and in the process makes a case against theistic religion in general and Christianity in particular—a case that, from what I can tell, is likely to be more philosophically astute and informed about evangelical Christianity (if not progressive theology) than the bestsellers I responded to in my book.

But I haven’t read it. I suppose there are several reasons for this. One has to do with the book’s content. A driving idea behind it is what Loftus has come to call the “Outsider Test of Faith”—essentially the view that Christians should test their faith according to the same standards they use to reject rival faiths. His argument is that Christians have reasons for rejecting Hinduism and Islam and Judaism, etc.—and consistency requires that they use the same criteria to assess their own faith that they invoke in assessing others.

This principle seems sound enough within its sphere of application, but it is clearly framed in response to an exclusivist brand of religious epistemology radically at odds with the pragmatic and neo-Hegelian approach that I find compelling—an approach which leads me to articulate an inclusivist respect for alternative religious traditions conditioned by what I call (in my book) “the logic of faith”—a logic which imposes standards on when it is morally and intellectually appropriate to live as if a hoped-for possibility is true. These standards are ones I apply to my own religious life as well as to the religious lives of others. It is according to these standards that I extend conditional respect to a diversity of religious traditions—the condition being that they fall within the parameters of the logic of faith. And it is according to these standards that I trenchantly oppose more fundamentalistic expressions of Christianity.

In other words, Loftus is not talking to people like me—whom he tends to dismiss rather precipitously on his blog as engaged in little more than intellectual gerrymandering to avoid atheist arguments. As far as I can tell, he never takes seriously the possibility that our perspective was arrived at through critical reflection in the light of a range of experiences, ideas, and arguments, including those pointed out by atheists like Loftus.

And this is one reason why I haven’t read his book. But it’s not the most important reason. The most important reason has to do with authorial voice. I’ve read enough of his blog to get a sense of it. And while I sometimes don't mind it (especially when he gets caught up in the substance and details of an argument), there are too many occasions when what I'll call a belligerent self-certainty saturates his words. And it grates on me.

This aversion to his authorial voice has led me to a not-so-trivial scholarly decision: Instead of reading Why I Became and Atheist, I will look at the anthology Loftus has recently edited, The Christian Delusion, which appears to be framed around some of the same core ideas and arguments that shaped his own de-conversion. While Loftus is the author of several entries in that anthology, his voice is interspersed with those of other atheist scholars (including the anthropologist David Eller, who wrote an uncharitable review of my book which I still haven’t carved out the time and energy to responded to, even though the several key misconstruals of my thinking deserve to be corrected—if someone wants to do it for me, please feel free).

In any event, despite being a bit put off (and astonished) by the nature and scope of Loftus’s book-promotion efforts (he even has a post in which he invites readers of his blog to become mini-sales reps for the book, going so far as to encourage them to “buy up copies to hand out” to Christian family and friends), I’ll probably get my hands on a copy of The Christian Delusion. Because I can manage Loftus’s authorial voice in small doses. What I can’t handle is spending 400+ pages in his company.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Loftus, before he de-converted, was not only an apologist in the same mold as William Lane Craig, but was his student. Maybe the character triats they inculcate in evangelical apologist circles are harder to shake off than the doctrines, and it is these traits I'm reacting to in both Craig and Loftus.

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that authorial voice matters. But despite its significance, it's not the sort of thing writers should attempt to manipulate or control. If one's readers don't like the personality on the page, the solution is not to fake a different personality. No author will get far with an inauthentic voice. And nobody has a personality that everyone finds congenial.

But if our authorial voice puts off a lot of people, it may be worth asking why. That is, it may be worth asking if we have vices that are manifesting on the page, character flaws that we can and should do something about. But we don't do something about them by changing how we write. We do something about them by changing who we are--by cultivating our character. The change in our writing--at least if one of the things we cultivate is authenticity--will follow.