PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION “SOMETIMES I THINK WE’RE ALONE. SOMETIMES I THINK WE’RE NOT. IN EITHER CASE, THE THOUGHT IS QUITE STAGGERING.” — R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) [31] WHAT DOES ‘GOD’ MEAN? A major opinion poll of people living in the United States found that 92% of the respondents believed in “God or a universal spirit” (margin of error: ± 0.6%). When asked how certain they were that God exists, 71% said they were “absolutely certain” and another 17% “fairly certain” (with 3% “not too certain,” 1% “not at all certain,” and another 1% “not sure how certain”).1 The source of this certainty, or lack of certainty, was not explored in the survey. As for the meaning of the word ‘god’, the most direct question concerned God’s relationship with individual human beings. While 92% believe in “God or a universal spirit,” only 60% believe in a “personal God,” with another 25% understanding God to be an “impersonal force” (with 4% claiming God to be either both or neither, and 3% not answering this further question). Related findings: 74% believe in a life after death, but only 50% are “absolutely certain of this.” 74% believe in a heaven (where good people are rewarded), but only 59% believe in a hell. Different qualities come to mind when considering the meaning of ‘God’. Some I often hear include the follow- ing: • Creator of the universe/source of all being. • Unknowable source of all that exists. THE OMNI WORDS • Invisible, non-physical. Omnipotent = all-powerful • Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent. Omniscient = all-knowing • Supernatural (above or outside of nature). Omnibenevolent = all-loving • Savior and comforter of human beings. Omnipresent = present everywhere • Personal and providential. • Source of love or human sociability. • Wrathful judge. Another recent study of religious belief in the United States found that, despite this fairly high agreement that God exists, people in the U.S. are deeply divided on the nature of this God. Baylor sociologists Paul Froese and Christo- 1 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey” (May 8-August 13, 2007; N=35,556). Website: http://religions.pewforum.org/ —187 — 188 Philosophy of Religion pher Bader found a fairly even split between four different conceptions of God, which they characterize as falling on the axes of “engagement” and “judgment”:2 (1) The Authoritative God (31%) is high engagement and high judgment. God is involved in human his- tory, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked in this world as well as in the hereafter, powerful, punishes those who disobey, and draws a clear division between the righteous and all the rest. (2) The Benevolent God (24%) is high engagement and low judgment. God is a force for good who cares for and comforts all people. God’s effects on the world are found everywhere, and while God acts in the world, these actions are not to punish humans. These believers often see happy coincidences as mi- raculous interventions by God to help us. (3) The Critical God (16%) is low engagement and high judgment. God watches this world but rarely in- tervenes in our lives, instead settling accounts in the afterlife. This is a God most readily believed in by those who suffer deprivations but receive little assistance. (4) The Distant God (24%) is low engagement and low judgment. This God created the world then left it alone; God is the source of the physical universe and its laws, and perhaps cares about humanity in a general way, but is not a personal God who might be called upon for help or consolation. POSITIONS ON GOD’S EXISTENCE In considering religion in this section, I will focus on belief in the existence of a personal God as commonly understood OUR BOYS IN VIETNAM… in the philosophical tradition of the Western monotheistic “The reactions of many Americans to the My Lai religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), that is, as a per- massacre in Vietnam are a good example [of group fect being who is related in some important way to human loyalty distorting one’s reasoning]. On reading about beings. Given this rough description of God, we can con- My Lai, a teletype inspector in Philadelphia is re- ported to have said he didn’t think it happened: ‘I sider the different attitudes one might take towards the can’t believe our boys’ hearts are that rotten.’ This statement that “God exists.” A theist is one who believes response was typical, as was that of the person who that God exists, an atheist denies such existence, and an informed the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which had agnostic withholds judgment on God’s existence (i.e., nei- printed photos of the massacre: ‘Your paper is rotten ther believes nor disbelieves).3 and anti-American.’ Surveys taken after wide circu- lation of news about the massacre revealed that large There are also three corresponding “philosophical” vari- numbers of Americans refused to believe ‘American ants of these three terms: a philosophical theist believes boys’ had done such a thing. The myth of American that God’s existence can be proven, a philosophical atheist moral superiority seems to have been a better source believes that God’s non-existence can be proven, and a phi- of truth for them than evidence at hand. They were like the clerics who refused to look through Galileo’s losophical agnostic believes that God’s existence can be telescope to see the moons of Jupiter because they neither proven nor disproven. knew Jupiter could not possibly have moons.” These “philosophical” positions differ significantly from Howard Kahane, Logic and Contemporary mere theism, atheism, and agnosticism. Agnostics must also Rhetoric, 4th ed., p. 73. be philosophical agnostics (or else appear to be horribly con- fused); for the same reason, philosophical theists are all theists, and philosophical atheists are all atheists. But a phi- losophical agnostic could be a theist or an atheist, as well as an agnostic. For instance, there are many people who believe that God exists but do not believe that we can prove this: these people are both theists and philosophical ag- nostics. We will now examine each of the three proofs offered by the philosophical theist to see if any of them are sound, and then we will examine an argument offered by the philosophical atheist. 2 Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, America’s Four Gods: What we say about God — and what that says about us (Oxford University Press, 2010). 3 All three terms are based on Greek words (theos for god, a- for ‘not’, and gnostos for ‘known), but ‘agnosticism’ is the newest term of the three, having been coined by the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869. What does ‘God’ mean? 189 ARE MY BELIEFS ABOUT GOD JUSTIFIED? In the chapter on Descartes and epistemology, two accounts of justification were discussed: foundationalism and coherentism. With foundationalism, a belief is justified so long as it is supported by more basic (more clearly true) beliefs, and these all ultimately rest on a belief (or set of beliefs) that is self-justified (there’s nothing supporting it, nothing that we know with greater certainty than it). This is the form of justification found in Euclidean geometry, and the sort that Descartes hoped to provide for the natural sciences. With coherentism, a belief is justified to the extent that it coheres, or fits in, with one’s other beliefs. In this sys- tem, the most justified beliefs are still not self-justified, they aren’t “indubitably true” like Descartes’ Cogito (I think, therefore I am). Rather, the most justified beliefs are simply those that are connected with the greatest num- ber of other beliefs; these are the beliefs that are so “central” to our system of beliefs that denying them would un- ravel a great many of our other beliefs. Religious beliefs (and perhaps all or most of our beliefs) would seem to gain their justification in this coherentist fashion, as suggested in the examples below. You might believe that God (as described above) exists, or you might believe that no such being exists. Is this belief of yours justified? That is, are there “good reasons” for believing that God does or does not exist, or that God has a certain characteristic (e.g., omnibenevolence)? Consider the following different statements about which you may have beliefs: • “John’s shirt is blue.” • “John has a heart.” • “The earth is spherical, rotates on its axis, and orbits around the sun.” • “It is wrong to torture human beings.” • “God exists.” We all have a sense of what these statements mean and, if we know what or who they are about, then we may also have some opinion about their truth-value (that is, whether they are true or false). If we think the statement is true, then we believe it; if we think it false, then we disbelieve it. What justifies our beliefs about these statements? Let’s consider the first, the statement about John’s shirt. We should note that this statement is understandable even if we don’t know which John it refers to, or which of John’s shirts, as- suming he has more than one. Any competent user of the language will understand the words and the sentence-structure — will know that ‘John’ is a common name for male human beings, and so on. The claim appears simply to be that some fellow named ‘John’ has a shirt, and that this shirt is blue. Of course, if we found this sentence scrawled on the side of a building or in a toilet stall or on the backside of a discarded envelope, we might find its meaning not so obvious, simply because of its odd location.