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8 Philosophy and Christian Postmodernism In order to clarify my thinking and to see what has been written around the subject of religion and the concept of God I read a couple of Christian philosophy texts. The first called “The Case for God” by Peter S. Williams[18]. Was unsatisfying in that even with little background in philosophy since reading Francis Schaeffer in the 70’s I could see the shallowness of the arguments. These consisted, mostly, in Pascal’s Wager argument for believing in God which says that if we believe in God we lose very little if he is not there but all eternity if he is. Or Anselm’s argument for the existence of God (this and similar are known as the Ontological Argument) is that if we can think of a being greater than God then there must exist one even greater than God but then that is impossible because we have defined God to be the greatest there is. Anselm tried to make his proof complete by postulating in the opposite direction a minimum concept of God but since the God we first thought of is the greatest being we can conceive of we already had a greater concept, so then the former must be God. The problem with this argument is that it assumes that if we can conceive a being with the properties of God then God exists. The premise on which the argument stands is that the world is created by a being that is great and good, and by definition is the greatest and best thing there is, and we cannot imagine anything else. A parallel is a parent asking a child to imagine the best birthday present possible and then being surprised at the child’s disappointment because they bought the child a bicycle and the child imagined a “Game Cube”. Being able to conceive of something does not make it so. The fallacies in these arguments are that they are based on the idea that if I can think of God then he must have caused me to be able to think about him so he must exist. On that basis anything I think of must exist. The latter is clearly not true and therefore just being able to conceive of God does not guarantee his existence. Just out of interest and historical recognition this circular argument goes back to Plato. The second book dealt with the more specific topic of Postmodernism in relation to the undermining of faith. (Truth Decay, Douglas Groothuis[19]) I quickly became completely frustrated with this author’s line of reasoning as he viewed faith in the God of the Bible as being based on objective reality. In fact the more I read and thought about it the more it seemed that the Christian position is founded in a lack of objective reality. Just the very criticism levelled at the postmodern worldview that nothing can be truly verified because we cannot be sure of the evidence except of our own experience, and maybe not even that. The thing is that I was reading the book looking for real evidence or argument. To be confronted by statements that Christianity is objective meant to me that one could perform a repeatable, if not experiment, then observation under identical circumstances. This would be to, say, see healing or a particular response from God in similar circumstances. The fact is that there is no consistency as far as I or anyone else who I have asked for an objective opinion. My observation and experience has been that Christians view most events as answers to prayer because valid answers are yes/no/maybe. False positive correlations are viewed as answers to prayer and negative correlations are forgotten rather like the questions and statements of a clairvoyant in a “cold reading” of a group or an individual by a “psychic”. The hits the “psychic” makes are remembered as remarkable and the majority of the attempts, which fail, are ignored. But to return to the philosophical evidence for God let me run through some of the arguments for God and the reasons I now find them unsatisfactory. I will use the order in which Peter S. Williams presents the arguments as a starting point but there are a few of Francis Schaeffer’s along with Michael Shermer’s I would like to touch on. The Moral Argument is coupled to the argument from evil in Williams’ first two chapters. He begins his argument with the problem of Evil, which, for some reason, he renames as Wrong. Presumably because he wants to discuss, not just Evil in abstract, but Evil in specific, particularly in human relations and behaviour. The argument from evil is in summary: If God exists and he is:
(Some philosophers add rationally acting in accord with his higher purpose, to the list of attributes. Christians regard this as already given.) Then this God would act to minimise human suffering and there would not be the pointless violence and suffering we see today. Therefore since we do see a high level of suffering there is no God. Williams [p62] counters this by saying that God’s higher purpose involves suffering so a world that has suffering is not incompatible with a God who meets the above criteria. Except that the omnipotence of God is not total partly because God has given us freedom. Williams bolsters his argument with a fallacy of presumption by saying that if there is a God as described then the world is as it is so therefore there is no contradiction. It is equally true that if there is no God that the world is as we see it and there can be no contradiction. Williams is attempting to argue that morality is an absolute and therefore requires a god. Part of his attempt to justify this position is to adopt William Lane Craig’s position that morality has an objective not a subjective basis. In doing so he reprints a transcript of Bertrand Russell discussing with F.C. Copplestone about the morality of the Holocaust. Clearly he chooses this subject on the basis that genocide is morally wrong and Russell’s argument for it being so without God is weak. I agree with his reasoning here. Those today who would argue that the Holocaust was a good thing are viewed as insane or moral pariahs. We would justifiably expect God to condemn such behaviour. In 1 Samuel 15 we find Samuel telling Saul to commit genocide. “Samuel said to Saul, I am the one the LORD sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the LORD. This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amelekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” Moses set this order down 450 or so years before. Even so Israel defeated Amelek at the time, so now they are out to demonstrate who really is boss and to ensure no one messes with Israel again (they hope). When I questioned this a friend gave me a photocopy of a section of a commentary dealing with this. The title of the section dealing with this passage says it all “The comfort of Vengeance”. So genocide is perfectly valid according to the Bible. So how does this look like a moral absolute? It clearly must be that genocide is at least contingent given that God has authorised it in a large number of cases in the foundation of Israel. It is not sufficient to say it is absolutely wrong as Williams does [p113] unless of course the Bible is flawed and it is absolutely wrong. Williams argues that because human societies have had very similar laws and moral codes that these indicate there are moral absolutes. While it may indicate that there is a strong set of requirements for a human society to function. But this is what we expect from our observation of other species. The fact that humans have a facility for language and cooperation, we have few offspring which are extremely vulnerable and have long maturation periods, we walk upright, our dietary requirements are able to be met from a variety of food sources all contribute to our social and therefore our moral operation being constrained to certain parameters. For example the aversion to incest has been demonstrated to be due to biology. Children of different genetic origin raised as siblings do not, in general intermarry. This is strong evidence that there is not a tablet of stone somewhere saying “thou shalt not marry your sister and from that we all have obeyed but rather that our instincts say don’t and they have a genetic component which came about through the people who did marry their sisters died out sooner. To say therefore that we deduce that morality has an objective basis is like saying that because the metre and the yard are similar they must be based on an absolute length standard built by the creator. The fact is that they are the length they are because they correspond to a manageable size in relation to a human body so we measure in terms of these rather than miles or microns for everyday objects. Williams has several other examples all of a similar or lower quality in demonstrating any notion of a higher moral authority. I have just pointed to one huge hole in the argument about genocide. For Williams or anyone else to demonstrate that there is a strong likelihood that moral behaviour is based on a divine, and objective, basis would require proof that the common ethical laws were unchanging as a minimum. Since we observe that genocide was not just an acceptable practice for Israelites between 1500 and 900 BCE but actually God instigated, and now it appears to be absolutely wrong then we have to conclude that: Either God has changed and there is no such thing as an objective moral standard, Or Moses and Samuel were delusional and the accounts of their actions and decrees should not be taken as being endorsed by any deity, Or the modern abhorrence of genocide is wrong and we should accept it as a valid response to any nation or race that annoys us. John Blanchard in his tract “Where Was God on September 11?” says that the atheist has real problems of no absolute basis for his moral standards. He too makes the mistake of using the Holocaust as an example of the breakdown caused by moral standards and shows either ignorance or a preference to ignore the Old Testament. Personally I would rather operate on a subjective basis of “whatever I wish men to do to me do so to them”. Others, who preceded Jesus, such as Confucius, used this saying, as well as being attributed to Jesus. I also note that Blanchard is careful not to be drawn into the problem of the hijackers on September 11 believing they were obeying objective moral laws in their actions. The Cosmological Argument as Williams puts it is just Aquinas’ prime mover argument. This runs like: The Universe had a cause that started it running. This cause is the prime mover, which is God. This has a number of fallacies. The biggest is the idea that the prime mover must be a person. Equally false is the idea of a cause in the sense of preceding in time before time exists. This is a result of medieval thinking that could not conceive of anything happening unless someone was there to make it happen. The problem is as we are now aware that intelligence is not just a simple attribute that Thomas Aquinas thought. His view was that God was a huge amount of intelligent personality that did not need to come into being but could just be and from its innate intelligence think the world into existence. Usually part of the cosmological argument although it is really a design argument is the argument that the universe is so finely tuned to produce life that it must be by design. The problem here is the spurious use of statistics to attempt to prove that the universe we live in is so unlikely that God must have created it. This side of the argument has arisen as the understanding of how the universe works has grown. Newton identified the first known physical constant in the gravitational constant. This arises in his equation for the force between two bodies due to their gravitational attraction f=GM1M2/d2. In English the force between two bodies is proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the distance separating them. G the gravitational constant links the values and scales them to give the force between the masses. These physical constants which link forces and matter together and the parameters of the universe such as the cosmological constant have grown to quite a number and they can be seen to be finely tuned to produce the universe we see now. What is not known is whether there is any choice about these settings or whether there are multiple universes with different settings that have no life, or whether there is no choice for the values, given others, which mean there are far fewer choices than at first appear. To demonstrate that the universe is extremely unlikely we would need a few samples or more information on what was determined and what was indeterminate in the beginning of the universe. My big problem is that if there is an infinite personal creator required where did he come from? It seems to take more credulity to believe that an infinite intelligence that could design the details of this universe, and more, sprang up spontaneously or has always existed. As we understand more of our own brains and their operation we see that they depend totally on the physical construction of neurones and their interaction. There is not a spiritual element as far as can be seen. Physical damage to people’s brains along with other defects has shown how the personality is changed by removing a part of the brain or by changing the level or mix of neurotransmitters, chemicals that carry signals between neurons. Given this information it is difficult to see how a mind could exist without a body. However a lot of modern thought about this has been shaped by Descartes and, in turn, by his Catholicism and the Bible, to view people as being made of spiritual stuff which doesn’t have a physical form and physical stuff and the two do not interact. The problem with these ideas are enormous basically they boil down to how to bridge the gap between the physical and spirit bits and the attempts there have been notably by Spinoza do not explain brain damage etc. at all. The Argument from Design has been dealt with earlier in the form proposed by Behe. Williams does not think much of the creationist arguments – for which he is commended – but thinks Behe has a point. There is also the idea that Alvin Plantigna puts forward that if something can be said to have a proper purpose then it can be said to be designed. The flaw here is that of applying a false anthropomorphism to the evolutionary process and the words used to describe a defect of a body such as heart disease. So for example if I have a defective heart valve that valve is spoken of as not functioning within its required parameters, which implies that if it has operating parameters it must have been designed. Tautology or semantics but it is not an argument for design that we use engineering language to describe a part of the human body. The Argument from Common Consent, Authority and Religious Experience are lumped together in one chapter. Basically the Argument from Common Consent says lots of sane people believe in God so you should, but then lots of people believed in a flat earth was that true? As children we believed in Santa Clause does that mean he really exists? Common consent is one of the weakest arguments there is. Williams attempts to counter the flat earth argument by saying yes those people were wrong about that but that does not make them automatically wrong about this. True, erroneous thinking about one does not mean that the same individuals are automatically wrong about the second. But it does not automatically make them right either. The thing is that the majority of people who have been classed as Christians have been so because they were born in a Christian culture. Very few have consciously converted and even of those who have, have not necessarily had any personal experience apart from assent to the idea of there being a god. Likewise the Argument from Authority says there have been lots of smart people who have believed this. But those smart people may (culture permitting) have believed in Santa Clause. Intelligence does not preclude one from believing all sorts of irrational ideas. Wallace who co-developed the theory of Evolution with Darwin was a great thinker but also believed in spiritualism and was taken-in by bogus mediums, even when he was trying to critically examine their claims, but that did not make it true. The argument from authority is classically used in advertising where a celebrity will endorse a product as their choice. Every now and then a paper will run a story on how these celebrities never used and indeed often hated the product involved. While these are clearly involved for pecuniary reward this illustrates the point that authorities on a subject are no less motivated by personal views and situations than the rest of us. The Argument from Religious Experience is stated by Williams as: 1) Many people claim to have genuine religious experiences. 2) Whatever many people claim to experience is most likely real. Therefore God is most likely real. The leap of logic is amazing. Not every, relatively, common experience is real in an objective sense. Religious Experience is the area in which a communicating God should excel. However, I am struck by how many titles I see on my bookshelf and those of friends like “Knowing God’s Will”, “In Search of the Invisible God” etc.. Clearly if the religious experience were universal and it was a real communication, more than a warm feeling, those questions would not be asked by believers. Nevertheless many people genuinely do have religious experiences in their lives. That is not to say that a religious experience is actually caused by God. Studies of the phenomena show that the experience of visions are very culturally biased, Christians see Jesus, Catholics Mary, Muslims Allah etc. The communication from the vision is very much to do with local and personal concerns and never contains material that can be verified as unknown to the recipient and of a verifiable nature such as a prophecy in unambiguous terms or a scientific revelation that turns out to be correct but unknown at the time. This applies to Biblical prophesies as well as other mystics for example Nostradamus. Ezekiel abounds in prophecies that have not actually come to pass. The prophecy against Tyre is very specific to Nebuchadnezer but was fulfilled later by Alexander the Great and even then not completely. These facts indicate an internal mental source for religious experience rather than an external objective cause. Williams’ argument is that your religious experience is valid and somehow is from God so go with it. This is clearly quite dangerous as the commonest religious experience is that of the schizophrenic is Williams saying that these are validations of the existence of God? John Nash the mathematician, who had a period of schizophrenia, described to a friend how he believed the voices in his head because they came from the same place as his mathematical inspirations. Because of this he believed the voices even though they would tell him of ludicrous things such as aliens were communicating with him through the headlines of the New York Times in code only he could decipher. The Argument from Desire is that if we desire something, in this case God, something must have caused that desire so God must exist. Likewise the Argument from Absurdity says life without God is absurd, life is not absurd therefore God exists. As Williams phrases them here these are circular arguments which attempt to prove the existence of the required object from its requirement. It is parallel to saying I need £1000 to purchase this item, I must purchase this item therefore I have £1000. The fallacy is that the a priori requirement for a condition to exist does not guarantee the existence of its fulfilment. I deal with the meaning of life, which is related to the argument from absurdity, later. Francis Schaeffer espoused The Argument from Personality in “The God Who is There”. I used to view it as the critical point in a philosophical justification of the existence of God. Someone brought it up in a discussion of an early draft of this document. However the more I have looked at how the brain works the more it is clear that our sense of being us is produced just within our own heads. The sense we have of consciousness and of being something more than just a machine is produced by the action of the billions of neurones we posses producing an emergent property of consciousness. Just as the billions of cells that make up our bodies produce an emergent property of a human body. Susan Greenfield, among others, has written several books dealing with the functioning of the brain and its internal Chemistry, if the reader wants to inquire further. The problem for Christian philosophers is that like the Creation Scientists (or Theistic Scientists for the Old-Earth view) they have already decided on the conclusion to a problem and are developing the argument to go between problem and solution. They phrase the problem in a general form and deal with it in a general form until there is a leap at the end where the God of the Bible is injected as the clear deistic solution. The logical leap is unfounded and their conviction that they have a solution leads them to skip steps in their proof. Fideism is the opposite of the preceding concepts. Where the former have tried to prove (or disprove if you look from the other side of the argument) the existence of God or at least demonstrate strong evidence for God. Fideism involves pure faith against rational belief. It says that it is in fact impossible to obtain knowledge of God except through revelation. At the formal end is a lot of modern evangelicalism with its view that God is revealed in the Bible and that this is sufficient, without questioning the origin and consistency of the Bible. It is also the idea that the comfort that a belief in God provides makes it true for the individual. This is not an argument from a logical position but merely says that if it works it’s OK. Islam demands such belief without question on this basis Islam is as true as Christianity. At the benign end of its spectrum it comes under the better-to-light-a-candle-than-curse-the-darkness approach or the sense of wonder or presence of a higher power that we feel in certain circumstances, such as listening to great music or viewing a natural wonder. At its malevolent extreme we have Jonestown and the Branch Davidian cult of David Koresh which resulted in the deaths of virtually all their followers. Fideism actually provides no answers but can be the basis for agnosticism by saying we don’t know and can’t know so we are not committed either way, or a faith in faith that says we cannot know except through faith. |