O.k all you 'smart ass’if you want to learn the hard way ,go ahead immerse yourself into this losers rambling & need to verify his brth mother before trusting her. http://www.sulekha.com/philosophy/messages/11470.html Theism, Atheism, and Rationality
Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Plantinga has been called “the most important philosopher of
religion now writing.” After taking his Ph.D. from Yale in 1958, he
taught at Wayne State University (1958-63), Calvin College (1963-82),
and has filled the John A. O’Brien Chair of Philosophy at the University
of Notre Dame since 1982. He was president of the Western Division of
the American Philosophical Association during 1981-82 and president of
the Society of Christian Philosophers, which he helped to found, from
1983 to 1986. He frequently directs summer seminars for the National
Endowment for the Humanities. He has received numerous honors, including
an Award for Distinguished Teaching from the Danforth Foundation, a
fellowship from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral
Sciences, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a fellowship from
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, separate fellowships from the
N.E.H., and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
He has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University. He
has been invited to deliver more distinguished lectures series at
American, Canadian, and British universities than can be listed here,
except to note that he was selected to give the eminent Gifford Lectures
at Aberdeen University in 1987-88. He was recently honored by a volume
of essays bearing his name in D. Reidel’s Profiles series. Widely
acclaimed for his work on the metaphysics of modality, the ontological
argument, the problem of evil, and the epistemology of religious belief,
he is the author or editor of seven books, including God and Other Minds
, The Nature of Necessity, and Faith and Rationality. Several of his
articles, which have appeared in journals such as Theoria, American
Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Journal of Philosophy,
and so forth, have been hailed as masterpieces of the metaphysician’s
craft.
Atheological objections to the belief that there is such a person as God
come in many varieties. There are, for example, the familiar objections
that theism is somehow incoherent, that it is inconsistent with the
existence of evil, that it is a hypothesis ill-confirmed or maybe even
disconfirmed by the evidence, that modern science has somehow cast doubt
upon it, and the like. Another sort of objector claims, not that theism
is incoherent or false or probably false (after all, there is precious
little by way of cogent argument for that conclusion) but that it is in
some way unreasonable or irrational to believe in God, even if that
belief should happen to be true. Here we have, as a centerpiece, the
evidentialist objection to theistic belief. The claim is that none of
the theistic arguments-deductive, inductive, or abductive-is successful;
hence there is at best insufficient evidence for the existence of God.
But then the belief that there is such a person as God is in some way
intellectually improper-somehow foolish or irrational. A person who
believed without evidence that there are an even number of ducks would
be believing foolishly or irrationally; the same goes for the person who
believes in God without evidence. On this view, one who accepts belief
in God but has no evidence for that belief is not, intellectually
speaking, up to snuff. Among those who have offered this objection are
Antony Flew, Brand Blanshard, and Michael Scriven. Perhaps more
important is the enormous oral tradition: one finds this objection to
theism bruited about on nearly any major university campus in the land.
The objection in question has also been endorsed by Bertrand Russell,
who was once asked what he would say if, after dying, he were brought
into the presence of God and asked whyhe had not been a believer.
Russell’s reply: “I’d say, ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough
evidence!’” I’m not sure just how that reply would be received; but my
point is only that Russell, like many others, has endorsed this
evidentialist objection to theistic belief.
Now what, precisely, is the objector’s claim here? He holds that the
theist without evidence is irrational or unreasonable; what is the
property with which he is crediting such a theist when he thus describes
him? What, exactly, or even approximately, does he mean when he says
that the theist without evidence is irrational? Just what, as he sees
it, is the problem with such a theist? The objection can be seen as
taking at least two forms; and there are at least two corresponding
senses or conceptions of rationality lurking in the nearby bushes.
According to the first, a theist who has no evidence has violated an
intellectual or cognitive duty of some sort. He has gone contrary to an
obligation laid upon him-perhaps by society, or perhaps by his own
nature as a creature capable of grasping propositions and holding
beliefs. There is an obligation or something like an obligation to
proportion one’s beliefs to the strength of the evidence. Thus according
to John Locke, a mark of a rational person is “the not entertaining any
proposition with greater assurance than the proof it is built upon will
warrant,” and according to David Hume, “A wise man proportions his
belief to the evidence.”
In the nineteenth century we have W.K. Clifford, that “delicious enfant
terrible” as William James called him, insisting that it is monstrous,
immoral, and perhaps even impolite to accept a belief for which you have
insufficient evidence:
Whoso would deserve well of his fellow in this matter will guard the
purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any
time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can
never be wiped away.[1]
He adds that if a
belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a
stolen one. Not only does it deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of
power which we do not really possess, but it is sinful, stolen in
defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from
such beliefs as from a pestilence, which may shortly master our body and
spread to the rest of the town. [2]
And finally:
To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe
anything upon insufficient evidence.[3]
(It is not hard to detect, in these quotations, the “tone of robustious
pathos” with which James credits Clifford.) On this view theists without
evidence-my sainted grandmother, for example-are flouting their
epistemic duties and deserve our disapprobation and disapproval. Mother
Teresa, for example, if she has not arguments for her belief in God,
then stands revealed as a sort of intellectual libertine-someone who has
gone contrary to her intellectual obligations and is deserving of
reproof and perhaps even disciplinary action.
Now the idea that there are intellectual duties or obligations is
difficult but not implausible, and I do not mean to question it here. It
is less plausible, however, to suggest that I would or could be going
contrary to my intellectual duties in believing, without evidence, that
there is such a person as God. For first, my beliefs are not, for the
most part, within my control. If, for example, you offer me $1,000,000
to cease believing that Mars is smaller than Venus, there is no way I
can collect. But the same holds for my belief in God: even if I wanted
to, I couldn’t-short of heroic measures like coma inducing drugs-just
divest myself of it. (At any rate there is nothing I can do directly;
perhaps there is a sort of regimen that if followed religiously would
issue, in the long run, in my no longer accepting belief in God.) But
secondly, there seems no reason to think that I have such an obligation.
Clearly I am not under an obligation to have evidence for everything I
believe; that would not be possible. But why, then, suppose that I have
an obligation to accept belief in God only if I accept other
propositions which serve as evidence for it? This is by no means
self-evident or just obvious, and it is extremely hard to see how to
find a cogent argument for it.
In any event, I think the evidentialist objector can take a more
promising line. He can hold, not that the theist without evidence has
violated some epistemic duty-after all, perhaps he can’t help himself-
but that he is somehow intellectually flawed or disfigured. Consider
someone who believes that Venus is smaller than Mercury-not because he
has evidence, but because he read it in a comic book and always believes
whatever he reads in comic books-or consider someone who holds that
belief on the basis of an outrageously bad argument. Perhaps there is no
obligation he has failed to meet; nevertheless his intellectual
condition is defective in some way. He displays a sort of deficiency, a
flaw, an intellectual dysfunction of some sort. Perhaps he is like
someone who has an astigmatism, or is unduly clumsy, or suffers from
arthritis. And perhaps the evidentialist objection is to be construed,
not as the claim that the theist without evidence has violated some
intellectual obligations, but that he suffers from a certain sort of
intellectual deficiency. The theist without evidence, we might say, is
an intellectual gimp.
Alternatively but similarly, the idea might be that the theist without
evidence is under a sort of illusion, a kind of pervasive illusion
afflicting the great bulk of mankind over the great bulk of the time
thus far allotted to it. Thus Freud saw religious belief as “illusions,
fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most insistent wishes of
mankind.”[4 ]He sees theistic belief as a matter of wish-fulfillment.
Men are paralyzed by and appalled at the spectacle of the overwhelming,
impersonal forces that control our destiny, but mindlessly take no
notice, no account of us and our needs and desires; they therefore
invent a heavenly father of cosmic proportions, who exceeds our earthly
fathers in goodness and love as much as in power. Religion, says Freud,
is the “universal obsessional neurosis of humanity”, and it is destined
to disappear when human beings learn to face reality as it is, resisting
the tendency to edit it to suit our fancies.
A similar sentiment is offered by Karl Marx:
Religion . . . is the self-consciousness and the self-feeling of the man
who has either not yet found himself, or else (having found himself) has
lost himself once more. But man is not an abstract being . . . Man is
the world of men, the State, society. This State, this society, produce
religion, produce a perverted world consciousness, because they are a
perverted world . . . Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,
the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of
unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The people cannot be really happy until it has been deprived of illusory
happiness by the abolition of religion. The demand that the people
should shake itself free of illusion as to its own condition is the
demand that it should abandon a condition which needs illusion.[5]
Note that Marx speaks here of a perverted world consciousness produced
by a perverted world. This is a perversion from a correct, or right, or
natural condition, brought about somehow by an unhealthy and perverted
social order. From the Marx-Freud point of view, the theist is subject
to a sort of cognitive dysfunction, a certain lack of cognitive and
emotional health. We could put this as follows: the theist believes as
he does only because of the power of this illusion, this perverted
neurotic condition. He is insane, in the etymological sense of that
term; he is unhealthy. His cognitive equipment, we might say, isn’t
working properly; it isn’t functioning as it ought to. If his cognitive
equipment were working properly, working the way it ought to work, he
wouldn’t be under the spell of this illusion. He would instead face the
world and our place in it with the clear-eyed apprehension that we are
alone in it, and that any comfort and help we get will have to be our
own devising. There is no Father in heaven to turn to, and no prospect
of anything, after death, but dissolution. (“When we die, we rot,” says
Michael Scriven, in one of his more memorable lines.)
Now of course the theist is likely to display less than overwhelming
enthusiasm about the idea that he is suffering from a cognitive
deficiency, is under a sort of widespread illusion endemic to the human
condition. It is at most a liberal theologian or two, intent on novelty
and eager to concede as much as possible to contemporary secularity, who
would embrace such an idea. The theist doesn’t see himself as suffering
from cognitive deficiency. As a matter of fact, he may be inclined to
see the shoe as on the other foot; he may be inclined to think of the
atheist as the person who is suffering, in this way, from some illusion,
from some noetic defect, from an unhappy, unfortunate, and unnatural
condition with deplorable noetic consequences. He will see the atheist
as somehow the victim of sin in the world- his own sin or the sin of
others. According to the book of Romans, unbelief is a result of sin; it
originates in an effort to “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”
According to John Calvin, God has created us with a nisus or tendency to
see His hand in the world around us; a “sense of deity,” he says, “is
inscribed in the hearts of all.” He goes on:
Indeed, the perversity of the impious, who though they struggle
furiously are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of God, is
abundant testimony that his conviction, namely, that there is some God,
is naturally inborn in all, and is fixed deep within, as it were in the
very marrow. . . . From this we conclude that it is not a doctrine that
must first be learned in school, but one of which each of us is master
from his mother’s womb and which nature itself permits no man to
forget.[6]
Were it not for the existence of sin in the world, says Calvin, human
beings would believe in God to the same degree and with the same natural
spontaneity displayed in our belief in the existence of other persons,
or an external world, or the past. This is the natural human condition;
it is because of our presently unnatural sinful condition that many of
us find belief in God difficult or absurd. The fact is, Calvin thinks,
one who does not believe in God is in an epistemically defective
position-rather like someone who does not believe that his wife exists,
or thinks that she is a cleverly constructed robot that has no thoughts,
feelings, or consciousness. Thus the believer reverses Freud and Marx,
claiming that what they see as sickness is really health and what they
see as health is really sickness.
Obviously enough, the dispute here is ultimately ontological, or
theological, or metaphysical; here we see the ontological and ultimately
religious roots of epistemological discussions of rationality. What you
take to be rational, at least in the sense in question, depends upon
your metaphysical and religious stance. It depends upon your
philosophical anthropology. Your view as to what sort of creature a
human being is will determine, in whole or in part, your views as to
what is rational or irrational for human beings to believe; this view
will determine what you take to be natural, or normal, or healthy, with
respect to belief. So the dispute as to who is rational and who is
irrational here can’t be settled just by attending to epistemological
considerations; it is fundamentally not an epistemological dispute, but
an ontological or theological dispute. How can we tell what it is
healthy for human beings to believe unless we know or have some idea
about what sort of creature a human being is? If you think he is created
by God in the image of God, and created with a natural tendency to see
God’s hand in the world about us, a natural tendency to recognize that
he has been created and is beholden to his creator, owing his worship
and allegiance, then of course you will not think of belief in God as a
manifestation of wishful thinking or as any kind of defect at all. It is
then much more like sense perception or memory, though in some ways much
more important. On the other hand, if you think of a human being as the
product of blind evolutionary forces, if you think there is no God and
that human beings are part of a godless universe, then you will be
inclined to accept a view according to which belief in God is a sort of
disease or dysfunction, due perhaps, to a sort of softening of the
brain.
So the dispute as to who is healthy and who diseased has ontological or
theological roots, and is finally to be settled, if at all at that
level. And here I would like to present a consideration that, I think
tells in favor of the theistic way of looking at the matter. As I have
been representing that matter, theist and atheist alike speak of a sort
of dysfunction, of cognitive faculties or cognitive equipment not
working properly, of their not working as they ought to. But how are we
to understand that? What is it for something to work properly? Isn’t
there something deeply problematic about the idea of proper functioning?
What is it for my cognitive faculties to be working properly? What is it
for a natural organism-a tree, for example-to be in good working order,
to be functioning properly? Isn’t working properly relative to our aims
and interests? A cow is functioning properly when she gives milk; a
garden patch is as it ought to be when it displays a luxuriant
preponderance of the sorts of vegetation we propose to promote. But then
it seems patent that what constitutes proper functioning depends upon
our aims and interests. So far as nature herself goes, isn’t a fish
decomposing in a hill of corn functioning just as properly, just as
excellently, as one happily swimming about chasing minnows? But then
what could be meant by speaking of “proper functioning” with respect to
our cognitive faculties? A chunk of reality-an organism, a part of an
organism, an ecosystem, a garden patch-“functions properly” only with
respect to a sort of grid we impose on nature-a grid that incorporates
our aims and desires.
But from a theistic point of view, the idea of proper functioning, as
applied to us and our cognitive equipment, is not more problematic than,
say, that of a Boeing 747’s working properly. Something we have
constructed-a heating system, a rope, a linear accelerator-is
functioning properly when it is functioning in the way it was designed
to function. My car works properly if it works the way it was designed
to work. My refrigerator is working properly if it refrigerates, if it
does what a refrigerator is designed to do. This, I think, is the root
idea of working properly. But according to theism, human beings, like
ropes and linear accelerators, have been designed; they have been
created and designed by God. Thus, he has an easy answer to the relevant
set of questions: What is proper functioning? What is it for my
cognitive faculties to be working properly? What is cognitive
dysfunction? What is it to function naturally? My cognitive faculties
are functioning naturally, when they are functioning in the way God
designed them to function.
On the other hand, if the atheological evidentialist objector claims
that the theist without evidence is irrational, and if he goes on to
construe irrationality in terms of defect or dysfunction, then he owes
us an account of this notion. Why does he take it that the theist is
somehow dysfunctional, at least in this area of his life? More
importantly, how does he conceive dysfunction? How does he see
dysfunction and its opposite? How does he explain the idea of an
organism’s working properly, or of some organic system or part of an
organism’s thus working? What account does he give of it? Presumably he
can’t see the proper functioning of my noetic equipment as its
functioning in the way it was designed to function; so how can he put
it?
Two possibilities leap to mind. First, he may be thinking of proper
functioning as functioning in a way that helps us attain our ends. In
this way, he may say, we think of our bodies as functioning properly, as
being healthy, when they function in the way we want them to, when they
function in such a way as to enable us to do the sorts of things we want
to do. But of course this will not be a promising line to take in the
present context; for while perhaps the atheological objector would
prefer to see our cognitive faculties function in such a way as not to
produce belief in God in us, the same cannot be said, naturally enough,
for the theist. Taken this way the atheological evidentialist’s
objection comes to little more than the suggestion that the
atheologician would prefer it if people did not believe in God without
evidence. That would be an autobiographical remark on his part, having
the interest such remarks usually have in philosophical contexts.
A second possibility: proper functioning and allied notions are to be
explained in terms of aptness for promoting survival, either at an
individual or species level. There isn’t time to say much about this
here; but it is at least and immediately evident that the atheological
objector would then owe us an argument for the conclusion that belief in
God is indeed less likely to contribute to our individual survival, or
the survival of our species than is atheism or agnosticism. But how
could such an argument go? Surely the prospects for a non-question
begging argument of this sort are bleak indeed. For if theism-Christian
theism, for example-is true, then it seems wholly implausible to think
that widespread atheism, for example, would be more likely to contribute
to the survival of our race than widespread theism.
By way of conclusion: a natural way to understand such notions as
rationality and irrationality is in terms of the proper functioning of
the relevant cognitive equipment. Seen from this perspective, the
question whether it is rational to believe in God without the evidential
support of other propositions is really a metaphysical or theological
dispute. The theist has an easy time explaining the notion of our
cognitive equipment’s functioning properly: our cognitive equipment
functions properly when it functions in the way God designed it to
function. The atheist evidential objector, however, owes us an account
of this notion. What does he mean when he complains that the theist
without evidence displays a cognitive defect of some sort? How does he
understand the notion of cognitive malfunction?
NOTES
[1]W.K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in Lectures and Essays
(London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 183.
[2]Ibid, p. 184.
[3]Ibid, p. 186.
[4]Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1961), p.
30.
[5]K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3: Introduction to a
Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, by Karl Marx (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1975).
[6]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis
Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.3 (p. 43- 44).