Category Archives: Cosmological Proofs

Hitchens’ “god is not Great”: An Assessment: VI: The Design of Things

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I want to return today to the series that I began some time ago on Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great. The last instalment of the series was about the metaphysical claims of religion. The question I raised there was whether the more refined of the arguments for the existence of God require closer attention than Hitchens gives them. It’s one thing to say that, if you posit god as a designer, this raises the question of who designed the designer; it’s a completely different thing to say why there is no way of stopping the regress. Modern Thomists like Edward Feser think that Thomas Aquinas had a way of doing that, so that the question becomes simply a misunderstanding of the arguments themselves. This applies especially to the first way of Aquinas, where what is at issue is not a first move in the order of time, but a first mover in the order of being.

I feel myself on very unsteady ground when considering these arguments, and perhaps that is because the arguments do not provide the kind of definitive proof that Thomists like to think they do, but I assume that, as philosophical arguments, they demand a response. I suspect, though I do not know this, that much hangs on the Aristotelian way of thinking about causes and effects, and how things come to be. If you can make a distinction between the essence of something and its act of existing, then it might seem that we need a prior thing (prior in the order of being) in order to actualise any existing thing, and then it might seem absurd — and I’m not sure that it is — that there is not something existing in its own right, that is, something whose essence is pure act (of existing), in order to explain why there is anything at all. I simply do not have confidence that the metaphysical arguments are that compelling, or that the premises of the argument are satisfactorily demonstrated, and I sometimes wonder whether this has more to do with the presuppositions that are brought to the argument rather than with the details of the argument itself.

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How Theologians Play With Words

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Warning! This is much longer than it set out to be!

In celebration of World Philosophy Day (of whose existence I was lamentably ignorant!) Wiley-Blackwell sent me a number of free special issues of various journals published by Wiley-Blackwell as well as a selection of various articles published in some other journals published by or related to the Wiley-Blackwell group of companies. One of them was published in New Blackfriars (which I stopped receiving years ago when an editor was sacked because, as I understand it, he was becoming too “liberal” in his theology). It is entitled “The New Atheism: Its Virtues and its Vices.” Of course, it piqued my interest, so I read it, and noticed, once again, how theology plays with words. This is the kind of thing that Jerry Coyne means when he alleges that theology “makes stuff up,” and I think, after considering what Brian Davies, OP, has to say, it will become clear just to what extent this is true.

I want to begin by considering the following.

When it comes [writes Davies] to what makes New Atheism new, the third point I want to note is that its exponents largely seem to write with little reference to the history of theology. They often talk about something called ‘religion’ and (especially in the case of Dawkins and Hitchens), they focus on what they call ‘belief in God’. But, we might ask, ‘Which religion?’ and ‘Whose God?’ My impression is that the fathers of New Atheism have not much studied the fathers of Old Atheism or the fathers of theism in its classical Christian form. [20]

The questions ‘Whose God?’, ‘Which religion?’ are meant to distract us, just as the similar questions of Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, are meant to do. One of the problems with religion is that there are so many of them. One of the problems with the concept of god is that there are simply too many of them too. To individuate or identify something as rarefied as a god is not an easy thing to do, and the idea is that we can do it with words. But defining ‘god’ is a bit like defining ‘number’. In Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead, if I remember correctly, define number in terms of the class of all classes that are similar to it. This makes the idea of number very elusive, and the idea of a god is even more elusive. Most of us can count, and count alike, though we  might count in tens or twenties or twos or twelves. But with gods it is all over the place, and agreement is hard to reach. Even Christians, who presumably believe in and worship the same god, cannot really agree, and are divided up into thousands of denominations, and then new denomnations, because someone thought there should be just one!

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Curiouser and Curiouser: Now Dawkins is an Anti-Intellectual Coward!

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More contempt for Richard Dawkins. In today’s English Press there are two articles arguing that Dawkin’s refusal to debate William Lane Craig is “cynical and anti-intellectual “– thus, Daniel Came — and intellectual cowardice – thus Paul Vallely. It seems, at any rate, that Craig’s PR team has at least convinced a few people that Richard Dawkins should relent, join William Lane Craig at the rostrum at the Sheldonian, and give a good account of himself. Daniel Came suggests that he can’t, and that that is why he is refusing. Indeed, Daniel Came, lecturer in philosophy at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, and an associate lecturer in philosophy at the University of Kent, goes so far as to say this:

Given that there isn’t much in the way of serious argumentation in the New Atheists’ dialectical arsenal, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Dawkins and Grayling aren’t exactly queuing up to enter a public forum with an intellectually rigorous theist like Craig to have their views dissected and the inadequacy of their arguments exposed.

This response comes as a bit of surprise to me, for having listened through two whole debates by Craig (the ones with Lawrence Krauss and Lewis Wolpert), and spottily to several others, Craig simply does not demonstrate the inadequacy of the arguments of others — and his voice is unctuous and a pain to listen to. He has a pretty standard spiel, and he is in the habit of deliberately refusing to address the arguments of those with whom he enters into debate.

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Varieties of Ignorance

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The other day I came upon Jonathan Rée’s piece in The New Humanist: “Varieties of Irreligious Experience.” To a large extent it is written in the popular genre — “the new atheists don’t really understand religion, which is diverse and doesn’t imply belief in anything” — but then it explores a completely new way of looking at things by saying that atheism is the very same, that there are as many forms of irreligious experience as there are religious experiences, and that the new atheism, bound as it is to the old 19th century wheel of blustering against religious belief is nowhere close to addressing the real issues that face us today. Of course, he’s never very clear what new issues face us today. He’s much better — well, he thinks he is — at knocking people down, than in building anything up. But what he’s most keen to do — and here he joins a large and growing club — is to tweak the noses of the new atheists.

However, Rée thinks he’s really put the new atheists in their place at last, because he traces the new atheism back to 17th century, when the phrase ‘le nouvel athéism’ was used “to alert Christians to the threat of Spinozism.” But even here, of course, it did not speak to unbelief, since Spinoza himself believed in something called god, but identified it with the whole of nature, rather, says Rée, than to “a transcendental supernatural agency.” But then, says Rée, when Spinoza was disarmed and identified with some sort of mysticism, ‘new atheism’ was transferred in the 19th century, seriatim, to those who supported the mutability of species, Ausguste Comte, and then secularists like Harriet Martineau and George Holyoake, Spencerian evolutionists, Darwinists, and, finally, Nietzsche. And then, of course, “[n]ew atheism was born again at the beginning of the 21st century, and some people think it has dealt a final blow to religion in all its forms.”

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Feser Fizzing Filosofically

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Edward Feser, the Pasadena pyrotechnic philosopher, has a new post up about the ignorance of philosophers, scientists, and others who refuse to pay close attention to Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Leibniz and, of course, him. Nor will he deign to argue the point in a blog post, because all the metaphysics that is assumed by the cosmological argument is simply too complex to pack into the compass of a blog post; we will just have to read his books, Aquinas and The Last Superstition. The basic error that is made can, however, be stated simply, and that is, well, simply this: “The [cosmological] argument does NOT rest on the premise that “Everything has a cause,” and “‘What Caused God?’ is not a serious objection to the argument.“

And, strictly speaking, this is true. The purpose of the argument is to show that the existence of contingent beings demands the existence of a being which is its own cause (causa sui). It follows, of course, that asking what causes the being that causes itself is not a serious objection to the argument, even though many philosophers have taken this course. Of course, it does not follow that the argument succeeds in demonstrating the existence of a self-caused being, in which case it does make sense to ask about the cause of the being which underlies contingent being. Doubtless, if the supposedly self-caused being — which, as Aquinas says, ”all men call God” – has not been shown to exist, asking for the cause of this self-originating being is merely rubbing salt into philosophical wounds, and perhaps this is what they intend to do, though Feser takes the question as a total misunderstanding of the cosmological argument itself.

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