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PHIL 100:

INTRODUCTION TO KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY

Christian Perring, Ph.D.
Department of Philosophy
University of Kentucky
Lexington KY 40506

Copyright 1998

This is a course on the rationality of religious beliefs in the existence of God and life after death. It will introduce you to some of the main philosophical traditions of the West, and it will include some information about other religious traditions. We will consider what kinds of reasons have been given for religious belief, and how convincing those reasons are. We will also consider whether, on the one hand, it is in some way defensible to have religious belief even if there is no proof of the existence of a God, or, on the other hand, all religious belief is just crazy. But this course will teach you more than just about religious issues. It will give you some knowledge about the nature of knowledge itself, and of how we come to understand the world around us.

We will read writings by many different philosophers. You will not be expected to memorize all the ideas of each philosopher. However, you will be expected to understand the main ideas involved, and you will have to show an ability to explain and analyze in detail the ideas in some of the texts.

These notes are meant to give you information that will help you understand the readings. They are certainly not a substitute for the readings, and on any pop quizzes, I will be sure to ask you questions that you could not answer from reading only the notes. However, the notes will often provide pointers to what questions I will ask in the quizzes. In particular, whenever you see a bullet " " you should pay close attention to the question or comment that comes after it, because that is a point I consider to be important or useful, and you need to think about it. Other questions that I ask are meant to get you to how you might think about the issues at hand. When reading the articles and my notes on them, you may feel that there are issues raised in the articles that I have not discussed in the notes, which are worth thinking about. You can raise such issues in class. You might even question what I have written. There are bound to be some mistakes here, and some places where there are other equally plausible alternatives to the interpretations that I have provided. Do feel at liberty to ask any questions you have.

Philosophy is a subject that is better at raising questions than providing answers. Many students find it hard at first to know what they are meant to be doing or how to read a text. My main advice is this: try hard to understand the main point the author is making, and then think for yourself whether it makes sense to you, and whether you agree with it. You must be an active rather than a passive reader, which is to say, you must intelligently question the ideas that the author is putting forward. This is unlike other subjects where the point is simply to get you to learn the facts and be able to repeat them upon demand. Here you not only have to understand what the author is saying, but you also have to assess what the author is saying. The main point of the course, as I see it, is to develop your skills at doing this, and to improve your skills at coming to your own opinions and being able to justify them. Philosophy is a deceptively difficult subject. While it is true that there is much controversy about each view we will discuss, and no view is universally recognized to be correct, there are standards for giving good arguments. Most important of all is being able to express your ideas clearly. You should also be able to show an understanding of the intricacies of arguments, and the pros and cons of each view.

One way to think of reading philosophy is as entering into a conversation with the author. Of course the author is not literally there to talk to you, but if he or she has done a good job at presenting his or her opinion, you can often see how a conversation would go. Once you have read a piece, consider what questions you have for the author, and then read the piece again, to see if he or she has already provided answers to your questions, either explicitly, or by saying enough for you to work out his or her opinion. You need to try to enter into the author's point of view, and then return to you own point of view, to see how the two compare. When reading various pieces in this course, you are bound to find references to other people, books, events, or even ideas which you have never heard of before. Some of these I explain in these notes, but if I do not explain something, it is probably because you can probably guess enough about what the author means from the context, or it is just irrelevant to our purposes. However, if it seems important and I have not explained it, you should make some effort to research for yourself what the author is referring, (for instance, by using a dictionary or encyclopedia) and raise the issue in class.

Religion is a topic on which most people have opinions, some of them strong and deeply held. Other people may be unsure exactly what they think, but the issues are still important to most people. In class discussions, you should not be shy about expressing your opinions. However you should be careful to try not to offend others who disagree with you. Be respectful of other opinions, even when you argue against them. Also you should try not to take offense too easily at the views of other people. Remember that they are disagreeing with your ideas, not condemning you as a person. By the end of the semester, you may or may not have changed some of your opinions about religion, but hopefully you will have deepened your understanding of your views and why you hold them.

We can know ahead of time that we will not achieve certain knowledge of "the answer" about religion in this course when everyone else has previously failed to do so. We will inevitably leave many questions unanswered, or not even addressed. This is an introductory level course, and part of the point is to tempt you to do more philosophy in the future, by taking more advanced courses, in which you can go into similar questions in more detail.

Not all people like talking in class, while others can hardly hold themselves back. One of the best ways to improve your understanding of the issues is to engage in debate with your classmates. You will have a chance to do this both with the whole class and also in small discussion groups. But if you find that you are talking a lot in class, you should also remember that listening is an equally important skill. You can't engage in debate well unless you are able to have a good grasp of the arguments of those who disagree with you. Stubbornness and inflexibility are weaknesses, not strengths, when it comes to arguing.

My rôle in this class is to help you examine your own views and see the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of views. It is not my aim to convince you that any particular views are right or wrong, and I do not intend to reveal to you what my own views are on any of the topics that we discuss. In assessing your written work, I am not grading you on what views you hold, but on how well you defend them and assess alternative arguments.

There are exercises at various points through these notes. You are expected to do these and normally hand them in the day that the reading is assigned, unless told otherwise.

A person gives an argument for his or her view in order to try to convince others that the view is true. In order to convince another person by argument, one starts out finding a common starting point, where everyone agrees about some ideas or beliefs. By giving an argument, a philosopher tries to convince others that if one starts out with those beliefs, then one is rationally forced to a certain conclusion. I.e., the conclusion is inescapable so long as one continues to agree about the starting point.

A very simple example: you want to convince a person she has 50¢ in her pocket. You both agree that she has two quarters in her pocket. Then you argue that a quarter is 25¢, and 2 x 25 = 50. She agrees with this. Therefore, she has to agree that she has 50¢ in her pocket.

A more controversial example: you want to convince a person there is no good reason to believe in unicorns. You get her to agree that it not reasonable to believe in something that nobody has ever seen. Then you point out that as far as we know, nobody has ever seen a unicorn. Therefore, you argue, there is no good reason to think that there are any such things as unicorns.

A final example: you want to convince a person that she should give you her 50¢. You get her to agree that it is we should do good things, and that it is good to make other people happy. You point out that the 50¢ could buy you a coke, which would make you happy. So, you argue, she should give you the 50¢.

Some arguments are better than others. Much philosophical discussion involves trying to sort out the good arguments from the bad ones. In order to do this, philosophers use some technical language. The initial agreed statements in an argument are called PREMISES. The premises lead to the CONCLUSION. Each individual argument may have many premises, but will have just one conclusion. The most important distinction we make is between VALID and INVALID arguments. Theses words here are used with a special, non-standard meaning. An invalid argument is one where the premises don't in fact lead to the conclusion. A valid argument is one where the premises do logically imply the conclusion.

Question: which of the three above examples use valid arguments?

It is good to have a valid argument. But note that it is not enough to have a valid argument to have a true conclusion. For example, here is a valid argument:
 

1). All politicians tell the truth all the time.

2). Newt Gingrich is a politician.

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Conclusion. Newt Gingrich always tells the truth.

Answers must be double-spaced, preferably typed, but very legible hand-written answers will be accepted. Margins should be no more than 1.25" and the font should be no more than 12 point. Suggested page lengths are for 1" margin all round, double-spaced typescript in Times font.

Make sure you have a copy of any work that you hand in. If you say you have handed work in which I have no record of, you will have to do it all over if you have no copy, and you will be penalized for lateness. If you hand in work late, you should get some record of when you handed it in, from myself, or a Philosophy Department secretary. If you hand work late in to my mail box, make sure that I have got it. I have had too many instances of students saying they handed work in to my mailbox, when I have never seen it. If you are handing your work in on time, then do not bother the secretaries for confirmation of when your work was handed in.

If you have a legitimate reason, backed up by evidence, for not handing your work in on time, and you explain this to me before the due date, I will give you an extension. I may not accept work handed to me after the due date if you have not made an arrangement with me for the work to be handed in late. Keep me updated about your difficulties with getting the work done.

If you come to me in office hours, or make an appointment to see me at another time, I am ready to look at and comment on drafts of papers.

It is essential that you write in clear grammatical sentences. Bad grammar and spelling frequently obscures your meaning, and when it does, you will lose points. Using a computer spell-checker can help, but it doesn't spot all wrongly spelled words, and if used carelessly, it can substitute completely the wrong word for the one you intended.

Whenever you copy any text from a book or article, you must always give a reference to the text, with a page number. Long quotations should be single spaced, and indented. Any copying without references will be treated as plagiarism, and could result in you being failed for the whole course.

You should always explain or paraphrase a quotation from another source to show you understand it.

Summarizing an argument involves:

Explaining what the premises and conclusion of the argument are. Set them out as explicitly as you can. It can be useful to number each premise separately.

Explaining how the author uses "subarguments" to justify the premises of the main argument.

It can be very useful to give shorts quotations from the text to show that the author really does say what you attribute to him or her.

Evaluating an argument involves:

Assessing whether the argument is valid.

Assessing whether we have good reasons to believe the premises.

When you make a claim that is not just obviously true, you should give some justification for it.

In assessing an argument, it is not enough to merely say that you agree or disagree with a view, or that it seems valid, well-argued, interesting or surprising. You need to justify your comments and go beyond what the author says.

For the evaluative part of your answers, you can set out points made in class, no matter who made them originally. You can also develop your own ideas even if they were not discussed in class.

When choosing which questions to answer, bear in mind that it is generally easier to criticize an author's arguments than to add to them, so you will probably find it easier to discuss an article that you mainly disagree with.

It is often very helpful when you have a point you want to make to choose a fairly detailed specific example to use to illustrate your ideas.

Style and Word Usage.

Never mix up singular nouns with plural pronouns. For example, "I have a friend who believes in God, but they don't know why they believe." is grammatically incorrect, (even though it is common usage in spoken language).

In philosophy (which may be different from other subjects in this respect), it is bad style to say "I think...", or "in my personal opinion." Philosophers aim for truth, not opinions.

I prefer (but do not insist) that you use gender-neutral language. When you don't intend to refer only to males, for "he" use "he or she", and for "him" use "him or her". For "mankind" use "humankind." For "man" use "humans."

Do not refer to the author as "Mr.", "Ms.", "Dr." or "Professor". When you first refer to him or her, use both the first and last name, and subsequently, just use the last name.

Do not say that the author "implies," "insinuates," or "infers" some view if the author has actually stated the view explicitly.

Sight/Cite/Site. Do not confuse these words. "Sight" is to do with vision, "citing" is referring to some text or evidence, and a "site" is a place.

Don't mix up "affect" and "effect." To affect something (verb) is to have an influence on it, and an affect (noun) is an emotion. To effect something (verb) means to make it happen, while an effect (noun) is any change brought about by a cause.

The following expressions involve wrong or very awkward word usage: She related that grass is green, she conveyed that grass is green, she views that grass is green, she expresses her ideas about grass, she extends her opinions about grass, she did express that grass is green, she opinionates that grass is green, she professes that grass is green, and she stems her conclusion that grass is green. Avoid any such expressions.

Don't use long words when short words are adequate. E.g., "Aggression" is better than "aggressiveness."

Make an effort to get right the spelling of the names of authors. It only requires looking at the text, and if you get the spelling wrong, you give the impression of having made very little effort with your paper.

Avoid clichés and platitudes like "For thousands of years philosophers have pondered the question of the existence of God." These expressions are trite and overused.

Don't put assertions in the form of a question. Is it really a good way of clarifying your meaning?

You may ask permission to rewrite a paper or do make-up work (except for a final paper) if you really did worse that you are capable of. You need to ask me about this within a week of receiving your work back. You will receive some penalty, but not necessarily a large on.

A Excellent work, demonstrating a clear and near-perfect understanding of the text(s), and answering all parts of the question. The writing must be grammatical with correct spelling. If your own ideas or opinions are asked for, then you must come up with interesting and original ideas and defend them well.

B Good work, showing a strong understanding of the text(s) and demonstrating that you have worked hard on the assignment. The writing must be easy for the reader to understand, and you must have grasped most of the main ideas. Any assessment of it that you make must be well set out and at least address most of the issues raised in class lecture or discussion.

C Many problems with a paper can lead to it getting a C. It can show a poor or superficial understanding of the text(s) being discussed. Ideas in it can be confused, and the question not adequately answered. Spelling and grammar can be so bad that it is hard to work out what you are trying to say. If assessment or your own input was asked for, you may have simply stated an opinion without justification. Simply working hard on a paper does not mean it deserves better than a C.

D A D paper is either too short, very confused, involves a major misunderstanding of what the question was asking, or leaves out a major part of what the question was asking, such as assessment or your own ideas. Generally a D paper gives the impression that the writer did not put much effort into writing it, or should have known to ask for help but didn't.

E Papers rarely get E's, but it is possible. This occurs when it seems that the writer has very little idea what the paper is meant to be about, has put hardly any effort into writing it, or has answered the wrong question.

You should put comments on the draft you are looking over even if they duplicate the comments made by someone else, and even if they contradict what someone else has said. Put your comments in the margin, on the back of the page, at the end of the paper, or on a separate sheet of paper which you staple to the original paper. Write legibly. You should comment on each paragraph of the paper. At the end of the paper you should write a few sentences summarizing what you think the paper is saying, and then giving constructive suggestions for improving the paper.

1. Note errors in spelling, grammar and word usage, and suggest corrections.
2. Note any sentences or paragraphs which are hard to understand, and indicate why they are confusing.
3. Note points where you disagree with the writer, and explain carefully, referring to the text, why you disagree.
4. Say what you liked about the paper, and what impressed you. Are there good parts of the paper that the author could expand on further? Make some suggestions.
5. Say what you found weak about the paper, and what needs improving, or editing out altogether. Be specific about what could be cut out of the paper.
6. Say whether the paper answers the question, and whether it sticks to the question asked, or whether it starts to move into irrelevant discussions. Note where the writer is repeating what he or she has already said, and also note the use of clichés.
7. Say whether the paper flows well as a whole and makes sense overall. The style should be clear, concise and tightly argued.

How to use comments in improving your paper

1. Do not get offended. Remember other people are commenting on your paper, not judging your worth as a person! Criticisms of your paper are not criticisms of your character. The comments are just honest responses to what the readers have read.
2. Not all comments are equally useful. Sometimes a person may have misunderstood what you are trying to say. Sometimes you may understand the issues better than the person giving you comments. Make changes intelligently, not blindly. Beware: it is possible to make a paper worse by just doing exactly what a commenter has suggested.
3. There is always something to be learned from other people's comments on your draft. The criticisms that you get may misunderstand what you were trying to say, but even then, it shows that you have not made yourself clear enough. Even when different comments disagree with each other, they do not cancel each other out. It shows that your writing is probably confusing.
4. When several people's comments agree on a point, you know that you really need to make a change to eliminate the weakness that has been pointed out.

 

Even if you make all the changes that are suggested, it does not mean that your paper is now perfect. Improving a paper is a gradual process. It is virtually impossible to convert a C paper into an A paper with just one set of revisions. It generally takes many drafts to achieve perfection!

DESCARTES, "MEDITATION I" (2)

Descartes' philosophical project was to find a secure foundation on which to base all knowledge. The most secure form of knowledge is that which is certain. So his aim was to find certainty. In his major work, The Meditations, he goes through six stages of deep thinking, supposedly taking a day for each stage. By the end, he believes he has succeeded in his project, and that he has justified nearly all of our everyday, scientific, and religious beliefs.

However, at the start of the project, he is looking for certainty, and he does this by excluding any of his beliefs which are open to doubt. In Meditation I he goes through each sort of belief he has, and considers whether there might not be reasons to doubt them. To his alarm, he founds that nearly all can be doubted.

He starts off with knowledge that he obtained through his senses (4). We can divide that knowledge up into two parts, what is in our memory and what we are currently aware of. Our memory can be mistaken, so it would seem that our current experience should be more certain than memories of experiences. Descartes happened to be seated by the fire in a winter dressing gown when he was writing this Meditation, and he was aware of those things as well as his body. As I am writing this, I am aware of my cat sitting on my lap, the computer screen in front of me, the house plants to my left, and music from the radio, as well as my hands in front of me. Presumably you are aware of similar sorts of things as you read this. Isn't this kind of knowledge certain? Surely, Descartes reasons, to seriously doubt those things would be like mad people "whose brains are so disordered and clouded by dark bilious vapours" claiming that they are kings, or that messages are being beamed into their brains by the CIA.

But while he agrees with what he has just said, he nevertheless things that there is reason to doubt his senses. His argument is that he has had dreams which have felt so real that they were just as vivid as his experience when his is awake, and so he cannot be certain that he is really awake. He knows that his experience while dreaming does not correspond to reality, so if he might be dreaming, he cannot be sure that what is thinks he sees and hears is really there. With this simple argument, Descartes decides that none of that the knowledge that he gets through his senses is sufficiently certain to act as foundation for the rest of his knowledge.
 

While our experience might be just an illusion, Descartes suggests that even illusions contain some reality. Fantastic creatures in dreams still have features that are based on those of real creatures, and the colors are based on real colors. Furthermore, whether in dream or reality, we know that physical ("corporeal") objects have some size (what Descartes calls "extension"), and they can be counted (i.e., there's a certain number of them in a certain space) (5). The doubtfulness of our senses means that we have to doubt all our scientific knowledge, but Descartes is suggesting that we might still be certain about our mathematical knowledge, such as arithmetic and geometry.

As soon as he has made this suggestion, though, he immediately retracts it. For he thinks that he has a reason to doubt even his mathematical knowledge. Maybe even the very ideas of space, numbers, shapes and size are illusions. Maybe every time he does a simple sum such as 2+3=5, he makes a mistake. We might find it hard to imagine how we could make such ridiculous mistakes, but Descartes suggests that we could be forced to make such mistakes by a very powerful God. He believes in an all powerful God, and such a being would obviously be able to fool him. Although he does not think God would fool him like that, because God is supremely good, he cannot be certain about the nature of God or what God's intentions are. Especially since he knows that God allows him to be mistaken some of the time, which is hard for him to explain.

Now Descartes has found reason to doubt everything that he had previously thought was certain. In order to avoid slipping into his old patterns of thought and unknowingly reintroducing mistakes into his reasoning, he plans to assume (for the sake of this inquiry) that everything that he has previously believed is false. He will do this by assuming that he is being deceived as much as possible by a "malignant demon" (6).

In the second meditation, Descartes goes on to realize that even when he is doubting everything, he can still be certain of one thing, which is his own existence as a thinking being. From that discovery, he thinks that he can prove the existence of God, and from that, he finds reason to reclaim all of his former beliefs. But most philosophers today think that his proof of the existence of God does not work, and so everything that follows from it is not well supported. So his project of making all our knowledge certain is considered a failure. But it is an extremely important failure, because it suggests that maybe the whole project was wrong-headed. Maybe it is a mistake to insist on unattainable certainty. But then we need to find some reasonable alternative to certainty.

The point of starting with Descartes is to show how difficult it is to find certainty, and how important it is to use rationality in forming our beliefs. In Part One, we will look at several proofs of the existence of God. These are proofs that very intelligent philosophers and theologians have sincerely believed. You might be tempted to dismiss these arguments as hopeless and a waste of time. But that would be a mistake. Religious belief is an important part of many people's lives, and an important part of most societies. If no proof can be found for religion, this means that it may hard to reconcile religion with living a rational life. If faith is irrational, then it is hard to see why anyone should have faith. We will examine faith and its justifiability in Part Two.
 

The Teleological Argument (also known as the Argument from Design) generally goes like this:

The world is so wonderful and well-made that it could not have come into existence by accident. It must have been created by a form of intelligence. Only a Supreme Intelligence would have been able to create the world. Therefore God must exist.

The First Cause Argument (also known as the Cosmological Argument) generally goes like this:

Everything in the world was brought into existence by something else, so there is a chain of causes going back in time for anything in the world that exists now. There cannot be a chain of causes going back to infinity, so there must be some point at which all the chain of causes start. The point at which the chain of causes starts is the First Cause, which is God. Therefore God must exist.

We will see variations of these arguments in many of the readings in the course.

WILLIAM PALEY, "THE COSMIC WATCHMAKER" (204)

Paley contrasts finding a stone and finding a watch. There are particular features of the watch which distinguish it from the stone, which make him conclude that the watch was constructed by someone. It is clear the construction of the watch is "complex and subtle," that "its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose" (205). He gives a careful description of the watch to show this. He has no doubt that it was made by a watchmaker. Note that here that the word "end" means purpose of function. The different parts of the watch mechanism have different functions, or ends, and they all fit together with the end of telling the time. What "does "subtle" mean here, and in what ways is the construction of the watch subtle?

Some philosophers might object to his argument in any of the following eight different ways. (We will see that several of these objections are made by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.)

I. You have never seen a watch made, and know no one capable of making a watch like the one you have found, so you have no right to conclude that there is a watchmaker.

II. The watch sometimes goes wrong. Why would a watchmaker have made an imperfect watch? It does not make sense to suppose that the watch was constructed.

III. The function of some parts of the watch is beyond our understanding. Some other parts of the watch seem to perform no function whatever, and are useless, since the watch works just as well without them. No watchmaker would make such a watch.

IV. The object had to have some internal structure. Some piece of matter had to occupy the space where we found the watch. It is just an accident that the arrangement of matter in that space was the one it happened to be, and we can't conclude that someone made it.

V. We don't need to suppose that a watchmaker made the watch. A better explanation is that a 'principle of order,' or cause of nature, led to the existence of the watch.

VI. The fact that the watch is so intricate is no proof that it was constructed. It just shows that we are inclined to think it was constructed.

VII. The watch is just a result of the laws of mechanics and the property of the materials inside it. We can't conclude that it was constructed by some watchmaker. .

VIII. We don't know anything about the matter, and can't draw any conclusions from the existence of the watch.

Paley replies to each objection, showing how it does not work. He leaves the reader to consider how each of these objections is analogous to objections to the Teleological Argument for the Existence of God, and how his replies would apply to those objections as well.

We can write out analogous objections to the Teleological Argument and replies to those objections.

Objection I. We have never directly experienced God creating the wonderful complexity of nature, and we have no idea how God might go about creating the world, so we cannot conclude from the complexity of nature that God created the world.

Reply I. Our lack of knowledge of how God performed his work makes no difference. All the argument relies on is the complexity of the world, not knowing precisely how it came about. We know enough to know that it is absurd to suppose that a world like this just came about by accident. Some all-powerful, vastly intelligent being must have arranged the world to be as it is.

Objection II. The world is very imperfect: our frail bodies go wrong often, and disease and accidents kill people. If God had created the world, he would have made us much stronger and more able to deal with the world, so our lives were not so difficult.

Reply II. The fact that an object is imperfect does not show that it was not created. God may have made the world perfect, but afterwards humans, through their free will and bad choices, made it less perfect. Whatever the reason for the imperfection of the world, we can still be sure that some intelligent being created it.

Objection III. There are many things in this world which are very mysterious to us. For instance, we do not understand much about human biology, the human soul, the fundamental nature of matter, and why the universe is physically arranged as it is. There are other parts of the world that seem to be pointless. For instance, a human body does not need its appendix or tonsils. God would not make the world like that.

Reply III. First, as far as mysterious aspects of the universe goes, the limits of our knowledge don't make any difference. Even if we don't understand various parts of the human body, for instance the brain, we can still know that it performs an essential function, because people who have damaged brains don't do as well. In fact, we should expect a wonderfully complex world as made by God to be beyond our understanding. Second, concerning parts of nature which seem to perform no useful function, the existence of such parts does not affect the reasoning from the parts of nature which do serve a useful function. Even if having an appendix is of no benefit, we can still know that some form of intelligence must have designed the human body, because it works so well.

Objection IV. The universe had to have some arrangement of matter, and it is just a matter of coincidence that it has the one it does. Like in a lottery, someone has to win. Even if there are millions of tickets, one of them will be the one that gets picked, and it is just a matter of randomness which one it is. The universe could have been an infinite number of different ways, and it just happened to be this one. There is no reason to think that some intelligent being designed it this way.

Reply IV. (Paley does not actually give a reply to this in the case of the watch, presumably because he thinks that it is so obvious that the objection is silly when seen how it applies to the case of the watch. We can set out what kind of objection he would give, if he was asked.) It is vastly improbable that some random collection of matter would form itself into a sophisticated working universe. Consider an analogy. If you get a monkey typing letters at random, on a typewriter or computer, it is true that it will type some assortment of alphabetic characters. However, if the monkey typed a book of perfectly grammatical English sentences which formed together to make an exciting work of detective fiction, you would find it impossible to believe that it was purely random, because that particular collection of letters requires so much thought and intelligence to form. You would have to conclude that the monkey was intelligent and understood English, and had a good understanding of the genre of detective novels. Similarly, when we look at the world, with the vast complexity of biology, for instance, it is impossible to believe that it just happened at random, and was not the work of intelligence.

Objection V. The explanation of the nature of the world is not that it was created by a form of intelligence, but rather that a 'principle of order' exists which has caused the world to be as it is. (This objection is similar to VII, except that the term 'principle of order' here refers to some more mysterious organizing force for the universe than simply ordinary scientific explanations.)

Reply V. First, whatever a 'principle of order' might be, we have never seen it create anything, let alone the world, so why should we think that it did. Second, the phrase 'principle of order,' if it means anything, can only mean the same as an intelligent creative force, and the objector is implicitly conceding that the world was made by an intelligent powerful being.

Objection VI. All the wonderful complexity of the world shows is that we are inclined to suppose that it was created by a God. It does not show that it was in fact created by a God. That is to say, we have a natural inclination to try to explain complex things, that we can't in fact explain, by saying that God made them. This is a fact about humans, and our innate irrationality. We are not actually justified in coming to the conclusion that there is a God. This objection becomes clearer if you consider the way that primitive humans think that natural phenomena like earthquakes and solar eclipses must be expressions of the anger of gods, since they have no other explanation for the occurrence of the frightening events they experience. The idea behind the objection is that we are really no different from such primitive people, because we bring in God to explain those things that we don't understand.

Reply VI. (Again, Paley does not bother to reply to this, except to say that someone finding a watch would be "surprised" to be told such a view.) This objection does not say why the inference to the existence of God is irrational. It is certainly true that humans tend to come to the conclusion that God exists after seeing the wonders of the world, but this by itself does not show it is irrational. We tend to come to the conclusion that 2+2=4, and this is perfectly rational. The objection provides no alternative explanation for the wonderful complexity and design of the world, so still the most rational explanation we have is that God made it that way.

Objection VII. The existence and nature of the universe are simply a result of the laws of physics, and other laws of nature. We can find a perfectly scientific explanation of the existence and nature of the universe through science, without ever having to bring God into the story. For instance, the existence of the universe is explained through the Big Bang theory. The wonderful complexity of nature is explained by the Theory of Evolution, where, through genetic variation and natural selection, biological organisms become more sophisticated and capable of surviving through thousands and thousands of successive generations.

Reply VII. A scientific law cannot be the cause of anything. To think so is to be confused about the nature of explanation. A law is simply a generalization describing how an intelligent force behaves. "A law presupposes an agent." Something must keep the parts of the world going.
 

Reply VIII. This lame objection begs the question, and provides no argument. We may not know much, but we know enough to see the how well the different parts of nature fit together in an incredibly well-designed way. This is all we need to be sure that some powerful intelligent being must have made the world.

DAVID HUME, DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION (24-31)

Hume himself was an "empiricist." This means that he believed that we should base what knowledge we have on experience. However, there are many different views among empiricists, and Hume is one of the most skeptical. He does not think that there is any justification of most of our everyday beliefs, such as beliefs about what will happen in the future, about the existence of objects around us, and our scientific knowledge of the nature of matter. He said that our beliefs should be guided by custom and habit, and not by reason, because reason is so inadequate.

Note the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. An atheist is sure that God does not exist, while an agnostic does not think we can tell whether God exists or not.

Part II. Demea says that, although we can be sure that God exists, the nature of God is "altogether incomprehensible and unknown to us." (24) We are finite, weak, and blind. We should not even try to understand God. Philo agrees that God must exist. He cites briefly a version of the First Cause argument for God's existence. (25) He also agrees that we have no idea of what God is really like. He agrees with empiricism: "Our ideas reach no further than our experience. We have no experience of divine experience and operations."

Cleanthes proceeds to give a version of the Teleological Argument. But he not only concludes that God exists, but also that God's mind is similar to, but far superior to, human minds. So the disagreement is, to start off with, about how much we can know about the nature of God. Demea objects that he disagrees, and that it is not enough to give the kind of argument Cleanthes just gave, because we should be able to prove God's existence a priori.

A priori (meaning "before") is a Latin phrase, that is contrasted with a posteriori (meaning "after"). All scientific proof is a posteriori, because it depends on our experience and the experiments we do, while all mathematical proof is a priori, because it can be known with certainty even before we do any experiments or test our mathematical truths with experience. Demea's point here is that God's existence should be absolutely certain, proved without any reference to our uncertain experience of the world, like mathematics. It should not be like scientific knowledge, which depends on our meager powers of observation, and is subject to improvement when we learn more about the world. (See also Philo's discussion of reason and experience on page 35, in Part IV.)

Philo's objection to Cleanthes is different. He says that arguments by analogy are uncertain and liable to error. (26) The further we go from our direct experience, the less certain our conclusions. Note that this is like Objection One considered by Paley. As Philo says, "surely you will not affirm that the universe bears such a resemblance to a house that we can with the same certainty infer a similar cause, or that the analogy is here entire and perfect." To put it in other words, the objection is that although we can judge that a house or a watch must have had a creator, we cannot apply the same principles to the case of the whole universe, because it is too far removed from our experience. He mentions, to support his point, the disanalogy between the sap in vegetables and the blood in animals. What is wrong with supposing that there is a close analogy between the flow of sap in plants and the flow of blood in animals?
  

Unless the cases be exactly similar, they repose no perfect confidence in applying their past observation to any particular phenomenon. Every alteration of circumstances occasions a doubt concerning the event; and it requires new experiments to prove certainly that the new circumstances are of no moment or importance. (28)

And will any man tell me with a serious countenance that an orderly universe must arise from some thought and art like the human because we have experience of it? To ascertain this reasoning it were requisite that we had experience of the origin of worlds; and it is not sufficient, surely, that we have seen ships and cities arise from human contrivance. (30)

Note that while Philo had originally said he was arguing we cannot know anything about the nature of God from the nature of the world, his argument seems to go further than that. It seems to show that we cannot even conclude anything about the existence of God from the nature of the world. This is one way in which Hume slips in a more skeptical view than he explicitly says he holds.

Part III. Cleanthes replies that we are not making a huge leap in assuming the similarity between deciding that objects like watches are made by someone, and deciding that the universe was made by someone. He says the similarity is "self-evident and undeniable." (31) He tries to show that Philo's approach has absurd conclusions, by giving the case of a voice speaking to all nations at the same time, and to each nation in its own language and dialect,

conveying some instruction altogether worthy of a benevolent Being superior to mankind-could you possibly hesitate a moment concerning the cause of this voice, and must you not instantly ascribe it to some design or purpose? (31)

Cleanthes gives two other examples: he says "the anatomy of an animal affords many stronger instances of design than the perusal of Livy or Tacitus." These are famous Greek authors. Another example is the eye. He says

tell me, from you own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation. The most obvious conclusion, surely, is in favour of design; ... Who can behold the male and female of each species, the correspondence of their parts and instincts, their passions and whole course of life before and after generation, but must be sensible that the propagation of the species is intended by nature? (32)

Part IV. Cleanthes thinks that anyone who believes in God must have some idea of what they believe in, so they must have some idea what God is like. He asks Demea

Is the name [of God], without any meaning, of such mighty importance? Or how do you mystics, who maintain the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity, differ from sceptics or atheists, who assert that the first cause of all is unknown and unintelligible? (34)

Demea objects to being called a mystic, and says it does no good to call him by epithets. He does also give some properties that he believes God to have: perfect immutability and simplicity. He sees everything at all times. This is very different from the idea of God that Cleanthes argues for, which is one similar to the human mind and understanding. Cleanthes says that Demea's conception of an immutable God is

absolutely incompatible with that intelligent nature essential to him. A mind whose acts and sentiments and ideas are not distinct and successive, one that is wholly simple and totally immutable, is a mind which has no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment, no love no hatred; or in a word, is no mind at all. (35)

Here Philo is moving towards the issues that arise in the First Cause Argument. The argument says that something must have created the universe, and that something is God. Critics of the argument say ask then how did God come into existence? And then what created whatever created God. And we can go on in this way, to infinity. Is we stop somewhere in this chain of reasoning, and say God just exists, and that is all there is to it, then the critics ask why we can't dispense with God altogether then, and say the universe just exists, and that is all there is to it? Philo concludes

It were, therefore, wise in us to limit all our inquiries to the present world, without looking further. No satisfaction can ever be attained by these speculations which so far exceed the narrow bounds of human understanding. (36)

Cleanthes replies that explanations have to end somewhere. Just because he cannot explain why God is as he is, does not mean he has not got reason to believe in God. We have got reason to think God exists, because it is clear someone designed the universe. But he cannot be expected to explain everything. "Let those go farther who are wise or more enterprising." (37) Philo replies that we have no reason to think that God created the universe, because this is not a real explanation of the nature of the universe.

Part IX. Demea suggests that a priori proofs of the existence of God might be better to pursue. He gives a version of the First Cause Argument (FCA). He thinks this will not only prove the existence of God, but also the unity and infinity of God. (48)

1. Whatever exists must have a separate cause or reason for its existence.

2. Even if there is an infinite chain of causes and effects leading up to the existence of an object, we still need to know why that particular chain of causes and effects happened.

3. There is no such thing as pure chance. Everything must have an explanation.

Conclusion. The only possible explanation of everything is God. (49)

Cleanthes thinks this argument does not work. (Here he gives a typically Humean argument-Philo is not the only one here to speak for Hume in these Dialogues.) He does not initially say which of the steps he disagrees with, but gives an argument against the conclusion. The conclusion of the FCA is not just that God exists, but that God's existence is metaphysically and logically necessary, like the truths of mathematics. This is what is meant by saying that God's existence is "demonstrable." Mathematical truths are demonstrable. For instance, consider the contrary of 2+2=4. That is 2+2_4. But this is self-contradictory. It is impossible to imagine. Similarly, consider the statement "bachelors are unmarried men." This is not just a contingent fact, but is necessary, because of the meanings of the words. The contrary of it is "bachelors are not unmarried men, and this is self-contradictory. Now the claim that Demea is making is that "God exists" is necessarily true. Cleanthes says it cannot be necessarily true, because the it makes sense to imagine that God does not exist. He says "It will still be possible for us, at any time, to conceive the non-existence of what was formerly conceived to exist;..." Cleanthes' point here is quite general: he thinks that for any object that can exist, it is possible for it not to exist.

Cleanthes takes issue with one of the steps of Demea's argument. He disagrees with Premise 2, that even if we know the what causes each item in an infinite chain of causes and effects, we still need to know the cause of the whole chain itself. He says that this is asking for too much: the chain is nothing over and above the items that make it up, and once we know what caused each item, there is nothing more to learn. (50)

Philo then finishes the job of demolishing Demea's argument. He says that for all we know, the nature of matter is necessary and could not be any other way. Some facts in mathematics seems accidental, but turn out to be necessary, such as the fact that when you add up the digits of any number divisible by 9, and then add the digits of that sum, and so on, until you get to just one digit, it will be 9. This is only true for multiples of 9. This seems like a strange accident to most of us, and could have turned out otherwise, but mathematicians can show why it has to be that way. Philo is suggesting that maybe the nature of matter is equally necessary, even if it seems to us that it could be different. If that was the case, then we would not need to bring in God to explain why things are as they ultimately are. This is saying that the step from the premises to the conclusion of Demea's argument is unjustified.

PAUL EDWARDS, "A CRITIQUE OF THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT" (193)

II. The second section gives some standard objections to the argument.

a) It doesn't show that God is perfect or all-powerful or omniscient.

b) It doesn't show that there is only one cause of the universe.

c) It doesn't show that God exists now. He might have stopped existing.

What does "omniscient" mean?

III. Edwards discusses two kinds of causes, in fieri and in esse. He reports that defenders of the First Cause Argument claim that they are talking about in esse causes. This gives a way around the third objection, that God might have stopped existing. It is no use in replying to the first two objections. However, we will not worry about this distinction here, since we do not need to get into such a level of technicality.

Much more interesting is his reply to the claim that the chains of causes cannot be infinitely long. He says that they can. He says that there is no reason the chain of causes cannot go back indefinitely far in time.

IV. Edwards points out that defenders of the FCA will say that even an infinite series of causes must itself have a cause, what might be called a "transcendental" cause. But Edwards denies this, and says we have no reason to suppose that there is some cause of the chain of causes. We have an explanation of each cause in the chain of causes, and that is enough.

V. Edwards moves to The Contingency Argument, which is a form of the FCA. This says that we don't have a satisfactory explanation of the world until we explain why the world is necessary, i.e., why it must have existed, and is not just some kind of accident. The only satisfactory sort of cause on this view is a necessary being, a being which logically had to exist. This is God.

Edwards, citing the famous atheist and pacifist Bertrand Russell, says it the Contingency Argument is mistaken about what is needed for a satisfactory explanation. We never have such strict demands on what counts as an explanation in our ordinary explanations. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that there must be any further explanation, which shows why the existence of the universe is necessary. Maybe it is just an accident of sorts.

VI. Edwards reinforces this last point. He says that there may simply be no reason why the universe exists. It might not be that we fail to understand what is too difficult for us (in the way that a dog could never understand how a computer works), but rather that there is simply nothing to understand. Some events or objects may not be caused or exist for any reason. This introduces an element of randomness and arbitrariness into our understanding of the universe.

WILLIAM JAMES, "THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MYSTICISM" (338-358)

Although this is quite a long piece, much of it is simply describing what mystical experiences are like. Only the last few pages discuss what they prove. (355-8) James starts out giving four distinguishing qualities of mystical experience: (339)

1. Ineffability. The experiences cannot be clearly described to others.

2. Noetic Quality. The experiences seem to convey knowledge or insight.

3. Transiency. They cannot be sustained for long.

4. Passivity. People cannot bring on these experiences at will, and sometimes feel as if they are taken over during the experience.

Know the definitions of each of these terms.

James looks at a variety of experiences, in increasing degree of mysticism. These are

(a) grasping the full meaning of a word.

(b) a feeling of déjà vu. ( What does this mean?)

(c) a feeling of being the world being full of significance.

(d) losing awareness of the physical world, and being fully aware of oneself.

(e) saying Yes to the world while drunk, rather than soberly saying no.

(f) nitrous oxide can give a sense of deep truth to the inhaler.

(g) mystical insight while practicing yoga, such as a state of nirvana.

(h) experiences during meditation, or "orison," of a kind of union with God.

(i) transformation of one's personality through mystical experience.

During his description of the experiences, James raises some important questions to do with what these experiences reveal. Often it is claimed by mystics that our every day experience is blinkered, and having mystical experiences is like taking the blinkers off. James believes that taking nitrous oxide reveals more types of consciousness than we are used to. (343) In describing mystical experiences, James relies on his own experiments and on the testimony of those who claim to have had such experiences.

His own experience suggested to him that our normal conscious is but one special type of consciousness. Similarly, he quotes a Hindu who entered into mystical states through yoga, and said that this is a "higher state of existence, beyond reason, a superconscious state." (343) The state "is not accompanied with the feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless."

Buddhists also try to reach a higher state of consciousness, which they describe as being indifferent to the world, with no desire, no intellectual judgment, no satisfaction, and one has memory and self-consciousness. It is even possible to reach a stage where nothing exists, not even ideas or the absence of ideas. (344)

James gives a long quote from an eleventh century Persian (Iranian) philosopher Al-Ghazzali. He talks about the difference between knowledge one gets through descriptions of something, and knowledge one gets from experiencing that thing. (345) He set out to purge his heart of all that is not God, and become totally absorbed in God, in accordance with the ideas of Sufism. This gives rise to a transport that can only be understood by those who have experienced it he says, in the same way that a blind person cannot understand colors.

There are also Christian mystics. James briefly quotes St. John of the Cross and then Saint Teresa at much greater length.^* She attempts to describe what it is like to be in a state of "orison," or union with God. In this state, one "neither sees, hears, nor understands." (348) It left her with a certainty that she has been in God, and God in her, even though she could not rationally justify this belief. It also provided her with a vision of God as "an enormous and sovereignly limpid diamond, in which all our actions were contained in such a way that their full sinfulness appeared evident as never before," and she later came to see how God can be in three Persons, and how the Mother of God had been assumed into her place in Heaven. (349) It had a general effect of energizing her. (351)

The question for us and James is whether these experiences tell us something important about the nature of the world and God that we are normally unable to see. Some say the experiences are just the product of "degeneration and hysteria" (350) but James says that the experiences should not be dismissed so lightly.

James says that mystical experiences generally convey optimism and monism, (or pantheism). As he phrases it, they "appeal to the yes-function" in us. (351) The truth is "super-lucent, super-splendent, super-sublime," super-everything. (352-3) However, mystical experience also involves the negation of oneself, to the union of oneself with God. This is what James means by "monism." Paradoxically, it seems as if the yes-function is based on the no-function, and he suggests that the affirmation comes from the negation of the negation. (351) He uses a quote from someone called Behmen to illustrate the state of complete negation.

The treasure of treasures for the soul is where she goeth out of the Somewhat into that Nothing out of which all things may be made. The soul here saith, I have nothing, for I am utterly stripped and naked; I can do nothing, for I have no manner of power, but am as water poured out; I am nothing, for all that I am is no more than an image of Being, and only God is to me I AM... (353)

(1) Those who have mystical experiences can take them as authoritative.

This was a recurrent theme in many of the descriptions of mystical experiences that James quotes. For instance, Saint Teresa wrote,

God establishes himself in the interior of the soul in such a way, that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her. This truth remains so strongly impressed on her that, even though many years should pass without the condition returning, she can neither forget the favor she received, nor doubt of its reality. If you, nevertheless, ask how it is possible that the soul can see and understand that she has been in God, since during the union she has neither sight nor understanding, I reply that she does not see it then, but that she sees it clearly later, after she has returned to herself, not by any vision, but by a certitude which abides with her and which God alone can give her. (348)

It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms [of delusional insanity] spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known. (357)

Strangely, although James thinks that while mystics are entitled to believe their experiences and non-mystics are entitled to be skeptical, he does not say that the ineffability of mystical experience is relevant to this. As we will see John Mackie point out, we normally suppose that if one person has an experience that gives her knowledge, then other people should also accept that knowledge. The fact that the knowledge that mystical experience provides might not be completely describable to others would help to explain why non-mystics are not rationally required to believe the same as mystics.

(3) Mysticism shows that ordinary rationality may not be the only method we have with which to understand the world.

It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. (358)

J. L. MACKIE, "RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE" (359)

Mackie mentions Kant in the first paragraph. Kant was a German philosopher of the nineteenth century who had enormous influence on the history of western philosophy and who many today still regard as the greatest philosopher of modern times. Kant argued that the traditional proofs of the existence of God were not valid, and his views were taken very seriously by most philosophers after him.

Mackie also mentions the "problem of evil," which, in a nutshell, it is the following argument. If God is all-good and all-powerful, then he could prevent evil and suffering. But some individuals still commit terrible crimes, there are natural disasters which kill huge numbers of people, and the innocent and the young die from diseases and accidents all the time. An all-good, all-powerful God would not allow these things to happen, so either God does not exist, or else he is not all-good and all-powerful.

The main issue for Mackie is the justification of religious belief using religious experience. He points out that some people don't claim that religious experience proves anything, any more than a dream does, and it is just enough to have the experience. (359-60) Other people do think that religious experience, unlike dreams, proves that something supernatural, such as God, exists.

While James believes that the origin of a religious experience is irrelevant to evaluating the value as evidence of the experience, Mackie disagrees. He says that when we have an ordinary, non-religious explanation of an religious experience, we do not need to suppose that there are any other causes of the experience. We can explain many religious experiences without supposing they are caused by anything supernatural. Mackie gives the example of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who believed he heard to voice of God telling him to kill. Sutcliffe was a serial killer who performed a series of gruesome murders on women who he saw as being immoral. [What explanation could we have of Sutcliffe's experience, if it wasn't God talking to him?] (361) Mackie goes on to argue that there is nothing intrinsic to any religious experience that makes it impossible to explain in purely human terms. ( What does intrinsic mean? What is its opposite?) For any religious experience, it is possible that there is a perfectly natural explanation of it, not involving God at all.

Mackie says that some people draw three different kinds of supernatural conclusions from religious experience. These are

(1) the existence of a god, and other central doctrines of religions,

(2) the truth of a particular kind of religion, or

(3) the existence of something with higher power than us.

He says that drawing the second kind of conclusion is a great leap in argument, with very little justification. (362) If someone has a vision of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary, this can be explained by the vision "having been fed from the religious tradition by which the experiencer has been influenced." The supernatural being that produces an experience of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in the person may itself not be Jesus or the Virgin Mary. Note that Mackie seems to be mixing two possible explanations here:

(a) the person experiencing the vision is influenced by her religious upbringing, and this makes her interpret the supernatural being experienced as one familiar to her, or

(b) the supernatural being decides for itself, without any interpretation on the part of the person, to appear to the person as a religious figure familiar to her.

We can see this problem as an example of a more general problem, sometimes called "the underdetermination of theory by data." What this means is that there are two or more equally adequate explanations of our experience, and so we cannot tell which is the right explanation.

Mackie goes further and says that we cannot even conclude the truth of central religious beliefs from religious and mystical experience. His point is that nothing in your experience could prove the cause of your experience was perfectly good, all powerful, the creator of the universe, or the only such being. (362)

This leaves the third possibility listed above, that religious experience just shows that "we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace," as William James says. James himself believed that mystical experience does at least show that much to the person who experiences it. Mackie wants to cast doubt on even that. He says, "The issue is whether the hypothesis that there objectively is a something more gives a better explanation of the whole range of phenomena than can be given without it." (363)

Mackie is relying on a principle called "inference to the best explanation." The general idea of this principle is that when we have different possible explanations of some data, we should decide which is the best explanation, and believe that one. James thinks that the best explanation of religious experience is that the experiencer is in contact with some higher power. Mackie supports the rival naturalistic explanation, which says that these experiences are entirely natural, and not supernatural. Mackie thinks that it is better to use naturalistic explanations even when we don't fully understand the full mechanism of the cause, rather than to resort to supernatural explanation which is totally mysterious. (364)

He says that in fact some of what James says implies the same conclusion, even though James does not come to that conclusion. Recall at the end of the extract from James that we read previously, he says that while religious experience is convincing for the person who has it, it is not for people who don't have it. Mackie says this is incoherent. He writes,

Since ... no authority emanates from mystical experiences ... for anyone who stands outside them to accept their revelations ... they cannot be authoritative in an objective sense even for those who have them. (364)

The article finishes with a discussion of whether mystical experiences are valuable in themselves, whether or not the prove any religious truths. Mackie says that it is important to consider whether the experiences have good or bad effects on the person's life. He gives several reasons to think that they have more bad effects than good. (365) He does allow though that the value of the experiences to the experiencer would probably be decreased should she start to be more critical about them. (366)

HUSTON SMITH, "DO DRUGS HAVE RELIGIOUS IMPORT?" (371)

Smith uses the term "phenomenology" in several places. This means the appearance or experience of something. (371) He talks about "psychopharmacology"; this means the study of mind altering drugs, and generally the study of chemical interactions in the brain. He contrasts this with the "sociological perspective," which is the study of society and the interactions between different parts of society. For instance, a sociological study of religion would focus on how religion alters the lives of groups of people, and it would look at the internal workings of organized religions.

1. Many religions involve the use of mind altering drugs or physical activities. Smith mentions that some religions may have even been started as a result of experiences of some people taking drugs, because people felt they had mystical revelations.

2. Smith considers what exactly religious experiences on drugs are like, and how they compare to other religious experiences. Some people say that there is an important difference between naturally reached religious experiences and those on drugs, but Smith is skeptical about this, and produces strong evidence that there is no real difference between the two, at least in how the feel to the person having them. He quotes a scientific study which showed that there was no discernible difference in people's descriptions of drug induced religious experiences and natural ones. (374). He quotes two different descriptions, and asks the reader to try to tell for herself which is which.

A man called R. C. Zaehner insists that there is a distinction to be made, but Smith replies that if there is a difference, it must be in the "ontology,", and not in phenomenology. (376) By this he means that maybe the true nature of the experiences is different (for example, maybe one kind is caused by drugs and the other kind is caused by God), but there is no difference in the experience from the point of view of the experiencer. He says anyone who rejects the obvious evidence is just being dogmatic.

3. Smith suggests that the reason some theologians are so reluctant to agree that there is no difference between the kinds of experience being considered is that they are afraid of what this implies for religion. He now considers what it does imply. First, what a skeptic or atheist might say.

The religious skeptic's view: "This shows that all religious experience is just fiction, like the delusions of someone having psychedelic experiences on LSD."

Smith does not agree with this skeptical view, and he aims to find a credible alternative to it. He considers first the idea from the last section (and his article would have been better organized if he had dealt with it there) that there is an ontological but indiscernible difference between natural and drug-induced religious experiences. (377) He says that this not a plausible approach, because the ontological difference will have to be "transempirical," i.e., beyond any human measurement or observation. Postulating such a difference is ad hoc, which is to say, the only reason to do so is to save a theory, and there is no independent reason to think that there is such an invisible difference. So Smith will suppose that there are no significant differences between natural and drug induced religious experiences. Then the question at hand becomes, is there any reason to think that drug induced religious experiences are really religious, and reveal something importantly mystical? Smith wants the answer to be "yes." Note that this is the same question that William James and John Mackie were also addressing.

The first justification for this answer that Smith considers is simply because William James said yes. This is an argument from authority. (377) William James was a smart man, maybe the most important American philosopher of the twentieth century, and the man who invented modern psychology. Maybe we should just believe what he believed. Clearly this is not a strong argument. Give reasons why this is not a convincing argument.

"Mycologist" means a researcher into fungi. "Psilocybin" is the chemical which is the active principle of a hallucinogenic fungus. Smith describes the emotionally overpowering effects of taking this drug. (378) He suggests that after going through such experience, one might gain a greater appreciation for life. We think people can have religious experiences as a result of surviving battles and severe illnesses, so why should they not have religious experiences as a result of taking powerful mind altering drugs, which can be as emotionally exhausting and traumatic as any other experience?

It is also possible to experience wonderful peace and contentment during hallucinogenic experiences. Smith makes a conjecture that this could be a result of the stimulation of parts of the brain that "lie deep," (380) and that are like those of lower animals. Our rational, intellectual powers are submerged under the influence of the drugs, and we gain a greater, more primitive, sense of unity with the world. Presumably Smith thinks that this intuitive awareness is a form of religious knowledge.

4. One point that Smith sees as important is that while drugs might be able to produce religious experiences, they don't seem able to produce religious lives. He thinks that an adequate religious faith requires use of intellect (mind), choice (will), and emotions (feelings). (381) If one or more of these is missing, something will go wrong. He gives various examples of this, and then says

If the religion of religious experience is a snare and a delusion, it follows that no religion that fixes its faith primarily in substances that induce religious experiences can be expected to come to a good end. (381)

ERNEST NAGEL, "A DEFENSE OF ATHEISM" (232)

2. There are two ways to deny that God exists. (235)

1) We can understand what it means to say that God exists, but there is no good reason to believe it, and there is good reason not to believe it, or

2) When we think clearly, we cannot even understand what it means to say that God exists, because it is nonsense, (although it might be understood just as an expression of human ideals, which is not how believers understand their own beliefs.)

Nagel says that he chooses option (1), so he thinks we can understand what it means to say that God exists. He points out that people who propose tests to find whether an idea is meaningless and say it is meaningless to say that God exists have too strict a definition of meaningfulness, which even many scientific theories would not satisfy.

We have already seen two of the three arguments for the existence of God that Nagel starts off discussing, so we will not spend much time on them. These are the cosmological, the ontological, and the teleological. The cosmological argument can be started with the question, what caused the world to come into existence? It assumes then that the world could not have created itself, and the world cannot have existed forever. But then it says the God created the world, and when asked what created God, the answer is that God caused himself. Nagel then asks if God can be self-caused, then why can't the world itself be self-caused? He also points out that there is nothing absurd about the universe having existed forever. (236)

The next argument is the ontological. (237) It has intrigued theologians and philosophers for centuries. It can be stated as follows.

1. The definition of God includes that he is completely perfect.

2. An object is more perfect if it exists than if it does not exist.

3. Therefore by the definition of God, he must exist.

Nagel takes issue with the argument by disagreeing with the second premise. He says that when we conceive of an object, it makes no difference to our idea of it whether it exists or not. When we imagine a $100 that does not exist, the nature of the $100 we are thinking of is the same as the nature of $100 that does exist. To put this more technically, existence is not a property of an object like other properties such as color, weight, size and smell. Does a lion that does not exist have any properties at all? Is it old or young? Another way to put the objection is that an object has to exist to have any properties at all.

This reply may satisfy you. However, it is a tricky argument and you may still think that there is an obvious difference between a $100 that does exist and a $100 that does not exist, so it may leave you with some further questions, and if so, it would be good to write them down and think about them further, for class discussion. You might consider whether parallel arguments to the Ontological Argument could prove the existence of the perfect cup of coffee, the perfect car, the perfect President of the U.S.A., and so on.

3. Nagel quickly moves onto the teleological argument, a.k.a. the argument from design. As he points out, the previous two arguments were a priori, like mathematical arguments, while this one is empirical, depending on facts about the world we know from experience. He considers two sorts of fact that are used in this argument. The first is the one that we have already seen. This is the mutual "fitness" of things in the world and the sophistication of the design of our bodies and other parts of nature, such as the fact that we humans are able to survive in this world. Nagel gives the same sort of reply to the argument that Philo did in Hume's dialogs, and he also points out what Hume could not, that we have Darwin's theory of evolution that explains the remarkable complexity and adaptiveness of biological organisms, without having to suppose that any supernatural being was responsible. (238)

The second kind of fact that is sometimes called upon is the way we have been able to find mathematical models of physics. Some have argued that nature must have been created using mathematical models, and therefore created by someone with mathematical knowledge. However, Nagel points out that we could describe nature using mathematics whatever nature turned out to be like. Mathematical models can describe anything, so there is nothing special about the fact that we have been able to use mathematics to describe the physical world as it is.

In recent years some physicists have made a different sort of argument by design for the existence of an intelligent creator, which is not discussed by Nagel. They say that the nature of the universe is precisely tuned to being able to support life. If the fundamental laws of nature were just slightly different, then the universe would not have been capable of supporting any biological life as we know it. The evidence for this is complex, and some might dispute it. But suppose for a moment that it is true. Is it plausible that the universe just happened to be able to support biological life, due to some cosmic coincidence? Does this give us any better reason to think that some God planned out the universe so intelligent life could exist?

4. Next Nagel considers an argument of Immanuel Kant for believing in God. The basic idea is that we would have no reason to act morally if God did not exist, so we should believe in God. Kant does not think it is an option to draw the alternative that God does not exist and so there really is no reason for acting morally. Nagel thinks that Kant's argument is very weak, and calls it a "desperate postulation". (239)

Nagel moves on to more familiar ground with religious and mystical experiences. He dismisses them quickly, saying

No one will dispute that many men do have vivid experiences in which such things as ghosts or pink elephants appear before them; but only the hopelessly credulous will without further ado count such experiences as establishing the existence of ghosts and pink elephants. To establish the existence of such things, evidence is required that is obtained under controlled conditions and that can be confirmed by independent inquirers. (240)

A different but common reply that Nagel does not consider is that God allows evil because he does not want to interfere with the world, and he wants us to be able to make our own choices. He lets us make our own mistakes. However, this reply does not say why God allows natural disasters to occur, which are not of humans' making anyway. Also, at many other times people do think God intervenes in the world, which is why they say prayers, asking for his guidance and help. Why would he interfere on some occasions and not on others?

6. Nagel ends by considering if there is in some way a general view of the world that most atheists share. (242) He says they don't believe in disembodied spirits or souls. Rather, they think we should explain what happens in the world by the interactions of identifiable objects. This is sometimes known as "materialism," the view that we explain everything in terms of matter, although Nagel emphasizes that he does not want to rule out the human perspective. (244) This is basically the same as Naturalism.

Along with this, atheists tend to be empiricists, believing that the best ways of investigating the world we have are to be found in modern science. They believe that ultimately we can explain all apparently supernatural or odd phenomena in scientific terms without bringing in any spiritual or religious explanations. They think that bringing in God to explain phenomena is no explanation at all.

Of course atheism may be less comforting than many religious beliefs, with no promise of an afterlife or justice being done in the world after this. Nagel does say that atheists do often think there are moral rules, rather than no moral rules, and they tend to be utilitarian, thinking we should maximize the total amount of utility, or more simply, happiness, in the world, while at the same time preserving individual freedom. (244) But they think that this is the only world we will ever see, and when we die, that is it. In a way, this is a tragic view of life, and he ends by saying that atheists have also developed a serenely resigned attitude toward the inevitable tragedies of the human estate. (245)
 
  

The next two articles are sophisticated and address the problem of evil in much more detail than we have up to now. McCloskey argues that the problem of evil is insoluble, and that it is irrational to believe in God as he is traditionally thought of, i.e., all good, all knowing, and all powerful. Robert Adams (who recently became Chair of the Philosophy Department at Yale University) argues that it possible to understand why God might chose to make the world less excellent than it could be.

H. J. MCCLOSKEY, "GOD AND EVIL" (248)

(a) Physical Evils. There are several kinds of physical evil:

1) dangerous places and dangerous animals.

2) natural disasters, such as fires, floods, earthquakes, and famines.

3) diseases, such as leprosy and cancer.

4) physical and mental handicaps with which babies are born.

The problem of physical evil is that we would expect a loving, all-powerful God to prevent such evils from occurring.

(b) Moral Evil. This is the problem of why God allows people to do evil acts. (250) The problem is greater for human atrocities: why did God allow the Holocaust to occur, for instance? McCloskey gives some examples of extreme human cruelty from the writer Dostoyevsky.

B. Proposed Solutions to the Problem of Physical Evil. McCloskey considers five attempted solutions to the problem of physical evil, and finds each of them unsatisfactory. (251)

(i) Physical Good Is Impossible Without Physical Evil

It is often argued that the reason that God allows pain is that we would not be able to appreciate or understand happiness and pleasure if we did not experience suffering. McCloskey draws an analogy with seeing colors: some people think that if the only color that we ever saw was blue, we would not understand the idea of color or what blue is.

McCloskey finds several things wrong with this explanation of the existence of physical evil.

Even if the reply is correct about the existence of pain, it does not explain why there is disease and insanity. He seems to be arguing that we could understand that we were healthy even if we had never experienced disease.

Even if the reply is correct about the existence of pain, it would only mean that there would have to be a tiny amount of pain in the world for us to understand what happiness is. So the reply does not explain why there is so much and such extreme pain in the world.

Furthermore, the reply is not correct in explaining the existence of pain. If the argument was correct, it would imply that a person would not be able to understand pain if she had never experienced pleasure. But he thinks that it is obvious that a person would know what pain was even it was the only physical experience she had ever had. (252)

(ii) Physical Evil is God's Punishment for Sin. McCloskey says that this claim does not fit with the facts that there is no particular correlation between who sins and who experiences suffering in this world. This is most obvious in the case of young children who suffer severely, or have defects from birth. It does not explain why animals also suffer.

(iii) Physical Evil is God's Warning to Men. In response to this, McCloskey points out that this is an implausible explanation of God's actions because if God is trying to rouse humans from religious indifference by allowing physical evils, he fails more often than not. People tend to lose their faith in God in the face of great loss. There would be much better ways to prevent religious indifference, and it is implausible to suppose that God would not try to achieve his aims in the best way possible. (253) ( What other ways are available to God to inspire a reverential awe of the Creator?)

(iv) Evils are the Result of the Operations of Laws of Nature. This explanation says that physical evils are not really God's doing, but rather are the result of the laws of nature. The basic idea is that once God created the world, he couldn't or wouldn't interfere with it any more? This raises at least three questions:

Couldn't God have made the laws of nature differently?

Couldn't God have made us differently so we were not so vulnerable to nature?

Couldn't God sometimes override the laws of nature to prevent physical evil from occurring? Why wouldn't he chose to do so if he could?
 
 

(v) The Universe is Better with Evil in It. The philosopher Leibniz claimed that we must live in the best of all possible worlds. That is to say, God could not make the world any better. Although there may be suffering in the world, it is for the best, and the world would not be such a good place if the suffering did not exist. This is the main idea behind this explanation of the problem of physical evil. As McCloskey puts it on p. 257, the claim is that physic gives rise to moral goodness, such as making people more virtuous, courageous, sympathetic, and the like.

McCloskey's response to this is first to say that we don't have any reason to think that the physical evil in the world really does make it better. At most, this gives a possible explanation. (255) He goes further, saying it would be impossible to show that "all the evil that occurs is in fact valuable and necessary as a means to greater good." (256) ( Why is this impossible to prove?) Second, McCloskey says that if it is true that evil might in fact be for the best, it is equally possible that good might be for the worst. It might be dangerous to do good. But he takes it that this is an unacceptable conclusion.

On pages 258-9, McCloskey goes into some detail in elaborating his reply to (v). We will not go into this part of his article, except for his summary on p. 259. He says that:

(a) It is false that physical pain leads to good action. "Much pain frustrates action and wrecks people and personalities. On the other hand many men work and work well without being goaded by pain or discomfort."

(b) It is false that the highest moral excellence results from physical evil.

(c) It is false that the moral virtues that people supposedly gain through suffering, i.e. courage, endurance, charity, sympathy and the like, are the highest forms of moral virtue. We value peace and harmony more.

C. Proposed Solutions to the Problem of Moral Evil.

(i) Free Will Alone Provides a Justification for Moral Evil. This says that it is better for us to have free will than not have it, even if this has the consequence that humans will commit evil acts. Free will is of supreme value. (260)

(ii) The Goods Made Possible by Free Will Provide a Basis for Accounting for Moral Evil. This is different from (i) because it does not say that free will is of supreme value, but it does say that free will bring about goods that would not otherwise be possible. These goods are moral virtues, or beatitude, which is a state of supreme blessedness.

McCloskey replies to each of these in turn, with two arguments for each.

(i) (a) If it were true that free will is of supreme value, then it would follow that it would still be better for humans to have free will even if all humans always chose to do evil actions, rather than for all humans to lack free will and cause no suffering. He says this is paradoxical.

(b) Furthermore, why wouldn't it be possible for God to give us free will but also to make us better people, or even to make us absolutely good? After all, God is supposed to be omnipotent. (261) McCloskey discusses whether it really would be possible for God to give us free will and yet at the same time ensure that we are good people and so chose to do only good actions. He comes to the conclusion that it is unclear whether God could make us perfect and yet still with free will, it is certainly true that God could have made us better than we are, so that we would perform fewer moral evils at the same time as acting with free will. (262)

(ii) (a) The claim under consideration here is that having free will is better than not having it, because even though it means that human perform some evil acts, it also means that humans become virtuous and attain beatitude. McCloskey says this view has a major weakness because all it does is show that there may be an explanation of moral evil, not that there is one. Furthermore, there could never be a proof that a world with free will really is better than a world without one. (This is exactly parallel to his objection to B(v) above.)

(b) McCloskey now considers the following claim: even though God could have made us better people, it is better that we come to be virtuous or even beatific after struggling with evil. That way we earn the virtue rather than just have it bestowed on us. We get it through our own efforts. Of course, this doesn't convince McCloskey. He gives two replies:

First, it struggling with temptation is so good, the it would follow we should go out of our way to find temptations to do evil and struggle with them. His implication is that this is a ridiculous conclusion.

Second, if this is the way God looks at it, then he calling for too much sacrifice from us. He knows perfectly well, being omniscient, that we will commit evil and that some of us will therefore suffer eternal damnation. He could make all humans better people in the first place. Even though we would then struggle less with temptations, we would also do less evil. God himself would be acting immorally by not making us good, and so standing by while we perform evil actions. We do not praise people who tempt others to do evil, so why should we praise God if he has made us so susceptible to temptation? As McCloskey phrases it, "To put severe temptation in the way of the many, knowing that many and perhaps even most will succumb to the temptation, for the sake of the higher virtue of the few, would be blatant immorality." (263) So it makes no sense to say that God would act in this way, and therefore this claim in (ii) (b) has not succeeded in explaining the problem of moral evil.

McCloskey concludes that none of the attempted solutions of the problems of physical or moral evil have been successful. He concludes from the existence of evil that there cannot be an omnipotent, benevolent God. (264)

ROBERT MERRIHEW ADAMS, "MUST GOD CREATE THE BEST?" (275)

(P) If a perfectly good moral agent created any world at all, it would have to be the very best world that he could create. (276)

The first point that Adams makes as part of his argument is that it may not make sense to talk about 'the best possible world,' in the same way that it makes no sense to talk about 'the highest number.' There is no highest number: for any number, there is always a higher number. However, Adams does not build on this point, since he wants to argue that even if there is such a thing as the best possible world, God would not have to make this world the best possible one.

Adams says that the issue depends on what the moral requirements are on a morally perfect being. He says that an act-utilitarian would have to create the best world possible, but that "utilitarian views are not typical of the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition." (276) An act-utilitarian is a person who believes that when faced with two or more possible courses of action, the best thing to do is to chose the one which maximizes the total happiness (or 'utility') of the world. Adams considers two arguments for (P), in order to find fault with them.

(1) It might be claimed that a creator would necessarily wrong someone, or be less kind to someone that a perfectly good moral agent must be, if he knowingly created a less excellent world instead of the best that he could. He argues against this in section II.

(2) It might be claimed that even if no one would be wronged or treated unkindly by the creation of an inferior world, the creator's choice of an inferior world must manifest a defect of character. He argues against this in section III.
 
 

II. Adams says that God does not have any obligations to the people in the best possible world to create them, because one cannot have obligations to possible people, only to actual people. (277) Someone might question this claim, saying that we do have obligations to people who do not now exist, i.e., future generations. But Adams says that the obligations we have in the case of future generations is not to bring them into existence, but rather, to make sure we don't act irresponsibly so that their lives are harmed. ( Is Adams' reply here convincing? He doesn't say a lot to explain what he means.) The basic point that Adams is making is that God does not wrong the people he brings into existence in a good world by failing to bring other people into existence in a perfect world. He does not harm the less-than-perfect people by creating them, because they would not have existed in a perfect world.

Adams goes further into this issue in considerable detail, but we will skip to the next section.

III. Plato argued that a creator whose creation is not as good as he could make it must have some less-than-noble reason for deciding to make his creation in that way. A truly noble creator would make his creation the best possible. But Adams disagrees. One element that is distinctive of the Judeo-Christian moral idea, according to Adams, is grace, which he defines as a disposition to love which is not dependent on the merit of the person loved. (280) God can love humans totally even though we are not perfect, because of his grace. Only if his creations are less than perfect can God demonstrate the virtue of grace. Adams says that this can help us understand why God can be perfect and yet at the same time make the world less good than it could have been.

IV. Adams considers an objection to his view. The objection says that we can agree that it would be morally wrong for a woman to deliberately take a drug which causes severe mental retardation in children conceived by those who have taken the drug. The reason we find it wrong, the objectors say, is that we think that the woman harms her future child by taking the drug, and it is wrong to make the child's life less good than it could be. But if this is so, the objection goes, then it would be equally wrong for God to make humans whose lives are less good than they could be. (283)

Adams considers what he calls Case (A), in which a couple take a drug which is known to cause damaged genes and abnormal chromosome structure, and then conceive a child, in order to be able to raise a severely retarded child. They lavish love and their resources on the child. Adams says that while such action would be wrong, it would not be because the woman is harming the child she conceived by taking the drug before conception. The child is happy rather than miserable on the whole, and no being who came into existence in better or happier circumstances would have been the same individual as the creature in question. the point that Adams is relying on is that if this couple had had a normal child, it would not have been the same person as the child that they did have. If they had had a normal child, then the retarded child would not have existed at all. Adams is denying that if the couple had not taken the drug, the child they in fact had would have turned out normal. If they had not taken the drug, the retarded child they had would not have existed. Therefore, that child would not have been benefited by the parents deciding not to take the drug before conceiving a child.

Adams explains himself further by drawing an analogy with the (mistaken) idea that one could have been born many years ago. He thinks it is nonsense to suppose that one could have been born in the Middle Ages, for instance. Although it is possible that someone like you could have been born in the Middle Ages, that person could not be you. (284)

V. What is the precise explanation of the wrongness of the action of the couple in Case (A)? One possible suggestion is that they have violated a principle of morality that Adams sets out as follows.

(Q) It is wrong to bring into existence, knowingly, a being less excellent than one could have brought into existence.

(R) It is wrong for human beings to cause, knowingly and voluntarily, the procreation of an offspring of human parents which is notably deficient, by comparison with normal human beings, in mental or physical capacity.

HUME, "OF MIRACLES" (302-314)

Part I. Hume plans to give an argument against all kinds of superstitious delusion. We want to form the most rational beliefs we can. Hume says we have to base our beliefs on our experience, but we need to remember that even experience can sometimes mislead us. (302) Some expectations we have, such as have June having better weather than December, turn out to be wrong in other places, such as in Australia. Hume says, "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence". When he has less than full proof of our beliefs, the wise man

weighs the opposite experiments: He considers which side is supported by the greater number of experiments: to that side he inclines, with doubt and hesitation; and when at last he fixed his judgment, the evidence exceeds not what we properly call probability. (303)

He applies this to whether we should believe what eye-witnesses tell us what happened. How often does eye-witness testimony turn out to be wrong? He points out that we are not inclined to believe people who are delirious or known liars. Even in other cases of testimony, we do not automatically believe what we are being told. Sometimes different people's accounts of the same event conflict with each other, and they cannot all be telling the truth. We are less inclined to believe someone when she has a vested interest in our believing what she says. We are also less inclined to believe someone if what she is telling us is extraordinary. (304) When someone is reporting something of which we have very little experience, we have less reason to trust what she is saying, than if she is reporting a very familiar event. For example, if you read an account of a football game in a newspaper, you have good reason to believe it is reporting the facts accurately. However, it you read an account of an alien body being found in a lake in a newspaper, you are much less inclined to believe the report, even if it is in the same newspaper as the football game. The more fantastic and strange the report, the less inclined we are to believe it. Hume gives the example of an Indian prince, whose whole life had been spent in a warm climate, who refused to believe reports of the effects of water becoming ice when he first heard them. (305) Hume thinks that this was quite reasonable, and the prince was right in waiting until he had much greater confirmation before be believed what he was told.

Now Hume moves to the crux of his argument. He considers reports of miracles. These are not just unusual events. Miracles are events that go against the laws of nature. The parting of the Red Sea, turning water into wine, cripples being cured before modern medicine, and the bringing back of people from the dead are not just unusual events. They go against everything we know. Therefore we should not just assign them low probabilities, but we should assign them zero probability to it happening. In footnote 3 Hume refines his definition of a miracle. He says that a miracle is not just an event which goes against everything we have ever experienced before, but rather "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.." (305) Of course, we cannot tell by observation that God or an invisible agent was involved, precisely because we cannot see God or anything invisible. So we have to make an inference from observation to conclude that something supernatural must have been involved.

The consequence of this line of reasoning is that when someone tells us of an event that is not just unlikely but is impossible according to the laws of science, we should never believe her report. No amount of testimony can ever make it reasonable to believe a report of something which is physically impossible. It is always more likely that the person telling us has been deceived, is mistaken, or is lying to us. So we should never believe any reports that a miracle has occurred. Note that Hume does not quite come out and draw this last conclusion, and it is a matter of interpretation whether he thinks it is impossible or just almost impossible for there to be enough evidence for a miracle. I have interpreted him as saying it is absolutely impossible. We will see that Richard Swinburne in the next piece takes the other interpretation (306)

Part II. Hume goes on to add to his argument. He points out that in fact reports of miracles never come from really reputable sources. Further, people love to hear stories of miracles, and people like to tell religious stories in order to promote their religion. People who tell stories of miracles benefit from doing so and gain the respect of credulous listeners. People are convinced by eloquence far more than they are by rationality. (308) Reports of miracles mainly come from "ignorant and barbarous nations". As nations become more enlightened, reports of miracles decrease. Reports of miracles are denied by other eye-witnesses. (309) Different miracles support different religions, and so one report of a miracle supporting one religion casts doubt on reports of miracles supporting other religions. Hume considers various reports of miracles that he is familiar with, and applies his skepticism to them.

Hume does say that it is possible to have good reason to believe from others' testimony that some extraordinary events have really happened. He gives an imaginary example. Remember this was written in 1748.

Thus, suppose, all authors, in all languages, agree, that, from the first of January 1600, there was a total darkness over the whole earth for eight days: suppose that the tradition of this extraordinary event is still strong and lively among the people: that all travelers, who return from foreign countries bring accounts of the same tradition, without the least variation or contradiction: it is evident, that our present philosophers, instead of doubting the fact, out to receive it as certain, and ought to search for the causes whence it might be derived. (312)

The whole of the earth going dark for 8 days is extraordinary, but it would not, so far as we know, be physically impossible. However, Hume then considers a different possible event. Queen Elizabeth coming back to life after being dead. Hume says that he would never believe reports of this, no matter how much evidence there was for it. He would think it more likely that people had been fooled or made a mistake in some way. The difference is that people coming back to life is not just extraordinary. It is impossible. It contradicts everything we have experienced about human life, while the "knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena." (312)

Hume ends by considering the Bible, and says that it is clear it is unlikely the extraordinary stories in there are true. He ends with a dangerous statement, which contains the same idea as the title of Mackie's book, The Miracle of Theism. He says for anyone to believe in Christianity is a miracle, because it goes against everything that is rational.

RICHARD SWINBURNE, "MIRACLES" (314)

1) Could there be evidence that a law of nature has been violated?

2) Could there be evidence that such a violation was due to God?

(1) Swinburne raises a problem about how we know what is a law of nature. Suppose we have a way of predicting events, involving what we thought was a law of nature, and we find a repeatable phenomenon which contradicts our predictions. We do not have to suppose that a miracle has occurred. We can just conclude that we were wrong about the supposed law of nature. (Strangely, this is not a possibility that Hume himself seems to have noticed. Hume seems to think we can be certain about what the laws of nature are.)

However, if the unusual event E is not repeatable, but is rather a one-off exceptional event, then Swinburne says we can have good reason for thinking a law of nature has been broken. The law of nature still holds in normal situations, and it would not be a good idea to modify it.

Swinburne goes into a fairly detailed, although very abstract, discussion about when we know we have a counter-instance to a law of nature. (316) He helpfully explains his ideas with an example. Suppose we observe a holy person levitating into the air. This violates the laws L of motion and gravity as we know them. But maybe we were wrong about these laws. Maybe the laws are more complex than we thought, and there are other possible and predictable instances when objects rise up away from the earth, rather than stay put once on ground, or fall down if unsupported in the air. Call such a modified law L1. L1 makes all the right normal predictions that L did, predicts when L will go wrong, and is not ridiculously complex or ad hoc. If we can find such a law L1 then we have reason to think that no law of nature has been violated. On the other hand, if we cannot find any such law L1 , then we have reason to think that L is still the correct law of nature, and when we saw the holy person levitate into the air, we were seeing a law of nature being violated. (316) Swinburne goes on to say that, by the criteria he has just discussed, if we observe a person who had been dead for 24 hours return to full health, or see water turned into wine without some chemical apparatus or catalysts, or a man getting better from polio in a minute, then we have seen laws of nature being broken. (317)

When Swinburne turns to Hume, he interprets him as thinking it is logically possible that there might be enough evidence to establish a miracle, but that there never has been enough evidence for any purported miracle. Swinburne considers an apparently physically impossible event occurring in front of two hundred skeptical witnesses. For Hume, their testimony would still not be enough. Swinburne says that Hume's standard of evidence is too high, and he is just being bigoted. (318) Swinburne thinks that just as we can collect evidence for, and increase our certainty in, the laws of nature, so we can go on, as long as we like, collecting evidence for an event breaking a law of nature, until all doubt disappears.

Swinburne explains this last claim, by showing that we can not just ask witnesses what they saw, but we can investigate the character and competence of those witnesses, and we can investigate the physical traces of the miracle, and we can try to rule out alternative explanations, and so on.
 

He first supposes that we have no independent reason for believing that there is a god. If E happens in ways and circumstances C strongly analogous to those in which occur events brought about by human agents, and other similar events also occur, then we would have good reason to think that E and the other events like it are brought about by intelligent non-human non-material agents. For instance, suppose E occurred in answer to a request, and a voice comes out of thin air at the same time saying "your request is granted." (320) Swinburne thinks that would give us good reason to think that E was brought about by a god.

Secondly, he considers the other alternative, that we already have good reason for believing that there is a god. Then the similarity between the event E and other human actions need not be so strong, because we already have some reason to support the hypothesis that E was brought about by a god. (320)

Swinburne ends by considering what evidence there might be for the existence of more than one god, and when different miracles supporting different religions are compatible with each other. (321)

J. L. MACKIE, "MIRACLES AND TESTIMONY" (322)

(a) Mackie gives a useful summary of Hume's argument. He makes a perceptive comment on Hume's theory. If the testimony for a miracle is strong, then although on the whole it is still more likely that it is false, "it will significantly lower the degree of confidence with which reject it." (326) Mackie says that Hume ends the first part of the chapter by seemingly allowing the possibility that there might be enough evidence for a miracle to balance or even slightly outweigh the reasons we have for doubting the evidence. If the evidence on either side is equally balanced, then we can believe neither side, and if the evidence for the miracle outweighs the doubts, then we should tentatively accept that the miracle occurred. This explains why Hume then bothers to go on in the second part of the chapter to show that in no case of a report of a miracle is there in fact any reason to believe the report.

(b) Now Mackie moves on to an evaluation of Hume's argument. He says that Hume's argument against miracles is epistemological. (327) "Epistemology" is a word we have not yet had to deal with. It means it is to do with what we know and how we come to know it. So Hume is not denying that miracles ever happen, but just that we could never know that they did, (at least, unless we saw them with our naked eyes, and maybe not even then, because we can be fooled even by what we see with out naked eyes).

However, Mackie, points out a problem for Hume. What is a law of nature? Hume's answer, developed elsewhere in his philosophy, is:

Definition D1: A law of nature is an exceptionless regularity in the world connecting two sorts of events. For example, the releasing of an object in thin air and it falling towards the center of the earth.

The modification that Mackie suggests is this:

Definition D2: A law of nature is an exceptionless regularity in the world connecting two sorts of events when the world is not being interfered with. (327)

Mackie goes into a discussion of how to extend the idea of a law of nature to statistical phenomena. Much of modern science does not deal in exceptionless regularities, but rather in probabilities and frequencies of regularities. He shows that it is still possible to come up with a perfectly good definition of a law of nature and of a miracle. (328-9) He also agrees with what Hume says about believing testimony, but he makes several qualifications to make it more precise. (329-332) He concludes that it would be very difficult indeed to prove that a miracle had taken place. It is especially hard if the people arguing do not agree ahead of time that a god exists. (334)

Mackie ends with the issue of what to think if one sees for oneself what looks like a miracle. Mackie points out that maybe there is a natural explanation for what one saw, and no laws of nature were broken. Furthermore, one's senses might be deceiving her, either because she was being deliberately fooled, or simply because she misobserved something. Mackie does concede, though, that one has particularly good reason to take what one saw very seriously. (334)

SOREN KIERKEGAARD, "TRUTH AND SUBJECTIVITY" (396)

However, he has been very influential on other thinkers, and he is famous for his idea that religious believers must not try to justify their beliefs, but rather must take a leap of faith. He suggests that it is one's personal devotion to the God and value that creates truth and value. He disapproved of the way organized religion went about things, and is seen as being a rebel against the establishment. During the last five years of his life, he spent his family inheritance on producing an explosive broadsheet (The Instant) , in which, under his own name, he savagely satirized the State Church, its dignitaries, and minions. Some people find his approach a breath of fresh air after the dry intellectualism of traditional philosophy. Kierkegaard uses passionate language, and you may find that his approach to religion suits you better than many of the other people we have studied. Although his writing is hard to follow, we have the advantage of being able to read work by scholars who have studied it carefully, and so we will be able to turn to them for insight when trying to set out what Kierkegaard's arguments are. However, his writing is rich and complex, so there may be arguments put forward by Kierkegaard that his commentators have not focused on.

Kierkegaard starts off by making a distinction between subjective and objective reflection. Subjective reflection is emotional, while objective reflection is like rational scientific thought, so it is emotionless, and it concentrates on the facts. When a person reflects subjectively on the truth, she is more concerned with how she personally relates to that truth. (396) Now it is clear that all the proofs of the existence of God and evidence for religious belief would be classed as objective reflection, so we are relatively familiar with what that is. Subjective reflection is much more obscure. Subjective knowledge of God involves some kind of personal relationship with God. What he says later casts some light on what he means by subjectivity.

Kierkegaard thinks it is impossible "to bring God to light objectively,"... "because God is a subject, and therefore exists only for subjectivity in inwardness." (397) What does this mean? Maybe that when one has a personal relationship with God, one cannot try to prove God's existence at the same time. It would be like trying to prove the existence of one of your friends. The personal relationship with God in emotional and spontaneous. One should give oneself up to God completely, not regard him as some specimen to be examined and speculated about. Kierkegaard says if one has subjective knowledge of God, as in a close personal relationship, then pondering whether God exists or not places one in deadly peril. He admits that if one has such a relationship, one is embracing uncertainty "with the passion of the infinite."

Robert Merrihew Adams extracts a similar, although not identical, argument from the text in what he calls "The Postponement Argument." (411-3) It goes like this:

1. One cannot have an authentic religious faith without being totally committed to it, which means being determined not to abandon one's belief under any circumstances.

2. One cannot yet be totally committed to any belief which one bases on an inquiry in which one recognizes any possibility of a future need to revise the results.

Conclusion. Authentic religious experience cannot be based on an inquiry in which one recognizes any possibility of a future need to revise the results. (412)

When Kierkegaard talks of the "three proofs" of the existence of God (bottom of 397, top of 398), he probably means the three ones we have discussed, the First-Cause, the Ontological, and the Teleological. He refers to Socrates, a figure we have already met in Plato's dialog. Socrates was convicted of blasphemy and corrupting the youth of Athens by the Greek authorities and sentenced to kill himself by drinking hemlock. Clearly Kierkegaard admires the passion and conviction of Socrates' final action, and connects this with Socrates' willingness to be uncertain about God's existence and immortality. He makes a very different comparison with women experiencing the power of love without having any logical proof that they are loved. Presumably the link we are meant to make is that the way to experience a personal relationship with God is to live with the uncertainty and lack of proof of his existence.

J. L. Mackie suggests that what Kierkegaard admires about Socrates is not his religious outlook, but rather his total commitment to philosophical, and especially moral, inquiry. (445) On this interpretation, it doesn't make much difference what in particular one is devoted to, so long as one is totally devoted, no matter what happens. Some might think that such an attitude would make one closed-minded and dogmatic. However, it seems that what is most important for Kierkegaard is passion, not rationality.

In the following paragraph (398-9) Kierkegaard makes a series of extraordinary claims. He says that in objective reflection, the truth becomes false, there is no difference between good and evil, or true and false, and to seek objectivity is to be in error. What he seems to mean by this is that what counts is how one approaches one's beliefs, and if one takes the detached view of a scientist, then one's beliefs become remote from one. It is essential, he thinks, to approach one's beliefs, or at least one's religious beliefs, with the "passion of the infinite" and this requires a subjective approach. It is only in subjectivity that one has conviction, and this is what is truth for Kierkegaard. So he thinks that faith is necessary for belief. Faith is belief without objective justification.

Robert Adams reconstructs this argument as follows, calling it "The Passion Argument" (413).

1. The most essential and the most valuable feature of religiousness is passion, indeed an infinite passion.

2. An infinite passion requires objective improbability.

Conclusion. That which is most essential and most valuable in religiousness requires objective improbability. (414)

Kierkegaard makes a lot of the idea that the knower is an existing individual. By this he means, roughly at least, that we should never forget our own role in knowledge and belief, and we should not treat knowledge as if it was separate from us. He interprets Socrates as being a philosopher who never forgot this. (401)

Much of the rest of the article seems to be developing the themes in the earlier part, and to be saying the more paradoxical one's subjective belief, the better.

BLAISE PASCAL, "THE WAGER" (404)

Expected benefits from belief in God = P x (Everlasting happiness) + (1-P) x Q

Expected benefits from not believing in God = P x (fun in this world) + (1-P) x (fun in this world)

= (fun in this world)

Difference between the two is

E(believe in God) - E(don't believe in God) = P x (Everlasting happiness) + (1-P) x Q - (fun in this world)

Now however small P is, i.e. however unlikely it is that God exists, so long as it is not zero, the expected benefit of believing in God is huge, because the benefit of everlasting happiness is basically infinite, and so P x (everlasting happiness) will also be infinite, even if P is a tiny probability. The only cost is missing out on fun in this world. However much fun you could have, it could not hope to compete with everlasting happiness, or even a small faction of everlasting happiness.

So it is rational to believe in God. That is the option that gets you the best predicted outcome. This is what your insurance company would recommend. If you find it hard to believe in God, Pascal recommends that you go through the motions, which will help you forget your doubts, and you will eventually become a believer. It has worked for other people, and it could work for you.

WILLIAM JAMES, "THE WILL TO BELIEVE" (423)

I. James distinguishes between live and dead hypotheses. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him whom it is proposed. Some hypotheses refuse to scintillate with any credibility at all. Liveness is not an intrinsic property of an hypothesis, but is relational. The decision between two hypotheses is an option. There are different kinds of options: 1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial (424).

II. What are the ways in which we actually come to have beliefs? Can we chose to believe something simply by an effort of will? For instance, can we make ourselves "feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars?" (425). This is a dead option for most people, i.e., they could not make themselves believe this no matter how hard they tried. There are many beliefs that we cannot will. Pascal's wager, as an argument for belief in God, is based on the assumption that we can chose whether or not to believe in God simply on the basis of our self-interest. But James says that he doubts that anyone ever came to believe in God through such a thought process. That is not how our minds work. People with scientifically oriented minds are shocked by the suggestion that we should just chose what to believe without strong evidence. For instance, Clifford says that it is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence (426).

III. Yet it is clear that it is not just pure reason that settles what we believe. It is only already dead hypotheses that we cannot bring to life by willing. For many of our beliefs, the evidence plays only a small part in determining what we believe. Exactly what determines the beliefs we have is hard to say, since we have very little insight into the causes of our beliefs for the most part. But we do know that often, it is the prestige of beliefs that lures us to them. At other times our faith is faith in someone else's faith. This is not just true of a few insignificant beliefs, since we form our beliefs on shaky evidence almost all the time. We reassure ourselves by being able to say a little about why we believe what we do, but if pressed on the issue, we would be unable to give any good justification.

But if a pyrronistic sceptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition against another, - we willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make (427).

Note that James is not necessarily condemning us for lacking evidence in our beliefs. He is so far just setting out what our psychology is like, not saying what it should be. And we will see that he later argues that it is inevitable that our psychology is the way it is, given our limited minds. If we tried to justify all our beliefs we would never come to any significant beliefs at all.

IV. James will argue:

Out passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open," is itself a passional decision-just like deciding yes or no-and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth (428)

He also makes a distinction between "empiricist" and "absolutist" ways of thinking. An absolutist insists that we must have certainty in our knowledge, which means not just that we know a fact, but that we know we know it. An empiricist, in his rather non-standard use of the term, says that ordinary knowledge does not require certainty. We can know most of the things we know, and yet be unsure whether our beliefs are right, and ready to admit that we might be wrong (428).

V. [This section is not in the textbook.] James distinguishes between skepticism, (which says we don't know anything), empiricism, (which says that we can have knowledge but not be sure we have it), and absolutism, (which says we can have knowledge and know that we have it). He says that we are all absolutists by instinct and only by reflection can we achieve empiricist moderation.

VI. James thinks that although we instinctively wish to be absolutists about our beliefs, and that we feel much more secure with certainty, it is much more rational to be empiricists and give up the quest for certainty. Certitude is hard to find. In fact, the only certainty we will ever have is that we possess minds (consciousness). All our other beliefs are less than certain, so we should constantly reflect on them, in the hope of getting closer to the truth. But there is no concrete test of what is true. In philosophy and the rest of life, James points out, completely contrasting views have been held to be certain. He gives some examples of this (in philosophy, the disagreement between Aristotle's and Hegel's logic). He further points out that in the past, people's certainty in religious belief has led them to persecute and tortures others. He says that this gives us even more reason to be suspicious of absolutism. We should keep with our quest for truth, but give up our need for certain truth (429).

VII. James expands on this last point. Requiring certainty requires us to shun error, but search for truth does not require us to completely avoid the possibility of being wrong. Once we accept that in searching for truth we can risk error, we see that aiming to believe truth and aiming to shun error can take us into two different directions (430). If one really wanted to avoid all error, one could just stop believing anything at all. But obviously we would not have any true beliefs then. James thinks someone who was so afraid of error is just showing their own personal emotional character, rather than showing us what is rational for everyone (431). He uses a military analogy which suggests that he thinks this is being much too timid.

It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained.

In our own speculative questions, we are not always able to wait for objective evidence to come along. He quotes Pascal who wrote, "The heart has its reasons that Reason doesn't understand." (432) But he does agree with Clifford that at least in cases where the need to come to a decision is not urgent, it would be best to wait until there is enough evidence to decide the issue.

IX. However, there are many parts of life where we cannot wait for there to be enough evidence. One case of this is moral questions. Whether or not to have moral beliefs is, psychologically speaking, decided by our will. James is very doubtful that we will ever be able to come up with a rational proof of what is morally right and wrong.

Furthermore, in many parts of our life we need to go beyond the evidence in order for our lives to go well. For instance, whether you like me or not can depend upon my beliefs about you and whether I believe you like me, and show you trust and expectation. If I stand aloof, then it is likely you will never like me. Here the desire for the truth of something can bring it about. There are many cases where we need faith in order to create the fact.

Cooperation is needed between members of a society, and if everyone waited for proof that others were going to reciprocate, nothing would ever get done. Sometimes this happens:

A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he make a movement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs him up. If we believe that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never be attempted (432).

X. What about religious matters? James defines religion very broadly, as having just two elements, first, that the best things are eternal, and second, that we are better off if believe the first element than if we don't. Religion is a momentous option, since it could make a big difference if it were true and we believed it. It is a live option for some people. It is also a forced option, since if we just wait and remain agnostic, we will not get the good that true believers do, should religion be true (433). Waiting to decide is like the man who waits to ask a woman to marry him because he is not sure that she will be an angel. This is cutting himself off from the option of marriage a with her as sure as marrying someone else. There are different risks involved in belief, disbelief, and agnosticism. Being churlish with belief in God might cut us off from the benefits of living a religious life. The agnostic approach could rule out the very possibility of acknowledging some kinds of truth that one is concerned to find out about. So adopting a rule of evidence that would force one to be agnostic, as Clifford does, would be irrational (434).

W. K. CLIFFORD, "THE ETHICS OF BELIEF" (419)

A surprising claim made by Clifford is that all of our beliefs are significant and have an effect on the fate of humankind. This leads him to conclude that we have to be careful about all of our beliefs (421).

No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe (421).

The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat; he lives in the bosom of this his family, and it is no marvel if he should become even as they are. So closely are our duties knit together, that whoso shall keep the whole law, and yet offend it in one point, he is guilty of all (423).

Clearly Clifford has very high standards. You should never maintain a belief if you cannot provide good reasons for it, on his view.

J. L. MACKIE, "BELIEF WITHOUT REASON" (435)

(a) Pascal's Wager. Mackie sets out Pascal's argument. Pascal assumes:

(i) the pay-off from believing in God, if God exists, is infinitely more than the benefits one could have by ignoring God.

(ii) the probability that God exists is non-zero.

On these assumptions, the expected benefit of believing in God is infinitely greater than the expected benefit of not believing in God. He quotes Pascal "There is an infinity of infinitely happy life to win, a potential gain against a risk of a finite number of losses, and you gamble a finite stake." (436)

Mackie does not quarrel with (ii) here. Instead, he makes a case against (i), by suggesting that Pascal has not concealed the potential danger of making oneself believe in God, if one has to do this by cultivating faith through holy water, having masses said, and so on. Even Pascal admits "Of course, it will make you stupid." (437) Mackie thinks this is a potentially serious damage to one's powers of reasoning.

This maybe dents the certainty for (i) but still we know that the cost of coming to believe in God is still infinitely smaller than the potential benefits, a defender of Pascal might say. Mackie argues that this is not so. There are plenty of other possible outcomes that Pascal does not consider. For instance, even some Christians believe in predestiny, according to which it makes no difference what you do in this world, because it is already determined whether you go to heaven or hell. Or maybe God would not condemn people who followed the evidence in an honest intellectual way and doubted his existence. Or there could be any number of other possibilities, such as that God is not the God of the Roman Catholic Church, but is rather the God of another sect or religion, and that he will only reward you with eternal happiness if you join the right religion. A further possibility not considered by Mackie is that there is no God, but instead there is only Satan, who will condemn you to everlasting torment if you are a devout worshipper of God. In the face of all these possibilities, and no evidence to prefer one over another, Mackie concludes that we have no idea which belief is likely to pay off best. So practical reason is no guide to what is the best religious belief to have, in terms of one's ultimate pay-off. The only reasonable guide to belief, he concludes, is what he calls 'speculative reason' (438).

(b) William James and the Will to Believe. Mackie first approvingly quotes one of James' criticisms of Pascal, to the effect that it seems likely that God would be so disgusted by believers who came to believe in him purely out of self-interest that he would refuse to grant them eternal happiness.

In setting out James' argument, Mackie agrees with the view that many of our beliefs about the world are not based on reason. He also agrees with James' endorsement of empiricism over absolutism (or as Mackie prefers to put it, fallibilism over dogmatism) (439). Mackie quibbles with some remarks of James about the nature of truth, but we don't need to worry about them. Thirdly, he agrees with James' distinguishing between the purposes of knowing the truth and avoiding error, and compares James' remarks about science to those of the philosopher of science Karl Popper. He even agrees with what James says about the unprovability of morality, although he has different reasons from James. Mackie holds the controversial view that moral judgments (e.g., "killing innocent people is wrong") are neither true nor false: they have no truth value at all (440). It follows that they are not capable of being shown to be true. It is quite unlikely that James would agree with this argument, even though he agrees with the conclusion. Finally Mackie explains James' argument that it can be rational to have religious belief because it can be rational to go beyond the evidence.

Since Mackie agrees with what James says before he gets to religion, he is ready to admit that James' argument is "persuasive and powerful" (441). Indeed, Mackie is ready to go along with James in trying religious faith as an experiment. However, he does suggest that James downplays the extent to which his proposal is very different from traditional ideas of faith (442). He argues this by separating out three themes in James' article, and explaining the weaknesses in each. First, he agrees with James that we have to use non-intellectual factors when deciding what is morally right, and points out that James gives no further guidance about how we should decide what is right (441).

The second theme that Mackie singles out is the idea that passion can be used as a tie-breaker in intellectual disputes. He agrees that his is possible, but says that James has exaggerated how much this happens in his discussion of how we tend to accept many of our beliefs on the authority of other people. Mackie's point here is that it can be rational, sometimes, to accept what other people say, because we know that they are experts and can be trusted (441). So our use of authority is not really going beyond the evidence, because we have evidence for the trustworthiness of the expert. ( Consider which experts you have good reason to trust, and which you don't.)

The third and most important theme in James, according to Mackie, is the idea that,

there may be for us a live hypothesis that 'the more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe' is personal in form, and then the only proper way to test this hypothesis will be to try to enter into conversation with this person... (441).

(c) Kierkegaard and the Primacy of Commitment. Kierkegaard, according to Mackie, sees faith and reason as completely distinct and mutually exclusive. Either one has faith in the truth of Christianity, or one takes an intellectual, contemplative attitude. Mackie analyzes the argument into three claims.

1. The question of the truth of Christianity is such that it part of the question itself that the questioner should be infinitely interested in the determination of it.

2. One cannot be infinitely interested in this determination unless one is infinitely interested in Christianity.

3. One can be infinitely interested in Christianity only if one is already convinced of its truth (443).

It follows from these that it is impossible to rationally discuss Christianity. But Mackie sees no reason to agree with any of the three claims. He simply says that 2 and 3 are dubious empirical claims. ( Are they empirical? Could we ever find someone with infinite interest in anything? What would count as showing an infinite interest? Would one have to lose interest in everything else in the world?) Mackie also argues against 1, since it seems clear the people can be interested in the truth of Christianity without being infinitely interested in it.

Mackie attempts to make sense of Kierkegaard's claims by examining the contrast between subjective and objective reflection (444). What seems to matter in subjective reflection is not what one believes, but how one believes it. It is important to have infinitely passionate personal interest and commitment. Yet at the same time Kierkegaard distinguishes praying to the true God with praying to an idol, even subjectively, so it does seem to make some difference what one believes. Mackie suggests that Kierkegaard is torn between saying it makes no difference what one believes, and saying it does make a difference what one believes (445).

Another element of Kierkegaard's thought is his attack on objective reflection and his approval of paradoxical belief, or belief in the absurd. But Mackie sees no argument for this view, but just an assumption of it. Not surprisingly, he finds it hard to make sense of. One of the few parts that Mackie can grasp in Kierkegaard's writing is his view that belief is under the control of the will (446). Mackie thinks that it is best to support one's beliefs by understanding rather than by arbitrary choice, and he sees no reason to think that looking for confirmation of one's beliefs automatically means weakening those beliefs.

To back up his claim, he gives an example of a test pilot, who must have faith in the designers and manufacturers of a new plane. Mackie points out though that as the pilot gets more experience flying the plane, his faith is confirmed by evidence (447). In doing so, he has taken the risk that his faith will be disproved. The only way to test and confirm faith is to look for weaknesses and faults. This is the direct opposite of Kierkegaard's view. Mackie says that although he can see the psychological attraction of gratuitous faith, Kierkegaard has failed to show that it is intellectually respectable.

ROBERT MCKIM, "RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY" (675)

I. McKim points out that people hold a wide range of different views about religion, they hold their opinions strongly, and they are convinced that other people who hold different views are wrong. He thinks this important, because it shows that people should be more tentative about their beliefs (675).

One assumption made by McKim is that people who hold different religious views really do disagree with each other. This is controversial, because some have argued that while it appears that different religions disagree, they all worship the same god, and other disagreements are superficial (676). But as McKim says, the different religions certainly seem to hold significantly different views, about the nature of God, for instance.

II. McKim thinks that whatever God is like, if there is one, is mysterious. Religious experience does not make the nature of God very clear, and does not support any one view unambiguously. But it is the very fact that serious thinkers, who seem equally qualified to talk about the issues, manage to disagree deeply that McKim takes to be the main reason for thinking that religion is mysterious. He states his premise here as follows:

if there is widespread and deep disagreement about some issue among those with intellectual integrity and some relevant expertise, it is likely that there is something mysterious and puzzling about that issue (677).

The phrase "ceteris paribus" is used at the end of this section. It is a Latin phrase, literally meaning "other things being equal." It could also be translated as "so long as there are no complicating factors to be taken into account."

III. McKim makes another qualification to his argument, saying that if disagreement can be explained away if someone holds her view because of some defect in their reasoning processes. But if the views of two or more of the parties disagreeing cannot be so explained away, then there is reason for all parties to the debate to be tentative about their views. Being tentative about one's views is different from suspending one's beliefs or abandoning them altogether. One can still hold them, but one should not be so sure one is right (678).

Of course, it may be hard to establish with certainty who has a defect in their reasoning process. Often people accuse each other of being blind to facts, which is an accusation of having a defect. But the people accused will not agree that they have any defect. McKim feels confident that some certainty can be achieved on this matter. When someone accuses another of having a defect in reasoning, he or she will have to produce good independent evidence that this defect exists.

IV. McKim says a bit more about what he means by being tentative in one's beliefs. It requires being aware that one might be wrong, and searching for further evidence or reasons concerning whether or not to continue one's beliefs. One is open to discussion and has an exploratory attitude (679). One should also be tolerant of the conflicting beliefs of other people. Compare this with cases where one has strong evidence for a belief, for example, that the earth is round. If someone else insists that the earth is flat, then we can tell him he his just wrong. He may have a right to his opinion, but we can be confident that he is wrong, and we have no need to take his view into account or respect his view. Similarly, although more controversially, if someone denies the theory of evolution, we can say she is entitled to her view, but she is just wrong. McKim is saying that when it comes to others' religious beliefs, we should not be so judgmental. This of course raises the question of what beliefs are religious and which are matters of scientific fact. Fundamentalist Christians think that the theory of evolution is wrong and that God literally created the world in seven days. I just wrote that science has shown the creationists to be simply wrong. Does this mean that I have not been tolerant of someone else's religious beliefs? What would McKim say about this issue?

V. Some philosophers (Goldstick, Sklar, and Gutting, but you don't need to know their names) have suggested that the mere fact that one has a belief can be a reason to keep it. Obviously this is not a very strong reason, and it can be overridden by many other reasons, but the point they are making is that it is a factor, and, other things being equal, it would be enough to make it reasonable to keep a belief even if you had no other independent reason for having it. This is called "methodological conservatism." It is conservative in the sense that it encourages you to keep what beliefs you have rather than changing them. For example, suppose that when you are asked who was the painter of "The Haywain," the name "John Constable" comes into your mind. You have no idea where you learned this, and you remember no other facts about John Constable or the picture "The Haywain." This principle of methodological conservatism would say that you have some reason to think that your belief is true, even though you had no other justification for that belief. (An alternative attitude would come from W. K. Clifford. What would he say about such an example?)

McKim thinks this principle of methodological conservatism is a plausible one, and he suggests some reasons for accepting it (680).

(a) we are justified in holding most of our beliefs, or most of them are true, so there is a reason to believe any particular one of our beliefs. (Question: is it possible to be justified in holding a belief when, unknown to the believer, it is actually false?)

(b) our beliefs have enabled us to survive this far, so they must have a lot to recommend them.

McKim moves on to similar, but not identical, principles. He suggests

The fact that there is a consensus within one's own group, including among experts in that group, perhaps also provides some support for a belief (680).

But it is not conservatism that is his main interest here. He is mentioning it to lend plausibility to what he considers to be the converse of conservatism. He calls it "methodological liberalism" (681).

the existence of people with intellectual integrity and some relevant expertise, who have reflected deeply on a belief and yet do not hold it, is reason to hold belief tentatively [if you hold it at all].

Of course the mere fact that some one disagrees with you is not a sufficient reason for you to give up your belief altogether. There may be good reasons for you to keep your belief, and they may not be just to do with the evidence you have. As McKim points out,

There can be good reasons to participate fully in one's tradition, such as the wish to express solidarity with one's community, or a wish to bring up one's children in a particular way. The extent to which participation is compatible with tentative belief will vary: it depends on what is required for being a member of one's religious community (681).

VI. McKim considers possible objections to his view.

Objection 1. Tentative belief is incompatible with some religions, which demand your full faith. (For example, Roman Catholicism teaches that it is the one and only true religion. Some fundamentalist religions say you will only be saved if you believe with all your heart.)

Reply 1. There is no reason to place your trust in any one religion.

O2. Even after one becomes tentative in one's beliefs, one still disagrees with other people, and so it would seem this argument would require one to become even more tentative still. Where will it end?

R2. (a) You only have to become tentative about a given belief once, not become more and more tentative about it.

(b) One becomes more and more tentative until there are other reasons to stop the process and become no more tentative.

O3. Religions will only help people if they are firm believers (684).

R3. It is true that without such firm beliefs, some people will not get the same comfort from religions. But sometimes that is better than comforting oneself with a lie.

McKim goes so far as to say that sometimes it is better to be tentative than to be a believer, despite the costs, if religious belief is really incompatible with being tentative (685).

VII. McKim says his principles apply not just to religious beliefs, but also factual ones, moral ones, and aesthetic ones (i.e., those about art and beauty). (686) He does point out that

Societies have to make some decisions about what courses of action are to be encouraged, discouraged, prohibited, and so forth: on some moral matters tentativeness may be difficult (686).

Consider some controversial moral issues, such as the death penalty, the right of women to have abortions, whether doctors should be allowed to help patients die when the patients request it, or whether everyone in the country has a right to a decent minimum standard of health care. People often hold passionate views on these topics. Would it be possible for them to be more tentative? Would it be a good idea for them to be more tentative?

VIII. McKim observes,

taking other traditions as seriously as they ought to be taken may shake one's tradition to the core: in particular it may require a different attitude of one's own beliefs (687).

the vast majority of people are not in a position to assess the evidence in a thorough way: they are much too busy with other things (688).

some people may be incapable of adopting tentative beliefs in certain areas, including religious belief (690).

WILLIAM JAMES, "CONCLUSIONS" (703)

James wants to know what unites different religions, and if this shared core is true. The shared core has two parts:

1. An uneasiness, which is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.

2. A solution to this, which is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

This solution brings a sense of security and joy (706). But are there really higher powers? What are they? Religions all agree that there are higher powers. But they disagree what the union with the higher powers is like.

James starts his explanation of the nature of union with higher powers by saying that there is more to our mental life than we are aware of in our consciousness (707). He thinks that the 'more' which is felt in religious experience, the higher power, is the subconscious part of the mind. Although a person may feel that she is in touch with an external control, James speculates that

it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely apparent, but literally true (707).

the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come (708).

James says this his own particular over-belief is that there are characteristically divine facts over and above the actual inflow of energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state. But he does not know what those divine facts are (710). He could be skeptical, and think that there is nothing over and above the psychological facts, but he just does not believe that is all there is to it.

Postscript. Some philosophers think that no god or ideal entity could interfere causally in the course of the world we experience (what James, following Kant, calls "the phenomenal world.") He calls this a "refined supernaturalism" (711). A crasser supernaturalism, supposedly belonging to uneducated people, says that God performs miracles and does have effects on the world. James says his view belongs to the crasser group. He thinks the refined view surrenders too easily to naturalism, i.e., the view that everything can be explained without reference to supernatural beings (712). He thinks it incredible that God would make no difference to what happens in the world.
 

James says that his view seems close to the Buddhist doctrine of Karma (713). Despite using some fancy terms, he does not add anything to what he said in the previous paragraph about the content of his views. He does go on to suggest that some of the actual effects of God's existence are felt during religious experience.

At these places at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest of our being belongs (713).

James thinks that religious experience does not give evidence for many traditional religious beliefs, such as there being only one god, and that God being infinite.

The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace (714).

For practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance (714).

The fundamental issue here is about the role of science in our lives and its relation to religion. Can one be rational and still reject theories that are accepted by the whole scientific community? It seems clear that if one takes the Bible's story of the genesis of the world literally, then if is incompatible with scientific knowledge. This leaves a believer in the Bible with at least 4 options:

1) Reject the scientific theories as false, or at least unproven.

2) Interpret the Bible metaphorically instead of literally, so that it is not incompatible with evolutionary theory.

3) Accept that some parts of the Bible are false, but insist that still most of it is true, where is does not contradict scientific knowledge.

4) Give up all religious belief.

A further issue is the status of evolutionary theory in comparison with other scientific theories or historical beliefs. Can we establish how certain the theory is in comparison with other beliefs about what happened in the past, such as geological theories about the formation of rocks and mountain ranges, or the lifestyles of humans who lived several thousand years ago? Are our theories about unobservable entities like the smaller atoms or subatomic particles any more certain than the theory of evolution? (Some experiments are able to detect some large atoms and molecules, and sometimes this is called "observation." You might wonder in what ways it counts as observation.) Are the "facts" taught in university science departments really proven, or is belief in them also ultimately a matter of faith?

People who are scientifically minded tend to think that science is special: in the world of knowledge, science is king. If you are at all tempted to deny that science occupies a privileged position in our knowledge systems, then you have a major problem facing you. You have to explain why science is so successful in its predictions, and in technological uses. Exercise: consider the technology that affects your life, and list the scientific theories that have been used to create that technology. For example, what scientific knowledge goes into designing and manufacturing a light bulb? Returning to the particular case of evolution, consider whether evolutionary knowledge is able to make any predictions or is used in the design and creation of technology.

Those are some of the issues you should keep in mind as you read the pieces in this section. The issue about the competition between evolutionary theory and creationism is important in itself, but it is also a particular case in a larger debate about what counts as a scientific theory, and how much credence we should put in what scientists tell us.

CHARLES DARWIN, "THE DESCENT OF MAN" (517)

1. For each biological species of animal, the offspring of parents inherit many of the traits and abilities of their parents.

2. There is a certain amount of small variation in how much each offspring resembles its parents.

3. In any given environment, some members of a species are better able to survive and produce offspring than others.

4. Those members who are able to have more offspring will pass on their traits to more offspring. So as time goes by over several generations, significantly more of the species will have the good traits which help them survive and procreate.

5. Therefore, the inheritable traits which help the members of a species survive will gradually be shared by more and more of the species. Those inheritable traits which hinder survival and procreation will be shared by fewer and fewer members of the species.

6. Through hundreds and thousands of generations of variations, a species can accumulate huge changes in its inheritable traits, so much so that it can become a different species, because it can no longer reproduce with the progenitive species.

7. Since species migrate to different environments, and sometimes environments change, if one species is split into two different populations in different environments, it can lead to significant differences between those populations.

8. We can trace the evolution of many different species and explain remarkable similarities between species using the theory of evolution.

9. Using evolutionary theory and careful observation, we can explain how the differences in traits came about between different races of humans and different subspecies of other animals.

10. Using careful observations of the fossil record and other data, we can see good evidence for thinking that the humans species evolved from other species, which themselves evolved from other species, and so on. There is good reason to think that humans derived ultimately from much simpler species.

Homework: No more than 1 page.
List 5 traits of humans which Darwin gives as being helpful for survival, and explain how each is helpful.

We must not, however, be too confident in deciding what modifications are of service to each being; we should remember how little we know about the use of many parts, or what changes in the blood or tissues may server to fit an organism for a new climate or new kinds of food. Nor must we forget the principle of correlation, by which ... many strange deviations of structure are tied together. (520)

Darwin also notes that some changes in animals might not help individual survival, but could benefit the survival of the community in which the animal lives. He gives examples of the pollen-collecting apparatus or the sting of the worker-bee, or the great jaws of soldier ants (521). Living in a community would improve the chances of survival of an individual.

The piece finishes with Darwin explaining why it would not have to be necessary for humans to be the strongest and fastest of animals in order to survive in competition with other species (522).

JACK HITT, "ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN" (ON RESERVE AT THE KING LIBRARY)

One of his main observations is that neo-creationist "science" is growing as a movement and has some supporters from "respectable" universities.  He says that there are two main sorts of creationist, the young-earthers, who think the earth was made by God about 6000 years ago, and the old-agers, who accept most of conventional scientific wisdom but try to show that God also had a hand in creating the world as it is today (52).

One way to bring God in is to say that he is responsible for the parts that science hasn't explained. This is the "God of the Gaps"  theory. What problems does this approach encounter?

Hitt points out that creationists accept microevolution, which is adaptation within a species. What they dispute is the existence of macroevolution. He mentions that Phillip Johnson, a law professor, wrote a best-selling book which documented many of the difficulties that evolutionary theorists have in explaining macroevolution. Some have argued that it would be incredibly unlikely that any evolutionary processes could have led to the existence of humans, and that to make the world as it is must have required "intelligent design."

The Supreme Court ruled in the 1980s that to teach creationism in schools would violate the separation of church and state (53). They saw creationism as a religious rather than a scientific view. Some modern creationism is trying to be scientific, and to become as scientifically plausible as modern evolutionary theory. This could open the school doors to creationism. Few parents will complain, he says, because polls have show that 58% believe it is only fair to teach creationism in schools.

One of the crucial issues in the debate between "scientific" young-earth creationism and evolution is the explanation of the existence of fossils. Hitt says how creationists try to explain the existence of fossils as a result of the Flood, and how they try to show the standard evolutionary explanation cannot explain the creation of fossils. On the other hand, creationism has a very hard time explaining our knowledge of dinosaurs. For one thing, it is hard to imagine how Noah was able to build an Ark that was capable of carrying such heavy creatures (54). One suggestion by John Woodmorappe, in Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, published in 1996, is that Noah only took baby dinosaurs with him.

Hitt identifies a central problem for creationism being the stunning success of the materialist approach of science, which has led to the "infrastructure of all progress" (55). How would our lives be different without the successes of modern science? How far are creationists willing to go in challenging modern science? Once they reject some of it, should they not follow their ideas to their logical conclusions? (56).

Eventually Hitt comes to the main character in his story, Kurt Wise, who teaches at William Jennings Bryan College in Dayton, TN. Wise is a man with training from some of the best universities, and who holds creationism up to apparently high standards. He is quoted as saying, "Most creation science is garbage" (57). Other things he says suggest that he has a more-than-healthy ego. His declared aim is to deliver a theory that replaces evolution.

In Hitt's view, Wise is an appealing character because he does not take the same kind of paranoid view of the world as other creationists, but instead thinks that science will eventually prove the truth of the Bible's story of creation. He wants to revise all supposed human knowledge from the last 5000 years. Hitt also emphasizes how comforting it is to believe that "every inch of infinity there has already been an accounting" (60). Evolutionary theory is scary because it suggests the world is just random and meaningless, while religious belief makes the world seem to make sense. However, in the end, Hitt hints that being comforting is not enough for him, and he is skeptical about creationism.

The letters page of the February 1997 issue of Harper's contained some responses to Hitt's article. One graduate school contemporary of Wise, Andrew Macfarlane, wrote,

At his dissertation defense, I watched him present a legitimate reevaluation of the criteria by which time ranges are assigned to various fossil groups. But in doing so he assiduously avoided the issue of the actual ages of the fossils. He know perfectly well that tens of thousands of radiometric-age determinations had been published, any one of which would have been enough to disprove the existence of a young earth, so in preparing his thesis he chose to ignore them.

Once, the abandonment of reason and the embrace of superstition led us into the Dark Ages. It is vital that we not let "scientists" such as Wise lead us down that road again.

In Kentucky a school superintendent went so far as to order that textbook pages be glued together because a discussion of the Big Bang theory did not include Genesis's account of creation as well.

Surely the readers of Harper's Magazine don't want their children learning that, as Wise claims, "flood tectonic activity heated up the ocean temperature to thirty degrees Celsius" (a temperature lethal to much marine life), or that, as creation scientist John Woodmorappe suggests, Noah's Ark might have been illuminated by fireflies! They need to know the truth and so do their parents.
 
Words and phrases you need to know to understand the article: vaudeville, warp and woof, antediluvian, muons and leptons, sophist, Greenpeace

PHILIP KITCHER, "ABUSING SCIENCE: THE CASE AGAINST CREATIONISM" (523)

When he says that the Creationist theories of the nineteenth century were 'refutable,' he means that it was possible to test some of their claims. Indeed, the claims turned out to be false. Kitcher says that for a theory to be scientific, it must take the risk of being proved false. If a theory is so vague or protects itself with all sorts of qualifications, then it ceases to be scientific. But the only theories that have any right to be included in scientific textbooks are those that are scientific and haven't been shown to be false (524). Kitcher says that Creationist theories always fail to be both scientific and not obviously false. Defenders of Creationism spend more time attacking evolutionary theory than setting out their own positive theories about how the world came to be as it is.

One of the main findings that any theory needs to explain is the fact that the fossil record is ordered through rock strata. Different kinds of fossils are found at different levels.
 

 The obvious explanation of this is that the different fossils were formed at different times. So "the animals who have inhabited the earth were not all contemporaries" (525). But this is not compatible with Creationism, which says that all animals were created at the same time. Creationists have to go to great lengths to account for this embarrassing fact about fossils. Two proposals have been:

(i) the Devil put the fossils there to deceive us.

(ii) God put the fossils there to test us.

But modern Creationists explain the stratification of fossils by referring to the Flood. All the land animals (except the few saved by Noah) drowned in the Flood, and their remains are the ones that got fossilized.

Kitcher says that this explanation hardly counts as an explanation, because it leaves so much unexplained. In particular, he asks

How exactly did the land reemerge after the flood?

If all of the kinds of land animals went on Noah's Ark, why did some of them die out after the deluge?

How did Noah organize the Ark to make it a feasible project?

Kitcher says none of these questions has been satisfactorily answered.

It might be replied that Darwin's theory is also sketchy and leaves a lot of questions unanswered, so Creationism isn't really in any worse shape than evolutionary theory (526). But Kitcher says that this is not a good comparison, because Creationism doesn't give a detailed explanation of anything, while evolutionary theory does give some detailed explanations, such as Darwin's account of barnacles and South American mammals. Darwin's theory fits well with other parts of science, while Creationism would force us to reject not just evolution, but also many other well-established theories. Kitcher also suspects that Creationism has no resources to draw on to make itself a better theory.

In order to make his point, Kitcher selects a proposed explanation of the fossil record by the Creationist Henry Morris. Morris uses a combination of three explanatory factors (527):

(1) habitat (lower dwelling animals were deposited first),

(2) hydraulic characteristics (the order of deposition depends on the animal's resistance to the downward waters), and

(3) mobility (more mobile animals will be deposited later).

Kitcher says that this account is extremely vague, and leaves a lot of unsolved puzzles. He clearly thinks it is completely unsatisfactory as an explanation of the stratification of fossils (528). Kitcher compares Creationism with a theory sketch of his own, that all life on earth is the product of experiments by aliens. He gladly acknowledges that his "alien" theory is silly, but says that it is no sillier than Morris's Flood Geology.

Another option open to Creationists is to say that we can never know how the Flood worked (529). If there are some facts which Creationism does not explain, it can just say that they are "exceptional cases" and leave it at that. But Kitcher says this would be to hold Creationism up to less strict standards than Creationists expect from evolutionary theory. He goes into the case of the fossils of teleostean fishes to show Creationism seems to have no ability to explain why these fishes are found in fossils no more than 200 million years old, and why they increase in abundance through the millennia. Flood Geology would seem to predict that "animals living at the lowest elevations would tend to be buried at the lowest elevations," i.e., in the oldest rocks, but they are not. There are many other kinds of fish, which we would expect to be more able to survive the Flood, which perished before the teleosteans.

Another problem for Creationists is to explain the anatomy of organisms and the similarities between different organisms (530). Creationists say that this all the intention and design of God, although sometimes we cannot understand his reasons. Kitcher points out that to say this is to abandon the aim of being scientific, and to resort to religious faith (531). "To provide scientific explanations, a Creationist would have to identify the plan implemented in the Creation." Furthermore, there seem to be plenty of cases where the anatomy of an animal can be explained by evolution but is mysterious for Creationists. Kitcher gives the example of the panda's thumb, which does not work very well, but works well enough to grasp the bamboo shoots it eats. Another similar problem for Creationists comes from cases where Nature is repulsive, such as the scavenging of vultures, or rabbits who eat their morning droppings. If these forms of behavior are just the result of evolution, it is understandable, but it is hard to understand why God would deliberately choose them.

Next Kitcher considers how to explain the distribution of different kinds of animals and plants around the world. He focuses on why Australia became a stronghold for marsupial mammals (533). Again, he finds that while evolution has a plausible explanation, that of Creationists is full of holes and inconsistencies with the facts.

Kitcher's conclusion is that Creationism just doesn't measure up as a science (534). It only provides blind guesses where standard evolutionary theory has a careful technical procedures and unified theories. Creationism doesn't have a satisfying scientific explanation for any part of the nature of the living world, and so there would be absolutely no benefits to taking it seriously (535).

WALLACE MATSON, "THE PIOUS GENE" (543)

I. He starts off considering whether having true beliefs is always useful for survival. He considers the view that a creature with false beliefs is at a biological disadvantage. The argument would be that false beliefs lead to inefficiency, and so creatures that have only true beliefs would be tend to survive better than those that did not, and so eventually creatures with false beliefs would be bred out of the species.

Matson says that we can all agree that most people have a good number of false beliefs, and error has not been bred out of our species. He suggests that the problem of the argument is that there is a complex relationship between belief and action, and false beliefs may have survival value.

II. Matson says that while we have been farmers for about 200 generations (i.e., about 10,000 years) we are still biologically speaking, still adapted to being hunter-gatherers, which requires both individual skills and teamwork. In order to be good at this, we need knowledge about plants, fire, water, how other people tend to respond. People who have false beliefs about these things will not do so well (544).

An important that Matson makes is between low beliefs and high beliefs. He classes low beliefs as those which occur as a kind of anticipation of experience. Animals have low beliefs, but no high beliefs, because high beliefs require the possession of language. The sense in which we can agree that animals have beliefs is in their tensing of bodies in preparation for combat, salivating for eating, and so on. When a cat comes to the front door at the sound of keys in the lock, we can say that the cat believes that someone is at the door, even though the cat is not able to think this in linguistic terms. Without language, claims Matson, animals are not able to think about the future beyond the present (545). Beliefs that are not subject to frequent, or even any, direct confrontation with experience are the ones that he calls high.

High beliefs are those that are not put to unambiguous test in a given society, for whatever reason. So a belief that is high for one society could be low for another. For instance, two thousand years ago, any belief about what was at the top of Mount Everest was a high one, but now that is something that we can and have investigated.

Both low and high beliefs can influence action. This is obvious for low beliefs. A high belief, such as that cows are sacred, will stop people from eating cows. With language, both low and high beliefs can be passed from one generation to another. High beliefs that. for instance, "reinforce industry, communal loyalty, cooperation, willingness to sacrifice immediate personal self-interest for the good of the group," will be helpful to groups. The usefulness of the high beliefs will not be directly related to their truth, but rather to the effects they would have on the groups of hunter-gatherers (546). "Evolution therefore does not tend to reinforce true over false high beliefs, but rather those that have survival value."

III. Matson says that it is important for high beliefs to have their effects that we take them just as seriously as low beliefs. But there is an obvious difference between them, so he says that Nature has arranged things so that we don't take this difference to show that we shouldn't have high beliefs. He gives seven mechanisms that protect the high beliefs from being disbelieved because of lack of evidence (547).

1. We are basically credulous, i.e., easily duped.

2. High beliefs tend to be explanations of what we see in our everyday life.

3. The explanations found in high beliefs tend to say that there are invisible powers in some ways similar to humans. They can choose when to act or not, so when they don't, it does not prove that they do not exist.

4. Although the invisible powers are generally thought to be omnipotent, they don't have to act if they don't want to, and they don't have to do it all themselves. We think we have to do our part.

5. We tend to be much more emotionally attached to high beliefs than to low ones.

6. One of the high beliefs is that it is wrong to question high beliefs.

7. When there are doubts about high beliefs, they can take refuge in being seen as metaphors rather than literal truths.

IV. Sets of high beliefs tend to change with time and across different cultures (548). One crucial development in human thought was the birth of science, which Matson defines as "the extension of low beliefs into the domain previously reserved exclusively to the high." It was the ancient Greeks who invented science. It took them a long time to notice that their science was in conflict with their other high beliefs, although philosophers like Plato and Aristotle did notice that there was a problem.

V. But it wasn't a practical problem for those societies, since only few people know about science then. Now things are different. This is one example of the difficulties that our natural biological tendencies create for us. Those tendencies are adapted for small groups of hunter-gatherers to survive, and are often incompatible with modern societies. Any society needs the members of that society to believe that their personal interests coincide with the interests of that society. But this belief is false, and so people must have other false beliefs that will help them believe it. Those false beliefs are some of the high ones. Now with the growth of science and education, we face the danger that we will abandon all those old high beliefs, and this will cause modern society to crumble as people start to act on self-interest alone. Technical terms used by Matson:

Behaviorist account of belief (543). Such an account would say that one's beliefs are necessarily reflected directly in one's behavior. Matson says that he is not assuming this is true.

Low beliefs ... not to be identified either extensionally or intentionally with "empirically verifiable" (544). You don't need to worry about "extensionally" or "intentionally," but for the record two terms are intentionally identical if they have exactly the same meaning, and they are extensionally identical if they refer to all and only the same things. A belief is empirically verifiable if it can be tested through our experience or by experiment.

The unverifiable propositions of Positivism (545). Positivism is a philosophical movement closely related to empiricism. It says that human beliefs can be divided into two sorts, those that are empirically verifiable and compatible with science, and those that are unverifiable, and unscientific. Positivism recommended that we should only concern ourselves with verifiable ideas.

Noumenal powers (547). These are powers which are invisible to us.
 
 
 

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