TALKING GOD Philosophers on Belief Gary Gutting W. W. NORTON & COMPANY Independent Publishers Since 1923 NEW YORK LONDON To Anastasia For so many fascinating conversations CONTENTS PREFACE 1. A CASE FOR THEISM (ALVIN PLANTINGA) 2. A CASE FOR ATHEISM (LOUISE ANTONY) 3. RELIGION AND DECONSTRUCTION (JOHN CAPUTO) 4. EXPERIENCE AND BELIEF (HOWARD WETTSTEIN) 5. SOFT ATHEISM (PHILIP KITCHER) 6. RELIGION AND SCIENTIFIC COSMOLOGY (TIM MAUDLIN) 7. RELIGION AND EVOLUTION (MICHAEL RUSE) 8. A MUSLIM PERSPECTIVE (SAJJAD RIZVI) 9. HINDUISM: DIVINITY WITHOUT GOD (JONARDON GANERI) 10. BUDDHISM: RELIGION WITHOUT DIVINITY (JAY GARFIELD) 11. RELIGION AND KNOWLEDGE (KEITH DEROSE) 12. A HISTORICAL CONTEXT (DANIEL GARBER) BY WAY OF A CONCLUSION ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEES ABOUT THE AUTHOR PREFACE Some people say religion has nothing important to teach us; it’s just a residue of long- discredited ways of thinking and acting. I’m open to that possibility but think it’s more likely that religion—like art, music, and science—deserves the central place it has long held in human culture. I don’t, however, assume that we have an adequate understanding of how and why religion is important. In particular, I suspect that many religious believers don’t have an adequate understanding of the real truth of their religion. Philosophical and scientific critiques may well undermine the “self- understanding” of various religions. But it doesn’t follow that there’s not a truth in religion that believers themselves do not (at least explicitly) grasp. My goal in this series of interviews with philosophers on religion was to see what this truth, if any, might be. Here I present, essentially unchanged, the twelve interviews that appeared during 2014 in The Stone, the New York Times philosophy blog. I conducted each interview by email, with the final version approved by the interviewee. The interviews make up about half of this volume. I’ve added introductions to each interview, providing some background and context, as well as further comments at the end, giving my own take on issues raised in each interview. A “self-interview” (which concluded the Times series) offers my personal reaction to the interviews and my resulting overall view of religion. The interviews cover many of the main issues that concern philosophers interested in religion, but I’ve emphasized the distinctive views of my interlocutors over a more systematic and complete account. There is, however, a logical progression in the order of interviews. We begin with general defenses of theism (Alvin Plantinga) and of atheism (Louise Antony), and then move to two more specific defenses of religion (John Caputo’s Christianity à la Derrida and Howard Wettstein’s Jewish experience). Next, there is Philip Kitcher’s nuanced but powerful “soft atheism”, followed by Tim Maudlin’s deployment of scientific cosmology against traditional religious claims, and Michael Ruse’s sympathetic but ultimately atheistic reflections on religion and evolution. Then we move the discussion beyond Judaism and Christianity, as I talk with Sajjad Rizvi on Islam, Jonardon Ganeri on Hinduism, and Jay Garfield on Buddhism. Finally, there is a discussion with Keith DeRose on the rationality of both theism and atheism, a historical perspective from Daniel Garber, and my “self-interview”. Readers may find this overall structure helpful, but each of the interviews can stand on its own, and they can be read in any order. My own training and interests—not to mention the focus of The Stone—explains why in these interviews “talking God” means primarily “talking philosophy”. Other disciplines, such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, biology, and neuroscience, also offer fruitful paths to understanding religion. But religions offer answers to fundamental questions about human existence that require the intellectual tools philosophers have developed over the centuries. There are those who argue that only scientists (if anyone) can answer these fundamental questions. But their arguments require them to grapple with philosophical questions about what there is (metaphysics), how we can know it (epistemology), and what follows about how we should live (ethics). Others will insist that religion is a matter of emotion rather than reason: “the heart”, as Pascal said, “has its reasons, which reason can never know”. But we are never entirely rational or entirely emotional, and the two are inevitably combined in our lives. We will question a rational conclusion that just doesn’t feel right but also be uneasy with an emotional commitment that we suspect makes no rational sense. Even Pascal in his Pensées offered an elaborate argument for the truth of Christianity. His famous wager argument (of which we will hear more later) was just his last desperate effort to lead the nonbeliever to God. Religion does not reduce to philosophy, but any mature faith will have some sort of rational underpinnings that are open to philosophical reflection. These conversations are contributions to that reflection. I have tried to represent a wide range of views on religion, both positive and negative. There is a particular emphasis on the God of Christian theism as the inevitable starting point in a Western culture formed and still strongly influenced by Christian thinking. But there are also discussions of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist perspectives, which raise serious questions about Christian presuppositions and suggest alternative religious paths. Almost half the interviews are with philosophers who identify as atheists. This is appropriate both because a good majority of professional philosophers are atheists and because the major concern of contemporary philosophy of religion has been whether there is any defensible basis for believing in God. Readers will, however, see various forms of atheism that are considerably more nuanced than the atheism of popular polemics. My goal in this volume is not to change minds but to advance lines of thought that readers—no matter what their views on religion—can engage with in their own ways and for their own purposes. My hope it that this sample of philosophers “talking God” will lead readers to their own fruitful conversations. My thanks to the philosophers I interviewed for the clarity, intelligence, and honesty of their responses and for their cooperation in putting together this volume. Thanks also to Peter Catapano and Jamie Ryerson at the New York Times for their expert editing of the interviews, and at Norton to Brendan Curry for encouraging the project, to Sophie Duvernoy for many editorial improvements, and to Nathaniel Dennett for excellent help with the last stages of the publication process. Thanks, finally, to the exceptional Norton production team, including Lauren Abbate, Nancy Palmquist, Susan Sanfrey, and copyeditor Rachelle Mandik. TALKING GOD 1 A CASE FOR THEISM (ALVIN PLANTINGA) A lthough most philosophers today are highly skeptical of religion, there are some strong voices in favor of belief. This is primarily due to Alvin Plantinga, who, since the 1960s, has developed philosophy of religion into an area where philosophical believers, especially Christians, are able to defend and elaborate upon their faith. Plantinga’s work gained serious attention, even among those who rejected his religious positions, because of his important contributions to mainstream metaphysics and epistemology. He initially responded to two major challenges to religious belief: the alleged lack of good arguments for the existence of a divine being, and the problem of evil in the world. In 1974, Plantinga made quite a splash with his rehabilitation of the ontological argument, Saint Anselm’s effort to show that God’s existence follows logically from his nature as a supremely perfect being. Plantinga crafted an ingenious argument purporting to prove that, if God’s existence is possible, it is also necessary. As we see in the interview, he is also favorably disposed to many other standard theistic arguments, particularly the recent “fine-tuning” argument based on the cosmology of the Big Bang. But Plantinga’s main response to critics who demand arguments supporting religious belief has been that no such arguments are needed. He points out that we all have many beliefs that we can’t support by argument. The history of philosophy is littered with failed attempts to show, for example, that other people have minds (inner subjective experiences), although all we see is their bodily behavior. We are inclined to think that we can argue by analogy to other minds: I know that my body is accompanied by an experiencing mind, so it’s reasonable to assume that the same is true of people with similar bodies. But it’s very implausible to argue from one example (me) to a general conclusion about all humans. Similarly, we all believe that material things exist when we aren’t experiencing them and that the past is often a reliable guide to the future. As in the case of other minds, we have experiences all the time that lead us to have these beliefs, but no one has yet come up with a compelling argument to show that these experiences establish the beliefs, and are not just comforting illusions. Nonetheless, we all think that we require nothing further to support the beliefs. Plantinga asks: How does this differ from religious believers who have repeated experiences of what they take to be the reality of God? These experiences are not the spectacular visions and raptures of the mystics, just an everyday sense of God’s presence, what John Calvin called a sensus divinitatis. Of course, not everyone has this sort of religious experience, and there’s no reason for those who don’t have the experience to agree with those who do. But, Plantinga maintains, the large number of believers who do have such experiences have every intellectual right to their theist belief. As to the problem of evil, Plantinga’s most important contribution has been a detailed and rigorous effort to respond to the logical problem of evil: the claim that believers fall into a logical contradiction when they assert that an all-good, all-powerful God exists while at the same time acknowledging the obvious evils we find in the world. According to the logical problem of evil, it is simply impossible for such a God to exist in a world of evil. As the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus put it, an all-good God would want to eliminate evil, and an all-powerful God would be able to do so; therefore, if there is such a God, there can be no evil. Since there obviously is evil in the world, God does not exist. Plantinga deployed a sophisticated knowledge of modal logic (the logic of possibility and impossibility) to develop a complex argument for the logical compatibility of God and evil. Most philosophers have found this argument convincing, but discussion has since moved to the probabilistic problem of evil, which claims that, even if it’s possible for God and evil to coexist, the reality of evil at least makes God’s existence highly improbable. On this point, which is likely the problem that concerns most ordinary people, there is strong disagreement among philosophers, with arguments that spin into subtle complexities of the mathematical theory of probability. In our interview, Plantinga touches on his response to the problem of evil and discusses in some detail his defense of belief without argument. He also offers two important critiques of atheism. First, he says, atheists should at least retreat to agnosticism since, even if there is no decisive case for theism, there is likewise none for atheism. This issue will also come up in later interviews. Plantinga’s second objection to atheism is the striking claim that it’s logically inconsistent with the evolutionary materialism that atheists often endorse. Many contemporary atheists are materialists, maintaining not only that God doesn’t exist but also that there is nothing immaterial—not even, for example, our minds. Atheism alone does not logically imply materialism. An atheist might even believe in an immaterial soul but deny the existence of God because it’s inconsistent with the reality of evil. But nowadays atheism—particularly among philosophers—is often part of an overall materialist viewpoint, which excludes anything immaterial and explains all human abilities and functions in terms of evolution by natural selection. Darwin himself worried that such a viewpoint might undermine trust in our ability to know the truth: “with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy” (letter to William Graham 3 July 1881, Darwin Correspondence Project [online]). The Christian apologist C. S. Lewis presented an influential version of this doubt in his 1947 book Miracles, arguing that beliefs need not be true to help the species survive. We might, for example, avoid eating poison mushrooms only because we think they are sacred. Plantinga has developed a detailed argument along these lines using the resources of contemporary epistemology and probability theory. He argues that materialism combined with an evolutionary explanation (via natural selection) of how our beliefs arise, casts serious doubt on the truth of anything we might believe—including atheism. In the interview that follows, he gives a sketch of this argument. * INTERVIEW WITH ALVIN PLANTINGA Gary Gutting: A recent survey by PhilPapers, the online philosophy index, says that 62 percent of philosophers are atheists (with another 11 percent “inclined” to the view). Do you think the philosophical literature provides critiques of theism strong enough to warrant their views? Or do you think philosophers’ atheism is due to factors other than rational analysis? Alvin Plantinga: If 62 percent of philosophers are atheists, then the proportion of atheists among philosophers is much greater than (indeed, is nearly twice as great as) the proportion of atheists among academics generally. (I take atheism to be the belief that there is no such person as the God of the theistic religions.) Do philosophers know something here that these other academics don’t know? What could it be? Philosophers, as opposed to other academics, are often professionally concerned with the theistic arguments—arguments for the existence of God. My guess is that a considerable majority of philosophers, both believers and unbelievers, reject these arguments as unsound. Still, that’s not nearly sufficient for atheism. In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of Heaven, what would you say to God to justify your life-long atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism. In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence. G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that