Atheism and Theism

Name: Atheism and Theism
Author: J. J. C. Smart & John Haldane
ISBN: 0470706260

by J. J. C. Smart & John Haldane

This book is now in its second edition, having first appeared in the mid 1990s. Smart is one of the most important thinkers in analytic philosophy in the 20th century. He primarily wrote in metaphysics and the philosophy of science , as well as writing on ethics. John Haldane is an analytical Thomist. I think he even came up with the label ‘analytical Thomism’. He is trained in both the analytical tradition and the Thomist tradition and has been very concerned with bringing these two traditions into conversation. And that is certainly reflected in this exchange between Haldane and Smart in this book. “Haldane tries to address the concerns that an analytic philosopher is likely to have with the kinds of arguments that a medieval thinker like Aquinas would give.” Smart takes the atheist side of the debate and Haldane takes the theist side of the debate. Haldane’s approach is very much in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, which is reflected in the kind of arguments that he gives in the book. But also, as with some of these other writers like Gavin Kerr and Brian Davies, he brings Thomism into conversation with contemporary analytic philosophy. He tries to address the concerns that an analytic philosopher is likely to have with the kinds of arguments that a medieval thinker like Aquinas would give. So, the book is unique among contemporary books on the subject of philosophy of religion precisely because Haldane is arguing from this more classical tradition – the tradition represented by Aristotle and Aquinas. And so, the arguments he presents are very different from the kind that you might see in a contemporary philosopher of religion like Alvin Plantinga or Richard Swinburne or William Lane Craig. So, someone who reads this book is not going to get the same old, same old. They’re going to find a very different approach than they might expect or that they’ve been used to from other literature in contemporary philosophy of religion. I think the strongest argument against the existence of God would be an argument to the effect that we simply do not need to appeal to any divine first cause in order to explain the existence and nature of the world. That’s one of the two main arguments that Aquinas regards as the chief arguments for atheism in the Summa Theologiae , the other being the problem of evil. I think this is a stronger and more interesting challenge to theism than the problem of evil. It’s the claim that God is unnecessary, that he is a fifth wheel. It’s no surprise that I don’t think that argument actually works even for a minute. At the end of the day, I don’t think it’s a strong argument. But I would say that if someone is committed to atheism and wants to make atheism plausible, then that will be the way to go rather than an argument from evil. A logical argument from evil would be an attempt to show that the existence of evil is strictly logically incompatible with God’s existence. Now, I don’t think that sort of argument works and it’s generally accepted even by contemporary atheist philosophers that that sort of argument does not work. On analysis, there is no strict inconsistency between God’s existence and the existence of evil. There is at least in theory, at least in principle, no example of evil for which God might not have some reason to allow it. So, you’re not going to get a logical argument from evil off the ground. Instead, you’d have to go for an evidential argument. This is the sort of argument offered by atheist philosophers like William Rowe. You’d have to show that even though, in theory, for any example of evil we come across, there might be some reason why an all-powerful and all-good God might allow it, nevertheless when we weight the probabilities there are some evils where it is unlikely or improbable that an all-good and all-powerful God would allow it. The existence of such evil gives us good grounds to doubt the existence of God or to deny God’s existence, even though it doesn’t count as a strict proof. That’s the kind of argument that an atheist would have to develop in order to get the problem of evil off the ground as an objection to theism. The problem with that, though, is that if you do have an independent demonstration that God exists, if you’ve got something like a successful version of Aquinas’ Five Ways, then you already know independently that there is a first cause of the world who is infinite in power, all-good, and so on. So, you independently know that for any instance of evil that occurs, there must be some reason why God allows it, even if we don’t know what that reason is. Even Rowe would acknowledge that if you do have an independent argument for God’s existence, then an evidential argument from evil is not going to have any force at all. An evidential argument from evil will have force only if you’re starting from a position where both sides agree that there are no good positive arguments for God’s existence. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So, for those sorts of reasons, I don’t think an argument from evil is very powerful. If you’re going to defend atheism, you’re better advised to go the route of showing that God is simply unnecessary – that we can explain everything without any appeal to a divine cause. I don’t think that approach works either. One of the problems is this. If you’re going to argue that the existence of God is simply unnecessary, you’re ultimately going to have to deny the principle of sufficient reason, where the principle of sufficient reason is the thesis that for anything that exists and for anything that occurs, there must be a reason sufficient to account for why it exists or occurred. There are different ways to formulate the principle but that’s one way of doing so. In my view, I think that if you follow out the implications of the principle of sufficient reason, you’re going to be led to a first cause of things that exists of necessity; you’re going to be led to a necessary being. And when you unpack the implications of the idea of a necessary being, you’re going to find that it has all the divine attributes. In other words, if you admit the principle of sufficient reason, you’re going to be led unavoidably to theism. “An evidential argument from evil will have force only if you’re starting from a position where both sides agree that there are no good positive arguments for God’s existence.” So, if you’re going to avoid theism, you’re ultimately going to have to deny that the world is intelligible and that we can ultimately make sense of it. You’re going to have to deny the principle of sufficient reason. But the minute you do that, you ultimately end up unravelling the very project of giving rational explanations, whether in philosophy or in science. Science and philosophy come tumbling down along with natural theology. There’s really no way for the atheist to have his cake and eat it too. We either have a world that really is intelligible, that we can make sense of, in which case we’re going to have to commit ourselves to the principle of sufficient reason and be led unavoidably to theism. Or, if we’re going to avoid theism, we are going to have to deny the principle of sufficient reason. But there’s not going to be any way to do that coherently without ultimately denying the possibility of philosophical or scientific explanation in general. That’s why I think this other approach to try to justify atheism is not going to work The arguments for God’s existence that I think are the most powerful ones lead you to the existence of a God who not only got the ball rolling thirteen billion years ago with the Big Bang, but who conserves the world in being from moment to moment. This is actually the standard view in classical theism, whether we’re talking about Aristotle or Plotinus or Maimonides or Aquinas or Anselm. The idea is that the fundamental way in which God is the cause of the world is not by virtue of having performed some single act in the past, but rather has to do with keeping the world going from moment to moment. If you can get to that, you have already ruled out deism. A deist conception of God is the idea of a cause who simply got the ball rolling but has disappeared and, for all practical purposes, may not even exist anymore. This is why deism, historically, was a kind of stepping stone from theism to atheism. If God need not be around to keep the world going, then maybe he was never around in the first place. But the kind of arguments that we see in Aquinas are arguments precisely for a God who is active at every moment at which the world exists.

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Edward Feser

"This book is now in its second edition, having first appeared in the mid 1990s. Smart is one of the most important thinkers in analytic philosophy in the 20th century. He primarily wrote in metaphysics and the philosophy of science , as well as writing on ethics. John Haldane is an analytical Thomist. I think he even came up with the label ‘analytical Thomism’. He is trained in both the analytical tradition and the Thomist tradition and has been very concerned with bringing these two traditions into conversation. And that is certainly reflected in this exchange between Haldane and Smart in this book. “Haldane tries to address the concerns that an analytic philosopher is likely to have with the kinds of arguments that a medieval thinker like Aquinas would give.” Smart takes the atheist side of the debate and Haldane takes the theist side of the debate. Haldane’s approach is very much in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, which is reflected in the kind of arguments that he gives in the book. But also, as with some of these other writers like Gavin Kerr and Brian Davies, he brings Thomism into conversation with contemporary analytic philosophy. He tries to address the concerns that an analytic philosopher is likely to have with the kinds of arguments that a medieval thinker like Aquinas would give. So, the book is unique among contemporary books on the subject of philosophy of religion precisely because Haldane is arguing from this more classical tradition – the tradition represented by Aristotle and Aquinas. And so, the arguments he presents are very different from the kind that you might see in a contemporary philosopher of religion like Alvin Plantinga or Richard Swinburne or William Lane Craig. So, someone who reads this book is not going to get the same old, same old. They’re going to find a very different approach than they might expect or that they’ve been used to from other literature in contemporary philosophy of religion. I think the strongest argument against the existence of God would be an argument to the effect that we simply do not need to appeal to any divine first cause in order to explain the existence and nature of the world. That’s one of the two main arguments that Aquinas regards as the chief arguments for atheism in the Summa Theologiae , the other being the problem of evil. I think this is a stronger and more interesting challenge to theism than the problem of evil. It’s the claim that God is unnecessary, that he is a fifth wheel. It’s no surprise that I don’t think that argument actually works even for a minute. At the end of the day, I don’t think it’s a strong argument. But I would say that if someone is committed to atheism and wants to make atheism plausible, then that will be the way to go rather than an argument from evil. A logical argument from evil would be an attempt to show that the existence of evil is strictly logically incompatible with God’s existence. Now, I don’t think that sort of argument works and it’s generally accepted even by contemporary atheist philosophers that that sort of argument does not work. On analysis, there is no strict inconsistency between God’s existence and the existence of evil. There is at least in theory, at least in principle, no example of evil for which God might not have some reason to allow it. So, you’re not going to get a logical argument from evil off the ground. Instead, you’d have to go for an evidential argument. This is the sort of argument offered by atheist philosophers like William Rowe. You’d have to show that even though, in theory, for any example of evil we come across, there might be some reason why an all-powerful and all-good God might allow it, nevertheless when we weight the probabilities there are some evils where it is unlikely or improbable that an all-good and all-powerful God would allow it. The existence of such evil gives us good grounds to doubt the existence of God or to deny God’s existence, even though it doesn’t count as a strict proof. That’s the kind of argument that an atheist would have to develop in order to get the problem of evil off the ground as an objection to theism. The problem with that, though, is that if you do have an independent demonstration that God exists, if you’ve got something like a successful version of Aquinas’ Five Ways, then you already know independently that there is a first cause of the world who is infinite in power, all-good, and so on. So, you independently know that for any instance of evil that occurs, there must be some reason why God allows it, even if we don’t know what that reason is. Even Rowe would acknowledge that if you do have an independent argument for God’s existence, then an evidential argument from evil is not going to have any force at all. An evidential argument from evil will have force only if you’re starting from a position where both sides agree that there are no good positive arguments for God’s existence. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So, for those sorts of reasons, I don’t think an argument from evil is very powerful. If you’re going to defend atheism, you’re better advised to go the route of showing that God is simply unnecessary – that we can explain everything without any appeal to a divine cause. I don’t think that approach works either. One of the problems is this. If you’re going to argue that the existence of God is simply unnecessary, you’re ultimately going to have to deny the principle of sufficient reason, where the principle of sufficient reason is the thesis that for anything that exists and for anything that occurs, there must be a reason sufficient to account for why it exists or occurred. There are different ways to formulate the principle but that’s one way of doing so. In my view, I think that if you follow out the implications of the principle of sufficient reason, you’re going to be led to a first cause of things that exists of necessity; you’re going to be led to a necessary being. And when you unpack the implications of the idea of a necessary being, you’re going to find that it has all the divine attributes. In other words, if you admit the principle of sufficient reason, you’re going to be led unavoidably to theism. “An evidential argument from evil will have force only if you’re starting from a position where both sides agree that there are no good positive arguments for God’s existence.” So, if you’re going to avoid theism, you’re ultimately going to have to deny that the world is intelligible and that we can ultimately make sense of it. You’re going to have to deny the principle of sufficient reason. But the minute you do that, you ultimately end up unravelling the very project of giving rational explanations, whether in philosophy or in science. Science and philosophy come tumbling down along with natural theology. There’s really no way for the atheist to have his cake and eat it too. We either have a world that really is intelligible, that we can make sense of, in which case we’re going to have to commit ourselves to the principle of sufficient reason and be led unavoidably to theism. Or, if we’re going to avoid theism, we are going to have to deny the principle of sufficient reason. But there’s not going to be any way to do that coherently without ultimately denying the possibility of philosophical or scientific explanation in general. That’s why I think this other approach to try to justify atheism is not going to work The arguments for God’s existence that I think are the most powerful ones lead you to the existence of a God who not only got the ball rolling thirteen billion years ago with the Big Bang, but who conserves the world in being from moment to moment. This is actually the standard view in classical theism, whether we’re talking about Aristotle or Plotinus or Maimonides or Aquinas or Anselm. The idea is that the fundamental way in which God is the cause of the world is not by virtue of having performed some single act in the past, but rather has to do with keeping the world going from moment to moment. If you can get to that, you have already ruled out deism. A deist conception of God is the idea of a cause who simply got the ball rolling but has disappeared and, for all practical purposes, may not even exist anymore. This is why deism, historically, was a kind of stepping stone from theism to atheism. If God need not be around to keep the world going, then maybe he was never around in the first place. But the kind of arguments that we see in Aquinas are arguments precisely for a God who is active at every moment at which the world exists."

Arguments for the Existence of God · fivebooks.com