Nicomachean Ethics (Pt. 2)

[Series introduction and table of contents here.]

Book I, Chapter 4

In my comments on Chapter 2, I described Aristotle's "grand goal" as the political art. That wasn't quite right. What he was saying back then and reiterates here in Chapter 4 is that the highest of goods is the same as whatever the political art's goal is. He sees politics as the most encompassing activity in human life, so its goal would be the most encompassing goal. And what is the goal of the political art? Happiness.

All human activities are subordinate to politics and politics is aimed at happiness. Got it. Aristotle doesn't feel the need to argue for the answer of "happiness" because he takes it as universally accepted by both "the many" and "the refined." (Yes, he's just a tad elitist.) He does note that "the many" give a variety of explanations for what constitutes happiness, e.g. health, wealth, pleasure, etc.

"Certain others, in addition, used to suppose that the good is something else, by itself, apart from these many good things, which is also the cause of their all being good."

"Certain others" being Plato and friends, obviously. It's interesting how Aristotle puts some distance between himself and this view. Before he elaborates, however, he goes off on another tangent about arguing from principles vs. arguing to principles. Why does he do this? I think it's because he wants to excuse himself from starting with Plato's principles. He actually names Plato as someone who understood these two different directions of argument. He's tip-toeing around his audience's reverence for his own former teacher. Aristotle is firmly on the side of arguing to principles, which might sound bad until you realize he's trying to be more of a scientist than an ideologue; he wants to use induction to discover what the true principles are from "things known to us" rather than "things known simply."

"Perhaps it is necessary for us, at least, to begin from the things known to us."

See, he's not being arrogant by going his own way from Plato. He's being extra humble.

Book I, Chapter 5

There are three "especially prominent" ways of life:

The life of enjoyment. This is what "the many" choose to pursue, though some rulers do as well. Aristotle calls this "the life of fattened cattle." These people think happiness and pleasure are the same.

The political life. The "refined and active" live the political life by pursuing honor...or maybe virtue. Aristotle considers the possibility that honor is more of a reaction people have when they encounter a person with virtue, which would make virtue the primary goal. He's not quite happy with this result, however, since there are many cases where the exercise of virtue and happiness seem at odds.

"For it seems to be possible for someone to possess virtue even while asleep or while being inactive throughout life and, in addition to these, while suffering badly and undergoing the greatest misfortune. But no one would deem happy somebody living in this way, unless he were defending a thesis."

Funny! But I have to wonder if Aristotle is being overly dismissive of the possibility of being fulfilled and happy despite great suffering, because a person is so overwhelmingly interested in what they're accomplishing.

The contemplative life. A footnote here says that Aristotle doesn't get around to explaining the contemplative life until Book X, Chapters 6-8. I've already seen how easily distracted he is, but this has to be some kind of record! Is "sophistication" a Greek word meaning "disorganized"?

Book I, Chapter 6

Aristotle argues that good can't be a Platonic form (see the "Certain others..." block quote above) because, roughly:

• For something to have a Platonic form, its expressions must pertain to a "common idea."
• Good can pertain to both what something is and its relations to other things.
• What something is is an essential property.
• How something relates to other things is an accidental property.
• A common idea can't be both essential and accidental.
• Therefore good can't be a Platonic form.

He goes on to list other difficulties in understanding good as a single idea. But then he admits that maybe we can divide instances of good into "things good in themselves" and things that "are advantageous" so we can consider whether the multiplicities of good might only be a problem for the latter category (what philosophers today call "instrumental good"). Perhaps there is a single idea common to all things good in themselves. For example, what if the idea of good itself is the only thing that is good in itself? Aristotle calls this "pointless."

In order to avoid pointlessness, it must be the case that all instances of things that are good in themselves outwardly manifest good in a common way, "just as the definition of whiteness is the same in the case of snow and in that of white lead." Aristotle believes that "honor, prudence, and pleasure" are good in themselves because people pursue these things for their own sake (even if they also pursue them in an instrumental sense). He doesn't see how the good of honor and the good of pleasure, for example, manifest in a common way, so good can't be a Platonic form even if we set aside instrumental goodness.

Now Aristotle has a problem. Why the heck do we call all of these disparate things "good" if they don't share a common idea?

"For they are not like things that share the same name by chance. Is it by dint of their stemming from one thing or because they all contribute to one thing? Or is it more that they are such by analogy?"

He doesn't have a ready answer. Instead, he points back at the Platonists and accuses them of having problems explaining how totally abstract forms and concrete human action interact with each other. Reminds me of physicalists in philosophy of mind who defend themselves by pointing out issues with Cartesian dualism.

I wonder what Aristotle would have made of Paul Ziff's book, Semantic Analysis. It seems to me that Ziff answered the question by discovering that things are never good in themselves and it's the other category that can fold neatly into a single idea.


Quotes from: Bartlett, R.C. & Collins, S.D. (2011). Aristotle's nicomachean ethics: A new translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Nicomachean Ethics (Pt. 1)

Time for a good old-fashioned blogmentary! In this series, I'm going all the way back to ancient Greek moral philosophy. Most of my previous readings in ethics have been more-or-less contemporary, with a side of Hume, Kant, and Mill. While I'm not a fan of confusing philosophy with history of philosophy, this Aristotle fellow keeps popping up in current, actively-defended philosophy. He's resilient! I decided it's high time to get acquainted with Aristotle's ethics beyond the popular quotes I've encountered elsewhere.

So you understand where I'm coming from, I have a very goal-oriented view of morality. Descriptively, morality arises from deeply-held human values. Normatively, moral truth arises from a fitting application of decisions or policies to the way the world works. This means I have a decidedly practical rather than mystical view of morality. In the not-so-helpful language of metaethics, "cognitivism," "success theory," "anti-realism," and "hybrid expressivism" should put you in the right neighborhood.

I will be using Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins' new (2011) translation, as pictured above. They pursued formal equivalence—as opposed to dynamic equivalence—to provide readers with a less filtered experience of Aristotle's wording. Think NASB instead of NIV or CEV, if you're familiar with Bible translations (and their acronyms!). I have no set plan on how much to write per original text or even if I'll comment on the whole thing. So long as I find the material interesting and worth discussing, I will. Finally, I encourage you to pick up a paperback copy for yourself. The Kindle edition has a typo in the first sentence and takes away from the excellent footnotes on nearly every page.

Series Links

• Pt. 1 — Introduction and Book I, Chapters 1-3.
• Pt. 2 — Book I, Chapters 4-6. 
• [On hold indefinitely. Aristotle is so very repetitive.]

Book I, Chapter 1

"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action as well as choice, is held to aim at some good. Hence people have nobly declared that the good is that at which all things aim."

Quite an opening line. The first sentence calls out for elaboration. Given an art, inquiry, action, or choice, what is the good being targeted? The second sentence is, intriguingly, hedged. Aristotle isn't flat-out saying all things aim at "the good." He's putting a common view on the table and expressing some sympathy for the people who take that view. It's one thing to say all things aim at "some good"; another to say all things aim at the same good. Even if they do, is this common good so abstract that we can only call it "the good"?

Aristotle immediately raises a difficulty with this noble declaration: how can all things aim at the same good when there are different types of things aimed at? As he puts it, "there appears to be a certain difference among the ends." Some ends are direct. The end of shipbuilding is the production of a ship. Other ends are indirect. The end of building warships isn't just the production of a warship, but of winning a war.

When one end is pursued as a means to a more encompassing end, Aristotle calls the encompassing end "naturally better" and "more choice-worthy." I'm less sure. Take bread-making, for example. The immediate end is the production of a loaf of bread. A further end is to alleviate hunger. Does this necessarily mean the work of alleviating hunger is better than the action of baking bread? Bread isn't the only way to take care of hunger; opening a can of beans could do the job. A person might value bread-making in itself, over and above its use as a hunger banisher. In other words, bread-making might have both instrumental and final value. (Or instrumental and intrinsic value, if you're not hip to Korsgaard).

I'm wary about pushing all value for one activity into its encompassing activity because it can lead pretty quickly to single-value ethics such as Mill's grand goal of aggregate happiness or Rand's grand goal of extending one's own lifespan. While we may value such broad ends and engage in many activities that promote them, I think it's a mistake—an error in judging human psychology—to empty all other values into such pools. The error is especially clear in Ayn Rand's case: we need to live to experience life, but what makes our lives worth living is more than just the time spent.

Book I, Chapter 2

"If, therefore, there is some end of our actions that we wish for on account of itself, the rest being things we wish for on account of this end, and if we do not choose all things on account of something else—for in this way the process will go on infinitely such that the longing involved is empty and pointless—clearly this would be the good, that is, the best."

Freshmen programmers who don't understand the need for a base case in recursive functions should be ashamed of themselves. The ancient Greeks knew this stuff! (They also put your middle school Geometry skills to shame.) Anyway, I still think Aristotle is wrong to ignore the possibility of multiple ends in the "on account of itself" category. But since he thunders on past that, what is his grand goal? ...the political art. Huh? I didn't see that coming, but it does make sense of this edition's beautiful cover art.

Aristotle lists activities such as economics, warfare, and rhetoric which can all be understood as supporting politics. Today we might say that all things are done for the good of society.

"[T]he good of the individual by himself is certainly desirable enough, but that of a nation and of cities is nobler and more divine."

Why not say that the good of nations and cities is subordinate to the good it produces for individuals? It will be interesting to see how Aristotle handles situations where what's good for the state is very bad for some individuals. Or when what's good for individuals is irrelevant to what's good or bad for society.

Book I, Chapter 3

This chapter argues for approaching political science in a rough—rather than an unduly precise—manner.

"The noble things and the just things, which the political art examines, admit of much dispute and variability, such that they are held to exist by law alone and not by nature. And even the good things admit of some such variability on account of the harm that befalls many people as a result of them: it has happened that some have been destroyed on account of their wealth, other on account of their courage"

Oh what a relief! He admits there are problems when civic good or other virtues are pushed to the extremes without considering their effects. Maybe he was familiar with Greek tragedies? This should have prompted some reflection on his part. If your great all-encompassing good can have bad effects, isn't this a flashing clue that you have the wrong fundamental good...or at least not the only fundamental good?

After some snappy characterizations of mathematicians and youngsters, Aristotle praises an attitude of patience when learning. He says his teachings are pointless for people who just follow their passions unreflectively, but of great benefit to people who "fashion their longings in accord with reason and act accordingly." This makes me ask myself, "When was the last time I allowed learning to shape my actions, and not just to justify them?" Honestly, not long ago, considering I participated in the political art just this week and made a different choice than I did four years ago.

Reasons of Love & Living a Meaningful Life

Creative Commons (cclark395).

What does it mean to live a meaningful life? Googling for "meaningful life" does turn up material written from the perspective of academic philosophy, but the first hit has to do with "psycho-spiritual lessons" from Jewish mysticism. There are also a variety of pages giving advice on how to get involved with advocacy or how to change personal habits in a goal-oriented way. This may be the area of popular philosophy most neglected by English-speaking philosophers, but it's not neglected by all of them.

A few years ago, Susan Wolf gave a pair of lectures titled: Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. These have recently been put into book form along with some responses. Since the book is overdue locally, I read through a slightly less polished PDF version (and will be quoting from that). Anyway, I warmed up to Wolf's approach pretty fast when I read this bit:

"In offering a conception of meaningfulness, I do not wish to insist that the term is always used in the same way, or that what I have to offer as an analysis of meaningfulness can be substituted for that term in every context. On the other hand, I do believe that much talk of meaning is aimed at capturing the same abstract idea, and that my proposal of what that idea is fits well with many of the uses to which the word is put."

This is a bit like Paul Ziff's treatment of the meaning of "good" — at its most general — as answering to certain interests implied by context. Seemingly different usages of "good" can be understood in this more abstract fashion. Wolf wants give an abstract explanation of meaning-in-life talk that works for specific instances. How does her "conception of meaningfulness" shake out? Before getting into details, it's important to understand what she means by the phrase "reasons of love."

Reasons of Love

Kant sought for moral principles in a kind of rational willpower that didn't depend one bit on consequences or, especially, human desires:

"That an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined, and therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of volition by which the action has taken place, without regard to any object of desire."
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Philippa Foot challenged this idea by suggesting that the pursuit of some human desires could be what morality is really all about:

"It will surely be allowed that quite apart from thoughts of duty a man may care about the suffering of others, having a sense of identification with them, and wanting to help if he can. Of course he must want not the reputation of charity, nor even a gratifying role helping others, but, quite simply, their good. If this is what he does care about, then he will be attached to the end proper to the virtue of charity and a comparison with someone acting from an ulterior motive (even a respectable ulterior motive) is out of place."
— Philippa Foot, Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives

Just because I'm following my own desire to help another person doesn't make my action selfish. Our desires can be self-oriented or other-oriented. It's not a stretch to say that a person acting out of other-oriented desires is acting out of love, i.e. acting for reasons of love. This might explain why we don't worry about people (or robots) with poor reasoning as much as we worry about those with excellent reasoning but who lack other-oriented desires.

Does this mean that acting for moral reasons and acting for reasons of love are equivalent? Susan Wolf says no. We can have and pursue desires which aren't particularly self-oriented, but they aren't particularly moral either. These desires might be oriented toward other people (e.g. helping a friend move) or they might be oriented toward impersonal interests (e.g. keeping a garden free of weeds). Wolf's categories look something like this:

My Desires

• Self-oriented (selfish reasons)
• Impersonal interest oriented (reasons of love)
• Other-oriented Non-moral (reasons of love)
• Other-oriented Moral (moral reasons)

No One's Desires

• Kant's notion of moral duty (dualistic moral reason)

Wolf admits she is lumping together two categories under the "reasons of love" label, but this is because she wants to emphasize that there are desires (and therefore reasons) which fall outside of the other categories:

"My claim then is that reasons of love – whether of people, ideals or other sorts of objects - have a distinctive and important role in our lives, not to be assimilated to reasons of self-interest or to reasons of morality. Insofar as we fail to recognize and appreciate the legitimacy and value of these reasons, we misunderstand ourselves and our values and distort our concerns."

Maybe you're skeptical. If you have an expansive view of morality, you might want to put both categories of other-oriented desires together. This would imply that, for example, a desire to help a kid learn to read would be both a reason of love and a moral reason. Environmentally minded folks might even want to make impersonal projects like preserving biodiversity a moral issue. Most fundamentally, isn't love itself a moral positive? This is all fine. I understand Wolf to be talking about strong moral imperatives when she talks about morality. We don't expect everyone to personally go out of their way to combat illiteracy or preserve an obscure plant species the way we might expect them to go out of their way to combat hunger or injustice.

The important thing about reasons of love is that they're personal and passionately held. Yours and mine can be quite different, and that's ok. I don't have to love your spouse the way you love your spouse. I don't need to feel the same thrill participating in cosplay culture that you do.

As you may have guessed by now, these personal and passionately held reasons of love are a central figure in Wolf's views on what it means for a life to be meaningful.

Engaging With What We Love

"Essentially, the idea is that a person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something– as opposed to being bored by or alienated from most or all that she does."

This is the first of the two parts of Wolf's "conception of meaningfulness." She's trying to capture the idea of finding your passion and actively pursuing it. This is subjective and can vary a lot from person to person, especially since she's talking about passions which aren't self-oriented desires or universal moral duties. Maybe I have a passion for dance, or writing about philosophy, or competitive video gaming. I don't think Wolf mentions it, but we might put charity causes here which are clearly moral but the particular cause isn't something we expect everyone to be involved with. So organizing and then participating in a breast cancer walk could count as a personal passion for an individual.

All of these things bring us "feelings of fulfillment" that living a merely selfish life or living only for an abstract moral code doesn't seem to provide. What's especially interesting about fulfillment so construed is that what fulfills me may not be the same as what's healthy or comfortable for me, or what makes me happy, or what morality demands. Our reasons of love can be in competition with these other human goods.

Loving What's Worthwhile

The other part of Wolf's "conception of meaningfulness" has to do with a worry that might have come up when you read the last couple of paragraphs: doesn't it matter which passions we pursue? Would a person's life be meaningful if she pursues passions that are pointless? What about passions that are wickedly dangerous to others?

Wolf uses Richard Taylor's thought experiment of Sisyphus fulfilled. Instead of feeling bad about rolling a boulder up a hill forever, this Sisyphus loves rolling the boulder uphill all day every day. Since he is subjectively fulfilled by following his passion, shouldn't we characterize him as living a meaningful life? Wolf writes:

"Something desirable seems missing from his life despite his experience of fulfillment. Since what is missing is not a subjective matter – from the inside, we may assume that Sisyphus’s life is as good as can be – we must look for an objective feature that characterizes what is lacking."

For this objective feature, Wolf appeals to another common way of talking about meaning in life: being involved with something "larger than oneself." Of course this is figurative; it doesn't mean that caring for a physically larger person counts while caring for a physically smaller person would not (otherwise, sorry babies!). Wolf takes it to mean that a person with a meaningful life must be engaged with something that has value beyond or outside the value she herself places on it. If Sisyphus is the only one who esteems boulder rolling, then his love for boulder rolling may make him feel fulfilled but it doesn't give his life meaning in the bigger picture outside of his mind.

This might not sound objective enough to you. Wolf wrestles with this problem too. On the one hand, she wants to be "minimally exclusive" when it comes to defining the kind of objectivity required. On the other hand, she wonders how we could maintain, e.g. that adding an observer who feels fulfilled by watching Sisyphus merrily roll his bounder would suddenly make Sisyphus' life meaningful. How could multiplying subjective valuers create objective value? After a few pages, Wolf concludes:

"Though I believe we have good reason to reject a radically subjective account of value, it is far from clear what a reasonably complete and defensible nonsubjective account will look like. The absence of such an account gives us all the more reason to be tentative in our judgments about what sorts of project deserve inclusion in the class of activities that can contribute to the meaningfulness of a life."

She's inclined to call some activities objectively worthwhile (even if no one else appreciates them) and others not worthwhile (even if lots of people value them), yet she tries hard to avoid the charge of snobbery by admitting it's hard to be sure which is which, or to even apply any certain methods of making such determinations.

Fitting Fulfillment

Putting these two parts together, Wolf sums up her "fitting fulfillment" view like this:

"[M]eaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness, and one is able to do something good or positive about it."

or

"[M]eaning arises from loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a positive way."

Or is that three parts? It's multi-part at any rate. But why would a single concept — meaningfulness — have distinct parts like this? Wolf argues that these parts are intertwined even when we talk in ways that make them seem like separate concerns. In subjectivity, an element of objectivity:

"When someone recommends that you find your passion and go for it, it seems, there is a hope, if not an expectation, lurking in the background, too. The hope is that the passion you find will be an intelligible one, within a certain range. You will not be passionate – at least not for too long – about stone-rolling, or Sudokus, or caring for your goldfish, or making handwritten copies of War and Peace."

And in objectivity, an element of subjectivity:

"[W]hen the recommendation to get involved with something larger than oneself is offered, it is typically offered in the hope, if not the expectation that if one does get so involved, it will make one feel good. The thought is that if one tries it, one will like it, and one will like it in part because of one’s recognition that one is doing something independently valuable."

I'm surprised she didn't include a Yin Yang diagram. While I was reading Wolf's paper, I wanted to say that fulfillment (subjective) and meaning (objective) could simply be treated as separate, peer ideas. Now I'm not so sure. She makes an interesting point about background assumptions when we talk about one idea or the other. Plus, it's a fact that we casually use "meaning" to refer to both aspects. Perhaps we do operate on a two-fold conception of meaning in life.

Human Nature & The Nature of Value

I'm one of those people who gets uncomfortable when the term "objective value" comes up. Means-end value, I understand. Subjective valuing, I understand. But I come up empty when I try to grasp value that is neither means-end nor subjective. I want to collapse Wolf's objective element into one or both of the kinds of value that make sense to me.

So how about this: because intellectually mature humans are social beings by nature, a significant portion of our subjective fulfillment is held hostage by the valuing of others. We crave appreciation, if not for ourselves then at least for our projects or for the results of our projects. I may love tapping piano keys randomly, but if I realize that no one else appreciates or even would appreciate this form of music, my social desires are frustrated. Wolf touches on this idea when she writes about "our need (or wish) not to be alone" and to "see (or try to see) oneself from an external point of view."

What about joyful Sisyphus? If he is fully satisfied because he loves boulder rolling and isn't frustrated even knowing that no one else could share his appreciation for boulder rolling, then — in a sense — he isn't human. He may share my DNA, but his psychology is alien to me. On this view, only subjective value is needed. The constraint on activities we call "meaningful" comes from typical human nature, not from an impersonal source of value.

Now what would be really interesting would be another society (with human DNA or not) that so differs in their valuings that our projects are meaningless to them, and their projects are meaningless to us. This implies neither our lives nor their lives would be meaningful in a sense that transcends all valuers, but I don't understand what it would mean for life to be meaningful in that sense anyway.

On "The Ethics of Belief"

In his 1877 essay, The Ethics of Belief, William Clifford claims: "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." The bulk of the essay is concerned with what counts as sufficient evidence, but I'm not going to get into that here. Let's just assume it's clear when a belief is based on sufficient vs. insufficient evidence.

A Sea Tale

What's so ethically wrong about believing something upon insufficient evidence? Clifford begins by telling a story about a shipowner who doubted his ship was safe, but stifled his doubts until he came to sincerely believe it was safe. The ship sank and he received his insurance money. What a jerk! Intuitively, he's guilty of something. But what, exactly? Clifford writes:

"He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it."

There's a problem here. Clifford's goal in this essay is to convince us of the wrongness of merely holding a belief without sufficient evidence. A more appropriate story would start with the shipowner believing the ship is seaworthy and then neglect to confirm his belief to some appropriate degree. He would not have "knowingly and willing worked himself into that frame of mind." We could consistently condemn someone for doubt-stifling yet not condemn someone for whom the doubt never arose.

Clifford goes on to say that the shipowner's guilt would not be reduced "one jot" if he stifled his doubts and the ship was — in fact — completely seaworthy. I agree that the shipowner would still be failing to carry out due diligence, but he can't be "guilty of the death of those men" as Clifford had claimed about the original case. This is a terrible story for making Clifford's point because it mixes in guilt for manslaughter, guilt for doubt-stifling, and the whole controversial idea that a person can choose what to believe.

Catch-22

What if the shipowner were convinced that the ship is fine, but checks it anyway to fulfill his professional obligations? Clifford would condemn him for believing the ship is fine before checking it. And even if the confident shipowner checks the ship and finds no problems, Clifford would still(!) condemn him for continuing to believe his ship is fine.

"No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiased; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty."

Why is being "really in doubt" unbiased, yet it's biased to believe something? Are doubters somehow immune to confirmation bias while believers are not? Can someone loan me a time machine so I can show Clifford the modern denialist movements?

Infection

I have to admit this bit is rather poetic:

"No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever."

So not only are we in a permanent failure state if we already believe something important without sufficient evidence, any "trifling" misheld belief is just as bad. As anti-religious as Clifford is, I feel like he's introducing his own system of everyone's-a-sinner. He actually does use the word "sinful" later on.

Virtue and Vice

We finally see more explicit ethical theory two paragraphs before his oft-quoted conclusion. First, he rejects act consequentialism:

"And, as in other such cases, it is not the risk only which has to be considered; for a bad action is always bad at the time when it is done, no matter what happens afterwards."

He does dabble with justification for his maxim from rule consequentialism.

"Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide."

But rule consequentialism might not cover all cases of believing for insufficient reasons. I suspect believing that one's own prescriptions are effective drugs is helpful as a rule, even though doctors sometimes prescribe placebos. Also, stifling doubts about doing something dangerous-but-necessary may increase one's chance of success.

Clifford turns to a form of virtue ethics as his primary justifications for saying it's wrong to hold any belief without sufficient evidence.

"If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should lose its property, but that it should become a den of thieves, for then it must cease to be society."

So it's not about immediate or far off consequences associated with the loss of money; it's about acting contrary to the kind of beings we are. We're social beings and social beings respect property. Likewise, beliefs held on insufficient evidence may have this or that consequence, but what's really wrong with such beliefs is that they turn us into credulous savages.

Beliefs and Ethical Goals

For Clifford, not falling into intellectual savagery is an ultimate and overriding ethical end. Holding beliefs without sufficient reason is detrimental to that end, so it's always wrong to do so. I don't think most of us would agree because we have other values that are (at least) on the same level as doing our epistemic duty.

I would connect evidence to ethics in a way that's quite significant, even if it isn't as absolute as Clifford's connection. Informally:

• Beliefs held with sufficient evidence are more likely to be true than beliefs held without sufficient evidence. 
• Goals are more likely to be achieved when holding relevant true beliefs than relevant false beliefs.
• Goals are more likely to be achieved when relevant beliefs are held with sufficient evidence.
• Ethical rightness involves maximizing the likelihood of achieving certain goals.
• Ethical rightness involves holding relevant beliefs with sufficient evidence.

At any rate, "The Ethics of Belief" is a provocative and fun read...or maybe an infuriating read. I appreciate the way he criticizes Christianity by only criticizing other religions directly. He's sure not a boring writer.

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 12)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter 10

Deep Conflict

This final chapter of Where the Conflict Really Lies is devoted to the "real conflict" between science and naturalism implied by the book's title. What sort of conflict? Not a logical conflict, but that a person who accepts evolution can't sensibly accept naturalism.

"By way of analogy: I can’t sensibly believe that there aren’t any beliefs, or that no one has true beliefs, or that my beliefs are all false. These things are all possible, but I can’t sensibly believe them. In the same way, I mean to argue that one can’t sensibly believe both naturalism and the scientific theory of evolution."¹

Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism is one of his signature ideas. It's well known among philosophers and, because of this book, increasingly familiar to the general public. Plantinga eases readers into the argument, but I'd rather shove everyone into the pool. Here's how it goes:

(1) The probability of [our cognitive faculties are reliable] given [naturalism]and[our cognitive faculties evolved] is low.

(2) Anyone who accepts [naturalism]and[our cognitive faculties evolved] and sees that [(1) is true] has a defeater for [our cognitive faculties are reliable].

(3) Anyone who has a defeater for [our cognitive faculties are reliable] has a defeater for any other belief she has, including [naturalism]and[our cognitive faculties evolved].

(4) If one who accepts [naturalism]and[our cognitive faculties evolved] thereby acquires a defeater for [naturalism]and[our cognitive faculties evolved], then [naturalism]and[our cognitive faculties evolved] is self-defeating and can’t rationally be accepted.

Whew!

Oh, you wanted that in English? The upshot is that a person who believes her cognitive faculties arose by unguided evolution might be fine...until she realizes that unguided evolution is more likely to have produced people with mostly false beliefs than people with mostly true beliefs. This means her own beliefs are more likely to be false than true. Which means she's probably wrong in thinking that her cognitive faculties arose by unguided evolution.

This makes "my cognitive faculties arose by unguided evolution" a self-defeating belief in roughly the same category as "all my beliefs are false."

As you might imagine, there's a lot of detail to unpack in Plantinga's premises and a variety of ways his argument can be criticized. If you find it intriguing, I would encourage you to pick up Plantinga's book for this last chapter if nothing else. The best place to explore criticisms is James Beilby's collection Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism.

My own criticism of Plantinga's argument is that he relies on a strong form of dualism between brain states and beliefs-as-propositions. I reject this dualism.

Parting Thoughts

On the whole, I would recommend this book as a decent introduction to a whole spectrum of pro-theism and anti-naturalism arguments. It's not a balanced introduction by any means. Plantinga is often unfair to naturalism (and Young Earth Creationists!), but he's not obscenely unfair like William Lane Craig or R.C. Sproul's crew. This book could be significantly improved in the second edition by sticking to defense in the chapters supposedly (but not really) set aside for defense. I am usually on Plantinga's side when it comes to defending religion against de jure objections, i.e. attempts to marginalize religious faith as irrational without addressing the question of whether it is true.

That's it for this series! I would love to hear what others think of this book if you have (or once you have) read it.


1. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 310

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 11)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter 9

Deep Concord

"Modern Western empirical science originated and flourished in the bosom of Christian theism and originated nowhere else."¹

According to Plantinga, this is no accident. Theism — and Christianity in particular — provides the deep ideas necessary for science to flourish. And here I thought science started with Greeks, was fostered by Arabs, and finally awoke in Christian Europe after a millennium of slumber. What was holding science back all those years, if the soil was more fertile than ever? No answers from Plantinga here. Let's see what he does have to say.

The Supreme Knower

According to the Bible, humanity is made in the image of God. God is maximally great at knowing things. So to be like God, our nature must include a faculty for knowing things about the world.

"Notice that it is blind luck if the human science-forming capacity, a particular component of the human biological endowment, happens to yield a result that conforms more or less to the truth about the world. From the point of view of theistic religion, this is not blind luck. It is only to be expected."²

This strikes me as rather roundabout.

Thought 1: I can know things about the world.
Thought 2: There is a God who knows everything, and that I'm modeled after God, so I can know things about the world!

Did everyone sit around worried that they couldn't know anything until Christians spread around that second thought? Later in this book, Plantinga will argue that naturalists should be terribly worried that we can't know anything if God isn't around ensuring that we can.

Faith in Nature's Order

"Furthermore, science requires more than regularity: it also requires our implicitly believing or assuming that the world is regular in this way."³

Why is the world orderly instead of "unpredictable, chancy, or random"? Because God made it that way. Why did God make it that way? Here Plantinga presents a medieval debate over whether God's will or God's intellect is primary. Ockham was on team will; Aquinas on team intellect. Plantinga backs Aquinas by saying that God's intellect has to be primary for the world to be orderly. A God whose will is greater than his intellect would be capricious. So...

Thought 3: The world is orderly.
Thought 4: A God whose intellect takes precedence over his will created the world, therefore the world is orderly.

Are you starting to see the pattern here?

(Not) Breaking the Law

The laws of nature are unlike civil laws because we can't violate the laws of nature, try as we might. Why not? They don't seem to be logically necessary. Plantinga suggests they are "propositions God has established or decreed, and no creature—no finite power, we might say—has the power to act against these propositions, that is, to bring it about that they are false."⁴

God serves as the explanation for why some things are impossible in our world, even though they aren't logically impossible. Naturalists once again have to assume the world just is a certain way. Theists can assume God is a certain way and does certain things to produce the world we see.

Mathematics

Why is the natural world so amenable to mathematical analysis? Because "sets, numbers and the like [...] are best conceived as divine thoughts."⁵ God's creations would, therefore, conform to mathematics.

Irony...I mean: Simplicity!

"Complicated, gerrymandered theories are rejected. Complex Rube Goldberg contraptions are ridiculed. When confronted with a set of data plotted on a graph, we draw the simplest curve that will accommodate all the data."⁶

Like mathematics, the concept of simplicity (or parsimony or beauty) works surprisingly well as a way of comprehending our world. Why is this? Because God likes simplicity. He created a world which conforms to his ideals. Since we're made in God's image, we have the same preference for simplicity. "This fit is only to be expected on theism, but is a piece of enormous cosmic serendipity on naturalism."⁷

The Formula

Find something unexplained. Posit a creator God with the right kind of attribute to explain why his creation would display the otherwise-unexplained feature. Deny naturalists the same opportunity to posit a world with the right kind of attribute to directly explain the feature in question.


1. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 266
2. ibid. p. 269
3. ibid. p. 271
4. ibid. p. 281
5. ibid. p. 291
6. ibid. p. 298
7. ibid. p. 299

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 10)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter 7

Fine-Tuning

"I’ve argued that science doesn’t conflict with Christian belief: can we go further, and say science offers positive support for it?"¹

This chapter goes over fine-tuning arguments for theism. In contemporary physics, there are some numbers which need to be close to what they are, otherwise our universe would not support stars, heavier elements, and life. It's a mystery why these numbers are the way they are, and for every mystery there's an argument for theism waiting to be made.

"The basic idea is that such fine-tuning is not at all surprising or improbable on theism: God presumably would want there to be life, and indeed intelligent life with which (whom) to communicate and share love."²

And a basic objection is that God wouldn't need to create a universe which requires fine-tuning (and is fine-tuned) to have a universe which supports life. I suppose one could argue that God chose to make a universe that requires fine-tuning so that 20th and early 21st century humans would be puzzled by it and some would consider it evidence of theism. That's a lot of trouble to set up a weak argument available to relatively few people. Physicists might even solve the fine-tuning puzzle this century.

Chapter 8

Intelligent Design

Speaking of solved puzzles, the amazing diversity and complexity of life once posed a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to naturalism. Since Darwin, Mendel, and lots of 20th century work on biochemistry, that obstacle is pretty much history.

Yet Plantinga again drags out Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box as if it's a legitimate challenge to contemporary biology. The sort of derision Behe gets (like the kind I'm giving here) is taken as evidence that scientists don't have serious answers for Behe and they're just culturally opposed to intelligent design.

Design as a Basic Belief

For the sake of argument, Plantinga considers the possibility that design arguments like Behe's all fail to make their point. Is there still a place for talking about biological design? Yes, he says, because we still have a tendency to simply look at things and form a belief that they are designed without needing an argument to that effect.

Even if evolutionary theory provides a way for, say, the human eye to evolve naturally, it could still be the case that God had a hand in its evolution and God designed our cognitive faculties to perceive design in the human eye. Design discourse, as Plantinga calls it, could be warranted even if design arguments aren't sound.

Chapter 8 is supposed to be about the positive support science offers theism, but it relies on fringe criticism and then a shift back to the defensive stance of earlier chapters. On the other hand, this chapter looks fantastic next to a talk I previously covered.


1. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 193.
2. Ibid. p. 199.

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 9)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Six

Defeaters

Supposing some results of scientific method really do conflict with a person's religious beliefs, is that person required to resolve the conflict by giving up those religious beliefs? Plantinga's short answer is: no. His longer answer requires an introduction to the concept of defeaters.

A defeater is a belief that has a detrimental effect on another belief. There are two types of defeaters: rebutting defeaters and undercutting defeaters. A rebutting defeater directly conflicts with another belief (and wins the conflict). If I believe my dog is outside, then I see her dash across the living room, my belief that she's outside is defeated by the belief that she's inside. An undercutting defeater doesn't conflict so much as it takes away the reasons for holding a belief. Suppose I believe my dog is outside because I hear scratching at the door. If I open the door and see that a stray dog was doing the scratching, I no longer have a reason to believe my own dog is outside.

A belief that works as a defeater for me, might not act as a defeater for you. Scratching noises might have been my only reason for thinking my dog is outside, but you might have seen my dog through a window two minutes ago. When I open the door and see the stray dog, I have no reasons left to think my dog is outside, but you still do. Ours sets of preexisting beliefs are different.

Can you see where this is going? A religious person typically holds beliefs which aren't in the common store of beliefs from which science proceeds. Just as seeing the stray dog had different consequences for my belief and your belief, scientific discoveries may have different consequences for individuals according to their total store of beliefs.

Plantinga advises theists to admit — when appropriate — that scientific results are reasonable conclusions to draw from the limited viewpoint of scientific inquiry, but not feel compelled to accept scientific results when other conclusions are more reasonable to draw from one's total worldview.

The Reduction Test

Can a theist hold onto any religious belief no matter what scientific inquiry turns up by saying: "Science suggests not-B, but my total store of beliefs includes B. Too bad for not-B." No, because then anyone — not just theists — could do that to avoid ever giving up a belief.

Instead, Plantinga proposes a thought experiment. Take your preexisting store of beliefs and remove B, along with any other beliefs which entail B. This leaves you with a reduced store of beliefs which is as close as possible to your original store of beliefs, except B could possibly be denied. Now, add the scientific suggestion of not-B. What is the best conclusion to draw from:

(Original total beliefs) minus (B and beliefs that entail B) plus (Scientific suggestion of not-B)

Take the example of evolutionary psychology. Plantinga's original belief B is that our minds were designed by God. Science suggests our minds arose by natural processes, without an intelligent designer. Plantinga can reduce his original store of beliefs to leave open the question of whether God designed our minds and still have God creating the world, God intervening in the world, God wanting human beings to have certain mental abilities, etc. Science without these ingredients might conclude: 100% natural origin of human minds! But Plantinga can mix in these extra ingredients and come to a different conclusion without assuming (specifically) that our minds were intelligently designed.

What about a Christian who reads Old Testament poetry and so believes the Earth is rectangular? When she encounters the scientific evidence that the Earth is globe-shaped, she can set aside her belief that the Earth is rectangular and any beliefs that entail it, then see how the scientific evidence interacts with her remaining store of beliefs. Plantinga thinks the globe-shaped Earth belief will win out and replace the beliefs that led her to believe the Earth is rectangular. For example, she might have to drop the belief that poetic sections in the Bible are trustworthy descriptions of the physical world.

I think this is a decent approach. There is a lot of room to argue about how to apply the reduction test, but the exercise of putting beliefs and conclusions into these terms is at least a helpful way to organize a complex issue.

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 8)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Five - Continued

Historical Biblical Criticism

In case anyone still thinks this book is about theism and science, the remainder of Chapter Five is about the clash between (1) assuming the Christian Bible was authored by God, and (2) examining the Bible to see how it fares apart from that assumption. Plantinga gives no notice of the Qur'an, the Book of Mormon, or the Jewish scriptures considered apart from Christian creeds.

And remember: this chapter is supposed to be about real-but-superficial conflicts between religion (or at least Plantinga's religion) and science. Just as he couldn't make up his mind whether evolutionary psychology is at odds with Christian belief, we'll see that his analysis of historical Biblical criticism is also needlessly inconsistent.

Traditional Biblical Commentary

The traditional (i.e. religious) approach to reading the Bible is to start from the assumption that God is the principal author of the whole thing. No book can ever contradict another. Each book is an authoritative lens through which to interpret the other books. "Commentary" to the exclusion of "criticism" is key, as Plantinga illustrates by comparing Biblical and Kantian studies:

"In Kant scholarship, for example, one tries to figure out what Kant means in a given passage [....] Having accomplished this task (at least to one’s own satisfaction), one quite properly goes on to ask whether Kant’s views are true or plausible, or whether he has made a good case for them. This last step is not appropriate in traditional Biblical commentary. Once you have established, as you think, what God is teaching in a given passage, what he is proposing for our belief, that settles the matter. You do not go on to ask whether it is true, or plausible, or whether a good case for it has been made."¹

Plantinga then describes two "critical" approaches to the Bible.

Troeltschian Historical Biblical Criticism — On the assumption that there aren't really any miracles and God didn't really inspire the Bible, what can be salvaged, historically, from the Bible?

Duhemian Historical Biblical Criticism — Without assuming Christian beliefs are true (or false!), what can historians from a variety of religious backgrounds agree is historical in the Bible?

I expected Plantinga to endorse Duhemian HBC as a worthwhile project in the scientific spirit of doing what can be done with public evidence interpreted across differing worldviews. He could have used the same pattern from earlier in this book:

Genuine Science (Duhemian HBC) + Philosophical Naturalism -> Alleged Science (Troeltschian HBC)

Instead, he expresses disappointment at how "monumentally minimal" the results of Duhemian HBC are, compared to Christian belief. Historical Biblical Criticism as a whole gives "negative results" from a Christian perspective. "[T]here are no miracles; there is no resurrection, and certainly nothing to suggest that Jesus was the incarnate second person of the Trinity or even that he was son of God in any unique sense."²

Why count a failure to affirm Christianity as a negative rather than a neutral result? If his goal in the first half of this book is to emphasize compatibility, he's making the job needlessly hard on himself. Nor is it great advertising to play up unquestioning "commentary" as the only appropriate way to approach his holy book.


1. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 154 
2. ibid. p. 160

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 7)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Five

"My overall claim in this book: there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism."

That was the first sentence of this book's Preface. Why bring it up now? Because the first four chapters covered the unmentioned "alleged conflict" part of the book. Evolution and the idea of scientific laws don't even qualify as "superficial conflict" by Plantinga's count.

"Of course there is conflict between the widely accepted idea that natural selection, or evolution more generally, is unguided; but that claim, though widely accepted, is no part of current science. It is instead a metaphysical or theological add-on; an assumption that in no way enjoys the authority of science."¹

Chapter Five covers ideas which Plantinga believes are genuinely part of current science and genuinely (though superficially) in conflict with theism.

Evolutionary Psychology

While it might be okay to explain the tiger's stripes in terms of natural selection, it's problematic to extend "Darwinian" explanations to human psychology. In particular, to explain religion and morality as the products of natural selection. 

One paper by Herbert Simon really pushes Plantinga's buttons by hypothesizing that a predisposition toward altruism (doing good without expectation of personal benefit) may result from natural selection favoring individuals with a moderate amount of "docility," i.e. the tendency to just accept what society teaches. On average, Simon claims, uncritically accepting the teachings of society helps individuals pass on their genes.

"In this scheme of things, altruism is a relative matter, for only a subset of the altruist's behaviors reduce fitness. Moreover, the altruist is rewarded, in advance, by the 'gift' of docility; altruism is simply a by-product of docility. Docile persons are more than compensated for their altruism by the knowledge and skills they acquire, and moreover not all proper behaviors are sacrificial."²

Why couldn't a self-interested individual just accept the parts of societal wisdom which are personally beneficial and reject the parts which aren't? Simon's answer is that it's often difficult (or impossible) for an individual to figure out which is which:

"Belief in large numbers of facts and propositions that we have not had the opportunity or ability to evaluate independently is basic to the human condition, a simple corollary of the boundedness of human rationality in the face of a complex world."³

Plantinga finds it thoroughly insulting to suggest that the altruistic behavior of "a Mother Teresa or a Thomas Aquinas" comes from their inability to sort out the costs and benefits of social suggestibility and notice they're on the losing side of the gene passing game. Frankly, I think Plantinga is confused about the nature of Simon's paper...and possibly about the language of genetic "fitness" in general. Yes, scientists use value terms to describe genes as tending to encourage or discourage reproduction in a given context. This is meant as a convenient way of talking, not as a social-Darwinist style commentary on human ethics. Of course there's a special danger of making this mistake when a paper discusses human ethics (whatever their contents might be) as arising from what we might call "gene values."

A few pages later, Plantinga writes on a somewhat different topic:

"[God] could have brought it about that our cognitive faculties evolve by natural selection, and evolve in such a way that it is natural for us to form beliefs about the supernatural in general and God himself in particular. Finding a 'natural' origin for religion in no way discredits it."⁴

Why not apply this thinking to ethics? Plantinga could allow for the possibility that altruistic tendencies have evolutionary roots, and still give God the credit. He could draw the same distinction he did in earlier chapters between natural selection and naturalistic selection, where the latter carries the additional burden of philosophical naturalism. Even if Simon himself were antagonistic to theism, I see no reason why Plantinga couldn't separate the man from the field as he does with Richard Dawkins and evolutionary theory in general.

Evolutionary Origins of Religious Belief

Pretty much the same issue as above, except religion is viewed as the byproduct of naturally selected traits. This time, he does draw a distinction between natural origins and naturalistic philosophy. More surprisingly, he goes back to the idea of evolved ethics and now claims it isn't a problem! Then, he writes of both evolved ethics and evolved religious beliefs:

"These theories, therefore, do conflict with religion, but in a merely superficial way. They conflict with religion in the way in which a theory that results from conjoining Newtonian physics with atheism does: that theory conflicts with religion, all right, but it certainly doesn’t constitute a serious religion-science conflict."⁵

Argh! His cases of no-real-conflict and real-but-superficial-conflict turn out to be equivalent.

Genuine Science + Philosophical Naturalism -> Alleged Science

In the first four chapters, he concluded "no real conflict" because he pointed to Genuine Science before the philosophical add-on. In this chapter, he's using the same structure but pointing at Alleged Science to conclude "superficial conflict." I can't interpret this charitably because he explicitly mentioned Newtonian physics on the first page of the chapter, then wrote: "There are other areas of science, however, where the appearance of conflict is matched by reality."⁶ Evolutionary psychology was first on the list that followed.

I hope a second-edition editor encourages him to make up his mind and consolidate these sections under one characterization.

1. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 129

2. Simon, H.A. (1990, December 21). A mechanism for social selection and successful altruism. Science 250, p. 1667. [pdf]

3. ibid. p. 1666
4. Plantinga (2011). p. 140 
5. ibid. p. 143
6. ibid. p. 130

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 6)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Three

"No Miracles" Zone

Shifting away from the discussion of evolution, Plantinga next addresses claims that modern people can't go around thinking it's possible for a supernatural God to act in the natural world (how quaint!). I wasn't satisfied with Plantinga's example, so I went and found this gem from Michael Martin:

"Consider science. It presupposes the uniformity of nature: that natural laws govern the world and that there are no violations of such laws. However, Christianity presupposes that there are miracles in which natural laws are violated. Since to make sense of science one must assume that there are no miracles, one must further assume that Christianity is false. To put this in a different way: Miracles by definition are violations of laws of nature that can only be explained by God's intervention. Yet science assumes that insofar as an event as an explanation at all, it has a scientific explanation--one that does not presuppose God. Thus, doing, science assumes that the Christian world view is false."¹

Put another way, there's something wrong with a person who helps herself to scientific explanations and still wants to appeal to miracles at times. Notice how this goes beyond the more typical claim that scientific explanations must be natural explanations; you can't commit adultery by entertaining supernatural explanations on the side and expect science to let you back in the house.

Plantinga responds by characterizing scientific laws as descriptions of "how things go when the universe is causally closed, subject to no outside causal influence. They don’t purport to tell us how things always go; they tell us, instead, how things go when no agency outside the universe acts in it."² We can imagine a little footnote anytime a scientifically discovered regularity is mentioned:

 * Valid when God isn't messing with nature.

I'm not quite happy with this philosophy of science, but I have to admit it's a pretty standard way of handling the problem.

Everything... All the Time

On Plantinga's view of classical theism, God does a lot more than occasionally intervene. God continually and actively sustains the natural world.

"[A]part from that sustaining, supporting activity, the world would simply fail to exist. Some, including Thomas Aquinas, go even further: every causal transaction that takes place is such that God performs a special act of concurring with it; without that divine concurrence, no causal transaction could take place." ³

This changes the footnote for scientific discoveries from "valid when God isn't messing with nature" to "valid when God is messing with nature in his more usual ways." Continual divine activity is what makes the natural world function at all.

Whatever the metaphysical situation may be, I view scientific laws as descriptions of how things go, as revealed by scientific method. Laws don't mention God's sustaining power or God's special interventions because these are "pluralities" scientists have not needed in order to describe the phenomena open to public view. If you want to believe God is behind Newton's law of gravitation, that's fine with me. But let's not put a metaphysical footnote on it.

Chapter Four

Masters of the Universe

Before the twentieth century, it was common to picture the universe as a whole behaving like it does at roughly human scales and human speeds. If, like Laplace's demon, you could know the current state of the clockwork universe, then — in theory — you could calculate future events perfectly. Or you could calculate backwards to reveal all the details of the past. Relativity and quantum physics made things more complicated, or at any rate more interesting.

For people of certain philosophical temperaments, the problem of divine action in the world remains a concern. Plantinga points out the Divine Action Project as a recent example.

"It would be fair to say, I think, that the main problem for the project is to find an account of divine action in the world—action beyond creation and conservation—that doesn’t involve God’s intervening in the world."⁴

Plantinga himself has no issue with the idea of God sometimes taking special action that disrupts the usual operation of the world, but he offers "a way around this problem" for those who do consider it a problem. On the Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber view of quantum physics, wave function collapses can happen spontaneously. As far as nature is concerned, something is going to happen...but what exactly will happen is left open. Plantinga offers a divine collapse-causation (DCC) model where God is deciding how things turn out when wave functions collapse.

"Furthermore, if, as one assumes, the macroscopic physical world supervenes on the microscopic, God could thus control what happens at the macroscopic level by causing the right microscopic collapse-outcomes. In this way God can exercise providential guidance over cosmic history; he might in this way guide the course of evolutionary history by causing the right mutations to arise at the right time and preserving the forms of life that lead to the results he intends. In this way he might also guide human history. He could do this without in any way 'violating' the created natures of the things he has created."⁵

He goes on to suggest at least some of the Bible's miracles could be chalked up to extremely unlikely outcomes of quantum physics. Even more exciting: maybe human beings possess this same special ability as part of our "image of God"! Our non-physical minds might be communicating our free choices to our brains. "Here we see a pleasing unity of divine and human free action, as well as a more specific suggestion as to what mechanism these actions actually involve."⁶

Before Christians get too carried away by this theological breakthrough, Plantinga has some words of caution:

"The sensible religious believer is not obliged to trim her sails to the current scientific breeze on this topic, revising her belief on the topic every time science changes its mind; if the most satisfactory Christian (or theistic) theology endorses the idea that the universe did indeed have a beginning, the believer has a perfect right to accept that thought. Something similar goes for the Christian believer and special divine action.

But where Christian or theistic belief and current science can fit nicely together, as with DCC, so much the better; and if one of the current versions of QM fits better with such belief than the others, that’s a perfectly proper reason to accept that version."⁷

Isn't accepting DCC a case of being significantly more flighty than keeping up with mainstream science? This seems like picking through oddball versions of periphery scientific suggestions for a way to make peace with a fairly obscure theology of not-intervening-when-intervening.


1. From Michael Martin's paper "The Transcendental Argument for the Nonexistence of God" which sparked a lively debate with John M. Frame. This paper is a kind of parody, so I'm not sure Martin would assert the same ideas in another context.
2. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 79
3. ibid. p. 67
4. ibid. p. 97 
5. ibid. p. 116
6. ibid. p. 120 
7. ibid. p. 121

On "The Epistemological Objection to Divine Command Ethics"

"Believers can argue that morality requires God all they want, but until they can provide some legitimate reasoning or evidence for it, they do not deserve the benefit of a doubt. Who's to say that a universe without God could have no morality? We aren't 100% sure that this one has a god, and yet many of us seem to have no difficulty in making moral decisions. Being good without God is not a problem."¹

While I agree with Taylor Carr that better reasoning or evidence is needed to make divine command ethics a convincing position for those of us who don't subscribe to it already, I think he goes one step too far when he raises what is known as the epistemological objection (i.e. the knowledge-based objection). Essentially:

How could morality require God, if knowing right from wrong doesn't require knowing God?

The not-entirely-absent moral sense of atheists is supposed to demonstrate God's irrelevance to morality. But does this objection work? My short answer is: no, because it's possible for our moral sense to rely on God somehow, without us realizing it.

Knowing vs. Knowing How One Knows

In case my short answer didn't totally satisfy you, let's take a look at Glenn People's recent paper "The Epistemological Objection to Divine Command Ethics." Or, if you're more of an auditory learner, I can recommend his podcast episode on the topic.

First, let's see how he characterizes the basic epistemological objection.

"The underlying argument is as follows, where Q is the act of knowing moral facts and C is anything.

1. If C is the cause of our ability to Q, then person p cannot Q unless he believes in C.
2. p does Q, and does not believe in C.
3. Therefore C is not the cause of our ability to Q."²

As an example, take Aristotle's views on the heart and the brain:

"Moreover, the motions of pain and pleasure, and generally of all sensation, plainly have their source in the heart, and find in it their ultimate termination. This, indeed, reason would lead us to expect. For the source must, whenever possible, be one; and, of all places, the best suited for a source is the centre."

"The brain, then, tempers the heat and seething of the heart."³

So...if [electrical activity in the brain] is the cause of our ability to [think and feel], then [Aristotle] cannot [think and feel] unless he believes in [electrical activity in the brain]. Yet Aristotle could think and feel even though he didn't believe his brain contained any such activity. (1) is false. It stays false when filled in this way:

1. If [God] is the cause of our ability to [know right from wrong], then [Richard Dawkins] cannot [know right from wrong] unless he believes in [God].
2. [Richard Dawkins] does [know right from wrong], and does not believe in [God].
3. Therefore [God] is not the cause of our ability to [know right from wrong].

Since (1) is false, (3) is an invalid conclusion to draw from (2).

31 Flavors

What counts as a "command" in divine command ethics? There isn't a consensus here. At one extreme, divine commands might be aspects of God's unexpressed private will. At the other extreme, a divine command might be a literally voiced, undoubtedly divine imperative given directly to the individuals expected to follow it. Let's label these extremes secret and explicit respectively.

If divine commands were secret, the epistemological objection would be quite strong since there would be absolutely no reason for our moral sense to bear a relationship with God's will. If divine commands were explicit, we'd all know it! Philosophers who actually subscribe to divine command ethics are at various points in between. They hold that God expresses his will somehow, but not as spoken commands to each person.

Here's a moderate form of divine command ethics:

"Consider for example the possibility that God conveys the “sign” to people regarding some act (let’s pick murder) via a proper function of the human conscience. Nobody needs to know what conscience is, how we got one, or that God uses it to ensure that we have some true beliefs in order for them to know, via conscience, that murder is wrong (assuming, of course, that there were a conscience with proper functions)."⁴

So God does express his will, not as a verbal command, but in the design of our consciences. Whether we believe in God or not, we have an innate sense of moral outrage when we witness certain kinds of killing.

I don't think this is how the world actually works, but it's not easily disproven.

Oh, Academics!

Up to this point, I haven't actually addressed the core of Peoples' paper. He's writing in response to a paper by Wes Morriston called "The Moral Obligations of Reasonable Non-Believers" who is himself writing in response to a book and some papers of Robert Merrihew Adams.

Adams is well known for developing a form (or two or three) of divine command ethics intended to steer a respectable path between the extremes of secret and explicit.

Morriston seizes on the most explicit-leaning aspect of Adams' work, and applies an epistemological objection to it.

Peoples responds to Morriston's paper by (1) pointing out that Morriston's objection is so narrowly aimed that it doesn't threaten divine command ethics in general, and (2) accusing Morriston of misconstruing Adams' position anyway.

I have no interest in taking sides on the interpretation of Adams' divine command ethics. It's a minor battle which isn't going to sway the campaign. But then...that does appear to be Peoples' main point.


1. Carr, T. (2009, July 24). Being good without God. GodlessHaven. Retrieved February 19, 2011, from http://www.godlesshaven.com/articles/good-without-god.html
2. Peoples, G. (2011). The epistemological objection to divine command ethics. Philosophia Christi 13(2). La Mirada, CA:Biola University. p. 389
3. Aristotle, On the parts of animals. Heart quote from Book III. Brain quote from Book II. Peoples used a different example, so blame any defects on me.
4. Peoples, G. (2011).

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 5)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Two - Continued

Draper's Evidential Argument

Dawkins and Dennett are meant to represent the position that evolutionary theory has ruled out theism, or at least traditional Abrahamic theism, or at least Plantinga's interpretation of God creating humankind in his image. Paul Draper will now represent the position that evolution at least constitutes significant evidence against theism.

Without getting into Draper's supporting arguments,¹ the basic idea is that we would be relatively less likely to discover that our origins are evolutionary in a world created by God than we would in a fully natural world. The discovery that our origins actually are evolutionary, therefore, constitutes some evidence that we live in a fully natural world. You may recognize this as a form of inference to the best explanation.

Suppose Draper is correct and the fact of evolution counts in favor of naturalism. Plantinga counters by saying that other facts weigh in favor of theism, e.g. that there are intelligent beings on Earth with a moral sense who worship God. Such beings would be relatively more likely to exist if there is a God who wanted them to exist, than in any scenario without a similar guarantee. At this point, I would argue that the facts of moral and religious diversity would be odd in a world with one God who wants a unity of morals and religion...to which Plantinga might play the Calvinism card. And so it goes.

Remember Plantinga's theology about theism being necessarily true? He also complains about Draper assuming theism is a contingent matter. (I really need to write a post on this topic sometime.)

Science Education

"A solid majority of Americans are Christians, and many more (some 88 or 90 percent, depending on the poll you favor) believe in God. But when that choir of experts repeatedly tell us that evolution is incompatible with belief in God, it’s not surprising that many people come to believe that evolution is incompatible with belief in God, and is therefore an enemy of religion. After all, those experts are, well, experts. But then it is also not surprising that many Americans are reluctant to have evolution taught to their children in the public schools, the schools they themselves pay taxes to support. [...] The association of evolution with naturalism is the obvious root of the widespread antipathy to evolution in the United States, and to the teaching of evolution in the public schools."²

I pretty much agree with Plantinga's point that equating evolution and naturalism is a foolish move if you want evolution taught in public schools. To use the weather analogy, meteorology might be controversial in middle school classrooms if Richard Dawkins were out there claiming the hydrological cycle reveals the truth of atheism.

At the same time, Plantinga is badly mistaken about the primary source of "the association of evolution with naturalism." He acts like American Christians are being duped into thinking there's a conflict between evolution and their religious beliefs. Nope. They came up with that idea on their own. Naturalists like Dawkins are reacting, not instigating. For many American Christians, taking Genesis as history is an essential doctrine, despite Plantinga's quick dismissal earlier in the book.

Come to think of it, this book bothers me the same way Intelligent Design books and articles usually do. There's no outright affirmation of the basic scientific discoveries that divide Old Earth Creationists from Young Earth Creationists. It's all about leaving things open for Christians, even when it's the equivalent of leaving open geocentrism. Plantinga is like a politician trying to please a broad base while hoping his scientifically literate constituency and his anti-science constituency don't notice he's refusing to stand with either of them.

Natural Evil

Setting the Genesis issue aside, what about the argument that evolution doesn't fit the picture of a good God who cares for the well-being of his creatures? As Darwin wrote:

"I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice."³

Plantinga gives a possible reason why God may allow so much suffering that can't be blamed on humankind.

"God wanted to create a really good world; among all the possible worlds, he wanted to choose one of very great goodness. [...] Among good-making properties for worlds, however, there is one of special, transcendent importance, and it is a property that according to Christians characterizes our world. For according to the Christian story, God, the almighty first being of the universe and the creator of everything else, was willing to undergo enormous suffering in order to redeem creatures who had turned their backs on him. [...] The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. He was subjected to ridicule, rejection, and finally the cruel and humiliating death of the cross. [...] All this to enable human beings to be reconciled to God, and to achieve eternal life. This overwhelming display of love and mercy is not merely the greatest story ever told; it is the greatest story that could be told. No other great-making property of a world can match this one.

If so, however, perhaps all the best possible worlds contain incarnation and atonement, or at any rate atonement. But any world that contains atonement will contain sin and evil and consequent suffering and pain. Furthermore, if the remedy is to be proportionate to the sickness, such a world will contain a great deal of sin and a great deal of suffering and pain. Still further, it may very well contain sin and suffering, not just on the part of human beings but perhaps also on the part of other creatures as well. Indeed, some of these other creatures might be vastly more powerful than human beings, and some of them—Satan and his minions, for example—may have been permitted to play a role in the evolution of life on earth, steering it in the direction of predation, waste and pain."⁴

What I'm hearing is that huge numbers of sentient beings suffered over millions of years to provide a fitting background for God to suffer briefly. Answers like this are why I recommend people read apologetics books rather than Dawkins, Dennett, et al. if they want to risk their faith.


1. See http://naturalisticatheism.blogspot.com/2006/01/biological-evolution-as-evidence.html for a more detailed analysis.
2. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 53
3. Darwin, C. (1860/1911). Charles Darwin to Asa Gray. In F. Darwin (Ed.), The life and letters of Charles Darwin (vol 2). New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company. p. 105
4. Plantinga (2011). p. 58

On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" (Pt. 4)

[Series explanation and index here.]

Chapter Two

Which came first, the mind or the material?

Richard Dawkins may not be a card carrying member of the philosophers guild, but Daniel Dennett sure is.¹ In his book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett argues that our natural — rather than intelligently designed — origin has profound implications for our lives outside of biology class. He compares the Darwinian Revolution to the Copernican Revolution, since both drastically changed our views about our place in the world.

One of the largest shifts, as Dennett tells it, was believing that a mind (God) brought the physical world into existence...to believing that the physical world brought minds into existence.

I admit this is a harder sell than the natural design of the human eye. At least with an eye, we all agree that having the parts in the right places will result in a functioning organ. There is much less confidence — even among atheists — that having the parts in the right places for a functioning brain will result in a functioning mind. (In fact, this is the reason I call myself a naturalist, but hesitate to identify as a physicalist; I'm not convinced that consciousness has been explained by the physical sciences.)

Clash of the Extremists

It's easy to paint Dawkins or Dennett as zealots for naturalism who go beyond what science strictly requires of modern educated people. Here are some options I see for theists:

• God brought the kind of physical world into existence which was capable of producing human-like beings by natural processes. Since it did, it's still correct to give God the ultimate credit.
• Our world could have produced human-like beings by natural processes, but didn't happen to do so. God tweaked the natural world to set things going in our direction.
• Our world could not have produced human-like beings by natural processes.
• No possible world — in the broadly logical sense — could have produced human-like beings by natural processes.

The first two options are, I would argue, easily compatible with modern science. The third is typical of Intelligent Design arguments. Plantinga himself holds the fourth and most extreme position, as he lets on here:

"So neither Dennett nor contemporary evolutionary theory shows that possibly, all of the features of our world, including mind, have been produced by unguided natural selection. But assume (contrary to fact, as I see it) that this is in fact possible in the broadly logical sense. If so, is it also biologically possible?"²

In a previous post, I explained that Augustine was reluctant to accept the standard interpretation of the days of creation because he held to a theology which made it hard for him to imagine God working on something over time. Plantinga's position also comes from a theological stance that God is the same in all possible worlds. This makes it hard to imagine that features of our world with close ties to God's intentions could differ in other logically possible worlds.

You keep using that word...

Plantinga does try to address the question as if naturalistic evolution were logically possible, but still questions whether it is possible given the way our physical world works:

"For, of course, it is perfectly possible both that life has come to be by way of guided natural selection, and that it could not have come to be by way of unguided natural selection. It is perfectly possible that the process of natural selection has been guided and superintended by God, and that it could not have produced our living world without that guidance."³

Q: Do you know what we call "guided natural selection"?
A: Artificial selection.

Rationalism and Empiricism

Let's talk about Plantinga's other signature area: the rationality of theistic belief. Through much of the twentieth century, certain philosophers brushed off theism as an idea unfit for even bothering to consider whether it is true or false; theism is irrational either way. Plantinga wrote a series of books which essentially argued — and argued successfully, I think — that if (a certain kind of) theism is true, then theism is not irrational.

What puts people off is that Plantinga can maintain his brand of Christian belief in a way that is almost in principle immune to contrary evidence and needs no positive evidence or arguments!

"But suppose Swinburne’s arguments are indeed unsuccessful, and add that the same goes for all the other theistic arguments—for example, the moral argument as developed by George Mavrodes and Robert Adams, and the cosmological argument as developed by William Lane Craig, and all the rest. Does it follow that one who believes in God is irrational, unjustified, going contrary to reason, or in some other way deserving of reprimand or abuse or disapprobation? No. After all, one of the main lessons to be learned from the history of modern philosophy from Descartes through Hume is that there don’t seem to be good arguments for the existence of other minds or selves, or the past, or an external world and much else besides; nevertheless belief in other minds, the past, and an external world is presumably not irrational or in any other way below epistemic par.

Are things different with belief in God? If so, why?"⁴

Until philosophers can defeat his theism on these terms, Plantinga is content to reject natural human origins because it doesn't fit the internally consistent story he believes about the world. Whatever the substantive fruits of science may be, the spirit of scientific inquiry is to look and see what is true about the world. This attitude of empiricism is very different from free-floating rationalism. Granted, we do need some minimal philosophy before empiricism can get to work, but theism — let alone a niche kind of theism — is not required.


Note: The Kindle Edition does not use traditional page numbers. I'm using "k. 93" to indicate Kindle location 93. This book is 6,220 locations long.

1. Plantinga and Dennett have beards. Dawkins does not.
2. Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the conflict really lies: Science, religion, and naturalism [Kindle Edition]. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. k. 701. 
3. ibid. k. 712.
4. ibid. k. 754.