Arguing About Gods

Author

Austin Hoover

Published

June 12, 2021

I’ve started reading Arguing About Gods by Graham Oppy  [1]. Oppy’s main thesis is that there are no successful arguments for the existence of orthodoxly conceived monotheistic gods, where “orthodoxly conceived monotheistic god” refers to an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator of the world (I’ll take “God” to mean the same thing). The book is organized as follows:

  1. Preliminary Considerations
  2. Ontological Arguments
  3. Cosmological Arguments
  4. Teleological Arguments
  5. Pascal’s Wager
  6. Arguments from Evil
  7. Other Arguments
  8. Concluding Remarks

I’m planning to write a post for each chapter to summarize the arguments and record my throughts/questions as they arise. This post starts with the first chapter.

Arguments about the existence of monotheistic gods

This section categorizes the various arguments for and against the existence of God: ontological arguments, cosmological argumentsm teleological arguments, moral arguments, decision theoretic arguments such as Pascal’s wager, “minor” arguments such as the argument from consciousness or the argument from beauty, and finally arguments from personal religious experience, corporate religious experience, etc.

Oppy makes several points about cumulative arguments. Suppose there is a set of n arguments, each with the same conclusion. Is the conclusion more likely based on the entire set of arguments, rather than a single argument? Not necessarily. For example, suppose there are \(n - 1\) strong arguments and one circular argument. In this case, a mega-argument formed from all the arguments in the set would also be circular and hence weaker than any of the arguments in isolation. Arguments could also be viewed probabilistically: each argument could raise or lower the probability of its conclusion. On this view, the meta-argument could be stronger than any individual argument. Oppy doesn’t like this idea. He notes that each argument considers only a carefully selected portion of the full body of evidence, while the correct thing to to is to consider all the evidence at once.

Pruss raises a problem with Oppy’s treatment of cumulative arguments in his review. Suppose each argument has one premise that could be rejected by a reasonable person who holds some particular view; for example, a moral realist could reject this premise, a materialist could reject that premise, etc. It doesn’t follow that a single person could hold all these views at the same time without contradictions. Pruss is also critical of Oppy’s suggestion that, if arguments are viewed probabilistically, all the evidence must be considered at the same time. Instead, Pruss suggests that only the evidence relevant to a given statement is required to evaluate that statement. I think I align with Pruss here.

Arguments

This section discusses what makes arguments successful. Oppy says this requires “(1) an account of rationality and rational belief revision, (2) an account of arguments, (3) an account of rational argumentation amongst rational agents, and (4) an account of the difficulties that arise as a result of the fact that we are not perfectly rational agents”.

Oppy claims that it’s possible for two perfectly rational people to disagree even if they have access to the same evidence. This seems wrong at first. The reasoning is: 1) the order in which the evidence is processed might be important, 2) there is a limit to how much information can be stored in a person’s mind at one time, and further 3) it could be argued that we generally make decisions as Bayesians, evaluating the probability of the evidence given a set of prior probabilities or prior beliefs. In this way, every new belief is formed against the background of other beliefs. If this is true of perfectly rational people, then, of course, we can expect disagreement between less-than-perfectly rational people.

Oppy also claims that the point of arguments is to cause reasonable belief revision:

The most successful argument would be one that succeeds — or perhaps would or ought to succeed — in persuading any reasonable person to accept its conclusion; good, but less successful arguments would succeed — or perhaps would or ought to succeed — in persuading a non-zero percentage of reasonable people to accept their conclusions.

On this definition, it’s very difficult to construct a successful argument. Suppose I’m trying to change Alice’s mind. I need to form an argument whose conclusion follows from premises Alice already believes. But Alice may hold some basic beliefs for which she does not appeal to any other beliefs for justification. If we disagree on those basic beliefs, it’s difficult to see how any argument could change Alice’s mind. If this is correct, then arguments might not be the best way to persuade other reasonable people.

Suppose there’s a premise h that any reasonable person would or ought to accept. For example, are there constraints on a reasonable person’s priors? Oppy writes:

I am not committing myself to the claim that there are no substantive constraints on ‘priors’ — it may be that there are quite severe constraints on reasonable sets of ‘priors’; however, I am claiming that I can see no reason at all for thinking that there is a unique set of ‘priors’ that any reasonable person must have on pain of conviction of irrationality.

How can I know that my priors satisfy these constraints? Pruss has some things to say about a related issue in the beginning of his review.

Some considerations about agnosticism

In this section, Oppy distinguishes between weak and strong agnosticism. He argues that strong agnosticism fails while weak agnosticism is acceptable. The strong agnostic’s view can be summarized as:

  1. In circumstances in which the available evidence no more — and no less — supports \(p\) than it supports logically incompatible hypotheses \(p_1\), \(\dots\), \(p_n\), \(\dots\), one ought to suspend judgment between \(p\), \(p_1\), \(\dots\), \(p_n\), \(\dots\) as well as the hypothesis that \(p\) is false.
  2. There are infinitely many God hypotheses, none of which are more likely than the others given the available evidence (e.g., a god who is not quite omniscient, a god who is not quite omnipotent, two gods rather than one, etc.).
  3. It is neither rational to believe that God exists, nor to believe that God does not exist.

Starting with (1): It’s not obvious to me why we shouldn’t just think p is false in this case. There is, however, a paradox that might illustrate the reason. Consider a lottery with infinitely many tickets. I shouldn’t believe that my ticket is the winner since the probability of winning is zero. But I should think this about every ticket, which amounts to believing that no ticket is the winner — a false belief. So, I should neither believe nor disbelieve that any particular ticket is the winner.

So (1) makes some sense. But believing (1) could make it very difficult to avoid skepticism about basic things like the reality of the external world. Consider the belief that I’m not a brain in a vat (BIV). That belief can’t be based on external evidence because the BIV hypothesis explains the evidence just as well as the alternative. It must be based on internal evidence. If I accept that some beliefs are based on internal evidence and think that it’s best to keep a belief unless there is some good reason to give it up (Oppy calls this “methodological conservatism”), then I have good reason to believe I’m not a BIV. The strong agnostic doesn’t agree with this and seems forced to suspend judgment on whether they are a BIV.

The strong agnostic needs to make some distinction between the God hypotheses and the cases involving extreme skepticism, but there’s no clear way to do this. Oppy notes that the best approach is probably to say that my skepticism about the external world requires me to believe that I’m special in some way (somehow, I’m the only real thing in my perceived world) and that this gives me a reason to reject my skepticism. Call this the “I’m special” consideration ISC. However, Oppy proceeds, if the strong atheist concedes that the ISC is required to distinguish between these cases, then they have conceded that external evidence is not the only thing that can support reasonable beliefs, for the reason why the ISC should count against the truth of a belief is not clear from external evidence even though it may be clear to the strong agnostic. So, the problem is not that the strong agnostic is unreasonable for liking the ISC, it’s that they might be forced to choose between extreme skepticism and admitting that theists and atheists can be reasonable. In other words, the strong agnostic cannot believe (3) and the following statement at the same time:

  1. It is possible to characterize a suitable notion of evidential support that does not rely upon a relativization to background assumptions.

This last view — suspending belief or non-belief in God while recognizing that this is not the only reasonable way to proceed — is weak agnosticism.

Alternative deities

The final section of this chapter considers the arguments for alternative deities like God*. God* is exactly like God but is completely evil. The thought is that the arguments for God work just as well for God*. For example, one way to respond to the problem of evil is to adopt skeptical theism, and it seems that this view could also be used as a defense of God*.1 Any arguments for which this applies would then seem to be ineffective as attacks against non-theists. A further step would be to claim that there is no way to choose God over God* and that theists should therefore give up their belief in God.

If one thinks that moral facts exist and can be known, which I think I do, then the following critique will be convincing. An omniscient being would know all moral facts, but it’s impossible to believe that an action is wrong without being inclined to refrain from performing that action, i.e., I couldn’t know that murder is wrong but have no problem carrying out murder myself. Therefore, God* is logically impossible.

If God* is off the table, then God’ could be introduced. God’ is as close to God* as possible: completely evil, but not quite omniscient. Again, the arguments for God seem to work for God’. If the idea of God’ is shown to be incoherent, maybe we could think of God’’, God’’’, God#, etc. Oppy thinks these alternative deities could be useful to the non-theist as a defense, but not as an attack. This is because the theist likely has a set of prior beliefs that make an orthodoxly conceived monotheistic god seem the most likely to them even if they accept that some arguments don’t nail down God’s moral character. In general, it’s supposed that we shouldn’t be forced to give up a belief just because we recognize the existence of alternatives that seem just as good to an outside observer.

Conclusion

This chapter was primarily about epistemology. I haven’t thought much about this topic — almost not at all before recently reading Alvin Plantinga’s Knowledge and Christian Belief — and I think that articulating my epistemological views is necessary to answer the questions I listed at the beginning of this post. A good first step might be to read the relevant entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

References

[1]
G. Oppy, Arguing about Gods (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Footnotes

  1. Skeptical theism is the view that we’re not in a position to know God’s thoughts, motives, etc. in any specific situation.↩︎