4 Short Philosophy Reflections…

For each of the Reading Reflections you will focus upon
one specific line of argument from the Keller book, making connections with a related reading (or readings), and using Discussion Questions to guide your thinking.

These should be about 2 double-spaced pages, with the exception of the Preliminary Reading Reflection, which is to be 1 double-spaced page.

Though they are very short, they should not therefore be seen as “easy. “ Rather, they will require textual analysis, critical thinking, and integration of concepts, all within a brief space. Being thoughtful, yet concise will be vital.

Preliminary Reading Reflection:

Keller, “Introduction” & “Chapter I: There Can’t Just Be One True Religion.”

· Watch: Keller, “Religion in an Age of Skepticism” (The Veritas Forum); covers same material as Chapter 1:

–

(first 40 minutes, up to the Q+A, though feel free to watch the rest, if interested)

Discussion Questions I:

Readings Set One:

· William T. Cavanaugh, “The Wars of Religion and Other Fairy Tales” (ABC: Religion & Ethics – 3 February 2012) http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/02/03/3422519.htm

· Alvin Plantinga, “A Defense of Religious Exclusivism” (e-mailed document). (A)

· What is the history of philosophy of religion: Plato, Aristotle, and antiquity?

· How does religious language work?

· Do we all have “faith,” when it comes to matters of spirituality, values, and meaning?

· What do your beliefs look like?

· What is the significance of religious pluralism?

· Do you think most people actually do rank religions qualitatively?

· Do all religions share some common “core?”

· Is it fair to ask that people keep their faith “private,” as a matter of personal belief?

Readings Set Two:

· Zagzebski & Miller [Z&m] – John Hick, “Religious Pluralism and Salvation” (444-445) – (Also uploaded to BlackBoard in PDF format)

· [Z&M – The Dalai Lama, “ The Bodhgaya Interview” (455-458)]

· [Z&M – Karl Rahner, “Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions (459-464)]

· What does Plantinga mean by “exclusivism” when it comes to religious truth?

· What does Hick mean by “pluralism” in matters of religion?

· Do you think Plantinga provides an adequate response to Hick’s argument?

Readings Set One:

· Keller, “Chapter 2 – How Could a Good God Allow Suffering?”

· Z&M – Plato, “God is Not the Author of Evil” (323-324)

· Z&M – Lactantius, “On the Anger of God” (325-326)

· Keller argues that just because we can’t find a good reason for God to allow suffering doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. – What do you think about this response? Is it just a cop-out to say that God’s ways of acting are necessarily beyond our comprehension?

· Keller argues that religion (particularly Christianity) provides resources for facing pain, with hope and courage – Have you ever experienced this sort of hope or courage? How and in what circumstances?

· Keller asks, “On what basis…does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?” – How would you respond to this question?

· How does Plato argue that God cannot be the cause of evil?

· What is Epicurus’ argument against a good God, based upon the existence of evils, as recorded by Lactantius? How does Lactantius respond to Epicurus?

Readings Set Two:

· Z&M – Augustine, “That Which Is, Is Good” (327-328)

· Z&M – Augustine, “On the Free Choice of the Will” (329-331)

· What does Augustine mean when he says that so long as anything exists, it is good and that if something was deprived of all goods, it would cease to exist altogether?

· According to Augustine, what is the relationship between free will and wrong doing?

· To what evidence does Augustine point ro show that free will, while it allows us to do wrong, is not for the purpose of doing wrong?

First Reading Reflection:

· Write about 2 pages on one of the topics raised by Keller, in his “Introduction” (belief/doubt) or Chapter 1 (exclusivism) or Chapter 2 (suffering).

· Bring in additional information from at least one other reading

(Cavanaugh, Plantinga, Hick, Plato, Augustine, etc.) where relevant

· Use the Discussion Questions, as a guide to direct your thinking.

Discussion Questions A:

Readings Set One (Choose two): — Tell me which 2 you’re choosing too!

· Z&M – J.L. Mackie, “Evil & Omnipotence” (342-349)

· Z&M – Alvin Plantinga, “The Free Will Defense” (350-368)

· Z&M – William Rowe, “Friendly Atheism, Skeptical Theism, &…Evil” (380-388)

· David Bentley Hart, “Tsunami & Theodicy” (Word document – e-mailed & uploaded)…(B)

· What is the contradiction that Mackie sees between existence of a good and all-powerful God and the existence of evil? (This is the logical problem of evil).

· What are the fallacious solutions to the problem that Mackie discusses and what are his responses to these?

· What is Plantinga’s criticism of Mackie? Do you think it succeeds?

· What’s Rowe’s argument that kinds and quantity of evil in the world makes a good and all-power God unlikely? (This is the evidential problem of evil).

Readings Set Two:

· Keller, “Chapter 3 – Christianity is a Straightjacket”

· Stanley Fish, “The Trouble with Tolerance” (Word document, e-mailed & uploaded)…(C)

· Keller argues that the values of Western democracy are a kind of secular absolute truth that lies beyond the possibility of complete certainty and proof. Do you agree? Does that make these values similar to religious values and beliefs?

· Fish’s essay is a review of Wendy Brown’s book Regulating Aversion, which examines the emergence of “tolerance” that Fish identifies, based on Brown’s book, and why does he think Brown’s solution is inadequate?

Second Reading Reflection:

· Write about 2 pages on one of the topics raised by Keller in his Chapter 3 (truth/freedom) or Chapter 6 (science & faith).

· Bring in additional information from at least one other reading

(Fish, Aquinas, Hume, Dennett, Haught, etc.), where relevant.

· Use the Discussion Questions, as a guide to direct your thinking.

Discussion Questions B:

Readings Set One:

· Keller, “Chapter 4 – The Church is Responsible for So Much Injustice”

· Keller, “Chapter 5 – How Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?”

· Keller admits that non-religious people are often more moral than religious people, but suggests this might be, in part, because religion attracts people looking for help. Does this make sense? Or would you say that if Christianity (or another faith) really does transform lives, then the behavior of its adherents should surpass that of non-adherents?

· In your experience, how have ideas of divine anger, punishment, and hell been portrayed?

· What do you think of Keller’s argument that, if God genuinely loves his creation, then he must oppose anything that seeks to harm it?

· Do you think that, if there is a God, it makes sense that he would be “big” enough to include not only mercy and love, but also judgment and wrath?

· Keller defines hell as “one’s freely chosen identity apart from God, on a trajectory into infinity.” What do you think of that definition and the implications Keller draws from it?

Readings Set Two: (read Keller, Dennett, plus another from Z&M or Hanby – tell me which one)!

· Keller , “Chapter 6 – Science Has Disproved Christianity”

· Z&M – Daniel C. Dennett, “Atheism and Evolution” (614-623)

· Z&M – John F. Haught, “Darwin, Design, and Divine Providence” (624-635)

· Z&M – Alvin Plantinga, “How Naturalism Implies Skepticism” (636-647)

· Z&M – Timothy O’Connor, “A House Divided…” (648-652)

· Michael Hanby, “Reclaiming Creation in a Darwinian World” (from Theology Today 62 (2006): 476-483) (PDF document – emailed & uploaded)…(D)

· Keller writes, “When evolution is turned into an all-encompassing theory explaining absolutely everything we believe, fell, and do, as the product of natural selection, then we are not in the area of science, but of philosophy.” What do you think about this assertion? How would you respond to it?

· What is Dennett’s argument for the conclusion that the explanatory success of evolutionary biology undermines the believing in the existence of God?

· How does Haught respond to Dennett’s argument (as well as arguments from proponents of “intelligent design” theories)?

· What is Plantinga’s argument for thinking that, if atheistic naturalism is true, then we have no good reasons to reject through going skepticism?

· How does O’Connor respond to Plantinga? Is his response convincing?

Readings Set One: (Read at least Aquinas & Hume)

· Z&M – Thomas Aquinas, “Miracles” (565-566)

· Z&M – David Hume, “Of Miracles” (567-571)

· Z&M – George I. Mavrodes, “David Hume and the Probability of Miracles” (583-593)

· How does Thomas Aquinas define a “miracle?” What do you think of that definition?

· What are Hume’s reasons for thinking, that even if a miracle did occur, we could never be in a good position to rationally believe it? How is eye-witness testimony unreliable?

· What is Mavrodes’ response to Hume’s argument? Do you find his response effective?

· Sometimes people reject sacred tests like the Bible, because of how they portray God. Keller responds, however, that this unreasonably “assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you” and why would we expect that? – Do you agree that we should expect a transcendent God to take stands and enforce rules that run counter to our sense of how things should be done? Why or why not?

Readings Set Two: Keller, “Chapter 7 – Intermission…”

· What does Keller mean by “strong rationalism” and why does he see it as problematic?

· What does he mean by “critical rationality?” How do arguments for the existence of God and/or the truth of Christianity fit into critical rationality?

· What sort of “explanatory power” does Keller think theism might have?

· What do you think about the relationship between faith and reason?

Third Reading Reflection:

· Write about 2 pages on one of the topics raised by Keller in his “Intermission” (faith and reason) or Ch. 8 (theistic arguments) or Chapter 9 (religion & morality)

· Bring in additional reading from at least one other reading

(Aquinas, Pascal, James, Aristotle, Hume, Plato, Adams, etc.), where relevant.

· Use the Discussion Questions, as a guide to direct your thinking.

Discussion Questions C:

Readings Set One:

· Z&M – Justin Martyr, “How Justin Found Philosophy” (481-486)

· Z&M – Thomas Aquinas, “Faith & Reason”

· Z&M – Blaise Pascal, “The Wager”

· How does Justin describe his conversion? In what way is Christianity a “philosophy?”

· How does Aquinas distinguish between faith, reason, and what, according to him, is the relationship between the two? Can they ever conflict? How does reason support faith?

· Why does Pascal think it’s worthwhile “betting” on the existence of God, even if there is no absolutely conclusive evidence for God’s existence?

Readings Set Two:

· Z&M – Thomas V. Morris, “Pascalian Wagering”

· Z&M – W.K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief”

· Z&M – William James, “The Will to Believe”

· What are the main criticisms of “Pascal’s Wager” and how does Morris reply to them?

· Clifford famously argues that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” What do you think of Clifford’s claim? Is it true? What does he mean by “evidence?”

· How does James respond to Clifford? Why does he think it is worth risking faith?

Readings Set One: (Choose one version of the cosmological argument from Z&M or McCabe, plus Hume’s critique – Tell me which version you choose too)!

· Keller, “Chapter 8 – The Clues of God”

· Z&M – Aristotle, “The Eternality of Motion and the Unmoved Mover” (62-65)

· Z&M – Al-Ghazli, “The Kalǡm Cosmological Argument” (66-67)

· Z&M – Thomas Aquinas, “The First Three Ways” (71-72)

· Z&M – Samuel Clarke, “The Argument From Dependent Beings” (73-75)

· Herbert McCabe, “God and Creation” (from Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Davies, Oxford Press 2000: 196-201) (Word/PDF documents – emailed & uploaded)…(E)

· Z&M – David Hume, “Critique of the Cosmological Argument” (76-78)

· Among other arguments, Keller suggests that, in general, innate desires correspond to some sort of real objects that can fulfill them (hunger àfood; arousal à sex). He goes on to argue that the human longing for meaning, love, and beauty are strong indicators that God exists —

Do you agree that universal human desires point to God, or is there another explanation?

· Aristotle, Al-Ghazali, Aquinas, and Clarke provide different versions of the same basic argument. What are their similarities and differences? Which do you think is the strongest? What are Hume’s main criticisms of these sorts of cosmological arguments? Do you think these objections are successful?

Readings Set Two:

· Z&M – Cicero, “The Design Argument” (25-26)

· Z&M – Thomas Aquinas, “The Fifth Way” (27)

· Cicero, (quoting the Stoic philosopher Quintus Lucilius Balbus) and Aquinas both provide very brief arguments for God from the appearance of design and purpose. What do you think of their arguments?

Readings Set One:

· Z&M – William Paley, “The Watch and the Watchmaker” (28-30)

· Z&M – David Hume, “Critique of the Design Argument” (31-38)

· Z&M – Robin Collins, “ The Teleological Argument” (39-50)

· Paley provides a more detailed sort of design argument for the existence of God. Do you think it is an important improvement over those of Cicero and Aquinas?

· What are Hume’s main lines of critique against design arguments for the existence of God?

· Do you think that Collin’s argument avoids Hume’s criticisms? Do you find it persuasive?

Readings Set Two:

· Z&M – Rudolf Otto, “The Numinous” (119-122)

· Z&M – Ludwig Feuerbach, “The Essence of Religion in General” (183-186)

· Z&M — Sᴓren Kierkegaard, “Truth is Subjectivity” (153-156)

· How might Otto’s discussion of the “numinous” intersect with what Keller says about beauty?

· Feuerbach and Freud both see belief in God as a projection of fulfillment of human beliefs, needs, and desires. How might their views serve as a response to what Keller says about innate desires, corresponding to real objects?

· What does Kierkegaard mean when he says in order for faith to be faith it must hold onto belief with passion, even though the content of faith is objectively uncertain?

· What do you think of Kierkegaard’s argument?

Make sure you answer all the discussion questions, to the best of your ability and thoroughly, especially those that are underlined. Please use MLA citations, when and where necessary, with a works cited page, following each paper. I’ll be attaching supplementary readings for these reflections A.S.A.P! The key sources for these documents however are:

[1] Linda Zagzabeski and Timothy D. Miller, eds. [Z&M] — Readings in Philosophy of Religion: Ancient to Contemporary

Edition: 2009

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

ISBN: 978-1-4051-8091-7

[2] Timothy Keller — The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

Edition: 2009 Reprint Edition

Publisher: Riverhead Trade

ISBN: 978-1-59448-349-3

Do not take on this assignment if you’re an atheist and don’t agree to complete it if you’re not Christian or, at least very familiar with Christian philosophical and theological viewpoints; thank you. I’d like these papers to be written from as Christian a perspective, as possible, yet far from a fanatical point! These reports must all be completed by 5:00 PM, of Saturday/Sunday, July 28th – July 29th, 2013, my time (Eastern Standard Time – New York). The sooner they’re completed, the better, but don’t rush through them so that thoroughness and accuracy are sacrificed. Absolutely no plagiarism or outside sources are to be used here!!!!

P.S. All supplementary readings for this assignment have now been attached!

Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism

Alvin Plantinga

from Thomas D. Senor, ed. The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith: Essays in
Honor of William P. Alston. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995: 191-215.

When I was a graduate student at Yale, the philosophy department prided itself on diversity:

and

it was indeed diverse. There were idealists, pragmatists, phenomenologists, existentialists,

Whiteheadians, historians of philosophy, a token positivist, and what could only be described as

observers of the passing intellectual scene. In some ways, this was indeed something to take

pride in; a student could behold and encounter real live representatives of many of the main

traditions in philosophy. However, it also had an unintended and unhappy side effect. If anyone

raised a philosophical question, inside, but particularly outside of class, the typical response

would be to catalogue some of the various different answers the world has seen: there is the

Aristotelian answer, the existentialist answer, the Cartesian answer, Heidegger’s answer, perhaps

the Buddhist answer, and so on.

But the question “what is the truth about this matter?” was often greeted with disdain as unduly

naive. There are all these different answers, all endorsed by people of great intellectual power

and great dedication to philosophy; for every argument for one of these positions there is another

against it; would it not be excessively naive, or perhaps arbitrary, to suppose that one of these is

in fact true, the others being false? Or, if there really is a truth of the matter, so that one of them

is true and conflicting ones false, wouldn’t it be merely arbitrary, in the face of this

embarrassment of riches, to endorse one of them as the truth, consigning the others to falsehood?

How could you possibly know which was true?

Some urge a similar attitude with respect to the impressive variety of religions the world

displays. There are theistic religions, but also at least some non-theistic religions (or perhaps

nontheistic strands of religion) among the enormous variety of religions going under the names

“Hinduism” and “Buddhism”; among the theistic religions, there are strands of Hinduism and

Buddhism and American Indian religion as well as Islam, Judaism and Christianity; and all of

these differ significantly from each other. Isn’t it somehow arbitrary, or irrational, or unjustified,

or unwarranted, or even oppressive and imperialistic to endorse one of these as opposed to all the

others? According to Jean Bodin, “each is refuted by all”;
1
must we not agree? It is in this

neighborhood that the so-called “problem of pluralism” arises. Of course many concerns and

problems can come under this rubric; the specific problem I mean to discuss can be thought of as

follows. To put it in an internal and personal way, I find myself with religious beliefs, and

religious beliefs that I realize aren’t shared by nearly everyone else. For example, I believe both:

1
Colloquium Heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis, written by 1593 but first published in 1857.

English translation by Marion Kuntz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). The quotation is from the Kuntz

translation, p. 256.

(1) The world was created by God, an almighty, all-knowing and perfectly good personal
being (one that holds beliefs, has aims, plans and intentions, and can act to

accomplish these aims)

and

(2) Human beings require salvation, and God has provided a unique way of salvation
through the incarnation, life, sacrificial death and resurrection of his divine son.

Now there are many who do not believe these things. First, there are those who agree with me

on (1) but not (2): there are non-Christian theistic religions. Second, there are those who don’t

accept either (1) or (2), but nonetheless do believe that there is something beyond the natural

world, a something such that human well-being and salvation depend upon standing in a right

relation to it. And third, in the West and since the Enlightenment, anyway, there are people—

naturalists, we may call them—who don’t believe any of these three things. And my problem is

this: when I become really aware of these other ways of looking at the world, these other ways of

responding religiously to the world, what must or should I do? What is the right sort of attitude

to take? What sort of impact should this awareness have on the beliefs I hold and the strength

with which I hold them? My question is this: how should I think about the great religious

diversity the world in fact displays? Can I sensibly remain an adherent of just one of these

religions, rejecting the others? And here I am thinking specifically of beliefs. Of course there is

a great deal more to any religion or religious practice than just belief; and I don’t for a moment

mean to deny it. But belief is a crucially important part of most religions; it is a crucially

important part of my religion; and the question I mean to ask here is what the awareness of

religious diversity means or should mean for my religious beliefs.

Some speak here of a new awareness of religious diversity, and speak of this new awareness as

constituting (for us in the West) a crisis, a revolution, an intellectual development of the same

magnitude as the Copernican revolution of the 16th century and the alleged discovery of

evolution and our animal origins in the 19th.
2
No doubt there is at least some truth to this. Of

course the fact is all along many western Christians and Jews have known that there are other

religions, and that not nearly everyone shares their religion.
3
The ancient Israelites—some of the

prophets, say—were clearly aware of Canaanitish religion; and the apostle Paul said that he

preached “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to the Greeks” (1 Corinthians

1:23). Other early Christians, the Christian martyrs, say, must have suspected that not everyone

believed as they did. The church fathers, in offering defenses of Christianity, were certainly

apprised of this fact; Origen, indeed, wrote an 8 volume reply to Celsus, who urged an argument

very similar to those urged by contemporary pluralists. Aquinas, again, was clearly aware of

those to whom he addressed the Summa Contra Gentiles; and the fact that there are non-

2
Thus Joseph Runzo: “Today, the impressive piety and evident rationality of the belief systems of other religious

traditions, inescapably confronts Christians with a crisis—and a potential revolution.” “God, Commitment, and

Other Faiths: Pluralism vs. Relativism”, Faith and Philosophy, Vol. 5, Number 4, October 1988, p. 343f.

3
As explained in detail in Robert Wilken, “Religious Pluralism and Early Christian Thought”, Pro Ecclesia 1

(1992). Wilken focuses on the third century; he explores Origen’s response to Celsus, and concludes that there are

striking parallels between Origen’s historical situation and ours. “What is different today, I suspect, is not that

Christianity has to confront other religions, but that we now call this situation ‘religious pluralism’.”

Christian religions would have come as no surprise to the Jesuit missionaries of the 16
th

and 17
th

centuries or to the Methodist missionaries of the 19th. To come to more recent times, when I

was a child, The Banner, the official publication of The Christian Reformed Church, contained a

small column for children; it was written by “Uncle Dick”, who exhorted us to save our nickels

and send them to our Indian cousins at the Navaho mission in New Mexico. Both we and our

elders knew that the Navahos had or had had a religion different from Christianity, and part of

the point of sending the nickels was to try to rectify that situation.

Still, in recent years probably more of us western Christian have become aware of the world’s

religious diversity; we have probably learned more about people of other religious persuasions,

and we have come to see more clearly that they display what looks like real piety, devoutness,

and spirituality. What is new, perhaps, is a more widespread sympathy for other religions, a

tendency to see them as more valuable, as containing more by way of truth, and a new feeling of

solidarity with their practitioners.

There are several possible reactions to awareness of religious diversity. One is to continue to

believe what you have all along believed; you learn about this diversity, but continue to believe,

i.e., take to be true, such propositions as (1) and (2) above, consequently taking to be false any

beliefs, religious or otherwise, that are incompatible with (1) and (2). Following current practice,

I shall call this exclusivism; the exclusivist holds that the tenets or some of the tenets of one

religion—Christianity, let’s say—are in fact true; he adds, naturally enough, that any

propositions, including other religious beliefs, that are incompatible with those tenets are false.

Now there is a fairly widespread belief that there is something seriously wrong with exclusivism.

It is irrational, or egotistical and unjustified
4
or intellectually arrogant,

5
or elitist,

6
or a

manifestation of harmful pride,
7
or even oppressive and imperialistic.

8
The claim is that

4
Thus Gary Gutting: “Applying these considerations to religious belief, we seem led to the conclusion that, because

believers have many epistemic peers who do not share their belief in God…, they have no right to maintain their

belief without a justification. If they do so, they are guilty of epistemological egoism.” Religious Belief and

Religious Skepticism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 90 (but see the following pages for an

important qualification).

5
“Here my submission is that on this front the traditional doctrinal position of the Church has in fact militated

against its traditional moral position, and has in fact encouraged Christians to approach other men immorally. Christ

has taught us humility, but we have approached them with arrogance…This charge of arrogance is a serious one.”

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Religious Diversity (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 13.

6
Runzo: “Ethically, Religious Exclusivism has the morally repugnant result of making those who have privileged

knowledge, or who are intellectually astute, a religious elite, while penalizing those who happen to have no access to

the putatively correct religious view, or who are incapable of advanced understanding.” “God, Commitment, and

Other Faiths”, p. 348.

7
“But natural pride, despite its positive contribution to human life, becomes harmful when it is elevated to the level

of dogma and is built into the belief system of a religious community. This happens when its sense of its own

validity and worth is expressed in doctrines implying an exclusive or a decisively superior access to the truth or the

power to save.” John Hick, “Religious Pluralism and Absolute Claims,” Religious Pluralism (Notre Dame:

University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 197.

8
Thus John Cobb: “I agree with the liberal theists that even in Pannenberg’s case, the quest for an absolute as a

basis for understanding reflects the long tradition of Christian imperialism and triumphalism rather than the

exclusivism as such is or involves a vice of some sort: it is wrong or deplorable; and it is this

claim I want to examine. I propose to argue that exclusivism need not involve either epistemic

or moral failure, and that furthermore something like it is wholly unavoidable, given our human

condition.

These objections are not to the truth of (1) or (2) or any other proposition someone might accept

in this exclusivist way (although, of course, objections of that sort are also put forward); they are

instead directed to the propriety or rightness of exclusivism. And there are initially two different

kinds of indictments of exclusivism: broadly moral or ethical indictments, and other broadly

intellectual or epistemic indictments. Of course these overlap in interesting ways as we shall see

below. But initially, anyway, we can take some of the complaints about exclusivism as

intellectual criticisms: it is irrational, or unjustified to think in an exclusivistic way. And the

other large body of complaint is moral: there is something morally suspect about exclusivism: it

is arbitrary, or intellectually arrogant, or imperialistic. As J. Runzo suggests, exclusivism is

“neither tolerable nor any longer intellectually honest in the context of our contemporary

knowledge of other faiths”.
9
I want to consider both kinds of claims or criticisms; I propose to

argue that the exclusivist is not as such necessarily guilty of any of these charges.

I: Moral Objections to Exclusivism

I first turn to the moral complaints: that the exclusivist is intellectually arrogant, or egotistical, or

self-servingly arbitrary, or dishonest, or imperialistic, or oppressive. But first: three

qualifications. An exclusivist, like anyone else, will probably be guilty of some or all of these

things to at least some degree, perhaps particularly the first two; the question is, however,

whether she is guilty of these things just by virtue of being an exclusivist. Secondly, I shall use

the term “exclusivism” in such a way that you don’t count as an exclusivist unless you are rather

fully aware of other faiths, have had their existence and their claims called to your attention with

some force and perhaps fairly frequently, and have to some degree reflected on the problem of

pluralism, asking yourself such questions as whether it is or could be really true that the Lord has

revealed himself and his programs to us Christians, say, in a way in which he hasn’t revealed

himself to those of other faiths. Thus my grandmother, for example, would not have counted as

an exclusivist. She had of course heard of the heathen, as she called them, but the idea that

perhaps Christians could learn from them, and learn from them with respect to religious matters,

had not so much as entered her head; and the fact that it hadn’t entered her head, I take it, was

not a matter of moral dereliction on her part. This same would go for a Buddhist or Hindu

peasant. These people are not, I think, plausibly charged with arrogance or other moral flaws in

believing as they do.

Third, suppose I am an exclusivist with respect to (1), for example, but non-culpably believe,

like Thomas Aquinas, say, that I have a knock-down, drag-out argument, a demonstration or

conclusive proof of the proposition that there is such a person as God; and suppose I think

pluralistic spirit.” “The Meaning of Pluralism for Christian Self-Understanding”, in Rouner,Religious Pluralism, p.

171.
9
“God, Commitment, and other Faiths: Pluralism vs. Relativism”,p. 357.

further (and non-culpably) that if those who don’t believe (1) were to be apprised of this

argument (and had the ability and training necessary to grasp it, and were to think about the

argument fairly and reflectively), they too would come to believe (1)? Then I could hardly be

charged with these moral faults. My condition would be like that of Gödel, let’s say, upon

having recognized that he had a proof for the incompleteness of arithmetic. True, many of his

colleagues and peers didn’t believe that arithmetic was incomplete, and some believed that it was

complete; but presumably Gödel wasn’t arbitrary or egotistical in believing that arithmetic is in

fact incomplete. Furthermore, he would not have been at fault had he non-culpably but

mistakenly believed that he had found such a proof.

Accordingly, I shall use the term “exclusivist” in such a way that you don’t count as an

exclusivist if you non-culpably think you know of a demonstration or conclusive argument for

the beliefs with respect to which you are an exclusivist, or even if you non-culpably think you

know of an argument that would convince all or most intelligent and honest people of the truth of

that proposition. So an exclusivist, as I use the term, not only believes something like (1) or (2)

and thinks false any proposition incompatible with it; she also meets a further condition C that is

hard to state precisely and in detail (and in fact any attempt to do so would involve a long and

presently irrelevant discussion of ceteris paribus clauses). Suffice it to say that C includes (1)

being rather fully aware of other religions, (2) knowing that there is much that at the least looks

like genuine piety and devoutness in them, and (3) believing that you know of no arguments that

would necessarily convince all or most honest and intelligent dissenters of your own religious

allegiances.

Given these qualifications then: why should we think that an exclusivist is properly charged with

these moral faults? I shall deal first and most briefly with charges of oppression and

imperialism: I think we must say that they are on the face of it wholly implausible. I daresay

there are some among you who reject some of the things I believe; I do not believe that you are

thereby oppressing me, even if you do not believe you have an argument that would convince

me. It is conceivable that exclusivism might in some way contribute to oppression, but it isn’t in

itself oppressive.

The important moral charge is that there is a sort of self-serving arbitrariness, an arrogance or

egotism, in accepting such propositions as (1) or (2) under condition C; exclusivism is guilty of

some serious moral fault or flaw. According to Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “…except at the cost of

insensitivity or delinquency, it is morally not possible actually to go out into the world and say to

devout, intelligent, fellow human beings: ‘…we believe that we know God and we are right; you

believe that you know God, and you are totally wrong’.”
10

Smith, Religious Diversity, p. 14. A similar statement: “Nor can we reasonably claim that our own form of
religious experience, together with that of the tradition of which we are a part, is veridical whilst others are not. We

can of course claim this; and indeed virtually every religious tradition has done so, regarding alternative forms of

religion either as false or as confused and inferior versions of itself…Persons living within other traditions, then, are

equally justified in trusting their own distinctive religious experience and in forming their beliefs on the basis of it…

let us avoid the implausibly arbitrary dogma that religious experience is all delusory with the single exception of the

particular form enjoyed by the one who is speaking.” John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1989), p. 235.

So what can the exclusivist have to say for herself? Well, it must be conceded immediately that

if she believes (1) or (2), then she must also believe that those who believe something

incompatible with them are mistaken and believe what is false. That’s no more than simple

logic. Furthermore, she must also believe that those who do not believe as she does—those who

believe neither (1) nor (2), whether or not they believe their negations—fail to believe something

that is true, deep, and important, and that she does believe. She must therefore see herself as

privileged with respect to those others—those others of both kinds. There is something of great

value, she must think, that she has and they lack. They are ignorant of something—something of

great importance—of which she has knowledge. But does this make her properly subject to the

above censure?

I think the answer must be no. Or if the answer is yes, then I think we have here a genuine moral

dilemma; for in our earthly life here below, as my Sunday School teacher used to say, there is no

real alternative; there is no reflective attitude which is not open to the same strictures. These

charges of arrogance are a philosophical tar baby: get close enough to them to use them against

the exclusivist, and you are likely to find them stuck fast to yourself. How so? Well, as an

exclusivist, I realize that I can’t convince others that they should believe as I do, but I

nonetheless continue to believe as I do: and the charge is that I am as a result arrogant or

egotistical, arbitrarily preferring my way of doing things to other ways.
11

But what are my

alternatives with respect to a proposition like (1)? There seem to be three choices.
12

I can

continue to hold it; I can withhold it, in Chisholm’s sense, believing neither it nor its denial, and

I can accept its denial.

Consider the third way, a way taken by those pluralists, who like John Hick, hold that such

propositions as (1) and (2) and their colleagues from other faiths are literally false, although in

some way still valid responses to the Real. This seems to me to be no advance at all with respect

to the arrogance or egotism problem; this is not a way out. For if I do this I will then be in the

very same condition as I am now: I will believe many propositions others don’t believe and will

be in condition C with respect to those propositions. For I will then believe the denials of (1) and

(2) (as well as the denials of many other propositions explicitly accepted by those of other

faiths). Many others, of course, do not believe the denials of (1) and (2), and in fact believe (1)

and (2). Further, I will not know of any arguments that can be counted on to persuade those who

do believe (1) or (2) (or propositions accepted by the adherents of other religions). I am

therefore in the condition of believing propositions that many others do not believe, and

furthermore am in condition C. If, in the case of those who believe (1) and (2), that is sufficient

for intellectual arrogance or egotism, the same goes for those who believe their denials.

“…the only reason for treating one’s tradition differently from others is the very human but not very cogent
reason that it is one’s own!” Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, p. 235.

To speak of choice here suggests that I can simply choose which of these three attitudes to adopt; but is that at all
realistic? Are my beliefs to that degree within my control? Here I shall set aside the question whether and to what

degree my beliefs are subject to my control and within my power. Perhaps we have very little control over them;

then the moral critic of exclusivism can’t properly accuse the exclusivist of dereliction of moral duty, but he could

still argue that the exclusivist’s stance is unhappy, bad, a miserable state of affairs. Even if I can’t help it that I am

overbearing and conceited, my being that way is a bad state of affairs.

So consider the second option: I can instead withhold the proposition in question. I can say to

myself: “the right course here, given that I can’t or couldn’t convince these others of what I

believe, is to believe neither these propositions nor their denials”. The pluralist objector to

exclusivism can say that the right course, under condition C, is to abstain from believing the

offending proposition, and also abstain from believing its denial; call him, therefore, “the

abstemious pluralist”. But does he thus really avoid the condition that, on the part of the

exclusivist, leads to the charges of egotism and arrogance? Think, for a moment, about

disagreement. Disagreement, fundamentally, is a matter of adopting conflicting propositional

attitudes with respect to a given proposition. In the simplest and most familiar case, I disagree

with you if there is some proposition p such that I believe p and you believe ~p. But that’s just

the simplest case: there are also others. The one that is presently of interest is this: I believe p

and you withhold it, fail to believe it. Call the first kind of disagreement “contradicting”; call the

second “dissenting”.

My claim is that if contradicting others (under the condition C spelled out above) is arrogant and

egotistical, so is dissenting (under that same condition). For suppose you believe some

proposition p but I don’t: perhaps you believe that it is wrong to discriminate against people

simply on the grounds of race, but I, recognizing that there are many people who disagree with

you, do not believe this proposition. I don’t disbelieve it either, of course; but in the

circumstances I think the right thing to do is to abstain from belief. Then am I not implicitly

condemning your attitude, your believing the proposition, as somehow improper—naive,

perhaps, or unjustified, or in some other way less than optimal? I am implicitly saying that my

attitude is the superior one; I think my course of action here is the right one and yours somehow

wrong, inadequate, improper, in the circumstances at best second-rate. Of course I realize that

there is no question, here, of showing you that your attitude is wrong or improper or naive; so am

I not guilty of intellectual arrogance? Of a sort of egotism, thinking I know better than you,

arrogating to myself a privileged status with respect to you? The problem for the exclusivist was

that she was obliged to think she possessed a truth missed by many others; the problem for the

abstemious pluralist is that he is obliged to think that he possesses a virtue others don’t, or acts

rightly where others don’t. If, in conditions C, one is arrogant by way of believing a proposition

others don’t, isn’t one equally, under those reflective conditions, arrogant by way of withholding

a proposition others don’t?

Perhaps you will respond by saying that the abstemious pluralist gets into trouble, falls into

arrogance, by way of implicitly saying or believing that his way of proceeding is better or wiser

than other ways pursued by other people; and perhaps he can escape by abstaining from that

view as well. Can’t he escape the problem by refraining from believing that racial bigotry is

wrong, and also refraining from holding the view that it is better, under the conditions that

obtain, to withhold that proposition than to assert and believe it? Well, yes he can; then he has

no reason for his abstention; he doesn’t believe that abstention is better or more appropriate; he

simply does abstain. Does this get him off the egotistical hook? Perhaps. But then of course he

can’t, in consistency, also hold that there is something wrong with not abstaining, with coming

right out and believing that bigotry is wrong; he loses his objection to the

exclusivist.

Accordingly, this way out is not available for the abstemious pluralist who accuses the

exclusivist of arrogance and egotism.

Indeed, I think we can show that the abstemious pluralist who brings charges of intellectual

arrogance against exclusivism is hoist with his own petard, holds a position that in a certain way

is self-referentially inconsistent in the circumstances. For he believes

(3) If S knows that others don’t believe p and that he is in condition C with respect to p,
then S should not believe p

this or something like it is the ground of the charges he brings against the exclusivist. But of

course the abstemious pluralist realizes that many do not accept (3); and I suppose he also

realizes that it is unlikely that he can find arguments for (3) that will convince them; hence he

knows that he is in condition C. Given his acceptance of (3), therefore, the right course for him

is to abstain from believing (3). Under the conditions that do in fact obtain—namely his

knowledge that others don’t accept it and that condition C obtains—he can’t properly accept it.

I am therefore inclined to think that one can’t, in the circumstances, properly hold (3) or any

other proposition that will do the job. One can’t find here some principle on the basis of which

to hold that the exclusivist is doing the wrong thing, suffers from some moral fault—that is, one

can’t find such a principle that doesn’t, as we might put it, fall victim to itself.

So the abstemious pluralist is hoist with his own petard; but even apart from this dialectical

argument (which in any event some will think unduly cute) aren’t the charges unconvincing and

implausible? Of course I must concede that there are a variety of ways in which I can be and

have been intellectually arrogant and egotistic; I have certainly fallen into this vice in the past

and no doubt am not free of it now. But am I really arrogant and egotistic just by virtue of

believing what I know others don’t believe, where I can’t show them that I am right? Suppose I

think the matter over, consider the objections as carefully as I can, realize that I am finite and

furthermore a sinner, certainly no better than those with whom I disagree, and indeed inferior

both morally and intellectually to many who do not believe what I do; but suppose it still seems

clear to me that the proposition in question is true: can I really be behaving immorally in

continuing to believe it?

I am dead sure that it is wrong to try to advance my career by telling lies about my colleagues; I

realize there are those who disagree; I also realize that in all likelihood there is no way I can find

to show them that they are wrong; nonetheless I think they are wrong. If I think this after careful

reflection—if I consider the claims of those who disagree as sympathetically as I can, if I try

level best to ascertain the truth here—and it still seems to me sleazy, wrong and despicable to lie

about my colleagues to advance my career, could I really be doing something immoral in

continuing to believe as before? I can’t see how. If, after careful reflection and thought, you

find yourself convinced that the right propositional attitude to take to (1) and (2) in the face of

the facts of religious pluralism is abstention from belief, how could you properly be taxed with

egotism, either for so believing or for so abstaining? Even if you knew others did not agree with

you? So I can’t see how the moral charge against exclusivism can be sustained.

II: Epistemic Objections to Exclusivism

I turn now to epistemic objections to Exclusivism. There are many different specifically

epistemic virtues, and a corresponding plethora of epistemic vices; the ones with which the

exclusivist is most frequently charged, however, are irrationality and lack of justification in

holding his exclusivist beliefs. The claim is that as an exclusivist, he holds unjustified beliefs,

and/or irrational beliefs. Better, he is unjustified or irrational in holding these beliefs. I shall

therefore consider those two claims; and I shall argue that the exclusivistic views need not be

either unjustified or irrational. I shall then turn to the question whether his beliefs could have

warrant: that property, whatever precisely it is, that distinguishes knowledge from mere true

belief, and whether they could have enough warrant for knowledge.

A. Justification

The pluralist objector sometimes claims that to hold exclusivist views, in condition C, is

unjustified—epistemically unjustified. Is this true? And what does he mean when he makes this

claim? As even a brief glance at the contemporary epistemological literature will show,

justification is a protean and multifarious notion.
13

There are, I think, substantially two

possibilities as to what he means. The central core of the notion, its beating heart, the

paradigmatic center to which most of the myriad contemporary variations are related by way of

analogical extension and family resemblance, is the notion of being within one’s intellectual

rights, having violated no intellectual or cognitive duties or obligations in the formation and

sustenance of the belief in question. This is the palimpsest, going back to Descartes and

especially Locke, that underlies the multitudinous battery of contemporary inscriptions. There is

no space to argue that point here; but chances are when the pluralist objector to exclusivism

claims that the latter is unjustified, it is some notion lying in this neighborhood that he has in

mind. (And of course here we should note the very close connection between the moral

objections to exclusivism and the objection that exclusivism is epistemically unjustified.)

The duties involved, naturally enough, would be specifically epistemic duties: perhaps a duty to

proportion degree of belief to (propositional) evidence from what is certain, i.e., self-evident or

incorrigible, as with Locke, or perhaps to try one’s best to get into and stay in the right relation to

the truth, as with Roderick Chisholm,
14

the leading contemporary champion of the justificationist

tradition with respect to knowledge. But at present there is widespread (and as I see it, correct)

agreement that there is no duty of the Lockean kind. Perhaps there is one of the Chisholmian

kind;
15

but isn’t the exclusivist conforming to that duty if, after the sort of careful, indeed

See my “Justification in the Twentieth Century” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50, supplement
(Fall, 1990), pp. 45 ff., and see chap. 1 of my Warrant: the Current Debate (New York: Oxford University Press,

1993).

See the three editions of Theory of Knowlede referred to in footnote 22.

Some people think there is, and also think that withholding belief, abstaining from belief, is always and

automatically the safe course to take with respect to this duty, whenever any question arises as to what to believe

and withhold. But that isn’t so. One can go wrong by withholding as well as by believing: there is no safe haven

here, not even abstention. If there is a duty of the Chisholmian kind, and if I, out of epistemic pride and excessive

prayerful consideration I mentioned in the response to the moral objection, it still seems to him

strongly that (1), say, is true and he accordingly still believes it? It is therefore hard to see that

the exclusivist is necessarily unjustified in this way.

The second possibility for understanding the charge—the charge that exclusivism is

epistemically unjustified—has to do with the oft-repeated claim that exclusivism is intellectually

arbitrary. Perhaps the idea is that there is an intellectual duty to treat similar cases similarly; the

exclusivist violates this duty by arbitrarily choosing to believe (for the moment going along with

the fiction that we choose beliefs of this sort) (1) and (2) in the face of the plurality of conflicting

religious beliefs the world presents. But suppose there is such a duty. Clearly you do not violate

it if you non-culpably think the beliefs in question are not on a par. And as an exclusivist, I do

think (non-culpably, I hope) that they are not on a par: I think (1) and (2) true and those

incompatible with either of them false.

The rejoinder, of course, will be that it is not alethic parity (their having the same truth value)

that is at issue: it is epistemic parity that counts. What kind of epistemic parity? What would be

relevant, here, I should think, would be internal or internalist epistemic parity: parity with

respect to what is internally available to the believer. What is internally available to the believer

includes, for example, detectable relationships between the belief in question and other beliefs

you hold; so internal parity would include parity of propositional evidence. What is internally

available to the believer also includes the phenomenology that goes with the beliefs in question:

the sensuous phenomenology, but also the non-sensuous phenomenology involved, for example,

in the belief’s just having the feel of being right. But once more, then, (1) and (2) are not on an

internal par, for the exclusivist, with beliefs that are incompatible with them. (1) and (2), after

all, seem to me to be true; they have for me the phenomenology that accompanies that seeming.

The same cannot be said for propositions incompatible with them. If, furthermore, John Calvin

is right in thinking that there is such a thing as the Sensus Divinitatis and the Internal Testimony

of the Holy Spirit, then perhaps (1) and (2) are produced in me by those belief-producing

processes, and have for me the phenomenology that goes with them; the same is not true for

propositions incompatible with them.

But then the next rejoinder: isn’t it probably true that those who reject (1) and (2) in favor of

other beliefs have propositional evidence for their beliefs that is on a par with mine for my

beliefs; and isn’t it also probably true that the same or similar phenomenology accompanies their

beliefs as accompanies mine? So that those beliefs really are epistemically and internally on a

par with (1) and (2), and the exclusivist is still treating like cases differently? I don’t think so: I

think there really are arguments available for (1), at least, that are not available for its

competitors. And as for similar phenomenology, this is not easy to say; it is not easy to look into

the breast of another; the secrets of the human heart are hard to fathom; it hard indeed to discover

this sort of thing even with respect to someone you know really well. But I am prepared to

stipulate both sorts of parity. Let’s agree for purposes of argument that these beliefs are on an

epistemic par in the sense that those of a different religious tradition have the same sort of

internally available markers—evidence, phenomenology and the like—for their beliefs as I have

for (1) and (2). What follows?

scrupulosity succeed in training myself not to accept ordinary perceptual judgments in ordinary perceptual

circumstances, I am not performing works of epistemic supererogation; I am epistemically culpable.

Return to the case of moral belief. King David took Bathsheba, made her pregnant, and then,

after the failure of various stratagems to get her husband Uriah to think the baby was his,

arranged for him to be killed. The prophet Nathan came to David and told him a story about a

rich man and a poor man. The rich man had many flocks and herds; the poor man had only a

single ewe lamb, which grew up with his children, “ate at his table, drank from his cup, lay in his

bosom, and was like a daughter to him”. The rich man had unexpected guests. Instead of

slaughtering one of his own sheep, he took the poor man’s single ewe lamb, slaughtered it, and

served it to his guests. David exploded in anger: “The man who did this deserves to die!” Then,

in one of the most riveting passages in all the Bible, Nathan turns to David, stretches out his arm

and points to him, and declares, “You are that man!” And then David sees what he has done.

My interest here is in David’s reaction to the story. I agree with David: such injustice is utterly

and despicably wrong; there are really no words for it. I believe that such an action is wrong,

and I believe that the proposition that it isn’t wrong—either because really nothing is wrong, or

because even if some things are wrong, this isn’t—is false. As a matter of fact, there is isn’t a lot

I believe more strongly. I recognize, however, that there are those who disagree with me; and

once more, I doubt that I could find an argument to show them that I am right and they wrong.

Further, for all I know, their conflicting beliefs have for them the same internally available

epistemic markers, the same phenomenology, as mine have for me. Am I then being arbitrary,

treating similar cases differently in continuing to hold, as I do, that in fact that kind of behavior is

dreadfully wrong? I don’t think so. Am I wrong in thinking racial bigotry despicable, even

though I know that there are others who disagree, and even if I think they have the same internal

markers for their beliefs as I have for mine? I don’t think so. I believe in Serious Actualism, the

view that no objects have properties in worlds in which they do not exist, not even nonexistence.

Others do not believe this, and perhaps the internal markers of their dissenting views have for

them the same quality as my views have for me. Am I being arbitrary in continuing to think as I

do? I can’t see how.

And the reason here is this: in each of these cases, the believer in question doesn’t really think

the beliefs in question are on a relevant epistemic par. She may agree that she and those who

dissent are equally convinced of the truth of their belief, and even that they are internally on a

par, that the internally available markers are similar, or relevantly similar. But she must still

think that there is an important epistemic difference: she thinks that somehow the other person

has made a mistake, or has a blind spot, or hasn’t been wholly attentive, or hasn’t received some

grace she has, or is in some way epistemically less fortunate. And of course the pluralist critic is

in no better case. He thinks the thing to do when there is internal epistemic parity is to withhold

judgment; he knows that there are others who don’t think so, and for all he knows that belief has

internal parity with his; if he continue in that belief, therefore, he will be in the same condition as

the exclusivist; and if he doesn’t continue in this belief, he no longer has an objection to the

exclusivist.

But couldn’t I be wrong? Of course I could! But I don’t avoid that risk by withholding all

religious (or philosophical or moral) beliefs; I can go wrong that way as well as any other,

treating all religions, or all philosophical thoughts, or all moral views, as on a par. Again, there

is no safe haven here, no way to avoid risk. In particular, you won’t reach safe haven by trying

to take the same attitude towards all the historically available patterns of belief and withholding:

for in so doing you adopt a particular pattern of belief and withholding, one incompatible with

some adopted by others. You pays your money and you takes your choice, realizing that you,

like anyone else, can be desperately wrong. But what else can you do? You don’t really have an

alternative. And how can you do better than believe and withhold according to what, after

serious and responsible consideration, seems to you to be the right pattern of belief and

withholding?

B. Irrationality

I therefore can’t see how it can be sensibly maintained that the exclusivist is unjustified in his

exclusivistic views; but perhaps, as is sometimes claimed, he or his view is irrational.

Irrationality, however, is many things to many people; so there is a prior question: what is it to be

irrational? More exactly: precisely what quality is it that the objector is attributing to the

exclusivist (in condition C) when the former says the latter’s exclusivist beliefs are irrational?

Since the charge is never developed at all fully, it isn’t easy to say. So suppose we simply

consider the main varieties of irrationality (or, if you prefer, the main senses of “irrational”) and

ask whether any of them attach to the exclusivist just by virtue of being an exclusivist. I believe

there are substantially five varieties of rationality, five distinct but analogically
16

connected

senses of the term ‘rational’; fortunately not all of them require detailed consideration.

(1) Aristotelian Rationality. This is the sense in which man is a rational animal, one that has

ratio, one that can look before and after, can hold beliefs, make inferences and is capable of

knowledge. This is perhaps the basic sense, the one of which the others are analogical

extensions. It is also, presumably irrelevant in the present context; at any rate I hope the objector

does not mean to hold that an exclusivist will by that token no longer be a rational animal.

(2) The Deliverances of Reason. To be rational in the Aristotelian sense is to possess reason: the

power or thinking, believing, inferring, reasoning, knowing. Aristotelian rationality is thus

generic. But there is an important more specific sense lurking in the neighborhood; this is the

sense that goes with reason taken more narrowly, as the source of a priori knowledge and

belief.
17

An important use of “rational” analogically connected with the first has to do with

reason taken in this more narrow way. It is by reason thus construed that we know self-evident

beliefs—beliefs so obvious that you can’t so much as grasp them without seeing that they

couldn’t be false. These will be among the deliverances of reason. Of course there are other

beliefs—38 x 39 = 1482, for example—that are not self-evident, but are a consequence of self-

evident beliefs by way of arguments that are self-evidently valid; these too are among the

deliverances of reason. So say that the deliverances of reason is the set of those propositions that

are self-evident for us human beings, closed under self-evident consequence. This yields another

sense of rationality: a belief is rational if it is among the deliverances of reason and irrational if

In Aquinas’s sense, so that analogy may include causality, proportionality, resemblance, and the like.

But then (because of the Russell paradoxes) we can no longer take it that the deliverances of reason are closed

under self-evident consequence. See myWarrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993),

chap. 6.

it is contrary to the deliverances of reason. (A belief can therefore be neither rational nor

irrational, in this sense.) This sense of “rational” is an analogical extension of the fundamental

sense; but it is itself extended by analogy to still other senses. Thus we can broaden the category

of reason to include memory, experience, induction, probability, and whatever else goes into

science; this is the sense of the term when reason is sometimes contrasted with faith. And we

can also soften the requirement for self-evidence, recognizing both that self-evidence or a priori

warrant is a matter of degree, and that there are many propositions that have a priori warrant, but

are not such that no one who understands them can fail to believe them.
18

Is the exclusivist irrational in these senses? I think not; or at any rate the question whether he is

isn’t the question at issue. For his exclusivist beliefs are irrational in these senses only if there is

a good argument from the deliverances of reason (taken broadly) to the denials of what he

believes. I myself do not believe that there are any such arguments. Presumably the same goes

for the pluralist objector; at any rate his objection is not that (1) and (2) are demonstrably false or

even that there are good arguments against them from the deliverances of reason; his objection is

instead that there is something wrong or subpar with believing them in condition C. This sense

too, then, is irrelevant to our present concerns.

(3) The Deontological Sense. This sense of the term has to do with intellectual requirement, or

duty, or obligation: a person’s belief is irrational in this sense if in forming or holding it she

violates such a duty. This is the sense of ‘irrational’ in which, according to many contemporary

evidentialist objectors to theistic belief, those who believe in God without propositional evidence

are irrational.
19

Irrationality in this sense is a matter of failing to conform to intellectual or

epistemic duties; and the analogical connection with the first, Aristotelian sense is that these

duties are thought to be among the deliverances of reason (and hence among the deliverances of

the power by virtue of which human beings are rational in the Aristotelian sense). But we have

already considered whether the exclusivist is flouting duties; we need say no more about the

matter here. As we saw, the exclusivist is not necessarily irrational in this sense either.

(4) Zweckrationalität. A common and very important notion of rationality is means-end

rationality—what our Continental cousins, following Max Weber, sometimes call

Zweckrationalität, the sort of rationality displayed by your actions if they are well-calculated to

achieve your goals. (Again, the analogical connection with the first sense is clear: the

See my Warrant and Proper Function, chapter VI. Still another analogical extension: a person can be said to be
irrational if he won’t listen to or pay attention to the deliverances of reason. He may be blinded by lust or inflamed

by passion, or deceived by pride: he might then act contrary to reason—act irrationally, but also believe irrationally.

Thus Locke: “Let never so much probability land on one side of a covetous man’s reasoning, and money on the

other, it is easy to foresee which will outweigh. Tell a man, passionately in love, that he is jilted; bring a score of

witnesses of the falsehood of his mistress, ‘tis ten to one but three kind words of hers, shall invalidate all their

testimonies…and though men cannot always openly gain-say, or resist the force of manifest probabilities, that make

against them; yet yield they not to the argument.” An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A.D. Woozley

(New York: World Publishing Co., 1963), bk. IV, sec. xx, p. 439.

Among those who offer this objection to theistic belief are, for example, Brand Blanshard, Reason and Belief

(London: Allen & Unwin, l974), pp. 400ff.; Antony Flew, The Presumption of Atheism (London: Pemberton, 1976),

pp. 22ff.; Michael Scriven, Primary Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 102ff. See my “Reason and

Belief in God” in Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds.,Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame: University of

Notre Dame Press, 1983) p. 17ff.

calculation in question requires the power by virtue of which we are rational in Aristotle’s

sense.) Clearly there is a whole constellation of notions lurking in the nearby bushes: what

would in fact contribute to your goals, what you take it would contribute to your goals, what you

would take it would contribute to your goals if you were sufficiently acute, or knew enough, or

weren’t distracted by lust, greed, pride, ambition, and the like, what you would take it would

contribute to your goals if you weren’t thus distracted and were also to reflect sufficiently, and so

on. This notion of rationality has assumed enormous importance in the last 150 years or so.

(Among its laurels, for example, is the complete domination of the development of the discipline

of Economics.) Rationality thus construed is a matter of knowing how to get what you want; it is

the cunning of reason. Is the exclusivist properly charged with irrationality in this sense? Does

his believing in the way he does interfere with his attaining some of his goals, or is it a markedly

inferior way of attaining those goals?

An initial caveat: it isn’t clear that this notion of rationality applies to belief at all. It isn’t clear

that in believing something, I am acting to achieve some goal. If believing is an action at all, it is

very far from being the paradigmatic kind of action taken to achieve some end; we don’t have a

choice as to whether to have beliefs, and we don’t have a lot of choice with respect to which

beliefs we have. But suppose we set this caveat aside and stipulate for purposes of argument that

we have sufficient control over our beliefs for them to qualify as actions: would the exclusivist’s

beliefs then be irrational in this sense? Well, that depends upon what his goals are; if among his

goals for religious belief is, for example, not believing anything not believed by someone else,

then indeed it would be. But of course he needn’t have that goal. If I do have an end or goal in

holding such beliefs as (1) and (2), it would presumably be that of believing the truth on this

exceedingly important matter, or perhaps that of trying to get in touch as adequately as possible

with God, or more broadly with the deepest reality. And if (1) and (2) are true, believing them

will be a way of doing exactly that. It is only if they are not true, then, that believing them could

sensibly be thought to be irrational in this means-ends sense. Since the objector does not

propose to take as a premise the proposition that (1) and (2) are false—he holds only that there is

some flaw involved in believing them—this also is presumably not what he means.

(5) Rationality as Sanity and Proper Function. One in the grip of pathological confusion, or

flight of ideas, or certain kinds of agnosia, or the manic phase of manic-depressive psychosis will

often be said to be irrational; the episode may pass, after which he regains rationality. Here

“rationality” means absence of dysfunction, disorder, impairment, pathology with respect to

rational faculties. So this variety of rationality is again analogically related to Aristotelian

rationality; a person is rational in this sense when no malfunction obstructs her use of the

faculties by virtue of the possession of which she is rational in the Aristotelian sense. Rationality

as sanity does not require possession of particularly exalted rational faculties; it requires only

normality (in the non-statistical sense) or health, or proper function. This use of the term,

naturally enough, is prominent in psychiatric discussions—Oliver Sacks’s man who mistook his

wife for a hat,
20

for example, was thus irrational.
21

This fifth and final sense of rationality is

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (New York: Harper and Row, l987).

In this sense of the term, what is properly called an ‘irrational impulse’ may be perfectly rational: an irrational
impulse is really one that goes contrary to the deliverances of reason; but undergoing such impulses need not be in

any way dysfunctional or a result of the impairment of cognitive faculties. To go back to some of William James’s

itself a family of analogically related senses. The fundamental sense here is that of sanity and

proper function; but there are other closely related senses. Thus we may say that a belief (in

certain circumstances) is irrational, not because no sane person would hold it, but because no

person who was sane and had also undergone a certain course of education would hold it, or

because no person who was sane and furthermore was as intelligent as we and our friends would

hold it; alternatively and more briefly the idea is not merely that no one who was functioning

properly in those circumstances would hold it, but rather no one who was functioning optimally,

as well or nearly as well as human beings ordinarily do (leaving aside the occasional great

genius) would hold it. And this sense of rationality leads directly to the notion of warrant; I turn

now to that notion; in treating it, we will also treat ambulando this fifth kind of irrationality.

C. Warrant

So the third version of the epistemic objection: that at any rate the exclusivist doesn’t have

warrant, or anyway much warrant (enough warrant for knowledge) for his exclusivistic views.

Many pluralists—for example, Hick, Runzo and Wilfred Cantwell Smith—unite in declaring that

at any rate the exclusivist certainly can’t know that his exclusivistic views are true.
22

But is this

really true? I shall argue briefly that it is not. At any rate from the perspective of each of the

major contemporary accounts of knowledge, it may very well be that the exclusivist knows (1) or

(2) or both. First, consider the two main internalistic accounts of knowledge: the justified true

belief account(s), and the coherentist account(s). As I have already argued, it seems clear that a

theist, a believer in (1), could certainly be justified (in the primary sense) in believing as she

does: she could be flouting no intellectual or cognitive duties or obligations. But then on the

most straightforward justified true belief account of knowledge, she can also know that it is

true—if, that is, it can be true. More exactly, what must be possible is that both the exclusivist is

justified in believing (1) and/or (2) and they be true. Presumably the pluralist does not mean to

dispute this possibility.

For concreteness, consider the account of justification given by the classical Chisholm.
23

On this

view, a belief has warrant for me to the extent that accepting it is apt for the fulfillment of my

epistemic duty, which (roughly speaking) is that of trying to get and remain in the right relation

to the truth. But if after the most careful, thorough, thoughtful, open and prayerful consideration,

examples, that I will survive my serious illness might be unlikely, given the statistics I know and my evidence

generally; perhaps we are so constructed, however, that when our faculties function properly in extreme situations,

we are more optimistic than the evidence warrants. This belief, then, is irrational in the sense that it goes contrary to

the deliverances of reason; it is rational in the sense that it doesn’t involve dysfunction.
22

Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, p. 234; Runzo,“God, Commitment, and Other Faiths,” p. 348; Smith,
Religious Diversity, p. 16.

See his Perceiving: a Philosophical Study (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957), the three editions of Theory of
Knowledge (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1st ed., l966, 2nd ed., l977, 3rd ed., 1989), and The Foundations of Knowing

(University of Minnesota Press, l982); and see my “Chisholmian Internalism”, in David Austin, ed., Philosophical

Analysis: a Defense by Example (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, l988), and chap. 2 of Warrant: the Current Debate.

it still seems to me—perhaps more strongly than ever—that (1) and (2) are true, then clearly

accepting them has great aptness for the fulfillment of that duty.
24

A similarly brief argument can be given with respect to coherentism, the view that what

constitutes warrant is coherence with some body of belief. We must distinguish two varieties of

coherentism. On the one hand, it might be held that what is required is coherence with some or

all of the other beliefs I actually hold; on the other that what is required is coherence with my

verific noetic structure (Keith Lehrer’s term): the set of beliefs that remains when all the false

ones are deleted or replaced by their contradictories. But surely a coherent set of beliefs could

include both (1) and (2) together with the beliefs involved in being in condition C; what would

be required, perhaps, would be that the set of beliefs contain some explanation of why it is that

others do not believe as I do. And if (1) and (2) are true, then surely (and a fortiori) there can be

coherent verific noetic structures that include them. Hence neither of these versions of

coherentism rules out the possibility that the exclusivist in condition C could know (1) and/or

(2).

And now consider the main externalist accounts. The most popular externalist account at present

would be one or another version of reliabilism. And there is an oft-repeated pluralistic argument

(an argument that goes back at least to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and possibly all the way

back to the third century) that seems to be designed to appeal to reliabilist intuitions. The

conclusion of this argument is not always clear, but here is its premise, in John Hick’s words:

For it is evident that in some ninety-nine percent of cases the religion which an individual

professes and to which he or she adheres depends upon the accidents of birth. Someone

born to Buddhist parents in Thailand is very likely to be a Buddhist, someone born to

Muslim parents in Saudi Arabia to be a Muslim, someone born to Christian parents in

Mexico to be a Christian, and so on.
25

As a matter of sociological fact, this may be right. Furthermore, it can certainly produce a sense

of intellectual vertigo. But what is one to do with this fact, if fact it is, and what follows from it?

Does it follow, for example, that I ought not to accept the religious views that I have been

brought up to accept, or the ones that I find myself inclined to accept, or the ones that seem to me

to be true? Or that the belief-producing processes that have produced those beliefs in me are

unreliable? Surely not. Furthermore, self-referential problems once more loom; this argument is

another philosophical tar baby.

Of course there are many variations on this internalist theme. Consider briefly the postclassical Chisholm (see his

“The Place of Epistemic Justification” in Roberta Klein, ed., Philosophical Topics, 14, no. 1 (1986), p. 85, and the

intellectual autobiography in Roderick M. Chisholm, ed. Radu Bogdan [Dordrecht: D. Reidel, l986] pp. 52 ff.), who

bears a startling resemblance to Brentano. According to this view, justification is not deontological, but axiological.

To put it another way, warrant is not really a matter of justification, of fulfilling duty and obligation; it is instead a

question of whether a certain relation of fittingness holds between one’s evidential base (very roughly, the totality of

one’s present experiences and other beliefs) and the belief in question. (This relationship’s holding, of course, is a

valuable state of affairs; hence the axiology.) Can the exclusivist have warrant from this perspective? Well, without

knowing more about what this relation is, it isn’t easy to tell. But here at the least the postclassical Chisholmian

pluralist would owe us an explanation of why he thinks the exclusivist’s beliefs could not stand in this relation to his

evidence base.
25

An Interpretation of Religion, p. 2.

For suppose we concede that if I had been born in Madagascar rather than Michigan, my beliefs

would have been quite different.
26

(For one thing, I probably wouldn’t believe that I was born in

Michigan.) But of course the same goes for the pluralist. Pluralism isn’t and hasn’t been widely

popular in the world at large; if the pluralist had been born in Madagascar, or medieval France,

he probably wouldn’t have been a pluralist. Does it follow that he shouldn’t be a pluralist or that

his pluralistic beliefs are produced in him by an unreliable belief-producing process? I doubt it.

Suppose I hold

(4) If S’s religious or philosophical beliefs are such that if S had been born elsewhere and
elsewhen, she wouldn’t have held them, then those beliefs are produced by unreliable

belief-producing mechanisms and hence have no warrant;

or something similar: then once more I will be hoist with my own petard. For in all probability,

someone born in Mexico to Christian parents wouldn’t believe (4) itself. No matter what

philosophical and religious beliefs we hold and withhold (so it seems) there are places and times

such that if we had been born there and then, then we would not have displayed the pattern of

holding and withholding of religious and philosophical beliefs we do display. As I said, this can

indeed be vertiginous; but what can we make of it? What can we infer from it about what has

warrant and how we should conduct our intellectual lives? That’s not easy to say. Can we infer

anything at all about what has warrant or how we should conduct our intellectual lives? Not

obviously.

To return to reliabilism then: for simplicity, let’s take the version of reliabilism according to

which S knows p iff the belief that p is produced in S by a reliable belief-producing mechanism

or process. I don’t have the space, here, to go into this matter in sufficient detail: but it seems

pretty clear that if (1) and (2) are true, then it could be that the beliefs that (1) and (2) be

produced in me by a reliable belief-producing process. For either we are thinking of concrete

belief-producing processes, like your memory or John’s powers of a priori reasoning (tokens as

opposed to types), or else we are thinking of types of belief-producing processes (type

reliabilism). The problem with the latter is that there are an enormous number of different types

of belief-producing processes for any given belief, some of which are reliable and some of which

are not; the problem (and a horrifying problem it is
27

) is to say which of these is the type the

reliability of which determines whether the belief in question has warrant. So the first (token

reliabilism) is the better way of stating reliabilism. But then clearly enough if (1) or (2) is true, it

could be produced in me by a reliable belief-producing process. Calvin’s Sensus Divinitatis, for

example, could be working in the exclusivist in such a way as to reliably produce the belief that

(1); Calvin’s Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit could do the same for (2). If (1) and (2) are

true, therefore, then from a reliabilist perspective there is no reason whatever to think that the

exclusivist might not know that they are true.

Actually this conditional as it stands is probably not true; the point must be stated with more care. Given my

parents and their proclivities, if I had been born in Madagascar, it would probably have been because my parents

were (Christian) missionaries there.
27

See Richard Feldman, “Reliability and Justification”, The Monist, 68 (1986), pp. 159-74, and chap. 9 of my

Warrant and Proper Function.

There is another brand of externalism which seems to me to be closer to the truth than

reliabilism: call it (faute de mieux) “proper functionalism”. This view can be stated to a first

approximation as follows: S knows p iff (1) the belief that p is produced in S by cognitive

faculties that are functioning properly (working as they ought to work, suffering from no

dysfunction), (2) the cognitive environment in which p is produced is appropriate for those

faculties, (3) the purpose of the module of the epistemic faculties producing the belief in question

is to produce true beliefs (alternatively: the module of the design plan governing the production

of p is aimed at the production of true beliefs), and (4) the objective probability of a belief’s

being true, given that it is produced under those conditions, is high.
28

All of this needs

explanation, of course; for present purposes, perhaps, we can collapse the account into the first

condition. But then clearly it could be, if (1) and (2) are true, that they are produced in me by

cognitive faculties functioning properly under condition C. For suppose (1) is true. Then it is

surely possible that God has created us human beings with something like Calvin’s Sensus

Divinitatis, a belief-producing process that in a wide variety of circumstances functions properly

to produce (1) or some very similar belief. Furthermore, it is also possible that in response to the

human condition of sin and misery, God has provided for us human beings a means of salvation,

which he has revealed in the Bible. Still further, perhaps he has arranged for us to come to

believe what he means to teach there by way of the operation of something like the Internal

Testimony of the Holy Spirit of which Calvin speaks. So on this view, too, if (1) and (2) are

true, it is certainly possible that the exclusivist know that they are. We can be sure that the

exclusivist’s views lack warrant and are irrational in this sense, then, only if they are false; but

the pluralist objector does not mean to claim that they are false; this version of the objection,

therefore, also fails. The exclusivist isn’t necessarily irrational, and indeed might know that (1)

and (2) are true, if indeed they are true.

All this seems right. But don’t the realities of religious pluralism count for anything at all? Is

there nothing at all to the claims of the pluralists?
29

Could that really be right? Of course not.

For many or most exclusivists, I think, an awareness of the enormous variety of human religious

response serves as a defeater for such beliefs as (1) and (2)—an undercutting defeater, as

opposed to a rebutting defeater. It calls into question, to some degree or other, the sources of

one’s belief in (1) or (2). It doesn’t or needn’t do so by way of an argument; and indeed there

isn’t a very powerful argument from the proposition that many apparently devout people around

the world dissent from (1) and (2) to the conclusion that (1) and (2) are false. Instead it works

more directly; it directly reduces the level of confidence or degree of belief in the proposition in

question. From a Christian perspective this situation of religious pluralism and our awareness of

it is itself a manifestation of our miserable human condition; and it may deprive us of some of

the comfort and peace the Lord has promised his followers. It can also deprive the exclusivist of

the knowledge that (1) and (2) are true, even if they are true and he believes that they are. Since

degree of warrant depends in part on degree of belief, it is possible, though not necessary, that

knowledge of the facts of religious pluralism should reduce an exclusivist’s degree of belief and

hence of warrant for (1) and (2) in such a way as to deprive him of knowledge of (1) and (2). He

might be such that if he hadn’t known the facts of pluralism, then he would have known (1) and

See chapter 10 of Warrant: the Current Debate and the first couple of chapters of my Warrant and Proper
Function for exposition and defense of this way of thinking about warrant.
29

See W. P. Alston, “Religious Diversity and Perceptual Knowledge of God”,Faith and Philosophy, 5, (October

1988), pp. 433ff.

(2), but now that he does know those facts, he doesn’t know (1) and (2). In this way he may

come to know less by knowing more.

Things could go this way, with the exclusivist. On the other hand, they needn’t go this way.

Consider once more the moral parallel. Perhaps you have always believed it deeply wrong for a

counselor to use his position of trust to seduce a client. Perhaps you discover that others

disagree; they think it more like a minor peccadillo, like running a red light when there’s no

traffic; and you realize that possibly these people have the same internal markers for their beliefs

that you have for yours. You think the matter over more fully, imaginatively recreate and

rehearse such situations, become more aware of just what is involved in such a situation (the

breach of trust, the breaking of implied promises, the injustice and unfairness, the nasty irony of

a situation in which someone comes to a counselor seeking help but receives only hurt) and come

to believe even more firmly the belief that such an action is wrong—which belief, indeed, can in

this way acquire more warrant for you. But something similar can happen in the case of

religious beliefs. A fresh or heightened awareness of the facts of religious pluralism could bring

about a reappraisal of one’ s religious life, a reawakening, a new or renewed and deepened grasp

and apprehension of (1) and (2). From Calvin’s perspective, it could serve as an occasion for a

renewed and more powerful working of the belief-producing processes by which we come to

apprehend (1) and (2). In that way knowledge of the facts of pluralism could initially serve as a

defeater, but in the long run have precisely the opposite effect.

Alvin Plantinga
University of Notre Dame

June, 1994

Tsunami and Theodicy

David B. Hart

No one, no matter how great the scope of his imagination, should be able easily to absorb the immensity of the catastrophe that struck the Asian rim of the Indian Ocean and the coast of Somalia on the second day of Christmas this past year; nor would it be quite human to fail, in its wake, to feel some measure of spontaneous resentment towards God, fate, natura naturans, or whatever other force one imagines governs the intricate web of cosmic causality. But, once one’s indignation at the callousness of the universe begins to subside, it is worth recalling that nothing that occurred that day or in the days that followed told us anything about the nature of finite existence of which we were not already entirely aware.

Not that one should be cavalier in the face of misery on so gigantic a scale, or should dismiss the spiritual perplexity it occasions. But, at least for those of us who are Christians, it is prudent to prepare ourselves as quickly and decorously as we may for the mixed choir of secular moralists whose clamor will soon—inevitably—swell about our ears, gravely informing us that here at last our faith must surely founder upon the rocks of empirical horrors too vast to be reconciled with any system of belief in a God of justice or mercy. It is of course somewhat petty to care overly much about captious atheists at such a time, but it is difficult not to be annoyed when a zealous skeptic, eager to be the first to deliver God His long overdue coup de grâce, begins confidently to speak as if believers have never until this moment considered the problem of evil or confronted despair or suffering or death. Perhaps we did not notice the Black Death, the Great War, the Holocaust, or every instance of famine, pestilence, flood, fire, or earthquake in the whole of the human past; perhaps every Christian who has ever had to bury a child has somehow remained insensible to the depth of his own bereavement.

For sheer fatuity, on this score, it would be difficult to surpass Martin Kettle’s pompous and platitudinous reflections in The Guardian, appearing two days after the earthquake: certainly, he argues, the arbitrariness of the destruction visited upon so many and such diverse victims must pose an insoluble conundrum for “creationists” everywhere—although he wonders, in concluding, whether his contemporaries are “too cowed” even to ask “if the God can exist that can do such things” (as if a public avowal of unbelief required any great reserves of fortitude in modern Britain). It would have at least been courteous, one would think, if he had made more than a perfunctory effort to ascertain what religious persons actually do believe before presuming to instruct them on what they cannot believe.

In truth, though, confronted by such enormous suffering, Christians have less to fear from the piercing dialectic of the village atheist than they do from the earnestness of certain believers, and from the clouds of cloying incense wafting upward from the open thuribles of their hearts. As irksome as Kettle’s argument is, it is merely insipid; more troubling are the attempts of some Christians to rationalize this catastrophe in ways that, however inadvertently, make that argument all at once seem profound. And these attempts can span almost the entire spectrum of religious sensibility: they can be cold with Stoical austerity, moist with lachrymose piety, wanly roseate with sickly metaphysical optimism.

Mildly instructive to me were some remarks sent to Christian websites discussing aWall Street Journal column of mine from the Friday following the earthquake. A stern if somewhat excitable Calvinist, intoxicated with God’s sovereignty, asserted that in the—let us grant this chimera a moment’s life—“Augustinian-Thomistic-Calvinist tradition,” and particularly in Reformed thought, suffering and death possess “epistemic significance” insofar as they manifest divine attributes that “might not otherwise be displayed.” A scholar whose work I admire contributed an eloquent expostulation invoking the Holy Innocents, praising our glorious privilege (not shared by the angels) of bearing scars like those of Christ, and advancing the venerable homiletic conceit that our salvation from sin will result in a greater good than could have evolved from an innocence untouched by death. A man manifestly intelligent and devout, but with a knack for making providence sound like karma, argued that all are guilty through original sin but some more than others, that our “sense of justice” requires us to believe that “punishments and rewards [are] distributed according to our just desserts,” that God is the “balancer of accounts,” and that we must suppose that the suffering of these innocents will bear “spiritual fruit for themselves and for all mankind.”

All three wished to justify the ways of God to man, to affirm God’s benevolence, to see meaning in the seemingly monstrous randomness of nature’s violence, and to find solace in God’s guiding hand. None seemed to worry that others might think him to be making a fine case for a rejection of God, or of faith in divine goodness. Simply said, there is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel—and none in which we should find more comfort—than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all.

The locus classicus of modern disenchantment with “nature’s God” is probably Voltaire’s Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, written in response to the great earthquake that—on All Saints’ Day, 1755—struck just offshore of what was then the resplendent capital of the Portuguese empire. Lisbon was home to a quarter million, at least 60,000 of whom perished, both from the initial tremor (reckoned now, like the Sumatran earthquake, at a Richter force of around 9.0) and from the tsunami that it cast up on shore half an hour later (especially murderous to those who had retreated to boats in the mouth of the river Tagus to escape the destruction on land). An enormous fire soon began to consume the ruined city. Tens of thousands were drowned along the coasts of the Algarve, southern Spain, and Morocco.

For Voltaire, a catastrophe of such indiscriminate vastness was incontrovertible evidence against the bland optimism of popular theodicy. His poem—for all the mellifluousness of its alexandrines—was a lacerating attack upon the proposition that “tout est bien.” Would you dare argue, he asks, that you see the necessary effect of eternal laws decreed by a God both free and just as you contemplate

Ces femmes, ces enfants l’un sur l’autre entassés,

Sous ces marbres rompus ces membres dispersés

“These women, these infants heaped one upon the other, these limbs scattered beneath shattered marbles”? Or would you argue that all of this is but God’s just vengeance upon human iniquity?

Quel crime, quelle faute ont commis ces enfants

Sur le sein maternel écrasés et sanglants?

“What crime and what sin have been committed by these infants crushed and bleeding on their mothers’ breasts?” Or would you comfort those dying in torment on desolate shores by assuring them that others will profit from their demise and that they are discharging the parts assigned them by universal law? Do not, says Voltaire, speak of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in the hand of a God who is Himself enchained by nothing.

For all its power, however, Voltaire’s poem is a very feeble thing compared to the case for “rebellion” against “the will of God” in human suffering placed in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov by that fervently Christian novelist Dostoevsky; for, while the evils Ivan recounts to his brother Alexey are acts not of impersonal nature but of men, Dostoevsky’s treatment of innocent suffering possesses a profundity of which Voltaire was never even remotely capable. Famously, Dostoevsky supplied Ivan with true accounts of children tortured and murdered: Turks tearing babies from their mothers’ wombs, impaling infants on bayonets, firing pistols into their mouths; parents savagely flogging their children; a five-year- old-girl tortured by her mother and father, her mouth filled with excrement, locked at night in an outhouse, weeping her supplications to “dear kind God” in the darkness; an eight-year-old serf child torn to pieces by his master’s dogs for a small accidental transgression.

But what makes Ivan’s argument so disturbing is not that he accuses God of failing to save the innocent; rather, he rejects salvation itself, insofar as he understands it, and on moral grounds. He grants that one day there may be an eternal harmony established, one that we will discover somehow necessitated the suffering of children, and perhaps mothers will forgive the murderers of their babies, and all will praise God’s justice; but Ivan wants neither harmony—“for love of man I reject it,” “it is not worth the tears of that one tortured child”—nor forgiveness; and so, not denying there is a God, he simply chooses to return his ticket of entrance to God’s Kingdom. After all, Ivan asks, if you could bring about a universal and final beatitude for all beings by torturing one small child to death, would you think the price acceptable?

Voltaire’s poem is not a challenge to Christian faith; it inveighs against a variant of the “deist” God, one who has simply ordered the world exactly as it now is, and who balances out all its eventualities in a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Nowhere does it address the Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that has wounded creation in its uttermost depths, and reduced cosmic time to a shadowy remnant of the world God intends, and enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God. But Ivan’s rebellion is something altogether different. Voltaire sees only the terrible truth that the actual history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible. Dostoevsky sees—and this bespeaks both his moral genius and his Christian view of reality—that it would be far more terrible if it were.

Christians often find it hard to adopt the spiritual idiom of the New Testament—to think in terms, that is, of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, of Christ’s triumph over the principalities of this world, of the overthrow of hell. All Christians know, of course, that it is through God’s self-outpouring upon the cross that we are saved, and that we are made able by grace to participate in Christ’s suffering; but this should not obscure that other truth revealed at Easter: that the incarnate God enters “this cosmos” not simply to disclose its immanent rationality, but to break the boundaries of fallen nature asunder, and to refashion creation after its ancient beauty—wherein neither sin nor death had any place. Christian thought has traditionally, of necessity, defined evil as a privation of the good, possessing no essence or nature of its own, a purely parasitic corruption of reality; hence it can have no positive role to play in God’s determination of Himself or purpose for His creatures (even if by economy God can bring good from evil); it can in no way supply any imagined deficiency in God’s or creation’s goodness. Being infinitely sufficient in Himself, God had no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest His glory in His creatures or to join them perfectly to Himself. This is why it is misleading (however soothing it may be) to say that the drama of fall and redemption will make the final state of things more glorious than it might otherwise have been. No less metaphysically incoherent—though immeasurably more vile—is the suggestion that God requires suffering and death to reveal certain of his attributes (capricious cruelty, perhaps? morbid indifference? a twisted sense of humor?). It is precisely sin, suffering, and death that blind us to God’s true nature.

There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of what Aquinas calls secondary causality—in nature or history—is governed not only by a transcendent providence, but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things. But consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of—but entirely by way of—every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines. It seems a strange thing to find peace in a universe rendered morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome. Better, it seems to me, the view of the ancient Gnostics: however ludicrous their beliefs, they at least, when they concluded that suffering and death were essential aspects of the creator’s design, had the good sense to yearn to know a higher God.

I do not believe we Christians are obliged—or even allowed—to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

The Trouble with Tolerance

Stanley

Fish

(From

The Chronicle of Higher Education

53.

2(Nov 10, 2006): B8-B11)

Some years ago, just after Salman Rushdie was made the object of a fatwa, I found myself at an academic conference listening to a panel address the issues raised by his situation. A member of the audience rose and, without a trace of irony, gave voice to this question/accusation: “What’s the matter with those Iranians? Haven’t they ever heard of the First Amendment?” The empirical answer to the question was maybe yes, maybe no. Some individual Iranians and many members of the Iranian legal community would have heard of (and studied) the First Amendment, but even those who had read it could not have been counted on to affirm the assumptions informing it – the assumption that expression as an abstract category is to be valued over the content of what is expressed; the assumption that no content is to be either stigmatized or embraced in advance of its having been subjected to the test of rational scrutiny; the assumption that contents (ideas, ideologies, opinions, hypotheses) are equal before the law, and none is to be prohibited unless it is put into (dangerous) action; the assumption that religious pronouncements, even those that issue from revered authorities, are in no way privileged, exempt from criticism, or entitled to a place in the policy deliberations of the state; the assumption that the holding of views, however unpopular or even sacrilegious, cannot be a reason for the denial of rights, the withholding of privileges, or the distribution of rewards.

Each and every one of those assumptions was seen by the person who asked the question to have been flouted by the government of Iran, and that government, accordingly, was regarded as backward, retrograde, myopic, and hopeless. (How little has changed.) Ignored was the possibility that what appeared to be an entirely negative and unprincipled act might be the product of an alternative set of principles — preferring community to individual rights, positive morality to respect for all points of view, truth to tolerance, the sanctity of God to the sanctity of choice.

Earlier this year, pretty much the same scenario was played out around the publication in Denmark of cartoons poking fun at the person and beliefs of the prophet Muhammad. Many Western commentators were simply unable to see why mere words or pictorial representations could be received as grievously wounding – after all, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but…” – especially given that those who reacted most vehemently (and, on occasion, violently) were not directly the target of the cartoons (they were not being libeled, so what’s the big deal?). The idea that you could be so identified with a religious creed that criticisms of it would lead you to actions that might be appropriate if you were being physically assaulted (there is, after all, the speech-action distinction, isn’t there?) is simply inconceivable to those who have been taught (by everyone from Locke and Kant to John Rawls) that tolerance of views you oppose is the highest morality.

This has been going on for a long time, at least since Locke declared (in A Letter Concerning Toleration, 1689) that “every Church is orthodox to itself” and concluded that, in the absence of an independent mechanism for determining which among competing orthodoxies is the true one, toleration is the only rational policy. Locke then asked, What about the churches and orthodoxies that value tolerance less than they do the truth and political supremacy of the faiths they espouse? Do we tolerate them? The answer he gave is still being given today by the guardians of Enlightenment liberalism: “No opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated.”

But the question of which opinions are “contrary to human society” does not answer itself, for if it did, if there were universal agreement on what views were simply beyond the pale, tolerance would be unnecessary. The category of interdicted opinions must be established by an act of authority and power, an act Locke performed later in the tract when he made his own list. He thus made it clear that in the liberal tradition he initiated, tolerance, rather than being a wholly benevolent and inclusive practice, is an engine of exclusion and a technology of regulation.

The triumph of toleration as the central liberal value, and the attendant inability of liberals to see the dark side of their favorite virtue, is the subject of Wendy Brown’s insightful and illuminating new book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton University Press). Brown sets out to understand “how tolerance has come to be such an important justice discourse in our time.” The “conventional story,” she reports, goes this way: “[T]he combined effects of globalization, the aftermath of the cold war, and the aftermath of colonialism have led to the world’s erupting in a hundred scenes of local and internecine conflict, roughly rooted in identity clashes, and tolerance is an appropriate balm for soothing those conflicts.” In a world where difference seems intractable and irreconcilable, parties are always poised for conflict (Brown notes the Hobbesian antecedents of this picture), tolerance appears to be a “natural and benign remedy”; natural because, given what men and women are (irremediably) like, it seems the only way to go, and benign because while it reins in differences, it accords those difference a space in the private sector. You know the commonplace aphorisms and slogans: Live and let live, different strokes for different folks, can’t we all just get along?

Sounds good, but Brown isn’t having any. Her critique of tolerance challenges the common assumption that the differences the sharp edges of which tolerance is supposed to blunt “took their shape prior to the discourse called on to broker them.” No, she insists, those differences are produced by a regime of tolerance that at the same time produces a status quo politics built on the assumption that difference cannot be negotiated but can only be managed. When difference is naturalized, she explains, it becomes the mark not of an ideological or political divide (in relation to which one might have an argument), but of a cultural divide (in relation to which each party says of the other, “See, that’s just the way they are”). If people do the things they do not because of what they believe, but because they are Jews, Muslims, blacks, or gays, it is no use asking them to see the error of their ways, because it is through those same ways – naturally theirs – that they see at all. When President Bush reminds us of “the nature of our enemy,” he is, in effect, saying there’s no dealing with these people; they are immune to rational appeals; the only language they understand is the language of force.

“This reduction of political motivations and causes to essentialized culture,” Brown says, “is mobilized to explain everything from suicide bombers to Osama bin Laden’s world designs, mass death in Rwanda and Sudan, and the failure of democracy to take hold in the immediate aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”

And, she adds, it does more than that: It legitimizes, and even demands, the exercise of intolerance, when the objects of intolerance are persons who, because of their overattachment to culture, are deemed incapable of being tolerant. Live and let live won’t work, we are often told, if the other guy is determined to kill you because he believes that his religion or his ethnic history commands him to. Liberal citizens, Brown explains, will be tolerant of any group so long as its members subordinate their cultural commitments to the universal dictates of reason, as defined by liberalism. But once a group has rejected tolerance as a guiding principle and opted instead for the cultural imperatives of the church or the tribe, it becomes a candidate for intolerance that will be performed in the name of tolerance; and at that moment any action against it – however violent – is justified. Tolerance, then, is a virtue that liberal citizens or those who are willing to act as liberal citizens are capable of exercising; and those who refuse to exercise it cannot, by this logic, be its beneficiary.

Nor, according to Brown, are the regulating and stigmatizing effects of tolerance limited to a nation’s relations with foreign states and actors; the liberal state does the same thing to its own citizens, at least to those citizens who, by being identified as the appropriate beneficiaries of tolerance, are at the same time marked as deviant and potentially dangerous. If it is “a basic premise of liberal secularism that neither culture nor religion is permitted to govern publicly,” Brown says, then those Americans who refuse to leave their sectarian beliefs and convictions of core identity at home when they venture into the public sphere – fundamentalist Christians, Orthodox Jews, strongly observant Muslims, gays and lesbians, etc. – must be made to understand that only by relaxing the hold of those personal commitments and promising to act as liberal citizens (rather than as Southern Baptists, Hasidic Jews, or citizens of the Queer Nation) in public spaces will they be welcomed into the fold. Should they resist the requirement to live a double life – apostles of individualism, progress, profit, and secularism in the courthouse and the ballot box, devout upholders of religious and cultural imperatives at home – they will either be tolerated and marked as “other” (the Amish) or made the objects of surveillance and profiling (anyone wearing a turban or a burkha) or detained and perhaps deported.

The state preaches tolerance, but because it has identified tolerance with those who have a certain set of (liberal, secular) beliefs, those who do not display such beliefs and the practices they subtend will be regarded with suspicion and become the “natural” subjects of intolerant actions: From roundups, detention, and deportation of illegal aliens to racial profiling in airport security searches, the state “engages in extralegal and prosecutorial actions toward the very group it calls upon the citizenry to be tolerant toward,” Brown says. Moreover, as she sees it, that is not a contradiction of the tolerance the state proclaims, but an inevitable result of a tolerance that cannot itself tolerate persons or practices that do not respect the boundaries and distinctions – between secular/religious, public/ private, mind/body – it presupposes.

To this point, I have been summarizing Brown’s analysis of tolerance (not all of it; there are more turns to her argument than can be dealt with in a brief review) and her denial to that resonant word of the good press that it typically receives in the Western world. As my readers will no doubt have surmised, I find the analysis trenchant and the critique persuasive.

What follows from Brown’s deconstruction (a term she uses) of tolerance? The question has an obvious answer if it is put to Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” (1965), an essay Brown cites as one of her two main inspirations (the other is Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality). Marcuse anticipates Brown when he declares that “the conditions of tolerance are ‘loaded’: They are determined and defined by the institutionalized inequality (which is certainly compatible with constitutional equality), i.e., by the class structure of society.” Marcuse emphasizes the difference between a legal or procedural equality that treats persons alike (“constitutional equality”) and the inequalities that result from long-in-place structures of privilege, discrimination, and inherited wealth. Those inequalities, he says, are left in place by a legal system that turns a blind eye to them. Brown sharpens and extends Marcuse’s point by observing that when difference is essentialized in the liberal state and made unavailable to negotiation, it is also depoliticized, relegated to the private sphere, where it is at once above and below judicial scrutiny. Hence its effects multiply in a political “underworld” where the damage done escapes official notice although millions experience it.

But Brown and Marcuse part ways when it comes time to draw a conclusion. Marcuse puts his up front at the beginning of his essay: “The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.” That is to say, and Marcuse says it, anything the right does is bad and should not be tolerated; anything the left does is good and should be welcomed. Marcuse’s reasoning follows from his wedding of tolerance and truth. (“The telos of tolerance is truth.”) The argument has the form of a syllogism. Only the truth should be tolerated. Truth resides on the left. Therefore tolerance cannot be extended to the right. In a world where the forces of good and bad vie for supremacy, “suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.”

Again Brown agrees with Marcuse that liberal tolerance, emphasizing as it does formal equality and the inclusion of all points of view, is unresponsive to the question of truth as it is posed by liberalism’s opponents. She thinks it a mistake, as does Marcuse, to “retreat from substantive visions of justice,” which makes room for fundamentalist social movements to rush in to fill the void created by liberal proceduralism. But Brown cannot embrace the logic of Marcuse’s syllogism because she does not want to smite her enemy hip and thigh. She wants a more general, more theoretical yield. She wants a vision that is at once substantive and alert to the truth of things and inclusive and alert to the injustices done to marginalized peoples. It would hardly be an advance to replace the “othering” of minorities and foreigners with the “othering” of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians.

But unless she follows her critique of liberal tolerance and her embrace of substance with some statement of who and what should and should not be tolerated, Brown will be left with noble-sounding phrases like “the fashioning of a democratic culture,” phrases that are vague to the point of being empty. Once she takes the notion of truth seriously – which means taking the notion of falsity seriously – Brown is in a difficult position. If she localizes truth – finds it here but not there, alive and well in Palestine but abandoned and dead in Israel and Washington – she abandons a capacious theoretical discourse for a narrowly partisan one. Either she is for truth in general and nothing particular follows, or she is arguing that the truth lies here not there. Either she’s making a theoretical argument about tolerance, in which case her opponents are those who would describe tolerance differently, or she is making a policy argument, in which case her opponents are those who would advocate different policies.

What she wants is to be doing both; she wants to derive a specific policy from a general, theoretical account. But you can’t get from a general account of a matter to a particular program of action because the general account, if it is really general and not already partisan, is descriptive not normative. It tells you what is, not what to do. A general account can be more or less accurate – when reading it, you can say to yourself, for example, “This is the way liberal tolerance works” – but it cannot generate a moral on the order of, “Now do this and not that.” Brown’s account of liberal tolerance tells us how it works not only in this instance, but whenever and wherever it is deployed; but it doesn’t tell us whether liberal tolerance is a good thing, or whether there is something better.

Assume, for example, that you are persuaded (as I am for the most part) by Brown’s analysis of tolerance and now believe that, far from being a simple, benign virtue, tolerance is the technology or governmentality (a word Brown borrows from Foucault) of an ideology that privileges some values – individual will, autonomy, choice, procedural (not substantive) justice, rationality, freedom of expression, freedom of markets – and stigmatizes or marginalizes others – group loyalty, religious obedience, the law of God, tribal traditions, the national ethos, blood, culture. It is perfectly possible that you could say, “Yes, now I see, thanks to Brown, exactly what substantive values inform liberalism despite its denial (at least in some versions) that it harbors any; but those values are fine by me, and I will continue to affirm them even if it means being intolerant toward those who reject them.” Or, let’s say you have read Brown’s scintillating chapter on the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance and find yourself agreeing with her conclusion: The museum celebrates respect for different beliefs, but at the same time its exhibits identify Israel as the only Middle East actor that embodies that respect, and thereby authorize and justify Israel’s disrespect (and worse) toward those it deems insufficiently respectful. You could think that Brown is right on target and still believe that the museum’s message is the right one and that Israel should not change its policies until the Arabs mend their ways and get a better set of ideas. Or you could accept my argument, made at the beginning, that Western commentators are incapable of understanding (except as misguided, crazy, or evil) the motivations of those who passionately protested the Danish cartoons, and you could nevertheless conclude that their incapacity is all to their credit. My point is that the demonstration that an ideology – liberalism, organicism, whatever – will have effects favorable to some interests and injurious to, or dismissive of, others will not be a reason to repudiate it if the favored interests are yours.

But, someone might object, what about values that are universal rather than local or parochial? Shouldn’t we be trying to identify them and work for their realization in the political structures of the world? One of Brown’s criticisms of liberalism is that it pretends to just such a universality even though its recourse to toleration is an implicit acknowledgment of the many who dissent from it: Cultural “conflict itself exposes the nonuniversal character of liberal legalism.” (Not as powerful a point as she thinks: The claim that liberal values are universal is not undercut by the millions, perhaps billions, who reject them. You can say that it’s just a matter of time, or that they are blinded by a particularistic ideology, or a hundred other things. Whether or not a value is universal is a matter not of votes, but of arguments.) But it’s not always clear whether Brown is rejecting universalism in favor of a particular policy – as seems to be the case when she suggests that we replace tolerance’s “therapeutic” project (let’s be nice even to those who have funny ideas and wear funny clothes) with a justice project – or whether she is rejecting liberalism’s false universalism for a truer one – as seems to be the case when she talks of “developing deep knowledge of others in their ‘difference.’”

On balance, I think it is the latter; she wants a better universalism than liberalism’s, but her articulations of it are without content, as they will necessarily be if she thinks to derive it from her critique of liberalism and liberal tolerance. That critique, to repeat the point made earlier, tells you what liberal tolerance is made of; it doesn’t tell you whether it is bad or good, and it certainly doesn’t tell you what should be put in its place. A phrase like “deep knowledge of others” is a teaser: Deeper than what? Deep, how? How deep do we go? If the knowledge is deeper than the surface differences – of religion, ideology, culture, tradition – that now divide us, then what it brings us to is the “thin” personhood of liberalism and a politics in which substantive beliefs are subordinated to some form of Kantian proceduralism, precisely what Brown has been arguing against. And if the knowledge is deeper than the caricatures that fill our political rhetoric, and what we’re supposed to do is really understand, say, the Islamic temperament from the inside, then we would either have to become Muslim (in which case we would inherit the exclusionary as well as the generous aspects of that faith), or we would have to view Islam from a perspective above all faiths, and that would again bring us to classical liberalism and its claim (denied by Brown) to occupy a position that is not one.

The same difficulties attend Brown’s call for a “project of connections across differences.” On what bridge? Built by whom? It’s a little late to be saying (with E.M. Forster), “Only connect.” Or consider this question, which Brown seems to believe is a call to action: “[W]hat if autonomy were recognized as relative, ambiguous, ambivalent, partial and also advanced by means other than law?” OK, I stipulate all those (theoretical) points, but now what? Do they direct us to do anything? Is the relativity or ambiguity of autonomy the answer to any question posed by circumstances in the world? If there is a particular problem to resolve or decision to make, is saying, “Autonomy is relative and ambiguous” going to help or point you in a particular direction? I think not. And what are we to make of Brown’s hope that “liberal regimes” might become open “to reflection on the false conceits of their cultural and religious secularism, and to the possibility to being transformed by their encounter with what liberalism has conventionally taken to be its constituitive outside and its hostile Other”? If a liberal regime were to decide first that the procedural virtues it promotes – fairness, tolerance, formal equality – were in fact substantive, and second (this would be crucial) that the substance is one it wants to disavow, then it would no longer be a liberal regime. If the “conceits” (not a word Brown earns) it lives by were rejected as false, it would in that very gesture of rejection reconstitute itself as a regime informed by other conceits. In short, a softer liberalism, a liberalism alert to difference in a way that does not privatize or naturalize it, wouldn’t be liberalism. It would be something, but what that something is Brown does not tell us.

Nevertheless, what she does tell us is valuable and illuminating. Her account of how liberal tolerance (and therefore liberalism) works is nuanced and bracing. The fact that her analysis does not (and in my view could not) deliver a program for improving the world (or even a set of reasons for rejecting liberal tolerance) makes it no different from any other effort (always doomed) to derive a politics from the discourses of postmodernism, anti-essentialism, and anti-foundationalism.

Brown is still trying in the final paragraph, when she declares that “we can contest the depoliticizing, regulatory, and imperial aims of contemporary deployments of tolerance with alternative political speech and practices.” Yes, we can. Alternative political practices are always a possibility, but they will not be generated by the realization that the practices you oppose are regulatory and imperial. Rather, they will be generated by the realization that the regulations and the imperialism now in place take forms you dislike; and the alternative practices you urge will bring new regulations that are similarly imperial; the difference is that they will be yours.

Here and elsewhere in the book, Brown makes what I have called the “awareness” mistake (otherwise known as the mistake of theory, or the mistake that is theory), the mistake of thinking that awareness is a general condition of consciousness that, once achieved, enables you to see past and through what members of the Frankfurt School called the “prevailing realm of purposes.” But it is within the prevailing world of purposes – the present one and the one you want to substitute for it – that awareness is possible. Awareness is a local not a global cast of mind, dependent always on constraints and limitations even as it attempts to overcome them. Awareness, in short, is particular and produces particular insights that are not universally generalizable.

Wendy Brown’s book makes us aware of some important things; it alerts us, for example, to the fact that by privatizing and essentializing difference, the discourse of tolerance tends to prevent us from searching for the political and social solutions to the problems difference presents both locally and globally. It is a genuine service to have made that clear, and it is enough for one book, even if the book doesn’t tell us, or even give us a hint of, what those solutions are.

Stanley Fish is a university professor and professor of law at Florida International University, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

neology Today 62 (2006): 476-83

RECLAIMING CREATION IN A
DARWINIAN WORLD
MICHAEL HANBY

The protestations of fundamentalists notwithstanding, most Chris-tians, and certainly those who fancy themselves intellectuals, have made their peace with Darwinism. And, while most Christians no
longer think a theological engagement with Darwin is necessary, a great
many people do not even think a real theological engagement with
Darwinism is possible. The Darwinian worldview has become cultural
orthodoxy in Anglo-American society, enforced by a scientific, legal, and
media apparatus whose presuppositions define for all participants the
terms of a now meager and stupefying debate. To contend against this
orthodoxy, on these terms, is only to confirm it. To contradict this ortho-
doxy is to risk the invitation of public ridicule.

It is worth the risk to say that this is a dangerous peace, which leaves
hanging in the balance not simply a proper understanding of God as that
full and superlative act of being—the I AM of Exodus and the Fourth
Gospel—who grants existence to the world out of the sheer, pointless
gratuity of his love, as if that were not serious enough. This “peace” also
wagers the very intelligibility of the world and of human life. Pope John
Paul II recognized this in Evangelium vitae (1995), for instance, noting as
a condition for this “culture of death,” that, when we forget God, “man not
only loses sight of the mystery of God, but also the very mystery of his
own being.”1 And he is right. A world known and loved into existence by
God and for our enjoyment of God is, in its very meaning and essence, a
different place from an intrinsically meaningless, machine-like world that
is merely the accidental product of blind forces, governed by scarcity and
force, and that patiently awaits our free and arbitrary assignment of quality
and values to it. Militant Darwinians understand this; hence, the predict-
able and often hysterical public outcry that erupts, often enough by

Michael Hanby is Assistant Professor of Theology in the Honors College at Baylor
University and Associate Director of the Baylor Institute for Faith and Learning. He is
author of several journal articles and of Augustine and Modernity (2003).
1http://www.vatican.va/holy_fati^
evangelium-vitae__en.html (27 June 2005).

476

http://www.vatican.va/holy_fati%5e

Reclaiming Creation All

At issue . . . is control of the stories that are going to define,
guide, and orient our lives, a preoccupation that well exceeds
the bounds of scientific concern.

popularizers of science, every time creationism rears its ugly head. These
protests show us that there is much more at stake here than the dispas-
sionate pursuit of scientific truth. At issue, rather, is control of the stories
that are going to define, guide, and orient our lives, a preoccupation that
well exceeds the bounds of scientific concern. The meaninglessness that
grips virtually every aspect of contemporary culture should serve as an
index of just how successful Darwinism, and the capitalist theory from
which it sprang, have been in asserting themselves as normative.

What would it mean, against the backdrop of this success, for Christian
theology to rigorously engage, even contest, the Darwinian world picture?
First, it would mean confronting Darwinism with its own metaphysical
and even theological presuppositions, whose inherent problems arguably
threaten to undercut its explanatory power. That Darwinism does imply a
metaphysical or theological position is evident simply in the way its
apologists frame their quarrel with Christianity: natural processes not
divine intervention, evolution instead of creation—distinctions that pre-
suppose complex metaphysical predecisions about “nature” and a corre-
sponding theological decision about the kind of “God” this view of nature
permits. These are not the conclusions of their science; rather, they are its
presuppositions.

To recognize latent metaphysical presuppositions in Darwinism is to
raise the possibility of a different kind of criticism of Darwinian theory.
Still, this is complicated business, partly because it is unclear just where
the real quarrel lies, and partly because “Darwinism,” having been pro-
foundly altered by the development of modern genetics, is a long and
variegated tradition that now often bears only the most general resem-
blance to Darwin’s own theories. As a consequence, the meaning and
“essence” of contemporary Darwinism is contested, even among its ad-
herents. And many both internal and external to this tradition agree that
some versions of these arguments threaten to take evolutionary theory
outside the bounds of “Darwinism” altogether. Some, such as Richard
Lewontin, accentuate the transmutation of species as Darwin’s core in-
sight.2 Christian theology has no real stake in contesting this feature of

2See, for example, Richard C. Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human
Genome and Other Illusions (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000); Richard C.
Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper, 1992); Richard
C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and
Human Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1984); Richard C. Lewontin, The Genetic Basis of
Evolutionary Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).

478 Theology Today

Darwinian thought and can accommodate this point without lapsing into a
hybrid “theistic evolution” or “Intelligent Design” mode. Even proponents
of this accentuation will concede, however, that the dominant strain of the
Darwinian tradition has emphasized Darwin’s mechanism for evolutionary
change, which he took over and renamed from the English political-
economists Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus: natural selection. Like
Smith’s “invisible hand” and Malthus’s “positive checks,” “natural selec-
tion” presupposes the constancy of scarcity and competition as the nec-
essary conditions making natural selection universally effective—ensur-
ing, in Darwin’s words, that it is “daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout
the world, the slightest variations, rejecting those that are bad, preserving
and adding up all that are good; whenever and wherever opportunity
offers.”3 Notice here the echo of Malthusian theodicy, the attempt to make
good use of suffering, starvation, and evil. The “adaptationism” so char-
acteristic of evolutionary explanation carries these theodical tendencies
even further, accounting for the persistence of every species and of its
most functional traits by virtue of their adaptive advantage. Whether in
evolutionary biology or the political economy from which it originated,
this is an ominous doctrine when carried to its logical conclusion. For
adaptationism by definition entails that everything that dies “deserves” to
die by virtue of its inferiority to what survives. Hence, Darwinism’s long
implication in the eugenics movement, and Darwin’s own blithe, but
embarrassing reflections in his mature work, The Descent of Man (1871),
about the inevitable extinction of “inferior races” by the more civilized
and advanced.4

Like Smith’s invisible hand, natural selection perpetually restores to the
ecosystem as a whole (or to geographically isolated ecosystems) a kind of
equilibrium analogous to the balance between supply and demand in a
competitive market. The inherited biological variations “selected” are
those that succeed in occupying a specific niche within the “economy of
nature,” just as agents in a market-economy survive by colonizing a niche
within the overall “division of labor”—both terms Darwin uses in Origin:
“If any one species does not become modified in a corresponding degree
with its competitors, it will be exterminated.”5 The result of such culling
over many centuries is a widening degree of biological variation and,

3Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6t h ed. (Amherst: Prometheus, 1991), 62. Compare
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776),
available online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html (27 June 2005);
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future
Improvement of Society, 1st ed. (1798), available online at http://www.econlib.org/library/
Malthus/malPop.html (27 June 2005), and An Essay on the Principle of Population: A View
of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into Our Prospects
Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions, 6 ed.
(1826), available online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong.html (27 June
2005).
4http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/charles_darwin/descent_of_man/index.shtml (27
June 2005).
5Darwin, The Origin of Species, 76, 85.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html

http://www.econlib.org/library/

http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong.html

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/charles_darwin/descent_of_man/index.shtml

Reclaiming Creation 479

ultimately, given an adequate number of generations, branching generic
taxa and divergent species—a divergence accentuated because the win-
nowing process eliminates those rivals biologically closest to the survi-
vors.

One need not latch on to the anthropomorphic connotations of Darwin’s
“selection” metaphor, nor even follow some of Darwin’s critics in ascrib-
ing purpose to natural selection in order to raise serious questions about all
of this. As heir to Smith and Malthus, Darwin’s theory belongs, along with
those of German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and
of Karl Marx (1818-83), among the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century attempts to provide a logic for contingent history, a kind of secular
providence accounting for all cultural and biological life as the outworking
of a single process transcending those events. Inasmuch as it does supply
a transcendental logic for history, “natural selection” belongs in the realm
of metaphysics, for, precisely as transcendental, it defies empirical or
experimental verification.

Nevertheless, if Darwinism is science and has thus foresworn meta-
physical speculation in favor of such methods, how can Darwinism justify,
in its own terms, its appeal to a transcendental mechanism? On what
strictly scientific grounds can we justify designating disparate events in the
lives of trees, beetles, fish, and nations as instances in the operation of a
single transcendent process? Perhaps a Darwinian will reply, as David
Depew and Bruce Weber do in their brilliant Darwinism Evolving, that
natural selection is, not a “single mechanism,” but rather a “single name”
generically unifying a vast array of causal mechanisms.6 This, presumably,
would stave off the metaphysical charge. But what makes this unity more
than arbitrary? And why, in this case, does “natural selection” not really
mean just “everything that happens”? This may be a great way to win
every argument in advance, but it is hardly an explanation—much less a
scientific one.

Darwinism’s concept of “fitness” is fatally circular^ defining
fitness by survival and survival by fitness.

Perhaps this emptiness explains the continuing dominance of “adapta-
tionist” explanations and a persistent charge against Darwinism that, to my
mind, it has never entirely shaken: Its concept of “fitness” is fatally
circular, defining fitness by survival and survival by fitness. Perhaps these
are gross simplifications, but, if this is so, then Darwinism owes us an
answer to a very simple question: Which species do not owe their exis-

6Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

480 Theology Today

tence to natural selection’s gracious hand? Of course, if Darwinism can
answer this question, then natural selection is dethroned as a controlling
mechanism, panadaptationist Darwinism ceases to be a “theory of every-
thing,” and the origin of species becomes, once again, a mystery.

Such questions, which are legion, are rampant within the guild of
evolutionary biologists, and they threaten in some cases to undermine the
characterization of this tradition as “Darwinian.” Obviously, they must be
pressed with far more rigor and detail than I can adequately accomplish
here. Regardless of the outcome of that inquiry, there is a second, still
more important, facet of a real Christian engagement with Darwinism: a
rigorous recovery and articulation of the doctrine of creation, which means
rescuing this doctrine from the distortions imposed by the shape of the
current debate on evolution. Since this debate is conducted entirely within
the presuppositions set by a Darwinian worldview, it imposes a gross
theological illiteracy on all the participants, which a culture that defines
religion as private and irrational is only too ready to endorse. In other
words, a rigorous Christian account of creation will be just as critical of
creation/sm as it is of Darwinism, whether the creationists in question be
those who read Genesis as a natural science textbook, those “compati-
bilists” who fuse creation and Darwinian evolution, or those heirs of
eighteenth-century “natural theology,” the adherents of the so-called In-
telligent Design school.

Such approaches are surely bad science, but they are even worse
theology. Each, in its own way, seeks to accommodate the Christian
doctrine of creation to a scientific worldview and to submit it to the
scientific demand for an alternative “explanation,” failing to challenge
either the metaphysics often latent in this worldview or the adequacy of
scientific models of explanation to the mystery that is the world. And
worse still, lacking a rigorous theological understanding of the relation
between creation and God, they fail to discern just what kind of “expla-
nation” the doctrine of creation is, and end up substituting for the tran-
scendent Christian God something less than God—usually the first in a
long sequence of causes and effects—that stands “outside” the closed
system of nature and may or may not exist. In other words, a hypothetical
finite object of science’s own invention.

Marilynne Robinson has written that creationism is the best thing that
could have happened to Darwinism, as it allows the latter to underwrite its
legitimacy as the vanguard of dispassionate inquiry. Darwinians indeed
need creationists, and, in a display of (theological) illiteracy they would
find scandalous among those who dare comment on the scientific domain,
they repeatedly invoke as a foil for their reflections the ghost of William
Paley, as if his Natural Theology (1802),7 which seeks to infer a divine

7Available online at http://www.hti.umich.edU/cgi/p/pd-modeng/pd-modeng-idx7type=
HTML&rgn=TEI.2&byte=53049319 (27 June 2005).

http://www.hti.umich.edU/cgi/p/pd-modeng/pd-modeng-idx7type=

Reclaiming Creation 481

Designer from the functional “contrivances” of organisms, represented the
apex of Christian thought on creation.

Funny, then, that Thomas Aquinas, a much more authoritative figure
within Christian tradition, despite being best-known for his alleged at-
tempts to offer rationalistic proofs of God’s existence, insists that the
creation of the world is an article of faith: “By faith alone do we hold, and
by no demonstration can it be proved, that the world did not always
exist.”8 Likewise, “the newness of the world cannot be demonstrated on
the part of the world itself.”9 Thomas’s insistence here does not derive
from a fideistic retreat from reason into the secure confines of faith, but
rather from a positive chastening of theological speech that stems from
rigorous understanding of the meaning of the word “God” and, conse-
quently, of what we must mean, in a strict sense, by God’s “creating.”

Aquinas takes great care to distinguish creation from other modes of
causing. Creation, in this strict sense, does not refer to a mere transmu-
tation of form, and so does not answer the question that preoccupies
evolutionary theory: “Why this instead of thatV Rather, the Christian
doctrine of creation refers to passage from potentiality in the mind of God
to actuality and answers an altogether different question: “Why something
rather than nothing?’10

Except that the doctrine of creation, strictly speaking, does not really
answer even this question. The difference between nothing and something
is infinite; hence, the movement from nonexistence to existence is the one
motion that only God can account for: Its “mechanism” remains inacces-
sible to us by definition, for the simple reason that prior to the movement
there is nothing for this mechanism to act upon. This is why creation
cannot be demonstrated on the part of the world itself and why Aquinas
says that “Creation places something in the thing created according to
relation only; because what is created, is not made by movement or by
change.”11 Creation simply names a relationship of dependence between
effect and cause that occurs when anything genuinely new appears, which
happens with everything that is neither reducible to the sum of its parts nor
to the sum of causes that produced it—which is, of course, every single
thing in existence.

There is a second reason that the Christian doctrine of creation cannot
answer science’s “why” question: The relationship of dependence that
“creation” names is not symmetrical. Creation needs God; but Aquinas
understands that “God,” properly understood, cannot need the world.
Hence, he concludes that God does not act for an end (a goal) in creating
the world, for this would imply that God somehow gains from the world’s
existence something he previously lacked.12 We can, therefore, posit no

8Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1.46.2.
9Ibid.
10See ibid., 1.45.1.
nIbid., 1.45.3.
12Ibid., 1.44.4.

482 Theology Today

other “motive” for the creation of the world, than the sheer, extravagant
generosity that God is, in his essence as trinitarian love.

The first function of the Christian doctrine of creation, then, is simply
to protect the infinite qualitative difference between God and all that is not
God, something that both Darwinian and creationist “explanations” fail to
do. Creation thus understood is not an alternative theory or explanation of
the world of the sort Darwinians or other scientists demand, but rather a
denial in principle that any such “theory of everything” is finally possible,
and a suspicion that any such comprehensive theory will necessarily
exercise a reductive tyranny over the things it purports to “explain.” To
precisely this extent, the Christian doctrine of creation is more “agnostic,”
less ideological, and thus—dare we say?—more scientific than Darwin-
ism. The Christian doctrine of creation refuses to posit a causal mechanism
for the being of the world, but only a misunderstanding of the word “God”
could register this refusal as a failure. For God is no “sky hook,” a straw
man of Darwinism’s own invention that likens God’s creative act to a
piece of stage-machinery that “intervenes” from “beyond,” like Aphrodite
restoring Paris to his bedchamber. Rather, God is that simple, immutable
act of being and love so transcendently other to creation as to be at once
external and internal to it, mysteriously indwelling it while calling it into
the novelty of existence in the mystery of the divine love.

To recognize the world as creation—to recognize that the mystery of
sheer, extravagant love is at the innermost heart of reality—is to recognize
something important about the nature of the world: that each created thing
is also a mystery, that there is intrinsic to each thing a novelty and an
excess of form that defies reduction to the sum of the causes that produced
it and that each whole, precisely as a whole, is irreducible to the sum or
function of its parts, even as it is inconceivable apart from them. To dissect
and track how electrical impulses in the brain manifest themselves in
physical actions that cause vibrations impacting upon the ear of another is
not to “explain” a conversation, any more than exhaustive mapping of my
DNA “explains” me. Indeed, this is manifestly not to have explained them,

Aesthetic and moral judgments are absolutely integral to true
knowledge of reality.

for no reduction of these transactions to extension, motion, force, mass,
energy flows, or any of the other standard modern ways of depicting
matter is adequate to the phenomena these terms purport to describe. In
fact, the most interesting elements of conversation—personality and iden-
tity—drop out of the equation altogether. Thus, aesthetic and moral
judgments are absolutely integral to true knowledge of reality. We need a
model of knowledge adequate to the mystery of the world. This does not

Reclaiming Creation 483

require that we invoke some nebulous spirit in opposition to the cold, brute
reality of matter (another frequent Darwinian straw man) but, rather, only
that we recognize in matter and in the wholes composed of it the true
reality of qualities—form, beauty, and purpose, for instance—that are
manifestly a part of the world yet inaccessible to science as it is currently
composed.

All of this means that a properly understood Christian doctrine of
creation, far from shutting down inquiry, creates the space for a form of
inquiry that does not falsify itself and its objects by absolutizing the
former and tyrannically depriving the latter of their most characteristic
content. Thus, it is only within the mysterious space afforded by the
doctrine of creation, and not in opposition to this doctrine, that we might
yet hope for evolutionary theory—even elements of Darwinism—to be-
come genuine science.

ABSTRACT

This essay argues for the necessity and viability of a rigorous theological
critique of the Darwinian tradition of evolutionary biology. Contending that
Darwinism and the political economy from which it originated have been
important agents in creating the contemporary “culture of death,” it argues
that Darwinism either violates its claim to scientific status by relying upon an
illicit metaphysics or that it robs itself of explanatory power by denying its
own metaphysical status. More fundamentally, the current debate requires a
metaphysically rigorous articulation of the Christian doctrine of creation, free
from the theological distortions imposed by the “creationist” debate with
Darwinism and thus equally critical of both.

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God and Creation

Herbert McCabe

From Philosophy of Religion (a guide and anthology), ed. by Brian Davies

Oxford Press, UK, 2000 (

96 – 201)

In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to carry on an activity, to be engaged in research, and I think this throws light on what we are doing if we try to prove the existence of God. To prove the existence of God is to prove that some questions still need asking, that the world poses these questions for us.

To prove the existence of God, then, would be rather like proving the validity of science – I don’t mean science as a body of established facts set out in textbooks or journals, but science as an intellectual activity, the activity of research currently going on; and not just routine research which consists in looking for the answers to clearly formulated questions by means of clearly established techniques, but the research which is the growing point of science, the venture into the unknown.

It is perfectly possible to deny the validity of this. It is perfectly possible to say we now have science (we didn’t have it in the eighth century, let us say, but we have it now). It is just there; from now on it is all really just a matter of tidying up a few details. Now of course all the really great advances in science have come by questioning just that, by questioning (let us say) whether the Newtonian world is really the last word, by digging down and asking questions of what everybody has come to take for granted. But you could imagine quite easily a society which discouraged such radical questioning.

In this century we have seen totalitarian societies which have been extremely keen on improving their technology and answering detailed questions within the accepted frame work of science, but extremely hostile to the kind of radical thinking I am envisaging; the kind of society where Wernher von Braun is honored and Einstein is exiled. I also think that the same effect can be produced in more subtle ways in societies that don’t look totalitarian. And of course it was notoriously produced in the Church confronted by Galileo. The asking of radical questions is discouraged by any society that believes in itself, believes it has found the answers, believes that only its authorized questions are legitimate.

Faced with such hostility or such incomprehension, you can, of course, say: well, wait and see: you will find that in spite of everything, science will make startling and quite unexpected changes, that our whole world view will shift in ways we cannot now predict or imagine. But that is just to assert your belief. And this I think is parallel to asserting your belief in God.

I think a belief in God – in the sense a belief in the validity of the kind of radical question to which God would be the answer – is a part of human flourishing and that one who closes himself off from it is to that extent deficient. For this reason I welcome such belief in God, but what I am asking myself now is not whether I believe, but what grounds I have for such belief.

And here again I think the analogy with proving the validity of fundamental thinking in science helpful. How, after all, do we show that there is still a long and probably unexpected road to travel in science? By pointing to anomalies in the present scientific world picture. If your world picture includes, for example, the idea of ether as the medium in which light waves occur, then there is an anomaly if it turns out to be impossible to determine the velocity of a light source with respect to ether; and so on.

Now in a parallel way, it seems to me, proofs for the existence of God point to anomalies in a world picture which excludes the God question. It is, it seems to me, quite anomalous to hold that while it is legitimate and valid to ask ‘How come?’ about any particular thing or events in the world, it is illegitimate and invalid to ask it about the whole world. To say that we aren’t allowed to ask it merely because we can’t answer it seems to me to be begging the question. The question is: is there an unanswered question about the existence of the world? Can we be puzzled by the existence of the world instead of nothing? I can be and am; and this is to be puzzled about God.

The question ‘How come?’ can have a whole lot of different meanings and be asked at several levels, and the deeper the question you ask about an individual thing the more it is a question about a world to which that thing belongs; there is finally a deepest question about a thing which is also a question about everything. Let me explain that enigmatic remark.

Supposing you ask ‘How come Fido?’ You may be asking whether his father is Rover or whether it was that promiscuous mongrel down the lane. In such a case the answer is satisfactorily given by naming Fido’s parents. At this level no more need be said; the question if fully answered at this level. But now suppose you ask: ‘But how come Fido’s a dog?’ The answer could be: ‘His parents were dogs, and dogs just are born of other dogs’. Here you have moved to what I call a deeper level of questioning and begun to talk about what dogs are. You are saying: for Fido to be is for him to be a dog, and Fido’s parents are the sort of things whose activities result in things being dogs. Now your original question ‘How come Fido?’ has deepened into a question about the dog species. It remains a questing about this individual dog Fido, but it is also a question about dogs – not about dogs in the abstract, but about the actual dog species in the world. Your question ‘How come Fido?’ at this new level is a question ‘How come dogs anyways?’

And of course there is an answer to that too in terms of things like genetics and natural selection and what not. Here we have a new and deeper level of the question ‘How come Fido?’ – still a question about this particular puppy, but one that is answered in terms of its membership of a still wider community; no longer now simply the community of dogs, but the whole biological community within which dogs come to be and have their place. Then of course we ask a question about Fido at a deeper level still. When we ask how come the biological community, we no doubt answer in terms of biochemistry. (I am not of course pretending that we actually have the answer to all these questions, as though we fully understood how it came about, and has to come about, that there are now dogs around the place, but we expect eventually to answer these questions.)

And now we can go on from the level of biochemistry to that of physics and all the time we are asking more penetrating questions concerning Fido and each time we go further in our questioning we are seeing Fido in a wider and wider context.

We can put this another way by saying that each time we ask the question we are asking about Fido over against some other possibility. Our first question simply meant: How come Fido is this dog rather than another; he’s Rover’s son rather than the mongrel’s son. At the next level we were asking: How come he’s a dog rather than, say, a giraffe. At the next level: How come he’s a living being rather than an inanimate, and so on.

Now I want to stress that all the time we asking about this individual Fido. It is just that we are seeing further problematics within him. Fido’s parents brought it about that he is this dog not another, but in the act they also brought it about that he is this dog (not giraffe), that he is this living dog, that he is this biochemically complex, living dog; that he is this molecularly structured, biochemically complex living dog, and so on. We are probing further into what it is for Fido to come to be and always by noting what he is not, but might have been. Every ‘How come’ question is how come this instead of what is not. And every time, of course, we answer by reference to some thing or state of affairs, some existing reality, in virtue of which Fido is this rather than what he is not.

Now our ultimate radical question is not how come Fido exists as this dog instead of that, or how come Fido exists as a dog instead of a giraffe, or exists as living instead of inanimate, but how come Fido exists instead of nothing, and just as to ask how come he exists as a dog is to put him in the context of dogs, so to ask how come he exists instead of nothing is to put him in the context of everything, the universe or world. And this is the question I call the God-question, because whatever the answer is, whatever the thing or state of affairs, whatever the existing reality that answers it we call ‘God’.

Now of course it is always possible to stop the questioning at any point; a man may refuse to ask why there are dogs. He may say there just are dogs and perhaps it is impious to enquire how come – there were people who actually said that to Darwin. Similarly it is possible to refuse to ask this ultimate question, to say as Russell once did: the universe is just there. This seems to me just as arbitrary as to say: dogs are just there. The difference is that we now know by hindsight that Darwin’s critics were irrational because we have familiarized ourselves with an answer to the question, ‘How come there are dogs?’ We have not familiarized ourselves with the answer to the question, ‘How come the world instead of nothing?’ But that does not make it any less arbitrary to refuse to ask it. To ask it is to enter on an exploration which Russell was simply refusing to do, as it seems to me. It is of course perfectly right to point out the mysteriousness of a question about everything, to point to the fact that we have no way of answering it, but that is by no means the same as saying it is an unaskable question. As Wittgenstein said ‘Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery’.

There is indeed a difficulty about having a concept of ‘everything’, for we ordinarily conceive of something with, so to say, a boundary around it: this is a sheep and not a giraffe. But everything is bound by nothing, which is just to say that it is not bounded by anything. To put what is the same point another way: we can have no concept of nothing, absolutely speaking. We can use the word relatively; we can say, ‘There is noting in the cupboard’ meaning there are no largish objects – we are understood not to be saying there is no dust or no air. ‘There is nothing between Kerry and New York’ means there is no land. It does not mean there is absolutely nothing, no sea or fishes.

The notions of everything and of absolutely nothing, are not available to us in the sense that the notions of sheep or scarlet or savagery are available to us. And this means that we are asking our ultimate radical question with tools that will not do the job properly, with words whose meaning has to be stretched beyond what we can comprehend. It would be very strange if it were not so. As Wittgenstein says, what we have here is the mystery. If the question of God were a neat and simple question to be answered in terms of familiar concepts, then whatever we are talking about, it is not God. A God who is in this sense comprehensible would not be worth worshipping, or even of talking about (except for the purpose of destroying him).

It is clear that we reach out to, but do not reach, an answer to our ultimate question, how come anything instead of nothing? But we are able to exclude some answers. If God is whatever answers our questions, how come everything? Then evidently he is not to be included amongst everything. God cannot be a thing, an existent among others. It is not possible that God and the universe should add up to make two. Again, if we are to speak of God as causing the existence of everything, it is clear that we must not mean that he makes the universe out of anything. Whatever creation means it is not a process of making.

Again it is clear that God cannot interfere in the universe, not because he has not the power but because, so to speak, he had too much; to interfere you have to be an alternative to, or alongside, what you are interfering with. If God is the cause of everything, there is nothing that he is alongside. Obviously God makes no difference to the universe; I mean by this that we do not appeal specifically to God to explain why the universe is this way rather than that, for this we need only appeal to explanations within the universe. For this reason there can, it seems to me, by no feature of the universe which indicates it is God-made. What God accounts for is that the universe is there instead of nothing.

I have said that whatever God is, he is not a member of everything, not an inhabitant of the universe, not a thing or a kind of thing. And I should add, I suppose, that it cannot be possible to ask of him, how come God instead of nothing? It must not be possible for him to be nothing. Not just in the sense that God must be imperishable, but that it must make no sense to consider that God might not be. Of course it is still possible to say, without manifest contradiction, ‘God might not be’, but that is because when we speak of God by using the ‘God’, we do not understand what we mean, we have no concept of God; what governs our use of the word ‘God’ is not an understanding of what God is but the validity of a question about the world. That is why we are not protected by any logical laws from saying ‘God might not exist’ even though it makes no sense. What goes for our rules for the use of ‘God’ does not go for the God we try to name with the word. (And a corollary of this, incidentally, is why a famous argument for the existence of God called the ontological argument does not work.)

What I have been saying may seem to make God both remote and irrelevant. He is not part of the universe and he makes no difference to it. It is therefore necessary to stress that God must be in everything that happens and everything that exists in the universe. If Fido’s parents make Fido to exist instead of nothing it is because in their action God is acting, just as if a pen writes it is because in its action a writer is acting. It is because it is God that wields every agent in the universe that agents bring things into existence, make things new. Every action in the world is an action of God; not because it is not an action of a creature but because it is by God’s action that the creature is itself and has its own activity.

For the moment may I just say that it seems to me that what we often call atheism is not a denial of the God of which I speak. Very frequently the man who sees himself as an atheist is not denying the existence of some answer to the mystery of how come there is anything instead of nothing, he is denying what he thinks or had been told is a religious answer to this question. He thinks or has been told that religious people, and especially Christians, claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, just like Basil Spence only bigger and less visible, that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and whole Christian tradition are atheistic too.

But a genuine atheist is one who simply does not see that there is any problem or mystery here, one who is content to ask questions within the world, but cannot see that the world itself raises a question. This is the man I compare to those who are content to ask questions within the established framework of science, but cannot see that there are genuine though ill-formulated questions on the frontiers. I have made a comparison with scientific research, but just the same parallel could be made with any kind of creative activity. The poet is trying to write a poem but he does not know what he is trying to say until he has said it and recognized it. Until he has done this it is extremely difficult to show that he is writing a poem or that he could write a poem. I can show, by pointing to the existence of bricks and cement and so on and the availability of a work-force, that there could be more houses made. I cannot show that there will ever be another poem.

I called this paper ‘God and Creation’ in order to indicate what I and the mainstream Christian tradition understand by creation as a path towards God. We come across God, so to speak, or rather we search and do not come across him, when the universe raises for us a radical question concerning its existence at all. And creation is the name we give to God’s answering this question.

I hope that it will be evident that creation is here being used in a quite different sense from the way it is used by people who seek to discover the origin of the universe (was it a big bang or a lot of little pops or whatever). Whatever processes took place in remote periods of time is of course in itself a fascinating topic but it is irrelevant to the question of creation in the sense that makes us speak of God. When we have concluded that God created the world, there still remains the scientific question to ask about what kind of a world it is and was and how, if ever, it began. It is probably unnecessary to say that the proposition that the universe is made by God and that everything that is, is begun and sustained in existence by God, does not entail that the universe has only existed for a finite time. There may be reasons for thinking that the universe is finite in time and space but the fact that its existence depends on God is not one of the them.

Coming to know that the universe is dependent on God does not in fact tell us anything about the character of the universe. How could it? Since everything we know about God (that he exists and what he is not) is derived from what we know of the universe, how could we come back from God with some additional information about the world? If we think we can it is only because we have smuggled something extra into our concept of God – for example, when we make God in our own image and ask ourselves quite illegitimate question like ‘What would I have done if I were God?’ It should be evident that this is a temptation to be avoided.

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