The road from atheism
As most of
my readers probably know, I was an atheist for about a decade -- roughly the
1990s, give or take. Occasionally I am
asked how I came to reject atheism. I
briefly addressed this in The
Last Superstition. A longer
answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.
I was
brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was
about 13 or 14. Hearing, from a
non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first
time -- “That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what
they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc. -- I was mesmerized, and
convinced, seemingly for good. Sola scriptura-based arguments are
extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise -- sola scriptura itself -- has absolutely
nothing to be said for it. Unfortunately
it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that. Such arguments can survive even the complete
loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the
death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding
like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends.
But I was
still a theist for a time, though that wouldn’t survive my undergrad
years. Kierkegaard was my first real
philosophical passion, and his individualistic brand of religiosity greatly
appealed to me. But the individualistic irreligion of Nietzsche would come to
appeal to me more, and for a time he was my hero, with Walter Kaufmann a close
second. (I still confess an affection
for Kaufmann. Nietzsche, not so
much.) Analytic philosophy would, before
long, bring my youthful atheism down to earth.
For the young Nietzschean the loss of religion is a grand,
civilizational crisis, and calls for an equally grand response on the part of a
grand individual like himself. For the skeptical
analytic philosopher it’s just a matter of rejecting some bad arguments,
something one does quickly and early in one’s philosophical education before
getting on to the really interesting stuff.
And that became my “settled” atheist position while in grad school. Atheism was like belief in a spherical earth
-- something everyone in possession of the relevant facts knows to be true, and
therefore not worth getting too worked up over or devoting too much
philosophical attention to.
But it takes
some reading and thinking to get to that point.
Kaufmann’s books were among my favorites, serious as they were on the
“existential” side of disbelief without the ultimately impractical pomposity of
Nietzsche. Naturally I took it for
granted that Hume, Kant, et al. had identified the main problems with the
traditional proofs of God’s existence long ago.
On issues of concern to a contemporary analytic philosopher, J. L. Mackie
was the man, and I regarded his book The
Miracle of Theism as a solid piece of philosophical work. I still do.
I later came to realize that he doesn’t get Aquinas or some other things
right. (I discuss what he says about
Aquinas in Aquinas.) But the book is intellectually serious, which
is more than can be said for anything written by a “New Atheist.” Antony Flew’s challenge to the
intelligibility of various religious assertions may have seemed like dated
“ordinary language” philosophy to some, but I was convinced there was something
to it. Kai Nielsen was the “go to” guy
on issues of morality and religion. Michael
Martin’s Atheism: A Philosophical
Justification was a doorstop of a book, and a useful compendium of
arguments. I used to wonder with a
little embarrassment whether my landlord, who was religious but a nice guy,
could see that big word “ATHEISM” on its spine -- sitting there sort of like a
middle finger on the bookshelf behind me -- when he’d come to collect the
rent. But if so he never raised an
eyebrow or said a word about it.
The argument
from evil was never the main rationale for my atheism; indeed, the problem of
suffering has only gotten really interesting to me since I returned to the
Catholic Church. (Not because the existence
of suffering poses a challenge to the truth of classical theism -- for reasons
I’ve given elsewhere, I think it poses no such challenge at all -- but because the
role various specific instances of suffering actually play in divine providence
is often really quite mysterious.) To be
sure, like any other atheist I might have cited the problem of suffering when
rattling off the reasons why theism couldn’t be true, but it wasn’t what primarily
impressed me philosophically. What really impressed me was the
evidentialist challenge to religious belief.
If God really exists there should be solid arguments to that effect, and
there just aren’t, or so I then supposed.
Indeed, that there were no such arguments seemed to me something which
would itself be an instance of evil if God existed, and this was an aspect of
the problem of evil that seemed really novel and interesting.
I see from a
look at my old school papers that I was expressing this idea in a couple of
essays written for different courses in 1992.
(I think that when J. L. Schellenberg’s book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason appeared in 1993 I was both
gratified that someone was saying something to that effect in print, and
annoyed that it wasn’t me.) Attempts to sidestep
the evidentialist challenge, like Alvin Plantinga’s, did not convince me, and
still don’t. My Master’s
thesis was a defense of “evidentialism” against critics like
Plantinga. I haven’t read it in years,
but I imagine that, apart from its atheism and a detail here or there, I’d
still agree with it.
I was also greatly
impressed by the sheer implausibility of attributing humanlike characteristics
to something as rarefied as the cause of the world. J. C. A. Gaskin’s The Quest for Eternity had a fascinating section on the question of
whether a centre of consciousness could coherently be attributed to God, a
problem I found compelling. Moreover,
the very idea of attributing moral virtues (or for that matter moral vices) to
God seemed to make no sense, given that the conditions that made talk of
kindness, courage, etc. intelligible in human life could not apply to Him. Even if
something otherwise like God did exist, I thought, He would be “beyond good and
evil” -- He would not be the sort of thing one could attribute moral
characteristics to, and thus wouldn’t be the God of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. (Richard Swinburne’s attempt to
show otherwise did not work, as I argued in another school paper.) The Euthyphro problem, which also had a big
impact on me, only reinforced the conclusion that you couldn’t tie morality to
God in the way that (as I then assumed) the monotheistic religions required.
Those were,
I think, the main components of my mature atheism: the conviction that theists
could neither meet nor evade the evidentialist challenge; and the view that
there could be, in any event, no coherent notion of a cause of the world with
the relevant humanlike attributes. What
is remarkable is how much of the basis I then had for these judgments I still
find compelling. As I would come to
realize only years later, the conception of God I then found so implausible was
essentially a modern, parochial, and overly anthropomorphic “theistic
personalist” conception, and not the classical
theism to which the greatest theistic philosophers had always been
committed. And as my longtime readers
know, I still find theistic personalism objectionable. The fideism that I found (and still find) so
appalling was, as I would also come to see only later, no part of the
mainstream classical theist tradition either.
And while the stock objections raised by atheists against the
traditional arguments for God’s existence are often aimed at caricatures, some
of them do have at least some force against some of the arguments of modern philosophers
of religion. But they do not have force
against the
key arguments of the classical theist tradition.
It is this classical tradition -- the tradition of
Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists, and Thomists and other Scholastics -- that I had
little knowledge of then. To be sure, I
had read the usual selections from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Anselm that pretty
much every philosophy student reads -- several of Plato’s dialogues, the Five
Ways, chapter 2 of the Proslogium,
and so forth. Indeed, I read a lot more than
that. I’d read the entire Proslogium of Anselm, as well as the Monologium, the Cur Deus Homo, and the exchange with Gaunilo, early in my
undergraduate years. I’d read Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia and De Principiis Naturae, big chunks of
Plotinus’s Enneads, Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, Augustine’s Concerning the Teacher, and Bonaventure’s
The Mind’s Road to God. I’d read Russell’s History of Western Philosophy -- hardly an unbiased source, to be
sure -- but also a bit of Gilson. All
while becoming an atheist during my undergrad years. And I still didn’t understand the classical
tradition.
Why not? Because to read something is not necessarily
to understand it. Partly, of course,
because when you’re young, you always understand less than you think you do. But mainly because, to understand someone,
it’s not enough to sit there tapping your foot while he talks. You’ve got to listen, rather than merely waiting for a pause so that you can
insert the response you’d already formulated before he even opened his
mouth. And when you’re a young man who thinks he’s got the religious question
all figured out, you’re in little mood to listen -- especially if you’ve fallen
in love with one side of the question, the side that’s new and sexy because
it’s not what you grew up believing.
Zeal of the deconverted, and all that.
You’re
pretty much just going through the motions at that point. And if, while in that mindset, what you’re
reading from the other side are seemingly archaic works, written in a
forbidding jargon, presenting arguments and ideas no one defends anymore (or at
least no one in the “mainstream”), your understanding is bound to be
superficial and inaccurate. You’ll take
whatever happens to strike you as the main themes, read into them what you’re
familiar with from modern writers, and ignore the unfamiliar bits as irrelevant. “This
part sounds like what Leibniz or Plantinga says, but Hume and Mackie already
showed what’s wrong with that; I don’t even know what the hell this other part means, but no one today seems to be
saying that sort of thing anyway, so who cares…” Read it, read into it, dismiss it, move on. How far can you go wrong?
Very, very
far. It took me the better part of a decade to
see that, and what prepared the way were some developments in my
philosophical
thinking that seemingly had nothing to do with religion. The first of
them had to do instead with the
philosophy of language and logic. Late
in my undergrad years at Cal State Fullerton I took a seminar in logic
and
language in which the theme was the relationship between sentences and
what
they express. (Propositions? Meanings?
Thoughts? That’s the question.) Similar themes would be treated in
courses I
took in grad school, at first at Claremont and later at UC Santa
Barbara. Certain arguments stood out. There was Alonzo Church’s
translation
argument, and, above all, Frege’s wonderful essay “The Thought.”
Outside of class I discovered Karl Popper’s
World 3 concept, and the work of Jerrold Katz.
The upshot of these arguments was that the propositional content of
sentences could not be reduced to or otherwise explained in terms of the
utterances of sentences themselves, or behavioral dispositions, or
psychological states, or conventions, or functions from possible worlds,
or
anything else a materialist might be willing to countenance. As the
arguments sank in over the course of
months and years, I came to see that existing naturalistic accounts of
language
and meaning were no good.
Not that
that led me to give up naturalism, at least not initially. A more nuanced, skeptical naturalism was my
preferred approach -- what else was there, right? My studies in the philosophy of mind
reinforced this tendency. At first, and
like so many undergraduate philosophy majors, I took the materialist line for
granted. Mental activity was just brain
activity. What could be more obvious? But reading John Searle’s The Rediscovery of the Mind destroyed
this illusion, and convinced me that the standard materialist theories were all
hopeless. That Searle was himself a
naturalist no doubt made this easier to accept.
Indeed, Searle became another hero of mine. He was smart, funny, gave perfectly organized
public lectures on complex topics without
notes, and said whatever he thought whether or not it was fashionable. And he wrote
so beautifully, eschewing the needless formalisms that give a veneer of
pseudo-rigor and “professionalism” to the writings of too many analytic
philosophers. “That is how I want to write!” I decided.
Brilliant as
he was as a critic, though, Searle’s own approach to the mind-body problem --
“biological naturalism” -- never convinced me.
It struck me (and seemingly everyone else but Searle himself) as a riff on
property dualism. But there was another
major influence on my thinking in the philosophy of mind in those days, Michael
Lockwood’s fascinating book Mind, Brain
and the Quantum. Lockwood was also a
naturalist of sorts, and yet he too was critical of some of the standard
materialist moves. Most importantly,
though, Lockwood’s book introduced me to Bertrand Russell’s later views on
these issues, which would have a major influence on my thinking ever
afterward. Russell emphasized that
physics really gives us very little knowledge of the material world. In particular, it gives us knowledge of its abstract
structure, of what can be captured in equations and the like. But it gives us no knowledge of the intrinsic
nature of matter, of the concrete reality that fleshes out the abstract
structure. Introspection, by contrast,
gives us direct knowledge of our thoughts and experiences. The upshot is that it is matter, and not mind, that is the really problematic side of the
mind-body problem.
This was
truly revolutionary, and it reinforced the conclusion that contemporary
materialism was shallow and dogmatic. And
that Lockwood and Russell were themselves naturalists made it once again easy
to accept the message. I got hold of
whatever I could find on these neglected views of Russell’s -- Russell’s The Analysis of Matter and various
essays and book chapters, Lockwood’s other writings on the topic, some terrific
neglected essays by Grover Maxwell, some related arguments from John Foster and
Howard Robinson. David Chalmers and
Galen Strawson were also starting to take an interest in Russell around that
time. But once again I found myself
agreeing more with the criticisms than with the positive proposals. Russell took the view that what fleshes out
the structure described by physics were sense data (more or less what
contemporary writers call qualia). This
might seem to entail a kind of panpsychism, the view that mental properties are
everywhere in nature. Russell avoided
this bizarre result by arguing that sense data could exist apart from a
conscious subject which was aware of them, and Lockwood took the same line. I wasn’t convinced, and one of my earliest published
articles was a criticism of Lockwood’s arguments on this subject (an
article to which Lockwood very graciously replied). Chalmers and Strawson, meanwhile, were
flirting with the idea of just accepting the panpsychist tendency of Russell’s
positive views, but that seemed crazy to me.
My preferred
solution was to take the negative, critical side of the Russellian position --
the view that physics gives us knowledge only of the abstract structure of
matter -- and push a similar line toward the mind itself. All our
knowledge, both of the external world described by physics and of the internal
world of conscious experience and thought, was knowledge only of structure, of
the relations between elements but not of their intrinsic nature. I would discover that Rudolf Carnap had taken
something in the ballpark of this position, but the main influence on my
thinking here was, of all people, the economist and political philosopher F. A.
Hayek. The libertarianism I was then
attracted to had already led me to take an interest in Hayek. When I found out that he had written a book
on the mind-body problem, and that it took a position like Russell’s only more
radical, it seemed like kismet. Hayek’s The Sensory Order and some of his
related essays would come to be the major influences on my positive views.
But
they
were inchoate, since Hayek was not a philosopher by profession. That
gave me something to do. Working out Hayek’s position in a more
systematic way than he had done would be the project of my doctoral
dissertation, “Russell,
Hayek, and the Mind-Body Problem.” (Both
here and in the earlier Master’s thesis link, by the way, Google books
overstates the page count. I wasn’t that long-winded!) This was, to be sure, a very eccentric topic
for a dissertation. Russell’s views were
marginal at the time, and are still not widely accepted. Probably very few philosophers of mind even
know who Hayek is, and fewer still care.
But I thought their views were both true and interesting, and that was
that. (If you want advice on how to
climb the career ladder in academic philosophy, I’m not the guy to ask. But you knew that already.)
Spelling out
the Hayekian position in a satisfactory way was very difficult. Lockwood had presented Russell’s position as
a kind of mind-brain identity theory in reverse: It’s not that the mind turns
out to be the brain, but that the brain turns out to be the mind. More precisely, visual and tactile perceptions of the brain of the sort a
neurosurgeon might have do not tell us what the brain is really like, but
present us only with a representation of the brain. It is actually introspection of our own mental states that tells us the inner
nature of the matter that makes up the brain.
It seemed to me that Hayek’s position amounted to something like functionalism in reverse: It’s not that the mind turns out to be a kind
of causal network of the sort that might be instantiated in the brain, or a
computer, or some other material system -- understood naively, i.e. taking our
perceptual experience of these physical systems as accurate representations of
their intrinsic nature. Rather,
introspection of our mental states and their relations is actually a kind of
direct awareness of the inner nature of causation itself. We shouldn’t reduce mind to causal relations;
rather we should inflate our notion of causation and see in it the mental
properties we know from introspection.
So I then
argued, and wrote up the results both in the dissertation and in another article. But the views were weird, required a great
deal of abstractive effort even to understand, and one had to care about Hayek
even to try, which almost no philosophers of mind do. To be sure, Searle was interested in Hayek in
a general way -- when Steven Postrel and I interviewed
him for Reason, and when I talked
to him about Hayek on other occasions, he even expressed interest in The Sensory Order in particular -- but
this interest never manifested itself in his published work. Chalmers very kindly gave me lots of feedback
on the Hayekian spin on Russell that I was trying to develop, and pushed me to
clarify the underlying metaphysics. But his
own tendency was, as I have said, to explore (at least tentatively) the
panpsychist reading of Russell.
And yet my
own development of Hayek might itself seem ultimately to have flirted with
panpsychism. For if introspection of our
mental states gives us awareness of the inner nature of causation, doesn’t that
imply that causation itself -- including causation in the world outside the
brain -- is in some sense mental? This
certainly went beyond anything Hayek himself had said. In my later thinking about Hayek’s position
(of which I would give a more adequate exposition in my Cambridge Companion to Hayek article
on Hayek’s philosophy of mind), I would retreat from this reading and
emphasize instead the idea that introspection and perception give us only
representations of the inner and outer worlds, and not their intrinsic nature.
This, for
reasons I spell out in the article just referred to, offers a possible solution
to the problem that qualia pose for naturalism.
But because the view presupposes the notion of representation, it does
not account for intentionality. Here my inclinations went in more of a
“mysterian” direction. I had long been
fascinated by Colin McGinn’s arguments to the effect that there was a perfectly
naturalistic explanation of consciousness, but one we may be incapable in
principle of understanding given the limitations on our cognitive
faculties. I thought we could say more
about consciousness than McGinn thought we probably could, but I also came to
think that his mysterian approach was correct vis-à-vis the intentional content of our mental
states. Lockwood and Hayek said things
that lent plausibility to this.
I would
later largely abandon the Hayekian position altogether, because it
presupposes
an indirect realist account of perception that I would eventually
reject. (That took some time. The influence of indirect realism is
clearly
evident in my book Philosophy
of Mind.) But I had come to some
conclusions in the philosophy of mind that would persist. First, as Russell had argued, physics, which
materialists take to be the gold standard of our knowledge of the material
world, in fact doesn’t give us knowledge of the intrinsic nature of matter in
the first place. The usual materialist
theories were not even clearly thought out, much less correct. Second, a complete naturalistic explanation
of intentionality is impossible.
But I was
still a naturalist. It was also while
still a naturalist that I first started to take a serious interest in
Aristotelianism, though at the time that interest had to do with ethics rather
than metaphysics. Even before I became
an atheist I had been introduced to the Aristotelian idea that what is good for
us is determined by our nature, and that our nature is what it is whether or
not we think of it as having come from God.
After becoming an atheist, then, I became drawn to ethicists like Philippa
Foot, who defended a broadly Aristotelian approach to the subject from a
secular point of view. Her book Virtues and Vices and Alasdair
MacIntyre’s After Virtue were the big
influences on my thinking about ethical theory during my atheist years.
One
consequence
of this was that I always took teleology seriously, because it was so
clearly
evident a feature of ordinary practical reasoning. (How did I reconcile
this with naturalism? I’m not sure I then saw the conflict all that
clearly. But in any event I thought that
teleological notions could be fitted into a naturalistic framework in
the
standard, broadly Darwinian way -- the function of a thing is to be
cashed out
in terms of the reason why it was selected, etc. I only later came to
see that teleology
ultimately had to be a bottom level feature of the world rather than a
derivative one.)
After Virtue also taught me another important
lesson -- that a set of concepts could become hopelessly confused and lead to
paradox when yanked from the original context which gave them their
intelligibility. MacIntyre argued that
this is what had happened to the key concepts of modern moral theory, removed
as they had been from the pre-modern framework that was their original
home. I would later come to see that the
same thing is true in metaphysics -- that the metaphysical categories
contemporary philosophers make casual use of (causation, substance, essence,
mind, matter, and so forth) have been grotesquely distorted in modern
philosophy, pulled as they have been from the classical (and especially
Aristotelian-Scholastic) framework in which they had been so carefully
refined. As I argue in The Last Superstition, many of the
so-called “traditional” problems of philosophy are really just artifacts of the
anti-Scholastic revolution of the moderns.
They flow from highly contentious and historically contingent
metaphysical assumptions, and do not reflect anything about the nature of philosophical
reflection per se. And the standard
moves of modern atheist argumentation typically presuppose these same
assumptions. But I wouldn’t see that for
years.
I was on my
way to seeing it, however. Several
crucial background elements were in place by the late 90s. Fregean and related arguments had gotten me
to take very seriously the idea that something like Platonic realism might be
true. (I would later see that Aristotelian realism was in fact the
right way to go, but the basic anti-naturalistic move had been made.) The arguments of Searle and others had shown
that existing versions of materialism were no good. Russellian arguments had shown that modern
science and philosophy had no clear idea of what matter was in the first
place. Whatever it was supposed to be,
though, it seemed it was not something to which one could assimilate mind, at least
not if one wanted to avoid panpsychism.
Naturalism came to seem mysterious at best. Meanwhile, Aristotelian ideas had a certain
plausibility. All that was needed was
some systematic alternative to naturalism.
Then, in the
late 90s, while still a grad student, I was given an opportunity to teach a
philosophy of religion course, followed by several opportunities to teach
“intro to philosophy” courses. In the
latter, I wanted to focus on topics that would be of interest to undergrads who
might have no general interest in philosophy.
Since everyone had some interest in religion (even if only, in some
cases, a hostile interest), arguments for God’s existence seemed a good topic
for at least part of the course.
Naturally, that was a topic for the philosophy of religion course
too. So, I had a reason to revisit the
subject after having given it relatively little thought for many years.
At first I
taught the material the way so many professors do: Here are the arguments; here
are the obvious fallacies they commit; let’s move on. I never came across like Richard Dawkins, but
I no doubt did come across like Nigel
Warburton (say): politely dismissive.
And, as I gradually came to see, totally ill-informed. The “line ‘em up, then shoot ‘em down”
approach was boring, and the arguments seemed obviously stupid. Yet the people who had presented them
historically were obviously not
stupid. So, it seemed to me that it
would be interesting to try to give the arguments a run for their money, and to
try to make it understandable to the students why anyone would ever have
accepted them.
So I started
to read and think more about them. I
came to find William Rowe’s approach to the Leibnizian sort of cosmological
argument interesting and pedagogically useful.
He didn’t seem to accept the argument, but he made it clear that asking
“What caused God?”, “How do we know the universe had a beginning?”, etc. weren’t
really serious objections. He also made
it clear that the thrust of the argument had to do with what was a
straightforward and undeniably serious philosophical question: Should we regard the world as ultimately
explicable or not? If not, then the argument
fails. But if so, then it does seem to
make it plausible that something like God, or at least the God of the
philosophers, must exist. And it didn’t
seem silly to wonder whether there
might be such an explanation. Richard
Taylor’s clear, punchy chapter on natural theology in his little book Metaphysics made the same point, and
made for a useful selection for the students to read.
Naturally, I
had already long been aware of this sort of argument. The difference was that when I had first
thought about it years before I was approaching it as someone who had had a
religious background and wanted to see whether there was any argument for God’s
existence that was really persuasive.
Russell’s retort to Copleston, to the effect that we can always insist
that the universe is just there and that’s that, had then seemed to me
sufficient to show that the argument was simply not compelling. We’re just not rationally forced to accept
it. I had, as it were, put the argument
on trial and it had been unable to establish its innocence to my satisfaction. But now I was approaching it as a naturalist
who was trying to give my students a reason to see the argument as something at
least worth thinking about for a class period or two. I was playing defense attorney rather than
prosecution, but a defense attorney with the confidence of someone who didn’t
have a stake in his client’s acquittal.
Already being a confirmed naturalist, I could be dispassionate rather
than argumentative, and could treat the whole thing as a philosophical
exercise.
And from
that point of view it started to seem that Russell’s reply, while it had rhetorical power, was perhaps not quite
airtight philosophically. Sure, you could always say that there’s no ultimate explanation. And maybe there’s no way to prove
otherwise. But is it really true? Is it really even more plausible
to think that than to think that there is an
explanation? Guys like Rowe and Taylor,
by no means religious fanatics or apologists but just philosophers
entertaining
a deep question, seemed to take the question pretty seriously.
Interesting, I thought. Though for the time being, “interesting” --
rather than correct or persuasive -- was all I found it.
Then there
was Aquinas. At the high tide of my
undergrad Brash Young Atheist stage, I had taken a class on medieval philosophy
with the late John Cronquist, an atheist professor at Cal State Fullerton who
was absolutely contemptuous of Christianity.
Campus apologists of the Protestant stripe were a frequent target of his
ire, though he had a choice quip or two about Catholicism as well. He was one of the smartest and most well-read
people I have ever known -- the kind of guy you find intellectually intimidating and hope not
to get in an argument with -- and I liked him very much. One of the odd and interesting things about
that course, though, was how respectfully Cronquist treated some of the
medievals, especially Aquinas. He said
that compared to them, contemporary pop apologists were “like a pimple on the ass
of an athlete.” (I remember him
dramatically pointing to his own posterior as he said this, for emphasis.) He obviously didn’t buy the Scholastic system
for a moment, but he treated the material as worth taking a semester to try to
understand. And he said a couple of
things that stood out. First, for
reasons I don’t recall him elaborating on much, he seemed to think that the
Third Way in particular might have something to be said for it. Second, he said that the mind-body problem,
which he seemed to think was terribly vexing, really boiled down to the problem
of universals. For years I would wonder
what he meant by that. (I now think it
must have had to do with the way our grasp of abstract concepts features in
Aristotelian arguments for the immateriality of the intellect.)
At the time
I filed these remarks away as curiosities (just as I had then regarded the
material we covered in the class as mere curiosities). But I think his example made it easier for
me, years later, to take a second look at Aquinas as I prepared course material. I look back at my first lectures on the Five
Ways with extreme embarrassment. If
you’d heard them, you’d have thought I was cribbing from an advance copy of The God Delusion, if not in tone then at
least in the substance of my criticisms. But that started slowly to change as I read
more about the arguments and began to work the material into my lectures. A good friend of mine, who had also gone from
Catholicism to atheism and was a fellow grad student, was familiar with William
Lane Craig’s book The Cosmological
Argument from Plato to Leibniz, and seemed to find it useful in preparing
his own lectures on the subject. Our
discussions of the arguments were very helpful.
Furthermore, Atheism and Theism
by J. J. C. Smart and John Haldane had recently appeared, with Haldane
defending, and Smart treating respectfully, some old-fashioned Thomistic
arguments for the existence of God. Such
materials opened up a new world. The way
I and so many other philosophers tended to read the Five Ways was, as I gradually
came to realize, laughably off base.
The
immediate effect was that I found a way to teach the Five Ways without seeming
like I was putting fish in a barrel for the students to shoot at. I still didn’t agree with the arguments, but
at least teaching them was getting interesting.
I recall one class period when, having done my best to try to defend
some argument (the First Way, I think) against various objections, I finally
stated whatever it was I thought at the time was a difficulty that hadn’t been satisfactorily
answered. One of my smartest students
expressed relief: She had been worried for a moment that there might be a good
argument for God’s existence after all!
(Anyone who thinks wishful thinking is all on the side of religious people
is fooling himself.)
None of this
undermined my commitment to naturalism for some time. I published my first several journal articles
while still in grad school, and two of them were criticisms of the doctrine of
the Trinity. (I’m now a staunch Trinitarian,
of course. But once again, it turns out
that I still more or less agree with the arguments I then presented. The versions
of Trinitarianism I then attacked are, I continue to think, wrong. But Trinitarianism itself is true.)
But the
language of act and potency, per se
and per accidens causal series and
the like started to enter my lectures on Aquinas, and before long, my
thinking. It was all very strange. Aquinas’s arguments had a certain
power when
all of this metaphysical background was taken account of. And there was
a certain plausibility to the
metaphysics. There were reasons for distinguishing between
actuality and potentiality, the different kinds of causal series, and so
forth. Yet no one seemed to talk that
way anymore -- or, again, at least no one “mainstream.” Could there really be anything to it all if
contemporary philosophers weren’t saying anything about it? And yet, precisely because they weren’t
talking about it, they weren’t refuting
it either. Indeed, when they did say
anything about Aquinas’s arguments at all, most of them showed only that they
couldn’t even be bothered to get him right, much less show why he was mistaken. Arguments from current philosophical fashion
are bad enough. But when most
philosophers not only do not accept a certain view, but demonstrate that they
don’t even understand what it is, things can start to smell very fishy indeed.
And so they
did. I already knew from the lay of the
land in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind that the standard
naturalist approaches had no solid intellectual foundation, and themselves rested
as much on fashion as on anything else.
Even writers like Searle, who I admired greatly and whose naturalism I
shared, had no plausible positive alternative.
McGinn-style mysterianism started to seem like a dodge, especially given
that certain arguments (like the Platonic realist ones) seemed to show that
matter simply is not in fact all that
there is, not merely that we can’t know
how it can be all that there is. Some
secular writers were even toying with Aristotelian ideas anyway. The only
reason for not taking Aquinas and similar thinkers seriously seemed to be that
most other academic philosophers weren’t taking them seriously. And yet as I had come to learn, many of them
didn’t even understand Aquinas and Co. in the first place, and their own
naturalism was riddled with problems.
Against Aquinas, for naturalism -- the case increasingly seemed to come
down to the consensus of the profession.
And what exactly was that worth?
It isn’t worth
a damn thing, of course. Careerists might
not see that, nor might a young man more excited by the “question what your
parents taught you” side of philosophy than all that “objective pursuit of
truth” stuff. But a grownup will see it,
and a philosopher had sure as hell better see it.
I don’t know
exactly when everything clicked. There
was no single event, but a gradual transformation. As I taught and thought about the arguments
for God’s existence, and in particular the cosmological argument, I went from
thinking “These arguments are no good” to thinking “These arguments are a
little better than they are given credit for” and then to “These arguments are
actually kind of interesting.”
Eventually it hit me: “Oh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!” By the summer of 2001 I would find myself trying
to argue my wife’s skeptical physicist brother-in-law into philosophical theism
on the train the four of us were taking through eastern Europe.
There’s more
to the story than that, of course. In
particular, it would take an essay of its own to explain why I returned to the
Catholic Church, specifically, as I would by the end of 2001. But I can already hear some readers
protesting at what I have said. I don’t mean
the New Atheist types, always on the hunt for some ad hominem nugget that will excuse them from having to take the
actual arguments of the other side seriously. (God Himself could come down from on high and
put before such people an airtight ontological proof of His existence while
parting the Red Sea, and they’d still insist that what really motivated these arguments was a desire to rationalize His
moral prejudices. And that their own
continued disbelief was just a matter of, you know, following the evidence
where it leads.)
No, I’m
talking about a certain kind of religious believer, the type who’s always going
on about how faith is really a matter of the heart rather than the head, that
no one’s ever been argued into religion, etc.
It will be said by such a believer that my change of view was too
rationalistic, too cerebral, too bloodless, too focused on a theoretical
knowledge of the God of the philosophers rather than a personal response to the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
But the
dichotomy is a false one, and the implied conception of the relationship
between faith and reason not only foolish but heterodox. As to the heterodoxy and foolishness of
fideism, and the correct understanding of the relationship of faith and reason,
I have addressed that set of issues in a
previous post. As to the “heart
versus head” stuff, it seems to me to rest on an erroneous bifurcation of human
nature. Man is a unity, his rationality
and animality, intellect and passions, theoretical and moral lives all ultimately
oriented toward the same end. That is
why even a pagan like Aristotle knew that our happiness lay in “the contemplation
and service of God,” whose existence he knew of via philosophical argumentation.
That is why Plotinus could know that we
“forget the father,
God” because of “self-will.” While the
pagan may have no access to the supernatural end that only grace makes
possible, he is still capable of a natural knowledge of God, and will
naturally tend to love what he knows.
As
Plotinus’s remark indicates, that does not mean that the will does not have a
role to play. But that is true wherever reason leads us to a conclusion
we might not like, not merely in matters of religion. And once you have allowed yourself to see the
truth that reason leads you to, what reason apprehends is (given the
convertibility of the transcendentals) as good and beautiful as it is
real. If you find yourself intellectually
convinced that there is a divine Uncaused Cause who sustains the world and you in being at every instant, and
don’t find this conclusion extremely strange and moving, something that leads
you to a kind of reverence, then I daresay you haven’t understood it. Of course, there are those whose heads and
hearts are so out of sync that they cannot follow both at the same time. But we shouldn’t mistake this pathology for an
insight into human nature.
Speaking for
myself, anyway, I can say this much. When
I was an undergrad I came across the saying that learning a little philosophy
leads you away from God, but learning a lot of philosophy leads you back. As a young man who had learned a little
philosophy, I scoffed. But in later
years and at least in my own case, I would come to see that it’s true.
