474 Stewart Goetz
do not have an adequate grasp of the value of complete felicity in God’s presence, it seems that he could not rule this out as a possible scenario. If Alston were to deny that it is a possible scenario, however, this would seem to indicate that he knows the value of complete happiness and that he is committed to the theodicy that maintains that God’s actual justifi cation for permitting persons to experience moral evils includes the possibility of their experiencing perfect happiness.
In response to my argument, a defender might argue that I have moved too fast. He might maintain that while it is true that any defender would deny that it is possible for God to have a justifi cation for allowing moral evils and it be the case that no person will experience perfect happiness regardless of how he has chosen, it does not follow from this denial that a defender must become a theodicist who knows that God’s actual justifi cation for permitting moral evil includes the justifi cation I have proposed. For example, a defender might claim that while the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness is a possible justifi cation for God’s permitting moral evil, it is also possible that it is no more than a necessary condition of any other possible justifi cation God has for permitting moral evils. Indeed, Alston might advocate this view. As I noted two paragraphs back, Alston recognizes that experiencing complete happiness might be a good in virtue of which God is justifi ed in permitting moral evils. Yet, he also claims that it might not be a justifying good. Even if it is not, there are other possible justifi cations (Alston 1996b, pp. 104–10).
One other possible justifi cation is the value of soul making: God allows moral evils as a means to the end of developing persons who exhibit moral virtues such as courage, patience, compassion, and so on. Another possible justifi cation is the value of libertarian free will. Still other possible justifi cations might involve goods that are totally beyond our intellectual grasp. Even if one (or more) of these other possible justifi cations for allowing moral evils is God’s actual justifi cation, Alston seems to believe that a necessary condition of its being such must be that God justly provide persons the experience of complete happiness:
[A] perfectly good God would not wholly sacrifi ce the welfare of one of His intelligent creatures simply in order to achieve a good for others, or for Himself. This would be incompatible with His concern for the welfare of each of His creatures. Any plan that God would implement will include provision for each of us having a life that is, on balance, a good thing, and one in which the person reaches the point of being able to see that his life as a whole is a good for him. Or at least, where free creaturely responses have a signifi cant bearing on the overall quality of the person’s life, any possible divine plan will have to provide for each of us to have the chance (or perhaps many chances) for such an outcome, if our free responses are of the right sort. (Alston 1996b, p. 111)
Why maintain, like Alston, that the provision that each of us have the opportunity for a life that is, on balance, a good thing (and perfect happiness is such a good) must be a necessary condition of whatever is God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evils? The only plausible answer is because the possibility of such a life is a justifi cation for permitting moral evils in so far as it makes available to a person a good that outweighs any of his experiences of moral evil. Stated slightly differently and more generally, my point is that it is implausible to think that perfect happiness is no more than a necessary condition of whatever it is that justifi es God’s permission of moral evil. This is because the reason for thinking that it must be a necessary condition of this justifi cation is that it itself is a good for a created person. And the fact that it must be a good for a created person makes one
T H E A RG U M E N T F RO M EV I L 475
suspicious of the view that it is no more than a necessary condition of God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evil.
For purposes of simplicity and continuity, I will assume that what Alston calls “a life that is, on balance, a good thing” is one that ends in perfect happiness and that the possibility of perfect happiness is a justifi cation God has for permitting moral evils. Is, however, the possibility of experiencing complete happiness not only a justifi cation for permitting moral evils but also the justifi cation? Because an agent might perform an action for more than one reason, I do not know of an argument that shows that the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness is more than just included in God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evils. If it is assumed, however, that this justifi cation obtains and that none other does, it seems to be the case that God’s permission of moral evils would be justifi ed. For this reason, in what follows, I will assume that the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness is the justifi cation for God’s permitting moral evils.
Like Alston, Michael Bergmann is a defender who believes that “we have no good reason to oppose the suggestion that the goods we know of are representative of only a minor portion of the goods there are and that many (or even most) of the goods beyond our ken are far greater than and signifi cantly different from any of the goods with which we are familiar” (Bergmann 2001, p. 284). He believes that this point applies to the goods of conscious experience. Thus, he defends the prima facie plausibility of the thesis that we have no good reason for thinking that the possible goods we know of that involve conscious human experience are representative of the possible goods that there are that involve conscious human experience. An implication of Bergmann’s thesis is that a defender should not become a theodicist who invokes the concept of complete happiness in his theodicy.
He should remain a defender.
The development earlier in this section of a version of scenario S where a person, for reasons that have nothing to do with how he chooses, either (1) spends an eternity in hell, (2) spends a fi nite period of time in hell after which he is annihilated, or (3) is annihilated at death, can be used to make clear the implausibility of Bergmann’s position. If a defender such as Bergmann affi rms the impossibility of this version of S, it would seem to be because he believes that the evils of this world constitute or are representative of the evil that cannot be included in the fi nal chapter of a person’s existence irrespective of how he chooses. If Bergmann believes this, however, what reason might he have for thinking that we have no good reason for believing that complete happiness, which is a good of conscious experience and a person’s greatest possible good, is included in God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evil? If the evils of this life are representative of what a person who makes a just-good-seeking SFC cannot experience in the last chapter of his existence, why not think that the happiness that we enjoy in this life is representative or a foretaste of the perfect happiness, that will be experienced in the afterlife by those who make just-good-seeking SFCs?
Bergmann says “it may be that enjoyment of goods that are very different from those with which we are familiar would lead to conscious experiences that are very different from –
and far more enjoyable than – those with which we are familiar” (Bergmann 2001, p. 285).
In support of this claim, he asks us to consider someone who has experienced no greater pleasure than the temporary absence of pain:
Suppose that no one has ever told her of a more pleasant experience and that she cannot even imagine one. That person would be mistaken to conclude that the possible positive conscious experiences she is aware of are representative of the possible positive conscious experiences
there are. She would be unreasonable to draw such a conclusion for she has no good reason to endorse it. But the same point applies to us. (Bergmann 2001, p. 285; emphases in the original)
But does the very same point apply to us? As Bergmann notes, our actual conscious experience is more positive than the woman’s (Bergmann 2001, p. 285). Although he does not explicitly say so, what Bergmann presumably means is that our experience includes experiences of pleasure, where experiencing pleasure is more than the mere absence of pain. Now it is no doubt the case that there are sources of pleasure beyond those known to us. The point that is relevant, however, is that those additional sources are sources of experiences of pleasure the concept of which is not beyond our ken.
Moreover, the experience of complete happiness surely is, in Bergmann’s words, “more enjoyable” than the happiness available in this life insofar as it contains no experiences of pain and is more pleasurable. The concept of enjoyment, however, like that of pleasure, is not beyond our ken. It seems, then, that all Bergmann does in trying to justify the idea that there may be goods of conscious experience beyond our ken is appeal to the idea of more enjoyable/pleasant experiences than those we experience in this life. This idea itself, however, seems to be nothing other than the idea of perfect happiness for an individual person.
Nevertheless, for the sake of discussion, let us assume that Bergmann is correct: we have no good reason to oppose the idea that there is a good of conscious experience that is greater than the experience of pleasure. Call this good of conscious experience “pleasure+.”
One can now think of the concept of perfect happiness as that of a person’s greatest possible good that includes experiences of either pleasure or pleasure+. My point is this: given our knowledge about perfect happiness, when presented with scenario S, a defender can avoid moving from a defense to the theodicy I have set forth only by unreasonably refusing to acknowledge that S is impossible.
If the possibility of experiencing complete happiness is God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evils, what is the nature of the relationship between this justifi cation and the experience of moral evils (pain resulting from morally wrong choices)? It is important to point out that one thing it is not is a means–end relationship. In other words, the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness is not a purpose or end to which the experience of moral evils is intended by God as a means. What this entails with respect to God’s creative action is that the experience of moral evils by persons with libertarian free will is at most foreseen and permitted by God, but not intended.
To make clear the distinction between intending an end and merely foreseeing its occurrence, consider the following two stories about bombers. First, there is Terror Bomber. He is trying to ascertain the best way to achieve military victory over Enemy. After considering various alternatives, he concludes that the best way to defeat Enemy is to terrorize Enemy’s population by bombing a school that is fi lled with children. Terror Bomber has some moral scruples about killing innocents but chooses to bomb the school anyway. He believes that by doing so he will promote victory. In virtue of making this choice, Terror Bomber intends to bomb the school and kill children in order to promote victory. His reason for so choosing and intending is that he promote victory.
Second, there is Strategic Bomber. He intends to bomb the munitions plant of
Enemy in order to bring about the defeat of Enemy. Strategic Bomber is also aware,
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however, that next to the munitions plant is a building fi lled with innocent children.
He also believes that when he bombs the plant he will kill the children. While for Terror Bomber killing the children is an intended means to the defeat of Enemy, for Strategic Bomber their deaths are not intended as a means but are foreseen as a side effect of the bombing.
God is like Strategic Bomber when it comes to permitting moral evils. Although
He foresees that moral evils might (will) occur as a result of His creating persons with libertarian free will and for the purpose that they justly experience perfect happiness, He does not intend that the moral evils that occur serve as a means to that purpose. Indeed, when all is said and done, those moral evils might very well be pointless in the sense that they do not serve as means to any purpose. Because this is the case, one should beware of wasting one’s time by asking of every moral evil why (for what purpose) God has allowed it to happen. One certainly should not routinely interpret a moral evil one experiences as God’s means of punishment. While a moral evil might be a divinely intended punishment, it also might be no more than a foreseen but pointless side effect in the divine plan for our just experience of complete happiness.18 Moreover, while God can bring something good out of a moral evil one experiences (St Paul reminds Christians in his Epistle to the Romans 8:28 that in everything God works for good for those who love Him), one must not confuse the idea of His doing so with that of His intending that one experience that moral evil as a means to the end that one justly experience perfect happiness or any other end.
Because God does not intend that the moral evils He permits serve as means to the end (purpose) of a person’s justly experiencing complete happiness, it is not the case that there is a certain amount of moral evil that God may permit in order for Him to accomplish this purpose such that the occurrence of more than that amount of evil would be unjustifi ed.
18. Compare van Inwagen’s recommendation to students of the problem of evil: “Do not attempt any solution to this problem that entails that every particular evil has a purpose, or that . . . God has some special reason for allowing it. Concentrate rather on the problem of what sort of reasons a loving and providential God might have for allowing His creatures to live in a world in which many of the evils that happen to them happen to them for no reason at all. . . . Such things are a part of God’s design in the sense that the ticking sound made by a clock is a part of the watchmaker’s design: not intended, necessitated by what is intended. . . .” (van Inwagen 1988, pp.
180, 182; emphasis in the original). What is intended by God for human beings? What is their purpose? According to van Inwagen, “human beings were designed for union with God. . . .” (van Inwagen 1988, p. 170). Thus, “[e]very human being has an eternal future . . . [w]hen . . . there will never again be undeserved suffering or any other sort of evil” (van Inwagen 1988, p. 165).
Michael J. Murray and Glenn Ross agree that not every particular evil has a purpose: “[W]e prefer to cast [a discussion of the problem of evil] in terms of evil types rather than evil tokens. In brief, the reason is that we think that it is consistent with and likely on theism that token evils are pointless. . . . [T]he theist should never, in treating the issue of evil, aim to give reasons for token instances of evil. For all we know, there are no such reasons. As a result, the theist should stick to showing why the permission of various types of good are necessary for securing outweighing benefi ts” (Murray and Ross 2006, p. 187, endnote 6). While I agree with Murray’s and Ross’s main point that token instances of evil might very well be pointless in the sense that they are not intended by God as means to ends, I do not think that this point entails that the theist should stick to God’s permission of types of good when thinking about the justifi cation for His permission of moral evil. If my theodicy is correct, the justifying good is a token of a type: it is a particular individual’s possibility of experiencing perfect happiness, which justifi es his experience of moral evil.
And given that created persons have libertarian free will, it is also the case that they might have chosen in ways that would have produced (much) less moral evil than that produced by the choices that they have actually made (e.g. more people might have made just- good-seeking SFCs).
In light of the fact that God does not intend that moral evil serve as a means to the good that justifi es His allowance of moral evil and this has the implication just noted for the amount of moral evil that He may justifi ably allow, it is helpful to consider the following objection raised by the defender Daniel Howard-Snyder against any proposed justifying good of which we are aware (Howard-Snyder 1996a, pp. 289f). According to this objection, for any justifying good of which we are cognizant, we cannot see how it would fail to be realized if God permitted a lot less horrifi c moral evil (examples here might be the Stalinist purges and the Holocaust). As applied to the justifying good that I am proposing, this objection can be posed in the form of a question: would not the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness have been achievable, if God had permitted a lot less horrifi c moral evil? Because we cannot see how this purpose would fail to be realized if God were to permit a lot less horrifi c moral evil, there is inscrutable moral evil; that is, there is moral evil for which we cannot see the justifi cation.
In response to this objection, it is true to say that we cannot see how the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness would fail to be realized if there were a lot less horrifi c moral evil. The reason, however, that we cannot see how this great good would fail to be realized with a lot less horrifi c moral evil is that we actually see that the possibility of experiencing complete happiness would have been achieved with a lot less horrifi c moral evil. And we actually see this because, given that created persons have libertarian free will, they might have chosen differently than they did and produced signifi cantly less moral evil.
It is also possible that they might have chosen differently than they did and produced signifi cantly more moral evil. Either way, we see that the moral evil produced would be justifi -
ably permitted by God’s purpose of granting to created persons the just experience of perfect happiness. Indeed, given that created persons have libertarian free will, the granting of which is itself justifi ed by this purpose, we see that any amount of moral evil would also be justifi ed by this purpose.19 Thus, contrary to what Howard-Snyder claims, there is no 19. What if God has middle knowledge? Might it not, then, be the case that something roughly like the following is true: God is considering creating a world that includes persons who make just-good-seeking SFCs so as to experience perfect happiness. In addition, God is aware of two worlds, W and W*, each of which contains persons A, B, and C who make just-good-seeking SFCs. Moreover, W and W* are identical in all relevant respects except that in W, A, B, and C experience less moral evil than in W*. Is God not morally obligated to create W?
If God has middle knowledge, then my point is as follows: whatever the amount of moral evil is in W, God’s permission of it is justifi ed by the purpose that created persons justly experience perfect happiness.
Thus, even if the amounts of moral evil in both W* and W had been greater and God created W because it contained less moral evil than W*, God’s allowance of moral evil in W would still have been justifi ed by the purpose that created persons have the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness. Moreover, while it is no doubt true, as Plantinga says, that although “we can imagine or in some sense conceive of worlds in which the only things that exist are persons always in excruciating pain” (Plantinga 2004, p. 6), no such world is possible
“if God, as we are assuming, is a necessary being who has essentially such properties as unlimited goodness . . . .”
(Plantinga 2004, p. 6).
T H E A RG U M E N T F RO M EV I L 479
inscrutable moral evil. There is no moral evil that God has actually permitted for which we do not know the justifi cation.20
If the theodicy I am suggesting is correct, then God’s granting to a person the experience of complete happiness is justly conditioned upon that individual exercising his libertarian free will in the right way (making a just-good-seeking SFC). What a critic might ask now is why, given the vast array of possible persons, did God create those who have libertarian free will, if such freedom is not itself a justifying good? Why did God not create from the array of possible persons those who do not have libertarian free will and who, thereby, always act deterministically but from the fi rst moment of their existence and continuously thereafter experience nothing but the great good of complete happiness?
It is important to make two points in answering this question. First, it is doubtful that merely possible beings are entities to which God has an obligation to bring into existence. As Robert Adams has said, “A merely possible being cannot be (actually) wronged or treated unkindly. A being who never exists is not wronged by not being created, and there is no obligation to any possible being to bring it into existence” (Adams 1992, p. 277).
Second, the critic seems to assume that the intrinsic goodness of an experience such as perfect happiness imposes no constraints upon the one who chooses to give it as to whom it might be given. This assumption is itself questionable. For a created person who is self-conscious and aware of himself as a potential recipient of what is for him his greatest good, namely, the intrinsic good of complete happiness, it is necessary for purposes of justice that the giver of this possible good provide him with the libertarian freedom to make a just-good-seeking SFC. In other words, because complete happiness is such a great good, the experience of it must be deserved, and while being self-conscious is a necessary condition of its being deserved, it is not suffi cient. What are needed for desert are the existence of libertarian freedom and the making of a choice about a life plan in the form of either a just- or an unjust-good-seeking SFC. W. D. Ross expressed this point about desert as follows:
If we compare two imaginary states of the universe, alike in the total amounts of virtue and vice and of pleasure and pain present in the two, but in one of which the virtuous were all happy and the vicious miserable, while in the other the virtuous were miserable and the vicious happy, very few people would hesitate to say that the fi rst was a much better state of the universe than the second. It would seem then that . . . we must recognize as a[n] . . . independent good, the apportionment of pleasure and pain to the virtuous and the vicious respectively.
(Ross 1930, p. 138; cf. Lemos 1994, pp. 40–5)
20. There is evidence that Howard-Snyder implicitly recognizes the purpose of perfect happiness as I have described it for theodicy. For example, he states that “[t]he theist’s hypothesis and its implications provide me and many others with a great source of comfort. . . .” (Howard-Snyder 1996a, p. 294). I do not think it is misguided to speculate that the great source of comfort to which Howard-Snyder refers is the great good of perfect happiness that he believes he will ultimately experience for choosing rightly. Dan Cohn-Sherbok (Cohn-Sherbok 1990) argues that without otherworldly reward, there is simply no way to make sense out of particular moral evil such as the Holocaust as part of a world that is the creation of an all-good and all-powerful God. Cohn-Sherbok’s understanding of reward includes the idea of the experience of perfect happiness or, in his words, “the realm of eternal bliss” (Cohn-Sherbok 1990, p. 289).
At this juncture, it is helpful to explore a bit more the necessary conditions of making a choice about a life plan in the form of either a just- or an unjust-good-seeking SFC. Upon refl ection, it is clear that a choice of a life plan requires a world of goods that are its (the choice’s) subject matter. These goods, which in our world include material objects that are instruments of pleasure, must have natures whose properties are what I will call “iffy” or conditional in character, where a property that is conditional in nature is a property that is specifi ed in terms such that if such-and-such is done to object O (e.g.
a cause C is exerted on O), then so-and-so will occur to O. In terms of our experiences of pleasure, the goods of this world must be stable objects of the kind which are such that if such-and-such is done to or with them, then so-and-so will result so as to produce pleasure. Consider sugar as a simple, fi rst example of a material object with an iffy nature.
It is a material substance whose nature makes it such that if a healthy person ingests it, it will taste sweet and produce an experience of pleasure. Another example of objects with iffy natures is that of the human sexual organs. Men and women who choose to fulfi ll their sexual appetites do so with the assumption that stimulation of their sexual organs will yield experiences of pleasure and, provided they did not use birth control and their reproductive systems are functioning properly, offspring. Or consider a tyrant who solidi-fi es his power and promotes his pleasure through stealth and brutality. He must rely on the nature of his weapons that are such that if he wields them, they will produce death and destruction.21
The iffy nature of material goods of our world helps provide an answer to the following questions that arise out of a consideration of moral evil. Why, it is sometimes asked, does not God intervene in the material world of objects with iffy natures to prevent moral evil?
For example, why does not God cause the gun of the murderer to jam when the latter pulls the trigger? Or why does not God cause the knife in the hand of the would-be robber to turn to rubber? Or why does not God cause the tongue of the would-be slanderer to become limp when the latter goes to speak?
While God is certainly able (has the power) to intervene in the material world to perform the actions in question, regular intervention of this kind is not consistent with the purpose of our existence in this world, which is that we make a just- or unjust-good-seeking SFC that is either deserving of or not deserving of perfect happiness. In the world as conceived by the objector, a human being would quickly learn that his choice of a way of life (a life plan) would count for nothing because he could never perform the actions that fl owed from that choice. What point would there be, then, in choosing a life plan?
Every time he went to perform an action that ensued from an unjust-good-seeking SFC, God would intervene to prevent the occurrence of moral evil. Moreover, as Lewis points out, “if the [objector’s] principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts
[and, I would add, unjust-good-seeking SFCs] would be impossible, for the cerebral matter 21. It is relevant to note that David Chalmers provides an “iffy” characterization of microscopic, theoretical entities: “Basic particles . . . are largely characterized in terms of their propensity to interact with other particles. Their mass and charge is specifi ed, to be sure, but all that a specifi cation of mass ultimately comes to is a propensity to be accelerated in certain ways [moved at certain rates] by forces, and so on. . . . Reference to the proton is fi xed as the thing that causes interactions of a certain kind that combines in certain ways with other entities, and so on . . .” (Chalmers 1996, p. 153). And the Nobel physicist Richard Feynman says, scientifi c questions are “questions that you can put this way: ‘if I do this, what will happen?’ . . . And so the question ‘If I do it what will happen?’
is a typically scientifi c question” (Feynman 1998, pp. 16, 45).
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which we use in thinking would refuse its task [because of God’s intervention] when we attempted to frame them” (Lewis 1962, p. 33). In short, if God were to intervene to eliminate the pain and suffering that result from unjust libertarian choices, He would end up eliminating the choices themselves.
At this point, an objector might insist that he never meant to suggest that God, if He exists, would frustrate every unjust choice by tampering with our brains or turning every knife into butter. Such a policy on God’s part would undermine the entire objective order of events involving material objects with their iffy natures. Rather, God would intervene only some of the time and thereby reduce the quantity of moral evil. In other words, it is not the mere existence of moral evil that results from our choices that is problematic for God’s existence. It is the amount of such evil. Surely, if God existed we would fi nd much less moral evil in this world than we do.
The problem with this argument is that for all we know God already does the very thing that the objector says He should do. Sometimes He does interfere with human choice and prevents moral evil. For example, if God has answered even one prayer to protect the innocent from an aggressor by, say, altering the latter’s thoughts and (thereby) his action, then He has done what the objector suggests. In the end, it seems as if there is no way to answer the present argument to the objector’s satisfaction because it essentially has nothing to do with the actual amount of moral evil in the world. For any quantity X of moral evil, it will always be possible to say that God, if He existed, would have intervened to permit only X – 1 instances of such evil. If X were to equal 1, the objector would want to know why God did not eliminate moral evil altogether. And the same point can be made with respect to what some might think of as the quality or kind of moral evil that results from free choices (the quality of a moral evil is the pain and suffering that result from a kind of action an agent chooses to perform). For example, the objector might ask, ‘Would not God have intervened to stop the mad choices of Hitler and/or Stalin and their equally demented minions to send millions of people to the concentration camps and the forced-labor camps of the Gulag?’ Once again, for all we know, God did intervene to stop choices that would have resulted in actions to commit worse kinds of atrocities than Auschwitz, Buchanwald, Dachau, and the Gulag. Our failure to be aware that He did does not amount to an awareness that he did not. Furthermore, the logical problem with the objector’s suggestion is that one kind of moral evil is “over the top” only in relation to another kind that is typical or normal. Thus, unless God eliminates every kind of moral evil by getting rid of such evil altogether (or somehow allows only one kind), there will always be some kinds which God could and should eliminate because they are worse than others. Thus, if God were to have prevented Hitler and Stalin from carrying out their kinds of madness, then the objector would bring forth some other type of moral evil as evidence that God does not exist.
If what I have argued so far in this and the previous section of this chapter is correct, the idea of a moral or virtuous choice is fundamentally that of making a just-good-seeking SFC. Among other things, the making of this kind of SFC implies that its subject (assuming the person is a theist) will express gratitude to God for his experiences of pleasure in this life and the possibility of his experiencing perfect happiness in the future. Thus, an implication of my proposed theodicy is that while we must take our experiences of moral evil with utmost seriousness, we err if we neglect to take our possible experience of perfect happiness with the same degree of seriousness. Adams points out that in the Judeo- Christian tradition, a person who worships God is typically not encouraged to
praise Him for His moral rectitude and good judgment for creating him. Rather, he is encouraged to express gratitude to God for his existence (Adams 1992, pp. 275–8). I believe that what explains this encouragement of gratitude to God by a created person for his existence are the created person’s present experiences of pleasure and, if he chooses rightly, his future experience of the great good of perfect happiness. The libertarian freedom to choose rightly (make a just-good-seeking SFC), however, entails the freedom to choose wrongly (make an unjust-good-seeking SFC). Thus, in order for God to have acted justly in choosing to provide created self-conscious creatures with the possible experience of the intrinsic good of complete happiness, He had to allow for the possibility of moral evil.
Ultimately, then, giving created persons libertarian free will is itself a necessary condition of the possibility of experiencing the intrinsic goodness of perfect happiness. As Rowe has rightly pointed out, “the free-will theodicy needs to be included within . . . a theodicy that stresses some intrinsic goods for which free will is a necessary condition” (Rowe 1996, p. 285). In addition, however, the intrinsic good of justice introduces constraints on choices not only for those self-conscious creatures who are provided the possible experience of perfect happiness,22 but also for the self-conscious Creator who provides that opportunity for the experience of that happiness. Because God must act justly, He must provide self-conscious creatures who are the potential recipients of perfect happiness with the libertarian freedom that makes possible the choice that makes His granting of that happiness just.
Rowe is an atheist who has argued that we have reason to believe that God does not exist in light of the occurrence of certain moral evils. For example, he asks us to consider the case of a 5-year-old girl being viciously beaten, raped, and, fi nally, strangled by her mother’s boyfriend (Rowe 1988, pp. 119–22). He notes that the girl’s experiencing complete felicity in the eternal presence of God does apparently outweigh the moral evil that she suffers. Indeed, he states that it apparently outweighs almost any horrendous moral evil that may befall her in her earthly life (Rowe 1996, p. 277). Rowe believes it strains credulity, however, to think that it is beyond the power of God to realize this great good without having to permit the girl’s being brutally beaten, raped, and murdered.
Two points are in order here. First, while I agree with Rowe that complete felicity in the eternal presence of God outweighs any23 moral evil experienced in this life, I have not maintained that God’s justifi cation for allowing moral evil is simply the experience of perfect happiness. Rather, it is the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness. The fact that God’s justifi cation for permitting moral evil is the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness helps to answer an additional point raised by Rowe in another context. While he defends the view (as was pointed out earlier in this section) that a justifi catory good 22. Seymour says that “we cannot embrace the . . . extreme of rejecting free choice altogether as an important good . . . , for if eternal happiness is the only good God is concerned to actualize, one could ask . . . why God does not create everyone in heaven. . . .” (Seymour 1997, p. 260). According to the theodicy I am proposing, eternal happiness is not the only intrinsic good, but this fact does not require that free choice also be an intrinsic good.
Justice in the form of justly experiencing perfect happiness is the other intrinsic good and free choice is a necessary condition of achieving it. It is because of the existence of the intrinsic good of justice that God does not create everyone in heaven. He cannot create everyone in heaven without acting unjustly.
23. I have removed Rowe’s qualifi cation of “almost” from “almost any.”
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must include good, conscious experiences of those who suffer, Rowe also maintains that
“[i]n the absence of any reason to think that [God] would need to postpone these good experiences, we have reason to expect that many of these goods would occur in the world we know” (Rowe 1986, p. 245). Given what I have argued so far in this section, the answer to Rowe’s point is that it is because not just any person deserves to experience perfect happiness that it is reasonable to think that it must be delayed to another life. In order to determine who does and who does not deserve to be completely happy, God gives a period of time (e.g. this life) wherein a person is free to make a choice that serves as the basis of justly granting or denying to him the experience of perfect happiness.24
Second, given that moral evils are not a means to the purpose (end) that justifi es permitting them, it does not strain credulity to think that God would have to permit the moral evils experienced by the girl in virtue of this justifying good. God has to permit their occurrence in virtue of this justifying good in so far as He has created persons with libertarian free will who are free to choose wrongly and produce moral evils. Moreover, given that God’s purpose is to grant the just experience of complete happiness to persons and that the girl presumably did not live long enough to be justly granted or denied complete happiness, it is reasonable to hypothesize that she will somehow be granted this opportunity, perhaps in another life.25
Creating persons with libertarian free will is justifi ed by the fact that if individuals exercise it rightly, they will experience the intrinsic good of complete happiness. Having the freedom to choose rightly, however, entails having the freedom to choose wrongly and produce moral evil. We can see, then, why it is necessary for God to permit moral evil even though the experience of that moral evil is not a means to the purpose of giving to persons the just experience of complete happiness. God must permit moral evils in order to achieve the purpose for which He created persons with libertarian free will. Some of the evils that humans suffer, however, do not appear to be explained by the exercise of human libertarian free will. For example, natural events such as earthquakes and tornadoes are evils in virtue 24. It is interesting to note at this point that Rowe maintains concerning any instance s 1of intense suffering that
“[p]erhaps preventing s 1would preclude certain actions prescribed by the principles of justice. I shall allow that the satisfaction of certain principles of justice may be a good that outweighs the evil of s 1” (Rowe 1990, p. 128, footnote 3). The disagreement, then, between Rowe and me comes down to whether or not it is unjust to bestow the great good of perfect happiness on someone regardless of either what kind of good-seeking SFC that person has made or whether that person has made any good-seeking SFC at all. Because the good of perfect happiness is so great, there would be a problem of justice if making the right kind of good-seeking SFC were not a necessary condition of experiencing perfect happiness.
25. Chignell (1998, p. 216) notes that infants like those who are brutally murdered in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov are perhaps reincarnated, if they fail to satisfy a necessary condition for union with God. Concerning the idea of reincarnation, Nathan Nobis says “we need to fi nd a greater good that could ‘balance out’ [a] tortured infant’s suffering and death. . . . It seems that there could be a balancing-off good for the infant in this case only if . . . the infant herself benefi ts from these events. . . . [T]he death by torture has to be a necessary component of the greater good, otherwise the torture is gratuitous” (Nobis 2001, p. 106; emphases in the original). On my theodicy, an infant’s torture is neither a means to nor a component of the good end – the just experience of perfect happiness – that justifi es God’s permission of it. It need not be either of these because a justifi cation for permitting moral evil need not be means–end in nature. According to the theodicy I am proposing, it is also the case that a tortured infant cannot be translated immediately to heaven where it is conscious of itself as a recipient of perfect happiness that is intrinsically good. It must somehow be given the opportunity to make a just- or an unjust-good-seeking SFC.
of the pain and suffering they produce, but they are not traceable by us to wrong human choices as their ultimate source. Is it possible to be a theodicist with respect to such evils (call them “natural evils”)?
Although natural evils do not appear to us to be moral in nature, perhaps they are.
Perhaps some of them are caused by human choices, even though we are not able to discern how they are. The present debate in the public square about whether or not human activity is responsible for global warming and the disturbances in weather that go with it should make us all too aware that many individuals are receptive to the idea that natural evils can be ultimately moral in nature. Perhaps the choices of nonhuman beings (e.g. fallen angels) with libertarian free will and the desire for complete happiness are ultimately responsible for some occurrences of natural evil. As Plantinga points out, the mere fact that this idea is unpopular at present with some is perhaps an interesting sociological fact but hardly relevant to the argument from evil (Plantinga 1974, pp. 58–62), and the idea is surely no more bizarre than the suggestion by Crick that life on our earth originally came from that of other intelligent beings in other planetary systems (Crick 1981). Or, perhaps the events that produce natural evils inevitably occur just as a part of nature, and what happened is that human persons lost an ability to protect themselves from these events when the fi rst humans sinned (made an unjust-good-seeking SFC) (van Inwagen 1988, pp. 168–71; cf. Lewis 1962, chap. 5). Even in this last scenario, what do not appear to be moral evils are. What is clear is that we simply do not know what the ontological status of natural evils is because we do not know what their ultimate explanation is. As a defender would rightly say in this context, the explanation of natural evils is a matter that is beyond our intellectual purview.
While the ultimate explanation of natural evils that do not appear to be moral in nature is a matter that is beyond our epistemic wherewithal, the justifi cation for God’s permitting them is not. Regardless of whether or not natural evils are ultimately moral in nature, the theodicy I have set forth maintains that their permission is justifi ed by the possibility of our experiencing perfect happiness. This is the justifi cation of natural evils for the same reason that it is the justifi cation of moral evils. Because experiencing perfect happiness is a person’s greatest good and as such decisively outweighs any evil, moral or natural, that he might experience, the possibility of experiencing it is God’s justifi cation for permitting him to experience that evil.
If natural evils are ultimately moral in nature, then we not only understand what their justifi cation is but also how that justifi cation explains their permission, because we understand how the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness requires giving created persons libertarian free will whose wrong exercise produces moral evil. If natural evils are ultimately not moral in nature, then while we know what the justifi cation for permitting them is, we do not presently understand (we fail to be aware of) how that justifi cation explains their permission. Thus, what makes natural evils different from moral evils is not that we are ignorant about what justifi es God’s permission of the former, whereas we know what justifi es His permission of the latter, but that we are ignorant about how that justifi cation explains the permission of the former.
In closing this section, it is relevant to note that a proponent of the problem of evil might argue that if God did exist, we would now understand whether natural evils are ultimately moral or not moral in nature and, if the latter, how the possibility of experiencing complete happiness explains their permission. Our ignorance regarding these matters is itself an instance of evil that does not appear to be moral in nature. Surely, this ignorance is itself an instance of unjustifi ed evil.
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I cannot see any good reason to believe that we would now understand the matters that the proponent of the argument claims we would understand, if God exists. While it is plausible to believe that we know what God’s justifi cation for permitting our experience of evil is, given that knowledge about these matters is not required for knowledge of this justifi cation, our ignorance about these issues is not surprising. As defenders are wont to point out, if theism is true, one would expect that God’s knowledge would dwarf that of created persons. Ignorance about many things is part and parcel of being a created person.
Adams and Horrendous Evil
If the argument of the preceding section is correct, a defender must become a theodicist.
Marilyn Adams is a theodicist who has recently maintained that the free will defense is inadequate because it defends God’s goodness as a producer of libertarian free will, which in her terms is a “global” or “generic” good, to the neglect of the good of individual persons (Adams 1999, chap. 2). She believes that if God were to create for this purpose alone, He would at best be indifferent to individual persons and at worst cruel. In the spirit of the justifi cation for permitting evils developed in the fi fth section of this chapter, Adams believes that an adequate theodicy of God’s goodness must take into consideration the good of persons as individuals. As she understands the issue of justifi cation, there are two ways in which God might justify permitting evil that is experienced by a person.
First, God might ensure that the good in an individual’s life balances off the evil in his life: “The balancing-off relation is arithmetical and additive: value-parts are balanced off within a larger whole if other parts of opposite value equal or outweigh them” (Adams 1999, p. 21). Adams claims that the problem with this theodical approach is that some individuals’ lives are affl icted with horrendous evils, where a horrendous evil is one “the participation in which constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant’s life could . . . be a great good to him/her on the whole. . . . [H]orrendous evils seem prima facie, not only to balance off but to engulf any positive value in the participant’s life. . . .”
(Adams 1999, p. 26). Examples of horrendous evils include:
the rape of a woman and axing off of her arms, psycho-physical torture whose ultimate goal is the disintegration of personality, betrayal of one’s deepest loyalties, child abuse of the sort described by Ivan Karamazov, child pornography, parental incest, slow death by starvation, the explosion of nuclear bombs over populated areas. . . . [W]hat makes horrendous evils so pernicious is their life-ruining potential, their power prima facie to degrade the individual by devouring the possibility of positive personal meaning in one swift gulp. (Adams 1999, pp. 26–8)
To present an adequate defense against horrendous evils, Adams claims that a theist must invoke a second form of justifi cation which, following Roderick Chisholm, she terms
“the defeat of evil” (Adams 1999, p. 21).26 Evil is defeated by good in an individual’s life when it is integrated into the whole of his life by means of a nonadditive relation or what 26. Chisholm’s discussion of the idea of the defeat of evil is found in Chisholm (1990).
G. E. Moore called an “organic unity” (Moore 1968, pp. 27–36). With an organic unity, not only may the whole have a different value than a part but also a negatively (or positively) valued part can contribute to a great overall positive (or negative) value in the whole.
Insofar as defeated horrendous evils make a positive contribution to the overall good of an individual’s life by being integrated in this way, they provide that life with a unity and harmony that it would otherwise lack. To help clarify the idea of the defeat of horrendous evil, Adams appeals to aesthetic examples:
Aesthetic examples illustrate this principle – for example, in Monet’s study of Rouen cathedral in early morning, the ugliness of the bilious green color patches is defeated by their integration into the vast beauty of the artistic design. Obviously, if the value-parts were networked to the whole possible world only by additive relations, it would be impossible that the best of all possible worlds should contain evils. (Adams 1999, p. 21)
Adams maintains that in order for God to justify permitting a person to suffer horrendous evils, He must defeat them by weaving them into a life that is overall worth living (Adams 1999, p. 168). They must be defeated in this way because otherwise they would engulf an individual’s life and defeat it by making it a life not worth living as a whole.
Adams claims that there are different aesthetic scenarios under which horrendous evils are defeated. One scenario is where the sufferer has a vision of God that has enough aesthetic value to defeat its correlated horror. Another scenario is where the sufferer by means of his sufferings identifi es with Christ’s suffering, most notably his crucifi xion. On this second scenario, the fact that God became incarnate in Christ enables a sufferer to identify with Christ’s participation in horrifi c evils so that a positive aspect is conferred on the sufferer’s experience of such evils ensuring their defeat (Adams 1999, chap. 8).
While Adams maintains that horrendous evils must be defeated, she believes that they must also be overbalanced by the experience of complete happiness in the afterlife if God’s permission of them is justifi ed: “Divine goodness to created persons includes an eventual and permanent over balance of concrete well-being” (Adams 1999, p. 158). In light of her conviction that divine goodness will not allow anyone to suffer eternal damnation because that would entail an ultimate and decisive defeat of good by evil in an individual’s life (Adams 1999, p. 41), it follows that not only would horrendous evils remain unjustifi ed if it were not possible for an individual to experience complete happiness but also that they would remain unjustifi ed if an individual were not guaranteed the experience of such happiness. Thus, Adams says that:
[i]f postmortem, the individual is ushered into a relation of beatifi c intimacy with God and comes to recognize how past participation in horrors is thus defeated, and if his/her concrete well-being is guaranteed forever afterward so that concrete ills are balanced off, then God will have been good to that individual despite participation in horrors. (Adams 1999, p. 168) According to my theodicy, all evils, moral and natural (assuming that there are natural evils that are ultimately not moral in nature), horrendous and nonhorrendous, have the possibility of being decisively overbalanced or outweighed by perfect happiness, but in order to be outweighed in this way they must fi rst be defeated. On my view, the defeat of evil is accomplished through justice, where justice is understood as the organic unity in which those who make a just-good-seeking SFC experience perfect happiness and those
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who make an unjust-good-seeking SFC do not experience it.27 In the fourth section, I said that choosing rightly included choosing a way of life in which one seeks to avoid situations that are likely to produce temptation. One’s best-laid plans sometimes fail, however, and when one is tempted and chooses wrongly, the defeat of evil is accomplished (as part of one’s chosen way of life) through the expression of sorrow (the asking for forgiveness) for what one has done. Moral evils that are suffered by oneself at the hands of others are defeated (again, as part of one’s chosen way of life) by not returning evil for evil, but instead by overcoming evil with good (cf. Romans 12:17, 21). If there are natural evils that are not ultimately moral in nature, then to the extent that they can be overcome by good (e.g. virtuous responses to victims of an earthquake or tidal wave), they too can be defeated.
Most generally, on my theodicy, any evil we suffer at the hands of either moral agents other than ourselves or nature, insofar as it can be responded to in a virtuous manner, can be defeated.
Like me, Adams recognizes the need for a decisive overbalance or outweighing of evil by good. Her theodicy, however, ultimately excludes the just defeat of evil by good.
On Adams’s view, every person must ultimately experience perfect happiness, regardless of how he chooses. Thus, she maintains that in order to prevent a person’s never experiencing complete happiness (hell), God will causally determine a person’s will so that he chooses rightly. As she puts it, “I fl atter the Creator with enormous resourcefulness to enable human agency . . . to recognize and appropriate positive meanings suffi cient to defeat its own participation in horrors. If this should mean God’s causally determining some things to prevent everlasting ruin, I see this as no more an insult to our dignity than a mother’s changing a baby’s diaper is to a baby” (Adams 1999, p. 157). According to my theodicy, God’s causally determining an individual’s will to ensure the enjoyment of complete happiness would itself be unjust and amount to the defeat of good by evil because it would violate the idea that perfect happiness must be experienced justly. The matter of what a person’s choosing wrongly (making an unjust-good-seeking SFC) implies about the duration of his failure to experience perfect happiness (the duration of his stay in hell) is a topic that is beyond the scope of this chapter. A few comments, however, are in order.
To begin, I can see nothing incoherent in the idea that a created person who has made an unjust-good-seeking SFC never reverses course. Because hell (whatever it is like) contains evil and no one can choose what is evil for its own sake, no one can choose to go to hell for the sake of the evil that it contains. What a person can do, however, is choose to pursue what is intrinsically good in a way that casts the restraint that is a prerequisite for experiencing perfect happiness to the winds (again, see the example of Augustine in the fourth section) and which, when all is said and done, results in his justly being excluded from heaven (justly denied the experience of perfect happiness) and confi ned to hell. Such a choice is an unjust-good-seeking SFC.
27. Chisholm (1990, p. 61) gives as an example of the defeat of good by evil the state of affairs where a wicked man experiences pleasure and good men do not (they need not experience displeasure, although presumably they might). Ross claims that the following is the one clear case of an organic unity: “Few people would hesitate to say that a state of affairs in which A is good and happy and B bad and unhappy is better than one in which A is good and unhappy and B bad and happy. . . . The surplus value of the fi rst whole arises not from the value of its elements but from the co-presence of goodness and happiness in one single person, and of badness and unhappiness in another.” (Ross 1930, p. 72)
But how could eternal separation from God be just? The answer to this question depends upon how one thinks of retributive justice in this context. Consider, for example, the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth ( lex talionis or literally “law of the claw”) found in Deuteronomy 19:21. As Adams has pointed out, some who accept this principle look for an immoral deed or deeds performed in this life for which the just punishment is hell (Adams 1975). They think of the issue of retributive justice in terms of proportionality and wonder what human act or acts deserve hell as a proportionate punishment. To illustrate the idea that they have in mind, consider a man named “Smith” who makes another individual named “Jones” unhappy for every moment of the latter’s 70-year life, and that Jones never “gets even” with Smith who lives out his years with more than his fair share of happiness. On the “eye for an eye” principle, God should make Smith unhappy to the same degree and for as long as Jones was unhappy, which was for 70 years. Suppose now that Smith not only made Jones unhappy for 70 years but also made a million other people unhappy for various lengths of time. On the “eye for an eye” principle as presently construed, God should sum up the years of unhappiness caused by Smith and make him unhappy to the same degree as everyone else and for the same cumulative amount of time.
It is fairly easy to construct other examples like the ones just mentioned involving Smith (Adams does just this in Adams 1975) and I will leave it to the reader to consider other examples like those I have just set forth. If we stick with my examples involving Smith, then thinking of retributive justice in the way suggested implies that no matter how much unhappiness Smith causes others, that unhappiness will always be fi nite in amount and Smith will deserve to be unhappy for only a fi nite period of time. Thus, there seems to be no way to make sense out of the idea of someone’s going to hell for a potentially infi nite or unending period of time if the justifi cation for going is thought of in terms of the “eye for an eye” principle.
Perhaps, however, the issue at this point is not with the “eye for an eye” principle per se but with how it is being construed. Perhaps we should stop thinking of it too literally. For example, while eyes and feet are sources of pleasure and pain, it is highly doubtful that the amount of pleasure and pain that one person gets from his intact eyes and feet equals the amount of pleasure and pain that another gets from his. Hence, it seems as if there is no way of guaranteeing that a guilty person who unjustly causes the loss of an eye or a foot in someone else will by the loss of his own eye or foot be deprived of the same amount of pleasure and suffer the same amount of pain as his victim. It is perhaps for this and other reasons that biblical scholars believe the Israelites did not in general literally employ the
“eye for an eye” principle as a form of retributive justice but instead intended it as an expression of the idea that punishment should be com mensurate with the harm that is unjustly caused.28 Perhaps the idea of punishment being expressed in the “eye for an eye”
principle is that there are outer limits of retributive justice that might be meted out to a guilty party and that excessive punishment is itself unjust.
What, then, about hell? Is there any interpretation of the “eye for an eye” principle that makes intelligible the idea of a person spending a potentially infi nite future in hell? I believe that there is and that it is a function of the freedom of the will and the choice of a life plan.
28. Rick Hess has pointed out to me in correspondence the virtual absence of examples in the Hebrew Bible of applications of the “eye for an eye” principle. The only kind of case in which it seems to have been literally enforced involved “life for life,” where the most famous invocation of the principle is the prophet Nathan’s parable and subsequent indictment of David for the incident with Bathsheba and the killing of Uriah, although even in this case it was not literally carried out.
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In simplest terms, retributive justice in this context is the idea of a separation of persons on the basis of their choices about life plans into two separate camps or modes of existence, where this separation leaves both parties permanently isolated from each other to do as they please. Heaven (the domain of perfect happiness) is occupied by those who have made a just-good-seeking SFC and hell is inhabited by those who have made an unjust-good-seeking SFC. Thus, heaven and hell are ultimately about how a person chooses to live his life in pursuit of what is intrinsically good. Will an individual choose a life of restraint and deference to others who are created by God for the purpose of experiencing perfect happiness? Or will he insist on pursuing what is good on his own terms, which means without restraint and at the expense of the well-being of others? It is a not uncommon experience in life that those who make an unjust-good-seeking SFC and reject the exercise of restraint in pursuit of what is good want to have nothing to do with those who make a just-good-seeking SFC, because the latter insist upon exercising restraint in their pursuit of what is good. The former also want nothing to do with God in this life, and for the same reason.
Given that the former cannot be perfectly happy in the presence of the latter and God in this life, they couldn’t be perfectly happy in the presence of the latter and God in the afterlife. Thus, God will justly give the former their wish to be left alone to live with others according to the unjust-good-seeking SFC that has informed each of their lives in this world. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, hell is the “state of defi nitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed” ( Catechism of the Catholic Church 1995, sec. 1033). No one makes this point about self-exclusion better than Lewis: Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. (Lewis 2001, p. 136)
[T]he damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. . . . In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: ‘What are you asking God to do?’ To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to given them a fresh start, smoothing every diffi culty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does. (Lewis 1962, pp. 127–8)
There are, then, in the end only two kinds of people: “those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘ Thy will be done’ ” (Lewis 2001, p. 75; emphasis in the original). In the end, certain people go to hell and remain there because they choose to pursue what is good on their own terms and to have nothing to do with others who insisted on pursuing it on other terms. What is the case is that in order to experience complete happiness, a person must (freely) choose rightly. He must make a just-good-seeking SFC. Only then can evil ultimately be defeated by good because an experience of what is a person’s greatest good must be had only by those who deserve it.
It is this point that Adams overlooks in her theodicy.
Plantinga’s “O Felix Culpa” Theodicy
After maintaining for some time that theodicies struck him “as tepid, shallow, and ultimately frivolous” (Plantinga 1996a, p 70), Plantinga has recently had a change of mind and embraced a theodicy in which God’s justifi cation for allowing created persons to experience
evil is that the great goods of incarnation and atonement be instantiated (Plantinga 2004).
He is careful to make clear that atonement, which presupposes incarnation, is a matter of created persons being saved from the consequences of their sin (morally wrong choices).
Thus, if there were no moral evil and the pain and suffering that come with it, there could and would be no atonement. Moral evil and pain and suffering are necessary conditions of atonement, and because God wanted to create a world with a certain level of goodness, and every world with that or a greater level of goodness contains incarnation and atonement, our world includes evil.
Plantinga considers various objections to his theodicy. In light of the theodicy developed in the fi fth section of this paper, it is most helpful to consider Plantinga’s response to what he terms the “Munchausen syndrome by proxy.” The Munchausen syndrome captures the idea of parents who mistreat or abuse their children for the purpose that they (the parents) act virtuously and save their children from their mistreatment and abuse. Does not Plantinga’s theodicy describe a divine parent who mistreats His children by creating them for the purpose that they choose immorally and experience pain and suffering so that He can then virtuously become incarnate and atone for their moral wrongdoing? Would God really play around with a created person’s well-being in this way for the sake of creating a world with the great goods of incarnation and atonement? Is this theodicy not a proxy of the Munchausen syndrome?
In answer to the Munchausen-syndrome-by-proxy objection, Plantinga maintains that a necessary condition of God’s justifi cation for allowing evil is that the fi nal condition of created persons be a good one, although that fi nal good is not part of the justifi cation for His allowing evil. Although not part of this justifi cation, it is the case that the fi nal condition of created persons in a world that includes the goods of incarnation and atonement
“is better than it is in the worlds in which there is no fall into sin but also no incarnation and redemption” (Plantinga 2004, p. 25). The idea seems to be that God is not morally blameworthy for creating persons for the purpose that the goods of incarnation and atonement be realized, so long as the stated necessary condition of His so doing (that the fi nal condition of created persons be a good one) is fulfi lled.
What might one say about Plantinga’s theodicy? Early on in his essay, he asks “[W]hat are good-making qualities among worlds – what sort of features will make one world better than another” (Plantinga 2004, p. 6)? Plantinga’s fi rst words in response are “Here one thinks . . . of creaturely happiness. . . .” (Plantinga 2004, p. 6). This is a perfectly natural response. Why, however, does one think of this? Although Plantinga does not answer this question, he does state that “Suffering is an intrinsically bad thing” (Plantinga 2004, p. 15).
If it is, it only stands to reason that happiness is an intrinsically good thing, and because God knows that it is and He is perfectly good and loving, He creates persons for the purpose that they experience this great good. Thus, as Plantinga says, while “we can imagine or in some sense conceive of worlds in which the only things that exist are persons always in excruciating pain” (Plantinga 2004, p. 6), no such world is possible “if God, as we are assuming, is a necessary being who has essentially such properties as unlimited goodness . . .” (Plantinga 2004, p. 6).
Given that God, because of His essential properties, cannot create conceivable worlds in which creatures are always in excruciating pain, and given that it is natural to think of creaturely happiness when one thinks of good-making features of a world, it is no surprise that Plantinga maintains that any world with incarnation and atonement will include the experience of a fi nal good condition (or at least the possibility of the experience of such a
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good condition) for created persons. Plantinga claims, however, not only that a world with incarnation and atonement will include a fi nal good condition for created persons, but also, as was already quoted, that this condition “is better than it is in worlds in which there is no fall into sin but also no incarnation and redemption” (Plantinga 2004, p. 25). What justifi es this claim? Intuitively, an earthly life that includes only happiness and runs seamlessly into perfect happiness in the afterlife is on the whole better than one that includes Earthly pain and suffering and ends with perfect happiness in the afterlife. Plantinga, however, is favorably disposed toward the idea that it is by suffering that we can achieve an intimacy with God (“enjoying solidarity with [Christ]”; Plantinga 2004, p. 18) that cannot be achieved in any other way. Perhaps, then, he believes that his claim about worlds with incarnation, atonement, sin and suffering being better in terms of their fi nal good condition for created persons than ones without incarnation, atonement, sin, and suffering is justifi ed by the idea that sin and suffering make possible a level or kind of happiness (enjoyment) that cannot be experienced without them.
If this is Plantinga’s reasoning, it is less than persuasive. After all, atheists and theists alike fi nd it quite easy to conceive of a world in which created persons have perfect happiness without the preparatory work of sin and suffering. Indeed, it is because such a world seems better than one in which created persons experience this happiness but do sin and suffer that the problem of evil presents the intellectual challenge that it does. Moreover, if one turns to scripture for possible insight into the problem of evil, something which Plantinga is not averse to doing, one can easily come away from reading the story about the garden of Eden (as many down through the ages have done) with the impression that Adam and Eve had ongoing access to the tree of life (continued happiness and no pain and suffering), access that would not have been lost had they not eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In short, while one can agree with Plantinga that a world with incarnation, atonement, sin and suffering includes the possibility of a fi nal and exceedingly great, good condition for created persons (i.e. perfect happiness), there seemingly is no reason to think that these things are a necessary means to the achievement of this exceedingly great, good condition.
Finally, what about Plantinga’s claim that, while it is a necessary condition of a world that includes incarnation and atonement that it also include (the possibility of) a fi nal good condition for human beings, this necessary condition is not part of God’s justifi cation (reason) for permitting evil? In the fi fth section, I stated that it was hard to see how the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness could be a necessary condition of God’s justifi cation for allowing evil, without being (at least a part of) that justifi cation. Has Plantinga shown us a way in which this is possible?
I doubt it. To see why, consider what Plantinga says about the relationship between incarnation, atonement, sin, and suffering.
The priority [of incarnation and atonement over sin and suffering] isn’t temporal, and isn’t exactly logical either; it is a matter, rather, of ultimate aim as opposed to proximate aim. God’s ultimate aim, here, is to create a world of a certain level of value. That aim requires that he aim to create a world in which there is incarnation and atonement – which, in turn, requires that there be sin and evil. (Plantinga 2004, p. 12)
In other words, while sin and suffering are a conceptually necessary condition of incarnation and atonement in the sense that atonement just is salvation from the consequences of
sin (“if there were no evil, there would be no sin, no consequences of sin to be saved from”; Plantinga 2004, p.12), in the order of explanation, God’s ultimate purpose that the goods of incarnation and atonement be instantiated explains the subsidiary purpose that sin and suffering be allowed. Now the (possible) achievement of a fi nal good condition for created persons is also a necessary condition of creating a world that includes incarnation and atonement. Why, however, is the former a necessary condition of the latter? Plantinga would have us believe that it is because God is essentially perfectly good and loving and, therefore, must provide a fi nal, good existence for persons in every world that He creates, but it is not because the idea of a fi nal, good existence for created persons is conceptually related to the idea of incarnation and atonement. Is it not the case, however, that just as atonement conceptually presupposes sin (and the suffering that it causes) because it by defi nition is salvation from that sin (and suffering), so also atonement conceptually presupposes the idea of a fi nal, good condition for created persons because it is by defi nition for that good? In other words, is it not the case that just as “atonement is among other things a matter of creatures being saved from the consequences of their sin” (Plantinga 2004, p.
12), so also atonement is fi rst and foremost a matter of creatures being saved for the fi nal good end for which they were created? Moreover, is it not the case that in terms of ultimate and proximate aims, which is a matter concerning the order of explanation, God’s ultimate justifi cation for allowing libertarian free will and moral evil, namely, that created persons have the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness, also explains the proximate or subsidiary aim that the great goods of incarnation and atonement be realized?
The intuitively plausible answer to these questions is “Yes.” Why so? Although we are, to use a favorite expression of Plantinga’s, in deep waters here, it seems reasonable to think that the purpose that incarnation and atonement be realized is a subsidiary purpose in relation to God’s ultimate purpose for allowing libertarian free will and moral evil because God will do what is necessary as a means to achieve this ultimate purpose. If acting justly is a conceptually necessary condition of achieving that purpose, as I suggested is the case in the fi fth section, then perhaps incarnation and atonement are a function of God’s acting justly and, thereby, are necessary as means to accomplishing that purpose. Perhaps acting justly itself requires that God submit Himself to what he submits His creatures to, namely, pain and suffering. If this is the case, then God must become incarnate. Or, if we follow a traditional Protestant understanding of the atonement, God atones for our sins by vicari-ously suffering the punishment due to us because the demands of justice must be satisfi ed (Aulén 1969, pp. 128–33). In the end, by according the possibility of experiencing perfect happiness primary place as God’s justifi cation for allowing evil, we are able to provide a more adequate conceptual integration than Plantinga does of the concepts of perfect happiness, incarnation and atonement, and sin (moral evil).
Beasts and the Problem of Evil
Finally, what about the beasts that it seems also experience pain? What is God’s justifi cation for permitting them to experience evil? With regard to this issue, it is reasonable for the theist to be a defender and answer these questions with “I do not know,” because the matter is one that lies outside our cognitive purview. One thing that is important to understand is why it is beyond our ken. The explanation for this ignorance has to do with our lack of knowledge of both a beast’s nature and the purpose for which a beast exists. Consider the
T H E A RG U M E N T F RO M EV I L 493
problem of evil as it relates to created persons. In general terms, the theodicy proposed and defended in the fi fth section identifi es God’s justifi cation for permitting a person to experience evil with this individual’s purpose for existing, where knowledge of this purpose requires awareness of a person’s nature and what is intrinsically good. Given our knowledge that a person is an entity whose nature includes libertarian free will and a desire for perfect happiness, where this happiness is intrinsically good, it is possible to know what God’s justifi cation for permitting created persons to experience evil is. When it comes to beasts, we lack knowledge of their purpose for existing because we lack adequate knowledge of their natures. We simply do not know enough about their psychological makeups and what the structures, if any, of their wills is like.
It is important to stress at this point that being a defender with regard to the sufferings of beasts does not require that one deny that they experience pain. As Michael J. Murray and Glenn Ross have recently pointed out, a defender can consistently embrace the following principle (I will dub it ‘SA’) concerning the sufferings of animals:
SA: Some non-human creatures have states that have intrinsic phenomenal qualities analogous to those possessed by humans when they are in states of pain. These creatures lack, however, any higher order states of being aware of themselves as being in fi rst-order states. They have no access to the fact that they are having a particular feeling, though they are indeed having it. Since phenomenal properties of states of pain and other sensory states are intrinsic to the states themselves, there is no difference on this score between humans and other creatures.
(Murray & Ross 2006, p. 176)
As Murray and Ross note, one might object to SA by arguing that there is moral disvalue in a world that contains experiences of pain, even where the subjects of those experiences do not possess the relevant higher order states of awareness of themselves as in those fi rst-order states. “Access to these states, the critic might contend, is irrelevant to whether it is bad to be in the state itself. Clearly, if a state is intrinsically bad, it is not made better merely in virtue of the fact that the creature does not know about it” (Murray & Ross 2006, p.
176). Murray and Ross rightly respond that a defender of SA need not deny that the pain experienced by a beast is intrinsically evil. What is crucial for this response is the distinction between kinds of evils. In particular, it is important to distinguish between a metaphysical (nonmoral), intrinsic evil such as pain and a moral evil such as unjustly allowing a sentient creature to experience a metaphysical, intrinsic evil such as pain. The truth of SA helps bring to light that there is nothing morally unjust about allowing a beast that is not self-conscious and is unable to represent itself as experiencing pain to experience such a quale and its intrinsic, metaphysical evilness. If we use the terms of thought from Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” (Nagel 1979, pp. 165–80), then it is because a beast lacks higher-order access to its own fi rst-order experiences of pains that “there is simply no victim, no subject for whom it can be said that there is a way it is like for it to be in such a state of pain” (Murray & Ross 2006, p. 177).
In light of this discussion of SA, consider Rowe’s example of a fawn:
Suppose in some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fi re. In the fi re a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering. So far as we can see, the fawn’s intense suffering is pointless. For there does not appear to be any greater good such that the prevention of the fawn’s suffering would require either the loss of that good or the occurrence of an evil equally bad or worse. Nor does
there seem to be any equally bad or worse evil so connected to the fawn’s suffering that it would have had to occur had the fawn’s suffering been prevented. . . . An omnipotent, omniscient being could have easily prevented the fawn from being horribly burned, or, given the burning, could have spared the fawn the intense suffering by quickly ending its life, rather than allowing the fawn to lie in terrible agony for several days. Since the fawn’s intense suffering was preventable and, so far as we can see, pointless, doesn’t it appear . . . that there do exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse? (Rowe 1990, pp. 129–30)
How can Rowe reasonably conclude, as he does, from the fawn’s suffering that we are justifi ed in believing that God’s permission of that suffering is unjustifi ed on the grounds that we cannot see what the point of its suffering is (Rowe 1990, pp. 127–32)? After all is said and done, does any one of us have adequate knowledge of a fawn’s psychology? Does any one of us know whether a fawn is self-aware and in possession of a concept of itself as a persisting entity that remains self-identical through time? Does any one of us know that a fawn desires the experience of perfect happiness for itself like a person desires this experience for himself? Does any one of us know whether or not a fawn’s existence ends with its death?29
I think it is reasonable to hold that if some beasts are like us in terms of being self-conscious and desirous of perfect happiness, then the justifi cation for allowing them to experience evil is the same as that which justifi es allowing us to experience evil. But I also believe that if we are honest it is correct to say that, while we might believe some things about a beast’s psychology (e.g. that beasts experience qualia such as pain and pleasure just as we do), we must admit that none of us knows the answers to the kinds of questions posed in the previous paragraph. But if we do not, then how can the claim that the fawn’s suffering appears unjustifi ed (on the grounds that we cannot see any justifi cation for permitting its occurrence) itself be justifi ed? Is it not the case that the fawn’s suffering as such neither appears justifi ed nor unjustifi ed because we simply do not know what a fawn’s nature and purpose for existing are? Is it not the case that considered by itself, the fawn’s suffering appears to be suffering, and that is it, the issue of whether its suffering is justifi ed or unjustifi ed being beyond our ken? With regard to instances of suffering of beasts, is it not reasonable to be a defender? It would certainly appear so.30
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29. Philip L. Quinn has recently advocated the following for solving the problem of evil for at least some beasts:
“I would . . . adopt the assumption that an afterlife is possible for at least some nonhuman animals. An afterlife for chickens? Well, why not?” (Quinn 2001, p. 398)
30. Thanks to Michael Bergmann, Andrei Buckareff, Douglas Geivett, William Hasker, and Nathan Nobis for reading earlier drafts of this paper and making several helpful comments. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Thomas Flint for numerous suggestions about the content of the paper.
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The Argument from
Religious Experience1
KAI-MAN KWAN
One of the main concerns of natural theology is whether there are rational arguments for the existence of God. The argument from religious experience (ARE) contends that given the appropriate premises, we can derive from the religious experiences (REs) of humankind a signifi cant degree of epistemic justifi cation for the existence of God. In this chapter, I will defend the ARE, but I have no intention to argue that only a particular theistic tradition (such as Christianity) is correct here. My strategy will focus on a subclass of RE, the experiences of God or theistic experience (TE), and argue that TEs provide signifi cant justifi cation for the belief in God. I do not claim that it is a conclusive argument, but I think it is a reasonable argument that can contribute to the cumulative case for the existence of God.
Some clarifi cation of terms is needed. By an RE, I mean an experience that the subject takes to be an experience of God, or some supernatural being or state of affairs. (By “God”
I roughly mean the supremely powerful, all-loving, and personal Ground of Being.) Such an experience is veridical if what the subject took to be the object of his experience actually existed, was present, and caused him to have that experience in an appropriate way.2 The claim that “S has an experience of God” does not entail “God exists.” So the fact that REs have happened does not prejudge the issue of the existence of God.
The Experiential Roots of Religion
God is not just a hypothesis for the religiously devoted. He is a Living Reality who permeates all their lives. REs sometimes convey such a heightened sense of reality that the conviction they instill transforms the lives of the experients. Furthermore, REs are often world 1. I have used a signifi cant part of my essay published in Philosophy Compass in this chapter (Kwan, 2006b). I am grateful for the permission given to me by the journal to do that.
2. The last phrase is added to safeguard against the so-called deviant causal chains. This condition is hard to specify in details. The same problem occurs for the explication of the concept of veridical sensory perception (see Grice in Dancy 1988, chap. III). It should also be noted that this is offered as a suffi cient condition for veridicality, and this may not be identical to its necessary condition.
The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology Edited William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland
© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17657-6
T H E A RG U M E N T F RO M R E L I G I O U S E X PE R I E N C E 499
transforming as well – just contemplate the immense impact of people such as Moses, St. Paul, Augustine, Wilberforce, and others on Western civilization. Let me follow with some concrete cases of RE.
Cases of TE
Case 1. The story of Christiana Tsai: queen of the dark chamber
Christiana Tsai was a Chinese lady who was born into a traditional Chinese society in the nineteenth century. She came from a Chinese family that was antagonistic toward Christianity, but she was converted after such an experience: one day she was playing in the backyard, and she noticed a stone that looked very smooth on the surface. She turned it over by a stick and discovered that there was a big lizard and many bugs under the stone.
Suddenly, she heard a voice in her heart: “You are just like this stone, looking beautiful from the outside but full of evil inside!” She knelt down and prayed to God for forgiveness.
Immediately, she found peace and felt that the burden of sin on her was lifted. Since then, the world appeared to her as the Lord’s beautiful garden. She found a source of love in her heart, and felt that even the inanimate objects in the surroundings were singing praise to the Creator with her.
She shared the gospel with friends and relatives and many were converted as well.
However, her mother was very resistant and was addicted to opium. One night, her mother had a vision of Jesus appearing in front of her in His glory. After that, her mother was also converted and found it easy to quit opium altogether. One time, Tsai was struggling over a decision concerning her relationship with her boyfriend. Suddenly, she seemed to see Jesus in Gethsemane. She was fi lled with the Holy Spirit. She felt the pain of Christ and knew that Christ could also understand her pain. She decided to let go of that relationship.
Since then, she felt that the love of the Lord had never left her, and her communion with Him became sweeter and sweeter. However, the most severe trial was still to come.
One day a strange disease suddenly started to infl ict immense sufferings on her. Even light would make her feel like being stabbed by a knife. For many days she just could not eat, move, speak, or open her eyes. Doctors said she would die soon. However, she saw a vision of a beautiful crown rising up to heaven one night, but a voice told her it was not yet the time. Then she started to recover. To cut the story short, although she survived the sickness, she had to stay in the dark chamber for the next 24 years, and tremendous pain still visited her. However, through such a long period and in darkness, she continued to feel strongly the love of God and the illumination of His light. She continued to have communion with God, and her life did show a kind of peace and joy that were almost palpable for her visitors. Many of them would say they could see God in her life.3
Case 2. Experience of Chinese Christians under persecution
Since the Communists have taken hold of China, many Chinese Christians were cruelly persecuted, but many of them courageously held on to their faith even though, sometimes, just a verbal denial of faith would easily secure their release. One believer said, “I am a 3. This story is told in Tsai (1953), and my account is extracted from the Chinese version of this book (Tsai 2000).
prisoner but my spirit cannot be imprisoned. I can freely have communion with the Lord from time to time. . . . Although my hands are handcuffed, and my body feels indescribable pain, my heart is still fi lled with peace and joy” (Xi 1990, p. 4). He was only released after 20 years in the labor camp, but he continued to experience the presence of God and His abundant grace (Xi 1990, p. 8). Another believer was arrested and brought before the crowd to receive criticisms. He felt like he was near the end of his life but suddenly he had a vision of Jesus bearing the cross and walking on the road to Calvary. Immediately, he felt a kind of relief all over his body, and all fear was driven out of his heart. He was then able to face the fi erce crowd calmly (Xi 1990, p. 54). Many similar stories were told in the same book.
Case 3. Sheila’s experience
“ ‘The One, losing nothing from itself, overfl ows’. . . . I simply saw that it was so . . . The only bodily symptoms were tears of joy. . . . It seemed for a moment as though I stood ‘in the great hand of God’. . . . Any distinction of subject and object, active and passive, noun and verb was lost. . . . That it was not an hallucination is, however, the most abiding conviction that I have” (quoted in Wall 1995, p. 47).
Case 4. Mark’s experience
This experience lasted over 9 months: “The experience included a sublime consciousness of a personalized sustaining power which defi es description. I recall wondering whether I had found God or had God found me. I was infi nitely more concerned with and aware of people and my environment. Mental perception and originality of thought were heightened. Living reached undreamed of levels of sheer joy. . . . I was at fi rst surprised to discover little correlation between my experience and the Church’s beliefs and behaviour” (quoted in Wall 1995, p. 50).
Case 5. Simone Weil’s experience
“In moment of intense suffering, when I was forcing myself to feel love, but without desiring to give a name to that love, I felt, without in any way prepared for it (for I had never read the mystical writers) a presence more personal, more certain, more real than that of any human being, though inaccessible to the senses and the imagination.” Weil remarks: “I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. I had vaguely heard tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them” (quoted in Layman 2007, p. 42).
Case 6. Angelique’s experience
Angelique is a psychiatrist. She writes, “as far back as I can remember I ‘knew’ of the existence of God. Whatever gradually developing sense I had of myself as an entity was accompanied by a sense of someone other, invisible and infi nitely greater than any other ‘person’ and different from them, a kind of all-powerful, pervasive force within the world but far from being impersonal was loving and benefi cent with a real interest in me. . . . I never used any word for this person- after all I never needed to- but other people’s use of the word ‘God’
or ‘Creator’ seemed to fi t pretty well. I never saw or heard anything that I recall but the
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knowledge was as certain as the knowledge that other people continued to exist when they left the room . . . my parents were both agnostic and anti-church. I don’t remember religion ever being a topic of conversation at home. Apart from a few fl irtations with Sunday School I did not attend church until at 13 years old” (quoted in Wall 1995, p. 77).
Angelique claims that the experiences “have the quality of being not only self-
authenticating but being the ground or standard by which everything else in my subjective experience can be, and is judged. This phenomenon itself is not unknown in abnormal states of delusion and hallucination,” which “invariably leads to progressive mental deterio-ration, pain, and eventually psychological and social disintegration, whereas the only objective test of spiritual experiences is that they show fruit in enhanced sensitivity and maturity, and lead to growth in all areas of the personality” (Wall 1995, p. 78).
Case 7. A completely surprising RE
“The experience itself is very diffi cult to describe. It took me completely by surprise. I was about to start shaving at the time, of all things. I felt that my soul was literally physically shifted-for quite a number of seconds, perhaps 15 to 20 from the dark into the light. I saw my life, suddenly, as forming a pattern and felt that I had, suddenly, become acquainted with myself again . . . I must stress here that prior to this experience I used never to use the words such as ‘soul’ or ‘salvation’ or any such ‘religiously coloured’ words. But in order to make even the slightest sense of what happened to me I fi nd it imperative to use them”
(quoted in Hay 1994, p. 21).
Case 8. Experience of design
“My mind suddenly started thinking about the beauty around me, and I considered the marvelous order and timing of the growth of each fl ower, herb and the abundance of all the visible growth going on around, I remember thinking ‘Here is mind’. . . . For a few moments I really did feel at one with the Universe or the Creative Power we recognize. . . . I must have been confronted with the source of all being” (quoted in Hay 1994, p. 23).
The ARE in the Twentieth Century
Earlier defenders of RE included both theologians and philosophers, for example, Farmer, Frank, Waterhouse, and Knudson. Some of them claimed that REs provide immediate knowledge of God, which was self-authenticating. However, philosophers tended to be critical of such claims (C. B. Martin, chap. 5; Flew 1966, chap. 6). Keith Yandell (1993, chap.
8), himself a defender of RE, was highly critical of this notion. No matter if these criticisms were cogent or not, they were infl uential and accounted for the rise of a form of ARE that did not rely on claims to self-authentication.
C. D. Broad anticipated the contemporary ARE:
The practical postulate which we go upon everywhere else is to treat cognitive claims as veridical unless there be some positive reason to think them delusive. This, after all, is our only guarantee for believing that ordinary sense-perception is veridical. We cannot prove that what people agree in perceiving really exists independently of them; but we do always assume that ordinary waking sense-perception is veridical unless we can produce some positive ground for
thinking that it is delusive in any given case. I think it would be inconsistent to treat the experiences of religious mystics on different principles. So far as they agree they should be provisionally accepted as veridical unless there be some positive ground for thinking that they are not.
(Broad 1953, p. 197)
From the fi fties to the seventies, able defenders of RE include A. C. Ewing, John Hick, H. D. Lewis, Elton Trueblood, John Baillie, Rem Edwards, and H. P. Owen. However, at that time, verifi cationism, roughly the doctrine that only in principle verifi able sentences were cognitively meaningful, was still infl uential, and hence even the meaningfulness of religious language was in doubt. The situation by now is very different. First, verifi cationism is effectively dead. Second, starting from the end of 1970s, a number of analytic philosophers had produced increasingly sophisticated defenses of RE. Richard Swinburne (1979, chap.
13) defended RE via his Principle of Credulity (PC), which said that it was rational to treat our experiences (including RE) as innocent until proven guilty. In other words, REs were treated as prima facie evidence for the existence of God until there were reasons for doubting them. This attracted a lot of attention in philosophy of religion. There were of course many critics (e.g. William Rowe, Michael Martin), but Swinburne had also inspired the support of quite a few professional philosophers (e.g. Gary Gutting).
Many books were written on RE that basically followed Swinburne’s line of reasoning: Davis (1989), Wall (1995), and Gellman (1997). Other philosophers (e.g. Wainwright and Yandell) also worked independently toward a similar conclusion. One landmark of this debate is William Alston’s Perceiving God (1991), which skillfully defended a doxastic-practice approach to epistemology. This approach said that it was practically rational to trust our socially established doxastic practices, including the Christian mystical practice.
His arguments were widely discussed and taken seriously in general.
Defenders of the ARE have made considerable progress in the twentieth century. When Swinburne fi rst propounded his ARE via his PC in the late seventies, he was greeted with incredulity. At that time, the prevailing opinion among professional philosophers seemed to be that this kind of argument was hopeless and beyond the pale for respectable philosophers. So not even Mary Hesse, who was kind of sympathetic toward religion, could stomach it at that time. In response to Swinburne, although she thought his paper was
“tightly argued,” she could dismiss it in a few words: “such appeals to RE . . . are not common nor intellectually persuasive nor even intelligible in the current secular climate”
(Hesse 1981, p. 288). Swinburne replied, “The suggestion that they are not common seems just false . . . The argument of my paper was that appeals to RE ought to be intellectually persuasive . . . As to the claim that appeals to RE are not intelligible- I can only suggest that he who fi nds them so should familiarize himself with the literature of religion in order to see what the appeals mean” (Swinburne 1981, pp. 303–4). This is a bit amusing.
Nowadays, on the whole, even critics among professional philosophers of religion treat it with some respect. It is now regularly treated in texts on philosophy of religion, and I think it is going to become one of the classical arguments for the existence of God.
The old defenders continue to update their case (Yandell 1999; Gellman 2001; Hick 2006), and it has also drawn new supporters (Garth Hallett, Stephen Layman, Grahame Miles, T. J. Mawson, Douglas Geivett). Of course, the ARE also have able detractors (Richard Gale, Matthew Bagger, Nicholas Everitt, James Harris), but I think even they will concede that their opponents are their epistemic peers. After all, Alston and Swinburne are active researchers in the fi eld of epistemology (and related fi elds), and they cannot be
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dismissed as amateur philosophers. No consensus exists yet but the ARE seems to be alive and well.
The ARE is also exciting and fascinating because it helps us rethink deep issues in epistemology. I think the contemporary defenders of ARE are exploring a new paradigm. There are also independent and consonant developments in the fi eld of epistemology in recent decades. When Swinburne fi rst boldly proposed his PC, it was quite novel and radical, and he did make apparently shocking statements such as “if it seems to me Poseidon exists, then it is good evidence that Poseidon exists.” True, it was similar to Chisholm’s critical commonsensism but few would imagine applying it directly to RE. At that time, the defi -
ciencies of traditional foundationalism have already been made apparent to many epistemologists but perhaps they were still hoping for a quick fi x. Now they are more open to radically different epistemological frameworks. Epistemic principles such as Swinburne’s PC have been accepted by diverse philosophers such as Gary Gutting, William Lycan, Robert Audi, and Michael Huemer (but they do not entirely agree on its scope of application). Things such as presumptive data and defeasible reasoning are now stock-in-trade of contemporary epistemologists. Moreover, they are exploring theories which resemble more or less Alston’s doxastic practice approach, for example, Catherine Elgin’s (very) weak foundationalism, Susan Haack’s foundherentism, or Nicholas Rescher’s methodological pragmatism. This kind of epistemological development certainly enhances the initial plausibility of the ARE.
The Decline of Traditional Foundationalism and
Stock Objections to RE
Traditional foundationalists believe that our knowledge has to be built upon the sole foundation of sense experiences (SEs) because only they are the indubitable given free from interpretations, and are open to public confi rmation. RE, if they are to be trusted, have to be vindicated on the basis of this foundation – SE. Although the ARE has strong intuitive force for many people, for Western philosophers steeped in the tradition of empiricism, the trustworthiness of REs is hard to swallow. In introductory books on philosophy, the ARE is usually dismissed on the basis of stock objections such as the following: 1 The logical gap objection: We have to distinguish the experience and the subjective conviction it produces from the objectivity (or veridicality) of the experience, for example, a very “real” hallucination or dream is a live possibility. Critics such as Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (p. 72) admit that REs often produce subjective certitude in the subjects. However, there is a logical gap between the psychological data and the ontological claim of the REs. To bridge the gap, we need independent certifi cation of the religious belief. For example, Flew challenges the defenders of REs to answer this basic question: How and when would we be justifi ed in making inferences from the facts of the occurrence of religious experience, considered as a purely psychological phenomenon, to conclusions about the supposed objective religious truths? (Flew 1966, p. 129)4
4. Although Flew has now become a kind of theist (Flew & Varghese 2007), the ARE is not cited as the major reason for his conversion to theism (or, better yet, deism).
2 The theory-ladenness objection: The REs are heavily (or even entirely) shaped by the conceptual framework of the experients. Hence they are not useful as evidence for ontological claims (Donovan 1979, chap. 5). Indeed, a recent critic Graham Oppy thinks that, since:
cases of revelation and selective (‘private’) religious experiences” are “rarely reported by those who are not already religious believers - or by those who are not embedded in a community in which there is considerable religious fervour, . . . there are good reasons for non-believers to suspect that there is pollution by prior theory in these cases as well. (2006, p. 350, n. 4) 3 The privacy objection: According to Rem Edwards, “the foremost accusation leveled at the mystics is that mystical experiences are private, like hallucinations, illusions, and dreams, and that like these ‘nonveridical’ experiences, religious experience is really of no noetic signifi cance at all” (1972, p. 318).
Evaluation of the logical gap objection
Many theists have provided reasonable responses to these objections. First, we should note that the logical gap objection to REs basically conforms to the structure of the general skeptical argument. This can be seen from Gutting’s parody of Flew’s question:
How and when would we be justifi ed in making inferences from the facts of the occurrence of experiences of material objects, considered as a purely psychological phenomenon, to conclusions about the supposed objective truths about material objects? (Gutting 1982, p. 147)
The certitude/certainty distinction applies to almost all kinds of experience, including SE.
A hallucination is exactly an unveridical SE, which, nevertheless produces subjective conviction. If the certitude/certainty distinction in itself threatens REs, it will also threaten SE.
Why, then, is the theological gap not damaging in other cases? If the critics only apply the objection to REs but not to other experiences, it would be extremely arbitrary. This would also confi rm Alston’s charge that critics of REs often adopt a double standard with regard to SEs:
The objections . . . involve unfavorable epistemic comparisons between mystical perception and sense perception; . . . they either condemn the former for features it shares with the latter (double standard) or unwarrantedly require the former to exhibit features of the latter (imperialism). (Alston 1991, p. 255; a list of double standards is provided on pp. 249–50) Evaluation of the theory-ladenness objection
The theory-ladenness objection again raises a general problem in epistemology. Even ordinary perception is theory-laden (Papineau 1979), and a similar problem plagues scientifi c realism. The empiricists and the positivists have searched hard for the rock-bottom “given”
that is free of interpretation. In this way, it can be the neutral arbiter of different theories or interpretations. However, the development of modern philosophy and, especially, contemporary philosophy of science bespeak the downfall of this project. All the major
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philosophers of science (e.g. Popper, Hanson, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend) agree that all observations are, to some extent, theory-laden. For example, Nancy Cartwright writes: We can be mistaken about even the most mundane claims about sensible properties, and once these are called into question, their defense will rest on a complicated and sophisticated network of general claims about how sensations are caused, what kinds of things can go wrong in the process, and what kinds of things can and cannot be legitimately adduced as interfer-ences. (p. 259)
Some authors also suggested that modern psychology confi rms the idea that interpretation
“is absolutely essential to there occurring a perceptual experience at all. . . . We are not passive recipients of ready-made representations of our environment; rather, stimuli from that environment must be processed by various interpretive mechanisms before they can have any signifi cance for us” (Davis 1989, p . 149). Ralph Baergen, after surveying the empirical study, concludes that the:
psychological evidence shows that the operation of the human visual system certainly is infl uenced by beliefs, assumptions, expectations, and so on. Moreover, “the processing involved is, to some extent, top-down . . . our beliefs, expectations, and so on infl uence our visual presentations, and not merely their interpretation. (Baergen 1993, p. 16)
That means even our sensations are “polluted.”
Now let us examine Oppy’s claim that in the case of REs, there is likely to be “pollution by prior theory.” I think this allegation at least involves two claims. First, believers’ prior theory has signifi cant infl uence on the content of their RE. Second, this infl uence tends to
“pollute” the experience, rendering it unveridical. The former claim is not implausible in light of the given considerations. It is not likely that RE can be the sole exception to a general rule about our experiences. However, it is not clear whether the prior theory in fact totally constrains the content of their RE. If it is not the case, then, at most, we can say that the interpretation of RE is fallible, and we cannot conclude that they are cognitively worthless. In fact, there is evidence that prior theory does not entirely determine the content of TE:
many people have experiences which are highly individualistic . . . some . . . feel the arms of God wrapped around them; others sense Jesus’ love gradually coming into their body from head to toe or from toe to head; . . . many experience Jesus or God in ways not clearly derived from Scripture or from reports in the church or elsewhere . . . at one time they have a fairly standard experience of Jesus and at another have an Eastern form of experience (we may think of Joy, who fi rst of all had a Nirvana-type experience, which then developed into an experience in which she felt herself to be a participant with Jesus on the cross, sensing the meaning of his death. (Wall 1995, p. 302)
See also Cases 3, 4, and 7 given earlier. Oppy really needs to adduce more real cases to support his sweeping claim.
The more important point is that the second does not follow from the fi rst: the infl uence of a prior conceptual framework in experience is not necessarily cognitively debilitat-ing. In fact, after pointing out the top-down way of processing in human visual system, Baergen goes on to say that:
it is “the top-down aspects of vision which allow us, for example, to recognize objects under poor viewing conditions or when only a small part of them is visible . . . certain forms of agnosia arise when our knowledge about objects is prevented from infl uencing perceptual processing.” (Baergen 1993, p. 16)
In other words, in our common experience, prior theory, even built-in our visual system, does not necessarily pollute. It may aid our perception instead. (Of course, we cannot noncircularly prove this point. What is said earlier is said within the critical trust framework.)
Gwen Griffi th-Dickson presses the question: “Does one say that the humiliation a rape victim feels in the attack is just ‘her interpretation’ of the event, distinct from the physical sensations, or is it an integral part of it?” (2005, p. 400). If it seems to be misleading, then the assumption that the less interpretation, the better is dubious. As the phenomena of agnosia in vision show, it is just as possible to miss the genuine signifi cance of an experience through underinterpretation as it is through overinterpretation. Experience only becomes “knowledge” when our basic experiences of the world are transformed by
“quite elaborate theoretical interpretations.” Might this be true of mystical experiences as well? If we accept making such rich use of interpretative techniques in science, art, and everyday life, is it fair to refuse the same toleration to RE? After all, the “commonsense physical objects dispersed in space conceptual scheme is inculcated in a thousand subtle and not so subtle ways in the course of socialization. Does this imply that we are not proceeding rationally in forming perceptual beliefs in the standard way?” (Griffi th-Dickson 2005, p. 402).
Perhaps the critic will still insist that this deprives RE of an independent evidential force.
Namely, the interpretive elements of RE have to be independently supported before we can deem the experiences reliable. However, since SEs also have interpretive elements, “if we were always required to provide independent evidence that the beliefs in terms of which we had unconsciously ‘interpreted’ a perceptual experience were probably true before we could take the perceptual experience to be probably veridical, we would be trapped in
[skepticism]” (Davis 1989, p. 144). If the critic is to avoid the charge of double standard, he needs to explain in what way this is a special problem for REs.
So, again, the theory-ladenness objection in itself is not decisive. Perhaps to avoid skepticism, the wiser policy is to treat the incorporated interpretations in our experiences as prima facie justifi ed. I call it the top-down approach. Furthermore, prior religious frameworks need not be corrupting; they may instead help to “tune” people to perceive a reality that they would otherwise miss.
Evaluation of the privacy objection
Let us examine the privacy objection, the allegation that unlike SE, RE is private and subjective. In what sense is an SE public? My experience of a chair occurs essentially in my mind- it is every bit as private as other experiences in this aspect. I cannot directly experience how you experience the chair and vice versa. What makes an SE public is that verbal reports of different persons can be compared. However, reports of people having REs can also be compared. For example, experiences of God are present in almost all ages, all places, and all cultures. The reports, to a considerable extent, match. The experience also develops in a tradition. So, in these aspects, RE is also public. As Edwards emphasizes:
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the experience of the Holy seems to be very much unlike dreams and hallucinations. Extremely large numbers of people from extremely diverse cultural backgrounds claim to experience the Holy One, and there is a signifi cant amount of transcultural agreement about what the experienced object is like. This is not the case with the objects of hallucinations- most hallucinators do not see pink elephants . . . Pink elephant is simply a convenient symbolic abbreviation for the immense variety of weird entities encountered by people having hallucinations. (1972, pp. 320–1)
Vestiges of traditional foundationalism
The force of many stock objections to RE depends upon the traditional foundationalist framework. However, although “a narrowly empiricist and foundationalist position is rarely found now outside discussions of religious experience,” the philosopher of religion comes up time and again against this outdated assumption (Davis 1989, p. 143).
Unfortunately, what Davis says is still true of some recent discussions. For example, James Harris’s severe critique of the ARE basically follows the foundationalists’ line of attack. He thinks that when a subject S has an RE, “it is not reasonable to attribute to S
the power of determining that x is God who is seeming to appear rather than a near-god, an intelligent alien from some distant galaxy, or Satan” (2002, p. 153). However, it is also not clear that when S has an SE, it is reasonable to attribute to S the power of determining that x is a physical object which is seeming to appear rather than an alien superscientist or Satan manipulating his brain/mind. Ex hypothesi, phenomenologically indistinguishable experiences can be produced by a physical object, an alien superscientist or Satan. How can S determine which is the case on the basis of his experience alone?
An appeal to further experiences will not help because similar problems plague those experiences as well.
Again, Harris insists that “S must make an inference from the experience of being appeared to by those properties or powers to the claim it is God doing the appearing” (2002, p. 153). This betrays a lack of understanding of the severe problems affl icting even ordinary SEs, and the rationales for the PC. True, some philosophers do think that when S is having an experience of a tree (being appeared to treely), S must justify an inference from the experience of being appeared to treely to the claim it is a tree doing the appearing. However, it is notoriously diffi cult how any such inference can be justifi ed. The spirit of PC contends that typically perceivers do not make such an inference, and they do not need to. They are rational to trust their experience unless there are positive reasons to the contrary.
The decline of foundationalism does not mean an automatic victory for the ARE.
However, the critics of RE should make sure their case is not based on problematic epistemological positions. Of course, the defenders also need to spell out and defend their epistemological framework. Swinburne has exactly attempted to do this.
The ARE via the Principle of Critical Trust (PCT)
Swinburne’s ARE
Swinburne proposes a defense of REs by espousing an epistemological principle that accord REs with prima facie justifi cation (PFJ). An experience has PFJ if the claims of the
experience are probably true unless there are positive reasons to the contrary. The idea is that all experiences should be treated as innocent until proven guilty. REs should also be accorded PFJ then; that is, the claims of REs should be trusted unless counterevidence can be brought forward. This epistemological principle is the PC:
(PC) If it seems (epistemically) to me that x is present on the basis of experience, then probably x is present unless there are special considerations to the contrary.
We need to understand Swinburne’s distinction between “epistemic seeming” and “comparative seeming.” For him, “to use ‘looks’, etc. in the comparative use is to compare the way an object looks with the way other objects normally look” (1979, p. 246). So a coin may look elliptical (comparatively) to me, but on the basis of this experience I am inclined (more or less) strongly to believe that the coin is round. The latter is how it seems epistemically. When I describe my experience of a chair as an epistemic seeming that the chair is present, it does not mean I only hold tentatively to the judgment that there is a chair. On the contrary, it means that on the basis of my experience I am spontaneously and strongly inclined to believe that the chair is there.
Then, Swinburne formulates the following argument:
(A) It seems (epistemically) to me that God is present.
(B) There is no good reason to think either God is nonexistent or not present; nor any good reason to think the experience unveridical.
(C) Hence, probably God is present.
The PC does not stand alone in Swinburne’s epistemological approach. It has to be used together with other epistemological principles such as the following:
(a) The Principle of Testimony: other things being equal, others’ experiences are likely to be as they report them to be.
(b) The Principle of Simplicity: “in a given fi eld, we take as most likely to be true the simplest theory which fi ts best with other theories of neighbouring fi elds to produce the simplest set of theories of the world” (Swinburne 1986, pp. 13–5).
These principles are important. Swinburne’s approach has to be distinguished from an
“anything goes” approach. It is recognized that man’s ability to know is far from perfect: his initial epistemic seemings are fallible. The hope lies in the ability of man to sift and correct these initial data. For example, an erroneous epistemic seeming can be corrected by other epistemic seemings by applying the Principle of Simplicity.
So Swinburne’s approach includes a way to sift the data and establish an orderly noetic structure. I call this the critical trust approach (CTA). The PC is renamed the PCT. I am glad that my terminology is at least accepted by Hick: “The term ‘the critical trust approach’
has been introduced by Kai-man Kwan (2003), and I use it in preference to the earlier
‘principle of credulity’ . . . and my own ‘principle of rational credulity’ ” (Hick 2006, p. 210).
Each version of PCT can be formulated variously in descriptive or normative terms, involving claims about probability, rationality, or justifi cation. I will mainly use the concept
“justifi cation” in this chapter. My basic contention is only that TE is also a basic source of
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justifi cation (BSJ), and will eschew the controversy about knowledge. The concept of justifi cation is also controversial, and we have the great debate between internalism and externalism. I think the PCT is more at home within the framework of internalism, which requires what justifi es a belief to be internal to the subject in some way. I cannot settle the debate here. I suspect that structurally similar AREs can be argued using different epistemological vocabularies.
The formulation of PCT
A PCT can be formulated in diverse ways. The PCT is supposed to apply to epistemic seemings. Sometimes epistemic seemings are about necessary truths, and these are typically produced by rational intuitions. If we think that rational intuitions have PFJ, then we can say that the PCT is applicable to rational intuitions – we can represent this claim by PCT(intuition). The content of the bracket after “PCT” stands for the scope of that PCT.
On the other hand, we also have epistemic seemings about the world, and they can be produced by intentional experiences (experiences of something external) and introspection as well as memory. These three are often recognized to be BSJs for our epistemic seemings about contingent states of affairs in the actual world, for example, about physical objects, one’s own mental states, and the past. They have similarities but also a lot of dissimilarities and cannot all be subsumed under the category of SE or even perception (unless in a very loose sense). However, they are all broadly speaking experiential sources of justifi cation. I would call all these noetic experiences.
If PCT(noetic experience) is true, then noetic experience is a BSJ. That would also entail that many kinds of RE (including TE) are also BSJ, possessing PFJ. Whether this is true is exactly the main controversy around the ARE. Defenders want to say that PCT(noetic experience) is true, but the critics either reject the entire CTA, or they want to restrict it to only SE or memory (some would also want to add introspection in the scope covered by the PCT but others, e.g. eliminativists, want to say that introspection is not a BSJ). If the scope of a PCT covers all epistemic seemings, including intuitions, I will call it the wider PC. In this chapter, the default version propounded is the PCT(noetic experience).
Formulations of PCT can also vary according to the epistemic force it possesses. We can distinguish the following types:
• Moderate
PCT
If it seems (epistemically) to a subject S that p on the basis of a noetic experience E, then S has PFJ for belief that p, which is suffi cient for justifi ed belief that p simpliciter in the absence of defeaters.
• Weak PCT
If it seems (epistemically) to a subject S that p on the basis of a noetic experience E, then S has some defeasible justifi cation for his belief that p which is less than suffi cient justifi cation for justifi ed belief that p simpliciter.
The moderate PCT is incompatible with the weak PCT. (I think strong forms of PCT
that grant infallibility or incorrigibility to our epistemic seemings are, on the whole, implausible.) Swinburne’s formulation of his PC, and Gellman’s (1997) formulation of
PCT are moderate versions. In contrast, the formulation by William Lycan is a weak one:
“Accept at the outset each of those things that seem to be true” (1988, p. 165). However, the initial weight of those spontaneous beliefs are only minimal and they can be overridden by “almost anything: new input, noncoherence with other beliefs in a minimal way, slight explanatory advantage to be gained elsewhere, or whatever. The justifi cation conferred on a spontaneous belief by the Principle of Credulity is fl ickering and feeble” (1988, pp. 166–7).
Some defenders of ARE favor the weak form over the moderate form. For example,
Gutting thinks that:
an of-X experience in general provides prima facie evidence of X’s existence only in the sense of supplying some (but not suffi cient) support for the claim that X exists. For belief in the claim to be warranted, the solitary of-X experience requires supplementation by additional corroborating experiences. . . . In cases of kinds of objects of which we have frequently had veridical experiences, we can of course rightly believe that they exist, without further corroboration beyond our seeming to see them. But this is because we have good inductive reason to expect that the further corroborations will be forthcoming. With relatively unfamiliar objects . . . this sort of inductive reason is not available; and warranted assent must await further corroboration. (1982, p. 149)
He gives an example of an experience of apparition. He suggests that even if we cannot fi nd cogent defeaters of this isolated experience, such an experience, although not completely without force, still cannot be deemed veridical. He then draws the conclusion that
“we should think of an individual of-God experience as providing signifi cant but not suffi cient evidence for God’s existence, needing to be included in a cumulative body of diverse evidence that can warrant the claim that God exists” (Gutting 1982, pp. 149–50). Several writers also have similar complaints, for example, Michael Martin (1990, p. 175) and Davis (1989, pp. 101–5).
This suggests we can further distinguish a Token PCT which applies to every token experience,5 and a Type PCT which applies to a type of experience. All the formulations of PCT given earlier are Token PCTs. Now, suppose the weak Token PCT is true but the moderate Token PCT is not. There is still the possibility that when a token coheres with many other tokens, that is, it falls within a type of experience, then it can possess a degree of justifi cation suffi cient for PFJ. This idea will be captured by the Type PCT, which will be explicated further in the discussion.
Argument for TE via the Type PCT
The prior question is: by what principles do we group token noetic experiences together as one type? I suggest two main criteria:
(a) Phenomenology: what kinds of sensations or feelings are involved in this kind of experience?
5. From now on, the word “noetic” would usually be dropped and “experience” would, by default, mean “noetic experience.” So when I say “an experience is justifi ed,” it means “the truth of the epistemic seeming embodied in that noetic experience is justifi ed.”
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(b) Ontology: what kinds of thing, process, or property are typically supposed to be the objects of experience?
I think that the ontological criterion should take primacy over the phenomenological criterion. For example, SE is the most clearly demarcated kind of experience. However, if the phenomenological criterion is primary, SE is not actually one type but a collection of many types: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and so on. It seems better to see SE as an epistemological unit and its unity explained by the common ontology shared by all these experiences: they all have physical objects as objects of experience. So, according to this understanding, SE should be taken to be an experience of a physical thing or event.
Sensations or sense data would come in as the qualitative character of SE.6
• Type PCT
If it seems (epistemically) to S that p on the basis of a noetic experience E, and E belongs to a well-established type of experience, then S has PFJ for belief that p, which is suffi -
cient for justifi ed belief that p simpliciter in the absence of defeaters.
When we can identify an experience as belonging to a well-established type, this means:
(a) Shared experiences: This experience is not altogether idiosyncratic. Similar experience occurs repeatedly and is shared by a substantial amount of people, preferably across cultures and eras.
(b) Common ontology: The tokens of the type have to largely cohere with one another before they can be grouped into a kind. Namely, the group of tokens does not have massive internal contradictions. They also need to share a common ontology such that different tokens can be mapped onto that ontology, exhibiting different sorts of epistemic relation among themselves (e.g. mutual support, explanatory
dependence).
(c) Conceptual coherence: To enable mutual communication of the experiences, which is the prerequisite of our identifi cation of a type of nonsolipsistic experience, the experiences have to be, to some extent, describable. It also requires a conceptual framework which is not obviously incoherent.
The degree of PFJ provided by a type of experience is also a variable because the degree to which each type is established is different. When a type of experience exhibits a signifi -
cant degree of intracoherence, I would call it a well-established type. The factors contributing to the degree of intracoherence of a type of experience are summarized in the following:
6. Everitt writes, “MP [mystical practice] is supposed to be a practice directed at mind-independent entities - but so is SP [sensory practice]. Why then count MP as a separate practice? Surely MP should be classed as simply one branch of SP, analogous to VP (visual perception practice), AP (auditory perception practice), etc” (2004, p. 168). In the main text, I have given some reasons why I would not agree with Everitt’s classifi cation, which is not even common among atheistic critics. His major purpose seems to be that by subsuming MP under SP, he can deny the relative autonomy of MP’s checking process, and so on.
Criteria of Intracoherence
The degree of intracoherence of a type of experience E would increase with the following factors, ceteris paribus:
(a) the number of people sharing E,
(b) the frequency of occurrence of E to an individual,
(c) the variability of the situations in which E occurs,
(d) the explanatory coherence between the tokens of E, and
(e) the conceptual coherence of E’s ontological framework.
We can now formulate the following argument for TE:
(A) Type PCT is correct.
(B) TE is a well-established type of experience.
(C) It seems (epistemically) to S that God exists on the basis of a TE, E.
(D) The TE, E, is not defeated.
Therefore,
(E) S is justifi ed to believe that God exists.
The argument seems valid. Premise (C) just states the fact of TEs and should not be controversial. If Premise (B) is also correct, then the conditions in the antecedent clause of Type PCT (applying to the case at hand) are satisfi ed. So if Type PCT is correct (Premise (A)), then it follows that S has PFJ for belief in God. Further, granting the truth of Premise (D), then it means S is not faced with defeaters. It follows that S’s belief in God is suffi ciently justifi ed. The crucial premises are (B), (A), and (D), which will be defended in that order.
The ARE can be defended via different routes, and some authors defend ARE on the basis of an analogy with SE. However, although Swinburne and Alston do appeal to considerations of analogy to illustrate and strengthen their arguments, they are in fact proposing a kind of ARE on the basis of fi rst principles in epistemology. The argument I defend is of this type.
RE and TE
The phenomenon and typology of RE
Since time immemorial, human beings as we know it are already religious. Throughout all periods of human history, and in all of the major cultures or societies, there have been a great many reports of a great variety of REs. The evidence for this claim can be garnered from the entire corpus of the religious literature in human history, which is evidently too voluminous to be summarized here. I trust that numerous basic texts on religious studies would substantiate this claim.
The experience of God is not confi ned to Westerners. A kind of God was known to the ancient Chinese. The most common Chinese translations of the word “God” are Shang-ti
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(ϞᏱ), which means “the Emperor above,” and the Lord of Tien (which means Heaven) (Џ). Both Shang-ti and Tien are not terms created by the missionaries. They are in fact widely used in the ancient Chinese classics, and point to the belief in a kind of personal God. The name Shang-ti has already appeared in the oracle bones, and it stands for the Supreme Lord of the universe.
In the Doctrine of the Mean, Confucius said, “By the ceremonies of the sacrifi ces to Heaven and Earth they served Shang-ti.” In the Book of Poetry, there is a Hymn of Zhou (lj਼䷠NJ), which praised Shang-ti, “Lord Wu with mighty power, Above all else will tower, Cheng the lord and Kang lord, Shang-ti likewise will laud.” Another poem said, “A good crop of barley and wheat, Will soon be ready to reap, Oh by Glorious Shang-ti blest.”
Shang-ti is One who can receive sacrifi ce, One who can bless. He is also One whom we should serve. Shang-ti or Tien (Heaven) cannot just mean the physical nature or some impersonal force because He was regarded as a fearful God who had a moral will. Besides being the source of judgment, Shang-ti is also the source of goodness or happiness: “The great emperor of heaven grants happiness (or goodness) to the people below. The one who can follow the human nature of the people and make the people follow the instruction single-heartedly is not other but the sovereign.”
So a contemporary Chinese scholar, He Guang-hu, thinks that the said view of Shang-ti and Heaven is the root of Confucianism, which believes in a personal God who is the Maker of the world and humankind, who is powerful, righteous, loving, and willing to communicate with human beings. So Chinese also have experiences of God, although the theistic tradition cannot be said to be very strong (Kwan & Han 2007).
REs can be further divided into the following types:
(A) TE – a noetic experience whose intentional object is God, the personal and supremely perfect creator of the world
(B) Ecstasy and peak experience (Abraham Maslow)
(C) Encounter of the Light Being in a near-death experience (Moody)
(D) Experience of evil spirit (Hay 1990, p. 49), angels, or departed saints
(E) Experience of contingency – a spontaneous feeling that the world is not ultimate and is somehow dependent on something beyond
(F)
Experience of design – experience of being struck by the beauty and intricacy of the natural order and the feeling that this order is ultimately due to Intelligence or Mind
(G) Nature mysticism or cosmic consciousness – a spontaneous feeling that the universe and oneself are one. It is usually induced by contemplation of nature, but a similar experience can also be induced by drugs (e.g. mescalin)
(H) Pure consciousness event (PCE): a pure state of consciousness without any intentional object and uncontaminated by any concept. This event should be
distinguished from the monistic mystical experience which may include a PCE as
a part
(I)
Experience of minor deities (e.g. visions of Kali or Buddha or Apollo)
(J)
Monistic mysticism (e.g. the intuitive apprehension that Atman is Brahman and that All is One)
(K) Experience of Nirvana – experience of Nothingness or No-self as the Ultimate
RE and TE in contemporary world
According to the secularization theory, the decline (and perhaps ultimate demise) of religion is inevitable as a result of the process of modernization. For the secularists, RE is just a vestige of premodern civilization, society, and worldview. Since religion no longer plays any essential role in modern society, and the religious worldview has been largely discredited or at least thrown in doubt by modern science and knowledge, it stands to reason that the phenomenon of RE will also fade out in the long run.
Although I have doubts about the secularization theory (Kwan 2001), the secularists are correct to point out that modern life is hardly supportive of religious life and RE. In fact, Hay points out that the “contemporary culture . . . is uncertain about religion. Ambivalence about religion and the question of whether it is an illness . . . appears to have been part of the European consciousness for a long time . . . Repeated fi ndings of modern research into religious experience” have testifi ed to “a shyness or ‘taboo’ on admitting to religious experience.” Many “respondents said they had never told anyone else about their experience, even relatives as close as their husbands or wives” for “fear of being thought mentally unbalanced, or . . . stupid” (Hay 1994, pp. 10–1).
In such a kind of inhibitive culture, it is indeed extremely surprising how religious faith and RE have held up quite well. The distribution of religious faith according to Schaffer and Lamm (1995, p. 393) is shown in Table 9.1.
Religious believers are still the overwhelming majority of the world’s population (84
percent), while nonreligious people are the minority (16 percent). It is certainly true that many ‘believers” counted here are not much more than nominal believers. However, it is reasonable to believe that a substantial portion of the religious people have had some form of RE (past studies of RE show that people who do not profess to any religion sometimes have RE). Note that Christians and Muslims together constitute 52 percent of the population, and the dominant form of RE in these theistic traditions is certainly TE. Hindus and Buddhists together amount to 19 percent of the population. However, we cannot conclude that the major form of their RE has to be monistic. In fact, the Advaita is just one among many schools in Hinduism, and there are theistic and panentheistic traditions in Hinduism (Madvha and Ramanuja). More to the point, many ordinary Hindus are not enthusiastic about the abstruse theory of monism, and their religious life in fact also consists of the worship of God or deities (bhakti).
Table 9.1 Distribution of religious faith (Schaffer & Lamm 1995)
Religion
Percentage of total population
None