Title: Dialogues Concerning Religion
Author: David Hume
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Title: The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God
Author: John L. Mackie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Title: The Existence of God
Author: Richard Swinburne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Title: Arguing about Gods
Author: Graham Oppy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Title: Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Faith
Author: John Bishop
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Much like sex, religion sells. Human beings are, for whatever reason, obsessed with gods, even if our obsession manifests in open hatred of a god we don’t believe exists. I am, of course, thinking of the New Atheists – Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and company – though I’m sure they would insist that it’s not God, but God’s followers they have a problem with. No matter. Evangelical Christian apologists have been churning out books defending the faith for decades, and it seems that atheist public intellectuals have finally decided to jump on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, much like their conservatively religious counterparts, the popular books defending atheism (or repudiating religion) generally lack the kind of philosophical rigour one would expect from self-proclaimed über-rational thinkers. This resurgence in atheist propaganda has predictably provoked a flurry of published responses by Christian public intellectuals. These tracts tend to do a decent job pointing out the weaknesses in the New Atheists’ arguments (or rhetoric, in lieu of argument), but (a) that’s not much to be proud of, (b) they invariably fail to provide convincing arguments for theism, and (c) they’re whiny. Indeed, I’m far from convinced that this burgeoning body of literature has contributed anything to the debate about God, though this proliferation of commercial goods certainly serves Mammon.
Thankfully, those of us interested in rigourous arguments about religion aren’t left to play Devil’s advocate against ourselves. There are plenty of capable potential interlocutors out there, and some of them have written terrific books defending their various positions. Of course, as in most interesting debates, no one has the answer to the question of whether or not God exists, but that should not discourage our quest for reasonable beliefs on the matter. Pace popular theistic and atheistic preachers: the point of constructing and examining arguments is not to persuade or convert, but to learn. If we are interested in holding reasonable beliefs, we should try very hard to figure out if our own arguments are any good, and part of that process involves considering others’ arguments. To that end, enter my five favourite books in philosophy of religion. They are my favourites not because they happen to concur with my opinions – indeed, most of them espouse positions antithetical to my own – but because I find them particularly helpful in my own thinking about these matters and I am deeply impressed by the some features of their methods. It is not what these authors think, but how they do and express it that I love about these books.
Written in 1776, David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is still one of the best reads in philosophy of religion, both because it’s beautifully written (as a fictional account of a conversation among clever, witty friends) and very insightful. Hume toes a more or less Christian line throughout as was socially acceptable at the time, but the Dialogues contain some of the most incisive (if not quite decisive) critiques of various traditional arguments for theism. Indeed, Hume’s arguments against miracles are still widely discussed today. So, this is a good place to start; it’ll prepare you for reading and thinking a little deeper about the specific arguments.
The closest modern-day equivalent to Hume’s sceptical masterpiece is J. L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism. Like the Dialogues, MoT is rigorous and well written (and, incidentally, was published posthumously). Mackie is more technical and comprehensive than Hume, and is therefore best read after him, but is no less clear for it. Mackie’s atheism is certainly more obvious than Hume’s agnosticism, and it is a refreshingly calm, reasoned atheism. His treatment of Hume’s argument against miracles, and his updated, expanded criticisms of ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments and theistic responses to the problem of evil terrified me as a Christian who’d just been convinced that he had to re-evaluate his beliefs critically. Though I was not, in the end, compelled to abandon my religious faith, reading MoT did cause me to heavily revise a lot of my favourite arguments and many of my until-then cherished beliefs. As Kant said about Hume, Mackie woke me up from my dogmatic slumber.
Mackie’s book was part of the renaissance in analytic philosophy of religion that made the careers of surprisingly many theistic philosophers, including Richard Swinburne. More so than Hume’s and Mackie’s books, Swinburne’s The Existence of God is a classic evidentialist text: it doesn’t bother with a priori arguments (e.g., ontological argument) or pragmatic arguments (e.g., Pascal’s wager). Instead, Swinburne builds a cumulative argument on the basis of evidence, concluding that the probability that God exists is greater than 0.5; that is, it is more likely that God exists than otherwise. More important than the arguments he marshals – really just permutations of well-known theistic arguments – is his cumulative, probabilistic strategy. Rather than looking as the separate arguments as a slew of unsuccessful deductive arguments, Swinburne, like a detective at a crime scene (his analogy, not mine), sees a collection of premises, many weak pieces of evidences, all of which together indicate that God probably exists. While I’m not as confident as he is about the evidential case for God’s existence, I found and still find his application of Bayes’ theorem an interesting and useful way to consider the matter.
Let’s start with Graham Oppy’s conclusion: there are neither successful arguments for theism nor successful arguments for atheism; and both can be reasonable positions to hold (which is not to say that all theists and atheists are in fact reasonable in holding the beliefs they do). Oppy proceeds by examining a whole slew of arguments – evidentialist or otherwise – in piecemeal fashion. He attempts to be exhaustive, and does a commendable job at what is almost inevitably an impossible task. In that sense, Arguing about Gods is a very good survey of the available argumentative strategies. It’s also a good companion to Mackie, as while both are calm, reasoned atheists, they come to quite different conclusions, and it’s interesting to see why.
John Bishop begins with the less controversial thesis that the evidence cannot adjudicate between theism and atheism. Given this situation, he asks, should people still believe in God? Ethics is, of course, a tricky subject and the ethics of belief is no exception. Bishop, who is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland, goes on to examine various versions of fideism: the claim that (religious) beliefs are justifiable on non-evidential grounds. The kind of belief that Bishop ends up defending, though, is belief as “taking to be true in one’s practical reasoning,” and this might not be the kind of belief we’re all interested in. Of course, Bishop defends his conflation of epistemology and ethics, but I’ll leave it to you to decide whether he’s right. At any rate, while I tend to be an evidentialist myself (albeit a less confident one than Swinburne), Believing by Faith has certainly made me more open to non-evidentialist positions.
This review evolved out of a list I’ve given on several occasions to Pentecostal proselytisers and born-again atheists I’ve met over the last four years. Somewhat ironically, both groups of people seemed to have The God Delusion as a set text. The latter believed that Dawkins had defeated theism, while the former believed that refuting Dawkins meant defeating atheism; both are mistaken. I spent tonight re-reading TGD to remind myself why I thought it was so unhelpful, and by the end of Chapter 3 (“Arguments for God’s Existence”) it was painfully clear to me. TGD is mostly an exercise in defeating straw men constructed out of out-dated arguments. Even if Dawkins hadn’t misunderstood (or deliberately misrepresented) Aquinas and Anselm, to consider the refutation of philosophers from a thousand years ago as a decisive victory for atheism is about as odd as thinking that Darwin’s later, misguided Lamarckianism counts as a victory for Creationism. But of course, he has either misunderstood or deliberately misconstrued his opponents, and that’s just poor critical thinking. Dawkins mentions Hume, Mackie, and Swinburne, but it’s not clear to me that he’s read them well. Those of us who are interested in thinking critically about religion, however, should.
Religion
