Agent Plus Environment

Is belief in God unjustified?

As a part of my recent philosophical wanderings, I’m reading Kai Nielsen’s 1985 book Philosophy & Atheism. He wants to show that belief in God is unjustified.

This is the second post in the series — I encourage you to read Part I if you haven’t yet.

In defense of atheism

In Part I, I introduced Nielsen’s primary argument for atheism, namely, that sentences used to talk about God are at their core incoherent. The word “God” fails to have an intelligible referent. We are not justified in believing in incoherent things.

In the chapter “In Defense of Atheism,” he elaborates on this argument.

First, Nielsen notes that religious discourse tends to reflect particular human commitments and attitudes — e.g., the feeling of gratitude for one’s existence, regardless of the quality of that existence. Two example utterances he puts forth are “God is my Creator to whom everything is owed,” and “God is the God of mercy of Whose forgiveness I stand in need.”

Fact-stating utterances of this sort always presume some background knowledge. Every utterance exists in a larger context.

“Take the classic example ‘The King of France is bald.’ We need a context, an application of the Principles of Relevance and the Presumption of Knowledge, to know how to take it. If our context is the present, and the relevant questions are ‘What is the King of France like?’ or ‘Is he bald?’ then neither ‘The King of France is bald’ nor ‘The King of France is not bald’ would be a correct answer, for the above questions in the above context are not to be answered, but are to be replied to by being rejected. The proper reply–a reply which rejects such questions–is (De Gaulle notwithstanding) ‘There is no King of France.’ But if our topic is historical and, with some specific period in mind, we are asking ‘What bald notables are there?’; ‘The King of France is bald’ is in such a changed context is an appropriate answer. And here it is a true or false statement.” (p. 79)

In statements about the King of France or about God, “the King of France” and “God” are referring expressions — i.e., there is the assumption that these expressions refer to something that exists. Additionally, there is the presumption that the speaker understands and believes in the reality of the thing being spoken about. In asserting the example utterances I mentioned above, “the religious man presupposes that there is a God and that this God has a certain character. The atheist, on the other hand, does not believe [the utterances] are true because he does not accept the presupposition on which they are made” (p. 79).

The point Nielsen is making here is that we cannot evaluate religious utterances in isolation from the complex activity we refer to as “religion.”

Next, Nielsen wants us to recognize that when using expressions in language that refer to existents of some kind, one needs to know how the referring is to be done — can one point at the entity? Can one identify it indirectly? His claim is that “the concept of God is so incoherent that there could not possibly be a referent for the word ‘God’” (p.82). He refers specifically to the non-anthropomorphic Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. Because the concept is so incoherent, he argues, it cannot possibly be true — the rational thing to do is to reject belief in that God.

So how does he support this claim?

Incoherent God-talk

First, he notes that even if incoherent, “God” is not utterly meaningless. There are pieces of what he terms ‘God-talk’ that are deviant and pieces that are non-deviant — e.g., commonly accepted uses are such statements as “God so loved mankind that he gave to the world his only son” and “God protect me in my need,” while deviant statements include such statements as “God lost weight last week” and “God brews good coffee.”

Second, Nielsen clarifies what he means by incoherency.

“[I]n saying that the concept of God is incoherent, I am saying that where ‘God’ is used nonanthropomorphically, as it is in at least officially developed Jewish and Christian God-talk, there occur sentences such as [the utterances mentioned earlier] which purportedly have a statement-making function, yet no identifiable state of affairs can be characterized which would make such putative religious statements true and no intelligible directions have been given for identifying the supposed referent for the word ‘God’” (p. 83).

God cannot be physically pointed to in the world the way we can point to chairs and instances of green things. If God can be identified, it must intra-linguistically. But as mentioned in Part I, what does it mean for a thing to transcend the world, be an ultimate reality, or be an infinite individual? “If in trying to identify God we speak of ‘that being upon whom the world can be felt to be utterly dependent’ nothing has been accomplished, for what does it mean to speak of ‘the world (the universe) as being utterly dependent’ or even dependent at all?” (p. 83). If we are puzzled by “God,” says Nielsen, we will be equally puzzled by these kinds of descriptive phrases. We know what it means to say that children or nations or lakes are dependent on other things, but we have no sense of what it would mean for the universe to be dependent on something.

He continues to discuss the dependent universe example:

“What are the sufficient conditions for the universe being dependent? What would make it true or false or what would even count for the truth or falsity of the putative statement ‘The universe is dependent’ or ‘The universe is not dependent?’ To answer by speaking of ‘God,’ e.g., the universe is dependent because God is its final cause, is to pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, for talk of the dependency of the universe was appealed to in the first place in order to enable us to identify the alleged reference of ‘God’. And to speak of a logically necessary being upon whom the universe depends is to appeal to a self-contradictory conception, for only propositions or statements, not beings, can either be logically necessary or fail to be logically necessary. Yet to speak of a ‘factually necessary being’ upon whom the universe depends is again to pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps; for what would count toward establishing the truth or falsity of a statement asserting or denying the existence of such an alleged reality?” (pp. 83-84).

If God exists, he somehow exists necessarily. But if the concept of a logically necessary being is self-contradictory, then it cannot be true that any being must exist simply because its existence is logically necessary. Nor, argues Nielsen, is there sense in the claim that there is anything which categorically must exist.

The problem is in determining what the referent of “God” is. The problem is that the phrases used to describe God (e.g., “a self-existent being,” “a self-caused being”) have the same problem of purportedly being referring expressions, namely, that there is no way of discovering their referents.

Another point he makes is that perhaps believers feel that they are in the presence of an “ultimate reality” that is taken to be God. But if this is to be taken as a nonanthropomorphic God and transcendent to the world, “it should still be evident that ‘a transcendent X’ could not be ‘an X whose presence was given in experience.’ Something given in experience would eo ipso be nontranscendent, for it would automatically be part of the spatio-temporal world” (p. 84).

It’s possible that some people will argue that Nielsen is assuming too much — some experiences, particularly experiences of God, may not be materially grounded in the spatio-temporal world. Philosophers have certainly posited that thought may have immaterial aspects. Could some kind of immaterial thought account for experience of God? Perhaps so.

The crux of Nielsen’s argument

Nielsen’s argument rests on this fact: If there is religious truth, the statements expressing those religious beliefs must be true. If he can show that the statements are indeterminate and incoherent, then, he says, there is nothing in those statements that could constitute something true or false.

One example Nielsen focuses on is what it means for God to act. In the case of a statement such as “God is the God of mercy of Whose forgiveness I stand in need,” further statements are entailed: that God does or can do things and that God acts or can act in certain ways. “[I]t is utterly senseless to speak of being merciful if one could not even in principle act, do or fail to do merciful acts” (p. 86). Nielsen says that anyone, not just reductionists and materialists, can recognize the truth of this. To say that a being acted mercifully implies that the being acted; to act implies that the being acting is an agent that can perform actions. This may seem trivial; however, Nielsen argues that even if one allows for bodiless action, e.g., as in cases of chemical agents or forces producing effects, “there is still a physically specifiable something which reacts in a determinate physically specifiable way” (p. 88). If God is indeed non-anthropomorphic, realized as Pure Spirit, not a reality with a body or a spatio-temporal location, how does God act? We have no idea, says Nielsen, “of what it would be like for something to be done, for something to do something, for an action to occur, without there being a body in motion” (p. 88).

In saying that God can act, God is conceived of as being able to do things. But we can only understand doing things when there is something identifiable doing the doing.

“X is only identifiable as an agent, and thus X an only be intelligibly said to be an agent if X has a body. For agency to be logically possible, we must have a discrete something specifiable in spatio-temporal terms. But the transcendent God of Judaism and Christianity is thought to be a wholly independent reality, wholly other than the world which is utterly dependent on this ‘ultimate reality’ and is said to be ultimately unintelligible without reference to this nonphysical mysterium tremendum et fascinans” (p.88).

But then it is senseless to speak of God as an agent who acts, and sentences about God are therefore incoherent.

One might argue, here, that utterances like “God loves all His creation” and “God is all merciful” are symbolic or metaphorical, but are not themselves literal true/false statements. Nielsen remarks that some theologians will then recourse to describing God as “Being-itself” or “the source and unity of all beings,” but the problem remains the same — what is the referent of “Being” or “Being-itself”? For a statement such as “God is not a being, but rather Being-itself within which all other beings have their being” to be be intelligible, then “being-itself” must be a genuine referring expression. But it is not, for much the same reasons why “God” in the utterances discussed above is not.

Nielsen notes that some people will now bring up ineffability — that there are ineffable truths that cannot be put into words and religious truths are of this category. The first part he agrees with; there are certainly “some things which are literally unsayable or inexpressible but are nonetheless given in those experiences of depth where human beings must confront their own existence” (p. 91). The second part he claims is incoherent.

First, if one claims that religious truths are ineffable, then some people with the proper experience can in a sense understand the concept of God but cannot literally express what they know to be true. Statements about the concept of God are not true or false statements; they merely hint at what cannot be literally stated. No sentences about God can literally express facts or assert that certain things are true or false, though they could be sensical, given their metaphorical or symbolic use.

“But if an utterance P is metaphorical, this entails that it is logically possible for there to be some literal statement G which has the same conceptual content. ‘Metaphorical,’ for that matter ‘symbolic’ or ‘analogical,’ gets its meaning by being constrastable with ‘literal.’ There can be no intelligible metaphorical or symbolic or analogical God-talk if there can be no literal God-talk. Thus the ineffability thesis is internally incoherent.” (pp. 91-92)

Furthermore, Nielsen argues that if knows something that is literally inexpressible, then trivially, one cannot communicate it. One cannot be justified in saying that it is, in fact, God you experience, know, or encounter because one cannot significantly say that if one does particular acts or has particular experiences, one will come to know God. If one says that God cannot be described, then the word “God” is meaningless — “we cannot even say that something is if it is indescribable” (p. 93).

“‘What is unsayable is unsayable,’ is a significant tautology. Only if one could at least obliquely or metaphorically express one’s experience of the Divine could one’s God-talk have any significant, but on the present radical ineffability thesis even the possibility of obliquely expressing one’s knowledge or belief is ruled out. So, given such a thesis, there could be no confessional community or circle of faith; in fine, the thesis is reduced to the absurd by making it impossible for those who accept such a thesis to acknowledge the manifest truth that the Judeo-Christian religion is a social reality. On this simple consideration alone, we should surely rule out the ineffability thesis.” (p. 93)

We don’t understand the concept of God

Here, Nielsen reminds us that what he wants is for the believer to show how God-talk is a coherent form of language. “Faith presupposes a minimal understanding of what you take on faith, and if my arguments are correct, we do not have that understanding of a nonathropomorphic concept of God” (p. 94).

He acknowledges that so far, his arguments have relied on verificationist principles, and that it clearly not the case that sentences are only meaningful if verifiable. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that only sentences can be meaningful or not meaningful, and only statements can be true or false; many meaningful sentences fail to make statements (“Could you pass the butter?”). However, he also argues that some form of verifiability is correct in determining factual significance.

What makes a meaningful utterances fact-stating? Nielsen argues that “a statement has factual significance only if it is at least logically possible to indicate the conditions or set of conditions under which it could be to some degree confirmed or infirmed, i.e., that it is logically possible to state evidence for or against its truth,” (p. 95). If you disagree, he says, try to think of a statement that everyone would agree has factual content that is not verifiable in principle.

In summary

In Judaism and Christianity, God is conceived of as a nonanthropomorphic, transcendent being upon whom the universe is dependent. Believers must accept certain that allegedly factual statements are true, such as “There is an infinite, eternal Creator of the world.” Believers take these kinds of statements to be factual. Yet Nielsen argues that these pieces of God-talk are not directly confirmable or infirmable — we have no idea how to establish their truth or falsity — and thus they are, in reality, not factual statements at all. Because the utterances fail to be fact-stating, there is a fundamental incoherency at the heart of these religions. One has no reason to cling to incoherent beliefs.

Is belief in God unjustified?

As a part of my recent philosophical wanderings, I’m reading Kai Nielsen’s 1985 book Philosophy & Atheism. He wants to show that belief in God is unjustified.

Here’s the route he takes in the first few chapters of the book.

Definitions of atheism and the problem of good empirical grounds

First, Nielsen defines a couple brands of atheism:

1. If there is an anthropomorphic God proposed, the atheist rejects belief in God because it is false or probably false that there is such a God.
2. If a non-anthropomorphic God is proposed, the atheist rejects belief in God because the concept of God is either meaningless, unintelligible, contradictory, or incoherent.
3. The atheist rejects belief in God because the concept of God merely masks an atheistic substance, e.g., “God” as another name for love or as a symbolic term for moral ideals.

By “anthropomorphic,” he references Zeus and Wotan — gods for which we can know approximately what it would be like to encounter or observe them. By “non-anthropomorphic,” he references the God of Luther and Calvin, Aquinas, and Maimonides, wherein God is transcendent to the world and cannot be pointed to; this God is mysterious and cannot be observed in any way, and certainly not through empirical means because anything that can be experienced and empirically observed is necessarily not an eternal transcendent reality (pg 16).

He then sets out the claims he intends to defend, namely, that

1. There are good empirical grounds for believing there are no anthropomorphic spiritual beings, and
2. There are good empirical grounds for believing that the non-anthropomorphic or even the slightly less radically anthropomorphic conceptions of God are incoherent or unintelligible.

In the first chapter, he relates some relevant autobiographical information: that he was raised with a vague Protestant background; he converted to Catholicism in late adolescence; he attended a Catholic university for two years and studied Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas; from these studies, he determined that one could not prove God’s existence and went elsewhere to study anthropology and philosophy. He picked up influences from Spinoza, Peirce, Dewey, and Marx; also prominent were Hume and Kant’s arguments that we have no grounds for belief in God (particularly an anthropomorphic God); from there he made his way to his current brand of atheism.

Here’s a brief passage I wanted to share, primarily because I share Nielsen’s concern about the jargon used by many philosophers. (Several friends of mine who’ve recently partaken in discussions of philosophy of religion with me can quickly attest that I regularly complain about the obscurity of the language used in the papers and books we read.)

“[S]ome of them [religious philosophers and theologians] also recognize that with Thomistic talk about Pure Actuality or Tillich’s talk about Being-itself or anything of that order, it becomes utterly unclear what, if anything intelligible, is being affirmed that skeptics could not affirm as well. With such Thomistic or Tillichian talk, there is a complicated jargon but not intelligible additional claims of substance. Yet these Protestant thinkers still give us to understand that they themselves believe in something mysterious and profound and crucial to the human condition of which the nonbeliever has no understanding or no real understanding. They seem, however, to be quite incapable of explaining or even describing what this “more” is, though they are confident that they are not just saying the same thing as the skeptic in a more obscure and heightened vocabulary. Given such a state of affairs, I came to wonder, as did many others, if, after all, there really is a more than verbal difference and a difference in attitude between the sophisticated believer and the skeptic or whether such a believer actually succeeds in believing anything intelligible or coherent at all that is distinct from the purely secular beliefs of the skeptic” (p. 37).

In arguing that it should be impossible for someone with a tolerable scientific background and good philosophical training to think carefully about religious belief and then accept religious belief, Nielsen takes two approaches. First, he argues against proofs of God’s existence, that revelation and religious experience are not in fact reliable and God cannot be known through these means, and that morality does not require religious belief. Second, building on the first set of arguments, he discusses whether and how we can establish the truth or probable truth of the claims of some religions, and whether we could reasonably accept those claims as articles of faith. He then turns to the question of whether religious beliefs can even count as valid truth-claims.

Essentially, Nielsen wants to show that belief in God is incoherent and thus unjustified.

A couple more detailed notes on Nielsen’s arguments

I’m not going to spend a lot of time elaborating Nielsen’s first argument, which is about how Hume and Kant concretely established that one cannot prove God’s existence, and that “[r]eason and observation cannot show the unprejudiced mind, willing to follow the argument and evidence wherever it will go, that there is a God” (p. 43). Nielsen notes that many of us now take this fact as almost cultural dogma. He then addresses the question of religious experience:

“Since the destructive attacks of Hume and Kant, it has become rather common, particularly in certain Protestant circles, to claim that we do not need the proofs, even if we could have them, for we have a much surer way of knowing God, namely through direct religious experience” (p. 45).

There are two things wrong with this. First, the problem of introspection and attribution of causes to our thoughts, feelings, actions, etc. This is the problem Gazzaniga unearthed with his studies of split-brain patients; this is what Nisbett and Wilson talked about in their famous 1977 paper. There is no way to know that an experienced classified as “religious” actually is religious and actually has the supernatural as its cause.

Second, and this is the point Nielsen focuses on, the God of Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions cannot be encountered (perhaps Zeus could be, though). If God is a pure spirit, transcendent to the world, mysterious and infinite, how could we encounter such a being? We cannot literally meet with such a being via our normal senses; if we could, then God would not be the God just described. Nielsen reports that some people claim that experiencing God is about experiencing “one’s finitude, to have feelings of dependency, awe, wonder, dread or to feel a oneness and a love and a sense of security, no matter what happens” (p. 46). The problem here is that these are human experiences that can be understand and experienced sans God. They can fit into a secular view. As Nielsen goes on to say,

“Why should we multiply conceptions beyond need and say these understandable human experiences are also experiences of God or that they are best explained as experiences of God or as attesting to the reality of God? We are not justified in postulating such odd entities unless there is reason to think that the phenomena cannot be adequately explained by reference to less recherche entities, which are plainly realities of our familiar spatio-temporal framework” (p. 46).

In summary, Nielsen argues that there is no religious experience that guarantees that our experience is of God.

Nielsen then discusses appeals to faith; he asks why, if we must accept religion solely on the religious authority, which authority should we accept? Why Jesus rather than Buddha or Mohammed?

“If there is no proof for the existence of God, no independent way of establishing or making credible his existence, isn’t a claim that Christianity is the Truth and the Way both incredibly arrogant, ethnocentric, and arbitrary?” (p. 47)

He also points out that one need not believe in God to have purpose in one’s life, which is often another point of contention:

“Without God there may be no purpose to life, but life can still be purposeful, be worth living, even if there is no overarching purpose to life. Even if there is no purpose of life or purpose to life there can be purposes in life, e.g., to cure the sick, to achieve racial equality and social justice, to achieve happiness and a fuller and more varied life for oneself and for those to whom one relates, to achieve love and close human bonds and solidarity. These are purposes we human beings can have and they remain intact in a Godless world” (p. 48).

The last of his main points is about the coherency of the concept of God. Specifically, he discusses what it means to talk about God and how the word “God” is grounded in our language. If, as he suggests all Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions do, we leave behind an anthropomorphic and idolatrous conception of God, then who or what does the believer pray and confess to? To what or to whom are we referring when we use the term “God”?

“…”God,” unlike “Hans” or “Erika” or “Mexico,” cannot be ostensively defined or taught. As we have seen, it doesn’t even make sense to speak of seeing or encountering God. We can’t literally be aware of God or stand in the presence of God. The term “God” can only be introduced intra-linguistically through definite descriptions” (p. 49).

Descriptions he notes include statements like “God is the only infinite individual” and “God is the maker of universe” and “God is the only ultimate reality upon whom all other realities depend.” The problem with these is that they raise more questions: what is it for something to transcend the world, be an ultimate reality, or be an infinite individual? The words clearly have some meaning grounded in the language we generally use them in, and perhaps some people claim to have a proper conception of what it means for something to be the maker of the universe, but Nielsen argues that it questionable that these kinds of characterizations of God have sufficiently unproblematic meaning for us to actually understand what it is we are referring to.

A question he poses is this: What support do we have for either, e.g., the claim that God is the maker of the universe, or the claim that God is not the maker of the universe? “What experinceable states of affairs count for one view and against the other such that on balance we are justified in claiming greater probability for one view over the other?” (p. 49). Nielsen claims that nothing does — but if all possible experiences and observations are equally compatible with either claim, then, he asks, what is each actually asserting? How does either sentence succeed in asserting something different than the other? What is one sentence claiming that the other is denying? There appears to be no answer here; Nielsen argues that none of the assertions really assert anything, on either side. As he goes on to say,

“Moreover, it isn’t the situation where we just have two theories equally compatible with the available evidence. What we have is one set of putative claims — the religious ones — claiming to assert something thoroughly different, through and through mysterious, and of a quite different order. Yet there are no differences of an experientially specifiable sort between the two accounts. Experientially the believer cannot show what more he is asserting, can’t elucidate, except in equally perplexing terms, what he means to be saying that the non-believer is not, so that the suspicion is very difficult to resist that there is, after all, no nonverbal difference between them” (p. 50).

Nielsen’s conclusion is that the sentences used to talk about God, and what the word “God” refers to, are such that we cannot ascertain their truth or falsity and cannot distinguish between assertions and denials except verbally. In which case, he suggests, the religions that speak of God thusly are tied to such heavily problematic conceptions that they are rendered incoherent. How are we justified in believing in something so incoherent?

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As I briefly alluded to, this is just what Nielsen says in the first couple chapters. It’ll be interesting to see where he takes his arguments over the course of the next couple hundred pages. I also have a more recent work of Nielsen’s sitting in the stack of books waiting for my attention. Perhaps in a week or two I’ll update you on my progress…