Right Reason

I’ve been reading the book by Christopher Hall and John Sanders, Does God have a Future? The Debate on Divine Providence. (http://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Have-Future-Providence/dp/0801026040). It’s a debate between an open theist (Sanders) and a classical theist (Hall). Open Theism is, in part, the view that God does not know about all the events that will happen in the future, as many of those events are the result of free human choices, and it is impossible for God to know what humans will freely choose. If he did know all the decisions that we would make in the future, so the open theist’s argument goes, then those decisions are not really free. My comments here have nothing to do with whether or not open theism is correct.

In this book John Sanders claims that in open theism, God has to allow horrendous evil to occur. God, he says, did not know that horrendous evils would ensue when God created the world. “However,” he adds:

Does this really help, since God could have prevented each and every instance of human moral evil? Again, here the answer of openness is not any different from that of traditional Arminians. God could not prevent us from doing harm to one another without constantly violating the very conditions in which he created us to live. That is, God would have to habitually remove our freedom, rendering our lives a world of illusion.

I think that this badly misconstrues what freedom of the will really is. In more general terms, if I handcuff a man to stop him from attacking me, I am “taking away his freedom.” But in philosophical terms, I am doing no such thing. I am preventing him from carrying out a certain course of action, but I am in no way preventing him from willing such a course of action. He is still able to freely chose to try something or wish to do it, and this is what freedom of the will is concerned with.

Would God have to actually take away our freedom in order to stop us from harming each other? Clearly not. He would merely have to stop us from succeeding. Examples of humans doing this are easy to imagine. What if, for example, someone had erected an impenetrable shelter over Dresden just prior to the Allied bombing? The bombers would have been prevented from harming the civilians below, and nobody’s free will would have been interfered with. If God restrained the hand of the violent husbands, stopped the bullets of the school shooters, or changed the course of the planes that smashed into the World Trade Centre, nobody’s free will would have been harmed, and yet it seems pretty obvious to me that people would have been prevented from harming other people. So it’s not true that “God could not prevent us from doing harm to one another” without habitually removing our freedom.

I am not for a moment suggesting that Sanders can think of no reason why the God of open theism does not intervene to protect people from the harmful free choices of others. He has not given such a reason, but I do not know that he has none. I’m curious as to what it is, though.

Glenn Peoples

I’m experimenting with some different themes, so please bear with my while Say Hello to my Little Friend goes through some visual changes.

While I keep you waiting for the next podcast episode (within the next couple of days, I swear!), this is a letter I wrote to the paper a few months ago. It was pretty long, and predictably they didn’t publish it. It was a response to this piece by Bob Brockie (be sure to hold your nose when you read the piece in that link, it’s a stinker!).

My response follows:

Fundamentalism and science: strange bedfellows

Fundamentalism is alive and well in the clash between religion and science. Its hallmarks are not difficult to locate. First, there’s the general carelessness about factual details when it comes to preaching for one’s cause. Bob Brockie (ironically in the name of sticking to the evidence) fudges both the date of the establishment of the Royal Society and is painfully sloppy in detail. He portrays the founders of the society as cool rationalists like himself without time for religious nonsense, showing no awareness at all of the deep religious faith of men like Issac Newton (who also, by the way, was deeply involved in occult studies and alchemy – oh the rationalism of it all). He also may want to brush up on his Latin. The slogan of the Royal Society, “Nullius in Verba” does not mean “take nobody’s word” as Dr Brockie alleges. It translates to “On the words of no one,” which is actually an abbreviation of a quote from Horace: Nullius addictus judicare in verba magistri. Translated, this is: “Not compelled to swear to any master’s words.” In practical terms it referred to the freedom to form opinions and reach conclusions that were not politically correct. The irony is almost amusing here. But why worry about accuracy? Just preach that sermon!

Another common fundamentalist phenomenon is mindless sloganism without serious reflection on the consequences of those slogans. Dr Brockie does not disappoint here either, urging all science classrooms today to refuse to take anything on anyone’s word, believing only things that they have confirmed via experiment. Gone are the textbooks, history lessons and teachers. To place stock in such things is unscientific, Dr Brockie urges. The trouble, of course, is that not only is nearly all of our knowledge gained by taking the word of others, but for us all to believe that the only way to gain knowledge of the world is by experiment is itself a claim that Dr Brockie is asking us all to take on the basis of his word. Fundamentalism is often self refuting in this way, for it is ultimately grounded in ignorance, bigotry and anger or fear, rather than reason.

Lastly, fundamentalism cultivates ignorance of “the other side” and the tendency to lash out with uninformed attacks regardless of the facts (if one is even aware of them) because the attacks serve the holy cause and “rally the troops” as it were. He assumes (without much by way of evidence) that there is one view out there called “creationism” that can be simplistically equated with “biblical Christianity,” apparently unaware of the spectrum of points of view held by many conservative Christian individuals and organisations on questions like the age of the universe, the role of intelligent design in the origin of species and so forth. He carelessly lumps together different organisations simply because they are Christian (in spite of their different views on science), he makes a blanket claim that literally “no rational person” – none at all – could believe in things like life after death or answers to prayer (in spite of the fact that Isaac Newton, cited by Brockie, believed in these things wholeheartedly). The wholesale denunciation of so many geniuses in history and the modern age is inexcusable, but understandable as a symptom of a fundamentalist approach to life: You’re either with me/us, or you’re not merely wrong but stupid.

Fundamentalism is as active now as ever, and in the name of reason it should now – as always – be opposed in all its forms.

Dr Glenn Peoples

For all those interested, here’s a debate that took place on September 9 2008 between Frank Turek of crossexamined.org and Christopher Hitchens, who has been getting the occasional mention here lately. The subject of the debate – what else: Does God Exist?

Enjoy. 🙂

Just a quick note on something that happened today:

I’ve been following with some interest the arguments about California’s proposition 8 that defined marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman, ruling out same-sex marriage. One disturbing development that has emerged is the wave of personal harassment, vandalism and even death threats that some conservative Christians are receiving by those who opposed proposition 8 and the religious convictions of many who supported it. For a couple of examples see here or here, for plenty more, as they say, “just google it.”

And then what should happen, but I get an email from an atheist with whom I’ve had some email exchanges recently, who wrote to me just for the purpose of saying, and I quote: “Funny how it’s always the religious who send the death threats.” He wasn’t talking about proposition 8, he was saying this because of a court case involving evolution where a judge received threats purporting to come from the opponents of evolution.

Funny how it’s always the religious? Is this the point where I say “funny how it’s ALWAYS THE ATHEISTS” who make untrue and stupid generalizations at points in history where the headlines scream at them just how wrong they are”?

But no, that would be to make a generalisation, I admit. Still, it did make me shake my head in disbelief. Nice going, Edward. There are none so blind.

Now that the pre-election madness is over, the podcast will be swinging back into action. The next episode will be on the “argument from atrocity,” where some argue that we should all reject Christianity because of its involvement with atrocities in history like the inquisition or the crusades.

Stay tuned!