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Truth Journal
Theism, Atheism, and Rationality
Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Plantinga has been called "the most important
philosopher of religion now writing." After taking his
Ph.D. from Yale in 1958, he taught at Wayne State University
(1958-63), Calvin College (1963-82), and has filled the John
A. O'Brien Chair of Philosophy at the University of Notre
Dame since 1982. He was president of the Western Division
of the American Philosophical Association during 1981-82 and
president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, which he
helped to found, from 1983 to 1986. He frequently directs
summer seminars for the National Endowment for the
Humanities. He has received numerous honors, including an
Award for Distinguished Teaching from the Danforth
Foundation, a fellowship from the Center for Advanced
Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, a fellowship from the
Guggenheim Foundation, a fellowship from the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, separate fellowships from the
N.E.H., and a fellowship from the American Council of
Learned Societies. He has been awarded an honorary
doctorate from Glasgow University. He has been invited to
deliver more distinguished lectures series at American,
Canadian, and British universities than can be listed here,
except to note that he was selected to give the eminent
Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen University in 1987-88. He was
recently honored by a volume of essays bearing his name in
D. Reidel's Profiles series. Widely acclaimed for his work
on the metaphysics of modality, the ontological argument,
the problem of evil, and the epistemology of religious
belief, he is the author or editor of seven books, including
God and Other Minds, The Nature of
Necessity, and Faith and Rationality. Several
of his articles, which have appeared in journals such as
Theoria, American Philosophical Quarterly,
Philosophical Studies, Journal of
Philosophy, and so forth, have been hailed as
masterpieces of the metaphysician's craft.
Atheological objections to the belief that there is such a person as God
come in many varieties. There are, for example, the familiar objections
that theism is somehow incoherent, that it is inconsistent with the
existence of evil, that it is a hypothesis ill-confirmed or maybe even
disconfirmed by the evidence, that modern science has somehow cast doubt
upon it, and the like. Another sort of objector claims, not that theism
is incoherent or false or probably false (after all, there is precious
little by way of cogent argument for that conclusion) but that it is in
some way unreasonable or irrational to believe in God,
even if that belief should happen to be true. Here we have, as a
centerpiece, the evidentialist objection to theistic belief.
The claim is that none of the theistic arguments-deductive, inductive,
or abductive-is successful; hence there is at best insufficient evidence
for the existence of God. But then the belief that there is such a
person as God is in some way intellectually improper-somehow foolish or
irrational. A person who believed without evidence that there are an
even number of ducks would be believing foolishly or irrationally; the
same goes for the person who believes in God without evidence. On this
view, one who accepts belief in God but has no evidence for that belief
is not, intellectually speaking, up to snuff. Among those who have
offered this objection are Antony Flew, Brand Blanshard, and Michael
Scriven. Perhaps more important is the enormous oral tradition: one
finds this objection to theism bruited about on nearly any major
university campus in the land. The objection in question has also been
endorsed by Bertrand Russell, who was once asked what he would say if,
after dying, he were brought into the presence of God and asked whyhe
had not been a believer. Russell's reply: "I'd say, 'Not enough
evidence, God! Not enough evidence!'" I'm not sure just how that reply
would be received; but my point is only that Russell, like many others,
has endorsed this evidentialist objection to theistic belief.
Now what, precisely, is the objector's claim here? He holds that the
theist without evidence is irrational or unreasonable;
what is the property with which he is crediting such a theist when he
thus describes him? What, exactly, or even approximately, does he mean
when he says that the theist without evidence is irrational?
Just what, as he sees it, is the problem with such a theist? The
objection can be seen as taking at least two forms; and there are at
least two corresponding senses or conceptions of rationality lurking in
the nearby bushes. According to the first, a theist who has no evidence
has violated an intellectual or cognitive duty of some sort.
He has gone contrary to an obligation laid upon him-perhaps by society,
or perhaps by his own nature as a creature capable of grasping
propositions and holding beliefs. There is an obligation or something
like an obligation to proportion one's beliefs to the strength of the
evidence. Thus according to John Locke, a mark of a rational person is
"the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the
proof it is built upon will warrant," and according to David Hume, "A
wise man proportions his belief to the evidence."
In the nineteenth century we have W.K. Clifford, that "delicious
enfant terrible" as William James called him, insisting that it
is monstrous, immoral, and perhaps even impolite to accept a belief for
which you have insufficient evidence:
Whoso would deserve well of his fellow in this
matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very
fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest
on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be
wiped away.[1]
He adds that if a
belief has been accepted on insufficient
evidence, the pleasure is a stolen one. Not only does it
deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of power which we do
not really possess, but it is sinful, stolen in defiance of
our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from
such beliefs as from a pestilence, which may shortly master
our body and spread to the rest of the town.
[2]
And finally:
To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and
for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient
evidence.[3]
(It is not hard to detect, in these quotations, the "tone of robustious
pathos" with which James credits Clifford.) On this view theists
without evidence-my sainted grandmother, for example-are flouting their
epistemic duties and deserve our disapprobation and disapproval. Mother
Teresa, for example, if she has not arguments for her belief in God,
then stands revealed as a sort of intellectual libertine-someone who has
gone contrary to her intellectual obligations and is deserving of
reproof and perhaps even disciplinary action.
Now the idea that there are intellectual duties or obligations is
difficult but not implausible, and I do not mean to question it here.
It is less plausible, however, to suggest that I would or could be going
contrary to my intellectual duties in believing, without evidence, that
there is such a person as God. For first, my beliefs are not, for the
most part, within my control. If, for example, you offer me $1,000,000
to cease believing that Mars is smaller than Venus, there is no way I
can collect. But the same holds for my belief in God: even if I wanted
to, I couldn't-short of heroic measures like coma inducing drugs-just
divest myself of it. (At any rate there is nothing I can do
directly; perhaps there is a sort of regimen that if followed
religiously would issue, in the long run, in my no longer accepting
belief in God.) But secondly, there seems no reason to think that I
have such an obligation. Clearly I am not under an obligation to have
evidence for everything I believe; that would not be possible.
But why, then, suppose that I have an obligation to accept belief in God
only if I accept other propositions which serve as evidence for it?
This is by no means self-evident or just obvious, and it is extremely
hard to see how to find a cogent argument for it.
In any event, I think the evidentialist objector can take a more
promising line. He can hold, not that the theist without evidence has
violated some epistemic duty-after all, perhaps he can't help himself-
but that he is somehow intellectually flawed or disfigured. Consider
someone who believes that Venus is smaller than Mercury-not because he
has evidence, but because he read it in a comic book and always believes
whatever he reads in comic books-or consider someone who holds that
belief on the basis of an outrageously bad argument. Perhaps there is
no obligation he has failed to meet; nevertheless his intellectual
condition is defective in some way. He displays a sort of deficiency, a
flaw, an intellectual dysfunction of some sort. Perhaps he is like
someone who has an astigmatism, or is unduly clumsy, or suffers from
arthritis. And perhaps the evidentialist objection is to be construed,
not as the claim that the theist without evidence has violated some
intellectual obligations, but that he suffers from a certain sort of
intellectual deficiency. The theist without evidence, we might say, is
an intellectual gimp.
Alternatively but similarly, the idea might be that the theist without
evidence is under a sort of illusion, a kind of pervasive illusion
afflicting the great bulk of mankind over the great bulk of the time
thus far allotted to it. Thus Freud saw religious belief as "illusions,
fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most insistent wishes of
mankind."[4 ]He sees theistic belief as a matter of wish-fulfillment.
Men are paralyzed by and appalled at the spectacle of the overwhelming,
impersonal forces that control our destiny, but mindlessly take no
notice, no account of us and our needs and desires; they therefore
invent a heavenly father of cosmic proportions, who exceeds our earthly
fathers in goodness and love as much as in power. Religion, says Freud,
is the "universal obsessional neurosis of humanity", and it is destined
to disappear when human beings learn to face reality as it is, resisting
the tendency to edit it to suit our fancies.
A similar sentiment is offered by Karl Marx:
Religion . . . is the self-consciousness and the
self-feeling of the man who has either not yet found
himself, or else (having found himself) has lost himself
once more. But man is not an abstract being . . . Man is
the world of men, the State, society. This State, this
society, produce religion, produce a perverted world
consciousness, because they are a perverted world . . .
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings
of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of
unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the
people.
The people cannot be really happy until it has
been deprived of illusory happiness by the abolition of
religion. The demand that the people should shake itself
free of illusion as to its own condition is the demand that
it should abandon a condition which needs
illusion.[5]
Note that Marx speaks here of a perverted world consciousness
produced by a perverted world. This is a perversion from a correct, or
right, or natural condition, brought about somehow by an unhealthy and
perverted social order. From the Marx-Freud point of view, the theist
is subject to a sort of cognitive dysfunction, a certain lack of
cognitive and emotional health. We could put this as follows: the
theist believes as he does only because of the power of this illusion,
this perverted neurotic condition. He is insane, in the etymological
sense of that term; he is unhealthy. His cognitive equipment, we might
say, isn't working properly; it isn't functioning as it ought to. If
his cognitive equipment were working properly, working the way it ought
to work, he wouldn't be under the spell of this illusion. He would
instead face the world and our place in it with the clear-eyed
apprehension that we are alone in it, and that any comfort and help we
get will have to be our own devising. There is no Father in heaven to
turn to, and no prospect of anything, after death, but dissolution.
("When we die, we rot," says Michael Scriven, in one of his more
memorable lines.)
Now of course the theist is likely to display less than overwhelming
enthusiasm about the idea that he is suffering from a cognitive
deficiency, is under a sort of widespread illusion endemic to the human
condition. It is at most a liberal theologian or two, intent on novelty
and eager to concede as much as possible to contemporary secularity, who
would embrace such an idea. The theist doesn't see himself as suffering
from cognitive deficiency. As a matter of fact, he may be inclined to
see the shoe as on the other foot; he may be inclined to think of the
atheist as the person who is suffering, in this way, from some
illusion, from some noetic defect, from an unhappy, unfortunate, and
unnatural condition with deplorable noetic consequences. He will see
the atheist as somehow the victim of sin in the world-
his own sin or the sin of others. According to the book of
Romans, unbelief is a result of sin; it originates in an effort
to "suppress the truth in unrighteousness." According to John Calvin,
God has created us with a nisus or tendency to see His hand in the world
around us; a "sense of deity," he says, "is inscribed in the hearts of
all." He goes on:
Indeed, the perversity of the impious, who
though they struggle furiously are unable to extricate
themselves from the fear of God, is abundant testimony that
his conviction, namely, that there is some God, is naturally
inborn in all, and is fixed deep within, as it were in the
very marrow. . . . From this we conclude that it is not a
doctrine that must first be learned in school, but one of
which each of us is master from his mother's womb and which
nature itself permits no man to forget.[6]
Were it not for the existence of sin in the world, says Calvin, human
beings would believe in God to the same degree and with the same natural
spontaneity displayed in our belief in the existence of other persons,
or an external world, or the past. This is the natural human
condition; it is because of our presently unnatural sinful condition
that many of us find belief in God difficult or absurd. The fact is,
Calvin thinks, one who does not believe in God is in an epistemically
defective position-rather like someone who does not believe that his
wife exists, or thinks that she is a cleverly constructed robot that has
no thoughts, feelings, or consciousness. Thus the believer reverses
Freud and Marx, claiming that what they see as sickness is really health
and what they see as health is really sickness.
Obviously enough, the dispute here is ultimately ontological, or
theological, or metaphysical; here we see the ontological and ultimately
religious roots of epistemological discussions of rationality. What you
take to be rational, at least in the sense in question, depends upon
your metaphysical and religious stance. It depends upon your
philosophical anthropology. Your view as to what sort of creature a
human being is will determine, in whole or in part, your views as to
what is rational or irrational for human beings to believe; this view
will determine what you take to be natural, or normal, or healthy, with
respect to belief. So the dispute as to who is rational and who is
irrational here can't be settled just by attending to epistemological
considerations; it is fundamentally not an epistemological dispute, but
an ontological or theological dispute. How can we tell what it is
healthy for human beings to believe unless we know or have some idea
about what sort of creature a human being is? If you think he is
created by God in the image of God, and created with a natural tendency
to see God's hand in the world about us, a natural tendency to recognize
that he has been created and is beholden to his creator, owing his
worship and allegiance, then of course you will not think of belief in
God as a manifestation of wishful thinking or as any kind of defect at
all. It is then much more like sense perception or memory, though in
some ways much more important. On the other hand, if you think of a
human being as the product of blind evolutionary forces, if you think
there is no God and that human beings are part of a godless universe,
then you will be inclined to accept a view according to which belief in
God is a sort of disease or dysfunction, due perhaps, to a sort of
softening of the brain.
So the dispute as to who is healthy and who diseased has ontological or
theological roots, and is finally to be settled, if at all at that
level. And here I would like to present a consideration that, I think
tells in favor of the theistic way of looking at the matter. As I have
been representing that matter, theist and atheist alike speak of a sort
of dysfunction, of cognitive faculties or cognitive equipment not
working properly, of their not working as they ought to. But how are we
to understand that? What is it for something to work properly? Isn't
there something deeply problematic about the idea of proper
functioning? What is it for my cognitive faculties to be working
properly? What is it for a natural organism-a tree, for example-to be in
good working order, to be functioning properly? Isn't working
properly relative to our aims and interests? A cow is functioning
properly when she gives milk; a garden patch is as it ought to be when
it displays a luxuriant preponderance of the sorts of vegetation we
propose to promote. But then it seems patent that what constitutes
proper functioning depends upon our aims and interests. So far as
nature herself goes, isn't a fish decomposing in a hill of corn
functioning just as properly, just as excellently, as one happily
swimming about chasing minnows? But then what could be meant by
speaking of "proper functioning" with respect to our cognitive
faculties? A chunk of reality-an organism, a part of an organism, an
ecosystem, a garden patch-"functions properly" only with respect to a
sort of grid we impose on nature-a grid that incorporates our
aims and desires.
But from a theistic point of view, the idea of proper functioning, as
applied to us and our cognitive equipment, is not more problematic than,
say, that of a Boeing 747's working properly. Something we have
constructed-a heating system, a rope, a linear accelerator-is
functioning properly when it is functioning in the way it was designed
to function. My car works properly if it works the way it was designed
to work. My refrigerator is working properly if it refrigerates, if it
does what a refrigerator is designed to do. This, I think, is the root
idea of working properly. But according to theism, human beings, like
ropes and linear accelerators, have been designed; they have been
created and designed by God. Thus, he has an easy answer to the
relevant set of questions: What is proper functioning? What is it for
my cognitive faculties to be working properly? What is cognitive
dysfunction? What is it to function naturally? My cognitive faculties
are functioning naturally, when they are functioning in the way God
designed them to function.
On the other hand, if the atheological evidentialist objector claims
that the theist without evidence is irrational, and if he goes on to
construe irrationality in terms of defect or dysfunction, then he owes
us an account of this notion. Why does he take it that the theist is
somehow dysfunctional, at least in this area of his life? More
importantly, how does he conceive dysfunction? How does he see
dysfunction and its opposite? How does he explain the idea of an
organism's working properly, or of some organic system or part of an
organism's thus working? What account does he give of it? Presumably
he can't see the proper functioning of my noetic equipment as its
functioning in the way it was designed to function; so how can he put
it?
Two possibilities leap to mind. First, he may be thinking of proper
functioning as functioning in a way that helps us attain our
ends. In this way, he may say, we think of our bodies as
functioning properly, as being healthy, when they function in the way we
want them to, when they function in such a way as to enable us to do the
sorts of things we want to do. But of course this will not be a
promising line to take in the present context; for while perhaps the
atheological objector would prefer to see our cognitive
faculties function in such a way as not to produce belief in God in us,
the same cannot be said, naturally enough, for the theist. Taken this
way the atheological evidentialist's objection comes to little more than
the suggestion that the atheologician would prefer it if people did not
believe in God without evidence. That would be an autobiographical
remark on his part, having the interest such remarks usually have in
philosophical contexts.
A second possibility: proper functioning and allied notions are to be
explained in terms of aptness for promoting survival, either at an
individual or species level. There isn't time to say much about this
here; but it is at least and immediately evident that the atheological
objector would then owe us an argument for the conclusion that belief in
God is indeed less likely to contribute to our individual survival, or
the survival of our species than is atheism or agnosticism. But how
could such an argument go? Surely the prospects for a non-question
begging argument of this sort are bleak indeed. For if theism-Christian
theism, for example-is true, then it seems wholly implausible to think
that widespread atheism, for example, would be more likely to contribute
to the survival of our race than widespread theism.
By way of conclusion: a natural way to understand such notions as
rationality and irrationality is in terms of the proper functioning of
the relevant cognitive equipment. Seen from this perspective, the
question whether it is rational to believe in God without the evidential
support of other propositions is really a metaphysical or theological
dispute. The theist has an easy time explaining the notion of our
cognitive equipment's functioning properly: our cognitive equipment
functions properly when it functions in the way God designed it to
function. The atheist evidential objector, however, owes us an account
of this notion. What does he mean when he complains that the theist
without evidence displays a cognitive defect of some sort? How does he
understand the notion of cognitive malfunction?
NOTES
[1]W.K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief," in Lectures and
Essays (London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 183.
[2]Ibid, p. 184.
[3]Ibid, p. 186.
[4]Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton,
1961), p. 30.
[5]K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3:
Introduction to a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right,
by Karl Marx (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975).
[6]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans.
Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.3 (p. 43-
44).
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