Playing with fire

Commonweal, May 21, 2004 by Bernard G. Prusak

God?

A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist

William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Oxford University Press, $19.95, 176 pp.

I have seen things," Thomas Aquinas is reputed to have remarked toward the end of his life, "which make all my writings like straw." The statement is obscure. Straw is extremely combustible. Did he mean that his writings were fit only for burning? Or did he mean to suggest that he had been playing with fire, something so elemental and powerful that it cannot safely be grasped, or sometimes even contained: something that threatened to reduce his words to ashes?

Playing with fire seems to describe well what human beings who dare to talk about the first and last things--what we call the divine--dare to do. It is, if we are honest with ourselves, a bold, possibly even foolhardy undertaking. When God's reply to Moses in Exodus 3:14 is read in this light, "I am who am," or "I will be what I will be," might be interpreted, "How could you ever know?"

Following the example of Aquinas's theological and philosophical writings, God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist, which should be subtitled "between an Evangelical Christian [Craig] and an Atheist [Sinnott-Armstrong]," takes up the perennial question of whether God exists, where God refers to the all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing, personal, eternal creator of Christian theism. Both authors bring impressive learning and passion to the question. What the book does not consider, however, is what a debate of this question is good for. In other words, what is such a debate supposed to do: make theists? make atheists? make agnostics? If so, we would have to believe that a person could be converted by a syllogism. Yet further, we would have to put great faith in the reach of human reason.

First the arguments--though obviously a brief review can do little more than state the conclusions. In the book's opening chapter, Craig presents "five reasons God exists." He argues, first, that "God makes sense of the origin of the universe"; second, that "God makes sense of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life"; third, that "God makes sense of objective moral values in the world"; and, fourth, that "God makes sense of the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus." This last argument calls for explanation: according to Craig, the facts about Jesus credited by New Testament scholars, believing and unbelieving alike, are best explained by the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead--a statement that implies God's existence. Craig proposes, fifth and finally, that "God can be immediately known and experienced"; as he sees it, belief in God is thus "a properly basic belief," foundational to a person's belief system in the same way that belief in other minds is.

In chapter 2, Sinnott-Armstrong criticizes each of these "reasons" rather convincingly, at least inasmuch as Craig believes himself to have eliminated all reasonable doubt about God's existence. Sinnott-Armstrong has interesting things to say about the argument from fine-tuning, and he rightly observes more generally that "what [Craig] argues for is a creator or a designer or an external source of religious experience," which is not self-evidently the same as the God of Christian theism. In other words, Craig's arguments, even if they were absolutely conclusive, do not yield the conclusion that he wants.

Craig counters that his "five reasons to believe that God exists constitute a progressive, systematic case for Christian theism," so that in the end we "recover a striking number of the traditional attributes of God." Yet he does not say why all of these attributes should be understood to belong to the same being, namely, the God of Christian theism; instead, he seems to take it on faith. Craig also claims that Sinnott-Armstrong's rejection of the argument from fine tuning exemplifies "the willful blindness to which traditional atheism leads"--a statement that, while not representative of Craig at his best, is too revealing of his mindset to be passed over. The heavens may tell the glory of God to someone who already believes; but it seems dubious to claim that persons who do not share this faith lack all "excuse."

Sinnott-Armstrong then goes on the offensive, presenting several "reasons to believe that there is no God." First, he offers a version of "the evidential argument from evil" (according to him): "Any neutral survey of the evidence is ... bound to point away from the existence of God." Second, he turns to what he calls "the problem of action," or how an eternal being could act in time. According to Sinnott-Armstrong, "To say that God is eternal is to say that He exists outside of time," a modality of existence that "can be explained by analogy with numbers." Since numbers, however, cannot be conceived to act in time, neither can God, who is thereby stripped of the title of creator and banished from history.

Finally, Sinnott-Armstrong claims that belief in God violates our common standards for justified belief--first and foremost that "we should not believe in entities for which we have no evidence." In reply, Craig might well have remarked that Sinnott-Armstrong's second argument turns on a lame analogy, and that his third limps from never having asked both just what could count as evidence for God's existence--could anything for Sinnott-Armstrong?--and further what it means to say that God "exists." Surely, if God exists, God does not exist as a rock, plant, animal, artifact, or human being does. The medievals took it to be God's essence to exist--see again Exodus 3:14--so that what God is suffices for God to be. Now, can we really talk of such a being as existing, or even as a being, when we use these words to speak of other things in our common experience? Aquinas and others thought not and so spoke of God "analogically," which is to say through a mirror darkly. But how do you argue for or against the "existence" of such a "being"? Thoughts like these led the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to wonder whether arguments about the existence of God are not really about ways of envisioning the world.