Why Many Philosophers Take Theism
Seriously Even Without Serious Evidence
Bryan Frances
A great many philosophers don’t believe in God.
I mean: they don’t believe in anything even remotely like the being, or beings,
worshipped by Christians, Jews, or Muslims. In a certain sense, they see no
real reason to think that virtually any of the common religious beliefs are true.
And yet, they take theism very seriously. They don’t merely take it
seriously as in ‘Well, religion is a phenomenon of great personal importance
(for many people) and tremendous social significance (for almost all
societies)’. They do take it seriously in those respects, but they also take it
seriously in the sense that it is something that really may well be true. But that’s pretty strange, right?
Why would an intelligent and reflective person consider a view to have a decent chance at truth when
they think there is no real evidence for it? Isn’t that just irrational? In this essay I will try to explain
what’s going on with these philosophers. I will not discuss any of my own views.
Let me emphasize, right here at the beginning, that there is a lot about religion
that they do not take seriously. A bunch of religious doctrine is just plain
clownish. For instance, the idea that the earth is only a few thousand years
old is about as reasonable as the idea that the sun goes around the earth. Sure, it
might not seem that way at first glance, but once one has a solid background in
science one sees how the two ideas are on a par when it comes to evidence: our
overall evidence for each idea goes incredibly strongly against the ideas.
Similarly, the idea that the Adam and Eve story from the Bible is anything other
than myth is not worth much time. Finally, the idea that Jesus rose from the dead or some other religious
leaders performed genuine miracles seems to many philosophers to be extremely unlikely as well. Despite
all that, they still think there is a real chance that God exists, which is why they are not atheists (which is
not to say that no philosophers are atheists; a huge percentage of them definitely are atheists).
Let me very briefly explain what I mean when I say that they
think there is “no real reason” for thinking there is a god, of
any kind you like. These philosophers have looked long and
hard at all the arguments for the existence of God that they
could find. Their opinion: the
arguments are bad.
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When we try to make them deductively valid (so there are no missing premises; everything is explicit),
there’s always at least one premise that we end up thinking is totally defective and beyond repair. I mean:
our total evidence regarding that premise supplies no good reason to think the premise is true. Often our
total evidence screams out that the premise is false.
Let me give one quick example of the arguments I’m thinking of.
1. The doctors said that Grandma’s cancer had spread throughout several organs in her body and
was unstoppable.
2. A month later they said her cancer was completely gone. It’s been five years since then and she
has had no cancer at all.
3. The best explanation is that God answered our prayers and healed Grandma.
4. So, that’s pretty good evidence that God exists.
Philosophers have no problem accepting that (1) & (2) are often true. But they balk at (3): just because
some amazing things happen to our bodies doesn’t give us even a tiny good reason to think there has been
a divine miracle. Instead, all it shows is that we have a lot to learn about cancer, which we already knew
quite well.
I’m not going to present any more of the reasons for thinking the standard theistic arguments offer no
good reason to believe any of the characteristic theistic claims such as ‘God is real’, ‘God loves us’, etc.
There are two reasons for this. One, it would take too damn long. Two, those reasons don’t matter for the
purposes of this essay.
Not only are philosophers skeptical about the quality of the arguments for theistic beliefs, many of them
are skeptical about the quality of the arguments against theistic belief. For instance, there are plenty of
impressive arguments for physicalism, understood as applying not just to humans (“Our mental life is
entirely physical”) but to all of reality (“Everything is physical, so there are no supernatural beings”), but
in the view of many philosophers all those arguments really accomplish, if anything, is that there probably
isn’t anything non-physical about people, dogs, cats, goats, etc. Many philosophers don’t think they are
good arguments against the idea that there are no supernatural entities at all.
There are five things that when combined make these
philosophers take theism seriously: testimony, spiritual
experience, the weirdness of science, the weirdness of
philosophy, and the possible poverty of our evidence.
I’ll go over each in turn. When I’m finished with that,
I’ll present a reason for thinking that we could discover that theism is false anyway.
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Testimony
There are a great many exceedingly intelligent people who
believe in God even after many years of reflection in which they
have rigorously subject their religious beliefs to every known
criticism. Their retained opinion that God exists amounts to
expert testimonial evidence that God exists: they are
experts regarding the evidence, pro and con, regarding theism
and they hold that God does exist.
It’s true that this testimonial evidence is not “direct” evidence, like what we get in science. It’s just
testimonial, which is indirect and not nearly as satisfying. (When philosophers say they think the
arguments for the existence of God are no good they are usually restricting themselves to talking about
the ones that don’t appeal to testimony at any point.) But expert testimonial evidence is not nothing, as
the people involved are incredibly intelligent, informed, fair, open-minded, reflective, trained in
argumentation, etc.
It’s easy to discount the preacher on television who spouts idiotic religious
commentary. He says that God spoke to him and told him that his flock of
worshippers needs to donate money to build a new
church, or that gays are immoral, or that women are
morally and intellectually inferior to men. Most
philosophers hear that and say to themselves: Yeah,
right. In the judgment of many philosophers, these
people are literally mentally ill. If the only
theists in the world were people like them there is no
way non-theistic philosophers would take theism seriously.
Neither would they take theism as having a serious chance at truth if the only theists were intelligent,
reflective, law-abiding, decent people who became theists but never evaluated
the relevant evidence with any real expertise. Most philosophers believe that
most of these people are sheep when it comes to their religious beliefs: they
adopt the beliefs that are current in their society for reasons that usually have
little to do with evidence of any kind. I know that’s a little insulting (but only a
little, as many philosophers think we all are sheep in a great many respects), but
philosophers are not like politicians, trying to flatter people or make friends.
The people who make agnostic philosophers think there might be something to theism are the ones who
have proven that they have extremely
sharp minds, have been trained in argumentation for
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many years, have encountered and fully understood all the known criticisms of
their theistic beliefs, and yet have stuck with them despite being very familiar with
those criticisms. The philosophers who aren’t theists don’t believe the theists when
they say that theism is true. And the agnostic philosophers
don’t have a lot of respect for some other things the
theistic philosophers say. For instance, the contemporary
Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (at right) thinks there are dozens of
reasonably good arguments for theism. For what it’s worth, when many
philosophers hear that they think to themselves that Plantinga is so far gone that
he’ll latch on to any argument, no matter how bad, in order to defend his views.
Regardless of what’s going on there, not all theistic philosophers are like Plantinga in that respect. If
anyone is the smartest person in philosophy today, it’s Saul Kripke (at left, on the beach), who is a theist.
Again, their opinions don’t make them think theism is true. But they do make them think this:
There’s a real chance that we’re missing some
strong non-testimonial evidence for theism
Think about it: if so many exceedingly intelligent theistic philosophers are sticking with their theism
despite being so familiar with the state of argumentation regarding theistic claims, then it’s a good guess
that they are doing so because they have some strong non-testimonial evidence that backs up their theism.
I don’t want to overstate the case: the “guess” of the previous paragraph is just a guess, just one
explanation among several. There are other explanations for why they stick with their theistic beliefs; no
doubt about it! But given how sharp and reflective the theists in question are, most of the alternative
explanations are quite implausible (e.g., the explanation ‘Those theists just don’t understand science’,
‘They haven’t thought things through properly’, ‘They have yet to understand that the suffering of
innocent children proves that God doesn’t exist’, ‘They just believe pretty much anything their parents
told them’, ‘They are unable to get over their childhood indoctrination’). The idea that non-theists are just
plain missing out on some good theistic evidence—evidence that at least
some of the smart theists are aware of—is an explanatory hypothesis with a
real chance to be true.
Spiritual Experience
Many people are convinced of God’s existence because they know that
some intelligent and reflective people sincerely claim to have experienced God, actually perceived
his presence. When addressing this topic the famous biologist and highly confident atheist Richard
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Dawkins chooses to focus on the clearly mistaken and deluded of the folks who claim to have had such
perceptions.
One of the cleverer and more mature of my undergraduate contemporaries, who was deeply religious,
went camping in the Scottish isles. In the middle of the night he and his girlfriend were woken in
their tent by the voice of the devil – Satan himself; there could be no possible doubt: the voice was in
every sense diabolical. My friend would never forget this horrifying experience, and it was one of the
factors that later drove him to be ordained. My youthful self was impressed by
his story, and I recounted it to a gathering of zoologists relaxing in the Rose
and Crown Inn, Oxford. Two of them happened to be experienced
ornithologists, and they roared with laughter. ‘Manx Shearwater!’ they
shouted in delighted chorus. One of them added that the diabolical shrieks and
cackles of this species have earned it, in various parts of the world and various
languages, the local nickname ‘Devil Bird’ [picture at right].
Many people believe in God because they believe they have seen a vision of him – or of an angel or a
virgin in blue – with their own eyes. Or he speaks to them inside their heads. This argument from
personal experience is the one that is most convincing to those who claim to have had one. But it is
the least convincing to anyone else, and anyone knowledgeable about psychology.
You say you have experienced God directly? Well, some people have
experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn’t impress you. Peter
Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper [at left], distinctly heard the voice of Jesus
telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life…. Religious
experiences are different only in that the people who claim them are numerous
(Dawkins 87-88).
Depending on the right interpretation of the passage, I am with Dawkins 100% here, at least up to the last
sentence. I think the brain is an awesome device not merely for getting accurate information about the
world but for generating the most convincing illusions. I am at least a little confident that of the
people who claim to have perceived God, the percentage who are right in that particular judgment is close
to zero (if not equal to zero). Again, my opinion is widespread amongst philosophers.
But this is to focus on the wrong group of individuals.
When it comes to the question ‘Has anyone actually
perceived God?’ we need to look at the people with the
best case for providing an affirmative answer: intelligent
people who have devoted their lives to some rigorous
training in a form of meditation. Dawkins probably
doesn’t know it, but these people tend to be highly
skeptical of their ability to perceive God. The person who
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meditates is often told that he or she has, once again, failed to understand what she is experiencing; she is
like a blind person who is struggling to see for the first time. And this is usually held
to be true for people at all stages of meditation, even the so-called experts.
Moreover, contemporary psychology has shown that the range of human experience is
simply incredible. Oliver Sacks and others have documented the bizarre experiences
people can have. And we have yet to discover the limits of experience. Who knows
what the bounds of experience really are?
Summing up, many of the people who claim to have experienced God are intelligent, sincere, reflective,
aware of the objections to their claims, and trained to deal with objections in intelligent ways;
furthermore, we already know that human experience can be incredible compared to the experiences we
have in our ordinary lives. This makes many philosophers think that perhaps some folks have
experienced a supernatural entity. They are not suggesting that any of this proves that the meditators have
experienced God; they are neither accepting nor rejecting that view. But the meditators do make some
philosophers think that there’s a real chance that one can perceive God, as that’s a
good explanation of why they are sticking with their claims about spiritual experience despite being so
familiar with the state of argumentation regarding those claims. Sure, there are other explanations; no
doubt about it! But given how sharp, informed, and reflective the theists in question are, the idea that we
non-theists are just plain missing out on some quasi-perceptual evidence for theism—evidence that some
theists have—is a hypothesis with a real chance to be true.
The Weirdness of Science
We all tend to think that over the last few centuries science
has provided a big objection to religion: if science discloses
truth, then many of the reasons for thinking God really
exists fall apart. That’s right, or so many philosophers think,
but in another way science supplies an indirect argument
against atheism, as I’ll try to show in this section.
Science has proven that the universe is almost unimaginably bizarre.
Just think about what we know about the universe. The earth is pretty
damn big: about 25,000 miles all the way around. But when you
compare the size of the earth to that of our galaxy, it’s like comparing
a grain of sand to the whole beach—that’s how comparatively
minuscule our earth is. And our galaxy? When it comes to the
cosmos our enormous galaxy is just a grain of sand compared to a
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beach.
Or consider Einstein’s theory of relativity. Suppose two things happen:
you turn on the oven, call that event X, and some person honks the horn
in her car, call that event Y. It’s seems as obvious as anything ever gets
that exactly one of the following has got to be true: either X happened
before Y, Y happened before X, or they happened at the same time.
Surely that’s obvious, right? But no: according to the standard
interpretation of the theory of relativity all three options are
true. That is, from some physical perspectives, X happened before Y;
from others, Y happened before X; and from yet others X and Y
happened at the same time. None of the perspectives is the “right” one.
Whether X happened before Y is relative to the physical perspective in
question, on how people in the three perspectives would be moving
relative to X and Y. How X and Y are temporally related to one another is perfectly objective in the sense
that it doesn’t depend on what any person thinks or feels, but it does depend on the physical perspective
from which X and Y are seen. Or so many physicists believe.
Now consider quantum mechanics, which is the mathematics behind the
theory of atoms, electrons, protons, and other microscopic particles. On the
one hand, this is probably the most impressive theory ever developed. For
instance, its predictive accuracy is simply mind-boggling (e.g.,
some of its calculations are accurate to one part in a trillion). But there is a
version of quantum mechanics, due to the work of physicist David Bohm,
the entire universe consists of just one
particle that exists in a physical space of almost
unlimited dimensions. The activity of that one particle generates
which says that
the entire universe, including people. No one knows whether Bohm’s one-particle view is true, but it’s
taken seriously as a live option. It’s hard to imagine anything weirder than that.
Or consider mathematics. Suppose you have a collection of
objects O1, O2, O3, etc. Now you add an object to that
collection—an object that was not already in the collection and
one that really and truly exists. You would think that the
collection is bigger now: it has increased in size because it has
one more thing in it. But no! Mathematicians insist that if the
original set was infinite in size (e.g., maybe it was the
collection of all even numbers) then adding a new thing to it doesn’t make it any bigger: it was infinite to
start with and after adding one new item its size is still infinite: it’s the same size even though you added
something new to it.
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That might not strike you as too weird, at least if you think about it for a while. After all, when I said that
you had a collection of objects and you add a new item to it, you were
probably implicitly thinking of a finite set, such as the set of letters of the
English alphabet, and not an infinite set. You may have thought to yourself
something like this:
Well, sure! If you’ve got a collection that has infinitely many things in
it, and then you add one more, you’re still going to have infinitely
many things in it. Infinity plus one equals infinity. Big deal! There’s
nothing bigger than infinity, so you can’t really make the collection
any bigger.
That’s entirely reasonable. But there are two problems with it.
First, it suggests that the number of even numbers 2, 4, 6,
8, etc. is the same as the number of even and odd numbers
1, 2, 3, 4, etc. (See two pictures.) Both collections of
numbers have the same number of members: infinity.
Most people have difficulty grasping that.
Second and more importantly, the idea that you can’t make an infinite set any bigger is wrong too,
because there are lots of different infinities: some
infinities are
bigger than others. I mean: you can have a collection that has
infinitely many things, add some new things to it, and end up with a bigger
collection. It won’t do any good to add just one thing, or even 99 trillion,
but if you add the right kind of new infinite collection to the old infinite
collection, then you get a bigger infinite collection. For instance there are more numbers from 0 to 1 than
there counting numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Weird but true.
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Or consider biology. It really is hard to reflect on the human eye,
or the heart, or photosynthesis, and think anything other than
‘How on earth did nature get this way?’ The idea that atoms and
molecules randomly moving
through space subject to blind
forces like gravity and
electromagnetism could create
eyes and hearts seems crazy.
Instead, it certainly looks as
though someone had to have designed the human eye and the other
amazing parts of nature. So, we have a variant of the traditional
design argument—which philosophers know is no damn good
in almost any form. But when we examine nature we do learn that
biological life is incredible: over millions of years of random fluctuations things like eyes and hearts can
come about naturally just by changing in accord with the laws of nature. Now, some theists will say that
God designed the laws of nature. I don’t know of any good evidence for that view, but my point here is
just this: microscopic particles zooming around obeying the laws of nature naturally produced all the
wonderful biological things on earth, and that is just incredible no matter how the laws of nature came
about.
Here’s another completely amazing thing: did the universe have a
beginning, with the Big Bang perhaps, or did it always exist?
There are just three possibilities, and each one is utterly bizarre:
a. The universe had no beginning, so it goes back in time infinitely. So
the question ‘Where did matter come from?’ has no real answer.
b. The universe had a beginning, but nothing caused it to start up. So
the birth of matter had no cause whatsoever. It just started up
without anything at all making it happen.
c. The universe had a beginning, and something—call it X—caused it
to happen. So X would have to be non-physical, since it caused the
beginning of the physical universe: X is a non-physical thing
causing the universe to happen.
Pretty strange, no? Yet consider this: exactly one of (a)-(c) has simply got to be true (as those are the only
possibilities) and yet each one is mind-boggling.
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And there are other, related questions. Are there other universes completely cut off from ours, as some
adventurous physicists have proposed after thinking hard about quantum theory? Was Einstein really right
about spacetime, thinking of it as a single entity with bizarre properties?
I could go on, with more amazing things about our universe, but why bother? It isn’t hard to realize that
the universe is utterly astonishing in the sense that it contains things and features that were totally
unpredictable from the standpoint of scientifically uninformed common sense.
The philosophers I’m writing about do not think any of this weirdness provides decent evidence for
theism. But when they think to themselves that theism is utterly bizarre, they remind themselves that
that’s not a good reason to think it’s unlikely to be true. The
universe is filled with the
bizarre, so it would be foolish of us to reject theism just because it’s bizarre.
Here’s an analogy. There is no good reason to think the moon is made of cheese. None whatsoever. Now
pretend that we never set foot on the moon. Pretend further that we make some amazing discoveries: one
of Jupiter’s moons is made of chocolate, another is made of frozen yoghurt, and yet another is a huge
clump of rutabagas; and Saturn’s moons turn out to be made of various foods as well. None of these
discoveries suggests, at all, that our moon is made of cheese. But it makes the hypothesis a lot less
bizarre, right? Before finding out about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn you would have scoffed at the
childish idea that our moon is made of cheese; but afterwards you can no longer discount it.
Well, philosophers who know a lot about the weirdness of science have similar thoughts: even though
there is no good, non-testimonial evidence for theism (or so they say), they know from science that the
universe is so bizarre that the oddity of theism should not make one scoff at theism.
I will describe more fully how this is relevant to theism at the end of the next section.
The Weirdness of Philosophy
Philosophy has been around in one form or other for thousands of years.
In the Land of Long Ago, pretty much anyone who was an intellectual
was a “philosopher”, as there wasn’t anything else (e.g., there was no
science yet). However, philosophy is still going as strong as ever in 21st
century, and part of the reason is that over the millennia people have
uncovered mysteries that have resisted solution and show that our
universe is astonishing and unpredictable. I’ll go over a few of those
mysteries here.
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A good portion of these mysteries have to do with us as human beings. Is consciousness just a
physically generated aspect of the brain? And if, as seems likely, consciousness is physically generated,
how does that happen: how does the technicolor of consciousness arise from the electrochemical activity
of the grey matter of our brains? No one knows.
Another mystery, about meaning: do our lives have any
overarching meaning or purpose, or are meaning and purpose
things we invent for ourselves as we go along? Ethics supplies
eternal questions as well: are there any real moral truths, or does
morality reflect nothing but a bundle of subjective preferences
and emotions that we are genetically programmed to accept or
are indoctrinated into? Is free will ruled out by the (alleged)
fact that we are just highly complex biological systems wholly
obedient to stubbornly impersonal physical laws of nature—
exactly like any other flesh and blood organism?
All of those are familiar philosophical mysteries,
ones you can find in many popular philosophy books and standard
introductory courses in philosophy. In saying that they are
“familiar” I don’t mean to say that they are easy in any way:
clearly, some of them are profoundly difficult to probe. I mean
rather to point out that those mysteries are well-known in that
many educated people outside of universities are aware of at least
some of them.
So what other philosophical mysteries are there, ones completely out of public view?
One unexpected mystery suggests—and I kid you not—that there are no ordinary
material objects such as cats or cups.
You think you have a can and a
coffee cup? Nope, not really. There are electrons and other particles where you
think your cup and car are, but there is no cup or cat there. The universe is
nothing more than a swarm of particles; electrons exist but cats, cups, and humans
do not.
Another mystery suggests that the whole notion of linguistic and
cognitive meaning is an illusion: so ‘I have shoes on’ and
‘Bill Clinton was President of the USA’ are meaningless, as is
every sentence and word in this essay and every thought running
through your mind. The arguments for this astonishing thesis
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have been analyzed for centuries, and there is no significant agreement as to what’s wrong with them.
Yet another mystery seems to show that the notion of truth
is
contradictory in the sense that it is simply incoherent: nothing is true and
nothing is false—including this very statement. You probably think that we
know of tons of truths, such as ‘I have clothes on’, ‘Twice two is four’, and
‘Miles Davis had soul’. But even if the mystery of meaning is illusory, another
mystery says that no statement whatsoever is true because the notion of truth is
as contradictory as the notion of a naked woman with a dress on.
The final mystery appears to show that even if there are trees and tables,
none of them are green, brown, or any other color. The universe is
utterly colorless. There may be bananas, but none of them are
yellow. Oh, and one of the consequences of our colorless universe
might be that our minds are partially non-physical, although there is no
hope here for an afterlife (not to say there’s no hope elsewhere).
Most philosophers do not accept these radical conclusions. They think
that there must be some flaw in the arguments for such insane thoughts.
The problem with their view (a problem they are fully aware of) is that no
one has been able to convince others that he or she has put their
finger on the flaws in the arguments for those stunning conclusions. And
this remains true despite many centuries of investigation into the
arguments by a good portion of the best and brightest minds that have ever walked on our planet.
As was the case with scientific weirdness, there is no argument here for theism. Instead, what we have is
an argument that reality is incredibly strange—so strange, in fact, that the oddness of theism
is not good evidence that it’s false. This point is trickier than it looks, so I will elaborate.
It’s pretty reasonable to get excited about the success of science. There are zillions of things that our
ancestors were completely clueless about that we have figured out. What is the sun, why does it come
back every day, and why is it hot? How do things grow? What makes babies grow inside women? Why
are there the seasons? How come rain can become snow? These and many other questions were
completely beyond our ancestors.
We know the answers now. In fact, science is putting together a
comprehensive view of reality, one that gets tested
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for accuracy a million times a day in all sorts of ways. If science’s picture was wrong, there is no way
medicine would work, I-phones would work, electricity would work, airplanes would work, etc.
Furthermore, and this point is crucial, there
is nothing in this view that looks
anything like theism. Science hasn’t discovered a bunch of non-physical objects interacting
with physical objects, as standard versions of theism require. Science hasn’t discovered any super
amazing beings who are anything close to omnipotent or omniscient. Science hasn’t discovered anyone
turning water into wine or raising the dead. Science hasn’t discovered anything like heaven or hell or any
other kind of afterlife.
In sum: science is enormously successful and hasn’t found anything remotely like theism. Given all that,
theism seems really improbable. Or so an intelligent person might think.
But the things I went over in these two “weird” sections (science and philosophy) show that our universe
is still incredibly mysterious and unknown to us. There is little reason to think “we have things figured
out now”: we most definitely do not have things figured out now despite the fact that we are a million
times more knowledgeable than our ancestors. So the fact that theism is utterly bizarre compared to what
our incredibly successful science has shown doesn’t amount to a good argument that theism is
improbable.
Poverty of Evidence about Theism
Imagine that you spend an hour observing a married couple
interacting with one another. Do you think you’d be in a good
position to judge the strength of their marriage?
I hope not. That would be
foolish—provided you know a
thing or two about marriage and human psychology. Sure, the two
people might have seemed very much in love during that hour, but
if you know much of anything about marriages then you know that
there are lots of completely realistic explanations of what went on
for that hour—explanations consistent with the idea that their
marriage is frayed to the breaking point. Similarly, for that one
hour they might have been yelling at one another and yet the
marriage is rock-solid. The more you know about human psychology the more you realize that one hour
of evidence just isn’t worth much. Sometimes our evidence is impoverished in surprising ways.
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Here is a better example of impoverished evidence.
Are there multiple universes? We have our great big
universe which currently available evidence suggests
was produced in the Big Bang around 14 billion
years ago. But are there other universes, ones
completely cut off from ours and not produced by the
Big Bang? It’s hard to imagine that we will ever be
in a position to be confident one way or the other
(after all, we are cut off from detecting them in any
way at all), as our evidence on the matter will most likely remain impoverished.
God is typically thought of as wholly non-physical: he’s not located anywhere in space and is not made of
things like atoms, electrons, etc. We humans are made of atoms and our bodies are equipped to perceive
other physical things. So how are we ever going to be a decent position to judge whether there are nonphysical entities? We might get some evidence on the issue, but it’s not hard to see that we probably
won’t get a lot of good evidence. Hence, I worry that even if it turned out that our total evidence
supported theism only very weakly or even not at all, that total evidence might well be impoverished and
thus not enough to hang one’s hat on to become an atheist. Sure, we have been trying exceedingly hard
for many centuries to gather evidence. I accept that historical fact. But I worry anyway; strange things
have happened.
Possible Fictional Origins of Theism
Those are five reasons for taking theism seriously even if one thinks the non-testimonial evidence for it
that one knows about is weak.
Some people will say that it’s actually quite easy to show
that we can never rule out the possibility that theism is true.
After all, theism revolves around the central belief that God
exists. Hence, in order to prove that theism is false, you
would have to show that God does not exist. But as
everyone knows, you
can’t prove a negative.
It’s true that one often hears the
slogan ‘You can’t prove a negative’
or ‘You can’t prove that something
doesn’t exist’. However, this is false.
For instance, it’s easy to “absolutely” prove to a confused foreigner that Harry
Potter doesn’t really exist. You prove it by revealing the origin of Harry Potter:
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it lies in the creative fictionalizing of JK Rowling many years ago while she was taking a ride on a train.
Maybe one could prove that God doesn’t exist by revealing that the whole God
story was actually made up as a work of fiction by some clever person
thousands of years ago. Perhaps some old woman made up the whole thing in a
series of stories she told children to keep them occupied and obedient. The
stories were passed on through the generations and slowly became transformed
into what we see today.
Does this sound far-fetched? Well, some philosophers think that something sort of along that line could
have happened. Consider this story:
Several thousand years ago, on a large and
isolated island, Jo took care of children. Jo
was incredibly creative in the stories she
told the children. She made up all sorts of
fantastic scenarios in order to entertain
them. She imagined huge animals with
noses that were up to eight feet long and
could be used as arms; she imagined incredibly tall animals with patches all over their bodies and necks
that were often over six feet long. She told stories about giant animals that were a hundred feet long with
huge teeth, horns, or claws; she imagined birds that had wing spans
of over thirty feet. There were no animals even remotely like that
on her island; they were the product of her creative imagination.
She also told stories designed
to get the children to be kind,
generous, truthful, etc. In
particular, she told them that the little voice in their heads—their
“conscience”—was the voice of a real person. This conscience
person was invisible but knew all of your thoughts—in fact, it knew the
thoughts and deeds of everyone. So if you did something naughty, then even if
adults or kids knew about it, the
invisible, all-knowing
conscience person would know all about it—and she would strongly
disapprove and be sad. Jo told the kids that it would be bad to make the
conscience person sad, as she is unfailingly kind and wants the best for you.
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no
Jo was just making this up of course. It was her creative way to make the children reflective and better
behaved. She knew it was a lie, but she thought this was one of those cases in which the ends justify the
means.
Jo’s stories became famous on the island. Children adored her,
which made the parents adore her as well. She was often asked
where she got her stories. She would always reply ‘It’s as though
they come to me in a dream’, which she knew was false but
sounded beautiful and mysterious, which
she hoped would encourage others to
become story tellers just like her.
Centuries went by and Jo’s stories were passed on orally from generation to
generation. So much time went by that people forgot that the
stories were
just children’s tales. It was even forgotten that they were fiction. People
knew them as great old stories, but there was widespread disagreement on
whether they were intended as fact or as fiction. Since most of us do have a
voice of conscience, some fanciful people took the conscience story as alleged
fact, while others—most of the island’s historians for instance—insisted that
Jo’s stories were intended as fictional tales for children.
Eventually, technology on the island advanced enough that they were able to build ships that could travel
great distances. They ended up discovering other large islands and continents. And lo and behold: they
encountered animals that fit the descriptions of Jo’s stories! And they found fossils of dinosaurs that also
fit her stories. This was pure coincidence: she was just making up stories to keep the children amused.
People who thought Jo’s stories were intended as fact treated
these discoveries as further evidence—in fact, as proof—that Jo’s
stories were intended as fact, not fiction. And so nearly everyone
started taking the stories about the invisible
mind-
reading conscience person as fact as well: if Jo was
right about the animals, then she must have been right about the
conscience person too. They started thinking that Jo must have
got her knowledge of elephants, giraffes, and dinosaurs from the
conscience person, who was, as Jo said, good, kind, all knowing, and spoke to her in dreams.
I’m a philosopher, not a story teller. But as you can see from my short story, it’s child’s play to imagine a
realistic scenario in which fictional stories end up being the basis of a whole religion. And that opens the
possibility that good portions of the origins of theism might lie in things like fiction, not fact.
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You might object that the Jo story is actually quite
unrealistic: the odds that someone would just
make up a story that turned out to reflect reality so well
is tiny—and the odds that the story would become the
basis for a whole religion are even
tinier.
Not so! Although I can’t give you
an actual example of this
happening, I do know of someone
who made up a fictional story and
discovered years later that it turns
out to mirror reality at least to some
degree. It isn’t a perfect example of
the kind of thing described above,
but it’s close enough to prove that a
religion could come from children’s
tales or some other form of fiction.
I once published a philosophy book
that contained a small bit of fiction:
the dinosaurs weren’t wiped out by
a meteor but by a series of
extremely powerful supervolcano eruptions. I never once, even for an instant, thought this hypothesis was
true; it was pure fiction. And yet, a student emailed me several years later and showed me that many
scientists think that although there was a meteor that struck off the coast of Mexico 65 million years ago,
and that event was a partial cause of the demise of the dinosaurs, at about the same time there was a
series of supervolcano explosions that was another partial cause of the death of the dinosaurs: the two
events working together did the dinosaurs in. So, my fictional story might end up being true!
There is of no good evidence that the origin of theism lies in fiction. Some religious beliefs, concepts,
rituals, and practices had origins that had nothing to do with evidence, but there is no credible evidence
that all of theism is akin to a children’s story. My point here is simple: there might be a way in which we
find out that theism really is based entirely on myths and fictions, which would undermine a good portion
of it.
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