Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

Still, he has to face ‘Epicurus’ old questions’. The strategy he follows has become ever more popular in the succeeding centuries. It is to take refuge in the mysterious and incomprehensible nature of the divine mind. Demea is opposed to impious attempts to understand God’s goodness on the model of human goodness, or God’s intentions or perceptions or understanding on the model of human intentions or perceptions or understanding.

As Wittgenstein was to say later, in a different connection: a nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.

Demea’s problem is going to be that having got himself to an utterly mysterious deity, he cannot reap any consequences. You can check into the Mysterious Mist, if you so wish, but you cannot check out carrying any more than you took in with you. Religious belief, reduced to its respectable core, turns out to be completely inert. It has no consequences.

Many people think that the difference between being a theist, believing, and an atheist, unbelieving, is incredibly important. But if nothing does as well as something about which nothing can be said, it vanishes.

We might say, following Wittgenstein’s remark, that Hume here ‘deconstructs’ the apparent difference between theism and atheism.

In particular, if ‘God’s goodness’ is not to be understood in the same terms as what we think of as good (so that, for instance, it might be ‘good’ of God in this different sense to unleash bubonic plague on defenceless infants) then it has no implications for how I am to live my life. It gives me no way of deciding whether to prefer pleasure to pain, or turning the other cheek to taking an eye for an eye, any more than it tells me to prefer heat to cold. But religion is supposed to do these things. It is important, because people take it to make a difference to how we act. Yet now we find that if we follow the traditional range of arguments, it makes no difference whatsoever.

The...

the ‘free will defence’.

There are many objections to this defence. First, it seems to depend upon a conception of free will that seems to be incoherent:

Second, it is just not true that all, or even many, of the ills that afflict human beings are due to human decisions at all. They are due to disease, pain, want, and accident. They afflict the animal creation as well as human beings, and did so long before there were human beings.

Third, even if the metaphysics of free will were accepted, a good God might be expected to protect some of the weaker from the misuses of free will of the stronger.

My own view about this is that religious traditions are at their best when they back away from the classical virtues of God. God is elevated in some traditions to being above good and virtue, or in Hume’s down-to-earth phrase, has no more regard to good above ill than heat above cold. In other traditions, he is by no means omnipotent, but subject to forces not of his own making. Each of these at least affords some kind of theodicy.

The problem, as Hume gleefully points out, is that it is quite common for testimony to be false.

Therefore the hurdle that ‘no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish’ is an incredibly difficult hurdle for any piece of testimony to cross. And even then, all we are left with is a kind of confusion: not knowing what to believe, so that the wise course is to suspend judgement.

The wise lend a very academic faith to every report which favours the passion of the reporter; whether it magnifies his country, his family, or himself, or in any other way strikes in with his natural inclinations and propensities. But what greater temptation than to appear a missionary, a prophet, an ambassador from heaven? Who would not encounter many dangers and difficulties, in order to attain so sublime a character? Or if, by the help of vanity and a heated imagination, a man has first made a convert of himself, and entered seriously into the delusion; who ever scruples to make use of pious frauds, in support of so holy and meritorious a cause?

The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events, from which it is derived. And this goes so far, that even those who cannot enjoy this pleasure immediately, nor can believe those miraculous events, of which they are informed, yet love to partake of the satisfaction at second-hand or by rebound, and place a pride and delight in exciting the admiration of others. With what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travellers received, their descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures, strange men, and uncouth manners? But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense; and human testimony, in these circumstances, loses all pretensions to authority.

Hume’s argument here is wonderfully economical. A less subtle philosopher might have tried to show a metaphysical conclusion, such as the absolute impossibility of miracles. Hume neither needs such a conclusion, nor tries to argue for it. He allows the metaphysical possibility of an intervening deity. There might be a deity who might on occasion let someone walk on water, or feed five thousand people on a few loaves and fishes. Still, experience is our only guide as to whether such events occur. If we are to believe that they do because of testimony, then the testimony has to be good: very good, and, in fact, miraculously good. But we never find testimony of the right kind.

Bayes’s theorem,

In Bayes’s terms, we let h be the hypothesis that a miracle occurred, and e be the fact that some person or persons say that it occurred.

So the Bayesian calculation always comes down against the truth of the testimony, and in favour of the uniformity of nature.

This is not to say that reports of things hitherto quite outside our experience have to be false. Science proceeds by finding such things. But we reason rightly when we maintain a sceptical attitude, until such time as the new phenomena are repeated and established, becoming part of the uniformities of nature.

Once we think of the theology of miracles, things become even worse. For a deity that sets the laws of nature into motion and never relents at least has a certain dignity. One that occasionally allows hiccups and intermissions, glorified conjuring tricks, is less impressive. Why just those miracles, just then? It is not what you would have expected. A little miracle or two snuffing out the Hitlers and Stalins would seem far more useful than one that changes water to wine at one particular wedding feast. It is no doubt very good of God to let St Giuseppe levitate in front of pictures of him, but other things being equal, one would have preferred, say, the miraculous quarantine or destruction of the Aids virus. It is what one might have expected antecedently, knowing that the world was under the regime of a good God. But the world as we know it does not confirm i...

Blaise Pascal (1632–62),

Pascal’s wager.

In decision-theory terms, the option of belief ‘dominates’, because it can win, and cannot lose. So—go for it! Unfortunately the lethal problem with this argument is simple, once it is pointed out. Pascal starts from a position of metaphysical ignorance. We just know nothing about the realm beyond experience. But the set-up of the wager presumes that we do know something. We are supposed to know the rewards and penalties attached to belief in a Christian God.

In fact, for my money, a God that punishes belief is just as likely, and a lot more reasonable, than one that punishes disbelief.

That's so interesting. And, I admit with shame, a little funny to picture countless brain-wasting dupes collectively gulping, "oops."

We can now briefly consider the ‘fideistic’ line, that although the arguments are negligible, nevertheless people at least have a right to believe what they wish, and there may be some merit in blind faith, like the merit attaching to the mother who refuses to acknowledge her son’s guilt in spite of damning evidence.

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1806–73)

‘mental slavery’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

So we have to use our human values, our own sense of good or bad, or right or wrong, to distinguish an admirable return from the mountain from a lunatic one. We seem to be irretrievably in the domain of ethics here. And it would be impossible in a brief compass to assess the harms and benefits of religious belief, just as it is hard (although not impossible) to estimate the benefit or damage done by belief in magnetic therapy or Feng Shui or whatever.

But Hume himself is responsible for clouding the picture. For reasons we are about to meet, there seems to be quite a lot of brute trust or faith in many everyday elements of common sense.

If in our time and place all we see are church picnics and charities, we will not be so worried. But enough people come down the mountain carrying their own practical certainties to suggest that we ought to be. Maybe some day something will be found that answers to the needs without pandering to the bad desires, but human history suggests that it would be unwise to bank on it.

LOGIC

premises.

conclusion.

The first reaction is that one of the premises is untrue. The second is that the reasoning is invalid.

But ‘logical’ is not a synonym for ‘sensible’. Logic is interested in whether arguments are valid, not in whether it is sensible to put them forward.

Logic has only one concern. It is concerned whether there is no way that the premises could be true without the conclusion being true.

One of the most famous forms of argument, for instance, rejoicing in the title ‘modus ponendo ponens’, or modus ponens for short, just goes: p; If p then q; So, q.

conjunction, and negation, are truth-functional or that they are truth-functional operators. Elementary propositional logic studies the truth-functions.

scope

ambiguities,

It is called a tautology.

reductio ad absurdum,

The connection between structure and proof is just this: the structure shows us if there is no way that the premises can be true without the conclusion being true.

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925),

existential quantifier.

universal quantifier,

A related ambiguity is responsible for some thirty thousand deaths a year in the United States. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ Each person? Or the people as a collective, as in ‘The team can have a bus’? If the founding fathers had been able to think in terms of quantificational structure, a lot of blood might not have been spilt.