Rust Belt Philosophy

I now pick up where we left off Tuesday and return to the Prosblogion's summary of Paul Moser's The Elusive God. Last time, Moser explained his understanding of religious skepticism and identified some ways in which he thinks such skeptics miss their mark. Specifically, he said that the evidence that skeptics typically use - "spectator evidece"; something like empirically verifiable facts or logically verifiable argumentation - is not the kind we should expect from a God. Rather, Moser said that we should make our judgments based on the availability of volitional evidence. Robert Gressis picks up the argument here.

In order to justify his vendetta against spectator evidence, Moser claims that it provides "no demand on our wills relative to God's will to call us to repentance and divine-human fellowship." Gressis challenges this with something involving devils, but I prefer to use really existing counterexamples - thus, to show that Moser's reasoning here is really a non-sequitur, I turn to my other area of expertise, basketball.

Roughly speaking, it looks as though Moser worries that spectator evidence (empirical evidence and logical argumentation) is just not motivating enough: God, after all, wants people to behave and not just believe. But showing people evidence of God's existence or greatness might just cause them to shrug their shoulders, he says, so God doesn't even bother. Maybe Moser has just recently woken up from a 19-year coma, but otherwise he ought to know that people just don't work this way: when we see empirically verifiable evidence of a being's greatness, we very often change our behavior to imitate it. Or, to paraphrase the 1992 Gatorade commercial, we want to be like Mike. Given the massive impact that Michael Jordan had on people's behavior (before he won his six rings, even!), Moser needn't worry about whether or not God could serve as a motivating example just with spectator evidence.

Having apparently finished his impotent screed against the only ways of knowing that have ever helped humans, Moser finally gets around to saying how we ought to look for God. According to Gressis, "Moser lists two" measures by which we can seek the divine, but I'll only need to look at one to show that Moser's project was doomed from the start. "First," Gressis says, "there are tests based on a baseline set of expectations about God's character, namely, that anything that fits the title, 'God', is worthy of worship." Skeptics will be happy to hear this: what with all the terrible things that gods do according to the relevant mythologies, it seems very much like Moser's first test is all a skeptic needs to disprove the idea that any God has ever revealed itself to humanity. Moser, however, knows full well how dangerous this test could be, so he then takes a step to prevent its use in this way. Unfortunately for him, this step takes him right off a cliff.

Allying himself with skeptical theism, Moser evidently writes that "humans, with their very limited cognitive and moral resources, would be in no position to serve as reliable judges over a perfectly loving God" (cited by Gressis as appearing on page 60 of Moser's book). We've looked at the weaknesses in skeptical theism before and they certainly apply here as well, but in fact this stance hurts Moser in a much more basic way. Remember, he already claimed to defend the following two ideas:

1. Religious skeptics are wrong - i.e., we can know that a perfectly loving God (like, say, the Christian one) exists.
2. If a human knows that any given existent being is a perfectly loving God, that human must know (and therefore must be able to know) that that being is praiseworthy - indeeed, even worship-worthy.

He now adds:

3. No human can ever know that a perfectly loving God is praiseworthy.

This, however, leads directly to a contradiction: 3, in concjunction with 2, produces the conclusion that no human knows that any being is a perfectly loving God. Or, put different, humans are incapable of knowing that God exists. Since this is the direct opposite of 1, his project is more than just a failure: if we take him seriously, it's a success for his opponents: 2 and 3 entail "hard" agnosticism, which in turn serves as an essentially invincible argument for atheism (or, at the very least, atheism in regards to all of the most popular gods).

It looks like the Prosblogion folks are going to continue to analyze Moser, but at this point I think we can stop. Presumably Moser will write another book at some point - maybe he'll have figured out which side he's arguing for by then.

|    
Labels: ad hoc, contradiction, religion