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Is Belief in a God Rational? · Centrally Speaking

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Centrally speaking, is the Central Schweinfeller Church's podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: It speaks about issues that would be of interest to our society.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: In particular, it addresses how a Christian worldview intersects with Western secular culture.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: In the spirit of the church's founder, we take the perspective of the middle way, which is in agreement with the historic Christian Church.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Drake Williams, Minister of Mission and Theology at the Church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Today we're talking about his belief in a God rational.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we're very pleased to have Dr.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Patrick Casey with us today.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: He has his PhD in philosophy from Stonybrook University in Stonybrook, New York.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: There he studied philosophy of religion as well as philosophical hermeneutics.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: He's done some writing and he's had several peer-reviewed articles published recently, including one in Respublica as well as Philosophia Christian.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: He's taught in multiple universities in the Philadelphia area and is now the visiting assistant professor at St.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Joseph's University in the city of Philadelphia.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Patrick, welcome to the show.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: We're glad to have you here.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pleasure to be here.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for inviting me.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: These are some heavy subjects that you've been involved with, Patrick.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Philosophy of religion and philosophical hermeneutics.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Could you say a word about those to uh most of us who won't understand what they are?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: So philosophy of religion is uh the philosophical study of God and any topic essentially related to that.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Patrick, those are some very heavy subjects that you're involved with.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: This uh getting your PhD in philosophy, but could you tell us something about this one, uh philosophical hermeneutics?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: What is that all about?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: So philosophical hermeneutics, it is a philosophical study of interpretation and understanding.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, it actually grew out of biblical hermeneutics in part.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: So it comes from the interpretation of texts.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so eventually philosophers became interested in the question of how do you interpret texts and how do you understand in general?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: So it went from a narrow focus on interpretation of ancient texts to a more general question of how does uh understanding and interpretation, how do those things work?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's very good.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, we're glad to have you.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we're gonna turn our discussion now to the topic about belief in God uh being rational.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: We'll start with thinking about just how belief in God is becoming less popular in America right now.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the Pew Research Center is known for statistical trends about uh American life, and they frequently ask people in America about their belief in God, whether he exists or not, whether they're certain or whether they're uncertain.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: But in recent years, they have identified that Americans uh who declare themselves to be Christian is declining.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then the share of Americans who say that they have no particular religious affiliation at all is growing.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder if you can speak to that at all.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: You've been a university professor now for many years.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Are you seeing an increasing doubt in the existence of God in the students that you teach?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: And are you seeing that at all in the research that you're doing as well?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a that's a good question.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, as you already know, but I want to make sure it's clear for everybody else, I'm not a sociologist by training.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm looking at this from the perspective of a professor in general as an educator.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I am certainly aware of data like this.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: It oftentimes does come up in my philosophy of religion class.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: We talk about whether or not belief in God is uh declining.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so I will talk to my students sometimes about it.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: I am generally curious about studies like this because of a phenomenon that's known as preference falsification.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: Preference falsification means that sometimes people will not say what they actually believe because it's sociologically, socially not acceptable.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the things that I wonder about is whether belief in God is actually declining, or if it's just that people are more willing to say that they don't believe in God.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: So in the past, I suspect that it was probably less socially acceptable to admit to not believing in God.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so I do kind of wonder if part of the change in the rates of people who respond this way is less reflective of a general decline in belief of God, or just a change in the rates of people who feel comfortable admitting uh to not believing in God.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: I honestly don't know.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: So that is just a suspicion.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: Nevertheless, I think it's at least plausible to me that belief in God is declining.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's at least plausible.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, I would say from my experience with students, and I do teach a lot of philosophy of religion, that students are at least uh quite open to the idea that God exists, by and large.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: As for my own research, philosophy is uh is an interesting discipline.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: Philosophy for the last couple of decades has been I don't know if I want to say atheistic in Maine, it's probably more likely to say agnostic.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that philosophy tends to do is it tends to dampen hardline stances on just about anything, and that includes the question of belief in God.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I think my suspicion is that philosophers themselves are not particularly willing to take hardline positions against the existence of God.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: By and large, philosophers are and have been for quite a while, I would say largely agnostic of belief about belief in God.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: So people like me, who are, you know, actual fervent believers in God, I think that they some philosophers see me as kind of bizarre, I suspect, as like a unicorn.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: Which I enjoy.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's not an insulting thing at all.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: I think they're actually more curious than anything.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: But just so our listeners know, this uh Pew Research uh center gave a study in 2007, and they said that their results found that 92% of US adults said yes when asked if they believe in God or a universal spirit.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: But then in 2014 it had slipped to 89%.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it seems that the belief in God is decreasing, while at the same time the certainty that they believe in God went from 71% in 2007 to 63% in 2014.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now, your point about uh are people feeling a little bit more free might uh play into that.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but it's interesting that in the in the classroom you say that you're you're finding people still are very interested, uh at least in exploring whether there is a God or not.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh my sense is that they generally are.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: And my sense is also that the the reasons for disbelief in God, when it is the case, actually might be shifting.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: It may have less to do with classical reasons for disbelief in God.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: But I think there may be a kind of shift in the way that people think about God that may actually be causing a very real shift in alignment about God, belief in God.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't want to overstate what I said about preference falsification.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think that might be part of it.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: I would be curious what sociologists who study the question would say.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if anybody's actually looked into it, but I do think that there is a very real shift going on in the way that the way that students conceive of God.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that may be reflected somewhat in the data as well.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: As you talked with students who may be uncertain about God or or even rejecting that there's a that there is a God, uh, what do you sense that they're rejecting?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: That that I think is the right question.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have a great answer for it, although it's something I'm deeply curious about, because I'm very curious as a philosopher and somebody who studies the history of ideas to some extent, I'm always very curious about how our concepts shift over time.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I do think that people think about God somewhat differently now than they have in the past, and that may feed into what it is that they're rejecting.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: So my sense is that, to speak frankly about it, that many students think that traditional notions of God are maybe somewhat bigoted.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I don't know if that's too strong of a word, but I I have that kind of sense.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and this leads them to either reject the traditional uh conception of God and traditional religion in particular, and to become agnostic.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: So, on the one hand, it's one thing that they do is they just reject traditional religion as being complicit in that way of thinking about God, or they tend to think that if God exists, then it doesn't really matter since God just believes whatever they believe.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: So I think for many students, the idea that there is a God that exists that would contradict what they already think and demand something of them is totally foreign to them.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think that they would find that unacceptable or unsettling.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, this is what I find most unsettling to be quite blunt or quite honest.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: The thing that I find most unsettling about the Christian God is that the Christian God, as he as Lewis says, is like the cosmic interferer.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: That's not a literal quote, but that's uh one of the things that Lewis says.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I do think that is the case.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that students find that unpalatable, to put it mildly.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so they are more likely to believe in a kind of God who just is requires of them that they be a good person in a very kind of vague and amorphous sense.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it's just not just my students.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to act like I'm, you know, dumping on my students.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is true of humans in general, but I do think it's probably on the rise.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think that you in the past it used to be, uh, it used to be kind of every day to think that there was, you know, a God up above who's kind of sets the rules and you either go along with it or you don't.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that now there's an increasing thinking of God that, you know, God just requires of you to be kind of an amorphous good person.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so many students already think of them as a kind of good person.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: And many of them are.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: They're very, you know, they're kind, conscientious human beings, and that therefore belief in God kind of becomes superfluous.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: You know, why why go to church?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: Why be affiliated with a traditional religion?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm already a good person.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: What does that have to do with anything?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: So one of these two alternatives, they either believe in an amorphous God who just you know doesn't require anything of them, or they think that a God that does require something substantial of them, if it disagrees with their pre-existing moral intuitions, that they find that unpalatable.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: And again, I want to emphasize I don't think this is true just of my students, I think this is uh true of humans.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you think some of these uh doubts in the existence of God emerge with some of your students?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: And might it just be uh a rejecting of their past or their their upbringing, or are there other factors that you see uh coming to play in people's lives so that they uh don't take interest in a God?
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's it's another good question.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: I have the sense that when I got into teaching, I I I did have the sense, you know, maybe I was projecting, but I had the sense that many students were kind of held off from belief uh in God for because of arguments, because of Darwinian evolution or because of the problem of pain or something like that.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: I do have the sense now that the reasons are more sociological or ethical or something like that, that there's not there's not a particular proof, uh, there's not a particular argument that students are being dissuaded from belief in God, that it is something more like a rejection of traditional ways of thinking, and they think of God as being associated with that, regardless of whether that's true about their own past biographically.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: Though it's certainly true of my generation, uh many of my friends, you know, raised in Roman Catholic households, for example, went to college and just kind of did their own thing.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: But then interestingly, what happened is when once they started having kids, uh, they started to go back to church.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, not true of all of them, but true of some of them.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know that that's going to be the case with the generation now.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's something else going on that's in the mix.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I do think that it has to do with maybe a more general suspicion of traditional ways of life or something like that.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: But some are still saying that a belief in God is rational, right?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: And whether uh one is, let's say, rejecting one's past, some are still saying that it's rational to believe in God.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm wondering if you might say a little bit about that.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Who is saying that it's rational?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you might point to uh figures in society or intellectuals that would uh hold to belief in an existence of God.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: One of the interesting things about my students is that they're they're very interested in these kinds of things.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: And they are one of the great virtues of this generation is that they're very, very open.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_02: They're they're curious, they're they're interested in hearing about ideas.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so when it comes to religious belief, they're oftentimes really eager to talk about arguments for the existence of God.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: So some people who have been uh making these kinds of arguments, one uh natural place to go is my philosophical and literary hero, C.S.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, he is no longer living, but he is generally considered to be the greatest apologist of the 20th century.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I often assign his readings in class, and students are usually very responsive uh to him.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we have uh excellent conversations about whether or not his arguments are good ones.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: So uh Lewis is intriguing.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think that a lot of people misunderstand Lewis among philosophers.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: I think that people believe that he offers, you know, particular arguments for the existence of God, offers an argument from a morality, for example, that God exists.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: I do think actually the right way to understand Lewis, though, is that he he doesn't believe in God because of any particular argument.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: He says in an essay called Is Theology Poetry?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: He uh he says pretty explicitly, he says, I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun is risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that is uh an interesting way of looking at things.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: So Lewis believes that belief in Christianity specifically, over and above just belief in God, is rational because he believes that it makes better sense of the world than any of the other competing belief systems.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: For example, naturalism or atheism.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: He thinks that naturalism or atheism cannot make sense of the things that we know about the world.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he lists specifically science, art, morality, as things that he thinks just cannot really be fit into a naturalistic or atheistic worldview, where they can fit into a Christian worldview.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: So just for the listening audience, uh C.S.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis, uh, can you share some background about who he is?
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: And he's certainly not the only one.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: So I can also talk about contemporary philosophers if you'd like.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: But C.S.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis was born in 1898 and lived until 1963.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: He was trained in philosophy.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: This is something people don't know about him, but he became a professor of English essentially at uh the University of Oxford and then uh the University of Cambridge.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so highly regarded uh literary scholar, but he also was trained in philosophy and so wrote popular philosophy and popular theology.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: See, who, of course, is probably most famous for his non-academic writings like the Chronicles of Narnia.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: So when I, you know, mention his name, students will say, yes, of course, you know, the line, the witch in the wardrobe.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: But he did more than that.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: He uh, you know, he wrote adult fiction, which is phenomenal.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: I highly recommend it.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: He just, you know, he wrote on a ton of different things.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: C.S.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis, uh, as well as others, uh, promoting a rational uh means for the belief in the existence of God.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: How about some major names of people who are saying that belief in God is irrational?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: So the first name that comes to mind in terms of people who think that belief in God is irrational is Richard Dawkins.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: He's certainly not the only one, but he's probably, I think it's probably safe to say that he's the world's most famous atheist.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: He is not a philosopher, though.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's worth noting.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: He is trained as a biologist, uh, is probably most known for his essentially popularization of scientific ideas, especially in evolutionary biology.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: But he is adamantly, pretty vitriolically at sometimes anti-religious.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: His motivations for thinking that belief in God or belief in God is irrational, I think, comes from the idea that science and religion are in conflict with one another.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: So he thinks basically that people believed in religion in the past because they didn't understand how the world works.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: And now we understand how the world works, and we can do so in such a way that we do not need to invoke the existence of God.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so therefore, science is pushing out belief in God.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: As um, I I think this entire way of thinking is historically and philosophically misguided, to be to be blunt.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I can say more about that if you'd like, but he does seem to think that science is what makes belief in God irrational.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: So science meaning, let's say, the theory of evolution or other things that uh he would add in into it?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: His specialization is evolutionary biology.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I've certainly not read all of his works, so I can't speak definitively about all of them, but my understanding is that that is primarily where he comes from.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's not the only kind of argument that he makes, but that is predominantly what he has in mind.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: There are other thinkers kind of in his cohort that come from different directions.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: So there's Sam Harris, who is uh actually tempered his kind of anti-religious sediment somewhat of late, but he is a neuroscientist by training.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: There is also, I believe, Lawrence Krauss, who I want to say is a cosmologist or a physicist, I might be getting that wrong.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: So there are different people who uh speak from different perspectives, but they all kind of share this common theme in believing that science has kind of made belief in God superfluous.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so that people who are holding on to religious belief are doing so irrationally because they're holding on to kind of pre-scientific superstitions.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: That is kind of the way that they they view the world.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Dawkins and C.S.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis never meant.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: How do you think somebody like C.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis would have answered Dawkins and his perspective of science overriding the rational belief in a god?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: So Lewis is an interesting character.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he was, while he did sometimes write, you know, popular philosophy and popular theology, he was typically willing to defer to people as specialists in their own field.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: He was tentatively accepting of biological evolution is my understanding of him.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: What he was not accepting of is a philosophical position which he saw somewhat conjoined with biological evolution, but not necessarily so, which is naturalism.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: He would have said that Dawkins is mistaken in thinking that science itself or any particular discipline of science actually speaks against the existence of God.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I would certainly sign on to that, uh, both historically and philosophically.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: Even Dawkins' idea that in the past people were religious because they believed that God was necessary to explain the world, I think, is simply just historically mistaken.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: The early forerunners of science and religion have been present for thousands of years and have always coexisted with one another.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: So it's simply not the case that people were religious because they didn't understand how the world works.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: For example, I like to point out to my students that people in ancient Roman civilization may have gone to the Temple of Cirrus, for example, the goddess of agriculture, and may have prayed for a bountiful harvest.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: But I asked them rhetorically, well, not rhetorically, I actually asked them.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: I asked my students, but do you think that when these people would go home from the temple of Cirrus, do you think that they would have watered their gardens?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: The students are somewhat perplexed by the suggestion.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: Rightfully so.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's a good thing, it's an interesting thing to think about because they would have.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: Irrigation was invented in something like 6000 BC.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: People knew what made the crops grow, but nevertheless they would pray that God would the gods would let the crops grow or cause them to grow.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: So these two things just simply, science and religion just were not seen as mutually exclusive.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, the same is true of today.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: I think people just don't understand what religious belief is like, and they think that it's a kind of scientific belief, but it's it's not the same kind of belief.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, contemporary Christians, if they have trouble conceiving, they will typically do two things.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that they will do is they will pray.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: Another thing they will do is go to a doctor.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: They don't view these things as mutually exclusive.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's a mistake to think that science and religion have been in the past always in conflict with one another, or that they're somehow philosophically opposed to one another.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think Lewis would also agree with that that Dawkins is mistaken to believe that science and religion are somehow philosophically irreconcilable.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't we uh turn the discussion a little bit to what are some more popular means that Christians have used for advocating belief in a God?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's several ideas that Christians have used, or maybe even uh non-Christians have used to advocate uh that there is a God.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: For example, if one is uh walking along a beach and then finds a watch, that obviously seems out of place because that doesn't seem like you'd find that on a beach.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then you must assume that that watch was made by a watchmaker.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Is that uh one of the uh arguments uh that that you've heard used?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe you might share a few others that have been used to uh support the rational belief in a god.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: So the the argument that you're referring to comes from uh William Paley.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: I believe it's an I believe the book was written in 1902, but the book is called Natural Theology.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_02: And in that book, I I like beach beaches better.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think he might have actually said heath, but I don't know what that is.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's a kind of candy bar.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: But uh he says if you're walking, if you're walking in a heath, yeah, he says you find you find a so what he says is he says, if you're walking out in the butt you know, in this way, like a heath is a kind of uh, my understanding is like a wasteland kind of area in uh uh in England.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: If you're walking out in the heath, he says, and if you find a stone, he says you won't be, you won't grab your attention.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: There's nothing abnormal, there's nothing odd about finding a stone lying out in the middle of a heath, it won't draw your attention.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: But he does say, as you rightly point out, that if you find a if you find a pocket watch, that's something else entirely.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it seems out of place.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he says the pocket watch is it's complex, it's intricate.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: Interestingly, he says that it also seems to be suited to its environment in a particular kind of way, that the hands will be oriented to a particular point when the sun rises and and when it sets and the same the next day.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, my understanding is that Charles Darwin had read William Paley at college.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, he said, I believe, in his autobiography, that reading William Paley was just about the only thing in the general education requirement that was worth reading.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that Darwin noticed was uh, I believe, that this idea that organisms seem to be suited to their environment.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: Paley says if you find a watch line out in the middle of nowhere, it will draw your attention because it's complicated, it's intricate, and all of these different features would intuitively lead you to believe that it was designed, that it didn't just come from natural forces, that an intelligence must have created it.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so complexity, intricacy, suitability to environment, these things speak, they provide evidence for design.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: And then Paley goes on to say, whenever you find design, then there must be a designer.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: So Paley, throughout the rest of the book, essentially makes an argument by analogy.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: He says that there are various things in the natural world, like the human eye, for example, and we could add others, you know, the dolphin's ability to have a kind of sonar, or a bat's ability to have echolocation or whatever it is that they do, all of these interesting, incredibly sophisticated biological faculties that organisms have.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: He says they are also just like the human eye is complicated, it's intricate, it seems to be suited to its environment.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: All of these different faculties would be.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so therefore, just like we said with the with the pocket watch, that complexity, intricacy, and so on lead us to believe that that the pocket watch is designed.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: So we should also think that the human eye, because it is also shows complexity, intricacy, and so on, we should also think that it is designed.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: So just like we thought that the pocket watch, if it's designed, must have a designer.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: So the human eye, we should also think that it is designed and it also must have a designer.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: Pale's famous argument, design argument.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: Another argument that's also been used is that of the uncaused cause.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: It must be something that leads to repercussions.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: And if you have to trace that back, and then you would have to end up with some intelligent being to be the initial.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Cause maker.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this is a very, very old argument.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: It has roots all the way back in the Greek, ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, and then was transferred into the Islamic philosophical tradition, actually, and then into the Christian tradition, and was articulated by St.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, most famously, as a part of his five ways of knowing that God exists.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: So basically, what Thomas says, and I'd call him Thomas, uh, because I know a lot of philosophers call him Aquinas, but his the town where he was from is called Aquino.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: So Saint Thomas of Aquino is what his name means.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: So Thomas pointed out that there's change in the world.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: Things are constantly changing, things are in the world around us.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so basically he says that every change is the effect of some prior cause.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: So if every change is the effect of some prior cause, then there appears to be a chain of causation, as you say.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: So you can think of this as kind of a chain of causation into the past.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: You can think about dominoes, set of dominoes, and you push the first one over and they all fall down.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: If you're looking at the final domino and it falls down, right, that's a change.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: So you could ask, well, that's you could say that's an effect.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: And what caused it, caused by the previous domino.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: And then you can say of that domino falling, well, that's an effect.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: So what caused it?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: And it was caused by the previous domino, and you can trace that backwards in time.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: Thomas says there's really only two alternatives.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: Either that that regressive causation, that chain of causation, will be infinite, it will just go back and never have a beginning.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: And he says, if that's the case, he says, Well, that seems implausible, basically.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: He says, if the chain of causation is infinite, what effectively that means is that there was no first cause.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: And that's just another way of saying that the dominoes falling, which we are observing, has no cause because there is no original cause.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: So he finds the idea of an infinite chain of causation implausible.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: The other only other alternative he says is that there must be a first cause.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so if the idea that there is, if there's only two options, you know, door number one and door number two, if I tell you there's a puppy behind one of these doors and I open door number one, it's not behind door number one, then it must be behind door number two.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: So he says that if we find the idea of an infinite chain of causation implausible, then the only other alternative is that there must be a first cause.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: And so if there's a first cause, we can properly call that God.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: Interestingly, Haley uh kind of developing these kinds of arguments because he thought that perhaps while arguments like Thomas Aquinas's might establish the existence of a god, he wanted to go further and say not only is there a cosmic superpower behind behind the scenes, but one of the things that's interesting about Paley's design argument is that he just tries to establish not only is there a god, but it's a god that has a personality, which is, I think, one of the interesting features of Haley's argument specifically is it's not just some higher power, but it's a god that has a personality that may like some things and dislike other things and has an has intelligence and so on.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting that uh the argument was developed through uh Thomas Aquinas and Haley, but that it originally came from ancient Greek society.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, absolutely.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very, very old argument.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that I like about philosophy is that these philosophers, over many hundreds of years, in some cases thousands of years, have been in kind of a process of constant dialogue with one another across different cultures, across different religions.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so one of the things that you find if you read St.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: Thomas Aquinas is that he is surprisingly fluent in Greek philosophy, in Islamic philosophy, and in earlier Christian philosophy.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's quite enlightening that there was this kind of ability to philosophy to cause conversations across the barriers of of culture and in time.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: This uh argument is not necessarily a Christian one, it's a it's an ancient Greek one.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: Are there other uh compelling reasons for belief in a uh rational belief in a God?
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, there's certainly well, there certainly are.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: There's um, of course, a wide variety of different arguments.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: There's the ontological argument, that's something maybe your listeners might want to look up on their own.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if uh that would be a that would be a difficult one to walk through in a in a short podcast.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: The most famous one there is from uh Saint Anselm of Canterbury, a very famous argument, but there's other versions of that argument, for example, with uh Rene Descartes.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: So there are broadly speaking three different categories of arguments.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: There's a cosmological argument, uh, which is kind of what we just talked about with St.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: Thomas Aquinas.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: Then there's the ontolog versions of the ontological argument, which come from Anselm uh and Descartes offer famous ones.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then there are design arguments, which I tend to think of as kind of a subspecies of cosmological arguments, but sometimes they're separated out on their own.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that was uh, for example, the kind of argument that that William Paley was offering.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so those are the basic categories of argument.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, do you feel that there's uh one of them that uh is uh uh more compelling than another?
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: That is an interesting question.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think about these things a lot.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: So I I uh I've been developing my own ideas about these kinds of things.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: What I tell my students is that from from my perspective, I tend not to think that any one argument is sufficient for my belief in God, that I actually have very many reasons for believing in God, not one.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't put all my eggs in one basket, and not just because I don't do it for pragmatic reasons, although a person could have pragmatic reasons for doing that, which is to say, if you base your argument your beliefs on three different arguments, then if any one argument is disabled, then you're still your belief isn't undermined.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: But that's not my reason.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: Most of my beliefs I find, I have very many reasons for believing them, not just one.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so it would be surprising to me if my belief in God were an exception to that rule.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I tend to agree with Lewis, what he said about that he believes in the sun, not just because he sees the sun, but because he sees everything else by it.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: And my own thinking about this is that my belief in Christianity is relies on the fact that I think that it's kind of like a comparative argument.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think that Christianity does a better job of making sense of all of the things in the world that we know of, and it does better than all of its competing alternatives, including atheism, naturalism, but also other major religious traditions, which I have a great deal of respect for.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_02: I do think that Christianity just does a better job with what the things that we know than competing alternatives.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so I would include in that all sorts of things.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: The fact that human beings can think, the fact that we can reason, the fact that we can create sciences, the fact that we have a sense of beauty.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's very unusual.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's just a very odd thing about human beings.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: The fact that things are pleasurable to us.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: I don't find any particular logical reason why the universe should have so much pleasure in it.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: This is something that C.S.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis did call attention to, but I think it's very odd, and I think people take it for granted that food should taste good.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: I don't see any particular logical reason why food should taste good.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: I can imagine a universe in which all organisms are simply programmed to eat food and that food does not taste any particular way.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: It seems utterly superfluous that I can find pleasure in observing a beautiful mountain range or in watching a sunset.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: All of these things are utterly superfluous, and not even all other organisms notice them.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: My dog, I try to point out beautiful sunsets to my dog, and he just is not oppressed.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: So all of these things combined, I think, provide my reasoning for belief in God, and specifically the Christian God.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: You're not so sure you need don't need another dog.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe there's something detective about this particular.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: I suspect that's not the case, though.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Some of our listeners today might be uncertain about a rational belief in God.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: And um, no doubt uh you've you know provided some good reasons through Lewis and Aquinas and others.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm wondering if you could suggest a few books uh for some who are considering whether there is a God or not.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: I should say uh for our listeners that if you wish to be in touch with us at uh the Central Schwankfelder Church, we'll have a copy of these available if you'd like to be in touch with us.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but maybe you could recommend uh one uh that's uh rather uh more popular, and then maybe one that's uh a bit more academic or heavy.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, just two or um Have you got a couple?
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's fine.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: I've got a couple.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: I'm still a fan of the classics, relatively recent classics, like C.S.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, he's written a number of books on a belief in God, going from the from the simplest to the more complicated.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: There's mere Christianity, the problem of pain, and miracles.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm also a big fan of G.K.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: Chesterton, who did convert to Roman Catholicism, but nevertheless, he is an incredibly witty and lively author.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so he wrote a book called Orthodoxy and the Everlasting Man.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: So those are the classics, and at least of the past, you know, 150 years or so.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: But there are also more accessible contemporary works.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ is a very accessible work.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: On the more complicated side of things, there's Plantinka's Knowledge and Christian Belief.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: And there's also William Lane Craig's Reasonable Belief.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: So that's much more than two.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of good ones out there.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're very glad that you've come to speak on this topic today.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners before we draw this to a close?
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a pleasure speaking with you, Drake.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: We're very glad to have you.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Dr.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Patrick Casey, a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at St.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: Joseph's University.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much, Patrick.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: My pleasure.