Over at his Debunking Christianity Website, secular philosopher John Loftus has put up a post entitled, There Isn’t a Bad Reason to Reject the Christian Faith. Now, I happen to believe that there are good and bad reasons to reject all sorts of intellectual positions, including theism, atheism and Intelligent Design. So as someone who cares about truth, I was shocked by the sheer effrontery of Loftus’ statement. If he can convince me of that, I thought to myself, he can convince me of anything.
What does Loftus actually claim?
It turns out that Loftus’ post didn’t quite live up to the claim made in its title. Loftus doesn’t really claim that there isn’t a bad reason to reject Christianity; and Loftus fully accepts that arguments about all sorts of matters (including Christianity) can be publicly discussed and scrutinized for any faulty logic that they may contain. Rather, what Loftus actually believes is that there isn’t a bad personal reason to reject Christianity. “What’s a personal reason?” you might ask. I’ll let Loftus explain:
Keep in mind I’m also speaking of the reasons people personally have for rejecting Christianity rather than the arguments constructed to convince others. I don’t think people must be able produce an argument that will convince others of something before it can be said they have good reasons for what they think…
Is there a legitimate distinction then between someone’s having good personal reasons and having bad reasons for believing something? Again we’re not talking about arguments constructed to convince others, for the rules of logic dictate which arguments are good ones from bad ones. We’re talking instead about the personal reasons people have for accepting or not accepting something as true. How do we really know that what we think is justified? Do we really understand how many cognitive biases affect most all of us most of the time? (Emphases mine – VJT.)
Later on, Loftus discusses the hypothetical case of a man named Pat becoming convinced that a message given to him in a dream is true, “because his God-given cognitive faculties are such that he would accept its message as true.”
Some brief definitions
I’ll now attempt to formulate a rigorous definition of Loftus’ terms. Here goes. On Loftus’ account, a good personal reason for a belief is “a reason that would justify you in forming that belief, given the way in which your cognitive faculties work.” Of course, your having a justified belief doesn’t make it true; and conversely, the fact that you have a true belief doesn’t always mean that it is justifiable.
A bad personal reason can now be defined as “a reason that would not justify you in forming that belief, given the way in which your cognitive faculties work.”
Who is Loftus’ target audience?
As we’ve seen, Loftus’ bold claim is that there are no bad personal reasons for rejecting Christianity. The kind of Christianity Loftus has in mind here is the kind whose members accept this doctrinal statement, which Loftus refers to as “DS” in his post:
There is an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent God who sent Jesus to atone for the sins of all who believe in him. This same God desires everyone should be saved and that no one should be lost (See 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9).
At the outset, however, Loftus acknowledges that there’s one group of Christians who would never accept DS: Calvinists. Calvinists would presumably disagree with the claim that God “desires everyone should be saved and that no one should be lost.” However, Loftus has a separate argument that Calvinists have no good reason to trust God. As I don’t propose to discuss Calvinism in this post, I’ll simply invite readers to evaluate Loftus’ argument for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
I should also point out that the overall logic of what Loftus says in his post would apply equally well to any of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). If Loftus is right, then there are no bad personal reasons to reject the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – in short, the God of the Bible.
Loftus’ claim, in a nutshell
Loftus’ claim that there are no bad personal reasons for rejecting Christianity means that there are no reasons that would not justify you in coming to believe that Christianity is false, given the way in which your cognitive faculties work. In other words, Loftus is saying that any reason that happens to persuade you (given the way in which your cognitive faculties work) that Christianity is false, would also justify you in arriving at that belief.
Loftus: involuntary beliefs destroy the distinction between good and bad personal reasons
Why does Loftus think this? A clue can be found in a little passage in his post:
What if, as I strongly suspect, that belief is overwhelmingly involuntary, if not completely involuntary. Is it all just a lucky coincidence if we get something right? If any of these conditions obtain then the distinction between having good personal reasons and bad personal reasons basically flies out the window. (Emphases mine – VJT.)
I think “determined” would have been a better word for Loftus to use here, as animal behavior may be voluntary in a minimal sense (i.e. uncoerced) but still completely determined. But let that pass.
I have to say that Loftus’ conclusion in the passage quoted above doesn’t follow. Even if our beliefs are completely involuntary – or alternatively, completely determined – not all of our beliefs will result from our cognitive faculties functioning properly. Sometimes there will be a glitch in our brain function, for instance: a seizure or spasm, or what have you. In that case, if you came to acquire a belief as a result of that malfunction, it would be correct to say that you had a bad personal reason for having that belief, as the belief didn’t result from the way in which your cognitive faculties worked, but from the way in which they failed to work, on that particular occasion.
But I’d like to be as generous as possible to Loftus, and leave cognitive malfunctions out of the equation. Let’s suppose that our brains are subject to various built-in cognitive biases, but that there are no malfunctions as such – or if they are any, then their effect on the content of our beliefs is almost non-existent. What Loftus is really saying is that if our false beliefs are the product of our built-in biases, then they are still justified beliefs, given the way in which we’re put together, neurologically speaking.
Counterintuitive consequences of Loftus’ position
I might point out in passing that if Loftus really believes what he is saying in the above passage, then he must accept the consequences of his position. If the truth of determinism renders the distinction between having good personal reasons and bad personal reasons an invalid one, then by Loftus’ own admission, we cannot distinguish between good and bad personal reasons for believing anything – including atheism! If I were in Loftus’ shoes, I would promptly jettison my belief in determinism, in order to avoid embracing such a conclusion. But I digress.
Loftus’ argument that there isn’t a bad personal reason to reject Christianity
I’d now like to address Loftus’ argument that there isn’t a bad personal reason to reject Christianity. First, he considers a man named Pat, who rejects Christianity for a bad reason: “he had a strange dream where his dead Christian mother, Patricia, tells him it’s all a ruse, that no matter what people believe when they die God is sending everyone to hell anyway.”
Loftus thinks that although Pat could never hope to convince anyone else that Christianity is false on the basis of his dream, he would still have a good personal reason to reject Christianity. “Why?” you might ask. “Shouldn’t Pat be more skeptical of what he hears in dreams?” Here’s Loftus’ devastating reply:
If God desires Pat to be saved, and if God knows Pat will be convinced by his dream because his God-given cognitive faculties are such that he would accept its message as true, then God should not have allowed Pat to have had such a dream in the first place. Allowing a vulnerable ignorant person like Pat to have had such a dream, knowing it would lead him to reject Christianity, makes that God just as culpable as if he himself caused Pat to reject Christianity. (Emphasis mine – VJT.)
Let’s put God’s culpability to one side for a minute. What Loftus is saying is that if Pat’s personal conviction that (i) his mother was speaking to him in his dream, and that (ii) she was telling him the truth, is caused by a built-in bias in Pat’s cognitive faculties, then Pat’s belief is justified, even though it is false. Why? Because it’s arrived at as a result of his cognitive faculties functioning in their normal fashion.
Loftus then argues that if a belief is justified, then the person who has that belief cannot be held morally culpable for having it – which means that any God Who punished a person for having such a belief would be acting unjustly. Indeed, Loftus’ argument would work equally well against any God Who punished unbelief in individuals.
Loftus’ argument, Part II: self-deception
In the case above, Pat was at least sincere in his search for truth. But what about people who are insincere, and who give up their faith because they have gradually deceived themselves into believing that it is false? Loftus brings a similar argument to bear in the case of these people’s beliefs, which result from self-deception:
The deceived do not know they are being deceived, even if it’s self-deception. Get it? So just as in the case of Pat above, if God allows us to deceive ourselves into nonbelief when we don’t know this is what we’re doing (and we don’t), then we can no more be held accountable for this self-deception than Pat can be held accountable for his ignorance. Just as Pat has good personal reasons to reject Christianity, even though they are ignorant, so also people who deceive themselves into nonbelief have good personal reasons for their nonbelief because they are ignorant of their own self-deception. (Emphases mine – VJT.)
The kind of self-deception envisaged here by Loftus is unconscious self-deception. What about conscious self-deception, of the kind condemned by St. Paul in Romans 1:18-32? Loftus rejects the very notion of conscious self-deception as unintelligible:
Paul is describing people who consciously knew the truth and knowingly choose to believe and act on that which they knew was a lie, which is a much too large of a claim to be taken seriously by anyone except believers. Come on now, seriously?
A critical evaluation of Loftus’ argument against the possibility of conscious self-deception
Loftus’ argument bears a strong resemblance to the old philosophical argument (dating back to the ancient Greeks) that there is no such thing as akrasia, or weakness of will: no-one would ever willingly choose what they knew was bad for them, as we can only will what is good for us. As Plato’s Socrates declared in the Protagoras: “No one who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action, better than the one he is following, will ever continue on his present course” (Protagoras 358b-c). Philosophers continue to debate how weakness of will occurs, at the psychological level, and there is an interesting article about it here in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But the fact that it occurs is something I consider to be self-evident. It is a simple fact, after all, that people break their New Year’s resolutions all the time, even though they know perfectly well that they shouldn’t. If we acknowledge that people can sometimes do things that they know they shouldn’t, then we have to allow that they might sometimes choose to believe pleasing but ultimately pernicious ideas, even though they know they shouldn’t.
The big flaw in Loftus’ argument: it assumes that we don’t in any way choose our beliefs
This brings me to the ultimate flaw in Loftus’ argument that there can be no bad personal reasons for rejecting Christianity – or more generally, for rejecting a God Who punishes people for their unbelief. Loftus is assuming that when people come to believe that Christianity is false, their belief is caused in a deterministic fashion by their cognitive faculties. And Loftus’ point is that people can’t be blamed for the way in which their cognitive faculties work: that would be like blaming Sam for being Sam, or for that matter, blaming Sam for being human. Sam is what he is, and he is who he is. Nobody can blame him for that.
Loftus’ argument implicitly assumes that we have no control over the way in which our cognitive faculties work – in other words, that free will (and here, I’m talking about the libertarian variety) plays no role in the formation of our beliefs. “Well, why should it?” I hear you ask. “You didn’t choose to believe Pythagoras’ Theorem, do you? The logic of the argument compelled you to accept it.” But this is a highly atypical case. The vast majority of our beliefs do involve an element of choice, and our cognitive faculties do not normally work in a deterministic fashion. People often believe things that they find pleasant, or aesthetic, or morally uplifting, or intellectually congenial, or currently fashionable, or politically convenient, or what have you. The point I’m making here is not that they should or shouldn’t be forming their beliefs for these reasons, as they’re not all bad ones – science, for instance, is often guided by aesthetic considerations. The point I’m making is that beliefs typically involve an element of choice.
Arguments for God’s existence: convincing, but not irresistible
Take, for instance, the arguments for God’s existence. I’d like to quote a passage here from a book by Fr. Richard Clarke S.J. (formerly Fellow and Tutor of St. John’s College, Oxford) entitled The Existence of God (1887), which is written as a dialogue between a (Catholic) believer and an agnostic:
First of all, I ask you to bear in mind the difference between a sufficient argument and a resistless argument, between one which is convincing and one which is compelling. In the one case you can manage to find some evasion, in the other you cannot; in the one case you deserve indeed to be called wrong-headed if you do not assent to the argument, but in the other to be called a simple fool. Thus the argument for the reality of early Kings of Rome is a convincing argument, but yet some ingenious people regard them as myths; whereas the arguments for the existence of the City of Pekin are resistless, and any one who said that it was but a fable of geographers would be looked upon as having one of the lobes of his brain affected, even though on all other matters he might be very sensible and prudent. The arguments for the existence of God are convincing, not compelling arguments. You can always find what our professor in theology called an effugium, some way of backing out, which saves you from absolutely contradicting yourself or running counter to obvious common sense. Now comes the delicate matter to which I allude, and on which fear you may think me narrow and uncharitable. When an argument is resistless all rational men accede to it, but when it is short of this, but yet in itself sufficient to convince, you will find a divergence of opinion among a certain number. Granting the same amount of natural ability and the same possession of the necessary points of the argument, you will find that those who reject such an argument are (putting aside abnormal eccentricities) those whose interest it is to reject it, or who have some strong influence moving their will to reject it. Such an influence leads them to make the very most of any possible difficulty which can be raised against it, and to slur over its strong parts, or find plausible objections to them, and so they manage to convince themselves or fancy they are convinced. Take a claimant in some disputed case at law. The arguments against him are convincing, but not resistless. The Judges on the Bench are perfectly satisfied that he is wrong, yet the fact of his pecuniary interests being at stake somehow prevent him from seeing the force of the opponent’s case – in good faith or in a sort of good faith he thinks he sees a weak point in their arguments. He comes to the question, in Aristotle’s words, ouk adekastos, not without a bribe in his pocket which warps his judgment and prevents him from being perfectly impartial. It is just the same in the arguments respecting the existence of a God. Mankind at large regard them as sufficient and more than sufficient, but there are a certain number who fail to be convinced by them, and the reason is that they too come to the question not unbribed. For one reason or another the idea of an over-ruling Providence is distasteful to them. (Emphases mine – VJT.)
Fr. Clarke’s point can be generalized to cover all beliefs relating to one’s worldview. People sometimes reject certain fundamental beliefs about the world, or about the nature of Ultimate Reality, purely because they find these ideas uncongenial or distasteful; and they sometimes adopt fundamental beliefs, simply because they happen to fit in with what they want to believe. I think my readers would agree that it is bad to base one’s fundamental beliefs entirely on such considerations.
Intellectual vice and where it comes from
Given these facts about the way people form their beliefs, we can now see where the notion of intellectual vice comes in. There are some terribly misguided people whom we would call intellectually perverse, rather than merely misinformed. “They should know better than to believe such nonsense,” we say of them. Religious people might say this sort of thing about certain notorious skeptics; but it cuts both ways: atheists often say the same kind of thing about religious believers. Loftus, for instance, is fond of quoting Mark Twain’s skeptical adage, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” If the concept of intellectual perversity being discussed here makes any sense, then Loftus’ argument that people cannot be held accountable for their false religious beliefs is flawed at the outset.
The reader will recall that Loftus deliberately directed his argument that there are no bad personal reasons for rejecting Christianity at those Christians who reject Calvinism – in other words, Christians who typically believe in libertarian free will and reject determinism. If Loftus is now going to argue, against these people, that people who come to reject Christianity cannot be blamed for doing so, because their cognitive faculties work in a deterministic fashion, then I think they will (not unreasonably) accuse Loftus of begging the question, regarding free will.
The second big flaw in Loftus’ argument: it assumes that God knows all possible counterfactuals
There’s one more point that I’d like to make about Loftus’ argument: it assumes that God has knowledge of each and every counterfactual, relating to human choices. For instance, God knows what I would do if I were offered a bribe, or if I suddenly lost my sight, or if I won the lottery, or if I dreamed about snakes. It’s absolutely vital to Loftus’ case that God should possess this kind of knowledge. Let’s recall what he said about Pat, who came to reject Christianity after having a strange dream:
If God desires Pat to be saved, and if God knows Pat will be convinced by his dream because his God-given cognitive faculties are such that he would accept its message as true, then God should not have allowed Pat to have had such a dream in the first place. Allowing a vulnerable ignorant person like Pat to have had such a dream, knowing it would lead him to reject Christianity, makes that God just as culpable as if he himself caused Pat to reject Christianity. (Emphasis mine – VJT.)
According to Loftus, God is morally culpable here – and hence, Pat is not to blame – precisely because God knew what Pat would come to believe if he had such a dream, and yet He still went ahead and allowed Pat to have that dream. Thus, on Loftus’ account, God’s knowledge that Pat, after having the dream, would come to reject Christianity, is antecedent (not merely temporally, but logically) to Pat’s having the dream. God knows about Pat’s change in belief because he knows that Pat would give up his faith if he had that dream, and then He went ahead and allowed Pat to have it. (The “then” here is logical, not temporal.)
Why it’s problematic to ascribing to God a knowledge of all possible counterfactuals
I’d like to make two brief comments here about God’s alleged knowledge of all possible counterfactuals. First, it is no part of the Christian doctrine of omniscience that God knows what I would do in each and every possible situation. Omniscience simply means that God knows all truths. The question at stake here, however, is whether it is legitimate to speak of counterfactuals as truths. And that brings me to my secoond point. The idea that there is always one and only one thing that I would do, if I were in a given situation, is pretty ridiculous. For instance, is there one particular course of action that God knows I would choose if I won the lottery? I see no reason to think so. That being the case, there is no “fact of the matter” for God to know here. What I would do if I won the lottery is undetermined, precisely because I have libertarian free will. I determine myself only when I make an actual choice.
This is not to say that all counterfactuals are meaningless. That would only be the case if I had unlimited free will, which I don’t. Our characters to some extent constrain our range of choices, as do the past choices we have made. So in some situations, we can say God knows what we would do. But in the majority of possible situations, there is literally nothing for God to know, about how I would choose: it’s undetermined.
An alternative account of Divine foreknowledge: the Boethian account
The account of God’s foreknowledge which is implicitly presupposed by Loftus in his post is very different from the Boethian account of Divine foreknowledge, in which God knows what I will do, not from knowing what I would do in each and every possible situation, but from the fact that He, being timeless, can instantly “see” (i.e. be informed of) the past, present and future, in their entirety. That is why some theologians speak of God as having knowledge of vision.
Recently, a variant on the Boethian model has been developed, according to which God is omnitemporal rather than timeless: He occupies all points in space-time, and is instantly aware of anything happening at any of those points. (See here, here and here for some very interesting essays on the subject, by a self-described “agnostic atheist,” David Misialowki, who nevertheless believes he can show that “no theist need fear the argument, heard so often from atheists intent on discrediting religious belief, that an omniscient God cancels human free will and moral responsibility.”)
On both the Boethian and omnitemporal accounts, however, God is dependent on us for His knowledge of our choices: that is, our choices inform Him of what is happening. On such an account, God’s knowledge of what we choose to do is logically posterior to our choosing to do it. This means that in the example relating to Pat above, God is not at fault. His knowledge is not derived from counterfactuals about what we would in each and every possible circumstance, but from what we actually did. And in that case, the buck stops with Pat, and not with God. God’s knowledge of Pat’s giving up his Christian faith is derived from Pat’s actual free choice to give up his faith, and not from God’s knowledge of what Pat would do, if he had that strange dream.
The Boethian account has been defended by John Wesley and C. S. Lewis, and it is also popular among Christian laypeople, although many theologians don’t like it.
Are there any good theological objections to the Boethian account?
On the Boethian account, as we noted above, God timelessly knows everything we will do, but He is still dependent on us for this information: from His timeless standpoint, He has to “see” – or more accurately, be informed of – what we in fact decide to do. Certain theologians dislike the notion of God’s depending on creatures for anything. In reply, it could be argued that this “limitation” is self-imposed: in creating free agents, God timelessly chooses to rely on them for His knowledge of what they do.
Another point that needs to be made in this context is that God’s depending on others for information is actually a perfection on that God’s part, rather than an imperfection. For this dependency is what enables intercessory prayer to occur. Prayer is a conversation between two parties: God and the creature praying to Him. If God is pulling the strings, either by making us act (and pray) as we do, or by putting us in situations where He knows precisely how we would act and pray, then we are not really conversing with Him, and His responsiveness to His creatures’ needs cannot be made manifest.
Other defenders of classical theism have argued that Boethius’ solution is at odds with the traditional idea that God is impassible – i.e. incapable by nature of being affected by what His creatures do, either inside or outside of time. How could our actions impact on God? Three points in reply: (i) difficult as this is to conceive, it is much less absurd than supposing that an essentially perfect Being could make a creature without automatically knowing what it was doing at any given time; (ii) strictly speaking, it is wrong to say that our actions impact on God; rather, we should say that when God makes a free rational agent, it is somehow “coupled” to God in such a way that the agent’s choices automatically determine the content of God’s (timeless) beliefs about the agent’s choices; (iii) the common Christian teaching that God is impassible can be understood simply to mean that God is not subject to pain, suffering or involuntary passions.
For those who are interested, I’ve written a little essay here, in which I discuss and critique various solutions that have been proposed to the question of how God foreknows our free choices. In the essay, I also discuss theological determinism (or universal predestination) and Molinism, in considerable depth, while keeping technical jargon to an absolute minimum.
The point I’d like to make before I finish this post is that Loftus’ argument that no-one can be blamed for rejecting Christianity presupposes a Molinist account of Divine foreknowledge (or more accurately, a Congruist account), which I reject, and which most ordinary Christian believers have never heard of anyway. In other words, it is theologically question-begging.
Loftus’ parting shot
At the end of his post, Loftus defends the notion of conscious rebellion against Islam and Christianity (and by implication, Judaism, his objections to God are largely based on the Torah):
Furthermore, I don’t even think conscious rebellion against the God hypothesis is a bad personal reason to reject Christianity. We are all rebelling against all other deities anyway. I state for the record, and for all to read, that I am rebelling against Allah who is pleased with militant Muslims willing to fly planes into buildings, if called upon to do so….
I think this is a good reason to reject Allah, don’t you, by rebelling against his moral codes in a civilized society? Or, must I have better reasons? If these are good enough reasons then why can’t I rebel against Yahweh for allowing, no demanding, child sacrifices, slavery, the denigration of women, homosexuals, and for rejecting the freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion, something akin to the First Amendment of the American Constitution?
Most Muslims, as far as I’m aware, don’t approve of flying airplanes into buildings. If Loftus wants to reject Islam, well and good; but he needs a better reason than that.
I don’t propose to get into an argument with Loftus about Biblical morality in this post. I believe I have largely addressed his concerns in an earlier post of mine, entitled, Why morality cannot be 100% natural: A Response to Professor Coyne (August 5, 2011). The point I would like to make here is that even if Loftus is right in condemning Biblical morality, it still doesn’t follow that any and every personal reason for rejecting Christianity is a good one, which is what Loftus was attempting to show in the first place.
My verdict on Loftus’ argument
To sum up: there is little that can be salvaged from Loftus’ attempt to show that there can be no bad personal reasons for giving up Christianity, apart from the fact that if our choices are determined by our cognitive faculties, or if God somehow knows how we would act in each and every possible situation, independently of how we do act, then we don’t possess libertarian free will. But since Loftus was addressing his post not to Calvinists, who reject libertarian free will, but to other Christians who (for the most part) believe in libertarian free will, then his attempt to demonstrate that no-one can ever be blamed for giving up the Christian faith falls flat on its face.
I’d like to close with a final observation. It seems to me that Loftus has a problem with the whole notion of libertarian free will, and how exactly it would work. He seems unable to conceive of the idea that our beliefs might be genuinely up to us. Loftus might like to read my online post, Is free will dead?, which was written to address the issues that concern Loftus.
The real challenge to atheists, on the subject of libertarian free will, is this: if you do believe in it, then where do you think such an amazing ability came from, on your worldview? And if you don’t believe in it, then how do you know that your thought processes on speculative matters (as opposed to practical matters, which could have been shaped along Darwinian lines), are actually reliable? Or don’t you?