Some notes on "No Argument for God" by John Wilkinson

I'm halfway through this. 

This book is written in a warm, conversational tone and it covers some important topics for Christians to think about. However, Wilkinson makes some serious errors in thinking, and those errors would be quite damaging to the Christian church if more people took some of the things he says on board. (Although I won’t go into that side of things here, I’ll merely discuss his ideas).  

Wilkinson writes about the limits of reason, and how reason and the senses on their own create a flat world, devoid of any clarity about ideas of meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose cannot be empirically proven. He uses this discussion as a springboard to talk about the third dimension, ie: revelation.

However I’m not convinced that things are as simple as Wilkinson makes out. Why does “reason” have to only involve the “senses”? On the contrary, reasoning about something is simply thinking about something. We can reason about things that go beyond the mere senses, and in fact there are entire disciplines of philosophy that do just that. Wilkinson himself is offering us “reasons” of sorts to accept Christian revelation in this book, but one assumes he doesn’t think his own “reasoning” falls prey to his own critiques of reason? Perhaps the discussion would’ve been clearer if Wilkinson had referred to the hard sciences here instead. But of course, he wouldn’t do that because he’d be unable to make the same critique of the limits of the entire concept of “reason” without referring to it as reason. It'd be much more obvious to any reader that his discussion needs to get broader if he did that. I agree with much of what he has to say about the limits of science, but science and reason are not coterminous. This is not mere semantics. 

So after critiquing reason, Wilkinson moves onto revelation. He believes we need the third dimension of revelation to give us meaning and purpose which can’t be attained from the two dimensional world of “reason” alone. Revelation gives us the “why” of life whereas “reason” gives us the “how” of life. (And again, perhaps Wilkinson should have said science, which would have been more accurate). But Wilkinson commits a familiar error here. He introduces a very crucial topic but doesn’t adequately define it. He merely says that “Revelation” is the disclosure of a person and that it answers the why questions.

This quote disappointed me: 

“When someone reveals something, he or she draws back the curtain on it’s purpose. Someone explains why the object is there. The problem with revelation is that there is no proof; we have to accept the person’s word”. (p56).

The Christian message is the message of God becoming flesh. Jesus walked among us. The central Christian claim is that of the resurrection. As the Apostle Paul wrote, without it our faith would well and truly be in vain. The Resurrection was, historically, the beginning of Christianity. It is the cornerstone of Christianity and, further than that, it is therefore the KEY to Christian revelation itself. It was an event that took place in history. It was God’s son literally interacting with the senses of the people who witnessed it.

This is why as a fellow Christian, reading the quote about “Revelation” above was deeply troubling. There is an obvious, serious, concerning problem with Wilkinson’s thesis: It simply does not make sense of the Christian message. Wilkinson is a Christian pastor, but he is wheeling out grand statements about abstract ideas like “revelation” that do not make sense of the Christian teaching itself! Christian revelation is not SIMPLY revealing the “why” of life, and “drawing back the curtain” on the purpose of the universe. Christian revelation is not an ethereal philosophy of life or a list of moral teachings. The key event informing Christian revelation is an event that happened in place and time. Now, the resurrection cannot be “proven” 100% one way or the other. But it can be investigated by the tools of history. It is not something that is completely sheltered from “reasoning” one way or the other as Wilkinson would so clearly and evidently like it to be.

Part way through the book, after Wilkinson’s threads start coming together in major arguments about reason and revelation as I’ve (fairly, hopefully) stated above, something dawned on me that hadn’t hit me earlier. Ironically, Wilkinson is actually doing the opposite of what he wants to achieve with this book.  Wilkinson thinks we are at risk of “robbing Christianity of it’s distinctive flavor” (p35). We’re trying to make it friendlier by robbing it of difficulties. We want to be able to tell people “it fits entirely in your brain!”(p35). But ironically, it is Wilkinson who is trying to fit God into a box. According to Wilkinson, “Christianity does not conform to human logic” (p24). Wilkinson recounts his own faith story, in which he prayed to God “I choose to believe in you, even though I have no reason to”. (p20).  But surely he must realize that this is not everyone’s experience? There are many Christians who have, in fact, come to faith through or partly through reason and arguments. C.S. Lewis was an Oxford Professor in his 30’s when he became a Christian, and he ended up as possibly the most widely read Christian author of the 20^th century. Mortimer J Adler was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20^th century, and he became a Christian in his 80’s.  

Stories like these (and countless others) should teach us that God is BIGGER than we think. God can use experiences like Wilkinson’s to reach people, but he can also use reason, science and arguments to reach people as well. Wilkinson is trying to fit faith into the “absurd” box, whilst telling us how much he despises those who try to fit faith into the “logic” box. God doesn’t fit into Wilkinson’s box anymore than he fits into anyone else’s. The truth is that everyone’s experience of God is different to other people’s, and that is perfectly OK.

Christianity doesn’t confirm entirely to human logic at all points. Wilkinson is right about that. But that’s largely because God is an infinite God and we are finite beings. How could small, rationally limited people like us fully understand and explain an infinite being? If there is an infinite God, it wouldn’t make sense for us to be able to “fully grasp” him/it. On the contrary, you’d have to ask yourself whether anyone who thinks they know it all about this God is in fact kidding themselves. Wilkinson would agree with that much as well.

We see like we’re seeing through glass dimly. Dimly indeed. But that doesn’t mean Christianity is, on the whole, “contrary to reason” or that there are “no reasons” to believe! 

How NOT to review a book

I love reading, as I've written about before, and I usually review the books I read on Amazon.

Two recent events have raised the issue of how NOT to criticise or review a book. I will use these two examples to illuminate this common error.

The first occurred on facebook. John Dickson wrote an article criticising Andrew Bolt's attempt at Biblical criticism, and then this article was linked on the Public Christianity facebook page. A guy named Dave Singer responded with this gem:


I note that John offers, as usual, NO evidence whatsoever to support the claim that the Gospels are true.

He may as well call Andrew Bolt an idiot for thinking the Phantom Menace contradicts The Empire Strikes Back.

 I responded by pointing out that it's an error to judge an author by a standard that he never intended to meet. John Dickson's purpose wasn't to "provide evidence to support the claim that the Gospels are true", it was to show that the problems raised by Andrew Bolt aren't all that troubling at all. I also referred to Dickson's latest video where he talks about historical reasons to believe that the Resurrection accounts are historically plausible- 1. They're historically very early, 2. The testimony of women and 3. The conviction of knowledge (as opposed to belief) evidenced by the early followers.

A second example occurred on Amazon.com. A review of Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible was heavily critical of the book, on the basis that Smith's argument was "hoisted on it's own petard". The author of the review, S.D Parker, berated Smith because Smith apparently criticises the Bible for not being definitive enough, but Smith's own conclusions won't reach definitive agreement either! As I pointed out in response to Parker, Smith never intended for his own conclusions to reach definitive agreement! He clearly states that his views are merely some suggestions to get the discussion started on how to better approach the Bible, and not the final word. Further, Smith's argument was not against the Bible for not being definitive enough, it was against a particular view of the Bible (Biblicism) which implies the Bible should reach definitive agreement when it clearly doesn't! Big difference.

 

 

Smith devotes the second half of the book to arguing that the theology of the Bible does contain ambiguities (Chapter 6) and even the theological conclusions that we can reach are not entirely based on the Bible but are developed with later reflection and discussion (Chapter 7).

 

 

Parker was welcome to argue that Smith's suggestions don't work, but it was a simple error to criticise them for not being capable of reaching definitive conclusions. Smith never said they would! In fact quite the opposite. Not only did Parker misrepresent Smith's argument, but he judged Smith by a standard he never intended to meet.

 

 

It's interesting to note that Parker deleted that review the day after my response. The moral of the story here is that you can only judge a book by whether it sets out to do what it intended to achieve- NOT whether it achieved what YOU want it to achieve.

Book Review: Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, by Julian Baggini

Well delivered but incomplete and rosy: 2.5 stars.

Julian Baggini's Very Short Intro to Atheism is written with clarity. He states his views clearly and never leaves the reader in any question as to what he's arguing for. This is worth mentioning because it is actually no small feat. Further than this, Baggini structured the book effectively, both in terms of his big picture flow of the book and secondly by always stating his specific points and concluding each chapter with a summary of the arguments. These characteristics made the book easy to read. Secondly, he does an admirable job of making his subject matter accessible, and so he showed his capability of delivering within the spirit of the Very Short Introduction Series.

Baggini begins (Chapter 1) by explaining what atheism is. He paints atheism as a positive belief, and this sets the scene for the next few chapters as it allows him to justify and explain his atheism before completing the more negative task of arguing why religious belief is mistaken, which he doesn't do until Chapter 6. In Chapter 2, Baggini claims that strong evidence supports atheism but only weak evidence can support theism. He argues that human nature and consciousness are completely biological, and that this strongly supports the naturalist, and therefore atheist, view. He argues that naturalist explanations are incredibly successful and that "The class of unexplained phenomena is unlikely to contain anything that will come to be explained in supernatural terms". This is a wide reaching chapter, as Baggini makes further positive arguments before taking on the claim that atheism is a faith position, and arguing against those who would use Pascal's Wager to justify belief.

In Chapter 3, Baggini starts by arguing for the separation of morality and religion, saying that we shouldn't see them as inextricably linked. He explores three frameworks for understanding Godless morality, and draws insights from them all. Meaning and Purpose is the subject of Chapter 4, and it can be summarised by the statement "Life is what you make it". Chapter 5 sees Baggini trace atheism back to naturalists in the 6th century BCE, and then in it's modern form, from the enlightenment forwards as a wholesale belief system in the marketplace of ideas. In Chapter 6 he turns to the deconstruction of the justification for religious belief, as he considers the merits of arguments for God's existence. In Chapter 7 he concludes by discussing humanism and praising the realism of atheism as a means of facing the world.

So, why only 2.5 stars? It's because Baggini's book is both incomplete and overly rosy. He admits at the start of Chapter 7 the fact that it's inevitable that much will be left out, given the brevity of the book (interestingly, this book is much shorter than many of the others in the VSI series- I just received 8 and this was the shortest). I understand this and so admittedly it must be factored in as I pin Baggini down on my charge of incompleteness.

In the earlier chapters, I found myself frustrated that Baggini didn't even mention any of the best anti naturalist arguments. Given his view that naturalism justifies atheism, this was disappointing. I was also dismayed with his lack of discussion on the point that many religious believers and religious belief systems are completely comfortable with naturalist explanations (and the different, but related point that many religious academics and philosophers of science believe God provides a better justification for the entire scientific enterprise than does naturalism), and thus that there's significant disagreement about whether many of Baggini's points provide much support for atheism at all, let alone strong support. It may be fair for Baggini to claim that space contraints kept him from responding to objections, and that he was simply trying to put forward a brief, summarised, positive case. Nonetheless, he could've easily made his entire discussion more well-rounded by mentioning those obvious objections and why he believes they fail. This would've only taken a small amount of space, yet would've made this book much more effective at it's aim of showing why one should be an atheist.

So, in making this criticism I will focus on the one glaring example where the arguments put forward are unequivocally and definitively incomplete. That is, Chapter 6. He refers to "The Cosmological Argument" when in actual fact there is no such thing- there are three broad forms of cosmological argument that together are given the family name "Cosmological Arguments" only because they are similar in their reference point- the cosmos. Baggini presents the design argument as the "watchmaker" argument given by Paley centuries ago, when scientific findings in the past 50 years have completely revolutionised the discussion on this argument. Now, it is true that most religious believers do not base their faith on natural theology, but nonetheless, since he's presenting and critiquing arguments for God's existence, he is at least obliged to mention the ones that modern Christian apologists and philosophers consider the most persuasive, such as modern renderings of the Kalam and Leibnizian Cosmological arguments or the fine tuning argument. I am aware of his statement in Ch 7 that he didn't want to mention sophisticated defences of theistic belief, but I'm not saying that is necessary. (I suspect he had in made some of Plantinga's philosophically dense ideas such as reformed epistemology). I'm asking him to merely lay out a more forceful argument, instead of laying out an ancient strawman.

The second criticism was that he falls prey to the very thing he shows awareness of in the introduction, by painting an overly rosy picture of atheism. Some of the ideas perpetuated by the figures who have paved the way for modern day atheism- Nietzsche, for example- are darker than the picture of atheism that Baggini presents. Atheism is in it's infancy, as Baggini notes, but he pays little attention to dark atheist ideas, or to the fact that atheism has arisen in societies heavily influenced by Christian belief. Baggini would have you believe that atheism is a knight in shining armour, waving the torch of rational thinking alight and ridding us of superstition. But where will atheism really lead people in the future? Caution is required, because as John Dickson observed: Any kind of life is logically compatible with atheism.

Baggini's picture didn't make enough room for the darker side of atheism, and thus he ends up being guilty of the very thing he foresaw in his own introduction. As he admits in Chapter 7, "the atheism described in this book really is a form of humanism". He even says he sees positive atheism and humanism as "coterminous", but the problem is that he simply doesn't give any justification for thinking this! And considering that it's such a huge part of the framework within which he describes and justifies atheism, this is a huge oversight. In other words, given the position of naturalism- nature is all there is- that Baggini subscribes to, many "logical" views of the world and ways of living are possible. And many of them are much bleaker than Baggini's polite and tolerant outlook, so I'm not sure he has a right to commandeer atheism by painting it in such a positive light. Perhaps Baggini is, as we all are, a product of his times.

By balancing out the strong readability and the clarity with which Baggini wrote with the two main criticisms I've levelled at the book, I give it 2.5 stars.