Is God the source of meaning in life? Four Critical Arguments

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(Previous Entry)

Theists sometimes argue that God’s existence is essential for meaning in life. In a quote that I have used far too often over the years, William Lane Craig puts it rather bluntly:

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value or purpose. 

(Craig 2007, 72)

It is clear from this that, for Craig, God is essential for meaning. Without him our lives are absurd. Is this view of the relationship between God and meaning correct? Is God the source of meaning in life? Or could our lives have meaning in His absence?

In the previous entry in this series, I looked at Megill and Linford’s recent argument about the relationship between God and meaning. To recap, they argued that God’s existence is sufficient for meaning in life. This is because God, being omnibenevolent and omnipotent, would not create beings with meaningless lives. To do otherwise would be to create a sub-optimal world in which people are susceptible to gratuitous suffering, and since it is widely-accepted that gratuitous suffering is incompatible with the existence of God it cannot be the case that He would create such a world. Megill and Linford also argued that this conclusion could be used to craft a novel argument for atheism, viz. if there is at least one meaningless life, then God does not exist.

This is an interesting and provocative argument, and it clearly suggests that God might be important for meaning. But it does not vindicate Craig’s position. It shows that God’s existence is sufficient for meaning; it does not show that God is necessary for meaning (i.e. that God is the source of meaning). This is an important distinction. If there is no necessary relationship between God and meaning, then it is possible to have a purely secular theory of meaning. And if it is possible to have a purely secular theory of meaning, then it is also possible for their novel argument for atheism to work (as I explained at the end of the last post).

The second half of Megill and Linford’s paper is dedicated to defending the view that God is not the source of meaning in life. They present four different arguments in support of this view. I want to look at each of them in the remainder of this post. I have given these arguments names, but be warned, in case you want to read their original paper, the names are my own invention. One other forewarning: the claim that God is sufficient for meaning is taken for granted in the following discussion. This does have an effect on the plausibility of some of what follows, though this will be flagged when appropriate.


1. The Possible Worlds Argument
The first argument asks us to imagine two different possible worlds:

G: A world in which God definitely exists and which is a perfect duplicate of the actual world.

NG: A world in which God definitely does not exist and which is a perfect duplicate of the actual world.

Both of these worlds are identical in terms of the lives that pass in and out of existence; the events that take place; and the outcomes that are achieved. The only difference is that God exists in G but not in NG. Linford and Megill suggest that both worlds are epistemically possible, i.e. for all we know we could be living in G or NG. What effect does this have on the meaning of our lives?

If we live in G, then our lives definitely have meaning. This follows from the argument in part one: if God exists, he would not allow us to live meaningless lives. That’s obvious enough. What if we live in NG? Well, then it depends on whether God is necessary for meaning or not. If he is necessary for meaning (i.e. if he is the source of meaning) then our lives in NG are meaningless. But if he is not necessary, then there is some hope (it depends on what the other potential sources of meaning are).

Let’s assume for now that God is necessary for meaning. This forces us to conclude that our lives in NG are meaningless. Is that a plausible conclusion? Megill and Linford argue that it is not. If it were true, then it would also follow that the actual content of our lives had no bearing on their meaningfulness. Remember, our lives are identical in G and NG; the only difference is that God exists in one and not in the other. But surely it is implausible to conclude that what we do (the actions we perform, the events we participate in etc) have no bearing on the meaningfulness of our lives? This gives us the following argument:

• (1) Imagine two (epistemically) possible worlds: G and NG. God exists in G and not in NG, but otherwise both worlds are identical to the actual world in which we live. Thus, the content of our lives is the same in G and NG.

• (2) If God is necessary for meaning, then our lives are meaningless in NG; if God is sufficient for meaning, then our lives meaningful in G.

• (3) Therefore, if God is necessary for meaning, the actual content of our lives has no bearing on whether or not they are meaningful (from 1 and 2).

• (4) It is implausible to assume that the content of our lives has no bearing on their meaningfulness.

• (5) Therefore, God must not be necessary for meaning.

For what it’s worth, the basic gist of the argument being made here — that if God is necessary and sufficient for meaning then what humans do with their lives would make no difference — has been exploited by others in the recent past. Still, the argument can be challenged from several angles. The obvious line of attack is to take issue with premise (1). That premise assumes that our lives really could be identical in G and NG, but surely that is false? Surely, if God exists, his existence would have to make some difference to the content or shape of our lives?

Megill and Linford consider two versions of this response. The first appeals to a necessarily interventionist God:

• (6) Objection: God is necessarily interventionist, i.e. he changes the course of events in the world. Consequently, G and NG could not be identical.

Megill and Linford respond to this by defending a narrower version of premise (1). They concede that God could intervene in some people’s lives, but point out that it is accepted (by ‘most’ theists) that there are at least some individual lives that aren’t affected by divine intervention. Those lives would be identical across both G and NG and the argument could still go through for the people living those lives. Similarly, if the claim is that God’s intervention is itself necessary for meaning, you run into the problem that God does not intervene in all lives. That means that those lives will lack meaning, which is inconsistent with the argument presented in part one (i.e. that if God exists, all lives must have meaning).

• (7) God does not intervene in all lives hence those lives could be identical across G and NG; furthermore, if such intervention is necessary for meaning, you run into the problem that lives in which God does not intervene would be meaningless, which is inconsistent with the claim that God is sufficient for meaning.

Some of that seems plausible to me but I wonder whether a theist could wiggle out of it by insisting that God does intervene (in some minimal way) in every life (e.g. through creation or at the end of life). Some people may not appreciate it or be aware of it, but that doesn’t matter: his minimal intervention is still the secret sauce that saves us from meaninglessness.

The other version of the objection focuses on the afterlife:

• (8) Objection: G and NG are not identical because the afterlife would exist in G and the afterlife is what confers meaning on our lives.

This is certainly a popular view among theists. The earlier quote from Craig made a direct appeal to the importance of immortality in our account of meaning. Megill and Linford offer two responses. The first is to argue that an afterlife is epistemically possible on atheism. In other words, there is at least one epistemically possible atheistic universe in which humans live forever. So God isn’t necessary for immortality. The other response is to argue against the notion that immortality is necessary for meaning. They do this by appealing to the fact that some events of finite duration appear to have value, and that sometimes the value that they appear to have is a direct function of their brevity. They give the example of one’s days as an undergraduate student, which are probably more fondly remembered because they don’t last forever. They could also give the example of lives that go on forever but seem to epitomise meaninglessness, e.g. the life of Sisyphus.

• (9) It is epistemically possible for their to be an afterlife in NG; and it is unlikely that immortality is itself necessary for meaning.

I suspect theists might respond by agreeing that immortality simpliciter is not necessary for meaning. What is necessary is the right kind of immortality and God provides for that kind of immortality (e.g. through everlasting life in paradise). In doing this, theists are making appeals to some feature or property that God manages to bestow on our lives to make them meaningful. To help us distinguish such claims, Megill and Linford appeal to something they call the fourfold distinction:

The Fourfold Distinction: When discussing the overarching ‘meaningfulness’ of our lives, it is worth distinguishing between four phenomena:

(i) The significance we attribute to our own lives;

(ii) The purpose to which we devote our lives;

(iii) The significance God attributes to our lives;

(iv) The purpose for which God created us.

The theist might concede that life in NG could have (i) and (ii), but it could never have (iii) and (iv). They are what make the crucial difference. They come from outside our own lives and confer meaning upon us. The other arguments presented by Megill and Linford try to deal with these sorts of claims.


2. The External Source Argument
The next argument is something I am dubbing the external source argument. It works like a dilemma involving a disjunctive premise (i.e. a premise of the form ‘either a or b’). The disjunctive premise concerns the possible sources of meaning in life. Megill and Linford suggest that there are only two possibilities: (a) the source is intrinsic/internal to our individual lives, i.e. human life is meaningful in and of itself; or (b) the source is extrinsic/external to our lives, i.e. what we do and how that relates to some other feature of the universe is what determines meaningfulness. The problem is that neither of these possibilities is consistent with God being the source of meaning.

The full argument works a little something like this:

• (10) If life has meaning, then that meaning is either intrinsic/internal to life or extrinsic/external (i.e. dependent on what we do and how that relates to something external to us).

• (11) If the meaning is intrinsic/internal to life, then God is not the source of meaning.

• (12) If the meaning is extrinsic/external, then God might be the source of meaning (though that depends on what else we know about meaning and God’s relationship to it).

• (13) We know that if God exists, then every life must have meaning (the sufficiency argument - from the previous post).

• (14) Therefore, we know that if God exists, every life must have meaning irrespective of how that life is lived and how the person living it relates to God (from 13 and previous discussion).

• (15) Therefore, God cannot be the external source of meaning.

• (16) Therefore, either way, God cannot be the source of meaning in life.

This formalisation is my attempt to make sense of the argument presented in Megill and Linford’s article. The first three premises should be relatively uncontroversial. The argument does not assume that life has meaning, merely that if it does, the meaning must be internal or external. It is pretty obvious that internal meaning excludes God as the source. That just leaves the external possibility. The problem is that the sufficiency argument seems to suggest that how we live our lives makes no difference to their meaning, which in turn seems to rule out the claim that how we relate to God (or how he relates to us) is what infuses our lives with meaning.

So far, this is very similar to the previous argument. The chief difference comes when Megill and Linford develop the argument by the considering fourfold possibilities: (i) that the purpose to which we devote our lives matches the purpose for which God created us; (ii) that the purpose to which we devote our lives does not match the purpose for which God created us; (iii) that the significance we attribute to our lives matches the significance God attributes to us; or (iv) that the significance we attribute to our lives does not match the significance God attributes to us. They argue that none of these possibilities is consistent with God being the source of meaning.

I’ll briefly summarise their reasoning. Suppose (i) is true: our purpose matches God’s purpose for our lives. There are two problems with this. First, it is not clear how one being creating us for a purpose necessarily makes our lives meaningful. When we consider analogous cases (e.g. a scientist creating a child for the purpose of organ donation) we often find something lamentable or problematic about the life in question. We think it robs us of proper autonomy and choice. At the very least, it would seem to depend on the nature of the purpose and not on the mere fact that another being has created us for a purpose. Second, we have the NG problem, outlined in the previous argument. We could imagine two worlds (G and NG) in which we live for identical purposes, albeit in one of these world’s God does not exist. Does this rob us of something important? Megill and Linford suggest that it does not: if our lives are directed toward the same end, they should be equally valuable. I suspect a theist would challenge this on the grounds that there are certain divine purposes that simply would not be possible in NG.

Suppose (ii) is true: our purposes don’t match. If that’s the case, then it seems like God would have created a particularly odd world. If he is rational, then he would want to accomplish his goals through his actions. And if he is truly omnipotent and ominscient, then surely he would not fail to create beings that matched his goals?

Suppose (iii) is true: we attribute the same level of significance to our lives as God does. In that case, Megill and Linford think that we once again have the G vs NG problem: “we would attribute the same importance to our lives regardless of whether we lived in G or NG. Therefore it is difficult to see what difference God would make in this scenario.” (Megill and Linford, 2015).

Finally, suppose (iv) is true: there is a mismatch in the level of significance we attach to our lives. There are then two possible mismatches. Either we attribute more significance than God or less. If we attribute more, then Megill and Linford argue ‘our lives would be imbued with a deep sense of importance (even if inappropriate) in both G and NG. So it is difficult to see why would need to be in G as opposed to NG for our lives to have meaning.’ (Megill and Linford 2015) And if we attribute less meaning, then we are confronted with a variant on the problem of evil: people would be made to suffer needlessly by thinking that their lives were less important than they actually are.

I have my problems with all of this. While I agree with the insight at the heart of the argument (if God exists, then what we do will make no difference to the ultimate meaning/significance of the universe), I think Megill and Linford do a poor job showing that God cannot be an external source of meaning. One reason for this is that they don’t spend enough time distinguishing between the different concepts (i.e. purpose, meaning, significance); another is that many of the points made here simply rehash or repeat points that have already been made in their article. The main reason, however, is that throughout this section of their paper they seem to assume a largely subjectivist standard of success for their argument. In other words, they assume that if we think our lives have meaning (or significance or purpose or whatever) then that’s good enough. This certainly seems to be the assumption at play in the two quoted passages in the two preceding paragraphs. In both instances, Megill and Linford rule out the importance of God on the grounds that if we attribute a high level of significance to our own lives, they must have that level of significance. They don’t seem to countenance the view that our subjective beliefs might be wrong.

This is problematic because it is then all too easy for a theist to take advantage of the distinction between objective and subjective standards of success. The theist could argue that, irrespective of what we think about the purpose or significance of our lives, what matters is that there is an objective standard for these things. They could bolster this argument by pointing to secular philosophers who have argued for similar views. And then they could argue that God is the only thing that could possibly provide the appropriate objective standard. In this sense, they could argue that the debate is very similar to that about God’s role in grounding objective moral truths. The problem with Megill and Linford's argument is that it too readily assumes the presence of meaning/significance when we subjectively perceive it to exist.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I think there is plenty wrong with the claim that God is the only thing that could ground the appropriate objective standard. I have tried to explain why I think that in several previous posts. I just don’t think that this particular argument, one of four in Megill and Linford’s article, is making the best case for this view.


3. The No-Belief Argument
I’ll try to deal with the two remaining arguments more quickly. The first of these focuses on the role of theistic belief in any theistic account of meaning. I’m calling it the ‘no-belief’ argument because it highlights the potential irrelevance of belief in God for meaning, which is then alleged to be disturbing for the theist.

The argument starts with the supposition that God is necessary for meaning, i.e. that He is an external source of meaning in our lives. This means that we must stand in some sort of relation to God in order for our lives to have meaning. That relation could take many different forms. It could be that we have to achieve salvation with God in the afterlife. It could be that we need to follow a specific list of divine commandments. The precise details of the relation do not matter too much. What matters is whether belief in God is going to be an essential part of that relation. In other words, on the theistic account, is it the case that we must believe in God in order for our lives to have meaning?

You might argue that it is. If you are a theist, you would like to think that your belief makes some kind of a difference. But in that case you run into a version of the problem of divine hiddenness. There are some people who are blameless non-believers either because they were raised in a time and place where belief in God was not available to them, or because they have honestly tried to believe and lost their faith. Either way, if you think belief is necessary for meaning, it would follow that these people are living meaningless lives. This is incompatible with the sufficiency argument outlined in part one. Recall the conclusion to that argument: if God exists, all lives must have meaning. It follows therefore that belief in God cannot be necessary for meaning.

But then the theist is in the rather odd position of believing that God is necessary for meaning but belief in Him is not. This is certainly an odd view of meaning for people like William Lane Craig, who insist that achieving salvation through a personal relationship with God is the ultimate source of meaning and purpose. And it would probably be uncomfortable for many other theists.

My feeling is that although theist would be uncomfortable with this idea, this argument once again fails to really upset the view that God is a necessary, external source of meaning. I feel like a theist could bite the bullet on this one and accept that belief in God is not important, but continue to maintain that something else about God is important (e.g. that he will save us all in the end, irrespective of belief). I’ve certainly conversed with a number of liberal, universalist-style Christians who embrace this idea. Their views about God and meaning are often maddeningly vague, but they aren’t quite susceptible to this objection.


4. The New Euthyphro Argument
The final argument is a variation on the Euthyphro dilemma. As you probably know, the Euthyphro dilemma is a famous objection to theistically-grounded views of morality, such as Divine Command Theory. It is named after a Platonic dialogue. The dilemma poses the following challenge to the proponent of divine command theory: for any X (where is an allegedly moral act) is X morally right because it is commanded by God, or is it commanded by God because it is morally right? If it is the former, then it seems like the goodness of X is purely arbitrary (God could have commanded something else). If it is the latter, then it seems like God is not the true ontological foundation for the obligation to X. This is independent from God. Neither of these conclusions is entirely welcome.

Megill and Linford argue that a similar dilemma can be posed about the relationship between God and meaning. To anyone who claims that God’s existence is necessary for meaning, we can pose the following question: do our lives have meaning simply because God decrees that they do, or does God choose his decrees based on some independent standard of meaningfulness? To make this more concrete, suppose we accept the view that meaning is provided by God’s plan of salvation. We then ask: is this meaningful simply because it is God’s plan, or is it God’s plan because it is independently meaningful? If it’s the former, then we run into the problem that God could have picked any plan at all and this would have made our lives meaningful. For instance, God could have decided that rolling a boulder up and down a hill for eternity provided us with meaning. That doesn’t seem right. If it’s the latter, then we run into the problem that God is not the true source of meaning. It is an independent set of properties or values.

Megill and Linford develop this argument in more detail by asking whether any of the responses to the traditional Euthyphro dilemma can apply to this novel version. I won’t get into these details here because I have explored those responses before and I think they are equally implausible in this context. In other words, I think this argument basically correct. God cannot be the source of meaning and because meanings (like other values) are most plausibly understood as basic, sui generis and metaphysically necessary properties of certain states of affairs. I have defended this view on previous occasions.


5. Conclusion
This post has been quite long. Much longer than I originally anticipated. To briefly recap, the question was whether God was necessary for meaning. To be more precise, the question was whether God was the source or grounding for meaning in life. Megill and Linford presented four arguments for thinking that He could not be. My feeling is that only two of these arguments are really worthy of consideration: (i) the possible worlds argument, which is based on a thought experiment about different epistemically possible worlds; and (ii) the new Euthyphro argument, which is based on the classic Euthyphro objection to divine command theory. The other two arguments strike me a being more problematic.

Assessing the Philosophical Apologetics of William Lane Craig (Series Index)

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Love him or loathe him, William Lane Craig is probably the most popular and successful of the modern philosophical apologists. And even though we view the world in very different ways, I have to admit that I find something admirable about the guy. His scholarly credentials are pretty impressive; he has published a long list of academic books and peer-reviewed articles; his debate performances are polished and precise; and his appetite for philosophically-inclined defences of the Christian faith is seemingly insatiable. There are things to dislike about him too, for sure, but I'm not in the business of disliking people so I won't get into that here.

Over the years, I have written a number of posts assessing various aspects of Craig's apologetical programme. These assessments have never been comprehensive. Those who are familiar with Craig's work, will know that he usually mounts a five-part defence of his faith: (i) an epistemological defence, based on the testimony of the Holy Spirit; (ii) a cosmological defence, based on his re-working of the Kalam Cosmological Argument; (iii) a teleological defence, based on the fine-tuning argument (though this is never particularly well-developed); (iv) a moral defence, based on both modified Divine Command Theory and claims about the lack of value and meaning in an atheistic universe; and (v) a historical defence, based on his argument for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection.

I've only dipped into two parts of this apologetical programme in my writings. First, I have examined various critiques of the Kalam cosmological argument, focusing in particular on the philosophical (as opposed to scientific) aspects of the argument. Second, I have considered challenges to Craig's views about the relationship between God and morality, and between God and meaning in life. This post brings together all my writings on these topics. I have divided into three main sections, deciding to treat morality and meaning as separate topics. I will use this for future updates.

1. The Kalam Cosmological Argument

The Kalam Cosmological Argument is very simple. It claims that (i) everything that begins to exist must have a cause of its existence; (ii) the universe began to exist; and (iii) therefore, the universe must have a cause of its existence. It then goes on to argue that this cause must be an immaterial, atemporal and personal being (i.e. God). I have looked at challenges to all aspects of this argument. Here is a complete set of links.

• Must the Beginning of the Universe have a Personal Cause? This four-part series of posts looked at an article by Wes Morriston, who is probably the foremost critic of the Kalam. This article challenged the claim that everything that begins must have a cause of its existence and that the cause must be immaterial and personal in nature. This series appeared on the blog Common Sense Atheism (when it was still running), so the links given below will take you there:

• Part One
• Part Two 
• Part Three 
• Part Four

• Schieber's Objection to the Kalam Cosmological Argument - Justin Schieber is one of the former co-hosts of the Reasonable Doubts podcast, and a prominent atheist debater. Back in 2011 he offered an interesting critique of the Kalam argument. Briefly, he cast doubt on Craig's claim that God could have brought the universe into existence with a timeless intention. I tried to analyse and formalise this critique in one blog post:

• Just one part

• Hedrick on Hilbert's Hotel and the Actual Infinite - The second premise of the Kalam is often defended by claiming that the past cannot be an actual infinite because the existence of an actual infinite leads to certain contradictions and absurdities. This is probably the most philosophically interesting aspect of the Kalam argument. One of the thought experiments Craig uses to support the argument is Hilbert's Hotel. In this series of posts, I look at Landon Hedrick's criticisms of this thought experiment.

• Part One
• Part Two 

• Craig and the Argument from Successive Addition - Even if the existence of an actual infinite is not completely absurd, Craig argues that it would still be impossible to form an actual infinite by successive addition. This is his second major philosophical argument in defence of premise (2) of the Kalam. In this post, I look as Wes Morriston's criticisms of this argument: 

• Just one part

• Puryear on Finitism and the Beginning of the Universe - This post looked at Stephen Puryear's recent(ish), novel, objection to the Kalam. It is difficult to explain in a summary format, but suffice to say it provides an interesting, and refreshing, perspective on the debate: 

• Just one part

2. The Moral Argument

Craig claims that the moral argument is the most apologetically useful one. That is to say, it is the one that is most deeply felt by would-be theists. Most people want there to be cold hard objective moral facts. They fear that in a world without God there would be no such facts. The moral argument plays upon these fears. Craig has formulated the argument in different ways over the years. Roughly, it works like this: (i) if God does not exist, objective moral facts cannot exist; (ii) objective moral facts exist; (iii) therefore, God exists. (Some people worry about the logic of this but it is fine: it includes a suppressed double negation: not-not Q implies not-not P; therefore P). 

I'm not sure that the moral argument is all that interesting from a philosophical perspective. But I think the alleged relationship between God and moral facts is. As are the more general metaethical questions raised by the argument. I've explored this many of my writings. The one's listed below are only those that specifically invoke Craig's work:

• Must Goodness be Independent of God? - This was a short series of posts about Wes Morriston's article of the same title. The series looked Craig and Alston's solutions to the Euthyphro dilemma. This was one of my early attempts to get to grips with this topic, and is thus probably surpassed by some of my later efforts.

• Part one
• Part two
• Part three

• Some thoughts on theological voluntarism - This was a post I wrote in response to the Craig-Harris debate way back in Spring 2011. Although prompted by that debate, the post tried to give a decent introduction to theological voluntarism and to highlight a possibly neglected critique of that view, one that Harris could have used in the debate. I have written about this critique subsequently, though never focusing specifically on Craig's work.

• Just one part

• Craig on 'Objective' Moral Facts -  Craig repeatedly appeals to the notion that there are objective moral values and duties. But what exactly does he mean by saying they are "objective"? This series subjects the crucial passages in Reasonable Faith to a close textual and philosophical analysis. It also suggests a general methodology for determining the merits of any metaethical theory. 

• Part one
• Part two

• God and the Ontological Foundation of Morality - Craig insists that only God can provide a sound ontological foundation for objective moral values and duties. But what would that mean and is it right? With the help of Wes Morriston (once again) I try to answer that question in the negative.

• Part one
• Part two

• Divine Command Theory and the Moral Metre Stick - In his efforts to avoid the Euthyphro dilemma, Craig sometimes relies on William Alston's analogy of the metre stick. According to this analogy, God stands in the same relation to the "Good" as the model metre stick stands in relation to the length "one metre". Does that make any sense? Jeremy Koons argues that it doesn't and in this series of posts I walk through the various steps of Koons's argument.

• Part one
• Part two 

• Is Craig's Defence of the DCT Consistent? - Erik Wielenberg has argued that Craig's defence of the DCT is fatally inconsistent. This series looks at Wielenberg's arguments, but also goes beyond them in certain important respects by trying to address the deeper metaphysical reasons for the inconsistency. 

• Part one
• Part two 

• Craig and the 'Nothing But' Argument - Craig sometimes argues that on the atheistic view humans are nothing but mere animals or collections of molecules, and that this thereby robs humans of moral significance. Can this really be a persuasive objection to atheistic morality? Using the work of Louise Antony, I argue that it can't.

• Just one part

• Craig and the Argument from Ultimate Accountability - Craig believes that the absence of any ultimate accountability for immoral behaviour is a mark against an atheistic account of morality. Again, with the help of Louise Antony, I suggest that this is not the case.

• Just one part

• Is there a defensible atheistic account of moral values? - Craig and his co-author JP Moreland have argued that atheism has serious problems accounting for the existence of moral values. Wielenberg counters by arguing that there is a defensible atheistic account of value, and this account is no worse off than Craig and Moreland's preferred account of moral value.

• Just one part

• Necessary Moral Truths and Theistic Metaethics - Atheists sometimes respond to Craig's moral argument by insisting that some moral truths are necessary and so do not require an ontological grounding/explanation. Craig has responded by arguing that just because something is necessary does not mean that it does not require a grounding/explanation. I wrote an academic paper (published in the journal Sophia) challenging this argument.

• Link to the paper (and an alternate version)

3. God and the Meaning of Life

Craig has a pretty disparaging take on the atheistic worldview. Without God there is nothing but despair. We are condemned to live short, finite lives in a meaningless universe. But with God there is hope. He bestows purpose, meaning and significance on our lives. Is this a plausible construal of the relationship between God and meaning in life? I have a written a handful of posts assessing Craig's answer to this question:

• Craig and Nagel on the Absurd - Back in the days when I did podcasts, I did this one about Craig and Nagel's arguments about the absurdity of life in an atheistic universe.

• Just one part

• Theism and Meaning in Life - With the help of Gianluco Di Muzio's, this series of posts tries to do two things. First, it tries to clarify the logic of Craig's arguments against meaning in a godless universe; and second it tries to present an alternative, Godless conception of meaning that avoids Craig's criticisms. 

• Part one
• Part two

• God, Immortality and the Futility of Life - Craig claims that two conditions are necessary for meaning in life: (i) immortality and (ii) God's existence. Both are necessary. But why exactly is immortality required? Toby Betenson suggests that it is because if we live forever there is a chance that we will make a causal difference to something of ultimate significance. But this sets up a tension with Craig's theory of ultimate justice. It turns out that if God exists, then we do not make a causal difference to anything of ultimate significance. This post summarises Betenson's argument.

• Just one part

The Shape of an Academic Career: Some Reflections on Thaler's Misbehaving

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I have long been interested in behavioural science and behavioural economics — heck, I even wrote a masters thesis about it once. I have also long been interested in the nature and purpose of an academic career — which is not that surprising since that’s the career in which I find myself. It was for these two reasons that I found Richard Thaler’s recently-published memoir Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics to be an enjoyable read. In it, Thaler skillfully blends together an academic memoir — complete with reflections on his friends and colleagues, and the twists and turns of his career — and a primer on behavioural economics itself. The end result is a unique and reader-friendly book.

But I don’t really want to review the book or assess the merits of behavioural economics here. Instead, I want to consider the model of the academic career that is presented in Thaler’s book. This is something that has been bothering me recently. Wont as I am to philosophical musings, I do occasionally find myself waking up in the mornings and wondering what it’s all for. Why do I frantically read and annotate academic papers? Why do I try so desperately to publish an endless stream of peer-reviewed articles? Why do I clamour for attention on various social media sites? I used to think it was just because I have a set of intellectual passions, and I want to pursue them to the hilt. If that means spending the majority of my time reading, writing, and sharing my work, then so be it. As Carl Sagan once said ‘when you’re in love, you want to tell the world’ and if you’re in love with ideas, that’s the form that your expression takes.

More recently, I’ve begun to question this view of my life. To this point, I have pursued my intellectual interests in a more-or-less haphazard fashion. If I’m interested in something, I’ll read about it. And if I’m really interested in it, I’ll write about it. I don’t worry about anything else. I don’t try to pursue any grand research agenda; I don’t try to defend any overarching worldview or ideology; I don’t try to influence public debate or policy. The result is an eclectic, disjointed, and arguably self-interested body of work. Should I be trying to do more? Should I be focused on some specific research agenda? Should I worry about the public impact of my work?

There seem to be at least two reasons for thinking I should. First, in terms of research agenda, it seems that one way to get ahead in academia (i.e. to win research-funding, wider acclaim and promotion) is to be an expert on a narrow range of topics. The eclectic and haphazard approach of my previous work is out of kilter with this ideal. Being a jack of all trades but master of none is a surefire way to academic mediocrity. Second, pursuing intellectual interests for their own sake, can be said to be both irresponsible and selfish. You ought to think about the public impact of your work (if only to save your job in the wake of the recent ‘impact’-fetishism in higher education). You ought to improve the world through what you do. Or so I have been told.

I have some problems with these claims. I don’t enjoy thinking about my work in purely instrumentalist terms. I am not convinced that eclecticism is such a bad thing, or that one should pursue ideological consistency as an end in itself. And while I would certainly like to make the world a better place, I would worry about my lack of competence in this pursuit. Ideas can make the world a much worse place too, as even a cursory glance at history reveals. That said, I do often feel the call of public spiritedness and grubby instrumentalist careerism.

Which brings me back to Thaler’s book….not that he’s a grubby careerist or anything (I don’t know the guy). It’s just that the book, perhaps inadvertently, presents a particular model of an academic career that I found interesting. It’s not the explicit focus of the narrative, but if you zoom out from what he is saying, you see that there are three main stages to his academic career. They weren’t pursued in a strict chronological fashion — there was some overlap and back-and-forth between them — but they are distinguishable nonetheless. And when you isolate them you see how it is possible to build a career from a foundational set of intellectual interests into something with greater public impact.

The three stages were:

Stage I - Pursuing one's Intellectual Curiosities: It would be difficult to be a (research-active) academic without having some modicum of intellectual curiosity. There must be something that piques your interest, that you would like to be able to understand better, or evaluate in more depth. Without a foundation in intellectual curiosity, it would be difficult to sustain the enthusiasm and hard work required to succeed. I choose to believe that anyway, and it certainly seems to be the case for Thaler. As an economics student, he was taught the standard rational utility maximising theory of human behaviour. But then he spotted all these examples of humans behaving in ways that contradicted this theory. He describes all this in Chapter 3 of the book where he talks about the ‘List’. This was something he compiled early in his career, listing of all the anomalies that were starting to bother him. A large part of his research was taken up with trying to confirm and explain these anomalies. And the curiosity didn’t stop with this early list either. Later in the book he gives some illustrations of how his curiosity was always being piqued by seemingly mundane phenomena, such as the formula the University of Chicago business school used for allocating offices in its new building, or the behaviour of contestants on popular game shows. I like to think this sort of ‘curiosity for the mundane’ is valuable, partly because I think curiosity is an end in itself and partly because mundane or trivial phenomena often provide insights into more serious phenomena. Either way, curiosity was the bedrock to Thaler’s career.

Stage II - Influencing one's Academic Peers: In academia there are few enough objective standards of success (outside of mathematics and the hard sciences anyway and even there influencing one’s peers is important). The only true measure of the academic value of one’s research is its acceptance by and influence on one’s academic peers. To some extent, the mere publication of one’s original research in well-respected journals is a way to do achieve this influence, but it is often not enough. After all, very few people read such articles. You often need to take more a more concerted approach. We see evidence of this in Thaler’s life too. His behavioural research presented a challenge to the received wisdom in his field. If he was going to get ahead and have any impact on the world of ideas, he needed to engage his peers: convince them that there was indeed something wrong with the traditional theory and influence future debates about economic theory. Part V of his book is dedicated to how he did this. Three examples stuck out for me. The first was relatively obvious. It concerned a conference he participated in in 1985. The conference was a face off between the traditional economic theorists and the more radical behaviourists. This conference format forced engagement with more sceptical peers. The second was a regular column he managed to secure in a leading economic journal (Journal of Economic Perspectives). The column was entitled ‘Anomalies’ and in it he presented examples of anomalies challenging the mainstream theory. The articles were intended for the economics profession as a whole, not just for research specialists, and most often involved findings from other researchers (i.e. not just from Thaler himself). The column gave him a regular platform from which he could present his views. And third, there was the summer school for graduate students that he helped to create back in 1992. This provided intensive training for future academic economists in the theories and methods of the behaviouralist school. This helped to ensure a lasting influence for his ideas. Building such outlets for academic influence looks like a wise thing to do.

Stage III - Pursuing Broader Societal Impact: The term ‘academic’ is sometimes used in a pejorative sense. People refers to debates as being ‘strictly academic’ when they mean to say ‘of little relevance or importance’. Academics often struggle with this negative view of their work. Some embrace it and defend to the hilt the view that their research need have no broader societal impact; others try to use their work to change public policy and practice. This is something Thaler eventually tried to do with his work (once the solid foundation in basic research had been established). There are several examples of this dotted throughout the book. The most important is probably the book he wrote with his colleague Cass Sunstein called Nudge. This book tried to show how behavioural research could be used to improve outcomes in a number of areas, from tax collection to retirement saving to bathroom hygiene. The book was published with a popular press and found its way into the hands of current British Prime Minister David Cameron (at the time he was leader of the opposition). Impressed by the book, Cameron established the Behavioural Insights Team to help improve the administration of the British government. Thaler was also involved in setting up and advising this team and he still works with them to this day. Now, I’m sure you could challenge some of the work they have done, but what’s interesting to me here is how Thaler managed to successfully leverage his research work into real-world impact.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that all successful academic careers will have these three stages, or that, if they do, they will look just as they did in Thaler’s case. All I’m suggesting is that there is a useful model in these three stages, one that I might think about using for my own career. Thus, I want to make sure that I always maintain a firm foundation in intellectual curiosity, and use that to generate a valuable set of insights/arguments. That’s effectively what I have spent most of my time doing so far and I will continue to do it for as long as I can. But I don’t want to just leave it at that. From this foundation I want to think about ways in which to influence both my academic peers and the broader society. I don’t think my work lends itself to the same kind of practical impact as does Thaler’s, but I think that’s okay. Societal impact can be generated in other ways, e.g. through public education and inspiration, and I suspect that might be more my thing.

The Art of Academic Reading: Strategies and Tactics

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If you’re like me, then reading will be an important part of your life. Indeed, it might just be the most important part of your life. I’m not an empirical researcher. I don’t have a lab in which to perform experiments. I don’t interview people or conduct surveys. I don’t go out in the ‘field’ and collect data. Heck, I rarely even leave the privacy of my own home. My primary form of research consists in sitting in quiet isolation, reading a bunch of stuff, thinking about it for a while, and then hopefully stumbling upon an interesting idea or argument. Reading is critical to what I do. It is the ‘field’ in which I collect my data; and the ‘laboratory’ in which I conduct my experiments.

Given its importance, it would probably behoove me to have some method or theory of reading. Methods and theories seem pretty important in other aspects of my life. When I write, or run, or cook, or clean, I don’t do so haphazardly. There is some set of defined steps, some method to my madness. I have a sense, however vague, of what I’m trying to achieve with these activities and I put in place a plan that I think will best achieve these ends. You would think that it would be the same with reading, but oddly I have found this not to be the case. Many people I know, including many academics, approach reading in a fairly haphazard and intuitive manner. I do not exempt myself from this. It is only in recent times that I have really reflected on the methods and theories behind my own daily reading. As per usual, the prompt for these reflections was the need to teach students the art of academic reading. The purpose of this post is to share some of these initial reflections.

Before I get to them, I hope you’ll indulge me for a moment or two as I consider further the need for such reflections (if you’re really only interested in my theories and methods you can skip to the next section). I think it is important to teach students something about the art of reading, but in my (limited and narrow) experience this is not often done, or if it is done it is not done well or systematically. I know that there are famous guides to reading, both general and discipline specific, but I don’t know how often those are taught as opposed to being proffered as further reading for interested students. And in my own discipline of law, I find that the efforts to teach the art of reading are woefully inadequate. The typical assumption seems to be that students already know how to read: our job should simply be to test whether they understood what they read. Indeed, I have encountered some really strange attitudes toward reading in my life as both a student and a lecturer. Two quick anecdotes about this.

When I was a student I distinctly remember, in my first ever tutorial, being told by my tutor that it should take me 12 minutes to read a 15-page case. At the time, I thought she was being serious, and I was disheartened when it took me much longer to get through it, but I later realised that this was a bizarre piece of advice. Cases are one of the bits of ‘raw data’ with which a lawyer must contend. They contain reasoned legal arguments that the lawyer can accept or dispute. Getting to grips with these bits of data is an essential part of a law student’s life. There’s no way this can be done properly for a 15-page case in a mere 12 minutes, certainly not if you are a first year law student. The tutor’s mistake came from assuming that reading a legal case was much the same thing as reading one of John Grisham’s legal novels. But these activities are not the same. One is highly engaged intellectual process; the other is passive enjoyment.

Similarly, when I was starting out as a lecturer, I remember one of my colleagues (who shall remain nameless) expressing bafflement at the notion that we should teach students how to read. She believed that this was something they would already know how to do, and that there were far more important things to be teaching them, such as the content of legal rules. Now, I admit there is some value to teaching law students the content of legal rules, but once again I was struck by how bizarre her attitude toward the teaching of reading was. Since reading is a practice that is intrinsic to virtually every aspect of the law (practical or academic), one would think that there could be nothing more important than teaching students how to engage in this practice well. Maybe my colleague didn’t really mean it — maybe if she had reflected on it for a moment she would have conceded that it is something upon which students need greater guidance — but her initial reaction is, I believe, indicative of the unreflective and intuitive approach most people have toward the art of reading.

Anyway, with all that in mind, I want to present my own thoughts on the theories and methods of reading. This is very much my first systematic attempt to get these reflections down in written form, and I hate to be overly prescriptive in what I say. There is much to be said for the notion that this reflective attitude toward reading is something that people can learn themselves over time. Consequently, I offer these thoughts merely as one way (among many) to think about and practice the art of reading. I would be happy to hear of other approaches in the comments section.


1. Why do I read?
The comedian Bill Hicks used to do a bit about reading a book in a waffle house in Fyffe, Alabama. He had just done a show, and he was hungry, so he ordered some waffles. While eating, he decided to occupy his mind by reading a book. The waitress approached him and asked ‘Hey, what you reading for?’. Hicks was surprised. He thought this was the weirdest question he had ever been asked. People might ask ‘what are you reading?’, but never ‘what are you reading for?’. Hicks thought about it for a bit and responded ‘I guess I read so I don’t end up being a waffle waitress’.

Stand-up routines are never quite as funny when reduced to prose, so you’d need to watch the bit to get the full effect (there’s more to it than I’m letting on as well - see for yourself). Clearly, Hicks was engaging in a bit of ‘Southern-bashing’, chastising and poking fun at the backward and anti-intellectual attitudes among denizens of the South. This is, no doubt, an unfair cultural generalisation. And, as it happens, I think the waitress’ question is a good one. It is always worth considering the purpose behind our reading. When I consider this myself, I find that the purposes are threefold:

Pleasure: I often read purely for pleasure, i.e. for the subjective enjoyment I get from following a story or narrative or argument. This is mainly true for fiction reading; but I also find certain forms of non-fiction reading to be highly pleasurable.

Understanding/Insight: I frequently read for understanding and insight, i.e. to gain a deeper appreciation for why something happens the way it does, to gain practical knowledge, to appreciate something from a new perspective, or simply to learn something cool. This is mainly true for non-fiction, but, of course, well-written fiction can often help you to gain insight or understanding.

Fuel for the imagination: I also read so I can provide fuel for my own thinking and critical reflection. This might be slightly more esoteric so allow me to explain. As I mentioned above, I am not an empirical researcher. My academic work consists in combining and recombining ideas, arguments and concepts that others have presented or written about in the past. In essence, I spot patterns and connections between different bodies of ideas. The only real novelty in my work comes from the combinatorial process. To do this, of course, I need to have a storehouse full of ideas, arguments and concepts in my brain and I need to have situational prompts or habits that allow me to see connections between these ideas, arguments and concepts. Reading is essential to this because it helps me to fill up the storehouse. This is the sense in which it provides fuel for my imagination.

The three purposes are not mutually exclusive. The same text can be a source of pleasure, understanding and imaginative fuel. That said, I think the three purposes are separable, to at least some extent. In other words, I think it is possible to read purely for pleasure, purely for understanding, or purely to provide fuel for the imagination. By this I mean that it is possible to approach the task with only one of these purposes locked in the focus of the conscious mind (your mind may subconsciously and automatically combine these purposes).

Knowing why you are doing something is a good first step to figuring out how to do it better. This is where reading methods come in. I won’t focus on reading for pleasure in the remainder of this post since my concern is really with ‘academic’ reading, which falls more squarely within the purview of the other two purposes. If you are reading for understanding/insight and to provide fuel for imagination, you need to do something to ensure (a) you are fully intellectually engaged by the process (i.e. that you are comprehending and evaluating the ideas being presented) (b) you have some reinforcement mechanism (i.e. some way to remember the ideas, arguments and concepts, and to fuse them into your mental frameworks). I’ll talk a bit about how you can do this. In doing so, I’m going to adopt a military metaphor and distinguish between reading strategies and reading tactics.


2. What are my reading strategies?
In military parlance, a strategy is a general campaign plan, whereas a tactic is a specific method or step used to implement that campaign plan. That’s a first pass at the distinction anyway. A lot has been written about it and some people flesh out the distinction in more rigorous and nuanced ways. I don’t want to go into too much detail here since I’m merely using it as a rough analogy for understanding how I approach the task of reading. For me, the term ‘reading strategy’ denotes a general style of reading, with a particular purpose or set of purposes in mind; whereas as a ‘reading tactic’ is a specific step taken to achieve those purposes. You may wonder why we need a separate category of reading strategies when we have already identified a set of reading purposes, but I think the category is needed because there are distinctive reading styles that are differentiated by the amount of time and intellectual effort they involve.

I employ two general reading strategies. They are:

Broad Brush: I use this strategy when I want to read a lot of material, in a relatively short period of time, and I don’t want to critically engage with the minute details of the arguments, ideas or concepts presented in the text. Instead, I just want to get the general gist of those arguments, ideas and concepts. I mainly use this strategy when reading popular non-fiction books. For example, when reading popular science, history or philosophy books. I use these texts to expand my general knowledge, and as gateways into new fields of inquiry. I approach them in a relatively open-minded fashion, hoping to gain new insights that may prove useful in the future; I’m not really concerned with critiquing them. Hence the broad brush style seems most appropriate for these texts.

Deep Dive: I use this strategy when I really want to critically engage with the minute details of the arguments, ideas or concepts presented in the text. This is a much more labour intensive style of reading. It takes a long time, and involves copious amounts of notetaking and reflective interludes (I’ll say more about these ‘tactics’ below). I mainly use this strategy when reading academic articles or monographs within my current field of research. This makes sense since these texts are the primary source material for my own imaginative combinatorics and critical evaluations.

Although I describe these as two separate strategies, it is important to realise that they are not truly distinct. They represent the two ends of a spectrum. One can slide along this spectrum depending on the degree of effort and time expended in the reading process. I should also clarify that I don’t adopt these strategies on an exclusive basis. I will often flit back and forth between them whilst reading the same text. Thus, even though I said I ‘mainly’ use the broad brush strategy whilst reading trade non-fiction; I don’t do so exclusively. Sometimes I’ll find that one of the ideas or arguments presented in such a book warrants a deeper dive, and so I’ll slow down and start to engage with the text in a more intensive. The same goes for academic articles and monographs. Sometimes I’ll speed up and start reading these in a broad brush style.

I think it is important to adopt both strategies. You might think that the labour intensive style of the deep dive is optimal and that really we should employ this style for all texts we read. But I don’t think that is true. One reason for this is that I don’t think people fully appreciate how much time it takes (in my opinion) to do a proper deep dive. This was the mistake of my tutor when she suggested that we read a 15-page case in 12 minutes. In reality, something like this should take a student a couple of hours. I know it takes me at least two hours to do a deep dive on a typical 10,000 word academic article. Oftentimes it takes longer, depending on the difficulty of the piece and my level of interest. But if I constantly did deep dives like this I would severely limit the amount I could read. This is why I think it is important to supplement deep dive reading with broad brush reading. That way you get a nice balance between depth of analysis and breadth of knowledge (hence the names).

That said, I have no idea what the optimal mix of these strategies is.


3. What are my reading tactics?
Tactics are the nitty gritty, step-by-step details of the reading process. The enumeration of such details might be something that is only of interest to uber-reading-nerds, but I’ll risk joining their ranks by providing some detail about what I do. The tactics I employ depend on the reading strategy I’m following, so I’ll need to talk about both (i) broad brush tactics and (ii) deep dive tactics.

There are, however, some shared tactics and it makes sense to start with them. For example, no matter what the strategy, I always try to cultivate a consistent and diverse reading habit. By consistent I mean I try to read every day, often at set times. A typical reading routine for me is to read for 30-60 mins first thing in the morning (either whilst having breakfast or shortly thereafter); to read in the afternoon (usually between 3 and 5); and to read late at night (just before going to bed — I usually don’t read in bed because I tend to fall asleep pretty quickly). By diverse I mean both that I try read a wide range of materials and jump back and forth between the different strategies. I think it is important to read a wide range of material (from many disciplines) because this helps you to identify novel connections and combinations of ideas. And I have already given my reasons for thinking that diverse strategies are important. On a normal day, I will do broad brush reading in the mornings and late at night. I will do deep dive reading in the afternoon. Even though I strive for consistency and diversity, I often fail at both things. It is not always possible to read at the same times every day, and sometimes I get stuck in routines where I’ll read the same kind of material over and over again. I don’t beat myself up about this. In the very long run I think I manage to maintain consistency and diversity.

In terms of broad brush reading tactics, there are really only three or four things I do on a regular basis. Remember, the purpose of broad brush reading is to get the general gist of argument, idea or concept. It is about breadth of coverage, not depth. So the tactics cannot be too labour intensive. Still, you need to have some way to understand and reinforce the breadth of the material you are reading. The simplest way to do this is to pause and reflect on what you are reading. I do this a lot. If you ever watched me reading something, you’d see me frequently gazing into the middle distance and you might assume I was goofing off. But I’m usually thinking about what I have just read (usually…). I also dog-ear important pages in the book for future reference (if I’m reading on Kindle, I’ll bookmark or highlight but if I am honest, I find Kindle pretty much useless for any sort of intellectually engaged reading; I use it almost exclusively for pleasure reading). Some people are infuriated by my habit of dog-earing books, arguing that it ‘ruins’ them. I find this odd. I don’t think the value of books lies in their resale value (which is negligible anyway); the value lies in what I get out of them. If dog-earing helps me to get more out of them so be it. That said, dog-earing by itself is not hugely effective. You need to revisit and reconsider the key passages. This requires discipline and I often fail to be disciplined. That’s why, if I really want to reinforce something I’ll write short end-of-chapter summaries. Sometimes (but sadly not always) chapters end on pages with plenty of blank space. If I’m so minded, I will use this space to summarise, in my own words, the key arguments and ideas. The image below shows an example of this from a book I read about David Hume’s argument from miracles (I eventually did a deep dive on this book, though that wasn’t my original intention). Another thing I will do (though I’ve only recently experimented with it) is assemble my own book-index. So, inside the front cover, I will write down page numbers and brief descriptions of the key ideas on these pages. This is a handy guide for future reference.

Fogelin's Defence of Hume's on Miracles - Chapter Summary

Although I use all of these tactics at different times, I find that by far the most useful broad brush tactic is to listen to podcasts or watch videos in which the author of the book I am reading lectures on or is interviewed about its main ideas. This is something that has only really been made possible in the past few years but it is now exceptionally easy to do: authors are encouraged to promote their work by doing talks and interviews, and a huge volume of this promotional effort is now archived online. To give an example, I am currently reading the book Why the West Rules for Now by Ian Morris. It is a long and detailed study of the patterns of social development across the East and West over the past 14,000 years. It is full of interesting and provocative insights. I highly recommend it. To supplement my reading of this book, I have watched or listened to about 5 or 6 different talks given by Morris. I listen to these repeatedly, whilst driving or cooking or when performing other manual tasks. Doing so helps to guide my reading of the book, and to reinforce its key ideas.

Turning to deep dive tactics, these are obviously more time-consuming and labour intensive. Remember, the main goal of deep dive reading is to understand the minutiae of the arguments, ideas and concepts contained in the text, and to spot interesting patterns or connections. To do this, I need to engage in extensive annotation of the material. The precise method of annotation depends on whether I am reading the material (usually an article or monograph) in hard copy or digitally:

Hard Copy Annotation: I will underline key passages; summarise the main steps in the argument in the margins; write down critical questions or objections when appropriate (though I don’t do this too often — I tend to save the critical probing for when I eventually write about the relevant idea, if I ever do). I will also diagram the arguments in the article, or draw some other flow chart or picture that helps me to understand what has been written. I am quite a visual thinker and I enjoy representing complex ideas in more than one dimension. I have tried to give some examples of these annotations in the photographs below.

Hard Copy Annotation - Summarising key points in the margin

Hard Copy Annotation - Diagramming key concepts

Digital Copy Annotation: I use a program called Papers for the Mac. This helps me to store, read and annotate digital copies of articles and monographs. I do this by reading in full screen, highlighting key passages, and using the note-taking function to write a rolling summary of the article. I find digital annotation less flexible and less engaging than hard copy annotation. But it has some compensating benefits: it is much faster to type summaries; and there is no need to print and physically store copies of the annotated papers. I’m doing this more often than I used to, but I still like to do a lot of hard copy reading and annotation. The screenshot below gives a flavour of how digital annotation works on Papers. I’m sure there are similar or better programs out there. I just happen to like this one.

Digital Copy Annotation on Papers - Summarising key arguments with notetaking function

I like to read things once and to do so in the most intellectually engaged manner that I can. I’ll then rely on my own notes and summaries if I want to revisit the piece. I don’t like the method of reading through something once to get the general gist and then going back over it to take notes. That seems like a waste of time to me: I have enough trouble motivating myself to read something once, never mind doing it multiple times.

The main tactic I employ for reinforcing deep dive reading is writing. If I want think further about something, I will either write a blogpost about it or use it as the basis for an academic article. I can think of no more effective reinforcement method. Writing is a type of thinking. Writing blogpost summaries of an article I have just read really forces me to make sure that I understand what it is saying, that I am being charitable to its author, and that I critically engage with its contents. This was one of the main reasons I started blogging in the first place. I didn’t do so because I wanted to be read (though that is nice); I did so because I wanted to forge a deeper understanding of the material I was reading.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say (for now) about the art of academic reading. I have tried to summarise my strategies and tactics in the diagram below. As I said at the outset of this post, I would love to hear from readers about their own reading strategies and tactics. What do you do differently? What do you find most effective?

Does God guarantee meaning in life? A Novel Argument for Atheism

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Meaning is important. People want to live meaningful lives. They want to make a ‘difference’. They want for it all to ‘matter’. Some people think that this is only possible if God exists. They say that if God does not exist, then we are doomed to live finite lives on a finite planet in a finite universe. Everything will eventually collapse, crumble and die. It will all be for naught. But if God does exist, there is hope. He will save us; He can guarantee our eternal lives in the most perfect state of being; He can imbue the universe with purpose and value.

But is this traditional picture of the relationship between God and meaning right? I have written numerous posts challenging it over the years. But I am always keen to find fresh perspectives. That’s exactly what Megill and Linford’s recent paper ‘God, the Meaning of Life, and a New Argument for Atheism’ provides. They make an interesting, two-part case. The first part argues that God’s existence would indeed guarantee meaning in life. The second part argues that even though God’s existence would guarantee meaning, it is highly unlikely that God himself is the source of that meaning.

As I say, this is an interesting juxtaposition of arguments. On the one hand God is said to be sufficient meaning; on the other hand he is not thought to be necessary for it. I want to look at both sides of this equation over the next two posts. Today, I look exclusively at the first part of the argument. As we shall see, Megill and Linford think that this argument has an interesting consequence: it allows us to formulate a new argument for atheism.


1. Why God’s Existence Should Guarantee Meaning
Let’s get something straight first: ‘meaning’ is a tricky concept. It denotes a property of human lives that is thought to be valuable and worth having. It is distinct from the property of well-being, though it may be related to it (i.e. well-being may be necessary or sufficient for meaning, according to some theories). It is also likely to be distinct from similar properties like significance or purpose or worthwhileness, though oftentimes the term ‘meaning’ is used interchangeably with these other terms. Another important point is that meaning is usually understood to come in degrees. It is not a purely digital phenomenon. It is not the case that you either have a meaningful life or you don’t. Rather, you can have degrees of meaning in your life, though this is consistent with the existence of some threshold of meaningfulness that is needed to make your life worth living.

There are many theories of meaning. I have covered some of them in previous blog posts. One of the most popular is that God somehow provides or imbues our lives with meaning. Megill and Linford’s first argument agrees with this. They say that God can indeed ensure that our lives are meaningful. The argument is pretty straightforward. If we assume that God is omnibenevolent (or maximally benevolent); and if we assume that meaning is something that makes human life better than it would otherwise have been; then it looks like God would only desire to create lives with meaning. Of course, desire is one thing, practical realities are another. To ensure that our lives have meaning God would have to have the ability and power to actualise meaningful lives. Fortunately, those powers are also part and parcel of the traditional concept of God. He is, after all, also said to be omnipotent and omniscient.

That gives us the following argument:

• (1) If God exists, he is omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient (or maximally good, powerful and knowledgeable, or whatever variant on ‘perfect being’ theology you happen to prefer)

• (2) An omnibenevolent God would not create meaningless lives.

• (3) An omniscient God would know whether or not lives had meaning.

• (4) An omnipotent God could actualise a world in which our lives had meaning.

• (5) Therefore, if God exists, our lives must have meaning.

We’ll run through a few critiques of this argument below, but a couple of points are worth noting before that. First, in relation to premise (2), it might seem intuitively obvious that a perfectly good being would, if possible, create lives with meaning. But this intuitive obviousness can be underscored by another argument that draws explicit links between meaning and the problem of evil. The problem of evil claims that God’s existence is incompatible with the existence of certain types of evil. One of the most problematic types of evil is gratuitous suffering. This is a type of suffering that seems to be pointless, or not contributive to the greater good. One of Megill and Linford’s main arguments — one that they return to over and over again in their article — is that a life with any degree of suffering, and which also lacks meaning, would consist of gratuitous suffering. If the life lacked meaning then the suffering within it would not be contributing to any larger purpose or good. Consequently, if it consists of any suffering whatsoever, it follows that this suffering would be gratuitous. But given that people do in fact suffer in life, and given that gratuitous suffering is incompatible with God’s existence, it follows that if God exists our lives must have meaning. As the authors themselves put it:

If our lives lack meaning, there would be no greater meaning for our suffering either, and so it would be gratuitous. But then, given that we do suffer, and that God’s existence and gratuitous suffering are not compossible, if God exists, our live must have meaning. 

(Megill and Linford 2015)

The other point worth noting about this argument is that it is very expansive in terms of its scope. It is not simply claiming that if God exists some lives must have meaning; it is claiming that if God exists, all lives have meaning. This becomes important below when we consider how this argument provides the basis for a new argument for atheism.


2. Objections and Replies
Let’s now consider five objections to the argument. This follows the discussion in Megill and Linford’s article, but I’m going to number both the objections and replies so that I can plug them into an argument map at the end of this section. As I run through these objections and replies, you will start to see how important the ‘gratuitous suffering’ argument is to their case.

The first objection claims that God need not guarantee that our lives are meaningful; rather he can simply create the conditions in which our lives have meaning and let us exercise our own free will in guaranteeing whether or not they actually have meaning. This is similar to the move made by many theists in the debate about the problem of evil. They claim that God need not guarantee an absence of suffering and evil in the world so long as he provides us with conditions in which we can exercise the great good of free will:

• (6) Objection: God merely has to create the conditions in which meaning is possible; he need not guarantee that our lives have meaning.

Megill and Linford’s response here is to appeal to the gratuitous suffering problem. They point out that if some lives lack meaning, and if there is suffering in these lives, then that suffering is gratuitous. This would be incompatible with the existence of God as traditionally conceived. Thus, if there is going to be suffering in our lives, God really does have to guarantee that life has meaning. There is a conditional built into this reply: it is only if our lives involve suffering that God must guarantee meaning. If there was no suffering, this would not be a problem. However, this is pretty cold comfort to the theist since in the actual world — i.e. the one we actually live in — our lives do involve suffering. Summing up:

• (7) If our lives involve any suffering (as they actually do) then God must guarantee meaning in order to ensure that our lives do not involve gratuitous suffering.

(For what it’s worth, I think a theist might be able to craft a response to this along the lines of Anderson’s defence of sceptical theism. I haven’t thought it out in full detail but you can read my critique of Anderson’s defence here.)

The second objection focuses on the distinction between well-being and meaning. As mentioned above, many philosophers think that meaning is distinct from subjective happiness or contentment. Maybe God could exploit this distinction? Maybe he could compensate us for a lack of meaning by providing us with an overabundance of well-being?

• (8) Objection: God could compensate us for the lack of meaning by providing us with an abundance of well-being.

Megill and Linford think that there are a number of problems with this objection. First, it is not clear that it is conceptually coherent. If a life is devoid of meaning then arguably one cannot be truly happy. Second, it is hard to see why God would actualise an inferior world. If it is possible to ensure that lives have both meaning and happiness, then surely God would actualise those lives over lives with merely superficial happiness. Finally, we have once more the problem of gratuitous suffering: a superficially happy life with no meaning, and a mere tincture of suffering, would involve gratuitous suffering and that would be incompatible with God’s existence.

• (9) There are three problems with this objection: a happy but meaningless life may be conceptually incoherent; God would not actualise an inferior world; a superficially happy but meaningless life would have to involve no suffering.

The third objection is a little bit more serious. It is similar to the classic objections to the problem of evil. It argues that God simply does not have it in his power to actualise a world that is devoid of meaningless lives (just as some theists maintain that God does not have it in his power to actualise a world that is devoid of suffering). So God is not to blame for the fact that some lives lack meaning.

• (10) Objection: It is impossible for God to create a world in which all lives have meaning.

Megill and Linford don’t say a whole lot in response to this. They say that it is difficult to see why this is impossible, and I suppose they have a point here. When responding to the problem of evil, theists will typically point to some reason why God has to allow some suffering in the world (such as free will). So I guess you could say that the burden of proof is on the theist in this respect. It is up to them to show why God is justified in creating a few meaningless lives. There is also the danger that any justification they offer would end up being paradoxical. I’ll discuss this in more detail in a moment. The other point Megill and Linford make is to appeal, once again, to the gratuitous suffering argument. But I won’t repeat that anymore.

• (11) No reason is offered for thinking that it is impossible for God to create such a world. The burden of proof is on the theist.

The fourth objection is a variation of the previous one. It is the sceptical theist response. This will be familiar to anyone who engages with the literature on the evidential problem of evil. The idea is that our minds are cognitively limited. We do not fully understand the relationships between different conditions of value and ultimate meaning. God does. Thus, it could be the case, for all we know, that God has some justification for allowing a few meaningless lives. The difference between this objection and the previous one is that it attempts to rationalise theistic ignorance. So there is some attempt here, however minimal, to discharge the burden of proof.

• (12) Objection: It could be the case, for all we know, that God has some justification for creating lives that are devoid of meaning.

There are many possible responses to this. One is to highlight the epistemic costs associated with the sceptical theist position. I’ve written a whole serious of posts about those costs. I have also published two academic articles about them. Unique to this particular dialectic, however, there is the complaint that any purported justification would be incoherent. I hinted at this above. Now is the time to spell out the argument in full. The idea is that any purported justification for the existence of meaningless lives would, presumably, be to the effect that those lives are necessary for some greater good. But if those lives are necessary for some greater good, it seems to follow that they have some ultimate purpose/value/meaning. Therefore, if God has a justification for them they must be meaningful, which undermines the original objection.

• (13) There are two problems with this: any purported justification for meaninglessness would imbue the life with meaning; and sceptical theism has other associated epistemic costs.

Megill and Linford discuss one final objection. I’m not going to get into this objection in any real detail though because I think it is an instance of philosophical overkill (i.e. identifying and responding to objections that aren’t really all that threatening just for the sake of being comprehensive). The gist of the objection is that there might be a particular theory of meaning that justifies some meaningless lives. But this looks very similar to the sceptical theism objection — which has already been dealt with — and Megill and Linford only really discuss it so that they can highlight what I take to be an obvious feature of their argument: it makes no appeal to any particular theory of meaning; if it works, then it works for all accounts of meaning (whatever it is that meaning turns out to be).

3. Conclusion: A New Argument for Atheism
That brings us to the end of this post. To briefly sum up, if Megill and Linford are correct, God’s existence would entail that all lives are meaningful. One interesting implication of all this is that the argument just presented can obviously be flipped around into an argument against the existence of God. As follows:

• (14) If God exists, then all lives have meaning.

• (15) There is or has been at least one human life that lacked meaning.

• (16) Therefore, God does not exist.

Megill and Linford claim that this is a novel argument. It is not simply a rehash of the problem of evil because it is not just about suffering and pain. After all, meaning is distinct from well-being and happiness. I not so sure that this is so ‘novel’. I think the problem of evil already encompasses a broader set of disvalue than mere suffering and pain. I wrote a series of posts about this on a previous occasion.

Anyway, let’s quickly analyse the argument. The first premise is just the conclusion to the preceding argument and so should cause no controversy. The second premise is the tricky one. An atheist would need to point to at least one life that lacked meaning. It might be quite difficult to prove this since a theist will, no doubt, always appeal to the possibility of some ultimate meaning. Thus, even if you could point to lots of individual human lives that seem (for all we know) to be devoid of meaning, it is possible for the theist to argue that they all fit into God’s mysterious plan. To make this argument stronger, you would need to cut off this possibility (i.e. insist on a purely secular theory of meaning). That’s what the second part of Megill and Linford’s article tries to do. I’ll discuss that in the next post.

Did my brain make me do it? Neuroscience and Free Will (2)

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(Part One)

Discoveries in neuroscience, and the science of behaviour more generally, pose a challenge to the existence of free will. But this all depends on what is meant by ‘free will’. The term means different things to different people. Philosophers focus on two conditions that seem to be necessary for free will: (i) the alternativism condition, according to which having free will requires the ability to do otherwise; and (ii) the sourcehood condition, according to which having free will requires that you (your ‘self’) be the source of your actions. A scientific and deterministic worldview is often said to threaten the first condition. Does it also threaten the second?

That is what Christian List and Peter Menzies article “My brain made me do it: The exclusion argument against free will and what’s wrong with it” tries to figure out. As you might guess from the title, the authors think that the scientific worldview, in particular the advances in neuroscience, do not necessarily threaten the sourcehood condition. I discussed their main argument in the previous post. To briefly recap, they critiqued an argument from physicalism against free will. According to this argument, the mental states which constitute the self do not cause our behaviour because they are epiphenomenal: they supervene on the physical brain states that do all the causal work. List and Menzies disputed this by appealing to a difference-making account of causation. This allowed for the possibility of mental states causing behaviour (being the ‘difference makers’) even if they were supervenient upon underlying physical states.

If that seems at all confusing, I recommend reading the previous post. I will be taking a lot of the argumentative ground covered in that post for granted in the remainder of this post. That’s because the remainder of this post switches the focus from physicalism (a philosophical doctrine) to findings from contemporary neuroscience. List and Menzies argue that many modern day neuroscientists are sceptical about free will. But their neuroscepticism exhibits the same flaw that they found in the exclusion argument. I’m not so sure about this. I’m going to try to explain why.


1. List and Menzies’ Interpretation of the Neurosceptical Argument
To start things off, I need to explain how List and Menzies’ understand the neurosceptical position. A paradigmatic statement of neuroscepticism can be found in Sam Harris’s book Free Will. I quoted this in the previous post, but it is worth repeating here:

’Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence’ 

(Harris 2012, 7)

List and Menzies use Harris’s work as their main scratching post in their paper, highlighting another section of the book where he refers to free will as an ‘illusion’ because ‘thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control’ (Harris 2012, 12).

Using quotes of this sort as their source, the authors argue that Harris and other neurosceptics rely on the following (oftentimes implicit) argument (numbering continues on from part one):

• (9) If an agent’s choices and actions are wholly caused by neural states and processes that are inaccessible to his or her consciousness, then these choices and actions are not free.

• (10) Human choices and actions are wholly caused by neural states and processes that are inaccessible to the agent’s consciousness.

• (11) Therefore, human choices and actions are not free.

Let’s consider how one might defend the two main premises of this argument.

The first premise states a condition for free will. It holds that causation by consciously accessible mental states is essential to free will. This is very similar to the sourcehood condition that I mentioned above. It is also very similar to the principle used to motivate the exclusion argument that was discussed in part one. If you recall, the opening premise of that argument stated that an agent’s mental states had to cause their behaviour in order for it to be free. The only real difference is that this new argument demands that the mental states be consciously accessible. I’m guessing this means that the agent’s conscious mental states must be causally responsible for their behaviour. I think this is a plausible sufficient condition for free will (or, at a minimum, for responsible behaviour), but I’m not sure if it is necessary. Neil Levy’s recent book argues that it is, but I have not read it yet. List and Menzies think it is plausible, citing some survey evidence from Eddy Nahmias suggesting that most ordinary people think that premise (9) is correct.

Premise (10) is where the discoveries in neuroscience come into play. Neurosceptics typically appeal to a widely-known set of evidence suggesting that our behaviour is caused by neural events that are largely beneath or outside our conscious awareness. I’ll mention three such sources of evidence here. This is for illustrative purposes only; it is not intended to be exhaustive. First, there are Benjamin Libet’s famous studies on intention and behaviour. By getting people to perform simple actions and recording associated brainwaves, Libet’s studies found that the conscious intention to act post-dated the neural causation of the action by nearly half-a-second. These studies have been scrutinised and challenged over the years (I always enjoyed Dennett’s discussion of them). Second, there are the more recent studies by the likes of Haggard and Haynes which seem to confirm and extend Libet’s results. These studies suggest that neural causes precede conscious awareness by even longer periods of time, perhaps by up to 10 seconds. Third, and finally, there is the work of Daniel Wegner, particularly the work found in his book The Illusion Conscious Will, which brings together a diverse set of studies, all pointing to the same conclusion: that the conscious will does not direct or control our behaviour. Rather, our consciousness confabulates a mental cause of our behaviour after the fact. This evidence all confirms Harris’s view that we are mere ‘conscious witness[es]’ to the true, underlying, neural causes of our actions.

If this is all correct, then the neurosceptical position is confirmed.


2. List and Menzies' Critique of Neuroscepticism
But, obviously, List and Menzies do not see it that way. They argue that the neurosceptics make the same mistake as the physicalists. This is unsurprising since most neurosceptics are resolute physicalists, but it is worth going through the mistake to see exactly how it applies to the neurosceptical position. The main flaw comes with the motivating principle stated in premise (9). This premise appears to claim that the existence of a sufficient neural cause rules out the existence of a mental cause. But this is wrong. Just as the physicalists mistakenly assumed that sufficient lower-level physical causes ruled out higher-level mental causes, so too do the neurosceptics mistakenly assume that sufficient lower-level neurological causes rule out higher-level mental ones.

To be more precise, the mistake lies in the assumption that a sufficient neurological cause rules out a higher difference-making cause. It could well be that for every single action there is a sufficient neurological cause, but also a difference-making mental cause. Remember the example from the previous post. Suppose you have a flask of boiling water and the flask cracks. What is the cause of the cracking? You could attribute it to a particular arrangement of the (expanding) molecules of water, or to the act of boiling. The particular arrangement of molecules is a sufficient cause of the cracking; but the act of boiling is the difference-maker. This is because boiling could have led to a different arrangement of water molecules that was also sufficient for cracking. It is the true-difference maker because its presence or absence makes a difference to the outcome across an appropriate set of possible worlds. The particular arrangement of water molecules does not.

The key point is that the same could be true of the relationship between sufficient neural causes and supervenient mental states. Neuroscientists might discover that a particular pattern of neuronal firing is sufficient for the act of raising one’s hand. But it is possible that the same act could be caused by a slightly different pattern of neuronal firing. The only thing shared by the two distinct patterns of neuronal firing might be a supervenient mental state (e.g. the intention to raise one’s hand). This mental state would then be the true difference-maker.

The upshot of this is that premise (9) would need to be reformulated if the neurosceptical position were to be persuasive. List and Menzies suggest the following reformulation, one that respects the difference-making account of causation (note I have amended this from their original discussion):

• (9*) If an agent’s choices and actions have a difference-making cause at the neuronal level, and they do not have any other difference-making cause at the mental level occurring at the same time, then the agent’s actions and choices are not free.

With this reformulated premise in place, the debate switches to premise (10), or rather to a suitably reformulated version of that premise. This one would claim that neuroscientific evidence points to difference-making causes at the neuronal level, not co-occurrent with difference-making mental causes. But List and Menzies reject this premise. In doing so they make two points, one conceptual and one empirical.

The conceptual point focuses on what it takes for something to be a difference-making cause. It requires the satisfaction of two counterfactual conditionals. First, there is the positive conditional ‘if C occurs, then E occurs’; then there is the negative conditional ‘if C did not occur, E would not occur’. List and Menzies’ argument is that mental causes will tend to satisfy these two conditional tests, whereas neuronal causes will not. As they put it themselves:

[W]hen we understand causation as difference-making, we are likely to conclude that the cause of an agent’s action is not the agent’s brain state, but his or her mental state. Only the supervenient mental state, but not the subvenient brain state, may satisfy the two conditionals for difference-making. 

(List and Menzies 2014)

They then illustrate this conceptual point in more detail by drawing out a map of possible worlds and the different possible causes that one can identify across these possible worlds. This is supposed to show how, under a difference-making account of causation, higher level mental causes can potentially exclude lower-level neural causes. They call this their ‘downward exclusion’ result. I find this slightly redundant, however, as the map is their own construction and merely serves to repeat their main conceptual point, which is that mental states are more likely to be the difference-makers.

This brings us to their empirical point. They accept that whether neural or mental causes are the difference-makers is an empirical question. And they also accept that a suitably constructed psychological study could tell us which is the case. But they say nothing more, suggesting that they think no such study currently exists (or, at least, the current set of studies are not decisive one way or the other).


3. Criticisms and Concluding Thoughts
What are we to make of all this? As mentioned the last day, I think List and Menzies are broadly correct in their critique of the exclusion argument from physicalism. But I think they are much less persuasive in their dismissal of neuroscepticism. It is not that I disagree with them entirely, or that I am a resolute neurosceptic, it is just that their interpretation of the neurosceptical position seems remarkably uncharitable and their engagement with the empirical evidence insufficient.

Their lack of charity stems from their original formulation of premise (9). They interpret the neurosceptic as holding that the existence of neural causes excludes the existence of mental causes. Perhaps there are some neurosceptics who rely on this principle. But as best I can tell, the neurosceptical position advanced on foot of the studies by Libet, Haynes and Haggard (who List and Menzies explicitly reference) and on foot of Wegner’s work (which they do not reference) has nothing to do with the alleged sufficiency of neural causation. It has everything to do with the timing of conscious mental states and the timing of unconscious neural events. The claim in these studies is always that the mental states come after the fact: people confabulate and reinterpret their behaviour as having a mental cause but it really doesn’t. In other words, I think the neurosceptics already embrace something akin to premise (9*). They think that neural causes (or external causes) are the difference-makers not mental states, because the neural causes precede and initiate actions, whereas the mental states do not.

This is also why I think their engagement with the empirical evidence is insufficient. At the end of the article they appeal to the possibility of psychological experimentation helping us to work out whether neural causes or mental causes are the difference makers. But it seems to me that the experimental evidence from the likes of Libet, Haynes and Wegner already helps us in this regard (maybe not directly, but certainly indirectly). For example, my interpretation of the evidence is that Libet-style experiments do not undermine the existence of difference-making mental causes because conscious mental states always seem to be required for the performance of actions in those experiments (the experimental set-up is such that the subject is primed well in advance to consciously will an action). My interpretation of the Wegner-like evidence is slightly different. You would have to read Wegner’s work to get a fuller picture (and I confess it has been several years since I read it myself). Nevertheless, it does seem to me like Wegner identifies many cases in which conscious mental states are not the different makers. For instance, patients with hemiplagias often perform actions with one side of their bodies that they subsequently deny or confabulate a reason for performing. In these cases, the hemiplagia seems to be the difference-maker, not the conscious mental state. Admittedly, these kinds of cases are exceptional as they involve some sort of pathology. The question is how far do similar causal sequences creep into our everyday lives. I am not sure.

Anyway, those are some of my quick reflections on the piece. Obviously, a much more systematic review of the empirical evidence, with List and Menzies causal principle in place, is needed. More experimental research would help too.