Draper on God and Evil (Part Three)

Tweet

(Part One, Part Two)

This post is part of a brief series on Paul Draper’s Plantinga Lecture “God and Evil: A Philosophical Inquiry”. In previous entries, I set out the basic structure of Draper’s argument, summarised the analogy he uses to illustrate some of his key points, and considered his defence of the first premise of his argument. In this entry, I focus on Draper’s defence of premises (2), (3) and (4).


1. The Defence of Premise (2)
The second premise of Draper’s argument is:

• (2) With respect to the data of good and evil, naturalism is much more accurate than theism.

There’s nothing too surprising about Draper’s defence of this premise. Anyone who has read his classic 1989 article will be familiar with the basic contours of his thinking on this matter.

In his lecture, he defends the premise by telling a story about two alien scientists who come to earth: Natty, the naturalist, and Theo, the theist. As they investigate the world, these two aliens acquire more and more data about good and evil. As they do so, they will try to make predictions about what they will learn about the conscious beings (those capable of experiencing pain or harm) who inhabit the earth.

Draper argues that Natty will be far more successful in making predictions about these conscious beings, and the fates that befall them, than Theo. For instance, Natty will be able to infer that the fate of conscious beings will be similar to that of unconscious beings such as plants. Why? Because on Natty’s worldview there is no reason to think that conscious beings will be treated any differently from unconscious beings: both are subject to the same process of evolution. On Theo’s worldview there is some reason to think they will be treated differently since conscious beings are capable of being morally wronged. Similarly, Natty will be able to infer that pain and pleasure are likely to be largely fitness-tracking experiences (i.e. tied to evolutionary success). Theo will be unable to make that inference because he has reason to think pain and pleasure will have some sort of deeper moral significance.

Of course, Theo can respond to both of these examples by playing the skeptical theist (ST) card. He can claim that he doesn’t know of all the entailment relations that can hold between possible goods and evils and that it is possible that God has some sort of “beyond-our-ken” reasons for allowing what we observe.

There are two points to be made about this kind of response. First, it does nothing to undermine premise 2. Anyone who adopts the ST-response must tacitly admit that naturalism is more accurate with respect to the data on good and evil. Second, at best this kind of response can be used to protect the other epistemic and evidential advantages that theism might have from being undermined by the data on good and evil. The problem is that ST might not be very successful in doing this. Indeed, it may come with significant epistemic costs of its own. This would actually have the effect of strengthening premises (3) and (4) of Draper’s argument. (I have written about these problems extensively on this blog).

A theist could also appeal to a theodicy in response to the problem of evil. Draper does not explore this possibility in his lecture, but suggests (maybe jokingly) that he will in his forthcoming book.

To sum up, Draper seems to defend premise (2) of his argument in the following manner:

• (2.1) The naturalist can make better predictions with respect to fates of conscious and unconscious creatures.
• (2.2) The naturalist can make better predictions with respect to the biological function of pleasure and pain.

The skeptical theist can interject here:

• (2.3) God could have beyond-our-ken reasons for allowing the particular distribution of goods and evils that we see.

But this can be responded to as follows:

• (2.4) This still implies that naturalism is better confirmed by the actual data on good and evil.
• (2.5) Skeptical theism is a position that comes with significant epistemic costs.

All of which gives us the following addition to our original argument map.

2. Defending Premise 3 and 4
Premise (3) of Draper’s argument states the following:

• (3) With respect to other data, any overall advantage in accuracy that theism has over naturalism is relatively small.

As Draper notes in his lecture, this premise is crucial and yet incredibly difficult to defend (or, indeed, reject). It suggests that in order to properly evaluate the success (or failure) of the problem of evil we must be able to say that theism and naturalism are roughly equally probable with respect to other available data (or, better, any advantage that theism might have must be outweighed by the disadvantage is has with respect to the existence of evil).

It’s difficult to say anything more conclusive about that here.

Let’s move on then to premise (4), which states:

• (4) Any other epistemic advantage that theism has over naturalism is relatively small.

Draper notes that there are several interesting routes that an objection to this premise could take. Perhaps fittingly, he focuses in his lecture on the Plantinga-style objection. Plantinga argues that we have non-inferential knowledge of theism thanks to the presence in us of a special faculty called the sensus divinitatus. He also argues that the knowledge provided by this special faculty might function as a defeater to any inferential or evidence-based justifications of naturalism.

• (4.1) The non-inferential knowledge of theism provided by the sensus divinitatus defeats the evidential knowledge in favour of naturalism.

Draper offers four responses to this kind of argument. I’ll just list them here:

• (4.2) The weight that should be afforded to an argument depends on the epistemic position of the person hearing the argument. Since not everyone has non-inferential knowledge of God, not everyone has access to the Plantingan defeater. To those people, Draper’s argument will still be relevant.
• (4.3) It is not clear (contra Plantinga) that theism strongly entails the existence of a sensus divinitatus.
• (4.4) Conversely, if theism does entail the existence of a sensus divinitatus then it must do so strongly (i.e. everyone must have one). Since not everyone seems to have a sensus divinitatus (including some self-professed Christians), its existence is disconfirmed by the evidence.
• (4.5) Current cognitive science of religion supports the existence of a broad sensus actoris (or hyperactive agency detector) it does not support the existence of a specific sensus divinitatus.

Before adding these points to the argument map, I should note that Draper goes on to suggest that (4.5) might not be that strong an objection since monotheism seems to survive defeaters better than animism or polytheism.

3. Does the Conclusion follow?
This brings us nearly to the end of Draper’s lecture. There’s just one last piece of business to wrap up. As noted in part one, the conclusion of Draper’s argument is as follows:

• (5) Therefore, theism is very probably false.

This conclusion does not follow straightforwardly from the premises. Draper shows that there is some further argumentation needed to justify that conclusion. The reasoning is roughly:

If premises 1 - 4 are true, then it follows that naturalism is more probable than theism. But naturalism is just one of the ways in which theism can be false. Thus, the falsity of theism must be as least as probable as the truth of naturalism. But then it does follow that if naturalism is much more probable than theism, then theism is very probably false. Why? Because the falsity of theism must be at least as probable at the truth of naturalism, and maybe even more so.

Draper on God and Evil (Part Two)

Tweet

(Part One)

This post is part of a brief series on Paul Draper’s Plantinga Lecture “God and Evil: A Philosophical Inquiry”. Part one introduced us to the basic structure of Draper’s argument and the analogy he uses to illustrate that structure. In this part, we’ll start to consider Draper’s defence of the argument. As noted last time, the lecture is really only a preview of his forthcoming book and so does not offer anything like a full defence of the relevant points.

I’ll just look at his defence of the first premise in this post.


1. The Simplicity of Naturalism
The first premise of Draper’s argument is the following:

(1) Naturalism is much simpler than theism.

In the philosophy of science, simplicity is typically assumed to be an explanatory virtue. An explanation is generally thought to be better than a rival if it is simpler. For Draper (and, indeed, others such as Swinburne) simplicity seems to affect the prior probability (or intrinsic) probability of a hypothesis.

While that is all well and good, there is a problem. There are a number of different ways of conceiving of theoretical simplicity. Perhaps the most well-known states that simplicity is a function of the number of hypotheses or axioms that must be presupposed in order to accept an explanation. This can be reformulated to have specifically ontological pretensions by stating that it relates to the number of ontological entities that must be presupposed. Another example would be that of Richard Swinburne. He offers a definition according to which a hypothesis is simpler if it postulates infinite as opposed to finite quantities.

Draper is aware of the dispute in the literature and tries to skirt it by offering yet another approach to the topic (thereby, irony of ironies, adding to the complexity of simplicity). He maintains that one hypothesis is simpler than another if it meets two conditions (i) it is more modest than the other and (ii) it has greater internal consistency than the other.

He illustrates what he means by referring back to his original example of Poisson’s spot (see part one for details). He asks us to imagine that in addition to wave-ism and particle-ism, there is a third theory on the nature of light called “particle-ism plus”. This theory claims that there are light particles but that they are carried by waves.

The interesting thing is that particle-ism plus is consistent with the presence of Poisson’s spot. So there doesn’t seem to be any reason to prefer wave-ism over it, at least by reference to that particular datum. But there is reason to prefer wave-ism with respect to simplicity. Why?

Well, because P-plus is clearly less modest than either particle-ism or wave-ism. It makes more specific claims about the nature of the world than either of the other theories. It thereby increases the chance of error. Furthermore, it has less internal coherence than the other theories. It only manages to account for the datum of Poisson’s spot by making considerable moves away from particle-ism towards wave-ism.

Returning to Draper’s argument, his claim is that theism is much like P-plus. For starters, theism, like P-plus, is a more specific version of another theory (in this case supernaturalism). And because it is more specific, it displays less modesty than supernaturalism (or, indeed, naturalism). Furthermore, while the specific claim of theism (i.e. there is an omni-propertied personal being) is not actively inconsistent with supernaturalism, it is certainly not a natural entailment or product of that more general theory.

All of this suggests that Draper is offering something like the following argument in support of premise (1):

• (1.1) A hypothesis H is simpler than a hypothesis H* if it is (a) more modest than H* and (b) more internally coherent than H*.

• (1.2) Naturalism is more modest and displays more internal coherence than theism.

• (1) Therefore, Naturalism is much simpler than theism.

2. Some Comments
Before moving on to consider Draper’s defence of premise (2) I want to say a couple of quick words about his defence of premise (1).

First, I’m not entirely convinced that Draper’s account of simplicity is correct, or whether its good to add another account to the pile, but I can let that slide and try to assess it on it own merits.

Second, I’m not sure the analogy Draper tries to make stacks up here. My feeling is that P-plus is less probable because it seems to have been so obviously introduced as an ad hoc saviour for particle-ism. In other words, it looks like a revision of particle-ism that is less modest because it is adopted in the face of unwelcome facts. This doesn’t seem to me to be at all like theism, which does not (yet) suffer from such ad hocery. Theism may suffer from immodest ad hocery when it is revised in the face of unwelcome facts, but since simplicity has to do with a priori plausibility this consideration seems not to apply here.

Now my reaction might just be an accidental by-product of how Draper presents his case: he discusses the simplicity of P-plus after having already discussed Poisson’s spot, and discusses the simplicity of theism prior to considering the problem of evil. If I abstracted away this sequence, the simplicity point might hold up.

Third, there is something a little stretched about the analogy Draper tries to draw between incoherence/inconsistency in the case of P-plus and incoherence/inconsistency in the case of theism. While it seems obvious enough that P-plus is some sort of an uncomfortable alliance between wave-ism and particle-ism, it seems less obvious that there is an uncomfortable alliance going on in the case of theism and supernaturalism. If theists had to make some concessions to the priority of the physical in formulating their hypothesis then maybe the analogy would hold up.

Furthermore, in his discussion of this point it seems like Draper is only saying that theism is not directly entailed by naturalism, which seems to me to be no different from his observation that theism is immodest when compared to supernaturalism and theism.

Finally, it occurs to me (although this is irrelevant to Draper’s argument) that there might be more specific forms of naturalism that could suffer from immodesty and incoherence (indeed, the more sophisticated forms of naturalism probably do). This is something to be borne in mind. While a vague and general form of naturalism might do well vis-a-vis theism, a more specific form may not.

Anyway, that's enough for now. In the next part I'll look at Draper's defence of (2).

Draper on God and Evil (Part One)

Tweet

Paul Draper delivered the Plantinga lecture last October. The lecture was effectively a sneak preview of his forthcoming book the Evidential Problem of Evil (according to his webpage). The text of the lecture has been made available online and I wanted to go through it over the next few posts.

As with all of his work, Draper’s lecture is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. It is also, on the face of it, quite humorous in places. Of course, it’s difficult to say how these things go over in person as opposed to on the page, but I can certainly say that some of the philosophical in-jokes elicited a wry smile from me as I read them.

Anyway, down to business. Draper’s lecture is entitled “God and Evil: A Philosophical Inquiry”. Unsurprisingly, it presents a basic argument against theism by focusing on a particular datapoint relating to evil. To support this argument, heavy use is made of an analogy drawn from a classic scientific dispute over the nature of light.

In this first part, I’ll outline the analogy, I’ll present Draper’s basic argument, and address some of the terminology he uses.


1. Poisson’s Spot
The analogy brings us back to the early 19th Century and a debate about the nature of light. At the time, there were two dominant schools of thought on the issue. According to one of these schools, light was a wave (call the relevant theory “wave-ism”); according to the other school, light was a stream of particles (call the relevant theory “particle-ism”). Neither theory seemed to have a decisive advantage over the other with respect to the data at the time.

All that was about to change. In 1818, a young scientist named Fresnel submitted work on wave diffraction to the French Academy of Sciences as part of a competition. Diffraction is what happens to a wave when it encounters an obstacle. One of the judges in the competition, Poisson, realised that Fresnel’s work could be used to confirm particle-ism over wave-ism was true (Poisson was a believer in particle-ism).

Poisson deduced that if a light was shone at a circular disc, then, if the wave theory were true, one would expect to see a single spot of light in the middle of the shadow cast by the disc. If the wave theory was false (as Poisson thought) no such spot should be visible. As fate would have it, the experiment actually confirmed the existence of the spot. The experiment is illustrated below.

Without getting too embroiled in the details, there are three important points arising from this story. First, there are two competing theories that seem, relative to one set of data, roughly equally probable (wave-ism and particle-ism). Second, there is a particular datapoint that seems to confirm one theory over another (the presence of Poisson’s spot). And third, there is the apparently reasonable conclusion that, as a result, wave-ism is more likely to be true than particle-ism.


2. Draper’s Basic Argument
The three features just alluded to are crucial to understanding why Draper discusses the example. His argument against theism, although certainly more complex, turns on a very similar pattern of reasoning. Once again we have two theories (naturalism, theism) which are symmetrical with respect to one set of data; we have a particular datapoint (existence of evil) which seems to confirm naturalism over theism; and we have the seemingly reasonable conclusion that naturalism is therefore more likely to be true than theism.

There are also some differences between the two cases that come to the fore in Draper’s subsequent analysis. Two differences seem worthy of mention at the outset: (i) Draper claims that naturalism is simpler than theism and thus has higher a priori probability; and (ii) it’s much more difficult to assess the respective merits of theism and naturalism.

This leads Draper to formulate and defend the following argument:

• (1) Naturalism is much simpler than theism.

• (2) With respect to the data of good and evil, naturalism is much more accurate than theism.

• (3) With respect to other data, any overall advantage in accuracy that theism has over naturalism is relatively small.

• (4) Any other epistemic advantage that theism has over naturalism is relatively small.

• (5)Therefore, theism is very probably false.

This is illustrated below. As you can see, I’ve placed a gap between the premises and the conclusion. This is because, as Draper acknowledges at the end of his lecture, the inference is not as straightforward as you might think.

Obviously, to make this argument in any way compelling, Draper needs to support each of its premises. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do all the necessary work in his lecture, he saves that for his forthcoming book. But he does sketch defences for (1) and (2) and offer some comment on (3) and (4). We’ll go through these in the subsequent posts.


3. Naturalism vs. Theism
Before we do that, we need to clarify some of the terminology employed in the argument. As can be seen, Draper is comparing naturalism and theism. But what do these respective hypotheses mean? Draper begins to answer this by noting that concrete reality seems to consist of a private, mental, subjective world, and a public, objective, physical world. He then drafts the following breakdown:

Naturalism: The view that the public, objective, physical world has ontological priority over the private, mental, subjective world. In other words, the view that the mental can be explained in terms of the physical.

Supernaturalism: The view that the private, mental, subjective world has ontological priority over the public, objective, physical world. In other words, the view that the physical can be explained in terms of the mental. In practice, this means that the physical world was created or brought about in order to fulfill or satisfy the purposes of one or many mental entities.

Theism: A sub-type of supernaturalism according to which the physical world was brought into being by a single, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent mental entity.

Note here that theism is defined as a specific type of supernaturalism that makes specific claims about the type of mental entity responsible for the creation of the physical world. This turns out to be significant later in Draper’s argument. It is probably worth asking at this stage whether there are more specific versions of naturalism too. Presumably there are (e.g. single-universe vs. multiverse theories). This might be significant as well.

Anyway, that’s it for now. In the next part, I’ll look at Draper’s defence of premise (1) and (2).