back
05 / 06
birds birds birds

God Discussion in the New York Times Part 2

November 01, 2015     Time: 24:10
God Discussion in the New York Times Part 2

Summary

Dr. Craig continues his interaction with two prominent philosophers in the New York Times

Transcript God Discussion in the New York Times Part 2

 

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, we’ve been talking about an opinion pages article in the New York Times.[1] It is a conversation between Gary Gutting and Michael Ruse, two philosophers with whom you’ve interacted, and we’ve done podcasts on them as well.

As we continue this conversation, they get into whether evolution lends support to the atheistic argument from evil. Dr. Gutting asks Michael Ruse what he thinks about this.

Do you think that evolution lends support to the atheistic argument from evil: that it makes no sense to think that an all-good, all-powerful God would have used so wasteful and brutal a process as evolution to create living things?

Dr. Craig: This problem is one, Kevin, that is interestingly enough pressed by both evolutionary naturalists and Young Earth Creationists. They are actually bedfellows in agreeing that the evolutionary process that brought us on the scene (according to the standard theory) is so filled with waste, death, and suffering that it couldn’t possibly be the choice of an omnipotent and all-good God as a way of bringing about human life on this planet. So this is a very important objection that has relevance both to naturalism as well as Young Earth Creationism.

Kevin Harris: Ruse does not address this so I’ll ask you to, Bill. If you notice the word “wasteful,” we hear that quite often. Why would God waste all this space or waste this and waste that? When it comes to an omnipotent eternal being whose resources are unlimited, waste does not enter into this.

Dr. Craig: I think that is right, Kevin. This is particularly relevant when people talk about astronomy and notice how most of the universe is just empty space. They say things like “this is a waste.” But the concept of waste is only applicable to someone who has limited resources and therefore needs to marshal those resources in an efficient way. But for a being like God who has unlimited resources, really the whole concept of waste as such doesn’t really apply. It is irrelevant.

Kevin Harris: There are some who think there needs to be that much space in order for certain things to function – galaxies and so on.

Dr. Craig: Yes, in terms of the expanding universe. Though here the concern is with evolutionary biology, not astronomy. The idea here is think of certain microorganisms which produce millions of offspring – progeny – and most of them die in order for just a few to live and survive and reproduce themselves. The idea there is that this is wasteful to have such expenditure of organisms in order for a few to advance and reproduce.

Kevin Harris: Ruse says,

Although in some philosophy of religion circles it is now thought that we can counter the argument from evil, I don’t think this is so. More than that, I don’t want it to be so. I don’t want an argument that convinces me that the death under the guillotine of Sophie Scholl (one of the leaders of the White Rose group opposed to the Nazis) or of Anne Frank in Bergen-Belsen ultimately contributes to the greater good. If my eternal salvation depends on the deaths of these two young women, then forget it.

Dr. Craig: That was interesting to me to read this paragraph because he mentions Sophie Scholl. At the University of Munich where I studied, the theology department is just off of the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz which is a square with a big fountain dedicated to the brother and sister Scholl who suffered in the German purges in the concentration camps. Then he mentions, of course, Anne Frank who also perished in the camps and is famous for her diary that she kept. Notice here that Ruse is not addressing the question of whether or not evolution creates an argument from evil. He has stepped back from Gutting’s question here to talking about the problem of evil in general. He doesn’t think that philosophers of religion can answer that problem, but he doesn’t explain why, notice. Rather, he expresses again merely his personal desires; that he doesn’t want it to be the case! He doesn’t want the deaths of these two young women to contribute to the overall goodness of the universe. So he doesn’t want God to have a morally sufficient reason for allowing these young women to be killed at the hands of the Nazis. That has no philosophical significance. That is just a matter of his personal preference.[2] You can’t do good philosophy by saying, “This is the world I would prefer to have. This is the way I would like the world to be.” The world and God in particular is under no obligation whatsoever to do things the way you would like it to be. So what Ruse needs to do is to offer us some good argument from evil to show that this is incompatible with the existence of an all-powerful and all-loving God. At least here in this interview he doesn’t even attempt to make such an argument.

Kevin Harris: Then he continues here, Bill, and more fully addresses Gutting’s question. He says,

This said, I have never really thought that the pains brought on by the evolutionary process, in particular the struggle for survival and reproduction, much affect the Christian conception of God. For all of Voltaire’s devastating wit in “Candide,” I am a bit of a Leibnizian on these matters. If God is to do everything through unbroken law, and I can think of good theological reasons why this should be so, then pain and suffering are part of it all.

Dr. Craig: OK! This is really, I think, fascinating! Here Ruse says that despite his dissatisfaction with the problem of evil in general, he does not think that the evolutionary argument from waste and pain and suffering is any good, that it has any purchase. He agrees with Leibniz on this that God can have good theological reasons for creating a world that would involve pain and suffering as part of the evolutionary process for getting human beings on the scene. This is really interesting, I think, that this very prominent agnostic theorist of evolution would see no problem in the idea of a world brought about through struggle, pain, suffering, and waste. God could have good reasons for doing it that way.

Kevin Harris: He says,

Paradoxically and humorously I am with Dawkins here. He argues that the only way naturally you can get the design-like features of organisms — the hand and the eye — is through evolution by natural selection, brought on by the struggle. Other mechanisms just don’t work. So God is off the hook.

Gutting says,

What do you think of the claim that evolutionary accounts show that religion emerged not because of any evidence for its truth but because of its adaptive value?

Dr. Craig: Yes, this is what used to be called socio-biological accounts of cultural factors like moral beliefs or, in this case, religious beliefs. The idea here is that you could somehow explain people’s moral beliefs or religious beliefs as themselves the byproduct of biological and social evolution. This is a very radical speculation that is completely unproved. There is no reason whatsoever to think that biological evolution and natural selection would produce specific moral and cultural and religious beliefs. This seems to be ascribing too much power and specificity to the evolutionary process.

Kevin Harris: Ruse says,

It is interesting that you ask this question because recently I’ve found myself wrestling with this issue more than just about any other. As an ardent Darwinian evolutionist I think that all organisms, and I include us humans, are the end product of a long, slow process of development thanks to the causal mechanism of natural selection. So this means that I think features like the eye and the hand are around because of their adaptive value; they help us to survive and reproduce.

Gutting kind of interrupts here and says,

Of course, evolutionary explanations are empirically well established on the biological level. But is the same true on the level of social and cultural life, especially among humans?

Ruse says,

I include society and culture here although I would qualify what I say. I don’t see being a Nazi as very adaptive, but I would say that the things that led to being a Nazi — for instance being open to indoctrination as a child — have adaptive significance. I would say the same of religion. The biologist Edward O. Wilson thinks that religion is adaptive because it promotes bonding and he might be right. But it can go biologically haywire, as in the case of the Shakers, whose religious prohibition on procreation had an adaptive value of precisely zero.

Dr. Craig: Right. The Shakers forbid marriage.[3] This was a sect which, in a sense, had doomed itself to be the last generation of whoever believed in it because they would not marry and procreate and have children.

Kevin Harris: They had separate worship. The men would sit on one side, the women on the other. They were kept apart.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, so here he admits that this has an adaptive value of zero. I think that is a huge counter-example to anybody who thinks that you can explain specific beliefs on the basis of adaptive value of evolution. The idea that what you can do for society and culture what can be done for features of biological organisms is really just completely conjectural. All Ruse is really saying here, it seems to me, is that there might be general traits that could be adaptive, like being open to indoctrination as a child, which then could go off anyway in social or religious beliefs. So there is not much specificity there. It would at most say that there are just sort of general traits that might be biologically ingrained into us.

Kevin Harris: Ruse continues,

So it is true that in a sense I see all knowledge, including claims about religious knowledge, as being relative to evolutionary ends. The upshot is that I don’t dismiss religious beliefs even though they ultimately can be explained by evolution. I think everything can! I wouldn’t dismiss religious beliefs even if you could show me that they are just a byproduct of adaptation, as I think Darwin himself thought. It is as plausible that my love of Mozart’s operas is a byproduct of adaptation, but it doesn’t make them any the less beautiful and meaningful. I think you have to judge religion on its merits.

Dr. Craig: This is really good. Here he is stripping the question of any sort of significance because even if it were true that religious beliefs are the product of adaptation in the evolutionary process, that is true of everything we believe, including the theory of evolution itself! Including Ruse’s own comments here. When something is true of everything, it is not true of anything in particular. So he would say you still have to judge these things on their own merits as to whether or not you think they are true or false. Just showing how one came to hold these beliefs, or that these beliefs have adaptive value, says nothing at all about the truth or falsity of those beliefs.

Kevin Harris: Bill, next they get into the moral argument. Gary Gutting says,

Is one of religion’s merits that it provides a foundation (intellectual and practical) for morality through the idea of God as divine lawgiver?

Ruse says,

I am on record as an “evolutionary skeptic.” I don’t deny substantive morality — you ought to return your library books on time — but I do deny objective foundations. I think morality is a collective illusion, genetic in origin, that makes us good cooperators.

Dr. Craig: Now here Ruse seems to say of morality what he would not say of religion or of other products of evolutionary adaptation. I cannot understand this inconsistency in Ruse. Why wouldn’t he say of morality what he just said a moment ago of religious beliefs or other sorts of socio-cultural beliefs; namely, that even if you can give an evolutionary explication of why we came to hold these beliefs, nevertheless that doesn’t show that they are untrue or illusory. They need to be judged on their own merits. It is just astonishing to me that Ruse could commit this fallacy. It is called the genetic fallacy – trying to invalidate a view or an idea by showing how a person came to hold that view. Even if our moral beliefs were the products of evolutionary conditioning, that doesn’t show that those beliefs are false or illusory. If objective moral values are gradually discovered rather than gradually invented then our gradual and fallible perception of the moral realm no more undermines the objectivity of that realm than our gradual, fallible perception of the physical world through scientific discovery undermines the objective reality of that realm. So I see this as just an enormous inconsistency in Ruse’s thinking.

Kevin Harris: He says[4],

And I would add that being good cooperators makes each one of us individually better off in the struggle for existence. If we are nice to other people, they are much more likely to be nice to us in return. However, as the philosopher J.L. Mackie used to argue, I think we “objectify” substantive ethics — we think it objectively the case that we ought return library books on time. But we do this (or rather our genes make us do this) because if we didn’t we would all start to cheat and substantive ethics would collapse to the ground.

Dr. Craig: Now what does this do, Kevin, for Ruse’s moral indignation that he expressed earlier about the Nazi atrocities against the Geschwister Scholl or Anne Frank? There really wasn’t anything wrong with that – what the Nazis did. Objectively speaking it was just fine what they did to those young women. It may have been socially inconvenient or unfashionable but there isn’t any objective moral value. So Ruse can’t himself live with his own sort of moral nihilism. He appeals to these moral values when he wants to reject the existence of God because of perceived evils in the world, but then he takes it back with the other hand and admits these things really aren’t evil at all. There aren’t any objective value. It is an illusion.

Kevin Harris: He says,

So I don’t buy the moral argument for the existence of God. I think you can have all of the morality you need without God. I am a follower of Hume brought up to date by Darwin. Morality is purely emotions, although emotions of a special kind with an important adaptive function.

Dr. Craig: Right. So morality is just your emotional response. When you say that it is wrong that ISIS would saw off the head of an innocent journalist, all you are really expressing is your emotional distaste for that, just as you might have a distaste for certain foods. But there is not really anything objectively wrong with those sorts of atrocities.

Kevin Harris: He says,

I don’t, however, think that here I am necessarily denying the existence of God. Were I a Christian, I would be somewhat of a natural law theorist, thinking that morality is what is natural. Caring about small children is natural and good; killing small children for laughs is unnatural and bad. If you want to say that God created the world and what is good therefore is what fits with the way God designed it, I am O.K. with this. In fact, I think you should say it to avoid the problem (raised in Plato’s “Euthyphro”) of simply making the good a function of God’s arbitrary will.

Dr. Craig: He is saying that if he were a theist he would hold that God designed the world in such a way that certain natural laws hold and these would include natural laws of morality. So he doesn’t see his view as inherently anti-theistic.

Kevin Harris: Gary Gutting asks him a really interesting question next here, Bill. He says,

There seems to be a tension in your thinking about religion. You aren’t yourself a believer, but you spend a great deal of time defending belief against its critics.

Ruse says,

People often accuse me of being contradictory, if not of outright hypocrisy. I won’t say I accept the ontological argument for the existence of God — the argument that derives God’s existence from his essence — but I do like it (it is so clever) and I am prepared to stand up for it when Dawkins dismisses it with scorn rather than good reasons. In part this is a turf war. I am a professional philosopher. I admire immensely thinkers like Anselm and Descartes and am proud to be one of them, however minor and inadequate in comparison. I am standing up for my own. In part, this is political. Religion is a big thing in America, and often not a very good big thing. I don’t think you are going to counter the bad just by going over the top, like in the Battle of the Somme. I think you have to reach out over no-man’s land to the trenches on the other side and see where we can agree and hope to move forward.

Dr. Craig: Here he expresses his objectivity as a philosopher and recognizing that sloppy and bad arguments for atheism or for his own view shouldn’t cut mustard philosophically. So he will stand up against atheists or agnostics who offer bad arguments in defense of their position. He admires theists like Anselm and Descartes. He says he is a minor figure, inadequate in comparison to these greats in the history of philosophy which I think is a becoming modesty on Ruse’s part. For those who don’t know, the Battle of the Somme was one of those terrible battles in World War I that claimed thousands and thousands of lives – a terrible slaughter on both sides.[5] Ruse is saying there don’t just go over the top over no-man’s land between the fronts where the slaughter takes place. Try to reach out and find areas of agreement with the theist where you can cooperate and move forward together. So this is an olive branch that he is offering here. I have to say in his own personal life and career Ruse has really exemplified this attitude of openness and charity and amiability, in contrast to the bitter and angry sorts of atheism that you find in people like Dawkins and Krauss and Hitchens and others.

Kevin Harris: We tend to say the same thing sometimes: let’s see where we have common ground and where we can agree and where we can get along and so on. But I tell you, the views are so different, and because of the nature of sovereign God, that can only go so far. It doesn’t mean we can’t be polite, right?

Dr. Craig: Absolutely! We need to have the same sort of charity that Ruse exemplifies, even with those with whom we disagree. I think we can do the same thing that he does: call fellow believers to task when they offer bad arguments on defense of theism or in defense of Christianity. We don’t gain anything by having weak arguments and sloppy apologetics for our point of view.

Kevin Harris: He says,

I should say that my Quaker childhood — as in everything I do and think — is tremendously important here. I grew up surrounded by gentle, loving (and very intelligent) Christians. I never forget that. Finally, I just don’t like bad arguments. In my case, I think I can offer good arguments against the existence of the Christian God. I don’t need the inadequate and faulty. In “Murder in the Cathedral,” T.S. Eliot has Thomas à Becket say, “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” Amen.

That is how they wrap up this interview, Bill. I think that Michael Ruse is very close to perhaps embracing God. I can’t help but think that.

Dr. Craig: Well, I know a lot of people are praying for him and hope that that will happen. Who knows?

Kevin Harris: At any rate, we certainly enjoyed this interview from the New York Times with both of them.[6]