J.D. Vance and the Philosophy of Religion Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, we were pleasantly surprised after reading a blog from Vice Presidential candidate J. D. Vance. He apparently has a good grasp of philosophy and theology. He wrote about his Christian conversion in an online publication called The Lamp back in 2020. That’s what we are going to take a look at today. He also wrote about a famous symposium that included the then-atheist Antony Flew. We’ll take a look at that as well. Let me hasten to say that we are trying to follow your mandate on politics in this podcast. We occasionally delve into political issues. If any candidate reveals interesting beliefs, we’ll try to cover it. Before we get into today’s topic, Bill, go ahead and give us your disclaimer on how we try to handle politics.

DR. CRAIG: We do not get involved in speaking to purely political issues. We recognize that there are Christians on both sides of the political divide. Therefore, we try to abstain from political opinions. The exception is when these political issues touch on either ethical or religious issues. Then I think it's fair game and indeed we have a responsibility to address those sorts of issues.

KEVIN HARRIS: Your first impression after reading this piece from Vance was that he is a genuine intellectual. What were some of the things that gave you that impression?

DR. CRAIG: This just shocked me. I was sent the article by a philosopher in England, Daniel Hill, who teaches at the University of Liverpool. He said, “Have you seen this?” It was J. D. Vance's interaction with this very famous symposium on theology and falsification that involved Antony Flew, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell. Well, I cut my teeth on this sort of symposium as a philosophy student, and so I was just shocked to find Vance interacting with it. As I read this article, this was sophisticated interaction. This was by no means amateurish or sophomoric. He turns out to be quite the reader and fan of St. Augustine. The article quotes extensively from Augustine's masterpiece The City of God, and Vance draws a number of lessons from this great philosophical theological work. I was really taken aback. I have never heard of a political candidate who has training in philosophy before.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's look at a few highlights from this article that he titled, “How I Joined the Resistance.”^[1] His bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis was made into a movie. Bill, you and Jan saw it, and I think you said it was not exactly a feel-good movie.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, not for me. I'll tell you, I came away from watching that very grateful for my traditional middle class family and upbringing. This is not a movie about Americana and apple pie. This is about people in Appalachia who are mired in the wretchedness of poverty, ignorance, vulgarity, substance abuse, violence, and so forth. The background that he came out of was just appalling. The characters in the movie, rather than being attractive, I found them repugnant and even horrifying. It's amazing that this man has come out of that kind of background. I think it was his joining the Marines, frankly, that really saved him. When he joined the Marines, that catapulted him into a different culture that then enabled him to get a student loan to attend Ohio State University where he studied philosophy and then go on to Yale Law School. In the movie you see the progress of his life, but it doesn't bring you up to date because it was made before he was elected to the Senate. I thought to myself – this is a remarkable story from rags-to-riches, and you could add to it his being elected to be a United States Senator and now a vice presidential candidate. It really is an extraordinary personal story.

KEVIN HARRIS: Like you said, he was raised in a rural, poverty-stricken, Pentecostal community. He said that it was anti-intellectual, very anti-Catholic, and had poor teaching. He had a lot to overcome, but he said something interesting in this essay. He grew up with Sallman's famous portrait of Christ hanging in the house – a humble Jesus and a little forlorn, as he put it. But images he and his grandmother saw of the Catholic Jesus were intimidating. Christ high above in beams of light. He said, “The Catholic Jesus was a majestic deity, and we had little interest in majestic deities because we weren’t a majestic people.” I know this calls for some psychological or pastoral introspection on your part, but do you think we tend to make God in our own image and according to how we were raised?

DR. CRAIG: I think that there's a tremendous influence from childhood concerning that. This passage in the article struck me because I, too, was raised in a non-churchgoing, non-believing family, but at the local United Methodist Church in town there was this same portrait of Jesus hanging on the wall. It, to me, was also very attractive. That is the way I pictured Jesus – in Sallman's portrait. It's so warm and attractive and inviting, it predisposed me toward belief, and so I resonated with what Vance said about the influence of that image on him.

KEVIN HARRIS: Skipping ahead a little bit in the essay, Vance joined the Marines after high school, later enrolled in Ohio State University, and while there he became an atheist after reading Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris (both of whom you've debated). He said he had no church and nothing to anchor him to his faith, and he couldn't square the Young Earth Creationism that he was raised to believe with science. Therefore when he went to Ohio State he embraced atheism, very ardently, in fact. We hear two things often. His faith was not anchored when he enrolled in the university – we hear that a lot. And his Young Earth Creationism got obliterated.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. This happens all too frequently and is really a call to action on the part of both parents and youth leaders in the church to make sure that before our high schoolers go off to university they are equipped to deal with these sorts of questions. I remember years ago talking with a campus minister at Stanford University. He said to me that most of the kids who walk away from their Christian faith in university have actually already lost their faith while in high school, but so long as they're living at home under the authority of mom and dad they just keep their unbelief to themselves. Then when they go away to university it comes out in the open. So we cannot begin to address these problems too early. From a young age we need to be training our kids in what they believe and why we believe it.

KEVIN HARRIS: By the way, I find it very gratifying that you debated Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens – full-on debates. Those are the two that he credited to his atheism. It just shows that Reasonable Faith, you, and your work at Reasonable Faith, you've been on the cutting edge.

DR. CRAIG: It's ironic – isn't it? – when you read something like that, and you just think, oh, how tragic that this led to the abandonment of his faith. What also struck me – you may remember I also had a debate at Ohio State University. I had an excellent debate there with a philosopher named Kevin Sharp on the existence of God. Sharp gave a penetrating analysis of my apologetic for the Christian faith that I had never put together in the way that he did. It was really impressive. I thought to myself I was probably there before J. D. Vance was a student there. I'm not sure. But I would be interested to know what was the time of my debate and the time of his study at Ohio State.

KEVIN HARRIS: He put together such a good PowerPoint of your case.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

KEVIN HARRIS: And you think, “Hey, can you send that to me?” [laughter]

DR. CRAIG: That’s true!

KEVIN HARRIS: Vance became an ardent atheist, and he watched Christian apologetics videos just so he could counter them. He said he didn't want to be caught off guard when arguing with a well-read Christian. But two things started changing him. He said one in the mind and one in the heart. The mind-change was in the dialogue between Antony Flew, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell that he encountered in a philosophy course there at Ohio State. Some of our listeners may not know about that dialogue. Before we look at specifics, what can you tell us about it?

DR. CRAIG: This was a dialogue between these three philosophers at Oxford University on theology and falsification. This is an issue which is now obsolete. It's now passé in philosophy of religion. But back in the 60’s and 70’s, this was all the rage. In my book Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, co-authored with J. P. Moreland, I describe this debate in the chapter on religious epistemology and how we've now moved beyond it. Basically what Flew was arguing was for a principle of meaning that he characterized as the falsification principle. Prior to this time logical positivists or verificationists had been plumping for the verification principle of meaning. That was a principle that said that unless a sentence can be in principle empirically verified that it has no factual content. It is factually meaningless. Well, that principle soon succumbed to criticism and so Flew tried to replace it with a falsification principle; namely, that a sentence which is in principle non-falsifiable is meaningless. It has no factual content. So he tried to argue that sentences about God – sentences having the word “God” in them – are non-falsifiable. Therefore, these are just meaningless combinations of words. Mitchell and Hare dialogue with him about that.

KEVIN HARRIS: Vance writes,

Flew, an atheist (though he later recanted) argues that theological utterances—like “God loves man”—are fundamentally unfalsifiable, and thus meaningless. Because believers won’t let a fact count against their faith, their views aren’t really claims about the world. This certainly spoke to my experience of what believers say when faced with apparent difficulties. Confronted with unspeakable tragedy? “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

He saw Christian faith as shallow, gullible, and subject to Flew’s falsification principle.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. He was apparently, as he tells us, completely unfamiliar with, for example, natural theology, arguments for the existence of God, as well as responses to the problem of evil and other objections to theistic belief. So he was a sitting duck for Flew’s falsification challenge.

KEVIN HARRIS: Vance said,

Our class spent the most time discussing Flew’s opening volley, and the response by Hare—which, essentially, concedes Flew’s point but argues that religious feelings are meaningful and potentially true nonetheless.

Can you comment on Hare's response?

DR. CRAIG: Hare’s response was utterly worthless. It was hopeless. What he basically conceded is that these statements are not falsifiable, but that's all right because religious language isn't about asserting truths about the world. It's just a sort of interpretation or language game that you play – a kind of framework that you put on reality to interpret your experience in your life. And the atheist can have a different frame of reference or language game that he's playing. He uses the atheistic frame of reference to interpret life, and none of these can be adjudicated. They're incommensurable. They don't make objectively true or false claims, and therefore even though they are meaningful in the sense that they serve to guide your life and to give you an interpretation of reality, in fact none of them really is objectively true or false. This is clearly not the way in which religious believers mean their faith assertions. When they say, for example, that God loves you, they mean that there literally is a being out there called God who loves you. Or when they say that God created the universe, they mean that the universe was brought into being by this transcendent, personal creator. So Hare’s view was just a gross distortion of religious language.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Let’s stop right there. We’re going to pick it up next time and look at the conclusion of this essay. Thank you very much for listening, and thank you for your support. Your prayers and your financial gifts are so appreciated. Go to ReasonableFaith.org. We’ll see you next time on Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig.^[2]