A Middle Way to God

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A Middle Way to God Hallett, Garth. Oxford University Press 0195132688 9780195132687 9780585365688 English God--Proof, Other minds (Theory of knowledge) 2000 BT102.H336 2000eb 231/.042 God--Proof, Other minds (Theory of knowledge)

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A Middle Way to God Garth L. Hallett

 



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Oxford New York Athens Auchland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 2000 by Garth L. Hallett Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitte, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hallett, Garth. A middle way to God / Garth L. Hallett. p.  cm. Included bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-513268-8 1. GodProof.   2. Other minds (Theory of knowledge) I. Title. BT102.H336   2000 2319.042dc21       99-21008 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  



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Preface In modern times, one epistemological straitjacket has followed another. Judged by the mathematical standards that Descartes and others espoused, belief in God's existence does not qualify as knowledge, but neither do scientific beliefs. Judged by the scientific standards that later rose to dominance, belief in God does not even qualify as rational, but neither do basic convictions such as belief in the physical world or belief in other minds. Today, despite repeated failures, the search for precise criteria of knowledge and of rational belief continues. For without such criteria how are we to evaluate belief in God or in anything else? My early thinking, influenced by Wittgenstein, took a different turn. Comparisons, I thought, might replace precise criteria. Thus, if basic nonscientific beliefs count against criteria that exclude them, rather than vice versa, they also count for beliefs that resemble them. Moreover, the closer the resemblance, the stronger the support. So, rather than test belief in God by unsuitable standards, why not compare this belief with the generally recognized basic belief that most nearly resembles itnamely, belief in other mindsand scrutinize their resemblance more closely? Why not write a book entitled God and Other Minds? When Alvin Plantinga published an admirable study on the same topic, with the same title, I abandoned my idea. Now, three decades later, I have returned to it. Subsequent reflection and the dialectic of debate have done nothing to lessen the interest of the comparison Plantinga undertook, but they have made clear how differently the comparison needs to be conducted. Hence, despite its similar focus, the present study differs from Plantinga'sindeed differs greatlyin its method, structure, and contents. The difference in methodmore exploratory, less demonstrativealso permits a more accessible style of discussion, aimed at a somewhat broader audience. I realize that my theme merits a more perceptive treatment than I am likely to achieve, for what question is more important than that of God's existence, and what issue is more complex? Fortunately, I have not been left entirely to my own inadequate  



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devices. My Jesuit confreres Barton Geger, Gerard Hughes, Arthur McGovern, William Rehg, and James Sadowsky have offered suggestions on the whole work; Theodore Vitali has commented on parts; and Victoria Carlson-Casaregola has polished the writing style. I should also acknowledge the valuable suggestions of the readers for Oxford University Press and of my students in a seminar on God and other minds. Warm thanks to them all!

 

G.L.H JUNE 1999 ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI



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Contents 1 Setting Course

3 3

A Basic Belief 6 A Probable Conclusion 7 A Middle Way 9 Exploration, Not Demonstration 2 Parameters

10 10

God 11 Other Minds 13 Truth 17 Rationality 3 Clearing the Way

26 30

Cognitive Spectacles 32 Cognitive Blinders 34 Propensities and Preferences 41

History 45 Overview 4 Immediate Experience

48 49

Candidate Experiences 53 Questions of Completeness 54 Epistemic Significance 57 Further Candidates 59 Credulity and Contradiction 64 Backing  



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5 Analogy

66 67

Other Minds 70 God 74 Overview 6 Teleology

79 81

A Sample Focused Argument 82 Literary Analogy 86 How Strong a Case? 7 Good and Evil

89 90

Evil Explained 92 The Objection from Evil Answered 104 Convincing Intimations 8 Concluding Comparisons

108 110

Other Minds: Best Explanation 111 God: Cosmic Source 113 Identity of Reference

9 Journey's End

117 120

Summing Up 123 A Happy Mean? Notes

125

References

145

Index

159

 



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1 Setting Course One of the uses of philosophyperhaps the most important useis to clarify methodological problems: that is, to make clear how we should set about trying to answer certain questions." John Wilson, Philosophy and Religion It is now widely agreed that strict proofstarting with evident premises, proceeding by sure steps, and thereby establishing an airtight conclusion on some controversial issueis not likely to succeed. It is not likely to succeed with regard to free will, justice, the uniformity of nature, or extraterrestrial intelligence. Neither is it likely to succeed with regard to God. One reaction has been to assimilate God's existence to many another truth we hold, rationally, without demonstration, and to deny that it needs to be proved. A contrary reaction has been to acknowledge the need of demonstration but replace the relatively simple, deductive proofs of old with more complex, inductive demonstrations. Between these two extremes a middle way, deserving fuller, different development than it has so far received, wends toward God. To indicate its direction and its interest, I shall sketch the two extremes and their respective attractions, then this alternative way that may combine the virtues of both. 1 To illustrate all three approaches, I shall draw on the writings of two of the foremost philosophical theologians of our day, Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne. Like them, when I speak of God I shall have in mind the God of Western tradition and of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefcreator and sustainer of the universe, supremely worthy of worship and obedience. A Basic Belief Plantinga looks askance at attempts to prove the existence of God, favoring instead the view that belief in God is "properly basic." In this stance, he claims to represent  



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a Reformed tradition deriving from John Calvin. 2 "What the Reformers meant to hold," he suggests, "is that it is entirely right, rational, reasonable, and proper to believe in God without any evidence or argument at all; in this respect belief in God resembles belief in the past, in the existence of other persons, and in the existence of material objects."3 "In none of these areas do we typically have proof or arguments, or need proofs or arguments."4 Because such beliefs do not derive from inference or reasoning, they are "basic"; because they require no such legitimation, they are ''properly" basic. With respect to the past, I may believe, for instance, that I mowed the lawn this morning. I do not deduce this belief from an image of myself mowing the lawn (after all, I did not view myself mowing the lawn). Neither do I reach it by a more complex processentertaining other, sketchier phantasms, recognizing them as images of actual rather than imagined events, intuiting from telltale clues that the events occurred this morning, surmising the parts left unrepresented, and from this combined evidencethis extremely shaky evidenceconcluding that I probably mowed the lawn this morning. No, I simply remember mowing the lawn this morning. And if I mowed the lawn, there was a lawn to mow; the lawn existed. Similarly, I may believe that I am presently mowing the lawn. As evidence for this belief, I do not observe the kinesthetic sensations in my muscles and thereby discern that I am guiding the mower rather than being pulled or guided by it. I do not inspect my visual images and from their special qualities infer that a mower, a lawn, and movements of my bodyor at least their nearest surfacescorrespond to the images. I simply believe, without reasoning or demonstration, that I am mowing the lawn. And if I am mowing the lawn, then the lawn exists, and so does the mower. Again, I see a friend weeping at a graveside and am sure that she is grieving. I do not reason from my visual sensations plus premises correlating sensations of that type with grief. I do not reason from the state of her nervous system plus correlations I have detected between neural events in my body and my own feelings of sorrow. No, I believe straight off in the sorrow and in the person who feels it. She is not a mere automaton, nor a set of visual phantasms. I am not alone in the world. Plantinga extends this type of account to theistic beliefs. In like fashion, for example, I may believe that God made the flower I am holding. I do not note the flower's contingency and infer an ultimate cause. I do not note its beauty and mount by Platonic steps to supreme Beauty. I do not note its teleological perfection and run through an argument from design. No, I simply believe, without evidence or argument, that God made this flower. And if God made the flower, then God exists. (Strictly speaking, Plantinga suggests, it is not belief in God that is properly basic, but particular beliefs such as "God made this flower," each of which self-evidently entails that God exists.) Such an account holds obvious attractions for theists. For one thing, it makes belief in God look legitimate and sureindeed, legitimately sure. For another, it extends to believers generally; it does not restrict legitimate belief in God to the clever and wise or to professional philosophers, but makes it available to ordinary folkas available as belief in the past, belief in other persons, or belief in physical objects. This assimilation is rendered more plausible by Plantinga's distinction (couched in his own special terminology, which I shall not adopt) between grounds for belief,  



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which imply no reasoning, and evidence for belief, where the evidence serves as premise and the belief as conclusion. It is the latter"evidence"that he regards as unnecessary, not grounds. Even so, misgivings persist. Can just any belief count as properly basic? Can belief in Santa Claus, or belief in the Great Pumpkin that returns every year at Halloween? "If we say that belief in God is properly basic," Plantinga himself expostulates, "will we not be committed to holding that just anything, or nearly anything, can properly be taken as basic, thus throwing wide the gates to irrationalism and superstition?" 5 In reply, he has proposed a plan for discriminating between properly and improperly basic beliefs: We must assemble examples of beliefs and conditions such that the former are obviously properly basic in the latter, and examples of beliefs and conditions such that the former are obviously not properly basic in the latter. We must then frame hypotheses as to the necessary and sufficient conditions of proper basicality and test these hypotheses by reference to these examples.6 In these post-Wittgensteinian days, one may question the chances of educing a single set of necessary and sufficient conditions of proper basicality from widely varied samples. And one naturally wonders, "For whom will the samples be obviously basic?" Plantinga replies: There is no reason to assume, in advance, that everyone will agree on the examples. The Christian will of course suppose that belief in God is entirely proper and rational; if he does not accept this belief on the basis of other propositions, he will conclude that it is basic for him and quite properly so. Followers of Bertrand Russell and Madelyn Murray O'Hare may disagree; but how is that relevant? Must my criteria, or those of the Christian community, conform to their examples? Surely not. The Christian community is responsible to its set of examples, not to theirs.7 It appears, then, that were Great Pumpkiners numerous enough, their belief might pass this communitarian test and count as properly basicfor Great Pumpkiners. Doubtless their belief would not satisfy the conditions that Plantinga has recently sketched for what he terms "warrant": it would not be "produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly . . . in a cognitive environment congenial for those faculties, according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth."8 But how might it be shown, by contrast, that belief in God does satisfy such conditions? Plantinga doubts the existence of any "short and elegant list of conditions at once severally necessary and jointly sufficient for warrant";9 and even if we possessed such a list, it might shed only feeble, indirect light on the question of whether belief in God should be included with our properly basic beliefs or be excluded along with belief in the Great Pumpkin. In the absence, therefore, of any discernible objective criterion with which to validate one set of basic beliefs rather than another, let us turn from Plantinga's Reformed position and look to the opposite extreme. There arguments and evidence are not only countenanced but required, and God as reasoned conclusion replaces God as basic belief.  



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A Probable Conclusion For Swinburne, beliefs, to be rational, must be based on the right sort of evidence, in the right sort of way. Not every kind of rationality can be required of a believer, but this kind can: "A belief is rational . . . if it is based on evidence resulting from investigation which was in the subject's view adequate and the subject has subjected his inductive standards to criticism which was in his view adequate, and checked in his view adequately that by them his belief was rendered probable by his evidence." 10 This obligation holds with special weight for religious belief, given its importance. Indeed, "the primary obligation on a man is to pursue religious inquiry with diligence, and to hold whatever religious belief that inquiry suggests."11 In The Existence of God, Swinburne's own diligent inquiry proceeds and concludes as follows: I have urged that various occurrent phenomena are such that they are more to be expected, more probable if there is a God than if there is not. The existence of the universe, its conformity to order, the existence of animals and men, men having great opportunities for co-operation in acquiring knowledge and moulding the universe, the pattern of history and the existence of some evidence of miracles, and finally the occurrence of religious experiences, are all such as we have reason to expect if there is a God, and less reason to expect otherwise. . . . I also discussed . . . the main argument against the existence of God from the existence of evil; and I argued that the existence of evil did not count against the existence of God.12 Accordingly, "On our total evidence theism is more probable than not."13 Such a reasoned case for God's existence places Swinburne squarely in the tradition which Reformed thinkers reject, but his approach differs greatly from that of Aquinas or Descartes. He does not believe in the deductive validity of any arguments to God from premises evident to most rational people. A calculus of probabilities replaces deductive rigor, and, since no single argument can any longer do the job, the calculus is applied to cumulative evidence. "The real issue," Swinburne writes, "is whether there is enough inductive force in those [traditional] arguments from such premises which can be represented as inductive arguments, taken together, to render the conclusion that there is a God more probable than not."14 Swinburne does not simply add indefinite probabilities, chapter by chapter, and conclude, somehow, that the probability of God's existence exceeds the probability of God's nonexistence. Instead, when at the end he comes to religious experience, he appeals to a "Principle of Credulity," according to which: "It is a principle of rationality that (in the absence of special considerations) if it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present, then probably x is present; what one seems to perceive is probably so."15 If, for instance, it seems that there is a table in the room, there probably is a table in the room. If it seems that the woman on the other side of the room is my wife, she probably is my wife. If it seems that the person I see is tired or angry, the person probably is tired or angry. Similarly, "in the absence of special considerations, all religious experiences ought to be taken by their subjects as genuine, and  



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hence as substantial grounds for belief in the existence of their apparent objectGod, or Mary, or Ultimate Reality, or Poseidon." 16 With regard to Poseidon, our background knowledge would suffice to overrule the Principle of Credulity; with regard to God (here the preceding chapters play their role), it does not. Swinburne does not restrict the Principle of Credulity to esoteric mystical experiences. There is no doubt, he notes, that a great many people have had experiences of one sort or another that had God as their putative object. Indeed, for many people life is one vast religious experience. "What is seen by one man as simply a wet day is seen by another as God's reminding us of his bounty in constantly providing us with food by means of his watering plants. What is seen by one man as merely a severe illness is seen by another as God's punishing him for the sins of his youth. That God is at work is no inference for these men but what seems (epistemically) to be happening."17 At this crucial point, Swinburne's approach can be seen to converge with Plantinga's. Similar comparisons are made, eliciting similar misgivings. One wonders whether such religious perceptions really belong, epistemically, with the perception of a table, one's wife, or another person's anger. Swinburne replies, in effect, "Why not?" There are differences, to be sure,18 but what disanalogy draws a clear, definitive line between religious experiences on one side and standard sense experiences or other-minds experiences on the other?19 With equal right, however, one might inquire what analogy or set of analogies clearly establishes parity between religious experiences and the others, or at least sufficient parity to warrant extension of the Principle of Credulity to religious experiences. The challenge to be met resembles Plantinga's, and Swinburne might propose a similar solution. As Plantinga envisaged a systematic comparison of properly basic beliefs from which criteria of proper basicality might be educed and then be applied to belief in God, so Swinburne might envisage a systematic comparison of generally reliable experiences from which criteria of reliable experience might be educed and then be applied to religious experiences. However, thereupon the same problem would arise for Swinburne as for Plantinga. Inclusion of religious experience might bias the sampling of reliable experiences in one direction; exclusion of religious experience might bias it in the other direction. What, then, can be done? What egress can there be from this impasse, or from Plantinga's? A Middle Way Neither bald assertion of proper basicality, on one side, nor probabilistic calculation, on the other, proves satisfactory. An alternative approach, splitting the difference between these two extremes, might partake of the firmness of the first and the fuller rationality of the second. This it might achieve by focusing on a single belief accepted as properly basic; carrying out a full comparison between it and theistic belief; and establishing epistemic parity, or near-parity, between them. Plantinga's early God and Other Minds may be viewed as a start (the most substantial of many)20 in this direction.  



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Plantinga, like Swinburne, has neatly summarized his procedure: We began this study by asking whether belief in the existence of God is rational. The natural theologian's answer, we found, is of dubious worth at best. The teleological argument is perhaps his most powerful weapon; and yet it suffers from a crucial and crippling deficiency. But if the answer of the natural theologian does not carry conviction, that of the natural atheologian is even less satisfactory. I then proposed to explore an analogous question in the philosophy of mind: the question how I know, what my reasons are for believing, that I am not the only creature that thinks and feels, reasons and believes. Here I argued that while the analogical position is as good an answer as we have to this question, it nonetheless shares the crippling defect of the teleological argument. And my final query is this: exactly what bearing do these conclusions have on the question with which we beganthe question whether it is rational to accept theistic belief? 21 Given this parallel, Plantinga reaches a tentative conclusion: "If my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God. But obviously the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latter."22 Plantinga had good reason to be tentative. The first premise in this closing syllogism, implying parity of theistic belief with belief in other minds, calls for something more than the limited, negative parallel he traced between the two beliefs. Consider just the two key arguments mentioned in his summarythe analogical argument for other minds and the teleological argument for God. To say that both arguments fail in the same way is not to say that both have equal force. And even if they did, what of the other arguments for each belief and their respective weights? What, for instance, of various types of religious experience, which figure prominently here (in chapters 4 and 5) but make no appearance in Plantinga's parity argument? Plantinga's key premise would require total epistemic parity of belief in God with belief in others minds, and proof of this overall parity would require far more than he either did or could have provided. All evidence for and against each belief would have to be assessed, then the cumulative results would have to be compared, to see if the weight of evidence for belief in God at least equals that of the evidence for belief in other minds. Not only would this task be dauntingly complex (Swinburne's task doubled, then compounded), but its comparisons would also be highly dubious. How might we assess the relative weight of even two very different argumentssay the analogical and the teleological argumentslet alone the cumulative weight of a half dozen different arguments on each side? How might we quantify the values of the different items of evidence, so many points for this and so many points for that, so as to permit a summing up of each column and a final comparison?23 And if the two beliefs' cumulative credentials did not come out roughly even, how much below full parity might belief in God fall before it lost its claim to like treatment, as properly basic? Nonetheless, there is no denying the interest of Plantinga's comparison. Belief in other minds does not satisfy the deductive standards of a Descartes or the inductive standards of a Carnap, but it is none the worse for that, as the standards are inap 



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propriate for general application. Plantinga's study suggests that the like may need to be said of Swinburne's standards. Tested by them, the truth of our belief in other minds might seem far from certain, and our unquestioning belief in other minds might seem far from rational. 24 Yet surely there are minds other than our own; and surely our belief that there are is not irrational, pending full investigation of the matter. On the other hand, the blithe assertion that belief in God belongs with such properly basic beliefs as belief in other minds seems in need of demonstration. Yet full demonstration, I have suggested, is out of the question, both practically and theoretically. What, then, can be done? Exploration, Not Demonstration Our problem, we might say with Wittgenstein,"can only be removed by turning our whole examination round. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)"25 Our need is a clearer view of what rationality and good evidence look like in areas where standard criteria do not apply. Our method cannot be to apply those criteriatesting every premise for its truth, checking every inference for its validitybut rather to free ourselves from familiar criteria long enough to look. Exploration and perspicuous comparison must replace demonstration. Inevitably, in the course of this exploration disanalogies as well as analogies will appear between belief in God and belief in other minds. Given the difference in the content of the beliefs, their grounding also differs. The like holds for belief in other minds and belief in physical bodies, or belief in other minds and belief in the past. From belief to belief, the content differs notably, and so do the grounds. Yet surely these uncontested beliefs are legitimate and rational; surely they are true. So our guiding question will be: Does belief in God belong in this company? It is not feasible, within a single study, to compare comprehensively belief in God with all of these other beliefs. Given the diversity of the beliefsin God, the past, the physical world, and other mindsany such attempt would prove excessively confusing and impossibly complex. It is both feasible and worthwhile, however, to scrutinize the single most interesting pairing: God and other minds. This, then, is the course we shall pursue.  



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2 Parameters True beliefs tend to be rational beliefs, and rational beliefs tend to be true beliefs. Yet true beliefs may not be rational (e.g., I may believe truly, on a hunch, that I will win the lottery), and rational beliefs may not be true (e.g., I may believe what experts tell me, yet the experts may be wrong). So two questions, not one, will guide the coming inquiry. If belief in other minds is true, is belief in God likewise true? If belief in other minds is rational, is belief in God likewise rational? Before pursuing these questions, I must first specify more definitely both terms of the comparison (God and other minds) and both of its aspects (truth and rationality), and thereby clarify the close connection between the two questions as I conceive them here. God I remarked at the start that, like Plantinga and Swinburne, when I speak of God I shall have in mind the God of Western tradition and Christian beliefcreator and sustainer of the universe, supremely worthy of worship and obedience. Actually, both authors understand a good deal more than this by the term "God." Thus Swinburne explains at the beginning of The Existence of God: I take the proposition "God exists" (and the equivalent proposition "There is a God") to be logically equivalent to "there exists a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, is perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of all things." I use ''God" as the name of the person picked out by this description. 1 Swinburne goes on to add further specifications. For example, he explains that by God being eternal he understands that God has always existed and will always exist, not that God's existence is timeless or outside time. Finding this latter conception difficult to make sense of, he comments: "it seems quite unnecessary for the theist to burden himself with this understanding of eternity."  



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With how much should the present inquiry burden itself? How fully should it characterize God? These queries pose a dilemma. Opting either wayfor greater definiteness or for lessmight appear to vitiate the comparison between belief in God and belief in other minds. On the more definite side, consider a pairing of beliefs such as Plantinga proposedfor example, "That person is grieving" and "God made this flower"and suppose that the latter is taken to mean: "A personal, spiritual being, who is eternal, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator and sustainer of all things, made this flower." To call this belief properly basic or to put it on a par with "That person is grieving" appears farfetched. To restore plausible parity, one would have to construe the other-minds belief with similar specificityfor example: "That hylomorphic substance composed of prime matter and a spiritual substantial form is grieving.'' So read, this belief, too, no longer appears a plausible candidate for properly basic status and hence loses its attraction as a relatively sure, unproblematic term of comparison. To restore its attractiveness, therefore, and to permit an appropriate comparison, it would seem best to read both beliefs less specifically. For present purposes, my initial, less definite characterization of God looks preferable to Swinburne's fuller definition. However, his definition typifies traditional Western belief, and a less specific characterization might therefore lessen the interest of a comparison so defined. To illustrate this difficulty, consider the problem of evil. By general accord, it is the combination of characteristics that Swinburne lists (creator of all things, endowed with perfect freedom, knowledge, power, and goodness) that, together with the quantity and quality of evil in the world, creates the principal difficulty for the existence of God. How could such a God cause or permit so much evil? However, drop the claim of omnipotence, as some have suggested, and the difficulty disappears. God desired to do better but could not. One might then wonder whether a God so limited could be the omniscient creator and sustainer of the universe or would be supremely worthy of worship and obedience. In any case, such is not the God in whom most theists have believed, and an inquiry so broadly defined as to admit such a God would therefore lose much of its interest. Were my purpose demonstration, I would have to decide one way or the othereither for greater specificity or for less; for the validity of an argument, whether deductive or inductive, turns largely on how its conclusion is understood. My purpose being exploration, not demonstration, I can strike a compromise. I shall not suppose a more definite understanding of "God" than that stated in chapter 1, but neither shall I exclude a more definite understanding. So I need not bypass the problem of evil. That, too, will be an appropriate area of inquiry in the coming comparison between belief in God and belief in other minds. Other Minds The other expression in this pairing"other minds"can also be taken amply or narrowly, and this determination, too, will affect the plausibility of Plantinga's  



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parity claim. To develop a sense of the options, let us sample the luxuriant variety of other-minds beliefs that vie for consideration as possible terms of comparison. The beliefs Plantinga had in view concern other persons like ourselves, who think and feel, reason and believe, experience anger, sorrow, joy, and the like, much as we do. About them we feel more certain, at least on many occasions, and about them we more readily agree. Yet, round about this firm nucleusbefore, below, and beyond the minds of contemporary adult human beings on planet Earthclaims and conjectures proliferate: Before Backward in our personal histories, some writers offer firm surmises about stages of which we have no recollection. The womb, write Daphne and Charles Maurer, can be "boomy, bumpy, unsettling, and foul tasting." 2 The world of the newborn is a world of synesthesia, of confusion of the senses. "His world smells to him much as our world smells to us, but he does not perceive odors as coming through his nose alone. He hears odors, and sees odors, and feels them too. His world is a mêlée of pungent aromasand pungent sounds, and bitter-smelling sounds, and sweet-smelling sights, and sour-smelling pressures against the skin. If we could visit the newborn's world, we would think ourselves inside a hallucinogenic perfumery."3 Below "At some level on the phylogenetic scale," notes Michael Devitt, "usually close to humans, we feel confident in attributing beliefs and desires; at other levels, usually close to insects, we feel confident in denying such attributions."4 Yet Darwin detected playfulness in ants,5 and Binet went so far as to attribute fear, memory, perception, choice, and the like to microorganisms.6 Nowadays, lifeless machines are credited with thoughts, beliefs, intentions, and desires (a chess-playing computer "wants to win; more particularly, at a certain stage of a game, it wants to save its rook").7 Consciousness or mental images, many suggest, may occur in the whirling innards of computers, as well as in living organisms.8 Beyond "The sperm whale," writes John Lilly, "has 'religious' ambitions and successes quite beyond anything that we know. His 'transcendental religious' experiences must be quite beyond what we can experience by any known methods at the present time."9 Thomas Nagel writes with similar assurance about conscious experience elsewhere in the universe: "No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe."10 Sometime in the next few years, predicts Thomas McDonough, scientists will detect a signal produced by an intelligent civilization, will zero in on the source, and will discover television signals in color and three dimensions: ''Every TV newscast on Earth will then show pictures of an alien being, looking like nothing ever seen on this planet even in the movies, a creature stranger than we can imagine, speaking an incomprehensible language."11 Were I to cite people's contrary opinionsagainst extraterrestrial intelligence, against the religiosity of whales, against consciousness in computers or even in cats and dogsit would be evident how greatly other-minds beliefs diverge in their objects, grounds, clarity, and degree of assurance. We therefore face another choice, as for God, between a tighter and a looser focus. It would be easy, on one hand, to establish the epistemic parity of belief in God with certain peripheral other-minds beliefs (the desires of mollusks, say, or the dreams of elephants). It would be easy to pick and choose and to show similarity between belief in God and a variety of other 



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minds beliefs, in this respect with some beliefs, in that respect with others. But such a pick-and-choose procedure would not establish parity with any single other-minds belief, still less with the sure, central kind that Plantinga termed properly basic. The ideal approach might be to select some single, specific other-minds beliefin this person's anger or that person's thoughtsand compare the rationality and truth of that belief with the rationality and truth of belief in God. However, the outcome might then appear to hang on too fine a thread, and maintaining the same term of comparison regardless of the issue or the context might require too much forcing. So here too, with respect to other minds as with respect to God, I shall strike a compromise. I shall pick a single other-minds belief, representative of many, and as far as possible, I shall keep that sample belief in view throughout the coming inquiry. At the same time, I shall amplify discussion by citing other examples as the occasion suggests or requires. Since the sooner I adopt this procedure, the better, I offer now, for use already in this chapter, a sample other-minds belief, drawn from personal experience. It was my first meeting with Mrs. M and my first visit to her apartment. Early in the visit, she had to change her baby daughter, after which she handed the child to her husband. At that moment the infant crowed with delight, and I caught a look of such tenderness in the mother's eyes that I knew she loved her daughter. There was no mistaking that expression. Although looks that are so unmistakable may be relatively rare (I recall only a couple of others with similar distinctnesson one occasion a look of intense pity, on another a look of utter terror), doubtless readers can recall similar experiences of their own. This last point is important. When I cite this focal paradigm here and in later chapters, the thought may come to readers that they are being asked simply to take my word for it that Mrs. M's look testified her love of her child, and this thought may shake their confidence in any comparisons focused on this paradigm. However, I trust that readers need not take my word for it that looks and facial expressions do sometimes furnish strong evidence that a person is in the grips of some emotionlove, terror, fury, grief, compassion, joy. In place of my experience, they may therefore substitute a comparable experience of their own. The example I shall use is no oddity; it does not stand alone. 12 As I say, a single experience, even if somewhat typical, may seem a slender thread on which to hang a whole comparison with belief in God. Yet the thread I have chosen may prove surprisingly strong. In important respects, belief in God does and may resemble my belief that this mother loved her child. And that belief, I submit, was and today still is both rational and true. Whether and to what extent belief in God appears similarly rational and true will depend, in part, on how rationality and truth are conceived. Since truth is the more fundamental notion, I shall begin with it. Truth What we seek determines how we seek. To see microbes, I use a microscope and focus on a slide. For birds I use binoculars and look, say, in the trees. For stars I use a  



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telescope and wait till dark. The kind of thing I seek determines the place, the time, the instrument, the procedure. And so it is for truth. The way we conceive truth affects the way we seek it and the results we reach, whether in everyday inquiry, where our unreflective criteria of truth largely agree, or in speculative inquiry, where reflective conceptions of truth vary widely. What, then, is truth? I shall sketch, very briefly, the answer I have proposed elsewhere, 13 then note its implications for the present study. If readers agree with my account, well and good. If not, they will at least understand what conception underlies and sometimes influences the coming discussion. First, I suggest that the notion of mental truth (of beliefs, ideas, convictions, etc.) is parasitic on the notion of linguistic truth (of utterances, statements, reports, etc.). To be sure, verbal definition can go either way: a belief is true if and only if any utterance that states it is true, and, reciprocally, an utterance is true if and only if the belief it expresses is true. However, the truth of beliefs is tested by the criteria for verbal truth, which I shall spell out now, and not vice versa. Second, an utterance or statement is true if and only if its use of expressions agrees, in the requisite manner and to the requisite degree (see below), with the expressions' established uses (established by usage or by stipulation). Since words are used for more than constructing sentences, the agreement in question is more than merely grammatical. And since the agreement holds expression by constituent expression and not statement by statement, a belief may fail this correspondence test no matter how many people state that belief. Thus, though all may believe and all may say that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, if the man so named did nothing that fits that description, then all are mistaken in their belief. Again, though most people may once have believed in witches, if no person matched the sense of "witch" established in the language, all those speakers were mistaken in their belief and in their statementsas mistaken as though they had said "It's raining" when no drops were falling from the sky. Similarly, though all were to agree in saying that God existsor does not existtheir utterances might be false. Third, the requisite manner of agreement with expressions' established uses depends partly on the individual expressions, partly on syntax, and partly on the type of utterance. For the typical utterance "It's raining" to hold true, drops of water must be falling roundabout. For the truth of "God is my rock," God need not be corporeal. For the truth of "Unicorns have horns,'' no unicorns need exist or ever have existed. Fourth, the requisite degree of agreement with expressions' established uses depends on verbal and nonverbal context and, more generally, on the relationship stated in a "Principle of Relative Similarity" (PRS). More accurately rendered than in an earlier version (though still with some fuzzy edges), this principle runs as follows: "A statement is true if, and only if, its use of terms resembles more closely the established uses of terms than would the substitution of any rival, incompatible expression." To illustrate both the sense of this dictum and its self-referential validity, consider a sample predication. Once, only human beings played chess, by moving pieces on boards, in accordance with rules for such moves. Now we can speak, truly, of computers playing chess with computersdespite the absence of human players,  



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boards, pieces, and movements of pieces. Why "truly"? Because in such assertions the use of "chess" conforms more nearly to the established uses of terms than would the substitution of any rival, incompatible expression. It would not be true to say, for example, that the computers are playing poker, tennis, or ring-around-the-roses. ''Chess" comes closest. Despite its brevity, this thumbnail account contains implicit or explicit answers to many objections. However, I do not expect readers unfamiliar with my earlier, fuller exposition to spot or grasp those answers straightaway; so even in the present sketch I had better respond, briefly, to a couple of likely difficulties. I have noticed, for example, that when people hear the expression "word use," they often think just of grammar or syntax, and so they wonder what has become of "the facts." It is as though, hearing talk of a hammer's use, they envisioned only idle movements in the air, without hands or nails or boards or end results. Yet nonverbal realities figure as prominently in the use of wordsfor example, rain figures as prominently in the use of the word "rain"as nails and boards do in the use of hammers; and the statement "It's raining" on a clear day no more agrees with the familiar use of "rain" than beating the air with a hammer accords with the familiar use of hammers. So too, if the statement "Caesar crossed the Rubicon" is true or false, what makes it so is Caesar's life story and not mere facts of English usage, by themselves. My account is more inclusive, not less inclusive, than traditional correspondence accounts of truth, which focused on "the facts" but ignored the language spoken, the meanings of its terms, how those meanings are acquired, and how the terms and their meanings relate to the truth of the utterances in which the terms occur. This response connects with a second likely objection. According to the sophisticated lore of the day, our familiar concepts are all "theory-laden"; so how, some may wonder, can they be proposed as neutral terms of reference by which to adjudicate truth and falsehood? To take a simple example, the term "water" is loaded with the theoretical content H2O, and my account of truth as linguistic correspondence may appear to preclude any challenge to this accepted theory. Sheer semantics may appear to assure the correctness of the current chemical analysis. In response, consider again Caesar and the Rubicon. The term "Caesar," we might say, is laden with the theory that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. If, however, the man called Caesar did nothing that fits the description "cross the Rubicon," then, regardless of how laden the name "Caesar" may be with that mistaken theory, the statement "Caesar crossed the Rubicon" fails the test of linguistic correspondence. Similarly, if the actual composition of ordinary water were, for instance, D2O, the statement "Water is H2O" would fail the test of linguistic correspondencewould fail it as surely as would "It's raining" if snow or sleet were falling rather than rain. By the Principle of Relative Similarity, "d(euterium)" would win over "h(ydrogen)" in the first case, and "snow" or "sleet" would prevail over "rain" in the second. If I planned to rely heavily on the preceding analysis of truth, I would have to extend it and answer these and other difficulties more fully. As it is, I have made the analysis as full as I have because, like any account of truth, this one has fallout. By PRS's standard, some claims about God and about other minds are too lax, others too rigid. The principle strikes a mean between unbending essentialism on one hand and "anything goes" on the other.  



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On the rigid side, many people have insisted that computers neither think nor calculate. Only humans, or living beings, do. Yet what rival expressions are preferable to "think" and "calculate," to state what computers do? Granted, computers do not calculate or think in the same way that people do, but neither do they play chess the same way that people do. Similar rigidity frequently surfaces in critiques of religious claims. If God does not think things out, as humans do, how can God be said to think? If God is not temporal, how can God be said to act? If God experiences no tender feelings, how can God be said to love? In every instance, PRS's response is the same: If what God does resembles more closely what we call "love" than what, for example, we call "hatred'' or "indifference," or resembles more closely what we call "action" than what we call "rest" or "inaction," or resembles more closely what we call "thinking" than what we call "dreaming," "emoting," or "feeling dizzy," then the word chosen"love," "act," or "think"is the right one, and the claim is true. 14 On the other hand, not just anything goes. PRS would hold the line against many a philosophical or theological extension of termsfor instance, those by writers such as J. T. Robinson and Paul Van Buren. As one author has remarked, "theologians of this stamp have exercised great ingenuity in pointing out what is 'really' meant by the predicates attached to God. For example, when God is said to be great, this means that man feels his littleness before the Unknown God; when God is said to be good, this means that man feels his sinfulness; when God is said to be Creator, this means that man feels insecure in the face of transcendent realityand so on down the line."15 If this were all the backing that theological sayings enjoyed, they would be false and would need to be abandoned. Alternative expressions are available and preferable for what these theologians wish to say. PRS not only strikes a balance between rigidity and laxity; it also connects importantly with a commonsense principle that underlies inductive inference: Other things being equal, the more specific an inference is, the less likely it is to be true, whereas the more broadly disjunctive and indefinite it is, the more likely it is to be true. Suppose, for example, that I infer from the amazing performance of an autistic savant that he is calculating. If by "calculating" I mean something just like what I do when I calculate, my inference has less chance of being true. If, instead, I allow for notable variations within the range of PRS, my inference has more chance of being true. Similarly, if I infer from answers to prayers that God has experiences closely similar to the experiences I have when I hear and respond to others' requests, the inference has less chance of being true than if I allow for some transcendent analog within PRS's ample reach. Though pertinent, these implications of PRS do not extend as far as one might wish. Computers may think in some PRS sense of "think," but do they think consciously? Autistic savants may calculate in some PRS sense of "calculate," when they zip off the date of the third Monday in July, 2037, but do they calculate consciously? Can we legitimately pass from the perceived performance to the unperceived act or conscious experience? Analogously, can we legitimately pass from temporal, sensible phenomena to an invisible, personal God? That is the kind of thing we wish to know when assessing belief in other minds and belief in God and comparing their epistemic credentials. We would like, above all, to identify some general criterion with which to settle the beliefs' respective statusa criterion that would tell us not  



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only which beliefs are likely to be true but also, in an important sense, which beliefs are rational. However, as far as I can see, PRS offers no clue to such a principle. The link between truth and rationality cannot be sharply defined. Rationality Rationality comes in many versions and varieties. It may consist, as just suggested, of a person's having good reasons for believing what the person believes. These reasons may be propositional beliefs (e.g., my belief that Mrs. M looked lovingly at her daughter) or experiences capable of propositional formulation (e.g., my experiences of other people's looks). 16 They may be good subjectively (the person thinks they are good) or objectively (they are, in fact, good). They may be good epistemically (with respect to truth) or good morally and overall (with respect to all life's needs and values, not just truth). Of chief concern here will be the kind of rationality that consists of having objectively, epistemically good reasons, whether propositional or nonpropositional, for believing what one believes. Otherwise put, interest will focus on whether a person has good evidence, in a broad sense of that term, for the truth of what the person believes.17 When I speak of the rationality of belief in God or belief in other minds, this is the kind of rationality I shall have in view. This focus has several advantages. For one thing, having defined rationality in relation to truth, I need not constantly advert to both issuesrationality and truthbut can let the first largely take care of the second. The better the epistemic reasons a person has for a belief, the likelier the belief is to be true. This is quickly said, but needs to be kept in mind; otherwise the double thrust of what follows may be lost to view, with consequent puzzlement. Secondly, this objective, epistemic focus bypasses many vexing puzzles of contemporary epistemology ("knowledge," "warrant," "justification," "internalism,'' "externalism," "fourth conditions," "proper basicality," etc.), and it thereby permits me to dwell instead on several distinctions of special interest for this inquiry.18 All have relevance for belief in God, and all can be illustrated by my belief about Mrs. M. With this simple example I shall now contrast another. For I agree with Wittgenstein that philosophical discourse is often influenced by unacknowledged models which cramp our thinking, and that the influence of these models can be counteracted not only by varying and enriching our diet of examples but also by examining more closely the paradigms that hold us in their grip. With respect to rationality, the things that philosophers say are frequently such as might be prompted by perusing court proceedings or by reading Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes. Reflective versus Unreflective Evidence In the story "A Study in Scarlet," Holmes and Dr. Watson view a man walking down the other side of the street, and Holmes promptly identifies him as a retired sergeant of marines. Watson, initially skeptical, is convinced when the man himself confirms Holmes's identification. "How in the world did you deduce that?" asks Watson. Holmes explains: "Even across the street I could see a great blue anchor tattooed on  



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the back of the fellow's hand. That smacked of the sea. He had a military carriage, however, and regulation sidewhiskers. There we have the marine. He was a man with some amount of self-importance and a certain air of command. You must have observed the way in which he held his head and swung his cane. A steady, respectable, middle-aged man, too, on the face of himall facts which led me to believe that he had been a sergeant." 19 "Wonderful!" exclaims Watson. Wonderful indeed; the evidence looks a bit thin. However, it would have appeared much thinner and much less convincing had Holmes replied, "He just looked like a retired marine sergeant," and had he then proved unable to explain the basis of his impression. In that case, we might say, Holmes would have had a mere hunch and would have been lucky to have it corroborated by the man himself. For Holmes's belief to be well-founded, it was not enough for his eyes to see what they saw, or for him to note, individually, the details of what he saw. No, he had to note their likely or possible significance and, combining this evidence, draw his conclusion. "Rational belief requires a critical attitude in which we do not simply believe whatever seems to be so, but test and probe and insist upon seeking and taking account of all relevant considerations."20 Other examples, however, convey a different impression. Consider Mrs. M. I believe that she loved her child. I believe this on the basis of a single look, now remembered many years later. On the occasion, I made no analysis of the look, à la Holmes, to determine what details of the woman's countenancea telltale compression of the lips, a glint in the eyes, the tilt of her headmade her look a loving one; and I drew no conclusion from this combined evidence. I just recognized the look as loving, and on this basis I believe that she loved her child. Thin though this evidence may appear in the absence of analytic reflection, it is good evidence, I maintain, and my belief in her love is objectively, epistemically rational. Given its importance, I shall return to this distinction between reflective and unreflective evidence. But first the same pair of examples suggests further important distinctions. Accessible versus Inaccessible Evidence Even if Watson had observed very closely, he might not have reflected on the significance of what he saw and might have drawn no conclusions about the observed man's identity. However, later on he might have recalled the tattoo and surmised a connection with the sea, or he might have recalled the man's bearing and surmised an affiliation with the military. The evidence was accessible at the time and, given the initial examination and normal memory, it would be accessible later on. Hence he might have done better on reflection. With respect to Mrs. M's look, the same does not hold. The look occurred in a moment, was caught in a moment, and could not be arrested or be replayed later on. No analysis could occur then; no analysis can occur now. If you ask me why I believe the woman loved her child, I can only report her loving look. If you ask me how and in what respects the look appeared loving, I can make no reply. Holmes could cite specific detailsthe tattoo, the man's bearing, his age. I can cite nothing comparablea pucker in the corner of the eyes, a lift of the eyebrows, a sudden crease between the eyes, or the like. Yet I am fully con 



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vinced of the woman's love for her child, and rationally so. My conviction is well founded. (Recall my earlier remarks about readers' own comparable experiences.) To carry further the contrast between these two cases, let us suppose that I had photographic memory and could now recall the mother's look in the finest detail. I would still be at a loss. I could not indicate to myself, still less to anyone else, just what about the look made it specially tender and loving. Does that particular shine in the eyes characterize all or most loving looks? Does it do so when combined with that particular configuration of lips, eyelids, eyebrows, furrows, wrinkles, and the rest? I haven't a clue. Even if I had total recall of all other loving looks I had ever observed, I might not do much better. Indeed, neither might leading experts in these matters. Regarding facial expressions of emotion, Paul Ekman observes that some of the learning processes that establish elicitors of emotion, consequences of emotional arousal, and rules for control of the expression of emotion are constant within a culture. Others, however, vary within a culture, for in addition to the neural determinants of facial expressions of emotion (common to all humans) and the cultural determinants (common within a culture but responsible for differences across cultures) there are psychosocial determinants of facial expressions of emotion. These determinants are responsible for differences between subcultures, social classes, age groupings, sex roles, and families, and are necessary to explain how facial expressions of emotion vary with personality. 21 With respect to personal variations, Silvan Tomkins notes the existence of "facial styles which are both as unique as the style of a composer, as complex and as invariant."22 Concerning the expressions' complexity, he cites the pioneering investigations of Landis and Hunt, who employed shutter speeds up to 3,000 frames per second to spot all pertinent details: Their research has made it clear that the speed of response of facial muscles is such that some responses, such as partial eyelid closures, are too fast to be seen by the naked eye, and that the patterning of both facial and gross bodily movements is so complex that one must have resort to repeated exposure of the same moving pictures if one is to extract the information which is emitted by human beings as they respond with affect in changes of facial and bodily movement.23 Thus, given the complexity and variability of expressions of emotion and the limited development of data and theory in this area (particularly with regard to expressions of love), it is safe to surmise that not even the world's foremost specialists, if furnished a frame-by-frame rerun of Mrs. M's expression, could establish scientifically that her look was indeed a look of tender love for her child.24 I, however, being no expert and having no photographic record of any kind to consult (much less one at 3,000 frames per second), cannot even furnish the raw data from which specialists might perhaps, some day, construct a case for Mrs. M's love. Yet my conviction, I repeat, is well founded. This second distinction, between accessible and inaccessible evidence, is as relevant as the first for the truth and rationality of religious belief. Even the mighty Holmes observed of his deduction that "it was easier to know it than to explain why  



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I know it." 25 So perhaps, for their conviction to be wellgrounded, believers need not have figured out their reasons for themselves, nor have a ready-made account to offer others. Perhaps, lacking Holmesian analytic gifts, they need not succeed in their attempts to formulate a case. But at least (it might be thought) they must be able to cite evidence which others, better endowed, can recognize as making a good case. If they cannot do even that, their belief is poorly grounded. Our example, typical of many (a malicious smile, a wince of pain, an angry frown, etc.), challenges this response and opens other possibilities. Before exploring them further, another distinction can be drawn from our contrasting samples. Two Senses of "Having" Evidence What Holmes saw, Watson also saw. What evidence Holmes had, Watson also had. So in a sense Watson had as good reason as Holmes for believing that the man was a retired marine sergeant. Yet he did not believe it, at first, and when he did come to believe it on the strength of the man's own testimony, what he had seen still did not ground his belief, reflectively or unreflectively. What I saw, on the contrary, when I glimpsed Mrs. M's tender look, not only provided objectively good evidence of her love for her child but also grounded my belief in her love, albeit unreflectively. This is what made the belief rational. To highlight the distinction between these two senses of "having" evidence, imagine a different case. Suppose that a crime has been committed and that the evidence which points to the criminal is as accessible to Watson as to Holmes. What Holmes has seen and heard, Watson has seen and heard. Suppose, furthermore, that Watson, like Holmes, believes in the criminal's guiltnot, however, on the strength of the evidence he shares with Holmes, but simply because he doesn't like the man's looks. If in fact there is nothing particularly revealing about the man's looksnothing that would link him with the crimeWatson's belief is not rational. Reflecting on this and similar cases, one might suppose that, to believe rationally, a person would not only need to have good reasons but would also need to harbor them reflectively. He or she would have to note the evidence and connect it with the conclusion. Think again of the episode in "A Study in Scarlet." Holmes's belief in the man's identity was rational not only because, for example, he saw the tattoo, but also because what he saw grounded his belief. And how could the tattoo ground his belief without his noting it and noting its significanceat least very rapidly? Perhaps it couldn't, in this case. But beliefs such as mine about Mrs. M provide an antidote to hasty generalization. When I observed her loving look, I did nothing comparable to noting the tattoo and saying, "Aha, the man's been to sea!" or comparable to noting his bearing and making a connection with the military. I did not note the crinkle in the corner of Mrs. M's eye and recognize it as a loving expression or note the combination of crinkle and bright eyes and recognize it as a love combination rather than a joy or amusement combination. I did not take in the whole configuration of her countenance and recognize it as the same configuration I had perceived in other people, whose love I knew for the object of their look and whose love I somehow linked with their look. Though my eyes registered the woman's glance in detail, I did no reasoning, no analysis, even of the rapidest, Holmesian variety.  



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Reflection on this sample therefore reveals an interesting possibility: a person may have objectively, epistemically good reasons for believing and have them in the sense of believing on their basis, without noting what the reasons are or being able to spell them out. This configuration is not peculiar to this single sample. It is commonly encountered, I believe, in a great variety of other-minds beliefs and may be similarly common, I suggest, in various religious beliefs. Believers struck by the beauty and wonder of the world, by an answer to prayer, or by a more direct experience of the divine, may be in a similar epistemic situation. They may have good reason for their beliefthat God made the world, that God answered their prayer, or that they experienced Godand yet be unable to furnish any convincing demonstration to themselves or to others, just as I am unable to furnish a convincing demonstration to myself or to others that Mrs. M's look was indeed a loving look and that she loved her daughter. Anthony Kenny views things differently. "Individuals may believe in the existence of God as something basic," he writes, "but they are rationally justified in doing so only if it is in general possible to offer sound arguments for the existence of God and to refute arguments against it." 26 Here, no alternative appears between objectionable fideism on one hand and full demonstrability on the other. Yet could the same be said about other-minds beliefs? Could the same be said about my belief in Mrs. M's love for her child? That belief is objectively, epistemically rational, yet to demonstrate its truth, I can do no more than cite the mother's loving look. I cannot produce that look for anyone else's critical inspection, nor can I recapture it in detail for my own examination. Even if I could, where would I go from there? How could I establish that the look was indeed loving? Kenny might reply: "Perhaps you have nothing more to go by than that look, but it might be possible to construct a much fuller case from the mother's treatment of the child before and after your momentary experience." The pertinent response seems evident: Such a demonstration, from many looks, many kisses, many kind words, and the like, might provide a still firmer basis for belief, but my belief is already well grounded without any of these supplementary data. Kenny's demand therefore appears excessive. His stipulations may derive in part, I suspect, from a phenomenon which I shall note later in this chapter and dwell on in the next. The spectacles we wear define the reality we see, and philosophers view the reality of rationality through the demonstrative, argumentative lenses which they constantly wear as they debate the existence of God or anything else.27 They view a candidate belief as either self-evident or a conclusion from premises, and a conclusion for which convincing premises have not been citedindeed, cannot be citedis a weak, ill-founded conclusion. Accordingly, a belief that is neither self-evident nor derived or derivable from convincing premises, as mine is not, appears an ill-founded belief. Fuller Illustration Given the importance of the foregoing distinctions, fuller illustration is in order. The simple other-minds example I have used by way of introduction may not carry full conviction by itself, and it hardly suggests how common is the threefold configura 



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tion just exemplified: (1) good unreflective evidence, (2) not reflectively accessible, (3) yet grounding the belief for which it is good evidence. Excessive though the assertion may sound, the same threefold configuration characterizes practically all objectively, epistemically rational beliefs. To back this suggestion, I can utilize the same examples as above. I, like Holmes, based my belief on what I saw. Asked why he identified the man as he did, Holmes cited the evidence observed with his eyes. Ask me why I believe that Mrs. M loved her child, and I would reply that I saw her loving look. Yet in Bertrand Russell's opinion, repeated often in his works, I saw no such thing. "To say that you see Jones is no more correct," Russell wrote, "than it would be, if a ball bounced off a wall in your garden and hit you, to say that the wall had hit you. Indeed, the two cases are closely analogous. We do not, therefore, ever see what we think we see." 28 Similarly, for Russell, we do not ever touch, taste, hear, feel, or smell what we think we do: we do not touch a table, taste a pie, hear a mockingbird, feel a fabric, or smell a rose. The table, pie, mockingbird, fabric, and rose are all outside us; the touching, tasting, hearing, feeling, and smelling occur within usin our brains. So science tells us. As I noted on an earlier occasion (citing references for every item), Russell's view is no isolated aberration: Just as Russell denied that we see or hear physical objects, so others, in similar fashion and for similar reasons, have denied that lights flash; that objects are red or yellow, hot or cold; that we hear anything but sounds; that adults were once children; that anything has value; that light rays are colored; that we ever step twice into the same stream; that people take an interest in their activities; that tables and the like are solid objects; that the sun rises or sets; that people are buried; that they are agreeable or useful; that they love one another; that they feel pain in their extremities or pleasure in their sexual organs; that anything ever changes, comes to be, or passes away; that we see automobiles or hear music; that animals act or feel pain; that unjust laws are laws; that sentences have meaning; that what we call "life" is really life; that individual people ever think; and so on, endlessly.29 I hold, on the contrary, that people have good reasons for believing all of these things. These reasons that they possess are, however, largely unreflective and relatively inaccessible, so that few people, if any, could formulate convincing cases for their beliefs. Nonetheless, their beliefs are based on these good reasons, and it is this grounding that makes the beliefs objectively, epistemically rational. If this is so, then my belief in Mrs. M's love is as typical as I have suggested. Countless veridical, rational beliefs reveal this same configuration; if belief in God does too, it is in good company. Such being the significance of Russell's claims, let us examine them more closely, as typical of the genre, and consider what can be said for and against them. The fuller the development of pros and cons, the more convincingly would it emerge that the situation here really is as I have described it: people's reflective reasons do indeed furnish inadequate grounding, and their unreflective reasons are indeed largely inaccessible. However, a brief dialectical exchange should suffice for illustration (readers who wish something more should keep this limited purpose in mind).  



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As a start, I would note that Russell's assertions violate PRS, and therefore are false. Saying we see our brains rather than the tree or the table does not conform with the established uses of words (e.g., "see"), whereas saying we see the tree or the table does. Russell, to be sure, would be unimpressed by this response, as he was by Ernest Nagel's similar objection: Like Mr. Nagel, I have often had the experience called "seeing a table." My objection is that the phrase, as commonly understood, involves false metaphysics. I see, let us say, something continuous, rectangular, shiny, and brown. My seeing is certainly an event in me, though Mr. Nagel is deeply shocked when I say that what I see is in me. . . . But in any case what I see when I "see a table" is simultaneous with my seeing, whereas the table as the physical object connected with my seeing is slightly earlier. (The sun is eight minutes earlier, some nebulae hundreds of thousands of years earlier.) 30 How can a sunspot be the thing I see, if the sunspot occurred eight minutes ago and the seeing occurs now? I suggest, in reply, that two key assumptions appear in Russell's reasoning, both of them questionable: (1) seeing is the psychological end-stage of the visual process; it consists solely in the event that terminates the causal chain from object to brain; (2) the object of seeing must be simultaneous with the seeing. Seeing the sun cannot be like receiving a letter from a friend who perhaps did not survive the sending of the letter. So far as I can discern, these restrictions have no basis in customary usage. However, I need not establish this claim or continue the debate in this fashion. For my present purpose, it is more pertinent to note that Russell rejected this whole linguistic approach to philosophical questions, as do many contemporary philosophers. Their opposition, far from causing difficulty, confirms the case I am making for the reflective inadequacy and relative inaccessibility of the reasons people have for their beliefs. If I am right, Russell's disagreement is more verbal than factual, but Russell does not see it that way, since he conceives the relationship between the verbal and the factual very differently than I do. If I am wrong and the disagreement is more factual than verbal, I have no idea how Russell's challenge might be met successfully. Neither do countless people who, though they know about light rays, retinas, nerves, and the rest, keep on saying that they see sunsets, hear phones ring, and feel the wind in their faces. In any case, the issue Russell raises is a deep one, and the correct answer is far from obvious. Thus the same pattern emerges as before, point by point. Although most people have good reasons, I am sure, for the beliefs Russell challenged: (1) they have not articulated these good reasons for themselves or for others; (2) if they tried, they would have great difficulty doing so; (3) yet the reasons are not merely ones they have, unreflectively and ineffectually, but ones that ground their beliefs; (4) therefore the beliefs are objectively, epistemically rational. In confirmation, let me take the demonstration a step further. It is one thing for the grounds of a person's belief to be so inaccessible to reflective articulation that the person can make no sound case for the belief. It is another thing for the grounds to be so inaccessible that the person, attempting to articulate them, gives a seriously mistaken account of the groundsthe grounds for the person's own belief. But  



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such, I suggest, is often the case. Thus, most people would say that Russell's assertions are false and their own assertions, about seeing, hearing, tasting, and the rest, are true. So saying, they would apply criteria of truth and falsehood of which not only could they give no satisfactory account but of which philosophers have given the most varied, contradictory accounts. Indeed, many philosophers have denied that there are any such things as criteria of truth and falsehood embedded in our use of "true" and "false." These terms, they allege, are not descriptive; hence truth and falsehood are not properties of anything. It seems evident, therefore, that somebody is mistakenmistaken not about some distant, transempirical realm but about common concepts belonging to the language we all speak. The grounds for our calling this true and that false are deeply hidden, deeply inaccessible. I may now seem to have made my point too well. When grounds are so deeply hidden, should they be termed grounds? Should just any influence, no matter how unreflective or inaccessible, that affects a belief be counted as a ground of the belief? This question, too, has relevance for our inquiry. Unreflective Grounds versus Unreflective Influences A striking seventeenth-century example illustrates the difference between an unreflective influence and an unreflective ground. Suddenly, thinkers as diverse as Galileo, Kepler, Hobbes, Gassendi, Descartes, Locke, and Newton were drawing a distinction between primary qualities (e.g., size, shape, motion, number), which were real, and secondary qualities (e.g., color, smell, taste, feel), which were not, save in an attenuated sense. On this view, a billiard ball that appears spherical and red is indeed spherical, as it appears, but is not red, as it appears; its redness consists of its power to cause red sensations in perceivers. Such, roughly, was the common doctrine. But the reasons given for it were so varied and so bad that one must look elsewhere for its origin. How might we explain the rise of this theory at this moment in the history of Western thought? The answer is not far to seek. The theory's rise coincided with the rise of mathematical science, in which all the thinkers I have mentioned were deeply immersed (even Hobbes, obsessed with motion, spent years studying optics). But the properties most amenable to mathematical treatmentthose that could be measuredwere precisely the primary properties. These, then, were the real properties, whereas the others were not. Reality, viewed through mathematical spectacles, looked mathematical. In comparison with this common, pervasive influence, the proffered arguments figured as mere afterthoughts, mere symptoms of the truly decisive factor. I think this thumbnail sketch contains enough truth to teach some important lessons, 31 which chapter 3 will expand by means of further examples. Here, this single sample can serve to illustrate the difference between influences that do and influences that do not ground people's beliefs. Galileo did not reason to himself or out loud, "I spend my time studying the motion and size of falling bodies, the motions and positions of the planets, and the like: therefore, these are the only real properties." Similarly, I did not reason to myself or out loud, "Mrs. M's countenance revealed these or those traits that are characteristic of love for the person or thing so regarded; therefore she loved her child." The influence of the perceived traits, like  



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the influence of Galileo's focused perspective, was unreflective. In what sense, then, might it be said that my belief was "based" on those traits, whereas his belief was not "based" on his perspective? In what sense did the traits ''ground" my belief, whereas his perspective did not "ground" his belief? Though a decisive psychological difference between these two cases proves difficult to pinpoint, 32 the epistemic difference between them seems clear. The perceived traits relate to and support the truth of my belief, whereas Galileo's perspective bore no relationship to the truth of his belief. The world may look green to someone wearing green glasses, but the glasses do not make the world green or make its greenness any more likely. The same contrast holds for our belief that we see people and not just our brains, and for the countless other beliefs that this belief represents. In such instances, we have good reasons for our beliefs, albeit largely unreflective, relatively inaccessible reasons. The reasons do not merely influence our beliefs but make their truth more likely, and if they make their truth likely enough, as in the cases I have cited (my belief in Mrs. M's love for her daughter, my belief that I saw Mrs. M, etc.), the belief is objectively, epistemically rational. On the other hand, if a belief derives entirely or principally from influences that have no relationship to the belief's truth, as may have been the case for Galileo and company, the resulting belief is not objectively, epistemically rational. In the next chapter, I shall return to these nonepistemic influences and note their significance for the present inquiry. Here I have dwelt on epistemic, truth-related factors because the epistemic standards with which one approaches inquiry about God so importantly affect the outcome. Set the standards too high, and God may be excluded, along with other minds, objective sensation, physical objects, the past, and so forth. Set the standards too low, and God may be readmitted, but so too may rival deities or fantasies such as Santa Claus and the Great Pumpkin. Standards would be too high, I have suggested, if cogent deductive or inductive arguments were required, or even the possibility of constructing such arguments. Grounds for belief may be objectively, epistemically good and yet be largely unreflective and inaccessible. On the other hand, for objective, epistemic rationality we do need to have good groundsgrounds that, like those for my belief that Mrs. Mloved her child or our belief that we see trees and tables, are not entirely unreflective or inaccessible. Clearly, some grounds exist for belief in God and belief in other minds. Yet it may be doubted whether these grounds are such as Sheriock Holmes might click off. Indeed, it may be that neither set of grounds can be formulated more fully and explicitly than my grounds for believing that Mrs. Mloved her child. It may be that even were they fully laid out they would not satisfy contemporary standards, based on other paradigms.33 However, all this remains to be seen. Inquiry hereafter will focus on the double question stated in the last chapter and refined in this one: How do belief in God, creator and sustainer of the universe, supremely worthy of worship and obedience, and belief in the thoughts and feelings of other people (e.g., Mrs. M's love) compare with respect to truth, as defined by PRS, and with respect to rationality, as defined by objective, truth-related reasons for belief?  



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3 Clearing the Way Plantinga recounts of his wife that "on first hearing she thought the thesis of God and Other Mindswhich might be summarized as the idea that belief in God and belief in other minds are in the same epistemological boatwas one of the sillier things she had heard." 1 The two beliefs did not strike her as at all comparable. Why not? The likeliest answer I can surmise is that the existence of other minds appears so evident and sure compared with the existence of God. Whereas sane people doubt the existence of God, surely sane people do not doubt the existence of other minds with thoughts, feelings, and desires other than their own. Here, it has been said, is a great and evident difference between belief in God and belief in other minds.2 The difference, though real, is not as sharp as it may appear to those sheltered from the vagaries of philosophical discussion. "In the philosophy of mind," observes John Searle, "obvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states and that these are not eliminable in favor of anything else, are routinely denied by many, perhaps most, of the advanced thinkers in the subject."3 Let this trend continue and spread, and a comparison between belief in God and belief in other minds might appear less quixotic. However, for the current populace, the difference remains: few have doubts about the existence of other minds like their own, with feelings, thoughts, desires, and the rest, whereas many have doubts about the existence of God. Therefore, the thesis of epistemic parity between these two beliefs, which I propose to examine, may strike potential readers as implausible from the start. For ready reference, let us label this difficulty the Subjective Disparity Problem. In first response, I note that had Plantinga cited not belief in other minds in general but some specific other-minds belief, his wife might have reacted differently. With billions of candidates for personhood and untold trillions of candidate thoughts, feelings, sensations, and the like, the evidence for the general belief may appear overwhelming; a single thought in a single mind on this or some other planet would suffice to establish the truth that mine is not the only mind, nor mine the only  



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thoughts. By contrast, the evidence for an individual other-minds belieffor instance, my belief in Mrs. M's love for her childappears less impressive. Yet that specific belief more closely resembles belief in the single, specific person God and accordingly furnishes a more apt term of comparison. 4 Thus, the narrower focus adopted in the last chapter will prevent us from loading the epistemic dice by the very way we pose the God-other minds comparison. In view of its importance, let me amplify this first response. The claim that belief in God belongs in the "same epistemological boat" with belief in other minds might be taken to mean: (1) conjunctively, that belief in God enjoys as much backing as the totality of any individual's or any society's other-minds beliefs, whether weak or strong, with regard to humans, extraterrestrials, dolphins, moles, etc.; (2) disjunctively, that belief in God stands on a par with the belief that at least one or the other of these innumerable beliefs (no matter which) is correct; or (3), specifically, that belief in God holds its own with this or that other-minds belief of an interesting, relevant variety (e.g., Mrs. M's love). The first reading greatly disadvantages belief in other minds, the second greatly advantages it, and the third puts both beliefs on fairly level ground. This last, most plausible reading of Plantinga's parity thesis is the one that will most interest me. It might be thought (indeed it has been suggested) that, to achieve a really close parallel with Mrs. M, I should focus on an equally specific belief concerning Godfor instance, the belief that God made this flower, that God answered my prayer, or the like. However, that would confuse the object of belief with the grounds of belief. The comparison I shall make is between belief in God's existence and belief in Mrs. M's love for her child, not between some single manifestation of God's existence and this single manifestation of Mrs. M's love. Her look happens to be the sole ground for that more general belief of minemy belief in her love for her child, whereas more varied grounds back belief in God. To assess the parity claim, I shall need to consider all the evidence on either side of the comparison. A second response to the Subjective Disparity Problem will prove much longer. As a start, I would note that the degree and extent of popular acceptance, at a given time and in a given ambiance, need not match the degree and extent of epistemic backing for a belief. Factors other than epistemic grounds are constantly at work, shaping our convictions without raising or lowering their truth-prospects. Thus, in David Hunt's view, "The classic arguments against the rationality of belief in other minds, for example, are sufficiently impressive by the usual standards of philosophical 'success' that they would have spawned little opposition if their consequences were not deemed intolerable."5 People want to believe in other minds. Similarly, in the opinion of Ignace Lepp, a well-qualified judge, "there are few atheists, especially among educated men, who are so for rigorously rational motives," and "the same is true of the majority of believers today."6 In illustration, Lepp cites a friend who, ''after having been a pious seminarian, was an atheist for several years; he then reconverted to Christianity. Neither the loss of his faith nor its rediscovery could be adequately accounted for by rational arguments, although my friend used them to justify both of his positions."7 Here, Lepp detects "the well known process of rationalization. The orientation of our civilization puts a premium on 'acting reasonably,' while in fact our emotions play a greater role in directing our actions than does our reason."8  



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Other cases that Lepp cites from his personal and professional experience bear still more directly on the Subjective Disparity Problem. For example: I recall a captain of the Red Army whom I met quite frequently in Paris after the last war. At first he seemed almost superstitiously scornful of anything that touched upon the question of religion. He presented seriously antireligious arguments which were so puerile that even the unbelievers in the group were embarrassed. A single serious conversation on the subject of religion cleared the air to the extent that he had nothing further to object to. Later he became a believer himself. But he represented a special product of Marxist-materialist education in Russia. 9 Atheistic education breeds unbelievers, religious education breeds believers.10 But no education of one person by others breeds disbelief in the existence of other persons with other minds. Here is a sharp and evident dichotomy of a kind that partially explains the subjective disparity between belief in God and belief in other minds. And there are others like it. Lepp notes that, although the faith of some believers bears undeniable signs of neurosis, in many cases atheism, too, is closely linked with the psychic conflicts of the individual.11 In one of several case studies that illustrate this point, Lepp writes of Evelyn, a woman brought up by puritanical parents: "Psychologically speaking, it was impossible for her to revolt against her father without at the same time revolting against God, and vice versa. In symbolically killing God, she also killed the tyrant-father, whom atavistic principles of filial piety did not permit her to confront directly."12 Again, no conflicts of this kind beget disbelief in other minds or even in particular antipathetic minds. How could they? For conflicts to occur with other persons, the others must be perceived as persons. Often, no recourse need be had to symbolism or hidden psychic conflicts. Offended or antagonized by believers, many react by becoming unbelievers. For the moment, let one illustration, from Susan Budd's Varieties of Unbelief, suffice: Another freethinker provides the only case of instantaneous conversion from Christianity to atheism, which took place at a famous revivalist meeting at Aldershot. The preacher was grandiose and the peroration on salvation highflown and emotional, and the young man suddenly saw himself as a sentimental fool. Alone, he refused to stand and be saved at the end, and immediately his friends drew away from him. To the preacher's questions, he replied that faith required reason as well as emotion; the revivalist denied that reason was necessary. He was rejected as an infidel, and the resultant social ostracism was so strong in his small local community that he was forced to leave Aldershot, and drifted into popular scepticism in London.13 Countless experiences play variations on this tale, but again no other-minds parallel seems possible. Offended by other people, we are not tempted to deny the existence of other people. Robots, seen as such, would not elicit our resentment. At the opposite extreme from such personal, small-scale influences, Richard Purtill cites a sentiment that might be termed the "cosmic bogey," since it takes a form like this: "Christianity arose when the universe seemed a smaller and cozier affair. Now that science has shown us the true age and size of the universe, we can no longer  



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accept the idea of a God who is personally concerned with our conduct or our consciences. If any creative power is the cause of the physical universe it has no interest in us." 14 As Purtill notes, this impression hardly deserves the name of an argument. And yet, "the emotional force of the size and age of the universe, once it is imaginatively grasped, is very great. To many people the universe, as science shows it to us, does not feel like the sort of universe which would be made by a personal god. And since many people think mainly with their emotions, there seems to them to be an argument." Belief in other minds is safe from any comparable corrosion. Indeed, it is our conception of human care and concern, so limited in time and space, that accounts for this impression of a cold, uncaring cosmos. How, we vaguely feel, could a person exercise a loving providence over such a boundless universe? To this introductory sampling of varied nonepistemic factors that disadvantage belief in God vis-à-vis belief in other minds, let me add one more illustration. Many have noted the effect on theistic belief of scientific and technical achievement, which has eroded the former sense of creaturely dependence. Thus, Man nowadays is his own master. He has created physical science and has replaced the pre-scientific rationality of his labor by the disciplined and sure rationality of the sciences. By means of technology he has won dominion over the world, control over health and illness, prosperity and poverty, natural calamities and epidemics. He is "the master and owner of nature" (Descartes). . . . These few words briefly describe the mentality of modern man living in our technological culture. It is said man no longer feels the need of God because he has learned to save himself. The physical sciences have made technology possible; the achievement of technology makes man independent; hence man no longer needs God.15 Obviously, no such attitude does or could extend to other minds. Science and technology are social, not individual, achievements. Hence, in this case the influence is again one-sided. And again, it is no more than thatan influence, a subtle psychological conditioning, not an argument. Add sufficient factors of this and other nonepistemic varieties, such as those just sampled, and the Subjective Disparity Problem would dwindle or disappear. It would become clear that belief in God and belief in other minds may differ less in epistemic merit than their present subjective, demographic disparity suggests. In explanation of this disparity, Plantinga and others in the Reformed tradition have stressed human finitude and our sinful condition. The preceding examples suggest more finitude than sinfulness, and for several reasons, that is the direction in which I shall now look. To impute sin on one side or the other would be invidious and would entail much debate about what counts as sinful. For example, as John Hare surmises, it may be that Russell saw God as the enemy of certain strong tendencies of his (for instance, his bent toward promiscuity),16 but did Russell view those tendencies as morally objectionable? Were they? I believe they were, but doubtless some would disagree, and I don't wish to debate such matters here. Furthermore, to assess the likely culpability of belief or unbelief would require a prior estimate of their respective epistemic merits. Further, it is the current state of belief that occasions the Subjective Disparity Problem, and one may wonder whether people today are more sinful than those  



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in former times. "It would be wrong," Albert Dondeyne contends, "to see in the present crisis of the faith nothing more than a deterioration and a lowering of the moral level of mankind." 17 If Dondeyne is right about this, then other, nonmoral factors account for the transition from times when belief in God was more comparable to belief in other minds, in its sureness and in its extent, than it has now become. For these several reasons, the factors I shall here consider share three characteristics: (1) they affect beliefs; (2) they do not ground, or provide evidence for, the beliefs they affect; (3) nonetheless, they entail no evident guilt on the part of those whose beliefs they thus influence, nonepistemically. Individually, these factors may work for or against belief in God, for or against belief in other minds. Collectively, I shall suggest, they operate far more powerfully for belief in other minds than for belief in God. Thus, they, in addition to epistemic factors, may account for the current disparity in the extent and strength of belief in God versus belief in other minds, and they, rather than epistemic factors, may account for the disparity between belief in God and specific other-minds beliefs such as my belief in Mrs. M's love for her child. Hence, the present work's inquiry, focused on this more restricted type of comparison, is not as far-fetched as it may appear. Given the number, diversity, and complexity of the factors in question, I cannot conclusively demonstrate such an imbalance of nonepistemic factors, favoring belief in other minds over belief in God. If, however, I can show that it is genuinely possible, indeed highly likely, I may assuage a serious misgiving in the minds of many readers. In the process, I shall provide a fuller account of nonepistemic factors affecting belief in God (not to mention belief in other minds) than I have encountered elsewhere. Cognitive Spectacles In the last chapter, I drew a distinction between grounds for belief and influences that affect but do not ground or epistemically support belief. Such influences are numerous and varied, and some are very powerful. Among the most powerful and pervasive are the kind I cited in illustrationthe kind I shall label "cognitive spectacles." The spectacles through which we view realitythe methods, the questions, the preoccupations, the foci of inquirybeget a corresponding conception of reality. Thus, in A. R. Peacocke's example, it is extraordinarily easy for the scientistsay, a molecular biologist, who employs methodologically reductionist concepts . . . in order to pursue his particular kind of researchto carry over that attitude into a more general philosophical position. Then the procedure of analyzing a biological organism, or part of it, by means of physical and/or chemical techniques becomes a philosophical belief that a biological organism is "nothing but" a physicochemical system.18 Paul Davies's illustration strikingly attests to the coercive power of such methodological spectacles: "Because of its indispensable role in science, many scientistsespecially physicistsinvest the ultimate reality of the physical world in mathematics. A colleague of mine once remarked that in his opinion the world was nothing  



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but bits and pieces of mathematics." 19 Though easy and natural, such transitions from practice to theory are typically neither reflective nor logical. Procedural, methodological limits do not limit reality. Influences of this kind merit special attention for several reasons. First, they are less readily recognized for what they are. If, in defense of his view that the world is green, a person replies, "Green is my favorite color," we know what to make of that reply. The person's preference may influence his belief, but the preference does not ground or epistemically support the belief. If, however, both we and those whom we interrogate view reality through green spectacles and construct our arguments from what we see, it may be much more difficult to detect how much our belief derives from reality and how much from our spectacles. Second, cognitive spectacles importantly affect belief in God and belief in other minds. With respect to the latter, behaviorism comes immediately to mind. Rejecting the subjectivism of introspective psychology, behaviorists have focused on overt behavior. Focusing on overt behavior, they have tended to define psychological reality behaviorally.20 At the extreme, some behaviorists "understand the position as implying that all so-called mental states are simply behavior and are therefore overt and publicly observable. Seemingly private events, such as talking silently to oneself, are reinterpreted as verbal behavior which it may be difficult but not, in principle, impossible for others to observe (for example, via laryngeal movements)."21 With the mental thus reductively conceived, the other-minds problem tends to disappear. The mental need not somehow be inferred from the behavioral, for the mental is behavioral.22 Third, cognitive spectacles affect belief in God still more than they affect belief in other minds. As noted, this is important for our inquiry. For it may appear to numerous readers that if so many people are unsure about the existence of God whereas so few are unsure about the existence of other minds, the explanation must lie in the solidity of the grounds for each belief. However, there are other possible explanations, including this present onecognitive spectacles. Relatively few people wear behaviorist spectacles, but a great many people, especially nowadays, wear cognitive spectacles that negatively affect belief in God. We need not go back to Augustine, long imprisoned by the impression that only the corporeal is real.23 In our day, William Abraham intimates a similar influence (perhaps the most potent of all nonepistemic factors blocking belief in God): By the mid-teen years I had become an atheist. Looking back, it would be easy to see this as a normal bout of intellectual measles that would pass with time. This was not at all the case. The issue for me was quite simple: If God was invisible, then God did not exist. Formally speaking, the problem was conceptual: Only those things that were available to the senses were real. God was not available to the senses; hence God was not real.24 Abraham speaks of "the senses." But others' thoughts and feelings are not available to the senses; so why did Abraham cease to believe in God but not cease to believe in other minds? Why did he not even question their existence? One answer, I think, is obvious. He had experienceconstant, intimate, personal experienceof human thoughts and feelings (namely his own), but he had no experience of divine thoughts or feelings. And what lay beyond his experience seemed unreal.  



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The mysterious entities of subatomic physics, their mass interchangeable with energy, might seem similarly unreal were it not for our conviction that they constantly impinge upon our senses. Reflection on their extreme dissimilarity from the world as we perceive it might reveal the possibility of realities very different from the world as we perceive it. However, for most of us such reflection is fleeting, rare, and sketchy; so the difficulty remains. The world of senseof colors, shapes, sounds, tastes, feels, and smellstends to confine our conception of the real. For such are the spectacles we wear all day long. As for those who wear subatomic spectacles much of the time, they may experience a narrowing rather than a broadening, liberating effect. Neutrons, protons, quarkssuch are the ultimate realities; indeed, for many, in final analysis such are the only realities. Subtly yet powerfully, modern scientific spectacles have played a major role in begetting modern atheism. How revealing, for example, are Einstein's words: "The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of eventsthat is, if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously." 25 But why should he take causality so "seriously"that is, in the sense of universal determinismand thereby exclude the God of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as traditionally conceived? Why did he? At least in part because such are the spectaclesthe causal spectacleshe constantly wore. For prequantum physicists and the milieu they dominated, universal determinism could appear a quasi law of physics. Subtle and powerful, the effect of modern science is also pervasive. As Mark Nelson notes, according to a current form of moral relativism "since there is no place in the world as described by science for objective values, moral judgments can't sensibly involve, or be about, such things. Consequently, moral judgments or value judgments are best understood as expressing the customs, ideals, or expectations of a particular group or person."26 It follows that there can be no place for an objective God. For no trait more essentially defines God than perfect goodness, and goodness, in this view, is purely subjective. However, to gauge the full impact of modern science on theistic belief, it is necessary to distinguish a second, related category of nonepistemic influences. Cognitive Blinders To the person who views the world through deterministic spectacles, as did Einstein, the world looks deterministic. To the person who views the world through mathematical spectacles, as did Galileo, Newton, and company, the world looks mathematical. A corresponding doctrinefor instance, the primary-secondary distinctionmay easily result, limiting reality to what is seen through such spectacles. Once, however, the world is seen as mathematical or as deterministic, it may readily appear that the only spectacles through which it is possible to view reality are mathematical or deterministic spectacles. Therewith, the cognitive spectacles become cognitive blinders, imposing limits on what can count as real.27 Well-known examples illustrate and nuance this distinction between cognitive spectacles and cognitive blinders. They also suggest the relevance of such blinders for the Subjective Disparity Problem.  



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Science, in particular, has had this further effect and begotten cognitive blinders, as well as cognitive spectacles. 28 God clearly falls outside the realm of science, whereas other minds do not. (Many scientists aspire thoroughly to explain, one day, the conscious contents of the mind.) It should occasion slight surprise, therefore, that in our day the existence of God has come to seem more doubtful than it did previously, and more doubtful than the existence of other minds. In a scientific culture, it is not only scientists who wear scientific spectacles and experience the consequences. And God cannot be seen through those spectacles. A remedy might be to remove the spectacles now and then and to take a wider look around. However, for many, these spectacles have become firmly fixed and have become blinders. "The characteristic theses of positivism," Nicola Abbagnano has observed, "are that science is the only valid knowledge and facts the only possible objects of knowledge. . . . Positivism, consequently, denies the existence or intelligibility of forces or substances that go beyond facts and the laws ascertained by science."29 To cite one noted instance, logical positivists' blinkers took a semantic form: "for a sentence to have 'cognitive,' 'factual,' 'descriptive,' or 'literal' meaning (for example, 'The sun is 93 million miles from the earth') it was held that it must express a statement that could, at least in principle, be shown to be true or false, or to some degree probable, by reference to empirical observations."30 Before being abandoned, this "Verifiability Principle" went through numerous revisions and refinements, all of them subject to the same guiding intention: However the principle was formulated, the result would have to be that science made good sense whereas metaphysics did not. The scientific viewpoint had to be the exclusive viewpoint. Whatever lay beyond its purviewincluding Godwas meaningless. ("Logic,'' wrote Rudolf Carnap, "is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.")31 The influence here starkly revealed subtly suffuses our culture. Of his communist past, Lepp reports, "I do not recall ever being disturbed by the mystery of the ultimate origin of things. Sometimes my students asked me such questions; I satisfied them perfectly by answering that science had not yet solved these problems, but that it would certainly do so one day; and this answer also satisfied me."32 Of her agnostic youth, Elizabeth Rhodes, a scientist, recounts, "I did not know what to believe about the [New Testament] miracles but concluded that they could not be scientifically tested and hence could not have occurred."33 At the age of fifteen, Bertrand Russell wrote, "Now in finding reasons for believing in God I shall only take account of scientific arguments."34 The outcome was what one might expect, for, as Russell later observed, "God and immortality, the central dogmas of the Christian religion, find no support in science."35 Theists, impressed by the order in the universe, the anthropic principle, or the like, might contest the absoluteness of this saying but not its basic thrust. The beliefs Russell cites are not scientific beliefs. For him, however, they thereby stood condemned. The scientific and the real are convertible. Many in our day wear similar, scientific blinders.36 Sometimes implicit, as for Lepp, Rhodes, and Russell in their youth, scientistic blinders can also become quite explicit. "The scientist," A. J. Carlson declares, "tries to rid himself of all faiths and beliefs. He either knows or he does not know. If he knows there is no room for faith or belief. If he does not know he has no right to  



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faith or belief." 37 Mere rational belief concerning any subject cannot be countenanced. On reflection it is clear that the grounds for such an assertion are no more scientific than are those that back the Verifiability Principleindeed that grounds, or evidence, have little to do with such a declaration. Some cognitive blinders, it is true, are at least partly based on evidence. Some, perhaps, have sufficient backing so that they should not be termed "blinders." But often one can sense other factors at work. The firmest limits are those imposed by the will. Propensities and Preferences Stressing the role of our "willing nature" in forming beliefs, William James explained, "When I say 'willing nature,' I do not mean only such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we cannot now escape fromI mean all such factors of belief as fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set."38 Antitheistic critics have made much of such factors to account for belief in God; yet, as James noted, the critics should not suppose that their own disbelief derives solely from evidence or reason. Emotive, volitional influences work both ways. Augustine aspired to union with "beauty ever ancient, ever new''; Marx declared, "I hate all gods." Kierkegaard exalted the leap of faith to an absolute Thou, whereas Dietrich Kerler asserted, "Even if it could be proved by mathematics that God exists, I do not want him to exist, because he would set limits to my greatness."39 Now, how powerfully do such emotive influences operate one way and the otherfor or against belief in God? Lepp cites Voltaire, Nietzsche, Sartre, and others as "authors whose atheism is more an expression of hatred than reason,"40 but he does not generalize. And even if all unbelief in God were a matter more of the heart than of the head, that would not settle the comparative issue that concerns us. How strong is the pull toward unbelief compared with that toward belief? How strong, cumulatively, is the pull toward and away from belief in God, compared with that toward and away from belief in other minds? The evidence I shall cite suggests that factors of the heart work more powerfully for than against belief in God, that overall they favor belief in other minds still more strongly than they favor belief in God, and that this difference provides further backing for the response to the Subjective Disparity Problem being developed here: nonepistemic factors, rather than epistemic, may primarily explain the imbalance between contemporary belief in God and other-minds beliefs such as my belief in Mrs. M's love. Let it be clear from the start how the evidence I shall cite should be taken. Consider, for instance, this item: "Voltaire's version of Sophocles's Oedipus, which made him the rival of Corneille and Racine in the eyes of a public parched for good plays, pointedly depicts God as a kind of metaphysical villain, a cruel, despotic, and implacable being."41 The accuracy of this depiction of God does not concern us here; its existence does. For anyone who so perceives God is not likely to believe in God. His heart would not be in it. On the other, theistic side, consider these words of John Reid: "Unbelief, this above all, is man's undoing, his ultimate ruin. No worse disaster can befall man than for him to be without faith through his own guilty choice.  



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The refusal to acknowledge and adore the living God is the downfall of men, individually and collectively." 42 Atheistic humanists may deplore such sentiments, but they do not deny the sentiments' existence. And their existence is what interests us, not their accuracy. For, though it is not entirely evident how and to what extent preferences foster beliefs43 (there may be such a thing as wishful thinking, but is there such a thing as wishful believing?), people who think and feel as Reid does are more likely to believe in God, whereas people who harbor the contrary sentiments of a Voltaire are less likely to believe in God. To paraphrase James: If your heart does not want to believe in Godor wants not to believe in Godyour head will assuredly never make you believe in God. Let it also be clear that in listing affective factors as nonepistemic, I do not mean to suggest that they are automatically antiepistemic. As Caroline Davis brings out, such factors, though not themselves grounds (i.e., truthrelated evidence) for belief, may help as well as hinder veridical belief: The fact (if it is one) that people have unconscious needs and desires for a protective and punishing parentfigure, "meaning" to life, and a "face" to the universe is often stated as if it were proof that religious experiences are nothing but wishful thinking. But needs and desires usually aid perception, helping us to identify and respond to those things which will satisfy us and to avoid things which are dangerous or unpleasant. A hungry person is more likely to notice a source of food, a person afraid of wild animals more likely to notice a rustling in the underbrush. Of course, like any other set, needs and desires can distort perception in certain circumstances; but again, the onus is on the sceptic to show that in the religious case the influence is a distorting one.44 As Davis's examples attest, the influences of our "willing nature" are many and varied. To organize discussion and permit perspicuous assessment, I shall gather them under some major headingsfirst for belief in God, then against belief in God. Only then will I consider to what extent the same general factors tell for or against belief in other minds and compare the results for both beliefs.45 In the first listing, of propensities and preferences favoring belief in God, we need not directly consider theories such as those of Feuerbach, Freud, and Marx, according to which human beings have tended to project their own traits and ideals onto religious objects. Analogy with humans is an evident fact of theistic and especially polytheistic belief. Motives of the kinds these theories allege are also evident. Some truth can be recognized, for example, in Freud's assertion that the gods have had a threefold task: "they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them."46 Doubtless these are among the attractions of theistic belief. However, there are others. Multiple, interrelated influences affectively foster such belief. For example, Fear According to Russell, religion is based primarily on fear. "It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thingfear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death."47  



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People do, indeed, experience such fears, and belief in God does respond to them. Therefore it is attractive. "The Lord is my rock, my fortress," the psalmist sings (Ps 18:2). "You alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety" (Ps 4:8). Hope With God there is hope; without God there is little hope. "Brief and powerless is man's life;" writes Russell, "on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day." 48 Theistic religions vary in the specifics of their hope, but the words of Paul bespeak a common theme: "No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Cor 2:9). Desire "As a deer longs for flowing streams," the Psalmist chants, "so my soul longs for you, 0 God" (Ps 42:1). "There is nothing on earth that I desire other than you" (Ps 73:25). In like vein, Ignatius of Antioch confesses, ''My love of this world has been crucified, and there is no yearning in me for any earthly thing. Rather within me is the living water which says deep inside me: 'Come to the Father.'"49 Though the desire of most believers may not attain this pitch, Augustine spoke for many when he declared: "Our hearts were made for you, 0 God, and they shall not rest until they rest at last in you."50 Consolation In this regard, William Luijpen remarks: "Earthly wretchedness means something different when it is borne in union with God instead of being undergone without Him by man alonejust as illness does not have the same meaning for the solitary sufferer and the one who has to bear it in union with a loving and beloved fellow-man."51 In expressive illustration, an anonymous believer testifies, "That he is mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste."52 Morality "One is often told," wrote Russell, "that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous."53 He did not believe it, but many have. And many have gone farther: without God, "anything goes"; without God there is no right or wrong, or moral obligation. And this eclipse of the whole moral order, they have felt, would be a tragic loss. Merit and Demerit Related yet distinct is the motive John Mackie mentions: "In a religious context credulity is often thought to be meritorious, while doubt or critical caution is felt to be sinful. Consequently, once even a modicum of belief arises in a group of people in communication with one another, it tends to reinforce itself and so develop into total conviction."54 Meaning "In addition," writes John Shepherd, "we may mention . . . the all-embracing issue of the meaning of life. As was emphasised earlier, life may be full of meaning quite apart from religion. It has to be admitted, however, that without religion life's meaningfulness stands against a backdrop of cosmic meaninglessness."55 It must also be recognized that some people do not draw these nice distinctions. For them, the absence of God "would be chaos."56 "On the day I first believed," recounts Dag Hammarskjöld, "for the first time the world made sense and life had meaning."57 Guidance

This value, like some of the preceding, is not implied by the minimal conception of God stated at the start of this study, but the attractiveness of belief in  



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God cannot be fully captured without recognizing the far richer conceptions enshrined in specific religious traditions. For the Jew, the Law, with its detailed prescriptions, is God's great gift. For the Christian, Jesus is "the way, the truth, and the life." For the Muslim, "Guide" is one of the sacred ninety-nine names, and the Koran often speaks of God in that capacity. To assess realistically the affective pull of belief in God for actual human beings immersed in varied cultures, one would have to invoke the full range of musical, artistic, liturgical, personal, social, mystical, doctrinal, and other features historically associated with belief in God (Gregorian chant, pilgrimage, Chartres, Hanukkah, King James prose, the Verse of Light, Christmas, patron saints, incense, Hajj, etc.). Of course, to appraise realistically the affective pull of unbelief, one would have to proceed in like fashion, citing unattractive features associated with belief in God (Inquisition, religious wars, mawkish art, fables, superstitious practices, hypocrisy in high places, etc.) and attractive features associated with unbelief (visions of a Marxist Utopia, the wit of a Russell or Voltaire, acceptance in one's academic milieu, etc.). Instead I shall now turn to a second general listing like the first, suggesting how love, hate, fear, desire, and the like stimulate disbelief in God as well as belief. For example, Fear of Error "Believe truth! Shun error!" These injunctions, notes James, "are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by colouring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance." 58 William Clifford, as James notes, exhorts us to the latter course. Of another, similarly motivated atheist, Cora Diamond writes: "In what I have Just called Russell's ontological parsimony, a refusal to accept the existence of entities which one can do without is justified on the ground that it is safer; you are diminishing the risk of error."59 Therefore, Clifford, Russell, and others have felt that God is a hypothesis they not only can but should do without. Pleasure of Doubt Some crave certainty; others (perhaps in reaction)60 delight in doubt. Holbach called Bayle that celebrated man "who teaches so well how to doubt."61 Hume noted with approval a maxim of the ancient Greek poet Epicharmus: "Keep sober and remember to be skeptical."62 Voltaire wrote of Montaigne: "He always (and I love that!) he always knows how to doubt."63 Holbach, Hume, Voltairethese willing doubters all found in God (as distinct from a deistic deity) a tempting object for their doubts. Creedal Taboos Mackie's remark about social pressure can be reversed. In an antireligious ambiancein the Enlightenment circles of Holbach, Diderot, Voltaire, and the like; in many contemporary academic settings; in modern secular or officially atheistic societiesunbelief is often regarded as meritorious whereas belief is viewed as regrettable, even reprehensible "credulity" (Mackie's term). And indirect censorship complements the direct. Roundabout the central issue of God's existence, inimical thinking concerning the spiritual, the religious, the transcendent blocks all approaches to theistic faith. Thirst for Unity, Simplicity Ockham's dictum is often cited and often applied: "Beings should not be multiplied without necessity." But one hears nothing of the complementary, equally valid principle: "Beings should not be eliminated without  



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necessity." Why is that? Russell affords a clue when he reflects, "I should have found intellectual satisfaction in becoming a materialist, but on grounds almost identical with those of Descartes . . . I came to the conclusion that consciousness is an undeniable datum, and therefore pure materialism is impossible." 64 It would have been so intellectually satisfying had there been only one kind of being!65 Of his and Russell's milieu James observed, "A certain abstract monism, a certain emotional response to the character of oneness, as if it were a feature of the world not coordinate with manyness, but vastly more excellent and eminent, is so prevalent in educated circles that we might almost call it a part of philosophical common sense."66 It appears, for example, in Carnap's thesis "that all empirical statements can be expressed in a single language, all states of affairs are of one kind and are known by the same method."67 Thus, "If the physical language, on the grounds of its universality, were adopted as the system language of science, all science would become physics. Metaphysics would be discarded as meaningless.''68 How beautiful the scheme, how elegant its simplicitywith God excluded!69 Threat to Science James notes a related methodological concern: "Why do so few 'scientists' even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called? Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me, that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity of Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot carry on their pursuits."70 To some, God looks still more threatening than telepathy. How can scientists proceed if an omnipotent agent can always intervene, at any moment, unpredictably? What becomes of their motivation to explain phenomena if it is always possible that the phenomena in question have no natural explanation? Such misgivings may be unfounded (see chapter 5), but apparently they are common and, implicating the central value of our scientific culture, are correspondingly strong. Passion for Precision On the general climate at Cambridge in his day, John Maynard Keynes remarked: "'What exactly do you mean?' was the phrase most frequently on our lips. If it appeared under cross-examination that you did not mean exactly anything, you lay under a strong suspicion of meaning nothing whatever."71 Even of such a statement as "There are a number of people in this room," Russell observed, "When you come to try and define what this room is, and what it is for a person to be in a room, and how you are going to distinguish one person from another, and so forth, you find that what you have said is most fearfully vague and that you really do not know what you meant."72 If it is thus in the green wood, what in the dry? One can imagine the fate of theological discourse in such an ambiancean ambiance subject to the norm: "It seems clear that what we MEAN must always be 'sharp.' Our expression of what we mean can in its turn only be right or wrong. . . . There does not seem to be any other possibility."73 Drive for Autonomy Regarding the drama of modern atheist humanism, Henri De Lubac observes, "Man is getting rid of God in order to regain possession of the human greatness which, it seems to him, is being unwarrantably withheld by another."74 In the abstract, it may appear difficult to understand how the existence of a supreme, transcendent being would in any way limit human realization, but, as I shall note later on, atheists have not reacted merely to an abstract conception. Rus 



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sell, for example, regarded the whole idea of God as a "conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms" and "quite unworthy of free men." 75 Freedomthere, it is felt, is the crucial issue. "We can understand nothing about the psychology of modern atheism," comments Lepp, "if we forget that its origin lies in man's will, which has achieved a high degree of awareness of his individuality, to break the chains that appear to bind his liberty and his dignity." Thus Marx, for example, "saw in Prometheus a symbol of man responsible for his own creation and defying the gods who would take this responsibility away from him. 'I would much rather be bound to this rock,' he exclaimed, 'than be the docile valet of Zeus the Father.'''76 Each individual's duty, proclaims Sartre, "is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person."77 There can be no "Big Boss."78 Let this double listing, for and against, suffice. It is clear that factors such as these affect belief in God, and that they therefore satisfy the first of the three criteria guiding this review of influences. It is less clear that they satisfy the second criterion, that they be epistemically neutral. Take the final item. Merleau-Ponty, notes Luijpen, "asks himself whether the idea of God as a Necessary Being does not unavoidably imply and include the idea of an Emperor of the World. He asks himself whether Christians would still call God the Maker of the world if they did not acknowledge God as this Emperor."79 The suggested implication may be mistaken, but if Merleau-Ponty's surmise were correct, wouldn't his rejection of God be epistemically well grounded? Yes, in the sense that he would have good reason to want God not to exist, but not to suppose that God does not exist. This distinction, stressed at the start, between the accuracy of a conception, which may be debatable, and its affective tug, which may be evident, applies to other items in the two lists. It also connects strongly with the third trait claimed for these varied factors, as for other factors I have mentioned: not only do they affect belief, not only do they do so nonepistemically, but they entail no evident guilt on the part of those whose beliefs they influence. Think again of the final item. To believers, who view God as covenant partner, loving father, the Compassionate and Merciful, or the Great Spirit, insistence on human autonomy may smack of satanic pride, but a Sartre or a Merleau-Ponty does not rebel against such a God. They and many like them rebel against an emperor, a "big boss," whose every command must be obeyed. I do not claim that their disbelief is morally blameless. I am just suggesting that their antipathy to such an authority figure and the effect of this antipathy on their belief do not evidently entail any guilt on their part. And the like holds for other items I have cited. My sampling of affective factors is not systematic or exhaustive, and an assessment of their respective weights cannot be scientific. However, an attempt at overall comparative appraisal elicits two impressions: first, it is not immediately evident which factorsthose that affectively favor belief in God or those that affectively favor disbelief in Godexert a greater influence;80 second, nonetheless, the factors favoring belief look more powerful overall than those favoring disbelief. Granted, the typical person may not experience the psalmist's yearning for God or Aquinas's thirst for a final explanation of the universe. Indeed, in a secular society, many give no thought to God. Neither, however, does the typical person experience Sartrian rancor against God, Russellian passion for precision, or protective concern for the integrity of  



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science. And on the whole, the second list of factors, favoring disbelief, looks more parochial, more restricted to a special population, than does the first, favoring belief. However, I need not argue the point, for if my impression is mistaken and the negative factors operate as powerfully as the positive, the overall conclusion of this section, toward which I am working, is thereby strengthened: factors such as those James cites favor belief in other minds more strongly than they favor belief in God. The discrepancy, in fact, seems notable. On one hand, a world without other people, in which one's parents, children, spouses, friends, and acquaintances were all mindless robots, would appear at least as dreadful to most people as would a world without God. 81 On the other hand, the strong counterinfluences that work against belief in God have little effect on belief in other minds. We have seen one illustration: To simplify reality, Russell would have liked to dispense with conscious thought as well as with God, but was prevented from doing so by his own conscious thoughts, which complexified reality whether or not any minds other than his own existed. The remaining items on the list of opposing influences suggest a similar imbalance. Talk of conscious thoughts strikes many as regrettably imprecise, but talk of God is, of necessity, much less precise. The existence of others puts restrictions on my freedom but not restrictions of the kind, degree, and extent that elicit Sartrian reactions. Error seems less fearsome when it concerns other minds, rather than God, and when it therefore entails that no other people would know or judge the error if it occurred. Doubt looks less delightful when not directed at the opinions of other people (e.g., theistic apologists or popes). Finally, science has nothing to fear from the intervention of other natural agents like ourselves; indeed, science would not exist unless there were others like ourselves. Item by negative item, the balance tips more strongly against belief in God than against belief in other minds; hence overall the weight of affective factors, pro and con, inclines more toward belief in other minds than toward belief in God. What, though, of more specific other-minds beliefsfor example, "This woman loves her child" (our paradigm from chapter 2) or "That man is angry"? People do not ordinarily desire that such beliefs be true, argues Richard Grigg, whereas often, perhaps usually, people want to believe in God.82 True, the same contrast would not hold for some other-minds beliefs and some theistic beliefsfor example, for ''My mother loves me" on the one hand, and "God is angry with me," on the other. However, urges Grigg, what needs to be kept in view here is the larger context of the belief. Why might I, supposing that I am a Christian theist, come to believe that God is angry with me? Probably because I have not fulfilled his will for me as that will has been revealed through his prophets, through the Christ, etc. Thus, while I will not want to believe "God is angry with me" in isolation, I probably will want to believe the larger context in which it arises and makes sense; I will find it comforting to believe that there is a God who provides a purpose for human life, a purpose that is revealed through commandments which, alas, I must obey on pain of inciting that God to anger.83 To this, one might of course retort that it is comforting to know that other people exist, with thoughts and feelings, even if their feeling at the moment is anger toward  



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me or their thoughts are not admiring. So Grigg carries his case one step further: "In order for us to desire to hold a belief, there must be room for doubt about that belief; desire, epistemic or otherwise, implies lack of immediate possession. There is, of course, just such room for doubt where belief in God is concerned" 84but not with regard to the existence of minds other than our own. Such a belief is "presupposed in our very sense of what it means to exist as human beings at all."85 This amounts to citing the fact with which we startedthe contemporary subjective, demographic disparity between belief in God and belief in other mindsand using it as an argument against even a partial Jamesian explanation of the disparity. Once God figured in "our very sense of what it means to exist as human beings." For many, he no longer does. What happened? History An adequate appraisal of the nonepistemic factors affecting theistic belief cannot abstract from personal and social history. Consider, for example, the case of JeanPaul Sartre. "I was led to disbelief," he recounts, "not by the conflict of dogmas, but by my grandparents' indifference."86 This etiology differs from any so far cited; yet it, too, is nonepistemic, inculpable, powerful, and of an extremely common variety. Behind it, as Sartre notes, lies something larger than his familial milieu: "My family had been affected by the slow movement of dechristianization that started among the Voltairian upper bourgeoisie and took a century to spread to all levels of society."87 His individual disbelief, that is, can be tracedat least in large part88to the Enlightenment. And that historical development, in turn, can be traced to largely nonepistemic influences.89 Looking deeply into the roots of the Enlightenment assault on God and revealed religion, Peter Gay cites "above all a triumphant scientific method."90 Thus, "Goethe, who witnessed the deist phase of German thought, rightly suggested that in an atmosphere saturated with Newtonian science and the cult of common sense, deism was a perfectly sensible religion to adopt."91 For neither Goethe nor Gay does this mean that the nonexistence of God logically follows from, or is epistemically backed by, this new atmosphere or this new cult. "Sensible" here means "natural." Such were the spectacles then being worn. Equally important, Voltaire and his companions in arms were engaged in an ideological battle with Christianity that knew no quarter (on either side). To concede that God might exist even if the Christian God did not, or that the Christian conception of God was not uniformly and consistently objectionable, might have better served the interests of truth but not of polemic. Wars are not won through negotiation. Rhetorical weapons are dulled by fine distinctions. Gay writes of a "fanciful and shocking fable" told by Diderot that aptly suggests this no-holds-barred mentality:

 

A misanthrope, having retired to a cave to meditate vengeance on mankind, emerged to shout the word "God, God!" and from that day on, once that "abominable name" had been pronounced, men began "to argue, to hate each



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other, and to cut one another's throats." Of all the vicious institutions perpetuating that abominable name, Christianity was surely the worst. 92 Such a portrayal of theism and Christianity is highly selective, to be sure. And to argue from some believers' hatred and intolerance to the nonexistence of a loving God looks quite hopeless. One might as validly infer the nonexistence of other minds from the sadistic, inhuman practice of many believers in other mindspractice often affected by their belief that others have minds. However, it appears that such was indeed the principal motivation driving the Enlightenment's rejection of God: "Ecrasez 1'infame!" (Crush the wretched thing!) and similar motivation continues to our day.93 Theists themselves may have played an important though unwitting part in the rise of unbelief, not only through their lives but also through their doctrines and defenses. In the late seventeenth century, John Edwards opined that "men doubt of the very existence of God, because so irrational and absurd things are attributed to him. They are loth to think there is such a One, or they wish there were not."94 Reading Edwards's own invective against unbelievers (labeled "irrational and brutish," "willful and sottish") and that of other theistic apologists, one can surmise a further factor contributing to unbeliefwhat J. M. Robertson termed "that perfect hatred which casteth out at once candour and courtesy."95 The badness of some theistic arguments could also prove counterproductive (e.g., ''if there be not a God, how comes it to pass, that the Sea which is agreed to be bigger and higher than the Land, should contrary to the Nature of Water . . . be restrained by a low sandy shore from overflowing the Earth . . .? ").96 Thus, theistic apologists have often been reproached with using God as a stopgap to explain the hitherto inexplicable, thereby contributing to what Haeckel caustically termed the "homelessness of God." "With each new scientific explanation," notes Hans Küng, "God then becomes more dispensable and in the end dies the death of a thousand qualifications."97 Michael Buckley has traced a different, complementary etiology. Contemporary disbelief in God, he suggests, stems largely from the Enlightenment rejection of the God proposed and proved in ghostly abstraction from Scripture, community, and religious experience by Christian apologists such as Lessius, Mersenne, Descartes, Newton, Halley, Malebranche, and Clarke. "The origin of atheism in the intellectual culture of the West lies thus with the self-alienation of religion itself."98 Other historical explanations might be added,99 but let us turn to belief in other minds and note possible parallels. Corresponding to the first reason cited for disbelief in God ("a triumphant scientific method") is the reason Searle cites for disbelief in other minds:

 

There is a persistent objectifying tendency in contemporary philosophy, science, and intellectual life generally. We have the conviction that if something is real, it must be equally accessible to all competent observers. Since the seventeenth century, educated people in the West have come to accept an absolutely basic metaphysical presupposition: Reality is objective. This assumption has proved useful to us in many ways, but it is obviously false, as a moment's reflection on one's own subjective states reveals.100



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The tendency to deny these subjective states, like the Enlightenment tendency to deny God, can also be traced to a strong antipathy: "We have a terror of falling into Cartesian dualism. The bankruptcy of the Cartesian tradition, and the absurdity of supposing that there are two kinds of substances or properties in the world, 'mental' and 'physical,' is so threatening to us and has such a sordid history that we are reluctant to concede anything that might smack of Cartesianism." 101 Searle suggests that, driven by fear, we are also drawn by desire: "Because of our conception of the history of the growth of knowledge we have come to suffer from what Austin called the' ivresse des grands profondeurs.' It does not seem enough somehow to state humble and obvious truths about the mindwe want something deeper. We want a theoretical discovery."102 In Russell's words, "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."103 As theists may have contributed to disbelief in God by having recourse to a "God of the gaps," so theorists may have abetted disbelief in other minds, with conscious contents, by their analogous recourse to mentalistic explanations. "When we do philosophy," Wittgenstein remarked, "we should like to hypostatize feelings where there are none. They serve to explain our thoughts to us."104 Thus, to explain memory, Russell hypostatized feelings differentiating memory images from imagination images, other feelings differentiating memory from other types of belief, and still other feelings dating the remembered events.105 To explain psychological verbs''feel," "remember," "desire," "like," "will," "believe," "love," etc.G. E. Moore hypostatized a mental act, or act of consciousness, for each.106 To explain words' meanings, James hypostatized "an affection of consciousness" correlative to each. What else could meanings be?107 A parallel of sorts can also be found for Buckley's account, since the mental, too, has often been conceived in ghostly abstraction, making it a target for elimination. Listen, for instance, to Russell: We must distinguish between believing and what is believed. I may believe that Columbus crossed the Atlantic, that all Cretans are liars, that two and two are four, or that nine times six is fifty-six; in all these cases the believing is just the same, and only the contents believed are different. I may remember my breakfast this morning, my lecture last week, or my first sight of New York. In all these cases the feeling of memory-belief is just the same, and only what is remembered differs. Exactly similar remarks apply to expectations. Bare assent, memory and expectation are forms of belief; all three are different from what is believed, and each has a constant character which is independent of what is believed.108 So conceived, "bare assent, memory and expectation" are bare indeed: no behavioral frills contaminate their mental purity; no mental variations infect their essential sameness. From this extreme, the pendulum may easily swing to the other. The absence of any such constant feeling, on the one hand, and the dispositional aspect of belief, on the other, invite a dialectical negation of any conscious aspect of belief. Such a reaction, multiplied for many accounts like Russell's and for other mental  



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concepts besides belief, memory, and expectation, can plausibly be seen as one historical factor contributing to behaviorism. Let these indications suffice, on one side and the other. 109 Now, which historical influences are strongerthose inclining to disbelief in God or those inclining to disbelief in others' conscious minds (along with one's own)? On reflection, I believe the answer is clear. Think again of Sartre and his personal history. He was led to disbelief, he says, by his grandparents' indifference. For disbelief in God, such social conditioning is common, but for disbelief in other minds, no similar etiology is conceivable. One cannot realistically imagine Sartre reporting (or thinking to himself), "My grandparents' indifference to the existence of other minds led to my disbelief in other mindsincluding my grandparents' minds and their indifference." A similar contrast holds for another kind of case, more akin, on the personal level, to the Enlightenment rejection of God. Often, as for Evelyn, who turned against God in turning against her puritanical father, disbelief arises in reaction to the conduct of other people. Lepp narrates further instances. Papal moves against the theologians and worker-priests whom a young Frenchman admired occasioned disillusionment that led to the young man's unbelief.110 Mother Superior's systematic opening of a pious girl's correspondence provoked a total rejection of the nun and all she stood for.111 Jilted by a distinguished man she found inspiring, a young woman was precipitated into unbelief and the loss of all ideals. How could there be anything great or sacred in the world, if even a man of this distinction was really no more than a cad?112 Imagine, now, this other-minds version: "How can there be cads in the world, or any other thinking creatures, if this man is such a cad?" Manifestly, no such inference is likely. It would be equally incoherent to wonder, "How can other minds besides my own exist if the Pope is so misguided or Mother Superior is so suspicious and insensitive?" Belief in God may be affected in this mannerby other people's cruelty, self-righteousness, inconsiderateness, complacency, and the likebut not belief in other minds. That is immune from any such influence. It is similarly impossible to suppose any other-minds equivalent of the Enlightenment motivation for denying God. In deprecation of religion, Holbach might exclaim, A thousand times, on every part of one globe, there have been fanatics drunk with the desire to slit each other's throats, to light the stakes, to commit the greatest crimes without scruple and for duty's sake, to make human blood flow. Why? To maintain or propagate the impertinent conjectures of a few fanatics, or to accredit the deceits of a few imposters about a Being which exists only in their imagination and which makes itself known only by the ravages, disputes and follies that it has brought about on the earth.113 So, down with religion, and down with religion's God! Now, how might a parallel declamation run, leading to disbelief in other minds? To achieve consistency between its starting point and its terminus, it would have to omit all reference to fanatics, desire, scruples, duty, conjectures, deceits, impostors, imagination, follies, and the restwhich is to say, it could not even get started. Again, belief in God may be affected this way but not belief in other minds.  



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This difference between belief in God and belief in other minds, together with other disparities already cited, has a multiplier effect. Let something be generally accepted, and few will doubt it. Let it be doubted, and many will doubt it. Thus, before the rise of mathematical science, few doubted the reality of color as perceived. After the rise of mathematical science, many came to doubt it, not only because they wore the same spectacles as scientists, as many did, but because the opinion had acquired a vogue. The new spectacles begot a new conception, and the new conception was contagious. Atheism and agnosticism have proved similarly contagious. "Something becomes a problem for the human mind," notes Dondeyne, "when it ceases to be something about which we say, 'It goes without saying' or 'it stands to reason.'" 114 For many peopleperhaps mostin our Western culture, the existence of other minds still goes without saying, but the existence of God does not. Of this shift Dondeyne observes: "The medieval man without much education had no problem with his faith; it was for him the most natural thing in the world. On the contrary, unbelief appeared to him as something unthinkable, as an impossible attitude of mind. Until recent times this was still so for the vast majority of people who from childhood had grown up in the faith; but today we are evidently in the midst of a change."115 Now no one would assert, as did an eighteenth-century writer, "As to Atheism, it is now justly and pretty generally understood that there neither is, nor ever was or can be, really an Atheist."116 Now many grow up in disbelief and take the nonexistence of God for granted. Thus a great divide has opened between belief in God and belief in other minds, and therefore Plantinga's wife could react as she did. How could these disparate beliefs be comparable? How could belief in God and belief in other minds stand on a par epistemically? In this and preceding sections, I have suggested reasonsnonepistemic reasonsfor this recent development. To trace adequately the ripple effect of unbelief, I would have to note the whole broad process of secularization, in which religious thinking, religious practices, and religious institutions, together, have lost their central place in Western society and thereby much of their power to foster theistic belief. If we look beyond the West and beyond these recent developments, however, doubts may arise about the preceding portrayal of history and its significance. How did medieval man come to his "natural," unquestioning faith? Many other peoples at many other times have not believed in God, whereas all have believed in other minds. Hence theistic belief, however firmly established within a given milieu at a given moment, may appear a mere "social construct." With equal legitimacy, however, one might surmise from its untroubled universality that belief in other minds is merely "instinctive," mere "animal faith." Neither inference is warranted. Epistemic merit might account for the widespread rise of theistic belief, over much of the earth, and epistemic merit might account for the universality of belief in other minds. The only way to decide is to compare the beliefs' respective epistemic merits, and this we shall do, starting with the next chapter. Overview Some may find the preceding account too ample; others may find it too slight to carry full conviction. Yet I think it strikes a reasonable mean, given the seriousness  



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of the problem addressed, on the one hand, and the modesty of the intended outcome, on the other. The discussion addresses the most evident disanalogy between belief in God and belief in other minds and the most serious difficulty for their epistemic parity; so it cannot merely suggest a possible solution then pass on, with a wave, to more important matters. For the present inquiry, there are no more important matters. Yet the treatment, though ample, does not pretend to provide a complete solution to the Subjective Disparity Problem. It does not pretend, first of all, to demonstrate that an imbalance in nonepistemic factors accounts, solely or primarily, for the fact that people in contemporary Western society believe more universally and more strongly in other minds than they do in God. It does not even presume, more pertinently, to demonstrate that such an imbalance accounts for the disparate firmness of belief in God and belief in specific other-minds phenomena such as Mrs. M's love. Neither resultneither the broader nor the more focusedcould realistically be hoped for from this chapter's discussion alone. The more general demonstration, if feasible, would require an exhaustive, systematic appraisal of all nonepistemic factorspersonal, social, or historicalaffecting belief in God and belief in other minds. A sampling of major types of nonepistemic influence, as above, with a few illustrations for each, would not suffice. Furthermore, even the most comprehensive comparative assessment could not reach the desired conclusion, if the evaluation considered only nonepistemic factors. The imbalance in nonepistemic factors might be as evident and great as you please: it still would not preclude an equally great imbalance in epistemic factors. And indeed, as noted at the start, the cumulative case for some person or other, somewhere, some time, having had some conscious experience or other, is much stronger than the case, slim but sure, for Mrs. M's love. With respect to such a specific other-minds belief, three possibilities define this chapter's role. The belief's greater firmness in comparison with belief in God might derive (1) solely or principally from epistemic factors, (2) solely or principally from nonepistemic factors, or (3) largely from both epistemic and nonepistemic factors. The preceding survey tends to challenge the first explanation and to strengthen the second in competition with the third. For, of the nonepistemic influences we have sampled, many kinds that work against belief in God affect only slightly or not at all a belief like mine in Mrs. M's affection for her child. Recall, for example, the Russian captain's atheistic education, Evelyn's psychic conflict with her father, the freethinker's experience with believers, and the countless cases these instances represent. Recall the erosion of human dependence, the scientific spectacles or positivistic blinders worn by scientists and nonscientists alike, the ideological warfare of the Enlightenment, the inept apologetics of theistic spokesmen, and the ripple effect of doubt. Such personal, social, and historical factors affect belief in God, but they do not touch my belief in Mrs. M's love. The remaining factor, desire, even if favorable to God's existence (as it often is not), must struggle with these varied, powerful influences. Other forces may intensify the struggle. At this initial stage, I have had to omit two important sorts of nonepistemic influence: the influence of arguments and the influence of the data the arguments cite. As instances of nonepistemic influence, these additions may sound odd; so let me explain. If particular arguments are worth 



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less yet affect beliefs, their influence is nonepistemic (that is, it does not affect the likelihood that the beliefs are true). If certain arguments are weak yet strongly affect beliefs, their excess influence is likewise nonepistemic. If the data the arguments cite exert their own, independent influence yet provide no grounds for belief, their influence is, again, nonepistemic. If the data provide weak grounds but exert a strong influence, the excess influence is nonepistemic. However, none of these itemsno such arguments and no such datacan I yet include on one side or the other without first assessing the arguments and their grounds, and this remains to be done. The problem of evil, above all, occasions these remarks. No other antitheistic argument has enjoyed nearly the same vogue as has the argument from the quantity and quality of evil in the world. Yet evil itselfespecially grave evil, personally experienced and deeply felt (e.g., a crippling disease, the loss of a loved one)may work still more potently against belief in God than do the arguments from evil which people formulate, entertain, or urge against God's existence. Thus, if the argument from evil is weak, as I shall suggest, two more nonepistemic factorsthe argument and the eviladd their weight on the antitheistic side of the scales. On the other hand, if popular, influential arguments favoring God's existence proved equally weak, the nonepistemic influence of arguments for and against belief in God might balance out. However, there is little prospect that such a result would redress this chapter's overall comparative assessment. No nonepistemic factor counteracts belief in other minds as forcefully as life's evils counteract belief in God. Indeed, it has been surmised that "more religious skeptics have been produced by the problem of evil than by all other dynamics of apostasy combined." 117 And popular arguments for other minds reveal their own problems, as we shall see. Despite these remaining loose ends, the chapter has, I think, fulfilled the promise of its title and "cleared the way" for what follows. It has done so primarily by addressing the Subjective Disparity Problem. Given the weight of nonepistemic factors favoring belief in other minds over belief in God, it is not implausible, a priori, to suggest that these two beliefsor specific instances of these two types of beliefmay enjoy rough epistemic parity. Their current psychological disparity does not prove the contrary. The chapter has also cleared the way, incidentally, by separating out the nonepistemic influences that it has scrutinized from the genuine evidence on which discussion will now focus. (Figuratively speaking: "If we want to see-indepth, it is essential to ensure that each eye sees only the view appropriate to its situation, and not the other")118 Also incidentally, yet importantly, the chapter's discussion has prepared a fair hearing for theistic belief. If the presence of desire sufficed to justify accusations of "wishful thinking," belief in other minds would rate as a prime target. More broadly, if the influence of nonepistemic factors of this and other varieties sufficed to cast doubt on the soundness of belief, belief in other minds would have to be called more seriously into question than belief in God; for, as we have seen, such nonepistemic factors favor belief in other minds more strongly, overall, than they favor belief in God. So let us not assume a double standard. The only way to assess the comparative epistemic merits of belief in God and belief in other minds is to set aside nonepistemic considerations and compare the evidence for each type of belief. This the next five chapters will proceed to do.  



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4 Immediate Experience Two plausible assumptions recommend the comparison between belief in God and belief in other minds. First, both objects of belief transcend our direct experience. Second, neither object can be inferred logically or scientifically from what we do directly experience. Yet one beliefbelief in other mindsappears epistemically sound, so why not the other? Thus Plantinga, having assessed arguments for God and arguments for other minds, concludes that the two beliefs belong in the "same epistemological boat." If, however, it were as many have alleged and we sometimes had direct awareness of either object of beliefof God or of other mindsthat object might enjoy a notable epistemic advantage over the other. "It is surely plain," notes Illtyd Trethowan, "that there is no sense in wanting to prove something to yourself if you are already directly in touch with it." 1 Accordingly, before considering arguments for or against the existence of God or of other minds, we must weigh the possibility that one or the other has no need of arguments but is known immediately, at least on some occasions by some people. If both God and other minds are known immediately, there is no initial disparity between them. If one is known thus and the other is not, parity may never be regained, however comparable the arguments for each may then turn out to be. Such being the apparent stakes, we must first define the question more carefully. What type of immediacy is at issue, and what, precisely, is its epistemic significance? Often the directness asserted for God or for other minds is directness of belief, not of perception. For example, when Max Scheler asserts that we see a person's shame in his blushing, such is the directness Scheler has in mind. He denies the passage from the blushing to the shame via any inference, conscious or unconscious.2 It would be a stronger and questionable claim to assert, as does one expositor of Scheler's thought, that the other person, with his or her emotions, is as directly present to me as is my own shame.3 This is the sort of hypothesis we shall examine here and the kind of directness we shall have in view with respect to God and with respect to other minds. For any less absolute immediacy would open an epistemic gap  



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between the object of experience and the object of belief. A tree appearance, for example, might exist without any tree. The appearance itself, however, is not known via any intermediary; neither are a person's own shame, pain, pleasure, thoughts, and the like. Do wedoes anyoneever have equally direct access to God or to minds other than our own? 4 Some, it seems, have thought that we do. "Baron von Hügel suggested that we know the mind of another (on at least some occasions) directly, in the same way we know our own minds. He apparently believed that just as a man has 'direct access' to his own mind, so he may on some occasions have direct access to someone else's."5 With respect to God, Aquinas believed that even in the present life some are raised to the vision of the divine essence;6 and for Jacques Maritain, to know God in his essence would be "to know God divinely, as He Himself knows Himself."7 According to Joseph Marechal, "High contemplation implies a new element, qualitatively distinct from the normal psychological activities and from ordinary grace; we mean the active, nonsymbolic presentation of God to the soul, with its psychological correlative: the immediate intuition of God by the soul."8 With regard to such claims, two chief problems arise. First, how could the claims possibly be verified? How could the percipients themselves know that God, or the mind of another, was immediately, nonrepresentationally present to them? After all, the external world seems immediately present, yet our awareness of it is mediated by our senses. Given my chosen focus on objective, epistemic reasons for belief, I might set this question aside. If in fact God or another mind, and not some mediating representation, were directly present to the mind, such evidence could not be improved on epistemically. The truth of a belief thus grounded would be assured, whether or not the believer knew that it was. However, if I am to assess the respective epistemic merits of belief in God and belief in other minds, I cannot sidestep the question: Is our awareness of God or of other minds ever that immediate? This first problem leads to a second: Is such awareness possible? Does the hypothesis even make sense? Thus some have urged: "If we are to become directly acquainted with another's states of mind, they must become our own, and a state of mind which is one's own is eo ipso not another's."9 "What we would be aware of would not be the contents of other people's minds but rather various thoughts and ideas in our own minds which would inform us about what was going on in those other minds."10 Whether similar objections apply to direct awareness of God is not immediately clear,11 for it is not immediately clear whether and why they apply even to other human minds. Rather than proceed further in this abstract fashion and run the risk of denying that bumble bees can fly, let us consider some actual cases. Candidate Experiences Telepathyinitially defined as "the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another independently of the recognized channels of sense"12seems the likeliest area in which to discover instances of direct other-minds awareness.13 However, the cases that recent parlance lumps under this heading vary widely, and the majority clearly do not qualify as instances of direct awareness of other minds.  



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John Hick suggests an analogy between mystical visions and the "crisis apparitions" that were recorded so abundantly in the early period of psychical research before the arrival of radio and other means of rapid communication. A man in India, say, is killed in an accident, and that very night his wife in England sees an apparition of him that contains some element suggesting his deathperhaps his deathlike appearance or a coffin in the background, or his speaking of his own death. In such a case, Hick surmises, What would seem to have happened . . . is that the man's sudden crisis experience makes a telepathic impact upon the wife's unconscious mind, and the information thus received is then presented to her consciousness (often at night, when the mind is relatively disengaged from the world) in the form of an apparition. The apparitionwhose content is derived from the percipient's memory and imaginationis hallucinatory in that there is no physical body present where she sees one; but the hallucination is nevertheless veridical, embodying true information. 14 In such instances, mind may act on mind without any intermediary; but mind is not revealed to mind. The dying person has no such hallucination, sees no coffin in the background, does not hear himself addressing any words to his wife. The contents of his thinking differ from hers. Closer to what we seek are accounts of transferred sensations, for instance the following report (from a Mrs. Severn, the wife of a distinguished painter): "I woke up with a start, feeling I had had a hard blow on my mouth, and with a distinct sense that I had been cut, and was bleeding under my upper lip, and seized my pocket-handkerchief, and held it (in a little pushed lump) to the part, as I sat up in bed, and after a few seconds, when I removed it, I was astonished not to see any blood, and only then realised it was impossible anything could have struck me there, as I lay fast asleep in bed, and so I thought it was only a dream!but I looked at my watch, and saw it was seven, and finding Arthur (my husband) was not in the room, I concluded (rightly) that he must have gone out on the lake for an early sail, as it was so fine. "I then fell asleep. At breakfast (half-past nine), Arthur came in rather late, and I noticed he rather purposely sat farther away from me than usual, and every now and then put his pocket-handkerchief furtively up to his lip, in the very way I had done. I said, 'Arthur, why are you doing that?' and added a little anxiously, 'I know you have hurt yourself! but I'll tell you why afterwards.' He said, 'Well, when I was sailing a sudden squall came, throwing the tiller suddenly round, and it struck me a bad blow in the mouth, under the upper lip, and it has been bleeding a good deal and won't stop.' I then said, 'Have you any idea what o'clock it was when it happened?' and he answered, 'It must have been about seven.' "I then told what had happened to me, much to his surprise, and all who were with us at breakfast."15 If accounts like the following are to be believed (and varied research lends them some credence),16 it would seem that thoughts as well as sensations can be telepathically communicated. A psychic researcher, G. A. Smith, recounts,  



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"One evening in September, 1882, at Brighton, I was trying some experiments with a Mrs. W., a 'subject' whom I had frequently hypnotised. I found that she could give surprisingly minute descriptions of spots which she knewwith details which her normal recollection could never have furnished. I did not for a moment regard these descriptions as implying anything more than intensified memory, but resolved to see what would happen when she was requested to examine a place where she had never been to. I therefore requested her to look into the manager's room at the Aquarium, and to tell me all about it. Much to my surprise, she immediately began to describe the apartment with great exactness, and in perfect conformity with my own knowledge of it. I was fairly astonished; but it occurred to me that although my subject's memory could not be at work, my own mind might be acting on hers. To test this, I imagined strongly that I saw a large open umbrella on the table, and in a minute or so the lady said, in great wonder: 'Well! how odd, there's a large open umbrella on the table,' and then began to laugh. It, therefore, seemed clear that her apparent knowledge of the room had been derived somehow from my own mental picture of it; but I may add I was never able to produce the same effect again." 17 Here we may have the kind of case we want. Mind, it seems, has acted on mind; the content of one is, to some extent, the content of the other. Mrs. W has an image of an umbrella in her mind, and so does he. Applying familiar criteria based on familiar experiences, we would have to conclude that if each of two people has an image, there are two images. The surmise that the image is one and the same, quantitatively as well as qualitatively, may appear to lack sense. However, given PRS's greater latitude, it is not immediately evident that the image must be double. In our ignorance of how such communication might occur, if it does, perhaps we cannot entirely exclude the hypothesis that in this instance one person was directly aware of another person's thought. Granted, Smith actively imagines the umbrella, and Mrs. W does not. Still, might not the same image be present in both minds, in one actively and in the other passively? The response, no doubt, would be that imagining an umbrella should not be conceived on the model of painting a picture of an umbrella, a picture which someone else might perceive as directly as I do. Imagining is active through and through. Very well, but walking and talking are, in the same sense, active through and through, yet others can perceive them. Ayer may be right that to say of one person that he is thinking the thoughts of another is self-contradictory;18 yet if I perceive your thoughts or have direct acquaintance with them, do I have to think them with you? If I see you walking or talking, do I have to walk or talk with you? There is danger here of constantly begging the question at issue. Fortunately, for reasons that will soon appear, we can sidestep this particular morass and turn without further ado to the other term of our comparison. Do comparable problems arise for direct acquaintance with God? Like telepathic experiences, purported experiences of God vary greatly, and of them, too, the majority do not qualify as possible instances of direct awareness. Manyfor example, many experiences of God's "presence"are ambiguous, at least as reported. One person may have a sense of another person's presence in the  



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house, and the other person may have dropped over to the neighbors'. Similarly, believers might have a sense of God's presence, and God might not exist. If such is the experience, the existential gap remains. However, there is a difference between sensing a person's presence in another room and experiencing a person's presence before one's eyes. And some people report not merely sensing that God is present or experiencing God's presence but experiencing God who is present. "At bottom," a Swiss writer recounts, "the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him." 19 A woman's recollection from childhood conveys a similar impression of immediacy: "My father used to take all the family for a walk on Sunday evenings. On one such walk we wandered across a narrow path through a field of high, ripe corn. I lagged behind, and found myself alone. Suddenly, heaven blazed on me. I was enveloped in golden light, I was conscious of a presence, so kind, so loving, so bright, so consoling, so commanding, existing apart from me but so close. I heard no sound. But words fell into my mind quite clearly'Everything is all right. Everybody will be all right.'"20 This child did not simply believe, understand, or have a sense that God was present thereabouts. No, God (to put the word in her mouth) was there, revealed to her. So it seemed, and so it may have been. Estlin Carpenter, noted educator and physiologist, stresses the directness of his own comparable experience. He recounts: "I went out one afternoon for a walk alone. I was in the empty unthinking state in which one saunters along country lanes, simply yielding oneself to the casual sights around which give a town bred lad with country yearnings such intense delight. Suddenly I became conscious of the presence of someone else. I cannot describe it, but I felt that I had as direct a perception of the being of God all round about me as I have of you when we are together. It was no longer a matter of inference, it was an immediate act of spiritual (or whatever adjective you like to employ) apprehension. It came unsought, absolutely unexpectedly. I remember the wonderful transfiguration of the far off woods and hills as they seemed to blend in the infinite being with which I was thus brought into relation. This experience did not last long. But it sufficed to change all my feeling."21 Saint Teresa stresses not only the immediacy but also the sureness of her mystical encounters and their object: "Because it so far exceeds all that our imagination and understanding can compass, its presence is of such exceeding majesty that it fills the soul with a great terror. It is unnecessary to ask here how, without being told, the soul knows Who it is, for He reveals Himself quite clearly as the Lord of Heaven and earth."22 One hesitates to question the assurances of a sane and holy person who has "been there." Still, problems arise for such claimsproblems of a kind that other-mind perceptions may also have to face.  



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Questions of Completeness ''He reveals himself quite clearly," Teresa writes, "as the Lord of Heaven and earth." So are Heaven and earth and all creation contained within the vision? Angela of Foligno speaks of beholding "a plenitude, a beauty wherein I saw the All Good." 23 So did she behold infinite beauty, infinite goodness? If not, did she behold God? As Hick notes: God is described in Christian theology in terms of various absolute qualities, such as omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, infinite love, etc., which cannot as such be observed by us, as can their finite analogues, limited power, local presence, finite goodness, and human love. One can recognize that a being whom one "encounters" has a given finite degree of power, but how does one recognize that he has unlimited power? How does one observe that an encountered being is omnipresent? How does one perceive that his goodness and love, which one can perhaps see to exceed any human goodness and love, are actually infinite? Such qualities cannot be given in human experience.24 Given such a conception of God, we might infer that no one ever does or can experience God directly. For, some have claimed, "To say that we are directly aware of something is, in part, to say that it is wholly present to consciousness. What lacks this quality is not an object of consciousness at all, let alone an object of direct awareness."25 However, this assertion sounds too strong. If I touch the top of a table, do I not touch the table? If I see the front of a house, do I not see the house? Granted, if I touch just the top I should not say that I touch the whole table; if I see just the front, I should not say that I see the whole house. Similarly, if my immediate awareness of an object is not all-inclusive, I should not say that I am directly aware of the whole object. Nonetheless, I may legitimately assert that I am directly aware of the object.26 The same response applies to Mrs. Severn, who shared at most a segment of her husband's experience (she did not feel the wind, the heaving of the boat on the water, and so forth, as he did), or to Mrs. W in Smith's account. At best (supposing his account to be accurate), her acquaintance with Smith's mind was far from complete, even with respect to just the image of the umbrella on the table. Smith actively imagined the umbrella to test her; she perceived just the umbrella. Even so, her awareness, though incomplete, may have been direct. In the absence of any further impediment, she may have had direct acquaintance with Smith's mind, just as Teresa, Angela, and others may have had direct acquaintance with God. Incompleteness does not exclude directness. So far, the two types of cases run parallel. However, Alston develops the objection from incompleteness in a way that calls into question whether there can be any direct apprehension of God, either total or partial, comparable to our awareness of our own thoughts and feelings:

 

If our cases are to conform to our account of perceptual consciousness, they must (phenomenologically) involve God's appearing to their awareness as being and/or doing so-and-so. And so our subjects do tell us. God is experienced as good, powerful, loving, compassionate, and as exhibiting "plenitude." He is



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experienced as speaking, forgiving, comforting, and strengthening. And yet how can these be ways in which God presents Himself to experience? Power and goodness are complex dispositional properties or bases thereof, dispositions to act in various ways in various situations. And to forgive or to strengthen someone is to carry out a certain intention. None of this can be read off the phenomenal surface of experience. This is quite different from something's presenting itself to one's sensory consciousness as red, round, sweet, loud, or pungent. Isn't it rather that the subject is interpreting, or taking, what she is aware of as being good or powerful, as forgiving or strengthening? 27 In response, one might question whether the divine nature and all its attributes are purely dispositional. Is even human or natural power purely dispositional? Is it defined solely in relation to Humean correlations of events? Do we not experience something more within ourselves when we are mentally active? With respect to love, it seems clear that a purely dispositional account will not do. A person whose "loving" looks or actions were accompanied by no loving thoughts or feelings would not be a loving person but a robot or an impostor. True, the tender thoughts and feelings might be included among the actions, inner and outer, to which the inner disposition inclines the person; and, for some, the disposition alone might be identified as love itself. In that case, even perception of the tender thoughts and feelings would not give direct perception of the love. The thoughts and feelings would have to be "interpreted" as acts of love. Similarly, even if a mystic perceived some divine analog of human sentiments of love or compassion, the mystic would not directly perceive the love or compassion. However, what this comes to, once again, even if we accept these reductive, essentialistic analyses, is not denial of directness but denial of completeness (we might not experience God's love, but we would experience God). And this we have already recognized, for both mystical experience and Mrs. W. Epistemic Significance From this sampling, we can now recognize the limited epistemic significance of directness. If acquaintance is direct, we initially supposed, there is no gap between the content of awareness and the content of belief. If, however, the acquaintance is direct yet partial, there is less of a gap but still a gap remains. The whole object of belief is not present directly in the experience. This gap is concealed in the case of Mrs. W by the fact that she has formed and expressed no belief about the contents of Smith's mind. Were she to do so, she might say, for example, that he had imagined an umbrella on the table in a remembered room, and we have no reason to suppose that she had direct acquaintance with either the imagining or the remembering, aside from its content. Indeed, if Smith's account is accurate, we have good reason to suppose that no such thoughts crossed her mind. Had she believed that the umbrella was the product of Smith's imagination, she would not have supposed or suggested that there was an umbrella in the room. Indeed, the question of immediacy looks doubly academic, since even if we had reason to be sure that Mrs. W was fully aware of the content of Mr. Smith's mind or  



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that the mystic was fully aware of God, we might have no way of knowing whether the awareness was direct or indirect. Smith himself, privy to the whole affair and convinced of what led to what, would be at a loss to determine whether Mrs. W had direct contact with his thinking or instead had only indirect contact via a mental duplicate distinct from his own mental representation. Teresa herself, intimately acquainted with the content of her mystical experience and convinced that God appeared to her, had no clue as to how God appeared to herwhether directly or via a faithful representation. Indeed, neither person could be sure that the hypothesis of immediacy made good sense. (How does another's umbrella image of which one is directly aware differ from one's own umbrella image?) Evidently, then, the whole discussion of immediacy can cast slight illumination on the principal issues that interest us, namely, whether Mrs. W perceived the contents of Smith's mind and whether mystics and others perceive God. Indeed, in neither case do our chief misgivings center on the question of immediacy. With respect to Mrs. W, we are likely to wonder whether the details of the case really were as recounted. If they were, we are likely to concede that somehow, mind acted on mind and mind was revealed to mind (albeit partially and unbeknown to the recipient). With respect to direct experience of God, the focus of our misgivings differs. We do not doubt that mystics and others have had the experiences they recount, but we do wonder whether they really were experiences of God. Why this difference? Because in the former case, we have no idea how one mind could thus act on another and therefore wonder whether the circumstances were as described, whereas in the latter case we think we can well imagine a natural explanation and therefore question the need for a supernatural explanation. However, doubtless our attitude would be different if we were the person in questionif, for instance, we were Smith or Teresaand not merely readers of the person's account. Clearly, Smith himself knows whether his account is accuratewhat he said, what Mrs. W said, what he then imagined, and so forth. So he himself might have objectively, epistemically strong reasons for his belief. Teresa, for her part, is thoroughly convinced of the reality of what she has experienced. "But how," she herself asks, " can one have such certainty?" 28 How can one be sure it was God? We, in our day, are likely to ask the same question more insistently. For now we are acquainted, as Teresa was not, with the wonders of the unconscious and the striking capabilities of various drugs. "The first thing to consider," counsels Alston, "is whether mystical experience can be given an adequate explanation in terms of purely natural causes. If we consider the actual attempts to do this (and this is not a popular research field for social and behavioral scientists), we must judge them to be highly speculative and, at best, sketchily supported by the evidence."29 Nonetheless, unprompted by the theories of a Freud, Marx, Durkheim, or I. M. Lewis, the thought comes: "If various psychedelic drugs can produce experiences akin to the theophanies recounted here, mightn't Angela, Teresa, Carpenter, the child in the field, the Swiss writer, and others owe their visions to some biological short-circuit which caused them to experience spontaneously what the drugs induce artificially?'' One problem with this suggestion30 concerns the alleged resemblance: to judge from favored citations, druginduced experiences do not resemble at all closely, in  



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their reported content, the experiences I have cited. 31 Even if they did, the parallel with other minds might still give us pause. For if drugs could produce such striking effects, surely there is no difficulty in supposing that they could elicit an impression such as I received from Mrs. M's look, and that such artificial stimulation might suffuse her features with an aura of lovingness. Indeed, we need not imagine what drugs might elicit if put to appropriate tests; we can cite more familiar phenomena and construct a parallel suggestion: In our dreams, without input from any external agent or real perceptual object, we experience people as friendly, hateful, threatening, loving, and the like. So, given the right conditions, might not the inner workings of our waking selves adequately account for impressions such as the way I experienced Mrs. M's look? Why, then, suppose a loving person in addition to the look? I cannot say, save to note the difference between waking and sleeping (just as the people I have mentioned might note the difference between being and not being on drugs). Yet I am unshaken by such counterreasoning. Should a mystic, convinced that God has shown himself to her, be more concerned? Mightn't she even enjoy an epistemic advantage over me and my experience? Consider a comparison. Suppose that I, neither musician nor user of drugs, suddenly heard in my mind a marvelous symphony I had never heard before, superbly played as though by the finest symphony orchestra. I might be nonplussed, but I would not suppose that a sudden shift in my body's chemical balance had brought about this effect nor that my love of music had surreptitiously begotten the object of my desire. After all, it took Brahms and Beethoven long labors to compose such music and symphony orchestras long hours of practice to perform it. The unconscious may be good, but it isn't that goodnot better than Beethoven, not better than the New York Philharmonic. Thus the very content of my experience might lead me to seek some external source for the experience. And the like might hold for mystical experience. I cite this particular illustration because of an episode Plantinga recalls from his student days at Harvard: One gloomy evening (in January, perhaps) I was returning from dinner, walking past Widener Library to my fifth-floor room in Thayer Middle (there weren't any elevators, and scholarship boys occupied the cheaper rooms at the top of the building). It was dark, windy, raining, nasty. But suddenly it was as if the heavens opened; I heard, so it seemed, music of overwhelming power and grandeur and sweetness; there was light of unimaginable splendor and beauty; it seemed I could see into heaven itself; and I suddenly saw or perhaps felt with great clarity and persuasion and conviction that the Lord was really there and was all I had thought. The effects of this experience lingered for a long time.32 Here the music "of overwhelming power and grandeur and sweetness" formed but part of the total, overwhelming experience. Of a comparable experience of his own, John Powell writes, "It was more than I could have ever dreamed in all my technicolor dreams."33 Recipients of such experiences might, it seems, have as solid reason for their belief as Smith might have for his. What, though, of us? We have no way of interrogating either Mrs. W or Mr. Smith. Even if we did and even if we had the fullest corroboration of their exchange,  



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we would still have no way, other than Smith's account, of verifying whether he imagined what he said he did before Mrs. W gave her answer. Full inquiry into Smith's character and circumstances might somewhat allay our doubts, but not fully, given the remarkable nature of his narrative. For a fact fundamental to his case would be known to him but not to us. With respect to Plantinga's account and those of various mystics, we find ourselves at a similar disadvantage. They may assure us that such an experience was unlikely to have a purely natural explanation, but we must take their word for it. 34 For we have not had their experience. This does not mean we have no reason to agree with them about the source of their experience; it just means that our reason is not as good as theirs.35 However, is it true, as we have supposed till now, that few of us, if any, directly perceive God or that few of us, if any, directly perceive other minds? Further Candidates So far we have focused on relatively rare occurrencesrare even among telepathic events, rare even among religious experiences. For such experiences as these are the ones that come most readily to mind when one examines the possibility that people may sometimes have direct awareness of God or of other minds. Now, however, recognition that awareness may be direct yet incomplete calls for a wider examination. Our initial sampling may have been unnecessarily narrow. Consider Mrs. M's loving look. It might be suggested that I saw her look but not her love, since love is not behavior but a sentiment or feeling from which the behavior derives. More radically, it might be suggested that she herself did not directly perceive her own love, since love is not a conscious feeling but an unseen disposition, which accounts for loving thoughts, feelings, and behavior but is not itself directly perceived. Thus I observed her look, she observed her thoughts and feelings, but neither she nor I directly observed her love. To counter moves like these, I think PRS (testing linguistic truth by agreement with established word use, whether customary or stipulated) may and should be invoked. So far as I can discern, no fact of linguistic usage warrants this reductive account of love. Some familiar speech forms suggest a disposition ("undying love"), others a feeling ("a heart on fire with love"), others behavior ("I saw the love in her eyes"). But what a verbal form suggests it need not truly indicate, and no one form has proprietary rights. None supplants the others or draws a sharp line between the essential and the inessential. Love, it might therefore be suggested (in Wittgensteinian fashion), is a variable weave in our lives, formed of these various strands. A loving look has as much right as a loving thought to be considered a constituent of love. And though I cannot directly observe the thought, it might further be suggested, I can directly observe the look. Here, then, is another candidate for direct though partial perception of ''other minds." A strictly behavioristic account of love would favor the same conclusion. For even a behaviorist would concede that if I saw Mrs. M's loving look, I did not see the whole of her love. For that, I would have to observe the whole of her loving behavior. Hence in this view, too, my experience would qualify as a possibly direct though partial perception of her love. And in either viewthe behavioristic or the  



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Wittgensteinianlove would have much company. With the same directness that I viewed Mrs. M's love, I might view a person's anger (he's red in the face), compassion (she tends the kitten's paw), intelligence (they give the right answer), and so forth. Few acts or aspects of other minds might resist similar analysis. This influx of candidates for immediacy might strongly favor other-mind perceptions over perceptions of God. However, a similar account may also apply to God. What holds for human love, compassion, intelligence, and the like may hold for divine love, compassion, intelligence, and the like. What are sometimes treated as mere "effects" or "outer manifestations" might be viewed instead as constitutive. How, for example, could God be creator of the universe if there were no universe? Hence, as I may have had a direct though incomplete perception of Mrs. M's love when I saw her loving look, I may have a direct though incomplete perception of creation when I view any part of creation. And with equal immediacy, perhaps, I perceive God's love (my prayers are answered), compassion (the leper is cured), intelligence (I observe the course of nature), and so forth. I shall not dwell on these parallel suggestions regarding God and other minds, for several reasons. First, the public aspects that I observethe loving look, the course of nature, and so onare physical, and notorious difficulties confront the claim that we perceive the physical world directly (as directly as our inner thoughts and feelings). Second, here too, it seems to make little difference, epistemically, whether the perception is direct or indirect. The loving look does not suffice by itself to constitute Mrs. M's love. So how do we know she is loving? The flower or the star does not suffice by itself to constitute the act of creation, so how do we know that the flower or star was created? Besides, a hawk might register the mere phenomenathe look, the flower, the starand register them more acutely than any human observer, but the hawk would have no experience like mine of Mrs. M's love and no experience of God such as many people report. Laura Garcia's account, transcending the sheer input of the senses, typifies the kind of report I have in mind: The second most powerful influence on my own acceptance of a spiritual realm was the natural beauty and grandeur of the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up. The rugged mountains of the Cascade range, with their unapproachable cliffs and wild, raging rivers, and the timeless thundering of the surf along the Oregon coast made a very deep impression on me. I still feel, with Wordsworth, that there are places where it is almost impossible to stand without coming to believe that one is face to face with the divine. My father loved to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins, the nineteenth-century Jesuit poet who I think understood the presence of God in nature better than anyone else. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," says Hopkins, and that has always seemed to me close to a self-evident truth. 36 "I would say the same thing," she adds, "about the example of my parentsthat I did not really infer the existence of God or the truth of Christianity from their actions so much as experience the presence of God in them." How might we do justice to such an account as this? To speak of a mere "interpretation" of Garcia's surroundings sounds too weak. Yet to seize on the preposition  



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("in them," not " through them") and surmise a direct revelation, occasioned but not mediated by her surroundings, sounds unnecessarily strong. For my experience of Mrs. M's love might be described in just such terms as Garcia employs. I did not infer, or reason to, the woman's love. I experienced her love in her look. The look was charged with her love. And yet, I directly perceived no more than the lookno loving thought or feeling, no loving disposition. The windows of her mind were not opened; I did not directly inspect her soul. All I saw was the lookthe loving look. Similarly, I suggest, Garcia may have experienced the grandeur of God in nature and the presence of God in her parents without directly perceiving God. As I might conceivably see what I saw without Mrs. M's loving her child, so Garcia might conceivably see what she saw without God's existing. There would be no contradiction in either supposition. If this parallel holds, we are left with parallel questions: How can I be sure that Mrs. M loved her child? How can Garcia be sure that God made the world? How can we bridge the epistemic gap? In answer, familiar argumentsof analogy, teleology, and the likemay come into play and articulate hidden grounds that perhaps explain and support our convictions. These arguments, germane to some experiences and not to others, can wait. Here, instead, is the place to consider several broad lines of argument, one invoked in favor of theistic appearances generally (rare or familiar, mediate or immediate) and others directed against them. Our question in each instance will be how sound such reasoning appears when applied not only to theistic but also to other-minds beliefs. Credulity and Contradiction We have seen Swinburne's assertion: "It is a principle of rationality that (in the absence of special considerations) if it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present, then probably x is present; what one seems to perceive is probably so." For Swinburne, this "Principle of Credulity" holds true regardless of what x may be. If it seemed to me that I perceived Mrs. M's love, and no special considerations tell against my powers of perception or against her love, she probably did love her child. Similarly, and with the same proviso, if it seemed to Garcia that God was revealed to her, he probably was; if it seemed to Angela of Foligno or Saint Teresa or the child in the held that God appeared to her, he probably did. The principle is broad and generoustoo generous, in critics' views. Their objections have focused on the differences between sensory experience and putative experiences of God. Whereas sensory experience is (a) public; (b) pluralistic (involving multiple senses); (c) frequently, producible pretty much at will; and (d) predictable, experiences of God are none of these. 37 To illustrate, in all of these four respects Teresa's experience of God contrasts strongly with her experience of a candle, say, or of a chair. Others can observe the chair, can feel it as well as see it, can produce either sensation pretty much at will (by touching the chair or looking in its direction), and can predict this result. Teresa's experience of God, on the contrary, is private, is not produced by any sense, cannot be produced at will, and cannot be predicted.  



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However, if we replace sensory perception with other-minds perception, the disparity diminishes. In general, otherminds experience is less public, less pluralistic, less producible at will, and less predictable than experience of physical objects or events. Thus, experience of Mrs. M's love could not be produced at will, and it could not be predicted. Experiences as decisive as my glimpse of her look are elusive and rare. Unlike a chair, her love could be seen but not touched. These and other discrepancies come as no surprise, for love differs greatly from a chair, and so it is differently perceived. If God differs still more notably from a chair, then God will be still more differently perceived. The nature of an object determines how it can be known. Hence, optimal perception of a nonphysical reality might rate as no perception if judged by sensory standards. 38 Emphasis has also fallen on a related disanalogy between sensory and religious experience. Against the latter, it is urged that "if an experience (or at least a kind of experience) can provide evidence for the existence of some item, then it must be possible that there be experiential evidence (perhaps from the same sort of experience) against the existence of that itemnot that some experience of the same sort must or even does provide such negative evidence, but that it is logically possible that it do so."39 If I seem to see a house, I can test the truth of the appearance by trying to touch the house or by going to the side or back to determine whether I have been duped by a mere facade. Or I can ask other people to come and take a look. But how is it possible to do anything comparable if I seem to experience God? What experiential test could show that the appearance was or was not illusory? With Alston, I might reply, Consider an analogous critique of introspective reportsfor example, that I now feel excited. Here too the report cannot be assessed on the basis of whether other people experience the same thing under the same conditions. Even if they don't that has no tendency to show that I didn't feel excited. But this will not lead most of us to deny that such beliefs can be justified. We would simply point out that we should not expect beliefs about one's own conscious states to be subject to the same sorts of tests as beliefs about ships and sealing wax.40 Still less should we expect God to be subject to such tests. As a corrective to what Alston terms "epistemic imperialism, unwarrantedly subjecting the outputs of one doxastic practice to the requirements of another," his example is effective. Other minds experiences, which more closely resemble God experiences, can teach a similar lesson. Take our paradigm. My experience of Mrs. M's love passes the test of possible contrary experience; I or other people might, for instance, observe her mistreat her infant daughter or speak of her with hatred. In fact, however, I had nothing else to go by than just the single, ever-so-tender glance. Moreover, realistically, there was no way for me to do better. Inquiries among acquaintances, interrogation of the mother herself, observation of her later dealings with her childall of these were merely theoretical possibilities. Nonetheless, I had good reason to believe that she loved her child. So what importance attaches to the theoretical possibility of discovering contrary evidence? It comes to this: if my belief passed these further teststhe inquiries,  



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the interrogation, the observation of her subsequent behaviorI would have still firmer grounds for my belief. In comparison with that ideal accumulation of evidence, my evidence is inferior. However, as this illustration indicates, inferior evidence may still be good evidence. For here "inferior" does not mean "bad" but simply "less than ideal." And the bane of post-Cartesian epistemology has been the denigration of good evidence because it falls short of some supposed idealmathematical, logical, scientific, empirical, or other. Paradoxically, whereas the preceding objection to theistic appearances cites the impossibility of contrasting experience, a common objection cites not merely the possibility but the apparent occurrence of such experience. A powerful challenge, it is said, arises from the fact that "subjects of religious experiences cannot agree on a single, consistent account of the alleged percepts." 41 This objection is difficult to grasp. Why should there be a single, consistent account of plural percepts? Why should there be a single account of even a single such target of perception? Consider a comparison. A half-dozen pages in William Manchester's The Glory and the Dream, recounting the days before Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932, contain the following diverse perceptions of the president-to-be: "a magnificent leader," "no leader," "wishy-washy," ''another Hoover," "another weak man," "an apostle of progress," "a great borrower," "the only politician in the country who thought of economics as a moral problem," "not a man of great intellectual force or supreme moral stamina," "corkscrew candidate of aconvoluting convention," "magnanimous and sure of himself," "too soft," "too eager to please and be all things to all men," "the image of zest, warmth, and dignity," "weakness and readiness to compromise," "a kind of universal joint, or rather a switchboard, a transformer," "a pill to cure an earthquake," "a vigorous well-intentioned gentleman of good birth and breeding."42 Hardly a "single, consistent account" here! No two of these descriptions are identical. Some are contradictory. Others differ greatly yet are mutually compatible. Others are neither clearly compatible nor clearly incompatible. Yet all refer to a single, real individual. In this instance, we do not conclude that no such man as Franklin Roosevelt existed. Nor do we infer that none of those who thus characterized him had any experience, personal or secondhand, of the man they described, or that none of those who knew him accurately expressed what they knew, or that no credit should therefore be given to any of their accounts. Rather, we simply recognize the truth of the Thomistic adage: "The thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower." Whether in accounts of FDR or of religious experience, we recognize the possible influence of multiple factorsboth subjective (bias, misperception, misinformation, limited information, varied interests and perspectives, ideology, theoretical orientation, conceptual confusion, training and tradition, linguistic diversity, etc.) and objective (the elusive richness and complexity of the reality encountered, the varied ways in which that reality may choose to reveal itself to different people). Of himself, St. Paul writes:

 

I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I



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might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. (1 Cor 9:2022) It seems not only possible but likely that God would show himself still more understandingly adaptable and not only reveal himself to those of varied backgrounds and mentalities but accommodate his mode of appearance to their needs, possibilities, and expectations. A personal God would deal personally with his creatures. Yet what about the basis of such comparisons? Is the supreme reality rightly conceived as personal, or does mystic diversity call this supposition into question? "The two basic concepts," writes Hick, "which are central to the different forms of religious experience are the concept of deity, or of the Real as personal, and the concept of the absolute, or of the Real as non-personal. These take particular concrete forms at different human interfaces with the divine, as the divine personae (Yahweh, Shiva, Vishnu, the heavenly Father, the Qur'anic Revealer, and so on) and the divine impersonae (such as Brahman, the Tao, nirvana *, sunyata*, the dharmakaya*)."43 The existence of diverging ''concepts of deity" poses little challenge to the truth of theistic belief, as do diverging perceptions begotten by (not supporting) those concepts. But when Hick speaks of "the 'lenses' through which different human faith-communities variously perceive the divine Reality," this might refer either to differing conceptions of the divine or, more troubling, to differing experiences of the divine. How might the latter kind of contrast be verified? How might mystics of different traditions experience the divine reality now as personal, now as impersonal? If on some occasion one mystic recounted an experience of a personal reality and another mystic recounted an experience of a nonpersonal reality, the natural supposition would be either that they were reporting different aspects of a single more comprehensive reality ("The side of the mountain was wooded," "The side of the mountain was bare") or that they were speaking of and had perhaps experienced a different reality, not a single reality that revealed itself in contradictory ways. For consider the alternative supposition; suppose that both accounts made a comprehensive claim and both had the same transcendent referent. In that case they would not stand epistemically on a par. Personality might be experienced in a transcendent, supreme reality, but not the absence of personalitynot the sheer negation. The only way the negation of personality might be experienced would be by experiencing its contrary (as one experiences the nonredness of an object by experiencing its blueness), and how might that occur? Theists agree, writes Robert McKim,"that God acts, responds to prayers, rewards, punishes, forgives, cares for people, perceives, knows, makes moral judgments, and is personal in these and other respects."44 Experiencing the contradictory of all this would mean experiencing that God, or the supreme reality, never responds to prayers, never punishes, never forgives, never knows a thing, and so forth. Such an experience seems out of the question. Experiencing the contrary would mean, for example, experiencing that God, or the supreme reality, ignores or turns a deaf ear to our prayers, and that would imply personality. Similarly, experiencing the contrary of God's rewarding or punishing would mean experiencing God's indiscrim 



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inate treatment of his creatures, experiencing the contrary of God's perceiving or knowing would mean experiencing God's misperceptions or erroneous beliefs, and so forth. Each contrary would imply personality. It is not surprising, therefore, that impersonalist mystics do not recount such experiences. Richard Gale perceives a more serious challenge to theistic experience posed by religious diversity namely, that whereas all persons who engage in the doxastic practice of making physical object claims on the basis of sense experience agree on what are the relevant tests for veridicality, this blatantly is not the case for all participants in the doxastic practices of basing claims about God on religious experiences: the tests for veridicality employed within the different religious traditions are mutually incompatible, as, for example, in what they count as growing in sanctity and the revealed truths that are recognized as normative. 45 Again, comparison with other-person claims, rather than with physical-object claims, seems more appropriate. When one person characterizes FDR as "no leader" and another calls him "a magnificent leader," do they differ solely in their access to the facts? When one person sees him as "another Hoover" and another perceives him as an "apostle of progress," are they viewing the same reality through identical lenses? To paraphrase Gale, different political traditions employ different tests for veridicality. With respect to God as with respect to other persons, the upshot is that each account must be judged on its merits. Is the person who makes the report sincere? Is she sane and of sound judgment? Was she under the influence of alcohol, LSD, or some other mind-altering substance? Has she shown herself reliable in reports of other matters? Is what she recounts credible? This last query is the crucial one, for the numbers and credentials of those reporting religious experiences are impressive. In his introduction to James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, sociologist Andrew Greeley reports, National sample research indicates that more than one third of the American population has had experiences like James described. Those who have had such experiences frequently are, as James would have argued, paragons of psychological well-beingnot the quasi-schizophrenics that psychoanalysts think them to be. Indeed, when one performs a form of modern witchcraft called "factor analysis" over the descriptions people record of their experiences, there emerges a factor that corresponds perfectly to James's description of ecstasy with the addition of the light experience described by Mircea Eliade. We call this factor the "twice-born scale." It is precisely those who are high on this Jamesian index who are the most likely to score high on psychological well-being. Indeed, the coefficient of association between these two scales is.4the highest correlation, according to Professor Bradburn who developed the psychological wellbeing scale, ever recorded with that scale.46 Thus, if some people accept the possibility of experiencing God and others reject it, the chief explanation seems to be that some believe in God and others do not.  



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Backing Such reliance on background beliefs is psychologically necessary and epistemologically legitimate. No single experience stands alone. On the strength of the look I observed, I believe that Mrs. M loved her child, and I so report my belief. However, the look alone did not tell me she was married or tell me that this was her child. The look alone did not suddenly bring forth in me the conviction that other people exist with minds like mine or that they too experience love and experience it for others of their kind. The look alone in the child's direction did not identify the child, rather than its nose or its diaper, as the object of her affection. Neither did it equip me with the concepts of my language and culture, with which to report what I saw and believed. All this I brought with me to the experience. And so it is for Carpenter, Angela, Teresa, Plantinga, and others whose religious experiences I have cited. The single experience did not define God for them, nor did it suddenly elicit their belief in God's existence. That belief they brought with them to the experience. This does not signify, as some have suggested, that either type of experience lacks worth as evidence. Of religious experience it has been asserted, "Unless the existence of the god is first established by some other means, there is not and cannot be any reason to believe that a private appearance of that god is not a delusion." 47 This claim is clearly too strong. Change it to read "Unless the existence of the god is first grounded or supported by some other means, there is not and cannot be sufficient reason to believe that a private appearance of that god is not a delusion," and the assertion might at least be plausible. As it stands, it ignores the possibility of a cumulative case for God as for others minds, with experiential evidence factored in. The following claim sounds similar: In the case of a religious experience believed to be an I-You encounter with God, unless the believer was in a position to supplement the experience with a good deal of already available knowledge about God (that he is creator of the world, for instance, judge of all men, father of Jesus Christ, etc.) his belief "I am personally experiencing God" would mean no more than "I am experiencing a profound personal encounter with someone I know not who." Without knowledge about what is being experienced, experience of points no more towards God than towards any other possible person.48 This claim, too, appears excessive. It suggests that knowledge of God, or at least belief in God, is required if religious experience is to be possible; without such backing, an experience such as Carpenter's or Teresa's would no more point toward God than it would toward Hitler or toward Genghis Khan. A more reasonable version of the claim would allege the need of conceptual preparation, not epistemic backing. A traveler in the Himalayas who encounters a creature that fits the description of a yeti need not have previously believed in the existence of yetis to accept his present experience as evidence for their existence. He just needs to have the concept "yeti." Likewise, to see Mrs. M's look as loving, I had to have the concept "love," but I did not need to have any opinion at all concerning Mrs. M's love for her child. These examples raise a further question. I have noted that people bring background beliefs to their religious and other-minds experiences. I have argued that re 



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liance on such beliefs is legitimate and that, despite such reliance, the experiences may have evidential worth as part of a cumulative case. However, I have not considered the possibility that an individual experience might suffice by itself. If I meet a yeti in the Himalayas, do I need any other reason to believe in the existence of yetis? If I observe Mrs. M's look, do I need any other reason to believe in her love? If I have an experience like Carpenter's or Teresa's or Plantinga's, do I need any other reason to believe in God? Might not that single experience suffice, epistemically? The fact of incompleteness, noted above, might suggest a negative response. Mrs. M's love consists of something more than her loving look. Likewise, the full reality of God transcends the content of even the most striking mystical experience. How, then, in either case can the experience suffice to ground the belief? Implicit in this query is the notion that some premise or evidence might be found that precontained the entire object of belief. However, this is an illusion. I do not view the yeti from all sides, then open it up for inspection. I did not survey the whole of Mrs. M's love, within and without. Yet my belief in her love was and is well founded. So the question returns: might a single theistic experience suffice? Consider again the other-minds parallel. Prior to perceiving Mrs. M's look I held no belief one way or the other concerning her love for her child. The look sufficed as evidence. Now, suppose that the child in the field neither believed nor disbelieved in God prior to her experience of that "presence, so kind, so loving, so bright, so consoling, so commanding, existing apart from me but so close." Might not that experience, similarly, suffice to ground belief? Might she not say to herself, "This must be the God I have heard of"? And mightn't she be right to say so? If not, why not? Where does the parallel break down? We have already considered one possibility: the religious experience may have a natural explanation (e.g., her unconscious or a chemical imbalance). A parallel suggestion would be that Mrs. M's look had a purely physical, nonmental explanation. This hypothesis appears less plausible than the other, but psychological influences of the kind enumerated in the last chapter might account for this subjective difference. How do the cases differ epistemically? A natural suggestion would be that the other-minds experience does not stand on its own but is backed by an implicit argument from analogy, whereas the mystical experience, being unique, enjoys no such backing. This suggestion leads from this chapter into the next. Here we have focused on experience and especially on its possible immediacy. This feature, it seemed, might have great significance. What we do not infer we may not need to infer, if it is directly perceived, and some have alleged direct experience of God or of other minds. However, given the incompleteness of either type of experience, it makes little difference whether the experience is mediate or immediate: a gap remains between the content of the experience and the full object of belief. Yet, regardless of its directness or indirectness, apparent experience may carry some epistemic weight. What weight that is depends on a variety of factors and especially on the likelihood that such an object exists and might so reveal itself. What reasons can be given for believing that other minds exist? What reasons can be given for believing that God exists? The next two chapters will examine in turn, first the foremost argument for the existence of other minds, then the chief argument, aside from religious experience, for the existence of God.  



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5 Analogy In The Christian Knowledge of God, H. P. Owen cites four "dissimilarities between our intuition of other human beings and our intuition of God." Of these differences, he regards the following two as most basic: (a) A human person's inner psyche and his outer acts are part of a single organism, the "embodied self." Hence his bodily actshis actions vis-à-vis other objects, his gestures, and above all his speechare adequate media for the expression of his mind. The world, however, is not co-substantial with God. Even when it reveals him it is incommensurate with his nature. (b) Therefore we cannot justify belief in God's existence and nature, as we can justify our belief in the existence and nature of other human persons, by the analogy of the immediately felt relation between our own acts and their mental source. Even though this analogy does not give us a logically decisive proof of our belief that other people have minds, it is enough to justify the "moral certainty" which accompanies our intuition. It proves [provides?] criteria for making the belief highly probable. There are no such criteria in the case of God because he is generically unique. 1 Like most, Owen regards the argument from analogy as the chief support for belief in other minds. Like most, he construes the analogy in terms of behavior. Like many, he recognizes no similar argument ("by the analogy of the immediately felt relation between our own acts and their mental source") for God. His remarks therefore suggest a framework for this chapter's comparative inquiry. First, does the argument from analogy suffice to "justify the 'moral certainty' which accompanies our intuition" of other minds? Second, does no similar argument hold for God? How great, in fact, is the alleged disparity? The focus here, as throughout this inquiry, will be epistemological, not psychological. Our question will be, "Do people have good analogical grounds for their belief (in other minds or in God)?", rather than, "Do people base their belief on analogical reasoning?" The need for this distinction appears  



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from remarks like those of Max Black. "It is generally said," he writes, "that we do believe that other minds exist on analogical grounds. When I see a pin stuck into my body, I experience a pain; hence when I see a pin stuck into your body, I argue by analogy that you are feeling a pain. And this hypothesis is confirmed by your testimony and subsequent behavior." 2 As an account of our actual thinking, this sounds implausible. As an account of an argument which we might constructof the grounds that we might, on reflection, cite for our beliefit sounds more realistic. Other Minds Simply stated, an argument by analogy proceeds from the association of A with B in one or more instances, to the probable association of A (or something like it) with a further instance, or further instances, of B (or something like it). For other minds, such analogical arguments vary greatly in their conclusions, evidence cited, and principles invoked. Their conclusion may be a sensation, belief, attitude, thought, intention, desire, dream, emotion, mind, or person. Their evidence may be causal (a dog sinks its teeth into a man's thumb), behavioral (the man cries out), or causal and behavioral together: "As I dropped the auroscope and jumped back, I saw that the dog had sunk his teeth into the ball of his master's thumb. And it wasn't an ordinary bite. He was hanging on, grinding deeply into the flesh. Mr. Whithorn emitted a piercing yell of agony before shaking himself free."3 Given both the bite and the yell, there can be little doubt: the man was in pain. To establish this conclusion, the evidence might be fed into a causal principle (e.g., "in the case of other human beings . . . the causal bases of their experiences are virtually identical with the causal bases of our experiences"),4 a behavioral principle (e.g., "Probably every case of painbehavior is accompanied by pain in the body displaying it"),5 or a combined causal-behavioral principle (e.g., "When I observe that some other person is similarly afflicted and that he acts in a similar way, I may infer that a similar feeling is also present").6 Numerous variant principles of these sorts have been proposed and carefully refined, and numerous arguments have been urged for and against them. However, we need not consider every combination of conclusion, evidence, and underlying principle. To clear a path through these complications, we can focus on our paradigm example, typical of many. My belief in Mrs. M's love for her child does not rest on a perceived cause of her love ("Whenever infants crow with delight, that causes their mothers to love them"). Neither does it rest on behavior perceived by two senses, as in the case of the man who audibly cries out and visibly shakes himself free. Instead, it rests on a single item of behavior perceived by a single sense: her loving look. That suffices. Yet I cannot recall another occasion on which I perceived such a look, of that intensity, much less an occasion on which I was somehow assured by other evidence that the look was indeed a look of love. As for other, less remarkably tender glances, none have stuck in my memory. So how, from such limited evidence, can an analogical argument be fashioned in support of my belief? Comparison with linguistic knowledge suggests a first response. Suppose I hear a person use a word, for instance the word "procrastinate." I am sure of the word's  



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meaning and am certain that the person has used it correctly. Yet what grounds do I have for my conviction? To be sure, I might consult a dictionary in confirmation of my belief, but its evidence would not ground my belief before the consultation. To be sure, too, this is not the first time I have heard the word used; but (speaking for myself) I cannot recall a single specific occasion on which I have heard the word used, much less an occasion on which the total evidence suggested that the word indeed had the meaning I am sure it has. Nonetheless, such is my evidence, and it is good evidence. For, as chapter 2 set forth, evidence need not be accessible to ground belief solidly. It does not matter, therefore, how many loving looks I can consciously recall that were somewhat similar to Mrs. M's. Despite my blank memory, I may in fact have perceived many such looks in people whose love was attested to by their other behavior. And perhaps these many looks furnish the basis for an inductive, analogical inference: If those other people loved the persons they so regarded, then probably Mrs. M, too, loved the person she so regarded. One difficulty concerns the connection with people's "other behavior." Suppose I caught a loving look in a widower's eyes as he regarded the photo of his deceased wife. And suppose I knew a great deal about his behavior toward his wife during their long relationship. He spoke to her in a certain tone, cared for her in her illness, spent much time with her, slept with her, and so forth. Although none of these individual items may bespeak his love more strongly than does the look itself, cumulatively each may receive backing from all the rest. The problem is, by what criterion should items be included or excluded? During the course of a day, this husband looked at his wife many times, and each time the look was the look of a man who did all these other things. Yet not all of the looks were distinctly loving looks. Indeed, the majority probably were notjust as the other looks of Mrs. M that I observed when she handled her baby were not particularly loving looks. It seems, therefore, that much as, in Quine's view, our reading of linguistic acts is underdetermined by the evidence, so our reading of loving acts is underdetermined by the evidenceor at least by our third-person evidence. What is missing, the familiar argument from analogy suggests, is one's own personal experience. Whenever I look at a person that special way, I love the person; so when Mrs. M looks at her child that way, probably she loves her child. To this familiar move, familiar objections may be raised. How can her facial expression closely resemble mine if her face does not closely resemble mine? What grounds do I have for supposing that she expresses her emotions just as I express mine, if she differs from me (as in fact she does) in sex, character, upbringing, parenthood, personal history, and other important respects? Most troublesome of all, what do I know about my own loving looks toward children or anyone else? I have not observed them in a mirror. If I did, they would not be spontaneous looks of love but attempts to stage-act loving looks while observing my performance. It seems, therefore, that an argument proceeding from analogy with myself cannot even get started. Though absent from Plantinga's critique in God and Other Minds, this final, most telling difficultythe lack of selfobservationhas long been recognized. Delton Scudder cites Theodor Lipps to the same effect:  



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Take, for instance, the expressive behaviour accompanying angerredness of the face, a certain characteristic setting of the features, stamping with the feet, and so on. In the case of another person being angry, we see all these changes, but we do not see them in our own case. If I turn red when I am angry, I cannot possibly know that I do, for as Lipps observes, we do not gaze into a looking glass while in a fit of rage. What I am aware of is a hot sensation in my cheeks, a catch in the breath, violent beating of the heart, etc.and these sensations present no analogy whatever to what I observe in the case of other people's anger. 7 This talk about what I observe may suggest a shift from the epistemological perspective that concerns us to the psychological perspective that does not. However, the upshot is epistemological: the data we do not observe, we do not know, reflectively or unreflectively. They form no part of our evidence, accessible or inaccessible. Hence they furnish us no reasons, good or bad, for believing in others' love, anger, sorrow, pity, joy, or the like. René Marres concedes that when, for example, we feel sorrow or anger we are usually not clearly aware of our own behavior, and that we are still less cognizant of our facial expressions of emotion. However, The solution of the problem is that a facial expression is usually not more than a part of the behavior and circumstances. It is true that we do not observe our own facial expression when we are angry. We do notice the aspect of our environment that makes us angry as well as the rest of our behavior, which usually includes a variety of other items. When someone else displays the same kind of behavior when stimulated by the same environmental factor, we do not need to rely on his facial expression to determine that he is angry. We do see on such an occasion what kind of face a person makes when angry. This information we then use later for our interpretation of the behavior of others. So in this way facial expressions do play a role.8 Thus, if external clues of which I am aware in myself and in others correlated in me with feelings of love and in others with looks like Mrs. M's, I might have reason to believe that Mrs. M's look was a look of love. However, what are these clues? What causal or behavioral aspects of my environment correlate with loving looks as stubbed toes correlate with pain or insults correlate with anger? Think of Mrs. M's reaction. Infants crow, gurgle, smile, suck their thumbs, or wave their arms without eliciting any tender look from their parents. And parents who love their children regard them sometimes lovingly, sometimes crossly, sometimes sadly, sometimes with amusement, and more often with no recognizable expression of emotion. In other instances, an analogical argument might come closer to explaining the solidity of our convictions. I may never have been bitten by a dog, may never have yelled out in pain, may never have shaken my hand free. Nonetheless, I have perceived things of these general kinds in myselfwounds, cries, bodily movementsas well as their connection with my pain. So doubtless a better analogical case might be made for Mr. Whithorn's pain than for Mrs. M's love. However, even in such a favorable example, it may be doubted whether the strength of the argument would match the strength of our conviction. And in cases like Mrs. M's, it appears entirely  



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unlikely that, in Owen's words, "the immediately felt relation between our own acts and their mental source" might provide "criteria for making the belief highly probable." Indeed, the support from analogy with myself looks so minimal in such instances, that analogical support for God's existence might well equal it or perhaps even surpass it. The alleged chasm between the two types of belief looks far from impassable. God Analogical intimations of God's existence fall roughly into two categories. Some are personal and particular; these will be considered here. Others are public and general and will be left for the next chapter. Between them, these two varieties far from exhaust the full range of evidence cited for God's existence, but they do figure among the most plausible and influential grounds. Though both varieties might be developed in the way Owen contests, "by the analogy of the immediately felt relation between our own acts and their mental source," the private kind lend themselves most readily to such formulation. Consider, for example, Augustine's conversion experience, recounted in his Confessions: I threw myself down somehow under a certain figtree, and let my tears flow freely. Rivers streamed from my eyes, a sacrifice acceptable to you, and (though not in these words, yet in this sense) I repeatedly said to you: "How long, O Lord? How long, Lord, will you be angry to the uttermost? Do not be mindful of our old iniquities." For I felt my past to have a grip on me. I uttered wretched cries: "How long, how long is it to be?" "Tomorrow, tomorrow." "Why not now? Why not an end to my impure life in this very hour?" As I was saying this and weeping in the bitter agony of my heart, suddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again "Pick up and read, pick up and read." At once my countenance changed, and I began to think intently whether there might be some sort of children's game in which such a chant is used. But I could not remember having heard of one. I checked the flood of tears and stood up. I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find. . . . So I hurried back to the place where Alypius was sitting. There I had put down the book of the apostle when I got up. I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: "Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts" (Rom. 13:1314). I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled. 9 His prayer had been answeredanswered by God. Such was clearly Augustine's conviction. His experience therefore belongs to a numerous, varied class which might be assimilated to human answers to human requests. These latter are something of  



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which we have personal experience, linking our inner responses to outer requests. How strong, though, is the analogy? Our first reaction might be to note that nothing in Augustine's account demands a supernatural explanation. The convergence of the prayer, the voice, the book, and the apt passage might be purely coincidental. So the evidence for divine intervention may appear weak. ("Experiences which are seen as the answer to a prayer often make fragile evidence, since the subjects themselves are usually willing to admit that things could have turned out just as they did without any divine aid." 10) However, such reasoning loses sight of the human analog with which answers to prayer are compared. In every instance, another person's appropriate response to a specific request might be purely coincidental. If, for example, I ask a librarian for a book on reserve and she brings me the very book mentioned, that, too, might be coincidental. Mental mediation is not the only possible explanation. In neither case, howeverthis one or Augustine'sdoes the hypothesis of sheer happenstance look adequate. Answers to requests addressed to humans fall along a continuum. At one end, the likelihood of mere coincidence is high (I urge my representative to vote against HR 317 and she does); at the other end, it looks slight (I ask a librarian to bring me Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and he does). Answers to prayer form a similar continuum: at one end the likelihood of coincidence is high (I pray for good weather, and lo, the weather is wonderful); at the other end it looks slight (I pray for $500 to meet the payment on the orphanage, and a check for $500 promptly arrives in the mail).11 Between these poles lie endlessly varied cases, some closely similar to Augustine's, others similar only in their suggestiveness. The same comparison with human answers to requests can illustrate the importance of this particular type of evidence within a cumulative case for God's existence. Suppose my only acquaintance with other human beings was observation of their buildings, bridges, roads, power plants, jet aircraft, ocean liners, and similar technological accomplishments. Impressed by their achievements, I might recognize and admire their intelligence but might have little sense of their goodness or of their being persons with whom I might form ties of friendship or affection. They might appear as cold and remote as the god of the deists. But let me interact with them, person to personlet us make requests of one another and have them grantedand the coldness and remoteness dissipate. The God of Augustine is a God who cares ("Take up and read, take up and read"). to personlet us make requests of one another and have them grantedand the coldness and remoteness dissipate. The God of Augustine is a God who cares ("Take up and read, take up and read"). I have been stressing analogies. Where are the disanalogies? First, the likely reasons for the outcome of requests made to God are, in general, more obscure than the reasons for the outcome of requests made to humans. Granted, even the latter are often mysterious. The president of a university asks the local alderwoman to present a streetclosing petition to the board. The petition appears reasonable, and she offers no objections to it, yet she stonewalls. Why? Prejudice against the university? Personal animosity toward the president? Board politics? Hope for useful leverage in gaining some advantage? Some hidden consequence of the plan, which she would rather not mention? Who knows, save the politician herself. One chief difference between human answers and divine is that we understand still less the reasons why pleas to God are sometimes granted, sometimes not. Why, for instance, were Augustine's earnest prayers answered on this occasion and not on previous occasions?  



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We may surmise possible explanations, as we can for the alderwoman, and recognize that our surmises may be off the mark, as we do for the alderwoman, but when making our requests to God, we are more acutely aware that his thoughts may not be our thoughts, nor his ways our ways. We are not omniscient. Neither are we omnipotent. A second disanalogy concerns the things that God can grant and that we can reasonably ask of him. What Augustine asked, only God could grant. What God did for Augustine, only God could do. Such is the impression in this and many other instances. The more pronounced the impression, the more likely we are to speak of the events as ''miraculous." We may not view the events that Augustine recounts as miraculous, nor even the arrival in the mail of the exact sum needed and prayed for. But if, in a pickup football game, a grotesquely broken bone is restored instantly in response to group prayer 12yes, that we regard as miraculous. Why? Where does the difference lie? A common answer has been that a miracle "violates the natural order." Yet this answer seems unfortunate, however miracles are viewed. One conception assimilates divine intervention to human intervention, and human intervention to nonhuman. If a strong wind sends leaves flying, no violation of the natural order has occurred: more than one kind of physical force exists, and one kind has counteracted another (kinetic force has counteracted gravity). If a human freely intervenes and rakes the leaves from where gravity holds them, no violation of the natural order has occurred: more than one kind of natural agent exists, and one kind has counteracted the other. Similarly, if God moves the leavesor heals a broken boneno violation of natural order need have occurred: more than natural agents exist, and another kind has exercised its superior power. Many kinds of forces and agents may interact without any alteration in their respective properties or powers or any violation of natural order. Material agents do their thing, human agents do their thing, and God does his thing: such is the natural order.13 Peter van Inwagen prefers a different conception. For God to work a miracle is for him to modify temporarily the powers of natural agentssay, of physical particles.14 "The causal powers supplied to a given particle are normally invariant, but God may, of His own good pleasure, momentarily supply certain particles with different sets of causal powers from the ones they normally receive from Him, and, if He does this, then a miracle occurs."15 In this perspective, too, talk of violating the order of nature appears unfortunate, since it suggests a rival power that God must overcome or the existence of necessities not dependent on his will. Inwagen dislikes even talk of divine "intervention." "The word 'intervention,'" he objects, "seems to imply that nature has some sort of native power, independent of God's, and that in working a miracle, God has, as it were, to overpower some part of nature."16 This seeming implication is no more than that, I suggest, for instances of intervention vary. When, for example, a surgeon removes an appendix, he does not overpower anything, but he does intervenehe does remove the appendix. Besides, any term applied to God carries possibly misleading connotations. And altering the very nature of particles appears more intrusive than simply blocking or altering their effects. However, semantics aside, actual instances of apparent miraclesthe instantaneous healing of a badly broken bone, neat silver fillings in children's rotten teeth17do not readily suggest the type of intervention Inwagen describes. What  



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powers would be given to what particles to bring about such effects? Why not suppose the creation of new bone or the creation of new silver? Why not suppose a combination of both modes of intervention? Why not suppose the suppression of some particles and the creation of others? Of more interest is the epistemological question: What reason do we have for supposing any such intervention? The answer depends principally on two factors: the type of case in question and the overall perspective, or set of assumptions, within which it is viewed. As already noted, candidate cases of divine intervention range from those like Augustine's, where a natural explanation is clearly possible, to cases like the fillings or the bone, where a natural explanation does not seem possible. Along this continuum, the more possible a natural explanation appears, the more we question a divine explanation of the facts, and the less likely a natural explanation appears, the more we question the alleged facts to be explained. (Was the grotesquely broken bone really just badly dislocated, or were those who observed the change somehow deluded? Did some unknown dentist slip into the village and surreptitiously insert the fillings without anyone observing him or his activity, or are those reporting the facts misreporting them?) Nowadays, such queries are likely to arise in anybody's mind. Whether the queries become doubts or the doubts become objections hinges largely on background assumptions. For the atheist, determinist, or deist, there must be a natural explanation of Augustine's experience, however great the coincidence appears, and the football players must be misreporting their experience of the injury and cure, however sane and sincere they appear. A nonexistent God or deistic God does not intervene in human affairs, and a deterministic universe permits no interference, human or divine, with its fixed course. To some, a naturalistic principle, excluding divine intervention, has appeared indispensable for doing science. And yet, as Alston notes: "The only thing a scientist is committed to assuming, by virtue of engaging in the scientific enterprise, is that there is a good chance that the phenomena he is investigating depend on natural causal conditions to a significant degree. These three qualifications mark three ways in which he need not be assuming the truth of the full determinist thesis. He need only assume a significant probability, he need only make his assumption for the particular area of his investigation, and he need not assume even there (even a chance of) complete determination." 18 Often, as in Hume, deterministic assumptions take a covert, epistemological form. The hypothesis of divine intervention, it is said, clashes with all our experience; so whatever people report, if it cannot be explained naturally, the report should be questioned and not the laws of nature. Though persuasive in a scientistic culture, such reasoning is tendentious. If "all our experience" here means the sampling derived from test tubes, cloud chambers, observatories, and the like, the question remains: Does the same (imperfect) regularity characterize all events, including human actions and religious experiences such as those being considered here? If, instead, "all our experience" is taken to embrace everything we have experiencedincluding conversions, healings, and the restthen there is no need to balance probabilities for or against divine intervention. The crucial move has already  



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been made, surreptitiously; the regularities observed in some areas on some occasions have acquired the status of "laws," governing the universe and deciding what is possible. And yet, as J. C. A. Gaskin has observed of such laws, "their real authority to say certain events could not happen is no better than the evidence which has been used to establish [them] in the first place." 19 What some see as impossible, others see as unworthy. A God who related to his creatures unpredictably, heeding Augustine's prayer while ignoring others, would be "arbitrary," "manipulative," "unjust."20 The difficulty, writes Hick, "is one of consistency. For if it is consistent with God's relationship to his creatures that he should over-ride the structure of their world whenever he chooses, to reveal himself to them, to give them guidance, to answer their prayers, to save them from sickness and danger, why does he not do this more often and on a larger scale?"21 Indeed, and why does God make a world in which there is sickness and danger and sin and need of conversion? Why does he not make a perfect world? In anticipation of chapter seven's discussion of this issue, I shall only note the tacit premise in Hick's argument: If we humans do not fully grasp the rationale for God's action in the world, God does not act in the world. Anyone who accepts this premise, with its implicit appraisal of human capabilities, should accept this other: If we humans do not fully grasp the reasons for the evil in the world, God does not exist. A more traditional, more modest, and I think more realistic assumption is that human knowledge and understanding may be more limited than Hick's argument supposes. As Peter Donovan notes, this assumption can have a liberating effect: A religious believer who looks on the world as a domain in which God may possibly manifest himself (in one way or another) has the potential for a whole range of significant experiences not open to the person without such a world-view. He does not just view the world in a religious way. He lives within it, and acts and responds and experiences its events and happenings (including his own feelings and states of mind) with the possibility in his mind that in doing so he may be coming in touch not just with the world and other people in it, but with the activity and manifestations of God.22 So viewed, incidents like those cited in this section acquire new epistemic significance. "For they are experienced under a wider interpretative system, which may be able to bear far more weight than the individual experiences by themselves can. Once seen as linked with a theology which makes them 'the kinds of experience you might expect' if it were true, they are both supported by the wider belief system and in turn give it support within an overall, cumulative argument."23 Overview Having considered analogical cases for other minds, then for God, let us now compare them. An argument for other minds in general or for one particular mind can draw on a variety of causal and behavioral evidence, often with little hindrance from inadequate self-observation. A person who cuts himself sees the cut. A person who cries out hears the cry. A person who answers another's request, say, for a book, is  



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aware not only of her inner experience linking request and execution but also of the execution. Such knowledge might serve as the basis for an analogical argument establishing another mind's existence or, more specifically, another's knowingly answering a request and not merely performing the requested action. I need not here discuss the precise strength of such an argument. What seems clear is that it would typically be stronger than an analogical argument for some divine response to prayer. For there the analogy is weaker; the effects of divine action may be perceived, but the divine action is not, even in the limited way that other humans' actions are. True, cases are common in which, for example, we send a mail order and receive the items requested without perceiving the intermediate activity of those who fill the order. And the gap between these responses and very specific answers to prayer may not seem great. Yet even here the epistemic balance tips in favor of the human response, in part because a basis in self-observation remains. We still know what it is like, inside and out, to answer others' requests. Once, however, we alter the cases compared and replace others' responses to our requests with, for instance, Mrs. M's loving look, the balance shifts. For we do not observe our own loving looks, so we cannot use that knowledge to construct an analogical argument for her love. How far does the balance shift? Does it favor at least the more likely instances of divine response to prayer, especially if known firsthand? I think the answer may be affirmative, for in such instances but not in the facial expression example an analogical argument of sorts can still be made. A beggar asks Augustine for alms; a feeling of compassion or a moment's reflection intervenes; a decision forms; and he hands the beggar a coin. In partial parallel, Augustine begs God for assistance with his problem, and an effective remedy for that problem is forthcoming. Augustine surely has some reason for supposing his prayer was answered, and the reason can be given analogical formulation, starting from his own experience. For in this instance there is no problem about linking the inner and the outer. Whereas I have no acquaintance with my own loving looks, Augustine, like the rest of us, is well aware of what requests are addressed to him and of how he then reacts, and can relate these public occurrences with the private thoughts, feelings, or decisions that, intervening between the requests and his reactions, make the reactions responses to the requests. If, as it seems, no comparable argument can be made for Mrs. M's love, thenstrictly from the standpoint of this chapter's discussionAugustine would seem to have had a stronger ground for his belief in God's reply than I have for my belief in Mrs. M's love. A better analogical argument from personal experience may be made for his belief than for mine. And the like may hold for many others who have similar experiences, as many do, It appears, though, that the analogical argument for Mrs. M's love enjoys advantages that compensate somewhat for the lack of self-observation. I may not know from my own experience how facial expressions reveal human love, but I do know from my own case that such a thing as human love exists. In contrast, only direct mystical experience of God could provide comparable evidence that such a being as God does or could exist, and it is not clear that even Augustine's mystical ascent at Ostia reached quite that point. Again, in an effort to even the epistemic balance, I might cite the cumulative evidence I have of other people's loveevidence which, though less striking than Mrs. M's look, does connect with my personal experience.  



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The words and actions that suggest their love for this or that person resemble words and actions I perceive myself directing toward those for whom I feel affection. Therefore I have reason to believe that other people experience love and that mothers, specifically, often love their children. These comparable cases lend plausibility to my conviction that Mrs. M loved her child. Augustine may have had similar cumulative experience of God's providential action toward himself or others, but in this expanded comparison, lack of self-observation no longer tells against the other-minds beliefs. It only weakens the case for my belief in Mrs. M's love. Again, I have cited objections against divine intervention, and I might cite others against impetratory prayer and "answers" to it. 24 My belief that satisfactory replies can respond to these objections does not alter the fact that such objections arise in a case like Augustine's but do not regarding Mrs. M's love. So perhaps, overall, the epistemic balance does come out fairly even, at least in this and similar comparisons. For a broader perspective, I should note several limitations of this and the preceding chapter. First, my reliance principally on Christian illustrations should not be taken to suggest that only Christians experience God. Second, my selective sampling of mystical experiences, then of answers to prayer, represents a wider, more varied range of religious experience (e.g., "experiences of new hope, strength, comfort, peace, security, and joy, seen as 'religious' because they are obtained during a religious activity such as prayer, apparently brought about by a divine power, or accompanied by the sense of a divine presence; experiences of being guided, 'called,' forgiven, and 'saved,' usually by an external divine power; healing experiences; an apparently divinely aided increase in moral virtues and love for others; and the discovery of 'meaning' in life").25 Third, more than experiences of the answer-to-prayer variety lend themselves to analogical analysis. For example, Powell quotes the following from the letter of a correspondent: "I decided to end my life, which had been utterly selfish and sinful. I was so miserable that I just wanted to end it all. I wanted to die by drowning. I imagined the ocean as a vast and watery mother who would rock me in the cradle of her waves and wash me clean in her waters. "I got to the strand of beach along the ocean, where I was to die. I walked all alone along the deserted shoreline. However, that day the ocean was not a warm and watery mother. The weather was nasty, and the ocean was a snarling beast. Inside me I knew that I had to die, to end it all. If I had to give myself to a snarling beast rather than throw myself into the arms of a great mother, then so be it.

 

"I had been walking along the sandy beach, and was about to turn into the water when I heard a very clear voice which seemed to be coming from within myself. It was very distinct and clear. The voice asked me to stop, to turn around and look down. There was something irresistible in the command, and so I did as I was asked. I could see only the waves of the ocean washing over, erasing my footprints in the sand. Then the voice returned: 'Just as you see the waters of the ocean erasing your footprints, so has my love and mercy erased all record of your sins. I want you back in my love. I am calling you to live and to love, not to die.'



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"It was like a shaft of blinding light in the darkness that was my life at that time. I turned away from the water and from all thoughts of dying. I have, with God's continued love and help, found a beautiful and satisfying life." 26 Though not an instance of response to prayer, this woman's experience does clearly resemble a personal exchange, with one person speaking and the other responding. And though not shared by others, such an experience can be communicated to others and stir belief similar to hers. "Something about the experience described in that letter," writes Powell, "sounds very authentic, and the author sounds truly balanced and blessed by God."27 Similar experiences are less rare than are such accounts, for reasons of a kind the same letter suggests. "I have never told anyone, not anyone, what happened to me that day on the beach. My whole life was changed forever by that experience. Still I was afraid that, if I were to share it, someone might tell me that it was all a dream, a delusion. Someone might tell me that I didn't really want to die, and so I made up the voice which would tell me what I really wanted to hear. Since so much of my life, the good and beautiful life I have found, is built on that moment, I could not risk its sacredness in hands that might be callous and insensitive. I could not bear to let someone take my most sacred secret and ridicule it."28 Whatever its likelihood, it seems that a natural explanation of this incident cannot in fact entirely be excluded. Granted, when people prefer not to die, they can, and generally do, simply act on their preference. Granted too, though inner voices are well known, this particular intervention would be a rather elaborate ruse for the unconscious to devise for its purposes. Thus, this woman's conviction seems reasonable. However, a naturalistic explanation in this instance does not appear as completely implausible as would a similar hypothesis with regard to Mrs. M's look. Surely I did not make up the expression on her face, nor project from within myself, for some mysterious motive, a loving interpretation of an unloving expression. For a still closer parallel, therefore, we can turn to a different type of experience: It is recorded that in answer to [St.] Martin's prayer the volume of oil in a flask increased. This is usually pooh-poohed, but not by those who have read, in The Hiding Place, the story of Corrie and Betsie ten Boom's experiences in Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1944. Betsie was ill, and Corrie tried to boost her health by putting on her slice of bread a drop of vitamin-concentrate from a tiny opaque bottle they had managed to smuggle in. But Betsie insisted on sharing the vitamins with others who were ill: more and more drops were given until twenty-five of their roommates were receiving them daily. Still the oil came. They encouraged themselves with Elijah's story of the bottle of oil which did not fail for the widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 17:1116). The day a new supply of vitamins arrived they up-ended their bottle and found it empty.29 Here, too, no prayer elicited a response. Still, it is natural to suppose that if the events were as reported, they were God's doing.30 Why? Not merely because in this instance  



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we can conceive no natural explanation, but also because we can conceive a non-natural explanation. Our own admiration, our own impulse to reward such generosity, suggests a divine analog. More generally, we have experienced our desire to help others, and the help we then furnished; and the assistance here provided suggests a parallel: "You have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress" (Is 25:14). It does, that is, if we are so disposedif we already believe in God, or halfway believe, or are inclined to take the possibility of God's existence seriously. And doubtless that depends on more than Just an individual experience, however well attested. In fuller support, a cumulative case might be made from many personal experiences, our own and others', of varieties mentioned in this and the preceding chapter. But we have not yet touched on the type of argument for God's existence that Plantinga and many others have considered strongest and that typically figures in the basis for people's belief in God. So let us move on.  



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6 Teleology Our exploration continues, in search of evidence for other minds and evidence for God, preparing a final comprehensive comparison between the two beliefs. Having examined more or less immediate experience of God and of other minds, then analogical indications on both sides, now we turn to what many have judged the strongest evidence for God's existencethe kind formulated in one or other version of the "teleological argument." Hume's classic statement of this argument reads in part: "The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble one another, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work, which he has executed." 1 In what he termed "perhaps the strongest version" of this argument, Plantinga proposed the following reformulation: Everything that exhibits curious adaptation of means to ends and is such that we know whether or not it was the product of intelligent design, in fact was the product of intelligent design. The universe exhibits curious adaptation of means to ends. Therefore the universe is probably the product of intelligent design.2 For Plantinga the chief difficulty that remains, even for this formulation, is the poverty of the conclusion. The teleological reasoner may have some evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer, but how does the presence of design in the universe indicate the existence of only one designer? How does it indicate the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good creator?3 Leaving these concerns for subsequent chapters, let us attend here to the pressing modern, post-Darwinian query: How does the evidence indicate the existence of an intelligent designer?  



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In response to recent scientific findings, the teleological argument has undergone dialectical development. What in Hume's day looked like products of intelligent design now look like results of natural evolution, but natural evolution itselffrom big bang to life, sentient beings, and Homo sapiensnow looks like the product of supremely intelligent design. To construct whole villages from Tinkertoys would be clever; to construct Tinkertoys that form the villages on their own would be prodigious. How prodigious the unfolding of our universe has been, we have only recently begun to glimpse. In partial summary, What the recent discoveries suggest is that our universe's early expansion speed, the strengths of its four basic forces, the masses of its particles, its degree of entropy, etc., are such that tiny changes in them would have made Life's evolution impossible; for there would then have been no galaxies, no planets, maybe even no chemistry, let alone biochemistry. For example, a change in the expansion speed by less than one part in a million could have led the universe to fly to pieces too fast for galaxies to form, or else (in the case of decreased speed) to recollapse within one hundred thousand years. A 2% strengthening of the strong nuclear force would have made protons, and hence atoms, impossible; a 15% weakening would have yielded a universe of hydrogen only. Again, all the richness of chemistry depends on a difference in the neutron and proton masses, a difference which has to be more or less exactly one part in a thousand. A slight change here would have been Life-excluding. 4 To many, the universe's size, newly revealed, may appear prodigal, extravagant, pointless, But in fact for life to appear, elements such as oxygen, carbon, phosphorous and nitrogen, which are much heavier than hydrogen, require several billion years heating up in the interior of a star. But general relativity requires that a universe providing several billion years of time must be several billion light years in extent. Thus from the point of view of the possibility of life, the universe, far from being extravagantly large, could not be other than it is if life is to emerge.5 The general impression such a universe evokes is one of fantastic fine-tuning, signaling fantastic intelligence and power. "Through my scientific work," writes Paul Davies, "I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation."6 Davies speaks of "ingenuity," but how does that come out? What, precisely, backs this impression of a powerful, intelligent source of the universe? "What, precisely?" The query can be taken in two different ways, as our other-minds paradigm brings out. The precise evidence for Mrs. M's love might be either some specific feature of her countenanceher eyes, her lips, the wrinkles on her browor the precise overall configuration of her eyes, lips, brow, and the rest. Teleological arguments for God have tended to focus on specific traits, for example on the means-end relationship, but our paradigm serves as a reminder that such an ap 



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proach may not be appropriate. It would be hopeless to argue that eyes which appear as Mrs. M's did always betoken love, regardless of the circumstances, the object of the look, or the rest of the person's physiognomy. Conceivably, a sharply focused teleological argument might encounter similar difficulties. This comparison and the alternatives it reveals can structure what otherwise might prove an excessively diffuse discussion. Were it my purpose to argue convincingly and exhaustively for some single version of the teleological argument, I could state the premises, draw the conclusion, and then answer objections. The order of exposition could largely take care of itself. However, such an approach looks no more promising for God than it does for other minds. Since my intention is, instead, to continue exploring the comparison between belief in God and belief in other minds, I shall adopt the framework just suggested by that comparison. First I shall consider the possibility that specific features of the universe bespeak an intelligent source, then the possibility that the universe as a whole bespeaks such a source. How close is the resemblance, in this respect, with Mrs. M's loving look? Along the way, I shall suggest more detailed comparisons. A Sample Focused Argument In The Existence of God Swinburne first briefly considers a reconstructed teleological argument that takes as its basis not present-day life forms, but the universe that engendered them: "natural laws are clearly such as to produce complex organisms from inorganic matter under certain circumstances." 7 In Swinburne's view, this argument, though immune to Darwinian surprises, is weakened by "the evident paucity of organisms throughout the universe"8 (an odd objection, it seems, given the cosmic conditions required for any life). He therefore turns to a form of teleological argument which appears much stronger to him. Its premise is the temporal order of the world"its conformity to formula, to simple, formulable, scientific laws. The orderliness of the universe in this respect is a very striking fact about it. The universe might so naturally have been chaotic, but it is notit is very orderly."9 Clearly, no scientific explanation can be given of this striking fact, via the very laws to be explained. There remains, then, only the alternative, personal type of explanation, through the intentional activity of a rational agent. This argument, as Swinburne notes, "is basically an argument by analogy, an analogy between the order in the natural world (the temporal order codified in laws of nature) and the patterns of order which men often produce (the ordered books on library shelves, or the temporal order in the movements of a dancer or the notes of a song) ."10 Why, one might wonder, does regularity require explanation more than does irregularity? The structure of a quartz is regular, the pattern of the acorns scattered round an oak tree is irregular; yet both have explanationsexplanations that, finally, must come to an end. Why not end with the regularities of nature? Why seek a further explanation? Given an irregular universe, might not we then remark, in parallel with Swinburne: "The universe might so naturally have been orderly, but it is notit is chaotic. Why these irregularities?" Or consider human agency. Some intelligent action produces regularities (e.g., a French garden, as at Versailles), some  



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produces irregularities (e.g., an English garden, as at King's College). How, then, does regularity rate special consideration? Why does regularity, rather than irregularity, require a special, personal explanation? Where, precisely, does the nub of the argument lie? Perhaps here. Swinburne argues that there are many more ways for a universe to be irregular rather than regular and that regularity is therefore less likely, a priori, and more in need of explanation. 11 This, too, proves puzzling. If I pick a card at random from a pack and it turns out to be a queen, is that pick less likely because the card is a queen and there are so few queens? In a well-shuffled deck, the pick of a queen is less likely than that of a nonqueen, as the pick of a two is less likely than that of a non-two, and so for every other card in the pack; but the pick of a queen is not less likely than that of any other cardjack, ace, three, or nine; and the pick of a specific queen, say of clubs, is not less likely than that of any other specific cardjack of hearts, ace of diamonds, or what have you. Similarly, the occurrence of a regular universe may be less likely than that of an irregular universe (I shall not argue the matter12), as the occurrence of an irregular universe consisting of three pebbles making wild, irregular gyrations is less likely than that of a universe not consisting of three pebbles, and so for all other universes; but the occurrence of a specific regular universe is no less likely than the occurrence of any other universe, however described, simply by reason of its regularity. Every conceivable universe might be so described as to make its occurrence seem improbable. What is so special about regularity compared, say, with threepebbledness or irregular gyrations? Such puzzlement suggests that the comparison with Mrs. M may indeed be apt. Focusing on nature's regularity as evidence of intelligence resembles focusing on Mrs. M's eyes as evidence of her love. As she gazed on her child, her eyes may have been specially striking, specially significant, but not by themselvesnot apart from her whole countenance. Similarly, the order of the universe may be specially striking, specially significant, but not by itselfnot apart from the whole universe. And indeed, Swinburne thus situates his more focused argument: ''It is very unlikely indeed a priori that there should be a universe made of matter behaving in totally regular ways, giving rise to conscious beings capable of changing themselves and others, making themselves fit for the heaven of which they have a glimpse in religious experience. Hence the reason which we use about science and history demands that we postulate a simple explanation of these phenomena in terms of a creator and sustainer God."13 The universe might have consisted of a thimble, a mud pie, or sheer chaos. Why this? Literary Analogy The shift of focus from a partial aspect such as order or design to the whole temporal tableau brings a shift from human analogs such as the notes of a song or well-ordered books on a shelf, to richer, more complex terms of comparison. For John Davis,

 

the world as a whole, in those aspects of interest to modern physics, is analogous to a human contrivance. By "contrivance" I mean a complex entity



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whose interrelated and interdependent parts are delicately adjusted to one another, and function over time in a regular, law-like manner, so as to produce an intellectually interesting result. By this definition a computer and printer producing an accurate readout, or a symphony orchestra playing Beethoven's Fifth, would be instance of contrivances, while one thousand monkeys pounding randomly on one thousand typewriters would not. The universe as known by modern physicists, with its finely tuned parts, operating according to regular laws, so as to produce a significant resultconscious lifeis, on this construction, a contrivance. 14 For others, looking beyond sheer physics, the drama of existence evokes comparison, not with a contrivance, but with such works of creative intelligence as the novels of Tolstoy or the plays of Shakespeare. The Designer or Creator of the universe becomes the Teller of the cosmic tale. Thus Dorothy Sayers suggests that "we consider God as a living author whose span of activity extends infinitely beyond our racial memory in both directions."15 With respect to his creation, "we are thus considering the temporal universe as one of those great serial works of which installments appear from time to time, all related to a central idea whose completeness is not yet manifest to the reader. Within the framework of its diversity are many minor and partial unitiesof plot, of episode, and of character."16 The force of this analogy depends in part on the percipient. "When we are very young children," writes G. K. Chesterton, "we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door."17 Boys, doors, movements, muscleswith the passing years all this and much more becomes familiar, like a story heard many times, and therefore loses its interest. That is why people spend so much time reading and watching the latest news. That is why scientists probe the ever-new mysteries of nature. "You know," remarks Ray Bradbury, "if I were going to become a rabbi or a priest or a minister tomorrow, I would have every Sunday morning or every Friday evening nature films and films on astronomy because the universe is so damned miraculous no matter how you look at it, scientifically or religiously or whatever."18 Such is the subjective attitude required to appreciate the force of the literary analogy. At the same time, however, science can subtly weaken the analogy's impact. It can suggest that once the big bang occurred, all else followed necessarily. It can suggest that if we just give scientists time, they will explain not only what followed but also what preceded and why the universe had to be as it is. No creator is required, much less a teller of the tale. So here Hume's lesson applies. Nature's "laws," of whatever generality, are mere regularities. We do not see and can never expect to intuit any logical link between what precedes in nature and what follows, any more than we can in a fairy tale. Neither, for that matter, can we discern any necessity in the initial conditions of the universe, to which the laws then apply.19 Hence, Chesterton's intuitive attitude is not fantastic but philosophically well grounded. "The only words," he wrote, "that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact and  



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its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched." 20 All occurs with the contingency of a tale told by a storyteller.21 The evidential weight of the literary analogy depends as well on the analogy's closenessthat is, on the degree of similarity between the universe and a literary work of art. This depends, in turn, on the type of literary composition chosen for comparison. With respect to their manner, content, and creativity, literary works form continua, and the cosmic analogy is closer at one end of each continuum than at the other. Manner Joseph Beach complains that "authors like Thackeray, or Balzac, say, or H. G. Wells . . . are always telling the reader what happened instead of showing them the scene, telling them what to think of the characters rather than letting the reader judge for himself or letting the characters do the telling about one another."22 By contrast, many a modern novelist "has effaced himself, renounced the privilege of direct intervention, retreated to the wings and left his characters to work out their own fates upon the stage."23 This, of course, is figuratively put. Upon an actual stage, with actors interposed between author and audience, the author disappears still more completely. There, "the spectator evidently has no direct concern with the author at all, while the action is proceeding. The author places their parts in the mouths of the players, leaves them to make their own impression, leaves us, the audience, to make what we can of it. The motion of life is before us, the recording, registering mind of the author is eliminated. That is drama; and when we think of the storyteller as opposed to the dramatist, it is obvious that in the full sense of the word there is no such thing as drama in a novel."24 But there is in real life, with its analogous mixture of script and improvisation (more on this below). Content On the other hand, however, as Percy Lubbock notes, "it is the method of picture-making that enables the novelist to cover his great spaces of life and quantities of experience, so much greater than any that can be brought within the acts of a play."25 Even a novel confined to a local setting, such as Middlemarch or Madame Bovary, states much moreof mores, history, and inner lifethan could ever be portrayed on stage or screen. Here, too, a continuum stretches, from a story centered on some single event at one extreme to an epic novel such as War and Peace at the other: "It is a panoramic vision of people and places, a huge expanse in which armies are marshalled. . . . It is crowded with life, at whatever point we face it; intensely vivid, inexhaustibly stirring, the broad impression is made by the big prodigality of Tolstoy's invention. If a novel could really be as large as life, Tolstoy could easily fill it; his great masterful reach never seems near its limit; he is always ready to annex another and yet another tract of life, he is only restrained by the mere necessity of bringing a novel somewhere to an end."26 Life itself, the universe itself, is not so constrained. Creativity Fiction ranges by degrees of originality from the heavily autobiographical novel, which re-creates life, to the historical novel, which is more inventive, to the realistic but entirely fictional novel, to a work of fantasy such as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, with its elves, dwarves, and hobbits set in a mythical past. Yet even such imaginative works as Tolkien's do not conjure up an entirely new world. As  



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Tolkien himself remarked, "Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted." 27 Some science fiction has ventured farther into never-never land, but not to the point of literary and scientific creation ex nihilonot to the point of creating an alternative universe inhabited by entirely alien beings, subject to a different set of physical laws, fully worked out. Even if written, such a work could not, of course, be acted out on the stage. Remaining mere words, it would be less real than a dramatic presentation. On the other hand, no stage enactment could have the comprehensiveness of a written account. So no single literary work approximates the cosmic analog in every respect. Neither does any literary work fully resemble the cosmic analog in any single respect. For example, even in a human drama, it is true, the actors are not forced to say the precise words and perform the precise actions set down in the script, and often they do not; but if humans are free agents, the divine dramatist not only does not force them to comply but writes no precise script for them to follow.28 Again, though human agencythe transition, say, from an author's thoughts and intentions to a written textis profoundly mysterious, the mode of fully creative activity"from nothing"would be still more mysterious. Whatever form literary agency takes, it relies on preexisting materials for its content and execution. However, complete resemblance is not necessary. An argument by analogy is not an argument by perfect similarity. After all, as noted, one novel does not exactly resemble another, still less does one type of literary production exactly resemble another. The question is, does the degree of analogy just indicatedthis general family resemblancesuffice to back the inference to a Teller of the tale, a Writer of the cosmic script? Comparison with Mrs. M suggests that it may. For my belief in her love is well founded, and its likeliest inductive grounding is by way of loose, indefinite analogy, as in the present instance. I had not previously seen that look on Mrs. M's face. I had not seen it on anybody else's face just as on hers. But doubtless I had noted somewhat similar looks on somewhat similar faces, looks that (despite the difficulties raised in the last chapter) I perhaps had some reason other than just their appearance to interpret as loving looks. And this experience, though never analyzed and no longer remembered, may have grounded my instant recognition of Mrs. M's glance as a tenderly loving look. Granted, neither for her love nor for the cosmic narrative is it possible to specify the most essential points of the comparison or the requisite degree of similarity, point by point. But such cannot be expected of a mere argument by analogy. "A mere argument by analogy," I say. Yet Mrs. M's look, I am convinced, did strongly back my belief in her love. And contemplation of the universe can beget similar conviction. So here is a puzzle. Is the conviction in both instances too strong? Or have we just failed to spot some cogent argument lurking in the evidence? Or does the problem perhaps lie, instead, in our notion that strong conviction, to be epistemically warranted, must be grounded in evidence capable of being formulated as a strong argument?  



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How Strong a Case? Faced with the accumulating evidence of extraordinary fine-tuning in the universe, some thinkers have come up with the theory that ours is just one of an infinity of universes in which all possible arrangements are realized. In this account, the question "Why this universe?" is no longer relevant, since all possible universes exist. For many other thinkers, as for Davies, "To postulate an infinity of unseen and unseeable universes just to explain the one we do see seems like a case of excess baggage carried to the extreme. It is simpler to postulate one unseen God." 29 What the theory does attest to, by its very extravagance, is the strength of the impression made by the recent discoveries. Such a universe cries out for explanation. Yet when the attempt is made to spell out this impression in terms of specific arguments, they seem to lack the strength of the original impression. As noted, a case like that of Mrs. M raises the same issue in the same way. There, too, the impression is strong, the evidence convincing, yet no attempt to articulate the evidence in argument form is equally convincing. From this contrast, as from the other, we might infer that the impression of epistemic solidity is erroneous, or we might, instead, be led to question the argumentative requirements we tend to impose on the evidence. Some have maintained, and many may have assumed unreflectively, that "when an analogy looks good there is a plain inductive generalization to support it; where there is no such support the analogical argument is worthless."30 Thus, for Russell, If we are to know of the existence of matter, of other people, of the past before our individual memory begins, or of the future, we must know general principles of some kind by means of which such inferences can be drawn. It must be known to us that the existence of some one sort of thing, A, a sign of the existence of some other sort of thing, B, either at the same time as A or at some earlier or later time, as, for example, thunder is a sign of the earlier existence of lightning. If this were not known to us, we could never extend our knowledge beyond the sphere of our private experience.31 Here, in part, may lie the source of our problem. I had only that one tender look of Mrs. M to go by. Was that not enough? We have only this one remarkable world to go by. Is that not enough? Russell, it seems, would reply in the negative, unless the single case can be subsumed under a general lawa general law for loving looks, a general law for universes. But we know no such law. So if Russell is right, it would appear that neither conviction is well founded. However, Russell's requirement itself lacks foundation. Why must epistemic links be general? Because such are science's needs? Because "scientific explanation, however one chooses to spell it out, must involve recourse to nomological regularities"?32 To extrapolate the conditions for science and require that they be met by all factual inferences looks like wishful thinking on a cosmic scale. A natural science of universes is an oxymoron, and no science of the mind grounds our everyday convictions about others' thoughts and feelings. Consider my belief in Mrs. M's love. If my myriad experiences of my own and others' expressions of affection were brought to light, would they reveal a hidden premise of the form, "Any person, regardless of her character, age, life story, temperament, facial features, circumstances, etc., who directs her gaze at another  



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person and configures her features in such-and-such a fashion loves, or probably loves, that person"? Would they have to do so, for my beliefmy firm beliefto be well founded? Familiar criteria for analogical inference are less exigent. The more loving looks (somehow known as such) Mrs. M's look resembled, the more numerous and varied the lookers, the more numerous the similarities and the less numerous the dissimilarities between her look and theirs, and the greater the relevance of the similarities and irrelevance of the dissimilarities, the stronger would be the case for her love. There is no need to pick out some single trait or set of traits and build a case on that. Nonetheless, even by these looser tests, a gap still yawns between the strength of the analogical case I might make for my conviction and the strength of the conviction. An argument should not be shakier than the conclusion it is meant to establish, but such is the case in this instance. How can I be sure of these other people's looks if I am not sure of Mrs. M's? And who are these other people? My memory yields no scrapbook or album of fond expressions. It does not even yield a distinct impression, trait by trait, of Mrs. M's glance. Even if it did, which traits would be most relevant, which least? Which less visible factorsage, temperament, culture, character, circumstances, etc.would be most relevant, which least? In the cosmic case by analogy, the analogs (e.g., Tolstoy's novels, Shakespeare's plays) are more definite, and the similarities and dissimilarities are more evident. However, to assess their import, it is necessary to distinguish, first, between analogies that would hold if the universe had an author and analogies that suggest that the universe has an author, and, second, between differences of degree and differences of kind. Consider, for example, the question of creativity. If God is teller of the tale, his creativity resembles, yet exceeds, that of the most creative human narrator. This difference, it might be said, is one of degree, not of kind and therefore does not weaken the case for God's authorship but, if anything, strengthens it. Or it might be urged, on the contrary, that total creativity differs not just in degree but also in kind and therefore counts against God's authorship. However, this particular analogy, with regard to creativity, enters at the end of the argument and not at the start. If God is the narrator, his activity is still more creative than that of any human author. But is God the narrator? What intimates his authorship? Well, what signs suggest human authorship? The meaningful words suggest authorship, the contents suggest creative intelligence and purpose. With respect to the words, the cosmic analogy seems weakest; with respect to the contents, it seems strongest. Which, then, is more relevantthe medium or the message? On this score, the psalmist had no doubts:

 

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. (Ps. 19:14)



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Novelists use written words, bards use spoken words, dramatists use both, mimes use neither. Yet whatever the medium, genius may appear, and by whatever criteria one defines creative genius, the world bears the marks of such geniusindeed, genius of a transcendent order. In their panoramic portrayal of people and placescomplex, coherent, vivid, stirring, imaginativeeven Tolstoy and Shakespeare fell far short of the stupendous drama, the stupendous universe, in which they lived out their lives. And yetwhat about goodness? Where does that key characteristic of divinity figure in the analogy? Fiction being fiction, a dark taleLord Jim, Moby Dickmay be a work of genius without being a work of evil genius. But for the world to be a work of God and to give evidence of God's existence, the cosmic tale cannot be dark; overall and in the end, it cannot be better that the world had never existed. In general, the less good the world, the less it speaks of God; the better the world, the more eloquently it speaks of God. Thus Garcia, in chapter 4, evokes the "beauty and grandeur of the Pacific Northwest," not a strip mine or slag heap, and her admirable parents, not criminals or psychopaths. Similarly, Plantinga proposes "God made this flower" as a properly basic belief, not "God made this puddle." So too, teleological arguers cite order, not disorder, as evidence, and invoke an anthropic principle, not a puddle principle or slag-heap principle. With a similarly positive focus, Swinburne asks: Why is intelligent life in special need of explanation? Why is there anything more to be explained if a Universe contains intelligent life than if it does not? Because, intelligent life is something which a creator God would have the power and abundant reason for bringing about, and so a phenomenon which, if he exists, would be quite likely to occur. If it is also (as the argument from fine-tuning claims) something not in the least likely to occur except as a result of God's agency, then its occurrence is evidence for God's existence. 33 The like holds for other goods besides those connoted by the phrase "intelligent life." "Telos" means end or goal, and goals are seen as good, worth striving for. Sometimes this aspect of teleological evidence remains tacit, as in St. Paul's allusion to "the things he has made" (Rom 1:20); often it becomes more explicitand not just in Christian circles. With Hebrew sage and prophet, Jews as well as Christians declare: "The work of the Lord is full of his glory" (Sir 42:16; Is 6:30). Outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, "God's handiwork appears often in the Qu'ran as the first, if not the foremost, locus of divine revelation. It comes down to this: anyone who sees the natural world in all its wonder with open eyes and an open heart will see there the unmistakable signs of the Creator."34 Others, however, have viewed things very differently. "So far as scientific evidence goes," writes Russell, "the universe has crawled by slow stages to a somewhat pitiful result on this earth and is going to crawl by still more pitiful stages to a condition of universal death. If this is to be taken as evidence of purpose, I can only say that the purpose is one that does not appeal to me."35 Science, of course, says nothing about a"pitiful result"; that is Russell's gloss. The Cascades are part of the result, as are Garcia's admirable parents. However, so are plagues, wars, and holocausts. Hence discussion of teleological evidence for God leads perforce to the question of evil. Is this universeand are weworth creating?  



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7 Good and Evil With regard to good and evil, two related issues must be distinguished: the validity of the teological argument for God's existence and the validity of the argument from evil against God's existence. The connections of these two questions to each other and to our comparative inquiry can be sketched, in first outline, as follows: (1) A satisfactory explanation of all the world's evils would doubly strengthen the case for God's existence, both by reinforcing the teleological argument on the one hand and by removing the objection from evil on the other. So doing, it would greatly reinforce Plantinga's hypothesis that belief in God is epistemically comparable to belief in other minds, for little or no teological evidence backs many an other-minds belief (for instance, my belief in Mrs. M's love). Even limited explanatory success might bolster Plantinga's thesis to some extent; however, given our cognitive limitations and the complexity of the universe, it appears unlikely that we humans could succeed in providing a detailed, comprehensive explanation of all evils. (2) For the same reasonsour limitations and the world's complexityit may not be necessary to explain all evils to counter the objection from evil. For all we fallible human beings know, there may well be a satisfactory explanation for each and every evil in the universe; we are illequipped to play Providence. "I firmly disbelieve, myself," wrote William James, "that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken." 1 However, the appeal to ignorance works both ways. Perhaps, for all we know, the universe is not good overall; perhaps it is not worth creating. How can we tell, being so  



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ignorant and fallible? If, however, we could do no more than confess our ignorance, an important argument for God's existencethe teological argumentwould lack essential confirmation. (3) We might, though, have reason to believe that all evils and types of evil are in fact explained, even if we humans do not know the explanation, in detail and comprehensivelymuch as children may have reason to believe in their parents' love without being able to account for all their parents' decisions, comprehensively or in detail. If so, the teleological argument would retain its force, and the answer to the problem of evil would be made stronger than by just partial success in explaining evil, in (1), or by a purely negative argument from ignorance, in (2), or by both of these together. Therewith, the epistemic comparability of belief in God and belief in other minds would be heightened correspondingly. The literature discusses (1) more than (2), and (2) much more than (3), but here, for the reasons indicated, emphasis will fall successively on each of the listed possibilities: first, a complete human explanation of evil; second, an answer from human ignorance to the problem of evil; and third, nonexplanatory intimations that the world is good overall and contains no gratuitous evils. Evil Explained War, famine, pestilence, bereavement, corporate greed, earthquakes, tornadoes, Holocaust, depression, despair, drought, dementia, the agonies of cancerthe litany of terrestrial miseries goes on and on. What kind of deity would permit so many and such dire evils? Is their existence compatible with the existence of an all-good, allknowing, all-powerful creator and sustainer of the universea God who desires to minimize evil, can do so, and knows how? Several levels of response to this query can be distinguished. Eschewing any "theodicy," Hans Kiing ventures only to suggest that "the mystery of the Incomprehensible in its goodness encompasses also the wretchedness of our suffering." 2 The nature of this "encompassing" is left nebulous, as is the reference to the mystery of God's goodness. Are just the specifics of divine providence unfathomable, or do even its most general outlines escape our all-too-human ways of thinking? Apparently both. In his reluctance "inquisitively to get behind God's mystery and world plan,"3 Küng efuses to specify in even the most general terms what a morally acceptable explanation of evil might look like. At a slightly less abstract level, it might be suggested that God's goodness resembles, for example, the goodness of a human parent. A loving father may permit his child to suffer, indeed, may even inflict suffering on the child, but only in view of some compensating good, whether of the child or of others (for example, members of the family) whose good he also has at heart. He may give the child unpleasant medicine or consent to a painful operation for the sake of its health, may send it to school or deny it TV for the sake of its intellectual development, may punish or scold it to improve its character, and so forth. What an assertion of fatherly love excludes is any suffering permitted or inflicted on the child without compensating reason. So it is for human fathers. So it is for God.4  



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Though helpful in understanding the problem of evil, this response does not solve the problem, either in the sense of assuaging people's grief in their misfortune (for that the response is far too general and abstract) or in the sense of providing any evidence that the world's evils are, in fact, thus providentially accounted for. Thus Swinburne, like others, goes further and in a full-fledged theodicy, or justification of God's ways, suggests what compensating values may explain the world's evils. In The Existence of God, for the two chief types of evil he suggests two chief explanations. 5 First, the value of genuine freedom may explain a host of evilspersecutions, wars, massacres, injustices of every descriptionbrought about by the abuse of free will. Second, the value of knowledgespecifically, "knowledge of how to bring about evil or prevent its occurrence"may explain a host of natural evils.6 For example, How are men to have the opportunity to stop future generations catching asbestosis, except through knowledge of what causes asbestosis, and how is that to be obtained except through records which show that persons in contact with blue asbestos many years ago have died from asbestosis thirty years later? Or suppose that men are to have the choice of building cities along earthquake belts, and so risking the destruction of whole cities and their populations hundreds of years later, or of avoiding doing so. How can such a choice be available to them unless they know where earthquakes are likely to occur and what their probable consequences are? And how are they to come to know this, unless earthquakes have happened due to natural and unpredicted causes, like the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755?7 This account has still more validity, I think, than comes out in Swinburne's ample exposition. And such explanations do mitigate the problem of evil. In a general way they suggest that all evils in each category and each evil in all categories may be compatible with the existence of God. To prevent the Holocaust, one might have to eliminate human freedom. To prevent the death of loved ones from cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, or other dread diseases, one might have to eliminate the regularities of nature and therewith the knowledge required for free human action. However, so long as a theodicy does not tighten each such connection and turn each "might" into "would," doubts may remain. One may wonder, for example, whether moral freedom entails the possibility of sin. Have not Christians held that the saved, living in God's presence, do not sin, and are the saved not free? If they are not, and yet live in bliss, is freedomfreedom to commit atrocious actsreally such an overriding value? Again, one may wonder whether this person's pain or that person's death is really required for the general knowledge that permits us to lead our lives. Have not theists believed, rightly, that occasional divine intervention, upsetting nature's regularity, carries no threat for scientific or practical understanding of the world? So why is this prayer answered and that prayer not? Why is this patient cured and that patient not? Even at this third, more detailed level of explanation, the ways of God remain mysterious. To remove all mystery and end all doubts, explanation would have to descend to a fourth, final level and become more particular and precise than any explanation has been or is ever likely to be. In Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey,  



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Brother Juniper takes a piecemeal approach and seeks to divine, person by person, what reasons Providence might have for allowing five specific people to perish. But for an apologist seeking to justify all evils, such a procedure is not feasible. The available facts are too few. The cases to consider are too many. The variety of possible explanations is too great. Hence the apologist's only hope, and the tactic consistently adopted, is to formulate a blanket account, covering all evils or whole classes of evils and abstracting from the varied, concrete details of particular cases. The question is whether this strategy of uniform, abstract, once-for-all rationales is merely an expedient or is required in principle. Consider again the comparison with a father and child, and suppose, for example, that the father repeatedly denies the child's requests to stay up late for club meetings, bridge parties, and various other gatherings in the home. It is not excluded that the father's refusals all have a single explanation, or that at least some single consideration always figures among his reasons, or that this single consideration, though accompanied by others, would suffice by itself to motivate his refusals. But there is little reason to assume such uniformity. One time the child may have a cold, another time a guest may object, a third time the family may be leaving early the next morning, a fourth time the child may have misbehaved, and so forth. Many refusals might be explained by the child's need for sleep, but not all. Many might be explained by a daily bedtime rule, but then that rule and its rigidity would have to be explained. Flaws might be found in any general defense of the father's decisions, yet the decisions might be loving in every instance. Is a case-by-case, person-by-person providence somehow a second-rate, all-too-human providence, unworthy of divine omniscience? Christian scripture and tradition have not thought so. Is such a conception somehow naive and unrealistic? The contrary looks likely. It is theodicists or their critics who are naive if they suppose that the workings of Providence must be sufficiently simple and uniform for humans to be able to formulate them abstractly and once for all, without regard for the many mysteries of physics, biology, cosmology, psychology, economics, philosophy, and theology, or for varied circumstances. Such simplicity and uniformity are not excluded a priori. Yet surely they cannot be assumed. ''There seems to be no reason in principle," M. B. Ahern remarks, "why instances of evil of the same kind should not be justified in wholly different or partly different ways. Nor does there seem to be any reason, in principle, why two instances of the same kind and degree should not be justified in ways that differ wholly or in part." 8 Hence theodicists' failures, alleged or real, do not have the significance they and their critics often assume. Indeed, paradoxical as it may appear, the worse the prospects are for a completely successful theodicy, blunting the argument from evil, the worse they are for a successful argument from evil against the existence of God. Both endeavors encounter the same insurmountable obstacle: human ignorance.9 The Objection from Evil Answered In Philosophical Problems and Arguments, James Cornman and Keith Lehrer inquire, "If you were all-good, allknowing, and all-powerful, and you were going to create a universe in which there were sentient beingsbeings that are happy and sad; en 



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joy pleasure; feel pain, express love, anger, pity, hatredwhat kind of world would you create? . . . Would it be like the one which actually does exist, this world we live in?" 10 A realistic response would be: "I have no way of knowing; for the stated supposition is counterfactual: I, who am invited to assess the universe, am in fact neither all-good nor all-knowing."Yet Cornman and Lehrer see no difficulty. They continue: "If your answer is 'no,' as it seems it must be, then . . . it seems we should conclude that it is improbable that [the world] was created or sustained by anything we would call God." These authors' failure to note the relevance of our human cognitive condition is symptomatic of much writing on the problem of evil; their oversight simply takes a more flagrant form than usual. Subsequent debate has done something to set matters right, but not enough. Even theists still concede that the existence of evil for which Homo sapiens can see no justifying reason weighs heavily against the existence of an all-powerful, all-wise, all-good God. ("If there is a God, the nature and quantity of evil in the world still remain a puzzle; and even if they do not support a conclusive argument, they still seem to provide strong evidence against the probability of God's existence.")11 Hence a theodicya justification of God's ways, by humans, for humansis deemed necessary. Others have denied that human puzzlement about evil carries such antitheistic implications. Given our cognitive limitations, our failure to understand a given evilor a given type or quantity of evilpermits no inference for or against the existence of a justifying reason. With this I agree. In Swinburne's terminology, such failure may perhaps constitute a C-inductive argument, negatively affecting the probability of God's existence to some extent, but not a P-inductive argument, showing that (other things equal) God's existence is improbable. To clarify this claim, the preceding comparison will again prove useful. A young child, let us suppose, becomes excited as guests start to arrive, and asks to stay up for the party. "Just this once," he pleads. But his father insists on his going to bed. Why? Because the boy needs his sleep. Because his presence would displease one of the guests or put a damper on the party. For the sake of regularity in the child's life, and so as not to favor his every whim, with the long-term effect that would have on his character development. And so on. That is, the father bases his decision on facts, values, and causal connections of which he is aware but which lie outside the small child's ken. The youngster does not know the guests or what they plan to do or how his presence would affect their evening. He has probably forgotten the effect on his disposition and behavior the last time he stayed up late and perhaps never connected the way he felt the day after with his lack of sleep the night before. And of course he knows nothing about child psychology or the connection between early training and adult personality. The very word "personality" means practically nothing to him, that level of values, so decisive in his father's considerations, having barely appeared on his horizon. So the child is in no position to judge his father's love on the basis of this one decision or of any combination. A smile, a kiss, a tone of voicesuch are the bases of his trust, not complicated calculations of his father's motivation and strategy.12 This comparison makes clear that the problem of evil has as much to do with our human understanding as it does with the evil in the world. If a small child were to say, "My father never lets me stay up for parties, so he mustn't love me," we would  



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know how to judge this inference. The child's failure to discern a reason for the refusal might carry some slight weight, for he might have considered and found wanting one or two possible explanations. However, he would have been unable to conceive or assess so many other possibilities that his failure to discern a reason would carry little weight. It would not reduce the probability below one-half; that is, it would not make it less likely than not that his father acted lovingly. The like holds for us if our status resembles that of a small child in relation to his father. In that supposition, our failure to account for some evils does not weigh heavily in the scales of probabilitynot heavily enough to impugn the existence of God. If, however, our condition is comparable to that of a ten-year old in relation to his father, our failure is more significant. If our condition is comparable to that of an adolescent, our failure is still more significant. Somewhere along the continuum between infancy and adulthoodthat is, between minimal understanding and omnisciencethe balance would tilt, and our failure to understand would not merely lessen the probability of God's existence but (in the absence of countervailing evidence) would make it improbable. However, where that point lies, we have no way of knowing, and where we stand with respect to it, both theodicists and their critics tend to ignore. Hence they argue their respective cases, pro and con, with unwarranted assurance. Let one illustration suffice. 13 Near the end of an article on the problem of evil, Bruce Russell writes: "At this point there seems to be a standoff. The theist has not been able to show that apparently pointless suffering cannot be used to ground the claim that there is pointless suffering but the atheist has not been able to show that it can." However, Russell suggests, the atheist might adduce the following example to break the deadlock. A skilled, beneficent doctor visits the village of a group of Stone Age people who have never seen a doctor before and who know nothing about modern medicine. There he finds a man suffering from appendicitis. Having successfully performed similar operations in equally primitive conditions, the doctor proposes to remove the man's appendix. The man's father won't let him proceed, for no one in the tribe has ever seen anyone be cut open and survive. In these circumstances, notes Russell, Though the father admits that it is possible that the doctor wants to help his son and that cutting his son's abdomen open with a knife will save him, the father is perfectly rational in believing that cutting open his son will not save him and so perfectly rational in believing that the doctor either does not intend to help his son or does not know what he is doing. He would be less than perfectly rational if he believed otherwise.14 The father might rationally trust the doctor only if the reason for the operation were fully explained to him or if he had independent grounds for believing the doctor's benevolence, competence, and knowledge. In like fashion, unexplained, apparently pointless suffering gives us reason to believe that a perfect, omniscient, all-powerful being does not exist. "Of course this reason could be defeated if the point of all the apparently pointless suffering were made clear (that is, if a theodicy were provided) or overridden if there were strong grounds for believing God exists."15 Russell's verdict on the tribesman may be accurate, but the parallel he draws with us is not. Why would the father be rational to mistrust the doctor's competence or  



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good intentions? Not only by reason of the father's experience of past incisions and their effects but for a further inductive reason: because all other human beings the father has known have resembled him in their powers; because none of them, ever, has built satellites or cyclotrons, flown in jets, conversed across oceans, transplanted organs, walked on the moon, traveled underwater, watched events on other continents, grown zygotes in dishes, spliced DNA, drilled for oil four miles down, or observed the birth and death of stars five billion years ago. The father has no experience of other human beings like himself possessing such knowledge and powers, so greatly exceeding his own. Hence, not just the fatality of past gashes, but the doctor's common humanity, counts against him in the tribesman's estimation. Similarity in nature suggests similarity in powers. But no analogous supposition counts against God. The parallel between Russell's case and the problem of evil would therefore be closer if we omitted all mention of the doctor and asked: Knowing nothing of modern medicine, could the tribesman reasonably judge that there is no possible way, known or unknown to human beings, to save a person's life by means of an incision? Would he be right to rate the likelihood of success at less than fifty-fifty? Posing the question this way, I may appear to load the dice against an affirmative answer since we know so much that the tribesman could not even suspect. However, I suggest that, on the contrary, our present knowledge serves to make clear that his rating the likelihood at less than half would betray unfounded confidence in his cognitive condition. Such confidence would be understandable on his part, as it is on ours. Yet it would not be reasonable for him to say, "Since I can see no way to do such a thing, there probably is none." Paradoxically, our own cognitive confidence stems from the repeated demonstration of our ignorance. The most constant reminders of how much we do not know or understand are the discoveries of things of which we previously had no inkling (bacteria, DNA, quanta, continental drift, relativity, big bang, etc.), and these may have the contrary effect of impressing us with our present knowledge. Logically, the advance of human understandingscientific, philosophical, and othermight serve as an inductive argument to ignorance. Psychologically, it is more likely to foster an assumption of near-omniscience. Our self-assurance has a theoretical as well as a historical source. It is commonly supposed that in dealing with the problem of evil we have little need of factual knowledge. We need merely know possibilities, and to know possibilities we need merely know logic. For an omnipotent agent is not restricted by the actual laws or constitution of the universe but can realize any state of affairs that can be expressed without contradiction. So we can freely hypothesize improvements on the universe, note their nonrealization, and infer God's nonexistence. To cite an important instance: "The arguments of Mackie and Flew rest on the contention that it is logically possible that humans be created with or have such a nature or character that they always freely choose the good. Since God is omnipotent, he can do anything that is logically possible, and since a world in which people only do good is clearly a superior world to one in which people do evil as well as (or instead of) good, we would expect that God would have created a world populated only with people who always and only do the good." 16  



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Swinburne defends this general style of thought, if not this particular illustration. Discussing various forms of afterlife, he writes, "The fact that there seems (and to so many people) to be no contradiction hidden in these stories is good reason for supposing that there is no contradiction hidden in themuntil a contradiction is revealed. If this were not a good reason for believing there to be no contradiction, we would have no good reason for believing any sentence at all to be free of hidden contradiction." 17 Swinburne's argument resembles this one: "The fact that people see no snakes in high grass is a good reason for supposing that there are none thereuntil one is spotted. If we started to suspect their presence in high grass, we would have to suspect their presence everywhere elsein the patio, along the path, and on the well-manicured lawn." Presented such an argument, we would distinguish between seeing no snakes in the grass and seeing that there are no snakes in the grass, and we would then note that whereas we can see that there are no snakes on the patio and the lawn, we do not see that there are none in the high grass. Similarly, in reply to Swinburne's argument, I would distinguish, first, between no contradiction appearing and there appearing to be no contradiction, and, second, between sentences for which freedom from contradiction can readily be surmised and those for which it cannot. For example, "People will one day walk on Mars" should be distinguished from "People will one day trisect an angle with just ruler and compass." Even before the latter was shown (a priori and not just empirically) to be impossible, people could question its freedom from hidden contradiction without needing to fear a hidden contradiction in the former assertion. Still less would they have reason to fear such incoherence in any and every assertion ("It's raining,'' "Mary died," "The party lasted all night"), as Swinburne warns.18 Trisecting an angle with just compass and ruler, traveling backward in time, moving faster than light, proving Goldbach's theorem, harnessing nuclear fusion, determining the simultaneous location and velocity of an electron, inventing a more effective photosynthetic molecule than chlorophyll, designing a machine that will "wash, dry, and iron clothes without the need for either water or any power source"19these can be described without evident contradiction, as can carnivorous rabbits,20 violins that sound like horns, life-forms on Jupiter, conscious computers, and various other fantasies. However, this psychological fact establishes no more than itself; it does not show that these things are possible, save in the uninteresting sense that they avoid evident contradiction. Similarly, the creation of free agents whose sinlessness can be known in advance can be described without evident contradiction, but it is not thereby shown to be possible, even for an omnipotent agent.21 The same holds for other hypotheses which I shall consider now. In each instance it is necessary to distinguish between seeing no impossibility in h and seeing the possibility of h. Failure to note this distinction can beget the impression that we are noetic adults, well equipped to deal with the problem of evil. Recognition of the distinction leads to a very different conclusion.22 Consider some intractable, apparently inexplicable instances of evilthe Holocaust, say, or a child dying of inoperable cancer.23 Surely a world containing such evils could be improved on. Surely it is absurd for Leibniz to allege that ours is the best possible world. Very well, how would we improve on it, if endowed with sufficient power? What would we decide in our wisdom? Let us review, systematically,  



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the conceivable sorts of remediesonce-for-all and comprehensive, once-for-all and selective, case-by-case and comprehensive, case-by-case and selectiveand consider how we might deal with the two kinds of evils, natural and moral, represented by our samples. Once-for-All and Comprehensive Given the scorn often heaped on a "crude," interventionist providence, we perhaps envisage a total, once-for-all solution. Rather than pluck the black raisins from the raisin bread, we will bake the bread without any raisins. That is, while retaining the values of the present world, we will revise the laws of nature so as to exclude any holocausts or children dying from inoperable cancer. To exclude the holocausts, we will make people free but keep them from abusing their freedom, or, less intrusively, we will make only people we know will always choose rightly, or at least people whose characters will make them less inclined to evil. To exclude the cancer or any comparable misfortune afflicting innocent victims, we will revise the laws of nature so as to retain the pleasures, joys, beauties, and varied values of life but eliminate all diseases, accidents, earthquakes, landslides, tidal waves, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, quicksands, and the like. Children will play with matches but never get burned, Alpinists will climb mountains but never fall off cliffs, racers will careen around tracks but never collide. Pianists and violinists will play without interference from crippling arthritis; novelists and essayists will write without ever losing their manuscripts; farmers will grow bountiful crops without fear of hail, drought, or locusts; and so forth. Things will be wonderful! Evident problems beset this projected paradise. For one thing, a world without evils would be a world without compassion, patience, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, courage, and various other high-order values. Furthermore, we have no reasonat least no nontheological reason, usable in an inquiry concerning God's existenceto suppose that such a world is more than a fairy-tale formula. The recipe sounds fine, but is it really possible to make free agents and somehow exclude their sinning? 24 Is it really possible to make people, en masse, less inclined to evil without remaking the race, and indeed the whole universe, in incalculable ways? What laws would have to be altered, with what consequences? (As a start, consider the largely cognitive sources of objective moral evil and the strength, pervasiveness, and important roles of the urges that, warring with perceptions of some higher good, largely account for subjective moral evil.) Again, is it really possible to revise the laws of nature so profoundly that no natural disasters will occur without thereby eliminating the values that make our world attractive? Might we pluck out the hurricanes and tornadoes while leaving the atmosphere; the earthquakes and landslides while leaving the mountains and fields; the floods and tidal waves while leaving the rivers and oceans; the diseases, dementia, and bodily injuries while leaving the human beings? Might we alter the forces that account for all these phenomena and leave our universe intact? It seems extremely unlikely. And, knowing as we do now how fine-tuned our universe has to be to permit its marvels, we have not the slightest conception of whether and how an alternative universe might achieve comparable wonders without incurring comparable evils.25 Even if we did, that would not suffice, for as Alston has noted:

 

Even if we could, at least in outline, determine what alternative systems of natural order are open to God, we would still be faced with the staggering job of



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comparative evaluation. How can we hold together in our minds the salient features of two such total systems sufficiently to make a considered judgment of their relative merits? Perhaps we are capable of making a considered evaluation of each feature of the systems (or many of them), and even capable of judicious comparisons of features two-by-two. For example, we might be justified in holding that the reduction in the possibilities of disease is worth more than the greater variety of forms of life that goes along with susceptibility to disease. But it is another matter altogether to get the kind of overall grasp of each system to the extent required to provide a comprehensive ranking of those systems. We find it difficult enough, if not impossible, to arrive at a definitive comparative evaluation of cultures, social systems, or educational policies. It is far from clear that even if I devoted my life to the study of two primitive cultures, I would thereby be in a position to make an authoritative pronouncement as to which is better on the whole. How much less are we capable of making a comparative evaluation of two alternative natural orders, with all the indefinitely complex ramification of the differences between the two. 26 Once-for-All and Selective So perhaps we become more modest in our improvements. We leave the disasters and diseases but so fashion the universe as to eliminate all pain. Thus, the child will still die of cancer but will feel no physical pain. The parents will still lose their child but will experience no anguish at the loss. Both parts of this selective solution pose problems. With regard to physical pain, one wonders whether stimulus-response mechanisms would adequately substitute for nature's method of self-preservation, whether eliminating pain might not eliminate pleasure and various agreeable sensations as well, and whether eliminating physical pain would not require altering the physical laws that explain it. With regard to the elimination of mental pain, one wonders whether it is possible to remove such pain without removing the love, care, concern, and sympathy that account for the pain; whether, more generally, the removal of all pain, both physical and mental, might not replace human beings with unfeeling robots; and whether, again, it is possible to effect such a radical alteration in our nature without altering the laws of nature. Here, too, our ignorance is complete. Knowing what we do about our human constitution, we can conceive no way in which the proposed revision might be selectively realized, eliminating the undesired pain while preserving the desired life, pleasure, love, laws, and the rest. We are therefore forced to consider the alternative, piecemeal type of solution. Rather than baking bread without raisins, we will bake raisin bread and pluck out the raisins, one by one. That is, we will let the universe unfold through billions of years, let it bring forth planets, life, and human beings, but we will then prevent holocausts, painful deaths from cancer, and the like. This we can do either comprehensively or selectively. Such an interventionist strategy, though much maligned, in fact looks more promising than a once-for-all approach. Case-by-Case and Comprehensive Precisely what features of our universe should we target for comprehensive elimination? One answer would be, "All evils for which we see no good reason." Another would be, "All evils for which there is no good reason." If we suppose important divergence between the two classes thus identifiedthat is, if we think we may often be wrong about the presence or absence of a good  



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reasonwe should abandon a comprehensive approach and focus instead on individual evils or types of evils about which we feel more confident. No doubt this is the tack we should take. For evils with no evident justification are so numerous that their removal would resemble plucking most of the raisins from a loaf thick with raisins. Our world would be left in shreds. Besides, our question is not, "What change might perhaps improve the universe?" but rather, "What change do we have good reason to suppose really would improve the universe?" So we had better focus more selectively on examples that give this impressionfor instance, on the Holocaust and a child's painful death from cancer. Case-by-Case and Selective Since our own interventions in the world are of this and only this varietycase-by-case and selectiveI should note at the start the difference between our human interventions and divine interventions. Ours, being natural, cause no surprise or confusion. Ours, being creaturely, may figure importantly in God's plan. Hence our ability to say how we should intervene does not entail our ability to say how God should intervene; neither does our inability to say how God should intervene entail our inability to say how we should intervene. We may have good reason to believe that we should do our best to prevent the Holocaust or to cure the child's cancer, without our having equally good reason to believe that God should bring about the same result. For example, for us, preventing the Holocaust might require defeating the Nazis; for God, it might require violating their freedom. This contrast prompts a first suggestion. If endowed with divine power, might we not leave the Nazis their freedom to choose, as human resistance does, but block the effects of their choices, as human resistance attempts to do? Might we not mount a far more effective blocking action than mere humans could? For example, no matter how much their Nazi guards may desire to mistreat Jewish prisoners, we can prevent them from actually doing so. Or, since this blocking action would not feed the starving prisoners, perhaps we prevent the police or SS from rounding them up in the first place or prevent higher-ups from ordering the roundup. Ultimately, perhaps all we need to do is to keep Hitler from approving or ordering the "final solution." We strike him speechless every time he wishes to make any such suggestion or whenever Himmler and company ask approval for their own schemes. If Hitler, finding himself speechless, tries to write instructions, we paralyze his hand. If he tries to nod his head in approval, we paralyze his neck. His strange affliction might result in his being replaced, and wouldn't that be a blessing! Well, who would replace himHimmler? The sober truth is that we have very little idea how the desired outcome might be brought about, even were we omnipotent, and what the overall consequences of our intervention would be. The selectivity of such a piecemeal providence poses further problems. If we allow Hitler and his minions to ravage most of Europe but block their mistreatment of the Jews, why is that? If, sensing where consistency might lead us, we decide to eliminate some massive evils but not others, how do we know that such a selection has not already been effected and that we do not inhabit precisely the kind of world we envisage, rid of many evils but full of many others without which we think the world would be better off? If, instead, we adopt the alternative, more consistent solution and seek to remove all wars, all genocide, all of the massive injustices that  



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afflict humanity, we find ourselves back where we started, comprehensively ripping the world to shreds. The child's painful cancer may appear less problematic. We cure the cancer or at least block the pain, and then the world is improved. But why this child or person and not others, this sickness and not others, this pain and not others, this physical pain and not a host of mental pains? Because, to eliminate all apparently "gratuitous" evils comparable to the child's suffering, we would have to remake the world, and we don't know how. Short of that, we might pick some evils and pass over others, but for all we know, this has already been done. The evils we see as gratuitous may be those that remain. The "improvements" we envision may already have been made. Still, we wonder. Mightn't there be further reductions without incurring chaos? Mightn't ten per cent, say, of all cancers, migraines, depressions, and so forth benefit from unexplained remissions? Fifty per cent might create mass confusion, but would ten per cent? Well, which ten per cent should they be? It would be an idiotic providence that randomly selected a tenth of the evils for removal and left the rest. The specifics of each case would have to be considered, comprehensively, and we are far from knowing them all, comprehensively. Vague, generic references to "a child dying of cancer" veil our ignorance. Who is this child? Who are the parents, grandparents, siblings, and other relations? How are they affected, and others through them? What are the longterm ramifications? We may know some details about one or two cases, but what of the others? To grasp our total incapacity to effect the proposed triage, try this thought experiment. Suppose, for example, that a ten per cent reduction would not be counterproductive. Then ask yourself: which ten per centfor instance, which ten per cent of incurable cancer cases, worldwideshould be eliminated? Which children, which parents, which victims young or oldAlaskan, Malaysian, Indian, or Brazilianshould we target for unexplained remission? We haven't the foggiest idea, for we do not know who these people are, and even the few cases of which we do have some knowledge, we do not know in adequate detail. Still, one query remains: "Granted, we can make no reasoned choice of cancers to remit, worldwide. Triage is beyond us. Yet wouldn't the world be better off without this or that specific evilfor instance, the death of this individual child from cancer?" In first response, recall the familiar tale of the horse's shoe and its implications: who would suspect that the loss of a nail would lead to the loss of the shoe, and that to the loss of the horse and rider, and that to the loss of the battle, and that to the loss of the war, and that to the loss of the kingdom? A mere nail! The lesson, of course, is not that each and every detail does have such momentous, unforeseeable consequences but that it may; hence, the consequences of even a single case of cancer, with its myriad details, are truly incalculable. We are confronted, again, with our almost total ignorance. Who, on hearing of the realm's collapse, would imagine, or take it into his mind to declare: "The nail made the difference"? 27 To develop this response with respect to the child's cancer might offend sensibilities, so let us stay with the nail. To predict that the loss of the nail would cause the loss of the battle, we would have to foresee at what moment, in what circumstances, the horse's shoe would come loose; and to do that, we would have to foresee not only the occurrence of the battle but its precise unfolding (e.g., "The shoe  



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will come loose at the moment when horse and rider are attempting to leap a fallen tree, with the result that the rider will be thrown and killed," etc.). This much prescience already is clearly out of the question; yet it is trifling in comparison with the next step (the loss of the battle), and that in comparison with the subsequent step (the loss of the war), and that in comparison with the final step (the loss of the kingdom). And this final step in the series would not, of course, in fact be final; for it, too, would have immense consequences, beyond all human comprehension. Furthermore, each event in this particular sequence, from the loss of the nail to the loss of the kingdom, would have many other effects, equally incalculable, besides the next event in the series. Those, in turn, would have their own effects, and so on ad infinitum. And even if we could foresee all the ramifications of all the events in the nail series, we could not know whether the loss of the nail was for better or for worse unless we could foresee with equal fullness and sureness the consequences of all alternatives (e.g., losing two nails instead of one, losing the one nail earlier or later, having it protrude partway, etc.). Furthermore, even if we could calculate all of the consequences of all of the alternatives, we would thereby accomplish only the first, factual stage of analysis; for we would still have to compare the various results for each alternative (comparing one entire world with another) and assess their comparative worth, item by item and overall, so as to estimate whether we really would improve the world by keeping that loose nail in place. The nail's loss, however, would pose a much easier problem (impossible though that may now appear) than some more complex eventfor instance, a child's death by cancer. At this point, I sense expostulations and waving arms. Surely some outcomes are more likely than others? Surely we are not mistaken in assessing outcomes as best we can and in basing our decisions on them? Yes, certainly. It makes excellent sense to guide our decisions by what we can foresee rather than by what we can'tto follow our flashlight, feeble though it is, amid the surrounding darkness of our ignorance. What other option have we? The only way to work for the good is to work for the good we can foresee. But this practical necessity offers no assurance that the narrow, short-term good we can foresee and can achieve will be for the best overall and in the long run. Such assurance might come from belief in a transcendent Providence, but within the atheistic perspective of a Bertrand Russell, the best thing we could do for the human race might be to put it out of its misery. A nuclear holocaust might be a blessing in disguise. Back, then, to the nail and its lessons. In the progression just traced from the clear impossibility at the start (of foreseeing the moment and manner of the shoe's loss) to the cumulative, quasi-infinite impossibility at the end (of foreseeing the kingdom's ultimate loss and its consequences), three dimensions of difficulty can be distinguishednatural, human, and evaluative. Nature's course may be regular and predictable compared with human conduct, but to foresee even the moment and manner of the nail's loss we would need, for instance, to know the state of the weather, in detail, and thereby the state of the ground at that particular moment at that particular spot. Such precision far exceeds the capabilities of any weather forecaster, present or foreseeable. Furthermore, for even this initial prediction, we would also have to foresee countless human decisionsleading, for instance, to the particular engagement, then to its particular course, incident by incident, down to the  



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rider's decision to leap the fallen treeand such decisions are still less predictable than natural events. Finally, as the results of the nail's loss rippled out in every direction, each segment of the process and not just some final outcome would have to be evaluated, and for that task, too, we are very ill equipped. Some people maintain the existence of objective good and evil, and others deny it, thereby eliminating both God and the problem of evil. Some people maintain the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic good and evil, and others deny it, thereby profoundly refiguring the problem of evil. Some people maintain the comparability of disparate goods and evils, as greater or less, and others deny it, thereby precluding the sort of answers commonly proposed for the problem of evil. Some people maintain and others deny the comparability of specific goods and evils, or classes of goods and evils, thereby affecting which solutions are available. Some people maintain and others deny that certain evils are unconditional, thereby precluding or permitting justification of those evils. Some people maintain and others deny that aesthetic valuesbeauty, order, variety, simplicity, etc.are relevant to the problem of evil. Of those who acknowledge the existence of objective values and disvalues, or intrinsic values and disvalues, some offer one listing, others another. Of those who acknowledge the comparability of disparate values and disvalues, some accept the feasibility of general value rankings, others contest it. Of those who accept the possibility of such abstract ordering, some adopt one set of ratings, others another. Most people, including the majority of those who discuss the problem of evil, have worked out no listings or ratings. Such are the beingsignorant, fallible, discordant, deeply perplexedwho would sit in judgment on the universe. By now it should be clear that in whatever direction we turnonce-for-all intervention or case-by-case, comprehensive or selectivewe come face to face with our ignorance. The closer we look, the more the puzzles multiply, and the more they multiply, the likelier it appears that we have little inkling just how extensive and profound our ignorance really is. What does a dog know about quantum mechanics? What does an infant know about moral norms? What do human beings know about ultimate reality? As Searle suggests after related reflections, "It's a good idea to ask ourselves, who do we think we are?" 28 The preceding review suggests that with respect to the problem of evil we primates of the species Homo sapiens are mere infants. If so, it follows that the argument from evil against God's existence is weaknot only a C-argument rather than a P-argument, but a weak C-argumentand therefore does not significantly affect the epistemic merits of belief in God vis-à-vis belief in other minds. Some readers will find this conclusion, based on a cursory survey, too strong. Casting about for the source of their misgivings, they may come to thoughts like the following. Suppose the world were a hellish place of unmitigated misery. Mightn't inhabitants of even such a world, if no better noetically endowed than we, apply the argument from evil just as I have done and reach a similar verdict? Mightn't they say, "Who are we to judge, we who are mere noetic infants?" But surely a hellish universe would count against the existence of God, and such pleading from ignorance would be unsound. Yet how would that pleading differ from mine? If my argument can accommodate the kinds and quantities of evil found in our world, couldn't it accommodate still more in the manner suggested? And doesn't that fact count against such reasoning?  



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Interesting things happen on the way from "some" to "all." Might all people be tall people? Might all statements be false? Might there be a world of "unmitigated evil"? More to the point in this thought experiment: Could inhabitants of such a hypothetical universe argue just as I have done and reach a similar verdict? No, they could not, for notice how I argued. I suggested, in general, that we have not the slightest conception of whether and how an alternative universe might achieve comparable wonders without incurring comparable evils. And at every step of the argument I adverted to values which, for all we know, might not survive the elimination of specific disvalues. Is it really possible to exclude sinning without excluding freedom? Is it really possible to eliminate all mental anguish without eliminating all concern? Might we pluck out the hurricanes and tornadoes while leaving the atmosphere, the earthquakes and landslides while leaving the mountains and fields, and so forth? In each instance, we must acknowledge our ignorance: "I don't know, I see no way.'' And this acknowledgment, repeated in every instance, legitimates the conclusion that, in our universe, the argument from evil is indeed weak. In a truly hellish universe, it would not be weak; for there, there would be no such values to save, no such trade-offs to suggest, no such warnings to issue about the possibly dire effects of tinkering with the existing universe. The worst would already be realized. 29 Since I cannot address or resolve all such doubts and misgivings, it is worth noting that weaker premises suffice to show that the argument from evil does not significantly affect the epistemic merits of belief in God vis-à-vis belief in other minds. I have argued here that the force of the argument from evil depends on our cognitive standinginfant, adolescent, or adultwith respect to the problem of evil. I have also argued, and I could argue more fully,30 that our standing is that of children. Suppose, however, that my argument is flawed. The likeliest fall-back position is, not that our status is that of cognitive adults, but that we don't know where we stand. In that case, our ignorance is double. Somewhere along the spectrum between infancy and adulthood, the balance would shift, and our failure to understand the world's evils would not merely lessen the probability of God's existence but (in the absence of countervailing arguments) would make it improbable. However, where that point lies, we have no way of knowing; where we stand in relation to it, we also have no way of knowing. In this alternative reading of the situation, our double ignorance shows the weakness of any anti-theistic argument based on the existence of evil. Though weaker, this response still supports the epistemic comparability of belief in God and belief in other minds, and still does so in two ways, as does the first, more fully developed response. Both show the weakness of the argument from evil and thereby redress the imbalance which that argument would otherwise create between the two beliefs. And both support chapter 3's surmise that nonepistemic factors largely account for the current subjective imbalance in strength and in extent between the two beliefs. Perhaps more powerfully than any other factor, evil counteracts belief in God. If its influence is much stronger, psychologically, than is the argument from evil, epistemically, this excess weight belongs with chapter 3's other indications and bolsters its already plausible conclusion. The fact that nowadays more people believe, more firmly, in other minds than in God need not reflect any epistemic disparity between the two beliefs.  



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Convincing Intimations In the preceding two sections, we have seen two different kinds of response to the problem of evil. One kind tries to justify all evils but founders, ultimately, on our ignorance. The other type recognizes our ignorance but uses it to answer the argument from evil. The first response, if successful, would greatly strengthen the teleological argument for God. It would show that the universe is amply worth creatingthat not only do the laws of nature wonderfully conspire to bring about an extraordinary world but, in addition, good and evil so combine as to make it an admirable world. Further, this overall convergence toward good would strongly suggest a purposeful, benign, and supremely intelligent source. The second response, on the contrary, carries no such implications. To confess our ignorance of the workings of Providence is to confess our ignorance of Providenceunless we have some evidence to go by other than a fully articulated rationale for the universe. The comparison with other minds suggests that we may. The child refused by his father is in no position, I said, to judge his father's love on the basis of this one decision or of any combination of refusals. A smile, a kiss, a tone of voicesuch are the bases of his trust, not complicated calculations of his father's motivation and strategy. It could not be otherwise. And if, as I have argued, with respect to the problem of evil our cognitive condition is that of children, it could not be otherwise for us. We may do some reasoning, as children do; but our trust and belief in God will have to rest more on directly experiential grounds than on complicated reasoning. The comparison with a child suggests that our grounds for belief may nonetheless be good. However, rather than pursue this particular comparison, several advantages suggest that we turn instead to our familiar other-minds paradigm. We know what Mrs. M did; we do not need to imagine it. We also know what a convincing intimation it wasfor me, an adultof her love. Indeed, her loving look was so convincing an indication that perhaps the only counterevidence that could effectively have challenged it would have been a look of equally intense hatred or an explicit, convincing avowal of dislike for her child. A cross word would have carried little weight; even loving parents lose their patience. Neither would a spanking have troubled my conviction; some parents believe in corporal discipline. A failure to respond to her child's cries would not have changed my mind; she might not have heard the cries, might have read them as not urgent, might have had pressing business elsewhere (visitors, a phone call, food burning on the stove). Without very full particulars, I could not conclude from one such sign or from many that she did not love her childnot after that look. Without it, I might doubt her love. With it, I would more likely wonder about the reason for this or that actionor simply take for granted that she must have had a reason. What, then, with regard to God, might compare with this woman's loving look? What might carry that kind of conviction? For Laura Garcia, as we have seen, it might be the beauty and grandeur of the Pacific Northwest and her admirable parents. For Plantinga, it might be the episode in Harvard Square. For Augustine, it might be his conversion experience. For Powell's correspondent, it might be the moment on the beach. For the child in the field, it might be her awareness of that loving, consoling, commanding presence. For Angela of Foligno, it might be her vision  



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of "the Supreme Beauty, which contains in itself all goodness." For early Christians and through them for later Christians, it might be the Christian mystery: "We have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father's only son, full of grace and truth" (Jn 1:14). As Mrs. M's glance bespoke her love, directly and forcefully, so varied experiences may attest to the existence of a good and loving God. Sometimes, the link between such an experience and the problem of evil becomes quite explicit. When her sevenyear-old daughter, Susie, was kidnapped, Marietta Jaeger came to painful reflections. What kind of God would allow this? Was belief in God a mere psychological crutch? Did she believe in God? Alone in her bedroom, she was struggling with these thoughts "when suddenly I felt as if somebody reached over and pulled me onto safe ground. I began to pray and pray, made a commitment to God, and he came to me. I felt as if I was absolutely surrounded, almost a physical feeling of love of God. It was incredible. I couldn't believe anyone could love me that much. I found him absolutely irresistible, and I had no choice but to love and serve him." 31 Even when Susie was murdered, her mother continued to believe in God's lovelargely, no doubt, on the strength of that memorable experience in her bedroom. Largely, but not entirely. Garcia cites more than one experience and more than one kind of experience that for her carried intimations of divine greatness and goodness. In this, doubtless her experience agrees with that of the others I have mentionedPlantinga, Augustine, the girl, Angela, early and later Christians, Mrs. Jaegerand many others. Furthermore, the kinds of experiences Garcia cites are accessible to all. Anyone may experience the world as charged with the grandeur and goodness of God. Anyone may experience the human worldits finest creations and its most shining examples of goodnessin much the same way. On the title page of his Little Organ Book, Bach dedicates the work "To the glory of the most high God." And it is true: through artistic creations and their creators, as through the splendors of nature, we can glimpse the goodness and greatness of their ultimate source. Still more, through the goodness of specially admirable, lovable people we can glimpse the goodness that accounts for a world that contains them. ("What a wonderful world!" Louie Armstrong used to sing; but still finer than the blue skies and white clouds of the song was Louie himself.) Anyone, I say, can have such experiences; and the experiences may be more powerful than talk of "glimpses" suggests. As I did not simply ''glimpse" Mrs. M's love, so Garcia did not simply "glimpse" the maker of the goodness she perceived. "Rather, it seemed to me as though I felt God's presence in the beauty of these natural wonders, that I was standing before Him, their maker and their life." Such a listing will doubtless appear selective. What of nature and humanity at their nastiest? What of hyenas, scorpions, and crocodiles, of cancer, smallpox, and the Ebola virus, of Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan? I have already suggested the answer. I am considering possible parallels with Mrs. M's loving lookthat single, striking, convincing glance. None of her other looks that I observed was particularly loving; none of her other actions that I observed gave clear testimony of her love; but that one look sufficed to convince me. Had I observed some apparent counterevidencea blow, a word, a failure to come quicklythe evidence and counterevidence would not have balanced out, leaving the issue in doubt. For I  



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would have found it easier to explain the contrary evidence than to explain away the look. To be sure, it is logically and physically possible that her features just happened to fall into that configuration at the moment she gazed on her child and that I mistakenly read this chance occurrence as a sign of her love. However, I don't believe it for a moment. Neither do I believe for a moment that a random universe just happened to form the features of the lovable people I encounter every day. I find it easier to explain the worst things in creation or to imagine their having an explanation than to explain away the best. "If we taste and see the goodness of God," writes Eleonore Stump, "then the vision of our world that we see in the mirror of evil will look different, too. Start just with the fact of evil in the world, and the problem of evil presents itself forcefully to you. But start with a view of evil and a deep taste of the goodness of God, and you will know that there must be a morally sufficient reason for God to allow evil." 32 The preceding section indicates how plausible this supposition is. It also suggests the proper answer to a hypothesis Jerome Gellman has proposed, which can bring the present discussion into sharper, final focus. "In the years that I have taught philosophy of religion at various universities," he recounts, "I have included in the basic course a section on the problem of evil. The treatment of the problem would consist in showing how there was no contradiction between the existence of evil and the existence of God, as He is conceived in the Judaic-Christian tradition."33 However, "almost invariably the reaction of the students, even the best of them who could be presumed to have followed the line of thought, was one of dissatisfaction. And they found it difficult to articulate clearly just what was bothering them."34 Gellman believes he can formulate their problem for them: ''I now think that the problem of evil that philosophers deal with is an intellectualized construction upon a basic human experience of God's non-existence. For I want to argue that just as there is a human experience of God's existence, there is likewise and just as surely a human experience of God's nonexistence. And the latter is to be found in humanity's experience of evil."35 What people perceive in evilespecially in its more extreme forms"is that the world is Godless, without a God. God's nonexistence is made manifest to them. And they perceive this non-existence of God in the utter repugnance and revulsion of the evil that they know. This is not unlike the poet who sees infinity in a grain of sand, or ordinary mortals who see God in the beauty and symmetry of a snowflake."36 Garcia sees God in the Cascades, and others see God's nonexistence in the Holocaust. Do the two experiences cancel each other out? To discern the answer, let us turn to our other-minds comparison. If I caught a look of tenderest love on Mrs. M's face, then a look of intense hatred, both directed at her child, these looks would cancel out, and I would be left in utter perplexity. However, I need not be similarly puzzled about the world, for the contrast Gellman draws is not comparable. The existence and nonexistence of God are contradictories, whereas love and hatred are contraries. Thus, a contrast that truly paralleled that between loving and hating looks would hold, for example, between the experience of the world as caused by a supremely benevolent being and the experience of the world as caused by a supremely malevolent being. But the latter is not the type of experience surmised by Gellman, nor the type suggested by the students' reactions.  



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How, then, should the actual or likely contrast be analyzed? Garcia sees the Cascades, or her parents, as made by God; and if they are made by God, God exists. Someone who endured the horrors of the Holocaust may see the Holocaust as inexplicable; and if it is inexplicable, God does not exist. The experience in both instances, it may seem, is equally immediate, equally powerful, and the entailment is equally sure: God does or does not exist. However, how might someone see the Holocaust as inexplicable? How might someone perceive this negation? Well, how does a person see the emptiness of a room? By looking into it. And that is how a person might see or strongly sense the inexplicability of some atrocious evilby looking into the world, perceiving no possible explanation there, and (naturally but illegitimately) equating that lack of perception with a lack of explanation. But a world empty of explanation is a world empty of God. 37 Such an experience, so analyzed, is more than a mere surmise, and it readily accounts for the students' reaction (what they wanted, Gellman notes, was "an explanation for the world's evils"). In his lectures, Gellman may have pointed out the lack of contradiction between the existence of evil and the existence of God, just as he might point out the lack of contradiction between seeing nothing in a room and there nonetheless being something there, unnoticed. However, where is it? Where is the missing object, where is the missing explanation? Where could it be? Such is the common, natural reaction to many an evil. Articulated philosophically, this experience becomes the intellectualized construction to which Gellman refers. Philosophers demand an explanation for such evils as the Holocaust, and finding none that fully satisfies, they conclude that God does not exist. In this way, the unreflective impression becomes a reflective conclusion: the evils are indeed inexplicable. What is missing in this argument, as in its experiential source, is any adequate realization of human cognitive limits and their relevance for the problem of evil. In this respect, too, the philosophical argument mirrors the lived experience. Recall, for example, the assurance with which Cornman and Lehrer judged that we would have to respond negatively to the query: "If you were all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful, and you were going to create a universe . . . would it be like the one which actually does exist, this world we live in?" Given this common mindset, the failure to see an explanation in any direction can equate, subjectively, with seeing that there is no explanation. Effectively to split these two things apartthe not seeing and the negative seeingrequires more than mere abstract reminders of human ignorance and fallibility. It is necessary to look in every direction and, in every direction, recognize how profound is our ignorance. The preceding section's systematic survey serves this essential function. Matching experience with experience, it seeks to make our cognitive limits as palpable as the "inexplicable" evils we strive to understand. This, perhaps, was what Gellman's treatment lacked, as have most discussions of the problem of evil.  



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8 Concluding Comparisons The heart of the case for belief in God and belief in other minds has, I believe, now been explored; chapters 4 to 7 have reviewed the most important evidence. However, since people have advanced many other arguments for the existence of God and several others for the existence of other minds, I shall illustrate the reasons for this assessment of the evidence and for my limited sampling by adding two more arguments, one for God and one for other minds, and examining the arguments' credentials. At the same time, with this inquiry's sampling of evidence drawing to a close, I shall need to address the problem that confronts any arguments which, not sufficing individually, form a cumulative casenamely, the problem of the arguments' common reference. Aquinas's "five ways" illustrate this problem. The first way leads to a first mover, the second to a first efficient cause, the third to a necessary being, the fourth to a supreme source of all perfection, and the fifth to an intelligent being directing all natural things to their ends. Each of the beings thus established, says Aquinas, is what we call God. In a sense, this statement still largely holds true. We say all these things of God and only of God. However, if we view the five ways as proofs, we can inquire how they demonstrate the existence of an identical, divine being. Problems arise on both scoresthe sameness and the divinity. Is the first mover, for example, identical with the necessary being, or the necessary being identical with the source of all perfection? Is the first mover or first efficient cause or necessary being a divine being, endowed with all perfections? If all five arguments point to the same referent, they can pool their perfections and demonstrate a being that is at the same time first mover, first efficient cause, necessary being, intelligent director of nature, and supreme source of all perfections, possessing them fully itself. If each argument possesses some strength and all pinpoint the same referent, they can combine their strengths and make a stronger case than any of them does individually. A crucial question, thereforeif Aquinas's ways are taken as proofsis whether the being demonstrated by all five ways is one and the same. 1  



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In like fashion, regarding the theistic evidence in chapters 4 to 6, we can ask: Do the mystical experiences of chapter 4, the providential experiences of chapter 5, and the teleological indications of chapter 6 all relate to the same being? For that matter, do the mystical experiences of different individuals or the providential experiences of different individuals all relate to the same being? Indeed, do the mystical experiences of even a single individual (for instance, Teresa) or the providential experiences of even a single individual (for instance, Augustine) all relate to the same being? If one prayer is answered in the garden and another at Hippo, are they answered by the same God? How does all this evidence cohere? Similar queries can be posed concerning other minds. Thus, on the strength of a single look, I believed that Mrs. M loved her child. Yet what reason did I have after such brief acquaintance to assume that the woman before me did not harbor multiple personalities and that one of her alters, not she, tenderly loved the child? For all I knew, she resembled the woman whom a psychiatrist treated for some time before the nature of her trouble became clear. Typically very passive and introverted, this woman had shared her body for many years with a six-year-old male, a five-year-old female, two twenty-year-old sisters, a nonhuman state called "The Animal," and an eightyyear-old grandmother. The two sisters were tough and aggressive, but the grandmother was the loving caretaker of the other personalities. 2 So if I saw a loving look on this woman's face, it might be very convincing, but whose expression would it behers or the grandmother's? If I gathered varied evidence to form a cumulative casea look, a smile, a caress, a spanking, a cross wordwhose would they be? Would all the kind, loving acts belong to one personality and all the apparently unloving acts belong to some other personality or personalities? Would the grandmother never give a spanking? Would the others never so much as smile at the child? Here, in extreme form, the same problem appears for other minds as for God. A cumulative case would require a common referent, but how can such a referent be established? When I come to consider the possibility of multiple reference for theistic evidence, I shall do as here and take the phenomenon of multiple personality as a handy term of comparison. Granted, the concept and the reality of multiple personality are varied, shifting, and contested, but replacing personality with some other category would not bring greater clarity. Alternative notionsperson, self, soul, subject, mind, ego, I, consciousness, and the likeare no less contested and no less obscure. Recall Russell's statement, quoted earlier: "When you come to try and define. . . . how you are going to distinguish one person from another, and so forth, you find that what you have said is most fearfully vague and that you really do not know what you meant." Without going that far, I would just note the relevance of all this unclarity. Puzzlement about unity and sameness is not confined to one side of the comparison between God and other minds. Thus, as we may wonder about the difference between a trinity of persons within a single godhead and a trinity of godheads, so we may wonder about the difference between a trinity of personalities within a single person and a trinity of persons. In this respect too (veiled by my previous facile references to "persons" and "other minds"), belief in God and belief in other minds prove comparable. This chapter's comparisons will proceed in two stages. First, as noted, I shall add one more argument for other minds and one more argument for God, and in  



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doing so, I shall touch already on the issue of common reference. Then I shall address the same issue more comprehensively for both beliefs. That donewith the sampling of evidence completed and the question of sameness addressed, the moment will arrive for a final, overall assessment. How comparable is belief in God with belief in other minds? Other Minds: Best Explanation Given the difficulties for arguments from analogy backing belief in other minds, philosophers have looked elsewhere for support. Robert Pargetter's "best explanation" approach exemplifies a major alternative. He acknowledges that "we may not be able to lay down completely adequate criteria for selecting the best explanation from any set of alternative explanations." 3 Nonetheless, we do have some sense of which explanations are plausible and which are not, both in science and in everyday affairs. And it clearly seems more plausible to account for others' behavior through the hypothesis of other minds than through the Cartesian hypothesis, resurrected by Plantinga, of a powerful, evil spirit intent on deceiving us. In the absence, then, of any plausible alternative, we may conclude that if others behave much as we do, they too are minded. In this argument, Pargetter notes, behavioral resemblance does not function as a premise but suggests and exemplifies the hypothesis that provides the most plausible explanation of others' behaviornamely, that they possess minds. Other philosophers have adopted a similar solution. In Robert Richman's view, for example, "our ordinary beliefs about other minds enable us to understand, to explain, and to predict certain features of our experiencein particular, of course, specific aspects of the behaviour of other personsin a way which no alternative known set of beliefs does."4 In short, ''There is no viable alternative."5 Pargetter and Richman tout the advantages of this approach over the argument from analogy. Their argument makes no inference from one person to many. It does not require knowledge or observation of one's own behavior. It consults not only behavior but also circumstances. It need not take account of possible variations from person to person. To these pluses we might add that if the argument from analogy needs support, this argument, if valid, can furnish it; for the referent which both arguments reach is clearly the same. The mind that provides the best explanation for others' behavior is the same mind that accounts for their analogous behavior; for the behavior in both instances is identical. However, these apparent advantages come at a price. The "best explanation" argument has its own problems. In parallel with questions raised about the universe, we may ask why others' behavior requires an explanation. Explanations must end somewhere; why not with others' behavior? No doubt the reply would be that other empirical eventssun spots, earthquakes, tidal wavesdo have explanations. Very well, why not explain human behavior similarly, by means of physical causes? There is no need to dream up evil geniuses to find a rival for the other-minds explanation. A neurological explanation stands ready at hand. We believe that others' actions do in fact have neural correlates; why assume anything more? Why postulate mental entities in addition to others' behavior and their neural condition? "If a certain organization of theory is  



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achieved by thus positing distinctive mental states and events behind physical behavior, surely as much organization could be achieved by positing merely certain correlative physiological states and events instead." 6 What is more, the organization could be achieved more economically. As Nathan Stemmer comments, "It is not difficult to see that this neurological explanation is simpler than the one which is based on any version of the mentalist hypothesis"; and "there is general agreement . . . that degree of simplicity is an important criterion" in choosing between competing hypotheses.7 Some may contest, with Richard Fumerton, ''that other things being equal simpler hypotheses are more likely to be true than complex hypotheses."8 However, Pargetter and Richman offer no reason for preferring an other-minds explanation to a neural explanation; they simply ignore this far more challenging rival. Not only does their argument thus fail to supplant the analogical argument; it also fails to support it, as extra, independent evidence backing the same conclusion. For if the other-minds hypothesis appears a more plausible explanation than a Cartesian deceiver, and if, despite its greater complexity, the hypothesis appears more plausible than a purely neural explanation, the likeliest reason is analogy. "All of us who act so much alike do so because we are alike."9 The support goes the other way. With respect to God, a comparison of teleological and cosmological arguments suggests a similar verdict. God: Cosmic Source Compare, for instance, Swinburne's cosmological argument with his teleological argument, already seen. The latter starts with the question, "Why these remarkable regularities?", the former with the question, "Why this complex physical universe?" Whether or not it had a beginning, Swinburne argues, such a universe calls out for explanation. Since no scientific explanation is possible, the explanation must be of the alternative, personal variety, through the intentional action of a rational agent. If, however, we invoke a personal explanation, we should postulate the simplest kind of person for the purpose, and that means a person of infinite power, knowledge, and freedomthat is, God. For, other things being equal, a simple hypothesis is more likely than a complex one. True, explanation must stop somewhere, and God here remains unexplained; but the choice is between the universe as stopping point and God as stopping point. And it is very unlikely that the universe would exist uncaused, but rather more likely that God, who is far simpler than the universe, would exist uncaused. "This supposition postulates a simpler beginning of explanation than does the supposition of the existence of an uncaused universe, and that is grounds for believing the former supposition to be true."10 Here, too, sameness of reference poses little problem. As, in the last section, the mind that provides the best explanation for others' behavior is the same mind that accounts for their analogous behavior (the behavior both times is the same), so here the God who explains the universe is the same God who explains its regularities (the universe both times is the same). So if the teleological argument needs shoring up, this new argument can do the jobprovided it has some independent strength of its own to contribute. However, that may be doubted.  



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Criticism has focused on Swinburne's criterion of simplicity and the use he makes of it. 11 It is not entirely clear that even in science, other things being equal, a theory is more likely to be true in so far as it is more simple.12 It is not clear that whatever principle of simplicity applies within science applies beyond it. It is not clear that the hypothesis of an explained world plus an unexplained God is simpler than the hypothesis of an unexplained world. It is not clear that the greater initial simplicity of God as starting point takes epistemological precedence over the greater total simplicity of a Godless universe. It is not clear that a divine source, whose creative intentions would match the universe item by item and whose knowledge would extend to countless alternative universes, would be simpler than the universe. It is not clear that a divine person "of infinite power, knowledge, and freedom"13 would be simpler than a finite person. (Is an infinite universe simpler than a finite universe?) All in all, it is therefore far from clear that Swinburne's argument can lend any support to the theistic evidence already considered. What about alternative versions of the cosmological argument? For Swinburne, the universe cries out for explanation. Others have spoken of the world's contingency and have been led to postulate an ultimate, noncontingent beinga "necessary" being, a "cause of itself," a being whose essence is identical with its existence. Critics, finding these accounts inadequate or unintelligible, have opted for an unexplained universe, which they know exists, rather than an unexplained God, who they do not know exists. "Beings should not be multiplied without necessity." Here, as often in such dialectical contrasts, proponents and opponents may share a common shortcomingin this instance a touch of rationalism, in the sense of excessive confidence in human reason. The demand that the universe have an explanation is not clearly rationalistic (after all, who seriously supposes that the universe simply popped into existence billions of years ago without cause or reason?). Rationalism enters more evidently when one side concludes that an explanation that human reason can neither grasp nor envision therefore does not exist (the world is simply a "brute fact") or when the other side concludes that an explanation that human reason, confined to sense data and their scientific elaboration, cannot perceive in the world does not exist in the world but in God. ("What ultimately explains the universe of creatures must be very different in kind from anything within that universe.")14 At the ultimate depths of reality, beyond our sense-bound cognitive horizons, what validity do such distinctions as "within" and "without" possess, and what sense?15 And if God may be self-explanatory in some mysterious way, why may not the universe? Traditionally, the coming to be and passing away of phenomenal realities have signaled their contingency and the need for a changeless, nontemporal being to explain their existence. The universe as a whole, however, may not have come into being, may not go out of being, and may contain the explanation of its changes. How this might be, we cannot conjecture; to invoke natural "laws" is simply to note the pattern of the alterations. (Grasping for some analogy, we perhaps think of the batteries that drive the wheels of an electric car without themselves moving, yet are as much a part of the car as are the moving wheels.) However, we are equally far from grasping how a changeless, nontemporal being distinct from the universe might explain it or its changes. Both explanatory hypotheses, the internal and the external,  



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carry far beyond our human comprehension; the mystery of ultimate origination seems equally profound in either direction. At this juncture, the cosmological approach appears to have need of the teleological, and not the other way around. A "ground of all being" might not be a distinct being, much less a personal being. But a designer of the universe is not the universe; a teller of the tale is not the tale. And if, with this split opened, a ground is to be found on one side or the other, doubtless it is on the originating sidethe side of the designer, or teller of the tale. For its part, the teleological approach thus gains something from the cosmological. The powerful, intelligent source of the universe is not self-creating, but if we understood the answer to the riddle of existence, doubtless that is where we would find it: the search for an explanation would end with the maker of the universe, not with the universe. Identity of Reference For such trading of benefits or pooling of strength to be possible between different arguments or evidence, sameness of reference is needed. And with regard even to a pairing like the preceding, C. D. Broad writes: If, e.g., two such utterly different arguments as the Cosmological Argument and the Argument from Design both establish the existence of something that can be called "God," it seems most likely that they establish the existence of two different "Gods," one a ground and not a designer, and the other a designer and not a ground, of the rest of the universe. Anyone who claims to identify the two should be expected to bring forward strong positive evidence for doing so. Unless such an identification can be justified, the various arguments cannot be regarded as corroborating each other. They will be like so many different strings, each acting as the sole support of a different weight. 16 The evidence reviewed in chapters 4 to 6 is still more disparate. Yet believers readily assume that the one who answers their prayers is the one who answered Augustine's prayer, that the one who answers prayers is the one who appears in mystical experiences, that the one who answers prayers and appears in mystical experiences is the one who made the universe, and so forth. What basis can be found for such identity assumptions? Well, what basis can be found for similar assumptions concerning other minds? As the universe forms a dynamic unity, so the human body forms a dynamic unity. In human bodies as in the universe, some phenomena suggest a personal source distinct from the phenomena, whereas others do not. In some human bodies, the phenomena suggest a multiple personal sourcea multiple personality, whereas in others they do not. Where they do not suggest such multiplicity, we do not assume it: personalities should not be multiplied without necessity. The like holds for the theistic clues here considered under the headings "immediate experience," "analogy," and "teleology": they suggest a personal source but not a multiple source, and personal sources should not be multiplied without necessity. Let us examine this extended parallel, point by point.  



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(1) What Davies says of the universe might be said of a human body: "The world contains individual objects and systems, but they are structured such that, taken together, they form a unified and consistent whole. For example, the various forces of nature are not just a haphazard conjunction of disparate influences. They dovetail together in a mutually supportive way which bestows upon nature a stability and harmony that are hard to capture mathematically but obvious to anyone who studies the world in depth." 17 The analogy between the universe and a body becomes closer if the universe is conceived as God's body, as some would have it, or at least in the traditional manner, as being directly known to God and subject to God's guiding action: "The body I have is mine (in part) because of its being volitionally and cognitively bound up with me. Hence, there is some analogy between the person-body and God-world relations, an analogy endorsed by many theologians from Augustine to William of Auvergne."18 Disanalogies might also be notedfor instance, the world's dependence on God for its existencebut in the present context the analogies seem more germane. (2) The bodily behavior that we share with inanimate objects (falling from heights, crashing through thin ice) does not suggest a personal source. Neither does the bodily behavior that we share with lower life forms (eating, sleeping, ambulating). Neither, at least very clearly, does the bodily behavior that we share with higher life forms (fleeing, cuddling, nursing, grooming, fighting). Thus the behavior worth citing as evidence for human personality is quite limiteddespite the fact that falling from a height, crashing through the ice, eating, sleeping, ambulating, and all the rest may be more or less deliberate. The parallel with God is therefore close. Though all temporal phenomena may have a personal, transcendent source, not all are equally suggestive of such a source. Thus chapter 4 cites striking, mystical experiences, not dreams or everyday waking experiences; chapter 5 considers unusual events such as the answer to Augustine's prayer or an inexplicable cure, not explicable remissions or answers to prayers for a sunny day or success in an examination; chapter 6 invokes the wonders of creationflowers, not slag heaps; admirable people, not puddles. (3) Within this narrower, personal focus, the behavior of a single human body may suggest a wide range of emotions, attitudes, and intentionsthe emotion of rage, sorrow, terror, love, or pity; the attitude of attention or inattention, interest or indifference; the intention to sit or rise, enter or leave, work or sleepwithout suggesting any splintering of personality. A uniform personality, focused on a single interest, is a sick personality. A healthy personality exhibits diverse interests, aims, and activitiesindeed, diverse identities. (4) "I am the same person," writes Ernest Hilgard, "who traveled to Europe last summer, and I am the same person who watched the game being played yesterday. This does not mean that I always behave the same, for I am various people at various times, according to the roles that I play as husband, father, grandfather, teacher, researcher, voter, or loafer."19 The  



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term "role," from the theater, suggests strong differentiation. "In daily life too, as Shakespeare reminds us, one man 'plays many parts': within a single day a person may, for example, be both motorist and pedestrian, buyer and seller, employer and employee, friend and enemy. There are many opportunities for conflict of roles and for role ambiguity, and serious problems can arise from even the simplest of the role transitions demanded in our daily lives." 20 Yet none of thisnor much more21occasions talk of split or multiple personalities. What does? (5) In 1994 the American Psychiatric Association listed four criteria of Multiple Personality Disorder (now termed "Dissociative Identity Disorder"): A. The presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self). B. At least two of these identities or personality states recurrently take control of the person's behavior, C. Inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness. D. The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., blackouts or chaotic behavior during Alcohol Intoxication) or a general medical condition (e.g., complex partial seizures).22 Concretely, what are these alters like? The individual personalities are nearly always quite discrepant and frequently seem to be opposites. For example: "When the presenting individual, the host, is conservative, cautious, and shy, one of the more prominent alters may be lively, flirtatious, and coarse." Thus, a quiet and retiring spinster may cohabit with a flamboyant, promiscuous bar habitué.23 (6) Short of this final splintering, no problems of ascription arise. Mrs. M may be excited one moment and depressed the next. She may love one person and loathe another. She may be one person at home and another at work. Still, in the absence of more radical splitting, if she is the woman who gazes on her child so tenderly, she is the one who loves the child. To suggest a team of Mrs. M's loving the child or one Mrs. M who loves the child and an otherwise indiscernible alter who does not, would not only be gratuitous but would not make evident sense. (7) So, too, for God. The data of chapter 4 suggest no radical split in the object of varied mystical experiences. The data of chapter 5 suggest no radical split, from case to case, in the one who answers people's needs and prayers. The data of chapter 6 suggest no radical split in the one who tells the cosmic tale and brings forth the world's wonders. When combined, the data of these chapters are more diverse than when taken singly, but they are still fully congruent. There is no difficulty supposing that the one whom Teresa experienced is the one who answered Augustine's prayers, or that the one who answered Augustine's prayers is the one who made the universe. To suggest a different divinity in each instance would not only be gratuitous but would also raise problems of sense.  



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This parallel with other minds puts Broad's challenge in perspective. Anyone who wishes to combine two theistic arguments, he saysfor instance, anyone who wishes to identify the Creator of the cosmological argument with the Designer of the teleological argument"should be expected to bring forward strong positive evidence for doing so." For Broad, it does not suffice that both arguments explain the same universe. Neither is it enough that each argument accounts for the whole universe and not separate parts, one part created and the other designed. For who knows, maybe one divinity did the designing and another did the creating. Similarly, however, maybe one Mrs. M did the looking and another did the loving. Perhaps multiple personalities dwelt in the single body I observed. In both instances, the response is the same: What reason do we have to thus multiply entities? Multiple personalities are difficult to spotmore difficult than brief accounts synopsized from long analysis may suggest. "During the 1980s," writes Ian Hacking, "investigators found that the average number of years a multiple spent in the mental health system prior to diagnosis was almost seven. Even today, only a committed clinician may be confident enough to diagnose multiple personality. To do so one must recognize and establish contact with alter personalities: you must see them come out and take control." 24 With respect to the cosmos, no human clinician has had any comparable experience. For some, the mix of good and evil in the world has signaled a Jekyll-and-Hyde origin, one source good and the other bad. This solution resembles assigning all kisses, candies, and bedtime stories to one Mrs. M, and all spankings, scoldings, and nasty vaccinations to another. It would be easier to work out some such split for Mrs. M than for the universe, with its one set of laws begetting famines as well as harvests, floods as well as flowers. However, we need not make the attempt. The same argument that answers the objection from evil answers this one, too. Given our cognitive limits, we have no valid reason to suppose that good and bad are not more fully integrated in the universe than are good and bad, love and hate, within a single personality. Let this suffice on the issue of common reference. With the disparate evidence of previous chapters now tied together, the time has come for an overall appraisal. How does belief in God compare with belief in other mindsor, more specifically, with belief in Mrs. M's love for her daughter?  



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9 Journey's End Sent to investigate Jefferson's surmise that a water route might link the Louisiana Territory with the Pacific Ocean, Lewis and Clark followed three main riversthe Missouri, the Snake, and the Columbiaand only near the end explored two interesting tributaries, the Yellowstone and the Marias. Many tributaries that tempted them to right and leftthe Kansas, Platte, Big Sioux, Cheyenne, Milk, and a score of othersthey merely noted in passing, since they had neither the time nor the need to investigate them all. Here, in figure, is the present inquiry. The surmise to be checked was Plantinga's parity thesis ("if my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God"). The three main lines of thought explored were the mystical, analogical, and teleological, with two othersthe "best explanation" argument and the cosmological argumentbriefly reconnoitered near the end. Many other arguments and considerations, passed by for reasons of space and relevance, remain merely to be noted. For instance, true to my stated focus on objective, epistemic reasons (that is, on evidence), I have ignored various pragmatic reasons for belief. It may be in our best interests to believe in God (on this there is disagreement); and it surely is in our best interests to believe in other minds. (Sartre may have written, "Hell is others," but one doubts that he would have wished to dispense entirely with human company, for instance, that of Simone de Beauvoir.) However, disagreement about the advantages of theistic belief and agreement about the advantages of belief in other minds stem largely from belief or disbelief in these respective objects of belief. As far as I can see, the alleged advantages or disadvantages of believing in God or in other minds furnish no independent evidence for the truth or falsehood of the beliefs. (The advantages of water in a desert do not make rain more likely; the disadvantages of water in a flood have no tendency to speed evaporation.) Again, I have not dwelt on two objections to God's existence which have enjoyed some vogue in recent timesone mentioned in chapter 2, the other in chapter 3. To some philosophers, theistic beliefs have appeared meaningless and accordingly are  



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neither true nor false. To other philosophers, God has appeared morally objectionable, so should not exist. In response to the first objection, I have suggestedbriefly here but more fully elsewherethat PRS, by furnishing truthconditions for theistic beliefs, can thereby assure their meaning. 1 In response to the second objection, I have suggested that a domineering divinity might be objectionable, but not one "supremely worthy of worship and obedience." Taking another direction, I might have balanced competing claims to epistemological priority and considered what epistemic advantage, if any, such claims confer. On one hand, theistic reasoning such as that in chapters 5 and 6, which repeatedly relies on analogies with human purposive behavior (caring, responding, designing, narrating, etc.), may therefore appear to presuppose belief in other minds. On the other hand, other-minds arguments, which rely on natural regularities, may therefore appear to need grounding by belief in God, as in Descartes' Meditations. Indeed, some have seen God as the guarantor of all human reasoning, inductive or deductive. I sense some truth on both sides of this confrontation. It is clear, on one side, that the premise of God's existence strengthens the case for other minds ("It would be puzzling to suppose that an all-good God constructs creatures with cognitive faculties designed only to mislead and generate systematically mistaken views"2). On the other side, it is evident that the premise of other minds strengthens both the teleological evidence for God and the evidence based on others' testimony. It is not clear, however, that this reciprocal supportiveness notably affects the beliefs' comparative epistemic standing (especially, say, with regard to Mrs. M's love) or that it merits an additional section or chapter. This tributary is large and interesting, but I pass it by. When I speak of a score or more tributaries lining my route, I have principally in mind the great number and variety of arguments for God's existence that I have not paused to assess. The arguments for other minds are much fewer. In fact, the only other such argument that has received attention comparable to that accorded the two arguments I have considered (from analogy and from best explanation) is the kind of linguistic, Wittgensteinian case advanced, for example, by Norman Malcolm.3 According to Wittgenstein, psychological concepts (e.g., "love" and "pain") have need of outer, public "criteria."4 In Malcolm's reading of this term, "satisfaction of the criterion of y establishes the existence of y beyond question."5 Accordingly, if loving behavior is a criterion of love and loving behavior is observed, there can be no further doubt: the person loves. The link between the behavior and the love is not merely inductive, but logical. "That so-and-so is the criterion of y is a matter, not of experience, but of 'definition.'''6 And yet, if the mental is not defined solely or exhaustively in terms of the nonmental, how can sheer logic bridge the gap between them? How, for example, can a mere grimace or wound establish without a doubt that a person is in pain or a mere dilation of the pupils establish without a doubt that a person is afraid? The kernel of truth in the linguistic demonstration, as also its fatal flaw, can be discerned in Wittgenstein's remark: "If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments."7 For psychological terms to signify something more than behavior, speakers must believe in something more than behavior and must agree to some extent about  



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the indicators of that something more. From this semantic requirement it does not follow, however, that there must in fact be something more than behavior. The use we make of psychological expressions reflects our beliefs in others minds, but it does not ground those beliefs. Since others have previously critiqued the linguistic case for other minds, 8 I can move on quickly hereand had better do so, to be even-handed in my comparison. Arguments for God, on the other side of the ledger, have been so numerous that I cannot venture even a brief critique of the majority but can only signal their existence. Theistic reasoning has passed, for example, from quasi-universal consent to the existence of the God believed in; from eternal and necessary truths to their immutable and eternal ground; from motion to the prime mover; from the complex to the perfectly simple; from the limited to the limitless; from the intelligible universe to an intelligent source; from the concept of God to the existence of God; from the distinction between essence and existence to the being in whom they merge; from the desire of happiness to the supreme good; from desire of the infinite to the existence of the infinite; from sensible "ideas" to the mind from which we receive them; from the idea of the infinite to the infinite cause of the idea; from the act of judgment to the absolute implicit in judgment; from the demands of the moral order to the one who can satisfy them by reconciling virtue and happiness; from moral obligation to a divine lawgiver; from virtuous theists to the truth of theism; from grades of perfection to the supremely perfect being; from the difference of the animate from the nonanimate, the reproductive from the nonreproductive, and the mental from the nonmental to the one who explains the rise of each; from being to Being, via the Hegelian dialectic; from I-thou to supreme Thou; from the value, or need, of God's existence to God's existence; from the logical possibility of God to the actual existence of God. This catalog of bypassed arguments is far from complete,9 and many arguments, like those previously considered, have numerous variants. It may appear therefore that I have failed to do justice to the epistemic case for theistic belief and that I have thereby falsified the comparison between belief in God and belief in other minds. To some extent, this may well be true. The chances are good that one or the other of these arguments possesses more weight

than I have discerned in it and therefore deserves a hearing. However, I do not sense that belief in God has fared badly as it is. In chapter 1, I asked: Does belief in God belong in the same company with the basic beliefs Plantinga and others cite? Is it comparable, for example, with belief in other minds? Since other-mind beliefs vary widely, some enjoying multiple backing and some not, I have asked more specifically: Does belief in God bear comparison  



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with other-mind beliefs with limited backing (e.g., a single look) which nonetheless have a strong claim to being both rational and true? It is time to assess the answers to these questions in the light of the evidence reviewed. Summing Up In Owen's summary judgment, "Just as a human person's acts reveal both his existence and his character as a spiritual being, so through God's signs we learn both his existence and, in varying degrees, his character as One who is infinite in goodness, wisdom, and power." 10 Can this much be inferred from the signs we have considered in preceding chapters? Does this cumulative comparison with other persons hold up? First, consider the persons. In Mrs. M's case, her look did, as Owen puts it, reveal both her existence and her character as a spiritual being. Specifically, it revealed her love for her child. During the same visit, other behavior of hers suggested further traits of characterfor example, intelligence, seriousness, and generosity. All this evidence directly supported belief in her existence as a person. Only her look directly supported belief in her love, whereas the rest supported it indirectly by testifying at least to her existence as a person (persons love, mere bodies do not). Finally, all the evidence supported, directly but bit by bit, belief in her existence as an intelligent, serious, generous person who loved her child. Though strong, this cumulative conclusion was more weakly supported than either belief in her existence simply as a person or belief in her love for her child. For its support was no stronger than that for the least sure of the conclusion's constitutive traits. Belief in God, even as minimally defined, resembles this final, cumulative conclusion rather than belief in Mrs. M's sheer personhood or her love for her child. However, such theistic belief is not weakened in the way just noted, for the evidence in chapters 4 to 6 coheres more closely than does the evidence for Mrs. M's multiple, unrelated traits. The evidence for her intelligence did not show her seriousness, generosity, or love for her child. The evidence for her seriousness did not reveal her intelligence, generosity, or love for her child. The evidence for her generosity did not demonstrate her intelligence, seriousness, or love for her child. Similarly, the look that revealed her love for her child lent no support for belief in her intelligence, seriousness, or generosity. By contrast, the varied theistic evidence here cited bears witness to all three traits that Owen mentioned. Mystical experiences suggest one who is good, wise, and powerful, as do the providential events of history and personal experience and as do the wonders of the universe. The like may hold for single items of evidence within each of these three categories. For example, Garcia was impressed by the glories of the Cascades and by the admirable character of her parents, both of which individually spoke to her of the goodness, wisdom, and power of their source. Similarly, each experience such as Augustine's in the garden or Corrie and Betsie ten Boom's in the concentration camp suggests the same three traitsgoodness, wisdom, and power. So also do some mystical experiences. Other experiences, however, at least as described, are more general or more restricted. When, for example, Angela speaks of beholding "the fullness of  



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God," or, more specifically, of beholding "a beauty wherein I saw the All Good," 11 she says nothing explicitly about divine wisdom or power. These traits remain implicit in the fact of the experience or come more explicitly to the fore in other accounts. "He reveals Himself quite clearly," writes Teresa, ''as the Lord of Heaven and earth."12 In one respect, Owen's conclusion stops short of what the preceding chapters suggest; in another respect it goes beyond their combined suggestive power. It stops short because it makes no explicit mention of God as creator and sustainer of the universe, whereas chapter 6 does. It goes beyond the chapters' collective witness because none of their evidence, so far as I can see, testifies to "infinite" goodness, wisdom, and power. However, what conceivably could? The notion of quantitative infinity proves sufficiently perplexing, but qualitative infinity is still more puzzling. What, for example, would it mean to suggest that Mrs. M loves her child infinitely? And if, as in this instance, we do not know what a hypothesis means, how can we prove it or find evidence to support it? Our initial characterization described God simply as "supremely worthy of worship and obedience," and the One evidenced by chapters 4 to 7, whose goodness, wisdom, and power surpass our imagining, uniquely satisfies this description. What experience and reason suggest, faith adorns and amplifies. "0 God," exclaims the mystic Dhu '1-Nun, "I never hearken to the voices of the beasts or the rustle of the trees, the splashing of waters or the song of birds, the whistling of the wind or the rumble of thunder, but I sense in them a testimony to the Unity, and a proof of the incomparableness; that thou art the all-prevailing, the all-knowing, the allwise, the all-true, and that in thee is neither overthrow nor ignorance nor folly nor injustice nor lying."13 Similarly, as Alston observes, "Christians regularly fill out these fragmentary epiphanies with what they have garnered from their tradition, taking what they perceive to go beyond what is revealed in experience in ways spelled out in the Christian tradition."14 We may not, for instance, have Trinitarian experiences. "Nevertheless, we may well be able to tell just from the way X appears to our experience that X is the kind of being that could well be the God of the Christian tradition. This would be the case if X appeared to us as very powerful, good, loving, and if X communicated messages to us of a sort the Christian God could reasonably be expected to communicate."15 Continuing the parallel with other minds, we might note how limited, though perhaps sure, are our surmises about another's thoughts and feelings if the surmises are based only on nonverbal behavior, and how much more we can learn through the other's verbal self-revelation. However, from these more general reflections let us turn again, in conclusion, to the more focused comparison that has recurred throughout the preceding inquiry. How does belief in God compare epistemically with belief in Mrs. M's love for her daughter? First, a richer variety of evidencemystical, analogical, and teleologicalsupports belief in God. Second, the analogical evidence for God looks as strong as the analogical evidence for Mrs. M's love, since the latter, despite some advantages, lacks crucial backing in self-observation. Third, the problem of evil does not shift the balance in favor of Mrs. M's love. For both beliefs, however, it seems that the evidence is stronger than the arguments formulated from the evidence. Thus many would concur with the parallel I drew in chapter 6. Although it is logically and physically possible that Mrs. M's features just  



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happened to fall into the configuration I observed at the moment she gazed on her child and that I mistakenly read this chance occurrence as a sign of her love, I do not believe it for a moment. Similarly, I do not believe for a moment, and neither do others, that a random cosmos just happened to bring forth the world Dhu 'l-Nun describes or the lovable people we encounter every day. Heighten this everyday experience, as in numerous accounts of mystical encounter, answers to prayer, or other providential occurrences, and the assurance may be proportionately heightenedas my assurance of Mrs. M's love might be, if further evidence came to supplement her loving look. If everyone shared the same evidence for God, I might ignore personal differences and formulate a common parity argument, à la Plantinga: "If belief in Mrs. M's love, or the like, is rational, so is belief in God. But the former is clearly rational; so, therefore, is the latter." However, the present comparative inquiry differs from Plantinga's not only in its more focused human paradigm (Mrs. M's love) but also in the more personal evidence it cites for God in chapters 4 and 5. Given this difference, fine-tuning requires that we consider, for any given individual, how much of the evidence is firsthand and how much is secondhand. If I observed a look like Mrs. M's but only heard or read about theistic experiences such as chapters 4 and 5 recount, my personal epistemic balance might favor belief in the person's love over belief in God. If I only heard about the look but had personal experiences of those theistic kinds, the balance might shift strongly in the other direction and favor belief in God. If I both saw the look and, in addition to the teleological evidence of chapter 6, had some experience of God, the two beliefs might balance more evenly. 16 To skirt such variations and venture a more general conclusion, I could suggest that the teleological evidence for God, by itself, may be epistemically comparable to firsthand experience such as mine; for that experience, as we saw, provides only defective analogical evidence. In this hypothesis, the remaining theistic evidence, whether powerfully personal or acquired from others' testimony, would not be needed to establish parity. However, it is difficult to make such assessments with any assurance. For how can we weigh one type of evidence against another? Even the analytically exigent might concede that none of the evidence cited for God or for Mrs. M's love can be marshaled with deductive or inductive rigor. However, on reading the foregoing chapter-by-chapter assessment, they might still wish to know: What weight should we assign the analogical evidence for God's existence compared with the analogical evidence for Mrs. M's love? What weight should we accord the combined mystical, analogical, and teleological evidence for God's existence compared with the analogical evidence for Mrs. M's love? What weight should we attribute, in my final suggestion, to the teleological evidence for God's existence compared with the analogical evidence for Mrs. M's love? I have no idea, and I have no way of telling. First, I have no idea precisely what or how much analogical evidence I had tucked away in my unremembered experience, backing my belief in Mrs. M's love. Furthermore, even if all that jumbled evidence rushed back into my conscious memory, I would have no epistemic scales on which to weigh its strength, then the strength of the evidence for God, so as to arrive at a comparative assessment.  



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Were all the evidence on both sides of the comparison of some single, suitable variety, a fairly exact comparison might be possible: so many reliable witnesses on one side, so many on the other; so many successful experiments on one side, so many on the other; so many pertinent similarities on one side, so many on the other; or the like. But such is not the situation in this or in comparable confrontations. The outcome would be equally indefinite, equally impressionistic, if I tried to compare the respective merits of belief in other minds and belief in the physical world, or belief in the physical world and belief in the past, or belief in the past and belief in other minds. Here, too, no common measure permits an exact comparison. 17 Yet these beliefs, we sense, are epistemically comparable. Similarly, at the end of this investigation belief in God appears epistemically comparable with various other-mind beliefs, though with some more than others. This, too, I sense, without precise calculation, and so may the reader. A Happy Mean? In God and Other Minds, Plantinga could make more definite comparisons because his comparisons were negative. The best argument for God and the best argument for other minds, he concluded, fail in precisely the same way. However, though the articulated "evidence" for both beliefs does not withstand analytic scrutiny, that same evidence, in its raw state, furnishes grounds for the beliefs. And its failing in the same way does not signify that it succeeds in the same way (it clearly does not) or that it succeeds equally in grounding the respective beliefs. Therein lies a weakness, already noted, of Plantinga's early approach. Still, now it may be asked, how has the present "middle way" proved preferable to the antithetical extremes that it sought to slip between? Plantinga could provide no analytic basis for grouping belief in God with other basic beliefs. Swinburne could provide no analytic basis for grouping theistic appearances with other appearances. I, in turn, can provide no analytic basis for grouping belief in God with belief in Mrs. M's love or any other specific other-minds belief. So what has been gained? Something, I would say, in comparison with both extremes. Plantinga envisaged a comparative study of basic beliefs that would elicit sufficient and necessary conditions of proper basicality. Neither he nor anybody else has undertaken or carried such an inquiry to term, and indeed the project does not look feasible. As we have seen, the choice of an initial sampling of beliefs from which to educe the desired sufficient and necessary conditions would be decisive for the outcome, yet could not be effected nonarbitrarily without applying the very conditions to be educed. Here, in the present study, something better has been offered: in place of a promissory note, an actual inquiry; in place of begging the question or pursuing analytical illusions, a feasible, plausible comparison. In Friedrich Waismann's words: "Arguments are used in such a discussion, not as proofs, though, but rather as means to make [a person] see things he had not noticed before: e.g. to dispel wrong analogies, to stress similarities with other cases and in this way to bring about something like a shift of perspective."18  



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The perspective that needs shifting is the one at the other extreme, aptly expressed by Donovan: If believers insist that belief in God is so unlike holding a scientific theory that we have no right to make the comparison, the cost of their doing so seems to be the admission that belief cannot, by any widely recognized criterion, be counted as rational. If on the other hand the way religious belief-systems are supported by an appeal to religious experiences is claimed as a rational procedure, the best way to show that is to bring out the parallels with reasoning used to support theories and hypotheses in the sciences, and with similar forms of reasoning used in everyday situations. 19 Swinburne has taken up this challenge. "My use of confirmation theory," he writes, "enables me to express my arguments with the rigour appropriate to any detailed presentation of the evidence for and against a large-scale theory of the universe; and also enables me to bring out the close similarities which exist between religious theories and large-scale scientific theories."20 So doing, he aims to satisfy the general prescription previously quoted: ''A belief is rational [in a sense required of all believers] . . . if it is based on evidence resulting from investigation which was in the subject's view adequate and the subject has subjected his inductive standards to criticism which was in his view adequate, and checked in his view adequately that by them his belief was rendered probable by his evidence."21 In chapter 1, I questioned how belief in other minds would fare if put to such a test, and now I ask more pointedly: By what inductive, "scientific" standards might I test my belief in Mrs. M's love for her child? How probable does that belief, so tenuously linked with my own unobserved behavior, appear when tested by available, "widely recognized" criteria? And yet I believefirmly, rationallythat this woman loved her child. Belief in God, if comparable, may be equally firm, equally rational, equally true. Here I side with Plantinga. So has a happy mean been achieved? Happy in comparison with the alternative extremes? Yes, I think so. Happy in comparison with some rigorous, analytical ideal? No, not that. But the inquiry now completed, comparing belief in God with belief in other minds, has suggested how unrealistic such an ideal would be. In this, my approach has resembled the one Wittgenstein described: I wanted to put this picture before your eyes, and your acceptance of this picture consists in your being inclined to regard a given case differently; that is, to compare it with this series of pictures. I have changed your way of seeing. (I once read somewhere that a geometrical figure, with the words "look at this," serves as a proof for certain Indian mathematicians. This looking too effects an alteration in one's way of seeing.)22 I have presented, not a geometrical figure, but a sample beliefmy belief in Mrs. M's lovebearing the invitation "Look at this." This looking, too, may affect one's way of seeing; it may bring one to regard belief in God differently.  



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Notes Chapter 1 1. For a kindred characterization of the extremes and a similar call for a "middle way," compare Küng, Does God Exist?, 536: "The question therefore arises whether perhaps a way is laid open here, a way between the fronts. The demarcations, anyway, have now become sufficiently clear: as against dialectical theology firstly: belief in God must not only be asserted, it must be verified; as against natural theology now: belief in God is to be verified but not proved; The right way, then, would lie between the purely authoritative assertion of God in the spirit of dialectical theology and the purely rational proof of God in the spirit of natural theology, would lie between Karl Barth and Vatican I. Is there such a way?" In its own way, the present study responds to Vatican I (which, as Küng notes, does not speak of "proof"), to Küng's closing query, and to the related problem he cites: "It seems here as if we had been rushed into a dilemma, into an inescapable situation. Either belief in God can be proved and how is it then faith? Or it cannot be proved and how is it then reasonable? This is the perennial dilemma between reason and faith, particularly in the question of the knowledge of God, which some solve in favor of faith and the others in favor of reasonor even do not solve it at all" (Küng, On Being a Christian, 64). 2. Beversluis, "Reforming the 'Reformed' Objection," contests Plantinga's continuity with Calvin. Sudduth ("Calvin, Plantinga") disagrees. 3. Plantinga, "Reason and Belief in God," 17. 4. Plantinga, "The Reformed Objection," 189. 5. Plantinga, "Reason and Belief in God," 74. 6. Ibid., 76. 7. Ibid., 77, and Plantinga, "The Reformed Objection," 197. 8. Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, viii-ix. 9. Ibid., ix. 10. Swinburne, Faith and Reason, 66. 11. Ibid., 102.  



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12. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 277. 13. Ibid., 291. 14. Swinburne, Review, 46. 15. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 254. With respect to the parenthetical term, "epistemically," Swinburne observes, "There is a crucial distinction due to Chisholm between the epistemic and the comparative uses of such verbs as 'seems,' 'appears,' 'looks,' etc. To use such words in their epistemic use is to describe what the subject is inclined to believe on the basis of his present sensory experience" (ibid., 24546). 16. Ibid., 254. 17. Ibid., 253. 18. Swinburne himself acknowledges "that there are two qualifications which somewhat diminish the evidential force of religious experience apparently of God. One is the qualitative remoteness of subjects' past experiences from what they claim to have recognized, viz. God. The other is the fact that there cannot be perceptions of the absence of God" (ibid., 270). Critics stress these differences and add others. See Gale, "Swinburne's Argument from Religious Experience," 5663, and Nature, 31719. 19. In The Existence of God, 25560, Swinburne argues "that attempts to restrict the principle in ways designed to rule out its application to religious experience are either unjustified or unsuccessful" (255). 20. Though equally full, Alston's kindred study, Perceiving God, focuses on practices rather than beliefs and does not directly address the question of God's existence. Comparisons of the beliefs Plantinga has termed "properly basic" are numerous (e.g., Audi, "Direct Justification"; Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing, chap. 7, and Theory of Knowledge, 133; Owen, The Christian Knowledge of God, 12537; Penelhum, God and Skepticism, 14756; Plantinga, "Is Theism Really a Miracle?" 13233, and "Reason and Belief in God," 6465; Scudder, Tennant's Philosophical Theology, 6014; Shepherd, Experience, Inference and God, 1045. Pairings are also plentiful, especially these: (1) Other minds and the external world (e.g., Castañeda, "Consciousness and Behavior," 121; Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality, 2125, 34246; Stace, "The Problem of Unreasoned Beliefs," 2735, 13740); (2) God and the external world (e.g., Alston, "Christian Experience and Christian Belief," 10830, "Is Religious Belief Rational?" 14454, "The Place of Experience," 1089, "Religious Experience and Religious Belief," and ''Religious Experience as a Ground of Religious Belief"; Audi, Belief, Justification, and Knowledge, 13233; Brown, Religious Belief, 3739; Ewing, "Pseudo-Solutions," 51; Hasker, "Epistemic Value," 15562; Hick, Arguments, 10916, An Interpretation of Religion, 21315, "The Rationality of Religious Belief," 3068, and "Sceptics and Believers," 24250; Howard-Snyder, Review; Leftow, "From Jerusalem to Athens," 19799; Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, 3; Wainwright, Mysticism, chap. 3); (3) God and other minds (e.g., Abraham, "Epistemological Significance," 44849; Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, 20127; Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms, 12526; Donovan, Interpreting Religious Experience, 5657, 6370, 8487; Gutting, Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism, 15558; Hicks, The Philosophical Bases of Theism, 14488; McLeod, Rationality and Theistic Belief, chap. 11; Meiland, "Analogy, Verification and Other Minds"; J. Smith, Experience and God, 8486; N. Smith, "Is Divine Existence Credible?" 39193). 21. Plantinga, God and Other Minds, 268. 22. Ibid., 271. In his preface to the 1990 paperback edition of God and Other Minds, Plantinga stands by this conclusion, though he would not word the case for it quite the same way.  

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23. Cf. Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 12324: "If it is difficult to the point of impossibility to assign comparative values on any objective basis to different items on the same side of the ledger, it is even harder to evaluate comparatively items drawn from opposite sides. By what criterion can we assert that the orderliness of nature tells more strongly, or less strongly, in favour of theism than human and animal suffering tells against it? Or that the explanatory superfluousness of the theistic hypothesis tells more strongly, or less strongly, in favour of atheism than reported divine revelations tell against it?" 24. Swinburne concedes that, despite the sound of the words, an "investigation which was in the subject's view adequate" might be no investigation at allthat, for example, "If in past times a man was absolutely certain about the truth of his religious beliefs, then there would have been no need for him to investigate their truth" (Faith and Reason, 66). But he also surmises, without distinction of times or beliefs, that "For a belief about a matter which the subject holds to be of supreme importance, perhaps investigation ought always to be undertaken" (ibid., 52). 25. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 108. Chapter 2 1. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 8. 2. Quoted in Klass, Review, 44. 3. Ibid., 45. 4. Devitt, Realism and Truth, 79. 5. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 448. 6. See Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence, 360. 7. Devitt, Realism and Truth, 79. 8. Griffin, The Question of Animal Awareness, 67, citing Scriven, Apter, Elithorn and Jones, and Gregg. 9. Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin, 5657. 10. Nagel, Mortal Questions, 166. 11. McDonough, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, 227. 12. In one respect, a look of anger or impatience might be preferable to work with, since it would obviate a possible misunderstanding, revealed by one reader's remarks. The parallel I shall be considering is not between belief in Mrs. M's love, based on an experience of her loving look, and belief in God's love, based on some comparable experience. Rather, I shall be comparing the evidence, of whatever kind, for God's existence with the only evidence available for Mrs. M's lovenamely her look. 13. Hallett, Language and Truth, especially chaps. 3, 4, and 7. 14. Implicit here is a response to objections often made concerning the meaningfulness of theological assertions. See Hallett, Language and Truth, 17783. 15. Klubertanz, St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy, 146. Klubertanz comments: "Surely these are all good points." I disagree. 16. Resistance to this extension of the term "reason" to experience as well as to beliefs might reflect the kind of narrow perspective that I shall counteract here, for it enjoys no clear backing from general usage. Were even a philosopher to ask, "What reason do you have for believing that Mrs. M's look was loving," I would hesitate to answer, "No reason," since the philosopher might accept as a reason I "have" a case conceived and formulated

after the fact, from the evidence I presently possess in raw, nonpropositional form. In any case, the important thing is that readers understand how I here employ such terms as "reason,'' "ground," and "evidence." 17. A reader has inquired whether I am an "evidentialist." For those interested in such labels, I answer in the negative. No theory of rationality is implied by my choice of focus.  



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18. PRS and the corresponding norm of predication suggest reasons for the quickness of my exit from these contemporary puzzles. For further indications, see, for example, Hallett, Essentialism, 3442, and Alston, "Epistemic Desiderata." 19. Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1, 26. 20. Hick, "The Rationality of Religious Belief," 313 (on William Rowe's viewpoint). 21. Ekman, "Universals," 212. 22. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, vol. 1, 22324. 23. Ibid., 206. 24. Ekman and Oster, "Facial Expressions of Emotion," 54244. 25. Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1, 26. 26. Kenny, What Is Faith?, 45 and Faith and Reason, 6465. Compare Parsons, God and the Burden of Proof, 105 (emphasis added): "the latest and most sophisticated efforts to provide arguments for God's existence are now seen to fare no better than earlier attempts. The atheist therefore seems fully justified in denying that there are any grounds for belief in the existence of God." Cf. Plantinga, "Is Theism Really a Miracle?" 110: "Mackie clearly holds that the rationality of belief in God stands or falls with the arguments for and against the existence of God: if the arguments for God's existence are stronger than the arguments against his existence, then theism is rationally acceptable; on the other hand if the arguments against God's existence are stronger, then it is irrational or somehow improper to believe in God." 27. "An effort is made to decide questions on the basis of arguments. Arguments for a thesis may be shown to be valid and their premises true. Counterarguments may be refuted or shown to be irrelevant. Definite conclusions may be reached or it may be concluded that there is no conclusive argument for or against a position. Philosophers characteristically ask, 'How can you show that?'" (Purtill, Reason to Believe, 9, on "philosophy, as it is understood by most contemporary philosophers"). 28. Russell, The Scientific Outlook, 78 (paragraph break omitted). 29. Hallett, Language and Truth, 11415. A pertinent addition: "If, as many modern thinkers seem to believe, mental contents such as qualia can be defined in terms of, and their essence reduced to, their causal relations to inputs mediated by sensory endings and to behavioral outputs, then consciousness is utterly emptied" (Tallis, "A Critique of Neuromythology," 108). 30. Russell, "Reply to Criticisms," 704. 31. In support, see Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations, e.g., 33, 180, 203 ("Intoxicated by his success and supported by the onrushing Pythagorean tide, Galileo conceived the whole physical universe as a world of extension, figure, motion, and weight; all other qualities which we suppose to exist in rerum natura really have no place there but are due to the confusion and deceitfulness of our senses. The real world is mathematical . . ."); Berlin, The Age of Enlightenment, 17 ("This use of observation and experiment entailed the application of exact methods of measurement, and resulted in the linking together of many diverse phenomena under laws of great precision, generally formulated in mathematical terms. Consequently only the measurable aspects of reality were to be treated as realthose susceptible to equations connecting the variations in one aspect of a phenomenon with measurable variations in other phenomena"). 32. Of a comparable case (perceptual determination of distance), Alston writes: "It is a matter of intense controversy in both philosophy and psychology just how to think about this matter. On one extreme is the view that inference is involved, that the subject performs an unconscious inference from premises concerning the cues to a conclusion concerning the way X looks. At the other extreme is the view that the processes that yield sensory

experience involve nothing like beliefs or inference at all, that it is all a matter of 'purely causal' transactions, with no sort of intentionality or 'taking account of of any  



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sort being involved. Intermediate positions hold that some kind of 'subdoxastic' taking account of is involved; these are less complex than full-blooded beliefs but nevertheless involve a rudimentary sort of cognition of the relevant factors" (Perceiving God, 8384). 33. Thus there are three possible explanations, not just two, for the difficulty of formulating convincing arguments for the existence of God or the existence of other minds: (1) the grounds we have for belief may in fact be weak; (2) they may be strong but largely inaccessible to analysis and explicit formulation; (3) they may be judged by inappropriate standards. So far I have stressed the second alternative and warned against concluding from the weakness of explicit arguments to the weakness of grounds. A person's grounds may be good without being either reflective or accessible. However, as the history of philosophy amply attests, the third possibility must also be kept in mind. Chapter 3 1. Plantinga, "A Christian Life Partly Lived," 60. 2. Grigg, "The Crucial Disanalogies," 39394. Cf. Gutting, "Plantinga," 33637 ("Prima facie, the near universality and inevitability of Humean beliefs suggest that they may have a different epistemic status from religious beliefs"); Martin, Atheism, 274 (''In this world, atheism and agnosticism are live options for many intelligent people; solipsism is an option only for the mentally ill"). 3. Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind, 3. Such denials, Searle acknowledges, are often well camouflaged. "Authors who are about to say something that sounds silly very seldom come right out and say it. Usually a set of rhetorical or stylistic devices is employed to avoid having to say it in words of one syllable" (ibid., 4). 4. Comparison with a mind endowed with multiple traits might be still more apt but would be much less manageable. 5. Hunt, "Middle Knowledge," 4. 6. Lepp, Atheism in Our Time, 10. Joseph Runzo goes farther. After asserting that "even when we do adopt a major change in our world-view, it is not principally rational reasoning, but faith, which decides the issue of which of two world-views, such as naturalism or monotheism, to adopt" ("World-Views," 45), he argues that this is necessarily the case, since, in his view, "world-views themselves are neither true nor false, only more or less expedient" (ibid., 46). Here our positions diverge, for I hold that belief in God is true or false. PRS applies. 7. Lepp, Atheism in Our Time, 10. 8. Ibid., 132. 9. Ibid., 80. 10. James Ross plausibly asserts, "Very few persons who believe there is a god of the sort supposed by the JudaicChristian tradition have come to this belief by any formal process of reasoning or argumentation; by far the largest percentage of believers have acquired their faith through the teaching (not the reasoning or argumentation) of parents, pastors and their cultural environment" (Introduction, 12). 11. Lepp, Atheism in Our Time, 3536. For a plausible, though less professional, account of this kind, see John Hare's analysis of the sources of Bertrand Russell's atheism ("Why Bertrand Russell Was Not a Christian," 27). 12. Lepp, Atheism in Our Time, 41. Cf. Budd, Varieties of Unbelief, 12122: "Few secularist biographies are revealing enough to include this kind of information, but rebelling against a father was apparent in some of the more detailed biographies. Family conflict may also have accounted for the disproportionate number of secularist leaders who were the sons of ministers, or, in Mrs Besant's case, the wife of one." 13. Budd, Varieties of Unbelief, 11011.

 



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14. Purtill, Reason to Believe, 60. 15. Luijpen, Phenomenology and Atheism, 86. Cf. Lacroix, The Meaning of Modern Atheism, 2829. 16. Hare, "Why Bertrand Russell Was Not a Christian," 27. 17. Dondeyne, Faith and the World, 10. 18. A. R. Peacocke, "Reductionism," 307. Cf. Smart, in Smart and Haldane, Atheism and Theism, 12: "It is interesting that (so my observation in talking to them goes) biologists are more frequently hard boiled in metaphysics. They are forced to look at human beings mechanistically and have it deeply impressed on their minds that we are mammals'poor forked creatures'rather than partly spiritual beings, little lower than the angels." 19. Davies, The Mind of God, 93. 20. Charles Taylor gives a fuller account of the spectacles that scientists and philosophers have worn: "Behaviorism has deep roots in the Western philosophical tradition. One thinks of the developments that immediately preceded its rise in the early decades of the century, linked with the names of J. B. Watson and Edward L. Thorndike in the United States, Ivan Pavlov and V. M. Bekhterev in Russia, of the trend toward mechanism in biology during the latter part of the nineteenth century, of the growth of studies of animal behavior (which in the light of Darwinian evolutionary theory could be seen as the basis for the study of human behavior), and of the influence of pragmatism (in the United States). From a longer perspective, we cannot neglect the influence of physics, which, with its methods of exact measurement and intersubjective verification, set a model for science, one against which the uncertain and shifting results of the introspective psychology of Wilhelm Wundt and E. B. Titchener compared badly. Later we find physics providing a model in another way, too, for the 'hypothetico-deductive' system of Hull" ("Psychological Behaviorism," 517). 21. Kaufman, "Behaviorism," 270. 22. Compare Nagel, "The Mind Wins!" 3940, and Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 19, on the "persistent confusion between the claim that we should try as much as possible to eliminate personal subjective prejudices from the search for truth and the claim that the real world contains no elements that are irreducibly subjective." This might plausibly be viewed as the type of effect I am describing (the spectacles constantly worn begetting the restricted view) rather than as a confusion. 23. Augustine, Confessions, 85 (5.10.19): "When I wanted to think of my God, I knew of no way of doing so except as a physical mass. Nor did I think anything exists which is not material. That was the principal and almost sole cause of my inevitable error." 24. Abraham, "Faraway Fields Are Green," 165. 25. Einstein, "Religion and Science," 26. 26. Nelson, "Naturalistic Ethics," 372. 27. Pratt, Religion and Secularisation, 1315. 28. In "What Is Scientism?" 1922, Mikael Stenmark distinguishes between "epistemic scientism" ("The view that the only reality that we can know anything about is the one that science has access to") and "rationalistic scientism" ("The view that we are rationally entitled to believe only what can be scientifically proved or what is scientifically knowable'') and illustrates both. 29. Abbagnano, "Positivism," 414. Compare Campbell, "Materialism," 179: "The enduring appeal of materialism arises from its alliance with those sciences which have contributed most to our understanding of the world we live in. Investigations in the physical sciences have a materialist methodology; that is, they attempt to explain a class of phenomena by appeal to physical conditions alone."

30. Ashby, "Verifiability Principle," 240. 31. Carnap, The Unity of Science, 22.  



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32. Lepp, Atheism in Our Time, 26. 33. Rhodes, "Personal Faith and Commitment," 129. 34. Russell, Autobiography, 57. 35. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, 50. 36. In his treatise on physicalism"a programme for metaphysical and epistemological system-building guided by the view that everything is a manifestation of the physical aspects of existence"Jeffrey Poland writes, "As I understood Quine, his contention was that physicalism provides standards for what is to count as an objective matter of fact and for what is to count as a legitimate branch of knowledge concerned with such facts" (Physicalism, 2). Of Sigmund Freud, William Luijpen observes, "For him there is no other way to reality than that of 'scientific work'" (Phenomenology and Atheism, 210). 37. Carlson, "Science and the Supernatural," 87. 38. James, The Will to Believe, 18. 39. In a letter to Max Scheler, quoted in De Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 27. Cf. Nagel, The Last Word, 130: "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and wellinformed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that." 40. Lepp, Atheism in Our Time, 52. Cf. De Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 19: "Nietzsche's aversion for Christianity and for all faith in God did not date only from the end of his career. It showed itself very early, and from the beginning it was a spontaneous, quite instinctive feeling, as he himself explained in his Ecce Homo: 'Atheism,' he said at that time, 'is not, for me, the consequence of something else; still less is it a thing which has befallen me; in my case it is something that goes without saying, a matter of instinct.'" 41. Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. 1, 385. 42. Reid, Man Without God, 3. 43. If I have no concern about the truth of a report (e.g., of a rise in IBM stock), I may accept it unquestioningly; if the truth of a report (e.g., of resurrection from the dead) concerns me deeply, I am less likely to accept it unquestioningly. Cf. Ward, "The Wish to Believe," 18494. 44. Caroline Davis, Evidential Force, 155. These observations permit a cautionary remark about the title and intent of the present inquiry. The "middle way" it pursues is not an alternative to faith, but to the epistemological extremes represented by Plantinga and Swinburne. Faith, as I understand it, is not something less than rational belief, but something more. Human beings are not mere cognitive processing machines. Feelings, emotions, desires, and the like may and often do accompany reason without distorting it. 45. It may confuse some readers to see me citing nonepistemic factors that favor belief in God. Doesn't that hurt my case? Yes, to be sure. If all nonepistemic influences worked for belief in other minds and none for belief in God, the imbalance I seek to demonstrate would be obvious and I would have no need to write this chapter. However, I aim to reach a realistic, plausible verdict, and that requires attention to both favorable and unfavorable influences for both beliefs. How do the overall influences affecting the one belief compare with those affecting the other? 46. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 18. Freud continues the tradition of Enlightenment philosophers who "explained religion as the product of men's fears and hopes, as their desire for immortality, their longing to recapture childlike innocence, their dread of the unknown" (Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. 1, 408).

47. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, 22. 48. Ibid., 11516. 49. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans (Roman Breviary for October 17).  



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50. Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1. 51. Luijpen, Phenomenology and Atheism, 154. 52. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 71. 53. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, 19. 54. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, 1516. 55. Shepherd, Experience, Inference and God, 167. 56. A man quoted in James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 70. 57. Quoted in Powell, He Touched Me, 59. 58. James, The Will to Believe, 24. 59. Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, 45, citing Russell, Logic and Knowledge, 22122. 60. Cf. "Anthony Collins's well-known witticism against the learned Dr. Samuel Clarkethat no one had doubted the existence of God until Dr. Clarke tried to prove it" (Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. 1, 326). 61. Quoted in Gay, ibid., 291, from Système de la nature. 62. Gay, ibid. 63. Ibid., 289, from Voltaire's correspondence. 64. Russell, Autobiography, 47. 65. Cf. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 21: "It seems intolerable metaphysically that there should be irreducibly subjective,'private' entities in the world, and intolerable epistemologically that there should be an asymmetry between the way that each person knows of his or her inner mental phenomena and the way that others from outside know of them. This crisis produces a flight from subjectivity. . . ." 66. James, Pragmatism, 65. 67. Carnap, The Unity of Science, 32. 68. Carnap, "Psychology in Physical Language," 166. 69. Earlier, Wittgenstein had written, "Men have always had a presentiment that there must be a realm in which the answers to questions are symmetrically combineda priorito form a self-contained system. A realm subject to the law: Simplex sigillum veri" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.4541). 70. James, The Will to Believe, 19. 71. Keynes, Two Memoirs, 88. 72. Russell, Logic and Knowledge, 179. 73. Wittgenstein, Notebooks 19141916, 68. 74. De Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 6. 75. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, 23. 76. Lepp, Atheism in Our Time, 66.

77. Sartre, The Age of Reason, 154. 78. Sartre, The Words, 97. 79. Luijpen, Phenomenology and Atheism, 298. 80. To this, some may react as did one reader: "Given the fact that the vast majority of the world's population believes in some kind of Godand the fact that very, very few of them arrived at this belief through philosophy or 'epistemic factors'I think it exceedingly obvious that affective factors favoring belief are much more influential than those that favor disbelief." To be clear about the focus of this section, this chapter, and this study as a whole, it is important to keep in mind the point made in the last chapter that grounds for belief may be unreflective as well as reflective, indeed may be inaccessible as well as accessible for reflection. Hence the facts the reader cites permit no such inference as he alleges. Here, too, the other-minds comparison helps. The fact that belief in other minds is still more universal than belief in God and still less based on reasoning or argument does not make it obvious that affective factors favoring such belief are much more influential than those that favor disbelief. Doubtless they are; but the inference overlooks the possibility that epistemic factors, working unreflectively, might largely account for the prevalence of the belief.  



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81. "Imagine, if you can, a world without love, gratitude, indignation, and resentment. It would be a colorless and cold world" (Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will, 2). "No sane man has ever seriously adopted solipsism, and the obvious reason is that it turns out to be a practical impossibility. It involves, as it were, a voluntary submission to solitary confinement, and the strain proves to be greater than the hardiest speculative intellect can endure. The state of Robinson Crusoe on his island would be as nothing in comparison with it" (Patterson, A Philosophy of Religion, 303). 82. Grigg, "The Crucial Disanalogies," 391. 83. Ibid., 392. 84. Ibid. Cf. Grigg, "Theism and Proper Basicality," 126. 85. Grigg, "The Crucial Disanalogies," 392. 86. Sartre, The Words, 1001. 87. Ibid., 97. 88. Alasdair MacIntyre's alternative etiology stresses social factors less directly linked with the history of thought. For a summary culled from MacIntyre's writings, see Nielsen, God, Scepticism and Modernity, 7980, e.g.: "In such a society with such class divisions and such class conflict, religious concepts came to lose their point and so their intelligibility (rationality), for they cannot in that environment do what they exist (at least in part) to do, namely to provide a framework for the activity we call 'religion' which in turn gives symbolic and ritualistic expression to a culture's moral unity. Religion can no longer give expression to our society's moral unity or to the moral unity of the society of the Industrial Revolution for the very simple reason that such societies have no moral unity." With Nielsen, I find slight epistemic implications in such an account and therefore view it as furthering the case made in this section and this chapter. 89. For an account that complements mine, see Hay, Religious Experience Today, 9196. Like Hay, "I am not competent to make an informed judgement on how the longstanding and increasingly powerful rejection of the religious dimension of life came about." Like him, I mention only "some straws in the wind," illustrative of the influencesthe nonepistemic influencesthat I find explanatory. 90. Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. 1, 374. 91. Ibid., 375. 92. Ibid., 37172. 93. Of English society in the years 18501960, Budd writes: "The many men who saw intellectual errors in religious dogma probably became liberal Christians or syncretists rather than atheists. To become a secularist, it seems to have been necessary to dislike or fear the religious establishment as well as believing it to be mistaken" (Varieties of Unbelief, 1067). 94. Edwards, Some Thoughts, 35. 95. Robertson, The Dynamics of Religion, 89. 96. Ibid., 8788. 97. Küng, Does God Exist?, 638. 98. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 363. Cf. Lacroix, The Meaning of Modern Atheism, 2223; MacKay, Science, Chance and Providence, 35; Ricoeur, "Religion, Atheism, and Faith," 65 ("Which god is dead? We may answer: the God of metaphysics"); MacIntyre, "The Debate about God," 14 ("the God in whom the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to disbelieve had been invented only in the seventeenth century").

Walter Lundberg notes a contrary failing that contributes to the same result: ''All too frequently, in organized Christianity, there is instilled deeply in young people a concept of God created in the image of man, rather than of man created in the image of God. When such minds are later trained in science, this reversed and limiting anthropomorphic concept gradually becomes more and more incompatible with the rational, inductive attitude of science. Ultimately, when all attempts at reconciliation fail (as they frequently do because they involve rationalization processes that are in  



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themselves inconsistent with the scientific method), the concept of God may be abandoned entirely. The accompanying disillusionment and other psychological consequences discourage any thought of embracing a new concept" ("Applying the Scientific Method," 56). 99. See, e.g., Budd, Varieties of Unbelief, 12223; Hick, Philosophy of Religion, 4345; Lepp, Atheism in Our Time, 6465, 16061; Pfeil, "The Modern Denial of God," 2021; Robertson, Dynamics of Religion, 8687. The cultural impediments to religious belief that Franklin Baumer reviews under the headings "utilitarian," ''scientific," "anthropological," "psychological," "economic," and "historical" (Religion and the Rise of Scepticism, 14062) have all adversely affected belief in God, either directly or indirectly, but require much sifting to sort out their nonepistemic from their epistemic aspects. 100. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 16. 101. Ibid., 13. 102. Ibid., 17. 103. Russell, Logic and Knowledge, 193. 104. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §598. 105. For references, quotations, and further illustrations, see Hallett, Companion, 56667. 106. Moore, Some Main Problems of Philosophy, 4. See Hallett, Companion, 3031. 107. Hallett, Companion, 63132. 108. Russell, The Analysis of Mind, 23233. 109. The tale would grow still longer and still more complex if I added positive factors to the negative historical factors affecting belief in God and belief in other minds, but I cannot discern how their inclusion might alter the final comparative assessment. Overall, history has been running against both beliefs but much more strongly against belief in God than against belief in other minds. 110. Lepp, Atheism in Our Time, 8389. 111. Ibid., 1078. 112. Ibid., 15758. 113. Lively, The Enlightenment, 46. 114. Dondeyne, Faith and the World, 3. 115. Ibid., 4. 116. The anonymous author of The Materiality of the Soul (1729), quoted by Berman, A History of Atheism, 42. 117. Loades and Rue, Contemporary Classics, 211. 118. MacKay, Science, Chance, and Providence, 48. Chapter 4 1. Trethowan, Mysticism and Theology, 1. "As I see it," writes Alston, "putative direct experiential awareness of God does not serve as a ground of Christian belief by providing a phenomenon that can best be explained in terms of divine activity. Rather it experientially presents us with God Himself, thereby giving us a ground for belief about God without requiring us to mount an explanatory or any other kind of argument" ("The Place of

Experience," 95). 2. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 260. 3. Gallagher, "Intersubjective Knowledge," 385. 4. On the type of "absolute" directness here envisaged, see Alston, Perceiving God, 21. For reasons which will appear, I need not examine the senses in which a person might be said to enjoy "privileged" or "direct" access to his or her own mental states of this or that variety. See Alston, "Varieties of Privileged Access," especially 23136.  



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5. Plantinga, God and Other Minds, 19091. For a general account of such thinking, extended to God as well as to other minds, see Price, "Our Evidence," 13437. 6. Aquinas, Summa theologica 1.12.11.ad 2; 22.175.3.C. 7. Maritain, Approaches to God, 110. 8. Maréchal, Studies in the Psychology of the Mystics, 200. 9. Jones, "Our Knowledge of Other Persons," 138. 10. Locke, Myself and Others, 3839. 11. For a parallel discussion of intuitive mystical awareness, see Hick, Disputed Questions, 2628. 12. By F. W. H. Myers. See Price, Essays, 4647. 13. At this point one reader objects, "I think that it's better to argue for parity with an other-minds belief that everyone agrees is rational, not ESP or telepathy." This mistakes the rationale of this chapter and this inquiry. I am not arguing for parity between belief in mystical experience and belief in telepathy. Still less am I arguing for parity between belief in God and belief in telepathy. On the contrary, if there is no sound evidence for telepathy or any other immediate experience of other minds, the case I am making is thereby strengthened. Belief in God may indeed be epistemically comparable to belief in other minds. 14. Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 167. 15. Gurney, Myers, and Podmore, Phantasms of the Living, 13233. Compare Sidgwick, Phantasms of the Living, 94, and Burt, ESP and Psychology, 75 ("Galton, for example, reports a case in which, when one such twin had toothache, the other experienced toothache in the same tooth"). 16. See Gauld, "ESP," 26; Castle, "Sleep and Dreams," 48594; Burt, ESP and Psychology, 6566. 17. Gurney, Myers, and Podmore, Phantasms of the Living, 76. Compare Sidgwick, Phantasms of the Living, 96. 18. Ayer, "Other Minds," 196. 19. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 69. Compare Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, 14 ("in an instant I was a different human being, changed forever by a Presence that was invisible and inaudible, yet at the same time more real to me than the wagon I was sitting on or the oak tree I was staring at across the field"). 20. Hay, Religious Experience Today, 72. Compare Plantinga's experience, below, or those recounted in Wall, Religious Experience and Religious Belief, 7679. 21. Hay, Religious Experience Today, 2. 22. St. Teresa, The Interior Castle, 186. On his similar experience, a retired Cornish engineer remarked: "When I hear men in their folly say 'You can't prove that there is a God,' I reply 'You wait until He takes half a step towards you, and you are left in no doubt'" (Gaskin, The Quest for Eternity, 90). 23. Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, 186. See ibid., 167, 169, 170, 178, 213, 215. 24. Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 189. See idem, An Interpretation of Religion, 25859; MacIntyre, "Visions," 256; and Alston, "The Place of Experience," 101: "what explicitly presents itself to one's experience in mystical perception is, typically at least, something less than the full theological characterization of God. With rare exceptions one doesn't suppose that God presents Himself as creator, three Persons in one Substance, the actor in salvation history, or even omnipotent, omniscient, and a se". In Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism, 15455,

Gutting challenges ''the assumption that divine qualitieseven in the strong form of omnipotence, and the likecannot be directly experienced." 25. Gram, Direct Realism, 51. Cf. Nielsen, "Skepticism and Belief," 397: "I also deny that, where God is construed non-anthropomorphically as an Infinite Individual transcendent to the World, that it makes any sense at all to say we have experienced or  



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become aware of God or felt the presence of God. If God is infinite and transcendent to the world, we plainly can have no experience of him." 26. Cf. Alston, Perceiving God, 60, 6263; Audi, Belief, Justification, and Knowledge, 132. Some such analysis may apply to the experience, powerfully described, of a woman who insists: "God was entirely within me, not just some 'divine spark' or bit or whatever, but all of God" (Wall, Religious Experience and Religious Belief, 104). One might insist, in like fashion, "I saw the sun, the whole sun, not just some of its rays"even though, on reflection, one would acknowledge that one did not perceive all sides of the sun and its interior as well as its exterior. 27. Alston, quoted by McLeod, Rationality and Theistic Belief, 56, from an unpublished conference paper, "Experience of God: A Perceptual Model." Cf. Alston, Perceiving God, 44. 28. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 370. 29. Alston, Perceiving God, 230 ("the most prominent theories in the field invoke causal mechanisms that themselves pose thus far insoluble problems of identification and measurement: unconscious psychological processes like repression, identification, regression, and mechanisms of defense; social influences on ideology and on belief and attitude formation. It is not surprising that theories like those of Freud, Marx, and Durkheim rest on a slender thread of evidential support and generalize irresponsibly from such evidence as they can muster. Nor do the prospects seem rosy for significant improvement"). Evan Fales's analysis, applying the theories of I. M. Lewis to St. Teresa"Since Teresa did not have demonic possession available to her as a route to coercing respectful attention, she had to draw upon the early Christian tradition that Jesus could appear to and anoint those whom He elected to be his special earthly representatives" ("Scientific Explanations of Mystical Experiences," 160)is no more persuasive. For a critical survey of such reductive accountspsychiatric, psychological, physiological, and sociologicalsee Payne, John of the Cross, 188209. 30. For other problems, see Hood, "The Facilitation of Religious Experience," 58485. 31. See the descriptions and samples in Leary, "Religious Experience," 329, 33233, and Pahnke, "Drugs and Mysticism," 18589. For other differences besides those in reported content, see Payne, John of the Cross, 205. 32. Plantinga, "A Christian Life Partly Lived," 51. 33. Powell, He Touched Me, 22. For the experience, see ibid., 1618. 34. "In the last analysis," writes Powell (ibid., 5859), "it is the person who has experienced God who is the best judge of his own experience. Perhaps he is the only judge. I know about all the desires repressed in the subconscious, about self-fulfilling wishes, about the power of autosuggestion. But I know with an imperturbable inner certainty that my loving God has touched me!" 35. Cf. Alston, Perceiving God, 27984. 36. Garcia, "Philosophy and Faith," 174. 37. This is Yandell's summation (The Epistemology of Religious Experience, 217) of Martin, Religious Belief. See O'Hear, Experience, Explanation and Faith, 2949, and Alston, "Religious Experience," 25354 (for a complementary catalog of differences, with responses). 38. For development of this theme ("the way in which we form beliefs about an object ought to be constrained by the nature of that object"), see Eberle, "God's Nature." Cf. Alston, "A 'Doxastic Practice' Approach," 17; Caroline Davis, Evidential Force, 7077, 11542. 39. Yandell's wording of the objection (The Epistemology of Religious Experience, 3435). See Gale, Nature, 31720; Caroline Davis, Evidential Force, 13638; Rowe, "Religious Experience," 91 ("we do not know how to discover positive reasons for thinking  

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that religious experiences are delusive"). In response, see Alston, Perceiving God, 20922, and Beilby, "William Rowe." 40. Alston, Perceiving God, 216. See Alston, "Religious Experience," 254. 41. Caroline Davis, Evidential Force, 3. 42. Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, 4753. 43. Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism, 92. 44. McKim, "Could God," 378. 45. Gale, "Swinburne's Argument from Religious Experience," 61. 46. Greeley, Introduction, 18. For a fuller account of his and Dr. McCready's findings, Greeley refers the reader to the article "A Nation of Mystics?" in the New York Times Magazine January 26, 1975. He might also have cited Greeley, The Sociology of the Paranormal. 47. Matson, The Existence of God, 17. 48. Donovan, Interpreting Religious Experience, 68. Chapter 5 1. Owen, The Christian Knowledge of God, 13536. See ibid., 75 ("Yet we cannot argue to God on the basis of analogy with other persons. His acts do not fall into the category of 'acts in general'"). 2. Black, Language and Philosophy, 10. Compare Hyslop, Other Minds, 53; Saunders, "Persons, Criteria, and Skepticism," 100 ("Noting, for example, that one has regularly been in pain when one has stepped on a tack and screamed, one infers from the like bodily state of another body that it too belongs to a person who is in pain"); Shorter, "Other Minds," 7; Slote, Reason and Scepticism, 119. 3. Herriot, The Lord God Made Them All, 349 (paragraph break omitted). 4. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 75. 5. Plantinga, God and Other Minds, 247. 6. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge, 250. 7. Scudder, Tennant's Philosophical Theology, 118. See Gallagher, "Intersubjective Knowledge," 37475; Richman, "Plantinga," 52; Schutz, "Scheler's Theory of Intersubjectivity," 160. 8. Marres, In Defense of Mentalism, 105. 9. Augustine, Confessions, 15253 (8.12.2829; all scriptural references omitted save the one). 10. Caroline Davis, Evidential Force, 33. William Whisner states explicitly the principle implicit in Davis's words and those of many other writers: "Acceptance of a supernatural explanation necessitates the a priori preclusion of any possible natural explanation for the occurrence, and there are no arguments to justify such a priori legislation. It is always possible that one may find a natural explanation for the occurrence and there are no arguments to establish the impossibility of such an explanation" ("What Is the Evidence?" 110). The bias in such thinking is made evident by the other-minds equivalent of Whisner's declaration: "Acceptance of a personal explanation (e.g., of a facial expression, or of a response to a request) necessitates the a priori preclusion of any possible nonpersonal explanation for the occurrence, and there are no arguments to justify such a priori legislation."

11. For instances of this kind, see, for example, Ceria, Bosco, 4001; Gardner, Healing Miracles, 1314; Dr. and Mrs. H. Taylor, Hudson Taylor in Early Years, 444, 449, 453, 48692. 12. Morris, "Suspicions of Something More," 17. For other answers to prayer, more fully recounted, where a natural explanation appears unlikely, see for example Gardner, Healing Miracles, 1011, 2021, 3137, 6063, 7577, 1047, 12628, 19899, 2025.  



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13. "As Sir George Stokes, the famous physicist who discovered the laws that now bear his name, has said, 'It may be that the event which we call a miracle was brought about not by the suspension of the laws in ordinary operation, but by the super-addition of something not ordinarily in operation.' In other words, if a miracle occurs, it would not be a violation or contradiction of the ordinary laws of cause and effect, but rather a new effect produced by the introduction of a supernatural cause" (Geisler, Miracles, 14). 14. Inwagen, "The Place of Chance," 218. 15. Ibid., 222. 16. Ibid., 215. 17. Gardner, Healing Miracles, chap. 9. 18. Alston, "How to Think," 5455. 19. Gaskin, Hume's Philosophy of Religion, 124. See Geisler, Miracles, 2829; Plantinga, "Is Theism Really a Miracle?" 11113; Purtill, "Miracles," 19192; and especially Houston, Reported Miracles, 13350, for fuller discussion of the issues touched on here. 20. Goulder, "The Action of God," 8485. 21. Hick, "Prayer, Providence and Miracle," 70. 22. Donovan, Interpreting Religious Experience, 81. 23. Ibid., 95. 24. For a full and admirable discussion of both these issues, stressing the relational and personal aspects of petitionary prayer, see Brümmer, What Are We Doing, chaps. 36. In answer to difficulties arising from a purely utilitarian analysis of alternatives, Brummer might more clearly have recognized request-and-response as a primary mode of interpersonal living in relationship, especially for parent and child, with value in and for itself and not just for its results. What holds for parent and child might hold a fortiori for creature and Creator. 25. Caroline Davis, Evidential Force, 4445. Cf. Alston's "M-beliefs" ("M" for "manifestation"): "beliefs to the effect that God, as conceived in theistic religions, is doing something that is directed to the subject of the experiencethat God is speaking to him, strengthening him, enlightening him, giving him courage, guiding him, sustaining him in being, or just being present to him" ("Religious Experience and Religious Belief,'' 296). Both Teresa, for example, (in the last chapter) and Augustine (in this) had such beliefs. Their experiences belong to this larger class. 26. Powell, The Christian Vision, 13839. 27. Ibid., 139. 28. Ibid. (paragraph break omitted). Cf. a woman's similar attitude concerning a similar experience, in Wall, Religious Experience and Religious Belief, 80. See also ibid., 40: "The people who wrote in to the [Alister Hardy Research] Centre conveyed to me the same impression of honesty as the people I interviewed, many of them stating that they had kept their experience to themselves for fear of being considered 'cracked.' Others stated that in no case was anyone to see what they said other than investigators at the Centre, and some said that they did not want anything they said published." 29. Gardner, Healing Miracles, 71. 30. For comparable accounts (multiplications, with no prayer made), see for example Aradi, The Book of Miracles, 19596 (St. John Vianney), 199200 (St. John Bosco), and 2078 (St. Joseph Cottolengo). For a variant, see McNaspy, Play On!, 7172.

Chapter 6 1. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 143. 2. Plantinga, God and Other Minds, 1001 (numerals omitted). 3. Ibid., 109. 4. Leslie, "Comments,"5.  



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5. Bowker, "Did God Create This Universe?" 118. 6. Davies, The Mind of God, 16. 7. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 136. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 148. "It is precisely this orderliness and predictability," writes Walter Lundberg, "that constitute a revelation of God in Nature" ("Applying the Scientific Method," 57). "Such order," observes another scientist, "according to common human experience, is a result of an orderly mind. Chaos rather than order emerges unless a designing or controlling force is functioning'' (Kreider, "Identifying Einstein's 'Creative Force,'" 64). 11. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 299. 12. In the next chapter I shall stress the distinction between a hypothesis's lack of evident contradiction and its genuine possibility. It is not evident by either criterion that irregular universes outnumber regular. Here, for instance, I speak of a universe consisting of three pebbles gyrating wildly. Is such a universe a genuine possibility? On the other hand, what limit can be placed on regular universes if the only test they must pass is freedom from evident contradiction? 13. Ibid., 299. 14. John Davis, "The Design Argument," 147. 15. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 5758. Cf. MacKay, Science, Chance and Providence, 42, 6062; Webb, God and Personality, 26770. 16. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 59. 17. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 9596. 18. Quoted in McDonough, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, 222. 19. See Davies, The Mind of God, 16570. "Barbour points out that the contingency of the world is fourfold. First, the laws of physics themselves appear to be contingent. Second, the cosmological initial conditions could have been otherwise. Third, we know from quantum mechanics that 'God plays dice'i.e., there is a fundamental statistical element in nature. Finally, there is the fact that the universe exists" (ibid., 169). 20. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 94. Nagel objects that "true causes do necessitate their effects." For example, "Given what heat is and what water is, it is literally impossible for water to be heated beyond a certain point at normal atmospheric pressure without boiling" (Mortal Questions, 186). Similarly, he might claim, given what water is, it cannot fail to run downhill; given what a fruit tree is, it cannot fail to grow fruit; and so forth. However, in each instance one would have to add: given what water is and continues to be; given what a fruit tree is and continues to be. Nagel's objection amounts to a veiled tautology. 21. "The consideration that for all the world teaches us otherwise it could simply cease to exist and could have ceased to exist at any time, resembles strikingly, for example, considerations which may arise from attending to someone speaking, namely that for aught we can tell from attending to the words alone the voice might simply desist, and might have done so at any time. All depends on the will of the creative utterer (and most speech is creation, to however limited an extent)" (Shepherd, Experience, Inference and God, 57). Within this perspective, certain difficulties do not arise, for example: "Work by Penrose and Hawking establishes that the first moment is a singularity, an instant when the laws of physics break down. The result is that the outcome of the big-bang explosion is in principle unpredictable. If God created the big bang, God could not know what kind of a universe would come out since the singularity is lawless. God could not even know that human beings would result since

any style of universe can emerge from the weird physics of a cosmic singularity" (Haig, Review, 384). 22. Quoted in Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2. 23. Ibid., 7.  



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24. Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction, 111. 25. Ibid., 118. 26. Ibid., 2627. 27. Kocher, Master of Middle-Earth, 1. 28. "Thus we would quite mistake the image of creation if we took it to suggest that we are only actors enacting a created play for which a complete script exists already. In terms of that metaphor we are not the actors but the characters. For the created characters (in their created space-time) the future is not an inevitable fact but a spreading fan of options which they have to narrow down to a definite outcome by making up their minds" (MacKay, Science, Chance, and Providence, 62). 29. Davies, The Mind of God, 190. See Swinburne, "Argument from the Fine-Tuning," 17072. "In short," comments Haldane (Smart and Haldane, Atheism and Theism, 127), "the hypothesis appears as entirely ad hoc, introduced only to avoid what for the naturalist is an unpalatable conclusion, viz., that the general regularities and particular fine tuning are due to the agency of a designer." As John Davis notes ("The Design Argument," 144), the like holds for the alternative hypothesis of an "oscillating universe.'' 30. Shaw and Ashley, "Analogy and Inference," 423 (on Beardsley). 31. Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 60. 32. Shaw and Ashley, "Analogy and Inference," 41718. 33. Swinburne, "Argument from the Fine-Tuning," 154. 34. Renard, In the Footsteps of Muhammad, 56. 35. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, 3233. Chapter 7 1. James, Pragmatism, 14344. 2. Küng, Does God Exist?, 624. 3. Ibid., 623. 4. Hallett, Language and Truth, 178. 5. Recently (long after these pages were written) Swinburne has published a fuller treatment of the problem of evilProvidence and the Problem of Evilthan in The Existence of God, but the latter still suffices for a sampling at this third level of response. 6. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 202 (italics omitted). 7. Ibid., 208. 8. Ahern, The Problem of Evil, 5556. 9. The following section coincides at points with my "Evil and Human Understanding" (as does the present section), but goes beyond it. Whereas there I argued (in terminology I shall explain momentarily) that "the argument from evil never amounts to more than a C-argument, of unascertainable strength, against the existence of God" (p. 476), here I argue that the argument's strength is in fact ascertainable: it is weak. 10. Cornman and Lehrer, Philosophical Problems and Arguments, 398.

11. Stump, "Knowledge," 49. Cf. Peterson, "The Problem of Evil," 397: "Eventually, if theistic explanations cannot withstand scrutiny, then it seems that critics are justified in holding that the evils under consideration are gratuitous and thus detrimental to religious belief." 12. Hallett, Darkness and Light, 8283. Cf. Swinburne, "Does Theism Need a Theodicy?" 296: "The God whose existence is at stake will, if he exists, be very different in nature from ourselves, and so have kinds of good and evil open to him of which we cannot dream, and understand the worth of actions (especially those open to him alone) with a depth which we cannot. As humans grow up and become more sensitive to the nature and consequences of their actions, they often come to see many kinds of action as good which previously they regarded as bad: e.g., discipline, loyalty, patience, courage and tol 



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erance. But our experience and our reflection upon it are still so limited that it would not be surprising if we had yet more to learn about the nature and consequences of actions which would lead to our revising further our judgments about their moral quality. Our extrapolations from human situations to what would be good or evil for a God must be particularly shaky." 13. For other examples, see for instance Swinburne, "Does Theism Need a Theodicy?" 309, and Rowe, "The Empirical Argument from Evil," 244: "That things appear to us to be a certain way is itself justification for thinking things are this way. Of course, this justification may be defeated. But apart from such defeat, the fact that things appear to us to be a certain way renders us rationally justified in believing that they are that way." In its generality, Rowe's principle overlooks our differing epistemic status with regard to different appearances. With respect to evil, the transition from "I see no reason for this evil'' to "There appears to be no reason for this evil," requires a strong missing premise about me and my capacities. Swinburne's response ("Does Theism Need a Theodicy?" 300) to similar objections in Wykstra ("The Humean Obstacle," 85) seems inadequate. 14. Bruce Russell, "The Persistent Problem of Evil," 134. 15. Ibid., 13435. 16. Reichenbach, "Evil," 68. Mackie comments: "This was the central thesis of my 'Evil and Omnipotence' . . . and of A. Flew's 'Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom'" (The Miracle of Theism, 164n). 17. Swinburne, in Shoemaker and Swinburne, Personal Identity, 25. 18. Cf. Inwagen, God, Knowledge, and Mystery, 1214 ("I am convinced that, however it is that I know the modal status of certain statements about everyday matters, this method or mechanism or technique or device or system of intuitions or whatever it should be called is of no value at all when it comes to judging the modal status of propositions remote from the concerns of everyday life"). 19. Gale, "Some Difficulties," 211. The viewpoint I am critiquing surfaces clearly in Gale's comments on this farfetched hypothesis. Of a man who confesses his ignorance as to how such a machine might be designed, he remarks: "His only problem is that he is not omnipotent." If we see no contradiction in the proposal, how can God have any difficulty with it? 20. Seddon, "Logical Possibility," 49192 ("To make a rabbit a successful carnivore we should have to restructure him so thoroughly that no oneleave alone the zoologistswould want to call him a rabbit any more"). 21. A reader objects, citing the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Even amplified by the belief that she never committed any actual sin, this doctrine does not entail that Mary's sinlessness could be foreseen in advance (any more than in the case of Adam and Eve, who were likewise free from original sin). 22. A reader has suggested that more pertinent here than the distinction I have stressed between seeing no impossibility in x and seeing its possibility is the distinction between logical and real possibility. However, logical possibility is a deeply problematic notion. If logical possibility is determined byword-meanings, and these by truthconditions, and these in turn by PRS, is it even logically possible to trisect an angle using just compass and ruler? For present purposes, it suffices to say that it is really impossible to perform such an operation and that we can see that it isbut not merely by knowing the meanings of the words. For related discussion, see Hughes, The Nature of God, 27 (contrasting logical possibility and real, causal possibility) and Alston, "The Inductive Argument from Evil," 5557 (contrasting "conceptual possibility" and "metaphysical possibility"). 23. Such a child, whom we can observe and whose reactions we can more surely surmise, poses a more difficult problem than a much-discussed alternative casethe hypothetical agony of a fawn burning to death in a forest fire. True, the fawn's agony, being  



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unobserved, bypasses Swinburne's argument from human noetic needs; however, not being observed, the fawn's pain cannot be assumed without begging the question of whether the world contains such an evil. Besides, how might we observe the pain of a fawn? Humans sometimes go into shock and become oblivious to pain; how are we to know that nothing comparable occurs in creatures as different from ourselves as fawns? 24. Cf. Plantinga, "Epistemic Probability and Evil," 7678; Gale, Nature, 120: "Just how shaky our intuitions are in this matter is apparent to anyone who has taught the free will-determinism issue to a group of introductory students. It takes no more than thirty seconds to turn them into a wild-eyed lynch mob of incompatibilists and about sixty seconds to turn them back into compatibilists. In my opinion, nothing short of an extensive metaphysical theory of the self conjoined with a normative theory about the forensic and ethical dimensions of personal responsibility will 'settle' this dispute, meaning that this is not the sort of issue that gets settled." 25. For fuller development of this assertion, see Inwagen, "The Problem of Evil," 14547. 26. Alston, "The Inductive Argument from Evil," 57. 27. In a different setting, critics of utilitarianism, consequentialism, proportionalism, and the likee.g., Kiely, "The Impracticality of Proportionalism," 66163; Wierenga, The Nature of God, 23334, and "Utilitarianism," 31314have stressed the same point. "Bergstrom claims that to know, at any time and not just at the time of acting, what the total consequences of an action are, we have to: (1) know that all the consequences of the act a are in some consequence set U, and (2) be able to enumerate the members of U. He gives no argument to show that this is impossible but is surely right that in fact we can never do it'' (Brock, "Recent Work in Utilitarianism," 251). I need not here suggest why proportionalism is, nonetheless, a tenable position. 28. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 24. 29. As already suggested, a universe without any redeeming features (no freedom, concern, mountains, skies, fields, etc.) may not be conceivable. My response takes the objection as it finds it, an abstract thought experiment. Attempting to formulate the objection more realistically would raise familiar difficulties, in reverse: For all we know, even evils such as we experience in this less than hellish world might require the copresence of wonders and values such as we experience. 30. I might, for instance, extend the preceding account to the evil of extensive nonbelief (Drange, "The Argument from Non-Belief") or "reasonable nonbelief" (Schellenberg. Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason), or to evils which, though perhaps balanced by related good elsewhere in the universe, apparently call into question the positive meaning of the existence of the individuals who experience them (Adams, "Horrendous Evils"). 31. Toner, Spirit of Light or Darkness, 60, quoting from Michigan Catholic, Dec. 2, 1977, p. 7. 32. Stump, "The Mirror of Evil," 242. 33. Gellman, "A New Look,"210. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 21112. 36. Ibid., 213. 37. A simpler comparison is with the headless woman illusion: "A woman is seated on a brightly lit stage with a black background. She has a black cloth over her head. The audience think that she has no head: they confuse not seeing her head with seeing that she has no head" (Smart, in Smart and Haldane, Atheism and Theism, 176). Chapter 8 1. See Wilcox, "The Five Ways."

2. Fraser, "Dissociative Phenomena and Disorders," 14647.  



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3. Pargetter, "Scientific Inference," 159. 4. Richman, "Plantinga," 53. Cf. Ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy, 13336; Churchland, Scientific Realism, 9192; Harman, "Inference," 9394; O'Hear, Experience, Explanation and Faith, 1035; Ostien,"God, Other Minds,'' 15153; Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality, 34547. 5. Richman, "Plantinga," 40 (echoing Ayer, O'Hear, and Putnam). 6. Quine, Word and Object, 264. Cf. Hyslop, Other Minds, 3033; Vallée, "Le problème de 1'esprit d'autrui," 445. 7. Stemmer, "The Hypothesis of Other Minds," 114. 8. Fumerton, "Skepticism and Reasoning," 167. 9. Ostien,"God, Other Minds," 155. 10. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 132. 11. Fawkes and Smythe, "Simplicity and Theology"; Helm, Review, 563; O'Hear, Experience, Explanation and Faith, 11218; Plantinga, "Is Theism Really a Miracle?" 131, "Justification and Theism," 41719, and "The Probabilistic Argument from Evil," 2223; Stump, Review, 47880; Sutherland, Review, 312; Wynn, "Some Reflections," 33033. 12. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 279. 13. Ibid., 127. 14. Meynell, "Comment on Lewis and Flew," 243. 15. Cf. ibid., 24344: "The rational theist owes her opponents a clear explanation of how God is supposed to 'transcend' the universe, to be beyond, behind, above it, or whatever. It is easy to say, that by these expressions one means simply that God is other than the universe as a whole or any part or aspect of it. But given what is at least a natural interpretation of the term 'the universe,' as 'the sum total of all that there is,' it is at first sight very difficult to see how what is other than the universe as a whole or any part or aspect of it can be other than nothing!" 16. Broad, "Arguments," 177. 17. Davies, The Mind of God, 196. 18. Taliaferro, Consciousness and the Mind of God, 248. 19. Hilgard, Divided Consciousness, 17. 20. McKellar, Mindsplit, 16. 21. E.g., "Freud, for his part, likened the rational ego to a rider seeking to guide a more powerful horse, and his ego, id and superego comprise probably the best-known relatively recent attempt to map the sub-systems of personality" (ibid., 9). "People are fairly consistently intelligent across different tasks, as Spearman first discovered; that is why it is possible to talk about 'general ability.' The same is not true for many personality traits, where exceptions to the rule are often so numerous as to make the rule useless as a tool for predicting behaviour" (Cook, Perceiving Others, 6). 22. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 487. 23. Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 27. 24. Ibid., 2627.

Chapter 9 1. Hallett, Language and Truth, chap. 12. 2. Taliaferro, Consciousness and the Mind of God, 273. See ibid., 15859, and Plantinga, "An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism." 3. Malcolm, "Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations," 22528, and Problems of Mind, 1623. Cf. Buford, Essays on Other Minds, xxii-xxiii; Dilman, Matter and Mind, 188, 193; Glasgow and Pilkington, "Other Minds on Evidential Necessity"; Locke, Myself and Others, chap. 8; Loux, Review, 18687; Narveson, "Evidential Necessity and Other Minds"; Saunders, "Persons, Criteria, and Skepticism," 9699; Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge  



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and Self-Identity, 16570, 19193; Shorter, "Other Minds," 11; Smythe,"0ur Knowledge of Other Minds"; Strawson, "Persons," 33031. 4. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §580. "Put most simply the point is that if a term or expression is to be genuinely meaningful it must be possible to explain, to others, what it means, how it is used, etc. So there must be public phenomena by reference to which we can teach and learn the meaning of that term or expression. In the case of 'feels a pain' it is obvious that the phenomena in question are going to be the way the person behaves, since it is this that establishes that what is felt is a pain. If 'feels a pain' is and must be taught by reference to such things as bleeding and groaning, then bleeding and groaning must as a matter of logic, of language, of 'grammar,' provide reasons for saying that someone feels a pain. So if, like the sceptic, we refuse to accept bleeding and groaning as justifying us in saying that someone feels a pain, we make it impossible to talk about feeling pains at all" (Locke, Myself and Others, 158). 5. Malcolm, "Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations," 227. 6. Ibid. 7. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §242. 8. Marres, In Defense of Mentalism, 11416; Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, 7174; Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality, 34957; Vendler, The Matter of Minds, 13. 9. See Plantinga's listings (which include even an argument from evil!) in "Religion and Epistemology," 213, and "God, Arguments for," 9192. 10. Owen, The Christian Knowledge of God, 135. 11. Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, 169, 186. 12. St. Teresa, The Interior Castle, 186. 13. Renard, In the Footsteps of Muhammad, 138. 14. Alston, "The Place of Experience," 101. 15. Ibid., 99. 16. Details like these suggest why I have skirted the question, "Is belief in God properly basic?" The answer would depend on the individual, as well as on the definition of "properly basic." 17. The situation parallels that in ethics, where a narrowly utilitarian theory might permit quantitative comparisons (so much happiness on this side, so much on that), to determine right action, whereas a realistically broader theory requires the comparative weighing of disparate values on one side and the other, despite the lack of any "common measure." See Hallett, "The 'Incommensurability' of Values" and Greater Good, 2329. 18. Waismann, "How I See Philosophy," 467. 19. Donovan, Interpreting Religious Experience, 9495. 20. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 23. Cf. Plantinga, "Is Theism Really a Miracle?" 13233 ("Mackie throughout assumes that theism is or is relevantly like a scientific hypothesis"). 21. Swinburne, Faith and Reason, 66. 22. Wittgenstein, Zettel, §461.  

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Index A Abbagnano, Nicola, 33 Abernathy, Ralph David, 35 n.19 Abraham, William J., 31 Ahern, M. B., 92 Alston, William P. on comparing universes, 9798 on determinism, 73 on introspective reports, 60 on "M-beliefs," 138 n.25 Perceiving God, 126 n.20 on religious experience, 5355, 121, 134 n.1, 135 n.24, 136 n.29 on sensory experience, 12829 n.32 Analogy, 6678 literary, 8388 Angela of Foligno, 53 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 49, 108 atheism, 45 nonepistemic origins of, 2747, 131 n.39 Augustine, St., 31, 34, 36, 7071, 130 n.23 Ayer, A. J., 51 B background beliefs, 6465 Baumer, Franklin L., 134 n.99 Beach, Joseph, 84 Berlin, Isaiah, 128 n.31 blinders, cognitive, 3234 Bradbury, Ray, 83

Broad, C.D., 113, 11516 Brock, Dan W., 142 n.27 Buckley, Michael J., 42 Budd, Susan, 28, 129 n.12, 133 n.93 Burtt, E. A., 128 n.31 C Campbell, Keith, 130 n.29 Carlson, A. J., 3334 Carnap, Rudolf, 33, 38 Carpenter, Estlin, 52 Chesterton, Gilbert K., 83 Clifford, William, 37 consequences (total), 1001, 142 n.27 contingency, 139 nn.1921 Cook, Mark, 143 n.21 Cornman, James, 9293 cosmological argument, 11113 D Davies, Paul, 3031, 80, 86, 114, 139 n.19 Davis, Caroline Franks, 35 Davis, John Jefferson, 8283, 140 n.29 De Lubac, Henri, 38, 131 n.40 determinism, 32, 7374, 139 n.20, 142 n.24 Devitt, Michael, 12 Diamond, Cora, 37 Diderot, Denis, 4142 Dondeyne, Albert, 30, 45 Donovan, Peter, 74, 124 E Edwards, John, 42 Einstein, Albert, 32 Ekman, Paul, 19

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emotion, facial expressions of, 19 Enlightenment, 4142, 131 n.46 evidence inaccessible, 1820, 22 two senses of "having" it, 20 unreflective, 1718, 22 evil, 47, 88107 answer to the problem of, 92103, 140 n.9, 142 n.30 explanations of, 9092 experience conflicting, 6063 immediate, 4859 religious, 76, 138 n.28 sensory, 59. See also external world, knowledge of external world, knowledge of, 126 n.20 F facial expressions of emotion, 19 faith, 125 n.1, 131 n.44 Fales, Evan, 136 n.29 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 35 Fischer, John Martin, 133 n.81 Freud, Sigmund, 35, 131 nn.36, 46 Fumerton, Richard, 111 G Gale, Richard M., 63, 141 n.19, 142 n.24 Garcia, Laura L., 5859 Gaskin, J. C. A., 74 Gay, Peter, 41, 131 n.46 Gellman, Jerome I., 1067

God analogical evidence for, 6667, 7078 cosmological argument for, 11113 cumulative case for, 12023 experience of, 4849, 5165 and the external world, 126 n.20 meaning of the term, 3, 1011 meaningfulness of belief in, 11718, 127 n.14 presence of, 5152 varied arguments for, 119, 144 n.9 God and Other Minds argument of, 78 differences from this book, 89, 123 good and evil, 88107 Greeley, Andrew M., 63 Grigg, Richard, 4041 grounds, versus influences, 2425 Gutting, Gary, 129 n.2, 135 n.24 H Hacking, Ian, 116 Haig, Frank R., 139 n.20 Haldane, J. J., 140 n.29 Hammarskjöld, Dag, 36 Hare, John, 29 Hawking, Stephen, 139 n.20 Hay, David, 133 n.89 Hick, John, 50, 53, 62, 74 Hilgard, Ernest R., 114 Holbach, Paul Heinrich, 37, 44 Hunt, David P., 27, 37, 73, 79, 83 I Ignatius of Antioch, St., 36

ignorance, argument from, 8990, 92103, 141 n.18 inference, 8687 influences nonepistemic, 2747, 132 n.80, 133 nn.93, 98 versus grounds, 2425 Inwagen, Peter van, 72, 141 n.18 J James, William, 34, 37, 38, 43, 89 K Kenny, Anthony, 21 Kerler, Dietrich, 34 Keynes, John Maynard, 38 Kierkegaard, Sören, 34 Kreider, Marlin Books, 139 n.10 Küng, Hans, 42, 90, 125 n.1 L Lehrer, Keith, 9293 Lepp, Ignace, 2728, 33, 34, 39, 44 Lilly, John Cunningham, 12 Lipps, Theodor, 6869 literary analogy, 8388 Locke, Don, 144 n.4 logical positivism, 33 love, 5758, 1046 Lubbock, Percy, 84 Luijpen, William A., 36, 39, 131 n.36 Lundberg, Walter Oscar, 13334 n.98, 139 n.10 M MacIntyre, Alasdair, 133 nn.88, 98 MacKay, Donald M., 140 n.28 Mackie, John, 3637, 128 n.26, 141 n.16 Malcolm, Norman, 118

Manchester, William, 61 Maréchal, Joseph, 49  



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Maritain, Jacques, 49 Marres, René, 69 Martin, Michael, 129 n.2 Marx, Karl, 34, 35, 39 Maurer, Daphne and Charles, 12 McDonough, Thomas R., 12 McKellar, Peter, 143 n.21 McKim, Robert, 62 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 39 Meynell, Hugo, 143 n.15 "middle way," sense of, 3, 79, 125 n.1, 131 n.44 miracles, 7274, 137 n.10, 138 n.30 Moore, George Edward, 43 Mrs. M, 13 multiple personality, 109, 11316 N Nagel, Ernest, 23 Nagel, Thomas, 12, 131 n.39, 139 n.20 Nelson, Mark T., 32 Nielsen, Kai, 133 n.88, 13536 n.25 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 131 n.40 Nun, Dhu 'l, 121 O other minds analogical argument for, 6670 "best explanation" argument for, 11011 and the external world, 126 n.20 linguistic argument for, 11819 a paradigm example, 13 strength of belief in, 26

varied examples, 12 Owen, H. P., 66, 120, 137 n.1 P pain, 67, 14142 n.23 Pargetter, Robert, 110 parity claim Plantinga's, 78 sense of, 2627, 30 Parsons, Keith M., 128 n.26 Patterson, Robert Leet, 133 n.81 Peacocke, A. R., 30 Peterson, Michael L., 140 n.11 physicalism, 131 n.36 Plantinga, Alvin. See also God and Other Minds on belief in God, 35 on proper basicality, 34 religious experience of, 56 on the teleological argument, 79 on warrant, 5 Poland, Jeffrey, 131 n.36 positivism, 33 possibility logical, 141 n.22 real, 9697, 139 n.12, 141 nn.19, 20, 22 Powell, John, 56, 7677, 136 n.34 pragmatic reasons for belief, 117 prayer, answers to, 7076, 137 nn.1113, 138 n.24 primary and secondary qualities, 24 Principle of Credulity, 67, 59, 126 n.19 Principle of Relative Similarity (PRS) applied, 16, 23, 57, 118, 128 n.18, 129 n.6

and inference, 1617 stated, 14 priorities, epistemological, 118 proper basicality, 123, 144 n.16 Purtill, Richard L., 2829, 128 n.27 R rationality, 6, 17, 21 reference, problem of common, 10811, 11316 regularity, 8183, 139 nn.10, 12 Reid, John, 3435 Rhodes, Elizabeth, 33 Richman, Robert J., 110 Robertson, J. M., 42 Robinson, J. T., 16 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 61 Ross, James F., 129 n.10 Rowe, William L, 141 n.13 Runzo, Joseph, 129 n.6 Russell, Bertrand on believing, 43 on consciousness, 38 on feelings, 43 pessimism of, 36 on philosophy, 43 on purpose and the universe, 88 on religion, 35, 36 on sensation, 22 his unbelief, 29, 33 on vagueness, 38 on valid inference, 86 Russell, Bruce, 9495 S

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 39, 41 Sayers, Dorothy L., 83