The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination (Continuum Studies In Philosophy Of Religion)

THE IMAGE IN MIND

Continuum Studies in Philosophy of Religion Series Editor: Stewart Goetz Editorial Board: Thomas Flint, Robert Koons, Alexander Pruss, Charles Taliaferro, Roger Trigg, David Widerker, Mark Wynn

THE IMAGE IN MIND Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination

CHARLES TALIAFERRO AND JIL EVANS

The Continuum International Publishing Group 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2011 Charles Taliaferro and Jil Evans All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-8470-6482-0 Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

Contents Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... vi List of Images ............................................................................................ vii Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1 The Turning Image ............................................................... 11 Chapter 2 The Aesthetics of Inquiry ...................................................... 37 Chapter 3 The Cosmic Question and Emergence: The Trick .............. 65 Chapter 4 Seeing into Other Minds..................................................... 107 Chapter 5 The Problem of Theism: Evil ............................................. 149 Chapter 6 The Fitting Imagination ...................................................... 179 Bibliography........................................................................................... 198 Index ....................................................................................................... 209

Acknowledgments We are immensely grateful to Haaris Naqvi of Continuum for his support and encouragement and to Stewart Goetz, the Continuum Studies in Philosophy of Religion series editor, for his advice and enthusiasm. We thank Sara-May Mallett for her assistance in bringing the manuscript to print. We are grateful to Sarah Bruce, Rebecca Dyer, Eric Erfanian, Jeanne Foels, Elisabeth Granquist, Noah Mitchell, Cara Stevens, Cody Venzke, and Conner Westby for assistance in preparing the manuscript. We are also very grateful for the assistance and support of Tricia Little. We would like to thank Stephen Carpenter, Karen Evans, Todd R. Evans, Geoffrey Gorham, Douglas Hedley, Jennifer Manion, Mara Naselli, David O’Hara, Daniel N. Robinson, and David Vessey, who gave us invaluable criticism of earlier drafts of the manuscript and in many cases, new images to challenge our own imagination. We thank Wayne Roosa, artist and art historian extraordinaire, for his generous engagement with the ideas presented here; his agile counter-points and questions have been challenging in the best sense of the word. A special thanks to Christine Baeumler for her friendship, and whose expansive curiosity and dedication both to the wild and to the civilized inhabitants of our planet, inspired Evans to explore Darwin’s thinking path at his home in Kent, and on to the Galapagos Islands. We are grateful to St. John’s College, University of Durham, for a visiting fellowship (2010) to complete the manuscript, and regret that unforeseen circumstances prevented us from accepting this kind offer of residency. We dedicate this book to Amy Louise Evans, for her pursuit of, and delight in, the manifestations of imagination that bind us to this world.

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List of Images Figure 1: Galapagos Cactus War no. 16, Jil Evans, 72˝ × 60˝, oil on canvas, courtesy of Form + Content Gallery............................................................10 Figure 2: Galapagos Cactus War no. 17, Jil Evans, 30˝ × 24˝, oil on canvas, courtesy of Form + Content Gallery............................................................36 Figure 3: Galapagos Cactus War no. 18, Jil Evans, 72˝ × 60˝, oil on canvas, courtesy of Form + Content Gallery............................................................64 Figure 4: Galapagos Cactus War no. 24, Jil Evans, 30˝ × 24˝, oil on canvas, courtesy of the collection of Irve Dell and Kira Obolensky......................106 Figure 5: Galapagos Cactus War no. 20, Jil Evans, 30˝ × 24˝, oil on canvas, courtesy of Form + Content Gallery..........................................................148 Figure 6: Galapagos Cactus War no. 8, Jil Evans, 30˝ × 24˝, oil on canvas, courtesy of Form + Content Gallery..........................................................178

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Introduction This is a book about images and imagination and their role in the greatest philosophical debate in the modern era: the debate over the credibility of theism versus naturalism. What is the theistic image of the world and how does it differ from the naturalist image? What is beautiful or ugly, deep or superficial, extravagant or empty, illuminating or stultifying about these images? How do these images impede or enlarge our moral and personal lives? Despite the enormity of the naturalism–theism literature, there has been insufficient attention to the aesthetic nature of the images and imagination in these two profound visions of reality. In The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination, we offer a brief overview of the history of imagination, identifying why images (specifically mental images) have been denigrated by modern philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean Paul Sartre and some contemporaries do not recognize the vital role images play in our exploration of the world and values. We defend a historically grounded view that imagination is the power of forming images that proves to be indispensable in our pursuit of a whole picture of reality; images and imagination enable us to recognize values and evidence, and to discover what is genuinely possible rather than merely chimerical. We think images and the imagination have an integral and foundational purpose in our ordinary, not just extraordinary, beliefs and projects in science, philosophy, religion, and in common sense. Susanne Langer recognized this in the latter part of the twentieth century. Langer claimed that “Religious thought, whether savage or civilized, operates primarily with images . . . [Images] only, originally made us aware of the wholeness and over-all form of entities, acts and facts in the world; and little though we may know it, only an image can hold us to a conception of a total phenomenon, against which we can measure the adequacy of the scientific terms wherewith we describe it” (Langer 1988, xviii). Our book is the result of our desire to extend Langer’s tantalizing proposal. By “images” we primarily mean visual or pictorial images, and in the case of developing an account of the imagination, we refer to mental images. But we sometimes use “image” to mean understanding, as in “my image of reality includes a necessary role for imagination.” We believe this is consistent with the common use of the term, and allows us to consider how pictorial images, in the visual world and in the mind, are bound up with understanding and 1

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knowledge of the world. The theism and naturalism debate may initially be understood as a clash between the theistic image of nature as a created reality, historically pictured as a book, versus the image of nature pictured as a machine that is not designed. While our focus is on naturalism and theism, and we seek to contribute to the science–religion debate today (e.g. debate over whether religious belief and science are compatible), we wish to go beyond its present contours. For the two images of nature that we are contrasting have a history and significance that predate the modern debates. In the fourth century bce Phaedo, for example, Plato depicts Socrates reflecting on the extent to which mind can explain states of the body and the world. Socrates rejects the idea that mind can be dismissed when it comes to explaining his own movements. Socrates would claim that every speech, thought, poem, composition, and philosophy is produced by mind. To account for all speech ultimately in terms of mindless forces (some “atoms-and-the-void” account of micro-processes) would not explain why he, Socrates, was put on trial, why he practiced philosophy, and so on. Socrates did think (at least the character Socrates in the dialogues thought) he would survive the death of his body. The debate, then, over the importance of mind and its relation to nature has a long history. And while the debate over materialism in the early modern and contemporary era may be different in some respects than the debates in ancient Greece, they are not entirely dissimilar. In the famous description of the giants and the gods in Plato’s Sophist, one can see contemporary figures that appear in the chapters that follow siding with the giants or with the gods: Stranger: What we shall see is something like a battle of Gods and Giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality. Theaetetus: How so? Stranger: One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word. Theaetetus: The people you describe are certainly a formidable crew. I have met quite a number of them before now. Stranger: Yes, and accordingly their adversaries are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless Forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to be true

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reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps. (Plato, Sophist 246 a–c)

So, debates over the nature of purpose and the constitution of the world predate the appearance of monotheism into Western philosophy and certainly predate the massive literature on Darwin, Genesis, and theism versus naturalism. We therefore see our project as an undertaking that may address a broader issue of worldviews — worldviews that take up different views on the world and that favor or give mind and purpose a foundational role, versus worldviews that see mind and purpose as secondary or a function of purposeless forces. In a sense our project is continuous with Plato’s insofar as he advanced his worldview in light of beauty (see the Timaeus) or what we would today call the aesthetic. In spite of the indispensable use of images in our yearning to make sense of reality, there has not been sufficient attention to the aesthetic in the debate between theism and naturalism. Darwin and the co-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, did debate whether natural selection could account for aesthetics, and in the nineteenth century John Henry Newman developed a theistic argument based on the experience of beauty, but there has only recently been revived attention to aesthetics in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science literature (spearheaded by David Brown, Lorraine Daston, Douglas Hedley, Martin Kemp, Anthony O’Hear, Barbara Stafford, Mark Wynn, among others). Part of this book addresses the concern of Wallace and Darwin: can the emergence of aesthetic values (such as beauty and ugliness) be fully accounted for on naturalistic grounds? What aesthetic emotions and feelings are involved in naturalism and theism, and how does each fare in relation to the objections each worldview faces? We believe the greatest obstacle facing naturalism in light of the existence of the imagination is the problem of explaining emergence. Can naturalism fully account for the apparent emergence of life, sentience, consciousness, free will, and moral, aesthetic, and religious experience through non-purposive, impersonal forces? Most forms of naturalism privilege a mechanistic, non-purposive explanation of the cosmos. As Thomas Nagel describes Darwin’s naturalism: Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which our environments and we are all composed. (Nagel 1997, 131)

Can Darwinism and its successors account for the emergence of aesthetics, as well as consciousness? As far as theism goes, we suggest its greatest obstacle is the problem of evil. Given that there is an all-powerful, all good God, why is there evil? Why wouldn’t a God of beauty prevent or eliminate the ugliness 3

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that appears to be integral to the natural world? We are interested in how theists and naturalists address these problems in terms of evidence, with special attention to the aesthetics involved. Theists in the West in medieval and early modern thought adopted the image of nature as the first book of God, scripture being the second. Hugh of St. Victor’s (twelfth century) depiction of the two books is representative: For the whole sensible world is like a kind of book written by the finger of God — that is, created by divine power — and each particular creature is somewhat like a figure, not invented by human decision, but instituted by the divine will to manifest the invisible things of God’s wisdom. (Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus diebus 4)

On this view, someone with an inward understanding of the divine recognizes the meaning of nature, just as a literate person is able to read a book. But for a person without a notion of God, the meaning of nature would go unrecognized, just as a person without any concept of reading or writing would not be able to recognize a book as a book. Charles Darwin and subsequent Darwinians (“natural” men) challenged the image of nature as a book. Darwin begins the first edition of On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life with a citation from Francis Bacon that appears to fully support the study of the Bible as God’s book and the study of nature as the other book of God: To conclude, therefore, let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-spirited moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless proficience in both. (Darwin 1870, 1)

However, in the Origin itself, rather than seeing nature as a book, an intentionally produced object for a purpose, Darwin set about writing what he saw as his own book of nature, which allowed some role for God though such a role was almost completely absent later in The Descent of Man. Perhaps a clue to the direction of Darwin’s thought may be seen in his pairing the citation from Bacon that appears in Origin with the following passage from William Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise: But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this — we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws. (Darwin 1870; Whewell 1833)

To be sure, Darwin may be seen here endorsing rather than hindering a theistic reading of the natural world, but general laws do not write books. Insofar as the natural world is not akin to an author’s composing each sentence or 4

INTRODUCTION

creating each character, nature appears to be less and less like a book. For some contemporary naturalists, the world may still look like a book, but it is, as it were, a book without an author. Richard Dawkins’ book title The Blind Watchmaker is apt given his view that the world may appear to be an intentional object like a watch or a book, but the forces that made it are nonintentional and non-purposive. Our focus on images is not driven by the idea that visual ways of knowing or thinking are superior to non-visual ways of knowing. As an autobiographical fact, we do find ourselves primarily drawn to visual images and visual ways of thinking rather than image-less reflection, but our claim only is that taking up questions concerning the role and importance of imagination and images of theism and naturalism is one important and not sufficiently appreciated path to pursue. This project emerged out of our two independent interests. Charles Taliaferro, a professional philosopher who is passionate about the arts, has been engaged in sustained work on the theism versus naturalism debate concerning consciousness and values. Jil Evans, a painter with philosophical training, has long been concerned artistically with the values and experience of the natural world. This interest led Evans to team up with another visual artist, Christine Baeumler, in creating artwork in response to the life and work of Charles Darwin, a project that included painting and filming in the Galapagos Islands and at Darwin’s house in Kent and in undertaking artwork in response to some of Darwin’s unpublished work at the Rare Manuscripts Room at Cambridge University. We are grateful that Continuum has reproduced images from the series of paintings Evans did based on observation in the Galapagos Islands — Galapagos Cactus Wars — at the outset of each chapter. These are black-and-white reproductions of oil paintings. Our shared artistic and philosophical engagement with Darwin naturally led to conversations over the years that formed the backdrop of this book. To summarize: we set out to co-author The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination as a way to combine our commitment to recognize and fully appreciate the aesthetic nature of all experience, which includes the aesthetic aspects of theories and concepts, all products of the mind, the way in which images and the imagination make forming theories, concepts and beliefs possible, and as a way to sharpen the images and reasons that come into play in the theism–naturalism debate. Chapter 1, “The Turning Image,” sets up and defends our view of images and imagination. We begin to establish the two images that are of great interest to us: the image of the natural world as teleological and purposive, created and sustained by God, versus the image of the natural world as fundamentally non-teleological and non-purposive. The latter position will be represented by what today is known as naturalism. It will be useful to sketch naturalism here and its opposite, theistic alternative. Naturalism is notoriously difficult to define. Barry Stroud comments: 5

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“Naturalism” seems to me in this and other respects rather like “World Peace.” Almost everyone swears allegiance to it, and is willing to march under its banner. But disputes can still break out about what it is appropriate or acceptable to do in the name of that slogan. And like world peace, once you start specifying concretely exactly what it includes and how to achieve it, it becomes increasingly difficult to reach and to sustain a consistent and exclusive “naturalism.” (Stroud 1996, 43–44)

We will refer to two forms of naturalism: strict naturalism and broad naturalism. Strict naturalists want a thoroughgoing, physical (or materialistic) account of the world. Daniel Dennett offers this portrait of what may be called strict naturalism: The prevailing wisdom, variously expressed and argued for, is materialism: there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology — and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain. According to the materialists, we can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and growth. (Dennett 1991, 33)

Dennett’s list of prestigious sources of knowledge (physics, chemistry, physiology) does not include psychology or philosophy. Dennett’s materialism does not recognize the intentional, the experiential, and beliefs as having an irreducible role in explaining persons, animal behavior and experience. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty embraces a form of strict naturalism that makes this commitment explicit: Every speech, thought, theory, poem, composition, and philosophy will turn out to be completely predictable in purely naturalistic terms. Some atoms-and-the-void account of micro-processes within individual human beings will permit the prediction of every sound or inscription which will ever be uttered. There are no ghosts. (Rorty 1979, 387)

Earlier, Wilfrid Sellars famously contrasted what he called “the manifest image” of the world, which is the world as we tend to believe it to be in our ordinary, practical lives with its thoughts, desires, feelings, is in contrast here with “the scientific image,” which is the world as it is described and explained in the physical sciences (Sellars 1963, 35). For strict naturalists, the manifest image is subordinate to the scientific image and where there is a conflict, it is the manifest image that is in jeopardy. At this stage, the following statement by David Armstrong will do as a statement of strict naturalism: What does modern science have to say about the nature of man? There are, of course, all sorts of disagreements and divergences in the views of individual scientists. But I think it is

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true to say that one view is steadily gaining ground, so that it bids fair to become established scientific doctrine. This is the view that we can give a complete account of man in purely physico-chemical terms. . . . I think it is fair to say that those scientists who still reject the physico-chemical account of man do so primarily for philosophical, or moral or religious reasons, and only secondarily, and half-heartedly, for reasons of scientific detail. . . . For me, then, and for many philosophers who think like me, the moral is clear. We must try and work out an account of the nature of mind which is compatible with the view that man is nothing but a physico-chemical mechanism. (Armstrong 1980, 1–2)

What we are calling strict naturalism has also been referred to as a naturalism that is reductive, restrictive, physicalist or puritanical; it has also been called scientificalism (see De Caro and Macarthur 2004, and Unger 2006). Broad naturalists differ from strict naturalists. They share the strict naturalist position that the cosmos is not, at base, purposive or teleological. But they differ insofar as they allow that consciousness, experience, values, aesthetic properties, and the like have emerged. Darwin and Richard Dawkins are both broad naturalists insofar as each recognizes that there are thinking, acting, conscious subjects with emotions, purposes, and desires. Broad naturalists seek to accommodate the manifest image, though they give the physical sciences primacy in terms of our knowledge of the world and they (like strict naturalists) reject theism, the soul, any concept of an individual afterlife, and so on. In fact, this negation of theism and its associates (sometimes referred to as supernaturalism) is the almost universal mark of naturalism. In Understanding Naturalism, Jack Ritchie calls this consensus “popular naturalism.” One can be anti-supernatural without being a naturalist (one may be a skeptic of all worldviews, for example), but it is more of a stretch to imagine a theistic naturalism. Some broad naturalists acknowledge the existence of consciousness, but then reduce or identify consciousness with physical processes. Be that as it may, they hold that this is no evidence of God or any purposive, creative force beyond the fundamentally non-purposive world. Broad naturalism has also been referred to as a naturalism that is liberal, transparent, common sense, or non-reductive. In Second Philosophy: A Naturalistic Method, Penolope Maddy describes what we are calling broad naturalism as “a vague science-friendliness” (Maddy 2007, 1). Most of the naturalists addressed in this book are secular and are not aligned with what may be called a religious worldview. We note for the record, however, that naturalism may be compatible with some religious worldviews (perhaps Taoism or a non-realist version of Christianity as in the case of Don Cupitt who combines atheism and Christianity) or what may be called spirituality. Our second image in this book, theism, could also have a broad or 7

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strict form. The stricter, more narrow concept of theism is the theism of a particular religious tradition like Christianity, while broad theism may be the general supposition that we live in a purposive, teleological cosmos, sustained by an all good, purposive being. The form of theism we engage falls somewhere in between and may be described as Platonic theism. Douglas Hedley offers a helpful account of Platonic theism in Living Forms of the Imagination: The Platonic theist will want to say that . . . the deepest values — truth, beauty and goodness — are part of the fabric of the universe, and persist whether or not they are realized in particular human societies. Theism is not in competition with experimental science, but with the idea that empirical scientific method provides the only access to reality. The theist characteristically holds that the awareness of truth, beauty and goodness deserves due attention, and indeed the scientific project collapses when these components are rigidly discounted as non-scientific. (Hedley 2008, 70)

One may be a theist without adopting the thesis that the practice of science requires an objective (or Platonic) view of the truth, beauty, and goodness, but the form of theism we explore includes such an expanded worldview and understanding of values. Platonic theism, in this book, is neutral with respect to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, theistic forms of Hinduism, and other theistic religious traditions. In the fifth chapter we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of employing a more specific form of theism than we employ in the first four chapters. We also assess that claim later, when we consider broader methodological lessons that may be learned from The Image in Mind. The first chapter, then, begins to sort out the naturalistic and theistic images of the world and to construct an initial philosophy of imagination. Chapter 2, “The Aesthetics of Inquiry,” brings to light the ways in which aesthetic features enter into our scientific, philosophical, and religious exploration of the world. This chapter includes reflection on the ways the arts and the sciences have been (and can be) fruitfully intertwined. We take note of how aesthetic considerations helped shape Darwin’s own inquiry. The aesthetics of naturalism and theism are articulated and compared. Chapter 3, “The Cosmic Question and Emergence: The Trick,” addresses the problem of accounting for the cosmos itself and the emergence of consciousness, experience, values, and purposive agents on strict and broad forms of naturalism. This chapter further investigates the aesthetics of naturalism. Barry Stroud identifies one of the key projects of naturalism as formulating an explanation for how there come to be beings that think and act intentionally. There was a time when there were no beings with intentional attitudes at all. Now they are all over the place. One might take an interest in how that transition occurred; how

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there came to be subjects with intentional attitudes in a world that originally did not contain them . . . Could we expect to explain from the ground up how there came to be such a thing as language and meaning in the world, and so how human beings have come to acquire the range of intricate capacities involved in their knowing all the sorts of things they now know? And would such an explanation invoke only facts expressed in exclusively non-intentional terms? (Stroud 2009, 166)

In Chapter 3 we take up this quest of providing an explanation of consciousness and intentionality, arguing that the existence of consciousness and intentionality makes more sense in a theistic rather than naturalistic setting. Chapter 4, “Seeing into Other Minds,” considers the nature of inter-subjectivity, the ways in which a subject knows of the thoughts, feelings, and desires of others. In this chapter we further develop our philosophy of imagination, images, and aesthetics. We also use this chapter to consider the nature and evidential value of moral and religious experience and compare the awareness of what may be a divine mind with an awareness of animal minds. Chapter 5, “The Problem of Theism: Evil,” addresses a central challenge to theism. We explore the problem of evil, employing the earlier work on images, imagination, and aesthetics. For Darwin, the problem of evil was one of the key reasons for his rejection of Christian theism or what may be called Platonic theism (notwithstanding his belief that there is a First Cause of the cosmos); we see this rejection as both an intellectual as well as aesthetic matter. Certain features of the world and certain tenets in Christian theism were (in his view) too ugly to be the reflection of a beneficent, good God. We critically assess the different ways in which God is imagined in relation to world evils. Chapter 6, “The Fitting Imagination,” involves an overall aesthetic and evidential assessment of our two images in the book and a foray into how the tools we have been employing in the naturalism–theism debate may be used in assessing other images of the world and other domains of inquiry. We also entertain different images of God, redemption, and the physical world. A brief word on our style of inquiry: the book is written in a format that is more akin to relaxed, non-hyper-analytic philosophy (i.e. little symbolic notation), but we also offer what may be considered phenomenological contributions. By “phenomenological” we do not mean anything highly technical; we are simply seeking to offer a careful descriptive account of experience. In Chapter 2 on the longing for unity, in Chapter 4 on mirrors and reflections, and in our last chapter on fittingness, we engage in phenomenological inquiry into the subjects at hand. In some respects we hope this will serve to help bridge the divide between so-called analytic and continental philosophy, at least in this book. For those interested in following up on the phenomenological tradition, our own efforts may be seen as aligned with the phenomenological realism of Max Scheler and Dietrich von Hildebrand. 9

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CHAPTER 1

The Turning Image As infinite kinds of almost identical images arise continually from the innumerable atoms and flow out to us from the gods, so we should take the keenest pleasure in turning and bending our mind and reason to grasp these images, in order to understand the nature of these blessed and eternal beings. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods

Chariots, caves, cantilevers, branching trees, peacock tails, circuit boards, a single eye, and a massive explosion are not just things and events in the world, but images with distinct aesthetic content. Each of these images constitutes a nexus of meaning, enduring or perishing in scientific, philosophical, and religious practices. Images are not static or absolute, and this is why they are often generative by nature. Images, like metaphors, can enlarge or diminish our potential to create or access greater meaning, just as they can enable a communion of minds. Their openness to interpretation reflects our subjectivity and the values implicit in how we picture the world and ourselves, our goals and desires. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, the soul is pictured as a charioteer driving a chariot with two horses. On the path of enlightenment, our passionate nature, both good and bad, is directed by reason to guide us to the truth. Today we rarely speak of souls, and our passions are no longer tethered to a chariot hastening in celestial flight; our passions are now frequently relegated to “figments” of our imagination while our minds are pictured as a circuit board. In this chapter we develop a provisional understanding of imagination and images in philosophical inquiry. What is the imagination? What are mental images? After defending an account of imagination and images we argue that both may be used in four ways: forming an image of a state of affairs can be prima facie evidence that what it is we are imagining is possible; the imagination and images makes explicit what we know or can come to know on the basis of other beliefs; imagination is indispensable in ethical reflection and philosophical inquiry; and images and imagination enables us to see connections between evidence and challenges to evidence. Imagination itself has undergone a history of changing definitions. Before identifying what we think is the most promising view of imagination, let us consider some background. 11

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THE MENTAL IMAGE A commonplace and, until recently, a fairly uncontroversial definition of imagination can be put succinctly: Imagination is the power to create or form images in the mind. Or, with a slight modification: It is the power to create or form mental images. On this view, “imagination” does not refer to a thing or object or event, but a power possessed by subjects that can either be cultivated or suppressed for good or ill. In the latter part of the twentieth century, this view of imagination was attacked, and in particular, “mental images” were seen as problematic. As Alastair Hannay begins his book Mental Images: A Defense, “It would be an exaggeration to say there was a conspiracy against mental images. But ‘campaign’ would not be too strong a word” (Hannay 1971, 19). But before the attack on images began, the controversy was mostly over the scope and power of the imagination.

SCOUTS AND SPIES RANGING IN A VAGUE FIELD The early modern philosopher, René Descartes, lamented the ways in which imagination can lead us astray, as did his contemporary Michel de Montaigne who wrote in the essay “Of Idleness” that unfocussed and undisciplined thought can lead us to the “vague field of imagination” (champ vague des imaginations). But Descartes also considered imagination indispensable in knowing the world. For Descartes, imagination pertains mostly to the sensible, material world and our reflection on it, as opposed to that which is intelligible but cannot be imaged, e.g. we may have an idea of God but this is not the same as God being imaged, the forming of an image God. He treated “conception” as broader than imagination, taking note of how we may conceive of some things (a figure with a thousand sides) that we are not able to imagine because we lack the power to form the appropriate image. Descartes anticipated the positive role of imagination as an important component in education and personal formation, and he expressed regret over those who neglect the imagination and thereby do not raise their minds “beyond things of the senses” (1996, 6:37). While Thomas Hobbes and Descartes were opposed on most matters, they overlapped somewhat on imagination. Hobbes, famously, held that “Imagination therefore is nothing but decaying sense” picturing imagination as a place where what is sensed goes to decompose (Hobbes 2009, ch. 2). While this may seem grim and altogether disparaging, Hobbes actually held that imagination was pivotal in education, personal formation, and action. It was through imagination that one comes to line up desires and objects of desire: “For the thoughts are to the desires as scouts and spies to range abroad and find the way to the things desired” (Hobbes 2009, ch. 8). It is imagination that enables us to think of what is not present and give direction 12

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to our desires. Hobbes’ materialism and mechanical view of nature led him to what he saw as a scientific account of values and politics, an account that relied on individuals using their imagination in accord with rational self-interest.

EXPLORING THE GOOD, TRUE AND BEAUTIFUL WITH A CANDLE SHINING The Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century also saw imagination as shaping and re-forming new images and ideas, combining and reconfiguring what we observe through the senses. Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Benjamin Whichcote, and the other Cambridge Platonists thought that imagination is not entirely under our control and can lead to excess in religion (what was pejoratively called “enthusiasm”), but they believed that our fundamental being was created by an all good God who enables us to have reliable cognitive powers to search out and discover what is essential for human flourishing. Unlike Hobbes, the Cambridge Platonists held that God has created us with an innate idea of the good, an intrinsic or “built in” natural sense and longing for communion with one another and God. The Cambridge Platonists upheld what Thomas Nagel in a provocative essay, “Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament,” calls the redemptive role of philosophy. According to Nagel, one of the historical roles of philosophy (going back to Plato) was providing wisdom in relating the self to the greater cosmos. If the Cambridge Platonists were right in their philosophy of human nature, such a cosmic point of view can be redemptive (healing or consoling). A recurring image of Cambridge–Christian Platonists was one used to describe human reason as “the candle of the Lord.” In their view, imagination can provide a natural means to make explicit and give shape to ideals that are not immediately observed. In this way, the domain or works of imagination can provide an arena in which to explore the good, the true, and the beautiful, assuming the powers of imagination are exercised in the context of a life of virtue. The Cambridge school of thought inherited Plato’s teaching that a virtuous form of life was essential for the love of wisdom (see, for example, Plato’s seventh letter). A vicious or mean-spirited or spiteful context can, however, lead the imagination to create (perhaps quite literally) hell. The drama of Paradise Lost would have resonated with the Cambridge Platonists. Satan carries hell within him (Milton 2008, book 4.20–21) and then by unleashing his malice (and giving it image or body) he gives rise to or creates hell, thus providing some grounds for agreeing with Satan when he boasts that he “can make a Hell of Heaven.” Actually, there is some reason to think the Cambridge Platonists recognized this power of imagination to create hell (or heaven) before Milton. In The Platonic Renaissance in England, Ernst Cassirer observes: 13

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That grand and audacious speech which Milton puts in the mouth of Satan: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” was first enunciated by the modest thinkers of the Cambridge Circle [Platonists]. “Heaven is first a Temper, and then a Place,” said Whichcote. (Cassirer 1970, 32–33)

Descartes, the Cambridge Platonists, and also Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) used imagination philosophically in setting up different pictures of the world to compare and assess. In Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau, John D. Lyons aptly describes Pascal’s meditations on human finitude as exercises in “cosmic imagination” (Lyons 2005). This seventeenth-century description by Pascal that follows is a prime example of an image of nature: Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in its high and full majesty, and let him turn his gaze away from the base objects that surround him. Let him look at that brilliant light placed like an eternal lamp to illuminate the universe, and let earth seem to him only as a dot compared to the vast circuit that this star traces, and let him be astounded at the fact that this vast circuit itself is only a fine dot when compared to the circumference embraced by the stars that spin in the firmament. But while our gaze stops there and imagination continues beyond, it will wear itself out conceiving forms before nature ceases to supply them. (Pascal in Lyons 2005, 110)

Pascal uses this image to challenge human pretensions to greatness, to increase our sense of vulnerability in a cosmos that stretches beyond both our control and imagination, and to prepare us for a different image: the image of a God of power and judgment that is more awesome and vast than the cosmos God creates and sustains. For John Locke, the imagination is less reliable than the Cambridge Platonists supposed, partly because Locke did not hold that God had implanted within us innate ideas of virtue and the like. Locke, famously, held that human beings begin life as a blank slate (a tabula rasa) rather than with an inchoate schema of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Still, Locke retained the notion that a good Creator bestows our faculties or cognitive powers upon us. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke writes: Men have Reason to be well satisfied with what God hath thought fit for them, since he has given them . . . Whatsoever is necessary for the Conveniences of Life, and Information of Virtue; and has put within the reach of their Discovery the comfortable Provision for this Life and the Way that leads to a better [life] . . . The Candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our Purposes. (Locke 1690, ch. I, §5)

For Locke as for the Cambridge Platonists our faculties do not yield infallible, incorrigible knowledge in all matters of importance, but our faculties 14

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(imagination, when governed by reason and senses) are adequate. In what follows, one may see Locke as a close ally to the Cambridge Platonists, not withstanding his rejection of innate ideas: The Discoveries we can make with this, ought to satisfy us. And we shall then use our Understandings right, when we entertain all Objects in that Way and Proportion, that they are suited to our Faculties; and upon those Grounds, they are capable of being propos’d to us; and not peremptorily, or intemperately require Demonstration, and demand Certainty, where Probability only is to be had, and which is sufficient to govern all our Concernments. If we will disbelieve every thing, because we cannot certainly know all things; we shall do much what as wisely as he, who would not use his Legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no Wings to fly. (Locke 1690, ch. I, §5)

While Locke locates the drive to action in terms of the uneasiness of the will, he seems to acknowledge that without being able to exercise imagination in conceiving of different courses of action, there would be no freedom (Locke 1690, ch. XXI, §8). Locke and Bishop George Berkeley, who followed him, differed on the kinds of images or ideas that we form and entertain. While there are scholarly disagreements in the vicinity, Locke is typically interpreted as holding a theory of meaning that gives a central role to images and he thought there could be abstract images or ideas (e.g. the meaning of “dog” may, in part, be the image of dog), whereas Berkeley attacked the possibility of there being abstract images or ideas. Each image or idea is specific. Still, both agreed that imagination is a power to create and fashion images, at will: “I find I can excite ideas in my mind at pleasure, and vary and shift the scene as oft as I think fit. It is no more than willing, and straightaway this or that idea arises in my fancy; and by the same power it is obliterated and makes way for another” (Berkeley 1965, 72).

SENSATION AND UNDERSTANDING LEAD TO THE “WHOLE” EXCEPT WHEN THERE IS A DANGEROUS FLIGHT OF IMAGINATION In his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume envisaged imagination as foundational to human understanding itself. Hume wrote that the human capacity of understanding is itself “the general and more established properties of the imagination” (book I, part IV, sec. VII). On this view, our understanding of the world involves our capacity to form images of what is or is not present. The use of memory may thus involve imagination insofar as one pictures or forms images of what is no longer present. In a wonderful passage, in which the imagination is pictured as a ship, Hume held that the imagination extends and completes our experience of the objects around us. 15

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[T]he imagination, when set into any train of thinking, is apt to continue, even when its object fails it, and like a galley put in motion by the oars, carries on its course without any new impulse . . . Objects have a certain coherence even as they appear to our senses; but this coherence is much greater and more uniform, if we suppose the objects to have a continu’d existence; and as the mind is once in the train of observing an uniformity among objects, it naturally continues, till it renders the uniformity as complete as possible. (Hume 1739, book I, part IV, sec. II)

Immanuel Kant sought to extend this high view of the power of the imagination in an elaborate epistemology involving what he called reproductive imagination and productive imagination. The first is akin to Hume’s usage. Arguably, you cannot (strictly speaking) see at any one time a full, dense three-dimensional object; one only sees the object’s surface or curvature. Imagination is what enables us perceptually to think of ourselves as perceiving baseballs rather than only being able to claim to perceive the surface of a baseball and infer that there is more to the object than its surface. The productive imagination then works to synthesize our experiences, allowing us to apprehend the world as a unified subject, seeing objects whole or as unities. Kant described this power as “transcendental” insofar as it was an operation that is prior to or it is a foundation for our understanding of the world and ourselves. In her important 1978 book, Imagination, Mary Warnock summarizes Kant’s position: Neither understanding alone nor sensation alone can do the work of the imagination, nor can they be conceived to come together without imagination. For neither can construct creatively, nor reproduce images to be brought out and applied to present experience. Only imagination in this sense is creative; only it makes pictures of things. It forms these pictures by taking sense impressions and working on them. Kant calls this activity “apprehension.” (Warnock 1978, 31)

Kant and Hume did not think of imagination in opposition to sensing or perceiving, as though if you sense something, a book, for example, you thereby do not imagine the book. Imagination, rather, is essential in our seeing and perceiving whole objects. Moreover, imagination has a vital role in conceiving of one’s whole, including one’s future, life. In exercising free agency we imagine our lives constituting very different roles we must choose between. Imagination is thereby a condition for agency. For Hume and Kant, imagination is good insofar as the ability to apprehend, perceive, and understand are valuable powers in their own right or they are put to good use, but although Hume thought the imagination was essential for ethics (“it is on the imagination that pity entirely depends”) he did not view the imagination as an intrinsic good (Hume 1739, book II, part II, sec. VII). Hume claimed that “Nothing is more dangerous to reason 16

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than flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers” (Hume 1739, book I, part IV, sec. VII). This negative judgment was countered in the romantic era, however, especially in response to what the romantics saw as an impersonal form of reason that promoted a mechanized, dehumanizing culture and science. So, Samuel Taylor Coleridge defended a high view of imagination, contending that it was an inner power that allows us to feel and it is linked in particular with joy. Coleridge can be seen as recovering or reviving the view of imagination that we find in the Cambridge Platonists and their conviction that we have a God-created constitution that orients us to the good.

JOY CONNECTS US TO THE WORLD In continuity with Kant, Coleridge thought there were two types of imagination: primary imagination has a role in perception itself, while secondary imagination is instrumental in the making of art. In this role, imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create . . . it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead” (Coleridge 1817, 183). Coleridge was not ignorant of the ways in which we can be misled by our imagination, and he referred to the lowest form of the imagination as “fancy” — sometimes not even calling it imagination but a separate faculty. At its best, the imagination involves joy and connects the subject with the world. In “Dejection: An Ode,” Coleridge exults, “We in ourselves rejoice!” (Coleridge 1912, 366) In an earlier work, he expounds: In looking at the objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolic language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing something new. Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomena were the dim awakening of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. (Coleridge 1895, 136)

Coleridge is very much in the Cambridge Platonist tradition as he sees imagination enabling us to restore a fitting relationship between the natural world and ourselves. On his view, we are created in order to find, experience, and act in light of a concord between the inner good (our being), and nature and nature’s God (see Douglas Hedley’s Coleridge, Philosophy, and Religion). In early American philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the more vigorous defenders of the imagination and the Cambridge Platonist-Coleridge stance that the imaginative perception of the world can be redemptive. In “The Nature of Beauty,” Emerson writes of the importance of linking our inner and outer senses: 17

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To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. (Emerson 1929, 8–9)

While Emerson was closer to pantheism than theism, he both resisted the growing impersonal, mechanistic philosophy of his day and affirmed the goodness of the natural world, as revealed to imaginative, caring perception: The ancient Greeks called the world kosmos, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion and grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. (Emerson 2009, 20–21)

In Emerson, imaginative perception is the key to realizing the value of nature and the valuable link between nature and the soul. The conviction that the imagination may be employed in imaging and interpreting the world has its defenders today. Warnock concludes her book, Imagination, with this claim: “Imagination is our means of interpreting the world, and it also is our means of forming images in the mind. The images themselves are not separate from our interpretations of the world; they are our way of thinking of the objects in the world. We see the forms in our mind’s eye and we see these very forms in the world. We could not do one of these things if we could not do the other” (Warnock 1978, 194; for a complementary position, see Eva Brann 1991). As it happens, Charles Darwin embraced such a view of the imagination in The Descent of Man: The imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of man. By this faculty he unites, independently of the will, former images and ideas, and thus creates brilliant and novel results . . . The value of the products of our imagination depends of course on the number, accuracy, and clearness of our impressions; on our judgment and taste in selecting or rejecting the involuntary combinations, and to a certain extent on our power of voluntarily combining them. (Darwin 1874, 44)

Darwin, like Descartes, thought that dreaming employed images, and so he thought that the apparent fact that some nonhuman animals dream is 18

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evidence that some of these animals have the power of imagination. As suggested at the outset of this survey of views on imagination, a more recent philosophical obstacle to a robust philosophy of imagination has focused on the problem of mental images. The attack on images is so strong, beginning mid-twentieth century, that the prestigious 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry “Imagination” includes this confident assertion: “Clearly it is inadequate to equate ‘imagination’ with the power to produce images” (Manser 1967, 137). The movement away from images in accounts of imagination was prompted by at least two related philosophical challenges. Both involve a deep skepticism about our common-sense understanding of our subjective experience as unique and irreducible. One challenge was derived from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s private language argument, and the other was advanced by Gilbert Ryle’s case against dualism. Both philosophers objected to the idea of images as private, mental objects. They both worried that positing mental images set up an artificial veil or barrier between the person and the world. Such a duality or bifurcation sequesters the subject from the world in a kind of subjective prison and invites a malignant form of skepticism. If you only know the “external world” indirectly or as mediated by mental images, how do you know the world is at it appears? Let us briefly consider these two sources of discontent with images.

PROBLEMS WITH IMAGES Wittgenstein’s private language has been variously interpreted. On one conventional reading, Wittgenstein held that the use of language requires following rules (of grammar in terms of syntax and semantics). In order to follow these rules, one must be able to tell when the rules are being followed or not. If meaning is acquired by matching words with some inner image that only a speaker has access to, then it will not be possible for the speaker to know that she means the same thing by, say, “green” as another speaker, because it may be that speakers have different inner, private images. Wittgenstein offers this parody of using language in terms of matching words and images: [T]hink of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked “five red apples”. He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked “apples”; then he looks up the word “red” in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers — I assume that he knows them by heart — up to the word “five” and for each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer. — It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words — “But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?” — Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations

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come to an end somewhere. — But what is the meaning of the word “five”? — No such thing was in question here, only how the word “five” is used. (Wittgenstein 1953, 2)

Clearly we sometimes define terms ostensively. We may not know what an elephant looks like until we look it up in a book with pictures, but Wittgenstein thought this couldn’t be the whole story. He likened the person who embraces private images to a situation in which all persons have their own private box with a beetle inside that only the individual person can see. “No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle” (Wittgenstein 1953, 85). In such conditions, persons would not be able to successfully compare beetles or meanings, and the practice of language would be undermined. In the story of shopping for apples, Wittgenstein signals that meaning needs to be articulated and identified in practices rather than in terms of referring to mental images that are private to each speaker. Private images cannot be subject to second-person inspection. If meaning is bound by such privacy, perhaps that shopkeeper’s “red” (what her mental image red is like) is different from the shopper’s and neither the shopkeeper nor the shopper really knows what he is talking about. Wittenstein’s notion of equating meaning with practice is a common-sense explanation for why communication can be successful in a community. But it does not account for the possibility of experiencing new meaning (or values) within a community, or creating and finding meaning in poetry. The hypothesis that someone may mean something different by their color terms because his or her spectrum is different (this imagined thought experiment is sometimes called the inverted spectrum) and that this condition may be uncorrectable or undetectable seems altogether coherent. We propose that skepticism about the meaning and structure of language (the possibility that one is systematically mistaken linguistically) is a bona fide possibility. Using the idiom of contemporary film, you might read and be convinced of Wittgenstein’s private language argument and yet be in the Matrix. (In the popular 1999 film, The Matrix, human beings are in the Matrix, a simulated world that seems real, while in reality their bodies are used as energy sources.) Still, even if we accept that linguistic meaning must be anchored in correctable practices, it does not follow that persons do not have mental images. One could always adopt a behaviorist account of linguistic meaning but allow that such an account does not cover all mental life. On this view, you might claim that meaning is necessarily defined by behavior (a highly implausible reduction) and thus shared meaning can be established by observation, while all along acknowledging there is more to meaning than behavior. This may have been Wittgenstein’s position (see, for example, Philosophical Investigations 304). But apart from the details and challenges to the private language argument, Wittgenstein’s own work supports our general approach to the imagination, which involves images. Many of Wittgenstein’s arguments may largely be seen in terms of images. Consider again the aesthetic properties 20

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of the image of a beetle in a box. Wittgenstein uses the claustrophobic image of a trapped boxed insect to generate an antipathy to the private world of images. Coleridge developed a different image or metaphor for private images. Coleridge was insightful when he described the power to form images that can link the inner and outer worlds as a “living Power” (in his Biographia Literaria, ch. 13). The capacity to create and hold mental images (and by all accounts, most people at least claim to have mental images) is not claustrophobic, but a capacious capacity of our minds to envision and entertain beyond what the senses inform. But whether you side with Wittgenstein or Coleridge on how you describe our imaginative powers, Wittgenstein’s own philosophical methods make ample use of images and their aesthetic dimension. Wittgenstein’s many images are arresting: letting a fly out of a bottle, a lion asking the time, the duck-rabbit, laborers calling out for slabs of material, the human face, a plane overhead, the very idea of a family resemblances, different games, and so on. If this way of proceeding is acceptable (and we find it quite imaginative and creative), then Wittgenstein presents no obstacles to the project of our book, which is the consideration, and comparison of two different images of nature. In The Concept of Mind, Ryle attacks mental images and the traditional portrait of the imagination as involving images. This is necessary for his critique of dualism, the idea that persons are embodied souls or mind. What follows is Ryle’s portrait of the dualism he rejects: Material objects are situated in a common field, known as “space”, and what happens to one body in one part of space is mechanically connected with what happens to other bodies in other parts of space. But mental happenings occur in insulated fields, known as “minds”, and there is, apart maybe from telepathy no direct causal connection between what happens in one mind and what happens in another. Only through the medium of the public physical world can the mind of one person make a difference to the mind of another. The mind is its own place and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear and jolt one another’s bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another’s mind and inoperative upon them. As thus represented, minds are not merely ghosts harnessed to machines, they are themselves just spectral machines. Though the human body is an engine, it is not quite an ordinary engine, since some of its workings are governed by another engine inside it — this interior governor-engine being one of a very special sort. It is invisible, inaudible and it has no size or weight. It cannot be taken to bits and the laws it obeys are not those known to ordinary engineers. Nothing is known of how it governs the bodily engine. (Ryle 1949, 20)

Ryle considers a host of cases when persons report that they are forming images “in their mind’s eye” or picturing some place or thing.

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If a person says that he is picturing his nursery, we are tempted to construe his remark to mean that he is somehow contemplating, not his nursery, but another visible object, namely a picture of his nursery, only not a photograph or an oil-painting, but some counterpart to a photograph, one made of a different kind of stuff. (Ryle 1949, 247)

Ryle’s case against this position is to drive home the thesis that when someone claims to picture his or her nursery, there is no picture or thing that is being pictured. Rather, they are in a position that is similar to actually seeing the nursery. “A person picturing his nursery is, in a certain way, like that person seeing his nursery, but the similarity does not consist in his really looking at a real likeness of his nursery, but in his really seeming to see his nursery itself, when he is not really seeing it” (Ryle 1949, 248). A similar point can be made about Ryle that was made in response to Wittgenstein. Ryle makes ample uses of images in his own arguments. We cited his extraordinary caricature earlier about dualists, who are imaged as utterly bifurcated or splintered; dualists are like a confused, blind and deaf Robinson Crusoe who posits an interior, ghostly field and can only be reached telepathically. Ryle deftly uses such images to draw us into a kind of aesthetic (as well as conceptual) revulsion of dualism. So, the project of this book is actually supported by Ryle’s own practice, his use of images to portray worldviews and engage us aesthetically. Ryle offers no reason to dispatch with mental images, construed along dualist lines. A dualist can fully affirm that in normal, healthy cases of embodiment you are not bifurcated or some odd ghost operating a body in the world that can only be reached directly through psi-phenomena like telepathy. But under traumatic, damaged conditions in which you lost all feelings, emotions, and powers of agency by which to express yourself, you might indeed be like Ryle’s ghost. You might actually still have an interior life and no way to express it; if you lost the powers of agency, you would indeed be inaudible and your actual desires might be invisible insofar as you are unable to display them through action or speech. Normally you are spatially embodied and available for touching, seeing, hearing, jolting, and speaking (see Taliaferro 1994 and 2001). Dualists simply maintain that in addition to the physical behavior involved, there is also the embodiment of intentions, desires, thinking, feeling, emoting, and so on. As for mental images, Ryle seems to concede that (in some sense) a person may picture something not present (the nursery), but by denying the existence of mental images he has removed experientially that in virtue of which we can say that when a person pictures the nursery they seem to be in a position of seeing the nursery. Ryle seems to utterly discount the fact that the person picturing his nursery is having an actual (rather than merely simulated) experience. Moreover, his analysis seems to fly in the face of what — to common sense — seems apparent: exercising the imagination (or thinking imaginatively) is an activity, as is “seeing in one’s mind’s eye” a nursery or whatever. 22

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Ryle claims: “Seeing and hearing are neither witnessed nor unwitnessed doings, for they are not doings” (Ryle 1949, 267). Seeing and hearing are not activities like painting or lifting weights, but surely they are activities that one may do well or badly. Ryle claims that seeming to hear things in one’s mind does not consist of actual auditions that are loud or quiet. Yet controlling the loudness or quietness of a “seeming” movement in Mozart’s’ Serenade in G Major is exactly what one can do in one’s mind that one cannot do listening in a concert hall. As the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch observed: “Imagining is doing, it is a sort of personal exploring” (Murdoch 1966, 48). The debate over mental images is considerable (see Imagery, edited by Ned Block, and The Imagery Debate, edited by Michael Tye). Because this book is in neutral about highly specific views of sensory images (though we are committed to there being images and that these are employed in the imagination to think about the world), we will leave off further work on representational mechanisms and non-imagistic accounts of cognition. Aristotle bodly claimed, “it is impossible even to think without a mental picture” (Aristotle 2007, 450e). Aristotle seems to go too far, but it is important to take seriously the mental pictures we employ when we think, and this will be a major aim in the next chapter. We will, however, clarify one more element in the philosophy of images employed here, and this concerns the way images can function to inform us of reality, and then offer some further points about the use of imagination in reflecting on the value of aesthetic experience.

MOVING IMAGES Wittgenstein, Jean Paul Sartre, and Colin McGinn each propose that a study of mental images themselves does not generate new information about the world or disclose its features. If our images are entertained in a fashion in which they are intentionally distinguished from the world itself, there is a sense in which they are right. Wittgenstein writes: “Images tell us nothing, either right or wrong about the external world . . . It is just because forming images is a voluntary activity that it does not instruct us about the external world” (Wittgenstein 1981, 106, sec. 621, 627). In The Psychology of Imagination, Jean Paul Sartre writes: “The image teaches nothing: it is organized exactly like the objects which do not produce knowledge, but it is complete at the very moment of its appearance. If I amuse myself by turning over in my mind the image of a cube, if I pretend that I see its different sides, I shall be not further ahead at the close of the process than I was at the beginning. I have learned nothing” (Sartre 1966, 10). Colin McGinn proposes that the reason why images themselves cannot illuminate or broaden our knowledge of reality is because they are subject to our voluntary control. Imagine we “frame an Idea of the Legs, Arms, and Body of a Man, and join to this a Horse’s Head and Neck” (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book II, 23

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ch. XXXII, 393). This act and image will not help us in determining whether such a creature exists. And the image will be quite responsive to our wills. Imagine you decide that the Lockean creature you have pictured (the HorseMan) is a vegetarian. When you then further imagine the creature refuses to eat a steak, you did not learn something new about it. After all, you invented it. In this way, seeing objects in the world is a more passive matter (you are not the cause of your sensations) whereas in matters of imagination, you are more in control. “The will has no causal control over what you see and hear” (McGinn 2004, 15). We have already cited arguments that hold the imagination as indispensable in perception, making perception an active, not passive activity. But we also think that images and the use of images in imagination are important instruments in thinking about the world, and play a vital role in sorting through evidence. Developing such rich images can be cognitively significant in at least four ways: forming an image of a state of affairs can be prima facie evidence that what it is we are imagining is possible; the imagination and images make explicit what we know or can come to know on the basis of other beliefs; imagination is indispensable in ethical reflection and philosophical inquiry; and images and imagination enable us to see connections between evidence and challenges to evidence. We now defend and clarify these four claims.

THE MODAL PRINCIPLE OR WHAT IS POSSIBLE Imagination and Possibilia: David Hume defended a strong claim: “[N]othing we imagine is absolutely impossible” (Hume 1739, book I, part II, sec. II). There may be some truth in this, but Hume’s precept must be qualified. We may imagine (or believe we imagine) some things such as time travel that appear possible but turn out to be impossible (e.g. time is necessarily onedimensional and irreversible). We suggest, then, a more qualified thesis: If one can imagine (picture or describe) some states of affairs obtaining, and its obtaining is not ruled out by anything independently known (e.g. the obtaining is not incompatible with the law of noncontradiction, necessary truths about space and time, and so on), then one has prima facie reason for believing the state of affairs is possible. (See Taliaferro 1994, 1997, and 2002)

“Prima facie” here signals that one may be mistaken. A prima facie reason to believe something is a good reason to believe it, even though further inquiry may overwhelm or undermine such reason. The linking of imagination and possibility is sometimes called the modal principle, often used in philosophy. The modal principle has come under attack recently, and so it is important to pause and consider at least one objection. 24

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Peter van Inwagen maintains we should be skeptics about whether the imagination can serve as a reliable guide to learning about what is possible. He says that we may know that some states of affairs are possible, even if they are never actual, through mathematical reasoning and reflection on the meaning of terms. But he argues that we cannot use the imagination in determining whether it is possible God exists or that a person might exist disembodied (e.g. a person survives the death of their body) or that there could be (to use his example) transparent iron or naturally caused purple cows. Consider those propositions whose truth-values cannot be determined by logic and reflection on the meanings of words or by the applications of mathematical reasoning. Among those, consider those whose truth-values are unknown to us or which are known to be false. If the only way to determine whether a proposition in this category is possible is by attempting to imagine a world we take to verify this proposition, then we should be modal skeptics; while we shall certainly know some propositions of this type to be possible, we shall not be able to know whether the premises of our illustrative possibility arguments are true; and neither shall we be able to know whether it is possible for there to be transparent iron or naturally purple cows. (van Inwagen 1998, 84)

Van Inwagen bases his skepticism on the grounds that in our imagination we lack a clear account of how we might tell what is genuinely possible; we lack the ability to form the precise details of imagining the relevant states of affairs; and it appears that for any of the interesting state of affairs (it is possible persons cannot be disembodied), he thinks we can imagine the opposite. If we can imagine the opposite state of affairs, we have negated any power of the imagination to guide us in what might be possible. Consider these briefly. As for the first objection, van Inwagen claims to know that there are many possible but not actual possibilities. I know that it is possible that . . . the table that was in a certain position at noon have then been two feet to the left of where it in fact was. I know that it is possible (in this sense) for John F. Kennedy to have died of natural causes, that it is impossible for there to be liquid wine bottles, and that it is necessary that there be a valley between any two mountains that touch at their bases. And, no doubt, reason — operating on a combination of “basic” modal knowledge like that displayed in the previous sentence and facts about the way the world is put together — can expand the range of our modal knowledge considerably. (van Inwagen 1998, 70)

But van Inwagen does not tell us how we know such basic states of affairs are possible. Fortunately, we do not have to have an adequate account of how we know statements of a certain type in order to know some statements of that type or to know that we know

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some statements of that type or to know that we know a given statement of that type. (van Inwagen 1998, 76)

If, as he states above, van Inwagen does not have a fully developed account of basic modal knowledge, why should this be a mark against using the imagination for bolder modal claims? We propose that the reason why van Inwagen knows about possible rearrangements of furniture and knows that JFK might not have been assassinated is due to the modal principle. Imagining is exactly the power he employs to locate reasons. Van Inwagen’s two other objections can be handled together. Van Inwagen writes: Can we imagine a world in which there is transparent iron? Not unless our imaginings take place at a level of structural detail comparable to the imaginings of condensed-matter physicists who are trying to explain, say, the phenomenon of superconductivity. If we simply imagine a Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which the new Nobel laureate thanks those who supported him in his long and discouraging quest for transparent iron and displays to a cheering crowd something that looks (in our imagination) like a chunk of glass, we shall indeed have imagined a world, but it will not be a world in which there is transparent iron. (van Inwagen 1998, 79)

In making this point, van Inwagen concedes that if you can imagine details that are sufficient to the state of affairs at issue, then imagination can be a guide to determining what is possible. Moreover, once one engages in such detailed analysis it is not at all clear that the imagination supports opposite, incompatible states of affairs in an abundance of philosophically interesting states of affairs. Take two examples. David Robb has used van Inwagen’s strategy against David Chalmers, who uses the imagination to argue that there could be zombies, a creature exactly like conscious beings but without consciousness. Chalmers imagines such a state of affairs in detail, but Robb offers this counter-move: But his [Chalmers’] opponent might shift the burden back in a similar way by advancing the ‘anti-zombie,’ a being who knows that zombies are logically impossible . . . I find such a being conceivable; after lengthy reflection, I can (as Chalmers says of zombies) detect no internal incoherence in the idea of an anti-zombie. There is, then, a strong presumption for the logical possibility of anti-zombies. (Robb 1998, 530)

Is imagining someone who “knows zombies are logically impossible” the same as Chalmers’ imaging, picturing or describing a state of affairs that justify us in believing zombies are possible? Doesn’t the burden of argument fall to Robb to flesh out the details of his thought experiment? By virtue of what essential relations, necessary truths or evident impossibilia, is Robb’s thought experiment an equal match to Chalmers’? As another example of when the 26

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claim to imagine a state of affairs is supposedly cancelled out by a contrary claim, consider David Kaplan’s claim that he can imagine the refutation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Does this show that Godel’s theorem is possibly false and thus not necessary? Certainly not the way Kaplan develops his claim about what he imagined, for Kaplan imagined the Los Angeles Times carrying huge headlines “UCLA PROF REFUTES GODEL; ALL REPUTABLE EXPERTS AGREE” (cited by Plantinga 2007, 115.) This proposed use of imagination to identify what is possible is not more plausible than to claim that by imagining a newspaper headline “TALIAFERRO AND EVANS CREATE A SQUARE CIRCLE IN TWO-DIMENSIONAL SPACE,” we have given anyone reason for thinking it is possible for there to be a closed two-dimensional figure that has four right angles and does not have four right angles at the same time. As for van Inwagen’s specific examples of transparent iron and purple cows, we believe that one plausible exercise of the modal principle is to provide evidence that the current laws of nature are contingent; there are many different ways that the natural world might be constituted. We suggest that David Lewis was right when he claimed: [T]hings might have been different, in ever so many ways . . . I might not have existed at all — neither I myself, nor any counterpart of me. Or there might never have been any people. Or the physical constants might have had somewhat different values, incompatible with the emergence of life. Or there might have been altogether different laws of nature; and instead of electrons and quarks, there might have been alien particles, without charge or mass or spin but with alien physical properties that nothing in this world shares. There are ever so many ways that a world might be; and one of these many ways is the way that this world is. (Lewis, 1986, 1–2)

Given Lewis’s outlook, in this world, with our current laws of nature, perhaps iron and cows cannot be transparent and purple (respectively), but by using the modal principle we have reason to believe it is possible for those laws to be different. Perhaps there can be people who have super-vision for whom iron would be transparent (presumably an object is transparent if persons can see through it with clarity) and perhaps cows might be in worlds where people’s retinal equipment are such that in ordinary conditions (sunlight as opposed to artificial light) cows are purple (presumably an object is purple if persons see it as purple in recognizably ordinary conditions). Before moving to the second objection to images and imagination, note some ways in which the modal principle is used in philosophy. An argument for mind–body dualism going back to Descartes has to do with the plausibility of the mind existing without the body (see Taliaferro 1994). The very use of the example and counter-example method in philosophy rests on some modal principle. So, when arguing about utilitarianism, for example, one commonplace argument is that if utilitarianism were true, then some 27

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state of affairs which we imagine and see to be morally repugnant, would be morally obligatory. So, for example, someone might be drawn to a form of utilitarianism in which morally right actions are determined solely in terms of which act maximizes pleasure. Arguably, however, one can imagine states of affairs in which what seems like a morally reprehensible act (the torture of an innocent person) would be justified if utilitarianism were true. An exercise of imagination provides reasons for either rejecting or modifying utilitarianism and other moral theories.

IMAGINATION AND MAKING KNOWLEDGE EXPLICIT The use of imagination in determining possibilities may work, in part, because it makes explicit something that we know implicitly or we are committed to believing, given the other things we know. Raymond Tallis, in The Explicit Animal, calls our power of what he calls explicitness underivable: “. . . explicitness is the essence of human consciousness . . . Once the nature of man as the explicit animal is grasped and explicitness is understood as the essence of consciousness, it becomes much more difficult to overlook the all-encompassing nature of consciousness, to eliminate, marginalize or underplay its role in behavior . . .” (Tallis 1991, 208). The reason why some thought experiments are successful is because, for example, we have some awareness of the mind as distinct from the body or we have some idea of goodness that is independent of utilitarianism. Thought experiments involving choices under magical conditions (what would you do if you had a ring that would make you invisible?) or ordinary conditions (would you cheat during a test to achieve personal wealth if you were confident about not being detected?) can bring to light one’s actual values. By exercising his imagination, John Stuart Mill discovered that his current life goals were insufficient. In the chapter “A Crisis in My Mental History, One Stage Onward” in his autobiography, Mill records this thought experiment: It occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for. (Mill 1969, 81)

Mill used his imagination as a tool to discern his own values and their fragile foundation for enduring happiness. 28

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IMAGINATION IN ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY Imagination plays a vital role (as Hume realized) in being able to picture the world from the point of view of other persons. The Golden Rule and the basic complaint “How would you like it if someone did that to you?” requires imagination. Philosophers like Martha Nussbaum, who have underscored the ways in which literature can expand one’s moral imagination, appreciate this point. The philosopher R. G. Collingwood in The Idea of History argued that a pivotal component of historical inquiry involves imaginatively representing the world from the point of view of different historical agents. In philosophy, this skill is clearly needed when it comes to evaluating worldviews. In a fair debate, a theistic philosopher should be able to understand and assess arguments from the standpoint of a naturalist philosopher and vice versa. An interesting case of a possible failure of imagination emerges in Bernard Williams’ critique of the concept of two persons switching bodies. Suppose a magician is hired to perform the old trick of making the emperor and the peasant become each other. He gets the emperor and the peasant in one room, with the emperor on his throne and the peasant in the corner, and then casts the spell. What will count as success? Clearly not that after the smoke has cleared the old emperor should be in the corner and the old peasant on the throne. That would be a rather boring trick. The requirement is presumably that the emperor’s body, with the peasant’s personality, should be on the throne, and the peasant’s body with the emperor’s personality, in the corner. What does this mean? In particular, what has happened to the voices? The voice presumably ought to count as a bodily function; yet how would the peasant’s gruff blasphemies be uttered in the emperor’s cultivated tones, or the emperor’s witticisms in the peasant’s growl? A similar point holds for the features; the emperor’s body might include the sort of face that just could not express the peasant’s morose suspiciousness, the peasant’s a face no expression of which could be taken for one of fastidious arrogance. These “could”s are not just empirical — such expressions on these features might be unthinkable. (Williams 1973, 11–12)

Williams may be correct that it is metaphysically impossible for persons to switch bodies, but is it really necessarily the case that those who are peasants are morosely suspicious and blasphemous and that emperors are essentially cultivated and given to fastidious arrogance? Presumably the foundation of many political rebellions has been the realization that hereditary monarchs and other rulers might have been peasants and vice versa. The imagination can help in royals considering what life would be like for non-royals and vice versa. Lest we give the impression that images and imagination are always emancipatory, imaginative portraits can also suffocate and distort. Some art can, as Margaret Iversen observes, be deeply problematic. “Art is no longer regarded as part of the solution but as part of the problem, laden as it is with 29

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all the ideological baggage of history, be it bourgeois, racist or patriarchal” (Iversen 1986, 84). Iversen commends a critique of art: “The new critical procedure . . . involves a . . . critique of visual imagery, from painting to pop videos . . . [in order to] lay bare the contradictions and prejudices beneath the smooth surface of the beautiful” (Iverson 1986, 84). We would only add that this critique itself inevitably involves images and imagination, the power to re-imagine social class, ethnicity, gender inequality, and so on.

IMAGINATION, COGNITION AND EVIDENCE Imagination functions as a vital cognitive power, enabling us to fill our worldviews, or understandings of nature, that can be assessed evidentially. Stephen Pepper was on the right track when he proposed that a great deal of our philosophical reflections on the nature of reality may be seen in terms of competing images, though his preferred term was root metaphors. In World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence, Pepper entertained four massive images by which to think about reality: Formism, Mechanism, Contextualism, and Organicism. Pepper has shown some of the ways in which each may or may not be seen to have evidential justification. Some philosophers have resisted the role of controlling images or metaphors. Jerry Fodor claims, “when you actually start to do science, the metaphors drop out and the statistics take over” (Fodor 1996, 20). But as Michael Ruse points out in his excellent book, Science and Spirituality, such statistics are best viewed as taking place in light of some overall root metaphor or image, typically today the image of nature as a machine (Ruse 2010). Jane Goodall explicitly invokes the important role of the imagination in assessing Darwin’s work. She takes the following important passage from The Descent of Man: We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system — with all these exalted powers — Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. (Quoted in Goodall 2009, 185)

Goodall comments: “Such a bipolar view of the species is radically destabilizing in ways that cannot be fully addressed through discursive exposition. Imaging is called for, but an order of imaging that widens the bounds of illustration or impersonation to provide the scope for metaphysical themes” (our emphasis, Goodall 2009, 185). Goodall aptly points out the important role that pictures played in the response (positive or negative) to Darwin’s work:

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If nature abhors a vacuum, the human imagination is similarly intolerant of absences and missing elements . . . People quite simply wanted to see [the missing link in Darwinian evolution], to fix in the mind’s eye a picture of the long-vanished being that somehow held the secret of their own nature. (Goodall 2009, 172)

As one further example of how imagination can bring to light evidence, consider how J. S. Mill managed to come out of the despair of his youth (referenced earlier). He recovered, in part, through the poetry of William Wordsworth who brought to light through his contemplative imagination new values. Mill writes: What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence. (Mill 1969, 89)

Through imagination, Mill discovered values or new sources of happiness.

SNEAKY SNAKES AND INNOCENT LAMBS In ending this chapter, it will be helpful to consider that the proposed use of imagination in testing theism and naturalism is one of enlargement of perspective (as Goodall recommends) rather than substitution. In earlymodern European philosophy, two images of nature were prominent. On one account, the cosmos is the work of an intentional, purposive, all-good being, much like a book. On the other account, the cosmos is the outcome of factors that are mindless, non-intentional, and non-purposive, factors that had no pre-vision of the end to be brought about. In An Antidote against Atheism, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More offered the following juxtaposition of these two images. In the passage that follows he casts the case for theism as worthy of assent but not incorrigible and coercive. For I conceive that we may give full assent to that which notwithstanding may possibly be otherwise: which I shall illustrate by several examples. Suppose two men got to the top of Mount Athos, and there viewing a stone in the form of an altar with ashes on it, and the footsteps of men on these ashes, or some words, if you will, as Optimo Maximo . . . or the like, written or scrawled out on the ashes; and one of them should cry out, Assuredly there

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have been some men here that have done this: but the other more nice than wise should reply, Nay, it may possibly be otherwise; for this stone may have naturally grown into this very shape and the seeming ashes may be no ashes, that is no remainders of any fuel burnt there, but some inexplicable and imperceptive motions of the air, or some other particles of the matter into the form and nature of ashes, and have fridg’d and played about so, that they have also figured those intelligible characters in the same. But would not any body deem it a piece of weakness no less than dotage for the other man one wit to recede from his former apprehension, but as fully as ever to agree with what he pronounced first, notwithstanding this bare possibility of being otherwise? (More 1653, 10–11)

More invites us to envisage the same thing (ashes on a stone) which one person reads as a deliberately written phrase and the other discounts as a mindless, unintended pattern. The imagination of each of these men on the mountain fills out or extends what each one believes to be the significance and cause of what they observe. This is not a case of free association or substitution. In contrast, Emily Brady offers a view of imagination that seems to involve substitution or free association. In “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” Brady writes: Whilst perception does much of the work in simply grasping the object and cordoning it off in our perceptual field, it is imagination that reaches beyond this in a free contemplation of the object. In this way exploratory imagination helps the percipient to make an initial discovery of aesthetic qualities. For example, in contemplating the bark of a locust tree, visually, I see the deep clefts between the thick ridges of the bark. Images of mountains and valleys come to mind, and I think of the age of the tree given the thickness of the ridges and how they are spaced apart. I walk around the tree, feeling the wide circumference of the bark. The image of a seasoned old man comes to mind, with deep wrinkles from age. The imaginings lead to an aesthetic judgment of the tree as stalwart, and I respect it as I might a wise old sage. (Brady 2003, 143)

This exercise of moving from the bark of a tree to a “seasoned old man” can be an element in a great folktale, myth, or fantasy (think of J. R. R. Tolkein’s Ents, the giant but lonely tree people in The Lord of the Rings). But this is not the use of imagination to enhance our grasp of whether the cosmos (or a tree or all forests) are purposive or non-purposive realities. Trees are not stalwart; though their typically vertical disposition in the world might be used to symbolize a human value. But this is not an aesthetic quality of the bark. The aesthetic qualities of the bark inform us of “deep clefts,” “thick ridges,” and these become sensible features that, if attended to, are part of our ongoing education in scale and tactility. It might be that this attending to aesthetic features or qualities is necessary to recognize our capacity for others and developing the capacity for empathy, such sensitivity being a quality of a moral being. 32

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Brady also commends using imaginative personal identifications in and with the natural world, which also seems wide of the mark in relation to imagination as a tool of inquiry à la Henry More or Jane Goodall. Brady writes: Sometimes we take the further imaginative leap of projecting ourselves into natural objects. For example, to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of an alpine flower, I might somatically imagine what it is like to live and grow under such harsh conditions. Without imagining such conditions I may be unable to appreciate the remarkable strength hidden so beautifully in the delicate quality of the flower. [This example shows] how imagination provides a more intimate aesthetic experience, and thus allows us to explore aesthetic qualities more deeply than through perception alone. (Brady 2003, 143)

Again, this seems more in accord with what Coleridge calls fancy than imagination. This is not to say that Brady hasn’t identified a meaningful, useful practice. Dante pictured those who commit suicide as trees in the Inferno (Canto 13), and there is the well-known haunting myth of Philemon and Baucis turning into a pair of intertwining trees (and many other Greek myths of persons transformed into trees, vines, and so on). But this is not the imagination employed by More et al. The distance between More and Brady is highlighted in the following passage in what Brady claims is a revelatory use of imagination: I want to distinguish an aesthetic truth from a non-aesthetic truth according to the manner in which it becomes known. We do not seek out aesthetic truths in the way we seek out the answers to philosophical or scientific problems. Rather, aesthetic truths are revealed through a heightened aesthetic experience, where perceptual and imaginative engagement with nature facilitate the kind of close attention that leads to revelation. A quick glance at a lamb reveals little except an acknowledgement of its sweetness. But the fuller participation of perception and imagination can lead to a truth about innocence. Contemplating the fresh whiteness of a lamb and its small, fragile stature evokes images of purity and naiveté. It is through dwelling aesthetically and imaginatively on such natural things that we achieve new insight. (Brady 2003, 144)

How is this different than assigning evil to a snake? Brady’s glance at the lamb reveals a great deal of projection, not aesthetic contemplation. It seems she is reversing an order, starting with a culturally specific symbol of lamb as white and innocent to get to purity and naiveté. Brady usefully notes how aesthetic contemplation of an object can lead one to contemplating greater contexts. She cites Andrew Wyeth contemplating a shell:

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A white mussel shell on a gravel bank in Maine is thrilling to me because it’s all the sea – the gull that brought it there, the rain, the sun that bleached it there by a stand of spruce woods. (Wyeth cited by Brady 2003, 144)

Brady rightly thinks that this is an imaginative enrichment of perception, but then in her analysis of similar aesthetic experiences we believe she misdescribes the boundaries of naturalistic experience. The close connection between perception and imagination in aesthetic response provides some help in distinguishing appropriate from inappropriate imaginings. Wyeth’s response to the seashell involves an imaginative aspect which is guided by attention to perceptual qualities and the recognition that the object comes from the sea. But problems arise if we depend solely on the connection between imagination and perception, because some imaginings can be so tentatively tied to perceptual qualities as to become inappropriate because they are irrelevant. For example, when coming upon Beachy Head, a high cliff on the south coast of England, one is awestruck by the dramatic, sheer drop to the sea, and this feeling is heightened by the knowledge that this is a favorite suicide spot. Imagining the feeling of jumping off the cliff and the fear of someone standing at the top of it accentuates the sublimity of the place. But this train of images would become irrelevant to aesthetic appreciation of the cliff if one then imagined several possibilities, such as financial difficulties, which might serve as a motive for suicide. (Brady 2003, 145)

Contemplation of the danger of natural events may well enhance a sense of the sublime, though we are not inclined to believe that imagining people committing suicide by jumping off a cliff enhances sublimity. Knowing such acts have occurred means you are informed about what is possible given the topography of Beachy Head. But once you step off of the cliff, you are no longer in the realm of the sublime, but in the realm of tragedy. We end this chapter with a passage in which imagination informs the experiences and valuation of the world. Mark Wynn, in Faith and Place, offers an aesthetic reading of a place whose significance was cast in equal parts to sharing repeated visits with a friend, and the specific aesthetic features of the place. Wynn’s account is a record of phenomenal experience, but one that has enduring meaning, and he argues that such enduring meaning is built in part through aesthetic encounters with place. Wynn describes his frequent trips with his friend Edmund to Port Meadow, a large commons on the outskirts of the city, while a student at Oxford University in the 1980s: [W]e’d push off, always at Edmund’s bidding, and swoop down towards the meadow. We’d feel the air rushing past our faces and hear the clang of the sprung gate closing behind us — all the senses partook in this sense of being released from the world we were leaving behind — a world which was even for a student in Oxford in the 1980s, one of responsibilities, of appointments to be kept, and particular paths to be followed, to navigate the traffic of ordinary living — whereas the meadow was all open expansiveness, flat and at

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times flooded, + even frozen over, so that its surface would collect + throw back the light of the sky. In its way it was a place of transfiguration — where even the motes suspended in the evening air, stirred up by the passage of our bikes across the dusty tracks of the meadow, would be caught + irradiated so revealing their true nature, and giving them the appearance of their own kind of life + their own kind of glory. And we would look back at the city + see its spires irradiated in the same light — and, often without articulation, we would set the business and congestion of our lives there against the open airiness of the meadow, and feel our ordinary concerns transfigured — a kind of disengagement in the name of a deeper, more compassionate re-engagement with the objects of those concerns. (Wynn 2009, 20)

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CHAPTER 2

The Aesthetics of Inquiry For the particular merit of images lies in the fact that they enable us to gain a total or overall impression of certain presentations and occurrences in such a way that the contribution of each to the total impression is not explicitly noticed, and in this way we can also retain an over-all impression of the character of certain occurrences when the memory of them individually has passed into oblivion. This does not preclude the control of images and the vetting of them on the basis of experience. But it does mean that such work requires to be skillfully and patiently carried out by remaining sensitive to the inherent dynamic of the image and sufficiently conversant in a general way with the facts out of which it arises to be informed by the images and not misled. Sanity and wisdom in living turns much on the skill we exercise here and the ease with which it comes to us by custom. We need to be imaginatively at home in the real world. H. D. Lewis Our Experience of God 1959, 139

The stars are fiery intelligences, burning to the glory of God. Creatures of the earth are in a vast hierarchy, with angels and God above humans, and below us are animals, plants and earth, which are all good in themselves but they are not to be worshiped. This view of the stars and more was part of the medieval image of nature, according to C. S. Lewis in his brilliant study in the history of thought and learning, The Discarded Image. This was also the image or model (Lewis uses the terms interchangeably) that came to be displaced by our image of nature that is deeply informed by modern science. Lewis’s book is as good a contribution to history as it is to the study of the way images can organize our projects — practical, intellectual, personal, moral, political, religious. Lewis takes note of how our images of nature and ourselves play a key role in how we recognize and organize evidence. He also hints at the ways in which the evidence for an image or model is not a matter of pure, disinterested intellectual inquiry. We must recognize that what has been called “a taste in universes” is not only pardonable but inevitable. We can no longer dismiss the change of Models as a simple progress from error to truth. No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each

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succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age’s knowledge. Hardly any battery of new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute as repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical. (Lewis 1964, 222)

Lewis introduces our subjective experience of attraction, repulsion, and the psychological into the construction of models of reality. In so doing, he brings the aesthetic realm to the fore. In this chapter we look at what we are calling the aesthetics of inquiry. It may well appear that some forms of inquiry, especially in science, are quite impervious to aesthetic considerations, but we suggest otherwise. We begin with observations about aesthetics and how we propose to use the term in our own inquiry in this book. We then, beginning with Darwin, highlight the ways in which the aesthetic functions in scientific inquiry into the natural world. This will then lead into an account of the aesthetics behind what it’s like to be a naturalist and what it’s like to be a theist. This chapter also investigates the aesthetics of the theistic and naturalistic images of nature.

AESTHETICS TODAY AND THE LONGING FOR UNITY “Aesthetics” was first introduced into philosophical parlance by Alexander Baumgarten to stand for sensory cognition or knowledge through the senses, a use that he then refined to the sensory perception of the beautiful, especially beautiful works of art. Kant then broadened the term to cover the perception of beauty in nature as well as art. Today, the term extends beyond matters of beauty. There is currently no firm consensus on its use, but we believe that the most common position is that aesthetics refers to the affective or emotive features of objects and events, especially evaluative features such as beauty and ugliness. In his famous 1959 essay, Frank Sibley lists the following as aesthetic properties: unified, balanced, integrated, lifeless, ingenious, serene, somber, dynamic, powerful, vivid, delicate, moving, graceful, elegant, and so on. Each of these has a certain emotive, positive or negative quality. How things look, feel, and sound affect you; these are the affective qualities of persons, things, events, and ideas that make up and define the values you recognize. These qualities can be obvious or subtle. Our interactions with the world bring dramatic confrontations as well as experiences that can be known only through bringing ourselves to fully attending to someone or something. In the twentieth century, Iris Murdoch made the case that this attending to something outside yourself, this “unselfing,” is occasioned most obviously by an encounter with beauty, as she recalled in observing a hovering kestrel while looking out of her window. She experienced a change of consciousness in that moment; she was brought out of her “brooding” self to awareness of 38

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nothing but the kestrel (Murdoch, 1971, 82; see also, Marije Altorf’s Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imaging). Affective, aesthetic experiences of qualities do not disappear in our practice of science; they inform the scientific enterprise and are in turn used by scientists to make judgments. Such a broad definition of aesthetics is in keeping with philosophers of aesthetics as diverse as John Dewey, Monroe Beardsley, Colin Lyas, and Gary Iseminger. We are aware that such a definition is so broad that almost all experience turns out to be aesthetic. (In Freedom and Neurobiology, John Searle suggests — without elaboration — that such a conclusion would not be unwelcome: “I think there is an aesthetic dimension to all conscious experiences” [Searle 2007, 14].) On a broad account, the collapse of a bridge, the look of a small restaurant, and a prancing Sheltie would turn out to be horrifying, inviting, and delightful, and thus have aesthetic dimensions. Aesthetic experience is often more complex and even contradictory than our set of examples might imply. A collapsing bridge is horrifying to witness; but there is a certain beauty in the aftermath. The physical re-ordering of materials creates new three-dimensional compositions, whose scale and intricacies invite inspection of massive disorder and incredulous juxtapositions. This kind of aesthetic experience is just one example of why the aesthetic is as alive as we are. If all experience is aesthetic, and we think it is, then the aesthetic is too entangled to be accounted for in the classical beauty/ugly distinction. We think this is fitting. Perhaps only severely impaired persons who lack emotions would inhabit a world without aesthetic features. In science as in art, one highly valued aesthetic feature is a cognitive, affective completeness or unity. That we value unity or wholeness is exemplified in the centuries of recorded human consciousness that acknowledges an awareness of incompleteness and lack of wholeness, whether it is Percy Blythe Shelly’s longing for something more: “desire of the moth for the star,” or Wittgenstein’s promise that his philosophical treatise would “let the fly out of the bottle.” In Shelly’s image, passages of space and incommensurate scales are joined, and in Wittgenstein’s image, a persistent buzzing alarm of misplacement is quieted in a gesture of freedom.

ANTICIPATION OF WHOLENESS Imagination is what makes planning for the future possible. When we plan, we anticipate. Anticipation is bound up with longing, and moves the scientist as much as the artist. This kind of anticipation is positive by nature and it precipitates inquiry in science and art, inquiry that seeks to uncover, make clear, or discover something new. William James proclaims:

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Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain? . . . Take science itself! Without an imperious inner demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we should never have attained to proving that such harmonies lie hidden between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world. Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need. (James 1956, 55)

Whether or not we will discover it, create it, and most of us have only known it in fleeting moments, we long for unity and wholeness. Why is this quality longed for? We suggest that it comes in part from our most basic experiences in the aesthetic quality of fittingness. The tactile experience of our skin against jagged rock or a grassy lawn is part of our education in physical habitation. We place ourselves on the rock in a different way than we collapse on the lawn. We have vast experiences of this kind, beginning in our earliest years of childhood, where we instinctively act to access and develop knowledge of the boundaries and the limits of our bodies. These instructive acts eventually grow into self-conscious awareness of the material world. It is the continuous testing of the material world and a growing awareness of its constancy that ushers in the self-conscious exercise of imagination, the imaginable. We are more intimate with the world than we are conscious of, and we think this intimacy may lay the groundwork for the longing for wholeness, for we do not long for things we do not already know in some way. (For a beautiful, nuanced articulation of this quasi-Platonic thesis, see Ralph Harper’s The Sleeping Beauty and Other Essays.) Some might argue that “the tactile experience” is just part of survival tactics, and our longing for intimacy evolved along with our nervous system. Surely, as biological beings, we do depend on tactility for well-being in a world that requires constant physical negotiation. But this intimacy with the material world does more than help us survive; it lays the foundation for empathy and feeling, and feeling (empathy) is the precursor to the ability to measure what is of value. We all use this, no matter our philosophical stance, artistic agenda, or religious beliefs, to judge what “feels” right to us. While rational argument might persuade us to reconsider a judgment of value, we are often led and informed by our affective responses. Examples from the arts on the aesthetic nature of the anticipation of wholeness abound. In John Constable’s great late paintings of the East Anglian countryside, he uses white slashes of paint across the surface of the painting — in tension with the marshy and dark recesses of his landscape forms, and the architectural structures of bridges and houses. The white marks surround a form, as well as skip over it. It is a kind of whipping around motion looking for a place to light. It is a mind that wants to apprehend all at once what it is ricocheting off. The whites call you to the form, but then you are relayed to another white, fine agitated webbing. It is mind longing for a final form, but there is finally no resolution. It is the impermanence of the 40

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material world that gives Constable’s paintings their poignancy. Material (the painted image) is changed into, transformed into ideas of the immaterial and the longed for (slipping back and forth). Anticipation of wholeness has an entirely different quality in the writing of Rainer Maria Rilke. His writing often advances slowly and evenly, and then takes a leap. We have been following the mind of a sweeper, and then suddenly we are up in the air or propelled into some new space. Rilke’s language hovers close to the base of things as he claims his soul does in his poems about his spirituality, its habitation of roots and darkness. In Letters on Cézanne he writes: But last night I was awakened by the presence of moonlight in a corner above my rows of books; a spot that did not shine but covered a place on the wall like a patch of aluminum. And the room was full of cold night all the way into the corners; one could tell, lying in bed, that it was also under the wardrobe, under the chest of drawers and around objects without any space in between, all around the brass chandeliers, which looked very cold. But the morning was bright. (Rilke 2002, 54)

Rilke continues by moving from the space of the bed and the cold he senses everywhere (cold separates objects) out into the city itself and its buildings (“Straight-edged quarry like surfaces”) to the avenue (“fast and rich like a river”) which “casts forth space.” Then there is a profusion of fecundity “from the roofs there and there, the flags hold themselves ever more high up into the air, stretching, flapping, as if to take flight; there and there.” The ecstatic vision cannot last in this world, and Rilke brings us back to the here and now with his next sentence: “That’s what my walk to the Rodin drawings was like today.” Later in Letters he argues for a particular kind of impartiality he senses in Cézanne when he insists that there is a moral imperative to go back each time to one’s task, open and ready, to see as much as one can without “prejudice” and “predilections” (Rilke 2002, 65). “One has to be able at every moment to place one’s hand on the earth like the first human being” (Rilke 2002, 65). Given the impossibility of that image, it is still possible to see that remaining open and ready, in a posture of anticipation, is Rilke’s answer to the anticipation he experiences for any kind of insight. There is no shortcut. Each time you set out it must be as if for the first time, and laying the groundwork of your own observations, you may see something, or something may be shown to you. This sounds very much like the stance that experimental science takes to evaluating the worth and value of new research: how original is it? Will it show us something new? In much contemporary art, there is renewed interest in the fragmentary, collage, and assemblage; perhaps motivated by a deep skepticism about any cohesive narrative or picture of experience. Recycled or cheap materials are used to put things together that do not look like they should go together. 41

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Artists working in this vein are not interested in art revealing any order in our experience. Rather they are pointing to the non-sense of experience, and the failure of our attempts to come up with models or images that do not privelege the senseless, random, and absurd aspects of life. The New Museum in New York opened its new building in 2007 with a show titled “Unmonumental,” filling the galleries with un-artful art. The intentional making of unintentional-looking art isn’t new. But in its current manifestation much of this art rebuffs the attempt for contemplation and the dialogue that can develop between the viewer and the artwork; which one could argue is where art exists. The recognition of the fragmentary, the discarded, the dispossessed, depends on some coherent context of “the whole” which functions as a backdrop or arena in which to display such fragmentation. While hope for cohesion may not always be in abundant evidence, the idea persists. For what else could Robert Rauschenberg have meant, in 1953, when he took a drawing made by the already famous artist Willem de Kooning, erased it, then framed it and displayed it as his own work of art called: Erased de Kooning Drawing?

THE STATUS OF PICTORIAL AND THEORETICAL IMAGES IN SCIENCE: SOME PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS In early natural history, recording (through drawing) what the eye could observe, helped to order the natural world, and simultaneously created its own problems. An example of the enthusiasm for collecting specimens and recording their details can be found in the extraordinary fieldwork and art of the Academy of Linceans, founded by Frederico Cesi in 1603 (see David Freedberg’s The Eye of the Lynx). This group encouraged and supported Galileo and his work, in a time when poetry’s language and forms were often employed to articulate empirical research. The vast numbers of specimens they collected outside their doors in the Umbrian countryside of Italy, coupled with what was brought back from the New World, begged for order and classification. Much of what they observed could not be found in the old classical texts, or was at odds with what they found in the old texts. The advent of widespread publishing and distribution of illustrations, and the invention of the microscope, altered the value of these illustrations and greatly quickened scientific output. For as soon as they began to look under the surface of the animal or plant, through the new aid of the microscope, the differences found on the surface gave way to similarities in interior structures. What did not look related on the outside, looked related on the inside. How to proceed? How do you find relationships and orders if observation of one aspect of a thing (its exterior, for example) turns out to be only one aspect? How do you decide what aspect of things brings together a united whole? (For some, physics has this job now.) 42

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The use of images today in science is no less problematic or crucial. The many forces and events explored by physics are not visible to the eye or lens. Martin Kemp, in his book Seen/Unseen, brings us a more recent example of physicist David Bohm. Trained and published in quantum physics, Bohm was “increasingly dissatisfied with the intractable qualities of quantum mechanics as an account of ‘real’ events — classically expressed by Feynman’s statement that ‘nobody’ understands [i.e. can visualize] quantum mechanics’. Instead, he explored the idea that contemporary physics, for all its enormous power and efficacy, needed to look outside the parameters of its accepted technical and theoretical concerns to posit the unifying principles of order that underlie the mysteries of the quantum universe” (Kemp 2006, 230–231). Bohm arrives at the use of analogy to answer how these two self-contradictory images of particles and waves might be unified, through the analogies of the hologram and the “unfolded dots.” Kemp goes on to write: “To accept that there is an implicate order is in the final analysis an act of faith or intuition. Such acts of faith have always been part of the age-old impulse to arrive at models of observed phenomena, and I believe they always will be. At least we can now confirm, through new aspects of the mathematics of complexity, above all chaos theory, Bohm’s necessary contention is that there may be crucial levels of order that are wholly inaccessible to what had previously been accepted as the proper means available to us” (Kemp 2006, 233). These examples from science and the arts demonstrate that in the pursuit to bring the urge for wholeness to fruition, wholeness is achieved by images. Whether or not we are convinced by the image lies in how we believe the image is constructed.

AESTHETICS AND DARWIN While Darwin explicitly repudiated the appropriateness of an affective dimension in the pursuit of scientific truth (he compared himself to a machine “grinding general laws out of large collections of facts” and claimed that “a scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections — a mere heart of stone”), he was nonetheless drawn to what may be called an aesthetic of scientific facts. In preparing what was to become the Origin, he wrote, “I am like Croesus overwhelmed with my riches in facts and I mean to make my book as perfect as ever I can” (Darwin 2005, 206). An aesthetic dimension appears in his striving for the ideal of creating a nearly perfect book, albeit one produced by an elegant machine with a heart of stone. This is a powerful image Darwin employs to picture his mind, a machine that grinds. It radically affects any subsequent feeling about what the mind is doing as the reader advances through his prose. In addition, Darwin’s many drawings and his “tree of life” may be seen as guiding aesthetic images. Howard Gruber supports such a reading of Darwin’s work: 43

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It may be argued . . . that Darwin’s diagrams are only conceptual tools for theoretical thought and have no aesthetic significance. Then why the evident pleasure in the actual drawings, the constant search for the right metaphor, the emotional excitement conveyed by his punctuation and frequent resort to a high-flown style? There is exactly that combination of feeling with concern for form and content that we have in mind when we speak of an aesthetic act. As well say that anamorphoses are not art, or that Dürer’s use of instruments or Leonardo’s studies of human anatomy have no aesthetic significance. Only if we presuppose a divorce between art and scientific thought would we be tempted to turn a blind eye to the aesthetic side of Darwin’s imagery. (Gruber 1978, 249)

Darwin was moved by Charles Lyell’s arguments on intellectual grounds but, arguably, also by their aesthetic tone. He wrote: “for I have always thought that the great merit of the Principles, was that it altered the whole tone of one’s mind and therefore that when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it particularly through his eyes” (Darwin 1988, 55). Nowhere do we have reason to think that Darwin developed his account of evolution or commended it only because it was beautiful or aesthetically fitting. Nonetheless, aesthetic considerations are not far from the surface in much of his work. Consider, for example, the famous last paragraph in the Origin: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (Darwin 1870, 425)

Darwin’s invocation of beauty and grandeur, his case for the awesome interconnected yet wholeness of the natural world, has an explicit aesthetic dimension. “[N]atural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and whatever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being” (Darwin 1870, 80). 44

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Moreover, Darwin’s case against the chief rival theory of the origin of species (separate, divine acts of creation) is also explicitly aesthetic. As he wrote in a 1856 letter to British botanist Joseph Hooker: “What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature!” (Darwin 1903, 94). Elsewhere Darwin wrote: “We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing around us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey” (Darwin 1870, 62). Even today, some of Darwin’s key popularizing advocates (as we shall observe below) explicitly invoke aesthetics in their case for naturalism. Darwin’s work may also be seen as employing the imagination in the way we sketched in the first chapter as enhancing our grasp of what we perceive. Peter Dear maintains: The theory of natural selection, despite all the circumstantial (and fully admissible) evidence that Darwin brought forward in its support, was fundamentally a thoughtexperiment. Again and again in Origin, Darwin invites his reader to imagine how natural selection might have brought about the organs or behaviors that are observed in nature — the mere possibility that it might have done so is what he needs in order to counteract the assumptions of natural theology, such as William Paley’s argument that the eye gave unquestionable evidence of an intelligent Creator. (Dear 2006, 99–100; our emphasis)

Dear offers the following helpful overview of the way that Darwin weaves together our powers of imagination and reason: Darwin’s attempts to persuade, however, use reason to explore ideas that have first been conjured up by the imagination. He uses infinitely large numbers — numbers that are allowed to be as large as you like — to do just that. Vast lengths of time, and vast numbers of individual organisms — so vast, indeed, as to beggar the very imagination that Darwin tries to downplay — lend a kind of sublimity to his vision of the history of life; he uses imagination in such a way as to transcend it. The role of reason is really to enable a leap from ordinary imagination to the literally unimaginable. (Dear 2006, 100)

Darwin may have tired of Shakespeare late in life (in his autobiography he notes that he found the Bard’s work nauseating and intolerably dull), but he did not thereby cease to ambitiously employ in his biology the kind of imagination that informs great literary work.

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AESTHETICS AND SCIENCE In recent years, there has been renewed attention to the relationship of science and art, and the study of aesthetic dimensions in scientific inquiry. The link between art and science has been recognized insofar as the criteria for accepting scientific theories may be cast in aesthetic terms. Aesthetic dimensions may differ across disciplines: in mathematically oriented theoretical physics, for example, the stress may lie on elegance, unity, economy, symmetry, consistency, balance, harmony, and order (Mainzer 1995; Sarkar 1996); while biology may employ the criteria of diversity, complexity, organicism, and differentiation (Flannery 1992a, 1992b; Gilbert and Faber 1996). As Elgin argues, “Aesthetic devices are integral to science” (Elgin 2002, 24). There have been a considerable number of scientists and philosophers who have seen beauty itself as a driving force in scientific inquiry. To cite just a few examples: Francois Jacob writes that James D. Watson and Francis Crick’s DNA model “was of such simplicity, such perfection, such harmony, such beauty even, and biological advantages flowed from it with such rigor and clarity, that one could not believe it untrue” (Jacob 1988, 271). On the same model, Watson observes, “like everyone else, [Rosalind Franklin] saw the appeal of the base pairs and accepted the fact that the structure was too pretty not to be true” (Watson 1968, 210). Writing on Einstein’s theory of relativity, Paul Dirac suggests: “it is the essential beauty of the theory which I feel is the real reason for us believing it” (Dirac 1980, 10). In The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene writes: “In physics, as in art, symmetry is a key part of aesthetics” (Greene 1999, 167). Finally, consider J. B. S. Haldane’s observation: “In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion is the word ‘simplest.’ It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting” (cited in McAllister 1996, 105). For further documentation of scientists who have prized beauty in their theorizing and research, see the quotes from Einstein, Henri Poincare, Warner Heisenberg, Hermann Weyl, and others in Truth and Beauty by Chandrasekhar (see also Anthony Zee’s Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics). Beauty may or may not be a mark of truth in scientific inquiry, but it is well documented that beauty and aesthetic considerations in general have (as a matter of fact) impacted scientific work, and that many elements (imagination and creativity) that enter into artistic practice have their analogue in scientific investigations. Aesthetic gestalt qualities have their role in the construction and assessment of scientific theories: unified, coherent, balanced, complete, tightly knit, simple, disorganized (Hermerén 1988). In “Visualization lost and regained,” Arthur Miller summarizes his assessment of some salient twentieth-century science:

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The importance for creative thinking of the domain where art and science merge has been emphasized by the great philosopher-scientists of the twentieth century — Bohr, Einstein, and Poincare. For in their research the boundaries between disciplines are often dissolved and they proceed neither deductively through logic nor inductively through the exclusive use of empirical data, but by visual thinking and aesthetics. (Miller 1978, 96)

In his highly acclaimed work Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science, Martin Kemp charts different ways in which a comparison of the motifs of art and science generate insights into both. In his inaugural column for the journal Nature, Kemp stated that his main interest is to examine “shared motifs in the imaginative worlds of artist and scientists.” In Visualizations, Kemp writes: “Science and art share so many ways of proceeding: observation, structured speculation, visualization, exploitation of analogy and metaphor, experimental testing, and the presentation of a remade experience in particular styles. In these shared features, the visual very often has a central role” (Kemp 2001, 4). Kemp demonstrates this remarkable shared visual method in his study of Maria Sibylla Meriam, whose artwork on the metamorphosis of butterflies and moths in 1699 anticipates later studies of natural transformations. (For further support on the contribution of art to science, see Robert Valenza’s “Aesthetic priority in science and religion,” 2002.) In his very useful essay, “Recent Work on Aesthetics of Science,” that appeared in the journal International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, James McAllister writes: “I forecast that the role of emotions in scientific practice will become a leading theme in philosophy of science over the coming decade, influencing our understanding of the aesthetics of science” (McAllister 2002, 9). This exploration of aesthetic emotion in scientific practice parallels some of the best work in philosophy of religion today, to be noted below.

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A NATURALIST As stated in the introduction, there are strict and broad naturalists. Both privilege the physical sciences but the stricter naturalists tend to keep as close to physics and chemistry as possible, treating the mental, consciousness, and so on, with some suspicion. A strict naturalist like Willard van Orman Quine, for example, held that explanations of human behavior that involved reference to mental terms were deeply suspect, preferring instead the behaviorism of J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Strict naturalists have also been called puritanical or severe or scientific naturalists as opposed to naturalists who are liberal, “common sense,” open-minded, and so on. The following version of what Jerry Fodor calls “scientism,” begins to capture the spirit of most forms of naturalism: 47

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I hold to the philosophical view that, for want of a better term, I’ll call by one that is usually taken to be pejorative: Scientism. Scientism claims, on the one hand, that the goals of scientific inquiry include the discovery of objective empirical truths; and on the other hand, that science has come pretty close to achieving this goal at least from time to time. The molecular theory of gasses, I suppose, is a plausible example of achieving it in physics; so is the cell theory in biology; the theory, in geology, that the earth is very old; and the theory, in astronomy, that the stars are very far away . . . I’m inclined to think that Scientism, so construed, is not just true but obviously and certainly true; it’s something that nobody in the late twentieth century who has a claim to an adequate education and a minimum of common sense should doubt. (Fodor 2002, 30; original emphasis)

But what needs special emphasis is that the above “scientism” is compatible with the position that virtually all naturalists oppose: theism. In fact, it has been argued by Alfred North Whitehead and others that historically theism laid the foundation for modern science and its quest for objective, empirical truths, its subsequent discovery of molecular biology, and development of geography, geology, astrophysics, and the like (Whitehead 1997). What therefore needs to be added to Fodor’s statement is that scientific inquiry is the only reliable means of inquiry. One begins to get closer to a more robust naturalism if one adds the dictum Wilfred Sellars stated as: “[S]cience is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not” (Sellars 1963, 173). Or, minimally, one needs a codicil such as: appeals to theism or souls are scientifically inscrutable and thus not acceptable. We note here that being “scientifically inscrutable” can mean that the tools of science cannot investigate theism or souls. It might be like trying to use hammers and saws to investigate fragrances. Hammers, saws, and fragrances all exist, are not incompatible coexisting, but hammers and saws cannot inform us about fragrances. William James famously distinguished between personality types and the likely match-up between such types and philosophical positions. In this context, naturalists appear to be what James called “tough minded” rather than “tender minded” (James 1908, 12). The aesthetic tone of much work in naturalism seems to be both positive in its endorsement of science, while also being vigilant about falling into superstition, irrationality, or embracing what is scientifically inscrutable. Consider Daniel Dennett’s passionate endorsement of his version of naturalism (a form of Darwinian naturalism) in terms of what he loves and a cluster of other emotions with aesthetic dimensions (humility, awe, delight, a sense of glory) and his care not to embrace mystery or allow for what is (scientifically) incomprehensible or deviates from reason: We who love evolution do not honor those whose love of evolution prevents them from thinking clearly and rationally about it! . . . In our view, there is no safe haven for mystery or incomprehensibility. Yes, there is humility, and awe, and sheer delight, at the glory of

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the evolutionary landscape, but it is not accompanied by, or in the service of, a willing (let alone thrilling) abandonment of reason. So I feel a moral imperative to spread the word of evolution, but evolution is not my religion. I don’t have a religion. (Dennett 2006, 268)

So, to be a naturalist is a blend of positive and negative responses to science and ostensible nonscientific alternatives. Perhaps nowhere in popular books is it more apparent that theism is aesthetically repugnant to some naturalists than Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. In a recent, illuminating book review, Timothy Chappell comments on Dawkins’ view of God’s existence, and specifically the Christian conception of the atonement: Dawkins rejection of the atonement . . . is not just a disagreement about historical facts or doctrines. It is an aesthetic rejection of the atonement. Dawkins finds it a “nasty” doctrine: it is not the kind of beauty that he can live by. His rejection of it is a refusal, or a failure, to share the imaginative life of which that doctrine is a part, the deep and rich background of faith, reflection, historical narrative, and symbolism against which alone that doctrine can make sense. (Chappell 2009, 243)

An aesthetic element of revulsion is also apparent in the conflicts between broad and strict naturalists. The difference between strict and broad naturalists can be articulated in terms of images and the aesthetics attached to them. Strict naturalists begin with an image of nature in accord with contemporary natural science and then consider whether there is a place in that image for consciousness, the mental, intentions, beliefs, and so on. The aesthetic is one of streamlined rigor and recognizing the awesome prestige of modern science. Strict naturalists are not shy about opposing what may be considered a “common sense” approach to experience. Dennett and others, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland and Stephen Stich, contend that what passes for “common sense” should not be held to be reliable. So-called common sense is sometimes described derogatorily as “folk psychology.” Stich asks us why we should trust folk psychology when we have come to see the errors of other folk beliefs: Folk astronomy was false astronomy and not just in detail. The general conception of the cosmos embedded in the folk wisdom of the West was utterly and thoroughly mistaken. Much the same could be said for folk biology, folk chemistry, and folk physics. However wonderful and imaginative folk theorizing and speculation has been, it has turned out to be screamingly false in every domain where we now have a reasonably sophisticated science. Nor is there any reason to think that ancient camel drivers would have greater insight or better luck when the subject at hand was the structure of their own minds rather than the structure of matter or of the cosmos. (Stich 1983, 229–230)

This critique of folk psychology is matched by an interesting argument 49

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launched against theism by Adolf Grünbaum. He argues that theism is a very ancient belief that is evidentially ill supported. Most ancient evidentially ill-supported beliefs are now considered to be wrong. Therefore theism is probably wrong. Grünbaum aligns belief in theism to belief in the “evil eye” or primitive “mumbo-jumbo.” Those embracing older theories should be cautioned in light of the vast history of discredited older theories in science. Anyone who is still inclined to quarrel with Premise 1 (“All archaic, evidentially illsupported illusions are very probably false”) will find it sobering to bear in mind how very difficult even science finds it to come up with true theories. Indeed, the history of science — both ancient and modern — is largely the history of discarded theories. Hence even for scientific theories that are now well supported by evidence, it is a reasonable induction from the past that they, too, will be found wanting in due course . . . It emerges after all that, though the history of science is the history of abandoned theories, scientific advances redound to the credibility of Premise 1, instead of leaving it devoid of support. Therefore, we can permit that premise to stand. (Grünbaum 1987, 120–121)

The aesthetic ethos of such a position is that naturalism is cutting edge, deeply informed by our most reliable ways of knowing the world, and not prey to superstition or unwarranted convictions. Strict naturalism comes across as a bold philosophical project beacause of its radical alliance with contemporary science. Broad naturalists are more sanguine about folk psychology and the mental. Arguably Darwin himself was more of what we are calling a broad naturalist, rather than a strict one, insofar as he recognized minds, feelings, thoughts, and activities among human and nonhuman animals. Actually, for at least part of his life, even after shedding any profession of Christianity, Darwin thought he could well be labeled a theist because he acknowledged an intelligent First Cause: Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight [than an argument from feeling God’s presence]. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist. (Darwin 1958, 92)

While it is likely his final position was agnosticism (a profession of not knowing whether or not God exists), Darwin paved the way for broad naturalism by providing an account of the development of life that did not require purposive guidance of intelligence. Broad naturalists may or may not be fervent Darwinians. Jerry Fodor, for example, is pitted against Darwin on several grounds. But what unites broad naturalists is that they are not committed to the eliminativism of Dennett, Stich, and others discussed above. At the 50

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same time, broad naturalists are committed to denying the existence of God and the soul. A passage from Fodor’s book In Critical Condition offers the following aesthetically charged portrait of naturalism in which we may sense the austerity and beauty of what he calls “the true scientific vision”: I think that sometimes, out of the corner of an eye, “at the moment which is not of action or inaction,” one can glimpse the true scientific vision; austere, tragic, alienated, and supremely beautiful. A world that isn’t for anything; a world that is just there. (Fodor 1998a, 169)

Fodor’s terms in the “true scientific vision” are transcendent terms, used for emotional power and conviction. Fodor’s glimpse of the scientific vision implies that the theistic hope is tragic and that we are alienated by the success of science. (As an aside, it may be that the concept of tragedy requires some background of meaning and purpose, or at least the possibility of some sort of transcendent value. In the absence of such value, one may follow the French existentialist Albert Camus and think of the cosmos, not so much as a tragedy, but as something absurd.)

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A THEIST In the great theistic religious traditions, and the theistic sub-traditions in the great world religions, the image of nature is of a created realm that is sustained by a living, purposive, supremely good, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being. Most philosophical theists also stress God’s existence as necessary or non-contingent; God is not causally dependent upon any other being, force or law of nature. In classical theism, God’s necessary existence is often expressed by the thesis that God’s essence (what God is) is God’s existence (that God is). In Judaism and Christianity, human beings are themselves described as being made in the image of God. Christian theologians sometimes stress that while humans are created in God’s image, they are called to be in God’s likeness (or, in their view, the likeness of God incarnate, Jesus Christ). These teachings provide a framework for theists to use terms appropriate to human persons in addressing or referring to God without being anthropomorphic. If we are the image and reflection of God, there may be a sense in which our power and knowledge is a dim or partial reflection of a much greater, divine power and knowledge. Resemblance is, of course, to some extent symmetrical, but in this case (from a theistic point of view) the lesser (the human) derives its powers and meaning from that which is much greater (the divine). Because God is the source of created intelligent, purposive, valuable created beings, we suggest it is misleading to describe God as “superhuman” or even “supernatural.” “Superhuman” suggests God is to be imagined as a magnified, 51

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superior human and today the term “supernatural” is typically defined or equated with a view, usually superstitious, that posits ghosts and spirits. In the introduction we identified the form of theism we wish to engage in this book as Platonic theism. Central to such an outlook is an affirmation of the intrinsic goodness of the divine. It is in virtue of such divine goodness that theistic religions understand God to be worthy of praise, adoration, awe, love, and obedience. The central divine attributes in Platonic theism are not value-neutral or a matter of sheer powerful, purposive agency or knowledge. Platonic theism is, then, very different from what Richard Dawkins describes as “the God Hypothesis”: “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it” (Dawkins 2006, 31). Dawkins’ account ignores a key aspect of God shared by the great monotheistic religions. God, in the great monotheistic religions, is intrinsically good and the foundation of the goodness in the natural world. Some critics of theism, especially those who also address environmental ethics, claim that theists (Christian theists in particular) offer a disparaging aesthetic view of the natural world. The following charge in a textbook, Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism is typical: Christianity saw mountains as despicable heaps of wreckage left by the Flood, wilderness regions as fearful places good only for human punishment and repentance, and all of nature’s workings as nothing but poor substitutes for the perfect harmony that had been lost in humanity’s fall from grace. The rise of a secular science and equally secular art forms was required to free nature from such associations and thereby to open it for aesthetic appreciation. (Carlson and Lintott 2008, 2–3)

Although the images of the wilderness and the desert in Christian tradition have been used in depicting arenas for purgation and enlightenment, Christian theistic tradition (and Jewish and Muslim traditions) are brimming over with abundant recognition of the awesomeness and goodness of the material world. A passing familiarity with the Hebrew Bible — Christian Old Testament — reveals an overwhelming affirmation of the wonders of the created world (from Genesis 1 to Job 37–42 to Jonah, and so on) and the sacredness of mountains as a place to encounter God (“the mount of God” Exod. 18:5). Having overlooked the liturgical celebration of the creation (as in Benedicte, Omnia Opera Domini), the immense affirmation of nature in the stories of saints (e.g. the golden legends of the desert fathers and mothers, St. Francis of Assisi, and so on), and the medieval theistic affirmation of the principle of plentitude, this particular critique of Christian theism as anti-nature turns out to involve a caricature. According to the principle of plentitude, the created world is replete with a multitude (some theologians thought infinitude) of diverse natural goods. This principle was often articulated in relationship to the privatio boni thesis, the belief that being (or 52

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existing) is itself a good (omne est bonum) and evil consists in the deprivation of being. The theory may be false but it demonstrates that historically theists did not construe the natural world “as nothing but poor substitutes” for heaven or God or unfallen paradise. For a corrective to the impression that theistic religions disparage animals as part of the natural world, see the chapters “Judaism,” “Enhancing the divine image,” “The Bible and killing for food,” and “Islam” in The Animal Ethics Reader, edited by Susan Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler. Philosophical theists may agree with Grünbaum’s thesis that theism (or versions of it) is old, though they are not likely to agree that this is a mark against theism. First, contra Grünbaum, quasi-naturalist views of the cosmos are old; materialism, complete with atomic theory, can be traced to Democritus and Lucretus. Evolution — as Darwin noted — can be found in Empedocles, so if being old is a mark against the truth of a theory then it seems that both theism and non-theism are in trouble. Further, most philosophical theists have in different ways contended that theistic belief is itself natural. Their stress on the cosmic scale of the personal and intentional actually reinforces the thesis that one can trust science. In a reply to the strict naturalist disparagement of folk psychology, theists tend to hold that folks do science. Naturalists who repudiate folk psychological notions of belief, risk undermining the practice of science that (itself) seems to require scientists having beliefs. If the practice of forming beliefs based on reasons is rejected as folk psychology, it seems one is bound to reject the practice of science. The image of nature generated by theism historically has been divided in terms of the trustworthiness of human cognition. Some theists have held high views of human reason, perception, experience, and imagination, as being reliable means by which persons can know of God without special revelation. These views bolster the tradition of natural theology with classical arguments for God’s existence. Often thought to have been undermined decisively by Hume and Kant, there are extensive defenses of virtually all the arguments for natural theology. (See, for example, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology and the Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology.) Other theists have been more skeptical about human cognition, largely due to sin (especially self-deception) and human finitude. This skepticism bolstered theists who have privileged revelation claims in sacred scriptures over against truths discovered through natural reason. In Christianity, Martin Luther, for example, promoted a theology that recognized only scripture as a supreme authority — sola scriptura, scripture alone, opposing the scholasticism of his day. In Islam, al-Ghazzali opposed the natural theology developed by al-Farabi, Avicenna, and others. (Though al-Ghazzali famously developed a powerful cosmological theistic argument.) Luther and al-Ghazzali were not unlike Wilfred Sellars: scripture (the Bible or Qu’ran) is the measure of all that is, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not. Theism has historically tended to be pluralistic in terms of methodology: in addition to revelation, 53

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one may learn of oneself and the world through introspection, science, moral reflection, aesthetic experience, and so on. The theistic image of nature and the kind of inquiry it promotes is almost the opposite of Dennett’s image of nature and inquiry. Dennett proposes that if any explanations leave us with an irreducible self or with mental, conscious causes that are not explained in terms of the non-mental and the non-conscious, then the inquiry has failed. Theists, instead, frequently allow that the created world has causal powers of its own, but they also hold that non-mental, non-conscious explanations are only fully accounted for by an appeal to a mental, conscious reality, namely God’s nature and will. For most philosophical theists, the full account of the existence and endurance of the cosmos includes God’s comprehensive, creative intention that there is a cosmos, sustained over time. Theistic traditions have been divided over the utility and propriety of using images of God. Brian Leftow observes that it is problematic for God to be an incorporeal being and to be represented visually: [A] visual image, mental or not, cannot depict the nonexistence of God — nor his existence. Visual depiction is based on how things look to us; a painting depicts Churchill because it looks to us in some respect as Churchill might from a certain perspective. So God can’t be depicted, because there is no way God looks. Nor can God’s absence be depicted, because there is no way His absence looks. One can no more visually depict a world containing or not containing God than one can a world containing or not containing the empty set. One can visually depict the nonexistence of visible things: showing Churchill as a corpse, or an empty chair in which he used to sit, with a grieving daughter nearby. But this is because there is a way things look when they are present, and so there is a way their absence looks. Perhaps existentialist plays attempt to depict how the world would be if God did not exist. But even if one succeeds, that is not the same thing as depicting God’s nonexistence in itself — not least because for all we know, some ways the world would look if God did not exist (if there could be a world without God) might also be ways it could look if He did. (Leftow 2010, 29)

While theistic religious traditions have been defined by and nurtured by the abundant metaphors, analogies and names of God found in scripture, and there has been a strong tradition of philosophers working in the via positiva or cataphatic tradition (that employs positive attributes and concepts of God). There is also a deep apophatic or via negativa tradition that resists positive attributes of God. The latter movement stresses what cannot be said about God. It is a movement that has historical, scriptural roots (“To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him? . . . To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? Says the Holy One, lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these?” Isaiah 40:18–26). It is also found in some Platonic dialogues. In the Republic, for example, Plato proposes that the Good is “beyond being” (Republic book VI). If God (like the Good, for Plato) 54

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is beyond being, then God may prove to be beyond the grasp of meaningful discourse. Perhaps following this vision, in the late-fifth-century The Divine Names, attributed to Dionysius (Denys) the Areopagite, there is this dictum: “The divinity is cause of all, but itself nothing” (1.5). The idea may be that if God is the cause of everything, God cannot be a thing. Aquinas himself (strongly influenced by Dionysius) seems close to endorsing such a position when he claims that God “is to be thought of as existing outside the realm of existents, as a cause from which pours forth everything that exists in all its variant forms” (De Interpretatione 1.14). The apophatic tradition has even led some Christian thinkers to claim that to affirm that God exists is to commit idolatry insofar as this makes “God” one more existing individual. Herbert McCabe writes: “It is not possible that God and the universe should add up to make two” (McCabe 1987, 6). In general, the apophatic tradition has been subordinate to the cataphatic in theistic tradition. One problem with extreme apophatic theology is that it seems to undermine theistic religious practice. To pray or love God seems to require having some positive conception of God. The following passage from Merold Westphal’s work reveals the problem with a radical apophatic theology: Discussing the hermeneutics of suspicion with students at a Christian college, I once said that I suspected I had never prayed to a God who wasn’t an idol. They were horrified, but they began to see my point when I explained that (1) I believed the God who heard my prayers was no idol, but the living God, and (2) that God as I intended, represented, conceived of God was always an imperfect, distorted approximation, not only in relation to God’s inherent reality but even in relation to God as we humans ought to think of God. Not only the finitude of our createdness but also the fallenness of our current conditions keeps our God-talk from being the mirror of the divine nature. (Westphal 2007, 145)

A Christian might readily grant that her finitude and sin always threaten to tarnish one’s concept of God, but it is another matter to conclude that one’s prayers (insofar as they are directed to a God who exists) are directed to an idol. Two related points need observing: persons in theistic religions do not pray to concepts and, second, insofar as Westphal thinks and speaks of a God who is living and hears prayers he seems to be committed to holding that God exists and (shy of some other factors Westphal does not disclose) it is not idolatrous (per se) to think and act that way. Some advocates of severely apophatic theology seem to rest on the dogmatic thesis that “we have no experience of God” (Kenny 2004, 40). Anthony Kenny makes that assertion in The Unknown God and then perhaps, not surprisingly, he despairs of grounding literal or metaphorical language about God. “When we talk in the language of the divine metaphor,” Kenny writes, “we do not really know what the metaphors are about” (Kenny 2004, 45). Many theists claim we can know of God experientially and through 55

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scripture. Moreover some apophatic claims seem difficult to sustain. Janet Soskice claims that God cannot be described but only pointed to by way of metaphorical language. “This is the fine edge at which negative theology and positive theology meet,” writes Soskice, “for the apophatic insight that we may say nothing of God, but only point towards Him . . . [T]his separation of referring and defining is at the very heart of metaphorical speaking . . .” (Soskice 1985, 140). But as Keith Yandell points out metaphors of God have substantial descriptive content and without some grasp of content, merely pointing makes no sense. Yandell contends that the reasons for denying literal descriptions of God are wanting. A basic assumption is that no literal description can be true of God. As is typical, we are referred to certain ideas: We cannot comprehend (know all there is to know) about God; descriptions of God based on religious experience are defeasible; certainty about claims concerning God is unattainable; and it is always possible that we will have to modify our concept of God. But there are an infinite number of truths concerning a golden retriever, seeing the golden is defeasible, certainty about it is unavailable, and we may have to revise our concept thereof. But it is not beyond literal description. Further, God can be misdescribed (e.g. “God is a cantaloupe”), which even the most deluded of empiricist positivists presumably will recognize as false. But then what, in principle, precludes God from being correctly described? (Yandell 2006, 418)

Probably the most robust project to treat theism as defined by inspired images was launched by Austin Farrer. In The Glass of Vision, The Rebirth of Images and elsewhere, Farrer argued that theistic scripture and tradition is best thought of in terms of images of the divine and created order that have a life of their own. While critics pointed out that the invocation of images could be no substitute for natural theology or building a case for religious belief on the basis of religious experience, Farrer’s work demonstrates the way in which images can play an important role in shaping theistic beliefs and literature (see Farrer 1948 and 1949; also see chapter 7, “Experience and images,” in H. D. Lewis’s Our Experience of God, and Words and Images by E. L. Mascall). By way of a final comment on Leftow’s stance, consider Wayne Roosa’s essay “Mediation on the joint and its holy ornaments”. Roosa analyzes exactly how certain images address presence and absence. After investigating Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void, a Denise Levertov poem, and a musical composition by Samuel Barber — three artworks in different media that articulate presence as absence by way of defining everything around the edges of that ineffable presence — Roosa examines the imagery in the Ark of the Covenant. The sculptural imagery of cherubim wings defines an empty center that implies the nature of God, showing how this very material image evokes the existence of One who exists in a different order. This visual translation between the material and spiritual orders respects the terms between 56

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both orders, while the wings and the empty center encircled by them implies, in this configuration, the relationship between both. In general, then, theism stands in relation to naturalism on the following positions: theism offers an account of the whole cosmos in terms of a good, purposive Creator; God’s reality is not derived from any higher power or law of nature; and meaningful images and discourse may be used referentially and descriptively of God. Some theists have so stressed divine sovereignty to the point of denying human freedom, but more often than not theistic philosophy and theology defend freedom. Let us further consider the nature of these two images (theism and naturalism) in reference to reflection on freedom.

IMAGING FREEDOM This closing section is not intended to establish whether human beings have freedom or some kind of deep ability to do something other than what we are determined to do. What we intend to do in this section is simply to present an argument about freedom and consider whether it seems more or less plausible given the two images of nature we are entertaining. Is freedom more fitting (both in terms of plausibility and aesthetics) given theism or naturalism? The argument is by Galen Strawson and he maintains that it is unanswerable. Strawson’s argument is set up to undermine the belief that persons have ultimate moral responsibility. He uses the term “U-free” to refer to a freedom that would enable a person to have ultimate moral responsibility for his or her action. The short form of the argument that U-freedom is impossible is as follows. 1 When you act, at a given time t, you do what you do, in the situation in which you find yourself at t, because of the way you are, at t. 2 But if you do what you do at t because of the way you are at t, then in order to be ultimately (morally) responsible for what you do, at t (in order to be U-free, at t), you must be ultimately (morally) responsible for the way you are, at t, at least in certain fundamental, mental respects. 3 But to be ultimately morally responsible for the way you are, at t, in certain fundamental mental respects, you’d have to be causa sui [self-caused] in those respects. 4 But nothing can be ultimately causa sui in any respect at all (or if God can be, nothing else can be). So you can’t be ultimately morally responsible for what you do — you can’t be U-free. I call this the Basic Argument against U-freedom. Here is a variant. a One cannot be causa sui — one cannot be the ultimate, originating cause of oneself.

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b But one would have to be causa sui, at least in certain crucial mental respects, in order to be ultimately morally responsible for one’s decisions and actions. c So one cannot be ultimately morally responsible for one’s decisions or actions: one cannot be ultimately morally deserving of praise or blame for one’s decisions or actions or one’s character or indeed for anything else. (Strawson 2008, 359–360)

Because no being can be self-created, no being can have ultimate moral responsibility. While Strawson notes that God might be an exception to the case against causa sui, most (if not all) classical theists claim not even God can be self-caused. For God to cause God’s own existence, God would have to exist prior to God existing — an evident impossibility. Strawson cites with approval Nietzsche’s declaration: The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness . . . (Nietzsche, cited in Strawson 2008, 360)

Note the affective tone of Nietzsche’s terms — rape, perversion, fear, audacity — and the absurdity of poor old Baron Münchhausen. Strawson’s argument seems, at first, to be neutral with respect to naturalism and theism. However, let us consider whether naturalism or theism provide a better framework in which to address Strawson’s argument. Strict naturalism seems the least plausible setting for a reply to Strawson and a framework for libertarian free will or any kind of freedom that would generate ultimate moral responsibility. Presumably, moral responsibility involves choices, beliefs, desires, and so on, and if these are all part of folk psychology, they are not allowed in creating a final account of reality. A strict naturalist might adopt the position that Strawson holds: we are so constituted (or evolved?) that we must treat each other as if we are morally accountable. But that is not a robust affirmation of the reality of possessing bona fide freedom. Broad naturalists such as Peter Unger in All the Power in the World may recognize “folk psychology” and claim that libertarian freedom (the power to do x or not do x in conditions not fully determined) is an emergent power. It is not easy, however, to conceive of how the power to act freely emerges from micro-particles and non-purposive forces. John Searle offers the following analogy of how a macro-object can gain causal powers from underlying microparticles. For Searle, our mental life (thinking, feeling, choosing) consists in high-level brain states. 58

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To illustrate the relationships between higher-level or system features, on the one hand, and micro level phenomena, on the other . . . Consider a wheel rolling down hill. The wheel is entirely made of molecules. The behavior of the molecules causes the higherlevel, or system feature of solidity. Notice that the solidity affects the behavior of the individual molecules. The trajectory of each molecule is affected by the behavior of the entire solid wheel. But of course there is nothing there but molecules. The wheel consists entirely of molecules. So when we say the solidity functions causally in the behavior of the wheel and in the behavior of the individual molecules that compose the wheel, we are not saying that the solidity is something in addition to the molecules; rather, it is just the condition that the molecules are in. But the feature of solidity is nonetheless a real feature, and it has real causal effects. (Searle 2004, 48–49)

Searle uses the wheel analogy to explain how a person’s conscious decisionmaking may be free, despite the fact that (according to Searle) consciousness is a higher-level biological feature of the brain. The consciousness of the brain can have effects at the neuronal level even though there is nothing in the brain except neurons (with glial cells, neurotransmitters, blood flow, and all the rest). And just as the behavior of the molecules is causally constitutive of solidity, so the behavior of neurons is causally constitutive of consciousness. When we say that consciousness can move my body, what we are saying is that the neuronal structures move my body, but they move my body in the way they do because of the conscious state they are in. Consciousness is a feature of the brain in a way that solidity is a feature of the wheel. (Searle 2004, 49–50)

There is some promise to this strategy. After all, a wheel rolling down a hill will have a path and direction not fully accounted for by the micro-particles that constitute the wheel itself. Despite its promise, Searle’s proposal is problematic. Arguably, the wheel’s solidity and causally relevant powers (weight, size, motion) are all derived from a bottom-up framework. And so long as solidity or consciousness is not “something in addition to the molecules” it is hard to see how the autonomy can be achieved that is necessary for U-freedom. There are abundant proposals other than Searle’s about how purely physical-chemical processes may give rise to consciousness — including mental powers of agency — and these will be considered in the next chapter. The burden of naturalism involves moving from non-purposive, non-intentional forces to recognizing a radically different set of properties and powers. Theism does not have this burden and we therefore suggest it leaves more room for the kind of freedom Strawson is looking for and finds either elusive or impossible. We do not claim that broad naturalism is unable to generate libertarian freedom. It may be argued that all one needs is a compatabilist form of freedom (you are both free and determined at the same time) to generate ultimate moral responsibility. Or perhaps one may argue that Strawson 59

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makes the concept of ultimate moral responsibility so stringent that it is impossible nonsense. In theism, we find a worldview or image of reality in which freedom finds greater receptivity. Consciousness and freedom do not emerge as a radical break in an impersonal cosmos. At the heart of reality, God is conscious and free. God sustains a cosmos in which persons have a power to act on the basis of “the way you are, at t” and to survey the way you were, are and might be at t, t minus n, and t plus n. We may be far from achieving a “God’s eye point of view,” but freedom seems to involve stepping back and considering any number of motives, desires, and possible futures, the action of imagination. Theists also (as noted earlier) tend to take seriously the first-person point of view and thus the experience we have when we exercise what appears to be free agency (see Goetz 2009 and Foster 1991). We suggest that this experience is an experience of selecting one or more ways one is to be. The kind of selftranscendence involved is not causa sui in which a person creates herself. It is instead entertaining more than one personal identity and deciding which identity is yours and deciding what kind of person you will become. Recall in Chapter 1 Bernard Williams’ reservations about a king and peasant switching places. We submit that persons have the power of imagination to picture themselves as irascible or generous, courageous or cowardly, a kind servant or cruel ruler and this involves one imagining more than one way to be. Our capacity to imagine ourselves as different people is persuasively developed by Ted Cohen in Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor. Cohen argues that in ordinary moral reflection (e.g. if you were to consider ‘What if you were a Muslim in the midst of Serbs?’) and in literature (e.g. you feel Sophie’s anguish in Sophie’s Choice by William Styron when she decides which child to save) you entertain being someone other than you are. Similarly, freely choosing to be kind (for example) involves a choice of habitation and (let us imagine) it is done for the sake of kindness as opposed to a choice of living in sullen indifference. It is a matter of freedom because one makes a choice that one could have refrained from making. If Strawson insists that such a choice cannot be free because one must assume the “choice” is determined by the way one is at t, Strawson needs an additional argument. It otherwise seems that he is simply begging the question against libertarianism. In theism, the laws of nature turn out to be derived from the free, purposive intentions of God. Theism can hold that God makes it a law of nature that when certain physical processes occur, consciousness comes into being and when further processes occur, conscious subjects gain the power of free agency. Some theists may hold that such an evolution of conscious free agency involves individual, discrete creative acts of God, but there is no reason why God could not secure the evolution of conscious free agency by a single comprehensive creative act covering all the laws of nature. In The Existence of God, Richard Swinburne proposes that from a theistic 60

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perspective there is some reason to expect that there would arise creatures with substantial freedom, but this is not so from a naturalistic perspective. As we discover the fundamental laws, we can choose whether to build atomic bombs, or send rockets to the moon, or cure cancer, or not to bother. A generous God would seek to give humans a range of choices. But, barring God, there is no particular reason to expect that we should have this ever-widening range of choice. It is a further greatly significant choice to be able gradually to change one’s character — to make it the case that some heroic actions that we cannot now choose to do eventually become natural to us; or, alternatively, to be able gradually to allow ourselves to opt out of morality, to choose to be uninfluenced by moral considerations. Humans are able to form their characters as a result of a crucial contingent feature of their nature — that doing a good action when it is difficult makes it easier to do a good action next time; and doing a bad action when it is not too difficult to resist doing it makes it more natural to do it next time. Each choice for good or ill marginally shifts the range of actions open to us — frequent good choices make heroic actions serious possibilities for us, when previously they were not live options; frequent bad actions bring really wicked actions within the range of psychological possibility. Humans can in these ways form their characters. In a Godless world there is no reason to expect that, even given that creatures make moral choices, these choices would affect character in this way. It might be just as hard to show courage after you have shown courage on innumerable past occasions as on an occasion when you had never shown courage before. Yet a God who wants to give us really significant choices would give us this choice of forming our characters for good or ill. (Swinburne 2004, 222)

Perhaps it is because Dennett’s naturalism does not allow for any radically new emergent properties that Dennett largely assumes we cannot have the kind of self-transcendent, libertarian freedom portrayed by Swinburne (Dennett 2003; for a critique of Dennett, see Pink 2004 and 2009). Some confirmation of our thesis is on exhibit in Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul. Flanagan defends what we are calling broad naturalism, though the extent to which he allows for freedom is not clear. It is clear that he does not allow for the kind of self-transcendence required to meet Strawson’s argument. In what Flanagan calls “neo-compatibilism,” he eschews libertarian agency. “[M]y view . . . does not in fact agree [that the] traditional concept of free will is compatible with determinism” (Flanagan 2002, 127). Flanagan explicitly repudiates libertarian agency because of its ostensible theistic connection. He repeatedly cites Roderick Chisholm’s thesis: “If we are responsible . . . then we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us when we act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain things to happen, and nothing — or no one — causes us to cause those events to happen” (Flanagan 2002, 127; Chisholm cited by Flanagan, 58). Flanagan thinks that because theism is discredited, this kind of liberty is not viable. The tone of both Flanagan and Dennett’s dismissal of libertarian freedom are prime examples of the 61

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aesthetics of inquiry: both find libertarian freedom a relic of an outdated superstition, theism. How we imagine the structure of nature (is it a creation or not) impacts how we assess the prospects of a central concern to both naturalists and theists: can we plausibly affirm the reality of freedom that provides a foundation for taking ultimate responsibility for our actions or not? Let us now turn to the resources of naturalism and theism when it comes to the overall account of nature in general and the emergence of consciousness in particular.

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Galapagos Cactus War no. 18

CHAPTER 3

The Cosmic Question and Emergence: The Trick The process whereby man has come to know the universe is from one point of view extremely complicated; from another it is alarmingly simple. We can observe a single oneway progression. At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life, and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds, and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as our sensations, thoughts, images, or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just mistaken (and mistaken in much the same way) when we attributed “souls” or “selves” or “minds” to human organisms, as when we attributed dryads to the trees, animism, apparently begins at home. We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications. Man is indeed akin to the gods, that is, he is no less phantasmal than they. Just as the dryad is a “ghost,” an abbreviated symbol for certain verifiable facts about his behaviour: a symbol mistaken for a thing . . . There is no “consciousness” to contain, as images or private experiences, all the lost gods, colors, and concepts. Consciousness is “not the sort of noun that can be used that way” (C. S. Lewis 1986, 81, 82).

In paintings that picture metamorphosis — as in many of the paintings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Theodore Gericault — emergent ambiguous forms and identities are grounded pictorially in a recognizable form, something recognizable whose identity is then complicated by the further viewing of adjacent shapes and forms that are unexpected, or even visually confusing. But it is important to realize that the emergent identities are grounded in something that is identifiable; otherwise there would not be a picture of metamorphosis, but a picture of no identities or without intelligible identity of any kind. The presence of metamorphosis as an idea in art reflects how the imagination works in a progression that involves being open to emergence that is guided by some logic of form-making; even when the objective of the artist is 65

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to disrupt our ability to “make sense” of any formal logic. In Tiepolo, we may begin with, say, the body of a lion and then are stretched to observe the head of an eagle that in turn suggests an arm and shield. In Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, there is a disturbing merging of human forms that frustrates our expectations for seeing the body as whole and complete, thereby raising the specter of dismemberment and cannibalism (see Darcy Grigsby’s Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France). For both artists, metamorphosis is convincing because there is a formal logic in its genesis. From a naturalistic point of view, the emergence of consciousness is the ultimate metamorphosis. But does consciousness “emerge”? In our portrayal of metamorphosis in pictorial art, new forms emerge from what might be called an original form or identify. In our analogy we are asking if the notion of emergence can apply to consciousness in the same way it applies to material forms of metamorphosis and evolution. In this chapter, we take a closer look at the prospects of naturalism, especially as this concerns what may be called the cosmic question and the emergence of consciousness. Thomas Nagel has defined what he calls “the cosmic question” as: “How can one bring into one’s individual life a full recognition of one’s relation to the universe as a whole?” (Nagel 2010, 6). We shall expand the “cosmic question” to explicitly include the question of why there is a cosmos at all or why does our cosmos exist rather than some other cosmos. We will, then, first consider the cosmic question and then turn to the question of whether naturalism can account for the emergence of consciousness. Some naturalists (those we are referring to as strict naturalists) disparage the very existence of consciousness and creativity, explaining away claims about creative invention in terms of non-creative, non-intentional forces. This is especially clear in the work of Daniel Dennett who discounts the explanatory role of irreducible artistic creativity, whether in the life of Tiepolo or (as in his example) the painter Philip Guston. Dennett cites the following lines from Guston: When I first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my contemporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I’m lucky, every one of them will disappear. If I’m really lucky, I will too. (Guston cited by Dennett, 2009, 408)

For Dennett, Guston’s remarks support the strict naturalist case against recognizing the self as an irreducible reality. Guston, in his remarks is doing no such thing! Guston took full ownership of his body of work, as much as he acknowledged the debt he owed to artists he revered. Guston is describing, in poetic terms, how the activity and discipline of painting provokes a shift in attention away from himself into a world that is painting, fully attended to by a self. This shift in attention is the demand required of us for any serious task. 66

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Guston is expressing the importance of letting go of self-consciousness when painting; it is indeed to difficult to paint when you are consciously aware of your ego or wrapped up in a distracting self-awareness. But Dennett, as we shall see, is doubtful there is a substantial self there at all to be distracted by. Dennett, in fact, seems to fit C. S. Lewis’s observations (cited earlier) perfectly. Dennett groups together a host of mental phenomena under the category of consciousness and then casts doubt on its very existence. But before turning to the question of emergence, let us consider the prospects of a naturalistic approach to the cosmos as a whole.

WHY IS THERE A COSMOS AT ALL? One strategy to bolster naturalism and dispense with theism is to deny that the question of the origin and continuation of nature or cosmos makes sense. This strategy is in play in the prestigious first edition of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy in the entry “Why?” If one can establish that there is no conceivable outside, extra-cosmic force that could (even in principle) account for the existence of the cosmos, one may effectively defuse questions about why the cosmos exists. This strategy leaves us with naturalism by default: providing reasons for thinking naturalism is (to use a phrase Fodor employs) the only game in town. D. Z. Phillips, Ronald Hepburn, Bede Rundle, and Kai Nielson have pursued this line of reasoning. Sometimes this point is advanced as a matter of grammar. Consider Hepburn’s comment: Why not imagine a being entirely outside the universe, infusing energy into the universe, without becoming in any way part of it? Why is this absurd? It is absurd because in imagining this, we inevitably picture the world as a limited system with a boundary beyond which dwells the God who is the world’s cause. But this would really be no different from thinking of a part of the world and of a being who dwells in another part but is in contact with the first. (Hepburn 1958, 167)

Hepburn’s thesis is that to imagine a being outside the universe is to try to imagine something beyond all sensible reference. One can compare beings (real or imaginary) within the universe (we can imagine that Zeus is a powerful god living on Mount Olympus), but imagining a being that transcends space and time is to court absurdity. The imagination cannot (for conceptual reasons) get beyond the boundary of the universe. Richard Rorty defends an extreme version of this line of reasoning in “Naturalism and Quietism.” In the essay Rorty distances himself from the naturalist project of accounting for the world as a whole, as well as, in particular, consciousness, freedom, responsibility, goodness, virtue, and so on. He suggests that “the world” and so on have relevance only insofar as language involving them has cultural relevance. On this view, the image of the universe is indomitable and unsurpassable. 67

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We should not be held captive by the world — picture picture. We do not need a synoptic narrative of how we came to talk as we do. We should stop trying for a unified picture, and for a master vocabulary. We should confine ourselves to making sure that we are not burdened with obsolete ways of speaking, and then ensuring that those vocabularies that are still useful stay out of each other’s way. (Rorty 2007, 150)

Although Rorty’s proposal would constitute an abandonment of some forms of naturalism, it would seem to block the theistic image of the world. Like Hepburn and Rorty, D. Z. Phillips argues that there is a deep problem with attempting even to generalize about the nature of the cosmos as a whole. It seems that theism requires that one can imagine a being that transcends and creates the world, but the very concept of the world as a thing some being may create or sustain is problematic. What kind of theory is a theory about the structure of the world? If by “the world” one wants to mean “everything”, there is no such theory. Certainly, science has no such theory, nor could it have. “Everything” is not the name of one big thing or topic, and, therefore, there can be no theory concerning a thing or topic of this kind. To speak of a thing is to acknowledge the existence of many things, since one can always be asked which thing one is referring to. Science is concerned with specific states of affairs, no matter how wide the scope of its questions may be. Whatever explanations it offers, further questions can be asked about them. It makes no sense to speak of a last answer in science, one that does not admit any further questions. Science is not concerned with “the structure of the world”, and there are no scientific investigations which have this as their subject. (Phillips 2005a, xv–xvi)

If there cannot be a thing called “the world,” how can one make sense of referring to a God who creates and sustains the world? Phillips also introduces an argument that seems reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’s depiction of the naturalist reminding us of how we can or cannot use the term “consciousness.” Phillips proposes that, according to classical theism, God is conscious or has consciousness. But being conscious and consciousness itself only make sense in an embodied, linguistic community. God is not a member of an embodied, linguistic community; hence there is no God. Phillips’ overall philosophy would be difficult to summarize succinctly, but in essence Phillips contends that when theists refer to God as conscious or as an incorporeal powerful, purposive agent, they are misusing language. “[C]onsciousness” cannot yield the identity of its possessor. Consciousness cannot tell me who I am. If it is supposed to pick me out, I’d need to experience a number of consciousnesses, which is absurd . . . If, on the other hand, consciousness is taken to mean my awareness of the world, or “there being a world for me,” others are in that world just as much as I am. It is a world in which I may see others in pain, or cry out in pain myself, for example . . . But God has no neighbors. It may be thought that he could identify himself

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for himself with a self-authenticating definition: “I am this.” But this reverts to the initial difficulty. It falls foul of [the] critique of a magical conception of signs, the view that the meaning of a word or sound is a power inherent in them, rather than something that is found in their application. (Phillips 2005b, 457)

For Phillips, theism is the outcome of a misuse of imagination. Conscious, self-aware speakers are fitting denizens in human neighborhoods, but not in the context of an invisible, incorporeal transcendence. These lines of reasoning are substantial, but each of them is problematic. Certain “Why?” questions do not appear to allow any reply. Identity statements “1 = 1” or “red is red” do not seem to allow for any room for asking “Why?” (except perhaps someone might answer a “Why?” with the dictum that “everything is what it is, and isn’t what it isn’t”). The question “why is there something rather than nothing?” makes a little more sense, though at such an abstract level of generality the question may be ill formed. Some of us think there cannot be nothing because we are Platonists who believe that there are necessarily existing properties and states of affairs. But if the question is put in the following way, there seems some sense to it: Why is there a contingent cosmos? As noted in the last chapter, naturalists and theists tend to agree that the cosmos does not exist out of necessity; that is, there is no necessary reason in or about the cosmos that accounts for why it exists (or to claim that it exists in all possible worlds). David Lewis, for example, contends that the cosmos and its laws of nature are contingent (see the citation of Lewis’s work in Chapter 1). Thomas Nagel offers the following exercise of the imagination in order to conclude that it is possible for there to have been no cosmos at all. Actually, Nagel uses the imagination to bolster the view there might have been nothing at all. This goes too far (for reasons noted below), but this thought experiment (along with the modal principle we defended in Chapter 1) would give us some reason for believing that at least the cosmos is contingent: Perhaps each of us can imagine [there being nothing at all] on the analogy of our own nonexistence. The possibility that you should never have been born is an alternative to all the alternative possible courses of your experiential life, as well as to your actual life. From the objective point of view, of course, this is a perfectly imaginable state of affairs, but it is not an alternative possible course of experience for you: Subjectively, it would not be something different, but nothing. The possibility that there should never have been anything at all is the objective analogue to the subjective possibility — all too real, when you think about it — that you should never have existed. (Nagel 2010, 30)

This thought-experiment supports and fills out the conviction that the cosmos is contingent, though this does not establish that nothing might exist because, if there is a God or necessary abstract objects (numbers, propositions) then there cannot be nothing (no God or abstracta). If one can make sense of the cosmos existing contingently and form some 69

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notion (or not rule out the notion) of a necessarily existing being, then the question of why the cosmos exists makes sense. One reason to support the intelligibility of there being a necessarily existing reality is that we seem to be able to recognize the reality of necessary abstract entities (necessarily true propositions and mathematical properties like being the number seven). This seems to defeat a strong claim to the contrary: that all reality must be contingent. (As an aside, someone who claims that all reality must be contingent seems to face the paradox that he is thereby affirming what is a necessary, rather than contingent truth. The statement “No state of affairs can be necessary” seems to involve a contradiction insofar as it implies “It is necessarily the case that no state of affairs is necessary.”) The burden of proof lies more on the philosopher who claims that there necessarily can be no necessary being than the philosopher who proposes it is possible (conceivable or imaginable) that there is a necessarily existing being. Recall the modal principle in Chapter 1: if one seems to be able to conceive of (imagine, represent, picture, describe) some state of affairs obtaining there is some prima facie evidence that the state of affairs is possible. A skeptic of the possibility of a necessarily existing reality would require more grounds than, say, he either does not or cannot imagine such a being. The skeptic’s predicament may only be due to his lack of imaginative or conceptual powers (see Koons 2000). It has been charged that the question of why this contingent cosmos exists only makes sense if we are prepared to already believe there is a necessarily existing being who may account for it. Milton Munitz advanced this objection: [W]e cannot say that we need, simply, to start from the realization that the world is contingent, and that we should then come to recognize that its existence is dependent upon God; to have characterized the world as contingent, as something that might not have existed, and whose existence is dependent on some being independent of itself, is already to use the concept of God. (Munitz 1965, 120)

Munitz is right that an argument for God that began with the premise “Our contingent cosmos depends for its existence on a necessarily existing being” would be problematic! But one can — as many philosophers have — recognize that our cosmos is contingent (it is not necessary) without affirming the truth of theism. David Lewis and Jean Paul Sartre were aggressively atheistic and yet they were entirely convinced of the contingency of the cosmos. Once one can distinguish conceptually between a contingent cosmos and a necessarily existing reality that may account for the existence of the cosmos, Hepburn’s objection to theism seems to be undermined. There is no grammatical or logical fallacy in asking whether the account of why the cosmos exists now and continues to be is due to the causal power of a necessarily existing being. Hepburn seems to imply that to imagine God “outside” the universe would be to imagine a bigger spatio-temporal zone outside a smaller one. Hepburn’s objection involves a failure of imaging. As for Rorty’s claims 70

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in “Naturalism and Quietism,” two points are raised here. First, the apparent coherence of naturalism and theism as two alternative unified pictures of nature give us reason to resist his dismissal of overall images or pictures of reality. Second, talking about theism and naturalism does have cultural relevance. These two worldviews present us with radically different concepts of the nature and structure of the world. What about Phillips’ objection that it makes no sense to think of a conscious being if that being is not part of an embodied, linguistic community? It is odd to claim that “consciousness cannot tell me who I am.” Indeed it cannot because “consciousness” cannot talk; people or subjects who are conscious talk, not “consciousness.” That is also why it would be very odd indeed for anyone to think that consciousness “is supposed to pick me out” because “consciousness” is not the name of a subject or thing that can point. So, the way Phillips sets up the supposed problem with theism seems faulty. In any case, it certainly does not seem to be the case that a conscious, thinking subject must be linguistic. Consciousness is in fact a precondition of linguistic powers; if a subject is not conscious she cannot begin to develop language. Finally, even if Phillips is right that embodied conscious subjects must be part of a linguistic community, why would it follow that the same constraints would hold with respect to a conscious, immaterial or incorporeal reality? Arguably, Phillips is mistreating the concept of God — an incorporeal, intentional reality — in reference to the image he has of finite, embodied social human beings. This appears to be a prime example of a regrettable anthropomorphism. Phillips’ objection to theism does not hold. Once naturalism is not “the only game in town” and we are open to the great cosmic question of why there is a contingent cosmos at all (or why is there this cosmos rather than a different one?), it seems that we are in a situation when naturalism is only able to give us the blunt answer that there is no deeper account as to why the cosmos exists or continues in being. In a critical treatment of cosmological arguments — in which theists propose that the best explanation of a contingent cosmos lies in the agency of a necessary being — J. L. Mackie notes that such arguments assume that “things should be intelligible through and through” (Mackie 1982, 85). Mackie contends that we should be content instead with our scientific and empirical inquiry into the cosmos, without supposing that there is some overall account of the existence of the cosmos that would ground such inquiry. The sort of intelligibility that is achieved by successful causal inquiry and scientific explanation is not undermined by its inability to make things intelligible through and through. Any particular explanation starts with premises which state “brute facts”, and although the brutally factual starting-points of one explanation may themselves be further explained by another, the latter in turn will have to start with something that it does not explain, and so on however far we go. But there is no reason to see this as unsatisfactory. (Mackie 1982, 85–86)

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But there is an interesting difference between theism and naturalism in terms of explanatory starting points. Naturalists allow that events within the cosmos are contingent and require explanations. They therefore have reason to seek the cause of the cosmos itself, but whether the cosmos is without origin or boundless in space, explaining contingent being in terms of other contingent beings will not generate a satisfactory answer as to why the cosmos exists at all or continues to exist. In Theism and Ultimate Explanation, Timothy O’Connor explicates the nature of God as a necessarily existing being, and then contrasts such a supposition with contingent existence. The claim that there is a necessary being is the claim that there is a being whose nature entails existence, so that any possible world would involve the existence of such an entity. Such a being, we might say, is absolutely invulnerable to nonexistence. By way of relevant contrast, were there a being which was causally immune from destruction (no existing thing or collection of things have the capacity indirectly or directly to destroy it), but whose existence was contingent, it would still, in the end, just happen to exist. Were such a being conscious, it could sensibly feel fortunate that it exists, even though it owes its existence to no existing being. (O’Connor 2008, 70)

O’Connor claims that without the agency of a necessarily existing being in sustaining the cosmos, the explanations within the cosmos are groundless. If our universe truly is contingent, the obtaining of certain fundamental facts or other will be unexplained within empirical theory, whatever the topological structure of contingent reality. An infinite regress of beings in or outside the spatiotemporal universe cannot forestall such a result. If there is to be an ultimate, or complete, explanation, it will have to ground in some way the most fundamental, contingent facts of the universe in a necessary being, something which has the reasons for its existence within its own nature. It bears emphasis that such an unconditional explanation need not in any way compete with conditional, empirical explanations. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that empirical explanations will be subsumed within the larger structure of the complete explanation. (O’Connor 2008, 76)

Mackie may claim not to need an ultimate, complete account in order to trust less ultimate, less complete accounts, but if such an ultimate, complete account is conceivable, it seems arbitrary or capricious not to seek such a broader account. As we have seen in Chapter 2, Darwin himself accepted some version of the cosmological argument. Rather than an argument from design or argument from religious experience, Darwin seems to endorse an argument for an intelligent, mindful First Cause: “I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist” (Darwin 1958, 92). Naturalism does not shut down or successfully address “the cosmic question” nor (if Darwin is on 72

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the right track) can the appeal to a necessary, sustaining cause be treated as a misuse of the imagination. We are, however, pointing out the difficulty of naturalism shutting down “the cosmic question” or treating the appeal to a necessary, sustaining cause as a misuse of imagination. Before moving on to the difficulty of accounting for the emergence of consciousness in a naturalist worldview, consider further the evidential and aesthetic dimensions to the cosmic question.

PHILOSOPHY OF ULTIMATE CAUSES Some naturalists seek to rule out theism in principle in any accounts of events within the cosmos. This is sometimes called methodological naturalism. For a contemporary scientist or historian to claim that some event (reports of Jesus’ resurrection, the evacuation of British forces at Dunkirk in May and June of 1940 against very difficult odds) was a miracle would seem (from a naturalist point of view) to be an admission of a failure of inquiry. This position is forcefully represented in Matthew Bagger’s work: [W]e can never assert that, in principle, an event resists naturalistic explanation. A perfectly substantial, anomalous event, rather than providing evidence for the supernatural, merely calls into question our understanding of particular laws. In the modern era, this position fairly accurately represents the educated response to novelty. Rather than invoke the supernatural, we can always adjust our knowledge of the natural in extreme cases. In the modern age in actual inquiry, we never reach the point where we throw up our hands and appeal to divine intervention to explain a localized event like an extraordinary experience. (Bagger 1999, 13)

Douglas Futuyama adapts a similar stance: Science is the exercise of reason, and so is limited to questions that can be approached by the use of reason, questions that can be answered by the discovery of objective knowledge and the elucidation of natural laws of causation. In dealing with questions about the natural world, scientists must act as if they can be answered without recourse to supernatural powers . . . of God. (Futuyama 1982, 169–170)

For Bagger and Futuyama it appears that an explanatory appeal to God is not an option or no more so than an appeal to the paranormal. This naturalist strategy calls for several replies. Physics and chemistry today do not seem to be practiced under the assumption that there is or is not a God. (Though early modern science in general in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was explicitly theistic, as one can see in the charter to the Royal Society.) A contemporary scientist studying dark matter might just as well be a methodological naturalist as a methodological theist (someone who is acting 73

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on the presumption that the natural world and its laws are sustained by God) or methodological agnostic (one who is undecided about ultimate questions about God). The exclusion of an appeal to theistic explanations may well be philosophically negligent. If one allows for teleological accounts of human and animal activity or at least does not rule out the possibility of libertarian free will, it is hard to see why God should be out of explanatory bounds in principle. The claim that God should be excluded because God is immaterial or noncorporeal or unobservable is contentious. Physics recognizes all sorts of unobservables (microparticles) and the existence of more than matter (energy) (see Nagel 2009, 21). Indeed, in the next section of this chapter we will entertain the thesis that subjective experience or consciousness is itself immaterial. (For a further extension of this reply see Stewart Goetz’s Freedom, Teleology, and Evil.) Methodological naturalism has also been used to promote the policy that philosophers should adapt (as far as possible) a scientific methodology (Ritchie 2008, 196). We argue against this stance if “science” is the equivalent of Dennett’s behaviorist view of science. (Arguments against Dennett’s neo-behaviorism are given later.) Science itself cannot be conducted without a philosophical framework, a philosophy of science, evidence, a commitment to trustworthiness and reliability, and so on. The twentieth- and early twenty-first-century attempt to substitute science for philosophy (specifically, metaphysics) has been a failure. The thesis that science is the only route to secure knowledge of the world is not itself a scientific thesis; it is a thesis about science and thus a philosophy of science. (For a brilliant defense of the indispensable role of philosophy, especially metaphysics, see van Inwagen 2009.) Both theism and naturalism are philosophies rather than themselves scientific theories or hypotheses. Partly this is because neither framework seems to involve replicable experiments and standard cases of what passes for scientific observations. Both theism and naturalism have been advanced as making more sense of science than the other, but this does not itself make theism or naturalism themselves scientific. In “Unasked questions, unsolved problems,” in Science and Spirituality, Michael Ruse notes that the natural sciences themselves leave untouched the legitimate philosophical question of why there is a contingent cosmos: You need something to break the succession. Dawkins does not think this is possible. Aquinas was more optimistic, but he realized that — a possibility Dawkins does not consider — the way to break the succession is by pointing out that we are not looking for an end point to the chain, way back in the past, even if there is one. To speak of a First Cause is not to speak in a temporal fashion at all, even though it may just so happen that there was a point at which the chain did start. We have to be looking for a cause that makes the whole thing happen, then, now, and in the future . . . If you like to think of time as horizontal, then we are looking for a vertical cause. Something that keeps the whole kit

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and caboodle in being and in action. And it is pretty clear — at least this is the traditional answer, and I see no reason to give it up — that this is going to require a being (let us call it that without prejudice) that is sufficient unto itself, needs no cause because in some sense it is necessary. In a sense, it is outside of time. You do not ask when 2 + 2 = 4 became true or when it will cease to be true. That is just not a sensible question. And the same has to be true of this being. And hence, obviously, this being is not going to be one of the chaps, a contingent fellow along with the rest of us. It cannot be a physical being, in the sense that we understand physical. That keeps us trapped in the chain. It has to be transcendent, whatever that may be. (Ruse 2010, 121)

As it happens, Ruse does not fully endorse a theistic cosmological argument, but he aptly defends the coherence and need to take seriously such cosmological reflection. There has been recent attention to the cosmic conditions that have made life possible. Naturalists have sought to discount such appeal to what seems like “fine tuning” as evidence of an intelligent purposive force, and we consider three of their objections. But first consider the following impressive list of essential conditions for our cosmos as articulated by John Leslie: a Alterations by less than one part in a billion to the expansion speed early in the Big Bang would have led to runaway expansion, everything quickly becoming so dilute that no stars could have formed, or else to gravitational collapse inside under a second. b Life was able to evolve only because the universe at early instants had been immensely smooth instead of turbulent. As estimated by Roger Penrose, it had to be smooth to one part in one followed by a thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion zeros. c Minimal tinkering with the strength of one of the forces controlling atomic nuclei, the nuclear weak force, would have destroyed the hydrogen that was needed as fuel for long-lived stars like the sun, and for making water. For sunlike stars to exist, the ratio of gravity’s strength to that of electromagnetism may also have required tuning to one part in many million. d Minor meddling with another nuclear force, the nuclear strong force, or with Planck’s constant, which controls the size of the quantum “packets” in which energy is transferred, or with the masses of the neutron and the proton, would have led to a universe without chemistry, made stars burn immensely faster or else not at all, or turned even small objects into neutron stars. e Slight strengthening of electromagnetism would have rendered chemical changes extremely slow, or made hydrogen the only element, or cause all matter to be violently radioactive. It could even have destroyed all atoms. f Various superheavy particles, common early in the Big Bang, needed to have masses falling inside narrow limits. Otherwise there would have been vastly much matter, quickly clumping to form black holes, or else hardly any matter, collisions between particles and antiparticles changing almost all of it into light. (Leslie 2007, 76)

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Without developing a full fine-tuning argument in detail, we propose that theism at least provides a framework in which we can even begin to form an overall account as to why the cosmos is attuned to life, whereas most forms of naturalism have to treat the structure of the cosmos as a not-further-explainable phenomenon. Three naturalistic replies to the fine-tuning argument seem altogether unsuccessful. We do not believe that three naturalistic replies to fine-tuning arguments are successful. We state our reservations about these naturalist moves succinctly. 1 Some naturalists posit infinitely many universes and then conclude that it is therefore not improbable that one of them should appear finely tuned. This seems both to go outrageously against a standard tool used by most naturalists (Ockham’s razor: do not posit more entities than necessary) but it also seems that this proposal would undermine all ordinary reasoning. Positing infinitely many universes can justify the claim it is just as probable we are in the universe as it appears to us as it is probable that we are in what may be called the skeptic’s universe, in which you and we might think we are in the world (as it appears to us) but we are actually brains in vats (as we discussed in Chapter 1 in connection with the Matrix), and merely imagine we are having the experiences we are having. Both our (presumed) universe and the skeptic’s universe are logically possible. Given infinite universes, why assume we are not in the skeptic’s universe? 2 Some naturalists seek to reduce our sense of wonder that our universe has produced intelligent life on the grounds that this should not be surprising for after all we are here to ask such questions. This is like claiming it should not surprise us if we are still alive after falling 30,000 feet without a parachute because we survived to raise the question. 3 Some naturalists claim that positing a fine-tuning God itself raises a highly improbable event, for God would be highly complex and have to be explained by simpler forces. Dawkins writes: “Any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it” (Dawkins 2006, 31) Thomas Nagel correctly points out the error in Dawkins’ reasoning: If the argument were supposed to show that a supremely adept and intelligent natural being, with a super-body and super-brain, is responsible for the design and creation of life on earth, then of course this “explanation” would be no advance on the phenomenon to be explained. If the existence of plants, animals, and people requires explanation, then the existence of such a super-being would require explanation for exactly the same reason. But if we consider what that reason is, we will see that it does not apply to the God hypothesis. (Nagel 2009, 22)

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Before turning to the problem of emergence, what about the claim that contemporary physics leaves us baffled about ultimate explanations? Consider the following claim: Quantum physics tells us that absolute knowledge, complete understanding, a total grasp of universal reality, will never be ours. Not only have our hopes been dashed for ultimate theoretical knowledge or the behavior of a single subatomic particle, but it turns out that in many respects life is organized in such a way that its behavior is inherently unpredictable, too. The mutations and genetic interactions that drive evolution are also unpredictable, even in principle . . . Life surely is explicable in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry . . . but the catch is that those laws themselves deny us an ultimate knowledge of what causes what, and what will happen next. (Miller 1999, 208–209)

Quantum physics gives us ample reason to think that Newtonian physics is not the whole story, but by itself no findings we know of in quantum physics undermines the intelligibility and importance of considering whether the world itself (with its mass and energy, suns and planets, quarks and leptons) is best accounted for in naturalism or theism. Modern physics invites us to increasingly think creatively and imaginatively about possibilities that stretch beyond common observation. If one is largely informed by terrestrial observations, one might well subscribe to such platitudes, as “What goes up, must go down” or “Nature hates a vacuum.” But from a wider perspective we may readily realize that if you accelerate certain objects on earth to a speed of 25,000 mph, given the right trajectory, they do not come down, and if you explore interstellar space you discover that nature “loves” vacuums/emptiness (unlike the state of play on our planet). In fact, very creative and innovative philosophical work on consciousness has been stimulated by quantum mechanics (see Smith and Jokic 2003). There is an interesting parallel move by many contemporary naturalists in their case against theism and their case against recognizing more to persons than bodily processes. In both categories some naturalists argue there cannot be more to the universe or more than bodily processes. Just as we challenge the naturalist effort to block theism, in the next two sections we challenge the effort either to eliminate the mental or reduce it to bodily processes.

THE DUBIOUS SKYHOOK VERSUS THE STURDY CRANE Deep in the history of philosophy and science lies the problem of how to account for the appearance or emergence or development of new phenomena. Anaxagoras asked: “How could hair come from what is not hair or flesh from what is not flesh?” (Kirk et al., Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 369). Eventually we discovered that hair is a protein filament that grows through the epidermis and we are able to locate some adaptive advantages to organisms with hair. The 77

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origin of flesh (biological tissues which consists of skeletal muscles, organs, fat) is a bit more daunting, but accounting for the more complex in terms of the simple seems to mark scientific progress. Paul Churchland aptly casts the naturalistic approach to accounting for the mental: Most scientists and philosophers would cite the presumed fact that humans have their origins in 4.5 billion years of purely chemical and biological evolution as a weighty consideration in favor of expecting mental phenomena to be nothing but a particularly exquisite articulation of the basic properties of matter and energy. (Churchland 1996, 211)

Given that the cosmos is non-mental, non-purposive, non-intentional, some naturalists are clear and explicit about the direction of explanation. The mental must be accounted for in terms of the non-mental. Ideally, in virtue of simplicity, there is a strong motivation to hold that the mental is not an addition to the physical, but a particular configuration or “exquisite articulation” of the physical. Dennett is quite explicit about the direction of causation: The account of intelligence required of psychology must not of course be questionbegging. It must not explain intelligence in terms of intelligence, for instance by assigning responsibility for the existence of intelligence in creatures to the munificence of an intelligent Creator. (Dennett 1978, 83)

Georges Rey makes a similar point: Any ultimate explanation of mental phenomena will have to be in non-mental terms, or else it won’t be an explanation of it. There might be an explanation of some mental phenomena in terms of others — perhaps hope in terms of belief and desire — but if we are to provide an explanation of all mental phenomena, we would in turn have to explain such mentalistic explainers until finally we reached entirely non-mental terms. (Rey 1997, 21)

Dennett introduces two images to contrast theistic and naturalistic accounts: the image of a skyhook and a crane. It is time for some more careful definitions. Let us understand that a skyhook is a “mindfirst” force or power or process, an exception to the principle that all design and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retrospectively explicable) product of the basic process. Some cranes are obvious and uncontroversial; others are still being argued about, very fruitfully. (Dennett 1995, 76)

Richard Dawkins elaborates on a Darwinian use of “the crane.”

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One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect . . . has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself . . . The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a “crane”, not a “skyhook”, for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that — an illusion. (Dawkins 2006, 157–158)

For Dennett and Dawkins, the naturalistic crane is far superior to the theistic skyhook. It is hard not to agree, given the images presented, that the naturalistic schema is superior, for the very concept of a skyhook is preposterous. (It is hard to imagine any theist gratefully embracing the supposition that theism is like a fanciful hook suspended in the air.) Dennett posits what may be called a bottom-up strategy. Rather than posit an incorporeal divine mind that (or who) creates a cosmos and then inserts mental life (or souls), Dennett believes we must start our explanation of intelligence and consciousness with that which is profoundly impersonal. We need to begin with simple, at best robotic matter, and then keep building our account of the world until we get persons. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe . . . Like the Christian version, it purports to explain something: the emergence of a new level of phenomena with special characteristics (meaners in one case, sinners in the other). Unlike the Christian version, it provides an explanation that makes sense; it does not proclaim itself to be a mysterious fact that one has to take on faith, and it has testable implications. (Dennett 1995, 203)

We cite Dennett at length on his “bottom-up” account of the process of consciousness to offer a wider picture of his work: [I]ntentionality doesn’t come from on high; it percolates up from below, from the initially mindless and pointless algorithmic processes that gradually acquire meaning and intelligence as they develop. And, perfectly following the pattern of all Darwinian thinking, we see that the first meaning is not full-fledged meaning; it certainly fails to manifest all the “essential” properties of real meaning (whatever you may take those properties to be). It is mere quasi-meaning, or semi-semantics. It is what John Searle . . . has disparaged as mere “as if intentionality” as opposed to what he calls “Original Intentionality.” But you

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have to start somewhere, and the fact that the first step in the right direction is just barely discernible as a step towards meaning at all is just what we should expect . . . There are two paths to intentionality. The Darwinian path is diachronic, or historical, and concerns the gradual accretion, over billions of years, of the sorts of Design — of functionality and purposiveness — that can support an intentional interpretation of the activities of organisms (the “doings” of “agents”). Before intentionality can be fully fledged, it must go through its awkward, ugly period of featherless pseudo-intentionality. The synchronic path is the path of Artificial Intelligence: in an organism with genuine intentionality — such as yourself — there are, right now, many parts, and some of these parts exhibit a sort of semi-intentionality, or mere as if intentionality, or pseudo-intentionality — call it what you like — and your own genuine, fully fledged intentionality is in fact the product (with no further miracle ingredients) of the activities of all the semi-minded and mindless bits that make you up . . . That is what a mind is — not a miracle machine, but a huge, semidesigned, self-redesigning amalgam of smaller machines, each with its own design history, each playing its own role in the “economy of the soul.” (Dennett 1995, 205–206)

There is a logical, constructive direction of explanation from the simple to the complex. But as we come to “the soul” or the person (a mature human being, for example), have we moved from the non-intentional (or “as if” intentionality or pseudo-intentionality) to bona fide intentional activity? In Dennett’s framework all the work that is being done in our writing this book (or your reading it) is by non-intentional processes. We appear to be given an interesting choice: either posit a miracle or face the explanation from below, in which the intentional dissolves and is accounted by the non-intentional. Dennett notes that while critics of Darwin jested that Darwin makes us descendents of apes, Dennett makes us descendents of robotic activity or, more accurately, Dennett sees himself and us as robots: There is a deep affinity between the synchronic and diachronic paths to intentionality. One way of dramatizing it is to parody an ancient anti-Darwinian sentiment: the monkey’s uncle. Would you want your daughter to marry a robot? Well, if Darwin is right, your great-great- . . . grandmother was a robot! A macro, in fact . . . Not only are you descended from macros; you are composed of them. Your hemoglobin molecules, your antibodies, your neurons, your vestibular-ocular reflex machinery — at every level of analysis we find machinery that dumbly does a wonderful, elegantly designed job. We have ceased to shudder, perhaps, at the scientific vision of viruses and bacteria busily and mindlessly executing their subversive projects — horrid little automata doing their evil deeds. But we should not think that we can take comfort in the thought that they are alien invaders, so unlike the more congenial tissues that make up us. We are made of the same sorts of automata that invade us — no halos of élan vital distinguish your antibodies from the antigens they combat; they simply belong to a club that is you, so they fight on your behalf. Can it be that if you put enough of these dumb homunculi together you make a real conscious person? The Darwinian says there could be no other way of making one. (Dennett 1995, 205–206)

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Dennett is a master of elegantly charged aesthetic terms: we are (on a certain level) wonderful and elegant, but this is the product of dumb, ostensibly horrid, awkward, ugly, pseudo-intentional processes. We are asked either to accept this image or to make use of halos and miracles. Is, however, Dennett’s “conscious person” really conscious? Not in the ordinary sense in which we use the term “conscious” or the sense in which we ordinarily think of ourselves as conscious beings. Dennett’s bottom line seems to be a form of radical behaviorism (which borrowing from Strawson, we will refer to as “neo-behaviorism”) in which consciousness, experience and so on are not recognized as having an intrinsic feel or experiential reality (Strawson 1994). Dennett’s position is neo-behavioristic as it is new in comparison with B. F. Skinner’s earlier approach but only insofar as Dennett professes to recognize consciousness and not because Dennett is not, at the very end of the day, a behaviorist. We highlight three interrelated areas in which Dennett’s eliminative project is in evidence: his refusal to recognize experience as a source of evidence (unless this is behavioristically construed); his behaviorist, mechanistic account of the emergence of creativity; and his rejection of the existence of the self as a substantial individual subject. First, in the following passage concerning evidence, Dennett maintains that David Chalmers’ conviction that there is such a thing as experience is equivalent to claiming that there is such a thing as cuteness. We can see this by comparing Chalmers’ proposal with yet one more imaginary nonstarter; cutism, the proposal that since some things are just plain cute, and other things aren’t cute at all — you can just see it, however hard it is to describe or explain — we had better postulate cuteness as a fundamental property of physics alongside mass, charge and space-time. (Cuteness is not a functional property, of course; I can imagine somebody who wasn’t actually cute at all but who nevertheless functioned exactly as if cute — trust me.) Cutism is in even worse shape than vitalism. Nobody would have taken vitalism seriously for a minute if the vitalists hadn’t had a set of independently describable phenomena — of reproduction, metabolism, self-repair and the like — that their postulated fundamental life-element was hoped to account for. Once these phenomena were otherwise accounted for, vitalism fell flat, but at least it had a project. Until Chalmers gives an independent ground for contemplating the drastic move of adding “experience” to mass, charge, and space-time, his proposal is one that can be put on the back burner. (Dennett 2000, 35; emphasis Dennett’s)

Here Dennett professes to be more confident in space-time energy and (presumably) similar scientific phenomena than experience. He will only allow experience into his inquiry if it is backed up by evidence that (by default) turns out to be external, and thus (given Dennett’s other veins) behaviorist criteria. This seems inevitable, for Dennett is ruling out someone claiming

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“I know experience exists, because I am experiencing things right now, such as reading a book.” Consider Dennett’s neo-behaviorist account of creativity, as developed in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. “If Darwinian mechanisms can explain the existence of a skylark, in all its glory,” Dennett writes, “they can surely explain the existence of an ode to a nightingale, too. A poem is a wonderful thing, but not clearly more wonderful than a living, singing skylark” (Dennett 2009, 396). Here is Dennett’s extensive account, which takes the shape of a thought experiment. Dennett seeks to coax us away from trusting what appears to be our first-person experience of consciousness and to adopt instead a robotic view of mind: Suppose Dr. Frankenstein designs and constructs a monster, Spakesheare, that thereupon sits up and writes out a play, Spamlet. Who is the author of Spamlet? First, let’s take note of what I claim to be irrelevant in this thought experiment. I haven’t said whether Spakesheare is a robot, constructed out of metal and silicon chips, or, like the original Frankenstein’s monster, constructed out of human tissues — or cells, or proteins, or amino acids, or carbon atoms. As long as the design work and the construction were carried out by Dr. Frankenstein, it makes no difference to the example what the materials are. It might well turn out that the only way the build a robot small enough and fast enough and energy-efficient enough to sit on a stool and type out a play is to construct it from artificial cells filled with beautifully crafted motor proteins and other carbon-based nanorobots. That is an interesting technical and scientific question, but not of concern here. For exactly the same reason, if Spakesheare is a metal-and-silicon robot, it may be allowed to be larger than a galaxy, if that’s what it takes to get the requisite complication into its programme — and we’ll just have to repeal the speed limit for light for the sake of our thought experiment. These technical constraints are commonly declared to be off-limits in these thought experiments, so be it. If Dr. Frankenstein chooses to make his AI robot out of proteins and the like, that’s his business. If his robot is cross-fertile with normal human beings and hence capable of creating what is arguably a new species by giving birth to a child, that is fascinating, but what we will be concerned with is Spakesheare’s purported brainchild, Spamlet. Back to our question: Who is the author of Spamlet? In order to get a grip on this question, we have to look inside and see what happens in Spakesheare. At one extreme, we find inside a file (if Spakesheare is a robot with a computer memory) or a basically memorized version of Spamlet, all loaded and ready to run. In such an extreme case, Dr. Frankenstein is surely the author of Spamlet, using his intermediate creation, Spakeshear’s, as a mere storage-anddelivery device, a particularly fancy word processor. All the R and D work was done earlier, and copied to Spakesheare by one means or another (Dennett 2009, 398–399)

Note that Dennett’s account is strictly third person. Some narratives are written from an ostensibly omniscient point of view; we may be told that a fellow took pleasure in killing his brother and assuming the throne in Denmark. Not so, in this case. Dennett mentions and sets aside as a flock of red herrings: questions about constitution, questions about what makes up 82

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Spakesheare. His focus is only on the mechanism and design that enabled us to observe writing a play. Because of the simplicity of the design, Dennett concludes Spakesheare is not yet a proper, conscious author. But once he introduces other mechanisms in the creature — mechanisms that can do their own research and development — Dennett concludes we have attained a thinking, creative author. He likens the result to the famous chess-playing computer Deep Blue. [Imagine] Dr. Frankenstein . . . delegated to Spakesheare most of the hard work of completing the trajectory in Design Space to one literary work or another, something to be determined by later R and D occurring within Spakesheare itself. We have now arrived, by this simple turn of the knob, in the neighbourhood of reality itself, for we already have actual examples of impressive artificial Authors who Vastly outstrip the foresight of their own creators. Nobody has yet created an artificial playwright worth serious attention, but an artificial chess player — IBM’s Deep Blue — and an artificial composer — David Cope’s EMI — have both achieved results that are, in some respects, equal to the best that human creative genius can muster. (Dennett 2009, 402; emphasis Dennett’s)

Dennett has given us no reason at all to think we have actually arrived at a conscious being. We seem, rather, to have machines that are programmed to behave in accord with intentionally produced programs, but we do not yet have reason to think Spakesheare is actually purposively writing at all. Writing is usually a purposive intentional conscious activity, and seeing a creature-machine “writing” is seeing an instrument simulating but not actually carrying out writing. Dennett does not think that intentionality and agency do any explanatory work qua intentionality and agency: It may seem that I am begging the question in favour of a computational, AI approach by describing the work done by Kasparov’s brain in this way, but the work has to be done somehow, and no other way of getting the work done has ever been articulated. It won’t do to say that Kasparov uses “insight” or “intuition” since that just means that Kasparov himself has no privileged access, no insight, into how the good results come to him. So, since nobody knows how Kasparov’s brain does it — least of all Kasparov — there is not yet any evidence at all to support the claim that Kasparov’s means are “entirely unlike” the means exploited by Deep Blue. One should remember this when tempted to insist that “of course” Kasparov’s methods are hugely different. What on earth could provoke one to go out on a limb like that? Wishful thinking? Fear? (Dennett 2009, 404)

Why is it hollow to invoke things like “insights” and even “intuitions”? Presumably we do know why we reach certain conclusions. To take a simple example, we can explain why when an average person is asked, “What is the smallest perfect number?” the answer given will be 6. A perfect number is a number that is equal to the sum of its divisors including 1, but not 83

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including itself. Our person, Newtonia, will answer 6 because 6 = 1 + 2 + 3, and there is no smaller number that functions as a perfect number. In the case of a conscious person this explanation stands even if (to use Dennett’s style) her body is made of certain proteins, she can reproduce, and so on. So long as Newtonia (or any being) is conscious and understands the axioms of mathematics, she can reach the right conclusion (which can be analyzed as an identity statement 1 + 1 + 1 + 1+ 1 + 1 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1). If Dennett insists this is not an explanation until we appeal to non-intentional processes (“horrid little automata”), then such a demand threatens to undermine reasoning itself. Quarks, Leptons, and so on do not reason. If “the reason” why we reply “6” to the original question is because of unthinking processes, it does not appear that we have undertaken any reasoning at all, for reasoning (by its very nature) involves accepting conclusions in virtue of (or because of) grasping reasons and entailment relations. We believe that reasoning is a genuine process in which subjects draw conclusions based on their understanding of necessary entailments, and this requires a “top-down” causal explanation. That is, the explanation is thoroughly normative and teleological (Reppert 2003, Hasker 2003, Goetz and Taliaferro 2008). Dennett offers a puzzling consolation to creative artists. You might as well think of the natural process that brought into being geniuses as though it was itself intentional! It is important to recognize that genius is itself a product of natural selection and involves generate-and-test procedures all the way down. Once you have such a product, it is no longer particularly perspicuous to view it solely as a cascade of generate-and-test processes. It often makes good sense to leap ahead on a narrative course, thinking of the agent as a self, with a variety of projects, goals, presuppositions, hopes . . . In short, it often makes good sense to adopt the intentional stance towards the whole complex product of evolutionary processes. This effectively brackets the largely unknown and unknowable mechanical microprocesses as well as the history that set them up, and puts them out of focus while highlighting the patterns of rational activity that those mechanical microprocesses track so closely. This tactic makes especially good sense to the creator himself or herself, who must learn not to be oppressed by the revelation that on close inspection, even on close introspection, a genius dissolves into a pack rat, which dissolves in turn into a collection of trial-and-error processes over which nobody has ultimate control. Does this realization amount to a loss — an elimination — of self-hood, of genius, of creativity? Those who are closest to the issue — the artistic and scientific geniuses who have reflected on it — often confront this discovery with equanimity. Mozart is reputed to have said of his best musical ideas: “Whence and how do they come? I don’t know and I have nothing to do with it.” The painter Philip Guston is equally unperturbed by this evaporation of visible self when the creative juices start flowing. (Dennett 2009, 408)

Dennett’s portrayal of creativity, and especially his appeal to Guston, is wide of the mark. In art-making, such as Guston’s painting, physical process is the 84

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necessary vehicle for the mind at work, but it cannot be the final explanation without undermining the idea that there is any creativity at all in art-making. Note here Dennett’s language. “[A] genius dissolves into a pack rat . . .” This is getting rid of the subject. The dissolving is akin to Dennett’s analysis (cited earlier) in which the human subject is likened to a “club” made up of “dumb homunculi.” We may well recognize the existence of clubs (societies, nations, corporations), but such social entities are naturally thought of as projections, legal fictions or conceptual entities, and not the sorts of things that can have feelings, sensations, and thoughts except metaphorically or as a short-hand way of referring to the members of the collective. To say “The University Philosophy Club is unhappy” is not to propose that in addition to its members, there is a thing (the club) that is feeling broodish or feeling anything at all. There is irony (though not an outright contradiction) in Dennett’s appeal to Mozart and Guston to advance his case against irreducibly creative agency. Dennett himself (as we have seen) urges us to treat first-person phenomenology as of little significance (equivalent to making claims about the reality of cuteness), whereas in the above passage he takes Mozart’s and Guston’s first-person phenomenological reports as providing significant evidential support for Dennett’s project. (A closer look at Mozart’s and Guston’s writings or accounts of their working as artists reveals nothing remotely like Dennett’s view that the artist as self is illusory.) Moreover, Dennett’s highly selective use of artistic testimony is suspect given that the methodologies and goals of artists are too diverse to establish some kind of universal general report on self-awareness. In a sense, Dennett’s extensive thought experiment seems to not generate any reasons for accepting his claim to account for consciousness unless you already concede his neo-behaviorism. In support of our conclusion, we note that Dennett explicitly endorses the Turing test: “The Turing test . . . is (as he thought) plenty strong enough as a test of thinking” (Dennett 2004, 297). The Turing test essentially holds that a machine is intelligent if the machine can engage in conversation in a way that makes it indistinguishable from an intelligent human being. “My philosophical conclusion in this paper is that any computer that actually passes the Turing test would be a thinking thing in every theoretically interesting sense” (Dennett 1998, 21). A third case in which Dennett’s eliminativism becomes apparent is in his case against the self. Dennett seems to think that we have a choice between dualism and dissolving the self. Dualism is unacceptable; therefore the self must be dissolved. But, of course, most people have something more in mind when they speak of selfconsciousness. It is that special inner light, that private way that is with you that nobody else can share, something that is forever outside the bounds of computer science. How could a computer ever be conscious in this sense? That belief, that very gripping, powerful intuition is, I think, in the end simply an illusion of common sense. It is as gripping

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as the commonsense illusion that the earth stands still and the sun goes around the earth . . . If you look at a computer — I don’t care whether it’s a giant Cray [supercomputer] or a personal computer — if you open up the box and look inside and see those chips, you say, “No way could that be conscious. No way could that be self-conscious.” But the same thing is true if you take the top of somebody’s skull and look at the gray matter pulsing way in there. You think, “That is conscious? No way could that lump of stuff be conscious.” Of course, it makes no difference whether you look at it with a microscope or with a macroscope: At no level of inspection does a brain look like the seat of consciousness . . . (Dennett 2004, 313)

Dennett further elaborates the problem with recognizing that we are selves: And the trouble with brains, it seems, is that when you look in them, you discover that there’s nobody home. No part of the brain is the thinker that does the thinking or the feeler that does the feeling, and the whole brain appears to be no better a candidate for that very special role. This is a slippery topic. Do brains think? Do eyes see? Or do people see with their eyes and think with their brains? Is there a difference? Is this just a trivial point of “grammar” or does it reveal a major source of confusion? The idea that a self (or a person, or, for that matter, a soul) is distinct from a brain or a body is deeply rooted in our ways of speaking, and hence in our ways of thinking. (Dennett 1991, 29)

Dennett concludes that this “deeply rooted way of speaking” is wrong. He may be seen here as completely reversing William Paley’s design argument. Paley argued that from observing a watch we can reasonably infer that there is a watchmaker. Dennett reverses this and assimilates the watchmaker to a watch, a machine without consciousness. Dennett’s repeated claim on behalf of his position is the problem with any other alternatives, especially the alternative that involves dualism. This fundamentally antiscientific stance of dualism is, to my mind, its most disqualifying feature, and is the reason why in this book I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs. It is not that I think I can give a knock-down proof that dualism, in all its forms, is false or incoherent, but that, given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up. (Dennett 1991, 37)

Specifically, Dennett claims dualism is incompatible with science. No physical energy or mass is associated with [the supposed signals sent from the mind to the brain]. How, then, do they get to make a difference to what happens in the brain cells they must affect, if the mind is to have any influence over the body? A fundamental principle of physics is that any change in the trajectory of any physical entity is an acceleration requiring the expenditure of energy, and where is this energy to come from? It is this impossibility of “perpetual motion machines,” and the same principle is apparently violated by dualism. This confrontation between quite standard physics and dualism has

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been endlessly discussed since Descartes’ own day, and is widely regarded as the inescapable and fatal flaw of dualism. (Dennett 1991, 35)

THE STUBBORN REALITY OF SUBJECTIVE, CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE Dennett’s position is altogether untenable. He does not so much have a crane that builds up an explanatory picture in which we get an authentic case of consciousness, as much as we get a wrecking ball that tears away the self and experience itself. First, note the fact that contra Dennett, the reality of experience is more foundational than the most certain posits of science. Without experience, you cannot have science. Observations, testing, hypothesizing, confirming, and disconfirming are intentional, conscious undertakings. One could not have the concept of electric change or space-time without experience and consciousness. The difficulty with Dennett’s attack on experience comes to the fore when considering Drew McDermott’s defense of Dennett. McDermott thinks that declaring the existence of experience to be basic and indisputable is akin to an insane person declaring he is Jesus Christ. “Suppose a lunatic claims he is Jesus Christ. We explain why his brain chemicals make him think that. But he is not convinced. ‘The fact that I am Jesus is my starting point, a brute explanandum [or a non-further-explainable reality]: explaining why I think this is not sufficient [to undermine or discredit the reality of this basic fact].’ The only difference between him and us is that he can’t stop believing he’s Jesus because he’s insane, whereas we can’t stop believing in phenomenal experience because we’re not” (McDermott 2001, 147). The analogy is flawed because it radically underestimates the role of experience as well as consciousness. One might be able to explain the falsity of one’s belief that one is Jesus Christ, but not unless one has experiences and is conscious. Without consciousness, one cannot have any beliefs at all, either sane or insane, and explanations of or refusals to explain something. Hence, explaining away the basic reality of experience or consciousness is not at all like explaining the falsity of a false belief. As Galen Strawson, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and others have argued Dennett’s neo-behaviorism seems radically wide of the mark. Michael Lockwood comments: Let me begin by nailing my colours to the mast. I count myself a materialist, in the sense that I take consciousness to be a species of brain activity. Having said that, however, it seems to me evident that no description of brain activity of the relevant kind, couched in the currently available languages of physics, physiology, or functional or computational

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roles, is remotely capable of capturing what is distinctive about consciousness. So glaring, indeed, are the shortcomings of all the reductive programmes currently on offer, that I cannot believe that anyone with a philosophical training, looking dispassionately at these programmes, would take any of them seriously for a moment, were it not for a deep-seated conviction that current physical science has essentially got reality taped, and accordingly, something along the lines of what the reductionists are offering must be correct. To that extent, the very existence of consciousness seems to me to be a standing demonstration of the explanatory limitations of contemporary physical science. (Lockwood 2003, 447)

Might it be the case that it only appears we are conscious, but we are not really? As John Searle and Galen Strawson have pointed out, Dennett cannot adopt such a stance safely because when it comes to consciousness, the appearing or seeming is fundamental to consciousness itself. As Searle observes: But someone might object: Is it not possible that science might discover that Dennett was right, that there really are no such things as inner qualitative mental states, that the whole thing is an illusion like sunsets? After all, if science can discover that sunsets are a systematic illusion, why could it not also discover that conscious states such as pains are illusions too? There is this difference: in the case of sunsets science does not deny the existence of the datum, that the sun appears to move through the sky. Rather it gives an alternative explanation of this and other data. Science preserves the appearance while giving us a deeper insight into the reality behind the appearance. But Dennett denies the existence of the data to start with. But couldn’t we disprove the existence of these data by proving that they are only illusions? No, you can’t disprove the existence of conscious experiences by proving that they are only an appearance disguising the underlying reality, because where consciousness is concerned the existence of the appearance is the reality. If it seems to me exactly as if I am having conscious experiences, then I am having conscious experiences. This is not an epistemic point. I might make various sorts of mistakes about my experiences, for example, if I suffered from phantom limb pains. But whether reliably reported or not, the experience of feeling the pain is identical with the pain in a way that the experience of seeing a sunset is not identical with a sunset. (Searle 1997, 111, 112)

Recall John Keat’s lines: “Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine — Unweave a rainbow” (Keats 2004, part II, 229–237). Philosophy (or science) may well reveal that a rainbow is an optical phenomenon brought on by meteorological conditions (the sun shines through water drops at a low altitude angle), but (if Searle is right) it cannot show that there is no such thing as conscious experience. Strawson similarly points out the stubborn reality of conscious experience.

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Dennett has suggested that “there is no such thing [as] . . . phenomenology” and that any appearance of phenomenology is, somehow, wholly the product of some cognitive faculty, the “judgment module” or “semantic intent module” that does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested fact that there really is “phenomenology” . . . It is unclear what Dennett means by “phenomenology,” but whatever he means this move fails immediately if it is taken as an objection to the present claim that we can be certain both that there is experience and that we can’t be radically in error about its nature. It fails for the simple reason that for there to seem to be rich phenomenology or experience just is for there to be such phenomenology or experience. To say that its apparently sensory aspects (say) are in some sense illusory because they are not the cognitive processes, is just to put forward a surprising hypothesis about part of the mechanism of this rich seeming that we call experience or consciousness. It is in no way to put into question its existence or reality. Whatever the process by which the seeming arises, the end result of the process is, as even Dennett agrees, at least this: that it seems as if one is having phenomenally rich experience of Beethoven’s eighth quartet or an Indian wedding. And if there is this seeming, then, once again, there just is phenomenology or experience. (Strawson 2008, 55)

Dennett may reply that the views taken by ourselves, Searle, and Strawson, beg the question, and insist that he is explaining consciousness. But as Strawson points out, this seems to involve Dennett in using the term “consciousness” in a peculiar, unfamiliar sense — a sense which Strawson likens to an Alice in Wonderland sensibility. Dennett conceals this move by looking-glassing the word ‘consciousness’ (his term for experience) and then insisting that he does believe that consciousness exists (to looking-glass a term is to use a term in such a way that whatever one means by it, it excludes what the term means . . .). As far as I can understand them, Dretske, Tye, Lycan, and Rey are among those who do the same. It seems that they still dream of giving a reductive analysis of the experiential in non-experiential terms. This, however, amounts to denying the existence of experience, because the nature of (real) experience can no more be specified in wholly non-experiential terms than the nature of the (real) non-experiential can be specified in wholly experiential terms. (Strawson 2008, 54, 55)

Dennett himself has provided serious reason for thinking he does not (at least in practical circumstances) act and think with skepticism about the self and experience. In a book written to critique religious beliefs (Breaking the Spell) Dennett offers the following anecdote and analysis. One’s parents — or whoever are hard to distinguish from one’s parents — have something approaching a dedicated hotline to acceptance, not as potent as hypnotic suggestion, but sometimes close to it. Many years ago, my five-year-old daughter, attempting to imitate the gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s performance on the horizontal bar, tipped over the piano stool and painfully crushed two of her fingertips. How was I going to calm down this terrified child so I could safely driver her to the emergency room? Inspiration struck: I held my

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own hand near her throbbing little hand and sternly ordered: “Look, Andrea! I’m going to teach you a secret! You can push the pain into my hand with your mind. Go ahead, push! Push!” She tried — and it worked! She’d “pushed the pain” into Daddy’s hand. Her relief (and fascination) were instantaneous. The effect lasted only for minutes, but with a few further administrations of impromptu hypnotic analgesia along the way, I got her to the emergency room, where they could give her the further treatment she needed. (Try it with your own child, if the occasion arises. You may be similarly lucky.) I was exploiting her instincts — though the rationale didn’t occur to me until years later, when I was reflecting on it. (This raises an interesting empirical question: would my attempt at instant hypnosis have worked as effectively on some other five-year-old, who hadn’t imprinted on me as an authority figure? And if imprinting is implicated, how young must a child be to imprint so effectively on a parent? Our daughter was three months old when we adopted her.) . . . (Dennett 2006, 130)

In this anecdote, Dennett does not seem at all skeptical about his own and other people’s subjective experiences. Elsewhere in Breaking the Spell he similarly seems far more sure of his own experiential conscious states (his own first-person point of view), than he does about second or third-person “objective perspectives”: When it comes to interpreting religious avowals of others, everybody is an outsider. Why? Because religious avowals concern matters that are beyond observation, beyond meaningful test, so the only thing anybody can go on is religious behavior, and more specifically, the behavior of professing. A child growing up in a culture is like an anthropologist, after all, surrounded by informants whose professing stand in need of interpretation. The fact that your informants are your father and mother, and speak in your mother tongue, does not give you anything more than a slight circumstantial advantage over the adult anthropologist who has to rely on a string of bilingual interpreters to query the informants. (And think about your own case; weren’t you ever baffled or confused about just what you were supposed to believe? You know perfectly well that you don’t have privileged access to the tenets of faith that you were raised in. I am just asking you to generalize the point, to recognize that others are in no better position.) (Dennett 2006, 239–240)

Now it may be claimed that in the above case Dennett is simply surrendering himself to folk psychology, but it certainly appears he is making a personal and philosophical point that our self-awareness involves reliable (almost privileged) access to one’s own experiential states. Moreover, it seems in the above passages that he is testifying to the reality of selves as real centers of feeling and action. Because of the apparent, overwhelmingly evident reality of experience itself, more modest or broad naturalists attempt to recognize experience as an emergent property or substance. This was Susanne Langer’s strategy.

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WHAT CAN THE CRANE BUILD? The problem of emergence was appreciated by Susanne Langer. She states the problem of emergence in terms of images. We are actually suffering today from the lack of suitable images of the phenomena that are currently receiving our most ardent scientific attention, the objects of biology and psychology. This lack is blocking the progress of scientifically oriented thought toward systematic insight into the nature of life and especially of mind: the lack of any image of the phenomenon under investigation, whereby to measure the adequacy of theories made on the basis of physical models. In borrowing models from physics, one is apt to borrow its image of reality as well; and that image derives from inorganic nature. It is becoming more and more obvious that it does not fit the forms of life very far above the level of their organic chemistry. (Langer 1988, xii, xiii)

Langer aptly captures the problem: the image we have that is anchored in the sciences seems ill suited to accommodate what we know ourselves in experience. Langer’s solution to this problem is, however, vexing. It was the discovery that works of art are images of the forms of feeling, and that their expressiveness can rise to the presentation of all aspects of mind and human personality, which led me to the present undertaking of constructing a biological theory of feeling that should logically lead to an adequate concept of mind, with all that the possession of mind implies. The fact that expressive form is always organic or “living” form made the biological foundation of feeling probable. In the artist’s projection, feeling is a heightened form of life; so any work expressing felt tensions, rhythms and activities expresses their unfelt substructure of vital processes, which is the whole of life. If vitality and feeling are conceived in this way there is no sharp break, let alone metaphysical gap, between physical and mental realities, yet there are thresholds where mentality begins, and especially where human mentality transcends the animal level, and mind, sensu stricto, emerges. (Langer 1988, xiii)

She uses the following strategy: In the first place, the phenomenon usually described as “a feeling” is really that an organism feels something, i.e., something is felt. What is felt is a process, perhaps a large complex of processes, within the organism. Some vital activities of great complexity and high intensity, usually (perhaps always) involving nervous tissue, are felt; being felt is a phase of the process itself. A phase is a mode of appearance, and not an added factor. Ordinarily we know things in different phases as “the same” — ice, water and steam, for instance — but sometimes a very distinctive phase seems like a product. When iron is heated to a critical degree it becomes red; yet its redness is not a new entity which must have gone somewhere else when it is no longer in the iron. It was a phase of the iron itself, at high temperature. Heat is not a thing, but an agitation, measurable in degrees, not amounts, and when the iron is no longer hot there will be comparable degrees of heat, or of some equivalent

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process or sum total of processes, outside the iron. But the redness simply disappears; it was a phase of heated iron. (Langer 1988, 7)

In the Introduction we acknowledged our indebtedness to Susanne Langer for highlighting the vital role that images play in inquiry. Langer has a good sense of the difficulty facing naturalism today. She holds that we lack a unified image of the world by which to bring together the mental and the physical, and she sought to supply an image involving recourse to the way in which vital living forms emerge in the process of artistic activity. Unfortunately, Langer’s proposal is unsatisfactory. We can fully understand how the agitation of iron produces heat insofar as heat is identified as mean kinetic energy. But if we are referring to the feeling of heat, Langer gives us no reason for thinking the feeling itself is molecules in motion. Arguably, molecules in motion are one thing, feelings are another. As Colin McGinn points out: The property of consciousness itself (or specific conscious states) is not an observable or perceptible property of the brain. You can stare into a living conscious brain, your own or someone else’s, and see there a wide variety of instantiated properties — its shape, colour, texture, etc. — but you will not thereby see what the subject is experiencing, the conscious state itself. (McGinn 1990, 10–11)

No inspection of the brain and body reveals its identification with felt, phenomenal experience. Langer seems to think that if we regard the mental (ways of feeling) as the mode of a substance (a human being) there are no problems facing an identity theory. But the problem remains just as obstinate, for modes of feeling seem altogether different from physical modes of the brain or body. The difference between consciousness and non-experiential, non-conscious states is simply too radical to identify the one with the other. All the standard forms of reductions or explanations that broad naturalists use as analogies seem to be utterly different than in the case of consciousness. Different philosophers have proposed that, just as liquidity is emergent upon H2O, and digestion is emergent given certain truths about enzymes and organs, so consciousness is emergent on non-conscious bodily states. But in the case of water one can see that once you grasp the properties of hydrogen and water and know atomic theory you may see that water is composed of H2O. The same is true about digestion or (to take another standard example of supposed emergence) photosynthesis amounting to truths about the parts and functions of plants in the atmosphere. There is nothing more to it. In the case of consciousness and the physical body this is not the case. Naturalists (especially the strict sort) often seek to discount introspection and subjectivity as revealing the nature of reality. In Matter and Consciousness, Paul Churchland argues against the reliability of self-awareness:

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But the argument is deeply suspect, in that it assumes that our faculty of inner observation or introspection reveals things as they really are in their innermost nature. This assumption is suspect because we already know that our other forms of observation — sight, hearing, touch, and so on — do no such thing. The red surface of an apple does not look like a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths, but that is what it is. The sound of a flute does not sound like a sinusoidal compression wave train in the atmosphere, but that is what it is. The warmth of the summer air does not feel like the mean kinetic energy of millions of tiny molecules, but that is what it is. If one’s pains and hopes and beliefs do not introspectively seem like electrochemical states in a neural network, that may be only because our faculty of introspection, like our other senses, is not sufficiently penetrating to reveal such hidden details. (Churchland 1988, 15)

But this is clearly a case of begging the question; the subjective experience of seeing red is not clearly a case of a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain wavelengths. The two phenomena are correlated and while the second is a convincing cause of the experiential seeing, it is another matter to claim that the two are identical. Similarly, the experiential hearing of the flute may be caused by sinusoidal compression wave trains and feeling warm is caused by mean kinetic energy, but identifying the two goes beyond correlation. Arguably, the identifying of the mental with the physical is to conflate correlation and causation with identity. Consider another case of broad naturalism, Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul. On the one hand he seems to be far more generous than Dennett: The scientific image and its proponents no longer accept the restricted role of understanding and explaining our animal “side.” Our animal side is our only side. We are all animal and the brain is our soul. This is not such bad news. There are still persons. Consciousness exists. Love, friendship, and morality all remain. Nothing disappears, save for certain fictions that never existed to begin with. My aim is to provide a naturalistic philosophy of human nature compatible with the scientific image that retains what is beautiful, true, and inspiring in the humanistic image. The project to live morally and meaningfully expresses our most noble aspiration. But this project proceeds inauthentically if it is built, as it now is, on a false picture of the kind of creatures we are. (Flanagan 2002, xv, xvi)

And he seems to explicitly endorse emergence. “Most everyone now believes that there are emergent natural properties that, despite being obedient to the laws of physics are not reducible to the laws of physics” (Flanagan 2002, 217). But in the same book he makes clear that this emergence is fairly weak and does not allow the mental much autonomy to ground free choice. In a discussion of those who have suffered in war, Flanagan writes, “The terrible experiences of war cause brain changes, which cause mental changes, which cause changes in thought, motivation, and behavior . . . The scientific image that regulates psychology assumes ‘supervenience’ of the mental on the physical, that is, any change at the level of experience is due to a change at the level 93

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of the brain” (Flanagan 2002, 255). Most so-called supervenience theories allow causation only from bottom to top, e.g. in this case not vice versa. This appears to run into the same problem that Dennett’s theory faces when it comes to undermining reason. Moreover, we are not given an account of the identity relationship of the physical and mental. He holds that when you are shown a blue object, “the activity in the blue-detection area [of the brain] is the experience of blue . . . Different segments of your nervous system being activated in different ways by different color chips is all there is to your color experiences . . . Each and every event, each and every experience is some physical event or other — presumably some central nervous event” (Flanagan 2002, 87). Flanagan may claim that he does not need to account for this identity (everything is itself, after all), but he does need some way of explaining how your experiencing a blue sky and thinking of your beloved can be the very same thing as a brain process which is neither blue, nor does it appear to be the very same thing as thinking. After all, observing the brain process alone would tell us nothing of the thinking without knowledge of correlation between thought and the brain. This identity of the mental and physical equation is not made any easier by claiming that our mental experiences are merely representations of the world. Of course the same object can be represented in different ways (via different conceptual schemes or names) as when the planet Venus is known as the morning star and the evening star. But in the case of consciousness or subjective experience, what we experience is not a name or framework or concept; we are undergoing actual tactile, visual, auditory (and so on) states. When it comes to the mental, the feeling or appearing (feeling pain or appearing to be dizzy) is the reality itself. It is for this reason that the distinction between what we recognize as mental and physical cannot be a merely epistemological distinction. With respect to physical objects (like the planet Venus), you may know it as “the Morning Star” whereas others may know it as “the Evening Star.” But in the case of the mental, its appearing (how one can experiences and its experiential, subjective state) is its essence. The appearing or experiencing cannot be the very same thing as that which is not appearing or experiencing. Any ostensible identification of the two winds up eliminating the appearing or experiencing or that which is not appearing or experiencing. The positive character of subjective experience has sometimes been articulated in what is known as the knowledge argument. In the argument it is claimed that if the mental is the physical, then if you know the one, you know the other. So, for example, if the hypothesis is that some experiential state (such as seeing red) is the very same thing as brain state S, then if you know all about the brain states you would know the experiential state. In a thought experiment introduced by Frank Jackson (but anticipated by Goethe), we are asked to imagine Mary in a black-and-white lab, and she comes to know all 94

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about the physio-chemical properties of color scientifically (Jackson 1986). One day she leaves the lab and sees a red rose. At that point she seems to learn something new (what it is to see red) she did not know before. Hence, it seems that the mental is not the very same thing as the physical. This use of imagination and its thought experiment is cogent and the attempts to dissipate its force fail (for other positive arguments in the same category as Jackson’s, see Kripke 1972, Nagel 1979, Robinson 1993, Bealer 1994, Chalmers 1996). Philosophers have argued that if, prior to seeing red, Mary knows all physical facts about color then she must also know what it is like to see red. How? She would know the relevant wavelengths and retinal activity, but knowing what red looks like seems something additional. Some claim that upon release Mary does not come to know something new but she develops only a new ability. This also seems weak: if it is a new ability surely it is the ability to know what red looks like. Some claim that the knowledge argument only warrants the thesis that representing seeing red in experiential terms is different from representing it in purely physical terms. But when it comes to experience the appearing (how it feels, looks, tastes, smells, and so on) is the essence of experience itself. When we are in pain we are not in a state in which we entertain a pain representation, we are feeling a certain way (undergoing a painful experience). The physicalist faces a major obstacle in showing how feeling a certain way is just a mentalistic representation or viewpoint on something that could turn out to be no more than brain states. The problem is that feeling a certain way, such as feeling pain, is not about the appearance of something, the feeling itself is the reality; it is what hurts. Dennett’s reply to Jackson’s original argument is perhaps the weakest. He asks us to imagine Mary as a robot (RoboMary) who can induce in herself the phenomenal experience of red based on her knowledge of psycho-physical relations, but even if Mary can do this, the original point still stands: the phenomenal experience of what red looks like appears to be more than the physical facts taken alone (see Dennett 2007; for criticism, see Balog 2008). For an extensive defense of the intrinsic, evident nature of conscious experience, see The Case for Qualia, edited by Edmond Wright. Galen Strawson states the problem of emergence with great clarity. We cite him at length: The emergent character of liquidity relative to its non-liquid constituents does indeed seem shiningly easy to grasp. We can easily make intuitive sense of the idea that certain sorts of molecules are so constituted that they don’t bind together in a tight lattice but slide past or off each other (in accordance with van de Waals molecular interaction laws) in a way that gives rise to — is — the phenomenon of liquidity. So too, with Bénard convection cells we can easily make sense of the idea that physical laws relating to surface tension, viscosity, and other forces governing the motion of molecules give rise to hexagonal patterns on the surface of a fluid like oil when it is heated. In both these cases we move in a small set of conceptually homogeneous shape-size-mass-charge-number-position-motion-involving

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physics notions with no sense of puzzlement. Using the notion of reduction in a familiar loose way, we can say that the phenomena of liquidity reduce without remainder to shapesize-mass-charge-etc. phenomena — I’ll call these “P” phenomena for short, and assume for now that they are, in themselves, utterly non-experiential phenomena. We can see that the phenomenon of liquidity arises naturally out of, is wholly dependent on, phenomena that do not in themselves involve liquidity at all. We can with only a little work suppress our initial tendency to confuse liquidity as it appears to sensory experience (how, we may think, could this arise from individual non-liquid molecules?) with the physical phenomenon of liquidity considered just as such, and see clearly that it is just and wholly a matter of P phenomena . . . But when we return to the case of experience, and look for an analogy of the right size or momentousness, as it were, it seems that we can’t make do with things like liquidity, where we move wholly within a completely conceptually homogeneous (non-heterogeneous) set of notions. We need an analogy on a wholly different scale if we are to get any imaginative grip on the supposed move from the non-experiential to the experiential. What might be an analogy of the right size? Suppose someone — I will call him pseudoBoscovich, at the risk of offending historians of science — proposes that all ultimates, all real, concrete ultimates, are, in truth, wholly unextended entities: that this is the truth about their being; that there is no sense in which they themselves are extended; that they are real concrete entities, but are none the less true-mathematical-point entities. And suppose pseudo-Boscovich goes on to say that when collections of these entities stand in certain (real, concrete, natural) relations, they give rise to or constitute truly, genuinely extended concrete entities; real, concrete extension being in this sense of emergent property of phenomena that are, although by hypothesis real and concrete, wholly unextended. Well, I think this suggestion should be rejected as absurd. But the suggestion that when non-experiential phenomena stand in certain (real, natural, concrete non-experiential) relations they ipso facto instantiate or constitute experiential phenomena, experience being an emergent property of wholly and utterly non-experiential phenomena, seems exactly on par. (Strawson 2008, 61–62, 63)

Strawson’s bold and protean alternative to standard forms of naturalism will be addressed in Chapter 6. Of all the naturalist treatments of consciousness that are in circulation today, we have the most sympathy with John Searle’s account. On the one hand he claims that: “Consciousness is a system-level, biological feature in much the same way that digestion, or growth, or the secretion of bile are system level, biological features” (Searle 2004, 115) and “The brain is an organ like any other” (233). On the other hand, he also claims: Consciousness is such a stunning and mysterious phenomenon that one always feels that the very effort to describe it in ordinary words somehow is not only bound to fail, but the very effort reveals a failure of sensibility. The general character of the relation of consciousness to the brain, and thus the general solution of the mind-body problem is not hard to state: consciousness is caused by microlevel processes in the brain and realized in the brain as higher-level or system feature. But the complexity of the structure itself, and the precise

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nature of the brain processes involved remains unanalyzed by this characterization. We are tempted to trivialize consciousness by thinking of it as just one aspect of our lives; and, of course, biologically speaking, it is just one aspect, but as far as our actual life experiences are concerned consciousness is the very essence of our meaningful existence. If Descartes had not already destroyed the meaning of the sentence we could say ‘the essence of mind is consciousness’. (Searle 2004, 157–158)

There is no formal contradiction involved in these claims. On the one hand, consciousness, like certain other properties, is a higher-level or system feature. On the other hand, consciousness is the very essence of mind and personal identity. Searle writes: “The relation of consciousness to brain processes is like the relation of the solidity of the piston to the molecular behavior of the metal alloys, or the liquidity of a body of water to the molecular behavior of the H2O molecules” (Searle 2004, 208). But in each of these cases (as we have noted earlier), the conception of the one simply is the conception of the other. Water is a case of straightforward composition. But the advent of consciousness is nothing like “straightforward composition,” and Searle seems to recognize this when he defends Chalmers’ so-called zombie argument (see Chalmers 1996). The zombie argument states that if functionalism, which analyzes mental life in terms of bodily functions, is true there could not be beings that satisfied a behavioral, functional account of consciousness and yet there not be consciousness. The zombie argument is pitted against the thesis that there is a non-contingent, necessary relationship between the mental and physical. If functionalism is right, you cannot have two identical physical beings and these beings differ in terms of mental states. But, so it is argued by Chalmers, there could be a being that met such conditions. Daniel Dennett . . . [objects to the zombie argument] with the following analogy. Suppose someone said that there are iron bars that behave in all respects exactly like magnets but are not magnets, they are zagnets. Such a thing is inconceivable, because, says Dennett, zagnets would just be magnets. Analogously a machine that behaves in all respects like a conscious agent is conscious. Zagnets are magnets and zombies are conscious agents. The analogy does not work. A suitable description of a magnet will entail that it is a magnet, but no third-person description of a physical system will entail that it has conscious states because there are two different phenomena, the third-person behavioral, functional neurobiological structures and the first-person conscious experience. (Searle 2004, 102–103)

This reply is sound. And if it is justified to believe that it is metaphysically possible for there to be the bodily life of a person but not the person (and hence no consciousness, experience, and so on) then it is justified to believe that the bodily life of a person is not the very same thing as the person him or herself (and thus not the same thing as conscious and experiential states). 97

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While Searle’s form of naturalism is attractive (he at least acknowledges the full-blown reality of consciousness) his identification of consciousness with brain processes is problematic. We suggest that the following analysis of the current state of play in philosophy of mind is spot on. According to Thomas Nagel: The concepts of physical science provide a very special, and partial, description of the world that experience reveals to us. It is the world with all subjective consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will left out; what remains is the mathematically describable order of things and events in space and time. That conceptual purification launched the extraordinary development of physics and chemistry that has taken place since the seventeenth century. But reductive physicalism turns this description into an exclusive ontology. The reductionist project usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical (e.g., behavioral or neurophysiological) terms, but it denies reality to what cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed — that conscious experience, thought, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts. (Nagel 2010, 25, 26)

THE PERSISTENT QUARRELS WITH DUALISM Part of the strict and broad naturalist approach to consciousness and the self is predicated on the conspicuous unacceptability of what is known as dualism. So far we have avoided the term, though we have maintained an important tenet of dualism: the non-identity of consciousness and physical bodily states and processes. In the next chapter the term “integrative dualism” is employed to map out a form of dualism that recognizes the functional unity of the person–body relationship and yet recognizes a metaphysical distinction between person and body. But for now we will make seven points in rapid succession. First, the name “dualism” is almost hopelessly tied up with what critics think of as a misogynist, vicious bifurcation in which bodily life is degenerated (see, for example, McFague 2008). Nothing of the sort is implied by the simple thesis that a person is not strictly speaking identical with his or her body. So, the mere fact that someone claims a person is or contains nonphysical reality (soul or mind) implies nothing debasing as far as the body or embodiment is concerned. Second, dualism is sometimes linked to the idea that the mind or soul is not subject to the laws of nature. According to a standard textbook: in dualism “the mind is not subject to the laws of the physical universe; it is not governed by the laws of biology, chemistry, or physics” (Cunningham 2000, 2). This is misleading. Most dualists claim there are psycho-physical laws that capture 98

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the relevant causal powers involved in thinking, feeling, acting, re-acting, and so on. Few, if any, dualists have thought mental-physical interaction was completely random or that embodied persons are not subject to physicalchemical laws (the law of gravity and so on). Dualists almost always insist there is more to embodiment and agency than physical-chemical processes but this is not the same as claiming the mind is somehow floating above the body. Third, dualism is accused of not making any sense in terms of causal interaction. How can something nonphysical interact with the physical? Dennett, as cited earlier, thinks dualism runs afoul of the law of the conservation of energy. In reply, physicists today recognize that there can be causal relations without an exchange of energy. The law does not state or specify what kinds of energy are conserved or involved, and the dualist is in no worse a position than the physicalist who thinks persons feel, think, and act. After all, if persons can do these things and energy is transferred in the process, why should dualism face any difficulty not faced by the physicalists? David Rosenthal’s assessment of dualism in light of the conservation of energy is radically different from Dennett’s: Although the character of physics underlies one major argument, a specific principle of physics is sometimes thought to show that dualism is wrong. That principle states that in a closed physical system (that is, closed to other physical systems) the total energy remains constant. But if mental events are nonphysical, then, when mental events cause bodily events, physical motion occurs uncaused by anything physical. And that, it seems, would result in an increase in the total energy in the relevant closed physical system. Mental causation of bodily events would conflict with the principle of the conservation of energy. No such problem arises, even if dualism is true, when bodily events cause mental events. When bodily events cause mental events, presumably they cause other physical events as well, which enables energy to be conserved . . . But [also,] the dualist need not adopt the unintuitive idea that mental events never cause bodily events. Conservation of energy dictates only that the energy in a closed physical system is constant, not also how that energy is distributed within the system. Since mental events could effect bodily changes by altering that distribution of energy, the conservation principle does not preclude minds having bodily effects. (Rosenthal 1998; see also Collins 2008)

And if dualists attribute basic powers to persons (powers that are not explained by further causal substrate), physical causal powers are often recognized by naturalists as basic. Keith Parsons writes: Of course, the powers and liabilities of one body may be explained in terms of the powers and liabilities of the constituent bodies and those in turn by even more fundamental entities. Presumably, though, rock bottom is eventually reached. At present, rock bottom would be the powers and liabilities of such entities as quarks and electrons . . . To say that there

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is no explanation of why a quark, given that it is a fundamental particle, has the powers and liabilities that it has, seems tantamount to saying that there is no explanation for why a quark is a quark. Surely anything with different powers and liabilities would not be a quark. (Parsons 1989, 91–92)

If physicalistic naturalists can attribute basic powers to physical objects, why cannot the dualist recognize persons as having basic powers? Fourth, dualism is sometimes described as claiming the mind or soul is separate from the body. This is, again, misleading. Many (but not all) dualists claim the person (or mind or soul) can separate from the body at death, but they claim that under healthy conditions a person functions as a psychophysical unity. Fifth, dualism is frequently accused of being anthropocentric (humancentered) and in conflict with evolution. Suzanne Cunningham writes: A further difficulty for Substance Dualism arises from evolutionary considerations. If it is the case that human beings are the product of a long evolutionary history — and there is abundant evidence that this is the case — and if evolutionary processes are natural physical processes substance could come into being. Some religious groups have responded that the soul or mind is a direct creation of God for each individual human being. Such a response, however, is not without its problems. If God exists and is the source of the laws governing evolution, one wonders why the human mind would have to be treated as an exception to the process. Furthermore, many nonhuman animals appear to have some mental states not all that dissimilar to those of human beings, yet no one argues that they must have nonphysical souls or minds. (I should note here that Descartes believed that nonhuman animals do not have any mental states at all; he considered them to be purely mechanical systems.) (Cunningham 2000, 10)

In this chapter, we believe it is difficult for naturalists to account for the emergence of consciousness. Most dualists today believe at least some animals (even most vertebrate mammals) are indeed conscious or have beliefs and feelings so there is no essential anthropocentrism with dualism per se. There is a statement on dualism from an evolutionary perspective by one of the most prominent dualists working today. In The Evolution of the Soul. Richard Swinburne writes: Men evolved from apes, and apes from more primitive animals, and the primitive animals evolved from the soup of inanimate atoms which consolidated to form the Earth some four thousand million years ago. Although there is much uncertainty about the exact stages and mechanisms involved, the fact of evolution is evident. Even more evident, to my mind, is the fact that what has evolved is different, radically and qualitatively, from that from which it has evolved. Rocks and rivers are not conscious; they do not have thoughts, sensations, and purposes; but men, and some animals, do have thoughts, sensations, and purposes. And having a thought or a sensation or a purpose is not just having some physico-chemical

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event occur inside one of greater complexity than the physico-chemical events which occur in rocks and rivers. It is not the same sort of thing at all. The mental life of thought, sensation, and purpose may be caused by physico-chemical events in the brain, but it is something quite different from those events: it is rich in inbuilt colour, smell, and meaning. The process of evolution so rearranged the atoms and molecules as to bring about creatures with a life of conscious experience, which is something altogether new in the history of the universe. (Swinburne 1986, 1)

Evolutionary history must include the recognition that when conscious experience came to be, there arose a radically new reality. We believe that the best account of the evolution of consciousness lies in the creativity of God. This need not involve envisaging God making multiple distinct individual acts of creation; it may instead be part of God’s general will that consciousness — conscious subjects come into being when physical organisms evolve with certain structures and constitution. This may be called theistic evolution. It is important to appreciate that by invoking theism in the account of the evolution of consciousness, we are not claiming that consciousness is somehow a miracle. In standard usage, a miracle is an act of God that brings about an event that would not otherwise, given the laws of nature. So, the resurrection of Christ (if it occurred) would be a miracle for if only the current laws of nature had prevailed Christ would not have been resurrected. If God wills that consciousness (or persons or minds) come into being when there is such and such an organic base, the appearance of consciousness under these circumstances would be a law of nature. Would such a theistic account be scientific or subject to empirical scrutiny? No, it would be a philosophical account. The fact (assuming it is a fact) that God wills the reality of consciousness is no more an empirically tested claim than the claim that God sustains the cosmos in being. But note, too, a naturalist theory that consciousness is identical to brain activity is not itself an empirically testable claim. Even the establishment of the exception-less correlation of consciousness and brain activity would not establish that the two are identical. Although our proposed terminology is unlikely to become standard usage, we believe it would be useful to use the term naturalistic evolution to refer to accounts of the emergence of consciousness-conscious subjects in an either strict or broad naturalistic framework in contrast to theistic evolution, and to simply use the term evolution in a way that is neutral with respect to theism and naturalism. So, a working scientist with no deep metaphysical interests may be said to engage in evolutionary biology without this implying she is a (metaphysical) naturalist or theist. Finally, there is a widespread assumption that physicalism has triumphed absolutely as the only serious position in philosophy of mind. In The Future for Philosophy, Jaegwon Kim claims “there is no credible alternative to physicalism as a general worldview” and that all that is left is a “mopping up operation” tying up a few loose ends. (Kim 2006, 145, 146). But if this is so, 101

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why has there been a remarkable increase in extensive defenses of dualism as in John Foster’s The Immaterial Self, Stewart Goetz’s Freedom, Teleology, and Evil, W. D. Hart’s The Engines of the Soul, William Hasker’s The Emergent Self, Daniel Robinson’s Consciousness and Mental Life, Howard Robinson’s Objections to Physicalism, Richard Swinburn’s The Evolution of the Soul, Charles Taliaferros’ Consciousness and the Mind of God, Peter Unger’s All the Power in the World, and so on. Interestingly enough, the entries for “dualism” in the prestigious reference philosophy works today (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, second edition of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy) are all quite positive.

REVISITING THE SKYHOOK AND CRANE The way Dennett and Dawkins image theism and naturalism is deeply problematic. The very idea that theism is akin to a skyhook is to evoke a tradition of picturing the gods floating over us on clouds. Appealing to teleological or mind-first explanations need not be seen as hanging in the air. Think, instead, of two foundations for the evolving or development of some phenomena (life, consciousness): in one case the foundation has been and is intentionally and purposively upheld, whereas in the second there is no intentional, purposive foundation. We might actually imagine the work of two cranes along the lines of theism versus naturalism. In both cases you have the crane working in a highly complex cosmos requiring just the right balance of gravity, the weak force, the electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. If gravity did not exist, there would be no crane because there would be no stars or planets. There would be no chemistry if electromagnetic force did not exist. The crane is a contingent object. In the naturalist scheme, there is no deeper account of why there is a crane at all rather than no cosmos, and no comprehensive account as to why all the elements and laws should be as they are. This re-picturing of theism versus naturalism is a fairer representation of what separates these two great worldviews.

THE COSMIC QUESTION, EMERGENCE, AND IMAGINING DESIGN Couldn’t it be that our very potential for seeing or recognizing design is based on our everyday perceptual experiences, from birth on, of the naturally occurring patterns and compositions of the natural world? Has our definition of design developed out of the powers of our observations of actual order and patterns that constitute our common understanding of design: i.e. the scattered array of stars that fills the night sky, the branching of trees, the constant feature of the horizon? In other words, design is a feature of the universe that has helped make coherence an observable quality of the universe, rather than 102

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our invention or inference of the idea of design that we have (supposedly) imposed on what are really “undersigned” things in the natural world. Design is design regardless of how it got there. Del Ratzsch offers a concise account of this explanation in examining the philosopher Thomas Reid’s theory of design: “According to the usual (non-Reidian) account of design recognition, we observe (and participate in) the coming into existence of humanly designed artifacts, and by some type of abstraction we notice certain commonalities among them. We infer that these constitute generally reliable marks of design, and we then attempt to inductively extend this generality to things in nature, thereby identifying relevant things as also designed. Reid, however, suggests a different story. To begin with, for Reid, the primary sense of design applies not to designed objects, but to minds” (Ratzsch 2003, 127). In the next chapter we pair up and compare the way we seem to recognize both design and other minds. Our subject matter in this chapter and the next is suffused with images and the philosophical exercise of imagination. Strict naturalists like Dennett begin with a third-person, mindless view of the cosmos and then blockade any importing of qualia and substantial selves. One alternative is to begin with what appears to be most certain: the existence of conscious experiences, our sense of being a self, and the like. Daniel N. Robinson underscores the basic reality of lived experience. Interestingly, Robinson sees this recognition as aesthetic: The phenomenology of lived life is not theoretical. It just is what it is. It is not to be explained by way of laws more fundamental than this very phenomenology, for the basic reason that the phenomenology is itself the most fundamental level of explanation. The arena within which psychological theories compete for acceptance is, when all is said and done, a cognitive and cultural arena. Whether one account is more economical than another is a matter that appeals at the level of aesthetics — the level of judgment, where what is judged are dimensions that go well beyond the merely quantitative. It is in this respect that the foundational science, so to speak, of human nature, just is Folk Psychology. That it must be refined through criticism and analysis there is no doubt. The methods and perspectives of science must always figure in that criticism and analysis. But these methods and perspectives are themselves cultural artifacts. Accordingly, they, too, require criticism and analysis. In the end, the relationship between an authentic science of human nature and the physical sciences is not one of causality, but of dialectic. (Robinson 2008)

Robinson rightly points out the dialectical relationship between science and first-person awareness. “Folk Psychology” should be subject to scientific inquiry, but not one that leads one to conclude there are no first-person experiences or selves. The theistic image of the natural world seems to vindicate what we experience as subjective, conscious beings. Theism does not have to account for the origin of consciousness for, in a sense, theism holds that consciousness (the 103

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mind of God) has no origin. The emergence of created consciousness from a theistic point of view, involves the Creator willing into being a myriad of experiencing subjects in the space-time universe of mass and energy, replete with psychophysical laws. Theism sees the natural world as good (a claim we will critically review in Chapter 5) and teleological (its goodness is part of the reason why the world is created and sustained in being). The contrary, nonteleological image of nature stands in sharp contrast. This contrast is brought to the fore by Thomas Nagel’s effective sketch of a modern form of naturalism. The starkness of naturalism is evident in the image of nature he describes. At the core of naturalism, meaning and mind are cast shadows of a meaningless process. This picture differs from the theistic image in which goodness and purpose are at the very center of reality: The profoundly nonteleological character of this modern form of naturalism is concealed by the functional explanations that fill evolutionary accounts of the characteristics of living organisms. But any reference to the function or survival value of an organ or other feature is shorthand for a long story of purposeless mutations followed, because of environmental contingencies, by differential reproductive fitness — survival of offspring or other relatives with the same genetic material. It is in the most straightforward sense false that we have eyes in order to see and a heart to pump the blood. Darwinian natural selection could be compatible with teleology if the existence of DNA had the purpose of permitting successive generations of organisms to adapt through natural selection to changes in the environment — but that, of course, is not the naturalistic conception. That conception, far from offering us a sense of who we are, dissolves any sense of purpose or true nature that we may have begun with. The meaning of organic life vanishes in the meaninglessness of physics, of which it is one peculiar consequence. It is widely thought that, without knowing the details, we now have every reason to believe that life arose from a lifeless universe, in virtue of the basic laws of particle physics or string theory or something of the kind, which did not have life or us “in mind.” (Nagel 2010, 15, 16)

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Galapagos Cactus War no. 24

CHAPTER 4

Seeing into Other Minds Since the human intellect is naturally delighted with every species of imitation, that species in particular, which exhibits its own image, which displays and depicts those impulses, inflexions, perturbations, and secret emotions, which it perceives and knows in itself, can scarcely fail to astonish and to delight above every other. (Robert Lowth, trans. G. Gregory, 1847, cited by Abrams 1953, 77) Lowth . . . is notable for conceiving the poem as a mirror which instead of reflecting nature, reflects the very pentralia of the poet’s secret mind. (Abrams 1953, 77)

In the last chapter we observed the apparent reality of consciousness and the challenge that naturalism faces in accounting for the very being of the cosmos and the emergence of consciousness. This chapter begins with general observations on the nature of self-awareness, employing the mirror. It then moves to an exploration of different images or accounts of animal minds. Our goal is to compare accounts of encountering animal minds and what may be called the mind of God. In bringing together the divine and created minds, we are following a path laid out by Alvin Plantinga in his important book God and Other Minds. Plantinga argued that the philosophical case for theism was on a par with the philosophical case for recognizing other human minds. We, instead, inquire into nonhuman animal minds and compare that with the case for theism. As part of this inquiry, we highlight the fact that our life with other persons and animals is not a value-free affair. It is, instead, shot through with ethical, aesthetic, and other normative values. Is theism or naturalism better placed to describe and explain such values? A minor point about terminology: we sometimes use the term “animals” below to refer to “nonhuman animals.” We do so for reasons of simplicity and style, fully recognizing that humans are animals. Before we turn to animal minds, consider a phenomenological exploration of the role of mirrors and mirror images in the development of personal identity.

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THE MIRROR AS WORLD The significance of the mirroring surface and its reflection is found across cultures; it spans the aboriginal, the classical, and the postmodern world. Reflections and mirrors enlarge the world mathematically, but reflections also have a psychological dimension and magnitude. Gazing at a reflection of a room in a mirror captivates the imagination and creates a mental puzzle that is the wellspring of renewal, reverie, enchantment, and a mysterious phenomenon. Attending to what you see reflected in the mirror, which in fact is an image of the very room you are sitting in, creates the strange sensation of its being more real than the physical space around you. The mirrored image functions as a world you can enter; it transcends mere reflection — the physical interaction of light and surface, and in the imagination becomes a door to a world that is experienced as more sensible, more tangible, more electric and alive. Is the experience of inserting oneself into the reflected world simply a projection? One could argue that it is just an illusion and therefore a mere wish or desire — a projection of what Coleridge would call a fancy rather than a proper exercise of imagination. And to some extent it is a projection, but the projection is what informs us of what is needed, what is absent and what could constitute fulfillment. So the experience of seeing in the mirror a reality that is more realized, more luminous than the reality around oneself, is a quickening of the promise of at-one-ment. The reflected image sets up a kind of sonority — a visual percussive. The mirrored image is not indistinguishable from what one observes without the mirror, but the mirrored image is an intensification of what it is mirroring. It is accessed or entered by the mind itself, and only embodied or felt or recognized by mind. There is a recovery of intimacy with the natural world through engaging in reflections. The reflection allows us to bind ourselves to the world with more self-awareness and intentionality. The reflection acts as a subtle affirmation, as if we are being acknowledged for seeing something from another’s point of view. The significance of reflections does not stop with our private experience either; political and moral agendas are advanced and deterred in accordance with the values we mirror to each other. The face of the world being reflected is an affirmation. Reflected in water, mirror, glass, it doesn’t matter. It affirms the viewer who now sees the world in two places; the image is one of our signals, reminders, of wholeness. Do we go to reflections because they teach us how to see? Are they operating like another mind that is open to our observations on what it is to see? The mirrored image is a visual proposition of imagination itself. Your familiar surroundings, often acknowledged with self-conscious awareness only intermittently in the course of tending to whatever task you are involved in, are suddenly made enticingly new in the mirrored image. You enter this alternative world (the mirror image) mentally. You are already in the space physically (the one re-presented in the mirror), you see yourself in two places 108

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at once. Perhaps this is where the sonority or echo comes in. The image is recognizable but parameters are unknown (the world beyond what is pictured). You are drawn to imagine what lies beyond or behind the image you can see. This heightened sense of vividness that attends the reflected image is a kind of idealization. Does imagination, as Coleridge thought, idealize as a matter of course or necessity? If imagination does idealize, then our mental activity of future planning, propositions, self-reflection, is always moving in that direction. Perhaps we are always idealizing in this sense. Even to imagine an act of evil or wrongdoing, we choose our ideal image, not in the sense of choosing the “best” of all possible examples, but in each example we attempt to create an ideal whole picture of our example. The mirror is also a helpful device to illustrate the way we develop selfcriticism and moral self-evaluation. In “The child’s relation to others,” Merleau-Ponty writes: To recognize his image in the mirror is for him to learn that there can be a viewpoint taken on him . . . I am no longer what I felt myself, immediately, to be . . . I leave the reality of my lived me in order to refer myself constantly to the ideal, fictitious, or imaginary me, of which the specular image is the first outline. In this sense I am torn from myself, and the image in the mirror prepares me for another still more serious alienation, which will be the alienation by others. (1964, 136)

Mirroring each other’s values and practices help us build up our powers of self-observation and evaluative proficiencies. Not everyone has appreciated as such thinking about mirrors, reflections and their power. Richard Rorty, in the 1970s and 80s led an attack on imaging philosophical inquiry as a kind of mirroring of the world. Rorty set out to diminish the utility or role of the images of a mirror in his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. He is highly critical of the philosophical tradition that believes our minds can be depended on to reflect or mirror a picture of reality that corresponds with any truth about reality. For Rorty, justification and matters of knowledge must be conceived of in terms of agreement with the beliefs of one’s social community. One is justified in believing that P [some proposition] if and only if one has engaged in the social practice of showing that one’s belief that P sustains appropriate relations to the other beliefs supported by the “epistemic authority” of one’s social community. (Rorty 1979, 186)

Rorty went on to develop an account of justification that is informed by pragmatism (self-described pragmatists differ in assessing his fidelity to that tradition) and eschews the task of philosophy of being able to provide an external critique of social practices.

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If we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature, we will not be likely to envisage a metapractice which will be the critique of all possible forms of social practice. (Rorty 1979, 171)

A full response to Rorty is not possible here, though later in this chapter reasons are advanced for thinking him mistaken in this. Three brief challenges to Rorty, however, may be registered here. First, Paul Moser and others have argued convincingly that the justification of our beliefs lies in first-person experience (“non-propositional experiences”) as opposed to social traditions (Moser 1989). Our perceptual and sensory experience confers evidence on our beliefs even when such beliefs are in conflict with the prevailing social tradition. Second, one cannot even begin to recognize one’s social practice unless one has prior trust in one’s own cognitive faculties. Trusting one’s own cognitive powers seems antecedent to even being able to identify social traditions (Zagzebski 2006). Third, it certainly appears that Rorty himself engages in a “metapractice” as he is offering a critique of all possible forms of social practice, claiming that none of the beliefs that are part of these social practices can mirror the world (or, simply stated, be true). He may claim to jettison “the world-picture picture” and substitute in its place culturally relevant conversation, but this seems to be a contradictory (and not merely ironic) state of affairs. Rorty appears to be advancing a world picture that he believes matches the world as it is. One more troubling point: Rorty now recommends the world picture as conversation. Taking such a stance also seems inherently unstable in his opposition to realist truth claims; what if all the culturally relevant conversations are serious inquiries into the nature of consciousness, values, freedom, and the truth or falsehood of theism and naturalism? Ironically, the mirror is conveniently employed by Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, when he advocates its rhetorical use in advancing our philosophical stances over against our opponents: There is no “normal” philosophical discourse which provides common commensurating ground for those who see science and edification as, respectively, “rational” and “irrational” . . . If there is no common ground, all we can do is to show how the other side looks from our own point of view. That is, all we can do is be hermeneutic about the opposition — trying to show how the odd or paradoxical or offensive things they say hang together with the rest of what they want to say, and how what they say looks when put in our own alternative idiom. (Rorty 1979, 364–365).

Rorty’s own outlook thus preserves a place for mirroring, and it is difficult not to see this as common ground, normal and rational: in forming a view of some state of affairs, try to see it from all relevant points of view. Rorty’s thesis is presented as true and not just from his point of view. If it was only from his 110

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point of view, why should Rorty think it should carry any weight whatsoever from someone who denies it from her point of view? Let us now consider the status of animal minds and then, eventually, the divine mind.

DOUBTING ANIMAL MINDS We seem to be in a bind when it comes to assessing animal minds. (As a matter of terminology, we treat “animal minds” as a reference to the mental states of animals, states that may include consciousness, beliefs, feelings, and so on.) We systematically study animal behavior and anatomy, but the resources of both can be limiting. Much animal behavior is certainly describable in intentional terms involving pleasure and pain, boredom and curiosity, and so on. In some cases, we have instances of what appears to be language or at least holophrastic communication: some animals can signal others about danger, appetites, needs, and desires. Some animal behavior seems to explicitly reveal self-awareness as in case studies in which animals recognize their reflections in mirrors. Monkeys and dolphins have performed mirror self-recognition (what researchers refer to as MSR). We can also study animal brains and central state nervous systems. Analogies or resemblances to human brains can provide some grounds for attributing consciousness to some nonhuman animals. Notwithstanding the great wealth of information on behavior and anatomy, it still remains contentious to attribute consciousness to animals. There is some evidence that we ourselves can engage in intentional (or at least purposive) activities without self-consciousness or higher-order thoughts. A so-called higher-order thought is a thought about thought(s). So, someone might know that (for example) there is a ball in the room but not know that she knows it; the subject simply lacks reflexive self-awareness. The question then arises: if we can engage in problem-solving, routinized motion, and language acquisition without conscious (or at least without self-consciousness) or higher-order thoughts, could it be that animals lack consciousness or higherorder thoughts? Ockham’s razor seems to favor not positing such additional mental phenomena unless the evidence compels us. (For a good guide to the study of animal behavior and cognition, see the Oxford Companion to Consciousness entries: “Animal consciousness,” “Animal consciousness: dolphins,” “Animal consciousness: great apes,” “Animal consciousness: ravens,” and “Animal metacognition and consciousness.”) Peter Carruthers is representative of those who deny animal consciousness on the grounds that animals lack higher-order thoughts. In Language, Thought, and Consciousness, Carruthers writes: In order to think about your own thoughts, or your own experiences, you have to possess the concepts of thought and experience. And these get their life and significance from being

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embedded in a folk-psychological theory of the structure and functioning of the mind. So in the case of any creature to whom it is implausible to attribute a theory of mind — and I assume that this includes most animals and young infants — it will be equally implausible to suppose that they engage in conscious thinking . . . If animals (or most animals) lack higher-order thoughts, then by the same token they will lack conscious experiences. For there will be just as little reason to believe that they are capable of thinking about their own experiences, as such. If true, this conclusion may have profound implications for our moral attitudes towards animals and animal suffering. (Carruthers 1996, 221)

On this view, animals (and human infants) may display discriminatory, purposive behavior and yet not be conscious selves. How might one discover whether Carruthers (or others who deny animal consciousness) is right or not? When we look at and interact with animals, are we encountering other minds? To appreciate the difficulty involved and bring to light why there are such deep difficulties with behaviorism and other frameworks, which deny consciousness as a real, intrinsic state, consider again Daniel Dennett, but this time regarding his view of animals. In the following passage, Dennett seems quite open to recognizing that some animals are conscious, though it appears Dennett uses the term “conscious” in what Strawson considers a “looking-glass” sense. By way of background to the passage cited below, Dennett is critiquing Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, “What is it like to be a bat.” Nagel claimed that bats are likely to have experiential, subjective states and yet no detailed, third-person account of bats (behavior and anatomy) will capture the experiential states or “what it’s like to be a bat.” Dennett replies to Nagel’s project: One of the rhetorical peculiarities of Nagel’s paper is that he chose bats, and went to the trouble to relate a few of the fascinating facts about bats and their echolocation, because, presumably, those hard-won, third-person-perspective scientific facts tell us something about bat consciousness. What? First and least, they support our conviction that bats are conscious. (He did not write a paper called “What is it Like to be a Brick?”). Second, and more important, they support his contention that bat consciousness is very unlike ours. The rhetorical peculiarity — if not outright inconsistency — of his treatment of the issue can be captured by an obvious question: if a few such facts can establish something about bat consciousness, would more such facts not establish more? He has already relied on “objective, third-person” scientific investigation to establish (or at least render rationally credible) the hypothesis that bats are conscious, but not in just the way we are. Why wouldn’t further such facts be able to tell us in exactly what ways bats’ consciousness isn’t like ours, thereby telling us what it is like to be a bat? What kind of fact is it that only works for one side of an empirical question? (Dennett 1998, 339)

But unless one already accepts Dennett’s neo-behaviorism, why think that a third-person perspective can settle the matter for someone like Carruthers who overtly claims that animals like bats lack consciousness? All the imaginable 112

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third-person accounts of bat sonar, eating and mating habits, brain activity and central state nervous system will not amount to our being able to knowingly attribute consciousness to bats. We encounter here the problem uncovered in Chapter 3 between first-person and third-person points of view. From a third-person perspective, first-person experiences are not observable. While Dennett appears to be arguing in a way that would undermine Carruthers (because Dennett is recognizing that bats and other animals are what he calls “conscious”), animal minds for Dennett turn out to be on a par with computer minds. In what follows he seems to allow — true to his overall philosophy reviewed in Chapter 3 — only third-person, behavioral evidence and to shun the idea that more might be involved when it comes to consciousness. The fact is that we all do rely, without hesitation, on “third-person” behavioral evidence to support or reject hypotheses about the consciousness of animals. What else, after all, could be the source of our “pre-theoretical intuitions”? But these intuitions in themselves are an untrustworthy lot, much in need of reflective evaluation. For instance, do you see “sentience” or “mere discriminatory reactivity” in the Venus Fly Trap, or in the amoeba, or in the jellyfish? What more than mere discriminatory reactivity — the sort of competence many robots exhibit — are you seeing when you see sentience in a creature? It is, in fact, ridiculously easy to induce powerful intuitions of not just sentience but full-blown consciousness (ripe with malevolence or curiosity or friendship) by exposing people to quite simple robots made to move in familiar mammalian ways at mammalian speeds. Cog, a delightfully humanoid robot being built at MIT, has eyes, hands, and arms that move the way yours do — swiftly, relaxedly, compliantly . . . Even those of us working on the project, knowing full well that we have not even begun to program the high level processes that might arguably endow Cog with consciousness, get an almost overwhelming sense of being in the presence of another conscious observer when Cog’s eyes still quite blindly and stupidly follow one’s hand gestures. Once again, I plead for symmetry: when you acknowledge the power of such elegant, lifelike motions to charm you into an illusion, note that it ought to be an open question, still, whether you are also being charmed by your beloved dog or cat or the noble elephant. Feelings are too easy to provoke for them to count for much here. (Dennett 1998, 339–340)

Dennett’s position can be turned around. He seems to acknowledge there actually is a difference between a fully conscious computer or animal (or any creature of any kind), even if there is no way we can determine consciousness from the outside (from a third-person point of view). After all, it seems Dennett claims Cog is not conscious (“Cog’s eyes still blindly and stupidly follow one’s hand gestures”) even though Dennett and others “get an almost overwhelming sense of being in the presence of another observer.” Be that as it may, Dennett also seems to reject skepticism about other animal minds (the thesis that we may never know the minds of animals) a priori (in principle). In response to someone who may (with resignation) claim not to know whether 113

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some animals are conscious (maybe some animals are conscious, maybe not), Dennett writes: How, though, could we ever explore these “maybes”? We could do so in a constructive, anchored way by first devising a theory that concentrated exclusively on human consciousness — the one variety about which we will brook no “maybes” or “probablys” — and then look and see which features of that account apply to which animals, and why. There is plenty of work to do, which I will illustrate with a few examples — just warm-up exercises for the tasks to come. (Dennett 1998, 334; emphasis Dennett’s)

Amid the warm-up exercises, there is one that we think displays the deeply problematic nature of Dennett’s project. I once watched with fascination and, I must admit, disgust while hundreds of vultures feasted on a rotting elephant carcass in the hot sun of a June day in Kenya. I found the stench so overpowering that I had to hold my nose and breath through a kerchief to keep from gagging, all the time keeping my distance, but there were the vultures eagerly shouldering each other aside and clambering inside the carcass for the tastiest morsels. (I will spare you the most mind-boggling details.) Now I am quite confident, and I expect you agree with me, that I was thereby given very good evidence that those vultures do not share my olfactory quality space. In fact, as I have subsequently learned, these Old World vultures, unlike their rather distant New World cousins, do not rely on olfaction at all; they use their keen eyesight to spot carrion. The peculiar nauseating odors of rotting carrion, carried by such well-named amines as cadaverine and putrescine, are attractants to the New World turkey vultures (Cathartes aura), however, and the presumed explanation is that in the New World these birds evolved in an ecology in which they hunted for food hidden under a canopy of trees, which diminished the utility of vision and heightened the utility of olfaction. David Houston (1986), has conducted experiments using fresh, ripe, and very-ripe chicken carcasses, hidden from sight in the forests of a Panamanian island, to titrate the olfactory talents of turkey vultures. So we’re making progress; we now know — to a moral certainty — something about the difference between what it is like to be an African vulture and what it is like to be a Central American turkey vulture. (Dennett 1998, 341)

Dennett goes on to lament the difficulty of determining what it is like to be a vulture using our experience and intuitive extrapolations as a guide. We agree that this is indeed difficult. But note that if we had a similar experience we would not doubt that we are selves who are in experiential states, whereas Dennett (in the end) does doubt the existence of selves. In fact, in the same article against Nagel (insisting that animals are conscious, in Dennett’s sense), he writes that animals are not selves because being a self is an illusion and they lack sufficient informational unification to have such an illusion. This is somewhat similar to Carruthers’ position but it is worth citing for its re-enforcing the radical conclusion that Dennett proposes. 114

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I have argued at length, in Consciousness Explained . . . that the sort of informational unification that is the most important prerequisite for our kind of consciousness is not anything we are born with, not part of our innate “hard-wiring,” but in surprisingly large measure an artifact of our immersion in human culture. What the early education produces in us is a sort of benign “user-illusion” — I call it the Cartesian Theater: the illusion that there is a place in our brains where the show goes on, toward which all perceptual “input” streams, and whence flow all “conscious intentions” to act and speak. I claim that other species — and human beings when they are newborn — simply aren’t beset by the illusion of the Cartesian Theater. Until the organization is formed, there is simply no user in there to be fooled. This is undoubtedly a radical suggestion, hard for many thinkers to take seriously, hard for them even to entertain. Let me repeat it, since many critics have ignored the possibility that I mean it — a misfiring of their generous allegiance to the principle of charity. (Dennett 1998, 346; emphasis Dennett’s)

We defend animal minds in what follows, arguing that some nonhuman animals are selves, and many more are conscious, though not in Dennett’s sense of the word. However, we shall maintain that this conclusion is plausible and convincing but not certain or infallibly known.

ANIMAL MINDS RESTORED The kind of difficulty we run into concerning assessing animal minds is akin to what some philosophers think is a difficulty in arguing from the cosmos to the existence of God. It has been argued by Anthony O’Hear and others (including David Hume) that to argue from the cosmos to God involves a unique inference. In the case of animals, arguably none of us will ever become one (that is, none of us will become a nonhuman animal), unless reincarnation is in the offing. Moreover, we do not seem to have access to two groups of animals: ones we know are conscious and ones we know are not. Similarly, some philosophers contend we do not have on hand multiple universes — some we know to be designed, and some not — so that we could match up our universe to the correct category. As O’Hear writes: In the absence of examples of sets of universes with and without designers, we simply have no basis for making the relevant judgments of probability. Universes are not, as C. S. Peirce was fond of saying, as plentiful as blackberries, so we cannot tell whether features of this universe — the only universe — are more or less likely to have emerged randomly or with an intelligent designer. (O’Hear 2009)

Unique inferences regarding the universe and animal minds can and should still be made. As for the case of theistic arguments, we can compose images of created and uncreated universes (as we are doing in this book) and we can also compose images of animals with or without consciousness. It has been 115

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our aim in Chapters 1 to 3 to fill out the different images of nature found in naturalism and theism and improve on the images of, say, choosing between a skyhook and a crane. Now it is our task to spell out the difference between the affirmation or denial of animal minds. First, consider in a little more detail the denial of animal minds, using scientific findings (unlike the more conceptual theorizing of Carruthers and Dennett). In “The myth of animal suffering,” Bob Bermond claims that much of what we may call mental or intentional activity such as problem-solving, acquiring a new language, and so on, can take place when “consciousness has no direct access to the cognitive process. So, too, can “emotional behavior” (Bermond 2001, 80, 81). Because in our own case, emotional behavior can take place during times of radical dissociation (absence of self-consciousness), Bermond thinks that a study of animal cognition and behavior (alone) cannot solve the question of whether animals are conscious. He is not an eliminativist when it comes to human consciousness. So, he allows that we are conscious and he reasons that this is made possible by our possessing a well-developed prefrontal cortex and a right neocortical hemisphere. He then seems to employ Ockham’s razor; if one can account for animal anatomy and behavior without positing consciousness, then those animals lacking a prefrontal cortex and a right neocortical hemisphere should be assumed not to be conscious or possessing consciousness. Imagine Bermond is correct and that what he claims we should conclude is actually true. So, under those conditions then picture chickens being slaughtered. If Bermond is correct, we may be allowed to claim that chickens can be stressed or even in pain, but such stress or pain would not be akin to states we are in when undergoing painful stress. The chicken would have no higher-order thoughts or self-realization of their predicament. If Carruthers’s is right, they would not be conscious, and if Dennett is right they would not be selves. Now, imagine Bermond, Carruthers, and Dennett are incorrect and that chickens have feelings that may be remote in kind from the sorts of feelings we have but their feelings still bear a resemblance to the way we feel when subject to painful stress. Whereas for Bermond, Carruthers, and Dennett, it appears that much of the animal world is sleepwalking or like a zombie, on the opposite view, animals can be only too wide awake, not unlike when we become wide awake (under normal conditions) when we are in pain. There certainly appears to be a profound difference between these positions, even when in both scenarios they are indistinguishable from a third-person point of view. The difference becomes clear when we reflect on the ethical implications of our behavior. If the second alternative is correct, then perhaps the majority of our factory farms are causing a massive amount of morally relevant pain (suffering, hardship, harm) and we should take steps toward animal welfare (allow chickens to be free range, insure that “harvesting” chickens is painless, or perhaps forego any animal slaughter). But if Bermond, 116

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Carruthers, and Dennett are instead correct, such a state and action need not be in play. We believe that anatomy and behavior plus our shared ancestral evolutionary past provides positive (though not definitive) reason to believe that primates such as great apes, monkeys, and dolphins are conscious and have some sense of self (they appear to have memory and thus a sense of identity over time). Among domestic animals, dogs and cats seem to display even complex intentional activity (including the ability to engage in deception). Our anatomical resemblance to some animals has allowed us to use animal organs in humans (parts of a pig’s heart can be grafted into a human heart) and has caused us to use similar procedures (e.g. use of anesthetic to reduce what seems like pain in both humans and animals). All this creates a picture or image of the natural world that has the advantage of seeing human consciousness as related to other animal minds. Our reasoning here takes the form of what is called abductive reasoning: if we assume some animals have minds, we have a good account of their behavior and their (apparent) display of thought and emotion. (Our view is similar to Bernard Rollin, as developed in The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain, and Science.) Recognizing animal minds may be bolstered by two further observations. First, Carruthers’ case against animal minds seems based on an assumption that is quite open to question. It is not clear that recognizing other minds or having higher-order thoughts requires being able to theorize or that higherorder thoughts would make someone possible of consciousness. Consider Daniel Robinson’s point: How could possession of a meta-state confer subjectivity or feeling on a lower-order state that did not otherwise possess it? Why would being an intentional object or referent of a meta-state confer consciousness on a first-order state? . . . Why should first-order psychological states become conscious, simply by having a belief about it? (Robinson 2008, 84)

Robinson is right to question the almost magical transformation that is attributed to higher-order thoughts. And philosophers have proposed means by which animals (and we) attribute feelings to one another rather than by way of supposing that animals must possess a theory of mind. In “Simulation and the evolution of mindreading” Chandra Sripada and Alvin Goldman defend a simulationist account, according to which we experience in ourselves the emotions that other persons (or animals) are experiencing. We may experience, say, anger in ourselves that we then ascribe to you as your emotion. There is some evolutionary evidence that this emotional contagion is found in many mammals (Sripada and Goldman 225). Our point here is not to defend this or other accounts, but to point out that we are not straddled with holding that if animals are conscious and have awareness of other animal conscious states then the animal must possess a sophisticated theory of mind. It should also be stressed that Carruthers’ thesis 117

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has the amazingly counterintuitive consequences that prelinguistic human children and autistic subjects are not conscious. In Subjectivity and Selfhood, Dan Zahavi duly observes: To suggest . . . that autistic subjects do not feel pleasure, anxiety, or frustration and that there is nothing it is like for them to taste hot chocolate or to be scalded by boiling water is outrageous. It reduces them to zombies. Carruthers might be applauded for his clarity and consistency and for actually biting the bullet, but this does not make his theory any more plausible. (Zahavi 2005, 194)

A second point can be made to bolster the case for recognizing animal minds. The argument advanced by Bermond may confuse sufficient versus necessary conditions. This confusion introduces some space to consider the moral implications of a Pascalian wager concerning animal minds. Bermond is treating the absence of a prefrontal cortex and a right neocortical hemisphere as evidence that consciousness is absent without such a developed brain, whereas his evidence base is simply that when the brain is so developed, there is consciousness. It might be that such brain development is sufficient for there to be consciousness (presumably along with other supporting organs and bodily processes), but that is not the same thing as the claim that such brain development is necessary. He uses Ockahm’s razor to establish his thesis, but the famous razor loses sharpness when paired off against an equally famous counter-point; a Pascalian wager argument has room to move in this context. Recall that the seventeenth-century philosopher-mathematician Pascal introduced a wager argument to the effect that if you are undecided about whether God exists, it is better to wager that God does. Let’s leave off reflection on the wager on theism for the moment, and think of it only in the context of animal minds. Imagine you think the evidence and theories are equally balanced, so that you think it is possible that some animals have minds (some nonhuman animals — imagine the animals in question include pigs, chickens, cattle, apes, dolphins — are conscious and their suffering is morally relevant) but also possible that they are mindless, as lacking in consciousness as Deep Blue or Cog or a less complex, but organic automaton. What are the moral consequences of your assumption about animals? In a case of honest doubt, it would be better to assume that they do have minds than they do not. So, on the assumption that they do have minds, one would (presumably) treat animals in a way that minimized suffering and hardship. If you are wrong and they lack minds, you have missed out on some goods (lessened the amount of meat available, for example), and the loss is not substantial. If you assume they are mindless but they do have minds, you are likely to have done great harm. We conclude, then, that a case can be made for nonhuman animal consciousness, and it does involve a real attribution of consciousness to animals as 118

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opposed to what Dennett treats as pseudo-intentionality (or “as-if intentionality”). In other words, the attribution of consciousness is not a matter of mere definitions (how we define terms), but it is a real matter of fact whether or not some nonhuman animals are conscious, have feelings, and such. Is it a problem if we are in the position that Dennett laments of having to admit that the question of animal minds does not admit of a decisive resolution? We do not think so. In fact, we believe that many matters in philosophy do not admit of decisive resolution (free will, theories of justice, philosophy of history, and even theism versus naturalism) and that in such areas equally reasonable persons may disagree. The fact (if it is a fact) that we may know we are conscious, and have good grounds for thinking some animals are conscious, but unsure about others does not invalidate or undermine our position. If there are animal minds, then naturalism faces the problem of emergence not just with respect to human consciousness, but animal consciousness as well. Darwin was himself a materialist based (apparently) on the causal impact of material change on mental change. “It is an argument for materialism, that cold water bring on suddenly in head, a frame of mind, analogous to those of feelings, which may be considered as truly spiritual” (Darwin 1987, 524). Darwin held that the apparent casual dependency of the mental on material processes was evidence for materialism. Darwin had some grasp of the problem of emergence. In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms, is as hopeless an inquiry as how life itself first originated. These are problems for the distant future, if they are ever to be solved by man. (Wiker 2009, 64)

For Darwin, it was an important element in The Descent of Man to establish that animals did indeed have mental powers. If he was going to succeed in showing that humans had an animal background it was necessary either to devalue human achievement and difference or to elevate nonhuman animal achievement and similarity. Darwin’s basis for recognizing animal minds is similar to our own. Positing animal consciousness is the best account of animal anatomy and behavior, and their possessing brains and nervous systems analogous to our own. It is reasonable to claim that we can perceive animal minds. Recall the earlier discussion in Chapter 1 of how imagination plays a constitutive role in our seeing the world. It is through imagination that we may claim to perceive more than what is directly and immediately present through sensations. Assume, for the sake of argument, that we are right about some animal minds and you observe a dolphin playing. The claim that you perceive the dolphin’s delight (where “delight” refers to a conscious, felt experience) seems to be akin to observing human children playing and laughing and thereby claiming to perceive their delight. The fact that we might be mistaken in such cases does not undermine the claims about perception. 119

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You may rightly and reasonably claim to perceive things (this book) even if it is possible you are having a massive hallucination. Before turning to values, we highlight our commitment to an integrated understanding of animal and human life. That is, while we have argued against the identity of consciousness and bodily processes, we believe that in a healthy embodied human being the person functions as a unit. The view we adopt is called integrative dualism (see Taliaferro 1994). If the existence of consciousness is problematic for naturalism and favorable to theism, then this includes the existence of nonhuman as well as human consciousness. While historically theistic religious traditions have sometimes diminished the estimation of animal minds, there is some reason to think that theism renders it more plausible that animal minds are as they appear. First, unlike strict naturalism, theism does not have any prior or independent reason for thinking consciousness or intentionality is philosophically problematic. Second, belief in an all good God provides some reason to believe that the natural exercise of our cognition is conducive to the truth (Platinga 2000). Arguably, we have some reason to think some animals have minds and, in the absence of strong reason for thinking otherwise, normal cognition should be treated as trustworthy. Third, the existence of animal minds seems to be a good, and thus it seems that a good God would have reason for creating such minds (Swinburne 2004, 231–233). Let us now turn to the problem of the emergence of not just consciousness but moral, aesthetic, and other values.

VALUES Let us consider Darwin’s account of moral and aesthetic values first, and then turn to cognitive values and, at the end of this chapter, address the naturalistic account of the emergence of religious experience. At the foundation of Darwin’s account of moral values is our ability to imagine, picture, or internalize the feelings and points of view of others. To do this requires imagination. On that front, Darwin believed that animals exercised imagination. He did so on the grounds that the imagination was akin to dreaming and the thesis that animals dream: The Imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of man. By this faculty he unites former images and ideas, independently of the will, and thus creates brilliant and novel results. A poet, as Jean Paul Richter remarks, “who must reflect whether he shall make a character say yes or no to the devil with him; he is only a stupid corpse.” Dreaming gives us the best notion of this power; as Jean Paul again says, “The dream is an involuntary art of poetry.” The value of the products of our imagination depends of course on the number, accuracy, and clearness of our impressions on our judgment and taste in selecting or rejecting the involuntary combinations, and to a certain extent on our power of voluntarily combining

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them. As dogs, cats, horses, and probably all the higher animals, even birds have vivid dreams, and this is shown by their movements and the sounds uttered, we must admit that they possess some power of imagination. There must be something special, which causes dogs to howl in the night, and especially during moonlight, in that remarkable and melancholy manner called baying. All dogs do not do so; and, according to Houzeau, they do not then look at the moon, but at some fixed point near the horizon. Houzeau thinks that their imaginations are disturbed by the vague outlines of the surrounding objects, and conjure up before them fantastic images: if this be so, their feelings may almost be called superstitious. (Darwin 1874, 77)

The imagination is what allows us to transcend our self-preoccupation and self-concern. Before we look at this in detail, we briefly note that Darwin held that while human and nonhuman animals shared many powers, human beings did (in Darwin’s view) possess superior powers over nonhuman animals. In a reply to Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin writes: Man in the rudest state in which he now exists is the most dominant animal that has ever appeared on this earth. He has spread more widely than any other highly organized form, and all others have yielded before him. He manifestly owes this immense superiority to his intellectual faculties, to his social habits, which lead him to aid and defend his fellows, and to his corporeal structure. The supreme importances of these characters has been proved by the final arbitrament of the battle for life. Through his powers of intellect, articulate language has been evolved; and on this his wonderful advancement has mainly depended. As Mr. Chauncey Wright remarks: “a psychological analysis of the faculty of language shows, that even the smallest proficiency in it might require more brain power that the greatest proficiency in any other direction.” He has invented and is able to use various weapons, tools, traps, etc., with which he defends himself, kills or catches prey, and otherwise obtains food. He has made rafts or canoes for fishing or crossing over to neighboring fertile islands. He has discovered the art of making fire, by which hard and stringy roots can be rendered digestible and poisonous roots or herbs innocuous. This discovery of fire, probably the greatest ever made by man, excepting language, dates from before the dawn of history. These several inventions, by which man in the rudest state has become so pre-eminent, are the direct results of the development of his powers of observation, memory, curiosity, imagination, and reason. I cannot, therefore, understand how it is that Mr. Wallace maintains, that “natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape.” (Darwin 1874, 49)

We return to the Darwin versus Wallace debate below. When it comes to ethics, Darwin embraced an account similar to Adam Smith and David Hume. We are able to imaginatively grasp how other persons feel, and this generates in us a motivation to go to their aid. This is not unlike the golden rule of treating others as you would want to be treated.

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Adam Smith formerly argued, as had Mr. Bain recently, that the basis of sympathy lies in our strong retentiveness of former states of pain or pleasure. Hence, “the sight of another person enduring hunger, cold, fatigue, revives in us some recollection of these states, which are painful even in idea.” We are thus impelled to relieve the sufferings of another, in order that out own painful feelings may be at the same time relieved. (Darwin 1874, 109)

Smith was one of the first advocates of what has come to be called the ideal observer theory. The moral point of view is the one we adopt when we know the feelings of all involved parties and we are impartial. One may formulate the ideal observer theory in terms of oneself: what would you decide if you knew all the facts and feelings involved and were impartial, or in terms of an abstract point of view (one reasons ethically to the extent one comes close to being genuinely impartial, knowing of all involved facts, and aware affectively of the feelings of all those involved). Acting and reasoning morally thus requires considerable cognitive power. As we cannot distinguish between motives, we rank all actions of a certain class as moral, if performed by a moral being. A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions, or motives, and of approving or disapproving them. (Darwin 1874, 115)

Darwin also locates our sense of right and wrong in our need (and the need of some other animals) to live in community. Attention on the life of others was foundational, according to Darwin. “Hardly any faculty is more important for the intellectual progress of man than Attention” (Darwin 1874, 75). Commenting on gorillas, he observed: We should, however, bear in mind that an animal possessing great size, strength, and ferocity, and which, like the gorilla, could defend itself from all enemies, would not perhaps have become social: and this would most effectually have checked the acquirement of the higher mental qualities, such as sympathy and the love of his fellows. Hence it might have been an immense advantage to man to have sprung from some comparatively weak creature. (Darwin 1874, ch. II, 65)

But while the community had an important role in shaping our abilities to imaginatively identify with others, Darwin also contended that our moral judgments could extend beyond our social group. So, for example, Darwin thought that we could observe the moral outrage of enslavement. I was crossing a ferry with a negro, who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavoring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. He, I suppose, thought I was in a passion, and was going to strike him; for instantly, with a frightened look and half-shut eyes, he dropped his hands. I shall never forget my feelings of surprise, disgust, and shame, at seeing a great powerful man afraid even to ward

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off a blow, directed, as he thought, at his face. This man had been trained to a degradation lower than the slavery of the most helpless animal. (Darwin 1909, 35)

While the moral theoretical framework found in Darwin’s work (and in Adam Smith’s) may be seen as thoroughly naturalistic, it bears noting that it may also be seen as theistic. In classical theism, God is understood to be omniscient with respect to all facts in creation, including knowledge of all the affective states of all creatures. God is also understood to be impartial. There is ample testimony to this in the Hebrew Bible (Job 34:18, 19; Psalm 45:2), Christian New Testament (Galatians 6:7) and the Qur’an (18:49). One may object that in theistic religious tradition there is also a singling out of persons or whole people (“the chosen people”) for special treatment, but in these traditions it is understood that any special providential “mission” or treatment is for the good or blessing of all (hence the missionary zeal of most theistic faiths to extend what is believed to be great goods such as redemption). Given this understanding of theism, the ideal observer theory may be described in terms of a God’s eye point of view (Taliaferro 2005). On this view, what one aims for in trying to know all the relevant facts, especially to know the affective points of view of all involved parties (how all parties feel) and in reflecting impartially is trying to understand some given state of affairs how God sees it. While the foundation of many religious traditions rely on a revelatory scripture to guide moral and ethical behavior; their healthy adherence does not come out of the absence of cognition (what we sometimes call being “brainwashed”) but through the desire to work out, through imagination and critical reflection, what might be the mind of God. What about our sense of beauty and ugliness? As noted in Chapter 2, Darwin was very much appreciative of beauty and ugliness in the natural world itself. In the next chapter, on the problem of evil, attention will be given to Darwin’s lament about the ugliness of the natural world and on how he thought that counted against the plausibility of theism. Darwin located the key to beauty among animals in terms of natural selection. We can to a certain extent understand how it is that there is so much beauty throughout nature; for this may be largely attributed to the agency of selection. That beauty, according to our sense of it, is not universal, must be admitted by everyone who will look at some venomous snakes, at some fishes, and at certain hideous bats with a distorted resemblance to the human face. Sexual selection has given the most brilliant colors, elegant patterns, and other ornaments to the males, and sometimes to both sexes of many birds, butterflies, and other animals. With birds it has often rendered the voice of the male musical to the female, as well as to our ears. Flowers and fruit have been rendered conspicuous by brilliant colors in contrast with the green foliage, in order that the flowers may be easily seen, visited, and fertilized by insects, and the seeds disseminated by birds. How it comes that certain colors, sounds, and forms should give pleasure to man and the lower animals,

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that is, how the sense of beauty in its simplest form was first acquired, we do not know any more than how certain odors and favors were first rendered agreeable. As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts and improves the inhabitants of each country only in relation to their co-inhabitants; so that we need feel no surprise at the species of any one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been created and specially adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalized productions from another land. Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect, as in the case even of the human eye; or if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of the bee, when used against an enemy, causing the bee’s own death; at drones being produced in such great numbers for one single act, and being then slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir-trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen-bee for her own fertile daughters; at feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars; or at other such cases. The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the way of absolute perfection have not been detected. (Darwin 1873, 414–415)

These passages, taken from the Origin, are then followed by his famous concluding paragraph (cited on page 42) in which Darwin reflects on the grandeur of evolution. Darwin was somewhat uneasy about the adequacy of the theory of evolution to fully account for our sense of beauty and ugliness, however. What about traits in animals that strike us as most beautiful (such as the tail of male peacocks) but that do not seem to confer any evolutionary advantage? In fact, the large tail seems to make male peacocks even more vulnerable to predators. Darwin sought to explain such unnecessary (from an evolutionary point of view) beauty as a matter of something that was once necessary for survival. He maintained that while natural selection would have eliminated such traits (a beautiful organ) if it rendered the animal weak, but so long as it did no harm the beautiful organ might not be eliminated. Darwin was not, however, untroubled by his account. Darwin wrote in a letter to Asa Gray in 1860: “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” The comment may have been intended as a jest, but it nonetheless supports the idea that Darwin was not altogether content with his account of beauty. Here is one further example of Darwin’s theory of beauty. Why should it be that the spindle-wood tree is so beautiful? [T]hat the gaily-coloured fruit of the spindle-wood tree and the scarlet berries of the holly are beautiful objects, — will be admitted by everyone. But this beauty serves merely as a guide to birds and beasts, that the fruit may be devoured and the seeds thus disseminated: I infer that this is the case from having as yet found in every instance that seeds, which are embedded within a fruit of any kind, that is within a fleshy or pulpy envelope, if it be coloured of any brilliant tint, or merely rendered conspicuous by being coloured white or black, are always disseminated by being first devoured. (Darwin 1873, 161)

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Although Darwin does not develop such a theory, there are grounds for proposing a Darwinian ideal aesthetic observer theory akin to the ideal observer theory in ethics. When is it proper to admire an object in the natural world as beautiful or ugly? One may argue that our aesthetic experience is marred insofar as we lack an impartiality or understanding of what we are observing in the natural world. To judge the aesthetic quality of the spindle-wood tree we must see it accurately and in terms of the forces that brought it into being and the role it plays in the surrounding ecosystem. So, knowledge of the natural object seems essential to a stable aesthetics, as well as the ability to appreciate the affective qualities involved — these may include the sense of fittingness (the role an object or process plays in the advancement of life) or the sense of disruption, as when a pollutant such as acid rain kills all life in a lake (Taliaferro, 1988, 1990b).

ETHICAL AND AESTHETIC NORMS FROM A NATURALISTIC PERSPECTIVE Is naturalism fully successful in grounding ethical and aesthetic values? Some criticism of Darwinian or naturalistic ethics seems wide of the mark. David Hull and James Rachels, for example, believe that Darwinian evolution would undermine our attempts to base values in nature because species or natures are no longer stable forms of reference. The implications of moving species from the metaphysical category that can appropriately be characterized in terms of “natures” to a category for which such characterizations are inappropriate are extensive and fundamental. If species evolve in anything like the way that Darwin thought they did, then they cannot possibly have the sort of natures that traditional philosophers claimed they did. If species in general lack natures, then so does Homo sapiens as a biological species. If Homo sapiens lacks a nature, then no reference to biology can be made to support one’s claims about “human nature.” Perhaps all people are “persons,” share the same “personhood,” etc., but such claims must be explicated and defended with no reference to biology. Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Darwin’s theory brought into question all these theories. The implications are not entailments. One can always dissociate “Homo sapiens” from “human being,” but the result is a much less plausible position. (Hull 1989, 74–75) The traditional supports for the idea of human dignity are gone. They have not survived the colossal shift of perspective brought about by Darwin’s theory. It might be thought that this result need not be devastating for the idea of human dignity, because even if the traditional supports are gone, the idea might still be defended on some other grounds. Once again, though, an evolutionary perspective is bound to make one skeptical. The doctrine of human dignity says that humans merit a level of moral concern wholly different from that accorded to mere animals; for this to be true, there would have to be some big, morally significant difference between them. Therefore, any adequate defense of human dignity

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would require some conception of human beings as radically different from other animals. But that is precisely what evolutionary theory calls into question. It makes us suspicious of any doctrine that sees large gaps of any sort between humans and all other creatures. This being so, a Darwinian may conclude that a successful defence of human dignity is most unlikely. (Rachels 1990, 171–172)

Neither of these points seems decisive. Against Hull, one may hold that human nature is sufficiently stable over the last hundred thousand years or at least since the earliest recorded signs of moral reflection. We may still identify the goods that comprise human nature (our ability to think, see, smell, feel, taste, hear, our powers of memory and expectation, our emotions, our powers of movement, and so on) and form a robust concept of what it is to be a healthy human being. If we evolved in strange new directions then certain ways of respecting each other might change. (If human beings became flameresistant, it would no longer be as bad if you have the misfortune of being in a burning building, for example, but this would not alter our concept and grasp of all these other goods.) Contra Rachels, perhaps an evolutionary perspective should not so much diminish our concept of human dignity as it should elevate our appreciation for nonhuman animals. Consider a rather humble analogy: you are under the impression that Wisconsin is filled with bandits and liars. You then meet Linnea who is from Wisconsin who appears to be a saint, someone who respects others and is trustworthy. You have a choice: rely on your background beliefs and think your impression of Linnea may be wrong or suspect that your beliefs about Wisconsin must be misplaced or misguided. Similarly, by appreciating our proximity to nonhuman animals, you might denigrate humans but, on the other hand, you might more positively appreciate nonhuman animals. Naturalism may (or may not) have a problem accounting for the emergence of consciousness and persons, but if you allow that naturalism could (in principle) offer such an account, wouldn’t it already have a proper grounding for ethics as well as aesthetics? Yes and No. Yes, if we suspend judgment on theism and naturalism, it is plausible to think that in appreciating what it is to be a human being, we can grasp the goodness of being human, and similarly with other animals. In understanding an animal or even a plant, we can formulate concepts of what makes a healthy or ill animal or plant. Healthiness (for the plant or animal) may be seen as a good for the plant or animal. A case for recognizing what might be called natural goodness can be bolstered by taking seriously the kinds of sentiments George Orwell expressed in his famous essay “A hanging.” Because of its power, we cite a rather large part of that magnificent text: We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and

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the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone 10 yards, the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened — a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog. “Who let that bloody brute in here?” said the superintendent angrily. “Catch it, someone!” A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and gamboled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail walls. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering. It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less. (Orwell 1968, 44–46)

Orwell recognizes the goodness of human life as a foundational value. But, alas, we suggest more is needed to get to the full, evaluative force found in ethics (and we shall argue shortly in aesthetics). One needs a rudimentary concept of normative fittingness. Moral realism (the belief that moral rights and wrongs are real and not illusions) requires that there are certain fitting and unfitting responses to states of affairs. For example, it is fitting to care for vulnerable human beings, to pursue fairness in society, to tell the truth, and so on, whereas it is unfitting or violatory to harm others for no reason, to lie for 127

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no reason, and so on. To successfully reach the conclusion of George Orwell’s impassioned case against capital punishment, appeals to health and even the good of a being, needs to be coupled with a normative realization that one must not injure such a being capriciously or perhaps even (and this is the point of Orwell’s essay) as part of retributive justice. We currently do kill healthy animals (in the US 23 million chickens are slaughtered on conveyor belts daily) and so a case for not killing or a case for protecting beings needs to include a grasp of the truth that killing is wrong (or it is unfitting to kill) and protecting is right (or it is fitting to protect). This normative relationship appears to be basic and not further accountable in other categories. Both a naturalist and theist may take such a position, though for the theist this does not involve a radical emergence because in theism (or at least the Platonic theism we are employing in this book) values lie at the very heart of reality: the supreme goodness of God. Let us expand this briefly and then turn back to naturalism and values. The form of Platonic theism we are employing maintains the goodness of God as something basic, underived, and constituitive of the divine nature. In Anselmian terms, God’s very nature is unsurpassably excellent. This divine excellence has relational implications. Following what Augustine called the order of love (Ordo Amoris), God’s goodness entails that it is fitting for creatures to love the very being of God and to take delight in the reality of God (see Taliaferro and Tepley 2005). Such a theistic vantage point is profoundly different from one that appeals only to God’s power. Divine commands have been defended on the grounds of God’s sheer omnipotent power, but such an outlook can (at best) ground the idea that it is prudent to obey God and imprudent (or against your self-interest) to disobey God. In Platonic theism, the created world is good, both for its own sake (a claim to be challenged in the next chapter on the problem of evil) but also because it is created and sustained by a good God. Our cognitive grasp of created goods is itself fitting because it is willed and sustained by God. For naturalism, matters get more complicated. Broad naturalists can simply claim that at a certain point in our evolution we developed the power to grasp what is fitting or unfitting morally and aesthetically. Just as broad naturalists can claim that at a certain point in evolution, consciousness simply emerged as a radically new property or state of being. The naturalist Peter Unger believes that at a certain natural state, selves as nonphysical individuals emerged. Such an emergence seems more mysterious in naturalism than in theism, but at least broad naturalists do not have to deny the normativity of ethics. But strict naturalists are in greater jeopardy. For them, our sense of fittingness is no guarantee of reliability; it is only a sign that some judgments or ways of judging have proved to offer advantages in terms of survival. But there is no necessary link between goodness and survival. There are many plausible descriptions (and plausible actual cases) in which that which survives some evolutionary 128

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process of elimination is that which is unjust or evil. As Richard Dawkins observes: What natural selection favors is rules of thumb, which work in practice to promote the genes that built them. Rules of thumb, by their nature, sometimes misfire. In a bird’s brain, the rule “Look after small squawking things in your nest, and drop food into their red gapes” typically has the effect of preserving the genes that built the rule, because the squawking, gaping objects in an adult bird’s nest are normally its own offspring. The rule misfires if another baby bird somehow gets into the nest, a circumstance that is positively engineered by cuckoos. Could it be that our Good Samaritan urges are misfiring, analogous to the misfiring of a reed warbler’s parental instincts when it works itself to the bone for a young cuckoo? (Dawkins 2006, 220–221)

We typically find that “Good Samaritan urges” are morally sound, but from an evolutionary standpoint we may only think such urges are good because they have been instrumental in long-term survival, rather than because such urges are actually good (normatively fitting). In the 1980s the naturalists Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson seem to follow the strict naturalist course to the end: if our sense of fittingness (or morality) is only that which aids survival, and survival alone offers no grounding for goodness, then it appears that the idea that morality as a real, objective force seems to be an illusion: Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will — or in the metaphorical roots of evolution or any other part of the framework of the Universe. In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but is not justified by it because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance . . . Unlike Macbeth’s dagger, ethics is a shared illusion of the human race. (Ruse and Wilson 1989, 316)

The role (positive or negative) of morality in helping a species adapt would not alone be able to offer a foundation for moral realism. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory. (Ruse 1989, 262–269)

Darwin himself seemed content to believe that his evolutionary naturalism recognized the general well being of life. 129

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But passing over the endless beautiful adaptations which we everywhere meet with, it may be asked how can the generally beneficent arrangement of the world be accounted for? Some writers indeed are so much impressed with the amount of suffering in the world, that they doubt if we look to all sentient beings, whether there is more misery or of happiness; — whether the world as a whole is a good or a bad one. According to my judgment happiness decidedly prevails, though this would be very difficult to prove. If the truth of this conclusion be granted, it harmonizes well with the effects which we might expect from natural selection. If all the individuals of any species were habitually to suffer to an extreme degree they would neglect to propagate their kind; but we have no reason to believe that this has ever or at least often occurred. Some other considerations, moreover, lead to the belief that all sentient beings have been formed so as to enjoy, as a general rule, happiness. (Darwin 2005, 67)

Darwin expressed optimism (perhaps aptly in the spirit of Victorian England) about the future course of humanity. Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. In this case the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be triumphant. (Darwin 1874, 130)

This optimism may be encouraging, but matters become profoundly troubling when Darwin turns his attention to the human race and to weak, vulnerable human beings. Darwin thought that there were vastly different powers between human racial groups. “The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to mention the greater differences between men of distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said” (Darwin 1874, 27). Darwin addressed the topic of racial extermination from an evolutionary perspective: “Do the races or species of men, whichever term may be applied, encroach on and replace one another, so that some finally become extinct?” (Darwin 1874, 6). Regrettably, Darwin predicted future racial extermination: At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. (Darwin 1874, 162–163)

Darwin may be doing no more than making a prediction. But at times Darwin goes further. In this passage, he postulates a positive relation between struggle and progress, and expresses regret when the struggle to survive has not eliminated some savages. 130

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Since we see in many parts of the world enormous areas of the most fertile land capable of supporting numerous happy homes, but peopled only by a few wandering savages, it might be argued that the struggle for existence had not been sufficiently severe to force man upwards to his highest standard. (Darwin 1874, 148)

As for the weak, Darwin lamented the way civilized, “charitable” people keep weak humans from perishing. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is ignorant as to allow his worst animal to breed. (Darwin 1874, 138–139)

Clearly here we must separate any moral criticism of Darwin with a criticism of the theory of evolution or the prospects of revised Darwinian theories. The broader point is what needs to be appreciated: if morality does involve objective norms of fittingness, then it appears that one needs to go beyond evolutionary biology to ground or find a place for those norms. Darwin quite explicitly acknowledged the contingent nature of evolution. It might have been that what helped us survive was not the ethic of caring and justice that (many of us) treasure today, but quite the opposite. Consider Darwin’s famous bee thought experiment: If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it is sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal would gain in our supposed case, as it appears to me, some feeling of right and wrong, or a conscience. For each individual would have an inward sense of possessing certain stronger or more endearing instincts . . . an inward monitor would tell the animal that it would be better to (follow) one impulse rather than the other . . . the one would have right and the other wrong. (Darwin 1902, 137–138)

Unfortunately, the bee thought experiment is not a mere hypothetical work of imagination. Elijah Millgram has noted that some “human females are fine-tuned by natural selection to murder their infants in a suitable range of circumstances . . . that human males are fine-tuned by natural selection to rape women in a suitable range of circumstances . . . that humans value 131

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occupying dominant positions in hierarchies to a degree not compatible with justice of any kind” (Millgram 2009). These cases give us reason to be cautious about relying on survivability or natural tendencies as a foundation for ethics (see Ruse 2010). While our focus has largely been on ethics, the same is true in aesthetics. If aesthetics involves normative relations of fittingness (the beautiful is that which it is fitting to enjoy or delight in aesthetically, the ugly is that which it is fitting to be revolting or displeasing aesthetically), there is no reason to trust or ground our sense of fittingness on the basis of survivability and adaptability. Darwin himself worried about the reliability of reasoning itself, given his theory of evolution. “. . . Thinking over these things, one doubts existence of free will every action determined by heredetary [sic] constitution . . . I verily believe free-will and chance are synonymous” (Darwin 1996, 76). If our rational powers are not freely under our control and are only matters of advantageous hereditary, it seems that we have lost sight of the normativity essential to reasoning. Darwin: “Shake ten thousand grains of sand together and one will be uppermost: —so in thoughts, one will rise according to law” (Darwin 1996, 76). But if that is one’s considered view of thinking, why trust it? This troubled Darwin: This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. But then arises the doubt — can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, and for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake. (Darwin 2002, 53–54)

A. C. Ewing states with clarity what is needed when it comes to capturing what is involved in reasoning: To realize the truth of any proposition or even entertain it as something meaningful the same being must be aware of its different constituents. To be aware of the validity of an argument the same being must entertain premises and conclusion; to compare two things the same being must, at least in memory, be aware of them simultaneously; and since all these processes take some time the continuous existence of literally the same entity is required. In these cases an event which consisted in the contemplating of A followed by another event which consisted in the contemplating of B is not sufficient. They must be events of contemplating that occur in the same being. If one being thought of wolves, another of eating, and another of lambs, it certainly would not mean that anybody contemplated the

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proposition “wolves eat lambs.” . . . There must surely be a single being persisting through the process to grasp a proposition or inference as a whole. (Ewing 1973, 84)

Reasoning must involve a robust appreciation and openness to seeing logical entailments over time; the activity of reasoning is not a matter of chance or only non-intentional processes (Reppert 2003). There has been a mid- to late twentieth-century attempt to account for (or dissolve) normative cognitive reasoning often called epistemology naturalized. In this project, rather than recognize basic normative relations, naturalists seek a purely scientific account of rationality and justification in terms of reliability in the past and present, and of future expectations. In naturalistic epistemology one may assume some goal (imagine you desire to be able to describe and explain some natural phenomenon), that which is justified or warranted (or what you ought to believe) is that which makes achieving the goal more probable. In Understanding Naturalism, Jack Ritchie provides an example of how this might work. If actions of a particular sort, x, have consistently promoted certain cognitive ends, y, in the past, and rival actions, z, have failed to do so then future actions following the rule “If your aim is y, then you ought to do x” are more likely to promote those ends than actions based on the rule “If your aim is y, then you ought to do z.” (Ritchie 2008, 87)

But as David Macarthur points out, normative matters are not that easy to explain away. Ritchie seems sanguine about the prospects of this sort of account. But what about moral norms? Or the norms of rationality itself? In particular, how would this sort of account explain the normativity of kinds of reasoning (e.g. moral, aesthetic, or mathematical reasoning) the rightness of which is not based on empirically established generalizations or laws? In abstract areas such as mathematics, logic and ethics, where there are no empirical tests of one’s reasoning, all we seem able to say in general about method is that we must “think carefully in the right way.” It is also hard to explain why we normatively aim at truth on naturalistic grounds. Presumably the naturalist thinks that this is to be explained as no more than a contingent desire for the truth. In that case rational normativity would be conditional upon one’s actually having such a desire. But it makes no sense to think that aiming at the truth is optional for a thinker. To see this suppose one does not have the desire for truth. Still one is a reasoned, hence a believer, and to believe P is to believe It is true that P. The relation between belief and truth is conceptual, not contingent. The goal of truth, far from being optional, is presupposed in the very idea of having beliefs. Ritchie admits, without explanation, “that making sense of the normative is the hardest tasks for naturalists.” (Macarthur 2004)

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We believe Macarthur makes a good point. Even engaging in instrumental reasoning leaves one with irreducible normative relations. For us to reason that “if our goal is y, we ought to do x” requires we accept the normativity of the principle of identity (everything is what it is, or y is y, and x is x) and the normativity of the law of non-contradiction (y is not not-y, x is not not-x). This is not a matter of reasoning about hypothetical or real desires; it is a matter of the bedrock of the very nature of rationality itself. Allow us to make a brief summary of the chapter before turning to the naturalistic critique of religious values and experience. So far, we are aligned with what Wallace claims in this passage: Neither natural selection nor the more general theory of evolution can give any account whatever of the origin of sensational or conscious life. They may teach us how, by chemical, electrical, or higher natural laws, the organized body can be built up, can grow, can reproduce its like; but those laws and that growth cannot even be conceived as endowing the newly-arranged atoms with consciousness. But the moral and higher intellectual nature of man is as unique a phenomenon as was conscious life on its first appearance in the world, and the one is almost as difficult to conceive as originating by any law of evolution as the other. We may even go further, and maintain that there are certain purely physical characteristics of the human race which are not explicable on the theory of variation and survival of the fittest. (Wallace 1991, 31–32)

We have not argued that naturalism is incapable of recognizing the normativity of ethics or objective values, such as beauty. One can always be a broad naturalist, and simply hold that there are irreducible truths about what is morally right or wrong. We have instead held that evolutionary theory itself is insufficient to ground normativity in ethics and aesthetics, and that theism offers a worldview that provides a reason for the emergence of conscious subjects who reason morally and aesthetically. Theism holds that the goodness of such a state of affairs is the reason the state of affairs exists (Wynn 1999). Naturalism does not have a similar over-arching explanation as to why the world is as it appears. In the next chapter we address more fully naturalist and theistic accounts of values. We also take note that our conclusions thus far continue to be in line with Thomas Nagel. In the following passage Nagel appreciates the problem facing the naturalist account of reason: The problem then will be not how, if we engage in it, reason can be valid, but how, if it is universally valid, we can engage in it. There are not many candidates to this question. Probably the most popular nonsubjectivist answer nowadays is an evolutionary naturalism: We can reason in these ways because it is a consequence of a more primitive capacity of belief formation that had survival value during the period when the human brain was evolving. This explanation has always seemed to me to be laughably inadequate . . . The other well-known answer is the religious one. The universe is intelligible to us because it and our minds were made for each other. (Nagel 1997, 75)

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Nagel certainly does not (at least not yet) embrace what he terms the religious answer. In the next section we consider the naturalist case against the reliability of religious experience. Is it possible or plausible that we can experience something of the mind of God?

DOUBTING THE DIVINE MIND While Darwin’s most serious reservations about theism (at least in its Christian form) involved the problem of evil, he did not see much of his work as irreligious per se. I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance. The understanding revolts at such a conclusion, whether or not we are able to believe that every slight variation of structure, — the union of each pair in marriage, — the dissemination of each seed, — and other such events, have all been ordained for some special purpose. (Darwin 1874, 636)

While not being content to think of the natural world as one of pure chance and while (as noted in Chapter 3) Darwin accepted an argument that there is a mindful First Cause, his reservations about (Christian) theism were fueled, in part, by the fact that the recognition of God is not universal. “The ennobling belief in God is not universal with man; and the belief in spiritual agencies naturally flows from other mental powers” (Darwin 1874, 131). In his autobiography, Darwin professed to have once had some religious experience or sentiments, but he seems to have dismissed any systematic or reliable argument for theism based on the apparent experience of God: At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons. But it cannot be doubted that Hindoos, Mahomadans and others might argue in the same manner and with equal force in favor of the existence of one God, or of many Gods, or as with the Buddhists of no God. There are also many barbarian tribes who cannot be said with any truth to believe in what we call God: they believe instead in spirits or ghosts, and it can be explained, as Tyler and Herbert Spencer have known, how such a belief would be likely to arise. Formerly I was led by feelings such as those just referred to, (although I do not think that the religious sentiment was ever strongly developed in me), to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst

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standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, “it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.” I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind, and the universal belief by men of the existence of redness makes my present loss of perception of not the least value as evidence. This argument would be a valid one if all men of all races had the same inward conviction of the existence of one God; but we know that this is very far from being the case. Therefore I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists. The state of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and which was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not essentially differ from that which is often called the sense of sublimity; and however difficult it may be to explain the genesis of this sense, it can hardly be advanced as an argument for the existence of God, any more than the powerful though vague and similar feelings excited by music. (Darwin 2002, 52–53)

So, the lack of an evident, clear, universal, uniform experience of God seems to undermine a theistic argument from religious experience. Darwin, like many naturalists before and after him, proposed accounts of the emergence of religion on naturalistic grounds. Darwin made use of the idea that we tend to over-attribute intentionality and purpose to that which is without intention and purpose. In the passage that follows Darwin identifies this tendency even among dogs. The tendency in savages to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by a little fact which I once noticed: my dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent, and that no stranger had a right to be on his territory. (Darwin 1874, 98)

According to Darwin it should not surprise us that we often think (falsely) that we are surrounded by intentional agencies. Darwin notes that religious communities would provide some evolutionary benefits: The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements. No being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level. Nevertheless, we see some distant approach to this state of

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mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps some other feelings. (Darwin 1874, 98–99)

Darwin’s suggestions comport well with subsequent naturalist accounts of religion. He stands in a tradition that includes Max Weber, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and others who have sought accounts of religion on naturalistic grounds. E. O. Wilson and Daniel Dennett carry on that project in the contemporary literature. Today, Darwin’s notion that we tend to overestimate the presence of intentional or personal realities has been honed. One of the foundational naturalistic claims is that if the ostensible experience of God can be accounted for without God actually existing, then the ostensible experiences cannot count as evidence. If belief in God is produced by a genetically inherited trait, if the human species is “hardwired” to believe in a spirit world, this could suggest that God doesn’t exist as something “out there,” beyond and independent of us, but rather as the product of an inherited perception, the manifestation of an evolutionary adaptation that exists exclusively within the human brain. If true, this would imply that there is no actual spiritual reality, no God or gods, no soul, or afterlife. Consequently, humankind can no longer be viewed as a product of God but rather God must be viewed as a product of human cognition. (Alper 2000, 79)

Here is a good overview of a common naturalist stance. Michael McGoodwin offers this summary of E. O. Wilson’s assessment of religion: The predisposition to religious belief is an ineradicable part of human behavior. Mankind has produced 100,000 religions. It is an illusion to think that scientific humanism and learning will dispel religious belief. Men would rather believe than know . . . A kind of Darwinistic survival of the fittest has occurred with religions . . . The ecological principle called Gause’s law holds that competition is maximal between species with identical needs . . . Even submission to secular religions such as Communism and guru cults involve willing subordination of the individual to the group. Religious practices confer biological advantage. The mechanisms of religion include (1) objectification (the reduction of reality to images and definitions that are easily understood and cannot be refuted), (2) commitment through faith (a kind of tribalism enacted through self-surrender), (3) and myth (the narratives that explain the tribe’s favored position on the earth, often incorporating supernatural forces struggling for control, apocalypse, and millennium). The three great religion categories of today are Marxism, traditional religion, and scientific materialism. Though theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline, traditional religion will endure for a long time to come and will not be replaced by scientific materialism. (McGoodwin 1991, 105)

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It is interesting to note that many (possibly most) naturalists have felt bound to account for the success of religion but without having any recourse to reason or evidence; that is, religion is not explained because there is some evidence that its practices are based on evident or justified true beliefs. Let us consider two more naturalist critiques before assessing the naturalist view of religion. In The Wisdom to Doubt, John Schellenberg works hard to defeat an argument from religious experience based on the view that we should trust religious belief-forming practices unless we have positive reasons for doubting them. He argues that many of the practices that generate religious belief may be known to be false, and we should be highly reluctant to grant them any credence. There are ever so many ways in which a doxastic practice could be socially established and yet also the purveyor of utterly false beliefs. Indeed, plenty of actual patterns of belief formation from the world’s history that have persisted for generations over large segments of the population and been deeply entrenched, both psychologically and socially, could be called on to make this point. One need only think about false beliefs concerning the shape of the earth, or the alleged inferiority of women, or claimed conspiracies and plots engineered by Jews or other minority groups. (We could also add a reference to “significant self-support”: think about how many of a medieval flat-earther’s experiences are just as they would be if the earth were flat!) And, of course, religion itself presents an obvious and uncontroversial example since the outputs of religious experiential belief-forming practices conflict, and thus not all such practices can be reliable: in virtue of this fact we know that right now there are socially established religious practices purveying mostly false beliefs, failing to put anyone in effective touch with reality, regardless of their fruits. Thus an appropriately cautious — and also curious and exploratory — investigator, when deciding how to proceed, has a reason to discriminate more sharply and sensitively than Alston [a philosopher who defends the evidential value of religious experience], choosing to accept certain socially established practices as initially credible, but ones that do not raise such credibility-threatening and investigation-worthy issues and that are in any case universal and unavoidable. (Schellenberg 2007, 170–171; for Alston’s position see Alston 1991)

For Schellenberg, it is wiser to trust only our basic faculties, our “common inheritance”: Because we find ourselves unable to not form and revise beliefs on the basis of sense perception, introspection, memory, and rational intuition, a certain basic picture of the world has been generated involving birth and conscious experience and physical objects and relations with other conscious beings and the reality of things past and death and also the appropriateness of valuation (presupposed by the humblest desires, and sanctioned by intuition). This picture appears to be our common inheritance. This inheritance consists of those beliefs that are virtually unavoidable (such as rudimentary claims based on perception) and do not include controversial religious content. It becomes the very fabric

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of a human being, affecting one’s sense of identity and of connectedness to others and of value and thus also of the appropriate goals, including intellectual goals. What we can see here — and some of what Alston says about the psychological and social establishment of our basic belief-forming practices is in accord with this — is that we are not independent, truth-registering machines that care not what the truth is and would question everything if we could, but rather deeply human inquirers, whose humanity and the basic picture with which it is intertwined do much to shape the nature of our inquiring impulse. Indeed, that very impulse itself, whatever shape it takes, is deeply conditioned by aspects of our “basic picture”; in particular, it is inextricably interwoven with valuation — how could one desire truth or nobly determine to see the truth, whatever it may be, without thinking it good to do so? . . . Religious belief-forming practices are by no means universal or unavoidable. So while it is correct to say that we have our basic, unavoidable picture of the world, and while it functions in the manner indicated above, it is equally clear that the deliverances of religious belief-forming practices are not a part of it. Indeed, with a proper awareness of the nature of that picture, and proper investigative sensitivities, we can see that if we are to embrace religious belief at all, it should be because investigation suggests that we need to do so in order to properly extend or accurately fill out the picture. (Schellenberg 2007, 172–174)

Schellenberg also introduces a clever new objection against the view that different persons may trust different religious experiences, e.g. it is reasonable for a Christian to trust her experiences, reasonable for a Buddhist to trust his, and so on. He imagines that this might be undermined if we could share one another’s experiences. For who knows what I would think I if I could have your experience? A Christian might be inclined to say to members of other traditions: “You would understand my reticence to give up my belief if you could only see what I see.” But a better thought here is this: “What if the Christian (or Hindu or the Buddhist . . .) could see from the inside what all religious experience have seen, perhaps in sequence, with a clear memory afterward of what she had seen—would her belief be affected then?” Presumably the answer is “perhaps yes, perhaps no.” But that is just the point. Who knows what would result if one could see from the inside what everyone else has seen? Perhaps one would conclude that one’s own experience was the most illuminating and likely to be reliable, but then again perhaps one would notice that the clouds were thicker on one’s own side. Who could say? Certainly one’s own experience can provide no grounds for going one way or the other on this matter. (That I have a powerful experience apparently of Christ may entail, at least for that moment, that I form a religious belief about Christ, and this belief may entail the falsity of incompatible beliefs from other traditions; but neither of these things entails that, should I experience the world as does a Hindu or a Buddhist, I would not conclude that their experience was more illuminating and convincing than mine.) But then it could well be that one would judge someone else’s experience at least as epistemically impressive as one’s own were one’s evidential situation suitably enlarged, as in the imagined situation. (Schellenberg 2007, 182–183; emphasis Schellenberg’s)

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If Schellenberg is right, we cannot simply conclude that religious experiences could justify incompatible claims. Finally, consider Bruce Russell’s strategy: it is always more reasonable to adopt the simplest, naturalistic explanation, rather than appeal to the transcendent. Over against the view that religious experiences can provide evidential weight when they are accompanied by persons’ transformed lives, Russell thinks this is not at all the case. [I]t’s not clear that the best explanation of the transformation in people after they’ve seemed to have had an experience of Spirit in conscience is that the transformation was caused by God. Suppose someone appears to me in my dreams who looks like my deceased grandmother and seems to be unselfishly loving and forgiving. Suppose she appears again and again, night after night, year after year. Suppose, further, that as a result of these dream experiences my life changes for the better, and I come to believe that my grandmother still exists in some way. Imagine that as a result of the experiences of my grandmother in my dreams I become a better person, more loving and forgiving, even of my enemies. Wouldn’t the best explanation of those experiences be that they were somehow produced by me alone, say, by the neurons in my brain firing in certain ways, and wouldn’t the best explanation of the change in my life be that my belief that my good and loving grandmother still exists and wants me to become more unselfishly loving somehow causes those changes? There is no need to posit the existence of my grandmother to explain either my experiences of her or the changes in my life. (Russell 2009)

SEEING INTO THE MIND OF GOD Over against this network of naturalist claims, how might a theist respond? We cannot possibly do justice to all the arguments pro and con, but we hope to consider an overview of the debate and a theistic reply. A succinct case for theism based on religious experience may take the following form. Arguably, many people over great tracks of time and over many cultures seem to have some sense or experience of there being a greater, intentional, good, purposive reality, a reality often thought to be divine (God or the sacred). In theistic religious traditions, this reality is experienced as God, the Creator and merciful judge and redeemer. Estimations of the extent of such experiences and their clarity vary widely. Some reports of this encounter with the divine seem very general and some are quite specific involving revelations (either in propositions or visions or the inspired imagination). Should such experiences be trusted? A range of philosophers (including William Alston, Richard Swinburne, Jerome Gellman, Gary Gutting, Carol Davis, William Wainwright, Kai Man Kwam), believe that we should trust such experience, unless we have strong reason for doubts (sometimes called defeaters). 140

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A defeater is a reason to think that some piece of evidence is false. So, presumably when we ask a stranger what time it is, then, under normal conditions, it seems we should trust his answer. The trust would be undermined if we hear reports that the stranger has a reputation for being deceptive. Let us grant at the outset what some naturalists are prepared to concede: significant numbers of people at least appear to have some experience of the divine or the sacred that is incompatible with naturalism. For a classical source that surveys the wealth of testimony about the ostensible experience of the divine, see Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism or, for a more recent source book, see Timothy Beardsworth’s A Sense of Presence. While not explicitly addressing Darwin, they offer a richly diverse but convergent or unified understanding of a transcendent (non-naturalistic) object of religious experience. Why shouldn’t we trust such experiences? According to theists like Alston, we should. Now, let’s consider the objections. What about our tendency to perceive intentionality whether or not there actually is intentionality? Alper (as cited on page 127) seems to think that if we would tend to believe in God or experience God when there is no God, then “this could suggest that God doesn’t exist as something ‘out there’ beyond and independent of us, but rather as the product of an inherited perception, the manifestation of an evolutionary adaptation that exists exclusively within the human brain. If true, this would imply that there is no actual spiritual reality no God or gods, no soul, or afterlife.” Why would that follow? If there is a God, wouldn’t it be more reasonable to think that human beings would have a tendency to believe or think they experience God? Note, too, the way Alper moves from “this could suggest” to “this would imply,” but there is no such connection. There is no plausible way to move from belief or experience in X is hard-wired into our brain, to X does not (or probably does not) exist. We may be hard-wired to undertake mathematics, to believe there is food, and so on. We may be hard-wired to believe in many true things. Two more points need to be made in reply to Alper. First, according to theism, God exists necessarily and the cosmos only exists in virtue of God’s sustaining creative will. Given theism, without God (an impossibility) there would be no universe of any kind at all. So there is no possibility of someone having what appears to be an experience of God and God not exist (granting a theistic framework). If Alper claims this is illicit, then it seems he is simply denying the truth of theism rather than providing a reason for someone to think theism is false. Second, the principle underlying his thesis seems to suggest that if what seems like an experience of X can be explained without X, then one cannot or should not trust the evidence of the experience. But this would seem to undermine all judgments. One can explain all your experiences on the grounds that you are in the Matrix and your brain is electro-chemically stimulated to have all the experiences you currently are having (a possibility we entertained in Chapter 1.) But surely that should not 141

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undermine your confident common sense, for example, that you are now confident you are reading this book. What about the advantages that religion offers? Should that make us suspicious about ostensible experiences of the divine? This seems implausible. If there is a God, why should there not be some advantages in believing there is a God and living as though God cares for the creation? There are also advantages to believing in clear, evident realities (laws of nature), but that does not undermine ordinary experience of such realities. If there is a God, why isn’t God experienced more? Perhaps God is experienced more, but we are not as readily aware of this. An analogy from philosophy of mind may be useful. David Hume famously claimed that the self is unobservable. In a famous passage from the Treatise, Hume reports: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist . . . When I turn my reflexion on myself, I never can perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive any thing but the perceptions. ’Tis the composition of these, therefore, which forms the self. We can conceive a thinking being to have either many or few perceptions. Suppose the mind to be reduc’d even below the life of an oyster. Suppose it to have only one perception, as of thirst or hunger. Consider it in that situation. Do you conceive any thing but merely that perception? (Hume 1739, book I, part IV, sec. VI)

Is Hume right that he does not perceive (or observe or see) himself and, if we are like him, nor do we? We follow a number of philosophers who think that Hume was working with the wrong image of the self (or himself). He seems to think that if he were to see himself, this would be something akin to perceiving an object or seeing a thing in a visual field. His insistence that he only sees perceptions can be turned around, for we do not perceive perceptions. Rather when a person perceives something, she is actually involved as a subject doing the perceiving. There is a sense in which all perceiving and all sensing involves self-observation. Touch a hot stove and you will not just experience pain, you will experience yourself in pain. Pain is the state that you, the subject, are in. Roderick Chisholm offers a forceful response to Hume: The difficulty is that Hume appeals to certain evidence to show that there are only impressions or perceptions, and that when he tells us what this evidence is, he implies not only (i) that there is, as he puts it in his example, heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, but also (ii) that there is someone who finds heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, and moreover (iii) that the one who finds heat or cold is the same as the one who finds

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love or hatred and the same as the one who finds light or shade, and finally (iv) that this one does not in fact stumble upon anything but perceptions. It is not unreasonable to ask, therefore, whether Hume’s report of his fourth finding is consistent with his report of the second and third. If Hume finds what he says he finds, that is to say, if he finds not only perceptions, but also that he finds them and hence that there is someone who finds them, how can his premises be used to establish the conclusion that he never observes anything but perceptions? (Chisholm 1976, 40)

Returning to the question of religious experience, we might well be in a similar position of Hume in thinking we do not perceive or experience God, but you are experiencing God all the time. Imagine, for the sake of argument that theism is true and God exists. More specifically, let’s imagine Christian theism is true and you attend a Eucharist service. Imagine you are an agnostic but you experience beautiful music and listen to a liturgy on caring for others. If Christian theism is true, it seems you actually had an experience of God, for the service would have been a participation in the grace of God and sustained by God. Consider a more terrestrial example. Imagine your beloved baked you a wonderful cake with the words “I love you” on it. He is not around and you do not know he baked the cake, or that the message was intended to be addressed to you. Did you actually experience his loving attention when you ate the cake? Arguably, you did, even if you did not realize it. What about Schellenberg’s example? It would take an extensive chapter on religious pluralism for a full response. Schellenberg wants to secure a thoroughly secular base of universal or unavoidable beliefs about reality based on perception, introspection, memory, and so on. Religious beliefs based on experience are then categorized along with believers in a flat earth and antiSemitism. He then makes the further claim that “there are socially established religious practices purveying mostly false beliefs, failing to put anyone in the effective touch with reality.” Perhaps he asserts this last point on the grounds that religions promote claims that are incompatible; for example, if the Buddhists are right, the Christians must be wrong. Schellenberg’s proposal faces certain challenges. First, is his position one that is universal and unavoidable? It is doubtful that all inquirers everywhere either do or should believe Schellenberg is right. In fact, it is more likely that most people do not think that their beliefs must be (if reasonable) universally shared. It is also worth wondering how the practice of philosophy would be assessed given Schellenberg’s recommendations. If we adopt his standards, perhaps the practice of philosophy (which has not produced universal and irresistible conclusions) should be discontinued. Second, why assume religious beliefs are akin to flat-earth convictions (which, as noted earlier, this is a conviction rarely held historically) or antiSemitism? Why not see religious beliefs and experiences as analogous to convictions against racism or slavery or injustice, when these convictions were most unpopular? For a compelling reply to the charge that religious 143

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beliefs are more inclined to promote prejudice and unjust suffering than non-religious/secular beliefs, see Is Religion Dangerous? by Keith Ward. Third, Schellenberg seems content to allow for perception, introspection, memory, and rational intuition concerning physical objects and conscious experience. Each of these modes of knowing has had an explicit role in religious experience. People have claimed to perceive God, to find God through introspection, memory, and rational intuition (again see Evelyn Underhill’s classic Mysticism for a systematic survey of such modes). Fourth, Schellenberg has elsewhere argued that there is a great good in experiencing the love of God (Schellenberg 1993). If he is right, and yet such an experience goes beyond Schellenberg’s secular base of acceptable beliefforming practices, he is essentially arguing that this good (assuming there is a God and the experiential relationship with God is good) should be shunned. Why? Schellenberg may have a reason to shun religious experiences that involve evident wrongs, but why shun prospective great goods? Fifth, and this gets to heart of Schellenberg’s position: Why assume religious experience and beliefs are in stark contradiction? John Hick has proposed that most, if not all, religions foster a vision of (what he calls) the Real, a vision that is positive in substance (Hick believes that such a vision supports a belief in a life beyond this one) and is in conflict with secular naturalism. While Hick’s position is worthy of serious attention, one may also take a more modest approach and claim that sometimes-apparent conflicts are not deep. Take, for example, a Buddhist claim that there is no substantial concrete self-enduring over time versus the conviction and experience of Christians that the concrete self is a substantial, enduring being. It may be that both experiences are authentic but rest on a vital conceptual distinction. The Buddhist experience may be akin to Hume’s and involve not experiencing the self as an object. But this does not mean there cannot be another framework in which the self is revealed. Finally, consider Bruce Russell’s phantasmic grandmother. He makes a good point concerning the rather bizarre instance of the loving grandmother, but the experiences (in his thought experiment narrative) seem isolated to just one person (himself), the experiences only occur at night in dreams, they seem paranormal, and we have no background information about what kind of universe we are in that might make such nocturnal appearances likely or even intelligible. There is instead a kind of eccentric fairy-tale tone to Russell’s thought experiment: we get a very odd image of a dutiful and responsive yet isolated grandson (after all, in Russell’s story the “revelation” is just between him and his solicitous mother’s mother) receiving moral instructions from a “deceased grandmother.” Given that theism fits that picture, Russell’s point is apt. But Russell’s objection is misguided if the ostensible experience of the divine is not limited to one person, given that they occur at all times of the day and waking or sleeping, the experiences are not matched up by the kind of paranormal ghostbusters apparition but 144

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are instead the kind of regular, constant sense of a divine presence. Imagine, too, that the widespread experience of the divine seems to be accompanied with transformed, changed lives. Then also consider the evidential character of the ostensible experience of God, if theism is considered a live option. This whole network of beliefs and occurrences changes the landscape considerably.

IMAGES AND SEEING Two cases of encountering minds have been considered in this chapter: the apparent encounter between human beings and animal minds and the apparent encounter between ourselves and what may be called the mind of God. Some of the evidence has been weighed on behalf of each. Both involve what may be called a unique inference, a kind of perceiving that does not admit of independent checking (under present conditions). We cannot be suddenly transformed into a nonhuman animal and then observe (if we can observe) whether we are conscious, and it is difficult to imagine a device that would confirm decisively when (or if ) ostensible experiences of the divine are authentic. While the choice between theism and naturalism may not be made in light of clear, irrefutable evidence, both worldviews support a profoundly different aesthetic experience of the world. In one framework, the world is experienced as an intended, purposive, valued reality; in the other, the world may be deeply valued but it is not the result of forces that could have foreseen its reality. In “Appreciation and the natural environment,” Allen Carlson argues that ecological knowledge of nature allows one to aesthetically relish evolutionary processes and the natural world itself rather than simply appreciate nature’s power or immediate sensible characteristics. Without a background in ecology, one may experience a waterfall as awesome and sublime. But with ecology, one may both experience the awesome sublimity of the waterfall but also experience the wonder of what (for example) was forged by the movement of glaciers thousands of years ago. Compare theistic and naturalist wonder and awe about the natural world. Imagine naturalism (in its broad or strict form) is right. Then in a sense the naturalist’s awe is deeper or more authentic or revelatory, and the theistic aesthetic response is more of a response to a (false) image of the world. The opposite would be true, if theism were the case. One may tangibly contrast such experiences in literature. Wordsworth may be read as representing a very broad, platonic theistic vision. How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World

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Is fitted: — and how exquisitely too — Theme this but little heard of among men — The external World is fitted to the Mind; And the creation (by no lower name Can it be called) which they with blended might Accomplish: — this is our high argument. (Wordsworth 1853, xi)

For a naturalist example, consider these famous lines from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman: My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy . . . I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world. Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so. (Whitman 1919, 33, 35)

We now turn to the next chapter and theistic and naturalist approaches to pain and suffering.

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Galapagos Cactus War no. 20

CHAPTER 5

The Problem of Theism: Evil We may identify with deprived or persecuted people through our imaginative understanding of their plight. Such understanding is an instance of moral knowledge. How much do we know, what do we know, about ‘what it is like to be’ other people? As moralists, as political moralists, we specialise, we have favourites. We sympathise with, know about, some sufferers not others, we imagine and desire some states of affairs not others. (Iris Murdoch 1992, 391)

In the last two chapters we have reflected on (among other things) the problem of emergence for naturalism. Is naturalism or theism better able to account for the existence of human and animal minds and normative values found in ethics, aesthetics, and reason itself? In theism, there is a deep philosophical and theological problem of emergence: what is the origin, nature, and scope of evil? From the standpoint of Platonic theism, goodness is preeminent, as is purposive, intentional power. How, then, does evil arise? The fact that evil is a problem is recognized by theistic religious traditions. According to classical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, evil does exist and counts as an aberration or violation of God’s very nature and will. Cries of injustice have no answer unless it is acknowledged that injustice is an aberration or violation of what should be the case. If evil was not recognized as a problem, these religious traditions would themselves be found wanting. The problem of evil for the religious theist involves seeking to fight or overcome or endure evil (as well as to theologically reflect on its nature), but some philosophers consider the problem of evil as the most significant evidence that theism is false. In this chapter Darwin is our starting point, taking stock of his ethical and aesthetic objections to theism based on his estimation of the waste and ugliness of the natural world. We then propose that there is a vital difference between the problem of evil pictured or imaged from a standpoint within creation, or from what may be called the ethics of creation. We slowly build up what may be called the breadth of theism defense, with an interlude about values that extend beyond this life.

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DARWINIAN DOUBTS AND A SATISFIED FAITH In his autobiography, Darwin claimed that during his voyage on the HMS Beagle he was a fairly orthodox Christian. He became dismayed, however, with a literal understanding of biblical history and its portrait of God as tyrannical and vengeful. He was also dismayed (as we recognized in the last chapter) by the plurality of religions. While on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality . . . But I had gradually come, by the time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. The question then continually rose before my mind and would not be banished, — is it credible that if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos, would he permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva, &c, as Christianity is connected with the Old Testament. This appeared to me utterly incredible. (Darwin 2005, 85,86)

Darwin was circumspect in expressing his doubts about Christianity and other forms of theism partly because his wife was a devout, practicing Christian. As we observed in Chapter 2, the Origin was explicitly presented as a theistic text insofar as it seemed to spell out how the author believed God creates the world, namely through natural selection and the survival of the fittest rather than by special creation and God’s particular (as opposed to general) providential care. As Darwin reflected further, he came to believe that if there were truly a God of omnipotent, omniscient power and goodness, the natural world would be different. Darwin did not explicitly entertain concepts of God that involved God possessing less power or less benevolence than he found in orthodox Christianity. So, Darwin did not explore what some theologians have done in process theology, panentheism, and personalism; movements in philosophy in which either the conception of divine goodness or divine power are qualified. (Witness, for example, the title of one process philosopher’s book: Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne.) But Darwin did not compromise his view: if there is a God, then God has boundless benevolence. Darwin uses an aesthetic argument, “revulsion,” in his reasoning about God. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create a universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from

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the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one; whereas, as just remarked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have developed through variation and natural selection. (Darwin 2002, 52)

Darwin’s question about the magnitude of suffering is a somewhat utilitarian one. He seems to assume that if theism is true, then all experience has a purpose or use that must be justified. Darwin’s estimation of animal suffering is particularly interesting because his theory requires that animals have the motive (or drive) to live, and this would not be feasible if animals were in a state of absolute misery. Darwin needed to acknowledge a general state of animal well-being. Every one who believes, as I do, that all the corporeal and mental organs (excepting those which are neither advantageous or disadvantageous to the possessor) of all beings have been developed through natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, together with use or habit, will admit that these organs have been formed so that their possessors may compete successfully with other beings, and thus increase in number. (Darwin 2002, 51)

But there are instances of suffering that seem not to be required in assisting animal life: “But pain or suffering of any kind, if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action; yet is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil” (Darwin 2002, 51; compare with Darwin 2005, 67, as cited earlier). Darwin thought it unworthy of a benevolent Creator to allow a cosmos that permits the animal predation he observed with wasps and their victims. Richard Dawkins’ description of the ichneumon wasps is worth citing: Ichneumon wasps, with their habit of paralyzing [sic] but not killing their victim, before laying an egg in it with the promise of a larva gnawing it hollow from within, and the cruelty of nature generally, were major preoccupations of Victorian theodicy. It’s easy to see why. The female wasps lay their eggs in live insect prey, such as caterpillars, but not before carefully seeking out with their sting each nerve ganglion in turn, in such a way that the prey is paralysed, but still stays alive. It must be kept alive to provide fresh meat for the growing wasp larva feeding inside. And the larva, for its part, takes care to eat the internal organs in a judicious order. It begins by taking out the fat bodies and digestive organs, leaving the vital heart and nervous system till last — they are necessary, you see, to keep the caterpillar alive. As Darwin so poignantly wondered, what kind of beneficent designer would have dreamed that up? I don’t know whether caterpillars can feel pain. I devoutly hope not. But what I do know is that natural selection would in any case take no steps to dull their pain, if the job could be accomplished more economically by simply paralysing their movements. (Dawkins 2007, 395)

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event (they both find this practice a matter of disgust) and unworthy of an intentional, all good Creator. Five traditional means of addressing evils found in nature were not open to Darwin: an appeal to the fall, an appeal to free will, construing suffering as essential for moral development, belief in an afterlife, and an appeal to miracles such as the resurrection of Christ (an event that some theologians have appealed to as revealing God’s loving power). As for the fall, some Christian theologians contend there was either a historical fall from grace as we find described in the first three chapters of Genesis, or there was a profound turning away from God in our human evolution, an aboriginal sin that might (metaphorically) be thought of as the disobedience of Adam and Eve. Gen. 3:17 contains a reference to what may be the environmental cost of humanity’s primordial sin: “Cursed is the ground because of you.” (As an aside, there is an unfortunate confirmation in our own day that human irresponsibility has led to a kind of cursing of the greater natural world, such as the anthropogenic cause of species extinction.) Darwin seemed to be convinced that death and suffering are inevitable features of a world of natural selection and survival of the fittest. He never entertained the possibility that predation and painful suffering only occurred after a primordial human evil. Nor did Darwin seriously consider whether prehuman ills could have come about as an effect of nonhuman moral agents (see Isa. 14:12–15, Ezek. 28:12–19, and Murray 2008, ch. 3). Second, some theologians argue that substantial amounts of suffering are the result of human beings misusing their freedom. Freedom is a basic good and it plays an important role in some greater good such as allowing creatures the opportunity to freely engage in loving, interdependent relationships. Darwin, however, thought there was no freedom in the natural order, and that what passes as freedom is simply chance. The impersonal nature of the cosmos insures that suffering is the inevitable consequence of mindless forces. “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows” (Darwin 2002, 50). Third, moral improvement may be a worthy goal even if it involves great suffering, but Darwin was convinced that much suffering is quite irrelevant to moral development. That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. (Darwin 2002, 52)

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always the case and, besides, there seemed to be enormous suffering of animals who do not survive. Fourth, as for life after death, Darwin was not above realizing that if death involves utter annihilation, then there is a genuine tragedy awaiting humanity. The science of his day was predicting that, ultimately, the cosmos would end. Darwin lamented: With respect to immortality, nothing shows me how strong and almost instinctive a belief it is, as the consideration of the view now held by most physicists, namely that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life. — Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful. (Darwin 2002, 53)

Darwin’s sense of the tragedy of death was perhaps most keen when he and his wife had to endure the death of their beloved daughter Annie in 1851. Still, Darwin seemed content in a faith in humanity acting at its best, even if there was no life beyond this one. While such a viewpoint may seem quite natural today, it was commonplace in mid-nineteenth-century Britain to think that belief in an afterlife was essential in moral conduct; persons who disbelieved in a divine judgment were deemed less reliable than those who believed. A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones. A dog acts in this manner, but he does so blindly. A man, on the other hand, looks forwards and backwards, and compares his various feelings, desires and recollections. He then finds, in accordance with the verdict of all the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts. If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth. By degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his inner-most guide or conscience. — As for myself I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science. (Darwin 2002, 54)

Fifth, Darwin put no credit in stories of miracles or divine revelation. Narratives about miracles were, according to Darwin, forged by those who “at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us” (Darwin 2002, 49). 153

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EVIL MULTIPLIED The problem of evil literature today covers most of the ground that Darwin did in his autobiography and elsewhere. Unlike Darwin’s case of the wasp, William Rowe uses this image of a fawn trapped in a forest fire to advance his case for atheism: Suppose in some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering. So far as we can see, the fawn’s intense suffering is pointless. For there does not appear to be any greater good such that the prevention of the fawn’s suffering would require either the loss of that good or the occurrence of an evil equally bad or worse. Nor does there seem to be any equally bad or worse evil so connected to the fawn’s suffering that it would have had to occur had the fawn’s suffering been prevented. Could an omnipotent, omniscient being have prevented the fawn’s apparently pointless suffering? The answer is obvious, as even the theist will insist. An omnipotent, omniscient being could have easily prevented the fawn from being horribly burned, or, given the burning, could have spared the fawn the intense suffering by quickly ending its life, rather than allowing the fawn to lie in terrible agony for several days. (Rowe 2007, 63).

Other images that are used in the attack on theism include real cases of rape and murder, child abuse, mass killings, especially the Holocaust. Marilyn Adams offers this list of what she calls “paradigmatic horrors”: The rape of a woman and axing of her arms, psychophysical torture whose ultimate goal is the disintegration of personality, betrayal of one’s deepest loyalties, cannibalizing one’s own offspring, child abuse of the sort described by Ivan Karamazov, child pornography, parental incest, slow death by starvation, participation in the Nazi death camps, the explosion of nuclear bombs over populated areas, having to choose which of one’s children shall live and which be executed by terrorists, being the accidental and/or unwitting agent of the disfigurement or death of those one loves best. I regard these as paradigmatic, because I believe most people would find in the doing or suffering of them prima-facie reason to doubt the positive meaning of their lives. Christian belief counts the crucifixion of Christ another: on the one hand, death by crucifixion seemed to defeat Jesus’ Messianic vocation; for according to Jewish law, death by hanging from a tree made its victim ritually accursed, definitively excluded from the compass of God’s people, a fortiori disqualified from being the Messiah. One the other hand, it represented the defeat of its perpetrators’ leadership vocations, as those who were to prepare the people of God for the Messiah’s coming, killed and ritually accursed the true Messiah, according to later theological understanding, God Himself. (Adams, in R. and M. Adams [eds] 1990, 211–212)

A great deal of the debate over theism and its critics has focused on whether evil is a necessary consequence of possessing morally significant freedom. We can in many circumstances appreciate that the exercise of freedom can 154

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be essential in developing a sense of autonomy. But, philosophers sometimes counter with the claims (a) we lack such freedom or (b) if we have such freedom, it is not worth the suffering. Some claim that we can acquire great goods without the kind of dangers posed by our world. Courage and fortitude, for instance, could manifest themselves as the persistence, steadfastness, and perseverance it takes to accomplish well any difficult or demanding long-range task — the writing of a doctoral dissertation, for example, or training for and competing in the Olympic Games. It is hard to see why a man or a woman cannot develop just as much patience, fortitude and strength of character in helping his or her spouse complete a doctoral dissertation as in caring for a sick child through a long and serious illness. (Kane 1975, 2f)

These moves are designed to cut off the possible move that suffering or evil might be permissible if it either led to a greater good or it prevented a greater harm. A popular, more recent argument has been advanced with a focus on Christian theism in particular. John Schellenberg has pointed out the problem of God not being more evident to more people. This may go beyond the problem of evil (in a narrow sense) but it is worth putting on display here for it shows a case in which God should not, if God is all good, allow for persons to be ignorant of God. The vivid thought experiments that follow form part of the “hidden-ness of God” objection. Suppose your daughter, whom you dearly love, is in the grip of an erroneous picture as to what sort of person you are and what you intend in relation to her. No matter what you do in seeking to facilitate real contact with the truth and choice in favor of a full and meaningful relationship with you, the response is only fresh resistance. And you correctly conclude that very likely nothing else of the same sort will work in the future. Now suppose that some way of instantaneously transforming her perspective is made available to you: if you press this button she will see you for who you really are and the snagged and tangled and distorted beliefs will rearrange themselves into a clear perception of the truth. Surely you will use this means of cutting through that mess, for it represents only an abbreviated version of what you have already been seeking. But suppose also that in facilitating a correct picture of who you are and what you intend in this way, you will render it inevitable that your daughter make at least an initial choice in favor of meaningful relationship with you — that is, her choice to do so will not be free in the sense we have been emphasizing. (She will say, “Oh, what a fool I’ve been,” and immediately be prompted to see to make up for lost time.) Surely you will still do it, for you see that a free choice, yea or nay, in favor of meaningful relationship with you of the sort that would have real value and that you ought never to take lightly isn’t threatened thereby: given the deficient information available to your daughter about who you are, even if you leave her alone she will not have been able to make such a choice . . . (Wouldn’t any parent make the correct view available, even if the choice facing the child is then so obvious and attractive as not to be free, rather than

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having the child persist forever in her misunderstanding-based free choice? And what would be chosen by a perfectly loving God, the one who according to spiritual geniuses like Jesus of Nazareth never ceases to seek the lost sheep and to reveal to it a shepherd?) (Schellenberg 2007, 224–225)

According to Schellenberg, if God exists, God would not be so hidden. Schellenberg offers one more parable making a similar point. Imagine yourself in the following situation. You’re a child playing hide-and-seek with your mother in the woods in back of your house. You’ve been crouching for some time now behind a large oak tree, quite a fine hiding place but not undiscoverable — certainly not for someone as clever as your mother. However, she does not appear. The sun is setting and it will soon be bedtime, but still no mother. Not only isn’t she finding you, but, more disconcerting, you can’t hear her anywhere: she’s not beating the nearby bushes, making those exaggerated “looking for you” noises and talking to you meanwhile as mothers playing this game usually do. Now imagine that you start calling for your mother. Coming out from behind the tree, you tell out her name, over and over again. But no answer. Oh, there is a moment when suddenly you hear sounds you are sure must signal your mother looking for you, but they turn out to come from nothing more than leaves rolling in the wind. So you go back to calling and looking everywhere: through the woods, in the house, down the road. Several hours pass and you are growing hoarse from calling. Is she anywhere around? Would your mother — loving and responsible parent that she is — fail to answer if she were around? (Schellenberg 2007, 228)

Before surveying the resources of theism in replying to all these objections, let us briefly consider how naturalism fairs in relation to the arguments we have posted.

EVIL AND NATURALISM Because naturalism does not posit a good, powerful, purposive Creator, it of course does not face the problem of evil, per se, as we have discussed matters so far. Naturalism may gain ground, however, not just because evil may make its rival theism seem discredited, but perhaps naturalism offers a better account of the levels of what we are terming evil that we actually find. Consider Dawkins’ overview of suffering and nature. His goal may be to discredit theism, but it also serves to provide a portrait of the process of evolution that Dawkins thinks of as “the greatest show on earth.” Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering, nor for it. Nature is not interested one way or the other in suffering unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquilizes gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite.

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Would such a gene be favoured by natural selection? Not unless the act of tranquilizing a gazelle improved that gene’s chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death — as most of them eventually are. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase of population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. (Dawkins 1995, 390, 391)

It was in light of Darwin’s portrait of the suffering in nature that led John Stuart Mill to a biting critique of the natural world. In the fierce passage that follows, one might only imagine how Mill would have strengthened his accusations today: In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature’s every day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives; and in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures . . . Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this, nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst; upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts; and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the well-being of a whole people, perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence. Such are Nature’s dealings with life. Even when she does not intend to kill, she inflicts the same tortures in apparent wantonness. (Mill 1874, 389)

Naturalist critics of theism have been ambivalent about the value of the natural world: some hold that the natural world is unworthy of being created or sustained, while others seem to recognize its abundant goodness. Contrast, for example, James Cornman and Keith Lehrer with Daniel Dennett. It appears that if Cornman and Lehrer had divine power they would not have created our world.

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If you were all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful and you were going to create a universe in which there were sentient beings — beings that are happy and sad, enjoy pleasure, feel pain, express love, anger, pity, hatred — what kind of world would you create? . . . Try to imagine what such a world would be like. Would it be like the one which actually does exist, this world we live in? Would you create a world such as this one if you had the power and know-how to create any logically possible world? If your answer is “no,” as it seems to be, then you should begin to understand why the evil of suffering and pain in this world is such a problem for anyone who thinks God created this world . . . Given this world, then, it seems, we should conclude that it is improbable that it was created or sustained by anything we would call God. (Cornman and Lehrer 1970, 340–341)

Dennett is on a different track. Dennett, for example, is drawn to celebrating evolution itself as a glorious process: We who love evolution do not honor those whose love of evolution prevents them from thinking clearly and rationally about it! . . . In our view, there is no safe haven for mystery or incomprehensibility. Yes, there is humility, and awe, and sheer delight, at the glory of the evolutionary landscape, but it is not accompanied by, or in the service of, a willing (let alone thrilling) abandonment of reason. So I feel a moral imperative to spread the word of evolution, but evolution is not my religion. I don’t have a religion. (Dennett 2006, 268)

Here we seem to have an important counter-point to Dawkins’ lament over the cost of evolution in terms of suffering. It appears that the whole of evolution itself is found (by Dennett) to be awesome, delightful, and glorious. Whether a naturalist finds good or ill in evolution, many (but not all) naturalists reject libertarian freedom, and accept some form of compatabilism or hard determinism. On these views, human and animal history (including the Holocaust, the wasp’s nesting in a caterpillar, all murders, all rapes, mass killings, torture, and so on) is built into the natural world as necessary. These moral horrors occurred necessarily and could not have been avoided given the antecedent conditions of the cosmos and the prevailing laws of nature. In this sense, deterministic naturalism accommodates suffering as part of its portrait of inevitable outcomes. Naturalists are not thereby accommodating suffering in the sense of approving of it or proposing we collaborate with suffering, but they do not see suffering as a violation of the very nature of reality and its purpose. Suffering is not an abhorrent break down of the goodness of the created world, but a natural event, brought about by other natural causes. The juxtaposition between theistic and naturalist approaches to suffering is evident in two replies to a recent tragedy in which a bus crashed, resulting in the loss of life of several children. Dawkins cites one theist’s response: “The simple answer is that we do not know why there should be a God who lets these awful things happen. But the horror of the crash, to a Christian, confirms the fact that we live in a world of real values: positive and negative. If the 158

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universe was just electrons, there would be no problem of evil” (Dawkins 1995, 132). Dawkins replies: On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies like the crashing of this bus are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. (Dawkins 1995, 132–133)

By way of an immediate response, Dawkins misses this point: tragedies are never “meaningless.” Tragedy is marked by lamentation and destruction, to say something is tragic is to recognize the value of a loss. While electrons and other “blind” physical forces do not possess “wills,” Dawkins dismissal of intention and purpose erases much of our experience; we suffer tragedies, and most people do consider that a problem. It may be that naturalism is the correct view of reality and that what is needed is a courageous acceptance of its framework and values, and not to seek “shelter” in theism or some non-naturalist alternative that might offer a wider set of values. But there is a sense in which naturalism does imply what may be (in John Hick’s phrase) “bad news for the many.” Alfred Russel Wallace paints a grim image of nature from the standpoint of evolutionary materialism: [According to evolutionary materialism] we, in common with the rest of nature, are but products of the blind eternal forces of the universe, and believing also that the time must come when the sun will lose his heat and all life on earth necessarily will cease — have to contemplate a not very distant future in which all this glorious earth — which for untold millions of years has been slowly developing forms of life and beauty to culminate at last in man — shall be as if it never existed; we are compelled to suppose that all the slow growths of our race struggling towards a higher life, all the agony of martyrs, all the groans of victims, all the evil and misery and undeserved suffering of the ages, all the struggles for freedom, all the efforts towards justice, all the aspirations for virtue and the wellbeing of humanity, shall absolutely vanish, and “like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wrack behind.” (Wallace 1899, 476–477)

John Hick echoes Wallace’s portrait of naturalism: For quite apart from the sometimes tragic brevity of so many lives, even those who have lived the longest can seldom be said to have arrived, before they die, at a fulfillment of the human potential. We human beings are for so much of the time selfish, narrow-minded, emotionally impoverished, unconcerned about others, often vicious and cruel. But according to the great

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religions there are wonderfully better possibilities concealed within us. We see the amazing extent of the human potential in the great individuals, the mahatmas or saints, the moral and spiritual leaders and inspirers, and the creative artists of all kinds within every culture. We see aspects of it in innumerable more ordinary but in some ways extraordinary, men and women whom we encounter in everyday life. We see around us the different levels that the human spirit has reached and we know, from our own self-knowledge and observation and reading, that the generality of us have a very long way to go before we can be said to have become fully human. For according to naturalism, the evil that has afflicted so much of human life is final and irrevocable as the victims have ceased to exist. Let me make it clear that I am not suggesting that all this is the fault of the humanists or naturalists! I am pointing out that, with the exception of tough-minded atheists, such as Bertrand Russell, they do not seem to be aware that they are announcing the worst possible news to humanity as a whole. They ought frankly to acknowledge that if they are right the human situation is irredeemably bleak and painful for vast numbers of people. For — if they are right — in the case of that innumerable multitude whose quality of life has been rendered predominantly negative by pain, anxiety, extreme deprivation, oppression, or whose lives have been cut off in childhood or youth, there is no chance or their ever participating in an eventual fulfillment of the human potential. There is no possibility of this vast century-upon-century tragedy being part of a much larger process which leads ultimately to limitless good. (Hick 2004, 23–24)

Hick’s own position is that all persons will eventually find a good, fulfilling end beyond this life in relation to what he calls the Real. The latter is his term for the ultimate transcendent object sought through many different religious paths. Hick’s observation about the tragedy of naturalism has some credibility, though naturalists may well be wary of the side-effects of looking and hoping for a good that stretches out beyond this world. Apart from the worry that Hick’s stance (along with all the religious traditions that posit an afterlife) is a result of wish-fulfillment, naturalists may argue that it is their position that is more intensely concerned with this world, for (in their view) there is no next world for redemption.

SURVEYING THE RESOURCES OF THEISM Some attention to the terms of debate is needed. In the overview of Darwin’s position, animal and human suffering has been treated as “evil” though we have not been employing any formal definition of the term. Using the terminology proposed in the last chapter in which goodness is described as something that is fitting, worthy of approval and the like, we might begin with the notion that something is evil if it is unfitting or deserving disapproval. In the case of theism, the debate is over whether a good God created and sustains a cosmos if it is so unfitting or deserving disapproval. 160

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Let’s begin with animal suffering and ostensible waste. In the last chapter we argued that it is plausible to believe that some nonhuman animals are conscious, experiencing beings and so can be subject to suffering. Let’s highlight some of the goods involved in animal and human life. There are the goods of pleasure, play, eating, movement, the different senses, exercising reason, having desires and appetites, using memory, being able to exercise anticipation, consciousness, and for more developed beings the goods of love, virtue, friendship, community, and so on. Obviously, these can be the roots of suffering (as when our appetites or an animal’s appetite is not met), but these can also be ingredients in good states of affairs. There is a great good in simply being; this is an old, medieval view but not without defenders today (Swinburne 1998). Holmes Rolston III offers this overview of the goods and ills of the cosmos, and proposes that it is problematic to expect an all-good God would have only created a cosmos of “vegetarian” creatures that do no harm to other sentient beings. Nature is random, contingent, blind, disastrous, wasteful, indifferent, selfish, cruel, clumsy, ugly, struggling, full of suffering, and, ultimately, death? Yes, but this sees only the shadows, and there has to be light to cast shadows. Nature is orderly, prolific, efficient, selecting for adapted fit, exuberant, complex, diverse, regenerating life generation after generation. There are disvalues in nature as surely as there are values, and the disvalues systemically drive the value achievements. Translated into theological terms, the evils are redeemed in the ongoing story. Look, for instance, at predation. Certainly from the perspective of any particular animal as prey, being eaten is a bad thing. But then again the disvalue to the prey is a value to the predator, and, further, with a systemic turn, perspectives change. There is not value loss so much as value capture; there is appropriation of nutrient materials and energy from one life stream to another, with selective pressures to be efficient about the transfer. The pains of the prey are redeemed, we might say, by the pleasures of the predator. There are many biological achievements in muscle, power, sentience, and intelligence that could only have evolved, at least in life as we know it on Earth, with predation. Could, should God have created a world with only flora, no fauna? Possibly. Possibly not, since in a world in which things are assembled something has to disassemble them for recycling. In any case, we do not think that a mere floral world would be of more value than a world with fauna also. In a mere floral world, there would be no one to think. Heterotrophs must be built on autotrophs, and no autotrophs are sentient or cerebral. Could we have had only plant-eating fauna, only grazers, no predators? Possibly, though probably we never did, since predation preceded photosynthesis. Even grazers are predators of a kind, though what they eat does not suffer. Again, an Earth with only herbivores and no omnivores or carnivores would be impoverished — the animal skills demanded would be only a fraction of those that have resulted in actual zoology — no horns, no fleet-footed predators or prey, no fine-tuned eyesight and hearing, no quick neural capacity, no advanced brains. We humans stand in this tradition, as our ancestors were hunters.

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We really cannot envision a world, on any Earth more or less like our own, which can give birth to the myriad forms of life that have been generated here, without some things eating other things. (Rolston 2003, 534)

Current ecology seems to offer a more symbiotic portrait of the interrelationship of animals in the natural world and a more devastating portrait of animal suffering that is brought about directly or indirectly by human beings (see Why Animal Suffering Matters by Andrew Linzey). The latter of course raises a moral problem for us to face, whether we are theists or naturalists. One way to test how far any of us are truly convinced of animal suffering is to raise the question of the extent to which we think we are morally bound to prevent such suffering. If Rowe or we are truly convinced that the loss of the fawn in the forest is a great evil (and while Rowe does not assert this in print, he uses the example as a case of gratuitous suffering), don’t we have a moral duty to rescue fawns in forest fires? If you are convinced that the case of the wasp and the caterpillar involves the grotesque infliction of suffering on the caterpillar, should we police the animal world to prevent such travesties among these invertebrate animals? Traditionally, theistic religious traditions have not treated animal predation as evil, though in Genesis in the pre-fallen state, there appears to be no killing of animals and in some visions of the kingdom of heaven there are visions of nature at peace. Philosophical theists in the medieval and early modern era tended to see every creature (including animals) as possessing some good. The multitude of creatures was taken to be a display of God’s goodness. As Aquinas writes: For he [God] brought things into existence so that his goodness might be communicated to creatures and re-enacted through them. And because one single creature was not enough, he produced many and diverse, so that what was wanting in one expression of the divine goodness might be supplied by another, for goodness, which in God is single and all together, in creatures is multiple and scattered. Hence the whole universe less incompletely than one alone shares and represents his goodness. (Aquinas 1964, 95)

Augustine and a number of historically prominent theists held that God creates not just ex nihilo but through gradual processes, including processes in which animals become food for one another. Augustine writes: But one might ask why brute beasts inflict injury on one another, for there is no sin in them for which this could be a punishment, and they cannot acquire any virtue by such a trial. The answer, of course, is that one animal is the nourishment of another. To wish that it were otherwise would not be reasonable. For all creatures, as long as they exist, have their own measure, number, and order. (Augustine 1983, 92)

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Augustine articulated a profoundly positive view of the goodness of the natural world, including all animal life. He held that there was no evil in nature in the sense that “evil” refers to a substantial reality. He held, instead, that evil was a privation or dysfunction involving something good. For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present — namely, the diseases and wounds — go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist, for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance — the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils — that is, privations of the good which we call health — are accidents. (Augustine 1961, 11)

Augustine did not thereby deny that animals feel pain. One theistic reply to animal pain and suffering is to contend that it is the inevitable component of a good natural world in which there is codependency and integration. In Darwin’s more optimistic moments, this is essentially how he saw the natural world: Natural selection acts, as we have seen, exclusively by the presentation and accumulation of variations which are beneficial under the organic and inorganic conditions of life to which each creature is at each successive period exposed. The ultimate result will be that each creature will tend to become more and more improved in relation to its conditions of life. This improvement will, I think, inevitably lead to the gradual advancement of the organization of the greater number of living beings throughout the world. (Darwin 1959, 221)

Stephen Jay Gould took a similar view of the extinction of the dinosaurs: Since dinosaurs were not moving toward markedly larger brains, and since such a prospect may lie outside the capabilities of reptilian design . . . we must assume that consciousness would not have evolved on our planet if a cosmic catastrophe had not claimed the dinosaurs as victims. (Gould 1989, 318)

Michael Murray has developed a complex defense of theism in light of animal suffering that, among other things, stresses there being a good to a world that has nomic regularity or laws of nature that are not subject to constant divine miracles or interference (Murray 2008). Peter van Inwagen supports a similar stance. He asks us to entertain the possibility that we live in a miracle-driven world: God, by means of a continuous series of ubiquitous miracles, causes a planet inhabited by the same animal life as the actual earth to be a hedonic utopia. On this planet, fawns are (like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) saved by angels when they are in danger of

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being burnt alive. Harmful parasites and microorganisms suffer immediate supernatural dissolution if they enter a higher animal’s body. Lambs are miraculously hidden from lions, and the lions are compensated for the resulting restriction on their diets by physically impossible falls of high-protein manna. (van Inwagen 2003, 395)

Such a world would lack any independence from God. F. R. Tennant advanced the Murray–van Inwagen thesis earlier in the twentieth century: It cannot be too strongly insisted that a world which is to be a moral order must be a physical order characterized by law or regularity. The theist is only concerned to invoke the fact that law-abidingness . . . is an essential condition of the world being a theatre of moral life. Without such regularity in physical phenomena there could be no probability to guide us; no prediction, no prudence, no accumulation of ordered experience, no pursuit of premeditated ends, no formation of habit, no possibility of character or of culture. Our intellectual faculties could not have developed . . . And without rationality, morality is impossible. (Tennant 1928, 199–200)

Contemporary ecology seems to help enhance such a portrait of creation as good, not withstanding suffering and death. Contrast the passage cited earlier from Mill’s work in which nature is likened to a sociopathic murderer with Keith Ward’s stance: On the newer, more holistic, picture, suffering and death are inevitable parts of a development that involves improvement through conflict and generation of the new. But suffering and death are not the predominating features of nature. They are rather necessary consequences or conditions of a process of emergent harmonisation which inevitably discards the old as it moves to the new. (Ward 1996, 87)

Or, contrast Mill’s portrait of the natural world as a kind of socio-pathic killer with the biologist Brian Goodwin’s position: [A] concept that is deeply ingrained in biology is competition. This is often described as the driving force of evolution, pushing organisms will-nilly up those fitness landscapes to more elevated states if they are going to survive in the struggle with their neighbors for scarce resources. However, there is as much cooperation in biology as there is competition. Mutualism and symbiosis, organisms living together in states of mutual dependency — such as lichens that combine a fungus with an alga in happy harmony, or the bacteria in our guts, which benefit us as well as them — are an equally universal feature of the biological realm. Why not argue that cooperation is the great source of innovation in evolution, as in the enormous step of producing a eukaryotic cell, one with a true nucleus, by the cooperative union of two or three prokaryotes, cells without nuclei? (Goodwin 2001, 179–180)

Just as Rolston asks us to consider animal suffering in the context of the natural development of goods (in the predator-prey relationship), these thinkers 164

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also see suffering as part of the good of a stable, natural world. Michael Ruse uses Dawkins to make a similar point: [Dawkins] argues that we could not have a functioning organic world without adaptation — designlike features — and that the only way in which you can set such features is through natural selection . . . The only way you can get adaptation through law is by natural selection. Natural selection demands a struggle for existence. A struggle for existence necessarily involves pain and suffering. The virtues of having animals, humans particularly, outweighs the pain and suffering. Hence, God could not have done other than He did, given His all-loving nature. (Ruse 2010, 201–202)

The view Ruse articulates in defense of theism over against the problem of evil in evolution is similar to Alfred Russel Wallace’s argument in Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection with Some of Its Applications.

DIVINE GOODNESS, GRATUITOUS EVIL, AND FREEDOM The attempt to justify the existence of evil extends to the consideration of the concepts of gratuitous or pointless evil. In a world created by an all-good God, can there be evil that serves no point? Some think that pointless evil cannot be ruled out as a part of a good creation. Bruce Reichenbach argues this: If we define pointless or gratuitous evils as evils which are not logically or causally necessary for there being a greater good, it follows that some instances of pointless or gratuitous evils, i.e., those whose possibility is necessary for there being a greater good or preventing a greater evil, are compatible with God’s existence and goodness. For example, it might be argued that a world operating with regularity according to natural laws is a necessary condition for the greater good of the realization of moral values. But the former in turn necessitates the possibility of such natural evils as fawns suffering. The suffering of the fawn may be pointless or gratuitous, but the possibility of it is a necessary condition of there being that great good. Thus, the existence of pointless suffering whose possibility is necessary for there being a greater good or preventing a greater evil is compatible with the necessity that God eliminate as much evil as he can without losing a greater good or bringing about a greater evil, and hence with God’s existence and goodness. (Reichenbach 1982, 39)

Reichenbach is essentially filling out the defense of theism in work by Wallace and others. Many, but not all theists, believe that significant evil is generated by the misuse of a good power, namely freedom. Michael Peterson writes: If God is to bestow upon man a kind of freedom which is not just artificial but really significant, He must allow man a wide scope of choices and actions. Indeed, the kind of freedom which is basic to the accomplishment of great and noble actions is the kind

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of freedom which also allows the most atrocious deeds. In creating man and giving him free will, God thereby created an astonishing range of possibilities for both the creation and the destruction of value. Although some freely chosen evils sometimes have more disastrous consequences than intended, others seem to be motivated by the very desire to do irreparable damage. Perhaps this second kind of free choice is the true love of evil. (Peterson 1982, 103)

We have discussed the prospects of affirming the existence of freedom in Chapter 2. We shall add two further points about freedom. First, the case for recognizing freedom is enhanced to the extent that we have successfully made a case for recognizing the reality of conscious experience. Some of the best cases for freedom appeal to what appear to be our genuine apprehension of our power to act freely (Goetz 2009). Second, an essential condition for the exercise of freedom is the power of imagination. Kant aptly appreciated this point: For the imagination ([in its role] as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it. . . . In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical use of the imagination); for although it is under that law that nature lends us material, yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature. (Kant 1987, 49, v. 314)

Imagination itself is best thought of as a power but it is also a power to enhance other powers, cognitive power (as we argued in Chapter 1) and the power of agency. In order for freedom to really be significant in terms of our having responsibility in our lives, there could not be regular divine interventions to prevent harm. John Hick observes the difficulty of continuous divine police work: It would mean that no wrong action could ever have bad effects, and that no piece of carelessness or ill judgment in dealing with the world could ever lead to harmful consequences. If a thief were to steal a million pounds from a bank, instead of anyone being made poorer thereby, another million pounds would appear from nowhere to replenish the robbed safe; and this, moreover, without causing any inflationary consequences. If one man tried to murder another, his bullet would melt innocuously into thin air, or the blade of his knife turn to paper. Fraud, deceit, conspiracy, and treason would somehow always leave the fabric of society undamaged. Anyone driving at breakneck speed along a narrow road and hitting a pedestrian would leave his victim miraculously unharmed; or if one slipped and fell through a fifth-floor window, gravity would be partially suspended and he would float gently to the ground. And so on. We can at least begin to imagine a world custom-made for the avoidance of all suffering. But the daunting fact that emerges is that in such a world moral qualities would no longer have any point or value. There would be nothing wrong with stealing, because no one could ever lose anything by it; there would

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be no such crime as murder, because no one could ever be killed; and in short none of the terms connotating modes of injury — such as cruelty, treachery, deceit, neglect, assault, injustice, unfaithfulness — would retain its meaning. If to act wrongly means, basically, to harm someone, there would be no way in which anyone could benefit anyone else, since there would be no possibility of any lack or danger. It would be a world without need for the virtues of self-sacrifice, care for others, devotion to the public good, courage, perseverance, skill, or honesty. It would indeed be a world in which such qualities, having no function to perform, would never come into existence. Unselfishness would never be evoked in a situation in which no one was ever in real need or danger. Honesty, good faith, commitment to the right would never be evoked in circumstances in which no one could ever suffer any harm, so that there were no bad consequences of dishonesty, bad faith, or moral vacillation. Courage would never be evoked in the absence of any challenges and obstacles. Truthfulness would never be evoked in a world in which to tell a lie never had any ill effects. And so on. Perhaps most important of all, the capacity to love would never be developed, except in a very limited sense of the word, in a world in which there was no such thing as suffering. (Hick 1977, 324–325)

A further defense of theism needs to argue that the goodness of developing these virtues is worth there being the serious harms involved. In a reply to Kane (cited earlier), William Hasker writes: It is good that there be such a creation, endowed as it is with enormous potentialities for the enrichment of life and existence. The relative autonomy allowed both to human beings and to nature means, however, that the good endowments of the creation are open also to the possibility of the events and actions we identify as evil . . . A world in which this was not so — a world in which creatures either lack powers of their own or in which God constantly intervenes to prevent those powers from acting in ways that are less than optimal — would be a world without internal integrity; the existence of such a world would add little of worth over and above the value of God’s simply imagining it. God, however, has instead chosen a creation that is really there — that has a genuine integrity and autonomy of its own. And it is good that this is so. (Hasker 2008, 201–202)

Hasker’s image or portrait of a creation with genuine perils and opportunities seems to take the value of freedom and virtue more seriously than Kane with his proposal that it would have been better for persons to learn courage, fortitude and other virtues by writing a doctoral dissertation or engaging in athletic activity. As we address Schellenberg and other aspects of the problem of evil, a theistic defense will emerge that appeals to goods that go beyond a secular list of values and that makes great use of the concept of redemption. In reply to Schellenberg, there are several ways to challenge his thought experiments. Let’s first consider the image of God as a parent who should push a button to reveal her or his true identity to a child. First, Schellenberg gives sparse attention to the possible goods involved in a person’s life independent 167

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of the mother/parent figure and, by analogy, God. In the button thought experiment, imagine your child (falsely) believes you are a gun-running, anti-environmental industrialist who is cruel with your labor force. Imagine further, however, that in rebellion against you, your child effectively undermines arms manufacturers (even succeeding in getting a complete, global condemnation of land mines), and she leads a successful pro-environmental business group dedicated to fair labor laws. Still further imagine that you have an overwhelming personality and if you pushed the button she would lose some of her passion and sink into a timid, more tepid pursuit of the good. Would you push the button then? We would not. (The child might also appropriately resent this whole button-pushing mechanism as manipulative if she were to discover why she suddenly understood her parent so well.) As for the parable of hide and seek, there is again no attention to the goods of growing up as one’s own person. Schellenberg seems to suppose that the mother should be making herself known constantly. The analogy with God seems to be this: A good God, like a good mother would not allow for there to be any time when God is not clearly evident to persons, especially if a person seeks God. This seems too strong a requirement on divine goodness. Most theists believe that ultimately and eventually all persons will know God (in this life or the next), so in the analogy we would have to imagine the mother eventually being made evident. But to expect the mother or God to be continuously evident overwhelms any substantial human independence. Schellenberg does not take seriously the idea that theism is best seen as claiming that the way the world is now is not the way either it should be or will be. As William Temple put matters: What we must completely get away from is the idea that the world as it now exists is a rational whole; we must think of its unity not by the analogy of a picture, of which all the parts exist at once, but by the analogy of a drama where, if it is good enough, the full meaning of the first scene only becomes apparent with the final curtain; and we are in the middle of this. Consequently the world as we see it is strictly unintelligible. We can only have faith that it will become intelligible when the divine purpose, which is the explanation of it, is accomplished. (Temple 1948, 537–538)

Following Temple, theists may well contend that given a wider breath of vision, problems such as God’s (temporary) hiddenness may be overcome. Given a narrow scope without this broader vision (more on this below), Schellenberg’s parable has poignancy. But in the broader perspective, the idea of hide and seek is not out of keeping with Biblical tradition, especially as found in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew God hides, then is found. The Hebrew hides, then is found by God. It is a long story of hide and seek and expressed in a deep longing for God’s presence, led by a promise for a home. The deeper portrait of this process needs to take more seriously the role 168

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and value of longing, the good of an evolving interior life, and the ultimate promise of divine fulfillment.

PARAMETERS Theists today differ in what they believe to be entailed by the goodness of God: some hold that each created being must have a life worth living, some hold that each created being is such that it is better that it was created rather than not, and some theists hold that the creation as a whole must be good, even if some creatures endure unwarranted suffering and do not have lives worth living. Marilyn Adams offers this overview of what is involved in God’s overcoming of evil. The worst evils demand to be defeated by the best goods. Horrendous evils can be overcome only by the goodness of God. Relative to human nature, participation in horrendous evils and loving intimacy with God are alike disproportionate: for the former threatens to engulf the good in an individual human life with evil, while the latter guarantees the reverse engulfment of evil by good. Relative to one another, there is also disproportion, because the good that God is, and intimate relationship with Him, is incommensurate with created goods and evils alike. Because intimacy with God so out scales relations (good or bad) with any creatures, integration into the human person’s relationship with God confers significant meaning and positive value, even on horrendous suffering. This result coheres with basic Christian intuition: that the powers of darkness are stronger than humans, but they are no match for God. (M. Adams, in R. and M. Adams [eds] 1990, 220)

Can this be reasonably believed to occur in this life alone or, if God is truly good, must there be an afterlife of some kind for persons or even for creatures that are person-like? A form of bare theism or non-Platonic theism may not require an afterlife; but if God is thought to be wholly good and loving, then some afterlife is essential. The parameters of this life alone are not sufficient an arena for redemption and the overcoming of evil. In God and the Holocaust, Dan Cohn-Sherbok writes: Yet without this belief [in an afterlife], it is simply impossible to make sense of the world as the creation of an all-good and all-powerful God. Without the eventual vindication of the righteous in Paradise, there is no way to sustain the belief in a providential God who watches over His chosen people. The essence of the Jewish understanding of God is that He loves His chosen people. If death means extinction, there is no way to make sense of the claim that He loves and cherishes all those who died in the concentration camps — suffering and death would ultimately triumph over each of those who perished. But if there is eternal life in a World to Come, then there is hope that the righteous will share in a divine life. (Cohn-Sherbok 1996, 128–129)

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If there is more to creation than this life, and there is an all-powerful, loving God, there is an arena in which lives may be transformed and both victimizers and those victimized and those who have suffered due to no immoral agency may find new levels of life, reconciliation, mercy, and justice. Consider for example, Keith Ward’s articulation of the broader vantage point afforded by Christian theism: One must remember that the Christian belief is that there is an existence after earthly life which is so glorious that it makes any earthly suffering pale in comparison; and that such eternal life is internally related to the acts and sufferings of worldly life, so that they contribute to, and are essential parts of, the sorts of glory which is to come . . . The Christian paradigm here is the resurrection body of Jesus, which is glorious beyond description, but which still bears the wounds of the cross. So the sufferings of this life are not just obliterated; they are transfigured by joy, but always remain as contributory factors to make us the sort of individual beings we are eternally. This must be true for the whole of creation, insofar as it has sentience at all. If there is any sentient being which suffers pain, that being — whatever it is and however it is manifested — must find that pain transfigured by a greater joy. I am quite agnostic as to how this is to happen; but that it must be asserted to be true follows from the doctrine that God is love, and would not therefore create any being whose sole destiny was to suffer pain. In the case of persons, the truth of this claim requires the existence of a continuous personal life after death. The Christian will then say that his sufferings, whatever they are, help to make him the unique individual he is. To wish for a better world is to wish for one’s non-existence, as the person one is. Often one may indeed wish for that; but the Christian would say that, if one could clearly see the future which is prepared for one, such doubts and fears would disappear and the resurrection of Jesus is given to confirm this faith. (Ward 1988, 104–105)

Some contemporary Christian thinkers treat the traditional belief in life after death as a metaphor. D. Z. Phillips has endeavored to translate talk of eternity to talk about what is of ultimate importance. Phillips seeks to advance his thesis in light of an experience he had in Poland in which the concept of “eternal judgment” has nothing to do with an afterlife. Warning of such an eternal judgment is given in the Gospels. I was privileged to be present on an occasion when I heard the warning delivered in a memorable sermon. It was in Warsaw, shortly before the Solidarity Revolution. I was attending a requiem mass for a student who had had his stomach kicked in by the police a year earlier. The police, of course, were not prosecuted. The doctors who tried, unsuccessfully, to save the student’s life were too useful to prosecute. But the ambulance men, who happened to have come across the student, and had taken him to the hospital, were given long prison sentences for criminal negligence. It was said that they had killed the student by the improper way they had lifted him and carried him to the hospital. I shall never forget the opening words of the priest’s sermon. It is not unusual to hear those in rebellion say, “I do not condone violence, but given the violence we have suffered, we must respond in kind, we must

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defend ourselves,” etc. But that is not what the priest said. His first words, translated for me, were: “Let us pray for murderers. Our brother is with the Lord. But there are those who are walking about with murder in their souls. What a terrible state to be in! Let us pray for murderers.” The authority in these words come from their being the judgment which talks of pity and punishment at the same time. The most pitiful and terrible thing would be for the murderer not to repent before death. The terribleness of dying an unrepentant murderer is the punishment. What a pitiful state for a soul to be in. (Phillips 2005a, 261)

We suggest that Phillips’ concept of “eternity expressed in time” pales before the more traditional conviction of a powerful, loving Creator — who seeks redemption both in this life and afterlife. When the priest proclaimed, “our brother is with the Lord” he was probably claiming that the brother has not perished but is actually present to God. One way to bring out the shortcoming of Phillips’ position is to imagine this thought experiment: imagine Phillips deeply loved the student and he had it in his power to save the student from death. Wouldn’t he use this power? Now, imagine there is a God of limitless power and love. Wouldn’t such a God save the student from perishing everlastingly? We shall explore the possibility of an afterlife and address the nature of redemption in the next chapter. We turn now to the role of images and imagination in addressing the problem of evil.

IMAGES, IMAGINATION, AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL As we have seen with Schellenberg’s thought experiments and the examples of Rowe, Adams, and others, the problem of evil literature is particularly rife with images of evil and good, cases in which we are challenged to imagine some good that might compensate or overcome or redeem the evil at hand. Among all these images, we believe one of the most vital to appreciate is what might be considered images that are forged from the standpoint of a creature and images that are forged from the standpoint of the Creator. If one casts the problem of evil in theism in reference to ethical responsibilities that human beings have for each other several problems arise naturally. Imagine that we consider a horrifying act — let’s imagine it involves murder in which a fiend poisons his aunt to get an inheritance — and we consider the general question: when would an agent who knew of the poisoning and was sufficiently competent to prevent the poisoning be warranted in not interfering? Tackling this question places theists in a bind: if they argue (successfully) that it is permissible for God not to interfere (because, imagine, the interference would cause greater harm or prevent a great good), wouldn’t the same rationale work to account for why a human agent need not interfere? The theist might be able to block such an interference based on God’s omniscience or God’s having a prerogative not had by creatures (Swinburne 1998). Still, there is a danger that a justification of God’s allowing the poisoning to 171

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take place may amount to a justification of the poisoning itself. Does the theistic conviction that God is good lead to the conclusion that in some sense the evils of the world are justified or good? Perhaps because of this possible implication, the very task of defending God’s goodness in light of world evils has struck some philosophers as itself debased or worthy of censure. D. Z. Philips has advanced the charge that it is pernicious to develop theodicies or accounts that may justify evil in a theistic framework: Philosophizing about the problem of evil has become commonplace. Theories, theodicies and defences about, all seeking either to render unintelligible, or to justify, God’s ways to human beings. Such writing should be done in fear: fear that in our philosophizings we will betray the evils people have suffered, and, in that way, sin against them. Betrayal occurs every time explanations and justifications of evils are offered which are simplistic, insensitive, incredible or obscene. Greater damage is often done to religion by those who think of themselves as its philosophical friends, than by those who present themselves as religion’s detractors and despisers. Nowhere is this damage more in evidence . . . than in philosophical discussions of the problem of evil. (Phillips 2005a, xi)

For Phillips, a successful defense of theodicy would betray those who have suffered evil for it would imply that such suffering was actually justified or that the suffering fits into some overall scheme that somehow mollifies or renders the suffering good. We believe that any such project or scheme is indeed radically mistaken and obscures an enduring point in religious theistic traditions: evil is not justified and is contrary to the will and nature of God. Two replies are in order. First, theism is best defended in light of redemption rather than justification. Second, once we separate the ethics of creation from the ethics within creation, the above objections against theism atrophy. As for the first point, theistic religious traditions have sometimes held that an evil act can be turned around to provide a greater good (the selling of Joseph into slavery, the crucifixion of Jesus), but more often than not these traditions have consistently held that this greater good in no way justifies the evil or sin. The evil or sin remains unjustified (it was wrong of the brothers to sell Joseph into slavery, and it was wrong of the people to crucify Jesus). Theistic religious traditions have been more concerned with the redemption of victims and victimizers, the healing of those who have been harmed or who have inflicted harm. Moreover, this healing is often conceived of as a matter of grace (unmerited or undeserved favor). On one model of redemption, such grace is not a matter of justice (people getting what they deserve) and may even run counter to a strict adherence to justice. For example, imagine a friendship in which there is a betrayal and, from a strict point of view, the one who was betrayed has every right to end the relationship. Imagine that not ending the friendship is even against the rightful, deserved self-interest of the injured party. We may nonetheless conceive of circumstances in which the one who did the betrayal repents, amends their ways, asks for forgiveness, 172

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and so on, and the injured person forgives him and invites reconciliation. We may further imagine that the reconciled friendship has a great good that they would not have had otherwise. Arguably, being loved when it is clear you do not deserve it is a great good. But, on a redemption model, the betrayal was not good, not justified or warranted in any way. If we take seriously the difference between justification and redemption, theism may be seen as not at all exonerating or ameliorating or accommodating world evil. A theist may well claim that, from the strict point of view of justice, perhaps God should annihilate or never have created the cosmos. The theist may still claim that it is compatible with God’s goodness if God seeks to redeem those who commit evil in this life and the next. But the important point needs to be preserved: given theism, evil is unjustified. There have been theistic utilitarians (e.g. William Paley), but the bulk of theistic value theory is non-utilitarian. Second, the theistic approach to evil is best seen in reference to an amplified understanding of God’s relationship to the creation. This may be called the breadth of theism defense. The problem of evil is often formulated in stark terms such as the claim that the following propositions involve a contradiction 1 2 3 4

God is all powerful God is all knowing God is perfectly good Evil exists

This is the standard format of the so-called logical problem of evil. There is a different version of the problem of evil that involves evidential claims. So, the evidential problem of evil may concede that the above four propositions might be compatible (after all, allowing some evil for there to be great goods might be warranted), but it is argued that the amount of evil in the cosmos is so great that it would not be permitted to allow it. In whichever formulation one prefers, there is missing the fuller theistic image or understanding of God’s relationship to the creation. For example, many religious theists believe that God is affectively responsive to the world’s ills and goods. Thus God is no bystander; evils in the cosmos that occur are in violation of the will and nature of God. As Alvin Plantinga observes: As the Christian sees things, God does not stand idly by, coolly observing the suffering of his creatures. He enters into and shares our suffering. He endures the anguish of seeing his son, the second person of the Trinity, consigned to the bitter cruel and shameful death on the cross. Some theologians claim that God cannot suffer. I believe they are wrong. God’s capacity for suffering, I believe, is proportional to his greatness; it exceeds our capacity for suffering in the same measure as his capacity for knowledge exceeds ours. Christ was prepared to endure the agonies of hell itself; and God, the Lord of the universe, was

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prepared to endure the suffering consequent upon his son’s humiliation and death. He was prepared to accept this suffering in order to overcome sin, and death, and the evils that afflict our world, and to confer on us a life more glorious than we can imagine. (Plantinga 1993, 71)

Richard Swinburne notes the importance of such a view of God. A theodicist is in a better position to defend a theodicy such as I have outlined if he is prepared also to make the further additional claim — that God knowing the worthwhileness of the conquest of evil and the perfecting of the universe by men, shared with them this task by subjecting himself as man to the evil in the world. A creator is more justified in creating or permitting evils to be overcome by his creatures if he is prepared to share with them the burden of the suffering and effort. (Swinburne 1982, 19)

Many religious theists further believe that God is active in human history to bring about redemption and healing. Christians go so far as to maintain that God seeks to overcome evil through an incarnation. Filling out the question at the heart of the problem of evil should take such a more specific view of theism. The complex set of questions and assertions that follows is a more substantial and interesting posing of the problem of evil than the standard four propositions cited above. In offering this image we offer a specifically Christian form of Platonic theism. Is it compatible with God’s goodness for God — as an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing being — to create and sustain a cosmos which contains profound goods like stable laws of nature, plant and animal life, consciousness, agency, sensations, moral experience, beauty and some experiential awareness of God (religious experience) and yet there is also profound suffering and pain brought about by flooding, drought, murder, rape, birth defects, torture, and crippling diseases? Although there are beautiful events like the birth of children, friendship, good family life, art works, and romantic love, there are also miscarriages, cruelty, dysfunctional-abusive parents and grave injustices such as mass killings. All evil is contrary to God’s will and nature, each murder, for instance, being a case in which something sacred (the victim) is destroyed and some aspect of the creation perverted (i.e. the murderer abuses free moral agency). God is affectively responsive to the goods and ills of creation — suffering over world ills, delighting in world goods — and has given libertarian freedom to human creatures so that we can freely appreciate having loving relations of interdependence instead of choosing selfish violence, though such freedom is routinely used for evil. Creatures are morally bound to prevent all such violence whenever possible and are morally blameworthy when they do not do so. God acts in the world to reveal God’s will and nature to some (but not all) people and to prevent some (but not all) harm. Some prayers to God for persons to be delivered from evil are answered, but not all prayers are answered and some harms occur in which it seems that God could miraculously prevent such harms without the loss of great goods or bringing about greater evils. Some evils may be seen as following from or providing grounds for great goods (libertarian agency is good

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and it provides the grounds for other good states), but some evils do not seem to stem from or provide grounds for great goods. While much animal life may be seen to be good, there also seems to be great suffering in the animal world. There is some evidence that God exists based on religious experience, the contingency of the cosmos, the emergence of consciousness, the existence of libertarian agency, and other matters, but this evidence is not so strong that it convinces (or can convince) all impartial inquirers. God became incarnate as Jesus Christ to redeem all of creation through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, such that while there is some goodness and redemption in this life, there will be a consummate redemption in an afterlife in union with God.

To summarize the question at the heart of the problem of evil, given the above form of Christian theism: is this understanding of creation and God’s creative agency compatible with God’s goodness? Does the experience and recognition of cosmic evil make it reasonable or unreasonable to accept this overall understanding of God and creation? With the concept of redemption, rather than justification, this more expanded treatment provides a fuller response to the critics of theodicy. Much would have to be done to fill out various components of redemption, and we shall do some of that in the next chapter, concerning redemption and the belief in an afterlife.

IMAGES AND PREFERENCES Some of the problem of evil literature is charged with emotion, accusation and counter-accusation. Much of this involves how one pictures or images the evils and goods. Galen Strawon writes: “It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other hand, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument — their intellect — which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously” (Strawson 1990). Strawson is supposing that if there is a God, then God is guilty of great cruelties in allowing (creating or permitting) enormous, undeserved suffering. Perhaps an atheist (like Strawson) may be said to love the idea of God insofar as an atheist might wish God did exist for (it might so be reasoned) then there would be no evil at all or no undeserved suffering and perhaps no suffering at all (whether deserved or not) and only bliss. William Rowe, for example, might be said to love the idea of a God of perfect goodness because he thinks that if such a God exists, we would be in the best possible world — which evidently we are not. In a sense, Strawson may be backed up by an observation by Erasmus. “Moreover, just as it is less unrighteous for someone to believe that God does not exist than it is to believe that he is cruel or vain, so it is less pious to 175

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deny flatly that he exists than to believe he is merciless and thus rob him of that virtue without which kings are not kings but tyrants.” But if we shift the ground a bit, in terms of images, we can ask a different question in response to Strawson. Imagine two universes that appear to be exactly like ours in its present state in every way except one. So, both universes have what seem to be equal amounts of suffering and pleasure, struggles and disappointment, happiness and tragedy. In one universe, however, there is a Creator-God who is lovingly seeking through prophets, an incarnation, and religious experience to call all people to a life of fulfillment, and this God indeed offers redemption to all in this life and the next through the incarnation of God in Christ. In this universe persons die; they are poisoned or murdered or die naturally, tormented, and so on, but they are not thereby annihilated at death. Through God’s omnipotent love, they are called from death to life. Now compare that with a universe that appears to be exactly like ours: it seems to have the same amount of suffering, death, happiness, and sorrow. But imagine that in such a universe, there is no all-good, knowing, powerful God who seeks redemption for the creation. In that universe, death is annihilation. Which universe do you think contains more good? If one were to play out Strawson’s schema, do you think a person who truly loves God or the idea of God would prefer living in the second universe?

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Galapagos Cactus War no. 8

CHAPTER 6

The Fitting Imagination [Phidias had] in his own mind . . . an extraordinary idea of beauty, this he contemplated, on this he fixed his attention, and to rendering this he directed his art and his hand. (Abrams 1953, 43) [A]ny creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrived late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. (Dawkins 2006, 31)

In this final chapter we begin with a phenomenological study of emergence as it is experienced in creating and some of the ways creativity has been used as an image to portray theism. We consider inquiry in both theism and naturalism that takes imagination and images seriously. In the spirit of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Roger Scruton writes: “The ennobling power of the imagination lies in this: that it re-orders the world, and re-orders our feelings in response to it” (Scruton 2000, 60). What further steps can we take to determine whether theism or naturalism reflect more reliable views of the world and what may be beyond the world? Finally, we address an important critical objection to our whole undertaking.

EMERGENCE IN AESTHETICS; A PHENOMENOLOGICAL SKETCH In the passages cited above from Abrams and Dawkins, you find two different views about the direction of creative activity. Phidias reaches back in his mind while going forward, relying on this mental feeling, intuition, to guide emerging form. This is an image of form being made even, as Abrams says, when the direction for action, decisions, choices, is “inchoate and without knowledge of where you will end up.” What moves Phidias to rely on his intuition is this need and desire to find fittingness between what he is making, and what should be made, in order to arrive at a sense of completeness or resolution. 179

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What is arrived at in the end will, if successful, have a relationship to a reality larger than the specific work. It stands complete or resolved not as a thingin-itself, but in relationship to other things or ideas. This guide for aesthetic fulfillment is intimately linked up with intellect and the values that Phidias holds in his mind. The idea in his mind by which he measures his progress is imaged as an internal echo in his mind between what he knows to be right, and the inchoate situation of being knowledge-less about the direction he is going. It suggests a back-and-forth movement that the artist follows in looking for form, but a movement that takes place through working, whether in a selfconscious way or not. In Dawkins’ view, the direction of creative intelligence is one-way, having emerged out of non-creative intelligence. Granted, Abrams is examining the work of an artist, and Dawkins is examining the beginning of the universe, but central to Dawkins’ view is that there can be no preexisting goods or ideas of beauty apart from whatever has evolved out of the processes of natural selection. It would not make sense for Dawkins to look for enduring goods that one might rely on in the search or quest for fittingness — or at least the experience of fittingness in the mind of the artist, scientist, or religious seeker, for this experience would only be part of the (design) of evolution, the drive of natural selection, and it’s meaning would begin and end there. But why does this search for fittingness exist at all? Why should it be found across human cultural practices? Nicholas Wolterstorff offers one reason why this is so, and the reason is grounded in our subjective experience and valuing of the world as an embodiment of fittingness: But also artists are workers in fittingness — all artists inescapably, not indeed in the sense that their work is made out of fittingness, but rather in the sense that fittingness is a feature of the reality within which we all exist. It is a feature of which we are all aware, artist and non-artist alike, and which the work of art inescapably shares in, partly by the artist’s intent, partly not. (Wolterstorff 1980, 96)

The aesthetic of emergence, as it occurs in making art might be an interesting analogue to emergence on the biological level, or it might be entirely of a different kind. If that is the case, then it does not make sense to reduce creative intelligence to non-intelligent forces. When making a new work of art, for a new form to be convincing it can’t look completely random, so design, in the case of making art, figures in. If it is just completely ambiguous, it looks unfinished. There are of course, famous examples of artists interested in exploring ambiguity and randomness as a theme (John Cage); but in such cases where the artist actually wants to get credit for working with randomness, the work is framed in such a way, through time limitations, physical boundaries, or through title, to alert us to the theme, a designed theme of randomness. Let’s look at what it means for the artist to recognize emergent form when working. When an artist realizes that the image he or she is working on has 180

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ambiguous dimensions, or is capable of more than one identity, the artist is alerted to the possibility of a new form: “What if this is really that?” or “What if this is not a static form? The potential new form, not yet fully realized and only hinted at, is grounded in something recognizable, suggesting or hinting at another identity or a plurality of suggestive identities. We have sketchbooks by Picasso that exquisitely exhibit this search for new form; we get to see step by step how Picasso arrived at permutations of form. When does this recognition of emergent form move us, or compel our attention? The ambiguous reading, or second reading, must also hint at a specific identity that is in tension with or in harmony with the original identity or it wouldn’t resonate or disturb; it would just look unfinished, or a mistake on the part of the artist. This process of emergent forms happens all the time when working with materials. Things happen. You are not always in control. You can decide to follow the suggestion of an errant mark, or new shape in the clay, or you decide to erase it, or press out the new shape altogether. Why do certain artists work in collaboration with ambiguity? Is it a desire for freedom? For not being pinned down to a specific identity? It seems inherent in the task of making itself, yet it can be disturbing and unsettling — and might underscore the initial fears about the instability of species that arose when the old book of nature and it’s hierarchies were challenged by the very idea of evolution. Let’s go back to the activity of the artist. Draw a tree. In its unresolved state, the potential for drawing something else may be presented. You follow certain formulas, those learned by habit, from copying other examples, learned schematics, and perhaps habits of perception in drawing from observation. But in that process of coming-into-being, you might respond to that “other” hinted at, or suggested and found in the unresolved form. And there is a sense in which you must choose whether or not to veer off the original idea, or intent, and pursue the newly hinted at identity or ignore it and cover it up. Sometimes it sits there, unseen to you the drawer, undiscovered until someone else points it out. But when it is a conscious choice, there is a sensation or experience of conspiracy in the act of making, as if you, invoking a world, are reminded that any world is always more complex, more filled with being and actions, than one can ever grasp. The artist that courts this ambiguity of form recognizes in the imagination the structural logic of form emerging from form, as well as the multitude of interpretations inherent in visual images: “For no two centers of consciousness are alike” (Wolterstorff 1980, 52). A non-deterministic understanding of all human endeavors fits with our subjective experience of those activities, and the value we ascribe to those efforts as successful or not successful. If every proposal of the imagination were simply determined by exclusively material processes, it would not make sense to see some outcomes as successful or not. Our discernment for values such as goodness, truth, or usefulness, that underscore our endeavors would seem to be a cosmic joke — as when someone is given a “pretend important” 181

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task simply to keep him busy, stripping any dignity in the activity and the person performing the task. How might this development of meaning in form take place in language, in poetry? Below is a bit of nonsense: Live I up, to do, to do Live I up to do blab o Blipity blow pick up the go Clivry e carry e cloppity no

The over-all sound of these lines can be heard as something to do with digging up ground, the action of digging, tossing, and turning over. There is an idea of letters and the written word having origins in the aesthetic qualities of animal life and vegetation — but sounds themselves, in connection to rhythm, are a way of propelling sound into a future that could go in any number of ways. So rhythm and sound become a vehicle for the potential to find fittingness in the images the poet creates. The implications of this for aesthetics are profound to us. It has to do with the imagination being grounded in “the ground” — the physical realities that help shape us (gravity, weights, solids, liquids, passivity, force, energy, light, air, density, etc.) moving in consort with those desires to abide in this world as “home” and with our desire for future or possible worlds. There is a leap, and the experience of the poem cannot be reduced to the analysis of a poem’s structure and content. We enjoy analysis, but it is the experience of the poem that startles us awake and reconnects us to a larger reality that is in constant need of being summoned and lived into.

CREATING WORK OF ART AND CREATING WORLDS The above account of creative, artistic activity can be used to fill out the image of God as creator. Aquinas commended the thesis that the God of Christian theism is analogous to an artist. Augustine developed an early account of Christian Platonist theism. In Plato’s schema the creator (demiurge or god) creates in a fashion that is guided by the forms that exist external to it. Augustine re-conceived of the Platonic forms as internal to the mind of God. Wolterstorff writes: St. Augustine rightly saw [Plato’s] understanding of the creating god as alien to the Christian scriptures. He located the decisive error in Plato’s conviction that the creating god was limited by the preexistent material of space and obligated by the preexistent Forms. God creates ex nihilo, said Augustine. And though He creates according to patterns, those patterns are not obligating ideals existing apart from Him. They are ideas in His own mind. God creates in sovereign freedom . . . In His essence God is love. And as the expression of His own self, God creates from nothing our whole array of things in space and time.

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Created in accord with God’s own ideas, these things are not pale copies of eternal paradigms but full-bodied realities in their own right. They are creations. They do not have their existence independent of God; yet they are not identical with God. One who gives free, untrammeled expression to His inner self by bringing into existence new realities — that is Augustine’s image of God the Creator. Ever since Augustine, it has been the image of Western man as well. (Wolterstorff 1980, 51)

Wolterstorff offers the following fascinating juxtaposition of God creating in sovereign freedom in contrast to the finite, free artist who must struggle with external obstacles. The artist is a center of consciousness. His business is to bring forth an expression of himself in the form of a new creation. In distinction from God, however, that requires struggle. God creates in sovereign, untrammeled freedom. But confronting the artist is an actuality which exists apart from his will, threatening him with constriction: the constricting actuality of aesthetic norms, the constricting actuality of artistic and social traditions, the constricting actuality of the institution of high art itself, the constricting actuality of materials, the constricting actuality of the fact that unless the artist finds acceptance for his work he cannot live. Thus the obverse side of his urge to create is the artist’s need to fight for liberation from the prime evil of constrictions on his freedom. We in the West are confident that the struggle for liberation can be won. We are confident that actuality will prove permeable by the will of the artist. (Wolterstorff 1980, 52)

What is in common in the divine and human artist is intentionality and purpose. Our free activity may be qualified and conditioned, whereas in the case of God, “God’s activity,” as William Alston notes, “is the activity of a free agent in the most unqualified sense” (Alston 1988, 269). The image of God as ultimate, or supremely creative artist may be found in Aquinas: “In Aquinas’ account, we find the metaphor of an artist, freely choosing the forms and materials that suitably realizes his design” (Garcia 2003, 89). As Aquinas puts it: “All creatures stand to God as products of art to the artist . . . Hence all nature be called an artistic product of divine workmanship (artificiatum divinae artis)” (Aquinas 1905, 100). The image of God as artist is developed in the twentieth century by the creative thinkers Nikolai Berdyaev and Dorothy Sayers. Summarizing the overall theistic framework with its central appeal to intentionality, J. R. Lucas writes: If we, as theists, believe that the universe is fundamentally personal in character, it follows that our ultimate understanding will not be in terms of things, which occupy space and may or may not possess certain properties, but of persons, who characteristically do things. Action, not substance, will be our most important category of thought. It is a truth too long neglected by philosophers. (Lucas 1976, 111)

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FILLING OUT THE THEISTIC IMAGE There is much work to be done in filling out the theistic image. Some themes to address are of interest to specific theistic religious traditions, while others concern theism in general. We offer a modest contribution that addresses three tenets in the last chapter: a case of an afterlife, a further portrait of redemption, and a theistic reply to the problem cited by Darwin and Dawkins about the image of the God of Hebrew and Christian traditions. In this section, we do not offer definitive work on each topic; we only aim to point to fruitful directions of inquiry.

Images of the Afterlife Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all contain traditions in which persons are believed to survive bodily death. Before addressing the philosophical aspects of such a belief, consider G. K. Chesterton’s image of the afterlife he offers in his classic book Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. While not a philosophy text, Chesterton’s prose captures the aesthetics and image of an afterlife: To every man alive, one must hope, it has in some manner happened that he has talked with his more fascinating friends round a table on some night when all the numerous personalities unfolded themselves like great tropical flowers. All fell into their parts as in some delightful impromptu play. Every man was more himself than he had ever been in this vale of tears. Every man was a beautiful caricature of himself. The man who has known such nights will understand the exaggerations of “Pickwick.” The man who has not known such nights will not enjoy “Pickwick” nor (I imagine) heaven. For, as I have said, Dickens is, in this matter, close to popular religion, which is the ultimate and reliable religion. He conceives an endless joy; he conceives creatures as permanent as Puck or Pan — creatures whose will to live æons upon æons cannot satisfy. He is not come, as a writer, that his creatures may copy life and copy its narrowness; he is come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. It is absurd indeed that Christians should be called the enemies of life because they wish life to last for ever; it is more absurd still to call the old comic writers dull because they wished their unchanging characters to last for ever. Both popular religion, with its endless joys, and the old comic story, with its endless jokes, have in our time faded together. We are too weak to desire that undying vigour. We believe that you can have too much of a good thing — a blasphemous belief, which at one blow wrecks all the heavens that men have hoped for. The grand old defiers of God were not afraid of an eternity of torment. We have come to be afraid of an eternity of joy. It is not my business here to take sides in this division between those who like life and long novels and those who like death and short stories; my only business is to point out that those who see in Dickens’s unchanging characters and recurring catch-words a mere stiffness and lack of living movement miss the point and nature of his work. His tradition is another tradition altogether; his aim is another aim altogether to those of the

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modern novelists who trace the alchemy of experience and the autumn tints of character. He is there, like the common people of all ages, to make deities; he is there, as I have said, to exaggerate life in the direction of life. The spirit he at bottom celebrates is that of two friends drinking wine together and talking through the night. But for him they are two deathless friends talking through an endless night and pouring wine from an inexhaustible bottle. (Chesterton 1909, 88–90)

The love of an individual’s uniqueness, celebrated in Chesterton’s image, is a fulfillment of our longing for each person to count, for each person to have intimate access to another’s uniqueness, to count being as meaning. But how might the survival of death be possible? Some philosophers in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam conceive of a bodily resurrection, while others affirm that the person may exist disembodied or being re-embodied. In either case, the transition from life through death to life involves the ultimate human metamorphosis of what the poet John Donne referred to as a translation: “. . . but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another” (Donne 2008, 97). The most recent development in the literature has been a growth in Christian materialism. Peter van Inwagen, Terrence Merricks, and others have defended the concept of an afterlife even though persons are thoroughly material realities. We commend this literature to you (see van Inwagen 1998). For the materialist the transition from this life to the next involves a bodily translation, the continuation of a bodily identity that may be radically different but still linked to a person’s earthly body. For the dualist the transition or translation involves the continuation of the incorporeal self or soul. The imagination may be employed to bolster the case for an afterlife that does not involve materialism. A classic way to build the case for a possible afterlife is to try to imagine or picture what it might be like to survive the loss of one’s body. If one can do so, and the modal principle defended in Chapter 1 is acceptable, one would then have some reason to believe this is a genuinely possible state of affairs. Consider, then, W. D. Hart’s account of the loss of one’s embodiment: Imagine that, still embodied, you wake up tomorrow in your bed. Before raising your eyelids, you stumble over to a mirror in your room. Pointing your face at the mirror, you now raise your eyelids. What you see in the mirror is that your eye sockets are empty. You can imagine how your face without eyeballs would look in the mirror. Curious. So you probe the empty sockets with your little finger. You can imagine how they would feel, and how the empty channel where the optic nerve once lay would feel. Interesting. So you saw off the top of your skull with your surgical saw and, lo and behold, your skull is empty. You can imagine how your empty brainpan would look and feel. You’ve imagined what seems to be seeing without the two bodily organs, eyes and a brain, most people think are essential to seeing. You don’t need your legs to see, so imagine them away. You don’t need

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your arms to see, so imagine them away. You don’t need your trunk to see, so imagine it away. You don’t need the rest of your head to see, so imagine it away. Now your whole body is gone, but you are still there seeing what is reflected in the mirror. Of course that is no longer your face or any of your body; it is probably just the wall behind you. But you are still there, disembodied, seeing that wall reflected in the mirror. (Hart 1988, 12)

Richard Swinburne offers the following account of what it might be like to become disembodied. If the following state of affairs is possible (a person can exist without his body), even if it never happens, then something is true about persons that is not true about bodies (a body cannot exist in a disembodied state). Imagine yourself gradually ceasing to be affected by alcohol or drugs, your thinking being too equally coherent however men mess about with your brain. Imagine too that you cease to feel any pains, aches, and thrills, although you remain aware of what is going on in what has been called your body. You gradually find yourself aware of what is going on in bodies other than your own and other material objects at any place in space — at any rate to the extent of being able to give invariably true answers to questions about these things, an ability which proves unaffected by men interfering with lines of communication, e.g. turning off lights so that agents which rely on sight cannot see, shutting things in rooms so that agents which rely on hands to feel things cannot do so. You also come to see things from any point of view which you choose, possibly simultaneously, possibly not. You remain able to talk and wave your hands about, but find yourself able to move anything which you choose, including the hands of other people. (Swinburne 1977, 13)

In this narrative, Swinburne is seeking to fill out an experiential picture of divine powers. He is imaginatively sketching what it would be like to have causal properties that extend beyond one’s body. Whether or not you think the narrative succeeds in clarifying divine powers, it offers a coherent account of what it would be like to being disembodied. In fact, there is an impressive body of literature in which persons report “out of body” experiences when they are near death or have been pronounced dead and prior to resuscitation. (See, for example, Badham 1997, and Fenwick and Fenwick 1995). Let’s assume all such experiences are not accurate accounts of persons actually leaving their bodies. But even granting that the experiences are false or unreliable, don’t they at least appear to describe a coherent, bona fide possibility? If we have reason to think a person can (even if she never does) survive the annihilation of her body, there is something true of her but not true of her body. Some of the criticism of Swinburne’s thought experiment is not compelling. Peter van Inwagen objects: I can’t imagine any of this. I can’t even imagine myself ceasing to be affected by alcohol, in any sense that will help Swinburne. I can, of course, imagine my never drinking any

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alcohol and thus “ceasing to be affected” by it; but clearly that isn’t what Swinburne has in mind. Or I can (perhaps) imagine myself drinking alcohol that is removed from my system by Martians before it reaches my brain; but this gets us no forwarder . . . Can I imagine alcohol having its usual effects on my brain but no effect on my sobriety? I can’t and I am sure that anyone who thinks he can “imagine” these things has just not thought the matter through. (van Inwagen 1998, 15)

But contemporary neurology and philosophy has not (or not yet) shown that brain states and mental states are identical. We do not yet have a philosophically successful account of the identity of brain states and mental states; all we have is correlation. By way of a further reply to van Inwagen, it seems that we can imagine the body as it is and yet the person has ceased to be. Imagine a case in which a person is subject to a severe coma, and she as a person has ceased to be, despite the fact that all the bodily organs continue to operate. Further work on this area merits attention (see A Brief History of the Soul, Goetz and Taliaferro).

Images of Redemption Here is a closer look at how redemption might be imaged in Christian tradition. The model we sketch here is in the Christus Victor tradition. In this view, humanity sins and, in addition to human persons needing to be reconciled with one another, there needs to be reconciliation with God. The problem, though, is with time. Once you have harmed someone, you simply cannot go back and reverse the harm. This is, of course, most dramatic and evident when the harm is decisive, such as the wrongful killing of a person. But even in less dramatic cases, restitution is difficult. If as professors, we break the eleventh commandment (thou shalt not be boring), we can never give back the precious minutes our students and readers have spent in fruitless discussion or wasted reading. Our “victims” will never be that young again. In the Christus Victor model, all is not lost. God becomes incarnate as Jesus Christ, and his birth, life, teaching, miracles, passion, death, and resurrection have at least two roles. First, Jesus is an exemplar, instructing us about God’s will and nature. Second, Jesus embraces the human condition, including death. Yet he overcomes death and promises life to all through his resurrection. The resurrection is an event of overcoming death itself and is also a sign that such abundant life through death is promised to all. While we cannot restore the minutes of an audience or reader, nor bring back to life someone we have killed, God through Christ can through everlasting life. What of those who do not know about Christ’s redeeming work? Are they doomed to being perpetually unredeemed? This fate may not be due to any fault of their own. Theism is a protean outlook and there are various possibilities to consider. According to the Christus Victor model, the life and work 187

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of Christ is the means by which redeeming abundant life is made available for there to be a reconciliation or atonement of creatures and Creator. But nothing about this model precludes the merits and power revealed in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection being available to those who do not know Christ or even (in this life) reject Christ as God incarnate. Either in this life or the next, the offer of abundant life may be revealed and (assuming we have free will) perhaps only those who steadfastly and completely reject such abundant life will remain unredeemed. A failure of redemption is unfortunately not difficult to envisage. Imagine we have done something horrific, such as wrongfully killing a person. Imagine further that the person is miraculously brought back to life and we have an opportunity to be reconciled with the person. But rather than seeking atonement, imagine we seize the opportunity to kill the person again. This refusal of life would count as a kind of selfdamnation or personal hell. How does our above image of redemption compare with other images? Consider two. The first is from Philip Quinn: Imagine that a great magnate makes his two sons stewards of the two finest farms on his estate. The elder son irresponsibly neglects and thus ruins his farm, while the younger son conscientiously makes his farm flourish. As a result of his negligence, the elder son owes it to his father to make reparations by restoring his farm to its former prosperity. It would be severe but just for the father to punish him by disinheriting him if he does not repair the ruined farm. Unfortunately, the elder son is not a good enough farmer to be able to accomplish this task, though he is good enough that he could have prevented the ruin of the farm had he but tried to do so. Acknowledging his responsibility and guilt, the elder son repents of his negligence, and sincerely apologizes to his father. But as the father contemplates the now desolate fields of the ruined farm, he cannot help thinking that repentance and apology are not enough. He is poised to exercise his right to disinherit his guilty son. Then the younger son intervenes. Moved by love for his brother as well as by devotion to their father and the welfare of his estate, the younger son undertakes to restore the farm that his brother has ruined to its former prosperity. This new endeavor requires tremendous sacrifices from him; he must maintain his own farm while trying to rehabilitate another. His guilty elder brother joins with him in this undertaking. And then a senseless tragedy occurs. At harvest time the younger son has to work late into the evening to finish mowing the hay in his brother’s fields. Just as he is completing this chore, marauding outlaws catch him in the open, slay him, and set the hay ablaze. His heroic attempt to restore the ruined farm ends in failure. But his sacrifices so work upon the grieving father’s heart that he is persuaded to be merciful, rather than severe, toward his surviving elder son. He forgives his elder son for the damage he has done to the estate, even though that damage has not been repaired, and he mercifully refrains from exercising his right to disinherit his erring elder son. (Quinn 1994, 298–299)

Quinn’s thought experiment seems like a plausible account of how a Christlike innocent brother might make a sacrifice that helps bring about atonement. 188

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The parable is quite different from the Christus Victor model. In Quinn’s story the death of the younger brother is “a senseless tragedy” rather than as part of Christ’s assuming the human condition, but this is a minor difference. The key difference is that there is no resurrection. The younger brother dies, whereas on the Christus Victor model, Christ dies to be resurrected and to promise resurrected life to others. We suggest that the Christus Victor image of redemption is more dynamic and seems to do more justice to the Christian concept of redemption involving the joyful overcoming of death and sin, rather than tragedy and the placation of an angry father. Consider, now, Richard Purtill’s thought experiment: A certain king had a jewel which he valued so highly that he had enlisted a band of knights, sworn to safeguard the jewel or die in the attempt. An enemy of the king, desiring the jewel, corrupted the knights one after another, some with bribes, some with threats, and some with promises. Then the enemy carried off the jewel. The king’s son, who had been away with his squire while this was happening, returned to find the jewel gone. He went alone into the enemy’s stronghold and after great suffering, managed to get the jewel back. On his return the king held court. The forsworn knights came before him to express their sorrow and accept their punishment. The king’s son was also there, and his father praised him for his heroism, promising him whatever reward he wished. The prince said to the king, “Father, as my reward I ask that you do not punish the foreswarn knights. Let my sufferings in getting back your jewel be all that anyone has to suffer in this matter.” The king agreed, but the prince’s squire objected, saying “This is to put these traitors on an equality with those of us who have not betrayed their king.” However, the chief of the forsworn knights replied to him saying, “Sir, we are not on an equality with you, but below you in one way and above you in another. You are above us in that you have never betrayed your king, while we are forgiven traitors. But we are above you in that our prince has given us a gift which you have not received from him: his suffering has won our pardon. Therefore we have more reason to love our prince, and more motive to serve him and his father faithfully in the future.” (Purtill 2009, 189–190)

This parable also seems a plausible case of an innocent person’s suffering winning favor and atonement. It does have some demerits however. In Purtill’s story (as with Quinn’s) the innocent person’s chief role is to placate a king or magistrate. On the Christus Victor model the problem is one of restitution. Once we have harmed another person wrongly we simply cannot restore the loss. Only God as a God of space and time, and who can author an afterlife, can provide full restoration. The Christus Victor model thereby gives a more central and deeper role to the work of Christ. Also, on Purtill’s model the jewel is the king’s property, not a living thing, and its safekeeping a matter of honor. The Christus Victor model sees the work of redemption not as the restoration of a prestigious stone, but the restoration to life of those who die.

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Biblical Portraits: Darwin and Dawkins We have cited Darwins’ lament about the image of God found in the Bible. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins continues in Darwin’s tradition. “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully . . . The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe” (Dawkins 2006, 31, 37). Dawkins’ portrait of God requires a lengthy reply, but we shall focus on his charge that the God of the Bible is vain and jealous. If we think only of earthly rulers or human beings, the desire to be worshiped is the height of vanity. And for an earthly ruler to be jealous of any other ruler, his desire for our complete fealty seems also to be a matter of megalomania. But if we take seriously the biblical and subsequent theological identification by Christian Platonists of God and goodness, matters change. If God is essentially good (God can do no evil) and the goods of the cosmos reflect God’s goodness (for example, there would not be the good of friendship between persons unless God created and sustains them in being), then to worship God is to take delight in and respond in reverence and awe to goodness itself. Worship is not, then, paying complements to a massive ego, but reverencing the goodness that makes created goods possible (see Taliaferro 1989). As for jealously, God is depicted as jealous in the Bible. But is jealously always a vice? Imagine, again, that God is good and a relationship with God is itself good. What would be amiss if, say, a creature’s desire for selfdestruction aroused God to call this person back to a good life of harmony with God and this calling was out of jealousy? Assuming God to be the good creator of all, this would not be akin to a human being. But even if we used human jealousy as an analogy or image of God’s character, would this be a matter of vice? Imagine a healthy, good relationship between parents and a child until the child goes to school and becomes infatuated with two alcoholic, drug-pushing, pornography-watching, narcissistic philosophy professors whom the child calls “Daddy” and “Mummy.” Wouldn’t the parents properly feel jealous (as well as perhaps angry) in response to this scenario? The Biblical portrait of a jealous God can be part of the Biblical injunction to live fully and forsake violence: “Choose life in order that you may live” (Deut. 10:19). Dawkins fails to recognize the centrality of goodness in the Christian concept of God. As we noted in Chapter 1, Dawkins defines what he calls “the God Hypothesis” as the thesis: “There exists a superhuman, 190

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supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us . . . Goodness is not part of the definition of the God Hypothesis, merely a desirable add on.” But in Christian Platonic tradition, goodness is the key reference point, the essential mark of divinity, and no mere “add on” or afterthought. And this is also central to Judaism. The Bible offers a progressive or evolving portrait of God, beginning with a divine revelation to a nomadic desert tribe, then reaching out in breathtaking dimensions to the great Hebrew prophets and their universal teachings of peace and justice (Isaiah, Jeremiah). The key to answering Dawkins lies, in part, by taking seriously the theistic framework in which goodness is the central nature of God (see Taliaferro 1989).

FILLING OUT THE NATURALISTIC IMAGE Having highlighted three areas in which the image of theism can be filled out, we take note of three areas in which naturalism may be extended. The first concerns the concept of what is physical. We argued in Chapter 3 that there are serious obstacles in the project of identifying the physical and the mental, and thus a serious problem facing naturalism in accounting for the emergence of consciousness. One possible naturalist strategy to overcome some of these problems may be to revisit the concept of the physical. Thomas Nagel suggests such a strategy: The search for the possible form of a theory of the relation between mind and brain has to continue, and if there can be no such theory, that too requires explanation. I believe that the explanatory gap in its present form cannot be closed — that so long as we work with our present mental and physical concepts no transparently necessary connection will ever be revealed, between physically described brain processes and sensory experience, of the logical type familiar from the explanation of other natural processes by analysis into their physico-chemical constituents. We have good grounds for believing that the mental supervenes on the physical — i.e. that there is no mental difference without a physical difference. But pure, unexplained supervenience is not a solution but a sign that there is something fundamental we don’t know. We cannot regard pure supervenience as the end of the story because that would require the physical to necessitate the mental without there being any answer to the question how it does so. But there must be a how, and our task is to understand it. An obviously systematic connection that remains unintelligible to us calls out for a theory. (Nagel 1998, 344–345)

Some naturalists (such as Galen Strawson) have recently proposed that experience should be recognized as certain and irreducible to nonexperiential states. Such states are nonetheless real physical features of the cosmos. Strawson charts a new direction which amounts to panpsychism, the idea that 191

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mental properties as physical phenomena are replete throughout the physical world. In Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, Strawson writes: What does physicalism involve? What is it, really, to be a physicalist? What is it to be a realistic physicalist? Well, one thing is absolutely clear. You’re certainly not a realistic physicalist, you’re not a real physicalist, if you deny the existence of the phenomenon whose existence is more certain than the existence of anything else: experience, “consciousness”, conscious experience, “phenomenology”, experiential “what-it’s-likeness”, feeling, sensation, explicit conscious thought as we have it and know it at almost every waking moment. Many words are used to denote this necessarily occurrent (essentially non-dispositional) phenomenon, and in this paper I will use the terms “experience”, “experiential phenomena” and “experientiality” to refer to it. Full recognition of the reality of experience, then, is the obligatory starting point for any remotely realistic version of physicalism. This is because it is the obligatory starting point for any remotely realistic (indeed any non-self-defeating) theory of what there is. It is the obligatory starting point for any theory that can legitimately claim to be “naturalistic” because experience is itself the fundamental given natural fact; it is a very old point that there is nothing more certain than the existence of experience. It follows that real physicalism can have nothing to do with physicsalism, the view — the faith — that the nature or essence of all concrete reality can in principle be fully captured in the terms of physics. Real physicalism cannot have anything to do with physicsalism unless it is supposed — obviously falsely — that the terms of physics can fully capture the nature or essence of experience. It is unfortunate that “physicalism” is today standardly used to mean physicsalism because it obliges me to speak of “real physicalism” when really I only mean “physicalism” — realistic physicalism. (Strawson 2006, 3–4)

We have enormous sympathy with Strawson’s position for we think the reality of experience is fundamental and known with greater certainty than (for example) the content of modern physics. (It is for this reason we find phenomenalist idealism more reasonable than strict naturalism; see Foster 2008 and Adams 2007.) Strawson’s stance is compatible with theism and might even bolster a case for theism (for theism provides a reason why there is a cosmos replete with experience). A second area in which naturalism can and is being filled out today is in terms of ethics. We noted in Chapter 4 how certain naturalistic accounts of ethics (as in the ideal observer theory) has a close analogue to theistic accounts of value that give prominence to seeking “a God’s eye point of view.” Such accounts (whether naturalistic or theistic) face challenges in how to account for particular points of view that are anchored in partial, entrenched points of view (Bernard Williams, Susan Wolf, Pamela Sue Anderson). A third area where naturalism may need filling out concerns what may be broadly considered spirituality. In Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, Thomas Nagel offers his view of the state of play in analytic philosophy vis-à-vis the historical role of philosophy. Nagel affirms the 192

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historical role for philosophy that seeks to align us with the cosmos. There has been a wave of recent books that have sought to articulate and defend religious forms of naturalism or at least forms of naturalism that address “spiritual” concerns such as the longing for fulfillment and meaning: Science and Religious Anthropology: A Spiritually Evocative Naturalist Interpretation of Human Life by Wesley Wildman, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry by Mark Johnson, Spirituality for the Skeptic by Robert Solomon, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World by Owen Flanagan, to name a few. These and other works address what may be called the aesthetics and meaning of naturalism. In our view, of all the traditions that are often classified as religious, naturalists would be most at home with Taoism (in its philosophical form, not in its form as a popular religion with its use of magic and alchemy). Some naturalists have looked to art and aesthetics as a key reference point in articulating a spiritually satisfying worldview. Iris Murdoch writes: Good art, thought of as symbolic force rather than statement provides a stirring image of a pure, transcendent value, a steadily visible enduring higher good, and perhaps provides for many people, in an unreligious age without prayer or sacraments, their clearest experience of something grasped as separate and precious and beneficial and held quietly, and unpossessively in the attention. (Murdoch 1977, 76–77)

OTHER PROJECTS The kind of study we have undertaken here with the attention upon images, imagination, and aesthetics in the course of reviewing the arguments for and against two great worldviews, can be applied to many other domains of philosophy. In philosophy of religion, one may investigate the images and aesthetics of arguments about Hindu traditions, Buddhist philosophies, Jewish–Christian–Islamic dialogue, Taoism, and so on. We suggest that one of the most important areas in which to assess images and aesthetics is ethics. In debates over abortion since the 1960s, for example, there has been a plethora of bizarre thought experiments, including emotionally and aesthetically charged images involving killing a fat person who is blocking an escape route that would save innocent people from a bomb blast, a run-away trolley, an expanding baby in an enclosed room, being hooked up to a violinist who needs your cooperation to stay on a life-support system, and more. This terrain cries out for an aesthetic study and separating the sound and unsound use of such images.

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IMAGINATION AND SKEPTICISM Recently John Schellenberg and Anthony Kenny have argued for a suspension of belief in theism as well as naturalism. Schellenberg has gone even further in claiming we should suspend belief in any view of ultimate reality. Have these philosophers undermined the project of our book? Let us consider Schellenberg’s position first. Schellenberg defines what he calls ultimism as “the claim that there is a metaphysically and axiologically ultimate reality (one representing both the deepest fact about the nature of things and the greatest possible value), in relation to which ultimate good can be attained” (Schellenberg 2009, 1). In the course of three books (Prolegomena, The Wisdom to Doubt, and The Will to Imagine), Schellenberg argues that we are not justified in either believing or disbelieving in ultimism. Schellenberg defends skeptical faith in ultimism. His reasons for skepticism are too extensive to review completely, though we have examined and criticized two of his skeptical arguments (his case against the evidential value of religious experience in Chapter 4, and his hiddenness of God objection in Chapter 5). We note, with interest, Schellenberg’s verdict on the two worldviews in this book: Similar considerations should lead anyone whose naturalism survived my earlier skeptical arguments nonetheless to draw an important conclusion here: the popular bipolarizing stance that says one must accept either a conservative believing form of religion or an irreligious naturalism has embraced a misleading and false antithesis. No more can anyone be led to embrace naturalism because it seems the only rational alternative to religion grounded in traditions of belief. If I am right, naturalistic belief is every bit as unjustified as believing religion, but even setting that aside, there is clearly another religious alternative that in the short evolution of religious thought has so far been overlooked, which can make a case for itself even where believing religion is regarded as a nonstarter — a faith both audacious and humble, sensitively aware of its place in time, one that harmonizes, unifies, and thus satisfies both the spiritual and the rational dimensions of our nature. (Schellenberg 2009, 252)

In our defense, we have not limited ourselves to a “conservative believing form of religion” and we have noted how naturalism does not have to be “irreligious.” We do question how satisfying “skeptical faith” can be unless it involves assent to what is believed to be true. Schellenberg defines and commends what he calls propositional faith, which “involves voluntary assent to a proposition” (Schellenberg 2009, 3). We are unsure what it means to “assent” to a proposition one does not believe to be true, though perhaps what Schellenberg means here is something like “hope.” In any case, Schellenberg’s work may do more to bolster the project of our book rather than undermine it. After all, he commends faith in ultimism, a worldview that seems more theistic than naturalistic, for it involves faith that 194

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(or hope that) “the universe or our environment in the largest sense . . . is not indifferent to our deepest needs” (Schellenberg 2009, 32). Ultimism even carries with it “some sort of afterlife for at least some of us . . . given the fact of deeply damaged human lives and earthly lives cut short” (Schellenberg 2009, 32). Schellenberg also, like us, recognizes the vital role of the imagination in considering different possible worldviews (Schellenberg 2009, 36–44). He offers the following dramatic portrait of the role of philosophy of religion today: In this context, an approach to philosophy of religion which seeks to remove the historical and cultural blinders that prevent us from seeing the distant future, which encourages us to strain further in every intellectual and spiritual direction with imagination fully unfurled, may come not a moment too soon. And though its emphasis on things unseen may initially seem deflating, its unremitting skepticism has a hidden religious side. Having dared to walk through the valley of skepticism, protected by a new conception of faith and openness to the future, we suddenly find unexpected new vistas opening up all around us. Certainly we must, as I argued in the second volume of the trilogy, discover the wisdom to doubt, but in fulfillment of the hope expressed in the conclusion of that book, such doubt is not, as it might seem, a dead end. Rather it has been discovered to be “the condition of imagining a new and more illuminating beginning” . . . From within the dark valley of skepticism and only from there — that is, only with a proper awareness of our true condition as a species both profoundly limited and profoundly immature — but guided by such trail markers as were carved out in Prolegomena, we can start to see the possibility of a new form of religion appropriate to our time, grounded in imagination rather than belief. The light of this realization, a light gradually dawning over the whole of our wilderness wanderings, ultimately reveals a striking fact. All roads of reason lead to religion. In a united profusion of ways befitting its august magnificence, the holy trinity of truth, goodness, and beauty shows that faith — real, pure faith — is the enlightened twenty-first-century mind’s inevitable destination. But another fact is revealed as well. This destination — this point to which the roads of reason have brought us — is really only a jumping-off point, a point of departure. If indeed the clouds have lifted, we should be able to see the many new pathways that lie before us. The possibilities for continuing religious exploration and development are indeed endless, like overlapping hills fading into the future. For the story of religion has just begun, and the end of the story told in these pages is only a gateway to its further unfolding. (Schellenberg 2009, 253–254)

While we do not share Schellenberg’s skepticism, his valorization of imaginative exploration is commendable. His skepticism is favorable to our project on images and imagination. Let us now turn to Anthony Kenny. In “Faith, Pride and Humility,” Kenny argues that humility requires that agnosticism be preferred over theism:

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There is, beyond doubt, a virtue — let us call it rationality — which preserves the just mean between too much (credulity) and believing too little (skepticism). From the viewpoint of an agnostic both the theist and the atheist err by credulity: they are both believing something — the one a positive proposition, the other a negative proposition — in the absence of the appropriate justification. On the other hand, from the point of view of theism, the agnostic errs on the side of skepticism: that is, he has no view on a topic on which it is very important to have a view. Internally, there is no way of settling whether it is the agnostic who errs on the side of skepticism, or the theist who is erring on the side of credulity. But if we look at the matter from the viewpoint of humility it seems that the agnostic is in the safer position. The general presumption that others are in the right will not help us here; for others are to be found in both camps, and there is no obvious way to decide to which of them one should bow. But there is one important difference. The theist is claiming to possess a good which the agnostic does not claim to possess: he is claiming to be in possession of knowledge; the agnostic lays claim only to ignorance. The believer will say he does not claim knowledge, only true belief; but at least he claims to have laid hold, in whatever way, of information that the agnostic does not possess. It may be said that any claim to possess gifts which others do not have is in the same situation, and yet we have admitted that such a claim may be made with truth and without prejudice to humility. But in the case of a gift such as intelligence or athletic skill, those surpassed will agree that they are surpassed; whereas in this case, the theist can only rely on the support of other theists, and the agnostic does not think that the information which the theist claims is genuine information at all. Since Socrates, philosophers have realized that a claim not to know is easier to support than a claim to know. (Kenny 2004, 108–109)

Is Kenny’s case for agnosticism successful? If he is right, we should perhaps see the project of our book as arrogant or at least not humble. Consider two points in reply. First, agnostics (and skeptics in general, historically) may be viewed as claiming to have a good: intellectual integrity or cognitive prudence. Alternatively, they claim not to have the impairment of false beliefs. Skeptics may be thought of as having “information” (namely they know more about the limits of cognition) not possessed by others. So, while an agnostic may or may not think of her suspension of belief is a gift, perhaps she may feel she earned it: but either way she implicitly claims to have a good that is not possessed by others. (Though perhaps a thorough agnostic might be a radical skeptic and claim to not be sure whether or not she has a good or even whether or not theists and atheists have what they believe are gifts.) Second, Kenny’s analogy with athletic and intellectual skill seems problematic. Historically and in our own day, theists can and have deeply admired naturalist arguments as well as agnostic arguments. A naturalist need not abandon naturalism in claiming that some theistic argument is deeply impressive. We suggest that humility seems to require that all parties seek a fair and generous hearing, rather than requiring the a priori adoption of one stance (skepticism or agnosticism) among others. Rather than conceive of the theism–naturalism debate as one of competing 196

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athletes, we prefer the image of an imaginative and non-polemical dialogue among friends. And it is our passionate hope that this book makes a contribution to such a dialogue and might inspire other projects that focus on images, imagination and aesthetics.

AN END AND BEGINNING There are limitations in our inquiry. We have not explicitly explored the way theism and naturalism may be supported by cumulative arguments. In the sections of this chapter we could only identify areas in which the images of theism and naturalism might be further articulated, rather than actually develop these images ourselves. But we have at least made a start, and commend to you further inquiry into worldviews that, as part of the inquiry into truth and value, one takes a heightened interest in the role of images, imagination, and aesthetics. And lastly, from its progress have we drawn The feeling of life endless, the one thought By which we live, Infinity and God. Imagination having been our theme, So also hath that intellectual love, For they are each in each, and cannot stand Dividually. (“The Prelude”, book 14, conclusion. Wordsworth 1871, 420)

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Index Abrams, M. H. 107, 179–80 Adams, Marilyn 154, 169, 171 Adams, R. 192 aesthetics 3–4, 8, 38–9, 43–9, 52, 57, 62, 103, 125–6, 127, 132, 134, 149, 182, 184, 193, 197 affective quality 38–40, 43, 58, 122–3, 125, 173–4 afterlife 7, 137, 141, 152–3, 160, 169–71, 175, 184–5, 189, 195 agency 16, 22, 52, 59–61, 71–2, 79, 83, 85, 99, 123, 166, 170, 174–5 agnosticism 50, 196 al-Farabi 53 al-Ghazzali 53 All the Power in the World 58, 102 Alper, M. 137, 141 Alston, William 138–9, 140–1, 183 analytic philosophy 9, 193 Anaxagoras 77 Anderson, Pamela Sue 192 Animal Ethics Reader, The 53 animal minds 9, 107, 111, 113, 115–20, 145, 149 anticipation 39–41, 161 Antidote Against Atheism, An 31 apophatic tradition 54–6 Aquinas, Thomas 55, 74, 162, 182–3 Aristotle 23 Armstrong, David 6–7 Armstrong, Susan 53 art 17, 29–30, 38–9, 41–2, 44, 46–7, 52, 65–6, 84–5, 91, 120–1, 174, 179–80, 182–3, 193 Augustine (of Hippo) 128, 162–3, 182–3 Avicenna 53 Bacon, Francis 4 Baeumler, Christine 5 Bagger, Matthew 73 Barber, Samuel 56 Baumgarten, Alexander 38 Beardsley, Monroe 39 Beardsworth, Timothy 141 beauty 3, 8, 17–18, 31, 38–40, 44, 46, 49, 51, 123–4, 134, 159, 174, 179–80, 195 Before Imagination 14 behaviorism 47, 81, 112 see also neo-behaviorism Berdyaev, Nikolai 183 Berkeley, George 15 Bermond, Bob 116, 118 Biographia Literaria 21

Blind Watchmaker, The 5 Bohm, David 43 Bohr, N. 47 Botzler, R. G. 53 Brady, Emily 32–4 Breaking the Spell 89–90 Bridgewater Treatise 4 Brown, David 3 Buddhist 135, 139, 143–4, 193 Cage, John 180 Cambridge Platonists 13–15, 17, 31 Camus, Albert 51 Carlson, Allen 52, 145 Carruthers, Peter 111–14, 116–18 Cassirer, Ernst 13–14 cataphatic tradition 54–5 Cesi, Frederico 42 Chalmers, David 26, 81, 95, 97 Chandrasekhar, S. 46 Chappell, Timothy 49 chemistry 6, 47, 49, 73, 75, 77, 91, 98, 102 Chesterton, G. K. 184–5 Chisholm, Roderick 61, 143 Christianity 7–8, 50–3, 149–50, 184–5 Churchland, Patricia 49 Churchland, Paul 49, 78, 92–3 cognition 13–14, 23, 30, 38, 53, 111, 116, 120, 122–3, 137, 196 Cohen, Ted 60 Cohn-Sherbok, Dan 169–70 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 17, 21, 33, 108–9, 179 Collingwood, R. G. 29 common sense 1, 7, 19–20, 22, 47–9, 85–6, 143 communication 20, 111, 186 Concept of Mind, The 21 conception 1, 12, 49, 55, 69, 97, 104, 126, 151, 195 consciousness 3, 5, 7–9, 26, 28, 38–9, 47, 49, 59–60, 62, 65–8, 71, 73–4, 77, 79, 81–2, 85, 87–9, 92, 94, 96–8, 100–4, 107, 110–20, 126, 128, 134, 161, 163, 174–5, 181, 183, 191–2 Constable, John 40–1 Contextualism 30 Cornman, James 157–8 creativity 46, 66, 81–2, 84–5, 101, 179 Crick, Francis 46 Cudworth, Ralph 13 Cunningham, Suzanne 98, 100 Cupitt, Don 7

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INDEX Dante, A. 33 Darwin, Charles 3–5, 7–9, 18, 30–1, 38, 43–5, 48, 50, 53, 72–3, 78–80, 82, 119–25, 129–32, 135–7, 141, 149–54, 157, 160, 163, 165, 184, 190 Daston, Lorraine 3 Davis, Carol 140 Dawkins, Richard 5, 7, 49, 52, 74, 76, 78–9, 102, 129, 151, 156–9, 165, 179–80, 184, 190–1 de Kooning, Willem 42 Dear, Peter 45 death 2, 25, 44, 100, 124, 138, 146, 152–4, 157, 161, 164, 169–71, 173–6, 184–9 Democritus 53 Dennett, Daniel 6, 48–50, 54, 61–2, 66–7, 74, 78–90, 93–5, 97, 99, 102–3, 112–17, 119, 137, 157–8 Descartes, René 12, 14, 18, 27, 87, 97, 100 Descent of Man, The 4, 18, 30, 119 design 3, 72, 76, 78–80, 82–3, 86, 102–3, 152, 159, 163, 165, 179–80, 183, 191 desire 1, 6–7, 9, 11–13, 22, 39, 58, 60, 78, 108, 111, 123, 133–4, 139, 149, 153, 161, 166, 179, 181–2, 184, 190 determinism 61, 158 Dewey, John 39 Dionysius the Areopagite 55 Dirac, Paul 46 Discarded Image, The 37 Divine Names, The 55 Donne, John 185 dreaming 18, 120–1, 140, 145 dualism 19, 21–2, 27, 85–7, 98–100, 102, 120 education 12, 32, 40, 48, 115, 175 Einstein, Albert 46–7 Elegant Universe, The 46 emergence 3, 8, 27, 62, 65–7, 73, 77, 79, 81, 91–3, 95, 100–1, 104, 107, 119–20, 126, 128, 134, 136, 149, 175, 179–80, 191 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 17–18 emotions 3, 7, 22, 39, 47–8, 65, 107, 117, 126 empathy 32, 40 Empedocles 53 Encyclopedia of Philosophy 19, 67, 102 epiphenomena 3 epistemology 16, 133 Essay Concerning Human Understanding 14, 23 ethics 16, 29, 52–3, 121, 125–6, 125–9, 132–4, 149, 172, 192–3 evidence 1, 4, 7, 11, 19, 24, 27, 30–1, 37, 42, 45, 50, 70, 73–5, 81, 83, 100, 110–11, 113–14, 117–19, 136–8, 141–2, 145, 149, 172, 175 evil 3, 9, 31, 33, 45, 50, 53, 74, 80, 102, 109, 120, 123, 128–9, 135, 149, 151–2, 154–6, 158–63, 165–7, 169, 171–5, 183, 190 evolution 3, 31, 44, 48–9, 53, 60, 66, 76–9, 100–2, 124–5, 128–9, 131–4, 152, 156, 158, 164–5, 179–81, 194 Ewing, A. C. 132–3 Existence of God, The 60 Explicit Animal, The 28

Faith and Place 34 Farrer, Austin 56 finitude 14, 52–3, 55 First Cause 9, 50, 72, 74, 135 fittingness 9, 40, 125, 127–8, 131–2, 179–80, 182 Flanagan, Owen 61–2, 93–4, 193 Fodor, Jerry 30, 47–8, 50–1, 67 Formism 30 Foster, John 60, 102, 192 Franklin, Rosalind 46 free will 3, 58, 61, 74, 119, 132, 152, 166, 188 see also God’s will; will Freedberg, David 42 freedom 15, 39, 57–62, 67, 110, 152, 154–5, 158–9, 165–6, 174, 181–3 Freedom,Teleology and Evil 102 Freud, Sigmund 137 Future for Philosophy, The 101 Futuyama, Douglas 73 Galileo Galilei 42 Gellman, Jerome 140 Gericault, Theodore 65–6 Giacometti, Alberto 56 Glass of Vision, The 56 God and Other Minds 107 God Delusion, The 49, 190 God’s will 4, 54, 101, 129, 142, 149, 172–5, 183, 187 see also free will; will Goetz, Stewart 60, 74, 84, 102, 166, 187 Goldman, Alvin 117 good, the 13–14, 17, 44, 53–4, 120, 126, 128, 150, 152, 154, 161–3, 167–9, 171, 173, 176, 194, 196 Goodall, Jane 30–1, 33 goodness 8, 18, 28, 52, 67, 104, 126–9, 134, 149–50, 157–8, 160, 162–3, 165, 167–9, 172–6, 181, 190–1, 195 Goodwin, Brian 164 Gould, Stephen Jay 163 Gray, Asa 124 Greene, Brian 46 Grigsby, Darcy 66 Gruber, Howard 43–4 Grünbaum, Adolf 49–50, 53 Guston, Philip 66–7, 84–5 Gutting, Gary 140 Haldane, J. B. S. 46 Hannay, Alistair 12 Harper, Ralph 40 Hart, W. D. 102, 185–6 Hartshorne, Charles 150 Hasker, William 84, 102, 167 Hedley, Douglas 3, 8, 17 Heisenberg, Warner 46 Hepburn, Ronald 67–8, 70 Hick, John 144, 159–60, 166–7 Hildebrand, Dietrich von 9 Hinduism 8 Hobbes, Thomas 12–13 Hooker, Joseph 45

210

INDEX McAllister, James 46–7 Macarthur, David 133–4 McCabe, Herbert 55 McDermott, Drew 87 McGinn, Colin 23–4, 92 McGoodwin, Michael 137–8 Mackie, J. L. 71–2 Maddy, Penelope 7 Marx, Karl 137 materialism 2, 6, 13, 53, 119, 137, 159, 185 Matrix 20, 76, 141 matter 6, 26, 32, 49, 73–5, 78, 86 Matter and Consciousness 92 meaning 3–4, 9, 11, 15, 19–20, 25, 34, 51, 69, 79–80, 97, 101, 104, 129, 154, 167–9, 180, 182, 185, 193 Mechanism (type of image) 30 mechanism 7, 23, 82–3, 89, 100, 137, 168 memory 15, 37, 82, 117, 121, 126, 132, 138–9, 143–4, 161 mental images 1, 11–12, 19–23 Mental Images 12 Meriam, Maria Sibylla 47 Merleau-Ponty 109 Merricks, Terrance 185 metamorphosis 47, 65, 185 metaphysics 74 methodological naturalism 73–4 Mill, John Stuart 28, 31, 157, 164 Miller, Arthur 46 Millgram, Elijah 132 mirrored image 108 modal principle 24, 26–7, 69–70, 185 Montaigne, Michel de 12 moral agendas 108 attitudes 112 considerations 61 experience 3, 9, 174 imagination 29 imperative 41, 49, 158 judgments 122 projects 37 realism 127, 129 reasons 7 reflection 54, 60, 126 responsibility 57–9 theories 28, 125 values 120, 165 morality 61, 93, 129–31, 150, 164 More, Henry 13, 31–3 Moser, Paul 110 Munitz, Milton 70 Murdoch, Iris 23, 38–9, 149, 193 Murray, Michael 152, 163–4 Mysticism 141, 144

Hugh of St Victor 4 Hull, David 125–6 Hume, David 15–17, 24, 29, 53, 115, 121, 142–4 Idea of History, The 29 ideal observer theory 122–3, 125, 192 illusion 50, 79, 85–6, 88, 98, 108, 113–15, 127–9, 137 Imagination 16 In Critical Condition 51 intelligence 50, 52, 65, 76, 78–80, 161, 179–80, 191, 196 intentionality 9, 79–80, 83, 108, 119–20, 136, 141, 183 interpretation 11, 18, 80, 181 introspection 54, 84, 92–3, 138, 143–4 intuition 43, 83, 85, 113, 139, 144, 169, 179 Iseminger, Gary 39 Islam 8, 53, 149, 184–5, 193 Iversen, Margaret 29–30 Jackson, Frank 94–5 Jacob, Francois 46 James, William 39–40, 48 Johnson, Mark 193 joy 17, 28, 31, 170, 184 Judaism 8, 51, 53, 149, 184–5, 190–1 Kane, S. G. 155, 167 Kant, Immanuel 16–17, 38, 53, 166 Kaplan, David 27 Keats, John 88 Kemp, Martin 3, 43, 47 Kenny, Anthony 55, 194, 196 Kim, Jaegwon 101 knowledge 2, 6–7, 14, 23, 25–6, 28, 34, 38–40, 50–2, 65–6, 68, 73–4, 77, 94–5, 109–10, 123, 125, 145, 149–50, 173, 179–80, 196 Kwam, Kai Man 140 Langer, Susanne 1, 90–2 language 9, 17, 19–20, 41–2, 55–6, 67–8, 71, 85, 87, 111, 116, 121, 182 Language, Thought, and Consciousness 111 Leftow, Brian 54, 56 Lehrer, Keith 157–8 Leslie, John 75 Levertov, Denise 56 Lewis, C. S. 37–8, 65, 67–8 Lewis, David 27, 37, 69–70 Linzey, Andrew 162 Living Forms of the Imagination 8 Locke, John 14–15, 23 Lockwood, Michael 87–8 Lucas, J. R. 183 Lucretus 53 Luther, Martin 53 Lyas, Colin 39 Lyell, Charles 44 Lyons, John D. 14

Nagel, Thomas 3, 13, 66, 69, 74, 76, 87, 95, 98, 104, 112, 114, 134–5, 191, 193 natural selection 3, 44–5, 78–9, 84, 104, 121, 123–4, 129–31, 132, 134, 150–2, 157, 163, 165, 180

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INDEX nature 2–4, 13–14, 17–18, 21, 27, 30–1, 33, 37–9, 44–5, 49, 51–2, 54, 57, 62, 67, 71, 77, 104, 124–5, 145, 151–2, 157, 159, 161–7, 174, 183 as book 2, 4–5 human 6, 13, 28, 93, 103, 125–6, 169 images of 2, 4, 14, 21, 30–1, 37–8, 49, 51, 53–4, 57, 104, 116 laws of 27, 51, 57, 60, 69, 98, 101, 142, 158, 163, 174 Nature, Aesthetics and Environmentalism 52 neo-behaviorism 74, 81, 85, 87, 112 see also behaviorism Newman, John Henry 3 Nielson, Kai 67 Nietzsche, Friedrich 58, 137 norms 125, 131, 133, 183 Nussbaum, Martha 29 Ockham’s razor 76, 111, 116 O’Connor, Timothy 72 O’Hear, Anthony 3, 115 omnipotence 51, 128, 150, 154, 176 omniscience 51, 82, 123, 150, 154, 172 On the Origin of the Species 4 ontology 98 Organicism 30 Orwell, George 126–8 Oxford Companion to Consciousness 111 Paley, William 45, 86, 173 panentheism 150 panpsychism 191 pantheism 18 Paradise Lost 203 Parsons, Keith 99–100 Pascal, Blaise 14, 118 Peirce, C. S. 115 Penrose, Roger 75 Pepper, Stephen 30 perception 17–18, 24, 32–4, 38, 53, 119, 136–8, 139, 141–4, 155, 181 personalism 150 Peterson, Michael 166 Phaedo 2 Phaedrus 11 phenomenalist idealism 192 phenomenology 85, 89, 103, 192 Phillips, D. Z. 67–9, 71, 170–2 philosophy of imagination 8–9, 19 of mind 98, 101, 142 of religion 3, 47, 193, 195 of science 3, 47, 74 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 6, 109–10 physical science 6–7, 47, 88, 98, 103 physicalism 98, 101–2, 192 physics 3, 6, 42–3, 46–9, 73–4, 77, 81, 86–7, 91, 93, 96, 98–9, 104, 192 Picasso, Pablo 181 Plantinga, Alvin 27, 107, 173–4 Plato 2–3, 13, 54

Platonic Renaissance in England, The 13 Platonic theism 8–9, 52, 128, 149, 169, 174 poetry 20, 31, 42, 46, 120, 182 Poincare, Henri 46 possibility 15, 20, 24, 26, 45, 51, 61, 69–70, 74, 115, 141, 152, 160, 164–5, 167, 171, 181, 186, 195 pragmatism 109 prayers 55, 175, 193 Primary Imagination 17 private language 19–20 Problem of the Soul, The 61, 93 productive imagination 16 psychology 6, 38, 78, 91, 93 folk 49–50, 53, 58, 90, 103 Psychology of Imagination, The 23 purpose 1, 3–4, 7, 14, 51, 98, 100–1, 124, 129, 135–6, 151, 158–9, 168, 183 Purtill, Richard 189 Quinn, Philip 188–9 Rachels, James 125–6 Ratzsch, Del 103 Rauschenberg, Robert 42 reality 1–3, 8, 20, 23, 38, 54–5, 57–8, 60, 62, 66, 70–2, 77, 81, 83, 85, 87–95, 98, 108–9, 128, 137–45, 163, 180–2, 192, 194 of consciousness 98, 101, 107 of experience 87, 90, 165–6, 192 nature of 30, 92, 158 Really Hard Problem, The 193 reason 11, 13–14, 16–17, 25, 45, 48–9, 53, 73, 94, 121, 153, 158, 161, 195 Rebirth of Images, The 56 Reichenbach, Bruce 165 Reid, Thomas 103 religion 1–3, 13, 47, 49, 136–8, 142, 144, 158, 172, 184, 193–5 reproductive imagination 16 Republic, The 54 Rey, Georges 78, 89 Rilke, Rainer Maria 41 Ritchie, Jack 7, 74, 133–4 Robb, David 26 Robinson, Daniel 102–3, 117 Robinson, Howard 95, 102 Rollin, Bernard 117 Rolston, Holmes 161–2, 164 Roosa, Wayne 56 Rorty, Richard 6, 67–8, 70, 109–14 Rosenthal, David 99 Rowe, William 154, 162, 171, 175 Rundle, Bede 67 Ruse, Michael 30, 74–5, 80, 129, 132, 165 Russell, Bertrand 160 Russell, Bruce 140, 144–5 Ryle, Gilbert 19, 21–3 Sartre, Jean Paul 1, 23, 70 Saving God 193 Sayers, Dorothy 183

212

INDEX Scheler, Max 9 Schellenberg, John 138–40, 143–4, 155–6, 167–8, 171, 194–5 science 1–3, 6–8, 17, 30, 37–43, 47–54, 68, 73–4, 77, 85–8, 91, 96, 98, 103, 110, 117, 131, 140, 153, 172, 193 Science and Religious Anthropology 193 Science and Spirituality 30, 74 scientificalism 7 scientism 47–8 Scruton, Roger 179 Searle, John 39, 58–9, 79, 87–9, 96–8 Second Philosophy 7 Secondary Imagination 17 Seen/Unseen 43 self-awareness 67, 85, 90, 92, 107–8, 111 self-consciousness 28, 67, 111, 116 self-interest 13, 128, 172 Sellars, Wilfred 6, 48, 53 Sense of Presence, A 141 sentience 3, 113, 161, 170 Shelly, P. B. 39 Sibley, Frank 38 sin 53, 55, 152, 162, 172, 174, 189 skepticism 19–20, 24, 41, 53, 89, 113, 194–7 Skinner, B. F. 47, 81 Smith, Adam 121–3 Socrates 2, 196 Solomon, Robert 193 Sophist 2–3 Soskice, Janet 56 soul 7, 11, 18, 21, 41, 48, 51, 61, 65, 79–80, 86, 93, 98, 100, 102, 135–7, 141, 153, 171, 185 Spirituality for the Skeptic 193 Sripada, Chandra 117 Stafford, Barbara 3 Stich, Stephen 49–50 Strawson, Galen 57–61, 81, 87–9, 95–6, 112, 175–6, 191–2 Stroud, Barry 5–6, 8–9 Styron, William 60 subjectivity 11, 92, 117 Subjectivity and Selfhood 118 Swinburne, Richard 60–1, 100–1, 120, 140, 160–1, 172, 174, 186 Taliaferro, Charles 5, 22, 27, 84, 102, 120, 123, 125, 128, 187, 190–1 Tallis, Raymond 28 Taoism 7, 193 teleology 104 Temple, William 168 Tennant, F. R. 164 Theism and Ultimate Explanation 72 Thinking of Others 60 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 65–6 Timaeus 3 Treatise of Human Nature 15 truth 8, 11, 17, 24–6, 33, 37, 43, 46, 48, 53, 56, 70,

92, 96, 109–10, 120, 128, 130, 133–4, 136, 139, 141, 155, 157, 167, 170, 181, 183, 195–7 Truth and Beauty 46 ugliness 3, 38, 123–4, 149 ultimism 194–5 Underhill, Evelyn 141, 144 Understanding Naturalism 7, 133 Unger, Peter 7, 58, 102, 128 Unheeded Cry, The 117 unity 9, 38–40, 46, 98, 100, 168 Unknown God, The 55 utilitarianism 27–8 values 1, 3, 5, 7–8, 11, 13, 20, 25, 27–8, 31, 38, 107–10, 120, 125, 128, 134, 149, 158–9, 161, 165, 167, 180–1 van Inwagen, Peter 25–7, 74, 163–4, 185–7 van Orman Quine, Willard 47 virtue 13–14, 22, 26, 52, 67, 78, 84, 104, 130, 138, 141, 159, 161, 162, 165, 167, 196 Visualizations 47 Wainwright, William 141 Wallace, Alfred Russel 3, 121, 134, 159, 165 Ward, Keith 144, 164, 170 Warnock, Mary 16, 18 Watson, J. B. 47 Watson, James D. 46 Weber, Max 137 Westphal, Merold 55 Weyl, Hermann 46 Whewell, William 4 Whichcote, Benjamin 13 Whitehead, Alfred North 48 Whitman, Walt 146 wholeness 1, 39–44, 108 Wildman, Wesley 193 will 15, 18, 24, 65, 120, 183–4 see also free will; God’s will Williams, Bernard 29, 60, 192 Wilson, E. O. 129, 137 wisdom 4, 6, 13, 37, 49, 138, 194–5 Wisdom to Doubt, The 138, 194 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1, 19–23 Wolf, Susan 192 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 180–3 Wordsworth, William 31, 146, 179, 197 World Hypotheses 30 worldview 3, 7–8, 22, 29–30, 60, 71, 73, 101–2, 134, 145, 193–5, 197 Wright, Edmond 95 Wyeth, Andrew 33–4 Wynn, Mark 3, 34–5, 134 Yandell, Keith 56 Zahavi, Dan 118 Zee, Anthony 46

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