Theistic philosopher Bill Vallicella recently posted again on Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:18-20). Here are the concluding sentences:
It ought to be obvious that one cannot straightaway infer from the intelligibility, order, beauty, and existence of nature that ‘behind’ nature there is a supernatural personal being that is supremely intelligent, the source of all beauty, and the first cause of all existing things apart from itself. One cannot ‘read off’ the being instantiated of the divine attributes from contemplation of nature.
Suppose I see a woman. I am certain that if she is a wife, then there is a person who is her husband. Can I correctly infer from those two propositions that the woman I see is a wife? Can I ‘read off’ from my perception of the woman that she is a wife?”
No, we can’t read off “wife” (a relationship) from her body, but the prior question should be: can we can “read off” her being a woman from . . . what exactly? From nothing: we don’t infer “woman” (female person) from a congeries of sensory phenomena, but rather intuit “woman” immediately.
And we’re responsible for treating her with the respect due every person, and not treat her as though she were an insentient android (on the off chance that the “inference” to personhood is an inductive leap to a falsehood).
We don’t infer God from the world’s existence, organization and beauty, but that’s irrelevant to Paul’s claim. That is, Bill’s report of what’s obvious to him is not germane to Paul’s claim to have revealed something about our epistemological situation.
What is known (gnoston) of God (Roman 1:19) is understood (noumena) by the things that are made (Romans 1:20). It is not that the latter provide materials for an inference to God, but rather that they occasion the occurrence of insight (as Augustus Strong put it).
Sinners know God, yet they suppress that knowledge. That they already know God makes sense (uniquely, in my view) of their knowing a great many other disparate kinds of things, like logical laws, regularities in nature, and moral absolutes.
Grasping the intelligible dependence of the latter on the “first truth” (or “presupposition”) of God (as creator of the world and of other persons) vindicates theistic belief rationally, if indirectly.
There’s nothing “arbitrary” about this presupposition (as Bill suggests): it identifies something as consequential as the conditions of intelligible predication.
The indirect vindication may be an inference, and thinkers who have a taste for that sort of thing will engage in it, but the affirmation of God does not necessarily involve an inference.
Into everyone coming into the world (John 1:14) God “hard-wired,” if you will, the “inborn capacity” (Strong) to affirm Him. Everyone, not just the argumentatively inclined or adroit.
Knowledge of God is no more a personal cognitive achievement than is knowledge of the existence of the world and of other people. Bill refers to “faith in the external world or in other minds,” to which he contrasts “faith in God.” This distracts from the issue at hand, which is gnosis, knowledge, not pistis, faith. It is precisely because one doesn’t “have faith in” what one knows that there can be no “faith” in God’s existence (or the world’s, or other minds’).
To my argument that God, the world, and other minds are in “the same epistemological boat,” all allegedly equally indubitable, Bill merely asserted that “it would not be reasonable to have” “real doubts about the existence of the external world or the existence of other minds.” He further (somehow) knows that “[n]o one loses his faith in the external world or in other minds.” But doubt about the existence of God is different, Bill claims, for the “various arguments from evil, and not just these, cast reasonable doubt on Christian theism.”
This assertion is an unsupported psychological claim about the sequence of, say, horror and doubt in a given person and their causal connection. To it we can contrast the failure of doubt to follow horror in another person.
(That Christian theism is the basis for even framing a problem of evil—or any other kind of problem— I argued in my previous post on Bill. This insight can help heal the psychic wound inflicted by the experience of horror.)
The occurrence of doubt (occasioned by horror) does not confer reasonableness on it.
Paul did not argue for theism. He described our cognitive relationship to God.
There are no atheists, not in foxholes or anywhere else. There are those who masquerade as atheists, disguising their suppressed knowledge of God in a foolish profession of atheism (Psalm 14:1). To the profession we may impute the moral culpability that attaches to the suppression.
I encourage readers interested what was covered in this post to study a long excerpt from Strong’s Systematic Theology on the “Origin of Our Idea of the Existence of God,” available on my old site.