In honor of Easter and Passover, I'm
going to revisit a topic I used to be very interested in, but haven't
messed with much in years: demitheism. Demitheism is a word that I
invented years ago to mean “middle positions between theism and
atheism, between 'a God exists' and 'no God exists.'” (Between explicit hard theism and explicit hard atheism - for both
terms there is considerable dispute on how best to define them, and we could be vastly more careful if we we're doing basically back of the napkin philosophical sketches.)
Thus demitheism tends to be compromise positions that answer “does
God exist?” with things like “well sorta, it's complicated.”
You might think that there is little space for compomise here, and
even less motive to try, after all people who believe in God tend to
BELIEVE, and people who reject belief in God, tend to REJECT. But,
in fact, you can build lots of interesting middle positions here, and
historically philosophers have felt pushed towards demitheisms by a
wide variety of concerns and pressures.
The most obvious and widely explored
middle position here is agnosticism, the position that one does not
personally know whether one or more Gods exist or not. OK, fair
enough, I don't have much to say about agnosticism that hasn't been
said before, but I think there are lots more possibilities. To quote
myself 12 years ago:
“But agnosticism is only the
beginning of the possible range of middle positions. Perhaps the
claim “a God exists” is factually meaningless and therefore in
neither true nor false, what A. J. Ayer called theological
noncognativism. Perhaps the claim “a God exists” is meaningful,
but still manages to be neither-true-nor-false, because Aristotle’s
law of excluded middle is an error. Perhaps the claim “a God
exists” is both-true-and-false. Perhaps existence is a fuzzy
predicate over divinities, and the truth-value of the claim “at
least one God exists” is .73. Perhaps God’s existence is
underdetermined by the facts, but both God’s existence and
non-existence are consistent extensions of the facts. Perhaps the
existence of at least one God is a claim that rational agents should
assert on some occasions, and retract on other occasions. Perhaps
all rational agents should assert this claim at some point in their
lives, but should also retract it eventually. Perhaps the
appropriate reply to someone who asserts that “a God exists” is
not the same on every occasion.”
And as we'll see we could go on. I
came to demitheisms originally as a way of thinking about logical
structure, what are the options for creating meaningful middle
positions? What are the places in our practices of giving and
critiquing accounts where there is space for middle positions like
this? But, over time I've also become interested in the question of
why someone might WANT to take a complicated middle position on a
topic that has more usually been disputed between sharply divided
camps.
Agnostic Demitheism
Most basically, one might simply be
interested in humbly admitting the limits of one's own personal
knowledge. If you say “I personally don't know whether a God
exists or not,” you are staking a middle position between atheism
and theism, but you aren't really asserting a middle position. You
aren't saying that theism and atheism are both inadequate or
incomplete; one of them might still turn out to be dead right, just
that you aren't convinced of either yet. You aren't disagreeing with
atheism or theism, you are merely unconvinced. There is lots of
space for non-assertive forms of demitheism. “Weak” atheism or
“implicit” is lack of belief in any God, without actually
rejecting belief in any God. Perhaps one has simply never considered
the issue, or perhaps one grew up with a conceptual scheme where gods
and their lacks are not an obvious issue for reflection. Perhaps one
is pre-verbal or brain damaged. Similarly, I've always thought there
is space for “implicit” or “weak” theisms, people who have
some belief in God, but haven't ever really understood atheism enough
to consciously reject it. A child perhaps raised in a family which
believes in God, but who hasn't ever reflected for themselves yet
much on the topic.
We may simply not have reflected
enough to reach a solid opinion, or perhaps we have reflected, but
not found any grounds yet that seem particularly decisive to us.
Some agnostics still hope that they will eventually come down on one
side or the other, but are as it were, still undecided. Other
agnostics feel like they have exhausted any strategy they might have
for coming to know the answer (short of death or miracle), and no
longer have much hope of deciding the issue. As a semi-joke we call
a “militant agnostic” someone who takes the position “I don't
know if God exists, and neither do you.” This starts looking more
like an assertive position on the limits of human knowledge, than a
mere admission of one's own lack of knowledge, but I've known folks that believed this way on basically epistemic grounds. It is perfectly
possible to be a demitheist on epistemic grounds. If a God existed
that wanted to hide its existence (perhaps to avoid being blamed for
past decisions), it's hard to imagine how humans would go about
trying to “catch” a hiding God.
Buddhist and Ignostic Demitheisms
-
Gautama Buddha famously supposedly
takes a middle position on the existence of a creator deity. Story
goes, that Buddha is asked if there was a single creator Deity
ultimately responsible for the mess we find ourselves in. And
Buddha is supposedly omniscient at this point (or rather has
all-embracing-knowledge, sarvajnajnana – the difference between
Western and Buddhist conceptions of omniscience is an interesting
topic in it's own right). Buddha replies that if a man was shot by a
poison arrow, he might be anxious on the question of who shot him,
but the more pressing concern is getting the poison arrow out, and
inquiry into who is responsible can wait until later. Similarly,
Buddha argues, we need to escape the bonds of suffering first, and
the question of whether a single creator God exists or not is not
helpful until, at best, after this process has been completed. Buddha
leaves open the possibility that the answer might turn out to be yes,
or no, or it's complicated. Perhaps the process of becoming
enlightened and escaping suffering will dissolve the question
completely. (The story is told in the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta, as
one of the 14 unanswerable question, and some of the others are
explicitly stated to be destined to dissolve, if I recall right).
Buddha's worry seems not to be about the limits of knowledge, but
about what kind of metaphysical disputes are helpful or non-helpful.
He refuses to answer about whether the universe is infinite or
finite, eternal or not, and whether the self (jiva) is identical to
the body or not. He characterizes answers to these as being like a
net of theories that can entangle one, and refuses to be “drawn
into” the net. This is clearly a different kind of theological
non-assertion, from the agnostic and with a different motivation.
Similarly, Rabbi Sherwin Wine coins
the term “ignosticism” in the process of trying to articulate a
view in the 1960s. He argues that before we can even productively
dispute about whether a God or gods exist or not we have to
clarify the meaning of the term “God” sufficiently for us to be
able to dispute with each other rather than talk past each other.
Before the question “does God exist?” can be responsibly explored
we have to answer a “prerequisite” question, “What do we mean
by 'God' in the question “Does God exist?'” The problem
according to Wine, is that we never actually finish answering the
prerequisite question sufficiently, to be able to ask the existence
question appropriately. The question of whether God exists or not
never manages to arise, we live and die, and spend our lives and
loves working slowly towards the question. This is what he calls the
ignostic position. It's traditional to interpret Wine and
Ignosticism as a species of theological noncognativism ala Ayer's
(we'll see more in a bit), but I've always found it more similar to
the Buddha's worry. The problem that animates Wine, is not that the
statement “God exists” might turn out meaningless rather than
true or false, but that it is not-meaningful-yet, that we have more
pressing issues to deal with, before we can give that problem the
attention that it eventually deserves.
Pyrrhonist Demitheism
A traditional agnostic claims not to
know whether God exists or not, but isn't necessarily actively
cultivating this absence of knowledge. A Pyrrhonist skeptic takes a
more programmatic approach, actively working to cultivate an absence
of knowledge and even belief on weighty topics like whether or not
God exists. Like Buddha, the Pyrrhonist is trying to avoid being
tangled up in nets of theory. The Pyrrhonist skeptic seeks to
balance arguments in favor of God's existence with arguments opposing
God's existence and thereby come to an “epoche” – or suspension
of belief, where balanced between competing considerations one finds
one self in a lack of belief. If you find one side of the argument
or the other to be overly tempting, you spend extra effort exploring
the opposite side to restore balance. If you have insufficient
arguments for one side, you employ one or more of the host of “modes”
or generic arguments about the limits of human knowledge to help
restore balance. The idea here is not at all like modern atheistic
skepticism, but rather an active balancing of position in an attempt
to “cancel out” both and remain at an extremely refined point of
balance. The tradition has a lot of technical language about how to
employ non-assertive “sounds” of skepticism “maybe” “perhaps
it is so” “I suspend judgment” etc. The idea is that by
attaining a very refined mental state of non-judgment, the skeptic
will wind up in a fortunate mental state of having minimized their
troubles as much as they can. For the Pyrrhonist skeptic taking a
middle position between theism and atheism is part of a larger
project of programmatically taking middle positions whenever one is
able to, and this is though to be personally salutary.
Ontological Demitheisms
Even if you in some sense believe in
God, God looks like a tricky limit case for the problem of existence.
You can start from very traditional theism, and find yourself pushed
slowly into saying careful complex, tricksy things about the extent
to which God exists. In traditional Christian theology, for example,
God is Creator, and all other things are Creations. God is radically
unlike all created beings in a wide variety of ways, God has no parts, for example, and doesn't experience change, or indeed “undergo”
or “experience” any thing of any kind. God, as it were, happens to
other things, things don't happen to God. Thomas Aquinas trying to
do hard onto-theology in Book 1 of his Summa Theologica, has to say
things like “God is not a substance” “God is not any sort of
thing” and “God has no properties other than his own nature.”
To the extent that God exists, God exists in a way radically
dissimilar from the way all other things exist. Now there are lots
of classic worries that things like words and intellectual categories
break down when we are trying to apply them to God, and we'll see
more of these in a bit, but words like “being” or “existence”
are especially problematic cases. If God “exists,” then God
“exists” in a way radically different from all other things that
“exist” so why use the word “exist?” Indeed, sometimes
basically theistic theologians will bite that bullet and say that God
is “super-existent” rather than “existent” or is
beyond-being, rather than being a being among beings.
Paul Tillich famously pushes this a
little further, if God is Being (das Seiende) even the highest Being,
then God cannot properly be said to be the source of all being, or
the ground of all being, and thus, it is preferable to think of God
as the ground of being-itself, and therefore not an example of being.
You can see similar moves in Origen and Middle Platonism. Or to
bring up more recent cases, recent
Continental thinkers like to point out that a discourse requires
some kind of ineffable background which grounds the discourse and can
never properly become a foregrounded topic of that style of
discourse. In a similar way, beings require a framework-for-being to
be, especially to be as-what-they-are, to be-in-the-foreground, and
the framework-for-being cannot properly be. But when we start
inquiring as much as we are able, into how to characterize or talk
about the framework-for-being, it starts looking a lot like some of
the ways theologians have talked about God.
Or we can phrase the problem in
Heideggerese. We thought we knew what we meant by the term “being,”
but now we are perplexed. If Wine's Ignosticism worries that we
spend our whole lives exploring the question of the meaning of the
term “God” and never progress to truly examining whether “God”
exists - a later day Heideggerian can imagine us spending our whole
lives exploring the question of the meaning of being, and never
getting far enough in ontology to really understand being or
existence well enough to truly progress to examining whether God
“exists.” The theist finds that God's ontological situation is
so different from the ontological situation of most beings that they
start getting pushed to demitheism. The atheist ontologist finds
that the nature and ground of being is so problematic, that even if
they reject God, they wind up describing something vaguely similar
playing similar roles.
Ineffabilist Demitheisms
Or perhaps the problem is not so much
God's odd relationship with being, but God's odd relationship with
words or conceptions. If we think that God is “ineffable” or
“beyond all conceptualizations” then in particular “God exists”
is going to fail to be true. Perhaps one thinks that all words fail
to live up to the transcendent God, but some words nonetheless wind
up being aimed at glorifying God.
One way that my favorite old
theologian (Pseudo-Dionysius) puts it, is that each conception we
have or try to frame to describe God, winds up describing something
less than God, which we argue if they exist or not “We make
assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it.”
(The Mystical Theology, 1048B). When we say that God is Goodness, or
Being-itself, or the Creator or All, or the big bearded Patriarch in
the Sky, an omniscient-omnipotent-omnibenevolent person or whatever,
these are conceptions which we can attempt to dispute as to whether
they are existent or non-existent, but none of these are God. (At
one point he calls them underhanging logoi.) We are really debating
about the existence or non-existence of our own imperfect and limited
conceptions of God. In a sense, we are back to Ignosticism, but
rather than arguing, we should live our lives as a slow exploration of
or journey towards (or wrestling match with) God, we are worrying
that the mechanism of reference is failing us. For Pseudo-Dionysius,
talking about God, much less disputing about God always winds up
making a strawman argument. Indeed, in this picture, even if I try
to assert that God exists, I fail and wind up only asserting
something like this-conception-of-God-that-I-like-to-use exists.
Apophatic Demitheisms
We can get far more sophisticated in
our accounts of the ineffability of God, and the many theological
strategies that have been used over the ages to partially cope with
this problem. Pseudo-Dionysius in particular has several other
strategies, besides the one I just mentioned, but we are drifting
towards my dissertation here, and I can talk too much about it.
Short version, Pseudo-Dionysius has a methodology for trying to
talking about God to the extent we can, while admitting it is
impossible. This method involves making affirmations and denial in
particular orders for particular reasons. This means that
Pseudo-Dionysius asserts that God exists at one point, and denies
that God exists at another point and says that God is beyond all
assertions and denials at a third. We call it “apophasis” -
“speaking-away” when someone says something, but also tries to
“unsay” it, denying the things they themselves have asserted. In
particular, Pseudo-Dionysius thinks that both the affirmation and
denial that God exist, are useful things to teach people at different
particular stages of their spiritual development. We encourage
people to journey towards God by affirming conceptions a little bit
more noble than what they already understand, and denying conceptions
that they are already ready to outgrow. In a sense, the issue here
is spiritual pedagogy, rather than epistemology, ontology, or
philosophy of language. We assert “'Conception x of God' exists”
and we deny “'Conception x-1 of God' exists.” But later on we
will assert “'conception x+1 of God' exists” and deny “conception
x of God' exists” for basically the same reasons. Eventually we
will even deny of all conceptions of God that they exist, without
affirming of any replacement conception, but only once we are
confident that the student has understood the basic pattern leading
to an apophatic demitheism. Another funny thing about this picture, in a sense theism and atheism are imagined as working together here in a joint project of improving our understanding of God.
Demitheism as a Translation
problem
Another fun form and motive for
Demitheism is when we try to make sense of disparate traditions using
common vocabulary, or use one style of philosophy to try to
understand another. So for example, Samkhya-darsana and Yoga-darsana
are two of the six orthodox (we might say “astika”) schools of
traditional Hindu philosophy – we might say the Rationalist school
and the Yoga school. Both are probably developing in the late BCE
centuries and reach their traditional form in the early CE centuries,
and both are remarkably similar.
But if we ask if the Samkhya-darsana
of ancient Indian “Rationalists” were atheists things get
complicated. For one thing, they are traditionally categorized as an
“astika” (literally “there exists”) school rather than a
“nastika” (“there doesn't exist”) school. In modern Hindi,
astika does mean "theist," and nastika "atheist," and the
classical-medieval six astika schools and four nastika schools do
roughly fit this typology. But is that what “astika” really
meant in classical and medieval times? There is dispute among
medieval and modern scholars about what makes one school astika while
another is nastika … is it taking the Vedas as authoritative
(Manusmirti's 5th cent? position) or perhaps belief in
another world for transmigration (Haribhadra's 9th cent position) or perhaps belief in an atman (Ghurye's 21st cent position) that makes a school astika. Heck, Nagarjuna in the 2nd (ish) century, lists Samkhya as a nastika school, even though most
authorities list it as astika, so there may have been dispute there.
But, the question of whether the
Samkhya-darsana were “atheists” or not gets even thornier. The
Samkhya believed in “prakriti” but not “ishvara.” Indeed,
the Yoga school has different aims and focus, but mostly borrow the
Samkhya metaphysics whole cloth, except to add “ishvara” as one
additional element of the metaphysical picture. Roughly, prakriti is
unified material being. It is a single thing which differentiates
into smaller things. It is an uncaused cause. A prime mover and
first cause, and the source of all material being. It is the ground
of material being. You'll see it translated as “nature” sometimes, but it
is “Nature” in the sense of an ontological prerequisite, not
“nature” as the opposite of “culture” or “artificiality.”
“Ishvara” in contrast, is a word for a personal God, or perhaps
for a Supreme Being, it literally means the ruler of beauty, or maybe
beloved lord. Ishvara often means God conceived as transcendent over
other gods, or the God to which one is most personally devoted, or God conceived as an object of desire. Most
Hindu philosophies have thought of brahman/atman, as combining both
prakriti and ishvara, as being both the first cause of all things,
and the final cause of all things, as being both the source of being
and the most supreme of beings. And that's how Abrahamic conceptions
of God, usually work too, God is both being and lord, both first and
last, both ground and ultimate goal. But the Samkhya school of philosophy
asserts and explores the existence of prakriti, while denying and
arguing against ishvara. And it's not entirely clear how to talk
about this in other languages. Is the Samkhya saying that God
exists, but not as a personal God? Perhaps, it is trying to be what
we might call “Deist” but not “Theist.” Although that way of
talking is problematic since they accept both holy scriptures and
religious rituals. Or maybe the point of this is to accept efficient
causation while denying final causation (although again their causal
theories are complicated and use pretty different terminology than Hellenistic ideas of causation). Or maybe the point is to deny any
kind of moral force or rightness to the way the universe is
unfolding. Or maybe it's frankly “atheist.” Certainly the
Samkhya school gets accused of atheism a lot in modern India. Nor
are there really living Samkhyaist to address the question to, and
the most obvious descendants of the samkhya-darshana, the
yoga-darsana and shaiva siddanta, both gave up the rejection of
ishvara. Samkhya has no problem with Aristotle's God, a first cause
of all things, but it rejects Plato's form of the good. So uhm, are
they theists or atheists? Er … it's not just a problem with
theology, or pedagogy, or philosophy of language, but rather the
contexts and histories are just so different … They never
interacted with the word “theos” one way of the other, but
neither did they ignore it. Rather they talked in their own way, in
their own tradition, and we trying to categorize them, need some
middle position between theism and atheism to do justice to their
belief in prakriti as well as their rejection of ishvara.
Dialethist Demitheism
Dialethism is the position that there
are true contradictions, that sometimes a statement and it's negation
are both true. This directly violated Aristotle's understanding of
the law of non-contradiction, but so be it, such philosophers
disagree with Aristotle, it's not like that's never happened before.
It is possible to motivate Dialetheism from several different cases,
such as the liar's paradox or Russell's paradox. Graham Priest, the
granddaddy of modern Dialethism, argues that dialethia arise at the
boundaries of the expressable in a variety of contexts in formal
semantics. Modern western Dialethists are usually motivated by
issues in logic, rather than say ontology or theology – the sorites
problem or the problem of reasoning from inconsistent case law. But
there usually is an acknowledgement of the role of dialethic
reasoning in Eastern philosophical contexts, the Buddhist logical
system catuskoti, the Jain insistence on anekantavada, the role of
nonduals in zen Buddhism, etc. If we are going to believe in true
contradictions anyway, the question of God's existence seems like a
classic case of a place we might want to assert a dialethia, for any
or several of the reasons already mentioned. If God is importantly
beyond existence, then perhaps we should say of “God exists” that
it is both-true-and-false, or that “God exists” and “God does
not exist” are both true, or however we like to phrase our asserted dialethia.
Summarizationist Demitheism
So my own position on philosophy of
language and truth is an “error theory” in which all claims come
out as being false if we are careful enough. Often I call my
position summarizationism. Statements, properly understood, are
trying to summarize complex situations for some particular
purpose. Statements about the world always wind up being, in fact,
false, but are often, helpful, appropriate summaries, or “close
enough” for their intended purpose. This isn't really even a
failing of language, statements are trying to draw our attention to
some aspects of our complicated world, while eliding and drawing
attention away from others. Rather truth is an overly strong goal,
that misunderstands what we want out of semantics. Our world always
transcends us. The situation is always more complicated than we can
say. Words always fall short of worldly realities. Even these
words. Obviously, like many of the other positions mentioned, I need
to get cozy with self-refutation, but I'm OK with that.
One of the side effects of my general
understanding of language and truth, is that I have to be a
demitheist when it comes to God. “God exists” and “God doesn't
exist” are both false. Both oversimplifications of a case which
transcends us. And for me, God is not unique in this respect. “I
exist” and “I don't exist” or even “The USA exists” and
“The USA doesn't exist” are going to have roughly the same
problem. The situation is too complicated. The USA is a political
fiction, but a political fiction with real bite and a real history.
I myself am more and less than my conceptions of myself. The world
includes beings which need a ground of being, and also which
stand-out from the background on their own (ex-ist, from ex-stare,
“stand away from”). I'm like a Jain asserting anekantavada –
the non-one-sideness of all things. The world just doesn't really
fit into words, and neither do things like God which might be
importantly beyond-the-world in some sense.
Theological Non-Cognativism
Logical Positivists used to argue that
for an empirical claim to have factual meaningfulness it ought to
have testable truth-conditions. Otherwise, we might waste time and
mental energy trying to falsify claims (or better pseudo-claims) that
are not even falsifiable in principle. Because of human limits, we
must establish limits to the claims we are allowed to treat as
factually meaningful, so that science can conduct its business
effectively. Thus, a scientific materialist atheist, may find that
their understanding of the philosophy of science forces them to back
away from strong atheism, and assert instead that the claim “a God
exists” is not factually meaningful, rather than being factually
false. This view came to be known as theological non-cognativism,
the idea that the claim “God exists” is meaningless because it
lacks good testability conditions, rather than it being actually
false, and it had quite a life in Anglo Philosophy from say the 1930s
to 1980s. The theological non-cognativism of AJ Ayers looks like
it's just atheism “phrased differently,” but the theological
non-cognativism of someone like Dewi Phillips looks far more like
someone searching for ways to talk about the weird grounds between
theism and atheism.
Eventually, though many parts of the
logical picture of the Logical Positivists have been beaten up badly
over the course of the twentieth century. Quine argued that the
empirical vs analytic distinction won’t hold up to close scrutiny,
and that there is no strict distinction between observations and
theoretical claims. Popper argued that falsifiability is a
requirement for distinctively scientific claims, but not for all
factual claims. Kuhn argued that claims which are factually
meaningful in one paradigm are often factually incommensurate with
claims from another paradigm. The Logical Positivist rules about
meaningfulness seem to cut against themselves. Heck, Alston and Hick
even used to argue that “eschatological verificationism” could
supply adequate testability conditions to the hypothesis of God's
existence dealing with the problem head on. Nonetheless, even if we
can’t form rigorous criteria for when a claim is or is not
factually meaningful, it might look like the claim “A God exists”
is a particularly tempting candidate for being a non-factually
meaningful claim.
Similarly Wittgenstein has a slightly
different take on how roughly Positivist worries effect religion.
According to him, the sense of the world must lie outside of the
world, and thus outside of the possibility of expressing it via
pictures of the world, and thus outside of the possibility of
expressing it via language (6.4-7). Ethics, aesthetics, God, and the
problems of life, all lie outside of the realm of possible speech,
according to the Tractatus. Thus a Wittgensteinian might be
suspicious of metaphysics of any kind, asserting OR denying the
existence of God. Indeed, Wittgenstein goes one step further, he
says “6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete
indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the
world.” And while this is more extreme than traditional theism,
religious perspectives have often wanted to imagine God as
transcending the world in some sense, so as to distinguish theism
from pantheism. Indeed, if God pre-existed the world and created the
world, it would be odd to think of God as one of the beings IN the
world.
But we habitually use the word
“exists” to refer to beings which are in the world, such as
chairs, or people, or lizards. Indeed, sometimes we even think that
when we assert something’s existence we are asserting that it is
in-the-world. But if so, then the transcendentalist theist’s claim
that “God exists, but not as a being in the world” could be
rendered as “God has some form of being other than existence” or
“No God exists, although some God has a form of being other than
being-in-the-world.” The more we take existence to be a matter of
falling under the scope of an existential quantifier, the more
extra-worldly being starts looking like non-existence.
Consistent Extension Demitheism
Another motivation for demitheism that
I always use to explore, is what I called “consistent extension”
demitheism, although I'm not familiar with anyone who has actually
advanced this one. The idea is to look by analogy at cases like the
axiom of choice, or the parallel postulate, or the relations between
normal modal logics. The Axiom of Choice is formally independent of
Zermelo-Fraekel set theory, ZF, which means that ZFC and ZF~C are both
consistent and non-equivalent extension of ZF. ZF is “neutral”
with respect to the axiom of choice. The axiom of choice is not
already contained within ZF set theory, but both it and it's denial
can be added to ZF set theory yielding coherent accounts of sets.
Similarly the “neutral” geometry can be consistently extended to
Euclidean, hyperbolic, or elliptical geometries. Or the “smallest”
Normal Modal Logic, K, can be consistently extended in a variety of
importantly different and inter-related ways (T, D, S4, S5, etc.).
OK now imagine world W, where a
complete enumeration of the truths of that world, such as they are, (or better yet the deductive closure of W, W*) contained nothing that implied or amounted to either the claim “God
exists” or “God doesn't exist” but that W + “God exists”
and W + “God doesn't exist” were each, non-equivalent consistent
extensions of world W. Such a world would be “neutral” or
“ambiguous” with respect to God's existence. God's existence
would be unprovable in such a world (because it is independent), but
so would the denial of God's existence. The facts of the world would
be capable of being given multiple interpretations, including an
interpretation in which God exists (or more likely several distinct
such interpretations), and at least one interpretation in which God
does not exist. God's existence would be underdetermined by the
facts of the world. No worldly test in world W would disambiguate
God's existence. In a sense, God “hides” from world W. Any
intervention God makes in world W, requires a layer of plausible
deniability, so that it is possible to interpret the facts of the
event as something other than God's intervention, even if it also
possible to interpret the event as God's intervention. W is, in a
sense, a “fideist” world, a world where the facts are
insufficient to falsify disparate faiths as to the interpretation of
the facts.
I don't really want to assert that our
world is a world like W. (In fact I think that truths and facts
don't really work like that, so when you try to enumerate the truths
of our world you get none, so the formalization just doesn't work).
But I still think this is a sort of helpful analogy for imagining
what a world where Fideism worked would be like. The facts always
underdetermine the interpretation of the facts. A world that you can
interpret with or without a God, doesn't really seem that alien to
me.
OK – so obviously each of those
could be a little paperlet or blog post on its own. And I haven't
even tried to tackle say, Hegel, or Heraclitus, or Zhuangzi's
understanding of the “maker of all,” or say Kant's understanding
of the fourth antinomy of reason with respect to the existence of an
absolutely necessary being, and also not. We could find more
philosophical motivations to be pushed to complex middle positions
between theism and atheism if we wanted. My goal here is really just
to give a sketch of a bunch of them to show that many people, for
many reasons, find the terrain between atheism and theism to be
compelling.
